Feast for Thieves
Page 5
Ten minutes later a fella I guessed to be Gummer came with the tow truck. He worked for the next three hours to get the jackknifed truck pulled upright and off to the shoulder. I found some motion to my feet, introduced myself to Gummer by my first name only and helped him wrestle with the semitrailer, then I went back to the shoulder by myself and stood. Deputy Roy directed traffic while a hearse came to collect the body of Ridge Hackathorn. I didn’t walk near to the proceedings—I’d seen enough dead men in my day to last a lifetime—but I wondered more of who this man was. I knew he was once the proud foreman at the Murray plant, a man wealthy enough to buy a Packard and support a family. He was once the loving husband of Emma Hackathorn—at least he loved her enough once to marry her. He was once the father of four young children, three boys and one girl. That counted for much in my book. Much indeed.
The sheriff talked to the mortician for a long time. I saw him signing papers. Then he climbed up the ditch and stood next to me. He shuffled his feet in the dirt of the highway’s shoulder. When he found his voice, he was all business.
“I got to head over to Rancho Springs and handle some more paperwork tonight. Deputy Roy will take you back to Cut Eye. It’s too late to get you settled at the parsonage, so we got a closet in the jailhouse with a cot in it. Stay there tonight and head back over to the café for breakfast. Sorry for not getting you any supper. You must be hungry.”
“I’m okay. Thanks for thinking of me, sir.”
“I’ll be tied up all tomorrow too. Lots to do to close this file. Deputy will take you over to the church after breakfast. Secretary will show you around and then you get to work. Understand what I’m saying? You better not skip town, that’s what I mean in plainest terms.”
“No sir. I understand, sir.”
The sheriff turned toward the field and stared at the Packard in the ditch. I turned around with him, and we stood without saying anything more, the sheriff and me. Maybe half an hour passed. Maybe forty-five minutes. He just kept staring at the waste of a wrecked car. His eyes were steeled with intent, the way a man’s eyes look when he’s lost someone he cares about. I’d seen that look in soldiers before. I’d felt the same look in my own eyes more than once myself. I decided to speak first.
“You knew this man, then—this Ridge Hackathorn? Deputy said he was your friend. You play cards together or something?”
It might have been another twenty minutes passed and still the sheriff didn’t say a word. Finally he spoke. He said one sentence, his voice staunch and unbendable.
“He was my son-in-law.”
In the dusk, a bird flew overhead. It flew not more than ten yards in front of us, and I recognized the breed at once due to its great concentrations in west Texas. It’s classed as a game bird, and it’s widely hunted in these parts. The bird was a mourning dove, and the sheriff said one more sentence, his voice just as resolute.
“This is why we need a preacher in this town.”
Sheriff Halligan Barker turned, walked wordlessly to his squad car, and drove into the night.
SIX
Texas, land of abundance, is a self-sufficient inland empire. Folks from Montana with their wheat fields and folks from Iowa with their corn might disagree on this point, but I don’t give a hoot nor a holler. Not only does Texas feed much of the nation and the world, but it also provides its native sons and daughters with all the fruits of Mother Earth in plentiful profusion. Frankly, we’re big eaters in this state. We like our bellies round. And we’ve got the cattle, sheep, goats, hogs, and poultry to prove it—they’re known far and wide for their savor and quality. We’ve also got fresh fruits and vegetables—peas, beans, squash, carrots, radishes, tomatoes, apples, oranges, peaches, blueberries, melons—anything a mouth could want, all grown under balmy Texas skies, and all recognized for their topflight quality and deliciousness.
That’s why at 6:20 the next morning I was already lined up outside the Pine Oak Café with at least two hundred other hungry fellas ready for Cisco Wayman to open the door at 6:30. They was all plant workers mostly, I could tell by their uniforms, lucky fellas with jobs living in the apartments and plant housing down the street. The Murray’s first shift started at 8 a.m., I ascertained by their talk, and the fellas would have plenty of time to eat up and drive up the road for the day’s work.
