by W. T. Tyler
“What’s that?”
“Something Doc Coker cooked up for me,” Wooster said as they drove away. “Something that hangs in the curtains worse than shit from a sick pig, stomps the bugs right off the wall, turns a dead cat over, belly up.”
“What are you gonna do with it?”
“I’m gonna fumigate someone’s house for her, fumigate her right out the back door so fast she’ll never look back, not until she’s ten miles down the pike, holding her nose all the way to the Georgia line.”
Combs gave a friendly chuckle. “Well, I don’t wanna know about that, but I can tell you one thing sure—that was a right horrible smell I got a whiff of. Where’d you say your car was at?”
“Over at the finance company.”
Combs turned again, but this time into the congestion of a Friday night crowd gathering for a basketball game. The street ahead was filled with arriving spectators crossing through the beams of the slowly passing cars toward a brightly lit high school gym. Members of a high school band in bright-red uniforms were hurrying through the shadows, instruments in hand. A policeman with a red-lensed flashlight was directing cars into a parking lot.
The Cadillac gathered speed as they passed the gym and escaped into thinning traffic. Out of the darkness a laggard clarinet player, still struggling into his tunic, bolted across the street. Combs slammed on the brakes. He was catapulted against the wheel, Shy Wooster was slammed against the dashboard, and something popped to the floor.
“Good God almighty,” Combs groaned from a bruised rib cage. “What kinda brakes are these, anyhow?”
“Moonshine brakes,” said Wooster. He looked queerly at Bob Combs, Combs returned the look accusingly, and a moment later Wooster’s hands were scrambling wildly among the cushions. It was too late. An angry sibilance was now audible from the darkness of the floorboards, and a moment later the loathsome contents of Shy Wooster’s vacuum-packed grenade exploded in their faces. The slight hint Combs had gotten earlier seemed now like a whiff of roses. The putrefaction was so numbing, so paralyzing, that neither man, having once breathed, could breathe again. Combs’s head expanded steadily, like a gas-filled balloon. The lips compressed first, then the cheeks bulged, finally the eyes popped out, like a bullfrog’s, but then the whole straining membrane burst, an asphyxiated croak followed, and he collapsed forward over the steering wheel, like a split bladder, slack-jawed and drooling.
Shy Wooster had tried to lower his window and screw his head out, but had failed. Sobbing for breath, he tried the door instead and had managed to partially open it when it was violently welded shut by a passing lamppost. The handle came off in his numb hand as the car climbed the curb, bounced down the sidewalk, and came to rest straddling someone’s hedge.
It was there that a summoned patrol car found them—two dark shadows sprawled on the turf, identified by their poisoned, possum-bright eyes, their reeking clothes, and their odd, braying voices. After he’d collected himself, Shy Wooster claimed that they’d been victimized by a stink bomb thrown by an intercity rival as they’d passed the high school gym. The officer approached the Cadillac but then retreated a few steps and put his report book away. Smooter Davis was summoned with the tow truck and the patrol car took the two victims to the city hospital.
Shy Wooster had three broken fingers—judgment enough, decided Combs, who had no visible injuries.
2.
“You say your house burned?” Buster Foreman asked. “Burned because of the stove, or what was it? A Sunday night?”
“Sunday night,” Birdie said.
She’d been attending services at the Mount Zion Church the evening it happened. The fire marshal had inspected the ruins the following day and in his report claimed that the fire had started in the kitchen wall, caused by the same flue defect that had forced him to give her two citations ten days earlier. She’d moved to Frogtown.
“So the stoves hadn’t been fixed,” Buster said.
“One was fixed,” she answered, her voice now a little hoarse, “the one in the parlor. Not fixed but started to get fixed.” She’d moved from the collapsible wheelchair to a straight-backed rocker Buster Foreman had brought in from the living room. A handkerchief was in her bony hand and was in constant motion—to her throat, her temples, her forehead, but most often to cover her mouth as she smiled like a young girl, remembering an incident she hadn’t talked about in years. “Oh, Lordy, Mister Foreman,” and she would laugh, “you asking me about a whole lot of foolishness I done forgot a long, long time ago.” But she hadn’t forgotten at all, and her memory was as clear as a spring fed from an underground fault, untouched by the rancor of the seasons.
