The Heavenly Table

by Donald Ray Pollock

  “Well, shit” was all Powys said. He glanced regretfully over at his clubs sitting by the door of his office. All week, the only thing he’d had to look forward to was spending some time practicing his swing. By the time he was photographed kneeling in prayer beside the coffin, and sat through three hours of pompous preaching and teary accolades, and walked the widow through the cemetery, he almost hated Bill more for getting killed than he did the outlaws for killing him.

  Even so, he woke up Monday morning looking forward to seeing the hard-earned publicity that his advisers had guaranteed him on the front pages of the papers, only to discover that John Herbert Montgomery had stolen his thunder. Yesterday evening, the tycoon had suddenly broken his silence about his son’s killers, informing a group of newsmen gathered outside his Long Island estate that he was willing to pay three times what Tennessee was offering to whoever brought him their heads. Except for brief notices in a couple of the local rags, Bill’s funeral wasn’t even mentioned. Photographs showed Montgomery barely able to control his grief, and the attorney general vaguely wondered whether he could ever summon such emotion—if, for example, his old mother passed away, or his wife ran off with a better man. He doubted it. As blind as he was to most of his defects, even Powys knew that the first thing a man lost when he entered politics was his humanity.

  Of course, the story Montgomery fed the journalists was not the real story at all, which was something the attorney general, as many times as he had manipulated the press himself, should have realized. As for the tears in the photographs, all the eighty-year-old tycoon had to do was recall the afternoon long, long ago when he’d told a young, impoverished Tom Edison to go fly a kite, and they fell like rain. And as far as Reese went, the outlaws had actually done him a favor by blowing his spoiled, rotten son out of the air—by his accountant’s calculations, the lazy little whoremonger had cost him close to a million dollars in the past year alone—but still, as several of his cronies had reminded him repeatedly in the days since the boy’s death, you couldn’t let the hoi polloi think they could murder the privileged class without repercussions, or you’d end up with another Russia on your hands. The sooner this Jewett trash was tracked down and dealt with, the sooner he could forget about the entire mess and get back to the business of the day, which was making as much money as possible off the cluster-fuck in Europe before somebody threw in the towel.

  On the heels of Montgomery’s pronouncement, reporters from all the big news organizations on the East Coast were quickly dispatched south to get in on the story before it was too late. Every newspaper in America featured tales written about the outlaws and their crimes. From time to time, the brothers managed to get hold of one lying around somewhere, and the black-and-white drawings of their faces nearly drove Chimney crazy the first few times he saw them, since he was made to look like a sneaky, bucktoothed rodent, and Cob a fat, goofy baby, while Cane was always portrayed as some sort of devilish ladies’ man. Disregarding the facts, several of the more liberal publications began to twist the crime spree into a romantic saga, due in part to a hysterical widow’s claim that the oldest had handed her a bouquet of sweet williams and a fifty-dollar gold piece after they watered their horses at her well in Chapel Hill. More conservative journalists, however, chose to ignore the heartthrobs and moonbeams, and put a different spin on the tale. Thus, on the same day that a Socialist weekly in Boston ran an editorial stating that the brothers were just humble, illiterate sharecroppers who had killed their tyrannical overseer after he refused to allow them time off to bury their dead father, a staunchly right-wing daily out of New York City compared the outlaws to a band of ungodly savages who were possibly even worse than the Huns, going so far as to claim that they had robbed and left for dead a half-dozen good Christians along a highway in Arkansas who were on their way to a revival. And things were just getting warmed up. Crimes as far away as Idaho and Arizona were soon attributed to the trio. A fruit farmer in Vermont, sensing that his nosy wife was beginning to suspect his own sick behavior, and viewing the brothers as the perfect fall guys, walked into the Montpelier police station and swore that he had come upon them burying a woman’s nude body in his orchard. Fortunately, the detective on duty, a man by the name of Abe Abramson, was blessed with an uncanny ability to detect when someone was lying, mostly by observing the manner in which they held the cup of coffee or tea he thrust upon them while they were being interrogated; and within hours the farmer was arrested for the slayings of nine females who had disappeared from the Green Mountains over the past decade. Still, even though that grisly incident received much attention nationwide and should have served as a wake-up call that perhaps the outlaws were being blamed for crimes they hadn’t committed, the reporting became more and more tawdry and unbalanced, and the telegraph and phone wires fairly sang with contradicting lies and outlandish bullshit. But there was one thing that everyone seemed to be in agreement on, and it was this: with deputized posses in six states now searching for them, along with a great number of independent bounty hunters, it was only a matter of days or even hours before the brothers now known as the Jewett Gang would be no more.

