He put the photographs back on the desk and re-read the opening paragraph of his still unfinished letter to his girls:
I've been an old bastard to you all your lives, and whether you believe me or not, I'm sorry. You don't know the demons I've let chase me all these years, or how many nights I've sat in this room and wished I could be a better father to you.
Sighing in frustration, Langston reached into one of the cubbyholes of the roll top desk. To an observer it would have looked as if he was pulling out a roll of receipts bound with a rubber band. Instead, the action triggered a hidden panel at the back of the desk. Langston smiled at the smooth mechanism of the secret compartment he'd integrated into the old roll top. Working with tiny, fine tools had been one of his few pleasures in life.
He placed the letter in the compartment and closed the opening. Time to finish it later, before the first in the sequence of events that would culminate in his death occurred. Langston leaned back in his chair. He scrubbed at his freshly shaven face with his big, work-scarred hands and blew out a heavy sigh.
If his girls didn’t hate him already, they would soon. Langston knew all too well what it felt like to be the son of a distant and dictatorial father. Milton Lockwood put off marrying until he was 65 years old. Then, he sired his only child at 66, a fact he crowed about like a prize rooster to anyone who would listen.
Being a real father to the living evidence of his late-in-life virility didn't seem to occur to Milton. He took on the task with demanding “instructions” thundered at the top of his voice and punctuated by the liberal use of the back of his hand.
For his part, Langston could look God in the eyes and swear that he’d never hit his wife or his girls. That was the truth, but Langston also he knew he'd lashed them with his words as surely as if he'd bloodied their backs with a bullwhip.
Time had never exorcised the wounded hurt in Irene's eyes from his memory. He turned on her the first time the morning after their honeymoon, fresh from a night of tender lovemaking. He knew Kate's iron-jawed resolve sprang from her intense longing for the love and approval he denied her. The same wounds that kept him from praising his daughters stifled any kindness and civility in Langston. To express such feeling would open him to the unendurable pain and danger of that most treacherous of all emotions, love.
The thought of the word made Langston sick to his stomach. They were all fools, those people who lauded the sanctity and immortality of love. He knew how it felt when the object of your love disappeared in the mere seconds that followed the foolish actions of a foul temper. Not one damn thing lasted in this world, most definitely not love.
The prospect of once again holding anyone close in his affections was more dangerous to Langston than any other threat in life. The fact that he did, in the privacy of his thoughts, love his children terrified him. It was that fear that made him push the girls as far away as possible for their sake as well as for his own. He didn’t want to expose them to the dangers of love either. That was why he crafted a will that would force his daughters apart and drive them away from the Rocking L.
Langston knew depriving Kate of the ranch would break her heart the way his shattered on a cold December night in 1956. She would mourn the loss of this land the same way he’d mourned the loss of his Alice. The land was the only thing to which his Katie gave her heart and the Rocking L was in her blood.
True to her raising, she wanted only to live her life within its borders. But she’d see the wisdom of his decision, in time, wouldn’t she? And then she’d thank him. Kate had a little ranch of her own and over all his dire predictions, she was one of the most respected landowners in the county.
She could have the life she wanted, on foundations she built herself. She’d never marry. Langston had seen to that. Her opinion of men was as bad as he could make it. Thanks to him, Kate would live a life of safe, peaceful solitude.
Jenny, the middle girl, was a harder case, but he’d managed to get her out of Texas. She’d told her father to go to hell when she was just 17, put herself through school, and taken off up to New York City. Jenny hated him so much for how he’d treated Irene, she’d never open her heart to the same kind of abuse.
In secret, Langston admired Jenny’s flashing spirit and he knew her talent as an artist would see her through life. He’d done his job well with the two older girls, but he worried about Mandy. She was the one he hadn’t been able to bring himself to hurt, and she was now the one that scared him the most.
