The Thomas Berryman Number

Reuven answered the original question then. His answer came as a kind of oath. “My interest is high,” he spoke. “I’d be interested and honored, John. Even to be considered, I’m honored.”

Terrell stood up on the porch and shook Mewman’s hand.

He left his choice for senator numb and speechless, but with two double bourbons on the way. He made his way across the front lawn, tipping his Palm Beach hat to people who still called him Mr. Governor.

PART V

“Punk”

Zebulon, November 17

One nippy, leaf-splattered Saturday in November—a week or so after a Chattanooga dentist upset a Memphis quick-food genius for Tennessee’s available Senate seat—three bulging station wagons set out like Conestoga wagons in the general direction of Zebulon, Kentucky.

The people driving the individual cars were myself, my father, and Moses Reed. I was embarking on a three month L.O.A. to shore up my domestic life, and to finish the Berryman book.

The place Nan and I rented was a big, crumbling, Victorian-style farmhouse. It had its own private catfish pond, a possum hollow, and three kinds of cornfields. The owners were wintering in St. Petersburg, and the furnished, seven-bedroom house was costing us the princely sum of $105 a month to rent.

It was located exactly six miles from where I was born, and where my parents still live.

The family moved into three of the bedrooms (three of the four rooms facing down over an apple orchard and the catfish pond), and I set up two of the other rooms for my book work.

At this point I’d collected one hundred and twenty interview tapes. I had hundreds of photographs showing the story’s important people as well as its key locations. There were also over a thousand pages of mimeographed notes and transcriptions from the

Citizen-Reporter.

That winter we all took up serious ice skating and ice fishing.

I mounted a 1952 Chevy on blocks and we learned about V-8 car engines inside the barn.

Cat and Janie Bug went off to school with “a lot of creeps and hillbillies” who had become “all our friends we can’t leave” by the following spring.

In general, working began to take its place in the grand scheme of eating, playing, loving, carpentering, catfishing, and card-playing at the V.F.W.

I felt I was in the right frame of mind to sit back and write something for people to read. I felt my location in Poland County gave me some pretty good perspective.

Now here’s exactly what happened that first week in July.

Philadelphia, July 3

It was one o’clock in the afternoon, and as usual, Joe Cubbah was sweating like a pitcher of ice water.

Cubbah was wearing a gray sweatshirt cut off at the shoulders, and a gray fedora with what looked like a bite out of its crown.

He went into Tiny’s Under the Bridge with grease all over his hands—he’d just changed the plugs and points on his Buick Electra—and he laid one hand on the shiny white rump of a twenty-year-old waitress named Josephine Cichoski.

The blond wheeled around, but when she saw it was Cubbah she only winced. She had sooty black eyelashes and thick red angel wings for a mouth.

“Your mother around?” Cubbah grinned at her. His dimples were showing and he looked kind of friendly.

“You know where.” The girl pointed toward the swinging doors to the kitchen. Her big white teeth had lipstick on them.

“Hey, look who it is.” Tiny Lemans blinked awake at the sound of swinging doors.

“Hey yourself,” Cubbah smiled.

“Restin’ my eyes here, Joey.” Tiny yawned so that his mouth got big enough to fit in a grapefruit. “You’re some piece of work.” His eyes focused on Cubbah’s sweatshirt and torn hat.

“I had to fix the Buick today,” Cubbah said. “What’s your excuse?”

Just then the waitress hit Cubbah in the ass with the swinging doors. Her pie-face appeared in the galley-hole, and she was sticking out her tongue.

Cubbah walked away from the door. “What’s she got, a bug up her ass?”

“Fuck her,” Tiny Lemans said. Fingers that were three-link sausages each tried to tie black soldier-style boots. Tiny was well over three hundred pounds.

Cubbah dipped his greasy finger in a pot of cake icing. “Goin on a trip tonight.” He tasted the icing. “Oooo la, la, Tiny.” He smiled at the sweetness of the icing. “Anyways … I could use a piece. You get hold of one this quick?”

Tiny Lemans pulled out a clattering drawer of silverware.

“Just got in a very nice little .38,” he said. “Oooo la la.” He pulled a waxed-paper package from the back of the drawer. He handed it to Cubbah intact.

“Never been fired,” he said. “Airweight.”

Cubbah took off the waxed paper, then held the small black revolver up to his nose. He smelled cosmo-line oil. The gun was brand new. “Just like you said it, Tiny. Very nice.

Very

nice.”

“Tiny says a grasshopper can pull a fucking plow,” the fat man grinned. “Hitch up that little motherfucker.”

“By the way,” Cubbah set down the .38. “How much is the little motherfucker costing me?”

The restaurateur yawned. “Oooo … fuck me.” His mouth opened wide again. “One hundred fifty,” he said as his mouth closed.