“Where they going could be something big. Security man I talk to at the hotel? A brother use to be with the Memphis Police, he say the Isle of Capri’s been held up twice. Two dudes come in the front wearing ski masks in Mississippi, scoop up three hundred thousand from the cage, security cameras getting the whole scene. They take off, run into a roadblock and one of ’em’s shot dead. The second heist, the newspaper makes a point of saying was unprofessional. Three dudes walk out with a hundred thousand and disappear into the night. It makes you think you don’t need to be a pro, do you? A dude robs both Harrah’ses, the old casino on Sunday, the new one on Wednesday, gets away with sixty thou. Witness say the man’s front teeth are gold. You bet they gold, the man’s a success. Yeah, Tunica County, Mississippi,” Robert said, “use to be the poorest county in the U.S. Jesse Jackson called it our Ethiopia. There still people farm. . . . Look on the backseat, all the pamphlets and shit I’ve picked up. The one calls Tunica a place where, I think it says, small-town friendliness is still a way of life. That’s long as you don’t get mugged, your car jacked or nobody passes off any funny money on you. Counterfeiters, man, love casinos.”
Dennis had questions, but kept quiet, listening.
“The sheriff they use to have? Went down for extortion, getting payoffs from drug dealers and bail bondsmen. Drew thirty years. A deputy was brought up, but he made a plea deal, testified against the sheriff and only drew two to five. A man running for sheriff, to take the one’s place went down? They find him lying in a ditch, shot in the head. They elected a brother as sheriff and now it’s cool, least the bad dudes aren’t wearing badges.”
Dennis was becoming at ease with this Robert Taylor from Detroit, a guy with style and what he called his own agenda. Robert was giving him leads and Dennis felt he could say anything he wanted and Robert would play it back in his own way, showing off, and they’d talk the talk with each other.
“You learned all that from the hotel security guy?”
“Some. Some I had looked up for me.”
“Planning your trip.”
“That’s right.”
“See what there is to offer.”
“Check it out.”
“What to look out for, like the crime situation.”
“You can’t be too careful.”
“Historical points of interest?”
Robert turned his head to look at Dennis. “You being funny, but history can work for you, you know how to use it.”
It stopped Dennis for a moment.
“You look into business opportunities?”
“You could say that.”
“Like mobile homes that aren’t mobile?”
Robert said, “Hey, shit,” grinning at him in the dark. “You quicker than I thought.”
4
“I STARTED TELLING YOU ABOUT this man name Kirkbride,” Robert said. “He started his business from what he made owning trailer parks. But you go back a couple of generations the Kirkbrides are farmers. Was Mr. Kirkbride’s grandpa, the first Walter Kirkbride, owned land over in Tippah County and had sharecroppers working it for him—one of ’em being my great-granddaddy. Worked forty acres of cotton, what he did his whole life. He’s the one I’m named for, the first Robert Taylor. Lived with his wife and children in a shack, five little girls and two little boys, my granddaddy being number seven, Douglas Taylor.”
Dennis said, “This is a true story?”
“Why would I make it up?”
They turned off the highway to approach Tunica, leaving open country and the night sky for trees lining the road and the lights that showed Main Street.
“That’s the police station,” Dennis said, “coming up on the left. The squad cars we saw were county, they didn’t come from here.”
Robert said, “Like you been checking up on crime yourself.”
“Go up past the drugstore and turn left, over to School Street and turn left again.”
“You want to hear my story or not?”
“I want to get home.”
“You gonna listen?”
“You’re dying to tell it. Go ahead.”
“See if you can keep quiet a few minutes.”
Dennis said, “I’m listening.” But then said, “Is this how the Taylors came to Detroit and your granddad went to work at Ford?”
“Was Fisher Body, but that isn’t the story. I’m holding on to my patience,” Robert said. “You understand what the consequence could be, you keep talking?”
Dennis was starting to like Robert Taylor. He said, “Tell the story.”
