Mockingbird Songs

by R.J. Ellory

  “I’m gonna go get her,” Henry said.

  “I’ll give you the address where she’s working. She finishes up at five, so if you’re outside o’ there, you’ll surprise her.”

  Chandler scribbled down the address. “You won’t have any difficulty findin’ it. It’s on the main drag.”

  “Appreciated.”

  “You comin’ on back here for dinner?” Chandler asked.

  “I don’t know. Figured maybe I’d take her out or something.”

  Chandler looked thoughtful. “Ah, well, this here’s where you and I are gonna have to have words, son. You start taking her out, then I’m gonna be sat here with a knife and fork and little else in front of me.”

  Henry opened his mouth to speak.

  Chandler smiled, laughed a little. “Go,” he said. “I’m yankin’ your chain. You ain’t back here by seven or thereabouts, I’ll take care of my own dinner.”

  Henry finished his beer, thanked Chandler, shook the man’s hand.

  “This thing with Riggs,” Chandler said as a final comment. “You hear a rattler, first thing to know is where he’s at—if he’s behind you, if you’re in his line of sight. Sometimes running is the worst thing to do, you know? Sometimes you just stand your ground and let him pass by. Main thing is not to give him cause to take a snap at you. Know what I mean?”

  “I do, yes.”

  “I hope so, son. ’Cause if any harm comes to Evie and it’s of your doin’, there’ll be a standoff. And I ain’t gonna be like Carson Riggs, I assure you. I ain’t comin’ around corners when you least expect it. I’m comin’ at you dead square, and I’ll be carryin’ a thirty-aught-six. Maybe somethin’ bigger.”

  Henry nodded, didn’t say a word. One thing he’d learned at Reeves is that sometimes any word was a word too many.

  Evie’s surprise pleased him. She was genuinely shocked to see Henry standing there at the side of the pickup across the street from the hotel.

  “Holy crap, Henry Quinn. What the hell is this?”

  “Saw your pa. He told me where you was at, and I figured I’d come get you.”

  She threw her arms around him and kissed him hard on the mouth.

  Henry was a little taken aback himself, but in a good way.

  “So what’s the deal?” she said once she was in the cab and the engine was started.

  “Can go on back home if you want, or I can take you someplace for dinner.”

  “Someplace sounds good,” she said.

  Henry put the truck in gear and pulled away from the curb. “I had a talk with your pa.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “He told me about Riggs. Something that happened a while back.” Henry repeated the story of the busted legs, then added, “Dangerous man, potentially, and he has warned me off again. He really don’t want me lookin’ any more.”

  “He told you that already, Henry. How many times do you need to be reminded?”

  “Enough times to get it through my thick skull, I guess.”

  “Is it through yet?”

  “Don’t reckon it is.”

  “That’s what I figured.” Evie put her heels up on the dash, took a cigarette from a packet in her jeans jacket pocket, and lit it. “So what you gonna do?”

  “Gonna keep asking questions ’til I get some answers.”

  “Or he ties you to a motel bed and breaks your legs with a tire iron.”

  “I guess so, yes.”

  “So why do you owe so much to Evan Riggs, Henry? What is the deal there? I get that he dragged you out of a fight an’ all, but that kinda thing has gotta happen plenty in jail. You got something going on with Evan Riggs that your girlfriend doesn’t want to know about? Was Henry Quinn a cute little prison wife, maybe?”

  Henry laughed. “Sure. That was it right there. You got me, baby.”

  “No, seriously. Why do you have to find this girl?”

  Henry took Evie’s cigarette from her, took a drag, handed it back. “Sometimes you cross paths with someone,” he said. “There’s something there. You can’t name it or label it. It just is. Evan Riggs is me, you know? Bad decisions, moment of weakness, moment of stupidity, and I could be there. Evan’s gonna die in Reeves. He knows he’s got one shot at leaving something of value behind. At least that’s the way I believe he thinks. His daughter, for better or worse, is his daughter, and maybe he’s not taken into consideration that she might not want to be found, I don’t know, but he has his mind set on this one thing, and I made a promise I would see it through.” Henry looked sideways at Evie and smiled ruefully. “I didn’t think there was anything to it but delivering a letter. I didn’t know that Evan’s brother was going to get in the road like a fallen telegraph pole, but he has, and now I have to deal with it.”