“What about the kitchen stove?” he asked, leaning forward again. He desperately wanted a cigarette and something cool to drink. They’d been talking for almost two hours.
“Well, the kitchen stove was working, but I wouldn’t say it was fixed yet. That’s where I left my cats in the evening, right there in the kitchen. The other stove, in the parlor, they was working on, but I didn’t have no fire in the box, not that Sunday evening. The masons was working on it and they left their tools there, still on the floor behind the stove. So the parlor was cold when I left, like the kitchen stove. But they say the kitchen stove took fire right up where the stovepipe went into the plasterboard, but that didn’t make no sense to me. I was cookin’ on a hot plate Miz Cora let me use. Then they say the curtains went up, then the ceilin’, an’ after that the can o’ coal oil in the kitchen. That’s what they tole me, but they didn’t know any more about it than I did. There wasn’t any curtains on the wall behind the stove, an’ there wasn’t no coal oil there neither, not when I left. It was out in the coal shed next to the chicken house, but you know what they say: colored don’t count, an’ I couldn’t tell them fire marshals how to do their business, not with them knowing how many shacks and tenant houses out there git burned up ever’ winter by a bad stove or someone, some chile, foolin’ around with stick matches.…”
“So you think someone started the fire in your house?”
She rocked backward slowly, and folded her hands in her lap. “There was some other burnin’ goin’ on in them days,” she said, “burnin’ folks didn’t hear about, like that foolishness out at Mount Zion Church after Deacon Caldwell Taylor brung that NAACP preacher from Atlanta up to meet with us. They say it was a cross burning, some folks said, burning right in the road out in front of the church, but it was a sorry-looking mess if that’s what it was. Looked like two old Christmas trees wired together to me, something some kids would do. So with that goin’ on, an’ all that marching and singing getting started up down in Atlanta and Montgom’ry an’ Birm’n’ham, it didn’t surprise me none some devil reached out an’ fired up my kitchen curtains that Sunday evening, not with Bob Combs an’ his kind being right next door. I knowed sumpin was coming—”
“Because Cora told you?” Foreman asked, his hand again moving to the cigarette package in his pocket. Her eyes moved too, and he took out his pen instead.
“Not with just what she said,” Birdie answered. “A whole lotta things. It was a feelin’ I had, a feelin’ some other folks had too. I knowed Bob Combs wanted to move me out and wanted my place, but I knew he wasn’t gonna give me good money for it, so I went down an’ talked to ’em at the bank. I told Mr. Giles down there, I told him find me someone who’ll pay me a good price, I’m fixin’ to move on, but do it quiet like, only I’m not selling out to Mister Bob Combs. So he did.”
“This was before the fire?”
“Two weeks before my place burned.”
“So you expected something to happen?” Buster asked.
“It was a feeling some folks had, like I said,” she replied, as if protecting someone.
“Cora, then,” Buster Foreman guessed.
She moved her head to say no, almost imperceptibly, the same Delphic smile on her lips. They sat in silence. Then she said, “Colored sticks together, Mister Foreman; maybe it don’t a
lways seem like it, but we do.”
No, not Cora. It was Smooter Davis who’d told her that the time had come for her to sell out. He was the one who kept his eye on her cottage.
“Folks never paid much attention to him, snappin’ that rag an’ walkin’ that fool duck walk like he used to do,” she said, “singin’ them low-down songs, he used to call them. But that man had eyes, had ears, had more sense’n all of that trash over at Mister Bob Combs’s car lot put together. He was Mount Zion too, but he never let on. He knowed everything that was goin’ on over there at that garage and car shop. It was him that had to clean up them cars on Monday morning, tires all muddied up after they’d been on the road all Saturday an’ Sunday or had been taking folks to one of them meetings out in the woods. It was him got the cars ready. He’d have to be a fool not to know about all them telephone calls comin’ in an’ goin’ out over in that used-car office, getting folks together, getting the automobiles, sendin’ them off down the road an’ heading out o’ town, picking folks up on the way—all that trash going down to Montgom’ry or Selma or wherever it was at—all that ugliness that was hanging along the side of the road waiting for them marchers to come walkin’ by.…”
Her voice faded. “The civil rights marchers?” Buster asked, leaning forward. “The Freedom Riders?”
