by Gerald Duff
“You are a romantic, J.W., to believe that myth,” Tyrone said. “I think your computer sounds ready to do it.”
“Yeah,” J.W. said, turning toward his keyboard with the reluctance of a teenage cotton chopper in Panola County, Mississippi picking up his hoe for the first time on an early morning in July. “I wish I had me Mr. Sirhan Barsamian’s wire cutter about now. I’d show this sucker something.”
FIVE
Tonto, Bob, Coy, and Earl
The rent house was set high on the bluff in South Memphis and had been there for close to a century, once neighbor to others like it up and down and across the street and on the streets behind and before it. Now of its kind it was alone, though between it and the river were rows of condominiums and single-family dwellings, well-fenced, with double and triple garages filled with SUV’s, high-end sedans, and speciality sports machines for land, water, and air.
To the south of the rent house itself was a development of single-family, stand-alone homes surrounded by a masonry and wrought-iron barrier topped with spikes, well over nine feet in height. Anyone entering through the gate had to stop for permission from personnel in a fortified booth, 24-7, and pass under a sign announcing the name of the development, Nathan Bedford Forrest Estates.
Coy Bridges could see from his vantage point high up in a small room of the rent house, which had once been servants’ quarters, though Coy didn’t know that, that the man in the entrance booth to N.B. Forrest Estates this morning shift was some kind of a Mexican, maybe not really from Mexico, Coy told himself, but from somewhere like that. Guatemala, maybe, or Honduras, who knows, Puerto Rico, or Costa Rica, one of those places.
No, not Puerto Rico, that belonged to the United States, didn’t it, so if the entrance guard was Puerto Rican he wouldn’t be in Memphis, for sure. He’d be up in New York City with the rest of that bunch, sitting on some steps in front of a tenement, eating a purple snow cone.
The guard this shift was definitely dark-skinned, all right, wore his uniform tailored to fit tight at the waist and close to his shoulders. Coy couldn’t see from here the man’s footwear, but he figured it would be highly polished half-boots with one cuff showing and the other one stuck down in the mouth of the shoe. The dude was a young one with no real belly on him yet, and that was the way Mexican type males liked to show out when they got any opportunity to wear a uniform, military or industrial. Muy macho.
“Bob,” Coy Bridges said without taking his eyes off the guard in his little fort at the entrance of Nathan Bedford Forrest Estates, “come see who’s in the booth this shift.”
The guard was reaching his arm out the window, leaning pretty far over, to take something from the driver at the wheel of a Mercedes convertible drawn up at the entrance. The top was down, and the mane of blonde hair on the woman at the wheel was flashing in the morning sun as she shook her head and said something to the guard.
“It’s Enrique, I imagine,” Bob Ferry said, coming up to stand by Coy and look out the window of the former servants’ quarters of the big old rundown house he’d rented from the real estate lady two days ago. “Enrique Valdez, yep, there he is.”
“You know that Mexican?”
“Not personally, no. I know who he is, though, of course, and I know when he’s on duty. Weekdays from four a.m. to eleven.”
“How’d you know that?” Coy Bridges said. “Damn, look at that little blonde bitch in that ragtop Mercedes. I’d love to crack that.”
“Only way you’d get close to something like that, Coy, is to break into her house in the middle of the night. Wait, no, I take that back. If it was daylight and you were to get past the gate there somehow, she might let you do a little yard work, if you’d do it minimum wage off the books. And you would.”
“That’s another reason I’d like to bust her open,” Coy said. “Just that very thing you said then.”
“Dream on,” Bob Ferry said. “You sure ain’t never going to meet her socially. Never see her, you know, on an equal footing.”
“I’d make her think footing,” Coy Bridges said, leaning further toward the window to watch the Mercedes move off up the street and out of sight. He bumped his forehead hard enough against the glass to make him jerk his head back.
“And how I know Enrique Valdez is on the job this time of day is how I know everything I know,” Bob Ferry went on. “I studied it out, wrote it down, and committed it to memory.”
“Got it by heart, huh?”
