Lone Star Noir

by Bobby Byrd

  He glanced up at the plaster Jesus nailed to the crucifix hung above the altar. If you were half of who they claim, he thought, none of this would be needed. Which pretty much concluded all the praying he could manage.

  He rose from his knees, let the weariness rearrange itself in his body, then ambled on out, murmuring “Thank you” to his friend as he passed, smiling at the girls who glanced up at him in giggling puzzlement or mousy fear. Orphans, he guessed, remembering what Jolt had said about the killing, knowing there were thousands of kids like this in every border town, their parents out in the desert somewhere, long dead. Some of the girls were lovely, most trended toward plain, a few were decidedly nun material. One among that last group—he couldn’t help himself, just the darkening track of his thoughts—reminded him of the Mexican’s tramp girlfriend, La Monita.

  He was halfway down the block, thinking supper might be in order, when his cell rang. A San Antonio number. He flipped the phone open. “Geno?”

  A gunshot barked through the static on the line. A muffled keening sob—a gagged man screaming—then grunts, a gasp, Geno came on the line. “Please, Chester, it’s just a box.” The voice shaky, faint, a hiss. “Buy yourself a new one. P-p-please?” Chester could hear spittle pop against the mouthpiece. The fact that it was Geno meant Skillet was dead. You don’t put the weak one on the line to make a point with the strong one. You kill the strong one so the weak one understands.

  He slowly closed the phone.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  He wandered the street for half an hour, dazed one minute, lit up with fury the next, settling finally into a state of bloodthirsty calm. In a juke joint off East Paisano he scored a pistol from the bartender, a Sig Sauer 9mm, stolen from a cop, the man bragged. In a gun shop nearby he bought two extra magazines and a box of hollow points, loaded the clips right there in the store, hands trembling from adrenaline. Feo’s gonna walk the border, he told himself, and the best place to do that is downtown, Stanton Street bridge. That’s where I gotta be.

  He walked toward the port of entry, found himself a spot to sit, lifting a paper from the litter bin for camouflage, spreading it out in his lap, the gun hidden just beneath. An hour passed, half of another, night fell, the lights came on. He sat still as a bullfrog, watchful, eyeing every walker trudging south into Mexico. And as he did the sense of the thing fell together, like a puzzle assembling itself in midair right before his eyes. If only that helped, he thought.

  A little after eight his cell phone rang again. He considered letting it go but then he checked the display, recognized the rectory number.

  “Jolt,” he said.

  Silence. “No one calls me that anymore.”

  “I just did.”

  “I want you to come back to the church.”

  “Not happening.”

  “What you’re thinking of doing is wrong.”

  “All I want’s Lorena. There’s others want him dead on principal. That’s why he’s running.”

  “He’ll be back.”

  “I suspect that’s true.”

  “Suspect? I know. He’s been in touch.”

  Chester shot up straight. A vein fluttered in his neck. “Feo.”

  “He wants to work a trade.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “No, you don’t understand. He can’t … Not what he’s asking. I won’t.”

  “The girl.”

  Another silence.

  “Chester …”

  “The one I saw in the church today. One who looks just like Rosa Sánchez.”

  “It’s just an accordion, Chester.”

  The rage blindsided him, a surge in his midriff like coiling fire. “Not to me. Not to my granddad.”

  “You can’t trade a child for a thing.”

  A thing? “Is it still a sin to chew the wafer, Dec? You know, because it really isn’t bread anymore. Something’s happened.”

  “Don’t talk like a fool.”

  “Says the man who turns wine into blood.”

  “Her name is Analinda. The girl, I mean.”

  Of course, Chester thought, knowing what the priest was up to. Give her a name, she turns precious. She’s alive. Like Lorena. “She’s his daughter.”

  “She’s her daughter.”

  “Point is, the girl’s what he wants, has been all along. Why? I have no clue. Killers are vain, kids are for show. It’s an itch, the daddy thing, comes and goes, maybe he felt a sudden need to scratch. The mother gave her away, spare her all that. So he paid me to write her a song, impress her, get her to ease up, forgive him, introduce him to his daughter. Then I went and screwed the pooch on that front, so—”

  “He has no right.”

