Slippage (46 page)

They secured the chain around his neck with the tow hook and pulled it so tight the links broke flesh. Then six of them got on the other end of the chain and, calling him a fuckin' nigger-fucker, they gave the chain a sharp, mean yank that sent him jerking so high his head hit the thick branch overhead. They slung the chain around the bole of the sweet gum and looped it fast. Then they stood back and watched.

His pale white face went almost black with mottled patches of trapped blood. His mouth opened and his tongue bulged past his lips. Rafe offered a pack of Marlboros around the group. They all lit up, and Wes Kurlan puffed on his pipe, his hood held loosely in his left hand. Above them there was prolonged jerking and trembling, and they commented on that. Several of them, exhausted from the crashing run through thickets, sat down and breathed deeply. Wes Kurlan inquired with concern about John Porter's condition. John had had a mild stroke only four months ago. John said he felt okay; a little winded; but okay.
 

They hung around for half an hour.

Then they retraced their steps, back out to the road, stopped to pick up the body of Ansel Lomax, put it gently into the bed of the lead truck, and drove back to town. The wind caught the pants legs of the man on the sweet gum, and he swayed gently, as if from a heavenly breath.

He had been shooting Klansmen with a 30.06 hunting rifle, from the concealment of the woods that ran deep from the edge of the road to the river. He had been working with the Deacons, a militant black group in Alabama, for about three years. He had been sending money for longer than that, but had finally decided he wanted to be involved in a little hands-on activity in aid of equaling the odds.

The Deacons—sharecroppers, furniture factory hands, two postmen, a dentist, and three Viet Nam vets—had discovered, more than twenty years earlier, that the nicest target on a bright night with a full moon was the long, white, stupid sheet worn by a moron standing high on the flatbed of a truck, whooping like a demented night owl and waving a Louisville Slugger over his head. Nice target, perfect target: pale white and clear as a light against the woods.

He had put the crosshairs of the Bushnell scope flat on the center of that peaked white hood, tracked the truck as it passed on the road, and squeezed the trigger of the big game rifle slowly, sending the pencil-thick, three inch long expanding slug on its way. It hit Ansel Lomax in the left cheek with a muzzle energy of 2930 foot-pounds and blew his head apart. His body lofted and went over the side of the truck. Now the hood was black, and filled with bloody soup. He slid eleven feet.

The three Deacons with him had escaped, but he was from Chicago and didn't know his way around scrub growth and mud pits. They chased him through the woods and brought him back and lynched him. Then they drove back to town with what was left of Ansel Lomax.

The white man from Chicago hung in the darkness for two hours, swaying gently in the pleasant northern Alabama breeze.

Then he reached up, grabbed the chain and pulled himself to a point where he could unclip the tow hook. He hung onto the chain for a moment, then dropped the fifteen feet to the muddy ground.

He leaned against the tree for a while, massaging his throat, and then, spitting blood, he turned to look toward the road. After a few minutes he scuffled his way back to the road and walked in the opposite direction the trucks had taken.

In the breeze, the chain clinked against itself, making a small sweet sound in the night.

He was not in Chicago; he was not in northern Alabama. He was in Beloit, Wisconsin. He stared down the dingy, ratty length of Fourth Street, at the bars and men's rooming houses encrusted with the soot and pulp refuse from the Beloit Corporation factory on the other side of the street. The Beloit Corporation was famous: it manufactured paper-making machinery for the world.

The man from northern Alabama had come into town on Highway 57. He had stopped at several bars on the way. In Beloit, they were usually called "lounges," not bars or taps or pubs.

He wandered down Fourth, stopping for a tequila, lime and salt at La Tropicana; a shot of J.D. with a Bud back at the Coconut Grove; an Arrow schnapps at Granny's; and finally came to The Werks. As he came through the door into the blue smoke, he took note that it was a workingman's oasis, and made sure he was wearing a blue chambray shirt, twill pants, and an old, cracked leather bomber jacket with a fur collar against the cold.

