The Devil's Good Boys, page 81
“What is this stuff?” I asked. “I haven't had a chance to look.”
“The manuscript is by Dorothy Kilgallen. It’s for a book entitled Murder One that’s been out for a year or so. I went out and bought a copy. The manuscript has a long, unpublished chapter on the conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy. I'm reading it now.”
That rocked me. Tuffy and I hadn't told her about our reporter pal's planned article, or Kilgallen's investigation into Kennedy’s murder.
“What's the other thing?”
“It's a private diary, baby. It belonged to some woman I never heard of named Mary Pinchot Meyer. She was an artist who lived in D.C. and had a love affair with President Kennedy. It's torrid, I’m telling you! Lots of salacious detail! I mean, holy cow! Reminds me of you and me – except nobody has ever been as intense as we are. The entries in the diary stopped suddenly... I think she might have died.”
Blackjack McGrath hired a second-year Lutheran seminary student from Ethiopia named Ezekiel Mesewa as a cook's helper. A white cook was his preference, of course. His problem: The Caucasian short-order wizards around town were in mortal fear of slinging hash in a combat zone. Ezekiel, on the other hand, wasn’t afraid of much of anything. Frankly, I was amazed we'd held onto our dishwashers and most of our teenage waitresses.
Ezekiel was very black, stood five-eleven and weighed maybe a buck sixty. He sported a magnificently hooked Semitic nose that would have been perfect in that recent Peter O'Toole movie, Lawrence of Arabia. His bearing was proud, scholarly and thoughtful, except for an occasional, raucous explosion of laughter that always startled me. He seemed amused by the screwy McGraths and the low-end restaurant that owned us.
Ezekiel's and my work were officiously superintended by the old man from a bar stool between the screen door and pizza oven – the exact bad-karma spot where Major Spiker intercepted two McGrath .45 bullets in his right shoulder.
Tuffy burst through the screen door from outside, startling all of us and causing the old man and me to grab for guns. She was five minutes late, barefooted and carrying her shoes. Cursed with painful fallen arches, Tuffy didn't take well to footwear that lacked expensive arch supports – not easily available in Gettysburg in 1966.
Her near-constant warm-weather barefoot condition rankled the old man.
“One foot, two-foot, slue-foot …!” he chanted, ending with the N-word and “-foot. “Misery, get your shoes on! You're late!”
Ezekiel gave a tiny start at the old man's heedless racial slur. Our new assistant cook must have needed this job very badly. “A-hah!” laughed young Charlie the dishwasher, firing up a Chesterfield. “'One foot, two-foot, slue-foot …!' I'll remember that!” Associating with the McGraths might shipwreck this kid.
“Charlie,” I told him, “take my advice, damn it! Don't remember that. Don’t ever say it!”
“A-hah! Haw! Haw!”
Meanwhile, the old man’s attention was focused on Tuffy. “Misery, I've come to a decision. Instead of paying for a big, expensive wedding when you finally trap some poor fool into marrying you, I'm giving you permission to elope...”
“Daddy, damn it! I'm not even dating!”
This he dismissed as irrelevant. “To sweeten the pot, I'm giving the unlucky bridegroom a thousand dollars. But to collect, he's got to show me a signed and notarized marriage certificate.”
“Gee, Daddy,” Tuffy pulled on her shoes, trying hard to conceal the hurt in her eyes and voice. “I don't know what to say.”
She pushed through the swinging double doors into the dining room. Ezekiel appeared dismayed and glanced at me. Charlie haw-hawed again, entertained by this latest bizarre and insensitive exchange. The old man was regaining his pre-gunshot, grizzly-killer stride.
Pleased with himself, he trotted out one of his most racially offensive jokes.
“Ezekiel,” he said, “I've been asking myself what I would choose if I could be any race or nationality on earth. What do you suppose I decided?''
Ezekiel’s smile was wary. “I have no idea, Mister Blackjack.”
“I'd be half colored and half Jew,” said Blackjack McGrath.
I cringed. Surprising me, Ezekiel seemed delighted.
“And why is that, Mr. Blackjack?”
“Because a colored man is happy if he's got two nickels to rub together. And a skinflint Jew always has two nickels.”
The old man chuckled. This was the apotheosis of great humor, at least to him. I was embarrassed. We were gonna lose our new cook! Ezekiel, to my astonishment, took no offense. “In that case, Mr. Blackjack, your choice is to become … me!”
