The Long Night of Winchell Dear

by Robert James Waller

  After the bad night in Santa Helena, it had begun. He’d stayed with the R9 for a few more months, got together a small stake, and then pulled out. A million miles, maybe several million, first on the buses, then on the Pullman trains, then in his own automobile when train service became thin and erratic.

  You might have seen Winchell Dear over the years, somewhere out there, and probably wouldn’t have paid too much attention if you had. There was nothing extraordinary about his appearance: one of those tallish thin men in gray suits with neatly trimmed dark brown hair, wearing spectacles when he read a newspaper or checked a railroad timetable. Not handsome, not otherwise. A little too thin in the face, a little awkward in his stride. Could be a banker, you’d have guessed, though the plain black boots might have seemed a little out of place in that respect, unless it was Texas or someplace like it.

  Maybe you later glanced in the window of a first-class compartment and noticed him playing cards with six or seven other men. Passing time during a long train ride, you supposed, not knowing that Winchell Dear never simply passed time at a poker table.

  If you had stared through the window for a moment, and not longer than that, since one of the men would have noticed the curtains were open and would have closed them in your face, you would have seen the hands of Winchell Dear work in the way of a magician’s. His shuffle was fast, and he dealt with a sure, alacritous stroke, the cards streaming out like flat bullets and landing always in front of the player who was supposed to get them. By the time he reached thirty-five, Winchell Dear was one with the cards and the whisper of them across green felt.

  If a player said, “I’ll take three, Winchell,” the cards were on the table near his hand in a quarter tick.

  And you might have noticed how his face always carried the same pleasant, detached expression. He’d worked hard on that expression, practicing it in a mirror until he always knew exactly how his face looked to those who might be staring at it, looking for a tell, of which there never was any.

  The road and the cards were an unforgiving lathe all their own, and over the years Winchell Dear had been turned on that device until the ragged edges of inexperience were ground and shaped. For the last year, he’d been thinking about going up to Las Vegas. He’d heard Vegas was getting better all the time, but the town was full of hard rocks all battling one another in a few games, not much in the way of mediocre players with big bankrolls, the ones always ripe for the pickings. Word was that if you were thinking about going up there, you had reason to do some rethinking unless you were plenty good and knew it. Playing head-to-head with nothing but the mean, tough boys meant a stake you put together through the years could disappear over a couple of nights in a cloud of smoke and the rank breath of mala suerte, no matter how neatly your best suit was pressed. Still, as Blue Griffith and others would testify, Winchell Dear was up to Vegas standards, to any standards, and there was no question about that.

  The Caddy ran well and easy toward Big Spring while radio voices droned on about the race coming up in Indianapolis. Winchell turned the radio dial and found music, a good ol’ Texas boy singing:

  The guitars down the street

  were a little out of tune,

  but you could see across the border

  from the window of our room.

  That would be nice on a day like this one, Winchell Dear mused, to look out a window, out across the border, and have a woman sleeping in a rumpled bed on the other side of the room. That had happened one time, something like it, when he was eighteen and spent a Saturday night in San Carlos, Mexico. He’d leaned on a windowsill in the early morning and looked out toward Texas, at the Chisos Mountains just waking up.

  The girl’s name was Lillian, and she had been a wild young thing, aboriginal and sophisticated at once, the daughter of the R9’s owner. When her parents went up to Clear Signal for a weekend on business, she and Winchell saddled up two horses and headed for San Carlos.

  He still remembered how she had been dressed: black skirt reaching over the top of her black boots, starched white blouse long in the sleeves and loose fitting, and a straw Stetson perched on black hair done up neat and fancy in the back. At seventeen, she had ridden like a Comanche, at one with the horse, as Winchell Dear eventually became with the cards.

  While riding home toward Texas on that long-back Sunday afternoon, Lillian said, “Winchell Dear, y’all ought to let yourself go a little more often. Y’all’re pretty good at debauchery when you lose that serious face and get to it.”

  She spurred the fast little mare and yelled back at him, “C’mon, let’s make the dust fly and go skinny-dippin’ in the river.”