  24

  ALTHOUGH BLACKIE TRIED to promote his new place as the “Celestial Harem of Earthly Delights,” it was hard for anyone to accept Virgil Brandon’s goat shed as being anything close to an exotic playground; and, to his dismay, it quickly became known simply as the “Whore Barn.” Too, it wasn’t quite as successful as he had initially hoped. He had planned on the girls having more johns than they could handle, but it turned out that the soldiers at Camp Pritchard were kept on a fairly tight leash, at least through the week. Mandatory classes on the horrors of venereal disease also put a damper on business. The physician who conducted the classes, a Dr. Eugene Eisner, scoured the county looking for the most ravaged victims of gonorrhea and syphilis he could find to parade and sometimes even treat in front of the recruits. He often had to pay them out of his own pocket, but he didn’t care; the look on the soldiers’ faces as they watched him knock the clap snot out of some hilljack’s pizzle with a rubber hammer was priceless. Since Eisner, who was also an ordained Methodist minister, believed that such diseases were a useful, even God-sanctioned deterrent against sex outside the marriage bed, he didn’t condone the use of condoms. As he had told various colleagues over the years, he would rather die than help promote anything that allowed the promiscuous to continue their licentious lifestyles with impunity. No, with the rubber hammer act, he was trying to achieve a more permanent psychological effect, something a man would automatically recall every time he thought about sticking his prick in some casual acquaintance. As he boasted at the little gatherings the general occasionally held for privileged members of his staff, half the men who sat in on his lectures took vows of chastity at some point or other, even those who were already betrothed. As one captain quipped to his buddies, the crazy bastard’s enthusiasm was “infectious.”

  However, if someone had asked Jasper Cone, he would have said that business was booming for the pimp. Ever since Blackie and the girls had set up shop in Virgil’s shed, he had been watching them at night from the weedy perimeter of the lot. At times he wondered why he tortured himself so. In addition to walking around half-numb from lack of sleep, the insects nearly ate him alive, and he sometimes witnessed things that sickened his stomach, not an easy feat when you consider that this was a man who spent hours every day mucking about in shithouses without the slightest qualms. Too, wasn’t it useless to pine over something you could never have? Because of his size, Jasper hadn’t had an erection since before he quit growing around the age of seventeen, not a full-blown one anyway. “Not enough blood in your body,” Doc Hamm had told him a couple of years ago. “Even if it was to happen, you’d probably pass out before you could do anything with it.” But though he knew the doctor was right—he had grappled with his cock enough times to know it would never stand at attention—he still had desires; he could feel them coursing through his body whe
never he came upon a woman, whether it be on the street, or in an outhouse during a surprise inspection, or looking through some neighbor’s carelessly curtained window late at night. He was to a great extent like a man without a stomach who nonetheless can’t resist spending all of his free time hanging around a chophouse buffet.

  Along with unrequited lust, another part of Jasper’s fascination with the Whore Barn was just being able to see how the women operated. There had always been a prostitute or two in Meade—old Midge Daniels with her varicose veins and flabby honkers, and a colored girl named Jellybean who lived over on White Heaven—but they did their dealings behind closed doors. Here, everything was out in the open. The number of men who went in and out of the tents astounded him. The weekdays were sometimes slow, but on Friday and Saturday nights he often counted seventy or eighty. Young bucks, too, determined to get their money’s worth. Jasper had heard that you couldn’t wear one of those woman things out, but, Lord, that was a lot of pounding when you added it all up. And there were other things to be had, too, besides just what the pimp called a “straight fuck,” which, even to the virginal Jasper, began to sound a little boring after a while. For an additional dollar, the blonde would speak strange words in a foreign accent, and the skinny one would dress up like a schoolgirl, while the ugly one, if properly aroused, would swallow a man’s spunk just for the hell of it. No wonder she was so fat, Jasper thought. Just the other night when that wagonload of boys from Monkey Town tore into her, she must have slurped down a quart of the stuff. Oh, yes, it was such a clamoring, festive, noisy place, with the lighted lanterns hanging between the posts, and the pimp serving drinks at the little plank bar, and the bodyguard taking the money and keeping the lines moving in an orderly fashion. They even had a jug band playing on the weekends, a trio from Kingston that called themselves the Ginseng Gang. True, there was sometimes trouble, like the other evening when they had to pistol-whip the big-boned country boy from Clarksburg off the one called Matilda. For one reason or another, he’d decided that he was going to make her moo like a cow, and when she refused, he went a little crazy. You could still see his handprints around her throat the next night in the campfire light. But the way Jasper figured it, at an average of three dollars a shot, the Whore Barn was making more than enough money, no matter how much he heard Blackie bitch to Henry on slow nights about the clap doctor out at the army base cutting into their profits with his rubber hammer trick.

