Glancing up from his whiskey, Chimney took note of the hateful glare in the barkeep’s eyes. Tardweller had looked much the same that day he held him by the shirt collar and booted his ass in front of those women like someone would do to a little kid. As Chimney remembered the greatest embarrassment of his life, his heart started beating faster, his hands began to sweat. He was right on the verge of telling Pollard to step outside when he thought about Matilda. Within a couple of hours, if everything went as he hoped, he would have her all to himself, and there wasn’t any way he was going to allow this fat bastard to fuck that up. “Ah, just give me another one,” he said, pushing his whiskey glass forward.
“But you ain’t answered me yet,” Pollard said. “What would ye do to him, someone who stole your car? Why, for that matter, what would ye do if I was to reach over and slap that stupid hat off your head? I bet ye wouldn’t do a damn thing, would ye?”
“Like I said, just give me another drink.”
“Two dollars.”
“It was fifty cents ten minutes ago.”
“That was before I knew what you were,” Pollard said.
Chimney stared straight ahead as he reached into his pocket for the money and laid it on the counter. He had been willing to let a little bit slide, but this fat cocksucker was going too far. “There,” he said. “There’s your damn two dollars.” The lamp flared for a second, then dimmed again. He thought again of Tardweller, of how good it had felt to split his head open in the barn that night. Pushing the duster back, he rested his hand on the Smith & Wesson tucked inside his belt. “So you think you know what I am, huh?” he suddenly said, just as Pollard started to pour the whiskey.
“Sure, I do,” Pollard replied, a maniacal grin spreading across his face. “I know what all ye pussies are like.” The hell with it, he thought. Why worry about waiting on the right time for this puny piece of shit. He’d lay him over his knee and break his spine first, then roll him like a wagon wheel to the back room. Tossing the drink to the floor, he walked quickly around the bar to the front door, slid the lock bolt in with a loud bang. “You’re fucked now, boy.”
“One of us is, that’s for sure,” Chimney said, watching in the splotchy mirror as the barkeep started to come toward him with his fist raised and his teeth shining yellow in the lamplight. Then he pulled the hammer back on the gun and spun around on the bar stool.
“Why, you little turd, I’ll stick that goddamn thing up—”
Two orange blasts exploded in the low-ceilinged room, the first bullet making a deep, puckered crevasse in Pollard’s forehead, two inches or so above the bridge of his wide nose, and the second breaking his collarbone. His mouth gaped open and a shocked expression crossed over his greasy, unshaven face. He tottered back, the sound of his heavy shoes clomping on the floor; and then, as if in slow motion, the top half of his body crashed through the front window and he landed on his back on the wooden walkway outside. Before the gunshots had even stopped reverberating in his ears, Chimney had dashed around the end of the bar for the wooden cash box. He stuffed the few dollars into his pants pocket, grabbed two nearly full bottles of whiskey, a Golden Wedding and a Sunny Brook. Unbolting the door, he stepped outside and looked down at Pollard, blood dripping out of his ears, his eyes staring blankly at the darkening sky above him. “Goddamn you,” Chimney said angrily, kicking him with his boot. “Why couldn’t ye just leave it alone?” Then he stepped off the porch and tossed the pistol and the liquor onto the seat beside Matilda’s roses.
He was still trying to get the Ford started when he heard the sharp clacking of horse’s hooves on the brick cobblestones. Looking back, he saw a group of soldiers racing toward him, their service revolvers drawn and a big man with a black mustache leading the charge. In the three days he’d owned the car, the engine had failed to ignite several times, and the only thing he knew to do whenever that happened was to start the whole process over again. But that took at least a couple of minutes, and the men weren’t more than half a block away. “Goddamn piece of junk,” he said, throwing the crank down. He sat down in the front seat just as the clatter of the horses’ hooves stopped, and all he could hear was the sound of their panting, a saddle creaking. He uncapped the fifth of Golden Wedding, and then, as the soldiers lined up behind him, he took a pull and reached over for the pistol. This probably was going to be the most important night of his life after all, he thought, just not in the way he had planned on.
