The Thomas Berryman Number (21 page)

“That’s Bennie,” Cubbah said. He was trying to be nice. “He’s failin’ out of grammar school, the chooch.”

Shea grinned effectively. “Listen Joey.” He sat down on the edge of the stove. “I have a possible for you…”

“Yeah, I know,” Cubbah said. “Tell me about it, Mikey.”

Shea told Cubbah all that he knew—which was basically that another hired gun, a tricky, expensive guy, was being set up somewhere down South. He said someone else would be around with all the details if Cubbah took the job. They’d give him the place, and the exact time schedule he’d need to work under.

“They’re offering ten plus expenses.” Shea took a Danish to go with his coffee. “Somebody thought you might be the perfect guy for it.”

“Yeah, that’s real nice of somebody,” Cubbah said. “Does this other guy have any idea somebody might be out after him?” Cubbah asked.

“My people say
no.
What the hell, I’d tell you something like that first thing out of the box.”

Shea took out a thick envelope that looked like an unbelievably huge phone bill. “Half now, half later,” he said. “You want it?”

Joe Cubbah shook his head slowly from side to side. “No owsies,” he said.

Shea then took out a second envelope and set it down on the first. “I forgot,” he grinned. “Sorry about that, sweets.”

“OK,” Cubbah said. He put both envelopes under his apron. “I’ll think about it,” he said.

He left Shea and walked out in the main part of the store again.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Shea called after him. “What’s this think about it shit?”

But Joe Cubbah had no more to say to the detective.

Whitehaven, July 2

Magnolias and azalias wave like high and low flags along the long, straight, whitestone drive leading up to the Powelton Country Club in the southwestern corner of Tennessee. The trees and bushes eventually open onto a grand antebellum plantation house with a great flagstone porch and thirty-foot-high Doric pillars. The ponderous building dwarfs people, motorcars, the realities of the twentieth century.

Short-haired blackmen in white coats shuffle around with silver trays holding mint julep, Jack Daniels, even Budweiser and a little Falstaff these days. Boys and girls ride and swim, play golf and tennis; and they fuck in the abandoned slaves’ cabins still standing around the grounds.

For five thousand dollars annual dues, the residents of western Tennessee can enjoy the South of their daddies and mammies at the Powelton Club.

On one end of the long, flagstone porch, Johnboy Terrell sits with silver-headed Dr. Reuven Mewman, a famous veterinarian with enough cotton money to paper both ends of all the Q-tips sold in America.

People watch the two men from respectable distances. Even the black waiters watch. They all try to guess what Johnboy wants with the Silver Fox.

Terrell was puffing on a satisfying, but dangerously dark Corona. “I have recently read a very outstandin’ book on vet’narians,” he was saying.

“Herriot, or something on that order.
All Creatures Beautiful and Pretty.”
Dr. Mewman shrugged. “I received three copies of the damn thing last Christmas. But hell John, I
see
enough horseshit without
reading
about it.”

Terrell, who in addition to having an immediate use for the silver-maned animal doctor, liked him well enough, laughed heartily. Reuven Mewman, he considered, had the good timing and sense of folkiness that either made or broke orators in the South.

“Esther donated the books to a rummage sale at our church.” Mewman was not one to surrender a captive audience. “They had me autograph the damn things, and charged near full price for them.”

“Then,”
Mewman took bourbon and swished it around his gums, “uh woman—whose thor-uh-bred springer spaniel I saved from a overdose of Alpo last spring—presented me with a copy of one of the books I had signed, sealed, and given away to my church … And I
still
haven’t read page one.”

“Well, you ought to.” Johnboy chewed and grinned. “Herriot’s prob’ly the finest livin’ vet’narian writin’ today.”

Both men laughed again and Dr. Mewman called for more drinks.

A black man who looked like Asbestos came and went, taking their reorders for double bourbons. As Mewman ordered, Johnboy watched two saddle-shoed teenagers teeing up their golf balls in front of the porch. He thought the game of golf a terrible waste of their precious youth.

“I understand,” he spoke while looking out over the golf course, “that you’ve expressed interest in spendin a few years in Washington, District of Columbia.”

“I did speak around about my availability,” the veterinarian admitted. “But that was earlier this year.”

“I advise against it.” Terrell made a face by misshaping his lips. “Northern winters rust you … But I do believe,” he went on, “that there’s an opportunity coming up in this Senate race.”

