Mockingbird Songs

by R.J. Ellory

  When Henry Quinn was nine, Nancy bought him a Teisco EP-7 electric guitar from a secondhand store. The guitar was already four or five years old, looked like it had maybe been used to row a boat out of a muddy swamp, but it cleaned up well and looked close enough to the one Freddie King used that she knew it would make Henry happy.

  When Henry saw it, he cried.

  Subsequently, and almost without variation, Henry returned from school, completed his homework, did his chores, and then headed for his room. Rare was the night when Nancy did not find him asleep in his clothes, the guitar still clutched in one hand, pieces of paper scattered around the floor covered in hieroglyphics, lyrics, musical annotations of one variety or another. Sometimes she would stand in the hallway and listen to Henry as he played a phrase from some scratched Bakelite disc on his Symphonic 556 record player over and over and then tried to replicate it himself. She marveled at the boy’s patience and determination, and when she started dating a music teacher by the name of Larry Troutman from San Angelo High, she watched as Henry literally bled the poor man dry for knowledge and a better scope of understanding.

  “Boy’s as hungry as a Cuban boxer,” Larry told her. “Never seen anything like it. Darn kid has a sponge for a brain … Don’t matter how much I tell him; he wants to know more.”

  The relationship between Nancy Quinn and Larry Troutman did not last. Henry’s passion, however, went from strength to strength.

  The songs he started writing were old songs. At least that’s the way they sounded to Nancy. Lines like Every time I die, someone steals my shoes from the lips of a fifteen-year-old seemed both terribly wrong and terribly right. He understands whiskey, women, and God, and everything in between. That was another one she heard as she crossed the hallway to the bathroom, and she stood there a moment and wondered if Henry was actually hers. Maybe they had switched babies on her in the hospital. Maybe this kid was some kind of gypsy. She knew as well as she knew her own name that it wasn’t so, but still she wondered at the source of this angled perspective and the strange wisdom it seemed to precipitate. Maybe Jack Alford was responsible, the errant and irresponsible one-night-stand father of Henry Quinn. She could not know, and never would, for she hadn’t known Jack then, and she doubted she’d ever see him again for long enough to find out.

  A few months after Henry turned sixteen, there was a talent show at the Tom Green County Fair. Henry got up on a makeshift stage in front of a tough crowd, and with his beat-to-hell Teisco EP-7 guitar and a Lafayette LA-75 amplifier, he played a song of his own composition called “Easier than Breathing to Love You.” Where he got the words from, Nancy did not know. She wasn’t privy to everything her son did, but she was pretty sure he hadn’t yet found a girl and lost his virginity. However, that song had been written by a man whose heart had been broken more times than he cared to recall. That’s how it sounded. It must have sounded that way to Herman Russell, a scout from a small record company in Abilene. Herman Russell was as wide as he was tall, kind of rolled enthusiastically forward, a crooked smile on his face like he knew everyone was a trickster, nevertheless certain he was trickier than most. Had a habit of wearing suits with a vest, a watch and chain, a pocket handkerchief that matched his tie. A Southern dandy with a penchant for two-toned shoes and pomade.

  “Seen a hundred thousand of these talent shows in my time,” he told Nancy Quinn.

  Henry stood by, guitar in hand, aware of nothing but the fact that he’d dropped a bar on the middle eight, hit a half dozen bum notes, and on the final refrain pitched a semitone flat. As far as he was concerned “Easier than Breathing to Love You” had sounded like a pet store burning down.

  “Kid’s got a voice, a good playing style as well,” Herman Russell said, and then turned to Henry and asked, “Who writ the song, boy?”

  “I did, sir,” Henry replied.

  “Straight up? You don’t say,” Herman said, and knocked his hat back an inch from his brow. He squinted against the light and looked at Henry as if for the first time. “You don’t say,” he repeated, as if somewhere deep inside him was a cave that served up echoes. “You got some more tunes like that?”

  “He’s got a ton of them,” Nancy said. “All he ever does, aside from school and chores, is play guitar and write songs, Mr. Russell.”

