The Thomas Berryman Number Read online

  I obliged him. I went partially, happily berserk at Hojo’s in West Hampton, Long Island.

  I gave out some rebel hoots and howls that had people knocking at me through the motel walls. I crowhopped around the rug on my big bare feet. I kicked the walls like somebody on their way home from Singin’ in the Rain.

  Before I go any farther, though, I should tell you that during the years 1958 to 1962 Terrell was governor of the state; that from about 1958 on, Terrell had just about run Tennessee; and that some people, myself included, thought that he had run it very, very badly.

  What’s more, Terrell certainly had a major grudge to settle with Jimmie Horn.

  That night, my batteries all recharged, I wrote up a long, inspired list of follow-up calls and visits I still had to make in the North. For the very first time, I felt totally comfortable with the story.

  I prepared for a trip out to Berryman’s summer house in a place called Hampton Bays. It was there that I was to make my one big mistake in judgment while recording this story.

  PART III

  The Girl Who Loved Thomas Berryman

  Hampton Bays, July 20

  Thomas Berryman’s house at Hampton Bays was a sprawling, storm-gray sea captain’s house with a long canopied porch and five hundred feet of private beachfront. There were separate garages all over the place. The garages were literally everywhere you looked.

  Inside the ten-bedroom house I found an unexpected surprise: Berryman’s girlfriend, a strange, beautiful lady named Oona Quinn.

  A modern woman I guess you could call her, Oona Quinn was growing up in the manner of young men: she was groping, grappling, scratching for what she considered her rightful place in the world. That’s why Thomas Berryman liked her, I imagine.

  Oona is tall and thin. (5’9”, big bones, 130 pounds.) She has flowing black hair that can come below her waist, but she generally keeps it up in a large bun. She has the classic, stately look of New England, and the best of it. She’ll smoke brown cigarettes, however, letting them hang out of the side of her mouth.

  Unlike Ben Toy, Oona was the kind of person I’d known in my own life. She’d been a clerk in a boutique the spring and winter before she met Berryman. But she was bright with common sense. She was the one, for example, who finally gave me a reasonable explanation why beautiful people are forever hugging. She said it was their way of breaking sexual tensions. I liked that idea.

  Oona Quinn said she was twenty, and that was a startling, but possible, fact.

  I first saw her through a screen door, a black, dirty screen in the kitchen. I had my eyes and nose up against it and the shadowy outline of her hair was wild and bushy. A beautiful witch, I thought. I called inside.

  During our first moments in the doorway–as I explained how I’d come to the house via Ben Toy–I scratched my nose, took a deep breath, scratched my chin, my ear, blinked several times, brushed the shoulder of my jacket, and lit a cigarette.

  “Haven’t you ever seen a woman before?” she asked. I laughed (embarrassing memory) and said, “Uh course.”

  At the outset, Oona was reluctant to talk about anything–even the kind of day it was, or wasn’t, or ought to be. This didn’t surprise me, of course.

  We walked down to the water on a gray picket fence that was laid flat instead of standing up. She carried a little kitchen radio that was playing cabaret songs, and it was almost as if I wasn’t there.

  After we’d tramped a good distance from the house she asked me some questions. “What … exactly what did Ben Toy tell you?” she said.

  I didn’t see a good reason to hold anything back, so I told her most of what I knew. She listened to it all, and then she simply laughed.

  “He’s crazy, you know. Tuned out.”

  “He said you know what happened in Nashville,” I told her.

  “He said?” she stopped walking and turned to me. “Or are you figuring things out by yourself, Mr. Jones?”

  She drifted away without an answer. Over closer to the water so it ran up over her feet. Her toes were long and bony with spots of red polish on the nails. And she was outrageously attractive.

  When we finally reached a point out of sight of the house she plopped down in the sand. “Lili Marlene” came on her radio and she turned it up full.

  “I feel very … like wind and things can pass right through me. It’s very weird talking to you right now. Unreal,” she said with a big sigh.

