The Long Count (24 page)

Clara was trembling, forced against the wall still, her hands caught above her head.

‘Well, anyway,’ Ishmael said. ‘Peggy goes in the house and she can hear voices coming from the bedroom. When she opens the door she sees her best friend half-naked, grinding away on her old man.’

His voice had cracked; knuckles taut around the grips of the gun. ‘Poor Peggy, she was so hurt, so shocked, so distraught by it all she didn’t know what to do. Stumbling around in the hallway she found the bayonet her husband was supposed to have taken from a German in World War II. I guess she picked it up and then her husband comes rushing out of the bedroom to try and calm her down, but she’s not about to calm down and she stabbed him with his own blade.’ As he spoke he worked the barrel of the pistol into Clara’s belly. ‘Three times she stabbed him but he didn’t die. Peggy-Anne Bowen, your best friend and Dad’s wife before he divorced her so he could marry you.’

Getting to his feet he stood above her. He had the shotgun at hip height, fingers flexed around the grips. ‘Attempted murder, they called it. But by then she wasn’t Peggy-Anne Bowen anymore, she was this Miss Annie person who’d been living in Peggy’s head. Too sick to be tried in a criminal court, she was locked away right here.’

Stretching his shoulders he worked his head around in a circular motion as if his neck was stiff. ‘As far as the world was concerned that was OK I guess; only nobody knew what Miss Annie had going on. Nobody knew anything about any of it, not till it started to show.’ Viciously he bent to her then. ‘But that wasn’t all, was it, Clara? By the time you found out she was pregnant you were carrying Dad’s baby too.

‘So, anyway,’ he said, stepping back. ‘I’m set there with Dr Beale and Briers wheels in this sick old woman clutching her doll, and they sit her down at the table and she’s eyeing the deck of cards like she wants to play.’ Vaguely he gestured. ‘Tells me how she used to play blackjack with her husband when she was first married, a whole bunch of years ago. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know why I’m there and I’m not about to play a game of cards with some old loon. So I sit there and I look at her and I look at Dr Beale because I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to a woman who stabbed her husband three times. Miss Annie, it seems she doesn’t know what to say either. She’s not talking now. She’s holding that doll as if she’s afraid I’m going to take it away.’

His voice stalled as tears worked onto his cheeks. ‘But I know I have to say something because that’s why we’re there. So I’m looking at her and I say the first thing that comes in my head. I lean across the table as far as I dare and I nod to the doll she’s clutching and ask Miss Annie what’s her baby’s name.’ Shaking his head he let go an audible breath. ‘You know what she told me, Clara? You know what Miss Annie said? She looked at me across that table with Dr Beale in the corner and Briers outside and Ms Gavin taping the whole thing.
My baby’s name is Ishmael
, she said.’

Clara was sobbing as he worked the action on the shotgun and pointed it at her head.

‘So now you know. Now you know what happened to me, and that’s why I came after you. It took me a while to track you down, but I told them I would kill them all if that’s what it took, and finally here we are. You betrayed her, Clara; you betrayed your best friend. You stole me from her the day I was born just like you stole my dad.’

‘Ishmael,’ she cried, ‘nobody stole you. Nobody stole your dad. Peggy was sick, she was very ill. There was no way we could leave a newborn baby with her.’

‘But why was she sick? That’s the question. What was it made her that way?’ His words seemed to break like ice. ‘It was you, Clara, you and the old man. Doing what you did behind her back – that’s enough to send anyone crazy for sure.’

Movement in the hall outside and Ishmael froze. He stood there in silence then a voice lifted through the darkness and he stared into Clara’s eyes.

‘Put the shotgun down, Ishmael.’ Quarrie stepped from the corridor into the doorway. ‘You’ve done enough killing. You’re not killing anyone today.’

For a moment Ishmael did not move, his gaze still fixed on Clara’s face. Standing tall he turned. Quarrie no more than a shadow in the moonlight, Ishmael stared at his outline with the shotgun levelled and his head cocked to one side.

‘I’m a cop, Ishmael. Texas Ranger, and I need you to put that shotgun down.’

Ishmael did not say anything. He stood his ground.

‘I ain’t holding.’ Quarrie lifted his palms. ‘You can see my weapons are holstered. I don’t want to shoot you. I don’t want to hurt you. I want you to put that shotgun down.’

Watching him, Quarrie waited; ten seconds, fifteen. Then, through the gloom, he glimpsed the way Ishmael’s shoulders started to twitch. In slow motion almost, he saw the way his arms began to climb. The barrel came up but before Ishmael could squeeze the trigger Quarrie drew a pistol and fired.