  “Oh, you go on and call me Herman. No one calls me Mr. Russell, save the cops and the IRS!”

  Herman looked at Henry’s boots, his raggedy jeans, his rolled cuffs and youthful face. Youthful he was, no doubt about it, but if this scrawny kid had writ a song such as that, then there was something going on that didn’t make sense.

  Herman, however, was the kind of man who attended church more often than Easter and Christmas and believed that it was right to trust a man until he gave a reason to do otherwise. Hence he had no motivation to consider that Henry Quinn had not writ that song, and a good song it was, the kind of song that could be pressed into a 45 and sold to a hundred or more West Texas music stores under the Crooked Cow label. For that’s who Herman Russell worked for—the Crooked Cow record label—and he was Abilene born and bred, had different boots and suits for every day of the week, ties and kerchiefs that matched, and he prided himself on a square deal for a square service. Henry, if all was as appeared, was not only a square deal but the real deal, and there weren’t so many of those that came along in a straight month of county fairs.

  Herman Russell suggested a visit on up to Crooked Cow in Abilene, and Nancy—seeing such a thing could do no harm in either the short or the long term—went with her son on the bus, tickets paid for by Herman Russell with a Crooked Cow business check at the Greyhound depot that same county fair afternoon. They took the bus ride just a week or so later, on Thursday, same day the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and in a small anteroom outside a large recording booth, Henry Quinn stared at a picture of a country singer called Evan Riggs. He knew the man and his album, The Whiskey Poet, but he did not know of Riggs’s current whereabouts, that he had already served seventeen years of a life sentence at Reeves for the murder of Forrest Wetherby in an Austin hotel corridor in July of 1950, and had Henry known then that he himself would share a cell with the man he now looked at, he would have smiled his Henry Quinn smile and said, “You know what? You’re just plumb crazy …”

  Henry cut a tape demo of “Easier than Breathing to Love You” that afternoon. He felt more relaxed, and there was no one watching him, at least no one he could see, and the man who spoke to him through the headphones seemed unhurried, as if all the time in the world were at their disposal. He had Henry sing the song a couple of times, “Just to check the levels, son …” and then told Henry that they were finished.

  When the man appeared, he was all elbows and knees, sapling-thin, had a smile as contagious as a summer cold.

  “Folks just settle down when they think they ain’t on tape,” he explained. “Great trick, but works only one time. You done good, son. Got a good song there, nice voice. Few years more you gonna sound as fine as anyone I’ve recorded.”

  Henry took the compliment. He expected nothing. He’d just bused it to Abilene for the adventure.

  Herman Russell took the recording away, told Henry and his ma to talk a walk around the corner to a soda shop, have a root-beer float or some such, come back in a while.

  They took a walk, they had a float, came back in a while, and Herman was awaiting them.

  “Spoke to the big boss with the hot sauce, played him your song. He was very impressed, but he ain’t gonna tape you now. Wants to wait a coupla years, let your voice mature a touch. Wants to know if you’d be interested to sign a holding contract.”

  “A holding contract?” Nancy asked. “What on earth is that?”

  “Nothing really binding,” Herman explained. “Just means that you’re gonna give us first refusal on your songs should anyone else express an interest in Henry, professionally speaking. We give you five hundred bucks, we get first refusal on your ma
terial if someone else wants to record and distribute you, and when Henry here turns eighteen, he comes on up here again and we cut some more demos and see what’s cooking.”

  “And the five hundred bucks? If we want to go with some other record company?” Nancy asked.

  “They buy Henry out for the same amount. Like I said, it’s kind of informal, to be honest. More a gentleman’s agreement than a legally binding contract. No one’s gonna go see a lawyer for the sake of five hundred bucks, Mrs. Quinn.”

  Henry signed the paper. Nancy signed it as his legal guardian, even though she thought five hundred bucks was little short of a money mountain. Herman signed it, too, but with a flourish, like it was the redrafting of the Constitution. He gave Henry the money right there and then, and in a music store two blocks east, Henry bought a 1968 Gibson Les Paul Custom guitar for two hundred and sixty-five bucks.

