by George Wier
“Cloak and dagger stuff,” she said. “Accounting is supposed to be boring, Mr. Travis.”
“I’m an investment counselor, Penny,” I said. “Nat’s the accountant. But yeah, you’re right. So consider yourself on hazard pay starting now.” I’d never thought of myself as merely an accountant, but, I guess that was just how she saw me.
“Hazard pay? I wonder what that works out to in dollars. Uh, sir.”
“Just hurry up, Penny,” I said.
“See you in ten minutes, sir.”
She hung up.
*****
There are not many people other than my original family who know me from when I was a kid, and even my family has forgotten this one little bit of information about me: when I was a kid, I stuttered. It wasn’t a bad stutter, but any sort of impediment to speech is bad in that other people recognize it instantly and wear their thoughts on their faces. The common thought is so visible that it could be easily etched in with chalk, and it usually translates something like: “something’s seriously wrong with this kid.” The point is that my mother was more patient with me than anyone else whenever I got excited and tried to convey my thoughts by way of spit. She’d stop me and say “Now, Bill. Go back to the beginning. Take a deep breath and start again.”
It was her admonition to “Go back to the beginning” that I’d gotten hung up on. And at the moment I was stuttering mentally. The beginning? Where’s that? There was a part of me — while the rest of me was busy watching my rearview mirror for a possible tail — that wanted to go down to Las Manitas to see if anything unfolded.
But thinking on it, I realized Las Manitas wasn’t the real beginning. The true beginning for me was there in that interview room with Norman Howell; him puffing one cigarette after another like there was no tomorrow (which for him was all too true) and me sitting there thinking about Emil Howell and desert lights and Norman’s trial and the faces of frightened jurors. And Dan Rather.
It was almost ten minutes exactly when Nat Bierstone’s long, candy-apple red Buick Skylark pulled up behind the insurance office.
As the Buick braked to a stop I grabbed Julie, kissed her hard on the mouth, let go of her, then swatted her rump on the way out the door.
She opened the back door of the Buick, her pony tail swishing back and forth, and climbed in.
The passenger side window rolled down and Penny stuck out a paper sack. I looked both ways. Nobody in the alley but us chickens. I stepped out into the alley and grabbed the sack from her hand. She winked at me and rolled up the window. I wouldn’t have to use my credit cards for awhile. Cash was still king.
I heard a noise behind me. I turned. It was Perry.
“You must have some serious shit going on,” he said.
“Naw,” I said. “It’s the serious shit that I’m averting.”
“Oh,” he said.
*****
I sprinted back around the block to my car, got inside, started her up and took off. Three blocks later I caught up with Nat’s Buick.
I followed them through town and out past the outskirts of Austin until I was assured that we weren’t being followed.
I flashed my lights at them to let them know the coast was clear and they could go west unmolested. Nat had a nice spread up near Marble Falls. Also he had more guns and ammunition than the First Mounted Cavalry up there, so I felt much better than if Julie had remained with me. There’s a study for you: a Democrat that loves to collect guns.
As I turned my old Mercedes back around heading east, I started thinking again about my mom. About some of the things she’d said during my formative years, and about stuttering.
My whole body had been sort of stuttering along the last hour, burning like a blow torch on a rich mixture of stress and adrenaline, or maybe more like a racing engine that had to be throttled back before it could be put into a lower gear. So when I stuttered, I knew what to do. I had to go back. Back to the beginning. That was where my old Mercedes wanted to go.
I went east through town and back out the other side, out past all the busy interchanges and new roadway construction, past the little towns that had over the years become conjoined with the outskirts of Austin by way of osmosis, and off into the brightening Texas sun. Going back. Back to Norman Howell, death’s warmest candidate. And back to Huntsville.
CHAPTER FIVE
Huntsville, Texas is the hub of the “Criminal Justice” machine run by the State of Texas. It is a town of some thirty thousand souls. Half of that number is made up of the townspeople, and the other half is nearly evenly divided between college students attending Sam Houston State University and the male inmate population of the three main prisons: The Walls, Wynne and Ellis.
Until 1925, capital punishment in Texas was meted out by the County Sheriffs of Texas’ 254 counties. The form of punishment was a tightly woven strand of hemp around the neck of the poor sinner secured to a beam with a trap door underfoot.
When the State took over the job it used electricity. All executions were carried out at The Walls Unit. In the 1970s the Death Row inmates were moved from The Walls to Ellis Unit so the candidates would be far enough removed from the Death Chamber so as not to be constantly reminded of their eventual fate. It was a moral decision if not a political one — a way of keeping the peace on the Row. The method of laying them low later became lethal injection.
There are arguments for and against the Death Penalty, but something was said to me by the old warden that oversaw the punishment during a guided tour of The Walls when I was a college student. I took the tour on a dare from one of my buddies.
There were roughly twenty of us crowded into a small room no larger than some elevators that I have been on. In the center of the room was a narrow bed, complete with restraining straps for arms, torso and feet. The silence in the room had spoken volumes, and the warden just stood there for a few moments letting that silence soak in to each of us before speaking.
