Mockingbird Songs

by R.J. Ellory

  “I am just kiddin’ you,” he said, and opened his arms wide. “Come here.”

  They hugged, and Carson leaned close to his ear and said, “You are the best brother a man could wish for. I think you is one crazy son of a bitch, but I hope you wind up happy and drunk and rich as a king.”

  “I appreciate that, Carson, and I wish the same for you. Take care of Ma and Pa.”

  “Will do.”

  They parted smiling, which is what William Riggs had hoped for.

  Of all the goodbyes, Rebecca was the toughest.

  Her father was there when Evan arrived; he shook Evan’s hand, clapped him on the shoulder, wished him fair weather and good fortune. He then left the two of them alone, knowing that the words they would share were not for his ears.

  “So this is it?” she said, already knowing the answer.

  “I’d ask you to come with me, but I know you wouldn’t.”

  “I can’t, Evan, and you know it, so sayin’ that is just unfair.”

  Evan looked away toward the horizon, didn’t respond.

  “You have nothing to say to me?” she asked.

  He could hear the break in her voice, the telling edge of loss and anger. She believed he was deserting her, for that’s how it felt, like a desertion, some kind of betrayal. It was not, but that didn’t change the emotion.

  “I can’t stay here forever,” he said. “You of all people should understand that.”

  “I do,” Rebecca said, “but that doesn’t stop me from hating you for going away.”

  Evan smiled. “You don’t hate me, Rebecca. If you hated me, you would feel nothing but relief.”

  “Why do you have to make my life so complicated?”

  “I don’t think I am. You are the one who is being unfair now.”

  She took a step closer, put her hand on his arm. “What would happen if you stayed, Evan? I mean, really … what would happen if you stayed?”

  “I would die a little more every day,” he said, for this was what he believed. “I would drink too much and I would argue with Carson, and I would fight with my father about the land and the work and everything that he wants me to do. I don’t belong here … and if you want to know the truth, the only people that have kept me here as long as I’ve stayed is my ma and you.”

  “Do you love me, Evan Riggs?”

  Evan looked at her. “You know the answer to that question, Rebecca Wyatt.”

  “But are you in love with me?”

  Evan sighed. “Now it’s your turn to make things complicated. You accuse me of something, and then you do the very same thing yourself. If you have a question, then ask me, Rebecca.”

  “Could you not bear to stay here if I were by your side … I mean really with you, as your wife?”

  “Could you not bear to go with me, wherever things took us, if I were beside you as your husband?”

  “Is that how it is, then?”

  “You know it is.”

  “Then you are really going?”

  “And you are really staying.”

  Her eyes brimmed with tears. “It isn’t right and it isn’t fair,” she said, and her voice was a cracked whisper, barely audible.

  “I think that describes life in general,” Evan said. He pulled her close, his arms around her, and he could feel the racing of her heart against his chest.

  Everything she imagined he felt, he then felt it a hundred times more. He could not tell her. It would only make things worse. He was caught between one thing and another, and whichever one he chose, he would have to compromise and sacrifice something. But, in truth, the decision had been easier than he would ever tell her, for the pull of his vocation, his music, the desire to travel, to see the world, to find himself in far-flung corners, even the wish to return someday with stories that no one else could tell, was so much stronger than the love he felt for Rebecca Wyatt. Perhaps not stronger, but different. Like a drug. Worse than a drug.

  Rebecca pulled back a little and looked up at Evan. “My father says you are irresponsible, a dreamer … that you’ll come to grief.”

  “Does he, now?”

  “Yes, he does, and I can’t say that a little of me doesn’t agree with him.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Evan said.

  “You’re calling me a liar now?”

  “No, but I know how clever and manipulative you can be, Miss Wyatt.”

  “To hell with you,” Rebecca said, but she pulled him close again and closed her eyes and breathed even more deeply, as if to draw him deep inside through the atmosphere.

  “I’ll be back,” Evan said.

