Mockingbird Songs

by R.J. Ellory

  Henry smiled back. Sometimes she surprised him with her beauty. “Just thinking.”

  “Surgeon General health warning against that,” Evie said. She leaned up, the sheet falling from her and exposing her throat, her breasts, her stomach.

  “Dad gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Every Sunday he goes out to put flowers on my mom’s grave.”

  “Where is she buried?”

  “Hundred and something miles away,” Evie said. “Done it for years, no matter the weather, no matter what else is going on.”

  “True love, huh?”

  Evie frowned. “I don’t know, Henry … Maybe it’s just that he can’t let go. Sometimes I wonder if he does it out of guilt.”

  “Guilt … for what?”

  Evie shrugged, brushed her bangs from her eyes. “Christ knows, Henry.”

  She slid from the bed, sat naked on the edge of the mattress. “We gonna go to Odessa and find Grace Riggs, right?”

  Henry nodded. “Go see Harold Mills first and ask him if there’s anything else he wants to tell us.”

  “You think he’ll talk?” Evie asked as she tugged a T-shirt over her head and fetched clean underwear from the drawer against the wall.

  “Seems like he wanted to last night,” Henry said.

  Evie smiled knowingly. “The previous night and the following morning can be a thousand years different, right?”

  Henry nodded. “Yep.”

  She made eggs. Henry wasn’t so hungry, but he ate a few mouthfuls out of courtesy. He drank three cups of coffee, though, and asked Evie if her father had given any indication that Henry’s presence might be a problem.

  “My dad is a What you see is what you get guy,” she said. “Maybe the last of a long line. If there’s a problem, he’ll tell you. He’ll tell you nice, but he will definitely tell you. Besides, he likes you.”

  “He does? How can you tell?”

  “Has he told you to get the fuck out of his house?”

  “No.”

  “Then he likes you, Henry. Don’t sweat it. Sometimes you are too well-behaved for your own good.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that you’re not in Reeves anymore. You don’t always have to color inside the lines. Most of the time it’s perfectly okay to be nothing but yourself.”

  “And the rest of the time?” Henry asked.

  “Be someone better.”

  Henry laughed. “Where the hell did you come from, Evie Chandler?”

  “Fell from heaven, didn’t I?” she said. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  Henry drove. Evie knew where the Mills house was, but she suggested they park up the block and walk down. It was a little after nine. If the Millses were heading to church, they would be going soon enough.

  Harold Mills was sitting out on the veranda. He was smoking a pipe, perhaps forbidden to do so indoors, and when he saw Evie Chandler and Henry Quinn turn the corner, there was a definite shift in the atmosphere. For a moment it seemed he was going to stand and greet them, but he went right on sitting there, his back against the front wall of the house, his feet outstretched. He was dressed smart—a shirt and tie, his pants pressed, his boots polished.

  “Wondered if you’d show,” he said when they were within earshot.

  “Harold,” Evie said. “You okay?”

  “Could be better,” he replied, “but isn’t that always the case?”

  Henry didn’t speak. He waited for Mills to broach the subject that they all knew was coming.

  “Sometimes a man opens his mouth when he should just keep the darn thing shut,” Mills said.

  “Last night,” Evie replied.

  “Last night, last week, last year, it don’t matter when,” Mills went on. “But what a man says is nowhere near as important as what he does. And what he does is sometimes far less important than what he doesn’t do.” Mills drew on the pipe, using the moment to consider what he was going to say next. It very much seemed that way to Henry, that Mills was choosing words carefully, considering what to say, how best to say it.

  “If you want to go out and see Grace Riggs in Odessa, I don’t believe anyone will stop you,” he said. “From what I hear, she’s as crazy as a shithouse rat. Can’t imagine she’ll be able to help you better understand much of anything, to be honest, but you never know. Sometimes the crazy ones went crazy because they saw more truth than anyone else.”

  “What happened with that family?” Evie asked.