“Now,” he said — and I believe I’ve got every word verbatim from that day — “this is where we carry out punishment. If any one of you ever has to serve on a jury where you are deciding on the life or death of a person, just remember that if you decide on death, it will be you sending him here, not me.”
I looked at the white-haired warden with his little pouch of belly fat and the wrinkles around his eyes and his sober expression and knew, just as certainly as I knew the sun would be rising tomorrow, that he slept well at night. His was just a job. He was Atticus Finch gone one row over to sit permanently in the corner with all the other good men who have decided that it was their destiny to do the dirty jobs that others couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do.
I spoke with him briefly after the tour, hanging on until the last conservative housewife and bored teenager turned away to leave. We chatted about the similarities between us: where we were from, a person or two that we knew in common. Our conversation was earthy and he looked at me with steady, unblinking pale blue and appraising eyes. I knew that many men other than myself — men who had taken the wrong road in life and found their last days spent in this man’s company — had likewise peered deeply into those same steady, unwavering eyes, searching perhaps, looking for an answer. And no doubt they had found something. Some sense of stability and place, maybe. And I remembered something the warden had said during the tour in answer to a simple question: Of the two hundred or so souls who had met their breathing end under his stewardship, only one had fought during that last walk to the chamber, and that one had been insane.
These were the things I mulled over as the miles and minutes slipped past me during my trip east to Huntsville.
And to my surprise, the three hour trip felt more like twenty minutes, on the outside.
*****
To get into a prison to see a convict you have to be either family, the convict’s lawyer, or it has to be in conjunction with an ongoing criminal investigation. Even in those instances there is paperwork. To get in to get some documents signed take
s some pull. I never had that much pull, myself, but Nat had used whatever pull he had available in order to get me in the door of the place the first time around, so I had no illusions about my chances of getting back in to see Howell for an unscheduled visit. Unless I was able to buffalo my way back in, my chances were pretty much nil, and if it was the case that Sawyer or one of his cronies had come into the picture by way of Howell or the prison, then there was a chance that I would find myself either under arrest, or taking a ride out into the countryside in a state vehicle. A final ride, that is, and possibly in the trunk.
I crossed Interstate 45 and slowed down for city traffic as my clock ticked off twelve noon.
I didn’t go straight to the prison. Instead, I found myself heading into downtown for a bite to eat. I needed it. Also, I needed to get my nerve up a bit.
Just leave the Governor alone, stop poking around, and everybody can rest easy, the voice had said, that back home voice.
Who was “everybody”?
People that stick their nose in where it don’t belong are called ‘meddlers’.
Meddlers. I could understand that mentality, not that I necessarily agreed with it. That way of thinking was familiar to me. Where I came from a fellow minded his own business. I remember a man from the city government came by once to tell my granddaddy he couldn’t keep chickens on his place inside the city limits anymore. My granddad ran the fellow off with a shotgun.
The guy on the phone with the accent. He had sounded a lot like my grandfather, a fellow nobody wanted to cross.
It can be a capital offense.
The threat of death. Not implied. Directly stated. The East Texas translation would be: “You keep this up, you gonna die, Boy.”
I pulled up to the curb in front of a diner a few blocks from downtown.
There was a row of newspaper stands butting up against a large, plate glass window, and there, on the front of the Austin American-Statesman a few feet in front of the shining hood of my car, I saw it. A chill ran down my spine and my spit dried in my mouth and my heart stopped beating for a moment, and I wished that I had picked up my morning paper, but it was right where Julie and I had left it during our hurried departure: out on my lawn, probably still wet underneath from the morning dew and baked dry on top by the Central Texas sun.
Before I was even out of my car I knew what had happened and to whom, even though the bold headline from which I couldn’t bring myself to avert my gaze didn’t say who it was. I knew how it had happened and the truth was I didn’t want it to have happened but it was too late for me to do a damned thing about it.
I was out of my car, fiddling in my pockets for change, and jumping toward the old, rusted and rickety-looking newsstand, my eyes glued to the picture.
LAKE TRAVIS BLAST CLAIMS LIFE
It could have said: MEDDLER EXECUTED. No difference.
I plunked two quarters quickly into the machine, yanked down on the handle and pulled a fresh paper from the short stack inside, the scent of printer’s ink already working its way into my nose.
I should have known when I’d heard the threatening voice over the phone, a voice similar to other voices heard long ago and far away in my life. And later at the service station when I got those three tones that hadn’t been there the previous day when I’d first called Milo. On some level, though, I did know, but just hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself.
I read as I walked to and through the door of the café. I read as I took a seat at a table that I didn’t even see, and I was still reading even as I ordered tea and the lunch special, whatever it was.
As far as being able to do something about what I read, I might as well have been reading ancient history.
LAKE TRAVIS BLAST CLAIMS LIFE
AP/LAKEWAY,TEXAS — Residents of Lakeway were awakened Tuesday by an early morning explosion on Lake Travis. A houseboat owned by Milo Unger, a freelance writer, ignited and burned, killing Unger, destroying the wharf where the craft was moored, and sinking two other nearby boats. The Travis County Sheriff’s Department is investigating the explosion.
