by Brett Riley
Or yours. That Comanche runnin with the Piney Woods Kid was a Redheart.
My ancestor was an outlaw, but he wasn’t no blasphemer like yours.
Roark laughed. Back then it wasn’t called blasphemy. They called it frontier justice. Red Thornapple’s gonna write an article about it for the Warrior-Tribune. We’ll hang a copy on our wall. Make it part of the place’s ambience.
Redheart shook his head. Ambience. Well, it’s your money. But me and Silky ain’t goin in that shed.
After Redheart left, Roark turned back to the depot. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. It’ll be nice to have a place of our own where we can eat a bite and drink coffee with our friends after we retire. Maybe Rennie and me can talk Will into workin here on weekends. Get his hands dirty before college. Who knew? The boy might even want to run the place one day.
C.W. started toward his truck as the wind kicked up, blowing grit from the yard.
Near the old storage building, the air shimmered for a moment, like heat wafting off a summer highway. Then the shimmer faded, and everything lay in shadow. Somewhere nearby, the first cricket chirped.
Chapter Four
October 7, 2014—New Orleans, Louisiana
Rennie Roark sobbed. The sound seemed to imbue Darrell LeBlanc’s Samsung with physical weight. He had just told her that Raymond had refused professional help again. It had been about eighteen months since her brother had admitted his drinking problem, but in that time, he had fallen off the wagon twice. Whenever LeBlanc found Raymond unconscious under the tree or face down on the floor or slumped over the toilet, the agency had to close while they played cards or checkers or watched television cooking competitions. Raymond shook and trembled and groaned and sometimes upset the board or threw the remote at LeBlanc’s head and dashed for his car, intending to find the nearest liquor store and drink himself into a stupor. LeBlanc tackled him, fought him hand to hand, and sat on his chest until the fit passed. Today Raymond slept in his easy chair, an old episode of Gilligan’s Island on TV, as LeBlanc gave Rennie the details. She wept and offered to fly out and beat Raymond’s ass like their momma should have done. LeBlanc told her it would be all right.
When they hung up, Raymond still slept, his brow furrowed, his nails digging in to the armrests. He was coming to the worst of it again. LeBlanc might be forced to restrain him, which could technically be called kidnapping. That, or try to have him committed.
No. Underneath his grief, he’s still strong. I hope.
LeBlanc sat on the couch, the springs creaking under his six-foot-three, 260-pound defensive end’s muscular frame, and changed the channel to ESPN. Soon a game of some sort would come on, and for as long as Raymond slept, he would watch a lower-stakes contest play out according to a set of defined rules and a clear time limit, a moment in which everyone would know it was over and who had won.
In the easy chair, Raymond twitched and groaned, his unkempt dark hair sweaty and plastered to his forehead. He was probably six inches shorter than LeBlanc but only thirty pounds lighter. The booze had gone to his belly, which distended over his belt. A graying, three-day, patchy beard covered his sallow cheeks and chin. Hard living made you old. Nightmares did not help either.
The dream never changed. Raymond tried to save Marie. He failed.
Marie had been driving on the Mississippi River bridge in Baton Rouge when a truck tried to change lanes and clipped her rear bumper. She spun and crashed into the railing, the grille crumpling all the way into the back seat, crushing her. The truck had never been found, and for a long time, Raymond wept and thought about the vanished vehicle and its faceless operator and drank himself to sleep. It was as if God himself had plucked the driver and the truck off the earth. Witnesses could not even agree on whether the truck had been maroon or navy blue or black, brand-new or an early ’90s model. Raymond had no one to punch, no one to shoot, so he dove into every bottle of booze he could find. He took cabs to Armstrong Park at 2 in the morning and sat against the statues, watching the ebb and flow of forgotten people with no place else to go. Friends told him it was just a matter of time before he joined Marie in the family mausoleum.
Well, yeah, he thought. That’s the point.
