Guns (John Hardin series)

by Phil Bowie

  “Hank,” she said in a low scolding voice, “I reckon you’ve just got it set in your mind to go ahead and wake Roy up.”

  “Sorry, Hattie. She slipped. Maybe the next time we go over we can find us a proper stove lid handle.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Let’s put that on my buy-or-borrow list before we forget it. Now, where did I put that list?”

  “I’ll just go in there real quiet and check on Roy. Now, if he wakes up it ain’t going to be me. It’ll be ‘cause he smells this good breakfast you’re fixing.”

  He came awake in the musty bright light knowing he was feverish. He was on a low bed looking out a dirty window at clear sky, trees, grass, and a long sliver of blue water. He was naked under a sheet and a thin wool blanket. His head was wrapped with something and it pounded sharply as though it was about to crack. His right leg was hot and whitely painful. Didn’t feel as though he could move it. His ribs and his hip ached and the teeth on the left side of his mouth felt loose. His tongue was like a wedge of un-sanded wood. He moved his head slightly. The ceiling was old-fashioned thick bead board, sagging in the center, water-stained, most of the paint having long ago flaked away. He eased his head over to the other side and looked up dizzily at a figure backlit in the doorway. Beyond a farther raggedly-screened doorway he could see breeze-bent grass and sand in the sunlight. “Walta…Maphau,” he said with dry cracked lips.

  “How’s that, son?”

  He scratched his parched lips with his wooden tongue. “You look…little like Walter Maf…Maffau. ‘Cept you have…mo’ winkles.”

  The skinny figure slapped its knee and hooted. “You hear that, Hattie? Roy says I got more wrinkles than Walter Matthau. Well, son, I reckon I earned every last one of them over the years since we seen you. Fifteen years it’s been now, and that’s a fact. Hattie, Roy needs him a cool drink of water here.”

  A little lady with her thin pure white hair in disarray showed in the doorway wearing a calico dress and a white apron. She carried a jelly glass half full of water with a straw, and his eyes fixed on it. She came over and held the glass for him to drink from it thirstily sideways, wiping a little overspill from the side of his mouth with her apron, then feeling his forehead with her palm. The water tasted far better than the finest wine could have. She was smiling and crying. “Roy,” she said. “Oh, Roy. You just don’t know how good it is to see you come home to us. She used her fingers to wipe at her pale blue eyes. Don’t you worry, now. You’ll be all right. I’ll have your breakfast ready before you can think about it. I just put on a pot of tea.”

  “Hattie makes the best cup of yaupon tea on Portsmouth,” the old man said as she left the room wiping at her eyes with the hem of her apron. “Don’t you, Hattie?”

  From the other room she called, “Hank, you’d best get the bucket and wash up for breakfast. Then you should get a towel and wash Roy’s hands and face. We’ll see he eats first. He needs to start getting his strength back.”

  “Okay, Mother.”

  “Hank?” he said weakly. “Listen. My name’s not Roy. It’s Sam Bass and…”

  “It’s dang sure good to have you home, Roy,” Hank said loudly, holding a finger up to his lips. Then he came closer, nervously pointing out toward the other room, using his body to hide the gesture. His eyes were stern and he said in a rasping whisper, “Now, I don’t think you want her to go and have another stroke, do you, son? This is her best day in fifteen years and we ain’t going to spoil it for her. So I’ll just be callin’ you Roy and my wife can too, she wants to, you hear?”

  Sam let his head ease back carefully onto the pillow, closed his eyes, and said tiredly, “Okay, Hank. God, that water tasted so good…”

  After the old man had gone out to wash himself and had brought a wet towel back in to wash Sam’s hands and face gently, Sam said, “How did I get here, Hank?”

  “Roy, you’re danged lucky I was out on the sea side walkin’ just then. I saw your plane go in. A real big splash it was, and like a cartwheel. Didn’t float long, on its back, looked like. I took a sight on the shore so I’d be able to find the spot. I come and got the skiff and went out that inlet hell for leather. Sea wasn’t too rough, thank the Lord. You had that yellow jacket about half on and blown up, and it just was holding your face above water. You was all banged up. Head looked the worst, but head wounds can bleed like the bejeesus. You was turnin’ the sea pink when I got my flashlight on you, but I think maybe the sea was chilled enough to slow your bleedin’ some. Out cold. I looked but I didn’t see nobody else. I tied you alongside the skiff and brought you back to the old Coast Guard dock.” He whispered again, “Come and got Hattie and right away she took it as a gift from God. It’s Roy, she told me, come back from the sea like I prayed for so long.”