  “That doesn’t mean anything, and you know it. Of course you’ll be back. Everyone comes back. How long? When? Why? You’ll come back with a wife and horde of children, or you’ll come back in a pine box …”

  “Enough,” Evan said. “I can’t apologize for who I am, and I’m not going to. We meet halfway on so many things, but not this, and that’s just the way it is.”

  Rebecca pulled away. Evan wrested her back, but she didn’t want to be held.

  “Go,” she said. “This is just making it worse.”

  Evan stood for a moment, and then he reached out and touched her cheek with the fingers of his right hand.

  “Until whenever,” he said, and then he crossed to the steps and walked down to the car.

  “Evan?” she called after him.

  He paused, glanced back.

  “Will always love you,” she said, “whatever happens.”

  Hindsight, cruel adviser that it was, told him that he should have said something in return. Perhaps then, with some vague hope of being together, she might have made different choices, taken a different path.

  A single word and everything could have worked out so very differently.

  But Evan Riggs said nothing, and that moment—along with so many others—would haunt him for the rest of his life.

  TWENTY

  With no certain place to go, Henry Quinn pulled over in front of the Checkers Diner. He went on in, took a seat at the counter, and ordered a Coke, if only to get the taste of Clarence Ames’s coffee out of his mouth.

  It was here that Carson Riggs found him. It was somewhere not far from noon, and once Riggs had ordered coffee and been served, they had the place to themselves. The woman tending seemed to understand that this conversation was not her business to overhear.

  “Seems to me you got a mind to pursue this thing,” Riggs said.

  Henry nodded, looking straight ahead at the row of flavored syrup bottles against the back wall. “Seems to me I don’t have a choice, Sheriff Riggs.”

  Riggs took a sip of his coffee, set it down again. He reached right and moved his hat along the counter just an inch. Slow motion, every action, as if all the time in the world was available for him to make his point.

  “Man can get himself tied in knots if he doesn’t have choices. Man can keep walking down a road that just has bad news waiting at the end.”

  Henry turned and smiled. “You have a way of saying things, Sheriff,” he said. “They don’t sound like threats, but they sure feel that way.”

  “I’m just talkin’ the way I talk,” Riggs replied. “Same way I always did.”

  “So, what do you want from me? Tell me straight.”

  “What I want, son, is for you to leave this well alone. This is family business, and you ain’t family. Never have been, never will be.”

  “A promise is a promise, Sheriff Riggs.”

  “Depends. Circumstances change, son, sometimes as much as the weather. People make decisions based on information that they then discover to be false or misleading.”

  “Are you telling me that your brother is a liar?”

  Riggs smiled, but there was no warmth in it. It was the smile of a spider when the web shivers with prey.

  “You and I had a civil word about this matter,” Riggs said. “From what you said, I believed we had an understanding. Seem to recall we took the girl�
�s feelings into consideration. Also seem to recall that we were of the same mind.”

  “You recall correctly, Sheriff.”

  Riggs nodded slowly. He lifted his coffee cup, paused before he drank. “Glad to hear that, Mr. Quinn. Wouldn’t want you thinking I was a liar as well.”

  “And Evan?” Henry asked. “What about him? Do you not think he deserves some real consideration in this matter?”

  “I have been giving my brother real consideration for more than twenty years. Our father was dead when this business happened in Austin. Some say that the loss affected Evan, perhaps contributed to his behavior, but his father and my father were the same man, and I was right there when he died. Did I get drunk and kill a man, Mr. Quinn? No, I can’t say that I did. You have any idea how it broke our mother’s heart? She loses her husband, and then her younger son goes to jail for the rest of his life. People can die of a broken heart, Mr. Quinn … far more easily than they can die of a broken promise.”

  “You want me to leave Calvary, don’t you?”

  “I have no concern whether you leave or not, son. All I want you to do is drop this little investigation of yours. Whatever consequence you might suffer as a result of failing Evan …” Riggs’s voice trailed away, and again there was that look in his eyes. The rest of the statement wasn’t required for Henry to get the message.

