Mockingbird Songs

by R.J. Ellory

  Rebecca barely had time to raise her hand in self-defense before Carson rained punches down on her like a whirlwind.

  It was Deacon who dragged Carson Riggs back, but by that time it seemed that the place was bedlam once more.

  Rebecca was screaming for Evan, Evan screaming at his brother, Carson hollering abuse at his wife, how she was a bitch, a good-for-nothing tramp, a whore.

  Orderlies were tasked with getting everyone but the staff out of the room and out of the building, and they did so. It was a running battle through and out of the front doors, and before either of them really understood what had happened, Carson and Evan Riggs were standing face-to-face on the driveway of the hospital, Evan still cuffed, Carson holding a gun in his hand, the expression on his face as if he possessed every intention of using it.

  “You are going back to Austin,” Carson said, his voice measured and certain.

  “You can go fuck yourself, Carson. What the hell are you doing? What the fuck—”

  Carson raised the gun and pointed it directly at Evan’s face. “You, my little brother, are going back to Austin. I am even going to take you there. You will not come back here again. You will not see Rebecca again. You will never speak to me, and you will never speak to Ma.”

  “You can go fuck yourself, Carson … You are fucking crazy. You can’t make me go. You can’t fucking make me do anything …”

  Carson swung the gun sideways. It connected with Evan’s right cheek and sent him to the ground.

  Carson stood over him, brandishing the sidearm, every word from his lips like a bullet.

  “You fucked her. You fucked her the night before she agreed to marry me. You are not my brother. You are not my blood. You betrayed me. You betrayed Ma and Pa. You are nothing to me.”

  Carson stepped back and let fly with a harsh kick to Evan’s ribs. Evan howled in pain, turned onto his side, and pulled his knees up to his chest.

  Carson got down on his haunches beside his younger brother and pushed the barrel of the gun beneath Evan’s chin.

  “I should shoot you right now. To me, you are dead already anyway. You’re going back to Austin. I am taking you, and you’re going back now. You will never come back. That is the way it is going to be.”

  Evan tried to push back against his older brother, but Carson just jabbed the gun hard into Evan’s face. His cheek now cut, the blood ran down the side of his nose and Evan could taste it on his lips.

  “Not another fucking word, Evan,” Carson said.

  “You cannot—” Evan started, but Carson shook his head, raised the gun, and brought it down on the side of Evan’s head with such force that the lights went out completely. No one intervened when they saw Calvary’s sheriff dragging an unconscious man to the black-and-white parked just a few yards away. He was the law, after all, and when it came to the law it was wise not to get involved.

  Evan Riggs was arrested in Austin at approximately eleven that night. He was found slumped in a doorway by a beat patrol. Not only was his face bruised and swollen, but his clothes were ripped, stained with blood, and he was rank with stale liquor.

  Seventeenth Precinct house took him, threw him in the tank, and called a doctor. Despite the stench of liquor, it appeared that he had not been drinking. He was dazed and confused, said something about his brother, that there was a girl in trouble, but little of that made sense. They held him, the doctor recommending he get a psych eval before they let him out.

  In the morning they let him go. Seemed whoever might have been interested in determining the mental state of Evan Riggs was no longer interested. To the duty sergeant, he was just another of the many dozens of drunks who dragged their sorry stink in and out of the precinct house on a routine basis.

  Evan Riggs walked a block and a half and found a bar. He was drunk before noon. By three he was haunting regular spots, arguing with folk he had no business arguing with, deep in a well of despair and self-loathing. It was a place he’d been before, knew it well, though this time there was more than enough reason for him to be there. He understood that Rebecca was pregnant. He also understood that he was the father of this soon-to-be child, and yet she was not only married to his brother but now locked up in the psych ward at Ector County Hospital. Carson was right. He had betrayed his brother, his folks, his own integrity, and he was an asshole of the first order. He drank more. Seemed the only solution.

