by R.J. Ellory
“You need me to come back and speak to him?”
“I need you to come back and visit your ma and pa, like you were darned well supposed to, Evan Riggs.”
“I’ll come soon,” Evan said. “I promise.”
“Well, maybe for the New Year or something, huh? Or even for Carson’s birthday in January.”
“I’m thinking of moving to Austin,” Evan said.
“Things are not working out in San Antonio?”
“Why do you assume that things are not working out, Ma? Why do you fret so much about me?”
“Because you’re my son, Evan. It’s my job to worry about you. That’s what mothers do. Of course, they worry less if their sons come home and visit every once in a while.”
“Point taken, Ma. You’re starting to sound like a scratched record.”
“So, Austin, is it?”
“That’s the plan.”
“And when are you moving to Austin?”
“I’m not sure. I need to save up some more money.”
“Do you need some help, Evan? I can send—”
“No, Ma. I’m not asking for any money, and I don’t want you to send any.”
“It’s okay to accept help, Evan. It’s not a sign of weakness.”
“It’s better to stand on your own two feet. That’s a sign of strength.”
“Sometimes you are so like your father.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
Grace laughed gently. “A terrible thing, Evan, just terrible. After all, he is such a wicked and dreadful man.”
“I gotta go, Ma.”
“I know you have, sweetheart. So, you’re not going to visit anytime soon?”
“Let’s see what happens, okay?”
“I think we have no choice, do we?”
“Say hi to Carson for me, and Pa, and I send all my love and everything.”
“I’ll tell them, Evan. You take care now.”
“Sure thing, Ma. Love you.”
“I love you, too, s-son.”
The line went dead, but not before Evan heard her voice crack on the last syllable. She was upset, no question about it, and he hated to think that he’d made her feel that way.
So how is that different from how you make everyone else feel? he could hear Carole-Anne Murphy saying, and he wondered if he was becoming the sort of man that even he wouldn’t much care to know.
His final thought as he walked away from the telephone was that he had sent no message to Rebecca. He wondered if word had gone ahead and she had been expecting him, too. He wondered if he was on some subconscious mission to drive her into Carson’s arms so as not to face the reality of what he had done. Make her decide what to do, and he would not have to make the decision. That was the attitude of a weak man. This much he knew.
Evan moved to Austin in January of 1947, and it was the sea change that he’d long hoped for. There was something in the air in Austin, and for a while it suited his mind, his temperament, his mood. Evan Riggs wrote a good deal of songs within weeks of his arrival, as if the change of air released some pent-up creativity within him. He found a residency at a small club on the outskirts of the city, and after three or four months had gathered quite a following. It was at one of these weekly performances that he met Leland Soames. Soames and his younger sidekick, Herman Russell, the pair of them from a small record label by the name of Crooked Cow, came down a number of times to see Evan play. They broached the idea of Evan heading out to their recording studio in Abilene to cut a disc.
“Maybe next year,” Soames said. “We have a whole bunch of things on the calendar, and we couldn’t really look at it until maybe the fall of next year, but what you’re doin’ sounds mighty good, and I think you could get yourself some radio play, son.”
This possibility lifted Evan’s spirits markedly, for he had seen himself tiring of Austin. He’d been playing for six months in the same venue, seeing many of the same faces, and those same faces were now talking through his set. The potential of cutting a disc with Crooked Cow also coincided with a fateful meeting. Her name was Lilly Duval, her mother, Angeline, a French-Creole, her father an itinerant longshoreman who had blown through Angeline’s life like a bold and brief squall. Lilly was a handful of years older than Evan, a woman of experience in many ways, and yet possessed of a naiveté and simple charm that belied her appearance. To say she was beautiful would have been misleading. The girl broke hearts crossing the street, married men wondering if they could just shoot their wives right there and claim self-defense. It was Texas, after all.
