It was hard for Henry not to see his life as a divided thing. The accidental shooting of Sally O’Brien was not so much a semicolon as a full-blown end of paragraph. Life had stopped for three years and had now begun again with the sense that what came before bore no relation to what was now on the way. Paragraphs from different books, the characters anomalous, the dialogue fractured and confusing.
He woke before Evie, slipped silently from the bed, put on his jeans and a T-shirt, and made his way out to the kitchen. Glenn Chandler was gone, presumably to work, and Henry went about the business of making coffee in a stranger’s house.
Standing on the veranda, looking out over the flatlands of West Texas, he felt as if this place was no longer his home. The Great Depression had almost killed the spirit of the state, and though oil had brought money, it had never erased the feeling that everything could be swept away in a heartbeat.
Remnants of the past were frequent and varied. Take a drive in any direction, and there were signs of leaving, of giving up, of quitting this godforsaken place for someplace better. A row of eroded fence posts like rotted teeth marking some long-vanished boundary; the stone bed of a redundant gas station, the subterranean tanks nothing more than vast mouths filled with dirt and rust and the bleached skeletons of prairie dogs, jackrabbits, and snakes. Broken-down convenience stores, the once-bright colors whipped by wind and dust into ghosts of former colors. Texas was a cul-de-sac for the westerlies, carrying with them bitterness and aggravation and the memory of failure.
“Hey.”
Henry turned and saw Evie standing there in the doorway. She had on nothing but Henry’s shirt; she came up behind him, snaked her hands around his waist, and rested her head against his shoulder.
“You left me sleeping,” she said.
“You looked happy,” Henry replied. “Like you were dreaming.”
She sighed gently and pulled him closer. “Did you see my dad this morning?”
Henry turned within her arms and faced her. “No. He was gone before I woke.”
Evie leaned up and kissed him. “You wanna hear about how I don’t normally do this?”
“I know you don’t normally do this,” Henry said, smiling. “And neither do I.”
“I know
you
don’t. You’ve been in Reeves for three years.”
“Still, even if I hadn’t …”
“Come on,” Evie said. “Let’s get some breakfast.”
She made eggs and rye toast and fresh coffee. Then she asked about Evan’s daughter and what it was really about.
“Just keeping a promise,” Henry said. “Evan took care of me, saved me from some trouble right at the start.”
“The hard-won lesson?” she asked, referencing the scar.
Henry nodded. “The hard-won lesson, yes. So I owe him. He gave up his daughter. I don’t really know the details, but I guess that he’s got something to say to her and he needs to say it.”
“He’s never gonna come out of Reeves, is he?”
“Maybe, but if he does, he’ll only go someplace else the same.”
“How do you even deal with that?” Evie asked. “Knowing that you’ll die in prison, that you’ll never be free, never drive a car, never make love, never …” Her voice trailed away.
“One day at a time, I guess,” Henry replied. “Three years seems like forever when you start it. Hell, a week seems like forever on the first night. But you get into a groove, a routine, a pattern of doing things a certain way that uses up the time. You teach yourself not to think. That’s the main thing. You teach yourself not to think about the past or the future, just about what’s happening right now. It’s like being drunk without the liquor. Everything is now—nothing before, nothing after.” Henry smiled ruefully. “It’s a tough habit to get out of.”
“Don’t worry,” Evie said. “I’m not asking you to think about our future.”
“I didn’t mean that, sweetheart. I meant with everything. You’re eating breakfast, and all you’re thinking about is eating breakfast. You’re at the gas station, and all that’s on your mind is the gas station and filling the tank and whatever. It’s not the way you normally think. Your mind is yesterday and tomorrow, you know? Everything is yesterday and tomorrow. You do a few years in a place like Reeves and your mind ain’t on nothin’ but today.”
“So what’s happening for you today, then?” Evie asked.
“Figured I’d go stick my nose in some places and see if I get bit.”
Evie smiled. “You don’t back off, do you?”
“Hey, only thing I’ve heard is that there’s some history with Evan and his brother. Carson Riggs may have himself a reputation as a tough guy, but I’m not breaking the law, and I’m not here to cause trouble. I’m just here to deliver a message.”
