Prayers the Devil Answers (25 page)

“No, thanks. I don't know what I'd say to a man of God.”

“I suppose he could help you to pray.”

“Don't you think I'm past praying for, ma'am?”

“They say nobody is. You might try praying for somebody besides yourself, though.”

“A preacher would want an explanation, and I don't want to talk about it. I already admitted to doing it. That should be enough.”

“I doubt the Lord is very happy about what you did, of course, but maybe you had your reasons. If so, He must already know what they were.”

I thought the prisoner was about to say something else then, but the door at the end of the corridor opened and Tyree hollered out, “Telephone for you, Sheriff!”

I didn't believe that for a minute—Tyree was just worried that I'd get my throat cut if I lingered too long with a dangerous prisoner—but I turned to go, anyway. I had about run out of things to say to a murderer, except for the one question that would be on the tip of everybody's tongue, which was the very one he didn't want to answer:
Why did you do it?

“Who's on the phone?” Tyree and Falcon were still in the office when I came back from the cells: Tyree drinking coffee and Falcon paging through the sports page of the Johnson City paper.

“Oh, the phone call?” Tyree had the grace to blush. “It turned out to be a wrong number. Sorry to disturb you. Did you get on all right back there?”

“He's not violent. I'd say he might be a danger to himself, and we should keep a close watch on him for that, but the rest of us are safe enough. Has anybody asked to see him?”

They both shook their heads.

“Any family? A lawyer?”

“Not that we know of,” said Falcon.

“I'm headed off home now, but if his in-laws stop by, I don't reckon you ought to let them in.” Tyree said this straight-faced, but I recognized it as the first of many jokes that would be made at the expense of the wife-killer.

I ignored him. “Shouldn't we find out more about who this fellow is?”

“We don't have to, Sheriff. All we have to do is keep him locked up here and make sure nobody breaks him out or lynches him. All the rest of it—
if
he did it,
why
he did it—that's for the lawyers.”

Falcon shook his head. “No, Tyree, the sheriff is right. We need to know more about the prisoner: who his friends are, where he worked, and how well liked he is. Because who knows how long we're going to have to hold him in here. Those things will tell us if we need to worry about a lynch mob coming to get him or a bunch of his pals
from work trying to slip him a knife or storming the jail to get him out. We have to know who we're dealing with.”

I was pleased to see Falcon come up with such logical thinking. Maybe he'd make sheriff himself one day. “Why don't you go and see what you can find out about him then? I think it's better for us to know. He told me he works at the sawmill. Start there.”

Falcon came back in time to eat his lunch—an orange and a can of beans from McInturf's Store—at the reception desk. “Did you know that fellow's an artist?” he asked me, between spoonfuls of beans.

“He told me that. He's the one who did that mural in the post office. But he doesn't make his living at it anymore. I guess the hard times are what made him go to work at the sawmill.”

Falcon grinned. “Well, he don't work there anymore. The owner of the mill told me they fired him last week.”

“What for?”

“If you wasn't the sheriff, I don't believe I'd tell you, Miz Robbins, but, seeing as how you are—” Then he stopped and looked up at the ceiling, trying to work out some delicate way of explaining it to me.

I sighed. “So he wasn't let go for stealing or for general incompetence?”

“No. Well . . . that's a matter of opinion. I reckon the girl's ­father—he's the foreman there—might call it that. Seems the young lady always took her daddy's lunch to him, and she got in the way of talking to some of the men who were taking their lunch breaks as well.”

“How old is this girl?”

“Oh, seventeen or so. Old enough to know better. Maybe she thought she'd catch a husband by making eyes at the sawmill workers. Well, she did, but, unfortunately, the one she caught was somebody else's husband. Anyhow, last week the foreman caught her and our Mr. Varden back there on some burlap sacks in the equipment shed—”

“Making hay?” I said, before he could phrase it in a cruder way.

“Making trouble, that's for sure. The foreman went in to get a screwdriver and caught them in the act. He fired the loverboy before he could even get his pants up. I suppose they didn't think they'd get caught.”

“Or maybe one of them was hoping they would.” Women need a lot less protecting from the unpleasantness of life than men seemed to think. “I wonder what he told his wife about getting fired?”

“I don't think he told her anything. Maybe he killed her because he wanted to go off with his girlfriend.”

“Why couldn't they just run away together? I don't think he had much to lose from a divorce. They didn't have much money or land or anything.”

Falcon shook his head. “Beats me, ma'am. I reckon you'll have to ask him.”

