Billie Joe Quagmeyer left the infirmary, put his forearm against the fingerprint-smudged door, and waited to be buzzed through. “Come on. Come on. Come on.” The cool glass felt good against his swollen cheek.
Lister—the beefy, short-haired screw seated behind the wire-reinforced glass— pretended to be deaf. Billie Joe had learned not to be in a hurry, but he was five years behind schedule. The guard, on the other hand, was in for life, a short life Billie hoped. He watched Lister stretch, yawn and, like someone feeling his way through the dark, reach across his cluttered desk to palm the electronic door release. Two things happened. First, Lister tipped over his caffè latte; second, as his neck bent forward the tatted scorpion flinched. Cool, Billie thought. Something to consider. The buzzer sounded and he pushed forward, oblivious to the ruined paperwork being swept off the desk into an overflowing wastebasket. With nary a grunt, the guard wiped his hand on his uniform and returned to the dog-eared paperback.
Billie saw the flickering light at the far end of the windowless corridor and began shuffling toward the annex, seemingly unaware that his shackles had been removed. He went out of his way to squash a pair of cockroaches performing a lude act. The stale air stunk of coffee. The floor needed mopping. So did Billie. Sweat had saturated his new white dress-shirt at the armpits, his chest, and lower back. His breathing was labored. He smelled of disinfectant. He hurt. Three hours earlier, four twisted screws from HR had summarily stripped, blindfolded, and run him through the gauntlet on his hands and knees—twice—all for the amusement of the warden. Blakely had yawned and waddled off to bed ten minutes before number 4032 cried uncle. Billie had no uncle, and the Mississippi State Penitentiary had no AAA rating; but, as of tonight, it had a vacancy. Billie’s cell was empty.
The revolving door sluggishly slid and swooshed when Billie put his back to it. He dizzied through three revolutions of the muggy chase before lunging into the annex. The thirty-three-year-old con had spent most of his dreary life rutting around in circles—in and out of scrapes, in and out of juvie, in and out school, in and out of foster care—but tonight he just wanted out. He stepped forward, laid his black gym bag on the counter, and waited. Then he waited some more. “Anybody home?” No reply.
“Hey, I got a bus to catch. Will somebody sign me out?” No reply. He body-slammed his gym bag against the counter three times. Nothing. He peppered the room with profanity.The salty southerner turned around. A small window in the locked door between him and freedom overlooked the yard, fogged in darkness. He wiggled the handle.
“Hold it . . . I said, STOP.” Billie sluggishly swung around. “Where do you think you’re going, Mr. Q.?”
Billie dropped his hands to his sides and let his shoulders slump. He stared at the floor. “Home. I’m going home, Mr. Knote.”
“You’ll go home when I say you go home. Get your bag off the counter. So, you were leaving without even a thank you? To me? Your handler? You know what ingratitude gets you, right?”
“Yes, Mr. Knote.”
“And didn’t you know I don’t like to be interrupted when I’m prepping for surgery?”
“No, Mr. Knote.
Bertram Knote finished drawing a sliver from his hand with a tweezer and then held it up to the light. He crossed his eyes. “Can’t tell whether this here’s a beam or a mote. What do you think, Mr. Q.?”
“It’s whatever you say, Mr. Knote.”
“On your knees.”
Billie dropped first to one knee, then the other. He drew a shallow breath, bowed his head, and closed his eyes; he wasn’t praying, just tensing for the blow. What used to be fire in his gut had dampered down but hadn’t been extinguished. Here we go again. Bring it on. He yearned to trade places with his trainer; one minute would suffice. Mr. Knote lifted the hinged counter and stepped forward, striking his open palm with a baton as he circled Billie like a tamer caged in a circus with a languishing lion. Bring it on. Here we go again. Knote’s crepe-soled shoes squawked at the tile floor.
“Here pussy-pussy-pussy cat. Almost time to leave the petting zoo. What did Doc Chalmers say about your accident, huh?”
“Nothing, Mr. Knote.”
“What did you say? Squeak louder, mouse.”
“I said, ‘nothing’, Mr. Knote. He said nothing.”
“I don’t believe you. What did you say about your little accident?”
“I told him I fell down the stairs on my way to the yard, Mr. Knote. Say, can I go now? I gotta bus to catch. I don’t want to miss it.”
“Too late, Mr. Q. You just missed it.” Loosening his grip on its leather-lashed handle, Knote let his baton free-fall on BJ’s head. “Still sounds hollow pussy, pussy. Anybody home?” He grinned out the left side of his whiskered mouth where he usually trapped a cigar. “Just remember, Mr. Q., no loitering allowed at the bus stop.” Billie nodded. “Get up and get out.” Billie stood and limped to the door. Hearing the buzz, he leaned into muggy Mississippi and left behind a manslaughter charge, paid in full.
Billie forged ahead at the pace and stride of a turtle paddling ashore after a miserable four-year stint in a briny sea. The asphalt sluffed and steamed beneath his flip-flops, but Billie paid it no heed. “Thirty feet, you can do that,” he mumbled to himself. “Then freedom.” But freedom to do what? A ghoulish guard buzzed Billie through the outer gate. It slammed behind him and chain-link fencing shook contemptuously.
Halogen pole lights—half of which, like Billy, had yellowed with age– rimmed the pitted parking lot. The smell of spent gasoline sullied the air. Alone, Billie sat and ran his hand across the bus-stop bench, still warm to the touch. It was as pockmarked as his complexion. Bird dung had pooled in the cracks and dried. In the dim light across the narrow street, a lowly dumpster-dunker shopped for a snack. The ring-tailed raccoon paid heed neither to her observer, nor to the bumper sticker crookedly affixed to the bin.
