Bad Signs

by R.J. Ellory

  “Christ Almighty, Clay …”

  Clay raised his hand. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you talking about your dad. I just thought it was strange that both our dads were killed in a store, that was all. Sure, my dad was a crazy man and your dad wasn’t. I just never mentioned the coincidence before.”

  “You want to talk about him?” Bailey asked.

  “There ain’t nothing to say. Reckon he was the kind of man who would be in jail if he wasn’t dead, or if he wasn’t in jail he’d be on his way.”

  Bailey looked back toward the horizon. “Life is weird,” she said.

  “No disagreement there.”

  “You have something, and then it’s gone. In an instant. Like clicking your fingers. Everything’s one way, and then bang, it’s all gone lopsided or back-to-front.”

  “The nature of things, I guess.”

  Clay was silent for a moment, and then he turned back to her and said, “And what about your mom?”

  “What about her?”

  “What was she like?”

  “You mean, her being a prostitute an’ everything?”

  Clay hesitated. “No, I don’t mean that. That was what she did, not who she was, right?”

  “Ain’t a lot of people who saw it that way.”

  Clay smiled. “My brother was a nice guy, and then he went crazy. Ain’t no shortage of dumb people, Bailey, you know that.”

  “She was good. I knew she loved me, right from the get-go. She didn’t have no shame about what she did, and when she got sick she didn’t think it was a punishment from God. She wasn’t like that. She was a great mom, and I loved her back just as much.”

  “Shame people’ve gotta die too early. But, like I said, that’s just the nature of things.”

  “Well, to hell with the nature of things, Clay Luckman. We’re just gonna have to change the nature of things, aren’t we? We’re gonna go to Eldorado and we’re gonna find out what nature has waitin’ for us there, and if we don’t like it then we’re gonna damned well change it or go lookin’ for it someplace else.”

  Bailey got up. She brushed down her pants and stamped her feet until her cuffs dropped.

  “We’ll get something to eat on the way,” Clay said. “That’s if you’re hungry.”

  She smiled. “Slap on enough ketchup and I’d eat a raccoon sandwich.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  One time Elliott Danziger heard a story. Where he heard it, the place it was about, well, he couldn’t remember these things, and they were unimportant details anyway. It was true and that was all that mattered.

  The story went that there was a valley someplace, and on the side of the valley was a town. It wasn’t a big town—maybe two or three hundred houses, a thousand or so folks living there, and these men came along to talk to the people about buying up their land and their houses so they could turn the valley into a reservoir. “We’re going to build a dam,” they said. “Each end of the valley we’re going to build a dam, and then we’re going to fill up the valley with water and we’re going to make a reservoir that will service the whole county. Crops will get irrigated, wells can be drilled, there’ll be plenty of water for everyone and prosperity will abound.” The townsfolk got together and they had a meeting. They discussed the issue back and forth, and finally a representative from the town went to see the reservoir men and told them to fuck themselves. “Go fuck yourselves,” they said. “We don’t want your dam and we don’t want your reservoir. We have enough water for our needs and that’s the way it’s going to stay. We built these houses with our own bare hands and we ain’t movin’ for no one.”

  Well, the reservoir men had this paper from the government, see. And the paper said that the people in the town had no choice but to let the reservoir men build their reservoir. The town representative said, “Go ahead, build the dam. See what happens.”

  So the reservoir men came, and they started building. They built all day, and then they came back the next morning and found that everything they’d built had been taken down and had disappeared. Bricks, stones, concrete, banks of earth—everything was gone. Tires were punctured on digger machines, tools had vanished, and aside from the machinery it was as if no one had been there. So they started again. They built and built all day, and then they left someone there overnight to guard the site. Came back the following morning and the guard was hogtied and gagged, all the building work was undone, and the guard didn’t have the faintest idea what had happened. So it went on for two more days. Everything they built was taken down. Machines went missing. Tools vanished. A man came from County Water & Power. He met with the town representative. The town representative sat patiently, and without a word he listened to everything the man from the County Water & Power had to say. When he was done the man from the county said, “So, what do you have to say to that?” and the town representative leaned forward and said, ever so quietly, “I think you should go fuck yourself.”

  Now they were mad. County Water & Power got an eviction order from the governor’s office, and because the governor was in the pocket of the company, financially speaking, and because he was going to earn a handful or two from the whole deal, he signed the eviction order without one bat of an eyelid or a shake of his tail feathers.

  County Water & Power came down to the town all excited. They had an official eviction order. If the townsfolk didn’t move on out now … well, they could call in the sheriff’s department. And they would do that if the need arose.

  This time the town representative didn’t even look at the paper. The man from the county handed it to him, and the town representative took it and tore it in half, and then half again, and then a few times more until it was confetti. He threw it up in the air and it came down like a shower, and then he turned to the county man and he said, “I told you last time, but you didn’t seem to hear me. Go fuck yourself.”

