by Tim Bryant
I didn’t like the picture Hilly was painting of Donnatella. Still, I had to admit she had led me on, making me think she was Ginny’s mother.
“Why didn’t he kick her out?” Slant Face said. “It was his house, right?”
I wasn’t sure what I believed, or whether I believed in anything, at that point.
“It’s his,” Hilly said. “William’s a good guy. He felt bad for Donnatella. What can I say? William has money too. I wouldn’t worry about William.”
I wasn’t too worried about him, but I was starting to feel a little bad about beating seven shades of shit out of him. I wasn’t ready to apologize yet, but I was ready to reconsider this whole picture. Donnatella obviously had not planned on me really finding Ginny. It made me wonder what she’d had in mind to begin with.
34
I met Hoot Castrie at his house later that evening. I had begun to think nobody was who they claimed to be, and it gave me some food for thought. Was I honest about who I was? I didn’t mention to Donnatella that I had been married to a woman who took me to court on charges of being too drunk to properly function as a husband. I hadn’t told Hoot that I shot Sheriff Stubblefield and put him permanently out of a job. Was it wrong for me to even know the things I knew about these people? They didn’t tell me.
When I got to Hoot’s place and pulled up the drive, there were two other automobiles parked ahead of me. One was Hoot’s old Chevy pickup, best described as the color of rust. The other, a pale blue Mercury with Oklahoma plates, seemed ominous. I told Starletta to let him know I was coming and had got no word back. Was it not a good night? I knocked on the door, a little quieter than I might have, and wondered if I could get across the porch, down the steps, into the car and out of the drive without anyone hearing.
Hoot opened the door.
“Dutch,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”
I walked into Hoot’s living room and there stood Lizabeth’s half-sister. In the flesh.
“Dutch, this right here is Victoria Curridge. Victoria, this is my friend Dutch. I’ve studied it some, and I believe he would be your uncle, so make that Uncle Dutch. His sister— who’s already passed— she was your half-sister, and I think that only complicates things.”
He looked back and forth at us, and we pretty much did likewise.
“Give her a hug, Dutch,” he said.
Giving that girl a hug did something to me that I wasn’t prepared for. It felt as close to hugging my sister Lizabeth as I could ever imagine. Our only connection was Lonnie Boy, but it was a real connection. And she was Alvis Sr’s daughter.
Starletta came over shortly, and she brought sweet potatoes and greens and black-eyed peas and cornbread. Hoot brought out pork chops and ham hocks and a little deer sausage and, before you know it, people started to drift in and pull up chairs. Then the moonshine was passed around and guitars came out. I sat there looking at this man, Hoot Castrie, and suddenly whatever he had been in the past no longer bothered me a damn. I didn’t know that guy back there any more than I knew Pancho Villa. If someone said he killed his wife and another said he woke up and found her dead, it was up to me to believe what I wanted to believe. I didn’t need to ask him.
I did finally work up enough pluck to approach Victoria. If Starletta was right that she came and went like the wind, I didn’t want to miss my shot.
“So Starletta says you don’t get back here as often as she would like,” I said. I had watched as different neighbors came up to this white girl and embraced her. She looked like she belonged. Something I was beginning to understand.
“I try to come for Christmas,” she said. “This year, I wasn’t able to, so I came on down for two or three days.”
There were so many questions, I couldn’t focus on one.
“I hear you’re in law enforcement,” she said.
“No,” I said, “I’m just a P.I.”
Her laughter sounded like Lizabeth. I wasn’t as shocked by that as I was by my memory’s sudden ability to bring up the exact cadence of Lizabeth laughing at me as I tried to ride Duke the mule back from the fields at the end of our work.
“I do clerical work for the police department in Broken Arrow,” she said. “Sometimes I think I know more than the Police Chief about what’s going on in the department.”
I knew now how to talk to her. I talked to her the way I did Sheriff Muncey’s secretary or Wiley King’s secretary. That is, I went to them knowing that they would give me better information than either of their bosses would. I got along with them better. Neither had ever thrown me in the drunk tank or thrown me out of a newspaper office.
We spent the better part of an hour trading work experiences. I told the story of Slant Face shooting a Bible out of Tom Bennet’s hand, about the shootout at the Top O’ The Hill gambling house, about killing Bret Masterson without even knowing it. She told me about shootouts on Indian land, about a man who set the police department on fire over a parking ticket, a tornado that came through a neighboring town and blew away a farmhouse, its occupants never heard from again.
The stories gave us a way through the door, and soon we were comfortable in the same room, the same life with each other. We had been in the same life all along. The only difference, now we knew it.
“So you are my daddy’s half-brother,” Victoria said.
She seemed to be studying my face, trying to find the resemblance there.
“No,” I said.
I still wasn’t used to thinking of him that way.
“I mean, yes.”
“This is all kind of weird, isn’t it?”
“A little bit.”
“Starletta is my mom, as far as I’m concerned,” Victoria said. “I never knew my real mom. They say she went to Hollywood, so maybe I do know her. I know ever actress who’s ever appeared on the big screen. But I also know Starletta. Starletta stayed and did the hard thing. She didn’t have to do anything, but she did.”
