by George Wier
“Jess,” I said, “why don’t you go with him.”
“Fine,” she said. “I think I’ll have a cup of coffee too.” She took Willett’s arm.
“Willett,” I said. “Don’t let her have more than one cup. I don’t think she’s ever had coffee and she’s already the most hyper kid in the Western Hemisphere.”
“Whatever,” Jessica said. As they disappeared out the door and it began to close I heard Jessica say to Willett: “You have to ignore him. He’s crazy.”
Holt beamed a smile at me and chuckled softly.
“I like her, Bill. Now I know you don’t know Willett very well, but he’s a good fellow.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“He is. He’s real quiet-like, but he’s got wheels just-a-turnin’ in that pointed head of his.”
“I don’t doubt it, Holt. Willett’s fine by me. I’ve got something to tell you Holt. You remember that two-hundred-seventeen thousand dollars you handed me?”
“Lost it already? Well... Easy come, easy go.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“No, sir,” I said. “You’re worth two million, now. I cashed it all in last Friday. I figured you didn’t need more than that.”
“I’ll be... damned. That’s fine, Bill. That’s mighty fine.”
“I sure was sorry to hear about your fall. Want to tell me about it?”
“Well... I was up on the roof and a piece of slate gave way under me and I rode it out on the air and hit the ground. You know, a good fall takes about half a second. But when I was coming down I could have written a book with everything that went through my head.”
“I don’t doubt it,” I said.
Holt smiled, thinly.
“You know, Bill,” he said, “I shouldn’t have told you that stuff―when was it? Last night?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t worry about that.”
“You didn’t have to come all the way out here, you know.”
“It’s nothing, Holt. Just miles.”
“And time.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “You’ll be paying me for it.”
He chuckled, but then winced a little.
“I shouldn’t make you laugh,” I said.
“Pay it no mind. Just forget what I told you last night. Will you do that?”
I looked at him, met his gaze. “That’s a tall order,” I said.
“I know. Nothing good can come of any of it. It’s brought me nothing but misery since I was eighteen years old.”
I waited. I was under the impression he would say more on the subject, but he simply regarded me with those blue eyes of his.
“There’s one thing you don’t know about me,” I said.
“What, pray tell, is it?”
“It’s that I can’t abide a mystery. I know, it’s a pretty bad flaw in my character.”
“It’s a gaping hole, Bill,” he said, and smiled.
“I know it. But it’s there. Will you tell me what happened in 1960?”
Holt breathed a long sigh. He turned his head away from me toward the window where a thin strip of blue sky was revealed between the nearly closed curtains.
“I’d tell you,” he said. “But you can’t go there and I know you would. And then it would all come out.”
I didn’t have to pause to think about my reply.
“You’re right about that,” I said. “I’d go and it would all come out. But let me tell you something I’ve learned. It all comes out anyway, Holt. Every secret, no matter how dark. It has to. That’s the only way to make it go away.”
“Bill,” he said, “are you some kind of philosopher?”
“Please,” I told him. “Never accuse me of that. It’s just plain mean.”
He smiled again, briefly, but the smile faded. The moment it began to fade, I knew he was going to tell me.
*****
I was just a kid, Bill, wet behind the ears and knowing little more about life than which girls were loose and which filling station sold the cheapest beer. I was just out of High School―I went to school in Karnack; we all did―and there was little to do but work, chase girls, drink, or go fishing. By the time I was done with school I had learned the best combinations of those categories, and believe it or not, they all combine easily.
I had explored nearly every acre of Harrison County by that time, and I had found some things maybe I had no business running across. That happens when you trespass, you know. But Caddo Lake isn’t like that. There are parts of it that belong to private individuals. Mostly, though, it’s wide open, and so I spent most of my time on the lake.
One evening during the summer I was out on the lake in my father’s bass boat with a girl named Molly Sue Perkins. She was a looker and I was in love and she wasn’t the least bit ‘loose’. I didn’t take her out there to do what I normally did. I would have done anything just to spend any length of time alone with her.
She had raven-black hair, long and straight, and she was thin-waisted and had a light-hearted laugh at any stupid little thing I would do. Any time I was near Molly Sue I felt like a comic-book character. She did that to me. I felt like Jughead.
I had designs on her. I kept an image in my head of a little house with a white picket-fence and Molly Sue pregnant and in her bare foot, watering the flowers along the front walkway.
After that last night, though, the image was gone. Wiped out, forever.
I had found a little island up one of the little bayous off of the lake and I was taking her there. The sun was behind us, no more than half an hour from going down. I knew we wouldn’t be back until dark-thirty―at least that was my plan―and so I had a large picnic basket, flashlights and blankets in the boat with us.
We were no more than a few hundred yards from where the bayou lets into the lake. We were threading our way through the stands of cypress that cover that part of the lake when we heard it. A howling sound, a high-pitched shriek, growing louder and coming from the sky.
