by Tim Bryant
Old Mother Curridge
Dutch Curridge series, Volume 4
Tim Bryant
Published by Behooven Press, 2016.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
OLD MOTHER CURRIDGE
First edition. August 26, 2016.
Copyright © 2016 Tim Bryant.
Written by Tim Bryant.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
About the Author
For daddy.
1
Two things happened in January of 1956 that I won’t live long enough to forget. As is true with many things, mostly of the unfortunate nature, they both were instigated by Sheriff Wiley King of the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Department. In fact, they both came swaggering into Peechie Keen’s Bar & Kanteen with him on Saturday, the 21st, just as I was calling the weekly business meeting to order with my friends Slant Face Sanders and James Alto.
“Curridge, when is the funeral?” King said.
I had just dealt a hand of cards, and we were about to play a game of cards known as either Spanish Bluff or Cheat. Not as good as Poker but easier to play while talking and quieter than Moon or Train, our favored domino games.
“I swear I was right here the whole time,” I said.
Penny Bob looked nervously from the bar. He knew King as well or better than any of us, but it didn’t mean he wanted the law in his place of business on an early Saturday evening.
“Don’t hassle my customers, Sheriff,” he said.
James Alto laid down a card.
“Ace!”
Slant looked at his hand.
“I swear, Wiley,” he said. “Dutch has been here a good twenty minutes.”
King always looked at Slant Face with a grin. I don’t think he could understand half of what he said. King nudged up closer to us, grabbed a toothpick from the center of the table and stuck it in his mouth.
“You hear about the little girl at the concert last night, I guess?”
I laid my hand down.
“Twos,” I said.
“Bullshit,” said Slant Face.
“What about a little girl?”
King leaned in, away from the surrounding tables, mostly full of people getting oiled up for a night out at the Crystal Springs Dance Pavilion or one of the nightclubs on Jacksboro. There was little of entertainment value left in Hell’s Half Acre, unless playing cards and drinking entertained you.
“We have an unidentified murder victim after the Hank Snow concert at the Coliseum last night,” Sheriff King said.
I had almost gone to the concert myself. Had two tickets still sitting on my night table in my room on Sharon Road. At the last minute, Ruthie Nell Parker had been called in on an assignment, and I had opted out, unwilling to face the hordes of teenyboppers who would show up to see the opening act. I had enjoyed Elvis Presley’s music when he played on the radio from the jamboree in Dallas, but, seeing him the previous summer on an afternoon bill with a few other performers, I was less than enthused.
“One of the sock hoppers?” I said.
I remembered calling them sock hoppers to Ruthie and being immediately corrected. Sock hoppers were a different generation, she told me. Those were the Sinatra fans. Presley was certainly no Sinatra.
Wiley King nodded.
“Maybe that Elvis Presley kid done it,” Slant Face said. “He looks a bit the hoodlum type.”
The body had been found by the cleanup crew, hunched over by the load out dock at the back of the building. A horrific airplane hangar of a building with horrific acoustics to match, it was Wiley King’s kind of place. He, in fact, was friends with several of the fine folks on the Coliseum board of directors. I knew why he was standing there in front of me. Somebody had made a big mess, and it needed to be cleaned up quickly and quietly, before word leaked out.
“Body will be over at the coroner’s office ‘til he’s good and done with it,” King said. “You go over there and talk to Bennie. He might have something for you to work with. Just keep it under your goddamn hat. You talk to that gal of yours, I’m gonna know.”
He thumped his sheriff’s badge with his thumb. I guess that was meant to impress me or maybe threaten me.
The game of Cheat had been thoroughly dashed, and, with it, any plans of adjourning to the Dance Pavilion, where Bash Hofner and the Pearl Wranglers were playing with Eddie Dugosh. And, to shoot from the hip, this young dead girl from the North Side Coliseum already had my attention. My own sister Lizabeth had died in the polio outbreak of 1918, leaving me behind with a bad left ear, a slight limp and a predisposition for young dead girls in trouble that lasted up until this day.
“Gonna go by and see Bennie,” I said. “I’ll catch up with you boys later.”
I knew I wouldn’t see Alto for a while. Saturday night was the big night at the Star-Telegram, getting ready to swing the big Sunday morning edition. He would be out of commission until Monday, by which time Slant Face would be back on at the Richardson waste treatment plant.
Sheriff King caught me by the coat sleeve as I made my pass out of Peechie’s, and I thought for a moment that he might be requesting a little off-the-books assistance with the case. It hadn’t happened often, but it had happened, especially when he had incentive to keep things hush-hush around the department.
“I was serious,” he said. “You know yet when Alvis’ funeral service is going to be?”
Nothing about the sentence seemed serious, but I didn’t get the joke. I was Alvis. Wasn’t I?
“Elvis?” I said.
My mind was lost in the emptiness of the North Side Coliseum.
