Mockingbird Songs

by R.J. Ellory

  “You are a lucky man, Carson. Not many men who could say that they have their life mapped out the way they want it before they’ve even hit thirty.”

  “And I want to take care of Ma and Pa,” Carson said. “I want to make sure they have enough money to never have to worry about things … to never have a concern for where the next meal is coming from—”

  “We have never had to worry about where the next meal is coming from, Carson,” Evan interjected. “I think that’s a little melodramatic, wouldn’t you say?”

  “How would you know, Carson? You’ve not been here. Things have been tough sometimes. Winter before last, you know? You wouldn’t know what was going on. You’ve never stayed long enough to get into the grain of the thing.”

  “I’ll give you that, Carson, but I’ll not give you the fight you’re spoiling for.”

  “I’m not spoiling for a fight, Evan. I’m trying to have a real, honest-to-God conversation with you about our responsibilities here.”

  “And what responsibilities would they be, Carson?”

  “See,” Carson said. “Just like always, you assume I have some other agenda here. I have no other agenda. I am trying to do what is best, and the reason I am talking to you about it is that you are heading off again, no doubt, and there ain’t no clue as to how long you’ll be gone or what’s gonna happen to you, and—just like always—I’ll be the one left behind to take care of everything. Now, we can either have this conversation, or you can agree to stay behind and take care of the farm and everything else with me. It’s your choice, Evan.”

  Evan conceded. “I am sorry,” he said. “You’re right. I will leave, and you will stay behind, and I will hear you out.”

  “Okay, good,” Carson said. He took a pack of cigarettes from his vest pocket and lit one. “So, here goes … I have been approached by a representative of the US Navy. More accurately, the Naval Petroleum Reserves Department. They are very interested in test drilling on our land, seeing if there’s oil here. If so … well, if so, you can just imagine the kind of money we’re talking.”

  “You want to sell the farm,” Evan said matter-of-factly.

  “I want to look at the possibility of subleasing the land to a petro-chemical firm that processes fuel oils and suchlike, Evan. I want to give us and our parents every opportunity to succeed in this life. I want Ma and Pa to have some real financial stability and freedom in their later years.”

  “And what does Pa say?”

  Carson hesitated.

  “He doesn’t know, does he? He doesn’t know that you’ve been talking to the navy people, right?”

  “Ha! You make it sound like some sort of conspiracy. People come to me. I can hear them out, hear what they have to say, make a decision to discuss it with you, and then if we decide it’s a good idea, we can go to Pa together and see what he thinks.”

  “If we decide?” Evan said. “I get the idea you’ve already made a decision, Carson.”

  “So, what are you telling me? That you won’t even consider such a thing, even though it might give Ma and Pa a quality of life that they could never have even dreamed of?”

  “I am telling you that this discussion, as you call it, is not for you and me to have. If we have this discussion, then Ma and Pa are right here … unless you don’t want them here.”

  “You don’t change, do you?” Carson said. “You were always a selfish son of a bitch, always thinking of yourself before anyone else. Everyone running around pandering to your every wish, Ma and Pa doting on you, spoiling you, giving you whatever you wanted. Hell, you couldn’t deliver up an honest day’s work if your life depended on it.”

  Evan didn’t respond. There was no point. Carson was going to be pigheaded and opinionated, and once he’d taken a stand, there was no shifting him. Changing his viewpoint was tantamount to admitting he was wrong, and that was something he could never do.

  “I am going to leave for Austin soon,” Evan said. “I won’t mention to anyone that we had this conversation, Carson. If you want to raise the issue with Pa and include me before I go, then so be it. If you act behind his back, then I will speak to Warren Garfield and stop you dead in your tracks. Sheriff you may be, but that does not give you license to do what you want. You say you’re acting in Ma’s and Pa’s best interests, but I think you’re acting in your own. You want to accuse me of selfishness, you go right ahead. Looks to me like you’re just after painting me the same color as yourself.”