  The county man called the sheriff’s department. The sheriff was the town representative’s brother-in-law. When the sheriff answered the call he asked if this was the man from County Water & Power. “Yes,” the man said, “it is I.” The sheriff said, “I believe you’ve been talking to my brother-in-law,” and the county man said yes, he had. “I wasn’t aware he was your brother-in-law, but yes I have been speaking to him and he still is unwilling to comply with the eviction order.” “Well, okay,” the sheriff said. “I understand we have a standoff here … and it seems to me, sir, that had you complied originally with the order given to you by my brother-in-law, well, we wouldn’t be in this situation right now.”

  The county man was puzzled. “What order was that?” he asked. “What order did your brother-in-law give me?”

  “If I seem to remember rightly,” the sheriff said, “he told you to go fuck yourself.”

  Now it was scaled up to a full-blown battle of wills.

  The town versus County Water & Power. County came in. They erected barricades and fences, and behind the barricades and fences they went on building their dam. They went on building as if everything were in order. There was no way around the fences and barricades and the townsfolk couldn’t stop the building, so they gathered up their provisions, and they sent out for more, and they hunkered down for the duration, determined not to move, determined never to give an inch to the County Water & Power people. Which would have been fine. Which would have worked out just fine if it had just stayed a war of territory and will. Maybe they would have battled it out forever. Maybe County would have opted for another valley. Maybe the townsfolk would have run out of food and finally conceded defeat. But it didn’t work out that way. Now there was a valley with a dam at both ends and a town on the western incline. It was not a deep valley, and when the storms came it got awful full awful fast, and the mud turned into swampland, and the foundations of the houses became waterlogged and they started to slide. Folks came out to buttress the foundations and they got swept into the water and were drowned. County heard what was happening and they didn’t do a damned thing.
There were no emergency calls, and later they said that the storm must have taken down the telephone lines because no word of distress was heard from the people. That may well have been true, but it was more likely that the County people just flat-out lied. A town with a thousand dead folks was a town they could now turn into a reservoir. And that’s what they got. Everyone drowned. Every damned one of them.

  Come morning the bodies floated out there like fall leaves on a lake. You could barely see the water for dead people. They called it a national disaster. There was an officially recognized day of mourning. The governor wore a black armband for a week and he said some things in church. He attended the memorial service, and then he went to the meeting with County Water & Power and they gave him a bucket load of money for being such a good guy, and the governor signed the order that granted permission to go on and build the reservoir.

  And they did. You can now take a boat out across that reservoir. In the summer the water is clear. Crystal clear. You can look down and there are all the houses. They never moved one of them. Not a damned thing. The houses, the little church, the fences, the trees—everything is still there, just as it was before the storm. How long it will last—who knows? Who cares? It’s there, and you can look down at the little doors and the little windows, and because the water is so damned clear it looks like there’s no water at all. Like you wouldn’t be surprised to see one of those little doors open fifty feet below you and for someone to come out and look up at you and wave.

  That was the story of the town that drowned.

  Elliott heard that story some years before. He’d listened intently, heard every word, and he’d never forgotten it. It told him that there wasn’t no such thing dumber than people. It told him that people who fight a losing battle are the dumbest of all. It told him that you got to get yourself on the side with the most power and the most authority, and that’s where you got to stay. No one gave a damn about the townsfolk. No one cared about the fact that these were their homes, this was where they carried on their lives, and intended to carry them on indefinitely. No, no one gave a damn about that. All they gave a damn about was money and power and control. Those were the important things, the things you had to get. Money and power and control. As much of it as possible.

  He had money. What he did made him feel powerful, but he wasn’t in control. That dumbass bitch in the store had shown him that. That was the missing element, he felt. He had himself a house. Morton Randall’s property was now his. He also had Randall’s pickup, and he had plenty of guns and ammunition, and he could pretty much stay there as long as he wanted. But still, despite all of this, he wasn’t in control. His immediate circumstances, yes, perhaps. But his fate? His destiny? No, he was not in control of these, and this was what he needed to resolve. He could stay right there, go out hunting and fetch someone back every once in a while for his entertainment, but that could go on for only so long. Someone somewhere would get wise, and then they’d come a knocking, and he didn’t reckon he had enough bullets to shoot the whole damned county sheriff’s department.

  The woman in the store would call the cops, he knew, and even as he turned back the way he’d come—intending to leave Van Horn and drive the ten or so miles to the house—he saw a sheriff’s department car coming up behind him. The car passed. The driver didn’t take one blind bit of notice of him. Soon he understood why. He passed the mercantile and the car was parked right outside, doors open, cops evidently inside, and he knew that the woman had already talked. What was it? Fifteen, twenty minutes? He was tempted to pull up, to go on inside that store and just shoot every motherfucking one of them, the woman, the cops, everyone. Whoever else would come down later and they wouldn’t have a clue who’d done it.

