“Today.”
“And that’s when all hell will break loose.”
“He won’t remain out of my sight. He’s moved in the jail permanent. I got his boy to bring over some fresh clothes. I got him some cigarettes and magazines. He’s already got to be real friendly with some of the women down there.”
“The prostitutes?”
I nodded.
“He’s always had a way with them.”
SINCE BERT FULLER’S BOND HAD BEEN REVOKED, HE’D spent the weeks at the Russell County Jail reading Zane Grey, True West magazine, Amazing Stories, and the Bible. Sometimes, when he read them all together, he’d forget if he’d read about the word of God with David and Goliath or about Wyatt Earp against the Clantons. He read one story in True West that seemed right out of the Bible, about a man named Moses Jones who’d led a wagon train through the paths of hell out to Utah or somewhere, a place they called the Holy Land. Fuller was pretty sure that the story was cribbed from the Bible, and he thought maybe that was some kind of sin, later realizing the whole Bible was nothing but a western.
The Jews were nothing but homesteaders with redmen all around them, trying to take what was promised to them by the Lord Almighty. Today, he read a book Georgia had brought him called Code of the West. It was a modern western, set out in a place called Tonto Basin in Arizona with this woman Mary Stockwell, a frontier schoolteacher. Fuller had just gotten to the part about Mary’s sister, Georgiana, coming west to cure her tuberculosis, and the woman thought, If Georgiana could stand the rugged, virile, wild Tonto Basin, she would not only regain her health, but she would grow away from the falseness and over-sophistication that followed the war.
All Fuller wanted to know is if Georgiana had big tits like his Georgia. Zane was really letting him down with this one. He introduced two women, and Fuller still didn’t know what they looked like. He thumbed through the pages, waiting for the gunslinger or bounty hunter or sheriff to enter the picture and give those two Yankee spinsters what they’d been needin’.
He put the book down and walked to the corner of his brick cell to take a leak and then went back and lay down on his bunk. The light was hard coming through the cell window, and he laid a forearm across his eyes. Some men were talking down the way, and he recognized one of their voices, wasn’t unusual for some bootlegger or clip joint operator to finally get picked up on warrant, and Fuller would call down to them and ask them how was business, as some kind of joke.
Frog Jones had just spent last week two cells down, and they’d shared some good stories about the days during the Border Wars and some of the women they’d known out at Cliff’s and where everybody had all been scattered about.
About two hours later, he saw an old nigger card dealer he knew push a mop bucket down the hall. He’d been there since Fuller had first been arrested on that vote-fraud joke charge, and sometimes the boy would smuggle him in some fresh biscuits and candy bars.
“What you got for me today, boy?” he asked.
“What you want?”
“Who’s that down the hall? I know that voice.”
“That’s Mr. Reuben.”
“They picked up every club owner in town.”
“He ain’t in here for that. He’s a witness. They figured he better be kept in a cage.”
“Who’s he testifying against?”
The old card dealer leaned against the mop handle and smiled big at him, a big old Amos-and-Andy smile, and said: “He’s testifyin’ ’gainst you and Mr. Arch. Ain’t you heard nothin’?”
Fuller jumped from the bunk and reached his hands around the bars, grabbing the old man by the throat, and shook him, rattling the entire cage. The old nigger on the other side of the bars didn’t do nothing but laugh and laugh.
“Go ahead and grin it up, nigger,” Fuller said. “Judgment Day will come soon enough.”
“I ain’t scareda you no more,” the man said.
“But you’ll still work for that dollar.”
“Bet your ass.”
Fuller let go of the man and walked back to the bunk, where he tore the title page out from Man of the West, with a simple black illustration of two cowboys riding along on their horses, a sketch of mountains in the background. He wrote beneath them a simple note and handed it back to the old man.
“You call this number here and you repeat what you just told me. There’s twenty dollars in it for you.”
“Sez who?”
“It’s an honest bet on just a goddamn dime.”
I LOANED REUBEN AN OLD SUNDAY SUIT BEFORE HE GAVE his testimony to the grand jury that afternoon, with Bernard Sykes leading him – no kind of cross-examination – and with me waiting for him in the courthouse hall when he got done. The suit was brown with wide lapels, and his shirtsleeves cuffed well into the palm of his hand. He nodded to me, and we walked together down the hallway.
“This the best you could do?”
“I didn’t have time to get you a tailor.”
“I look like a corpse.”
“You did real good today,” I said.
“I bet your daddy is finally proud of you now,” Reuben said. “I remember how much he hated you bein’ a fighter.”
“Proud for what?” I asked.
“Being sheriff.”
“Are you kidding?”
Reuben looked at me.
“The first thing he said to me was, ‘How low can you go?’”
“What’s his problem?”
“He thinks it’s a redneck job.”
“Well.” Reuben smiled and shrugged. “You got anything more to eat?”
“Joyce dropped off some leftovers. You can have them if you want them.”
“No, that’s all right. She didn’t mean them for me.”
“I’m not all that hungry.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“Would you please shut up, Reuben. I’ll get Quinnie to bring it in.”
“Lamar, please excuse me for being ungrateful. I mean the food is really good, please thank Joyce for that, she’s always been good to me, but I really can’t stand to be in this shithole anymore. I haven’t talked to my boy in a week. I don’t know what’s going on out at my place.”
Ten minutes later, I drove slow out into the country, turning off the paved road, the unpainted farmhouse growing in the windshield. I wheeled around and parked along a gully, and he wandered out ahead of me, dead leaves from a big shade oak twisting and scattering in the light breeze.
I watched him walk and heard the hard thwap of the screen door close. I waited there in the car and looked at the unpainted house with its rusted tin roof, the lean-to nearby that Reuben’s father used as a smokehouse. There was an outhouse, a burned-out shed, and a rotten barn. An old skinny tire, like they used to use on Model Ts, hung from a knotted rope from a pecan tree.
I didn’t see Billy and heard no sounds coming from the house.
I knew of the boy’s mother, a woman Reuben had met in California before the war, and had heard how she had left in ’48, tired of Alabama, or perhaps tired of this new man who had returned with a limp from the Philippines. A man she’d heard had been dead for two years.
But she’d left with little else but a suitcase, the boy thinking his mother would return and perhaps still believing it.
I stared at the unpainted house again and the antique tire swinging in the wind. Reuben came back with a few things wrapped up in some fresh shirts, and I started the car and drove back to Phenix City.
“How long am I gonna have to keep this up?”
“Till the trial.”
“When will that be?”
“Couple months.”
“Could they at least get me a hotel or a damn television? You ever watch the Red Buttons Show? That sonofabitch sure makes me laugh. You ever see that dumb boxer he does? Rocky Buttons? I never wanted to end up like that with half your brains left out there on the canvas. Maybe it was a good thing the war happened.”