The Rock Hole

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  They sipped for a few minutes while the storm moved on. Ned held up his mug. Frenchie folded her paper and brought a fresh pot to refill their cups.

  He blew across the surface. “You finding anything out from Ralston or that bunch of outlaws he’s running with?”

  “They don’t know nothing. Somebody put the fear of God into Ralston, and I think it was Big John out on the highway that day. He fell off his high horse pretty quick after y’all brought them in. I had warrants on one of his friends and he’s going back to Dallas.”

  They sat together without talking. O.C. could tell Ned had something on his mind. He waited for his old partner to speak.

  Ned finally reached a decision. “I been at this a long time.”

  “If you’re talking about law, we both have.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about. I’m afraid it’s all passing me by.”

  O.C. watched Ned’s face and for the first time noticed the deep lines at the corners of his eyes and on his forehead. The creases were a revealing map on the face that had aged twenty years in the past few months.

  “I don’t know nothing. I don’t believe I’m able to do my job anymore.” Ned rubbed his head again, a sure sign he was worried, and sighed.

  O.C. looked up in surprise. “I thought you were planning to catch this man.”

  “I know it, but I was mad about them FBI boys. Back when I started we used to break up stills and family fights and arrest drunks, and I knew what I was doing. But the other day I found a bunch of bales of something hid out under the creek bridge and found out it was mary-wana. Some mary-wana addicts, I guess, have decided to grow or sell dope around here. I don’t know nothing about that stuff. Shitfire, it could be growing in the ditches and I wouldn’t know what it was if it stung me.”

  “You know it’s illegal. Same as shine.”

  “I know I can’t even catch whoever put it under the bridge. Now I have something the FBI calls a psychopathic killer and I can’t figure out what he’s doing. Who’da thought we’d have somebody running around chopping up animals and hanging people over fences like dead coyotes. What’s next? You think all the young people in town are going to get together and riot during an Elvis Presley picture show like they do when them Beatles play? You think the coloreds here in town are gonna start doing like them people in the cities and have them civil rights protests?”

  O.C. cleared his throat. “Ned, we’re both getting old, but it don’t mean we can’t do our jobs.”

  “Maybe not for you. Everything you do is in your head. You know the law and know what to do when we drag people into court. Me, I have to get out and look around and talk to people on this deal. In between I have crops to raise and stock to feed. It may be time for a younger man.” He held out his shaking hand. “Look at this.”

  “Younger men have more energy and their hands are steady, but they don’t have much in the sense department.”

  “Neither did we when we first started.”

  As he stared glumly at his coffee, sadness and the futility of a lawman in a changing society swamped the man who only wanted to do the right thing. His elbow on the table, Ned ran a hand over his bare head.

  Frenchie saw their mood and brought another warm-up. “You boys look like somebody died.”

  “Not somebody, something. Ned’s enthusiasm.”

  Frenchie snorted. They’d been a couple of curmudgeons all their lives, and she didn’t see anything different. She returned to the counter and brought them each a slice of peach pie. “Y’all eat these and you’ll feel better.”

  Ned smiled up at her. “Thanks.” She left and he sipped the strong brew. “I think I’ll even quit farming. I might keep a few head of cattle and some chickens and be done with it.”

  “You’ll sit on the porch and waste away if you do that.” O.C. reddened again because he’d seen it happen to several of his friends.

  “I’d like to sit on the porch for a while without worrying about whether it’s gonna rain, or if it’s raining too much, or if there’s somebody out there breaking the law. O.C., I’m tired.”

  The judge paused and looked down at the table. The conversation was going nowhere and he needed to change the subject right then. “Oh, say, I got some more news for you. “Delbert Poole died last night.”

  “Well.” Ned carefully examined his laced fingers, remembering the man and his hard ways. He wasn’t sorry to hear the news. “He was a rough old cob, but I didn’t know he was in bad health. What killed him?”

  “Heart quit beating, I guess.”

  “You know he used to carry a machine gun?” Ned moved his shoulders to ease the tension in his neck.

