'You're still a young man. You haven't done anything that can't be undone.' When he didn't answer, I said, 'Have you?'
He looked down at the tops of his feet. His fingers were pressed into his bronze hair like white snakes. When I walked to the car I realized I had forgotten to deliver his father's message, but I felt Bunny didn't need another reminder that day of who or what he was.
I almost didn't recognize her when she got out of a taxi cab in my drive at noon the same day. She wore a powder-blue suit, heels, a white blouse, and a beige shoulder bag. But for some reason, in my mind's eye, I still saw the tall, naturally elegant woman in tan uniform and campaign hat. I opened the side door and stepped out under the porte cochere.
'Wow,' I said.
'Wow, yourself.'
'You sure look different.'
'That's the welcome?'
'Come in.' I opened the screen.
She hesitated. 'I don't want to interrupt your day.'
We seemed to be looking at each other like people who might have just met at a bus stop.
'I don't know what to say, Mary Beth. I got one phone message. My only source of information about you has been Brian Wilcox.'
'Brian?'
'He got a warrant and tossed my house.'
She looked away, her face full of thought.
'I'm not supposed to be here. My people are cutting a deal with the new sheriff,' she said.
'Your people?'
'Yes.'
The wind blew the curls on the back of her neck. I could hear the tin roof on the barn pinging with heat, like wires breaking.
'The locals are trying to jam you up on the shooting?' I said.
'It's their out. I handed it to them on a shovel.'
'Sammy Mace was a cop killer. He got what he had coming,' I said.
'Can we go inside, Billy Bob? We were in Denver this morning. I overdressed.'
She sat down at the kitchen table. I poured her a glass of iced tea. I ran cold water over my hands and dried them, not knowing why I did. Outside, the barn roof shimmered like a heliograph under the sun.
'My office is taking the weight for me. I screwed up, but they're taking the weight, anyway,' she said.
'A stand-up bunch. We're talking about the DEA?' I said.
Her back straightened under her coat. Her hand was crimped on a paper napkin, her gaze pointed out the window.
'I thought coming here was the right thing to do. But I'm all out of words, Billy Bob.'
'Can't we have dinner? Can't we spend some time together without talking about obligations to a government agency? You think you owe guys like Brian Wilcox?'
'This is pointless. Because you hung up your own career doesn't mean other-' She didn't finish. She put both her hands in her lap, then a moment later placed one hand on top of her shoulder bag.
I opened the refrigerator door to take out the iced tea pitcher again. Then closed it and stood stupidly in the center of the room, all of the wrong words already forming in my throat.
'An English writer, what's his name, E. M. Forster, once said if he had to choose between his country and his friend, he hoped he'd have the courage to choose his friend,' I said.
'I guess I missed that in my English lit survey course,' she said, rising from her chair. 'Can I use your phone to call a cab? I should have asked him to wait.'
'I apologize. Don't leave like this.'
She shook her head, then walked into the library and used the telephone. I stood in her way when she tried to walk down the hall to the front door.
'You see yourself as a failure. You put yourself through law school. You were a Texas Ranger and an AUSA. You can be a lawman again, anytime you want,' she said.
'Then stay. I'll cancel the cab.'
I put my hand on her arm. I saw the pause in her eyes, the antithetical thoughts she couldn't resolve, the pulse in her neck.
'I'd better go. I'll call later,' she said.
'Mary Beth-'
Then she was out the door, her cheeks glazed with color, her hand feeling behind her for the door handle so she would not have to look back at my face.
But by Monday morning there was no call. Instead, a dinged gas-guzzler stopped out front of my office and a woman in a platinum wig and shades and a flowered sundress got out and looked in both directions, as though by habit, then entered the downstairs foyer.
A minute later my secretary buzzed me.
'A Ms Florence LaVey. No appointment,' she said.
'Who is she?'
'She said you'd know who she was.'
'Nope. But send her in.'