  “So you’re gonna keep looking for her no matter what Carson Riggs does?”

  “Well, I can only look so long, but yes, I guess I’ve made that decision.”

  “Only look so long?” she asked. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that if he kills me, then the game is over, ain’t it?”

  “You think it’s that serious?”

  “Sweetheart, I don’t even know what the it is, let alone whether or not it’s that serious.”

  “He’s warned you off twice now,” Evie said. “Looks serious to me.”

  “Well, right now there’s no law against trying to find Sarah Riggs or whatever the hell name she goes by, and the more people tell me to be careful, the less careful I want to be.”

  “Regular kind of man, then,” Evie said, lowering the window an inch or two further.

  “And if you want to stay out of this, I understand completely.”

  Evie laughed. “You don’t know me at all,” she said. “You may have fucked me, but you don’t know me, Henry Quinn. Nope, I’m in this ’til the bitter end. I’m like you, I guess. Someone tells me not to fetch down the cookie jar, then not only am I gonna fetch it down, but I’m gonna eat every damn cookie in there even if it makes me sick as a dog.”

  Henry laughed, and then he glanced sideways at her. She had a smile on her face, but there was a coolness in her eyes, a flicker of anxiety perhaps.

  “Bring it on, Carson Riggs,” she said.

  So now he knew. Whatever they were cooking up, they were in it together. Okay, so they weren’t on some wild spree of robbing banks and shooting folk, but there was trouble up the line. Five days out of Reeves, and there was something going on. Henry could feel it in his bones. Bonnie and Clyde, Dillinger and Billie Frechette, Starkweather and that poor dumb teenage girlie he dragged along for the ride. Not such good precedents.

  “Now you gotta feed me,” Evie said, interrupting his thoughts. “Hungry enough to eat shoelaces and bottle caps.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Lilly Duval: muse, inspiration, lover, friend, the beginning and end of so much.

  Love changed the world, both for those who were in love and those who were not. Determining when loving someone became being in love was indeterminable. Something they said, something they did, an idiosyncrasy of character that was theirs and theirs alone? The simple fact that such an idiosyncrasy became achingly endearing, that you were the only person in the world who could see it, and thus you somehow became more special in your own eyes. Loving someone helped you love yourself a little more, perhaps. That was how it worked for Evan Riggs. Loving this girl made reality more real. He wrote more, more than he’d ever done, and not just songs of love. He wrote from the gut as well as the heart, and sometimes he would find lyrics that surprised even himself. “Lord, I Done So Wrong.” “I’ll Try and Be a Better Man.” It was during this time that such plaintive expositions of the soul were penned, and few were the times he dared to ask if she could ever mean as much as Rebecca. He knew she could not, that no one ever could, but Lilly somehow consumed his thoughts and emotions so as to leave room for little else. Rebecca, at least for a while, was a ghost of something that might have been but never was.

  Th
ere was an edge to the woman, a spectrum of colors that erred toward the dark and shadowed. Perhaps there was just a greater part of everything, the ability to love and to love life matched by an ability to hate whatever opposed her. She fought, and fought with ferocity. She railed against conformity, acceptance, banality, against that which she perceived as safe and normal. She was bohemian, a firebrand, a wire so live that the very air around her seemed to crack and snap with electricity. Against her, Evan knew that he did not possess anything like the gypsy blood his mother had jokingly suggested.

  And yet, as with all people, Lilly was a contradiction, sometimes spending days in bed, wishing to do nothing, seemingly exhausted with the effort of forcing life to be interesting. Perhaps she believed that merely being alive entitled her to something, that she should not have to work so hard, that there should not be so many reasons and obstacles and deprivations.

