FANGS

By Milton T. Burton © 2009

Liddy saw his fangs just as they retracted back up into his gums. Other than scaring the hell out of her, it was a moment of personal gratification. She'd always known that those absurdly short, blunt plastic teeth in the vampire movies couldn't possibly penetrate human skin. Liddy had been a biology major in college, and she knew how thick and tough human skin really was. But these fangs were about an inch long and narrow and needle-sharp like a rattlesnake's.

It was a short-lived victory, though. He seemed to know instantly what she’d seen, and he turned and smiled and riveted her with his eyes. "Come along and grow old with me," he said, his voice soft and silky. "The best is yet to be."

Her mouth fell open. She was talking to a vampire. Not something that happened ever day. At least not to biology majors. And certainly not in trendy bars on lower Greenville Avenue in Dallas. Except for a dark burgundy turtleneck under his suit coat, he was dressed all in black. Middle-aged and tall and slim, he had a ruddy face and a cloud of wild silver hair that orbited around his head like a thundercloud. He noticed that her glass was empty, and motioned for the bartender to give her a refill of white wine.

"Calm yourself," he said. "We only prey on criminals. Drug pushers and killers and the like. It's our code. Nor does everyone we feed on turn into one of us. The world would be full of us if it worked that way. No, you can only be made like me if you drink a little of my blood after I've drunk a little of yours. Then, when the next sunset comes, you will die, and a few minutes later you will rise transformed."

"Whaaa..." Liddy was speechless.

"Come," he said, holding out his hand.

She drained her glass and banged it down for another refill. "Why me?" she finally managed, her voice sounding small and tinny and little girl-like in her ears.

"I've been watching you here for months. You drop by two or three times a week after your work at the lab. And you are the most beautiful woman who ever comes in this place."

Liddy shook her head. A few people had told her she was pretty over the years, and she knew she had a cute figure, but beautiful? "No, I'm not," she whispered.

"You are to me, and no one else matters. So come with me, and we will fly the night together. The smells! The textures! The colors! You must see them to believe." He reached out and put his hand on her arm. "Be mine," he said.

Liddy dropped her glass and bolted from the room. As she went out the door she heard his laughing voice say above the din, "I'll get your check for you, Liddy, Dear.”

She never went back to that bar, and it was over a month before she stopped by for a drink anywhere after work. When she did, she picked a tavern several blocks away that was popular with the early-thirties crowd like herself. Suddenly, halfway through her second glass of wine, he was there beside her, a small snifter of brandy in his hand. Startled, she blurted out the first thing that popped into her mind. "You can drink?"

"It would be a poor life without a glass of brandy from time to time."

"Are you going to bite me?"

"Not yet."

"Why me?" she asked.

"I've fallen in love with you.”

“Me?”

He nodded, his face calm and thoughtful. “You see, I’m very particular. I haven't had a companion in almost a century."

Exit time for Liddy! As she went through the door she once again heard his dark laughter ringing in her ears.

The next morning she took stock of the situation. Something had to be done. Raised Catholic, she hadn't been to church in ten years. She decided to go now. She went to confession first, and when she finished she was actually a bit ashamed of the paltry little collection of sins she'd been able to accumulate over the past decade. The priest hadn't seemed particularly impressed, either. After the midday Mass, she went behind the church to the little arcade run by the Sisters of Mercy and bought a pewter crucifix that was about three inches long. Still, when she slipped the thing in her pocket, she thought If this is living, why not try something different?

Weeks went by without her seeing him. Then one night when was beginning to think the whole thing was her imagination, he appeared once more at her elbow as she reached for her wine. “Please,” she said softly.

“You’re terribly lonely, aren’t you?” he asked.

For some reason she didn’t understand, she told the truth with a nod and a whispered, “Yes.”

“There’s no need to be. And you are drawn to the idea, aren’t you?”

A little rebellion mounted within her. “And so what if I am? Haven’t you ever been a attracted to something but known you didn’t really want it?”

“But you do want it.”

She felt herself about to say, Yes, I do. Then she dropped her glass and fled once again.

She quit going to bars and didn't see him again for two months. Then one night after working three hours overtime, he was there beside her in the darkness as soon as she stepped from her car in front of her apartment.

"It's time, Liddy," he said.

"No! I'm not going with you!" She scrabbled around in her pocket for a moment, then held up her crucifix.

He looked at her almost sadly.

"Back!" she commanded and stepped boldly forward, holding the little cross out in front of her. "Back!"

He took a step toward her and gently took the little crucifix from her hand and examined it for a moment. Then he slipped it into his pocket and said, "Very nice workmanship. I'll keep it safe for you."

She looked into his eyes, then in a swoon that mixed terror with lust and longing, she melted into him. He swept her up off her feet and into his arms and smiled down at her.

"Why didn't it work?" she asked in a breathless voice.

"The crucifix, you mean?"

"Yeah."

"We don't set much store by crucifixes."

"Who do you mean by 'we'? Vampires?"

He shook his head with an ironic smile and said, "No, Baptists."

***

THRICE HANGED THROCKETT

By Milton T. Burton © 2009

I was the sheriff in Gabble, Texas, back in 1878 when Wild Bill Throckett was hanged. Most of my working life was spent as a peace officer, but Gabble was unlike any other place I ever served. They said I was awful short tempered in those days, and I’ll own up to it. Back then people in other parts of the state claimed that Gabble wasn’t anything but a roosting place for drunkards and morons, which was true. And I guess I qualify as one of the morons for hiring on there since Gabble would have tried the patience of Job. But it was also one of the few places in the state where Throckett hadn’t killed anybody, so as it turned out that’s why we got the honor of hanging him.

It all started when two deputies from Nacogdoches showed up one Thursday morning in early fall with Throckett all wrapped up in chains and said we were supposed to try him there in Gabble.

“Why here?” I asked. “Why us?”

“Governor Hubbard said so,” the larger of the pair told me. “The prosecutor will be along with the witnesses in a few days. It’s called a change of venue.”

“You don’t say. . .”

He nodded. “I’ve got all the paperwork on it for you and for the judge. They claim he can’t get a fair trial in Nacogdoches. See, we caught him over in Louisiana, but when we went to try him, Judge Hooper vetoed the idea on account of that fair trial business. If you ask me, I think old Hooper is just plain scared of the crazy bastard. Not that I blame him. You’ve heard of Throckett, haven’t you?”

“Sure,” I said. “Who hasn’t?”

“Then you know what I mean. Hell, if he got loose---”

“I don’t reckon I’ll be having any trouble out of him. We’ve got a fine jail. In fact, it’s about the only thing this damned town’s got going for it. That and the biscuits down at the café.”

“Biscuits?”

“They are mighty good,” I said. “Their clabber’s not bad, either.”

“How are the steaks?”

“Usually burnt.”

"Oh... Anyhow, after the judge went and hid on us, we wired Austin to see what to do with him. Folks in the governor’s office told us to bring him on over here. You’re supposed to give him a fair trail and then hang him.”

“Is that right?” I said.

“It sure is, and that’s the part I don’t understand.”

“What part?”

He laughed. “The part about the fair trial. I mean, hell, if the trial really is fair it seems like there might be at least a slim chance the jury could come back with a not guilty verdict.”

“Not here in Gabble,” I said firmly.

“Why not?” the smaller of the two asked, apparently puzzled.

“The folks here are all drunkards and morons, and they’ll do whatever the prosecutor tells ‘em to do. They see it as their civic duty.”

“Oh. . .”

I shrugged. “I expect that’s why the governor sent you all over here. You see, we don’t have innocent verdicts.”

“None at all?”

“Not that I can recall.”

“What about the judge? Is he a drunkard or is he a moron?”

“Neither,” I said.

“Oh, well then---”

“He’s a dope fiend and an idiot. Goes through a couple of bottles of laudanum a week. The druggist orders it special for him.”

“What is laudanum, anyhow?” he asked. “I’ve always wondered.”

“Tincture of opium.”

The big man nodded. “And you say that besides being a dope fiend, this judge is an idiot, too. . . Is that right?”

“Yep.”

“I don’t recall the difference between an idiot and a moron.”

“They claim an idiot’s got a little more sense than a moron,” I said. “I reckon that’s why they made him judge.”

The smaller man spoke. “I don’t know that I’d want to live in a place where they don’t never hand down ‘not guilty’ verdicts.”

I shrugged. “Like I said, the hot biscuits down at the café are mighty good. I guess folks figure they’re worth the risk.”

#

Wild Bill was a corker. I’ll give him that much. The most fractious bastard I ever laid my two eyes on. Might near all his killings were off-hand affairs that happened over nothing and never profited him a dime. He was born William Coldwell Throckett in Delta County up in Northeast Texas back in 1851 to a family of poor dirt farmers. That “Wild Bill” business came later. You see, Kansas and Nebraska had Wild Bill Hickock, so I guess those newspaper boys figured Texas needed one too.

The first mistake the soon-to-be Wild Bill made was to become unnaturally good with a pistol when he was a kid. If he’d been less adept with a shooting iron he might have seen the wisdom of learning to get along with people. But he wasn’t, so he didn’t. His criminal career started when he was about sixteen. He attracted a lot of attention to himself by shooting a colored man in Giddings who was working for the Reconstruction government. While that didn’t hairlip any of the locals, the occupation authorities got awful stirred up over it. Reconstruction officers--particularly colored Reconstruction officers--were seen as fair game, and if he’d quit right there he probably would have gone down in local history as something of a hero. But a couple of years later he got into a fracas up in Gainsville and killed two more colored men who were well-regarded in the community. That was seen as a major breach of etiquette by decent people everywhere. Then he shot a newspaper editor in Nacogdoches and a preacher in Kerrville. After that, people began to say it looked like he was headed for a life of crime.

His momma talked him into getting out of the state. He promised her he’d do better and signed on to a cattle drive going up north to Kansas. Things rocked along pretty good for three whole days. Then he got into an argument with the ramrod and shot him. Witnesses said Throckett made a disparaging remark about the cornbread one night at supper. The ramrod said it tasted pretty good to him. That’s when Throckett stood up, whipped out his pistol, and plugged the man right in the center of the forehead. “That’ll teach that son-of-a-bitch to argue with me!” he bellowed. One of the other cowhands started to point out that the lesson was pretty near useless to a dead man, but wisely he held his piece while Throckett saddled his horse and rode away.