The inner door opened and the woman in the platinum wig stood framed in the doorway, her shades dripping from her fingers, her face expectant, as though at any moment I would recognize her relationship to my life.
'Can I help you?' I asked. Then I noticed that one of her eyes was brown, the other blue.
'The name doesn't turn on your burner, huh? San Antonio? The White Camellia Bar?'
'Maybe I'm a little slow this morning.'
'I know what you mean. I always get boiled on Sunday nights myself. I think it has something to do with being raised Pentecostal… Let me try again… A nasty little fuck by the name of Darl Vanzandt?'
'You're the lady he beat up. You're a waitress?'
'A hostess, honey.' She winked and sat down and crossed her legs. She opened a compact and looked at herself. 'I'd like to slip some pieces of bamboo deep under his fingernails.'
'His father says you and a pimp tried to roll him.'
She wet the ball of one finger and wiped at something on her chin and clicked the compact shut.
'His old man paid me ten thousand dollars so he and his son could tell whatever lies they wanted to. You interested in what really happened?'
'It's not of much value if you took money to drop the charges.'
'I'm not talking about what that little shit did to me. I read about that girl in the paper when she got beaten to death. But I didn't make any connections. Then last night him and this ex-convict named Moon come to this new bar I'm working in. Fart Breath starts talking about a trial, about this girl got gang-raped and her head bashed in, about how some lawyer is trying to make him take somebody else's fall. I'm standing behind the bar. I keep waiting for him to catch on who I am. Forget it.'
'Yes?'
'Get the girl dug up. See if she wasn't stoned-out on roofies.'
'We're talking about Ro-'
'You got it. Rohypnol. That's what the Vanzandt kid uses. He picks up a girl and dumps it in her drink so he can do anything he wants with her.' She fitted her glasses on, then removed them again. 'I wish I'd sent him to the Ellis Unit at Huntsville. The colored boys always appreciate new Ivory soap when they come out of the field.'
'I've seen the autopsy. She was full of booze but no dope.'
She brushed a long red thumbnail back and forth across a callus. 'He sat on my chest and spit in my face. He broke both my lips. I told this to his old man. He goes, "Ten thousand is my limit."'
'The Vanzandts have their own way of doing things,' I said, my attention starting to wander.
She got up to leave.
'Forget about the dope. Either that kid did her, or y'all got real bad luck.'
'What do you mean?'
'Two like him in one town? This might be a shithole, honey, but it doesn't deserve that,' she said.
Just before lunch, the lady in charge of payroll at my father's old pipeline company called from Houston.
'We didn't contract any jobs around Waco during the late Depression or the war years. But of course that doesn't mean in itself your father wasn't there,' she said.
'Well, what you've found is still helpful,' I said.
'Wait a minute. I did some other checking. I don't know if it will be useful to you or not.'
'Yeah, please, go ahead.'
'Your father worked steadily for us in east Texas from 1939 to 1942. Then evidently he was drafted into the army. I don't kn
ow how it would have been possible for him to have worked for another company around Waco at the same time. Does this help you out?'
'I can't tell you how much.' I thanked her again and was just about to hang up. Then I said, 'Just out of curiosity, would the "search" key on your computer kick up the name of a man named Garland T. Moon?'
'Hold on. I'll see. When did he work for us?'
'During the mid-1950s.'
I heard her fingers clicking on the keyboard of a computer, then she scraped the phone up off the table.
'Yes, we have a record of a G. T. Moon. But not during the 1950s. He was a hot-pass welder on a natural gas line down at Matagorda Bay in 1965. Is that the same man?… Hello?'
I don't remember if I answered her or not. I recall replacing the receiver in the cradle, the residue of moisture and oil that my palm print left on the plastic, the skin tightening in my face.
My father had been blown out of a hellhole while mending a leak on a pipe joint at Matagorda Bay in 1965. chapter twenty-seven
I walked across the street to the one-story sandstone building, which was now the office of the new sheriff, Hugo Roberts. He sat with one half-topped boot propped on his desk, the air around him layered with cigarette smoke.
