Graves' Retreat (16 page)

    “What!”

    “And I’m moving out of the house.”

    “My God, Byron, you go over and sit down right there and right now. I’m going to get you a snifter of brandy and we’re going to talk.” But Byron stood unmoving. “I’m going to talk to somebody about a job with the electrical company. That’s the coming thing and I want to be a part of it.”

    But Mrs. Thaxton Fuller wasn’t listening. She had crossed the room to pour from a diamond-faceted blue glass bottle with colored decorations of birds some of the brandy she had imported from a monastery in Italy.

    “Here,” she said to Byron, handing it to him.

    She led him, against his will, to the walnut-framed armchair with the buttoned back, one of her favorites.

    Once he was seated, his eyes still peculiar, still
most
peculiar, she handed him the brandy.

    “Now, Byron, I want you to tell me what’s troubling you.”

    “Susan is troubling me. I love her. I’m losing her.”

    “As I said, there are other women.”

    “I don’t want other women.”

    Mrs. Thaxton Fuller sighed. “Then we’ll see to it that you get Susan back.”

    He glanced up.
"We’ll
see to it. You and I? She’s not an acquisition, Mother.”

    “That isn’t what I meant.”

    “Of course it’s what you meant.” He looked down at his brandy and shook his head. “I don’t blame her for breaking it off.”

    “You don’t?”

    His eyes raised to meet hers. “No, Mother, I don’t. I-I haven’t been the man she needs.”

    “Don’t be ridiculous.”

    "In fact, I haven’t been a man at all.”

    “You’ve been to Dartmouth. You’re the youngest bank vice president in the state. What are you talking about?”

    He laughed. “I’m not sure we have the same criteria for manliness, Mother.”

    “So you’re going to quit your job and move out of the house?”

    “Yes, Mother, I am.”

    For the first time in many years, he saw tears in his mother’s eyes. He was moved, of course, and sorry for her, for her particular type of loneliness and her need to dominate all people and situations-but he was also determined.

    He was not going to back down.

    He set his brandy on the small table next to the chair and stood up. By now his mother had begun to sob rather dryly, as if she did not quite know how, and Byron took her with great tenderness in his arms and held her, and the mere act of it was enough that his mother felt the freedom to cry.

    “I love you, Mother, and I’ll see you every Sunday and I’ll get a telephone and you can telephone me anytime you like, but it’s time I move out. It really is.”

    And then his mother startled him by pulling back her tear-red face. She laughed a peculiar laugh, a
most
peculiar laugh, and said, “I was afraid you were never going to move out, Byron. And it frightened me. I don’t want you to be one of those men who live with their mothers. But-”

    "But what?”

    “But it had to be your own idea.”

    From her sleeve she took a handkerchief. She blew her nose. She looked up at the portrait of her husband. “Thaxton was like that. You said I was the real power behind your father. I wasn’t. All I could do was plant suggestions-and let him come to the idea in his own good time.”

    He smiled at her. For one of the few times he could ever recall, he not only loved his mother, but in this moment he
liked
her as well.

    She said, “I can go with you and help you find a decent place to live.”

    Now it was his turn to laugh. He slid his arm around her tenderly and said, “No, Mother, if I’m finally going to strike out on my own, I don’t think it’s a good idea to have my mother pick out my lodgings.”

    She smiled. “No, Byron, I guess that wouldn’t be a good idea, would it?”

    

    

    “You see fewer and fewer of them every year,” Mr. Waterhouse said.

    As Les reached the porch of his boardinghouse, he smelled the mint used in sun tea, and the lazy smoke of a cigar.

    His mind still filled with images of his brother hanging, and the curiously detached attitude of Black Jake Early with him yet, he decided to sit on the porch with the other boarders and listen to the preacherly tones of Mr. Waterhouse and his tales.

    “Fewer and fewer,” Mr. Waterhouse said.

    “Where have they gone?”

    “Some of them have died off, I suppose,” Mr. Waterhouse said. “Living on a reservation likely kills some types of people, I imagine.”

