Additionally, on the sidewalk in front of the agency, two Model T’s in excellent restoration were displayed, a Runabout and a Coupe. Near where we stood, close by a concrete watering trough, an antique Packard touring sedan was parked at the curb. And they had built a hitching rack to which were tied three saddled horses. A thousand people lined, crowded the sidewalks along the dressed block of the street. Talking, laughing, looking, waiting.
Hoofbeats.
Silence.
Suspense.
A horse and buggy trotted up Silver Street, turned the corner onto Gold. On the seat a young woman in crinoline costume, reins in hands, and beside her a baby, a doll swaddled in a shawl.
Out of the Luna three toughs in cowboy getups reeled. Tigh Gooding and the Pennington brothers discharged six-shooters in the air.
At the reports the horse reared, bolted, ran the right front wheel of the buggy into the watering trough. The young woman driver threw herself athletically out of the seat onto the concrete, lay as though lifeless. The doll in its cocoon of shawl was hurled from the buggy to the pavement. The horse hauled the buggy away, trotting down the street.
Applause.
Hollywood could not have done it better.
Intermission. A thousand men, women, children waited, breath held, heads craned, eyes wide.
A callow clerk in shirt sleeves, armbands, and yellow shoes burst from the Guarantee Electric Store, galloped frantically down the street to bear the tragic tidings to someone.
Silence.
Suspense.
I bit my knuckle.
We stood at the intersection of Gold and Silver Streets, Ace in front of Annie, Annie in front of me. Close. So close that I could sniff myself high on her blond hair, could press my pelvis to hers till we were as inseparable as Siamese twins. It was either this adjacency or my haberdashery which had earlier attracted notice. I wore a purple velvet jacket with gold cloisonne buttons by Brioni, a white silk shirt adorned at the open throat by a simple gold chain, a pair of Cantoni’s velvet stained-glass-print slacks, and light blue patent-leather pumps.
Annie had pointed out to me the ad in the El Paso morning paper. Harding, New Mexico, invited all and sundry to its annual “Buell Wood Day,” featuring a rodeo, a buffalo barbecue, bargain sales by local merchants, and in the afternoon, an authentic re-enactment of the most dramatic day in Harding’s history, the tenth of May, 1910. She asked if I would like to go. Hell no I won’t go, I said. I’d spend a year selling Jesús in Jerusalem before I’d spend another second in Harding. Then immediately changed my mind. Sure, I said, yes, maybe it would test my mettle. Show me if I really had become the average programmed American male adult. And I had an ulterior motive. I wanted the pleasure of their company by day. She was at the library, Ace was in school, I saw them only in the evening.
“Annie Snackenberg I love you,” I had remarked to her last night, apropos of nothing in particular.
She lived in a small brick house on the heights overlooking El Paso not far, naturally, from Border Patrol HQ. We were on her patio, the stars were out, Ace was in. Reading in his room.
“I love you by God,” I said. “The first time I saw you, a year ago, I offered you my hand in marriage. A year later I still love you, so the offer is still good. I can’t write without you, I can’t live without you. So please wed me and come to New York and bed me and let’s have offspring right away so I can read to kids of my own and if you go up the wall with me around the apartment every day you can seclude yourself in some library and do my research.”
She frowned. “Love or guilt,” she said. “I wonder which.”
“Guilt?”
“Henry. If you still feel responsible. I’ve had some long talks with Alvah Helms, and he assures me you shouldn’t.”
“It’s love.”
“What about the damsel in distress?”
“She tried to shoot me.”
“Shoot you?”
“Marry me?”
She scanned me as she might have a bibliography. “You’ve changed. I don’t know why. When you came out here last year I warned you about small towns in the Southwest. About opening closets in their pasts. Did you open one in Harding?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“Skeletons.”
“Tell me.”
“Marry me?”
“Dammit,” she said.
“Dammit,” I said. “Say yes or no. Quit beating about the stacks.”
Annie smiled. Eyes as baby blue as mine, teeth like pearls, lips like roses. Dimples, too. DEFINITELY EDIBLE.
“Well?” I demanded.
“I’m thinking,” she said.
“Don’t. You’re nubile as hell and as lonely as I am and you must be interested or you wouldn’t have let me off the hook a little.”
“I’m not husband-hunting, if that’s what you imply. There’s a problem.”
“What?”
“I have to find a father.”
FIND A FATHER.
My ears almost fell off.
“Find a father!”
“Not for me. For Ace.”
“Oh.” I sat down on a chair. Hard. “Oh, for Ace. Thank God.”
“He needs one. He’s ten now, and turning out well, but he grieves for Henry, I can tell. Deeply. I can’t just say Ace, dear, meet Mr. Butters, your new father, and be happy. He must accept you, Jimmie.”
