Mockingbird Songs (2 page)
It was just one of those things. An accident, a coincidence, once more the spinning of those fateful threads. Beyond that, it was God’s will, and there was no fathoming that.
How Henry Quinn wound up at Reeves went like so:
Sally O’Brien’s husband, Danny, was already at work. The two eldest kids, Laura and Max, had run out to the school bus no more than twenty minutes earlier, and Sally was alone with the baby, Carly. Sally was dressed in one of her husband’s T-shirts and a robe. It seemed to be a regular day, a day just like yesterday, just like the day before, save it wasn’t. Sally’s life would dramatically change for the worse before that minute was out, and she had never even suspected it.
The bullet that came through the window at 9:18, morning of Monday the third of February 1969, made a sound like a blown lightbulb as it punctured the pane. Sally barely heard the sound, had no time at all to register its source. It traversed the last six or seven feet to where Sally stood stirring eggs on the stove, and it entered her neck at a near-perfect angle to cause the maximum amount of damage without actually severing her trachea or spinal column.
The radio was playing some song by the Light Crust Doughboys, not the original lineup, but the later crew that Smokey Montgomery put together. Sally could listen to that kind of thing all day and all night and all day once again, folks like Tommy Duncan and Bob Wills and Knocky Parker. Her husband said it was too old-timey, but then her husband said a great many things to which she didn’t pay no mind.
Involuntary response caused Sally to grip the spoon she was using to stir the eggs, and for a moment she stood there—stock-still, her eyes wide—and then she keeled over sideways and hit the linoleum. The spoon caught the edge of the pan, and hot scrambled eggs scattered across the floor around her.
Carly—all of one year and four months old—started giggling. She didn’t understand the game Mommy was playing, but it was funny. She went on giggling for a mere twenty or thirty seconds more, and then she figured that this wasn’t such a fun game anymore.
Another thirty seconds and Carly was crying, and would go on crying for a further twenty minutes before the mailman, a sometime drinking buddy of Danny O’Brien’s called Ronnie Vaughan, appeared at the door with a package requiring a signature.
Vaughan knocked on the screen, on the inner door. Then he rang the bell. He could hear the baby crying, and yet there was no response. The inner door was locked, and so he walked around the side of the house and approached the building from the rear. From the rear porch he could see sideways into the kitchen. He did not notice the neat hole in the other window; nor did he see Sally O’Brien lying on the linoleum in a pool of blood and scrambled egg. He could see the baby, however, and the fact that no one seemed to be attending to her raised sufficient alarm for Ronnie Vaughan to call the police.
A black-and-white arrived at 9:43 a.m. The attending officers, James Kincade and a recent academy graduate named Steve French, surveyed the scene. Kincade rang the bell, rapped repeatedly on the front door, and then obtained the telephone number for the O’Brien property. He had Dispatch call that number three times, allowing the phone within to ring for a considerable time. By 9:51, Ronnie Vaughan, James Kincade, and Steve French came to the collective conclusion that something was awry. Kincade and French went in through the rear kitchen door, and before Kincade had even taken three steps, he was aware that he was traipsing not only through Sally O’Brien’s breakfast, but also her blood. Kincade, later acknowledged as having taken action that ensured Sally’s survival, stuck a finger in the bullet hole and prevented any further blood loss. He kept his finger in that hole even as she was lifted onto a gurney, even as she was driven the eight and a half miles to San Angelo County Hospital triage.
Had James Kincade not done his Little Dutch Boy routine, then Sally O’Brien would have bled out. But she didn’t bleed out; she made it. There was a darn good chance she would never speak again, but she was alive.
Then came the investigation. Why would anyone want to shoot a woman like Sally O’Brien in the throat while she was making eggs? Why would anyone want to shoot her at all?
