by Tim Bryant
22
Delores Cooley wasn’t difficult to find. There were only three Cooleys listed in the Dallas phone book, and two lived on the same street. Slant Face said I was crazy for not phoning them up, but, way I figured it, I would still make the drive to see them, so why not just save time and go. Besides, I didn’t like telephones.
Delores Cooley was the one that didn’t live on Barnaby. She lived with her parents on 13th, in an apartment house that was more my speed. Her father, an oversized man in bermuda shorts named Al invited me in and even gave me a beer.
“Ginny Silvestri was like my second daughter for a while,” Janetta Cooley said. “Then she just stopped coming around. Hurt Delores’ feelings for a while.”
“So y’all weren’t aware she’d gone missing,” I said.
Delores, who hadn’t said boo to me up to this point, held her hand up.
“Oh no,” she said. “This was months, I’d say, before she ran away.”
Changes in habits meant something when you were forty-six like me. Teenagers were fickle by nature.
“Delores is a year younger than Ginny,” Mrs. Cooley said. “I thought it was just Ginny wanting to be around an older crowd. Sixteen year olds and seventeen year olds are getting their driver's’ licenses and things.”
I suppose that’s true. I was riding a bicycle at that age and right through my twenties. Not many people got cars in the thirties, at least not in my neighborhood. Then came the war. I didn’t go because of my limp and bad hearing, but most of the automobile plants were busy making bombers and tanks. I was in my mid-thirties when I got my first car, so I could take a job with the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Department.
“Y’all know whether Ginny Silvestri had a car?”
It was a question I hadn’t thought to ask of her mother.
“She drove her dad’s car,” Delores said. “I rode in it once. We went to the malt shop on Zangs, by the park.”
“You remember the make and model?” I said.
Delores looked at her dad.
“It was a coupe,” mom said. “A Studebaker coupe, I think.”
Nice wheels, I thought. The pickup would be jealous.
“Color?”
“Yellow,” Delores said.
For not having a big X painted on it, seemed it would stand out in your average parking lot. Far as I know, though, the coupe hadn’t gone missing along with Ginny.
“She didn’t take the car when she disappeared, did she?”
Donnatella had never mentioned a yellow coupe. Didn’t seem like the kind of thing you would overlook.
“No, Mr. Silvestri has the car, I think,” Mrs. Cooley said.
I didn’t come away with a lot, but I did know that William Silvestri drove a yellow Studebaker coupe. That might prove helpful for entirely separate reasons.
“Are you aware that Mr. Silvestri beat his wife up and put her in the hospital?” I said.
Mrs. Cooley looked horrified.
“She’ll wind up dead. And, to be honest with you, Mr. Curridge, Ginny would have too, if she’d stayed. Her mother knew that.”
“Her mother came to me hoping to find her,” I said.
“She was hoping not to find her, Mr. Curridge,” Mrs. Cooley said.
I couldn’t argue that point. Donnatella Silvestri was in a bad position. I decided it was time to spring the question.
“I hear you guys are of some relation to the cowboy singer Spade Cooley.”
It gave Mrs. Cooley a chance to get up and leave. I don’t think she liked me very much. I could understand why. I’m sure she had something else that needed doing more than sitting there and looking back and forth at me and Slant Face. Slant Face looked like he wanted to leave as well.
“Donnell is a bad seed, Mr. Curridge,” Al Cooley said. “I neither know him well nor do I wish to.”
That was a little hurtful.
“He’s a good band leader,” I said. “I saw him a couple times on Jacksboro Highway in Fort Worth.”
I had seen him at The Green Parrot in 1952 and at the 2222 Club the following year. He hadn’t been back since then, but I had heard he was out in California making movies.
“Jacksboro is just about where I’d expect to find him,” Al said.
I knew what he was getting at, even if he wouldn’t come out and say it.
“Well, sir, he was on the bandstand. I reckon he might do a little drinking, but he sure knows how to play that fiddle.”
