by Ed Gorman
“You’re not being very intelligent,” Early said after Les had stood up.
“He isn’t in Cedar Rapids. You’re wasting your time.”
“The newspapers like to print accounts of the men I’ve killed.”
“Or how about the man you stabbed in the forehead?”
“Simple necessity, Mr. Graves. That’s all.” He looked down at his thick hands and shook his head. “I’ve apprehended more than one hundred men and I’ve killed only twenty-three of them. I’d say that’s a small number, given the type of men I pursue.”
“He isn’t here. He wouldn’t have any reason to come here.” Early laughed again but not quite so heartily. “He’d have a very good reason to come here, Mr. Graves.” He stared at Les for a long moment. “You work in a bank and your brother’s a thief. You could help him get some escape money.”
Then Early went back to staring at his hands. In a voice little more than a whisper, he said, “Good night, Mr. Graves.”
Les left.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Good night, dear,” Byron Fuller’s mother said, bending over to kiss him on the cheek.
“Good night, Mother.”
When she pulled back from him, she said, “You’ve been acting queerly tonight, Byron.”
“Have I, Mother?” He didn’t look at her. Simply stared straight ahead.
“Quite queerly.”
Mrs. Thaxton Fuller was a large woman given to busted silk dresses that somehow managed to make her look formidable instead of feminine. Her husband had made one of the city’s first fortunes by organizing an insurance company that worked exclusively with farmers in areas that the larger companies in Chicago and Kansas City and New York did not want to risk. But the risk had paid off, as was evident by the fact that this was the second-largest estate in Cedar Rapids, and that its sprawling living room contained not only a real electric light but such items as a Louis XVI gilt bronze and Chinese porcelain candelabra and rare English pewter porringers dating back to the 1400s and several original paintings by Vandyke. Mrs. Thaxton Fuller was a great world traveler, and a great world spender, and it was entirely too bad that Mr. Thaxton Fuller, who had made the money, had died at age thirty-five of pneumonia, six months after his son was born and a scant year and a half after the first time that his company had taken in more than three million dollars in premium revenues. So it had fallen to Mrs. Thaxton Fuller to protect both her husband’s fortune and her son’s upbringing, both of which she had done perhaps too well. She went to the insurance company once a month and fired one or two people on the theory that this would keep all the others in line, and much oftener than that she demanded from Byron subtle expressions of filial allegiance that could have unmanned General Sherman.
“It’s Susan, isn’t it?”
Byron looked up at her. “I’d rather not talk about it.”
Mrs. Thaxton Fuller clucked. She was a past master of clucking. “She’s too headstrong, Byron. I’ve told you that many times.”
He frowned. “Mother, I’ve already told you. I don’t want to talk about it.”
His words came out angrily, a rebuke.
His mother’s retort was no less angry. “It’s this age we live in. The suffragettes and all the rest of it. They just confuse women about their place and the natural order of things. Women belong in the shadow of their men.”
A curious smile lit Byron’s eyes.
“Do you find something funny, Byron?”
“Yes.”
“And just what would that be?”
“You, Mother. I find you funny.”
He had never taken this tone with her. It was exhilarating.
He got up from the chair and walked over to the wide fireplace, above which hung a huge oil painting of his father. He kept his back to his mother, studied the portrait of the man above him. His father had been handsome, no doubt about that, but it was not unlike Byron’s handsomeness. There was something melancholic in the gaze and something weak in the mouth.
“You owe your mother an apology, Byron.”
But Byron seemed not to hear. “I suspect something, Mother.”
“I am waiting for an apology, Byron.”
He continued to stare at the portrait. “I suspect it was you who made his fortune for him.”
“The apology, Byron.”
“I suspect you were the real power, not Father.”
She came up and turned him roughly about by the shoulder. “Have you lost your senses? Do you know how you’re speaking to me-your own mother?”
Calmly, Byron said, “Susan is moving to Omaha.”
Mrs. Thaxton Fuller seemed unable to keep a glow of satisfaction from touching her lips. “I’m sorry to hear that. But there are other women your age in this city.”
“Other women who are more likely to be intimidated by you-the way Susan isn’t?”
“It’s not only me she’s disrespectful to.” Mrs. Thaxton Fuller snapped. “It’s her own father.”
“Her father,” Byron said in a soft but considered way, “is a bully and a tyrant.”
“Byron! He’s one of the most important and respected men in this town!”
That was Mrs. Thaxton Fuller’s only measure for judging a man’s worth. His importance. True, she often expressed feelings that this or that man was a boor or uneducated or that he was not “cultural,” but none of these failings mattered much if he was “important,” meaning of course that his fortune was equal to if not more substantial than her own.
“He’s destroying Susan and he’s destroying me,” Byron said. “I’m going to resign tomorrow.”
“What!”
“And I’m moving out of the house.”
“My God, Byron, you go over and sit down right there and right now. I’m going to get you a snifter of brandy and we’re going to talk.” But Byron stood unmoving. “I’m going to talk to somebody about a job with the electrical company. That’s the coming thing and I want to be a part of it.”