Took Officer James Kincade all of twenty-five minutes to find the hole in the fence that ran adjacent to the O’Brien property. Running a line of cord to ascertain trajectory from the other side, he found a ricochet mark on the side of a water barrel. He surveyed the area extensively, and with his not-insignificant knowledge of firearms, he concluded that there was only one place from which that bullet could have originated and yet still be possessed of sufficient power to pass through a fence, ricochet off the water barrel, and puncture a woman’s throat. The yard that backed onto the O’Brien property became the focus of his attention. The property—a rental—was occupied by a woman called Nancy Quinn and her son, Henry. Finding no one home, Kincade went over the back fence of the property and discovered empty beer cans and shell casings. He didn’t touch a thing.
Two and a half hours later, he and French returned with a warrant, a detective by the name of Oscar Gibson in tow, an Oklahoman by birth, a West Texan by default. He’d been San Angelo PD for eight years, was a good man, an honest cop, and he waited patiently while Kincade and French hammered on the door, rang the bell, came to the inevitable conclusion that there was no one home.
Vaulting the O’Brien fence and surveying the scene with a clear and unbiased eye, Gibson came to the same conclusion as Kincade, albeit unsupported and hypothetical. Someone or some persons had drunk beers and fired a handgun in the Quinn yard. One of those bullets had passed through the fence, ricocheted off the water barrel, punctured the window, and penetrated the throat of the O’Brien woman. The bullet had done its worst around nine a.m., presumably the sound of gunshots unnoticed and unreported because it was a weekday and a working neighborhood. Whether the beers had been drunk at the same time as the firing of the gun and whether those who had drunk beers had been the same as those who had pulled the trigger was unknown. Henry Quinn was the name they had, unless his mother, Nancy, was some kind of errant modern-day Annie Oakley with a taste for Buckhorn.
The kid was rounded up within two hours. They had him dead to rights. First questions asked and answered in the affirmative—
Were you at home this morning, drinking beers in the yard? Did you fire a handgun?
—saw him arrested on the spot. Nancy Quinn was fetched from work, and by the end of the day, she saw her son charged with unlawful possession of a weapon and assault. They let him slide on the underage liquor beef. Gibson proclaimed he had a forgiving and lenient side. The kid had dug himself a deep hole; no one, least of all Henry, needed it deeper.
Henry Quinn, two days shy of his eighteenth, was charged as an adult, arraigned, remanded to San Angelo City Jail. Preliminary hearing would be a formality. The kid had no defense. He was drunk, he fired the handgun, and Sally O’Brien got a slug in her neck. The slug was confirmed as having been fired from that very same handgun and no other. Had Sally died, it would have been manslaughter. Counsel from the PD’s Office told Nancy O’Brien that if her son got a sympathetic jury, he’d do three-to-five, more than likely in Reeves County Farm Prison. He made a point of telling her that Sally O’Brien wouldn’t be so lucky. Prognosis for vocal recovery was not looking so good. Said that Henry Quinn should keep a weather eye out for Danny O’Brien after his release.
The trial went as expected. Henry got a sympathetic jury. Defense counsel, PD Office or otherwise, was a great deal more astute and purposeful than that provided for Evan Riggs back in August of 1950. Henry Quinn got the three-to-five, was shipped out to Reeves after sentencing on Monday, June 16, 1969. Hendrix had just been busted for heroin possession. Apollo 10 had been launched and was short of the moon surface by nine miles. The toll of Americans dead in Vietnam had just exceeded those lost in Korea. “Get Back” by the Beatles topped the Billboard.
That was the way it happened.
To say that prison life came as a shock to Henry Quinn would have been an understatement. More than an understatement. Everything that had taken place between the day of his arrest and his arrival at Reeves possessed a spectral and transparent quality. None of it was real, and none of it mattered. He would wake soon, of course, secure in the knowledge that it had been nothing but the fun-house mirror of imagination distorting his worst fears into a far worse reality. But it was not reality. It was dreamland. He didn’t need to worry.