She nodded, her eyes dropped to her green woolen skirt. She plucked at the wool with her small fingers, the handkerchief still wadded in her palm. “It was over at Bob Combs’s used-car office they got things organized around here. They was the ones got that white trash all riled up, got ’em the cars, got ’em the gas. Smooter Davis even knowed when it was they had their meetings out at Mister Bob Combs’s huntin’ camp—stompin’ around the fire, burnin’ them torches, listenin’ to those devils in their white robes they’d bring in here from down in Georgia an’ Alabama—”
“The Klan? These people had ties to the Klan?”
She didn’t say it. “Smooter Davis knowed all about that. He’d tell Deacon Caldwell Taylor that maybe folks should stay pretty close to home, not be drivin’ around out there in the piny woods on the other side of the county line when they was getting together. So that’s how Mount Zion knew. Smooter Davis was watching for us. He knowed everything that was going on over in the car office, who was doin’ this, who was doin’ that, who it was that burned—”
She faltered in embarrassment. Buster waited.
“Last time I talked to white folks like this was Mister Giles at the bank,” she said softly. “He’s dead now, but he never did come out to my house, not even when I buried my daddy.”
“Times have changed,” Buster said.
“Not hardly, they haven’t. Some things have got worse. Lookit my cousin out there, all got up like that.” Her hands had stopped and she hesitated, drew a deep breath, and then began again, uncomfortably. “You from Wash’n’ton. Maybe you know about this business, maybe you can tell me. It never did make a whole lot o’ sense to me. I ain’t tole no one this, not a soul, an’ I thought I never would, but Smooter Davis been gone a long, long time now, over twenty years, an’ no one ever laid eyes on him again, just like the law never laid a hand on Bob Combs and that used-car bunch over there. They say he stole a cash box out of the used-car office that night he disappeared, but I never believed that, neither.” She lifted her eyes at last. “I never told Deacon Caldwell Taylor this, I never told Cora this, neither. There was a whole lotta guessing going on about who done it, but that was all it was. I never said a word, just like Smooter Davis tole me not to, so what I’m gonna tell you now is between me an’ my own conscience.…”
She didn’t learn the truth for almost seven months. She’d sold her three acres by then, not to Bob Combs but to an East Coast tire and auto accessory chain searching for local property for a new suburban outlet. Mr. Giles at the bank had handled the transaction. She’d moved to a small rented cottage in Frogtown, only a half mile from the Mount Zion Church, and it was there that Smooter Davis came to see her one sultry July evening. She had just finished supper and was sitting in the front porch glider when a car came down the sand road from the direction of the church, passed her house, stopped, backed up quickly as the driver saw the light from her kitchen at the back of the house, and stopped at the gate in front. Smooter Davis got out and ran quickly along the path to the front steps. He was wearing a white shirt and a straw hat, dressed the way he usually dressed when he went out on the road for a pickup or delivery around the state for the used-car lot. He told her he’d just been to Deacon Caldwell Taylor’s house, but it was dark, like the church. He wanted to use the phone at Deacon Taylor’s house or the church. She told him he could use her phone and led him into the front room.
“But before he made the telephone call he went out and moved the car down the road a piece, like he didn’t want anybody knowing he’d been there,” Birdie said. “He was all hot an’ bothered about something, like I’d never seen him before. Then when he got on the telephone to this man in Atlanta, it was like it wasn’t Smooter Davis a-talkin’ at all. He sounded just like Mr. Giles down at the bank—giving out these numbers, car numbers, an’ who was in ’em, a bunch of that trash goin’ down to Columbus, Geo’gia, for some big hoo-raw down there, only he didn’t say hoo-raw. Then when he started talkin’ guns an’ dynamite, I just went on back out to the porch again. Then I heard him give out my name and my telephone number, like I could be his witness if somethin’ happened.…”
She paused to touch the handkerchief to her temples, as Buster Foreman leaned forward to catch the small, quiet voice. From beyond the door behind him, he heard a child begin to cry.
