Mockingbird Songs (10 page)

Would Gabe follow Rebecca out to the barn was the only question, but it wasn’t really a question.

Dinner over, Rebecca said she was taking a walk. She walked slowly, knowing that Gabe would require sufficient time to head for the veranda and a smoke, angling to see where she was headed without making it too obvious.

Ralph would be gone soon enough and had his mind occupied with the Sonora drive and whatever business awaited him.

Evan was in the barn already, a split-level affair with a suspended upper hayloft that projected half the length of the building. From this vantage point he could see all below, and he waited patiently for Rebecca to appear, Gabe coming after her with no more than a ten-minute delay.

Sometimes people wore faces that told stories before any word was spoken. Cousin Gabe had one of them faces, and the story was no fairy tale.

Gabe feigned surprise when he saw Rebecca.

“Hey, girl,” he said. “Known you was here I’d a left you to your own devices.”

Even from twenty feet aloft, Evan could hear the lie in his tone.

“You’re not gonna start any trouble, now, are you, Gabe?” Rebecca asked.

“Well, I’ll be damned, Rebecca Wyatt,” he said. “You certainly have set your mind to disliking me, haven’t you? What did I ever do to deserve such a welcome?”

“You are welcome,” Rebecca replied. “It’s your intentions that ain’t.”

“And what intentions is they, my sweet?”

“You know very well, Gabe Ellsworth. I know what you’re thinking.”

Evan guessed she was saying this stuff on purpose, winding Gabe up like a cheap watch. His spring was gonna break, that was for sure, and then he’d do something stupid and irreversible and they would have him run out on his heels and back to wherever he crawled from.

“You do, do you?” Gabe purred. “So, what am I thinking?”

“That maybe you want me to rub your thing for you.”

Evan felt sure that Gabe would have heard his intake of breath as he lay there amid the musty hay. Dust filled his throat, and it was all he could do to suppress a coughing fit. Evan was shocked to hear such a thing from Rebecca’s lips. But there it was, five seconds of the obvious, and they had both known what they were dealing with before they set out.

“My, oh my,” Gabe said. “You do have a wicked mind, little girlie. Though I can’t say I am surprised. You always took a liking to me, didn’t you? I could tell even last summer that you wanted me to show you a thing or two.”

Rebecca didn’t reply.

“Why don’t you hitch your dress up a little there, sweet pea? Show Cousin Gabe how growed up you is since I last seen ya …”

Evan wanted to gag. After that he wanted to leap from the hayloft and land on the man’s head, breaking his neck with one clean snap.

“You better leave me well alone, Gabe, or I’m gonna tell my pa.”

“What you gonna tell him, huh? He’s gonna be gone anytime now, and then what ya gonna do?”

“Don’t you come near me, Gabe Ellsworth—”

Gabe took three or four slow steps toward Rebecca. “Oh, come on, sugar pie. Just a little kiss for big ol’ Gabe, eh? Gets awful lonely out here, you know? Working like a dog, helpin’ out your daddy when he’s got no money and whatever. Seems to me you only got food on the table because I’m bighearted enough to work for nothin’ …”

Another step, another two, and Gabe Ellsworth was within ten feet of Rebecca Wyatt, and it seemed the man’s head was losing whatever fight it may have had with his loins. Seemed he was dumb enough to get frisky before Ralph Wyatt had even left the house for Sonora.

“Seems a man that makes a sacrifice might earn himself a favor. Whaddya say?”

“You want to kiss me?” Rebecca asked.

In that split second Gabe glanced sideways and Rebecca looked up at Evan. There was a fierce and defiant light in her eyes.

“Kiss you, sure,” Gabe said, and he took another step.

“Well, if you mean no more than that, Gabe Ellsworth, and you promise that you’ll leave me alone, then I will let you kiss me.”

“Now we’re talkin’ the same language, baby doll,” Gabe said, and he slunk a little closer to Rebecca, his right hand reaching for her.

Rebecca pushed his hand away. “Don’t you get any fresh ideas, Gabe,” she said. “You can kiss me one time and one time only, and then we’re done with this dumb game, okay?”

“Whatever you say,” Gabe replied, but what he said and what he meant were not even close.

Again Rebecca glanced up at Evan, but Evan was already out from under the hay, edging carefully toward the top of the ladder, ready to come down those rungs at lightning speed and start hollering trouble.

