Andrew Vachss: Two Trains Running

“Go ahead, then,” Tussy said, setting her jaw. She adjusted the lumberjack shirt tightly around her, sitting with her knees together, back straight.

“I was a wild kid,” Dett began. “Always in trouble, for one thing or another. Nothing big, but plenty of it. Mostly because I had a foul temper. When I turned seventeen, I went to prison, for robbing a store. That’s where I learned how to fight. Not like I had before, in a temper. This was the cold way.

“When I got out, I was twenty-one years old, and the war was on. I went in the army. Not to be a hero, or a patriot, or anything. Just to get away from everything I… didn’t have. They were taking anybody then.

“I served in the Pacific.” Tussy’s eyes started to flood. “That wasn’t it,” Dett said, sharply. “I’m sorry, Tussy. I didn’t mean to yell at you. But you need to understand-what happened, it didn’t have anything to do with the war. It was just me, what I did, later. Okay?”

Tussy nodded, lips pressed tightly together.

“When I got out, I was almost twenty-six, and I didn’t know how to do anything. But that’s no excuse, either. I could have gone to school. To college, even. On the GI Bill. I could have gotten a good job, bought a house… I could have been a regular person.”

Tussy opened her mouth to interrupt, but reached for a cigarette instead.

“I just… drifted,” Dett said. “But wherever I went, I was always in the same place. I’d work for a while-there was plenty of jobs: oil fields, timber mills, cotton crops-then I’d just sit around and do nothing. Have a few drinks, get into a fight, spend a couple of nights in jail. Three months on the county farm, once.”

Dett paused, lit a cigarette of his own. “Then I killed a man,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. I’m not saying it was an accident, but I wasn’t thinking about killing him. It was just another fight. If he’d been a white man, my whole life would have been different.”

Tussy squirmed in her seat, as if awaiting a sign from Dett to speak.

“They took me down to the jail,” Dett said. “And that’s when it started. A couple of men came to see me. Government men. I say it was two men, but it could have been one; they were so much alike I couldn’t tell where one started and the other left off.

“They told me I might get off on self-defense, this being Mississippi and all. But I might not, especially with my record. I might spend a long time down at Parchman for what I did. They said everyone was watching now. They meant the whole world. It was right after that boy was killed for whistling at a white woman. They said the law might have to make an example of me. I was scared.

“Then they said there was a way I could make it right. They could fix things so I wouldn’t have to go to prison, fix it so nobody would even be mad about it. And what they wanted in exchange, they just wanted me to join the Klan.”

Dett took a deep drag of his cigarette, closed his eyes for a split second, then went on. “See, I was a natural, Tussy. Anybody checking me out, they’d find I was in prison before. The Klan wouldn’t care about that, the government men told me. What they’d care about was that I went to prison by myself. I never told who else was in on that robbery with me. So it was like a good mark on my record. And being in the army, overseas, that was a good thing, too. It showed I could… do stuff, they said.

“But the best thing, that was me killing that man. They said the Klan was mostly loudmouths. Brave when they were burning a cross, but just bullies, hiding behind sheets. You know, scared to fight a man fair. But me, I had done that. ‘You killed a nigger,’ one of them said. ‘In hand-to-hand combat. For the Klan, that’s a better medal than any you could get from Uncle Sam.’

“I would be like a federal agent, they said. I’d have to use my eyes and ears, and make reports to them. They said the Klan was a danger to America. A subversive organization, they called it. I would be like a spy, for the government. When I found out the names of the people who were doing the lynchings and burnings and bombings, I’d tell the FBI-that’s what they said they were, the FBI-and they’d move in and clean things up. Because it was for damn sure the local cops were never going to.

“They said I might have to commit crimes, just to prove I was a good Klansman, but that would be okay because I was working undercover. I’d get a full pardon when I was done, for everything.”

Dett stubbed out his cigarette. “I’m not sure why I did it,” he said. “Not even now. I could say I wanted to do something good. For America, like they said. I could say I felt guilty about killing that man. I could say I didn’t want to go to prison. I could even say I wanted the money-they paid me, just like a salary-but that would just be… saying things. Because I really don’t know.

“My trial only lasted one day. A bunch of colored people testified that they saw the whole thing and the other guy had pulled his knife first. I don’t know if that was true-it all happened so fast-but I know not one of them had been out there in that parking lot. So they were all lying.

“I was found not guilty, and nobody was mad at me, not even the dead man’s own mother. I know that because she said so, right in court. She said her son would get crazy-wild when he was drunk, and that he had been drinking all that day it happened. That was a lie, too. He wasn’t drunk when we fought. Everything was all lies. I never even had to say anything.

“It was that same day, right after it got dark, when the night riders came to where I was staying and took me. The government men were right. The Klan thought I was the greatest man in the world for what I had done.”

Tussy’s green eyes seared into him. Finish it, he ordered himself. Get it done.

“The first time I went riding with them, it was a few nights later. We burned out a family. I don’t know what the man who lived there was supposed to have done. They said he was some kind of agitator.

“I called the number the government men had given me, and I told them everything. Who was there, what they did. They said I was doing a good job, but they were after bigger fish.”

Tussy opened her mouth, caught Dett’s eye, and reached for another cigarette without speaking.

“They were all scared then,” Dett said. “Not the colored people. I mean, I guess they always were, but I wasn’t among them, so I couldn’t say. But the Klan, the people in it, they were scared. Of… the future, I guess. You could feel it coming. It was all in the air. Things were going to change.

“The way one of them explained it to me, it used to be, if you were a colored man who wanted to have a chance, you went north. Lots of them did that. But now the strongest ones weren’t leaving. They were staying. If they got the vote-I don’t mean got the vote; they already had the vote; I mean, if they got to actually vote, cast a ballot-they could be running things in twenty years, that’s what he said.

“Everywhere you looked, you could see it. The way it was told to me, there was a wall between whites and coloreds for a good reason. Like how you have to keep gamecocks away from each other. If that wall came down, we wouldn’t be shaking hands with what was on the other side, we’d be fighting it to the death. Segregation was good for the coloreds, that’s what they all said. It protected them, kept them safe. It was just the outsiders, the people from up north, who stirred everything up.

“And the Jews were behind everything. You couldn’t see them, but they were there. They didn’t care a damn about farming-they needed more and more people to work in their factories. That’s what started it all. The Civil War, I’m talking about. It wasn’t to free the slaves; it was because the Northerners needed people to work in their factories.”