Brambleman Read online

  “Why you wanna do that?” She opened the door. “People shootin’ at you back there. Get real. Get out.”

  The stranger stood and stretched, popping several body joints. “This is the job.”

  “What job?” Charlie asked.

  His traveling companion was already climbing down the steps. Charlie got off the bus and looked at its lighted route sign above the windshield: Out of Service. The rain had stopped. To their right, just ahead, stood Bay Street Coffeehouse, famous for the fact that there was no Bay Street within ten miles of it. They were in the Virginia-Highland section of Atlanta, many miles from where they’d started. What a screwed-up route. Charlie watched the bus pull away; he was unable to shake the feeling that a door had closed behind him.

  The stranger walked a few paces to Bayard Terrace, a narrow side street, then turned and beckoned for his confused companion to follow. “Come on.”

  Seeing no choice, Charlie fell in step behind the stranger. They hiked up the hill on the cracked sidewalk beside Bayard Terrace. Rain-spattered cars glistened in their parking spots on the street in front of close-set homes. After passing ten houses, the stranger turned up the sidewalk of a bungalow with a glowing porch light. He called to Charlie: “Forward or back, which way do you choose?”

  Charlie stopped. This is absurd, he thought. Insane.

  The rain started falling again, pushing Charlie toward the house just as the door opened and a birdlike woman with snowy white hair stood bathed in light, gazing out past both men, calling, “Bounce! Bounce! Where are you?” She wore an old burgundy cardigan along with black stretch pants, and she seemed trim except for a little pot belly. Charlie thought she’d take one look at them and slam the door. She didn’t. “My cat’s been gone a week,” she declared to the stranger. “I think my daughter had her executed. Maybe not, but I don’t like the odds.” She shook her head sadly.

  “Do not be afraid,” the stranger told her. “We’re here to help.”

  The old woman, showing no sign of fear, gazed at them expectantly.

  “Do you always say that?” Charlie cried out in exasperation as he stood halfway between street and porch. “It’s guaranteed to make people suspect you, which they should. You almost got us killed.”

  “You wish.” The stranger turned to the woman, who seemed not to mind his aroma. “He’s the one. Charlie Sherman—or is it Charles?—”

  “Charlie’s fine.”

  “—meet Kathleen Talton.” He neglected to introduce himself.

  “The one what?” Kathleen asked.

  “The one who’s going to finish your husband’s work.” He turned to Charlie and said, “You’re going to finish Thurwood’s work, right?”

  “Thurwood?”

  “Her late husband. The history professor I told you so much about.”

  Charlie shook his head. “The professor you told me nothing about.”

  “Who are you?” Kathleen asked the stranger.

  “Ask him,” he said, pointing at Charlie.

  “I don’t know who you are,” Charlie said, perplexed. “I’m sorry, ma’am. We—”

  “That man found me,” the stranger said. “And you were looking for him, and I found you. So here we are. And there you go.” He seemed well-pleased with his logic.

  “Who are you, the Riddler?” Charlie stepped back. “Ma’am, I’ll be honest. I don’t even—”

  “As far as you’re concerned,” the stranger told Charlie, “I’m nothing but trouble. I thought I established that.”

  “Trouble?” Charlie stepped forward and looked at him closely under the porch light. “Yeah, I see that now. Trouble it is, then.” Suspecting he’d been lured into a shakedown—or worse—he added, “This is a bad idea. Let’s go.” He reached for Trouble’s arm, then thought better of it and withdrew his hand.

  “Nonsense. This is a great idea.” Turning to the woman, Trouble said, “You asked for help, remember?”

  Kathleen smiled uncertainly. “Did I?”

  “In there.” He pointed into the house and wagged his finger.

  She turned and looked inside, then gave Trouble a blank look. “How did you know that?”

  He said something to her that Charlie couldn’t hear. She retreated into the living room, and although she opened her mouth, no sound came out. Trouble stepped inside and beckoned Charlie, who asked, “What did you tell her?”

  “I gave her my credentials.”

  “Which are?”

  “Impeccable,” Trouble said. Charlie followed him reluctantly, believing he’d walked into some sort of offbeat home invasion that happened to be going very smoothly at the moment.