    So the talk was of Indians. It often was.

    “I can remember seeing them,” Mr. Waterhouse went on. "They’d camp outside of town and work the maple trees for sugar and then you’d see them traveling through Cedar Rapids on the way back to their reservation, bringing the sugar with them. There was a small army of them and sometimes they sang and sometimes they chanted and sometimes they laughed at us in just the same way we talked about them. Indian sugar, though, that was the sweetest sugar I ever tasted.”

    Then there was talk about sugar and cakes and how good certain kinds of desserts tasted on Christmas day and how nobody seemed to like fruitcakes much.

    It was not the sort of dialogue that could take Les’s mind from his problems.

    So he sat and watched how the elms formed a canopy over the road and how the shadows from the streetlights seemed to chase themselves like silhouetted dogs down the center of the sandy street.

    Then Mr. Waterhouse said a startling thing indeed. “The McIntosh boy got out of Fort Madison today.”

    Fort Madison was the state prison.

    “The McIntosh boy? Who’s that?” one of the boarders asked. “David McIntosh? You really don’t know who he is?” Mr. Waterhouse said. The way he asked it, you could tell he was eager to tell everybody.

    “Nope.”

    "Well, I guess that isn’t surprising.”

    “What isn’t surprising?”

    “Why you wouldn’t know.”

    “Wouldn’t know what?” the boarder asked.

    This was how Mr. Waterhouse liked to tell his tales. Sort of tease you with them. You kind of had to force them out of him. He loved that.

    There was wind. The summer leaves were so thick they sounded like waves of the ocean as the breeze trapped them and swung them first this way and then that way. A collie trotted down the middle of the sandy road looking tired, as if he’d been out chasing rabbits for the past few hours.

    And Mr. Waterhouse, leaning forward now and taking a preparatory drink of his ice tea with the mint leaves floating in it, said: “David McIntosh was the boy who lost a bank.”

    “Who lost a bank?”

    “That’s right.”

    “Now how could a thing like that be?”

    “I take it you want me to tell you.”

    “We sure do,” said the boarder.

    Mr. Waterhouse had a bit more tea and then he said, “It’s very simple, really. Back when Cedar Rapids only had one bank, David McIntosh was a farm boy who fell on hard times and came into town one day to rob that bank. Well, he stuck it up all right but he lost it.”

    “That’s the part I don’t get. How could he lose it?”

    “Well, he got the money, all right, you see-a big leather satchel of it-but on the way out of town he stopped at a rowdy roadsider for some beers. That was one of the McIntosh boy’s most terrible problems. His liking for beer. Couldn’t leave it alone. That was why he fell on hard times in the first place.”

    “I still don’t see-”

    “I’m coming to that,” said Mr. Waterhouse, heading off the impatience of his audience. “Well, a fellow who’s just robbed a bank isn’t about to walk into a roadsider carrying a satchel full of money now, is he?”

    “Not likely.”

    “So you know what he did?”

    “What?”

    “He did what any right-thinking bank robber would do.”

    “What?”

    “He buried it.”

    “Well, that sounds sensible enough.”

    “Yes, it does, till you stop to consider that because of his liking for beer, he had terrible blackouts.”

    “You mean he couldn’t remember things?”

    “Exactly.”

    “So what happened?”

    “Well, he went into this roadsider expecting to have just a few mugs, but he couldn’t quit with just a few, the McIntosh boy.”

    “So then what happened?”

    "Well, he also had one other failing.”

    “What was that?” another boarder asked.

    “He was a braggart. A terrible braggart. According to him there wasn’t a man in the valley who could spit as far, slug as hard or womanize as long.”

    “But how did that get him in trouble?”

    “Well,” said Mr. Waterhouse, “imagine yourself a young buck of twenty-three or less with a penchant for drinking beer and a tongue that just loves to brag.”

    “So?”

    “Well, then imagine that you’ve just stuck up a bank and gotten clean away with it.”