It was an airplane, coming in low and fast. It left a streak of black smoke behind it that just hung there in the breezeless, darkening sky.
It passed over our heads less than a couple of hundred feet.
We knew what was going to happen.
Molly Sue looked at me. Gone was her beautiful smile. In its place was fear. I’ll never forget that look; her wide eyes, her quivering face and thin body.
‘Holt’, she said. She’d never called me by my name before. It had always been ‘Junior’, which she had taken to calling me when she was a Senior in High School and I was a year behind her. Even after I graduated, which was that May, two months before that night, I was still ‘Junior’ to her. But there on Lake Caddo in my Pa’s little bass boat with the tiller vibrating in the grip of my left hand from the one-cylinder motor and death passing over us, I had become very real to her. I had become ‘Holt’. And suddenly I hated the sound of my own name.
‘Holt’, she said, but never finished her sentence.
I was powerless. I could do nothing to erase the fear etched on her features and I could do nothing about the doomed craft that had just disappeared through the trees.
But the sound―that shriek―grew in intensity. It lasted probably no more than ten seconds, but it was like falling from that roof. It... lasted.
But then the crash came, as we both knew it would. I’ve never heard anything like that, before or since. I’m not going to live to be a hundred, but if I did, I would still hear it perfectly.
That mile to the crash sight was the longest mile, by water or land, of my life. The water was motionless. The air was still and thin, like I imagine outer space would be.
Molly Sue kept saying the Twenty-third Psalm, over and over again under her breath as she faced forward. But I could hear it. I heard every word. When I was a kid I loved that Psalm. Now I can’t stand it. Those last few lines though, when she finished them she would repeat them: ‘Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fe
ar no evil for thou art with me thy rod and thy staff they comfort me surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the lord forever.’ Just like that. No punctuation in between. She’d repeat it a few times and then start back all over again from the top.
I lost my love for her there at the exact halfway point to the island. I lost it the moment I realized that she was going to keep repeating that dad-blamed Psalm until we arrived at the crash site. And I felt... well, vindicated, when that was exactly what occurred.
Suddenly I hated her. I wanted nothing more to do with her, ever again. And I haven’t since that very night.
Bill, call the nurse. I think I’ll take some of that pain medication now. I’ll tell you the rest after awhile.
*****
I went out into the hall and got a nurse’s attention and passed on the information. The lady I talked to was a chunky one who must have out-weighed me by fifty pounds or more. She looked terribly bored, but she brightened up at the news that Holt wanted something to relieve his pain. I couldn’t understand her reaction, but I let it go.
Back inside Holt’s room, I told him that he’d be out of pain shortly.
“Have you eaten yet?” he asked me.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I was born during the lunch hour, so I’m always hungry.”
“Willett doesn’t complain about the food here. Why don’t you go and get a bite. When you get back we’ll pick it up again.”
“That’s fine, Holt,” I told him. “See you in a bit.”
Later I was sorry I left, because when I got back Holt was gone.
CHAPTER FIVE
After leaving Holt’s room, I followed the smell of cooking food and found the hospital cafeteria, along with Jessica and Willett. The cafeteria was no large affair, consisting of little more than a couple of steam tables, a cash register, half a dozen small round tables, and a lone, bored cafeteria worker.
Jessica brightened when I entered, got herself up and skipped over to me. Willett Mahoney and I exchanged nods.
As I got in the cafeteria line and poured myself a cup of coffee that from the smell had to be hours old, Jessica let me in on the big secret of the day.
“Dad,” she said, “that Willett fellow never says anything. He just grunts.”
“Like some of your friends when they’re around me. Now you know how it feels.”
Jessica looked up. I detected an eye-roll coming, but she noticed my face and decided against it.
“Willett’s pretty much harmless,” I said. “At least I think he is.”
“Nobody’s harmless,” Jessica said.
“You’ve got a point.”
We rejoined Willett.
“Well,” I said, finally, not knowing how to finish.
“That’s a pretty deep subject,” Willett replied.
“Uh-huh. Holt looks better than I thought he would.”
“Yeah,” Willett said.
“Aren’t you going to ask what we talked about?”
Willett drained the last of his coffee and set the cup down.
“Nope,” he said.
“Okay. He asked for some pain medication. A nurse is probably giving him something right now.”
“Uh-huh,” Willett said.
“I’ve got a problem, Willett. I need a little guidance, and you’re the only person I know in these parts besides Holt.”
“I knew somethin’ was on your mind,” he said, regarding me with me with green, tired eyes.
“If anything happens to Holt, who can I trust? His family will have something coming to them, but I don’t know them.”
“What did Holt have to say about it?” Willett asked.
“Nothing, yet. I haven’t broached the subject.”
“I thought that was what ya’ll were talking about. Reckon I was wrong.”
There was a long silence.
Jessica looked as if she were about to speak, but I gave the barest of headshakes and she got the message.
