Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

  By the time Troy was old enough to understand how angry he was, he convinced himself that it was mostly on Harlan’s behalf, at the injustice of a boy so young having to be his father’s father. But he failed to see how much Harlan had to be a father to him, too, or how much of his own pain was caused by his desire to be more like Bill, to inhabit that kind of ease and self-possession, the trick of seeming to float just outside all the places where he was supposed to belong. As it often does, this yearning took the form of competition, a battle of wills made worse by Bill’s ignorance of it, or more likely just his refusal to acknowledge its existence.

  By ten, Troy had started to light out by himself. Walking to school with Harlan, he would turn off without a backwards glance and hide in the treed bottom across from the county park or the caliche pit west of town, reading library paperbacks by Max Brand and Edward Anderson or sometimes just thinking, watching the shadow line advance slowly over his feet, his knees, his waist, slipping over his head as the sun fell below the far wall. Even at that age, Harlan said, Troy had an uncommon capacity for two things: lying and enjoying his own company.

  At fourteen, cleaning windshields on weekends at the Humble gas station near the motel, he was sometimes able to talk passers-through into driving him the distance of a town or two, to Hobbs or Brownfield. One July, an Old Dominion freight driver took him all the way to Artesia before Troy grew bored and made up a story about being due at Fort Bliss for basic training. The driver was young and muscular, with a pencil mustache and high Indian cheekbones. He was duded up like a cowboy movie star, wearing his hat cocked high on his head and a cigarette tucked behind his ear. Troy wondered what someone so good-looking was doing driving a truck and he thought that life was probably just like that, as he had always suspected.

  The driver stared absently ahead through the windshield. “Army must be takin’  ’em young these days,” he said.

  Troy had stopped caring whether he was being believed and was talking mostly to himself, addressing the ruler of two-lane road that seemed to extend through eastern New Mexico to the edge of the known universe.

  “There’s a shortage on,” he said finally. “Korea and all.”

  The truck was coming into Artesia. The driver lit the cigarette and cracked his window.

  “Listen, son, I don’t mind taking you on,” he said, “but I don’t appreciate being lied to in my own rig. Why don’t you save the bullshit for your next freeload?”

  Troy listened to the motor protest as the truck engine-braked at the city limit. He said: “I don’t imagine you could spare one of those cigarettes, could you?”

  The driver took off his wire-rimmed sunglasses and stowed them beneath a strap on the visor.

  “You imagine correct,” he said.

  While the truck was pulled over at a filling station and the driver was inside paying, Troy leaned over and spat a prodigious wad of phlegm onto the middle of the spring-shot leather driver’s seat and stole the sunglasses and a thermos full of Canadian whiskey and walked away down the road wearing the shades—idly, like someone out for an afternoon stroll. The highway patrol found him within an hour and telephoned Bill, who delayed his arrival until dawn. He waited until they were a few miles outside town before he whipped the pickup off the road, slammed on the brakes, and backhanded Troy in the face, busting his lip. Troy called him a son of a fucking bitch, and Bill hit him again, this time with his fist, bloodying his nose in a gush that made a fantail down the neck of his white undershirt.

  It was the only time Bill Ray ever hit him. He understood as if in the bones of his hand how little it would ever accomplish. But for Troy the blows, after a night spent awake in a jail cell, brought a revelation. Riding back to town with his heartbeat pounding in his swollen face and Roy Acuff wailing the “Great Speckle Bird” on the radio, he came to see for the first time that he was not going to grow up to join the world of respectable or even passably decent people—no matter how hard he tried. The truth was that he knew he was never going to feel like trying. He kept the T-shirt he was wearing for many years as a kind of relic, hiding it in the back of a drawer, taking it out from time to time and spreading it across his bed to see how the blood of his youth had darkened to a color as brown as cow shit, crusted and cracking.

  Troy stood in the hallway of the house now, staring back into the darkness of the bedrooms. He wondered if Harlan had left the little dresser here, the one where he had hidden his T-shirt. The dresser was nothing, a paltry stick of furniture, made of thinly primered pine, missing three of its knobs, but it was the only dresser he had used until he was an adult so it still seemed strangely significant. He wondered if he would find it as he remembered it, in the northwest corner of his old room. It had sat on an unraveling rope rug, across from a narrow iron bedstead and a box shelf hung on the wall over the bed, a sort of curiosity cabinet filled with things he had found in the pasture across from the house, a natural history of the alien-looking artifacts a hard land like West Texas casts up—a devil’s claw, a dead silverfish, the desiccated skin of a horned toad, the carapace of a scorpion half as big as his hand, a collection of severed rattlesnake rattles, and a dozen flint Comanche arrowheads that looked as if they had been carved the day before he found them.

  He wondered if these new people, whoever they were, had taken out a mortgage on an entire life he had once lived, container and contents. It wasn’t a totally unpleasant thought; maybe their version would turn out better, though signs didn’t seem to point in that direction.

