By Milton T. Burton © 2010
Liddy saw his fangs just as they retracted back up into his gums. Other than scaring the hell out of her, it was a moment of personal gratification. She'd always known that those absurdly short, blunt plastic teeth in the vampire movies couldn't possibly penetrate human skin. Liddy had been a biology major in college, and she knew how thick and tough human skin really was. But these fangs were about an inch long and narrow and needle-sharp like a rattlesnake's.
It was a short-lived victory, though. He seemed to know instantly what she'd seen, and he turned and smiled and riveted her with his eyes. "Come along and grow old with me," he said, his voice soft and silky. "The best is yet to be."
Her mouth fell open. She was talking to a vampire. Not something that happened ever day. At least not to biology majors. And certainly not in trendy bars on lower Greenville Avenue in Dallas. Except for a dark burgundy turtleneck under his suit coat, he was dressed all in black. Middle-aged and tall and slim, he had a ruddy face, and a cloud of wild silver hair that orbited around his head like a thundercloud. He noticed that her glass was empty, and motioned for the bartender to give her a refill of white wine.
"Relax," he said. "We only prey on criminals. Drug pushers and killers and the like. It's our code. Nor does everyone we feed on turn into one of us. The world would be full of us if it worked that way. No, you can only be made like me if you drink a little of my blood after I've drunk a little of yours. Then, when the next sunset comes, you will die, and a few minutes later you will rise transformed."
"Whaaa..." Liddy was speechless.
"Come," he said, holding out his hand.
She drained her glass and banged it down for another refill. "Why me?" she finally managed, her voice sounding small and tinny and little girl-like in her ears.
"I've been watching you here for months. You drop by two or three times a week after your work at the lab. And you are the most beautiful woman who ever comes in this place."
Liddy shook her head. A few people had told her she was pretty over the years, and she knew she had a cute figure, but beautiful? "No, I'm not," she whispered.
"You are to me, and no one else matters. So come with me, and we will fly the night together. The smells! The textures! The colors! You must see them to believe." He reached out and put his hand on her arm. "Be mine," he said.
Liddy dropped her glass and bolted from the room. As she went out the door she heard his laughing voice say above the din, "I'll get your check for you, Liddy, Dear.”
She never went back to that bar, and it was over a month before she stopped by for a drink anywhere after work. When she did, she picked a tavern several blocks away that was popular with the early-thirties crowd like herself. Suddenly, halfway through her second glass of wine, he was there beside her, a small snifter of brandy in his hand. Startled, she blurted out the first thing that popped into her mind. "You can drink?"
"It would be a poor life without a glass of brandy from time to time."
"Are you going to bite me?"
"Not yet."
"Why me?" she asked.
"I've fallen in love with you.”
“Me?”
He nodded, his face calm and thoughtful. “You see, I'm very particular. I haven't had a companion in almost a century."
Exit time for Liddy! As she went through the door she once again heard his dark laughter ringing in her ears.
The next morning she took stock of the situation. Something had to be done. Raised Catholic, she hadn't been to church in ten years. She decided to go now. She went to confession first, and when she finished she was actually a bit ashamed of the paltry little collection of sins she'd been able to accumulate over the past decade. The priest hadn't seemed particularly impressed, either. After the midday Mass, she went behind the church to the little arcade run by the Sisters of Mercy and bought a pewter crucifix that was about three inches long. Still, when she slipped the thing in her pocket, she thought If this is living, why not try something different?
Weeks went by without her seeing him. Then one night when was beginning to think the whole thing was her imagination, he appeared once more at her elbow as she reached for her wine. “Please,” she said softly.
“You're terribly lonely, aren't you?” he asked.
For some reason she didn't understand, she told the truth with a nod and a whispered, “Yes.”
“There's no need to be. And you are drawn to the idea, aren't you?”
A little rebellion mounted within her. “And so what if I am? Haven't you ever been a attracted to something but known you didn't really want it?”
“But you do want it.”
She felt herself about to say, Yes, I do. Then she dropped her glass and fled once again.
She quit going to bars and didn't see him again for two months. Then one night after working three hours overtime, he was there beside her in the darkness as soon as she stepped from her car in front of her apartment.
"It's time, Liddy," he said.
"No! I'm not going with you!" She scrabbled around in her pocket for a moment, then held up her crucifix.
He looked at her almost sadly.
"Back!" she commanded and stepped boldly forward, holding the little cross out in front of her. "Back!"
He took a step toward her and gently took the little crucifix from her hand and examined it for a moment. Then he slipped it into his pocket and said, "Very nice workmanship. I'll keep it safe for you."
She looked into his eyes for a moment, then in a swoon that mixed terror with lust and longing, she melted into him. He swept her up off her feet and into his arms and smiled down at her.
"Why didn't it work?" she asked in a breathless voice.
"The crucifix, you mean?"
"Yeah."
"We don't set much store by crucifixes."
"Who do you mean by 'we'? Vampires?"
He shook his head with an ironic smile and said, "No, Baptists."
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He has published two crime novels with St. Martin's Press, NY titled "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead." His third book, "Nights of The Red Moon" is due to be released by St. Martin's in the fall of 2010.
Showing posts with label Milton T. Burton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Milton T. Burton. Show all posts
February 03, 2010
December 21, 2009
The Hobby
By Milton T. Burton © 2009
At first Sam MacCord didn't think the van was going to stop. But at the last moment the brakes squealed and it pulled up beside where he stood on the narrow oil-topped road. The driver took his time about rolling the window down, just as he took his time about everything. He was a skank, with long skanky black hair and a Mephistolian mustache and a grungy goatee. He wore a black leather vest over a white tee shirt and spiked leather wrist bands. Heavy metal music pounded away on the sound system, and the fetid air that came out of the van's now-open window reeked of marijuana smoke. The driver's companion was a skank too, only she was female. Dressed much the same as the driver, she had a pretty but sullen face, dark, scraggly hair, large breasts, and long legs that protruded from a pair of cut-off jeans and rested, ankles crossed, on the vehicle's cluttered dash. Sam put the driver in his early thirties, the girl maybe a half dozen years younger.
Her name was Debbie Pond, and her chief activities in life were snorting coke, gobbling downers, and functioning as a sort of ambulatory receptacle for the seminal emissions of any male skank in her immediate proximity who could be induced to part with some of his dope. Or at least that was how things had been until she met the driver of the van. The one time she'd strayed after hooking up with him, he'd whipped her so hard with his heavy leather belt that she couldn't stand up for over an hour. Not only had that helped Debbie get her head straight as to where her real interests lay, but deep down she'd secretly liked it. As a consequence of that lovely evening, she'd come to look upon their romance as a match made in Heaven.
The driver himself was a small-time coke pusher and wannabe heavy metal musician named Ronnie DeLoach who would never make it big, partly because he was void of any real musical talent. But mostly this sad fact could be attributed to his very limited life span. Although Ronnie didn't know it, at the precise moment he reached languidly toward the dash to switch off the music, he had less than twenty-four hours to live. "Yeah?" he asked in a voice that was full of annoyed disinterest.
Sam smiled pleasantly. "I was wondering if you could tell me where a woman named Linda Popper lives."
DeLoach didn't answer right away. That was another aspect of his personal style, one he'd gotten from the cheap action movies he loved where the cool dude always took his time responding to questions. Instead he spent about ten silent seconds looking Sam over. What he saw was a trim man in his mid fifties who stood maybe five-ten and was dressed in dark slacks, a rust colored shirt, and a dark gray Ike jacket. His head was bare, and his short hair, which was had been coal black in his youth, was now running heavily to gray.
"Linda Popper?" Sam reminded finally.
DeLoach jerked his thumb over his shoulder indicating the way he had come. "Back there," he told Sam.
"Right," Sam said, nodding in agreement. "That's what I've been told, but the problem is that I've already been back that way, and there are several houses." He gave the driver a friendly smile and a diffident shrug.
"Whadda you want me to do?" the skank asked. "Draw you a freaking map?"
"Maybe you could tell me what her house looks like--"
"It's yellow," the driver said impatiently, rolling his eyes. "Pale yellow. The last one on the left about a mile on down."
"Thank you. I really appreciate your--"
But before he could finish, DeLoach slammed the van into gear and roared off down the road. It had rained off-and-on all that week, and somewhere along the way the van had been in mud. As it sped away, a thumb-sized daub of damp red clay flew off one of its rear tires and landed on the front of Sam's jacket. But Sam paid no attention to the mud. Instead, he whipped a solid gold pen and a 3x5 card from his inner pocket and quickly jotted down the van's license plate number. Then he flicked the blob from his jacket and cleaned the spot as well as he could with a monogrammed linen handkerchief.
Had DeLoach been more astute and less interested in playing it cool, he might not have been misled by Sam MacCord's modest demeanor. He might have noticed that the man's pale blue eyes were both glacially cold and obscenely happy--eyes that could make cats hiss and puppies whine and send small children screeching for their mothers. But such subtleties were lost on Ronnie DeLoach. The alpha male in his little cluster group, he was master of all he surveyed. He had a crew of admiring buddies who acknowledged him as their leader, he was boning a submissive doll with big knockers who would drop to her knees at the snap of his fingers, and he had a few hundred bucks in his pocket. And to top it all off, a couple of grand nestled sweetly in his savings account down at the bank. Everything a man of his limited horizons needed. So why bother to read the message in somebody's eyes or even extend a little common courtesy? Especially some old doofus standing out in the middle of nowhere asking directions.
Sam MacCord put his pen and the card back in his inner jacket pocket and whistled softly to himself as he cranked his rented Lexus coupe and glided off down the narrow road.
#
The door of the yellow house opened a few seconds after Sam knocked, and suddenly there she was. She was older now--fifteen years older--and small wrinkles showed around her tired eyes. But she was still slim and pretty and her short hair was still the same copper-blonde he remembered. A close examination might have revealed a few more signs of age, but Sam MacCord didn't give a flying damn. She still took his breath away. She wore a pair of trim khaki slacks and a dark green sweatshirt from some college in Louisiana. At first her face showed surprise, and then he thought for a moment she was going to cry. "Sam?" she said hesitatingly. "Is that you?"
"Of course it's me. Have I changed that much?"
She gazed at him in silence for a long moment, then shook her head. "You haven't changed at all except that your hair has gone gray." It was then that her eyes misted up and she said sadly, "Oh, Sam, I want to hug you so bad, but I don't feel like I have any right to."
"You've got every right in the world," he said and reached out and took her in his arms and pulled her toward him. For Sam it was like regaining feeling in a limb that had been dead for years. They stood that way for a long time while he was aware of little beyond the sweetness of her body, the fleeting, cinnamony odor of her perfume, and the slow, rhythmic ticking of the old German clock on the mantle behind her.
Finally, as if by mutual agreement, they pulled apart.
"I don't know what to say," she said, pulling up her sweatshirt to dab at her eyes.
"Why do you have to say something?"
She gave him a halfhearted shrug. "Want some coffee?" she asked. "I was just about to have a cup."
"Sure."
"Then come on back in the kitchen. I just made a fresh pot."
She took his hand and led him, little-girl-like, back through a house that was neat and surgically clean, but cheaply furnished. The kitchen was big and sunny, and outside the windows he could see a row of early spring daffodils blooming bright yellow.
She poured them both a cup from a shiny percolator that stood on the counter. A homemade pound cake emerged as if by magic from the cabinet above the sink. Linda set a plate before him and handed him a knife. "Have fun," she said.
"This almost makes me think you knew I was coming," he said. "You remember how much I loved your pound cake?"
She nodded. "I didn't know, but I'm sure happy to see you." He ate for a while in silence, then finally she asked, "Why did you come, Sam?"
"Mr. Van Horn asked me to look you up on his behalf."
For a moment there was a flash of disappointment in her eyes. "I see," she said.
"No, you don't," Sam said firmly. "The truth is that I was about to beg off and tell him to find somebody else, but then I realized just how bad I wanted to see you myself."
"Really?"
"Did I ever lie to you? I admit that I've got a lot of faults, but did I ever tell you a single lie."
She shook her head and smiled sadly. "It's just that for so long I thought you were mad. I mean, I dumped you for Freddie Popper and--"
"I never was mad at you, Linda. I was hurt, but I didn't blame you. Freddie loved you, and back in those days he was more stable than I was. He had more to offer a woman, and I understood that. Hell, in your position I would probably have done the same thing."
"Really?"
"Sure."
She shook her head and dabbed once more at her eyes. "And you were always wound up so tight, Sam," she said. "That worried me, too."
He laughed. "I remember. You always told me I needed a hobby or something to calm me down, spend all the excess energy."
"You do seem a lot calmer now."
"I've slowed down a lot. Hell, I'm fifty-five-years old."
"I'm forty-two."
"You don't look it, Linda. You're still beautiful."
She blushed and looked down at her coffee cup. He reached over and patted her hand. She was naturally shy, and it was one of the things he had always loved about her.
"Me and Freddie had two good years," she said. "He'd gotten out of the life, and he was working at a straight job and making good money. That was before the cancer hit him." He sipped at his coffee for a few moments while he stared intently at her across the table, then he said, "Linda, did you know of Freddie pulling any jobs that last year? I mean before he got too sick?"
"I suspected he was doing something. I think he was trying to get some money together for me to have after he was gone."
"That's exactly what he was doing, and that's where Mr. Van Horn comes in."
"How is he?" she asked. "You know, he gave me my first job when I came to Dallas. I'm really surprised he's still around."
"He's almost eighty, and still going strong. But back to our business. Do you happen to remember a heavy-duty thug named Carl Whittle who used to hang around Van Horn's nightclubs?"
"You bet I do. He was a scary guy."
"Right. Well, he and Freddie took down a big bank in Austin about six months before Freddie died. A nightime burglary. Then that fool Whittle got all pilled up a couple of days later and got stopped for weaving all over the road. He had some currency bands and a few bearer bonds from the robbery in the trunk of his car, but none of the cash. He went down for the job, but he never ratted out Freddie. He never gave him his cut of the take, either. I guess he figured that since he was going up for at least ten years there was no reason he shouldn't just hang on to the whole score, especially with Freddie due to check out pretty soon, anyway. He got word to Mr. Van Horn where the money was stashed, and the old man laundered it and invested it for him, taking his ten percent off the top just like he always does."
"I never heard anything about any of this," Linda said. "I do know that Freddie died bitter about something, though. And he was worried sick about me. He even wanted me to look you up after he was gone."
"You should have."
She shook her head. "I couldn't do that, Sam."
He chose not to argue with her. "Anyway, Whittle drew fourteen years. He was lucky. The only evidence that tied him to the burglary was the bearer bonds, and he could have been fencing them. The jury knew he was guilty of something, but they were unwilling to hang the whole farm around his neck. But Mr. Van Horn started hearing rumors about Freddie being his partner on the job. So when Whittle fell out of the joint and came to him for his money, he asked him about it."
"What did Whittle say?"
"He told the truth. Hell, if he hadn't and the old man had found out later that he'd lied, that would have been all she wrote for Carl Whittle."
"Really? Mr. Van Horn was always so sweet to me."
"Sure he was. Because you never gave him any reason to be anything else. But he only let Whittle have half of the money. The other half is yours, Linda."
"Really? How much?"
"Two hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars."
She was stunned. "Two hundred and what?"
"Two hundred and forty-seven thousand. Mr. Van Horn has had it in a blind trust all these years, and the taxes on the interest and appreciation have been paid yearly. It's yours, Linda. You're going to need to come back to Dallas with me and sign some papers, but that shouldn't be any problem. You have a job, I suppose."
She nodded. "I'm the hostess in a real nice restaurant in Oxford. It's a steak and seafood place."
"Can you take off a few days?"
"I guess so."
He stared at her a minute, then sighed and screwed up his courage. "Linda, I want you to put your money up where nobody but you can get hold of it. I don't want you to spend a nickel of it. You don't have to. I'm rich."
"Huh?"
"We missed one chance fifteen years ago because I wouldn't settle down. I don't want us to miss this one."
"Sam--" she began plaintively.
"Linda, please listen to me. For all practical purposes I'm out of the life now. I haven't pulled a job in years. Right now I own a very lucrative sports book in Dallas. Some of the biggest bigwigs in town do business with me, and I belong to a couple of upscale clubs. Hell, I'm respectable now. I even get invited to a wedding or a party now and then in Highland Park, if you can imagine."
"Gee, Sam. This is all so. . ."
"Are you involved with anybody at the moment?"
She shook her head. He leaned forward and looked her right in the eyes and spoke as persuasively as he could. "Linda, I'm fifty-five years old, and I don't have time to be coy. Hell, there's no need for it. We slept in the same bed for better than a year, so why beat around the bush? I realize now how much I loved you then and how much I still love you and what a damn fool I was to let you get away."
She smiled wistfully. "Aww, that's so sweet of you to say that, Sam."
"You're going to have to come back with me to do this legal stuff to get your money. Mr. Van Horn won't have it any other way. He always liked you a lot, and I think he just wants to see you one more time. While you're there I want to show you my home. I've got a nice house in North Dallas and--"
She laughed. "You own a house? I can't believe it. Back when we were together you didn't even like to rent an apartment. You always wanted to live in hotels. You said your idea of Heaven was around-the-clock room service."
He laughed with her. "Not only do I own a house, but I've learned to cook, too. Isn't that something? I'm really pretty good at it."
She shook her head in wonder. "You in the kitchen. I can't see it."
"Come back with me and you can."
"Aw, Sam. . . If we only could. . ." her voice tapered off.
"I won't pressure you. If you like what you see, we've got a future together. If you don't, then you come back to Mississippi and no hard feelings."
"When would we go to Texas?"
"I'd like to leave here the day after tomorrow. I've had a little something come up that I need to tend to in the morning."
"I guess I could," she said. "I'd have to call work and let them know. I've got some vacation time coming. Maybe I'll just take a week off."
"Do that. I'll make plane reservations as soon as I get back to my motel."
She giggled like a little girl. "I've never flown in a plane in my whole life."
"Never?" he asked in amazement.
"Nope. I'm really kinda scared of flying."
Thirty minutes later they were at the door. "Sam. . ." she began shyly.
"Yeah?
"Do you want to stay here tonight?"
He smiled at her and reached up and brushed her cheek gently. "Of course I do, Linda. But I got a couple of things to do, so I can't. How about if I come and stay tomorrow night? Then we can get up and leave the next morning."
She nodded. He started to give her a chaste peck on the forehead, but she melted into his arms, crying. "I'm so glad you came," she said through her tears.
"Me too, Linda."
#
A mile down the road he pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number in Austin. The man who answered was a supervisor in the state bureau of motor vehicles who had been on Van Horn's payroll for years. "Do you recognize my voice?" Sam asked.
"Indeed I do," the man replied dryly.
"I need the name and address of the owner of a van with Mississippi plates."
"Give me it to me and your phone number too. I'll call you back in a couple of minutes."
Sam rattled off the information. "And see if you can pull up the picture on the owner's driver's license, too," he said. "I want to make sure I've got the right guy."
"Will do."
He drove leisurely on, enjoying the early spring afternoon and the tender green of the world around him. After about five minutes his phone buzzed. "Yeah?" he said.
"That van is registered to one Ronald DeLoach. You want his address?"
"You bet," Sam said and pulled over to the side of the road and wrote quickly on a 3x5 card. Then he asked about the photo.
"Yeah, I got it," his contact said. "Want me to fax it to you?"
"Just describe the guy."
"Skinny, Long black hair, goatee, thirty-three years old. A really scroungy looking young toad."
"You're a good man, Lewis," Sam said. "Forget you ever heard from me."
"Don't I always?"
#
The next morning Sam parked two blocks down and around the corner from the bungalow the skank rented on a narrow, shady street in a blue collar neighborhood in Oxford. The front door lock was a cheap in-the-knob affair. Sam pulled a pair of channel-lock pliers from his coat pocket, and after one sharp twist he was inside.