A few months later he drifted down to Beeville, Texas, where he shot and killed a mild-mannered man in the local saloon for being a Republican. Then there came a two-year dry spell where he doesn’t seem to have murdered anybody, after which he turned up in Topeka, Kansas, where he killed a prominent local Democrat. I guess maybe he’d switched his party affiliation in the intervening years. Or maybe he’d been an independent all along.

Not long after that he got into another argument and killed a farmer in Delta County, where he’d been raised. The hometown folks weren’t of a mind to put up with any such behavior, so they just took him out and lynched him for his trouble. That was the first time he was hung. As it all shook down, I’d have to hang him twice more before I got done with him. It was cold weather, and the boys that strung him up were in a big hurry to get back to the saloon. They rode off and left him swinging, expecting nature to take its course. A couple of minutes later a pair of poor fools came along and cut him down. Bad mistake. After he coughed and snorted and wheezed for a few minutes and drunk a little whiskey one of them had in a pint bottle, he asked if they had a gun. When they said they did, he asked to see it. The fellow that owned the pistol, which was an old cap and ball Colt from the War, dug it out of his saddlebag and handed it over. That’s when Bill shot both of them and rode off with their horses. One lived to tell the story. Now, in my view it took a special kind of man to shoot two fellows that had just saved his life.

Next he drifted up North and got himself another preacher, this one a Presbyterian in Davenport, Iowa. I could have told him that was a mistake. If you want to shoot preachers, you need to stick to Baptists and Campbellites and such. You go to shooting Presbyterians and you’re bound to annoy some prominent folks, which is just what he did. They saw to it that this little stunt earned him fifty years in the Iowa state pen. But that didn’t stick no more than the lynching did. Bill had some money hid out somewhere and bribed a couple of guards to let him bust out.

Back in Texas he joined up with a gang of bank robbers. I guess he was trying to find a new trade, but he couldn’t make a go of it. They ran him off when he proved too cantankerous to deal with. Then there was a prostitute in a Fort Worth cat house he claimed was trying to rob him. He shot her and then plugged the john in the next room who tried to come to her rescue. He fled Fort Worth with his britches on fire and dropped out of sight for about two months. After that he reappeared in Nacogdoches where he got himself another newspaper editor. Quick as he could, he skedaddled across the Sabine River to Louisiana, but that’s where the long arm of the law finally caught up with him.

#

So I locked Wild Bill in the jailhouse and waited for the prosecutor to arrive. It wasn’t just a few days, either. It was the better part of a month, and I got to know the man pretty well during that time. He was fair at Checkers, which meant that we played a lot in those weeks. I would set up the board on a nail keg just outside the bars of his cell, and we’d go at it. I could always beat him when I put my mind to it, but I let him win better than half the time just to keep him pacified.

There were a couple of little incidents, though. As an extra precaution against escape, I decided to chain his hind leg to a two-hundred-pound blacksmith’s anvil I installed in the center of his cell. I had about fifteen feet of chain, which gave him plenty of slack to move around. But he didn’t like the idea. In fact, he was so opposed to the project that I had to go in there and work on his head a little with a billy club to get him of a mind to cooperate. That made him sull up for a couple of days, but eventually he came around and got friendly again. Then one afternoon when we were playing Checkers, he said, “This seems like a pretty nice town you all got here, Sheriff.”

“You’d fit right in,” I replied. “We ain’t got nothing but drunkards and morons.”

“I ain’t no drunkard!” he said, getting a little riled.

“I know that. But you’re about to go on trial for killing a man over nothing more than a little piece he wrote in the newspaper. That tells me that you’re probably a moron.”

Before you could blink he was on his feet, his face red and his eyes flashing fire.

“If I had a damn gun I’d kill you for saying that,” he yelled.

“I’m well aware of that, Bill. But you haven’t got one, so you won’t be doing any killing. Now sit down and play. It’s your move.”

#

A couple of preachers came in to try to save his soul, but they didn’t get anywhere at all. Then the most unlikely thing happened. Padre O’Neal, the Catholic priest from the town a few miles down the road started stopping by. O’Neal was a kindly fellow, a sweet little Irish leprechaun of a man, and I gave him free run of the place. He stopped by most days, riding all the way up to Gabble on his mule. Then one morning about a week before the trial, he came in with a satchel in hand. “Do you need to examine this?” he asked.

“I don’t guess so,” I replied. “Not unless you have a gun or a hacksaw inside it.”

He smiled and shook his head. “Just a few things. Holy water, anointing oil, my stole, a Missal. . .

“Yes?”

“Baptism. He is uniting with the Holy Mother Church.”

I gave them their privacy. It seemed like the decent thing to do.

#

Finally came the day of the trial. It was on a Saturday morning, which was common in those days. Trials were a big spectator sport, and having them on weekends let folks come in from the farms and ranches to watch. Court convened at 10:00 A.M. and the whole thing was over before noon. The prosecutor from Nacogdoches was a fidgety, bald-headed little man named Otis Tharp. I never did catch the defense attorney’s name. He was young kid who looked like he’d fallen off a hay wagon the day before and probably had. He did the best he could, which wasn’t very good considering what he was up against from the bench.

Judge Enoch Thurber was big and bald and blustery, with fleshy features and pale, waxy skin that made him look like he’d been embalmed, which was not an inapt description in view of the amount of laudanum he consumed each week. Judge Thurber was not a graceful man: he heaved and he crank; he lurched and he billowed, and when he spoke it was either in a surly snarl or an outraged roar. Indeed, his entire life seemed to be played out at the very edge of some outlandish act of barbarism that never quite came to pass.

The trial went the way most of Thurber’s trials went. Or at least the way his trials went when he was conscious. Occasionally he dropped off on the nod from his laudanum, in which case the lawyers involved were actually able to get some of their arguments before the jury. Not so in the case of Wild Bill Throckett. Thurber cut off both attorneys in the middle of their opening statements and ordered the prosecutor to call his first witness, a merchant named Obidiah Smith. But in his third question, Tharp had the misfortune to use the word “alleged,” which was one of those high-toned legal terms guaranteed to set old Thurber on fire. “Alleged, hell!” he raged through gritted teeth. Ain’t nobody alleged nothing. They claim he done it!”

“But Your Honor, if I might---“

“You might not! Now shut up and sit down. You don’t know how to question a witness, anyhow.” He turned to Smith. “Now just tell us what you seen and when you seen it.”

“It was the ninth day of December last year.”

“Go on. . .”

“It was about 7:00 in the evening, and I was in Bell’s Saloon right there on the Square in Nacogdoches having a drink with Editor Wiggins when this Throckett fellow sitting right over yonder come in and started yelling at him about this here editorial Wiggins wrote a couple of days earlier.”

“Was the defendant mentioned in the piece?”

“No sir, he was not.”

“What was the editorial about?” Judge Thurber asked.

“I don’t remember.”

“That’s all right,” Thurber said. “It don’t make no difference no way. You just go ahead on with your story.”

“Well, Throckett went to yelling at Wiggins, and Wiggins said something back at him. That’s when Throckett whipped out his pistol and shot him dead.”

“Did Wiggins make any move to attack Throckett?”

“No sir, none at all. He didn’t curse him, neither.”

“Was Wiggins armed?”

Smith shook his head. “No sir.”

“So Throckett shot an unarmed man over some little something the fellow wrote in a damned newspaper?”

“That’s right.”

Judge Thurber snorted in disgust. “All Right. You can step down.”

The defense lawyer was on his feet. “I’d like to ask that man a few questions, Your Honor.”

Judge Thurber appeared astounded. “What in hell for? He’s done told what he seen.”

“I just want to clear up a few points.”

Thurber seemed puzzled. I was standing beside the bench, performing my function as bailiff. I leaned over toward him and said, “It’s called cross examination, Your Honor.”

He whirled around to give me a glare that was full of pure venom. “Who in hell asked you?” he roared and turned back to the young defense attorney and said in an uncharacteristically gentle tone of voice. “You go on with your questions, son,” he said.

The kid approached the witness. “You say you were in the saloon having a drink. Is that right?”

“Yes sir.”

“And how often do you do that? Have a drink, I mean.”

“Most days after work.”

“And how much do you drink?”

“Usually no more than a couple of drams.”

“A couple of drams?” the young lawyer said with a smile of satisfaction. “So I think it would be safe to say you are a daily drinker. Is that right.”

“Well, I usually skip Sunday because the saloon is closed then.”

“I see. Well, Mr. Smith, in view of the prodigious amount of whiskey you consume each week, how can you be so sure that my client was the man who shot Mr. Wiggins?”

Suddenly Thurber experienced another of his abrupt mood swings. He hammered down with his gavel and began sputtering and spewing in a fit of unvarnished rage. “What in the hell kind of damned fool question is that?” he roared.

“I just wanted to know if he was sure---”

“Well, goddamn, why wouldn’t he be sure?” Thurber yelled and pointed at Throckett. “Just look at the son-of-a-bitch! He’s six and a half feet tall and skinny as a beanpole and he’s got a head like a damn gourd. It ain’t like nobody would have trouble picking him out of a crowd.”

“Your honor, please---”

“Sit down and hush. I’m not putting up with any such foolishness.” He pointed to the prosecutor. “Call the next witness, damn it.”

Who turned out to be a blacksmith named Luther Quirt, and he told the same story Smith told. The defense managed to get in one question, and I guess it was the best he could do under the circumstances. “So you and Mr. Smith are the only people who claim they saw my client shoot Editor Wiggins?”

“No sir,” Quirt said. “There was seventeen other fellows who seen it too. Mr. Tharp just figured that two of us would be enough.”

“Oh. . .”

“Anything more?” Judge Thurber asked, looking at the prosecutor.

“The prosecution rests, Your honor.”

