by George Wier
“I was wondering how she got my number.”
“She just said it was an emergency. I’m sorry, Baby,” she said. “Are you going to be okay?”
I thought about it. I suppose I had to be.
“I’ll be all right. It’s a bit of a shock, is all. Brad and I have been drifting apart for some years.”
“And now he’s gone,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“You need to take off, don’t you?” I could hear it in her voice — the certainty of someone who knows me like no other could.
The baby was due any time. I couldn’t not be there by her side when the time came, whenever that was.
“Bill?”
“I’m here,” I said.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, reading my mind, as always. “Go, okay? Just go.”
“I’ve got to be here when you deliver,” I said, my throat feeling dry.
“You will be. Just no more hanging from blimps, no more shootouts. You got that?”
“Baby. We don’t even own a gun.”
“I know. But somehow guns seem to find you.”
“Yeah,” I said. She was right. “I know.”
“How did he die?”
“Mary Jo told me that somebody killed him and that she knows who did it. Beyond that, it’s why I’m going. I simply don’t know.”
“And you need to.”
“Need to know?” I asked, but then realized Julie was anticipating me, as usual. “Yeah. I suppose I have to.”
CHAPTER TWO
There’s an old saying: “You can’t put your foot into the same river twice.” Time is like that. You turn around and look where you were looking just a few seconds before, and something will have changed, just in that short interval.
With my home town the change this time was bone deep, and while my toes hadn’t been back in these waters for some time, still I was expecting... well, home.
I’d passed through the burgh a few times in my comings and goings across Texas in the years since I left high school. During those previous infrequent trips I had noted that other than the new civic buildings, the new strip malls and retail outlets, and the obvious expansion outward into areas of the county that I had once considered the untracked wilderness, the changes had been superficial. It was the same town. There had once been a Perry’s Department Store on Bryan Street — gone now. But the Dairy Queen still doled out the ice cream and “Hunger-Buster” hamburgers, and the Baptists still had the market cornered on the local soul harvest. In these respects all was right with the world because home was, to this degree, still home.
But then a very unhome-like event occurred.
Red and blue flashed in my rearview mirror.
I was being pulled over.
Fine, I thought. Welcome back.
“License and registration, please,” the policeman said. He had a stone face. I was willing to bet he’d spent hours at a time practicing it in a mirror until he had it perfect. You could have used a chisel on his face and broken the thing.
“Sure,” I said. I fished out my license and the registration and handed them over to him with a calculated nonchalance.
He took them, glanced at the registration and stood unmoving, looking at my driver’s license.
“I’m from Austin,” I said. “My best friend died and I’m in town to pay my respects.”
“My condolences,” the policeman said. If he meant it then I had complete lack of insight into human character.
“Say,” I said. “Why’d you stop me? Did I do anything wrong?”
“Ran a red light,” he said, trying to drill little holes into me with his eyes.
“I turned right on red. I came to a complete stop. Looked, then turned. Not trying to argue or anything, but you know that’s what happened.”
“You don’t know anything that I know,” he said.
He looked back down at my license.
“Is this your correct address?” the policeman asked, his eyes moving back and forth from me to my driver’s license.
“Yes,” I said. I normally reserve “sir” for people I have actually found respectable, or for dignitaries like the Governor. Thus far I’d found nothing about the guy to respect.
“Travis, William. Wait here, William.”
“It’s Bill,” I said. I looked at his name tag. It read “H. Leonard.”
“Bill, huh? Are there any other assumed names you answer to?”
“No, Officer Leonard,” I said. “It’s not an assumed name, it’s my name. Bill — William. William — Bill. Like Hank for Henry.” I yawned. Yawning usually works best with his kind.
“I know what a nickname is. Any other assumed names, Bill?”
“No,” I said. I was long past tired of the guy.
“Wait here.”
I waited.
He was in his cruiser behind me for all of ten minutes. I glanced in my rearview mirror from time to time. What the hell was he doing?
Officer Leonard returned.
“Mr. Travis,” he said, handing me my license and registration. I took them. “I’m going to do you a favor.”
I didn’t even have to think about it. “That’s not necessary,” I said.
“Still, you’re going to accept this favor.”
“Okay, what is it?”
“You’re going to start up your car. You will turn right at the next intersection. You will turn right again at the very next stop sign. When you come to the next stop sign you will turn left. You will proceed back in the direction from whence you came, not deviating. I will follow you until you have crossed the Brazos River Bridge from Brazos County over into Burleson County. Go back to Austin, Mr. Travis.”
“You’re running me out of town, huh? Why?”
He leaned toward me.
“Mr. Travis. I firmly believe that you would be better off not exploring the alternative.”
“Fine,” I said, not missing a beat.
It’s an eighteen-mile drive through relatively flat river-bottom countryside west from Bryan to the wide and muddy waters of the Brazos River.
In the last two miles I had to restrain myself from speeding. My toes itched.
Also, I was hopping mad.