The place was cleaner and neater than he expected but not as tidy as he would have been comfortable living with himself. The living room took up the whole front of the house. It was furnished with cheap modern furniture, and posters for various heavy metal bands were thumb-tacked here and there about the walls. The largest, at the end of the room, was a large framed photo of Van Halen. A fancy sound system occupied one wall, and in the place of honor right in front of the faux fireplace a small ceiling-mounted spotlight shown down on a coal-black Fender electric guitar that rested on a fancy chromium stand like some ancient pagan god awaiting a sacrificial virgin.
Sam's shoes were rubber-soled, and he was good at what he was doing. He checked the house quickly. Besides the living room and the attached kitchen, it contained only two bedrooms and a small bathroom. The smaller bedroom was empty and looked like it hadn't been used in some time. The larger of the two contained a mammoth king-sized bed fitted with black satin sheets and a black coverlet. In it slept the skank. The girl was nowhere to be seen, for which Sam was deeply grateful. Had she been present, he would have quietly left the house and put the whole matter in the future reference file.
A wooden kitchen chair rested in front of a small dressing table to one side of the bed. Very carefully Sam moved it beside the bed and sat down. Then he fired up one of his small Cuban cigars and blew a great puff of smoke toward the skank's face. The boy's nostrils twitched and he stirred a little under the sheet. "Wake up, Rock-Away Johnny!" Sam said loudly.
The skank's eyes opened. "What the. . .?" he began.
"Tell your ma! Tell your pa! Our love's a'gonna grow!!" Sam sang melodiously. "Ole Rock-Away Johnny. Top of the morning to you, Johnny me boy."
The skank shook his head and blinked his eyes a few times. Then they widened in disbelief.
"That's right, my friend. I'm the guy you were so courteous to yesterday on the road out near Water Valley." The skank blinked some more. "How the hell did you get in here?" he finally asked.
"Through the front door. Getting into locked places is my trade. Or at least it used to be. Where's the girl?"
"Who?"
"The girl who was with you yesterday, idiot. Where is she?"
"Oh, her. She went home to see her mama for a few days. The old bitch is sick."
"The old bitch? That's how you talk about your girlfriend's mother to strangers? You're such a lovely fellow, Johnny."
"My name's not Johnny," DeLoach said sullenly for lack of anything better to say. He was confused. Last night's mixture of whiskey and cocaine had dulled his normally dull senses even more than usual.
"I know that," Sam said. "But as it happens, I didn't care for the name your no doubt genetically defective parents bestowed upon you at birth. So I changed it to Rock-Away Johnny for the short time you have left here on this vast and turbulent globe we call Mother Earth. Any objections?"
The skank was getting his wits about him, and his basic personality was beginning to emerge. "Yeah. I don't like it," he said.
"So?"
"So who the hell do you think you are coming into my crib like this?"
"Who do I think I am? The last time I looked at my driver's license it said I'm some guy named Sam MacCord, so I guess we'll just have to roll with that. You know, like in the old Johnny Horton song."
"Who?"
"Johnny Horton, the king of rockabilly." Sam sang once again: "Where the river is winding, big nuggets they're finding. North to Alaska! Go north, the rush is on!!"
"Man, I don't like that redneck shit."
Sam smiled and sang on: "Yes, Sam MacCord was a mighty man, and the year was ninety-one."
"Well, you don't look too damned mighty to me. I think I may just get out of this bed and kick your sagging old ass."
"Wrong, Johnny," Sam said happily. He reached deftly inside his jacket and withdrew a silenced Ruger .22 target pistol and pointed it right at the boy's head. "You're not going to do anything of the sort because your ass-kicking days are drawing peacefully to their close."
"Huh?" DeLoach was suddenly mesmerized. He'd never seen a gun from the business end before, and he didn't like it. "What's that thing for?" he asked stupidly.
"When the time comes I'm going use it to blow you right out of your shoes. Metaphorically speaking, of course, since you don't seem to be wearing any shoes at the moment. And a .22 doesn't really have that much blasting power. They're great for brain shots, though."
The great Rock-Away Johnny, nee Ronnie DeLoach, stared at Sam MacCord and his gun while his drug-addled mind tried desperately to get a handle on the unusual situation he was finding himself in. He didn't really believe that this goofy old fart was going to kill him. It just wasn't within his capacity to believe that anybody would kill him for no good reason. After all, he was a cool dude. And even more than that, in his rather limited social circle he was THE MAN, and nobody whacked THE MAN. But he was savvy enough to realize that you didn't just walk into Wal-Mart and buy a silencer for $19.95 or whatever. Silencers were highly illegal, and had been for about a zillion years. In fact, he knew a guy from Shreveport who'd once drawn five years hard time just for having one of the damn things. It hadn't even been attached to a gun. And that definitely looked like a silencer on the end of the automatic the goofy old fart was pointing his way. Which meant that its owner was almost certainly some kind of authentic heavy, maybe a CIA spook who'd gone a couple of turns around the bend with all the Casper The Ghost crap those guys had to put up with. He pulled himself up a little in the bed and gathered his legs in close to his body. It was beginning to look like he was going to have to get physical.
Sam watched his movements, smiling all the while and reading the boy's mental processes with pinpoint accuracy. Rockaway Johnny was getting notions. Ideas, even. Sam loved it. "You're number nine," he said.
"Number nine what?"
"Assholes. You're the ninth despicable, ill-mannered asshole I've been in this very same situation with."
"I don't get it."
"You don't?" Sam asked cheerfully. "It's really very simple. You see, some people hunt. You know, quail, pheasant, deer. Things like that. Others fish or play golf or bridge or refinish antique furniture. Then you have these guys who're into coins and stamps. And I know a couple of little old ladies who collect dolls from all over the world. But with me, it's assholes."
Johnny was authentically mystified. He was having a very difficult time following Sam's logic. "You collect assholes?" he asked in a puzzled voice.
Sam MacCord laughed. He felt great. "In a manner of speaking," he said. "I don't keep them, though. I send them on their way."
"Huh?"
"That's right, I dispatch 'em. I find 'em here and there, and then we have a little chat, after which I send them on someplace else."
"Where?"
Sam shrugged. "Wherever it is we go when it's all over."
The skank grimaced. "Aw, man, let's drop this shit. It's freaking me out."
"What's freaking you out?"
"All this talk about when it's all over when we both know you're not going to shoot anybody."
Sam sighed, mildly exasperated. One of the things truly vexed was when people told him what he wasn't going to do. Which in his view was extremely presumptuous of them since he often didn't even know himself. But at that particular moment it was crystal clear exactly what his next move was going to be. "Wrong again," he said and quickly raised the gun and blew Rockaway Johnny's left earlobe clean off his head.
The fool's mouth fell open and he gazed at Sam like a man hypnotized. He reached tentatively up and felt his ear, which was beginning to bleed freely. "You shot me!" he said, his voice full of wounded dignity.
"That's right. And I intend to shoot you some more in a few minutes, but I thought we'd talk some first."
"You shot me!"
"Didn't anybody ever tell you that repetition is tiresome? Grab a bunch of Kleenex out of that box on your bedside table and squeeze them up against your ear if you want it to stop bleeding." The skank stared at him dumbly. "Go on," Sam said, motioning with the Ruger. "Get some tissues."
Rock-Away Johnny scrabbled a handful of Kleenex out of the box and pressed them gingerly against the side of his head, his eyes still warily on Sam. Finally he blurted, "You're crazy, man! Freaking crazy!!"
Sam nodded thoughtfully. "It's possible, and I'll be the first to admit it. In fact, I've given the matter considerable thought in the last few years." Then he shrugged and smiled. "But finally I quit worrying about it. I just figured, what the hell? I'm happy as a lark, so if it ain't broke, why try to fix it?"
Rock-Away Johnny couldn't formulate an answer to that particular question. The earlobe business was forcing him to drastically reevaluate his previous assessment of the situation. Indeed, he was getting religion where the subject of Sam MacCord was concerned. He was beginning to comprehend that this goofy old fart was one serious dude. "Why have you got it in for me?" he asked. "Why not somebody else?"
Sam sighed once again. "Because you're an asshole, Johnny. I've already told you that once. Can't you remember anything?"
"But there are lots of assholes!"
"Don't blame me. I'm certainly doing my part to rectify that situation."
"You can't just go around shooting people because you don't like them!"
"Can you think of any better reason to shoot them?"
"Uh. . ."
"Now if you were the sort of fellow who was inclined to historical research, which of course, you're not, you might check out the Dallas and Biloxi newspapers from about thirty years back. If you did, you're find me mentioned pretty often. Back in those days the reporters had me linked with an outfit they called the Dixie Mafia. It never existed, really, to be perfectly truthful. The term was just a lurid journalist's creation that was used to describe a bunch of us fun-loving ole country boys who did a lot of robbing and killing back then. Even the Texas Rangers handled us with tongs and gloves, so to speak, and my own name was linked to some pretty heavy scores and a couple of contract hits. But you didn't know any of that yesterday afternoon. You thought I was just some old guy you could get away with treating as shitty as you wanted treat him. Bad mistake."
"Yeah, but. . ." The boy's voice trailed off.
"Yeah, but, yeah but, yeah but," Sam repeated. "You sound like a spoiled first grader." He stood with agile quickness and took one step back away from the bed. "And you're starting to bore me."
This was the worst cut of all. Nobody had ever told DeLoach he was boring. His buddies all competed for his attention, and the women were his for the taking. When he talked, people listened. "You old bastard--"
"Hush!" Sam said loudly.
Startled, Johnny stopped speaking. He just couldn't get a grip on where this man was coming from.
"Try to exit with a little grace, my young friend," Sam said. "After all, grace is one of those delicate, elusive qualities that separates us from the beasts of the field."
The boy was still puzzled. Wha--" he began, but before he could finish, Sam MacCord raised the silenced pistol, took quick aim and gently squeezed the trigger. And so Rock-Away Johnny passed from this life, a small, neat hole in the precise center of his forehead and a look of profound bafflement on his scraggly face.
#
The Delta MD 80 lifted off the runway at the Jackson airport, bound for Dallas. Sam and Linda were in the first class section where he'd insisted she take the window seat. She was nervous and clutched his hand tightly all through the takeoff roll. "Jeze!" she said once they were airborn. "Do they always climb at this steep an angle?"
"It depends," Sam replied.
"On what?"
"Different things. The load they're carrying, the weather, the type of plane. This Douglas 80 series is real agile. A lot of fun."
"Fun? You call this fun?"
"You'll get used to it after a few flights."
"Am I going to be flying more?"
"If you want to. Have you ever been to Europe?"
"I've never been anywhere, Sam. Heck, I've waited tables most of my life."
"Just relax and enjoy the view. As soon as we get to cruising altitude the flight attendant will be around with the drink cart and I'll get you a scotch. You still like scotch?"
She nodded, and looked out the window. He held her hand and said no more. After a couple of minutes she peered at him again. "Why are you smiling so big?" she asked.
"Oh, I was thinking about something I must have heard my grandfather say a thousand times."
"Yeah? What was that?"
"He claimed that to be really content a man needed a good woman, a rewarding trade, and an interesting hobby."
"And. . .?"
"It sure took me an awful long time to have sense enough to hang on to that good woman."
She squeezed his hand and leaned over and kissed him gently on the cheek, then turned to gaze once again in fascination out the window where the soft, green Mississippi countryside was rapidly falling away as the plane climbed swiftly into the bright spring sky.
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He has published two crime novels with St. Martin's Press, NY titled "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead." His third book, "Nights of The Red Moon" is due to be released by St. Martin's in the fall of 2010.
At first Sam MacCord didn't think the van was going to stop. But at the last moment the brakes squealed and it pulled up beside where he stood on the narrow oil-topped road. The driver took his time about rolling the window down, just as he took his time about everything. He was a skank, with long skanky black hair and a Mephistolian mustache and a grungy goatee. He wore a black leather vest over a white tee shirt and spiked leather wrist bands. Heavy metal music pounded away on the sound system, and the fetid air that came out of the van's now-open window reeked of marijuana smoke. The driver's companion was a skank too, only she was female. Dressed much the same as the driver, she had a pretty but sullen face, dark, scraggly hair, large breasts, and long legs that protruded from a pair of cut-off jeans and rested, ankles crossed, on the vehicle's cluttered dash. Sam put the driver in his early thirties, the girl maybe a half dozen years younger.
Her name was Debbie Pond, and her chief activities in life were snorting coke, gobbling downers, and functioning as a sort of ambulatory receptacle for the seminal emissions of any male skank in her immediate proximity who could be induced to part with some of his dope. Or at least that was how things had been until she met the driver of the van. The one time she'd strayed after hooking up with him, he'd whipped her so hard with his heavy leather belt that she couldn't stand up for over an hour. Not only had that helped Debbie get her head straight as to where her real interests lay, but deep down she'd secretly liked it. As a consequence of that lovely evening, she'd come to look upon their romance as a match made in Heaven.
The driver himself was a small-time coke pusher and wannabe heavy metal musician named Ronnie DeLoach who would never make it big, partly because he was void of any real musical talent. But mostly this sad fact could be attributed to his very limited life span. Although Ronnie didn't know it, at the precise moment he reached languidly toward the dash to switch off the music, he had less than twenty-four hours to live. "Yeah?" he asked in a voice that was full of annoyed disinterest.
Sam smiled pleasantly. "I was wondering if you could tell me where a woman named Linda Popper lives."
DeLoach didn't answer right away. That was another aspect of his personal style, one he'd gotten from the cheap action movies he loved where the cool dude always took his time responding to questions. Instead he spent about ten silent seconds looking Sam over. What he saw was a trim man in his mid fifties who stood maybe five-ten and was dressed in dark slacks, a rust colored shirt, and a dark gray Ike jacket. His head was bare, and his short hair, which was had been coal black in his youth, was now running heavily to gray.
"Linda Popper?" Sam reminded finally.
DeLoach jerked his thumb over his shoulder indicating the way he had come. "Back there," he told Sam.
"Right," Sam said, nodding in agreement. "That's what I've been told, but the problem is that I've already been back that way, and there are several houses." He gave the driver a friendly smile and a diffident shrug.
"Whadda you want me to do?" the skank asked. "Draw you a freaking map?"
"Maybe you could tell me what her house looks like--"
"It's yellow," the driver said impatiently, rolling his eyes. "Pale yellow. The last one on the left about a mile on down."
"Thank you. I really appreciate your--"
But before he could finish, DeLoach slammed the van into gear and roared off down the road. It had rained off-and-on all that week, and somewhere along the way the van had been in mud. As it sped away, a thumb-sized daub of damp red clay flew off one of its rear tires and landed on the front of Sam's jacket. But Sam paid no attention to the mud. Instead, he whipped a solid gold pen and a 3x5 card from his inner pocket and quickly jotted down the van's license plate number. Then he flicked the blob from his jacket and cleaned the spot as well as he could with a monogrammed linen handkerchief.
Had DeLoach been more astute and less interested in playing it cool, he might not have been misled by Sam MacCord's modest demeanor. He might have noticed that the man's pale blue eyes were both glacially cold and obscenely happy--eyes that could make cats hiss and puppies whine and send small children screeching for their mothers. But such subtleties were lost on Ronnie DeLoach. The alpha male in his little cluster group, he was master of all he surveyed. He had a crew of admiring buddies who acknowledged him as their leader, he was boning a submissive doll with big knockers who would drop to her knees at the snap of his fingers, and he had a few hundred bucks in his pocket. And to top it all off, a couple of grand nestled sweetly in his savings account down at the bank. Everything a man of his limited horizons needed. So why bother to read the message in somebody's eyes or even extend a little common courtesy? Especially some old doofus standing out in the middle of nowhere asking directions.
Sam MacCord put his pen and the card back in his inner jacket pocket and whistled softly to himself as he cranked his rented Lexus coupe and glided off down the narrow road.
#
The door of the yellow house opened a few seconds after Sam knocked, and suddenly there she was. She was older now--fifteen years older--and small wrinkles showed around her tired eyes. But she was still slim and pretty and her short hair was still the same copper-blonde he remembered. A close examination might have revealed a few more signs of age, but Sam MacCord didn't give a flying damn. She still took his breath away. She wore a pair of trim khaki slacks and a dark green sweatshirt from some college in Louisiana. At first her face showed surprise, and then he thought for a moment she was going to cry. "Sam?" she said hesitatingly. "Is that you?"
"Of course it's me. Have I changed that much?"
She gazed at him in silence for a long moment, then shook her head. "You haven't changed at all except that your hair has gone gray." It was then that her eyes misted up and she said sadly, "Oh, Sam, I want to hug you so bad, but I don't feel like I have any right to."
"You've got every right in the world," he said and reached out and took her in his arms and pulled her toward him. For Sam it was like regaining feeling in a limb that had been dead for years. They stood that way for a long time while he was aware of little beyond the sweetness of her body, the fleeting, cinnamony odor of her perfume, and the slow, rhythmic ticking of the old German clock on the mantle behind her.
Finally, as if by mutual agreement, they pulled apart.
"I don't know what to say," she said, pulling up her sweatshirt to dab at her eyes.
"Why do you have to say something?"
She gave him a halfhearted shrug. "Want some coffee?" she asked. "I was just about to have a cup."
"Sure."
"Then come on back in the kitchen. I just made a fresh pot."
She took his hand and led him, little-girl-like, back through a house that was neat and surgically clean, but cheaply furnished. The kitchen was big and sunny, and outside the windows he could see a row of early spring daffodils blooming bright yellow.
She poured them both a cup from a shiny percolator that stood on the counter. A homemade pound cake emerged as if by magic from the cabinet above the sink. Linda set a plate before him and handed him a knife. "Have fun," she said.
"This almost makes me think you knew I was coming," he said. "You remember how much I loved your pound cake?"
She nodded. "I didn't know, but I'm sure happy to see you." He ate for a while in silence, then finally she asked, "Why did you come, Sam?"
"Mr. Van Horn asked me to look you up on his behalf."
For a moment there was a flash of disappointment in her eyes. "I see," she said.
"No, you don't," Sam said firmly. "The truth is that I was about to beg off and tell him to find somebody else, but then I realized just how bad I wanted to see you myself."
"Really?"
"Did I ever lie to you? I admit that I've got a lot of faults, but did I ever tell you a single lie."
She shook her head and smiled sadly. "It's just that for so long I thought you were mad. I mean, I dumped you for Freddie Popper and--"
"I never was mad at you, Linda. I was hurt, but I didn't blame you. Freddie loved you, and back in those days he was more stable than I was. He had more to offer a woman, and I understood that. Hell, in your position I would probably have done the same thing."
"Really?"
"Sure."
She shook her head and dabbed once more at her eyes. "And you were always wound up so tight, Sam," she said. "That worried me, too."
He laughed. "I remember. You always told me I needed a hobby or something to calm me down, spend all the excess energy."
"You do seem a lot calmer now."
"I've slowed down a lot. Hell, I'm fifty-five-years old."
"I'm forty-two."
"You don't look it, Linda. You're still beautiful."
She blushed and looked down at her coffee cup. He reached over and patted her hand. She was naturally shy, and it was one of the things he had always loved about her.
"Me and Freddie had two good years," she said. "He'd gotten out of the life, and he was working at a straight job and making good money. That was before the cancer hit him." He sipped at his coffee for a few moments while he stared intently at her across the table, then he said, "Linda, did you know of Freddie pulling any jobs that last year? I mean before he got too sick?"
"I suspected he was doing something. I think he was trying to get some money together for me to have after he was gone."
"That's exactly what he was doing, and that's where Mr. Van Horn comes in."
"How is he?" she asked. "You know, he gave me my first job when I came to Dallas. I'm really surprised he's still around."
"He's almost eighty, and still going strong. But back to our business. Do you happen to remember a heavy-duty thug named Carl Whittle who used to hang around Van Horn's nightclubs?"
"You bet I do. He was a scary guy."
