Wild Horses (16 page)

In the final stages of her cancer, Lorelei St. John had for weeks vacillated between burial and cremation, finally opting for the tradition of earth and roots. While he could not bring himself to ask, Tom wondered if she hadn’t also chosen the cemetery as a devious ploy to bring him up here more often. A man could visit two graves as easily as one, and maybe he needed to. Mom, even in death, nudging him a few rows over, to stand before that headstone dated five years back and carved with the name HOLLY ST. JOHN, and to someday make his peace with it. To forgive the young woman who lay below it, forgive the husband he once had been to her.

But some things could not be rushed.

How they nagged at him, these persistent and unquiet dead.

He’d told no one, but for the past five years Tom had visited the grave of a stranger more often than that of his wife, one of a dozen surrounded by their own wrought-iron fence, a final family gathering from over a century ago. The thin dark wafer of tilted headstone was still surprisingly readable: DEBORAH SWEETWATER. She’d been born February 24, 1858; died November 16, 1877.
Walking with Jesus now
, the concluding sentiment to mark her passage.

He had no idea who she’d been, nor the life she’d led, only that she’d died at the age of nineteen, and this seemed as cruel an injustice as he’d ever really thought about. For some reason, five years ago, Holly’s grave a new blot on the landscape, he’d adopted Deborah Sweetwater, or she him, as a kind of guardian saint.

Her name, those tender dates — they prompted in him a hundred questions, and when he’d imagined their answers, along came a hundred more. What had Deborah looked like? Sounded like? He wondered if she’d died a virgin; liked to think she had not. Wondered if she might have come here alone on summer days, to linger over the grave of a young man who’d perished long before she was born, and wonder if, time being no obstacle, they might not have made perfect lovers for each other.

They talked, in their fashion, Deborah Sweetwater listening to those things that professionals charged eighty dollars an hour to listen to, offering her advice for free. Some days, when the breezes fell still, he really thought he could hear her voice over that gulf of more than a century.

Oh, I do believe Holly’d like to hear from you,
Deborah would say.
She’s got her some places to go, Tom, and she can’t get there from here, not so long as you’re hanging on her like an anchor on a balloon. And I’ve a suspicion maybe it’s the same for you too…

I think she’s sorry. So how ‘bout you, for once?

It always came down to this, and always the temptation was strong: to stand over Holly’s grave and tell the woman, the body, whatever soul that lingered, to go to hell. But what would be the point? He’d told her as much already, five years ago. And look how well things had turned out then.

After his mother’s burial, Aunt Jess elected to stay at Tom’s beachfront house until Lorelei’s headstone was erected. He took her up to see it, the granite slab anchored and leveled, the ruptured earth tamped smooth around the base. The cemetery was theirs alone, the earth seeming to breathe with rhythms that refused to be hurried. Oaks grew vast, green as Eden, and the elder headstones were slowly turning to pebbles — seasons of hot, wet air kind to one, cruel to the other.

Jess stood for a time without moving, hands laced together atop the cane, then lifted it to point at the polished gray face of Lorelei’s stone.

“You made a fine choice, Tommy,” she said. Thirty-six years old, premature gray streaking his hair, and still he was Tommy. “She’d’ve liked that. She’d’ve liked that very much.”

Certainly he hoped so. Names and dates told nothing about who they marked, and while he’d still conceded to them, chiseled above was what he hoped would speak loudest to any stranger who might pause here. Cut into the rock was a pair of stringed masks, tilted side by side, that even Aristotle would have recognized. One mask smiling and the other crying, all the laughter and all the tragedy in the world reflected in their immutable faces.

Aunt Jess looked into the sky, starting to blacken with the threat of rain. “Coming up a cloud,” she said, then shrugged it off. “What pains me most is that this plot here’s a plot for one. And that’s not right, that’s not as it should’ve been.” Aunt Jess looked him in the eye. “That was a wicked and hurtful act your father committed, running off the way he did. Leaving her alone with a four-year-old. It did something to her, more than she’d let on. There was no reason for her spending the rest of her life alone. But for better or probably for worse, that was her choice.”

Jess dropped her hand to his, gave it a squeeze. “You’ve your own choice to make. What she most wanted you to hear from her own heart, she left to me to tell, because she didn’t think she could get it out and still look you in the eye. So I told her even if it took this cane against your tail to make you listen you’d hear it.

“You buried a woman five years ago, and I know you still hold this notion it was your fault. But you didn’t put the razor to her wrists. She did that all of her own choice. People who do such a thing do it no matter who it is they have in their lives. They do it because they choose to, not because someone drives them to it.”

He nodded, having heard it before, from more than one mouth.

“Whether or not you remain alone is your choice,” Jess went on. “But the last thing our Lorelei would want is for you to favor her in one regard: Don’t let your fear make that choice for you.”

Both her hands folded back together atop the cane, and as he watched her, he heard the distant rumble of thunder. Jess looked at the new stone as if it could be reasoned with, or set at peace.

“Well,” she said to it, “I told him, so that’s that. Didn’t even have to wallop him none, either, so maybe he listened.”

And he had. But listening was the easiest thing in the world.

“Look at it this way, Tommy,” Jess said, lighter now that she was freed of obligation. “There’s someone out there for you. There sure is. She’s breathing right this instant. In, out … in, and out again. The same as you. You just have to try hard to hear her.” A smile now, and above it, the same bright eyes he recognized from family pictures of long ago. “I wonder what else she’s doing right this instant. Ever think of that? Where she is, what she’s doing?”

He looked at the headstone, at the simple faces carved there. The comedy and the tragedy. All the world a stage and all upon it merely players.

“Yeah,” he admitted, finally. “I wonder that a lot.”

*

Tom crunched over to where the fallen barmaid lay in blood and gravel and dust, went down on one knee beside her.

