“I thought I did. At the time.”
“You always do. At the time.”
“But I married you.”
“But not for long.”
Silence.
“You must hate me,” she said. “If you do, I can’t blame you. But the truth is, I’m so sorry I have no way to express it.”
“Where did you get that old Colt revolver? Your grandfather’s.”
“Pingo Chavez gave it to me.”
“Where did he get it?”
“I don’t know.”
“There were two, you said. A matched pair. Where’s the other one?”
“I don’t know.”
Silence.
“This is probably the end of us,” she said.
“Probably. Why didn’t you tell me about Crossworth?”
“I was afraid to. Afraid you might not come out here.”
“Because I’d be afraid to.”
“Yes.”
“Because I’m a born coward.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Why writers, Tyler? Why not private detectives, people like that? You’ve got the money.”
“Like a Grade B movie? No, I told you. Writers do research. And they’re intelligent, imaginative. They can put things together in plots.”
“Well, just because the three of us struck out, don’t be discouraged. There must be at least a couple hundred more in New York you haven’t slept with yet. And when you’ve run through them, how about the Writers Guild of America West? Move to LA. They have thousands of members.”
“Please don’t.”
She rose, took off her jacket, tossed it on the king-sized bed, stood looking at it. The bed. So did I. With a certain ululation in my loins.
“If this is the end of us,” she said, “I’d be grateful if you’d tell me anything else you think important.”
“Why not?” I said. “A heart of eighteen-carat gold. Nice to old ladies, give anybody the shirt off my back. And my coat. And my pants. Which I just did, last night. Well, let’s see.” I had to watch it. I’d decided to cooperate with Snackenberg to the extent of not mentioning him or his Border Patrol or the bit about illegal aliens to her. I’d do that much for Uncle Samuel, but no more. And patriotism had nothing to do with it—things between us were sufficiently screwed up without throwing that in the hopper. “Speaking of shirts, I can tell you what happened to Sansom. You were right—it wasn’t hit-and-run. He was dragged to death under a car. And you were right about Chavez—he did it. Last night he and his deputies were the ones who tied me under a car and told me to get out of Harding and dragged me long enough to give my chest a close shave. Practically to the bone.”
Tyler sat down beside her jacket, and in the last of the light began to paint nickels, dimes, and quarters with red nail enamel.
“So Sansom was murdered,” I said. “Just like Crossworth. The guys who ball you really lead exciting lives, don’t they, Tyler?”
She shook her head. “We don’t know Max is dead, or Phil either.”
“No, not for sure. But I read the report of the county medical examiner on Sansom, and if he isn’t dead I’d hate to meet him on Halloween. What a face. In fact, no face.”
Silence.
“You hate me, don’t you, Jimmie?”
I took a long time answering that one. I drank cold coffee and looked out the window at the lights in Mexico. “Tyler, at this point I’m too totaled to hate anyone. Seven days ago I kissed you goodbye in New York—it seems like a year—and this has been the worst week of my life. I’m an urban, apartment-type person. I eat my porridge and dream and listen to records and weave my little webs for the kiddies and type and a barber appointment makes a big day for me. When I think what I’ve been through— what you’ve put me through—Jesús H. Christ. And the frustrating thing—I simply can’t figure it. Can’t figure you, to begin with. I think I love you, but I’m also mad as hell at you. It’s a really vicious thing for a woman to bribe a man with love and marriage if he’ll just go out after some Unholy Grail of hers and put his life in jeopardy. And that was our deal, remember? Find out if Sansom was murdered and who did it and you’d be mine forever and ever and I did it and now I’m not sure I care to collect. Looking at you now, sitting on that bed, I still lust for you—it must be my glands, it’s certainly not my brains. You’re sorry for me? I’m sorry for me. And for Crossworth, too, and even old Max. Where was I? My God, I’m almost incoherent—oh yes, so I can’t figure you. And sure as hell any of the rest of it. Oh, I get stuck on a storyline often, like all writers, but this takes the moldy cake. If you really are remorseful, as you say, then lay it on the line with me, Tyler. What for God’s sake is going on in that home town of yours?”
“Jimmie, I honestly don’t know.”
“Why did your mother go off her rocker?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’s the problem between you and your father?”
“I don’t know, really. We were never close.”
“You don’t know, you don’t know. Okay, let’s take another tack. You sent three men out to Harding—why? I mean really why. Do you know that?”
She hesitated. “Yes. Partly to find out what became of my grandfather.”
“Buell Wood.”
“Yes. I heard his story a hundred times when I was a little girl. The old people remembered him personally. They made certain we young people would never forget him. Somehow he’s always been more real to me than my own father.”
“The great gunfighter. Your mother told me there were rumors for years—that he was south of the border, that he was a sheriff in Utah, so on. But she never saw him again after the 1916 trial. What do you think became of him?”
“I think he was murdered, too.”
“By who?”
“I don’t know.”
“I repeat. Where did Pingo Chavez get your grandfather’s gun—the one he gave you?”
“I asked him but he wouldn’t say. So I don’t know.”
“You don’t know, you don’t know.”
Silence.