  “Fuck you, Evan,” Carson said. “You are narrow-minded, self-centered, and an asshole, to boot.”

  “You were first of the line,” Evan said. “Seems to me you got the lion’s share of all those things.”

  Carson just looked at his younger brother, and there was a defiance in his eyes that Evan knew all too well.

  What Carson would do in his absence he could not predict, and he knew that he should stay. He should stay, but he could not. Not after what had happened with Rebecca on Friday night, not to see her marry his older brother, not to see Carson manipulate and maneuver his way around everyone, tying them up, getting them convinced that whatever he was doing was for the best. No, he could not stay for that.

  Evan Riggs knew he was relinquishing his responsibility for the family as a whole, and perhaps that was selfish and uncaring, but the pull to leave was far greater than any force of familial gravity. His mother and father had always taken care of themselves. His ma would see something she didn’t like long before it even happened, and she would prompt her husband to act. Together they would effortlessly subvert and derail any attempt on Carson’s part to do something with which they did not agree. And then there was the law. Sheriff he may be, but Warren Garfield, the family lawyer, would have access to any and all paperwork and documentation relating to land, leases, mortgages, ownership deeds, and suchlike, and Carson did not have the authority to act as proxy for their father. The farm was safe. Evan felt sure of that, and if he was not sure of it, then he would work on convincing himself so as to justify his departure.

  Evan stayed a few more days, and then he made preparations to leave. Carson did not broach the matter with their father, and William Riggs showed no sign of anything that gave Evan cause for concern.

  William and Grace were sorry to see their youngest leave once more, but they knew better than to try and stop him.

  And so Evan left Calvary for Austin. Morning of Monday the fourteenth, he pulled up stakes once more and left the Riggs farm behind, Rebecca, too. Carson was stoic and mannered, evidently suppressing what he really wanted to say for the sake of their parents. He shook his younger brother’s hand, wished him well, but his tone was guarded. No doubt Grace was aware of it, but she said nothing.

  What she did say unsettled Evan, and it was a mere whisper as he hugged her.

  “Let’s not see you back here with anything but good news, eh, son?”

  He did not reply. The implication was that he was more capable of returning with bad news than anything else, and in his very being he knew this to be true.

  Perhaps he was—after all was said done—nothing but a magnet for trouble. Carson’s fall from the hayloft back in thirty-seven, the incident with Gabe Ellsworth, the death of Lilly Duvall, this most recent matter with Rebecca and his betrayal of Carson, the potential conflict about the oil people.

  Was he a harbinger of trouble and bad news? Was that the kind of person he was? Someone whose passing could be proven by the wreckage he left behind?

  Driving away, the farm once again disappearing in the rearview, Evan Riggs hoped he would not return with bad news, caused either by himself or his older brother.

  Carson Riggs was an arrogant man, a man of fixed opinions and vested self-interest. He had not really settled, nor had he really learned a great deal from his work. Evan had tried to convince himself that Carson had mellowed, but he had not. Now Evan was not only leaving the family farm once more, but also leaving Calvary in his older brother’s hands. Those hands were more than ca
pable of stirring up a great deal of trouble.

  Evan turned a blind eye, as he was wont to do, as he had so often done before, and that was perhaps his greatest sin. The last person to admit cowardice is the coward himself.

  It had been said that all it took for evil to prosper was that good men did nothing.

  Carson was not evil—far from it—but he had a mind of his own, and that mind formulated intentions that perhaps did not serve everyone else as well as they served himself.

  Was Evan now also painting Carson the same color as himself? Perhaps so. They were brothers, after all.

  What would happen now, he could not predict; events would play out, and only time would tell.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Marriage hadn’t worked for Clarence Ames. He had a taste for liquor and cards; she had a manner of making her disapproval clear without ever saying a word. Her name was Laetitia Redmond, one of the Langley Redmonds from over the Pecos. Langley women said Calvary men were all hat and no cattle. Calvary men said that Langley women were two shovels short of a bucketload. Within a week of marrying her, Clarence Ames knew he’d picked a sour ’un, and there wasn’t no way to take her back and pick again.

