David (33 page)

“Exactly what I had in mind,” Burwell said. “After you.”

“Always the gentleman,” I said.

I took the lantern from where I'd left it hanging on the wall just inside the upstairs door. Because I'd been almost ready to go home, I hadn't left any lights burning in Sophia's. Before taking the first step downstairs, I locked the door behind us from the inside. Ferguson pointed at the lock and shook his head rapidly.

Addressing Burwell, “We don't want any unexpected visitors,” I said.

Burwell considered this.

“I'm leaving the key in the lock,” I said.

Burwell nodded at Ferguson, and I led the way downstairs.

“Tell me how you see the profits being split,” I said.

“Why, fifty-fifty, of course, lad.”

“But if I'm working here every night, I should get a wage too, shouldn't I?” I picked a number I knew Burwell wouldn't agree to. “How about fifty dollars a week, plus my fifty percent take?” We'd reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Light a lamp or two, lad, it's as dark as a dungeon down here. And of course you're entitled to a wage, but how about something that won't insult your partner's intelligence? Let's say ten dollars to start, and we'll go from there.”

“Let me put the lantern down and I'll get our drinks.” I was the lead elephant, with Burwell and then Ferguson following close behind. I led us to the bar, where I set down the lantern and palmed three shot glasses from underneath. “Come in the back, I'll show you where I keep the good whiskey. And forty dollars would be a little fairer. Remember, I won't just be swinging drinks here, I'll be keeping an eye on our investment. That's not something you can expect from a ten-dollar-a-week hired hand.”

“By all means let's have the best you've got, lad—
we've
got, I mean—but bring the bottle out here. You can serve
Ferguson and me as a proper bartender should. And I see your point about you being our eyes and ears. Let's say twenty dollars a week.”

Hand on the door handle to the backroom, “Whatever you say,” I said, “but I thought I'd show you where the safe is while we were at it. Another time, I guess. And I think thirty dollars would make me happy.”

Burwell followed the light, came around the front of the bar after all, Ferguson, of course, trailing right behind. “Oh, well,” he said. “Procrastination
is
the thief of time.”

“Someone I used to know always used to say that,” I said, turning the handle.

“He was a wise man,” Burwell said. “And let's say twenty dollars. I wouldn't want to—”

As soon as the door was open far enough for him to squeeze through, Waldo leapt at Burwell and I jumped aside and knocked the lantern off the top of the bar; Waldo didn't need to see what he wanted. I knew Ferguson was somewhere in the screaming, roaring dark behind me and that he'd be going for his knife, so I put my head down and charged as hard as I could, hoping to hit anything but blade. Burwell's screams became cries, like the sound of a woman wailing over the body of her dead child.

Given its size, Ferguson's stomach was surprisingly hard and unyielding, and he managed to wrap me in a headlock, but I got the bearing I needed and smashed the three shot glasses into his genitals. Ferguson's hands fell away from my head and I dived past and behind him across the floor. I looked for something to use on him while he was bent over with his hands covering his balls, but without the lantern I could only see the ghostliest of outlines of tables and chairs. Before I could grab a chair to bring down on his head, Ferguson straightened up and whipped his knife out of its sheath.

I ran.

I ran for the stairs and found them and tore to the top, figuring my speed advantage would give me time to unlock the door before Ferguson stumbled to the top after me. Which I did, but only barely, Ferguson's fleetness of foot as unexpected as his firm fat. By the time our feet touched the back lot, it was a race too close to call.

I ran in a straight line, in the direction of the rear of the lot, and didn't look back, somehow remembering what the Reverend King always told the children on race day, on the last day of school. Of course, there'd been a life lesson to learn too: “Pick a goal in life, children, and do not deviate from it and do not look back. Never look backward.”

I only looked back once, when I couldn't hear Ferguson's feet pounding behind me anymore. Then I looked again, and again, until I stopped running. I walked back to the middle of the lot and Ferguson's face-down, beached body.