  He was able to see better now and went into the kitchen, which smelled strongly of cigarettes and cooking grease. The streetlight coming through the window shone on pearl-gray dishwater standing in the sink and illuminated its depths down to forks and knives glinting at the bottom. He pulled out a chair from the table and sat down to take a closer look at the studio portraits on the wall, to see if he recognized the man or wife or little girl. As he sat studying them he felt fairly sure that the wife and daughter were no longer a part of the picture here anymore, if they ever really had been. The house felt the way it always had, like a place without women, but even more so now, useful only for the refrigerator, the bathroom, and the bed, in roughly that order.

  The man in the pictures looked big and well fed. He wore a cowboy hat of cream-colored felt and a bolo tie with string-ends weighted down by copper bullet casings. His wide smile beneath a rope of brown mustache gave his face a benignly boyish look, but there was something about the smile that put Troy off; it seemed too satisfied, the type of smile he had grown up seeing at rodeos on the faces of calf ropers as they stood up over the vanquished animal. An unsettled feeling he’d had on first looking into the kitchen returned, a cloud gathering at the back of his brain. And then it came to him with the force of self-evidence: This was a law enforcement house now. Harlan had sold it to a sheriff, or maybe to one of the highway patrol stationed in town, though everything about the man in the picture marked him as local, not state. Troy was stunned it had taken him so long to pick up on the signs; there was a time in his life when he would have smelled it instantly, some unbodied presence warding him off before he even touched the doorknob.

  On first coming into the house he had felt a strange sense of familiarity, not because it had once been his but because he knew it didn’t belong to him anymore, and for years he had spent so much time inside places like it, darkened rooms belonging to other people, in their absence, sock-walking through their undefended possessions. Yet as he continued to look at the picture of the big cowboy it occurred to him that this house felt like a place that still knew him and he had the sinking sensation of returning to it after a long journey to find it ransacked and occupied.

  He walked back to his old room, empty except for a stack of cardboard moving boxes in one corner. He coughed and the sound echoed off the sheetrock. He walked into what had been Bill Ray’s room and saw that the old matching oak bedroom set was still there, the one Ruby’s mother had given them for their
wedding. The bed was unmade and mounded with dirty laundry. Troy tried to avoid looking at anything. He turned on the closet light, keeping the door almost closed, and went straight to the bottom drawer of the nightstand, the one he would sneak in to open when he was a boy, mostly for the forbidden thrill of handling Bill Ray’s Masonic gear—the carefully folded, starched white apron, the little blue handbook embossed with a caliper enclosing a golden G that he had figured must have something to do with God, though a God more private than the one he knew from church. He had thought of these things as the visible tip of a vast submerged continent of adult secrets. The drawer had seemed to contain all the talismans of manhood—cuff links, tie clips, money clips, lapel pins, sock garters, pocket watches, penknives, all exotic because so rarely ever taken out and used—along with Bill Ray’s olive Army garrison cap and discharge papers and sometimes a bottle of unused aftershave and a box of rubbers. The drawer was empty now except for a scatter of unpaired black socks.

  He rose from the floor and saw that a belt and holster had been left looped over the right-hand post at the foot of the bed—the lawman’s extra rig. Or maybe he was off duty tonight, Troy thought, although in his experience few men given the right to conspicuously carry firearms ever passed up a chance to do so, especially at public functions like football games. Troy looked at the gun for a minute, then lifted it gingerly from the holster. It was a Colt .38 revolver, standard police-issue with checkered grips, a gun that looked unfired and ceremonial in its polish. He swung the cylinder out and saw that it was empty. It had been so long since Troy had handled a pistol that its deadweight surprised him. He stood up and straightened his left arm slowly toward the dresser mirror, bringing the barrel into line with his eye. He wanted to see what he looked like but it was too dark in the room; his shape was more shadow than reflection. It reminded him how much he hated mirrors, which had caused him more than once during his house burglary days to jump half out of his skin when he caught sight of himself, fearing he wasn’t alone.

  The idea of taking the gun crossed his mind, just to have something for protection now. But Troy had never worked with a weapon and stealing one from a cop would be the worst way to start, so he eased it back into the holster and wiped down the grips with his coat sleeve.

  Back in the kitchen he checked the time and sorted through the mail, learning the man’s name, Darryl D. McGuire, deputy county sheriff. He opened the refrigerator but found nothing revealed by its jaundiced light to be worth the risk, so he rummaged around in the cabinets for a can of coffee and rinsed out the percolator and started a pot. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and by the light reaching it from the street began to write on the stationery tablet he had in his coat pocket, trying to clear his mind while he thought about where Harlan could be.

  He sat looking toward the hallway where he had just been, which darkened to black from the kitchen to the bedrooms, a distance he estimated to be no more than twenty-five feet, though he remembered it being infinitely longer. As a child he had been terrified of traversing it at night when only he and Harlan were at home and most of the lights were off, per Bill Ray’s strict orders to save electricity. The sprint down the hallway to the wall switch in the bedroom he shared with Harlan was a gauntlet that grew agonizingly longer each time he took it. In those five or so seconds he felt as if he was becoming entangled in some unseen web, snatched at by the fingers of thousands of hands trying to get hold of him, to drag him into an even deeper dark from which he would never emerge. The fear tormented him, and to conquer it he made up his mind to plunge into the hallway nightly until it went away, but he gave up after a week and waited until Harlan had gone back to turn on the light before going to the bedroom himself.

