The Heavenly Table(96)

Screaming another obscenity, Sugar kicked the bucket again, and Lester drew his revolver. “I’m tellin’ you for the last time,” he warned, “settle down.”

“But you surely don’t believe him, do ye?” Sugar said.

Glancing over, Lester saw that Mrs. Grady was still watching from her window. She was bound to cause trouble if he didn’t make an arrest, and, though he figured Pollard was lying through his teeth, he couldn’t prove it. “Well, unless you got a paper or something saying that he hired you,” he said, “I don’t have no—” Just then, Sugar saw the barkeep wink, and he went crazy, lunging past the cop and trying to jerk the door open to get at the dirty bastard. “That’s it!” Lester yelled, sticking the barrel of his gun in the black man’s face. “You’re goin’ to jail.” He clapped a set of tarnished handcuffs on Sugar’s wrists and shoved him toward the car.

“You ain’t gonna allow him to sit his ass on your seats like that, are ye?” Pollard said. “Covered in shit like he is?”

The lawman thought for a minute, then said to his prisoner, “You’ll have to stand on the running board.” They both heard Pollard start chuckling, and Sugar turned to stare at him, his eyeballs bulging with hate. He didn’t know how long he’d stick around this cow town, but he vowed right then and there that the last thing he would do before he left was burn this motherf*cker’s bar down. When they arrived at the jail, the cop made him empty his pockets in the parking lot out back. “What’s this for?” Lester asked, pointing at the razor. Sugar shrugged. “Shaving.” Not in the mood to waste any more time messing around with a penniless vagrant when he could be out looking for real lawbreakers, Lester didn’t bother questioning him any further about it, even though the man didn’t look like he’d done much grooming as of late. He was, however, concerned about the smell from Pollard’s shitter causing trouble among the other jailbirds, simply because it would give them something new to whine about, so he allowed Sugar a couple of minutes to wash off in a bucket of water before leading him down the hall toward the cells. As they passed a bulletin board on which was pinned a copy of the Jewett Gang wanted poster, he said to the cop, “Those dirty dogs held me up the other day.”

“Sure they did,” Lester said.

“No, really, they did. Took my hat.”

Lester shook his head. “Whatever you say, pal.” It was common knowledge among lawmen that when it came to criminal types, the more miserable and luckless they were, the more grandiose and numerous their lies and fantasies. Did this f*cker really think that he’d believe the most notorious band of outlaws to emerge since the James Gang would bother stealing a hat that a colored boy wore, especially one who used a goddamn vine to hold his pants up?

In the cell across from Sugar’s was a country preacher by the name of Jimmy Beulah. He was dressed in a pair of baggy dress pants with a wrinkled white shirt buttoned tight around his neck. After a while, Sugar asked him, “What they got you in here for? Stealin’ from the collection plate?”

“Attempted murder,” Beulah replied blandly, brushing away one of the many flies that had followed the new prisoner in. “What about yourself?”

The man’s answer took him a little by surprise, but Sugar figured he was probably trying to bullshit him, maybe scare him into giving up his supper or something. But even if he was, and the f*cker turned out to be no more than a public nuisance or a petty thief, Sugar still wasn’t about to admit that he was behind bars simply for cleaning out a sonofabitch’s shithouse and being played the fool. He hemmed and hawed around a bit, mostly cursing the cop, and then, instead of answering the question, asked the preacher another: “Who’d ye try to kill?”

“According to them, it was some soldier,” Beulah said. “To be honest, I don’t really remember.”

“Oh,” Sugar said. Jesus, he thought, maybe he wasn’t lying after all. “Why not?”

“I get like that when I drink,” Beulah answered. “Why, I even forget the End Times is a-comin’ if I get enough in me.”

“End Times,” Sugar repeated. “My mother used to talk about them.”

“She was a God-fearin’ woman, your mother?”

“All her life,” Sugar said, recalling the number of times that he’d heard her in the other room of the house praying for his soul, fervently at first, but then, as he got older, not so much. He realized suddenly that he’d been the one who had worn her out, and that she’d been right to shut the door on him.

“Remind me again,” Beulah said. “What is it you’re in here for?”

Sugar spent a silent minute retracing the events of the last week or so in his mind. He thought again about Flora and her f*cking boyfriend, and the bloody white woman on the kitchen floor, and the promise he had made to God on the roadside after he found his bowler shot to pieces, the promise he had broken the first chance he got. And he knew that as soon as he got out of here, he’d break another if he made one, and continue to do so until one disaster or another finished him off for good. He saw the preacher looking at him, waiting for a reply. But instead of giving him one, he rolled over in his bunk and went to sleep.





56


AT SIX O’CLOCK that evening, Chimney left the Warner to meet his brothers in the park. He was wearing his goggles and duster and holding the leather driving gloves in one hand. Thoughts of Matilda had preoccupied him all day, and he was in a hurry to get out to the Whore Barn to see her again. He had burned up two tanks of gasoline driving the Ford around and remembering the way her lips curled back when he slipped inside her, the way she had patiently talked him through his first clumsy attempts. To kill more time, he had gone back to O’Malley’s for another shave, but the barber took one look at his face, still as smooth as when he’d left the shop yesterday, and just splashed a dime’s worth of lotion on his neck. “Well, did ye get ye any woolly jaw last night?” he asked Chimney.