Pavement

  If his father scares Hector—even inspires secret loathing—the boy quietly idolizes Pike, who’s tall, present in any room, and has a big Colt riding his hip. Pike rolls his own cigarettes and carries a flask of bourbon in his boot cuff. He hunts, fishes and sits a horse well.

  Thinking about what Pike might do now, Hector snatches up a toy pistol, but as he enters the common hallway, he remembers the mudroom between the bedrooms and the gun rack. Heart pounding, he detours there for a real weapon, flying on bare feet.

  The boy selects his favorite long gun—a Parker Brothers 1900-model twelve-gauge.

  Hector’s only been permitted to shoot her twice, as each time her wicked kick left him with a bruised shoulder. Both times she also planted the boy on his bony rump. But Hector is determined to conquer the big gun. He also knows all of the shotguns and rifles in the mudroom rack are stored loaded.

  Struggling to keep her long, heavy barrel up, running again on tip-toe over squeaky pine floorboards growing slippery under feet damp with nervous sweat, Hector at last reaches his parents’ bedroom.

  Rounding the corner, he’s seized by terrible images, jockeying for attention: Crazy visions trip over each other in a rush to be the first on which the boy’s palest of blue eyes fix.

  A broken bedroom window: Blood stains sill and sash. It’s still drip, drip, dripping.

  More blood runs down a short expanse of wall under the window to pool on the floor.

  His mother Olivia, eyes open but not seeing, sprawls alone on the bloodstained, king-size bed. Her body is farthest from the broken and bloodied window. Olivia’s naked from the waist up, the rest of her bare body covered by bloodstained sheets and soaked-through comforter.

  Hector’s eyes are torn between trying to comprehend the novelty of his first sight of bare female breasts, and the terrible, seeping wound between them.

  And there is Grafton, back to Hector, raising his rifle for another shot, now pointing at Olivia’s head as he growls, “Cheating fucking whore! I goddamn knew it!”

  Hector yells, “No!”

  Father spins, instinctively taking fresh aim.

  Already leaning forward in anticipation of her kick, skinny legs braced, Hector doesn’t so much aim the shotgun at any particular part of his father, but points the barrel in Grafton’s direction, fixed somewhere between the slayer’s face and heart.

  Hector fires first.

  Grafton, frowning as he realizes he’s drawing down on his boy, is slung backward in a haze of blood. His long gun is flung from a nearly severed arm, discharging on impact and blasting a hole in the ceiling above his son’s head.

  Hector’s also knocked over—once again undone by the big shotgun’s backward kick. The boy sprawls, his grandpa’s too-big hat rolling on the floor behind him as ceiling plaster settles over him like snow.

  His pale blue eyes still don’t know where to fix, torn between Mother’s bloodied breasts and the terrible new vision of Father, twitching and bleeding out on the floor, arm clinging to shoulder by threads and splintered bone.

  And there’s that blood trail leading out the bedroom window.

  A spell passes as the sheriff and others survey the carnage, awaiting Hector’s maternal grandfather’s arrival to take custody of the kid.

  The old man is believed the boy’s “only other livin’ kin,” Hector hears the big-bellied sheriff confide in too-loud whispers to a minion, just before spitting more foul tobacco into one of Olivia’s cherished crystal goblets.

  A badly-shaken Hector barricades himself in his bedroom with a notebook and pocketknife to sharpen the dozen pencils he’s frantically gathered.

  Hector sits up in his bed, frenziedly composing repeated drafts of letters, all addressed to God.

  Each letter begs His forgiveness for shooting his father.

  Eventually—unconsciously—with each subsequent draft, Hector’s letters become less a plea for forgiveness and more a description or account of what he’s done. As if God is not omniscient, and so already surely familiar with the bloody circumstances of this terrible night.

  An avid reader, Hector’s thought about being a storyteller, himself.

  Tonight he writes as if God needs to be told the story of the crime that will haunt Hector the rest of his life.

  In Texas, the wheels of justice grind fast and mean.

  Not long after doctors succeed in miraculously saving Grafton Lassiter’s mauled arm, the convicted wife-killer hangs for the murder of Olivia Destry Lassiter.

  Lassiter ranch hand Pike Knox, Olivia’s longtime clandestine lover, is figured to have bled out somewhere in the dense scrub after being twice back-shot by Grafton as Pike hurled himself through that bloodstained bedroom window.

  Grafton testifies he thinks he struck Knox in the upper and lower spine.

  Yet Olivia’s lover’s body remains missing.

  The sheriff declares Pike staggered off and his corpse was ravaged, remains scattered by coyotes and other indigenous “meat-eatin’, bone-chawin’ critters.”

