skeletons (26 page)

“I see.” He sighed. “Well, you have said enough, Mr. Butters. Now I will talk. You listen. I will not kill myself. You will give me your car. Now. I will go over the border.”

“They’ve closed it.”

“I know many ways. You will let me go and say you never found me. You know I must not come to trial or I will testify—I will tell the court what is in this tower. So much for Judge Vaught. So much for his whore daughter.”

“Testify and be damned. By then the evidence will be gone. Buried.”

Waited.

“But I have more to tell. Much more than this tower, and much worse.”

“Balls.”

But I had that sickening, subliminal sensation again. “Much more of your personal concern.”

“Big burning balls.”

“Listen, Mr. Fag.”

A pure spring evening in 1946. She spends it alone in the small gray stucco house on Quartz Street she has bought for them with an inheritance from her grandfather. Her husband has driven up to Albuquerque this morning, will be gone on business overnight. There is little enough for him—a will now and then, some chattel mortgages, land contracts, the leavings of the law. His father might have built him a thriving practice, but he has not seen, except at a distance, nor spoken to his only son for thirteen years.

She does her few dishes, dust-mops the entry floor, reads several chapters from Daphne du Maurier’s latest,
The King’s General.
At ten o’clock she tunes in to an El Paso station for the news. Truman has asked Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace to resign.... Wallace has been vocally critical of late of the government’s increasingly firm policy toward the Soviet Union.... Congress has extended the Selective Service Act for another year.

She turns off the radio, puts her hair up in kid-curlers, goes to bed. To put herself to sleep, she justifies a walk over to Gold Street in the morning. She needs baking powder. And she has noticed in the
Graphic
a sale at Maurice’s of pumps and sport shoes. She can at least look. It will pass the time. Then she sleeps. She is thirty-six and childless.

A knock at her door. Repeated. It is after midnight. On the hope it may be her husband, returning early, she does not put on her robe but hurries through the living room to the entry, switches on the porch light, and though it is not her husband, though it is beyond belief that this man should ever, while he draws breath, stand at her door, lets him in. At once she smells liquor on his breath. He never drinks. Suddenly she knows in her blood, in her bone, in her womb, what he will do. He does.

It is as though for thirteen years he has acted out in monstrous imagination every move. He seizes her, tears the nightgown from her body. They struggle. She had not believed he could be so strong, so spry. She does not speak to him, nor he to her, nor does she scream. He steps back, strikes her cheek with his fist with such impact that two of her teeth are loosened and her gums bleed. “If you try to stop me, Blaise, I’ll kill you.” “He would have, too. Right then that man was walking thunder.” She struggles no more. He pushes her into the bedroom, throws her down, removes his trousers, penetrates her, rapes her with almost murderous ferocity. Blood from her gums fills her mouth. She chokes on it, spits it out in his face. It is an execution. He shoots George Pennington in the open mouth. The bullet tracks through the soft palate and pharynx and the upper end of the spinal cord. Orgasm. His, not hers. It is his infant daughter, Helene, wrapped in a shawl, unharmed. He takes the child in his arms, carries her through the pure spring afternoon down the center of Gold Street to his office, opens the door, enters, closes the door behind him. He lies exhausted on her for a time, then rises, finds his trousers, puts them on, moves slowly to the door, braces his back against the wall to support himself.

“There, you bitch. You bitch out of a son of a bitch.”

He speaks as though his words have been chosen in obscene rehearsal over thirteen years.

“My cock has cursed your cunt forever. Let us see what comes out of it.”

He is gone. When she is able, she crawls into the bathroom, rinses the blood from her mouth, then goes naked to the telephone in the living room, calls the operator, is put through to the County Sheriffs Department.

“Yes. Please send an officer at once. Yes, now, please, oh God please. This is Mrs. Charles S. Vaught Jr.”

COMPREHEND.

“No. No. No.”

I knelt on the iron steps, head down.

“Yes.”

“Are you saying that—”

“Yes.”

“Old Judge Vaught raped–”

“Yes.”

“Helene Vaught?”

“The wife of his son.”

“No. No.”

“His daughter-in-law.”

Had I not lost everything in my stomach at La Casa, I’d have lost it now. Dry heaves.

