“Some men were trying to kill me, and I had to hide in the woods all night.”
He never batted an eyelash. “Well, such things do happen, I’m told. But whatever your reasons, there’s nothing I can do for you except give you some more pain medication. Your foot is swollen far too much to put a cast on it. The pain would drive you crazy, then when the swelling went down the cast would be too loose.”
“So what can I do?” I asked.
“Let it heal the way it is, then have it rebroken under surgical conditions by somebody who knows what they’re doing. Where are you from?”
“Matador County.”
“Go to San Antonio. They’ve got some good bone men there.”
He wrote me a prescription for a hundred of the same codeine tablets I’d been taking.
“That’s a pretty big prescription, isn’t it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “A man’s either going to be a dope fiend or he isn’t, and the size of a bottle of pills doesn’t have much to do with it. I see no reason for you to have to pay some doctor down in South Texas another three dollars to prescribe some more of the damn things. Don’t take them except when you have to, and put what’s left in your medicine cabinet for emergencies. Soak that foot in epsom-salts water twice a day, and keep it elevated as much as you can.”
We stopped by the telephone company office so I could call Tía Carmen. She spoke with me and Nora both, and the outcome of the whole matter was that the Raffertys were to bring me back to La Rosa and stay through Christmas, which was only a few days away.
* * *
That night, after Press and Brenda were asleep, Nora came into my room with a tray that carried a kerosene lamp, a bottle of brandy, and two glasses. “Like a little company?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. “How did you know I was awake?”
“I didn’t. I was going to rouse you if you weren’t.”
She set the lamp on the bedside table and adjusted its wick as low as it would go. Then she poured us each a glass of brandy. After giving me mine, she crawled up on the foot of the bed facing me and curled her legs up under her Indian style. “How you doing, Virg?” she asked.
“Okay,” I said offhandedly.
“No, I mean how you doing?”
“In respect to what?”
“Madeline.”
I drew in a deep breath and sighed a long sigh. “Mostly I feel sorry for her. If she had stayed here she would still be alive today. But like your doctor friend said, some people are born fools.”
“So you’re not wallowing in guilt?”
I shook my head. “I think I did the best I could have under the circumstances. Besides, I’ve never been much of a hand at beating myself up over what’s already done.”
She grinned at me. “No, I remember back when we were kids you were always the first one to forgive yourself, and you expected everybody else to hop on the bandwagon.”
I grinned back at her and said nothing.
“Did you know she was halfway in love with you?” she asked.
“I’m not surprised that she would lead you to believe that. It may have even been true.” I went on to tell her of Madeline’s affair with Henry DeMour, and how she’d kept it from me. “So you can see that she wasn’t above using people to get what she wanted.”
“Who is?”
“You, Nora,” I said honestly. “Everything’s out in front with you.”
“Yep,” she said, sipping her brandy. “I’m the original pay-as-you-go girl. I don’t like debts, and you start piling them up the minute you start misleading people. Which is why I wanted to know how you felt about Madeline. I didn’t want to be accused of seducing a man who was pining away for his dead sweetheart.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me,” she said as she rose from the bed. She quickly drained her brandy and dropped her robe to the floor. “I think we’ve earned this, Virgil. And I suspect we’ll never get another chance.” She pulled her gown over her head and slid into the bed beside me. “That is, unless you’ve taken too many of them damn codeine pills.”
“I think I can manage,” I said softly and turned toward her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It was the best Christmas in recent memory, and there is no doubt in my mind that having Brenda present made all the difference. When we arrived, a tall cedar tree already stood in the corner of the living room ready to be trimmed, the first one we’d had in years. My aunt had been shopping in town, and she showered more presents on Brenda than any little girl needed. Alonzo and the other vaqueros doted on her and argued among themselves about which one would get to ride her around on the front of his saddle. After the second day, Nora pronounced the kid completely ruined by all the attention. It was a fine time, and I was able to forget for a while the dark cloud that hung on my horizon.
* * *
The night before they were due to leave, Nora entered my room quietly through the connecting door and slipped once more between the covers beside me. Later, over brandy and cigarettes, we talked for a while, me reclining propped up on my pillows, she leaning against the footboard of the bed, her legs stretched out in front of her. She was wearing one of my old shirts, her hair was disheveled, and her eyes were sleepy. But she looked gorgeous anyway. I finished my brandy quickly, feeling it warm my insides, then poured a couple more inches into my glass.
“I just want you to know, Virgil,” she said, “that I believe Madeline was basically a good kid, and I think it was really decent of you to do what you did for her. Not everybody would have.”
I grinned at her. “I’ll accept a verdict of decent,” I said, “but I don’t want anybody thinking I’m some kind of starry-eyed idealist.”
She laughed. “That’s never gonna happen, Virgil. Not anybody who knows you, anyway.”
“I hope not. But, I think I’m getting even worse the older I get. Almost as cynical as old Charlie Grist, in fact. When this war first started I was all cranked up to go do my duty. I tried to get my naval commission reactivated, but they wouldn’t have me. And to tell the truth, I felt guilty as hell that I wasn’t in uniform. But in the last few days I’ve been thinking about the war, and I realize now that in my heart I’ve known all along that it’s just another damned catastrophe brought on by rascals and fools. When you put aside all the political crap they spout to justify themselves, Hitler and the Jap warlords are really no different from Scorpino and Walsh and Salisbury.”
