Alabama Noir

by Don Noble

  The last thing Dottie said to her was, "We never have anything we need in this house!" The last thing she had said to her daughter was, "I love you." Because that's what you say when you're a parent—no matter how mad your kid is at you, no matter if they won't say it back. You say "I love you" when they walk out the door, in case.

  Goddamn poster board. Goddamn Star of the Week.

  That first month, she kept finding herself parked in front of Walgreens, in a haze, sitting there, about to go in to buy poster board. If she could just get the poster board, none of this would happen.

  * * *

  Here's the thing: you have to start somewhere. A law is a law is a law, until somebody changes it. Death is impersonal until it happens to your family. She knows this, everybody knows this. But she wants people to know it in their guts, the way she does. She wants this man's wife to feel it when she wakes up in the morning, rolls over in bed, and her husband isn't there.

  She even wants the sons to feel it: the absence of their father.

  They won't know her name tomorrow. It will be years before they know her name, because this is a very long story. Longer than she wants it to be. It starts in Alabama, but who knows where it will end? She's determined to pull the pesky thread until the whole thing unravels.

  Advertising? an old friend asks her on Facebook.

  Marketing, she clarifies. Like any decent campaign, this one won't mean anything until it goes viral. One dead senator is a story, sure, but what she wants is much bigger. A movement. Something so catchy, the public can't turn away.

  For a campaign to really take fire, you can't let the messenger get in the way. It has to be an invisible machine. No one can know who's working the levers.

  In order to go viral, a campaign must be visual. Some say it's wrong to show the bodies of the victims. She understands, she gets it. On the other hand, she thinks of Emmett Till, how his grieving mother insisted on a photograph that changed the whole conversation.

  Only bodies show the true nature of the violence. Without the bodies, the brutality is whitewashed, a blurred vision with a movie-like sheen. Just another action movie you forget after you leave the theater. All the movies run together; they're putting out so many these days. Her own family's death barely made the news. Only seven people died at Walgreens, after all. Twenty-three had died in a mass shooting on a high school campus the week before, fifty-seven at a concert a few months before that. "The incident" at Walgreens hardly even qualified, to the outside world, as a horror.

  * * *

  Four months after the senator's death, when the mystery remains unsolved, she takes a flight to Paris, a bus to Belgium. At an Internet café in Brussels, she enters the dark web. She posts three photographs of the senator lying on his living room floor in his own blood. There is a hole in the back of his head. This was not a matter of torture, but of expediency: she wanted to make it quick, and did. From the angle of the photo, you can see the exit wound in his forehead. The phrase exit wound sounds tidy; the reality is not.

  After he fell she put a hole in his back, another in his right calf, another in his upper arm. Four bullet wounds, just like her nine-year-old daughter. She wanted to show what a body with multiple gunshot wounds looks like. Not under a body bag, but in full color.

  Six months before she entered the sliding glass door at Plantation Estates, nine weeks before the murder of her husband and child by a man with a history of mental illness who legally obtained an assault weapon in Nevada and brought it across the state line to California, where such weapons were illegal, the senator had stood on the senate floor and lambasted the parents of dead elementary schoolchildren for "politicizing" a school shooting. He had led the charge against a bill that would prevent people with mental illness from purchasing weapons, and had sponsored a bill making it illegal to publish photographs of the bodies of victims of mass shootings.

  There are those who will say that her grief made her crazy, but the fact is, her grief made her rational.

  * * *

  She had expected to feel more. She had expected to hate herself. But as she stands over the senator's body, gazing at the shredded exit wounds, the bits of brain and tissue scattered across the room, amid the rising stench of it, she does not feel guilt. She feels sadness, but not for the dead man on the floor. She is thinking of her daughter at Walgreens, and of her husband, who would have shielded their daughter's small body with his own if he'd had the chance. But he'd been in the next aisle over, and the gunman got to him first. He had been shot in the back, running toward their daughter. Only after the fourth bullet struck him did he collapse, and he was hit with three more after that. Then, one aisle over, the gunman found their daughter, crouching on the floor, trying to hide behind a sheet of neon-green poster board. The whole thing was caught on the store's surveillance camera.