    “Well, I’ll be damned,” the boarder said. “Excuse me, ladies.”

    “He started bragging.”

    At this point the boarders, as if having just been told a joke, started laughing there in the splendid darkness of the July night.

    “He started bragging to the people in the tavern that he’d just robbed the bank and that he’d gotten away with it,” Mr. Waterhouse said.

    “They probably got the sheriff.”

    “They certainly did. He came right out to the roadsider and took the McIntosh boy to what passed for a jail in those days and manacled him to a bedpost and then let him sleep off his drunk.”

    "But I still don’t understand-” the boarder began.

    “You still don’t understand how he lost the bank?”

    “That’s right.”

    “Well, when he woke up in the morning and the sheriff came in and asked him if he’d robbed the bank, the McIntosh boy confessed right away. But then the sheriff asked him where the money was.”

    “My Lord,” said one of the lady boarders, who was now anticipating what Mr. Waterhouse was about to say.

    “And that was how he lost the bank-he couldn’t remember where he’d buried the money,” Mr. Waterhouse said.

    “Did they ever find it?”

    “Never,” said Mr. Waterhouse with great and abiding satisfaction.

    “You mean to this day?”

    “I mean to this day.”

    “The money’s still buried-”

    “-somewhere,” finished Mr. Waterhouse. “Somewhere.”

    “My Lord,” said the same lady boarder who had said “My Lord” before.

    So then everybody fell to talking about how now that the McIntosh boy was released from prison he’d probably start hunting his money again, even though (as Mr. Waterhouse went on to elaborate) literally dozens of men had searched for dozens of days and had never found that money at all.

    The story made Les smile and he sat there and played with the absurdity of the tale the way he might suck on a piece of candy, slowly, savoring it.

    For a lingering, luxurious moment he was filled with an overwhelming optimism that somehow everything was going to be all right- T.Z. and Neely would make it to Mexico without having to rob the bank where Les worked, and Black Jake Early would go back to St. Louis and give up his guns and live out his days playing with his grandchild.

    But then, as if sobering up from a very happy drunk, he saw Neely’s face, the cynicism and sadness and irony of that shanty-Irish face, and knew there could be no such ending for T.Z. or Neely-or for Les himself.

    Because he loved his brother, Les was inextricably bound up in their Sate, in the events that Neely was now setting in motion.

    The return of his gloom exhausted him completely.

    He stood up on shaky legs and said, “Good night, everybody.”

    “Wondered when our town’s baseball pitcher was going to hie off to bed,” said Mr. Waterhouse with affectionate irony.

    “Well, now's the time,” Les said.

    “Good night,” everybody said to him.

    

    

    Somebody had been in his room.

    Black Jake Early stood three steps over the threshold, his weapon drawn, sniffing and listening with the intensity of an animal alerted suddenly to danger.

    Somebody had been in his hotel room.

    Through the window the lamplight from below tinted the air with a thin yellow color, just enough so that Early could see only places for anybody to be.

    He went to the bed and rather than get on his knees and look under, he simply picked it up and flung it aside.

    Nobody was under it.

    Then he went to the closet and stood to the right of it and jerked the door full open.

    He waited a full minute, his massive body greasy with summer sweat now, and then stepped into the darkness of the closet, his eyes adjusting fully to the gloom, and looked around.

    Nothing.

    He started to check his bag on the bed and that was when he saw the note.

    He picked it up quickly and read it:

    YOU WANT T. Z. GRAVES. I WILL HELP YOU FIND HIM. I WILL CONTACT YOU TOMORROW NIGHT. I EXPECT A PART OF THE REWARD FOR THE RISK I’M TAKING.

    He read it a few more times, as if it might hold some secret code, and then he went over and sat on the window ledge and took out a big stogie and bit off the end and spat it on the floor. He spent the next few minutes just rolling the stogie around in his lips. Enjoying the tart sweetness of the tobacco leaves.

    Who knew he was in Cedar Rapids to find T. Z. Graves other than