All the Dead Lie Down

by Mary Willis Walker

  Overhead, the footsteps beat a retreat—trip-trap. Oh, yes! The troll says—Who’s that tripping over my bridge? That’s it. She’s so pleased to remember it she whispers it in Lufkin’s ear: “Who’s that tripping over my bridge?”

  “Huh?” he says, finally inching his zipper all the way down.

  She feels like calling it out loud: Who’s that tripping over MY bridge? That’d shake ’em up for a second or two—those goats up there—show them maybe they don’t own the world after all.

  The door closes, muffling the distant clink of knives and forks, the chatter and laughter from inside the grill. The harsh floodlight flicks off. Now it is peaceful again, with just the soft moonlight drifting through the cracks in the deck, making everything look nice and dreamy, exactly the way Sarah Jane likes it.

  “Now,” she croons, “let’s take a look at that wine.”

  AN ARMED NATION IS A POLITE NATION.

  —NRA SLOGAN

  “Stars everywhere you look,” Molly Cates said with her head resting on the back of the seat. She was gazing up at the constellation of glass stars etched on the skylight panels that made up the ornate ceiling of the Texas Senate chamber. “Stars on the ceiling, stars in the chandeliers, stars on the doorknobs, even the hinges.”

  “Texans do not scrimp on stars. Maybe that’s why I put stars in this new design,” Rose Morrisey said, studying the needlepoint in her lap. Molly looked down at the half-completed piece—a mostly floral design with pansies on a royal blue background, but scattered throughout were tiny white stars.

  Wanda Lavoy, the handgun expert with the big hair, who was sitting on Molly’s other side, leaned across her to look. “That’s real pretty, Miz Morrisey.”

  “You can’t overdo stars.” Molly rolled her head from side to side, trying to relax the kinks in her neck. Every day she spent in the legislature watching her state government at work made her neck stiffer and her current project less interesting, like a term paper whose subject has turned sour.

  Everybody agreed that the concealed handgun bill was a slam dunk, a done deal from the start. It had whizzed through the House and showed every indication of doing the same in the Senate. The new governor was on the record with a campaign promise to sign it into law. After several weeks of following it, Molly had concluded there was no real drama and, ultimately, very little importance. Texans would most likely continue to shoot one another in record numbers whether they could get licensed to carry concealed handguns or not.

  “Rose, you remember those star cookie cutters Aunt Harriet had?” Molly asked. “And those fabulous butter cookies she’d make at Christmas with the shiny colored sprinkles on top? She’d put them in baskets on the table and they’d twinkle in the candlelight—like baskets of real stars.”

  Rose looked up from her needlepoint. “Harriet sure knew how to bake and how to make a house pretty at Christmas.”

  The memory made Molly’s stomach lurch with a sudden dip, like when an airplane hits an air pocket. Now her Aunt Harriet, that opinionated, cookie-baking bane of Molly’s adolescence, was in a nursing home and didn’t know a star from a bedpan.

  Molly had been experiencing more than the usual number of memory air pockets lately. Family was on her mind. It wasn’t just the stars. It was spending so much time with Rose and Parnell Morrisey that was doing it. Rose, her godmother, sitting next to her in her elegant navy knit suit and silk blouse, still wore her long hair French-braided in one thick plait, though it was pure white now, and she still smelled coolly of the same tea rose perfume she had always used. The scent recalled vividly the summer evenings of Molly’s childhood, when they had all sat on the Cateses’ front porch and told stories.

  Parnell, especially, had a way of opening Molly’s old wounds—and old delights as well. All it took was his physical presence: his whiskey-and-tobacco smell, his raspy drawl and booming laugh. The way he said, “Molly, sweetheart, you just sit your pretty self right down here and let me worry about that,” made her feel like a girl again, taken care of in a way she hadn’t felt since her daddy died—her daddy, who had been dead and buried these twenty-eight years. But not forgotten, no, never forgotten.

