The Preacher

by Ted Thackrey, Jr.

  “Son of a howah, boy,” he said, the wording and cadence still jarringly incongruous. “You and the lady be company. I don’t use alkali water for my own coffee, and I surer’n hell don’t serve it to guests. That there is pure mountain spring, trucked in every day, and the coffee is brewed with fresh-ground Mexican bean and settled with eggshell. Drink up, b’Jesus!”

  The old man did not lie. We live in an age of the almost-right substitute: Frozen foodstuffs and powdered condiments and instant beverages are not only a concomitant of modern urban life, but its very substance. Without them, millions would starve. Yet no benefit is without its price, and the levy in this case is that whole generations grow up without experiencing the true taste of fresh vegetables, unprocessed dairy products…or real true-brewed coffee.

  Late breakfast at the Thieroux ranch was therefore an experience not to be missed or forgotten.

  Coffee—a full, rich concoction carrying as much warmth from the Mexican plain as from the stove—was balanced by the unchilled sweetness of fresh-squeezed orange juice, scratch-recipe soda biscuits, and a jam that had no label but seemed to be some combination of jalapeño and hedge apple that I had never encountered before. The earlier meal notwithstanding, I managed to taste it all and do violence to quite a bit without making a total pig of myself.

  “Homemade, the jam is,” Mose Thieroux said, sipping his own coffee from a mug that had begun life as a German artillery stein. “Cook won’t tell me the jeezly recipe, so I make sure she goes to get a checkup with the doctor in town twice’t a year so she’ll be sure to outlive me.”

  He twitched that decade-devouring smile across the corners of his mouth again, and then turned the gunfighter eyes full force in my direction.

  “Ayuh,” he said. “Reckon it’s time to get down to it…”

  I started to respond, but he seemed to have something to get off his chest and held home-court advantage. I shut up and listened.

  “You,” he said, “have got one hell of a nerve onto you, coming out here after my grandboy winding up dead, driving your car and you taking a wad of money off’n him in a gawdam poker game. Another time or another place—different circumstances, different people—a thing like that could sure-God get a body killed. I am one mean-tempered old son of a howah, and a town like this, that kind of killing could happen and nothing never come of it. Betcha ahss!”

  He paused to take a deep pull at the coffee, and I kept my mouth closed and my face still while he did it.

  “But if there is one thing on this earth I do like and admire,” he went on with no notable change in tone, “it is a man who will face up to something instead of running away from it. Prime comfort to know they’s still a few like that around. Get to wondering sometimes. And besides, I knew my grandboy better’n purt’ near anyone else on this earth, and he was pure-dee pissant!”

  The eyes blinked and the mouth tightened for a moment with a heaviness that was private and not to be shared. I didn’t look away, but I didn’t move or glance at Dana, either. He had more to say, and I wanted him to say it before I asked any favors.

  “One or two of the younger, and dumber, hands here on the place turned up looking some feeble and lumpy the same morning Bobby Don died,” he said. “I suspicioned the one thing might kindly have something to do with the other and talked to them about it, and after they got done lying and talking foolish, they told me some cock-and-bull story about a crazy man in a preacher-black suit who flat-out kicked their asses for them. Then I made one or two telephone calls around town and a few more out of town. Come up with some of the damnedest, by-Christ pack of nonsense I heard in all my borned days. So when you called this morning and wanted to come out, what it done was save me a trip into town. Now you’re here, I can see for myself that the part about the preacher suit is true. But what about the rest? Way I heard, you really did start out to be some kind of jeezly Bible-thumper. Seminary and all. But that don’t fit with playing poker for a living. And they don’t none of it square up with you being some kindly kung fu ball-buster or, come to think of it, being here in Farewell at all…”

  It was a long speech for a man I suspected wasn’t usually much for talking, and I let it lie there for a while, cooling, before offering the only answer I had.

  “Shouldn’t wonder,” I said.

  The young-old eyes blinked. “Shouldn’t wonder what?” he said.

