Vengeance is Mine

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  “Not what you’d think.”

  “So you get a lot of bank robberies and shoot-outs too?”

  Uncle Cody reached behind him for the tea pitcher sitting on the chest-style deep freeze. “Well, you remember almost being arrested for the bank robbery…”

  Everyone around the table laughed.

  Grandpa held out his empty glass to be refilled. “So that happens, but it was the first one since the Depression. Even Bonnie and Clyde steered clear of devilment in Chisum back in the day and drove on through. Most of our work is small stuff, drunks and people yammering at one another over the least little thing.”

  “Were you involved in a shoot-out last year?”

  Uncle Cody sighed. “They do like to talk up at the store, don’t they? Yeah, we had some trouble here a while back. It seems like we’re seeing more and more problems lately. But that’s not normal. This is a quiet place, like I told you in Vegas. Ned mostly rides a tractor during the day and handles calls at night. I do the same, except I don’t run a tractor.”

  “Things are changing.” Grandpa dipped a spoon full of pinto beans from the bowl an arm’s reach away. “I may still sit on a tractor, but those days are gonna be gone pretty soon. Things are changing here and in town, too. We’ve had three Yankees hanging around, taking pictures and asking who owns what, then the other day there were three more hard-looking fellers in Frenchie’s that I figure don’t have no business in our town. Now we have at my table a New Yorker through Vegas.”

  Mr. Tony’s head snapped toward Grandpa. “Yankees? I haven’t heard that word pitched around much until we got to Texas.”

  They all laughed. Grandpa studied his empty plate. “Didn’t mean to be rude, but that’s what we still call anybody who comes from north of Oklahoma. I knew right off they weren’t from around here when I saw the first three in town, because they wore suits. I was sure when one of ’em opened his head and talked like you. I hear they’re looking to invest. Ain’t that a kick? This town is drying up and the kids are leaving as fast as they graduate high school, then right on their heels, other folks from up north come in to buy up what the kids don’t want. It’s a strange world.”

  “What’d these new guys look like? We might be related.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Oh, the first three with the camera.”

  “Nah.” Grandpa shook his head. “They don’t favor you at all. They all favor one-another, so I imagine they’re brothers.”

  Mr. Tony reached out and rubbed Miss Sam’s shoulder like she had a knot in it and was trying to work it out. “What about the other three at the café?”

  “One’s a bald-headed bull, but the other two are dark complected, black hair.”

  “You notice everybody who comes through?”

  “We try.”

  I ate till I was full, and that included everything on my plate, so I carried it into the kitchen. Uncle Cody stood and opened a door on Miss Becky’s homemade china cabinet. He pulled out a bundle of folded papers. I knew what was on them, because every now and then I’d take out the wanted posters and study the bad guys in case I might run across one in town.

  Uncle Cody handed them to Mr. Tony. “We keep an eye out. These FBI flyers come in the mail every week. I always look them over and then watch out to see if any of these people are coming through.”

  Mr. Tony shuffled through the folded flyers. Each was headed Wanted by the FBI in bold letters. Underneath, two rows of fingerprints capped another row of mug shots, front, back, and side. Below, a description of the fugitive filled the remainder of the page.

  From the photos, they all looked hard, sullen, and dangerous to me.

  “I swear, every time we sit down at this table, it’s either law work or cattle.” Aunt Ida Belle picked at the remains of a bony piece of chicken. “Tony, tell us about Las Vegas and what you did for a living there. We don’t get out of this town very much, and I dearly love to hear about exotic places. Did you work in one of them gambling houses, or have you met Dean Martin?”

  Mr. Tony passed the wanted flyers to Miss Sam. I saw them make eye contact for a second, and it was a whole conversation. “They call them casinos. I’ve seen him and the rest of the Rat Pack, but I’ve never met any of them. I worked for a guy who owns the casino where I met Cody and Norma Faye.”

  Aunt Ida Belle was shocked to find her suspicions were right. “So you did meet Cody and Norma Faye in a gambling house?”