  “Who are you to say?”

  “He’ll sell her.”

  “So offer him a price.”

  “You said it yourself, he’s a killer.”

  “He’s not alone in that. My granddad was a killer. Killed for you. Killed for me.”

  “Chester …”

  “God’s a killer. Put some heat under that one.”

  The priest, incredulous: “You want to argue theodicy?”

  “Not really.” He felt strangely detached all of a sudden, preternaturally so, tracking the walkers bobbing past. It was no longer in his hands. “I’m just passing the time, Jolt.”

  “I want you to come back to the church.”

  “And what exactly does that mean—argue the odyssey?”

  “Not the odyssey. Theodicy.”

  “I know,” he said. “Just messing with you.”

  He spotted it then, the hardshell case he knew so well, nicked and battered from the Italian campaign, a long whitish crease like a scar across the felt, left by the bullet from a Mauser 98 at Gallicano. The man carrying it walked hurriedly, face obscured by the hood of his sweatshirt. Chester felt no doubt. He flipped his phone closed, rose to his feet, and let the newspaper flutter down, tucking the pistol beneath his shirt. You’ve taken what belongs to me, he thought, what belongs to my family, the most precious thing we’ve ever owned. Two good men are dead because of you, not to mention the woman, the one you crowed over, said you loved. You deserve what’s coming. Deserve worse. I’m doing your daughter a favor. I’m bringing Lorena home.

  He chose his angle of intercept and started walking, not so fast as to draw attention but quick enough to get there, easing through some of the other walkers. From across the street, a second man appeared. Chester recognized him too, the shoulders, the bulldog face, that distinctive jarhead fade.

  Let it happen, he told himself, and it did.

  Feo caught sight of the ex-Marine, began to run but the accordion slowed him down. Drop it, Chester wanted to shout, but the Mexican wouldn’t let go and then the gunman was on him and the pistol was raised and two quick pops, killshots to the skull. Feo crumpled, people scattered. The killer fled.

  Blinking, Chester tucked the Sig in his pants, pulled his shirt over, moving the whole time, slow at first, cautious, then a jog, breaking into a run, till he was there at the edge of the pooling blood, the Mexican, the poacher, the Ugly One, lying still, just nerve flutters in the hands, the legs. Strange justice, Chester thought. The sickness at the bottom of the mind.

  He pried the case from the dead man’s fingers, gripped the handle, and began to run back toward downtown. Something wasn’t right. The weight was off-balance, wobbly, wrong. He stopped, knelt, tore at the clasps, lifted the lid. Staring back at him from a bed of sheet music, the eyes shiny like polished bone, was the severed head of Rosa Sánchez.

  Some time later—hours? days?—he found himself propped on a cantina barstool, a shot of mezcal in his fist, a dozen empties scattered before him, splashes of overfill dampening the bar’s pitted wood, a crowd of nameless men his newfound friends, all of them listening with that singular Mexican lust for heartbreak as he recited the tale of La Monita and Feo, told them of Geno and Skillet, confessed in a whisper his unholy love for Lorena. Time blurred i
nto nothingness, he felt himself blurring as well, just another teardrop in the river of dreams, and he wondered what strange genius had possessed him, guiding him to this place, over the bridge from El Paso to Ciudad Juárez, the murder capital of the planet. Nor would he recall how or when he crossed that other bridge, the one between lonely and alone, but it would carry him farther than the other, days drifting into weeks, weeks dissolving into months then years, more cantinas, more mezcal, till life as he’d known it became a whisper in the back of his mind and the man named Chester Richard drifted away like a tuneless song.

