Old Mother Curridge (The Dutch Curridge Series Book 4)

by Tim Bryant

  “So tell me what you know about Maime Guzman,” I said.

  She took a fake swig from her bottle and wiped her lips.

  “I used to babysit her,” she said. “She was ten, eleven, I guess twelve. I was twenty, and it was easy money. My family knew hers, and she didn’t live far away.”

  If she lived anywhere in Weatherford, she couldn’t have been that far away.

  “You say she’s left handed. You know that for sure?”

  Slant Face was left handed. Not that it mattered, but one of his monologues about how lefties are overlooked and misunderstood geniuses had been running through my mind when I stumbled onto the idea that our mystery girl had been a lefty. I also remember getting into an argument that night over whether Lefty Frizzell, my personal favorite entertainer, was a real, true blue lefty. Slant Face and Ruthie Nell had insisted that he played left handed, which made him the real deal. I stood my ground. He played right handed just like everybody else did, I said. It had taken almost a year before he came back through the area, playing the Crystal Springs Dance Pavilion in the fall of 1954, and, lo and behold, he played right handed all night long. Slant Face ended up paying for all my drinks that night.

  “I used to have to make her do her homework,” Alice said. “She had a hard time with writing, partially because she had to do everything backwards. I showed her how to change the way she turned her paper.”

  I remembered Slant saying something to that effect.

  “What do you know about her family?” I asked.

  I assumed that, if she had run away, there were problems at home.

  “There might have been some problems with Mr. and Mrs. Guzman, if that’s what you mean,” Alice said. “But I don’t think Maime ran away at all.”

  Ruthie Nell. Ruthie Nell Parker. There was no getting around it. Alice reminded me of Ruthie Nell back when she was new to Fort Worth and looking for something she thought I could hand her. And I had done it, quite willingly. Even enthusiastically. Now, rumors were that she was thick with one of the new reporters at the Startlegram. He looked like a kid. And I looked like a chump.

  “What do you mean?”

  I could feel my defenses go up. Ruthie had done a number on me.

  “She didn’t come back to school this year,” Alice said, “but I don’t think it was like that. I think there’s a reason she didn't come back.”

  Why hadn’t the Sheriff said such a thing? Surely he knew what his niece was talking about.

  “You think there’s a reason,” I said.

  I needed more than winks and knowing smiles. I wasn’t stupid enough to miss what she was saying. All the same, she was leaving a lot of blanks for me to fill in.

  “I know there is,” Alice said.

  I was starting to feel like I was questioning a hostile witness.

  “Ma’am, you got something to say, I sure wish you’d work your way around to it,” I said. “It could be my funeral before we get this all ironed out.”

  She looked around to be sure there wasn’t anyone hiding in the bed of my truck or maybe over on the other side.

  “She told me she was going to have a baby,” Alice said.

  Believe it or not, I had already gathered as much. It wasn’t unheard of for fifteen-year-olds to do that now and then. Usually, parents shipped them off to out-of-state aunts or cousins, and they came back nine or ten months later with a new haircut and a nice tan.

  “You think her family sent her away?” I said.

  She shook her head no.

  “She told me she was planning to run away, but she never done it. I know where she was going, and she never showed up.”

  I could see the girl was about to bust out crying, a thing that made me want to bust out my own self.

  “She was coming to your place, huh.”

  “I think her father might have killed her,” Alice said.

  We got in the truck and drove around downtown Weatherford while Alice told a story of Maime Guzman coming to her, almost two years after she had last seen her, with the story of Mr. Guzman coming to her several times late at night and forcing his way on her. Of the girl’s confusion at finding herself pregnant. Of her plan to get away and then the long nights when she never showed up at Alice’s door,

  “Then I realized after a month or so, she wasn’t showing up anywhere,” she said. “I went to my uncle and told him everything. I thought the law would settle everything. I thought maybe they would even find Maime.”

  She stopped every once in awhile, and I just drove. The silences added up, mile after mile. I drove up and down every road in town.

