by George Wier
Blood was everywhere. The steering wheel was caked with it. The seat held a drying pool of it, and there were splatters on the inside of the passenger window.
Milo was somewhere, hurt or possibly dead.
“That’s about half of it,” Walt said beside me.
“Half of what?” I asked.
“His blood. I don’t see how he made it this far, except — ”
“Rasputin,” I finished for him.
“Yeah. Him.”
Walt clicked on a flashlight, shined it first down toward the driver’s seat, then to the floorboard, then down onto the grass beside the car. He knelt down and ran his fingers through the grass, stood and shined it at his fingers.
“He was still bleeding when he left the car,” he said.
“Still alive,” I said, stating the obvious. “He left under his own power.”
Walt knelt back down to the grass, moved the flashlight close.
“I think there might be a trail here,” he said.
“Let’s hope.”
Walt duck-walked around the open door.
“Here’s more.”
Walt noted the distance from the first blood spatters on the ground to the second, then cast his flashlight beam in an arc the same distance further out.
“Yeah,” Walt said. “He was under his own power alright. But he was still spurting blood.”
Walt continued around toward the back of the car, pausing with his beam toward the ground every four or five feet. I followed him around behind the car.
We were both in the ditch and moving away from the highway toward the distant flickering lights. The lights that no man on Earth had a true explanation for.
Thirty feet from the cruiser we ran across a barbed wire fence. Walt’s flashlight moved across the strands until a tuft of cloth was revealed. It had been caught and pulled free by a steel barb. I’d probably left half a hundred such rips in my jeans over the course of my life. That’s just how barbed wire works.
I looked up toward where the Chinati range merged with the night sky.
In the area where there had been first two lights, then four or so, there were now dozens. As Walt and I stood there, watching, they continued to multiply before our eyes.
“Let’s go,” I said.
“Wait for me,” Walt said. “I’m gonna get some ordnance.” He loped back toward his pickup.
I didn’t wait for him. I don’t think I could have if I had wanted to.
I ducked low, grasped the middle strand of wire right where Milo had gone through and pushed it down. I planted one foot on the other side, shifted my weight and pulled the other leg through and stood. Unlike so many times before, I didn’t get snagged.
On sacred ground? At the moment it felt so. Perhaps the Apache had believed so.
I couldn’t see Milo’s spent blood on the ground, but then again I didn’t have to.
I ran.
*****
I was dimly aware of the bouncing flashlight beam a great distance behind me, but I had already run the length of half a dozen football fields, leaping low sage brush and kicking up dust behind me.
If I made it through this encounter I’d need some new shoes.
I ran toward the lights, as Milo must have stumbled and run in his blood loss-induced delirium.
My own blood was hot, pumping with increased adrenalin through my body.
Back when I was a kid of seventeen I ran, much the way I ran towards Milo and the lights. Every day for an entire summer I ran for miles on end through the countryside, melting the stitches in my side and feeling my blood pounding in my ears. I ran for the joy of it, for the love of it — because I was alive and I was seventeen and I could. There in the northernmost reaches of the Chihuahua Desert I ran until I felt the shiv of a stitch in my side, and continued on without losing my pace. I ran and felt as though all the years that I had lived since were peeling away from me, cast off into the dusty wake of my flight.
And before my eyes the lights hovered, dipped and rose in their never-ending dance.
*****
The human will is the most amazing thing I’ve ever run across. The elan vital. The life force. The essence of who we really are.
Milo had made it two miles into the desert before collapsing for a final time.
Human will had brought him so far, and it was human will alone that found him. My will.
*****
I was sure he was dead.
But I wanted answers.
I knelt in the dust, grabbed him by the vee of his shirt and lifted him a foot off the ground.
“Not yet you don’t, you son of a bitch,” I yelled at him.
I slapped him. Hard.
I felt sticky blood on my fingers. What of it? I thought.
I slapped him again.
“What...” a shrill gurgle of a voice said. It was Milo.
“I want some answers, Milo,” I said.
“What do...”
I waited, holding him up by his shirt.
He raised his head a little.
“What do you hate... Bill?”
“You,” I said. “I think it’s you I hate.”
“Good,” he said, and coughed, his voice now a thin rasp.
“Why good? Why?” I demanded, shaking him.
“Because... Because it is... It is my life. I’m glad... You stopped me.”
“I had to,” I said.
“The light,” he said. There was a slight etheric sheen to the left side of his face.
“What light?”
But I knew.
I looked back over my shoulder. There it was above me. A ball of light hovering in the air perhaps fifteen feet off the ground. It was perhaps two feet across. It spun about amorphously, the way a bucket of water would if released in outer space.
I felt a slight tug of weight along my arms. I looked down and saw that Milo’s neck was slack and his head bobbed an inch above the dirt.
He was dead.