“Our first job is to make sure that other property here is safe, then to find out what happened,” Bob Sanders, spokesman for the Travis County Sheriff’s Office stated at the scene. The explosion may have been the result of an ignition of fuel vapors. “Unger must have stored a lot of fuel on board the boat,” Sanders said. “But we don’t know for sure yet if this was the cause.” A heavily damaged fuel container was found on shore nearby the destroyed vessel and wharf.
Unger’s body was recovered by divers. “He may have been smoking up on deck, and the vapors simply caught.”
I knew there would be no mention of Sawyer, even though there were a good number of people who knew that Unger had been one of Sawyer’s greatest detractors.
In Austin you could call the Governor or the Mayor or anybody else anything you liked. You could whisper about their sexual peccadilloes and not-so-secret proclivities to your heart’s content, and there were some who made a lot of hay out of doing so. But one thing you couldn’t do was accuse the Governor of graft or murder in the media without some concrete proof. Really, you couldn’t even blab about it. Not, that is, if you wanted to keep working in the city. There were folks at the Statesman who wouldn’t have minded seeing Sawyer’s head on a plate, but I seriously doubted any one of them would put their own ass on the line to see it happen. And while I hadn’t known Milo Unger all that well, he’d seemed to me the sort of guy I would have as a friend.
As I sat drinking my unsweetened tea I was thinking that I might be persuaded to punch Sawyer’s ticket myself if the situation were just right.
I don’t hate Dick Sawyer, Milo had said. I don’t hate anybody.
“Nobody should be allowed to get away with taking out somebody like that,” I mumbled to myself, then looked around to see if anybody had heard me. There were half a dozen local customers toward the back.
“Not in Austin. Not anywhere,” I whispered to myself.
Even though my mother and father are dead because of him, Milo had also said. I was almost sure I’d heard it just like that.
I flipped over to the next page of the article:
This is the first such explosion to occur on Lake Travis since 1982 when two ski boats collided and one ignited, claiming four lives.
When asked whether or not foul play was being ruled out, Sanders is quoted as saying “there will be an investigation. You can’t fail to investigate when something like this happens. But I hope this is not a crime.”
Milo Unger was a political activist for the Green Party and a noted journalist and detractor of several key state officials and their policies.
At least they’d gotten that part right.
Someone at the Statesman did know who he was, even when writing in the middle of the night. It wasn’t stated as such, but I could read it between the lines: respect.
My hands were shaking. My knuckles were white. No doubt my neck and face were as red as a beet.
I wanted to act. The anger was building inside me. But I also needed to settle down first, before I did anything else. Okay, then what? I asked myself.
I would call the prison. It would beat popping up like a duck in a shooting gallery. Maybe, just maybe, I was learning to think.
Then what? The voice in my head stated again.
Then, possibly, I could find out what had happened to Unger’s parents.
I sat at my café table and ate my BLT and chips when they arrived, sipped my tea, and watched the traffic go by outside.
CHAPTER SIX
Looking at it, as I polished off one last glass of tea, there were things that I knew Sawyer couldn’t do. He couldn’t make people not have ever existed and he couldn’t alter time.
There would be a trail, somewhere, leading back to him.
I had met Dick Sawyer once before. I shook hands with him at a gala affair when he was Governor-elect. I recall he had a strong handshake, and I looked down to see if
he had any missing fingers, as was the case with a former governor I once knew. Men who do roughneck work for any length of time are liable to have missing digits. Sawyer’s hand was whole. I recall that he caught my look and raised a silvery, questioning eyebrow. I didn’t offer an explanation but instead made small-talk, which successfully distracted him.
A week later Sawyer moved his offices off Congress Avenue over to the Governor’s Mansion.
Even then Sawyer must have been a tyrant-in-the-making. That was two years past and there had been whispers running around Austin about the man since that time; the kind of whispers that you might hear over pasta at Vinny’s Restaurant or in the elevator coming down from the top of the Frost Bank Building. Whispers about back-biting and potential lawsuits averted by threat.
You didn’t necessarily have to corrupt one of the greatest police organizations that ever walked (namely the Texas Highway Patrol and the Texas Rangers) in order to threaten and cajole your enemies. But a few well-placed individuals willing to execute an order or carry out a temporary detention in order to get a point across — that sort of thing could be managed from just about any point of the system, to say the least for the top, and it could be done with any police force in any state or country.
I sat there at my table in the restaurant, the newspaper with the article on Milo Unger’s abrupt demise in front of me. Below the headline there was a color photograph of what was left of Milo’s Boat being hoisted partway into the air by a piece of county road equipment with a long boom. The boat looked as though it had been shredded by a Tyrannosaurus Rex that had been bent on peeling the boat the way a kid will mangle a candy wrapper to get at the sweetness inside.
Then it hit me. The wreckage hanging from the boom... the only thing missing was Dan Rather’s voice.