by Tim Bryant
“I stood over there and watched and waited and watched while those Texas Rangers moved in. I waited outside. I could hear the guns going off. I counted the shots and knew he wasn’t coming out. I waited there for a long time, and a whole bunch of other people gathered too. I still remember one of those Rangers walking out and looking at me. This ain’t no place for a little girl like you, he said. You want to know what? I wanted to tell him, you know what? I have helped Lonnie Boy Curridge rob so many places. In Mineral Wells, in Weatherford, in Graham, Graford, all the way up to Jacksboro. It would make your hair stand up on end. Don’t you dare talk to me about no place for little girls. I wanted to walk over there and go in that building and see him. I didn’t do that. I waited ‘til they brought him out and put him on a slab and got in line and walked by and touched him just like everybody else.”
I didn’t have anything wise to say to that, so I just let it be.
“Oh, them Rangers shot him up but good,” she said, “but his face still looked as pretty and as sure of itself as ever.”
A little later, I did ask her how come she had never told me any of it before.
“Alvis kept me from having to,” she said.
14
If the house of Clear Fork Road wasn’t calling out to me, the one at the end of the little road in Cool, Texas was tickling my good ear. I didn’t want to be sheriff of the little old ladies of Weatherford, Texas. There was no question about that. I did like the idea of moving to Cool. I could reside in a place like Cool. What I was more interested in, though, was going back and having a gander around Dry Creek. See if I could locate Alvis’ campsite, get a feel for how the old guy lived and maybe even how he died.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about Alvis. I wanted to know more about Lonnie Boy. I aimed to do that, but it seemed like if I was going to dig into the past, I should dig my way past Alvis before I started looking for his father. Which brings up the real question I was asking myself: how did the son of the man who fathered me end up marrying my mother? It didn’t seem like a natural thing. It almost had some kind of strange biblical smell to it. Slant Face told me one time of an old biblical belief that said if a man died, his brother was to move in on his wife and kids and take over the household. That seemed so far out of bounds to me, it pushed me farther from religion. It reminded me of those hillbillies up in Arkansas who married and remarried until, like that old Lonzo and Oscar song said, “I’m My Own Grandpa.” It happens.
I was interested in finding out who owned that four acres up toward Dry Creek that Thomas Dearbohn mentioned. If I ever left Fort Worth, and there were plenty of times I thought about it, that might be a good direction to go. Ruthie Nell had warned me not to keep coming up to the newspaper office. She knew it was part of my job, knew my friend Alto worked there, but she claimed it made her feel uncomfortable. I got back at her for that though. When the story about me shooting Bat Masterson’s son was just about to break, I took it to the Fort Worth Press, the little crosstown rival paper that had given Ruthie her first reporting job. They had run it on the first page the day before the Startlegram got it. It got my point across.
I wondered if the four acres in Cool was mentioned in Alvis’ will, but I knew the will had been worked up many years earlier and figured it predated any dealings there. I also didn’t like the idea of going back to momma and asking about it.
I drove to Cool that afternoon as the sun was disappearing in front of me. This time I pulled up in front of the old Curridge house and set down on my horn like I was coming home for Christmas. A lady pulled a white sheet from a basket and waved it around like she was surrendering to me, then turned away and worked at hanging it on the droopiest clothesline I’d ever seen. Surrender to totally ignoring me in three seconds.
“Thomas around?” I said.
She stooped down and grabbed for another sheet.
“She can’t hear a fucking thing you’re saying.”
I turned around to find young Paul looking at me through dirty hands.
“That why you cuss like a damn mule skinner?” I said.
I can hear like a hound dog out of my right ear. Left ear, I lost about three quarters of my hearing and picked up a ringing sound. If things get too quiet, the ringing can throw me off balance. Drink enough whiskey, it either fades away into the background or moves closer to the center of my head.
