by Austin Davis
The early-evening sun coming through the windows flung bright bands of light across the ancient furniture. Stroud was sprawled on a sofa in the room’s deepest shadow. He got up and lumbered toward me, holding out his hand for me to shake.
“Welcome to Jenks, Mr. Parker,” he boomed against the music. “How’s the leg?”
I told him it was fine, though to tell the truth it throbbed a little.
“That’s fine, that’s fine,” he said. “I’m mighty proud of you, boy. Anybody who’d take a darning needle in the leg for a client—such heroism.”
He put his hand on my shoulder, smiling broadly and, I thought, mockingly at me. He was wearing a bright yellow shirt with intricate designs like figures on a Mayan ruin and white linen pants that looked as if they had been wadded up before he put them on. He looked like a shriveled Sydney Greenstreet on a beach holiday, his pale feet marbly against the dark bands of his sandals. With a shock I noticed that the big toe on his left foot was missing. That explained the limp.
“We’ve got a housewarming present for you,” Stroud said, motioning toward a package on the coffee table. I set my beer on the table and unwrapped the package. It was a shiny nickel-plated revolver.
“Smith and Wesson model thirty-six,” said Stroud. “Hope you don’t already have one.”
I wondered if the gift was a joke concerning my run-in with Kirby Nutter. But when I replied that I didn’t own a gun, I got a look of genuine surprise.
“A Texas lawyer without a gun? Well, you’ve got one now, son. And it’s a honey.”
“There’s a holster goes with it,” said Wick, who had come up behind me, still dancing. “We’re getting your name put on it. In a while we’ll go down to the pond and you can shoot some snakes.”
“Thanks,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
We were joined by a slim blond woman who I guessed was in her late thirties, with a cloud of cotton-candy hair floating above the deep, leathery tan of her face and shoulders. It was Deirdre, the emu lady, dressed in a bright blue jumpsuit with sailor trimmings and a lot of cleavage showing. As we shook hands I wondered where her husband was. To my surprise, she told me.
“My husband Mike’s off catching bass at Texoma.”
“Is that so?” I said, smiling.
“Do you fish, Clay?” she asked, and now I saw that she was drunk.
“Not since I was a kid,” I answered, but she didn’t hear me, because another woman had walked up behind her and slipped an ice cube down her back. Deirdre whirled around and around.
“Get it out, get it out!” she shrieked. She managed to extract it herself, and she flung it at the other woman.
“Wanda Sue, I swear!”
Wanda Sue was blond and dark-tanned like Deirdre, maybe a little younger, and dressed in a sleeveless jumpsuit of white and green polka dots. The depth of their tans was a little shocking; these women had been seriously irradiated.
“This is Wanda Sue Lovell, my cousin,” Deirdre said. “She’s been dying to meet you.”
I shook hands and smiled at Wanda, who smiled back and moved close. Wick danced over and scooped Deirdre into his arms. He bumped against me, whispered, “Sally’s out of town,” and danced away grinning at me as if to say, Well...I realized then that Wanda was to be my date for the evening. A second welcome-party surprise: first the gun, now Wanda.
“Nice gun,” Wanda said. I was still holding the revolver. Wanda slid her dark fingers along its barrel.
I tried to think, but it was hard with the Cajun fiddle music making my vision blur. I figured I was being scammed again, but by whom? Was it just Wick, unhappy about my relationship with Sally and hoping Wanda would steer me in another direction? Or was Stroud in on it, too, which meant he knew about Sally and me?
“Do you like to shoot snakes?” I asked. I was hoping to talk Wanda into taking my place on the snake-shooting expedition.
“I’ve shot a few in my time.”
We all went to the dining room, where a feast was laid out on two card tables set up amid folding chairs and dusty piles of books: beef ribs, baked beans, potato salad, and a relish spicy enough to take paint off siding. Before long I was on my sixth beer and feeling wobbly. Gilliam Stroud didn’t seem to have much of an appetite. He sat distracted, glaring around the room. Was he upset about Sally and me? Had he heard?
Wanda, it turned out, was a dental hygienist and had a fund of stories about bad teeth. They made for unusual table talk. I continued to drink until the buzz from the beer muffled the screeching fiddle music. At one point, maybe in the kitchen, I remember Wanda telling me that I had good, strong teeth, but I don’t recall what I had done with them to earn her approbation.
