The Heavenly Table (45 page)

Pollard wiped his hands on a wet rag and made the boy’s change. He stared at his tan duster, the purple shirt, the striped pants, the hat cocked back at a jaunty angle. If he didn’t already have one chained up in the back, he’d love to work on this little bastard stinking of shaving lotion and store soap. Another goddamn ladies’ man. Images of the shopgirl laughing at him flickered in his head like a picture show, and it suddenly occurred to him that there was no reason he couldn’t do two at the same time. Let this one watch while he made the other skirt-sniffer small enough to fit into a bucket. Who knew? It might be nice to have an audience.

“Looks like things is kinda slow,” Chimney said.

Pollard ignored the remark and looked out the window. “That Ford out there, does that belong to you?” he asked Chimney.

“Yeah, it’s mine.”

“How much it cost ye?”

“I forget.”

“Well, you better keep an eye on it,” Pollard said. “Lot of thieves around here since they opened that goddamn army base.”

“He be a sorry sonofabitch whoever tries to steal from me.”

“Is that right?” the bartender said, suddenly lighting up. “You talk mighty big for someone your size.”

“I ain’t afraid to fight, if that’s what you mean,” Chimney said.

“Well, then, tell me what you’d do to them.”

Glancing up from his whiskey, Chimney took note of the hateful glare in the barkeep’s eyes. Tardweller had looked much the same that day he held him by the shirt collar and booted his ass in front of those women like someone would do to a little kid. As Chimney remembered the greatest embarrassment of his life, his heart started beating faster, his hands began to sweat. He was right on the verge of telling Pollard to step outside when he thought about Matilda. Within a couple of hours, if everything went as he hoped, he would have her all to himself, and there wasn’t any way he was going to allow this fat bastard to fuck that up. “Ah, just give me another one,” he said, pushing his whiskey glass forward.

“But you ain’t answered me yet,” Pollard said. “What would ye do to him, someone who stole your car? Why, for that matter, what would ye do if I was to reach over and slap that stupid hat off your head? I bet ye wouldn’t do a damn thing, would ye?”

“Like I said, just give me another drink.”

“Two dollars.”

“It was fifty cents ten minutes ago.”

“That was before I knew what you were,” Pollard said.

Chimney stared straight ahead as he reached into his pocket for the money and laid it on the counter. He had been willing to let a little bit slide, but this fat cocksucker was going too far. “There,” he said. “There’s your damn two dollars.” The lamp flared for a second, then dimmed again. He thought again of Tardweller, of how good it had felt to split his head open in the barn that night. Pushing the duster back, he rested his hand on the Smith & Wesson tucked inside his belt. “So you think you know what I am, huh?” he suddenly said, just as Pollard started to pour the whiskey.

“Sure, I do,” Pollard replied, a maniacal grin spreading across his face. “I know what all ye pussies are like.” The hell with it, he thought. Why worry about waiting on the right time for this puny piece of shit. He’d lay him over his knee and break his spine first, then roll him like a wagon wheel to the back room. Tossing the drink to the floor, he walked quickly around the bar to the front door, slid the lock bolt in with a loud bang. “You’re fucked now, boy.”

“One of us is, that’s for sure,” Chimney said, watching in the splotchy mirror as the barkeep started to come toward him with his fist raised and his teeth shining yellow in the lamplight. Then he pulled the hammer back on the gun and spun around on the bar stool.

“Why, you little turd, I’ll stick that goddamn thing up—”

Two orange blasts exploded in the low-ceilinged room, the first bullet making a deep, puckered crevasse in Pollard’s forehead, two inches or so above the bridge of his wide nose, and the second breaking his collarbone. His mouth gaped open and a shocked expression crossed over his greasy, unshaven face. He tottered back, the sound of his heavy shoes clomping on the floor; and then, as if in slow motion, the top half of his body crashed through the front window and he landed on his back on the wooden walkway outside. Before the gunshots had even stopped reverberating in his ears, Chimney had dashed around the end of the bar for the wooden cash box. He stuffed the few dollars into his pants pocket, grabbed two nearly full bottles of whiskey, a Golden Wedding and a Sunny Brook. Unbolting the door, he stepped outside and looked down at Pollard, blood dripping out of his ears, his eyes staring blankly at the darkening sky above him. “Goddamn you,” Chimney said angrily, kicking him with his boot. “Why couldn’t ye just leave it alone?” Then he stepped off the porch and tossed the pistol and the liquor onto the seat beside Matilda’s roses.