  Emotionally speaking, Laetitia Ames was as cold as a fish. Had a face on her like a well-worn shoe. Not the well-worn that comes from fondness, but the kind that comes from wearing them in all weathers or wading through the deepest shit. Pinch-faced is how you might call it, like a bloodhound chewing a wasp, Roy Sperling said, but never to Clarence’s face. There were two things you never ran down to a man: his choice of handgun and his taste in womenfolk.

  When all was said and done, the marriage was over before it started. Laetitia returned to her ma and pa in Langley, thus precluding the hope of any progeny. Once bitten, twice shy, Clarence said, and never considered another marriage. The Ames line would die with Clarence, and he knew it. In truth, there was a deep and ingrained sadness in the man, and over time that had soured to a vinegarish resentment toward those in love, those married, those with children, and pretty much everyone else who wasn’t Clarence Ames. He tolerated the saloon crowd—Doc Sperling, Eakins, Mills, even Warren Garfield when he’d still been alive enough to drink with them—but that was simply borne out of a sense of responsibility for the community as a whole. Lord knows what they would have gotten up to without someone to keep an eye on them, and he had assigned himself this supervisory duty.

  Henry Quinn and Evie Chandler were—additionally—a cause for civic concern. A small social environment such as Calvary possessed a natural balance, and that balance was maintained by knowing what worked, knowing who did what and when, by following tacit agreements and consents, some of which didn’t even need to be directly communicated. Some things were just understood, and that was enough.

  Like Carson Riggs. As a result of Carson’s post and functions as sheriff, there was almost nothing in the way of crime in Calvary. Bums and hobos showed up every once in a while. They didn’t stay long. Itinerant workers came in from the east and south in the hope of farm work at harvest time. Where they were needed, they stayed. Where they were not, they were moved on quickly. If they drank too much, got troublesome, harassed the womenfolk, made trouble of any kind, they spent a night or two in Carson’s office basement, and then they were gone. First train, first bus, Carson even going so far as to drive them thirty or forty miles back the way they came and bidding them adieu personal-like. Of course, there were rumors, hearsay, some story about a hobo being found dead out near Stockton Plateau, both his arms snapped jagged and drag marks behind him for a quarter mile, but rumors and hearsay could go to hell in a handbasket. Calvary was safe and quiet and settled. Calvary was everything that it needed to be, and Evan Riggs, and everything that had taken place all those years ago, was a thing of the past. The past was full of different people, and they had no place in the here and now.

  What Clarence had heard of Henry Quinn didn’t sit well with him. He had gotten drunk and shot a woman. Carson had told him so. Carson had access to prison records, police records, any kind of record he wished. He done looked the boy up, and there he was in black-and-white. Grievous assault, unlawful possession of a firearm. Probably other stuff. Drugs, no doubt. Evie Chandler was a sweet enough kid. Had a mouth on her, for sure, but nothing malicious. They flirted with her in the saloon, but then, who wouldn’t? She was a pretty girl, and even if they were old enough to be her granddaddy, they weren’t queers, were they? It was a little fun, harmless enough, and it never went beyond that. But now this boy had showed up and she’d fallen in with him. An ill-advised course of action, if Clarence had ever seen one.

  Clarence was in his kitchen when Henry Quinn and Evie Chandler showed up at his door.

  He saw them standing there through the screen from the end of the hallway, and though his initial feeling was one of aggravation and ire, he quickly recognized the potential for defusing what could be a volatile situation. Carson had made it very clear that he did not want this Quinn boy snooping around in Calvary business. And so it was with a calm sense of self-assurance and moral rectitude that Clarence Ames opened the screen door and greeted his visitors.

  “Mr. Quinn,” he said politely. “Evie.”

  “Hey, Clarence,” Evie said. “Wondered if you had some time for us.”

  “Sure thing,” Clarence said, and stepped aside. “Come on in.”