People around here assuming that woman's death was her own fault didn't mean they were going to let her killer get away with it, though; not when there were two horrified witnesses who were able to describe exactly what they saw: no quarrel, no blows exchanged, no provocation that anyone could see—just a plain little woman holding a camera, her back turned to the man behind her, suddenly thrown from a mountain outcrop and smashed to pieces on the boulders below. The law wouldn't let an act like that go unpunished, even if people had wanted it to, and, because this was a God-fearing place, mostly they didn't. At least, despite Galen's warning, we never heard any talk about people wanting to lynch the killer. That was something to be thankful for, not on his account, but because if a mob stormed the jail, some of the deputies were likely to get hurt trying to protect the worthless wife-killer. The speculation went on for a few more days, but Lonnie Varden never said a word about what happened—not to the officers of the sheriff's department, not to his court-appointed lawyer, not even to Rev. McKee, who
came to the jail to pray for him, more out of Christian charity than sympathy.

The incident had been a nine days' wonder when it happened, even attracting newspaper reporters from as far away as Nashville.

A few weeks later everybody here more or less forgot about him, because shortly after the arrest, whoever makes such decisions arranged for the case to be tried in Knoxville, and they took him to the jail there to await trial. I wondered why he ended up in Knoxville. I suppose either they thought he wouldn't get a fair trial in a town where a lot of people knew him, or else they thought a murder case was so serious that they wanted it tried by a more experienced prosecutor than the one we had. I asked Roy, but he didn't know either. “I figure our job is to catch lawbreakers. What happens to them after that is somebody else's problem.”

I was too busy doing my job and taking care of my sons to give much thought to the trial of a stranger happening a hundred miles away. It didn't seem worth wondering about. It wasn't as if there was any doubt about whether or not he did it, after all.

LONNIE VARDEN

“The way I figure it,” Lonnie Varden told his cellmate, “if I could just bust outta here, I'd have two choices: I could either jump a freight train down at the rail yard, ride it until I can catch another one heading west, and another one after that, until I got all the way to south Texas and then I could jump the border, where the law couldn't get me . . .”

“Or?” The grizzled old man with the pock-marked face didn't care, really. Every inmate whiled away some of the time dreaming up escape fantasies, and men on trial for their lives dreamed even longer and harder.

This little chicken hawk of a fellow—the old man judged him to be on one side or the other of thirty—was a stranger. He was just somebody who had happened to be put in the same cell with him, waiting for trial. Now, it turned out he was the talkative kind, nervous to be trapped in jail with a dangerous felon, and hoping he could muster enough charm to keep himself from getting murdered in the night. The sort of fellow who would end up telling you secrets his mama don't even know, if you are a stranger, because strangers were the only ones safe to confide in.

He said again, “Or—what?”

The chicken hawk still didn't answer. He sat on his bunk, staring out the cell door, perhaps regretting that he had blurted out that ad
mission. Maybe he wasn't as cocky as he pretended to be. Something was chasing him, anyhow. His nails were bitten down to the quick, which told the old man that this kid had two things that he didn't: more trouble than he was accustomed to and good teeth.

The old man thought of the boxcars, where he often sat among the crates on the straw floor, swaying with every lurch of the train, and watching brown-stubbled fields flicker past. Above the clatter of the train, the tramps would talk in fits and starts. Here there was only the noise made by the men in other cells, sometimes howls or sobbing, because the state didn't seem to differentiate between madmen and felons.

At least this young man kept talking calmly, and, even if he had preferred otherwise, the older one didn't have much choice but to listen. Well, that was all right. Listening to a talker was as good a way as any to pass the time. Food or smokes would have been better, of course, but just now those things were past praying for. Sometimes when he'd been out on the rails he might get a windfall—a crate of canned goods in an unguarded boxcar or a moonlight raid on somebody's orchard or garden. If he ever got hungry enough, he could make a few dimes chopping wood, or burning trash, or digging out some flower beds—whatever the housewife had wanted done. Here he was as helpless as a penned-up hog. All he could do was wait for whatever his captors chose to dole out, and he didn't even have the choice in the company he kept.

In the long silence, swallowed by all the noise from outside, the old tramp had nearly managed to drop off to sleep again, but then his young cellmate stirred, apparently remembering he wasn't alone. He looked over at the old man with a faraway smile. “You're a traveler, aren't you? Riding the rails, I mean.”

“When I can. It's a life.”

“Funny, I used to hop trains as a kid. Never thought I'd still be wishing I could do it when I grew up.”