  “Yep. I have it locked up at the courthouse. He showed up one day last year and asked for it like he wanted to borrow a shotgun to go quail hunting, but I wouldn’t give it to him. I knew he’d lost his mind by then.”

  “I never trusted him much farther than I could kick him.”

  “Me neither. He did things his own way, because he felt he was right. I never trusted him after I got back from Germany. I’ll always have a sneakin’ suspicion he killed One-Arm George, but there was no way to prove it.”

  “I know.”

  “He took that little bit of news with him, but I’m sure he done it and even worse meanness. I heard tell he messed with that boy of his. They say his wife ran off with the boy the first time she found out, when he was about four, but somehow Poole talked her into coming back home.

  “The second time, though, when the boy was about five or six, she caught him again and left for good, changed her name and was through with him. I tried to get her to file charges against the son-of-a-bitch, but she wouldn’t because she was scared. Then she moved up to northeast Oklahoma and nobody has heard from her since. Now that Poole has gone, though, it makes me feel a lot older somehow. I reckon you’re right. Our kind is dying off, but you still have one more outlaw to catch, and then you can quit if y’ont to.”

  “You won’t let anyone rest, will you?”

  “Nope.” O.C. thought for a moment. “Now, who were your suspects?”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them.”

  “Well hell, I studied on half a dozen, but the killings never stopped, not even when one or two of my best guesses were in jail.”

  “List them anyway.”

  “Doak Looney’s boy, Lightfoot, Ralston… those were the ones I brought in.”

  They discussed each man without bringing any new details to light.

  “Then there’s Calvin Williams and those hired hands of his, Donny and Tully Joe. In my mind I’ve accused might near everybody in town. I thought about that mean little shit Cale Westlake at one time.”

  “Well, he may be a wild kid, but he ain’t no killer.”

  “I know it, but you see how it’s got my mind going in circles? I’ve been suspicioning Ty Cobb and Jimmy Foxx, because they’ve been around at least three times, finding dead animals and people, but I don’t think they have enough sense to play this kind of game.

  “Hell, I can’t even clear Cody in my mind. How’s that for a man to think of such about his family? And I can’t tell you how close I watched Mark Lightfoot when he was living with us, even though I think the world of that boy.”

  O.C. found a rough spot on the handle of his coffee cup and worried at it with his thumbnail. “What about somebody else in town?”

  “That could be the problem. It could be anybody, and I don’t have any suspicions that single out any one person. I’ve talked to Neal, and he’s keeping an eye out in the store. Cody watches the people in his bar over in Juarez, and Big John knows what’s going on across the tracks. Hell, everybody I know is carrying a gun, or has one close by, and they’re all watching each other like nobody trusts anybody anymore. I just hope they don’t take to shooting one another over the least little thing. All in all, it ain’t like we ain’t doing nothing, but we’re spinning our wheels.”

  “Then go back and start
spinning them from the start.”

  “It was pretty general at first, just people finding the animals. I guess the first time it became personal was when Cody’s bird dog was stole, though if I recollect, there was six carved-up animals before that. Remember me telling you about the burnt squirrel, the gutted coon and that coyote?

  “Now listen to this.” Ned held up an index finger. “Add two more coyotes gutted, skinned and hung on fences, a gutted calf in Oklahoma left to die on its feet in misery, another skinned dog Ty Cobb and Jimmy Foxx brought in, a cut up goat in a culvert, and my dog Carlo that was butchered like a deer.”

  “I hadn’t added all that up.”

  “Well, then cipher in the Lightfoot baby. It wasn’t cut up thank god, but somebody had kept it in an icebox for some reason. Then Joseph was quartered like a beef while he was hunting. It all led to tortured and skinned kids on fences and somebody trying to get into my house.”

  “My lord.”

  “See? There’s been a lot of blood, and I don’t have any idea who it is, and maybe this is just the beginning. I’ve also had several people come by the house to tell me they think it’s a field hand. They don’t have any proof. They’re just naturally suspicious of colored folks.”

  “Do you think it’s one of John’s people?”

