skeletons (13 page)

I raged around the room. I wanted light, I’d had enough of the dark. I switched on the dresser lamp.

“I just thought of it—how come you haven’t asked me yet? To go back there and find out what happened to Buell Wood? Now that we’ve got Crossworth and Sansom laid away, why not go back and Sherlock around a little more and this time lose a little more of my anatomy? Like my face? How come?”

I switched on her vanity light.

I’ll tell you, Tyler—you look for your own goddamned identity on your own goddamned time! I’m not losing any more of mine looking for yours! I know who I am! I’m B. James Butters! I’m hot for virtue! I hate evil and I won’t wallow in it for anybody! The bottom line is—I’m a decent human being and I have a right to live in a decent world and yours ain’t!”

I switched on a bed lamp.

“I have a talent, a gift—I write damned good children’s literature—and you will not take that talent away by turning me into an adult! I have to be immature—I have to be a child myself—and I will not allow you to make a beat-down, hung-up average man out of me! And besides that, I’m only thirty-four years old and that’s too young to die!”

She sat impassively while I rammed into the John and turned on the light and rammed out again.

“So have your identity crisis by yourself, baby! Go on over to Harding and find out the filthy facts on your own time! As for me, I’m going the hell back where I belong while I’m still able and still me!”

I grabbed the phone and snarled at the operator to get me American Airlines and when she did booked myself on a New York flight leaving El Paso at 10:15 in the morning, which would give me ample, time before boarding to engage some local yokel to chauffeur my car home.

“There by God,” I said, triumphant.

Tyler had not heard. In the glare of lamps she was stretched out on the bed beside her painted coins, staring at the ceiling. For a second she seemed dead. Her eyes were empty, her face fixed as if by a mortician, and when she spoke, her voice was disembodied, almost mechanical. It was as though, switching on lights, I had also activated a machine somewhere within her. It was as though her words were being played on tape.

“I didn’t go to high school in Harding. I went to a girls’ school in El Paso, the Revette School. In my sophomore year I was called home for the funeral of my grandfather, Judge Vaught. He lived to be ninety-one. After the funeral, my father begged me to stay the night, and I did, and had a date with Howell Word. Tom Word’s son. Tom Word’s father was Francis Word, who had been a friend of my grandfather, the judge. This was in 1963.

Howell took me to a movie, then out in the desert and parked. I knew very little about boys. When we had parties at Revette, we were always in groups, and always chaperoned. Howell shocked me, and frightened me—the things he wanted to do. Finally I got angry and got out of the car and said I was walking home. I knew where we were. It was about five miles back to town. I took off my shoes and began walking. Howell drove beside me, pleading through the window to forgive him and get back in. But I was stubborn. I wouldn’t. Then another car came along, a prowl car of the County Sheriff’s Department. It was Pingo Chavez, the sheriff. I’ve never been gladder to see anyone. Pingo told Howell to go home, get lost. He did. Then Pingo offered to drive me home and I said yes, yes, I was so relieved. But he didn’t take me home. He drove down another road and parked and turned off his radio. He took out from under the seat an old Colt revolver. He said it had belonged to my other grandfather, Buell Wood, who had disappeared long ago. I asked him how he got it, but he wouldn’t tell me. He said it was one of a matched pair given to Buell Wood by the town, and had been used in the gunfight on Gold Street—when he killed the three men who were responsible for my grandmother’s death. He asked me if I’d like to have it. I said oh yes, I’d rather have that gun than anything else on earth. He said, ‘You will have to fuck for it.’”

In the telling she had not moved, nor had I. I stood beside her, listening to the tape.

“I had the revolver in my hand. If I’d been older, if I’d known what I know now, I’d have pointed it at him and said, ‘Touch me and I’ll shoot you. I’m choosey about the company I keep, so don’t ever speak to me or come near me again. I’m getting out of this car, you insignificant bean son of a bitch, and if you try to stop me I’ll kill you.’ And I would have.”

Flashback. I recalled how she had cut down to insignificance the foul-mouthed Mexican cabbie in New York on our way back from JFK.

“But I didn’t say it. I was terrified, and I was vague about what it was he wanted. How you did it. But going home without my grandfather’s gun would have broken my heart. So I said yes.”

