by Anthology
Somehow Leona didn’t think they’d trouble her.
There was a railway station in town, and she thought the first train came about sunrise. She’d be on it, no matter where it was headed.
She cradled the burlap sack in her arms, and started to sing to herself as she walked into the warm Hallowe’en night, away from Miss Mamie’s, never looking back.
THE GUNNER’S LOVE SONG
Joe McKinney
For Manly Wade Wellman
Sheriff John Morison was a big man, six-three and two hundred and sixty pounds in his boots, slack-brimmed Stetson cowboy hat, and chocolate brown suit. He had a strong, proud chin, a drooping, Teddy Roosevelt-style mustache, and sleepy, nut-colored eyes that had seen much and feared little. People around Sabine County said he’d come home from the Great War with his eyes like that - sleepy, yet with an intensity behind them that withered most men.
He was the only man from my youth with the stones to stand up to my Daddy when Daddy was on one of his benders, and growing up, I respected him, and even feared him, because of that power he seemed to have over other men.
And now, sitting in his office, a lazy metal fan turning on the windowsill with a steady clack, clack, clack, I had those eyes focused on me again.
Two days before I’d been in a hotel bar in New York City, sipping mint juleps with a lovely flaxen-haired gal from Iowa, the two of us enjoying my recent release from the Army, when I’d received a telegram from Morison telling me my cousin Mike had got himself into some serious trouble.
Now my cousin Mike has a problem. He stutters. People hear him talk and they think he’s retarded, which he ain’t. When the two of us were kids, folks took to calling him Machine Gun Mike. He hated it, and I hated hearing it.
Still, it was pretty accurate, far as nicknames go, because his stuttering makes him sound like he’s spitting bullets.
But when Morison told me why I’d just raced halfway across the country, I nearly laughed in his face.
War will do that to you. The giants of our youth become merely men, and sometimes even the objects of our pity.
“A girl?” I said, staring Morison square in the eye. “You called me back here because Mike is having trouble with a girl? Is that why you got him locked up?”
“That’s for his own protection.”
“From who?”
He held up both hands and patted the air like that was supposed to calm me down. “Let me explain,” he said.
“I bet it’ll be a riot,” I said.
And it was, too, because what he told me was a lunatic’s tale.
Recently, there’d been seven murders along County Road 153, the dirt road that winds north past my cousin’s house, into the pine forests of northern Louisiana, and from there to God knows where.
Mike and I had wandered that road many times in our youth, and I knew most of the folks who lived along it. They were all poor, just good old fashioned backwoods folks, their homes simple weather-beaten shacks that were even smaller and humbler than the little house Mike and I had shared with his Dad after my Daddy died. All seven victims had come from those simple folks, two men and five women.
The bodies had been chewed to pieces, like a pack of wild dogs had done it, and the whole county was up in a roar.
Armed men started patrolling the road at night—hard drinkers with rifles, most of them.
Two nights before my arrival, at the same time I was enjoying the company of my flaxen-haired Iowa nurse, those patrols had seen a large doglike thing skulking through Myrtle Ferguson’s back yard.
They shot it, and they saw it fall, but when they checked to see what it was they’d shot, all they found was the naked body of a young, black-haired woman named Rosalinda Villalobos.
“Now there were witnesses,” Morison assured me. “All those men swear up and down that what they shot was a dog. Or a wolf. Something like that.”
“They were drunk,” I said, unimpressed. “They made a mistake.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I thought of that. First thing, that’s what I thought. But you see, this Villalobos woman, she had a reputation.”
“What kind of reputation?”
He sighed. “People ‘round here claim she was a witch.”
“A witch?”
He nodded.
“I see.” I looked briefly at my fingernails, then back at Morison. In that moment I realized the number of sacred monuments from my youth had just been reduced by one. “Do you mind telling me what this has to do with Mike?”
“She’s the one Mike was involved with,” Morison said. “He was crazy in love with her, Tom. I mean crazy. You know the way some men get? Wild in the head.”
That floored me. My first instinct was that this girl had talked Mike into doing something illegal. It hadn’t even occurred to me to think of Mike falling in love. I guess even I hadn’t figured he had that kind of emotional sophistication. Not the Gunner.
But then the implications of what I was thinking hit me, and I was ashamed.
I lowered my voice. “Has he tried to hurt himself?” I asked.
“No, not yet.”
“So why did you put him in a cell?”
Morison looked down at his desk and pushed the blotter around, fidgeting with it. “Look, Tom, it’s like this. Folks ‘round here believed that woman was bad news. I don’t believe she was a witch any more than you do, but those people were terrified of her. Still are. After they killed her, they chucked her body in the peach orchard up near the start of the pines.”
I licked my teeth while I thought about that. The peach orchard hadn’t been a working orchard since before the War with the Union. Sabine County’s always had a lot of poor people, both black and white, and the peach orchard was where the blacks buried their people that didn’t have family or friends to pay for a grave marker. For those people up in the pine country to toss a white woman—even a white woman with some Mexican blood in her—into an unmarked grave in the peach orchard, they must have really hated her.
Morison went on.
