by Trey Holt
“If you’ll‘scuse me,”he said to Larry Beaman,“I’ll be passing through the door now.”
Covertly rude but not obviously defiant, Mr. Beaman moved his feet enough to have appeared he moved, but still not enough where Lucky could pass easily.
“Have you been drinkin’, Chief Hall?” he asked. His voice, its inflection, had a nagging quality, like fingernails sliding lightly across a chalkboard.
Lucky looked at him like had been slapped. Nobody in Franklin would have ever asked such a question. With church and a beer joint every mile, a still in every stand of woods, it was as common for a lawman to drink as for his wife to attend church regularly. It was how he had gotten in with Oscar Garrett, his predecessor, to begin with. Drinking buddies. Crap-shooting buddies.
“I ain’t sure that’s any of your business,”he said.
“Oh, everything’s our business, Chief Hall,”said Herman Garrison, the older one.
“Our business and the business of our readers,”said Beaman, the little prick.
“How’d you get the marks on your head, Lucky?” asked Fred Creason. I was certain he already knew. If the busybody old women inside knew, then I was sure it had made it back to the Review Appeal already. But they wouldn’t run such a thing; they only ran the“good”things, or at least the civil ones.
Lucky there, propped up on the wall, appeared as if one strong breath might finish him. He eyed the men as if he were trying to decide what course of action to take. He drew from the Lucky in his free hand and started to drop it on the porch but seemed to suddenly realize where he was. He kept the cigarette in his hand, the fire growing ever closer to his thumb and forefinger. Finally, he exposed the bottom of his boot, and snuffed out the burning butt there. Then dropped it in his pants pocket.
“219 Russell Street,”he said.“Ike Beatty.”
Their pens went to scribbling again.“What’s that?” Beaman asked.
“An address and a name,”Lucky said sarcastically.
“Whose?” said Herman Garrison.
“Your guess is as good as mine,”said Lucky.“It was the only thing we found with the body.In the pocket of them ridin’pants she had on. That’s all it said. Just a name and number.”
“And no idea who that is…or where?”
“No sir,”said Lucky.“I’ve had a couple of men who’ve been checkin’but they ain’t turned up anything yet.”
Lucky, now having given them the only piece of information I figured he’d been holding back for the better part of two days, must have thought them sated. He turned his bloodshot eyes from one to another, the little young man, our local man then to the older one, Garrison. His jaw locked, he turned his face to West Main Street, watched a couple of cars pass, people move down the concrete sidewalk glowing white in the darkness and toward their cars. He knocked some stray potatoes off his sleeve, a green bean off his pants. Then turned himself back to Beaman.
“Now, if you’ll‘scuse me,”he said,“I’ll be goin’in. I’ve got some other things to take care of.”
“Chief Hall?” he said.
“Yessir?” said Lucky.
“Why’d you take those negroes into custody if you don’t think they did it?”
“‘Cause the whole town thinks they did,”he said. He grasped the door handle and passed through one of the double doors and motioned for me to follow him. He nodded at George Preston, still standing in the front foyer, now appearing none the worse for wear. Like he had set sail on the sea of contentment via another bottle somewhere. This time, he allowed his eyes to float toward the front, where the line seemed to have remained as long as it had been most of the afternoon and evening. He shook his head, I assumed, in amazement.
“What time do we cut it off?” George Preston asked him.
“What time is it now?” Lucky said.
George Preston said,“You have a watch, Dillard.”
Lucky turned his wrist and peered at its face.“Son of bitch either quit or I forgot to wind it. I ain’t sure.”
I looked at my Mickey Mouse, sometimes the only vestige of childhood I had left. The reason I took shit from everybody about it. Seemed important for some reason.“It’s seven-thirty,”I said.“Or just a couple of minutes after.”
“Quarter to eight,”said Lucky.“I say that’s when we stop lettin’people come in. How’s that, George?”
George Preston turned and looked at the line, then turned his gaze to what had been a fine, deep burgundy, floral patterned carpet before this day. Now a soppy mess of embedded footprints and mud.
