Evan Riggs’s life did not modulate gracefully into a minor key; it dropped with all the force of gravity.
Like a cold stone from a great height, Evan’s emotional state plunged into the deepest reaches of despair and self-hatred. He could not have believed himself more guilty for what had happened to Lilly Duvall. Perhaps he did not wish to believe himself anything other than solely responsible, looking to punish himself for so many things that may have led to her suicide: the small betrayals, the lies, the deceptions, the times he ignored or neglected or set aside her importances in place of his own. These were things of which all humans were guilty, an incumbent and inherent aspect of all relationships, but some believed themselves more culpable than others. Looking to punish self for both the real and the imagined, any motivation would serve. Evan believed himself the guiltiest of all. Perhaps it was his nature to be melodramatic, to be the artist, the tortured poet; perhaps he was looking to fuel the fires of creativity with something dark and possessed. Whatever the rationale, it was a heavy coat he cut for himself, and he wore it irrespective of the weather.
Never once in those initial weeks did he consider the possibility that he may not have been complicit. Never once did he look beyond himself for the cause of her death. The truth, in fact, was that Lilly Duvall had been on a self-destruct mission for years, her suicide the final act of a performance lasting more than two decades. Perhaps she had merely become exhausted with remembering lines, writing new scenes, recognizing that those who shared the stage with her were not there of their own volition. That last vain declaration of abandonment had been her curtain call, an invitation for an encore that never came, and so she bowed out in the most dramatic way she could imagine. History would write her as some tragic Shakespearean character, a Lavinia, an Ophelia perhaps, but history was as good a liar as any Machiavelli. In the final analysis, the facade stripped away, the scenery taken down, Lilly Duvall’s suicide was an act of selfishness. She died to make others feel guilty for her own inherent shortcomings.
Evan did not write for a long time, and then the songs he wrote were moody and somber. Those songs he had earlier created now became something else, something so much darker and more introspective. The people who came to hear him changed, too—no longer the lovers of classic country melodies and soulful ballads, but those also seeking some kind of tacit consent and agreement that life was forever tinged with sadness and desperation.
And Evan drank. He did not drink to quench some physical thirst, but to douse some inner fire that raged unseen. However much he drank, the fire raged on, and the violent shifts in temperament became too much to bear. Those around him either escaped, or they were drawn into this dark orbit and turned inside out.
The decline of Evan Riggs did not end in a fall. A woman had sent him into a tailspin that lasted for the better part of six months, and he finally reached a point where he knew he would have to level out, climb once more, or keep on heading down until he crashed for good.
Morning of Sunday, March 21, 1948, Evan Riggs woke on the floor in the back room of a bar. He had evidently collapsed dead drunk, been locked inside, and everyone had gone home none the wiser. He went into the bar itself, found a glass, headed for the first bottle of bourbon. He poured a good three inches, raised it to his lips, and stopped. There was a mirror behind the bar, and he could see himself as clear as day. That—it seemed—was enough, for he tipped the bourbon back into the bottle and put the empty glass in the sink.
He could hear his mother.
Show me anyone who ever got anything done by being weak and I’ll be weak, Evan. You show me one person who hasn’t made a mess of things. It happens. It’s called life. You get past it. You deal with what happened.
The choice was there, plain as day.
Evan started cleaning the bar. He swept; he washed glasses; he straightened chairs and tables and cleaned the windows. He worked hard. By the time the owner turned up at four, Evan was flat-out exhausted.
“Hey, what the hell is this?” the guy said. “What you doin’ in here?”
Evan smiled. “Got locked in here, woke up, figured I’d clean the place up a bit.”
The man came forward. “What’s your name?”
“Riggs. Evan Riggs.”
“You didn’t drink nothin, rob the till?”
Evan laughed. “No, sir, I did not.”
“So, what’s your business, son?”
“Don’t have one … not exactly.”
“You want a job? I got a bunch of places, all need to be taken care of. I got cleaners, but they rob me blind, steal liquor, you know?”