  The next day, after the detectives had completed the crime scene investigation and brought her family to the morgue, she insisted on seeing the bodies of her daughter and husband. She was told that she should not see them, but who was she, what kind of wife and what kind of mother, if she could not face the truth of what happened to her husband and child?

  The senator had often boasted that he kept more than a dozen guns at home to defend his property and his family. "A gun in every room," he'd say with a wink. "If the bad guys come to my house," he had drawled in a widely televised ad for his latest senatorial run, "they're gonna have a fight on their hands." In the advertisement, which had been, after all, too common and too cliché to go viral, the polished wife and his polished sons were all holding guns of their own.

  All along, she had suspected he might use one of them on her, and this thing might all be over before it really began. A failed marketing campaign, like so many other failed marketing campaigns.

  So be it, she had thought. If she died, she died. She does not believe in heaven, and yet . . . if, somewhere in the ether, some atom of her dead husband and child exists, perhaps she would find them there. Probably not. And yet.

  * * *

  She walks back out through the sliding glass door into the hot, sticky Alabama night. She is wearing plastic gloves, plastic covers over her shoes. She is waiting for lights and sirens, but they don't come.

  She is thinking, This should have been more difficult.

  Walking through the yard, she feels the crunch of pecans underfoot. She reaches up and touches the leaves of a tree, rubbing them between her fingers. She remembers the last time she was here, thirtysomething years ago, on the land that was briefly in their family, until suddenly it wasn't. She and her sisters had competed to see who could gather the most pecans. In her sweat-drenched shirt, she lugged the heavy bag from tree to tree. Later, after the trip down I-65 to the nut-processing plant, they returned home and her mother had made the first and only pecan pie of her childhood.

  "How Southern are you?" her husband once said affectionately. "You don't even like pecan pie." Her mother's pie was burned around the edges, a heap of brown on more brown. The outside of the pie, where the pecans had caramelized, was pleasingly crunchy, the burned taste not unpleasant. Inside, the pie was dense and gooey, the sugar so sharp it hurt her teeth. She and her sisters sat hip to hip on the floor in front of the television, drinking cold milk and eating pie.

  She had a strange sense of elation but she felt it couldn't last. She didn't know what or why. She had that fragile feeling of her life existing on a knife's edge, as if the universe itself were a razor-sharp blade that could slip at any moment and slice right through her happiness.

  MURDER AT THE GRAND HOTEL

  by Winston Groom

  Point Clear

  Gordon V. Pumps whacked at the bamboo in the canebrake as if he were possessed. He saw in each whack of the gleaming machete a death stroke against his nemesis, Horace P. Dumpler, head of the Alabama Department of Revenue, who was trying to put him out of business—or so he was convinced.

  Gordon V. Pumps gathered the cane in his arms and threw
it into the back of his truck, then headed to his house in Point Clear, not far from the Grand Hotel. The hotel had been a fixture on its great spot of land since 1842, and was considered a queen of Southern resorts.

  Gordon had unctuously befriended a desk clerk, knowing firsthand that Dumpler visited the hotel for a week every spring to play golf, at which he was basically no good since he was a hunchback, although he excelled at putting. He played in a foursome with several of his revenue agents. That's how Gordon had encountered him, a year earlier.

  For three decades Gordon had offered the public sightseeing trips into the exotic Mobile-Tensaw River Delta, which was the second largest of its kind in the country, and luxuriated in a diverse plethora of flora and fauna. Gordon had fished and hunted the Delta since he was a boy and knew as much, if not more, about it and its various features as anyone. He had a pleasant, folksy manner of speech and some people went on his trips just to hear him talk. He had a few years back taken courses and received a degree in what amounted to swampololgy from a local university, and he considered what he did more than mere sightseeing—it was educational.

  That was where the rub with Dumpler came in. The previous year, while visiting the Grand Hotel, Dumpler had read a piece in the local newspaper on Gordon and his boat, and on a whim had booked a trip. The price was eighty dollars per passenger, and Dumpler had graciously included his revenue agents–cum–golf foursome in the retinue.

