skeletons

by Glendon Swarthout

“They are.”

  DIEGO RIVERAS? In the office of a SHERIFF?

  “I bought them in Mexico City in 1951, for $12.50 each. I have been offered a thousand each.”

  I stared at them, then at him again. His eyes were brown and easy. His hair was black as comedy, with epaulets of gray at the temples which were damned near distinguished. According to Tyler, if anyone had finalized Max Sansom, it had to be Pingo Chavez. Poor girl. She had to be as non compos as her poor mother. If this intelligent, cultured “Little Devil” was a murderer, I was Robert Redford.

  I sat down. The chair was real leather. “When he came to see you—Sansom—what did he want?”

  “What you want. What I could tell him about the two trials, and what happened to the Villistas. He was going to write a book. I told him what I knew. It was not much.”

  “How much?”

  “About the trials, nothing. About the four peons—that they were let go and caught and killed. That some years ago my people buried them near the border and made a sort of shrine. It is called ‘La Casa de la Justicia.’ ‘The House of Justice.’”

  “Justice?”

  “We have our sense of humor, too.”

  “Oh.”

  “If you want to see it, drive down. It is on my ranch. Eleven miles south, toward Columbus. You will see a sign, ‘Los Esqueletos.’ Turn left under the sign and follow the road. It leads to my house.”

  “Did Sansom go there?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  He offered me a small cigar. I said no thanks. He lit one himself.

  “What I don’t get is this,” I said. “If those Villistas were run down and wasted in 1916, as you say, and Judge Vaught says, why wasn’t something done about it later? Or anytime since? There’s no statute of limitations on murder—I read that in a crime novel.”

  “Nothing was done because they were Mexican.”

  “You’re bitter.”

  “Realistic. And whoever killed them joined them long ago. The men who sat in this chair before me could not track down dead men. Should they have dug up the graves of the guilty and said I arrest you for homicide?” He appraised his cigar smoke. “It was a bad thing, though—four men executed for a crime the jury had found them innocent of. La Mierda de Dios.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Shit of God.”

  I was running out of rope. Somewhere, counterpoint to our conversation, was the monotone of a radio dispatcher’s voice moving prowl cars around the county. “Is there much friction here between Chicanos and Anglos?” I asked.

  “Not now. There was in the old days. I was born north of the railroad tracks. We call that place ‘Sal Si Puedes.’ ‘Get Out If You Can.’”

  “And you did.”

  “Over twenty years ago. I was first elected sheriff in 1956, but I was a deputy long before that. The first Mex on this force. Times had changed by then.”

  I stirred. “Well, this has really been a wild-goose chase. It all started when I went out to Kennedy with Tyler to sign for the body.”

  “We shipped it. That is, my department called our mortuary here. They did what they could to make him presentable, then hearsed him to American Airlines in El Paso. Standard procedure.”

  “I don’t know what to tell her—she thinks old Max was murdered.”

  He smiled again. “If a woman wishes to believe something, permit her. She will be contented, and better in bed.”

  That depends, Pingo, I thought, recalling the last night in my apartment, the second sexual round when I had tried to play the man to Tyler’s insatiable girl and completely pooped myself in the process. “Did you know Tyler Vaught?”

  “No. I saw her once—she was very young and came here for the funeral of her grandfather, the old Judge Vaught. She was very beautiful.”

  “She still is. She warned me about you, by the way. She says you’re dangerous.”

  “I am. You can tell.”

  “She claims that if anyone knocked Max off, it really was you.”

  He sobered. “Do you believe it?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Gracias.”

  It was time to go. He rose with me, walked me to the door. I caught a slight limp.

  “You return to New York City now? In that splendid car?”

  “Home sweet home.”

  “My sympathies to your chief of police.”

  “Oh, I forgot. Her other grandfather, the gunslinger— after the 1916 trial he turned up missing, too. Like the Villistas. And the transcripts. Any idea of whatever happened to him?”

  “No. But he lives.”

  “Lives?”