He picked out a man in his middle forties sitting alone at the bar working on a bottle of Ten High. As he poured his shot glass to the line from the bottle, the man from northern Alabama saw that the drinker was missing the thumb and little finger of his right hand. He walked to the bar and took the stool beside the drinker. The man looked up only momentarily.

"Hi," the man from northern Alabama said.

The drinker looked up from under thick eyebrows, nodded to the stranger, and mumbled, "Right."

They sat silently for a few minutes till the bartender wiped the mahogany into their area. "What can I get you?" he asked.

"I'll bet you've got a secret bottle of George Dickel down there someplace," the man from northern Alabama said, firing off a winning grin. "Why don't you just bring the bottle and a couple of water glasses for me and my kid brother here. I figure he must have some kinda death wish sittin' here going at that Ten High straight. If you can't put a little good Tennessee sour mash sippin' whiskey into your kid brother, what the hell's it all about, right?"

The stranger beside him had looked up as the words
kid brother
were spoken. And he realized he was, in fact, sitting beside his older brother Vernon, whom he hadn't seen all week because Vern had been on the road with the cartage company van. Now he smiled, and allowed the bartender to remove the bottle and empty shot glass. "You must of got paid."

"Couple of Sonys fell off the loading dock. Carson told me to take 'em, he'd line 'em out as smashed on the invoice. Gave one to Ma and sold th'other one over to Janesville."

Then he made that goofy face that had always made his kid brother laugh when they were growing up.

"So. How's it goin?"

Vernon shrugged, said, "Ah, you know, the usual. Gettin' tired of driving interstate, though; I'll tell you that, Bobby. Sometimes I just get cranky as hell and begin to think it's never gonna end. You know, workin', drivin', tryin' to forget Bea and the kid."

Bobby nodded. They sat silently. Then, after a while, when the George Dickel had come, and they'd poured generous amounts into the tall water glasses, and were sipping like bluegrass Colonels, Bobby said, "You remember when Pa was workin' in the wet end?" He inclined his head to indicate the big Beloit Corporation factory across the street. "Remember he used to come home some nights and go straight upstairs and lay on down..."

Vern said, "...and put his arm over across his eyes..."

"Yeah, and he'd stay up there till supper, and when he come down he always looked pulled up tight, and he'd say..."

"...did you ever get the feelin' you'd lived too long, past your time, and just wanted to sleep forever?"

Bobby sighed. "That was it."

"Yeah, well, I'm gettin' to feel like that, too," Vern said. They sat silently, working at the secret bottle.

"I got a headache," Bobby said.
 

"You drink too much."
 

"Horseshit."

"You do. You drink too much. You're gonna die young, like Pa. They'll take out your liver and send it over to the college for the medical department. Famous example of an organ that ate a man."

Bobby grinned his brother's grin. They looked a lot alike. "Fry it up with onions, real crisp."

"
I
think," Vern said, slapping his hands together, "that what you need is some adventure! Somethin' to sober you up and put a spring in your step, m'boy."

"Hold it, Vern. I'm not goin' on one of your redneck trips. No Alpo contests, no wet-t-shirt bars, no pool cue brawls. Not again. Denise says she'll divorce me I come in torched like that again." He was serious. His hands were out flat in the air between them, a barrier to mischief.

His big brother (and he had no big brother, had been one of four children, the other three girls) laughed and leaned in to hug him. "No, absolutely not! I agree. Nothin' like that. But I got somethin' special. Somethin' I heard over to Janesville."

"Like what?"

"Like, that Nicky Pederakis messed himself up good and finally died. Of diverticulitis."

'Of
what?
What the hell's that?"

"Don't matter. But he didn't go to the doctor for a while, and his bowels got obstructed and a fistula formed, and they operated on his colon, and he died on the table."

"Where the hell did you learn that kind of stuff?" Then he paused and a grim smile froze his lips. "Good. The lousy motherfucker. He used to beat the shit out of me every day back in school."

Vern said softly, "I know."

