“So he gets up and he says, ‘Saved that girl’s life, near as damn it. Last time I saw her, I didn’t know whether to fuck her or shoot her. I must have figured I was too drunk to fuck her, so that left only one other option.’”
The men around the table laughed. Four of them, seats crossways, elbows touching as if here were some secret redneck conclave. They were fixing to choose the Pope of West Texas, and once done, someone would head out front and light a corncob pipe to alert the world.
“Charming conversation,” Evie told the small gathering as she passed. Henry was in tow. He didn’t know whether to smile or nod or just keep his mouth shut.
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Princess Evelyn her very self,” one of the men said.
“It’s Evie, you old goat,” was her reply, and then she turned to Henry and said, “These four are why someone should just bomb West Texas and be done with it.”
“Careful, now, little lady—”
“Little lady? Really?” Evie said. She looked at Henry, nodded toward the seated foursome. “This here is Clarence Ames. And then clockwise we have onetime Calvary doctor Roy Sperling, next to him, Harold Mills, and George Eakins at the end. They’re all here because this is where their wives prefer them to be. Used to be one more, but he up and died a couple of months back.”
“Town lawyer,” Clarence said. “Warren Garfield … a man so bitter he could sour milk at a hundred paces.”
Eakins laughed. “You got that right.”
“Leave him alone,” Evie said. “Disrespectful to speak ill of the dead.”
The gathering fell silent, as if a schoolma’am had hushed them. Henry was a little bemused by the level of familiarity so evident between Evie and the four men.
“Anyway,” Evie went on, “this is Henry Quinn, late of San Angelo, even later of Reeves County Prison.”
Henry glanced at Evie, now ill at ease with the fact that she had told four strangers that he was an ex-con.
Roy Sperling saw that look. “Oh, don’t mind her,” he said. “And don’t mind us. No one here could give a good goddamn where you’ve come from, son. Besides, you’re in Calvary now, and there ain’t no such thing as a secret here—right, Evie?”
Evie raised her eyebrows as if some earlier story lay behind the comment. “Don’t I know it,” she said.
“So, are the princess and the prisoner gonna honor us with their company?” Harold Mills asked.
“We will,” Evie said, “but you better not be telling any more filthy jokes.”
“Sit yourselves down,” Clarence Ames said. “What you drinkin’ there, Mr. Henry Quinn?”
“Let me get you gentlemen a drink,” he said, and dug his hand into his pocket for dollars.
“Put that away, son. You just got out of Reeves County. You may as well show up with Confederate dollars. Your money is worthless. Now, what you havin’?”
“Bourbon, beer back,” he said, “and much obliged.”
“Evie?”
“Same for me.”
Ames looked at Roy Sperling. “Git, Roy. This ’n’ ’d be yours, I reckon.”
Sperling rose without complaint, returned soon enough with six of everything.
Once served and seated, Sperling turned the conversation to Henry Quinn’s reason for being in Calvary.
“I am here to find someone,” Henry said, and nothing more.
“Usually such a statement is followed by a name, son,” Ames said. “That’s usually the way it goes.”
“I know her first name,” Henry replied. “Sarah.”
“That’s all you got?” Sperling asked.
“That’s all I got.”
“And how do you know to come here?”
“Because of Evan Riggs,” Henry said. “I’m here to find his daughter.”
In that moment, there was a very tangible shift in the atmosphere.
For a second no one spoke, but it was a long second, and it drew out like a vacuum and seemed to suck every sound out of the room into a pocket of silence.
Harold Mills emptied that pocket with, “Got his record. Killer he may be, but the man can sure as hell sing.”
“Let me get this straight,” George Eakins said. “You are here to look up Evan Riggs’s daughter?”
“Yes, sir, I am,” Henry replied.
“And how in hell’s name do you happen to know Evan Riggs?”
“Bunked with him at Reeves. Better part of three years.”
“Hang fire, Henry Quinn,” Evie interjected. “Carson Riggs’s brother made a record?”
“Oh, he made a record, all right,” Harold Mills said. “I got it, too. Don’t know there’s anyone in Calvary that didn’t buy that record. When was that?”
“Late fall of forty-eight, far as I remember,” Roy Sperling said. “Recorded it up in Austin. I remember it being here for Christmas of that year.”
“That’s right,” Eakins said, smiling. “My wife played it over and over ’til I was dead-sick of that thing.”