“Well, if you’re gonna do it, then do it,” Rebecca told Gabe, and Gabe came at her with his slick words and his slicker smile, and it was then that Evan Riggs’s foot connected with the top of the ladder, pushing it away from the edge of the loft merely a couple of inches, but upon its return it connected with a sufficient thump for Gabe to turn suddenly.

He saw Evan then. His eyes flared. He looked back at Rebecca, and the expression she saw terrified her. There was something inside Gabe Ellsworth that she had never seen before. Unknown to her, unknown to most everyone, it was the same expression he’d worn when he did the thing that got him excommunicated from his hometown, never to cast his greasy shadow over that boundary again.

“Why you—” he started, and with that he raised his hand as if to strike her.

Evan grabbed the ladder, swung his foot over, connected with the second rung, started down with far greater speed than was well-advised.

Gabe turned suddenly, realizing now that this was some sort of honey trap, and there was no way that Rebecca Wyatt and this skinny rat of a kid were going to confound and bamboozle him.

“You little son of a bitch!” he growled, turning his attention from Rebecca to Evan, already reaching out to grab the boy as the ladder started to swing backward.

Evan, arms flailing, lost his footing and dropped to the ground. He felt something twist sharply in his ankle, and he yowled.

Rebecca screamed involuntarily even though Gabe’s violent intent was now focused on Evan. On his back now, Evan’s eyes wide with fear as Gabe rushed at him, and the ladder still falling.

“Evan!” Rebecca hollered, and Evan rolled sideways just as Gabe dropped to his knees.

The ladder came down with force, landing a good blow on the back of Gabe’s head. Gabe flattened to the ground, lifeless almost, no sound but a dull moan escaping his lips.

Evan got up and limped awkwardly to where Gabe lay. He glared down at the man, and then he took a step back and let fly with a good kick to the ribs.

“No …” Rebecca said, but she only half meant it.

Evan hesitated, almost as if he were contemplating fetching a rock and bashing Gabe’s brains out, and when he looked up at Rebecca, she saw something that chilled her. It was gone as soon as it had appeared, and she shuddered. There was a meanness in that look, and she questioned its source.

They clung to each other then, and Evan was the first to ask.

“Is he dead?”

It was a dumb question, because the moaning was weak but constant, and Rebecca guessed Cousin Gabe was merely concussed.

“Go!” she urged. “Now! Don’t be here when my pa comes out.”

Evan understood, hurrying away on his bruised and already-swelling ankle, pausing only to look back at Rebecca, in her eyes the unspoken and tacit consent to utter no word of this to anyone.

Whatever they had done, they had done it together.

Rebecca waited until Evan was clear of the bordering field, and then she fetched her pa. By the time Ralph Wyatt appeared, Gabe Ellsworth was struggling to get up on legs as weak as a newborn calf’s. The sight of the man, his head already swollen on the right, the toppled ladder, presumed a story that Ellsworth possessed neither the coherence nor the honesty to relay. Rebecca stood back, allowed her father time to check Gabe’s condition and then make the judgment that they should take him to the clinic in Sonora. Ralph was headed such a route anyway, and he could take him.

The drive was awkward, Rebecca in back with Gabe slurring out mouthfuls of semi-intelligible words, all the while expecting him to snap to, to start hollering about Evan Riggs and the truth of what had happened. He would leave out the attempted seduction, of course, and Rebecca would be on the spot not only for collusion in the crime, but failure to immediately tell her father what had happened.

But Gabe garbled, and at one point he fell silent and his breathing became shallow, and Rebecca—despise the man though she did—prayed that he wouldn’t die right there on the backseat of the truck. Had Evan accompanied them he would have been reminded of a very similar journey the Riggses had made some years earlier with Carson in much the same condition.

Rebecca’s prayer was answered. They made it to Sonora, all three of them alive, and the doctor there had Gabe Ellsworth on a bed and under examination pronto, especially considering the hour.

Twenty minutes later the doctor explained that it was a severe concussion, recommended Gabe stay overnight.

“There is no sign of hemorrhaging, no swelling beyond the superficial, and I don’t think he needs an X-ray. We’ll see how he’s doing in the morning, and if he hasn’t markedly improved, then we’ll ship him up to San Angelo and take a look inside.”

The following morning, Saturday the twenty-first, Ralph Wyatt got a call to say that all was well in the Gabe Ellsworth camp. The swelling had diminished significantly, Gabe was lucid and coherent, had demolished a tornado of ham and eggs, drunk a pint of coffee, was even now asking if there weren’t any buttermilk pancakes to be had in a place like Sonora. The doctor added that there was no reason not to come fetch him later that day.

