Remember Ben Clayton (17 page)

When they got home and heard from Maureen that Clayton had still not returned, the sense that something was really wrong began to take hold.

“Maybe we should have checked the train station,” Martindale said.

“Not likely. Would he have gone to the train station without his luggage? Without checking out of his hotel first? Of course, there’s nothing likely about this whole thing.”

He grabbed the hat he’d set down on the table only moments before. “You’re right, I should check the train station. And the hospital too.”

“Want me to come again this time?” Martindale asked.

“No, you stay here with Maureen.”

Maureen knew there was no point in suggesting that he telephone the hospital instead. He was already out the door again, desperate for any active gesture.

“I have the feeling I’m in your father’s way,” Vance said when Gil had driven off.

“There’s nothing going on for you to be in the way of. We’re just sitting here. What did you two talk about?”

“Nothing. Just small talk. Trying to solve the case of the fugitive patron. Listen, as long as you’re not going to kick me out, do you mind if I take a look at the work in question that’s causing all the anxiety?”

SHE TOOK VANCE
into the studio and the two of them stood staring at the scale model. Maureen tried to see it through Lamar Clayton’s eyes—how it had moved him, how it had failed him. But she could only see it through her own. It was her father’s most assured work in many years. It was even better than the Pawnee Scout. His own heart was revealed in it. In the posture of the young man’s body, in his focused gaze, in the unforced mysterious comradeship between him and his horse, there was a welling sorrow. The sorrow came from nowhere that she could discern, from no particular detail. It came instead from the sculptor, from her father.

“What a gift he has,” Vance said.

“I know.”

He got out his pipe and was about to light it, then seemed to remember he was in another man’s working sanctum. He slipped the pipe back into his pocket and regarded the Ben Clayton model again.

“How old was he?”

“Twenty-one.”

“Poor bastard.”

“Here. Help me cover it.”

She handed him a wet cloth and together they draped the model again so it would not dry out. Then he gestured to her little corner of the studio, where the panels for the Spirit of the Waters were likewise hidden beneath layers of moist cloth.

“Is this your piece here? May I see it as well?”

“Not tonight.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m not happy with it. And because even if I were I wouldn’t want you to judge my work after looking at my father’s. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“I wasn’t planning to ‘judge’ it. Anyway, you’re not in a contest with him, so why should it matter?”

“I don’t know why it should, but it does. And your nosiness is unbecoming.”

“I agree that it’s a character flaw. One of my favorites.”

He walked up to her and kissed her, but the moment didn’t feel right to her and neither did the place. She kissed him back and briskly patted his lapels.

“We should get back to the house in case he calls.”

Her father did call, fifteen or twenty minutes later, with the news that Mr. Clayton wasn’t in the hospital.

“Maybe we should tell the police,” she told him over the phone.

“All right. I’ll go over to the station now. While I’m there, maybe you and Vance should take over the search. I don’t want to let any time go by without somebody looking for him.”

“I BELIEVE
this is the first time in my life I’ve ever been enlisted into a posse,” Vance declared as they drove away from the house in his friend’s Chevrolet, with neighborhood dogs sprinting out of their yards and snapping at the tires.

They drove slowly up and down Roosevelt, passing ramshackle cafés and boardinghouses, dry goods stores and warehouses. It was as drab a commercial strip as San Antonio had to offer, and reminded her once again how far she was from the places in the world where things that mattered to her were happening.

“By the way,” Vance said, as they peered down alleys and side streets, “I got out my copy of Wilbarger the other night to see if your friend might be in it.”

“Wilbarger?”

“
Indian Depredations in Texas
. The Bible for this sort of research. You said it was on the Salt Fork, didn’t you, where Clayton’s housekeeper lost her family?”

“That’s what she said.”

“It seems to have been a fairly famous massacre, at least to the folks in Stonewall County. Do you think she’d talk to me about it?”

“George’s Mary? She’d probably hit you over the head with a skillet if you pried into her private life. Or maybe I would.”

“Too bad. It would have made a good article for the
Quarterly
. But I suppose it’s for the best. It would only give my overlords another reason not to take me seriously.”

He drifted into a monologue about his endless travails at the university. “A lot of these professors, they’re intimidating, all right. A farm boy from Waxahachie or someplace will take one look at some crusty old medievalist in his bow tie and think he’s face-to-face with God. But the truth is half of them don’t have enough brains to fry an egg in. And when it comes to being open to new ideas—”

He braked, inspecting a group of men gathered at an icehouse, but Clayton was not among them.

