Mockingbird Songs (4 page)

FOUR

On the sidewalk outside an Eldorado gas station, a three-legged dog sat statue-still and watched as Henry Quinn rolled a cigarette and lit it with a match. Henry wondered about the leg, how it was lost, where it wound up, and how a dog like that would think about such a thing. Whether a dog like that would think at all.

A bus had stopped to refuel, disgorging its passengers, giving them time to use the restroom, stretch their legs, buy chilled bottles of root beer and sacks of potato chips before their own journey resumed. He had driven fifty-odd miles south on 277, would head east out of Eldorado, would perhaps make another brief stop in Ozona, and then cover the last handful of miles to Calvary.

The passengers gathered on the forecourt as they waited for the driver to fill the bus and fetch coffee, and Henry listened to the vignettes of conversation that snuck their way between the sound of the wheels against the highway and the passage of cars.

How am I doing? Spending money I don’t have, drinking myself into an early grave. The usual, you know?

…three gross of Nibco 633 copper pipe unions …

…tell you now, ideas is like assholes. Everyone’s got one, and they’re usually full of shit …

To Henry they seemed like people of another race. In his mind he was still cell-bound. Would take a while to come out of it. Evan had spoken of such a thing.

Man’s as likely to get someplace and ask for the smallest room he can get. Can’t take too much space, you see? We don’t care much for the unfamiliar, and when you’ve been buckled up in an eight by ten for years on end, you don’t feel so good unless you’ve got four walls arm’s breadth apart and a door you can shut tight. People get over it, but it takes a while. Some of them never get over it, and they do something to get ’emselves brought right on back. You can feel their sigh of relief when someone locks ’em up again
.

Henry knew whereof Evan spoke. There was a comfort in claustrophobia. There was a comfort in routine. There was a comfort in never having to think about anything save the book you were reading or the conversation you were having. In jail you did not need to find the rent. In jail you did not miss a meal. There were a great deal of things you
did
miss, but even they seemed to fade from reality after a time. In a way it reminded you of being a child. You ate when you were told; you slept when you were told. Step out of line and there was always someone mighty keen to show you right where that line was and put you behind it once more.

But now it was all done. Now he was out and free, and though he could not leave the state for another year without telling someone, he was his own man.

Except for his promise to Evan and whatever was happening with his ma, he could do pretty much as he pleased.

The reunion had not gone well. She was still right there in the house where it all happened. The O’Briens, Henry was relieved to discover, were gone. Sally O’Brien had not lost the faculty of speech. A blessing, no doubt about it. Should Henry keep a weather eye out for Danny O’Brien? Maybe. Maybe not. Henry didn’t know the man from Adam, thus could not determine his temper or taste for retribution. Seemed to Henry that when it came down to basics, there were two kinds of people: those who blamed everyone else for their situation and those who blamed themselves. Would take a broad perspective to accept that accidents and coincidences were of your own making, but given a choice between
yay
and
nay
, Henry would fall on the
yay
side. Even if such things weren’t of your own design and decision, the mere fact of taking responsibility for them got you of a mind to do something about it, rather than just bitching like a cuckold.

Anyhow, all such philosophical ramblings aside, his mother was his mother, and she was slipping out through the gap between what was and what wasn’t. The drinking didn’t help none. Drinking, in Henry’s experience, merely served to exaggerate what was already inside of you. Like money. Like power. Give those things to a man and he just becomes more of what he inherently is.

Reeves County Farm Prison transport drove Henry as far as Odessa. The driver said little, save that he wanted to stop at a roadside diner to get a cup of coffee and a bear claw. Henry waited on the bus. Driver never asked if he wanted anything and brought nothing back for him. Just sat and ate his bear claw, drank his coffee, lit a smoke, and then started out again.

By the time they arrived, it was nightfall. Henry slept at a shabby motel in a room that smelled of mold and bad feet. Didn’t undress, for he doubted the sheets had been changed in a month. Even the water in the bathroom seemed uncertain of its own ability to clean anything. Wash your hands in it and they needed to be washed again elsewhere. It was not a good welcome back to the free world.

