The Heavenly Table (22 page)

After checking the rest of Itchy’s usual haunts, Jasper had gone back and finished the job at Mrs. Fetter’s. He didn’t have any choice, really; the woman’s daughter was getting married over the weekend, and they had promised that the shithouse would be in tip-top shape for the guests. Just by luck, Paint Street was closed off at the paper mill because of a gas leak, and the only way to get through to the dump with Gyp and the honey wagon was to take the alley that ran behind the Blind Owl. And that’s how he finally found Itchy, an old tarp slung over him and beaten to a pulp just a few feet from the bar’s back door. Jasper had taken him back to his own house, put him to bed in his mother’s old room. Doc Hamm did his best to patch him up, but it was touch and go there for a while. For the entire four days he was unconscious, Jasper never left his side except to feed and water Gyp. And then, on the fifth morning, the old man opened his eyes and asked for a drink of water. He never did remember anything about that night, though Jasper was fairly certain he knew what had happened, and it didn’t have anything to do with a troll camped out under a bridge.

After the sanitation inspector delivered the warning and ran out the door, Pollard locked up and went to the back room to check on the man he’d had chained to the floor next to his cot for the past four days. He’d pried his nose off with a bottle opener an hour ago; and he sat down on the bed and told him it wouldn’t be much longer, that he was going to finish him off with an axe tonight. He went on talking, though he wasn’t sure the man was capable of listening anymore. “You make number seven,” Pollard said. “A lot of people consider that a lucky number, but I bet they’d change their minds if they saw you right now, wouldn’t they?” He lingered awhile longer, eating a can of bully beef while he looked over his work. Then he went back out front, served a few drinks to some winder boys getting primed to start the second shift over at the paper mill.

As far as the man in the back room went, he’d been beyond caring after the second day in the chains. His name was Johansson, and he was a carpenter from Indiana who specialized in fine joinery and loved to square dance, but after tonight, he would just be a pile of dumb pieces. Around three or four in the morning, Pollard would bag up everything he wasn’t keeping and carry it over to Paint Creek. Standing on the bank shaking out the bloody burlap sacks and watching the slop float away in the dark water, he would picture some of it making it via the Ohio all the way to Cairo, Illinois, and from there down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, the soft parts eventually passing through a hundred fish guts, the bones scattered perhaps as far as the cold, deep Atlantic. And for just a few minutes, with the stars ticking in his ears like bombs and the air rubbing against his skin like sandpaper, he would find himself slowly building to an ecstatic orgasm, as if some beautiful angel was reaching down out of the heavens and touching him with a knowing hand in all the right places.

29

T
HE POSSE FROM
Russell, their horses wrung out and the last of their liquor gone and the storekeeper getting on their nerves with his countless retelling of his brazen confrontation with the outlaws, returned to town two days later, half drunk and empty-handed. No sooner had the bleary and disappointed clerk walked into his house than his wife showed him a new poster issued just that morning stating that Kentucky was upping the reward for the Jewett Gang an additional five hundred dollars. “God Almighty,” he said, “I better go get the boys rounded back up.”

“Now wait a minute, Wilbur,” she said. “Why let any of those fools have a share of it? There’s only the three of them, and you done winged the one, right?” She grabbed his hands and looked pleadingly into his eyes. “Just think about it, the new life all that money could buy.” He stood for a long moment looking past her out the window at his brood of rickety brats playing listlessly around the front stoop. One of them, his namesake no less, was eating dirt again, and he was the healthiest one of the bunch. How would he ever pay Mr. Haskins for his rifle when he couldn’t even keep his own family fed? He remembered again what the sonofabitch had said as he strutted out the door: “That’s between you and this Mister feller you keep going on about.” His wife was right. To share an opportunity like this when he was in such wretched straits would be downright madness. Townsfolk would talk about him for years, about how he went back out on his own to hunt the bandits down that very same afternoon, barely taking the time to swallow some cold hash and trade in his old plug for a fresh one at Jim Flannery’s livery, talking gibberish about having an important appointment at some crossroads somewhere.