  Henry knew he wanted it the moment he saw it. It was like meeting an old friend.

  “Guitars is like guns, son,” the salesman told him. The salesman’s name was Norman. He had it woven above the pocket on his chambray shirt. “There’s a gun for every man. Soon as he picks it up, he knows. Feels like he’s shaking hands with someone he can trust. Guitars is the same. You got yourself a bargain there. Good as new, should be about three twenty-five, but we sold it six months ago only for this lightweight feller to come back and tell us it was too heavy. Not a mark on it, not a scratch. Coulda sold it as new, but that’d be dishonest, and we ain’t dishonest.”

  Nancy stood aside. She said nothing. It was like listening to a different language. A conversation between aliens. Alabama rednecks, maybe.

  “You got yourself an amplifier, son?”

  “Got a Lafayette.”

  Norman smiled, said, “That’d be like putting cookin’ oil in a Cadillac. Need yourself a Fender. Should git yourself one of these here Princeton Reverbs.”

  Norman took Henry into the back. Nancy stood a while and felt like Henry now loved something just as much as he’d once loved her. She knew the music thing was inside of him like a blood-borne virus. There was no cure, only a medicine with which the symptoms could be managed and allayed. That medicine was playing and singing and being the center of attention and all else that went with the life her son had evidently chosen. Or maybe the life had chosen him—she wasn’t so sure which it was.

  Henry walked out of Abilene’s Finest Music Store with his new gear and enough change for a good dinner. He and his ma went to a diner a couple of blocks from Arthur Sears Park, and here they talked a little of the past, a great deal about the future, and Nancy Quinn understood in her heart that soon her son would be leaving this life for something unknown, untried, untested.

  As it turned out, less than four months shy of that scheduled return to Abilene, a trip that might very well have seen Henry Quinn cutting records for Herman Russell and Crooked Cow, Henry would get drunk and play fool with a loaded .38.

  By the time he was released from Reeves in July of 1972, a great deal of life would have happened. The United States had apparently put a man on the moon, though Henry Quinn would have been among the first to question that; Mary Jo Kopechne drowned at Chappaquiddick; the hippies found free love and peace, and Manson lost his mind; even the demise of the Beatles could not keep Vietnam from the headlines; trigger-happy National Guards, much the same as those who had quelled the Reeves riot in 1959, shot four students dead at Kent State; Arthur Bremer tried to assassinate George Wallace, and J. Edgar Hoover’s ghosts and paranoid delusions finally provoked a heart attack big enough to kill him.

  The young man who bought a ticket for Calvary at the Greyhound depot in San Angelo was a changed man in a changed world.

  He carried with him a backpack, that selfsame Gibson guitar he’d bought in Abilene all of five years earlier, and a letter to a girl called Sarah from a father she’d never seen.

  Henry Quinn believed that Evan Riggs’s friendship had helped him maintain his sanity in Reeves. He’d said he would go down to Calvary and speak to Evan’s brother. He’d said he would find Evan’s daughter and deliver the letter.

  As far as Henry Quinn was concerned, there was no real difference between a promise given and a promise kept. That was just the way he was made.

  THREE

  Rumor had it that Calvary was once called Calgary. Just as in the Bible, the place of the skull. The place they nailed up the king of the Jews.

  “They sure as hell done that ’fore any Texians done got here,” someone once said. “Texians here too darn drunk and too darn lazy to do anything so fancy. Woulda just shot the dumb sucker ’stead of buildin’ all that fancy riggin’ and whatnot. Shot the boy and then thrown him in a ravine or some such. Let the coyotes git ’im.”

  Way back before all the border wars and suchlike started, Texas didn’t rank so well in the popularity stakes. It was too far from the other colonies, there were too many Indian raids, and something about the endless panorama of dust and nothing debilitated the soul.

  Calgary, if it was even called that back then, came about by accident.

