The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

  He finally flipped the cigar behind the greeting cards rack. Stepped on it. Tightened the garrison belt inside his shirt.

  The druggist coughed and Berryman ignored him. Then he stepped out of the cool store and started pushing through the good-natured crowd like somebody important.

  Joe Cubbah had gotten a tremendous headache. Moreover, he had the runs.

  The sun was white hot, but he had his sunglasses off. He had to make facial distinctions, and he couldn’t do that, or judge depth, through the dark glasses.

  The sun was directly in his eyes and pain grew from the bridge of his nose like a small, spreading tree.

  He thought he’d found Berryman. But Berryman was walking with his back to the sun. He was extremely hard to look at.

  He was pushing his way up through the crowd–being very unsubtle–and Cubbah didn’t get it. He could see the blue windbreaker and thought it concealed a gun. He’d snapped the button on his own holster, Weesner’s; he had his hand on the unfamiliar service revolver. He thought he might shit in his pants.

  Berryman was saying something. Saying something, then smiling. People were clearing out of the way for him. He was only about ten rows away, and if it hadn’t been so noisy, Cubbah would have been able to hear whatever he was saying to get through.

  He slipped the service revolver nearly all the way out.

  He was sweating like he was being cooked, trying to keep track of both Horn and Berryman, trying to control his bowels, squinting very badly, when Berryman stepped all the way into the sun.

  The pudgy master of ceremonies laughed and clapped his hands like a seal. “Whutat under yay?” he called down from the podium.

  Horn couldn’t hear or understand. He smiled. Looked elsewhere.

  Black people were drinking lemonade. Grinning as though someone was taking wedding pictures. They slouched on one foot. Squinted under the sun. Wiped their foreheads with their sleeves and brown paper bags.

  The noise made it easy for Horn to retire inside himself. Relax for a minute before his speech. It was a long field of striped cotton. Four o’clock of a day that had begun in the dark. There was a party for some undiscoverable reason. Everybody was forgetting everything. His grandmother, however, was out walking in the bright sun. She avoided shadows like a fly.

  A college boy pumped his hand with embarrassing enthusiasm. These younger men in the crowd, Horn was sure, had dreams of going up on fancy platforms like the one before him. He’d had those dreams at times. Dreams of having his important (at least sensible) words amplified a half a mile. Of getting the attention, eyes, of five thousand faces. Of wearing suits that made you look as good as you knew you could.

  The m.c. tapped his thumb against the microphone. It coughed. “… eesha? …” he called off the mike.

  Keesha? His little girl?

  Horn smiled again. Waved to Charles Evers while his eyes were up on the platform. Evers smiled. He couldn’t hear, either. Slouched over a card-table chair, he looked like he was waiting for a train.

  Jap Quarry shouted down from the stage. Encouragement. Baseball catcher rah, rah.

  Horn’s fingers were following a prickly restraining rope leading to the stairs of the platform. He was smiling at the faintly familiar receiving line. His wife pinched his elbow. Someone did.

  Applause rose as he got closer to the stairs.

  Then it fell. Sank. Faces and clothes flashed by him like laundry in a washer. Lights winked, one of them the sun.

  Two strings of gunpops seemed to happen in another dimension of sound. There were five more pops, then four more. Then two more. There were flashbulbs that sounded like more shots, but looked more frightening than the actual shooting.

  The master of ceremonies stood still, his mouth was gaping. He thought he was shot himself. His picture was taken.

  Many people thought they’d been shot. Several had been.

  Jap Quarry finally took charge of the microphone. He looked down at Horn, never once out at the crowd. The pauses between his sentences were lengthy. “A doctor is up here already.” “The sniper is a white man.” “Please clear back. Please … You get back there, mister.”

  Oona Quinn was up close. She’d seen Berryman.

  “If you don’t give Jimmie air,” Quarry said, “he’ll die right here on us.”

  The great craning of necks was followed by the spectacle of people running around with their arms spread out like wasps. Running, flapping wings.

  Little girls hugged their mothers and were hugged right back. Old people held one another up from falling. Big men sat on the top of tractor trailers and cried on their shoetops.

  One old social worker went onto her black stockings on the platform. She swayed, swayed–reciting “Thou art my good and faithful servant in whom I am well pleased.”

  Oona Quinn watched a man’s bare, hairy leg for several minutes. She knew he was a policeman. Shot in the stomach by another policeman.

  She saw Poole where he’d been shot down. A thin, curly-headed boy with no more nose or right eye. Frozen deranged. A broken straw hat was pulled down over his eyes like a gambler’s visor.

  All along she’d watched Mrs. Horn.

  They pulled her back from him. She had blood on her nose and cheek.

  As she rose, Jimmie Horn slowly came into sight.

  The bones in his forehead had been splintered, piercing out through the skin like miniature broken ribs. There was sweat all over his face, and the sweat beads looked like blisters. He was saying something in a soft voice that seemed unrecognizable to his wife.

  Two pale hospital attendants ran with a feathery litter, then ran with him dead.

  As he’d known he would from the beginning, Thomas Berryman had succeeded.

