by Tim Bryant
“So Alvis Curridge is your father?” Castrie said.
Castrie swiped a liberal portion of the peanut butter across an apple wedge and handed me the knife, blade open and handle first.
“Something like that,” I said.
The peanut butter was better than my usual brand. The apple tasted sweeter.
“I like complex men,” he said. “Your father was a complex man.”
The notion had set itself in my mind that it might be smart of me to keep some of what I knew to myself, at least for the time being. I still wasn’t completely sure what I believed myself. Alvis had been my daddy for so long, bastard that he was, that I was loathe to dump a lifetime of belief overboard just because someone had shot a hole in my boat.
“You know he rightfully owned several acres there in Cool,” Castrie said.
I buttered up another slice, took a bite and nodded. Eating for the first time in days, my appetite had awakened with a start.
“He chose to live down there by the river,” Castrie said. “He lived there for as long as I can remember. I saw him just about every time I ran my trotlines.”
I tried to imagine him living like some modern day Huck Finn. I liked Mark Twain, but the news didn’t make me happy.
“Seems like a long way to go for trotlines,” I said.
Castrie sat and whittled up more apples as he talked. I wondered if he planned on us eating all of them.
“Too far,” he said. “Never have anything good on them. Specially lately, with the draught. But we have deer stands, rabbit traps. I don’t only eat apples, you know.”
I could have taken some venison.
“Your daddy lived in a camp on the edge of his property, because he said he had to be near the water or near the trains. Problem with the trains, he said, there were too many other people loitering around.”
I knew that to be true. The train yards at the end of Ninth Street in Fort Worth were lousy with hobos at that time of year, waiting for the yards up north to thaw out and warm up. You couldn’t throw a rock down Ninth without knocking out a couple of them.
“Did he drown?”
I had heard you could drown in an inch of water. I hoped, as much as I hated him, that Alvis hadn’t proved it to be true.
“Shit, no,” Castrie said. “Who told you that?”
I couldn’t even remember.
“He had been dying for years,” Castrie said. “That was the main reason I went so far south, just to check on him. He had heart problems. Heart attacks, I guess they would call them. This last year, he was more dead than alive most of the time.”
So Hoot Castrie had been walking six miles to check a few rabbit traps, a trotline, and the man who walked away from me and momma almost forty years ago.
“I would share a rabbit with him or a fish or two back in the day,” he said. “Alvis had a good camp there and would cook up as fine a meal as I could cook here. Then, he took a bad turn and couldn’t do much in the way of cooking or anything.”
It was then that Hoot began bringing Alvis apples from the apple orchard in Cuneytown. The same apple orchard that he got my apples from. I almost felt like I had been tricked.
9
“I tell you what. Those damn apples kept that dying man alive for three whole months,” he said.
Why had Hoot Castrie given a damn whether Alvis Curridge lived or died? He must have seen something worth saving. It was something I was blind to. I wasn’t sure I wanted my eyes opened to any more.
“You happen to know Lonnie Curridge too?” I said.
It was an attempt to change the subject, even if, in reality, it didn’t change it one whit. It had only expanded it. Whatever it did, Castrie seemed happy enough.
“Lonnie!” he said. “Lonnie was like my big brother. What he really was, he was the best friend I had. See, I grew up thinking Lonnie was family. Like he hung the damn moon, you know. Sure, he was eight, nine years older than me, but that didn’t matter none. We hung out together, mostly him talking about all manner of things and me mostly just a-listening. We went to school together in the basement of the church, because I was smart for my age back then. We even joined up with the Army together. We were the Buffalo Soldiers. Off to see the world.”
“So what happened?” I said.
Castrie folded his pocketknife into itself and set it halfway between the two of us. Somehow it seemed like some kind of show of peace or acceptance.
“Lonnie just went bad sitting around with a rifle in his hand, waiting for something to happen,” Hoot Castrie said. His face clouded over and he finally looked a little his age. “I guess, by the time he went off on his own, he was as bad as Alvis was good. Maybe he was always bad and I just didn’t see it. Did Alvis ever tell you anything about him?”
“No,” I said. “He never said a word.”
I had memories of me and Lizabeth walking to the movie show with Alvis. I remembered him pointing at houses and saying this aunt or that cousin used to live there. But I couldn’t recall a single name, and the houses were long since gone.
“I meant you, too. What happened to you?”
I was truly interested in this man who had seen the Philippines before I had seen all of Hell’s Half Acre. And I wished Slant Face was there with me. Slant Face would have loved this guy.
“Lonnie was a Buffalo Soldier for a while, but he skipped out before we ever shipped out for the Philippines. You know how some people get addicted to some kind of drug— morphine or heroin or something? Lonnie was that way about robbing banks. He robbed his first bank when he was twenty-four, and, once he started, he couldn’t stop. They caught him once up in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Put him and his gang in jail and all. Somehow he talked them into sending him back to Texas, and, before you know it, he’s back on the street.”
I wondered if he had heard what I said at all. Should I repeat it or just let him go?