Evan shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I’m a musician.”
“Is that so?
“Yes, sir.”
“That what were you doin’ when you got locked up in here? Being a musician? Seems more likely you were sleepin’ off a drunk.”
Evan didn’t reply.
The man extended his hand. “Name’s Lou Ingrams.”
Evan Riggs and Lou Ingrams shook hands.
“You look like you need a job, son. You can take it or not. You show up here Monday at noon, I’ll know I got a supervisor. You don’t, I know I ain’t. Not complicated.”
Lou Ingrams let Evan out of the bar. Evan went back to the apartment and surveyed the devastation of empty bottles, dirty laundry, unwashed cups and plates.
He got to work. Three hours. Then he bathed, shaved, and put on clean clothes.
He looked in the mirror and was reminded of a man he once knew.
Monday at noon he went back to Lou Ingrams’s bar.
“I got five bars, one club,” Ingrams said. “I’m gonna show you where they are and what I need.”
Evan worked the day. He worked the week. By the start of April, he was a different man. He wasn’t drinking. His apartment was clean, and it stayed that way. He took his clothes to the Laundromat. He showed up on time for work and he went home exhausted.
One time he asked Lou Ingrams why he had given him the job.
“Because I done the drunk thing,” Ingrams said. “You got locked in a bar all night and didn’t kill yourself with bourbon. Where you were was the same as me. That’s no place for anyone. You get back on the horse, you know? Even if he gets a leg up from someone, a cowboy gets back on the horse and gets himself home no matter what.”
“I appreciate what you done,” Evan said, and they never discussed it again.
In July of that same year, Evan Riggs contacted Leland Soames at Crooked Cow in Abilene and asked whether there was still an opening to go on up there and make a record. Soames said he would get back to him, and Evan felt it was a brush-off. Soames, however, was good to his word. Called him three days later and said there was a week in August if Evan could make it.
“I can make it,” Evan said.
Evan then told Lou Ingrams about it.
“So, you gonna be the new Hank Williams, then.”
“What, get the shit beaten out of me and die at twenty-nine?”
“Some sense of humor you got,” Ingrams said. “Don’t let them music business people take it off you.”
“I won’t.”
Evan Riggs and Lou Ingrams parted company on Sunday, August 1, 1948. Evan was taking a Greyhound up to Abilene early on the following day.
Ingrams told him to make a good record and to send him a copy when it was done. He promised he would. He said he would bring one back and deliver it personal.
Just a week later, August eighth, Lou Ingrams was shot dead in a failed robbery at his club. He died right there on a floor that Evan Riggs had cleaned a hundred times.
Evan Riggs heard about it more than a month later. The funeral had been and gone.
Evan went to a bar and drank himself senseless. He spent the night in a jail cell and was bailed out by Herman Russell the following morning.
Leland Soames thought nothing of it. He’d recorded too many people and spent too much time with too many musicians to see Evan Riggs’s behavior as anything but standard. You took the rough with the smooth. The kid was young. He’d get over it, whatever
it
was.
Evan Riggs wasn’t so sure. Life had beaten him hard with Rebecca Wyatt, beaten him some more with Lilly Duvall, and now—with the untimely death of Lou Ingrams—it seemed intent on undermining every ounce of faith he possessed in the universal balance of all things. It wasn’t right. It was further confirmation that life was skewed in favor of someone other than himself.
And that was when Evan Riggs decided to quit Abilene, to quit his plan of returning to Austin and head home to Calvary. Maybe to lick his wounds, maybe to try to gain some perspective, he didn’t know. Intuition told him that going back for a while was the right thing to do.
In truth, he couldn’t have been more wrong.