“Did Sheriff Muncey not get word to you?” King said. “Your daddy Alvis Sr. died two days ago. They brought him up to your momma’s house yesterday, and she sent him on to Ford White.”
I had not heard the name Alvis Sr. in almost twenty years. It hadn’t crossed my tongue in longer than that. As far as I was concerned, Alvis Sr. had died the day he walked off the front porch of our house on Clear Fork Road just months after Lizabeth was buried. My last memory had been watching him walk across the edge of our cotton field in a cloud of dust, although, come to think of it, I might have confused him for Henry Fonda in The Grapes Of Wrath or Alan Ladd in Shane. I tended to fill in the spaces when it came to Alvis Sr. and there were lots of spaces. Mostly, I filled them with hate and anger. The hate I was okay with. The shit ass deserved that. The anger could be a problem. I hated the fact that he mattered enough to make me lose my temper.
2
I was so lost in thought that I had driven halfway to the coroner’s office, around the block but in the same precinct as the Sheriff’s Department, before I turned the radio on. WBAP was playing Sixteen Tons b
y Tennessee Ernie Ford for the seventeenth time that day, so I switched over to KLIF in time to turn off Johnny Desmond’s “Yellow Rose of Texas,” curse my way into the parking lot and shudder to a stop.
I knew the system. Enough that I had my own stick of mentholatum in the glove compartment. I rubbed it three times under each nostril without looking in the mirror and headed for the door.
“Dutch,” Bennie Enders said.
He couldn’t have said less if he’d tried. Yet there was a joyfulness in him. Maybe he was just happy to see anyone that could talk back to him, but he seemed glad to see me.
“Bennie, I’m here about that teeny-bopper you’re holding.”
Bennie laughed.
“She’s a little too young for you, sir. And if not that, a little too dead.”
Bennie liked his humor the way I liked my coffee. Black. It was a tool of the trade. We walked into the exam room where all the bodies were laid out, where the autopsies were performed. I noticed, not for the first time, that Bennie didn’t use the mentholatum that he insisted everyone else use. I wondered, not for the first time, if he had used it until it finally just gave out and wouldn’t work anymore. I wondered if he could smell any damn thing at all anymore.
He was right about one thing. The bobby-sockser, or the teeny-bopper or whatever she was, looked young. I mean really young.
“Dallas County asked if one of our cars could transport her,” Bennie said. “I told ‘em I’d feel better if they’d send somebody here.”
I felt bad that the thin white sheet wasn’t covering up as much as it should. I reached down and pulled it higher on her chest. It was obvious and a cliché to say it gave the illusion that she was lying there asleep, but, at such a young age, death didn’t suit her at all. I thought of fairy tales. Who was the girl under the sleeping spell? Snow White? Goldilocks?
“You’ve I.D.’d her?”
“Based on clothing,” Bennie said. “She went missing from South Dallas, Thursday evening. Connie Fae Pittman.”
All the name meant to me was that there was a Mr. and Mrs. Pittman that would have to be told, and they were real.
“How old?” I said.
Bennie carefully lifted her right hand, as if to read her palm, and long, intersecting cuts stretched out between her wrist and the inner crook of her elbow, glaring red and angry at me.
“Oh, fourteen, fifteen maybe,” he said.
I wanted to ask if he could tell that by looking at her hand, but I didn’t. I was too shocked by what I was seeing. Maybe it was what I was feeling.
“That’s why I don’t want to transport. We’ve got a mother in Oak Cliff who says her sixteen year old daughter went missing on the week before the concert wearing a pleated navy skirt, white blouse and cardigan sweater. Hardly what you’d call a positive ID. That probably described a hundred girls at that show.”
Still, he admitted, no other girls had come up missing.
“I heard about this,” I said, pointing to her arm.
If it were a brand, it was too fresh to recognize as such Puffy and swollen, it reminded me of a blood bruise or a burn, yellowing around the edges.
“It’s swollen,” Enders said, “but it spells out Elvis Presley. Actually, it appears to misspell Presley, e-l-y instead of l-e-y.”
It looked like Chinese to me. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. I supposed that if the name was misspelled, it might let Presley himself off the hook. I had no doubts that you could make a lineup from Fort Worth all the way back to Oak Cliff of dumb teenaged boys who only thought they knew how to spell it.
Bennie offered me a handkerchief, but I pushed it away.
“Had a sister named Lizabeth,” I said.
I guess I wanted him to know I wasn’t shedding tears over some unknown teeny-bopper from Oak Cliff. As if that made everything fine.
“Sorry to hear that, Dutch,” Bennie said.
I finally took the cloth, folded it three times for good luck, wiped it across my face, refolded it and handed it back.
“I guess she was even younger than this here,” I said.
Bennie Enders stood there and looked at the girl’s body like he was measuring the distance between Lizabeth and this girl in his mind. Lizabeth had died almost forty years before, and it didn’t seem much of a distance at all.
“When she died?” he said.