  But he didn’t stop. He wasn’t that dumb. He put his foot down and he cruised right on by, reached Randall’s house in less than a quarter hour, and when he sat in the kitchen he realized his heart was beating rapidly. Why, he didn’t know. Was it because the police were already at the mercantile? Was it because it had taken only twenty minutes for the woman to get the cops there? And if so, how many minutes had elapsed between his leaving and their arrival? By how many minutes had he evaded being seen? Was he scared that they would find him? Was he scared that someone would say they saw Morton Randall’s pickup outside the store, and the police would come on over to check out the accuracy of that report?

  Elliott got up and walked to the kitchen window. It looked out toward the highway. There was nothing out there. No one was driving toward the house. But if they came, they would come later. It was still too soon for them to think that Randall might know something.

  And if someone—if the police—came to the house, what would he do? Hide? Would they come inside if no one answered the door? Would they just walk on in? Was it one of those little places where everyone knew everyone else by their first names, and the sheriff would just make himself at home, coming right on in here to see what had happened to Morton Randall? And he would come in here—the kitchen—and he would check in back and find Randall and the girl. And then all hell would break loose.

  No, it couldn’t work this way. Elliott needed more time. He had more things to do. He couldn’t have the police coming in here and finding two dead bodies.

  The bodies had to go. He had to get them out of the house.

  Elliott left by the back door. Ten yards down to the left was the outhouse. There was more than enough room for Randall and the girl. Enough for ten or twelve of them.

  He took the girl down first. Wrapped her in the sheet and hauled her up onto his shoulder. She didn’t weigh a great deal, and soon he had her down in the corner of the outhouse behind a couple of feed sacks. Randall was a different prospect altogether. Randall was a big guy, bigger than Elliott, and it took every ounce of Elliott’s strength and determination to even drag him as far as the back door. Elliott went back into the front of the house and took a rug from the sitting room. He laid it out on the steps that went down from the back door, and then he managed to maneuver Randall onto the rug. He grabbed the rug and hauled Randall across the ten yards to the outhouse, managed to sort of roll him over the threshold, and then got him in the corner beside the girl. He threw the rug over the pair of them. He stood there for a minute, and then he saw a pitchfork hanging on the wall. He took it down, smiled, and then thrust it like a spear into the carpet. It made him laugh. The feeling of the pitchfork stabbing into Randall. He had to use the sole of his foot against the rug as leverage to get the thing out. He ran his finger along the tine of the pitchfork but there was no blood. He hung it up again and closed the outhouse door behind him.

  Back in the kitchen he felt better. The exertion, the fact that the bodies were out of the house, simply the feeling that he’d done something as opposed to nothing. There was a little blood, more than likely from the girl, on the floor at the back. He used a towel to clean it up, and then put the towel in the trash bucket beneath the sink. All done. No one would ever know that two dead folk had been sitting there, and unless the police went into the outhouse they wouldn’t be found. That hadn’t been so hard. He’d gotten overanxious for no reason. Maybe he was just hungry. Maybe he was a little tired. He would eat something, he would take a nap maybe, and then he would have a good think about where to find some more entertainment.

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  Culberson County sheriff was an Everhardt. The Everhardts had always been in law enforcement, all the way back to frontier days when Lyle Everhardt shot a man named Gilbert Hardy in June of 1877. He shot him in the face while Hardy was trying to rape a sixteen-year-old Methodist girl named Greta Jansen. The Jansen girl’s father was town mayor. He ran the campaign start to finish in seventy-two hours and gave the sheriff’s job to Lyle. Lyle took the job because he figured it would help him keep sober. It didn’t. Regardless, from that day forward, one son out of every litter had wound up in the law, and Kelt Everhardt was the choice for his generation. His younger brothers—Clint and Radley—were f
armers. Clint perpetually wore an anxious expression, as if always fearful of what might happen next. Farming was an unpredictable business, a business for fools as far as Kelt was concerned. “I would never be a farmer,” he’d once told his brothers. “Have all your successes and failures governed by things that you can’t even talk to. That and the weather. Spend your whole life smelling of shit. If I wanted to be that lonely it’d be out of choice.” They agreed to disagree.

  The law, however, was predictable.

  So it was that on Friday morning, November 27, 1964, that Kelt Everhardt—representative of the law—was called down to Sue-Anne McCarthy’s mercantile, and he heard what she had to tell him.

  The officer who had responded to the emergency call from Sue-Anne, a young pup called Freeman Summers, was still there on the scene. He stood by the bullet hole in the wall as if it would take off if he didn’t mind it some.

  “Just came on in here, asked for his stuff. I put it right out there and asked for the money. First of all he said I should give it to him for free, and when I told him to pay up he bad mouthed me and then he slapped me.”

  “Close up the store,” Everhardt told Summers. “Call the office, tell them to send two of anyone they can find. You are responsible for the crime scene, young man. Not a footprint, not a fingerprint, not a hair, not a breath is to make a mark on this scene. I’m calling in the federal people. I have an idea that this young man is the one the federal people have been looking for, and they’re the only ones who have the wherewithal to examine something like this and find prints and whatnot to confirm it.”

  Summers took the order without complaint. He merely nodded, touched the peak of his cap.

  Everhardt drove back to the office. En route he called his dispatcher and told her to find him a nearby federal office.