  This time his smile was ironic. “Once a year, on Gold Street. Buell Wood Day.” We shook hands. “Buenos tardes, Mr. Butters.”

  “Tally-ho, Sheriff.”

  “Go back and write your books.”

  “Earn a living.”

  “Make the children happy.”

  Tyler:

  Why estranged from parents?

  Why not tell me mother’s condition?

  How came by Buell Wood’s gun?

  What’s she got against Pingo?

  Judge:

  Why not tell me wife in funny farm?

  Ditto transcripts gone. He knew.

  Why his father’s quote about justice?

  Helene:

  Why tell elopement tale?

  Why evasive about trials?

  What put her in funny farm?

  Pingo:

  Why did Doc Shelley phone him?

  Why have me tailed?

  Why stick me same room Ramada as Sansom?

  Telling me something?

  What?

  Transcripts:

  Why missing?

  Any connection Sansom’s death?

  Butters:

  Why in hell not on way to NYC?

  Because I was dumb, that was why. Because I was about to do the dumbest thing I had ever done in my life or ever would. And because, though I was packed and had credit-carded my bill at the Ramada and could have been en route to El Paso and points east, I sat that night in 112—Sansom’s room—making a damned list of questions that bugged me because I had no answers and letting that damned small, incessant WIND bug me even more. And I was homesick. For the flags on Fifth Avenue and the look of the Algonquin lobby and the X-movie posters on Forty-second and the stink of subway platforms and even the cacophony of garbage cans. For my apartment and typewriter and desk and roomfuls of imaginary kids to read to. And for Frisby, my famous Fly, whom I’d left in midparagraph about to take off for Africa.

  And of course for Tyler. I reread my list. I could make no sense whatever of my two and a half days in Harding. I couldn’t take back one damned concrete thing to my damsel in neurotic distress. The late unlamented luminary of American lit had been killed in a hit-and-run—no more, no less. And as for the past, I had exhumed as much of it as I could and hit a dry hole. Four forgotten Mexicans planted by their own people where they had tried for the border and failed. Old songs sung on porches under the stars of summer. Diego Rivera sketches in a sheriff’s office. Would these be enough for her? Would she live with me and be my love on the basis of these bits and pieces? Or would she, like her tragic mother, climb the fence and run away again? To shack up with some other big-shot book-club son of a bitch?

  I feared she would. And I sat there in Sansom’s room with Sansom’s gross ghost and stared at my list and bit my knuckle and finally, after an hour or so, summoned up my reluctant blood.

  Leaving the key in the room, closing the door, I toted suitcases and garment bag to the Rolls, arranged them in the boot. Then I lurked along the walk, turned a corner of the building, tried a doorknob. That afternoon I had noticed the Ramada yardman push a power lawnmower through a door. I switched on a light. It was his toolroom—pruning shears, power mower, gas cans, pool-cleaning equipment, rakes, insecticides—and just what I wanted. I took it to the car, stowed it in the rear compartment, Royced away.
r />   I drove down Gold Street, turned on Silver, circled Harding Courthouse, headed south, out of town. The road, a two-lane blacktop, ran straight as a string.

  I punched my Pulsar. Two minutes past 9 P.M. The fascia clock checked out with it exactly—a compliment to both manufacturers. I began counting miles with the odometer.

  This was the last loose end. The one thing Sansom might not have done. So hairy or not, scary or not, I would. And when I had, I could tell Tyler I had done everything I humanly could.

  At eleven miles I slowed, and presently located a sign elevated on two poles over a turnoff to the left. “LOS ESQUELETOS,” and in a lower corner, “Chavez.” I turned under the sign, doused my headlights, and commenced to crawl. The road was sand and two-track and twisty, meandering southeast through desert and lifting slowly toward the base of mountains.

  I had made perhaps a mile when there materialized suddenly in my windscreen a sight which put my heart in my throat. Bearing down on me headlightless. Tons and tons of it. Capable of crushing me like a rabbit.

  MOVING VAN?

  I slewed off the road and let him have it, the bastard. As he rumbled by, thanks to a half-moon I could read the logo on the long side of his trailer: “VIAVAN” in large letters, and under that, “Interstate & Transcontinental.”