Her sisters were Lockwoods to the bone, with their lean frames and angular features. Mandy was soft and pretty, just a tiny little thing with a cloud of blond hair. She wasn't strong like Kate, or fiery like Jenny, and Langston feared her kind, romantic streak would be her undoing. With his gruff pride in her and greater tolerance toward her, Langston had failed Mandy.
It scared him to think his eternal damnation could be the forced witnessing of her ruination. She was the only gentle soul who carried the Lockwood name. If he wasn't going to be here to stop her from risking her heart, he could at least make sure Mandy stayed in her vapid world of Houston fashion. He would not have her be a vulnerable heiress sitting on the Rocking L, a prime target for every land-hungry gigolo in Texas.
Chapter 134
The Perspective of a Dead Man
Langston had never wasted one minute in his life believing in God. From where he stood, praying was just begging by another name. He did, however, believe that a man has to answer for the things he’s done. He knew hell was real because he’d felt the licking flames of personal damnation for 55 years. Suicide should take care of that.
What the Almighty had in store for him in the beyond, Langston didn’t know. But, true to his Methodist raising, he expected something to happen. He didn’t expect nothing, which was pretty much what he got.
Langston imagined that his awareness would be snuffed out in an instant. He didn’t expect that his perspective would just reverse itself. One second he’d felt the barrel of the old Colt against his chin. The next he was standing in his own barn watching his ruined thousand dollar, silverbelly Stetson float down and land in the dirt.
Putting a loaded pistol under your chin and pulling the trigger is enough to make any man nervous. But even as the sound of the blast reverberated in his ears, Langston couldn't believe he'd forgotten to take off his hat.
“Goddamn it,” he muttered, as he watched the 100x silverbelly spiral downward. “What did I just do?” The destruction of that Stetson was a far worse sin in Langston’s book than killing himself.
Between the hat and his own altered consciousness, the enormity of what had transpired was a lot for a man to take in. Caught between the last beat of his heart and the first second of eternity, Langston suddenly felt weak in the knees.
He sat down heavily on a bale of hay and stared at the blue smoke curling out of the end of the pistol. He hadn’t thought that through either. It was one of Langston’s unwavering rules. If you fired a gun, you cleaned it. Who was going to clean that gun?
And if that was himself lying there in the dirt, why could he still feel the weight of the .45 in his fingers? Langston shook out his hand trying to make the phantom sensation go away. He couldn’t, however, reconcile the disorientation of hanging suspended between worlds.
“It’s not supposed to feel like this,” he said uncertainly, fighting the empty longing that rolled through him. Damn it. Right now, in this moment, he wanted nothing so much as to go back. A sudden, horrible clarity engulfed him. He’d still had time to fix the wrongs he’d done. His suicide wouldn’t fix anything, but it would leave loose ends dangling everywhere.
A pulsating sense of dread vibrated through him as his eyes nervously tracked around the space. He took in the freshly splintered wood on the back wall of the barn. That’s where the bullet stopped after it passed through his brain and through the crown of his best hat.
He looked at himself again and studied the blood that pooled around his body and stained the shou
lders of his white shirt. There was no question that he’d successfully committed suicide. He was lying dead right there in front of himself. But wasn't there supposed to be a doorway or a bright light or something? Not this instant, crushing regret for the mistake he’d just made?
Suddenly a well-remembered voice asked from behind him, "What’s the matter, boy? Your plan didn’t work out quite the way you thought it would?"
Startled, Langston swiveled around. He watched his father, Milton Lockwood, walk out of the shadows at the back of the barn.
"Daddy?" he asked, in an incredulous voice. “Is that really you?”
"You were expecting some goddamn angel with wings or something?" Milton barked. "Of course it’s really me? Did you blow all your brains out with that Colt, or is there still something left in there you can use for thinking?"
The long-buried yearning of an abused child to fight back against his tormentor rose in Langston. He stood up, glowering down at his father from his full 6 feet 6 inches. “You go to hell,” he said. “I didn’t kill myself just so I’d have to listen to you again. You’re still the same ornery old bastard you always were, and you don’t scare me anymore.”