Still, no matter how blackout drunk he got, the dream visited him at least three times a week. In it, he stood on the bridge as traffic zipped by. He leaned against the railing, the same one that would drive the engine block through Marie’s abdomen. The winter wind screamed off the water. The night sky was pitch black. When Marie’s Pontiac shimmered into view, Raymond recognized the truck that would kill her, even though it was never the same one—sometimes a Ford, sometimes a Chevy, sometimes an amorphous blob. He tried to warn her, but nothing ever worked. His feet were lead, fused to the bridge, and his arms might have weighed three tons each. His voice disappeared, too. No matter how he tried to shout, nothing came out except a shrill whine.
Tonight, as he stood on the dream bridge again, Marie’s car appeared just as the truck, dark green this time, struck it. She spun and careened straight for Raymond, her face floating above the steering wheel. Just as she was about to run him down, she opened her mouth and said, Ray.
When he jerked forward, awake and roaring, tears on his face, LeBlanc had already reached him. The big man gave him a bottle of water and rubbed his shoulders and held him as he wept, until he fell asleep again.
A week later, after Raymond returned to work, he studied some financial documents at his desk. LeBlanc goofed around on the computer. It was nearing five o’clock. They would have to grab dinner soon, or LeBlanc might start eating the drywall.
Raymond dropped the papers on his desk and sighed, rubbing his bleary eyes.
I can’t look at this shit anymore, he said.
LeBlanc did not look up. You called Rennie lately?
Raymond stood up and stretched. Not since the last time you made me.
Reckon you better in the next day or two.
She’s still callin you.
Don’t get mad. She’s worried.
That’s an understatement. She’s been scared half to death. I reckon C.W.’s gonna punch me in the nose the next time I see him.
Raymond and his brother-in-law used to call each other twice a week. They fished the Louisiana waters and Texas rivers and ponds, hunted squirrel and duck and deer, made idiotic wagers every time the Saints played the Cowboys—loser must dye his hair the winner’s team colors for a week—that sort of nonsense. But once Raymond’s drinking spiraled out of control and Rennie cried herself to sleep enough times, Roark’s phone calls ceased. The few times he answered the phone, his responses were curt, bordering on hostile, and when Rennie came to the phone, she sounded tense.
I need to check my email one more time, LeBlanc said.
Do it on your phone, Raymond said. I got a hankerin for a catfish po’ boy. I’m buyin.
LeBlanc grinned. He shut down the computer and stood up. Now you’re talkin my language. I could eat a horse.
Chapter Five
May 8, 2015—Comanche, Texas
Morlon Redheart finally seemed happy. He’s sick of landscapin, C.W. Roark thought, and Silky’s gettin too old to drag pallets around Brookshire’s. They need this. The contractors had installed the new front walk and lights and windows and an alarm system but left the depot’s more picturesque scrapes and dings alone. They laid a small concrete parking lot but didn’t bother with a light pole. The ambient light from Austin Street would suffice.
As the renovations progressed, Roark sometimes stopped on Austin and watched, leaning against his truck with his arms and ankles crossed. Gotta make sure Red gets a good picture when it’s finally time to run his article. The newspaperman had decided to make it part of a group. Other photos would show Old Cora—the authentic frontier cabin that had served as the original county courthouse and now squatted on the town square as if a bored god had sco
oped it out of the past and dropped it in the twenty-first century—and the Fleming Oak, the old gnarled tree in which a white boy had once hidden from a Comanche attack. Tourists eat that kind of shit for breakfast, especially the ones who think every town west of the Mississippi used to be like Dodge City or Tombstone.
As for the outbuilding, they installed no extra lights and protected it with only a padlock. Why bother with much else, when the best any thieves could hope for might be a big can of corn or a broken stool? Morlon had ordered the workers to toss all the old shit into the courtyard, where he stuffed smaller items into trash bags, larger ones into the bed of his pickup. He planned to haul it all to the dump.
One day, Roark stopped by as Morlon was dropping half a dozen pewter plates into a Hefty.