Sure enough, a man I guessed to be Cisco opened the door at the crack of half past the hour, and all us boys piled through in a rush. My stomach was growling something fierce and I just had time to glimpse the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet laid out along tables in the middle of the café—piles of hickory smoked bacon, flapjacks and johnnycakes with their rich cornmeal texture; succulent eggs; warm buttermilk biscuits; tender waffles; steaming apple pork sausage links and mounds of honey hams; a hot roast beef ready for carving; uncountable platters of fried country-cut potatoes and onions; bowls of grilled mushrooms, ripe avocado, creamy coleslaw, and fried grits; dishes of butter; jugs of syrup; milk, coffee, and orange juice; oranges, apples, bananas, and grapes; barbecue sauce, salsa, ketchup, and pepper sauce—yes sir, I saw it all in one clear and glorious picture. It was how I imagined a feast in heaven might look, if a man such as myself would be permitted to enter, and I ain’t a man for crying but I do admit the sight of such Texas culinary profusion was just about enough to make this hungry man blubber like a baby.
“Hold on, fella, where do you think you’re going?” A powerful hand gripped my collar and jerked me out of line.
It was Cisco Wayman. He was tall and broad in the shoulders. As big as me but gray-haired and slower on his feet, I reckoned, if it came to blows.
“My name’s Rowdy. Rowdy Slater. I ate here yesterday along with the sheriff. Augusta served us.”
“That’s Mrs. Wayman to you.” He glared into my face. “I ain’t never seen you around these parts. You a drifter? We don’t feed drifters here. If you want to eat like all these other fellas, you need a job.”
“I got a job.”
“Where?” He looked me up and down. “Don’t see your plant uniform. I know every man in town. Who you work for, and why didn’t he tell me he hired you on before sending you over?”
I swallowed. “The sheriff hired me, sir. He needed to go out of town today, on account of last night’s traffic accident.”
Cisco’s eyebrows lowered. He was an angry man in general, I gathered, and with the heap of good cooking he’d done before dawn, he was making sure nobody ate for free. “You a deputy then?” he asked. “I didn’t hear nothing about Roy needing help.”
“No sir.”
“What then?”
“Well …” It was time for the first public declaration of my new profession. I wasn’t sure how the words would come out of my mouth. I decided to blurt. The blurting wasn’t about courage. It was about needing to eat, and I said it all in a jumble—“Sir, I’m the new preacher at the Cut Eye Community Church.”
The whole café hushed. A lone fork clattered on the tile floor. The silence was flagrant. Other men gawked my direction, their hungry mouths hanging open. Far in the back of the room, a snicker broke. Another followed, and the whole room erupted in laughter. Men clapped and whistled, hollered out catcalls, and blew raspberries with their tongues. “Give us a sermon!” someone yelled. None of the rattle was charitable, I gathered.
Cisco held up his right hand and the room shut up. With his left he grabbed the front of my collar and twisted the fabric. “You listen to me, and you listen good. The town of Cut Eye don’t need a new preacher. And even if we did, you don’t look like a man of the cloth. Any fella who comes into my joint lying to my face is a fella who needs a fist smashed into his. So you got five seconds to clear out. One … two …”
“Look mister,” I interrupted. “I don’t want to fight you, but I will if need be. You can telephone over to the sheriff’s office if you’d like. They told me all my meals came with the job, and I’m ready to eat.”
“Three … four …” Cisco kept counting.
“All right! All right!” I said with a sneer. “I’m leaving. But I’ll be back for lunch. Augusta knows me. We’ll settle up then—”
“That’s Mrs. Wayman to you!” Cisco roared, and shoved me out the door onto the street. A chorus of guffaws swelled behind me.
