The Thomas Berryman Number (17 page)

He remembered Ben Toy drinking warm beer and singing corny Mexican love songs. And coyote balls hanging from the Ford’s rearview mirror. And snuggling up with girlfriends and watching bullbats swoop over sad shallow ponds.

Country living was a turned crock of shit, he thought.

Over a bumpy half-mile stretch, he pulled the big car off the dirt road. He got out and went around to the trunk for his rifle. He’d wrapped it in a horse blanket. It, too, smelled of dung.

He set the gun on the car roof, then sat on the fender fishing shells out of his pockets. These too he set on the roof. He slowly loaded the rifle as a peach-colored sun half-blinded him and made him think of sunstroke. The word, “sunstroke.”

Berryman put the rifle under his chin, and looked at the desert through its crystal-clear sight.

There were telephone poles that were connected to nothing. With functionless blue-green cups up and down their sides. There was an ancient highway BUMP sign. Its black lettering stretched high on rusted gold.

There was a puny rabbit peeking out of a hole in the ground. And a bird with a song like electricity. Berryman could see bacteria squirming in the hot air.

He squeezed the trigger. Lightly, like a piano player.

The slender rifle barked. Jerked to the right. The
BUMP
sign was left intact.

Berryman carefully squeezed again. Nothing.

He took more time. Barely touching the trigger. Knowing
he had
the crotch of the
M.
Missing everything.

Berryman fired and missed. Fired and missed. He began to perspire. His arms and eyes weren’t making sense together. He stopped everything.

He set the rifle against the car for a moment and collected his thoughts. It was his style. Automatic.

He calmly unscrewed the rifle’s sight with his penknife. He fired a single shot without the sight. Gold metal disappeared and the
BUMP
sign burst open through its back.

Berryman continued until he had shot the sign away. Made it nothing. Then he drove on.

He didn’t recognize the outskirts of Amarillo. There were hundreds of quick-food stops. Supermarkets with corny names. Drive-ins showing quadruple beaver movie features.

He stopped at one of the many taco places. He had a beer, and then he called an old girlfriend named Bobbie Sue Gary, now Bobbie Sue Pederson.

Sitting on the orange tile floor outside the phone booth, Thomas Berryman talked to the girl about old times. He gulped sweat-cold Pearl tallboys. Smoked a half a pack of Picayunes. Ate a taco that was tasty as a fist.

“My husband’s a night shift supervisor for Shell Oil,” Bobbie Sue said.

“There are airplanes and bats flying all over this desert.” Berryman reported on the scene out the Taco Palace window.

“Well, I have three children now. And one in the hopper,” Bobbie Sue reported.

“Well, I don’t give a flying fuck,” Berryman said. “I want you to get into a party dress. We’re going to party.”

“Tom,” she complained in a lighthearted, giggling voice. “You’re just trying to get into my panties all over again. I’m married now. No more hotsy-totsies for Bobbie. I have my responsibilities now.”

“Oh, come on Bobbie.” Thomas Berryman was laughing hard, “Don’t you want to get into my pants?”

That said, he told her he was on his way.

Bobbie Sue Gary Pederson had grown slightly rat-faced over the years. The nipples of her breasts were dark brown and showing through her blouse. They looked unattractive.

On account of all this he took her to the dark cocktail lounge at the 7-10 Bowling Alleys. But he was pleased with her looks. Really.

Bobbie Sue wore a red A-line skirt umbrellaed out over seamed stockings. She wore black pumps with blue ribbons over her toes. She drank Singapore Slings, and they both ate the special chicken-fried steaks.

Thomas Berryman got high on Bobbie Sue.

“What’s it like,” he asked, “kissing old Tommy Pederson? Just tell me that one thing. I’ll go away from here content. I’ll sing in that jet back to New York City.”

She was patting his leg and saying, “Now, now, now.” It was just like he’d never gone away and they were still high school sweethearts.

“Don’t give me that now, now, now stuff. C’mon, babe.”

“It’s like kissin … Noooo …”

“C’mon, babe. ’Fess up, Rev’ren Thomas is here …”

“Like a rug on a floor. Kissin it.”

“Ooh, Bobbie Sue!” Berryman howled with delight. “That’s terrible, babe.” He was laughing, and talking southern, and she thought he was hilarious.