  I asked her if Berryman was around somewhere and she gave no answer.

  And then for some reason (I wasn’t able to understand it until I’d gathered more information) Oona Quinn began to tell me little things about herself. She spoke cautiously at first. In a cynical, irreverent sort of way. But after a while I started to get the feeling that I was hearing a nervous, maybe even a contrite confession. I also got the feeling that the girl was scared and confused.

  She and I spent nearly three days together in Thomas Berryman’s house, and she spoke more and more freely (I thought) about what had happened between herself and Berryman.

  One time she called him “the master of good vibes.” She said that he had a ten-inch prick, if that question was circulating around my mind. And she also said that I tended to be gloomy.

  All in all it was a crazy environment for me. For one thing, I’d never spent a lot of time with beautiful women before; for another, the only other time I’d been at the seashore was in Biloxi, Mississippi. I also had trouble sleeping. At night, it got cold as Tennessee winter out there.

  During our second day go-round, Oona told me that Bert Poole hadn’t shot Jimmie Horn.

  “Ben Toy told me the same thing,” I said.

  “He doesn’t know.” She disputed that. “He thinks Tom’s going to come take him back to Texas in the Mercedes.”

  The back porch ran along the entire length of the house, and that was where we usually talked. We would sit on wicker porch furniture, facing out at the ocean. Thinking about it now, I can remember her bony, wool-socked toes wiggling in and out of leather clogs. It was her nervous tic, she said.

  More often than not, a khaki-uniformed gardener would be working on the lawns as we taped.

  A rangy, suspicious Jamaican, he thought I was getting into Oona’s pants behind Berryman’s back. He was fiercely loyal to Thomas Berryman, and said it was none of my damn business how come, mon.

  One afternoon I noticed Oona handing the man several twenty-dollar bills. It gave me the uncomfortable feeling that Berryman was somewhere close by, supervising, maybe watching us from the mountainous dunes all around his house.

  For her part, Oona Quinn would shrink up all vulnerable and wallflower-like whenever we talked. She’d sit on her long legs, hugging herself. She’d rock, and the wicker chair and porch would creak in unison.

  She’d be very much in control, even haughty, until I pulled the tape recorder from its leather case. But something about the tape recorder got to her. Something about having her words recorded put a big, hard lump in her throat.

  She was a lively storyteller though; she had a natural sense for ironic detail. I thought, in fact, that she was feeling ironic about herself, and I hoped to use that to get closer to Thomas Berryman.

  Hampton Bays, June 18

  Under a fat red sun, Thomas Berryman straddled the roof of his sea captain’s house and watched down where whitecaps were breaking all over a rough, stony Atlantic Ocean. The high air was clean, thick with salt, blue to look at. It was late June now.

  Working at about fifty percent consciousness, Berryman’s mind kept drifting back to sugary Sunday school scenes from Texas. He wondered what was becoming of himself.

  After a while, his eyes focused on a small piece of tar patchwork he’d completed, and he thought it was good work to patch your own roof. His gardener had refused to do the high roofing job, and now Berryman was pleased.

  He looked over at sand dunes–rising fifty or sixty feet on the other side of the highway–and his eyes followed a white Must
ang tooling along the pigeon-gray road at their base. The Mustang scampered away between the sand hills like a cartoon car. At one time, Berryman remembered, he’d threatened his father with bodily harm over the issue of a Ford Mustang.

  He lit a rare cigarette and let himself float in warm, afternoon sensations. He could see Oona walking down on the beach in a white string suit. Very chic-chic. Now and again his mind drifted to the subject of Jimmie Horn.

  He shimmied over to the dark stone (cool) chimney, and began to install a new screen over its big mouth.

  Because the old penny loafers he was wearing slipped on the roof slates, he had to ride the apex horseback style. The danger of possibly slipping off the three-story roof–missing the sun porch–hitting patio furniture that looked the size of pocket change–was part of the job and part of its pleasure.

  He placed his face inside the musky hole and in the light of a match saw that the chimney screen was clogged closed with soot. With sooty sand. With sooty seagull feathers and a child’s deflated balloon.