Mrs. Dearbohn was totally deaf in both ears. Paul quit cussing long enough to run and get her chalkboard, and we then carried on a slow and frequently misspelled conversation.
I came by and talked to your husband. My father is the one who died at Dry Creek.
I had no desire to write out the whole story out for her. I felt like that got the point across. She read it and took the chalk from my hand.
My husband is in Millsap.
Millsap was where a lot of farmers took their crops to market. I wondered what crops he was harvesting in the middle of winter. Frozen vegetables?
Can you show me where the Curridge family property is?
I pointed in the direction Thomas Dearbohn had indicated and shrugged. She looked behind me and grimaced.
“Put your hands up.”
I turned to find Paul with a pistol pointed right at my nose.
“That a toy you got there?”
I could tell it was no toy. It was a Smith and Wesson .38 Special, not that different than the .38 Colt beneath my coat.
“Don’t you lay a goddamn finger on my momma,” the little boy said.
I had no plan to do so, but I did have a sudden itch to coldcock the kid. I pulled my .38 out, spun it once on my finger and caught the grip against my palm. The kid feigned disinterest, but mom yelled out loud enough to make me jump.
“Why the hell you go and do that?” I said.
“I told you she can’t hear what you’re saying to her,” Paul said.
Of course, I knew that, and I told him so, using as many cuss words as I could hook together to show it. We scribbled a few other things back and forth at each other, and it all ended with Paul walking with me across the field and through the woods to the northwest, where we found Dry Creek doing its best to live up to its name.
“It’s so narrow up here where the trail comes out, you can cross over easy as all get out,” Paul said as we made our way over the soft blanket of straw and crunching tree limbs. “Everybody crosses over there, but you go on up the creek a ways on the south side, you run straight into the old man’s lean-to.”
I was surprised the kid could string so many sentences together without any fucks or goddamns. He was almost better at it than I was.
“So you knew the man who lived up here?” I said.
We walked on a ways.
“I seen him a time, I guess two including the time he was dead. I always knew Old Hoot better.”
You could hear the creek running, so we were getting close.
“What you think of him?” I said.
He stopped so fast, I almost ran him over.
“Old Hoot is my friend. I feel real fucking sorry for him sometimes though.”
It was pretty evident what Paul’s favorite word was. I wanted to tell him it was more powerful if you used it more sporadically, but who was I to tell a kid anything.
“What do ya mean?” I said.
“Well,” he said as he continued walking, “he tells a bunch of good stories about when he was in the war with Pancho Villa or somebody like that, and he tells about when he went down to the Philippines and all, but most folks say Old Hoot ain’t never been out of Parker County, except for when he was in prison for a while down in Huntsville.”
I like to think of myself as pretty damn hard to fool, but, right at that moment, I was feeling a little foolish.
“You fucking kidding me?”
If you can’t beat ‘em, I usually join ‘em. Especially when I’m feeling peeved.
“That’s what daddy says, and he should know.”
We got to the creek, and, instead of cr
ossing over it, we turned and walked a not-so-well-worn path along side of it. It was no more than fifteen or twenty feet across and not two foot deep. You could see straight to the bottom.
“You know what he did, got him put in Huntsville?” I said.
Huntsville was the state prison. The real tough cases went there. It was home to Ol’ Sparky, the infamous electric chair that had seen the end of several members of Clyde Barrow’s gang, not to mention two or three guys that I had personally put away.
“He don’t like to talk about it none,” Paul whispered, “but he busted his wife’s goddamn head in two with the pearl handle end of a pistol.”
Not looking where I was walking, I stepped off the creek bed, directly into the cold Dry Creek. At that moment, I would have paid a tidy sum for it to have truly been dry. The cold January water worked its way into my boots before I could pull it back out. I didn’t even try to hold back the cussing. Paul just looked back and laughed.