“You never told me you bunked with a recording star,” she said to Henry. “And none of you guys ever told me that Sheriff Riggs’s brother made this record.”
Clarence Ames leaned forward. “We’re avoiding the issue, sweetheart. The issue at hand is that your friend, Mr. Quinn, has rocked up here with a view to finding Riggs’s girl, and taking into account the fact that there’s a great deal of history between them brothers, this is gonna be the cause of trouble, whichever way you look at it. Carson Riggs is Carson Riggs—always has been, always will be. Sometimes you can see that a man doesn’t want to be part of his own history, and you gotta respect that.”
“Sheriff Riggs said he didn’t know nothin’ about the girl, that she was adopted right away, that he had no idea where she was.”
Again, a tangible silence was present, no less evident than if another person had joined the gathering.
“Is that so?” Ames asked, but it was a question he appeared to be asking himself.
No one answered it, and no one seemed to be able to look at either Henry or Evie. Whatever they knew of this matter seemed to be for themselves and themselves alone.
“So what happened between them?” Henry asked.
Ames frowned. “You spent three years in a box with that man, and he never told you what went down between him and Carson?”
“No. He didn’t tell me anything about him at all, ’cept that his brother was the sheriff down here and that he might help me find his daughter.”
Again, there was a very awkward hiatus in the conversation.
George Eakins cleared his throat. “So this Sarah …” he started, and left the sentence incomplete.
“Evan told you enough to know that this girl was his daughter,” Ames said.
“He did, yes. He asked me to deliver a letter to his daughter, Sarah. Said she was adopted as a baby, that he didn’t know what family name she was using, but that his brother had been her legal guardian after he went to jail, and that he might be willing to help.”
“And you said you’d met Carson Riggs?” Eakins asked.
“I did, yes … when I first arrived. I went down to his office and spoke with him.”
“And what did he have to say about this matter, aside from the fact that he didn’t know where the girl was?”
“He asked me why I thought he would be willing to help Evan do anything.”
Ames nodded. “Sounds like Carson, all right.”
“So tell us the story,” Evie interjected. “For God’s sake, tell us what happened between them.”
“Not me,” Eakins said. “I’m stayin’ the hell out of this.”
“Likewise,” Sperling said.
Harold Mills was quick to show his hand, too, and all that Clarence Ames could add was, “See here, this is the thing. Your buddy Evan Riggs has been gone all of twenty years or more. Meanwhile, his brother is back here, has been sheriff in Calvary since old whatever the hell his name was up and croaked—”
“Charlie Brennan,” Sperling said.
“He’s the one … Charlie Brennan. Charlie was three sips short of a real drink, but he was good enough for a town like Calvary. Carson was his deputy, and when Charlie’s heart finally gave out on him, Carson stepped up to the plate, just temporary-like. First election was maybe a year or so later, and Carson walked it. He was the town’s best friend, you know? Everyone respected Carson Riggs, and then in the years to come, ’specially after what happened to his wife and his daddy, and then everything with Evan on top of that, it seemed like an unspoken agreement was made. Carson Riggs was Calvary’s sheriff, like it was a job for life.”
“So he’s been sheriff here since the war?” Henry asked.
“Previous sheriff died in November of forty-four,” Eakins said. “I remember that because that’s when Frances Warner’s boy was killed in the Hürtgen Forest.”
“And you made yourself ever so available to comfort her in her time of need, eh, Georgie?” Ames said, a crooked smile on his face.
“Man has to do his duty, even when he ain’t in the direct line of battle, you know?”
“Oh, you go on telling yourself that, George. And also that Floyd Warner knew nothing about what was going on between you pair.”
“So is no one going to tell us anything about the Riggs brothers?” Evie asked.
“Whatever you wanna know, you can ask Carson Riggs yourself,” Ames said.
“But surely—” Henry started, and was cut short by a glance from Clarence Ames that left him cold.
“I’m sorry,” Ames said. “Did you think this conversation wasn’t done?”
“I didn’t mean to pry,” Henry said. “I apologize.”
Ames smiled, and it was as if nothing had happened. “Only thing that needs an apology is that you’re still nursing that drink and George here hasn’t put his foot on that bar rail once this evening.”
“One more drink,” Henry said, “which I would like to pay for, and then I’m outta here.”
“Me too,” Evie said. “My pa’s gonna pick me up soon enough.”
“If you insist, kid,” Ames said.
Henry got up. Headed to the bar.
