by George Wier
“You’re saying...”, she said a bit too loudly.
“I’m saying don’t ever doubt your own sanity.”
Lydia’s eyes widened. She smiled faintly and sighed loudly. Further down the row an old woman leaned forward and looked at us crossly. I half expected the old biddy to shush us both. After all, there was a funeral in progress.
*****
Lydia held Ronnie’s hand and I walked behind them into the courthouse chamber. The lawyer was there with his bolo tie and his clean straw hat sitting on the table beside his open briefcase.
When they were all seated, the lawyer began.
“I believe everybody is here who is coming. This is the formal reading of the last will and testament of Edgar Wayne Bristow.”
He opened the single manila file folder in front of him, put on a pair of spectacles and with his back ramrod straight, leaned forward and peered down at the paper.
“‘To Ronald Brent Bristow I bequeath the bulk of my estate, including all real property and all assets, except for the sum of one million dollars, which I give to my son, Burt Sanderson.’
“‘Ronnie, at your birth you were my last best hope, and that has never changed. I love you, son. I always have.’
“‘To the rest of you, if there be any, I leave you only with a father’s love, which is far more valuable than any coin. I loved you all, the worst of you along with the best of you. I hope you find peace. I never did. It wasn’t what I was looking for.’”
The old lawyer closed the file in front of him, looked up at the blank faces staring at him. He smiled warmly.
“And that’s it,” he said.
CHAPTER FORTY
Buster LeRoy took Ronnie and me over to visit Burt. The fallout shelter was looking more like a home from the outside. Gone was the graffiti. The fresh paint glistened in the warm sunlight.
Isabel was there hanging new curtains in the doorway. She was doting on her son and it was good for her. Her face had dropped five years of age. She smiled as we got out of Buster’s cruiser and came to her.
“Buster, you shouldn’t be up and about. Aren’t you supposed to be healing?”
“The only way I know to do that is by working,” he said.
Isabel began to protest, but Buster raised both of his hands. “But,” he said, “I’m only working half-days for the first few weeks, and even then, I’m only driving or flying a desk.”
“I suppose it’s okay then,” Isabel granted.
“How’s Burt?” Buster asked.
Ronnie stood there beside me, smiling, waiting. He wore a new football jersey, a baseball cap, and had one of those larger-than life styrofoam mitts that the sports fans wear at games. The tip of the extended figure brushed the grass at his feet.
“He’s in bed,” Isabel said, and then concern clouded her face.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We just want to verify with him what happened.”
“You don’t have to,” she said. “He told me everything. But if anybody is going to go in there, it would be just Ronnie. I don’t want Burt any more upset than he has been. He’s been put to some hard choices in life. He doesn’t need any more of that.”
“There are no more choices for him to make as far as I’m concerned, Izzy,” Buster said. “Really, Bill or I can state it and Burt can just nod, whether yes or no, and that would be enough for me.”
“I think that would be okay,” she said. “But not today, alright?”
“Why?” Buster asked. “What’s so special about today?”
“Because,” she said. “It’s his birthday.”
*****
In the end, it was Ronnie who went in to see Burt and Ronnie who came back out. I wasn’t counting on getting too much out of him. Not that I didn’t already know everything I needed to know.
Once back inside Buster’s cruiser and on our way back downtown, Buster nodded to me.
Here goes nothing, I thought. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“Ronnie. It was Burt who found Molly, didn’t he? Found her dead?”
Ronnie nodded. Yes.
“But you knew it was Reg who killed her.”
Again a nod. Yes.
“Burt didn’t know it was Reg. Burt thought it was you, Ronnie, didn’t he?”
Yes.
“Going back all those years before, to Barbara and the others. It was Reg every time, wasn’t it?”
Yes.
“Did you know from the first, Ronnie?” I asked him.
Slight shake of the head. No.
I peered deep into his twinkling eyes and the faintest hint of a smile began to stretch its way across his rugged and craggy feature, features that so closely resembled those of his father.
“I understand, Ronnie,” I said. “It’s all over now. There’s no more need to make things right because you have made them as right as they can be from now on.”
Ronnie drew in the deepest of breaths and then let out a very long, very slow sigh.
“Alright. Ronnie,” I said. “One last thing, and it’s not a question. It’s just that... I want to thank you. I’m so very glad you were there when Reg came for us. You saved Izzy and me. You know that.”
“Yes,” he said. Said.
And that was that.
EPILOGUE
I could wax poetic about flying. About the feeling of freedom and the range of space around you it affords. All of those things. But the moment that I took to the sky once more and saw the flash of molten gold reflecting from the Pedernales River as it wound its way through the Central Texas wilderness, the sensation was the simplest kind, most easily expressed: I was going home, with all that implies.
