The Spyglass Tree (23 page)

So come on in here with all that money, man, Curtis Howard said, and Grady MacPherson said, All that
long
money, man, and Solomon Gatewood said, Come on in here with all of
my
money, man, and somebody else said, Man, come on in here with all of
all of our
money, and nobody noticed that he was standing with his
hand up because they were all so busy signifying at him and laughing among themselves without interrupting the deal going down at the same time that nobody had turned to look at him as yet.

Old money himself in person, Logan Scott said back over his shoulder, still watching the table, Come on money, and Wendell Franklin said, No, man, you talking about
Mister
Money. Come on
Mister
Money. And Curtis Howard said, Hey, wait y’all. What’s this cat doing coming over
here
at
all?
With all the money he already got, this ain’t nothing but some little old nickel-and-dime stuff to him. And Eddie Rhodes said, Man, that just goes to show you about money people. Now me and you just trying to pick up a little extra change because it will come in handy, but Old Giles Cunningham just like to be
around
money, even if it ain’t nothing but a little
chickenshit chicken feed
like this. And somebody else said, No, man, Old Giles Cunningham like to have money
around him
, and Eddie Rhodes said, Hey, yeah man, that’s a good one—
right around his waist
.

They were all laughing, and you couldn’t help laughing at yourself with them, and you knew that they knew as well as you did that all of you always came together whenever you could, mainly because you always had such a good time just being together. Not that at least a little playful wagering was not almost always a part of it. Indeed, even when they were all emotionally aligned on the same side of some contest. They were likely to make side bets on specific aspects of the performance, such as point spread, extra points, home runs, extra base hits, strikeouts, or knockouts, round-by-round point tallies and so on. But obviously such petty wagering was always far more a matter of ceremonial risk-taking and sportsmanship than of making a killing. Clearly the main reason that they used to make such a big deal of getting together to listen to the radio broadcasts of the important prizefights and the World Series and the Rose Bowl Game back in those
pretelevision times was that it was the next best thing to sitting together at ringside or in the grandstand.

So what say, Giles, Logan Scott said, come on in the house, and Wendell Franklin said, Man, ain’t you got that money belt off yet, and that was when they all finally turned to look at him and saw his hand up even as he laughed along with them, and that was when he said, Hey wait a minute, y’all. I trying to say something. Bald Eagle Bob Webster said, Hey Ho(ld) y’all. Hold on, hold on, hold on. He stood fanning his hands across each other in front of him and then he cocked his ear and said, Hey, what is it Giles? What’s the matter, man?”

Hey, I’m sorry I’m late, y’all, he said, but looks like somebody got another kind of little game that just might be shaping up out there tonight. It might be just a threat, he said, but you never know, and that was when he told them about what had happened between him and Dudley Philpot out at the Pit that afternoon and about what Hortense Hightower had told him on the telephone about Will Spradley.

So now I guess it’s supposed to be my turn if I’m still here after he told me to unass the area, he said, and Eugene Glover said, Giles, you mean to tell me that Dud Philpot told you that? Not Dud Philpot, Giles. Man, you can’t mean some weasly clodhopper like Dud Philpot think he can come up with some old tired-ass peckerwood shit like that. Man, come on. And Bald Eagle Bob Webster said, Just tell us what the fuck you need, Giles, and you got it, man, you know that.

They were all waiting then and he said, Well, Eag, I could use some of y’all over at the Pit with Speck and some others over at the Dolomite with Wiley, and I got a couple of other things I got to see to by myself, and Yancey Williams said, Well, you just go on, Giles. You just leave that to me and Eag. We’ll divide them up. You get to Speck, Eag, and I’ll get to Wiley. And look, Giles, if a gang of them happen to jump you out there somewhere, all you
got to do is make it on back over here. Hell, you know goddamn well ain’t none of them going to try to follow you over in here.

Man, Bob Webster said, you couldn’t
pay
none of some somitches to come over in here even before they got taught that lesson. I’m quite sure they’ll never forget when they let some fool talk them into going up on the campus that time.

Everybody there remembered what had happened (and had not happened!) back some fifteen years earlier when the Ku Klux Klan was on the rise again for a while, following the World War in France. Some could tell you about it from first-hand experience and others had heard about it from somebody who had been either personally involved in one way or another or were around at the time. But the account of it that I have always been most familiar with is the one that Deke Whatley used to recount in the barbershop when he used to get going again on one of his first-chair sermons on the folly of political action without organization.

Anybody think I’m just talking about some kind of old church membership politics already missed my point, he always used to say. I ain’t talking about nothing where you got to go to meeting and they collect dues for some sanctimonious hustler in a Cadillac to rake in.
Hey, remember that time when a bunch of them Old Ku Kluxers put on all of them sheets and shit and come talking about they going to bring a motorcade through the campus to show niggers that white folk mean for them to stay in their place? Well, gentlemen, the whole goddamn crew of them goddamn drunk-ass rednecks were all the way onto the grounds before it finally hit their dumb-ass asses that they hadn’t seen a soul, not because everybody was either up there hiding under the bed or peeping out from behind the curtains, but because there were all of them combat-seasoned AEF veterans in the student body at that time and they and the ROTC cadets were all
deployed
in them hedges and behind them knolls and on top of them buildings, all them goddamn sharp-shooters and bayonet fighters and ain’t no telling what else, gentlemen. Sheeet, them goddamn crackers got on the hell on through here in a hurry, then, and went on out somewhere and
found themselves a hill and burned a chickenshit cross and went on back home and went to bed. Now that’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about organization. Them white folks said, Oh shit, these niggers up here
organized
! Let’s get the hell out of here. And now that brings me to another point. Did you ever notice whenever some white folks go somewhere to pull some old shit like that and you let them get away with it, you going to see it all over the papers, and here comes all them old reporters from up north, can’t wait to feel sorry for us and ain’t going to do a damn thing to help out. But when some of us turn the goddamn tables on them somitches, all them newspapers act like ain’t nothing at all happened in the first goddamn place. That’s some more stuff I been studying for years and you know what I found out? I think them somitches know what they doing. Gentlemen, if they had put anything in the papers about how these folks had them people scared shitless because they were organized and just watching and waiting like that, it’s subject to drive white folks crazier than the Brownsville raid, and ain’t nobody fired one single round of nothing
.