“Heart hasn’t got a damn thing to do with it, Coy,” Bob Ferry said. “When the subject is business, you got to leave everything out of the equation but your brain.”
“What good does that do us?” Coy said, stepping away from the window and reaching in his pocket for a cigarette, “knowing that greaser’s name and what hours of the day he’s working. We ain’t going in there in the morning. That ain’t what we supposed to do.”
“You know I’ve asked you not to smoke around me,” Bob Ferry said. “I’d appreciate it if you put that out. And yes we are going in there in the morning, and we’re going to do it more than once, too.”
“Why?” Coy Bridges said, stubbing out the Marlboro carefully on the window sill to save it for later, maybe. “We done know his address.”
“Knowing a number is not knowing an address or the house at that address, Coy,” Bob said. “That’s nothing but the first little bit of what you need when you’re setting out to plan a project.”
“You’re one to plan, all right. I’ll give you that.”
“I am that, and I’m proud of it. Another thing I’m proud of is that I have never spent a single night incarcerated, which is more than I can say for lots of folks.”
“You don’t know what you been missing, Bob,” Coy Bridges said. “You have no idea.”
“I guess that’s something you’ve learned by heart, Coy,” Bob said.
“I’ve learned it by everything, starting from the ground up.”
Both men fell silent, looking out of the third floor window of the servants’ quarters of the mansion built in 1892 by Ruben Weiss, a cotton factor in Memphis in the time before the first automobile turned a wheel on a street in the city. Hot on the south bluff already this early on a summer Sunday morning, and they watched Enrique Valdez below in the entrance booth slide the window closed to conserve air from the cooling system.
“When’re we going in there the first time, then?” Coy Bridges said. “In the preacher’s house, I mean.”
“We’ll talk about that when Tonto wakes up,” Bob Ferry said, “and when Earl gets back from whatever whorehouse motel on Lamar he spent the night in. We got somewhere else to go before that, though, you and me.”
“Yeah, where?”
“To a worship service this morning We got some worship time to do before anybody moves a peg to do anything else on this deal.”
“Not no, but nuh uh for me on that shit,” Coy said.
“Oh, yeah, Coy. You and me are going at eleven this morning to the Sun-Rise Ministry of the Big Corral. But don’t worry. You don’t have testify or sing a solo or kiss a cross or nothing like that. This is business. They got church every day in the Big Corral. All week long.”
“It’s always business every day in a damn church.”
“What an attitude to have in Memphis,” Bob Ferry said. “Enrique does look good in his outfit, doesn’t he? You can see the creases in his shirt from way up here. Just like the edge on a knife.”
SIX
Jimbo Reynolds
Jimbo Reynolds had been leery about the space at first. No matter how you chose to view it, no matter how you tilted your head to the side, narrowed your eyes and tried to sneak up on it as though you weren’t looking to see anything and then all of a sudden there it was, jumped up and staring back at you, the building was still just a big warehouse that some component of the Memphis manufacturing base had moved out of, first a little at the time, a little more at the time, and then all at once.
The final depar
ture had been in the usual pattern of such tuck-tails-and-run. Equipment was abandoned, window fittings had been ripped out for sale because of the value of the aluminum in their make-up, a couple of delivery trucks that wouldn’t run stood where they were last parked, their wheels naturally gone early and gone entirely, but surprisingly some cargo in the trailer vans was still there.
The financial holders, the banks and mortgage concerns, stuck with what was left, had grown more efficient over the year, Jimbo figured, knowing they had to secure what they could of commercial failures as quick as they could if they wanted to keep anything that might sell for a penny or two on the dollar.
What was good about the warehouse marking the corpse of MidSouth Floor Coverings, Inc. was readily apparent to the trained eye, however. The building was big, it had a roof that looked sound, and there was a shitload of parking in front and on both sides of the metal-sided structure. Enough pick-ups, minivans, outdated Detroit four doors, privately owned school buses, and the rest of the variety of transportation used by the religious demographic in question could be accommodated to provide a good-sized congregation. If you could turn them out, of course. But that was Jimbo’s strategic problem and opportunity, not the responsibility of the facility itself.