Thanks for visiting California. Now go home. Billie was one hundred and fifty miles from Greenville.
Overhead, a single fluorescent lamp intermittently blacked out then regained consciousness. It served as a tanning salon to half the frenzied moths, flies, and mosquitoes in Sunflower County and led the list of many in desperate need of a ballast transplant. Billie needed sleep. He drifted in and out of consciousness while wave after wave of resolute insects meticulously timed their dives and dined on his sweaty skin or died at his hand. Billie grew weary of swatting his bruised arms and legs. He needed a break. He waited.
He waited some more. Facing the parking lot, Billie watched the cars, trucks, and three motorcycles swap places. Some left quickly. Others arrived slowly. A shift had ended. A shift began. Monotony in the moonlight. Three hours passed. The bus rolled up. The brakes broke wind. With a finger and thumb Billie pinched his pocket seeking assurance that the get out of jail -ride free token hadn’t abandoned him. It had. He climbed aboard, leaving behind an entire squadron of malevolent mosquitoes, grounded for harboring bad blood or lifeless on the bench.
“Lost my token.”
“That’ll be three bucks.”
“I only got a Jackson.”
“Drop it in the bank.”
Billie dropped the crumpled twenty into the collector chute. It landed on a stippled, grey conveyor belt, housed in glass; the pudgy driver glanced down, punched a button, the conveyor belt carried the bill forward, and the machine gobbled it up. Billie put out his hand expecting seventeen dollars in change.
“Oh, I’m sorry sonny, I don’t have change for a twenty; I’ll get you a voucher,” said the driver as he grabbed the Brodie knob—cons called it the suicide knob—on the steering wheel. The doors folded closed. The air brakes hissed. The bus lurched forward. Billie grabbed the vertical balance bar, stood upright, and eyeballed the locked cash box beneath the driver’s seat. “Here. Send this into the company and they’ll do right by you.”
Billie pocketed the card, took the seat immediately behind the driver, and counted the ripples on the back of his neck, there were three—one more than he had chins. The driver resumed eating his donut; he glanced in the rear-view mirror and, unnerved by Billie’s stare, stopped chewing.
Billie tossed his head back as if to say, “You should feel uncomfortable, Chub. There are only two people on this bus, and one of them is a low-life thug.” His stomach growled. It registered on empty. And when Billie Joe got off three hours later, so did the cash box.
By the time he walked the five miles from where the bus driver lay unconscious in the weeds on the side of the road, the board-walks of Greenville had folded up for the night. But not the dogs. Dogs don’t fold easily. Their lurid howling, like Sirens from a distant, rocky shore, taunted Billie’s dark soul. He hated dogs. He hated coming home. He hated his solitary life. He hated being hungry.
His dirty, sandaled feet tightrope-walked the freshly painted double-yellow lines down the middle of Hamblin Street—known to the elderly as Lynching Lane— while Billie painfully recalled the sniggers, the jeers, and the cat-calls from folks who had looked on as his father, goaded by a cop, attempted to push a peanut down the line with his bloodied nose. The Quagmeyers in former days had borne the brunt of more than a few collaboratives’ caustic harangues. Distain for the disjointed family was knotted into the fabric of local lore.
“WELCOME HOME,” Billie extended his arms, smiled contemptuously, and spun a clumsy three-sixty-degree circle in the middle of town. “What? No posse? No kangaroo court? No tar and feathers? And, Mr. Mayor, no all-night diner? Listen up everybody. ODD MAN OUT IS BACK TO GET EVEN. NOW HEAR THI . . .” He hushed, held his breath, and heard two distinct sounds—one, his own heartbeat, and the other, a mentally disturbed dog, closing fast.
Time to climb.
Billie spent a stressful thirty minutes shinnied halfway up a flagpole in the town square. Each time he released a hand to scratch a mosquito bite, he slipped a quarter inch toward the lathered jaws of a barking German shepherd. Slip-scratch-slip-scratch. Snarling back, Billie spat and called the immigrant hound every foul name he’d pedaled in prison. Soon disgusted, his opponent quit the debate over her right of citizenship and ran off to feed her undocumented pups. Relieved, Billie slid down from half-mast, dashed over to Holcomb Grocery Co-op, broke a window, unlocked the door, liberated some stale sweet rolls, grabbed a six pack, and sat cross-legged on the floor. Possessed of a voracious appetite, he inhaled food like garbage disposal.
Above his head a handmade, dog-eared sign had been scotch-taped to the back of an antique National Cash Register. God helps those who help themselves. Well sir, he’d better help you if you help yourself! BJ paid it no mind. To him, self-reliance and help-yourself were two peas in a pod. End of story.
Filled with sugar, Billie equated to a two-hundred and fifty-gallon tanker of high octane gasoline. Both could do a lot of damage. Time tested, his short fuse and extensive blast radius had proven lethal. The combination had landed him in solitary confinement twice in just the last eight months. Each time he’d survived the hellish hole by imagining it to be an all-expense paid vacation. His penthouse suite in cell-block eleven consisted of a four-by-four, windowless hovel with a drain in the center of the floor. Valeted to his quarters, Billie had convinced himself that he was in total control of his environment. His first all-expense-paid-trip to Isolation Island had come on the heels of a frantic phone call from his mother:
“Billie Joe, do you hear me, boy? The feds was here tadie. Cyrus Raven seed ‘em comin’ up the draw toward the still, an’ so he hitched hisself up that ol’ Cyprus tree by the river. Whin he refused to come down, them revenue boys plugged him in the gut. I seed it all for myself. He flopped into the river, thrashed some, waved, and down he went. Oh Billie, I’m all alone.”
