by John Lawton
A few miles from Bald Eagle he spoke. The sum total of all that he’d been holding back for the last six hours.
‘He’s ruined me. The goddam kid has ruined me.’
But he hadn’t. Billy had made Sam. Made all of us.
The next couple of weeks of summer went by with Sam working furiously, burying himself in any activity by day, and by evening watching the track for any sign of Billy—looking for the tell tale trail of dust whipped up by the wheels of a pickup.
Then Lois announced she was expecting. My father whooped with joy and added two rooms to the house in anticipation—thrown up with his usual mixture of enthusiasm and carelessness. Six months later my brother Huey was born—Samuel Houston Raines Jr. But two months before that the old man drilled right through a salt crust and struck oil. Like I said, Billy made us.
It was a character-forming moment. Sam had been a feckless dreamer all his life. I’d already worked out that if we ever struck it rich he’d find a way to fuck it up. He didn’t. He came home plastered in oil, hugged Lois—must be traditional to ruin your wife’s clothes at a moment like this—sat down without any ‘Yippee! We’re rich!’ and said, ‘This is going to be tricky. We need money now. Lots of it. Backing, financial backing—or this could slip right through our fingers.’ It was calm, a precision of mind I had not expected. I had never admired the old man more—he took success exactly as Billy would have done, in his stride, with a pragmatism that made him rich. He took samples for evaluation, hawked the samples round every bank in the Panhandle till he found one that believed in him, took out a loan and took off for Pennsylvania and West Virginia. He came back with seasoned oil crews—complete pros, guys who’d spent a lifetime drilling oil back East. Within a year he was back in credit, and then the oilmen in slick suits, cowboy hats and shiny boots came up from Midland and started to talk temptation money to this hick in blue jeans and a check shirt who lived in a wooden shack. Sam refused all offers of a buy-out and managed the whole damn thing himself. Within eighteen months he was a millionaire. Billy made us and what Sam learnt from Billy made us rich as Croesus. The dream come true. Not my brother’s dream, you will understand, but the other dream, the American Dream.
§
You ever dreamt of being rich? Seems un-American, almost indictable not to. Most Americans would think a man without that dream a fool. As I was saying, Sam had been a dreamer all his life, tumbleweed between the ears, and windblown to the point where the man was a hazard to his own well-being. But he got seriously rich and I began to wonder which of his dreams he would summon up first. Took a while, the financing of the company meant he could take little out of it for the first year. All he did for himself and the family was buy a new pickup and tack the two extra rooms onto the shack. But after eighteen months or so he was ready to spend. The dream he chose surprised us all.
We stood on the porch of the shack, me and Sam and Lois, and Lois holding young Huey. And Sam pointed up to the bald mountain and said, ‘That’s where the new house’ll be.’
I looked at Lois seeking some reassurance, but she just smiled, so obviously pleased for her man. Build a house on the mountain, where Billy and I had stood to watch the universe turn above our heads and corkscrew off into infinity, and looked down on Texas stretching off into the lesser infinity below us? It was pretty well sacrilege. It was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard.
He did it. He embraced modernity with a fervor I had not imagined he could possess for a concept I did not think he knew. If I say the house looked a little Frank Lloyd Wright then I am gracing it too much from my own paucity of comparison. It was a glass and concrete monstrosity, about fifty feet up the shady side of Bald Eagle, overlooking our shack. He did not demolish the shack. The shack stayed in the sight line of the huge plate glass window on the dawn side of the mountain. A memento of our humble beginnings? He’d of laughed out loud if I suggested that. Nor was it a lasting reminder of his first marriage, to my mother. If it were he might have kept it as it was, left the old chairs and table, and the iron bedstead, like museum pieces. He didn’t. He cleared it and used it to keep tools and tack in. I used to sit in there, the way I’d used to sit up the mountain staring at the stars, now just gazing out through the coating of dust on the windows, swimming in the smell of oil and leather that had replaced the smell of cooking and the waft of Lois’ scent. It wasn’t life on the mountainside with Billy. No one whispered the secrets of the universe in my ear anymore, I was alone with my own thoughts, but it wasn’t all bad. The occasional burst of rain on the roof could bring my skin up in goose bumps. I would sit through a rainstorm as though it were the most erotic experience known to a boy until Lois came out with a flashlight and an umbrella, insisting I should come ‘home’, and I knew then it wasn’t.