  “Uncle Hugh went out to the Guzmans’ place. It’s out on Old Dicey. Uncle Hugh said Mr. Guzman was real friendly. Said he admitted right to his face that Maime had been with a boy and had got herself into a bad situation. They talked in code. You know how men do. Talk all around a thing and both leave thinking they know what’s happening.”

  Admittedly, this was true.

  “Mr. Guzman told Uncle Hugh it was a nigra boy that did it,” she said, “but I know that isn’t true. There’s four people, I guess, that know the real story.”

  “You counting me, I guess?” I said.

  “Me, you, Mr. Guzman and Maime.”

  She rolled down her window and threw her gum out the window.

  “Maybe just three,” she said.

  12

  Hugh Muncey’s job was, for all its similarities and proximities, a world away from Sheriff King’s in Fort Worth. If Wiley King had rounds to make, they were the rounds of a man running from one fire to another, stamping down the flames until he could get back around and start over again. Muncey’s rounds seemed to have more to do with gossip and gardening and recipes and who was down with what ailment or what cousin was coming to town. Which made his comment all the more startling.

  “Dutch Curridge, I’ve had just about all of this job a man can stand. What you say, I put in for my retirement and you take this badge?”

  Wiley King tried to deputize me into his posse a time or two, but I had never been offered the sheriff’s star.

  “Don’t you have to be elected sheriff in Parker County?” I said.

  Of course, I knew you did. I was skeptical that anyone besides momma would vote for me, and I wasn’t sure she would.

  “So I name you my number one deputy, then I campaign for you to take over,” he said. “You’re a shoe-in.”

  I decided, as I so often do, that the best response was none.

  “This Guzman girl was left handed,” I said.

  He seemed taken aback with the news.

  “Well goodness gracious.”

  “Why was there never any kind of B.O.T.L. put out on her?” I said.

  “Be on the lookout” bulletins would normally be sent out, at least to the sheriff’s department in Fort Worth, just in case she showed up on Jacksboro or down in Hell’s Half Acre.

  “I talked to the girl’s daddy, Dutch,” he said. “He tells me she’s staying with family, what can I do? You know it’s not that unusual— Weatherford’s not exactly a hopping little town like Fort Worth is. I have no reason at all to doubt Tom Guzman.”

  He seemed content to strike Maime’s name from the list. I wasn’t so eager.

  “She is left handed,” I said again.

  He wasn’t the excitable type. I can give him that much.

  “I’m sure she is, Dutch.”

  I had no real reason to think Maime Guzman was our girl in Fort Worth. I was interested in what the sheriff thought of Tom Guzman. He seemed quick to believe the guy.

  “I think I’d like to talk to this fella Guzman,” I said. “Just make sure everything adds up.”

  I could tell I was beginning to be a burr in Muncey’s saddle. He didn’t care for high falutin’ cowboys from the city coming into his jurisdiction and poking around. Wiley King was the same way when Dallas encroached on him.

  “You been talking to Alice?” he said.

  I didn’t s
ee any sense in lying to him, although I also saw no sense in telling him I’d driven her around the town while she flirted like a schoolgirl.

  “She wanted to know what it was like to shoot an infamous outlaw,” I said.

  I knew that one would sting a little. Muncey laughed around a cheekful of snuff and acted like it didn’t bother him any.

  “I wouldn’t go flashing that federale money around if I were you,” he said. “You did let that brother of his get away.”

  I didn’t want to fight with this guy. There was nothing in it for me.

  “The little guy claimed to be Bret Masterson’s brother Sly,” I said, “he wasn’t no such a thing because there wasn’t no such a thing.”

  I told him Bat Masterson and Annie Ladue only had the one kid. Sly’s real true last name was Scarbrough. He didn’t amount to much more than the getaway driver. He might have got away, but he didn’t get away with any money or with his partner either.

  We were standing in the front office of the Parker County Sheriff’s Office, which was big enough to hold maybe five people, and, by the time I got to telling my story good, there was that many people in the room. I knew three of them, and that included myself.

