Last Bus to Coffeeville

by J. Paul Henderson

  Returning from church that Sunday morning, Selena was both surprised and overjoyed to see Little Bob sitting on her porch steps. Bob’s eyes lit up too when he saw his favourite aunt appear. He ran to kiss her and hand her the letter his mother had written. Selena took the letter and opened the house door.

  ‘You had anythin’ to eat, L’il Bob?’ she asked.

  ‘No, Ma’am. Nothin’ since breakfas’.’

  ‘Well, sit yo’self down an’ I’ll make us both a san’widge.’

  She knew what was in the letter before she even read it. Her sister’s behaviour had been getting stranger by the day. All that talk about jazz and how Bob was holding her back. She wondered sometimes if Clarissa wasn’t popping some kind of pill, or taking powders when she went to those nightclubs. The letter said she’d be back for Bob in a couple of weeks, but Selena knew it was a lie. ‘Looks like it jus’ you an’ me, L’il Bob,’ she murmured to herself. Secretly, she was pleased.

  Selena showed Bob real love, the kind of love a small boy of seven should have expected from his mother. Early in their time together, Bob asked her about his mother, if she loved him and when she’d be coming home, but soon stopped asking these questions and appeared to forget about her altogether. He seemed to accept that Aunt Selena was now his new mother, and wasn’t unhappy with the situation. He made friends with children in the neighbourhood, started school there and ended his schooling there.

  When Bob was small, he and Selena – forever limited to the fashions of the very young – shopped for clothes in the same children’s department store, but it wasn’t long before Bob grew taller than his aunt. He’d stand next to her and proudly point out this fact. He never saw the hump on her back or the crookedness of her small body; all he ever saw was someone he loved more than any other person in the world. For her part, Selena was thrilled to have Bob in her life. Apart from her work in the mill during the week, and attending church on the Sunday, hers had been a relatively lonely life. She knew men didn’t find her attractive and that she’d never have a husband, but now at least she had her own child. She hoped Clarissa would never return.

  Clarissa didn’t return: she followed her dream for two years and then died of a heroin overdose. She was found dead in a cheap hotel room by the man who’d introduced her to the drug, the very same man who’d advised her years earlier to ditch Bob. Selena arranged her sister’s burial, but for many years made no mention of the matter to Bob.

  Bob was a bright child, inquisitive and naturally mischievous; he was also lazy. Miss Priddy lost count of the times she was summoned to the school by his teachers. On her return she would scold Bob, but all he did was smile his big goofy smile at her. Bob did, however, excel on the baseball field: he had a keen eye and an accurate throw, and every year was chosen to pitch for the school team. Nothing made Selena prouder than to see him on the field wearing his baseball uniform, or when Bob took her hand and walked her home after a game.

  Bob and Selena walking together made for an incongruous sight. At six feet two, Bob dwarfed his aunt, and from behind it was difficult to tell who the adult was and who the child. Bob, by now, had come to look upon himself as his aunt’s protector. He didn’t have to rescue her from fist fights, but he couldn’t help but notice the snide looks as they walked through town, or hear the cruel jokes made at her expense. Despite Selena telling him to ignore these people, he never hesitated to confront them. These confrontations often led to altercations and, occasionally, an overnight stay in jail. After one such fracas with a white grocer, Bob was given the choice of going to prison for a short spell or joining the army. Both he and Selena opted for the latter.

  Bob proved a natural soldier. He was big, strong, naturally athletic and surprisingly – under direction – exceptionally disciplined. He also looked the part. What really caught the eye of his superiors, however, was his eye, and shooting ability. He had twenty-twenty vision and accuracy honed on the baseball field, and years of sitting quietly in a chair watching cartoons on the television had also equipped him with a natural stillness. Bob, they decided, was a natural born sniper.

  For his part, Bob delighted in his new-found skill and the elite status he now enjoyed. He boasted of both to his Aunt Selena, and she was the first to know of his posting to Vietnam, though neither of them was too sure just exactly where Vietnam was. The French had known where the country was for some time, and until 1954 had made it their home away from home. In that year, however, their forces were defeated and expelled. What had once been one country, now temporarily became two, split by the Geneva Accords at the seventeenth parallel until elections could be held.