  “Shouldn’t wonder I’d have another cup of that coffee, long as you’re buying…”

  For a moment I thought I had guessed wrong. The wire-thin shoulders stiffened and the eyes narrowed by that millionth of a millimeter that sometimes goes with a big raise on a low pair and guts, and other times means a sleeve gun. But it passed, and the climate of the room eased from formal to comfortable in the few seconds it took him to refill our cups. Contact had been established.

  “Ayuh,” he said, sitting down again.

  Dana looked at Thieroux and then at me and then back at him again.

  “What the hell just happened here?” she demanded. “Something sure did.”

  Thieroux favored her with a chilly little smile that was, nonetheless, not unfriendly.

  “Two dogs sniffing, deciding they could get along,” he said, explaining as much as he could to someone he wasn’t sure could speak the language. “You’ll be the Hallowell girl. The one married that gambling man, name of Lansing he was, and moved away to Las Vegas and stayed there after he took and kilt hisself.”

  It was a statement, not a question, and left Dana no ready answer. But none was required.

  “Wellsir, Miss Dana,” he said. “I did hear tell that you was back in town to be with your sister in her time of trouble. Tragic thing, that was. Strapping young feller like her husband, and doing real well, what I heard. Tragic way to end up. Suicide.”

  He was quality. No change in cadence or tone, not a single sly peek at either of us when he threw the loaded word. Just a possum-quiet wait to see how we would handle it. I wondered how he would be at a poker table, and made a mental note to be circumspect to the point of paranoia if ever I had a chance to find out.

  But Dana wasn’t half bad, either.

  “Funny thing,” she said, cocking her head to one side in the way that once again stirred my memories of Sara. “You’re the first one I heard use the word. Right out, I mean. Most people just think it.”

  “That a fact, now?”

  “It is. And I’m grateful, because it gives me a chance to say that you’re full of crap, and so is anyone else who thinks my brother-in-law would do a thing like that.”

  Thieroux nodded. “Careless, then,” he said, still on the prod. “Or drunk or doped or had what they call that delayed stress syndrome—fancy name for being loony—like all the other fellas lost the war over there in the ’Nam…”

  I wondered if that round had been target-ranging on me, but decided probably not. We’d passed the point of random fire, and his aim would have been better if he’d been firing for effect.

  And he’d missed Dana, too.

  “My brother-in-law was murdered,” she said evenly. “Someone robbed him and then killed him and counted on everyone thinking just the kind of rotten, vicious things you said. But it’s not true. No one who knew Pres Prescott would ever believe it…and you don’t either, or you wouldn’t be sitting with us now, poking around at the sore spots to see if we’re worth helping.”

  Thieroux looked at her silently for a moment and then turned to me with another of his wintery smiles.

  “She’ll do,” he said. “Ayuh. She’ll do fine, b’Jesus. All right, then! Suppose one or the other of you tell me what the hell it is you come for…”

  I ran through the story for him—Jake’s original suspicions, my own assessment, and some of the reasoning that went into them—using as few words as possible. He asked one or two questions, grunted at my answers, and then sat looking into the middle distance while he ran the result through his personal mental filters.

  It didn’t ta
ke him long.

  “Ayuh. Sounds about right,” he said, the leathery features dour as they buried extraneous matter. “Fact is, it even fills in a few spaces I been studying about for a while…”

  He turned his gaze on Dana. “You say the offer your sis got was for all the Prescott land, not just that little dab where her husband set up that helicopter landing field of his’n?”

  “The whole thing,” she said, “‘Land, subsoil rights, and all improvements’ was the way the offer was made.”

  Thieroux nodded and turned back to me. “I’ll need to do me some telephoning here and about,” he said. “Might take an hour or two—more, if’n I can’t get hold of everybody right off—to nail the jeezly thing down, so mebbe you could kindly leave me the number of the motel you’re at, and I’ll call you up and let you know when I’m for sure.”

  I gave him the number, and we finished our coffee in silence. It didn’t seem like a good time for small talk.