There was no Sally O’Brien. There had been no drunken gunplay in the yard. There had been no bullet, no ricochet, no Carly O’Brien left crying as her mother nearly bled out on the linoleum. No public defender, no preliminary hearing, no charge, no arraignment, no trial, no conviction. And the day of sentencing? That had merely been the precursor to his moment of waking.
A moment of waking that never actually arrived.
The reality of who he was, where he was, the surreal diversion his life had suddenly taken, came home to him with the sound of a heavy door, a door that slammed shut behind him that first night in June of 1969.
There is nothing comparable to that sound, almost as if the very nature of that sound is somehow ingrained into the spiritual woof and warp of human existence. We have all heard it. We all know what it means. It never loses its potency or power. Such an old sound for such young ears.
You are no longer a free man, Henry Quinn.
You will eat when we say. You will piss when we say. You will smoke and walk and talk and work and shit when we say. You will not see girls or guitars or a good breakfast for a long time to come, sonny. That’s the way it is. Deal with it or hang yourself in the latrines with six feet of twisted bedsheet and a prayer that no one finds you until your eyes glaze over and you soil yourself.
This is a done deal.
Henry Quinn lay in prison that first night. He did not sleep. He was on suicide watch, as were all greenhorns. First seven nights alone, first seven nights in a cell with nothing but bars. Guard on duty changed every four hours so there was no chance of sleeping on the job. Men cried. Men sobbed. Men prayed. The guard said nothing; it was the others who hollered for the noisy ones to keep their goddamned mouths shut.
Quit your fucking whining, you asshole, or I’ll come in there and cut you good.
Henry did not cry, nor sob, nor pray. He lay in silence and wished the night away. Somehow it worked, for each night seemed briefer than the last, and after three days, he slept, sheer exhaustion snatching him away into a fitful but thankfully dreamless slumber.
On the morning of the eighth day, he was integrated. He was showered, deloused, issued a second set of denims, a pair of rubber-soled shoes, no socks. Socks had been withdrawn from standard uniform at Reeves after the 1959 riot. Men had brought fist-sized rocks back from the fields, dropped them into socks, felled some guards, killed one, brought the place to a standstill for two days straight. The National Guard came down, and eight dozen wannabe soldiers restored order with fire hoses, batons, and sheer force of numbers. Closest any of them would get to war, but the inmates gave them a good run for their money.
Warden at the time was “retired,” and the new man, a seasoned veteran by the name of Frank Colby, was brought in to kick Reeves in to shape. And he did. Convict leasing was reestablished—external work parties, chain gangs—and the pent-up frustration and inherent anger within Reeves County Farm’s populace was channeled into constructive and socially contributive endeavors. A N
ATURAL
F
ORCE FOR
G
OOD.
C
OLBY
S
WEEPS THE
C
ORRIDORS
C
LEAN.
R
EEVES:
A R
OUTE TO
R
EHABILITATION
. It was all so much whitewashed horseshit. Colby was on the make, had always had an eye for a bribe and wasn’t scared to take it. He was a generous man, however, and officials the length and breadth of Reeves County and beyond took advantage of that generosity. The farm prison became a proverbial horn of plenty, and thus the beatings, the unduly harsh solitary terms, the inmate injuries and accidental fatalities were overlooked.
It was into this new and improved correctional facility that Henry Quinn found himself integrated, and he had known—within a matter of days—that here was a place that would make him or break him.
Whichever way you told the tale, Henry Quinn was an accident.
To be raised with such a knowledge does something to a kid, no doubt.
Nancy Quinn, all of twenty-two years old, had never intended to get pregnant, and Jack Alford had never intended to be the man who’d done it to her.