“Well, I have to accept him, too. And I don’t know thing one about boys.”
“You should. You write for them.”
“Imaginaries. But real?”
“Well, for a start, you might stop calling him Ace. I suspect he resents it. That’s what Henry called him. Try something else.”
“Jason?”
“He hates that. Jimmie, I am interested. More than. You’re—you’re—you are unique.”
“Don’t stop.”
“But I worry. So far I’m certain the two of you aren’t clicking. Before I marry you I have to have some sign it will work—the three of us. That he accepts you. And that you really want him.”
“I want you.”
“He goes with the territory.”
I groaned. “Oh God. I can give you ivory, apes, and peacocks. But this I don’t know.”
It seemed to me I had become a goddamned Bureau of Missing Persons. I’d already located a father and a grandfather and four Villistas and the remains of two writers and a murderer who smuggled aliens on the side. Now I was supposed to supply a substitute sire for a ten-year-old Texan. Which was possibly impossible. Then, on the night air, her perfume. A blend of books and yellow roses and decency and love true love that would last a lifetime if I could win it. I slid off the chair, went down on one knee before her.
“If I can do it, Annie Snackenberg, will you be my woman?”
She smiled again, extended her hand. I drew it to my lips.
“I will, B. James Butters,” she said.
I bit HER knuckle.
Waiting. A thousand of us on Gold Street, breath held, waiting.
A wind blew, a small incessant wind.
I looked at faces across the street, recognized one under titty-pink hair and behind eyeglasses with purple plastic frames shaped like butterflies. Miss Millicent Mills. Who, on the tenth of May, 1910, when she was a girl of fourteen, had hidden by the ticket window of the Crystal Theater, waiting.
Murmur.
HERE HE CAME.
Silence.
Suspense.
He was a tall handsome man with dark hair and mustache. He wore black serge vest and trousers, white shirt, a black string tie. In each hand was a .38-caliber Navy Colt with a six-inch barrel, high-gloss blue finish, oil- stained walnut grip. He walked at a moderate, purposeful pace, arms at sides, down the center of Gold Street toward us.
Walking thunder.
At a corner he was intercepted by a man with a sheriff’s star on his chest.
“Don’t do it, Buell.”
Loudly, so that a
ll might hear.
The attorney did not pause.
“Leave them to me, Buell.”
“If you try to stop me, Blaise,” was the response, “I’ll kill you.”
Buell Wood proceeded.
Out of the Luna spilled Tigh Gooding and the Pennington boys, headed for their horses, were halted by the sight of husband and father. Bill Pennington took a reasonable step.
“Mr. Wood, we didn’t mean—”
The attorney stopped, raised his right arm, fired. Bill Pennington sank, pitched forward, lay still in shock, breathing hard.
His brother George and Tigh Gooding fled in terror down the sidewalk, took cover behind the Model T Runabout and the Coupe, drew Peacemakers, began firing wildly at Buell Wood.
He moved upon them.
“Goddammit, Wood!” Tigh Gooding yelled. “We’re sorry, goddammit! We’re sorry!”
He was shot in the left leg, howled, tried to hop from Runabout to Coupe, was shot again in the spine, collapsed, died instantly.
George Pennington lay on the sidewalk halfway under the Coupe. As he fired, a flare of flame enveloped his forearm. He screamed, dropped his pistol, stood upright.
“Oh I’m burnt! I can’t fight no more!” he screamed. “Mr. Wood I give up! Jesús Christ don’t shoot me!”
Buell Wood advanced to within ten feet, raised arm, fired. It was an execution.
Gold Street resonated with gunfire. The air around the Fords was clouded by the smoke of blanks.
Buell Wood looked left, where Bill Pennington lay groaning, arms hugging his belly.
The attorney went to him, lowered a revolver barrel to his temple, fired.
He pushed guns under his belt, strode then through the silence and the smoke across the street to the watering trough, stood for a moment over the body of his wife. Bending then, he lifted the doll which represented his daughter, Helene, cradled her in his arms, carried her through the pure spring afternoon away from death, away from us, down the center of Gold Street. He reached his office, opened the door, entered, closed the door behind him.
There was no applause.
But a sigh, almost sensual, was thrust from a thousand throats. Including mine.
It was true. I could never be the same. Even though it had been only a commercial come-on, a play within a play employing blanks and props and actors, the boy I had been a year ago could not have watched it. The man had.
I punched my Pulsar.
3:03.
I squinted down Silver Street at the clockface in the tower of Harding Courthouse.
3:03.
Men wait upon women. He waited on one side of the living room, I waited on the other. Both of us dressed to squire a dame to dinner.
“How’d you like it?” I asked, trying to get the conversational ball rolling.
“Like what?”
“The shootout.”
“It was okay.”
Insensitivity.
“Do you enjoy reading?”
