Bottomland: Based on the Murder of Rosa Mary Dean in Franklin, Tennessee

by Trey Holt

  “I just hope he gives me enough time to get over there and get me a few of‘em,”said Ronnie.

  “I’d go if I could,”Van interjected, his voice sounding like the three drinks of beer he’d had had already gone to his head. He pulled on another cigarette, mindful of his wrist position. Offered me one.

  I shook my head. Knew that he’d probably stole them from Lucky the last time he’d been at our house, probably to watch our t.v. in the few days after FDR had passed away. Or Lucky had left them out for him, pretended not to see when he took them. As my eyes left Burkitt and moved through the black, empty space between us, the thought went through my head for the first time—at least the first time that I had ever recognized it—that Lucky had probably rather have him as a son. The silver tongued devil. He’d talked all week with Lucky about FDR, the war, Truman, like he really knew something about the siti-ation, as Lucky said it. With pearly white teeth and a smile that would make you believe he would always be on your side. Blue eyes…blonde hair. Built taller than we were. Yeah, Lucky would rather have him because he was not like himself. Lucky was more like me—when he was nervous, his words tangled in throat like vines around his feet in a thicket. When he ran out of things to say that would convince you he was right, he knew nothing else but to hit you. Make you scared to believe he was wrong. Give himself space one more day to believe he was all right, because he knew he really wasn’t.

  “Me and Barbara’s goin’to get married tomorra’night,”said Ronnie Langford.

  “Get the fuck out’a here,”Burkitt spat, pawing the box to find another bottle. He threw the empty in his hand at the rail close to Van, shattering the bottle and the stillness. Van jumped and screamed like he’d pissed on an electric fence.

  “Goddam, boy!” said Burkitt.“You almost made me piss my pants.”

  “Sorry,”said Van.“I was just excited.”

  “Excited, my ass,”I said, the few swigs I had having started my brain on its journey toward peace. Lack of inhibition.“You screamed like a woman‘cause you were scared. Excited like my ass’s excited. Humff.”

  Like times when I had heard bobcats scream after the darkness and silence had wrapped themselves like a blanket around a summer night, this blood-curdling sound made its way out of Burkitt’s mouth. Caused me to scream out like Van had. Thankfully, though, he produced another one with me. Truth be known it was probably the first time that either of us had ever been out this late. I’d gone out the window for the first time. Down the huge Oak that lay its limbs on the roof of the side porch by the driveway. Van had come out through the cellar door, which he had unlocked from the outside earlier after he had decided we were going to sneak out. Meet Ronnie Langford and Fred Burkitt.

  The way Fred Burkitt began to dance around, run down one sliver of train track fifty feet or so, then turn and run back toward us, he looked like a grizzly bear on a tricycle. His hulking body swallowed the silver train rail as he came back toward us. His arms to his sides, he glided like a delicate ballerina down one way, then would scream that sound again and make his way the other. The only thing I’d ever seen like it was when I’d gone on a call with Lucky after a black woman had killed over during a church service. Several others had decided that God had come to claim her during the service itself. Had done their best to welcome him, entertain him. Something. Lucky had described it to me as they were“slain in the goddam spirit. Niggers and Pentecostals…they’re both like that. Hell, I’ve heard sometimes at funerals they get the body out of the casket and dance around with it. They have a goddam good time at anything. I tell ya that.”

  But whether Fred Burkitt was slain in the spirit, in that moment I did not know. As far as I knew, there were no holy rollers nor colored people in his family. Nevertheless, he’d been overtaken by something.

  “Shit goddamit to hell!” he hollered, loud enough you could have heard him to town. His voice split the virtual silence like a midnight rock through a plate glass window.

  “Kill the Japs!” yelled Ronnie.

  “Kill the fuckin’Japs!” Burkitt echoed. Grabbed another bottle out of the box, popped the top with his teeth and took off running again. Hollering indecipherable sounds as he made his way seventy-five, a hundred feet down the track, hopping on one leg, somehow keeping his balance on the rail.

  “Kill the Germans!” Ronnie Langford yelled once more.

  “I’m gonna kill me some Germans and some Japs!” Burkitt yelled from what looked to be a quarter mile away.