Henry took a walk around Odessa on the morning of the twelfth. Little things caught his attention. Colors seemed brighter, hair was longer, cars louder than he recalled. What had he expected, that time would wait for him unchanged and unmoved while he served his three years, three months, and four days? That it would be like dreamtime—a day in a second, a week in an hour—and yet upon waking the dreamer discovers that everything is the same? No, everything had changed. He could sense it. He could feel it. He did not like it, for it was a constant reminder that the time he’d spent in Reeves was as good as time lost forever. The only upside had been Evan Riggs, the fact that the man understood the need for music, that he’d shared some wisdoms and words that would count for something on the road to wherever Henry was ultimately headed. Where that was, well, Henry would find out in due course. Like Hemingway said,
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

And so he walked, and he thought of how best to talk to his mother, to explain to her that he was not staying in San Angelo, that there was a road he was going to walk and its first wide part was somewhere called Calvary. Once that was done, the pledge honored, then where? He didn’t know, and he didn’t
need
to know. After a thousand or more days of regulations, he figured he could do without them for a while. Would she understand? There was no way of knowing until he got there and told her.

It was bad, but not as bad as it might have been.

A man had been staying in the house. That much Henry could determine from the shaving accoutrements in the bathroom, the shoes on the porch. Who he was and what his business was, his ma didn’t say, and Henry didn’t ask.

“You’re leaving?” she asked. “I haven’t seen you for a year and you’re leaving?”

That first line he could have written before he left Reeves.

“I am,” he told her.

“But why?” She stood in the kitchen doorway, her hand on her hip, something in her body language that said he was going nowhere until she received some satisfactory answers. Her appearance was further confirmation that more than three years had passed. Her hair was close to silver, her eyes reconciled to the sight of an unappealing future. She did not look well.

“Have to deal with something, Ma,” Henry said.

“But you need to spend some time here, spend some time with me, settle down, get a job. You need to get a job, Henry. A job should be your first order of business.”

“It isn’t, Ma. I don’t expect you to understand, but there is something I have to do. I made a promise, and I gotta keep it.”

“What about your promise to me?”

“What promise would that be, then?”

She changed the subject, went for the bourbon, took a slug that would have put Henry on his back after three years of no liquor. She started off on a detour concerning something or other that Henry did not understand, and in truth had no mind to. Seemed like she was working up enough courage for a fight, and that was the last thing Henry wanted.

“Look, Ma,” he finally said, interrupting her midflow on some wild anecdote about a raccoon as big as a dog in the garbage, “I just have to do something. I’ll be gone a little while. A few days, a week, a month maybe. As far as the rest of my life is concerned, I have to figure that out, sure, but that’s not my priority right now.”

“I am not happy, Henry,” Nancy Quinn said.

“Is anyone?” Henry replied.

Nancy Quinn looked at her son like he was a stranger.

Henry smiled at her like she was the only mother in the world.

Compromising, Henry agreed to stay one night. His mother’s gentleman friend arrived for supper. His name was Howard Ulysses Morgan.

“Hell of a story behind the Ulysses, if you’re interested,” which Henry was not, but Howard proceeded to tell the story anyway.

The story was no big deal, but politeness won over and Henry smiled at the end.

“And that, young man, is how I came to be Howard
Ulysses
,” Howard concluded, pleased with himself perhaps, as if the oddity of his middle name somehow compensated for an absence of charm and personality.

Whichever way you painted the sign, Howard was a drunk. His was the bourbon, and he had no shame in keeping it to himself. Only once did he offer some to Henry. Henry declined. Nancy took a second man-sized jolt, then switched to her own brand of poison, and the pair of them slid into semi-coherence, seemingly untroubled by the fact that Henry had just been released from prison and might have had an ache for company.

After an hour, he left them to their own devices. He went out back to check on his pickup, an Apache Red 1962 Studebaker Champ. Pride and joy, no question. Front driver’s-side tire was down some and would need a breath of air; rust around the wheel arches was accelerated but not fatal. It had been tarpaulined, and the tarp had at least prevented animal or insect infestation and sun-bleaching. She kicked over on the first try.

“Y-you goin’ s-someplace?” Howard slurred at him from the back door.

“No, sir,” Henry said. “Not just yet. Just checkin’ she’s still runnin’.”

Howard looked at Henry as if he’d forgotten the question he himself had asked, and then he raised his glass, smiled cheerily, and headed back indoors.

Henry heard Howard and his ma laughing about something, and then there was silence.

Maybe folks like Howard got through the day by convincing themselves it was still Christmas or New Year’s or some such.

Half an hour later Henry was in his room. Evan Riggs’s letter was there on the nightstand. It had one word clearly and carefully printed on the front.
Sarah
. Henry’s guitar case sat on the floor at his feet. It had been underneath the bed all this time. The Princeton amp was still working. No reason for it not to have been, but when he switched it on and the transformer came to life, he was almost surprised.

Why there was a sense of trepidation as he leaned forward to open that case, he did not know. It was there, and he could not deny it.