Milton let out a harsh bark of laughter. “Ornery old bastard?” he asked. “That’s the pot calling the kettle black if I ever heard it. You’re a chip off the old block when it comes to being a bastard. You spent your whole life cussing God. Did you think you’d just find Saint Pete standing here waiting to cart you up to the Pearly Gates? The flies haven’t even had time to land on your body, boy, and you’re already going right back to being an arrogant son of a bitch. You can’t have it both ways.” He pointed to the hay bale and ordered, “Sit down and shut up.”
Langston gritted his teeth, but he obeyed his father and sat down. Milton joined him and gestured toward the Stetson lying in the bloody dirty. “Did you have to shoot the hat?” he asked.
“I honest to God didn’t even think about it,” Langston admitted sullenly. “I just pulled the trigger before I could change my mind.”
“At least you’re honest about it. I don’t imagine killing yourself comes easy,” Milton said, with unusual equanimity. He pulled a sack of tobacco out of his shirt pocket and starting rolling himself a cigarette. “You want one?” he asked, smoothing the thin paper with his fingers, then licking the seam to seal it.
“I quit.”
Milton erupted in laughter and held the cigarette out to his son. “Take the damn thing,” he commanded. “You can’t get any deader than you already are, and you’re looking a might green around the gills. A smoke will make you feel better.”
Langston accepted the cigarette, and watched as Milton struck a match on the sole of his boot. He held the flame out so Langston could puff his cigarette to glowing life. The two men sat in companionable silence until Langston asked, “What are you doing here, Daddy?"
“You act like I just showed up,” Milton said. “I've been here right along. All those times you felt like I was looking over your shoulder? I was. I watched it all.”
Langston considered that for a minute and then asked quietly, “All of it?”
“Yep,” his father said. “Everything that’s happened since that heart attack took me out in '58. Does that bother you?”
“Yes,” Langston admitted. “It does. I don’t imagine I did too much to make you proud of me.”
Milton leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and absently flicked the ash off the end of his cigarette. “I can’t say I approve of how you spent your time up in Baxter’s Draw, but other than that, you’ve done a damn fine job with this place.”
“Thank you,” Langston said, and then added sourly. “I don’t want to talk about Baxter’s Draw.”
“Because it doesn’t really belong to us or because of what you’re hiding up there?” Milton asked.
“Both,” Langston said.
“Well,” Milton said, “I reckon I can understand that. I never told anybody what was up there either.”
Langston didn’t know what was more confounding. The casual tone of his father’s voice, or the fact that Milton had known the secret of Baxter’s Draw and kept it to himself. “You knew?” Langston asked, sounding as shocked as he was.
“Yep, I found the cave pretty much the same way you did,” Milton said, spitting a fragment of tobacco off his tongue. “You sure as hell put the place to be better use though.”
“What did you do after you found it?” Langston asked curiously.
“Left it alone,” Milton said. “Nothing but trouble ever comes of Baxter’s Draw. You ought to know that better than anybody.” He looked down at his hands and then said quietly, “I will tell you this, boy. I never loved a woman as much as you have. Me and your Mama worked hard all those years out here, even with such a big difference in our ages, but what we had I wouldn’t call love.”
“Why did Mama marry you anyway?” Langston asked. “Most of the time I didn’t even think the two of you liked each other.”
Milton sighed. “Believe it or not,” he said, “her daddy was worse than I ever thought about being. Sarah was safer with me than she was with him. But did we like each other? Probably not, but I respected your mother. She was a finer woman than the likes of me deserved. I asked her to give me a son, and she did. She asked me to leave her alone after that, and I did. So like I said, I don’t know what it’s like to love a woman the way you loved Alice Browning.”
