by George Wier
“The dead man don’t know any difference,” Cottonmouth said.
Jennifer put her own napkin down, put her elbows on the table and leaned forward. I sat there, rapt, at what was about to come out of her mouth. “As I see it,” she said, “it’s pretty cut-and-dry. You can’t do something like that for something stupid like money. And you can’t do it because somebody thinks you owe them something, even if it’s true. If I owed my best friend, Leila, for saving my life, and she asked me to do something wrong, then she’s not really my friend. Even if she once saved my life. The thing is, Mr. Cottonmouth, is we’re always supposed to do what’s right. We’re supposed to save someone’s life whenever we have the chance. No one can pay us for that. It’s free. Doing the right thing is always free. It’s always doing the wrong thing that cost something. I think you can’t afford to do the wrong thing, Mr. Cottonmouth. Not if you had a billion dollars.”
Cottonmouth laughed. The grin spread across his face and he raised his head and laughed long and hard in the direction of the ceiling. Ms. Delphina, beside him, began to smile.
“What’s so funny?” Jennifer asked.
“Oh child,” Ms. Delphina said. “You are your daddy’s girl.”
“That I am,” she replied. “But I still want to know what’s funny.”
“Honey,” I said. “I think Cottonmouth can explain it best to you.”
When he stopped laughing, he said, “You’re the one Corporal Henry Sterling sent down here, Jennifer Travis, and that’s for sure. I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing at myself. I was all bent out of shape about this here thing, and I try to foist it off on somebody else, like’s it their problem, and you come all the way here and put it all right back in my lap. As far as I’m concerned, I owe you a great deal.”
“She’s eleven years old,” Jessica said, and reached next to her and slugged Jennifer gently in the shoulder. They then high-fived each other.
“And that,” Delphina said, looking down at Cottonmouth, “is what me and your grandson have been trying to tell you for a whole month.”
“I think,” I said, while reaching a fork for a second pork chop, “that I need to have a talk with Mr. Atwell. And I think that you need to go with me when I do.” I pointed the fork and pork chop at Cottonmouth, for emphasis.
“Oh Lord,” he said. “I don’t know if I can face him.”
“You will face him,” I said. “But it’ll be all right. Because we’re bringing the girls and your grandson with us.”
“Now that is just what I wanted to hear!” Ms. Delphina stated. She turned and did a little dance as she went back to the kitchen.
“There’s only one other thing I need to know.”
“What’s that?” Cottonmouth asked.
“How is that both you and your family are in danger over this?”
He shook his head and looked down again. I had gone right to the heart of things.
“Because,” he said, “Mr. Horner knows that I’m supposed to murder him.”
“Why?” Jessica asked. “How?”
“Because,” Bubba said. “Grandpa done went on and told him.”
CHAPTER FIVE
A fter lunch, we all loaded into the Expedition with Jessica driving and Cottonmouth sitting up front. Jennifer and I rode in the backseat with Bubba between us. Bubba was singularly impressed with the DVD-movie system, and he thumbed through her small binder of movies, disapproving of all the Disney titles and zeroing in on the collection of violent cop-and-robber movies, which appeared to be all Jessica’s.
“Let’s not watch any movies now,” I said.
“Duh, dad,” Jennifer said. “We can’t watch a whole movie while driving across town.”
“Okay.” I leaned forward. “Cottonmouth, where are we going?”
“It’s a big operation, over off of Japheth Street. Mr. Atwell used to run one of the largest shipping operations on the Houston Ship Channel, aside from some of them refineries like Mobil Oil and Texaco and some of the big chemical companies, like Dow and Elf. They got a dock right on the Channel for those big bulk carrier ships, too, but most of the place has gone to hell. One time, he had over a thousand employees there. Now there’s maybe a hundred.”
“Jiminy. He used to be pretty big, then. What happened?”
“He used to blame it on NAFTA. Now he blames it on his daughter’s husband.”
“Uh huh. And since his son-in-law is running the operation, why is Mr. Atwell there?”