  The coroner shares the same theory with the local newspaper, choosing scavengers in lieu of critters.

  Hector, freshly orphaned, sole heir to the Lassiter family cattle ranch, is, at last, put into legal custody of his dashing old granddad, self-described “businessman” Beauregard Stryder.

  At first, the official, and the reeling, Gulf Coast community’s assumption, is Hector stands to inherit the small fortune, one a stern-faced judge quickly places in trust, increasingly concerned by the stubborn lack of specificity regarding grandfather “Beau Stryder’s precise means of self-support in the so-called “business” world.

  It emerges the Lassiter ranch is deeply mortgaged for loans. Grafton had mounting gambling urges but no gift for games of chance.

  Increasingly unflattering portraits of the boy’s parents cohere: They’re exposed as profligate spenders, mutually sexually promiscuous, and both severely alcoholic.

  Grafton, some say, also had a budding weakness for Heroin-brand cough syrup. He was downing the stuff by the bottle in the nights leading up to the fatal shooting.

  At the very least, the Lassiters were calamitous investors.

  As the presiding, dithering judge publicly loses taste for the increasingly tawdry affair, postponing pivotal ruling after ruling, Beau quickly and quietly liquidates the Lassiters’ remaining assets before they’re seized by energetic creditors or laggardly court officers. Beau sets up a trust fund for his grandson to become the boy’s upon turning eighteen.

  Then Hector’s grandfather hustles reedy, blue-eyed, brown-haired Hector off by train to New York City, pledging to introduce the dumbstruck lad to the real Coney Island.

  “The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.”

  —G.K. Chesterson

  2

  TRAVELS WITH BEAU

  (1908-1913)

  New York’s every bit the distracting jumble to Hector’s hungry, haunted mind Beau had hoped. The buildings are taller, more densely packed than the kid can comprehend.

  The boy’s first glimpse of the soaring woman extending her torch out over the choppy bay leaves Hector breathless, grasping for words he can’t lay tongue to.

  The city’s rich ragout of exotic accents, strange clothes and stranger people—people everywhere, of every color and packed in so tight, just like all the towering buildings—similarly swamps Hector’s senses.

  Soon after their arrival, standing in the window of their hotel room overlooking Herald Square in the gloaming, the kid gazes wide-eyed out the window at the dazzle of lights coming on across the impossible city; at the elevated trains rattling by, showering sparks on the streets below.

  To his grandfather’s obvious delight, Hector takes it all in ravenously and gratefully: his boy’s palpably mesmerized.

  As they move through the bustle and sprawl of the city, Hector keeps detailed diaries in a swiftly growing stack of notebooks
, frantically scribbling about everywhere they go, everything Hector sees and, most interestingly to Beau, how it all makes his grandson feel.

  Just as Beau wagered, the scale and incomparable majesty of New York City benignly overwhelms Hector’s senses to the old man’s relief, at least for a time pushing thoughts of guilt and damnation for shooting his father from Hector’s mind.

  But Hector’s also a lightning study.

  Almost immediately, Hector grasps New York’s a metropolis composed of smaller, isolated exotic cities.

  Beau first takes him to Little Italy. They light a candle there for Olivia in Our Lady of Help on Mott Street.

  That same day, over a lingering lunch, Hector savors his first taste of Italian food—chicken scarpariello—in a place called Belmonte’s in the borough of Brooklyn.

  All of it, the names, the scents and tastes, go straight into his newest notebook, frenzied but highly-detailed notes taken down in bold, block letters.

  A little fuzzy on the geography, Beau tries to answer his grandson’s questions about Italy—where it is, what it is. But he comes up short and so, in his way, old Beau invents a story for Hector.

  For dinner that night, they make a second sally back to Mott Street, this time to Chinatown.

  Hector samples his first Asian food as he intently devours a copy of Argosy Magazine, caught up in a tale titled, “On the Brink of the Precipice.”

  The title page promises the story will give a sense of, “What it is like to be accused of an awful crime and find oneself helpless in the meshes of the law.”

  To Hector’s terrible frustration, the story’s a cliffhanger, part one of a multi-part tail to spool out across subsequent editions of Argosy.

  Feeling guilty that Hector’s left hanging, Beau springs for a hardcover novel, a thriller in full by G.K. Chesterson titled The Man Who Was Thursday.

  He has no way of knowing it, but even as he succeeds in staunching Hector’s guilt and pain for shooting his father, Beau’s stoking in his grandson a yen for adventure and exploration. He’s shaping the young century’s last true maverick. He’s also fostering an intoxicating appreciation for pulp literature, gulped down in the midst of his own globe-trotting adventures that will eventually define and drive Hector through all his remaining days.