I thought about Brad and about Mary Jo; Brad as I had remember-ed him with a toothy grin on his craggy face, and Mary Jo as I would probably find her, trying to smile and be her warm and courteous self even as the tears rolled down her face.
As I approached the bridge I glanced up in my rearview. Officer H. Leonard slowed down and moved off the road. Probably he’d sit there for a good half hour or more and wait to see if I turned back around and crossed again.
Fine, I thought.
I’ve been known to be a tad single-minded. Some might call it stubbornness.
Two miles down the road I took the turn-off south onto a highway that I knew followed the course of the river for fifteen miles to a four-way stop. I rolled down that highway pushing ninety-five. A left at the four-way and I was back in College Station, Bryan’s twin city.
There was more than one way to come home.
CHAPTER THREE
I was back home and beginning to seethe a little less.
I made a quick cell phone call and got Julie. She was fine. She didn’t want me to worry about her. Do what I had to do, stay for the funeral if I needed to and for as many days as I needed after that, then get back to Austin. I told her I’d try to commute back and forth as needed. She loved me. I loved her. The baby was taking her time. I could understand it. If that were me in there, I wouldn’t want to leave either.
I passed by Texas A&M University, which had now spread itself out into the old cow pastures west of the main campus, and the college appeared to be bursting at the seams. Not that there was ever a time it wasn’t.
A campus policeman passed by me. I looked down at my speedometer. I was just under the limit. We ignored each other, and that was a good thing.
I turned and skirted the campus heading
south and paralleling the railroad tracks and the main campus loomed on my left. College kids crossed the road on foot and bicycle, not even looking up at the traffic.
I may have been watching for all the changes in the city of my rearing, but I was also attempting to avoid certain painful thoughts.
There is nothing like losing someone close to you to remind you of your own mortality. I’m not usually a morose fellow. I’m generally too busy to take notice that the days, months and years are flitting past me. That’s how I’ve always lived: stay busy, keep moving, and stick to the program.
Lately, for me, the program had been not engaging every little invitation to disaster that came rampaging my way. Me, I’m a mild-mannered financial consultant. Well, maybe not so mild-mannered, at least according to my wife. It was the world of trouble outside my insular little world that seemed to want to bust my door down, and far too often. The previous fall, I’d had a run-in with a latent insurgent Republic of Texas revolutionary group that had come very close to assassinating the Governor of Texas. Somehow I’d gotten out alive. I don’t know how I did. About all I can say is that I was still breathing afterwards.
The last few miles to Brad and Mary Jo’s house I spent introspectively, thinking about the ghosts of good times past, and more than a few not-so-good times.
I thought about Brad. I’d known him since the two of us were kids. There was one occasion that usually sprang up when I thought very long on the subject of Brad. When we were kids we used to pick up extra spending money by shoveling horse manure at a quarter-horse stable near my family home. We mucked out stables and kept the horses watered and put them on the walker — all sorts of things. The time I was thinking about, Brad wanted to ride an old brood mare named Daisy — a horse that us kids had not-so-affectionately renamed “Hell Bitch.” That day Hell Bitch was fine during the curry-combing and hoof-cleaning, didn’t nip at us with her huge teeth as we put a blanket on her and cinched a saddle into place. But the instant that Brad got in the saddle, she took off.
He tried to rein her in, but she was too much horse for him. He ended up getting pitched off at a full gallop right onto a barbed-wire fence.
It wasn’t pretty. I had thought at the time that he was a goner. Before his ride I had entertained the notion that I might ride Hell Bitch. After that, we mutually agreed to give her a wide berth. Daisy didn’t get much grooming after Brad’s run-in with the fence. All told it took twenty-six stitches to put him back together interspersed between his left clavicle, his right arm, and a spot just below his belt but thankfully above his groin. As I saw it he wasn’t just lucky to have kept his baby-making packaging — he was fortunate to still be able to breathe, or what’s more, walk.
As many rough scrapes and tight places as I had been in, Brad had me beat by about a factor of ten.
And there I was all of a sudden — pulling into his driveway.
Bradley wasn’t home. He would never be home again
CHAPTER FOUR
All of Mary Jo’s tears had dried, and seeing me at her front door did not at once set her off again. She hugged me, squeezing me tightly.
“Bill, you’re the first one here,” she said.
“Who else is coming?”
“Brad’s brother, Freddie. That’s about it for now, as Brad’s parents are dead and it was just the boys.”
“Sure. I remember Freddie. We never got along, though.”
“I know,” she said.
I followed Mary Jo into the house. The place had not changed much since they were married. It was her house. Mary Jo had a little money of her own. She was frugal with every dime that came her way; a complete opposite from Brad in that respect, but in all others they matched up fine.
She took me into the kitchen, chattering all the way, avoiding the main topic.
“Coffee?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Lots.”
“Good.” The coffee was already made. Probably she’d done it out of habit. Brad usually had a cup when he came home from work. She poured two cups and set them down by me at her kitchen table. I watched the steam boil off of it.
