Ferguson smiled. “Who are these people, Roger?”
“Well, that’s part of my problem. I was the lawyer they contacted, as you’ve guessed, I’m sure. I think this falls under the client-lawyer confidence.”
“In this case, I believe not.”
“Have you researched the point?”
“I will,” said Ferguson.
“I’ve talked to the son. Naturally, he was terribly upset about it. My feeling is that ethically I’ve done what I’m obliged to do. It’s now his duty to see Winston and you. He told me he would see Judge Winston Monday, after the Thanksgiving weekend, and I’m sure Winston will send him right over here.”
Ferguson flipped the leaves on his calendar pad to the following Monday and wrote “Annulment.”
“What’s this policeman’s name, Roger?”
“He’ll be coming to see you Monday.”
“Just in case he doesn’t.”
“I can’t tell you, Ralph. It’s probably a whacky old possessive mother. The woods are full of them. We’d be sick if it finished the kid as a cop.”
TWO
Beef got Tessie Maguire to fill in for Mae at the Ponderosa Pines and together they honkytonked the night away. “Let’s go out and have some fun, dammit,” was Beef’s proposal. They shot eight ball, they threw darts, they rolled dice. They tried their luck at the bowling machine and the shuffleboard. Beef won beers for the house, first by swallowing a whole hard-boiled egg in one clean gulp and then by lifting a barstool upright from the floor by only one of its four legs. They danced the pony. “If that’s a pony,” yelled another honky-tonker, “I’m dyin’ to see the bull moose!” They laughed. “See,” said Beef, “I knew I could make you laugh.” They sang. “Good-bye, cruel world, I’m off to join the circus...” They staggered from one joint to another, supporting each other along the way. They ended the night weaving in front of a bar with no name, sharing a pickled pork hock. “Live life to its fullest, that’s my philosophy,” said Beef, licking his fingers. “The hell with heartaches.”
Somehow he got her home, but in the darkness they both stumbled and sprawled across the floor. Mae grumbled, “Oh, fuck,” and Beef tried to suppress his laughter.
They lay there, neither bothering to get up to turn on a light.
“You wanna cup of coffee?” Beef asked her. She did not reply. They lay quietly for a few more minutes.
“Mae, she won’t let up.” The joy of the evening fell out of his voice.
Mae said nothing.
“She ain’t foolin’ around, let’s face it, sooner or later she’ll find somebody who’ll do it. Well, I can’t let her. Wouldn’t matter to me if Maria was as ugly as a mud fence, I still wouldn’t stand by and let her die. But somebody is gonna die soon, and I have a feelin’ I’ll have a hand in it. Don’t get me wrong on this, I never killed anybody in my life. I never even liked huntin’ much when I was a kid. Fishin’ was for me. Hell, a fish don’t feel nothin’. But I wonder, is there a killer in me too, Mae? That ain’t like me. I’ll tell you what I’m like. I like to have fun. Didn’t we have fun tonight? Didn’t we? What I’d like outa life is two nights a week like this here, maybe Wednesday and Saturday, and a good steady job that I can count on and that I can show what I can do, and a decent woman to come home to...a couple kids...I’d like to buy a pickup and take them all campin’. You know, Mae, I never voted. Never had a bank account or a listing in the phone book. So what, right? So something, is my whole point here. Look, is there a killer somewhere in me, Mae? Is there a killer somewhere in everybody? Mae?”
He took her cheeks between his hands and turned her face toward him, her mouth like a fish’s. She looked like every other girl in his life, including the one he married. “Mae?” She was unconscious.
Mae had not been invited to Thanksgiving dinner at Ginny Mom’s. Since the meal was to be served at one o’clock and Mae always slept deeper into the afternoon than that, Beef slipped out of the apartment alone, promising himself to take her to dinner that evening, when she would have a better stomach for it.
Mrs. Lister was there, as always, but Gordon was not, and he had promised he would be. “If he doesn’t come...” said Ginny, “...if he doesn’t come...” but she never said what would happen if he didn’t come. And he didn’t.