  It was a well-ordered house, though a bit dusty, with a closed-in, old-folk smell. Gas flames danced in the fireplace. “What big eyes you have,” Kathleen told Charlie. “Pull up those things so I can see your face.” Charlie pushed his goggles up on his forehead. After scrutinizing him for a moment, she said, “You look just like my son.” She pointed to a framed photo on the mantel of a young man in cap and gown. “That’s Gary. He died in Vietnam.”

  “That’s sad,” Charlie mumbled. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Yes. Yes it is. … Well, where are my manners?”

  Kathleen told them to make themselves comfortable while she got tea. Charlie stood by the fire to warm himself and looked at her photos. A family portrait with two kids, a girl and a boy. A framed black-and-white snapshot of a young man in a combat helmet, grinning in front of a palm tree. There were several pictures of the daughter, from gap-toothed girl to middle-aged woman. None showed her with a child or man, though she appeared in pictures with two different women.

  “Kathleen needs someone to take care of her,” Trouble said.

  “Someone like you?” Charlie felt queasy, fearing that when Kathleen returned, the conversation would turn to her bank account and the whereabouts of her jewelry. What if she ended up dead? The halfwit accomplice was always the one that was caught and convicted. If Charlie could just figure out what the bastard was doing, he’d stop this nefarious plot.

  “No, someone more down to earth. Like you, to talk to her and wreak vengeance, that sort of thing.”

  “Wreak vengeance?” Charlie’s face contorted in disbelief. He whispered harshly, “You’re fuckin’ crazy, you know that? This is insane.”

  “At least she’s not shooting at us, eh?” Trouble gave him a rotten-tooth smile.

  Kathleen returned with a tea tray, placing it on the coffee table. Charlie watched Trouble from the corner of his eye. The old cadger and Kathleen were talking, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying—it was as if they were speaking Greek.

  Charlie asked to use the bathroom. Kathleen pointed toward the hall, and Charlie squished his way through the dining room and into the hall.

  When Charlie returned to the living room, Trouble was gone. Disconcerted, he checked his companion’s cup. Empty. And the box of shortbread cookies Kathleen had offered them had disappeared, as well. “Where’d, uh, Trouble go?”

  “He said he had to go see a man about a mule. Or maybe a horse. I don’t remember things as well as I used to. I have Alzheimer’s, you know.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Comes with the territory,” she said with a shrug. “He said his job was to get us together, and his work here was done, for the moment.”

  “You might want to check your purse.” Charlie opened the front door and looked out. No sign of Trouble. He returned and sat in a wing chair by the fireplace, then stirred some sugar in his cup of tea. “You don’t know him, do you?”

  “I don’t suppose I do, but here you are, and you are an editor, aren’t you?” She hummed a few notes and picked at some lint on her sweater.

  Charlie took a sip. “I’m a writer. I’ve been a newspaper editor. I don’t know that I can do this. Or should.”

  She gave him a pleading look. “You’ve come so far. You may as well look at the manuscript. Please.”

  Bu
t he was still perplexed. “Ma’am, aren’t you concerned about your safety? I mean, letting strangers in … it’s after midnight!” He pointed to the clock and shook his head.

  “If you were going to hurt me, you would have already done so. I can tell you’re good.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of what you’re getting into?”

  “Not at all. You’ve been sent here to help me. It’s Providence, you know. He told me we’re not supposed to tell anyone about him, by the way.”

  Even if Charlie wanted to talk about Trouble, what could he say about a thunderstruck stranger who suddenly appeared during his life’s lowest moment and offered him salvation in the form of a scam? No, he wouldn’t have any problem keeping his mouth shut. And while he didn’t understand what was happening, he realized that, no matter how weird it seemed, he was getting a second chance of some sort. So, there it was: stay here, or walk back into the night.

  Charlie listened to the rain, which had just started falling harder. “All right. Show me the book.”

  She led him into the study and pointed to the massive manuscript on the fine old desk—three times the size of any of the novels Charlie had written. “Sit down.”

  Charlie took a seat. “Ma’am?”

  “Yes, dear?”