"Right. Well, he and Freddie took down a big bank in Austin about six months before Freddie died. A nightime burglary. Then that fool Whittle got all pilled up a couple of days later and got stopped for weaving all over the road. He had some currency bands and a few bearer bonds from the robbery in the trunk of his car, but none of the cash. He went down for the job, but he never ratted out Freddie. He never gave him his cut of the take, either. I guess he figured that since he was going up for at least ten years there was no reason he shouldn't just hang on to the whole score, especially with Freddie due to check out pretty soon, anyway. He got word to Mr. Van Horn where the money was stashed, and the old man laundered it and invested it for him, taking his ten percent off the top just like he always does."
"I never heard anything about any of this," Linda said. "I do know that Freddie died bitter about something, though. And he was worried sick about me. He even wanted me to look you up after he was gone."
"You should have."
She shook her head. "I couldn't do that, Sam."
He chose not to argue with her. "Anyway, Whittle drew fourteen years. He was lucky. The only evidence that tied him to the burglary was the bearer bonds, and he could have been fencing them. The jury knew he was guilty of something, but they were unwilling to hang the whole farm around his neck. But Mr. Van Horn started hearing rumors about Freddie being his partner on the job. So when Whittle fell out of the joint and came to him for his money, he asked him about it."
"What did Whittle say?"
"He told the truth. Hell, if he hadn't and the old man had found out later that he'd lied, that would have been all she wrote for Carl Whittle."
"Really? Mr. Van Horn was always so sweet to me."
"Sure he was. Because you never gave him any reason to be anything else. But he only let Whittle have half of the money. The other half is yours, Linda."
"Really? How much?"
"Two hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars."
She was stunned. "Two hundred and what?"
"Two hundred and forty-seven thousand. Mr. Van Horn has had it in a blind trust all these years, and the taxes on the interest and appreciation have been paid yearly. It's yours, Linda. You're going to need to come back to Dallas with me and sign some papers, but that shouldn't be any problem. You have a job, I suppose."
She nodded. "I'm the hostess in a real nice restaurant in Oxford. It's a steak and seafood place."
"Can you take off a few days?"
"I guess so."
He stared at her a minute, then sighed and screwed up his courage. "Linda, I want you to put your money up where nobody but you can get hold of it. I don't want you to spend a nickel of it. You don't have to. I'm rich."
"Huh?"
"We missed one chance fifteen years ago because I wouldn't settle down. I don't want us to miss this one."
"Sam--" she began plaintively.
"Linda, please listen to me. For all practical purposes I'm out of the life now. I haven't pulled a job in years. Right now I own a very lucrative sports book in Dallas. Some of the biggest bigwigs in town do business with me, and I belong to a couple of upscale clubs. Hell, I'm respectable now. I even get invited to a wedding or a party now and then in Highland Park, if you can imagine."
"Gee, Sam. This is all so. . ."
"Are you involved with anybody at the moment?"
She shook her head. He leaned forward and looked her right in the eyes and spoke as persuasively as he could. "Linda, I'm fifty-five years old, and I don't have time to be coy. Hell, there's no need for it. We slept in the same bed for better than a year, so why beat around the bush? I realize now how much I loved you then and how much I still love you and what a damn fool I was to let you get away."
She smiled wistfully. "Aww, that's so sweet of you to say that, Sam."
"You're going to have to come back with me to do this legal stuff to get your money. Mr. Van Horn won't have it any other way. He always liked you a lot, and I think he just wants to see you one more time. While you're there I want to show you my home. I've got a nice house in North Dallas and--"
She laughed. "You own a house? I can't believe it. Back when we were together you didn't even like to rent an apartment. You always wanted to live in hotels. You said your idea of Heaven was around-the-clock room service."
He laughed with her. "Not only do I own a house, but I've learned to cook, too. Isn't that something? I'm really pretty good at it."
She shook her head in wonder. "You in the kitchen. I can't see it."
"Come back with me and you can."
"Aw, Sam. . . If we only could. . ." her voice tapered off.
"I won't pressure you. If you like what you see, we've got a future together. If you don't, then you come back to Mississippi and no hard feelings."
"When would we go to Texas?"
"I'd like to leave here the day after tomorrow. I've had a little something come up that I need to tend to in the morning."
"I guess I could," she said. "I'd have to call work and let them know. I've got some vacation time coming. Maybe I'll just take a week off."
"Do that. I'll make plane reservations as soon as I get back to my motel."
She giggled like a little girl. "I've never flown in a plane in my whole life."
"Never?" he asked in amazement.
"Nope. I'm really kinda scared of flying."
Thirty minutes later they were at the door. "Sam. . ." she began shyly.
"Yeah?
"Do you want to stay here tonight?"
He smiled at her and reached up and brushed her cheek gently. "Of course I do, Linda. But I got a couple of things to do, so I can't. How about if I come and stay tomorrow night? Then we can get up and leave the next morning."
She nodded. He started to give her a chaste peck on the forehead, but she melted into his arms, crying. "I'm so glad you came," she said through her tears.
"Me too, Linda."
#
A mile down the road he pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number in Austin. The man who answered was a supervisor in the state bureau of motor vehicles who had been on Van Horn's payroll for years. "Do you recognize my voice?" Sam asked.
"Indeed I do," the man replied dryly.
"I need the name and address of the owner of a van with Mississippi plates."
"Give me it to me and your phone number too. I'll call you back in a couple of minutes."
Sam rattled off the information. "And see if you can pull up the picture on the owner's driver's license, too," he said. "I want to make sure I've got the right guy."
"Will do."
He drove leisurely on, enjoying the early spring afternoon and the tender green of the world around him. After about five minutes his phone buzzed. "Yeah?" he said.
"That van is registered to one Ronald DeLoach. You want his address?"
"You bet," Sam said and pulled over to the side of the road and wrote quickly on a 3x5 card. Then he asked about the photo.
"Yeah, I got it," his contact said. "Want me to fax it to you?"
"Just describe the guy."
"Skinny, Long black hair, goatee, thirty-three years old. A really scroungy looking young toad."
"You're a good man, Lewis," Sam said. "Forget you ever heard from me."
"Don't I always?"
#
The next morning Sam parked two blocks down and around the corner from the bungalow the skank rented on a narrow, shady street in a blue collar neighborhood in Oxford. The front door lock was a cheap in-the-knob affair. Sam pulled a pair of channel-lock pliers from his coat pocket, and after one sharp twist he was inside.
The place was cleaner and neater than he expected but not as tidy as he would have been comfortable living with himself. The living room took up the whole front of the house. It was furnished with cheap modern furniture, and posters for various heavy metal bands were thumb-tacked here and there about the walls. The largest, at the end of the room, was a large framed photo of Van Halen. A fancy sound system occupied one wall, and in the place of honor right in front of the faux fireplace a small ceiling-mounted spotlight shown down on a coal-black Fender electric guitar that rested on a fancy chromium stand like some ancient pagan god awaiting a sacrificial virgin.
Sam's shoes were rubber-soled, and he was good at what he was doing. He checked the house quickly. Besides the living room and the attached kitchen, it contained only two bedrooms and a small bathroom. The smaller bedroom was empty and looked like it hadn't been used in some time. The larger of the two contained a mammoth king-sized bed fitted with black satin sheets and a black coverlet. In it slept the skank. The girl was nowhere to be seen, for which Sam was deeply grateful. Had she been present, he would have quietly left the house and put the whole matter in the future reference file.
A wooden kitchen chair rested in front of a small dressing table to one side of the bed. Very carefully Sam moved it beside the bed and sat down. Then he fired up one of his small Cuban cigars and blew a great puff of smoke toward the skank's face. The boy's nostrils twitched and he stirred a little under the sheet. "Wake up, Rock-Away Johnny!" Sam said loudly.
The skank's eyes opened. "What the. . .?" he began.
"Tell your ma! Tell your pa! Our love's a'gonna grow!!" Sam sang melodiously. "Ole Rock-Away Johnny. Top of the morning to you, Johnny me boy."
The skank shook his head and blinked his eyes a few times. Then they widened in disbelief.
"That's right, my friend. I'm the guy you were so courteous to yesterday on the road out near Water Valley." The skank blinked some more. "How the hell did you get in here?" he finally asked.
"Through the front door. Getting into locked places is my trade. Or at least it used to be. Where's the girl?"
"Who?"
"The girl who was with you yesterday, idiot. Where is she?"
"Oh, her. She went home to see her mama for a few days. The old bitch is sick."
"The old bitch? That's how you talk about your girlfriend's mother to strangers? You're such a lovely fellow, Johnny."
"My name's not Johnny," DeLoach said sullenly for lack of anything better to say. He was confused. Last night's mixture of whiskey and cocaine had dulled his normally dull senses even more than usual.
"I know that," Sam said. "But as it happens, I didn't care for the name your no doubt genetically defective parents bestowed upon you at birth. So I changed it to Rock-Away Johnny for the short time you have left here on this vast and turbulent globe we call Mother Earth. Any objections?"
The skank was getting his wits about him, and his basic personality was beginning to emerge. "Yeah. I don't like it," he said.
"So?"
"So who the hell do you think you are coming into my crib like this?"
"Who do I think I am? The last time I looked at my driver's license it said I'm some guy named Sam MacCord, so I guess we'll just have to roll with that. You know, like in the old Johnny Horton song."
"Who?"
"Johnny Horton, the king of rockabilly." Sam sang once again: "Where the river is winding, big nuggets they're finding. North to Alaska! Go north, the rush is on!!"
"Man, I don't like that redneck shit."
Sam smiled and sang on: "Yes, Sam MacCord was a mighty man, and the year was ninety-one."
"Well, you don't look too damned mighty to me. I think I may just get out of this bed and kick your sagging old ass."
"Wrong, Johnny," Sam said happily. He reached deftly inside his jacket and withdrew a silenced Ruger .22 target pistol and pointed it right at the boy's head. "You're not going to do anything of the sort because your ass-kicking days are drawing peacefully to their close."
"Huh?" DeLoach was suddenly mesmerized. He'd never seen a gun from the business end before, and he didn't like it. "What's that thing for?" he asked stupidly.
"When the time comes I'm going use it to blow you right out of your shoes. Metaphorically speaking, of course, since you don't seem to be wearing any shoes at the moment. And a .22 doesn't really have that much blasting power. They're great for brain shots, though."
The great Rock-Away Johnny, nee Ronnie DeLoach, stared at Sam MacCord and his gun while his drug-addled mind tried desperately to get a handle on the unusual situation he was finding himself in. He didn't really believe that this goofy old fart was going to kill him. It just wasn't within his capacity to believe that anybody would kill him for no good reason. After all, he was a cool dude. And even more than that, in his rather limited social circle he was THE MAN, and nobody whacked THE MAN. But he was savvy enough to realize that you didn't just walk into Wal-Mart and buy a silencer for $19.95 or whatever. Silencers were highly illegal, and had been for about a zillion years. In fact, he knew a guy from Shreveport who'd once drawn five years hard time just for having one of the damn things. It hadn't even been attached to a gun. And that definitely looked like a silencer on the end of the automatic the goofy old fart was pointing his way. Which meant that its owner was almost certainly some kind of authentic heavy, maybe a CIA spook who'd gone a couple of turns around the bend with all the Casper The Ghost crap those guys had to put up with. He pulled himself up a little in the bed and gathered his legs in close to his body. It was beginning to look like he was going to have to get physical.
Sam watched his movements, smiling all the while and reading the boy's mental processes with pinpoint accuracy. Rockaway Johnny was getting notions. Ideas, even. Sam loved it. "You're number nine," he said.
"Number nine what?"
"Assholes. You're the ninth despicable, ill-mannered asshole I've been in this very same situation with."
"I don't get it."
"You don't?" Sam asked cheerfully. "It's really very simple. You see, some people hunt. You know, quail, pheasant, deer. Things like that. Others fish or play golf or bridge or refinish antique furniture. Then you have these guys who're into coins and stamps. And I know a couple of little old ladies who collect dolls from all over the world. But with me, it's assholes."
Johnny was authentically mystified. He was having a very difficult time following Sam's logic. "You collect assholes?" he asked in a puzzled voice.
Sam MacCord laughed. He felt great. "In a manner of speaking," he said. "I don't keep them, though. I send them on their way."
"Huh?"
"That's right, I dispatch 'em. I find 'em here and there, and then we have a little chat, after which I send them on someplace else."
"Where?"
Sam shrugged. "Wherever it is we go when it's all over."
The skank grimaced. "Aw, man, let's drop this shit. It's freaking me out."
"What's freaking you out?"
"All this talk about when it's all over when we both know you're not going to shoot anybody."
Sam sighed, mildly exasperated. One of the things truly vexed was when people told him what he wasn't going to do. Which in his view was extremely presumptuous of them since he often didn't even know himself. But at that particular moment it was crystal clear exactly what his next move was going to be. "Wrong again," he said and quickly raised the gun and blew Rockaway Johnny's left earlobe clean off his head.
The fool's mouth fell open and he gazed at Sam like a man hypnotized. He reached tentatively up and felt his ear, which was beginning to bleed freely. "You shot me!" he said, his voice full of wounded dignity.
"That's right. And I intend to shoot you some more in a few minutes, but I thought we'd talk some first."
"You shot me!"
"Didn't anybody ever tell you that repetition is tiresome? Grab a bunch of Kleenex out of that box on your bedside table and squeeze them up against your ear if you want it to stop bleeding." The skank stared at him dumbly. "Go on," Sam said, motioning with the Ruger. "Get some tissues."
Rock-Away Johnny scrabbled a handful of Kleenex out of the box and pressed them gingerly against the side of his head, his eyes still warily on Sam. Finally he blurted, "You're crazy, man! Freaking crazy!!"
Sam nodded thoughtfully. "It's possible, and I'll be the first to admit it. In fact, I've given the matter considerable thought in the last few years." Then he shrugged and smiled. "But finally I quit worrying about it. I just figured, what the hell? I'm happy as a lark, so if it ain't broke, why try to fix it?"
Rock-Away Johnny couldn't formulate an answer to that particular question. The earlobe business was forcing him to drastically reevaluate his previous assessment of the situation. Indeed, he was getting religion where the subject of Sam MacCord was concerned. He was beginning to comprehend that this goofy old fart was one serious dude. "Why have you got it in for me?" he asked. "Why not somebody else?"
Sam sighed once again. "Because you're an asshole, Johnny. I've already told you that once. Can't you remember anything?"
"But there are lots of assholes!"
"Don't blame me. I'm certainly doing my part to rectify that situation."
"You can't just go around shooting people because you don't like them!"
"Can you think of any better reason to shoot them?"
"Uh. . ."
"Now if you were the sort of fellow who was inclined to historical research, which of course, you're not, you might check out the Dallas and Biloxi newspapers from about thirty years back. If you did, you're find me mentioned pretty often. Back in those days the reporters had me linked with an outfit they called the Dixie Mafia. It never existed, really, to be perfectly truthful. The term was just a lurid journalist's creation that was used to describe a bunch of us fun-loving ole country boys who did a lot of robbing and killing back then. Even the Texas Rangers handled us with tongs and gloves, so to speak, and my own name was linked to some pretty heavy scores and a couple of contract hits. But you didn't know any of that yesterday afternoon. You thought I was just some old guy you could get away with treating as shitty as you wanted treat him. Bad mistake."
"Yeah, but. . ." The boy's voice trailed off.
"Yeah, but, yeah but, yeah but," Sam repeated. "You sound like a spoiled first grader." He stood with agile quickness and took one step back away from the bed. "And you're starting to bore me."
This was the worst cut of all. Nobody had ever told DeLoach he was boring. His buddies all competed for his attention, and the women were his for the taking. When he talked, people listened. "You old bastard--"
"Hush!" Sam said loudly.
Startled, Johnny stopped speaking. He just couldn't get a grip on where this man was coming from.
"Try to exit with a little grace, my young friend," Sam said. "After all, grace is one of those delicate, elusive qualities that separates us from the beasts of the field."
The boy was still puzzled. Wha--" he began, but before he could finish, Sam MacCord raised the silenced pistol, took quick aim and gently squeezed the trigger. And so Rock-Away Johnny passed from this life, a small, neat hole in the precise center of his forehead and a look of profound bafflement on his scraggly face.
#
The Delta MD 80 lifted off the runway at the Jackson airport, bound for Dallas. Sam and Linda were in the first class section where he'd insisted she take the window seat. She was nervous and clutched his hand tightly all through the takeoff roll. "Jeze!" she said once they were airborn. "Do they always climb at this steep an angle?"
"It depends," Sam replied.
"On what?"
"Different things. The load they're carrying, the weather, the type of plane. This Douglas 80 series is real agile. A lot of fun."
"Fun? You call this fun?"
"You'll get used to it after a few flights."
"Am I going to be flying more?"
"If you want to. Have you ever been to Europe?"
"I've never been anywhere, Sam. Heck, I've waited tables most of my life."
"Just relax and enjoy the view. As soon as we get to cruising altitude the flight attendant will be around with the drink cart and I'll get you a scotch. You still like scotch?"
She nodded, and looked out the window. He held her hand and said no more. After a couple of minutes she peered at him again. "Why are you smiling so big?" she asked.
"Oh, I was thinking about something I must have heard my grandfather say a thousand times."
"Yeah? What was that?"
"He claimed that to be really content a man needed a good woman, a rewarding trade, and an interesting hobby."
"And. . .?"
"It sure took me an awful long time to have sense enough to hang on to that good woman."
She squeezed his hand and leaned over and kissed him gently on the cheek, then turned to gaze once again in fascination out the window where the soft, green Mississippi countryside was rapidly falling away as the plane climbed swiftly into the bright spring sky.
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He has published two crime novels with St. Martin's Press, NY titled "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead." His third book, "Nights of The Red Moon" is due to be released by St. Martin's in the fall of 2010.
September 05, 2009
Fine Tuning
By Milton T. Burton © 2009
Most people think parallel worlds lie in the future. They see every significant event as generating several outcomes, each of which makes its own timeline. Modern physics seems to support this idea as well. But it's all wrong. The parallel worlds are in the past, and the Adjusters work hard to keep them there. I should know. I'm one of the Adjusters.
I live in a renovated Victorian house in Galveston's historic old East End. It's more room than I need, but time workers tend to be pack rats. We almost always develop the habit of collecting mementos from the various ages and places we have visited, so a little extra space is advisable. Besides, Galveston has been my family's home for generations, and when you range as far and wide as I do, you need some connection to your roots.
I was coming off a month's vacation and looking at two hard weeks ahead. Major projects that had been put off too long. The first stop was Rome, December, 799 A.D. It wasn't too hard to get an audience with Pope Leo III. Gold is a universal lubricant. It will get you in just about anywhere, then or now. And it didn't take much to convince him. Charles The Great, King of the Franks---known to history as Charlemagne---was in town, having rescued Leo from the Roman mobs that had sought to kill him. The man had fled to Paderborn where he petitioned Charles for relief. On the advice of his own confessor, Alcuin of York, Charles moved his army south across the Alps into Rome and reinstated Leo in the papal palace. Which left the Pope in his debt. Not the best place to be in that politically-charged world. The Roman throne in the West had been vacant for three hundred and fifty years. In the east, in Byzantium, a woman reigned as Emperor, recognized by neither the papacy nor by the Franks.
"When Charles kneels to take the Eucharist," I said to Leo in Church Latin. "Crown him Emperor of the Romans. Put the crown quickly on his head. Do not hesitate. Not only will you elevate him to this great office, but you will be asserting the power of the papacy to propose and dispose. He will be grateful and in your debt rather than you in his."
"Do you think?" he asked, a bit of greed mixed with fear in his eyes.
"I know."
"But what if he is offended?"
"King Charles is a deeply religious man, Holy Father, a man with great respect for the papacy and the Church. Be spiritual in your dealings with him and he cannot be offended."
My flawless logic plus twenty kilos of gold carried the day, and the outcome is recorded in every good library in the world. This action revived the imperial tradition in the west and set a precedent that the emperors’ authority rested on the approval of the pope. Although the imperial title did not confer any actual power on Charlemagne, it did give legitimacy to his rule over central Italy, a fact that the Byzantine emperor would acknowledge a decade hence. The Holy Roman Empire created that day was to last, in one form or another, for a thousand years, and I was off to...