  The United States viewed the nationalists in the north of the country as communists, and Ho Chi Minh as no less than a thinner version of Mao Tse-tung. Consequently, to ensure the creation of a non-communist government that would act as a bulwark against communist expansion from the north, it poured vast amounts of financial and military aid into the south. It also sent people. They were amorphously termed advisers or technicians, and their duties were similarly irregular; one of them was Bob.

  Bob arrived in Vietnam in 1958. Insurgency in the south had targeted government officials, school teachers, health workers, agricultural officials and village chiefs; Bob’s brief was to target the insurgents. For the next two years he rarely moved, spending his time motionless in trees, on the ground or on the roofs of buildings. He stopped counting the bodies at fifty.

  Bob’s rifle became his best friend. Unlike other snipers stationed there, who preferred the newer and semi-automatic M1D rifle, Bob stuck with the M1903A4 Springfield. It was a pound or two heavier, but its bolt-action made for greater accuracy and range; mounted with a Stith-Kollmorgen Model 4XD scope, Bob could kill a target at 1,200 yards. He called it Old Mo, in memory of his father.

  Though he personalised his rifle, Bob never personalised his targets. They always remained targets, and never became living people. The scope allowed him such detachment. Every killing was at a remote distance, and he never had to witness the results of his handiwork at close quarters. Bob felt no guilt, no remorse; in his mind killing was no more than a regular nine-to-five job sanctioned and paid for by the government. If the US government viewed communism as an evil, then communism was an evil.

  Bob made friends among the other advisers, but most of his free time was spent alone; he preferred to explore the strangeness of the country he was there to defend, rather than joining them in their search for what they crudely called chicken-chow-pussy. Vietnam, in fact, fascinated him. More people should come visit here, he thought, and within a matter of years they did – hundreds and thousands of them, all soldiers. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of tourism Bob had had in mind.

  After two years in Vietnam, Bob returned home to serve out his final months at the Fort Bragg army base in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Shortly before his discharge, Bob was summoned to base headquarters and introduced to Colonel William B Fogerty, a man who appeared to live life in the shadows. Even when asked, Fogerty never directly told Bob which agency or branch of government he worked for.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, son,’ he told Bob. ‘The mere fact we’re having this conversation on base tells you I’m legit, and that my business isn’t just army business but government business.

  ‘You did a hell of a job in Vietnam, Crenshaw; killed more gooks than the rest of the other snipers put together. You’re blessed, kid. God has given you a talent for putting lead into people when they least expect it, and it would be a crime to waste it, a sin. Now here’s the deal…’

  The deal was that Bob would work for him – and therefore the government – on an informal and freelance basis. There would be no contract or written paper trail; he could tell no one what he did or where he went. In return, he would be paid a monthly retainer for – as Fogerty put it – essentially sitting on his butt, and larger sums after completing missions.

  Bob took the deal. He’d had little idea of what to do after leavin
g the army anyway, and this option appeared to allow him the part of being in the army he enjoyed, without the rest of it. Besides, he needed money: Aunt Selena’s health had deteriorated. A relatively short lifetime of hard work and deformity had taken its toll, and she’d suffered a stroke; her beautiful face was now as crooked as the rest of her small body.

  His decision pleased Fogerty. Apart from one trip to Laos in the three years that followed, the majority of Bob’s missions were to Central America: Haiti, Guatemala, Ecuador and the Dominican Republic. Wherever Bob went, dead bodies were left in his wake.

  ‘What you do, Bobby?’ Aunt Selena once asked him. ‘You never rightly say.’ She was in a nursing home now, sitting in a chair propped up with cushions, her small legs sticking out parallel to the floor.

  Bob hesitated. ‘I work fo’ the governmen’, Aunt Selena. Take care o’ problems o’erseas.’

  ‘But you do good, right?’

  He hesitated again. ‘I figure so,’ he said uncertainly.