I wasn’t lying. I reckoned he was better with a bow than Bob Wills by that point. I liked Bob, but he spent too much time reading his press.
“We don’t play that kind of music in this house,” Al Cooley said.
Slant Face looked at me. He knew me well enough to know what I was about to say. “Well, maybe you would liven things up around here a little if you did.” He shook his head, and I didn’t say it. Later he claimed that wasn’t what he was saying at all. Later, he said it had only been a vague can-you-believe-it kind of shrug. I don’t know. All I know is I left the Cooleys on 13th Street with little more to go on than I had to begin with. Except the opinion that Spade Cooley was a bad seed. I seemed to know a lot of bad seeds. Takes one to know one, I guess.
I headed for Peechie Keen’s. I needed to do less thinking and more drinking for a while. Slant Face was up for it, and I knew we’de find other bad seeds there waiting for us.
23
As an employee on Dallas Methodist’s cleaning crew, Donnatella Silvestri had plenty of reason not to get caught thumbing through hospital records. As a patient, she seems to have found both opportunity and will.
“I decided if they caught me, I would say I was looking for my records,” she said. “And, honestly, I did want to know what my records said. I wanted to know if they mentioned William. If I could use them against him in court if I had to.”
Donnatella had enough going on that I hated to bother her. Thankfully, that wasn’t a problem.
“Wanna know what I found?” she said.
It was the morning of Alvis’ funeral, which I had invited her to at the last moment. What could be better than inviting a girl to a funeral for your first date? That’s the kind of guy I am. Well, especially when you’ve got something you want to tell me, and I’m worried your husband might finish killing you off if I leave you home alone for long enough. I had an hour to blow, and, of course, I wanted to know. I had driven straight over after getting the call. Too quickly to stop for Slant Face, who was planning to attend the funeral alongside me. Now us. Not that we were an us. It was enough to confuse old Sarah.
“I’m pretty sure she was in the hospital at the first of December,” Donnatella said.
Her face was a painful collection of colors, halfway hidden under bandages, but even more stark against the white. She didn’t look completely convinced.
“Not long ago,” I said.
She hadn’t written anything down. Flipping through papers, she had seen the name and committed what she could to memory. Finally at home, she’d written it down on the back of her release papers.
“It was too close not to be her,” she said.
She held the paper up for me to see for myself.
“Margaret Guzman,” I said.
It was a name. As names go, it seemed a little unusual.
“She’s listed as fifteen,” she said.
“What was she being treated for?” I said.
She jabbed at the paper
“Encephalitis.”
Now that was a word I knew, a word I sort of understood. Both me and my sister Lizabeth came down with polio when I was eight and she was five. Polio-encephalitis momma always said. That’s what the doctor told her. Maybe it was the undertaker. I always called it polio. Partly because I couldn’t always remember the second half of it, and partly because that second half just sounded so scary. Encephalitis. It reminded me of elephants for some reason. Big and wild and deadly.
“Can a person be healed of encephalitis?” I said.
>
Donnatella was one step ahead.
“The question is, would encephalitis make her more susceptible to sepsis,” she said, “and the answer is yes, I think so.”
It was that particular moment, when she said those particular words in the way she did, that I saw her differently. I hadn’t known Donnatella until the last couple of days, but, all of a sudden, I could see the girl inside of her. I could see the bobby-socks sock-hopper whatever she had always been, what had always been there underneath the grief and the hard knocks. I only knew I liked what I saw and didn’t mind seeing more of it.
The records didn’t show her discharge date, but a fifteen year old Margaret Guzman had been hospitalized on December 12, 1955. Her address was listed as Dallas, Texas.
“Pretty damn vague,” I said.
“Well, she was out of the house,” Donnatella said. “Maybe she didn’t have an address to give.”