He heard one of the soldiers say, “Put your hands up where we can see ’em.” He looked toward the bridge, remembering a cocksure lawman using the same line on Bloody Bill when he thought he and his posse had him cornered in a corncrib. He smiled to himself. The sonofabitch had emerged from that mess without a scratch after killing every one of them. But he wasn’t Bloody Bill, and this wasn’t some fucking book. He went over his options in his head, either get shot now or hang later; and found both of them to be lacking in any sort of hope. He wondered what Cane would do if he were here. He’d play it smart, probably surrender, and then try to figure out a way to escape later on. Taking another quick slug from the bottle, he heard the soldier repeat the order. His skin tingled, and his hands began to tremble. He glanced down at the flowers. Well, at least he had known a woman first. But, damn, he wished…He wished more than anything that he could have found out what Matilda’s answer might have been. It would have been nice, knowing some pretty girl wanted to be with him, was willing to travel clear to some other country by his side. “This is your last warning,” the man called out.
68
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, after the Lewis Family finished their encore and took their final bow, Cane and Cob exited the Majestic just in time to see throngs of people heading down Second Street toward the center of town as if in a hurry. Falling in behind them, Cob started talking about Mr. Bentley, about how he wished he could buy him and set him free in an apple orchard somewhere. “Or maybe we could take him to Canada with us,” he said, looking over to see how his brother reacted.
“Ah, I don’t think he’d like—” Cane started to say as they got to the corner, but then he stopped in mid-sentence. Coming down the street was the group of soldiers they’d seen earlier, only now two of them were pulling with their horses a car that looked exactly like the one Chimney had bought. “Clear the way,” the stout man who’d been giving orders earlier called out as citizens jammed around the auto. “Get back, I said! Get back!”
“Stay here and don’t move,” Cane told Cob. He pushed his way through the swarm until he was within five or six feet of the car, and that’s when he saw Chimney, bound in manacles and sitting with a stony look on his face beside a soldier manning the steering wheel. In the backseat lay another man partly dressed in a bloody uniform, obviously badly hurt. Jesus Christ, two hours ago everything was fine. A sick feeling swept over Cane, and his ears buzzed with all the voices going on around him.
“What the hell happened?”
“Goddamn it, people, clear the way!”
“They say that skinny boy shot Pollard that owns the Blind Owl, but the soldiers caught him ’fore he could get away.”
“Back off!”
“Someone said he’s one of them Jewetts they been hunting.”
“No way.”
“Hey, quit your shoving, goddamn it.”
“What about the one in the uniform? Did the boy mess him up like that?”
“No, it was Pollard did it. Had him chained up in his back room cuttin’ on him.”
“I told my wife just the other day that damn army camp was going to lead to trouble.”
“Jimmy Beulah said the same thing.”
“Aw, shit, Fuller, you don’t want to listen to anything that ol’ coot says. He put some boy’s eye out the other night at the Big Penny.”
“Look there. Is his fingers cut off?”
“Just on the one hand it looks like.”
“They say Triplett sold him that car.”
“Well, that explains why the
y’re pulling it then.”
“Be just like Trip to sell a car to a bandit.”
“Here comes Chief Wallingford. You wait and see, he’ll try to take credit for the whole shebang.”
“Jack Meadows said he’s got a new lady friend over in Fayette County.”
“Shit, she can’t be much of a lady if she’s hangin’ around with ol’ Pus Gut.”
“Wonder where the other ones are?”
“Who you talkin’ about?”
“The other Jewetts. There’s supposed to be three of ’em, ain’t they?”
Cane swallowed some bile and hurried back through the crowd to where Cob stood eating from a bag of peanuts he’s picked up on the way out of the lobby. “Come on,” he said in a low voice, “we got to get out of here.”
“But what about Mr. Bentley? Think we could—”
“We’ll talk about that later,” Cane said, grabbing Cob by the sleeve. “Come on, I need you to hurry.”
“Don’t go too fast,” Cob complained after only a few yards. “My leg’s hurtin’ me.”