She sat down at my right elbow, crossed her arms on the table and looked at me. She had such beautiful eyes, and right then they were full of inexpressible sadness and grief. I didn’t know whether to grab her and hold her or start crying myself. She was such a fine woman. I hoped that Brad knew what he was leaving behind.
“Mary Jo, who killed Brad?” I asked after a few unbearable minutes.
She almost lost it for a moment. She bit her bottom lip and held her head erect. I could tell she was fighting to keep it together, and doing a damn fine job of it.
“Officially, it was an accident,” she said, her voice clipping off the words.
“Tell me what happened.”
“Bradley told me a week ago that if anything happened to him that he wanted me to pack my bags, put up a For Sale sign on the house and run off to Florida, or Maine, or anyplace but here. He knew, Bill.”
I waited.
“He knew. I didn’t want to believe him at first, but I saw that he had changed. He never smiled anymore. He never laughed...”
“Mary Jo,” I said. “If someone hurt Brad, I need to know who and how.”
“I wanted to call you. I told Brad I was going to. He got mad. It was the first time he ever raised his voice to me. He told me ‘No!’ emphatically. I was not to call you no matter what.”
And then she did it. She broke down, burying her head in her enfolded arms on the kitchen table. I wanted to reach out to her, to touch her and reassure her. But there was no reassurance I could give. I made out the words “should have” and “why didn’t I” amidst her sobs.
“Mary Jo,” I said, pressing gently.
“It’s my fault,” she sobbed the words out.
“No,” I told her. “You could never have hurt Brad. It’s not in your nature.”
I let her go on, wishing all the while that I could be a thousand miles away. I don’t like to see a woman cry. Through hard experience, however, I have discovered that it’s always best to let a person feel what they’re feeling. It’s when you resist it that real problems develop.
She wiped her eyes on her sweater.
“He was running a work crew,” she began. “Not the crew he had trained, but a different crew. He hated his job, and I hated that he kept working at a job that he hated, but I could never tell him anything, you know? Yeah. You do know.” She picked up her coffee cup and sipped at it. I followed her example. It was good coffee.
“From what Mike Fields tells me — he was the only guy at CTL&P that Brad trusted — Brad got hit with about ten thousand volts when he went into a satellite station that had detected a power drain. Other than that, I don’t know. They won’t let me see his body, Bill.”
I got an unpleasant image in my head. A picture of Brad’s body convulsing as his clothes and skin and hair caught on fire. I shook my head, trying to wipe the image out of existence.
“Mary Jo, there might not be much of his body left.”
She looked up at me, her eyes wide open now and aware.
“I know,” she said. “But until I see something, none of this will be real.”
“Yeah. I know,” I told her. “Who wanted to kill Brad?”
“Why, the company, of course.”
*****
Brad had gone to work for Central Texas Light and Power some fifteen years before. He had worked his way up to foreman after two years, then to supervisor. I was never sure how the chain of command worked in such outfits, but I knew that Brad’s only having a high school diploma had kept him from rising to the very top. I knew — and certainly Mary Jo and Brad himself knew — that he knew more about engineering than the professors in college who taught the courses. But also I knew that in this country it’s the sheepskin that counts. It’s paper that, in the final analysis, is more important than people. You can’t even die properly unless your paperwork is done.
&nb
sp; It took a little longer to drag the rest of the story out of Mary Jo.
From what I gathered, Brad had never given her a “why.” What she was able to tell me was a “who.” A name. The guy who ran the show over at CTL&P.
When she first told me the name it stirred some of the cobwebbed furniture around in the back of my mind — that place reserved for almost useless yet unpleasant memories.
Terry Throckmorton, she had told me.
The name was familiar to me, but at the moment I couldn’t place it. Couldn’t get a face to go with it, nor connect it up directly with any single event from my former life in that town. But it was significant, and I felt an old, familiar chill coming home to roost in my stomach.
I asked her if she felt like she was in danger, if she needed to take some measures — lock up the house and get out of Dodge for a while as Brad had suggested.
The answer was “No.” There would still be a memorial service, even if the locals wouldn’t give up Brad’s body in time for a proper funeral. There was Brad’s brother to think about, and his friends, like me. Come hell or high water she would give him a proper send off.
I found myself admiring her. Her fortitude and pluck.
“Do you have any protection here?” I asked her.
“I’ve got Brad’s shotgun behind the front door and a pistol in my top dresser drawer. I think both are loaded.” She looked at me. “I know how to shoot, Bill.”
“Oh. All right. But shooting and killing are two different things.”
“My father took me hunting with him when I was growing up. I think he wanted a boy, but what he got was me. If I can kill an innocent deer, I can kill a man trying to kill me.”
“Good,” I said. “I hate the idea of you being alone just now, but I’ve got to go.”
“Where are you going?” she asked me.
“I need to talk to Mike Fields.”
“Oh,” she said. “I forgot to tell you. I told Mike that Brad’s best friend was coming from Austin.”
“Why did you tell him, Mary Jo, if you think he’s involved in Brad’s... uh, case?”