"So that's good. Goddam it, I outlived the sonofabitch." Vern laid a hand on Bobby's shoulder. "Come on, we're goin' over to the funeral."

His brother stared at him. After a few seconds he let the lupine smile fade, and his face grew serious. "Yeah."

And they went outside after Vernon had paid for the fine, rare George Dickel, and there was a 1980 Mustang at the curb that hadn't been at the curb when the man from northern Alabama had entered The Werks.

And they got in; and Vernon drove; and they went the twelve miles to Janesville; and Vern turned into the parking lot at a funeral home Bobby didn't know, because it wasn't the one that had handled Pa's service; and they got out and went inside.

There was a ribbed black velvet directory board on a slim tubular steel stand in the foyer. Small, tasteful plastic letters and arrows had been pressed into the ribbing indicating that the Kessler service was in Parlor A and the Pederakis service was in Parlor C, the former to the left, the latter to the right.

Vernon and Bobby walked slowly toward Parlor C. There was a line of people entering the room, a dark-suited employee of the funeral home, wearing a pink carnation in his lapel, holding the door open so visitors would not get hit by the door. He smiled bravely at Bobby and Vernon, who smiled back as bravely. They got in at the end of the line, and moved slowly forward.

When they had paced the length of the aisle, after twenty minutes, they came at last to the front of the parlor and found themselves looking down into the placid face of Nicky Pederakis, a dead man no longer in his middle forties, but rather his final forties. Life had not dealt sweetly with Nicky Pederakis. Despite the refurbishment of funerary cosmeticians, or perhaps in part
because
of their attentions, he looked like a cross between someone who had had his kisser regularly bashed in barroom encounters, and one of a thousand clowns exploding from a tiny car in a center ring.

Bobby stood looking.

Vern watched the family. Two men in cheap black suits, their faces younger stampings of the death mask now worn by Nicky Pederakis, were pointing at Bobby and whispering agitatedly. They separated and turned to the people on either side. They whispered much louder now, jerking their thumbs over their shoulders to indicate Bobby, still staring raptly into the open casket, leaning over with his hands on the anodized pastel blue metal lid panel. He seemed unable to get close enough.

"Hey!" One of the younger Pederakis boys was pointing at Bobby. "Who the hell are you?"

The room went silent. The knots of visitors humming condolences opened, everyone stopped talking, and they stared first at the pointing finger, then at Bobby.

It took a moment for the silence to register on Bobby, and when he looked up, still leaning over the open section at Nicky's face, he saw the room's attention on him. He stood up. Vern moved closer. "You know me," he said to the family.

"Yeah, I know you," the other brother said, almost snarling. "You're that creep Nicky used to kick ass alla time. What the hell you doing here? Nicky hated your guts."

"Just wanted to make sure the cocksucker was really dead," Bobby said, moving fast toward the side door exit. Vern was right behind him.

They got halfway through the first open row of chairs before the brothers and their friends exploded across the neat rows, knocking chairs in all directions. The one who had done the pointing caught up with Vern, reached out and snagged the collar of the bomber jacket. Vern pivoted and hit him in the throat. The brother fell back gasping, into the crowd, and Vern picked up a folding chair and smashed him in the head with it. Bobby grabbed Vern by the arm and pulled him through the exit door he'd pushed open. He was screaming, "The lousy bully got what was comin' to him! I hope he suffered like a dyin' shit, an' he's goin' straight to Hell!"

Then they were in the side-hall and Vernon grabbed a plush chair and wedged it under the doorknob and they ran like crazy men out the back entrance of the funeral home, got to the Mustang, and left skid marks exiting the parking lot.

When Vern dropped his kid brother off at the house, he leaned out the window and said to Bobby, "Maybe there's still some good stuff to get, bein' alive! Whaddaya think, Bobby?"

His brother leaned in and kissed the man from northern Alabama on the lips, grinned hugely, and whooped. "Better high off that goddam minute starin' at that sonofabitch croaked in his fuckin' baby-blue coffin than all the whiskey in the world!"