  “Y’all better be a little quieter,”said Van to Ronnie.“Mr. Oscar Garrett’ll be down here.”

  “Shit, he’s drunk as a skunk right now. Prob’ly down at the fillin’station shootin’goddam craps with Henry’s daddy.”

  I’d been so glad to finally get to the ground and out of the oak tree, I’d failed to even look to see if his car was there. After I’d met Van, he’d pointed out that the police cruiser wasn’t under the carport, so we’d have to go from yard to yard, tree to tree, making sure we hid ourselves well till we got close to the railroad tracks.

  “I’m gonna go with ya!” Burkitt yelled from his stopping point. Threw the beer bottle he’d opened with his teeth then drained into the woods, the foliage notifying us of its descent and landing.

  “You can’t go with me,”yelled Ronnie.“You ain’t got but a little over a month left in high school…and I don’t think Franklin needs but one hero. And plus, you ain’t even got a woman to come home to after you kill your share a’Germans and Japs.”

  Ronnie’s voice had grown slower with the beer and now quieter as Fred made his way back close to us, the spirit of what had overtaken him either gone or, at least, resting.

  Burkitt’s was the same.“I got just as much right as you to go.”

  “Yeah, but you hadn’t already dropped out’a school. You might as well graduate. Don’t you think that would be a grand fuckin’idea?”

  For a matter of seconds, it appeared that what few cogs there might have been were turning in Fred Burkitt’s brain. Hero? Finish high school? No girl to come home to. Maybe I’ll have one if I’m a hero like Ronnie. Hell, he’s always been the hero. He was the star fullback; I was a linebacker. Everybody knew who he was; the only time my name was ever spoke was when I made a tackle…or even missed one. No, godammit, I wanna be a hero too!

  “My country needs me,”he said.“I don’t think I’d really ever thought about it before the last few minutes. Hell, with everything that’s happened in the last coupl’a weeks, I’m sure they could use me for somethin’. They’re in Germany now. They’re on that island now, too—what’s it called?”

  “Okinawa,”Van told him.

  “Yeah…yeah…that’s it. It’s like God’s callin’me to help. Like God said to me,‘Fred Burkitt, you can go help, too.’”

  “I think the beer’s callin’him,”Van leaned over and said to me.

  I nodded, careful not be seen, since either of them could have swatted me like a fly.

  It was when Ronnie Langford was explaining to him how he had enlisted almost two weeks before in the Marines—the day after they raided Okinawa and lost five thousand men—and that they were highly unlikely to be in the same unit or even battalion that I thought I saw him for the first time. A little further down the track than Fred Burkitt had made it in his journey with the spirit, I saw the silhouette I immediately suspected to be him. As Ronnie Langford explained to him that if he enlisted on the spur of the moment it was unlikely he’d even get to pick the branch of the service he’d be in, I knew I’d recognize his posture anywhere. His gait. The oddness that seemed to surround him like an aura. Follow him like a pet dog. The oddness I seemed only to recognize when I was with someone else I knew would see him that way also. The love I had for him was choked by the shame of what others thought of him. Another way I was like Lucky, I suspect.

  After all was said and done, especially done, I wondered just short of a million times if I had done something different in that moment, if it w
ould have set the wheels of fate to turning in a different direction. Steered its eventual course even a degree or two different, taking life as we all knew it into another future. If I had acknowledged his presence in that moment, rather than trying, as I most often did, to pretend that I had in fact not seen him, would Ronnie and Fred Burkitt have acted different? Would their acting different have steered their lives another way? His? Mine? Van’s? Lucky’s? Who the hell knows. I only know the questions themselves can make you crazy sometimes.

  “Five thousand lost when they raided Oklahoma!” Fred Burkitt screamed. To which I saw the figure down the track respond my jumping, startled. I imagined it was the first sound he’d heard besides the year’s earliest bullfrogs singing their songs to one another. His figure disappeared as quickly as I had seen it. Down the hill on the Lewsiburg Pike side of the railroad tracks.

  “What’s next, Texas?” said Van.

