Murder in the Rough Read online

  It wasn’t the pain behind her ear, it was the fact that she couldn’t move. Or see through the bandages. She could only hear, and smell the antiseptic that was everywhere.

  “Some people never come out of a coma, Mr. Bridget. Or, who knows, she could open her eyes and be talking in a few days. We just have to wait and see.”

  “But, okay, let’s say she comes to, Doc. Will she… ever get up out of that bed?” Johnnie Bridget asked in a quavering voice.

  “I don’t want to get your hopes up, Mr. Bridget. There’s been some damage to the brain, and there’s so much swelling. We won’t know until the swelling goes down. It could take days. She might just pull through, but—the truth?—the likelihood of her ever… walking again is, well, almost nonexistent. I’m sorry.”

  “Mother of God. Can I… bring anyone else in to see her?”

  “Only relatives are permitted, Mr. Bridget.”

  “It’s her husband.”

  “Oh. Of course. But keep it very quiet, please.”

  “Do you think… I mean, is it possible that she can hear us?”

  The doctor exhaled. “Anything is possible, Mr. Bridget, but I seriously doubt it. I’ll leave you alone. Nurse, you can let the other gentleman in. Five minutes, please.”

  Annie heard the doctor leave. Then footsteps and low whispers and the sound of a chair, maybe two, scraping across the floor to where she lay.

  “Jesus,” said the quiet voice of David Strickland. Then no one spoke.

  “Tell her,” ordered Johnnie.

  “I… can’t do this,” said David. “I thought it might be a good idea. I’m sorry, Johnnie. I can’t.”

  “You piece of shit. You owe her!” insisted Johnnie. “Sit down. If you won’t say it, I will. This might be our only chance. She could be gone tomorrow.”

  “She can’t hear us,” moaned David. “What’s the point?”

  “Ah, Christ, shut up, you putz,” hissed Johnnie.

  She smelled a trace of bourbon as Johnnie drew closer. “Honey,” he said in a softer tone. “It’s… Dad. And David. I… we… have something to tell you.”

  She thought she heard a sob. She had never heard her father cry.

  “Go on, for God’s sake,” Johnnie said impatiently. But David didn’t speak.

  “Oh, shit, forget it. Never mind! Sweetie. It’s me. It’s… Daddy. I need to tell you this, maybe it’ll ease your mind, I don’t know. Listen, I… I paid David to leave the country. I knew you wanted him out of your life and I’m your dad. I wanted to take care of you. But… I’m so sorry, honey. Just… so sorry.”

  Johnnie laid his head slowly onto the edge of the bed near Annie’s face. David Strickland got up and left the room.

  The days are long. One of her nurses, the one who talks to her, likes to watch TV. “Do you want to watch with me?” she asks in a singsong tone that makes Annie wish she could spit, or scream. “Of course you do!”

  The nurse loves afternoon talk shows, Ellen, Oprah, and the local news. When her mind is awake, Annie hears it all.

  It’s afternoon. The nurse zaps on the set and gathers her knitting. A compassionate-looking doctor is a guest on Maury.

  “Doctor,” says Maury, “as an expert, can you shed any light on what might have been going on in this woman’s mind? Why would a person confess to a crime she didn’t commit? A crime, as it turns out, that was never committed?”

  “Well, Maury, no one can really answer that question except Annie Bridget.”

  “Oh, dear,” says the nurse, shaking her head disapprovingly and looking down at Annie. “Cover your ears.”

  “But from most accounts, Ms. Bridget probably won’t ever speak again,” says the host.

  “Maury, some people’s moment-to-moment anxiety is so great that they spin worst-case scenarios about everything. Some of these people become agoraphobics—they literally can’t leave their homes or neighborhoods for fear of what they think will happen. Logic doesn’t help them. Therapy and medication can produce wonderful results, but…”

  “Annie Bridget’s therapy,” suggested the host, “such as it was, was golf?”

  “I think so. In order to control their world in any way they can, some people become great achievers. Intensely skilled perfectionists. Annie Bridget apparently believed that her father had had her husband killed. That was real in her mind. She felt she couldn’t tell anyone. And that must have been a terrible burden, although in some perverse way, it may have also fueled her.”

  “She played golf like a champion. She was a champion.”

