by R.J. Ellory
“Not sure,” Henry replied, once again feeling that someone was telling him something without actually saying anything at all.
If Mrs. Honeycutt was surprised by Henry’s response, she didn’t show it. She simply explained where the bathroom was and that the shower ran a mite hot sometimes so to be careful.
Henry thanked her, said he would be out for a little while.
“Out?”
“Yes, I was just going to have a beer with Evie.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Honeycutt said. “I see.” Merely two words, but they somehow managed to communicate a tone of restrained disapproval.
“Is there a problem with that, Mrs. Honeycutt?” Henry asked, perhaps of a mind to challenge her.
“No, not at all, Mr. Quinn.” She smiled, albeit superficially. “It’s a free world,” she added, her tone suggesting that she believed it was anything but.
Evie was on the street when Henry returned. She was leaning against the pickup as if she were waiting for a ride.
“We need to drive?” Henry asked.
“Nope. We can walk.”
They walked for several minutes before Evie said a single word.
“Where you from?” she finally asked.
“San Angelo yesterday, before that Reeves County.”
“Where in Reeves County?”
“The prison.”
Evie laughed. “You are shittin’ me.”
“Wish I was,” Henry replied, and then wondered if he really did wish that he was bullshitting her. He’d not been out long enough to take stock of how he’d changed as a result of Reeves, the longer-term consequences of spending three years in a cell, but he knew that there had been changes. Beneath the skin, under the fingernails, somewhere in the mind and heart.
“Why were you in Reeves?”
“Shot someone.”
Evie stopped dead in her tracks. “You’re a murderer?”
“No, not a murderer. It was an accident. They were wounded. I did three years for that and the unlawful possession.”
“You are seriously shittin’ me, right?”
“I’m not, actually, no. Got out the day before yesterday. Went to see my ma in San Angelo, then drove here.”
“For what purpose, exactly?”
“To deliver a letter.”
“To someone you know?”
“No, the daughter of someone I bunked with at Reeves.”
“And you found her?”
“Nope.”
“What’s her name?”
“Sarah.”
“Sarah what?”
“No idea,” Henry said. “She was adopted soon after she was born, went to live with another family. She could be anywhere. She could be married, have changed her name again, could be living in Bohunk or Iceland or Panama City, for all I know.”
“But you must have had some reason for starting here, right?” Evie asked.
“Sheriff Riggs.”
Evie stopped walking. “Meaning what?”
“Meaning the guy I bunked with is Sheriff Riggs’s brother, so the girl I am looking for is his niece.”
“Fuck,” Evie said, and it was a blunt one-syllable gunshot of a word that surprised Henry Quinn a good deal.
“Why fuck?”
“I know that everyone says what a great guy he is and how he’s made this town safe an’ all, but if you want my opinion …”
“I want your opinion.”
“There is something wrong with that guy. There is something wrong with this whole place.”
“In what way?” Henry asked.
Evie had started walking again, Henry keeping pace, but now she was animated and vocal, so unlike the surly, sassy attitude she’d worn when they’d first met.
“You tell me to name something specific, I can’t,” she said. “This place is … Well, hell, it’s like it’s never moved for twenty years. I’ve been coming here my whole life, and it’s never changed. He was the sheriff before I was born, and he’ll probably be sheriff when I die.”
“So you live here?”
“No. I live up in Ozona.” Evie pointed to the right of the church. “’Bout twenty miles that way.”
“But you work for the Honeycutts.”
“Work for them? Kind of, I guess. I just help out when the regular girl can’t come in. Alice Honeycutt is my mom’s cousin. My dad drives me down here, and he’ll come pick me up when he finishes work. He does a late shift.”
“So you live with your folks out in Ozona?”
“Live with my dad. My mom’s dead.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
Evie smiled. “Why be sorry? You didn’t kill her, did you?” She frowned. “Hey, wait a minute … You shot some woman and went to Reeves. Maybe you have a habit of shooting innocent women and saying it was an accident.”
“Yeah, that’s what I do.”
Evie turned right at the end of the street. Henry had lost track of where they’d been walking, but he saw lights through the trees and figured it was their destination.
“Now this,” Evie said, “is about as old-timey as you could imagine, even for Calvary. This is the watering hole for most of the regulars. Good I’m with you; otherwise they’d probably lynch you for the sheer fun of it. They can be a cantankerous bunch of assholes when they see fit.”
ELEVEN
The guitar was called a Stella Gambler. It was a good ten years old, and the rosette and playing card decals were somewhat shabby and worn-out around the edges, but it was solid birch and there wasn’t a crack in it, and when Evan Riggs held it he felt much the same as Henry Quinn would nigh on thirty years later in that guitar store in Abilene.
There was indeed a gun for every man, a guitar, too, if he was musically inclined, which Evan was.
It arrived for his birthday, and within a week he had a song from the wireless figured out. He was listening to some station out of Odessa that played colored artists like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Son House and a lay preacher called Charley Patton.
Grace thought their names were just the strangest ever, but that guitar and the music he was learning had set Evan on fire, it seemed.
