That’s another thing I’ve always liked about Robbie. Sometimes he can be a real mind reader.
We matched quarters for the job of changing the tire, and he swore I was using one with two heads, but did the job anyway while I hunted up some spare plywood to make temporary repairs on the broken window.
By the time both jobs were done it was dark, and we started back toward Farewell in silence, absorbed in our own thoughts.
Mine were pretty cloudy. Offhand, I could think of one or two people who might have good reason to want me—or maybe both of us—out of town. But neither of them had impressed me as being stupid enough to think that a few chunks of metal flying around would do the job. Robbie’s reaction was only partially an echo of my own.
I wasn’t especially fond of gunfire either, but the shooting had given me a prime case of the stubborns, which can be hell on wheels when it gets mixed up with curiosity, and now I could hardly wait to find out whether any of the feelers I had put out during the day had touched a nerve.
On the other hand, I was having trouble with myself.
Little by little, I could feel the beginnings of a mood I knew to be dangerous, especially in the present circumstances. I was beginning to take things personally. Bad news…
One of the most attractive things about playing poker for a living is that you keep score with money. Put it down on the table at the beginning of the game and change it for chips, turn them back into money when you’re done, and count. That’s how you find out whether you won or lost. No agonizing or philosophizing. No recriminations. Just simple addition or subtraction. Impersonal.
Other games can turn out something else without warning: Play the stock market and you’re dealing with actual part-ownership of a business—with the lives and prospects of the people who work there. Too easy to find yourself identifying with the company, taking a personal interest in its fortunes. Letting the feelings get in the way of logical strategy and tactics.
But poker doesn’t deal with anything real. Just money. Win it, lose it, spend it, save it, do anything you want with it; in the end it’s still just money, a temporary marker that means absolutely nothing until and unless it can be exchanged for something else. Pretty hard to form any personal attachment.
Unfortunately, not everyone sees it that way.
Money impresses people. One of the downtown hotel-casinos in Las Vegas takes advantage of this. In the lobby, between the registration desk and the poker alcove, a million dollars—in cash—is permanently on display. It is in $10,000 bills; one hundred of them geometrically arranged for maximum visibility between two heavy sheets of shatterproof glass. Visitors are encouraged to pose for snapshots standing beside this visible symbol of the city’s basic religious dedication.
Here it is, folks: money!
Examine it closely. Note the cunning artisanship of the engraver, the technical mastery of the paper mill. Admire the lifelike lineaments of the portraiture, the handsome symmetry of design. We’d like to let you touch it, smell it. Even taste it. But that’s a no-no. So why don’t you all just stand there and drool? Lots of people do.
Every now and then, of course, someone cracks under the strain.
True religious experience is like that.
Something snaps in the brain, and a voice as from above seems to say, Go for it! The usual—intended—result is an all-out assault on such hopeless propositions as roulette, the money wheel, or the slots. By the time sanity returns, considerable wealth will have departed.
But once in a while the impulse is more direct, and the new-hatched engraving-fancier decides on a little do-it-yourself social reform. Share the wealth. Guards at the casino are under strict orders not to interfere. The glass protecting the bills is high-test, shatterproof, and quite heavy. It was handled into place by a forklift. Watching the would-be thieves get it out of the building could be a show in itself, something you don’t see every day.
And once they are off the premises, the problem of spending the proceeds would be considerable.
The $10,000 bills are real enough, purchased from and attested to by the Federal Reserve Bank. Legal tender of the United States. But they are rare. Few legitimate transactions of such size as to require such sums are carried out in cash; the Federal Reserve keeps a record of every $10,000 bill in current circulation—where it is and how it got there. Any attempt to spend the money would be an immediate prelude to arrest.
Such is the nature of reality.
And such is the reality of money. At best, it’s a handy way of keeping score while keeping the mind clear for more consequential matters.
But the game in Farewell was getting serious. Personal. Emotional. Something other than money seemed to be involved, and someone seemed to think it was important enough to outweigh human life.
And as always, I found this difficult to believe.
Murder—casual murder, offhand and unthinking—is a daily occurrence in our world. Newspapers have long since stopped publishing accounts of any but the more interesting examples: the grisly serial slaughters by obviously demented life-collectors, the drive-by offings of fourteen-year-old rivals by fifteen-year-old street gang candidates, the quiet removal of wealthy spouses by ambitious gigolo-husbands. Anything more mundane simply isn’t news.
Yet the fact remains that murder is a crime of almost incredible violence, the ultimate frustration of the individual and an act well beyond the real-world capabilities of most people. Psychopaths and sociopaths aside, when the moment of truth arrives, most men and women simply cannot pull that trigger even in defense of their own lives.
But it had happened here. That made the pot a big one. Call it two raises before the final card. No time for me to start having doubts about my objectivity. I was in for the whole ride.
“Think they're going to sell?”
Robbie’s voice broke into the long silence just as we were reaching the edge of town. I dragged myself back from the distance. “Sell what, the helicopter operation?”
“Yeah.”
“Already sold.”
“Oh…”
The disappointment in his tone was so patent that I just couldn’t let it alone. “Only temporarily,” I said. “Part of an idea I have to see who was doing what to whom. Mrs. Prescott will own it again in the end.”