  By five, Evan Riggs was through and out the other side of the depression. He was angry, bitter, the shame and ignominy he felt for what he’d done somehow turning back upon itself. Carson deserved everything that had happened to him. Carson never really loved Rebecca; he just wanted her as some kind of trophy. Carson didn’t know what it meant to feel what Evan felt. Carson was the bad guy here, not because of what he’d done, but because of what he’d failed to do.

  Evan would take her away. He would go back to Ector, get her the hell out of there, and the two of them would somehow disappear. Rebecca would have the child, and Evan … Evan would change everything. He could be a good man, a good father, and Carson could go to hell, for all he cared.

  Evan showed up at the Excelsior Hotel, little more than a flophouse on the west side of Austin, at around six that evening. It was a regular haunt for those late nights when he couldn’t make it back to where he was staying, or had no place to stay. They knew him there, not only a regular face but a regular tab that they let run to thirty or forty bucks before turning away. That evening they took him in. He was drunk, but Evan was always drunk. No change there.

  Evan Riggs lay on a cot in a first-floor room. While the ceiling swam in circles above his head, he put his life back together, if not in reality, at least in his imagination. Tomorrow he would go back to Calvary. He would straighten it all out. He would make everything good. He could do that. He really could do that.

  It was with a sense of positive optimism that Evan responded to a knock at the door. He was feeling a little better. It was still early. He could clean himself up, go out, have just another drink or two. Tomorrow was the demarcation point between the past and the future. Tomorrow the bottle would be part of his history.

  The man in the hallway was a stranger to Evan Riggs.

  “Mr. Evan Riggs?” the man said.

  Evan nodded. “Yeah … who are you?”

  The man held out a sheaf of papers. Evan instinctively took them.

  “You’ve been served, buddy,” the man said.

  “Served? What the hell?”

  The man took a step backward. “Go within three hundred yards of Rebecca Riggs, speak to her, call her, attempt to gain entry to the hospital, and you will be in violation of that injunction,” the man said. “Okay?”

  The man started to turn.

  “Hey,” Evan said.

  He turned to face Evan.

  Evan threw the papers at the man.

  The man was implacable, had seen it all before. “Buddy, you’ve been served. That’s just the way it is.”

  Evan took another step forward, pushed the man’s shoulder.

  “Okay, now you’re crossing another line, my friend. I am an officer of the court. Touch me, and you’re in deeper shit than you could even imagine.”

  “Take your goddamned papers!” Evan snapped, the anger surging inside him. How dare this stranger tell him that he could not see Rebecca. How dare he ferry a message from Carson and think that this would carry some weight. What the hell did he think was happening here?

  “Seriously, you need to think about what you’re doing, buddy boy,” the man said. “Back the hell away. You raise your voice or your fists to me, I will have you arrested right here and now; then you will be dealing with an assault charge as well as whatever other bullshit you’ve caused for yourself.”

  “How dare you come in here—”

  “Hey,” the man said, raising his hands. “This is not me, mister. This is due process. You can’t tell me anything I ain’t heard a thousand times before. You are just one more sorry asshol
e who fucked up his life, and I am not the target here … You deal with whatever you gotta deal with, and you keep me the hell out of it.”

  Evan was incensed. He took another step forward, his fists raised. “You take those papers back to my fucking brother and you tell him—”

  “Okay, that’s it,” the man said. “I’m outta here. Next stop for you is the drunk tank—”

  Evan swung, connected hard. That fist came like a runaway train and caught the man on the jaw.

  The man went down hard, and Evan was over him, fists flying, a drunken rage powering every muscle, every vein, every nerve, every sinew.

  Evan could see nothing but Carson’s face in that final moment outside Ector Hospital, the way he looked down at him, the condescending sneer, the knowledge that Carson would do everything he could to keep Evan away from Rebecca, from his own child.