“Then is the defense ready to present its case?”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Judge Thurber nodded and motioned the young lawyer up to the bench. “I don’t think there’s any doubt that your client shot Editor Wiggins, counselor,” he said in a raspy attempt at whispering that could be heard clearly all over the courtroom. “So I think your best move at this point would be to try to show some reason that Wiggins might have needed shooting.”

The kid nodded. He had no choice but to put Throckett on the stand. He also ignored Thurber’s suggested strategy. I’m sure he’d seen the futility of going for an acquittal. Instead, he appeared to be angling for a lesser penalty than hanging as the only hope for his client. No doubt he hoped to strike a chord of sympathy with the jury by having Throckett detail his spiritual activities since his arrest. At his urging, Wild Bill launched off on a long, twisted recitation of his time with Padre O’Neal that must have droned on for five minutes. I was amazed that Thurber allowed it, but he was oblivious. For some reason he seemed entranced by the label on his laudanum bottle. He held it up and peered at it from different angles, turning it first this way and then that, all the while ignoring Throckett who was becoming more and more animated with his wild and improbable tale of Christian conversion. Finally, Thurber lurched forward with one of his characteristic plunging motions, thrust the bottle into his pocket, and turned to the defendant. “So you joined up with the Catholics, eh?” he demanded.

“Yes sir, Your Honor,” Throckett replied proudly.

“Well, I don’t give a damn if they elected you pope. My notion is that one religion is about as good as another so long as they’re both Christian. Besides, religion ain’t got nothing to do with this trial. What I do want to know is why you shot Editor Wiggins.”

Throckett appeared confused. “Beg your pardon?”

“Why did you shoot that damned editor over there in Nacogdoches?”

Throckett mulled this over for a few seconds, then looked up quizzically at Thurber. “Ain’t there something in the constitution that says I don’t have to answer that question?”

“Damned if I know,” Thurber said, throwing up his hands in exasperation. “It probably don’t make no difference if you answer or not. I’m just curious about it.”

Throckett sighed. “I reckon I shot him in Nacogdoches because that’s where he happened to be when I got ready to shoot him.”

Thurber froze and sat motionless for several seconds, gaping at Throckett. “By God!” he finally exclaimed. “That’s the first thing anybody has said in this whole damned trial that’s made any sense. I’m of a good mind to turn you loose on the strength of that answer.”

Tharp appeared near panic. Throckett started to rise from the witness’s chair.

“But I won’t,” Thurber said. He motioned with his gavel. “Now you go sit over yonder with your lawyer. Any more witnesses?”

Father O’Neal took the stand. The young lawyer led him through a recitation that matched Throckett’s tale of conversion, but shorn of all the florid melodrama. While he spoke, Judge Thurber sat staring straight ahead, his mouth hanging a little open. Then suddenly, he came to life and asked loudly, “Are you really a Catholic priest?”

“I certainly am.”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned!”

“Oh, let us hope not,” O’Neal said sweetly.

Thurber rose ponderously to his feet and leaned over to shake the priest’s hand. “We ain’t never had one of you fellows here in court before. I’m proud you came. You just go ahead and tell what you know and don’t pay no attention to either one of these damn fool lawyers. They’ll just try to trip you up if you do. They try to trip me up all the time, but they don’t never get away with it.”

O’Neal smiled and continued. When he got to the word “confession,” Thurber interrupted him again. “You mean he told you everything he done?”

“I truly hope so. That’s the purpose of confession, you know. Cleanse the conscience and free up the spirit to commune with God.”

“I don’t reckon you could tell me what he said, could you?” Thurber asked. “I mean private-like, where I wouldn’t be able to hold it against him?”

O’Neal shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid not.”

The judge’s face showed the disappointment of a petulant child. “How about after we hang him?”

“I’m afraid that wouldn’t be proper either.”

I was expecting this refusal to send Thurber into one of his volcanic rages. But as he so often did, he seemed to lose interest in the matter at hand. He shrugged and said offhandedly, “Oh, well. You just go ahead and say what you have to say and let’s wind this thing up.”

O’Neal finished his testimony, and Tharp chose not to cross examine. Not that Thurber would have let him, anyway.

“Anything more?” Thurber asked.

“The defense rests, Your Honor.”

Prosecutor Tharp bobbed to his feet. “Your Honor, at this time I would like to make my summation, if it pleases the court.”

“That notion don’t please this court one damned bit,” Thurber snapped.

“But Your Honor---”

“Shut up! If I turn you two jackasses loose up here, you’ll waste too much time. You just sit down and hush and I’ll sum this mess up myself.” He swung his chair around and faced the jury. “You men got two choices here. Two determinations you have to make. The first is you can either find this bird guilty or not guilty. I don’t think there’s any doubt that he done it, so I don’t see how you would have any trouble with that one. If you do find him guilty, you’ll still have another choice before you. You can either send him to the penitentiary down there at Huntsville for the taxpayers of this state to feed for forty years, or you can hang him. You might want to keep in mind that ten feet of rope is a whole lot cheaper than forty years of grub. Now get in there in that jury room and do your damned duty.”

#

It took just seven minutes for them to decide that Wild Bill Throckett definitely needed hanging. It was 11:30 when they came out of the jury room, and if they had held out just thirty more minutes they would have gotten a free lunch sent over from the café. Back then jury duty paid four bits a day plus lunch, if applicable. But they didn’t have sense enough to make it applicable.

Thurber was going to set the execution date a week hence. But Tharp objected. “You can’t do that, Your Honor,” he said.

“Eh? Why in hell can’t I?”

“It’s the law. You have to give him thirty days to mount an appeal if he wants to.”

“An appeal? What in thunder are you talking about?”

“The law says the execution has to be at least thirty days from the day of the verdict. He might want to take his conviction to the appeals court or ask the governor for clemency.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Very sure,” Tharp said, peering intently at Thurber, no doubt hoping that he was getting across to him.

But by that time the old man had lost interest in the matter. He hauled out his laudanum bottle and took a big swig and then gave Tharp an amiable smile. “Well, you just go ahead and draw up the necessary papers to get it all done and I’ll sign ‘em. Ask the sheriff and see what he says about the date.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

Thurber made a motion with his hands like a man shooing chickens. “Now everybody get the hell out of here. I’ve had enough damned foolishness for one day.” He perched his feet up on the bench, tucked his chin down into his chest, and went on the nod before the room was completely clear.

#

So I had Throckett on my hands for another month, and it rained off and on the whole time. We played checkers some, and Padre O’Neal came by often and the two of them had long prayer sessions. Though the kindly old priest was no doubt suspicious of Throckett’s sincerity, he was sympathetic to his plight and eventually let him take Communion. The rest of the time Throckett spent writing long, mournful pleas to editors and public officials all over the state. I read several of them, and I can tell you they were calculated to bring forth the tears. That is, if you had any tears to shed on his behalf. Which I didn’t. I don’t know why he expected newspaper editors to rally to his cause, seeing that he’d planted two of their number in the graveyard. And I had been around politics long enough to know that elected officials focus their attentions where the votes are to be found. His pleas went unheeded.

But his masterpiece was the letter he wrote to Governor Hubbard. It was a truly maudlin screed in which he pointed out how unfair it was that John Wesley Hardin, who had killed more men than he, had recently drawn only thirty years, while he, William Coldwell Throckett, also the son of devout Methodist parents, had been sentenced to the gallows. He seemed quite flattered that the governor chose to answer him personally:

Mr. Throckett:

Two wrongs would not make a right. If I had my way about it, Hardin would have been hanged too. Therefore, I am denying your request for clemency. I suggest that you use the time you have remaining to see to the needs of your immortal soul.

Respectfully,
Richard B. Hubbard,
Governor of Texas

Of course, Dick Hubbard was a Baptist but I don’t think that was the main factor in his decision.

#

The execution loomed. Judge Thurber’s brother-in-law was a drunken carpenter named Jude Squane. Thurber had assigned him fifteen dollars out of the county treasury to build the gallows in the back of the jail yard, which was where the law said the man had to be hanged. I’d instructed Squane to screen off the lower part of the structure with heavy canvass. The witnesses would see Throckett plunge through the trap, but they would not be privy to his actual death throes.

The scaffold was almost completed before I got a chance to inspect it. I was not pleased with what I found. “This floor of this damn thing isn’t but six feet tall,” I said.

Squane, a skinny, persimmon-faced man who was almost as surly and disagreeable as Thurber himself, turned, shot a long stream of tobacco juice toward the foot of the scaffold, and said, “So what?”

“The condemned man is six feet, six inches tall. You figure it out.”

“I don’t aim to figure nothing out because I don’t give a damn.”

“You thieving son-of-a-bitch,” I yelled. “You shorted the materials and put the difference in your pocket.”

“What if I did?”

“This is an execution.”

“It ain’t my execution, so I don’t give a damn.” He turned and resumed tacking the canvas to the uprights.

The county commissioners allowed me two deputies. Or I guess I should say they allowed me two of what might have passed as deputy sheriffs on a good day with the wind at their backs. And as could have been expected, one was a drunkard and the other was a moron. I called them in and showed them the scaffold. “Go down to the hardware store and get a couple of shovels,” I said.

“Huh?” they both asked.

“Shovels. You’re going to need to dig a hole under that gallows.”

“How come?” asked Grumley, the drunkard. The moron was named Fant.

“To hang him in. The damn thing ain’t tall enough as it is. Make that hole at least five feet deep. Do a good job of it and I’ll give each of you a pint of whiskey when you get done.”

Their faces lighted up and they shuffled off in search of tools. Then the whole business slipped my mind because later that morning a transient from Ohio made off with three horses from the livery stable, and I had to go after him. It was two days before I could turn my attention back to Wild Bill Throckett and his impending doom.