Phenomenon. I wished Crossworth and Sansom had been there to see it. They might have decided dying for her had been worth it. This was the Tyler Vaught who summered at the Hamptons, wintered in Marrakech. This was the Gucci girl, the St. Laurent swinger. This was the lovely face which had launched a thousand sips at La Cote Basque, the face you said hello to in photos from the pages of
WWD.
But now, though it remained lifeless, the expression as embalmed as ever, tears welled in each gray and staring eye, slid down her cheeks to the pillow. A corpse crying. Tears unspooled from pain recorded in the past. The effect was SHATTERING.

“He did it to me twice. He hurt me so awfully I screamed. I was sixteen years old. I was a virgin.”

Along one wall of the room, four large white opaque glass screens.

Facing the four screens, a wide, curved console of dials and buttons before which, at the left center, sat the operator, and around the curve of the console, to his right, the radioman.

“The most top-secret room in our operation,” he said.

“And the most important. What you see is our Geotech Sensor System.”

“Four TV’s,” I guessed. “So you can catch four different game shows at one time.”

“Wrong.” He grinned. The screens were receivers representing the system along four different sectors of the border, he explained. In each of these sectors, on the American side of the line, a field of sensors, or detecting devices, was buried. The sensors were highly sensitive and usually one-directional, though sometimes bidirectional. When pressure was applied to them—when the earth above or around them was disturbed in other words —they responded by sending a radio signal. This signal, magnified and relayed over considerable distance, reached one of the screens and was translated on it into a white dot of light. When the dots winked on in a directional sequence—one after another at intervals and in a straight line—the operator and the computer built into the console recognized instantly that a genuine and meaningful penetration of that field was occurring. Then the computer began at once to print out the date, time, sector, and sequence while the operator logged the penetration on a typewriter. Simultaneously, the X-P Plotter, a machine also built into the console which received additional information from the sensors by radio, went into operation. A stylus drew on a moving chart a graphic picture of the seismic effects in the field—the weight of the penetration, or how much disturbance of the earth was taking place, whether caused by an animal or a man or a vehicle—very much as an electrocardiograph recorded the beats of a heart.

He paused, eyebrows raised.

“I can’t pound a nail,” I confessed.

The grin again. “All right. This man, the operator, studies the screen, and the taped information provided by the computer, and the picture drawn by the X-P Plotter. We call this ‘taking a read-out.’” When the operator’s training and experience convinced him that the penetration of one of the four sectors was significant—this took no more than seconds—he passed on all the relevant information to the radioman on his right. That gent immediately alerted all the ground units in the sector under consideration, and if necessary, called in aircraft as well. His messages, broadcast on one of the four frequencies used by the Border Patrol, were picked up by “repeaters,” radio relay stations erected in a network throughout the district, and reached the units no matter how great the range. These responded at once, and kept in constant communication.

I was impressed. “And this gizmo works all the time?”

“Round the clock. Two men in three shifts.”

“Then what’s your problem? Why doesn’t this detect every wet who puts a toe across the line?”

“Because the system covers only four small areas.”

“Why not install it everywhere?”

“Cost. We have six thousand miles of land border with Canada and Mexico.”

“You must grab quite a few, though.”

“One out of ten. I told you, our guess is that two thousand cross the Texas line every night of the week.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Every night. Probably ten per cent of the entire population of Mexico is already here by now. Illegally.” He frowned. “About all we can do is keep a finger in the dike, Mr. Butters. But the flood is on its way, and the country isn’t paying attention.”

Henry Snackenberg ushered me out of the room and down the hall of Border Patrol HQ, on the heights overlooking El Paso, and into his office. On the walls a portrait of the President and a personal letter of commendation, I assumed, from the U. S. Attorney General.

“Hank, how the hell tall are you?”

“Henry. Six-four. And you?”

“None of your beeswax.”

“Well,” he said. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Butters. What changed your mind?”

“Jimmie. What does Ace look like?” “Like a boy. A little long and lean for his age.”

“Where did you find Annie?”

“In high school.”

“Robbing the cradle.”