I kept on drinking, moving from beer to whiskey. Everything got blurry. There may have been a fire. I have a memory of Wick dancing like a maniac with Deirdre, spinning her round and round until both of them fell laughing onto the sofa in the front room. Deirdre landed on me, and in the scramble she turned into Wanda, who performed a dental examination on my mouth with her tongue. I had one hand caught in the top of her jumpsuit and one in the tight bundle of her hair when I started to black out.
Then my brain jolted hard, like a fastball thudding into a catcher’s mitt, and a sharp pain peeled layer after layer of drunkenness away until I was awake and standing in the gloom of Stroud’s parlor. Wanda writhed on the couch, her hands clapped against her ears. I could hear Deirdre shrieking from the floor behind the sofa. “Goddamn it, Gill!” Wick hollered. “Cut it out.” The pain stopped, and in the silence—where had the fiddle music gone?—I could hear dogs howling, some from close by, some from far away across the fields. There was an old porch swing just outside the door, and from it came the creak of chains and a deep-voiced chuckle. Gilliam Stroud had blown his whistle.
I stumbled toward the screen door in a rage. I was going to make sure Stroud never seared my skull with his little toy again. The door wobbled, stuck in the frame. I yanked hard.
“Give me that whistle!” I yelled. Before I could pull the door open, Wick Chandler collided against me, pushing me away from the door.
“Wait, Clay!” he said. “You don’t know about it. Listen to me.” I pushed at him and grabbed for the door. The girls had gotten up, Wanda half out of her jumpsuit, and watched us struggle.
“Get away from me, Wick,” I said. “I’m gonna make him swallow that thing.” I wrenched the door open and stepped out onto the porch. Gilliam Stroud lay in the porch swing, head thrown back, snoring. It had taken him less than a minute to fall asleep. The whistle hung on its silver chain against the hieroglyphs of his shirt.
I wanted to yank the whistle off its chain and throw it as hard as I could. But looking at the massive ruin of the man, the utter collapse of him, I couldn’t do it. The anger began to drain out of me. Wick came out and stood with me, watching his partner drift on the swing.
“You don’t want to take it away from him, Clay,” Wick said.
“Why does he call it the voice of doom?” I asked. Winded, we sat down on the edge of the porch. Deirdre and Wanda joined us, and while Stroud snored, Wick told us the story of the whistle.
“There’s a pond on this property,” he said. “It’s over yonder. Gill and I used to go down there to shoot snakes. This was years ago, right after he moved here. He had been living somewhere down around Gonzales, just marking time since he left El Paso. His wife had died there.”
“What did she die of?” asked Deirdre.
“Cancer, I think. I’m not sure. Gill doesn’t talk about it. I think it’s what ruined him. He gave up his judgeship right after she died. A federal judge stepping down. I never heard of it before.”
Neither had I.
“He had a daughter, too,” Wick continued. “A friend of mine out in El Paso told me that she turned out to be no good. She got into drugs in a big way.”
“What happened to her?” asked Deirdre.
“She died, too, a year or so after her mother. Car accident
in New Mexico, I think. Gill almost never talks about it. We’ve been partners going on seventeen years, and he has mentioned her to me maybe three times.” He gave his dozing partner a long, puzzled look.
“How did you two wind up together?” I asked.
Wick shrugged. “Just weird luck. I heard about his wife’s death and sent him a sympathy card. My old professor, you know? A couple of years later I got the craziest letter from him, asking if I thought East Texas had room for another lawyer. He didn’t mention the lawyer’s name, and I thought he was asking me to do him a favor, take on some kid out of law school who needed experience, that sort of thing. I wrote him back and said, Sure, send him on. Business was good back then, and I figured if the guy had a recommendation from Gilliam Stroud, he’d do fine. I didn’t know he was talking about himself until he showed up in the Lincoln. He was pulling a trailer with everything he owned in it. It was an awful small trailer.” Wick shook his head in wonder. “Gilliam Stroud, asking for a job from me. I wasn’t his best student, not by a long shot. To this day I’m not quite sure why he chose me and Jenks.”