#

Finally the day dawned, grim and sleety. Prosecutor Otis Tharp had come by train from Nacogdoches, and the young defense lawyer had come with him. The three of us had coffee at the jail. The town doctor, Elwood Smoot, was on hand since the county would pay him to pronounce Throckett dead. Smoot was a limping, impatient little troll of a man with about sixty years under his belt and an air of unrelenting bitterness that hung about him like the shroud on a corpse. He could also be expected to have a pint bottle of whiskey sticking out of his pocket, morning, noon, and night, which put him on the roster with the drunkards. Though he was said to be a competent physician, I wouldn’t have let him trim my toenails, and he knew it. The one time since I’d been in town that I got sick enough to need a croaker, I rode five miles down the way to a young doctor who could at least be counted on to be sober when he treated you. Smoot found out that I had scorned his services, and he had hated me cordially ever since. Judge Thurber was also there that morning, though he didn’t take coffee. I don’t suppose he wanted to dilute the laudanum in his belly.

“His parents sent money to buy him a coffin and ship his body back home to Delta County,” the young defense lawyer said. “I thought that handling the arrangements for them was the least I could do considering how I botched his defense.”

I gave him a kindly smile. “You didn’t botch anything, son,” I said. “You did as well as any man could have done under the circumstances.”

“Is there an undertaker here in town?” he asked.

“No, but the fool that owns the hardware store keeps coffins in stock and lays out bodies. He’s a drunkard, so you better get on down there as soon as you can. By noontime he’s usually past helping anybody with anything.”

He peered at me quizzically. “Who tends to the store after he gets drunk?”

“His wife.”

“I could deal with her if I had to, couldn’t I?”

I shivered a little at the notion and shook my head. “I wouldn’t do that if I was you.”

#

The law said Throckett was to be hanged as soon after sunup as possible. Once it was good light outside, I shackled his hands in front of him and led him around back to the jail yard. There were about a hundred people present, including a handful of kids, and the mood was festive despite the weather. Father O’Neal had been with Throckett earlier, and now waited at the foot of the gallows, his stole about his shoulders and his prayer book in his hands.

I led the condemned man up the steps with the Padre following in our wake. The law required that the death warrant be read in his presence, and I did so, the convoluted legal language with its wherefores and whatfors seeming out of place against the bleakness of the moment. The crowd was happy and eager, and few listened.

Law and custom also required that I ask Throckett if he had any last words. As it turned out, he had several. Fifteen minutes worth, as a matter of fact--a remarkable oration in which he cast himself as the victim of the very fates themselves. He’d had a hard childhood, he allowed, one void of love and affection, and he’d been the helpless target of many a schoolyard prank. Friendless and alone, he’d been singled out by dark forces that had conspired to bring him to this terrible day, while a cold and unyielding officialdom stood poised to revel in his tragic passing. He cast aspersions on all newspaper editors and claimed that they were in a league against him because of malicious rumors. He reserved special scorn for the high and mighty governor who had rejected his pitiful plea for mercy, and he even took a gentle jab at Father O’Neal for having withheld Holy Communion for so long from one of Christ’s true followers. At last he wound down and put an end to it by saying, “Man can do no more than this; God can do no less.”

What that last meant, I have no idea, but he apparently expected applause, for he hung his head dramatically like a thespian finishing a Shakespearian soliloquy. Such was not forthcoming. All he received from the crowd in the way of appreciation was a mild twitter and a loud fart from a fat man who stood near the scaffold.

“It’s time, Bill,” I said, and pulled the black hood over his head. Next came the noose, and I stepped back to grab the lever. My eyes locked with Father O’Neal’s eyes. He gave me a sad smile and a faint nod, and I hauled back on the lever. The trap sprung and Trockett plunged downward.

#

Only to slam feet-first into the ground six feet below, his hooded head sticking up above the floor of the scaffold for a long moment. Then he collapsed.

The hole I had ordered had never been dug, of course. Which was why my deputies had not come for the whiskey. In my urgency to catch the horse thief, the whole matter had slipped my mind.

We went behind the canvas and pulled Thockett to his feet. I removed the noose and started to take off the hood. He shook his head and whispered something to the little Irish priest. O’Neal nodded and turned to me. “He wants you to leave the hood on.”

“How come?”

“He’s embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed?”

Father O’Neal motioned me out of earshot of the condemned man. “Sheriff, this fellow has come to realize that his life has been a failure. Now he feels like he’s even been a failure at getting hanged.”

“I don’t know about that failure business,” I said. “He was pretty bang-up at killing newspaper editors. And as far as the hanging goes, we’ll get that rectified pretty quick.”

“But you will leave the hood on?”

“I’m agreeable if that’s what he wants.”

We brought him out from behind the canvass. He was limping some, having sprung one ankle in his fall. I turned to look at Grumley and Fant. “You two are fired. Get the hell out of my sight.”

“Fired?” Fant asked, uncomprehendingly. “But how will we make a living?”

“I don’t give two hoots in hell.” I turned to the young defense lawyer. “When we came out of the jail I noticed two colored fellows standing over at the blacksmith’s shop,” I told him. “Go see if you can find them and tell them the them the sheriff said to come over here.”

He was back in a couple of minutes with both men in tow. Their eyes were wide and their faces were full of alarm, no doubt the result of being in a crowded jail yard with a hundred or so rowdy whites and a brand new gallows. “Want to make four bits each for a few minutes work?” I asked.

They both nodded.

The new tools my deputies hadn’t used still stood leaning against the back fence.

“Then grab those shovels and get under that scaffold and start digging,” I said. “I want a hole under there at least five feet deep.”

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing, Sheriff?” Doc Smoot demanded.

“I’m going to have a hole dug under that damned scaffold so we can drop him far enough to break his neck.”

“Hell, bells!” he yelled. “There ain’t no need for all that. Just throw the rope over the crossbeam and haul him up. I don’t like standing out here in the cold.”

“Me neither,” Thurber growled.

I looked at Smoot and shook my head in disgust. Barely sunup and he was already three sheets in the wind. “You aren’t any colder than I am,” I said. “The county is paying you three dollars to pronounce this man dead when the time comes. If you want that three dollars, then you better stick around and do your duty.”

“Why do you always have to be such a jackass?” Smoot yelled. “Just string him up like I said.”

“It’s going to be done humanely,” I said. “We’re going to break his neck.”

“The law don’t say nothing about it being done humane,” Judge Thurber thundered. “Nor about having to break his neck, either. It just says to hang the son-of-a-bitch until he’s dead.”

“Ha! How would you know what the law says? You’re the last man in this town who ought to talk about what the law requires and what it doesn’t. You’ve forgot most of what law you ever knew, and you’ve got no respect for the little you do remember.”

He lumbered two steps forward and shook his finger in my face. “Listen, you sawed-off little shit, I’m the judge here, and I’m ordering you to haul him up just like Doc Smoot told you.”

“No.”

“What?” he roared.

“I said no, you old buzzard. No, and hell no.”

We stood eye to eye for a few seconds, then he asked in a hoarse, rage-filled voice, “Are you disobeying a direct order of this court?”

“I believe I am.”

“You, you. . .!” He was beyond words.

“Judge, there’s no doubt the man is guilty as sin. But you railroaded him with hardly a word allowed spoken in his defense, which wasn’t right. I can’t do anything about that, but I be damned if I’ll put him to a lingering death just because you’re in a hurry to get your sorry, dope-addled old ass back to your hot stove.”

That sent him into such a towering fury that for a moment I thought his head was going to explode. Then once again his mood shifted and he lost interest in the proceedings. He shrugged and reached in his overcoat pocket and pulled out the biggest bottle of laudanum I ever saw in my life. I reckon that damn fool druggist had gone to ordering it by the quart for him. He took a long pull and said expansively, “You go ahead and do as you see fit, sheriff. Far be it from me to meddle in another man’s business.”

I nodded at the two men waiting with the shovels and said, “Get started and be sure you make it deep enough.”

Soon the sounds of vigorous digging could be heard from behind the canvas. I went over to where Throckett stood shivering and shaking and breathing hard behind his hood. Padre O’Neal was praying quietly beside him. I waited for the prayer to end and then said, “Bill, I’m sorry about this. It’s my fault. If I’d thought to check on what I told those two fool deputies of mine to do you’d be on your way to wherever it is you’re headed, I’d be having a hot breakfast. So we both suffer for my mistake.”

He nodded and mumbled something I couldn’t understand. The Padre patted him on the arm, and I turned away. I hadn’t had anything to eat, and my stomach was beginning to tell me about it. I glanced around the crowd and picked a boy who appeared to be about twelve, with bright, eager eyes and a rapscallion look about him. I motioned him over and handed him a dime. “Run down to the café and get me a small bowl of clabber and a hot buttered biscuit. You can keep the nickel in change.”

He was off like a shot and back in a flash. I slipped the paper-wrapped biscuit into my pocket and began to eat the clabber.

“I don’t see how you can stand that stuff for breakfast,” the kid said. “I don’t like it no time.”

“Different folks have different tastes,” I said.

“Shit on clabber. I like fried catfish.”

“I do too,” I said. I eyed the kid for a few seconds. “What do you aim to do when you grow up?” I asked.

“I aim to get the hell out of Gabble, Texas, just as soon as I’m old enough to hit the road.”

“What about your folks? Won’t you miss them?”

“Hell no. Pa’s a drunkard and Momma’s a moron. She does a pretty good job of frying up catfish, though. I might miss that catfish.”

“I expect there’s good cooks everywhere,” I said. “Maybe you’ll marry one.”

“Shit. . .”

#

The men were hard workers, and with all the rain we’d had in the past weeks the ground was soft for digging. They were through in a half hour. This time I checked and found the hole a good five feet deep like I’d told them. “That will do,” I said and handed each of them a half dollar.

Once again I escorted Bill Throckett up the steps of the gallows, and once again I affixed the noose about his neck. For a second time I read the death warrant, and Father O’Neal repeated his litany of prayers. Just as I had before, I asked the condemned man if he had any last words. He shook his head. There would be no windy rhetoric this time around. Instead, he maintained a stoic silence, but his teeth were chattering and his whole body trembled. That cannot be held against him. Murderous scoundrel though he was, he faced the noose--and for the third time at that--with as much courage an any man could have summoned under the circumstances.

“Are you ready, Bill?” I asked.

The hooded head nodded. I stepped back and took the lever that worked the trap. With a deep breath and an even deeper stab of regret, I pulled on the thing as hard as I could. He plunged through without a hitch, and there came an audible “snap” as his neck broke. Thus ended the short, unproductive life of William Coldwell Throckett, five days shy of his twenty-seventh birthday.