Wall patch—$300. Pay-phone–$639.00. Beating—complimentary.
Metaphorically speaking—at 5:02 p.m. three months and one day later, holes had been tapped and charges laid for a second cataclysmic blast. Billie Joe had dozed in the day-room and fallen asleep with his mouth full and wide open. The TV was on, the sound muted. Billie gagged, came to life, and there she was. “MAMA.” Karman Jean Quagmeyer—her cheeks, arms and legs all puffy-like–was stretched out across the screen in her skivvies next to a sulking coral snake. WTNZ flashed the grainy photo on the screen for an eternal fifteen seconds. Karman looked pretty dead, the snake, not so much. The reporter announced that she had been discovered by an entrepreneurially-minded census-taker earlier in the day. He had first peddled the story to the local FOZY News outlet, then violated the contract by posting the story on Tweetter. His reputation tanked, but Karman got half a million likes—only one of these from the snake.
TV Bracket–$135. Samsung big screen—$1500. Punishment—donated. Billie had accumulated enough travel points to visit Isolation Island free for six weeks of quiet repose beside the pool—his plugged drain. But weeks had passed; now that was water under the bridge.
Billie sat up. The floor was wet. He’d fallen asleep leaning against the Co-op’s pop machine. Both hands of the back-lit Coca Cola clock on the wall stuck straight up. The imagery wasn’t lost on Billie.
“Bejeebers. Where am I? . . . No, where am I not? Not home.” The witching hour had arrived, and 5,280 feet of dirt road lay between Billie and his inheritance. Hurrying from the store without closing the front door, he made a beeline for Dummy Lane. He found it, trotted twenty yards down the dirt road, heard something or somebody drop in the bushes, turned about, and hightailed it back into town, finally stopping to catch his breath at the corner of Hagan’s Haberdashery. Billie was out of shape.
He squatted, his knees elbowed, his hands on his forehead. “Time for a confabulation,” he said to himself in an attempt to steel his nerve. “If you walk down that lane in the dark you’re stupider than a donkey’s dingleberry.”
“Watch your tongue.” He thumped his chest. “The last guy who called me that can’t walk anymore.” After rubbing down his facial hair and cogitating over his options—all the while keeping an eye out for dogs—Billie poked around town until he spotted a bicycle leaning against the mossy rear wall of a two-story clapboard house. “Hallelujah and amen.” He gave himself an unearned, congratulatory high five. “Yes Reverend, the Lord does help them that helps themselves. Gimme that o-o-l-d time religion,” he chanted sarcastically. After snaking through knee-high weeds, he wrapped his hands around the handlebars, threw his leg over the frame, peddled, and instantly proofed Newton’s first law of motion. The bike stopped before Billie Joe stopped. At the point where his legs formed a “V” he rammed into head-tube. It was undamaged by the collision. But not Billie.
A security-minded rascal had tethered the bicycle to a gas meter with a leather harness and BJ had bucked into the saddle horn. The bucolic backyard instantly transformed into a bullpen. Frustrated and angry, Billie stomped, and then with his bare hands twisted free a length of copper flex from the meter. The liberated pipe zig-zagged back and forth, hissing like a frightened sidewinder; escaping gas filled the air with the smell of rotten eggs. But at least the harness fell free of the pipe.
Only then did Billie apprehend that—although it was free of the gas meter—the harness remained securely knotted to the rear wheel. He reached down, grabbed the strap, gave it a violent yank and stripped three spokes from the wheel. That did it. Like a spoiled brat at his own birthday party, Billie jumped up and down—first on the rear wheel, then on the front—and then he stomped from the yard, deliberately crushing every soybean plant in the garden.
Still on the prowl for transportation, he spied another bicycle lying in the driveway of a rundown residence. Banded newspapers told him nobody was home, so he rushed forward, mounted up, canted his knees outward so they wouldn’t hit the handlebars, and pedaled for home. The Little Buckaroo’s overloaded front wheel racked violently. The chain rattled against the guard. The seat had no give but plenty of take.
An inebriated fisherman on his way home from “repairing a hole in his boat”—a lie he frequently told to his wife—stopped in the middle of the lane and stared at the dark specter closing on his position; he heard the clink-clink of the chains of hell; he heard nascent nostrils’ heavy breathing; he sank to his knees, threw the jug into the weeds, crossed himself, and plaintively petitioned, “No, no Dios! Voy a cambiar! Voy a cambiar!”
Then Billie rang the bell—not something even a sober Southerner would expect from the black horse and rider of John’s Revelation. The fisherman recanted his pledge and crawled off the road in search of his jug, repeating over and over— “No importa padre.” Perhaps fortunately for him, both the moon and Billie were full of themselves that night.
After pedaling for thirteen minutes, Billie clattered around a bend in the trail, hit a rut and—absent a seat belt—launched over the handlebars into a shallow orbit. Upon his re-entry a chorus of crickets chirped until he hit the ground and rolled. BJ hoisted the bicycle overhead—in the dark he looked like Godzilla taking revenge on Tokyo—and flung it into the weeds that inundated the property. The ramshackle Confederate barracks didn’t look half bad in the dark. But then, Billie couldn’t see the other half. At last he was home.