  His secretary wasn’t used to such action around the office. She wanted to hear more, even if Muncey looked like he was sorry he had brought it up.

  “Didn’t that Sly fella break away and escape?” she said.

  As a matter of fact, he had, but it hadn’t been quite so cut and dried. I had caught Sly Scarbrough a quarter of a mile away, sneaking through a lower part of Jacksboro called Roberts Cutoff. He had gotten tangled in a barbed wire fence, and, when I threatened to shoot him just like I’d shot his friend, he decided to cut his losses. He was bleeding pretty badly from a cut on his leg, but I didn’t want to hand him to Harris Methodist. I knew, as soon as they got wind that he was injured in the commission of a crime, they would turn him over to Wiley King. Even though I didn’t know anything about a bounty, I knew I wanted to do the handing over myself.

  “I took him to Dr. Teal, the colored doctor who works over in Quality Grove,” I said. “He lets white patients come in by the side door.”

  Muncey’s deputy, a young fella that looked like he was straight out of high school, got a good laugh out of that.

  “You took him to a nigger doctor?” he said.

  I already didn’t like the deputy.

  “I reckon I would do the same with you, hot shot,” I said. “Sly Scarbrough wasn’t good for nothing. I’ve seen it happen where Dr. Teal had to give someone like that blood, and, sometimes, if they got enough of that nigger blood in them, they’d straighten up and start living productive lives.”

  Now we all laughed and the deputy turned red-faced and said nothing. Of course, I was lying. Dr. Teal couldn’t give no blood, even if it was an emergency. I think most of them understood I was pulling their legs. Maybe not that kid deputy. But, again, it was one of those lies that tells a bigger truth.

  And there was one part of it that was true. Sly Scarbrough really was good for nothing. I had left him there with Dr. Teal, who administered doses of Demerol and morphine, combined with Vitamin B-12. Should have been plenty to keep him docile until he improved and I could hand him over to the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Department. Unfortunately, Scarbrough seemed to have a high tolerance for morphine. He overpowered Teal and his nurse and got away from them on the second day.

  Before I left, I told Sheriff Muncey that I had been thinking it through, and I didn’t really think I wanted to claim my half of the property on Clear Fork Road.

  “What happens if I just say no?” I said.

  He shrugged.

  “It goes to your mother, and you get the whole damn she-bang when she passes,” he said.

  Sometimes you can’t lose for winning.

  13

  I looked close at momma. She didn’t look like the same woman to me anymore. She seemed to have aged overnight and yet, for the first time, I could see the girl inside of her. Her story was still in there, to be pulled out like pulling pieces from a box of puzzle pieces. Put back together in ways that you knew weren’t completely right but also weren’t all that wrong. You could squint and just about see the gist of it.

  Momma was born on June 28, 1888. I had known that date for the greater part of my life and had no reason to doubt it. That made her twenty-one years old when I was born. I also know that momma was born in Palo Pinto County, just one county west of Parker County, close to Lake Mineral Wells. I remember somebody driving daddy— and, by daddy, I mean Alvis Sr.— momma, Lizabeth and me all the way to Mineral Springs and back in either the fall of 1917 or the spring of 1918. We rode in a Hudson Town Car. I guess it was the first time I had ever ridden in a car. I remember being scared to death. Maybe it was because of the car. I also knew me and Lizabeth were sick, and, just the fact that they would haul us all the way to Mineral Springs to take the water meant that things were getting worse instead of better.

  Lots of people were going to Mineral Springs to take the water in those days. When we got there, there were lines of people. Some of them sick and hoping to get healed, some of them maybe hoping to keep from getting sick. It was on that ride over that momma pointed out where she had been born and raised, somewhere close to Lake Mineral Wells. They didn’t say anything about Cool, Texas. I’m pretty sure there wasn’t such a thing in 1918, but daddy’s people were from around there, whatever was there at the time.