“You’ll know the answer to that when you meet him.”
“Huh. I can’t wait.”
“My dad is an impatient man, Cottonmouth,” Jessica said. “And just by the way, I can’t wait to hear you play.”
“Well, I’m playing tonight down at the Nite Wing. You sure are welcome to come have a listen.”
“You hear that, dad? We’re going to Mr. Cottonmouth’s blues club.”
“Oh! I want to go!” Jennifer said.
“You may be a little young for that, darling,” I said.
“No she ain’t,” Cottonmouth replied. “They’ll let her in, they just won’t serve a kid alcohol, is all. Bubba comes with me all the time, don’tcha, Bubba?”
Bubba—and I had to keep reminding myself he was Willard III—did a slight rolling of the eyes, and I instantly knew that listening to his grandfather play harmonica and sing at the Nite Wing wasn’t exactly his cup of tea.
“Yes sir,” Bubba said, with little glee. I suspected that the old man made him come so that he could keep an eye on his grandson and keep him out of trouble at the same time. I had to admit, I was a little more than intrigued with the prospect of listening to Cottonmouth play and sing. He’d done so at the Cotton Club and at Carnegie Hall, so he couldn’t be half bad.
“Turn left at this next light,” Cottonmouth said. Jessica had already told him that she knew the way from the wagon’s built-in GPS system, but Cottonmouth was having none of that. He knew the way, and there was no other way.
We crossed beneath the Katy Freeway and ambled south and east, the Houston skyline alternatively coming into view, then disappearing over the shoulder to our right.
“I like Houston, dad,” Jennifer said.
“And Houston likes you, too.”
When I’d first seen Bubba asleep in the chair opposite Cottonmouth’s bed, I’d assumed him to be in his early twenties. As I got to know him, I found myself repeatedly revising that estimate downward, until I arrived at about seventeen. He appeared, however, to be fully grown if fairly short, and had a blasé attitude about life that only a teenager can properly affect. I also suspected, from his unassertive attitude, that there had been some real trauma in his life, and not particularly remote in his past. Where were his parents? Why was he living with his grandfather? Was one of the other rooms at Ms. Delphina’s little bed and breakfast his? I felt I needed to know what the family dynamic was before things moved too much further along, and so found myself asking.
“Bubba, you lived with your grandfather long?”
“Uh. Yes sir. I’ve been staying with him since I was twelve. My father died of an overdose. My mother run off with another man when I was little. We haven’t ever seen her since then.”
“The boy’s had a rough life,” Cottonmouth said. “A lot rougher than mine was at his age. My son got a bad load of heroin. The medical examiner said his heart exploded. That’s a hard way to go, with your heart exploding.”
Jennifer put her hand on Bubba’s arm. “I’m sorry for all your loss, Bubba.”
Bubba reached up and wiped the corner of his eye. “It’s okay,” he said.
“It fell to me to raise him,” Cottonmouth said. “Which isn’t right, because I didn’t raise my own kids properly.”
“You have siblings?” I asked.
“Got a sister lives on Galveston Island. She won’t come visit. Won’t leave the Island for nothing. Not even a hurricane.”
“I’ve known people like that,” I said.
Cott
onmouth continued to gesture the directions to Jessica, and we turned on Runnels Street, which I estimated to run southeast. The dark bulk of U.S. Highway 59 passed over us, blotting out the early afternoon sun.
“When you get down to Hirsch Road, take a left,” he told Jessica.
I watched Houston pass by outside as we moved through the day. We were clearly in one of the city’s large industrial zones, fairly close to the Ship Channel. I moved my window down halfway with the tap of a button and the tangy smell of salt air mingled with marsh water worked its way into my nose.
“Right here,” Cottonmouth said, and pointed, “make a left.”
After a moment we crossed over the Ship Channel at one of its narrowest points. I hadn’t been in this sector since I was eight years old, and my father had brought me to work with him. He’d been a longshoreman working for Brown & Root at the time. That had been more than forty years in the past. It dawned on me then how old I had become.