During the flight home Denise told me about Edgar Bristow and about how he came into her life. She told me about little girl dreams of flight, dreams that would have gone unfulfilled but for the intervention of a wealthy man with a soft place in his heart for little girls down on their luck. In essence, I learned about the difference between pasted-up clippings of pictures of planes and flying in a real one for the first time.
And I learned something more about Edgar Bristow—something that I should have suspected, but like a dark phantom hiding behind a deputy sheriff’s badge, it had been an elusive thing ever since the moment I had landed, a thing just beyond the limit of my vision. Like black thread in a very dark room.
“Bill,” Denise said. “About Edgar. After I was eighteen, I slept with him.”
I didn’t say a word.
“He was old even then. But he never asked me. I guess I always knew it was going to happen, even when I was that little girl who had just lost her parents in a big blast and he came to me out of the sky. It was the price I knew I would have to pay. I suppose I was glad to pay it then... so that I could make things more even. I was nineteen when it happened. Old enough, you know?”
I nodded, not daring to speak.
“It’s important, you know? How old I was, that is. But it didn’t matter—I still wondered. I wondered about the other girls. You know, there’s not a whole hell of a lot of difference between nineteen and sixteen.”
She paused, but I could have been a ghost there with her. She wasn’t talking to me, anyway.
“I wondered about Molly. She and Ed had something special between them. At times it seemed a little too special. I don’t know. A father and a daughter. I always hoped he wasn’t that kind of man.
“And I wondered about Burt’s mother, Isabel, although that would have been ancient history by the time I came along. Still, I knew they had been together when she was younger, only I didn’t know how young.
“Burt reminded me of Edgar, you know. Edgar was always thinking and Burt was only a shadow of him. Quiet-like, most of the time. But Isabel, she stayed away from Ed, and I knew there must have been a reason. He kept her picture with him always. And Lydia. I wondered if he slept with her, but when she ran off with Buster LeRoy that time, just before he was elected sheriff... what it did to Edgar. That man cried like a ba
by. And because he cried like that, I knew. Lydia was me, Bill. Or rather, I could have been her. But I never left Ed, even when I was away flying and building my ground school. I called him every week. Sometimes I flew in and spent the night with him, but by that time he was no longer interested in girls anymore. I guess it happens as men get older. I never thought it would happen to Edgar Bristow.
“He put me through college, you know? He gave me an envelope and in it was check for fifty thousand bucks. The note with it said: ‘For tuition at the school of your choice.’
“Bill, have you ever known anyone you loved more than anything, but couldn’t stand them at the same time?”
I thought on it for a second. I had known someone like that once. My ex-wife, in what was a lifetime ago.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think maybe I have.”
“Then you understand me, Bill. Maybe if Edgar had never come into my life I would have graduated high school like any other kid, regardless of the fact that I was orphaned. I may not have gone to college, true, but I think I would have found a good man, settled down, you know? Had a few kids. I think I’m a little past that now. The old biological clock has ticked a few too many times. And besides, no man could really compete with Ed.”
We both paused, each of us hearing only the prop wash and seeing only fleecy white clouds against a forever blue.Then she said it.
“If Reg hadn’t killed him... I think eventually it would have been me. I might have done it. Hell, I would have. After all, it was his storage tanks that blew up and killed my parents.”
And both of us lapsed again into a silence of silences, but for the howl of the wind and the howl of our most private thoughts.
*****
My life has always been simple. I do what’s in front of me that has to be done. I don’t plan too far ahead because I know that my plans don’t always coincide with the Fates or even with what is necessarily best. But still, I’m a pretty selfish fellow. I want things to go my way, I want others to understand what it is that I know, and I get a little ruffled when I don’t seem to be pushing those things home. But then again, I suppose, who doesn’t?
I’d like to think my time in Trantor’s Crossing was not wasted time. That it meant something. That, for better or for worse, I had made a difference in the great scheme of things. I had pushed things, pushed the envelope until it covered a whole town and everyone in it and had affected all of their lives, hopefully for the best. And that is what has always bothered me the most: that I had to do that when I would rather have been dribbling a basketball with Jessica, faking her out with a zigging right feint and then zagging to the left for the basket, or giving Jennifer horsey rides on my knee and listening to her giggle and make Indian sounds, or calling a client and letting them know that I had pushed their portfolio up another notch and that they could afford a vacation for a change, or kissing my wife and her kissing me back, and both of us meaning it. Those things were important to me. But I hoped that one day my wife and my kids would understand why I wasn’t always there. No doubt, had they been me, had they seen what I had seen and known what I had known, they would have done the same thing. I hoped.