She did not break Evan Riggs’s heart. His heart had already been broken beyond repair by Rebecca Wyatt. However, Lilly Duvall managed to repair it somewhat, papering over the cracks with a deft hand and making the seams close to invisible. At least for a time. The way she drifted across the dance floor in a cotton print dress and cowboy boots, the way she leaned against the bar, one foot on the rail, drinking her drink and watching him sing, making him feel like every song he sang was not only being performed for her, but had been written for her in the first place … It was not one thing, but all of them, yet—in truth—one alone would have been sufficient. And when he was done, she kept on watching him, smiling gently, a bemused expression crossing her face when it became obvious that he was walking directly toward her.
They connected in slow motion. That was how it seemed. Or maybe the rest of the world slowed down. Had it been raining, they could have walked between each drop and never gotten wet.
“You play well,” she said. “Good voice, too.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ve seen you play before … a while back, a couple of months maybe.”
“I didn’t see you.”
She smiled. “You were really drunk.”
“I used to do that a lot.”
“What happened?”
“That made me drink, or made me stop?”
“Made you stop.”
“You get up in the night and realize that you actually don’t know your own name. I mean, you really have to think hard to remember your own name. Not even kidding. That makes you think about what else you might forget.”
Lilly Duvall held out her hand. “I’m Lilly,” she said.
Evan took her hand and held it. “I’m Evan.”
“I know who you are, but it’s a pleasure to meet you anyway.”
“Can I get you a drink?”
“I only drink with drinkers, and you’re not a drinker anymore.”
“I drink,” Evan said, “but I don’t drink.”
“Then I’ll take another Sazerac.”
“A what?”
She laughed gently. “Sazerac. It’s a New Orleans thing. Bourbon, absinthe, and Herbsaint. Only place you can get it in West Texas is right here, so you picked a good saloon to play in.”
Lilly turned and glanced at the bartender. He was elsewhere, but in a heartbeat he was in front of her. Evan would notice that time and again. She got people’s attention. Bars, restaurants, clubs, diners, crosswalks, it didn’t matter. Lilly Duvall appeared oblivious to it, but she was candlelight and everyone else a moth.
Lilly gave her order, and Evan asked for the same. He put money on the counter.
“So,” she said, “how do you wanna do this?”
“Do what?”
“You want to go through the whole ‘How are you doing, what’s happening in your life,’ checking each other out, finding out if we’re attached, coming out of something complicated, single, available, all that jazz, or do you just want to give this a go and see what happens?”
Evan smiled. “You’re not in the wasting-time business, are you?”
“I haven’t got time to waste, Evan. I don’t mean the ‘Life is too short’ stuff, but sometimes you meet someone and you think something good could happen, and most people are too afraid to say or do anything about it. The epitaph for most peoples’ lives is ‘What if?’ Wouldn’t you say so?”
The drinks came
. It was a good cocktail. Evan Riggs never thought he’d say such a thing, but he did.
“New Orleans was my mother; still is,” Lilly said. “French-Creole.”
“And your father?”
She shrugged. “Who the hell knows. Who cares? These things happen, right?”
“They do. And you live here now, in Austin?”
“Staying with friends. Came here for a week or so … oh, I’d say three months back.”
Evan laughed. “So, let me get this straight. Your friends have had enough of you. They are kicking you out, and you need somewhere to stay. So you’re not actually looking for a boyfriend. You’re looking for free accommodation?”
“Boyfriend? Really? You wanna be my boyfriend?”
“You are teasing me, Lilly. I’m an outlaw. You tease me, I will shoot you and throw you down a dry well for the rattlesnakes.”
“Well, I am French-Creole in my blood, and I will do some fucked-up hoodoo on your skinny white ass and then you’ll be sorry.”
Evan Riggs lost close to half his drink.
“See?” she said. “The spell is working. You are already losing control of your limbs.”
“I think I did that the first time I saw you,” Evan said.
Lilly smiled. “Is that what you call outlaw charm?”