  “Are you sure you’re not afraid of me?”

  “Oh, quite sure. You’re the one. I know that now.” She smiled. “And you fit just right at the desk.”

  While Charlie looked through a pile of rejection letters, she talked about her husband. “Thurwood was murdered. They never caught the racist who hit him on the head with that … thing he threw. That’s what caused the blood clot that killed him. My dear husband would still be alive today … ” She trailed off, tears welling in her pale blue eyes. She jabbed the air with her finger. “It was a beer bottle. I won’t forget that.”

  She pointed at the wall, but Charlie didn’t look up, absorbed as he was in the task of figuring out what kind of work the professor had written. Kathleen went to the kitchen to fix coffee. After reading two pages of Talton’s dry-as-dust introduction, Charlie glanced up and saw the newspaper clipping Kathleen had pointed at. He positioned the lamp to spotlight the yellowed paper taped to the wall. It was dated Sunday, January 18, 1987. The photo showed a crowd of white rowdies taunting civil rights marchers. It was an ugly-looking bunch: the great-great grandsons of Confederate deserters, their faces grim under baseball caps like the one Trouble had pitched into the flames. One man wore a Confederate soldier’s slouch hat. A bareheaded boy in the foreground had a serene, inbred look. Beside him, poised like a baseball pitcher on his follow-through, was a huge, round-faced youth who glared at the camera. His face was encircled by ink, with the hand-lettered caption: “J’ACCUSE!”

  Charlie groaned in disgust and disbelief. He knew the guy. Oh, he didn’t just know him. The asshole was family—a varmint, Susan’s cousin, Rhett “Momo” Hastings, Jr. In the foreground, two steps away from a ducking Redeemer, stood Talton, raising his hand to his head. Charlie cursed Momo (who had once nearly killed him, too). “You bastard, I can’t believe you followed me here.”

  But there they were. Charlie briefly considered telling Kathleen that he knew the guy who threw the thing, then decided against it. After all, what could he say? There was nothing anyone could do now. Besides, cause and effect didn’t jibe. An old man keeled over a week after he was conked on the head. That wasn’t exactly murder in his book. Anyway, that was twenty years ago. Momo had done time for his misdeeds back in 1987. Just not for this one.

  And so, with nothing else to do and nowhere to go, Charlie settled in with the cup of coffee Kathleen had fixed for him and began reading Talton’s work. He was vaguely familiar with the events of 1912 and knew that, nearly a century later, locals were still tight-lipped about them. He certainly remembered the two 1987 marches, which had been major media events. During the second one, Charlie and Susan had opened up their home as a refugee camp for Susan’s Forsyth County kin, who fled the invading civil rights protesters. With characteristic gall, Charlie had pointed out to his mother-in-law Evangeline that, unlike black sharecroppers in 1912, she could return to Forsyth any time she wanted. He’d stopped short of telling her he’d considered joining the march. That would have incurred her eternal enmity as well as that of her brother, State Rep. Stanley Cutchins, a Reagan Republican and barely closeted racist who’d flown to Hawaii on a lobbyist-paid junket rather than welcome the civil-rights marchers.

  Soon after the event, Oprah herself had traveled south to tape her show in Forsyth County, which by then had become known worldwide as a racist, redneck backwater. Of course, locals believed they’d been vilified unjustly. (Cumming residents told reporters, “We didn’t do nuthin’ to nobody.”) Certainly there had been some progress in the seventy-five years since 1912. For one thing, subdivision signs advertising “Gracious Lake Living” had replaced the infamous county-line postings that said, Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You Here.

  Charlie knew that since 1987, a few blacks and increasing numbers of Hispanics had moved to Forsyth County. He’d seen photos of an African-American high school track star on the Cumming newspaper’s sports page. This showed acceptance, but also suggested that speed was essential for blacks who chose to live there.