  “It ain’t funny,”said Ronnie.“The damn fool’s likely to go over there and get hisself killed.”

  Again, Fred Burkitt, now a beer in each hand, took himself—or was transported by the spirit—down the railroad track to the south. He screamed the whole way, his voice now close to indecipherable. Something about Oklahoma again. The Japs. The Germans. The Russians. The Jews. Benjamin Muscleddy. Hitler. He turned up one of the beers, downed it and threw the bottle into the woods once more. Somewhere close to where I’d seen him enter them. And then he, too, disappeared.

  In the sense of strange immanence, it was I who began to run after him first. I imagined that Ronnie and Van behind me were moving slower, that they hadn’t the same urgency in their heart I did. By the time we reached the clearing, I found Fred Burkitt standing there, his hands on his knees, breathing like Lucky would come to do years later.

  “There was some…crazy ass…runnin’in front of me,”he pushed out.“I saw him when we…were up there on the tracks and chased his Jap ass…all the way through the woods. I lost him though. All I could see was his cigarette as he moved further and further away. I couldn’t get through all the goddam vines and brush. Thick as fuckin’molasses. Done tore my britches all to pieces.”

  I looked at his legs. In the given light, the holes and the blood were just visible, like shadows. He pawed at them with a mammoth hand, took the last swig of his beer and hurled the bottle, I assumed, toward where he had seen the figure disappear. He looked around himself, examined his surroundings like he might have just been realizing where he was.

  “Ain’t that the Confederate Cemetery over there?” he said, throwing his hand in the general direction.

  “Yeah, I think so,”I told him. I heard Van and Ronnie coming up behind us. The bottles of beer rattled in the box under Ronnie’s arm, clinked as he set the box on the ground.

  “Goddam Yankees,”said Fred Burkitt.“No better than the goddam Japs.”

  Burkitt’s voice was like one I had never heard previous to this moment. As he stood there, conversing with Ronnie Langford after he and Van had arrived, it would be the first time I would not be the first time see alcohol change someone, but most significantly. Even though I had seen Lucky drink whisky, he was only likely to become sullen and angry if the alcohol affected him badly, not like another person.

  “Burkitt don’t say much when he’s sober,”Ronnie explained to us after Fred had left to go piss in the woods.“He’ll be all right. Just put up with him. I ain’t seen him like this but a coupl’a times. He gets pretty crazy. I should’a thought about that before I told him to get that beer at Chester’s…before I told you boys you could come. Wonder why in the hell I did that to begin with?“

  Ronnie opened another beer while he watched Fred Burkitt as he looked through the next patch of woods into the clearing that led to the cemetery. Like a dog who smelled something of which he couldn’t extinguish the memory, neither his head nor his attention wavered. For a brief moment, he appeared almost sober again.

  “Goddam the Japs!” he screamed.“Goddam the Germans! Goddam the goddam Yankees!” And, having mostly regained his breath, he was gone again.

  As I chased Fred Burkitt through the last thicket of trees and then the hundred or so yard clearing before the gate that led into the cemetery, I was only worried about him confronting the shadowy figure I had seen make his way down and across the track just after Fred Burkitt had been slain in the first place. Halfway to the graveyard, Ronnie Langford passed me, his legs pumping like pistons. As I imagined had been reversed a thousand times in practice, Ronnie Langford was going for a tackle. Thinking he was intending to stop something, rather than incite it more severely, I stopped as he passed me. Van stopped beside me.

  “He sure can move,”he said.“Your daddy said he was the fastest fullback he’d ever seen. A fullback that ran like a halfback.”

  Lucky, never one to miss a Franklin High School football game, had seen every home game of Ronnie Langford’s career, as well his two-year ascension to state-wide notoriety.

  Van and I squinted through the milky darkness as Ronnie reached Fred Burkitt and, still running, took hold of his shirt collar. And then as the shirt pulled and tore and made itself limp in Ronnie’s hand. Fred Burkitt, shirtless, ascended and descended the four steps on each side that led over the rock fence.

