The Thomas Berryman Number

I took a tricky little bite of waffles and strawberries.

“Mmmff,” I drooled. “Tasth jus lith waffleth ‘n’ strawbearth.”

Cat punched me in the side. Misnomer:

love tap.

She lay in my lap and looked upside down into the new beard. Her little-owl eyeglasses were being held together with a Band-Aid.

“Mom’s mad,” she said.

“Mmm hmmm. Where’s Janie Bug at?”

Not too long after the question was raised, our five-year-old appeared in the hall leading to the kitchen. She had a piece of rye toast stuck in her face.

“Right here,” she managed.

“It’s beautiful outside,” she continued after a bite.

“How do you know that, Buggers?”

“How do I know that, Daddy? I just took Mister Jack for a walk. He went to the bathroom in Mrs. Mills’ packajunk again.

“By the way.” She pushed her way onto the couch. “The paperboy threw the

Tennessean

at me on Tuesday.”

It goes like that at my house. More often than not, I like it very much. In fact, I’m still amazed that I have children.

That’s one of the reasons I wound up in Poland County, Kentucky, writing all this down.

Nan came downstairs before nine and I could tell she wasn’t that mad. Not at me anyway.

She’d brushed out her long farmgirl’s hair, put on the smallest tic of makeup, put on an Indian blouse of hers I like very much.

Nan is a tall, klutzy lady who happens to make as much sense as anybody I’ve bumped into yet on this planet. We were married when we were both sophomores at the University of Kentucky, and I haven’t regretted it yet.

“I had a funny dream, Ochs,” she said; she was sitting with Cat and Janie on the couch. “You and James Horn were riding on a raft on a river. Somewhere in the South it looked like. I was there … I watched you both through kudzu on the shore. You were talking quietly about something. Something sad and important it looked like. Individual words were carrying on the river, but I couldn’t make out the sentences. Then both of you floated out of sight,” she said.

After the kids’ breakfast, Nan admitted she was glad I was doing the story, though. She’d done volunteer work for Horn once and she’d liked him quite well. Besides that was the fact that Horn’s daughter, Keesha, was a best friend of Cat’s in school.

The four of us spent all day Saturday at a clambake out in Cumberland, Tennessee.

Lewis Rosten and his graduate school girlfriend were there, and spirits and hopes were high as Mr. Jack Daniels could bring them.

Lewis and I spent part of the day under a shade tree, figuring out how a possible lead story might go. Even that couldn’t bring us down though.

Before the sun set Moses Reed showed up in his big, shiny Country Squire. For the first time since I’d come to the

Citizen-Reporter

in 1966,1 thought we were a family.

On Sunday morning I took a long, solitary walk over to Nashville’s Centennial Park. Once there I tried to draft a story that could work with what I’d gotten from Ben Toy up to then.

It turned out to be a hearsay story. Very exciting, but with the danger of no follow-up.

The lead read:

A NEW YORK MAN SAID TO BE CONNECTED WITH A HIGH-PRICED GUNMAN CLAIMS THAT MAYOR JIMMIE HORN WAS NOT SHOT BY BERT POOLE HERE LAST THURSDAY.

I thought the

Citizen

might run something like that, but I hoped we could open up with a story we wouldn’t have to back off of later.

Lewis Rosten stopped by at the house while I was packing up to go back North that night. He seemed as restless about the story as I was. He kept referring to it as “a mystery story.”

Rosten told me that the editor-in-chief of the

Nashville Tennessean

had called Reed that afternoon. He’d wanted to know why we were sending reporters around to every hotel and motel in central Tennessee.

“That’s all we need,” I said. “To get scooped on this.”

Rosten didn’t want to discuss the possibility. He waved it away like a nauseous man being presented with dessert.

“We checked out every single hotel. Every motel,” he said. “We’ve shown his photograph everywhere a man can sleep in a twenty-five-mile radius.”

“Yeah … and?”

“Goose egg.”

PART II

The End of the Funniest Man in America

West Hampton, July 17

That Monday in West Hampton I could smell northern winters.

The rusty white thermometer on Bowditch’s front porch said 67.

I had a feeling that the St. Louis Cardinals were going to get into the World Series; that Ali was going to beat George Foreman. It was all in the air.

It was July 17th and this was to be my last visit with Toy. Our subject was the whereabouts of the southern contact man, Harley John Wynn.

We set up my Sony cassette recorder on a redwood table out in the exercise yard. Its learner traveling case made it look official and important. Historical.

The two of us sat on hardwood deck chairs. Our respective sport shirts off, facing into a lukewarm ball of off-yellow sun.

The sun was just on the verge of overcoming the morning’s chill.