  As Hector reads the Chesterson novel, his grandfather scans the daily papers, mostly looking for items on Mexico, his grandson’s growing preoccupation. Living close to the border, and occasionally crossing over with his folks, or with that ranch-hand Pike, has invested Hector with a love of all things Mexican, so Beau feels it worth some minimal effort to stay current with volatile affairs there.

  He reads that increasingly detested Mexican President Porfirio Díaz’s recent pledge not to seek re-election looks about to be reneged upon.

  That would be, pundits warn, another and possibly final step toward certain revolution south of the border.

  Even as he expands Hector’s horizons and cultivates his palate, Beau gradually reveals to the boy exactly how Paw-Paw butters his bread and pays for their succession of swanky four-star hotel rooms.

  To Hector’s initial confusion—and eventual half-apathy—he learns that for Paw-Paw Beau, “business” has always been synonymous with “bunco.”

  He learns Beau is an acknowledged maestro of the “Big Store Con,” a brand of confidence game bordering, in its larcenous way, on a kind of crooked high theater.

  The complex and grand-scale big-money games Beau conjures and launches against various rich marks require acres of rigged back-story, acquired and even set-designed false offices, homes and gambling parlors.

  Storytelling: A cast of characters who might have wandered out of a tale from Argosy in Hector’s dazed eyes is required to stock these false fronts and stages for the scalping of knowingly selected “marks.”

  Over a series of successive, other big cities—mostly state capitols but none a match in scale and variety to New York City, of course—young Hector makes the acquaintance of a who’s who of storied grifters and twilight characters.

  For a time, Beau takes baby steps, trying to ease Hector into his world as an apprentice.

  To the old man’s view, writing seems at best “a cussed and shaky way to eke out a livin’.” His grandson, Beau assures himself, needs a dependable career.

  The suave, smooth-talking old charlatan reckons the boy’s burgeoning imagination and gift for patter—his grandson’s love of storytelling and inventing tales—make Hector a natural for the Big Store Con.

  But the kid repeatedly muffs dry runs playing troubled waifs, duplicitous bellboys and roper newspaper hawks.

  Each time at bat, that yen for imaginative invention Beau sees as promising actually proves Hector’s undoing.

  Invariably, the kid, to use an actor’s term, buries himself in each role. He goes on too long with the set-up or tears off on imaginative tangents that test marks’ patience and attention spans at critical junctures.

  Beau, having always hated the name Hector, and far more abhorring Lassiter, has always adopted a pet version of his grandson’s middle name of Mason in addressing Hector.

  Beau also grudgingly decides it’s better to let “Mase” chase his dream of writing ’til reality inevitably sets the boy’s fool head straight.

  But Hector, an instinctive autodidact, stubbornly gropes his way through schooling himself in the art of fiction writing while Beau and company fleece new marks across a succession of cities.

  As Beau runs his elaborate games, Hector’s increasingly off attending author readings and signings, or, more often, ferreting out local poets and novelists, large and small, in the towns and cities where Beau plies his dark trade.

  Hector cold knocks on sundry front doors, begging half-an-hour’s talk about craft, work habits and storytelling strategies.

  He’s never turned down by the disparate authors he ambushes.

  Over time, quietly and strategically, Hector manages to meet and exchange words, sometimes just a greeting, other times a shared meal and deep talk—charla profunda, as one Mexican scribe puts it to him—with a pantheon of popular authors and poets. They include Jacques Futrelle, Damon Runyon, Zane Gray, Owen Wister and Edgar Rice Burroughs, W.C. Morrow, Blanche Partington, George Sterling and a slew of others.

  At the tail end of 1914, Beau at last determines enough years have been spent away from Texas for his own safe return after countless scams run in the state.

  Beau reckons enough time has maybe passed to have also cooled any guilt or bad feelings about the place Hector might still nurse.

  Those theories driving his decision-making, Beau turns fresh sights to Texas, partly due to Hector’s enduring fascination with Mexico and increasingly the bandit-turned revolutionary General Francisco “Pancho” Villa, whom Hector frequently fantasizes to Beau about seeking out…Boasting of one day riding behind Villa in combat to overthrow the despised President Victoriano Huerta.

  Over breakfast, spotting the latest headline on Mexico, Hector, who usually shows little interest in newspapers, asks, “Can I read that when you’re through with it?”

  With Thanksgiving looming—and much of Europe at war with itself—Hector and Beau at last return to their mutual place of birth, squirreling right up against the long, uneasy border with Mexico.

  Hector’s resulting zeal to be at the border and in possible proximity to his Robin Hood-like hero Pancho Villa freshly unnerves Beau.

  Click here to learn more about Once a World by Craig McDonald.

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