Her mashed potatoes were instant, her peas and her cranberry sauce were canned, her rolls were out of a cellophane package. But the turkey was her own show, and she had left it in the oven for as long as she dared. Gordon would evidently rather dine with his pregnant Mexican wife than with his mother, a preference Ginny found insulting.
Beef helped Mrs. Lister sit at the dining table. He uncorked a bottle of wine. “Ain’t this nice?” he said. Ginny fetched the turkey. Hoping for the perfect bird, she opened the oven door, and like a dragon it belched a ball of fire at her. Frozen in the instant, Beef was struck by the sickening thought that life would be better for him, and Maria, and Gordon, and Mrs. Lister, if she were consumed by the flame.
Ginny slammed the open door shut, killing the fire, but her hair was still burning. She screamed, “They’re trying to kill me!” Beef tore off the tablecloth and knocked over Mrs. Lister as he dived at Ginny, covering her head. Her screams were muffled under cover of the tablecloth. Mrs. Lister lay on the floor near her overturned chair, stunned from overexcitement and the pain of her own fall. Beef slowly removed the tablecloth from Ginny’s head. Her eyebrows were singed away. What was left of her hair was man’s length. The pungency of burned hair filled the room.
“They tried to murder me!” she cried. “You’re both my witnesses!”
“It was an accident,” said Beef. “Let me look at your neck, Ginny Mom. Are you burned anywhere?”
Mrs. Lister had risen to her knees and from that posture began whimpering.
“She put him up to it,” moaned Ginny. “He rigged that turkey. That’s why he’s not here. She’ll pay for this!”
“My God, Ginny Mom, can’t you see it was an accident!”
“Kill or be killed!” shrieked Ginny.
“You stop it!” said Beef and he slapped her face, dashing her into numbed silence. She lay on her side on the kitchen floor, eyes staring at nothing.
Mrs. Lister made it to her feet. She took her cane and in a daze started shuffling toward the door. Beef watched her until she left the apartment and shut the door behind her, without a word.
“I’m sorry, Ginny Mom,” said Beef. “You were hysterical.”
“Are you in it with them? Do your job and get it over with.”
“Stop talking crazy. C’mon, get off the floor.” He tried to lift her up, but she resisted. She wanted to lie where she had fallen, on the cold kitchen tile.
“Nobody loves me,” she said.
“Gordie loves you. Relax.”
“Nobody does.”
“Gordie does,” said Beef, “and in some cockamamie way I guess the hell I do.”
It seemed to help her, if not him. “My pills,” she said, “get my pills. I want to sleep.”
Beef got them for her. He gave her a glassful of water. “Easy with those things,” he said when he saw how many she was taking. He took the pill bottle and put it on the counter.
He got her a pillow and spread a blanket over her. “I want to sleep,” she mumbled, burrowing under the blanket.
Beef waited until she was asleep. Then he dropped the mashed potatoes into a pot, poured the peas on top of the potatoes and the cranberry sauce on top of the peas. He twisted both drumsticks off the burned turkey and dropped them into the pot, which in twenty minutes sat on the bed between him and Mae, both of them bare-ass naked.
“Give thanks,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Mae.
Monday came and went, and the young policeman who was supposed to did not appear in the office of Pueblo’s district attorney. Tuesday, Ralph Ferguson called Judge Barry Winston and asked him for the name of the people involved in the fraudulent annulment which took place in
his courtroom. The judge refused, claiming a concern for the reputation of the young man, who had that morning conferred with him, and an uncertainty about the ethics involved. What he didn’t say, but what the district attorney understood clearly, was that he considered Ralph Ferguson a ruthless prosecutor who took every minor crime committed in his district as a personal injury, who believed that the only sound way to prevent crime was to make the punishment for it quick and severe. There had been a running feud in the newspapers during Ferguson’s entire tenure, twelve years, between the DA’s office and the county judges, whom he accused of being lenient to the point of malfeasance.
