S-Town · Serial Productions

Chapter II

March 28, 2017·48 min·3 clips

John insists a wealthy family's son bragged about getting away with murder, launching Brian Reed's investigation into Shit Town.

Chapter II opens with Reed recalling an early phone conversation with John McLemore, in which John told a parable about a pantsless woman outside a trailer park and his friend Roger's philosophy that people who look a certain way must have done something to get that way. Reed admits it took him years to understand the meaning of that story. Back in Alabama, Reed meets Jake Goodson, the original source of the murder rumor, who casually suggests they simply ask Cabram Burt directly — since Cabram lives nearby and probably wouldn't mind talking. Reed declines, feeling unprepared and wary of the danger. That same instinct is tested when Reed visits Black Sheep Inc., a tattoo parlor in Bessemer with a secret door leading to a hidden clubhouse. The space functions as a haven for self-described misfits, criminals, and runaways, and Reed describes its regulars in vivid detail — including a 350-pound man with 'Feed Me' tattooed on his stomach and a man named Razor whose friend Willard is apparently impervious to being run over. Tyler Goodson, Jake's brother and a co-owner of the shop, is sleeping there because he cannot afford rent, and carries a briefcase containing tattoo machines, a gun, nipple jewelry, and an online minister's license. Reed navigates an uncomfortable evening in which he pretends to smoke marijuana to avoid seeming like a narc, and endures openly racist commentary from a tattoo artist named Bubba. Reed learns that John McLemore is a regular at the shop, where he lectures the regulars about climate change and calls them failures, yet is genuinely accepted by them. Bubba reveals that John — who openly despised tattoos — began getting them at age 47, and that Bubba initially feared John was planning to kill himself. Bubba then discloses that John had been covertly timing his tattoo appointments to pay off the shop's bills right before they came due, effectively keeping Black Sheep Inc. solvent. Bubba explains that John's generosity is rooted in sympathy for Tyler, who was put to work laying block at age five by an abusive father who is a convicted sex offender. A year later, Reed returns to confront Cabram Burt at K3 Lumber, having determined through police records that the fight did occur but no one was killed. Cabram, operating on what Reed calls the 'fuck-it philosophy,' immediately agrees to talk on the record. He describes a chaotic, drug-fueled party in the woods where a man named Dylan attacked his friend Tim with a knife, and Cabram fought back. At the hospital afterward, random girls told Cabram that Dylan had died, which sent Cabram into a paranoid spiral — but he left before finding out the truth. The rumor apparently spread from a motel room full of meth users in Bessemer. When Reed calls John to share his findings, John responds not with relief but with a weary sigh of disgust at Bibb County's culture of inaction and acceptance of low-down circumstances. Reed reflects that John's many obsessions — climate disasters, local sex offender statistics, a rumored murder — are all connected by his fury at collective resignation and the world's failure to respond proportionally to its own suffering. Reed then describes John's ongoing project of trying to transform Tyler Goodson's life: accompanying him to court, hiring him a lawyer, giving him steady work, moving him to the trailer park across the street, and planning to leave him and Jake each twenty ounces of gold. Reed draws a parallel between John's clock restoration work and his attempt to repair Tyler. The episode closes with John sharing sundial mottos — melancholy inscriptions about the brevity of life — as Reed reflects on the deeper meaning of John's worldview.

As heard by us

A murder claim opens into a careful, unsettling portrait of John's care for Tyler and the town around him.

Chapter II begins with John's answer about Capron Burt, then drifts through a truck stop errand, Roger Price, and Tyler before settling into the harder part of the story.

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Why you'd press play

For listeners who want a murder rumor to widen into a town-sized moral puzzle.

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