  PART VII

  The Thomas Berryman Number

  Louisville, December 8

  I’m sitting in the largest farmhouse bedroom, drinking Johnny Walker Scotch. Mostly I’m considering the final interview I had. But I’m also thinking that you never really know who lied to you along the way. Who led you down a wrong road. You just get someplace. This is it.

  Institutional gray buildings had blended into foothills that were just about blue. They were smoke-colored. Negro men ran in a yard that was visible from the neighboring streets. They seemed to be practicing professional football drills. This impression struck me as illogical at first. Then slightly logical as I thought about it. I had come to the federal penitentiary at Louisville.

  I parked the Audi outside the front gates. Across from an apple-red gas station. It was cool. A day for carcoats. It was a Saturday in early December.

  Walking toward the somber gray buildings, I thought about this book as a whole.

  It seemed odd to me that there is no discernible pattern to personality, but that readers come to expect cause and effect. I myself expected cause and effect as a reader.

  Well, I was short on causes–so maybe I had achieved some sort of realism. Or maybe I just hadn’t dug deep enough. I wasn’t really sure.

  I thought about my daughter, Cat, then. At that time, whenever I thought about her and she wasn’t around, I came to a remark she’d made a few weeks earlier. She’d said, “Ochs, when I go to the supermarket now, people shooting guns always comes into my mind.” On Saturdays (Saturday is Nan’s shopping day), Cat had been sleeping late or starting to vacuum or dust if her mother even mentioned going to shop.

  A tall, balding guard at the front gate asked me who I was there to see. He didn’t ask me to “state my business,” or anything like that. He was sipping coffee, very cordial and friendly.

  “My name is Jones,” I said. “I’m here to see Joseph Cubbah. My newspaper has already contacted your warden.”

  (Interview between Ochs Jones and Joseph Cubbah. Taped at the federal penitentiary at Louisville.)

  Jones. Do you mind if I ask questions?

  Cubbah No. No, that’s a good way. Yeah…

  J: I uh… What were your feelings about Bert Poole?
For starters.

  C: Who’s Bert Poole?

  J: I’m sorry… The young hippie boy in Nashville. The boy you…

  C: None. Nothing.

  J: If you could think of anything?…

  C: … He was an asshole. (Laughs) Really.

  (I felt that Cubbah thought I was trying to draw some kind of half-assed parallel here. I abandoned the topic.)

  J: … All right… What about Berryman? Tell me what happened?

  C: In actual fact, he got fucked over. I don’t know, you know…

  J: Not exactly… Any specifics you…

  C: He was double-crossed. See, he was in the crowd there… Hey, why don’t you make sure your tape’s working…

  J: It is. I can see the thing turning… I’ll play it… (Click)…

  C: That’s me, huh?

  J: I’m always surprised at the way my voice sounds… It’s on…

  C: Yeah, well, Berryman was in the parking lot. I was watching him when the other kid…

  J: You’re talking about Bert Poole?

  C: Bert Poole, he opened up right in front of me. Maybe I was a row of people away from him. When it happened, you know, I figured he was working with Berryman. I don’t know what I thought. He never hit Jimmie Horn, though. Didn’t even know how to hold a gun.

  J: What happened to Horn? Do you know?…

  C: Berryman hit him. Shot right through this windbreaker. He had a windbreaker over his arm. Two shots, I figure. Silencer. Pfft. Pfft. .44. Which I don’t understand to this day. Neat trick.

  J: You shot Poole though?…

  C: That was just an accident. Reflexes. See, I already had my hand on the gun. But when I turned around for Berryman, he’s already gone. Back in the crowd. I couldn’t believe it. Like ten seconds of the greatest fucking confusion in my life. Everybody’s screaming. There’s movie cameras all over Horn. He’s shivering. Keeps kicking the back of his heel into the asphalt. Like these little kicks. This is fifteen, twenty seconds. I swear to Christ.

  J: I’ve seen films, Joe…

  C: Yeah.

  J: What did you do then? I’ll try not to interrupt.

  C: Fuck it, that’s OK. After that? Well, I got my bearings first of all. Then, I started to make my way back through the mob. Saw Berryman going into the big market there with this girl. Long-hair girl. Tall one. I walked in behind them, both of them, and he’s filling up a cart. Actually filling up a fucking grocery cart with fucking steaks and Rice Krispies. This girl’s cool. She looks cool, I mean. But I can tell she’s nervous. You can tell. She does these little things like brush her hair back too much. Berryman can tell, too. At least something’s bothering him. He keeps telling her to shut up. He’s so mad he looks like he’s blushing or something. Anyway, they get together all these groceries–two or three bags at least–and then they go outside like it’s home to baby.

  J: They left?

  C: Hell no. Because outside is this huge traffic jam. They have to sit tight in the car. I sit tight myself. Take a dump I’ve been holding in for hours. Try to figure out what I should do… Please… (Sound of lighter snap)… (Splice in tape)… Around four-thirty. Thereabouts. It gets dark and starts to rain like a bitch. The air gets cleaned. I get cooled off. It’s terrific. I hop into the drugstore. Buy a big black umbrella. Stand around outside like Potsy the Cop.

  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