“You done started something here,” she told William. “Giving him that guitar. He gets back from school, he eats, does his chores, his homework, and then it’s music, music, music. Surprised he doesn’t go crazy, playing those same things over and over again.”
“Same as anything, I guess. Get as much out of it as you put in.”
“Don’t reckon Carson is much pleased. Don’t think they’ve shared three words the whole week.”
“Carson is doing fine, my sweet. He’s out with me, and he’s a good worker. Have to stand over him sometimes or he gets slipshod, but he’s gettin’ the message.”
“I know, William. Best thing for that boy is to leave for work at dawn, drag himself home at dusk, and be too tired to eat. He does that for a while, it’ll strengthen his backbone, give him some pride in whatever he’s doing.”
“We’ll get there, Grace. We’ll get there. I reckon both of them are gonna do just fine.”
Somewhere inside of a month from Evan’s birthday, the first weekend of April 1938, Carson told his younger brother there was something he needed to see.
“What?” Evan asked.
“You’ll see when we get there.”
“That’s just dumb, Carson. Tell me now or I’m not coming.”
“Found a rats’ nest. A big ’un. Loads of baby rats all squigglin’ and squirmin’. It’s disgusting. You gotta see it.”
“You tell Pa?”
“Not yet, no. Want you to see it first. He’s gonna poison ’em, and then that’ll be that. It’s only a ways down by the river. Rebecca’s gonna come, too.”
“She walkin’ over?”
“Yup.”
“Soon?”
“An hour maybe. Told her last weekend, and she said she’d come this morning.”
Evan weighed up the Saturday-morning music shows against time with
Rebecca Wyatt. The girl won out.
“Okay,” he said, not because he wanted to see a rats’ nest, but because he wanted to see a rats’ nest with Rebecca. Whichever way it went and for whatever reason, she made him feel like no one else.
Rebecca arrived a little after ten. She had on jeans and boots and a blue gingham blouse. Her hair was tied at the back of her head, and she looked like a million bucks.
“You gon’ play me a new song, Evan Riggs?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said, and started back from the veranda to get his guitar.
“Do that sappy business later,” Carson said. “We gon’ go see this nest, okay?”
Rebecca looked at Evan, her expression a mite disappointed. Evan smiled at her. “We’ll go see this disgusting thing, and then we’ll come back and we can listen to the wireless and whatever.”
“You really wanna go see a rats’ nest?” Rebecca said. “I seen ’em before. Rats is rats.”
“Not like this one,” Carson said. “You ain’t seen nothin’ like this one.”
Sufficiently intrigued, both Evan and Rebecca came down off the veranda and waited a while for Carson to fetch something from the back of the house. It was a small canvas knapsack.
“What’s in the bag, Carson?” Rebecca asked.
“Wait an’ see,” Carson replied, and there was something mischievous in his expression that Rebecca—if pressed—would have said she didn’t much care for. Carson had a different-colored streak in him, and the times it showed were the times that things went awry and awkward.
“Troubled, troublesome, and a troublemaker,” Ralph Wyatt had once said of Carson Riggs, echoing a sentiment from the boy’s own parents, and when questioned further by his daughter, he had refused to say more.
In truth, Rebecca Wyatt loved both Carson and Evan for their differences as much as their similarities. Carson was very much the man’s man, kind of clumsy and bullish, both in manner and mouth. He tried to be sophisticated and sensitive, but it was like trying to train chickens to fly. It just wasn’t happening, not in a month of Sundays with an extra weekend thrown in for a last-ditch attempt. But he had his own means and methods, and in some small way his lack of sensitivity was oddly charming. Because he did not really understand the convoluted pathways of human emotion, his attempts to understand were all the more endearing. Carson would be a solid husband, unflinchingly loyal, dependable in all things for which he could be depended upon. A life with Carson Riggs would be a regular life, the kind of life sought by so many women in the Midwest and the South. Pressed for admission, Rebecca would say that Carson held—and would always hold—a special place in her heart. Perhaps he inspired in her some still-unrealized maternal instinct. Perhaps it was something else entirely. She didn’t think to question it in detail. She just knew that when Carson was around, she felt safe and substantial, as if anything that came along could be faced, even bested.
Evan, however, was a bird of different plumes. It wasn’t just the music, the books, the wireless, the odd comments he made about why things were the way they were and why could they not be different; it was all of him. Rebecca had turned sixteen in February, and she was already most of the woman she would ever be. Girls grew faster, their emotions and sensibilities matured so much quicker than boys, and already she knew what kind of life Evan would offer a girl. Unpredictable, changing towns as often as they changed shoes, sometimes down-at-the-heel, sometimes affluent, and even when affluent, they would be unconcerned with saving or planning or thinking on tomorrow. It would be a wild life, bohemian perhaps, exciting in some way, desperate in others. Unaware of their fraternal connection, you would never have placed Carson and Evan as brothers. They were that different, and it was as if she possessed no magnetic pole at all and was being pulled both north and south simultaneously.
Wordlessly at first, Evan and Rebecca followed Carson out across the yard and down the driveway to the road. Fifteen minutes and Evan was already asking how much farther, Rebecca inquiring once more as to the contents of the bag. The first question elicited a characteristically uninformative monosyllable, the second another Wait and see, goddammit!