  There was no uncertainty now. Riggs really did not want him in Calvary; his mission to find the long-lost daughter was meeting clear opposition. The threat, though not directly stated, was as obvious as daylight. Continue along this line, and Sheriff Carson Riggs of Calvary would be having harsher words with Henry Quinn, late of Reeves County.

  Later, after some time to consider how he’d felt in that moment, Henry realized that stubbornness had played a major part. Wherever that stubbornness came from, it was a strong thing, possessed a will all its own. It rose in Henry’s blood, and he could not calm it. The determination to defy Carson became as strong as the promise he’d made to Evan. Instinctively, he rested his hand against the scar on his side. He remembered—all too clearly—the certainty that he was going to die, the way his body seemed bathed in blood, how Evan Riggs had shouldered him and crossed one gantry after another to get him to the infirmary.

  “I understand,” Henry said, which was true. “I will leave it alone,” he added, which was not.

  Carson Riggs looked at Henry Quinn, and there was a light in Riggs’s eyes … a light of suspicion, a light of near certainty that Henry was lying, but perhaps an element of doubt borne out of Riggs’s self-belief that he could back Henry off with a handful of edgy words. Perhaps he was not used to be contradicted and challenged; perhaps the mere fact that Henry had already spoken with Clarence Ames had set him on an unerring path to Henry’s certain failure. There was something about the kid that raised his hackles, and this would not do. Not at all.

  This was some kind of standoff, and both were resolute.

  “So, where will you be headed?” Riggs asked.

  “Back home, I guess,” Henry said.

  Riggs drained his coffee cup, reached for his hat, put it on. He rose from the counter stool and hitched his Sam Browne. He looked down at his boots as if checking their sheen, and then he looked up at Henry and smiled.

  “Been good to straighten things out, Mr. Quinn,” he said. “Glad to see that we are not headed in two different directions on this.”

  “We are not, Sheriff Riggs.”

  “So this is goodbye, I guess.”

  “Guess it is.”

  Carson Riggs extended his hand. Henry got up from the stool, faced the man, and shook.

  “Want to believe that I was right to trust you,” Riggs said.

  Henry said nothing.

  Riggs turned and left the diner.

  Henry Quinn stood there, believed that never in his life had he felt so set on something. To hell with Carson Riggs. To hell with the veiled threats and menacing intimidation. Fuck him. Fuck him.

  Henry took his seat again. He looked back toward the wall, through and behind the bottles of flavored syrup to the mirror that sat behind them.

  For a moment he did not recognize himself. Was that the expression of a man afraid?

  Henry looked away.

  What was he getting into? Not only with Riggs and the lost daughter, but also Evie Chandler, her father, the people of Calvary.

  He thought of his mother, back there in San Angelo with Howard Ulysses Morgan, drinking a hole through her liver out of which she imagined she’d escape the banal reality of existence. Or the disillusionment of it all.

  Henry knew he’d contributed to that disillusionment, her only child little more than a dumb kid with a six-pack and a handgun. What was he thinking? What problem was he solving? Was he no different from her, stumbling blindly from one day to the next in the vain hope that one day he would write a song, earn a fortune, make good his escape? His escape to what?

  Was his promise to Evan Riggs nothing more than a means by which he could avoid confronting and taking responsibility for his own life?

  No, he could not accept that.

  He owed Evan Riggs his life. That was the truth. He owed the man his life, and this was the very least he could do in return.

  Carson Riggs was an obstacle, sure, but wasn’t the accomplishment of anything merely down to a man’s ability to recognize, acknowledge, then surmount whatever obstacles appeared en route?

  Henry finished his Coke. He headed back out to the car. He drove in the direction of Ozona. He wanted to tell Evie of his latest confrontation with Sheriff Carson Riggs.

  The sense of being watched was there as he headed for the highway. How he knew, he did not question, but he was certain that Carson Riggs knew exactly where he was going and why.