15
The lean-to was right there on the side of the creek where the little cuss said it would be. At first glance, it didn’t look like much. Maybe something some kids threw together for a fort. The closer we got, the bigger it looked, and when we finally walked up on it, you could tell it had once been someone’s home. A bed that looked more comfortable than mine at home. A fire pit. A coffee pot. A straight razor. Matches.
It was hard to make the man who lived and died here measure out to be the same man who taught me and Lizabeth how to shoot rats with a .22. Who taught us how to shell purple hull peas and shuck corn. Who rode with us out to Mineral Wells to take the waters. Who walked away from momma and me just a couple of months after we laid Lizabeth in the ground and never returned until they pulled him back with a couple mules that reminded me of our old mules Duke and Charlie.
“What can you tell me about the man who lived out here?” I said
I wasn’t expecting much. I was grasping at some straw that would help me see him as a father, even if I knew he had only been that to Lizabeth. I admit it made me a little sore at her.
“I think I seen him twice when he wasn’t dead. First time, he was drunker than Cooter Brown, and he come splashing up on a bunch of people from the Baptist Church getting a baptizing. People said it was a wrong thing to do, but, way I seen it, they had it coming, showing up at Dry Creek like they did. People come walking into your house wanting to use your wash tub to baptize themselves for Jesus, you probably wouldn’t like it too much either.”
I had to agree with that.
“What about the second time?” I asked, my curiosity getting the best of me.
“Well, I kind of made a promise I wouldn’t say nothing about the second time,” he said.
We negotiated hard, and he cussed me a little more, but I finally agreed to drive him back up the little store on the main road and get him some peanuts and a Coca-Cola. Even then, he wouldn’t say anything until the soda pop was purchased and pouring down his throat, which seemed to loosen his lips again. The story he told came out too natural to have been a total lie, and, even if I find some of it hard to believe, I know that true life can be that way.
“Old Hoot found the old man laid out in the pasture up on the north side of the property a couple years back. About halfway between the river and Cuneytown if you know where that is. That’s where all the niggers live at. Hoot said he had to shoo the buzzards off of him. He thought the old man was sure enough dead, but when he bent down, he said one of the man’s eyes rolled open and looked on him.”
Paul tried to demonstrate how that might occur. As much as he tried to make it look scary, it mostly reminded me of something from an old Laurel and Hardy movie.
“The old man said, ‘I think I done shit my damn britches,’ and, sure enough, he shit himself real good. By the time I was out there, you could smell him laying there a quarter mile downriver. Old Hoot says, ‘Mister Al’— I think that’s what he called him; something along those lines— ‘Mister Al, I believe your ticker done played out on you.’ So he come back to get daddy, only daddy was in Millsap. Daddy’s just about always in Millsap. So he says to me, ‘Paul, how old is you?’ And I say six, almost seven, because this was last year. Now I’m almost eight. And Old Hoot says, ‘Paul, I reckon you can help me out,’ so we go up there to the meadow, and, like I already said, I smell the old man before I can see him. He stinks to high heaven. But we get him balance on an old wooden wheel barrel and go rolling him off to Cuneytown. That was the first time I ever seen Cuneytown.”
He stopped like a man approaching a fork in the road and seemed to study his options.
“My daddy had told me Cuneytown was full of all kinds of bad stuff. People fucking each other out in the street. Shooting each other. Hanging little white boys in the trees same as we do the niggers. But it wasn’t like that so much. There was little boys who ran to meet us and ran alongside of me asking my name and did I like to play baseball and all kinds of questions. And when we put the old man in the back of Hoots truck, on account of he didn’t want all that stink up in the front, the little nigger boys all asked me when I was gonna come back and said I could play baseball and they would even let me use one of their gloves, because I don’t have one.”
“So what did you and Hoot do?” I said, trying to get the story back on track.
“I rode up front with Old Hoot, and we rode all the way to Weatherford. We took the man to the hospital they have there, and when we got to it, Old Hoot said, ‘Young Paul, you go up there to that door, and you tell them there’s a man out here in need of some help. You just tell them that and don’t say one word about me.’ So I go in there, and I tell one lady, and she tells someone else, and they ask me again, and I tell them, and then they bring a wheelchair out to get the man in the back of the truck. And when we get out there, guess what.”