But Mrs. Thaxton Fuller wasn’t listening. She had crossed the room to pour from a diamond-faceted blue glass bottle with colored decorations of birds some of the brandy she had imported from a monastery in Italy.
“Here,” she said to Byron, handing it to him.
She led him, against his will, to the walnut-framed armchair with the buttoned back, one of her favorites.
Once he was seated, his eyes still peculiar, still most peculiar, she handed him the brandy.
“Now, Byron, I want you to tell me what’s troubling you.”
“Susan is troubling me. I love her. I’m losing her.”
“As I said, there are other women.”
“I don’t want other women.”
Mrs. Thaxton Fuller sighed. “Then we’ll see to it that you get Susan back.”
He glanced up. "We’ll see to it. You and I? She’s not an acquisition, Mother.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“Of course it’s what you meant.” He looked down at his brandy and shook his head. “I don’t blame her for breaking it off.”
“You don’t?”
His eyes raised to meet hers. “No, Mother, I don’t. I-I haven’t been the man she needs.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
"In fact, I haven’t been a man at all.”
“You’ve been to Dartmouth. You’re the youngest bank vice president in the state. What are you talking about?”
He laughed. “I’m not sure we have the same criteria for manliness, Mother.”
“So you’re going to quit your job and move out of the house?”
“Yes, Mother, I am.”
For the first time in many years, he saw tears in his mother’s eyes. He was moved, of course, and sorry for her, for her particular type of loneliness and her need to dominate all people and situations-but he was also determined.
He was not going to back down.
He set his brandy on the small table next to the chair and stood up. By now his mot
her had begun to sob rather dryly, as if she did not quite know how, and Byron took her with great tenderness in his arms and held her, and the mere act of it was enough that his mother felt the freedom to cry.
“I love you, Mother, and I’ll see you every Sunday and I’ll get a telephone and you can telephone me anytime you like, but it’s time I move out. It really is.”
And then his mother startled him by pulling back her tear-red face. She laughed a peculiar laugh, a most peculiar laugh, and said, “I was afraid you were never going to move out, Byron. And it frightened me. I don’t want you to be one of those men who live with their mothers. But-”
"But what?”
“But it had to be your own idea.”
From her sleeve she took a handkerchief. She blew her nose. She looked up at the portrait of her husband. “Thaxton was like that. You said I was the real power behind your father. I wasn’t. All I could do was plant suggestions-and let him come to the idea in his own good time.”
He smiled at her. For one of the few times he could ever recall, he not only loved his mother, but in this moment he liked her as well.
She said, “I can go with you and help you find a decent place to live.”
Now it was his turn to laugh. He slid his arm around her tenderly and said, “No, Mother, if I’m finally going to strike out on my own, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have my mother pick out my lodgings.”
She smiled. “No, Byron, I guess that wouldn’t be a good idea, would it?”
***
“You see fewer and fewer of them every year,” Mr. Waterhouse said.
As Les reached the porch of his boardinghouse, he smelled the mint used in sun tea, and the lazy smoke of a cigar.
His mind still filled with images of his brother hanging, and the curiously detached attitude of Black Jake Early with him yet, he decided to sit on the porch with the other boarders and listen to the preacherly tones of Mr. Waterhouse and his tales.
“Fewer and fewer,” Mr. Waterhouse said.
“Where have they gone?”
“Some of them have died off, I suppose,” Mr. Waterhouse said. “Living on a reservation likely kills some types of people, I imagine.”
So the talk was of Indians. It often was.
“I can remember seeing them,” Mr. Waterhouse went on. "They’d camp outside of town and work the maple trees for sugar and then you’d see them traveling through Cedar Rapids on the way back to their reservation, bringing the sugar with them. There was a small army of them and sometimes they sang and sometimes they chanted and sometimes they laughed at us in just the same way we talked about them. Indian sugar, though, that was the sweetest sugar I ever tasted.”
Then there was talk about sugar and cakes and how good certain kinds of desserts tasted on Christmas day and how nobody seemed to like fruitcakes much.
It was not the sort of dialogue that could take Les’s mind from his problems.
So he sat and watched how the elms formed a canopy over the road and how the shadows from the streetlights seemed to chase themselves like silhouetted dogs down the center of the sandy street.
Then Mr. Waterhouse said a startling thing indeed. “The McIntosh boy got out of Fort Madison today.”
Fort Madison was the state prison.
“The McIntosh boy? Who’s that?” one of the boarders asked. “David McIntosh? You really don’t know who he is?” Mr. Waterhouse said. The way he asked it, you could tell he was eager to tell everybody.
“Nope.”
"Well, I guess that isn’t surprising.”
“What isn’t surprising?”
“Why you wouldn’t know.”
“Wouldn’t know what?” the boarder asked.
This was how Mr. Waterhouse liked to tell his tales. Sort of tease you with them. You kind of had to force them out of him. He loved that.
