Mockingbird Songs (6 page)

EIGHT

Never one to judge by first impressions, Henry Quinn could not help but be a little surprised by Calvary. Expecting little more than a wide part in the road, Calvary seemed to him a fully-fledged town, long-established, boasting a main drag, a grain store, a couple of general mercantiles, a garage, two saloons, a pool hall, a brightly-lit supermarket, a boot maker, a saddler, and a host of other businesses and concerns that led away to a tall-spired church that had the look of fresh paint and generous accommodation.

He pulled the Champ up to the curb in front of a soda fountain, well-kept but outdated, a range of barstools and the long curved counter visible from the street. Even the soda jerk wore an outfit that wouldn’t have gone amiss fifty years earlier.

If anyone were angling to haul Calvary, Texas, into the 1970s, they were slacking on the job.

Henry imagined there were a multitude of such places: quiet burgs minding their own affairs, unconcerned with whatever progress was being forged and hammered in San Antonio and Houston and Dallas. Rushing headlong toward the twenty-first century might be all the rage there, but this century was just fine for the likes of Calvary. Come to think of it, the last century might find even more favor.

Up at the counter, the place empty but for himself and the man serving, Henry asked after Sheriff Riggs.

The man smiled as if he knew something that was a secret to most others.

“Well, son,” he said, “Sheriff Riggs is not only the law; he’s pretty much a law unto hisself also, so where he’d be right now I have not the slightest notion.”

“Is there a Sheriff’s Office?”

“Oh, I’d say there’d be about a half dozen offices where Sheriff Riggs attends to his business, if you know what I mean.”

Henry frowned. “I don’t understand … I’m sorry—”

“Merl,” the man said. “Name’s Merl. As I say, Sheriff Riggs’ll be out and about, doin’ something or other,” he explained, which in truth was no explanation at all. “Time we have?” he asked himself, and looked back at the clock on the wall. “Somewheres around four. I guess he’ll be back at the department office in an hour or so. You carry on the way you was headin’; maybe a quarter mile after the church, take a right—cain’t miss it ’cause it is the only right you can take—and you’ll see the building down there. Low-slung place, one story, painted blue. If there’s a sheriff’s car outside, then he’s in. If there isn’t, he ain’t.”

“Appreciated, Merl.”

“No bother, son. What’s your name, anyways?”

“Henry. Henry Quinn.”

“Well, good luck on finding Sheriff Riggs there, Henry Quinn,” Merl said, as if to imply that such a thing was some kind of Holy Grail escapade.

Henry, resisting any sense of obligation to get a soda, went back to the pickup and drove past the church. He pulled up facing the turn of which Merl had spoken. He could see the roof of the blue, one-story building and guessed he would stay there until Sheriff Riggs appeared.

For an hour he didn’t see a single car, and then a tired-looking Oldsmobile Cutlass crawled past. The driver’s eyes looked straight ahead, and the passenger—a girl of no more than five or six—stared at him blankly, as if seeing right through him, her expression unchanging even when he smiled. There was nothing to read into it, but it nevertheless provoked a sense of disquiet.

Merl’s seeming air of dismissive nonchalance, the girl’s vacant stare, and here was Henry Quinn in his pickup waiting for the brother of his cellmate. As if to remind himself of his reason, Henry reached back into the knapsack and took out Evan’s letter.
Sarah
. That was it. Just the forename. Evan said that Sarah’s mother was dead and he did not know the name of the family who’d adopted her. All he otherwise knew was her date of birth—November 12, 1949—and the fact that his brother, Sheriff Carson Riggs of Calvary, Texas, would be able to help.

As if to echo that thought in reality, a black-and-white appeared in Henry’s rearview and headed on down the road toward him. As it slowed and turned, he was aware of being scrutinized by the driver, by assumption alone the one and only Carson Riggs. Beneath the hat and behind the sunglasses, Henry had no way of determining if this was indeed Evan’s brother, but there was only one way to find out. He waited for the car to turn and head down to the Sheriff’s Department building and then followed on after it.

Exiting his car, Henry felt sure that the driver of the sheriff’s vehicle was undoubtedly Carson Riggs. His sunglasses removed, there was a distinct likeness, perhaps not in specific physical characteristics, but certainly in presence and posture. Where Evan was rangier, attributable perhaps to the Reeves diet, Carson was heavier-set in all aspects. A whisker shy of six feet tall, his hair full yet grayed, he leaned against the car, his thumbs tucked into the Sam Browne belt, his hat now tipped back and his hand raised against the last glares of the setting sun.