#

I sent the two fellows who’d dug the hole into the jail to get the stretcher I’d made the day before out of two poles and some of the heavy canvas left over from screening in the scaffold. Then I gave them each a dime apiece to haul remains to the hardware store.

“I appreciate all your help,” the young lawyer told me. “You treated my client very decently, and for that I am grateful.”

I shook his hand and wished him the best and turned to Otis Tharp. “Let’s go have a dram or two of whiskey.”

“I’m all for it,” he said. “But I’ve heard that you aren’t a drinking man.”

“Normally I’m not,” I said, and threw my arm over his shoulders and steered him toward the saloon. “But if this town has taught me one thing, it is that when you can’t beat ‘em, you may as well join ‘em.”

#

That was the end of Will Bill, but some folks didn’t think so. Legends still abound after all these many years. One says he escaped death by some unspecified means and joined the Mexican army where he rose to the rank of colonel and married a grandee’s daughter. Another has me accepting five thousand dollars from his “wealthy family” to fake his execution. The most ridiculous of all claims that he somehow survived his hanging and finally made his way out to San Francisco where he bought two China clippers in partnership with Jesse James, another frontier outlaw who’d recently joined the ranks of the mythically undead. How two birds who could barely do a credible job of robbing and killing could be expected to have sense enough to run a shipping business is beyond me. But that’s the way folks are. We all have the urge to believe whatever gives us the most satisfaction rather than what the evidence shows. So when I hear one of these outlandish stories I just smile and nod and sometimes even add a few little flourishes of my own to embellish the tale at hand.

#

Two years later I took a job as a sergeant with the Austin police. I don’t know if that move represented any real progress or not. Gabble had been drunkards and morons whereas Austin was drunkards and politicians. And a lot of the politicians did double duty as drunkards. The hours were better, though, and so was the pay.

One night not long after I left, Judge Thurber and Doc Smoot got into a squabble that turned into a shooting fracas. Neither one of them was hurt, but a stray round hit a coal oil lamp, and that was all she wrote for Gabble. It was windy and dry and the fire spread fast. Everything but the jailhouse burned slap to the ground. No great loss.

They put the jail on rollers, moved it five miles down the road, and built a new town with a new name. Now where Gabble once stood there’s nothing but a crossroads with one of those historical plaques that tells about the hanging of Will Bill Throckett. The plaque claims to be on the spot where the gallows stood, but it’s fifty yards too far south. And they misspelled my name. No great loss there, either. Besides, if they’d gotten everything right, it wouldn’t have been Gabble.
***

Fine Tuning

By Milton T. Burton © 2009

Most people think parallel worlds lie in the future. They see every significant event as generating several outcomes, each of which makes its own timeline. Modern physics seems to support this idea as well. But it's all wrong. The parallel worlds are in the past, and the Adjusters work hard to keep them there. I should know. I'm one of the Adjusters.

I live in a renovated Victorian house in Galveston's historic historic East End. It's more room than I need, but time workers tend to be pack rats. We almost always develop the habit of collecting mementos from the various ages and places we have visited, so a little extra space is advisable. Besides, the Island has been my family's home for generations, and when you range as far and wide as I do, you need some connection to your roots.

I was coming off a month's vacation and looking at two hard weeks ahead. Major projects that had been put off too long. The first stop was. . .

Rome, December, 799 A.D. It wasn't too hard to get an audience with Pope Leo III. Gold is a universal lubricant that will get you in just about anywhere, then or now. And it didn't take much to convince him. Charles The Great, King of the Franks---known to history as Charlemagne---was in town, having rescued Leo from the Roman mobs that had sought to kill him. The pope had fled to Paderborn where he petitioned Charles for relief. On the advice of his own confessor, Alcuin of York, Charles moved his army south across the Alps into Rome and reinstated Leo in the papal palace. Which left the Pope in his debt. Not the best place to be in that politically-charged world. The Roman throne in the West had been vacant for three hundred and fifty years. In the east, in Byzantium, a woman reigned as Emperor, recognized by neither the papacy nor by the Franks.

"When Charles kneels to take the Eucharist," I said to Leo in Church Latin. "Crown him Emperor of the Romans. Put the crown quickly on his head. Do not hesitate. Not only will you elevate him to this great office, but you will be asserting the power of the papacy to propose and dispose. He will be grateful and in your debt rather than you in his."

"Do you think?" he asked, a bit of greed mixed with fear in his eyes.

"I know."

"But what if he is offended?"

"King Charles is a deeply religious man, Holy Father, a man with great respect for the papacy and the Church. Be spiritual in your dealings with him and he cannot be offended."

My flawless logic plus twenty kilos of gold carried the day, and the outcome is recorded in every good library in the world. This action revived the imperial tradition in the west and set a precedent that the emperors’ authority rested on the approval of the pope. Although the imperial title did not confer any actual power on Charlemagne, it did give legitimacy to his rule over central Italy, a fact that the Byzantine emperor would acknowledge a decade later. The Holy Roman Empire created that day was to last, in one form or another, for a thousand years, and I was off to. . .

Florence, Spring, 1470. The man across the table from me was Lorenzo de' Medici, known to history as "Il Magnifico"---Lorenzo the Magnificent. Now but twenty-one years old and ascended to the head of the clan upon his father's recent death, he was destined to be the Renaissance's greatest patron of the arts. We keep deposits with sound banks in all the ages where we work, and I had just added a significant amount of money to our account with his family bank. And no bank was more sound than the Medici Bank. Lorenzo might have been the wealthiest man in the world at that time, but he had been brought up in the banking business and had a banker's instincts. Which meant that he liked to meet the big depositors personally. But he was a convivial fellow, and our conversation drifted away from finance and on to other matters.

"His name again?" he asked me. "This painter you mentioned, I mean."

"Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, but he goes by Sandro Botticelli. A diminutive man, but a great wit."

He laughed. "Botticelli. . . The little barrel. A small fellow, eh?"

"That's right."

"But one who likes to eat, judging from his nickname?"

"That he does," I replied. "He just opened a workshop down by the Arno, near the Ponte Vecchio."

"Why haven't I heard of him if he is so good?"

"Some say he has been in Hungary for several years, working for the archbishop there. They also say that if his work proves unpopular here he will return. That is the problem. He has no name here. Yet he was born in Florence, and it would be tragic for the city to loose so talented a son. Especially to the Hungarians."

He looked at me sharply. "You are not Florentine yourself. I believe you told me you are from Regensburg, so why should you care?"

I gave him a shrug and a disarming smile. "Like Jesus, I think a prophet should not be without honor in his own land."

He laughed. "There is a wine shop near the Vecchio. Let us have a glass and then I will view the work of this paragon. Perhaps I will like some of his canvasses."

"He needs more than the sale of a few canvasses, Excellency," I said bluntly. "He needs a patron. He was an apprentice to Fra' Lippi, you know."

I heard a sharp intake of breath. "I had no idea. Then he must be good. Lippi will not tolerate anything but the best. Why, once he even snarled dismissively at some of my sonnets. Can you imagine such cheek?"

I smiled an easy smile. "Great artists can afford to be cheeky, whereas lesser men such as ourselves. . ." I let my voice taper off.

He rose from his chair with a laugh. "All too true, my friend. Let us go have that glass of wine. I find art more invigorating than business, especially in the springtime."

And as they say, the rest is history...

After Florence came a couple of minor assignments. In the first, I had to get a particular red-headed young Missourian extracted from the Confederate Army and out west where he would be safe to write the books he was meant to write. Next was the kidnapping in Hyde, Park New York, 1883, that I had to prevent. It was a simple matter of cutting a pair of cut buggy traces and leaving a note the police station. The child that wasn't abducted and murdered would go on to become the thirty-second president of the United States. But these were nuts and bolts matters.

It's not always this easy. Three years ago one of our operatives who was also a close friend of mine killed herself after she saved Hitler's life in 1921. Why save Hitler, of all people, you might ask? Because the alternative would have been worse. Much, much worse. Take my word for it. And therein lay the problem. She had the facts from both timelines, ours and the one that wasn't allowed to happen. But she couldn't get her head around the fact that she preserved the Holocaust. I don't know that I could have either, but my next job was one I had no qualms about even though it was to be the first time I had to kill in the line of duty. It was the most crucial assignment I’d ever had. . .

New York, New York, January, 2012. The Harvard Club. Roland DeJong was a tall, slim, handsome smartass who exuded a sense of entitlement the way a field hand exudes sweat. I found him sitting in the reading room, the New York Times in his lap, a snifter of fine old brandy at hand. A low reading table, now piled with magazines, separated two heavy wingchairs of dark brown leather. I sat down across the table from him and made no effort to choose anything to read. He gave me a manly smile and introduced himself quietly.

"I know who you are," I said.

"Really? I'm flattered. What class were you in?"

"I'm not a Harvard man. You might say I'm a guest here."

He nodded, but his demeanor became just the tiniest bit patronizing. "Where are you from?"

"The future."

He barely blinked at this. I suppose he thought of himself as a sophisticated man, one used to sophisticated word games.

"You don't say."

"But I do say."

"Whose future, then?" he asked with a sardonic smile. "Mine?"

"You don't have a future."

"Ahhh. . . I see. Then you must have been sent here to prevent some terrible catastrophe from befalling me. Is that it?"

I shook my head. "No. As it happens, I am your catastrophe. I know more about you than you know about yourself. We have a good research department. Best in the world, in fact."

"But why research me? To what purpose?"

I ignored his question. "Your family has been wealthy for five generations. You went to an exclusive prep school, then on to Harvard for your degree in pre-law. After that you were given a commission in the Army which was followed by Special Forces training, then an assignment in conjunction with the C.I.A. where you became expert at 'extracting' information in Afghanistan. The 'Special Methods Section,' they called it. Did you have fun?"

He gave me a crinkle-browed frown that was as false as the smile the serpent gave Eve. "So you're one of those people," he said. "Is that Sheehan woman still involved? I've been down this road before."