My scalp prickled, a thousand tiny needles poking and withdrawing and poking again. I felt my hair begin to stand up. It was not unlike the sensation I had felt in Hap’s biplane.
I let Milo Unger’s body fall back to the earth.
I turned slowly and looked upwards.
*****
When it was just past an arm’s length I called to it.
“What are you? What do you want?”
It flared brightly and spun about.
“What can I do to set things right?” I yelled at it.
No answer.
It flashed blue, then green.
“I want answers,” I yelled. “I want to know.”
Silence.
I reached out my right hand out, slowly.
I couldn’t feel my feet, my legs. It was as though I had forgotten them somewhere. The skin on my face hummed and buzzed, much the way it does when I’ve eaten too much chocolate, but that sensation times a hundred.
The light remained, unmindful of my outstretching arm, un-moving.
I thought I could hear a voice, distant, faded, as if it were playing over the radio and broadcast from the other side of the moon.
“Bill,” I heard it say, only for all its silence the voice was screaming.
“Don’t touch it,” I distinctly heard, or thought I heard.
But I had to.
One hand half covering my eyes, I extended my right arm its full range, and stepped forward.
And then somebody turned off all the lights.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I have a large forty gallon fish tank in my bedroom where the African fish swim from light to shadow and into the light again.
I used to sit and watch them for hours back in my single days. That fish tank with its captive denizens and its unmoving green fronds and its cold blue light was like a little universe to me, all contained in a space no larger than a deep freezer.
Looking down on my body in the desert in the night was like gazing into that oceanic cosmos in
my bedroom.
I could hear something but it wasn’t exactly sound. More of a feeling. Not a voice, exactly, but an intention. Perhaps it was Walter Cannon down there, shouting at me.
Thump!
The first slap jarred me, got my attention, even there amidst the ether.
Thump!
The second one pulled me down from the air.
Crack!
The last one woke me up.
“What?” I asked and began coughing. I supposed that my lungs would have to get used to breathing again.
“Can’t let you check out, Bill,” Walt said, his visage a black silhouette against the starry night sky over me. “Hank told me your woman’s expecting. I can’t let you go.”
Was he crying? There was a bit of a quake in his voice.
“The light...” I started to say.
“It’s gone. They’re all gone. Can you stand?”
I wasn’t sure, but when I moved, everything seemed to be in working order. I got up, shakily.
I took a few steps and almost stumbled over Milo’s body.
Walt knelt down, moved his hands over the corpse. The night was nearly pitch black, but for starlight.
I heard the sound of metal scraping against rock and sand.
“Find something?” I asked.
“Yeah. Any idea what this is?”
Walt held something silvery out towards me. I reached and got it. It was smooth, thin and heavy.
“It’s his laptop computer,” I said. “Where was it?”
“Underneath him.”
“Okay, Walt, let’s go.”
“Yeah. Where to?” he asked.
“Austin.”
“Okay. Fine by me.”
*****
We walked the long walk back to the highway. Once there, I reached into the back seat of the patrol car Milo had taken from the ranch, the one with all his blood, and got the Sawyer-box. I turned off the lights in the car, closed it up and locked it.
I wedged Milo’s box on the seat between me and Walt and turned my attention to his laptop computer.
The thing came to life.
The opening screen prompted for a password. Behind it, a picture of the Alamo filled the screen.
I typed “Texas,” and hit the return key. Got a “Retry” message.
I typed “Republic.”
No dice.
“Dammit, Milo,” I said. “What’s your password?”
Walt stayed quiet. He was going to let me figure out this one.
I thought about the brief conversations Milo and I had had. Had he dropped me any hints?
I typed in “Posse.” Nope.
Looking out across the desert in the night I thought about his last words. About hate. About how it had become his life.
One word flashed into my mind. A byword, a watchword. A brand.
I typed it in. Seven letters. I hit the return key.
The screen changed. The Alamo was gone and in its place was a picture of a simple doorway as Milo’s computer desktop background. Perhaps it was the doorway into some old wood-frame house or barn. Along the left side of the screen a couple of icons popped up and decided to hang around.
One icon was labeled “My Computer,” the second one down was “Trashcan,” and the last one was labeled with the same word Milo had used as his password into the computer.
It was a text file named “Revenge.”
I moved the cursor over it and thumped the mouse panel twice. The screen filled with words. And as the night wore down I read every one of them. I read until the lights of Fort Stockton were ahead of us, and then behind, and didn’t finish until after we took the Highway 290 exit off of I-10 and Austin was a little over a hundred miles to the east and the sun was yet again in the sky.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Some people are born mean, and some are made so. They are very carefully and deliberately created, shaped and molded.
Emil Howell arrived mean. He then proceeded to take his first born son and make a carbon copy of himself. The result: Milosh Howell or, for the sake of survival in school, just plain “Milo”.
