The Thomas Berryman Number (26 page)

J
: Berryman’s still stuck?

C
: Of course. He’s finally out in an aisle though. Right up alongside this cyclone fence. Like leaving the drive-in. I go up to the car and bang on the window.

J
: Does he know you?

C
: No. He looks out to see who it is. Opens the window about an inch for me. “Put your window down,” I yell over the rain. It’s pounding like hell on the umbrella. Teeming. You can’t see shit it’s so gray. “Hey, you know it’s pouring rain?” he yells. Something like that. His girlfriend’s as cool as ice, though. She’s beginning to worry me. “You know your brake lights aren’t working,” I say. He smiles very polite at this point. He’s really smooth as silk, I can tell. So when be opens the door about three feet I immediately hit him in the heart. “Hey man,” he says. He’s dead before I pull the knife. The girl is yelling, but mostly drowned out by rain on the roof and maybe a little thunder. I slapped her right in the face. “You don’t want to wind up in the joint,” I tell her—
jail,
I think I said. “You get him the fuck out of here.” The girl just about stops crying. She gets something like the hiccoughs.

J
: You’re talking about… like, hi-
cup?
…

C
: Yeah. Right.

J
: What happened then?

C
: That’s the most beautiful part of it. Nothing happened. I waited for the lot to clear out a little. Stood around thinking about his girlfriend. How she’s going to handle it. How I’m going to handle the ten grand. That’s what you always think about. Every time. They should give me a medal, no?…

January of the Following Year

Early in January, sitting upright in a canvas beach chair at the Royal Biscayne Hotel in Key Biscayne, a copy of
National Geographic
in his lap, Johnboy Terrell felt a brief, sharp pain at the center of his chest. His head dropped sharply and his wife said something. He thought he was throwing up his breakfast until he saw blood all over his lap. He died right there in the beach chair, his jury trial not having reached the courts yet.

And then late on another day in January, a cold, dark one, Thomas Berryman’s body was uncovered by three schoolboys and a girl. They were sleighing in a cow pasture behind a Quality Court motel in Asheville, North Carolina. The body had been covered over by a mound of hay.

There were no clothes on the body, but it had been wrapped in two woman’s dresses. The stomach and feet were exposed, and they were crusted with black blood.

The boys ran to the nearest house. They told a housewife that a skinny old man was dead in Skinner’s Field. They skipped the part about the woman’s dresses.

Two deliverymen in the neighborhood went with them to look at the body. They too thought it was an old man. The housewife they told came with a pocket camera and took a picture.

A deputy sheriff found men’s clothes and various forged identifications nearby.

Ochs Jones

Zebulon, Kentucky