Henry got out of the pickup and paused before speaking.

That pause was sufficient for Sheriff Carson Riggs to get the first words in.

“Howdy there, son. Can we do for you?”

“I was looking for Sheriff Carson Riggs.”

“I’d call your mission a success, then.”

“You are he?”

“Am indeed, head to toe and all in between.”

“My name is Henry Quinn.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, sir. It is. I came looking for you on an errand from your brother.”

Carson Riggs stood up straight, took off his hat, and wiped his brow with the back of his hand. “Well, well, well. If I’d had to make a list of all the things you’d say, that there’d be pretty much the last.”

“He said you might be surprised.”

“Well, you can tell him I was,” Riggs said, and put his hat back on.

“I came to ask you about his daughter.”

Riggs seemed to take a step back then, not physically, but spiritually. That was the only way Henry could have described it.

“His daughter?”

“Yes, sir. His daughter.”

“I take back what I said earlier. That would have definitely been the last thing on my list.”

“You know where she’s at?”

“Not the faintest clue, Mr. Quinn. You have any idea how long ago this was?”

“I know her name is Sarah, and she was born in November of 1949. Your brother said that you were her legal guardian after he was jailed.”

“He said what?” Riggs looked positively baffled.

“That you became her legal guardian.”

Riggs smiled wryly, and yet there was a sympathetic tone in his voice when he spoke. “I guess more than twenty years in Reeves has finally turned the poor son of a bitch’s mind, Henry Quinn. He said that I became her legal guardian? His daughter? Hell, that is just the wildest notion I ever did hear. You do know she was adopted, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And did my hapless, hopeless, half-crazy brother happen to tell you the name of the people who adopted her?”

“He said he didn’t know that.”

“And I guess you met him in Reeves.”

“Yes, sir. I did.”

“Bunked with him?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And he set you on this foolhardy errand to find a girl he hasn’t seen for more than two decades who is someplace with a family whose name he does not know?”

“That’s right.”

Riggs smiled sardonically. “And you agreed to this?”

“I did, yes.”

“Might I ask why?”

“Because he is my friend. Because he helped me out at Reeves.”

“Well, son, you are a better man than me. I mean, hell, I’m a sheriff. I have the entire Redbird County Sheriff’s Department at my disposal, and I would be hard-pressed to find that girl. I think my brother has set you on a coon hunt where there ain’t no coons.”

“Perhaps you would be willing to help me find her, Sheriff Riggs.”

Riggs frowned and once again removed his hat, but this time he tossed it through the open window of his car. He eyed Henry warily, as if the young man had said something that might be read one way or another, and both meant some fashion of trouble.

“And why would I do that?”

Now it was Henry’s turn to be puzzled. “Because he’s your brother … because the girl is your niece—”

“Well, son, you’re assuming that such a thing gives Evan Riggs an entitlement to my time and efforts, and I can assure you that it does not. You are assuming that just because he is my brother, he is also my friend.”

Henry understood, or at least believed he did. Sheriff Carson Riggs’s brother was a convicted killer, not only that, but up in Reeves for life. To assume that there were issues between him and his sheriff brother would be pretty safe as assumptions went.

Henry wondered where that left him and his obligation to Evan. He wasn’t no detective, and he sure as hell couldn’t afford to hire one. Three years’ prison salary amounted to three hundred and eighty-five dollars and change, and with the little he’d given his ma, the work on the car, just his expenditures since leaving Reeves, Henry Quinn had less than three hundred left.

“So, I don’t know where that leaves you, son. Guess you could ask around. Some of the old-timers might be able to help you some. Not many of them go back that far, but if you check in the saloon, you’ll see ’em. I’m sure a slug or two of the good stuff’ll get ’em talking.”

“That’s much appreciated, Sheriff. Thank you for your time, and I am sorry if I stirred up something you aren’t comfortable talking about.”

“Oh, don’t give it a thought,” Riggs said. “I’m just a little saddened to know that poor old Evan has finally lost his senses.” There should have been a smile in his voice, but Henry didn’t hear it. “I do have one question for you, though.”

Henry knew what it was before it was asked.

“What you do to get yourself in a place like Reeves?”

“Malicious wounding, unlawful possession.”

“How long they give you for something like that?”

“Three years.”

“Seems like a darned fool thing to have brought on yourself.”

“It was.”