  Mills looked momentarily surprised. “You think this is about the family, sweetheart?” He smiled resignedly, shook his head. “This isn’t about a family, my dear. This is about a whole town, maybe a whole county. Sometimes you don’t ask a question for the sole reason that you know how bad the answer’s gonna be.”

  “And this all has something to do with Evan’s daughter?”

  Harold Mills shrugged. It was not the shrug of a man who did not know, but that of man who did not want to know. Everything about him said that forgetting, perhaps even pretending to never have known in the first place, was sometimes so much more preferable than reality. Reality meant responsibility; responsibility meant confronting the fact that there were things that should have been done that were not.

  “Where is she?” Evie asked.

  “Odessa, like I said,” Mills replied. “Some nuthouse out there. They call it a rest home or some such. You want to find it, you’ll find it. They don’t say so, but it’s part of the Ector County Hospital. Like most things, they dress it up as something it ain’t.”

  “Did Carson put her there?” Henry asked. It was the first time he’d spoken, and it was a question that raised a knowing smile on Harold Mills’s face.

  Mills paused for some time before he said anything, and the silence became tangibly uncomfortable. When he did finally speak, it was to Evie, almost as if the question had arrived from the ether and Henry was not there at all.

  “I’ve said all I’m gonna say, and if you want to go digging holes and looking for stuff, then you knock yourself out.”

  He turned then, suddenly, and walked back into the house. The door slammed shut behind him like a gunshot.

  Evie looked at Henry. Henry looked back at Evie.

  “Fuck,” she said, and that, too, was like the sound of a gun in the still morning air.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Evan Riggs’s life did not modulate gracefully into a minor key; it dropped with all the force of gravity.

  Like a cold stone from a great height, Evan’s emotional state plunged into the deepest reaches of despair and self-hatred. He could not have believed himself more guilty for what had happened to Lilly Duvall. Perhaps he did not wish to believe himself anything other than solely responsible, looking to punish himself for so many things that may have led to her suicide: the small betrayals, the lies, the deceptions, the times he ignored or neglected or set aside her importances in place of his own. These were things of which all humans were guilty, an incumbent and inherent aspect of all relationships, but some believed themselves more culpable than others. Looking to punish self for both the real and the imagined, any motivation would serve. Evan believed himself the guiltiest of all. Perhaps it was his nature to be melodramatic, to be the artist, the tortured poet; perhaps he was looking to fuel the fires of creativity with something dark and possessed. Whatever the rationale, it was a heavy coat he cut for himself, and he wore it irrespective of the weather.

  Never once in those initial weeks did he consider the possibility that he may not have been complicit. Never once did he look beyond himself for the cause of her death. The truth, in fact, was that Lilly Duvall had been on a self-destruct mission for years, her suicide the final act of a performance lasting more than two decades. Perhaps she had merely become exhausted with remembering lines, writing new scenes, recognizing that those who shared the stage with her were not there of their own volition. That last vain declaration of abandonment had been her curtain call, an invitation for an encore that
never came, and so she bowed out in the most dramatic way she could imagine. History would write her as some tragic Shakespearean character, a Lavinia, an Ophelia perhaps, but history was as good a liar as any Machiavelli. In the final analysis, the facade stripped away, the scenery taken down, Lilly Duvall’s suicide was an act of selfishness. She died to make others feel guilty for her own inherent shortcomings.

  Evan did not write for a long time, and then the songs he wrote were moody and somber. Those songs he had earlier created now became something else, something so much darker and more introspective. The people who came to hear him changed, too—no longer the lovers of classic country melodies and soulful ballads, but those also seeking some kind of tacit consent and agreement that life was forever tinged with sadness and desperation.

  And Evan drank. He did not drink to quench some physical thirst, but to douse some inner fire that raged unseen. However much he drank, the fire raged on, and the violent shifts in temperament became too much to bear. Those around him either escaped, or they were drawn into this dark orbit and turned inside out.

