by Jim Nisbet
And she had many of the other feminine attributes men think a matter of beautification. Breasts, hips and thighs swelled appropriately beneath the taffeta housecoat. Dark hair sparsely swept along her bare arms like gently curved, fragile filaments aligned by secret magnetic fields. Her calves folded together like parallel waves, glided very nicely into two perfectly bare, finely arched feet. Her face swathed in raven hair lay on the pillow like a bust of a pale Madonna packed in a nest of fine ebony excelsior.
By God, Royce thought, this indeed is a very fine specimen of a woman. And suddenly his mind was cast back over thirty years, to an anatomy class, and the cadaver he’d shared there with three other students. The body had once been a young woman, killed in a motorcycle accident, unaccountably donated to science. And they’d all wondered who she was, what she’d done, how she’d moved, thought, acted, lived and… Well. They knew how she’d died. Multiple internal injuries, severe trauma to the brain, internal and external bleeding, a broken neck…
Now, here was the other side of the coin, Royce thought: a woman who, like the motorcycle girl, has deliberately put herself on the edge of death, yet unlike the other, here she remains, alive; she’s going to survive. And I could discover all those things about her before—if and when—she dies.
He thoughtfully placed his middle and ring fingers against the carotid artery in the woman’s neck. The pulse was very slow but very regular. Her skin was cool in the hot evening. He stroked the artery, the neck, the underside of her chin. Her pocked skin slid under his fingers like coarse, silky burlap. Yes, a very lovely woman. He could see now what any man might see in her, and that wouldn’t exclude Bobby Mencken, who had lived with her for at least two years before he was imprisoned, five or six addresses ago.
He removed his hand from her throat and let it slide along her shoulder, down her arm, over her hip, along the swell of her thigh. Then he removed it.
He went out to the hallway and retrieved the Gladstone bag and his hat. Closing the door behind him, he stashed the bag behind the sofa in the living room and put the hat on the table. It had been a long night, and a long day. After he’d read Mencken’s case history, at least insofar as the prison had records of it, he’d packed the file and a few other things into the Gladstone bag and headed out for Dallas without so much as a single look back. The drive was quite long, over eight hours. During it he’d become accustomed to the idea of Bobby Mencken’s innocence, and furthermore, he’d become accustomed to the idea that he was going to take a stab at finding out why Mencken had taken the ultimate fall for something he might not have done. What he was going to do if and when he found an answer was something he hadn’t quite thought out yet.
Colleen Valdez was his first lead. Her name had once figured on Bobby’s visitor list, and she hadn’t been too difficult to find. He’d only been searching since yesterday. Everybody remembered the tall beauty with the ruined complexion. Judging by the look of things, she was a little too broke and a little too self-involved to be going down to Huntsville to claim the body. But that wouldn’t be bothering Bobby any. In fact, she hadn’t been to see him in two years.
Royce left the shabby apartment and walked a couple of blocks until he found a liquor store, where his Spanish was good enough to get him a bottle of Ezra Brooks’ Tennessee Sipping Whiskey. Night was coming on for good, but he thought it was as hot and humid as it could conceivably be outside of Houston. He looped around a couple of blocks to get the benefit of the thick air. People were hanging around in the darkness on their stoops, talking quietly among themselves. The men wore sleeveless undershirts or none at all. The women had small children with big eyes on their laps. Everywhere windows were open to the hope of cool air, and here and there he would hear music from a radio or see the blue light of a television dart over the walls of a dark room. Once he passed by his pickup truck. A couple of young kids were playing in the back of it. He chased them away, and they watched him from the end of the block as he saw to it that the truck was still locked. After a while, he made his way back to the apartment, to wait for Colleen Valdez to come down enough to wake up and talk to him.
EIGHT
When he first awoke, Royce couldn’t tell how long he’d been asleep. He’d enjoyed one of those naps people take when they’ve been doing the same thing for too long and have little hope of ever getting around to doing anything else, so they better get rested up for it. Life around them wouldn’t have had enough time to change very much while they were napping, but then, life would never get enough time to change at all, so far as these nappers are concerned. So maybe he’d been asleep about an hour.
