She dropped the sign she had been carrying.
Stop Murdering the Babies! it said.
I looked at the men in my squad, the ones standing on either side of me, but they had faces I didn’t recognize, and we weren’t on the hill in the rain forest anymore, either. These were National Guardsmen—I recognized the citizen-soldier patches on their obsolete combat fatigues—and we were on the park-neat campus of Sara’s college, and the squad was getting ready to fire again. I shouted at them to stop, but my voice made no sound, and so I turned my own rifle on the frightened fuzz-face of the officer at the end of the file and switched the selector to full automatic.
He took a whole banana-clip, and it didn’t seem to faze him.
“Fall down,” I roared. “Goddamn you, you civilian shithead, fall down!”
And then I was awake with only the sounds of silence in my ears.
Darkness filled the motel room, but it was not the dream that had roused me. The door of the room had opened and closed—I was almost getting used to prowlers now—and someone was walking toward the bed. I closed my hand around a pillow and braced a leg to throw myself off the bed in the opposite direction but stopped a split second before giving my body the execute command. The visitor’s aura touched mine, and it was neither threatening nor angry.
I relaxed and took a deep breath.
The air nearby now contained a faint scent of Marlboros, partially masked by musk and soap.
“If you’ve come in here with a plate of carne estilo Nogales,” I said, “I still don’t want any.”
But my visitor hadn’t come for a chat.
“Just shut the hell up,” she said. “And move over.”
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
Death may lie in wait.
Ruin may threaten.
Sometimes the shadow corners seem truly to contain all the terrors of childhood, formless and implacable…
TWENTY-FIVE
We slept late the next morning, but there was none of the strangeness that sometimes accompanies the first awakening with an unfamiliar bedmate.
Dana was startled, but not repelled, by the sight of my right eye.
I had removed and cleaned the prosthetic eye, storing it away in the case it shares with a twin, before lying down to talk to Mistah Dee Tee the night before. And had forgotten all about it—what with one thing and another—afterward. I don’t own an eyepatch or use any other halfway measures, so she got the full treatment as soon as she rolled over to face me, and I lay perfectly still, awaiting developments. Reactions, over the years, have been various. You never can tell. But hers was the only one of its type that I could recall.
She laughed.
And after a startled moment, I laughed, too. And we kept it up for a minute or two and couldn’t seem to get stopped, setting each other off again every time one or the other of us would begin to achieve some kind of control, while occasionally trying without notable success to form words. There was no occasion for hilarity, of course. None at all. But the laughter was real and not self-conscious, and while there may be better ways to start a morning than laughing with a pretty woman, I would have to say that I couldn’t have named one at that moment. The world was beginning to look almost habitable.
“Oh, God,” she said when things finally tapered off to an occasional honk of mirth. “I’m sorry! Well, no…sort of sorry anyway. I guess. But you looked so solemn, with that eye all drooped over in a kind of sunken wink. Did anyone ever tell you that you look like a drunken coyote when you do that?”
“Not lately,” I replied with a fair affectation of stuffy austerity. “Coyote, you say? Gracious, goodness me—and here all this time I just took other people’s word for it that I was the handsomest man they had ever seen who was intended by nature to be an ape. I’ll have my secretary make a note.”
“A memo would be better,” she said, rolling out from under the covers and heading for the shower. “Get the damn thing in triplicate and roll all three of them into a tight little tube—”
I threw a pillow at her. She caught it in midair and swung it back at my head, and I grabbed it and she tripped and landed on the bed again.
And then we laughed some more. And after a while the laughter became smiles and there were no more words, and it was a lot later when we finally got into the shower—which was where we were when Vollie Manion came to take us both into custody on suspicion of armed assault with intent to do grievous bodily harm.
He was playing it a lot cooler than he had on his last visit; none of the aw-shucks country boyishness and no Gomer Pyle mannerisms. But there was an underlying threat implicit in everything he said and did, and I wasn’t happy about the idea of Dana being involved.
I had been expecting something like this, of course.
Seeing Vollie with his companions the night before was really just the icing on the cake. Ever since the encounter with Greenteeth—I had real trouble thinking of him as someone called Boo—it had seemed obvious that someone was going to have to take some kind of countermeasure. So, considering Vollie’s track record, a second arrest came as no big surprise. I had even taken a moment, on the off chance that it might be something like this, to put one of the prosthetic eyes into the empty socket before answering the door. But dragging Dana into it was something else again.
I decided to try a little reconnaissance-in-force.
“Just for the sake of argument,” I said, stuffing the tail of a fresh shirt into my trousers and fiddling with my necktie while we waited for Dana to do her dressing in the bathroom, “can we assume that you’ve gone to the trouble to get a warrant or two this time?”
He shook his head.
“Don’t need none,” he said.
I sighed with what I thought was a fair approximation of friendly concern. “The last time we went through all this,” I reminded him, “Frank Ybarra didn’t seem too pleased with the way things came out. I even had a feeling that he might be going to holler at you a little when I was out of earshot. Was I wrong about that?”