  Evan Riggs was no flyweight. Lessons learned at Fort Benning were not forgotten. The process server didn’t have a chance. He may well have been a fair-minded and decent man, a good father to two small boys, a faithful husband, a hard worker who believed that doing the right thing was always the easiest way out of any trouble you might experience in life, but he was no fighter. He served papers to recalcitrant husbands, loan defaulters, errant wives, folks who missed payments on mortgages and cars, and on weekends he liked little more than a barbecue and a couple of beers in the backyard, his pretty wife in a cotton print dress bringing hot dogs and corn for him and the boys.

  His name was Forrest Wetherby, and the papers he’d delivered had come from Warren Garfield at the request of Carson Riggs. How Wetherby had found Evan Riggs was part experience, part dogged persistence, part sheer luck, but those papers were the very last he would serve.

  Evan Riggs couldn’t have hit him more than a half dozen times, but they were decisive blows, driven by a fierce and uncontrolled rage. The throat, the chest, the solar plexus, finally some blows to the head that put Wetherby back against the wall. The final strike caught him full in the face, and it was the thunderous impact the back of his skull made against the wall that precipitated the fatal hemorrhage.

  Forrest Wetherby’s legs gave way like those of a newborn heifer. He was dead before he hit the worn-out linoleum hallway on the first floor of that Austin, Texas flophouse.

  The hotel people found Wetherby right where he’d fallen, blood running from his ear due to the sustained trauma to which he’d been subjected.

  Evan they found sprawled across the mattress in his room, drenched in sweat, his clothes spattered, his knuckles raw.

  Every other room was empty. No one had entered or exited the building following Wetherby’s arrival.

  Evan didn’t even realize what had happened until he woke in a cell three hours later with a murder charge on the books. He’d already been booked for drunk and disorderly the day before, said he didn’t remember a thing. Coincidentally, he went back to the seventeenth, and they held him there for arraignment. A public defender was assigned, and he came down on Monday the twenty-second. By that time, Evan Riggs had lost whatever semblance of self-possession he had formerly maintained.

  Evan Riggs was done for. He knew it. He reconciled himself to fate, and had it not been for the intervention of Governor Shivers, he would certainly have gone to the chair. Forever after, folks would listen to The Whiskey Poet and hear a man confessing, even though those songs were written long before Evan Riggs crossed paths with Forrest Wetherby. Maybe a man could confess in advance, seek forgiveness for something he was yet to do. Maybe some people just knew that bad things were on the way, things they would do and things that would be done to them, and they were getting ready for it ahead of time. As had been noted so many times before, people were always of a mind to think what they wanted, and there was often no relationship between that and the truth.

  Rebecca Riggs gave birth to a daughter in the second week of November, 1949.

  It was Grace Riggs who got word to her younger son that he was now the father of a beautiful girl called Sarah.

  Carson had expressly forbidden Grace to contact Evan and did not learn that his mother had gone behind his back until after Christmas. By that time he’d already found her a place at Ector County Hospital, her committal papers countersigned and processed by Roy Sperling and Warren Garfield. The last will and testament that William Riggs had authorized before his death—the very document that William had delivered into Garfield’s hands after learning what Carson, Garfield, and Sperling had done to Rebecca—was conveniently lost. An earlier will was processed, a will that left the house to Grace, also financial provision for the remainder of her life, the land then divided into equal parts between Carson and Evan. Evan was already in Reeves, would be there for life, and thus by law he had no defensible position. Carson Riggs called in a longtime favor from Alvin Lang’s father, John. John Lang, not only the eldest son of Congressman Chester Lang but a significant authority in the Texas Department of Corrections, had words with the Redbird County DA. The DA made a call to Warren Garfield. Warren Garfield was unreserved in his willingness to cooperate, and any right Evan Riggs might have had to contest Carson’s decisions about the land were summarily waived.

  The Riggs farm was broken up into lots. Before Grace Riggs was even admitted to Ector County, Carson had signed away every one of those lots to the Naval Petroleum Reserves Department. A good number of people became a good deal richer with a single signature. Proceeds from that sale found their way into the pockets of both Chester Lang and his son, John. Warren Garfield and Roy Sperling were taken care of generously. George Eakins, Clarence Ames, and Harold Mills, all three of them members of the Calvary Residents’ Charter, were impressed upon sufficiently to overrule a petition to revoke the drilling rights granted by Carson Riggs.