But things had changed since Royce had fallen asleep, even though he hadn’t been asleep very long. Gentle changes. Musical changes. A man, very close to him, was strumming the guitar and singing.
The old hometown looks the same
As I step down from the train,
And there to meet me is my mama and papa.…
Royce kept his eyes closed and listened. A simple melody, but there was a sadness in the voice. A very soothing sadness.
Down the road I look and there runs Mary,
Hair of gold and lips like cherries.…
The singer broke into talking without disturbing the rhythm of his chords. “Hey, hey, Colleen,” he said, “that’s you, honey,” and he laughed and repeated the line; but by the following line his voice had regained its introspection.
…hair of gold and lips like cherries.
It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.…
Royce might have vaguely remembered the tune, but he was strangely touched by the plaintive simplicity of it, and couldn’t place the source of its emotion, until the player strummed the instrument around the verse one time, and then took up the lyric again.
Then I awake and look around me
At four gray walls that surround me,
And I realize that I was only dreaming.…
Ah, so. A prison song, and a very famous one. One might still find Porter Wagoner’s version of it on truck stop jukeboxes in certain parts of the West.
For there’s a guard and there’s a sad old padre.
Arm in arm, we’ll walk at daybreak.…
Yes, they’ll all come to meet me,
Arms reaching, smiling sweetly.
It’s good to touch the green, green grass of home.…
The singer repeated the chorus and then began to pick out the melody line on the guitar strings. He found his way through it once, jazzed it up the second time through, and his third version was very hip, according to his own comment mid-chorus, “Yeah.” Then he slowed it down and spoke the last verse as he played, the way Wagoner did it.
Then I wake and look around me
At four gray walls that surround me
And I realize… I was only dreaming.
For there’s the guard and there’s the sad old padre.
And we’re gonna walk…
Here the player walked the guitar strings,…arm in arm at daybreak.…
Now, with an unexpected fervor that neatly eclipsed his previous fooling around, the player swung into a fine, understated and unbearably sad final chorus.
Yes, they’ll all come to meet me
In the shade of that old oak tree
As they lay me ’neath the green, green grass of home.…
Then the player, apparently a recidivist clown, vitally strummed the fourth chord, probably a C, and sang with it a long “Ahhhhhhh,” as if he were having his tonsils examined, Royce thought. Then he descended onto the tonic like an owl onto a rat, necessarily a G, and sang “Me-ennnnn… ,” all the while decreasing the tempo of the strum until he’d decided it was time to end on the final bottom note of the chord, also a tonic G, and did so.
Amen, agreed Royce, what a relief.
“And if that didn’t wake you up, mister, you’re dreaming you’re sleeping in church.”
Royce opened one eye. The guitarist was sitting in the sagging easy c
hair opposite the end of the sofa Royce had stretched out on. Half of him was bathed in the flickering blue light of the television, the only light in the room, by which it could be seen that he was shirtless and tattooed. Prison tattoos. A scorpion, spiders, little knives, a woman in tears, a 13, a 69. Black and blue tattoos on the bluish-white skin. His head had been shaved but the white hair had been coming back for a while, and the tattoos on his skull looked like the reforested landscape diagrams of Nazca. The skull itself was so narrow and flesh-less it had the warped uncial figure-eight appearance of the screaming bedlamite’s in Edvard Munch’s famous picture, “The Scream,” with a shiny star-shaped puncture scar on his left cheek. His bare arms were very thin also, but finely muscled, and indeed the guitarist was not a particularly small man. He had long, finely boned fingers that could easily fret the thick, wide neck of the Spanish-style instrument across his lap. Each hand sported a large ring, each of a figured flat stone mounted in silver. These moved fitfully but tunefully over the strings, but the eyes gleaming white, deep in the moist gloom of their sockets, watched Royce.