  Me and Pepper slid through the kitchen and put our dirty plates on the counter. Mr. Tony gave me and Pepper a smile as she followed me out on the porch. The screen door didn’t block what we could hear, so we stopped outside to listen. It was better than sitting in the living room.

  Mr. Tony’s voice was as clear as if I was sitting at the table with them. “That’s right. Mr. Best is a casino manager. If you work in the business, you’re always near where the players are, but I’m not a gambler.”

  “Well, Cody and Norma Faye should have stayed out of those sinful places.” To Aunt Ida Belle, everything was sinful. “I hear they drink in there, too. I bet you can have a good time in Las Vegas somewhere other than a casino. Sam, what did you do?”

  “Mostly secretarial work…keypunch…things like that.”

  The conversation drifted for a while until they all grew quiet for a minute. I stepped to the screen door. “Uncle Cody?”

  “What do you need, hoss, another biscuit?”

  “Nossir. Do you think we can go frog giggin’ sometime soon?”

  “What’s frog gigging?” Miss Sam asked.

  Beside me, Pepper put her nose against the screen. “You don’t know?”

  “No honey, I don’t.”

  “Have you ever been on a snipe hunt?”

  Uncle Cody shook his head at the glint in her eye. “Oh no you don’t, missy. Sam, don’t let these two outlaws get you out on a snipe hunt, we’d never see you again. There’s no such thing. They’ll take you out in the dark woods and leave you.”

  We came back inside while everybody around the table laughed at the look on Miss Sam’s face.

  “It isn’t to be mean,” Norma Faye explained. “Snipe-hunting is more of a rite of passage around here that young folks play on those who don’t know.”

  Grandpa joined in. “But frog giggin’s different. You either walk a creek or pool bank with a flashlight and sticker, or float the creek in a boat and stick the frogs from there.”

  Miss Sam’s forehead wrinkled. “Stick them?”

  “Yeah!” Pepper couldn’t wait to join in. “We have these long poles with sharp tines on one end, and you jab them into the frog that sits there while you do it.” She wrapped her hands around an invisible pole and jabbed hard, her eyes bright and almost mean.

  “Then what do you do with them?” Miss Sam’s own eyes were wide.

  It tickled me. “Why, you skin ’em and eat ’em, of course.”

  “The whole frog?”

  “Nope, the legs, but a big old bullfrog has a lot of meat in them legs, and when you fry them up, they make a good meal.” Pepper couldn’t resist aggravating Mr. Tony and Miss Sam. “The thing you gotta remember is that fresh frog legs will jump out of the frying pan if you ain’t careful.”

  Unsure of the truth, Miss Sam looked for help. “Is she kidding?”

  Miss Becky laughed. “Hon, a lot of wild game does strange things in a frying pan. Frog legs will twitch, and fresh rabbit is bad about quiverin’ while you’re cutting it up. We don’t pay too much attention to it, though.”

  Miss Sam blanched at the thought of eating frogs, but Mr. Tony perked up. “I hear the French like frog legs. That sounds like fun. I’d like to go with you some time.”

  “How about tonight?” Uncle Cody asked. “The weather is good, and the skeeters haven’t been too bad this fall.”

  “Deal.” Mr. Tony lea
ned back and stuck out his chest. “I’m going frog gigging.”

  “Oh, Lordy,” Norma Faye said.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  In the car on the way back to their rented house, Tony lit a cigarette and blew smoke through his nose. “I suppose you caught that talk about new people here in town.”

  Samantha watched the crooked fence posts pass by. She loved the tiny community and felt like she could spend the rest of her life in a place that seemed to be frozen in time and reluctant to emerge. “You think they’re from Daddy?”

  Tony wondered if the trio in the café was sent by Malachi Best. He couldn’t imagine how they’d found him in such a backwater place, if they were really after him at all. But then again, they found them in Shamrock.