There was wind. The summer leaves were so thick they sounded like waves of the ocean as the breeze trapped them and swung them first this way and then that way. A collie trotted down the middle of the sandy road looking tired, as if he’d been out chasing rabbits for the past few hours.
And Mr. Waterhouse, leaning forward now and taking a preparatory drink of his ice tea with the mint leaves floating in it, said: “David McIntosh was the boy who lost a bank.”
“Who lost a bank?”
“That’s right.”
“Now how could a thing like that be?”
“I take it you want me to tell you.”
“We sure do,” said the boarder.
Mr. Waterhouse had a bit more tea and then he said, “It’s very simple, really. Back when Cedar Rapids only had one bank, David McIntosh was a farm boy who fell on hard times and came into town one day to rob that bank. Well, he stuck it up all right but he lost it.”
“That’s the part I don’t get. How could he lose it?”
“Well, he got the money, all right, you see-a big leather satchel of it-but on the way out of town he stopped at a rowdy roadsider for some beers. That was one of the McIntosh boy’s most terrible problems. His liking for beer. Couldn’t leave it alone. That was why he fell on hard times in the first place.”
“I still don’t see-”
“I’m coming to that,” said Mr. Waterhouse, heading off the impatience of his audience. “Well, a fellow who’s just robbed a bank isn’t about to walk into a roadsider carrying a satchel full of money now, is he?”
“Not likely.”
“So you know what he did?”
“What?”
“He did what any right-thinking bank robber would do.”
“What?”
“He buried it.”
“Well, that sounds sensible enough.”
“Yes, it does, till you stop to consider that because of his liking for beer, he had terrible blackouts.”
“You mean he couldn’t remember things?”
“Exactly.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, he went into this roadsider expecting to have just a few mugs, but he couldn’t quit with just a few, the McIntosh boy.”
“So then what happened?”
"Well, he also had one other failing.”
“What was that?” another boarder asked.
“He was a braggart. A terrible braggart. According to him there wasn’t a man in the valley who could spit as far, slug as hard or womanize as long.”
“But how did that get him in trouble?”
“Well,” said Mr. Waterhouse, “imagine yourself a young buck of twenty-three or less with a penchant for drinking beer and a tongue that just loves to brag.”
“So?”
“Well, then imagine that you’ve just stuck up a bank and gotten clean away with it.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” the boarder said. “Excuse me, ladies.”
“He started bragging.”
At this point the boarders, as if having just been told a joke, started laughing there in the splendid darkness of the July night.
“He started bragging to the people in the tavern that he’d just robbed the bank and that he’d gotten away with it,” Mr. Waterhouse said.
“They probably got the sheriff.”
“They certainly did. He came right out to the roadsider and took the McIntosh boy to what passed for a jail in those days and manacled him to a bedpost and then let him sleep off his drunk.”
"But I still don’t understand-” the boarder began.
“You still don’t understand how he lost the bank?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, when he woke up in the morning and the sheriff came in and asked him if he’d robbed the bank, the McIntosh boy confessed right away. But then the sheriff asked him where the money was.”
“My Lord,” said one of the lady boarders, who was now anticipating what Mr. Waterhouse was about to say.
“And that was how he lost the bank-he couldn’t remember where he’d buried the money,” Mr. Waterhouse said.
“Did they
ever find it?”
“Never,” said Mr. Waterhouse with great and abiding satisfaction.
“You mean to this day?”
“I mean to this day.”
“The money’s still buried-”
“-somewhere,” finished Mr. Waterhouse. “Somewhere.”
“My Lord,” said the same lady boarder who had said “My Lord” before.
So then everybody fell to talking about how now that the McIntosh boy was released from prison he’d probably start hunting his money again, even though (as Mr. Waterhouse went on to elaborate) literally dozens of men had searched for dozens of days and had never found that money at all.
The story made Les smile and he sat there and played with the absurdity of the tale the way he might suck on a piece of candy, slowly, savoring it.
For a lingering, luxurious moment he was filled with an overwhelming optimism that somehow everything was going to be all right- T.Z. and Neely would make it to Mexico without having to rob the bank where Les worked, and Black Jake Early would go back to St. Louis and give up his guns and live out his days playing with his grandchild.
But then, as if sobering up from a very happy drunk, he saw Neely’s face, the cynicism and sadness and irony of that shanty-Irish face, and knew there could be no such ending for T.Z. or Neely-or for Les himself.
Because he loved his brother, Les was inextricably bound up in their Sate, in the events that Neely was now setting in motion.
The return of his gloom exhausted him completely.
He stood up on shaky legs and said, “Good night, everybody.”
“Wondered when our town’s baseball pitcher was going to hie off to bed,” said Mr. Waterhouse with affectionate irony.
“Well, now's the time,” Les said.
“Good night,” everybody said to him.
***
Somebody had been in his room.
Black Jake Early stood three steps over the threshold, his weapon drawn, sniffing and listening with the intensity of an animal alerted suddenly to danger.
Somebody had been in his hotel room.
Through the window the lamplight from below tinted the air with a thin yellow color, just enough so that Early could see only places for anybody to be.