Florence, Spring, 1470. The man across the table from me was Lorenzo de' Medici, known to history as "Il Magnifico"---Lorenzo the Magnificent. Now but twenty-one years old and ascended to the head of the clan upon his father's recent death, he was destined to be the Renaissance's greatest patron of the arts. I had just added a significant amount of money to our account with his family bank. We keep deposits with sound banks in all the ages where we work. And no banks were more sound than the Medici Bank. Lorenzo might have been the wealthiest man in the world at that time, but he had been brought up in the banking business and had a banker's instincts. Which meant that he liked to meet the big depositors personally. But he was a convivial man and our conversation drifted away from finance and on to other matters.
"His name again?" he asked me. "This painter you mentioned, I mean."
"Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, but he goes by Sandro Botticelli. A diminutive man, but a great wit."
He laughed. "Botticelli... The little barrel. A small fellow, eh?"
"That's right."
"But one who likes to eat, judging from his nickname?"
"That he does," I replied. "He just opened a workshop down by the Arno, near the Ponte Vecchio."
"Why haven't I heard of him if he is so good?"
"Some say he has been in Hungary for several years, working for the archbishop there. They also say that if his work proves unpopular here he will return. That is the problem. He has no name here. Yet he was born in Florence, and it would be tragic for the city to loose so talented a son. Especially to the Hungarians."
He looked at me sharply. "You are not Florentine yourself. I believe you told me you are from Regensburg, so why should you care?"
I gave him a shrug and a disarming smile. "Like Jesus, I think a prophet should not be without honor in his own land."
He laughed. "There is a wine shop near the Vecchio. Let us have a glass and then I will view the work of this paragon. Perhaps I will like some of his canvasses."
"He needs more than the sale of a few canvasses, Excellency," I said bluntly. "He needs a patron. He was an apprentice to Fra' Lippi, you know."
I heard a sharp intake of breath. "I had no idea. Then he must be good. Lippi will not tolerate anything but the best. Why, once he even snarled dismissively at some of my sonnets. Can you imagine such cheek?"
I smiled an easy smile. "Great talents can afford to be cheeky, whereas men such as ourselves..." I let my voice taper off.
He rose from his chair with a laugh. "All too true, my friend. Let us go have that glass of wine. I find art more invigorating than business, especially in the springtime."
And as they say, the rest is history.
#
After Florence came a couple of minor assignments. In the first, I had to get a particular red-headed young Missourian extracted from the Confederate Army and out west where he would be safe to write the books he was meant to write. Next was the kidnapping in Philadelphia in 1934 I had to prevent. Nuts and bolts matters.
It's not always this easy. Three years ago a fellow operative who was also a close friend of mine killed herself after she saved Hitler's life in 1921. Why save Hitler, of all people, you might ask? Because the alternative would have been worse. Much, much worse. Take my word for it. And therein lay the problem. She had the facts from both timelines, ours and the one that wasn't allowed to happen. But she couldn't get her head around the fact that she preserved the Holocaust. I don't know that I could have either, but my next job was one I had no qualms about even though it was to be the first time I had to kill in the line of duty.
#
The Harvard Club, New York, NY, January, 2012. Roland DeJong was a tall, slim, handsome smartass who exuded a sense of entitlement the way a field hand exudes sweat. I found him sitting in the reading room, the New York Times in his lap, a snifter of fine old brandy at hand. A low reading table, now piled with magazines, separated two heavy wingchairs of dark brown leather. I sat down across the table from him and made no effort to choose anything to read. He gave me a manly smile and introduced himself quietly.
"I know who you are," I said.
"Really? I'm flattered. What class were you in?"
"I'm not a Harvard man. You might say I'm a guest here."
He nodded, but his demeanor became just the tiniest bit patronizing. "Where are you from?"
"The future."
He barely blinked at this. I suppose he thought of himself as a sophisticated man, one used to sophisticated word games.
"You don't say."
"But I do say."
"Whose future, then?" he asked with a sardonic smile. "Mine?"
"You don't have a future."
"Ahhh... I see. Then you must have been sent here to prevent some terrible catastrophe from befalling me. Is that it?"
I shook my head. "No. As it happens, I am your catastrophe. I know more about you than you know about yourself. We have a good research department. Best in the world, in fact."
"But why research me? To what purpose?"
I ignored his question. "Your family has been wealthy for five generations. You went to an exclusive prep school, then on to Harvard for your bachelors in pre-law. After that you were given a commission in the Army which was followed by Special Forces training, then an assignment in conjunction with the C.I.A. where you became expert at 'extracting' information in Afghanistan. The 'Special Methods Section,' they called it. Did you have fun?"
He gave me a crinkle-browed frown that was as false as the smile the serpent gave Eve. "So you're one of those people," he said. "Is that Sheehan woman still involved? I've been down this road before."
"So go down it one more time. Was it fun?"
"It's not always pleasant," he said. "Protecting civilization, I mean. Certain things have to be done no matter how repugnant we find them."
I nodded sagely. "Indeed. I can see you and a handful of cohorts forty years from today, sitting around some clubby room much like this one. Like the hunter home from the hill, old warriors, home from the foreign fields of empire. A crackling fire in a stone fireplace. Rowing trophies on the mantle, photos of long dead members from decades past hang here and there on finely paneled walls. Leather and brass and polished wood everywhere. You sip your brandy and say, "Nasty business, that. Afghanistan, I mean. But somebody had to do it.' Your friends all cough and snort and nod in passable imitations of Victorian gentlemen, and all those present agree that, indeed it was a nasty business, but one that had to be done on behalf of all the naïve little people out in the world who believe in quaint notions like common decency the rule of law."
He frowned again, but this one was for real. "Your point being?"
"My point being that most such people are really just harmless oafs. Or at least they do no more harm than their kind always has
"I do believe I detect a bit of class resentment here."
Again I ignored him and continued on. "But you have ambitions. Everything has been but a stepping stone for you. When you got out of the Army you whizzed through law school and then had a job waiting with one of the Wall Street bond firms. You made still more money, even though you didn't really need it. A few people got screwed, but so what? I mean, shit happens, doesn't it? Your skirts are clean. Besides, you were just marking time anyway. And now you're getting interested in running for congress."
"How on earth did you know that?" He was beginning to take me seriously.
"I told you I'm from the future, fool. I know what will happen if. . . How did you put it? If certain things aren't done, was it? First would come three terms in he House, and then an easy election to the Senate. You're a natural demagogue, you know. I'll give you that. You know how to push all the right buttons. Red states and blue states both, you know where the prejudices and insecurities lie. You will have a national reputation even before you enter the Senate. Then near the end of your first term a major crisis, one engineered by you and your backers, will force the resignation of a seated president for the second time in history. You'll be picked to replace the vice president when he moves up. Your party wins the next election, but soon the president dies under what can only be described as peculiar circumstances during another major crisis. You emerge as the American savior. Only in reality, you're the American Caligula."
"I've heard about enough of this," he said. "You are a thoroughly unpleasant man."
"And I've said about enough. Except to note that you would never have made anything really decent of yourself, no matter what. Still, you wouldn’t have been the monster you are had if your older sister hadn't seduced you when you were fifteen. A relationship, I might add, that's continued right down to today."
He turned white and froze, motionless. I gave him my coldest smile. "That's why I compared you to Caligula. Remember his sister? But you're actually worse. Caligula was just a spoiled brat with absolute power who wanted to have orgies. Do you recall what Alfred told Batman in The Dark Knight? He said 'Some men don't want money or power. They just want to watch the world burn.' That's what's in the future unless something happens to stop you. And I'm that something."
I rose to my feet. "How about you? What kind of movies to you watch?"
"I don't feel like having a civil conversation with a man who has accused me of having sex with my sister."
"Accused? Hell, man, we've got 3-D halos of the two of you going at it hammer-and-tongs. But back to the movies. I'm a big film fan, myself. Love the Coen Brothers stuff." I fell into a phony Italian accent and snarled, "Like I tell my boys, always put one in da brain. That’s from their Miller's Crossing. Great flick. Johnny Caspar to Tom Reagan. Always put one in da brain."
He looked perplexed. I slipped my hand beneath my coat, came out with the little silenced .22 Magnum auto, and shot him right in the center of the forehead. The hollow-point bullet exited the back of his skull, making a colorful little jet of blood and brains as it went. For a moment his feet beat a grim tattoo on the floor, but his eyes had had morphed into dead fish eyes that told me it was nothing but reflex. My job was done, and there was no to linger. I dropped the gun in his lap and flicked the return switch in my belt unit. There came a moment of vertigo when the Harvard Club blurred out and the time vault in my Galveston home materialized.
I hung up my gear and locked the room. Out on the front porch I sat down with a bottle of good scotch whiskey and a crystal glass. It was just after sunset and the sea breeze was starting to pick up. I sipped my drink and stared off toward the Gulf, trying to decide what to do with my two weeks upcoming holiday. Lorenzo had bought a half dozen of Botticelli's paintings the morning we visited his shop, and then he invited us both to his palace for dinner. I think I may take him up on it. We also found one small canvas that is not mentioned in any catalogue of his works. That is because it now hangs in my parlor here in Galveston. Imagine that: a freshly painted Botticelli.
It's a tolerable world we live in. It's far from perfect, but it has plenty of good people, fine art, great music, loyal friends, innocent children, and fresh spring flowers. It's a world worth preserving in spite its flaws. I laughed for a moment about what DeJong had said about how saving it is sometimes unpleasant. It never is to me. I love my work.
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He has published two crime novels "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead" with St. Martin's Press, NY. His third, "Nights of The Red Moon" is due out next spring.
Most people think parallel worlds lie in the future. They see every significant event as generating several outcomes, each of which makes its own timeline. Modern physics seems to support this idea as well. But it's all wrong. The parallel worlds are in the past, and the Adjusters work hard to keep them there. I should know. I'm one of the Adjusters.
I live in a renovated Victorian house in Galveston's historic old East End. It's more room than I need, but time workers tend to be pack rats. We almost always develop the habit of collecting mementos from the various ages and places we have visited, so a little extra space is advisable. Besides, Galveston has been my family's home for generations, and when you range as far and wide as I do, you need some connection to your roots.
I was coming off a month's vacation and looking at two hard weeks ahead. Major projects that had been put off too long. The first stop was Rome, December, 799 A.D. It wasn't too hard to get an audience with Pope Leo III. Gold is a universal lubricant. It will get you in just about anywhere, then or now. And it didn't take much to convince him. Charles The Great, King of the Franks---known to history as Charlemagne---was in town, having rescued Leo from the Roman mobs that had sought to kill him. The man had fled to Paderborn where he petitioned Charles for relief. On the advice of his own confessor, Alcuin of York, Charles moved his army south across the Alps into Rome and reinstated Leo in the papal palace. Which left the Pope in his debt. Not the best place to be in that politically-charged world. The Roman throne in the West had been vacant for three hundred and fifty years. In the east, in Byzantium, a woman reigned as Emperor, recognized by neither the papacy nor by the Franks.
"When Charles kneels to take the Eucharist," I said to Leo in Church Latin. "Crown him Emperor of the Romans. Put the crown quickly on his head. Do not hesitate. Not only will you elevate him to this great office, but you will be asserting the power of the papacy to propose and dispose. He will be grateful and in your debt rather than you in his."
"Do you think?" he asked, a bit of greed mixed with fear in his eyes.
"I know."
"But what if he is offended?"
"King Charles is a deeply religious man, Holy Father, a man with great respect for the papacy and the Church. Be spiritual in your dealings with him and he cannot be offended."
My flawless logic plus twenty kilos of gold carried the day, and the outcome is recorded in every good library in the world. This action revived the imperial tradition in the west and set a precedent that the emperors’ authority rested on the approval of the pope. Although the imperial title did not confer any actual power on Charlemagne, it did give legitimacy to his rule over central Italy, a fact that the Byzantine emperor would acknowledge a decade hence. The Holy Roman Empire created that day was to last, in one form or another, for a thousand years, and I was off to...
Florence, Spring, 1470. The man across the table from me was Lorenzo de' Medici, known to history as "Il Magnifico"---Lorenzo the Magnificent. Now but twenty-one years old and ascended to the head of the clan upon his father's recent death, he was destined to be the Renaissance's greatest patron of the arts. I had just added a significant amount of money to our account with his family bank. We keep deposits with sound banks in all the ages where we work. And no banks were more sound than the Medici Bank. Lorenzo might have been the wealthiest man in the world at that time, but he had been brought up in the banking business and had a banker's instincts. Which meant that he liked to meet the big depositors personally. But he was a convivial man and our conversation drifted away from finance and on to other matters.
"His name again?" he asked me. "This painter you mentioned, I mean."
"Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, but he goes by Sandro Botticelli. A diminutive man, but a great wit."
He laughed. "Botticelli... The little barrel. A small fellow, eh?"
"That's right."
"But one who likes to eat, judging from his nickname?"
"That he does," I replied. "He just opened a workshop down by the Arno, near the Ponte Vecchio."
"Why haven't I heard of him if he is so good?"
"Some say he has been in Hungary for several years, working for the archbishop there. They also say that if his work proves unpopular here he will return. That is the problem. He has no name here. Yet he was born in Florence, and it would be tragic for the city to loose so talented a son. Especially to the Hungarians."
He looked at me sharply. "You are not Florentine yourself. I believe you told me you are from Regensburg, so why should you care?"
I gave him a shrug and a disarming smile. "Like Jesus, I think a prophet should not be without honor in his own land."
He laughed. "There is a wine shop near the Vecchio. Let us have a glass and then I will view the work of this paragon. Perhaps I will like some of his canvasses."
"He needs more than the sale of a few canvasses, Excellency," I said bluntly. "He needs a patron. He was an apprentice to Fra' Lippi, you know."
I heard a sharp intake of breath. "I had no idea. Then he must be good. Lippi will not tolerate anything but the best. Why, once he even snarled dismissively at some of my sonnets. Can you imagine such cheek?"
I smiled an easy smile. "Great talents can afford to be cheeky, whereas men such as ourselves..." I let my voice taper off.
He rose from his chair with a laugh. "All too true, my friend. Let us go have that glass of wine. I find art more invigorating than business, especially in the springtime."
And as they say, the rest is history.
#
After Florence came a couple of minor assignments. In the first, I had to get a particular red-headed young Missourian extracted from the Confederate Army and out west where he would be safe to write the books he was meant to write. Next was the kidnapping in Philadelphia in 1934 I had to prevent. Nuts and bolts matters.
It's not always this easy. Three years ago a fellow operative who was also a close friend of mine killed herself after she saved Hitler's life in 1921. Why save Hitler, of all people, you might ask? Because the alternative would have been worse. Much, much worse. Take my word for it. And therein lay the problem. She had the facts from both timelines, ours and the one that wasn't allowed to happen. But she couldn't get her head around the fact that she preserved the Holocaust. I don't know that I could have either, but my next job was one I had no qualms about even though it was to be the first time I had to kill in the line of duty.
#
The Harvard Club, New York, NY, January, 2012. Roland DeJong was a tall, slim, handsome smartass who exuded a sense of entitlement the way a field hand exudes sweat. I found him sitting in the reading room, the New York Times in his lap, a snifter of fine old brandy at hand. A low reading table, now piled with magazines, separated two heavy wingchairs of dark brown leather. I sat down across the table from him and made no effort to choose anything to read. He gave me a manly smile and introduced himself quietly.
"I know who you are," I said.
"Really? I'm flattered. What class were you in?"
"I'm not a Harvard man. You might say I'm a guest here."
He nodded, but his demeanor became just the tiniest bit patronizing. "Where are you from?"
"The future."
He barely blinked at this. I suppose he thought of himself as a sophisticated man, one used to sophisticated word games.
"You don't say."
"But I do say."
"Whose future, then?" he asked with a sardonic smile. "Mine?"
"You don't have a future."
"Ahhh... I see. Then you must have been sent here to prevent some terrible catastrophe from befalling me. Is that it?"
I shook my head. "No. As it happens, I am your catastrophe. I know more about you than you know about yourself. We have a good research department. Best in the world, in fact."
"But why research me? To what purpose?"
I ignored his question. "Your family has been wealthy for five generations. You went to an exclusive prep school, then on to Harvard for your bachelors in pre-law. After that you were given a commission in the Army which was followed by Special Forces training, then an assignment in conjunction with the C.I.A. where you became expert at 'extracting' information in Afghanistan. The 'Special Methods Section,' they called it. Did you have fun?"
He gave me a crinkle-browed frown that was as false as the smile the serpent gave Eve. "So you're one of those people," he said. "Is that Sheehan woman still involved? I've been down this road before."
"So go down it one more time. Was it fun?"
"It's not always pleasant," he said. "Protecting civilization, I mean. Certain things have to be done no matter how repugnant we find them."
I nodded sagely. "Indeed. I can see you and a handful of cohorts forty years from today, sitting around some clubby room much like this one. Like the hunter home from the hill, old warriors, home from the foreign fields of empire. A crackling fire in a stone fireplace. Rowing trophies on the mantle, photos of long dead members from decades past hang here and there on finely paneled walls. Leather and brass and polished wood everywhere. You sip your brandy and say, "Nasty business, that. Afghanistan, I mean. But somebody had to do it.' Your friends all cough and snort and nod in passable imitations of Victorian gentlemen, and all those present agree that, indeed it was a nasty business, but one that had to be done on behalf of all the naïve little people out in the world who believe in quaint notions like common decency the rule of law."
He frowned again, but this one was for real. "Your point being?"
"My point being that most such people are really just harmless oafs. Or at least they do no more harm than their kind always has
"I do believe I detect a bit of class resentment here."
Again I ignored him and continued on. "But you have ambitions. Everything has been but a stepping stone for you. When you got out of the Army you whizzed through law school and then had a job waiting with one of the Wall Street bond firms. You made still more money, even though you didn't really need it. A few people got screwed, but so what? I mean, shit happens, doesn't it? Your skirts are clean. Besides, you were just marking time anyway. And now you're getting interested in running for congress."
"How on earth did you know that?" He was beginning to take me seriously.
"I told you I'm from the future, fool. I know what will happen if. . . How did you put it? If certain things aren't done, was it? First would come three terms in he House, and then an easy election to the Senate. You're a natural demagogue, you know. I'll give you that. You know how to push all the right buttons. Red states and blue states both, you know where the prejudices and insecurities lie. You will have a national reputation even before you enter the Senate. Then near the end of your first term a major crisis, one engineered by you and your backers, will force the resignation of a seated president for the second time in history. You'll be picked to replace the vice president when he moves up. Your party wins the next election, but soon the president dies under what can only be described as peculiar circumstances during another major crisis. You emerge as the American savior. Only in reality, you're the American Caligula."
"I've heard about enough of this," he said. "You are a thoroughly unpleasant man."
"And I've said about enough. Except to note that you would never have made anything really decent of yourself, no matter what. Still, you wouldn’t have been the monster you are had if your older sister hadn't seduced you when you were fifteen. A relationship, I might add, that's continued right down to today."
He turned white and froze, motionless. I gave him my coldest smile. "That's why I compared you to Caligula. Remember his sister? But you're actually worse. Caligula was just a spoiled brat with absolute power who wanted to have orgies. Do you recall what Alfred told Batman in The Dark Knight? He said 'Some men don't want money or power. They just want to watch the world burn.' That's what's in the future unless something happens to stop you. And I'm that something."
I rose to my feet. "How about you? What kind of movies to you watch?"
"I don't feel like having a civil conversation with a man who has accused me of having sex with my sister."
"Accused? Hell, man, we've got 3-D halos of the two of you going at it hammer-and-tongs. But back to the movies. I'm a big film fan, myself. Love the Coen Brothers stuff." I fell into a phony Italian accent and snarled, "Like I tell my boys, always put one in da brain. That’s from their Miller's Crossing. Great flick. Johnny Caspar to Tom Reagan. Always put one in da brain."