  The ghost in the mirror of the bus terminal washroom, rinsing out his armpits, brushing his teeth with a finger, hair wild as an outcrop of desert scrub, sooner or later shambled off to the next string of lights across a doorway, entered and plopped himself down, crooning his garbled tales of love and murder and music, then begging a drink, told to get out by the owner, indulged by the angry man’s wife, exiled to a corner with a glass of tejuino—no mezcal for a gorrón—and he’d wait for the musicians to appear, assembling themselves on the tiny bandstand like clowns in a skit, until once, in that endless maze of nights, a boy of ten shouldered on his accordion in the smoky dimness, and the nameless drunk criollo glanced up from his corner to see the seasoned mahogany dark as cane syrup, the pearl inlays, the purple heart accents, the buttons of polished bone, and with the first sigh of the kidskin bellows came that deep unmistakable throbbing tremolo, and he felt his heart crack open like an egg, knowing at last he was free.

  SIX DEAD CABBIES

  BY TIM TINGLE

  Ellington AFB

  Fifty years later, the image will not leave me alone. Six cab drivers, their throats sliced from behind, left slumped and twitching in the front seat, while a gaunt man with a bum knee wipes blood from his switchblade to his jeans and walks ten miles to his car, parked in the lot of the Officers’ Club at Ellington Air Force Base, southeast of Houston. He limps through the security gate to his waiting car, pulling his jacket collar high and nodding to the guards.

  “Another fight with the old lady?” yells a guard.

  Just a nod in reply.

  “Man, I hope she’s worth it. Making you walk at four in the morning.”

  A shrug. Nothing more. Laughter from the guards.

  “Don’t ever tell anybody more than absolutely necessary to get what you need.” If Denny said it once, he said it a dozen times. “Too many words will cost you.”

  Too many words. 1966, summer of. I was working as a busboy at Ellington Air Force Base, senior year of high school coming up. I was doing okay, too. After a month I got promoted to Head Salad Maker, an illustrious title worth fifteen more cents an hour, the price of a gallon of regular. But the promotion meant a stylistic change that came as a sweet surprise. I became part of the kitchen crew, who made no pretense at cleanliness and courtesy, like waitresses and busboys had to. Nope, if you felt it coming, no need to stifle, not in the kitchen.

  Burns and yelps and cussing out loud, grease-splattered sleeves and aprons and bumping into each other ten times a night, stolen minutes with cigarettes in the cinder-block men’s dressing room—nobody would think of wearing real clothes in this kitchen, only the white pants and shirts provided by the management—while jokes and dirt of every sort came flowing from the kitchen and spilling out the back door onto the employee parking lot.

  Where Denny waited.

  “I’m dating one-uh the waitresses at the Officers’ Club.” That always got him in the gate. No one even asked who, but he wouldn’t have minded telling ’em Sherry if he had to. She was a good-looker all right, a real sexy woman.

  Sherry started glancing at the back door usually around one a.m., squinting through the screen for her skinny, limplegged beau. What she saw in him nobody could guess. He had a scary glint in his eye. We closed at two.

  “You gonna stay up past your bedtime again tonight?” came the first round of catcalls from the cooks.

  “Not Sherry, Sherry baby,” said another. “She always knows when it’s bedtime.”

  Sherry disappeared with entrees for four, through the swinging double doors to the thick maroon carpet and chandeliered dining hall, where astronauts brought their wives and officers sported formal dress attire. Different world. Twenty-piece orchestra playing “Strangers in the Night” and even early Beatles songs …

  Michelle, ma belle,

  These are words that go together well,

  My Michelle

  … sometimes with a crooner, mostly instrumental. Men drank whiskey and women stirred swizzle sticks in fruity drinks or rum and cola, till everyone shed the skin of daytime sufficiently and eased into the star-spangled night. Then lights came up, the show was over, and busboys split tips with the waitresses. Eighty-twenty, advantage waitress. That was the deal.

  On nights when Denny waited, Sherry would go fifty-fifty if her busboy did her cleanup work and let her leave early. You’d have to be nuts not to go for a deal like that. Made me want to be a busboy again, all those crisp dollar bills changing hands.

  Till one Saturday night, early. Cooks and kitchen help, the night shift, were getting dressed when Sherry walks into the men’s room, flips her Camel ashes, and says, “If Denny comes to the back door tonight, tell him I am not going out with him, ever again.”

  “Why don’t you tell him?”

