Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

  Next came the credit union and the defunct Mac movie theater, missing its marquee since the mid-sixties, not long after it went out of business; the old barbershop, now a CB radio sales and repair store; the Dairy Queen, glassy and still new-looking; and the cream-brick three-story courthouse, constructed in a vaguely modernist style that set it at odds with every other structure in town but conferred its importance.

  Like most towns its size, New Cona was a picture of rural America in miniature: Anyone driving along its spine could perceive in less than five minutes the shape of a century’s arc—pioneer struggle and its meager, adequate architecture, succeeded by hard work, prosperity, and the ambitious municipal buildings they bequeathed through the fifties, followed by a slow structural and civic retreat in the form of trailer houses, cinder block, Quonset huts, and pastured gaps like a pox in the middle of town. The last time Troy had driven down this road he had been on his way out of town for what turned out to be a very long time. It was a Saturday evening after the rodeo parade and everyone had gone home. The wooden bleachers in front of the courthouse sat empty and the grounds had been cleaned but the pavement along Main Street was still littered with little hillocks of fresh, green horseshit, a fitting token of farewell.

  Up ahead to the left shone lights that seemed to be glaring at business brightness, and as he drove closer he saw that they came from an all-night Allsup’s convenience store that had not been there when he left. Troy pulled in, looking up and down the street. Except for a cashier stationed behind the counter, there was no one inside, at least no one he could see through the big glass-front window. The top half of the cashier’s head was obscured by the hanging cigarette rack, but judging by his posture and the thin gleaning of hair on his face he seemed to be no more than sixteen or seventeen.

  Troy got out of the car and walked briskly inside, saying nothing, making no eye contact. He aimed for the milk cases in the back and then lingered in an aisle, pretending to inspect a pegboard hung with Frito-Lay and pork skins while trying instead to get a surreptitious look between the shelving at the boy—not to figure out whether he knew him but to figure out whether the boy resembled anyone he knew, a mother or father his own age who might be able to place him from their son’s description.

  After a minute his quarry finally shifted into sight, staring slack-mouthed easterly through the store’s plate-glass window toward the road out of town, looking as if he would exchange his place behind the counter for any place out there. Troy was half surprised: The boy was Mexican, which reduced the chances of identification sufficiently for him to stand down his guard.

  He looked around, picked out a pack of gum, and walked up to the counter, watching the boy take a good look at him as he approached. The boy caught himself and shifted his focus toward the cash register and attempted to put on a professional voice, but it came off like that of most country boys his age in conversation with adults—awkward, pained, half ashamed, as if an indecent subject had been broached. He was taller than Troy but stooped, with narrow delicate shoulders. His face was sallow and pale; his diet probably consisted of too many items from the store’s own shelves. He wasn’t old enough to grow a mustache but had tried anyway; it looked like a plastic spider on his upper lip, a handful of thin black tendrils headed in different directions.

  “You need to fill her up, too, sir?”

  “I’m fine for gas, just needed a little something to keep my jawbone busy till I get to Lubbock,” Troy said. He put a twenty-dollar bill down on the counter and, wanting to give the boy no time to think, said: “Listen, son, I’ve got a question for you. I used to come through here every now and then, a few years ago, and I did some business with an old boy named Bill Ray Falconer. You wouldn’t happen to know of him, if he’s still around here somewhere, would you?”

  Color rose into the boy’s face and his unease appeared to solidify into something like actual discomfort. He was very still for a moment, causing Troy to become aware of the shining movements of the greasy hot links rolling in the heat-lamp cabinet near the cash register.

  “What’s the name again, sir?”

  “Falconer,” Troy said. “Tall, slim, sharp dresser, kind of a cut-up and a rounder when he was young. He had a couple of grown boys if I remember?”

  The boy didn’t speak right away. “Yes sir, I know him. I mean, I knew him. I’m sorry to say, but he’s dead, sir. He passed a few years back, of a heart attack I think.”

