“Tell him, Wynona,” Mr. Watts said.
“He’s lying, Daddy,” she said.
“Bring a Bible out here,” Mr. Watts said. “I’ll put my hand on it.”
“Is he telling the truth, Wynona?” Grandfather said.
“How many times were you so drunk you couldn’t remember what planet you were on?” Mr. Watts said. “Down in Mexico in 1916. You didn’t do that with Pancho Villa’s señoritas?”
“You close your mouth, you vile man,” Mother said.
Grandfather’s eyes were pale blue, lidless, empty of feeling or thought, as though his soul had taken flight. I saw him swallow, then he eased down the hammer on the revolver and picked up his gun belt and replaced the revolver in its holster. “We’re leaving now,” he said. “Come on, Aaron.”
“He’s a liar, Daddy.”
“I don’t know what I did back then. I never will. I killed people in Mexico who have no faces. There’s a whole year I cain’t remember.”
We went out the door and into the night. The wind was howling, the clouds huge and crawling with electricity. I sat in the front seat of the car with my mother. Grandfather was hunched in the back, like a caged animal, his eyes tunnels of sorrow.
Grandfather finalized our defeat that night when he went into the barn with a lantern and returned with a bottle that had a cork in it and no label. He carried the bottle into his bedroom and sat on the side of the bed and pulled the cork and tilted the bottle to his mouth. My mother took me upstairs and told me to put on my pajamas and lie down. Then she put Tige in bed with me and sat down beside me and looked into my face. “Pay no attention to what you saw or heard in the saloon, Aaron,” she said. “Grandfather is a good man and would never intentionally do harm to his family.”
“What was Mr. Watts saying?”
“Never listen to people like Mr. Watts. Their words are like locusts in the wind. I have to run an errand in town now. Don’t worry if Grandfather gets drunk. He’ll be all right in the morning.”
“What kind of errand?”
“I know someone who might be able to help Maria and Jesus,” she said. “He’s a federal judge.”
I looked at her eyes. They were clear. “It’s too late to go to town,” I said.
She stroked my hair, then clicked off the light and went down the stairs and out the front door. Through the window I could see the beams of her headlights bouncing on the fence posts and fields along our road.
I woke to sunlight and the sound of rain ticking on the dormers and people’s voices downstairs. I got up and put on my blue jeans and went to the head of the stairs. I could see Grandfather talking to the sheriff and a deputy and a man in a suit with a stethoscope hanging from his neck. I did not see my mother. I walked down the stairs, still in my pajamas, Tige running in front of me, his nails clicking on the wood, his rump waddling on each step.
“We need to look at it, Hack,” the sheriff said. “Hackberry” was Grandfather’s first name.
“Big waste of time, if you ask me,” Grandfather said.
“You know the position I’m in, Hack,” the sheriff said. He wore a white beard and was almost as big as Grandfather. “Just bring it out here, will you?”
“Whatever you want,” Grandfather said.
He went into the hallway and returned holding his holstered revolver, the belt wrapped around it. The sheriff took it from him and he slipped the revolver from the holster and half cocked the hammer, then opened the loading gate and rotated the cylinder. “Smells and looks like you just cleaned and oiled it.”
“A couple of days ago, I did.”
“When did you start loading with six rounds instead of leaving an empty chamber?”
“Since I stopped toting it,” Grandfather said.
“I’ll keep this for a while, if you don’t mind.”
“You’re going to run ballistics on it?”
“I ain’t got any ballistics to run. The rounds never slowed down and are probably halfway to San Antonio.”
The sheriff shucked the rounds from the cylinder one by one and dropped them in his coat pocket and stuck the pistol back in the holster and handed it to his deputy. The only sound in the room was the creak of the wind.
“So we’re done here?” Grandfather said.
“It was the way he went out that bothers me,” the sheriff said.
“A bullet is a bullet,” Grandfather said.
“Watts got one through the mouth and one that took off most of his penis,” the sheriff said. “What kind of shooter is apt to do that, Hack?”
“I guess somebody who was a bad shot or pretty mad.”
“Let me restate that,” the sheriff said. “Which gender is inclined to do that?”
“It’s a mystery to me,” Grandfather said.
My mother walked from the kitchen into the hallway. “The coffee is ready if you gentlemen care to sit down,” she said.
The sheriff looked at his deputy and the man with the stethoscope and at Grandfather. “I think that would be fine, Miss Wynona,” he said. “Are you feeling okay today?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” she said.
“I know what you mean,” the sheriff said.
In April of 1942 Jimmy Doolittle bombed Tokyo and crash-landed his B-25s on the Chinese mainland. In reprisal for the help given to his crews by Chinese peasants, the Japanese murdered 250,000 civilians. Maria and Jesus were brought back to Grandfather’s place, and Mother and Tige and I rejoined my father in our little brick home on Hawthorne Street in Houston. That summer, after the Battle of the Coral Sea, the war turned around at Midway, and we knew that in all probability the light of civilization had been saved. It was a grand time to be around. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Michael Cebula
Second Cousins
from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine
“Could you ever kill a man?”
That’s how she said it, that’s how she laid it on me, us two in bed and it so early in the morning that I hadn’t even had my first cigarette. Of course, I could guess who she was talking about.
I took my time, which is my way, and before I could respond, Toola turned and propped herself up on her elbows, looked me over, and answered herself.
“You could do it,” she said.
I knew how she came to that conclusion, or thought I did. I’ve got that lean and hungry look, one you’re born with, one that persists even on a full belly, and it’s enough to make people assume you’ll do anything for a dollar; it makes them think they can ask you something like that and you’ll stick your hand out and say, “How much?” without ever wondering How come? Didn’t even matter that she knew I was a deputy and had the badge to prove it. The color of your eyes and the set of your mouth determine your destiny as much as anything else. Well, that and your family.
“That’s quite a question,” I said, “for so early in the morning. I don’t know.”
“Now you’re going modest on me?”
“When wasn’t I modest before?”
Instead of answering, Toola turned again and lay on her back and stared at the ceiling, her old and much-abused mattress squeaking and protesting like it’d been shot. The box fan on her bureau did nothing to cool the room down, and sweat lingered on her chest like some kind of slick icing. Toola claimed she was thirty-one, her license said thirty-six, and sometimes when she’d smile you’d swear twenty-five. She had long black hair and soft white skin and was good-looking in all the ways you’d expect, but what caught me first was she had the greenest eyes I’d ever seen. She told me later they were contacts.
Now I pawed at the nightstand beside me but couldn’t find my cigarettes. I was feeling about half starved, but even after all our times together I still didn’t know if Toola could cook, only that she wasn’t the type of woman you asked to make you breakfast. My head was aching and I wanted to sink back down into that bed, but I could already hear the combine running over the soybean field across the road. That meant somebody could have seen my patrol car out front. I hardly had the energy for it, but I swung my legs over the bed and looked around for my clothes. My clothes and my cigarettes.