Winding Stair (9781101559239) (13 page)

“They want me to talk about it,” she broke in. “They want me to talk about all those bad things. What happened to my papa. You told me I wouldn't have to talk about that.”

“Who wants you to talk about it?”

“That mean old bastard with the long beard,” she said, her voice bitter.

“Evans? Evans talked to you again?”

She nodded. “Just a while ago. He's a mean man, Eben.”

“He's trying to find the ones who did all those bad things.”

“I don't know nothing about it. I was up in that attic. I don't know nothing about it. You believe me, don't you? Don't you?”

Suddenly she lifted her hands and took my face between her fingers. She bent to me and her lips pressed against mine, firm and warm for a long moment. I felt her hair blowing around my face, and as she drew back some of the yellow strands clung to my cheeks. I reached to take her in my arms, but she pulled back and turned, running across the cemetery through the gravestones.

“Good-bye, Eben,” she called, and ran past Zelda Mores, who looked as startled as I must have.

“What in God 's name?” I said and started after her, but Zelda stood before me threateningly.

“You'd better leave her alone now, Mr. Pay,” she said.

“What's going on here?”

“Mr. Evans. He showed her Johnny Boins in the split room.” The split room was a small alcove at one end of the men's jail, divided by a partition, where witnesses could identify suspects standing on the other side of a screened window. “She went all to pieces when she seen him.”

“He did
what
? For God's sake, why didn't he tell me . . . ?” Zelda turned after Jennie, who was already disappearing into the compound gate. The bile was rising in my throat and I could feel my good disposition going to hell. Oscar Schiller's words were in my mind: “There's more to it than the horse.” I despised him for having said what was now becoming obvious to me.

By the time I reached the courthouse compound, Jennie and Zelda Mores were already inside. I ran past the gallows, where a deputy marshal was leaning against one wall with a Winchester, watching a prisoner scrub the platform with lye water. As I rushed up the steps to the courthouse, a crowd of people met me coming out and I pushed through them. Court was in recess, and that meant I would find Evans in his office.

I opened his door without knocking and caught him before his desk, his hands full of documents. As he turned to me, I shouted at him.

“What did you do with that girl?” The color came suddenly to his cheeks above the beard. He yanked off his pince-nez and threw them on his cluttered desk.

“I assume, young man, you're speaking of Jennie Thrasher?”

“Of course I'm speaking of Jennie Thrasher. She's been crying.”

“I wouldn't be surprised.” He sighed, shaking his head and gaining control of his own temper. He moved behind the desk and sat down. “I did what had to be done.”

“You took her to look at that man without taking me. And all along I've been her closest friend since what happened to her, and with your approval and encouragement.”

“I didn't want you there.”

“Goddamn it . . .”

“Look here, son,” he said quietly. “Don't come in here raving about that girl, or how I'm running this case. Are you afraid we might find out more about her than you want us to know?”

“I hope you're not implying that I know anything I haven't told you.”

“Of course not.”

“She's told you what she knows,” I said, still panting. “She's told you that. And she knows nothing. She was up in that attic, terrified. Why in God's name are you badgering her?”

“Oh hell,” he said, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. “She knows Johnny Boins, Eben. She knows him but won't admit it.”

“But she said—”

“I know what she said. But after a while in this business you can tell. When she saw him she almost jumped out of her hide. It was like I'd hit her in the belly with a stick of stove wood. He never saw her, of course, behind that screen, but it didn't matter. I can promise you, she knows him.”

I was so furious, the implications of what he said failed to penetrate. All I could think of was her drawn face and the painful twist of her mouth.

“I thought we were supposed to be her friends.”

“You don't have any friends in this business. You try to find the truth.”

“Truth, hell! What you're trying to find is a conviction, no matter what, and you—”

Abruptly he was up, slamming his fist down so hard on the desk that the typewriter bell rang.