The black man pushed Ferguson over onto his side as far as he could in order to retrieve his knife; slid it out and let the great dead weight fall back to earth.

“Why?” I said, catching my breath.

The black man stayed squatting, dragged his knife back and forth across a clump of dewy weeds. “Saw a white man with a knife chasing a Negro.”

“How did you know it was the Negro who needed help?”

“Didn't,” he said. “Suppose I just never seen it the other way around before.”

Satisfied his blade was clean, the man stood up. He was old, maybe as old as sixty.

“My name is David,” I said.

“Tom,” the old Negro said, putting out his hand for me to shake.

Clichés when you're ten tend to become eternal verities once you're approaching forty. Particularly when you have two dead bodies to dispose of, preferably before sunrise. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, for instance, suddenly made a whole hell of a lot of sense.

Tom helped me haul Ferguson's body into the back of my wagon, but I left him outside to keep an eye on things so I could assemble what was left of Burwell. Waldo was lying on the floor only a few feet away from the body, panting, watching over his kill. He looked like he could have just come inside from a particularly spirited game of fetch. When he saw me at the bottom of the stairs, he wagged his tail.

“Good boy,” I said, carefully making my way toward the bar. But I didn't have to worry; what had to be done was done. I led Waldo into the backroom and patted his rug and he immediately lay down, head resting between his paws as he watched me close the door on him. Waldo had done his job. Now it was time for me to do mine.

Burwell's throat was torn out and a chunk was missing from his right cheek and both sleeves of his coat were tattered from wrist to elbow, but otherwise he was intact, if bloodied. Actually, most of the blood, the source of which was where Burwell's neck used to be, was pooled around the
outline of the body, but it was now slowly flooding across the floor. I'd worry about that later. I placed a burlap potato sack over Burwell's head and tied it in place with a long piece of string, Tom not needing to know anything more than here was another white man who had to vanish. I tossed Burwell over my shoulder like a bag of flour. I'd never noticed before how small he was.

Tom was silent until I'd laid out Burwell on the ground beside the wagon. “I'll take the feet,” he said. And so I took the head and we placed him in the wagon beside Ferguson.

“I'll ride in the back, if you don't mind,” he said.

“You don't have to come. I'll take care of it.” Even if I didn't have any idea how.

“If it's all the same, I'd like to see this through.”

To see with his own eyes that it got done. “I understand.”

Tom looked up at the beginning-to-bruise sky. “Best we get a move on, then. Sun-up not long now.”

As if on cue, a bird twittered awake in one of the trees, and we climbed in the wagon and were off.

*

Knowing we had to leave town was the easy part; deciding where to go after that was the problem. I didn't have any clearer idea who Burwell was today than I'd had the day twelve years before when he'd hired me, but even if no one was going to miss him, he and Ferguson had to disappear for good. No one was going to miss Ferguson.

I kept driving deeper and deeper into the country, the only thing I could think to do being to bury them both in the woods. It wasn't the bodies being discovered that concerned me; rather, now that it was becoming light, someone seeing us digging the graves. After a decade without incident
removing countless corpses from the ground, I wasn't about to go to jail or worse for planting two last ones.

BUXTON TWO MILES
, the sign said.

It wasn't Damascus, but it would do.

*

“Wait here, please.”

I heard voices inside from where I stood on the porch, my cap in my hand. I'd wondered what George's wife was like. Pretty and pleasant, I discovered. Imagine, I thought, what she'd be like if it wasn't six-thirty in the morning and there wasn't a stranger knocking on her front door. It was the same house George had grown up in, but with a large addition built onto the back and with a whole other floor added on top.

George came to the door and shook my hand, but without inviting me inside. No one shows up at your doorstep at six-thirty in the morning with good news, particularly after not having seen you in twenty years. George closed the front door.

“What's wrong?” he said.

“I need your help.”

“I assumed that. What do you need my help with?”

It was like two decades had been two days. There was more of him—a lot more of him—but other than that, he was still George and I was still David. I told him enough of what had happened and what needed to happen for him to understand.

