Mockingbird Songs

by R.J. Ellory

  “What does he do?”

  “Do?” Evie shrugged. “Used to farm, but like all these boys, they sold up for the oil rights. Made a fortune, so I heard. So much money they don’t need to work, but to look at them, you’d think they didn’t have a dime to share between ’em.”

  “And what are you doing today?” Henry asked.

  “For now I’m mindin’ my own business, Henry Quinn, that and waitin’ to see how much trouble you get yourself into.”

  “So I guess I’ll see you later.”

  “I guess you will.”

  Henry smiled. “Are you really this nonchalant and easygoing, or are you putting this on for me?”

  Evie reached across the table and took Henry’s hands. She looked him directly in the eyes and didn’t crack a smile. “Come back tonight and I’ll tell you.”

  “You are just a little crazy, I guess,” Henry said, “but good crazy.”

  “You hope.”

  Half an hour later he was on the road back toward Calvary. He followed Evie’s directions, drove on past the Honeycutt place and kept on going. He found Clarence Ames’s place, saw Clarence there at the front window as he drew to a halt. Before he’d exited the pickup, the front door opened and the man himself came out onto the veranda.

  “Figured I’d see you again,” Clarence said. He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun.

  Henry walked on up the path to the porch steps.

  “You’ve come with questions.”

  “I have.”

  “What makes you think I wanna answer them?”

  “I know you don’t,” Henry said. “Came anyway.”

  “Evie Chandler put you up to this?”

  “Evie said you’d be the best person to start with, yes.”

  “I’ll have words with her, then,” he replied, and there was a reconciled expression on his face; the visit was inevitable, and they’d both known it.

  “You better come on in, I guess,” Clarence said, and unlatched the screen door.

  He turned and disappeared into the shadowed hallway. Henry went on up the steps, through the screen door, and followed the man into the house.

  “Talk last night got me thinking about Evan,” Clarence said. “Went through the records I got and found it.”

  The room they were in was so much the room of a man living alone. Books and newspapers were piled high left and right. A collection of bottles, some empty, some half full, sat on the floor by the fireplace. Boots, a coat, a pair of gloves, a couple of hats, other things in random places. It wasn’t a dirty room, but disorderly, lived-in. Clarence Ames resided here alone—no doubt about it.

  Clarence nodded toward the table, and there sat Evan Riggs’s record, The Whiskey Poet.

  Something happened when Henry picked it up. The face that looked back at him was two men—the picture he had seen on the wall at Crooked Cow in Abilene back in 1967 and the friend he’d made in Reeves. They were different men, but even as Henry looked, he could see something in that photograph that he’d not seen before. There was an edge in the expression, something almost cruel in the eyes, and he realized then that Evan Riggs had been the only man in Reeves to never mitigate his actions. Jail was filled with the innocent, the unlucky, the unfortunate, and even in the case of those whose guilt was beyond doubt, their incarceration was still the fault of lawyers and snitches and biased judges with grievances. Friend though he’d been, and a good one, there was no denying the fact that Evan Riggs was more than likely a killer, regardless of his amnesia. Evidence said he’d beaten a man to death with his bare hands in a motel in Austin, and whatever that man might have been guilty of, it had not been Evan Riggs’s job to take his life. Simply stated, and if guilt was assumed, Evan Riggs should have gone to the chair.

  “You heard it?” Clarence asked.

  “Many times,” Henry replied. “Had it before I went to Reeves.”

  “I played it last night after I got back from the saloon. Hell of a singer. Some of it ain’t even in tune, but it still makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Outlaw music, I guess.”

  “I guess.”

  “You want some coffee?”

  “If you’re havin’ some, sure.”

  “Tastes like raccoon piss and vinegar.”

  “Just the way I like it.”

  Clarence went out back to the kitchen, returned with cups.

  He was right: the coffee was awful, but it didn’t seem to matter.

  “So, I don’t know what you think I can do to help you, son,” Clarence said.

  “I don’t know either.”

  “What’s the story here? I mean, really … what you doin’ this for?”

  “Evan stopped me from getting killed,” Henry said. “Not that anyone was trying to kill me, specifically, but jail has its own territories, you know? Put a bunch of men someplace, no matter how small, and they all want a piece of it. Instinct, I guess. Anyway, someone upset someone. I don’t even know what it was about. But in a place like that, everything gets blown out of proportion. Use a man’s soap, and he’s gonna take it as an insult to him, his family, his whole world. So one guy wants some other guy dead, and he buys an opportunity by staging a riot. The wardens are occupied on one side of the prison block, some guy gets stabbed on the other, and no one saw anything. I just happened to be on the wrong side of the block. I sort of wandered into the middle of it. There were two or three guys with knives, some other guy on his hands and knees with a hole in his neck, blood everywhere, a hell of a scene, and they took me for his buddy. They came after me and I got myself sliced. Evan came from nowhere, floored one of them, threw me over his shoulder and ran. Got me into the infirmary before I bled out. Place like Reeves, the wardens’d just as easily let you bleed out as go to the trouble of fixin’ you up. A dead man is a man you ain’t gotta feed. And that was that. And aside from him being responsible for me still being here, I guess I feel a certain kinship with the man. Live with someone for three years in a room that size, well, you either get on or move out. We got on just fine, talked a lot about music. Evan is the kind of man who doesn’t say a great deal, but when he does say something, it’s worth listening to.”