  Before Lillian went off a few months later to Sarah Lawrence or some such place, the two of them sneaked into the canyons more than a few times. When the rains came and depressions in the rocks, the tenahahs, were filled with water, they splashed naked in them and made love afterward on rough creek sand. By the way Lillian handled herself when she was naked and getting down to serious business, Winchell had the clear impression he was not the first cowboy who had drifted her way and bathed in the tenahahs with her. After she left for college, he never saw her again.

  About ten in the morning, Winchell Dear pulled the Cadillac up to a café in Colorado City. He ordered bacon and eggs over easy and looked around, thinking if such a thing as the Winchell Dear Diner existed, it would have only one stool. It was the way of his life. Until, on that Memorial Day in 1967, Lucinda Miller took his order and later came out of a kitchen in Colorado City, Texas, in a pink uniform, carrying his bacon and eggs.

  In the billiards room of the Two Pair ranch house, the balls sat neat and tidy, racked tightly by Sonia Dominguez as part of her cleaning chores, with the cue ball spotted at the other end of the table. Winchell Dear hung his jacket over a chair, broke the rack, ran off a string of seven straight, then let his concentration float and got sloppy. The .380 hung down from his armpit when he bent over the table and annoyed him. He removed the shoulder holster and tucked the pistol in his boot sling.

  The phone rang in the kitchen, sputtered, rang again, and was silent. Sometimes it did that when there was a storm, even a hundred miles away. The wires ran long in West Texas. Winchell Dear walked to a bookshelf and removed a fiddle, once belonging to a cowboy named Arky Williams, from its case. Winchell had never been much of a musician, but the fiddle had kept him company on the road over the years. One of the six songs he knew was “Westphalia Waltz,” which Lillian of his border days had greatly favored. He tuned the fiddle, switched off the billiards room lights, and stood there in the dark, playing the waltz.

  Lucinda had also liked the song. But “Silver Bell” was her favorite. So he went over to “Silver Bell” and remembered Lucinda. He liked remembering Lucinda. In a life that seemed spread over with grit and smoke, the road dirt of a thousand hotel rooms, and a million poker hands, Lucinda always came up in his memory as sweet smelling and newly washed. It was after two o’clock in the high desert as Winchell Dear played “Silver Bell” for the fifth time, struggling as he invariably did with the modulations from one key to the next as the Bob Wills Band would have played it, missing a note occasionally, and all the while thinking he and Lucinda should never have let go of what they once had together.

  CLEAR SIGNAL, TEXAS, was pretty much asleep when the Lincoln Continental came down Front Street, the local name for Route 90, and stopped for a flashing red light, the only required stop on the way through town.

  “Hey, look, there’s an Amtrak train in the station.” Marty was pointing to his right. “We could have ridden the train out here, I bet. Could have had a compartment and played cards or something in the lounge car. No flat tires, no worries about anything. How come we didn’t do that?”

  The driver was watching a black-and-white move across the intersection in front of him: “Clear Signal Police Department, To Protect and Serve.” He gave the car plenty of time to get farther in the direction it was headed before pulling away fro
m the flashing red light and continuing east.

  “Amtrak’s puffing out, going the same way we are. How come we didn’t ride the train?”

  “I don’t know, Marty. Didn’t think about it, I guess. Besides, trains don’t give you the kind of flexibility we need. Look, we’ve only got about fifteen miles to go. Check that hand-drawn map we were given, one more time.”

  Marty unfolded the piece of paper torn from a legal pad and squinted at it. “Yep, fifteen miles is what it says. We better be thinking about getting the equipment off the engine struts and into our hands.”

  “We will, soon as we get near to where we’re going.”

  The Connie went past a saddle shop, past the Sonic Drive-In, past the Cholla Bar with plywood over the windows and cowboys in the parking lot, drinking beer near their pickups. The cowboys turned and watched the Connie slide past them, looking faintly bellicose with their hats pulled low and faces in shadow.

  “Pretty mean-looking bunch there in the parking lot,” the driver said.

  “Yeah, one burst from the Berettas we’ve got riding on the struts and they wouldn’t look so mean, would they?” Marty turned and watched the cowboys watching the Lincoln.

  Past a line of motels, the Best Western’s marquee reading, “Welcome Film Crew.”