  Carson Riggs ran for sheriff again, once more uncontested and unchallenged. Where questions might have been asked about the veracity and fairness of that election, those questions were answered with contributions to church renovation funds, civic projects, licenses issued by the Redbird County Sheriff’s Department for roadworks to be undertaken, construction permits granted, building certificates authorized. A great deal of money found its way into a great many hands. Those payments served to tuck in corners and tidy away any unsightly threads. All was well that ended well.

  Sarah Riggs was taken from her mother when she was four days old. Between that day and the day Rebecca died in June of 1951, mother and daughter did not see each other again.

  That was Carson Riggs’s wish. He was sheriff of Calvary, had been for five years, and it looked like he was going to be sheriff for as long as such a position was available. He knew people, he had money enough, and all that had happened with Evan was a matter of history. People knew not to speak of it, and so they did not.

  That history would remain right where it was until one Tuesday in May of 1972, when Warren Garfield’s heart stopped in the middle of a telephone conversation. Perhaps it was the burden of guilt that finally killed him, not only for what had happened with William Riggs’s last will and testament, but the committal of Grace, of Rebecca, and his collusion with Roy Sperling and Carson Riggs in a matter that went back many years earlier to a time when America was calling on its loyal sons to fight the good fight in the European theater of war. No matter what Carson might once have said about the Second World War never reaching the United States, it had done so, and those who did not volunteer were ever aware that conscription might remove any power of choice.

  With the death of Warren Garfield, a closed chapter was opened. Despite that Garfield had conspired to overturn Williams Riggs’s final wishes as to the division of land and wealth, Garfield’s final wishes were honored, one of them being the dispatch of a letter to Evan Riggs at Reeves County Farm. Ironically, it was Roy Sperling who insisted Garfield’s wishes were abided by, perhaps to mitigate the burden of guilt Sperling himself had carried for as long as memory served.

  That letter arrived just a little while before E
van’s cellmate was due for release, and it was to this cellmate that this letter was then entrusted.

  “This is for my daughter,” Evan Riggs told Henry Quinn. “Her name is Sarah. That’s all I know. I need you to find her and give her this letter. Start in Calvary. My brother is the sheriff there. He will know where she is.”

  Calvary was where it all started, and Calvary was where it would end.

  FIFTY

  Roy Sperling possessed no uncertainty. He knew his nose was broken, his left wrist, too. He was a doctor, after all. He had fulfilled that position in Calvary for as long as anyone could remember.

  He sat in a chair in his own kitchen. Blood had coursed down his chin and soaked the front of his shirt. He looked much the same as Henry when Henry had been admitted to triage.

  “We’re done for,” he told Carson Riggs. It was not the first time he’d said such a thing. The second time had prompted the swift right hook that broke his nose.

  “Shut the hell up,” Riggs had told him. “John Lang is gonna come down here and fix things up.”

  “You really believe that, Carson? He’s a functionary in the Department of Corrections. What the hell—”

  “Shut the hell up. This is gonna get fixed.”

  “That kid has screwed you, Carson. Evan sent that kid down here and he has screwed you. Screwed both of us. Only reason Warren isn’t getting screwed is he had the good fortune to fucking die before the shit hit the fan.”

  Carson Riggs, face like a hammer, stood with his back against the sink and looked at Sperling.

  “I am not going down,” Riggs said. “And if I do go down, you and the rest of them go with me.”

  “Ha! You are an arrogant asshole, Carson. Always have been, always will be. You are dealing with the lieutenant governor of Texas, you dumb son of a bitch. You think he’s gonna let some small-town sheriff from the middle of nowhere fuck his life up? He may very well have hailed from here, but he is a big shot now, Carson. Politically, that man is even more powerful than the governor. What happened was nearly thirty years ago. His sons are long grown-up. The war is over. Jesus, you are living in a world entirely of your own creation.”