Before Reeves, music had been his life, his being, his raison d’être. Glancing now toward the wall, seeing the stacks of vinyls that rested there—everything from Lead Belly and Sonny Terry to Gene Vincent and Johnny Burnette, British imported records like
Five Live Yardbirds
and
Piper at the Gates of Dawn
, the West Coast sounds of
Surrealistic Pillow
and
Easter Everywhere
from right here in Austin, Texas—Henry could see himself seated right where he was now more than three years earlier.

A moment. That’s all it took. A moment of dumbass stupidity.

He was drunk. Four, five, six cans of beer, he couldn’t even remember. He was in the funk. The black dog. He was pissed about something he couldn’t learn, something that frustrated him. Nothing so simple as girl trouble; it had been soul trouble. Maybe something only musicians could understand, but there was a point where the body defied the mind. Maybe it was the same for athletes, as if you knew something could be achieved, but there was no clear way to achieve it. Regardless of reason or rationale, Henry had been down. He’d drunk most of a six-pack and then took the .38 into the yard and let off a few rounds. One degree up or down, one degree left or right, and that slug would never have ricocheted as it did, would never have made it across the yard and through the fence, would never have reached Sally O’Brien.

And he would not be here three years later with a void in his mind.

The weight of the guitar surprised him. Ten pounds, give or take, but it seemed so much heavier. The shape and feel was unmistakable, and the chords were still there, though changing was slow and clumsy. That would come back in no time at all. It was the riffs and lead lines that were gone, and where muscle memory had once put his fingers exactly where they needed to be, there was little of anything left.

Henry played the guitar for a handful of minutes, and then he laid it back in its case and just stared at it for a while. Finally, he kicked the lid closed with the toe of his boot.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, his head in his hands like a man taking delivery of heartbreaking news.

FIVE

“Ides of March,” Grace Riggs told her husband on the morning of their youngest son’s fifth birthday.

“What of it?”

“It’s an important date.”

“How so?”

“You don’t know about Julius Caesar, sweetheart?”

“Can’t say I do,” William said. “He a stock farmer or grain?”

“You are teasing me,” Grace replied. “You know exactly who Julius Caesar is.”

William and Grace were in the kitchen, William sat tying his boots while she busied herself at the stove. Six in the morning, children still asleep, the early-morning routine as Grace fed and watered her husband before he went to work. This day was different, however. William would wake the children in a half hour or so, share breakfast, acknowledge Evan’s birthday before he headed out.

“I do, indeed, my love,” William told her. “He’s that feller who done run into a steer with his tractor on—”

Grace swatted her husband with a dish towel. “Such an ignorant man, you are.”

“Smarts is overrated,” William replied. “Don’t wanna git involved with none of that book-readin’ business, now, do we?”

“I’m serious, Will,” Grace said. “It’s an important date. Historically significant. Lot of things have happened on the fifteenth of March. Columbus arrived back in Spain, the Red River Campaign, Tsar Nicholas abdicated—”

“I think you’ll find, dear heart, that we human beings, for better or worse, have been around long enough to see a great many historical events on every day of the calendar. Besides, I don’t think it’s a good to idea to fill Evan’s little head with such things. I know he’s as bright as a star, but all this special attention is only going to make Carson feel left out. We spoke about this before, remember?”

Grace was silent for a moment, her expression as one readied for rebuttal, but nothing but silence was forthcoming. She knew her husband was right, said certainty not borne out of any requirement to bend to his will, for Grace Riggs was as righteously stubborn as any woman could be when she felt her self-determination was being subsumed, but out of simple agreement.

“Yes,” she said. “You are right, my dear. Enough.”

William reached out his hand toward her. She stepped closer, and he put his arm around her waist. He pulled her close and pressed the side of his face against her stomach.

“Different boys, different minds, but we cannot treat them differently,” he said. “It will only be the cause of trouble they don’t need.”

Grace stood there beside her seated husband, one hand on his shoulder, the other touching the side of his face, and she looked out through the window as early-morning sun lit the fields like fire. She saw no purpose in reminding her husband of how distant he had been when Carson was first born. She was twenty-seven years old, and time with William Riggs had done nothing but strengthen her love and respect for the man. Never one for hearsay and rumor-mongering, she was nevertheless privy to words shared by wives in the postchurch gaggles that clucked and prattled beyond earshot of the minister. The husbands conspired to engage in late-night drinking and gambling, all the more ironic when the sermon had broached such things as temperance and abstinence, and the wives spoke ill of their husbands in such a way as Grace could never have countenanced.