  Lincoln’s election in 1860 saw South Carolina set on secession, and five other lower South states followed suit, Texas among them. The Civil War played out, the army of Northern Virginia finally surrendered, and Reconstruction began. Congress welcomed Texas back into the Union in 1870, but it seemed once more that Texas was like a distant and unruly cousin, bad-tempered, prone to drunken outbursts, volatile at the best of times. Invitation was little more than a resentful obligation, the loutish and unsophisticated uncle at a genteel Southern party. While everyone was drinking watermelon juleps and talking politics, Uncle Tex had cleared half a bottle of bourbon and was trying to fuck the help. Texas seemed to offer nothing but agricultural depression, unrealistic demands, and a landscape sculpted by wind and an endless caravan of hard wheels and hooves.

  Until the oil. Until black gold burst from the ground south of Beaumont in January 1901, and Spindletop defined the new Texas. Seemed there was no looking back. Texas possessed a currency that everyone wanted and everyone could spend. But that did not make the state any more hospitable; nor did it prevent the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. It was only the Second World War, the vast influx of federal money that built army bases, munitions factories, and hospitals that really changed the state’s fundamental nature. Three-quarters of a million men left Texas to fight, and those who returned did not return to stare at featureless horizons and work an inhospitable land.

  One of the Texans who did return from the war was Evan Riggs, twenty-one years old, and the homestead he returned to perhaps defied the seeming inclination toward progress that characterized so many other towns and cities statewide.

  “One of those places Jesus forgot, or just plain gave up on,” was the way Evan’s father, William, described it, but he’d already set himself to farming all of three hundred and fifty acres of cereal, was stubborn enough to set his spurs as deep as they’d go into the haunch of West Texas.

  Born in Marathon, just on the other side of the Stockton Plateau, in the late summer of 1896, William Riggs was West Texas in blood and bone and everything else that made a man. William bought a plot of land that he would, in time, expand and establish in his own methodical way. He was twenty years old when he went out there, but West Texas had a way of accelerating the years on even the most unsuspecting and naive young man, and by his second decade, William was as able and confident as would ever be required for survival.

  On a clear-skied day in October 1918, William Riggs married a seventeen-year-old girl called Grace Margaret Buckner. Though he had known her less than six months, William loved that girl with a missionary zeal equaled only by those first Spanish colonists of the late 1600s.

  Perhaps Grace agreed to the marriage as an escape route. Her own father possessed a skittish eye, as if always watchful of things others could not see. Stray dogs, lost kids seeking forgetful parents. Even ghosts. Folks called him crazy, but they meant some
thing a good deal harsher. Rumor had it he messed with his own kids, and not just the girls. William Riggs saw the man had no manners. Never ate nothing but it wasn’t with his fingers and straight from the pan, and when it came to the marriage day, Lester Buckner’s face was nothing more than a twisted knot of grievance and displeasure.

  However, Buckner had good sense enough to let his daughter go. The deal was done, and Grace was now a Riggs. Just seventeen years old, she went out to Calvary with her new husband, and though she may not have felt true love in her heart, she certainly did feel that the life ahead could only be better than the one she’d left behind. Thankfully, it was. Better, but no less tough. William Riggs was a good man, no doubt about it. He was honest and straight, a worker, a churchgoer, a good friend, and a decent husband. He did not want children, not yet, not until they had settled and stabilized, and this was something she could understand and appreciate. If you were going to bring a child into the world, then best make that world as good as it could be.

  And so it was with trepidation and anxiety that Grace informed her husband that she was pregnant in April of 1919.

  William stood stock-still and silent for some time. His expression was unreadable, but it was an expression Grace had not seen before.

  He opened his mouth to speak, seemed to reconsider his chosen words, and then simply said, “No one to blame but myself.”

  William Riggs left the house and did not return until dusk.

  Grace asked him if he was okay. He replied, “I was all set on gettin’ myself angry about this, but now I don’t feel so much like it.”

  Something had changed in the man. As if something inside of him was broke down and irreparable.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Grace assured him, but she did not believe that, and it was obvious in her voice.