Following his first night of freedom, BJ sat on the stoop of the dilapidated dwelling listening to a mocking bird and tried to ignore the squadron of fanged flies circling overhead, vying for a turn to land and refuel. Billie Joe was hungry, too. Discouraged and chigger-chunked, he exclaimed: “Looks like I inherited one hundred percent of nothing.” True to their roots, the Quagmeyer clan had been swamp people for generations and, according to Cyrus Raven, they could trace their genealogy back to the Okefenokee tribe. Billie had never seen documentation, but he considered himself the last ripe fruit on the family tree. But then, he couldn’t eat an idea.
From his lonely perch he surveyed the entire half-acre estate. Forty yards leeward of the barracks, cattails sucked life from green scum; frogs croaked; the ill-reputed coral snake slithered; the Cypress tree, draped with Spanish moss, steamed in the morning mist; the bewitching, muddy river washed its mouth out on the rocky shore, then swigged and swirled toward the salty sea. The yard—littered with tawdry toys, cigarette butts, foam plates, a few flattened beer cans, drug paraphernalia, and the remnants of a still—apologetically confirmed that Cyrus Raven and his wife had not died of natural causes.
Land which had once grown soybeans in abundance refused to grow healthy weeds. Most were dead or dying. BJ had no tools and no way to cultivate the blanched earth. The tractor wouldn’t start but still bore the manufacturer’s label: Case, Model 1953. Its lifetime warranty had expired. The rusty crank hung below the radiator and straddled the remains of a collapsed outhouse. The transmission no longer peed oil.
Before its own demise, a pernicious bougainvillea had stabbed and strangled a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign and weaseled its way to the top of a tether-ball pole anchored in tired cement. As a child Billie had played against himself for hours—but had never won. He twirled around and gazed one last time at his birthplace. It looked like he felt. Pealed curls of calcimine wash had left the structure denuded and denigrated. Hurricane Castro had uprooted a large eucalyptus and dumped it head-first through the barracks roof, creating the bizarre illusion of an upside-down tree house. Toilet-paper remnants stuck to its branches like ghoulish Christmas decorations and waved goodbye—all a reminder that bad things happen to good toilet paper, too.
The disgruntled ex-con flip-flopped his way back to Greenville, gargled, washed his face, hair, and hands in the drinking fountain by Beno’s Drug, and then slipped into the shadows where he squatted by his gym bag until the town woke up. BJ discarded the soiled dress shirt and donned one of two new tea-shirts furnished by the warden’s wife. Its back had been silk screened with If You Met My Family You’d Understand.
Billie wanted to avoid fisticuffs until he’d snarfed down some breakfast. A new eatery on Main Street—Pancake Palace— caught his eye. Shiny, tomahawk-shaped, multicolored flags, tantalized by a warm breeze, ran from the eaves to the curb. A perky Pensacola maiden, her dark hair braided and sporting a blue bow, stopped open the door and tendered a smile to passersby. Billie checked his coin pocket and followed his nose.
Short of an hour later, still hungry, his shirt torn, his left cheek bruised, BJ was on the run—again. From a distance, eyewitnesses swore he looked like a bow-legged orangutan fleeing on his hind legs. With his flip-flops in one hand, a gym bag and a lady’s purse in the other, Billie scooted across the Genesee-Southern railroad tracks only seconds before a freight train—its whistle wailing “not you again”—barreled through, cutting off the Holcomb brothers’ hot pursuit.
Billie found seclusion, food, shoes, toilet paper, and a dandy M-9 bayonet knife in Arkansas’s 435 acre Poison Springs State Forest—a pilferer’s paradise. Three conclaves of campers fled the cathedraled woods swearing they’d been ravaged in the night by the devil himself. Billie’s impersonation just seemed to come natural.
Keeping parallel to the road, he shop-lifted his way to Kingsland, birthplace of Jonny Cash, man in black, hoping to hook up with the singer who had made himself and Folsom Prison Blues famous. BJ figured Jonny must be an ex-con. No Jonny. No cash. So, Billie packed it in and—since no passing motorist dared offer him a ride—hoofed it back to a pasture near Pine Bluff where years earlier Cyrus Raven had brought him on a fishing expedition. Actually, the fishing trip had been an afterthought. The trip’s purpose had been to school BJ in the fine art of boosting cars. The plan had hooked a snag and sent them reeling.
Seventeen days had come and gone since Billie’s flight into Arkansas, and today marked his eighteenth day of freedom. He dangled his feet in Big Muddy, fed out his trot line, let down his guard, and—with the line between his first and second toes—drifted to sleep on the grassy riverbank. Spent autumn leaves, weary of hanging on to life, detached from a shady sycamore and dished back and forth, down, down, down. More than a few lay in unfettered repose on Billie’s bulk. He looked like Gulliver—fit to be tied.
On the road above the pasture, two Pine Bluff Humane Society employees—their conversation cluttered with clichés—motored toward home from LaSalle. A freshly poached white-tail doe and her fawn lay lifeless in the back of the beige panel truck.
“Jasper, pull over. My eyeballs is swimmin’.” The truck rolled to a stop so Enid could swing out and take care of business. Jasper opened the driver’s door to air out the cab. He untangled the strap on the field glasses, pressed them to his eyes, and looked down range.
“My, oh my, Ida Claire. Whoever he is, that feller looks peacefuller than a dead pig in the sunshine.”
“Lemme see.” Enid stretched the overall straps back over his rounded shoulders while he penguin-walked around the truck. “I cain’t see a thing. Wait. . . . Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit. He looks like ten miles of bad road.”
Jasper reached into the back of the panel truck and—hand over hand–commenced dragging out the long, noosed control pole.
