The Porkchoppers

by Ross Thomas

  Etheridge was moving toward the door now. “What?”

  “You didn’t make me any little speech about how the White House couldn’t get itself involved in something nasty like I just told you about.”

  “No.”

  “You know why I like that?”

  “Why?” Etheridge said, his hand on the doorknob.

  “Because I’ve just had myself a mighty fine breakfast and I didn’t want to have to throw it up all over the floor.”

  12

  If Truman Goff had been drafted into the army and if the army had sent him to Vietnam and if he had spent a little time there killing Viet Cong and North and even South Vietnamese, he most likely would never have ended up in the assassination business.

  But by the time Truman Goff was nineteen he already had a wife and a child so the draft didn’t touch him. And by the time he was twenty-four he had left Southwest Virginia where he and his wife had been born and was working for Safeway in Baltimore. He was working as a checker then and living downtown in a row house and sometimes hanging out at a neighborhood bar called The Screaming Eagle.

  Another regular customer at The Screaming Eagle was Bruce Cloke who had been forty-three when Goff had first met him nearly five years ago now. They had bought each other a few beers and talked about the Orioles and the Colts and about Cloke’s success with women. Cloke was a salesman and wasn’t too particular about what he sold as long as he could sell it to housewives. Sometimes he sold vacuum cleaners and sometimes aluminum siding and sometimes encyclopedias and even, upon occasion, magazine subscriptions. He was a big, ignorant, good-looking man with an immense amount of surface charm and if he had wished, he could have had his own sales crew working for him. But Cloke was also a passionate fisherman and hunter and whenever the notion hit him, he liked to drop everything and spend two weeks or ten days going after bass or ducks or deer.

  It had been November when Truman Goff had dropped into The Screaming Eagle for a beer. It was also the middle of the afternoon and the only other customer in the place had been Bruce Cloke.

  “How come you’re not working?” Cloke asked, after buying Goff a beer.

  “I got a week off. It’s my vacation.”

  “How come you didn’t take it last summer?”

  Goff shrugged. “I don’t much like vacations. I took a week in July but I didn’t have enough money then to go anywhere so I’m taking the other week now. If I don’t take it before the first of the year, I’ll lose it.”

  “Well, I’m taking myself a little vacation this week, too. Right down to Virginia.” Cloke aimed an imaginary rifle at some imaginary target and went pow-pow a couple of times.

  Truman Goff got interested. “Deer, huh?”

  “That’s right, buddy.”

  “Where you going? I’m from Virginia, you know.”

  “Down around Lynchburg.”

  “Yeah? I’m from down around there.”

  Three beers later Truman Goff had agreed to go deer hunting with Bruce Cloke. They left the next morning and by nine that night they were settled into the Idledale Motel on the outskirts of Lynchburg. They were also about halfway through the first of two fifths of Old Cabin Still that Cloke had brought along.

  “You know something, buddy?” Cloke said.

  “What?”

  “I been a fisherman all my born days, but guess where I first got interested in hunting?”

  “Where at?”

  “Italy, that’s where.”

  “What the fuck were you doing in Italy?”

  “I was hunting the real thing, that’s what I was doing in Italy. I was hunting krauts.”

  “Oh, yeah, in the army.”

  “That’s right, in the army. In the goddamned infantry is what. In the Forty-fifth Division.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess that’s something all right.”

  “You guess it’s something?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Well, let me ask you something. You ever been in the army?”

  “No, you know I ain’t ever been in the army.”

  “Then you ain’t never hunted the real thing; you ain’t never hunted men.”

  “Maybe I ain’t never hunted men but I’ve hunted more deer and more possum and more quail and more bobcat than you ever hoped to hunt.”

  “But you never hunted no man, did you?”

  “Well, I reckon I could, if I put my mind to it. Wouldn’t be no more trouble than hunting bobcat.”

  “You think you could kill a man? I mean you think you could get a fellow human bean right in your sights and then squeeeeeze that trigger ever so easy without getting the shakes? You think you could do that, Truman?”