As I watched, I noted that the entire area had become run-down, rusted out, and apparently in imminent danger of collapsing altogether. Rusted and shabby warehouses with tin peeling back in swaths, the weather-stained remnants of old distilleries and grain elevators, and ossified petrochemical refineries dotted the landscape, the mute evidence of a long bygone age of progress. I blinked, striving to put into view the snapshot bustle of cars, trucks and longshoremen from my own past, but saw only the amber glow of sunlight filtered through eyelids. On good days, I can summon a mental time machine. This was not one of those days.
At Cottonmouth’s continued direction—and to her credit I noticed that Jessica had at some point switched off the GPS system so that she would not be frustrated by the contradictions of his directions with what was clearly in front of her on the screen—we took a right-hand turn and I looked to our right. I was appalled. The area we had left behind held no candle in terms of shabbiness to what was there. The place looked like one big open pit, carved out of the earth, but with islands of rusted-out oil storage drums, the kind that store fuel in terms of tens of thousands of gallons.
“That’s the place,” Cottonmouth said, and pointed to exactly what I was looking at.
“Of course it is,” I replied. The place hurt the eyes to look at it.
We passed a large sign that read:
ATWELL, INC.
Contractor’s Entrance
A large arrow that had once been red, but that was now a pink so pale that it almost wasn’t there pointed in our direction of travel. A few hundred yards farther on, Jessica turned us into the yard. One of the gates was missing, so she drove around it and onto a pitted gravel road that wound around a tall pile of sandy earth and downward.
“This place is so cool,” Jennifer said.
I looked at her as if she were not my child; somehow, possibly, there had been a switch in the nursery shortly after birth. The movie binder forgotten, she pressed her face to the glass and watched the blasted landscape roll slowly past.
We came up even with a long, low building that appeared to be the administration offices for the outfit—if, indeed, the outfit was a going concern. There were several pickup trucks parked out front, as well as a Mercedes, but a far newer model than my own, at home. It stood to reason that there wouldn’t be very many people around on a Saturday, and Atwell, Inc. didn’t appear to be a huge employer, at least from the drive going in.
Cottonmouth directed us to bypass the building, and head around back, were a series of tall, needle-like structures loomed over the blasted and desiccated landscaping. I had yet to see any grass, green or otherwise.
We continued around back until Cottonmouth pointed to a small travel trailer stuck close to a tall, barbed-wire-topped chain-linked fence. In front of the trailer was a pickup truck and next to this was a golf cart. On the golf cart sat a man.
“That’s him,” Cottonmouth said. “That’s Jimmy Atwell.”
We drove up and Jessica brought us to a stop twenty or so yards in front of him. She opened the compartment between the seat and started to fish out her pistol, but Cottonmouth put his hand over hers and said, “I assure you, Miss, you won’t need that.”
She considered it, then nodded slowly.
“I think it’ll be okay, Jess,” I said. “Jennifer, you and Bubba stay in the car until I motion to you to come. Cottonmouth, just the adults for the initial meeting.”
“That’s fine. I’m ready to get this thing over with.”
Cottonmouth got out first and Jessica and I followed him.
As we walked up to him, I appraised the man sitting in the golf car. He was eighty going on a hundred, if he was a day. His hair was all there, but it was as white as the mountaintop snow. He was several days unshaven, and his eyes were little pig eyes beneath layers of puffy eyelids. He was large-framed, yet gaunt, as if sometime in the past he had been a big man, prone to overweight, and his shirt was more of a tent that clothing, many sizes too large and twenty years out of style. As we drew closer I detected that he had something physically wrong with him, apart from age, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“Willard, who’re these people?”
“They are friends of mine. The kids are still in the car,” Cottonmouth gestured behind us. Cottonmouth rarely said anything, I noted, without including a gesture of some kind to drive it home. Words weren’t simply concepts to the man, they were things to be given out. “This here is Mr. Bill Travis, from Austin. This is his daughter, Jessica.”