“Now hold on thar jest a minute. What in tarnation do you think yur gonna do?”
Jasper scratched his noggin. “Enid, the way I figure it, this here’s public land, and him there’s a public nuisance. It’s our swarn duty to noose and cage varmints. Besides, dollars to donuts this uns on the run an’ has a bounty on his hade. Who knows, he coulda kilt somebody.”
“Lemme see them glasses agin.” Enid zoomed in tight from seventy-five yards. “Jest lookin’ at that feller makes me as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockin’ chairs. Don’ you think he mighta just offed hisself?”
“Confound it, Enid. He’s got a trot line in the water, don’t ya see? Don’t go off and be an old stick-in-the-mud. Could be we’re about to hit the jackpot.”
“But what if I got it figured right and he is dade? Shore as shootin’ somebody’ll trip on by and see us proddin’ him? They’ll think we kilt him. We’d be in a mess a hurt. I think we jist otter skedaddle and let em’ be.” Enid turned and walked toward his side of the truck. “Leave em be, I tell ya.” He grabbed the door handle and pushed the button. “We’d have more luck tryin’ to herd a bunch a cats across the road than capturin’ that big monkey.”
“Enid, Enid. Like your Pa used ta say, ‘If you can’t run with the big dogs, stay under the porch.’ I’m gonna lasso me a reward.”
“Okay, okay, you win. Hold your horses. If you’ll noose him, I’ll dart him.”
Jasper carried the pole and noose. Enid grabbed and loaded the tranquilizer rifle. It had been a long time since the friends had tiptoed to the edge of what came easy, and they’d never had more than a few dollars in their pockets at one time. They spread out and sneaked down the hill.
The plan had two flaws—Jasper was one, Enid, the other. They had a reputation for being “dumber than a box of rocks.” Like overturned kayaks both men soon floated face-down toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Billie waved a salacious goodbye. Sedate as a dug-in badger, he climbed in the truck, leaned over, and popped open the glove-box. Out spilled half a box of 12 gauge shotgun shells, a half-eaten Rocky Road candy bar, and—wadded into a ball—a map. Billie chugged down the bar, got out, and smoothed out the wrinkled map on the warm hood of the truck. “Ya got it caddywompus, Billie. Turn it like so.” He used a finger as a pointer.
“Let’s see now, I might could . . . Here’s me, and there’s Gulfport, the second biggest city in Mississippi.” Billie splashed his finger up and down in the Gulf. “Thinkin’, thinkin’. You should be able to disappear on the coast, with all them docks, and ships, and beaches, warehouses, and such. Who knows, one day, Billie Boy, you might just take a cruise.” Moving his finger up the middle of U. S. Highway 49 he circled Hattiesburg twice and punched it in the middle. “Hattiesburg. Hattiesburg? Ma. That’s where you was born. Oh, Billie, Billie, Billie.” Spiked by a few volts of enthusiasm, Billie hastily calculated the mileage. “Two hundred and ten. I can make that before nightfall. Highway 49. Got it.”
He wadded up and threw the map on the back seat, climbed in the truck, slammed the door, floored the accelerator, and turned the key. Rejection. “Story of my life.” But the fuel gauge registered half-full. Billie’s stomach, on the other hand, floated but half a candy bar and registered hungry. He turned the key and pumped the accelerator. Nothing. He forced the shifter into park and turned the key; the engine turned over and came to life. “Giddy-up.” He racked the steering wheel, made a U-turn, slapped the outside of the door-panel with his hand, and yelled, “Giddy-down.” The tires spun, the truck fishtailed down the road, and in fifteen minutes he was bridging the mighty Mississippi and imagining the good life in Gulfport.
Billie Joe invented a technique for staying awake. Since he detested the wealthy, every time a luxury car passed him on the road, he screamed, “high cotton,” and laid on the horn. Every five or ten miles when an oncoming vehicle moved into the passing lane, he dodged back and forth across the median, flashed his headlights, and played chicken.
Two hundred and ten miles later BJ passed Southern Mississippi University. “I’m nearly there, Mama.” Not far ahead on the left-hand side of the street, and set back from the blue and white marquee, the eight-story Forrest General Hospital’s windows glowed golden in the afternoon sun. Billie pulled over to the curb, slid across the bench seat, and climbed out on the sidewalk. “If I had a camera I’d take a picture of where you was born, Mama.” A tear tried to moisten his eye but he blinked it away. “And if you was alive, I’d drive back to Greenville and staple it to your head for dying on me without saying goodbye . . . what stinks?”
Billie opened the paired sheet-metal doors on the back of the panel truck and threw up his hands to fend off an attack. The wafted smell of rotting meat cannibalized his senses. He grabbed the legs, yanked, and parked the doe and her spotted fawn behind the truck, but he nixed the idea of trying to pose them “all natural-like.” He hurriedly climbed in the cab, slammed the door, and sped away–but not away from the smell on his hands. To Billie the rancid deer symbolized everything he hated about life—the federal government, the American flag, the South, the wealthy, and Mississippi—his home. He had spent his life—not just his time in prison—in colorless isolation and poverty. He had never looked to heaven for help. He had never cried for joy.
Instead, Billie had learned to contrive, script, and masquerade his own brand of so-called “pleasure.” His vocabulary of racial epithets festered in his brain like an infected wound. He sought solace by screaming out the window at pedestrians and passersby. He cursed cities, hamlets and hovels along the way. Billie-blinders blocked his vision of the sprawling savannahs, the stands of longleaf, slash, and loblolly pine; the drooping azaleas, mountain laurels, wild orchids, and wild flowers—all intoxicated with their own scent—all now closing up and settling in for the night.