“A host of golden daffodils!” he went on. “Fine! No complaints. Everyone should know their Wordsworth. But when I gently suggest that poetry can also be written about mesquite beans and turkey buzzards, that it can come from the native soil, out of the old rock, so to speak, well, that’s when they look at me like—”

“Slow down!” Maureen said. It was dusk now and they were passing a garage where in one of the open bays she could see two mechanics in coveralls sitting at a table. There was a third man at the table wearing a suit and a white stockman’s hat: Lamar Clayton.

“There he is,” she told Vance. “Stop the car.”

She approached them carefully, Vance following a few discreet steps behind. Mr. Clayton had not seen them and was engaged in a leisurely conversation in Spanish with the two mechanics. They were all drinking orangeade and the table was covered with butcher paper, upon which sat a pile of greasy barbecued meat and stacks of tortillas.

Clayton was not eating, just sipping his orangeade while the two mechanics helped themselves to the food. They were the ones who saw her first, and she heard one of them say, “Señor.” Clayton turned to look at her and said nothing and the expression on his face was blank. He remained seated while the two mechanics stood and offered her a chair.

She turned to Vance.

“Would you please drive back to our house and let my father know that we’ve found him? He’ll probably be home before too long.”

“You’ll be all right here?”

“Of course.”

He gave her hand a warm squeeze and then got in the car and drove away.

Maureen took a seat. The mechanics offered her some of the meat but she politely waved it away and they gathered it up in the butcher paper and went inside to the office so that she and Clayton could be alone.

“They’re both from Chihuahua,” Clayton said. “They don’t say it but I bet you a dime the older one there rode with Villa.”

“We’ve been looking for you all afternoon, Mr. Clayton.”

“Oh, hell,” he said. “I don’t need people looking for me. You want to do that, that’s your business.”

“We thought something had happened to you.”

“I told you I was just going to go out for a minute. I ran into these men here and we got to talking and I went next door to that barbecue place and bought them some dinner. So if anything happened to me that’s about what it was.”

He took a sip of his drink. He had spoken to her in the same surly, annoyed tone she had heard him using with George’s Mary. A trace of temper in her own voice, she decided, would be a good thing.

“Don’t be so selfish,” she told him, “and please don’t speak to me that way.”

Her tone caught his attention. He came swimming back from his crotchety self-absorption and looked at her as if aware of her presence for the first time.

“We’ve all been very worried,” she went on, “and it will be a great relief for my father to hear that you’re all right. But he’s also very concerned about your reaction to the model. He’s worried that it might have offended you, and if it did, I think you at least owe him the courtesy of telling him why. If you want to cancel the commission, of course that’s your right, but for decency’s sake—”

“I don’t want to cancel the goddam commission!”

The outburst seemed to startle him. He looked around uneasily, staring at a moldy sign on the wall for Goodrich tires as if it were some difficult text he was trying to decipher.

“To tell you the truth,” he said to Maureen, “I ain’t all that sure how the hell I got here.”

“You walked out of our house.”

“I remember that, and I remember being here. I don’t remember anything in between. How long have I been gone?”

“About five hours.”

She had never seen fear in his eyes before, but it was there now.

“Do you think I’m losing my mind, Miss Gilheaney?”

“I very much doubt it. Maybe seeing the model gave you a shock. That happens to people.”

“I’ve had plenty of shocks and I ain’t never forgot where I was before.”

He stared at the Goodrich sign again. “I seen my own mother lying on the floor of our little house with an arrow through her. I’d say that was a shock, wouldn’t you? And I ain’t forgot a minute of any of that.”

Maureen was careful not to say anything. But she reached out and touched his arm and he didn’t flinch as she supposed he would.

“If I get to where I’m losing my mind I believe I’ll just go out and shoot myself.”

“Please don’t talk that way.”

He said it was nobody’s business how he talked, but he said it as an observation, not a rebuke. Then he sat there in silence for almost a full minute. Through the window, Maureen could see the two mechanics arguing with each other, and she guessed they were trying to decide whether or not to ask the old man to leave so they could close up for the night.

“When I was with the Indians,” Clayton said at last, just when Maureen thought he had decided to turn obstinately mute, “the Rangers used to chase us all over hell. One time we was running from them across the desert for days without any water, and when we finally come to this lake we was counting on, damned if it wasn’t dry, nothing but dead fish lying out there in the sun. And so we kept on going west. We had to kill a few horses just to drink the blood. We finally got to some better country and found a spring, but you know what? I started to drink that water and it wouldn’t go down. My tongue was swole up so bad the water just came back up out my nose. There I was at that spring, dying of thirst with all that cold mountain water, and it didn’t do me a damn bit of good.”