  “Just can’t imagine how it’d be to know you’ll never be out of there,” Clarence said. “He was a young man when that happened, war hero, up-and-coming music star an’ all, but a drunk. That was no secret. And he was a bad drunk, I guess. Otherwise what happened would never have happened.”

  “You think he really did it? Killed that man?”

  Clarence shook his head. “I don’t know, son,” he replied. “One thing that life has taught me is that people are capable of all manner of things you’d never expect. No one’s a killer until they kill someone, and from what I understand, he killed a good many in the war.”

  “But surely war is different—”

  “Sure it is, but it’s still gotta change a man, hasn’t it? Even if you shoot someone from three hundred yards away, you’ve still taken someone’s life. That’s gotta do something to your viewpoint.”

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “So what’s your story, Henry Quinn? Aside from this thing with Evan’s vanished daughter?”

  “My story? I don’t have one.”

  “Sure you do,” Clarence said, smiling. “Everyone has a story. Everyone has a dream, even a little one. I mean, say you find her tomorrow. Say you track this mysterious girl down and deliver whatever message Evan gave you for her, then what? Where do you go from here?”

  “Back home to San Angelo. Have a mother there. She’s not doing so good. Drinks too much, hangs out with people who ain’t so good for her, far as I can tell. I have a responsibility there. Beyond that, I want to start writing music again. I have a holding contract with a record company in Abilene, same company Evan recorded with, coincidentally. Still owe them five hundred bucks, and that’s something that’ll need sorting out sooner or later.”

  “So whatever’s going on with your ma and your
own life is all on hold until you find Evan’s girl.”

  “Yep, it seems that way.”

  “That’s some promise you made.”

  “Gave my word.”

  “And you think I know something?”

  “Well, Carson Riggs would be my first choice. However, I get the idea he’s not so interested in helping me.”

  “You got that right.”

  “So what did happen between them? Why so much animosity?”

  Clarence smiled ruefully. “Always the same reasons, son. Money or a woman. In this case, both. I don’t know details, but rumor has it that they were both after the same girl, that and the fact that Carson wanted to sell the land for oil rights, and he got involved with people he shouldn’t have while Evan was away. And then there was the father’s death. Strange circumstance. Folks sayin’ that it was not what it appeared to be, that a cloud of uncertainty still stands over it. I say more often than not that things are exactly what they appear to be, but what the hell do I know?”

  “But if you don’t know what happened and Carson won’t talk to me, then what do I do to find this girl?”

  “My advice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Drop it like a hot stone, Henry Quinn. Really, seriously, no bullshit. If Carson Riggs don’t want her found, then you ain’t gonna find her. And if he don’t want her found, there’s a reason. Maybe it’s spite, maybe nothing more than another way to get back at Evan, but if I were you, I would let it go. Can only lead to the kind of trouble you don’t want.”

  “But I promised—”

  “Man makes a promise when he gets married. ’Til death do us part. But what happens if she turns out to be a drunk and a philanderer? Does that mean he’s gotta keep that promise? I don’t think it does. Circumstances change. People change, too. You made a promise in good faith, but you were unaware of the reality out here. You also gotta ask yourself whether the girl really wants to be found.”

  “Sheriff Riggs said the same thing.”

  “Maybe he’s got a point.”

  “Maybe he has, but I feel like I haven’t even started in on this yet. I’m here, sure, but have I really made any great effort to find her? No, not yet. I can contact the adoption people in Eldorado or San Angelo. If not there, then there will be records in San Antonio or Austin or someplace. People don’t just get adopted and vanish without a trace. There has to be a way to find her.”

  “And your mind is set on it?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Well, I can’t help you,” Clarence said. “Not because I’m unwilling, but because I just don’t know anything.”

  “I appreciate your time, nevertheless.”

  “Not at all. Now, do you want some more coffee before you go?”

  Henry smiled. “I’ll take a rain check. No offense, Mr. Ames, but I have to say it really is the worst coffee I ever tasted. The stuff they gave us at Reeves was better than this, and I think that came off the packing-room floor.”

  “Well, I’ll take that as a compliment, son,” Clarence said, smiling.

  They shook hands on the porch. Henry drove away. Clarence Ames stood there for a moment and then sighed audibly. He headed back into the house and made a call.

  “Sheriff Riggs there?”

  Clarence waited while Riggs was fetched.

  “Carson. Clarence here. He came down, asked a few questions.”

  Clarence listened.

  “Like you said, not a word. Must say he has a mind to get under this thing, whatever this thing is.”

  Clarence closed his eyes for a moment.

  “I know, Carson. I know. Leave it be, okay? We all know what you want, and we don’t even want to know why. You do whatever you have to do. It’s none of my business.”

  Clarence Ames didn’t wait for a response. He hung up the phone and stood there for quite some time without moving.

  And when he did move, it was back to the kitchen. He half filled his cup with bad coffee and then reached down for a bottle of bourbon and filled his cup to the rim.

