“Now, that don’t seem possible, does it?”
I started to say I didn’t know whether it did or not, but he didn’t wait for an answer.
“Normal course of things,” he went on, “someone would have caught on, of course. But this wasn’t normal for the times. The hands worked on drilling the well knew just enough about oil to do their jobs. Nothing more. The tool pusher in charge of drilling told them what to do, and since he was one of the thievin’ bastid partners in the well, he sure wasn’t about to tell no one. So it got drilled and flowed for a while and then went to pump, and the partners got richer’n hell, suckin’ oil out from under old Lupe’s land without him knowing about it.
“Oh, sure—it all come out later. But by that time, the pool was damn near dry and Lupe’d finally sold off the subsoil rights to them, not knowing they’d been using them all along, because he needed money to build a café and some tourist cabins on his place.”
I thought for a moment of the monuments to long-gone hope that I had seen the night before.
Some people don’t seem to have much luck.
“Anyway, the bastids done it took their money and went away back east, and I heard they lost the whole kaboodle in the ’29 crash. Good enough for ’em! But don’t none of that tell us why someone would be wanting land around the Good Hope nowadays, does it? Nothing down in that hole no more. Just an empty dome more’n a mile down, under two horizons of rock. Hard to figure. Unless nothing was what they wanted.”
He sat back to let me think about it, but it made no sense at all to me.
“Give up?” he said after a while.
“Well…”
“Dump!” Dana practically shouted the word, light breaking across her face and her fists hammering delightedly on the table top. “Someone wants that thing for a dump! Am I right?”
Thieroux nodded at her with real appreciation. “Ayuh! Thought from the beginning you’d do fine,” he said, “but I was wrong. You will do some better’n fine, missy. Betcha. Ayuh! That’s it, for sure as sure. What we have got here is a big chemical company that’s been having one hell of a lotta trouble about dumping the dangerous damn muck that they throw away after they make the stuff they make. Don’t matter what it is. The throwaway is toxic—hell, maybe even radioactive for all I know—and they want to build a whole new plant where they can get rid of the garbage without no trouble.”
“You mean dump toxic wastes down one of the old wells?”
“Hell, no. I mean dump it down every livin’ one of them! The wells is only just a bunch of thin holes leading down to the empty cave where that oil pool used to be. Sometimes water’ll seep in and fill up the cave when the oil’s gone, but it didn’t do that here, so what you got is a jeezly big cavern way the hell and gone down yonder. Thing like that, you could go on dumping radium droppings and skunk piss for damn near ever, and if you done it careful and sly—like the way them bastids did when they drilled the holes in the first place—maybe they wouldn’t anyone ever know what went on.”
I thought about that.
“Or,” I said, “maybe the Environmental Protection Agency would even give you a permit to do that. The whole idea, as I understand it, is to find someplace where the dangerous stuff can’t do any harm. Maybe if you put it that far down…?”
Thieroux nodded. “Sure,” he said, “it might be just the place. And then again, b’Jesus, it might not! Who the hell knows? Might be you just building a kind of a time bomb for my great-grandbabies to worry about when they get their growth. That’s the whole thing, see: Nobody knows. Don’t even know if the Christless dome’s connected with the water table here. Or somewhere else you’d never suspect. Don’t seem likely, but that’s the whole trouble. They don’t know! And they don’t give a damn.”
“They’d be caught,” I said.
“They’d shit,” he growled. “Plant the like of that, kind of jobs they could offer to people here, the kind of growth it would mean for Farewell—wouldn’t nobody be looking too close at the deal. Hell, the chamber of commerce here’d welcome an atom bomb factory if they was money in it. I oughta know. Time was when I was just like ’em.”
“All the same…”
“All the same what we have got here is someone looking to build something dangerous and someone else, right here in town, willing to buy up all the land they would need for it on the quiet. Real quiet. Because it is going to make him some richer’n God.”
“How rich would that be?”
“Son of a howah, boy! Places like this is rarer’n balls on a heifer, and what ones there are is mostly took.”
“So the price would be good?”
“You might say so. Feller moves quiet and don’t spook the herd, he could get it for two, maybe three million. Sell it for five times that if he’s in a hell of a hurry. Ten times the buyin’ price—hell, more, maybe—if he’s careful, or knows the right buyer. And they for sure knew who was going to buy. I made sure about that, one way or another. But the buyer wouldn’t be interested unless he had the whole package. No use to him no other way. They got the deal made, but only if they can put all the land together.”
“You’re talking about Barlow and Watrous, then?”
He hesitated and took a breath before answering. “Ayuh,” he said, his voice quiet again.
“Absolutely sure?”
The heaviness that had been on him when we arrived rushed back to perch on his skinny neck and shoulders now, darker and more oppressive than ever, and he answered from a place where the soul goes to mourn.
“They the ones,” he said. “Spent all of yesterday trying to find where there could be an out. Trying to show myself where it could be some other way and it could be someone else working through them unbeknownst—a bank does that sometimes, y’know, fronts for other money—but the more I checked and double-checked, the more it got to be them. Hand-fed each other to get that land, double-dealing friends and strangers. Well, that’s business and, like I said, I could live with it. Mighta done the same myself, backalong. But to kill the Prescott boy…”
“Maybe they didn’t do that.”