  Troy whistled and looked down at the counter and then up at the tag pinned to the pocket of the boy’s paisley-print Western shirt, which said B. JIMENEZ.

  “You don’t say! I’m sorry to hear that. I sure am.”

  Troy waited while the boy rang him up. “Didn’t he used to live over there near the northwest corner of town, right by the pasture?”

  “Yes sir, he did.”

  “Do either of his boys still live there, as far as you know?”

  The boy flushed again on the high bones above his hairless cheeks. He seemed suddenly aware of being in solitary charge of the store at night. Something about Troy unsettled him.

  “One of them, name of Harlan, used to,” he said, “but . . . well, I don’t know. He must’ve run into some trouble or something because he moved out of there a while back and the county rents it now.” The boy appeared to gain a measure of confidence as he heard himself relate verifiable facts.

  Troy watched a dirty pickup pull to a stop in front of the store and he suddenly became aware of the unholy fluorescent brightness inside. “Where did this Harlan end up, do you think? Did he move somewhere else?”

  He thought he saw the hint of an embarrassed smile move across the boy’s face before it resumed its previous immobility. “Well, he’s still here. But I think he’s outside of town now. He works tending to the big radio tower out east, that one you see over on the Brownfield highway past the Bozart ranch gate. I heard he’s living out there now. But it ain’t exactly a house or anything.”

  “And what about the other brother?” Troy asked.

  He glanced outside. The man who had pulled up in the pickup, an old man in a feed cap, was filling up with diesel, looking into the store absentmindedly as it pumped.

  “I don’t know nothing about him, sir. I ain’t even sure of his name. I think maybe he got into some trouble with the law but I don’t know for sure. He might be dead, too.” The boy paused, maybe wondering if he should have included this final thought but when he saw that it produced no effect he paused and ventured a question:

  “What kind of work did y’all used to do with Bill Ray?”

  Troy picked up the chewing gum packet and dropped it into his shirt pocket and smiled tightly, fixing the boy for the first time with a good look in the eyes.

  “What’s your name, son?”

  The boy looked at him for a second, then away.

  “My name’s Brandon.”

  “Brandon?”

  “Yes sir, Brandon Jimenez.”

  Troy smiled and touched a finger to his brow. “Thank you for your help, Brandon Jimenez. You have a good night now.”

  Troy wanted to greet Harlan by daylight, so he took the car to the end of a pumpjack road and tried unsuccessfully to sleep. By the time he pulled onto the road to the radio tower, the sun was close enough to the horizon that he could see the outline of the little flat-topped cinder-block shack sitting against the tower base. The shack looked comically small alongside the tower, which rose two hundred feet like a skeletal ladder, stabilized by an array of guy-wires as straight as bicycle spokes running down to the pastureland. The wires pinged as a high morning breeze came in, but when Troy stepped out of the car and began walking toward the shack it was still quiet enough for him to hear clearly, in the near distance, the distinctive metallic chuck of a bolt being shoved forward to chamber a round.

  “You come any further and I’ll part your goddamned skull.”

  The voice came from above and when Troy looked up he could see the big cuneiform shape
of a head silhouetted just above the parapet that skirted the shack’s roof. He instinctively brought his hands away from his sides, turning his palms out and stopping where he was, waiting for the next instruction.

  When one didn’t come right away, he looked up and asked: “Is that Bill Ray’s old Winchester?”

  Harlan’s head and shoulders came up higher above the parapet, dark against the purplish morning sky.

  “That rifle hasn’t worked in twenty years, Harlan.”

  A reply was a long time in coming.

  “How do you know I didn’t fix it?”

  “Because I know you wouldn’t.”

  “Maybe you think that and maybe I’ll shoot you anyway.”

  Troy let his hands drift back down to his sides. “Then do it and get it over with. Or come on down here and let’s talk.”

  Harlan slowly drew the rifle up against his shoulder but didn’t seem ready to relinquish his position.

