Cape Disappointment (19 page)

The FBI held him for twelve hours and
then
turned him over to local authorities? What was that all about?

“You know where your brother is?” I yelled to Snake in the other room.

Turning the sound down, he said, “What?”

“Where is your brother?”

“I don't know. He called yesterday. He didn't say where he was hangin'.”

“He call from jail?”

“It didn't sound like it.”

“You bail him out a few days ago?”

“Nope.”

“What'd he call you about?”

“You,
actually. He thought you might be in trouble. Wanted me to come over and guard you.”

“Guard me? Is that what he said?”

“That's what he said.”

“Why would I need protection?”

“He thinks you're taking this pretty hard. Which you are.”

“Did you know he warned me not to let Kathy travel with Sheffield?”

“When was this?”

“A few days before it happened. He said he had a premonition. Now that I think about the meeting, I remember getting the feeling that there was more on his mind than he was admitting.”

“Jesus.”

“Snake? Why don't you fill me in on your brother.”

Snake froze the picture on the movie and stepped into the dining room. “Jesus H., I hope Bert's not messed up in this.”

“You have any reason to think he might be? I mean, besides his arrest?” When Snake didn't reply, I said, “Snake?”

“He could be mixed up in
anything.”

“Mind telling me about him?”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“Let's try the beginning. Start with him in diapers.”

Snake gave me a lugubrious look and turned a chair around so he could straddle it backward. “At least you're not moping anymore.”

“Cut to the chase, would you?”

“YOU REALIZE YOU'RE ASKING
me to rat out my brother.”

“Only if he's involved.”

“But he's still my brother.”

“And my wife is dead.”

“I didn't say I wasn't going to do it. I just wanted you to know I'm making a sacrifice here.”

“Yeah, well, I made a sacrifice, too.”

Snake and I stared at each other. “He told me something once …” he trailed off. “I want this to remain confidential.”

“Like hell.”

“Five years ago, right before I went on the wagon, he told me about something he'd been involved with in South America ten or fifteen years earlier. He said it was so ugly he couldn't tell people without worrying about their mental health afterward.”

“What about
his
mental health?”

“Right.”

“No, I mean it. I've just known him the last year or two, but from the start I thought he was a couple of pickles short of a full jar. Was he always like that?”

“He may seem like a nut job, but I wouldn't underestimate him.”

“Is there a possibility he might have had something to do with that plane going down?”

“Listen, Thomas. It was an accident. The sooner you get a grip on that, the better off you'll be.”

“But what if it wasn't?”

“It was.”

“They haven't found the cause yet. And Bert warned me to keep Kathy from traveling with Sheffield.”

“They never find the cause of an airplane accident quickly. As for your second point, he told me about the original World Trade Center bombing a couple of days before it happened.”

“You're kidding, right?”

“I wish I was. Same with Oklahoma City. A month before 9/11 he told me not to fly for a while. But, hell, even the attorney general was telling people he wasn't going to fly. That whole event stinks.”

“So he's got what … ? Ties with terrorist groups?”

“With the government.”

“You saying the government knew about Oklahoma City before it happened? About 9/11?”

“I'm just telling you what Bert told me. Bert knew something. And he didn't get it from terrorists.”

“So tell me about this business he was involved with in South America.”

“He worked for a place called Green Farms, which was a CIA front company. Or maybe it was called Green Produce. Something like that.”

“You know for a fact it was CIA?”

“With my brother, you never know anything for a fact. But yeah, even though he'll deny it if you ask, I'm pretty sure. He told me he was eventually sold out by the Company. They set him up and sent him up for selling drugs. Came out of the slammer with a real hostile attitude.”

“He ever have a good attitude?”

“Well, no. Our father was a steelworker, a big sloppy guy, but strong, with these massive forearms. If he grabbed you, you'd feel it for a week. I learned my lesson pretty quick, but Bert never got tired of taking him on. He was in the hospital once with a concussion when we were ten. Oh, our father could be a charmer. He had these electric-blue eyes so you thought he was looking into your soul. Women melted. Mom loved to tell the story about how they met. She was seventeen and he was maybe thirty-five, serving him dinner in a small restaurant where
she worked in Louisiana. Against her parents' advice, they were married a month later.

“He was raised to believe the wife did what the husband said and the man did whatever he damn well pleased. It broke our mother's heart, but he took that in stride, too. He took everything in stride except back-talk. Give him anything except ‘yes sir, no sir,' and wham, you were bouncing across the room on your butt. He hung me by the heels off a bridge over the Mississippi River when I was eleven. When I was stupid enough to say he wouldn't dare let go, he dropped me into the river. Then he jumped in and saved me. It was in the papers.
FATHER RISKS LIFE
TO
SAVE SON.
Hell, they were going to give him a medal, but we moved away before he could collect it. He thought that was funnier than shit. After that, he used to threaten us by saying, ‘Don't make me collect another medal.'”

“They should have given him the medal for bad fathering.”