  25

  SERGEANT MALONE WAS sitting on a stool in front of the camp post office, his nose stuck in the Scioto Gazette, when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Bovard approaching. Jesus Christ, he moaned to himself, not a minute’s peace. It wasn’t so much that he disliked the lieutenant; hell, he was nicer than most of the college boys he had come across. At least he didn’t walk around like he had a broomstick shoved up his ass and his nose stuck high in the air like the Yale brats, Benchley and Smothers. And he had gotten Malone drunker than Katy’s cunt again two nights ago, so there was that, too. No, it was something else. He reminded the sergeant of those Englishmen he had watched with a telescope from a distant field hospital kicking a football out into No Man’s Land just as they began an attack, their heads swollen with glory and honor and all that other bullshit they were taught in their public schools. By the time the sortie was over, the only thing left of the entire regiment was that damn ball, bobbing around in a shell hole filled with bloody water and body parts. You might have gotten by with that sort of bravado in the past, but not anymore. Now there were machine guns that fired three hundred rounds a minute and mustard gas that turned the lungs to pink froth and generals who thought that if they only lost a few thousand men gaining an extra yard or two, why, they had achieved some great victory. Maybe it really would be, as some people predicted, the last war that would ever be fought.

  “Anything interesting in the paper?” Bovard asked as he stepped up onto the porch.

  “Not really, sir,” Malone said. “I just been reading about this Jewett Gang.” The lieutenant’s eyes, he noticed, were even more bloodshot than yesterday morning, and his face was flushed and sweaty, but he looked damn happy for a man who was so obviously hungover. In fact, he was practically beaming. Malone wondered if maybe he had visited the whore camp last night, perhaps gotten laid by the blonde the pimp billed as a genuine Parisian fashion model. From what he had heard, she was quite a hit with some of the officers. He held the newspaper up for Bovard to see. The main headline proclaimed in big black letters: SEARCH STILL ON FOR KILLER OUTLAWS. An interview with the local city engineer discussing the mental, physical, and spiritual benefits of indoor plumbing was the only other front-page story. The war wasn’t even mentioned.

  “Yes, I heard something about them,” Bovard replied. Leaning against a porch beam, he pulled his cigar case from his pocket and offered the sergeant one. The Jewett Gang had come up in a conversation he’d had last night with an effeminate theater manager named Lucas Charles. They had bumped into each other in the Candlelight Supper Club, a quiet establishment that carried a decent brandy and was quickly becoming the lieutenant’s favorite watering hole. Lucas was girlishly slender and small-boned, with soft delicate hands and purplish bags under his rather corrupt-looking gray eyes. They had talked about this and that, and then sometime around eleven o’clock, he had invited Bovard to a room he kept above the Majestic Theater, just a bed with an unwashed sheet thrown over it and a red upholstered chair and scattered bouquets of dead flowers and half-empty jars of cold cream. A torn and faded poster of a once famous actor, twinkly-eyed and sporting a top hat and monocle, was tacked to the wall. “Ol’ boy performed here once,” Lucas said, nodding at the picture as he poured them a drink. “Fell in the orchestra pit twice, he was so plastered.” He shook his head. “Poor bastard. Couldn’t remember his lines anymore.”

  “Whatever…whatever happened to him?” Bovard had asked nervously, glancing again at the bed. It had become apparent to him over an hour ago that he was being seduced, but now that push was about to become shove, he wasn’t so sure he wanted to have his first sexual experience with such an obvious sissy. Wasn’t being queer bad enough without being so damn blatant about it?

  “Cut his throat in Cleveland a week later during an intermission. Made a real mess of the dressing room, from what I heard. I guess they booed him off the stage for the last time.”

  The lieutenant took a drink from the glass Lucas handed him as he thought back on his own dark time in the hotel room in Columbus. Fortunately, before he slipped up and mentioned it, there was a knock on the door, and a man named Caldwell entered. He was even more disheveled and limp-wristed than the theater manager. A druggist by trade, he was dressed in a wrinkled white suit and carried a battered straw boater in his hand. A half-smoked cigarette was stuck behind his ear, and his blue tie looked as if it had been dipped in a mustard pot. Tossing the hat in the corner, he kicked off his shoes and produced a vial of tincture of opium from his pocket with a grand flourish. “Damn it, Clarence,” Lucas said, as he locked the door, “I told you to quit bringing that stuff over here.”

  “Yeah, but you like it, don’t you?” Caldwell said, as he uncapped the bottle.

  “That’s the problem,” Lucas said. “I like it too much.”

  Bovard glanced uneasily at the bottle. Jesus Christ, not only were they homos, they were dope fiends, too. From what he had heard, just one little taste of that poison and you were forever after crawling the walls for it. A panicky urge to flee the room swept over him, but, in the end, the greater fear of being viewed as some sort of cowardly boor won out. And so he had stayed, and within thirty minutes of slugging down the drink Caldwell doctored up for him, there wasn’t another place in the world he would have rather been than in that filthy hole with his two new pals.

  Malone lit the cigar and dropped the match into a dented helmet that served as an ashtray next to his stool. “According to this,” he told Bovard, “they might be in Ohio now.”

  �
��And isn’t there an outlandish reward being offered for their capture?”

  “Five thousand dollars. Or fifteen thousand if you take their heads to this Montgomery tycoon. Lot of jack for three sharecroppers.”