Victoria seemed like she had a good head on her shoulders.
“I guess Alvis Sr. tried something like that,” I said. “He couldn’t quite hack it.”
I was on my third glass of shine. Maybe my fourth.
“I don’t think he ever got over Lizabeth dying like she did,” Victoria said. “I heard he took her to Mineral Wells more than once, hoping that water would take.”
I told her he had taken me along on at least one of those journeys. It must have been a cruel insult to him that I had been the one to survive. No wonder he ran out.
“Everybody’s running, Dutch. Some people run from things, others run to ‘em,” Victoria said. “I’ve learned that much from my job.”
She was right about that. There were some other people that were just running blind though, not sure if they were coming or going. Truth is, I guess we’re all doing both at the same time.
“You do have a pretty awesome momma,” she said just a little later.
I wasn’t sure if she was even talking to me. The crowd had thinned away into the night, leaving the two of us, Hoot and Starletta. Starletta was cleaning things up and Hoot was plunking around on a Stella guitar.
“You know Hilly Driskell?” I said.
He stopped and thought for a minute.
“White boy, plays the Rose Room with a colored outfit?”
I wondered what Victoria meant about momma being awesome. Had I misheard her? Was she talking about the Hollywood starlet again?
“That very one,” I said.
“If I had a momma I could go to, I would go straight to her and wrap my arms around her and make her tell me a thousand stories about all the things she had done, all the places she had been,” Victoria said.
“Hilly’s a cool cat,” Hoot said. “The Skyliner offered that boy three times the dough to come up there and play. Only thing was, they said he would have to play with their boys. They didn’t want any band that had more colored folks than white. And you know what? Ol’ Hilly told ‘em where to find Jesus.”
/> He fell off into a soft fit of laughter that was contagious, and soon we all joined in.
“You wanna go see my momma?” I said. “If you’re around tomorrow, we could go.”
We made plans to go, and I celebrated by drinking one last glass of Hoot’s best whiskey. It may have been my fourth, but I think it was probably number five. I’m good when it comes to numbers, not so good with whiskey.
35
In my dream, I was driving on the highway from Cool to Fort Worth when the idea hit me. It wasn’t like a light bulb going off in my head or like I was hit over the head with a hammer or anything. It was just a small thought that, all of a sudden, and against all odds, caught my attention and wouldn’t let it go.
I had been thinking about the lady who tried to burn down the police station in Broken Bow, and that somehow led to thinking about what Hilly said about Ginny hiding money under the floorboards so Donnatella wouldn’t find it.
Lonnie Boy had been building that old house where Thomas Dearbohn lived, had it almost done in the summer of 1909 when he was killed by the Federales. Maybe he built the whole thing, but hadn’t Hoot said he completed it?
So what if Lonnie Boy had robbed the Mineral Wells Bank & Trust, got the loot all the way back to the farmhouse in Cool, hid it there under the house that he was building around it, then decided he needed just a little more to do everything he wanted to do? Might he go back to the source for another roll of the dice? How ironic would it be if the Dearbohn family were sitting right on top of $50,000 and didn’t have the foggiest idea?
I could drive back into town and sleep on it, but my mind was wide awake with possibilities. While it’s possible I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t had Hoot’s hootch running through my system, I was convinced that the idea was solid. I reached down and switched on WBAP. If they were playing “Sixteen Tons,” I would go home and go to bed. I turned up the sound. “A Satisfied Mind” by Jean Shepard. Jean Shepard, Red Foley and Porter Waggoner had all had hits with the song over the past year. Porter Waggoner had the biggest hit with it, and his was the one that got the most airplay. I preferred Jean’s version, even if I rarely got to hear it. I turned the International around, and we headed for the little road with the church on it. Overall, I did feel pretty satisfied.
The road to the church seemed longer. It stretched on and on, and Jean Shepard gave way to Ferlin Husky singing “I Feel Better All Over (More Than Anywhere’s Else), which I sang along with, and Hank Snow’s “The Next Voice You Hear” which I didn’t. Finally, the church appeared there in my headlights, the gravestones flashing as the lights moved across them from left to right. I pulled up to the side of the church and shut off the motor.
The night was quiet except for some hyenas I could hear up north, farther away than the house and out of my concern. My footfalls seemed so loud to me, I stopped a few times just to listen. A screech owl. Maybe a mockingbird. Mostly what I heard was a big silence. The kind that made you feel like, if you coughed, the Dearbohns would all wake up.
My plan was to use a flashlight from the glove box and get up under the crawl space of the house and have a quick look around. It seemed like a good idea. What better way to get in there and look around? It didn’t seem likely they would welcome that kind of thing if I drove up and asked. And I sure as hell didn’t want to give them the idea, just to have Thomas and Paul beat me to it.
I came up on the house from the south, following the tree line, so that I could stand back and take everything in before I made my move. There was no moon out, so I was going by starlight, afraid to turn on the flashlight in case someone saw it through a window. The house looked dark and lifeless, but I had seen momma sit and stare from the window of a dark and lifeless house. I didn’t trust it.