"So go down it one more time. Was it fun?"

"It's not always pleasant," he said. "Protecting civilization, I mean. Certain things have to be done no matter how repugnant we find them."

I nodded sagely. "White man's burden, eh? I can see you and a handful of cohorts forty years from today, sitting around some clubby room much like this one. Like the hunter home from the hill, old warriors, home from the foreign fields of empire. A crackling fire in a stone fireplace. Rowing trophies on the mantle, photos of long dead members from decades past hang here and there on finely paneled walls. Leather and brass and polished wood everywhere. You sip your brandy and say, "Nasty business, that. Afghanistan, I mean. But somebody had to do it.' Your friends all cough and snort and nod in passable imitations of Victorian gentlemen, and agree that indeed it was a nasty business, but one that had to be done on behalf of all the naïve little people out in the world who believe in quaint notions like common decency the rule of law."

He frowned again, but this one was for real. "Your point being?"

"My point being that most people like you are really just harmless oafs. Or at least they do no more harm than their kind always has."

"I do believe I detect a bit of class resentment here."

Again I ignored him and continued on. "But you have ambitions. Everything has been but a stepping stone for you. When you got out of the Army you whizzed through law school and then had a job waiting with one of the Wall Street bond firms. You made still more money, even though you didn't really need it. A few people got screwed, but so what? I mean, shit happens, doesn't it? Your skirts are clean. Besides, you were just marking time anyway. And now you're getting interested in running for congress."

"How on earth did you know that?" He was beginning to take me seriously.

"I told you I'm from the future, fool. I know what will happen if. . . How did you put it? If certain things aren't done, was it? First would come three terms in he House, and then an easy election to the Senate. You're a natural demagogue, you know. I'll give you that. You know how to push all the right buttons. Red states and blue states both, you know where the prejudices and insecurities lie. You will have a national reputation even before you enter the Senate. Then near the end of your first term a major crisis, one engineered by you and your backers, will force the resignation of a seated president for the second time in history. You'll be picked to replace the vice president when he moves up. Your party wins the next election, but soon the president dies under what can only be described as peculiar circumstances during another major crisis. You emerge as the American savior. Only in reality, you're the American Caligula."

"I've heard about enough of this," he said.

"And I've said about enough. Except to note that you would never have made anything really decent of yourself, no matter what. Still, you wouldn’t have been the monster you are had if your older sister hadn't seduced you when you were fifteen. A relationship, I might add, that's continued right on down to today."

He turned white and froze, motionless. I gave him my coldest smile. "That's why I compared you to Caligula. Remember his sister? But you're actually worse. Caligula was just a spoiled brat with absolute power who wanted to have orgies. Do you recall what Alfred told Batman in The Dark Knight? He said 'Some men don't want money or power. They just want to watch the world burn.' That's what's in the future unless something happens to stop you. And I'm that something."

"Batman," he spat. "What nonsense."

"How about you?" I asked as I rose to my feet. "What kind of movies to you watch?"

"I don't feel like having a civil conversation with a man who has accused me of having sex with my sister."

"Accused? Hell, man, we've got 3-D halos of the two of you going at it hammer-and-tongs. But back to the movies. I'm a big film fan, myself. Love the Coen Brothers stuff." I fell into a phony Italian accent and snarled, "Like I tell my boys, 'Always put one in da brain.' That’s from their Miller's Crossing. Great flick. Johnny Caspar to Tom Reagan. 'Always put one in da brain.'"

He appeared perplexed. I slipped my hand beneath my coat, came out with the silenced .22 Magnum auto. His eyes fell on the pistol and widened in surprise. "Huh?" he asked in confusion.

"Right," I said with a smile and shot him in the exact center of his forehead. The hollow-point bullet exited the back of his skull, making a colorful little jet of blood and brains as it went. For a moment his feet beat a grim tattoo on the floor, but his eyes had had morphed into dead fish eyes that told me it was nothing but reflex.

My job was done, and there was no reason to linger. I dropped the gun in his lap and flicked the return switch in my belt unit. There came a moment of vertigo when the Harvard Club blurred out and the time vault in my Galveston home materialized.

I hung up my gear and locked the room. Out on the front porch I sat down with a bottle of good scotch whiskey and a crystal glass. It was just after sunset and the sea breeze was starting to pick up. I sipped my drink and stared off toward the Gulf, trying to decide what to do with my two weeks upcoming holiday. Lorenzo had bought a half dozen of Botticelli's paintings the morning we visited his shop, and then he invited us both to his palace for dinner. I think I may take him up on it. We also found one small canvas that is not mentioned in any catalogue of his works. That is because it now hangs in my parlor here in Galveston. Imagine that: a freshly painted Botticelli.

It's a tolerable world we live in. It's far from perfect, but it has plenty of good people, fine art, great music, loyal friends, innocent children, and fresh spring flowers. It's a world worth preserving in spite its flaws. I laughed for a moment about what DeJong had said about how saving it is sometimes unpleasant. It never is to me. I love my work.
***

A Good Beginning

By Milton T. Burton © 2009

I found it at an agricultural equipment dealership in a little town called Terrell that lay about thirty miles east of Dallas. The moment I saw it sitting there a hundred yards off Interstate 20, gleaming brightly in the noonday sun, I knew that I was on the cusp of some great adventure. There were a dozen others lined up beside it, none different from the one that had caught my eye. But this was the one I had to have. This one was mine. The others didn't matter a bit. They were just window dressing.

Upon later reflection, I realized that how I came to be in Texas was a sordid story in itself. A week earlier I'd left my Hudson River Valley estate (which I had grown to hate) in my brand new $90,000 Beemer (which I was rapidly growing to hate) and headed west. Before I left, I had a tasteful, well-bred, little dust-up with my tasteful, well-bred, little thirty-eight-year-old trophy wife, Victoria. You can visualize her, I'm sure. Two decades my junior, petite and slim with an astringent body, perky breasts, and a firm butt. A well-exercised and expensive body: Pilates, Yoga, massage, personal trainer, the whole nine yards, as the kids say. A woman determined to maximize her assets for the specific purpose of holding onto what she has for as long as she can. And what she has is me and my money. Or so she thinks. She also has a worry line between her brows and a lovely oval face that always holds an expression of mild discontent.

"I can't take any more of this for a while," I told her. "I've had enough. More than enough, in fact."

"Enough of what?" she asked.

That was the problem. I didn't really know what the "what" was that I'd had enough of. She was part of it, of course, even though we almost never argued and she rarely nagged. Or at least she didn't until after I came back from Texas. I'd married her five years earlier, four years after the death of my first wife. I thought I'd wanted her, but I really hadn't. What I'd wanted was to get laid about twice a week and be left alone the rest of the time. Mistakes are made, you know.

I waved her off. "I'll call," I said.

"But where are you going?"

"The Southwest, I think. Probably Texas."

"But why Texas, for God's sake?"

I shrugged helplessly. "I guess because I've never been there."

#

I screeched off the Interstate and onto the access road and skidded into the farm dealership in a shower of gravel. I didn't wait for them to come to me. No sir. This wasn't that kind of day. Doubtlessly wild-eyed, I went to them, lunging into the building and then into the first office that was occupied. A young salesman rose from behind his desk, a bright, hale-fellow-well-met smile on his face.

"I'm Tommy Treen," he said. "Can I help you?"

I glanced around the room. The walls were resplendent with Rotary plaques and Kiwanis Club certificates; company awards and farm show pictures. For some reason I found it all terribly reassuring.

The kid had a firm handshake, and beneath his small town booster surface I could sense a hardness about him that I liked. I took him by the shoulder and pointed out the window. "There," I said. "The one next to the far end. I want it."

"Good choice. That's the John Deere 548 standard round hay baler. Makes two thousand pound rolls."

"A hay baler!" I said. "So that's what it does."

Tommy Treen's smile was still there, but now it seemed frozen on his face, and his eyes were a little puzzled. "You didn't know?" he asked.

"Hell, I didn't care. I'm buying the damn thing for its looks."

"It's looks?" He was definitely puzzled now.

"Right."

"So you're not in the cattle business?"

I shook my head. "I run an investment company on Wall Street."

"I see," he said.

But I could tell he really didn't see at all. I took a seat in front of his desk and he settled himself into a big, high-backed executive chair. "That baler is quite an expensive piece of equipment, you know," he said.

"I should hope so. I'd hate for something that fine-looking to be priced cheaply."

"Well, we're always willing to talk discount if--"

"Let's not get tedious, my friend," I said expansively. "Round the price upward if you want. I like prices with a lot of zeros in them."

"Uhhh. . ."

"My sentiments exactly."

He seemed lost in thought for a moment. "I've never made a sale quite like this before," he said. "To be honest with you, I'm having a hard time believing you're not a practical joker."

"Me? No way. I'm as serious as death and taxes."

"Then I need to know what arrangements you'd like to make in order to. . ." He let his voice trail off.

"Pay for the thing, you mean?"

He nodded.

I flipped my American Express Centurion card across the desk and heard him gasp.

"The black card!" he exclaimed. "I've heard of these, but I've never seen one before."

"It's the apex of the apex, Tommy Treen. And you'll probably want a little identification." I tossed my New York driver's license and my passport, which was thick with added pages, across the desk. "And feel free to call my bank in Manhattan. You work on commission, I take it."

He nodded absently and stared euphorically at the Centurion card for a few moments. When he looked back up at me his smile was no longer frozen. It was alive and happy. "You don't fool around, do you, sir?" he asked.

"I have no reason to. You see, I'm on a quest, Tommy. I didn't realize it until the instant I saw my hay baler, but that's exactly what I'm on. A quest, just like the knights of old."

"And that 548 baler is your Holy Grail, right?"

I considered this for a moment, then shook my head. "I don't think so. But I know it will help me get there. I know that in my heart. A man on a quest has to go by faith."

"I know a little about faith," he said and pointed proudly to a framed certificate from a local Baptist church that hung on the wall behind him."

"I'm aware that you do, Tommy."

We sat and basked for a few moments in the warmth of our shared faith: his in the God of the Texas Baptists, mine in the purity of my quest. Then a mild frown appeared on his face.