  When I got myself together, I took the road again, into his dust. The only consolation was that if I had been shaken up by a moving van in such a place at such an hour, so must he have been at running into rolling stock right out of Piccadilly Circus.

  Now I looked hard, left and right. After another mile, I squinted it. A tiny light, fitful. And a turnoff to it. I turned south again, followed tire tracks through grease-wood and mesquite and cactus, cut the engine, got out, walked a few yards up a rise.

  La Casa de la Justicia. On the crest of the rise. This was as far, evidently, as the four Villistas had fled that night in 1916 after their trial. Prosecuted by the state in the person of Charles Vaught, defended by Buell Wood, found not guilty, they had been let go. But here the “Texas horse race” had ended, less than a mile from the border I estimated, less than a mile from freedom. Here they had been caught, here killed. And here they had lain, haute cuisine for ants and coyotes, decade after decade till, some years ago, discovered by their own people, Mexican-Americans from Harding or Columbus or both, they had been given decent burial. It was a kind of shrine.

  There was a small pedestal, crudely made of rock and mortar, and recessed in its top a flame, fueled probably by kerosene. A perpetual tribute to Anglo justice. A grim reminder, burning ever, to the majority by the minority. The Shit of God. The graves were tended, too. At the head of each of the four mounds was a white cross of wood. The flame was enough to let me read the names: Juan Sanchez, Taurino Garcia, Jesús Alvarez, Luis Obedo.

  I went back to the car. What I had bagged from the Ramada Inn was a shovel. I brought it to the graves, stood for a moment trying to decide which one, finally said eeny-meeny-miny-mo. Third one from the left. Taurino Garcia. I positioned myself, raised the shovel.

  Looked. Nothing. Listened. Only the wind.

  But broke out in a sweat anyway. Because it was a dirty ghoulish thing to do and because I didn’t know why I was doing it.

  Writers learn in time to trust their creativity, though. Suppose you’re stuck with a story or a character. You sit around for hours waiting for the lightbulb to go on, the crucial idea to come, and eventually, if you’re really creative, and really professional enough to sit around long enough, it does. And so at some point during the evening, sitting around in the room at the Ramada and staring at my list of questions and biting my knuckle, I’d had this brainstorm. To sneak out to La Casa de la Justicia and dig up a grave. If caught it could get me thirty days in Pingo’s pokey, but I hated going home to Tyler with not one damned thing to show for two weeks and four thousand miles except eggs Benedict on my face. I dug in.

  Since the graves were mounded, they were probably shallow. I dug down two feet, expecting hopefully to hit a casket lid. Or unhopefully, bones. Or at best a Coke bottle. I started where Garcia’s feet should have been.

  They weren’t.

  I worked my way toward the cross, digging and sweating and swinging dirt. I got to where his head should have been.

  It wasn’t.

  I turned around and worked back again, digging another foot deeper until I reached my starting point.

  No trial transcripts, no Buell Wood, no Coke bottle-okay.

  But NO TAURINO GARCIA?

  I sat down on the side of the hole blowing on a blister and thinking I was ready for a rubber room myself because a grave without remains was a reality with which I absolutely couldn’t cope.

  What in hell did it mean? What did this do to all the abadaba I’d heard from Tyler and Judge Vaught and Pingo Chavez about local legends and Texas horse races and Anglo justice? Who’d take the trouble to build four fake mounds and erect four fake crosses and keep a fake memorial flame burning for years and why?

  When it happened I was somehow not surprised. I saw the traditional stars and was aware of a huge cranial hurt but before I blacked out I had time to say to myself why of course, Butters, my boy. You’ve read enough whodunits to know that detectives and private eyes are ALWAYS being hit over the head and knocked out. It’s a requirement of the genre. So now you’ve been hit over the head and you’re about to go blotto—so what else is new?

  I came to. Furious.

  “How dare you!” I cried. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

  There were three or four of them, lugging me along face down.

  “Put me down! I’ll tell you who I am! A famous writer from New York, that’s who!”