“Maybe I can find Michael in Nashville,”he said.“Find out from him what his secret potion was.”
Lucky raised his eyebrows, frowned and nodded his head. I followed them as they both took refuge behind the closed door of the front office. Soon, Lucky and I would begin to turn people away at the front door and George Preston, prepare to finish his job.
Chapter Fourteen
Even though it’s the middle of December, the attic is hotter than I imagine hell. My sweat has covered the sheet and I lay in it, that is, when I’m not rolling from side to side of that tiny bed. The bed on the other side is, of course, empty. Jean’s fat ass is downstairs where she can hear my mother up tinkering around during the night, Lucky snoring like a damn freight train, when he isn’t coughing and hacking, bringing up his lungs. Over the years, I guess, I remember Percy sleeping up here with me more than anybody else. Occasionally, Lucky makes his way up here like he did last night. When he’s playing pretend with my mother. With me…that we really have a relationship. Every once in awhile, it seems like Percy’s still here, still spouting all that bullshit he used to…moving around, arranging himself one way then the other because he’s too long to sleep in the fucking bed.
For a minute I hit a position where it feels good. Throw the covers off, lay there in my own sweat, the air in the room cooling me as it merges with the water my body’s produced. The ceiling as dark as pitch, the only light’s the little coming in the window from a street light half way up the block. I try to imagine what Lucky and my mother are doing downstairs…what they’re talking about. Probably Jean. If they do talk about me at all, I imagine that it’s Lucky, lamenting what became of my football career. Saying that it makes him feel bad because I really don’t have any other talents besides baseball and football. Not the smartest guy in the world—I mean after all, look what happened to him after his football career went down the drain. You know that was Paul Chester’s fault, my mother would tell him. Hey, Lucky, I want to scream out in the attic, if I ain’t too smart then I’m sure that I got it from you! But nobody screams much anymore. I’ve noticed that.
Turn over again. Sometimes, I think I can smell Percy, too. He had this strange scent, cigarettes combined with something. Kind of musty. Not stinky, though. Not particularly unpleasant. As a matter of fact, smelling it usually calms me. Makes me think in some odd way—maybe one of those ways he talked about—he’s still around here. It’s all about energy, he used to tell me. It’s a fact of science: energy is neither created nor destroyed. The same energy that runs us will always be around, Henry. That’s what he’d say.
A noise makes me come two feet off the bed. Something hitting the side of the house…probably just a stray tree limb knocked loose in the rain earlier. Or it could be that person…whoever he...they...she might be. I don’t imagine it to be a woman. Women seldom can be as mean as men. Sometimes bigger pains in the ass, but not as mean.
I try to tell myself that there’s nothing to worry about. That Lucky has arrested two people, although he believes it’s the wrong two people. That whoever did this is not concerned with me, in the upstairs bedroom…no, you can’t really call it a bedroom…in the fucking hotbox, I mean hotbox (no fucking, bad words might make them come, make something bad happen) of an attic of a little brick house on Cleburne Street. Maybe God will send whoever it was over here to strike my ass down. That’s the way my mother and Jean and Brother Myron Brown talk about God.
He’s always waiting to catch somebody doing something wrong so he can kick them in the ass. Sounds a lot like Lucky to me.
Lucky and Percy used to fight about that. You gotta make somebody into what they become, Lucky would say. We don’t have to be made into anything, Percy would say. We are already are what we are…what we’re to become. But at the same time we’re taught to run from that person because we’re taught to avoid anything that’s flawed. And I can guarantee you this, Henry Boy, that person is flawed. Human Frailty, my boy. If somebody is open to everything inside them, or even the majority of voices that fly through their heads, then they know how fucked we all are. But unless we live into that, then we never know. If we pretend we don’t hear the voices, then we never know what they say. What they tell us about ourselves. It’s easier to pretend we don’t hear them.