“Aha,” said the guitarist, seeing Royce’s open eye, “half dreaming.”
Royce moved uneasily in the deep cushions of the couch. His bottle hit the filthy olive-green carpet below with a thump.
“Well, I’ll be damned, Colleen,” the guitarist whined, “the reverend done dropped his bottle right between hymn number one,” he strummed the fourth, “and hymn number two.” He strummed the tonic. “Say, Reverend, how about a little communion for the choir?” He fingered a bright little ditty that had something suspended about it, just the kind of thing one might expect to presage an intermission at a dance. “Mind?”
Royce sat himself up and tried to shake off the effects of his sleep and the two or three stout snorts he’d had beforehand. He picked up the bottle and looked at it—two-thirds full—and passed it over.
“My, my,” said the guitarist, “Ezra Brooks. That’s good whiskey, Reverend.”
Royce rubbed his head with both hands and asked what time it was.
“Nighttime,” said the guitarist, lifting the bottle.
“The right time,” Royce muttered, just to be friendly.
The guitarist swallowed and raised an eyebrow. “Always the right time around here,” he said, handing the bottle back to Royce.
Royce had assumed his standard television posture. He was sitting on the edge of the sofa, leaning forward, his forearms resting on his knees, a bottle nearby, the screen flickering before him. The flicker appealed to his grogginess.
The guitarist picked idly for a few minutes. Royce saw a package of cigarettes on the table and held it up. The guitarist nodded. Royce lit one and watched the television awhile. There was something soothing about the television, something that postponed the future, or suspended the present, and after noticing that, Royce found himself staring at it without prejudice, sure that everyone would understand if he didn’t want to be interrupted.
The guitarist strummed softly and watched this stranger on the couch. Royce had salt-and-pepper hair cut in a short burr, what was called “GI” after World War II; a sweat-stained, white, short-sleeved shirt with a button-down collar; innocuous tan pants held up by a belt; thin, white socks in unshined brown brogans. A ballpoint pen was in the shirt’s breast pocket. He would be about fifty.
A mildly amused expression came over the guitarist’s features as he watched Royce. Then he leaned forward over his guitar to have a look at the television screen. A sequence of rapidly cut scenes were selling beer. He looked at Royce. Royce’s eyes did not leave the screen. His mouth hung slightly open. The guitarist retrieved the whiskey bottle and sat back in his chair.
“Got a name, Reverend?”
“Royce.” He took his eyes off the television. “Franklin Royce.” His eyes went back to the screen.
“Call you Frank?”
“Wife called me Royce. When I had a wife.”
“How about Rolls Royce? Anybody ever call you Rolls Royce?”
“That’s what Bobby called me, once, in a way.”
“You and Bobby were partners in stir?”
Royce was silent.
The guitarist took a cigarette, lit it and sat back against the cushions of his chair, the guitar flat in his lap. He blew smoke into the blue gloom. Then he said, “That’s the way I feel about the bastards, too. Let ’em eat anonymity.”
Royce smiled vaguely at the television.
The guitarist crossed his legs. “Keep out of their way, I mean,” he explained. “If they don’t even know what to call you, they can’t come and find you. They don’t even know your name. That takes care of all sorts of stuff. Taxes, for example. They can’t get any taxes off you if they don’t know where to find you, and they don’t know where to find you if they don’t know who you are. It’s a good system. Of course, you have to make certain sacrifices. Like you can’t have any credit, or a telephone—at least, not in your own name. That’s a whole other scam.” The guitarist waggled the bare foot propped over his knee and watched it. “But all in all, it’s a good system. That’s why we ain’t got a phone here. I was thinking,” he added abruptly, “about getting somebody to tattoo some rattles on this foot of mine, and a snake head on the back of my neck with his mouth wide open, so my face is in his mouth, connected by a long series of diamondback rattlesnake type designs curling around my spine and through the crack of my ass and ’round and around my leg, until it gets to my foot, where the rattles are, and that’s where the snake’s tail would be, see, and I could sew a bunch a dried seed pods to my sneakers or maybe to just the webbing between my toes, and then I’d completely realize my snakeness and at the same time get people off my back about why I waggle this foot all the time.” He blew smoke in Royce’s direction. “That’s my totem, the rattlesnake. You know?”