It was years before I could see the new house for what it was. Must have been the early seventies. The Sam Shepard/Antonioni film, Zabriskie Point. There’s this house, all glass and steel and concrete, that gets blown to pieces over and over again as the film repeats itself. That’s what my father’s house looked like, Zabriskie Point. Don’t know how many times I sat in the shack and mentally blew up the new house. Enough for a movie to strike a chord in me the best part of twenty years later. Into that house Sam packed all his dreams, his wife, his sons, his memories, his frustrations, his deep-felt satisfaction that he had made his mark on the world, etched himself into it as bold as canyon. I could have anything I wanted. I never knew what to ask for. I could rip through the consumer world like I was taking scissors to a mail order catalogue. But I never did. I would have liked the impossible, I would have liked my brother back, but Sam’s firstborn was never mentioned in his presence. Only Lois and I ever talked of Billy. And after a while not even that. If she thought of him at all she ceased to tell me. I guess there was safety in silence. And as Huey grew there was another brother to entertain and be entertained by us. Young Huey looked a lot like Sam. But, then, so he should. Billy too looked a lot like Sam. Everyone said he was the spittin’ image of his daddy. Could be it was just a cliché, but I could see it in every movement the child made. Few things could disappoint me more than that as he grew older I saw so little affinity in the operation of their minds. In that respect Huey was Sam to the T.
§
It must have been ’52 or ’53, the Senate elections looming up, when Sam decided it was time to play politics. We’d had a new senator last time around in ’48. Scraped home with an eighty-seven vote majority, a ballot no more or less crooked than any other in Texas, and earned a nickname that wouldn’t stick, ‘Landslide’. Sam decided he’d like to see ‘Old Landslide’ re-elected and gave $20,000 to his campaign fund—a sum so large it merited a personal visit from the man.
He came out to Bald Eagle, the down-home weekend senator, starchy-looking Levi’s, chunky belt buckle, pearl-buttoned cowboy shirt and Stetson. He swept off his hat with one hand and shook Sam’s hand with the other, telling him how much pride and pleasure he felt in finally meeting such a loyal Democrat. For loyal read rich.
Lois emerged with young Huey in her arms. Sam gave the full intro for the boy, ‘This is my youngest, Samuel Houston Raines.’ The senator ruffled the kid’s blond curls and said, ‘Would you believe it, them’s my brother’s Christian names—Samuel Houston. My great-granpappy fought alongside old Sam at San Jacinto.’
And then he spotted me, spindly and shy and shot through with all the inhibitions of adolescence. I didn’t speak and Sam didn’t speak for me.
‘And you young man, you would be . . . ?’
I muttered my name, thinking to myself that the guy had the biggest ears I’d seen this side of a jackass. He dropped the Stetson on a chair, grabbed my right hand in both of his and said, ‘And I’m Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ to my friends and I hope all the Raines family will look upon me as their friend.’
Still clutching my hand he looked directly at Sam and made a
bullshit line sound a hundred percent sincere. ‘I want you to know, Sam, that you have a friend in Washington.’ Bullshit, pure bullshit straight from the critter’s ass. But, truth is, he meant it.
§
At age eighteen I’d reached the same point Billy had. College. I could go down to Austin. Several kids I’d grown up with were going down to Austin. But I had to get away from Texas. If I did not get away from Texas I did not know how to ‘become’. I didn’t know in the first place but that was neither here nor there. Stay home and I’d never know. Where home was didn’t much matter, it could have been Tuscaloosa or Tallahassee, I would still have felt the same.
There was only one problem. Sam.
‘I’ve gotten into college, Dad. I’ve been accepted to Georgetown.’
Sam mulled this over a while. He could hardly be surprised. He wanted all his boys to be college boys. I’d kept it a secret. But all the same he must have known.