  Moments later they were seated at the kitchen table. Lemonade had been offered and accepted, and Clarence awaited the questions that he knew were forthcoming.

  “Maybe hard to understand,” Henry began, “but I really feel a sense of obligation and duty to do this thing for Evan … to find out about his daughter, you know?”

  Clarence nodded, took a sip of his lemonade. He glanced at Evie and smiled patiently.

  “I did a really stupid thing, Mr. Ames, getting into trouble and winding up at Reeves an’ all, and had it not been for Evan, I might still be there. I got into some scrapes. That kind of thing can happen in places like that, and Evan sorted it out.” Henry smiled. “Might sound foolish, seein’ as how I was there an’ all, but there’s a lot of people in a place like Reeves who you wouldn’t want knowing where you live.”

  “I can imagine so,” Clarence said.

  “So, Evan helped me out, and then he asked me to deliver this letter to his daughter, and I thought it was just a straightforward matter of comin’ on down here and finding out where she was at. But it’s not turned out to be as simple as that.”

  “No, evidently not.” Clarence raised his glass and sipped his lemonade again.

  “So, I need some help, you know? Evie here has been good enough to sort of get involved, but she’s Ozona, not Calvary, and she doesn’t really know much about the Riggs family and everything that happened in the past.”

  Henry paused, as if he expected Clarence to speak. Clarence remained silent.

  “But you’ve been here as long as Carson, longer maybe, and I wanted to ask you about some of that history.”

  Clarence set down his glass. He was calm and measured in his response.

  “I have to tell you, Henry, that Carson and I have discussed this matter. Not at length, of course, but the bare bones. Carson raised a good point, and I know he raised the same point with you. Carson even understood that you and he agreed on this particular detail.”

  “That the girl might not want to be found?”

  “Precisely.”

  “I understand that, sir, but—”

  “But nothing, Henry. There is no but here. One thing you learn with age and experience is that there are two things you cannot take back.”

  “I know, sir … everything you say and everything you do.”

  “You sing the tune, son, but you don’t really know the words. I do know that Sheriff Riggs was certainly of the understanding that this matter was closed. Though you may have shared a cell with Evan Riggs, you are nevertheless a stranger here, Mr. Quinn, and I don’t believe you will ever be anything
but a stranger.”

  “This is all getting a bit heavy and serious if you ask me, Clarence,” Evie interjected.

  Clarence turned toward her slowly. He didn’t crack his face with a smile. “I didn’t ask you, Evie.”

  “Whoa, what the hell is this?” she asked, her tone one of indignant surprise.

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” Clarence said, looking first at Evie, then turning back to Henry. “It is none of your business.”

  “But—” Henry said.

  “But nothing,” Clarence said. “You are from Ozona, Evie, and Mr. Quinn here is from Reeves, and before that who knows where. You are not Calvary. Never have been, never will be. Evan was once Calvary, but he killed a man in Austin, and now he will die in Reeves. That is the way it is, and there is nothing you can do to change it. Evan may very well have asked you to come on down here to deliver some letter to his daughter … a daughter he has never seen, a daughter that should never have been his in the first place. You don’t know what happened back then, and I am not going to explain it to you. All I know is that the past stays where it is, and that’s all there is to it.”

  “But Evan—”

  “Evan Riggs killed an innocent man. He got drunk and he beat that man to death. Evan had talent, he had a career ahead of him, and then he betrayed his brother, betrayed the Riggs name, and he became a drunk. More than likely it was the guilt of what he did that drove him down the neck of a bottle. Well, look where it got him, why don’tcha?”

  “What did he do, Clarence?” Evie asked.

  Clarence turned and looked at her. He was silent for a few moments, and then he said, “He didn’t mind his own business, sweetheart.”

  Evie took on a look Henry had seen before. She had been pushed, and she didn’t like it.

  “You threatening me, Clarence Ames?” she said.

  “Nothing of the sort, my dear.”

  “Sounds like a threat. You done wrapped it in pretty paper and tied me a bow, but I know what’s inside.”