“Do you need any help?” he asked.

She lay in shadows and her eyes did not open. After a moment, her backhand flashed and a big chip of gravel ricocheted off Tom’s forehead.

“A little lower, and maybe you can put my eye out next time.” He fumed for a moment, even if this woman’s pride was the last thing she had left to guard. “Anybody I can call for you, then?”

She struggled to rise onto one elbow, began to snicker when she saw him shield his face with crossed arms. The little bit of laughter did her face some good, battered as it was, all tangled hair and dirty scrapes, trickles of blood and swelling, and that crusty hole on her cheek like a wound from a .22-caliber bullet.

“No. Not one soul.” She looked as though she wished she’d never gotten up that morning, maybe all year. “Pretty sad, huh?”

He’d lowered his arms by now, pulled a black kerchief from his pocket that he sometimes used as a bandanna. “It’s clean,” he said. She went scooting backward to lean against a dusty fender and dab away at the damage.

“You know, what I can’t figure out is, how come nobody moved in to stop it, you coming from behind the bar.” In any bar he’d ever lifted a bottle in, it was the Eleventh Commandment: Thou shalt not mess with the barmaid. Break it and unshaven angels would be dancing on your head in seconds, if only to save themselves from thirst.

The woman gave a spiteful look at the closed door. “Loretta? She’s local. I’m not.” This said it all. “You must not be either, if you didn’t know.”

Tom shook his head. “Just passing through.”

She huffed with a low whiskey laugh. “Looks like your IQ just shot up forty points.”

He grinned. “You’re sure there’s nothing you need?”

Her hand dropped to her side, came up with another big pebble that she held as if deciding whether or not to throw it. No fire behind it this time, just a stubborn pride and a smile too painful to let loose.

He nodded, started across the lot against a backbeat of bass, thumping like a sick heart inside the bar. With one last look back he saw that some enormous yellow cat was lumbering toward her. It stopped, looked at Tom and seemed to scowl in a terribly wise and intolerant way, then sauntered into the woman’s arms. She hugged it like a lost child.

He got into his van, backed out, angling for escape, and when he stopped to gear it into drive there came a frantic thumping up along the side. Then her splayed hand slapped glass, and there she was in his window, more life in her than he’d thought was left. He cranked the window down.

“I just saw your license plate.”

Florida tag, picture of a manatee in the center. “And?”

“You wouldn’t happen to be going back there, would you?” The hope in her voice, her eyes, lit her up and put the damage into dim perspective. “
Would you?
”

“Eventually. I’ve got a lot of stops along the way, though.”

“Can I ride along?” The fingers of both hands went curling over the edge of his door, fierce as eagle claws. “Only as far as Mississippi. I’ll go halves on gas.”

The last thing he wanted was an argument, her on one side and his conscience on the other, both of them telling him the very same thing. At least his conscience would never throw rocks.

“Mississippi?” he said, then what must have sounded to both of them like yes. Probably not the best decision he had ever made.

But the heat made people crazy, and crazy never ran out of ways to show its face.

CHAPTER 9

Boyd could feel his chest loosening, thought he sensed it in Krystal as well, both of them breathing with relief now that the fight was over and Allison was moving without crutches. For more than two hours they’d been sitting fifty yards from Dickory Doc’s, parked within the shadows alongside an adobe building whose front windows were filled with saddles and boots and hats.

“I don’t mind telling you, that hurt to watch,” he said.

“You don’t think we should’ve gone over there and tried to stop it, maybe?”

“And end up part of tonight’s hit parade too? What would that accomplish?” He patted Krystal’s thigh. The bruises and the blood had visibly bothered her. “Hey, she’ll be okay, Allie’s strong. She’s got good bone structure.”

They watched as she finished speaking with some rangy fellow who then drove off in a van. While the plates said ST JOHN, he didn’t look like any Bible-thumper, with those black clothes and that coiled wariness in his step. Boyd couldn’t figure out the relationship; their body language didn’t belie real acquaintance. Allison remained on the parking lot, alone, hugging a cat the size of a sandbag. After a few minutes she carried the cat inside.

“She’s going back to work after all that?” Krystal sounded astonished. “Wow, that takes some moxie.”

“Yeah, but if I know Allison, she’ll be spitting in drinks.”

“Are you sure this wasn’t a wasted trip, that you’ve got your facts straight? I mean, look at this place, Boyd. Do you think anyone with the kind of money you say she took from you would choose to stay in a place like this?”

“I didn’t say she had the money. What I said was she took my access to it. I don’t think she even realizes what she’s got.” He sighed, fanning himself, the two of them sweating like a pair of hormonal teenagers. He pointed toward the stereo, where for maybe the sixth time today the same five CDs were playing, all mellow keyboards and Gaelic lyrics, the woman’s voice overdubbed until it sounded as though the Mazda was surrounded by a choir of clones. “Could we listen to somebody else besides Enya for a change?”

Krystal looked wounded. “Don’t you find her soothing?”

“Yeah, she’s soothing. I’m about soothed into a coma, is the problem.” He ejected the discs and replaced them with a few he’d brought along. Texas rockabilly, the Reverend Horton Heat. Guitars jangled and smoked, and Boyd was good for a few hours more.

This had been their longest day yet, and most productive. They’d followed this morning’s lead down from Utah and come into town hoping only to find someone who might recognize Allison’s picture, perhaps recall anything she had said about a destination. Never dreaming she’d still be here after a week. The chromosomal wreckage staffing the gas station had been no help. On the hunch that Allison might’ve been more interested in food than fuel, they had shown her picture at the town diner, to be told that she was working down the road. Dickory Doc’s was already teeming with evening life when they got there, and Krystal popped in long enough to make sure that it was indeed Allison.