The urge to run was overwhelming.
Henry held her down, but Evie fought back like a wildcat. She scratched his face. She was out-and-out hysterical.
Alvin Lang sat slumped against the kitchen cabinets, an expression on his face like relief and disappointment all rolled into one. Whatever guilt had burdened him was a burden no longer. Now he just had his Maker and the afterlife with which to contend.
Ten minutes, fifteen perhaps, and Henry managed to get Evie to her feet. Hauling her out of the kitchen and getting her into the front room was a Herculean task, as if she believed that staying in the kitchen would somehow enable her to turn back time. She held on to the frame of the door, still crying, still hyperventilating, looking at Henry with wide-eyed horror and abject disbelief.
She didn’t speak for another ten minutes after that, and then it was some kind of shocked rambling monologue about Alvin Lang and Carson Riggs and what the hell were they going to do.
“We are calling the Sheriff’s Department,” Henry said. “We have no choice.”
“Let’s j-just g-go,” she said. “Let’s j-just go … No one knows we came here … No one know we’re h-here. Let’s just g-go.” And with that she started for the front door. Henry had to grab her and haul her back and sit her down and hold her shoulders so he could get her focused and talk directly at her.
“Evie!” His voice was like a whipcrack. “Evie! Stop! Quiet! That’s enough! Listen to me!”
She sort of snapped to, and then she was gone again, trying to get out of the chair. Henry held her down and she started crying.
Henry slapped her face hard, the sound as sharp as his tone.
Evie started hyperventilating once more, and then she kind of hitched her knees up toward her chest and held on to them, turning on to her side and lying there in the armchair.
Henry walked through to the front hall and called the operator.
“Put me through to the Sheriff’s Office, please,” he said.
He held on for just a moment.
“This is Henry Quinn. I am over at Alvin Lang’s place. He just shot himself. He’s dead. You better send over whoever the hell deals with this shit.”
Henry hung up. He went back to Evie and got a number for her father.
Henry called it. There was no answer. He went back to the living room and lifted Evie out of the chair. She walked with him to the front of the house, and he sat her there on the porch steps. It was a matter of minutes before Carson Riggs’s car drew to a halt outside the Lang house.
Riggs got out and stood on the sidewalk. He looked at Henry Quinn, at Evie Chandler sitting there beside him on the steps, and he said, “Now what the fuck have you done, boy?”
“Done nothin’, Sheriff Riggs. Came over to talk to your deputy, and he done shot himself.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, sir, it is.”
“Well, I’m gonna go on in there and take a look. You stay right there, both of you. You move a goddamned muscle and I’m arresting both of you, you understand?”
“Not going anywhere, Sheriff. I called it in. You got nothin’ on me.”
Riggs shook his head and started toward the front door. “I wouldn’t be so damned sure of yourself, Henry Quinn. Can have you back in Reeves in a heartbeat.”
“Is that so?” Henry said, feeling the color rise in his cheeks, feeling his heart start to race.
“It is, boy. It sure as hell is.”
“Well, you know what I think you should do, Sheriff Riggs?”
Riggs hesitated, standing now no less than six feet from Henry and Evie.
“I think you should go fuck yourself.”
Riggs laughed. “You really got a bad mouth, son. Mouth like that winds up swallowing teeth.”
Henry didn’t rise to the bait. “Your deputy said something very odd just before he turned his gun on himself, Sheriff.”
“And what might that have been?”
“Said he done what Evan should have done. You know what that means?”
“No idea what he was talking about.”
“Maybe something to do with May of sixty-six and what he had to take care of down in Nueva Rosita? Take care of an unwanted child, maybe …”
Riggs’s face changed. Implacable superiority was replaced with something bitter and enraged. Henry could see it in the man’s eyes.
“You don’t talk about my deputy. You don’t talk about my brother. You hear me, boy? You’ve done enough damage here. This ain’t your town. It’s my town. This is my territory, and I control it. I don’t need the likes of you comin’ down here and stirrin’ all manner of private business up. You know nothing about Calvary or the Riggs family. It ain’t none of your damned business, and you’d best be leavin’ ’fore I do whatever the hell I have to do to see you back in Reeves or six feet under.”
Riggs pushed past Henry and went on through the screen door. He was not gone long. When he reappeared, he merely glanced at Henry Quinn and Evie Chandler, an expression of disdain on his face. He went to the car and called it in, asked for the coroner, told the woman at the desk to call in a couple of special deputies, have them bring the necessaries to close off the scene.