“Willett,” I began. “You don’t know me and I don’t know you. We’ve got that in common. But I have to know something right out front.”
Willett waited, and at the same time looked as though he was waiting for nothing.
“Do you know about what happened to him back in 1960?”
“Why?” Willett asked.
“I just need to know where things stand.”
“I know something. Holt doesn’t know that I know or what I know.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “I’m about to go up and find out the rest of it.”
Willett didn’t reply.
I pushed my chair back and stood. Jessica followed suit. Before I could take my first step away, Willett said it: “Don’t trust nobody.”
I turned back to look at his face. It was unchanged.
Willett looked down at his coffee cup, picked it up and tilted it back to see to the bottom, as if making sure it was empty.
“Thanks,” I said, and walked away.
*****
I was quick to learn how correct Willett was.
Holt was gone.
His private room looked so antiseptic and so thoroughly vacant that at first I thought that I had entered the wrong room. I quickly checked the room number. Right room―no Holt.
“Weird,” Jessica said. “Wasn’t he just in here?”
“Yeah. He was,” I said.
We went to the nurse’s station down the hall.
“Excuse me,” I said to the nurse, the same one who had showed evidence of life when I told her that Holt was requesting medication. Her name tag read “Babette.”
“Nurse Babette, where is Holt Gatlin?”
“It’s pronounced ‘Babe-ette’,” she said.
“Huh?” Jessica asked.
“You know. Like a little baby?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Where’s Holt?”
“Are you family?” she asked.
“Uh. No. But he was here just twenty minutes ago. Is he being x-rayed or something?”
“If you’re not family, I can’t disclose anything,” Nurse Babette said. She turned away from me and went back to her paperwork.
“Excuse me,” I said. “We’re still here.”
“Yeah. I know. I wish you weren’t.”
I looked at Jessica.
“We got that,” Jessica said. “But would you please answer my dad’s question?”
Nurse Babette shrugged. She was a solid and frumpy woman. Also, she reminded me of some kind of wind-up toy. “Let me get the Nursing Director,” she said.
“Fine,” I said. “Do that.”
Nurse Babette picked up her phone and pushed a button.
“Ms. Wilkinson. There’s a man and a girl here asking about one of our patients.”
I waited.
“No, ma’am. Not family... Yes, ma’am.” Nurse Babette hung up the phone. “She’ll be right down in a minute.” She turned away.
“Thank you,” Jessica said. I would have said something completely different.
*****
The Nursing Director, Ms. Linda Wilkinson, would be winning no prizes in the personality division of any contest.
She was a tall, straight-backed woman in her late fifties. She did not wear nursing scrubs, but instead wore a conservative white shirt and black slacks. She had mousy, silvered hair piled up on top of her head in a tight bun and had a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles perched forward on her long, narrow hawk-nose. Also, she had a name tag that gave her name.
“It is hospital policy not to provide anyone outside of family and attorney with information.”
“Spoken like a real lawyer,” Jessica said.
“That’s enough,” I enjoined. “Look, I know the rules. But I’ve got Holt’s Power of Attorney.”
“For health care, or for financial matters?”
“Financial,” I said. There was no use in lying. I had no illusions that I would get anywhere by doing so.
“Not go
od enough,” she said, and smiled. If I’d had a gun I would have shot her.
“The last time I checked,” I said, managing to keep my composure, “hospitals charge money for health care. That’s where I come in. So, strictly speaking, if you will give me your fax number, I’ll have my secretary fax over the proper documentation. That way, you’ll be covered.”
Her mouth tightened. I knew I had her.
“Mr. Gatlin has been transferred to Memorial Hospital in Houston.”
“Thank you,” Jessica said.
As we turned away I saw Willett emerging from Holt’s room. He spotted us.
“Where is he?” Willett asked.
“They’ve moved him to Houston Memorial.”
“Then it’s begun,” Willett said. “Let’s go, Bill.” Willett started off toward the elevator at a trot and I hastily fell into pace behind him.
“Hey, wait for me!” Jessica called out.
CHAPTER SIX
“Are we going to Houston?” I asked Willett. We were in the hospital parking lot and I was looking at the possibility of following Willett in his beat-up Ford pickup or trying to convince him to ride with the two of us. It was going to be slightly more complicated than a coin toss.
“Nope,” Willett said. For once I found myself wishing that Willett was longer on words and shorter on introspective silence.
“Where then?” Jessica asked. After a moment of watching Willett stand there and consider, she added: “Come on, Mr. Mahoney. I know you’re able to speak in multiple syllables.”
Willett took off his feed store cap and scratched at the roots of his unruly yet thinning mop of reddish hair. “Well, as I see it, what they’re looking for is at Holt’s house. At least they think it is.” He turned towards his pickup again.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Who is they and what is the ’it’ they’re looking for?”
Willett stopped suddenly and sighed. He raised his head toward the sky and then turned around.
