Kleagle-hoodless, his sheet in scorched tatters- arrived. Once his involvement in the Klan was exposed on TV, the man resigned as district attorney and moved upstate to Macon. Lester’s father blamed himself, a sentiment echoed in harsher terms by the other Klansmen. Morale in the local chapter further deteriorated when a newspaper revealed that the young doctor who had revived the dying Kleagle was a black man, possibly from Savannah.
The Parsonses decided to leave the Klan while it was still their choice to do so. Lester’s father joined a segregated bowling league, while his mother mailed out flyers for J. B. Stoner, another famous racist who periodically ran for office. Politics bored young Lester, who turned his pubescent energies to crime. He dropped out of school on his fourteenth birthday, although his preoccupied parents didn’t find out for nearly two years. By then the boy’s income from stealing backhoes and bulldozers was twice his father’s income from repairing them. The Parsonses strove not to know what their son was up to, even when it landed him in trouble. Lester’s mother worried that the boy had a mean streak; his father said all boys do. Can’t get by otherwise in this godforsaken world.
Lester Maddox Parsons was seventeen when he got his nickname. He was hot-wiring a farmer’s tractor in a peanut field when a game warden snuck up behind him. Lester dove from the cab and took a punch at the man, who calmly reconfigured Lester’s face with the butt of an Ithaca shotgun. He sat in the county jail for three days before a doctor came to examine his jaw, which was approximately thirty-six degrees out of alignment.
That it healed at all was a minor miracle; Snapper was spitting out snips of piano wire until he was twenty-two years old.
The Georgia prison system taught the young man an important lesson: It was best to keep one’s opinions about race mingling to oneself. So when Avila introduced Snapper to the roofing crew, Snapper noted (but did not complain) that two of the four workers were as black as the tar they’d be mixing. The third roofer was a muscular young Marielito with the number “69” tattooed elegantly inside his lower lip. The fourth roofer was a white crackhead from Santa Rosa County who spoke a version of the English language that was utterly incomprehensible to Snapper and the others. Although each of the roofers owned long felony rap sheets, Snapper couldn’t say that his feelings toward the crew approached anything close to kinship.
Avila sat the men down for a pep talk.
“Thanks to the hurricane, there’s a hundred fifty thousand houses in Dade County need new roofs,” he began. “Only a damn fool couldn’t make money off these poor bastards.”
The plan was to line up the maximum number of buyers and perform the minimum amount of actual roofing. By virtue of owning a suit and tie, Snapper was assigned the task of bullshitting potential customers through the fine print of the “contract,” then collecting deposits.
“People are fucking desperate for new roofs,” Avila said buoyantly. “They’re getting rained on. Fried from the sun. Eat up by bugs. Faster they get a roof on their heads, the more they’ll pay.” He raised his palms to the sky. “Hey, do they really care about price? It’s insurance money, for Christ’s sake.”
One of the roofers inquired how much manual labor would be involved. Avila said they should repair a small section on every house. “To put the people’s minds at ease,” he explained.
“What’s a ‘small’ section?” the roofer demanded.
Another said, “It’s fucking August out here, boss. I know guys that dropped dead of heatstroke.”
Avila reassured the men they could get by with doing a square, maybe less, on each roof. “Then you can split. Time they figure out you won’t be back, it’s too late.”
The crackhead mumbled something about contracting licenses. Avila turned to Snapper and said, “They ask about our license, you know what to do.”
“Run?”
“Exactamente!”
Snapper wasn’t pleased with his door-to-door role in the operation, particularly the odds of encountering large pet dogs. He said to Avila: “Sounds like too much talking to strangers. I hate that shit. Why don’t you do the contracts?”