“No doubt that he killed himself, is there?” Henry said. “Make it look whichever way you want it to look. You and I still know that your deputy shot himself in the heart rather than deal with whatever you people are fuckin’ hiding down here. What’s so big that people are gonna die for it, Sheriff Riggs? What’s so big a secret that you’re gonna threaten folk, run this place like it’s your own little county farm, stop me gettin’ Evan’s message to his daughter, even try to put me back in Reeves? What the hell is really going on here, Carson?”
Riggs turned suddenly. His face was red, his eyes wide, his lips white as he gritted his teeth and leaned close to Henry Quinn. His face was inches from Henry’s, his words a hissed threat.
“Don’t use my name,” he said. “Don’t ever use my name, boy. You have no right to use my name—”
“Carson? What’s the problem with that? Carson Riggs. Asshole sheriff of Calvary. What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell did you people do? You and Roy Sperling and Warren Garfield? What was so bad that you had to hide Rebecca up in Ector, that you had to put your mother there, that you had to blackmail and threaten everyone into silence? Did you kill Warren Garfield, Carson? Is that what you did? Did you ki—”
Henry never finished the word.
Riggs’s first strike hit him square in the face. Henry had never his nose broken before, but that didn’t alter the certainty with which he knew it had just been broken.
He went down like a tenpin, and Riggs was over him, fists flailing, and then his sidearm was out and he was beating down on Henry with the butt of the gun, and Henry just rolled on his side and got his hands up over his head, and his knees were tucked up into his chest much the same as Evie had done in the house, and he kept his mouth shut because that’s what Evan had told him to do the last time he’d taken a beating like this in Reeves.
The beating didn’t stop.
Henry remembered Evie screaming once more, but he couldn’t connect her screaming with what was happening to himself. He remembered thinking that they needed to get things under control. But they were out of control. Completely.
Henry was unconscious before Evie managed to drag Carson Riggs off of him. Riggs was still a whirlwind of thrashing fists and kicking feet. He caught Evie Chandler broadside and floored her. She went down, too. And then it was all over. Sheriff Riggs stood breathless over the broken body of Henry Quinn, Evie Chandler unconscious at his feet, and an ever-increasing crowd of people gathering in the street, each of them asking what the hell was going on, what had happened, where was Deputy Lang, why were two people on the ground in Lang’s yard, one of them spattered with blood.
Was he dead?
Had Sheriff Riggs killed someone?
What the hell was going on?
And then the special deputies arrived, two of them, their names being Lucas Wright and Donny King. Wright, ironically, was distantly related to old Ralph Wyatt. He’d heard word of the daughter who went crazy and died up at Ector, but he never followed it.
Special Deputies Wright and King took one look at the situation and knew it was as good a mess as either of them had ever seen. Then Wright went on in the house and realized there was a dead deputy sheriff in there.
By the time he got back out onto the front yard, Sheriff Riggs was sitting on the ground. King had taken the blood-spattered pistol off of him with no resistance. Had he understood something of what had happened, he might have decided to handcuff Riggs, but he did not know the details. Riggs was sheriff. Riggs was still the boss. King saw no guns or weapons in the hands of the girl and the guy. There appeared to be no other weapons on the veranda, in the yard, or in the front of the house. Wright told King about Lang. King wanted to go take a look. Wright told King there’d be plenty of time for that.
Wright called for both an ambulance and the county coroner. He went on in to look at Lang’s body again. He got down on his haunches and stared at that dead face for the longest time. He’d seen dead animals, sure, but this was different. This was altogether creepy. It made him feel a little sick, but he would never have admitted it.
He shouted for King, told him he could come on in and take a look. King didn’t say much of anything. He was surprised that there was so little blood. He asked Wright what he imagined might have happened here, but the question sort of hung in the air and Wright didn’t reply.
And then there was hollering in the street, and Donny King and Lucas Wright—as familiar with police procedure as they were with Wright’s family tree—hurried back out to the yard to discover that Sheriff Carson Riggs had gotten to his feet and taken off.
Bystanders across the road were shouting and pointing, indicating the direction Riggs had taken.
Both Wright and King could hear the engine, but they did not see the car.
Caught between a rock and a hard place, Lucas Wright told Donny King to stay with the injured folks, and then he ran down to the street, got into his car, and took off after Riggs.