  The white Ford sports car passed down on the road again. He flicked his cigarette butt at it, then yanked up the chimney debris with both hands on the inky screen.

  He and Oona ate a good dinner of white spaghetti and red wine. He drew on a stogie joint and passed it to her across their dinner table on the front lawn. They were both dressed rather hautily, in white, and together looked like a page out of a fashion magazine.

  On closer examination, he was wearing red, white, and blue track shoes. Oona was wearing no makeup. She had promised to chase his blues away that night.

  “Oh,” she said before beginning her exorcism, “Ben Toy called.” Her lips were slightly blistered from sunbathing. She drew daintily on the fat joint.

  Tom Berryman held smoke in as he spoke. “While I was on the roof?”

  “Didn’t believe me when I told him … that you were on the roof. Sounded weird.”

  Berryman continued to hold the smoke in.

  “All he said was, something about, he read about the Horns. What good people the Horns are. Who are the Horns?”

  Berryman blew out smoke and talked to himself.

  “… Ben’s flipping out on me.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  Oona passed the cigarette and cocked her head like a pretty bird. “So who are the Horns?”

  “They ‘re nobody,” Berryman said. He took up the joint. His eyes twinkled with dope dust. “Really they’re twins,” he smiled. “We used to go out with them in Amarillo. Patsy and Darlene, High Plains High,” He started to laugh. “Darlene had a pretty little red mustache. Nice personality, too.” He laughed some more. “Great little talker, that girl.”

  Oona got the giggles, and then they both forgot about Ben Toy. He forgot his blues. They indulged in a freak rift that would have put good southern writers to shame. Berryman told a story in which a family’s grandmother dies on a long car trip, and the father puts her in the trunk so that the kids won’t know, and the car gets stolen at Hojo’s with grandma in the trunk. He said it was true.

  Hours later, Oona Quinn sat stoned, looking at his face. Berryman held both her breasts in his hands, feeling them through her blouse, testing their weight.

  A burning oak log gave the bedroom a smell like backwoods. The curtains on the open windows ballooned in the night breeze.

  She stared at cool, splintering blue eyes.

  A thick bushy mustache that wasn’t well groomed.

  A flickering, pearly smile that caused her to smile back.

  She imagined Thomas Berryman as one of Clark Gable’s sons. And she imagined, or remembered, a strange man who kept caged crickets to simulate the backwoods in his bedroom.

  “Bugfucker,” Berryman commented when she told him. She sucked and ate crickets like the French candies with hard shells and gooey centers. She thought there was nothing she wouldn’t like to try.

  “Ever been married?” he asked her in response to that.

  “No. You?”

  “I guess,” Berryman smiled up with his eyes closed. “For about seventeen days in high school. It wasn’t religious or legal bound. Lived in a treehouse if I remember right. Say,” he went on, “you said that Benboy called before? You said that, right? You said that?”

  The bedroom where he and Oona Quinn were lying was the plainest space in the house. It was a wide place with a low, wood-beamed ceiling, a small fieldstone fireplace, and white rows of library shelves stacked with bound-up National Geographies and American Scholars (from a past owner).

  The one small window (it is clouded with salt) looked out on the ocean, while a big bay window faced up the long narrow highway. Berryman said that the house had been spun assbackward in a hurricane and/or it had been built by assholes. Take your pick.

  Oona slipped an expensive peasant’s blouse up over her hair, and her tiny breasts popped out of the folds one at a time. They were white and startling.

  “Do you like my boobs tanned or white?” the twenty-year-old in her asked. She was both self-conscious and serious.

  Thomas Berryman pinched one nipple and held it up near his chin. He examined it like a grocer with an apple by its stem. “Yes,” he said. “Very, very much.”

  He pulled his own shirt over his head. He was lobster pink from the roofing job. “How do you like my little titties?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “You’ll look like a black man in a week or so. Except your nose is so waspy.”