"Yes?" I asked.

"Won't you need a tractor to go with it?"

That was a new wrinkle, something I hadn't considered. "You think I should have one?"

"Well, a hay baler is pretty useless without a tractor. I mean, you can't even move it around without one."

"Hummm. . ."

"I really wouldn't feel right selling you something you couldn't use, and you simply can't use a baler without a tractor."

"You're looking out for my interests, aren't you, Tommy?"

"I'm trying my best, sir."

"I know you are, so let's go for it."

"So you're saying you want a tractor, too?" he asked.

"You bet I do."

"Well, which one?"

"Why don't you pick one out for me? You know a lot more about them than I do."

#

Tommy Treen called around to several rental places and found me a semi-truck and trailer. Once the deal was cut on the truck, he directed me to his cousin, a recently laid-off trucker named Billy Don Pringle who was willing to drive the rig back to New York for me. Billy Don was in his early forties with a happy face and brown hair. His attire consisted of low-slung Levis, cowboy boots, and a seemingly endless supply of red checked gingham shirts, along with a weathered baseball cap with a feed company logo on the front. The cap was perpetual. It appeared to have been born there and matured there, and it gave every impression that it would probably go on to its final reward without ever leaving his iron ball of a head. He was also blessed with stumpy fingers on quick, competent hands that could fix anything. Twice the truck broke down on the way back home, and twice he got it going again without ever pulling a frown.

The first time he said, "Now don't you worry none, Boss-man. We'll be back to skippin' through the dew in no time at all."

The second time he waxed philosophical about my recent purchase as he delved expertly around in the innards of the truck's fuel system. "These round balers like you got here are amazing," he said. "What you sometimes find in the hay months later is amazing too. I knew an ole boy who had this low-lying meadow down by the Trinity River. He bailed up a full grown alligator one time."

"Really?" I asked.

He nodded and closed the hood on the truck. "Didn't find it until that next December when he put the bale out in the pasture and the cows ate down to the alligator. He hadn't noticed no odor or nothing. See, that hay's dry and all, and hot from being bailed in the summer sun. It just kinda mummified that damned gator. Beat anything I ever seen."

"Fascinating," I said. "Utterly fascinating."

"Ain't it?"

#

So I brought it home and parked it right in front of my eighteenth century manor house where it sat surrounded by ancient oaks and chestnuts and carefully tended grass that stretched a quarter mile down to the river. My wife was not happy with this addition to the landscaping. She was even less happy that I had hired Billy Don Pringle as maintenance chief and all-round handyman for the estate. With Victoria it was loathing at first sight, an obvious fact to which Billy Don was sublimely indifferent. But I didn't care. Hiring the man had been one of the best decisions I'd ever made. In three weeks he'd gotten the sprinkler system working better than ever before, rewired two of the outbuildings, and was in the process of installing motion-sensitive lights at strategic location all over the grounds. Much to my surprise, I was beginning to like my home once again.

The day I got the idea that it might be fun to actually make some hay, Victoria and I were sitting on the small patio-like courtyard she had urged me to have built on the front terrace not long after we were married---a courtyard on which she could sit and sip vodka Martinis and survey her domain on pleasant afternoons. In the early months of our union I had been eager to please her.

That afternoon we had a guest---an all too frequent guest, as a matter of fact---in the person of Reginald Van Nye, a neighbor from a couple of miles down the river. Reggie is a descendant of one of the oldest and wealthiest Valley families. Now in his forties, he looks fifteen years younger. He has a handsome face with wavy hair that's going a little silver at the temples, a manly jaw, and dark eyes of the sort the old romance novels used to call "smoldering." He also has a habit of calling me "Old Boy" that I find deeply annoying.

Reggie keeps an office in the city so he can go in a couple of times a month and convince himself that he has business affairs that need his attention. The truth is that all he ever does is bank his trust checks, play tennis, and fornicate. The trust checks aren't much of a challenge, not even for a man of his limited wattage, and with his weak backhand he's only a mediocre tennis player. However, he is known locally as a terrific fornicator, usually choosing his partners downscale from among his social inferiors. Usually, but not always.

He bills himself as my best friend, but he's not. My best friend was a Kentucky farm boy who died in screaming agony in the Mekong Delta forty years earlier. But even aristocrats like to name-drop occasionally, and mine has been a good name to drop since not long after I came to the New York financial world out of a Cleveland blue color neighborhood by way of Vietnam decades ago. Because of my humble background, my fast success led me to be quickly tagged as "The Barefoot Boy of Wall Street, the man to know if you want your money to grow." So you can probably see why I hate the human race. Most of it, anyway.

"Strange thing for an impulse purchase, Old Boy," Reggie says. "That tractor business, I mean."

"You have your little hobbies, Reggie. And now I have mine."

"Are you just going to leave it there?" Victoria asks.

"I haven't decided yet," I reply. "But I do I like to look at it in the late afternoons."

"I hate that shade of green," Reggie says.

"So do I," Victoria chimes in.

"Tough," I say and dig my cell phone out of my pocket. I punch in a number and a few seconds later I mumble a few words into the thing and then snap it off and put it away.

"Who on earth did you call?" Victoria asks, exasperated for some reason.

"Billy Don."

"I don't like that man," she replies. "The other day he was making a lot of noise out back with that pump on the ornamental fountain. I asked him if he would tend to it some other time, and he just snorted at me and kept on working."

"Very perceptive of him," I say. "No doubt you could use a good snorting."

"Don't be vulgar," she hisses.

"In fact, why don't you and Reggie go on up stairs right now and just snort away until your hearts are content?"

"What?. . ." This from Victoria.

"Surely you don't think--" That from Reggie.

No, I don't think. I know. But I cut him off with a good-natured laugh. "Just joking, Old Boy," I say.

Reggie repeats, in an appropriately injured tone of voice, his oft-stated but rarely-followed maxim: "No true gentleman ever seduces a friend's wife."

Just then Billy Don Pringle emerges though a hitherto unnoticed gap in the lilac bushes, his round, ruddy face a mask of good humor. "Where I come from," he says, "a man with any gumption don't seduce nobody's wife except his own. Not unless he wants his ass shot off, begging your pardon, Missus." This last with a barely perceptible nod at Victoria.

Master of a dozen trades and never long without employment, Billy Don sees no reason to be deferential to anyone. Another feather in his cap as far as I am concerned. "What's up, Boss?" he asks, turning toward me.

I point at the tractor and baler and say, "I bought them for aesthetic reasons, but I've been thinking. I've got six hundred acres here, and about a third of it is in grass. I've been paying some people to mow it, but maybe we ought to make a little hay. What do you think?"

"I'm all for it," Billy Don says.

"Oh, for God's sake!" says Victoria.

I turn and look at her. "Do you begrudge me a few thousand dollars for my tractor and hay baler?" I ask.

"No, but I just don't see any point---"

"Here's the point, Victoria. What do I do? Think about that a minute, will you please? I go into the city and make phone calls and fool with numbers on computers and talk to people all over the world. I've done it until my accountant now says I'm worth a half a billion dollars. But I still can't find it."

"Find what?" she asks, clearly annoyed.

"Whatever it is that I do."

"You're a financier, Old Boy," Reggie says jovially. "Be proud of it."

"But where is it? What I've done, I mean. Where is my product? A hog farmer has his hogs. A factory worker can show you all the gimmicks and gizmos he's made. Hell, even a shoeshine boy can point to the shoes he's shined. But I have no it to point to. Am I less than a Times Square shoeshine boy?"

"This identity crisis of yours is getting tiresome," Victoria says, impeccably miming upper class annoyance. She tries hard, Victoria does.

"Tiresome of not, I like my tractor and baler, and I plan to have some fun with them no matter what you say."

At that precise moment Ingrid Lawson, the seventeen-year-old belle of the adjoining estate, thunders across the far end of the lawn astride her coal-black Morgan, her long blond hair streaming wildly in her wake. Victoria watches with eyes that are cold and hard. Jealous and bitterly so, she slips easily into shrew mode. Her great unrealized ambition is to thunder across somebody's front lawn on a coal black steed. The only problem is that Victoria is terrified of any animal larger than a Cocker Spaniel. "You know what Freud said about young women and horses," she asks, her voice snippy. "Sublimated masculine power between her legs. . ."

"Sounds like a bunch of crap to me," Billy Don says. "Besides, that's not a stallion that gal's on anyhow."

"Oh really?" Victoria says.

"It's a gelding. Women can handle geldings a whole lot easier than they can stallions or mares, either one. See, Missus, a gelding his a male horse that's been---"

"I'm very aware of what a gelding is, Mr. Pringle," Victoria says distractedly, fruitlessly punching her little electronic gadget that she uses to summons the servants.

"Gimmie that thing and let me take a look at it," Billy Don says.

She hands the switch over reluctantly and says, "Won't somebody please go and tell the maid it's time to serve afternoon cocktails?"

Neither Billy Don nor I respond. Reggie smiles a manly smile and gets to his feet. "I'll be happy to."

"Thank you," she says softly.

As Reggie turns toward the house, Billy Don winks at me and then speaks in a happy voice. "Yep, like I said, women sure can manage them geldings."

For just a moment Reggie's whole back stiffens. Then he squares his shoulders and heads up the walk.

"Do we have everything we need to bail some hay?" I ask Billy Don.

He shakes his head. "We need a sickle mower to cut the grass and a trailing rake to windrow it with. The tractor can operate 'em both of them off the power-take-off."

Billy Don fiddles with the call switch while we say nothing. Then he tosses it back to Victoria. "Loose connection," he says.

She pushes the button and the light comes on. "Thank you," she says grudgingly.

A few moments later Reggie is back with the maid following closely behind. She carries a tray laden with an ice bucket, a bottle of single malt, glasses, and a stainless steel shaker full of vodka Martinis for Victoria.

I point at the tray and tell Billy Don, "Sit down and have a drink."

He shakes his head. "I better not. I'm going into town to see my lady friend in little while."

"A girlfriend already?" Reggie asks. "My, my. . ."

"Yep."