“Well, you go deliver your message, Henry Quinn, and if someone bites you and you need some first aid, you come on back here and we’ll fix you up.”
“You got any suggestions as to where I should start?”
“Go on and speak with Clarence Ames, I guess. Seems he had the most to say.”
“Also made it clear that the conversation was done.”
“Place is full of ears. Man says different things when he thinks he ain’t bein’ listened to.”
“And where’s he at?”
“Clarence has a place on the far side of Calvary. Head through town, on past the Honeycutts, keep on that road, and you can’t miss it. Used to be white, two stories, round tower on the left-hand side, has a lean-to on the right where he parks his truck. You’ll know it when you see it.”
“What does he do?”
“Do?” Evie shrugged. “Used to farm, but like all these boys, they sold up for the oil rights. Made a fortune, so I heard. So much money they don’t need to work, but to look at them, you’d think they didn’t have a dime to share between ’em.”
“And what are you doing today?” Henry asked.
“For now I’m mindin’ my own business, Henry Quinn, that and waitin’ to see how much trouble you get yourself into.”
“So I guess I’ll see you later.”
“I guess you will.”
Henry smiled. “Are you really this nonchalant and easygoing, or are you putting this on for me?”
Evie reached across the table and took Henry’s hands. She looked him directly in the eyes and didn’t crack a smile. “Come back tonight and I’ll tell you.”
“You are just a little crazy, I guess,” Henry said, “but good crazy.”
“You hope.”
Half an hour later he was on the road back toward Calvary. He followed Evie’s directions, drove on past the Honeycutt place and kept on going. He found Clarence Ames’s place, saw Clarence there at the front window as he drew to a halt. Before he’d exited the pickup, the front door opened and the man himself came out onto the veranda.
“Figured I’d see you again,” Clarence said. He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun.
Henry walked on up the path to the porch steps.
“You’ve come with questions.”
“I have.”
“What makes you think I wanna answer them?”
“I know you don’t,” Henry said. “Came anyway.”
“Evie Chandler put you up to this?”
“Evie said you’d be the best person to start with, yes.”
“I’ll have words with her, then,” he replied, and there was a reconciled expression on his face; the visit was inevitable, and they’d both known it.
“You better come on in, I guess,” Clarence said, and unlatched the screen door.
He turned and disappeared into the shadowed hallway. Henry went on up the steps, through the screen door, and followed the man into the house.
“Talk last night got me thinking about Evan,” Clarence said. “Went through the records I got and found it.”
The room they were in was so much the room of a man living alone. Books and newspapers were piled high left and right. A collection of bottles, some empty, some half full, sat on the floor by the fireplace. Boots, a coat, a pair of gloves, a couple of hats, other things in random places. It wasn’t a dirty room, but disorderly, lived-in. Clarence Ames resided here alone—no doubt about it.
Clarence nodded toward the table, and there sat Evan Riggs’s record,
The Whiskey Poet
.
Something happened when Henry picked it up. The face that looked back at him was two men—the picture he had seen on the wall at Crooked Cow in Abilene back in 1967 and the friend he’d made in Reeves. They were different men, but even as Henry looked, he could see something in that photograph that he’d not seen before. There was an edge in the expression, something almost cruel in the eyes, and he realized then that Evan Riggs had been the only man in Reeves to never mitigate his actions. Jail was filled with the innocent, the unlucky, the unfortunate, and even in the case of those whose guilt was beyond doubt, their incarceration was still the fault of lawyers and snitches and biased judges with grievances. Friend though he’d been, and a good one, there was no denying the fact that Evan Riggs was more than likely a killer, regardless of his amnesia. Evidence said he’d beaten a man to death with his bare hands in a motel in Austin, and whatever that man might have been guilty of, it had not been Evan Riggs’s job to take his life. Simply stated, and if guilt was assumed, Evan Riggs should have gone to the chair.
“You heard it?” Clarence asked.
“Many times,” Henry replied. “Had it before I went to Reeves.”
“I played it last night after I got back from the saloon. Hell of a singer. Some of it ain’t even in tune, but it still makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Outlaw music, I guess.”
“I guess.”