'You want Garland T. Moon's file? Marvin Pomroy don't have it?' he asked.
'It's gone back into Records.'
'What d' you want it for?'
'Idle curiosity. Since he probably killed your predecessor with an ax, I thought you might be interested in it, too.'
He dropped his foot to the floor.
'Damn, Billy Bob, every time I talk with you I feel like a bird dog sticking his nose down a porcupine hole.' He picked up his phone and punched an extension. 'Tell Cleo to stop playing with hisself and to bring Garland Moon's sheet to my office,' he said. He put the phone back down and smiled. 'Hang on, I got to take a whiz.'
He went into a small rest room and urinated into the bowl with the door open.
'You got Moon made for the sheriff's murder, huh?' he said.
'That'd be my bet.'
He washed his hands, combed his hair in the mirror, and came back out. 'Since nobody else has figured that out, what gives you this special insight?' he said.
'Because you're not worried about who did it.'
'Beg your pardon?'
'The sheriff was on a pad. In this county the pad is passed on with the office. If the sheriff was murdered by the guys he was taking juice from, you'd be walking on eggshells, Hugo. You're not.'
A deputy opened the front door and stuck his head in. 'You wanted the file on Moon?' he said.
'Give it to the counselor here,' Hugo said. 'Billy Bob, you don't mind reading it outside, do you? There's a nice table under the trees. Then carry it on back to Cleo.'
I took the manila folder from the deputy and started to follow him outside. Hugo lit a cigarette from a match folder with cupped hands. 'Read the weather warning, son. This is the last time you track your shit in my office,' he said.
I sat under an oak tree filled with mockingbirds and went over the long and dreary history of Garland T. Moon. In Texas alone, he had been jailing for five decades. His career stretched back into the tail end of a prison farm system that had held the gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, Buck and Clyde Barrow, and the twelve-string guitarist Huddie Ledbetter. Hollywood films had always portrayed the Georgia chain gang as the most severe form of penal servitude in the United States. But among old-time recidivists, the benchmark was Arkansas, where convicts were worked long hours, fed the most meager of rations, and beaten with the Black Betty, a razor strop attached to a wood handle. Among these same recidivists, Texas always came in a close second.
At Huntsville Moon had been written up repeatedly for 'shirking work quota' and 'weighing in with dirt clods.'
In the old days a convict at Huntsville had to pick a certain quota of cotton each day. If he didn't, or if he was caught weighting his bag with dirt from the field, he was separated out from the other inmates, taken hot and dirty to a lockdown unit, not allowed to shower or eat, and forced to stand with two others on top of an oil drum until the next morning. If he fell off the drum, he had to deal with the gunbull in the cage.
Moon had been hospitalized twice for head lacerations and broken foot bones. No cause for the injury was given. Each hospitalization took place after an escape attempt. His stomach had been seared by liquid Drano, his back held against a hot radiator, his calves branded with heated coat hangers. Everything in his record indicated he was as friendless and hated among the prison population as he was among the personnel.
But what good did it do to dwell upon the cruelty that had been inculcated in Garland T. Moon or that he had cultivated and nourished in himself and injected systematically into the lives of others? The day you understood a man like Moon was the day you crossed a line and became like him.
I needed to know what had happened between him and my father around the year 1956. Moon had said my father had put him in his truck and dropped him on the highway without food or money or destination. My father was a good-hearted and decent man, slow to anger and generous to a fault. If Moon's account was true, Moon had either committed a crime so heinous or represented a threat so grave to others my father had felt no reservation in abandoning an ignorant, sexually abused boy to his fate.
I went back to the first entries in Moon's file. He had been released from the county prison, at age sixteen, in February of 1956. His record remained clean until August 17 of that same year. The words 'suspicion of abduction' were typed out neatly by the date without explanation.