  She looked for Parnell amid the chaos down on the Senate floor. There he was, sitting at his desk, talking with several legislative aides. The old senator’s bald pate gleaming in the lights looked vulnerable as a bird’s egg, and his doleful mud slide of a face droopier and more creased than usual, as if it were threatening to slip right off his skull. He’s getting old for this circus, Molly thought, seventy-three now, the same age her daddy would be. He’d had a heart bypass last year and had never fully recovered, it seemed to her. The powerful men of her childhood were now either dead or decrepit versions of what they had been, and she hated it.

  They’d been best friends from the third grade on—Parnell Morrisey and Vernon Cates. They’d gone to grade school and high school together out west in Crosbyton, near Lubbock, run track together, worked on the school newspaper together, and gone to Texas Tech together. Parnell and his wife Rose were Molly’s godparents; her earliest memories included Parnell and Rose at family birthdays and picnics and holidays. And funerals, of course. The Morriseys had been at all the Cates funerals. When her mother died, it was Parnell and Rose and Molly’s Aunt Harriet who filled in to help her and her daddy cope with the loss. Molly had been nine. And then when her daddy was killed, when Molly was sixteen, the same three people were there to console and support her, even though she was inconsolable and her Aunt Harriet always maintained she was insupportable.

  “When’s he going to retire from this circus?” Molly asked.

  Rose looked down at her husband of more than fifty years. “When he loses an election, or when they bury him—whichever one comes first.”

  Down on the floor, the pastor from the First Baptist Church of Waco was finishing a long-winded invocation, thanking God for just about everything he could think of, including the bicameral body of the Texas legislature, the lieutenant governor, the pages, the new governor, the visitors up in the gallery, the spring weather, and the renovations to the Capitol. The lieutenant governor then introduced the first speaker for Bill 98—the honorable Senator Garland Rauther from Schulenburg.

  Senator Rauther, the cosponsor of the concealed handgun bill, a large man in a pinstripe suit and lots of French cuff at the wrist to show off gold cufflinks in the shape of pistols, stood at his desk and picked up his microphone. “Folks, today I could recite to you the many polls that show how strongly the citizens of Texas support this bill, but I’m not gonna do that. And I could tell you how successful and trouble-free such carry laws have proved to be in states like Florida which have been pioneering the way for us, but I’m not gonna do that either. Instead, I want to tell you a story. It is a story that will break your heart and it will also explain why I am cosponsoring Bill 98 that will allow any law-abiding citizen of our state to obtain a license to carry a handgun for personal protection. Now this story may be familiar to you, but I believe it warrants being told today.”

  “Oh, no,” Molly groaned, “the Pizza Parlor again.”

  “Shhh,” Wanda said.

  Rose leaned her shoulder against Molly’s. “Behave yourself.”

  “But, Rose, there can’t be a single person in the state who hasn’t heard this story twenty times,” Molly said. She had a sudden rebellious urge to take off and go home. She’d much rather be working on her other project—the stories of five homeless women she’d been interviewing for several months. She could just declare her research in the legislature finished and leave. True, she had a lunch date with the Morriseys, but Rose would understand if she decided to leave now. She had enough information to write her handgun article right now. The problem was, once she got started on research, she found it difficult to stop, even when she was disenchanted with a subject, as she was now. She was afraid if she stopped she’d miss the one perfect detail or the one quote that would make the story.

  “Folks
,” Senator Rauther was saying, “you’ve all read about Elizabeth Shoemaker in the newspaper. She is a remarkable woman, a fifth-generation Texan, a loyal wife, a loving mother and grandmother, who never once, in thirty-five years, missed teaching her Sunday school class at First Lutheran in Houston. She is also a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, a crack shot with a pistol,” he intoned, “the daughter of a Beaumont police officer who taught all his children the fine points of gun safety and marksmanship. Before she was twelve this lady could shoot off a gnat’s eyebrow at twenty yards.”

  Wanda leaned over and whispered, “You’re coming tomorrow, right? You and your daughter?”

  Molly nodded. She had committed to the course of handgun training as part of the research for her article on the bill and there was no getting out of it now.

  “You can stay after the lesson,” Wanda said, “and watch my WIC gals shoot.”