Milo’s mother was Carrie Ruth Unger Howell. She and Emil married on her sixteenth birthday. It had been a shotgun wedding, according to Milo’s journal. The entire text file on his laptop computer had been one long journal entry covering the majority of his life, and not a few seriously traumatic and mind-warping tragedies.
Emil Howell had worked alongside a ruthless upwardly-mobile longshoreman named Trent Sawyer — the current Governor’s father. Sawyer had started off working on the docks in Morgan City, Louisiana. At the age of sixteen, in or around the year 1920, he had taken his deceased father’s paltry inheritance of five hundred dollars and rolled it into a whiskey smuggling operation that would one day cover the lower Mississippi Valley. From there his growing empire encompassed gambling on the Mississippi, pari-mutuel horse-racing in Bossier City, flop-houses in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, and shrimping in the coastal waters in order to keep up at least the appearance of legitimacy. Emil, who was younger, had followed Sawyer around, doing his dirty-work and devouring the scraps thrown to him. Emil, according to his son’s journal, had become a murderer at the age of fifteen when he blew a parish constable’s head from his shoulders with a sawed-off shotgun. No one, seemingly, was allowed to get away with refusing Sawyer’s bribes and threatening him publicly.
Trent Sawyer got one of his own whores — a girl named Lily — pregnant around 1939. He took the child, who until the age of three was simply called “Boy”, gave him a Christian name, expelled the mother from his employ and raised him himself.
Somewhere around 1949, Trent Sawyer had a run-in with a cousin of Huey P. Long, the “Kingfisher,” the legendary former Louisiana Governor and U.S. Senator who once wielded the power of life and death throughout many Louisiana parishes. Senator Long had been assassinated many years before, but there were remnants of his family still scrambling to consolidate the power base he had vacated in an untimely manner.
When an exchange of words turned into an exchange of bullets, Sawyer, who had never run from anything in his life, showed his utter genius by liquidating everything he had and moving to Galveston, even as Emil’s first wife was on her deathbed in a final fight with rheumatic fever. Howell, it seemed, could do little else than follow his boss and so took his wailing first-born son, Milosh, with him to Galveston five days before Carrie Ruth expired. Neither Howell nor the son were there to pay their last respects when the vault of the infant’s mother was sealed.
Two years later, at the age of thirty-nine, Emil Howell married a thin wisp of a girl from La Marque, Texas, moved himself and his toddling son into her parents’ house and set up shop for the long-haul.
Around January or February of 1950, Trent Sawyer arrived in Galveston with his pockets lined with money and his eyes glittering with expectancy. Galveston in those days was a haven for every degenerate and criminal fleeing from the law in New York, New Jersey and Chicago. Into this melting pot was added the Hollywood jet set and politicians and businessmen looking for a good time while away from home. In essence, Galveston was New Orleans all over again, and Sawyer was the wolf, newly arrived amid the bleating lambs with an insatiable hunger and money to burn.
Trent Sawyer established a construction business, bought a shrimp boat and began building a new empire. His last. He made connections in the shrimp and lobster industries as far away as Maine and sealed his deals over a handshake. The brute began to settle down and conduct business like a gentleman.
The singular instant where the lives of the Sawyers and the Howells took a downward turn was with the departure, at the age of seventeen, of Trent Sawyer’s only son, Richard. There had been a lot of threats shouted between Trent Sawyer and his son Richard that day. Richard hit the streets on his own without a dime in his pocket, seemingly cut off from the tainted family fortune.
Trent Sawyer began to drink every day and became insufferable to everyone around him.
On a cold February day in 1961, Emil Howell and Trent Sawyer came to blows. The topic of discussion was a Brazos Riverboat casino idea of Howell’s. Howell had been there all along, doing Sawyer’s dirty-work and quietly removing the competition, but over the years Sawyer had less and less use for Howell. Howell wanted a million dollars. Sawyer told him to rot in hell. When Howell pulled a gun on Sawyer, Sawyer took it from him and pistol-whipped him.
Thereafter Emil Howell and his family were on their own. Within months after the split-up between Trent Sawyer and Emil Howell, Sawyer married a Galveston school teacher named Sara Hardin. She began attempting to civilize the big brute in earnest, and apparently the best way to do that was to get herself pregnant as often as she could. For each of six years she gave him a new child, and the couple settled down in one of Galveston’s elegant historic homes.
By 1980, Trent Sawyer was a respected businessman who had amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in the construction industry, in shipping, in oil and shrimping. In his early retirement he had a habit of taking off in the early morning hours with one of his shrimpers and a son or two.
In 1998 Trent Sawyer quietly passed away at home. From his second marriage he had six children, nineteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. Three thousand mourners attended his funeral in Galveston.
There was no indication in Milo’s journal that the senior Sawyer had anything to do with blowing up shrimp boats. I later found, though, that the tall tale whispered to Howell by his half-brother while he was on Death Row was just the first of many details in his overall plan to lure me in and to convince others of the Governor’s questionable character.