When we didn’t get an answer, the manager knocked again.
A hot wind blew off the beach, around the cool shadows of the first floor facing the parking lot.
The manager knocked again and then tried the key.
The room was empty. A sliding door facing the Gulf was open, the curtains fluttering in the breeze. I opened the bathroom and searched inside, only to find a used razor and some wet towels. On the nightstand, I saw an empty gin bottle and a dirty ashtray. Hearing the kids outside splashing around in the pool, that hot putter of wind in the curtains, there was no mistaking she’d been there only moments ago.
You could smell her perfume just as if she stood behind you, waiting to whisper in your ear.
I knew I’d always wonder where she went and what new name she’d taken. I wondered if the new men in her life would ever know anything about her.
The Gulf stretched out green and endless across the summer horizon.
I’D ALWAYS FOUND COMFORT BEING AROUND HORSES. I even liked working with plow mares on my father’s farm, and there was a strong feeling of peace just watching them graze, standing around them and hearing their massive teeth reach into the ground and pull a clump of grass right out of the earth. The farm had been, and continued to be, for the years I remained sheriff, a sacred ground, a place where I could retreat and work. Even when Anne grew older and went off to college and Thomas had discovered cars and girls, I’d go out there alone and feed the geldings their sweet feed and hay, clean out their water tanks and talk to them. They liked to be talked to. It soothed them. It soothed me.
I needed it sometimes. Quinnie was right. Some things you couldn’t wrap your head around.
Bert Fuller didn’t spend life in prison.
He only spent ten years for good behavior and well-placed friends.
In 1965, he’d already been out two days when I heard he planned to return to Phenix City. That was also when I learned of our star witness, Cecil Padgett, and his fate out in Texas – killed when he fell from the open door of a train, not far from the town where the newspapermen said he’d become a drunk.
After the trial, Cecil and I had become friends. I even recommended him for a few jobs, and, later, when John Patterson became governor, replacing Jim Folsom, Cecil became Patterson’s driver.
I didn’t see him falling. I couldn’t imagine it.
I saw Bert Fuller behind him, pushing him from an open door, destroying the man who had destroyed him, and riding the rails, the big locomotive chugging and turning on those hot steel rails, hammering like blood in those veins, all the way back to Alabama.
No one had to warn me that Fuller was coming for me.
I’d dreamed about it for ten years.
AFTER EVERY ELECTION, THE JOB BECAME EASIER. JOYCE helped me run the books and keep the prison kitchen going. Quinnie stayed with me for a short time, but Jack didn’t last a year, trading the slow pace of the new Phenix City for Atlanta, where he worked as a detective for several years. Most of my deputies worked traffic stops and stolen bicycles. We had some real excitement one time when someone was stealing tractors and hauling them away on flatbed trucks. Most of the old racketeers had left for Biloxi or southern Tennessee, where they’d become the foundation of what people later called the Dixie Mafia.
Hoyt Shepherd stayed until he died an old man.
I’d see him every so often at the barbershop.
I broke in new deputies, studied the law all I could, and tried to keep that slow-going pace.
We were in a heat wave when Fuller came back.
I stopped by a halfway house close to the railroad tracks and found him sitting on the floor of the room listening to a Gene Autry 45. He stood, embarrassed, but greeted me with a warm handshake like an old friend.
I told him I didn’t want any trouble.
And he spent the next forty minutes witnessing to me, quoting parables from the Bible, casting himself as Phenix City’s Prodigal Son. When he’d finished, I asked him again about what had happened to Mr. Patterson, telling him he didn’t have a thing to lose now that he’d served his time. I told him how much it would mean to the Pattersons to know how their father died.
But his face was filled with ignorance and questions, and in a soft child’s voice he said, “I don’t know any more ’an you what happened in that alley. I guess that’s something we’re all going to have to live with.”
“You know I’m going to keep asking?”
Fuller nodded. “Say, you know what’s showing at the Palace?”
“Bert, they tore that place down two years ago.”
He looked sad but pumped my hand again as I left, and I drove away, heading out to the farm.
Two nights later, he made his move.
RAIN HIT THE TIN ROOF OF THE BARN, AND I HAD BOTH MY horses in. Old Braddock was still hanging on, his back sloped and teeth worn, and I had a new one, a sweet filly I’d bought from a man in Auburn. The zap of the electric storm in the bright blue daylight made them skittish and they shook their heads, their eyes wide. I soothed them with talk.
I put up some rope, coiling it in my hands, and went to close a back gate after letting them in. A long row of tiny white bulbs lit the interior of the barn but flickered and sputtered out with a harsh boom, lightning hitting not a mile from where I stood.
The ground shook. The horses raised up on their hind legs.
Without their bridles, I smoothed their rumps, and they turned and turned, wide-eyed, until they slowed in the cooling darkness of the storm.
He appeared as a shadow to me at the mouth of the barn. The storm moving away now, the thunder retreating and cracking from far away. Wind rocked the flypaper that hung from the rafters of the loft, and I didn’t move, I just stood there, seeing the shadow man, and simply said, “Come on in, Bert.”
But he didn’t say anything, the dark shape shifting, studying me in the wide box of light. His hand disappeared for a moment and then reappeared with a pistol. He aimed the pistol at me without threats or words and drew a close bead down the sights.
The gun fired and fired again.
The shadow tilted and then fell back, trying to stand his ground, but losing a grip on the barn door and falling into the light, half man, half shadow.
One of my young deputies climbed down the loft ladder and walked toward Fuller, slowing as he grew close, making sure it was really him, and then he fired again. Twice more. Fuller in the mud, rain streaking across him, blood coming from his mouth. He fired twice more into the mud and blood.
I was outside with the deputy.
“I think he’s dead now, Billy,” I said.
He looked over at me, shaken awake from the dream.
“I want to be sure.”
I looked down in the mud, Fuller’s head sinking into the places that my horses had made soft with their hooves.
NOT LONG AFTER, BILLY AND I RODE THE TRAILS ON MY land, hearing the sounds of the bulldozers and earthmovers cutting Phenix City in half with a highway bypass to Columbus. We found a spot at my small pond to let the horses drink, calm and sweaty from the ride, and they felt gentle and tired as they filled themselves with cool water and we made our way back up that well-worn path to the barn.
“Did I tell you my wife was pregnant?”
“Must’ve slipped your mind,” I said. “Her folks okay with y’all living here? Or they still want you in Atlanta?”
He shook his head. “They didn’t know things had changed.”
We were silent for a moment, just the sounds of hooves on earth, as we crested the hill.
“You like being a father?” Billy asked.
“Very much,” I said.
I dismounted and walked back to my patrol car, pulling out a beaten cloth book that’d I’d found deep in our evidence locker and carried the great weight of it back to the barn, chaining the gate behind me.