But he did, all hot and sweaty and half undressed in the back of a Buick Super four-door sedan, the drunken moment most memorable for the fact that Nancy Quinn whacked her elbow on the white Tenite steering wheel and couldn’t stop laughing for three minutes straight. The sex itself had not been memorable. Waking alone and clothed in her own bed the following morning, Nancy was aware of two things: her elbow still hurt and her underwear was missing. She prayed that she hadn’t gotten knocked up. Her prayer, like so many others, went unanswered, and within a week she knew. She just
knew
. The mental and psychological hurricane through which she survived over the subsequent weeks was biblical, but she never said a word to her parents. She confided in her sister, and her sister said that the only thing to do was cross the border into Ciudad Acuña or Piedras Negras and get an abortion. As far as she understood, all of Nancy’s worldly problems could be solved with a length of hose, a liter of lye, and about seventy-five bucks.
Whether it was the horror stories she’d heard about backstreet abortions, whether it was guilt, innate compassion, or a sense that something like this happened for reasons she could never begin to understand, she made a decision. That decision occurred to her while she sat in a movie theater in San Angelo. The film—
Edge of Doom
with Dana Andrews and Farley Granger—did not engage her attention. However, it was during that film that she was overcome by an emotion she could describe only as
peaceful
. Accompanying that emotion was the certainty that she would see the pregnancy through; not only that, but she would tell her parents the truth.
It didn’t go well. Her mother said little of anything. Her father called her a
hussy
, gave her two hundred dollars, and told her that this was the limit of his financial and parental responsibility. She was twenty-two years old, she had a job (she worked as a secretary for the San Angelo County Library Department), and she rented her own apartment. Whether she kept the child or not would be her own decision. He knew what he would decide, but he was
not
her and this was
not
his problem.
Not unsurprised by her father’s reaction, Nancy left the house somewhat reconciled to the fact that this was a one-way ticket. Even her mother, trying to console her at the threshold with a
Don’t worry, dear … he’ll come around in time
didn’t allay her fears. It was a fearful thing, after all, and whatever the whys and wherefores, Nancy didn’t believe it was right for her family to abandon her. The sense of abandonment became a sense of injustice became a sense of self-righteous indignation, and by the time she reached the second trimester, she knew that if her father came crawling on his knees for forgiveness—not that he ever would, mind—she would turn him away unsympathetically just so he’d understand how he’d made her feel.
Her father never came, the self-righteous indignation tempered and softened, and by the time Nancy Quinn gave birth on February 5, 1951, she was a different woman. She called the boy Henry. Just Henry. No middle name, no ancestral relevance, nothing but the simple certainty of a two-syllable sound that felt right for the little one who returned her gaze unerringly and melted her heart. Had there ever been a ghost of doubt in her mind about the rightness of her decision to see the pregnancy through, that doubt was exorcised and vanquished in a single beat of that selfsame melted heart.
If anything, time alone served to vindicate that decision, for Henry Quinn—by any standards—was no normal kid.
To say he was bright would have been an understatement. The child was incandescent. It was not that he asked questions, for out of the mouths of babes the questions are endless and routine. It was the questions asked that puzzled Nancy, and those questions often left her lost for words. And sometimes Henry would make a statement as if that statement were nothing less than fact, and from a child so young it just baffled the hell out of her.
Why is it that some days go really fast and some go really slow, even when they have the same amount of hours in them, Ma?
Turn the music up, Ma. It makes me feel like nothing bad could ever happen to anyone.
This from a child merely a year past his first words.
And then, one night, lying in her arms, he looked up at her and said,
My heart goes twice as fast as yours. Is that because I love you twice as much as anyone else?
These were the things that told Nancy Quinn her boy was different. These were the joys and wonders that her father would never discover. Henry’s maternal grandfather died before Henry was three, and Nancy never once regretted harboring the resentment she felt toward him. Even if she couldn’t hold on to a man, she sure as hell could hold on to a grudge.
Nancy took Henry to the funeral, told him that he was going to meet his grandmother for the first time. Henry seemed to take the whole thing in his stride. He charmed everyone, men and women alike, and when Grandma Quinn picked him up and hugged him, she cried more than she’d ever done for the loss of her husband.