Ralph drove out there with Rebecca. Gabe sat up front on the return journey, said nothing meaningful at all, gave no indication that he was going to ’fess up to his part of the scenario and take whatever stripes he got just so he could see Rebecca in trouble.

He went on and stayed the whole summer, wore the demeanor of a kicked cat whenever Rebecca showed up, steered clear of her as best he could.

Saturday nights saw him take off for Iraan, where word had it there was a brothel with two girls, both of whom would do things for five bucks that were probably against the law.

As for Rebecca Wyatt and Evan Riggs, they never spoke of what happened, though it haunted the space between them like a shared shadow. What happened to Gabe Ellsworth they had done together, and that bonded them like bad glue.

However, Rebecca couldn’t forget that she’d seen something in Evan Riggs that scared her, like a potential for trouble, and she wondered how long it would be before he did something he’d never forget and forever regret.

She let it lie. Sleeping dogs and sharpened sticks didn’t play well together.

FOURTEEN

Alice Honeycutt told Henry Quinn that Sheriff Riggs had been asking after him.

“He was here an hour or so ago,” she said, pouring Henry coffee at one of the small tables in the dining room. She had made pancakes and bacon, delivered them as if there were no choice but to eat them, and he’d done so, despite the fact that he rarely ate breakfast.

“Really?”

“Sure. He was here about seven, said that you should go on down and see him at his office soon as you were able. Said he’d be there all morning.”

A knot of anxiety started to tighten in the base of Henry’s gut. Not a good feeling.

Breakfast done, Henry went back to his room and put on a clean T-shirt. He looked in the mirror and combed his hair. A couple of times he’d been up before the warden at Reeves, once as eyewitness to a stabbing, second time for brawling with a paperhanger from Lubbock who went by the name of Frenchie Robicheaux. His real name was Lyman, and he was about as French as Wyatt Earp. Name aside, he was still an asshole.

This felt the same, as if he had somehow crossed an invisible line, was already in bad with the boss, was about to get striped for something.

Regardless, Henry did not hesitate. Perhaps some degree of institutionalization, perhaps a vague hope that Carson Riggs might have warmed to the idea of giving the estranged brother and his ex-con lackey a helping hand.

Henry remembered the way down to the office, pulled over at the side of the highway to smoke a cigarette and calm his nerves.

He looked out across an all-too-familiar landscape, a landscape merely irritated by something professing to be civilization. Texas, all that was not scarred by human hand, was as old as God and twice as unforgiving. In every stone and tree and handful of red dirt was a certainty that within days of man’s departure, this scenery would swallow any sign of his presence. It was a tough place and it bred tough people, and Carson Riggs sure seemed like one of them.

Henry got back in the truck and found his destination.

The Sheriff’s Office was open, but there was no sign of Riggs. Deputy Sheriff Alvin Lang greeted him with, “You must be the Reeves boy, I guess?”

“Henry Quinn,” Henry said, “here to see Sheriff Riggs.”

“Ain’t here, but won’t be long. Said if you showed up you was to wait. You can sit over there,” Lang added, and indicated a couple of plain deal chairs against the wall.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll wait in the truck,” Henry said.

Lang looked at Henry dead-straight. He was a lean man with a lean manner, and not once had he cracked that facade with a smile or a gesture of friendliness. In build he was much the same as Riggs, the rangy windswept features pared back to basics by sand and sun and seclusion. This was not a welcoming country, and these men seemed set to remind Henry of this as often as they could.

“You do whatever you wish, Mr. Quinn,” Lang said, and went back to filling out paperwork at the front desk.

Riggs drove up within ten minutes. He got out of the black-and-white in slow motion. There was a weight of history in his eyes, in the lines on his face, in the languid gait, moving now as if certain that there was nothing ahead requiring urgency. If it was of any importance, it would wait for him, and he would deal with it in his own time.

He reached for his hat and put it atop his head even though the walk from the car to the office was no more than thirty feet. That was protocol, and so that was what he did. Sunglasses, pressed shirt, high-waisted pants, the crease in those pants so clean it could cut paper. He took one glance at Henry Quinn, nodded in acknowledgment, and walked to the office without a word.

Henry followed on after him, was again greeted coolly by Lang.

“Sheriff will see you shortly,” he said. He tipped the end of his Biro in the direction of the plain deal chairs. “You go on and sit there now.”

Henry did so, all the while feeling that sense of indignation and ire rising in his chest.