  Facing the little stretch of painted sheetrock now, he found it hard to understand how anyone could have suffered so much in such a tiny nothing of a space. And it occurred to him that in some deeply buried way a child’s fear of ghosts might just be a substitute for the fear that there isn’t anything else out there, larger, unseen, good or evil—that what we see is all there is. And as we get older we accept this, so we stop being afraid of the dark in one way as we begin to fear it in another.

  Aug. 18, 1972

  I can’t account with any accuracy for how I’ve occupied my time since I started. A lot of it has been spent looking as if I’m busy. I like to show the semblance of industriousness—to be out on the road at dawn, the taste of black coffee and toothpaste in my mouth. I never feel better than when I’m moving.

  But many days I just sit in my motel room with the television on, mostly for the sound and motion, watching commercials for products I know I won’t have to buy. Or I sit in silence for long stretches listening to passing cars and trucks, to the whine of a vacuum cleaner coming through the walls, to other motel guests shutting and opening their doors, coming and going, talking and talking. Sometimes I sit in a hot bath, one leg crossed over the other, thinking about the world at work while I watch the pulse of my heartbeat in the hollow of my ankle.

  To keep myself out of unnecessary trouble, I decided early on to steer clear of hitchhikers, women, and alcohol, and I generally upheld this pledge, which was easy on the alcohol front because I was traveling mostly through counties that had been dry since before Prohibition.

  When I met Bettie I wasn’t looking for company—but she was, in a manner of speaking, for reasons that became clear. I was in Friona that morning, sitting in a booth near the front of a café, drinking a cup of coffee after the early rush, reading the newspaper. I never come into such places during the rush, never before nine a.m. To do so as an unaccompanied stranger in a small town is like walking onto the stage of a crowded theater with the spotlight on your face. But by nine these cafés are usually almost empty—the farmers and ranchers head out first, before seven, to the fields, then the lingering jobholders, to make their eight o’clocks, followed by the retirees and the profoundly elderly, who go home to watch a little TV before returning at noon for lunch.

  This was a nice café, though in its particulars it differed little from any café in any small town in West Texas, probably any town in rural America: the sweet, flat, animal smell of fry grease, not unpleasant but not quite pleasant, either, a kind of limbo smell; a small counter dominated by a Bunn double-tank coffee maker, with a top warmer for a third pot containing no coffee, only steaming water; a chrome three-drawer Toastmaster cabinet, to warm the dinner rolls and the thick, oiled Mexican tortilla chips; Naugahyde-backed booths with chipped Formica wood-grain trim; an Ace Reid cowboy-comics calendar behind the cash register (“Naw, I ain’t gittin’ throwed off; I ain’t got on yet!!”) next to a framed piece of crewelwork depicting a windmill against a sunset, above the words “The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You” stitched in Palmer Method script. Next to the cash register a metal toothpick roller and a double courtesy bowl—matchbooks and cellophane-wrapped peppermints. In the vestibule between the two glass doors a newspaper machine, a cigarette machine, a penny shopper rack, and two gumball machines below a row of hat pegs still used by the older farmers and ranchers. On the outside door, facing into the parking lot, a sign that says “Sorry, We’re Open” in mock-official red letters on a black background.

  I was eating the breakfast I always ate when it was available: a short stack with syrup and a scoop of whipped butter on top; half a cantaloupe; a small glass of milk. The stack was served on a heavy plate decorated around the edge with various cattle brands. The cantaloupe came in a bowl with matching cattle brands. Both sat atop a paper placemat printed with nostalgic frontier scenes from the Old West that had never happened. The milk was served in a short, brown-tinted glass with wavy sides, the same as the ice water.

  The only interesting difference about this diner was a pair of high horizontal mirrors that met at a corner above the front window. When you looked into them from my booth you could see the reflection of the road outside and the sight of the occasional car coming from what appeared to be two directions at once, cre
ating an illusion of identical vehicles approaching each other, crashing head-on, and consuming themselves into nothingness in the middle.

  In these mirrors I saw the car, an alpine-white 1970 Challenger R/T, slow and pull into the parking lot. She walked through the door at five minutes to ten and paused just inside to survey the room before sliding into my booth across from me, wordlessly, smiling without making eye contact. She was dressed to be someplace other than a town like Friona, Texas—a fancy starched blue-jean dress with a broad white lace collar and blousy sleeves that draped down like wings, half covering slender fingers weighted down with gold and silver and turquoise. Her coal-black hair was arranged on top of her head in a tall complicated braid formation that made me think of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra or the Aztec princesses on Mexican nudie calendars. The only thing slightly off about her getup, catching your eye, was the panty hose—white ones, like the kind nurses wear in hospitals.

  She looked about twenty-five, though she could have passed for nineteen and I suspected she was at least thirty. Her perfume smelled sweet, like layer cake. She had a confidence-inspiring olive-colored face that only in betraying nothing betrayed her attempt at an appearance of youthful virtue.