—

I
T WASN’T LONG
before the Jewetts were on the move again. Hardly believing his luck that he’d found them, the storekeeper had managed to get within a hundred feet of the house before Chimney spied him over the rim of his coffee cup through the porch vines. Now he lay sprawled in the mass of rosebushes around the well, his spectacles still cocked crooked on his face, a .303 bullet from the Lee-Enfield having split his brave but foolish heart into two nearly equal pieces of pulpy muscle. He had toppled into the briars just as a light rain began to fall. Cane and Chimney then circled the perimeter of the property searching for other members of the posse, but all they found was a lone horse covered with sores tied to a tree fifty yards into the woods. The animal had been on its way to the glue factory when the clerk rushed into Flannery’s yelling that he needed a new mount. “Not worth keeping,” Chimney said, looking the spindly nag over. He pulled off the saddle and bridle and cut it loose. Then they headed back to where the dead man lay. Inside one of his pockets, along with a handful of shells and two dirty hoecakes, they found the updated wanted poster.

Cane kept glancing up to scan the tree line as he read the latest offer. They were now accused of three times as many murders as they had actually committed, and robbing twice as many banks. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the torching of an old folks’ home in Gainesville, Florida, and the vicious defilement of two virgin sisters with a wooden crucifix outside of Waynesboro, Virginia, had also been added to their list of crimes. He folded the paper and stuck it in his pocket. The rain picked up a little more. “I’d say we better get out of here tonight,” he said. “If some damn store clerk can find us, it’s hard to tell what’s comin’ next.” Passing Chimney one of the corn cakes, he started to bite into the other one before he realized what he was doing. He slung it to the ground and stepped on it; and for a brief second he was recalling the time that Pearl stomped Chimney’s biscuit on the floor, not long before he passed.

“But what about Cob?”

“Don’t have no choice,” Cane said. “We’ll just have to take it slow.”

Chimney stuffed the corn cake into his mouth and bent down to pry the Winchester from the clerk’s hands. “I think I’ll hang on to this.”

“Jesus Christ, brother, we already got enough guns to start a goddamn army.”

“We might need to before this is over.”

“Well, I hope that poor bastard took better care of it than he did his horse,” Cane said.

“I doubt it,” Chimney said. “You’d have to be an idiot to try what he did.”

“Aw, you can’t blame him,” Cane said, just as a loud clap of thunder shook the air and the rain turned into a steady downpour. “Fifty-five hundred dollars, that much money would fuck any man’s head up.”

Thirty minutes later, as they started away from the farmhouse in the gray storm light, Cob looked down with feverish eyes from his horse at the storekeeper’s wet corpse caught in the briars, his face turned up at the sky, and his open mouth overflowing with rainwater like some obscene fountain. “It’s funny,” he muttered.

“What’s that?” Cane asked.

“I was just a-thinkin’ that one of the very last things I said to that man ’fore he shot me was I hoped we got some rain. And now look at him.”

30

F
ROM TIME TO
time during that period, Jasper saw a couple of the men who sat on the city council stop by the Whore Barn, men who were always casting complaints about him shutting down this or that well or shithouse like he was some sort of despot lording it over the citizenry, when all he was trying to do was the job he’d been assigned. He had met up with the worst one of them just yesterday, Sandy Saunders. Dressed in a tailored blue serge suit and swinging a new cane, the insurance salesman started to pass by silently, with a look of disdain bordering on revulsion, as if the sanitation inspector were nothing but a maggot or a bit of offal stuck to the bottom of one of his custom-made shoes. However, when Jasper stopped in the middle of the sidewalk three or four feet in front of him and grinned, Saunders couldn’t resist a smart remark. “What say, shit scooper?” He tapped his cane on the sidewalk, then struck a rakish pose as he saw a couple of young ladies approaching.

“I wouldn’t call me that no more if I was you,” Jasper replied, the smile plastered on his face growing even wider.

“Oh,” Saunders said with a laugh, “and why not, you little turd?”

Moving closer, Jasper waited until the women walked on by, then said, “Because I saw you over at the Whore Barn the other night. Sucking on the toes of the fat one got the grease dabbed all over her face. And you a-courtin’ that nice daughter of Mr. Chapman’s and blowin’ off to everyone about how you’re gonna run for mayor next fall. That’s why, Sandy. From now on, you either start calling me Mr. Cone, or I’ll tell the whole goddamn town about ye.”

