by Don Noble
"I do. Are you denying it?" Her body was trembling.
"You're not such a fool that you think I'd admit it even if I had done it." He leaned in and tucked a stray curl behind her ear. "Midnight tomorrow. I'll be waiting at the cemetery."
He brushed past her and walked away, disappearing down the gray street in the pale light of dawn, leaving her to face a long day of questions and anxiety.
* * *
Jackie woke from a troubled sleep to the sound of gunshots. Just as she sat up in bed, the window of her room shattered. Glass blew in toward her, and she ducked and rolled. Two bullets smacked into the bedroom wall.
When her breathing finally settled back to normal, she crawled up and got a rifle from her father's closet. She went to the back door and slipped into the night. She couldn't see, but neither could they.
A milky film of fog covered the stars and moon, dripping steadily from the trees onto the dying leaves. She knew the woods and moved through the trees without hesitation, making her way to the narrow road. When she saw the sandy lane, she found a place tucked near a fallen scrub oak and set up the rifle, braced on the tree. A hoot owl cried into the night, and she was glad for the company. Whoever had taken a shot at her house was gone. The wild creatures told her that much.
She went back to her house and examined the damage. It was more warning than threat. Not worth involving the law, who'd been eager for an invite onto her property since Jackson had died. She'd handle this herself.
Her phone rang, startling her to the point that she almost dropped the rifle. She put it away, convinced the danger had passed. For the moment. She answered the phone, expecting to hear Jet Swanson's voice. Instead, there was only the sound of breathing, and in the background, a sweet chorus of young women singing "Softly and Tenderly." She realized it was a recording. A train whistle shrilled in the distance, but she couldn't tell if it was on the recording or from the location of the caller.
"Who is this?" She waited. "Who is this?" She was hanging up when she heard what she thought was a sob. The line went dead.
Jackie held the phone for a long moment before she put it back in the cradle. She pulled on her clothes, grabbed the rifle, and headed to the still. Long before she got there, she saw the fire. Someone had torched her still. The blaze danced above the treetops. An explosion that literally rocked the car told her there was nothing to salvage.
She swung the car so the headlights illuminated the path through the woods and stopped. A white dress had been draped over a set of shrubs. The Empire waist and longer skirt told her exactly what kind of dress it was. She slammed on the brakes and froze. "Angels in White." She whispered the words aloud before she leaped out of the car and snatched the white dress. She completed her U-turn and headed away from the still, going as fast as she dared.
There was nothing she could do to save the operation. Someone had put her out of business. Destroyed the thing her father took pride in. And left her a message. Angels in White.
Her certainty that Jet Swanson was the man responsible for her father's death was shaken. Jet would kill a man, no doubt about it. He would kill a woman. But he would not dig up his daughter or use her church clothes to make a threat. Fire trucks passed on the main road. She gave the police another fifteen minutes to get to the scene, then grabbed her camera and drove to the still. Taking photos for the newspaper gave her a reason to be at the scene. An empty gas can had been left fifty feet back from the still. Hardly necessary with that much alcohol right at hand.
To her surprise, Deputy Stewart was the man in charge. "Any clues as to what happened?" she asked.
He scoffed. "I thought you might be able to tell me."
"I was home, asleep. Heard the sirens." The flames had died down considerably, and the volunteer firemen were spraying the surrounding trees to prevent sparks from jumping.
"Who would want to put you out of business, Jackie?" The deputy gently grasped her shoulder when she started to turn away. "You've been poking into someone's business. This is a message. If you don't heed it, they're going to seriously hurt you. Just like they did Jackson."
"Who killed my daddy?" She kept her tone flat.
"Knowing won't bring Jackson back and it could get you killed."
She thought about showing Sandy the dress. It was the best evidence and she'd plucked it from the scene. Angels in White. Dead Cornelia Swanson. An empty grave.
* * *
She drove straight to the newspaper and turned in her film of the fire. She wrote her story and left it on Clint's desk.
She made her last delivery at the Forest Grill, a bar on old Highway 45. Freddie McGee was a favorite customer. He was older with bad knees so she unloaded the moonshine. She put the jugs behind the counter. The building was half general store and half bar, with a short-order cook to boot. Dolly Mason could whip up a grilled cheese in under three minutes. Jackie didn't even have to order. Dolly put the sandwich and a cup of coffee in front of her at the bar.