  I had a splitting headache. I was too weak to struggle, and besides, I loathe violence.

  “You stop this! When I get home I’ll have the NYPD and the FBI after you!”

  My wrists were tied. Finally they dropped me in the sand, shoved me under something.

  A car.

  “What’re you doing?” I cried. “Let me go!”

  The straps which bound my wrists were being tied to something. On the underside of the car.

  “And the CIA!”

  They left me. I lay face down under the car, hot with its heat, my stomach sickened by the fumes of oil and grease and gas.

  “You’ll be sorry, goddamn you!”

  Someone squatted beside the car, spoke to me. “You said you were leaving us, Mr. Butters. But you didn’t. In a while I think you will want to. Go then, por favor. And don’t visit us again.”

  The car’s engine started. I tensed, tried to yell, but couldn’t.

  The straps tightened around my wrists, my arms extended, I began to move. I was being dragged under the car along the two-track road. Faster.

  Faster.

  My arms excruciated in their sockets. I could feel the front of my Halston jacket shredding and the toes of my Florentine leather boots scrape through. More speed and another minute or two of this and I would have “fractures of patellae” and “fractures of phalanges and metatarsals.” And unless I could keep my head up, my face an inch above the blurring earth, “disintegration” of my “recognizable features.”

  Faster.

  I screamed like a siren now. My jacket shredded through, my silk jersey polka-dot body shirt tattered. Beneath that was my own flesh. My head sank, my chin close to contact. I screamed not for help but for unconsciousness. Before it came, mercifully, I knew three things.

  Max Sansom was murdered. How he was murdered.

  Who murdered him.

  I groaned.

  The car was gone, they were gone, I lay alone in sand and darkness.

  I pushed up with my hands.

  “Ohhhhhhhh!”

  I almost fainted. Which would have been the third time out in ten minutes. For on my untied hands were sandy swatches of blood. I had seen my own blood only once in my adult life, during a gamma globulin test, and fainted then.

 
; I got to my knees, then to my feet, flapped around till I managed some balance, staggered back along the road toward where my car was till my pants fell down around my ankles, tripping me, and I followed them.

  I sat up, saw that my belt buckle was gone, stood again, hauled up my pants, held them, reeled along the road again, began to cry.

  Outrage, yes. Fear, yes. But humiliation, too. I had been physically abused and SPIRITUALLY INSULTED. It had been far more dehumanizing than my two muggings in New York.

  I blubbered all the way to the car, collapsed against it, examined myself. Strap burns around my wrists, although my watch had survived. My beautiful jacket had no front. I pulled off the rest. My ascot was gone. My sexy body shirt was rags. I stripped them off. From chest to belly button my skin oozed blood. Through rents in my lovely Cacharel slacks the bloody knobs of my knees protruded. I stumbled out of the twill. My gorgeous antique leather boots had holes in the toes. I tugged them off. Then stood there in my holey socks and Jockey Classic Briefs and shed tears on a fender of my classic saloon. Over eight hundred dollars’ worth of sartorial splendor destroyed. Plus my dignity, which was priceless.

  Bidding both a tearful adieu, I cramped behind the wheel and took off down the sand road over my own blood. Headlights on. High beam. If they were watching me—up theirs. I intended to do precisely what I’d been warned to do–get the hell out of this HELLHOLE of a Harding, New Mexico.

  I barreled into town and two-wheeled around the courthouse and hoped the heap burned to the ground and cremated everybody in it and ran a red light at the intersection of Gold and Silver and spit out the window. For once I could break every law on the books with impunity.

  I was bailing out, and no prowl car connected with the County Sheriffs Department was about to impede my progress.

  I ramped onto the interstate and floored it for El Paso. There was no hospital in Harding, and I’d have had to be a bigger idiot than I was—if that was possible—to pay a call on young Doc Shelley, who couldn’t wait till I was out his door before he was on the pipes to Pingo Chavez. So I put that dear old lady of an automobile up to eighty, which was the limit of her legs, in order to get medical attention before I bled to death.