by Ed Kurtz
Shannon was sure they would. He did not envy them.
“We have twelve,” he offered sympathetically. “Thirteen with me.”
“Lucky thirteen,” John Martin piped up from his pew. He looked sad.
“I’ve chosen a hymn,” Mrs. Hutchins declared. “We will sing it as we come up the block. It’s ‘When I Get to the End of the Way.’”
“All right,” Shannon said.
“You know it.” It was a statement rather than a question—something of a challenge, the reverend thought.
“Yes,” he said. “I know it.”
“Well, I brought songsheets for those who might not. Though they ought to; we’ve sung it enough in this old house of the Lord.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“Alice wanted ‘Shall We Gather at the River,’ but we did that one last time.”
“Yes, we did.”
“I thought it best not to repeat ourselves—they might not take us seriously enough.”
“That’s wise.”
Alice Maxwell lingered half-invisible in front of the rostrum, staring at her shoes in the dominant shadow of Emma Hutchins. Suggestions always welcome, but never applied.
“We must be at our best and brightest,” Mrs. Hutchins said. “Now, I propose we rehearse the song before we go.”
“Oh, I’m sure we all know . . .”
“I’ll lead us off. You don’t mind if I use the rostrum, do you, Reverend Shannon?”
“Well, no . . .”
She turned on her heels and raised her great, flabby arms to the other eleven: a rotund, feminine Moses to her small band of wanderers. As she rounded them up and absorbed their full attention, Shannon considered an aphorism a Texan great-uncle often used when he was a boy: all hat, no cattle. That described him perfectly at that moment, he thought, whereas Emma Hutchins had both. The hat was his; the cattle maybe never really were.
He was just a cowhand at the Litchfield H.
Chapter Nine
“Put that damned thing away,” Georgia said.
Jojo regarded the revolver in his hand as though it was the gun, and not the girl, who had said it.
“The way you’re getting on with that gin, you’re liable to blow your own pecker off.”
“Doesn’t do me that much good anyhow,” he said.
He had already removed every round from every chamber, examined them, and pushed them back in, one by one. Now he was repeating the routine like some sort of sacred ritual.
“You’ve been playing with that thing for twenty minutes. It ain’t a Daisy, you know.”
“I know.”
He loaded the last round, spun the chamber and closed it with a click. This he followed with a healthy gulp of gin from the jelly jar on the table, which he punctuated with a satisfied gasp.
“I’m waiting for you get tight enough to start shooting up the place,” she said. “You don’t want me to get the sheriff on you, do you?”
“Certainly not.”
“Then how about letting me in on whatever’s rattling around that ginned-up brain of yours?”
“Chekov,” Jojo said.
“Chekov.”
“That’s right.”
“Some Russkie?”
“A pretty important one, I guess.”
“He running the Eastern Front or something?”
“Naw—he’s dead. Been dead for forty years.”
Georgia frowned. “Eventually this story’s going to get interesting. I just know it.”
“He wrote plays,” Jojo explained.
“Well, that’s nice.”
“And he had this idea, see? He said if you’re going to go and whip out a gun in the first act, then the damn thing had better go off sometime in the third.”
“Fascinating.” She sashayed over to the table and finished off his gin for him. “So what’s it to you?”
“I’m waiting for the third act,” Jojo said.
Her mouth screwed up to one side, she seized the bottle and filled the jelly jar. “Life’s got plot holes,” she said after a while.
“That’s true.”
She took a slug and passed the glass to him. He took his and lit a cigarette.
“Plus it’s a police matter now. Ernie’s problem, not yours.”
“Happened in one of my rooms.”
“In one of Hibbs’ rooms,” she corrected.
“I was responsible.”
“You’re a house dick, not a lifeguard. Folks bring all sorts of baggage to a hotel, some of it not the variety a bellboy can lug up the steps for them.”
“We got an elevator.”
“Yeah, but it hardly ever works.”
“That’s true, too.”
“My old man killed himself in a motor lodge outside of Scottsdale, Arizona. Thumbed his way out there to do something he could have done anyplace. I guess he always wanted to see the Great Southwest.”
“That’s a sad story.”
“You don’t say,” Georgia jeered. “Point is, only man accountable was his own stupid self.”
“I don’t think the victim in this case ripped himself apart.”
“That’s not what I’m . . . ripped apart?”
“Forget it.”
She narrowed her eyes and plucked the cigarette from Jojo’s lips, dragged on it and exhaled a long blue stream.
“Nope,” she said, “you can’t do that.”
“The hooch loosened my lips. Loose lips sink ships.”
“Listen,” she lectured, pointing his own cigarette at him, “you’re the one who brought it up. First act, third act—Chekowsky’s rules, not mine.”
“Chekov.”
“Whichever. Spill, brother.”
With a heavy, dramatic sigh, he fired up a fresh Old Gold, drank deeply from the jelly jar, and told her.
And after that, both Georgia and Jojo were silent for what seemed like a long time.