Well now, I took stock of my situation. My pockets were empty, as empty as my stomach. It’d been days since I’d eaten much of anything. I wandered back over to the sheriff’s office, stuck my head inside the front door, then meandered out onto the front patch of grass to wait for Deputy Roy to come by and take me over to the church building. I thought about having somebody from the sheriff’s office telephone over to the café and vouch for me, but Sheriff Barker wasn’t in, of course, and his secretary wasn’t there this morning neither. In her chair sat an older gal with thick reading glasses, and I doubted if reports of my new job had been relayed to her already. My eating breakfast was a losing proposition any way I examined the matter.
Half an hour went by and I stood and waited. I paced around and whistled a few tunes, killing time. I cranked out a few sets of pushups on the patch of grass. A gamble quail scuttled across the road. Its color, like that of the scaled quail, is bluish-ash, but it has that plume of soft curved feathers on its head that gives its subspecies away every time. My stomach rumbled.
Deputy Roy pulled up precisely at seven a.m. with the passenger window of his car already rolled down. “Get in,” he said, and I obliged.
We drove east on Main Street and turned the corner south onto Highway 2. It was the same route Crazy Ake and I had run only a few days ago. We passed the café and the mercantile, the tavern and pool hall south of that, the school with its baseball field, and then we were out of town. The wind whistled through my open window. I hadn’t closed it on purpose of the way I stunk. There was no shower in the jail where I overnighted, although I tried to wash up as best I could in the bathroom sink. My clothes were a mess. That don’t matter much if you’re lying in a foxhole for days on end, but for a man on his first official day of work, I felt a mite ashamed of my condition, even if I was only stinking for Deputy Roy.
“You been to the church building yet?” he asked.
“No sir.”
“Just so you’re oriented correctly as to the lay of the land, we take a right on the Lost Truck Road just before we hit the bridge over the river. Church is down that road on the left. You from these parts?”
“Grew up in Denim.” Him nosing around my past made me antsy, and the specific whereabouts on the highway were looking all too familiar. This was the very same stretch of blacktop he’d shot at me.
“Denim, huh. We used to play them in baseball. What year did you graduate?”
“Finished tenth grade then went into the CCCs.”
“Digging ditches for President Roosevelt, eh. I’ve never gone out for that unskilled manual labor myself, and I don’t cater much to public relief programs. Yet I’m curious about your ministerial training. Where’d you say you went to seminary?”
“I didn’t.”
“Correspondence courses?”
I shook my head.
“You trained as a chaplain then? What branch of the service? I would have liked to serve our country myself, but I was 4-F on account of my flat feet.”
“No sir. Wasn’t a chaplain.”
The deputy slowed the car and stopped. He didn’t pull over to the shoulder even. It was right in the middle of the highway. No other cars were around, and we both sat there, neither of us saying a word. Finally he spoke. “Engine’s running a mite warm today, Rowdy. Be a pal and pop the hood for me. I want to let it cool a spell.”
The engine was still running. I knew he was testing me. He wanted to see me stand in front of his patrol car, to gauge my height and build against his memory. The color of my jacket. The way the back of my head looked through his windshield.
“Go on,” he said. “Get out and pop the hood.”
“Seems to be running fine.” My voice was low. As low as I could make it while still being heard. My heart pounded in my chest. I didn’t want to need to kill a man this morning, and I didn’t want to get shot at neither.
“No, you’re wrong. Engine’s hot. Needs to cool off. I’ll just sit here if that’s okay. My back’s been out of sorts lately.”
The deputy wasn’t relenting, and I knew the man wouldn’t until he got his way. Slowly I eased open the door. Slowly I walked to the front of the car, reached down while keeping my eyes on the deputy, and fiddled with the hood latch. It popped and I opened the hood. I stayed standing where I was, not even looking at the engine. It was a typical Ford Flathead V8, and it wasn’t steaming, I knew that much—not steaming in the least. I counted three hundred Mississippis in my mind until I was certain five solid minutes passed. All this time the deputy kept the engine running. I closed the hood, making sure it latched firm again, slowly walked around to the passenger door again, opened it, and slid in.