I didn’t guess.
“Old Hoot wasn’t even there. Old Hoot got scared and run off. It was okay though, because those people all got the old man out, and they didn’t even say anything at all about him smelling like shit. And then, after they got him in the hospital, I seen Old Hoot hiding across the road, and I waved at him.”
So what happened next?
“We got back in the truck and went back. Old Hoot let me out at the Baptist Church and told me to walk the rest of the way to my house and not to say a fucking word to my dad about what we had done.”
Paul didn’t know anything else. All he knew was Alvis Sr. returned to his place on the river and lived out the last year of his life there before Hoot Castrie found him dead, and this time, his eye didn’t open up and roll at him. I figure the old man had a heart attack out in the field that day the buzzards almost got him. There didn’t really seem to be much question about that. The question that did remain? What was he doing halfway between the river and Cuneytown? If he had been stricken somewhere along the river, where he lived, he had gone for help in Cuneytown and not at the home of the Dearbohns. He had surely been right to do so. I couldn’t help wondering, though, why they had been so quick to run to meet him, to carry him to Hoot’s truck and make that run for the hospital in Weatherford. I knew just enough to make me curious. Just enough to want to ask more questions.
16
Thomas Dearbohn got home right after Paul and me traipsed back into the backyard of what had once been called the Curridge place. A place I had never seen, had never even known to exist. After the less-than-hospitable welcome I’d received last time, I admit my butt cheeks clenched at the sight of him rolling up with a crew of mostly colored fellas in the back of a 1946 Ford Jailbar truck. He tossed himself over the side like a convict going over a wall and hit the ground running. The truck sped off, kicking a rooster tail of dirt up behind him.
“Well, how ya do, Mr. Curridge,” he said.
He was drunk enough that even I winced. Mrs. Dearbohn pointed into the house and hollered out “Paulie” in a roar that seemed both unruly and practiced. Paul backed away slowly, like he knew he was about to m
iss something.
“How’s things, Mr. Dearbohn?” I said.
He reached out to shake my hand and missed. In another circumstance, I might have clobbered him good. I thought about it and let the thought pass.
“Hard day’s work, I take it,” I said.
He spat on his hands and scrubbed them together.
“I’m foreman for the Cuneytown crew,” he said. “Damn porch monkeys, sometimes I swear it’s easier just to get down in there and do the work for ‘em.”
I could see where Paul got his taste in swear words. I could also see that Thomas Dearbohn had a lot to hide. For one thing, I would bet the closest he ever got to foreman was when he took orders from one every morning before work. I knew plenty of people like him back in Fort Worth. Men who couldn’t stand to be seen working the fields alongside colored people. They lived alongside them, took lunch with them, laughed and sometimes even loved with them, but then when they got around other white folks, they had to do that goddamn song and dance. It was no different than the shuck and jive some coloreds did when they got around whites.
“I’ve done my time working cotton fields with all kinds of folks,” I said. “The only ones I didn’t get along with were the ones who thought they were too good for me.”
It wasn’t true. I had worked cotton fields up until I was fifteen or so. I left home first chance I could and swore I’d smelled my very last mule fart. I wasn’t cut out for that kind of life. I was happy as hell to sell race records for Vita Calhoun in Fort Worth. I would have kept that job forever if I’d had any say in it.
Thomas and me scraped the mud off our boots and took chairs on the back porch of the old house. In one corner was the rusty frame of a wringer washing machine, and I imagined it had once wrung out the clothes of Alvis and Lonnie, and I wondered who else.
“I drove all the way back over here because I want you to start at the beginning and tell me everything you know about two people,” I said. “One of them is Lonnie Curridge, and the other is the daughter that you bought this house from.”