“Mike was real upset by that, Tom. Sometime during the night, he went up there and dug her up. A couple of boys found her body the next morning.”
“Where?” I asked.
“Mike’s front yard.”
My stomach turned over.
“Folks up in the pine country was plenty pissed. They took the body and pitched it back into the peach orchard, then they came back lookin’ for Mike. When I got there, they was fixin’ to lynch him.”
My mind raced through the options, trying to figure out what, if anything, I could do for Mike. The old big brother instincts I’d always had for Mike were stronger than ever, like I’d never been gone at all, and I knew the only thing I could do to help him was to keep him close.
“You mind if I take him home?” I asked.
“I was kind of hopin’ you would,” Morison confided.
He led me back to the cells, which I remembered well from all those horrible Sunday mornings when I’d wake up to Sheriff Morison banging on the screen door of our house, yelling for me to get dressed and come with him to fetch my Daddy.
Little had changed. Many of the same faces looked out at me, their hands gripping the bars, their faces staring at me like morose, drunken butterflies in some grotesque bug collection.
Morison opened Mike’s cell and Mike came out, head hung low, shoulders stooped. He looked like he wanted to disappear into the shadows.
He was sadder than I’d ever seen him before, which was maybe why he looked older than I remembered. But little else had changed. He still wore his pants hitched up too high and his skin still had that flabby, unhealthy paleness to it. He hadn’t combed his hair.
I pulled him into the yellow circle of light that an overhead lamp made on the floor and straightened his hair.
“You okay?” I asked him.
He muttered something.
One of the other prisoners yelled at him. “Hey Gunner, what day is it?”
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I hadn’t heard anybody use his nickname out loud since Mike and I started to run around together, and the sound of it snapped something inside of me.
Mike looked up at the man with watery eyes that wanted so much to be liked. “S-S-S-Saturday,” he stuttered, and that brought a loud, braying laugh from the cells.
I went over to the man’s cell and punched him through the bars, laying him out on the floor.
The laughing stopped.
“You mind if I take him home now, Sheriff?” I asked.
“No,” said Morison, staring at the man in the cell, who was on his back, breathing noisily through a red, blossoming flower of blood that had once been his nose. “Go ahead.”
***
We drove back to Mike’s house in the ‘27 Ford his Daddy had left him and stopped in the driveway, a cloud of white dust settling across the trash-strewn yard ahead of us. Mike hadn’t said a word since leaving the jail, and I didn’t push him. I figured he’d come around sooner or later.
The house where I had grown up was an absolute wreck. Mike’s Daddy had been a good man, a kind man, but not a strong one. In the last years of his life he’d let his home slide into shabbiness, and when Mike took over, the slide just sort of kept on sliding, but at an accelerated rate.
I looked up at the gray, two story wood frame house and sighed. A corner near the kitchen window had been threatening to cave in since I was a kid, but still hadn’t fallen. It drooped over the yard like the brim of an old hat. The porch sagged in the middle and its support beams tilted at uncertain angles. The roof, no doubt full of holes, looked like a checkerboard of black and gray tar strips and the whole place was up to its waist in yellowing alkali grass.
I was wondering how bad it was inside when Mike finally spoke.
“I been m-m-meanin’ to p-p-paint it,” he said.
I put my hand on his shoulder and guided him towards the front door. “It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll do it together.”
The inside was as bad as I’d thought, so crowded with ruined furniture that I barked my shin with every step. Water had come through a hole in the ceiling and the wood floor near a far corner of the living room was dark and probably rotted through. I made my way to the kitchen and sat down while Mike made us coffee.
Outside, the sky was coloring with the pink and gold and darkling purple of an East Texas sunset, the kind I’d missed so much during the war. A cool breeze stirred the curtains of an open window in the dining room and I smelled the scent of country pine mingled with the dust.
“Tell me about her, Mike?” I said.
Mike put our coffees on the table and sat down next to me. It occurred to me then that the truly remarkable thing about Mike was the honesty of his expressions, for another man might have tried to hide the naked pain of lost love I saw in his face.
“I l-l-loved her,” he said with a stiff set to his mouth and chin that almost dared me to challenge him. “And she loved m-m-me.”
That seemed to say everything that needed to be said in his mind, and I nodded.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay,” he answered back, like we’d settled something.
I waited.
“I have a p-p-picture,” he said. He got up suddenly and went into the living room. When he came back he put a picture frame in my hand.
I took it and studied the girl I saw there.
“This is Rosalinda?” I said.
He nodded.
She wasn’t an attractive woman, to be sure, but her eyes were full of a vital spark that gave her face character, and kindness. They were as black as her hair, tucked in beneath a large, heavy brow line that shaded her face with one continuous, unbroken eyebrow.
He told me how they met. She’d wandered onto the property, looking for milkweed root, and came upon him while he was trying to fix the burned valves on his tractor’s motor. The two of them talked all afternoon, and by the time Mike went to bed that night, he was hopelessly in love.
It was at that point I realized how unfairly I’d judged him when I doubted his ever falling in love, for he clearly loved Rosalinda Villalobos in that same absolutely honest and genuine way in which he expressed all his emotions. He was like a child in the uncomplicated purity of his heart.