“I thought he’d go right after that,” Castrie said. “By then, I don’t guess Lonnie knew straight. He had a woman over in Weatherford he was seeing, and she wasn’t no better than he was. They was like Bonnie and Clyde before there was a Bonnie and Clyde. If he had any hope at all, that woman sucked it all out of him.”
Was he talking about momma? I felt like a painter trying to capture the ocean. It was too big, too wide and way too deep. You could only look at the surface, the little part of what you could take in.
“What do you know about the woman?”
If you stood on the shore in San Francisco, as Castrie had done with his regiment, you could only see as far as you could see. There was no way of holding the magnitude of something that stretched all the way to the Philippines and beyond.
“Well, she was just trouble,” Hoot Castrie said. “You know trouble when you see it. I never met the woman. I don’t truck with nobody in Weatherford. I can tell you why, but that’s a whole other story. But you gotta understand, I never did know Alvis the way I knew Lonnie. Least ways, not until Alvis was getting old hisself.”
Castrie acted like he hadn’t had a soul to talk to in years, and I guess he hadn’t. I was glad I had come along, as much for him as for myself.
“All I know is he went out hating Lonnie,” he said. “I can’t blame him for it, but I do think it’s what done him in. A man just can’t take on that much.”
I was beginning to think I had taken on a little too much as well.
“A man can’t make up for another man’s shortcomings. I tried to tell him. He couldn’t no more make up for the things Lonnie Curridge done than I could stop him. We each gotta make our own way.”
I finally found the way back to my question.
“So what happened to you?” I said.
He began to speak slower, like the words had to be pushed and pulled.
“I made my way,” he said. “Everything started over after Myra was killed. I had been honorably discharged from the Army by then, of course. I worked at the gristmill here for a long time. That was when Myra was alive.”
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His eyes seemed to hold a flood of tears, but his jaw remained firm and dry. Part of me wanted to stop him, to change the subject to something easier, safer. The other part of me knew that it would be wrong to do any such thing.
“I became a carpenter,” he said. “You believe that? I was already older than you are right now. Only house I had ever helped build was that old house Lonnie left when he got hisself killed. Did you know I helped finish that? So, I took what little I could remember and started patching the roof over at the feed store. Then I fixed up Miss Ruthie’s house. Then somebody else’s house. Somebody would want a new porch. Somebody would need a fence. Whatever it was, I built it. If I didn’t know how to build it, I figured on it ‘til I worked it out. Then a few people started wanting indoor toilets. You know how that is. By then I was fully committed, building toilets, so I learned to do a little plumbing. Little by little, over the years, I patched over enough and built enough new stuff that I reckon, by now, it’s about all mine.”
The man had single handedly rebuilt a goddamn town. It was a nice looking town too.
“That’s something to be proud of, for sure,” I said.
He got up and went to the ice box, opening it and grabbing two drinks.
“You may be used to something stronger,” he said, “but will a Dr Pepper do you?”
I told him I was used to a little Jack Daniels in mine, but that it was a personal favorite.
He sat back down and pushed a cold bottle over to me.
“You want to know what I’m proud of?” he said.
I took a drink and waited.
“I knew love.”
“That’s it, huh?”
“That’s it, sir. I saw the Philippines, and they looked just like they do in pictures. I saw Pancho Villa himself, and he was smaller than me. All those things are fine, and they’re good stories to tell, but, when my end comes like Alvis Curridge’s end came, and it certainly will, I’ll leave here knowing that I loved somebody and that I was loved by somebody, even if it was for a short spell.”
He leaned in closer and spoke softer.
“Let me tell you a secret. Time don’t matter none. Time is just an illusion. What is it? A minute? A day? A year? It’s all the same. It all disappears, like that. You know what lasts? You know the one thing you can’t goddamn well kill off?”
I felt like the young kid in one of those Baptist revival meetings that used to come through Weatherford. I wondered if they still did.
“Love,” I said.
I wasn’t as fully committed to it as Hoot Castrie wanted me to be.
“You’re damn right. Love,” he said. “You ever been in love, Mr. Curridge?”
I reached into my files and pulled out the easiest thing I could get to.
“I got married once,” I said. “Her name was Noreen.”
He seemed happy to hear it.
“And did you love her?”
I had to admit that I didn’t. I had admitted as much and more to the judge who granted her the divorce.
“You ever know love once, you’ll sure enough know it,” he said. “You’ll understand a lot of other things too. Most important being, if it’s love, it won’t never die. Pain will fade off, hate will exhaust itself, fear will be forgotten in the morning, but love will always be there.”
I left Hoot Castrie the Buffalo Soldier alone with his apples and his love on a cold evening when the sun was setting on Cuneytown, the houses casting long shadows behind them. A lot of what he said was eating at me, not so much that you would notice. Kind of like a bunch of little mosquitoes biting here and there, gone before you can slap at them and then right back again where you’re not looking.
10
Alvis Curridge Sr. was laid out in White’s Funeral Home, the main funeral home in Weatherford, and, yes, the one the white folks used from all over the county. There were two viewing rooms, each of which had one dead body and a small crowd of living ones. Most of them seemed to know each other, so people made their ways through each room, shaking hands and talking about how peaceful the dead ones looked. To be honest, nobody looked that tranquil to me, least of all the man whose casket bore my own name.