“That’s because? …”

“That’s because the one candidate, John Fair the second, is a horse’s ass. Ridin high on his daddy’s money plus a set of brass testicles … And that’s because Horn … I understand Jimmie Horn has been seein’ a white woman.”

Reuven Mewman’s head shook in a short arc.

“That nigger is far too smart for that, John. Too smart. Too hungry. I’m sure it’ll happen one day, but not just yet … Where did you hear that bullshit from, John?”

Terrell watched as one of the teenagers lofted an iron shot high over two pine trees. The little white pellet dropped fifteen feet off the pin on hole number 2.

He turned in his chair to face Mewman. “I thought you were smart, also,” he said. “A little smart and hungry yourself.”

The veterinarian understood and he blushed a ripe, tomato red.

“You see, I’m just checking on your availability, Reuven. Because as I said, John Fair, Jr., is the original horse’s ass—and Horn is vulnerable at this time.”

Reuven answered the original question then. His answer came as a kind of oath. “My interest is high,” he spoke. “I’d be interested and honored, John. Even to be considered, I’m honored.”

Terrell stood up on the porch and shook Mewman’s hand.

He left his choice for senator numb and speechless, but with two double bourbons on the way. He made his way across the front lawn, tipping his Palm Beach hat to people who still called him Mr. Governor.

PART V

“Punk”

Zebulon, November 17

One nippy, leaf-splattered Saturday in November—a week or so after a Chattanooga dentist upset a Memphis quick-food genius for Tennessee’s available Senate seat—three bulging station wagons set out like Conestoga wagons in the general direction of Zebulon, Kentucky.

The people driving the individual cars were myself, my father, and Moses Reed. I was embarking on a three month L.O.A. to shore up my domestic life, and to finish the Berryman book.

The place Nan and I rented was a big, crumbling, Victorian-style farmhouse. It had its own private catfish pond, a possum hollow, and three kinds of cornfields. The owners were wintering in St. Petersburg, and the furnished, seven-bedroom house was costing us the princely sum of $105 a month to rent.

It was located exactly six miles from where I was born, and where my parents still live.

The family moved into three of the bedrooms (three of the four rooms facing down over an apple orchard and the catfish pond), and I set up two of the other rooms for my book work.

At this point I’d collected one hundred and twenty interview tapes. I had hundreds of photographs showing the story’s important people as well as its key locations. There were also over a thousand pages of mimeographed notes and transcriptions from the
Citizen-Reporter.

That winter we all took up serious ice skating and ice fishing.

I mounted a 1952 Chevy on blocks and we learned about V-8 car engines inside the barn.

Cat and Janie Bug went off to school with “a lot of creeps and hillbillies” who had become “all our friends we can’t leave” by the following spring.

In general, working began to take its place in the grand scheme of eating, playing, loving, carpentering, catfishing, and card-playing at the V.F.W.

I felt I was in the right frame of mind to sit back and write something for people to read. I felt my location in Poland County gave me some pretty good perspective.

Now here’s exactly what happened that first week in July.

Philadelphia, July 3

It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and as usual, Joe Cubbah was sweating like a pitcher of ice water.

Cubbah was wearing a gray sweatshirt cut off at the shoulders, and a gray fedora with what looked like a bite out of its crown.

He went into Tiny’s Under the Bridge with grease all over his hands—he’d just changed the plugs and points on his Buick Electra—and he laid one hand on the shiny white rump of a twenty-year-old waitress named Josephine Cichoski.

The blond wheeled around, but when she saw it was Cubbah she only winced. She had sooty black eyelashes and thick red angel wings for a mouth.

“Your mother around?” Cubbah grinned at her. His dimples were showing and he looked kind of friendly.

“You know where.” The girl pointed toward the swinging doors to the kitchen. Her big white teeth had lipstick on them.

“Hey, look who it is.” Tiny Lemans blinked awake at the sound of swinging doors.

“Hey yourself,” Cubbah smiled.

“Restin’ my eyes here, Joey.” Tiny yawned so that his mouth got big enough to fit in a grapefruit. “You’re some piece of work.” His eyes focused on Cubbah’s sweatshirt and torn hat.

“I had to fix the Buick today,” Cubbah said. “What’s your excuse?”