King went to speak to the girl, but she was talking crazy, made no sense at all, and she wouldn’t let him see to her friend. King was worried about that one, the way his face was all smashed up, the blood around his eyes, the fact that he wasn’t moving at all. He tried to remember what he should do from first-aid classes, but nothing came. He hoped to God that the kid didn’t die before the ambulance got there. The girl was getting kind of wild, too, shouting at the people gathered across the street, telling them that Riggs had done this, that Riggs had to be stopped, that Riggs was
a fucking crazy motherfucking son of a bitch
.
Donny King, a churchgoing man, told her that that kind of language wasn’t necessary. The girl told him to go fuck himself. He wanted to handcuff her, simply because she was annoying the hell out of him, but then the ambulance arrived and people who seemed to know a great deal about what to do were all over the scene.
Donny King stepped out of the fray and let them go on about their business. The coroner arrived, too, another car from the Ozona Sheriff’s Department, and Donny felt like a spare part.
The whole scene was surreal. Lights, crime-scene tape, gurneys, people shouting, sawhorse barriers erected and ropes strung between them to cordon the Lang place off from the street.
The ambulance peeled away, presumably to the County Hospital. For triage and surgery and suchlike, it was the closest and largest facility, and that boy sure as hell looked like he needed something more than a doctor’s clinic.
Lang’s body was taken away, and then it all went quiet, and Donny King sat in his car and watched as the crowd of onlookers dispersed. He wondered where the hell Lucas was, if he’d caught up with Sheriff Riggs, and what the hell was going to happen next.
It rained, and rained good. A couple of pickups got jammed in muddy ruts, and Carson Riggs organized other pickups to drag them out. Seemed like the world and all its relatives descended upon the farm that Wednesday afternoon, grim-faced, sodden through, tracking footprints across the veranda, down the hall, right into the front parlor where Grace Riggs held court like the bereaved matriarch that she was. William Riggs was dead. Ralph Wyatt was dead, too, but with Rebecca up at Ector, her doctors unwilling to release her for her own father’s funeral, the Wyatt occasion had been organized by Ralph’s sister. A handful of cousins, news of an aged uncle who ultimately never showed, and now the Wyatt place was as still and silent as Ralph’s grave. Word was that the sister would take over the place. Time would tell, as it always did.
The Riggs gathering was different. William had been settled in Calvary these past three decades. He knew everyone, and those he did not yet knew of him, if not through Carson, then through the country-singing son. He was fifty-three years of age, no age at all, in fact, and here he was laid out in his Sunday best in a handmade coffin from a funeral place in Ozona.
Grace Riggs had told Carson to find Evan. Carson gave his word and was good to it. Evan was found just three days after the shooting, drunker than a second-rate actor in a third-rate play, all set to fall into the orchestra pit and break his darned fool neck had someone not been there to catch him.
And so it was that the Riggs boys were having to bury their differences along with their father, at least for the duration of the funeral itself and the gathering that followed. They stood side by side at the end of the hallway, shaking folks’ hands, accepting condolences, directing the mourners through to the parlor where women from Grace’s church group had laid out potato salad and honey-baked ham, King Ranch chicken casserole, a bucket of spaghetti for the kids, assorted sandwiches and sheet cake and an endless supply of lemonade and hot coffee. The menfolk huddled awkward and silent, discreetly passed around a bottle with which to fortify the aforementioned coffee; the women gathered around Grace as if their presence alone would somehow serve to offset the imbalance occasioned by William’s absence. Absence did not and never had made any heart grow fonder. Absence was absence, nothing more nor less.
Carson appeared stoic, Evan merely stunned. Nevertheless, he was sober for the first time in months. The shock of his father’s death had been complemented by the shock of all that had transpired between Carson and Rebecca. It was his mother who had told him about the pregnancy, about Carson’s decision to send the girl up to Ector County, and yet no one had possessed the courage to tell him the real truth: that Rebecca was carrying his child, that he was—in fact—a father.
Carson said nothing. It would have been an admission of utter failure. To stand in the shadow of a brother was difficult; to stand in the shadow of a younger brother was nigh on impossible. To know that you played second fiddle when it came to the affections of your parents was one thing; to know that you played the same part when it came to the life you’d subsequently created for yourself as an adult was another level of failure altogether.
Carson simply said that the pregnancy, as was sometimes the case with women, had unsettled her, not only physically but emotionally, and her needs were being best served by the professionals up at Ector. Not only that, but she was now contending with the loss of her own father in such dreadful circumstances. Psychiatric opinion, according to Carson, was that her attendance at the funeral could only make things worse, and protest though she might have done, what they were doing was for her own good. Could Evan visit with her? No, not yet. Could Evan perhaps send her a note to let her know that he was here in Calvary, that he was thinking of her, that he wished her a speedy recovery? No, it was best not to do that right now. Let her concentrate on getting herself well.