“But you is all rehabilitated now, I guess.”

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“And you have a probation period?”

“No, sir. I do not. I am required to inform the authorities if I want to leave the state anytime in the next year, but no probation.”

“Good ’nough. ’Cause I don’t wanna be hearing about no trouble in town.”

“You won’t, sir.”

Riggs stood a little taller. “I know that you can’t generalize about these things, but I guess there are folks whose trust you gotta earn, and there are those who trust you from the get-go and will go on doing so until you betray that trust. I err toward the latter philosophy, despite the number of people who try to dissuade me from it.” Riggs smiled coolly. “Don’t be one of those people, Mr. Quinn.”

“I won’t, sir. I am not here to cause any trouble for anyone.”

“Good to hear. Now, I guess you is plannin’ on stayin’ overnight.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Ask at the Calvary Mercantile. Man there name of Knox Honeycutt. He’ll see you right.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Henry replied.

“Don’t mention it,” Riggs replied, and headed into the office building.

Henry stood there for a moment, uncertain as to how he felt. Like he’d left the store only to realize he’d been short-changed. More than that, like Sheriff Carson Riggs had just told him to leave Calvary without saying any such thing at all.

NINE

For a long time everything stayed the same, and then suddenly everything changed.

Because of the girl.

Grace knew it, could see it as plain as day after night, and even though William wasn’t blessed with female intuition, he could see it, too.

Neither believed it was anything so troublesome as jealousy or envy. It didn’t possess that dark a shadow. Perhaps it was nothing but physics, the simple truth that the world appeared to work in binary ways. Two were company, as they say, but three was plain awkward.

Rebecca Wyatt was fifteen years old. It was the outset of 1938, and just two weeks after the New Year’s celebrations, the Riggses were looking at Carson’s eighteenth. No doubt about it, the boy had become a man, at least physically speaking.

“He doesn’t catch fire like Evan,” William said, and not for the first time.

“Longer fuse doesn’t necessarily mean any less of a firework.”

William smiled at her. “You ever anything but glass half full, Grace Riggs?”

“Saddens me that he’s a disappointment to you,” she said.

“I don’t think—”

Grace touched her husband’s sleeve as they sat there at the kitchen table. It was early morning, a few days before Carson’s birthday, and neither boy was yet awake. “I see it, William. I reckon Carson sees it, too, though he doesn’t know what he’s seeing. Must be hard work being the less favored.”

“I don’t intend to be that way toward him.”

“I don’t think you ever intended a mean thing in your life. Sometimes the way we want to be and the way we are just don’t work out. People can see it, and sometimes you are easier to read than the funny pages.”

“Is it that obvious?” William asked.

“It is obvious how much you love Evan,” Grace said, and would not be pressed for further comment.

And then they spoke of the girl.

“She is a beautiful girl,” Grace said. “Will be an even more beautiful woman. But she’s a gypsy.”

William frowned.

“No mother, raised by her father, and she has an errant spirit,” Grace explained.

“Meaning what?”

“Some people are content with whatever life brings to the doorstep. The rest go out and look for more. Carson is the first. Evan is the second. I think our Miss Rebecca Wyatt is far more like Evan than she is Carson.”

“She’s a child,” William ventured.

“No, she isn’t,” Grace replied. “Girls get grown faster than boys in every way. And she’s a bright flame, that one. She’ll go one of two ways. She’ll want someone to keep her grounded, remind her that life isn’t all Ferris wheels and fireworks, or she’ll do what Evan’s going to do.”

“What Evan will do?”

“You don’t think he’s going to run out of here the first moment he sees a way? That boy is going to take the road less traveled; of that I am sure. Music, you know? He’s an artist. He’ll never be a farmer. What Carson will do, I do not know, but those boys could not be less alike if we had planned it.”

“I see how Carson looks when she is around,” William said.

“And I see how she looks when Evan shows up,” Grace replied.

“We shall see who wins, eh?”

“My concern, if you want to know the truth, is that everyone will lose.”

“I would hate to see either of them hurt.”

Grace smiled, her expression slightly distant, as if remembering something tinged with sadness. “Steel yourself, William Riggs. Life has a habit of disappointing most of us.”

The birthday arrived. Carson Riggs, eighteen years old. Hard to fathom how such a number of years had passed, but they had. The boy was a man, and Grace had him in a suit and a bow tie, his hair slicked with pomade, his shoes shined Sunday best. He looked the part more than he acted it, but it was his birthday, so allowances were made.