  “Shit yes, I could do it,” Goff said and poured himself another drink.

  Cloke looked at him for several moments, grinning. “I’ll be willing to bet you fifty bucks that you can’t.”

  “What kind of a fuckin bet is that?” Goff said.

  “Just what I said.”

  “Shit, I ain’t going to no electric chair for fifty bucks.”

  “You don’t have to worry about no electric chair.”

  “You just said that you was willing to bet me fifty bucks that I couldn’t get somebody in my sights and then pull the trigger and I said I bet I could, but I wasn’t going to no electric chair just to prove it.” The whisky was making Goff confused. “Well, shit, it’s a dumb bet anyhow.”

  “Tell you what, Truman.”

  “What?”

  “What if we fixed it up so that there wasn’t no chance, I mean no chance at all, of you going to no electric chair. I mean it.”

  “How you gonna do that?”

  “Never you mind how I’m gonna do it. Is it a bet?”

  “Well, shit, I ain’t about to—”

  “What’s a matter, you chicken?”

  “Now don’t try to get me riled by calling me chicken, Bruce. You could call me chicken all night and it wouldn’t bother me none. I been called worsen that. So you can just keep on calling me chicken, but I ain’t gonna make no bet until I know what I’m betting on.”

  So Bruce Cloke explained how Truman Goff could get a man in his rifle sights, pull the trigger, collect fifty dollars, and not go to the electric chair. When Cloke had finished, Goff said, “Well, shit, you didn’t tell me that it was gonna be a nigger.”

  “Well, it’s still a man.”

  “Yeah, but shooting a nigger. Hell, that’d be easy.”

  “I’m willing to bet you fifty bucks you can’t do it.”

  “All right, smart ass, I’ll just bet you fifty I can. Let’s go.”

  Cloke and Goff drove the seventy-four miles to Richmond in a little less than three hours, arriving on the outskirts of the city just after midnight. They had finished the first fifth of Cabin Still and had opened the second. In the back seat of Cloke’s 1965 Pontiac was Goff’s old .30-.30 Marlin. It was loaded.

  “Where the hell you going now?” Goff asked as Cloke drove in an apparently aimless fashion through the Richmond streets.

  “What the hell do you care? You ain’t gonna do nothing anyhow.”

  “You just have your fifty bucks ready, smart ass.”

  “I got my fifty bucks ready. Don’t you worry about that. You just worry about what you gotta do. You only get one chance. Just like deer hunting. Ain’t nobody gonna stand around and wait for you to make up your mind.”

  “Just tell me when,” Goff said. “That’s all you gotta do. Just tell me when.”

  “Now!” Cloke said and braked the car to a stop. It was a residential street lined with gray, wooden houses. A few lights burned. Cars, most of them several years old, were parked closely together on both sides of the street. It was dark, but three street lamps provided yellow patches of light along a broken cement sidewalk. The houses had small yards and most of them offered nothing but hard-packed dirt although a few had spots of Bermuda grass that were turning an autumn brown.

  “Where?” Goff said.<
br />
  “On your right. Just coming out of that house—about fifty yards down.”

  Goff looked and then saw what Cloke meant. A man was coming down the steps of a two-story frame house that had its porch light on. He was wearing a dark overcoat. He walked from the porch to the sidewalk and turned left, toward Goff and Cloke who sat double-parked in the Pontiac, its lights off.

  “You wanta pay me now, chicken?” Cloke said.

  “I’ll pay you shit,” Goff muttered, turned in his seat, and reached for the rifle. He opened the door.

  “Remember, you gotta squeeeeeeze the trigger,” Cloke whispered.

  Truman Goff got out of the Pontiac, went around the end of a car that was parked next to the curb, and knelt by its rear right fender. He brought the rifle butt up to his shoulder and stared through the sights at the man who was walking toward him. The man was now no more than 120 feet away. In a few seconds he would be directly under one of the block’s three street lamps. Goff waited. When the man came under the street lamp Goff saw that he had on a dark tan topcoat, a white shirt, and a dark tie. He also had a black face. Goff squeezed the trigger, the rifle cracked, and the man stumbled, “Shit,” Goff thought, “this ain’t nothing.” He worked the bolt on the Marlin and fired again. This time the man went down, sprawled on the sidewalk and bathed in yellow light. He lay on his left side, his face toward Goff. The man’s mouth was open and Goff thought that his teeth were awfully white.