I walked across the square to the newspaper and asked permission to use the paper's morgue. The issues from 1956 -had never been put on microfilm and were still bound in a heavy green cardboard cover that had turned grey with age around the borders. I turned to the August issues and found a four-inch backpage story about a missing ten-year-old Negro girl who was later discovered hiding in a cave. She told officers a white man had come into her yard and had led her into the woods behind her home. She refused to tell anyone what had happened to her between the time she left home and the time she had been found by sheriff's deputies.
Four days later there was a follow-up story about a juvenile who had been brought in for questioning about the girl's abduction. The story did not give his name but stated he had been working on a pipeline nearby the girl's home.
The juvenile was released from custody when the parents refused to bring charges.
The date on the newspaper follow-up story was August 18, the day after the date on Garland T. Moon's rap sheet.
I walked back across the street and threw Moon's file on the sheriff's desk.
'Sorry, I couldn't find Cleo,' I said. 'By the way, some exculpatory evidence disappeared from the Roseanne Hazlitt homicide investigation. I'm talking about some bottles and beer cans taken from the murder scene by your deputies. You mind going on the stand about that, Hugo?'
Pete's mother was waiting for me when I got back to the office. She wore a pink waitress uniform, her lank, colorless hair tied behind her head. She kept twisting the black plastic watchband on her wrist.
'The social worker says she's got to certify. If Pete ain't living at home no more, she cain't certify.' She sat bent forward, her eyes fastened on the tops of her hands.
'I'll talk to her,' I said.
'It won't do no good.'
'It's dangerous for him, Wilma.'
'They ain't done nothing but write that note. They sent it to you. They didn't send it to us.' The resentment in her voice was like a child's, muted, turned inward, resonant with fear.
'I'll ask Temple to bring his stuff home after school,' I said.
'You been good to Pete and all but…' She didn't finish. Her eyes looked receded, empty. 'I'm gonna move away. This town ain't ever been any good for us.'
'I don't think that's the answer.'
Then I saw the anger bloom in her face, past the fearful restraint that norm
ally governed her life.
'Yeah? Well, why don't you just raise your own son and leave mine alone for a while?' she said.
At six that evening Mary Beth called from Denver.
'Am I going to see you again?' I asked. My throat was dry, my tone vainly ironic and preemptive, the receiver held too tightly against my ear.
'I can't come back there for a while.'
'I can get a flight to Denver… Mary Beth? Are you there?'
'Yes… I mean, yes, I'm here.'
'Did you hear what I said?' But I already knew the answer, and I could feel a weakness, a failing in my heart as though weevil worms had passed through it.
'Some people here are still upset about the way things went in Deaf Smith,' she said.
'With you and me?'
'That's part of it.'
'I think the problem is Brian Wilcox. Not you, not me, not the shooting of Sammy Mace and his bodyguard. I think Wilcox is poisoning the well everywhere he goes and your people are overlooking it to save the investigation.'
'Maybe that's true. But I can't do anything about it.'
I could hear her breathing in the silence.
'Can you give me a telephone number?' I said.
'We're leaving tonight for a meeting in Virginia.'
'Well, I hope it works out for you,' I said.
'What? What did you say?'
'Nothing. I never did well inside organizations. I hope you do. That's all I meant.'
In the silence I could hear her breath against the receiver.
'Mary Beth?'
'Yes?'
'I'll need you to testify at Lucas's trial. About the cans and bottles those other deputies lost or destroyed.'
'It's a bad time to bring that up.'
'Bad time? That's what's on your mind? It's a bad time?'
'Good-bye, Billy Bob.'
After I hung up the receiver, I stared at the telephone in the fading light through the window, as though I could will it to ring again. Then I walked outside, under an empty dome of yellow sky, into a sand-bitten wind that shredded leaves from the chinaberry tree. I got into my Avalon, the wind buffering the windows, and drove to Pete's house.
'You're by yourself?' I asked.
He stood on the porch in a pair of pin-striped overalls and a Clorox-stained purple T-shirt.
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