Sam saw that Dad had stopped talking because he’d noticed him listening. Dad hadn’t seen the fight? But Sam had seen! He was just opening his mouth to tell the wonderful tale to the High Sheriff when Dad grabbed his arm and swatted him on the bottom again. He chased him into the house and told him in no uncertain terms to stay there, so Sam had to watch the rest of the conversation through the parlor window, hiding in the curtains.
After a few more minutes of conversation, the High Sheriff got back in his car and drove off. Dad came in the house then.
“Is there gonna be a trial?” asked Sam’s mother from the kitchen doorway.
Dad shook his head. “No witnesses. And the wounded man don’t know who shot him.” He turned to Sam who wanted to ask questions, but thought better of it. “Don’t play in the car shed for a couple of days.”
Sam nodded, and went off to his room. That question didn’t need asking.
The next day while Dad was at work and Mom was making bread, Sam pilfered the car shed. The sides of the shed were lined with shelves filled with fruit jars, tools, and odd scraps of wood and metal. Sam picked his way past the two-by-fours and the brass-bound trunk and began to investigate the bottom shelf where the tools were kept. When he noticed three red-and-white fishing floats on the shelf, he opened Dad’s tackle box and found the first revolver, a.32 special, nickel-plated. It was a shiny thing with red rubber grips on the handle, and it used to hang by the trigger guard on a nail over the bed. One of the family stories that they told up-home was how Sam had been a fretful baby the summer he was teething, and he used to cry for the shiny toy hanging on the wall above him. Finally Mom unloaded it and gave it to him to play with, and the rubber handle grips felt so good to his itching gums that it did keep him quiet. When Dad finally traded it for that Atwater Kent table radio, it still had Sam’s tooth marks on the grips. Sam held the Smith & Wesson up to the light, using both hands to steady it. One of the cylinders was empty. Sandy Hair’s weapon. He found Black Hair’s stuck in a fruit jar at the back of the jar shelf. Sam couldn’t reach it, but he could tell by the shape that it was a.38 Colt revolver, nickel-plated from the shine of it. Sam was careful to put things back the way he found them before he left the shed.
A couple of days later Sam was helping Dad untangle fishing line, when the older man in the black coat came up the driveway. Sam excused himself to go out back to the outhouse, and he went around the corner of the house toward the backyard. When he thought it was safe to peek around the corner, he saw the man go into the car shed and then drift back out and stroll back down the driveway. When Sam got back to the front steps, Black Coat was gone. So was the nickel-plated Colt when he checked the car shed the next day.
On Saturday Sandy Hair himself came up about suppertime. Dad was chopping stove wood, and Sandy Hair even took a turn or two with the ax while they were talking. Sam stayed still at his marble circle near the privet hedge, hoping nobody would notice him and chase him inside. He kept shooting aggies, pretending not to notice the visitor at all. He was too far away to hear what was said, but he kept watching for Sandy Hair to head for the car shed, and sure enough in a couple of minutes he did. He stayed around for a few more minutes, talking to Dad, and Sam thought he could see a bulge in his brown suit coat. When Mom came out on the steps to call them in for supper, Sandy nodded to her and strolled away. It was Sunday morning before Sam had a chance to check out the shed again. The family was getting ready to go to church, so Sam got himself ready in a hurry and said he’d wait for everybody outside. He slipped into the shed and went straight to the tackle box. The floats were back in place, and the Smith & Wesson was gone.
That afternoon the family piled into the Ford and took the dirt road across the mountains to Pigeon Roost. After Grammaw Hemrick’s Sunday dinner of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and new peas, Sam got to sit out on the porch with Dad and all the uncles, and Dad told the story about the day they hanged the elephant. Sam waited for him to tell the new story, the one about the duel and the hidden gun, but he never did. Dad never did tell that story, and finally Sam came to understand why.
More than twenty years later, Sam would come home from the Pacific with captain’s bars and medals for what he did in the Philippines. He’d talk about the war anytime his children asked about it, but always just the one story: about a little monkey he’d found orphaned in the jungle, and made a pet of. Just the one story, over and over.
NOT ALL BRIDES ARE BEAUTIFUL
THEY SAY THAT all brides are beautiful, but I didn’t like the look of this one. She came into the prison reception area wearing a lavender suit and a little black hat with a veil. Her figure was okay, but when she went up to Tracer and that other photographer from the wire service, there was a hard look about her, despite that spun-sugar smile. I knew it would be easy to get an interview-she’d insist on it-but that didn’t mean I was going to enjoy talking to her.
“Is it true you’re going to marry Kenny Budrell?” I called out.
She redirected her smile at me, and her dark eyes lit up like miners’ lamps.
“You’re here for the wedding, honey?” she purred. “Have you got something I could borrow? I already have something old, and new, and blue.”
Just a regular old folksy wedding. I was about to tell her what I’d like to lend her when I felt a nudge in my side. Tracer-reminding me that good reporters get stories any way they can. I managed a faint smile. “Sure, I’ll see what I can find. Why don’t we go into the ladies’ room and get acquainted?”
She smiled back. “This is my day to get acquainted.”
“That’s right,” said Tracer. “You’ve never met the groom, have you?”
Kenny Budrell had been a newsroom byword since before I joined the paper. By the time he was eighteen, his clip file in the newspaper morgue was an inch thick: car theft, assault and battery, attempted murder. He did some time in the state penitentiary about the same time I was at the university, and it seems we both graduated with honors. The next news of Kenny was that he’d robbed a local convenience store and taken the female clerk hostage. Tracer was the photographer on assignment when they found her body; he says it’s one of the few times he’s been sick on duty. It took three more robberies, each followed by the brutal murder of a hostage, before the police finally caught up with Kenny. He didn’t make it through the roadblock and took a bullet in the shoulder trying to shoot his way past.
The trial took a couple of weeks. The paper sent Rudy Carr, a much more seasoned reporter than I, to cover it, but I followed the coverage and listened to the office gossip. The defense had rounded up a psychologist who said Kenny must have been temporarily insane, and he never did confess to the killings, but the jury had been looking at that cold, dead face of Kenny’s for two weeks and they didn’t buy it. They found him guilty in record time, and the judge obliged with a death sentence.
After that, the only clippings added to Kenny’s file were routine one-column stories about his appeal to the State Supreme Court, and then to Washington. That route having failed, it was officiaclass="underline" in six weeks Kenny Budrell would go to the electric chair.
That’s when she turned up.
Varnee Sumner-sometime journalist and activist, full-time opportunist. In between her ecological-feminist poetry readings and her grant proposals, Varnee had found time to strike up a correspondence with Kenny. The first we heard of it was when the warden sent out a press release saying that Kenny Budrell had been granted permission to get married two weeks before his execution.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me that Varnee Sumner wanted to be pals-that’s probably what my city editor was counting on when he assigned me to cover the story.