Mockingbird Songs

by R.J. Ellory

  “I am not saying that Carson Riggs’s continued presence as sheriff is incorrect,” Harold Mills ventured, “but Warren, being a lawyer an’ all, said there might have been questions asked about the veracity of those elections … whether or not the votes placed and the votes counted were one and the same thing.”

  “Isn’t there some kind of limit as to how many terms someone can serve as sheriff?” Henry asked. “I mean, from what I can work out, Riggs has been sheriff for the better part of thirty years. That can’t be right.”

  “Garfield’s the man who’d have known,” Sperling said. “But he up and died at the end of May.”

  “How did he die?” Evie asked.

  “Heart gave out,” Ames said. “Right there at his desk.”

  “And no one has ever really challenged Riggs for the position?” Henry asked.

  George Eakins leaned forward, his elbows on the table, his hands nursing the glass of whiskey before him. “This isn’t San Angelo, kid,” he said. “Life in a city and life in some small backwater town are not the same thing at all. Here you say something, everyone knows it in an hour. Everyone is living out of one another’s pockets. That’s the way it is, the way it’s always been, probably the way it will always be.”

  “Things are the way they are because no one changes them,” Evie said.

  Clarence smiled. “The voice of youth.”

  “The voice of truth,” Evie said. “Seems to me you guys are frightened of Carson Riggs. You flinch every time his name is mentioned.”

  There was a definite cooling of the atmosphere then. Henry sensed it, felt it, looked at each man in turn and knew that Evie had voiced something that none of them had wanted to hear.

  “Careful now, young lady,” Roy Sperling said, almost under his breath. “You don’t go saying things like that if you want to keep your friends.”

  Evie Chandler smiled, started to laugh. It broke the tension. “Oh, come on, guys!” she said. “You know what I mean. Hell, this guy backs everyone off. Henry’s here trying to find something out, trying to help a friend, and all he gets is brick walls and bullshit. Someone must know something about what happened between Evan and Carson.”

  “Their mother,” Harold Mills said, and if there had been a cooling of the atmosphere in the saloon before, it then became positively icy.

  Ames looked at him, Sperling, too, and there was an unspoken hostility in their response. It was unclear who wished for this history to be revealed and who wished for things to remain unquestioned.

  “Their mother?” Henry said. “She’s alive?”

  Clarence Ames looked away and down, shook his head in seeming disapproval. Something was definitely not right. Some line had been crossed.

  “Hey,” Evie said. “What’s the deal here? Carson’s and Evan’s mother is alive?”

  Harold Mills nodded. “She’s alive, yes.”

  “Where?” Evie asked.

  “Someplace out in Odessa, far as I know,” Mills said.

  “Enough, Harold,” Ames said. “You can’t send these people out there … harassing some old woman who can barely remember her own name.”

  “Old?” Harold said. “Grace Riggs is not so much older than you. And maybe they should go out there. Maybe they should start some trouble, Clarence. Been a long time since there’s been any real trouble in Calvary. Warren said it a few times, didn’t he? That we should all tell him to go fuck himself, and to hell with the consequences.”

  “You’re drunk,” Ames said. He turned to Henry and Evie, smiled somewhat resignedly. “Pay no mind to him,” he told them. “He’s drunk.” It was clear that Mills was not drunk, clearer still that Ames was angry with him for speaking of Grace Riggs.

  “I am not drunk, Clarence,” Mills said. “Nothing to do with liquor. Hell, maybe it is … If I had a good deal more, I might open my fucking mouth and never shut it.”

  “You go ahead and do that, Harold. See what the hell happens,” Ames said.

  “You think I wouldn’t?” Mills retorted, his voice edged with animosity now. “You think I wouldn’t say to hell with all of this … all of you. Take one last stab at that—”

  “Enough!” Roy Sperling said sharply, cutting them all dead.

  Silence hung awkwardly in the middle of the room. There was no going back. Words had been spoken that could neither be retrieved nor forgotten.

  Henry Quinn and Evie Chandler perceived a sense of quiet terror. It was tangible; the air was cold and electric.

  Henry got up from his chair. “We’re going,” he told Evie.

  Evie got up without a word.

  “Thank you for the drink, gentlemen,” Henry said. “Next time it’s on me.”

  He turned and started toward the door. He reached out his hand behind him, and Evie took it.

  “Mr. Quinn.”

  Henry stopped, turned back, and looked toward the small gathering.

  “Man digs a hole, he better shore up the sides,” Clarence Ames said. “Last thing he wants to do is go and bury himself.”

  Evie opened her mouth to respond, but Henry squeezed her hand and she said nothing.

  They left the saloon and walked back to Henry’s truck, and neither of them said a word.

  An hour later, sitting beside each other in the Chandler house, McCloud on the TV with the sound turned down, Evie’s father evident in his absence, the conversation could not have been about anything but what they’d witnessed and heard that evening in the saloon.

  “He’s got something on them,” Evie said.