A good salesman does not blame his product or his tools. He hustles and moves what he has to work with. That Jimbo knew, and that he lived by. All Jesus was given to work with on the banks of the Sea of Galilee was two fish and four loaves of bread. But He didn’t whine about it, or try to blame staffing problems or kick it upstairs. No, He went to work and convinced that bunch of Jews that there was enough for all of them to eat. And they believed it and acted like they were in the buffet line at a Morrison’s Cafeteria franchise. What they ate filled them up, and that’s what counted to them. Jesus sold that idea, and they all bought it, and people were still buying that bullshit.
A sense of occasion and what’s right for it, that what makes success, Jimbo Reynolds thought to himself as he sat on the edge of one of the bales of hay on the platform against the west wall of his leased galvanized steel warehouse, former home of the ex-MidSouth Flooring Company.
The wide double doors before him across the way were propped open with their own bales of hay, and they were coming in, his target demographic, a steady stream of them, those who came to seek, to worship, to fellowship with one another, to partake of the rodeo meal after services, and to quell for a space those feelings of fear and dislocation which drove them through the streets of Memphis on their way to the Big Corral.
Family groups were most in evidence, and Jimbo lifted the Stetson from his head in a steady motion to tip in homage and welcome toward the mamas and daddies and young’uns moving inside together like clots in an artery. Most of the men returned the gesture, those wearing western headgear – not many of the ones with ball caps who seemed to consider those coverings to have been welded to their skulls at birth – many of the wives and mothers did a little curtsy, those who’d learned that was what cowboy women did in greeting, the kids for the most part slouched in like robots, testimony to what was wrong in America these days, and the singles and the couples scattered in the crowd displayed the usual ignorance of how and when to act. Their behavior came from what Jimbo knew were deep-set psychological feelings of inadequacy and nowhere to belong, but God bless them, they were always the biggest givers. The unhappy try to buy good feelings by giving beyond their means, and a secure man is as stingy as a goat. Blessed be the miserable. Praise them.
The western band behind and around Jimbo on the platform was providing a steady musical accompaniment to the procession of worshippers this morning into the great galvanized cathedral of the Sun-up Ministry of the Big Corral. The Cowboy Combo of Grace included two guitars, a fiddle, a snare drum and cymbal set-up, a bass, and a piano, and they sounded upbeat and particularly tight this morning. This tune the Combo was working this morning during the entry of the congregation was a softly intoned “Red River Valley,” instrumental only, but Jimbo let the words run through his head as he greeted the gathering crowd of worshippers from his perch on the hay bale. “From this valley they say you are leaving,” Jimbo thought as the fiddler squeezed he haunting notes of accompaniment from his instrument. “I will miss your bright face and your smile.”
“Folks,” Jimbo said aloud, rising from his lounging position, the small wireless mike on the collar of his shirt picking up his words and broadcasting them from the banks of speakers throughout the building, not a distortion to be heard in any part of any sound. “Welcome to the Big Corral this morning. I hope y’all had a good breakfast right around daylight, and that you slept as sound last night as a wrangler does that’s rode fence all day and rounded up half a hundred strays in the meantime. I mean to tell you that cowboy’s tired. He’s earned his rest, and I know you have, too.”
Most of them were seated now, all the pews Jimbo had salvaged from a closed U.C.C. church in Raleigh filled, the crowd overflow pushing toward the limits of the folding chairs arranged in banks to the right and left and behind the rows of wooden pews. The last few found places to sit, the Cowboy Combo of Grace segued from the “Red River Valley” to the first bars of a more traditional church service offering in song, “Peace in the Valley,” and Jimbo told himself to remember to congratulate Joe B. Wyatt, the lead guitar and vocalist, for the arrangements. Nice transition and nice thinking. The boy has a vision.
These folks are here for a total experience, just like they are anytime they enter a themed establishment, and whether they realize what’s happening to them or not, they are gratified by good attention to the details making up the moment.