An’ I seen the way he looks at her … what with her cheekbones tucked up tight and them bee-sting lips o’ hers …

Know when he’s lyin’ … can see it painted all across his face like whitewash …

Staggered home reekin’ something devilish; told him to sleep in the barn, not to come near me with that disgusting thing o’ his …

For William, Grace had other words, words like
loyalty
and
dependability
,
trustworthiness
and
constancy
. He did not look at other women, save that they crossed his line of sight, and he kept on looking wherever he’d been looking and did not follow them as they passed. He did not drink to excess, and though there had been half a dozen times when he was a little worse for wear, he had always remained jovial, never angry, and certainly never violent. One time he danced a jig for her like some half-crazed Irish leprechaun, and she near lost her breath for laughing.

Other wives seemed to have found other kinds of husbands. May-Elizabeth Crook once sported a shiner to rival those inflicted by Jack Dempsey upon the likes of Gene Tunney and Georges Carpentier.

“Crook by name, crook by nature, that’s my husband,” May-Elizabeth once told Grace, conveniently forgetting that she was a Crook herself.

Word was that Yale Killebrew was sharing his bed with Montie Jennings’s new wife, and the womenfolk used words like
blowsy
and
sluttish
. Seemed to Grace that people should check for muddy footprints on their own porch before commenting on the state of others’.

And so Grace listened to her husband, not out of duty, but out of a mutual understanding and agreement that the life they shared was the life they created together. They stood back-to-back against the world, reliant upon no one but themselves for their own mental and emotional survival. Whatever bed they made, they would be lying in it, and that went for their children, too.

It was Evan’s fifth birthday, and that was the only required significance for this, the Ides of March.

Until later, of course, but later had yet to arrive and thus was as unknown a territory as the rationale of Calvary’s collective womenfolk.

Five years was old enough for a horse, and that’s what Evan got. Set with saddle and stirrup and rein and bit, that narrow-haunched paint was a gentle beauty. Sire and dam were different, a bay and white for one, a sorrel and white for the other, and this one came up kind of hazel, except for a white hock-to-hoof splash on the forelimbs. Grady Fromme, two farms east, gave William Riggs a fair price for a good steed, ideal for a little ’un, and in the three days that William and Grace had kept that horse hidden in the barn, there had been nothing to indicate that the pony was anything but perfect in nature and temperament. He was a quiet one for sure, nudging up against William with an affectionate manner. William’s experience was more bovine than equine, but he’d been around horses all his life and they were a good animal. Smarter than steer—that went without saying—and there was a devotion to be found in a horse that was equaled only by a hound. Good horse would carry you as fast as it could go until its own heart burst, and that was a fact. He’d seen it happen, heard of it more often, and that was something William could never fathom save were it for your own kin.

Breakfast done in a whirlwind of pancakes and spilled juice, Grace and William Riggs walked out to the porch with both of the boys. Carson was all of nine years old, had gotten his own pony at five but never really took to the thing. Two years on, William had sold it and bought the boy a bicycle. Didn’t take to that, either. Each to his own, though what was Carson’s own they had yet to learn.

Grace stayed up on the veranda with the boys, and William headed on down to the barn to fetch the paint. When he led him out across the yard and Evan saw him, there was a whoop of delight the like of which neither parent had seen nor heard before.

Grace sensed the envy. It seemed to swell around Carson. Like some sort of airborne virus, it infected the air as an unpleasant odor, an unsettling sound of indistinct origin.

“Go,” Grace urged Evan, and Evan nearly tumbled appetite over tin cup as he barreled down the porch steps and hurtled across the yard toward his father.

The pony seemed untroubled by the whirlwind of arms and legs and laughter that gamboled toward it, and when William hoisted the boy up and settled his boots in the stirrups, when he started to lead that horse down the driveway and onto the grazing range, Grace couldn’t believe how happy such a sight made her feel.

After ten minutes Carson wanted to go inside. He tugged at his mother’s sleeve, but Grace wanted to stay and watch as her youngest bonded with the pony.

Carson went inside by himself, and when she heard a door slam upstairs, she knew there was a storm brewing.