After the sun dropped from sight, Billie commenced looking for a place to hole up and get some shut-eye. Lettering on the crumpled map and words on a highway sign merged and flagged his mind to slow down. He buttoned the headlights on high beam with the touch of his toe, shifted down, pulled left across the median and stopped diagonally in the middle of the highway. The routed beige and brown Forest Service marker, lettered in white, read—De Soto National Forrest: Caylee Campground.
“Okefenokee for you, Billie Boy. Time to raise a little hell.”
He rolled off Highway 49, shut off all but the parking lights, and idled down a gravel road beneath the canopy of evergreens. “Time to torch the truck, jack a new ride, find some grub, and get some shut-eye.” To his left a dusty, green Winnebago motor home slumbered in the dark. Further on, a family of four sat on lawn chairs beside a Mercury station wagon watching– “TV?” Billie drove a quarter mile, pulled into an empty campsite, shut off the engine and listened to the sound of silence; he dozed. “What, what? Wake up.” He slapped his cheeks and climbed out of the truck. After bagging his belongings, including a disassembled shotgun and shells, he retrieved and fired up a cigarette lighter. Off came the gas cap.
“Boom-boom Billie? Not tonight. I’m not that stupid.” He dropped the lighter into his pocket without closing the lid. Damage control. Burn, burn. After biting his tongue, slapping his thigh, and dancing a jig for five minutes, Billie regained a modicum of composure. But his blistered skin still hurt. He stripped a few suckers from nearby trees, laid them across the truck, slashed its tires, and set out to explore the large campground in the dark.
Distant rippling laughter turned Billie’s head. He set a course toward the noise and commenced muscling his way through the trees toward the badinage, straight-arming low-hanging gut-stabbers with the shotgun, raised defensively in both hands. He paused now and then to listen and make minor course corrections. Presently, the flickering light of a small fire magically meandered through the trees and cheered his dark, baggy eyes. He grinned. “Supper time, BJ,” and knelt, but not to bless the food. After fumbling around in the dark for a minute, he retrieved, assembled, loaded the magazine, and pumped a shell into the shotgun chamber. After stowing the rest of his gear under a fallen tree, he continued on, combating the underbrush and stomping toward the encampment exuding the confidence of a full-grown water buffalo in heat.
As he drew nearer, one giant step at a time, Billie detected a salubrious soliloquy. A man’s voice, punctuated with “yep-yeps,” titillated his eardrums. He paused and pushed a right ear forward like a bull elephant does before charging. Silence. He shrugged, picked up the pace and navigated around a covey of motorcycles—too many to count. When he got within ten feet of the camp, someone snarled, “You with the shotgun. If you were trying to surprise us, your imitation of a Sherman tank was too well done. Now you’ll soon be well done unless you turn around. This here’s an exclusive man’s club, so turn your hiney toward the fire and buggar off.” Billie Joe didn’t break stride. He broke wind. One-two-three-four-five steps.
He stopped three yards from four picnic tables, lined end to end and sprawling away from him. Sixteen men— half on one side of the tables, half on the other—stood with one leg in and one leg outside the bench seats, eyeballing the twelve-gauge. At the far end a solitary figure, his features indistinguishable, a ball cap pulled forward on his head, stood with his arms folded across his chest. Billie’s eyes darted from one rebel face to another, taking note of the Glock 19- Generation Fours that hung from studded belts ready for action. Billie showed no fear. He was hungry and anxious.
Again the voice standing in the dim light at the far end of the tables barked, “You interrupted our carvin’ contest. Yep, yep. It’s true. True enough. So, before we take you for a big chunk of balsa wood, turn around and run. I’m not askin’ again.”
Billie stood his ground, his trigger finger straight and ready to curl and pull. Then the unbelievable happened.
“Well, if I ain’t a horsefly on a sow’s butt; looky who we got here. What a Petri dish world we live in.” The gang leader sprang effortlessly onto the table and walked the gauntlet between his men and toward Billie Joe. It was Jonny Ray Santos, wanted for murder in Charleston, South Carolina. He jumped to the ground with the grace and agility of a Siamese cat, landed two feet in front of the intruder, and took off his cap. “Billie Joe Quagmeyer, are you a sight for sore eyes.”
Orphaned at age seven, Jonny was three years Billie Joe’s junior. They had bonded in Mississippi during a botched attempt to rob a grand master of the Ku Klux Klan on his way to supervise a lynching. To elude capture, BJ had piggybacked Ajani across a snake infested, slimy slew in the dark. Admiring the high-water mark on BJ’s neck, Ajani set his sights on growing up to be like his role model. The dream required a long stretch—in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Ajani still came up short by one foot, and so he gave up the quest and contented himself with disappearing into BJ’s size fifteen footprints.
The paltry pair had spent most of their time in the shadows. Jonny, type-cast for his role as tag-along, became adept at pressing like a chameleon against dank walls in the alleyways of life. Both his tongue and misdeeds left him pricked with regret, but he didn’t bleed. He’d snatched snakes but had never been bitten. To him, coiling to strike back—or strike first—came naturally. With arms outstretched he stepped cautiously forward to give BJ a hug.
Billie straight armed Jonny in the chest and stepped back. Sixteen semi-automatics vacated their holsters. “Yeah, well here I am. Now what?”
“Not meaning any offense, but you do remember me, don’t you?”