Henry and Evie followed the Pecos up to Iraan, took 349 to the intersection of 67 and headed west. They made Odessa by eleven. Henry had been in Odessa just five days earlier, had stayed overnight on the day of his release. Five days. It was hard to believe. This was the journey now: his experiences in Calvary; the run-in with Carson Riggs; meeting Evie Chandler, a girl who had so effortlessly worked her way into his heart and seemed set to stay there; the time spent at the Honeycutts’, the words he’d shared with Evie’s father, with Clarence Ames, Roy Sperling, George Eakins, and finally, with Harold Mills. All of it in five days. It seemed surreal, and yet it stretched out behind him in slow motion. Time was relative to nothing but itself. This he had learned in Reeves. Boredom was nothing more than an inability to occupy each moment as if it were the only moment that existed, agitation and frustration nothing more than an effort to slow it down. Time just was, and if you did not let it be what it was, it became an endless source of trouble.
“I want a cup of coffee,” Evie said. “Let’s find someplace and ask where the County Hospital is.”
It was Sunday morning; finding someplace wasn’t as easy as would have been the case in Austin, but a small diner downtown was serving late breakfasts and strong coffee for those who weren’t in church.
Henry and Evie took a corner booth at the back, asked the waitress for directions to the hospital when she brought their order.
“Easy enough,” she said. “Go right, keep on going, and don’t stop until you see it. Big building. Ugly, too.” She smiled and left them to it.
Ector County Hospital was big, and it was ugly. It seemed intent on spoiling the view with its dingy concrete mass. The design was cumbersome, as if additional wings and blocks had been nailed on as afterthoughts and addendums. Frank Lloyd Wright would have refused even to be sick in such a place.
“So, we have a plan?” Evie asked.
“Tell them you’re her sister’s niece or something,” Henry said. “Her granddaughter, maybe? I don’t know.”
“Let’s go see what happens,” Evie said, and took off up the main steps of the facility and went through the heavy glass doors.
It was far easier than either of them had imagined. Hospital policy seemed welcoming of visitors, and inquiries were not made as to who Henry and Evie were or how they were related to the patient they were asking after.
“Grace Riggs, yes,” the woman at reception said, having consulted a typed directory of names. “She is in the Andersen Wing. Third floor, turn left out of the elevator, go all the way to the end of the corridor, turn right, and then follow the signs.”
They did as they were told, the size of the building evident only as they walked. It must have taken them ten minutes to find their destination. The Andersen Wing was some sort of psychiatric facility, perhaps a final repository for the unsalvageable and terminally ill. The atmosphere was foreboding, as if to find yourself here was to know that all hope had been abandoned.
The ward nurse did ask who they were, their names, who they had come to visit.
“John Wilson,” Henry lied, “and this here is my wife, Mary.” He smiled guilelessly. “Mary is Grace Riggs’s niece’s cousin,” he added.
The nurse looked surprised. “Well, if ever there was a distant relative contest, you’d more ’an likely win a prize, my dear,” she said. “However, I am sure that Grace will appreciate your makin’ a visit. She’s been here a long time, and aside from her son, she don’t get no one comin’ down here.”
“That’d be Carson, right?” Henry asked. “The sheriff.”
“He’s a sheriff?” the nurse asked. “Who woulda known, eh? Saw him just the once. That was a long time back, though. Like I said, she don’t get no visitors.”
“How long has she been here?” Evie asked.
“Oh, Lord, I have no idea,” the nurse said. “I’ve been working on this wing for fifteen years, and Grace was here long before me.”
“She hasn’t told you?”
The nurse gave a weak smile. “You go visit her now,” she said. “Let me introduce you.”
The nurse left them standing there at the edge of a bed, within which was a frail and distant woman, a woman representing nothing more than a rough sketch of the person she’d once been.
Evie looked at Henry. Henry looked back at her. Their expressions were the same: a sense of disbelief, a sense of guilt, as well, as if they were bringing bad news to the doorstep of someone who had already received far more than any human being should have to bear.
Evie pulled up a chair and sat down. She reached out and took the pale and fragile hand of Grace Riggs.
“Grace,” she said, and Grace turned her head and looked back at her through milky eyes.