He looked perplexed. I slipped my hand beneath my coat, came out with the little silenced .22 Magnum auto, and shot him right in the center of the forehead. The hollow-point bullet exited the back of his skull, making a colorful little jet of blood and brains as it went. For a moment his feet beat a grim tattoo on the floor, but his eyes had had morphed into dead fish eyes that told me it was nothing but reflex. My job was done, and there was no to linger. I dropped the gun in his lap and flicked the return switch in my belt unit. There came a moment of vertigo when the Harvard Club blurred out and the time vault in my Galveston home materialized.
I hung up my gear and locked the room. Out on the front porch I sat down with a bottle of good scotch whiskey and a crystal glass. It was just after sunset and the sea breeze was starting to pick up. I sipped my drink and stared off toward the Gulf, trying to decide what to do with my two weeks upcoming holiday. Lorenzo had bought a half dozen of Botticelli's paintings the morning we visited his shop, and then he invited us both to his palace for dinner. I think I may take him up on it. We also found one small canvas that is not mentioned in any catalogue of his works. That is because it now hangs in my parlor here in Galveston. Imagine that: a freshly painted Botticelli.
It's a tolerable world we live in. It's far from perfect, but it has plenty of good people, fine art, great music, loyal friends, innocent children, and fresh spring flowers. It's a world worth preserving in spite its flaws. I laughed for a moment about what DeJong had said about how saving it is sometimes unpleasant. It never is to me. I love my work.
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He has published two crime novels "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead" with St. Martin's Press, NY. His third, "Nights of The Red Moon" is due out next spring.
July 18, 2009
The Grays
By Milton T. Burton © 2009
Even though I've been a Baptist all my life, I've always viewed it as a blessing that Father Cozart was at the theater that night. The rest of us were just average Joes, people with no special credibility. But Cozart was a theologian and philosopher with an international reputation who had been associated with one of the most prestigious Catholic universities in the country for three decades. He was also a kind, unpretentious man with a gentle demeanor that inspired trust. The two of us happened to have adjoining seats at the Jane Street Theater one evening, and we struck up a conversation before the performance started.
It was my first trip to New York City where my daughter had been living for three years. She and her fiancé cooked up the idea of taking me to the play. The theater was a respectable establishment, but one that was in a section of Greenwich Village that was almost deserted in the evenings. Perfect for an after hours robbery. After the final curtain, we were all walking toward the nearest cab stand when the four young thugs slipped out of an alleyway. I won't waste a lot of time describing them. Gangbanger clothes and smirky, feral expressions. It didn't take an Einstein to figure out what they were after. We froze and they smirked, their bright, gleeful eyes drinking in our fear. Then two of them pulled knives. Large knives. I put my arm around my daughter and drew her close. Cozart was calm beside me but I could hear him whispering a prayer in what sounded like Latin. Old habits die hard, I guess.
What happened next happened exactly as Father Cozart and I told the world on Larry King Live and a half dozen other shows. The iconic little man just appeared out of nowhere, standing between us and the muggers. One second he wasn't there, and the next second he was. You've seen his picture, I know: the silvery coveralls, the slanted, oval eyes, the tiny, almost lipless mouth. That face is found in magazines and books and on internet websites by the score. It's also prominently displayed on roadside signs outside Roswell, New Mexico. I later learned that UFO researchers refer to his type as "The Grays." Only this one was a little different. Besides his shiny coveralls he was wearing a low-slung Colt Frontier .45, a fine western hat and a pair of cowboy boots.
"Huh!?" exclaimed the biggest mugger.
"I didn't say nothing, pardner," the little man said, his voice soft and metallic. "But I was about to point out that you hombres can't expect me to just stand here and let you rob these fine folks. Now can you?"
"Huh?" the big thug asked again.
The little man turned his head toward us. "Redundant, ain't he?" he asked. He turned back to the muggers and leaned forward to point at two of them. "You two need to get while the gettin's good. I'm lettin' you boys live to see another sunrise. You ain't done murder yet, so you can still get your houses in order if you're of a mind to."
The frontier brogue coming in that machine-like alien voice was eerie and sent chills down my spine. We all stood motionless for a few seconds. "Git!" the little man barked. The two thugs he'd pointed to began to back away. He gave his attention to the remaining pair. "But you rascals," he said. "You're already killers, so. . ."
The big Colt seemed to leapt into his hand as if by magic. It roared twice, and the remaining two muggers fell to the ground, a small neat hole in the forehead of each.
There came a long, stunned silence. Then the shiny little man turned to us, blew an imaginary puff of smoke from the muzzle of his gun, twirled it expertly back into its holster, and said, "As you folks get to know us better you'll come to understand that we've got real firm ideas about what's right and what's wrong." He winked one of his big, almond-shaped eyes at us and then vanished so quickly that the air made an audible "pop" as it rushed in to fill the void where he'd been standing.
My daughter and her fiancé refused to talk to the press. Thus Father Cozart and I became the two-week wonder. We had the fifteen minutes of fame neither of us wanted, and after that the whole incident dropped from the world's radar screen. I am convinced that since the coming of television people rarely believe or disbelieve anything. They merely watch. Four reputable people, one of whom was a famous theologian, had seen an alien, and the whole thing was allowed to drift onto the back page. No mater. Cozart and I talked it over, and we agreed that we'd done our duty and tried to alert mankind. If mankind refused to take heed, then so be it.
There was a little ribbing when I went back to work, and the company president called me in and pointed out that the firm offered to pay for "counseling" for long-time employees. I demurred. After a few days even the sidelong glances ceased and things returned to normal. Father Cozart and I had our vindication, though. It came some six weeks after the incident when a dozen of the little men appeared out of nowhere in the House chamber during the president's state of the union message. The one with the Colt and the cowboy hat was there, and two were dressed as Knights Templar. One wore a Roman toga and a laurel crown while three were decked out as Robin Hood and a pair of his merry men. But their costumes didn't really matter because that's the night the hangings began.
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He have published two crime novels with St. Martin's Press, NY titled "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead."
Even though I've been a Baptist all my life, I've always viewed it as a blessing that Father Cozart was at the theater that night. The rest of us were just average Joes, people with no special credibility. But Cozart was a theologian and philosopher with an international reputation who had been associated with one of the most prestigious Catholic universities in the country for three decades. He was also a kind, unpretentious man with a gentle demeanor that inspired trust. The two of us happened to have adjoining seats at the Jane Street Theater one evening, and we struck up a conversation before the performance started.
It was my first trip to New York City where my daughter had been living for three years. She and her fiancé cooked up the idea of taking me to the play. The theater was a respectable establishment, but one that was in a section of Greenwich Village that was almost deserted in the evenings. Perfect for an after hours robbery. After the final curtain, we were all walking toward the nearest cab stand when the four young thugs slipped out of an alleyway. I won't waste a lot of time describing them. Gangbanger clothes and smirky, feral expressions. It didn't take an Einstein to figure out what they were after. We froze and they smirked, their bright, gleeful eyes drinking in our fear. Then two of them pulled knives. Large knives. I put my arm around my daughter and drew her close. Cozart was calm beside me but I could hear him whispering a prayer in what sounded like Latin. Old habits die hard, I guess.
What happened next happened exactly as Father Cozart and I told the world on Larry King Live and a half dozen other shows. The iconic little man just appeared out of nowhere, standing between us and the muggers. One second he wasn't there, and the next second he was. You've seen his picture, I know: the silvery coveralls, the slanted, oval eyes, the tiny, almost lipless mouth. That face is found in magazines and books and on internet websites by the score. It's also prominently displayed on roadside signs outside Roswell, New Mexico. I later learned that UFO researchers refer to his type as "The Grays." Only this one was a little different. Besides his shiny coveralls he was wearing a low-slung Colt Frontier .45, a fine western hat and a pair of cowboy boots.
"Huh!?" exclaimed the biggest mugger.
"I didn't say nothing, pardner," the little man said, his voice soft and metallic. "But I was about to point out that you hombres can't expect me to just stand here and let you rob these fine folks. Now can you?"
"Huh?" the big thug asked again.
The little man turned his head toward us. "Redundant, ain't he?" he asked. He turned back to the muggers and leaned forward to point at two of them. "You two need to get while the gettin's good. I'm lettin' you boys live to see another sunrise. You ain't done murder yet, so you can still get your houses in order if you're of a mind to."
The frontier brogue coming in that machine-like alien voice was eerie and sent chills down my spine. We all stood motionless for a few seconds. "Git!" the little man barked. The two thugs he'd pointed to began to back away. He gave his attention to the remaining pair. "But you rascals," he said. "You're already killers, so. . ."
The big Colt seemed to leapt into his hand as if by magic. It roared twice, and the remaining two muggers fell to the ground, a small neat hole in the forehead of each.
There came a long, stunned silence. Then the shiny little man turned to us, blew an imaginary puff of smoke from the muzzle of his gun, twirled it expertly back into its holster, and said, "As you folks get to know us better you'll come to understand that we've got real firm ideas about what's right and what's wrong." He winked one of his big, almond-shaped eyes at us and then vanished so quickly that the air made an audible "pop" as it rushed in to fill the void where he'd been standing.
My daughter and her fiancé refused to talk to the press. Thus Father Cozart and I became the two-week wonder. We had the fifteen minutes of fame neither of us wanted, and after that the whole incident dropped from the world's radar screen. I am convinced that since the coming of television people rarely believe or disbelieve anything. They merely watch. Four reputable people, one of whom was a famous theologian, had seen an alien, and the whole thing was allowed to drift onto the back page. No mater. Cozart and I talked it over, and we agreed that we'd done our duty and tried to alert mankind. If mankind refused to take heed, then so be it.
There was a little ribbing when I went back to work, and the company president called me in and pointed out that the firm offered to pay for "counseling" for long-time employees. I demurred. After a few days even the sidelong glances ceased and things returned to normal. Father Cozart and I had our vindication, though. It came some six weeks after the incident when a dozen of the little men appeared out of nowhere in the House chamber during the president's state of the union message. The one with the Colt and the cowboy hat was there, and two were dressed as Knights Templar. One wore a Roman toga and a laurel crown while three were decked out as Robin Hood and a pair of his merry men. But their costumes didn't really matter because that's the night the hangings began.
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He have published two crime novels with St. Martin's Press, NY titled "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead."
June 16, 2009
The Collector
By Milton T. Burton © 2009
He was questioned by two detectives from the Organized Crime Squad---one older, tall, thin and gray haired; the other younger, short, thickset and bald. Raymond Chandler said they always came paired that way. But the old man didn't read Chandler. In fact, he didn't read anything but Stockman Magazine and the local newspaper. A cattleman from deep East Texas, it was his first trip to New York---a visit to his only granddaughter who did something he didn't understand in the fashion industry. She knew he didn't grasp what she did and that he only feigned interest when she started chattering on about her job, as she was prone to do. But that didn't matter. What mattered was that he was her granddad and she loved him and was delighted to have him visit her.
She'd taken him to a fancy, upscale Italian restaurant for his first night in the Big Apple. It started out as a fine evening. He might be a country man, but he loved that Dago food and didn't mind to tell Mr. Anybody. Dago wine wasn't all that bad either. He was on his third glass and having the time of his life. Then the man in the cape battered his way through the side wall of the restaurant and strode their way, a move that got everybody's attention since the wall was double layer brick.
"When I first seen him, I thought he was coming for us," the old man told the detectives.
"But it was the folks at the table beside ours he had his eye on. There were five of them there, all men, all clustered around this rich looking older guy--"
"That was Don Orsini," the stumpy guy said.
"Who?" the old man asked.
"Vittorio Orsini," the slim detective said. "He is, or I guess I should say he was, the most powerful mob boss in Manhattan."
"One of them Mafia fellows, huh?" the old man asked.
"Right," said the slim man.
"Well, he sure looked the part," the old man said. "All that fine-barbered, wavy, silver hair. That hair made it right easy for that joker in the cape to tote his head away once he got done with him."
"How long did it take him to come through that wall?" the stumpy cop asked.
"About as long as it would take one of us to rip through one made out of a single layer of newspaper. He just knocked a hole in it and sorta brushed it aside."
"That's what the other witnesses said," the slim cop said with a nod.
The old man nodded with him. It was a meeting of the minds. They were in substantial agreement that the fellow in the cape was one unique hombre. "Have you ever had something like this happen before?" the old man asked.
The two detectives looked at each other for a couple of seconds. "We probably shouldn't tell you this," the slim cop said. "But, hell. . . It's going to in all the papers tomorrow because there's no way to keep it under wraps. Orsini was the fourth one this evening. All done within an hour of one another, all high-level mob figures. All done the same way. Same M.O. Four heads. He took 'em all."
"You don't say?" the old man said calmly.
The slim man blinked a few times in surprise. "That doesn't bother you?"
The old man shrugged. "I don't see no reason why it should.
The chunky guy laughed a rueful little laugh. "Damn! You are unflappable, aren't you?"
This earned him a cold smile. "Son, I was in the first wave ashore at Omaha Beach. I seen more of this kind of shit my first hour in France than you're gonna see in your whole lifetime here in this big city. So, no. It don't flap me none."
"What did he look like?" the slim man asked quickly. "I mean the guy in the cape."
"He was about six feet tall, graying hair, a bit of a paunch. I guess he was in his late fifties or early sixties. He was wearing Bermuda shorts, a college sweatshirt and that red cape. But I don't think it was a real cape. It looked more like a table cloth to me, something he'd just tied around his neck to look like a cape."
"Anything else?" the stumpy man asked.
"I'm pretty sure he was from Texas."
"That's news. What makes you say that?"
"Well, for one thing that was a University of Texas sweatshirt that he was wearing. Then there was his accent, the way he talked."
"You're pretty sure about that?"
"I don't think there's any doubt about it."
The old man went on to relate how the guy in the shorts and sweatshirt just walked over to Orsini's table as bold as could be and announced in a loud voice, "My name is Sue! How do you do?"
Orsini had looked at one of his capos and asked, "Who's this asshole?"
The man in the cape ignored the question. His face was happy, his eyes bright and gleeful. "That's a line from an old Johnny Cash song about a boy named Sue," he said. "You see, this guy's daddy named him Sue and then abandoned him, knowing he'd have to grow up tough with a name like that. That boy grew up tough, all right. And he searched for his daddy long and hard. When he finally found him, that's how he introduced himself. 'MY NAME IS SUE!'"
"What is this shit?" Orsini asked, looking around at his capos. "Can't a man eat in peace on his own turf any more?"
The intruder gave him a conspiratorial wink. The thugs sat transfixed, motionless. They weren't used to goofy-looking old dudes in capes and sweatshirts who just tooled right on up to their table and started babbling away about Johnny Cash.
The caped man continued. "After that, the boy and his daddy got into a big tussle, rolling around down on the floor gouging eyes and what-not. Later in the song there's a line about how pappy hacked off a piece of his ear. But I'm not after ears tonight. I came for your head."
The stumpy cop whistled softly. "So he just told him straight up what he was after?"
"Damn right he did."
"Go on," the slim cop urged.
"Well, they all just sat there staring at him for a few seconds, then one of the young ones stood up and started to reach under his coat. That's when the guy in the cape backhanded him. Killed him too. That backhand knocked that fool clean across the room. His head was plum lopsided on his neck, and what was left of his face looked like fresh hamburger. That's when the others come out with the guns. They must have shot that fellow a dozen times or so, but it didn't amount to nothing. I don't know where the bullets went. They didn't bounce off of him or anything like that. It was more like he absorbed 'em."
"Then what happened?" This from the thickset cop.
"Well, he just stood there grinning at them boys. They didn't grin back. I can promise you that. One of them was sharper than the rest, though."
"How so?" the slim cop asked.
"Well, he dropped his gun, made the sign of the cross and tore into the Hail Marys. I mean to tell you he went to praying lickety-split. To me, that meant that he'd figured out that the whole bunch of 'em was in way over their heads. And speaking of heads, that's when he done it."
Both cops were spellbound. "Yes?" they asked in unison.
The old man nodded. "Right. He grabbed that Don Whoever-He-Was by the hair, reached around to the back of his belt and come out with that big meat cleaver. Then he jerked his head down there on the table and WHACK!! One lick was all it took."
The spell was broken when a third cop stuck his head in the door. The slim cop went over and the two of them talked quietly for a few seconds. When he turned back his face was grim. "Two more," he said.
"Same guy?" his partner asked.
"Must be. Same description, same M.O., same kind of sweatshirt even. The first one was Maurice Combs, the black drug lord up in Harlem. The second was Oleg Orlovski, the head of the Russian mob. He got him at his daughter's birthday party."
"Yeah?"
The slim man nodded. "Helped himself to a big piece of the cake, too."
"That's what?" the stumpy cop asked. "Seven?"
"I think so."
"That's a lot of heads," the old man mused thoughtfully. "I wonder what he's planning to do with 'em."
The stumpy cop laughed. It was a stress-born laugh, the laugh of a man out of his element and trying to make light of it. "Maybe he collects the damn things," he said.
"Maybe he crawls into his coffin at dawn," the slim man muttered bitterly. "Maybe he's from Mars. Maybe, maybe maybe. The truth is that we're up against something we don't understand."
The old man laughed. "He ain't no vampire, if that's what you mean. I can promise you that. Wouldn't no Texas vampire be caught dead eating a Russian birthday cake."
The pair gaped at him. "Are you joking?" the stumpy man finally asked.
The old man shrugged and sighed. "I'd like to see my granddaughter, if you don't mind."
"In a minute," the tall one said. "She's fine. A little shaky, but not in hysterics like one might expect."
"I'm not surprised about that," the old man replied proudly. "The apples don't fall very far from the tree in our family."
They both stared at him across the table. The old dude seemed calm as ice. Happy, even. Maybe he'd had a few old memories rekindled this evening. Omaha Beach the tall cop thought and shuddered, devoutly grateful that he hadn't made that one. "We just need to ask you a couple more questions," he finally said.
"Fire away and let's be shed of it," the old man said.
The tall cop nodded. "The guy in the cape. We were told that you spoke with him."
"Damn right I did."
"Go on."
"It was just before he flew off. He was just standing there holding that fellow's head by the hair with it dripping blood on the floor and all. He turned to me and my granddaughter and gave us a kind of salute with his free hand and said 'See you folks later.' That's when I said what I did."
Both cops were leaning eagerly forward, transfixed by the old man's story. "Which was?" the tall one asked, the suspense almost palpable in the room.
"I asked, 'What's your hurry?'"
"Why that, of all things?" the stumpy cop asked, his voice a near whisper.
The old man shrugged. "Hell, I don't know. It's just what popped into my head."
"Did he respond in any way?"
"Yeah. He looked at me for a second, then he grinned real big and said 'There's a really bad-ass son-of-a-bitch after me, and I aim to get out of his way.' Then he just launched up through that damn ceiling like a rocket ship."
The third cop was back a the door. This time it was the stumpy man who spoke to him. "He hit Newark," he said as he returned to the table. "Two crime bosses. Same guy, same M.O. Only this time there was a cop on the scene. He shot him too, but it didn't have any more effect than it did when Orsini's button men did it. And he told the cop he was on his way to Washington."
The tall detective propped his elbows on the table and cradled his head in his hands.
"Where does it end?" he asked, his voice tinged with wonder.
The old man cackled. "End?" he asked. "Hell, it sounds to me like this old boy is just getting started. I do wonder about one thing, though."
"Yeah? What's that?" the stumpy cop asked.
"Do you reckon he might have been telling the truth about that bad-ass he claimed was after him?"
They regarded the old man for a few moments with horror, then the slim man spoke.
"God, I sure hope not!"
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He have published two crime novels with St. Martin's Press, NY titled "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead."