He was still trying to get the Ford started when he heard the sharp clacking of horse’s hooves on the brick cobblestones. Looking back, he saw a group of soldiers racing toward him, their service revolvers drawn and a big man with a black mustache leading the charge. In the three days he’d owned the car, the engine had failed to ignite several times, and the only thing he knew to do whenever that happened was to start the whole process over again. But that took at least a couple of minutes, and the men weren’t more than half a block away. “Goddamn piece of junk,” he said, throwing the crank down. He sat down in the front seat just as the clatter of the horses’ hooves stopped, and all he could hear was the sound of their panting, a saddle creaking. He uncapped the fifth of Golden Wedding, and then, as the soldiers lined up behind him, he took a pull and reached over for the pistol. This probably was going to be the most important night of his life after all, he thought, just not in the way he had planned on.

He heard one of the soldiers say, “Put your hands up where we can see ’em.” He looked toward the bridge, remembering a cocksure lawman using the same line on Bloody Bill when he thought he and his posse had him cornered in a corncrib. He smiled to himself. The sonofabitch had emerged from that mess without a scratch after killing every one of them. But he wasn’t Bloody Bill, and this wasn’t some fucking book. He went over his options in his head, either get shot now or hang later; and found both of them to be lacking in any sort of hope. He wondered what Cane would do if he were here. He’d play it smart, probably surrender, and then try to figure out a way to escape later on. Taking another quick slug from the bottle, he heard the soldier repeat the order. His skin tingled, and his hands began to tremble. He glanced down at the flowers. Well, at least he had known a woman first. But, damn, he wished…He wished more than anything that he could have found out what Matilda’s answer might have been. It would have been nice, knowing some pretty girl wanted to be with him, was willing to travel clear to some other country by his side. “This is your last warning,” the man called out.

68

T
HIRTY MINUTES LATER,
after the Lewis Family finished their encore and took their final bow, Cane and Cob exited the Majestic just in time to see throngs of people heading down Second Street toward the center of town as if in a hurry. Falling in behind them, Cob started talking about Mr. Bentley, about how he wished he could buy him and set him free in an apple orchard somewhere. “Or maybe we could take him to Canada with us,” he said, looking over to see how his brother reacted.

“Ah, I don’t think he’d like—” Cane started to say as they got to the corner, but then he stopped in mid-sentence. Coming down the street was the group of soldiers they’d seen earlier, only now two of them were pulling with their horses a car that looked exactly like the one Chimney had bought. “Clear the way,” the stout man who’d been giving orders earlier called out as citizens jammed around the auto. “Get back, I said! Get back!”

“Stay here and don’t move,” Cane told Cob. He pushed his way through the swarm until he was within five or six feet of the car, and that’s when he saw Chimney, bound in manacles and sitting with a stony look on his face beside a soldier manning the steering wheel. In the backseat lay another man partly dressed in a bloody uniform, obviously badly hurt. Jesus Christ, two hours ago everything was fine. A sick feeling swept over Cane, and his ears buzzed with all the voices going on around him.

“What the hell happened?”

“Goddamn it, people, clear the way!”

“They say that skinny boy shot Pollard that owns the Blind Owl, but the soldiers caught him ’fore he could get away.”

“Back off!”

“Someone said he’s one of them Jewetts they been hunting.”

“No way.”

“Hey, quit your shoving, goddamn it.”

“What about the one in the uniform? Did the boy mess him up like that?”

“No, it was Pollard did it. Had him chained up in his back room cuttin’ on him.”

“I told my wife just the other day that damn army camp was going to lead to trouble.”

“Jimmy Beulah said the same thing.”

“Aw, shit, Fuller, you don’t want to listen to anything that ol’ coot says. He put some boy’s eye out the other night at the Big Penny.”

“Look there. Is his fingers cut off?”

“Just on the one hand it looks like.”

“They say Triplett sold him that car.”

“Well, that explains why they’re pulling it then.”

“Be just like Trip to sell a car to a bandit.”

“Here comes Chief Wallingford. You wait and see, he’ll try to take credit for the whole shebang.”

“Jack Meadows said he’s got a new lady friend over in Fayette County.”