His head snapped around to face me suddenly, and there were lightning bolts playing back in the soul chamber behind the eyes, a cold electricity like northern lights, and the temperature of the surrounding countryside was sub-zero.
“Ruint him first,” he said. “Took me three telephone calls to be certain sure. But I made ’em, and I am. They cut Prescott off at the pockets on three of the biggest whirlybird contracts he had, did it right easy because they owned the companies. That would’ve been just after he told them the first time that he wouldn’t sell, I shouldn’t wonder. Then when he still wouldn’t budge—after him and Barlow stopped speaking—they bullied a few more of his steady customers into quitting him. And all to make him poor enough to sell the land and move. Goddamn them! All in the world J. J. Barlow had to do was tell Orrin Prescott what was going on. Orrin loved him. Was like a son to him. He’d’ve done anything. And kept his mouth shut about it, too.”
A winter of the spirit shook him for an instant, sweeping him along through the outskirts of lamentation. I could feel the quick tears of age rising from the bottomless well that is at the center of all exiles from Eden. But the moment froze, and passed, leaving an inner landscape mantled in cold, white fury.
“But, no. No! They wanted all the money and they wanted it all for themselves, and so they killed him instead. Murdered him!”
His voice had turned soft and almost gentle.
But the ice-edge of loathing remained.
“And now,” he said, “they can put their souls upon the altar of the Lord…because their asses are mine!”
A SERMON
(CONTINUED)
Man’s destiny, prepared for him by the hand of the Creator, is to become truly the son of God.
And a vital part of that process is the joyful injunction to love and defend and protest his fellow man; joyful for—admire him or despise him as you
will—he is your only possible companion here in the living world…
TWENTY-EIGHT
Dana and I rode most of the way back to Farewell without talking, thinking our own thoughts.
Mose Thieroux had been in pain, hurting deep, and when a man is doing that, there is no point in trying to argue with him. Later, perhaps, he might consider the possibility that a land grabber and swindler might not automatically be a murderer as well…might not, in fact, even be an especially bad person, as such things go.
People are far more complicated than that.
And so are motives.
But for the moment the old lobsterman was sick deep in himself, not only with the thought that two men he had known and trusted might do murder, but that they could conspire so cleverly in business as to put together a major undertaking with neither his knowledge nor his participation.
Hubris is affliction, from any angle.
“I might not want any part of the jeezly deal,” he had said. “Fact is, the more I hear about it, the less I like it. But that ain’t the point, b’Jesus! I don’t drink hot buttered rum on a summer morning, neither, but if I go where it’s being drunk I like to have it offered…”
I wondered what his attitude might have been thirty years earlier. Or twenty. Or ten. Or even a few months. Some people grow up early and others grow up late, but it’s painful either way.
Dana sat beside me quietly, face averted, staring out at the cold flatness of the landscape but not seeing it.
She seemed to be at war on two levels; it worried me that I could only find one of them.
Twice during the trip she fumbled a pack of cigarettes, and twice she put it back with effort and annoyance. It was obvious now that she was trying either to cut down on the smoking or stop altogether, and that gave me a minor-league case of the guilties.
Ever since the government started printing its warnings on the side of cigarette packages, the decision to smoke or not to smoke has become the very latest crusade of all the world’s busies. I find this especially depressing because I haven’t smoked since my second tour in ’Nam, and so am accounted to be on the Side of the Angels in what has suddenly emerged as the Crusade of the Self-Righteous.
In point of fact, I have no deep feelings on the subject one way or the other. And I am not much for crusades. I was never a heavy smoker, and quitting was almost inadvertent. Cigarettes were one of the few things that Dee Tee Price and I didn’t bribe the orderlies to smuggle into the hospital for us, because it is dangerous to use an open flame anywhere in the vicinity of pure oxygen, and several of the people in our ward were apt to need oxygen at any moment.
When they finally turned me loose, it seemed a little silly to start again. So I didn’t.
But that doesn’t even qualify me for a gold star on the forehead, never mind sainthood, and what people now call the “smoking revolution” has pretty much had to get along without me.
I don’t care who smokes what in my vicinity—well, I could make an exception for certain brands of cigar and a few of the sweeter, more heavily scented pipe tobaccos—and I find the presence of cigarette smoke far less offensive than the simon-pure vaporings of nonsmokers who insist that everyone in their vicinity cease smoking simply because they have deigned to favor a room with their delicate presence. They are probably in the right; the Surgeon General says he has scientific evidence that ambient secondhand smoke is a danger to one and all.
But the attitude is still arrogant.
And the steamroller methodology is enough to drive a reasonable man back to the tobacco counter.
When it became apparent, then, that Dana might be trying to give up the Marlboros, it posed a somewhat delicate problem: If the lady was trying to quit for her own sake, it was her business and a damn good idea and I wanted to help in any way I could, even if the best support I could give was to shut up and let her fight her own battles. But if she was doing it for me, we were in Indian country with hostiles behind every bush.