“Maybe he was just looking for a way out,” I said. It made sense to me. If Gill Stroud had wanted to bury himself, Jenks was a good place to do it.
“I made him a partner right off, of course,” Wick said. “Jesus, I couldn’t get over the way he had changed since the days at Baylor Law. I don’t know how to describe it. It was like he’d been bitten in two, like something had dug in and scooped most of him out.”
Wanda went into the house and came back with longnecks for the four of us. Wick took a long drink before continuing.
“Anyway, Gill liked shooting snakes. He built a cabin by the pond; it’s about two miles over that way. We’d go out there with a cooler of beer and sit on the porch and shoot at the water. We could generally hit the pond. I don’t know that we killed many snakes, but they by-God knew we were out there.” He laughed. “One day we got really drunk and decided to play a fast-draw game. We strapped on pistols and nailed targets to a couple of pine trees, moved a ways off from each other, and let fly. We didn’t put a single hole in either of those targets. We were really buzzed.”
“You were lucky you didn’t kill yourselves,” I said.
“I thought about that later,” Wick replied. “I noticed that some of Gill’s shots were going wild. I mean really wild, snapping branches high off of trees. I looked around at him, and it looked kind of like he was fighting himself for the pistol. It was the strangest thing I ever saw, one hand fighting the other. He actually got the gun pointed at his skull a couple of times, and the second time, it went off, just missing him and singeing his hair. If you look hard, you’ll see a little white scar over his left ear.”
Wanda got up, tiptoed around behind the porch swing, and squinted at the side of Stroud’s head.
“Wanda!” hissed Deirdre.
“Yep,” Wanda whispered, “there it is.” She came back to the group. “Well, I’m sorry, Dee-Dee,” she said to Deirdre, “but I’m the sort of person likes things proved. It’s there, all right, just the tiniest little scar.”
“We were shooting .22 target pistols,” Wick said. “If we’d been shooting anything else, the man wouldn’t be here with us today. You should have seen him, half-bald, black gunpowder on his face, and that red welt running across his skull. He was blinking like a baby, like he’d just been born.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I went crazy. I ran for him, got my hand on the gun. And it was like there were three of us fighting for it, me and Gill and whatever it was inside him that had made a grab for it in the first place. We fought for what seemed like five minutes before the gun went off again. The bullet hit him right in the joint of his big toe. It damn near tore it off.”
Wanda reached out to touch the empty spot on Stroud’s sandal. Deirdre swatted her hand.
“That sent him into shock, and I was able to get him into the Dodge and drive to the clinic. The doctor there said he couldn’t do anything but take off what was left of the toe. But Gill didn’t want any part of that. He raised hell, threatened to sue if the toe came off. We wound up going to Dallas in an ambulance, with Gill swearing and thrashing around, in spite of all the painkiller they gave him. He was a sight, hair all standing up, that big scar on his scalp, and the powder that had bit into his face and wouldn’t wash off. It looked like his brain had exploded inside his head. A surgeon at Parkland tried to save the toe, but he couldn’t do it. Gill was under anesthetic, of course. When he came to, there was hell to pay.”
“Wick,” I said, “what does this have to do with the whistle?”
“I’m coming to that. When he found out the toe was gone, he asked for it back. Can you imagine that? He wanted the remains. The surgeon said he couldn’t have them; they were long gone. Gill roared at him, said he would sue him and his hospital and the whole damn town if he didn’t get his toe back. finally he wore them down, and they gave him a prescription bottle with some tiny bone fragments in it and something that might have been a toenail. If you ask me, there was no way to know if they were really Gill’s toe bones or bones from a rat’s ass, but Gill took them and sent them to an Indian silversmith he knew in El Paso.” He pointed at the whistle hanging from Stroud’s neck. “You see those little flecks of white in there? Toe bones.”
“God almighty,” said Wanda. She tried to move in for a closer look, but Deirdre grabbed her arm and yanked her back down.
“You are a scandal,” Deirdre scolded.
“The silver isn’t really silver,” said Wick. “It’s white gold. It’s his wedding band, and his wife’s. I asked him why he did that, why he would make such a godawful trinket, and he told me something strange. He said his little accident with the gun—he called it an accident—taught him the last lesson he ever had to learn. He said he had already learned that other people could die, but he hadn’t believed it of himself. He said his little accident taught him that he could die, too. Now he blows his whistle to teach his lesson to others.”
