Hunting Mister Heartbreak by Jonathan Raban

Author:Jonathan Raban [Raban, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79163-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-05-10T16:00:00+00:00

I was the only afternoon drinker in the downstairs bar of the Holiday Inn. Chaz the bartender was squinting professionally at the water through the long picture window; when he wasn’t tending the bar he worked as a commercial fisherman, laying trot-lines for catfish from his aluminum skiff.

“Father … Francis … Craven,” he said slowly. “Yes, everybody liked him. Not just Catholics, but most everybody in town. He was a good man.”

“Somebody didn’t like him,” I said.

“That was a tragedy.”

“When did it happen?”

“January. He was meant to be taking an afternoon service. Just never turned up. They waited there in the church for him; thought he’d been caught in the traffic … he was coming back from his vacation in Florida. Then, a week later, they found his body, what was left of it, in a remote place outside of Tuscaloosa. He’d been clubbed to death, then they’d bound him to a pair of railroad ties and burned him. Only way they could identify him was by his teeth.”

“Why was he in Tuscaloosa?”

“Don’t nobody know. He used to work in Tuscaloosa, before he came here to Guntersville, but Tuscaloosa ain’t on the route from Florida. They reckon he must have been lured there. Lured to his death.”

“Was the Klan involved?” Were the two railroad ties a flaming cross?

“I don’t know about that,” Chaz said. Then, “There been theories. Nothing definite, though. Ain’t no evidence to prove nothing.”

“You think there was a Guntersville connection?”

“Maybe. But I don’t know nothing about that. Don’t nobody know, I reckon.”

Silence. Long silence. I could hear the squeak of the cloth on the glass as Chaz wiped an imaginary speck from it.

I said, “How’s the fishing?”

“Oh, the fishing … that’s getting to be pretty good.”

“How big do the catfish run round here?”

“The record, it stands at 103 pounds, and that’s a big catfish, but that ain’t nothing to what there is down there. There’s catfish there that are big big; bigger’n you could imagine. Why, when they were putting down the piles for the new bridge, there was a diver working there, he felt the ground move under his feet … That was a cat. He saw it with his own eyes. He was scared. He said that cat had a mouth so big it could have swallowed a man alive. And that ain’t doubtful!”

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