  “I think it could be anyone big enough to rear up on their hind legs. Big John talked to everyone down there and he don’t have any suspicions at all. I’ve never heard of a field hand doing something like this. Hell, they’ll cut one another over some gal, or when they get drunk and mean, but it’s over pretty quick. I think this is a white man.”

  “I heard tell them circus people could be involved.”

  Ned snickered, feeling a little better at the thought. “Yep, Isaac Reader thinks so and he’s still scared to death about it. He’s been sleeping with a shotgun in his bed ever since he found Cody’s bird dog. I don’t think it’s them. Everyone suspicions circus people when things are stole or when there’s trouble, but I’ve not had much trouble with them myself, outside of a little drunk driving. I know some of ’em are running from something, but they’ve acted right most of the time.”

  The rain slacked off to a light shower. O.C. drained his mug. “Well, I gotta go. You keep at it. Whyn’t you go by and see Cody. He might have an idea.”

  “All right.” Ned’s knees cracked when he stood up. “I told you I was getting old.”

  They huffed out of the booth, and it took a minute for O.C. to straighten up. Putting on their Stetsons, the two old men each left Frenchie a nickel and limped toward the door.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Ned pulled into Cody’s gravel drive as rainbow formed behind the departing storm. A howling pack of dogs met his car.

  For once Cody was home. He stepped out on the porch at the commotion and motioned Ned inside. “Hush up! Ned, don’t let them pups get you muddy. Get down, Silky!”

  The dogs settled down and Ned rubbed each of them once, so they’d remember who he was. He dodged the puddles and climbed the steps of Cody’s neat little frame house. The porch was big enough to sit on, but not like Ned’s.

  Buckets holding a scattering of tools and screwdrivers lined up against the house, the result of some job left unfinished. Ned shook his head and grunted. Now he was looking for evidence at his own nephew’s house. He couldn’t shake the bad feeling, though, as he wiped his feet and stepped inside.

  “Have a seat, Uncle Ned.” Cody pulled a chair out from the chrome and Formica table. Ned could smell beer in the house and on Cody’s breath. “What brings you out here? I don’t think I’ve seen you out this way since I got back from overseas.”

  “I oughta be ashamed of myself for not coming by sooner.” Ned pitched his hat on the afternoon’s edition of The Chisum News spread out on the table. The paper fluttered, revealing a pair of scissors before the page fell back into place.

  “I’m still working on this case, looking for someone who can help me find who’s doing all these killings.”

  “I read about the latest one in the paper. It’s awful what people do to one other.”

  “You’ve seen it firsthand, I reckon, over there in Viet Nam.”

  “Yeah, and it’ll be worse in the next few years. This is quicksand we’re getting into over there.”

  “You’re like O.C. You don’t talk about war much.”

  “No one ever asked me, but there ain’t much to tell.” Cody opened the icebox. He hooked another beer for himself and a Dr Pepper for Ned. He popped both caps with the opener hanging from the cord around his neck and handed the bottle to Ned. “On Monday I was standing in a rice paddy with a rifle across my shoulder and Friday night I was getting off the bus down from the Grand Theater. No one knew what I saw, or what I’d been through. Hell, half of them still don’t know where Vietnam is,and they don’t care. For the others, it was like they don’t know enough to ask or care.”

  “Well, maybe they thought you didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “I usually don’t.”

  “You better not let Miss Becky look in that icebox.”

  Cody winked. “Don’t you bring her over here without calling first.”

  They drank in silence for a few minutes. Ned looked around the kitchen, almost bare without curtains and knickknacks on the walls. Cody quickly drained his beer and opened still another bottle. The alcohol soon loosened him up. Cody started talking and it was like he’d been waiting for someone to ask him the right trigger question to get started.

  “Ned, I saw a lot of things over there I need to forget. That’s why I don’t talk much about it, and it’s probably why O.C. keeps his war to himself, too.