The Wyatts came over. Ralph brought him a knife with a bone handle. Rebecca delivered up a pocket watch that had once belonged to Ralph’s cousin Vernon Harvey. Vernon was born in Snowflake, Arizona, and died in France twenty-two years later. During something called the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, Vernon’s legs were blown clean off. Whoever thought such a thing would be appreciated took the time and trouble to empty Vernon’s pockets and get those personal effects back to his family. Vernon’s sister couldn’t bear to have anything in the house, and thus the effects were scattered far and wide. How the dead soldier’s watch ended up in the possession of Rebecca Wyatt, even Rebecca was uncertain, but she believed that Carson would value it, and thus she wrapped it in tissue and presented it to him on the occasion of his eighteenth. Carson was polite, but he did not really get the point of someone else’s dumb old pocket watch. Evan, however, was fascinated, and wanted to know everything there was to know about Vernon Harvey and the legs he’d left behind in the Argonne Forest. Rebecca embellished the story for him, detailing acts of selfless heroism performed by Corporal Vernon Harvey, the lives saved, the children rescued from burning French farmhouses, the German marksman he tracked for three days and nights, sleepless, without food or water, until finally cornering him and killing him stone dead with a single bullet to the heart.

Evan Riggs was fourteen years old, and he could feel the history in that watch. He could also feel something in his lower gut that told him he would think of Rebecca Wyatt last thing before he slept and first thing when he woke.

After the party was over, Grace asked Evan what he thought of Rebecca. Evan was almost asleep, exhausted from the day’s celebrations.

“She makes my mind quiet and my heart loud,” he said, which unsettled Grace Riggs, not simply because it was a remarkably profound thing for a boy of Evan’s age to say, but because she knew it was true.

She also noticed that the pocket watch that had survived the First World War now seemed to belong to Evan rather than Carson.

Rebecca Wyatt came over to the Riggses’ place three days later. She stood there on the veranda in the sunlight and she was more beautiful than she’d ever been.

Being beautiful meant a different life, a life those without beauty would never understand. Beauty opened doors, alleviated pressures, vanished cares, paid for dinner. Beauty made a path less rugged and challenging. Those fortunate enough to be beautiful would also never understand how it was to be plain and unimportant and forgettable. Those who said beauty was a curse were always beautiful, and they lived in a very different world.

And then there was another kind of beauty, and that was beauty unaware. Even more mysterious and enchanting, even more dangerous perhaps, were those who did not know it. Rebecca Wyatt was one of those, and Grace Riggs knew that through no real intent of her own, Rebecca would break more hearts than ever she would heal.

On Wednesday, January nineteenth, the soon-to-be-sixteen heartbreaker set wheels in motion that would resolutely turn unseen for years to come. Unbeknownst to her, she would establish lines of battle between Evan and Carson sufficient to challenge the ferocity of the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, and it started—as such things so often did—with a kiss.

“Rebecca,” Grace said, opening the screen. It was midafternoon, school was done, and this was the third day in the same week that the girl had shown up on the doorstep. Once had been by invitation, but the other two had not.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Riggs,” Rebecca said politely. “I wondered if Carson and Evan would be interested in coming for a walk.”

“Carson’s away with his daddy,” Grace explained. “He’s a working man now. Evan is here, but I believe he has homework.”

“Maybe I could help him?” Rebecca asked.

“Maybe you could,” Grace said. “I know he struggles a little with math.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“Come on in, my dear. Let’s see what he’s up to.”

Evan was indeed struggling some with math.

“I mean, what the hell would anyone be doing with sixty cantaloupes, each weighing an average of five pounds, anyway?” he wanted to know, and Rebecca said, “That’s just math, Evan. It’s like life. You don’t have to understand why. You just have to figure it out.”

They figured it out together, and when the cantaloupe issue was resolved, Evan told his ma that he and Rebecca were going to take a walk out toward the Pecos River.

“Back by supper,” Grace said. “You want me to telephone your father and ask if you can eat with us, Rebecca?”

“That’s really appreciated, Mrs. Riggs, but I have to have supper with my pa. He says that eating alone is like drinking alone … You wind up talking to yourself out of boredom, and it’s all downhill from there.”

“Your father has a wry sense of humor, indeed.”