That day saw the resolution of any conflict or disharmony that may have existed between mother and daughter. Marion Quinn paid for Nancy and Henry to move out of the cramped apartment where they’d lived since forever and into the rental house where she and Henry would remain until that fateful morning when beer was drunk, a gun was fired, and a water barrel deflected a bullet into the throat of an unfortunate and unsuspecting Sally O’Brien.
The years between the funeral of Walter Quinn and the arrest of the grandson he never met were quietly eventful in their own way. Henry Quinn attended a local school, jumped grades twice, graduated, attended college, and though his academic prowess was never questioned, his motivations were. Henry Quinn did not care. That was the way it seemed. He read books by the handful, sometimes two or three simultaneously; he wore out his library card and his shoes with the sheer number of trips he made to the library. Nancy, still employed by the San Angelo County Library Department, herself a remarkably well-read woman, made lists of recommended volumes. Henry not only read the books on those lists, but he strayed wildly down odd literary avenues into obscure genres and rare subjects. Everything from English classics to contemporary American poetry passed through Henry’s hands, through Henry’s mind, and thus into Henry’s psyche. Equally at ease quoting
Twelfth Night
, H. P. Lovecraft, or a stanza from Helen Adam’s
Margaretta’s Rime
, Henry Quinn confounded people. The person folks expected Henry Quinn to be and the person Henry Quinn actually was were never the same thing. In fact, Henry seemed to take an inordinate degree of pleasure in defying people’s expectations of him. Perhaps they anticipated someone with such an intellect to be superior, even condescending, but Henry could not have been more humble had he tried. He was neither self-deprecating nor riddled with internal doubt, but he exuded an air of carefree nonchalance that somehow eased the air around him. However quick his mind might have been, his manner was slow, his speech measured, as if everything he uttered had the flavor of something planned and practiced and yet could never have been.
The truth, if there were such a thing, was that Henry Quinn thought in terms of music. He lived his life as if everything he heard were merely a soundtrack. From his first discovery of T-Bone Walker and Freddie King, he did as he had done with books. He wandered wildly through myriad genres and subgenres, listening to Red Garland, Charlie Christian, Harry Choates; then suddenly it was Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff, once more veering wildly back to Ernest Tubb and the Texas Nightingale, Sippie Wallace.
When Henry Quinn was nine, Nancy bought him a Teisco EP-7 electric guitar from a secondhand store. The guitar was already four or five years old, looked like it had maybe been used to row a boat out of a muddy swamp, but it cleaned up well and looked close enough to the one Freddie King used that she knew it would make Henry happy.
When Henry saw it, he cried.
Subsequently, and almost without variation, Henry returned from school, completed his homework, did his chores, and then headed for his room. Rare was the night when Nancy did not find him asleep in his clothes, the guitar still clutched in one hand, pieces of paper scattered around the floor covered in hieroglyphics, lyrics, musical annotations of one variety or another. Sometimes she would stand in the hallway and listen to Henry as he played a phrase from some scratched Bakelite disc on his Symphonic 556 record player over and over and then tried to replicate it himself. She marveled at the boy’s patience and determination, and when she started dating a music teacher by the name of Larry Troutman from San Angelo High, she watched as Henry literally bled the poor man dry for knowledge and a better scope of understanding.
“Boy’s as hungry as a Cuban boxer,” Larry told her. “Never seen anything like it. Darn kid has a sponge for a brain … Don’t matter how much I tell him; he wants to know more.”
The relationship between Nancy Quinn and Larry Troutman did not last. Henry’s passion, however, went from strength to strength.
The songs he started writing were old songs. At least that’s the way they sounded to Nancy. Lines like
Every time I die, someone steals my shoes
from the lips of a fifteen-year-old seemed both terribly wrong and terribly right.
He understands whiskey, women, and God, and everything in between
. That was another one she heard as she crossed the hallway to the bathroom, and she stood there a moment and wondered if Henry was actually hers. Maybe they had switched babies on her in the hospital. Maybe this kid was some kind of gypsy. She knew as well as she knew her own name that it wasn’t so, but still she wondered at the source of this angled perspective and the strange wisdom it seemed to precipitate. Maybe Jack Alford was responsible, the errant and irresponsible one-night-stand father of Henry Quinn. She could not know, and never would, for she hadn’t known Jack then, and she doubted she’d ever see him again for long enough to find out.