  He went on in a normal voice, “We rolled you up onto the dock in a low part of it, then dragged you along to where we could roll you off gentle into our cart, and then pushed you on home. We’d already borrowed a real good first aid kit and Hattie knows a lot about mending folk, so we cleaned you up and used two bottles of peroxide and got the bleedin’ stopped in the worst places and bandaged you. Hattie thinks your right leg’s broke but it’s straight and we got it splinted good. You might of cracked a few ribs on that side, too. I wrapped a clean shirt around you and then bound you up good with duct tape. All you can do for ribs. Now, you can get some of her good food into you and start healin’ up. Only thing, was anybody with you in your plane?”

  “No. Just me. You two saved my life.”

  Hank smiled. “Glad it was only you. That was workin’ on me, fact there might’ve been somebody else trapped down there in that plane. As for savin’ you, if you could see the difference in Hattie, today from yesterday, from fifteen years of yesterdays, you might put that the other way around.”

  Hattie brought in a tray that was actually an old cookie sheet and put it on a small rickety table beside him. There was a big steaming bowl of grits drizzled with maple syrup along with two thick pieces of fried bread and a cup of tea. There were also four aspirins on a folded paper towel. Hank dragged in a rocking chair that had been repaired with splints, duct tape, and string lashings, and a straight-backed chair with a square of canvas nailed down where the caning had once been. Hattie took the rocker and Hank sat in the straight chair.

  Sam raised himself slowly and painfully onto his elbow and Hank hurried over to prop him up with pillows.

  “That smells delicious,” Sam said. He managed to reach gingerly for the spoon and take a swallow of the grits, which were hot and sweet and immediately made his stomach feel better. “Ma’am, I appreciate this. I didn’t know how hungry I was. He took a bite of crisp bread and then sipped the tea, which tasted wild and bittersweet. They watched him slowly put away the aspirin, the tea, and all of the food and then Hank helped him lie back onto the lumpy bed. He already felt a hundred percent better.

  “Thank you, Hank. Thank you, ma’am.”

  “Have you forgotten what you used to call me?” Hattie said.

  “Course not, Mother,” Hank said. “He knows he always called you Flutter because you was always makin’ such a fuss over him.”

  “You’re the best of them, you know,” Hattie said. “Your brother and sister never did understand Hank and me, although we surely tried.”

  “What they finally went and done, Roy,” Hank said, “was go to the lawyers and they came to us with papers. Put us in Shady Grove down in Morehead City. A wonderful place to enjoy your golden years, they call it. We had a dinky place they call a villa. All the villas is connected by halls. Locked doors at the ends of the halls. Place don’t look like a jail, but that’s what it is. Villa had a dinky kitchen with what they call a intimate dining nook. A little bedroom, a livin’ room about big enough for a TV and two chairs, and a bathroom full of chrome-plated rails. Like we’re gonna get too light-headed takin’ our showers. Hell, we been takin’ showers together more years than we can count, ain’t once fainted over it yet. Out
the one window we could see a iron bench, a dead tree, and more villas across the cozy courtyard. You couldn’t fart, sorry, Hattie, without drawin’ the Lieutenant Witch down onto you. They tell you when to sleep, when and what to eat. You better eat your jello now, or let that butcher in a white coat poke you any damn place he feels like, or you don’t get no allowance this week. They take your dentures out and then start askin’ you questions. Mean spirited. People livin’ there all got one foot on the shuffleboard court and the other foot in the grave.

  “They got activity time. What do you think of that? Activity time. Tell you who you’re supposed to play checkers with for today’s activity time. I swear I come this close to takin’ a shuffleboard stick to that Mr. Moser. A man ninety years old ought to know when you can double-jump and when you can’t. I play maybe three bars on my fiddle and here comes the Lieutenant Witch, says, ‘Now, Mr. Gaskill, you know Miz Toomey right next door here is tryin’ to sleep.’ Well, the fact is, you couldn’t wake Miz Toomey up if you was to crash-land Air Force One in the parkin’ lot. That woman will be dead a week before they figure it out.”

