I plugged "Old Man of the Sea" into the Alta Vista search engine and got back 756 Web pages; most of it was junk, but it became pretty clear that the original Old Man of the Sea was a character from the Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor.
According to the story, Sinbad was stranded on an islandhe never learnedwhere he came across an old man who he believed to be crippled. The old man asked to be carried to a pool of water, but when Sinbad got him there, the old man wouldn't get off Sinbad's back.
In fact, he grew something like spurs, and claws, and dug into Sinbad's neck. For days, Sinbad was forced to carry him around the island and feed him Sinbad himself, in an excess of pain, hollowed out a gourd that he found, and filled it with grapes. In a few days, the grape juice had become strong wine, which he drank to kill the pain.
The old man noticed him doing this, and demanded some of the wine. Sinbad gave it to him. The old man became drunk, and Sinbad was able to throw him off his shoulders. Not being a major moralist, Sinbad then beat the old man to death. When he managed to get a ship off the island, he was told that the old man was a famous devil, who would beg to be carried, but then would ride his victim to death, eventually eating the body.
"Nice story," LuEllen said.
"I should have remembered it," I said. "I read all the Sinbad stories, but a long time ago."
"So. what does it mean?"
"There are some very heavy social and psychological implications to it."
"You have no fuckin' idea what it means," she said.
"Why do you think we've been cutting the devil card out of my tarot deck?"
She opened her mouth to crack wise, and then shut it. And kept it shut.
Actually going out on the Net suggested something else to me. I did a quick search, found a site, and plugged in www.dallasnews.com. The Dallas Morning News had one of the better newspaper sites, and on page one, it earned a teaser: "One Killed, One Wounded in Denton Shooting."
I punched it up and after a minute, a brief story trickled down the laptop's screen.
A california woman was killed and a man who told police that he was her "bodyguard" was wounded in a shooting at the Eighty-Eight motel in Denton late saturday night. Denton police say the shooting may be drug related.
Lane Ward, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, was pronounced dead at the scene, while her "bodyguard," identified by police as Lethridge Green, of Oakland, California, was in fair condition at Mount of Olives Hospital.
Police said that both Ward and Green had prior drug-related arrests, Ward in 1986 in San Francisco for possession of marijuana, Green in 1977 in Oakland for possession of cocaine.
Witnesses said the gunmen were two white males, one of whom was wounded in the shooting. Neither gunman has been found.
Police said Green was being held for questioning at the hospital.
"Ooo. Little Lane was smoking dope," LuEllen said
"In 1986," I said. "She was a college kid."
"But it sounds bad, doesn't it?"
"Not unless the cops dropped some dope in the room, and the paper doesn't mention any dope being found," I said. "Of course, there's the other possibility."
"Yeah?"
"That it's all bullshit from start to finish; that the FBI or somebody is mixing in with the cops, and don't want reporters asking any more questions. I mean, right now, it's another dope-related shooting. Nobody'll give it another look."
"Good for Green."
"Probably," I said.
So we didn't go to the library. We didn't go to Waco, either; not that day, or the next. If there was anything going on at the ranch, they might be looking out for conspicuously non-rancher cars, for at least a couple of days.
So we spent Sunday and Monday wandering around Austin; bought a basketball at a Wal-Mart and played a little one-on-one at a local playground, hit some more golf balls, did some drawing. Checked the Dallas Morning News Web site a couple more times, but the story was dead.
Talked to Bobby. The FBI had interviewed Green, pretty much cutting out the local cops. He'd convinced them that he was hired muscle: he had all the background, plus the attitude. They left with a few threats, but both Green and his lawyer thought it was all over.
I also spent some time calling around Austin, and found a place I could rent a pickup"I need to help my daughter move some furniture from one house to another," I told the guy at Access Car Rental, who didn't care one way or the otherand picked up the truck. On Monday night, we watched movies on pay TV. The next morning, at eight o'clock, we left for Waco.
Or Whacko, as LuEllen pronounced it.
CHAPTER 22
When we were killing time in Austin, we hardly talked about Lane Ward. We were working at pushing her away, the image of her dead on the motel bed. Instead of talking about that, we were technicaclass="underline" How did they find us so quickly? When did they detect the intrusion, etc.?
On the way up to Waco, LuEllen, who had hardly spoken at all that morning, asked, "Who's going to take care of her?"
"What?"
"Who's going to take care of Lane? Who's going to take care of the funeral and her stuff at her house? What's going to happen with all that? Does somebody just haul it to the dump?"
"Don't start," I said.
"I can't help it. I woke up thinking about it. I mean, she was about my age, and she doesn't have any kids, and her parents are dead, just like me. Then, all of a sudden, she's killedand who takes care of her? The state? I mean, do they just cremate her and throw her ashes in a dump somewhere? Do they take all of her books out and throw them away, or have a garage sale, or what?"
"If she's got a will. I mean, that should take care of it."
"That's just legal," LuEllen said. "I wonder if there's anybody who really cares?"
She worried about it all the way to Waco; and didn't really stop then, I don't think. She just stopped talking about it.
Waco has a county courthouse that looks like a state capitol. I went in looking for a map, and they sent me across the street. I got one, chatted with the map guy for a few minutes, and he showed me a plat book. It took a while, but I eventually spotted Corbeil's ranch just outside a little town called Crawford, which was northwest of Waco proper. We stopped at a Barnes amp; Noble bookstore, LuEllen ran in and bought a couple of crumpets and some kind of health juice, and we headed for Corbeil's.
There's a big lake at Waco, and a couple of rivers, which didn't fit with my mental picture of the place: but there they were. The November countryside was low and rolling, and as we got closer to Crawford, cut by gullies and a few creeks. There was some corn farming, and lots of hay around, but in general, the country was more ranch than farm. We crawled through Crawford, inadvertently ran a four-way stop that I thought was two-way, and almost got T-boned by a Chevy pickup. LuEllen was peering out the window and said, eventually, "Took me sixteen years to get out of a place like this."
"Really? A place like this?"
"Up in Minnesota," she said. I'd never known she was a smalltown girl, though if I'd thought about it, I might've guessed. And I waited. No small-town kid has ever been through another small town without some kind of comment about the other town's inferiority. She said, "But the place I grew up, at least we had a Dairy Queen."
Yup.
Corbeil's place was set on a ridge above Texas Highway 185; the place was a sprawling yellow log-cabin-style house. Not new, but not antique, either: the kind of log place that city people buy. We couldn't see it all from the road, but a half-dozen outbuildings of one kind or another were scattered about the place: a steel pole barn stuffed with hay, what was probably a machine shed, a six-car garage, what might possibly have been a bunkhouse or an office buildingtwo doors, and a row of windows with decorative shutters next to each windowa long, low stable with a training ring off one side, and what might have been a pump shed.