I am just not brave enough to let people make big, or even medium-size, changes in their lives on my account. I don’t know enough of the answers, and I’m not sure enough of the ones I do know.
Only heroes have to be heroes; the rest of us are exempt.
A gutless attitude, perhaps. But mine own, so if that’s what was going on, it was time to find a tactful way to call a halt…
But the subject changed before it ever came up.
The road connecting the Thieroux spread to the highway had dipped into a dry wadi, the bed of a steam that holds water only in the immediate aftermath of a rainstorm, and Dana turned away from the window with a tiny smile at the edges of her mouth.
“Pull over for a minute,” she said.
I glanced at her and was pleased to see that she no longer seemed interested in the contents of her handbag.
“If you are going to barf again…” I teased.
She pretended to take offense. “Just pull over, turkey,” she growled. “And don’t talk so much.”
Oh.
Well, that was more like it, and I can’t deny that the moments after the little car was safely parked by the side of the road were pleasanter without the faint taste-tracks of nicotine and tars. Score one for the angels. Concentration is the main thing on these occasions, and distractions should be avoided.
Not that they would have mattered much.
It had been several hours since the night before, and after the first minute or two I found myself wondering if added privacy was really worth the effort of driving all the way back to the motel. The morning was turning warm and we had just passed a secluded-looking pasture with a few trees clustered around a stock pond. Winter grass was tall there. And green.
“Uh…Dana,” I began.
But she laughed, a bit shakily I noted, and moved an inch or two away. It was as far as she could move; the car was really as small as it looked. And I could have followed. But the climate had changed, and what had been sudden and heated was now warm and easy, and the time to follow up had passed.
“The district attorney in Farewell,” she said when she was sure I wasn’t going to press matters for the moment, “is Lionel Sparda. He lives on Yucca Street, or did the last time I was here.”
“Fascinating,” I said.
“So…do we go there, to him, or do we just go back and tell Frank Ybarra what we’ve found out?”
I looked at her and there was a sudden vertiginous moment of déjà vu: I had told Dana that it was her I saw, not Sara, and for the most part it was true. But in that moment it was a lie and the hair was red and the nails were bitten and the wide, trusting eyes were asking me why I was going away to join the army when I didn’t have to and the answer was going to be one she couldn’t accept.
I blinked, and Sara was gone.
But Dana’s eyes were still the same, and suddenly I didn’t want to explain anything at all, or stay in Farewell, or do any of the things that I knew I was going to do in the next few hours. So I wouldn’t do them: I would turn the car right instead of left when we got to the highway and drive it to Amarillo and take a plane to Tahoe and we would drive back to Best Licks from there. Phone Ybarra from the airport, maybe, and give him the information I’d picked up from Thieroux and Dee Tee Price, and leave him to deal with all of it.
But I can lie to myself for only a few seconds at a time, and that’s where I stopped.
“Neither one,” I said. “We go back to the motel, and I get myself ready to play a game of poker tonight.”
At first she didn’t believe me, and then she didn’t understand, and there was only so much that I could tell her.
But I did my best.
“Mose Thieroux is a good man, and he swings a pretty big hammer hereabouts,” I said. “But what he knows and what I know—which is quite a bit more because I talked to someone that he didn’t and I looked in some different places—is still not enough to do more than dim a few reputations around town.”
“But Mose said Pr
es was murdered!”
“And that is just what happened, angel. Someone killed your sister’s husband. Set up the crash to pass for an accident. Or for suicide, if anyone got to checking too close. And the killer’s not going to walk away from it. That I promise.”
“So let’s tell Ybarra.”
“Tell him what? That there is a new industry that might be planning to locate in Farewell if they can find a nice quiet place to dump their refuse? That we have some bad news about the town’s only remaining bank? Ybarra is a good man, better than this town has any right to expect, but if we went to him with a tale like that and told him to arrest someone, he wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“He already suspects old Vollie.”
I grinned at her and shook my head. “Miss Big Ears,” I said.
She actually blushed, but without real embarrassment. “The door to Frank’s office is pretty thin,” she said. “I got real tickled at that spooky lawyer, Pemberton. He came all over nervous, watching me put my ear to the door, and had to think up an excuse to leave.”
“So you know Ybarra doesn’t have enough to go on yet—maybe never will—and what we know about Barlow and Watrous wouldn’t help him a bit.”
“If Vollie was working for them…”
I leaned back to my own side of the car and reflected that necking by the side of the road like a couple of high school kids was a lot more fun than talking about malfeasance and murder. Or small-town social mores.
The moment had passed.
“Vollie may have been working for one of them,” I said. “Anything is possible. But being essentially a gambling man, I would be willing to put a little money on the street at six to five or better that he wasn’t.”
That surprised her. “What makes you say that?” she asked.
“Character,” I said.
There was a moment when she was going to say she didn’t know what I meant. But she did know, and she didn’t say it.
“You don’t think those two would do it?” she said.
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