“You lie. You lie.”

“It is true. I was deputy then, in 1946. I took her call, went to her house. She wanted him charged. But I wrote no report, I did nothing. I thought what I had learned from her would be useful to me. Like the bones of these poor peons here. Mr. Butters, it has been very useful.”

COMPREHEND.

I raised my head. “Then if. If. Are you saying Tyler–Tyler Vaught–”

“Is the child of rape? Yes. She must be. Nine months later she was born.”

“But he was old. He–”

“He was seventy-four. It has happened. He hated his son because he married Wood’s daughter. Hated her because she was Wood’s daughter. In his hate he could do anything. He could hang men. He could shoot one in the back.”

“Her grandfather—”

“Was her father.”

“You lie.”

“And so her mother lost her mind.”

“But I thought—I thought it was because Judge Vaught told her about this tower—what was in it. That’s what he said.”

“No. He could not tell you about the rape. But that was what it was. Her mind was not strong enough. They put her away in San Carlos. You saw her tonight, how she is.”

WHO I AM.

DEAR GOD.

THREE OUT OF THREE.

“Oh Tyler,” I groaned.

“What a bitch she is, that one. Sending men out here to dig up the past, to die. She did not care. And if I come to trial, I will not care, Mr. Butters. I will tell this, too.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“So you see, you have no choice. You love her,
verdad?
Maybe you are not homosexual after all, if you love her. But if you are her friend, you will let me go.”

No choice. Not if I were to keep the secret of the tower. Not if I were to save a woman’s sanity. A decent man, I had the right, I had believed, to live in a decent world. But I had no alternative now. To save decency, I must sacrifice my own.

I HAD TO TAKE A HUMAN LIFE.

If I could. If I could. I had to have time. “And you’ve used this, this awful thing, all these years, like the tower,” I said.

“You are Anglo,” he said. “You do not know what it is like to be Mexican in an Anglo town. They call us ‘beans,’ the young people.”

I heard movement. “Don’t come near these stairs. I’ll shoot, Pingo.”

“We waste time. Let us trade. Give me the keys to your car.”

“You swear never to come back? To talk?”

“How could I? I will live a good life down there. I have friends there, and money. Why should I come back?”

“All right.” I felt in my pocket. “I’ll toss you the keys. Then I’ll go downstairs—backward. Don’t move till I’m gone.”

I tossed the keys into the clock chamber, heard them fall.

“Stay there,” I warned.

“How intelligent you are, Jimmie.”

I backed down the steps.

He had no choice either. I knew too much about him. HE COULD NOT LET ME LEAVE THE TOWER ALIVE.

The landing. Gun pointed at the aperture. Down the second flight to the floor of the lower chamber. Across the chamber, silently, not to the iron door but to the cable cage.

Hid behind it, standing sideways.

Placed the two-inch barrel of the .38 upon a cross-slat of the wooden cage. Muzzle at an angle thirty feet above, at the aperture. ONE BULLET. Steady.

Then, the idea.

The creative “What if?”

There the four had hung for sixty years. Fragile. A feather and they might fall. What if the clock were activated? What if the clock, after sixty years, were started for even a split second? What if the slightest turn of the chain wheel and the hand rods resulted in a dance of death upon the ropes? The disarticulation of old bones from old sockets? A rain of arms and legs and hands and feet near a man already under strain? What if the sight and sound were more mind-blowing than he could bear?

Held the barrel of the Airweight steady on its rest.

Reached, with left hand, between the slats of the cage.

Grasped the cable.

HAD I THE STRENGTH?

Airweight aimed.

Pulled the cable.

A creak, a clatter.

A yell: “Ayeeeeeeee!”

He appeared, plunging through the aperture, face contorted, eyes extruded. A man who had seen the unseeable. A man who had imagined the unimaginable.

Yelling “Ayeeeeeeee!”

Squeezed the trigger.

BANG.

He stopped, stepped down.

One step, two.

Toppled headlong, tumbled down the iron stairs, over and over, lay still upon the landing.

I put the weapon in its holster. Went to where he lay. His arm hung, a gun clutched even in death. I stood on tiptoe, made myself put my hand into his shirt pocket, retrieved my car keys. His body was warm. Had he children? I had never known. Began to weep again.