“Was my granddaddy brought his family later on to Detroit. He’s the one told me this story when he was living with us. About how my great-granddaddy had a disagreement with Kirkbride’s grandpa—a black man accusing the white man of cheating him on his shares—and the white man saying, ‘You don’t like it, take your pickaninnies and get off my land.’”
“This is School Street.”
Robert said, making the turn, “I can see it’s School Street.”
“The house is on the right-hand side, end of the block.”
“You through talking?”
“Yeah, go on. No, wait. There’s a car up there,” Dennis said, “in front of the house.”
“Man, what’s your problem?”
“I don’t know whose it is.”
“Your landlady’s.”
“She drives a white Honda.”
“Well, it ain’t a cop car.”
“How do you know?”
“It doesn’t have all that shit on top.”
“Stop a couple of houses this side.”
Robert crept the Jaguar down this street of tall oaks and old one-story homes set back among evergreens, drifted to the curb and killed the engine. The headlights showed the rear end of a black car. Robert said, “’96 Dodge Stratus, worth maybe five,” turned the lights off and said, “You happy now?”
“Your grandfather,” Dennis said, “got in an argument with Kirkbride’s grandfather, and?”
“Was my great-grandfather. They have a disagreement over shares and the man tells my great-granddaddy to get off the property.”
“With his pickaninnies,” Dennis said.
“That’s right. Only he didn’t feel he should take this shit off the man. Where they suppose to go? He’s got his wife and seven children to feed. What he does, he takes a drink of corn and goes up to the house, see if he can reason with the man. Goes to the back door. The man ain’t home, but his woman is and maybe Robert Taylor gets ugly with her. You know what I’m saying? Ugly meaning disrespectful, like he raises his voice. The woman becomes hysterical a nigga would talk to her like that. Keeps screaming at him till Robert Taylor says fuck it and walks away. Goes home. He believes that’s the end of it, they may as well pack up the few things they own and go on down the road. Except that night men come with torches and set his house on fire, his shack, with his family inside.”
Dennis said, “Jesus.” No longer looking at the black Dodge or Vernice’s house.
“He gets his wife and the kids out, the little children screaming scared to death. Can you see it?”
Dennis said, “That kind of thing happened, didn’t it?”
Robert said, “Few thousand times is all. They told my great-granddaddy this is what you get for molesting a white woman. That’s the word they used, molesting. Like he’d want any of that grandma. They stripped him naked, tied him to a tree and whipped him, cut him up, cut his dick off and left him tied there through the night. In the morning they lynched him.”
Dennis said, “Jesus—Kirkbride did it?”
“Kirkbride, men that worked for him, people from town, anybody wanted to see a lynching. But you know why they waited till morning? See, they didn’t lynch him right there.” Robert stopped. His gaze moved, inched away, and Dennis turned his head to look toward the house, Robert saying, “I believe that’s the cowboy.”
It was, coming down the walk from the house, Vernice by the front door h
olding it open.
“One of the dudes,” Robert said, “wanted a free show.”
Dennis said, “It could be, but I don’t know him.”
“He knows your landlady, if that’s her.”
“Vernice,” Dennis said.
The one in the cowboy hat looked back at the house and waved as he reached his car and Vernice went inside, Dennis noticing she didn’t wave back. The one in the cowboy hat glanced this way as he opened the door of his car, stared a moment, got in and drove away.
“Man would like to know who the fuck around here owns a Jag-u-ar.”
Dennis watched the taillights going away.
“I don’t have any idea who it is.”
“You keep reminding me of that,” Robert said, “in case I forget.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dennis said. “I know he didn’t come by to see me.”
Robert said, “Dennis?”
“Yeah?”
“Look over here at me.”
Dennis turned his head.
“What?”
“That man gives you any shit, tell me.”
Dennis almost said it again, insisting he did not know the man. But he saw Robert’s expression, Robert’s cool showing, his confidence, Robert knowing things he didn’t have to be told, and it was strange, the feeling it gave him, that he could rely on this guy, the guy maybe drawing him into something, using him, but so what; he liked the feeling of not being on his own—standing exposed on the perch, the two rednecks looking up at him. Dennis said, “They waited till morning to lynch your great-granddaddy.”