Perhaps Evan’s deep-ingrained guilt regarding what had happened between himself and Rebecca the night of the farewell party made him take a step back. Unaware that it was his child she was carrying, Evan acceded to Carson’s dictates and decisions. He had no right to challenge Carson’s authority when it came to his own wife.
With all that was needed for their own father’s funeral preparations, Carson insisted that Evan spend time with his mother, that he be appropriately attentive to his own family. Perhaps Evan was a little shamed. He had been found drunk; he had been hauled back to Calvary, had barely realized what was going on until he’d been there a good twenty-four hours. As was always the case in such situations, those left behind believed that had they been present, perhaps they could have done something to avert whatever inevitability had struck. Evan could no more have prevented the strange series of events that resulted in the deaths of both William Riggs and Ralph Wyatt than he could have left a bottle of rye unopened. Life, in truth, was not there to be challenged. It was there to be lived, and it possessed more than enough force and unpredictability to remind you who was in charge if you ever believed yourself capable of besting it.
Life and circumstance had bested William Riggs, and the brothers were reunited to bury him. Grace told them not to fight, and so they did not. Not until later. Not until the last of the mourners and well-wishers had traipsed through the red Texas mud back to their respective pickups and cars and buggies. It was late afternoon, the sun aiming for its usual spot beyond the horizon, and Evan stood looking out from the west-facing veranda at a view he barely remembered. Carson came up behind him, carried a bottle and two glasses, told his brother that they should share a drink and a few words.
Evan took his first glass of the day, drank it down, had it refilled before Carson had taken his first sip.
“Bad business all round,” Carson said.
Evan merely nodded.
“Changes coming, and fast.”
Evan drank, listened, didn’t have much to say.
“You gonna stay for a while, Evan?”
“Long as Ma needs me,” he said, holding out the glass for a third go at the bourbon. The shakes were settling, his stomach untying from whatever Gordian arrangement had tangled his innards.
“I’m here,” Carson said, which was as good as telling Evan his presence was no longer required.
“You are, indeed,” Evan replied, which was Evan’s way of telling his brother that the whole of Calvary now seemed to be in the thrall of Sheriff Riggs.
“I’ll speak to Warren Garfield in the morning,” Carson said.
“About what?”
“What do you think?” Carson said, a note of disbelief in his tone. “The will. The land, the farm … what we are going to do. Everything will be in Ma’s name, but she’ll want us to sort it all out. She won’t want to be dealin’ with lawyers and whatever.”
“You been talkin’ to them oil people still,” Evan said. “Ma told me. She ain’t happy, you know? Not what Pa wanted, and not what she wants.”
Carson smiled imperiously. “Sometimes you gotta make a decision for someone, Evan. Sometimes you gotta do what’s right for someone even when they don’t know what’s right themselves.”
“Like what you done to your wife?”
Evan felt it rather than saw it, as if the very spirit of his elder brother took an angry and defiant step forward. Fists were raised, figuratively speaking, and Evan knew that he should back off or face the music here and now.
“You’re not to speak of my wife, Evan,” Carson said, his voice a snarling hound on a leash.
“Your wife, my friend,” Evan said.
“Hell of a friend you are. Deserted her, deserted Ma and Pa, went off to Austin to drink yourself stupid.”
“Least I had stupid to get to, Carson. You been livin’ there for years.”
“Sometimes you are such an asshole, Evan.”
“Beats being an asshole all the time, Carson.”
“We gonna do this now?” Carson asked.
“When did we ever not do it?” Evan asked. “You always been down on me. You always had a sharp word and a bitter comment in your mouth when it came to me. You ain’t much of a brother by any standards. Doesn’t look like you’re much of a husband, either. Ain’t right that you got her up at Ector. She should be here, being looked after by kin.”
“Don’t see you have any right to tell anyone how to behave, little brother. You’re so courageous, you go rescue her, why don’tcha?”
Carson had him, and Evan knew it.
“Your job, Carson, not mine. Guess the only thing for you to do is find some extra ways to go fuck yourself.”
“They teach you to talk like that in them bars and saloons you frequent?”
“Nope,” Evan replied. “I learned that all by myself. Special kind of language I studied up on just for you.”
Carson set the bottle down on the veranda rail. “You stay here and drink the whole thing,” he said. “Maybe you’ll find some sense way down near the bottom.”
Evan smiled. “Oh, I doubt it, big brother. Been looking there a long time, and all I found is more reasons to go on drinking.”