OH CHILDREN. CHILDREN

EVERYWHERE.

FORGIVE ME.

I closed the iron door, left it unlocked, descended the stairway to Judge Vaught’s chambers, turned on a light, found a box of his clerk’s Kleenex, dried my tears, blew my nose, used the phone book, dialed the judge’s number, let it ring till he answered.

“Jimmie Butters, Judge.”

“Yes. Tyler’s gone, Mr. Butters—where I don’t know. I’m sorry, I fell asleep and—”

“No problem. She came here, to the courthouse, and I sent her back to El Paso.”

“Praise be.”

“It’s over.” I punched my Pulsar. “It’s 1:43. You have four hours. That’s the best I can do. If I were you I’d call Mr. Turnbow and young Doc Shelley—he’ll help. The three of you have four hours to clean up the tower, ropes and everything, every trace. Are you equal to it?”

“Indeed we are. Thank you again.”

“You’re welcome. Oh, by the way, going up and down the stairs you’ll have to step over Pingo Chavez. He’s dead.”

“Dead?”

“I shot him.”

“You–”

“He mustn’t be moved. The police.”

“Of course. But why–”

“Self-defense.”

“I see. You’re leaving now?”

“Yes. Tyler’s waiting for me.”

“Did he—did Pingo say anything?”

Meaning: DID HE TELL YOU WHAT I COULDN’T?

“He said a lot.”

“How much will you tell her?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope–”

“Four hours. Good night, Judge.”

“Goodnight.”

In the Rolls, forehead on the wheel.

“HOW MUCH WILL YOU TELL HER?” “I DON’T KNOW.”

On to El Paso. I started the engine, switched it off. I had forgotten. Got out of the car, climbed the steps, entered the courthouse again, climbed the stairs again. To the tower.

11:14

11:14

11:14       11:14

11:14       11:14

11:14

11:14

11:14

11:14

“Would you like coffee?” she asked. “I can call room service.”

“No.”

Past four in the morning. In the high-up room at the Paso del Norte we had shared two nights ago, the room to which I had slapped her back tonight after she had given her father the slip. She hadn’t noticed I had brought no luggage up, nor the bundle beside me in the chair. Wrapped in a polish cloth from the boot of the car.

I began at the beginning, chronicling my exploits, and she let me go on till I got to the iron key.

“Why did my mother lose her mind?” There it was again—the broken-record question she had twice put to her father in the dark courtroom tonight. I had thought it dumb, even psychotic then. I knew better now. I evaded it.

“Why she gave it to me,” I said, “I haven’t the faintest. Maybe because when I talked to her at Tamarisk she seemed to like me. She said she trusted me. I was a child.”

“You are.”

“I was.”

Tyler sat on the side of the bed. In a Dior caftan I recognized, of ruby-red wool which matched the enamel of her toenails. Not that I had a foot fetish, but hers were marvelous. There was no mark on her cheek, the massed auburn of her hair was combed, she seemed to be in control. But I sensed strain. Desperation even. For once she was not painting coins. This was the moment of truth she’d been waiting for a long, long time. It had never been the trials or Buell Wood’s disappearance—it had been the answer to a single question. WHO TYLER VAUGHT WAS. Crossworth had failed her four years ago, Max Sansom three weeks. She had sent me West next, I had survived, and now she was only a few words of mine away from what she had paid the lives of two lovers to obtain.

“Why did she lose her mind?”

“Here,” I said.

I handed her the bundle in the polish cloth.

She unwrapped it.

“That’s really why you came back to the courthouse tonight—right? Well, I got it for you.”

She looked at it.

Looked at me.

“It’s his,” I said. “It was lying on the floor between his legs. To get it, I had to move his skull. So, one from Pingo, one from me. He must have seen it in the tower long ago, and one day, when you’d grown up to be beautiful, wondered how much it would be worth to you.”

She turned it in her hands, doubtful.

“It’s his,” I assured her. “If you don’t believe me, check the serial number.”

She positioned it to see the number stamped into the frame above the cylinder.

“40178,” she said.

“Is that right?”

“I think so. I’ll see.”