“You know why?”
Dennis shook his head saying no.
“So a man from the newspaper could take pictures. Get all these white trash people standing there, some with grins on their ignorant faces, alongside Robert Taylor hanging from a tree, the way it’s mostly done. Can you see it?”
Dennis nodded.
“But then the photographer had an idea—the way photographers to this day fuck with you taking your picture, put you in poses that don’t make any sense. What they did, they took Robert Taylor down to a bridge over the Hatchie, the river east of here some, tied one end of the rope around his neck, the other end to the iron rail, and lifted him over the side. He’s hanging there in the picture naked, his neck broken, a bunch of people lining the rail.”
Dennis said, “You have the picture?”
“The one took it had postcards made and sold ’em for a penny apiece. Yeah, I have one.”
“You brought it with you?”
“Yes, I did.”
“You’re gonna show it to Mr. Kirkbride?”
There was Robert’s smile again, in the dark.
“Yes, I am.”
5
DENNIS ASKED IF CHARLIE HAD called and Vernice said, “He hardly ever does. I don’t have to worry about meals for him, so he comes and goes when he wants.” She said, “You’re hungry, aren’t you? There some Uncle Ben rice bowls in the fridge. There’s Teriyaki Chicken and some Lean Cuisines, different ones. The Chicken l’Orange’s my favorite.”
They were in the kitchen, Dennis at the table where she told him to sit down after working on his ladder all day. Vernice’s Georgia accent was slow-paced, but the words full and rich the way she rolled them out. Dennis at the table and Vernice with her back to him making toddies—Early Times over crushed ice and a sprinkle of sugar on top—in her Isle of Capri uniform, its short skirt tight around her rear end, which Dennis was staring at no more than three feet in front of him.
He wanted to know if Charlie had called Vernice and told her what happened. He wanted to know who the cowboy was and why he was here. And he wanted to know if Vernice and Charlie were old friends or if they were getting it on.
“He calls if he wants me to do something for him. Throw his T-shirts in the washer. He’ll wear ten’r twelve of those let’s-see-your-arm T-shirts before he thinks to wash ’em. I don’t ordinarily bother with him.”
“I thought you two were close.”
“Two months in a trailer, that was close encounters with a man never shuts up. Three months in this house I bought with my own money. I get tired of hearing him talk’s the thing. Couldn’t stand it in that little trailer, so I told him he had to go. It was at one of those Kirkbride Trailer Havens. Mr. Kirkbride’s making prefabs now, or whatever they are.”
“Manufactured homes,” Dennis said.
“You see ’em on the highway,” Vernice said, “they have that sign, ‘Extra Wide Load,’ on the back end? He’s putting up a mess of ’em right over here, calls it Southern Living Village. They’re not too bad. Dishwasher and microwave in the kitchen.”
“You know Kirkbride?”
“I’ve met him. He has an office at the Village, but he’s mostly in Corinth. I gave Charlie the end of the month to move out. He was broke, had no job or place to live, and I didn’t care.”
“Couldn’t stand him talking all the time.”
“Telling baseball stories if he didn’t have nothing else. What a star he was. All the big-name hitters he’d struck out. I said, ‘Honey, who gives a shit.’” Vernice turned from the counter with a drink in each hand. “Here, sweetheart, sip it, do you good. Let the bourbon work its way down your tired young body.”
Dennis took a sip and made a sound, Mmmmm, to show he liked it. He said, “I bet I’m older’n you are.”
Vernice said, “Well, of course you are,” sitting down at the table. “I tell Charlie he has to leave? This is when we’re living in the trailer. He says there’s a job waiting he knows he’s gonna get. Celebrity host at the Tishomingo. Oh? I said, ‘What qualifies you, being a relative of Big Chief Tishomingo, or a onetime famous ballplayer no one’s ever heard of?’ Charlie says he can go either way, talk the talk. I said, ‘Charlie, you ever get hired as a celebrity host, I’ll lose twenty pounds and get a job as a keno runner.’ You know what he said? ‘Better make it forty pounds.’” Vernice got up and went over to the counter to get her cigarettes. “I’ve always been full-figured, it runs in my family.” She came back to the table patting her tummy, holding it in. “Since then I’ve lost almost thirty pounds. I started out on what they call the Jenny Crank diet? If you know what I mean.”