  TWENTY-ONE

  San Antonio was a kick in the balls. It was a swift right hook into the very substance of Evan Riggs’s ego. In San Antonio no one gave a good goddamn about some hick country singer from Calvary with a bagful of old-timey tunes.

  Money, lack of it, was the first order of business. Playing juke joints and straw-floored saloons gave him barely enough to cover the rent on a small room in a boardinghouse. Food came second, liquor came third, but it wasn’t long before liquor took precedence. It was no consolation, no reprieve, however. It was not a replacement for God or love or anything else. Liquor was a remedy for disillusion and the fear of failure. What he believed he might fail in, Evan was not sure. He didn’t even know what it was that he was trying to attain. Fame, money, attention, adoration? He began to question why he was even pursuing this uncertain goal, but any attempt he made to divert his attention to some other plan, same other means of survival, was met with the same feeling: He could not help it. He could not alter his personality. He was who he was, and who he was would never change.

  There were girls, of course. There were always girls. Put a good-looking guy on any kind of stage and he became something that he was not. What the girls saw and the reality could not have been further from each other. However certain and confident and charming Evan Riggs might have been with a guitar around his neck, he was a desperate young man with a heavy burden of self-doubt. None of the relationships he undertook lasted long; the veneer wore thin, the drinking became noisy, even violent on one occasion when a woman by the name of Carole-Anne Murphy broke a whiskey bottle over Evan’s head, saying, “Lousy good-for-nothin’ asshole of a man … Christ, Evan, anyone’d think you had some talent, the way you go on …”

  It was a cutting jibe, and she said it merely to hurt him, knowing that such a line would bury its claws in his skin and burrow beneath the surface. Whatever Evan Riggs needed, it was not further fuel for those fires of self-doubt. It was also clear from the first moment and through every moment beyond that no girl could ever be Rebecca Wyatt. They were substitutes, replacements, stand-ins, and cameos. They would never make the grade. Such a thing was not possible.

  Evan stayed in San Antonio for less than a year. H
e returned to Calvary for Christmas of 1946 and was swiftly reminded of all the reasons he’d left in the first place, so much so that he never even made it to the farm. He sat in his car at the side of the highway and smoked three cigarettes. He then turned around and drove back the way he’d come.

  He called his mother the following day.

  “Something came up,” he lied.

  “I don’t understand, Evan … You said you’d be back for Christmas. We all expected you. Are you coming today?”

  “No, Ma. I’m not coming today. Can’t make it all. I’m sorry.”

  She was silent for a while. He could feel the sense of dismay at the other end of the line.

  Eventually, “Is everything okay, Evan?”

  “Sure, Ma. Everything is fine.”

  He could hear his own voice. He sounded like the liar that he was. Perhaps not a liar, but certainly a son telling a mother what he believed she wanted to hear.

  Her reply reminded him of his complete transparency.

  “If you need a little time to get your thoughts together … you know, a little break from all the work you’re doing, then you could always come and stay for a while. There will always be a bed and a place at the table for you. You know that, don’t you, Evan?”

  “Yes, Ma. I know that.” He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. Not only was he disappointing himself, but he was now disappointing his mother.

  “Your father would like to see you. He will be really upset that you won’t make it. He worries about you.”

  “Tell him not to worry. I’m fine.”

  She fell silent again, waiting for him to say something that would fix things.

  “And Carson?” Evan asked, wanting to change the subject, if only to find a reason to get off the phone.

  The hesitation at the other end of the line said more than any words. Evan knew then that he should have done as he’d promised and gone back to the farm.

  “Carson is Carson,” Grace Riggs said. “He has his own way of upsetting things, just like you.”

  “Who is he upsetting, Ma?”

  “Who’s he not upsetting?” she replied, and immediately regretted it. “Pay no mind to me, Evan,” she added. “Carson is just fine. Carson just has his ways and means, and sometimes they grate on folks.”