  “Why is it all so shit?” she would ask Evan, and yet be unable to define what all actually was.

  A month, seeing her every day, almost every hour of every day, made Evan aware that a life with Lilly Duval would be no ordinary life. Everything was drama. There was no middle ground. It was extravagant and wild, or it was nothing, and the nothing was to be challenged and argued with and defied.

  Perhaps he began to better appreciate the decision Rebecca had made in letting him go, how her refusal to follow him was more to do with saving herself from something almost destructive in its intensity than any real measure of her love for him.

  Three months with Lilly and the edges were wearing thin. Even sex seemed driven by some other purpose, as if fucking each other was an act of revenge against something or someone unknown.

  Nine months in and Evan felt himself start to disconnect. Just a little, but he did disconnect. He watched himself as if from a distance, finally refusing to become embroiled in the furor of her emotions. There were no half measures, no respite, no breathing space, and where he had at first found her passion and hunger for life somehow energizing, it was now enervating. The attention that had once seemed so perfectly validating of everything that he was, now felt claustrophobic and oppressive. A fight with Lilly about some meaningless detail left him exhausted, not only mentally and emotionally, but spiritually.

  Close to Christmas of 1947, the train came off the rails.

  Evan played a bar in Round Rock, night of Friday the twelfth of December. Just a small place, maybe thirty or forty regulars, but it was a good set and he was well received, hollered at for three encores and a crowd at the bar waiting to get him drunk. And he got drunk. So drunk he did not make it home until the following day.

  “I was here all night waiting for you,” she said.

  “I know, and I’m sorry,” he replied.

  She stood in the kitchen doorway. She had on her fighting face, the eyes that said I’m winning this one, asshole, and Evan was hungover and tired and he’d driven back as early as he could, and his mouth tasted like a goat had bedded down in there, and he didn’t need it.

  Hand on her hip, that sass in her stance that said she wasn’t moving until there was an explanation that would satisfy, forgetting—as always—that there was no such thing as a satisfactory explanation.

  “Sorry isn’t gonna be enough, is it?” he asked.

  She smiled, and there was a cruel flash in her eyes. He had left her behind. That was the point. It was not that she suspected the attention of other women. Nothing like that. It was simply that something had happened, something that might have relieved her boredom, and she had been excluded. It would only be later that Evan would begin to understand this state of mind, the sense that whatever was happening now, however good or exciting or new or fresh or interesting it might have been, there was always the chance that there was something better going on elsewhere. It was an inability to be in that moment. People could spend their whole lives elsewhere, all the while oblivious to the wonders right before their eyes. Had he understood that at the time, he might have been able to do something about it, but he did not, and thus was impotent.

  “It’s not a matter of sorry, Evan. It’s a matter of thoughtlessness. You could have called me, told me you were going to stay. I could have driven over there. It’s twenty miles, goddamnit. I could have stayed overnight with you, and we could have had breakfast together and whatever.”

  “You’re right,” Evan said. “I didn’t think.”

  “Is it because you didn’t want me there?”

  “No.”

  “Then why?”

  “Because I didn’t think. Because I played a set, I had a drink, then another one, and the more I drank, the less I thought. That was all there was to it. There is nothing else to it. There is nothing else to read into it or try to understand. I fucked up. I am sorry. I apologize. I will do my best not to be so thoughtless in the future, okay?”

  “The sarcasm isn’t appreciated, Evan,” she said, and she glowered at him.

  “I wasn’t being sarcastic.”

  “Sounded sarcastic to me.”

  “Okay, well, it wasn’t meant that way. What I am saying and what you are hearing are not always the same thing.”

  “Meaning what?”

  Evan stood facing her, his hand on his guitar case, his mind slipping its moorings.

  “I know that look,” she said.

  “Do you, Lilly? Do you really? Well, enlighten me, sweetheart. Why don’t you tell me what my face is telling you right now? I would love to hear it.”