“When we were in our teens we were living in New Mexico in a trailer. That was when he started giving most of his attention to Bert. Sometimes he'd use a belt, sometimes his fists. Sometimes he'd just slap him around and ask why he was such a pussy. That was the worst, actually, the humiliation. I can't say Bert didn't ask for it, always lipping off.

“One day when we were fourteen Bert was home from school faking sick, and our dad left work at noon and came home to catch him banging his sister.”

“Your sister?”

“Hell, no. We didn't have no sister. Besides, that would be incest. It was our dad's sister. Aunt Arianna.”

“And that
wasn't
incest?”

“Well, not like if it'd been our own sister, no.”

“Sheesh. Okay. So what happened?”

“I got different stories on that over the years. When I got home from school Bert looked like hell. The whole side of his face— Dad was a lefty— looked like hamburger. Blood everywhere, all over the house. Bert said Dad slammed him around, then got drunk and walked out into the desert with a bottle. Took the Luger he kept under his pillow. That was his pattern, slam us around, get a bottle, and walk out into the desert. There was a lot of places you could get lost out there, little arroyos,
even some mountains nearby. This time he didn't come back the next morning the way he generally did. After a week went by we figured he either walked too far out and got lost or fell in a hole.”

“And?”

“We never saw him again. His truck sat untouched in the driveway for months. Our mother was afraid to drive it without his permission. Mom eventually sold it when we moved a year later.”

“Your mother alive?”

“Living in Tulsa with a really sweet guy she met ten years ago. Retired and still bowling once a week. Still a live wire. She's got all my rodeo trophies.”

“You ever find out what really happened to your father?”

“I don't know if I'll ever get the whole story, but five years ago Bert told me most of it and I've cobbled enough together to sense the gist of the rest. Arianna's like eighty-something now, but back in those days she was the blue-plate special. It's tough to watch what thirty-five years can do to someone. When Bert banged her we were fourteen, almost fifteen, and she must have been … early forties. With a husband and three kids. Lived just across town. The way Bert told it, one day our mother mentioned to Arianna that Bert was home sick from school and she needed to be at work herself. So Arianna, who was a stay-at-home mother and kind of a goody-goody, or at least that's what I always thought, made some chicken soup and took it on over. The long and the short of it was, they ended up sharing the soup she brought while he poured his heart out about how bad our father was treating us. Bert started crying and Arianna hugged him, at first to comfort him I guess, but then it turned into sort of a clinch and they fell onto the sofa and things progressed from there. Arianna kept trying to break it off but Bert would play hooky and then get her out to the place on a pretext and the next thing she knew they'd be at it again.”

“What happened when your father found them?”

“He went ballistic, whipped off his belt, and began beating whichever one of them was closer. On his own, Bert would have taken a beating, but he couldn't stand to see this woman he adored being beaten and humiliated. Bert hit our dad with a two-by-four, stunned him long enough for Arianna to escape, then kept hitting him until he was lifeless. After that, he dragged him to the truck and took him out
into the desert. We both knew how to drive by then. Out in the desert, he shot him in the head with his own Luger and buried the body in a wash.”

“Your brother admitted killing your father?”

“He was drunk out of his skull when he told me, but that
is
what he said. Not that our father didn't ask for it.”

“And he lived through his high school years without ever telling you about it?”

“Not me or anybody else.”

“That's what I call a rough childhood.”

“MOM ENDED UP
moving us to Las Cruces to work for a former boss of hers. I got an executive starter position mucking out stalls at a dude ranch. Bert worked there, too, until he got kicked in the head by a mare and decided to even the score with a shovel. He did enough damage to the horse that they fired him. Bert ended up hanging out with a bunch of greasers all through the rest of high school. Most all of them ended up in prison.”

“But not your brother?”

“He went into the army. By that time I was rodeoing pretty strong and getting a few wins, so I didn't see where a hitch in the army was going to do me any good. He did a four-year hitch, and signed up for a second tour. We hardly ever saw him after that. I worked on ranches and kept on with the rodeo. Once in a blue moon he'd send Mother a postcard.”

“Bert got busted up pretty good, too, judging by the way he moves.”

“He had a bad parachute drop in the army and spent five months in the hospital. The army was good for Bert, though. He liked to travel and it instilled some discipline. He was still a Ranger when the army recruited him into some outfit I never did know the name of. It was all very hush-hush. I know he used to get flown to foreign countries to teach guerrillas how to use weaponry. He was an expert with anything that fired a projectile, from slingshots to rockets. Did that for another
eight years. Sometimes he'd be out of the country for six days, sometimes for six months. After the army, he signed up with some company that did contract work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“I think the first one was called Tidewater Stone. He worked a couple of years for them out of Maryland. Then he switched to some other company. After a while, I couldn't keep them straight. Always traveling. I didn't see him hardly until he did time at Walla Walla. At least there I could see him on visiting days. I
can
tell you this: He was a sniper for the army. I don't know what the hell he was doing for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, because he doesn't know anything about growing food or farming, but I visited him in Bolivia, and one day when I was alone in his apartment, I found a Dragunov in the closet.”

“What's that?”