“Frank’s the boss. He can holler at anyone he wants, anytime he feels like doing it.”
“So when this arrest doesn’t stick either, don’t you think you might be in a lot more trouble than you were the first time?”
“This one’ll stick.”
“Not if you forget to read us our rights again, it won’t. And not if you forget to tell us who we are supposed to have ‘grievously harmed,’ and not if you try bouncing that damn nightstick off my head again, Mr. Deputy,” I said. “This time there is a witness, and we’ll either do it by the book, starting right here and right now, or we will forget the whole thing.”
It was a fair bluff, but he didn’t bat an eye. “This time,” he repeated, “it’ll stick.”
“The hell it will, Vollie Manion!” Dana walked out of the bathroom with her damp hair neatly swept into a ballerina’s bun at the top of her head and her eyes bright with anger. “You know damn well you’re just doing this for meanness.”
Vollie smiled and attempted what might have passed for a formal bow. “Why, Miz Dana, ma’am,” he said, “I don’t think I’ve had a chance till now to tell you how glad I am to see you back here in Farewell again. And to see you’ve made some nice close friends right off…” He favored her with an oily smile that did not reach his eyes.
“My!” he said, when she didn’t seem to react. “Living off there in Las Vegas surely does seem to agree with you. I declare you even prettier than ever!”
This time he seemed to have hit a nerve.
Vollie had given peculiar emphasis to the name Las Vegas. It had been somehow aimed at Dana, and she had heard something in it that I didn’t. Her eyes and the aura she had brought into the room with her went through a chain reaction of emotions from anger to shock to defiance and back to anger again in the space of a second.
“I still want to know who it is we are supposed to have assaulted,” I said, breaking up the private exchange. “And wi
th what deadly weapon.”
He waited a moment before turning back to face me.
But he didn’t lose the smile.
“The victim,” he said, assuming a more formal tone, “was one Commencement P. Brown, a resident of this community. And the weapon was a motorcar. Driven by you.”
He pointed a finger at me, and I hoped the relief I felt didn’t show in my face.
“And occupied by you,” he concluded, turning his attention back to Dana.
Knowing Greenteeth’s name was a definite plus. It is embarrassing to meet anyone—even someone like Greenteeth—more than once when you didn’t catch the name, except for a nickname such as Boo, at the first encounter. And when all the meetings seem to involve some form of physical violence, that kind of ignorance can be construed as outright social error.
Gauche.
Unforgivable, perhaps—though, when you think of it, a man saddled with a name like Commencement might very well prefer to be known as Boo. Or even Greenteeth.
The point, however, was that Vollie Manion seemed unaware that his friend Commencement and I had met at Lupe’s café the night before.
It might mean anything, or nothing. But I was hoping it indicated that Greenteeth had been either too drunk or too surprised by the turn events had taken to remember just how he wound up sitting in the old telephone booth.
It would simplify things, I thought, if Vollie didn’t know that I had seen him with his playmates.
I shook my head to register sad bewilderment.
“Commencement,” I said with a puzzled note in my voice. “Commencement. Commencement? No, I’m sorry, Mr. Deputy, sir, but that name just doesn’t seem to ring a bell. Truth is, I really don’t think I have assaulted anyone named Commencement for—oh, two, three weeks now. Especially not in any way that would cause him ‘grievous bodily harm.’”
“There was a Circumstantial, though,” Dana said, picking up on the line. “You remember him? We assaulted a Circumstantial just day before yesterday.”
“Why, now that you mention it, ma’am, I think that’s so,” I agreed solemnly. “But his last name was Smith, not Brown. And besides, we didn’t really do him ‘grievous bodily harm.’”
She sighed. “I suppose you’re right. Let me see…has to be ‘grievous,’ you say? Not just ‘moderate’ or ‘negligible’?”
“Nor ‘inconsiderable,’ either,” I admonished. “Don’t forget that.”
Vollie’s face was getting red.
“Commissariat!” Dana crowed, clapping her hands. “That’s who he means, I bet. Commissariat. I don’t know if the last name was Brown or not, but we sure as God did him some grievous bodily harm.”
It had gone a little too far. I still couldn’t feel any heat from Vollie’s wa—he was truly unusual in that respect—but I didn’t need to inspect his aura to know he was on the verge of popping his cork. One look at his face was enough. The red had drained away, and the sudden pallor was almost frightening. If we didn’t quit soon, he was either going to kill one of us or have a heart attack.
Fortunately, there was a diversion.
The telephone rang and we all stood still for a moment, looking at it and waiting.
It rang again.
“Answer it or let it ring?” I inquired. “Or would it be for you?”
Vollie hesitated for another moment, but then nodded in my direction. “Hold it where I can hear,” he said.
That was fine with me. I picked the handset off the cradle, held the receiver just under my ear, and made social noises to indicate that I was listening.
“Ayuh!” the caller said. “Be that you, Preacher?”
Mose Thieroux.
“Shouldn’t wonder,” I said.
