The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

  Berryman finally parked on a hill overlooking Bert Poole’s building. Now for the proof of the pudding.

  As he came down the hill, Thomas Berryman smelled fish frying. Once again he noticed the black Marlboro cowboy.

  He buttoned his green shirt and tightened the green and red Christmas tie. He waited until he got to the pink house itself before he slipped into the green Bond’s suitjacket.

  Dressed the way he was, Thomas Berryman looked like a character out of James T. Cain.

  Bert Poole answered the door wearing only blue-jeans and green wool socks.

  He didn’t have a chest or stomach, just a straight plumb-line drop from his chin to his toes. His belly button was protruding like a small wart.

  Loud music was coming from inside the apartment.

  “I’m Marion Walker,” Berryman said. “Sorry to have to bother you on a holiday. I’m with the Cain-Sloan Department Stores.”

  He handed Poole one of the business cards he’d been collecting around Nashville. It said Marion A. Walker, Cain-Sloan Co.

  Bert Poole looked troubled and confused at first, then he started to smile.

  “Damn,” he spoke in a soft, polite hippie’s voice, “they don’t even let you guys rest on a holiday, do they?”

  Berryman shook his head. “No sir, they don’t. They been tryin to reach you all over the place I guess. People at home more on the holidays. That’s how the F.B.I. catches deserters, I heard.”

  Poole started to look past Berryman into the street. Three little black kids passed the house on Easy Rider bikes. “Well, you got me,” Poole said. “I guess you want your record player and your chair?”

  “Don’t know anything about a record player,” Berryman said–he’d only seen a bill for a chair when he’d visited the apartment. “I’m afraid you do owe us on a Naugahyde recliner though. Brown Naugahyde. You never did make a payment on that one.”

  Bert Poole started to laugh. He crouched forward holding his bare arms, rubbing them up and down. “You’re taking that chair right now?” he managed.

  Berryman scratched at the front of his short haircut. He shook his head.

  “I don’t personally pick up any furniture,” he said. “Our men would like to pick it up today though.”

  Bert Poole suddenly turned serious again. “Today’s out,” he said.

  Berryman squinted distrustfully. “What’s the matter with today? You’re here, aren’t you?”

  “I work for Mayor Horn,” Poole quickly said. “I can give you the chair right now. Either that, or you have to wait … I’m working with Mayor Horn from one-thirty until I don’t know what time today. That’s how come I’ve been too busy to pay. I really have the money.” Poole started to come apart before Berryman’s eyes.

  Berryman started scratching his head again. The one thing he didn’t want to do was spook the young hippie. He smiled.

  “Well, just fuck’m,” he said to Poole. “They can wait ‘til tomorrow for their chair. Fuck’m …” Berryman shook his head as though he was embarrassed. “I’m just sorry to have to bother you like this … on a holiday.”

  “Well, I’m sorry you had … I’m sorry I made you come out here,” Bert Poole’s soft hippie voice returned. He was smiling now too. “It’s your holiday, too, isn’t it? Don’t forget about that.”

  The two men shook hands on the porch and Berryman noticed the time. It was 11:45. Poole was going to be out of the house by one-thirty. It was getting very, very close, Berryman thought. It was all going to fall into place just about right.

  Horn’s staff was trying to be careful. Conscientious and smart.

  Right after his speech, they hustled the popular mayor out of Dudley Stadium like an unpopular Saturday afternoon football referee. A gray limousine was waiting, and the air conditioner had it ice cold. Big sweaty men pressed inside the car like sides of beef. Eight of them.

  The mayor’s speech had gone extremely well; Santo Massimino had delivered on nearly all of his arrogance; but you wouldn’t have guessed it from the conversation.

  Horn had been pushed in back between his advanceman Potty Lynch, an alderman, and a black secret service man named Ozzie. The mayor was squirming.

  “What is … uh … going on here?” he kept projecting his soft voice into the front. He was clearly agitated by the unexpected state troopers at Dudley Field. Also by the state Cadillac. And by Ozzie. “Where’s the parade convertible?” he asked, “and what is going on?”