  “Sometimes you are such an asshole, Evan Riggs.”

  “Sometimes you are such a bitch, Lilly Duvall.”

  “Is this the way it’s going to be?”

  “Is this the way what is going to be?”

  “Our life together. You forget me and I get angry, and then we fight, and then we fuck, and then we wait for it to happen all over again.”

  “Is that how you think our life is?”

  “That seems to be how it’s going, Evan.”

  “You are fucking crazy sometimes, Lilly. In fact, no, you are not crazy. You are driving me crazy. This is bullshit. This is just wild. I don’t know where the hell you get these ideas from, but they seem to be based on nothing that I can even see, let alone anything that I think is actually happening. Seems to me you are angling for a fight, and I am wondering why—”

  “I could say the same about you … leaving me back here on my own.”

  Evan fell silent, inside and out. He was exhausted. He didn’t want the battle. He sighed quietly and then turned and headed back toward the door of the apartment.

  “You’re leaving?” Lilly asked.

  “Yes, I am, Lilly.”

  “Asshole.”

  Evan turned back. “Enough now,” he said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning nothing more nor less than that, Lilly. I love you, but this is driving me crazy. I don’t know how to make you happy. I don’t know how to make you stop fighting the world—”

  “I am not fighting the world,” she interjected.

  “You are, sweetheart, and you know you are. I have lived with you for a year, and I see it every day. I even see it when you are enjoying yourself. There is always some tiny facet of you that wants something better or different. You know what it’s like? It’s like talking to someone who’s always looking for someone more interesting to talk to, and it wears me out.”

  “You’re leaving me,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Evan smiled. “I am not leaving you.”

  “But you want to.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “You’ve stopped loving me,” she said, as if whatever now passed her lips was an undeniable truth.

  “It’s not a question of how much I love you, Lilly, but who I love. I don’t love the person you are being right now, not the person you believe you have to be in order to get what you want.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” she snapped.

  “Yes, it does. And you know it makes sense,
and that is why you are getting defensive.”

  “Fuck you, Evan.”

  Evan smiled again, which aggravated her further.

  “You can’t just walk up to someone and tell them what to think about who they are,” she said.

  “Yes, you can,” Evan replied. “And I just did.”

  “Well, you’re wrong.”

  “I am always wrong, Lilly, even when I’m right. That’s the point.”

  “I can’t talk to you. You contradict yourself and you make no sense.”

  “Okay,” Evan said resignedly, and once more he headed for the door.

  “You really are leaving me, aren’t you?” Lilly asked, and in her voice there was a slight shadow of anxiety, as if she was wondering if she had pushed him too far.

  “Yes,” Evan said, “I am leaving you for about fifteen minutes. I am going to the store to get some cigarettes and some beer, and then I will come back. Do you want me to get you anything?”

  Lilly looked at him wide-eyed. There was an emptiness in her expression. He felt something then, some strange sense of uncertainty, but he did not trust his intuition. He let the moment go.

  His hand on the door, Evan glanced back at her and smiled. It was an artless, simple smile, an effort to lighten the mood, to relax her, to make her feel at ease, but she did not smile back.

  He should not have gone. He knew it in that second. It was the same as that final moment with Rebecca, knowing he should have said something but staying silent.

  Evan Riggs left the apartment and walked to the store. He bought cigarettes, half a dozen bottles of beer, and a box of Ritz crackers.

  As he’d told Lilly, he was gone no more than fifteen minutes, but a quarter of an hour was all it took.

  By the time he got back, it was too late.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  That which had been suspected was proven out, at least by intuition and observation, that evening at the saloon in Calvary.

  Ames, Sperling, Mills, and Eakins were present, and when Henry Quinn and Evie Chandler starting plying them with drinks and questions, the seams began to unravel. For there were seams, pulled tight from one to the other and back again, and there were moments when one would look to another, and both Henry and Evie knew that some unspoken agreement was in force. Someone speak first, then I will speak; until then I am silent.