A white moon rode the dark Texas skies as they fornicated in the big cushy Lincoln.

Sergeant Ames found him asleep in the rocker beside his father’s bed. It was morning. The judge’s thing was lying out of his pajamas, large as a king post.

As he revived the judge, Sergeant Ames told Young Tom an old story about falling asleep on a cattle drive. Waking and finding he was being circumcised.

Old Tom Berryman just lay on the bed and looked at the paperback on the floor near the rocker. It was
Jiminy
. After some puckering and smacking his lips, he asked his son if he was reading about Jimmie Horn.

“Well, yes I am,” Berryman said.

“Well, good for you then.” The old man struggled with each word. “He seems … He seems … like a hell of a good nigger.”

Berryman spent the morning back in Amarillo, arranging for the visa in the name of Keresty. His supplier was an egotistical Mexican artiste who hand-lettered the document himself. For his morning’s drawing he earned three hundred dollars.

That afternoon, Berryman flew back to meet the man who was paying heavily to have Horn killed. This man was ex-Tennessee Governor Jefferson Johnboy Terrell.

Thomas Berryman was calm as a snake after its sunbath.

Nashville, October 12

This past October 12th, Columbus Day, was the kind of unexpectedly cold day mat makes grown men, like me, sleep through their alarm clocks.

That morning—a flat, gray, homely one—the state had its first frost.

That afternoon, ex-Governor Jefferson Terrell was driven into downtown Nashville to face a grand jury on the charge that he had paid over one hundred thousand dollars to accomplish the murder of James Horn the previous July.

Terrell’s car, a somber, black, 1969 Fleetwood, was chauffeured by a soldiery-looking man with short sandy hair brushed back like Nixon’s Mr. Haldeman.

Terrell’s new lawyer, a slick gray fox (also from Houston), was riding in the back seat with him.

The media coverage for the upcoming trial had by this time risen above the noise level of Procter and Gamble’s newest soap detergent commercials.

People would hear about the trial on the radio coming home from work; then find it staring up at them from the newspaper on their front porch; then get hit with it on both the local and network TV news programs.

People from the hills were already planning weekends around a Friday at the trial and a Saturday trip to Opryland.

Over three thousand of them greeted Terrell at the courthouse on the twelfth.

Johnboy struggled up out of the Cadillac, revealing patent leather loafers, then a gray banker’s suit, then a pasty, death-mask face.

Not that much had changed about Terrell’s general demeanor though.

He
held
one of his familiar dollar cigars instead of smoking it. But otherwise, it was the way he’d been around the capitol for all the years I’d ever seen him there.

He shook a few hands and gave a proper politician’s wave all around.
Yes his health was just fine,
he answered a query from some well-wisher in a checkered bird-dog hat.

Then a little man in a gray raincoat got ahold of Terrell’s hand and wouldn’t let him go.

“Bad times,” the man was heard to say a few times.

“But it’s a good, strong country all the same,” Johnboy told him. “Isn’t it a good country we’ve got here, my friend?”

The eyes of the man in the raincoat blinked on and off. Then he let go of Terrell’s hand.

Johnboy then bulled his way up the forty-three courthouse stairs and disappeared inside without once looking back.

“He’d make a fine corpse,” Lewis Rosten muttered from somewhere behind me. “Mr. Dickens, in his neat mystery
Martin Chuzzlewit
.”

During the secretive grand jury proceedings, the newspapermen and TV guys sat around the second floor of the courthouse drinking free Folger’s coffee.

Occasionally we’d get official word that
nothing
was happening. Some Nashville policeman had the job of coming in to tell us that nothing was happening.

His one big news break was the information that ex-Governor Terrell had taken some pills from a little black snap case just before he went in to meet with the grand jury.

A long-haired northern reporter stood up and said with a straight face, “Sergeant, could you give us anything on the
color
of the pills?”

That was the big laugh of the morning. In fact, that
was
the morning.

Just after lunch, though, we finally got a little surprise.

A Tom Wolfe-ish young man (the
new
Tom Wolfe) walked into the press room to make an important announcement for Mr. Terrell.

He was a little dandy, in a white suit and polka-dot bow tie. Yale, without any doubt. Word went out that he was Terrell’s own son.