Hang on, the Mayor said. He pulled out the plates and then dug through the bag. He found a few more dishes, a set of tarnished forks and knives, a pair of busted cowboy boots, and a gun belt that looked older than Moses. Both the boots and the belt were stained with what might have been mud a century old. Roark spread these items on the ground. You find any other stuff like this?
Nope, Redheart said. Just trash.
Get somebody to clean these up, the mayor said, indicating the dishes and cutlery. Maybe we can hang ’em around the diner. Give the place more authenticity.
What about that cowboy shit?
When Roark picked up the boots and gun belt, he shivered. His arms broke into gooseflesh despite the heat. He dropped the junk and wiped his hands on his pants. Felt like stickin my hand into ice water. Maybe I’m comin down with somethin.
Redheart raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
Just put ’em back on a shelf, Roark said. I’ll figure out a place for ’em.
Redheart shrugged and resumed loading trash.
Roark left. Tomorrow, I’ll call around and see if anybody works on leather that old.
The next day, however, meetings took up most of his time. When he got home that night, he was exhausted, and he had forgotten all about the boots and belt.
After the building passed inspection, Roark announced the grand opening of the Depot Diner. It seated about as many people as your average Waffle House and served authentic Texas and Mexican cuisine, from family-recipe posole to Americanized dishes like chili cheeseburgers. The mayor and his family attended opening night, as did every Comanche bigwig Roark could beg, harass, or threaten. By the time these people brought their friends and neighbors, cars and pickups filled the parking area and the grass lot, with many more lining both sides of Austin Street. Patrons stood on the walk or sat on the new backless benches as they slapped mosquitoes, bullshitted, and waited for their tables.
No one paid any attention to the wind that sometimes kicked up when certain townsfolk stepped onto the depot grounds. And if the patrons noticed the way the air shimmered near the storage building, none of them spoke of it.
Chapter Six
May 23, 2016—New Orleans, Louisiana
Raymond sat on his front porch, watching the oak’s shadow stretch its bony fingers across the yard. He held a glass of sweet tea in his lap, the condensation dampening his trousers. These days, he drank enough tea to make him diabetic, as if water or Coca-Cola would cast him back to rock bottom as effectively as straight whiskey. Those drunken months had probably damaged his liver, and all this sugar could not be good for his kidneys. Would it always be like this—exchanging one addiction for another, one kind of harm for something just as bad?
He had left LeBlanc in the office around three. They had just finished one of those divorce jobs that made Raymond feel like a piece of shit in a broken-down outhouse, and now he badly wanted a whiskey, a beer, anything to dull the knife edge in his brain.
The wife had hired the agency to follow her husband, who led them to a motel on I-10. This fellow went inside one of the rooms and exited an hour later, his clothes disheveled. Raymond snapped some photos and stayed put, keeping his camera trained on the door. Ten minutes later, the man’s companion left, running her fingers through her hair and adjusting her bra straps. She could not have been more than fifteen. Raymond took more pictures as she descended the concrete-and-metal staircase and passed under the breezeway, out of Raymond’s sight, out of his life. Ever since, he had felt dirty just for having been there, for not trying to save that girl from whatever life she led. Even Travis Bickle had done more than watch. But saving her had not been the job. Besides, who was he to fix anybody else’s life? Hopefully, the wife would use the pictures to take everything that son of a bitch had, maybe put him in jail for statutory rape, where he would find out firsthand what it was like to be used.
On such days, Raymond ached for Marie so deeply it felt like illness. In the old days, whenever he came home feeling slimy, he took off his shoes, cracked his toes, and stretched out on the couch, his head in her lap. If she asked him about the job, he told her. If she did not, he just closed his eyes as her fingers worked his temples, his sinuses. The tension and filth drained away. Sometimes he would drift off to sleep for twenty minutes or half an hour. When he awoke, he saw her face, and if that could not make him feel better, nothing would.
But now she was gone.
Take a real vacation, LeBlanc kept saying. Get outta the city. Go fishin. Take some long naps. You want me to come with?
That sounded good, but if he walked away for even a week, he might never come back. He might find a shack on the beach or a cabin near a lake and let the world pass him by. He was not ready for that.