I also remember him saying what he always used to say about Gin Mill Crossing when he used to get going about how the main thing in that connection was to let
them
know that you ain’t going to take no shit lying down!
And y’all know good and damn well I ain’t talking about getting up somewhere woofing at somebody. You know me better than that. I’m talking about just letting them get the goddamn message that it’s going to cost them something because you willing to put your ass on the goddamn line. Otherwise, here they come with some old foolishness like it’s their birthright to make niggers jump. But now you take them people over in Gin Mill Crossing. Old bad-assed Cat Rogers himself don’t go messing around over in there without first off giving somebody some advance notice, and he’s the high sheriff and a tough somitch by any standard. Even if Cat want to get somebody that everybody already knows broke the law and got to go to jail, Cat always going to call Yank Williams or Big Eag, and they’ll either say come on in or we’ll send him out or he ain’t here, and that’s good enough for Cat Rogers. That’s what I’m talking about when I’m talking about Gin Mill Crossing gentlemen
.

So you just go on and take care of whatever you got to see to, Yancey Williams said outside on the porch with Bob Webster standing by as the others filed past, some still putting on their coats. Ain’t going to take nobody here more than fifteen or twenty minutes to go by home and pick up what they need. What you think, Eag? and Big Bald Eagle Bob Webster said, probably no more than a quarter of an hour at most, and then goddamn it, we’ll find out. But frankly, Giles, I can’t see very many of them people following Dud Philpot nowhere. Maybe a few of them old razorbacks that been used to ganging up on somebody ten to one and saying shoo.

T
his is my young friend from the campus I was telling you about, Hortense Hightower said when Giles Cunningham finally got there, and he said, What say there, my man? and I said, Nice to meet you, and we shook hands and he gave me a pat on the shoulder and turned to Will Spradley and said, Man, goddamn, just look at you, goddamn! Man, you let a nothing-ass somitch like Dud Philpot do something like this to you? Goddamn man. And Will Spradley said, That’s all right about me, Gile. I just been trying to make it to you so I can tell you he done all this to me because you the one he really working himself up about. And Giles Cunningham said, Well I appreciate that, Will Spradley, I really do.

Then, looking at me again, he said, and I also want you to know how much I appreciate you giving the Boss Lady a hand with all of this. But hold up for a minute and I’ll be right with you and we can talk while I do what I got to do and get on back out of here.

He moved on over to the wall behind the bar and unlocked
the door to the walk-in closet and when he clicked on the light the first thing you saw was a rack of shotguns and rifles, and it took only a glance for me to see that there were 20-gauge pumps as well as single- and double-barrel breechloaders and that the rifles included a lever-action Winchester, a bolt-action Enfield, a magazine-fed Springfield, a .30-caliber carbine, and also a stack-barrel combination 410-gauge shotgun and .30-caliber rifle called an over-and-under gun.

I could spot any of those in a matter of seconds anywhere, even in a dim light, because Little Buddy Marshall and I had learned how to fire and also how to fieldstrip most of them by the time I was thirteen years old. After all, hunting, like fishing, was so much a part of everyday life in Gasoline Point back then that you didn’t think much more about using guns and rifles (but not pistols!) than about any of the other workaday tools that you were always being warned to be careful about. Pistols, to be sure, were another matter altogether. Whether revolvers or automatics, they were always special, always redolent of nimble daring and expert doing and escaping and retaliating. But then, pistols had just about nothing to do with hunting in the first place.

Anyway, I already had the gun rack checked out even before I realized that I was doing it, but it was not until after he had signaled for Will Spradley to be taken to another room for the time being that he said, Hey, Poppa, I can use a little help with this. Then when he opened the footlockers, I saw that there were also three Thompson submachine guns, also known as Tommy guns. And I said, Chicago Typewriters because that was what we used to call the ones you saw (and heard!) in the gangster movies in those days, and I said, These are the very first
real
ones I’ve ever actually seen, and he said, One for each place, but just in case.

Just in case, he said, and only just in case. I mean, this stuff is strictly for the last resort, he said, and then he said, What I really think they’re most likely to have in mind is to come out and scare
somebody. So if that’s it and they get to any one of my joints and find Eag and the boys or Yank and the boys waiting for them, I think that just might take care of that, because they didn’t leave home to go to no battle. They just out to have themselves a little cheap fun, showing off. But since you never can tell when some of them are subject to get all carried away and start trying to burn some property and all that, I got to have this stuff on hand just in case.
But now here’s my point. Don’t nobody in these parts know I have my hands on no stuff like this but the Boss Lady, Wiley, Speck, Flea, Eag, and Yancey and now you and that’s the way I got to keep it. You get the point? And I said, I sure do, and I did. All you had to do was imagine the type of newspaper headlines that would be featured from border to border and coast to coast:
ALABAMIANS MOWED DOWN IN WILD TOMMY GUN MASSACRE BY CRAZED, RAMPAGING BLACK RENEGADES
.