Yet he moved from one emotional extreme to another with furious speed. As he told me how the mob had denied Rosalinda a decent burial—even as he knelt over her dead body and pleaded with them—he became so angry I thought for a moment he might start throwing things around the room.
“They t-t-told me she d-d-deserved to rot in the s-s-street like a d-d-dog,” he said, his voice thick with sobs.
I looked him straight in the eye and asked him if he’d dug up her body.
“No,” he said, and the word sounded like a judge’s gavel pounding the bench.
“Then how?” I asked.
“That was her,” he said. “She was trying t-t-to come b-b-back to me.”
I let out a long sigh, seeing a long road to recovery ahead of him. I tried to reason with him, asking him all sorts of questions designed to get at the truth, but the honesty never left his face. He stood firmly by the belief that death was not the end for his beloved Rosalinda, and that not even the grave could keep her from coming back to him.
Though I never lost my patience, I finally got to that point where I couldn’t listen any more.
I sent him to bed.
As for myself, I slept only in fits, tossing and turning on the couch all night.
*
The next morning Rosalinda’s body was waiting for us on the front lawn.
I was angry, and for the first time in my life I yelled at Mike, convinced now he’d lied to me. I accused him of sneaking out behind my back, of digging up that poor girl and dragging her corpse back here.
But his motives were a mystery to me, for he flatly denied any wrongdoing, and though the words ‘sick’ and ‘perverted’ lingered on the tip of my tongue, I couldn’t bring myself to say them.
“Let me see your hands,” I said, taking them in my own and studying his fingernails for tell-tale signs of dirt.
I saw none.
“Come with me,” I said, and led him upstairs to his room. I searched everywhere, looking for sweaty clothes or dirty boots or anything that would confirm my accusations.
“She c-c-came back to me,” Mike said. “I t-t-told you she would.”
“Shut up,” I roared at him. It took us both by surprise, the anger in my voice. He backed into a corner and hung his head while I ran my hands through my hair, wondering what in the hell to do.
“Tell me the truth, Mike,” I said. “Did you dig that girl up?”
He shook his head.
“Look me in the eye and say the words,” I said.
He did. He looked me straight in the eye and pleaded innocent.
“She came b-b-back to m-m-me,” he said. “She loves m-m-me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Come on.”
“Where are w-w-we going?” he asked, following me down the stairs and out onto the lawn like a puppy.
“We’re going to bury your girl good and proper.”
***
Looking at Rosalinda’s face, I felt a tinge of panic. This was not the same girl I had seen in Mike’s picture frame the night before—or, rather, she was, only changed.
Those eyes, those eyes that had seemed to possess such kindness in the photograph, no longer seemed kind. They were bloodless and mean, wide open and fixed. To my surprise, they hadn’t milked over with cataracts, the way they usually do in a dead body. I looked deep into them and shuddered.
The prominent brow ridge was gone too, and with it, the single eyebrow. In its place was a delicate, decidedly feminine brow, high and smooth, sensuous.
She was pale. I expected that, of course. But not the rosy, shapeless patches on her cheeks. Those seemed unnatural, definitely not right.
I knelt down next to her and looked at her hands. Her fingernails and the palms of
her hands were caked with brown ditch mud, the kind found all through the peach orchard further up the road. Her simple white dress was stained with dirt, too.
“What are you d-d-doing?” Mike asked, as I ran my finger along the leading edge of Rosalinda’s top teeth.
“Nothing,” I said, and took my hand away. But it was at that moment that a new thought took shape in my mind.
***
Back in the war, my platoon was part of Patton’s spearhead through France. At one point, we got so far ahead of the main force that we had to stop and spend two days in a little town on the banks of the Saone River.
As I washed the dust from my hands at a pump on the side of our house and watched an angry crowd of about twenty men coming up the gradual rise of the front lawn, I thought about those simple folk in that French village and all the funny superstitions they’d shared with me over dinner and endless bottles of wine. I didn’t find those superstitions quite as funny now as I had then, though.
Mike, whose face was still glowing with the childish faith that his lover had come back to him, smiled stupidly from the porch down at the lynch mob.
I grabbed an axe handle and came up next to Mike as one of the men was mounting the steps to the porch. I hit the man in the gut with a hard backhanded slap that doubled him over. Then I kicked him in the face and sent him sprawling onto his back at the feet of the crowd.
Two more men charged us. A moment later, both were on the ground, one holding his shattered knee, and the other on his hands and knees, swaying drunkenly while he spit out teeth and blood onto the grass.
“Get off our land,” I said, walking down the steps toward the crowd.
They backed up a few steps before somebody in the back yelled, “That retard done crossed the line.”
There was a murmur of agreement as the others took courage from the defiant voice and stopped retreating. Several of them muttered threats.
“Bring us that witch’s body,” somebody yelled.
“She’s not here,” I said. That was a lie, of course. She was underneath a tarp in the woodshed, waiting to be buried.
“We know that retard dug her up,” the crowd shouted.