“Maybe,” Evan said. “Why, is it not working too well?”
She reached out and touched his hand. “It’s working just fine, Evan … working just fine.”
Evan Riggs looked at Lilly Duvall. Somewhere, deep within the recesses of his mind, a light had been switched on. Felt like he could see the way to himself for the very first time since Rebecca. Felt like he’d found a girl who could not make him forget, but make him unafraid to remember what it was like to fall in love.
Before their second drink, he’d fallen. No doubt about it. Fallen like a stone.
TWENTY-TWO
Evie was not home. Without a clue as to her whereabouts, Henry was painfully aware of the tenuous and uncertain nature of his situation. He neither belonged here, nor in San Angelo with his mother. He felt rootless and transient. He even considered going back to visit Evan at Reeves, if for no other reason than to establish the motivation for Carson’s evident unwillingness to assist in any way. It seemed now that it was less a case of Carson not wishing to help Evan and more a case of Carson not wanting Henry to find Sarah. The question begging for an answer was why.
Glenn Chandler showed up first. Henry had waited a good two hours. It was close to three in the afternoon. The sun was high and bold, and sitting in the truck, he felt like he’d done an overnighter in the Reeves’ sweatbox. That was a memory he didn’t want to be reminded of, but was reminded anyway.
“Hey, son. What’s up?” Chandler asked him. The tone was warm and amicable. Glenn Chandler seemed to Henry to be a good man.
“Just waitin’ on Evie,” Henry said.
“You’re gonna be waitin’ a while longer, then,” Chandler said. “She’s up in Big Lake. She has a cleaning job in a hotel up there.”
“Any idea what time she’ll be back?”
“If she comes on the bus, she’ll be back by six or thereabouts. She finishes up at five, so maybe you wanna go up there and fetch her. She’d appreciate that.” Chandler smiled. “She’s always asking me to come get her. I tell her get the bus. She says some folks was born to be chauffeured.”
“It’s not so far,” Henry said. “I can go up, sure.”
“Well, come and get a cold one and shoot the shit for a while, unless you got someplace else to be.”
Henry shook his head. “Only other place I could go is Calvary, and I ain’t so welcome there.”
“Sheriff Riggs run you out?”
“As good as.”
“Best excuse for an asshole that ain’t the thing itself,” Chandler said. “Never liked the man, never will. Coupla things happened I didn’t tell of last night. Not so polite for dinner conversation, and I ain’t a man to talk of others out of school. For Carson Riggs, however, I’ll make an exception.”
Chandler turned and walked to the porch steps. Henry took this as a cue to follow him.
“One time,” Chandler explained when they were seated at the kitchen table, “there was a kid got clipped by a car on one o’ them narrow roads out here. This was, I don’t know, maybe four or five years back. It was an accident, plain and simple, and I don’t believe the driver of the car was even aware that it had happened. It was evening, pretty dark, and he come around a corner and the kid was in the road and that was that. Kid wasn’t killed, but he got his legs busted up and suchlike. Anyway, no one is sure of the whys and wherefores, if the driver knew what had happened or what. You drive these roads at night, you clip all sorts of things, animals and whatever, and you don’t think to stop. What you gonna do?”
Chandler reached for his beer and took a drink.
“Riggs set himself to finding out what happened. Kid himself remembers it was a dark car, out-of-state plates or somethin’. I don’t know the details, but three days later, there’s this guy found tied to a bed in a motel room up near Barnhart. Someone has gone to work on his legs with a tire iron or somethin’. Busted ’em to pieces. From what I heard, they were busted so bad he wasn’t gonna walk again. There’s an investigation or whatever, and they find evidence on the front of his car, a scrap of fabric, a ding, I don’t know, that suggests he’s hit somethin’ with the car. Word had it that Riggs found him and done that to him. Eye for an eye an’ all that. Figured he didn’t have a hope in hell of proving that he hit that kid, but he was gonna get the kid some justice anyhow.”