He was looking at her now, and speaking to her. His air of confusion and distance had slowly evaporated during the time it had taken him to tell this story, and there was a direct look in his face again.

“I guess you might say I had that same kind of feeling when I saw what your dad had made. It was Ben, all right, or close enough. Closer than I’d thought it would be, to tell you the truth. I thought it would make me feel better to see it, but it didn’t. And a full-size statue ain’t going to neither.”

Moved as she was, she could not quite keep her self-interested alarm at bay, and he must have seen it on her face, because he smiled at her and said, “Don’t worry. I ain’t going to back out of the contract with your dad.”

“He wouldn’t want to complete it if it caused you pain.”

“It won’t cause me pain, Miss Gilheaney. It just won’t make the pain go away, and I ought to have knowed that already.”

He reached into the pocket of his suit coat and removed a much-handled envelope. He took a letter out and handed it to her. The letter had been repeatedly folded and unfolded and the creases were almost worn through.

“I got this a while ago. I know I ought to write this boy back but I can’t make myself do it.”

Maureen read the letter.

“This here is what came along with it,” he said, taking the little homemade medallion out of the envelope and setting it on the table between them. Maureen studied it for a long time—it was crude but not bad, and rendered with such longing it almost brought her to tears. She carefully folded the letter back again.

“Would you like me to write him for you?” she said.

“All right,” he said.

“What would you like me to say?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Anything you say would be all right with me, I guess.” He handed her the envelope. “You’ll need that for the address.”

She heard a car pulling in and turned to look. It was her father. She waved to him to stay in the car and wait for them, and then she gently suggested to Mr. Clayton that it was time to go.

SIXTEEN

A
fter Lamar Clayton went home to his ranch, it took Gil, with Maureen’s help, a week and a half to build the armature for the full-scale statue. Ben Clayton had been five feet, eleven inches tall, but because a life-size statue invariably appeared oddly puny to a viewer, Gil had increased the height of the human figure to a full seven feet, and had scaled up the proportions of the horse as well. As a result, the armatures for man and horse looked like oversized mechanical beings from another world. The forms were made from old water pipes Gil had scavenged from junkyards, reinforced in vulnerable load-bearing areas with plaster. He had formed the torsos with odds and ends of lumber from his scrap pile, and applied a patchy covering of hardened burlap that he soaked in plaster. After he had brushed on a coat of shellac, the skeletal figures had seemed to spring to life on their own terms, and it was always at this point that he paused for a moment in amusement. He could send it off to the foundry to be cast as it was and call it “modern.”

He wondered what Clayton would think of people like Picasso or Gaudier-Breszka. He supposed that at least on the subject of so-called modern art he and Clayton might see eye to eye on what a statue was supposed to be—a work that was about its subject and not about itself. As it was, the old rancher had said almost nothing after Gil picked him up at the gas station and drove him back to his hotel. Maureen had told Gil what Clayton had said to her, how the sight of the statue had thrown him back and sent him on a disoriented odyssey through the streets of San Antonio. But he had been too ashamed, or too scared, or just too surly to say anything to Gil himself. He had gone back to West Texas without ever explicitly approving the work, just had sadly decreed as Gil dropped him off at the hotel that it was to go on.

He would never be able to please him; Gil knew that much now. Clayton was a different sort of client, someone who was looking for something—redemption, perhaps, or some deeper, sharper pain—that no artist would have any way of providing.

“Should we start with the clay now?” Maureen asked on the afternoon they finished, staring up at the armature in its mummy wrapping of burlap. Her hair was pinned back and she was wearing her smock and beneath it the faded dress she usually wore for work.

“No,” Gil decided, after glancing at the miniature clock on his worktable. “It’s three o’clock. Let’s start fresh in the morning. I think we’ve earned a few hours off.”

The Menger Bar was crowded when Gil arrived, and Urrutia and Sutherland were out of sorts because their usual table in the back was taken and they were condemned to sitting near the front door, exposed to gusts of cold air every time a patron entered.

“We were just talking about how much whiskey we can stockpile before January, when this goddam amendment goes into effect,” Sutherland said, biting a hard-boiled egg in half. “I was thinking about fifty barrels or so ought to tide me over till people come to their senses again.”

“Fifty barrels?” Gil asked.

“Well, I don’t want to call attention to myself, but I do like a drink or two in the evening. How’s the statue?”

“We’ll start packing on the clay tomorrow. Then I’ll begin the modeling next week. A couple of months and it’ll be ready for the plasterers.”

“And how’s your client?” Urrutia asked. “The Indian captive.”