  Everyone seemed fascinated as Gordon pointed out eagles' nests, eagles, cormorants, mergansers, herons, pelicans, snipes, wood ducks, ibis, alligators, nutria, wildcats, deer, feral hogs, possums, raccoons, various types of snakes, poisonous and otherwise, and turtles that sunned themselves on logs in the early spring.

  The revenue agents asked questions about all this, but Dumpler's mind seemed to be elsewhere. Then, when Gordon cut off the engine to drift up on a flock of white pelicans, Dumpler broke the silence by proclaiming in a stentorian voice, "You must make a good living doing this."

  The pelicans, of course, flew off.

  Gordon was somewhat taken aback. "Not bad," he replied. "When the weather's good."

  "Well, let's see," said Dumpler, "today with us you're making $320. If you have an afternoon trip, that's $640—I'd say that's better than just not bad."

  "Like I said, there's a lot of days when I'm down because of weather."

  Since the pelicans had taken off Gordon cranked up the engine. They'd been out a good two hours so he headed back to the dock. Everybody left seemingly satisfied and Gordon thought no more about these men until Monday morning, bright and early—at seven a.m. in fact—when a woman, wearing a purple pantsuit and a man's felt hat, showed up at the dock as he was preparing the boat for an eight o'clock trip. She said, "My name is Lucille Bratt and I'm from the Alabama Department of Revenue."

  Gordon smiled politely and replied, "Pleased to meet you."

  Lucille Bratt got right to the point: "Are you paying your Alabama State entertainment tax?"

  "The what?"

  "The entertainment tax. It was passed by the state legislature six years ago."

  "Never heard of it," Gordon said.

  "Ten percent of every dollar you take in," said Lucille Bratt.

  "Ten percent? What for?"

  You are entertaining people and they are paying for it. It's taxable."

  "Well, my business is more educational," Gordon told her. "There are 346 different birds in this Delta, and I can spot every one of them. From time to time."

  Doesn't make any difference," the woman said. "People with these duck-boat tours, and those folks down at the gulf who have the parasailing concession—everybody's got to pay it."

  "Well," Gordon said, flustered, "I never heard of it. I've never heard any of the fishing guides mention it."

  "They got themselves exempted."

  Gordon stood there flabbergasted. Finally he said, "How did you come to be here telling me all this today?"

  "My boss brought it up."

  "And who would that be?"

  "Mr. Horace P. Dumpler, commissioner of revenue for the state of Alabama."

  "Dumpler? You mean the guy I took out last Friday?"

  "I guess so," Lucille Bratt responded. "He was the one who told me about you. Said to tell you he had a nice time." She fumbled in her large handbag. "I've got these forms for you to fill out and sign. You'll have to pay the tax this year and back taxes for every year from the date the act was made into law."

  "I've what?" Gordon exclaimed.

  "It's the law," Lucille muttered resignedly.

  * * *

  On the back steps Gordon had taken out his $400 eight-inch Shun Hiro Honesuki butcher knife and was splitting the cane four ways from the top. He had already cut it into a dozen sixteen-inch pieces. He thought of Dumpler and sneered. When he had gone back six years to when the Alabama Entertainment Act was passed, he'd calculated that it would have amounted to approximately $28,000 in back taxes. Cash. That was on top of his federal income tax, his regular state income tax, sales taxes, boat taxes, car taxes, etc., etc.

  He didn't have it. He would have to sell his boat. It would be the end of his business. He'd hired a lawyer but nothing could be done. The unfairness of the exemption for the fishing guides rankled him as well. He was providing an educational service. He was seventy-four years old, and he was dispensing all the wealth of knowledge he had accumulated up in this Delta since he was a boy of eight and his father had taken him duck hunting.

  All his life he'd tried to be a good citizen—well, maybe in his drinking days he'd strayed from the narrow path, but those were long behind him. He'd always paid his taxes, he'd served honorably in the army in Vietnam, in combat. Served his country and now in his twilight years it was treating him thusly!