He’d come to sleep somewhere other than the cot in his office, never intending to get half lit so early in the day, but Georgia had to get back to the hardware store so Jojo shaved with her razor and hit the sack. He slept for an hour, then woke up for no reason at all and he couldn’t do a thing about it.
He found a dirty skillet on the cluttered kitchen counter, wiped it down with a rag, and helped himself to a couple of eggs in the icebox. While they sizzled on the stovetop, he went into a kind of trance, going over the events of the night before, searching his muddled subconscious for some seemingly insignificant detail he might have neglected to fully understand. Nothing came to mind, and the eggs ended up burning. He ate them anyway, washing them down with what was left of Georgia’s gin, and washed the skillet in the sink when he was done.
She was entirely correct, of course, when she said it was a police matter now, Ernie Rich’s problem to solve and not his, not the ex-deputy with no authority or jurisdiction or any hand in a murder case at all—if indeed it was a murder. Which it was. He knew it as sure as he knew his stomach was churning from the burnt eggs and booze roiling in it. And he was curious, if nothing else: a man had been pulled apart like a tender Thanksgiving turkey, a feat no one could possibly achieve on their own, or with several of their strongest friends. It just couldn’t be done, not as far as Jojo was concerned. He’d heard of people being drawn and quartered in the old days, but that particularly nasty method of execution required a team of horses. He was fairly certain he would have noticed had someone managed to smuggle four horses into Room 214 of the Litchfield Valley Hotel. Besides, he considered with a grin, they would never have fit in there, anyway.
The full-colour memory of the carnage in the room, however, made quick work of the grin. He glanced at the clock and decided that the roadshow people—the survivors, he thought grimly—would be gearing up for their second s
how before long. In the intervening time, he had a long, hot walk back to town and enough time to cool off in the Starlight before heading into the theatre to commence his casual investigation.
Or, he considered a few hundred feet up the dirt road from Georgia’s place, in Earl’s tavern, which had air conditioning where the Starlight did not. It certainly wasn’t the truest reason Jojo changed his mind with regard to destination, but it was the one he went with.
The icebox was bereft of milk and John Fields wouldn’t be around with a fresh bottle for another day, so Theodora spent the requisite time putting herself together for a trip into town. Russ had the car, his cherished Continental, which meant she was to walk the two miles in, heat be damned. Accordingly, she took the umbrella from the closet to provide walking shade, and set off as the waning afternoon sun hung low in the distance.
Theodora did not much like leaving the relative safety of her home. It was not that she deemed the rest of the world to be particularly hazardous, nor that she suspected anyone in town meant her harm. She simply wasn’t comfortable in the world, and although she wasn’t terribly comfortable in her own skin wherever she was, the typical loneliness of home was her sanctuary, her personal temple wherein she needn’t worry about anything that wasn’t directly in front of her and demanding her immediate attention—housework, largely. She could iron or sweep or dust without much anxiety if she only let her mind slow to a crawl with just enough power to focus on the task at hand and nothing else. Too much thought was an anathema to her, a terror she knew well from experience and which she avoided at all costs. Too much introspection was worse than the worst nightmare, a living nightmare of hopelessness and fatigue that scared her more than death itself. And when life seemed worse than death . . .
A dull-red truck rumbled in the distance, shimmering in the dancing heat and kicking up a dust storm in its wake. Theodora stiffened and clumsily stepped into the irrigation ditch, sliding on loose rocks and only barely managing to remain upright. The truck crunched over the loose pebbles and quartz and sediment of the unpaved road, and as it came near Theodora could see the mountain of corn in its bed. When it came up beside her, it slowed and a farmer in a battered straw hat waved as he passed by.
She was perplexed. There was nothing unusual about a truck farmer returning from town in the late afternoon, but why in the world did he still have his whole crop with him? She turned to watch the truck rock down the road, diminishing in size until it vanished in a brown puff of road dust. A flock of blackbirds took flight from the ruckus the truck made, crying out in their escape, and Theodora watched them. Her eyes followed them over the intermittent copses of lush hackberries and elms until Leroy Dunn’s freshly-painted red barn came into view. And unless Dunn had gone and moved his barn a mile or so closer to town, Theodora recognized the fact that she’d gone the wrong way down the road.
It was a road she had travelled all her life. To the west, it led to town. To the east, it made a straight shot to the outlying farms and, further out, the shacks populated by Negroes and poor whites. There was absolutely no mystery about it: she went left to go to town. She never went right, had no reason to. But today, Theodora went boldly east, and there was no telling how much farther she might have walked had her muddied thoughts not been interrupted by the truck and the blackbirds and Leroy Dunn’s bright red barn.
Her shoulders slumped and she gave a weak sigh. Holding her umbrella aloft, she stepped up on the mild rise between the ditch and the road, whereupon the rocks gave way and her foot flew forward. As her shoe sailed up and onto the road, Theodora dropped like a stone to the ground below, landing at an awkward angle with her left foot twisting underneath her until something snapped. She cried out—a pitiful, animal cry—but the only reply came from some of the blackbirds, which screeched as they fled yet again from impending disaster.