  Molly nodded again. She was entertaining herself by letting her gaze range around the gallery, looking for more stars, like the children’s game of finding Waldo. She spotted a group of elementary school children wearing matching gimme caps with little Texas flags on the front—more stars. Then her eyes stopped on a glittery silver star she hadn’t noticed before—a man’s belt buckle proudly displayed just below his prominent paunch. “And star-spangled bellies,” she muttered.

  “Say what?” Wanda said.

  “Why is it, Wanda, that Texas men wear their belts so low?”

  “Is this a joke?”

  “No. A quest for enlightenment. That one standing over there with the belt buckle, for example.” She pointed at the man across the gallery who was talking with one of the security guards, his hands in his pockets, his head turned away from them.

  Wanda studied the man. “Don’t it beat all? The way men’ll flaunt their big guts like that? A woman would be doing her best to hide it.”

  “Yeah,” Molly said, “it’s a dominance thing, I think. Like baboons raising their hackles and jumping up and down to make themselves look bigger.”

  As though he sensed he was being talked about, the man turned in their direction.

  The second she glimpsed his face, Molly stopped breathing. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. It was a face she hadn’t seen in twenty-five years, but she remembered every detail of it: the weak chin, the lumpy cheeks, the slightly off-center nose, the mean-spirited slit of mouth. His hair had grayed and thinned to a few strands combed over the top, but otherwise he looked pretty much the same.

  Molly felt her cheeks flush with heat. It was as if her recent dwelling on family memories had conjured up this nightmare from the past, this demon that had lain dormant for twenty-five years.

  “Wanda,” she said when she had caught her breath, “Wanda, do you know that man?”

  Wanda got her glasses out of her purse and put them on. “The one with the star on his gut?”

  “Yeah. Him.” She could barely squeeze the words out.

  “I think he’s one of the lobbyists for TEXRA, but darned if I can remember his name.”

  “Olin Crocker.” The name tasted like acid on Molly’s lips.

  “Crocker, yeah. That sounds right. You know him?”

  “A long time ago. He used to be Travis County sheriff.”

  “Was he?” Wanda said with no interest. “Must’ve been before my time.” Her attention had clearly shifted to the floor where Senator Rauther, finished extolling Elizabeth Shoemaker’s virtues, was launching into the Pizza Parlor horror. “It was a Friday night,” he said, “two years ago—a rainy Friday night in November, and Miz Shoemaker, her daughter Jessica, and Jessica’s three young children happened to stop for dinner at the Pizza Parlor in Liberty. They’d put their order in and were sitting at the table waiting for their food, innocent of the fact that the worst kind of bad luck was about to befall them—the kind of random bad luck that could just as easily happen to any of us.”

  Molly found the story too painful to hear again and she couldn’t take her eyes off Olin Crocker. “Rose,” she said, leaning over to whisper in her ear, “that’s Olin Crocker over there.”

  Rose looked where Molly was pointing. “The sheriff, you mean? Is that him? I don’t believe I ever met him, Molly.”

  The guard had moved back to his station in the corner of the gallery and Crocker was standing alone now, his hands still in his pockets, looking down at the speaker on the Senate floor.

  “If I could raise my finger right now,” Molly said to Rose, “and smite him with Pharaoh’s plagues—all ten of them—I would do it.” She raised her index finger in front of her eyes and lined it up so it rested on Olin Crocker’s belt buckle. “Pow.”

  Senator Rauther was saying, “The bad luck came in the form of Randall Carpenter, a drifter with a long history of mental problems. Randall Carpenter had just been fired that morning from his job as dishwasher and floor sweeper at the Pizza Parlor and he was angry, real angry, so angry he decided to get even. He still had a set of keys and the first thing he did this November night when he got to the Pizza Parlor was lock the front door so no one inside would be able to escape his wrath. Miz Shoemaker says she looked up and saw him standing there at the door all wild-eyed, with his rifle at his side, and she knew he was fixing to go on a shooting spree.”

  Molly kept her finger lined up on Olin Crocker. “You owe me something,” she whispered to herself. “You vicious, corrupt, lecherous son of a bitch, you still owe me something, and I still want it.”