Two shots, left hand covering the hammer, the sound seemed to shatter the air. Ishmael slammed against the wall with the shotgun spilling from his grip. For a moment he hung there and then he slid down the wall. Just a pace away Clara was screaming as he buckled at the knees.

He was on his side on the floor, both palms clutching his stomach; he blinked at stick-children where they leered from the walls.

As she bent over him Clara’s arms were stretched across her chest
so harshly it seemed they would be sucked from the sockets where she was bound to the window bars.

‘Don’t you die on me,’ she screamed. ‘Isaac – where is he? What happened to him? Ishmael, where’s your brother? What did you do?’

When Quarrie finally pulled off the highway onto the dirt road late the following afternoon, he was only three miles from home. Ahead lay the low scrub hills where Nolo was nursing a few strays back towards the southern pasture. The young foreman, he was up on the ridge where the dirt road cut underneath. With the sun splitting the horizon the whole languid panorama formed a silhouette and Quarrie watched the way he sat that colt so low in the saddle with his feet almost dangling as if he didn’t need the stirrups at all.

A gravel bar, a thicket of black cottonwood; a drainage breaking from the lip of the creek that meandered all the way back to the water tank they used for the stock. For some reason Quarrie was picking up on every detail of the landscape; every stand of cactus, every stump of mesquite and every pale-colored stone. He could see Clara in his mind’s eye, the pain in her face; the desperation in her voice. Again he heard Ishmael’s howl.

Ishmael had survived the bullets. Down but not out, between them Quarrie and Clara had patched him up enough where they could get him to a hospital and that’s where he was right now. He would not go to the chair. Quarrie doubted there would be any trial, not with his problems. Like his mother before him, he’d be shut away for the rest of his life.

Pulling up outside the house, he killed the engine and by the time he had the driver’s door open, James was on the stoop, his features stretched in a smile. Leaving his guns and hat on the back seat Quarrie swept the boy into his arms.

‘You OK, kiddo?’ he said. ‘Everything good back here?’

‘Everything’s just fine, Dad. You look a little beat-up though. Are you OK?’

Inside the house Quarrie sat down wearily on the couch. He lifted first one boot to the coffee table and then the other. Straddling his legs, James helped him haul the boots off. Quarrie nodded to the floor where the Aurora four-lane race track was set up with two cars all ready to go. He had sent to Sears for it and it had come in time for his son’s tenth birthday just a few weeks ago.

‘You been waiting on me then, huh?’

‘Yup,’ the boy said. ‘You’re going to lose, Dad. You know how Pious kept beating me? Well, I been practising now.’

Leaning back with his head against the wall Quarrie closed his eyes. ‘Just give me a minute here, would you? Got to tell you, bud, been a tough few days. I hate being away from you so much and I’ve had a belly-f of rangering right now.’ Slipping an arm around his shoulders Quarrie sat up and looked his son in the eye. ‘I tell you something, what we talked about, vacation time up in the mountains. I’m thinking about maybe calling up a couple of old buddies in Teton County to see if I can’t get some work.’

‘You want to quit the Rangers?’ His son was wide-eyed. ‘You can’t do that, Dad. It’s what you do.’

‘Not quit, son, no. Fact is you don’t ever quit the Rangers, but sometimes you take what they call a sabbatical. My Uncle Frank used to do that from time to time. It’s a tough old job and it keeps me away from you a whole lot more than I’d like.’ He winked then, mussing a palm through the young boy’s hair. ‘You never know, one of these days maybe the two of us will move north again and live in that house I bought with your momma instead of paying rent down here anymore.’

They played with the racecars for a while and James won as he said he would. Afterwards Quarrie took a shower and when he came out the boy was watching TV.

‘Dad,’ he said, ‘when do you think it’ll be we get color?’

Working a towel through his hair, Quarrie glanced at the screen where James T. Kirk was in discussion with his Scottish engineer.

‘Television, you talking about?’

‘Yes, sir. That shirt the captain’s wearing is sort of mustard color,’ James said. ‘I know that from Tommy Morrison.’

‘Tommy got color then, does he?’

‘Yes, he does. Most everybody does, even Miss Munro and she told us she don’t hardly ever watch TV.’ Again he indicated the screen. ‘Mr Spock’s shirt is blue, and that guy sitting at the helm right there, his is red, I think. How long do you figure before we can get us a color TV?’