The old man's grin was replaced by perplexity. “Why's that?”
“Because, Mr. Blackjack, I am a Hebrew!”
“Bullshit, Ezekiel!” the old man protested. “You're a colored! Anybody can see you aren't a Jew.”
“Oh, assuredly you are in error, Mr. Blackjack. While I am indeed a black man, I am descended from the ancient Hebrew tribe of Levi. My ancestors fled to Ethiopia bearing the Holy Ark of the Covenant stolen from Solomon's Temple almost three thousand years ago. That was in the reign of the backslidden King Manasseh. So, I am both Negro and Hebrew. I was a member of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church until I became a Lutheran.”
Ezekiel beamed. “The blood of kings, Hebrew priests, Ethiopian lion men, and holy warriors of God – perhaps even that of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba themselves – flows in my veins, Mr. Blackjack. Mine is the holy bloodline of the Messiah! The earth’s noblest heritage!”
The old man was speechless. I don't know what kind of reaction he'd expected from his new cook, but this wasn't it. Ezekiel reached into his trousers and offered for inspection a pocketful of change.
“Also, Mr. Blackjack, I am a happy man. I have two nickels.”
Eyes narrow and suspicious, the old man wordlessly dismounted from his bar stool and went out to the snack bar to draw root beers for a brace of grubby neighborhood kids. These pint-sized mendicants held him up at least twice a week for free Cokes and root beers, and the old man had nicknamed them Buckshot and Hipshot.
Dehydrated and needing a glass of water, I followed him. Just then, Professor G.W. Paulson burst in. Resembling a very black Hobbit of the Shire out of J.R.R. Tolkien, he was in a state of high dudgeon and fearlessly confronted the old man:
“McGrath! I parked on Codori Street, and through your screen door I heard that alarming conversation with your beautiful young daughter! Followed, I must add, by the equally horrifying racist exchange with your cook! Appalling, sir, appalling!”
“So, now you're eavesdropping on us, Professor Paulson?” the old man replied cheerfully.
“Eavesdropping? Eavesdropping! Good heavens, man! Nobody has to eavesdrop! The riot, pandemonium and bigoted clamor from this chaotic establishment is there for the world to hear, McGrath! It beggars credulity!”
“You're saying you enjoyed it?” The old man grinned.
“No! I have a question for you, McGrath! When will you cease your infernal Gone with the Wind cotton plantation racism and war mongering, sir?”
“Not in this life, Professor Paulson,” Blackjack McGrath replied. “So, let's get down to cases. How many cheese-steak subs do you want? How about side dishes? Hominy? Fatback? Black-eyed peas? Possum belly? Watermelon rind? Okra?”
Blackjack smiled, thinking that was funny. Professor Paulson sucked in his breath, outrage ramping up.
“I will not dignify that, McGrath! Make me two subs, sir! Just the way you always make them! No hominy, watermelon, fatback, possum belly or okra, thank you very much! They are not on your menu, sir! And hold the offensive stereotyped racist jibes!”
Leaving them to it and shaking my head, I returned to the kitchen. I piled sliced onions and thin strips of beefsteak on the grill for Professor Paulson's subs, oiled them down and slapped a lid on the works. Ezekiel, in a low voice, said, “If you don't mind my saying so, Mister Gifford, your father is quite a character.”
“A character? Holy hell, that is one way of putting it, Ezekiel! Welcome to the crazy ship McGrath.”
“Why does your father call you Hammerhead and your sister Misery?”
“Terms of endearment? Who knows? Name calling toughens people up, makes ‘em bulletproof, that's what he believes. At least, I think that’s what he believes; he’s never told me, exactly. Before long, he'll probably invent an insulting nickname for you, too.”
“Then I would be thrice blessed, Mr. Gifford.”
“Oh, right!”
The old man's persistent racism was almost unendurable. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. daily risked death in that summer of ’66 campaigning to end the scandalous Jim Crow segregation and lynchings that had been features of the Old South since the Civil War. Meanwhile, here was the barbaric Blackjack McGrath, far from the fray, cracking the most offensive racist jokes he could think up. That hit home with me the year before I headed off to college. Several white college and seminary students, regular customers, took a train south during spring break to join Dr. King in a freedom march. Fewer college kids had cars in those bygone days, and two of those students were intercepted and savagely beaten in a Mississippi rail depot. On their return to G-burg, one on crutches the other with a broken arm, the old man had laughed at them. He thought that was a real knee-slapper.