“What changed your mind, Jimmie? You told me yesterday, in no uncertain terms, you wouldn’t cooperate with us and you were pulling out of the Wild West pronto.”

“I saw your gun. Have you ever fired it? I mean, at anybody?”

“Once or twice. What changed your mind? The flag or the bed?”

“Did anyone ever take a shot at you? Did they come close?”

“Missed by a mile. What changed your mind?”

I grinned at him, ruefully. I was beginning to like him again. His patriotism wasn’t intolerable, if he tricked himself out in boots and a ten-gallon that was his regionalism, not his fault, and I sensed that under his ambling, shambling exterior he was efficient and dedicated and probably heroic as hell.

“Did anybody ever tell you you’re a dead ringer for James Stewart thirty years ago?”

“No. I liked John Wayne better.”

“You would.” He broke me down. “Okay, goddammit,” I said. “I also told Tyler I was leaving in no uncertain terms. I even booked a flight out this morning—then canceled it this morning.”

“I know.”

“You do? How?”

“We have ways.”

“You’re keeping tabs on me.”

“You’re very valuable.”

“Oh. Well, she melted me. She’s the only woman I’ve ever really loved. Except for Annie. And I’m intrigued as hell by that town of hers—by what might have happened there long ago and by what might still be happening. And I’m a writer, God help me. So were Crossworth and Sansom, God help them. I can’t bear to leave a story in mid-air. Without an ending.”

“I see.”

“So I’ve committed myself to go back to Harding for a couple more days and no more. She’s staying on at the Paso del Norte till I pick her up. Then we’ll drive back to New York and get married on the way.”

“Congratulations.”

“So I’m doing it for love, sweet love, Hank.”

“Henry.”

“Not for the U. S. Government. But if I stumble over anything I think might concern you, I’ll pass it on. I tell you frankly, I still don’t see a connection—logical connection—between what you’re doing and what I’ll be doing.”

“Neither do I. Logical.”

“Then what’s-”

“Why did you dig up a grave?” he asked.

“Why did you?” I asked.

“I had a hunch.”

“So did I.”

“Give me another one,” he said.

“Well?”

“Were you just concocting a good plot when you said yesterday you think the sheriff over there—Chavez—is the one who dragged you under a car?”

“I don’t think, I know. And he undoubtedly did Crossworth and Sansom in. D’you know what Pingo’ means? ‘Little Devil.’ What a character he is—he’s got original Diego Rivera drawings on his office wall worth a thousand dollars per. How about that—an aesthete sheriff. And homicidal. And a fiend, too, sexually.”

“How do you know that?”

“Never you mind.”

“How long has he been sheriff?”

“He said since 1956.”

“Long time. He must be very electable, or have the county in his hip pocket.”

Snackenberg was thinking, making a Tinker Toy tower of his long fingers and peering into it. “The sheriff thing fits. He’d have done the investigation on Crossworth, as thoroughly or superficially as he cared to. And he’d have had access to Sansom’s coffin before the airline took over. But who investigates a sheriff? Who has jurisdiction or authority? The state of New Mexico? I don’t know. And even though the office is a perfect cover, sheriffs just don’t run around committing murders and tampering with remains. And how could he be involved with events in Harding sixty years ago—before he was born? It isn’t credible.”

“No it isn’t,” I agreed. “But what’s credible about a connection between Chavez and importing illegal aliens?”

“Nothing. So it’s got to be.” He shook his head, dismissed doubt. “When are you going?”

“Today. Now.”

“Where will you stay over there?”

“The Ramada, I imagine. They have a bar.”

“All right. Here’s my card and phone number.” He opened a desk drawer, handed me a card.

“This number will reach me day or night when I’m in town. If I’m not, tell our switchboard you have to talk to Alvah Helms, my boss. I’ve briefed him—he knows who you are and what you’re up to. And by the way, we’ll have you under surveillance every minute you’re in Harding.”

“Golly gee. Like in the movies.”

He elongated himself to his feet. “That reminds me. Glad you mentioned it. Come along.”

He led me out of the HQ. We crossed a grassed area—I had to trot to equal his stroll—entered a low, narrow building without windows. Snackenberg turned on lights.