I slowly worked my way across the yard, past a propane tank that afforded little cover and much explosive power should Thomas— or young Paul— decide to shoot at me through a window. From what I knew of the house, the two bedrooms were on the north end, a layout which seemingly worked for me. I slipped up between the two windows, one of which faced out from the main living area and the other, slightly mismatched, being a newly added bathroom. The house didn’t have a cellar. It was at ground level on the front side. Even the porch wasn’t really a porch. No stairs were needed to step up onto it. On the backside, it sat up on blocks, maybe a foot and a half off the ground. Just enough for a dog to get up under it. Or a private detective with nothing better to do and no one to talk him out of it.
If someone had been in the toilet, they might have seen me pass the window, might have even heard me as I positioned myself head first on my back and pushed myself beneath the place like I was a mechanic sliding beneath a chassis. When I got there, I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. There was a toy or two, hopefully dragged under by a dog. A couple of bottles, one of which looked to be turn-of-the-century. Once I was fully under the house, I flipped over on my stomach and started looking at what I had done. There was a lot more dirt than I had imagined. A lot less treasure. The wooden beams above my head made for a workable graph for me to measure my work. I decided to take it one row at a time, working south to north, from the bathroom toward the bedroom and back again. Like mowing the grass. The going was slow, about a foot at a time, testing the ground, looking for any indication that something might have once been hidden. I felt like, if Lonnie Boy had hidden it, he had done so quickly, with plans to retrieve it shortly. It wouldn’t be deep, and it wouldn’t be hard to find. At least, it wouldn’t have been in 1909. I had to admit that time had changed things. The flooring had been shored up in the kitchen area, below the oven. You could see where the gas went in. It had also been fortified in the middle of the house, and I remembered from earlier that a wood heater lay directly above that spot. I spent extra time around both of these areas, thinking Lonnie may have used one of them as an indicator.
Somewhere along the way, I discovered two different places where the flooring opened up and I could see straight up into the house. The worse place was wide enough to stick a finger through. I listened to the silence for a moment and did it, my index finger sliding easily past the second knuckle. I almost had a heart attack when I had trouble pulling it back through. I played that scenario over and over in my mind for the next half hour. What would I have done if I hadn’t been able to get it back out? I had read stories where, maybe fifty years later, people are tearing down the house because a highway is coming through or a spaceship landing field is being built, and they discover my skeleton, now nothing but bone, still hanging on underneath the house.
Maybe worse, Mrs. Dearbohn would see my little finger sticking up out of her kitchen floor and let out one of those bloodcurdling screams. Then Thomas Dearbohn would come outside, pull me out by my heels and torture me, much to the delight of that foul-mouthed boy of his. Through all of these scenarios, I was finding absolutely nothing to go on. Just dirt, dirt and more of it.
Twice, in the middle of the night, Mrs. Dearbohn climbed out of bed and walked into the living room. I could hear her footsteps above me. I could tell right where she stopped by one of the front windows, hear the chair creak as she sat down and then the floor. Each time, she sat there for fifteen or twenty minutes before following the same trail back to bed. I wondered if she could somehow sense me close by. If she was watching for something out the window. Maybe she was just trying to steal a few minutes for herself, away from a world dictated by Thomas Dearbohn. I could sympathize with that.
I wondered what she would think of someone like Donnatella Silvestri. What kind of message might Donnatella scratch onto her little writing board? How about Maime Guzman? What might she say? I lay there wondering if I was on a fool’s errand, tossing all these different images around in my head, and maybe I got a little too close to that propane, but somewhere along there, without even seeing that I was crossing a line, I drifted off into another dream, and then to another.
“Curridge, I know you’re under there. You’ve got
yourself trapped now. I kill you right there, no one will ever know you were even here.”
I awoke to the sound of voices and thought I was under the Dearbohn’s house. It was light. I jerked myself up and looked around. I was fixed but good this time.
“You finally wake up?” said Hoot. “I was beginning to get worried about you.”
He didn’t know the half of it. I had never been so glad to see anybody that wasn’t Thomas Dearbohn in my life. The smell of coffee hung heavy in the room, and I saw that he already had me a cup poured and ready.
36
Nothing about Peechie Keen’s ever looked any different. I could have stayed away for years, and it would have been the same, often right down to the faces at the bar and at the tables. Frank Sullivan and Herman Chambers from the meat packing plant, Mack Parks from the tire store. Penny Bob behind the bar and Slant Face and James Alto at our table in the corner.
Alto had promised some big news, and I was curious what it was. I knew he was dating some Indian girl he called Babita, and I was wondering if maybe something was going on with that. Of the three of us, Alto was the ladies’ man— he could sing like Lefty Frizzell and play guitar too— so we figured it was just a matter of time before one of them would fall for his charms and pull him away from us.
“No, no, no. Nothing so earth shaking as that,” he said. “There’s been an internal investigation going on up at the newspaper. We just heard about it in deliveries, but it’s been going on for a while, I guess. Somebody found out that one of the sources for a report had been paid. Paid off. I’m not sure which article. I don’t know if anyone knows. They brought three different reporters into the main office yesterday, and today, two of them didn’t come in.”
“Gave them pink slips?” Slant Face said.