  When we were done, Thieroux accompanied us back to Dana’s car, and I saw that the ranch, for all its earlier appearance of near-vacant efficiency, was not entirely devoid of human life. Two children, a boy and a girl, were throwing sticks for a dog in the pasture next to the horse ring.

  Thieroux followed my gaze, and I was startled by the mixture of pain and pride that began behind those unusual eyes and ignited the rest of his face.

  “Mine,” he said.

  I stopped with my hand on the door handle and took a second look. The girl was about four, I decided, the boy perhaps a year older. Both were dark-haired, but the boy’s face was broad and freckled in the black Irish mold, while the girl might have passed for pure Aztec.

  “Bobby Don’s bastids,” Mose Thieroux said. “Two different mothers, ayuh, but my own great-grandbabies right enough for now, anyways. Sometime next week, though, soon as I can get the Christless court to sign the papers, they’ll be my own children. Adopted fair and square.”

  The old man’s attention never left the youngsters as he spoke, but he left no room for interruption.

  “I get seasick,” he said. “Three generations of lobstermen in my family, but I get seasick, and I purely hate the smell of fish, so when the army turned me loose in 1919, I come out here to New Mexico and went to ranching. Got married. Damn good woman she was, but she died having our only son, and like a damn fool I kind of dried up and left him to raise hisself while I got rich in cattle and the land business.

  “Funny thing, he turned out right good quality. Good man, decent and smart and reliable. Don’t that beat all? And so for a long time I went around feeling real smart and proud of myself, though if you’d asked me why, I surely couldn’t’ve told you.”

  The old man’s attention had moved to the far horizon now, and I wondered how many times he had played this recording for himself in the dark morning hours when sleep hides and dawn won’t come. I wished I had some comfort, or even concealment, to offer. But I knew I didn’t.

  “So when he got hisself kilt, froze to death trying to save a Christless runt stray fifteen years backalong, I thought I would handle my grandboy the same way I done him…Come out the way you saw.

  “Bobby Don.

  “By the time he was ten, I knew I’d been wrong, but by then I reckon most of the damage had been done. Anyways, nothing I tried seemed to help, not even sending him off to that military school—reform school it is, really—down to Roswell. Come back here the same sneaky, arrogant little pissant he was when he left.

  “Well, now he’s gone, too, and everyone’s telling me I’m too old to be raising any more young’uns. Too old and tired. Ayuh! And maybe they right, too.

  “But I been doing every Christless thing my own way since before I can remember, and if some of it was wrong, some of it was right, and I be damn if I am going to stop now. Let me live another fifteen years…hell, give me just ten…and let me use the time to do as much work on my own blood kin as I done on making m’self such a rich old son of a howah, and who knows? The goddam Thieroux family might wind up amounting to something after all!”

  A SERMON

  (CONTINUED)

  Man’s purpose transcends simple survival.

  And a good thing, too!

  For if survival, per se, were the whole purpose of life, then there would be no purpose at all. For the sustaining of life is, ultimately, beyond us.

  Our time on earth is short…

  FOURTEEN

  Three telephone messages and the keys to a new rental car were waiting at the front desk when we got back to the motel, so Dana left me there and headed for her sister’s house while I attended to business.

  Only two of the messages required return calls. The third was a simple estimated time of arrival, and I took time to convert it into another room reservation before leaving the main building to return to my own cubicle.

  The rental was parked by my front door, and it wasn’t anything I would have picked—fire-engine red is a nice color only if you want to be sure you’ll be remembered, and I always thought roller skates came in pairs—but it didn’t seem worth an argument, and I went inside without giving it much more than a glance.

  The telephone was by the bed, and I allowed myself the luxury of returning the calls from a fully recumbent position. The day was still young and I’d had plenty of sleep, and of course a hardcase gambler like the Preacher never runs out of gas. He is immune to pain and fatigue alike; all-night poker sessions and back-room beatings are all in the average day’s work. Part of the mystique. Hardly worth a mention.