He turned to me. “That’s why he calls it the trumpet of doom, Clay. He says it’s an intimation of mortality. He says the sound it makes is death laughing at us, laughing at us through his toe bones, laughing inside our skulls. It’s death, saying life is short. He says he’s taught his lesson to all the dogs in the county and now he’s working on the humans.”
“That’s the saddest thing I ever heard,” said Deirdre, her eyes welling with tears.
“I think it’s a crock,” Wanda said. “I think you’re yanking our chains, Wick Chandler.”
Wick shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, “I can’t hear a thing when he blows it. I guess that means I’m going to live forever.”
The snoring stopped, and Stroud’s head jerked upright. “Sally!” he cried, coming out of his sleep. His eyes focused slowly. He saw us all sitting at his feet, looking up at him.
“What happened to the party?” he asked.
“I think it’s about played out, Gill,” replied Wick.
“Well then,” said Stroud, “we need a benediction.” He raised the whistle to his lips and blew. The girls hunched their shoulders, my mind flapped like a window shade in a gale, and from all points of the compass came the mournful howling of dogs.
CHAPTER 28
ABOUT ELEVEN O’CLOCK I said good-bye to Wanda Sue and the other partygoers and drove home in fragile condition from the beer-and-whiskey combination. As I left, Wanda kissed me on the cheek and offered to clean my teeth for free anytime. On Sunday I slept until almost noon. I got up, with my head thundering, and called Wick to remind him that we were to pick up Stroud at eight o’clock the next morning and drive out into the country to depose Nyman Scales at his ranch. Wick was groggy on the phone. I had woken him up.
“I’m pretty wrung out,” he said. “That Deirdre.”
I reminded him of his promise to reform. He did not want to be reminded. I asked him if there had been any word on Stroud’s at
tempt to get relief from the judge on our failure to answer the interrogatories.
“Not as of last night,” Wick said, yawning. “There won’t be any relief, Clay. Not from Wrong Tit Tidwell. There’s bad blood between him and Gill going way back. It was Gill that gave him his nickname.”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” I said. “Jesus, Wick, is there anybody in the East Texas judicial system that you guys haven’t pissed off?”
“Maybe a few court clerks here and there,” he said.
I suggested that he get out of bed and do something to try to save his law firm.
“What is there to do, Clay?” he asked. “We haven’t seen a single piece of evidence from the plaintiff; we haven’t even got that goddamn Pulaski’s pathology report. We have a client who won’t listen to us and lies every time he opens his mouth. And now we’re deposing people who won’t be allowed to testify, either in person or by deposition, for God’s sake. You tell me what I can do, Clay, and I’ll do it.”
“I don’t know. Would you comb back through the file? Maybe we missed something we can use.”
Wick promised to review the file as soon as his head stopped pounding. I hung up and called Stroud but got no answer. We had not gone over the questions that he would ask Scales at tomorrow’s deposition, but I supposed that was okay. According to Bevo, there was only one question that mattered—his whereabouts at the time of the fire—and Scales already knew what to say about that.
I was not looking forward to the deposition, although Wick had told me that Nyman Scales’s operation was worth seeing, a state-of-the-art horse ranch, complete with a genetics lab. Also, it would be our first look at the other side’s hired guns, the trial lawyers from SWAT.
A deposition is a pretty formal affair. Both parties to the action have to be present, as do their counsel and the court reporter. Only the judge and jury are missing, but the testimony from a deposition can be used in evidence at the trial, subject to objections. I did not relish the prospect of sitting there watching the SWAT people smirking at us while Gilliam Stroud asked his useless questions. So what if Scales could place Bevo at his place on the night of the fire? Scales was not going to get the chance to testify, and the judge wouldn’t let us use the deposition. And even if he did, all Scales’s testimony would show was that Bevo did not actually start the fire. SWAT might—and probably did—have evidence linking Bevo to whoever lit the match. Bevo could have helped us by giving us the names of his accomplices, but he continued to proclaim his innocence, despite the fact that no one, not even his lawyers, believed him.