The Blackstone Commentaries (15 page)

Part Three

XVI

Eddie

It was hard to rattle Eddie. But from the moment he and Charlie rounded that last bend and plunged through the flares into the world of the Carvers' blasted Monte Carlo, he had become uncharacteristically obsessed. Weeks, months later, he would conjure up that car with its shattered windows and all, already derelict somehow, because from the outset to him it was more than what it was: it was an omen. An omen for everything crazy that was coming. If anything, his obsession was a state of amazement verging on outright disbelief at the sequence of events—the
collective
sequence, by God.

For instance, if it hadn't been for the Blackstone County Fair and Richard Skinner burying that boy alive, he doubted Charlie would ever have taken the trip to Pinetown, which to his mind was what changed the course of things for good.

The Carver case had been delayed so much already—Charlie had checked out leads and done enough investigation to convince anyone except maybe the Carvers he'd done what he could—that if he'd let it go, he
might have gotten over it, and political necessity being what it was, he and Pemberton could have made a truce. By then, people were beginning to think maybe Carver and his wife had gotten just a bit dotty about the whole thing, were pushing where it didn't need pushing, seeing that a lot of time had gone by and everyone seemed okay. Though Martin Pemberton was a well-known sinner, people were ready to forgive him because he'd done surgery on a good number of them over the years. Even without the status of his family, he was an icon, if not a saint.

Eddie thought he almost had Charlie convinced to drop the case until that day in July when the Carvers came to complain about the third preliminary hearing postponement, after which Charlie appeared more troubled than ever, and in a private way that excluded even Eddie. And if that wasn't bad enough, Skinner showed up, and all Charlie's frustrations suddenly had a place to land.

It began with “The Burial,” as it came to be known, which took place at the county fair. The
Damascus Gazette & Reformer
only reluctantly reported the event because Harlan Monroe, a great promoter of the advance of Southern civilization and industry, usually avoided such stories like the plague. The fact was, however, no one had ever seen the likes of the crowds attending that so-called funeral and the nearby monkey wrestling. The paper estimated the crowd for The Burial alone at “over 500,” but everybody knew the paper never got anything right. The sheriff's department's estimate was well over a thousand, and maybe double that, and the visitors didn't slacken off day or night for most of a week.

For Eddie, the whole notion of a fair had been a joke for years—ever since the animals and tractors and pie contests and whatever else made a real fair began to disappear and the chamber of commerce handed it over to the carnies and the strippers and such, and didn't even bother to hold it in September anymore, the end of the harvest, the way you would a real fair when people still had something to show for their labor, but brought it around in July because the carnies, strippers and such had so many other places to go and people to fleece. But it was still the Blackstone County Fair, and the chamber held its nose, put its hand out and ran to church for absolution on the last Sunday.

The Burial was like nothing the county had ever seen. Skinner, the
man who concocted the event, showed up in an old black Cadillac hearse with huge, upswept fins, no hubcaps and bald tires, the only thing fresh about it being some printing just below the driver's window:

THE LIVING DEAD

Oswena, Tenn.

Which was why he got the initials L. D., for the Living Dead.

He found a boy, Julius Lippett, seventeen years old going on five, in sneakers, bib overalls and T-shirt, whose father was a part-time dirt farmer and factory worker and most-of-the-time drunk from up near Asheville. Skinner promised the boy two hundred dollars to stay underground in a pine box for five days, with just a big wooden chimney running up above ground to keep him alive and happy with a supply of air, comic books, Moon Pies, colas and Hardee's hamburgers. They dug a grave and put a funeral awning over it, and the first night the fair was open Skinner, donning a black suit and top hat, threw a white choir robe over the boy and started to read the service. His words were accompanied by organ music coming from the open rear of his hearse. With smoke swirling out of it and a red light inside, its chrome casket rails all shiny and gleaming, that vehicle looked more like a one-way trip to hell.