For at least a minute, Saunders stood speechless, staring openmouthed at the inspector. His face turned a ghostly white, then a bright red, and finally a deep angry purple. “You’re…you’re crazy,” he finally managed to sputter.

Jasper winked and started to move on. “I might be,” he said over his shoulder, “but at least I’m not payin’ money to lick a whore’s dirty feet.”

Even though he had finally turned the tables on Saunders, his most vocal critic and one of the snootiest pricks to ever come out of Ross County, Jasper was still rattled by the encounter. Because it was the only thing that soothed him when he became upset, he hurried home right after work and took his buffalo gun out of the closet in his bedroom, where he kept it wrapped in an old quilt. Sitting down on the bed in front of a tall mirror, he wiped the long, heavy rifle down with a rag dampened with Hoppe’s Solvent. He began talking to himself as he did so, glancing in the mirror from time to time, pretending that someone was seated across from him listening. “So this Jasper feller,” he said to his reflection, “he decided his town had been dirty long enough and it was time to clean it up, and the first thing he did was go over to Sandy Saunders’s office on Paint Street and, BOOM, he shot the dirty snake’s head off with a buffalo gun his daddy bought at an auction one time up in Frankfort, and, by God, you should have seen the look on the sonofabitch’s face right before ol’ Jasper pulled the trigger, and his brains splattered like red mud against the wall. And then he walked over to the jail and killed both those Wallingford boys and their old man just because they’d let everything go to hell, and then he blasted a hole the size of a…” He talked on and on like this for quite a while, assassinating various city leaders and other higher-ups, ridding the town of filth and corruption once and for all. He was being hailed a hero when he realized he was at it again, losing himself in a fantasy that he kept wishing he had the courage to carry out. Though he did so with regret, he stopped abruptly in the middle of a speech being given by some big-breasted matron in which she was extolling his high morals and princely virtues. She was standing on a stage in the newly renamed Cone Park. Draped behind her was a banner that had the image of a buffalo gun sewn on it, and in the front row sat his father, alive and well and hardly aged at all.

After sitting for a few minutes staring at his now silent image in the mirror, he wrapped the gun in the blanket and stuck it back in the closet. Then he dropped his pants, undid his truss. A thin shaft of yellow sunlight swirling with dust motes shone through a crack in the curtains. Taking out his cock, the bane of his existence and his cross to carry for as long as he walked the earth, he wrapped both hands around it and whipped it against the side of the oak dresser until he wept. He finally quit beating it and took a bloody leak in a bucket sitting in the corner and bunched it back up in his pants. Exhausted by his efforts, he went downstairs and drank a glass of water, then curled up on his mother’s couch and went to sleep with all her old plaster saints watching over him with sadness and understanding and compassion, as saints are wont to do.

31

T
WO DAYS AFTER
killing the store clerk from Russell, the brothers came to a high granite bluff overlooking a wide river. A mile or so to the west, they could just make out, in the early morning fog, a train crossing over the water on a covered bridge; and to the east, they watched a coal-fired barge come around a curve, pulling a load of raw lumber. They had been riding hard all night. To Chimney’s dismay, most of the arsenal they had collected had to be dumped in a pond after the packhorse split a hoof and couldn’t keep up. A group of men, a dozen or more in number, had been gaining on them steadily. Yesterday evening Cane had caught a whiff of their cook fire as they came up out of a steep, rocky ravine they had hidden in all day. While he pushed forward with a weak and feverish Cob, Chimney had slipped up close to their camp and listened to them as they ate and drunkenly bragged about what they would do with the criminals after they killed them. From what he could gather, a bearded man that the others called Captain was the leader. Sitting on a campstool, he wore an old blue coat with tarnished braids on the shoulders, and a tall hat decorated with shiny bits of foil and a plume of peacock feathers. “As long as we got their heads as proof for the bounty, I don’t give a good goddamn what you do,” he heard him say. “Fuck ’em in the ass for all I care.”

“By God, Cap, that’s a grand idea,” another man said. “Many women as they’ve raped, them sonsofbitches deserve a good cornholing.”