"I heard about the fire."
Jackie felt the pressure of emotion yet again. She blinked back her tears. "I'm done, Dolly. I'm thinking about moving into town. Maybe buy one of those little cottages on Mohawk or Japonica. Not too close in." She was surprised at how much she revealed and how these thoughts had come, unbidden, to her mind.
"You don't need to be out in those woods alone. Moving into town is a good idea, hon. Maybe find you someone to date." Dolly picked up a strand of Jackie's hair. "You could be pretty if you let yourself. Eat your sandwich."
Jackie sipped her coffee. She had to get back to the newspaper. Clint would be looking for her. She took a big bite of the sandwich and peered at the wall behind the bar. The place was old and not all that clean. Her eye caught a photo of three very young men at the pool table, holding sticks and grinning at the camera. Two small girls sat on the edge of the table. One had white-blond hair.
Dolly followed her gaze. "That's your daddy." She took the picture down and gave it to Jackie. "He was a handsome man. When he was young, all the women had a crush on him. He was also a bootlegger, which made him dangerous. Like a pirate." She laughed. "When he married your mama, we were all heartbroken. I don't think he ever looked at another woman after he said his vows. The same can't be said for the other two. They were tomcats in heat."
Jackie knew her father, but not the other two men. They were so young. "Who is that?"
"You don't recognize Sheriff Hilbun?" Dolly pointed to the man on the left. "And that one there is Mobile's most famous radio minister, Fred March."
"And that is Lyda."
"She used to go everywhere with Fred. Places she shouldn't have gone."
Jackie ran a finger over the glass that protected the photo. "So that's my dad, the sheriff, and a television minister. That's quite a trio. They were friends?"
"Once upon a time Lloyd Hilbun and Fred March were stevedores at the dock. That's where the sheriff got his base of support to run for office, and Fred went in the other direction. He learned the power of persuasive talk as a union organizer."
"Was Jackson a stevedore too?"
Dolly laughed again. "Not on your life. You father never worked for anybody but himself. He cooked mash alongside his daddy, who learned from his daddy. That's why all your daddy's clients kept buying from you. That's generations of trust and quality. They kicked about buying from a girl—I heard them—but in the end, the ties were too strong." She patted Jackie's arm. "What are you going to do now?"
"I'm still deciding."
"Your daddy wanted you to go to college. Get an education. He said legal liquor would push the bootleggers out if the law didn't."
Jackie didn't say anything.
"I'm not your mama so I don't have a right to offer guidance, but your paw and I talked sometimes. He was so proud of you, Jackie. He said you could be anything you wanted."
Jackie stood up and put the picture back behind the bar. She had to get to the paper before Clint blew his stack, but she had one stop
to make. She turned back at the door. "Who killed my daddy?"
"Even if I knew, I wouldn't tell you. No one here would. That information won't do anything but hurt you."
* * *
The white dress she'd found in the woods was still in the backseat of her car. Angels in White. How long had that eaten at Lyda?
She parked behind the strip club and went in the back door. Euclid saw her and filled a glass with crushed ice and Diet Coke. He put it on the counter. "Sorry about your still."
"End of a family tradition."
"What are you aimin' to do?" Euclid leaned on the bar.
She shrugged. "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose, right?"
Euclid came around the bar. "Johnny's on his way. Lyda's been sick and missed her performance. He's goin' to pin that on you."
She slurped the last of her Diet Coke. "I have to see Lyda. I got something of hers I need to return."
"What would that be?"
"A white dress. She left it at my place."
"I don't know if she's awake. She's in bad shape."
"What kind of shape are you in, Euclid?" She picked up one of his hands and examined his nails.
"What are you doin'?"
"Looking for graveyard dirt. Lyda didn't dig up that dead girl by herself. Johnny Z. is crazier than a shithouse rat, but he didn't do that. Had to be you."
Euclid snatched his hand away. "You can't prove it."
"I don't want to. Where's the body?"
"It'll show up. When the time is right."
Jackie tapped the bar lightly with a finger. "I know what Fred March did to Lyda. But what about that dead girl's mama?"