“I’ll give you a hand,” Evie said, and followed after.
“What the hell is all that about?” she asked Henry as they stood out of earshot.
“Not a clue,” Henry replied. “Was hoping you could illuminate me.”
“Can illuminate you like an unlit candle,” Evie said. “Seems like they’re scared of him.”
“But you’ve been coming here for a good while, right?”
“On and off. Odd summer jobs as a kid. Nothing significant or long term. I’m Ozona, not Calvary.”
“Seems like I gotta find this Sarah all by myself,” Henry said.
“Seems you do.”
“Thought this would be straightforward. Take a trip, ask a couple of questions, find someone, deliver a letter.”
“What’s the letter about?”
“He never said. I didn’t ask. Evan is the sort of guy you don’t interrogate.”
“Like his brother … and like the people who know his brother.”
“Don’t make sense that Carson Riggs would say what he said about knowing nothing and then these guys pretty much contradict it.”
“I didn’t hear them contradict nothing,” Evie said. “But I sure as hell get the idea you’d have to pull their fingernails to get anything further out of them.”
The drinks came. Henry took the beers, Evie the shorts, and they returned to the table.
The conversation had moved to old-timer things—memories of events long gone and half-forgotten—and when the drinks were drunk, Henry thanked them for their company and bade them a good night.
“Was a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Quinn,” Ames said, seemingly the spokesman and representative of the little group, “but we shall always remember you as the one who took the pretty girl away.”
“You are an outrageous flirt, Clarence Ames,” Evie said.
“You go on with your new boyfriend, now,” Clarence said.
“This is not my new boyfriend,” Evie replied, laughing. “This one’ll be out of here before you know it—”
“I’ll be out of here when I’ve found the girl,” Henry said.
The laughter stuttered and died.
“Take care with that,” Clarence Ames said. “You walk on Carson Riggs’s toes, there’s an awful lot of bigger shoes you’re gonna be muddyin’ up.”
“Man’s got longtime friends,” Roy Sperling said. “And that’s all there is to it.”
Ames looked at Evie. “Give my best to your pa,” he said, and went back to his drink. Within a moment, it was as if Henry and Evie had never been there.
Evie grabbed Henry’s sleeve and near dragged him to the door.
Neither said a word until they were twenty yards away.
“Thanks for taking me there,” Henry said.
“Not that it did you any good.”
“Told me I’m gonna be hard-pressed to get any help finding this girl. Told me that Carson Riggs ain’t as straight up as he’d have folks believe.”
“Seems that way. Looks like you’re gonna have to be one of the Hardy Boys all on your lonesome.”
“You wanna be my Nancy Drew?”
“I don’t think that’s a game I wanna play, Mr. Quinn,” Evie said.
“I wasn’t being so serious. It’s nothing that should concern you.”
“You’re right. It doesn’t. However, it does concern me that you have just gotten out of Reeves, you are all alone in the big, bad world, and it looks like I’m the only friend you got in a two-hundred-mile radius.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that if you are still here tomorrow, you could come pick me up when I’m done and drive me to Ozona. You can meet my dad. You and he would get along.”
“How so?”
“He likes music. Used to play some guitar himself. Has a garage full of old vinyls and whatever. He’s a good guy.”
“I’d like that.”
“But maybe you won’t be here, eh?”
“I don’t know what’s gonna happen,” Henry said. “I made a promise, and I have to keep it.”
“Lot of people make promises that don’t mean shit.”
The expression in her eyes told Henry that she was talking about something, more than likely some
one
, very specific. He didn’t inquire further.
They were near to the boardinghouse.
“You know the way?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe see you tomorrow, Henry Quinn.”
“Maybe so, Evie Chandler.”
She turned and walked away, headed left and across the street to whatever rendezvous point she had agreed with her father.
Henry watched her go. He missed her right away. Considering that he’d not spoken to such a girl for more than three years, it was remarkable to him that they had fallen in with each other so easily. She really was very pretty, and even after she’d disappeared from sight, he could still smell a kind of citrus aroma in the air, perhaps from her skin, maybe her hair, and recall very distinctly the sound of her laughter, which was both liberated and liberating. Until she’d left, he hadn’t really thought about those things at all. He had thought about the pledge he’d made to Evan Riggs and how she might be persuaded to help him. That and the evident unease when the name of Carson Riggs was mentioned. Could a town keep a secret? And if so, why?