Grace stood drying her hands on the veranda as Rebecca Wyatt took off with her youngest son. They were fluid and compatible, those two. There was no awkwardness or irregularity in their body language, as if each knew that there was no other place to be. Even at fourteen, Evan had a sense of grace about him. Nothing less than masculine, but somehow fluently mannered. Together, Rebecca and Carson were different. There was a stiffness about Carson, his actions possessive of some maladroit clumsiness. He was not accident prone, not at all, but his and Rebecca’s physicality were certainly not complementary.

Out of earshot, Evan asked more about Vernon Harvey.

“Why do you want to know about him so much?” Rebecca asked.

“It’s interesting.”

“I got something more interesting,” Rebecca said.

“What’s that?”

“Got a .22 rifle and a rattler’s nest.”

“You have not.”

“Have too.”

“No way, Rebecca.”

“Swear it’s true. You ever fired a rifle?”

“Sure I have. Pistol, too. With my pa, of course.”

“Well, I took the rifle out of the barn, got some shells, hid it down by this place I know. You wanna shoot it?”

“Do I ever! Yeah, sure. Let’s go kill some snakes.”

They got the gun, fired it a few times at rocks and trees, Evan near flat on his ass one time because he didn’t sit it in his shoulder correctly. Rebecca was a better shot than he, but—unlike Carson, who would have been aggrieved by such a detail—Evan merely saw it as an opportunity to learn something.

The snakes’ nest was found, but the snakes didn’t want to come out and get their heads shot off. Rebecca said they’d been too noisy coming over the rocks, scared the things deep inside, which baffled Evan because he didn’t think snakes had ears.

Giving the whole thing up as a foolhardy notion, they walked the rifle to the Wyatt farm, put it right back where it was supposed to be, and went inside for lemonade.

“Where’s your pa at?” Evan asked.

“Somewheres,” she said, which seemed an adequate answer, because Evan inquired no further.

They sat at the kitchen table, silent for a time, and then Rebecca asked if Evan had ever kissed a girl.

Evan laughed. He didn’t seem embarrassed. He just wondered why she asked, and said so.

“Just curious,” Rebecca said.

“Can’t say I have.”

“You want to?”

“Sure. Why … ? Who do you want me to kiss?”

Rebecca laughed. “You are a goof sometimes, Evan Riggs. I want you to kiss
me
.”

Evan looked serious for a moment. “Now, why on earth would you want me to do that?”

“For the hell of it. To see what it’s like. Do you have to have a reason for everything?”

“I guess not,” Evan said. “So, when shall we do this?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe next Tuesday. I’ll have to check my social calendar.”

“Well, perhaps I have other girls to kiss next Tuesday, so you should let me know.”

“Are there other girls you wanna kiss more than me, Evan Riggs?”

“I don’t even really wanna kiss you, Rebecca Wyatt,” Evan replied, which was a lie, and he had a tough time keeping a straight face.

“So, are you gonna kiss me or what?”

“Should we stand up?” he asked.

“I guess we should,” Rebecca said. “My lips aren’t big enough to reach yours from here.”

They stood up. They looked at each other and started laughing. It wasn’t awkward. It was just kind of dumb, and they both knew it.

Rebecca reached out and took Evan’s hand. He took a step or two closer until their noses were no more than four or five inches apart. He closed his eyes and puckered.

“You look like a fish,” she said.

Evan frowned. “You want me to kiss you or what?”

“I’m sorry … This is kinda stupid.”

“Stoopid is as stoopid does,” Evan said. “If you think this is that stoopid, why’d you ask me to do it?”

She leaned forward suddenly and kissed him. Later he would think of it, and though there was no real way to describe the sensation he experienced in that moment, he did see how such a thing might become addictive, how it might prompt people to write songs and poems and suchlike. It was an external action that provoked an internal reaction, and he liked it so much, he kissed her back.

This time she parted her lips a fraction, and when her tongue flickered against his, it was as if he’d been given an electric shock by a butterfly. Most of the sensation he felt, however, was in his stomach.

“How was it?” Rebecca asked him.

“Real nice,” Evan said.

She smiled and touched his face. “I liked it, too,” she said.

They didn’t kiss again, at least not that day, and when Evan headed home, it was already close enough to suppertime for him to go at a run.

When he arrived, his mother, father, and brother were already washed up and hungry.

“Where have you been?” Carson asked.

“Over at the Wyatt place,” Evan said, and he smiled a smile that Grace Riggs had not seen before.

She saw something in him, something new, something quite real, that told her that her younger one was closer to a man than her older one might ever be.