I nodded.
“Must’ve been the yellow fever,” he said.
I had heard there were several yellow fever outbreaks in our area down through the years. I’d even known a few families who lost loved ones to it.
“We both took what our old country doctor called the polio-encephalitis,” I said.
I could see that old doctor’s eyes so clear, it seemed like he was looking at me all the way from 1918. I couldn’t call his name to save my life.
“You were lucky then,” Bennie said.
I knew what he meant. I had never considered myself lucky. I had wrestled with things as far back as I could remember. I tried to make deals with God, to take me and bring Lizabeth back. When nothing came of those negotiations, I decided he wasn’t bargaining in good faith. Then I began to question if he was even there. I started making deals with the devil, and that son of a bitch got real real, real quick. If Bennie Enders thought I was lucky because I survived polio, he didn’t know the half of it.
“Ben, I need you to do something for me,” I said. “Can you put a twenty-four hour hold on this young lady? I think I might be able to sort this all out.”
Work it out. Figure it out. Sort was a Slant Face word. I had never used it in forty years of not knowing him. I could almost hear the accent sliding off the back of my tongue.
“If there’s an active investigation, I can hold her for longer than that,” Bennie said.
I knew that. I was just formally letting him know that the investigation was now active.
“Okay, forty-eight hours then,” I said.
Forty-eight hours meant Oak Cliff could wait. For the time being, I was going in the opposite direction. I had just seen momma the week before Christmas, but it looked like she was due another visit, whether she liked it or not.
3
Momma wasn’t a touchy-feely type of dame. Never was as far as I knew and damn sure wasn’t by the time we found ourselves standing in the kitchen with the gas stove on full blast and a buttermilk pie placed strategically between us. Each of us had a fork and was standing at arm’s length, careful not to spill any on the carefully scrubbed table.
“You do understand, son, I’m only telling you this because you’re gonna see it in the will anyway,” she said.
She wanted there to be no mistaking this moment for anything more than it was. In other words, under any other circumstance I never would have known. And I may have been a naïve son, but it had never crossed my mind until that moment of that day in my forty-sixth year.
“So if Alvis Curridge Sr. is not my father, how the hell did I get to be Alvis Jr.?”
She had brought it up with all the delicacy of a car mechanic suggesting that your spark plugs needed a changing. There wasn’t a deathbed pall hanging over the kitchen, nary a tear welling up in her eye. No doubt, she had baked a cake special for the occasion, and that was the extent of her commitment to the situation.
“Times was different back then, Alvis,” she said. “Alvis Sr. meant nothing more than to give you a real family growing up. He had good intent.”
She made sure that my mouth was full of buttermilk pie before she started the conversation, a move meant, I’m sure, to keep me from saying too much and maybe from walking out. I have to say I lost my taste for the pie, which was second only to blueberry on my list of favorites.
“So tell me the first part again,” I said.
I didn’t want to hear it again, but I was hoping it would sound different if she backed up and started over. Maybe there would be some word or detail I had missed, that would make all the difference.
“Your real dad
dy was a man named Lonnie ,” she said. “Everyone called him Lonnie Boy. He died before you was born. He never had a clue you was even a thing.”
Even a thing.
“The feeling is mutual, momma,” I said.
I was angry enough to consider using the fork in my hand as a weapon, but I knew the .38 was just inches away and would do a more efficient job. At that moment, I hated everything about that house on the hill, every goddamn memory it held, and this latest one was just the one to set that hatred into motion. I could shoot momma dead in her tracks and burn the whole thing, pie and all, right down to the dirt.
“Lonnie Boy wasn’t a great person,” momma said, “and I was no great shakes either.”
I dropped my fork and grabbed into my jacket, bypassing the .38 for the flask of corn liquor stashed away in case of emergencies. There was plenty to swallow my last bite of pie.
“Why you didn’t tell me this a hell of a long time ago?”
Momma didn’t act like she had been practicing the answer for most of her life. The words didn’t pour out in speeches. They came out two, three words at a time, spit out in a way that made me wonder if she weren’t as surprised at them as I was.
“Lizabeth,” she said. “When your little sister come along. That made everything seem alright. It seemed to, for a while. Even I almost forgot the way things were.”
Lizabeth was Alvis’ girl. She was born with the name. She made the family legitimate. It made perfect sense for the very first time, of course, why daddy got out while the getting was good.
“So what happened with whoever? With this Lonnie guy?”
“You mean Lonnie Boy?” Momma said.
She kept on eating pie. I can’t even say she was a nervous eater. She ate because she made a pie. It never occurred to her to do otherwise.
“Lonnie Boy got hisself killed in Mineral Wells, August of ‘09.”
I wanted to sit down, but that would signal a commitment. I needed to keep my options open. At least the option of walking out the door and not looking back. I leaned on my right foot to test that possibility. It buckled ever so slightly beneath the weight but was planted more firmly than I had hoped.