  A murderous scowl twisted Gordon's face. That low-life Dumpler! he thought. Comes on my trip, accepts my hospitality, then turns on me like a snake. Now Gordon was sitting on the back steps of his house trailer carefully shaving one end of each of the bamboo pieces. It was large, heavy bamboo, similar to the kind they had encountered in Vietnam. That was what had given him the idea—a punji stake trap for that scumbag Dumpler.

  On the golf course no less. It was an intricate plot but rewarding in Gordon's mind. He'd seen a number of punji pits in Vietnam—about three feet square and three feet deep, camouflaged. He could dig that in a night. He would do it about twenty yards from the eleventh hole on the Lakewood course, one of two eighteen-hole courses that the hotel maintained.

  The plan was so ingenious that it gave Gordon a warm feeling inside, a premature sense of accomplishment. Number eleven was a short hole and there was a bit of swamp alongside the fairway in which he could hide and watch both the tee and the lie of the ball. His dog Lesly, perhaps the best bird dog in the South (everybody said that about their quail dogs), was intricately involved.

  Having shaved each of the punji stakes to a point as fine or finer than the $400 Shun Hiro Honesuki knife, he gathered the pieces and placed them in a preheated 375-degree oven where they would bake all night. In the morning he would plunge them into a bucket of ice water, and when they had dried they would be as razor sharp and strong as the tempered steel in the Shun Hiro. The Viet Cong dug punji pits on trails everywhere Americans patrolled and not a few soldiers were maimed and even died from their wounds. The bamboo stakes were so strong they would actually go through the soles of leather boots until the army wised up and put metal plates in the soles, but that didn't make walking patrol any easier. The worst thing was that the Viet Cong smeared the tips of the stakes with human feces to create horrible and dangerous infections. That would be the finishing touch, Gordon thought, knowing full well where he would obtain the feces for that rat Horace Dumpler. There would be no steel plates in boots here. Only flimsy golf shoes. Gordon rubbed his hands.

  While the stakes were baking in the oven, Gordon got into his truck with a shovel and drove to the Lakewood golf course of the Grand Hotel, and trudged
to the eleventh hole, Dogwood run, now bathed in the light of a silver three-quarter April moon. He'd already sighted in the spot for his pit and had brought a small wheelbarrow with him to dispose of the excess dirt.

  Lesly's role had been well rehearsed. He would hide in the swamp with Gordon until Horace Dumpler and his companions appeared on the eleventh tee. It was a fairly long way off but Gordon would be able to identify Dumpler because as a hunchback he never used a driver or even irons—he always used his putter, even to tee off. That might seem ridiculous but he'd perfected long putts up to fifty yards, and on a short hole he could be on the green in three shots; once there, he was deadly at the cup. Gordon had watched him every day since he'd arrived. At the cup, Horace Dumpler cleaned up.

  The trick was to watch and make sure Dumpler was up to drive—or putt, or whatever it was he did—and then, when the ball got down close to the green (and the punji pit), it was Lesly's time to go into action. On Gordon's signal he would rush out and grab the ball and deposit it just on the far side of the punji pit, so that Dumpler would have to address his shot by standing on the pit—then, voilà! For the time being Gordon had put a piece of plywood over the hole, covered with leaves to disguise it, but as Dumpler's foursome neared, he would replace it with a light screen, camouflaged with leaves, which would immediately collapse when stood upon.

  He could picture Dumpler writhing in agony when he fell into the pit, one or more of the deadly stakes driven into his feet and legs. Infection would begin immediately. Death, hopefully, would follow.

  * * *

  The first of the foursome teed up his ball. He drove a shot that landed square in the fairway, about forty yards from the pit. Gordon held Lesly back by his collar and he struggled to break free.

  The others took their turns and then Dumpler addressed the ball with his putter. His first putt was straight down the middle of the fairway, but about a hundred yards distant. Dumpler, in his peculiar crouch, ambled down from the green toward his ball. Apparently it was the practice of the others to let their boss take more shots out of turn in order to catch up.