  Most blacks he knew rolled their eyes in exasperation at the mention of the place. African-Americans certainly couldn’t be too comfortable in Atlanta’s ultimate suburb. After all, Forsyth’s reputation drew the sort of white person who wanted to escape crime, drugs, poor schools, and welfare this and welfare that, but who didn’t necessarily use racial pejoratives, preferring to speak in code. Forsyth recently had become the nation’s fastest-growing county, a paradise for people of paleness. It also happened to be Georgia’s wealthiest and one of the twenty richest in the nation. That was no mere coincidence. There were now polo fields in Forsyth, once the home of Hee-Haw’s Junior Samples.

  Charlie knew Forsyth’s saga was interesting. Talton’s manuscript, not so much. “This work is not publishable in its present form,” stated one rejection letters he read.

  While the old woman thought he could rescue the book, all Charlie wanted was to survive the night. That meant staying as long as he could—until his hostess asked him to leave or the police arrived. But Kathleen didn’t tell him to go. Instead, she asked, “How long can you stay?”

  “I got nowhere else to go,” he confessed. “I have all night.”

  “You can rest on the couch if you get tired. Use the quilt.”

  Kathleen retired at 1:30 a.m. Completely at peace with his presence, she was soon snoring gently in the front bedroom. The Seth Thomas wall clock ticked in counterpoint to the rain’s wavering beat. Wrapped in a quilt—his clothes remained incredibly damp—Charlie continued reading, mainly to justify his existence.

  He reached the hundredth page. There was nothing remarkable written on it; so far, none of what Talton had written was special. Weariness overcame him. He couldn’t continue. The scope of this mission was beyond his skills. The past was not within his power to change. The only thing Charlie could do was get some rest and try to save his own life. In frustration, he banged his head on Dr. Talton’s desk.

  The old sofa was inviting. Perhaps he could sleep off his dampness. He got up and shuffled over to it. The window trembled in its frame. The wind was rising, chasing the storm away. Charlie stood for a moment and considered his plight. He knew a couple of guys who might put him up for few days. Or not. The local Home Depot might hire him. Everyone who worked there knew him already, anyway. Then maybe he could rent a room. But he wouldn’t return to the house on Thornbriar Circle, not until things changed. Not until Susan apologized and begged him to come back. But what about Beck (Rebecca) and Ben? What would he tell his children? He didn’t know.

  Charlie collapsed on the musty old couch. The dust he’d raised made him sneeze. He closed his eyes and dozed off. Soon he was dreaming that he was standing just a few yards away from
an unpainted cabin. The world was sparsely furnished and small. He felt like he was on an old, cheaply designed movie set. Trees were bare-limbed silhouettes painted on canvas.

  A family of black sharecroppers loaded up a mule-drawn wagon as a mounted gang of masked men watched them from under a spreading oak tree. The nightriders held reins in one hand, rifles and shotguns in the other, all aimed at heaven. Their skittish horses danced to crashing thunder that sounded like sticks hitting tin pans. The scene was illuminated by handheld torches. Charlie suspected that there was a Cutchins in the mob when he saw beady eyes glinting through holes in a makeshift white hood.

  The children tearfully protested being dragged from bed in the middle of the night. Their mother, her body wrecked by childbirth and field work, snapped: “Get goin’, ain’t time to dawdle.”

  The father, wearing a look of utter defeat, knew his life depended on bowing before the hooded men. He said “Yassuh, yassuh,” as he threw his meager belongings into the wagon.

  Charlie knew what the sharecropper was thinking: Get to Hall County by nightfall tomorrow, got a cousin there, figure out what to do.

  The wagon lurched off with the cotton still in the field. It was a scam: Drive them off at harvest time and take their crops. Affirmative action for white folks. A big, cruel-hearted swindle you couldn’t perpetrate on humans and call yourself a moral being. But there was an easy solution: Make the victims less than human. That family became no more important or deserving of reparation than a steer from which you’d carve a steak.

  Charlie had to stop this outrage, but how? The book he held in his hand had something to do with it, but when he looked at it, the cover was blank.

  Chapter Two

  “Darling, you’ve been working too hard on the book. Come to bed.” Charlie opened his eyes and looked up at the ancient woman gazing amorously upon him. Her hair dangled loosely, and the curtain’s shadow formed phantom grizzle on her face. For a moment, in the soft glow of reflected streetlight, Kathleen looked like country singer Willie Nelson.