He ended his fruitless conversation with Judge Winston and called Roger Glover, hoping to pressure him into revealing the names of the principals, since the cop he was so sure would contact the DA did not show. Roger Glover had gone on vacation and would be gone for a week.
“Chickenshit,” said Ralph Ferguson. He drummed his fingers on the desk and said to himself, “So here I am. A felony’s been committed in the county court. A cop knows. An attorney knows. A judge knows. It seems the only one who doesn’t know is the district attorney.”
He wrote a memo to a staff secretary to check the court records and make a list of all annulments granted during the previous two months. It was a bother, but conceivably, in the long run, worth it.
THREE
A wise gardener plants a patch separate, away from his main crop, a patch for the rabbits and other wild marauders. He makes a deal with them: This is your patch and you may eat from it freely. But venture into the main garden and you’re dead, as a lesson to the others. And if the others don’t learn the lesson, the patch will be taken away and you can all starve to death.
If God is a gardener, then the earth is his rabbit patch. If man had the power to do likewise, he would make a deal with cancer.
City planners are familiar with this principle and conscientiously, though discreetly, practice it. They know that any community, no matter how respectable, how scenic, how clean, is going to have its number of nasties. They need their square block. Give it to them and draw the borders clearly. Within this square the police will carry a light stick, but mind your skull should you truck outside. Citizens, go there if you must. Buy a temporary tour through blessed oblivion, purchase a moment’s contact with warm flesh, double your money on the turn of a card or the angle of an eight ball. What you do there and see there, you leave there.
In the Springs the block formed by Nevada, Colorado, Tejon, and Cucharras filled this need. It was right across the street from the courthouse.
The Panama Club was there, hip to hip with the Ponderosa Pines and the Elbow Room. Its only apparent distinction from the other two establishments was that instead of Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb, its jukebox spun out Jorge Negrete and Jose Alfredo Jimenez, to whose heartbreaking melodies patrons would add the excruciating Mexican song-laugh, followed by someone in the crowd yelling, “Call Immigration!”
On a busy Friday night the pursuit of happiness there approached carnage, and the interns who drew the duty that night approached their vigil with both dread and excitement, wondering what new surgical challenges might be sent them courtesy of the Panama Club.
Naturally there were those idealistic citizens of Colorado Springs who wanted the place closed. The police who came regularly to take pictures of the aftermath would tell the proprietor, Juan Barrajas, that he was skating on thin ice. The Liquor Control agents told him the same thing. He was skating on thin ice. He wondered what it meant.
Ginny Wynn had for some time been attracted to the Panama Club, as she was to the whole neighborhood, initially because Gordie had told her of the many arrests he made there. It gave her a thrill to think that her son was feared there. But beyond that, the Panama fascinated her for its own dark promises, and she wished she were a man so that she might openly dally in such places.
So it came as no small pleasure to learn that Juan Barrajas himself had been arrested, and by Gordon. It seemed that receipts from Coors beer were hardly enough to keep the Panama solvent, and other enterprises were demanded, specifically the sale of transistor radios previously burglarized from a local store.
The pinch was for receiving stolen property. Juan managed to make the bail and was back at his bar, but the outlook was that he would have to do some time.
Ginny wasted none of her own time. Her singed head wrapped in a bandana, eyebrows penciled in, she took Mrs. Lister to lunch on Wednesday to Howard’s, because she knew that Howard’s was closed on Wednesdays. Faced with the locked door, she suggested they walk down Colorado Avenue and find some other suitable place. They passed several places and wondered aloud that anyone could possibly put into his mouth any item that touched those grills.
They passed the Folding, where Beef lived when he first came to town. They turned the corner and soon were in front of the Panama Club.
“Let’s go in here, Mrs. Lister.”
“This doesn’t look like a restaurant to me, Ginny.”
“Well, maybe they’ll know where to go around here for a good lunch.”