“Shouldn’t wonder what?”
“Shouldn’t wonder it be me and shouldn’t wonder I be listening—if’n you got something to say.”
“H’mph!”
There was a pause, and I used the moment to evaluate Vollie Manion’s reaction. He had recognized the voice, too, and I decided he was already regretting his decision to let me answer the call.
“If’n you was here or I was there,” Thieroux said, “and if’n I was about thirty year younger. And if I didn’t like you—and your pretty lady—I would jeezly sure muckle on to you one of these times. You know that?”
“Ayuh,” I said, playing the accent for all it was worth.
Another pause. And then a faraway, unaccustomed sound that might have been a chuckle. Or might not.
“Anyways,” he said, “how soon can the two of you get back out here?”
“Well,” I said, looking at Vollie, who looked back at me dead-faced, “happens the lady and I are just a bit tied up this morning. What with one kind of trouble and another. I think I am going to be over to the courthouse for a while.”
“Ayuh?”
I didn’t know Mose Thieroux well enough to read him with any degree of confidence, but I thought I could detect the quiet sound of mental gears meshing. It occurred to me that I wished we were closer to the same age. It was interesting enough to be acquainted with him now; I wondered what he’d have been like in his twenties or thirties.
“Wellsir,” he said, “you come on out here then, anytime you can. I got me some more of them Mexican bean. And water.”
“Sounds good.”
“And don’t come alone, neither…Scenery hereabouts could stand improving.”
“Shouldn’t wonder.”
One final pause.
“Ayuh, the hell with you. Come when y’ready.”
He hung up.
Vollie took the handset from my shoulder, replaced it on its cradle, and then spent a moment or two looking at me with his head slightly cocked to one side.
“You know old man Thieroux?” he said.
I shook my head and blanked my face. “Never heard of him,” I said.
He started to say something. But you could see him hitting the brakes and shifting gears, and instead of whatever he’d intended, he managed to keep his voice both level and casual as he said the second thing that had come into his head instead of the first. “Just seemed sort of odd, is all.”
“Odd?”
“You knowing Mose Thieroux. I mean, seeing as how the victim, Commencement Brown—that is, the one you think has got such a funny name—used to work out there at the Thieroux spread.”
His use of the past tense triggered an alarm. “Used to?”
“Well, sure.” I could see Vollie beginning to enjoy himself, and I didn’t like it. “Used to, until you done what you done to him thataway. Lord knows he won’t be working there for a while. Nor anyplace else…if he ever get back to where he can work at all.”
It didn’t track.
Greenteeth had been in good enough health last night, give or take a few cuts and bruises. I certainly hadn’t hit him hard enough to inflict permanent damage, and I almost said so before I managed to catch my fool tongue and shut my mouth around it.
“Sorry,” I said when everything was under control. “I think you lost me back there somewhere.”
“That a fact?”
“That’s a fact.”
“Well, that does beat all! I reckon, then, the things he told me—before he lost consciousness, you know—were just imagination. Said you and the lady, here, waited for him on a road outside town here yesterday, and then crowded him into the ditch playing chicken head-on. Smashed up his truck. Hurt him real bad.”
I had an answer to that. And a question or two. But Dana spoke up ahead of me. “Lost consciousness?” she said.
“Oh, yeah, lost consciousness,” Vollie nodded emphatically, looking at her but aiming the words at me. “Woke up long enough to give the statement. Front of witnesses, too, in case you were wondering. And then he went into a coma or something. People over there at the hospital say he might not ever wake up.”
He paused momentarily, looking back and forth between us. “And if he don’t wake up, of course,” he went on, “what he s
aid could count as what they call a deathbed statement.”
He didn’t say anything more after that, and neither did we.
Nothing to say.
We locked up the room—God knows why; people seemed to come and go through the doors in that place as though they weren’t there—and got into the back of his patrol car for the ride to jail. It was getting to be a familiar routine. But this time was easier and less painful than the first trip. Vollie evidently didn’t think either of us was going to run.
He didn’t bother with handcuffs.
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
We do not yield to them.
We take up arms; they seem to flee before us. But ever and ever they return, altered in form but no less terrible for all that.
We are strangers in a strange land, unarmed and lonely upon a darkling plain…
TWENTY-SIX
The jail hadn’t changed much.
There were a few more signs of life than on my last visit to the top floor of the courthouse: two trusties mopping up instead of one, a crickety old man in an ill-fitting deputy’s uniform on hand in the booking room to fingerprint us and take the pictures, and a fat-bellied man wearing sergeant’s stripes at the desk.
But we didn’t have time to get acquainted.
The older man had just finished my profile view and was getting ready to take down the vital statistics when Deke Pemberton walked in and handed two papers to a sergeant.
“Judge Bronson’s waiting downstairs,” he said. “So let’s get moving.”
The sergeant seemed stunned to see Pemberton at the jail in person. “I be gawdam!” he said.
Pemberton looked at him without expression. “Something bothering you?” he inquired.
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