He was questioned by two detectives from the Organized Crime Squad---one older, tall, thin and gray haired; the other younger, short, thickset and bald. Raymond Chandler said they always came paired that way. But the old man didn't read Chandler. In fact, he didn't read anything but Stockman Magazine and the local newspaper. A cattleman from deep East Texas, it was his first trip to New York---a visit to his only granddaughter who did something he didn't understand in the fashion industry. She knew he didn't grasp what she did and that he only feigned interest when she started chattering on about her job, as she was prone to do. But that didn't matter. What mattered was that he was her granddad and she loved him and was delighted to have him visit her.
She'd taken him to a fancy, upscale Italian restaurant for his first night in the Big Apple. It started out as a fine evening. He might be a country man, but he loved that Dago food and didn't mind to tell Mr. Anybody. Dago wine wasn't all that bad either. He was on his third glass and having the time of his life. Then the man in the cape battered his way through the side wall of the restaurant and strode their way, a move that got everybody's attention since the wall was double layer brick.
"When I first seen him, I thought he was coming for us," the old man told the detectives.
"But it was the folks at the table beside ours he had his eye on. There were five of them there, all men, all clustered around this rich looking older guy--"
"That was Don Orsini," the stumpy guy said.
"Who?" the old man asked.
"Vittorio Orsini," the slim detective said. "He is, or I guess I should say he was, the most powerful mob boss in Manhattan."
"One of them Mafia fellows, huh?" the old man asked.
"Right," said the slim man.
"Well, he sure looked the part," the old man said. "All that fine-barbered, wavy, silver hair. That hair made it right easy for that joker in the cape to tote his head away once he got done with him."
"How long did it take him to come through that wall?" the stumpy cop asked.
"About as long as it would take one of us to rip through one made out of a single layer of newspaper. He just knocked a hole in it and sorta brushed it aside."
"That's what the other witnesses said," the slim cop said with a nod.
The old man nodded with him. It was a meeting of the minds. They were in substantial agreement that the fellow in the cape was one unique hombre. "Have you ever had something like this happen before?" the old man asked.
The two detectives looked at each other for a couple of seconds. "We probably shouldn't tell you this," the slim cop said. "But, hell. . . It's going to in all the papers tomorrow because there's no way to keep it under wraps. Orsini was the fourth one this evening. All done within an hour of one another, all high-level mob figures. All done the same way. Same M.O. Four heads. He took 'em all."
"You don't say?" the old man said calmly.
The slim man blinked a few times in surprise. "That doesn't bother you?"
The old man shrugged. "I don't see no reason why it should.
The chunky guy laughed a rueful little laugh. "Damn! You are unflappable, aren't you?"
This earned him a cold smile. "Son, I was in the first wave ashore at Omaha Beach. I seen more of this kind of shit my first hour in France than you're gonna see in your whole lifetime here in this big city. So, no. It don't flap me none."
"What did he look like?" the slim man asked quickly. "I mean the guy in the cape."
"He was about six feet tall, graying hair, a bit of a paunch. I guess he was in his late fifties or early sixties. He was wearing Bermuda shorts, a college sweatshirt and that red cape. But I don't think it was a real cape. It looked more like a table cloth to me, something he'd just tied around his neck to look like a cape."
"Anything else?" the stumpy man asked.
"I'm pretty sure he was from Texas."
"That's news. What makes you say that?"
"Well, for one thing that was a University of Texas sweatshirt that he was wearing. Then there was his accent, the way he talked."
"You're pretty sure about that?"
"I don't think there's any doubt about it."
The old man went on to relate how the guy in the shorts and sweatshirt just walked over to Orsini's table as bold as could be and announced in a loud voice, "My name is Sue! How do you do?"
Orsini had looked at one of his capos and asked, "Who's this asshole?"
The man in the cape ignored the question. His face was happy, his eyes bright and gleeful. "That's a line from an old Johnny Cash song about a boy named Sue," he said. "You see, this guy's daddy named him Sue and then abandoned him, knowing he'd have to grow up tough with a name like that. That boy grew up tough, all right. And he searched for his daddy long and hard. When he finally found him, that's how he introduced himself. 'MY NAME IS SUE!'"
"What is this shit?" Orsini asked, looking around at his capos. "Can't a man eat in peace on his own turf any more?"
The intruder gave him a conspiratorial wink. The thugs sat transfixed, motionless. They weren't used to goofy-looking old dudes in capes and sweatshirts who just tooled right on up to their table and started babbling away about Johnny Cash.
The caped man continued. "After that, the boy and his daddy got into a big tussle, rolling around down on the floor gouging eyes and what-not. Later in the song there's a line about how pappy hacked off a piece of his ear. But I'm not after ears tonight. I came for your head."
The stumpy cop whistled softly. "So he just told him straight up what he was after?"
"Damn right he did."
"Go on," the slim cop urged.
"Well, they all just sat there staring at him for a few seconds, then one of the young ones stood up and started to reach under his coat. That's when the guy in the cape backhanded him. Killed him too. That backhand knocked that fool clean across the room. His head was plum lopsided on his neck, and what was left of his face looked like fresh hamburger. That's when the others come out with the guns. They must have shot that fellow a dozen times or so, but it didn't amount to nothing. I don't know where the bullets went. They didn't bounce off of him or anything like that. It was more like he absorbed 'em."
"Then what happened?" This from the thickset cop.
"Well, he just stood there grinning at them boys. They didn't grin back. I can promise you that. One of them was sharper than the rest, though."
"How so?" the slim cop asked.
"Well, he dropped his gun, made the sign of the cross and tore into the Hail Marys. I mean to tell you he went to praying lickety-split. To me, that meant that he'd figured out that the whole bunch of 'em was in way over their heads. And speaking of heads, that's when he done it."
Both cops were spellbound. "Yes?" they asked in unison.
The old man nodded. "Right. He grabbed that Don Whoever-He-Was by the hair, reached around to the back of his belt and come out with that big meat cleaver. Then he jerked his head down there on the table and WHACK!! One lick was all it took."
The spell was broken when a third cop stuck his head in the door. The slim cop went over and the two of them talked quietly for a few seconds. When he turned back his face was grim. "Two more," he said.
"Same guy?" his partner asked.
"Must be. Same description, same M.O., same kind of sweatshirt even. The first one was Maurice Combs, the black drug lord up in Harlem. The second was Oleg Orlovski, the head of the Russian mob. He got him at his daughter's birthday party."
"Yeah?"
The slim man nodded. "Helped himself to a big piece of the cake, too."
"That's what?" the stumpy cop asked. "Seven?"
"I think so."
"That's a lot of heads," the old man mused thoughtfully. "I wonder what he's planning to do with 'em."
The stumpy cop laughed. It was a stress-born laugh, the laugh of a man out of his element and trying to make light of it. "Maybe he collects the damn things," he said.
"Maybe he crawls into his coffin at dawn," the slim man muttered bitterly. "Maybe he's from Mars. Maybe, maybe maybe. The truth is that we're up against something we don't understand."
The old man laughed. "He ain't no vampire, if that's what you mean. I can promise you that. Wouldn't no Texas vampire be caught dead eating a Russian birthday cake."
The pair gaped at him. "Are you joking?" the stumpy man finally asked.
The old man shrugged and sighed. "I'd like to see my granddaughter, if you don't mind."
"In a minute," the tall one said. "She's fine. A little shaky, but not in hysterics like one might expect."
"I'm not surprised about that," the old man replied proudly. "The apples don't fall very far from the tree in our family."
They both stared at him across the table. The old dude seemed calm as ice. Happy, even. Maybe he'd had a few old memories rekindled this evening. Omaha Beach the tall cop thought and shuddered, devoutly grateful that he hadn't made that one. "We just need to ask you a couple more questions," he finally said.
"Fire away and let's be shed of it," the old man said.
The tall cop nodded. "The guy in the cape. We were told that you spoke with him."
"Damn right I did."
"Go on."
"It was just before he flew off. He was just standing there holding that fellow's head by the hair with it dripping blood on the floor and all. He turned to me and my granddaughter and gave us a kind of salute with his free hand and said 'See you folks later.' That's when I said what I did."
Both cops were leaning eagerly forward, transfixed by the old man's story. "Which was?" the tall one asked, the suspense almost palpable in the room.
"I asked, 'What's your hurry?'"
"Why that, of all things?" the stumpy cop asked, his voice a near whisper.
The old man shrugged. "Hell, I don't know. It's just what popped into my head."
"Did he respond in any way?"
"Yeah. He looked at me for a second, then he grinned real big and said 'There's a really bad-ass son-of-a-bitch after me, and I aim to get out of his way.' Then he just launched up through that damn ceiling like a rocket ship."
The third cop was back a the door. This time it was the stumpy man who spoke to him. "He hit Newark," he said as he returned to the table. "Two crime bosses. Same guy, same M.O. Only this time there was a cop on the scene. He shot him too, but it didn't have any more effect than it did when Orsini's button men did it. And he told the cop he was on his way to Washington."
The tall detective propped his elbows on the table and cradled his head in his hands.
"Where does it end?" he asked, his voice tinged with wonder.
The old man cackled. "End?" he asked. "Hell, it sounds to me like this old boy is just getting started. I do wonder about one thing, though."
"Yeah? What's that?" the stumpy cop asked.
"Do you reckon he might have been telling the truth about that bad-ass he claimed was after him?"
They regarded the old man for a few moments with horror, then the slim man spoke.
"God, I sure hope not!"
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He have published two crime novels with St. Martin's Press, NY titled "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead."
May 02, 2009
Quicklube: A Fable
By Milton T. Burton © 2009
It's turning out to be an A-number-one-fine day for C.C. Chumly. He and several of his like-minded buddies are quaffing a few Tall Toad Pilsners at the Belly-Up Bar, a truly classy place in beautiful downtown Midland, Texas. Early that morning Chumly, a Midland City Councilman, was asked on a local live radio talk show just what he thinks of the allegations of torture of the Iraqi prisoners. His reply prompted his ejection from the studio, but earned him thunderous applause from the audience. "If hooking up an Iraqi prisoner's gonads to a car's battery cables will save one Texas GI's life," he said, "then I have just three things to say: "Red is positive. Black is negative. And make sure his gonads are wet."
Still basking in the warm glow of his friends' backslapping approval of that morning's escapade, C.C. is working on his third brew and wondering if the young punk will show up like he promised. Suddenly the door opens and a pudgy kid in his late 20s slides into the room, a Quicklube gimmie cap pulled low over his face, his movements jerky and nervous. He pushes his cap back and his eyes dart anxiously around the room. "Is C.C. Chum...." he begins hesitantly.
The bartender, Jean The Ex-Porn Queen, nods toward the group of older men gathered at the end of the bar. Chumly notices the new arrival and grins broadly. "I'll be back in a few minutes," he tells his companions with a knowing wink. "Me and this young whipper-snapper got some MAN BUSINESS to tend to back yonder in the gents' room."
The others snicker. Oil operator Stub Martindale holds up his empty glass. "How 'bout some service here?" he asks Jean.
She pops the cap on another Tall Toad and sets it down on the bar in front of the hulking, red-faced oilman. "You want service, then you better follow them two," she tells him. "I ain't in that line o' work no more."
This brings a nasty giggle from the assembled men. Stub watches Jean as she oscillates back down toward her end of the bar. "Wouldn't mind gettin' me a little of that," he says to nobody in particular.
"You kiddin'?" one of the men asks.
Stub turns toward the man and shakes his head gravely. "This is Midland, Texas, boys. And in Midland, it don't pay a man to cull none of 'em."
"You're sure right about that," says fellow oilman Clifford Snark. "It's different in Odessa. Why, one time me and ole Chester Hoot went to one of them cat houses up there and..."
Outside the West Texas sun beats down hot and relentless, while inside the men pointedly ignore the pig-like squeals coming from the restroom. "Nope," Stub muses philosophically, "in Midland nothing ever changes."
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He have published two crime novels with St. Martin's Press, NY titled "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead."
It's turning out to be an A-number-one-fine day for C.C. Chumly. He and several of his like-minded buddies are quaffing a few Tall Toad Pilsners at the Belly-Up Bar, a truly classy place in beautiful downtown Midland, Texas. Early that morning Chumly, a Midland City Councilman, was asked on a local live radio talk show just what he thinks of the allegations of torture of the Iraqi prisoners. His reply prompted his ejection from the studio, but earned him thunderous applause from the audience. "If hooking up an Iraqi prisoner's gonads to a car's battery cables will save one Texas GI's life," he said, "then I have just three things to say: "Red is positive. Black is negative. And make sure his gonads are wet."
Still basking in the warm glow of his friends' backslapping approval of that morning's escapade, C.C. is working on his third brew and wondering if the young punk will show up like he promised. Suddenly the door opens and a pudgy kid in his late 20s slides into the room, a Quicklube gimmie cap pulled low over his face, his movements jerky and nervous. He pushes his cap back and his eyes dart anxiously around the room. "Is C.C. Chum...." he begins hesitantly.
The bartender, Jean The Ex-Porn Queen, nods toward the group of older men gathered at the end of the bar. Chumly notices the new arrival and grins broadly. "I'll be back in a few minutes," he tells his companions with a knowing wink. "Me and this young whipper-snapper got some MAN BUSINESS to tend to back yonder in the gents' room."
The others snicker. Oil operator Stub Martindale holds up his empty glass. "How 'bout some service here?" he asks Jean.
She pops the cap on another Tall Toad and sets it down on the bar in front of the hulking, red-faced oilman. "You want service, then you better follow them two," she tells him. "I ain't in that line o' work no more."
This brings a nasty giggle from the assembled men. Stub watches Jean as she oscillates back down toward her end of the bar. "Wouldn't mind gettin' me a little of that," he says to nobody in particular.
"You kiddin'?" one of the men asks.
Stub turns toward the man and shakes his head gravely. "This is Midland, Texas, boys. And in Midland, it don't pay a man to cull none of 'em."
"You're sure right about that," says fellow oilman Clifford Snark. "It's different in Odessa. Why, one time me and ole Chester Hoot went to one of them cat houses up there and..."
Outside the West Texas sun beats down hot and relentless, while inside the men pointedly ignore the pig-like squeals coming from the restroom. "Nope," Stub muses philosophically, "in Midland nothing ever changes."
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He have published two crime novels with St. Martin's Press, NY titled "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead."
April 04, 2009
Grassy Knoll
By Milton T. Burton © 2009
It took me ten years to find him. And the funny thing is, I was never a conspiracy theorist. Even before I read Posner's "Case Closed," I was almost completely sure Oswald had acted alone. But...
The Zapruder film was the fly in my ointment.
Anyone who's had as much experience with firearms as I have is aware that the Zapruder film proves the final shot came from the front. Or at least it does to my satisfaction.
Never mind how I found the old guy. Never mind why a redneck Klansman born eight decades earlier in a little town outside Birmingham, Alabama, was dying of pancreatic cancer in a nursing home in Stovington, Vermont. None of that matters. What does matter is that he talked.
"Why not?" he said. "I'll be dead in six weeks, anyway."
"You were the grassy knoll gunman, weren't you? The guy behind the stockade fence?"
"Damn right I was. And I can tell you exactly what happened, but it won't give you any satisfaction. Nobody is ever going to believe you because the truth isn't complicated enough to satisfy people."
"Why did you do it?"
The old man sighed and moved his wasted frame around a little on the bed trying to get more comfortable. "It damn sure wasn't notoriety, I promise you that. I wasn't trying to make a big splash and go down in history. I really wanted the man dead."
"It was race, wasn't it? The civil rights movement?"
"Hell yes!" he said. "I've been a white supremacist all my life, and I still am. I joined the Klan when I was just sixteen and took part in three church bombings and one lynching. And everybody knew Kennedy was trying to ram the niggers down our throats. I'd just had enough."
"Go on," I said.
"I felt like it needed to be done, and in my own estimation I was the perfect man for the job. I had a highly skilled trade. In a year's time I made about twice what a school teacher made back then. I was divorced and didn't have to pay any child support because we'd never had kids. That meant I had no family obligations and no wife to snoop in my business. I also had enough money to take a couple of weeks off. So I got me a black market Winchester Model 70 in .257 Roberts caliber and fitted out with a Weaver four-power scope. I'd done some work in Dallas, and I was familiar with the downtown area. I drove over there and checked into a motel. I cased the place a few days early and picked my spot. I changed motels a couple of times, ate some good meals, saw a movie or two. Then not long before noon on the morning of the 22nd I drove to that alleyway behind the knoll and parked my car. It was a white Chevy sedan--"
"There were people who saw it," I said, interrupting him.
"Why, hell yes there were. One woman saw me get out of the car with my rifle wrapped up in an old blanket. She told the cops, but they never followed up on it because they had Oswald, and that was enough to suit them. I got hunkered down behind that fence and smoked a couple of cigarettes while I waited. They found the cigarette butts, too, but they explained them away just like they did everything else. Then I heard a lot of cheering, and before I knew it the motorcade was coming. Oswald's first two shots didn't surprise me a bit. Like everybody else, I thought they were a motorcycle backfiring. But I didn't pay any attention to them or anything else but the job at hand. One thing I can say about myself is that I can concentrate even when things are going to pieces all around me. Oswald's third shot came about a half second before mine did, but he missed. It was then that I realized what I'd been hearing wasn't no motorcycle. Those two shots coming that close together are what screwed up the investigation and caused all that damn fool crap about the echoes and the acoustics in Dealey Plaza. It was my shot that got him, though."
"What did you do then?"
"I rolled the rifle back up in the blanket, threw it in the trunk of the car, and drove off. Nobody gave me a second look. After dark that night, I stopped on the Interstate 35 bridge over Lake Dallas and threw the gun in the drink. I spent the night in Texarkana and then drove on back to Little Rock the next morning. And that was that. I just went back to work and kept my mouth shut."
"I see," I said. "Any regrets?"
"Ha!" he said. "But I learned something."
"What was that?"
"You can't fight history. You can't slow it down, either. In fact, I think I may have speeded it up a little."
"How's that?"
"Lyndon Johnson come in and he was better at getting things through Congress than Kennedy ever thought about being. He rode on that big wave of sympathy and guilt over Kennedy's death and got all those civil rights bills passed a lot sooner than it would have if I'd just left well enough alone."
"So do you see yourself as an instrument of history?"
"Hell, no. I see myself as an old man dying far from home among strangers. How did you find me, anyway? I never said a word to anybody about what I'd done."
"There were always rumors that the Klan was involved. I did a lot of research, that's all. Some of your Klan buddies had put two and two together way back then and had a pretty good idea you had something to do with it. They talked to me."
"The Klan," he said contemptuously. "A bunch of nobodies doing nothing. I wish I'd never gotten tangled up with them."
"What was your connection with Oswald?" I asked.
He looked at me like I'd grown a second head. "Ain't you heard nothing I've said? There wasn't any connection. You're bound to have read as much about that poor fool as I have. A man would have been a complete idiot to have conspired with him to rob a candy store, let alone kill the President of the United States. Hell, he couldn't even drive a damn car."
"Then how--"
"There wasn't no 'how' to it. It just happened that way. Coincidence. Just a couple of guys in the same place at the same time trying to do the same thing."
"You mean?. . ."
"That's right, sonny. Now you know the truth, but nobody will ever believe you. Not in a million years. Two lone nuts!"
The expression on my face must have really been something. He began to laugh. He laughed and laughed and laughed. I turned away in disgust and went through the door. As I walked down the corridor away from his room, I could still hear his mocking laughter ringing in my ears.
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He have published two crime novels with St. Martin's Press, NY titled "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead."
It took me ten years to find him. And the funny thing is, I was never a conspiracy theorist. Even before I read Posner's "Case Closed," I was almost completely sure Oswald had acted alone. But...
The Zapruder film was the fly in my ointment.
Anyone who's had as much experience with firearms as I have is aware that the Zapruder film proves the final shot came from the front. Or at least it does to my satisfaction.
Never mind how I found the old guy. Never mind why a redneck Klansman born eight decades earlier in a little town outside Birmingham, Alabama, was dying of pancreatic cancer in a nursing home in Stovington, Vermont. None of that matters. What does matter is that he talked.
"Why not?" he said. "I'll be dead in six weeks, anyway."