Ginny tentatively opened the door. A curtain blocked the view of the interior, in the custom of bars like the Panama which appeal to every man’s desire to know what’s beyond the veil. From the inside, the curtain serves to keep natural light out of an unnatural atmosphere, no matter how many people move from outside to inside, inside to outside.
Ginny drew aside the curtain and ushered Mrs. Lister into the stale darkness.
Juan Barrajas was seated behind the bar washing beer glasses.
If misery is a destination, Juan wore all the directions on his face. His eyes were shadowed and watery from lack of sleep, from darkness, from smoke, from the things they had seen. His face, tight and deeply creased, was turning sallow. One side of his upper lip was twisted and on his chin was a one-inch scar. His hair was brittle black, turning gray. Tuberculosis had settled in his wasted body. He looked on the verge of his last mortal cry.
He automatically turned toward the rustle of the curtain. “Yes, ladies, what can I do for you?” He did not assume they had popped in for their first beer of the day.
“Do you serve coffee here, señor?” asked Ginny Wynn.
“Yes, I have coffee. Do you want to sit at the table?”
They sat next to the jukebox and Juan Barrajas served them coffee. He was pleased to have respectable people sitting in his establishment. He tried to smile at them. If he could have his way, he would have nothing but nice customers, ladies and gentlemen, but this was only desire, not reality.
Ginny looked up at him and said, “I hear you’re in a bit of trouble.”
Juan felt a cramp in his stomach. What’s going to happen to me now, he wondered.
“Trouble, yes. I know about trouble. What do you know about it?”
Ginny opened her wallet and showed him a picture of Gordon in uniform. “My hijo,” she said.
“This man, your son, is not my friend,” said Juan.
“I have a message from him,” said Ginny.
“What message?”
“There is a very bad woman. A bitch. A puta, who has made my son marry her.”
“That is the message? I do not understand it.”
Ginny took a sip of the bitter coffee.
“She has become a problem to him.”
The old man shrugged.
“You have a problem too.”
The old man cocked his head. When did he not have a problem, when in the course of nearly seventy years was there a day without a problem?
“Now you may have to go to prison.”
“It is unfair!” said Juan. “I told them they could keep some stuff in my back room. I did not know it was not theirs. Then your son comes here...”
“You help him with his problem, he will help you with yours.”
“He? Help me? It was him that did this to me.”
“He will testify at your trial that you are innocent. He will fix it
so there is no trial, so you are left alone.”
“He can do this?” asked Juan hopefully.
“Is he not an officer of the police?”
“Why would he want to do that for Juan Barrajas?”
“He needs your help.”
“What can I do?”
“This bitch, do you have some friends who would help me get her out of the way? I will pay well for the job.”
There was a boy, Danny Yanez, who sometimes helped out at the bar. He had a friend, Rudy Montalvo, who was a fry cook once but quit.
“There are some boys,” Juan told her. .”I know them. I don’t know if they want to talk to you or not.”
“Could you ask them?”
“Yes, I will ask them to talk to you. I don’t know if they will want to.”
“I’ll pay well. Can you ask for tomorrow, here?”
“I will ask them,” said Juan. “That is all I will do. For this your son will...?”
“Si, si,” said Ginny, taking Mrs. Lister by the elbow and leaving quickly before he could change his mind.
Forty miles to the south Ralph Ferguson was reminding a girl named Peggy that she was to check the court records for annulments granted over the past two months. Peggy did not know he was in such a hurry for the information. She promised to put aside her other work and get right on it.
FOUR
They met for lunch at Manitou Springs, near the hotel they went to as man and wife, when Maria thought they would have a good life together. She wondered now what made her believe it. She did not feel like eating and suggested a walk instead. They stopped at a window and inspected some Navajo turquoise rings. “Would you like one?” he asked.
“Gordon,” she said, “it’s not going to happen.”
There was no need to ask what she was talking about. “Just for a while longer,” he said.
“Have you done anything?”
“When the baby is born you’ll see a miracle. You’ll see her maternal instincts come out.”
The Accomplice: The Stairway Press Edition Page 11