Donald Pollock - The Heavenly Table

“Yeah,” Herman Matthews, the real estate agent, chimed in, “he’ll be making money hand over fist. Maybe we should think this over some more.” Though he’d just voted for the measure, he was already beginning to have a change of heart. As the owner of at least a dozen rental properties, none of which had indoor plumbing, it had just occurred to him that he might be held responsible if his tenants didn’t abide by the new law.

“No,” Rawlings said, “that won’t happen. I’ve already talked to him about it. He understands he’ll have to quit the honey-dipping if he takes the inspection job.”

“But calling him an inspector?” said Saunders. “Jesus Christ, Rawlings, we’re talking about Jasper Cone. Does he even know how to read? People will think we’ve lost our goddamn minds.”

“It’s just a job title,” the city engineer replied. “Call him what you want.”

“Well, then, who’s going to take over his business?” Edgar Blaine asked. A Presbyterian minister by trade, he had recently retired, and it had taken him most of the evening to figure out exactly what was being discussed. Up until just a few minutes ago, he thought they were planning some sort of celebration. He had told his wife again this morning that his brain wasn’t working right, that it would be better if he let someone else have his seat on the council, but she wouldn’t hear of it. For some reason, no matter how many times he came down to breakfast wearing nothing but socks on his hands, or tried to butter his bread with a coffee cup, she still refused to believe that his best years were behind him. Why couldn’t she see that he just wanted to spend his time in the garden with a blanket covering his cold legs, reading through his old sermons and reflecting on the number of souls his words might have saved before he forgot what words were actually used for?

“I don’t know yet. Anybody here interested in cleaning out privies?” Rawlings said. He looked over at Saunders. “What about you, Sandy? Pays two dollars a cubic yard.”

AFTER SHOOTING DOWN Reese Montgomery’s airplane, the Jewett brothers started traveling mostly at night. Since they had to stay off the roads most of the time, it was slow going in the dark. During the day they camped along brushy creeks and snaky swamps, hid in hollowed-out caves and deserted homesteads, with one always standing guard while the other two slept. They lived mostly on hardtack and candy and tins of stew and evaporated milk, but it was still the best fare they had eaten since before their mother died. Continuing their way northward, they robbed several general stores, collecting up various firearms and boxes of ammunition — along with a Webster’s International dictionary and a teakwood box of silver flatware — to the point where they finally had to steal an extra horse just to haul their arsenal. Inspired, at least in part, by The Life and Times of Bloody Bill Bucket, Chimney and Cob started dressing in cowboy garb, ten-gallon hats and dungarees and hand-tooled pointy-toed boots, while Cane, with the black frock coat and new white shirt, his hair greased back with pomade, took on the same look of shady refinement favored by riverboat gamblers and dissipated men of the cloth. Crossing into Tennessee, they held up three more banks, finally hitting the jackpot in a little town called Wayward. That night, after Cane finished counting the $29,000 in hundred-dollar bills the trembling bank clerk had pulled out of the vault and tossed onto the coat Chimney had spread on the floor, he looked at his brothers and said, “That’s it, we’re done.”

“What do ye mean?” Chimney said.

“No more robbing. There’s enough cash here we don’t need to take any more chances.”

“You swear?” Cob said. By this point he was sick to death of running all night and hurting people and stealing their property. Sometimes the only thing that kept him from slipping off and giving himself up at the nearest post office or calaboose was Cane’s promise that they would buy a farm, a home, a place to call their own, as soon as they made it across the border into Canada.

Cane nodded. “All we got to do now is disappear.”

Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to be as easy as it sounded. The big haul in Wayward had come with a heavy price. While Cane was sitting on his horse acting as lookout during the holdup, a deputy in a motorcar had spun around the corner, ramming the steel bumper into the animal’s front legs and snapping them like twigs. Tumbling backward out of his saddle, Cane hit the ground hard, but managed to hold on to his Smith & Wesson. Just as the deputy raised his rifle, Cane fired two shots at him, the first one ripping his chin off and the second puncturing his right lung. Townspeople ran to their windows and watched as the tall man in the black coat put the screaming horse out of its misery before emptying another pistol into the still-sputtering engine of the automobile.