The boy, apparently thoroughly pleased by the huge crowd and his first bare-naked-woman show down the Midway, to which Skinner had treated him as part of the deal, stood in the coffin in that robe, hands folded over his chest, and stared up into the top of the funeral awning. His face was shiny and angelic, like he was already seeing the clouds and harps and whatever else was up there. He was so good, women began to weep, and there was all kinds of
amen
ing.

Then they lowered him into the ground and covered him with dirt before anyone in the sheriff's department knew much more than rumors. It was hard enough for a person to believe anything he heard coming out of the fair anyhow, much less that they were actually going to bury somebody alive and charge the public two dollars a shot just to talk through that chimney to prove the boy was still down there, the promise, the hook, being Skinner would pay a thousand dollars to anyone who discovered he wasn't. People went out there day and night—some on foot, others by
bicycle, car, motorcycle, truck, taxi, even a horse once, whatever it took—just to pay two dollars to talk down the chimney.

Eddie, off-duty at the time, decided it was not only the biggest crowd he'd seen at the fair, it was the biggest he'd ever seen period. The cause was more than helped by its next-door neighbor, Red, an orangutan a fellow from Georgia trucked in to wrestle all comers. A hand-painted sign announced,

Old Red. Meanest of the Mean!
Don't let him make a monkey out of you!

Monkeys were nothing new at the fair, but, that said, Eddie for one had never seen the likes of Red before, and neither, he supposed, had anyone else. “He'd just as soon shit as look at you,” he reported back to Charlie, who for some reason didn't jump on the implications.

One hundred dollars was promised to whomever managed to last three minutes in the ring with the brute. Given the three-dollar admission charged per person for each fight and the several hundred people lining up to see, the math spoke for itself. They were already flying out of the ring when Higby Wardell—better known as “Puma,” who, as well as being the strongest man within a hundred miles, owned a gambling place down in Jessup in the eastern part of the county—volunteered to help lower that Lippett boy's coffin into the grave next door, then found himself volunteered to fight the monkey. Puma never could say no to anybody, he was so good natured. They put an old-time football helmet on him, but it was too small for his head, so the flaps stuck out like little wings and they had to tie it off with a piece of clothesline. “For safety, son,” the monkey man insisted.

The first night, Puma lasted about three seconds, coming out of the ring wearing only his brogans and the collar of his T-shirt, the Fruit of the Loom label dangling at his neck, while the monkey trotted around mashing Puma's overalls on its head. He showed up the next night wearing blue jeans and a trucker's kidney belt, and then for three more nights running, appearing promptly at eight in the evening to bigger and bigger crowds. Each time, he staggered away looking like he'd just plowed the south forty
with his face, but grinning nonetheless. Puma's battle soon became positively biblical, preachers taking time off from picketing the strippers down the Midway to see if he would defeat the monkey and restore His divine order.

Eddie discovered all this religion was making the Georgia fellow nervous. It was supposed to be nothing more than a monkey that had no goddamn use for people, beating the crap out of a bunch of bozos too dumb to figure out they couldn't win, so the man said. Well, maybe that did have something to do with evolution, Eddie thought. Anyway, no one had figured on Puma.

Charlie stayed away till late the third night, when he had Eddie take him out to the fairgrounds. The crowds had disappeared by the time Eddie guided the silver unmarked Dodge up behind a taxi parked near the funeral awning. An electric light shone down from inside the awning onto the chimney and the brass grill through which people could talk to the “deceased.” A white-haired old man dressed in a suit and carrying a cane was doing just that. A little picket fence, about knee high, surrounded the awning, and a short, swarthy, unshaven man leaned against a lectern beside a gate in the fence. His cheeks deeply chiseled, eyes dark, the man sported a coal-black mustache and long hair yanked back in a ponytail that protruded from beneath a grubby black beret. He reminded Eddie of hippie posters of Che Guevara.

Something always felt grand and ghostly about that Dodge. It was part of the theater, Eddie knew, part of what Charlie understood he had to be in order to do what he had to do. Their high beams bathing the taxi, they sat there idling a moment, just for effect, the man at the lectern staring at them a little harder with each passing second. The old man with the cane stopped shouting into the grill and came tottering back just as the taxi driver, a scrawny little man, threw open his door and marched back toward the other car, shielding his eyes with a hand and hollering, “Turn them goddamn lights down!” He hollered like every scrawny taxi driver Eddie'd ever met, which seemed like most of them.