He would carry the mark of a prisoner for the rest of his life, and comments such as that from Evie the night before did not help his cause. In a town such as Calvary, he doubted that anyone was now uneducated as to his past and the reason for his presence.

Sheriff Riggs opened the door to his private office, just there to the right of the reception area, and surveyed Henry Quinn.

“Mr. Quinn,” he said.

Henry got to his feet. “Sheriff Riggs.”

“I appreciate your swift compliance.”

“Not at all,” Henry replied.

“You come on in and take a seat, and we’ll discuss your business awhile.”

Henry started for the door, was halted by Riggs’s slowness to move, and then Riggs took one step back and let him pass. That hesitation had been purposeful.
I say what goes here, and when
, that action said. It was clear who was running the show.

Henry took a seat.

“Alvin, fix us some of that good coffee o’ yours,” Riggs said, and closed the door. He did not close it fully, almost as if he wished to make the point that nothing was sacrosanct here. There was no privacy to be found in the Calvary Sheriff’s Office.

Riggs sat down, fixed Henry with that predatory gaze, and smiled like a hungry lizard.

“Hope you didn’t say nothin’ impolite or out of turn to my deputy there, Mr. Quinn.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

Riggs smiled the lizard smile again. “Alvin Lang is a very important person around these parts. His daddy, John, is a real high-up fella in the Texas Department of Corrections, and his granddaddy, Chester Lang, is the lieutenant governor of Texas, no less. May very well be governor one day, though he’s maybe a little long in the tooth for that nowadays.”

“I didn’t say anything to Deputy Lang, Sheriff.”

“Well, good enough. You don’t wanna be gettin’ on his bad side, now, do you?”

“Don’t plan to be gettin’ on anyone’s bad side, Sheriff Riggs.”

“Good to hear that, son. Good to hear that. Now, to business. Fact of the matter is that no one ever said I was anything but fair-minded, Mr. Quinn, and no one ever will. Most people aren’t lookin’ for trouble, and I would consider myself most people.”

“Like I said before, I’m certainly not lookin’ for any trouble, Sheriff Ri—”

“I ain’t done talkin’, son,” Riggs interjected, and again that smile appeared, right there on his lips without making the short distance to his eyes.

“Had some words with myself about this matter here. Whether I should involve you or no. My business head won out. Decided to give you the full truth so you could waste no more time on this matter.”

Deputy Lang elbowed the door open and brought in two cups of coffee. He set down Riggs’s first, then Henry’s.

“You need anythin’ else, Sheriff?” Lang asked.

“We’re good here,” Riggs said, and Lang returned to the front, again leaving the door ajar.

“Now, you may have come down here like Deadwood Dick, scout for General Custer, Indian fighter, Pony Express rider, all fired up to get this matter resolved for my brother, but I have to tell you that it’s a fool’s errand, boy.”

Riggs reached for his coffee, and though it was near boiling, he took a good mouthful as if from a cool stream.

“As far as my brother is concerned, and just so you appreciate my sentiment, I’m after seeing him come here with his hat in his hand, his eyes down to the floor. If not that, then on his knees.”

“I guessed there was some friction between you,” Henry said, and immediately knew he should have said nothing, especially something so presumptuous and naive.

“Is that so?” Riggs asked. “Well, I don’t know what personal matters he may have shared with you at Reeves, but every story has two sides, and most of them have a great deal more.”

“I am sorry,” Henry said. “I didn’t mean to presume anything.”

“Well, you went ahead and presumed anyway, irrespective of what you meant,” Riggs replied. “Two things you can never take back. Everything you do. Everything you say.” Again the smile, and again he lifted the cup to his lips and drank.

“To be honest, I know nothing at all,” Henry said.

“Well, son, there isn’t a great deal to know, and there sure as hell isn’t a great deal of mystery to unravel. It’s no secret that my brother and I are estranged. He has been out there in Reeves for a long time. We have never visited, we have never written, we have never spoken, and we never will. That’s about as simple as it gets. As to this daughter business, again there is no great secret. He got a girl pregnant, he gave up the child, the child vanished with whatever family took her in, and that is the end of that. I was never her legal guardian, no matter what my brother may have said. Prison may be overcrowded, but I figure it’s pretty much the loneliest place in the world sometimes. Loneliness can turn a man’s mind. He looks inward too damned much. He gets to thinking things are real when they just plain ain’t. Now, if you have some letter that you want me to hold on to in the event that this girl o’ his ever shows up, which I think is about as likely as icebergs on the Pecos, then I will do that for you. Beyond that, I don’t think there’s anything you can do. Sometimes the past is just the past, and best for all concerned that you don’t try dragging it into the present.”