  Goff ran toward the already moving Pontiac and scrambled in. “You crazy son of a bitch!” Cloke shouted at him and stamped on the accelerator. The Pontiac shot down the street, past the sprawled body of the man on the sidewalk. They passed by close enough for Truman Goff to get a good look. The dead man appeared to be in his early twenties and Goff noticed that he had some gold teeth among all those white ones.

  “Young nigger buck,” he said to Cloke.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re a crazy son of a bitch!”

  “Where’s my fifty?”

  “I don’t want nothing to do with you,” Cloke yelled. “You’re crazy.”

  “You owe me fifty bucks, fella,” Goff said in a cold voice.

  “All right,” Cloke said, digging his wallet out and fumbling in it while continuing to drive too fast, twisting and turning the car through the streets of Richmond. “All right, here’s your fifty goddamned dollars.” He flung the bills at Goff.

  “What’re you so antsy about?” Goff said, folding the bills carefully after he counted them.

  Cloke turned to stare at Goff and Goff noted that the older man’s features were distorted. His face is all stretched out of shape, Goff thought. The son of a bitch is scared. The big blowhard bastard is scared shitless.

  That discovery was so interesting that Goff decided to examine his own feelings. I don’t feel no different than if it was a deer, he decided. I don’t feel near nothing like the time I got that bobcat. Christ, there really ain’t nothing to it, shooting down some poor nigger who can’t shoot back or run or nothing. He felt a little sorry for the nigger for a moment, just as he always felt a little sorry for deer. But it was only for a moment.

  “I don’t want nothing to do with you ever,” Cloke was saying. “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to be around you. You’re crazy. You know that? You’re plumb crazy.”

  “What the fuck’s bothering you?” Goff said, lifting up the fifth and taking a long swallow. “Hell, there wasn’t nothing to it. All that crap you gave me about hunting men. Shit! It ain’t near as hard as getting yourself a good deer. Not near.”

  “I ain’t never gonna talk to you anymore, hear?” Cloke said. “I mean never.”

  “All right, see if I give a good goddamn.”

  When Truman Goff awakened the next morning in the Lynchburg motel room he was alone. He went looking for Cloke in the coffee shop and when he didn’t find him, Goff ordered breakfast, a big one, because he knew that it would help his slight hangover. He ordered coffee, three fried eggs, ham, grits, and biscuits. After he ate he went to the motel office and asked about Cloke.

  “He checked out early,” the man in the motel office said. “He checked out and said you’d pay.”

  Goff paid and asked the man to call him a cab. He went back to his room and packed his bag and slipped the canvas case over his rifle. I’ll clean it when I get home, he thought, and then went back to the motel office to wait for the cab.

  Truman Goff caught a Trailways bus to Richmond and then took a nonstop Greyhound to Washington where he caught another Greyhound to Baltimore. In Richmond he had bought The Times-Dispatch and read it carefully, but he saw nothing about a black man being shot to death. It probably happened too late for a morning paper, he told himself. And besides that, he was a nigger. Truman Goff never did find out the name of the man that he had killed in Richmond.

  In Baltimore that night, Goff’s wife wanted to know why he had returned so early. “The guy I went with got sick so I came back.”

  “Well, what’re you gonna do the rest of your vacation?”

  “I don’t know. Just hang around, I guess.”

  The next afternoon Truman Goff wandered down to The Screaming Eagle. He went up to the bar and ordered a beer. He took the first swallow and then looked around. In the back booth was Bruce Cloke and another man. Goff didn’t recognize the man but he looked out of place in The Screaming Eagle. Too well dressed, Goff decided. The man wore a neat dark suit, a button-down blue shirt, a dark striped tie, and dark shoes. He seemed to be in his late thirties or early forties with a long, narrow face that was decorated with a thick moustache. He wore his hair fairly long and it swirled around his temples in gentle gray waves.