I knew this was hard on her, but she was playing tough. I think she was probably doing it out of respect for me burying my father. I hadn’t yet told her the story, but I did as we sat in the small reception room at White’s Funeral Home. I even told her the part about White’s Funeral Home being the white funeral home. After that, we sat and waited for the mourners to arrive. Donnatella seemed unfazed by my story, saying only that most families kept their best stories to themselves. Slant Face showed up and sat on the other side of me. James Alto sat next to him. I was surprised to see Ruthie Nell there, sitting way back on the last row with the receptionist from the Startlegram. She looked embarrassed to be there, surprised at the gulf of empty seats between us and them. Momma and two of her friends, Sheriff Muncey and his wife, me, Donnatella, Slant Face, James Alto and the two stragglers in the back. Eleven people, and, to be blunt, ten were only there because of momma. I’m not sure why momma was there. Maybe there was still a love there between them, but the gulf had to have made the one in the church look like small potatoes.
Thinking about love made me think of Hoot Castrie. I sat there as the preacher shuffled down the aisle and made us a cool dozen, and I wondered what Hoot was up to. Maybe fishing for wishes in Dry Creek, or maybe he was still sitting there at his table, pining for Myra. That made me think of Paul, who said in no uncertain terms that Hoot lied about the whole shebang. Had he lied about Myra too? Had he lied about love?
I sat there during the six-minute eulogy, delivered by a man who had never met the man he was eulogizing, and thought about every person I knew except Alvis Sr. The preacher said something about the body returning to that great big hole in the ground, and I couldn’t help expanding on that in my head. Truth was, you couldn’t really sit and think on Alvis. You could only think of the big hole where he should have been. And now it was getting ready to swallow him up for good. What had his life been? A great big nothing for the twelve of us in that little room, and even less for everyone outside it. But he must have had a life full of memories, and that means, just maybe, he had a life full of regrets and sore feelings too. Maybe he had more of a life than I do. Maybe he was looking down on all of us and laughing his ass off. I didn’t know if I could stir up any belief in a heaven in the sky with beautiful angels and all the dead looking down at our deeds and misdeeds. I didn’t like to think there was a God who could read my mind.
The preacher ended his short speech with a verse that said you should be happy with those that are happy and weep with those who weep. I thought that a curious ending because there wasn’t any weeping going on. I guess, in his own way, he was telling us to go on and be happy.
He shook momma’s hand on the way out and said something to her I couldn’t make out. Then he said, “I’ll see you at the graveside,” and I realized we weren’t through. We now had to haul Alvis’ ass out to the Greenwood Cemetery and say a few more of those encouraging words over him before a black man named Teevy put him in that hole the preacher was talking about.
Teevy was another story. I liked him ever since I met him at the general store down close to where those B-29 bombers went down back in ‘45. He said his name was Teevy, and I asked him “like the television,” and he proceeded to give me detailed lessons in how to pronounce his name with the stress of the Teev part whereas the other word stressed the other part of the name. He could say each one and make them sound totally different, like they weren’t any relation at all to each other. I never heard all that much difference, but I liked his spirit. I took off my hat and nodded to him at the end of the preacher’s talk, which was pretty much the same thing he said earlier, only using different words. As we walked away from the casket full of Alvis, I felt like I was putting a part of my past to rest. It didn’t feel the way I thought it should though. I didn’t really feel any way at all. I looked over my shoulder.
“Teevy,” I said.
I tried my best to get it just the way he liked it. He laughed and looked up out of the hole.
“You said it right, Mr. Dutch,” he said.
I was surprised he remembered my name, but I guess Dutch Curridge is as easy to remember as most. I gave him the thumbs-up sign and he laughed and went back to his work. Teevy made his living digging holes and planting caskets in them. It was a hell of a way to make a living. But who was I to talk?
24
The funeral of Alvis Curridge seemed surreal, only because he had already died to me when he abandoned our family years before. This second funeral was mostly an inconvenience. There was a get-together afterwards at the same church where I had first met the Sheriff, and curiously there were more people there than at the funeral. People grieve in different ways, but they all get hungry at lunchtime.