“I am just trying to help your brother, Sheriff,” Henry said.

“Well, maybe my brother doesn’t deserve any help, son. You ever think of that? He killed a man in Austin. He beat that poor son of a bitch to death. Facts of the matter are black-and-white. The law is the law. My brother, whatever reason and rationale he may have had, was neither judge nor jury, and he was certainly no executioner. But he went on and executed that man, and now he’s paying the price for it. He was a drunk and a violent man, and he done what he did and that’s the end of it.”

“I have no intent to justify or excuse what he did, Sheriff. He just helped me a great deal, and I wanted to do something in return.”

Riggs smiled, and for the first time there was a shadow of warmth somewhere in among the sculpted hardness of his features. “You are young,” he said, “and bright you may be, and well-intentioned, but I have seen a great deal of everything and more besides. I have reached a time in my life when the past is clearer than the present. You look back and every decision is easy. The real test of a man is being responsible for the decisions he made in the heat of the moment, even though they might be proven wrong in hindsight. That’s where you find real backbone. You made a mistake, and not a small one, but you learned a lesson and now you got a chance to do somethin’ useful and constructive with your life. My brother, well, his is a different story, and he don’t have a chance to rewrite the end. He’s gonna spend his last day looking at the world through bars, and however I might feel about that, there is nothin’ I can do to change it.”

Henry paused, just to ensure that Riggs was done, and then he said, “I appreciate your candor, Sheriff. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll hold on to that letter from your brother. Seems only right that I exhaust all possibilities ’fore I quit. Maybe I’ll make some inquiries along official adoption channels in San Angelo or San Antonio or Austin. Perhaps there’ll be a record of what happened to the girl. The least I can do is my best, right?”

“Whichever way you want it, son, though I reckon you’ll be disappointed.”

“You don’t know the name of the family that adopted her?”

“I only know what’s already been spoken,” Riggs said.

“You were sheriff back then, right?”

“Assumed the post in 1944; been here ever since.”

“And Evan’s daughter was born in late ’49.”

“That seems about right.”

“Seems odd that you don’t remember something so significant as the adoption of your own niece—”

Riggs cleared his throat.

Henry fell silent. He knew then that he had crossed another invisible line.

“I guess you have as much a right to your own mind as anyone else. You go on and think whatever you want to think, Mr. Quinn. That doesn’t change the facts. I told you what I know. I was sufficiently respectful of my brother’s troubles to give you the time of day. I know what jail can do to a man. It’s my business to know such things. He clings to thin straws. He has desperate thoughts. He regrets his life and tries to change it. Too late, see? His daughter is long gone, and probably isn’t even aware he exists. She’ll be a young woman now, if she’s even alive, and I am sure she has her own mind, too. What right does my brother have to suddenly show up like some uninvited guest? Is that right? Is that fair? What about her feelings? Does she not deserve greater consideration than him? She didn’t break the law, did she? She didn’t murder someone in a motel room in Austin.”

“I didn’t think of it like that,” Henry replied, which was the truth.

“Well, I did,” Riggs said, “and that’s how come I said it.”

“Rock and a hard place.”

“Sounds like a great deal of life, son.”

“Now I am uncertain as to what to do for the best.”

“Well, there ain’t no great reason for you to stay here,” Riggs said. “Evan ain’t here, nor his daughter, nor anyone who knows the whereabouts of his daughter, so if you want to pursue it, then it seems you’re gonna have to go farther afield. Best o’ luck to you, but you have to consider the girl in all of this and make a decision about what’s right. Gotta put yourself in her shoes, think about being all of twenty-some-odd years old, gettin’ on with your life, and then someone throws a rock through the window and you got pieces of glass everywhere. You think she needs to know who her father is, what he done, where he is? You think she wants that hangin’ over her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Neither do I, Mr. Quinn, but right now you’re on a mission to throw that rock and you gotta know that no one’s gonna get hurt.”

Henry said nothing.

“Changes things, don’t it?” Riggs said.

“It does, sir.”

“Well, that’s where we are, son. I got things to do, places to be, people to see, and I can’t sit here mindin’ your business all day.”

“Of course not,” Henry said. He leaned forward, took the coffee cup, and drank it down. Though he did not want it, it would have been discourteous to do otherwise.