Though they managed to escape and steal another horse that night, the very next day they encountered still more trouble. While looking for a place to relieve himself, Bill Wilson, the leader of a posse from Wayward, accidentally wandered upon them hiding in a thick, tangled stand of pine trees. He was unbuttoning his trousers when he looked up and saw Cane pointing a gun at him. To the outlaw’s surprise, Wilson smiled with an air of complete confidence. He was the constable in Henderson County, and had been, over the course of a twenty-year career, in a number of fixes just as bad as this one. Most criminals, he had often told people, were essentially gutless cowards, and if you didn’t show any fear, they’d usually lose their nerve and slither away like snakes. He’d shot a number of them hightailing it for some hidey hole after he’d stared them down. But even men as dedicated and tough as Bill needed a break now and then, and he had been fishing the riffles on the Beech River when all hell broke loose in Wayward, or he would have probably already had these bastards either locked up or in their graves. “You better think twice about that, buster,” Wilson said coolly. “I got a whole pack of men right over the hill waitin’ on me.” From the witnesses he’d talked to, he was fairly certain this dirty thug was the one who had blasted half of Deputy Lamar’s face off.

“Keep quiet,” Cane said.

“And what if I don’t?” asked Wilson loudly, shifting his eyes over to the fat one someone had described as a half-wit, sitting on a log in the gloomy shade in a cowboy outfit with what appeared to be a paper bag of Circus Peanuts in his lap. He wondered where the third one might be. Probably passed out in his bedroll, he figured. That was another thing about such scum; within a few hours of committing a crime, they usually got liquored up, either to celebrate their haul or to keep from dwelling on the fate that awaited them once they were apprehended. He was about to say as much when he heard a footstep behind him and the swish of something cutting through the air. There was no chance to call out to his comrades over the hill or draw his weapon or even utter a final prayer. As he landed with a soft thump on the pine needle floor, the last thing he saw was a skinny boy bend down in front of him and wipe blood off a machete; and the last thought that went through his partially detached head was that today was a Thursday, and tomorrow would be a Friday.

Just a few hours after the posse brought Bill Wilson’s body back to Wayward, the attorney general of Tennessee, Ezra Powys, consulted with his most trusted political advisers and upped the reward for the brothers dead or alive from $750 to $5,000 American dollars. It was an outrageous amount to offer, even for cop killers, but he had run on a platform pledging to clean up corruption, and recent allegations that he was in the pocket of a consortium of Memphis moonshiners were steadily gaining traction throughout the state. But, as his consultants told him, if he played this right, and showed the people that he was willing to do whatever it took to bring the criminals to justice, the murder of Bill Wilson might just save his career. Within hours of making the announcement, he realized he had made a mistake ever listening to the dumb bastards. According to several editorials that ran in that evening’s papers, the majority of taxpayers of Tennessee didn’t think there were more than three or four people walking the globe worth five thousand dollars, and certainly not a self-deluded, two-bit constable from Henderson County who had a reputation for shooting misdemeanors and old drunks in the back. Too, many of these same taxpayers lived on collard greens and corn pone six or seven days a week; and a great percentage of them were beginning to view the robbing of a bank as a just blow against the system that helped keep them in poverty. One of the writers even speculated that the reason the attorney general was so eager to offer such an outlandish reward was because the money the Jewett boys had stolen in Wayward belonged to one of his Memphis cronies! Even worse than that, Powys found out that the funeral for Bill Wilson was to be held on Sunday at noon, and he had a tee time scheduled for one o’clock at the newly opened Happy Valley Golf Course. Though he had only recently taken up the game, it was already becoming an obsession. One of his underlings discreetly tried to get the service changed to an earlier time, or perhaps even moved to Monday, but Mrs. Wilson insisted that her husband be buried on the Sabbath at the same time of day that he had entered this world forty-two years ago. “Sorry, Chief, she won’t budge.”