Given the times, those two college kids were fortunate to survive. That year, a trio of civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi and their bodies hidden. The FBI was unable to close the case or find the bodies, so a mob enforcer was brought aboard to help lay the case to rest. Not exactly Sherlock Holmes, this hairy-knuckled thug’s investigative technique consisted of jamming a gun barrel into the right eye of an in-the-know white supremacist and ordering him to cooperate, or else.
The frightened cracker led the G-men to the remains.
“Shortly after we came down here from Alaska,” I told Ezekiel, “I broke my ankle. I was eleven years old and off my feet for weeks. I sat around reading Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, watching TV, and gaining weight from inactivity. So, the old man gave me a nickname. I was no longer Gifford – my new name was Guts.”
Ezekiel considered that. “Did that toughen you up?”
“Ultimately, yeah, I suppose it did.”
It took more than a year to figure out what to do about my chubby condition and the hated nickname. I was a little kid, after all. And unlike Truman Vernam at the same age, I wasn't yet reading Jean-Paul Sartre and Camus.
Shortly after my twelfth birthday, profoundly sick of my self-image and the insults, I began a daily regimen of sit-ups, pull-ups and push-ups. The pre-adolescent baby fat melted off like candle wax. The other upside for me was, my workouts alarmed the old man and Mama. Even the genius editors at Reader's Digest hadn't prepared them for a pre-teen muscle builder. They ordered me to stop, so I did my workouts in secret. When I hit adolescence, my bedroom took on the aroma of a locker room, and that, too, whizzed them off. Thus commenced an undeclared war of wills between me and my parents.
“On behalf,” I told Ezekiel, “of the rest of the Mighty McGraths, I apologize for the old man's insensitive racist jokes.”
“Oh,” Ezekiel said, “that did not offend me, Mr. Gifford. I am quite proud of my heritage.”
Maxine hit the bell and hung up a slip. Ezekiel and I busied ourselves putting out an order and finishing up Professor Paulson's subs. Ezekiel, as he worked, said, “As you know, Mr. Gifford, the holy Bible tells us that everyone is descended from eight people on Noah's ark. The Deluge was perhaps 4,430 years ago, and I am firmly convinced that all human beings are of one race. You might say we are cousins, although educated folk today do not believe the Great Flood was an actual event or we are one family. The Apostle Paul in Colossians instructs sons and daughters to honor their fathers and mothers and admonishes fathers, 'Do not provoke your children lest they become discouraged.'”
That made me laugh. “Discouraged?” I said. “Blackjack McGrath would tell ol’ Saint Paul that a kid who gets discouraged is a cupcake. He’d say it’s a parent's responsibility to provoke his children.”
I also doubted that my old man would buy into the idea that we're all cousins. This conversation made me think of a joke I’d heard: Br’er Noah, builder of the ark, was the world’s first conspiracy theorist. Until it started to rain.
Tuffy burst into the kitchen and hung up an order.
“Got your shoes on?” I asked, easily falling into the role of thoughtless teenage asshole and chip off the old block.
“Don't start up with me, Muscle Brain!” she yelled, still smarting over Blackjack McGrath's thousand-dollar offer. “I will kill you in your sleep!”
Holy shit!
Charlie hooted as she banged through the swinging doors into the dining room. “I'll kill you in your sleep,” he repeated. “A-hah! Haw! Haw! I love it – I'm gonna remember that one, too.”
Chapter Nineteen
Shanghai McGrath
Present Day
With Barnabas McGrath off to the wars, the Estoque experienced a period of blessed tranquility. Kingsley's staff moved back into the guest house and resumed work; their salaries, Shanghai was told, were automatically paid out of a dedicated bank account. What they earned must have been substantial to keep them on the job, even given everything they'd been through.
These people, confided Tamiym, also feared betraying their employer. She moved back into her quarters and resumed supervision of Kingsley's recovery. Meanwhile, the security team left by Col. Hawser set up its headquarters in three pre-fabricated buildings near the guest house. They banged together a defensive wall of old-growth red fir boards, sandbags and cinder blocks to surround it.
An amused Shanghai began calling the ranch headquarters Fort Estoque.