“You listen,” he roared. “The truth so far is you've got too close to that girl. You're blind to what might have gone on in this case. Think, for God's sake! That letter. What girl do you think they were talking about in that letter?”

With a little encouragement, I could have strangled him. Yet at that moment, I knew he was right. It had been a thing in the back of my mind from the time we'd heard Lila's story. Johnny Boins bragging about women and getting even with someone in The Nations, and now the letter. If we had arrested the right man, surely Jennie Thrasher was the girl Milk Eye said he'd found. But until Evans threw it at me, I had been unable to face it.

“Did she say anything else? About the case?” I asked, choking and hardly recognizing my own voice.

Evans sat down again, replacing his pince-nez. Deliberately he unwrapped one of his fat cigars and struck a match to it. I knew he was taking his time to allow my temper to cool, but it only made me indignant, to be treated like a child.

“Nothing. She said nothing more. But I warn you, Eben, she likely knows a great deal. I told her that someday she'd be on the witness stand and would have no choice but to tell. You know what she said when I mentioned perjury?”

He looked at me through the dense blue smoke, peering over his pince-nez, and beneath his beard I thought there was the beginning of a smile.

“How would I know?” I said sarcastically. “Not having been invited to listen.”

“She said I could go to hell!”

The whole thing was falling down around me. The enthusiasm I had felt just a short time ago at the prospect of seeing her again had gone sour. And I could still feel the caress of her hair against my face. I took the china dog from my pocket and put it on his desk.

“Would you have someone take this up to her?”

“Yes. If you don't want to do it yourself.”

“From what you've just said, I assume you want me clear of this whole case and everything to do with it.”

The remark infuriated him. He was up again, banging his desk with a clenched fist, red-faced and the cigar almost aflame from his puffing.

“Goddamn it, Eben, I don't want you clear of this case. But you still haven't grasped the kinds of things we deal with here. Hell's fire, haven't you learned anything about this business yet?”

He slammed the cigar into a tortoiseshell ashtray and spun around toward his dusty window, looking out onto the compound as he tried to regain control. The back of his neck was still red when he spoke softly, but with great emphasis.

“Whiskey! Greed! Lechery! God knows what else. It's tearing that country apart. Do you know how many men we've got out as deputy marshals at any one time? About two hundred! And do you know how many men we've lost in the line of duty? Shot or stabbed or clubbed and left to die in some ditch? Over fifty! Why, the things that go on make some of those old hell-raising towns like Ellsworth and Dodge look like a girls' school promenade. Do you know how many square miles we try to police from this court?”

“What's that got to do with—” I started, but he turned on me.

“I'm trying to make you understand something!” he shouted. “I'm trying to get it through that thick skull of yours what we have to deal with here. We can't get involved with these damned cases personally. Do you know how much territory we've got? Hell, even I don't know anymore. We started with over seventy-four thousand square miles. That's bigger than New England. It's too big. We can't get involved. . . .”

He stopped, sweating, the beads of moisture running down his face and into his beard.

“All the goddamned predators over there in that country. Congress has whittled away parts of it and given it to other courts, but it's still too big. Hell,” he said, throwing out his arms and then slapping his sides with his hands. “You've got to assume the worst and take it all as a part of the working day, Eben. Anything can pop up. Anything.”

He sat down and grabbed the cigar again, stabbing at it with his hand.

“We shouldn't even be in this case. The Choctaw Nation is supposed to be under the jurisdiction now of a court in Texas, but they haven't picked it up yet, so we're still in it. And now, you've gone and got the sweetass over some pretty little thing . . .”

He let it trail off and somehow what he'd said irritated me only a little. Perhaps because it was all true.

“Then you still want me to work with Schiller on it?”

“Yes, but goddamn it, don't come in here again raising hell about how I'm preparing the case.”

“All right. But I'd still appreciate it if you saw she gets this stuff.” I placed two packages of peppermint chewing gum on his desk beside the china dog.

