The fat man, Moon, and Johnnie Benefield waited in the car. Johnnie hunched into the center of the car, turning the radio’s dial. The fat man stared straight ahead, immobile in the backseat, a simple, solid smile on his face.
Reuben walked back, leaving the car door halfway open. “There’s no need to be a hero right now,” he said.
I smoked down the cigarette and flicked a tip of ash into the gravel.
“Just go home, Lamar. Watch your family.”
“A threat’s not really your style.”
“It’s not a threat,” he said. “You understand?”
I nodded at the words and watched as the car drove off, my stomach feeling weak and cold.
WE BURIED ALBERT PATTERSON OUTSIDE A SMALL CHAPEL in Tallapoosa County on a hot, airless June day after an endless stream of handshakes and condolences and sermons and prayers. After, a train of cars followed the long highway back east where the women of Phenix City filled the Patterson home with fried chicken and deviled eggs and macaroni and cheese and cool Jell-O molds and chilled lemon and chocolate pies. Most of the men still wore their black suits, the doors opening and shutting and battling the summer heat, while people mourned by exchanging loose talk about the killing, giving hugs, or exchanging funny stories about how stubborn ole Pat could be or how rotten this town had grown.
I grabbed a plate of cold fried chicken and some baked beans and found a little chair out on the small front porch with my wife and kids.
I still wore a black armband as one of the pallbearers.
“You doing okay?” Joyce asked.
“Fine and dandy.”
She had a soft summer glow on her face and a light dusting of freckles across her nose. A hot wind brushed the brown hair, which she’d recently cut short to match the new Parisian styles, over her dark eyes.
I smiled at her. She winked at me.
“Reuben came by the filling station the other day.”
“What did he want?”
“He tried to warn me off. Tried to give me fifty dollars.”
“Fifty dollars? You should’ve taken it.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Sure I do.”
“He’s connected to this thing. They all are, whether their hands are dirty or not.”
“Did you ask him about it?”
I nodded.
“You two were such good friends. When I married you, I thought Reuben was part of the deal.”
“You never liked him.”
“The thing you hate about Reuben is that you have to smile when you see him. He has that way about him that just makes you laugh.”
“I don’t think it’s intentional.”
“I think it is.”
“You know, when we used to spar, he’d play and josh around for the first couple rounds. Always smiling and laughing, tapping out the jabs, while the Kid would yell at us for half-assing it. And then he’d come on, drop that head and lay into you with a cross that would leave you with stars. That’s Reuben, all laughs till he decides to knock your lights out. He’s been up to something, I know it.”
“When is Reuben not up to something?”
“Did I tell you he was with Johnnie Benefield?”
She shook her head and looked away. “He never learns.”
We stayed till late and helped the Pattersons clean up, the night growing cool and dark, Anne and Thomas joining a cluster of kids in the backyard, running and chasing lightning bugs in little shadowed pools under oaks and magnolias. The kids held fat pickle jars with holes poked in the lid with forks so the bugs could breathe.
Joyce stayed in the kitchen with some other women cleaning dishes, while I helped Hugh Britton stack some folding chairs they’d borrowed from the Methodist church back into his station wagon.
I’d barely seen John Patterson all night, but when I came back into the house to grab Joyce and the kids John called me into a back room. He’d dropped his jacket somewhere and loosened his black tie. He looked out in the hall and then quietly shut the door.
An old mantle clock whirred away in his parents’ bedroom by a loose grouping of sepia photos in silver frames. The room smelled soft and ancient, like an old woman’s powder box. Albert Patterson’s cane hung on the back of the door.
“Hoyt Shepherd called.”
“Now, that’s class.”
“He wants to see me.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Tonight? You got to be pulling my leg.”
“Would you ride with me?”
“Sure. You want me to get Hugh?”
“Maybe you can get him to take your wife and kids home,” John said. “You mind driving? Not really feeling up to it.”
I nodded and then watched as he opened the top drawer of his father’s bureau and pulled out an Army-issue.45 he’d probably carried in North Africa and Sicily. He checked the magazine. “Let’s go.”
HOYT SHEPHERD CAME TO PHENIX CITY DURING THE DEPRESSION to make it in the mills built alongside the Chattahoochee. But instead he found out his talent lay elsewhere and joined up with a British-born hustler and cardsharp named Jimmie Matthews. Soon, the two learned they could make more money playing poker with soldiers at Fort Benning than they ever could working looms or in the hellfire heat of the foundries or delivering laundry, like Matthews had done. Hoyt Shepherd never even graduated high school, but he’d always had a peculiar – some said genius – way with numbers and figures and was the man to ask when playing the odds. He and Jimmie soon took over the Bug racket – the town’s numbers game – and by the time the big war was in full swing, they were knee-deep in whores and cash and hoped to hell the good times would never end.
But it had been a decade since D-day, and the rackets game couldn’t be played as wide open as the old days. Once again playing out the odds, he and Jimmie had sold off their interests on Fourteenth and Dillingham a few years back and parlayed their twenty-year hustle into some good real estate and a factory that made marked cards and loaded dice for saloons and casinos from Atlantic City to Havana.
John and I drove out on Opelika Highway, heading toward the Lee County line, where I turned onto a backcountry road that dipped up over a hill and followed a loose downward curve into a little private valley. The narrow road softly turned again, causing the car to glide and flow on its own, and we could see the massive brick ranch house set among long, wide wooden fences corralling Black Angus and a few quarter horses that pricked their ears as the car neared.
At the iron gate, I slowed, and a man carrying a hunting rifle tapped on the driver’s-side glass. I rolled down the window and told him who we were, and the man looked into the front seat and checked the back. He asked us to step out of the car and we did.
He patted both of us down, taking the.45 off John and checking the trunk.
Finally, he unlatched the gates and swung them wide to a long gravel road.
The house glowed bright, as perfect as a doll’s house, and we weren’t halfway up the concrete walk, landscaped neatly with a row of crepe myrtles and sweet-smelling gardenias, when Hoyt Shepherd shuffled outside.
He was shoeless in black trousers and a big Cuban-style shirt and he smiled and waved and walked toward John, offering him a big, meaty hand, a soft smile on his lips.
John looked to me and then back to Hoyt. Not knowing what else to do, he just shook his hand. But I could see it pained him, and he tore away as soon as making contact and Hoyt invited us inside.
Hoyt didn’t shake my hand. Only looked to me and grunted.
He asked us if we wanted a cocktail and we both declined, and he walked us through the house, past a big old stone fireplace with a big deer head over it holding an antique rifle and through all the modern, boxy furniture and out back to a kidney-shaped pool. A little record player on a drink cart played a rhumba.
Jimmie Matthews sat at a table under an umbrella, only a soft blue glow coming from the pool, and the light made Matthews’s face look strange and pale as he nodded to us and also offered his hand to both of us.