“Contrary to the suspicions of many of you here,” he read from a small brown pad, “my father is not planning to sneak out a back door to a second Cadillac after these proceedings.” The petulant young man looked up at us as though he’d really stung it to us. “Following the grand jury session,” he continued without aid of his pad, “Mr. Terrell will entertain questions from the press outside.” With that, Terrell’s son stalked out of the room.

Well, you’ve heard the speech Terrell gave several times over these past few sad years in America.

It’s the one that never fails to bug your eyes and put a ringing in your ears. It’s the same speech that proved that Nixon, and Mitchell, and Connally, and all the others, despised us to the point of ridiculing us to our faces.

Standing up on the white courthouse steps, Terrell seemed overly casual to me. Confident. Thoroughly despicable.

And in the sincerest voice I could remember hearing out of him, in a voice choking with moral outrage, he said that he “welcomed the chance to prove his innocence once and for all, before a judicial system that he for one still believed in.”

Some people booed loudly; more people cheered.

He went on to say how he was confident that “the courts will vindicate me.” And he said, “I swear to you before my Lord and Savior, that I have done nothing wrong, and nothing to be ashamed of.”

It was as strange and scary then as it was the first time I heard a grown adult serve up that kind of tripe to a group of other adults.

An even more frightening thing was in store for me that afternoon.

I’d gone down near the Fleetwood to observe the crowd up close. I was standing with a long-haired
Citizen-Reporter
photographer putting it all down on film.

To a man the people down by the Cadillac had that sick, hurt look I’ve never seen so much as at the Bible Belt showings of a movie called
Marjoe. Marjoe
is a documentary about a young, very well loved evangelist who openly admits how he’s been lying to and defrauding the people of the South. I want to tell you that the people around here cried after seeing that film. They are basically trusting, and they can’t comprehend deceit at that high a level.

At any rate, I was busy watching this fussed-up crowd, and I never saw Terrell until he was practically on top of me. In fact, I only saw him because the photographer started snapping away like a madman.

Johnboy never stepped one foot out of his chosen path, but he raised a stubby index finger and pointed at me from about ten feet or so away.

He looked at me with all the pride and Son-of-God feelings power can give a weak man. He looked and pointed, and all he said was “You.”

I’ve got the photograph to prove that, too. It’s hanging safe and sound, blown up into proportion over my fireplace up here in Poland County.

Standing in front of the Tennessee state courthouse that day, October 12, I took the wild guess that Terrell would never be tried and convicted. That turned out to be right.

Nashville, June 30

A wasted American dreamer, Jefferson Terrell is 99% fat now. He has greasy, cardboard-colored hair slickly parted down the middle, but ducktailing in back. He constantly smells of tobacco and mash whiskey, and since he’s developed high blood pressure his plump face is tomato red. Johnboy also has a big, lazy accent. He pronounces words like pleasure, “play-sure.”

But there is a smoldering brain in the wreck of Terrell’s body, and he is the man who finally got Thomas Berryman.

They met to exchange money in a top-floor suite in the old Walter Scott Hotel near the Old Opry Building and Tootsie’s Orchard Lounge. Berryman showed up late. He wore a yellow rubber terrorist’s mask for the meeting.

Still, an open Amana freezer couldn’t have dominated the tacky hotel sitting room any more than Johnboy. The man had presence; he’d always had it.

He’d ordered Beam’s Pin, and he was lounging over a squash-yellow davenport, drinking the overrated whiskey without ice. He told Berryman that he looked like a State Farm Insurance agent. His clothes did. Terrell said nothing about the mask, though it clearly had surprised him.

Trapped inside the stuffy room, Berryman wanted to be back outdoors. Where it was breezy and sunny and quiet. More than that, he wanted to be done with this job, and with the
Souf.

“You may consider it foolhardy that I’ve chosen to meet with you myself,” Johnboy said. “Well, I agree. It is foolish. But it’s the way I’ve always done things. I am a southerner, an empiricist. I wanted to talk to you. To evaluate you. To see you, I had hoped.”

Thomas Berryman nodded. He was catching sun-streaks in the brass minor behind Terrell’s head. He was remembering Oona Quinn coming out of the Atlantic Ocean like the girl in the famous airline commercial.