"You were the grassy knoll gunman, weren't you? The guy behind the stockade fence?"
"Damn right I was. And I can tell you exactly what happened, but it won't give you any satisfaction. Nobody is ever going to believe you because the truth isn't complicated enough to satisfy people."
"Why did you do it?"
The old man sighed and moved his wasted frame around a little on the bed trying to get more comfortable. "It damn sure wasn't notoriety, I promise you that. I wasn't trying to make a big splash and go down in history. I really wanted the man dead."
"It was race, wasn't it? The civil rights movement?"
"Hell yes!" he said. "I've been a white supremacist all my life, and I still am. I joined the Klan when I was just sixteen and took part in three church bombings and one lynching. And everybody knew Kennedy was trying to ram the niggers down our throats. I'd just had enough."
"Go on," I said.
"I felt like it needed to be done, and in my own estimation I was the perfect man for the job. I had a highly skilled trade. In a year's time I made about twice what a school teacher made back then. I was divorced and didn't have to pay any child support because we'd never had kids. That meant I had no family obligations and no wife to snoop in my business. I also had enough money to take a couple of weeks off. So I got me a black market Winchester Model 70 in .257 Roberts caliber and fitted out with a Weaver four-power scope. I'd done some work in Dallas, and I was familiar with the downtown area. I drove over there and checked into a motel. I cased the place a few days early and picked my spot. I changed motels a couple of times, ate some good meals, saw a movie or two. Then not long before noon on the morning of the 22nd I drove to that alleyway behind the knoll and parked my car. It was a white Chevy sedan--"
"There were people who saw it," I said, interrupting him.
"Why, hell yes there were. One woman saw me get out of the car with my rifle wrapped up in an old blanket. She told the cops, but they never followed up on it because they had Oswald, and that was enough to suit them. I got hunkered down behind that fence and smoked a couple of cigarettes while I waited. They found the cigarette butts, too, but they explained them away just like they did everything else. Then I heard a lot of cheering, and before I knew it the motorcade was coming. Oswald's first two shots didn't surprise me a bit. Like everybody else, I thought they were a motorcycle backfiring. But I didn't pay any attention to them or anything else but the job at hand. One thing I can say about myself is that I can concentrate even when things are going to pieces all around me. Oswald's third shot came about a half second before mine did, but he missed. It was then that I realized what I'd been hearing wasn't no motorcycle. Those two shots coming that close together are what screwed up the investigation and caused all that damn fool crap about the echoes and the acoustics in Dealey Plaza. It was my shot that got him, though."
"What did you do then?"
"I rolled the rifle back up in the blanket, threw it in the trunk of the car, and drove off. Nobody gave me a second look. After dark that night, I stopped on the Interstate 35 bridge over Lake Dallas and threw the gun in the drink. I spent the night in Texarkana and then drove on back to Little Rock the next morning. And that was that. I just went back to work and kept my mouth shut."
"I see," I said. "Any regrets?"
"Ha!" he said. "But I learned something."
"What was that?"
"You can't fight history. You can't slow it down, either. In fact, I think I may have speeded it up a little."
"How's that?"
"Lyndon Johnson come in and he was better at getting things through Congress than Kennedy ever thought about being. He rode on that big wave of sympathy and guilt over Kennedy's death and got all those civil rights bills passed a lot sooner than it would have if I'd just left well enough alone."
"So do you see yourself as an instrument of history?"
"Hell, no. I see myself as an old man dying far from home among strangers. How did you find me, anyway? I never said a word to anybody about what I'd done."
"There were always rumors that the Klan was involved. I did a lot of research, that's all. Some of your Klan buddies had put two and two together way back then and had a pretty good idea you had something to do with it. They talked to me."
"The Klan," he said contemptuously. "A bunch of nobodies doing nothing. I wish I'd never gotten tangled up with them."
"What was your connection with Oswald?" I asked.
He looked at me like I'd grown a second head. "Ain't you heard nothing I've said? There wasn't any connection. You're bound to have read as much about that poor fool as I have. A man would have been a complete idiot to have conspired with him to rob a candy store, let alone kill the President of the United States. Hell, he couldn't even drive a damn car."
"Then how--"
"There wasn't no 'how' to it. It just happened that way. Coincidence. Just a couple of guys in the same place at the same time trying to do the same thing."
"You mean?. . ."
"That's right, sonny. Now you know the truth, but nobody will ever believe you. Not in a million years. Two lone nuts!"
The expression on my face must have really been something. He began to laugh. He laughed and laughed and laughed. I turned away in disgust and went through the door. As I walked down the corridor away from his room, I could still hear his mocking laughter ringing in my ears.
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He have published two crime novels with St. Martin's Press, NY titled "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead."
March 03, 2009
A Good Beginning
By Milton T. Burton © 2009
I found it at an agricultural equipment dealership in a little town called Terrell, which lay about thirty miles east of Dallas. The moment I saw it sitting there a hundred yards off Interstate 20, gleaming brightly in the noonday sun, I knew that I was on the cusp of some great adventure. There were a dozen others lined up beside it, none different from the one that had caught my eye. But this was the one I had to have. This one was mine. The others didn't matter a bit. They were just window dressing.
Upon later reflection, I realized that how I came to be in Texas was a sordid story in itself. A week earlier I'd left my Hudson River Valley estate (which I had grown to hate) in my brand new $90,000 Beemer (which I was rapidly growing to hate) and headed west. Before I left, I had a tasteful, well-bred, little dust-up with my tasteful, well-bred, little thirty-eight-year-old trophy wife, Victoria. You can visualize her, I'm sure. Two decades my junior, petite and slim with an astringent body, perky breasts, and a firm butt. A well-exercised and expensive body: Pilates, Yoga, massage, personal trainer, the whole nine yards, as the kids say. A woman determined to maximize her assets for the specific purpose of holding onto what she has for as long as she can. And what she has is me and my money. Or so she thinks. She also has a worry line between her brows and a lovely oval face that always holds an expression of mild discontent.
"I can't take any more of this for a while," I told her. "I've had enough. More than enough, in fact."
"Enough of what?" she asked.
That was the problem. I didn't really know what the "what" was that I'd had enough of. She was part of it, of course, even though we almost never argued and she rarely nagged. Or at least she didn't until after I came back from Texas. I'd married her five years earlier, four years after the death of my first wife. I thought I'd wanted her, but I really hadn't. What I'd wanted was to get laid about twice a week and be left alone the rest of the time. Mistakes are made, you know.
I waved her off. "I'll call," I said.
"But where are you going?"
"The Southwest, I think. Probably Texas."
"But why Texas, for God's sake?"
I shrugged helplessly. "I guess because I've never been there."
#
I screeched off the Interstate and onto the access road and skidded into the farm dealership in a shower of gravel. I didn't wait for them to come to me. No sir. This wasn't that kind of day. Doubtlessly wild-eyed, I went to them, lunging into the building and then into the first office that was occupied. A young salesman rose from behind his desk, a bright, hale-fellow-well-met smile on his face.
"I'm Tommy Treen," he said. "Can I help you?"
I glanced around the room. The walls were resplendent with Rotary plaques and Kiwanis Club certificates; company awards and farm show pictures. For some reason I found it all terribly reassuring.
The kid had a firm handshake, and beneath his small town booster surface I could sense a hardness about him that I liked. I took him by the shoulder and pointed out the window. "There," I said. "The one next to the far end. I want it."
"Good choice. That's the John Deere 548 standard round hay baler. Makes two thousand pound rolls."
"A hay baler!" I said. "So that's what it does."
Tommy Treen's smile was still there, but now it seemed frozen on his face, and his eyes were a little puzzled. "You didn't know?" he asked.
"Hell, I didn't care. I'm buying the damn thing for its looks."
"It's looks?" He was definitely puzzled now.
"Right."
"So you're not in the cattle business?"
I shook my head. "I run an investment company on Wall Street."
"I see," he said.
But I could tell he didn't really see at all. I took the chair in front of his desk and he settled himself into a big, high-backed executive chair. "That baler is quite an expensive piece of equipment, you know," he said.
"I should hope so. I'd hate for something that fine-looking to be priced cheaply."
"Well, we're always willing to talk discount if--"
"Let's not get tedious, my friend," I said expansively. "Round the price upward if you want. I like prices with a lot of zeros in them."
"Uhhh. . ."
"My sentiments exactly."
He seemed lost in thought for a moment. "I've never made a sale quite like this before," he said. "To be honest with you, I'm having a hard time believing you're not a practical joker."
"Me? No way. I'm as serious as death and taxes."
"Then I need to know what arrangements you'd like to make in order to. . ." He let his voice trail off.
"Pay for the thing, you mean?"
He nodded.
I flipped my American Express Centurion card across the desk and heard him gasp.
"The black card!" he exclaimed. "I've heard of these, but I've never seen one before."
"It's the apex of the apex, Tommy Treen. And you'll probably want a little identification." I tossed my New York driver's license and my passport, which was thick with added pages, across the desk. "And feel free to call my bank in Manhattan. You work on commission, I take it."
He nodded absently and stared euphorically at the Centurion card for a few moments. When he looked back up at me his smile was no longer frozen. It was alive and happy. "You don't fool around, do you, sir?" he asked.
"I see no reason to. You see, I'm on a quest, Tommy. I didn't realize it until the instant I saw my hay baler, but that's exactly what I'm on. A quest, just like the knights of old."
"And that 548 baler is your Holy Grail, right?"
I thought for a moment, then shook my head. "I don't think so. But I know it will help me get there. I know that in my heart. A man on a quest has to go by faith."
"I know a little about faith," he said and pointed proudly to a framed certificate from a local Baptist church that hung on the wall behind him."
"I'm aware that you do, Tommy."
We sat and basked for a few moments in the warm knowledge of our shared faith: his in the God of the Texas Baptists, mine in the purity of my quest. Then a mild frown appeared on his face.
"Yes?" I asked.
"Won't you need a tractor to go with it?"
That was a new wrinkle, something I hadn't considered. "You think I should have one?"
"Well, a hay baler is pretty useless without a tractor. I mean, you can't even move it around without one."
"Hummm. . ."
"I really wouldn't feel right selling you something you couldn't use, and you simply can't use a baler without a tractor."
"You're looking out for my interests, aren't you, Tommy?"
"I'm trying my best, sir."
"I know you are, so let's go for it."
"So you're saying you want a tractor, too?" he asked.
"You bet I do."
"Well, which one?"
"Why don't you pick one out for me? You know a lot more about them than I do."
#
Tommy Treen called around to several rental places and found me a semi-truck and trailer. Once the deal was cut on the truck, he directed me to his cousin, a recently laid-off trucker named Billy Don Pringle who was willing to drive the rig back to New York for me. Billy Don was in his early forties with a happy face and brown hair. His attire consisted of low-slung Levis, cowboy boots, and a seemingly endless supply of red checked gingham shirts, along with a weathered baseball cap with a feed company logo on the front. The cap was perpetual. It appeared to have been born there and matured there, and it gave every impression that it would probably go on to its final reward without ever leaving his iron ball of a head. He was also blessed with stumpy fingers on quick, competent hands that could fix anything. Twice the truck broke down on the way back home, and twice he got it going again without ever pulling a frown.
The first time he said, "Now don't you worry none, Boss-man. We'll be back to skippin' through the dew in no time at all."
The second time he waxed philosophical about my recent purchase as he delved expertly around in the innards of the truck's fuel system. "These round balers like you got here are amazing," he said. "What you sometimes find in the hay months later is amazing too. I knew an ole boy who had this low-lying meadow down by the Trinity River. He bailed up a two-hundred-pound alligator one time."
"Really?" I asked.
He nodded and closed the hood on the truck. "Didn't find it until that next December when he put the bale out in the pasture and the cows get down to the alligator. He hadn't noticed no odor or nothing. See, that hay's dry and all, and hot from being bailed in the summer sun. It just kinda mummified that damned gator. Beat anything I ever seen."
"Fascinating," I said. "Utterly fascinating."
"Ain't it?"
#
So I brought it home and parked it right in front of my eighteenth century manor house where it sat surrounded by ancient oaks and chestnuts and carefully tended grass that stretched a quarter mile down to the river. My wife was not happy with this addition to the landscaping. She was even less happy that I had hired Billy Don Pringle as maintenance chief and all-round handyman for the estate. With Victoria it was loathing at first sight, an obvious fact to which Billy Don was sublimely indifferent. But I didn't care. Hiring the man had been one of the best moves I'd ever made. In three weeks he'd gotten the sprinkler system working better than ever before, rewired two of the outbuildings, and was in the process of installing motion-sensitive lights at strategic location all over the grounds. Much to my surprise, I was actually beginning to like my home once again.
The day I got the idea that it might be fun to actually make some hay, Victoria and I were sitting on the small patio-like courtyard she had urged me to have built on the front terrace not long after we were married---a courtyard on which she could sit and sip vodka Martinis and survey her domain on pleasant afternoons. In the early months of our union I had been eager to please her.
That afternoon we had a guest---an all too frequent guest, as a matter of fact---in the person of Reginald Van Nye, a neighbor from a couple of miles down the river. Reggie is a descendant of one of the oldest and wealthiest Valley families. Now in is 40s, he looks fifteen years younger. He has a handsome face and wavy hair that's going a little silver at the temples, a manly jaw, and dark eyes of the sort the old romance novels used to call "smoldering." He also has a habit of calling me "Old Boy" that I find deeply annoying.
Reggie keeps an office in the city so he can go in a couple of times a month and convince himself that he has business affairs that need his attention. The truth is that all he ever does is cash his trust checks, play tennis, and fornicate. The trust checks aren't much of a challenge, not even for a man of his limited wattage, and with his weak backhand he's only a mediocre tennis player. However, he is known locally as a terrific fornicator, usually choosing his partners downscale from among his social inferiors. Usually. But not always.
He bills himself as my best friend, but he's not. My best friend was a Kentucky farm boy who died in screaming agony in the Mekong Delta forty years earlier. But even aristocrats like to name-drop occasionally, and mine has been a good name to drop since not long after I came to the New York financial world out of a Cleveland blue color neighborhood by way of Vietnam decades ago. Because of my humble background, my fast success led me to be quickly tagged as "The Barefoot Boy of Wall Street, the man to know if you want your money to grow." So you can probably see why I hate the human race. Most of it, anyway.
"Strange thing for an impulse purchase, Old Boy," Reggie says. "That tractor business, I mean."
"You have your little hobbies, Reggie. And now I have mine."
"Are you just going to leave it there?" Victoria asks.
"I haven't decided yet," I reply. "But I do I like to look at it in the late afternoons."
"I hate that shade of green," Reggie says.
"So do I," Victoria chimes in.
"Tough," I say and dig my cell phone out of my pocket. I punch in a number and a few seconds later I mumble a few words into the thing and then snap it off and put it away.
"Who on earth did you call?" Victoria asks, exasperated for some reason.
"Billy Don."
"I don't like that man," she replies. "The other day he was making a lot of noise out back with that pump on the ornamental fountain. I asked him if he would tend to it some other time, and he just snorted at me and kept on working."
"Very perceptive of him," I say. "No doubt you could use a good snorting."
"Don't be vulgar," she hisses.
"In fact, why don't you and Reggie go on up stairs right now and just snort away until your hearts are content?"
"What?. . ." This from Victoria.
"Surely you don't think--" That from Reggie.
No, I don't think. I know. But I cut him off with a good-natured laugh. "Just joking, Old Boy," I say.
Reggie repeats, in an appropriately injured tone of voice, his oft-stated but rarely-followed maxim: "No true gentleman ever seduces a friend's wife."
Just then Billy Don Pringle emerges though a hitherto unnoticed gap in the lilac bushes, his round, ruddy face a mask of good humor. "Where I come from," he says, "a man with any gumption don't seduce nobody's wife except his own. Not unless he wants his ass shot off, begging your pardon, Missus." This last with a barely perceptible nod at Victoria.
Master of a dozen trades and never long without employment, Billy Don sees no reason to be deferential to anyone. Another feather in his cap as far as I am concerned. "What's up, Boss?" he asks, turning toward me.
I point at the tractor and baler and say, "I bought them for aesthetic reasons, but I've been thinking. I've got six hundred acres here, and about a third of it is in grass. I've been paying some people to mow it, but maybe we ought to make a little hay. What do you think?"
"I'm all for it," Billy Don says.
"Oh, for God's sake!" says Victoria.
I turn and look at her. "Do you begrudge me a few thousand dollars for my tractor and hay baler?" I ask.
"No, but I just don't see any point---"
"Here's the point, Victoria. What do I do? Think about that a minute, will you please? I go into the city and make phone calls and fool with numbers on computers and talk to people all over the world. I've done it until my accountant now says I'm worth a half a billion dollars. But I still can't find it."
"Find what?" she asks, clearly annoyed.
"Whatever it is that I do."
"You're a financier, Old Boy," Reggie says jovially. "Be proud of it."
"But where is it? What I've done, I mean. Where is my product? A hog farmer has his hogs. A factory worker can show you all the gimmicks and gizmos he's made. Hell, even a shoeshine boy point to the shoes he's shined. But I have no it to point to. Am I less than a Times Square shoeshine boy?"
"This identity crisis of yours is getting tiresome," Victoria says, impeccably miming upper class annoyance. She tries hard, Victoria does.
"Tiresome of not, I like my tractor and baler, and I plan to have some fun with them no matter what you say."
At that precise moment Ingrid Lawson, the seventeen-year-old belle of the adjoining estate, thunders across the far end of the lawn astride her coal-black Morgan, her long blond hair streaming wildly in her wake. Victoria watches with eyes that are cold and hard. Jealous and bitterly so, she slips easily into shrew mode. Her great unrealized ambition is to thunder across somebody's front lawn on a coal black steed. The only problem is that Victoria is terrified of any animal larger than a Cocker Spaniel. "You know what Freud said about young women and horses," she asks, her voice snippy. "Sublimated masculine power between her legs so forth."
"Sounds like a bunch of crap to me," Billy Don says. "Besides, that's not a stallion that gal's on anyhow."
"Oh really?" Victoria says.
"It's a gelding. Women can handle geldings a whole lot easier than they can stallions or mares, either one. See, Missus, a gelding his a male horse that's been---"
"I'm very aware of what a gelding is, Mr. Pringle," Victoria says distractedly, fruitlessly punching her little electronic gadget that she uses to summons the servants.
"Gimmie that thing and let me take a look at it," Billy Don says.
She hands the switch over reluctantly and says, "Won't somebody please go and tell the maid it's time to serve afternoon cocktails?"
Neither Billy Don nor I respond. Reggie smiles a manly smile and gets to his feet. "I'll be happy to."
"Thank you," she says softly.
As Reggie turns toward the house, Billy Don winks at me and then speaks in a happy voice. "Yep, like I said, women sure can manage them geldings."
For just a moment Reggie's whole back stiffens. Then he squares his shoulders and heads up the walk.
"Do we have everything we need to bail some hay?" I ask Billy Don.
He shakes his head. "We need a sickle mower to cut the grass and a trailing rake to windrow it with. The tractor can operate 'em both of them off the power-take-off."
Billy Don fiddles with the call switch while we say nothing. Then he tosses it back to Victoria. "Loose connection," he says.
She pushes the button and the light comes on. "Thank you," she says grudgingly.
A few moments later Reggie is back with the maid following closely behind. She carries a tray laden with an ice bucket, a bottle of single malt, glasses, and a stainless steel shaker full of vodka Martinis for Victoria.
I point at the tray and tell Billy Don, "Sit down and have a drink."
He shakes his head. "I better not. I'm going into town to see my lady friend in little while."
"A girlfriend already?" Reggie asks. "My, my. . ."
"Yep."
"Some bar girl, I suppose," Reggie says.
"Nope. She teaches English at the college."
Reggie's face shows skepticism at this statement. He pours a tot of scotch for each of us while the maid fills Victoria's glass.
"We need to head back down to Texas in a few days and get the rake and whatever else we need," I tell Billy Don.