The pressure dressings on my chest began to draw. I got up, stepped to the bed, sat down beside her. She would not look at me. I took her face in my two hands, turned it to me. She resisted. I had to use force. Much as I despise violence in any form or degree, I used it. I scowled into those gray orbs. I resisted her beauty as she resisted my strength.
“Tyler, I don’t believe you.”
“About what?”
“About your grandfather. All right, I’ll accept hero worship, girlish fantasies, but that’s not enough to risk the lives of three men. One loves you and pays the price, so you send another. And he pays, so you send another. And that’s me. And I almost paid. I’m lucky to be here. No, there’s something rancid in Harding—I can smell it fifty miles away. What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
I tightened my grip. “Then goddammit, tell me. Why did you send us? Why? What did you really want us to find out for you—really?”
She closed her eyes.
“Damn you, Tyler-”
She said: “Who I am.”
I said: “Who you are?”
She said: “I’ve never known.”
“Who you are!” I believed my ears. I let her go. I shot to my feet, ready to eat the carpeting. “Who you are? You mean—you mean all you wanted was an identity trip? And you talked us three sad bastards into taking it for you? My God Almighty!”
WHO TYLER VAUGHT WAS.
A timing device had been ticking in me for twenty-four hours, ever since I’d come to under a car staring down at sandy swatches of my own blood. And now like ten pounds of plastic explosive I went off, sky high and wall to wall.
“Who you are! My God, if it wasn’t so tragic it’d be hilarious! Two men dead and one injured for something you could have had on the couch of any shrink in New York for a hundred bucks an hour! I’ve finally heard everything! Who are you? No, what are you? As bananas
as your mother? Or some kind of a goddamned monster?”
I raged around the room. I wanted light, I’d had enough of the dark. I switched on the dresser lamp.
“I just thought of it—how come you haven’t asked me yet? To go back there and find out what happened to Buell Wood? Now that we’ve got Crossworth and Sansom laid away, why not go back and Sherlock around a little more and this time lose a little more of my anatomy? Like my face? How come?”
I switched on her vanity light.
I’ll tell you, Tyler—you look for your own goddamned identity on your own goddamned time! I’m not losing any more of mine looking for yours! I know who I am! I’m B. James Butters! I’m hot for virtue! I hate evil and I won’t wallow in it for anybody! The bottom line is—I’m a decent human being and I have a right to live in a decent world and yours ain’t!”
I switched on a bed lamp.
“I have a talent, a gift—I write damned good children’s literature—and you will not take that talent away by turning me into an adult! I have to be immature—I have to be a child myself—and I will not allow you to make a beat-down, hung-up average man out of me! And besides that, I’m only thirty-four years old and that’s too young to die!”
She sat impassively while I rammed into the John and turned on the light and rammed out again.
“So have your identity crisis by yourself, baby! Go on over to Harding and find out the filthy facts on your own time! As for me, I’m going the hell back where I belong while I’m still able and still me!”
I grabbed the phone and snarled at the operator to get me American Airlines and when she did booked myself on a New York flight leaving El Paso at 10:15 in the morning, which would give me ample, time before boarding to engage some local yokel to chauffeur my car home.
“There by God,” I said, triumphant.
Tyler had not heard. In the glare of lamps she was stretched out on the bed beside her painted coins, staring at the ceiling. For a second she seemed dead. Her eyes were empty, her face fixed as if by a mortician, and when she spoke, her voice was disembodied, almost mechanical. It was as though, switching on lights, I had also activated a machine somewhere within her. It was as though her words were being played on tape.
“I didn’t go to high school in Harding. I went to a girls’ school in El Paso, the Revette School. In my sophomore year I was called home for the funeral of my grandfather, Judge Vaught. He lived to be ninety-one. After the funeral, my father begged me to stay the night, and I did, and had a date with Howell Word. Tom Word’s son. Tom Word’s father was Francis Word, who had been a friend of my grandfather, the judge. This was in 1963.
Howell took me to a movie, then out in the desert and parked. I knew very little about boys. When we had parties at Revette, we were always in groups, and always chaperoned. Howell shocked me, and frightened me—the things he wanted to do. Finally I got angry and got out of the car and said I was walking home. I knew where we were. It was about five miles back to town. I took off my shoes and began walking. Howell drove beside me, pleading through the window to forgive him and get back in. But I was stubborn. I wouldn’t. Then another car came along, a prowl car of the County Sheriff’s Department. It was Pingo Chavez, the sheriff. I’ve never been gladder to see anyone. Pingo told Howell to go home, get lost. He did. Then Pingo offered to drive me home and I said yes, yes, I was so relieved. But he didn’t take me home. He drove down another road and parked and turned off his radio. He took out from under the seat an old Colt revolver. He said it had belonged to my other grandfather, Buell Wood, who had disappeared long ago. I asked him how he got it, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said it was one of a matched pair given to Buell Wood by the town, and had been used in the gunfight on Gold Street—when he killed the three men who were responsible for my grandmother’s death. He asked me if I’d like to have it. I said oh yes, I’d rather have that gun than anything else on earth. He said, ‘You will have to fuck for it.’”