  When Goff spotted Cloke he started to wave at him, but Cloke looked at him and then past him or through him without the slightest sign of recognition. To hell with him, Goff thought and started to turn back around toward the bar. But it was then that Cloke leaned toward the gray-haired man, said something, and shook his head slightly as if in warning, but the gray-haired man shrugged and looked up at Goff. He spent nearly a minute staring at Goff with his dark, serious eyes. Goff had stared back, thinking that he was damned if he’d let any pal of Cloke’s stare him down. When the minute was over the man had smiled slightly and turned back to Cloke.

  Goff faced around to the bar and started thinking, but he didn’t much like his thoughts because they made him a little afraid so he ordered another beer. He drank that and started to leave but looked back again at Cloke and the gray-haired man. Cloke still wouldn’t look at him, but the gray-haired man turned once more and gave him another careful look, as if inspecting something that he wasn’t yet sure that he could afford to buy.

  When Truman Goff got home, he switched on the television set, took his rifle out of its case and began cleaning it. When his wife came into the living room he said, “I’m gonna need the car all day tomorrow.”

  “Where you going?” she said, not because she expected much of an answer, but because she considered it her duty to ask.

  “I gotta see a couple of guys,” Goff said and rammed the cleaning rod down the rifle barrel.

  The next morning at nine Truman Goff waited in his car for Bruce Cloke to come out of his East Baltimore apartment. Cloke always parked on the street and Goff had driven around until he spotted the Pontiac and then found a place to park about half a block from it. Truman Goff was driving a five-year-old Chevrolet Impala then. On its back seat under a blanket lay the Marlin .30-.30.

  When Cloke pulled away from the curb, Goff followed. Cloke headed for South Baltimore and thirty minutes later pulled up in front of a yellow brick house that had an FHA-approved look about it. Cloke got out of his car, went around to its trunk, opened it, and took out a large brown leather salesman’s case. He closed the trunk and went up to the front door of the yellow house and rang the bell. A moment later he disappeared inside.

  Truman Goff waited forty-nine minutes for Cloke to come out. He’s proba
bly tearing off a piece in there, Goff thought. He watched the house, not taking his eyes from it except to glance at his watch. When Cloke finally came out of the house, he paused at the door to talk to whoever was inside. Goff got out of his car on the left-hand side, reached back for the Marlin, and moved around to the rear of his car.

  When Cloke was through talking he turned and walked down the sidewalk toward his car. He was a little over two hundred feet away when Truman Goff stepped out from behind his own car, lifted the rifle, aimed, and shot Bruce Cloke three times, twice before he even hit the ground. Then Goff got in his car, made a U-turn, and sped back toward East Baltimore.

  When he arrived home, he turned on the TV set and started to clean his rifle.

  “That didn’t take long,” his wife said. “I thought you was gonna be gone all day.”

  “One of the guys I was supposed to see couldn’t make it,” Goff said.

  “I thought you cleaned that thing yesterday,” his wife said.

  “I didn’t do too good a job.”

  “Well, can I use the car this afternoon? I gotta go shopping.”

  “Sure, go ahead and use it.”

  When the telephone rang at three-seventeen that afternoon, there was no one in the apartment but Goff who was sprawled in a living-room chair reading a Max Brand western. After Goff picked up the phone and said hello, a man’s voice said, “This is Bill.”

  “Bill who?”

  “Just Bill.”

  “I don’t know any Bill.”

  “Too bad about old Bruce Cloke and how he got shot up and killed this morning, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah?” Goff said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I guess you’re sorry about that nigger down in Richmond, too.”

  I shoulda killed that son of a bitch down in Virginia before he could talk to anybody, Goff thought. I should’na waited. I shoulda killed him the same night I shot the nigger.

  “Whaddya want?”

  “Well, Truman, I think you and me can do a little business.”

  “I ain’t got any money, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Oh, I don’t want any money from you. I wanta give you some.”