“Virgil…”
“And if that’s not disgusting enough, add in the half dozen or so big American banks who were doing business with the Japs and the Germans both, and who used every bit of political clout they had right up to the day Pearl Harbor was bombed to keep us from breaking off diplomatic relations with them so’s not to kill the goose that was laying the golden eggs. Then on top of that put the munitions makers and the chemical firms who wanted war just as bad as the banks wanted peace because that’s where their profits were going to be. So when you get right down to it, why should I give my life to pay for their stupidity and greed?”
“You sound like my daddy,” she said.
“Really?” I asked. “Well, did he ever tell you that the human race is just a great big buzzard perched at the top of a rotting tree waiting for an opportunity to pick its own carcass clean?”
She’d been amused by my little tirade, and her eyes were full of mischief in the lamplight. “Not in those exact words. But he got the idea across. And I suspect there’s a lot of truth in what you say. But when you boil it all down, the human race is all we’ve got.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” I said. Then at that moment it hit me just how many years her face and her ash blond hair and her impish smile had been lurking in the back of my mind. So long, in fact, and so omnipresent that I’d become unconscious of it. I realized, too, how much I cared for her and how hopeless it all was. “Nora, let’s get married,” I said impulsively, all but certain what her reaction would be.
; She shook her head sadly. “We can’t, Virgil.”
“Is it the climate down here in South Texas?”
“Partly. But there’s more to consider than that.”
“What?”
“Daddy. I can’t take Brenda away from him. Besides, he’s getting older, and we’re all he’s got. The time will come—”
“Hell,” I said, “bring him down here, too.”
She got out of bed and poured more brandy into her glass, her flanks under my old shirt shining golden in the dim lamplight. Then she took a long pull of her drink and turned to face me. “Virgil, up at home Daddy’s somebody. He’s known in a half dozen counties as the best hunter and dog man in the Neches River bottom. People come to him for advice and small loans and all kinds of help, and even the Liquor Control Board officers and the game wardens who try to catch him respect him. But down here?” She shook her head and grimaced. “Down here he’d just be another old geezer with a bunch of stories nobody wants to hear.”
“So maybe I could move up to Palestine,” I said, knowing even as I spoke that it was a fool’s notion.
“Now there’s a really fine idea,” she said sarcastically. “Then a few years from now you could start sitting on the front porch and brooding all the time because Tía Carmen had died and you’d sold off La Rosa and thrown away your birthright. What good would you be to me then? Hell, I’d have to start having affairs just to have somebody to talk to.”
“You’re right, of course,” I said, smiling a little at her blunt honesty.
She drained her glass and set it on the bedside table, then said, “There are things in this world that outweigh romance, Virgil. Family and place and a person’s obligations are all more important. And you know it as well as I do.”
We dropped the subject and talked on for another half hour until finally she came around the bed and climbed in. I turned off the light and spooned her up against me, pressing her back close to my belly. After a little while we both drifted off to sleep. About an hour later I half awoke as she slipped from my bed and went back to her own room. Early the next morning she and Brenda and Press left for Palestine, and except for a few quick hugs over the years, I never held Nora Rafferty in my arms again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“We’ll hear something from Walsh soon,” I told my aunt over our midmorning coffee. “Either that or they’ll attack the ranch. Which I can’t see them doing since the guards are lawmen.”
“You feel sure he’ll try to contact you?” she asked.
I gave her a thoughtful nod. “The fact that I haven’t gone to the Rangers with the journal should tell him I’m willing to deal.”
“But why haven’t you gone to the Rangers? Not that I think you should, you understand. I’m just curious since you’ve always trusted them.”
“Because we don’t have any idea who’s behind Walsh. Hell, it could be the governor for all I know. Going to the state boys right now might just dig us in deeper. My hope is that I can give him the damn thing and be shut of the whole mess. Like I told Jack Amber, the coast’s problems aren’t our problems, and I want to convince Walsh of that. I hate to see Sam and Rosario put on the spot, but there’s nothing I can do about it. At the moment they’re under guard and at least as safe as we are. In the long run, it might be in their best interests to make a deal, but that’s not my decision to make. I just want out.”
“But you know as well as I do that the journal may not satisfy him,” she said.
“If that’s the case, then we’ll have to deal with the problem ourselves.”
* * *
The call came on the last day of the year, and it came from an unexpected source. Tía Carmen picked up the phone when it rang, then after speaking for a few moments, handed me the receiver. I listened, then said, “Thanks,” and hung up.
My aunt looked at me inquiringly.
I nodded. “Monday at the Windmill Café in San Diego.”
“Is Walsh going to be there?” she asked.
“No, but he’s sending me a proposition.”
“Can you drive?”
I shook my head. “I’ll get one of the vaqueros to take me over in the truck.”