“Sure.”
“Do you read a lot?”
“With my mom a librarian?”
Impertinence.
“Have you ever been to New York?”
“No.”
“Would you like to?”
“Not much.”
Disrespect. He was tall for ten, would one day be as long and lank as his father. James Stewart Jr. In no way would anyone ever mistake him for my natural procreative product.
“Do you mind if I call you something else instead of Ace?”
“What?”
“You don’t care for Jason.”
“No I don’t.”
“I know—how about Tex?”
“Why?”
“Well, because everybody in New York calls everybody from Texas Tex.”
“That’s dumb.”
“But is it okay if I call you Tex?”
“If you have to.”
Condescension. I could have kicked his uncooperative little ass. And he, I supposed, could have kicked mine. But I could understand the condescension. He’d had a hero for a father, a man who packed a pistol and roamed a dangerous range. I was a soft, sedentary sort. I pounded a typewriter. I never went anywhere or did anything dramatic. He wore a black jacket and white ducks and a white shirt and a bow tie and his sleeves were too short for his arms and his ducks too short for his legs. Wrists, ankles, and a cowlick at the back of his brown head. I would take him by the ear to Brooks Brothers as soon as possible. Provided I got the chance. And provided they’d permit him on their premises.
“Have you ever been across the border, Tex?”
“We went to Juarez once.”
“I’ve been down there just once myself. Acapulco. For a week. But listen, in the hotel dining room was a little pool, with gardenias floating, and in it lived a darling little turtle. The waiters called her ‘Chata,’ which means Pugnose. All Chata did all day was float around among the gardenias and eat goodies people fed her from their tables. And out behind the hotel lived a big fat pigeon the waiters called ‘Pedro.’ They baited a box trap for him every day, and watched to see if they could catch him and bake him in a pie. They almost did, too, by baiting the trap with cigar butts. Pedro loved cigar butts. Chata and Pedro were close friends. He’d flap through a dining room window at night and they’d have long heart-to-heart talks about life and things. She worried a lot, though. She often had indigestion from eating starches and sweets, and she knew it was only a matter of time before Pedro gave in to temptation and waddled into the trap and wound up in a pigeon pie. So she’d rest her pug nose on a gardenia and worry and sometimes shed a delicate tear.”
At least he’d listened.
“I always wanted to write a book about them. Pugnose and Pedro. I wanted them to save themselves, to go away together, but I could never figure out how they’d go, or where.”
Indifference. I felt a fool. He seemed to be thinking about something. I shot my cuffs and cursed Annie for being interminably tardy.
“I know.”
Surprise. He’d spoken without being spoken to.
“I know,” he said. “Pedro could fly and carry Chata on his back.”
I gaped at him. “On his back? Yes of course! But he’s so fat—how would he get off the ground?”
“She’d be the pilot. Like a pilot on a 747—they’d need a long runway to get up ground speed—they could take off from the beach. Then she’d fly him.”
“My God yes!” I said. “I can see the jacket—this fat pigeon flying at five thousand feet blowing smoke from a cigar butt and a darling turtle on his back holding on for dear life! Tex that’s terrific! But where would they go?”
We scowled at each other, racked our brains. Suddenly I clapped my hands. “Got it! They want a better life—so where do they fly to? Where?”
“Where?”
“The USA! They cross the border!”
“Sure!” Jason Snackenberg was on his feet. “Illegal aliens!”
“Terrific!” I cried. “Sensational!”
“Wait a second,” he said.
“What?”
“They can’t come to Texas.”
“Why not?”
“Border Patrol would pick them up on radar. Besides, all they could do here is pick fruit or work in the fields. That’s not much of a life.”
“You’re right.”
He began to awkward up and down the room, scowling. Now and then he’d make a funny, effortful face to show me how seriously he was into the collaborative process.
“Hey!” He clapped his hands. “I got it!”
“Say it!”
“California!”
“California? Yes! Los Angeles!”
“Hey, yeah!”
“The Big Orange!”
“Disneyland! They ride the rides!”
“Marineland! Chata talks to dolphins!”
“Hey I know!”
“What?”
“TV! Their own show!” “
‘Pugnose and Pe
dro’!”
“They’re rich!”
“They re starsl”
“Let’s go!”
“Let’s go!”
His mother smiled into the room. “Let’s go where? What are you two so excited about?”
“Hey, Mom guess what! Guess what Jimmie and I are gonna do?”
We grinned at each other like monkeys.
“Annie you won’t believe it!” I BUBBLED.
“Believe what?”
I BOUNCED out of my chair. “Tex and I are gonna write a book!”
Glendon Swarthout was the author of many novels, his most recent being The Melodeon. Two of his previous works The Shootist and Bless the Beasts and Children, have been made into films.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
skeletons Page 23