  “Hey,” Marty said, “they must be making a movie or something out here, probably a Wild West thing. I hate being in this country, but I like watching movies about it. Always laugh when I see some movie cowboy guy shooting a forty-four and holding it like a cap pistol. Son of a bitch’d jump right back and crack him in the face holding it like that. Ever watch those old cowboy movies they run this time of night?”

  “No, I keep pretty regular hours most of the time except when I’ve got one of these jobs to do. Got a family, you know.”

  “Your wife and kids know what you do for a living?”

  “They think I’m a salesman. That’s what I tell them. My wife’s a little suspicious, always has been about that line, but I bring home the bacon and she doesn’t say much. Told her I sell secret computer parts and can’t talk about it because of industrial piracy problems.”

  “Glad I’m not married,” Marty declared. “Too many worries being married. All I got to do is drift down to the Orchid Lounge over on Vine and pick up a little something when I get the urge. No worries other than that. Got naked dancers there, too…at the Orchid. Some of the hugest tits you’re ever going to see. For a tip they’ll sit on your lap and shake ’em right in your face. That’s kind of fun sometimes. Ever been there?”

  “No.” The driver clicked the headlights up to bright as they moved past the Buckin’ Bronc truck stop and beyond the city limits of Clear Signal.

  “Damn, the moon’s gone. All kinds of clouds up there.” Marty leaned forward and looked up through the windshield, then pivoted in his seat and tried a side-window view.

  “Yeah, wind’s come up, too,” the driver said. “Feels to me like the temperature’s dropping.”

  “I didn’t bring a topcoat, did you? Didn’t think about that. Hell, this is still August and you wouldn’t think about needing a topcoat. Got a beauty I picked up on sale over on Rodeo Drive, direct from Savile Row in London, they said. Cashmere, pretty close to the nice cream color of this car. Should’ve brought it. Didn’t guess it would get cold on us, did you?”

  “No, never gave it a thought. The sign on the edge of Clear Signal back there said the elevation was forty-seven hundred feet. I suppose the weather’s a lot different out here…. Jesus, that wind’s really picking up, can feel it even in this heavy car. Ten more miles and we’re ready to go to work.”

  “Then back to civilization where you can’t see the moon, right?” Marty laughed. “I’m going to miss seeing the moon like it looks out here, but that’s all I’m going to miss about this place. Should’ve brought my topcoat, though, don’t you think?”

  The driver slowed the Lincoln and pulled into a roadside park. “This is about right for getting the equipment ready.”

  “Hey, I don’t want to get my suit dirty getting those boxes down from the struts.”

  “Don’t worry, Marty. I’ll take care of it. I’ve become more and more aware of your suit during this trip.”

  “Well, hell, I don’t want to appear uncooperative. Just don’t want to mess up this good suit, you know. Can’t blame me for that, can you?”

  Dark clouds moving fast across the sky and wind blowing empty plastic cups across dry grass as the driver halted the Connie.

  “Look, a goddamn tumbleweed. Just like in the old movies.” Marty was excited, pointing at the tumbleweed racing past the car, through the headlights, and into the darkness.

  The driver was out of the car, wind flapping his coattails, calling for Marty to hold the flashlight while he unfastened the metal boxes.

  “Jesus, goddamn wind’s something else, ain’t it? Not as cold as I thought, though. This wind, spookier’n shit, don’t you think?”

  “Marty, point that light up under here for me.”

  “Damn hair’s blowing in my face. Should’ve brought a hat or something. You bring a hat?”

  “Hold the light steady, Marty.”

  The driver reached up toward the engine struts, being careful not to touch anything that might be hot. He found the boxes and fingered along them, feeling for an edge of duct tape he could use to peel the rest away. A section tore loose, and he handed it to Marty. Another section, then a third, and more after that. The boxes loosened until he could grasp the end of one and yank on it. One box came into his hand with strips of tape still clinging to the metal. The other was dangling, held only by a single piece of tape still attached to the strut. It came off and out with a single jerk.