  “All of them,” Henry replied, “and maybe not the same thing. He has been sheriff for nearly thirty years, for Christ’s sake. Every misdemeanor, every wrongdoing, every fuckup … It’s a small town. He must know everything that happens, every little secret.”

  “And he keeps them in check and he keeps getting voted in.”

  “And the mother,” Henry said. “Evan never said a thing about her. I never even suspected that she was still alive. I want to go to Odessa and talk to the mother.”

  “We have no idea where she is, Henry. Odessa ain’t Calvary. I don’t think you can stop the first person you see in the street and they’ll tell you.”

  “We ask Harold Mills,” Henry said. “There’s a man who wants to talk if ever I saw one.”

  “Tonight? Tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow,” Henry said.

  “And tonight?”

  “I wanna get drunk and do stuff to you that’s nearly illegal,” Henry said.

  Evie laughed. “Hell, soldier, why stop at nearly illegal?”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The apartment entrance was off a walkway. At the end of the walkway there was a flight of wrought-iron steps down to the street. It was one flight, maybe twelve or fifteen feet. By the time Evan returned to the lower step of that flight, he knew something was awry.

  A gentleman dances with the one that brung him.

  Someone said that to him one time. He couldn’t remember who or when or why, but it had stayed with him. It meant so many things, and all of them were about loyalty.

  Later he would ask questions that could never be answered, and there would be so very many of them.

  Later he would turn all of it back upon himself, and she would be blameless and perfect, and he would be the worst kind of man for any woman, and there would be nothing right about what he had said or done. He had broken promises. He had lied. He had deserted her. He had made her life a misery. He had used her to fill a vacuum left by Rebecca, and that—in itself—was the greatest lie of all. He had told Lilly that he loved her so many times, and yet he didn’t even know the meaning of the word.

  This was his penance. Of course it was. If not, then how could this have happened?

  Halfway up the stairs, he set down the bag he was carrying. Why did he set it down? He did not know then, and he could not explain it in hindsight.

  He just knew.

  He would write a song about this moment. It would be called “No T
ime Left.” He would never perform it. He would never even sing it after the day it was completed.

  As he reached the end of the walkway and started down toward the door of the apartment, a quiet feeling of panic started in his lower gut. He had felt this before. Stronger then, walking down to the barn and finding that Rocket had vanished. He remembered it vividly, the sense that something was so terribly, terribly wrong, and one thing could never be wrong by itself … There would be other things wrong, things spiraling out of control, one small catastrophe somehow drawing other greater catastrophes and disasters into its orbit. Eventually it would all be a black hole of despair and panic and horror …

  Evan Riggs forced such things out of his mind.

  He reached the apartment door. He pushed it, but it did not give. He had neither closed it nor locked it. He turned the handle. Again, the door did not give.

  His heart skipped.

  Evan raised his hand and knocked. He waited no more than five seconds and knocked again.

  “Lilly?” he called out. “Lilly, open the door, for Christ’s sake. This is just dumb.”

  Nothing.

  He knocked again. Clenched his fist and pounded. Heart matching rhythm, but pressure inside now, like something coming to the boil.

  He looked left and right as if to find someone or something that would tell him what he didn’t know.

  Was she just being mischievous? Was she meting out a little punishment for his failure to come home, his failure to call, his failure to inform her? For all his little failures.

  Was this all that it was? Or was there something else happening? Was there something more serious?

  “Lilly? Sweetheart?” he called, louder this time. There was no way she would not have heard him. The apartment was small. Four rooms: bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, a narrow living room where they would sit and talk and watch TV and sometimes he would read lyrics and sing melodies to her and she would say, That is so beautiful, Evan … That breaks my heart …

  And now the pressure he feels is breaking his heart. Surely a heart cannot survive such a thunderous assault … panic swelling up like some dark spread of blood in water, like a black flower of despair that buries its roots deep into the very core of self, the petals filling the chest, the odor rank and fetid and poisonous.

  This is not happening.

  Evan remembered thinking that. He was behind himself. That’s how it felt. As if he were right there on the walkway watching himself as he beat on the door, having to step aside as other people came out of their apartments, people he knew, people saying, Is everything okay, Evan? What’s happening, Evan? Jeez, Evan … give it a rest, man, until they understood that this was real life, that this wasn’t Evan once more drunk and raging, that this wasn’t Evan drunk and fighting with Lilly or Lilly mad with Evan yet again and trying to break down the door to get to him and rail at him for some other foolish stunt he’d pulled …

  This was life in its realest form, and it did not look good.

  People came to help.

  Evan was back inside himself. His shoulder was against the door. Couldn’t have been more than a minute since he’d first knocked, and yet it seemed as if he had been prevaricating for an hour.

  What would have happened if he had acted immediately?

  What might have he been able to do had he gotten through that door without delay?

  In truth, nothing, but rationality and logic parted company as soon as panic and fear showed up for the party.

  The door went through on the third attempt.

  He knew then without doubt.