  The chauffeur carefully guided the big car through the quiet stadium back lots. The limousine passed through rows of orange school buses. Through spotless alleyways. Under brick arches and hanging vines. The car glittered everywhere.

  “No more convertibles.” Jap Quarry smiled at his friend’s question. “Parade’s over, baby.”

  “They don’t make convertibles in Detroit anymore,” the alderman said.

  Santo Massimino, New Yorker masquerading as Californian, was studying the windshield like it was an important map.

  At that point, the chauffeur took two wheels of the Cadillac bang-thud over a hump of sidewalk.

  Everyone thought gunshot. All eight men were disconnected for a minute.

  When the car wheels were properly on the road again, Horn lit up a cigarette. In between slow puffs he cracked a few jokes about his naiveness. About everyone else’s bad nerves.

  Potty Lynch eventually turned sideways and started to give him his good, blue-eyed donkey advice. Lynch had ridden in cars with the Kennedys, he said.

  “Jimmie, listen to me.” He was Pat O’Brien incarnate. “See, the ball’s in our court. See, we’re experienced in this incredibly miserable shit. We have to watch out for you. Because you won’t be able to watch out for yourself.”

  This Boston posturing only served to set Horn off again. Maybe it was because Lynch’s attitude was so know-it-all.

  “What’s this we?” Jimmie Horn asked in the habitually sweet-sounding voice. “Do you have a frog in your pocket?” he toyed with the veteran. “What’s this we stuff, Jap? You won’t mind telling me?”

  Jap Quarry only laughed. “This man’s trying to be your friend, don’t you see,” he said without turning to the back. “Besides, the whole affair’s going to be too big to start bringing your own personal feelings in. Join the Horn team, man.”

  Horn looked around and deadpanned the secret service man. “I’m … uh … James Lee Horn,” he said, “and I’m running for United States Senator. I’m awful glad to meet you.”

  The secret serviceman had a surprisingly human laugh. “I’m not a Tennessee resident,” he cracked.

  Santo Massimino finally turned around. He lowered tinted sunglasses onto a large, pocked nose. “Very, very nice speech back there,” he grinned. “You’re very good.”

  Horn smiled softly. He patted his haircut.

  As the limousine waited quietly under a red light at West End Avenue, a motorcycle escort swept up on both sides. The cycles stopped extremely close, idling within an arm’s length of the car.

  Silent three ring and lead on, Lochinvar signs were exchanged back and forth through the windows. Sirens wailed, then wailed again at a higher pitch. The small motorcade ran all the other traffic lights to midtown and Roger Miller.

  As they reached Tenth Street a green and white Country Squire shot up alongside of them. Jimmie Horn looked out, frowned, then smiled into the lens of a hand-held Arriflex movie camera.

  Noon. The air-raid siren had begun to blend into each Nashville afternoon. Oona Quinn walked down a quiet shady street outside of Dudley Field. Her mind was a blank. Seeing Horn in the flesh, watching him deliver his speech inside the stadium had panicked her. She wanted to talk to Berryman, but she didn’t know where to find him until 3:15.

  Less than a mile away, Thomas Berryman was standing in an open field with his arms outstretched. Listening to the grass grow.

  He was thinking that it was the experience of peyote that had taught him to relax, and conversely had proba
bly started Ben Toy on his road to going crazy. He was remembering different things about Toy as he watched a coven of Catholic nuns and some school-age lovers counting the front steps of Centennial Park’s ludicrous Parthenon.

  Berryman’s eyes parted company with the dull sheep, and traveled with the dark ladies.

  They walked the great stone walls to an edge, then stood still, as though they’d come to the very end of a gangplank. They seemed to be praying for the world’s leapers. Praying for them, or trying to understand them.

  Berryman had taken a light downer, and he was calm enough to feel a falling body float, even swim. Talking to himself he said: I’ll walk around here until two. I’ll get a sandwich. Black coffee. Then I’ll split. Basically, he was on autopilot now.

  He was carrying a transistor radio and he begrudgingly tuned in a bulletin about the parade and rally at the football stadium. It was reported that Horn and his family had already been taken downtown. It was speculated that extra security precautions were being taken around Horn.