  Senator Rauther’s voice got lower. “And she was right, folks. Randall Carpenter raised that rifle and commenced to shoot. First he shot the manager who’d fired him. Then he shot a pretty seventeen-year-old waitress who’d refused to go out on a date with him. Then he shot the cook and the new dishwasher who’d replaced him. And then he started in on the customers. There were twenty-seven of them, including a kids’ soccer team; see, Friday night in Liberty lots of folks like to go out for pizza. You can imagine the scene, can’t you? Everyone screaming, running for the door, hiding under tables and behind chairs, trying to shield their loved ones. But it didn’t do them any good. The shooter went about his business real slow and deliberate, Miz Shoemaker says, walking around the room calmly, shooting them, one by one, those people who were unlucky enough to have gone out for pizza that night. Fish in a barrel.” He shook his big head. “Fish in a barrel. The Shoemakers were the last ones. Before he got around to them he’d already shot the twenty-two other customers and reloaded his gun twice.”

  He paused for dramatic effect, his head hanging as if in mourning. Then he looked up at the gallery and said, “Now, folks, Miz Shoemaker happens to be the owner of several guns. One of them is a .38 police special her daddy gave her when he retired from the force. When she travels she carries that revolver in the glove compartment of her vehicle for personal protection. She would of liked to bring it with her in her handbag into the restaurant that Friday night, but she didn’t because it is against the law to carry a concealed weapon in the state of Texas and Elizabeth Shoemaker is a law-abiding citizen who has never gotten so much as a parking ticket.”

  Molly was barely listening; she knew the story all too well and had noticed Elizabeth Shoemaker sitting stoically on the other side of the gallery, listening to the retelling of her tragedy. But right now Molly had eyes only for Olin Crocker. He moved down to the front row and sat. Since she was in the front row too, directly across the gallery, they were separated only by space, empty air. If she were Elizabeth Shoemaker, in possession of that .38 police special, and if she could shoot like Mrs. Shoemaker, and if she had the gumption, which she probably didn’t, she could blow Crocker to kingdom come right here and now. Maybe carrying a handgun wasn’t such a bad idea: once or twice in a lifetime you just might need it.

  Would Crocker recognize her after twenty-five years? And if he did, how would he react? She kept her eyes fixed on him and willed him to look in her direction, but he seemed to be totally engrossed in the scene down
on the Senate floor.

  Molly shifted her gaze back to Senator Rauther, who was saying, “Miz Shoemaker had plenty of opportunity to think about that .38 police special of her daddy’s sitting in the glove compartment of her car that was parked outside, just a few yards from where she and her daughter and her three young grandkids were hiding under the table. She says if she’d had it she knows she could have stopped the massacre because the shooter was taking his time, enjoying his work. She could have slipped the gun out of her bag and aimed it in that two-handed police grip her daddy always favored.” He acted this out using the microphone as the gun.

  He brought the mike back to his mouth. “But, of course, she didn’t have the gun. So she was helpless. She and her daughter were huddled under the table in front of the youngsters, trying to shield them. But Randall Carpenter was a relentless killing machine that Friday night. He worked his way around the room until he got to the Shoemakers and first he shot Jessica, who was begging for mercy for her three babies. Then he shot Miz Shoemaker, then the older boy, Kevin, who was eight, then the girl, Lizzy, who was four, and the other boy, John, who was five.”

  The back of Molly’s neck prickled. Across the gallery, Olin Crocker was staring at her. When she met his eyes, he raised his hand and, with two fingers extended, pointed right at her. Then he narrowed his eyes and looked down the finger, as though he were aiming a gun.

  Molly looked back at him with what she hoped was an icy stare, but her stomach was roiling with fury and loathing.

  After a minute he stood up and stuck his hands in his pockets. Then, looking directly at Molly, he made a movement so tiny no one else would have noticed—a quick obscene little thrust with his belly. The silver star on his belt winked once in the lights. He turned away and headed toward the door to the lobby. Molly felt as violated and victimized and cheated as she had after their last encounter twenty-five years earlier.