  Uh-huh.…

  Like hell…

  By the time the call I’d awarded first priority was answered, the instrument in my hand weighed a ton and I was on board a lotus barge, dreaming about some place with the unlikely name of New Mexico while a bevy of sloe-eyed lovelies whispered the riddles of immortality into the air that shimmered and sang around my head.

  The words were soft seduction and the waters of Lethe were rising to flood—but none of it stood a chance, of course, when attacked by the bright and cultured persona of Mistah Dee Tee Price.

  “You crazy bastard!” he thundered in a voice that might have devoured the miles between Farewell and Houston without benefit of A. G. Bell’s little gadget. “What in Christ’s kingdom you doin’ in the wilds of east New Mexico? Wasn’t ’Nam bad enough? And where the hell y’all get off waking me up at three in the morning to run your goddam errands, anyway?”

  The lotus barge sailed away without me and I was back on the motel bed. Alone.

  “Answering your tactfully phrased questions in order,” I said in the tone of sweet reason that I reserve for conversation with Mistah Dee Tee. “It’s small-minded and downright inaccurate to call me crazy, because the nice folks at the asylum gave me a paper to prove I was sane before they turned me loose. What I am doing in the wilds of New Mexico is the same thing you’re doing off in the wilds of Houston—trying to cope with a hot game and a cold deck. And as for getting you up at three in the morning, you are just damn lucky it wasn’t earlier.”

  He laughed. “Okay,” he said. “Just makin’ sure it was you…”

  “Convinced?”

  “Must be. Ain’t nobody else talks so mean to me nowadays.”

  “So, then, Mr. smartass corporate financier and high-class heist man, what did you come up with?”

  Dee Tee Price has made a lifetime career of being a good ol’ boy from Texas, and I’d probably never have found out about the Rhodes scholarship or the business degree from Harvard if he hadn’t been tied to the bed next to mine at the hospital where I was sent after my second tour in Vietnam. Talk was just about the only recreation we were allowed (I couldn’t see, and he was still only partially convinced that he wasn’t dead), so we had a month or two to become pretty well acquainted. Later, when we both were feeling better, we became allies in various small enterprises—such as our plot to kill one of the orderlies.

  The pill pusher had made himself obnoxious in various ways, but
might have been overlooked as a minor nuisance if he hadn’t made a series of passes at the pretty wife of an artillery sergeant on our ward. The sergeant was having trouble enough getting used to the idea that he was not likely to be able to move anything below the waist for the rest of his life, and wondering what a thing like that would do to a marriage that was brand new when he was shipped out. Watching helplessly while another man tried to date his wife was not exactly the kind of therapy he needed.

  So Dee Tee and I got an outpatient friend to bring us some steel wire, which we coated with soot from a candle and strung between our beds late one night: one wire at ankle height between the footposts to trip our man when he brought the late sedative cups, another tight between the mattress supports, the distance from the trip wire carefully measured to cut his throat as he fell.

  It would have worked, too, I think. But some goody-goody warned the ward nurse, and we barely got the booby trap disassembled and out of sight before she arrived with the provost and two MPs.

  Dee Tee and I were loud in our protestations of injured innocence, and no physical evidence could be found, so the whole thing blew over. But the orderly turned out to be smarter than he looked: He never came back to the ward, and I heard later that he had requested a transfer to West Germany but was shipped to the Southeast Asia command instead.

  Things have a way of working out…

  “First off,” Dee Tee said, shifting to his business mode and dropping the thicker part of the stage-Texan accent, “I talked to a friend of mine over at City National—soon as it was time for civilized folks to be up and about, you night-crawling sumbitch—and set up the line of credit you wanted. I don’t suppose it’s any of my business—after all, it’s just my entire reputation and financial future that’s on the line—but what are you planning to do, buy Peru?”

  “Something like that.”

  “All right, then, play ’em tight if that’s how you’re gonna be. See if I care. About the other thing you asked, though, let me warn you going in that J. J. Barlow and I are not strangers. Fact is, I’ve known him longer than I’ve known you, and so I could be biased in his favor. Fair enough?”