gun.”
“Hmmm, now Buck, I’m trying to figure this out. How about your boss? If I give you ten days this time, is he going to fire you?”
“Naw. Hell, you know I’m just a flunky, anyway. Any high school numb-nuts can stack that lumber just a good as I can. ’Sides, I done got enough ahead of the job to where I could sit on my big fat for a few days so I guess I can sit as well in jail as I can sit on the job. ’Sides that, when I’m in your jail, you got to feed me. Out there on the job, ain’t nobody gonna feed me, so ten days will be fine.”
“Okay, Buck Beckner. I hereby sentence you to ten days in jail for being drunk. Case dismissed.”
The cop was tapping me on the shoulder. “Let’s go,” he said.
Chapter 6
Buck, and I, both fell into line behind him, as he led us back to the cell block. Ten days. Was that a standard sentence for drunks and guys like me? Fiddlesticks. Yeah, fiddlesticks, and old childhood expression, always used when something went wrong. As I grew older, I learned to use the many expressions of the fuck word, and the shit word. Humans. We have a way of twisting things. Yeah, even a reason for making it a crime to stop a man from beating you up.
“Well?” It was old Charlie. He and the others were all sitting at the card table, and they were all looking at us, when the cop let us through the door.
“Usual,” Buck said, “and he hit Jake with a dime too.”
“Cocksucker,” and it was like a chorus coming from the card table. The mayor seemed to be an unpopular guy.
I dropped into one of the spaces around the table. “Ever heard of a man named Marcello?” I said to Charlie.
He didn’t answer right off. Just sort of sat there silent, like maybe studying the question. Buck who had sat down beside him said something, but Charlie put up his hand, motioning him to silence.
“Moneyman,” Charlie said. “Owns the casino. A lot of stories about him. What’s true, and what ain’t, nobody knows. I’d probably say he’s a disliked person. Why you want to know?”
“One of the guys I attended to over at Turner’s saloon yesterday was named Abe Roster, and the cop said he worked for Marcello. Just thought there might be some kind of connection between the mayor’s assessment of my actions, regarding my refusal to rent a barstool, and his decision to turn the whole shebang into a big mistake on my part. And that he only gave me ten days.”
“You pissed because he didn’t give you a bigger sentence?” He was grinning and so were Buck and Willy Smith.
“No,” I said. “See, every winter I spend a lot of my nights in flophouses. See, with the work I do, I can’t save enough to afford a motel every night, so I use the flophouses.”
“Trouble is, man, it gets colder than old billy hell up north, and the flophouses run you out early. So, I go to the library and I do a lot of reading, and some books I use are legal books. Now what that means is that I have a fair knowledge of legal jargon, and the way the courts work.”
“In the saloon, I put three guys in the hospital. Here we can add another two. Boys, that’s not just a small time. I should have got more time. The mayor was trying to please somebody, while trying not to hurt me too bad. At first, I was pissed at him. Later, I might just owe him one.”
“Well kiss my patootie,” Charlie laughed. “You’re about as devious as you are bloody. But yeah, you might be right. See, nobody likes our mayor, but nobody ever claimed he was dumb. If he’s in Marcello’s pocket it wouldn’t come as any surprise.”
“Lots of others are,” Buck put in. “But you may as well get happy about your sentence. You will be right here with me for the next ten days and there ain’t no changing it.”
“Crap,” I said. “Ten stinking days.”
Charlie’s answer was another laugh, followed by Buck and Willy’s. “It’ll go fast,” he said. “Heck now, just think of it. We got plenty of sex, religion, and politics to talk about and we ain’t about to use all that up in a measly ten days.”
“Hey,” Buck said. I ain’t even finished my tale about ole Hunt Morgan, and his rip roaring raiders. Would you believe that he escaped from those Yankees that put him in jail?”
“Escaped?”
“Bet your butt. See, what those Yankees didn’t figure on was the copper-heads, and they be the ones that got him out, and got him, and all his men down to the river, and across right around Bel Pre.
“Hold on a second. What the heck is a copperhead?” I asked.
“I done forgot that you’re a stranger here. A Copperhead is a guy that didn’t believe in the war. That don’t mean they loved niggers. They were just plumb dead set against killing their relatives. A whole hell of a lot of them had kinfolk living in the South. On top of that, we all knew how niggers like to rape white ladies and we were against that too.”
“I’m getting the idea that you’re a copperhead,” I said, and I made sure I was grinning when I said it.”
“Bet your butt. Ain’t no secret about it. Now I wasn’t here back then, but it’s still the same, only now the darkies want to be white. Damn fools detest their own skin so much, that they got to turn it white, only now, they don’t have to rape so many white girls cause the bible toters and Jesus junkies got everybody believing that those niggers ain’t animals.”
“You’d have made a good rebel general,” Charlie said.
“Yeah, you can bet your butt on that one,” Buck agreed.
I was still curious. I hadn’t been in this burg long enough to know anything about it. All I’d seen was the railroad, a bunch of rubbers, and the police station. Still, I could see that the town was in two separate parts separated by the railroad. How did it happen? Since Buck seemed to be the local historian, I just asked him.
“How long has the railroad separated this town in half?”
“Huh. Since long before the Civil War. Back then, from everything I’ve read, the railroads, ‘cause they were all big money men, had the government by the ass and did just about anything they wanted to.
“From Turner Avenue to Wills Creek was one big hill, just like all the other hills in Guernsey County. Right next to Turner Avenue was our first graveyard, where all the old folks that started this county are laid.
“Well, that fuckin railroad came in here with a god dammed steam shovel, and chopped down that hill and damn near ruined the graveyard until the locals got to raising too much hell about it. They just needed the extra tracks for a siding, but they built a station house, where a guy can buy a ticket on their passenger trains, and I’ve heard it said that they also built the viaduct over the tracks and the creek.
“Only thing good about it I remember is that back during the 1929 depression people could go along the tracks and pick up pieces of spilled coal that fell off the railroad cars.”
Chapter 7
Over the space of my sentence, I became