“All right,” Cane said, “all right.” He slowed down and glanced behind them, tried to steady himself with a deep breath. “Just do the best ye can.”
“What’s going on back there anyway?”
“I’ll tell ye later,” Cane said. “Right now we got to get back to the hotel.”
69
SUGAR HAD BEEN following the two brothers the entire time, and once they entered the McCarthy, he ran the three blocks back uptown to find the police chief. Although Malone and his patrol had passed on through with Chimney and Bovard on their way to the army camp, the crowd of onlookers continued to swell. Wallingford, irate that the sergeant had acted so uppity when he asked him what had taken place, was headed back to the jail with his other son, Luther, to call the general’s headquarters and make a complaint. He’d already sent Lester over to secure the Blind Owl before it was looted, and Pollard’s carcass before some sicko got hold of it. When he heard footsteps running up behind him, he flinched and closed his eyes. Jesus Lord, was this the end? It was one of the downfalls of being a lawman for so many years: having a great number of enemies. You never knew when someone might get the notion to do violence to you, just for trying to maintain a little bit of order in this world of chaos. Sure, nine times out of ten the assassin might only be planning to throw a pie in your face, or call you a dirty name or two, but then again, he might gun you down in cold blood, like what had happened to his friend sheriff Buddy Thompson, over in Athens County a couple of summers ago. Blasted clear out of his chair on a Sunday while reading the funny papers, by the family of a man he’d arrested for running a white slavery ring that catered to clients looking for Appalachian females endowed with the stamina of an ox and the woodsy know-how of a Davy Crockett. It was a lot of pressure, living on edge like that day after day, and that’s why, he figured, he ended up doing reckless shit like taking on mistresses he couldn’t afford. “Hey, Chief,” he heard someone say in a ragged pant. “Hey, Mister Police.”
When Wallingford opened his eyes, he saw before him the filthy black man Lester had arrested for cleaning out Pollard’s outhouse. “Jesus Christ, you again? Boy, you nearly give me a heart attack.”
“I saw ’em,” Sugar panted.
“Who?” Wallingford said.
“Them men on the paper hanging in your jail.”
“What the hell you talkin’ about?”
“The wanted poster,” Sugar said, sucking in another draft of air. “With the three men on it.”
“You mean the Jewetts?” Luther said.
“That’s them. I seen ’em just a couple of minutes ago. Well, two of ’em anyway. Them soldiers done caught the one.”
“Soldiers?” Wallingford said. “You mean the boy they nabbed at the bar for killing Pollard? He’s a Jewett?”
Sugar nodded his head rapidly. “Yes, sir. Sure as hell is.”
“And you know this for a fact?”
“I swear on my mother’s grave,” Sugar said.
“That reward’s over five thousand dollars, Daddy,” Luther said.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned. So that’s why that mustachioed bastard was so tight-lipped.” Five thousand dollars, Wallingford thought. He could solve all of his problems with that kind of money. Not only could he get out from under the bitch in Washington Court House, he could retire and never have to worry again about being assassinated. He’d swear off strange pussy and renew his marriage vows, maybe even—
“We gotta hurry ’fore they get away,” Sugar said urgently. “They’re not gonna stick around now.”
“Where did you see ’em last?” Wallingford said.
Sugar hesitated. “No, no, I can’t be playin’ it that way. You’d end up with the reward all to your own self.”
“Well, maybe we better talk about that then. How much are ye willing to settle for?”
“All of it.”
Wallingford laughed. “Bullshit. We’re the ones takin’ all the risk. Either cough up a figure that makes sense, or get your ass out of here.”
Sugar tried to calculate in his head. He wasn’t good with numbers, but he did know that half of five thousand still added up to a lot of cash. “All right then,” he said. “I’ll settle for half. But that’s as low as I’ll go.”
“Half! These fuckers have murdered a shitload of people already. Hell, we’ll be lucky if we don’t get killed.”
“Yeah, but—”
“One third,” Wallingford said. “That’s my final offer.”
“How much is that?” Sugar said.
“I reckon that’d be around sixteen hundred, wouldn’t it, Luther?” Wallingford said with a wink to his son.
