He was a stringy man in his fifties, baked dry, straw hat tilted forward, his eyes the same washedout blue as his work shirt. His big hands were permanently curled by hard labor, and the veins in his leathery forearms were fat and blue.
“Do you think she’d remember the salesman’s name?”
“Allie died six years ago, friend. On a rainy June day just one day after her forty-fourth birthday. I took her a present but she didn’t know me. She didn’t know anything at all by then. She was never real well. She didn’t have a good heart or good kidneys or good lungs, and they all seemed to go bad at the same time. Don’t know why I go on like this. Man doesn’t see people all day, he tends to talk their ear off.”
“Did you happen to see the salesman?”
“Not up close. Saw him standing there when she came to me to get the money. I thought you fellows were after some kind of spider, but you sound like you’re after that lantern salesman.”
I laughed in a jolly hollow manner and said, “Two birds with one stone.” At that point Meyer came trotting up to us, holding a twist of the netting with great care.
“This is a fiddleback,” he said nervously.
“It sure is,” I said, and we transferred it to our improvised specimen box. It seemed slow and lethargic. Meyer took out his notebook and wrote down the time and place.
“Could you describe the lantern salesman?” I asked the man.
“Hell, he looked like any other young Anglo around here. But he sure could talk Mexican. I heard him and Allie jabbering away like crazy. I met Allie when I was working down in Vera Cruz a long time back. Prettiest thing I ever saw in my life. I never could get my mouth around that Mexican talk. God knows I tried. She was a real smart woman. Trouble was, I had things to say to her that I never really could say, because she just never did get to have that much American.”
“Where did he work out from?”
“I can tell you that. The one she wanted, it had a kind of a gouge in the top of it, into the stone. So he went right away and got a new top. Very obliging of him. He said it was a little less than a fifty-mile round trip. He had his stock at a place north of Freer, off State Road Sixteen.”
Meyer said, “You have a remarkable memory, sir.” The man smiled and shook his head. “Not really. Out here there aren’t so many stopping by you can’t remember them all. And Allie did talk to him a long time. I guess it made me kind of curious-to look him over good.”
We told him how much we appreciated his help. He seemed a little disconsolate at having us go. It meant company was leaving. The land around his buildings looked reasonably tidy, but the quick glance I had at the interior showed a fat brown dog stretched out on a welter of newspapers, and a young turkey pecking at something on the floor beyond it.
A couple of miles down the road, I stopped and Meyer dumped out the Brown Recluse. When he got back in, I asked him if he’d stomped it. He said that he had thought of it but decided that the spider had its rights, and had played its part in a charade reasonably well and at the right time, and anyway it was part of the scheme of things, just like the snail darter, the snow goose, and the ACLU. I reminded him that they were poisonous, and he said that you usually have to provoke something in nature to get it to bite. You have to threaten it or make it think it is threatened. Western sheep ranchers are poisonous, he said, because they believe they are threatened by coyotes, when all scientific data from reliable sources indicate otherwise. Wolves never chased the Russian sleighs, he said. A tarantula bite is less bothersome than a bee sting, he said. The more precarious the existence of all living creatures on the planet becomes, he said, the more valuable is each individual morsel of life. I told him he seemed to be getting one hell of a long way from stomping or not stomping a little brown insect, and he told me that the spider is not an insect at all but an eight-legged predacious arachnid of the order Araneae. I asked him if his veneration for life extended all the way from brown spiders to Evan Lawrence; he too was part of the scheme of things. Meyer told me that I had a tendency to put discussions on an emotional basis, thus depriving them of all intellectual interest. I told him I was sure lucky to have him along to straighten me out on all these things.
He studied his notes and said, “Of the four students who could have been Evan Lawrence, we have eliminated one: Rodefer. Of the remaining three, the one most likely to be fluent in Spanish is Cody T. W Pittler. Eagle Pass was his home town, apparently. On the border. And he went to the branch of the University of Texas at El Paso, also on the border. That, of course, does not eliminate Wyatt and Broome. Nor does it mean that any one of the remaining three could have been Evan Lawrence. All it does mean is that if it took an equal amount of effort to check out Wyatt, Pittler, and Broome, it would be logical to try Pittler first.”
“I think Allie was probably a pretty nice woman.”
“We should inquire in Freer about a Mr. Guffey, if indeed there is one.”
“And change our act, I think.”
“To what?” he asked me.
“We don’t have to have an act to go around asking where the Guffey place is. And when and if we find it, we’ll think of something.”
Fourteen
FREER was an intersection of three numbered highways. It looked flat and spread-out, with maybe two or three thousand people in it. On the edge of town I saw a farm equipment and supply agency, with a colorful row of tractors out by the shoulder.
I found some shade to park in and went inside. There was a small office and display room, with a maintenance floor out behind it. Meyer wandered over to the line of tractors and stood there, studying them, his cowboy straw shoved to the back of his head, kitchen match in the corner of his mouth, thumbs hooked into the side pockets of his ranch pants. He looked almost-not quite-authentic. But I was glad to see him improvising. He was beginning, in small ways, to enjoy the small arts of deception. As in the old days, before Dirty Bob.
I sauntered in and angled obliquely over to two men leaning against a monstrous piece of yellow equipment. I had no idea what it could be used for. It looked designed for the uprooting of trees and the mashing of small buildings. One was old, dressed in a yellow jumpsuit. He was the shape of a toby mug, had wild white hair sticking out in all directions, and wore a red embroidered Bunky over his left breast pocket. His face was almost as red as his embroidery.
The other man was swarthy and much younger, and huge. Size of a nose guard. Six-seven, maybe, and two sixty, thereabouts. He had a round amiable face and a nose that had been mashed almost flat.
As I came closer I heard Bunky say, “Now I’m not trying to tell you the bank will go for it, Miguel. You know how the times are. What I can’t do, honest to God, is go on the paper with you. We’re up to our eyeballs on the building here and the floor stock. I know you got a good record, and I’m sure that counts with the bank. But you should go talk to them first. I gave you the figures, the allowance and all.”
Miguel muttered something I couldn’t hear. They shook hands and Miguel left.
Bunky watched him go and then shook his head, smiled at me, shrugged. “What happens to too many of these farmers, they turn into machinery junkies. They get three dollars ahead, they want to go deep in hock to buy something about half again too big for the piece they’re working. Bigger tires. Sit higher. A hundred more horsepower. Then suppose they drop the support level on his crop. He can’t meet the payments on all that equipment, and pretty soon he gets foreclosed and loses the land too. And everybody from John Deere to International Harvester helps push them into bigger stuff. Fancy advertising. Know the smartest man in the county? Old Lopez. He’s down on the Benavides Road. He’s older than me, which means older than God himself. Old Lopez has got three husky sons. He had tractors and cultivators and all that shit. But when the gas price jumped out of sight-it takes eighty gallons to work one acre of land-he sat down on his porch a whole day thinking it over. And then he went right back to the way he used to do it. He works his spread with six mules. He drives the county agent crazy. He’s making more money than anybody else in this part of Texas. Now he’s got his land all free and clear. Doesn’t owe a dime. You take Miguel there that just drove away. If he don’t owe two hundred thousand right now today, I’ll eat one of old Lopez’s mules. Now wouldn’t it be funny if you come in here to buy a thirty-thousand-dollar tractor and I turned you off before you could even ask? But I don’t think so. You’re no farmer. If you want to sell me something, forget it.”