“Yes. I saved your brown hide by carrying your bag of bones through a swamp so as we could get away from the Grand What-cha-ma-call-it of the Ku Klux Klan up north.”
“Did you hear that, boys? It sure is true. I was on his shoulders and he was up to his neck in pea soup. Everybody meet my friend, Billie Joe Q.—the toughest, meanest, smartest man I ever met. Say, when did you get out?”
“Who wants to know? I’ve been cuffed up so many times I’ve lost track. What are you doin’ down here on my turf?”
Jonny eyeballed his men. “Well, if this ain’t providential. Yep, yep. Shall I tell him why we’re here?” Although weapons were holstered, nobody spoke. Nobody relaxed. All eyes were sizing up Billie. “Well then, I’ll tell him.” Jonny puffed out his chest, shoved his thumbs in his front pockets, and smiled. “BJ, how’d you like to go to Afghanistan? You could be our chief. I’d nominate you myself.” The crew muttered in protest under their breath. Jonny Ray straightened up and wagged his finger. “Listen up you bunch a hayroobs. This here fella is a direct descendant the Okefenokee. You are still descended from one of their chiefs, ain’t ya, Billie?” BJ nodded mechanically.
“See? It’s just like I said. So, here’s the deal, and its sweeter than a mess of grits. We’re gonna to truck on down to Gulfport tomorrow.” He leaned forward and whispered, “I got connections. We’re shippin’ out to Karachi, Pakistan, and from there we’ll skip on over to Afghanistan.”
“Skip where, you say?”
“Afghanistan. Hey, didn’t you watch TV at Club Fed?” Jonny didn’t wait for an answer. “We’re going overseas to join ISIS. It stands for I Stab In Spades. I figured that out on my own. Maybe it’s a code word that’ll slick the skids, if you get my meanin.’ Once you’re on the inside ya get chicks compliments of the owner; the chicks love ya; the money comes stacked on government pallets; ya get on TV, and ya can kill anybody who isn’t a member . . . AND,” he leaned up close, “no jail time. Yep, yep, and get this, when it comes to Americans, there’ no bag limit. Should I continue?”
At first take, the idea of stowing away on a freighter bound for Karachi, Pakistan, spelled “insanity.” Billie shrugged and pawed the air dismissively with his hand. “Naw. Not for me.” But he couldn’t turn down a free ride to Gulf Port. So, the next day found him hanging onto Jonny’s bunny-hop handles for dear life, racing south at eighty miles an hour on a Harley Hog.
Within the week, Jonny had another sales opportunity dropped in his lap. He secretly called it providential. He led the whole gang into Frigg’s Food Mart and Drive-Thru—on East Railroad Street, a block away from the wharf—for some refreshments. “The drinks are on me.” The timing couldn’t have been more perfect. As they slurped down a sixth refill, TRAGER TV re-ran old footage of the October World Series Boston massacre. It garnered more attention than the overweight strippers in the Catfish Club down the street. Every bloodshot eye took in more carnage than they could have otherwise imagined. Billie Joe Quagmeyer puffed up like an adder looking for someone to bite. “Wow, what a . . . WOW.” He gave Jonny a high five.
Everybody grinned. Gotcha.
Just then the entry door swung open, a bell tinkled, and a cop strolled into the food mart to buy a donut and a Coke. The gang hushed and meekly walked out the door single file, their weapons covered by sloppy shirts.
“Good morning, officer.”
“Howdy doody, Sir.”
“Have a nice day, Mr. Policeman.”
“Nice ride ya got out there.”
“Hungry, huh?”
“I hate cops.”
They walked around back and congregated by the dumpster to take a deep sniff of ocean air, relax, finish their drinks, and swap stories. Twinky, the youngest and most fragile of the crew was last to slip by the cop and first to offend BJ by accidentally bumping his arm with his head. What had been a full cup took three seconds and two forward flips to land upside down on the crab-grass.
” Oops.” Twinky trembled, swallowed, and tried to drain BJ’s bile with misdirection. “A . . . Mister Billie, before your release from prison for good behavior did you by any chance come onto that story of the Oregon dude who joined ISIS and had the honor of hacking off the head of an American diplomat on TV?” The lengthy question depleted Twinky’s oxygen supply. His face paled. His feigned smile straight-lined and died. His lower lip trembled, and he held his breath, fully anticipating that he’d be squashed and thrown like an under-cooked cheeseburger into the dumpster.
Right on cue, Billie’s nostrils flared; he eyes narrowed into slits, and he perceived the ploy—the kid’s trying to buy time. “Naw, never happened, not on TV.” Billie stomped on the overturned cup and twisted his foot back and forth, back and forth, as if he were crushing the nicotine out of a Marlboro. He looked down at Twinky and pressed a giant index finger against his forehead, much like the baton which had so often been pressed between his own beady eyes up in Parchman. “You’re foolin’ with me kid, and I don’t like it.” Twinky backed away, tripped on the curb, and fell into the drive-up right in front of an orange, slowly moving VW, causing a hungry patron to punch her brakes. One foot more and Twinky’s head would have popped like a watermelon—just like those Jinny used to shoot from three hundred yards. The driver laid on the horn. Billie leaned forward, bunched up his nose, and fired three rounds of hate into the woman’s chest. She gulped, rolled up the window, jumped the curb, mowed down a bed of wilting chrysanthemums, and sped off without her order.
Jonny seized the moment and stepped in front of Billie Joe. No peace-pipe. “Easy chief, Twinky wasn’t pulling your leg. I saw the hacking with my own two eyes.”