  Perhaps again in this moment, something could have happened differently. If Ronnie Langford had tackled him, if his shirt had not ripped. If Ronnie had not fallen when the shirt ripped and gone headfirst into the second and third rock steps of the gated opening, perhaps he, too, wouldn’t have been pissed off. Maybe, as he was making a second attempt to tackle him, if his weight had not been behind the first blow when Fred Burkitt, the blitzing linebacker, made his initial hit, like he was tackling a quarterback. Like he was taking down Benjamin Muscleddy. Like he was raiding Oklahoma.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Lucky lit a Lucky and leaned back at the table, surveying what he had done to the next room. It was what made him a good cop: at his best, he had this strange sixth sense about things, like he could read what was happening before it was all the way there. The day before, he had been to the newly opened Sammy Samuels Auction barn, bought the bedroom set and hauled it into the room that had been the family room. This had come about, he said, because we would soon start spending our evenings in the bigger of the two available rooms: the living room. It would be better, he told us, to watch the television he would be bringing home in a few days.

  Dillard“Lucky”Hall never told any of us where he came by the thing. Just brought it in three or four days later—with Percy’s help, reluctantly—and set it under the bay window that looked out of the living room. Its blue glow at night was a status symbol only one other family—the Pitts, almost all the way to the other end of Cleburne—on the street had, and something, I would guess, about which our neighbors concluded fairly quickly that someone had supplied my father with it as a reward for an ongoing overlooking of something.

  During the first two weeks we had the thing, the shades open and the sheers thrown back, everyone on the street except the Smithsons and the Pitts came to our house to watch it. Perhaps it was the ten days or so of Lucky’s life, besides football games, that I had seen him the happiest. Like a tour guide, he would usher people in, have them sit around the living room like they were at the picture show, and then turn the lights down and bring up the blue glow with a flip of the switch. The only one I’d ever personally seen before was one in the front window of McFadden’s Electric. The one Percy would not look at as we walked by it.

  “They’re trying to take over our minds,”he had told me not a month earlier, as we made our way half a block down from Main Street. When I slowed to look at it, to try to catch a glimpse of it around the four or five other people who were looking, he had not stopped, but simply kept his feet moving toward where he said he was headed in the first place.

  “That’s amazin’,”the kid standing in front of us turned and said to me. I recognized the man he was with as Mr. Shafer, our neighbor
just past the stop sign below our house. The kid himself was runt of a child. Made me feel big, which was unusual.

  I puffed out my chest, nodded and told him I agreed. Behind me, Percy nervously paced up and down the sidewalk, a strange, rhythmic twitch coming over him every once in awhile like a phantom surge of electricity. Deep blue circles under his eyes, he had told me just before we stopped in front of McFadden’s that he’d been walking back and forth between Thompson’s Station and Franklin every day.

  “My daddy’s got one of those,”the little boy told Mr. Shafer.

  Mr. Shafer nodded his head politely. Patted the little boy on the back.

  “When’s Mama comin’back to get me?” he asked.

  Mr. Shafer told him,“She said she’d be back by next weekend.”

  “Where’d she say she was goin’?” he asked.

  “Off down in Alabama somewhere.”

  “To do what?”

  “To go see some fella’,”Mr. Shafer told him.

  “She told me she was goin’for work.”

  “Maybe she was. Maybe it had somethin’to do with her job.”

  I would later find out that the boy’s mother’s job was men. Not in a literal sense, but it was all she thought about. Would do anything, move anywhere to be with one. Leave her child behind.

  Behind me, a horn blared that turned all our heads. Percy had started to cross the street in front of a work truck. The city workers smiled, laughed and roared away.

  Perhaps this early in 1945, few people actually knew that he was Lucky’s brother.

  “Come on,”Percy said, pulling on my shoulder from behind.“We got to go. That was one of them.”

  “One of who?” I asked as he pulled me twenty feet down the block.

  “One of them,”he said.“I don’t need to say more!” Abruptly, he stopped and spun toward me, took me by the shoulders and peered into my eyes.“They and that goddam pig follow me. They know I have the insight into world affairs. From the civil war to this tragic thing we’re involved in now, they know I have the answers. The pig knows it. Those guys while ago…they may have looked like dirty city workers, but that’s just a brilliant disguise! Don’t you understand?!”