Crossing to the bunkhouse for dinner Quarrie ate rice and red beans with bits of chopped up chorizo sausage and chilli peppers in a sauce Eunice liked to make for Nolo, because for a while now she’d been carrying a torch. Quarrie wasn’t sure if it burned the other way but the foreman seemed happy to flirt.

He talked to Pious about it after the meal had been cleared away. Nolo had gone over to the big corral to work a couple of colts. Mama Sox had long since retired for the night, and Eunice was over by the water tank where she could dip her toes and watch Nolo while pretending to read a magazine.

‘Yeah, I seen how she is,’ Pious said. ‘But it ain’t exactly a regular sight, a Mexican and a colored girl, especially one older than him.’

‘Pious, Nolo ain’t Mex and Eunice don’t look her age.’

Pious made a face. ‘No, she don’t, but most folk round here would figure Nolo for a Mex, John Q, and he’s a whole lot younger than her. The way things are right now, I don’t see much future in it, do you?’

‘Well, she sure looks smitten to me, bud, so try telling that to her.’

Arms folded across his chest, Pious rocked on the legs of his chair. ‘I don’t know why we’re even talking. It don’t matter what anybody thinks, Eunice’ll go her own way like she always does. It’s
been years since she took account of Mama, leave alone a brother like me.’

Getting up from the table Quarrie found a bottle of Jim Beam and poured out a couple of shots. Then he remembered Pious hated whiskey on account of his father being drunk on corn mash and getting run over by a truck. Tipping the second glass into his, he grabbed a Falstaff from the fridge and knocked off the top. He passed the beer over and Pious indicated the double shot.

‘Ain’t like you to be supping on a glass that size. What’s on your mind, John Q? You been preoccupied ever since you got home.’

Swallowing a mouthful of whiskey Quarrie squinted at him. ‘You read your Bible anymore, do you? You know the story of Ishmael and Isaac?’

‘John Q,’ Pious said, ‘you know I don’t got no time for religion. When I was in the pen I read me a book by a feller called Darwin. God and all – it don’t matter want some preacher wants to tell you – that ain’t the way things are. The way I see it God didn’t make man in his image so much as man made God in his.’ Taking a sip from his bottle he spread a palm. ‘I heard it said one time that religion is opium for the people, but the trouble with opium is how it only soothes for a little while before it starts fucking with your head.’

‘Darwin, huh?’ Quarrie said. ‘Survival of the fittest.’ Tipping the rest of the bourbon down his throat he reached for the bottle. ‘Maybe you ought to read about Ishmael and Isaac – that’s natural selection right there.’

In the morning he drove to Wichita Falls and the sheriff’s office where he had his part-time desk. He had to go past the hospital and, on a whim, he pulled up outside the back doors where the coroner’s ambulance was parked. Making his way past the mortuary assistant he nodded to a nurse as she came out through the examination-room doors.

The red bulb on the ceiling was alight which meant Tom Dakin,
the medical examiner, was making a tape. When he saw Quarrie he switched it off and stripped the microphone from where it hung around his neck. Before him was a waxy-looking cadaver on one of the porcelain tables with a stainless-steel sluice at the base.

‘John Q,’ Dakin said. ‘I haven’t seen you in here since you took down that long hair with a double-tap.’

‘Wiley,’ Quarrie said. ‘His name was Wiley, Tom: I never killed anybody I don’t know the name of, except in Korea perhaps. If that guy had listened to the advice being given him he’d be tucked up in Huntsville now.’

His tone was grim, his features equally so, and Dakin seemed to pick up on it. ‘So what’s up?’ he said. ‘I can see something’s chewing at you, so what is it? What’s going on?’

Hunching his shoulders Quarrie worked them into his neck. ‘Can’t tell you, Tom. Fact is I can’t put a finger on it myself.’

‘Well, I heard how you’ve been busy shooting somebody else.’

‘I shot him all right. Over in Panola County, but I made sure he didn’t die.’ Quarrie glanced at the corpse on the table and then at Dakin again. ‘Weirdest thing,’ he said. ‘Sumbitch took down a whole bunch of people yet I kind of feel sorry for him.’

‘Yeah, well, some things just get to you, don’t they? We’re all human, Johnny. It even applies to you.’

‘So anyway,’ Quarrie stood straighter now. ‘These bones we found up on the Red, that old train wreck from way back when. My boy’s writing up about what happened. Did you hear anything about that?’

‘A project for school – Sheriff Dayton told me, yes.’ Dakin still had his arms folded across his chest. ‘Those bones though: that skull and the clavicle, the little bit of vertebrae they brought in.’ He shook his head. ‘They’re not sixty years in the water. At the most I’d say fifteen.’