I stepped forward and extended my hand. Jimmy Atwell looked at it, then up at me, then finally reached. He couldn’t reach far, however, and as I stepped closer to take his hand, I saw his physical handicap, and several things made sense at once. Both of his legs were amputated above the knee, and the pants legs had been cut off and tied into knots. I pegged him for a diabetic, one of the worst forms of the disease—a Type II. If I was correct, then he was lucky to have made it to his advanced age. His handshake was hard, but perfunctory, as if it meant less than nothing. Jessica likewise stepped up, and didn’t bat an eye at seeing his handicap.
“Nice to meet you, sir,” she said.
He nodded and shook her hand, and let it go.
“Willard?” Atwell asked.
“They’re here because of me. They know what you want me to do.”
Jimmy Atwell’s face flushed red and his jaws clenched. “Why in the hell would you do that? It’s a betrayal, I tell you. A betrayal. I saved your life, Willard. You were done for. You were already mostly dead. But I brought you back from that. And this is how you repay me!”
“We’re here to help,” Jessica said. “But we won’t help you kill a man.”
I motioned behind me and one of the car doors swung open and Jennifer and Bubba came out and walked over.
“This is another daughter of mine,” I said, “Jennifer Travis.” Jennifer stared at Jimmy Atwell’s face, but he wouldn’t make eye contact with her. Jennifer took it as given from the expression on the man’s face that she would not be shaking his hand.
“And I believe you know Bubba, my grandson,” Cottonmouth stated.
Jimmy Atwell didn’t speak. He got tired of staring at Cottonmouth and turned away.
“Mr. Atwell, we’re here about your problem. Killing won’t solve anything.”
“The problem just got worse,” he said, and nodded his head to a point behind us. I turned to see a pickup coming toward us. It was coming fast.
“Who’s that?” Jessica asked.
“That’s Weller and Price. Plant security.”
“Are they hostile?” I asked.
“Well, no,” Atwell said. “Not hostile unless provoked. Then again, they aren’t exactly nice.”
“Okay,” I said. “Good to know. Jennifer, get behind me.”
Cottonmouth stepped in between the oncoming truck and Bubba and said, “I know these two clowns. I can handle them.”
The truck stopped in a cloud of dust, and two men with sunglasses, white shirts, black slacks and
black neckties got out.
“The Blues Brothers,” Jessica whispered.
“Hush, Jess,” I whispered back.
“All they need is the hats,” she rejoined.
“Who are these people, Jimmy?” one of the two said. I took him to the be leader of the two.
“It’s Mister Atwell to you, Jake. Folks, this is Jake Weller. His partner there, the gum-chewing one, is Lyle Price.” At that, Price abruptly ceased chewing his gum. “It’s Jake’s job to look after the place, to make sure nobody tries to steal any of the worthless junk around here. Also, he’s used to keep people in line, to escort them off the property when they get out of line, and to generally be a pain in the ass. Isn’t that right, Jake?”
“I’ll repeat the question, Jimmy. Do you know these people?”
“That wasn’t your question,” Jessica said. “You said, ‘Who are these people?’ You didn’t ask him if he knows us.”
“Well, I’m asking now.”
“I’ll answer both of those questions, Jake. I do know these people, and they’re here at my request. The last I checked, this entire outfit is in my name. So, I say it’s okay that they’re here.”
Jake took a step forward, took off his sunglasses. “According to Mr. Horner, your name may be on the title to this property, but Atwell, Incorporated leases it.”
“Yes, that’s so,” Atwell said. “But if you had bothered to read the fine print on the lease, which was written before you were born, it gives me a life estate on any acre of this property of my choosing, and that, by law, gives me the right to have people come and go and have safe passage to and from the public roadway to this little acre here. That particular contract was drawn up when you were knee-high to a cess bucket. So, why don’t you climb back in your little pickup and get the hell out of here.”
“Lyle,” Jake Weller said, “write down the license plate of this...Ford Expedition. It may be needed in case any damage is done on the property.”