“You’re on speed?”
“I said I started out on it. One weekend I painted every room in the house without stopping, day and night till it was done. I knew you could get hooked, so I quit.”
“Don’t lose any more,” Dennis said. “You look great.”
She said, “I do?”
He watched her sit at the table sideways to face him and cross her legs, showing him the whitest thighs he had ever seen. Just about any time he looked at Vernice he’d try to picture her naked.
“So Charlie talked his way into the job?”
“He goes to see Mr. Darwin and starts bragging how he can still pitch. Mr. Darwin says, ‘Okay, if you can strike me out you got the job.’ Charlie says he’ll do it on three pitches. Mr. Darwin says he’ll give him four. They get a kid to bring a ball and bat, meet at a field . . .” Vernice paused to light a cigarette.
“Charlie struck him out?”
“He threw one at him, trying to come inside? And Mr. Darwin had to hit the dirt to save his life.”
“He got the job anyway?”
“That’s what I asked him. ‘He hired you even though you knocked him down?’ You know what Charlie said? ‘Honey, it’s part of the game.’ He let Mr. Darwin hit one and got hired.”
Dennis said, “He’s a character.”
Vernice said, “He’s a pain in the butt. He comes in my bedroom asking can he use the treadmill you might’ve noticed in there? Before I know it he’s sitting on the side of my bed with his beer gut. You’re lucky, you have a nice trim body from swimming.”
“Divers don’t have to swim much.”
“You still have a nice physique.” She said, “Oh. I’ll be there to see you—I forgot to tell you, I start working at Tishomingo next week. Charli
e put in a good word with the human resources guy. Don’t you hate that, calling personnel human resources?”
“I think of bodies laid out in a stockroom,” Dennis said.
Vernice drew on her cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. “I start as a cocktail waitress. The outfit’s real skimpy—you’ve seen it—it looks like buckskin only it’s polyester with fringe. And you wear the headband with the feather sticking up? It’s cute.”
Dennis said, “If you’re gonna be there every day . . . I was thinking, how’d you like to be in my show?”
“You don’t mean dive.”
“Call the dives. You have a mike and you tell the audience what dive I’m gonna do next.”
“I’d have them, like on a sheet of paper?”
“Yeah, and things you can say to the crowd. Like, ‘You have to clap real hard if you want Dennis to hear you, way up there eighty feet in the air.’”
“What do I wear?”
“Whatever you want.”
“When would I start?”
“Tomorrow night. They’re gonna televise it.”
“Really?”
“It’s in the local paper and there’re posters around town.”
“I know, ‘From the Cliffs of Acapulco to Tunica . . .’ But tomorrow night, you’re not giving me much time.”
“Charlie said he’d do it if I don’t find a good-looking girl. You want to think about it?”
Vernice sipped her drink and smoked.
“I have to let Charlie know,” Dennis said. “Give him time to look at the script. Shouldn’t he be back pretty soon?”
“He sees any new faces in the bar, he’ll hang around to tell baseball stories.”
“I got a ride,” Dennis said. “We pulled up, I saw a car drive away. I thought Charlie might’ve come and gone.”
“No, it was that shitbird Arlen Novis stopped by to see Charlie.”
“A friend of Charlie’s?”
“Maybe at one time. Arlen was a sheriff’s deputy till he went to prison for extortion. He’d make bail bondsmen give him a cut of their fee or he wouldn’t okay the bond. They also had him for accepting payoffs from drug dealers. I don’t know, either they couldn’t make a case or it was part of a deal he made. Plead guilty to the extortion and testify against the sheriff, he’d only do a couple years. The sheriff’s doing thirty years on those same charges.”