  Hattie held a corner of her apron up to her mouth to stifle a girlish giggle. She said, “So Hank and I ran away.”

  Hank took on a sly expression. “What we done, we saved up our allowance until it was near fifty dollars, packed our suitcases, then we borrowed the extra door key from Private Witch’s desk while she was outside smokin’ a cigarette, and when the coast was clear after midnight we walked right on out of there real quiet. Spent the rest of the night hidin’ out in a little park. Hitched a ride over to Beaufort early. We stocked up on a few things and then we borrowed an old outboard skiff and come on out here. Hattie read a book about Portsmouth once.”

  Sam said, “How long have you been here?”

  “Goin’ on six weeks, I guess. We got all we need right here. This house nobody else wants anyway; doesn’t leak much. Set in here among the trees. Furniture and stuff we found around the town. I got a tarp rigged to catch rain off the tin roof. Dug a good latrine out back and put a bench across it and a lean-to over it. By the way, don’t you worry none about that, Roy. I got an old cake pan you can use until you’re up and around. I’ll take care of it. Anyway, when we borrowed the skiff it had fifteen crab pots on it so we set those out in the sound. We eat some of the catch ourselves—Hattie makes a killer crab cake—and take the rest over to a fish house in Sealevel. We wade the shallows and dig clams for ten cent apiece. The man over at the fish house buys the clams and the crabs. Always fills up our gas tanks, too, and throws in a jug or two of fresh water if it ain’t rained lately or if we ask, or some other stuff like a can of lantern fuel. I expect he knows we’re fugitives but he won’t say anything. He’s eighty-three himself and his sons want to take over the business, run it their way, but he comes in to work every day, keeps his hands on that wheel. Hell, it’s his wheel.”

  “We have that old stove out there to cook on and keep us warm on these chilly nights,” Hattie said. “There’s plenty of wood around. If we only run the stove with good dry wood and at night or when there’s some breeze, we don’t think anybody will see the smoke. We keep soft drinks cool in the gut out back, where I wash our clothes. I don’t get groceries that go bad fast.”

  “We keep the skiff hid under the Coast Guard dock. We go over to the mainland once in a while to buy or borrow whatever’s on Hattie’s list. We borrowed the big cart. It was on a dock back of a fancy house. I guess they used it to carry stuff to their yacht. We call it our go-cart. It’s good for haulin’ wood and stuff. We borrowed the big first aid kit from there, too, and a few other things.”

  “I’ve got a list of the things we’ve borrowed.” Hattie said, “and about where we’ve borrowed them from, so later on it can all go back.”

  “You can gig a flounder in a heartbeat not three hundred feet from here,” Hank said. “You walk along in the shallows at night with a flashlight and just use a long sharp stick with a barb whittled back of the point. Nothin’ to it.”

  “We have the sand and the sea and a good clean breeze most always,” Hattie said. “And even with the others out here it’s so peaceful.”

  “Others?”

  “Oh, there are the ghosts,” Hattie said. “You can catch a glimpse of one sometimes, if you happen to move your head just right, over by a dune at sunset or in the shadow of an old house in the daylight. Sometimes you can hear one in a building, or they whisper when it’s raining, but they don’t mean us any harm at all. I expect we’re good company for them.”

  “We can get out my fiddle and raise Cain anytime we want,” Hank said, “and there’s nobody around to give a dang.”

  Hattie gestured at a yellowed 1956 calendar hung on a nail and smiled. “When it’s Sunday,” she said, “Hank and I get dressed up and walk over to the church. We just sit for a time with the sunlight coming in those old rippled glass windows. Hank will take out his fiddle and play ‘Ave Maria’ or ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ or ‘Silent Night’ and we’ll sing. We’ll just fill up that little old church with singing. I’ll read some words from the Good Book. Then Hank will take me for a walk on the beach. When we come home I’ll maybe fry us two flounders that Hank gigged just before dawn and make some skillet corn bread we can have with molasses, and brew up my tea.”