  There were people behind him as he rushed through the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom, all the way to the bathroom, where he had lain beside her in the overflowing tub, a tub too small for two, but both of them drunk and laughing and so very much in love, candles lighting the room with a multitude of halos, late nights beside each other, talking of things that they wanted, things they would do together, things they could never do with anyone else … traveling the world and seeing wonders and making friends and gathering into their collective experience those things that only they and they alone would fully understand and appreciate. That was the life they had planned. That was the life that should have happened.

  The blood spooled through the water like clouds being born. Scarlet, slow-motion clouds.

  She had cut her arms from elbow to wrist, the full length, the full nine yards. Her veins had opened up without resistance, given her an irreversible escape route out of whatever desperate unreality within which she imagined she was living.

  What she believed and what actually was could never have been the same thing.

  Anything can be changed.

  Tomorrow will always be different.

  Most things come easier after a good sleep and a long laugh.

  Not this time.

  Evan dropped to his knees at the side of the tub.

  Fifteen minutes, maybe less. He grabbed her arms, and the blood filled the spaces between his fingers as he lifted her from the tub.

  Evan could not speak. But he could scream, and the sound came from deep inside him, somewhere primitive and ancient, and he pulled her close and held her so tight, and she looked back at him with that unmistakable deadlight in her eyes.

  Standing then, he turned, and there were people crowding the bathroom.

  His voice returned. “Get back!” he shouted. “Get out of the way! Goddamn you, get out of the fucking way!”

  The huddle parted, and Evan staggered through into the bedroom, the living room, out onto the walkway beyond the front door of the apartment, and Lilly seemed to weigh nothing at all, as if every drop of blood within her had now been emptied out.

  He kicked over the brown paper bag on the way down the steps. The bottles of beer he’d bought bounced down the steps. Two of them broke, and beer spilled out into the dirt. He would have opened that beer with Lilly. He would have opened a bottle of cold beer and passed it to her, and she would have smiled the way she always did after they’d fought, after the emotional dust had settled, and he would tell her she was no good for him, and she would tell him how he couldn’t live without her, and then she would laugh and tell him he was more of an asshole than she was a bitch, and then he would pull her close and they would stay like that for some endless time, and he would tell her once again that he was sorry, and he would mean it with every atom of his being, and then everything would go back to battery until the next time.

  Now there would be no next time.

  Now there would be nothing.

  Evan dropped to his knees in the dirt at the bottom of the steps. He cradled her in his arms, and he knew she was dead.

  He’d known that from the first moment he’d seen her lying there within a scarlet, slow-motion cloud of her own blood.

  To Evan, in that moment, it all seemed to have been borne out of a lie. If he had stayed back in Calvary, this never would have happened. If Rebecca had left with him, this never would have happened.

  But it happened, and it happened in a heartbeat.

  All done and over with: the passion, the promise of the future, the life they would have created together.

  The end of one thing is not always the beginning of something else; sometimes it is just the end.

  It was twenty minutes before an ambulance showed up.

  The attending medic was named Don Halliday, and he’d seen it all before.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Henry Quinn woke beside Evie Chandler and wondered what he had done to bring all of this upon himself. He believed he had lost all connection to whatever his life might have been before Reeves.

  For a short while he lay there as Evie slept, her father making the sounds of someone trying not to make a sound, and then he left the house, the banging of the screen perhaps an accident. Evie stirred, but she did not wake, and Henry slid out from beside her and put on his jeans and T-shirt.

  He did not leave the room but took a chair from near the wall and
set it in front of the window. Sunday morning, the sky bright, the breeze uncharacteristically fresh for West Texas, as if the arid wind that so often drew everything from you had now acceded to the notion of giving something back.

  Henry thought of Evan. He missed the man, and though unafraid to voice his feelings, he perhaps missed him more than he would have been willing to say. And even if he chose to speak of it, what would he say? That one of the most important people of his life was a killer he’d known for less than three years? It made no sense.

  Henry thought of his mother, too; if she and Howard Ulysses were drunk and fighting or drunk and getting along great. Or just drunk.

  If he was completely honest, he cared more for what was happening with Evan than he did for what was happening with his mother. They were mother and son, sure, but they had never connected. He was, after all, an accident, and though she had never said or done anything intended to make him feel that way, it was still an inescapable truth that sat between them like an unwanted member of the family. They both were aware of it, but never said a word. That was how they dealt with it.

  That morning, the morning he got drunk and fired the handgun, the morning he nigh on killed Sally O’Brien and simultaneously fucked his own immediate life beyond repair, was perhaps the single most complete expression of his own desperate frustration. It begged the question: How much of what happens to us is determined by a single, nonchalant thought? That carefree, throwaway I wish … becomes the force majeure, and then everything changes, perhaps rapidly, even more likely in increments and inches, sometimes so slowly you don’t even notice … and then you’re looking back and wondering how the hell you ended up here.

  Started with a thought, and that was all that was needed.

  Henry glanced back as Evie stirred.

  She stretched, opened her eyes, saw him sitting there, and smiled.

  “What you doin’?”