The old man shrugged. “That right?” His garrulous companion of twenty-four hours' acquaintance had been hauled into the cell the day before, feet shackled together and wearing handcuffs attached to chains around his waist. The manacles were gone now, and the young man seemed to be neither insane nor violent, which made his cellmate wonder what all the fuss had been about. There had been no point in asking the guards who'd brought him in. Guards made a point of ignoring anything a prisoner said. From the sound of him, though, the young man himself would be telling him all about it, sooner or later.

Off and on since the kid's arrival they had made unintrusive small talk, but they hadn't yet bothered with names. The old man liked it that way. Part of the lure of the open road was the chance to be nobody for as long as you wanted. You could invent a new past every day for all anyone cared, and best of all, you could run away from the real one.

The nameless chicken hawk didn't want to know his life story, which was just as well, but after the initial alarm at being locked up wore off, he became bored in the bare cell. When he found out his companion was a railroad bum, he passed the time by asking the sort of questions a new traveler generally wants to know: how to survive while riding the rails—where to get clean water, how to avoid the railroad guards, and how to keep well if you have just a few clothes in bad weather. (
“You don't.
”
) The old man humored him, knowing that his answers to these questions were fuel for the escape fantasy the chicken hawk would have started constructing in his head.

Before long the chicken hawk seemed to think that their chance meeting made them friends, and the old man did not disabuse him of this belief. What would be the point?

He sized up the new prisoner. He was a polite, clean-cut fellow, and, despite the superficial friendliness, he was worried about something—why else would a good-looking fellow be in jail in the first place?—but the way he covered his troubles with a ready smile and
a flow of amiable chatter would fool most people. Out in the world that might have been worth something. If they had met on the rails, and the chicken hawk had been determined to tag along, he would have found a way to turn that charm to their advantage. On the road, you learned to use whatever comes to hand.

Too bad they were locked away instead of free to roam the countryside. The chicken hawk's baby-faced innocence would have been useful in getting them handouts from motherly housewives. Like as not, the ladies would have been so taken with that tight little body and chiseled face that they'd miss the coldness in his companion's eyes. The old man had taken the newcomer's measure right off, from force of habit, because sizing up people was life and death to a hungry traveler. He had been traveling for so long that he had nearly forgotten what came before it; if he hadn't been good at reading strangers he'd have been dead long ago.

The young man smiled, but he was staring off into space again. “Yessiree bob. I sure wish I could be riding the rails like you did, like I used to pretend I was doing when I was a kid. You ever do that, mister? Hop trains as a kid?”

“Never did.”

“Well, I guess you had to live out in the country, near the railroad tracks, to do it. And, Lord knows, there wasn't much else to do where I grew up, except hunting and farm chores. Maybe town boys play sandlot baseball, but we chased trains. We called it playing Pony Express. Ever heard of it?”

“Can't say that I have.” The chicken hawk was angling for information with that mention of town boys and baseball, but the old man did not take the bait. Best to keep him talking about himself; it was too soon yet to get the truth out of him, but sooner or later those idle reminiscences were bound to end up in revelations.

“Well, a bunch of us pals would ride our bikes to the railroad tracks . . .”

“Oh, you had bikes?” Something in the old man's voice said that he hadn't had a childhood, much less a bicycle, but the chicken hawk was too wrapped up in memories to notice.

“Some of the fellas did. If their daddies could afford to buy them one. I built mine out of scrap parts. Garden hose for tires. It didn't look like much, but I could keep up with the rest of them.”

“Pony Express on bikes, you said . . .” The old man shook his head. “
Pony Express.
Y'all delivered the mail then, did you?”

“Naw. We just called it that 'cause we rode hard, same as those Wild West riders once did. We got all that from the dime novels about cowboys and outlaws. When we played Pony Express, we'd ride our bikes through the woods to a steep hill next to the tracks, waiting for a train headed up that long grade. Going slow, you see.”

The old man nodded, imagining a ribbon of trees unwinding outside. It was hard to tell if he was listening or not, but the young man was oblivious, caught up in his tale and smiling as he remembered it. He had forgotten where he was—and why.

“Mind you, it had to be a freight train—well, that's about all we ever saw out our way, anyhow. Hopper wagons full of coal, flat wagons, and finally that long chain of boxcars—that's what we were waiting for. We'd let the locomotive and the coal cars pass, and we'd try to spot the freight brakeman so we could stay out of his way. Then we'd scratch off on our bikes, trying to keep level with one of the boxcars. We'd be pedaling hard, and reaching for that outside ladder.”

The old man nodded, picturing the metal ladder on the side of the boxcar.