They did wait and see, as it seemed there wasn’t a great deal of choice in the matter, and within ten minutes Carson was heading left off the main road and down into the scrub. It was there, down in a hollow where the Riggses’ fencing walked close to the banks of the Pecos, that they slowed down and approached the quest’s objective.
Both Evan Riggs and Rebecca Wyatt had seen enough rats to remain unconcerned by such things, but it had to be said that there was something truly disturbing about the size of this nest. The babies were very young, not more than a week or so, all pink and slippery and squealing. Rebecca counted fourteen of them, and when the mother appeared, distressed and agitated by the presence of outsiders, the noise that was generated by the litter was almost unbearable.
Carson was already laughing when he backed up to the fence and set down his knapsack. When he produced a handful of Globe Salutes, Evan knew what Carson was planning to do. Light those little paper bombs and hurl them in there. It would be akin to putting a hand grenade in your pocket and hoping it didn’t hurt.
“What are you doing?” Rebecca asked, perhaps unfamiliar with Globe Salutes to realize how powerful they could be. Carson had gotten some before, and a couple of them dropped into a flowerpot were powerful enough to blow that pot to splinters.
“Gonna blast ’em out,” Carson said, and there was a glint in the eye and a crook in the smile that really said everything that needed to be said.
“No,” Rebecca said. “You’re not …”
“Yes, indeedy, I am,” Carson replied, and from within the knapsack he produced another handful of Salutes and a box of matches.
“Where the hell you get those?” Evan asked, caught between a rock and a hard place. He knew it would be carnage and horror, but half of him wanted to see how much carnage and horror it would be. The other half of him would side with Rebecca, the measured and practical aspect that said such things were just downright cruel and unnecessary. Vermin they may be, but there were ways and means of humanely getting rid of them, and detonating them with Globe Salutes didn’t figure on that list.
Carson did not say where he got them, and he would not be dissuaded. He was US Infantry. This was as close as he would ever get to the Battle of Meuse-Argonne or Cantigny or Soissonnais et de l’Ourcq.
The first Salute was lit, and even though his aim was wide of the mark, it still was sufficiently ferocious to kick a hole in the ground as big as Evan’s fist.
The mother rat, aware now that her nest was under siege, engaged in a futile effort to move her young away from the site of the explosion.
Carson was already laughing like a drunken hyena.
“No, Carson,” Rebecca urged him, but he didn’t want to hear her. He was set on a course, his blood was up, and there was no way he was quitting. That was a Carson characteristic: stubborn, muleheaded, insistent about his own rightness even when he was plain wrong. Some situations required such an attitude, and some did not.
The second Salute drew blood. A couple of the babies, maybe even three or four, were consigned to whatever hereafter awaited rodents, and Rebecca started screaming.
The mother was aggrieved. She even ventured away from the nest on the attack, but soon realized that she didn’t even know what she was attacking. She hurried back to be present as the third incendiary device went off. If this did not kill her, it certainly incapacitated her. The back legs were blown clean off, and she lay there immobile and silent. Rebecca instinctively took three or four steps forward, and even though Evan hollered at her to get back, it was too late. The last Salute landed fair and square in the midst of the remaining babies, and that bomb went off good.
When the smoke and dirt had settled, Rebecca Wyatt looked back at Carson Riggs with a horrified, thunderous expression. Blood had spattered her blouse and jeans, and even as she looked down at her boots, sh
e saw the body of a baby rat there on her right toe. She screamed, kicked it away, and then she did not hesitate. She charged across the short distance between herself and Carson and slapped him across the face.
“Asshole!” she shouted. “You are an asshole, Carson Riggs!”
Carson was stunned. He didn’t dare respond, and that wicked glint in his eye was killed as stone dead as the rodents.
Evan didn’t know where to look, didn’t know with whom to side, and so he did and said nothing.
Rebecca looked at Evan, perhaps waited for him to spring to her defense, but was disappointed.
“Christ Almighty, I don’t know why I even visit with you Riggs boys,” Rebecca said. “You can both go to hell.”
With that, she turned on her heel and stormed away. She headed home to change her clothes, to wash her hands and face and arms, to get the smell of cordite or flash powder or whatever the hell it was out of her hair. What she couldn’t wash away, and could not forget for some time, was the sight of baby rats exploding amid clouds of West Texas dirt and the sound of Carson Riggs’s laughter as he tossed another Globe Salute into the nest. It had been a wicked sound, both mean and cruel, and she had not heard it before.
Rebecca Wyatt did not visit with the Riggs boys for close to a month, and when she did return, it was to see the younger one, not the elder. There was something she needed to say, and she could wait no longer.
TWELVE
“So he gets up and he says, ‘Saved that girl’s life, near as damn it. Last time I saw her, I didn’t know whether to fuck her or shoot her. I must have figured I was too drunk to fuck her, so that left only one other option.’”
The men around the table laughed. Four of them, seats crossways, elbows touching as if here were some secret redneck conclave. They were fixing to choose the Pope of West Texas, and once done, someone would head out front and light a corncob pipe to alert the world.