  The decline of Evan Riggs did not end in a fall. A woman had sent him into a tailspin that lasted for the better part of six months, and he finally reached a point where he knew he would have to level out, climb once more, or keep on heading down until he crashed for good.

  Morning of Sunday, March 21, 1948, Evan Riggs woke on the floor in the back room of a bar. He had evidently collapsed dead drunk, been locked inside, and everyone had gone home none the wiser. He went into the bar itself, found a glass, headed for the first bottle of bourbon. He poured a good three inches, raised it to his lips, and stopped. There was a mirror behind the bar, and he could see himself as clear as day. That—it seemed—was enough, for he tipped the bourbon back into the bottle and put the empty glass in the sink.

  He could hear his mother.

  Show me anyone who ever got anything done by being weak and I’ll be weak, Evan. You show me one person who hasn’t made a mess of things. It happens. It’s called life. You get past it. You deal with what happened.

  The choice was there, plain as day.

  Evan started cleaning the bar. He swept; he washed glasses; he straightened chairs and tables and cleaned the windows. He worked hard. By the time the owner turned up at four, Evan was flat-out exhausted.

  “Hey, what the hell is this?” the guy said. “What you doin’ in here?”

  Evan smiled. “Got locked in here, woke up, figured I’d clean the place up a bit.”

  The man came forward. “What’s your name?”

  “Riggs. Evan Riggs.”

  “You didn’t drink nothin, rob the till?”

  Evan laughed. “No, sir, I did not.”

  “So, what’s your business, son?”

  “Don’t have one … not exactly.”

  “You want a job? I got a bunch of places, all need to be taken care of. I got cleaners, but they rob me blind, steal liquor, you know?”

  Evan shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I’m a musician.”

  “Is that so?

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That what were you doin’ when you got locked up in here? Being a musician? Seems more likely you were sleepin’ off a drunk.”

  Evan didn’t reply.

  The man extended his hand. “Name’s Lou Ingrams.”

  Evan Riggs and Lou Ingrams shook hands.

  “You look like you need a job, son. You can take it or not. You show up here Monday at noon, I’ll know I got a supervisor. You don’t, I know I ain’t. Not complicated.”

  Lou Ingrams let Evan out of the bar. Evan went back to the apartment and surveyed the devastation of empty bottles, dirty laundry, unwashed cups and plates.

  He got to work. Three hours. Then he bathed, shaved, and put on clean clothes.

  He looked in the mirror and was reminded of a man he once knew.

  Monday at noon he went back to Lou Ingrams’s bar.

  “I got five bars, one club,” Ingrams said. “I’m gonna show you where they are and what I need.”

  Evan worked the day. He worked the week. By the start of April, he was a different man. He wasn’t drinking. His apartment was clean, and it stayed that way. He took his clothes to the Laundromat. He showed up on time for work and he went home exhausted.

  One time he asked Lou Ingrams why he had given him the job.

  “Because I done the drunk thing,” Ingrams said. “You got locked in a bar all night and didn’t kill yourself with bourbon. Where you were was the same as me. That’s no place for anyone. You get back on the horse, you know? Even if he gets a leg up from someone, a cowboy gets back on the horse and gets himself home no matter what.”

  “I appreciate what you done,” Evan said, and they never discussed it again.

  In July of that same year, Evan Riggs contacted Leland Soames at Crooked Cow in Abilene and asked whether there was still an opening to go on up there and make a record. Soames said he would get back to him, and Evan felt it was a brush-off. Soames, however, was good to his word. Called him three days later and said there was a week in August if Evan could make it.

  “I can make it,” Evan said.

  Evan then told Lou Ingrams about it.

  “So, you gonna be the new Hank Williams, then.”

  “What, get the shit beaten out of me and die at twenty-nine?”

  “Some sense of humor you got,” Ingrams said. “Don’t let them music business people take it off you.”

  “I won’t.”

  Evan Riggs and Lou Ingrams parted company on Sunday, August 1, 1948. Evan was taking a Greyhound up to Abilene early on the following day.