He didn’t reply at once, and I could almost hear the computations in his mind as he tried to select exactly the right words and phrases. The ones that would seem casual.
“In that case,” he said, “I guess they’ll be doing some hiring. A pilot, I mean…”
I started to give a straight answer, but couldn’t resist the temptation to play the game out with him. Sometimes I’m a real bastard. “Beats me,” I said. “That would be up to the new manager.”
“Oh. Yeah, I guess he’d probably want to bring back the guy who was working there before…You said they had a second pilot.”
“Not a chance.”
“Say what?”
“He’s already got a new job. And moved away to Amarillo.”
“Oh.”
Another long pause. It was getting too thick now. I decided to cut out the nonsense. And about time…
“Probably a couple or three more guys with helicopter experience living around here,” I said. “And someone could always be hired from the outside. But that would be your problem, not mine.”
“My problem?”
“Of course, yours. Look: You’re a nice guy, Robbie, and good company and even moderately decorative in a Frito Bandito sort of way, but I sure as hell didn’t get you out here just for that. The problems of who to hire and all the rest of it are yours because you’re the new general manager of Prescott Helicopters. The boss!”
He looked at me, goggling, and I laughed.
“Who else could I trust?”
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
Not all the dreams of mankind are worthwhile, of course. But some are worth dreaming—so strong and so real and so utterly
satisfactory that even the vagaries of chance and the certainty of death cannot entirely destroy their power…
TWENTY-ONE
Introducing Robbie to the Prescott family was pure pleasure. I had already told Marilyn why he was in town, prudently with holding certain details concerning his personal history—and the prosthetic hands. If they were going to be a problem for anyone, I wanted to know about it up front.
But I had guessed right. If Marilyn noticed the steel clamps protruding from Robbie’s sleeves, the only outward sign was an omission: She didn’t extend her hand to shake and then withdraw it hastily, as too many people do. And the children did the rest. No shyness there. And no awkwardness, either. Just open and wide-eyed curiosity, totally devoid of pity or squeamishness and expressed in practical questions and demands for close personal inspection.
Marilyn started to intervene, but reconsidered in the face of one of the blinding de Bonzo smiles as Robbie rolled up a sleeve to let Bubba and Missy see how the prosthesis was fitted to his arm. The expressions of wonder and admiration were profuse and genuine, but faded into the background of accepted knowledge when Robbie demonstrated the grasping ability of his substitute hands by picking up one of the checkers from the Connect-Four game that was set up on the family room table. He was, he announced, the Connect-Four champion of California. Were there, by chance, any possible challengers on the premises?
There were.
Dana drifted in from the kitchen and stood for a minute or two in the doorway, nursing a Marlboro while taking in the scene. Robbie was holding his own at Connect-Four. Barely. She went on watching the game for a while and then grinned at me.
“You,” she said in a voice audible only as far as my ear, “have nice friends.”
Say this for me: I recognize a peace overture when I hear one.
“Speaking as an outsider, or…?”
“Bastard.”
My turn to grin. “Takes one to know one.”
Dana blew a lungful of cigarette smoke in my direction, then seemed to regret it and waved her hand to dissipate the cloud.
“Sorry,” she said. “Reflex.”
“The smoke or the hand signals?”
“Double bastard.”
“My, but we’re salty tonight.”
“Speaking of which…” She made a come-with-me forefinger gesture and vanished into the hallway. I followed and caught up with her at the kitchen end of the passage, where she was pounding the unfinished half of the cigarette into a cutesy little ashtray formed to resemble an old-style peaked sombrero.
“Speaking of feisty, or salty, or whatever it was,” she said when the last spark was out and she had made sure no one was around to overhear, “one of your other friends called. The motel referred him here, and I promised you’d get back to him as soon as possible. Was that all right?”
“Depends,” I said.
“On what?”
“On who it was.”
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry…I’m still a little bit shook—fuzzy—from that thing with the pickup truck today. Don’t know what’s wrong, really. But something.”
I looked her over. The hand now unconsciously fumbling for another cigarette had a slight tremor that I didn’t remember being there before, and there was a suspicious redness at the corners of the eyes.
“Try getting some sleep?” I asked.
That earned me an indignant snort. “Fat chance!” she said. “Ever since I got out of that damn little car, I’ve been shaky. Sleepy. Out on my feet. But go to sleep? No way, José. The eyes pop open as soon as the head hits the pillow, and I’m back there on that road with the truck coming at us.”
I sighed inwardly but restrained an impulse to put my arms around her and make comforting noises. Gestures like that are rarely of much help, and they can lead to all manner of complication.
“Delayed stress,” I diagnosed. “You know: kind of a short-run version of the thing they talk about ’Nam vets having. Comes of building up a big head of steam—lots of adrenaline pumping—and then giving it nowhere to go.”
“Terrific! So what do you do about it?”
I shook my head. “If I knew a specific answer,” I said, “I could probably get elected President right now, without opposition. But there isn’t any that I know about. Everyone handles that, or doesn’t handle it, in their own way.”
“What’s your way? Poker?”