A few months after Henry turned sixteen, there was a talent show at the Tom Green County Fair. Henry got up on a makeshift stage in front of a tough crowd, and with his beat-to-hell Teisco EP-7 guitar and a Lafayette LA-75 amplifier, he played a song of his own composition called “Easier than Breathing to Love You.” Where he got the words from, Nancy did not know. She wasn’t privy to everything her son did, but she was pretty sure he hadn’t yet found a girl and lost his virginity. However, that song had been written by a man whose heart had been broken more times than he cared to recall. That’s how it sounded. It must have sounded that way to Herman Russell, a scout from a small record company in Abilene. Herman Russell was as wide as he was tall, kind of rolled enthusiastically forward, a crooked smile on his face like he knew everyone was a trickster, nevertheless certain he was trickier than most. Had a habit of wearing suits with a vest, a watch and chain, a pocket handkerchief that matched his tie. A Southern dandy with a penchant for two-toned shoes and pomade.
“Seen a hundred thousand of these talent shows in my time,” he told Nancy Quinn.
Henry stood by, guitar in hand, aware of nothing but the fact that he’d dropped a bar on the middle eight, hit a half dozen bum notes, and on the final refrain pitched a semitone flat. As far as he was concerned “Easier than Breathing to Love You” had sounded like a pet store burning down.
“Kid’s got a voice, a good playing style as well,” Herman Russell said, and then turned to Henry and asked, “Who writ the song, boy?”
“I did, sir,” Henry replied.
“Straight up? You don’t say,” Herman said, and knocked his hat back an inch from his brow. He squinted against the light and looked at Henry as if for the first time. “You don’t say,” he repeated, as if somewhere deep inside him was a cave that served up echoes. “You got some more tunes like that?”
“He’s got a ton of them,” Nancy said. “All he ever does, aside from school and chores, is play guitar and write songs, Mr. Russell.”
“Oh, you go on and call me Herman. No one calls me Mr. Russell, save the cops and the IRS!”
Herman looked at Henry’s boots, his raggedy jeans, his rolled cuffs and youthful face. Youthful he was, no doubt about it, but if this scrawny kid had writ a song such as that, then there was something going on that didn’t make sense.
Herman, however, was the kind of man who attended church more often than Easter and Christmas and believed that it was right to trust a man until he gave a reason to do otherwise. Hence he had no motivation to consider that Henry Quinn had not writ that song, and a good song it was, the kind of song that could be pressed into a 45 and sold to a hundred or more West Texas music stores under the Crooked Cow label. For that’s who Herman Russell worked for—the Crooked Cow record label—and he was Abilene born and bred, had different boots and suits for every day of the week, ties and kerchiefs that matched, and he prided himself on a square deal for a square service. Henry, if all was as appeared, was not only a square deal but the real deal, and there weren’t so many of those that came along in a straight month of county fairs.
Herman Russell suggested a visit on up to Crooked Cow in Abilene, and Nancy—seeing such a thing could do no harm in either the short or the long term—went with her son on the bus, tickets paid for by Herman Russell with a Crooked Cow business check at the Greyhound depot that same county fair afternoon. They took the bus ride just a week or so later, on Thursday, same day the Beatles released
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
, and in a small anteroom outside a large recording booth, Henry Quinn stared at a picture of a country singer called Evan Riggs. He knew the man and his album,
The Whiskey Poet
, but he did not know of Riggs’s current whereabouts, that he had already served seventeen years of a life sentence at Reeves for the murder of Forrest Wetherby in an Austin hotel corridor in July of 1950, and had Henry known then that he himself would share a cell with the man he now looked at, he would have smiled his Henry Quinn smile and said, “You know what? You’re just plumb crazy …”