Carson took his glass with him. Took his anger and his resentment, too. Evan could feel it behind him in the house, like the sound of someone breathing, like the certainty that something was right behind him and it did not wish him well.
Several people saw Carson Riggs leave the offices of Warren Garfield the following morning.
It was a little after ten, and Carson—according to reports—“looked like he’d swallowed thunder and had the indigestion to match.”
Voices had been raised. That much was known. Specifics and details were unknown, but common sense said it had to involve the last will and testament of William Ford Riggs, deceased. Something had happened, something about which Carson Riggs had been both angry and confused, and when he returned to the farm, he took Evan aside and asked him point-blank if he was planning on staying back and running the farm.
“You know I ain’t gonna do that,” Evan said, “but that don’t mean we can’t get a farm manager in, pay him a good wage, keep the place going for Ma. I’ve spoken to her, and she feels that would be best. I think that’s what Pa would have wanted—”
“Hell, Evan. Seems to me you’re the last person in the world to have any kind of opinion about what Pa would have wanted.”
“What did Garfield say?”
“What did he say? What do you think he said? Place is fifty-fifty. You and me, little brother. We gotta make some decisions.”
“What’s the hurry?”
“The hurry?” Carson frowned. There was something in his face that Evan had seen only a couple of times before. Carson was angling for a fight, and a real one at that. “You gonna stand in my road, Evan? Is that what you’re gonna do?”
“Don’t see there’s a road for me to stand in,” Evan replied. “Where the hell you think you’re headin’ anyhow?”
“Future lasts only so long as it’s there,” Carson said.
“The hell does that even mean?”
“Means you’re gonna come to see Garfield and we’re gonna sign some papers and we’re gonna start talking to them oil people and make enough money to take care of Ma and ourselves for the rest of our lives. They want drilling rights here, and I am set on givin’ ’em just exactly what they want.”
“Is that so?”
“Sure is, and I don’t wanna hear a goddamned word of resistance about this, Evan. Matter of days you can head off back to Austin or wherever the hell you wanna go, and you will go richer than you could ever imagine.”
“And if I don’t got no interest in bein’ richer than I could ever imagine?”
Carson frowned. He tilted his head to one side as if trying to see his younger brother from some new angle. Then he started laughing. “What in God’s name are you talkin’ about, boy? You don’t wanna fill your pockets with gold and head out of here like a king?”
“I have no such interest, Carson. Right now I am interested in two things and two things only. Firstly, I wanna see Ma settled down. She’s grievin’, Carson, and she’s gonna be grievin’ for a good while yet. Let her deal with this, okay? Let her deal with this before we start throwin’ even more confusion and craziness into her life. There’s time, man. This business can wait a couple of months. Hell, if there’s oil here, it ain’t goin’ nowhere. Been here a million years; will still be here five years from now.”
“Five years? What—”
Evan raised his hand. “Listen for a minute, Carson. You got yourself fixed up as sheriff, and you are so busy bein’ big boss with the hot sauce that you ain’t hearin’ anythin’ but your own goddamned voice. Well, let me have a chance here. Like I said, there’s only two things I am interested in. Helpin’ Ma deal with everything she’s gotta deal with, and that means we change nothing, do nothing, let everything settle for a while. Second thing, and this is something I plan on doing right now, and that’s go see your wife up in Ector, give her my condolences about her pa, see she’s all right, have a talk with them doctor people and find out what they plan on doin’, when she’ll be out, an’ all that. She’s pregnant, Carson. You’re gonna be a daddy. You need to be dealin’ with that.”
Carson said nothing. His eyes were cruel slits out of which he glared at his younger brother. “You are
not
to go and see Rebecca,” Carson said. His voice was emphatic.
“Sorry?”
“I told you. You heard me. You are
not
to go and see my wife.”
Evan laughed. “Carson, you may be the sheriff of this here pokehole, but when it comes to telling me what I can and can’t do, you can go to hell.”
Carson stepped forward, his fists clenched.
Evan frowned. “What is this? You gonna arrest me? You gonna fight me? What the hell is going on with you?”
“Don’t go up there,” Carson said. “I’m tellin’ you now, and I ain’t sayin’ it again, Evan. Don’t go up there.”
“Well, fuck you, Carson. More times you tell me, the more determined I am to be contrary. I’m gonna go up there right now and visit with her, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.”
Another step forward, Carson and Evan now no more than three feet from each other, the tension palpable, the sense of threat and bottled violence both potent and real.