Heading back to Mobile, my heart started pounding like a drum and my skin felt tight. I figured it was the irritation of highway driving, an idiot behind every third steering wheel and slowmoving semi-rigs backing traffic up for miles.
I veered down a ramp and took the back roads south, driving through piney woods with trees straight as arrows, crossing slender bridges over black-water swamps. I roared around a bend and saw a typical roadhouse bar, a mason-block building with painted-over windows and a heavy metal door. A sign saying Al’s Hideaway hung over the door on a rusting iron frame. A dozen pickups and cars were on the dusty, crushed-gravel lot. A portable sign near the road proclaimed Big Picher of Beer $8.
I was thirsty and hot and what energy I’d had was fading. I veered into the lot beside the building, skidding sideways in the gravel.
It was as cold as a refrigerator inside. Three men sat at the bar, another five played cards in a back booth. Two chalked cues and stalked pool balls at a table. I heard a decades-old Conway Twitty song on the juke: “It’s Only Make Believe”.
Eyes found me, held for an evaluative two-count, turned back to the serious work of heavy drinking.
The man behind the bar was a porcine guy in his thirties, a bandana covering his pumpkin head. His shirt advertised Colt Arms. His voluminous jeans were held aloft by a black leather belt clasped by an ornate silver buckle big as a dessert plate. He was pulling beers from cases at his feet and racking them in a cooler. He didn’t look happy at being distracted from his labor, muttering shit and padding over.
“Whatcha need?” he asked.
“A couple RCs. And a half-pint of Maker’s.”
He reached in a cooler, scrabbled through some bottles, produced two RCs, dropping them in a bag with the bourbon.
I headed toward my truck and put the bottles in the passenger seat. I heard a bite of tires on asphalt as a big-ass Dodge Ram veered on to the lot. The driver gunned the engine for no reason but to announce arrival. He swerved to send a rolling cloud of dust my way and jammed the brakes to skid to a stop. A bumper sticker said, DON’T LIKE MY DRIVING? CALL 1-800-EAT SHIT. In the back window was a Confederate battle flag, only at the crossing of the bars was the grinning face of country singer Hank Williams, Jr. The license plate was from Ohio.
Ohio?
The door pushed open and out jumped a jostling beer belly overlaying a large frame, six three or four. The belly’s owner had a wide chest and heavy biceps, and I took him for a laborer on a construction site or maybe a loading dock. He looked at me, seemed to sneer at the sports jacket, like I was a lost tourist. He flicked his cigarette to the dirt, hawked up a gob of phlegm, fired it at the butt, missed by two feet.
The passenger was smaller, with tight tiny eyes and dirty fingernails tapping the side of the truck. His wispy beard, long trailing mustache, and hard-edged face made my neurons fire three random words: syphilitic hillbilly Confucius.
“Get a case for the cooler, Beefer,” Syphilucius whined, a nasal wind as flat and nonmusical as air dribbled from a balloon, the tone straight from the plains of a Midwest backcountry nowhere.
Beefer. I looked at the driver and the name fit, probably applied while a high-school lineman pushing aside smaller players like a fat bull, stomping their ankles when he saw the chance. He maybe went on to some second-tier college on scholarship, but found that elbow-spearing opposing players’ necks didn’t make up for slow legs and an inability to remember the play-book.
I looked at the sullen, obnoxious Beefer. My eyes went to the comedic flag on the cab and the bumper sticker. I looked at the license plate. I felt a fast and scarlet anger sizzle through my guts and a deep thrumming in my brain. Normally I would have pushed the irritation out with a few quick breaths, moved on. But something kept my feet planted.
“Hey, buddy,” I called to the wide back.
He turned. Eyes squinted in a flat red face. “Huh? You talkin’ to me?”
I nodded at the flag in the rear window. “I like the flag. Looks good.”
He was pissed at my stepping into his day, bewildered by what seemed a compliment to his truck’s attire. It was a wash, so he nodded, turned away toward the roadhouse.
I said, “Hey, buddy.”
He stopped, wheeled. This time there was no confusion, only ire.
“What now?” he growled, squaring in my direction and pulling off his shades. I removed my sunglasses, absent-mindedly polishing them on my shirtfront.
“What’s it mean to you?” I asked, looking at my glasses, not him.
“What the hell you talking about?”
“The Stars’n’Bars. The flag of the Confederate States of America. What does it mean?”
“It means I’m a rebel. That’s what it fuckin’ means.”
I puffed breath over my lenses, studied them closely. Resumed polishing. “What are you rebelling against?” I asked.
He moved two steps my way, fists closing. “Stop with the fucking questions, freak. You got a problem with my flag?”
“Your flag?” I twirled the glasses in my fingers and nodded toward his bumper. “But the license tag says Ohio.”
“So the fuck what?”
“Ohio was a member of the Union,” I explained quietly. “Not the Confederacy.”
He moved closer, now a half-dozen feet away. “What the fuck does that have to do with anything? Get outta my face before you get hurt.”
I turned and took the three steps to my truck, opened the door, set the shades inside. Closed the door and turned slowly back to the Beefer.