She nodded. I leaned down to kiss her forehead. “What do you think will happen?” she asked.
“I think there’s a chance Walsh will take the diary and call it quits. If not…”
“If not, it’s nothing we can’t handle.”
* * *
The man who’d just come through the door of the Windmill Café stood five feet eight inches tall. He had a sturdy, compact body and wore a well-cut double-breasted suit of blue wool, a fine white cotton dress shirt, and a silk tie of mottled reds and golds. His thinning brown hair had been carefully combed straight back from a broad forehead that loomed above a pair of mischievous brown eyes behind rimless glasses. To all the world he looked like a prosperous small-town banker. But this man was no banker. He was El Patrón—George Berham Parr, the Duke of Duval, the Boss of Bosses in South Texas politics.
As always, he was guarded by a trio of deputy sheriffs. All three were Mexican-American men in their midthirties, and all three were dressed in cheap gabardine suits, scuffed boots, and ratty Stetsons. Two of them were tall, and thin to the point of emaciation. They wore Colt pistols slung low on bullet-filled belts, while the third, a short, stolid individual with a jailhouse swagger, carried a sawed-off pump shotgun and stared out at the world with the dead-fish eyes of a cut-rate mortician.
They were but three of a hundred or more similarly armed and hard-bitten border men he could call on in times of need. Now forty-two years old and nearing the peak of his career, Parr was preeminent in a group of ruthless political bosses that included—besides my own aunt—such individuals as Ed Lloyd, the virtual dictator of Jim Wells County; the Guerra family of Starr and Hidalgo counties; and Judge Manuel Ramon of Laredo, a figure so spectral and illusive that it was joked that not even his own wife recognized his voice. Through these interlocking alliances, he controlled an enormous bloc of votes, a bloc large enough to make his support the deciding factor in any closely contested statewide election. Consequently, all the state’s major politicians, even silver-haired patrician senators from the old cotton counties, eventually found themselves waiting hat in hand in the anteroom of his fortress-like office a block from the decaying courthouse in San Diego.
Parr came over to the table where the kid who’d driven me to the café and I sat while the two skinny deputies took up positions near the door. The shotgun man followed his boss and stood nearby the whole time we talked. “Virgil,” Parr said, his voice high-pitched and happy. “How you doing?”
“I’ve been better, George,” I replied, shaking his hand.
“So I heard. You gotta be more careful.”
“I plan to once this business is all over.”
He stared at me quizzically. “Just what the hell’s going on?” he asked.
“Do you really want to know?”
“Sure,” he said firmly. “But let’s have a hamburger while we talk. Best burgers in the state.”
“Okay,” I agreed.
Parr motioned for the waitress, then turned to Juan, my driver, and broke into a stream of fluent Spanish. “I need to talk to your patrón privately,” he said. “Why don’t you go on back in the kitchen and eat?”
“Sí,” the man said with a shy nod and rose to his feet.
“Order anything you want,” Parr told him. “And have them put it on my ticket.”
“So you want the whole story?” I asked once Juan was gone.
“Hell yes. I want to know as much as I can about everything. Half of mastering politics is just learning to listen and knowing how to use what you hear.”
“And the other half?” I asked, still grinning.
He made motions with his hands like a man dealing cards. “Spread that moola around. But you know how it works as well as I do. By the way, how’s Tía Carmen?”
“As bossy as ever.�
��
He cackled and slapped his hand down on the table. There was a boyish exuberance about the man that made you like him despite what he was. Which was as crooked as a snake. Two years earlier he’d bought the famous Dobie Ranch, making the first payment with a check he simply drew on the Duval County treasury. But in politics his word was good, and he was loyal to his friends.
The waitress appeared and took our orders. When she’d left, Parr leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Like I told you on the phone, this concerns Milam Walsh. What I didn’t tell you is that he came all the way over here to see me, and asked me to arrange a meeting between the two of you. Said he had something you needed, and you had something he needed, and he was willing to trade.”
“Is he still here?” I asked in surprise.
“No, he went back home.”
“Why didn’t he just call and tell you what he wanted on the phone? Why go to all the trouble of driving down here?”
Parr smiled coldly. “My guess is that he doesn’t entirely trust the security of the telephone system.”
“Oh,” I said. “I get it. He’s worried about the Feds?”
“Maybe,” Parr said with a shrug. “Or maybe he was just unsure of himself and wanted to look me in the eye. But anyhow, I thought the whole thing was pretty strange since he’s the big dog over there in Jefferson County, and you’re really just a private citizen. And why come to me? I’ve never even met the guy before.”
“He’s smart, George,” I said, “and he knows how things work. Which means he realizes that you’re the man to see if you want to get something done in South Texas.”
“Yeah, but why didn’t he just drive out to the ranch if he wanted to talk to you?”
I gave him an offhanded shrug. “I guess he just didn’t feel free to.”
“Oh? Have the two of you had some trouble?”
“You might say that,” I replied with a sour smile. “The bastard tried to kill me.”
His eyes widened but he remained silent while the waitress poured our coffee. Once she’d left the table he leaned forward and said, “Maybe you need to tell me the whole story…”
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