  “Where was I calling when I called you last month?” Troy asked.

  After another long silence, and the wind picking up: “The phone company let me keep the number. It rings out here now. You shouldn’t drive up on a man like that so early in the morning, Troy. You’ll get yourself shot.”

  “Is this where you live?” Troy asked, resuming his walk toward the shack.

  “If that’s what you want to call it. They don’t care if I stay out here. As long as I do my job. It ain’t much—hot plate, a cot. No room for a fridge but the tank out there keeps things cool enough.”

  He fell silent again, seeming to search for something else to recommend his accommodations. “The TV reception’s hard to beat. You snake an antenna wire out to the tower leads and you can tune in a Dallas station clear as a bell.”

  Troy looked around the overgrown tower site, a dry, sorry-looking patch of cleared pasture that the pasture was rapidly taking back. “How did you lose the house?” he asked, beginning to feel the absurdity of conversing with a man crouched on a rooftop in rifle position.

  Harlan raised himself slowly, grunting, and walked over to a metal ladder bolted to the side of the shack. He looked out over the horizon, then laid the rifle on the roof against the parapet and wrapped it several times in a thick tarpaulin and swung his weight out over the ladder.

  He approached Troy beating the dust from his shirt and pants with his hands and stood looking at him, stopping a good three feet away.

  “Lawbreaking always suited you, Troy,” he said. “You don’t look a day older than last time I saw you. I can’t even remember how long ago it was.”

  Harlan’s face was leaner and his eyes more deeply set than the last time Troy had seen him. His features had more of Bill Ray in them than Troy had ever noticed before. He was already beginning to bag at the eyes and elbows and he looked a decade older than he was, due partly to the fact that he now wore a saucer-brimmed felt cowboy hat like the one worn by President Johnson, along with the uniform of the older farmers and ranchers, who preferred heavy khaki work shirts tucked into khaki trousers, never blue jeans. As big as Harlan was, he wore his shirts a size too big, with the sleeves rolled high on his upper arms. His big hands hung down heavily like things he stopped acknowledging when not in use.

  “What happened to the house?”

  “You asked me that.”

  “I’m asking you again.”

  Harlan turned without hurrying toward the shack, through high bluestem grass that nearly fenced it from view on the side facing the road. With each footfall grasshoppers arced out around his boots like splashing water. His voice came from inside the shack, where he had turned on a light:

  “She talked me into drawing money against it, as little as it was worth. When she left she took that with her, too. The bank claimed it a couple of months ago. Darryl came over himself and told me he hated to have to do it.”

  Troy hadn’t known about this part. It gave him a momentary sensation of the ground moving underneath him, of ignorance stretching out in every direction. He turned away from the road and looked across the lightening land. The stock tank sat about a hundred yards off at the foot of an old Monitor windmill whose vane had not yet cranked its blades into the wind. A hundred miles further west, carrying the sun, a line of clouds as big as kingdoms marched across the plains and Troy stood watching them, wondering how long it would take Bettie to spend everything.

  “What difference does the house make to you? It’s been more than ten years since you lived there. Hell, you were barely there when you lived in it. It was mine.”

  Troy told him about the visit. “It didn’t feel half bad being back in there, Harlan, like I thought it would. I just wish you hadn’t left the furniture you did. I don’t like to think of that deputy bastard using any of it.”

  “Did you break one of my windows?”

  “I didn’t need to break anything. I still have the key.”

  Harlan considered this for a moment. “If the thought had ever occurred to me, I’d have changed the locks a long time ago.”