Henry had listened silently. He had no difficult imagining Riggs tying some poor unfortunate son of a bitch down to a bed and going at him with a tire iron. The man had a look about him, the kind of look that said such a thing was well within his capability.
“First time I met him, I walked away unsettled,” Henry said.
Chandler smiled sardonically. “There are some people you decide to stay away from, or at least don’t make a fucking enemy of them, and he sure as hell is one of them.”
“You have any further notion of what went on between him and his brother? Why he doesn’t want me to find the daughter?”
“Secrets,” Chandler said. “That’s what it’s always about. Basic problem with families is that you don’t choose who you get. That’s the fundamental flaw right there. You don’t choose ’em.”
Henry thought of his own father, Jack Alford, gone before he even knew that Nancy Quinn was pregnant, unconcerned regarding the consequences of his own action, and Nancy now drinking herself into an early grave, already losing her grasp on whatever fragile threads tied her to the same world as Henry. His expression gave up his thoughts.
“You got ’em, too, right? The ones you don’t know what the hell to do with, the ones you invite and then sorely regret it when they turn out to be just as plumb crazy as you remembered ’em to be.” Chandler laughed. “When I was a kid, my folks had a cousin used to come over for Thanksgiving. Drunk from dawn to dusk, telling the kids the worst jokes, teachin’ ’em the worst language … laughing like a hyena when some five-year-old he’d coached said Fuck you, Mommy at the dinner table. Real asshole. Anyway, it’s the same with all families. Doesn’t matter who they are, where they’re from, if they’re dirt -poor or they shit in high cotton. We all got ’em. Now, whether Evan is the crazy one or it’s his brother, or maybe both of them, I don’t know, but if there’s something serious going on between those two, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to get involved.”
“I think it’s too late,” Henry said. “I already dug the hole.”
Chandler paused for a moment and then leaned forward. “My girl is a smart one,” he said. “I trust her judgment about people, and she says you’re a smart one, too. She doesn’t fall easy. I’ll tell you that much. But she seems to have fallen for you. If I had my choice, I wouldn’t have her take up with an unemployed ex-con who’s gotten hisself int
o a scrap with Carson Riggs, but there’s no explaining the human heart, is there, Mr. Quinn?”
“No, sir. There isn’t.”
“Well, for whatever reason, you and she have wound up together, and whatever trouble you’re getting’ yourself into, she’s more than likely gonna get into it, too. She’s like her mother that way, you know? She sees a door, she wants to know what’s on the other side, especially if it’s locked. She sees a dark hole, she wants to climb down it, see if the monsters are real. Some of us choose the safe option, my friend. Chandler girls ain’t those people.”
“I’ll take care of her, Mr. Chandler,” Henry said.
“You can’t say that, Henry,” Chandler replied. “You can’t say that without knowing what you’re dealing with. And you are evidently the kind of man who makes a promise with the intention of keeping it. Besides, if and when there’s trouble, then she’s more ’an likely gonna be the one takin’ care of you.” Chandler gave a wry smile and added, “And if you’re plannin’ on pursuin’ this thing, whatever this thing might be, then I think it’s more a question of when than if.”
“Can I ask about Evie’s mother, Mr. Chandler?”
“Why so?”
“I am just curious. What happened to her, why you never married again.”
“Ain’t none of your business, son,” Chandler said. “You may be in Evie’s good books, but you ain’t family. If you ever get to be family, then I’ll have that conversation with you, but until then I’ll just politely decline.”
“I apologize if—”
Chandler smiled, and it was sincere and genuine. “You don’t got nothing to apologize for, son. I ain’t bein’ ornery about it, and I ain’t offended. And I sure as hell ain’t concerned if Evie tells you whatever she wants, but family is family, and you ain’t there yet.”
Henry understood; seemed that when it came to Glenn Chandler, there was what you saw and what you got and they were invariably the same thing.
“So, you gon’ go get her, or what?”
