Blue Lonesome

17

The intensity of John T.’s emotions surprised him; he’d expected anger but not raw, seething fury. Roebuck got right up in his face, stretching on the balls of his feet so that his nose was an inch or so below Messenger’s. His breath, hot and moist, stank of sour-mash bourbon and Mexican cheroots. The black eyes under their craggy brows caught the outspill of light from the house; it made them look as if fires burned in their depths. They reminded Messenger of the eyes of the diamondback rattler in the pit at Mackey’s. But he stood his ground, met them with a lidless stare of his own.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Messenger?”

“Standing here smelling your bad breath.”

“You son of a bitch, I warned you not to hang around and make any more trouble. And now I find out you’ve moved in. Talked Dacy into giving you a job and moved the hell in.”

Behind him Dacy said, “I told you, John T., he didn’t talk me into anything.” She was angry too, standing with arms folded tight across her breasts. But from her tone and the crooked set of her mouth Messenger sensed that satisfaction and a hint of amusement lay under the anger. “I make my own decisions.”

“You goddamn well made the wrong one this time,” John T. said without taking his hot eyes off Messenger.

“None of your business if I did.”

“Yours and his, that it?”

“That’s it.”

“What other kind of business you and him got, Dacy?”

“What’d you just say?”

“You heard me. Been a long time since you had a man around to tend to your needs. Pick up a better man than this one at any bar on Saturday night, good-looking woman like you. Or maybe you just like short-peckers from the big city.”

Dacy’s amusement was gone. She came forward in a jerky rush and caught Roebuck’s arm and pulled him around to face her. “Get off my property. Now.”

“When I’m good and ready.”

“Now. I mean it.”

“Or what? You figure to put me off? Or you gonna ask this sorry hunk of horse turd to do it for you?”

Messenger said thinly, “It won’t work, Roebuck.”

“What won’t work, asshole?”

“Trying to provoke me into a fight so you can call the sheriff and file an assault charge. I won’t fight you, not that way. And you won’t get rid of me that way, either.”

“You son of a bitch—”

“You used that name already. Try a new one.”

Dacy laughed. She’d relaxed again. “When it comes to cussing,” she said to Messenger, “he’s about as original as a kid in a schoolyard.”

Roebuck’s fury was on the edge of explosion; you could see him struggling to maintain his control. He tried to reestablish an aggressive position by getting back up in Messenger’s face. Messenger stood with his arms flat against his sides, his expression neutral — giving John T. nothing to blow up on.

They maintained their positions for what must have been a minute or more. Messenger knew the game; it was called staredown. The first one to blink or look away was the loser. He’d never played it before, would have considered himself a poor prospect if he’d thought about his chances. Old Jim was too passive for a game like that. But this wasn’t Old Jim; this was New Jim. And New Jim played John T. Roebuck to a draw.

Dacy broke it up. She said, “Lonnie, if John T. isn’t off our property in three minutes, you go get your Ruger carbine and shoot out two tires on that station wagon of his. It’ll be a freak accident. You and me and Jim’ll swear to that.”

John T. backed up a step — a slow, sinuous movement like a snake uncoiling. He had his anger in check now. “We both know that’s an idle threat,” he said.

“You think so? Lonnie, you timing what I said?”

“Two and a half minutes left, Ma.”

“What’ll you do when the time’s up?”

“Go get my Ruger and shoot out two tires on his wagon.”

“Bullshit,” Roebuck said, but he no longer sounded convinced. He said to Messenger, “I’m not through with you, boy, not by a long shot. I’m just getting started.”

“Is that so? How do you plan to get shut of me?”

“There are ways, by God.”

“Sure there are,” Dacy said. “Night riders with buckets of tar and sacks of chicken feathers, that’s one. Or maybe you could hire a couple of men to lure him out to Mackey’s and shove him down into the snakepit.”

“What the hell?” John T. said, and for the first time since Messenger’s arrival he put his gaze on her. “I didn’t have anything to do with that. If it even happened.”

“It happened,” Messenger said.

“Well, I didn’t make it happen. I don’t do things that way.”

“Too violent for you? Or not violent enough?”

“Could be you’ll find out.”

Dacy said, “How much time’s he have left, Lonnie?”

“Less than a minute.”

“Just won’t learn, none of you. Just won’t learn to leave well enough alone. Well, all right. It’s on your head too now, Dacy. His and yours.”

Roebuck walked to his station wagon, back and shoulders rigid. Messenger expected him to drive off with another little show of aggression — fast and reckless, fouling the night air with dust. But he didn’t. His departure was slow, measured, as if he were afraid to slacken the tight rein he’d put on his control.

When the wagon’s lights reached the gate, Dacy said, “Well, you wanted to shake things up, Jim.”

“Yeah.”

“Having second thoughts?”

“No.” He was wondering why John T. had come flying over here in such a high state of rage. He was no real threat to the man, unless John T. was involved in his brother’s death. Or unless some other kind of guilty knowledge was driving him. He was hiding something: Messenger felt as certain of it as he did that Lonnie was hiding something. The same thing, maybe? Even if John T. wasn’t behind the snake trap at Mackey’s, it had upset him in some way that wasn’t quite clear. The fact that the target had survived unharmed? The fact that the trap had been set in the first place?

Dacy said, “Well, I’m not either, so you don’t need to worry on that score. I like seeing that strutty rooster with his feathers ruffled and his pecker down.”

“Just as long as he doesn’t... what’s the phrase? Do you a meanness?’

“He won’t. But we better watch out he doesn’t try to do you one.”

“I’m not afraid of him.”

“That the truth, or just bravado?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe a little of both.”