‘Would that be the Georgetown over to Waco or the Georgetown over to Denver?’
‘Neither Dad, it’s the Georgetown over to Washington.’
‘DC?’
‘Yep.’
‘You’re going east?’
No Raines had gone east, not since the first Raines had gone west—and even then he’d only set off from Missouri.
‘Why Washington?’
‘It’s a good place for Law.’
He’d known for a year or so that I wanted to be a lawyer. That he didn’t mind. He thought a lawyer in the family was a good idea. He hated lawyers. To breed his own seemed like the obvious solution. He’d never have to deal with one outside his own family again. But Washington he had to wrestle with.
It was a day or so before he got back to me about this. Picked up the conversation right where he’d left off.
‘It’s what you want, son?’
‘Of course.’
He slapped me on the back.
‘Well, if you’re headed east we’d better go pick you out some wheels.’
It was acceptance of a kind. He wasn’t happy, but he wasn’t going to argue. But it was clear as moonlight he expected me to come back.
If I’d of let him the old man would of packed me off to college in a brand new Cadillac. He drove me down to the dealer’s and told me to pick one out. I said no, I couldn’t let him. And I certainly couldn’t tell him I thought it was a car for a middle-aged man. So middle-aged he wouldn’t drive one himself. In the end he gave in and bought me what I wanted, a sound, solid Chevy pickup—the gleam of newness gone but less than three thousand miles on the clock—from a sprawling used car lot on the edge of town.
He said, ‘Why d’you want to show up at your fancy eastern college looking like a good ole boy? All you need now is a shotgun in an overhead rack and a dead ’coon jammed in the radiator grill.’
I said, ‘You want them to think I’m a Yankee?’
First laugh I’d managed to get out of him in ages.
I passed my last summer at Bald Eagle. Working on the ranch. Cattle, pigs and hay. Like we weren’t rich. Like, as Sam was wont to say, ‘we wuz just folks’. I would not have had it any other way.
The day before I left Sam said, ‘I’ll give Lyndon a call. Let him know you’re coming. Washington’s a big place. You’ll need somebody you know.’
I didn’t know Landslide Lyndon. He was a man I’d met once. A man who’d scared me shitless with his ears.
‘You don’t have to do that, Dad.’
‘Yes I do. You never know when you might need a friend.’
And I could not talk him out of it. I figured it didn’t matter. LBJ would just say sure, pocket the next donation and forget about me. I was wrong.
I’d been less than a week in Washington—still green to city life, still a hick from the sticks to my fellow students. A guy from the floor below knocked on my door.
‘Raines. Lobby phone’s ringing for you. A woman.’
I took the stairs three at a time. Lois. Had to be Lois. Then a voice said, ‘Mr Raines? Please hold one moment. I have Senator Johnson for you.’
Oh God, no. But I held.
‘Johnnie Raines?’ A Texan drawl, a ham version of my own voice. Had to be real.
‘Yessir.’
‘Yore daddy told me you was here. Son, you have a friend in Washington. Let me show you round the Capitol. Just call my seccertary and fix a time. Be a pleasure to see one of Sam Raines’s boys again. Now tell me. How was Texas when you left her?’
‘Big, sir.’
He roared with laughter and rung off. I never called him. I never looked round the Capitol. Years later, when I stood outside the Pentagon and yelled, ‘LBJ LBJ how many kids did you kill today?’ I told no one I had a friend in Washington.
§
1969. It was a hot June evening. Sticky with the humidity of sunshine and rain. Summer had burst and blossomed while I’d been in Toronto—a low lilac light in the sky, tinting the side windows, occasionally glinting in the rear-view mirror as I followed the highway south and east down the New Jersey bank of the Hudson. It was going to be a strange summer, it was written in the sky. Texas had lilac sunsets, as well as magenta, purple and plain old bloodshot. It was the first time I’d seen one over the grimy haze that was New Jersey. I parked the car in a high-rise stacker in Hoboken—I have never seen the sense of keeping a car in Manhattan, it’s a walker’s city—the price of which was the occasional broken window and the accumulated dents in the hood where the local kids stomped on it. It was almost dark by the time I emerged from the PATH station in Manhattan. I walked from Cortlandt Street up Broadway to my office. I had a vision of a month’s unopened mail piling up behind the door. I’d fish out what mattered and take it home with me. Maybe Rose would be home. I’d fling the mail in another pile, open a bottle and listen while she digested a month’s gossip into two hours’ straight talking. After that I’d probably fall asleep. She might not even notice.