  He found her questions unsettling. There were official reasons why he could never tell his aunt the truth, but there were also personal grounds. If he told her he killed people for a living, she’d be shocked and more than disappointed in him; and the realisation that he could never tell her the truth also shocked and disappointed him.

  He’d been proud of his achievements in Vietnam and had understood the nature of his task there, but now he had no idea of the rights and wrongs of his actions and an uneasy feeling started to eat away at him. He began to question the nature of what he was being asked to do, and over the months that followed reluctantly concluded that it was no more than blood money that allowed his aunt the comfort and care of a nursing home. If she’d known this, Aunt Selena would have left immediately.

  His decision to leave his vocation was made all the easier after his aunt’s death. Selena’s body had never been strong, but her will and spirit had always appeared to Bob to be indomitable. After her stroke, he knew her time on earth would be limited but, even so, was still surprised she died as soon as she did. The second stroke was massive. For two days, Selena lay in a coma, twitching and flinching, her body in the throes of a spasm that looked to be trying to straighten its own misshapen form. And then she died.

  Bob had visited his aunt regularly after her first stroke. Her once beautiful smile had become lop-sided, but the light that radiated from her face never dimmed. She still laughed at his stupid jokes, listened to his stories and told him she was proud of what he’d made of himself.

  ‘All this travel o’ yo’s, Bobby,’ she’d once said to him. ‘Yo’ daddy woulda been jealous. All he ever wanted was to travel the worl’. It prob’ly in yo’ blood, boy.’

  ‘If you’da had a chance to travel, Aunt Selena, an’ you coulda gone any place in the worl’, where would you o’ gone to?’

  Without blinking an eye, she answered straightaway: ‘China, Bobby, I’da gone to China.’

  ‘Why China?’ Bob had asked her, somewhat taken aback.

  ‘’Cos ever’body there little. No one woulda given me no mind. No one woulda looked twice at me there.’

  Bob sat by her bedside stunned into silence. It was the first time his aunt had ever indicated she didn’t like the way she looked, or that her appearance had made her life a trial. Because she’d never complained, and seemed to accept the way she was, he’d wrongly presumed it didn’t matter to her. Obviously, he’d been wrong, very wrong.

  Tears from a six foot two inch man are no larger than those shed by a woman of four feet two, and they still fall – just a lot further.

  Aunt Selena died with Bob holding her hand.

  The Congo

  It was now 1965 and Bob straddled a tree branch in the eastern Congo, the Springfield carefully balanced across his arm. More than a year had passed since he and Gene had been arrested and thrown into jail.

  He still kicked himself for getting the two of them locked up, and felt particularly guilty for involving Gene in the roadside altercation. Even at the time he knew he shouldn’t have been messing with those police, but something outside his control had driven him on. Maybe it was as simple a thing as a man being programmed to take only so much bullshit in one lifetime, and that by the time the police had pulled him over his quota had been filled. Maybe. He couldn’t say for sure. Whatever the reason, he’d managed to get both of them in deeper shit than he could dig either one of them out of. It was then he’d remembered Fogerty and the colonel’s last words to him when he’d told him he was quitting.

  ‘You ever change your mind, son, or find yourself in some kind of predicament, call me on this number. I warn you now there’ll be a price to pay, because there’s no such thing in life as a get out of jail free card – but we can talk about that then.’ He’d then written a telephone number on a small blank piece of paper and, for some reason, Bob had placed it in his wallet and kept it. (Bob still thought it strange that Fogerty had used the expression ‘get out of jail free card’. How had he known?)

  Bob remembered the colonel’s words while being led to the cell, and insisted he be allowed the one phone call that was his due. The number Fogerty had given him had rung and rung, and Bob had grown nervous; but then came the familiar click of a phone being lifted from its cradle and the sound of Fogerty’s gruff voice.

  ‘You believe in God, Crenshaw?’

  ‘Yes sir, I do.’

  ‘You ever seen Him?’

  ‘Cain’t says I have, sir.’

  ‘You ever heard His voice?’