“Seems to be cooler now,” the deputy said.
I nodded.
“Thanks, Reverend. That was kind of you.”
I nodded again.
The deputy put it in gear and started down the road. My heart was still pounding, but nothing more was said between us. I didn’t know precisely where this man stood. He catered to the letter of the law, so I knew his mind worked on suspicion. But he didn’t have nothing solid on me other than his hunch. It had been raining thickly that day of the robbery, and a man shooting at another man will often not look closely at his features if he’s not trained to do so, which I doubted this fella was.
The deputy pulled up in front of an old white-boarded building and let me out.
“Welcome to the Cut Eye Community Church, Reverend Slater.” The deputy coughed slightly. “A man of your background and training should surely enjoy your time here.” He coughed again, this time louder.
I looked at him through the open passenger window and touched two fingers to my forehead lightly in an even-tempered salute goodbye. “Deputy,” I said. “Thank you kindly for the ride.”
He smiled broadly. Too broadly. “Reverend Slater, be warned that some in this congregation may call into account your background and training, but I am not a man to question the Lord’s anointed. The test of any true preacher comes by fire and the blood. So I’ll be praying for your sermon this Sunday—that it would be delivered with power and might and real conviction. Yes sir, I will be praying for you. Be praying for your soul.”
I did not want to turn my back on him, even to walk away, and so I eyed him without gesture, as one might eye a cougar in a tree. The deputy put the car in gear and drove away into the dust.
SEVEN
The building needed paint, I saw that right off. I doubt if it had seen a brush with color since it opened in 1900. The roof was missing shingles. One of the two windows in front was boarded up. A bell tower sat to the right. The wood siding was peeled, the rope to the bell had long since rotted away, and when I gazed up into the cup-shaped hollow, the clapper was rusty—an indication that the church bell hadn’t been rung in years. Parked sideways in the gravel was a dusty 1934 Plymouth, the world’s lowest priced car, so somebody was inside the church building, undoubtedly waiting for me to show.
I ambled up the steps to the church’s front door. It was unlocked and I poked my head inside, looked around, and called out a long, “Hello-o-o-o.” The room smelled musty and needed a thorough cleaning. Rain from a leak in the roof had colored brown the ceiling in the far corner, and the hymnbooks in the backs of each pew looked worn and frayed. I counted ten rows of seats with an aisle down the middle and reckoned the building held a hundred and twenty folks in a pinch. A large stump of a
pulpit stood at the far end and an old black pump organ squatted to its right side. One bare lightbulb hung limp from a cord on the ceiling. I tried the light switch but it didn’t turn on. Those were the church’s only furnishings.
“You’re late!”
A voice from behind made me start and turn. It was brittle and loud, and the woman who spoke was thin-faced and in her late sixties, I guessed. She stood with a stoop, but her back looked sturdy, like she was no stranger to hard work.
“Come ’round to the side door where the office is,” she bellowed. “You don’t look like much, but we’ll get you settled away quick.”
I obeyed. Nailed to the left-hand side of the church was a rickety annex built onto the main building. Four doors ran lengthwise of the annex and each opened to the outside. “General office is closest to the road.” The woman pointed. “Pastor’s study is the second door. Sunday school classroom is the third. Furnace room is in the fourth—although if you ask me, coal is a waste of money when we’ve got a perfectly good stand of trees right next door.”
“You’re the church secretary?”
“You expecting somebody else? Name’s Myrtle Cahoon, but everybody calls me Mert. I’ve been administrating this office now for eighteen years, but you’ll only find me in this place an hour each day. Time’s wasting and I also sell eggs and put up fruit and deliver mail to a rural route and drive the school bus mornings and afternoons. My husband, Clay, is a kindhearted dirt farmer, the purest man you’ll ever meet. He’s ailing with fevers, can’t work anymore, and needs medication, and medicine ain’t cheap. You got any more smart questions?”