The Thomas Berryman Number

Bobbie Sue Gary Pederson had grown slightly rat-faced over the years. The nipples of her breasts were dark brown and showing through her blouse. They looked unattractive.

On account of all this he took her to the dark cocktail lounge at the 7-10 Bowling Alleys. But he was pleased with her looks. Really.

Bobbie Sue wore a red A-line skirt umbrellaed out over seamed stockings. She wore black pumps with blue ribbons over her toes. She drank Singapore Slings, and they both ate the special chicken-fried steaks.

Thomas Berryman got high on Bobbie Sue.

“What’s it like,” he asked, “kissing old Tommy Pederson? Just tell me that one thing. I’ll go away from here content. I’ll sing in that jet back to New York City.”

She was patting his leg and saying, “Now, now, now.” It was just like he’d never gone away and they were still high school sweethearts.

“Don’t give me that now, now, now stuff. C’mon, babe.”

“It’s like kissin … Noooo …”

“C’mon, babe. ’Fess up, Rev’ren Thomas is here …”

“Like a rug on a floor. Kissin it.”

“Ooh, Bobbie Sue!” Berryman howled with delight. “That’s terrible, babe.” He was laughing, and talking southern, and she thought he was hilarious.

A white moon rode the dark Texas skies as they fornicated in the big cushy Lincoln.

Sergeant Ames found him asleep in the rocker beside his father’s bed. It was morning. The judge’s thing was lying out of his pajamas, large as a king post.

As he revived the judge, Sergeant Ames told Young Tom an old story about falling asleep on a cattle drive. Waking and finding he was being circumcised.

Old Tom Berryman just lay on the bed and looked at the paperback on the floor near the rocker. It was

Jiminy

. After some puckering and smacking his lips, he asked his son if he was reading about Jimmie Horn.

“Well, yes I am,” Berryman said.

“Well, good for you then.” The old man struggled with each word. “He seems … He seems … like a hell of a good nigger.”

Berryman spent the morning back in Amarillo, arranging for the visa in the name of Keresty. His supplier was an egotistical Mexican artiste who hand-lettered the document himself. For his morning’s drawing he earned three hundred dollars.

That afternoon, Berryman flew back to meet the man who was paying heavily to have Horn killed. This man was ex-Tennessee Governor Jefferson Johnboy Terrell.

Thomas Berryman was calm as a snake after its sunbath.

Nashville, October 12

This past October 12th, Columbus Day, was the kind of unexpectedly cold day mat makes grown men, like me, sleep through their alarm clocks.

That morning—a flat, gray, homely one—the state had its first frost.

That afternoon, ex-Governor Jefferson Terrell was driven into downtown Nashville to face a grand jury on the charge that he had paid over one hundred thousand dollars to accomplish the murder of James Horn the previous July.

Terrell’s car, a somber, black, 1969 Fleetwood, was chauffeured by a soldiery-looking man with short sandy hair brushed back like Nixon’s Mr. Haldeman.

Terrell’s new lawyer, a slick gray fox (also from Houston), was riding in the back seat with him.

The media coverage for the upcoming trial had by this time risen above the noise level of Procter and Gamble’s newest soap detergent commercials.

People would hear about the trial on the radio coming home from work; then find it staring up at them from the newspaper on their front porch; then get hit with it on both the local and network TV news programs.

People from the hills were already planning weekends around a Friday at the trial and a Saturday trip to Opryland.

Over three thousand of them greeted Terrell at the courthouse on the twelfth.

Johnboy struggled up out of the Cadillac, revealing patent leather loafers, then a gray banker’s suit, then a pasty, death-mask face.

Not that much had changed about Terrell’s general demeanor though.

He

held

one of his familiar dollar cigars instead of smoking it. But otherwise, it was the way he’d been around the capitol for all the years I’d ever seen him there.

He shook a few hands and gave a proper politician’s wave all around.

Yes his health was just fine,

he answered a query from some well-wisher in a checkered bird-dog hat.

Then a little man in a gray raincoat got ahold of Terrell’s hand and wouldn’t let him go.

“Bad times,” the man was heard to say a few times.

“But it’s a good, strong country all the same,” Johnboy told him. “Isn’t it a good country we’ve got here, my friend?”

The eyes of the man in the raincoat blinked on and off. Then he let go of Terrell’s hand.

Johnboy then bulled his way up the forty-three courthouse stairs and disappeared inside without once looking back.

“He’d make a fine corpse,” Lewis Rosten muttered from somewhere behind me. “Mr. Dickens, in his neat mystery

Martin Chuzzlewit

.”

During the secretive grand jury proceedings, the newspapermen and TV guys sat around the second floor of the courthouse drinking free Folger’s coffee.

Occasionally we’d get official word that

nothing