Just then the waitress hit Cubbah in the ass with the swinging doors. Her pie-face appeared in the galley-hole, and she was sticking out her tongue.

Cubbah walked away from the door. “What’s she got, a bug up her ass?”

“Fuck her,” Tiny Lemans said. Fingers that were three-link sausages each tried to tie black soldier-style boots. Tiny was well over three hundred pounds.

Cubbah dipped his greasy finger in a pot of cake icing. “Goin on a trip tonight.” He tasted the icing. “Oooo la, la, Tiny.” He smiled at the sweetness of the icing. “Anyways … I could use a piece. You get hold of one this quick?”

Tiny Lemans pulled out a clattering drawer of silverware.

“Just got in a very nice little .38,” he said. “Oooo la la.” He pulled a waxed-paper package from the back of the drawer. He handed it to Cubbah intact.

“Never been fired,” he said. “Airweight.”

Cubbah took off the waxed paper, then held the small black revolver up to his nose. He smelled cosmo-line oil. The gun was brand new. “Just like you said it, Tiny. Very nice.
Very
nice.”

“Tiny says a grasshopper can pull a fucking plow,” the fat man grinned. “Hitch up that little motherfucker.”

“By the way,” Cubbah set down the .38. “How much is the little motherfucker costing me?”

The restaurateur yawned. “Oooo … fuck me.” His mouth opened wide again. “One hundred fifty,” he said as his mouth closed.

“Too much,” Cubbah said without hesitation. “Shit, I only want to
scare
somebody with this thing. You can have it back if you want.”

“Look, I’m not going to fuck around with you. One thirty-five,” Lemans said.

This time Cubbah took out his billfold.

Tiny waved the money away. “Put it on the Pi-rets for me. Pi-rets 7 to 8 over Yogi Berra. An’ that fuck pitches Seaver you got a job
from me.
You waste Yogi Berra.”

Joe Cubbah put the .38 into a brown lunch bag. He took another lick of icing and grinned.

“OK, I gotta split, Tiny. I really got to get out of state tonight,” he said.

“Stick around a while,” the fat man frowned. “You just got here. Have a fucking tongue sandwich. I just made some out-of-this-fucking-world tongue.”

“I really have to split,” Joe Cubbah said. “I really got to catch this plane tonight.”

“Yeah, you gotta
scare
somebody,” Tiny Lemans said.

“That’s right.” Cubbah held up the brown paper bag. “Right between the eyes.”

Nashville, July 3

Oona Quinn was traveling south to meet Berryman.

It was a serious time for her; almost a religious time, and she didn’t want it mucked up by the soldier riding beside her.

He was a baby-faced P.F.C. From Fort Campbell, Kentucky, he’d already told her. With Beetle Oil in his hair he’d told her. She’d just watched him chug a Jim Crow and Coca-Cola, and the mash whiskey and caffeine had glazed over his baby-blue mama’s-boy eyes.

The two of them were seated together on an Eastern 707 flight into Nashville.

Oona had a copy of the Jimmie Horn autobiography in her lap, but she hadn’t read a word since the flight started. She’d read the book halfway through the night before on Long Island. A day earlier she’d seen Ben Toy at the William Pound Institute.

Two days earlier, on the first, Berryman had called and told her to meet him in Nashville on the fourth. He’d refused to tell her why, except that he needed her there. He’d given her a place and a time, and he’d told her to dress as if she was the wife of Tennessee Ernie Ford. Then he’d hung up before she said she would or she wouldn’t.

Oona was imagining Horn and Berryman meeting somewhere in the story,
Jiminy.
It would be a good chapter.

It seemed to her that Horn should win out. There had already been two attempts made on his life. A diner chef had shot at him from point-blank range and missed. Another time he’d been beaten lifeless, but had lived.

If Tom Berryman succeeded, it seemed to her, it would have to be totally unfair. Some mysterious bush-whacking. Jimmie Horn would have to end up as a martyr. She found that neither possibility bothered her. Berryman had already convinced her that the Horn shooting was inevitable. In
Jiminy,
Horn seemed to feel the same way.

She thought that she still didn’t know Berryman the way she wanted to. Their relationship was too heady. All his relationships were. Maybe that was what was drawing her to him, though?

The soldier put his empty cup on her tray. “Were you all vis’tin’ in New York, honey? Or are you vis’tin’ in Music City? Or goin’ on to Dallas maybe?”