After supper he and Dacy spent an hour on the porch, talking. Her opinion on the intensity of John T.’s reaction was that it didn’t necessarily mean anything. “That’s the kind of man he is. Something upsets him, he goes off like a damn firecracker.” In addition to John T. they discussed his brother, his wife, Joe Hanratty, Lynette Carey, Maria Hoxie, and others who in one way or another had been involved with Dave Roebuck — Messenger probing for specific background information, some factor in personalities and relationships that might be worth exploring. Neither he nor Dacy found one. But he did come away from the talk with a definite conviction.

Beulah’s closets were full of secrets. More, it seemed, than in most small towns; uglier ones, too. And the more you shook the closet doors, the louder the skeletons would rattle.

In the morning he and Lonnie finished work on the windmill and then went to the holding pens to repair a loose panel on a large cagelike device called a squeeze chute. Made of welded bars, its two main panels were used to immobilize steers during spring and fall roundups for branding, castration, and inoculation against disease.

Just before lunch they began replacing broken rails in the corral fence and loose and warped boards in the stable and barn. Next week, Lonnie said, if the wind cooperated and the weather remained dry, they would weather-seal the wood and then spray paint both buildings. They were running low on lumber and ten-penny nails by midafternoon, and Messenger volunteered to drive into town to the building outfitters. Dacy gave him a list of supplies to pick up that included paint and turpentine and a new pane of glass for the kitchen window. She also gave him the keys to their pickup.

The truck was a GMC product, fifteen years old. Lonnie was a good enough mechanic to get it running again whenever it quit (which was too damn often lately, Dacy said), but not quite good enough to keep the engine from idling high and rough and funneling hot-oil fumes into the cab. The suspension was shot too; every time a tire thudded through a chuckhole, the pickup jolted and shuddered and threatened to come apart like one of those comic cars in a Mack Sennett two-reeler. By the time he reached town he felt as shaken as a marble in a box.

The clerk at the building supply knew who he was. He wasn’t refused service, but he was subjected to obvious and sullen slow down tactics that kept him there nearly an hour. He endured it without comment. A pointless confrontation with one of Beulah’s citizens was the last thing he needed right now.

A thought occurred to him while he waited — something he should have done by now but hadn’t. When the pickup was finally loaded he drove over to the library. Thin and juiceless Ada Kendall was alone inside the stifling trailer. She drew back in her chair when he entered, as if she fancied he might leap over the desk and attack her. Then she sat spine-locked and fixed him with a sour look of disapproval.

“You’re not welcome here, you know,” she said.

“I know. But it’s a public place and you’re not going to ask me to leave, are you, Miss Kendall?”

“It’s Mrs. Kendall. I’m a widow.” She spoke the last sentence proudly, as if it were a badge of honor. “What is it you want?”

“Your file of the Tonopah newspaper, if you have one.”

“The past twelve months only.”

“That’s all I’m interested in.”

“Going to read about the murders, I suppose.”

“No. The real estate ads.”

“Real estate?”

“Didn’t you know? I’m thinking of settling in this area.”

Her mouth opened and she blinked at him behind her glasses.

“In your neighborhood, maybe. One of the places next door to you wouldn’t be up for sale or rent, would it?”

“Why, you... you...”

“Easy, Mrs. Kendall. This is a library — no obscenities permitted.”

He found the newspaper file on his own, in an airless alcove at the far end. Sweat ran freely on his face, dripped from his nose and chin, as he culled the issues containing stories about the killings. There were several, despite the fact that the Tonopah paper was a weekly: a bizarre, double homicide was big news in a small county like this one.

The initial account was prominent on the front page, and was accompanied by photographs of both Anna and Dave Roebuck. The one of Anna was a smiley wedding photo a dozen years old; the likeness between the woman and the one Messenger had observed in San Francisco was so slender they might have been two separate people. The photo of her husband was more recent but the reproduction was grainily poor; it conveyed no clear impression of the man.

He didn’t expect to learn much from the lead story and follow-ups that he didn’t already know. But he did find out one detail that neither Dacy nor Reverend Hoxie had mentioned — a detail that made Tess Roebuck’s death even more of a puzzle.

The child had been found not only wearing a white Sunday dress, but with a sprig of something called desert verbena tightly clenched in one hand. The fact appeared in two of the news stories, each time without either explanation or speculation.

Messenger left Ada Kendall glowering behind her desk and drove the rattling pickup back out to the ranch. Lonnie helped him unload the supplies, and when they were put away he went to talk to Dacy.

“Verbena?” she said in response to his question. “It’s a flowering desert plant. Common enough around here.”

“Why would Tess have had a sprig of it clutched in her hand?”

“Don’t go trying to make anything out of that, Jim. It’s not important.”

“The white dress is important — it has to be. Why not the verbena too?”

“Anna had bushes growing in the yard, along with some other plants. County cops found where the branch’d been broken off one of the bushes near where she was hit with the rock, and they figured when she fell she clutched at the bush and the branch snapped off in her hand.”

“Makes sense, I guess,” Messenger admitted. “Still, what if they were wrong? What if the murderer broke it off and put it in her hand, for the same reason he changed her clothes and put her in the well?”

“Jim, nobody could figure an explanation for the dress or the well. Maybe there isn’t any that makes much sense. You’ll only make yourself crazy trying to come up with one that includes the verbena, too.”

“Crazier than I already am, you mean.”

“You said it, I didn’t. Why don’t you go on back to work and let me do the same?”

He went back to work. But he couldn’t get the Sunday dress, the well, the verbena out of his mind. Or the feeling, groundless or not, that the three were connected somehow, and that if he knew their purpose he would know who was guilty and why.