  Troy had come up into the doorway. The windowless space that Harlan lived in was no bigger than a modestly proportioned bathroom, except that it had no facilities, not even a sink. Troy had known a few motel rooms only marginally more hospitable. A wooden cot occupied the right-hand wall, made up with a gray horsehair blanket and a caseless pillow. Along the back was a kind of bivouac kitchen with a single-burner hot plate, an electric coffeepot, and a small larder of plates, cups, and boxed goods arranged on a two-by-eight plank raised off the concrete floor on cinder blocks. A heavy black Bakelite wall phone with a braided cord hung near a jack. On a metal television tray to the other side rested a little Philco television set, which looked like an electronic appendage of a large, vaultlike bank of aluminum cabinets, fitted with switches and cooling vents, the housing for the tower’s broadcast equipment. The whole place smelled acridly of metal and a weak dome light shone in the middle of the ceiling, brown with bug juice.

  “I thought you’d like to know that when I got into town last night I paid my respects at your final resting place,” Troy said. “There wasn’t anywhere for me to put flowers.”

  Harlan had taken a small aluminum pot and poured water into it from a canteen and put the pot onto the reddening hot plate coil. He took a rubber band from around a box of Cream of Wheat and sat on the corner of his cot to wait for the water to boil.

  “There wasn’t anybody else going to take care of it except me, so I thought I might as well get it done. It’s a good thing I did, too, while I still had some money. Bettie liked to have killed me for it, but it’s pretty much the only thing of value she didn’t make off with.”

  He smiled, looking away from Troy, though Troy was trying just as studiously to evade his gaze. “Only thing of value I have left and I have to be dead to use it. There must be a country song in that somewhere.”

  Troy took a metal folding chair leaned against the wall, the only other piece of furniture in the shack. There was no room inside for it, so he swung the door out and put the chair across the threshold on the packed caliche and sat just outside facing in, rocking back on the legs. Harlan took a mug down from a hook over the head of his cot.

  “Coffee?”

  “No thanks. I had a pot of the deputy’s last night.”

  “Whose vehicle is that that you’re driving over there?”

  “Mine, for the time being.”

  “You know damned well I’m not putting a foot inside it. The truck’s around behind back. I can’t promise it’s going to get us very far but it’s the only thing I’m going to drive.”

  Troy suddenly noticed a dog almost the same shade of dun as the pasture sand stretched out on its side about a dozen feet from him. The animal was whimpering in its sleep, its feet moving slightly as it ran chasing something along a dream plane perpendicular to the ground. “I thought you didn’t like dogs, Harlan. When did you get that?”

  “I didn’t get him—he got me,” Harlan said. “This seems to be
where he lives. They call these radio shacks doghouses, so I guess by rights it’s his.” Harlan rose from the cot and walked to the side of the door, snapping his fingers and whistling. Without stirring its head from the ground the dog opened its eyes to look at him and then longer, suspiciously, at Troy. “He’s ancient, old coot. I find him sacked out by his empty water dish. Too old to even whine for it. Just lays there with his head pointed at the dish like a divining rod that tells you where water ain’t.”

  The dog’s eyes rolled up and his lids eased shut again. “He’s not a bad one when he’s awake. I call him Beau Jack. After that one Bill Ray brought home that time.”

  Troy studied the old dog, which seemed, unaccountably, to be some kind of poodle mutt, greatly overgrown. Troy laughed. “He didn’t bring that dog home, Harlan. That damned dog just showed up one day and Bill Ray kept hauling him out to the country to get rid of him, but he kept finding his way back. So eventually Bill gave up. He named him after some famous colored boxer.”

  “What ever became of that dog?”

  “He liked to run in the pasture at night. He probably started to think those coyotes calling to him were his friends. One morning he didn’t come back.”

  “Sounds like somebody I used to know,” Harlan said, meeting Troy’s eye for the first time.

  He poured coffee and arranged his breakfast on his cot in a way that suggested long-established routine. Harlan had always been maddeningly methodical but the ritual of his movements produced a different effect on Troy this morning, peaceful, almost calming. It made him think of a Benedictine monk he had once watched for an hour in a New Mexico thrift shop carving a pair of sparrows from a piece of evergreen pine.

  Harlan began to eat, not looking up from his bowl. “Where’ve you kept yourself the last few years? You never say where you’re calling from.”