“The trick was to grab on to it, kick your bike away from the train, and ride along a half mile or so, hanging on to the ladder. Then you had to jump down before the train picked up speed again.”

The old man considered it. “Sounds dangerous. You lose many bikes? Or many chums for that matter?”

“The danger was what made it fun. You don't believe in death anyhow when you're that age.”

“Falling under a train would convince you quick enough.”

The chicken hawk grinned. “A time or two somebody's bike would fall the wrong way and get smashed to pieces by the boxcar wheels—it never happened to mine, though. Worst I ever got was a twisted ankle jumping down on a hard place and landing wrong. Looking back, I reckon it would have been easy to lose the grip on the ladder and fall under the train, but none of us ever did.”

The old man snorted, unimpressed. “God protects drunks and fools.”

“I reckon He does. Sometimes. Most of us quit chasing freight trains about the time we turned fourteen.”

“Better things to do then?”

“Different things, anyhow. Work or school. Chasing girls instead of trains.”

“Well, that's safer.”

The chicken hawk gave him a look. “Don't you believe it.” He yawned and stretched. “Yeah, I never thought I'd be wishing I could catch a boxcar again. Just goes to show, don't it? Fifteen years pass, and here I am—lower than a bum.”

Bum.
The old man narrowed his eyes. Now he was paying attention.

Traveler
. . . wayfarer . . . vagabond.
Even when he hadn't eaten for a day or two, asking for a handout at some citizen's back door, the old man was particular about what people called him, and it stung him that he had never heard any citizen refer to him by any word as polite as any of those perfectly respectable words for a wanderer.

When the lady of the house, holding a cold potato or a hunk of cornbread, invariably asked,
“How long have you been a hobo?,”
he would smile to soften his answer so that he'd get his handout, but even at the risk of having the door slammed in his face, he always said:
“Not a hobo, dear lady. Hoboes travel from job to job, working
whenever they can get work, which I confess I do not. To the hobo, travel is merely a means to an end. But I am not a bum, either. Now, you see, your bum, he doesn't ride the rails at all. He stays put in one place, but he doesn't work. Just bone lazy, I suppose. No, madam, properly speaking, the correct name for my species is tramp.
I work when I plain flat have to, but I am traveling all the time. To us tramps, the journey is the end, not the means.”

If the lady hadn't slammed the door in his face by then, next she would ask him how he came to be down-and-out, and then he would have to size her up quick to figure out which yarn would be likeliest to land him a plate of choicer leftovers. The one where the wicked banker cheated him out of his inheritance usually went down well. Most everybody these days hated bankers.

This cold-eyed young buck currently horning in on his boxcar fantasy wouldn't have thought up any good yarns yet. He had been demoted from citizen to felon quite recently, if the old man was any judge. He was too clean and too jaunty to have been in the system for any length of time. Less than a week, most likely.
Mark-of-Cain
guilty or just naughty and unlucky? Too soon to tell; maybe the chicken hawk didn't even know yet himself. His way of talking said he was a little short on education and probably not too far from home, because he sounded like the folks from these parts. That, too, might have been handy for getting some local lady of the house to part with a slab of pie, as long as the chicken hawk wasn't afflicted with that stiff-necked mountain pride that made the hill folk think themselves above taking charity, no matter how hungry they were. No hillbilly would last long on the road if he tried to hang on to his pride. Begging or stealing. Take your pick. If they had been in a boxcar instead of a jail cell he would have given the chicken hawk some pointers in panhandling before the next stop. It would have been a shame to waste those clean-cut looks of his.

He wondered what the chicken hawk's story was, but he didn't
much care. On the outside he would have wanted a cut of whatever the chicken hawk could charm out of the pantries of sentimental small-town matrons. In here, though, since neither of them had a scrap of food or a single fag to smoke, he figured he'd lean back on his bunk and keep listening to the flow of talk. It kept his mind off his empty stomach. Maybe even put him back to sleep, if he was lucky.

“What's your name, son?” he asked when the silence had stretched on for a few more minutes. He judged that their acquaintance had lasted long enough for trivial confidences. Maybe he'd learn enough to verify that hunch he had about the newcomer.

The cool stare the chicken hawk gave him instead of an answer told the old man what he already suspected: this fellow was in here for something so serious that he didn't want anybody knowing who he was. Too late now, of course, but maybe there had been a reward out for him—not that he would have bothered trying to collect it. Even attempting to do the town cops a favor could land you in trouble; best to steer clear of them altogether. When the silence had stretched out for too long, he added, “I ain't the law, son. I'm just your cellmate, trying to be civilized. Getting acquainted. You can call me Ulysses.”