What was Betsy McDowell up to these days? Her charms, like Marie’s, made the world seem lighter.
LeBlanc had reintroduced them back in the summer of 2013. Expecting a flighty, annoying fraud, Raymond found her both charming and capable. She had consulted on six or eight cases since then and often stopped by the offices to shoot the shit. While her histrionics resembled every other medium’s he had ever seen—the trancelike state, the muttering of information just specific enough to hook you, head lolling, eyes that shut tight or opened wide and refused to blink—he had never felt like she played anyone false. In fact, as far as he could tell, she was genuinely uninterested in money. Her presence made people feel better, just as LeBlanc had said.
Plus, there was the way LeBlanc looked at her when he thought she was not looking back. If Raymond had any right to give advice, he would have told LeBlanc to stop wasting time. Life was short.
Reckon I ought to call Rennie tonight. But not until after supper. I don’t want to get yelled at on an empty stomach. Hell, maybe I’ll even cook.
That last part was a lie. He kept very little food in the house these days. It gave him a reason to leave. Otherwise, he would stay here, alone with his pain and his guilt, and one night he would find a bottle in his hand. Better to leave and come back only when exhausted enough to fall straight into bed. Somebody else could make the gumbo or the stuffed red snapper.
He sighed and took a drink. His crotch was freezing. Soon enough, the sun would go down, and then he would have to fill the long evening.
Chapter Seven
July 4, 2016, 7 p.m.—Comanche, Texas
Red Thornapple—owner, editor in chief, publisher, and staff writer for Comanche’s local paper, the Warrior-Tribune—set in motion the events leading to the first death. In prepping his long-promised article about the Piney Woods Kid and the local descendants of the men who killed him, Thornapple had researched the outlaw, dug in to old family documents, and used an online ancestry program to create family trees. At least one direct descendant of each man who had handled the Kid’s body still lived in town. The McCorkles and Johnstones had left Comanche in the early 1900s, but one of them came back and planted seeds in the town’s soil—the McCorkles in the fifties, the Johnstones in the midseventies. For every other family on the list, some members had moved on—as close as Stephenville and Granbury, as far away as Fargo, North Dakota—but s
omeone had stayed. A small miracle.
Roark had asked for a picture and a fluff piece about the diner, but Thornapple smelled a real story—a historical think piece about how these families had been tied together through violent Old West justice. It took quite a bit of effort to gather the descendants together, especially when you had to get the mayor in the same room, at the same time, with a long-haul trucker and a shift worker like Benny Harveston. In fact, it had proved impossible. Thornapple found a day when everyone but Harveston could make it, and he scheduled the interview for that evening—the Fourth of July. Harveston sent his daughter, Lorena, in his place.
Everyone arrived around 7 p.m.—Thornapple, the Harveston girl, Mayor Roark, Sue McCorkle, Adam Garner, John Wayne and his wife, Pat, and Joyce Johnstone. The town no longer provided a fireworks display, so there was nothing to see in the sky except the occasional arc of someone’s Roman candle or bottle rocket. Inside the diner, the jukebox played classic country and country pop. McCorkle flirted with the men, while Garner and Wayne, old high-school friends, spent half their time arm wrestling or laughing at each other’s jokes. Joyce Johnstone sat near Thornapple, answering questions with grace and humor. He returned to her over and over and ignored some of the others, like Sue McCorkle, too often.
John Wayne showed genuine interest in their shared history. The mayor seemed bored.
In the following days, though, Thornapple would mostly remember Lorena Harveston, who was not even supposed to be there.
It started with a question he asked her just after Garner and Wayne recounted several amusing but useless stories about their days playing football for Comanche High, their nights prowling the back roads with a bootlegged case of beer, and their literal pissing contests. Thornapple laughed and pretended to take notes. Then, as Wayne turned to the mayor and began a lecture on why the town should hire fewer Mexicans, Thornapple looked to Lorena Harveston and said, So. Tell your daddy we sure do wish he could have come.