  “I have to kill a blackman.”

  She laughed. “That gardener. Good, he’s a snot.”

  Berryman knelt in the middle of the bed and kissed her, without touching his pink chest against her.

  He told her that ladies in Texas never cursed, and that they always kept scented handkerchiefs in their bosoms, and that they talcumed their rear ends.

  Outside the bay window, far across the highway in the sand dunes, Ben Toy sat in darkness on the hood of the white Mustang. He studied the glowing second floor window. In his mind, he was there to protect Tom-Tom and the Irish girl. In return, they had to protect him.

  A few times out on the dunes Toy heard a black woman’s voice announcing it was James Horn’s mother. One time he heard his father. Ben Toy thought he was having a nervous breakdown, and he was right.

  Oona and Thomas Berryman continued to smoke the night away, and at a time when neither of them could do much more than nod their overblown heads, he started to ramble about a southern blackman he had been paid to kill.

  As he described his plans for the unfortunate man, Oona Quinn threw up on the bed and then conveniently passed out.

  Hampton Bays, June 19

  In the morning, he was wearing a gray PROPERTY OF NEW YORK KNICKS sweatshirt and looking innocent as a new M.D.

  He was ministering to the sick, too. Fluffing feather pillows. Opening old singed shades to bright ocean sunlight.

  He carried Oona a pewter pot of coffee and honey cakes in a different bedroom from the one she’d thrown up in. The two of them didn’t have much to say, and only slowly did she realize he’d moved her, and changed her clothes sometime between night and morning. Put her in black tights.

  “If you don’t want to stay,” he said, “you ought to go pretty soon. I had to find out, you know. You don’t have to be afraid to leave.” He continued to break bags of natural sugar into her coffee. “I’ve never harmed any friend. Not even anyone I liked. Don’t be afraid.”

  She sipped the steamy coffee and watched him over the cup’s rim. Her eyes were slow and sad. Berryman had already figured that if she’d wanted to go, she would have tried to sneak away earlier.

  “Coffee all right?”

  He frowned at the dumbness of his question.

  Oona refused to pout, however, “S’all right,” she said. She was drinking it.

  “Scumbag,” she added after another sip.

  Berryman felt obliged to offer her some explanation. “It just gives me too much freedom to stop now,” he
offered first. “I don’t even think I want to.

  “I remember when I was … some teenage year. Eighteen. Seventeen, nineteen … I drew up this philosophy. Ben and I did … I suppose it was more me than Ben…

  “It was more complicated, but it really boiled down to–fuck it all. Somebody named me the pleasure king. At least I made a choice,” he said.

  “Let me put it another way. Take an average person. Approach him with an offer to do what I do. Bad stuff, right? All kinds of immoral. Imagine it, though.

  “Say this man is offered fifty to kill a total stranger. Say he has the know-how to do it. That’s important for it to be a fair question.

  “What do you think would happen? In most cases?”

  Oona’s chin hadn’t moved from the coffee cup. “I don’t know,” she said.

  “That’s no answer, babe.

  “OK, that’s what you think. No, then. He’d call the police, OK?”

  Berryman could see she was looking for some killer line. Some way to flush his toilet but good. He wouldn’t let her. “So you mean if I put fifty thousand dollars on this bed,” he asked her. “Better yet, if I’d left it at that little shop where you worked. Real money. Tens, twenties, fifties. And I’d told you–just to take a weak example–‘get rid of the manager of the Hyannis A&P’? No action, huh? …”

  She said scheis.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You said something. Say it.”

  “Nothing. It doesn’t matter. Scheis means shit in Russian.”

  “Uh. I don’t think so.”

  Oona Quinn didn’t say any more, but she didn’t go anywhere, either.

  Revere, Massachusetts, July 22

  Oona Quinn had grown up in one of a thousand similar claptrap houses in the amusement park town of Revere, Massachusetts. A pop singer named Freddie Cannon had grown up in Revere, too. Then he’d written a hit song about Palisades Park. It was that kind of uninspiring town.