The team consisted of lean, bearded operators with multiple combat tours in the Middle East. Tough, dangerous dudes wearing steel Rolex Submariners and tactical handguns by FNX, Wilson, Ed Brown, Nighthawk, Staccato and Sig, all concealed under untucked shirts outside their blue jeans.
Juliette seemed trapped in some sort of vortex. Her dusty Stetson was developing a pronounced sweat stain, her nose was sunburned, and her hands were chapped from work and the parched desert air. She began wearing leather gloves to spare them further damage.
During the day, she and Shanghai were together almost constantly; at night her lovemaking was desperate. Despite repeated vows to quit, Juliette went through at least a pack of cigarettes a day, the result of tension brought on by the horrific violence she'd witnessed or been party to.
The cigarettes embarrassed her and she tried to conceal her addiction. Increasingly, Juliette called to mind the young ranch women Shanghai had grown up around – tough talking, iron-assed rodeo queens, princesses, and barrel racers, comfortable around horses, cattle, uncurried buckaroos, and raucous, beer-tavern Friday and Saturday nights.
Juliette told him she preferred to stay on at the Estoque and continue her Butch and Sundance project.
“You can hang around here forever, Juliette,” he replied.
That bought him a wan smile. “I know where you're going with that, Shanghai, but Peter Tarleton and I are engaged, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. I'd almost forgot about short pants. Didn’t you tell me he’s receiving mental health counseling for his gender confusion issue? –I can’t remember.”
“I will not rise to that, Shanghai.”
Early on the second morning after that discussion, she entered the barn with her gun buckled cross-draw on her hips. Shanghai was loading water bags, a pick, shovel and tarps into pack boxes. Juarez was saddled, and he’d cinched a sawbuck onto a horse they called Manuel. The day was warm, and Juliette had removed her cowboy hat and was swabbing a red bandana around the damp hat band.
Her mouth dropped open in surprise. “Where are you going, Shanghai?”
“Thought I'd take a spin down toward Little Red Horse Creek.”
“Without me? What the hell?”
“I was going to talk to you about it.” Lowering his voice, he added, “Juliette, you might be happier taking a pass on this ugly little clambake. The bodies of those dudes we killed, remember them? They need to disappear –as in off the flippin’ planet! Wouldn't do for some birdwatcher or prissy BLM range manager to blunder onto what's left of Simon Debney and Kemper Culpepper, or that gang of outlaw bikers we killed, and then go runnin’ to the law.”
“I'm coming with you!”
He looked doubtful, which annoyed her.
“Don't you dare treat me like this, Shanghai McGrath! I'm not some dewy country club co-ed. Damn it, I shot a man dead, remember? I helped bury him and eight others! After t hat, I took an ax to Simon whats-his-face and that monster hillbilly Kemper Culpepper. So, don't pull this crap on me, buckaroo!”
Juliette's transition into a hard-as-nails Great Basin ranch gal was proceeding with breathtaking speed, bringing a smile to his lips, although she didn’t appear to realize it was happening.
“Fair enough. I'll fetch your horse.”
“I'll get my own damned horse, Shanghai!”
“I was brought up in a tradition of knightly chivalry, Juliette. So, I'll get Dancer. You can brush him down before I throw your heavy ol’ stock saddle on him. How’s that?”
She glared at him. Then, with a sudden release of tension, she said, “Deal.” She stepped outside and lit a cigarette.
They trailered the horses fifteen miles south of the ranch headquarters and parked within comfortable riding distance of where they'd encountered Simon and Kemper Culpepper. After unloading, they tightened girths and mounted.
Cantering into the desert foothills, Shanghai couldn't help noticing that Juliette forked a saddle with the aplomb of somebody who'd pounded leather for a lifetime. Nevertheless, the baking, high-desert heat made for a less-than-pleasant ride. He much preferred mornings and late afternoons on horseback during high summer.
When they reached the place where he'd intercepted the pursuing bikers, it became apparent that wolves and coyotes had been at the bodies – no big surprise. The canines had accomplished an astonishing clean-up. Shanghai was reminded of a still-warm big game carcass he'd once ridden up on – a spike bull elk shot and then lost by a bow hunter. Returning eleven days later, he’d found that coyotes and a bear had dismantled and slicked everything up, leaving only scattered bones. Predators and scavengers –nature’s cleanup crews –were efficient and wasted little time.