The door opened smoothly. No mail, no mess. Just a pair of leather brogues resting on my desk, attached to feet that belonged to Donald Speke, Detective First Grade, working out of the 5th Precinct at Elizabeth Street.
‘Donny? What brings you out of a Sunday night?’
Speke didn’t answer. Just swung his feet to the floor, looked past me and said, ‘Cuff him, Jack.’
I had no idea who Jack was. I didn’t even see his face. I just dropped the bag and stuck out my hands behind me, as years of passive resistance had taught me to do, and felt the metal snap onto my wrists.
Into the elevator, down to the street. Bundled into the back of their car. Jack at the wheel, Speke sitting next to me, not looking at me, all of six blocks to the Precinct House.
‘Donny. Could you tell me what this is about?’
‘Lieutenant wants to see you.’
‘Fine—has Nate forgotten how to use a phone?’
Speke turned to look at me. It came home to me that the man had never liked me.
‘To you, Raines, it’s Lieutenant or Mr Truegood. I don’t know where you’re coming from talking like you were one of us. You’re not. You private guys are all the same. You think you’re cops. Well, sit on the cuffs, feel steel under your ass and get the message.’
I got it. I shut up. I was used to being arrested, although it was a good few years since this had happened to me, and never in New York. I knew the procedure and I knew to roll with it. This could not be much. I’d been gone a month. I could not even have a moving violation or a ticket. It was some sort of foul up and I’d be on the streets again as soon as I’d seen Nate. Nate and I got along surprisingly well. I think he regarded me as a rare specimen. The total New Yorker regarding the total outsider.
They whisked me past the front desk to where Nate’s name and rank in flaking black stencil on a frosted glass door
faced me. Speke knocked once and pushed me through the door ahead of him.
Nate was feeling the heat. He was cursing and fiddling with the electrical outlet that seemed to be powering a big fourteen-inch blade fan somewhat erratically. It purred and stalled and purred again. His jacket was slung across the back of his chair, his collar was popped, and all the buttons on his fancy vest undone. Nate was not the easiest of men. He had a reputation as a hard man. There was a rumour that the big dent in the top of his battered metal desk was caused by him pounding the head of a perp into the surface. This was not true. I’d been there when he’d done it. The fancy dresser cohabited with the slob in Nate. Not being able to find an ashtray one day he’d simply taken a hammer out of his drawer and beaten a hollow into which he could drop the ash from his cigar. But this begged a question—he hadn’t used a perp’s head, but what was he doing with a hammer in his desk drawer in the first place? I’d never ask. He liked me. That was the straw I clung to.
Nate looked angry, but he wasn’t looking at me.
‘What’s with the cuffs? Did I tell you to cuff him? All I said was go get him.’
Speke said, ‘Sorry, Lieutenant. I just . . .’
‘Just what? For fuck’s sake take ’em off.’
Speke unlocked me. I rubbed at my wrists. Nate stared at Speke until he backed out and closed the door behind him.
‘Take a seat, Raines.’
‘Nate—what is all this about?’
Nate got back behind his desk.
‘This is serious, Raines. I had to pull you, I didn’t tell Donny to cuff you, that comes of him thinking when he should be doing. But I had to pull you. I’ve had guys in your office and down by Front Street since yesterday.’
‘And?’
Nate pulled a file from the top drawer of his desk, missing eye contact as he said, ‘It’s murder, Raines.’
I knew enough law to say nothing to this.
‘You know a guy named Melchior Kissing?’
Oh Jesus no—not Mel.