  ‘No sir,’ Bob said, wondering where the conversation was heading.

  ‘Well, you’re hearing it now, son, and when you see me, as far as you’re concerned you’ll be seeing Him. From then on, you’ll be beholden to me. You got that?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll see you in the next day or so. What’s the name of this other clown you want out?’

  ‘Chaney, sir. Gene Chaney.’

  Fogerty hung up. Six hours later, Bob was handed over to the FBI and put on a plane for Washington, DC.

  The Congo had become independent from Belgium in June 1960. Scarred by the savagery of its colonial experience and cursed by vast mineral wealth, the Democratic Republic soon spiralled into chaos. That the United States judged its first prime minister anti-western also didn’t help matters; Patrice Lumumba, they told anyone prepared to listen, was a communist.

  The bulk of the nation’s wealth – cobalt, copper, gold and uranium – lay in the province of Katanga. Under the leadership of Moise Tshombe, and supported by Belgium and the United States, Katanga seceded from the republic. Patrice Lumumba, meanwhile, was overthrown in a US-inspired military coup led by Joseph Mobutu and, in January 1961, assassinated. Three years later, his ideological heirs rebelled and the United States despatched two hundred advisers and technicians to support the established government, now headed by its old friend Tshombe. Among them was Bob.

  Bob had been grateful for Fogerty’s intervention in Jackson, but now felt trapped by it. He’d escaped prison in Mississippi only to become a prisoner of the colonel, serving a non-determinate sentence in cells overseas – the Congo being the most recent of a series of such cells. He was wondering how long this situation would prevail when his attention was caught by the glint of sun striking either glass or metal.

  He looked through the scope and saw a white man with a trained rifle. The weapon he was holding was an M1D, but had no cone-shaped flash hider; Bob quickly surmised that the man was therefore one of the mercenaries operating in the area, and not an American. He followed the direction of the man’s rifle and made out the crouched figure of a dishevelled-looking Hispanic man in the process of emptying his bowels on to the baked Congo soil.

  Bob had to make a split-second decision: did he let the mercenary kill the man, or did he save the man and kill the mercenary? He disliked mercenaries and resented their contempt for the Africans whose country they operated in; he also thought it unfair that any man be
shot in the middle of a bowel movement. It was another thought crossing his mind, however, that ultimately won the day for the Hispanic. As the mercenary’s finger closed on the gun’s trigger, a bullet from Bob’s Springfield hit him square in the temple, and the mercenary slumped to the ground.

  Bob walked towards the Hispanic with his arms held in a gesture of surrender. The crack of rifle fire had disturbed the man mid-motion, and he trained his pistol on Bob. When Bob saw that his presence had been noted, he carefully took the rifle from his shoulder and placed it on the ground. He then looked away while the man cleaned himself and gathered his trousers.

  When the man came towards him, Bob motioned for him to follow. They reached the body of the mercenary, whose arms were heavily tattooed. ‘He was gonna shoot you,’ Bob said.

  ‘Espanol?’ the man replied.

  Fortuitously for Bob, the only Puerto Rican family in the whole of Atlanta had lived next door to his Aunt Selena. He’d made friends with the son, and tiring of ever making himself understood in English started to learn Spanish word equivalents. The result was that his friend learned to understand and speak English, while Bob learned to understand and speak Spanish with an almost perfect accent.

  ‘He was going to shoot you,’ Bob repeated. ‘He’s a mercenary.’

  ‘What’s your name?’ the man asked.

  ‘Bob Crenshaw.’

  ‘American?’ Bob nodded.

  ‘Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. I’d give you my hand, but in the circumstances I doubt it hygienic. I’m interested as to why you saved me?’

  The part of his name that struck a chord of recognition in Bob’s mind was Guevara, and his eyebrows rose. ‘Guevara as in Che Guevara?’ he asked. It was Che’s turn to nod.

  ‘Well, I don’t like mercenaries, Che.’ Bob said, ‘But I was also hoping you might be able to help me out. I’d heard there were Cubans operating in the area and figured you were one of them.’