  What troubles me is this. Momma couldn’t have been that much older than Maime Guzman— certainly not as old as Alice Muncey— when she met the man called Lonnie Boy. And he wasn’t a boy in any way.

  “Momma, do you remember how you met Lonnie Curridge?”

  I had come back to tell her she could keep all of the land for as long as she lived. I didn’t have any need for it. But if I was going to come back for that, there were a couple of other questions I wanted answers to. Momma had just finished washing dishes, the remains of food she had taken to a few of the people at Alvis Sr.’s visitation. She sat down in her favorite rocker and took a dip of snuff. I hated that shit, but who was I to say anything? I had my flask of whiskey, and she knew it.

  “I met Lonnie over in Mineral Springs,” she said.

  Remember how I said momma was like a box of puzzle pieces. She wasn’t a natural story teller. You had to do most of the work.

  “What were you doing in Mineral Springs?” I said. “Y’all were living out close to the lake, right?”

  I took her a while. I don’t know for sure if she was busy trying to recall details or trying to decide if she wanted to answer the damn question.

  “I never lived anywhere but out there at the family place,” she said. “Not until Alvis built this place.”

  I had heard that story before and didn’t particularly want her to waste any energy on it. Basically, Alvis and a handful of guys he worked with at the saw mill built the house we were standing in. It was a fine house, especially given that none of them were carpenters by trade.

  “But you took up with Lonnie for a while,” I said.

  “Lonnie Boy had his charms,” she said.

  I wanted to say he seemed like a bad luck charm to me, but then again, I wouldn’t have been there without him. I held my tongue and waited a while longer.

  “You know, I kept a scrapbook with some of his stories in it for a while. I don’t know but what Alvis burned that up in the barrel.”

  I hadn’t thought of the burn barrel in years. That rusty old thing had been part of a weekly ritual for years.

  “You still have that damn thing?” I said.

  “Lonnie died on a Saturday afternoon in the early summer of 1909,” momma said. “I always remember because it was just a few months before you were born.”

  It wasn’t what I asked, but that didn’t bother me any.

  “I heard the Texas Rangers shot him,” I said.

  Momma wasn’t given to lots of animation. She didn’t talk w
ith her hands any. She didn’t even use much of her face. She noticeably flinched when I said that though, like a wasp had landed on her nose or something.

  “Goddamn Rangers,” she said. She punctuated it with a spit into her snuff can.

  “What exactly was it they shot him for?”

  I had been too mad to wait around for this particular bit of information the first time the subject had come up. I had a good guess, and it turned out to be mostly right.

  “What didn’t they shoot him for?” she said. “They caught him in the Mineral Wells Bank and Trust on a Saturday morning. Mineral Wells Bank and Trust not being open for business on Saturday mornings.”

  I laughed out loud. Us Curridges knew how to tell a story, even when we didn’t particularly want to.

  “So he was a bank robber,” I said.

  “Banks, stores, houses,” she said. “He wasn’t particular.”

  I momentarily forgot she was my mother. She was telling a good story, a piece at a time, and I wanted more. Mainly, so I could pass it along to Slant Face and James Alto and get it right.

  “What the hell was it that attracted you to somebody like that?” I said.

  I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to know.

  “Back in that day, Alvis, there was lots of trouble. Droughts. Floods. Fires. Polio. Yellow Fever. People’s jobs would play out. Mills close down and leave families with nothing. Nobody knew what was gonna happen the next day. People was just all real unsure,” she said. “Lonnie Boy was the most sure-headed person I ever knew. He knew he was going to be alright, no matter what happened.”

  I started to mention a certain irony in his dying and leaving her to live, as unsure of things as she might have been, for so many years. She raised her hand and sushed me.

  “You ask where I was and how I found out about it,” she said. “I wasn’t the getaway driver, because we didn’t have automobiles. But I did have our horses waiting outside, and I was the watch-out.”

  She grabbed a kerchief and dabbed at the corners of her mouth. I knew it was as close to wiping tears as she would ever allow herself.