Gil turned to Sutherland. “What else do you know about him? Is he stable?”

“Stable if he ain’t drunk. Why?”

“He took a strange turn when he saw the model. Wandered off and didn’t come back and claimed he didn’t remember a thing about what happened.”

“He ain’t trying to cheat you out of your money?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, as long as you get your money I guess it don’t matter what sorts of crazy things Lamar does.”

Urrutia reached into a bowl of peanuts and cracked one open. Then he fixed Gil with a weary, wounded look.

“Is something the matter?” Gil asked him.

“I’m just very disappointed in you, my friend. You have a great secret. You’ve kept even your good friends in the dark. But now, at last, your secret has been exposed.”

Gil froze, uncertain about what sort of information Urrutia might have found out. Had he somehow uncovered the fraudulent story about his mother?

The look on Gil’s face startled Urrutia for a moment, but then he broke into a relaxed smile and laughed.

“Don’t worry about him,” Sutherland said to Gil. “He’s got a secret or two himself.”

“Yes, very dark ones. I’ve heard all the rumors. But, Gil, there’s no reason for you to keep such wonderful knowledge hidden from us. You should be very proud of your daughter. She was entrusted with the new sculpture for the Commerce Street bridge. Or am I wrong?”

“No,” Gil replied, hollow with relief. “I am very proud of her. And she did it all on her own. She didn’t even tell me she’d entered the competition. How did you find out about it?”

“Oh, my spies are everywhere, even among the members of the San Antonio Women’s Club.”

Sutherland spotted someone he needed to talk to, a young man from Kerrville who he said was trying to move in on his grocery business. He walked over to slap the kid on the back and buy him a drink.

“He keeps his enemies close,” Urrutia said.

“What do you know about arthritis?” Gil asked him.

“I’m a doctor. I know everything I’m supposed to about it. Why?”

“I’ve started getting this pain at the base of my thumbs when I’m working.”

Urrutia reached across the table, grabbed both of Gil’s hands and roughly examined them.

“No crepitus,” he said. “That’s good. No Heberden’s nodes. That’s good too. Are you eating enough meat?”

“I think so.”

“Eat more. Take smaller portions of bread and potatoes, or even better eliminate them. Take aspirin for the pain. Come around to the office and I’ll make you splints to wear at night. Most important, rest your hands. A few weeks.”

HE TOOK
all of Urrutia’s advice except for resting his hands, worried that those few weeks of idleness would leave him cold on what could be his most important commission in decades. He wore the splints at night, and they helped well enough to get him through the mornings as he and Maureen covered the armatures of the horse and then the man with clay. They worked mostly in silence, packing the clay tight into the crevices, then building it up to a thickness of two inches or so throughout the entire surface area. Before he had begun to worry about his hands, it was the sort of brute work that Gil enjoyed, kneading the stiff clay in his powerful fingers and then jamming it in place without any particular creative demands plaguing his mind. For a good part of the three days this process took he stood on a stepladder fashioning the head and shoulders of the human figure as Maureen handed up buckets of moist clay.

Lately he had taken a dislike to being on the ladder, not as secure in his balance as he used to be. When he reached down to Maureen for another bucket he sometimes felt light-headed and unanchored. He knew that these intimations of vertigo, along with the more recent twinges of arthritis, had to be accepted as harbingers of other inevitable complaints. How long could he remain vital before something crucial began to fail? His eyes? His joints? His mind? His heart? He thought that with exceptional luck he might have as many as twenty more productive years, but he knew that it would become increasingly difficult to convince potential clients that he was the man for the job the more his age began to show and miscellaneous infirmities began to undermine his bearing.

But at the moment he felt inexhaustible. At noon one day, Mrs. Gossling brought a tray of sandwiches into the studio but both Gil and Maureen were so seduced by their work rhythm that it was mid-afternoon before they were hungry enough to pause for lunch. They finally ate their sandwiches sitting in the studio’s rickety wooden chairs, the two of them staring without comment at the work they had done so far, the human figure almost sketched out, with a featureless globular head beneath a flattened mound of clay that Gil would later fashion into a hat.

As they ate, he shifted his attention from the crudely emerging sculpture to the face of his daughter, a face that nature had already defined and completed. He could see himself in the shape of her head, in the bold prominence of her features. He had sadly concluded long ago that there was no case to be made that she was pretty, but there was something about her, he believed, that an open-minded man might find attractive, even beautiful. Her brown eyes were large and warm and frank; people did not turn away when she looked at them. She was not fashionably slender, and never would be, but she was not overly stout either. Her body had density and strength, her forearms, exposed by the rolled-up sleeves of her blouse, were visibly muscular from the hard work of manipulating clay and carrying lumber and lengths of pipe. Character, resolve, physical power, and shining intelligence—how could she have all this and not have, on some level, to some discerning eye, beauty as well?