After a moment Royce moved his head in the guitarist’s direction with a series of wooden movements. He looked at him a moment, said “Sure,” and looked back at the television.
“Of course,” the guitarist continued, “it’d have to be a really good tattoo artist, you know, maybe Erno out on the coast, the kinda guy who wouldn’t mind sleeping with a few snakes just to get their moves down right, making a really close study of them, because after all a snake of these huge proportions would have to be exact, right down to the smallest detail, a real artist, a guy that’s devoted to the transmogrification of skin.”
Royce raised an eyebrow. On the screen, the Cowboys were looking out of whack. He wondered how it could be Monday night.
The guitarist picked a speck of organic matter off the tip of his tongue and studied it as he continued. “But I don’t know this guy Erno from Adam. I mean, I heard of him. He’s a big tattoo man out there in Frisco, on the coast. There’s guys around here that do it, down in Galveston. You gotta have a port city, where there’s ships and sailors and stuff, to get a really together tattoo artist. Of course,” he shrugged and modulated his voice, “that doesn’t exactly limit the possibilities. There’s a lotta ports in the world, you know? But as usual, man, you have to be in the scene, man, and have a little bread, you know, man, and a few connections, man, to make sure you don’t get some guy who turns your back into the Book of Revelations, man, or a letter to his mother, or a spider that vampires your blood in your sleep….”
Still Royce was locked into the Dallas Cowboys, and why shouldn’t he be? He’d had a lot on his mind lately. Pamela is definitely certifiable…. No, let’s not get into reality tonight…. Nice pass….
The guitarist regarded Royce with philosophical annoyance. He took two quick drags on his cigarette and set aside the guitar. “The doctor I got on ATD with,” he said, leaning forward to crush the butt in the ashtray on the table in front of Royce, “says this thing with the foot is tensions.” He took the bottle and leaned back into his chair. He crossed his foot over his knee and it began oscillating again. “I said I’d had them ever since I was a kid.” He raised the bottle and ha
d a swallow. “‘That’s a sure sign of intelligence,’ the quack says with a tentative smile. ‘No way,’ I’m saying to him. ‘It goes along with the two hollow teeth in the front of my mouth and the hissing I hear whenever I eat peyote. It’s my innate snakeness, Doc. The rattlesnake is my totem. Nothing and nobody is going to convince me any different. I’m a fucking snake, and that’s that.’ Well.” He replaced the bottle on the table between himself and Royce and lit another cigarette. “It wasn’t too long after that they decided I was socially 4F, if you know what I mean, and granted me the Aid for the Totally Dependent.”
The Cowboys were driving downfield, looking good, and here it was just an exhibition game—in fact it might have been a replay of an exhibition game from last year. Royce felt for the bottle and fitted the neck to his mouth without looking at it.
“They thought I was crazy, and I don’t blame them. I’m just glad for all of us that I didn’t have to go too far with the whole thing. But crazy is one thing, and thrift is something else. I been saving some of that ATD money. I know, I know,” he held up a hand, palm out, “you think that’s impossible. After all, ATD’s not all that much, and Reagan even cut it back some. Still and all, we get by on the grace of God and miscellaneous felonies.” He regarded the end of his cigarette and blew on it. Little bits of ash flew off the end and the coal glowed brightly. “By and by,” he continued, taking a small puff and looking at the end again, “I’m going to have enough to get that tattoo one day.” He looked down at his body. “Get rid of all this big house peacock shit.” He looked at Royce. Royce looked at the television. “Then, by God,” the guitarist said quietly, “then, by God, with that snake body all coiled around me, when that foot starts to shake,” his foot started to shake, “and the seed pods start to rattle, shake-a shake-a shake-a, and maybe a little hissssss… people are gonna by God know.”