  “If she could do this impossible thing of hitting a tiny golf ball perfectly and then winning under what may have been the most intense pressure any golfer ever had to face—that was a way to fix her world. But it didn’t work, finally, because in her own mind she was a don’t-ask, don’t-tell accomplice to a murder. That was real to her. Everything else was denial.”

  “Wow. So sad.”

  “It’s just one possibility, Maury. I could be way off.”

  The nurse zaps off the TV. “Enough of that! Experts! What do they know? Shall I open the window, dear? Shall I? Of course I will!”

  No! No.

  The nurse turns a handle at the bottom of the window frame and opens it a few inches. Annie hears the sound of a loud motor and feels a slight breeze waft across her cheek.

  “The noise will stop in a few minutes, dear,” purrs the nurse kindly. “It’s just the gardeners. They’re almost finished. When they cut the grass, it leaves such a nice smell. Don’t you think? Of course you do!”

  THOSE GOOD DAYS

  Tom Franklin

  The first thing Mr. D. L. Philips did when they found the oil on his land was buy more land, cheap, and rent some bulldozers and hire some black guys to work under him, and within a year they’d built his famous golf course. It had 178 holes, and it took three or four days to play through, sometimes a week. He called it the Luna Gautreaux Commemorative Golfing Course, named for his girlfriend. Later he added “and Shooting Range” to the title when golfers started carrying arms to shoot snakes with. There was a swamp along the eastern rim of the course where the cottonmouths and diamondback rattlers came from, and poor black children kept sneaking over the chain-link fences and stealing, as decoration for their bicycles, the flags that marked the holes, so it became custom that dead snakes were wrapped around the flags—freshly shot snakes replacing rotting ones—to scare the thieves away.

  Mr. D. L. built a giant house next to where the course began, a room and bathroom for each of his three boys, and a huge den. We were the nearest neighbors, half a mile south. Me and the old man. He ran a lathe at the mill and I was in ninth grade for the second time.

  If people wanted to play golf—and they always did, there were dozens of golfers every day—they got Mr. D. L.’s permission, provided they were white and could pay his fifty-dollar-per-head fee. The first year the course was open, rich people from all over Alabama came all the time, and Mr. D. L. rented them four-wheelers with racks welded on to carry their golf bags. At the other end of the course there was a gate with a guardhouse, and here sat Jimmy Younger, supposed descendant of the Youngers who rode with Jesse James. He had a jar on the windowsill for tips, but the two dollars in the jar were put in by Jimmy in the morning and taken out by Jimmy at night. His job was to take the four-wheelers people returned and make sure they hadn’t been damaged and in a pickup truck drive the golfers back to their cars where they were parked on oyster shells by Mr. D. L.’s house.

  I was fourteen that year and friends with Mr. D. L.’s youngest boy, T-Bob, who was thirteen, and while we cared little for golf, we loved roaming the land and watching the rich people—and Luna—play.

  The course started back in the woods behind Mr. D. L.’s house, kudzu clogging the trees and anaconda vines fit for Tarzan hanging down. It was eighteen miles long, the LGCGCASR, through the woods for several miles into an abandoned gravel pit of red clay that looked like a blood-drenched desert. A grea
t butte rose in the center of it, the ninety-fourth hole up there in the middle, flag snapping in the wind. After you played through the pit, you came to the final eighty-four holes, spaced hundreds of yards apart in Mr D. L.’s cattle fields. There were great rolling hills and gaps and gullies and banks of earth, and there were sand traps, bunkers, in the shapes of all the southern states. The cows and bull were legitimate obstacles, and so were the ponds. Little stands of oak or pine made good hiding places for us boys. Sometimes the golfers stopped to pull in some of Mr. D. L.’s catfish and grill them on straightened coat hangers over a fire and eat them before playing on, and once, near Christmas, we saw Mr. D. L. get out of his four-wheeler with a rifle and aim into a giant oak tree stripped bare by winter. We crouched in the brush and followed the barrel of his .30-30 with our eyes and saw what he was shooting at: sprigs of mistletoe growing in the top of the tree. When it fell Luna ran after it and held it over her head so he would kiss her.

  I was watching them until I noticed T-Bob watching me.

