The dark eyes came up slowly, and the world was swallowed. “Hold your peace.” He looked old just then; small, old, and tired, as I had never seen him before. His eyes returned to the dead lights of the tree. “She was my wife.”
2
Room 42 at the Durant Home for Assisted Living had been locked off, and the body of Mari Baroja was now waiting for the medical examiner from the division of criminal investigation.
In Room 32, two old widowers were sitting over a forgotten chessboard and were looking off into the distance in so much of a Dickensian fashion that it could have been an illustration by Phiz. The exposed punt in the twenty-year-old bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey sat in the middle of the contained golden sea: tempest in a teapot, lightning in a bottle, or the muse contained.
Dog was already asleep on the only sofa he was allowed to sleep on.
I kept expecting the thick glass to loosen itself from the bottom of the bottle and float to the surface. Maybe I expected it to sail up through the extended neck and dance about the room; it was, after all, the season for miracles. Maybe that was what I was waiting for, something to jog us loose like the punt in the bottle, something that would allow me to approach the black king sitting across the battlefield, a man up until tonight I thought I knew.
“You have to talk or move or I’m going to fall asleep.”
He didn’t move. “Fall asleep, then.”
I had opened with the Queen’s Indian Defense, Petrosian Variation, a move I had neither the skill nor the determination to prolong, but Lucian liked to ponder it when I tried.
I didn’t consciously fall asleep; it’s just that the chair was soft and comfortable, the room was dark and warm, and maybe it was the protection of those black eyes that reflected the blinking of the silly lights. Those eyes were not looking into the small darkness outside the double-paned windows; they were looking farther and to a place about which I did not know. There was nothing that would overtake us tonight that those eyes would not see, nothing that would not deal plainly with a king not in his perfect mind.
I must have slept longer than I thought. I didn’t remember waking up, and maybe that’s what he had intended by starting to tell me the story while I was asleep. I remember hearing his voice, low and steady, coming from some place far away, “After the war. Her family were Basquos from out on Swayback, Four Brothers.” He paused to take another sip of his bourbon. “My gawd, you should have seen her. I remember lookin’ over the top of Charlie Floyde’s ’39 Dodge when she came out on the porch. Her hair was black and thick like a horse’s mane.” He stopped with the memory; the only other sound in Lucian’s apartment was the scorched-air heating. His two rooms weren’t any different from any of the others in general design, but they had all the style and mass of the Connally ancestral furnishings. I shifted my weight in the overstuffed horsehair chair and waited.
“It was summertime, and she had on this little navy blue dress with all the little polka dots. The wind held it against her body.” It took him awhile to get going again. “She was the wildest, most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my entire life. Hair, teeth… We sparked that whole summer before her father tried to break it up in the fall. They wanted to send her away to family, keep us from each other, but it was too late.”
I looked at him, and the night in my head seemed darker. “We used to tremble when we touched each other. She had the most beautiful skin I’d ever seen. I would forget from night to night. She wasn’t like American girls; she was quiet. She’d speak if spoken to but only then. Short, soft replies… Basque. There was a part of her that I knew I couldn’t get at, ever. It wasn’t hostile or intentional, but it was there, like this life apart from us. Maybe she just knew.” He stared at the chessboard. “The Basquos have an old proverb, ‘a life without friends means death without company.’ ” He sighed. “We ran off together, got as far as Miles City and snagged a justice of the peace off his hay field to come in and marry us.” He snorted a short laugh. “His wife played the foot-pump organ, and he stood there in his rubber, shit-caked boots readin’ the words.” He took another sip, and I listened to the ice in his glass. “They caught us a little north of there. It was her father and three Basquo uncles.” He paused again, and I became aware that my eyes were open and he was looking at me. “Hell of a rumpus.” He reached across and took my hand, rubbing it under his hat along an ancient ridge that ran from the crown of his head to behind his left ear. He let go and resettled his hat. “One of the uncles finally went back and got a tire iron.”
That was two run-ins with Basques that I knew about, this one and the other with some bootleggers where he’d lost his leg. “They sent her away?”
He worked at something caught in his teeth, or maybe his jaw still wasn’t ready to call that one even. “Annulled us and married her off.” He placed an elbow on the arm of his tooled leather chair and cupped his chin in his palm. “I’d see her father and them uncles every once in a while in town, even after I was sheriff. They didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything right back.”
“When did you see her again?” It took awhile for him to reply, and I had the feeling I was getting in further than he wanted. It didn’t matter; when I had sealed Room 42 and had the EMTs stow her at Durant Memorial, it had gotten official.
He was staring back into the dark reflection of the glass. “About a year ago, a friend of mine said there was a woman over in the far wing who asked about me, new woman. I went over, and it was her.”
“Must’ve been quite a shock.”
“Humph. She had a little house down in Powder Junction. I guess that’s where she’d been livin’.”
I edged up in my chair a little. “Lucian, why is it I’ve got her room sealed up and her waiting on a table over at the hospital?” His eyes swiveled to mine and stayed there. “All I’m saying is that an absentee husband of a three-hour marriage that was annulled more than fifty years ago is going to be a hard press as next of kin.” I rubbed my hand across my face, tried to straighten my beard, and continued to look at him. “Lucian, you have to give me something to go on before the children and grandchildren show up and start making my life miserable.” I waited. “You’ve got to give me something more to work with here.”
“You don’t trust me?”
I let it sit there for a while. He wasn’t being rational, and it might take a few moments for him to recognize it. I went through the file cards on Lucian’s outburst and came up with fear of the unknown and frustration with society and the system, mixed with an ingredient I’d never seen in him before, love. Lucian in love; it was hard to summon up.
His eyes shifted back outside, and I could tell a little shame was lurking there. “You have the ME down at DCI do a general, then you come back here and we’ll talk some more.”
When I got back to the front desk, the tree had been placed back in its original spot; it was minus a few ornaments, and I noticed the lights weren’t working. Nat King Cole was now singing in German, giving the place an international flavor it sorely needed.
I figured Joe Lesky was one of those people that fill the gap of human misery, doing their best to make everybody’s lives a little better; about my age, with dark hair and dark eyes, he looked like he might have a touch of Indian, but all the time spent inside must have taken a lot of it out of him.
I leaned against the counter, and Dog sat on my foot. I glanced back over at the tree. “How’s the patient?”
He leaned back in his chair and looked over his shoulder at the abused conifer. Some of the arms looked as if they were signaling aircraft. “I don’t think there were any family heirlooms lost, but I still can’t get the lights to work.”