  He shrugged. Those guys could simply be traveling through, the way he and Samantha passed through a dozen towns of similar size on their way to Chisum. “There is that possibility. I’d like to get a look at those guys. If Malachi sent them from Vegas, I’ll know them. If they’re contractors from somewhere else, I’ll probably recognize their look.”

  “How did he know where we are?”

  “That’s the thing that’s bothering me. None of it makes sense.”

  Instead of heading directly back toward the Ordway place, he took the first dirt road they passed and soon found himself driving between fields of cotton and harvested corn stalks.

  Cicadas shrieked from the trees. Tony slowed on the dirt road when a narrow plank bridge spanned a dry ditch. They crept over the dusty boards. He and Sam leaned their heads out the open windows to see dried Johnson grass dying in the cracked mud of the wash. When he looked back up, half a dozen dogs broke from the nearby trees where they’d been lying in the shade. They darted down the rows of green cotton.

  “Did you see that?”

  “What a different world.” Sam started to flick her cigarette butt out the window, and then thought about the dried grass. Instead, she stubbed it out in the ashtray. “Those guys showing up here has to be a coincidence.”

  “I’d like to think that, but more folks like us in Chisum? Look, I don’t think your dad could have put us together at any time. I think they’ve figured out where I am, and are here for me, not you. Pinocchio must have told someone about this place.”

  The sickening odor of rotting meat filled the car. Something nearby had died. Samantha waved her hand in front of her face. “Ugh.”

  Tony accelerated, raising a rooster tail of dust, but getting into fresh air. Samantha punched the lighter into the dash. It popped out and she lit two more cigarettes, more to kill the stench in the car and their sinuses than anything else. “So you think my old man sent people to Chisum looking for you? That’s crazy.”

  Tony sighed. “You’re right. I’m being paranoid, but something’s up. There are too many somethings going on here. I still can’t shake the idea that I’ve seen this Sheriff Griffin somewhere. He looked so familiar…”

  A puzzle piece fell into place.

  “Sonofabitch!” Tony slammed the brakes and the dust cloud that had been following them caught up, wrapping the car in a mini-sandstorm.

  Sam waved at the dust rolling through the open windows. “What?”

  “I remember seeing him now. This sheriff was sitting at a table with Malachi when he ordered me to take out that family, the one I couldn’t do.”

  “The family and kids?”

  “That’s the one.”

  Tony let off the brakes and steered off the sunny dirt road to park in the shade of a wide oak tree where other vehicles had obviously parked before. Only a few feet away, a pipe crowned with a hand pump jutted from the sandy ground. He had no idea he was parked exactly on top of Cody’s bird dog killed by The Skinner three years earlier.

  “Sheriff Griffin was at the table in Vegas when I was there to talk with Best. The man didn’t say a word, he just kept staring at me. I bet he remembered and called Malachi when he saw me in cuffs on the side of the road.” He snapped his fingers. “Then Malachi sent the squad in the café they were talking about.”

  “What do you think he was doing in Vegas with Daddy? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Stranger things have happened. Who knows why he was there, but I can promise you these guys are here for me.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.”

  “I’ll find out.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll figure it out.” He chuckled as they made their way from the bottoms.

  “Something funny?”

  “Yeah, I was thinking about the city and the Family, and now here I am getting ready to go frog gigging with a bunch of country hicks.”

  “They’re nice people.”

  He nodded and chuckled again at the incongruity of it all. He’d graduated from clocking people to bumping off frogs.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  It was full dark by the time Uncle Cody and Mr. Tony backed the El Camino under one of the hay barn’s wings to load the flat bottom johnboat. It was going to be the four of us, because Miss Sam said she’d rather watch color television and catch up on her magazine reading.

  Uncle Cody tied the boat into the back so it wouldn’t slide out. “Hold this flashlight, Top, so I can see. Ned’ll meet us in a couple of hours down close to the river.”

  I held it and Mr. Tony watched him snug down a half hitch. “How will he know where to pick us up?”

  “We’ve done this for years. You kids, climb in there and let’s go.”