Thankfully, Ruthie Nell and her friend decided to skip the meal. Still, to see Slant Face, James Alto and me sitting at a picnic table outside a Baptist church would have given any God worth his salt a laughing fit to shake the ground for miles. I had a bottle of whiskey, James had a flask of vodka and Slant Face asked aloud twice whether they had any Scotch and milk.
“Mr. Sanders, we might have milk,” one of the church ladies said. “As for the Scotch, well, we don’t have none of that, and if we don’t have it, you don’t need it.”
From what I could gather, the preacher who came and led the funeral was not the preacher whose church we were seated at, a situation I found puzzling.
“That’s Brother Ballard Trubody,” another church lady said. “He does such a good job.”
“I could listen to Ballard preach every day,” the first lady said.
These ladies seemed to get the same kick out of attending funerals that me and my pals did watching rhythm and blues bands at the Rose Room or western swing at the Skyliner. I missed the greatness in Ballard Trubody, but if you had put a guitar in his hand and a swinging band behind him, I might have seen the light, as Hank Williams said.
We ate pimento and cheese sandwiches and drank until we were all pretty deep in the spirit. I finally got deep enough to say something to Slant Face.
“You wouldn’t lie to me,” I said.
I couldn’t go quite so far as saying “would ya?” I knew Slant Face didn’t lie when he was drunk.
“Are you screwing Ruthie Nell?”
Slant Face looked angry. I didn’t want to fight him. If he made it necessary, I didn’t want to fight him on church grounds.
“I can’t believe you’d ask me that, Dutch,” he said.
I can look myself in the eye and lie. Drunk or sober. If I can lie to myself, I can lie to anyone.
“Someone mentioned it,” I said.
He swore he had never laid a finger on her. I guess it pissed him off, because he got up and left with James Alto. I sat there, finished off the bottle of whiskey and ate one more little sandwich. Donnatella helped the ladies clean everything up, and then we scrammed.
I drove up and showed Donnatella where the one bomber had hit the cornfield in 1945. She said she remembered it all clearly. She and William had been married for less than a year. They were living in Arlington, and William was w
orking at the bomber plant in Fort Worth. It was a year they would never forget.
“How did you get to south Dallas?” I asked.
It seemed like a move downward to me. Not the typical move for someone at retirement.
“It wasn’t a move I wanted to make,” she said. “My father died and left us the house. It was a better house than we had. I did like the pool. But I wish we’d never moved.”
She sighed like Ruthie Nell used to when she had an imposing deadline with the Fort Worth Press.
“You don’t think you and William would have divorced if you’d stayed in Arlington,” I said.
I knew Arlington like the back of my hand. I had worked a job there at Top O’ The Hill, an illegal gambling joint, for a while after I quit the Sheriff’s Department. Most of the people who lived in Arlington worked in either Fort Worth or Dallas. Most of the people who worked in Arlington lived in either Fort Worth or Dallas. They all seemed to hate each other.
We drove down Clear Fork Road until we reached the bottom of the hill below the house. I showed her where I always pulled the truck in, not thinking about the line of questioning that move would make. For a while, we just sat there. Momma was back in the house alone, the new widow. She would probably wear that well. I didn’t know. I had been with her the longest and seemed to know her the least. The ex-bank robber. Had she never kept any of the money? Or had he and Lizabeth been raised with it? I would have to ask about that.
“So you drive all the way over and park here with all your girls?” Donnatella said.
She seemed a little put off. I knew I had probably crossed a few lines. I had run Slant Face off. Had I run Ruthie Nell off as well? What had I said?
“I like parking here because this is where I used to hitch up old Duke and plow the field,” I said. “Funny thing, that was the thing that ran me away from this place. I hated it more than anything else on the farm, including momma. Now, it’s the main thing I sit here and think about.”