Coursing through the ether beneath a canopy of billowing but scattered cloud as we flew above the outskirts of Austin, my new friends came home to me: Lydia, the closeness of her and her trusting eyes, Sheriff Buster LeRoy and his chewing-up-iron-rails-and-spitting-spikes way of handling the world around him, Burt, his shadow-laden and layered soul, Isabel, who somehow defined both despair and hope, Reg, force of nature mixed with palpable invisibility, Felix, both far away and near at hand but nonetheless a friend, Ronnie, no less the innocent lamb than one Jesus may have carried in his gentle arms, and last, the one man I had never met and knew only by the impressions, the dents he left indelibly in others—Edgar. I was both glad and somehow deprived in never having known him in life. I guess that’s all that life is after all—the fullness of being. It seems we are always forcing our shadows away from us, trying to cast out the evil. I think that is both a saving grace and a defect. The sphere of life has all there is, both beautiful and ugly, lovely and terrible. We make of it a pulling back from and drawing close to, when we possibly should simply contain it. If anything, Edgar must have weathered and embraced all those things—his daughters as they were struck down one by one, his wealth and prosperity as it flowed in and then clogged his life, and even the hour of his death. He may or may not have found peace, but then again that wasn’t his quest. Peace can be awfully un-fulfilling, especially if there’s too much of it.
And then I saw that I was right from the beginning, that terrible day I took that first ride with Burt into town from the airport—I had come to know Edgar Bristow, both the public and the private, the good and the bad. And for a bonus I had learned something from him. I learned that I had better come to know my own family while I am with them and while we are all together.
“Denise,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“No more adventures for me.”
She chuckled for a moment, then saw I was serious. She nodded and smiled. Who knows, maybe she believed me.
Finis
AUTHOR’S NOTE
(Please note that this introduction was written prior to the demise of my good friend, Milton T. Burton, to whom I have dedicated this volume.)
I discovered Raymond Chandler late in life. If I had found him sooner, my life would probably have been a good bit different. Before him, going back to what is for me the ancient of days (when dinosaurs roamed the Earth) there was the 1960s republication by Bantam Books of the old Doc Savage pulps. And before that there was Tolkien, Richard Adams, and sci-fi’s Larry Niven. Fantasy and Science Fiction may have brought me to the dance, but I left the dance with Mystery and Adventure, and we have been together ever since.
Any author is shaped by what he has read, no matter how much he will attempt to deny it. And therefore, there are a few books which have shaped this author from numerous genres, both fiction and nonfiction. I have listed them here, just in case there is any curiosity on the subject. My seventy or so favorite books, in no particular order, are as follows:
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze by Lester Dent
The Girl In A Swing and Watership Down by Richard Adams
The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane by Laird Keonig
Ringworld by Larry Niven
Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
Haunted Mesa by Louis L’Amour
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Up The Line by Robert Silverberg
Fever Dream by George R. R. Martin
Nine Princes In Amber and Roadmarks by Roger Zelazny
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin
The Kin Of Ata Are Waiting For You by Dorothy Bryant
Final Blackout and Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard
Twilight Eyes by Dean Koontz
Voyage: A Novel Of 1898 by Sterling Hayden
Dune by Frank Herbert
The Greatest Salesman In The World by Og Mandino
Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran
The Thornbirds by Colleen McCullough
World Without Stars and The Long Way Home by Poul Anderson
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
The Onion Field by Joseph Wambaugh
Sho-gun and Taipan by James Clavell
Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale
Shadowlands by Peter Straub
The Call Of The Wild by Jack London
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote
Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions: The Adventures Of AReluctant Messiah by Richard Bach
The Mote In God’s Eye and Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle
The Stand by Stephen King
The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Witching Hour by Anne Rice
A Princess Bride by William Goldman
The Veils of Azlaroc and The Dracula Tape by Fred Saberhagen
Confessions Of A Kamikaze Cowboy by Dirk Benedict
City and The Waystation by Clifford D. Simak
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Yoga, Youth and Reincarnation and The Search For The Girl With The Blue Eyes by Jess Stearn
Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett
There Is A River by Thomas Sugrue
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World by Ignatius Donnelly
The Rogues Game by Milton T. Burton
Jumper and The Wildside by Stephen Gould
East of Eden and The Wayward Bus by John Steinbeck
Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned by Walter Mosely
In The Electric Mist With Confederate Dead by James Lee Burke
River God by Wilbur Smith
Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health by L. Ron Hubbard
The Pride of Chanur by C. J. Cherryh
Booked To Die by John Dunning
Pearls Are A Nuisance by Raymond Chandler
So that’s the list. These are my favorites, those I have read and will read again and again and again. I could go on to list hundreds, but you get my point.