  Ingrams told him to make a good record and to send him a copy when it was done. He promised he would. He said he would bring one back and deliver it personal.

  Just a week later, August eighth, Lou Ingrams was shot dead in a failed robbery at his club. He died right there on a floor that Evan Riggs had cleaned a hundred times.

  Evan Riggs heard about it more than a month later. The funeral had been and gone.

  Evan went to a bar and drank himself senseless. He spent the night in a jail cell and was bailed out by Herman Russell the following morning.

  Leland Soames thought nothing of it. He’d recorded too many people and spent too much time with too many musicians to see Evan Riggs’s behavior as anything but standard. You took the rough with the smooth. The kid was young. He’d get over it, whatever it was.

  Evan Riggs wasn’t so sure. Life had beaten him hard with Rebecca Wyatt, beaten him some more with Lilly Duvall, and now—with the untimely death of Lou Ingrams—it seemed intent on undermining every ounce of faith he possessed in the universal balance of all things. It wasn’t right. It was further confirmation that life was skewed in favor of someone other than himself.

  And that was when Evan Riggs decided to quit Abilene, to quit his plan of returning to Austin and head home to Calvary. Maybe to lick his wounds, maybe to try to gain some perspective, he didn’t know. Intuition told him that going back for a while was the right thing to do.

  In truth, he couldn’t have been more wrong.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Henry and Evie followed the Pecos up to Iraan, took 349 to the intersection of 67 and headed west. They made Odessa by eleven. Henry had been in Odessa just five days earlier, had stayed overnight on the day of his release. Five days. It was hard to believe. This was the journey now: his experiences in Calvary; the run-in with Carson Riggs; meeting Evie Chandler, a girl who had so effortlessly worked her way into his heart and seemed set to stay there; the time spent at the Honeycutts’, the words he’d shared with Evie’s father, with Clarence Ames, Roy Sperling, George Eakins, and finally, with Harold Mills. All of it in five days. It seemed surreal, and yet it stretched out behind him in slow motion. Time was relative to nothing but itself. This he had learned in Reeves. Boredom was nothing more than an inability to occupy each moment as if it were the only moment that existed, agitation and frustra
tion nothing more than an effort to slow it down. Time just was, and if you did not let it be what it was, it became an endless source of trouble.

  “I want a cup of coffee,” Evie said. “Let’s find someplace and ask where the County Hospital is.”

  It was Sunday morning; finding someplace wasn’t as easy as would have been the case in Austin, but a small diner downtown was serving late breakfasts and strong coffee for those who weren’t in church.

  Henry and Evie took a corner booth at the back, asked the waitress for directions to the hospital when she brought their order.

  “Easy enough,” she said. “Go right, keep on going, and don’t stop until you see it. Big building. Ugly, too.” She smiled and left them to it.

  Ector County Hospital was big, and it was ugly. It seemed intent on spoiling the view with its dingy concrete mass. The design was cumbersome, as if additional wings and blocks had been nailed on as afterthoughts and addendums. Frank Lloyd Wright would have refused even to be sick in such a place.

  “So, we have a plan?” Evie asked.

  “Tell them you’re her sister’s niece or something,” Henry said. “Her granddaughter, maybe? I don’t know.”

  “Let’s go see what happens,” Evie said, and took off up the main steps of the facility and went through the heavy glass doors.

  It was far easier than either of them had imagined. Hospital policy seemed welcoming of visitors, and inquiries were not made as to who Henry and Evie were or how they were related to the patient they were asking after.

  “Grace Riggs, yes,” the woman at reception said, having consulted a typed directory of names. “She is in the Andersen Wing. Third floor, turn left out of the elevator, go all the way to the end of the corridor, turn right, and then follow the signs.”

  They did as they were told, the size of the building evident only as they walked. It must have taken them ten minutes to find their destination. The Andersen Wing was some sort of psychiatric facility, perhaps a final repository for the unsalvageable and terminally ill. The atmosphere was foreboding, as if to find yourself here was to know that all hope had been abandoned.