  Marty’s left hand was full of oil-soaked, sticky duct tape. He whipped his hand about, trying to dislodge the tape. One piece stuck to his shirt cuff, and he shined the light on it. “Jesus Christ, what a mess. Look at this shit; got a greasy, sticky spot on this eighty-dollar shirt. Ever see such a mess?”

  “You packed solvent for cleaning the weapons, didn’t you? It’ll take the sticky stuff off your hand.”

  “Yeah, but not off this eighty-dollar white shirt. Not even sure my Chinese laundry buddies can get the spot off the shirt.”

  Back in the car, the driver opened one of the metal boxes while Marty held the flashlight. The Beretta 93R lay quietly on red felt in its own section of the partitioned box. The pistol had a wooden butt and a folding metal grip attached to the front of the trigger guard. With the grip in its down position, the forward hand could take hold of the grip with the thumb hooked in the extended trigger guard, thus allowing a two-handed hold on a relatively small weapon. Stamped into the barrel support was “PIETRO BERETTA Gardone V.T. Cal. 9 Parabellum,” the word parabellum coming down from the Old Latin and meaning “If you want peace, prepare for war.”

  In a separate section of the box, three twenty-round magazines containing nine-millimeter cartridges were stacked. And in yet a smaller section were cleaning tools and solvent wrapped in plastic.

  “Man, look at that.” Marty was grinning. “One of the prettiest guns you’re ever going to see. Ever use one of these?”

  “Not this exact model. I’m familiar with an older model, the M9 fifty-something.”

  “That was the M951, which was followed by the Model 92. This is another improved version of the old 951.”

  “This the rapid-fire lever, here?” the driver asked, lifting the pistol and testing the heft and fit of it in his hand, pointing at a thumb switch with the other hand.

  “Yep. Flip the lever, and the gun changes from single-shot to firing three-round bursts, which is just about optimum. Any more on full automatic and she’d begin to wander on you. Plus this model’s got a compensator”—Marty put his finger on an open-ribbed portion of the barrel at the muzzle end—“blows gas upward when you fire, which pushes down on the gun. Counteracts the tendency of the muzzle to rise when you’re in rapid-fire mode. Man,
they sent us with first-class equipment.”

  “They always do, Marty. Remington pump shotguns the last time, remember?” The driver shoved a clip into the pistol, folded down the metal handgrip, and aimed at an imaginary target through the windshield. “They were afraid we might run into a bunch of ranch hands on the property, so that’s the reason for the Berettas.”

  Marty opened the second box and took out his pistol, imitating what the driver had just done. “Shit, better wipe off this crap from my hand ’fore I get the little honey all sticky.” He opened the plastic package, poured solvent on a gun cloth, and cleaned his left hand. Outside, the wind was gusting near thirty miles an hour, blowing dust and beer cans across the roadside park.

  The driver laid his pistol on the seat beside him and began to pull out of the park. Marty was now full in his element, a world he understood and in which he was competent.

  “Man, oh man, I just love holding machinery like this. Get caught with one and the BATF will haul you off and make you spend half your life in jail or something.” He swung his Beretta in a slow arc, pointing it toward the road in front of them: “Dah-da-dah…dah-dah-dah…dah-dah-dah. Won’t take long to get our work finished with these babies, will it?” He wiped off the already immaculate gun with a corner of the cloth he’d used for cleaning his hands, being careful not to get any sticky residue on the pistol.

  “Five miles to go, Marty. Should be coming up on that place called Slater’s Draw pretty soon.”

  “Can’t wait,” Marty said, putting down the gun and straightening his lapels, brushing the sleeves of his suit jacket with his hands, examining the smudge on his shirt cuff one more time. He was already feeling a little hungry.

  LUCINDA MILLER was a Texas woman from up near Muleshoe, the flat-ground country called the Llano Estacada. She wasn’t what you’d have called pretty, back when Winchell Dear met her, but then and on the other hand, she wasn’t anywhere near the opposite extreme. One of those women who start out plain as a young girl and grow into something with a certain look and style that, on close examination, gives promise of more than an offhand glance would suggest. The kind of smile certain women develop as they grow older, a special way of holding their bodies and talking with an easy laugh behind the voice. As if the world has done about all it can do to them, and anything out in front is bound to be an improvement, or at least no worse.