He hears fuckin’voices all right, Lucky would tell me when I told him things like this. It took a while for me to realize it did no good, only made Lucky madder than he normally was, to tell him the kind of stuff Percy talked to me about. I was a captive audience, I guess. Somebody to whom he could spew his ideas like water coming from a spring in a feral field. The son of a bitch has always heard voices, he’d say. That’s what happens to people when they don’t have to do anything. By the time Mother and Daddy had him, they was too old to be hard on him. I guess he was a fucking surprise. In more ways than one. He wasn’t right from the beginning…and I think it’s just got worse with the years. I can still remember Mother and Daddy and Wanda Jean and Nelly and…me working out in the field and fuckin’Percy sittin’on the porch, readin’a book.
You know, that’s what he always had thought, don’t ya, Henry Boy? He’s always thought that I got crazy‘cause Mama and Daddy were too easy on me. That they didn’t hold me to the same standard they held the other ones to. He thinks they let me read too much. He belly laughs. It’s a good sound. As good as I know. Like kindness dancing, holding itself out where you can hear it, know what it sounds like. He says that I use it to avoid reality. His eyes grow tired, the heaviest thing about him. And you know the funniest goddam thing? He thinks that I don’t know I’m this way. He lights a cigarette, holds the pack out to me. I listen to see if I hear Mama moving around downstairs. Don’t. I take the one he’s shook out the furthest. He touches it with the match he’s struck. Don’t let your daddy find out that I’m givin’you cigartettes, okay? You know, he can be a violent man at times. The only ones I’ve never known him not to be violent toward is Mama and Daddy. He’s the same way as our daddy. It just comes over him, takes him like an evil spirit. As for me, I’m starting to enjoy the nicotine buzz, and even though Percy’s a little crazy and the stuff he talks about doesn’t always make sense, he keeps me from being lonesome. Lonesome in my own goddam house.
I tell you how I make myself feel better, though, Henry Boy. Do you wanna know that? I nod, so the silence won’t close in around me, bring the voices, the evil spirits, the demons, whatever the hell you want to call it, along with it. I know that everybody’s got it. Their own affliction. When Randomness meets Human Frailty. Gives us our own particular brand of frailty.
You know the trick, don’t ya? he asks. The nicotine’s taking its effect by now. My hands are shaking ever so slight as I try to hold the thing to my mouth. I take its burn-off all the way to the bottom of my lungs and shake my head back and forth.
The trick’s not letting the craziness in us turn into meanness. That’s what happens when we convince ourselves it’s not there. It bends all around itself, distorts itself into something that looks different. Something that swells beyond the person it’s in and starts to hurt other people. Leeches onto their life and starts to affect the energy coming through them. Takes their energy. Hood’s a primary example of that, you know. I know, I know…you get tired of hearing about him. I can tell by the look on your face. I won’t talk about him tonight. I shake my head back and forth, try to convince him with a feigned smile that I want him to keep talking, even if he tells me about General Hood.
He couldn’t admit that his perception was primarily distorted, that his frailty was about to turn into randomness in the lives of so many of his men. He was more concerned with quieting the voices in his own head.
Percy paces to the window, like I’ve seen him do a thousand times, pulls his pack of cigarettes from his sock, the only one article of clothing he has on besides his skivvies. He touches the burning head of a match to the end of it, smoke wafting up, coloring his face hazy and gray for a moment. He checks out the window for Christine Smithson. He turns quick, like she might have been there, seen him. Takes to staring at his cigarette.
It islike John Bell Hood, he says, like he forgot he told me he wouldn’t talk about him. He sacrificed so many men because he couldn’t identify what were the crazy voices, what were the sane ones. Laudanum. Have I ever told you that?
I nod.
He’s nervous now. Fidgety like he got both those times. The summer when I was nine and last summer. Pacing. Looking like his head might blow off if he doesn’t find a way to get where he’s trying to go with his words. He stops. Stares at me kind of insolently. Like maybe he’s seeing Lucky, not me.
He’d been hurt at Chickamauga, he tells me anyway. He needs something to say, something else to focus on to help him avoid the voices in his head. He told me that just last summer. Got real sad and told me, like he was finally admitting he was crazy. Finally giving into what everybody else already knew. Acknowledging that the voices in his head were worse than the average joe. Or average jane, he had laughed when he told me.