“I'll do that. And I don't think I'll be needing you the rest of the afternoon. Get out and walk, or shoot some pool and forget it. You got a load of guts, Eben, but you got a generous nature, too. Don't let it blind you. Now, let's not say anything more about it.”

He had already begun to arrange papers and open files lying in folders on his desk, puffing his cigar furiously. As I went out, I gave him one last bellow—“I think I'll get drunk!”—and slammed his door.

 

 

It was Frisco payroll day at Henryetta's, and the downstairs bar-parlor was crowded with railroaders. Henryetta was at her usual place against the bar, but not dozing now. Her golden smile flashed as she talked with her customers, telling bawdy stories and winking slyly. I found a small corner table, wanting to be left alone, but she came over and started a conversation that interested me not at all, even when she said that Lila had left for Memphis the day after Oscar Schiller and I had talked with her. Big Rachael brought me a lemonade and gin, but I irritably pushed it away and told him to bring me a bottle of the best house rye and a water glass.

For a moment, it appeared Henryetta might ask me to leave, what with my rudeness. Then she shrugged her fat shoulders and returned to more amiable guests. Some of the girls were working the parlor, dressed in their evening clothes. They disgusted me with their bare shoulders and garishly painted lips—all meant to titillate, I supposed. Each time I saw one of them laughing, the red mouth open in mock cheerfulness, I thought of Jennie Thrasher's pink lips and how they had felt against my own.

To hell with it all, I thought. Getting myself involved with a little Nations chippy who didn't want to get involved with me. A girl who cussed and smoked cigarettes. As the rye burned down my throat and boiled in my stomach, I goaded myself with the thought of Jennie. Evans was right, of course. All along, I'd thought the whole messy business might blow away in the wind, leaving Jennie and me as though courting in Saint Louis, me in my boater and needlepoint shoes, she in demure taffeta and lace. To hell with it all, I thought. I am going to throw myself one magnificent drunk, and then go back home where I can drown myself in civilization and good breeding.

I began to relax, looking at the crowd and at Henryetta's gold teeth, finding it all suddenly amusing and frivolous and high-spirited. Not so slowly, the liquor began to dissipate despair and self-pity.

The room was full of talk about the great event planned in just two days in celebration of the Fourth of July. There was to be a prizefight on the sandbar along the bend of the river across from Fort Smith, it being against the law to hold such a contest in the state of Arkansas. It held little interest for me at first, but as the rye took its effect, everything changed. I could hardly keep from hearing all about it; because the railroaders seemed so accustomed to shouting while they worked around the noisy trains, it had become the only way they knew how to talk.

A visiting professional prizefighter from somewhere in the East would be matched against a local challenger. The challenger was Big Rachael, the overwhelming favorite. I heard it said that Dirty Jake, the professional, weighed twelve stones. Mentally, I calculated that this meant he was about 168 pounds. It occurred to me that Evans had failed to explain, in his professional role, that there were so many Anglo-Saxons working in Fort Smith. But then, it could be expected because the English had always been railroaders.

If Dirty Jake weighs twelve stones, I thought, Big Rachael would run close to twenty-one, for he was every ounce of three hundred pounds. I giggled at my own cleverness, converting old English weight to pounds. As the rye continued to dull the sting of what had happened earlier in the day and created, too, a loss of inhibition, I found myself making bets with the railroaders against the local favorite. They were laying three-to-one odds that Big Rachael would knock Dirty Jake senseless. Soon, I was at the bar, inviting bets at five-to-one that Big Rachael would not last twenty rounds.

During the course of this sporting talk, two of Henryetta's girls took my arm and explained that my money might be more enjoyably spent upstairs, but I brushed them away. Henryetta and some of the railroaders apparently thought me too abrupt with the girls, considering the nature of their business and the enterprise they displayed. I began to hear comments that I was another of these Yankee sons of bitches, like Dirty Jake, come down to Fort Smith to show off and spread my big-city money around.