Euclid looked down at the bar, wiping at imaginary spots with his shirtsleeve. "Folks get hurt in the fallout. You should know that, what with your daddy getting shot and all."
"Who shot my father?" She caught his wrist and dug in with her fingernails.
"Stop." He shook her off. "You need to get out. Johnny said he'd hurt you if he caught you here again."
She left him and walked through the curtain and into the long hallway that smelled of beer and piss. She opened Lyda's room without knocking. Her friend was on the sofa, her eyes closed, her face pallid and waxy.
"Go away, Jackie. We aren't friends." Her lips barely moved.
"Why'd you torch my still?"
"I set you free."
"Why'd you do that?"
Lyda pushed herself up so that she was leaning against the arm of the sofa. "I'm dying."
Jackie shut off her emotions, refusing to feel anything. "That's not my fault."
"No, but it's your daddy's. And the sheriff's. Everybody knew what Fred was doing to me. No one stopped him. No one lifted a hand. Not Jackson. Not the high sheriff. Even when I was working in New Orleans, Fred would show up. It wasn't until I got sick that he stopped. Then he had the Angels in White to fill in the dark places in his soul. He didn't touch those girls, though. He preserved their innocence. Because he had too much at stake. But me, he ruined me for anyone else. For love or having a family. And no one stopped him. Not even your daddy, who set such a store by you."
"You left that white dress so I'd know you set the still on fire."
"I did. You deserve to know. You're the only one who tried to help. And I did set you free. You'd'a run that still until you dropped dead in the woods because it was your precious daddy's. Now you can move on."
Lyda knew her better than she knew herself. The taste of freedom in the back of Jackie's throat was bittersweet.
"Lyda, have you seen a doctor?"
"Liver's gone. Hepatitis." She shrugged. "Shit happens."
"Where's Cornelia Swanson's body?"
Lyda grinned, the skin pulling over her skeletal features. She'd gone far downhill in the few days since Jackie had last seen her. "In the trunk of my daddy's car. He's been driving his dead princess around for days. Imagine that."
Lyda forced herself off the sofa, stumbling as she went to a dresser in a corner of her room. She opened the top drawer and brought out a tape recorder. "This is all you'll need, Jackie. The whole story. Even the part about who killed Jackson."
"It was Fred, wasn't it?"
She nodded. "My dear daddy wanted to make an issue out of bootlegging and warned Jackson it was coming down. Jackson threatened him about Charlotte Rush, and about his visits to me in New Orleans. Next thing I knew, Jackson was dead."
"The law won't be able to make charges stick about digging up that dead girl. Fred'll get out of it."
"Maybe. But I left another recording with the body. One he won't get out of so easily."
"How do you know he won't remove that before he calls the sheriff?"
Lyda inhaled and flinched. She put a hand on her side. "That's the real reason I burned the still. They'll be investigating."
"You're framing a man for something he didn't do."
"Because the things he did do, he'll never be punished for." She sank back onto the sofa and turned away. Her chest rapidly moved up and down and Jackie thought of two cocks she'd seen fighting in a farmyard. The fierce fluttering of a desire to maim and mutilate. She knew it too well.
"Let me get you some help, Lyda. Have you even seen a doctor?"
"I don't want help. I want revenge, and then release."
"But—"
"Just let me go. That's the kindest thing you can do. Let me go."
Jackie believed her. Lyda had loosened the tethers long ago. Fred March had set her on that path. He'd stolen her will to live, her innocence, and her best friend's father.
"I'll call the sheriff for you. And I'll do what I can to protect Euclid."
Lyda nodded. "I'll tell your daddy hello for you." Her expression held a hint of the old Lyda. "And Jackie, I don't want to be buried. I want to be cremated and my ashes spread in the Mississippi River. I want to wash right on out to the gulf and the Caribbean islands I always dreamed of visiting. Let me go, okay?"
"You're going whether I let you or not."
"We're alike that way. If you write a story, use a picture of me dancing in my cowgirl outfit. Back from the first, when I looked good. Now get out of here."
Jackie walked out and closed the door. Lyda would be dead within weeks. If her plan to frame Fred March failed, she still had her exit.
Johnny Z. was coming down the hall, a scowl on his face. Lyda had escaped him too.