He had lost a leg and had a useless arm. Did you know that?
Yes, I tell him.
He gets up from the spot on the end of the bed he’d taken and paces to the window again. He stands there, his elbow cupped in the palm of his other hand at the bottom of his rib cage, puffing out the smoke he draws from the cigarette.
I believe in God enough to believe that what he, or hell, she made us to be is all right. It goes back to the whole energy idea, he tells me, knowing that God is spirit and in us is that spirit and in everybody is that spirit. The spirit…the energy…that’s what drives us. But we live in a society of people that make themselves into something. What the hell does that mean? We all look alike, act alike, talk alike because there’s a comfort there. It can’t be wrong if everybody’s doin’it. I tell ya this, Henry Boy, there’s gonna come a day—not too long in the future, I might add—when people are gonna start knocking against this cookie-cutter mentality. Gonna see that there’s more to life than a house in a subdivision, two kids, a sedan and decent job. We feel so good right now that the Germans and the Japs didn’t take us over, we haven’t thought about anything else in ten years.
He keeps his back to me as he speaks. Seems to have run out of words to keep away what he runs from. That feeling of not having control of one thing in the whole world, even your own mind.
Now, it seems forever ago when he told me how a huge pig with foot-long fangs had been following him for weeks, tracking him everywhere he went. Cussed at him when he wasn’t paying enough attention to him. Snarled and called him ugly names. And the goddam pig was hungry, he added. It was all I could do to keep myself from laughing when he told me, until I saw his eyes, grievous and fixated on the place where he told me he sat waiting right now, to follow him again when he left and went somewhere else.
To know God is to participate in the ongoing process of disillusionment, he tells me. He sits at the base of the window, his head high enough that he can still see out the window. He smothers his cigarette in the ashtray he keeps up here. Shakes his head. And sighs as deep as a human can.
+ + +
He was here one minute, gone the next, but I’m still here. Like a prisoner of this damned place. The doors are locked downstairs. Lucky’s got his gun if he needed it. Probably too drunk to hit a bull in the ass with a bass fiddle, though. I can feel sleep coming finally, settling over me like a soft breeze. And God
knows I need it after the last couple of days. My banging heart slowing down. There goes the stupid noise again. Nothing. Nothing.
I walk to the far window, on the west side of the house. I still don’t look out the one on the east side. As a matter of fact, I took the ashtray he used and slid it under the bed, with his butts still in it. I knew if I had left it out, it would have just disappeared like him. It would have been just one more piece of playing pretend. With his cigarette butts under the bed, I can look and remind myself he was here. Really here. Not like tonight. There goes the damned noise again. It sounds like it’s toward the front of the house, the south side. I wonder if it could be something on the inside. Without thinking, I open the closet within my reach as I stand near the window. She falls out on me. Takes me to the ground with her. Folds on top of me.
I can’t get her off me. She weighs three hundred pounds, but it looks like she should only weigh a hundred and thirty. And she doesn’t look like George Preston made her look. She’s back the way she looked in the parking lot. But now she’s got maggots eating at the wound. Oozing, working all down in it, spilling out down her chest into the collar of her shirt. And the goddam things are falling on me. In my hair, my eyes, my mouth, even though I’ve got my jaw locked trying to keep them out. She’s dead but everywhere I move her, try to push her arms, her trunk, she falls right on me again. It’s like I’m one pole of a magnet and she’s the other. Now her wound’s bleeding on me, all over me. At least the maggots are gone. No, there’s one. I flick the motherfucker off. Just her blood mostly covering me now. Making her too slick to push off me. I begin to pry at her eye lids, thinking if I can get them open again, then everything will be all right. That I can turn back everything that’s happened in the last year. For a moment I think they’re open, but then I realize it’s just been me holding one that way. When my finger moves, the lid drops shut again. I start to panic. I can’t just leave her here. If I leave her on top of me, then I can’t get up myself. I struggle again with all I’m worth. Can feel my shoulder grinding, pulling, acting like it might pop again.