  Back in the front room, he paused to look at the picture of Evan Riggs on The Whiskey Poet.

  “Why d’you have to send him down here, Evan?” he asked the picture. “Why couldn’t you just leave it all alone?”

  NINETEEN

  By Christmas of 1945, Evan Riggs knew he could stay no longer. Calvary had become a different place. Even his home was a different place, and there was a dimmed light in his father’s eyes that made it clear a fight was not going to happen. At some point William Riggs had decided that Carson as sheriff was a good thing, and now the decision was made, he would not change his mind. He all-too-clearly remembered the sense of nothing he’d felt when Carson was born. Now he could redress the balance. Acknowledge Evan’s musical aspirations though he did, his support for Carson was both vocal and unvarying.

  “I know you have to go,” Grace told her younger son. “Even when you’re here, you’re always leaving, if not physically, then spiritually. I see it in you, the gypsy blood.”

  “Same gypsies that left me on the porch,” Evan said, smiling.

  “Spent all these years waiting for them to return so I can give you back, but have they sent word? Hell, no. Nothing so much as a postcard.”

  “I’m worried about Carson,” Evan said. “I was speaking to Clarence Ames, Doc Sperling, some of the others. They seem scared of him, like he’s railroading them into this oil business.”

  “Carson is headstrong. He’ll settle down.”

  “I think Pa is being too easy about this. I think he needs to tell Carson that the farm is staying a farm.”

  “And when me and William are gone, what then? You gonna come back and take care of it all?”

  “You both have a lot of years ahead of you, Ma. You’re gonna be here for a long time. Pa isn’t even fifty.”

  “I know. It’s not a matter we have to deal with right now, and we’re going to keep this place on for as long as we can. Your father has absolutely no intention of turning it over to the oil people.”

  “It wouldn’t be right,” Evan said. “Everything doesn’t have to be about money.”

  “It’s a good sentiment,” Grace said, “but there’s not many folk who have it.”

  “I would stay and fight with him, but I am not—”

  Grace touched Evan’s arm. “Evan … you don’t need to tell me who you are. I know exactly who you are.” She smiled, and there was nothing but love and empathy in her eyes. “And even though your father might not find it easy to say, he also understands why you’ll never be a West Texas farmer. Only kind of man who can do that has to be more stubborn than the dirt and the weather in this godforsaken place, and your father can be that stubborn, believe me.”

  “I’ll stay through Christmas,” Evan said, “and then I’m heading for San Antonio. That’s the plan.”

  “You never made a plan in your life, Evan Riggs,” Grace said. “And I wouldn’t start now.”

  Evan did stay through Christmas, January, too, and in early February of 1946, he packed what little he possessed into a beat-to-hell station wagon and said his goodbyes.

  William Riggs shook his younger son’s hand and told him to watch out for three things: women, cards, and liquor. “First will break your heart, second your wallet, third your spirit,” he said out of Grace’s earshot. “You get involved with them country-singin’ fellas, they’re gonna have drugs and whiskey and women all around them. You got a square head on your shoulders when it suits you, so you know what I’m sayin’.”

  “I’m gonna be fine, Pa.”

  “Famous last words, son. That and ‘It’ll come out right in the end.’ Sometimes it doesn’t.”

  “I know where to come if I get into trouble.”

  “You do,” William said. “Home is home, even when you don’t live there no more.”

  Grace was quiet and tearful. She held him close and didn’t want to let go. She wondered if the abiding memory of her life would be that
of farewells with Evan. Eventually he whispered something to her and she released him.

  “What did you say to her?” his father asked.

  “Told her that I survived a war. I can survive San Antonio and whatever else might happen.”

  “You gonna go see your brother?”

  “Sure I am.”

  “I told him you were heading out today. He said that he still had a job to do, that you could come find him at the Sheriff’s Office. Said if he wasn’t there, he wouldn’t be far.”

  “I’ll find him.”

  “Don’t rile him, okay?”

  Evan frowned.

  “Don’t act dumb, Evan. You know how wound up he can get around you. You were always smarter, and he doesn’t care that people know it. If you’re gonna part company, then do it civil and pleasant. Don’t leave on bad terms with your brother.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Give me your word, Evan.”

  “I give you my word, Pa.”

  “Okay, now git, ’fore your mother starts weepin’ and all that theatrical business.”

  Carson was at the Sheriff’s Office. Evan could still not get used to him in uniform. It seemed anomalous.

  “So you’re outta here, then,” Carson said.

  “I am.”

  “Think you’re on a fast road to nowhere, Evan, but that’s the last time I’m gonna say it.”

  “I know what you think, Carson. I know we don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things, but we ain’t ever been enemies and there’s no reason to start now.”

  “No intention of bein’ your enemy, Evan. Just think this game you’re playin’ ain’t worth a hill o’ beans.”

  Evan didn’t respond. Carson was winding and Evan wasn’t going to snap. It wasn’t worth it, and he’d given his word to their father.

  “So, San Antonio, is it?”

  “Yep.”

  “Safe journey, little brother.”

  Evan extended his hand. Carson hesitated, and then he grinned like a fool.