“About that, yeah.”
Well, Sugar thought, even with only a third he could buy an automobile and a nice suit and a new bowler and a case of whiskey and still have quite a chunk left over. “Okay,” he said, sticking his hand out to shake on the deal. He could already see the look on Flora’s face when he pulled up in front of her apartment and tooted the horn. It would be even more satisfying than walking into Leroy’s with a new woman on his arm.
As Wallingford gripped the man’s sweaty hand, he asked, “So where they at?”
“Uptown.”
“Shit, that don’t tell me anything. Come on, boy, time’s a-wasting.”
“No, I’ll take ye there,” Sugar said. “That’s the only way I’m doin’ it.”
Wallingford sighed and turned to Luther. “Go back to the jail and get my shotgun and a couple rifles. Make sure they’re loaded. Then meet us up at Paint and Main.”
“I’ll need a gun, too,” Sugar said. “They already tried to kill me once.”
“No way,” Wallingford said. “Christ, son, I give you a gun people will think I’ve lost my mind. I just had you locked up this morning. Now come on, let’s go.”
When people saw the chief of police walking behind a black man who had shit stains on his tattered clothes, some, either out of curiosity or drunkenness or both, began to tag along. By this time, many of them had heard that the soldiers had captured one of the Jewett Gang, and since Wallingford refused to answer any of their questions, quite a few became convinced that they were hot on the trail of the other two outlaws. Some ran home to get their own guns, others slipped away to lock their doors or get another drink. By the time Luther showed up with the weapons and Sugar led the two policemen to the front of the Hotel McCarthy, there must have been fifty people behind them.
“So this is where they’re staying?” Wallingford said to Sugar quietly.
“I saw ’em go in there just ’fore I came lookin’ for you.”
Satisfied that the informant was telling the truth, the chief turned to Luther and said, “Arrest this man and take him back to the jail.”
“Who?” Sugar asked.
Luther pulled out his service revolver and pointed it at the black man. “You heard him. You’re under arrest.”
“For
what? I showed you where they was.”
Wallingford looked back at the crowd of people milling about, many of them now armed. “Disturbin’ the peace.”
“You dirty sonofabitch,” Sugar cried. “I should’ve figured. Goddamn white bastards are all the same.”
“And verbally assaultin’ an officer,” Wallingford added. “Now get him the hell out of here.”
For Sugar, getting gypped out of his potential share of the reward money was the last straw in the series of crushing events over the past few days that had led to this moment. He realized that he couldn’t take it anymore, that he’d been beaten down too far. As Luther pulled out the handcuffs, he decided that the only thing that was going to make him feel any better about himself was to make a stand, to fight back, to cut the shit out of someone, regardless of the consequences. With all of his rage centered on the police chief, he took a step toward him, and someone yelled out, “Watch out! He’s got a knife!” Fortunately, for Wallingford anyway, his son didn’t hesitate to act. As is sometimes the case with those who go into law enforcement, Luther had been looking for a legitimate reason to kill a man ever since he’d taken his oath to protect people, and Sugar barely had time to snap his razor open before he was lying in the street with three bullets in his bony chest. Looking up at the crowd of white men gathering around to take a look at him, he thought one more time of many things, some of them good and some of them not: Flora’s big round ass, the bowler the first time he saw it in the shopwindow, the old white woman begging him not to hurt her, the way his mother used to sing him to sleep at night, and on and on, pieces of his life flying past before he could grab hold of them; and then, just before he took his last miserable breath, he turned his head a little to the left and spat on the toe of Sandy Saunders’s shoe.
70
UP IN ROOM 8 on the second floor of the McCarthy, Cane was hurriedly packing the saddlebags when he heard the three gunshots. He looked out the window, saw a gang of citizens gathered in front of the hotel. Some cradled rifles and shotguns, others were sipping from liquor bottles. A dozen or so, along with several policemen, stood over a body lying in the street. He shoved another shirt into the bag and cinched it tight. “Cob,” he said in a tense voice, “get up.” He reached for his pistol on the nightstand.
The Heavenly Table Page 36