Indeed, something in Maureen had obviously attracted Vance Martindale, kept drawing him back down here from Austin, which was eighty miles distant. Intellectually and temperamentally, he was a fit for her. He had a solid sense of humor and a mind that bristled at academic caution. But it was the bristling itself that still gave Gil pause. An impatience with convention was a problematic thing when it came to the courting of his daughter—if indeed Martindale was courting her and not just amusing himself with a woman who was sufficiently strong-minded to tease him and spar with him.

And the man took up a lot of space, with his cowboy-professor costume and his rebellious opinions and verbosity. Gil could not escape the feeling that Martindale’s winning manner carried within it hints of empty promises and dashed expectations. Or was this just the assessment of a guarded father whose daughter’s heart had already been broken at least once?

“Were you there when either of my grandparents died?” Maureen abruptly asked him, after they had gone back to work.

“No,” he said. “I was studying in Paris when your grandfather had his heart attack.”

“And my grandmother? How old were you?”

“Let me think,” he said. “I would have been in my late twenties.”

“So back in the States?”

“Yes,” he said, amid a hidden frenzy of calculation, “but in Washington.”

“She just collapsed? Walking home from church after Mass?”

“Yes,” he lied.

“So your father died of a heart attack, and your mother of a brain hemorrhage. Should that concern us, that these sorts of things run in the family?”

“Not necessarily,” he said. “You and I are both hardier than they were. And my father, of course, never looked after himself. The drinking and so on.”

“And your mother?”

“Well, I suppose it was just one of those things that happen.”

“It must have been very hard on you, to be away when it happened. I’m grateful I was with Mother when she died.”

“Yes,” he said, “it was hard.” He hoped that she would now move on to another subject, or, even better, turn her attention back to their work. His mother had lived on into her eighties. He had been there when she died, watching as Monsignor Berney prayed over her and anointed her. But the alternate story seemed oddly just as real, and Maureen kept boring ahead.

“What was she like when you were growing up? My grandmother?”

“Religious, if you want a single word for it. Great, unwavering, relentless faith. Holy water founts in the bedrooms, rosary every night, lectured us on not letting our teeth touch the host during communion. That sort of thing.”

“You make her sound more superstitious than devout.”

“You can be both. Or, in our case, maybe, you can be neither.”

“Speak for yourself. I’m superstitious, a little. I think you are too. And devout in your own way.”

“Maybe, but not in hers. An old woman, still believing in guardian angels.”

“Old woman? If you were in your late twenties, she can’t have been much more than fifty when she died.”

“I meant she seemed old to me,” Gil rushed to say and then, before she could ask another uncomfortable question, stood up from his chair, clapped his hands together, and decreed that it was past time to get back to work.

The work continued, and the working silence now made Gil wary, because Maureen must surely be turning over the conversation they had just had about her grandmother. From the concentrated look on her face, he worried that she was brooding about inconsistencies and uncertainties, checking them against comments on the same subject that he might have heedlessly offered in the past. He could not be sure after all these years of duplicity why he had gone to such lengths to protect his mother from an intolerable truth, when the cost of that protection amounted to the betrayal of his wife and daughter.

“I wrote to that boy,” Maureen said, after half an hour of saying nothing as she packed clay onto the armature under the horse’s head. The remark surprised him, but any reprieve from the interrogation about her grandmother was welcome.

“The boy? You mean Ben’s friend in France?”

She nodded as she continued working. There was a drop of sweat running down her face in front of her ear. Even in December, in San Antonio you toiled in the heat.

“I didn’t know how much I should say,” she went on, “and I certainly didn’t want to tell him about Mr. Clayton’s breakdown or whatever it was. I just told him he had asked me to say how grateful he was to him for writing, that sort of thing. And I thought it would interest him to hear about the statue.”

“That was kind of you,” Gil said.

He stepped down from the ladder to judge his work for a moment.

“Tell me something,” she said.

“What?”

She nodded toward her own nearly finished panels in the corner of the room.

“My work’s not any good, is it?”

“What are you talking about? Of course it’s good.”

She walked over to one of the panels and stared at it, aggressively adjusting the moist clay with a finger as she spoke. “Look at it—it’s lifeless. Look at the way the water moves across that cypress trunk. It looks like syrup or something. Why did I put a tree trunk in there in the first place?”