“I’d like to ask all you cowhands and your ladies and your young’uns to bow your heads in the presence of the man who runs this spread for all of us. Let’s have a little palaver with Him this morning.”
The knocks and scrapes of boots on the concrete floor, the rustle of hats and sombreros being removed, the hushed swish of petticoats beneath the western skirts and dresses of many of the women, a cough or two and some throat clearings, a child’s bright thin voice lifted in a question immediately stilled by his mama – these sounds rose and mingled into a single murmur as soothing to Jimbo Reynolds as that first bite of Maker’s Mark bourbon at the end of a filled and harried day. Slow down, it said. Ease up. Rest.
“Boss,” Jimbo said into the wireless Sanyo mike at his throat. “It’s me again, wanting you to straighten out some things for us. We’re here together, this bunch of wranglers and mothers and tikes, old and young, big and little, men and women, and me along with them waiting and needing to talk with you, Boss.”
Jimbo looked out from beneath the edge of his left hand, the one lifted to his forehead as though to ward off the slanted rays of the sun as he stood alone at the end of the day on a solitary butte, cattle grazing and milling peacefully about him. The Stetson in his right hand Jimbo Reynolds held waist-high and to the side a bit, propped against his hip as he stood in a calculated lean, just a hair off the vertical the way John Wayne habitually assumed a stance when not mounted on a horse or backed up against a saloon bar. The angles of his body and their intersections presented interesting contrasts, Jimbo knew from long practice, suggesting a cowpoke at rest, yet one capable of sudden and powerful motion if need arose. Jimbo worked out, he went to the iron three times a week, he watched what and how much he ate, he appeared on the edge of being dangerous, middle-aged as he was, and he was conscious of the image he presented. Jimbo Reynolds looked right, he looked fit, he looked good.
Peering up from beneath the edge of his left hand, his chin tucked prayerfully as it had to be, Jimbo could observe the closer rows of worshippers in the steel-sided Cathedral of the Sun-Up Ministry of the Big Corral, and he could tell they were doing what they should. Every head was bowed, every eye was closed, every ear was open to the words he was delivering.
“Boss,” Jimbo said, “we come to You as Your people, as Your range outfit, and we offer You on t
his pretty morning in Memphis with the sun shining and the birds singing and our hearts beating together all that’s due and all that’s owed You. We promise You a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, and we look back behind us at the week since last we gathered in the Big Corral at what we’ve tried to do, and at what we’ve got done.
“Boss, You gave us our riding orders a week ago, and we paid attention to the work You set before us and the way You laid out for us how we ought to go about carrying out Your orders. Boss, some of us have rode fence, and we’ve made sure any downed wire was put back where it’s supposed to be. We nailed it back to them heart cedar posts, and we stretched the wire tight. The dogies are still on the right side of the barb wire You wanted us to keep up. We took care of that. We rode Your fence.”
“You tell him, Range Foreman,” someone called from back near the rear of the auditorium, the voice lifted in a tone of resigned satisfaction, “we doing what we can to carry out the Boss’s will.”
“Amen, amen,” the words came like the start of a rain shower, more this time and from all quarters of the congregation, the higher and lighter voices of women laid over the throaty barks of the men.
“But we’re tired, Boss,” Jimbo said, lifting his left hand to quiet some of the outpouring. “We’re tired. It’s the end of the day, and the sun is setting, and Cookie’s got the beef and beans on the plank table, and we’re longing to eat and seek our bunks and take our rest as the whippoorwills call and the cattle low, bedding down on the prairie.
“But, Boss, we’re here to tell You at the end of a long day of doing Your will and carrying out Your orders, that after we get our rest, we going to be here tomorrow, looking up at You in the dawn of a new day with the dew on the grass and roosters crowing and cattle grazing on a thousand hills, we’ll be here, Boss, I’m pledging for all Your hands and all Your outfit, asking You what You want us to do this week. We’re ready, Boss, we’ll do our job, we’ll satisfy Your will, we’ll do it the cowboy way.”