“I swear to you, it was them or me,” I said. “I didn't have any other choice.”

George nodded at Tom, who was standing beside the wagon I'd parked alongside George's house. “I know you didn't,” George said. “I wouldn't help you if I thought you did.”

I kept my eyes on the porch floor.

“Drive around to the back of the factory,” he said. “I've got an idea.”

*

On our return to Chatham, I offered Tom half of all that was left of Burwell, the five-hundred-dollar billfold. Which, it turned out, was nothing more than a Missouri bankroll, an impressive stack of counterfeit money stuck between five real twenty-dollar bills on top and another five real twenties on the bottom. You had to give the man credit: even dead, Burwell was still cheating his way to a better deal.

“Wouldn't feel right taking money for what I done,” Tom said, riding up front with me this time. “I did what I did because it needed doing.”

“I understand that. I'd feel better, though, if I could do something for you.”

It turned out Tom had come upon Ferguson and me while cutting across Sophia's back lot on his way to an all-night shift at the sugar plant, a job he despised. “Man can't hear himself think in a place like that,” he'd said. And now, after not showing up for work, he didn't even have that.

“It seems to me,” he said, “the business you in, you might be able to use a man at the door to make sure the wrong sorts of people don't bother you or your customers.”

“Sort of like a watchdog,” I said.

“Seems to me you don't have no worries in that particular area.”

I smiled; Tom, too. Double homicide tends to bring people together.

“Are you sure you'd want to stand around all night just waiting for trouble?”

“I expect I'd be sitting,” Tom said. “Nothing fancy, a stool maybe, if you could manage it. And I expect the idea is to make sure trouble don't happen before it does.”

“That's exactly the idea.”

It was a lovely fall morning, sunny and cool all at once. The wind was mild, southwesterly, and you could smell the smoke coming from the potash factory.

Every time I learned that George had moved up another rung in the company, I'd wonder what they actually did there—what, for example, they were always burning in their big furnace. And that morning, after finally meeting George's wife, I'd gotten my answer, had found out first-hand not only what they burned all day but how, if you wanted to burn up something else, there'd be nothing left of it once you had, nothing at all except maybe a few grey clouds of smoke.

*

One more fatality-free dynamiting a couple of months later—this time to the home of Israel Evans, another Scott Act inspector—finally led to the arrest of one Mr. Jason Macy of Port Huron, Michigan, a convicted American felon whose room at the Royal Tavern was discovered to contain a Ranger No. 2 revolver and three fulminating caps and a fuse. Although the county Crown attorney failed to gain an admission from the accused of his part in a conspiracy by local hotel-keepers to blow the Scott Act off the face of Kent County, Macy was found guilty and sentenced to fourteen years in Kingston Penitentiary, the judge declaring at the sentencing that “You came to this country to commit one of the most diabolical crimes known in this land. It is proper and right to make an example of you. The laws of the land must be maintained and justice vindicated. Such as you must learn that law is supreme.”

Until I learned of Macy's conviction, I was never sure that one of Burwell's supposed secret witnesses wouldn't come forth and claim that it was the Negro named David King who was responsible for the dynamitings, the one who ran the illegal saloon people called Sophia's. But I should have known better. Even if Burwell hadn't been bluffing and did have three bought-off accusers lined up and ready to lie, his sudden and permanent disappearance rendered more than just myself free. Dead men can't collect on promissory notes.

Once I read news of the conviction in the
Planet
, I wrote George a letter asking him if he would care to visit me in Chatham sometime. When he wrote back suggesting the following Saturday, I answered that that would be fine and closed Sophia's for the first time since I'd opened for business.

I hadn't known Loretta for very long, but when I told her not only how I hadn't seen my oldest friend except for once in over twenty years but how I owed him a debt so large it was impossible ever to repay, she prepared us enough strudel, coffee cake, and marzipan to make George fat if he hadn't been already.