  Berryman switched on music and walked around kicking kickweed, blowing blo-balls, talking to the different people who pleased his sense of composition in the park. This relaxing was a ritual with him. It was necessary.

  When he left the park he was as cool as he could have hoped to be.

  Oona Quinn, meanwhile, was hiring a city cab to take her out to the junction of Kingsbridge Highway and Fullerton Avenue. That was where the Farmer’s Market was; it was where Jimmie Horn was going to make his next public appearance; and it was where Berryman had asked her to meet him.

  From 2:10 on she sat in the Lums restaurant at the Market Plaza. She was wearing a J.C. Penney pantsuit that blended very nicely into the crowd. Then, at 2:30, Oona Quinn decided to telephone her father.

  Random Observation (Jap Quarry’s):

  “I think one of the evil things you’ll find on television,” Quarry said to me one slow afternoon after the shooting, “is this practice of showing news films of the so-called violent events. They’re like circuses on television. Like some novel form of entertainment.

  “These films don’t recreate the way it feels. They create false feelings.

  “The news clips of Jimmie’s shooting, for example. They didn’t recreate any truth for me. There was nothing, let’s-all-sit-back-and-be-objective about the actual scene. In reality it was a fucking disgrace.

  “On the other hand, I can remember the way TV portrayed the death of Lyndon Johnson.

  “That was sad. That had dignity. It gave you a feeling for what had occurred. For the way his people may have felt.

  “Maybe it’s because I have a touchstone in my experience for deaths in the family, but not for wholesale shootouts.

  “Maybe these TV shootouts will begin to pass for touchstones. That’s what I’m afraid of sometimes.”

  The rally at the Fair Farmer’s Market was calculated to cookie-cutter black voters out of the large, doughy black bread of Tennessee. It was a carbon copy of rallies Santo Massimino had held in municipal parking lots in Newark, and in trucking yards in Roxbury, Mass.

  By two-thirty, adventuresome families had lined up across the Better Crust bakery and the jewelry and dime store rooftops. Little flying dresses were playing tag on one roof. What good was it to come, they seemed to have all decided, and not see Jimmie Horn in Technicolor.

  Rows (there were actually small lines) of school-age boys boosted one another up on greasy tractor trailers, and even onto the buckling Dr Pepper and Wrigley’s advertising billboards.

  It was hectic and exciting, but also pretty in a democratic way.

  The market lies five hundred feet beneath Snake Hill, and from the hill’s crest it’s said by local people to look like a county fair on fire.

  Coming down off the hill, pushing his way through waist-high grass, stumbling on hidden rocks–kicking them with his boot heel–Bert Poole had the strange feeling that he was walking in a foreign country. Someplace like Jamaica or Brazil.

  Poole’s attention kept drifting away from the podium.

  He looked down on families of ten and twelve people–sharecropper antiques–shuffling across a nearby farmer’s field. Some of the children trampled tomatoes. Danced on them. Threw them back and forth like sponge balls.

  Poole looked back to the dais. It was up on a level with the Commercial Southern bank roof, and up over the people standing on the bank roof was the white eye of the hottest sun of the summer.

  A small man with a plump, pink head stood at the podium microphone with his thumbs in his belt like a baseball manager.

  “Mrs. Betty Lou Rice is eighty-two years young,” he announced over the happy background of carnival noise. “This week. This week of July fourth. She has walked. She has walked over one hundred miles. To come and see her young prince. That is Jimmie Horn.”

  Applause. Applause. Right-ons.

  “As a younger woman, Mrs. Rice just told me, she did the same thing … To meet Mister Huey Long of Louisiana.”

  Boos. Louder applause.

  White-shirted managers of the Plaza stores were lined up to give the old black woman gifts like a pair of black-tie grandmother shoes. She didn’t look as if she knew exactly where she was, but wherever it was, it was swell, and worth a big grin. “Jim-mah Hone” was the only thing she ever said.

  The four Cadillacs seemed to float into the sea of hands. The sun made stars and circles off the chrome, and the steel guard tires made a sound like a sticky tape being pulled up off linoleum.