Perceptive lady.
“Partly,” I said. “Or, anyway, part of the reason I learned to play poker well enough to make a few dollars at it is because of what I do about the stress…which is a pretty evasive answer, I guess.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Okay, then. Try this: I deal with some of my feelings by going away from the place where they are. Not physically. Geographic solutions don’t work. At least not for long. But you can go away in your mind.”
Her eyes didn’t believe a word of it, but she didn’t interrupt, so I went on.
“Everyone has a different place. One to a customer, strictly personal service. Mine is a high meadow where the sun is warm and the breeze is cool. I sit there and try to understand an endless nonverbal lecture delivered by a holy man who died fifteen hundred years ago…”
Dana went on looking at me in silence through two complete lungfuls of smoke and then stubbed out the new cigarette beside the other one.
“I was right in the first place,” she sighed. “You’re crazy.”
I drew back in mock astonishment. “Why, Miz Dana, ma’am,” I said, “I surely do hope that I never went to give you any impression to the contrary!”
“Oh, to hell with you.”
She turned away toward the stove, where the evening meal seemed to be in a relatively early stage of preparation, but caught herself and swung back immediately. She brought a scribbled bit of paper out of a skirt pocket and handed it to me.
“Almost forgot, in all this brilliant repartee,” she said. “The call you got. It was from someone named Price. In Houston.”
Mistah Dee Tee wasn’t immediately available at the number he’d left with Dana. It was, a discreetly modulated Texican voice informed me, the twenty-four-hour number at his office, and he would be out of touch for an hour or so. But was there a number where he could reach me later? Mr. Price had left strict orders…
I thanked her kindly and was on the point of reading off the number of the telephone in my hand when I thought better of it and gave her the motel number instead.
She thanked me and rang off.
“If you go now,” Dana said when I had put the phone down, “you’ll be missing one of the great dinners of all time. Carne estilo Nogales, prepared by one of the truly great chefs of the great Southwest.”
“Better than Helen Spence?”
She made an offhand gesture. “Helen got a late start,” she said. “You have to grow up cooking this kind of food to really do it justice.”
“May I assume, then, that the great chef you mentioned was a modest reference to yourself?”
“Who else?”
“Who, indeed.”
I went over to the stove. The pot that smelled so good would be the simmering tomato sauce with beer. Odor intensified and resolution wavered as I lifted the lid. Chances were she had not exaggerated.
“Sherry?” I inquired.
“Just before serving,” she said. “Otherwise it gets lost. Good?”
“Superb. But I still have to go.”
“Triple bastard.”
I considered this. “Sounds unscientific to me,” I said. “But you may know more about such things than I do.”
I ducked the half-empty pack of cigarettes she threw at me.
“On the other hand,” I laughed, making a tactical retreat down the hallway, “perhaps not. In any case, you were asking how I keep from gaining weight after eating two breakfasts and a big lunch? Well, it’s simple: I don’t follow them by sitting down to a meal I like as much as carne estilo Nogales. That’s my secret. Tell me, what’s yours?
”
I really don’t know whether she would have thrown the little ceramic sombrero or not. But it was in her hand by the time I was in a position to duck through the family room to the front door, and I decided not to press my luck. The best way to handle a short-tempered woman is with your hat. Grab it and run.
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
Most of us, however, dream small.
We live from day to day, from hour to hour. Our hours loom large; twenty-four hours is a lot, next week is the horizon. We live, as Thoreau said, lives of quiet desperation…
TWENTY-TWO
Ihadn’t been entirely candid about my reasons for leaving early. True enough, my usual food intake was one meal a day, and the amazing three I had already taken aboard were still keeping step with me. I knew they were there, and felt as though I needn’t eat again for a month. But avoidance of temptation wasn’t my only reason for leaving early.
The conversation with Robbie, before it was so pointedly interrupted, had given me the beginning of an idea, and I wanted a chance to check it out privately before talking to Dee Tee again.
Jake’s office was dark when I pulled up at the church, but there was a glow from the sanctuary. The double doors in front were unlocked—I wondered, irrelevantly, how many big-town churches would dare leave them that way after sundown—and after only a momentary hesitation I let myself in and moved past the guest-book lectern and tract rack to the nave.
At first glance the place seemed deserted. Jake had built his church on the original southwestern plan of high windows and narrow roof, a style adapted to that elder world’s need for defensibility against Indian attack and the relatively short lengths of wood available for ceiling beams. The only light was behind the rood screen, and the nearer reaches of the nave were in deep shadow. But after a moment I was able to make out a recessed side altar with two pews, probably used now and then as a chapel, and fixed on a single black-clad figure kneeling at the rail.
I stood still and kept quiet.
Years before, deep in the throes of those doubts that customarily assail young and overearnest postulants, the preceptor to whom I had confided my reservations and I had come upon Jake similarly occupied at solitary prayer in a chapel at Sewanee. The preceptor, my assigned guide to the world of religious enlightenment, had stood surveying the praying figure for a time and then turned away with a deprecatory shake of the head. “True believers,” he said in a voice edged with icy contempt. “They always make more trouble than they’re worth.”
The Preacher Page 17