  “I expect they’ll track us down one of these days,” Hank said, “and make us go back to Shady Grove or some other jail, but then we’ll have all these good days out here to think about. This last free time.”

  “I think Roy needs to rest now,” Hattie said, “so we’ll go get our own breakfast and then do some chores. Come on now, Hank.”

  Sam was sleepy with the warm food in his belly and the aspirin beginning to dull the pains. “Thank you, Hank,” he said. “And thank you, Flutter,” seeing the way it made her smile. He closed his eyes and felt himself drifting off.

  He woke briefly in the early afternoon to take a long drink of water and more aspirin, and Hank helped him use the cake pan.

  When he woke up again it was dark. Outside the smudged window, bright stars were tangled in the trees and way off there was the lazy regular wink-flash of the Ocracoke lighthouse. He had a heavy black feeling that there was something terribly wrong over there and his mind shied away from it. He had drawn them away from the island. They must think they had killed him, and they had no reason to harm anyone else over there. They had to be long gone. Valerie and Joshua would be missing him and would be worried. They would think he’d just left the island in a hurry for some reason, he thought with a nervous hollowness, for some emergency, and would be waiting to hear from him, but he could make up for all of that.

  Hattie set a hissing lantern on his bedside table and made him a supper of a large golden-fried flounder and fried bread with molasses, with canned peaches and a Mountain Dew. He ate every morsel of it and had another long drink of cool sweet rain water. If he had any fever left it could not be much.

  After Hank and Hattie had eaten, they came in and sat with him. Hank said, “You feel up to a little music, son?”

  Sam nodded, so Hank went out and came back with his violin case.

  The instrument looked old, the grainy wood burnished in the lantern light. Around its bridge there was a powdery patch of rosin. Hank plucked the strings and tuned it by ear, then tightened up the age-discolored horsehair bow and drew it briskly across a small grooved rosin cake several times.

  “Play ‘Blue Eyes in The Rain’,” Hattie said. “That one is so pretty to me.”

  Hank rested the back of the fiddle on his chest and sat erect in the straight chair. Hattie leaned her head back and got the rocker moving slightly. Hank drew the bow deftly across the strings, making them vibrate and setting the old wood to resonating richly, his scuffed boot toe tapping out the time, his weathered bent fingers pressing with sureness on the slim neck of the instrument, Hattie’s small palm tapping the rocker arm softly in unison. He and Hattie sang in a harmony tuned to perfection f
rom long practice, and Sam watched them and listened to the old song. He hadn’t heard anybody else do it better.

  Hank played a lively “Turkey in The Straw", double-stringing most of it, and then a haunting “Red River Valley".

  “Here’s one you ought to know, son. And you can sing right along if you’re up to it. I call it ‘Me and My Hattie McGee’.”

  Hattie said, “I surely wish you had your guitar, Roy.” She smiled and closed her eyes, rocking slowly.

  Hank plucked the strings, using the pegs to fine-tune them, and then began singing Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee", substituting “Hattie McGee” for Bobby, and Sam soon joined in weakly.

  Hank gestured toward Hattie with his head. She was dozing off, her head canted on a thin pillow tied to the rocker back. He played “Love Can Build a Bridge” softly, not singing, then sat there with the fiddle resting on his knee.

  “When I look at her now, son,” he said quietly, “or when we’re out in the shallows clammin’ and she’s got her skirt tied up above her knees and her straw hat on, I don’t see all the years on her. I see her like she was forty years ago. It’s the same spark in her blue eyes and the same way she carries herself and the same good light in her voice. That woman there has stuck with me goin’ on fifty years now, like I really was somebody. When I never was.”

  Hank put the violin up on his chest again and played “Tennessee Waltz". Watching her sleep.

  Sam closed his eyes and saw the ghosts of Portsmouth town standing out there among the trees listening.

  Smiling contentedly to themselves because their island was alive once again.

  If only for a while.

  15

  WHEN SAM CAME AWAKE AT DAWN HE SAW HANK ASLEEP in the straight chair, his head on his shoulder and his arms folded. In his right hand he held a big squarish automatic pistol. Sam stirred, trying to raise his upper body and awkwardly stuff a pillow back there as a prop. Hank started and woke up abruptly, looking around.