“It was after he hung up my telephone that he told me who it was burned down my house. Shyrock Wooster done it, he said, with someone else waitin’ outside over in the car lot, not setting foot inside my fence, just a-watching, the way Bob Combs always did. He done it with a blowtorch, Smooter told me, done it with a blowtorch off the garage bench over at the car lot, fired it up inside my kitchen, and cooked up that wall till it took fire too. Only there was nothin’ he could do about it, he tole me, and that was why he hadn’t come to talk to me about it. He said I couldn’t say nothing about it, couldn’t tell no one at all, not a soul. He said Mr. Bob Combs’s day in court was coming, his day in court an’ his day o’ judgment, and when it did I would be readin’ about it in the newspapers. He said Bob Combs an’ them others over at the car lot had done a whole lot worse than that, mixed up with the Klan down in Georgia and Alabama like they was—”
“He said Klan, then?” Foreman asked. “You’re sure of that?”
“He said ‘Klan,’ said it right out. But he said he had to stay clear of it an’ I thought he meant he’d be getting himself into a whole lot of trouble, but that’s not what he was talkin’ about. He said he had to hold his peace right then on account of there was a whole lot of other things going on—back in the pinewoods near Mr. Bob Combs’s huntin’ camp, them cars shufflin’ here an’ yonder on the road all the time, some of them not even with the right license plates, some of ’em packing guns an’ dynamite. He said this was a whole lot bigger than that meanness Shyrock Wooster did, burning up my house with a blowtorch. I tole him I didn’t know what that could be and he said my house was just city law, state law, and what he was talking about was the U.S. government, like the man down in Atlanta he was just talking to.…”
She had leaned from the straight-backed rocker to bring the old cigar box to her knee.
“That was the last time I saw Smooter Davis,” she continued. “They found his machine later, drove up behind the Trailways bus station in Athens, Geo’gia, but they never found Smooter. They say he stole a cash box out of the used-car office that night, stole the car too, but that was just ugly talk by folks makin’ up lies for what they didn’t never understand. ‘Stole him a cash box an’ tried to swim the Savannah River with it,’ that’s what Shyrock Wooster tole Cora. Smooter used to get his coffee at Cora’s back door. ‘Stole him a
cash box just like that Emmett Till boy done down in Miss’ippi, tried to swim the Pearl River with that stolen cotton gin ventilator wired around his neck.’ That’s what Shyrock Wooster said after Smooter Davis walked off the face o’ the earth, an’ that’s when Cora broke a soup bowl over his head. Then he had to go an’ say somethin’ even worse, about how he used to see Smooter all the time creepin’ around the back of the diner an’ it wasn’t just his coffee thermos he was gettin’ filled up. That’s when Tom Pepper lit on him—jumped clean over the table to grab him. That was some mess Cora had to clean up. Tom Pepper got fired from his job an’ had to go to court.…”
She searched among the faded letters, the old ribbons, the photographs and brass keys in the cigar box, until she found a yellowing fold of paper. She adjusted her tortoise-rim spectacles and unwrapped it very carefully to read what was written there.
“Smooter wrote it down for me before he walked off the porch that evening, the name of this government man down in Atlanta that was gonna bring Bob Combs, Shyrock Wooster, an’ all the rest of them to judgment in the U.S. courthouse. He wrote it down for me so I’d know if he had any trouble an’ this man could come an’ talk to me. He said he’d been meetin’ with him—out at Mount Zion once, in Athens, even down in Atlanta, where he had his office. You from Wash’n’ton, maybe you know what it was he was talking about. Only it never was in the newspapers, unless it was up there or down in Atlanta. He never did come see me.”
Buster Foreman took the old utility bill which Birdie passed to him and turned it over, reading the telephone number and the name penciled there so many years ago by Smooter Davis. The telephone number was that of the FBI’s Atlanta field office. The name of the FBI agent was Bernard Klempner.
3.
When Nick Straus was finally told he was being transferred from the special-watch group at DIA, he stopped by Leyton Fischer’s office on the third floor of the Pentagon, to question him. No explanation had been offered by the DIA personnel officer.