In the telling she had not moved, nor had I. I stood beside her, listening to the tape.
“I had the revolver in my hand. If I’d been older, if I’d known what I know now, I’d have pointed it at him and said, ‘Touch me and I’ll shoot you. I’m choosey about the company I keep, so don’t ever speak to me or come near me again. I’m getting out of this car, you insignificant bean son of a bitch, and if you try to stop me I’ll kill you.’ And I would have.”
Flashback. I recalled how she had cut down to insignificance the foul-mouthed Mexican cabbie in New York on our way back from JFK.
“But I didn’t say it. I was terrified, and I was vague about what it was he wanted. How you did it. But going home without my grandfather’s gun would have broken my heart. So I said yes.”
Phenomenon. I wished Crossworth and Sansom had been there to see it. They might have decided dying for her had been worth it. This was the Tyler Vaught who summered at the Hamptons, wintered in Marrakech. This was the Gucci girl, the St. Laurent swinger. This was the lovely face which had launched a thousand sips at La Cote Basque, the face you said hello to in photos from the pages of WWD. But now, though it remained lifeless, the expression as embalmed as ever, tears welled in each gray and staring eye, slid down her cheeks to the pillow. A corpse crying. Tears unspooled from pain recorded in the past. The effect was SHATTERING.
“He did it to me twice. He hurt me so awfully I screamed. I was sixteen years old. I was a virgin.”
Along one wall of the room, four large white opaque glass screens.
Facing the four screens, a wide, curved console of dials and buttons before which, at the left center, sat the operator, and around the curve of the console, to his right, the radioman.
“The most top-secret room in our operation,” he said.
“And the most important. What you see is our Geotech Sensor System.”
“Four TV’s,” I guessed. “So you can catch four different game shows at one time.”
“Wrong.” He grinned. The screens were receivers representing the system along four different sectors of the border, he explained. In each of these sectors, on the American side of the line, a field of sensors, or detecting devices, was buried. The sensors were highly sensitive and usually one-directional, though sometimes bidirectional. When pressure was applied to them—when the earth above or around them was disturbed in other words —they responded by sending a radio signal. This signal, magnified and relayed over considerable distance, reached one of the screens and was translated on it into a white dot of light. When the dots winked on in a directional sequence—one after another at intervals and in a straight line—the operator and the computer built into the console recognized instantly that a genuine and meaningful penetration of that field was occurring. Then the computer began at once to print out the date, time, sector, and sequence while the operator logged the penetration on a typewriter. Simultaneously, the X-P Plotter, a machine also built into the console which received additional information from the sensors by radio, went into operation. A stylus drew on a moving chart a graphic picture of the seismic effects in the field—the weight of the penetration, or how much disturbance of the earth was taking place, whether caused by an animal or a man or a vehicle—very much as an electrocardiograph recorded the beats of a heart.
He paused, eyebrows raised.
“I can’t pound a nail,” I confessed.
The grin again. “All right. This man, the operator, studies the screen, and the taped information provided by the computer, and the picture drawn by the X-P Plotter. We call this ‘taking a read-out.’” When the operator’s training and experience convinced him that the penetration of one of the four sectors was significant—this took no more than seconds—he passed on all the relevant information to the radioman on his right. That gent immediately alerted all the ground units in the sector under consideration, and if necessary, called in aircraft as well. His messages, broadcast on one of the four frequencies used by the Border Patrol, were picked up by “repeaters,” radio r
elay stations erected in a network throughout the district, and reached the units no matter how great the range. These responded at once, and kept in constant communication.
I was impressed. “And this gizmo works all the time?”
“Round the clock. Two men in three shifts.”
“Then what’s your problem? Why doesn’t this detect every wet who puts a toe across the line?”
“Because the system covers only four small areas.”
“Why not install it everywhere?”
“Cost. We have six thousand miles of land border with Canada and Mexico.”
“You must grab quite a few, though.”
“One out of ten. I told you, our guess is that two thousand cross the Texas line every night of the week.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Every night. Probably ten per cent of the entire population of Mexico is already here by now. Illegally.” He frowned. “About all we can do is keep a finger in the dike, Mr. Butters. But the flood is on its way, and the country isn’t paying attention.”
Henry Snackenberg ushered me out of the room and down the hall of Border Patrol HQ, on the heights overlooking El Paso, and into his office. On the walls a portrait of the President and a personal letter of commendation, I assumed, from the U. S. Attorney General.
“Hank, how the hell tall are you?”
“Henry. Six-four. And you?”
“None of your beeswax.”
“Well,” he said. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Butters. What changed your mind?”
“Jimmie. What does Ace look like?” “Like a boy. A little long and lean for his age.”
“Where did you find Annie?”
“In high school.”
“Robbing the cradle.”
“What changed your mind, Jimmie? You told me yesterday, in no uncertain terms, you wouldn’t cooperate with us and you were pulling out of the Wild West pronto.”
“I saw your gun. Have you ever fired it? I mean, at anybody?”
“Once or twice. What changed your mind? The flag or the bed?”
“Did anyone ever take a shot at you? Did they come close?”
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