They’d come back for the money. He’d known about it for a couple weeks after finally reading his daddy’s letter just outside Memphis. And Lorelei begged for them to never come back, but it didn’t take long before they couldn’t pay for breakfast one morning and that wrinkled letter in his pocket was already feeling like a hundred-dollar bill.
When they got to the farm, they found every piece of furniture upside down, his grandmother’s pie safe turned to sticks, dresser drawers turned inside out, and before Billy could get to a hiding place Benefield was there. Benefield put a gun in Lorelei’s mouth and gave Billy a phone number to call when he, as he said, “got his head straight.”
That Christmas morning, after he’d watched Johnnie Benefield’s taillights fade away down the dirt road, Billy had gone to the outhouse and pulled that knotted rope from the dark hole, six burlap bags tied hard, but pissed and shit on so many times that they’d turned black.
Lorelei begged him to leave.
They got as far as Notasulga, and he turned his daddy’s Buick back.
He’ll find us, Billy had said. Wherever we would go.
Billy liked what he saw in the mirror, liked the way the coat made him feel bigger, liked the image of the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and, before he walked away, he looked at himself a final time, trying to make his eyes grow slack and sleepy, trying to settle down that jackhammering in his chest.
THE GANG WAS ALL THERE. JOHNNIE BENEFIELD AND Moon, Clyde Yarborough – just two days out of Kilby on the only charges the grand jury could make – and two nigger boys they’d paid forty bucks apiece to join them. Six shotguns and a pint of Canadian blended sat on the bed. A deck of playing cards and a couple of nudie magazines.
“Let’s drink to Bert Fuller,” Johnnie said. “May he fuck the jury up the ass!”
Yarborough garbled out a no, or maybe a hell no, lifted up the bandanna on his face, and spit on the floor.
“No?” Johnnie asked. “You still blaming him? Well, he still deserves a drink. Everybody deserves a drink on Christmas. And to Phenix City, too! May that beaten old whore rise from the ashes.”
“I got to take a shit,” Moon said in that high-pitched, little-girl voice.
Johnnie thumbed back at the toilet in the back. “Moon will make this whole place smell like the elephant house at the zoo.”
The phone rang and Johnnie answered it, smiling and nodding and cupping the receiver between his shoulder and his ear. “Yes, yes.” He smiled some more. “Billy, I’m so damn glad we’ve come to a fucking civil agreement. You’re a fine young man.”
Johnnie lay down the receiver and looked over to the two niggers for hire. “You two boys get back to where I need you. Don’t drink, don’t piss, don’t breathe. If the boy comes alone, we don’t need you. But we all know he ain’t got the goddamn sense. If a soul comes along with him, you wait till I raise my hands like this.”
He raised his hands up in surrender.
“And you kill every sonofabitch that ain’t me, Moon, or Mr. Clyde here. Understand?”
Mr. Clyde chortled out a laugh, his black eyes narrow, his breath smelling of dirty ashtrays and onions.
WE PARKED DOWN THE ROAD, BETWEEN THE OLD HILLBILLY Club and Veto’s Trailer Park, and Jack opened the trunk and tossed me a 12-gauge, lifted another shotgun for himself, and then pulled out the Thompson and fitted on the round clip. He smiled and took a moment to relight a dead cigar in his mouth before slamming the trunk of the new Chevy.
About that time, another black Chevy drove up behind us and Quinnie got out, dressed in the same lightweight suit I’d bought him in September, with a star proudly pinned to his jacket. “You sure Benefield is in there?”
“That’s the rumor,” Jack said.
“Kill the lights, Quinnie,” I said. He’d been so excited that he’d hopped out with the motor running and the headlights on. Pretty soon, two Army jeeps pulled up, four men in each, and I quickly updated them on the situation and what we expected to find.
“Wait till we see if the boy’s in there,” I said.
The guardsmen nodded and fanned out back of the stucco-and-tile units behind the big Casa Grande façade. The old motel probably seeing better days when car travel was a novelty, a place where Model Ts huddled up for the night and folks ate chicken dinners Mamma had packed herself. The road sign was missing several white bulbs, had been ever since I’d known the place, no one giving a damn to replace them.
In the parking lot, we’d spotted three cars. No one on desk duty, the motel closed down during the raids for running whores.
“Jack, would I hurt your feelings if I told you I hated guns?” I asked. “I never even liked to hunt.”
“No kidding.”
“No kidding.”
“That.45 on your belt loaded?”
“Oh, yes.”
BILLY DROVE RIGHT THROUGH THE CASA GRANDE PORTICO and parked right in the middle of the center lot, the stucco-and-tile units fanning out in a U shape. He shifted in his coat, feeling the gun on his spine, and outside let out a deep breath, clouding his eyes. When he popped the trunk, the money still let off an awful reek – even after being repacked – of being deep down in that shitter for months, and the smell about made him want to puke.
He grabbed the burlap bag, PURINA FEEDS printed on the side, and walked toward the only unit with the lights on in the entire place. He heard the sound of foot stomps and laughter.
Billy gritted his teeth and speeded up his walk, but, as he did, he tripped and the gun loosened from his back, slipping down his butt and down the leg of his saggy jeans. He stopped, looked around to see if anyone noticed, feeling the gun come to rest on the top of his shoe.
But as he bent down, the door opened and out walked Johnnie Benefield in a man’s tank top and plaid pants and boots. He was eating an apple and ambled down to meet Billy, who stood up, not moving, that gun sliding over his shoe and down onto the gravel.
Johnnie just kept chomping on the apple, working it like a wheel in his mouth and then tossing it in the bushes, before shaking his head and reaching down to get Reuben’s pistol.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “You brought me a Christmas present.”
And then he yanked Billy by the neck, slapped the boy hard across the mouth, and tugged him to the door and then threw him in the room, the big bag of money in his right hand. “Man, it’s colder than a Minnesota well-digger’s ass.”
Billy fell to the floor of the efficiency, looking up into the face of that fat bootlegger Moon. The fat man ate at an orange from a giant fruit basket set in the center of the room. He didn’t say a word, just ate, and then took a drink from a whiskey bottle, warming himself by a gas heater.
Johnnie turned over the burlap bag and let the money snow out on the bed. He smiled and smiled as Billy wavered to his feet, inching backward to the door, before Johnnie said, “Where in the name of baby Jesus is the rest? This ain’t all of it. It ain’t all by a mile.”
Moon got off the bed and set the orange on the nightstand with a thud. He unlatched his big overall and let the straps drop, pulling up his flannel shirt and mammoth stomach, telling Johnnie to bring the boy to him. He licked his lips as he used the flat of his hand to test the bed springs.
“It’s all there was.” Billy’s voice shook.
“You know, Moon ’bout split your girlfriend in two. He’s hung like a goddamn donkey. But I guess you’ll figure that out.”
He threw down an apple at Billy’s feet. “Just bite down when it hurts,” he said.
FROM THE OTHER SIDE, I WATCHED AS TWO NEGRO MEN moved from the shadows on top of two motel units with pistols in their hands and whispered back and forth to each other. We had four of the Guard boys right behind them, two more at the far end of the motor court and two with me and Jack. We told Quinnie to wait by the radio for when all hell broke loose, and the little man’s face turned red with frustration, but he said, “Yes, sir.”