  “I did tell him, last night. But he won’t give up. He’ll be back. Lemme know when he comes, and don’t give him the time of day. Just tell him to leave me alone.”

  “You got it, sis,” we all of us agree.

  As soon as she was gone, the speculating starts.

  “Man, whatever Denny did, he messed up this time.”

  “Yeah, and she was in LOVE with that skinny fool.”

  “Not no more.”

  “Un-uh. Gonna be cold day in hell ’fore she sees him again.”

  “Maybe some other leg went limp.” Hoots and laughter, especially from the black cooks, and a buskid buddy, Eddie, asked me later, “So did Denny hurt his other knee?”

  “Whatever happened, she better off for it. That Chevy he drives ’bout to fall apart.”

  “You right about that. Giddy-yap, giddy-yap, 409.”

  “Giddy-yap to the junkyard.”

  Everybody laughs, and ten minutes later no one gives a second thought to the demise of Denny and Sherry.

  Including Denny. He had other plans, though for the next week he appeared, as expected, at the back door of the Officer’s Club, his figurative hat in hand. “Would you mind telling Sherry I’m here?”

  “She don’t want to see you no more,” said whichever cook was out back smoking.

  “If you’d just let her know, I’ll wait here for a while, in case she changes her mind.” Denny wasn’t so good at kicking the dirt and sighing regretfully, but he did the best he could, and since none of the cooks were so good at detecting guile, everybody seemed to buy the fact that Denny was pining and Sherry was holding her ground.

  First indication otherwise came a few days after the breakup, when I snatched a half-full margarita glass from a bus tray and dashed to the men’s room. I was just about to push the door open when the screen door banged and I saw Denny standing there. “Have a cigarette, kid,” he said, tossing me a pack of Marlboros.

  “I don’t smoke.” I tossed them back.

  “Have it your way,” he smirked, then flicked his lighter, cupped his hand, and leaned into the flame. “Enjoy your drink.” He had to see the panic on my face.

  “Look, Denny, don’t tell anybody about me drinking, please.”

  “Kid. Do I look like some kinda snitch? Your secret’s safe, no worries.”

  “Thanks.” I stepped in the men’s room and downed the drink. On my way out, he was still there.

  “How old are you, kid?”

  “Fifteen, be sixteen in November.”

  “Too young for beer.”

  “Too young to buy it, maybe,” I told him.

  “But no
t too young to drink?”

  “Nope.”

  “That’s good, kid. ’Cause I’m up for a few beers tonight. Maybe let the other boys know. You spring for the bucks, I spring for the ID.”

  Simple as that. Saturday was a great night for tips, and Denny found four takers, myself and three busboys—Eddie Serge, Bobby Haney, and Charles Savell. Ready for kicks. We pooled our tips, gave Denny six bucks, and he had a case of Lone Stars iced down in a brand-new cooler by the time we finished our clean-up work.

  “New cooler? You buy that?” Charles asked.

  “Yeah, kid. I bought it with this,” he said, tapping his head with the tip of his longneck. We let it go at that, but an hour later, when we passed a snatch ’n grab, as my old man always called a convenience store, Bobby said, “Denny, man, pull over. I need some smokes.”

  “Not here,” said Denny. “That’s where I got the cooler. No reason to risk it.”

  “Huh?”

  “I done told you. I used my head. Paid for the beer like a good little boy, then asked the man where the john was. After I finished, I told him the toilet was overflowing. He ran to check, and I grabbed the cooler from a stack on the sidewalk.”

  Denny drove another two blocks, to the Gulf Freeway feeder road, and we piled out for cigarettes and chips. Denny grabbed me by the shoulder before I could enter the store.

  “Okay. You seem to be the smart one here. So listen up. Never leave the car, unless we staying for a few hours, then you park away from the place. Get it?” I nodded. “If we here for a quick stop, keep the engine running. Better yet, back into the space. If we need to leave in a hurry, no problem, we do it.”

  He tossed me the keys, and I started the car. Ten minutes later, he dropped a bag of Fritos in my lap and slid in beside me. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”