"We can get all that here local," he says.
I shake my head firmly. "I like your cousin, Tommy Treen down there at the dealership where I got the tractor and baler. I'd rather spend my money with him."
"Fine with me, and I know Tommy will appreciate it. A sickle and a rake don't weigh much. We can just rent a flatbed trailer and I can tow them back behind my pickup truck. I need my truck up here anyway. I feel lost without it, and besides, Miss Suzanne says she ain't never rode in no pickup before, and she's looking forward to it."
"Suzanne Weiss?" Reggie asks in a voice that's both surprised and offended. "She's your lady friend?"
"Yep. . ."
Suzanne Weiss is a tiny, forty-year-old Jewish knockout with a sweet, ripe body, kind eyes, and a head full of brains---a full professor of American literature with a national reputation as a Faulkner scholar. Which is at least a partial explanation why she would be attracted to Billy Don Pringle. I say a partial explanation. I sense that a robust and competent country lad like him also has virtues that range far beyond his mechanical skills. I sense too that Suzanne Weiss was one of Reggie's downscale seductions that didn't come off.
". . . that's her," Billy Don says. "She's a peach." He turns to me. "I need to get some of my stuff, too," he says. "Mostly a few clothes and my guns."
At the word "guns" Victoria jerks like she's been hit with a mild electric current. "You own firearms, Mr. Pringle?" she asked.
"A few. Bird guns and deer rifles, mostly."
"Could you teach me how to shoot clay pigeons?" I ask him. "I got pretty good with a rifle in the army, but I've always had a yen to learn skeet and trap. Just never took the time."
"I'm your man," he replies. "Back when I was younger I won a passel of trophies shooting trap."
"There must be some fine gun stores in Dallas. You can advise me."
"We'll do it," he says and gives us a parting wave and vanishes back through the magic hole in the lilac bushes. The three of us sit for a while and say nothing as the day draws gently to a close.
"Are you really going to buy a gun?" Victoria asks, breaking the silence at last.
"I think maybe I'll buy several."
She shivers almost imperceptibly. I glance over at Reggie. Manly muscles contract in a manly jaw while dark eyes smolder. I sip my scotch and stare happily off across the lawn where my new toys gleam fetchingly in the last dying rays of the setting sun.
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He have published two crime novels with St. Martin's Press, NY titled "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead."
I found it at an agricultural equipment dealership in a little town called Terrell, which lay about thirty miles east of Dallas. The moment I saw it sitting there a hundred yards off Interstate 20, gleaming brightly in the noonday sun, I knew that I was on the cusp of some great adventure. There were a dozen others lined up beside it, none different from the one that had caught my eye. But this was the one I had to have. This one was mine. The others didn't matter a bit. They were just window dressing.
Upon later reflection, I realized that how I came to be in Texas was a sordid story in itself. A week earlier I'd left my Hudson River Valley estate (which I had grown to hate) in my brand new $90,000 Beemer (which I was rapidly growing to hate) and headed west. Before I left, I had a tasteful, well-bred, little dust-up with my tasteful, well-bred, little thirty-eight-year-old trophy wife, Victoria. You can visualize her, I'm sure. Two decades my junior, petite and slim with an astringent body, perky breasts, and a firm butt. A well-exercised and expensive body: Pilates, Yoga, massage, personal trainer, the whole nine yards, as the kids say. A woman determined to maximize her assets for the specific purpose of holding onto what she has for as long as she can. And what she has is me and my money. Or so she thinks. She also has a worry line between her brows and a lovely oval face that always holds an expression of mild discontent.
"I can't take any more of this for a while," I told her. "I've had enough. More than enough, in fact."
"Enough of what?" she asked.
That was the problem. I didn't really know what the "what" was that I'd had enough of. She was part of it, of course, even though we almost never argued and she rarely nagged. Or at least she didn't until after I came back from Texas. I'd married her five years earlier, four years after the death of my first wife. I thought I'd wanted her, but I really hadn't. What I'd wanted was to get laid about twice a week and be left alone the rest of the time. Mistakes are made, you know.
I waved her off. "I'll call," I said.
"But where are you going?"
"The Southwest, I think. Probably Texas."
"But why Texas, for God's sake?"
I shrugged helplessly. "I guess because I've never been there."
#
I screeched off the Interstate and onto the access road and skidded into the farm dealership in a shower of gravel. I didn't wait for them to come to me. No sir. This wasn't that kind of day. Doubtlessly wild-eyed, I went to them, lunging into the building and then into the first office that was occupied. A young salesman rose from behind his desk, a bright, hale-fellow-well-met smile on his face.
"I'm Tommy Treen," he said. "Can I help you?"
I glanced around the room. The walls were resplendent with Rotary plaques and Kiwanis Club certificates; company awards and farm show pictures. For some reason I found it all terribly reassuring.
The kid had a firm handshake, and beneath his small town booster surface I could sense a hardness about him that I liked. I took him by the shoulder and pointed out the window. "There," I said. "The one next to the far end. I want it."
"Good choice. That's the John Deere 548 standard round hay baler. Makes two thousand pound rolls."
"A hay baler!" I said. "So that's what it does."
Tommy Treen's smile was still there, but now it seemed frozen on his face, and his eyes were a little puzzled. "You didn't know?" he asked.
"Hell, I didn't care. I'm buying the damn thing for its looks."
"It's looks?" He was definitely puzzled now.
"Right."
"So you're not in the cattle business?"
I shook my head. "I run an investment company on Wall Street."
"I see," he said.
But I could tell he didn't really see at all. I took the chair in front of his desk and he settled himself into a big, high-backed executive chair. "That baler is quite an expensive piece of equipment, you know," he said.
"I should hope so. I'd hate for something that fine-looking to be priced cheaply."
"Well, we're always willing to talk discount if--"
"Let's not get tedious, my friend," I said expansively. "Round the price upward if you want. I like prices with a lot of zeros in them."
"Uhhh. . ."
"My sentiments exactly."
He seemed lost in thought for a moment. "I've never made a sale quite like this before," he said. "To be honest with you, I'm having a hard time believing you're not a practical joker."
"Me? No way. I'm as serious as death and taxes."
"Then I need to know what arrangements you'd like to make in order to. . ." He let his voice trail off.
"Pay for the thing, you mean?"
He nodded.
I flipped my American Express Centurion card across the desk and heard him gasp.
"The black card!" he exclaimed. "I've heard of these, but I've never seen one before."
"It's the apex of the apex, Tommy Treen. And you'll probably want a little identification." I tossed my New York driver's license and my passport, which was thick with added pages, across the desk. "And feel free to call my bank in Manhattan. You work on commission, I take it."
He nodded absently and stared euphorically at the Centurion card for a few moments. When he looked back up at me his smile was no longer frozen. It was alive and happy. "You don't fool around, do you, sir?" he asked.
"I see no reason to. You see, I'm on a quest, Tommy. I didn't realize it until the instant I saw my hay baler, but that's exactly what I'm on. A quest, just like the knights of old."
"And that 548 baler is your Holy Grail, right?"
I thought for a moment, then shook my head. "I don't think so. But I know it will help me get there. I know that in my heart. A man on a quest has to go by faith."
"I know a little about faith," he said and pointed proudly to a framed certificate from a local Baptist church that hung on the wall behind him."
"I'm aware that you do, Tommy."
We sat and basked for a few moments in the warm knowledge of our shared faith: his in the God of the Texas Baptists, mine in the purity of my quest. Then a mild frown appeared on his face.
"Yes?" I asked.
"Won't you need a tractor to go with it?"
That was a new wrinkle, something I hadn't considered. "You think I should have one?"
"Well, a hay baler is pretty useless without a tractor. I mean, you can't even move it around without one."
"Hummm. . ."
"I really wouldn't feel right selling you something you couldn't use, and you simply can't use a baler without a tractor."
"You're looking out for my interests, aren't you, Tommy?"
"I'm trying my best, sir."
"I know you are, so let's go for it."
"So you're saying you want a tractor, too?" he asked.
"You bet I do."
"Well, which one?"
"Why don't you pick one out for me? You know a lot more about them than I do."
#
Tommy Treen called around to several rental places and found me a semi-truck and trailer. Once the deal was cut on the truck, he directed me to his cousin, a recently laid-off trucker named Billy Don Pringle who was willing to drive the rig back to New York for me. Billy Don was in his early forties with a happy face and brown hair. His attire consisted of low-slung Levis, cowboy boots, and a seemingly endless supply of red checked gingham shirts, along with a weathered baseball cap with a feed company logo on the front. The cap was perpetual. It appeared to have been born there and matured there, and it gave every impression that it would probably go on to its final reward without ever leaving his iron ball of a head. He was also blessed with stumpy fingers on quick, competent hands that could fix anything. Twice the truck broke down on the way back home, and twice he got it going again without ever pulling a frown.
The first time he said, "Now don't you worry none, Boss-man. We'll be back to skippin' through the dew in no time at all."
The second time he waxed philosophical about my recent purchase as he delved expertly around in the innards of the truck's fuel system. "These round balers like you got here are amazing," he said. "What you sometimes find in the hay months later is amazing too. I knew an ole boy who had this low-lying meadow down by the Trinity River. He bailed up a two-hundred-pound alligator one time."
"Really?" I asked.
He nodded and closed the hood on the truck. "Didn't find it until that next December when he put the bale out in the pasture and the cows get down to the alligator. He hadn't noticed no odor or nothing. See, that hay's dry and all, and hot from being bailed in the summer sun. It just kinda mummified that damned gator. Beat anything I ever seen."
"Fascinating," I said. "Utterly fascinating."
"Ain't it?"
#
So I brought it home and parked it right in front of my eighteenth century manor house where it sat surrounded by ancient oaks and chestnuts and carefully tended grass that stretched a quarter mile down to the river. My wife was not happy with this addition to the landscaping. She was even less happy that I had hired Billy Don Pringle as maintenance chief and all-round handyman for the estate. With Victoria it was loathing at first sight, an obvious fact to which Billy Don was sublimely indifferent. But I didn't care. Hiring the man had been one of the best moves I'd ever made. In three weeks he'd gotten the sprinkler system working better than ever before, rewired two of the outbuildings, and was in the process of installing motion-sensitive lights at strategic location all over the grounds. Much to my surprise, I was actually beginning to like my home once again.
The day I got the idea that it might be fun to actually make some hay, Victoria and I were sitting on the small patio-like courtyard she had urged me to have built on the front terrace not long after we were married---a courtyard on which she could sit and sip vodka Martinis and survey her domain on pleasant afternoons. In the early months of our union I had been eager to please her.
That afternoon we had a guest---an all too frequent guest, as a matter of fact---in the person of Reginald Van Nye, a neighbor from a couple of miles down the river. Reggie is a descendant of one of the oldest and wealthiest Valley families. Now in is 40s, he looks fifteen years younger. He has a handsome face and wavy hair that's going a little silver at the temples, a manly jaw, and dark eyes of the sort the old romance novels used to call "smoldering." He also has a habit of calling me "Old Boy" that I find deeply annoying.
Reggie keeps an office in the city so he can go in a couple of times a month and convince himself that he has business affairs that need his attention. The truth is that all he ever does is cash his trust checks, play tennis, and fornicate. The trust checks aren't much of a challenge, not even for a man of his limited wattage, and with his weak backhand he's only a mediocre tennis player. However, he is known locally as a terrific fornicator, usually choosing his partners downscale from among his social inferiors. Usually. But not always.
He bills himself as my best friend, but he's not. My best friend was a Kentucky farm boy who died in screaming agony in the Mekong Delta forty years earlier. But even aristocrats like to name-drop occasionally, and mine has been a good name to drop since not long after I came to the New York financial world out of a Cleveland blue color neighborhood by way of Vietnam decades ago. Because of my humble background, my fast success led me to be quickly tagged as "The Barefoot Boy of Wall Street, the man to know if you want your money to grow." So you can probably see why I hate the human race. Most of it, anyway.
"Strange thing for an impulse purchase, Old Boy," Reggie says. "That tractor business, I mean."
"You have your little hobbies, Reggie. And now I have mine."
"Are you just going to leave it there?" Victoria asks.
"I haven't decided yet," I reply. "But I do I like to look at it in the late afternoons."
"I hate that shade of green," Reggie says.
"So do I," Victoria chimes in.
"Tough," I say and dig my cell phone out of my pocket. I punch in a number and a few seconds later I mumble a few words into the thing and then snap it off and put it away.
"Who on earth did you call?" Victoria asks, exasperated for some reason.
"Billy Don."
"I don't like that man," she replies. "The other day he was making a lot of noise out back with that pump on the ornamental fountain. I asked him if he would tend to it some other time, and he just snorted at me and kept on working."
"Very perceptive of him," I say. "No doubt you could use a good snorting."
"Don't be vulgar," she hisses.
"In fact, why don't you and Reggie go on up stairs right now and just snort away until your hearts are content?"
"What?. . ." This from Victoria.
"Surely you don't think--" That from Reggie.
No, I don't think. I know. But I cut him off with a good-natured laugh. "Just joking, Old Boy," I say.
Reggie repeats, in an appropriately injured tone of voice, his oft-stated but rarely-followed maxim: "No true gentleman ever seduces a friend's wife."
Just then Billy Don Pringle emerges though a hitherto unnoticed gap in the lilac bushes, his round, ruddy face a mask of good humor. "Where I come from," he says, "a man with any gumption don't seduce nobody's wife except his own. Not unless he wants his ass shot off, begging your pardon, Missus." This last with a barely perceptible nod at Victoria.
Master of a dozen trades and never long without employment, Billy Don sees no reason to be deferential to anyone. Another feather in his cap as far as I am concerned. "What's up, Boss?" he asks, turning toward me.
I point at the tractor and baler and say, "I bought them for aesthetic reasons, but I've been thinking. I've got six hundred acres here, and about a third of it is in grass. I've been paying some people to mow it, but maybe we ought to make a little hay. What do you think?"
"I'm all for it," Billy Don says.
"Oh, for God's sake!" says Victoria.
I turn and look at her. "Do you begrudge me a few thousand dollars for my tractor and hay baler?" I ask.
"No, but I just don't see any point---"
"Here's the point, Victoria. What do I do? Think about that a minute, will you please? I go into the city and make phone calls and fool with numbers on computers and talk to people all over the world. I've done it until my accountant now says I'm worth a half a billion dollars. But I still can't find it."
"Find what?" she asks, clearly annoyed.
"Whatever it is that I do."
"You're a financier, Old Boy," Reggie says jovially. "Be proud of it."
"But where is it? What I've done, I mean. Where is my product? A hog farmer has his hogs. A factory worker can show you all the gimmicks and gizmos he's made. Hell, even a shoeshine boy point to the shoes he's shined. But I have no it to point to. Am I less than a Times Square shoeshine boy?"
"This identity crisis of yours is getting tiresome," Victoria says, impeccably miming upper class annoyance. She tries hard, Victoria does.
"Tiresome of not, I like my tractor and baler, and I plan to have some fun with them no matter what you say."
At that precise moment Ingrid Lawson, the seventeen-year-old belle of the adjoining estate, thunders across the far end of the lawn astride her coal-black Morgan, her long blond hair streaming wildly in her wake. Victoria watches with eyes that are cold and hard. Jealous and bitterly so, she slips easily into shrew mode. Her great unrealized ambition is to thunder across somebody's front lawn on a coal black steed. The only problem is that Victoria is terrified of any animal larger than a Cocker Spaniel. "You know what Freud said about young women and horses," she asks, her voice snippy. "Sublimated masculine power between her legs so forth."
"Sounds like a bunch of crap to me," Billy Don says. "Besides, that's not a stallion that gal's on anyhow."
"Oh really?" Victoria says.
"It's a gelding. Women can handle geldings a whole lot easier than they can stallions or mares, either one. See, Missus, a gelding his a male horse that's been---"
"I'm very aware of what a gelding is, Mr. Pringle," Victoria says distractedly, fruitlessly punching her little electronic gadget that she uses to summons the servants.
"Gimmie that thing and let me take a look at it," Billy Don says.
She hands the switch over reluctantly and says, "Won't somebody please go and tell the maid it's time to serve afternoon cocktails?"
Neither Billy Don nor I respond. Reggie smiles a manly smile and gets to his feet. "I'll be happy to."
"Thank you," she says softly.
As Reggie turns toward the house, Billy Don winks at me and then speaks in a happy voice. "Yep, like I said, women sure can manage them geldings."
For just a moment Reggie's whole back stiffens. Then he squares his shoulders and heads up the walk.
"Do we have everything we need to bail some hay?" I ask Billy Don.
He shakes his head. "We need a sickle mower to cut the grass and a trailing rake to windrow it with. The tractor can operate 'em both of them off the power-take-off."
Billy Don fiddles with the call switch while we say nothing. Then he tosses it back to Victoria. "Loose connection," he says.
She pushes the button and the light comes on. "Thank you," she says grudgingly.
A few moments later Reggie is back with the maid following closely behind. She carries a tray laden with an ice bucket, a bottle of single malt, glasses, and a stainless steel shaker full of vodka Martinis for Victoria.
I point at the tray and tell Billy Don, "Sit down and have a drink."
He shakes his head. "I better not. I'm going into town to see my lady friend in little while."
"A girlfriend already?" Reggie asks. "My, my. . ."
"Yep."
"Some bar girl, I suppose," Reggie says.
"Nope. She teaches English at the college."
Reggie's face shows skepticism at this statement. He pours a tot of scotch for each of us while the maid fills Victoria's glass.
"We need to head back down to Texas in a few days and get the rake and whatever else we need," I tell Billy Don.
"We can get all that here local," he says.
I shake my head firmly. "I like your cousin, Tommy Treen down there at the dealership where I got the tractor and baler. I'd rather spend my money with him."
"Fine with me, and I know Tommy will appreciate it. A sickle and a rake don't weigh much. We can just rent a flatbed trailer and I can tow them back behind my pickup truck. I need my truck up here anyway. I feel lost without it, and besides, Miss Suzanne says she ain't never rode in no pickup before, and she's looking forward to it."
"Suzanne Weiss?" Reggie asks in a voice that's both surprised and offended. "She's your lady friend?"
"Yep. . ."
Suzanne Weiss is a tiny, forty-year-old Jewish knockout with a sweet, ripe body, kind eyes, and a head full of brains---a full professor of American literature with a national reputation as a Faulkner scholar. Which is at least a partial explanation why she would be attracted to Billy Don Pringle. I say a partial explanation. I sense that a robust and competent country lad like him also has virtues that range far beyond his mechanical skills. I sense too that Suzanne Weiss was one of Reggie's downscale seductions that didn't come off.
". . . that's her," Billy Don says. "She's a peach." He turns to me. "I need to get some of my stuff, too," he says. "Mostly a few clothes and my guns."
At the word "guns" Victoria jerks like she's been hit with a mild electric current. "You own firearms, Mr. Pringle?" she asked.
"A few. Bird guns and deer rifles, mostly."
"Could you teach me how to shoot clay pigeons?" I ask him. "I got pretty good with a rifle in the army, but I've always had a yen to learn skeet and trap. Just never took the time."
"I'm your man," he replies. "Back when I was younger I won a passel of trophies shooting trap."
"There must be some fine gun stores in Dallas. You can advise me."
"We'll do it," he says and gives us a parting wave and vanishes back through the magic hole in the lilac bushes. The three of us sit for a while and say nothing as the day draws gently to a close.
"Are you really going to buy a gun?" Victoria asks, breaking the silence at last.
"I think maybe I'll buy several."
She shivers almost imperceptibly. I glance over at Reggie. Manly muscles contract in a manly jaw while dark eyes smolder. I sip my scotch and stare happily off across the lawn where my new toys gleam fetchingly in the last dying rays of the setting sun.
Milton T. Burton was born and raised in East Texas. He has been variously, a college history teacher, a political consultant, and a cattleman. He have published two crime novels with St. Martin's Press, NY titled "The Rogues' Game" and "The Sweet and The Dead."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