  “What you looking at?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  But things lull, and end. For a year after the course was finished, even the lieutenant governor of Alabama came and played the first nine holes while flashbulbs popped and men in dark suits eyed the trees and the snakes on the poles and talked into their collars. But gradually people stopped coming. Mr. D. L. had lost interest in the sport shortly after completing the course and had stopped sinking money into it. If he hadn’t removed the fifty-dollar fee a few months later and opened it to the poor public, the grass wouldn’t have kept the footpath you followed, fresh snakes wouldn’t have stayed on the flags. It would’ve become the jungle/desert/cattle range it was before the oil. But soon even the poor lost interest and Mr. D. L. had to let Jimmy Younger go. He sold the four-wheelers to a hunting club.

  Now Luna alone played regularly, but she alone couldn’t keep it going, and now cows, not golfers, moved slowly up and down the hills. They’d shit piles as big as cakes for the flies to lay their eggs into and piss great yellow streams onto the grass, wade neck-deep into the algae-green water of the ponds to chew their cuds, emerging to drag their heavy tongues over the dark brown salt blocks Mr. D. L. had ordered from the hardware store in Grove Hill. What he did to keep the course from going completely to pot was hire a colored man called Lucius to drive a tractor and bushhog the greens, and to keep hunters out. Lucius wore a big pistol strapped to his leg, sweat streaming from his black-black skin, his eyes and teeth gleaming from under the brim of his St. Louis Cardinals cap. He died one day when he bushhogged over a yellowjacket nest and, trying to jump off the tractor, firing the pistol in the air, got one of his legs caught in the blade.

  He lay there for days, at last getting spotted by Luna as she played 48. She came to the house and locked herself in the bathroom while we boys went with Mr. D. L. to have a look, excited to see our first corpse. Mr. D. L. told us to stay in the truck as he wrapped his handkerchief around his nose. We could see Lucius lying in the grass, half under the bushhog, flies swarming. Mr. D. L. walked over and looked at Lucius, shaking his head. He poured a gallon of gasoline into the yellowjacket nest and used the truck’s battery to jump-start the tractor and cranked it and pulled it a few yards off. He got a spade from the back of the pickup and buried Lucius there on the spot, pistol and all, for Lucius didn’t have any family. He’d lived in one of the five barns on the course.

  We went there next, and one after another we climbed the ladder into the dark hayloft where Lucius had lived. We saw his things, a mandolin with “Gold Fingers” carved into the back of its neck, a cigar box full of papers that Mr. D. L. tucked under his arm, some copper wire in a coil, a blue suit on a hanger, a coverless Bible, four or five hundred cartridges in a suitcase and, hanging in a frame on the wall, a picture of Jesus as a black man.

  “Y’all boys want any of that stuff?” Mr. D. L. asked.

  There were four of us, Mr. D. L.’s three sons and me. We shook our heads.

  “Let’s go, then,” he said.

  At the end of the next school year, T-Bob failed the ninth grade, and to stay in the same class as him I failed it, too, on purpose, which is harder than it sounds, especially when the vice-principal says, “We’ll just bump you on up, see, ’cause it looks bad for a fellow to fail the same grade twice, reflects poorly on us all,” but I called him a faggot and gave him the finger and spit on his desk so he sighed and closed my file and said, “Fine,” and T-Bob and I would be together in school as well as on the golf course.

  To celebrate we climbed back into Lucius’s hayloft and stole the suitcase full of cartridges. We used gasoline syphoned from the last four-wheeler to make a giant fire in another of the barns and threw the suitcase in and waited. When the cartridges started going off we hid in an empty horse stall. It was like a war, especially when a bullet ricocheted about four times and lodged in T-Bob’s calf. I helped him out as the fire spread and we watched the barn cave in.

  We went back to Lucius’s barn then, which was built like a dog-run house, split through the middle with rooms on both sides, haylofts over the rooms. It sat with its back against the woods, this barn, so the kudzu from the woods had already claimed the building and covered it and camouflaged it so it seemed part of the woods, its big front door, when opened, the mouth of a cave leading into a vast green mountain face. Lucius had picked it because he said the shade kept it cool. Grass from the field grew right up inside the front door, as far as the sun could reach, and after that there was soft dirt and several old easy chairs arranged in a circle. Once we’d asked Lucius what the chairs were for, since he’d lived alone and except for us never had visitors, and he’d said they were for spirits, for after haunting the woods all night the spirits are weary, Lucius told us, smoking his pipe, and they need a place to sit down and rest their feet before they go in for the day.