“Shit, she can’t be much of a lady if she’s hangin’ around with ol’ Pus Gut.”

“Wonder where the other ones are?”

“Who you talkin’ about?”

“The other Jewetts. There’s supposed to be three of ’em, ain’t they?”

Cane swallowed some bile and hurried back through the crowd to where Cob stood eating from a bag of peanuts he’s picked up on the way out of the lobby. “Come on,” he said in a low voice, “we got to get out of here.”

“But what about Mr. Bentley? Think we could—”

“We’ll talk about that later,” Cane said, grabbing Cob by the sleeve. “Come on, I need you to hurry.”

“Don’t go too fast,” Cob complained after only a few yards. “My leg’s hurtin’ me.”

“All right,” Cane said, “all right.” He slowed down and glanced behind them, tried to steady himself with a deep breath. “Just do the best ye can.”

“What’s going on back there anyway?”

“I’ll tell ye later,” Cane said. “Right now we got to get back to the hotel.”

69

S
UGAR HAD BEEN
following the two brothers the entire time, and once they entered the McCarthy, he ran the three blocks back uptown to find the police chief. Although Malone and his patrol had passed on through with Chimney and Bovard on their way to the army camp, the crowd of onlookers continued to swell. Wallingford, irate that the sergeant had acted so uppity when he asked him what had taken place, was headed back to the jail with his other son, Luther, to call the general’s headquarters and make a complaint. He’d already sent Lester over to secure the Blind Owl before it was looted, and Pollard’s carcass before some sicko got hold of it. When he heard footsteps running up behind him, he flinched and closed his eyes. Jesus Lord, was this the end? It was one of the downfalls of being a lawman for so many years: having a great number of enemies. You never knew when someone might get the notion to do violence to you, just for trying to maintain a little bit of order in this world of chaos. Sure, nine times out of ten the assassin might only be planning to throw a pie in your face, or call you a dirty name or two, but then again, he might gun you down in cold blood, like what had happened to his friend sheriff Buddy Thompson, over in Athens County a couple of summers ago. Blasted clear out of his chair on a Sunday while reading the funny papers, by the family of a man he’d arrested for running a white slavery ring that catered to clients looking for Appalachian females endowed with the stamina of an ox and the woodsy know-how of a Davy Crockett. It was a lot of pressure, living on edge like that day after day, and that’s why, he figured, he ended up doing reckless shit like taking on mistresses he couldn’t afford. “Hey, Chief,” he heard someone say in a ragged pant. “Hey, Mister Police.”

When Wallingford opened his eyes, he saw before him the filthy black man Lester had arrested for cleaning out Pollard’s outhouse. “Jesus Christ, you again? Boy, you nearly give me a heart attack.”

“I saw ’em,” Sugar panted.

“Who?” Wallingford said.

“Them men on the paper hanging in your jail.”

“What the hell you talkin’ about?”

“The wanted poster,” Sugar said, sucking in another draft of air. “With the three men on it.”

“You mean the Jewetts?” Luther said.

“That’s them. I seen ’em just a couple of minutes ago. Well, two of ’em anyway. Them soldiers done caught the one.”

“Soldiers?” Wallingford said. “You mean the boy they nabbed at the bar for killing Pollard? He’s a Jewett?”

Sugar nodded his head rapidly. “Yes, sir. Sure as hell is.”

“And you know this for a fact?”

“I swear on my mother’s grave,” Sugar said.

“That reward’s over five thousand dollars, Daddy,” Luther said.

“Well, I’ll be goddamned. So that’s why that mustachioed bastard was so tight-lipped.” Five thousand dollars, Wallingford thought. He could solve all of his problems with that kind of money. Not only could he get out from under the bitch in Washington Court House, he could retire and never have to worry again about being assassinated. He’d swear off strange pussy and renew his marriage vows, maybe even—

“We gotta hurry ’fore they get away,” Sugar said urgently. “They’re not gonna stick around now.”

“Where did you see ’em last?” Wallingford said.

Sugar hesitated. “No, no, I can’t be playin’ it that way. You’d end up with the reward all to your own self.”

“Well, maybe we better talk about that then. How much are ye willing to settle for?”

“All of it.”

Wallingford laughed. “Bullshit. We’re the ones takin’ all the risk. Either cough up a figure that makes sense, or get your ass out of here.”