“Alvis Curridge” No Sr. added.
I found a lady I recognized from some long-ago social function— probably my wedding to Noreen ten years previous— who had a Brownie camera in one hand and a bag in the other.
“You the official photographer?” I said.
As my landlord Miss Sarah would say, she smiled like the Mississippi river.
“Mr. Curridge, how are you and your wife doing? Is it Noreen?”
Somebody had taken pictures at our wedding. I remembered seeing a couple of them. I had no memory who it had been.
“Well, it was Noreen,” I said, “but it’s not anymore.”
I swear, I had no intention of flirting with this lady. I just wanted her to take a photograph of me standing next to the casket with the name “Alvis Curridge” stamped onto the sign. I thought Slant Face would get a kick out of it. I didn’t even need the other Alvis to be in the shot. This lady was a bigger flirt than me.
“My name is Alice,” she said. “So you’re this Dutch Curridge that I’ve been hearing about.”
I don’t do small talk without at least half a bottle of whiskey in me. And I had decided that a funeral home wasn’t the proper place to booze, although I was just about to reconsider that.
“I can assure you that whatever they told you has been wildly exaggerated,” I said.
Alice looked to me to be somewhere around the age of Ruthie Nell at the newspaper. Ruthie was twenty-six, and she was too young to be messing around with somebody like me. As much as it hurt to admit it, I knew it to be true.
“My uncle says you brought down the son of Bat Masterson and Annie Ladue in the Green Parrot on Jacksboro Highway.”
If I was going to have to hang around this funeral home for a while, I could have picked a worse conversation to be in. In fact, I had just got a glimpse of momma at the other end of the room. I was somewhat surprised to see her there, considering she hadn’t been in the same room with her husband, dead or alive, since Woodrow Wilson was president.
“Well, I did do that,” I said, “and that was an interesting story. He had been going by the name Dead John Modoc. Claimed to be a pure breed Modoc Indian. When I shot him, that’s who I was shooting at. Turned out later, the goddamn feds said he was Bret Masterson. Had a good size bounty on his head too.”
I was wanting to ask who her uncle was, but I was feeling a little bad for cursing, partly because I was talking to a lady and partly because I was in a funeral home with a dead body ten feet away. I had momentarily forgotten it was Alvis Sr. And I had completely forgotten about the photograph.
Alice switched to her next conversation, with a woman who reminded me of Ma Kettle in the Ma and Pa Kettle movies. I moved along the wall of the place until I finally had nothing left to do but nod and say hello to momma.
“You shouldn’t have left the way you did yesterday, Alvis.”
I didn’t want to argue, but I damn sure didn’t want to give in. I chose silence. Momma shuffled closer to me and reached into her jacket for something. It reminded me of the way Bret Masterson a.k.a Dead John Mudoc had pulled that 1911 semiautomatic out at The Green Parrot. Only a quick reflex had given me the chance to shoot it from his hand. And no, I didn’t shoot it out clean. I ripped a good piece of his elbow off in doing it.
“You forgot this,” momma said.
She handed me the whiskey bottle neck end first. Bone dry. I was pretty sure it had a few swallows left when I last saw it, but I didn’t say anything about it.
“James Alto’s cousin made that whiskey. His name is Joseph Bowlegs,” I said. “Reckon how he come to get a name like that.”
I had seen the man before, and he didn’t appear to be any more bowlegged than I was. I guessed it was one of those unfortunate family names that just gets handed down.
“M
aybe he shot himself in the leg with a bow and arrow,” momma said.
That was a personal slight and pretty well signalled the end of the conversation. I was walking out, not to go home but to grab a drink from the truck, when Miss Alice caught me again.
“Mr. Curridge, I knew Maime Guzman,” she said. “I know for a fact she was left handed.”
I signaled for her to follow me to the truck. Seemed like Alice was somebody I needed to get to know a little better.
11
“So how do you know this Maime Guzman, and who exactly is your uncle?”
Alice stopped short.
“I’m Uncle Hugh’s niece. Hugh Muncey, the sheriff.”
Small town.
“My daddy was a lawman,” she said. “His name was Emmett Muncey. Actually, he was the game warden.”
I wasn’t much of a hunter. I had been squirrel hunting as a boy, went deer hunting a handful of times but spent most of the mornings praying one wouldn’t walk out on me. That was so long ago, it was when I still prayed and believed it mattered.
“Don’t believe I’ve ever met a game warden before,” I said.
She was following me to my truck which was parked a block away from the funeral home. I had done that on purpose, to give me a good running start on my way into the place an hour before.
“That’s okay,” she said. “You still won’t. He got killed by a couple of duck hunters that thought he was a duck. That was back in 1949.”
What do you say to that? I’m sorry hardly seemed to suffice, but it had to, and that’s what hung out there for the rest of our walk to the truck. I think she was sure I was going to get something to write her information down on. I might have done that if I had thought to bring my little notebook. It was back in my room though, so I pulled a beer from the cooler in the back of the truck and offered her one. Surprisingly, she took it.