“I can’t say loving Alice ever did me any good,” Langston replied bitterly. “It ruined my life and I turned around and ruined other people’s lives just because I could. Do you know that Mama moved into town the week after you died?”
“I do,” Milton said.
“Did you hear what she said to me before she drove off?” Langston asked.
“She told you to get the hell off this place before you became a carbon copy of me,” Milton said. “You should have listened to her.”
Langston shifted uneasily. He wasn't sure what made him more uncomfortable. The sight of his own body lying six feet away or having his first civil conversation with his own father. He cleared his throat and then asked, hesitantly, “Did I go crazy out here, Daddy?”
“Son,” Milton said, reasonably, “you just blew your own brains out. What do you think?”
Langston reached up to scratch his forehead and suddenly realized he was still wearing his hat. Milton saw the motion out of the corner of his eye and laughed. "Get used to that kind of thing,” he said. “You haven’t gone anywhere without your hat on in 50 years. The rules on this side are a little different, but you still get to be who you are."
"Well, that's something I guess," Langston said, lifting the hat up a few inches to run his fingers through his hair. Then he took a deep breath and admitted, "I'm kinda pole-axed about all this, Daddy."
Milton took a pull on his cigarette and breathed out a cloud of acrid smoke. "How do you think I felt?" he asked. "Wasn't nobody here to explain any of it to me. Your granddaddy was a better man than either of us. He stayed about half lit all the time on whiskey, but he raised a house full of kids. He worked hard, and had himself many an adventure gallivanting off with the Texas Rangers. Reckon he went straight on up to heaven with a brass band waiting for him.”
“I remember Grandpa,” Langston said. “He was always laughing. How in the hell did you turn out like you did?”
Milton shrugged. “My Mama’s people were all a sour lot,” he said. “I’m just turned like them, I guess. My sisters married men and moved far off. All my brothers got themselves killed in one way or the other. I was the only one left. That’s why you’re here — or were here. I had to get busy and get myself a son to keep the ranch in the family. If I hadn’t, those damned Baxters would have been sniffing around the title to the Rocking L before the first shovel of dirt hit my coffin.”
“So if you’re dead and I’m dead,” Langston said, “are we both in hell?”
“Well,” Milton said, considering the questio
n, “it’s not the kind of hell your Mama and the Bible thumpers talked about. Still, I've been walking the earth better than fifty years now and I expect to walk it fifty more. Your mother was right about one thing, there is no rest for the wicked."
A small sound made both men turn to the left. They were mirror images of one another since in death they were now roughly the same age. A man in camouflage gear stood by the barn door, keeping carefully to the grassy spot by the corral.
"Who’s that?" Milton asked.
"I'm not sure," Langston said, "but I don't think I like this one damn bit."
As they watched, the man took a small pair of binoculars out of one of the pockets of his fatigue pants. He trained the lenses on Langston's body. He studied the crime scene for several minutes and then took out a satellite phone and placed a call.
“Those cell phone things are the devil’s own invention,” Milton said. “Who in the hell wants to be out in the middle of the pasture and get a phone call? Far as I can tell, this world has gone straight to hell in a hand . . . ”
“Would you shut up,” Langston hissed. “I want to hear this.”
Milton shrugged in compliance and went back to smoking. The man in the doorway seemed to stand almost at attention as the connection made. “Sir,” he said, “I've confirmed that the shot originated on the ranch."
He listened, and then said, "No sir, he's not here. I can’t actually approach the scene. The dirt is too soft in the barn. I’d leave tracks. It would appear, however, that Mr. Lockwood committed suicide. I see no evidence that will suggest otherwise to the authorities."
Milton frowned, "How'd he know what happened in here this afternoon?"
"Damned if I know," Langston said.
The man waited patiently, listening to the voice on the other end of the line. Then he said, "Yes sir, he's quite dead, and nothing has been disturbed. What are your instructions, sir?"
The Lockwood Legacy - Books 1-6: Plus Bonus Short Stories Page 93