Because of the bright lights, the taxi driver couldn't see the antenna, though he might have heard it thunking gently on the rear quarter panel. Nor did he see that single gold star sticking up from the front bumper. He
didn't see anything, he was so mad. Eddie kept the high beams on, the motor idling, because Charlie didn't tell him otherwise. Charlie got that way sometimes, like he had to prove something.

The taxi driver pushed through the glare and came to an abrupt halt a couple of feet from Eddie's door. At the same moment, Charlie eased the rear door open.

No interior light went on. They always kept it off, so when Charlie emerged, it was like a shadow. Because Charlie was heavy, he seemed less to walk than float toward that suddenly very unhappy-looking man. Eddie could see by the way the taxi driver craned his neck, Charlie was a lot bigger than he expected. Eddie had lowered his window but kept his gaze straight ahead.

“Hear you been carrying folks out to Pinetown, Lester,” Charlie said, his voice almost impossibly soft, the way he could make it, but conversational, no trace of recrimination. Eddie glanced over and saw Richard Skinner staring from under the awning. “Don't know anything about that knifing at Natty Moon's last Saturday, I suppose?”

“No, sir,” the taxi driver answered, mad once more, Eddie could tell, but now at himself for even being there, like he'd screwed up again.

“I heard there was a little card playing on a felt-top table, and a bit of whiskey, and one or two men there with guns ought not to have been carrying because they are convicted felons. Gaius Ford, maybe. I heard, too, one of them, not Gaius, got taken out there by taxi. That could be accessory.”

“Don't know nothing about it,” the driver said, cramming his hands in his pockets and hunching his shoulders. He glanced wistfully at his taxi and the little old man peering out the rear window.

“Been a little whiskey finding its way down into Damascus in the back of taxis again, I hear, too, but I don't suppose you know anything about that.”

“No, sir.” The voice was sullen and defiant at the same time, like a child who's been caught and is just tired of the hassle. Eddie saw Lester try to meet Charlie's gaze and fail.

“You and I need to talk, Lester. Come see me,” Charlie said, dismissing him as he turned toward the funeral awning, where Skinner stood behind the lectern, still watching. It was as though Lester had never existed, but
that was Charlie's way when he was in a mood like that.

Charlie was wearing his three-piece suit and a string tie like Bat Masterson on TV, the boots custom made in Nacona, Texas, and that night, just for the fair, the derby instead of the Stetson. It was the second and last time Eddie would ever see him wear it. He'd watched Charlie hesitate a moment, then yank it off the rack and head out with a new energy. Now Eddie saw why, saw Skinner troubling over it:
Nobody wears a derby anymore—it's like the cartoons!
Skinner obviously wanted to laugh, but Eddie saw then it was just what Charlie wanted. The man might not know in time not to laugh. Or maybe it wouldn't matter.

“You running this … burying?” The voice was gentle.

“Yeah.”

“Yeah,” Charlie echoed, like something was missing, as he stopped not a foot away from Skinner. The contrast was something, Charlie's big face so close to that little bony one, his ears large and a bit cauliflowered out from under the derby. Eddie could see Skinner still wanted to laugh, was fighting the natural volition of his lips because he was scared, too. Charlie never gave a hint of emotion in such situations, not even the wound-up kind you find so often in drinkers and young lawmen. Just that too-soft voice and Charlie's incredible politeness and an indefinable sense that everything was all emotion or none at all. Eddie saw Skinner shudder, then saw Charlie's gaze wander over to the glow showing at the top of the chimney. “You the one they call the Living Dead?”

“That's my business name.”

“I see.” Eddie wondered if Skinner had ever encountered such politeness in a person of authority before. He could tell Skinner's entire body had gone tight on him, like he was waiting to be hit. “So what's your name?”

“They call me L. D.”

“That's not what I asked.”