  Young Massimino and Potty Lynch trooped man-of-the-people style in front of Horn’s car. They waved and smiled as though everyone in town knew them.

  Joe Cubbah was last in one line of three husky troopers flanking the limousines. He searched the crowd for Berryman, holding the limousine door handle so he wouldn’t lose track of the car.

  Ten-year-old Keesha, and teenager Mark Horn, were laughing and dangling out the windows of the car ahead of their parents. The lead car carried Horn’s own mother and father.

  Smiling black faces and arms were disappearing inside the rear windows, ready to shake hands with any of them, knowing that if they succeeded, they would later claim it had been Jimmie.

  Naturally enough, Jimmie Horn was happiest and at his best among predominantly black crowds. He felt he could loosen up and show more of himself–be a person instead of a phenomenon.

  Black people, especially country folks, liked to touch Horn to make sure he was real.

  They wanted him to touch them too, especially their children, and tell them they were going to be doctors or lawyers or teachers. Sometimes when Horn bent and spoke to a child specially dressed to meet him, the child’s mother or grandmother would start to cry.

  But it was too noisy for Horn to be heard that afternoon in the Farmer’s Market. Smiling black faces mouthed complicated-looking sentences at him, but he just shook their hands and held their hands, and ran his big hands through the fluffy hair of their children.

  When he let go of one smiling, hollering boy he found the boy had left him a photograph.

  It was of a black family of eighteen or twenty members all dressed in suits and organdy dresses and men’s and women’s felt hats. They were all posed with a cantankerous-looking Marblehead Horn, standing in front of the old man’s run-down grocery.

  The back was carefully signed by each family member and then by Jimmie Horn’s own father.

  Bert Poole accepted a peppermint-striped straw hat from one of the Schoolgirls for Jimmie, and he put it on as he continued to walk sideways through the crowd.

  He stopped in front of two young white boys. Each was wearing a battered George Wallace hat. From the looks of their faces, neither had a measurable I.Q.

  “Trade you this new hat,” Poole smiled. “For one of those old ones. Just one. You keep the other.”

  The boys looked at one another and started laughing.

  “Nuh,” the taller one finally answered. “We ain’t jig lovers.”


  Bert Poole smiled again. “Ri-ight. ’Course not,” he said. “I’ll give you some money for the hat,”

  Once again the boys looked at one another. As if there was only one brain for the two of them. “How much is some?”

  Poole took off the Horn hat and put a dime store wallet inside it. “Take what you think’s fair,” he told the taller boy. “Don’t take any more than that.”

  Each boy took two dollars and they ran like hell.

  Nearly all the shops along the Plaza were closed and dark, and women were using the blackened windows as mirrors.

  Even the airfield hangar of a supermarket–OPEN 24 HOURS, 365 DAYS OF EVERY YEAR–was cleared of all but a few deadfaced shoppers.

  A lighter flared in one of the grayish windows. Not the usual gold Carrier, a Gillette Cricket.

  Thomas Berryman drew on a cigarillo as he looked on through red FARMER DRUGS lettering.

  Berryman was playing a mind-game with himself: he was thinking about all of the jobs he’d completed successfully. He was figuring out exactly how they compared with this one; degree of difficulty they called it in those high-diving contests. The thing he didn’t trust about this plan was that it was so spectacularly different from all the others. Either it was brilliant, or it was foolish; and even though he was ninety-nine percent sure it was the former, he could have done without the latter 1%.

  Then the idea of dying, actually dying, powered through his mind. The idea used so much energy that his mind shut off and went blank for a moment.

  He focused on the neon FARMER DRUGS lettering. He wondered if Oona had shown up. That would make it easier. A man and his wife wouldn’t be stopped after the shooting. All the better if she was crying.

  The red neon and the weak light behind the prescriptions window were the only ones left on in the store. “Closin’ up,” the druggist called from the rear of the store. “Closin’ for the speeches. Open up at four.”

  Berryman cradled the magnum revolver in a blue windbreaker over his arm. The rest of his outfit was the pea-green shirt and tie, and the green suit pants. He was silent and pensive. A little nervous now.