  “My squad was working with the NVA, that’s the North Vietnamese Army. Our job was to teach them how to fight. I guess they’re like us, our army. But they weren’t like us. Those little people over there are brutal. It wasn’t the killing I minded much, that’s what war is. And I saw my part of killin’.”

  Ned didn’t say a word. He listened and stared through the open screen door at the dogs sprawled on the porch.

  “There was one guy they shot. They call them Viet Cong or VC for short. He was wounded, laying there on the ground with his guts sticking through a hole in his stomach, and those people stomped him for the fun of it. They didn’t even change expressions, and the VC never made a sound while they tortured him. He couldn’t have run off or fight, he was too shot up, but they stomped and stomped.”

  “Maybe he’d done something to them.”

  “Naw. They didn’t know him from a hole in the ground. They’re mean. They look at an enemy different than we do. I bet they broke every bone in that feller’s body before he finally died. That’s how they got information out of prisoners.

  “They were god-awful. The first thing they’d do is accuse the village chief of being VC. Then they’d beat him up or kill him, after they raped his wife and daughters while he watched. That would scare the rest, and they might talk. It was nothing for them to shoot half the livestock in the village just for the fun of it. I remember one guy, he liked to kill their dogs and pigs and he always stuck their heads on a pole for a warning.

  “It gives me bad dreams. I have nightmares every night about that little country. The only time I sleep good is when Norma is holding onto me. I don’t know what I’d do without her, though I know the trouble we’re causing.”

  The outpouring of information soaked into Ned like a cold rain and made him feel miserable. Each time Cody became agitated, he moved the newspapers around, unconsciously lining them up with the edges of the table while he talked. Ned couldn’t help but notice two or three clipped ads beside the scissors he saw earlier.

  Cody got up and opened another beer. They were going down quick. “All that will mess a man up inside. It happened to several of my friends over there. But if you were raised tough, you had a better chance to leave it all behind.”

  His voice trembled with emotion. “I feel a rage inside. Like when
those boys started in with me at the store, I felt good. Lord amighty. I wanted it to keep going for a while.”

  “I’m glad you stopped. I didn’t want to arrest you for killing somebody, even if it was Calvin and that worthless Tully Joe and his addled brother.”

  “Aw, I wouldn’t have killed them, Uncle Ned. But they deserved what they got. I know the three of them ganged up on some feller a few nights before over in Juarez and they worked him over good. He wasn’t any good at fighting back so they took advantage of him. A little jail time or a fine wouldn’t have been enough. I paid them back in what they understood. They deserved it.”

  “They did at that.” Ned reached out and placed the empty Dr Pepper bottle on the table beside advertisements featuring young boys about Top’s age. Another hawked a sale on young girl’s dresses. Ice crept up Ned’s spine. “What are these?”

  Cody was surprised to find them in Ned’s hand. “Uh, they’re ads for kids’ clothes. Remember, Top’s birthday is coming up and I wanted to get him something he’d like. You know how he’s growing. The other day he mentioned how much he liked a shirt I had on, so I was trying to find him one like it.”

  “Pepper too?”

  “Well, you know how kids are. If you buy something for one, you have to get the other’n something, too.”

  Ned looked at Cody for a long time, feeling heavy and sad inside. “Do you know anything about these killings son? Something you need to tell me, or something you don’t think is even related? I feel like I’m grasping at straws here.”

  “I wish I could help you.” Cody opened the icebox once again and pulled a bottle across the aluminum shelf with a rasping sound. “I’ve asked and asked, and no one over in Juarez knows a thing.”

  “You have any ideas?”

  “Yeah. I think it’s someone who’s young and maybe been in the army.”

  The answer surprised the old law man. A sick, empty feeling spread across his ample stomach. “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, Griffin dropped by to see me this morning. There are some FBI men expected to be in town tomorrow, and since I own the club across the river they’ll most likely be talking to me. They have something they called a profile that they’re following. According to the profiles, young folks who like to torture animals grow up to do the same to people, because they had something done to them when they was kids, probably. It got me to thinking about torture and how easy it is for the guy to get away, like somebody was raised here and knew the country, and then I thought about a veteran.”