“You want some coffee?”
“If you’re havin’ some, sure.”
“Tastes like raccoon piss and vinegar.”
“Just the way I like it.”
Clarence went out back to the kitchen, returned with cups.
He was right: the coffee was awful, but it didn’t seem to matter.
“So, I don’t know what you think I can do to help you, son,” Clarence said.
“I don’t know either.”
“What’s the story here? I mean, really … what you doin’ this for?”
“Evan stopped me from getting killed,” Henry said. “Not that anyone was trying to kill me, specifically, but jail has its own territories, you know? Put a bunch of men someplace, no matter how small, and they all want a piece of it. Instinct, I guess. Anyway, someone upset someone. I don’t even know what it was about. But in a place like that, everything gets blown out of proportion. Use a man’s soap, and he’s gonna take it as an insult to him, his family, his whole world. So one guy wants some other guy dead, and he buys an opportunity by staging a riot. The wardens are occupied on one side of the prison block, some guy gets stabbed on the other, and no one saw anything. I just happened to be on the wrong side of the block. I sort of wandered into the middle of it. There were two or three guys with knives, some other guy on his hands and knees with a hole in his neck, blood everywhere, a hell of a scene, and they took me for his buddy. They came after me and I got myself sliced. Evan came from nowhere, floored one of them, threw me over his shoulder and ran. Got me into the infirmary before I bled out. Place like Reeves, the wardens’d just as easily let you bleed out as go to the trouble of fixin’ you up. A dead man is a man you ain’t gotta feed. And that was that. And aside from him being responsible for me still being here, I guess I feel a certain kinship with the man. Live with someone for three years in a room that size, well, you either get on or move out. We got on just fine, talked a lot about music. Evan is the kind of man who doesn’t say a great deal, but when he does say something, it’s worth listening to.”
“Just can’t imagine how it’d be to know you’ll never be out of there,” Clarence said. “He was a young man when that happened, war hero, up-and-coming music star an’ all, but a drunk. That was no secret. And he was a bad drunk, I guess. Otherwise what happened would never have happened.”
“You think he really did it? Killed that man?”
Clarence shook his head. “I don’t know, son,” he replied. “One thing that life has taught me is that people are capable of all manner of things you’d never expect. No one’s a killer until they kill someone, and from what I understand, he killed a good many in the war.”
“But surely war is different—”
“Sure it is, but it’s still gotta change a man, hasn’t it? Even if you shoot someone from three hundred yards away, you’ve still taken someone’s life. That’s gotta do something to your viewpoint.”
“Yes, I guess so.”
“So what’s your story, Henry Quinn? Aside from this thing with Evan’s vanished daughter?”
“My story? I don’t have one.”
“Sure you do,” Clarence said, smiling. “Everyone has a story. Everyone has a dream, even a little one. I mean, say you find her tomorrow. Say you track this mysterious girl down and deliver whatever message Evan gave you for her, then what? Where do you go from here?”
“Back home to San Angelo. Have a mother there. She’s not doing so good. Drinks too much, hangs out with people who ain’t so good for her, far as I can tell. I have a responsibility there. Beyond that, I want to start writing music again. I have a holding contract with a record company in Abilene, same company Evan recorded with, coincidentally. Still owe them five hundred bucks, and that’s something that’ll need sorting out sooner or later.”
“So whatever’s going on with your ma and your own life is all on hold until you find Evan’s girl.”
“Yep, it seems that way.”
“That’s some promise you made.”
“Gave my word.”
“And you think I know something?”
“Well, Carson Riggs would be my first choice. However, I get the idea he’s not so interested in helping me.”
“You got that right.”
“So what did happen between them? Why so much animosity?”
Clarence smiled ruefully. “Always the same reasons, son. Money or a woman. In this case, both. I don’t know details, but rumor has it that they were both after the same girl, that and the fact that Carson wanted to sell the land for oil rights, and he got involved with people he shouldn’t have while Evan was away. And then there was the father’s death. Strange circumstance. Folks sayin’ that it was not what it appeared to be, that a cloud of uncertainty still stands over it. I say more often than not that things are exactly what they appear to be, but what the hell do I know?”