  We went over the tailgate and sat in the boat. The El Camino’s engine caught. Grandpa was waiting by the gate when we drove down from the barn. Once past, he closed and locked it behind us.

  “Y’all do what they tell you,” Grandpa warned us as we drove past.

  “What does he think we’re gonna do?” Pepper asked me. “Run around these dark woods like chickens with our heads cut off?”

  “Adults always say that. They think they have to.”

  “I wish Miss Sam had asked me to watch TV with her.” Pepper’s long hair was parted in the middle and tied with a leather headband. It blew in the wind as we rode down the highway, and she kept pulling it out of her face.

  “This was your idea for the most part. You were the one talking it up to Mr. Tony.”

  “Well, that’s before I knew Miss Sam wasn’t going with us. I’m thinking I’m getting too old to be a tomboy anymore. A different scene is calling me.”

  “What?”

  “A cool new scene, man. Think about what it’s like out there. Wouldn’t it be far out to split this town and hitchhike to somewhere else, like Vegas or California and…?”

  “I don’t know who you are,” I interrupted. “You’re talking like a Dutchman. I don’t understand a thing you’re saying.”

  She shot me that look that was worse than her cussing. Uncle Cody pulled off the road and under the creek bridge. He backed the truck to the creek and killed the engine.

  Pepper thumbed the switch on her flashlight and we saw the muddy water swirling past. A water moccasin slid off a nearby log and plopped into the current. “Did Mr. Tony see that?”

  He was looking the other way. “No, but this is going to be fun.”

  Pepper handed me the flashlight and tugged the transistor radio from the pocket of her jeans. She rolled the on switch with her thumb. The Byrds were singing “Tambourine Man.”

  “Get rid of that crap or get us some good country music.” Uncle Cody came around to the tailgate. “Y’all get out of there so we can unload the boat. Tony, you’re gonna get them shoes all muddy.”

  He looked down and shined his flashlight on the bank. “I didn’t think about that.”

  “It’ll wash off,” Pepper rolled the dial wheel, looking for a different channel. Johnny Wright’s “Hello Vietnam” came on.

  Uncle Cody shook his head
and pulled the light boat out of the back. “Not that neither.”

  “Girl on the Billboard” filled the night. Everyone but Mr. Tony sang along while we loaded the boat with the frog gigs and ’toe sacks.

  “Tony, you get in the bow and we’ll put the kids between us.”

  “That’s the front, right?”

  “That’s it.” We were barely settled when Uncle Cody pushed us into the sluggish current. He dipped a paddle into the dark water and pointed us downstream. The late October waning moon was still bright overhead, and if we didn’t need the flashlights to light up the frogs, we could have read a book in the bright glow.

  Pepper shined her light forward and I passed Mr. Tony the frog gig. He held it sideways. “What am I going to do with this?”

  “Job the frogs with it when we see ’em.” Pepper made a jabbing motion.

  “Jab them? Kid, why don’t you move up here and do it.”

  “Because you’re company.”

  “Huh?”

  Uncle Cody angled us toward the right bank. “She means that you’re our guest, so you get to have the fun. Pepper, on your right.” Her beam steadied on a large frog. “Tony, see that bullfrog’s eyes shining right there beside that pin oak?”

  “What’s a pin oak?”

  We tried not to laugh, but frog gigging with a city boy was fun. I added my flashlight to Pepper’s beam. “That tree closest to the water.”

  He finally found the frog’s bright, reflective eyes. “That’s the biggest frog I’ve ever seen.”

  “He’s a good ’un. Now, when we get close enough, stick ’im with that gig.”

  We drifted into position and I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Now!”

  Mr. Tony lunged with the gig, and missed by a mile. With a yip, the frog jumped into the water and vanished.

  Pepper had to duck to miss the long pole waving over her head when Mr. Tony yanked it free of the mud. “Shit! Careful. We’re back here.”

  Uncle Cody cracked her in the back of her head with his knuckle. “Watch it, missy.”

  “Ow!”