“What was the capital of the Confederacy, Rebel Boy? It’s what any Southerner would know. I won’t ask you what famous battle was fought in Manassas, Virginia. I won’t ask you the year the war began. Just prove you know enough about the Confederacy to tell me its capital.”
“What is your fucking problem, asshole?”
“Children who play games with symbols they don’t understand.”
“Fuck him up, Beef,” the guy in the truck tittered. “Fuck him up bad.”
I’d had enough of Confucius and headed that way, but was sucker-punched in the side by Beefer, faster than I thought he’d be. His grapefruit-sized fist knocked me sideways.
I dropped to one knee, gasping. He circled around my back to put a kick into my kidney, but I surprised him my diving toward him, grabbing his foot at toe and heel and twisting with all I had. It brought him down like a sack of wet manure and he swung his fist as he fell, the punch hitting my shoulder. I didn’t want to match strength to strength so I blunted two roundhouse swings, head low, looking for the moment.
He jumped into me to try to get his hands around my neck, and for a split-second his fat throat was open. I drove a knife-hand chop into his larynx.
Game’s end. Beefer’s hands fell from my throat and clutched at his own. I stood, resisting the notion to punt his head like a football and instead crouched beside him as he struggled for breath, my hand clutching his hair.
“The war began in 1861,” I whispered into an ear so close to my lips I could have bitten it off. “Manassas was the site of the Battle of Bull Run. The capital was Richmond, as in the state of Virginia. Say it.”
“Hur-ugh,” he rasped.
I yanked his head back, the better to see the fear in his eyes. “The name of the capital of the Confederacy.”
“Rug-mom,” he gargled.
I threw Beef’s head toward the ground and spun to the truck, yanked open the door. The syphilitic hillbilly Confucius held his hands in front of his face, babbling, “No, man, I didn’t disrespect you. No, man…”
I yanked him from the truck and sent him skittering across the parking lot. I tore the flag free of the rear window. I climbed in my truck and drove away, jamming the flag under the seat.
I felt like crying, but didn’t know why. So I started yelling as loud as I could. The feeling passed by the time I reached the next curve.
When I rolled in, at half past seven, Harry was still there, looking through YouTube videos in the side conference room. I wondered if he was checking out more background on Scaler or just playing around.
“Do I smell mint juleps?”
I opened my mouth and showed him a green tongue. “Tic-Tacs,” I slobbered. “Mint flavor.”
He frowned and sniffed the air. “I could have sworn I smelled whiskey, too.”
“Because you associate mint with whiskey,” I explained. “It’s how the mind works. Now sit your ass down and let me tell you what I got solved.”
I conveyed my conversation with Kirkson.
“That begins to explain things,” Harry said, after I’d run through the play-by-play. “Bailes was on the way out. Looking at nothing but pain and a plot in Potter’s Field.”
“A man with no future. Remember when he got quiet? I said to him, ‘It’s over. Set the kid aside and you get to live’?”
Harry thought back. Nodded. “Bailes said, ‘No I don’t.’”
“Bailes knew he was a goner, so he decided to act out some weird-ass fantasy,” I said. “Kirkson inadvertently helped light the fuse by telling Bailes to get his shit together and man up. Then do what he wanted because he was in the no-consequences zone.”
“Why did Bailes get weird? What was the fantasy?”
“No one will ever know what Bailes was thinking. When you’ve got a mama like that and a face like that there ain’t no way to turn out normal.”
“What if there’s more to it, Carson?”
“There isn’t.”
“We’ve got to make absolutely sure.”
“I’ve got two goddamn cases on my plate, Harry. One is a preacher who died while getting whipped as part of his sex life. The other is a delusional man-child who tried to jump out a window with an infant. Both are over. THE PEOPLE ARE DEAD!”
It finally seemed to penetrate Harry’s leaden skull. He thought for a few moments, shifted gears.
“Hardasses like Kirkson never tell cops anything without a trade. How did you get Kirkson to spill?”
I ahemed and told him the story of my on-the-spot creativity with the fake transfer.
“Jesus,” he whispered, jumping up to close the door. “You could have gotten your ass fired. The guard’s ass fired. Why did you take such ridiculous chan—”
“It worked,” I said, waving my hand in the done-with-talking mode. “That’s what’s important. Why don’t you call Clair and ask if she can get a pathologist to run the ripsaw through Bailes tomorrow after Scaler’s funeral so we can confirm the rotten pancreas and file this case under Dying Freak’s Last Wish?”
Harry paused, picked up the phone. I went to the can to take a leak. Washing my hands, I saw a wide red smear on my face, an abrasion from the set-to with Beefer. Harry had looked straight at it and hadn’t mentioned a thing.
When I returned to the meeting room, Harry was gone, a note in his place:
Post on Bailes @ 11.30 a.m. tomorrow. Scaler’s funeral at nine.
I went home, took a couple of Fossie’s sleeping pills, and watched a show about groups of people racing around the world. Everyone was angry at everyone else and I drifted into a rich and welcome sleep as they screamed at one another in an airline terminal in Singapore.