  The two haylofts were accessed by ladders, the loft Lucius used for living quarters fairly clean, the other wild: dusty, rotting hay still on the floor, gaps in the walls where boards had come loose, rusty nails sticking out of the woodwork, ivy curling around the door and the gaps in the walls, having ventured in and, not finding the sunlight it needed to live, crept back out. After he died we stayed in Lucius’s loft when we felt serene, but feeling wild as hair grew under our arms and between our legs we would clamber up the ladder to the other loft and light cigarettes and drink whiskey and with our rifles take potshots at birds in the trees skirting the fields.

  Going out the back of the barn you went into immediately dark woods, kudzu hanging all over like chandeliers gone mad. We climbed the trees there behind the barn and went higher than the barn, looked over its peak to the hills where you could see the flags of the golf course still standing. We took boards from a woodpile in one of the barn’s rooms and nailed ourselves a ladder up the steep back side of the tin roof, and we’d climb and lie on the peak looking at the green hills and at the dots that were cows, the grass of the greens growing high and turning brown in spots without Lucius to cut it back, the fancy irrigation system Mr. D. L. had installed no longer working, hairy tridents of bitterweed overtaking the bunkers. A mile away the gravel pit baked in the sun, the ponds drying up. Soon even the cows started dying.

  After a while T-Bob and I were the only ones who went behind Mr. D. L.’s house, past the great iron gates into the woods. T-Bob still limped. We shot anything that moved. We shot a panther. We shot owls, hawks, deer, coyotes, coons, squirrels, dogs. We shot at each other once, after an argument.

  Mr. D.L. had become interested in the stock market. He hired some fellows in suits who knew what they were doing and the group of them flew to New York City, where they made more money. “A mint,” he wired. He liked it up there and stayed, letting Luna tend to the kids. With Mr. D. L. gone, T-Bob’s brothers, Strump and Mike, used to take turns getting her drunk and trying to seduce her. T-Bob said when their daddy got home, he’d cream them, didn’t I think so?

>   Yes, I said, turning away.

  The thing was, I was in love with her.

  The golf course jungled up even more, and Mr. D. L. didn’t come back even after a month. There was plenty of money at home for Luna and the boys—Mr. D. L. saw to that—and Luna threw parties where she invited fifteen or twenty guys. She drove to the next county, which was wet, and bought whiskey and beer by the case and pot by the pound—Jimmy Younger grew it somewhere out in the woods. If the deputies came, Luna did stripteases, but only to her bra and panties, and bribed them with free cases of beer. They’d give her a “warning” and drive away with their lights off. They began stopping by every night.

  More cows died. T-Bob and I were led to their rotting carcasses on the fields by skyfuls of sailing buzzards, and we came over hills or out of woods to see ten or more of the huge black stinking birds with their bad posture and leathery heads lit all around the dead cows, some with their necks deep inside the holes they’d eaten in the cows’ sides, others standing apart, as if on watch. We charged them and they hopped away on foot, their wings half-spread. We set the cows afire using gasoline and old tires to get the blazes going and watched them bake and pop in the sun, and we shot off the buzzards’ heads with our rifles and holding our noses against their smell drenched them in gas and set them afire too.

  Afterward we would go to Lucius’s barn and climb into one of the lofts and drink from the cases of whiskey we’d stolen from the house. We would get drunk and sit brazenly in the spirits’ chairs and call out to them to show themselves, expecting moldy skeletons, executed slaves, to show their rattling old bones. We stood in the chairs and tossed the bottles back and forth, juggled them, and broke the empty ones on the ground so that a terrible garden of broken glass grew between the chairs, and because we were barefoot, climbing along the walls became necessary to get to the chairs and to the ladders leading to the haylofts, and a game evolved. We would go all around that barn without touching the ground, the threat of jagged glass great and growing greater with the hurriedly passing days and their sound of smashing glass, for if you fell you would be impaled on the crystal shapes that rose from the dirt like teeth.