She smiled faintly, as if there were some sense of recognition, and she said, “We had angel food cake at the party. I made it myself.”
Henry stepped up behind Evie and placed his hands on her shoulders.
“We came to visit you, Mrs. Riggs,” he said. “We wanted to talk to you about Evan and Carson, you know? We wanted to ask you about Evan’s daughter … your granddaughter.”
Grace looked surprised for a moment. “She was only here for a little while,” she whispered, as if some secret was being divulged. “I saw her before she died.” She smiled then, heartfelt and sincere, yet with a shadow of poignancy. “I came to visit her, but Carson was so angry. He told me never to come again.”
“Sarah was here?” Evie asked. “And she died?” She turned and looked at Henry, and there was a visible sense of distress in her expression.
“Sarah?” Grace asked. “Who is Sarah?”
“Your granddaughter,” Henry said. “Evan’s daughter.”
“No, I didn’t see her today,” Grace said. “Is she here?”
“Who died, Mrs. Riggs? Who was here that died?” Henry asked.
“Why, Rebecca, of course. Sarah’s mother. I came to see her here. Carson told me not to come again, so I didn’t. I should have defied him.”
Grace Riggs looked away for a few moments, and then she turned back. She smiled at Henry, at Evie Chandler. “We had angel food cake at the party,” she said. “I made it myself, you know?”
Evie squeezed Grace Riggs’s hand gently. “Is that right, Mrs. Riggs? Rebecca was Sarah’s mother, and Rebecca died here at Ector?”
The look in Grace’s eyes was so very distant that Evie knew she was gone. Where she had gone, Evie had no idea, but she certainly wasn’t in the Andersen Wing of Ector County Hospital talking to her visitors.
Evie sat there a while longer. Henry didn’t say a word. When they finally got up to leave, they found the nurse again and told her they were leaving.
“She was lucid?” the nurse asked.
“A little.”
“Less and less frequently now,” she replied. “Six months, a year perhaps, and she might not even recognize me, and I see her every day.”
“Thank you for letting us visit,” Evie said. “And thank you for taking such good care of her.”
“Someone has to, eh?” the nurse said, smiling. “Most of these old ’uns have been abandoned and deserted by family, you know? Terrible shame, but that’s life, isn’t it?”
Outside, they sat in the truck. Both of them were silent for a while, but Henry broke that silence with something they had both been thinking.
“You reckon Rebecca was the mother?”
“I do,” Evie said. “She wound up here, died here. Grace winds up here, too, and Evan ends up in jail. The father is dead, as well. Is it my imagination, or does everyone around Carson Riggs get completely fucked-up?”
“Not your imagination,” Henry replied.
“That was really sad. Seeing that woman like that. Carson doesn’t come out here and visit her. However, I can’t say that’s so bad, all things considered. She can’t see Evan … probably doesn’t even remember what Evan looks like. She’s been there—what?—twenty years, maybe?”
“Fifteen at least.”
“No life, is it?”
Henry shook his head.
“So we need to find out who Rebecca is, if she ended up here, if she died. We find some record of her, we might get a little closer to Sarah.”
“Interesting, huh?”
“Which bit?”
“Looking for someone no one wants us to find.”
“Except Evan,” Evie said. “Wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Evan, right?”
“Right.”
“You ready to quit, Henry?”
“Hell, no.”
Evie smiled. “Me either. More I hear about Carson Riggs, the less I like him. The less I like him, the more I want to see him get fucked-up, too.”
“Remind me to stay friends with you.”
“Oh, I think you’d make a pretty good enemy, Henry Quinn. I think you’re a much darker horse than you let on.”
“Oh, you’re so right there, sweetheart,” Henry said, a smile in his eyes. “All hidden currents, me. Black water. Deep, too. So very deep.”
“Idiot.”
Henry started the engine and they pulled away, both of them making a point of not looking back at the dark, angular shape on the horizon.