Billie shook his head as if he were coming out of a trance. “Well, if that don’t beat all.” He’d been vacationing in the hole at the time the graphic footage first aired, and the mental picture of someone being decapitated on TV stimulated his revolutionary juices better than Jonny’s conciliatory Slurpee. But Billie didn’t help Twinky to his feet, and he never spoke to him again.
Within a few days, Ajani had filled the boss’s head with fermented, treasonous, propaganda and cunningly topped off the intoxicating brew with, “I give you Karim— Chief of the Okefenokee Clan, the high potentate of the Mississippi Militia.” Billie’s brain cells filled with caustic acid and charged his take on joy. He cherished the notion that somehow his clan and ISIS leaders, or even the Taliban chiefs, might be blood relatives; he panted over the prospect of inheriting 70 chicks in heaven; he drooled over the idea of randomly slashing off the heads of American soldiers with no fear of retribution; he savored a drive to become infamous and wealthy. A hijab sealed bubbling angst within his soul when, on January 25, the gang gathered round a ceremonial campfire in a secluded wood northwest of Biloxi. They locked arms, swayed from side to side singing Kumbaya, and got bombed on a batch of homemade hooch. Billie donned a black hijab—stolen from the Bradford-O’Keefe funeral home on Howard Street—and Jonny led the chant. “Karim- Karim-long live Karim, chief of the Okefenokee.”
Ajani had convinced everyone, including Billie Joe, that the Red Cross was filthy rich, that bloodletting leads to wealth and international acclaim, and that Afghanistan lay just over the crimson horizon. (Jonny purposely didn’t factor in the 8,301 miles of turbulent ocean between, “bon voyage,” and “yippy ki yay.”)
Before they sneaked aboard the Mobil Maiden—a supertanker docked at Biloxi—Karim sprinkled hooch on Jonny Ray’s head and exclaimed, “I crystalize you, Ajani, first lieutenant to the great Karim. We’ve been born again. Afghanistan, here we come, and it’s all for you, Mama. Wish you were here.”
Smuggled by freighter to Karachi, Pakistan, Karim and his gang stole a truck and headed across the border into Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires. Eleven hours later they limped into Kandahar, disgruntled that nobody stood on the road into town waving the black ISIS flag. No fanfare; no pats on the back; no weapons; no matching black outfits; and the Coca-Cola truck was useless—out of gas and had a flat tire.
“Where’s the palm trees, the parks for sleepin’, the Taliban, and where’s all them ISIS warriors we saw on TV?” Weather-worn and burping carbonated gas, Karim suffered from scurvy and weeks of exposure. He climbed a fire-escape with his men and perched atop a low-lying apartment building where they looked over a parapet into a barren wasteland. “What in blazes are they doing with all the poppy money?” Bewildered stares focused on the U.S. Army Special Operations base several clicks outside the city.
“Jonny Ray Santos, alias Ajani, spoke up. “Karim, maybe you led us to the wrong place.” Jonny only got away with the observation because he was BJ’s most trusted lieutenant.
“How should I know? Look Ajani, even cell-phones don’t work good up here,” Karim replied. His unkempt hair, bugaboo beard, and black, hairy brow, perhaps the shaggiest photographed in anthropological history—or pasted on a rap sheet—sprawled over his face and around his coal black eyes, underscored by tired looking tea bags. He stared into the distance hoping the military base was just a mirage. Without daring to say it aloud, his men thought their chief looked more like anemic hound dog on the prowl than a chief. He spit his chaw on the orange clay tiles and muttered, “Any place has to be better than my shack back in Mississippi.”
“What are you thinking, Chief?” Billie’s nervous system had been a tangle of loose connections for many years, but he was thinking he needed to prove his machismo to his crew by finding someone to “boost”—his word.
“Well, the American base isn’t a mirage.” Slow to arise, his disenchanted men followed Karim off the roof and trudged single file down the road to the north, looking for an easy mark. They spied a sleepy-eyed soldier returning from Kandahar after a day off. He was on foot, high on something, and headed toward the U.S. Special Operations base near the city. Karim and Ajani sneaked up behind, tapped him on the shoulder, and asked for his weapon and wallet. The soldier declined the request and began to run, so Karim tapped him three times in the back with his Glock. The men would later affirm that Karim didn’t shoot the soldier in the back; he scared him to death, and then fired the three rounds. Regardless, He gave Arabic-sounding names to a few of his men. Jonny, liked his alias—Ajani; it stuck like the dirt beneath his toenails. “Yep. Yep.” And most importantly, Karim of Kandahar was born on the road that day.
At a shadowed ceremony in the evening—and after again locking arms, swaying from side to side singing Kumbaya—the Mississippi-born curmudgeon renounced his American citizenship over a shared can or two of pork and beans pried open with a knife. He swore an oath that the only way he’d return home was in a box—preferably dead. Privately, Karim figured he might die of starvation, but he made all kinds of pie-in-the-sky promises to his men and then concluded the service by threatening to kill anyone who deserted.
Of course, Karim’s nationality made no difference to the team of Afghan military policemen who, the following morning, chased the gang in and out of the bazaar’s lining the Kandahar streets before running them into a well-conceived trap. With no place to hide, hungry and dehydrated, they surrendered, were shackled and shoved in separate, rectangular wire cages like hen-layers in a backyard. Karim consoled himself. At least the food and accommodations are an improvement over the Mississippi jails, and the morons didn’t use no noose. And no more beatings. Thus far, all Karim had to show for his sacrifice was a dried blood stain on his clothing—that of a young soldier from Trenton, an American treasure, a sacrificial Lamb.