The pain shot up her leg en route to her brain, increasing the heat that was already baking her, and she gritted her teeth. She shifted a few inches, tried to lift her backside to move her injured ankle, but her body protested. She wasn’t going anywhere.
Her eyes welled up with fear and frustration. She didn’t want to cry: the wracking sobs building in her breast only exacerbated the pain. But she couldn’t help herself. The tears and gasping breaths came on whether she liked it or not. Had she gone the right way in the first place, this might never have happened, but even if it had there was a much greater likelihood of someone coming along to find and rescue her. As things stood, she was down and out on a little-used farm road, farther from town than her house, which wasn’t particularly close. The red truck heading to town (not away from it) was something of a fluke, an uncommon apparition, particularly at this time of day. The possibility of another farmer passing by was so remote it wasn’t worth considering.
Theodora wept at the bleakness of her prospects. One wet, sobbing breath later, she began to laugh at the absurdity of it.
If only she’d had her head on straight, if only she’d been capable of finding her way to town as she’d done thousands of times before without incident.
If only.
Still, she laughed.
Jojo went for another cigarette only to find the pack was empty.
“Damn.”
He tossed the empty package on the side of the road and kept walking. The afternoon was segueing to evening, but at that time of the year it was much too hot at one in the morning. He reckoned that after a given point, hot was just hot, and a few degrees in either direction didn’t make much difference. Halfway between Georgia’s house and the edge of town, he was already planning out the rest of the evening and into the night in terms of which spaces were best air conditioned, which didn’t leave much. There was Earl’s, and the Palace, and the meat department inside the farmer’s market had a walk-in freezer he could happily nap in if they’d let him. Most places had fans, but they only turned the thick, stagnant air into something of a sirocco, an over-exaggerated version of that blast you got when you opened up a hot oven. Any way he sliced it, relief was scarce and temporary. He wished he was in Antarctica, like some hoary old explorer, plunging himself and his crew deeper and deeper into the ice and snow and frost. It was a childish fantasy, and he knew it, but it helped shave off some of the heat, at least in his imagination.
It was like the yellowing Red Cross poster in the post office said: every little bit helps.
On the north side of the road, in the middle distance, Dunn’s old barn appeared through the heat-haze. It was startlingly red—freshly painted, Jojo imagined—the colour close to that of the gruesome tableau he saw the night before. The bending of the image from the shimmering air complimented the comparison, creating the illusion that the colour was sliding, dripping, bleeding into the earth. He shuddered, shook it off, kept walking.
No sense crying over spilt milk, he figured. Or blood.
When he first heard the laughter coming from the irrigation ditch, he decided he was probably hallucinating. Heat stroke. Not good, so far from town.
He slowed his pace and ran the palm of his hand up his forehead and over his slick hair, sluicing the sweat back with it. The closer he got to the laughter, the louder it sounded, and as he came to be parallel to it, Jojo considered the possibility that it was not a hallucination, that there really was somebody madly cackling in the irrigation ditch. The way things had been going, it wasn’t the oddest thing he could imagine happening.
So he stepped cautiously over to the ditch and looked down. There lay the woman, dressed in her best going-to-meeting clothes, all twisted up like the hand of God had plucked her up and dropped her there. And sure enough, she was laughing so hard she was crying, as though her predicament was the funniest damn joke she ever heard.
Jojo licked his salty lips and squinted at her.
“Um,” he began. “Ma’am?”
The laughter cut off with a sucking gasp. Now that they were both startled a
nd confused, she and Jojo regarded one another in silence for a long moment. It was he who eventually broke the awkward quiet.
“You look like you could use some help.”
“Took a spill,” she said, breathless from the laughing. “I think maybe I broke my ankle.”
“I don’t get it.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I fell, I landed on my ankle, and I think a bone is broken,” she said sternly.
“That I get. It’s the good time you were having of it that escapes me.”
“I don’t guess I can explain it,” she said.
“Well.”
“But maybe while you’re thinking it over, you might think about giving a lady a hand?”
Flushing pink, he straightened up and nodded dumbly. “Oh, right. Right.”
He came to the edge of the dirt road, right up to where it dipped sharply into the ditch.
“Careful,” she said, “wouldn’t be too good if we both ended up mangled down here.”
“I guess not.”
He slid down, his arms extended for balance, and crouched beside her. She made a face he found difficult to interpret, but Jojo found women to be generally difficult in that way.
“I think we should get you straightened out first.”
“All right.”
“I reckon it’s going to hurt pretty good.”
“Wonderful.”
“Here, wrap your arms around me.”
He bent over and she smiled nervously.
“It’s okay,” he said, “I’m just going leverage you up, so you can get that leg out.”
“Good grief.”
She extended her arms like a child looking for a motherly hug and tightened them around his neck. With a mild grunt, he leaned back, lifting her as he hooked a foot under her calf and slowly pulled it out. The woman cried out, but she did nothing to impede him. Once the leg was cleared, he lowered her back down and knelt in the ditch to examine the injury.
