“If I said yes, what proof would I have that you’d live up to your word?”
Buckman looks at me as though puzzled by my question. “I’m no saint, as I said. But I am a man of my word. My word is all I have.”
“And about three hundred million dollars.”
The banker gives me a tight, patronizing smile. “Closer to five, actually. May I make a suggestion? Ask your father about me. Duncan and I were never close, but he always treated me fairly. He did right by the club as well. Put it to him the way I’ve put it to you. See what he advises.”
“I might do that. One thing I would need is compensation for Buck’s widow, Quinn Ferris.”
“Did Ferris have life insurance?” Buckman asks.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
“Seven hundred fifty thousand,” Buckman says flatly. “All cash, payable by five p.m. today.”
“A million,” I counter.
“Done.”
“Damn.” I believe I could have asked for more and gotten it. “You guys must be set up for a world record payoff on this deal.”
“That’s our business, son. We look forward to hearing from you.”
“One hour,” Pine says. “Don’t push it.”
Chapter 32
I’m playing Buck’s handmade guitar on an earthen mound built by Indians around the time Genghis Khan invaded China. That’s recent construction compared to the site Buck discovered down at the industrial park, but Buck spent a lot of time on this hill, so it seemed like a good place to take stock of my situation. He served as superintendent of these 170 acres, officially called the Snake Creek Site but known locally as the “Indian Village.” A lot of Bienville residents come out here to walk, picnic, or run their dogs. When I was in junior high, I had buddies who used to sneak out here at night to get high and lie on their backs staring at the stars. I sneaked out here a few times with Jet during our magic summer, but today that seems a lot further in the past than it once did.
My meeting with Claude Buckman and his buddies left me disoriented. I felt like a protester who’d walked into a boardroom to tell off a bunch of corporate execs and walked out with a thousand shares of preferred stock. I’ve always felt I had a pretty stable moral compass, but the magnitude of the bribe offered by the Poker Club has set that compass spinning the way an electromagnetic field would. My intention in coming to this ancient site was twofold: first, to ground myself with Buck’s memory; second, to have a quiet place from which to make telephone calls. During this brief period when Buckman believes I might agree to his proposition, I feel physically safe, and I’d rather make my calls under the warm May sun than from my office downtown.
I hadn’t touched Buck’s guitar since picking out that one tune for Quinn, right after he died. The simple act of tuning the big baritone, then playing some of the songs I used to play with Buck, has settled me quite a bit. I’ve got the Indian Village mostly to myself today, and that’s helped, too. About four hundred yards away, an elderly man is walking a golden retriever near a smaller mound. They’re my only company now. After about twenty minutes of fingerpicking, I set the guitar in its open case, push my earbuds into my ears, and call my mother.
When I tell her I want to ask my father a question, Mom goes into protective mode. She’s worried I might pester him about accounting issues at the paper or even bring up the car accident that killed Dad’s first family. When I tell her I only want to know something about the Poker Club, she finally relents. I could have gone to their house to question him, but if Dad’s going to make me a target of abuse today, I’d rather it be from long distance. He can’t hold a cell phone with any stability, so she puts him on speaker. And because of his speech limitations, Mom acts as his interpreter and megaphone. Thankfully, she mutes the television.
“Marshall?” I hear Dad whisper. “Are you there?”
“Yes, sir. I’m here. I’m working a story, an important story, and I need to ask you a question. It’s about the Bienville Poker Club.”
He grunts as though surprised. Then he slowly croaks, “Fire away. Beats watching these paid flacks pretend to deliver objective commentary on CNN.”
Mom must be holding the cell phone right against his lips.
“All the years you ran the paper,” I say, “I can’t find any stories where you wrote critically about the Poker Club. I’ve been all through the morgue, and so far as I can tell, you never attacked them.”
This time my mother answers, trailing just behind the hoarse whisper that remains barely audible. “Well . . . I imagine you’re right. I think I suffered from tunnel vision back then. Those guys weren’t involved in the racial violence, not directly, and that’s where my focus was. I didn’t realize then that their corruption probably hurt the black community a lot more than a few rednecks with burning crosses. It was those guys, above all—the moneymen who held the power—who maintained the status quo.”
“Were they friends of yours? Buckman and the others?”
“Not really. I liked Blake Donnelly all right. Wyatt Cash’s father was a decent fellow. But I never had many friends in this town. My buddies were in the army or overseas. Foreign correspondents. The Poker Club actually asked me to join once, but I never considered it.”
“Why not?”
Dad hawks and spits with laborious effort, hopefully into a Kleenex. Then my mother says, “Different breed.”
“It sounds like you were aware of their corruption, though.”
This time the silence stretches for a while. “So that’s what this is about,” Mom repeats finally. “I read your story about Buck Ferris being killed. And I believe he was. But here’s the hard truth, son. Corruption is a part of capitalism. It’s a by-product of the system. A necessary lubricant to make the machine work. Given human nature, I mean. Because that’s the motive force of capitalism: greed. It’s the most pragmatic system there is.”
Even after decades of hard drinking, Dad still has a way of reducing complex questions to a few empirical statements. That’s why his editorials were always so pithy. “You’re saying we have to accept a certain amount of corruption as the price of business getting done?”
“I used to believe that. Take this paper mill deal—leaving out the question of whether the Poker Club killed Buck or not. If that mill is built, it will surely rest upon a tangled web of felonies and misdemeanors. You dig around enough, you can probably cut some of the strands of that web, maybe even pull the whole thing apart. But should you? The town needs that mill, Marshall, and everything coming with it. Is it right to deny folks employment just so you can stop Claude Buckman banking another few million dollars?”
Would Dad be surprised to learn that he’s restated Buckman’s thesis for him, in almost his exact words? For a moment I wonder if the crafty old banker just got off the phone with my father. “Probably not,” I tell him. “But damn, I’d like to take those bastards down.”
“Of course you would!” Mom says for him. “That’s the newsman’s dream. It’s Jesus driving the money changers from the temple. John Wayne wading through the black hats with a shillelagh, taking no prisoners. But that’s not real life.”