Jackie nodded at Euclid as she crossed through the bar. She couldn't help her friend, but she would see that Fred March was held accountable. Brother Fred was about to discover that the wages of sin were high, though nothing compared to the price of indulgence.
COME LIKE A THIEF
by Anthony Grooms
South Titusville, Birmingham
But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.
—2 Peter 3:10 English Standard Version
Dr. Blackwood taught literature at Miles College, but I knew him from St. Paul's Lutheran, where Daddy had started to take us after we left the Presbyterians. Dr. Blackwood was a thin man, not much taller than five feet, a dapper dresser, with bulging eyes and a thin line of mustache, like it had been drawn with a fountain pen across the ridge of his lip. I loved to hear him speak. His voice was soft and crisp and he used words that I didn't know the meaning of. I doubt if anyone who sat on the porch watch on that fall night understood half of what he said.
"Prof," Mr. Snodgrass (we called him "Snotty") said, "that's a mighty good speech! Good 'nough to deliver from the pulpit at Sixth Avenue. You could drive ole Wilson right on outta there. He puts the dead to sleep. God up in heaven be snoring through his sermons. The Lord's head be falling down and rolling around His neck like a ball on a billiard table." Mr. Snodgrass spat tobacco in the bean can he kept with him. "'Cept nobody in hell know what you be talking about." Mr. Snodgrass was a bu
lky man, whose size should have been intimidating, except his body slouched, making itself look soft. He walked with a stoop as well. He worked in the warehouse at the Golden Flake plant. "You never knew tater chips could be so heavy," he often said.
I could see Dr. Blackwood's lips twitching in the silver light that shone through the front-door window onto the porch. "I am too often amused by your flights of imagination, Snodgrass, but to make a spectacle of the Divine is defamation beyond redemption." The whites of his eyes caught the light. My father, who made up the north-facing point of their triangle, shifted toward me, a sly grin, siding with neither man. The shadow of the Remington 11-48, a shotgun he had managed to keep from his time in the service, moved along the porch railing as it lay across his lap, pointing out into Center Street. I ducked behind the curtain, lest he saw me and sent me to bed.
Like in practically every other household in South Titusville, my parents were teachers. My father worked at Lawson State, a vocational college where he taught painting. The test of a good painter was that he could carry a loaded paintbrush across a room, like a debutante balancing a book on her head, without spilling a drop. Papa had studied at Tuskegee Institute, living among the black airmen who would make up the 332 Fighter Group, and the syphilitic farmers who unwittingly became the guinea pigs of the US Public Health Service. He occasioned, too, to meet the humble, effeminate, and by then very frail inventor George Washington Carver. This touch with greatness, he said, always inspired him to do right by people. Mommy taught second grade for Birmingham Public Schools, where in addition to buying school supplies with her salary, half that of white teachers, she would buy shoes, toothbrushes, clothes, and lunch for the poorer of her students.
Early that week, Williams's Store, a mom-and-pop sundry shop, which Sister and I frequented after our trips to the library, had been dynamited. We loved to buy the hard candy from the store, not so much for its taste, but because of its price: two for a penny. A nickel could keep us in candy for days.
Why the store was bombed was a mystery. Bombings—dynamite, Molotovs—were common in Birmingham's black neighborhoods, especially those that were encroaching into whites-only zoned areas. But South Titusville was not one of those communities. It was self-contained, mostly content, mostly complacent, or so it seemed on the surface. It was a neighborhood where nice colored folks minded their business, went to work, to church, to school, and prettified the front yards of their quaint brick and clapboard ranches. But beneath the surface, as in every black neighborhood, bubbled the slow boil of discontent, whispered in the churches beneath the call and response, or over the fence between neighbors, or on playgrounds among children tossing a softball. The city had closed all the parks that year in resistance to integrating them. The next spring would see thousands of children, some as young as six, march in protest, bitten by police dogs and bowled over by jets of pressurized water. I would be among them. That night, though, no one knew by whom or why Williams's Store had been shaken off its foundation and gutted by fire from two sticks of dynamite tied to a brick thrown through the window. But for the week since the bombing, on nearly every street corner in Titusville, both North and South, sat men with guns on porch watch, waiting, as Mr. Snodgrass summed up, "to blow open any Klan sonofabit' stupid enough to drive down Center Street."
