The Thomas Berryman Number

It was just after that when Toy spoke of the contact, or bagman, involved with Jimmie Horn.

It was then also that I heard the name Thomas Berryman for the first time.

Provincetown, June 6

The time Toy spoke of was early June of that year; the place was Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Young Harley John Wynn parked in the shadows behind the Provincetown City Hall and started off toward Commercial Street with visions of power and money dancing in his head. Wynn was handsome, fair and baby-faced like the early F. Scott Fitzgerald photographs. His car was a Lincoln Mark IV. In some ways he was like Thomas Berryman. Both men were thoroughly modern, coldly sober, distressingly sure of themselves.

For over three weeks, Harley Wynn had been making enquiries about Berryman. He’d finally been contacted the Tuesday before that weekend.

The meeting had been set up for Provincetown. Wynn was asked to be reading a

Boston Globe

on one of the benches in front of the City Hall at 9:45 p.m.

It was almost 9:30, and cool, even for Cape Cod in June.

The grass was freshly mown, and it had a good smell for Wynn: it reminded him of college quadrangles in the deep South. Cape Cod itself reminded him of poliomyelitis.

Careful of his shoeshine, he stayed in tree shadows just off the edge of the lawn. He sidestepped a snake, which turned out to be a tangle of electrician’s tape.

He was startled by some green willow fingers, and realized he was still in a driving fog.

It wasn’t night on Commercial Street, and as Wynn came into the amber lights he began to smell light cologne instead of sod.

He sat on one of the freshly painted benches—bone white, like the City Hall—and he saw that he was among male and female homosexuals.

There were several tall blonds in scarlet and powder blue halter suits. Small, bushy-haired men in white bucks and thongs, and bright sailor-style pants. There were tank-shirts and flapping sandals and New York

Times

magazine models posing under street-lamps.

Wynn lighted a Marlboro, noticed uneasiness in his big hands, and took a long, deep breath.

He looked up and down the street for Ben Toy.

Up on the porch of the City Hall, his eyes stopped to watch flour-white gargoyles and witchy teenagers parading to and from the public toilets.

Harley Wynn’s hand kept slipping inside his suitjacket and touching a thick, brown envelope.

Across the street, Ben Toy, thirty, and Thomas Berryman, twenty-nine, were sitting together drinking beer and Taylor Cream in a rear alcove of the A. J. Fogarty bar.

Rough-hewn men with expensive sunglasses, they brought to mind tennis bums.

They were talking about Texas with two Irish girls they’d discovered in Hyannis. One girl wore a tartan skirt and top; the other was wearing a pea-coat, rolled-up jeans, and striped baseball-player socks.

Toy and Berryman told old Texas stories back and forth, and listened to less-polished but promising Boston tales.

Oona, the taller, prettier girl, was telling how she sometimes walked Massachusetts Avenue in Boston, pretending she was a paraplegic. “Like all these business types from the Pru,” she said, “they get too embarrassed to ogle. I can be by myself if I want to.”

Thomas Berryman stared at her boozily with great red eyes. “That’s a very funny bit,” he smiled slightly. Then he was tilting his head back and forth with the pendulum of a Miller beer clock.

It was ten o’clock. Miller’s was still the champagne of bottled beers. Bette Midler was singing boogie on the jukebox.

A handsome blond man was talking to Oona from a stool at the bar. “You know who you remind me of,” he smiled brightly, “you remind me of Lauren Hutton.”

“Excuse me,” the tall girl smiled back innocently, “but you’ve obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a shit.”

This time Berryman laughed out loud. All of them did.

Then Berryman spoke quietly to Ben Toy. “Don’t you think he’s been waiting long enough now?”

Toy licked beer foam off his upper lip. “No,” he said. “Hell no.”

“You’re sure about that, Ben? Got it buttoned up for me? …”

“The man’s just getting uncomfortable about now. Taking an occasional deep breath. Getting real p.o.’d at me. I want him good and squirmy when I go talk to him … Besides though, I don’t need this paranoia shit.”

Berryman grinned at him. “Just checking,” he said. “So long as you deliver, you do it any way you want to.”

At 10:30, forty-five minutes after the arranged time, Ben Toy got up and slowly walked up to A. J. Fogarty’s front window.

He was later to remember watching Wynn through the Calligraphia window lettering. Wynn in an expensive blue suit with gray pinstripes. Wynn in brown Florsheim tie shoes and a matching brown belt. Southern macho, Toy thought.

For his part, Ben Toy was wearing a blue muslin shirt with a red butterfly design on the back. With pearl snaps. He was a big, blue-eyed man; Berryman’s back-up; Berryman’s old friend from Texas; a Texas rake.

Among boys in Amarillo, Ben Toy had once been known as “the funniest man in America.”