It would not have been fair to say that Carson Riggs arrived into a world that did not love him. Despite his father’s original reticence, the arrival of Evan had done wonders to smooth whatever edges and corners might have existed. Tradition seemed to dictate that the eldest was the favored, certainly when that eldest was a boy, but here it was different, tangibly so, and Grace was aware that Carson was aware, and that mutual awareness was something she wrestled with most every day. Those outside would perhaps have noticed nothing out of the ordinary but—as with all things—when you knew what you were looking for, you saw it all the time. Details, simple matters, the fact that William would pass the vegetables first to Evan, the fact that come an evening when William saw fit to listen to the wireless, he would have Evan on his knee while Carson sat cross-legged on the floor below. The devil was in the detail, and Grace knew that if they were not cautious, then the devil might find its way into Carson as well. Having said that, Carson was not a bad boy. He was solid and reliable and conscientious in his own way. He was easy to love, for there was a simplicity in his outlook and manner that possessed its own immutable charm. Carson would never be fickle nor absentminded; nor would he be stricken with wild flights of fancy. Where Evan was akin to the newest and latest, Carson was the all-too-familiar sense of nostalgia that accompanied an old pair of boots that could never be discarded.

It being a school day, the boys were packed up with books and lunch pails by eight. Evan, predictably, didn’t want to go, but he didn’t put up a fight. Never one for tantrums and the like, Evan seemed philosophically resigned to the fact that though his elders were not necessarily always his betters, they still had the say-so in the general run of things. He hung back as William returned the pony to the barn, said goodbye to the thing, and headed for the road with Carson and his father.

“You gotta find that pony a name, son,” William said.

“Will do, Pa.”

“You any ideas yet?”

Evan shook his head. “Nope. He’ll tell me when he’s ready.”

“Darn fool thing to say,” Carson interjected. “Horses don’t talk, you dumbass.”

“Carson. Enough of that. Animals have a sense, and some folks have a sense for animals. Lot of things we don’t understand—”

“Understand that horses don’t talk,” Carson jibed.

“Not another word out of you, young man,” William Riggs replied, and there was a sharp edge in his tone.

Carson fell silent, knew better than to challenge his pa.

William drove them to school in the buggy, had some business over the other side of Calvary and school was en route. Little more than half a mile, they ordinarily walked and the walk was good for them. Got some air in their lungs, some limber in their muscles. And when school was done, Evan was all but falling over himself to get back to see his horse.

“That dumb pony done telephoned you and told you his name yet?” Carson needled.

“Don’t be such a fool, Carson. Horses don’t use telephones.”

“And horses don’t talk, you dumbass.”

“You’re the dumbass.”

“You’re the king of all the dumbasses in the world.”

“I reckon you are so.”

Thus it went on, back and forth, trading petty insults until the farm came into view and Evan started running.

Carson let him go. He didn’t care to see the horse; nor did he much care that it was his younger brother’s birthday. Birthdays were a whole heap of nothing disguised as something, and that you could take to the bank.

But it wasn’t nothing. It was something. It was like a seed caught in a tooth that wouldn’t give up. A hangnail that snags and catches. And Carson sat on it for three days before he did something cruel and foolish.

Perhaps it was nothing more nor less than jealousy, the innate knowledge that he was not as well loved, that the years before Evan’s arrival were marked by some cool distance between himself and his father, but there was a ghost of something in the boy’s mind. He loved Evan, no question there, but he envied him as well. Grace sensed it. William trusted Grace’s female intuition about such things, and he was responsible enough to recognize that he was as much to blame for the situation as Carson himself.

Had the action been impulsive, it would have been seen as nothing more than childish and spiteful, albeit malicious, but it was the forethought that troubled both William and Grace Riggs.

Three o’clock in the morning, Monday the eighteenth of March, nine-year-old Carson Riggs, no slouch but never the brightest light in the harbor, crept out of bed, down the stairs, across the yard, and hurried out to the barn where his younger brother’s pony was stabled. He then proceeded to let the thing loose. He raised a good ruckus, waving his arms and stamping his feet, and the little horse bolted. Had it been a bigger horse, with perhaps a sharper temper, Carson Riggs might have gotten his head kicked off, but no, the animal was just spooked some and took off like a whirlwind.

Took William a day to reunite heartbroken boy with skittish horse, and even then it came back of its own accord. William drove the perimeter of the farm, the farms adjacent, put word out that he was looking for a young hazel-colored paint, distinct for the white hock-to-hoof splash. Returned the first evening with no word of the thing, wondered whether it was gone for good. Evan had wept himself into a dreadful state, took no consolation from anything, and only when that pony made its cautious way up the drive toward the house did it look like the world was not actually at an end.

William and Grace Riggs knew who’d done it. It was obvious. Even the vain efforts to get involved in the search did not assuage their certainty that Carson had been responsible.

Once Evan was settled for the night, William took Carson aside and let him know.

“No use to lie, son,” William said. “We know you let the pony go. No other way it could have happened. I am mad enough already, son. Don’t get me madder by telling me it wasn’t you.”