"Some bar girl, I suppose," Reggie says.

"Nope. She teaches English at the college."

Reggie's face shows skepticism at this statement. He pours a tot of scotch for each of us while the maid fills Victoria's glass.

"We need to fly back down to Texas in a few days and get the rake and whatever else we need," I tell Billy Don.

"We can get all that here local," he says.

I shake my head firmly. "I like your cousin, Tommy Treen down there at the dealership where I got the tractor and baler. I'd rather spend my money with him."

"Fine with me, and I know Tommy will appreciate it. A sickle and a rake don't weigh much. We can just rent a flatbed trailer and I can tow them back behind my pickup truck. I need it up here anyway. I feel lost without it, and besides, Miss Suzanne says she's never rode in a pickup before, and she's looking forward to it."

"Suzanne Weiss?" Reggie asks in a voice that's both surprised and offended. "She's your lady friend?"

"Yep. . ."

Suzanne Weiss is a tiny, thirty-seven-year-old knockout with a sweet, ripe body, kind eyes, and a head full of brains---a full professor of American literature with a national reputation as a Faulkner scholar. Which is at least a partial explanation why she would be attracted to Billy Don Pringle. I say a partial explanation. I sense that such a robust and competent country lad also has skills that range far beyond the mechanical. I sense too that Suzanne Weiss was one of Reggie's downscale seductions that didn't come off.

". . . that's her," Billy Don says. "She's a peach." He turns to me. "I need to get some of my stuff, too. Mostly a few clothes and my guns."

At the word "guns" Victoria jerks like she's been hit with a mild electric current. "You own firearms, Mr. Pringle?" she asked.

"A few. Bird guns and deer rifles, mostly."

"Could you teach me how to shoot clay pigeons?" I ask him. "I got pretty good with a rifle in the army, but I've always had a yen to learn skeet and trap. Just never took the time."

"I'm your man," he replies. "Back when I was younger I won a passel of trophies shooting trap."

"There must be some fine gun stores in Dallas. You can advise me."

"We'll do it," he says with a parting wave and then vanishes back through the magic hole in the lilac bushes. The three of us sit for a while and say nothing as the day draws gently to a close.

"Are you really going to buy a gun?" Victoria asks, breaking the silence at last.

"I think maybe I'll buy several."

She shivers almost imperceptibly. I glance over at Reggie. Manly muscles contract in a manly jaw while dark eyes smolder. I sip my scotch and stare happily off across the lawn where my new toys gleam fetchingly in the last dying rays of the setting sun.
***

Hobby

by Milton T. Burton

At first Sam MacCord didn't think the van was going to stop. But at the last moment the brakes squealed and it pulled up beside where he stood on the narrow oil-topped road. The driver took his time about rolling the window down, just as he took his time about everything. He was a skank, with long skanky black hair and a Mephistolian mustache and a grungy goatee. He wore a black leather vest over a white tee shirt and spiked leather wrist bands. Heavy metal music pounded away on the sound system, and the fetid air that came out of the van's now-open window reeked of marijuana smoke. The driver's companion was a skank too, only she was female. Dressed much the same as the driver, she had a pretty but sullen face, dark, scraggly hair, large breasts, and long legs that protruded from a pair of cut-off jeans and rested, ankles crossed, on the vehicle's cluttered dash. Sam put the driver in his early thirties, the girl maybe a half dozen years younger.

Her name was Debbie Pond, and her chief activities in life were snorting coke, gobbling downers, and functioning as a sort of ambulatory receptacle for the seminal emissions of any male skank in her immediate proximity who could be induced to part with some of his dope. Or at least that was how things had been until she met the driver of the van. The one time she'd strayed after hooking up with him, he'd whipped her so hard with his heavy leather belt that she couldn't stand up for over an hour. Not only had that helped Debbie get her head straight as to where her real interests lay, but deep down she'd secretly liked it. As a consequence of that lovely evening, she'd come to look upon their romance as a match made in Heaven.

The driver himself was a small-time coke pusher and wannabe heavy metal musician named Ronnie DeLoach who would never make it big, partly because he was void of any real musical talent. But mostly this sad fact could be attributed to his very limited life span. Although Ronnie didn't know it, at the precise moment he reached languidly toward the dash to switch off the music, he had less than twenty-four hours to live. "Yeah?" he asked in a voice that was full of annoyed disinterest.
Sam smiled pleasantly. "I was wondering if you could tell me where a woman named Linda Popper lives."

DeLoach didn't answer right away. That was another aspect of his personal style, one he'd gotten from the cheap action movies he loved where the cool dude always took his time responding to questions. Instead he spent about ten silent seconds looking Sam over. What he saw was a trim man in his mid fifties who stood maybe five-ten and was dressed in dark slacks, a rust colored shirt, and a dark gray Ike jacket. His head was bare, and his short hair, which was had been coal black in his youth, was now running heavily to gray.

"Linda Popper?" Sam reminded finally.

DeLoach jerked his thumb over his shoulder indicating the way he had come. "Back there," he told Sam.

"Right," Sam said, nodding in agreement. "That's what I've been told, but the problem is that I've already been back that way, and there are several houses." He gave the driver a friendly smile and a diffident shrug.

"Whadda you want me to do?" the skank asked. "Draw you a freaking map?"

"Maybe you could tell me what her house looks like--"

"It's yellow," the driver said impatiently, rolling his eyes. "Pale yellow. The last one on the left about a mile on down."

"Thank you. I really appreciate your--"

But before he could finish, DeLoach slammed the van into gear and roared off down the road. It had rained off-and-on all that week, and somewhere along the way the van had been in mud. As it sped away, a thumb-sized daub of damp red clay flew off one of its rear tires and landed on the front of Sam's jacket. But Sam paid no attention to the mud. Instead, he whipped a solid gold pen and a 3x5 card from his inner pocket and quickly jotted down the van's license plate number. Then he flicked the blob from his jacket and cleaned the spot as well as he could with a monogrammed linen handkerchief.

Had DeLoach been more astute and less interested in playing it cool, he might not have been misled by Sam MacCord's modest demeanor. He might have noticed that the man's pale blue eyes were both glacially cold and obscenely happy--eyes that could make cats hiss and puppies whine and send small children screeching for their mothers. But such subtleties were lost on Ronnie DeLoach. The alpha male in his little cluster group, he was master of all he surveyed. He had a crew of admiring buddies who acknowledged him as their leader, he was boning a submissive doll with big knockers who would drop to her knees at the snap of his fingers, and he had a few hundred bucks in his pocket. And to top it all off, a couple of grand nestled sweetly in his savings account down at the bank. Everything a man of his limited horizons needed. So why bother to read the message in somebody's eyes or even extend a little common courtesy? Especially some old doofus standing out in the middle of nowhere asking directions.

Sam MacCord put his pen and the card back in his inner jacket pocket and whistled softly to himself as he cranked his rented Lexus coupe and glided off down the narrow road.

#

The door of the yellow house opened a few seconds after Sam knocked, and suddenly there she was. She was older now--fifteen years older--and small wrinkles showed around her tired eyes. But she was still slim and pretty and her short hair was still the same copper-blonde he remembered. A close examination might have revealed a few more signs of age, but Sam MacCord didn't give a flying damn. She still took his breath away. She wore a pair of trim khaki slacks and a dark green sweatshirt from some college in Louisiana. At first her face showed surprise, and then he thought for a moment she was going to cry. "Sam?" she said hesitatingly. "Is that you?"

"Of course it's me. Have I changed that much?"

She gazed at him in silence for a long moment, then shook her head. "You haven't changed at all except that your hair has gone gray." It was then that her eyes misted up and she said sadly, "Oh, Sam, I want to hug you so bad, but I don't feel like I have any right to."

"You've got every right in the world," he said and reached out and took her in his arms and pulled her toward him. For Sam it was like regaining feeling in a limb that had been dead for years. They stood that way for a long time while he was aware of little beyond the sweetness of her body, the fleeting, cinnamony odor of her perfume, and the slow, rhythmic ticking of the old German clock on the mantle behind her. Finally, as if by mutual agreement, they pulled apart.

"I don't know what to say," she said, pulling up her sweatshirt to dab at her eyes.

"Why do you have to say something?"

She gave him a halfhearted shrug. "Want some coffee?" she asked. "I was just about to have a cup."

"Sure."

"Then come on back in the kitchen. I just made a fresh pot."

She took his hand and led him, little-girl-like, back through a house that was neat and surgically clean, but cheaply furnished. The kitchen was big and sunny, and outside the windows he could see a row of early spring daffodils blooming bright yellow.

She poured them both a cup from a shiny percolator that stood on the counter. A homemade pound cake emerged as if by magic from the cabinet above the sink. Linda set a plate before him and handed him a knife. "Have fun," she said.

"This almost makes me think you knew I was coming," he said.

"You remember how much I loved your pound cake?"

She nodded. "I didn't know, but I'm sure happy to see you." He ate for a while in silence, then finally she asked, "Why did you come, Sam?"

"Mr. Van Horn asked me to look you up on his behalf."
For a moment there was a flash of disappointment in her eyes.

"I see," she said.

"No, you don't," Sam said firmly. "The truth is that I was about to beg off and tell him to find somebody else, but then I realized just how bad I wanted to see you myself."

"Really?"

"Did I ever lie to you? I admit that I've got a lot of faults, but did I ever tell you a single lie."

She shook her head and smiled sadly. "It's just that for so long I thought you were mad. I mean, I dumped you for Freddie Popper and--"

"I never was mad at you, Linda. I was hurt, but I didn't blame you. Freddie loved you, and back in those days he was more stable than I was. He had more to offer a woman, and I understood that. Hell, in your position I would probably have done the same thing."

"Really?"

"Sure."

She shook her head and dabbed once more at her eyes. "And you were always wound up so tight, Sam," she said. "That worried me, too."

He laughed. "I remember. You always told me I needed a hobby or something to calm me down, spend all the excess energy."

"You do seem a lot calmer now."

"I've slowed down a lot. Hell, I'm fifty-five-years old."

"I'm forty-two."

"You don't look it, Linda. You're still beautiful."

She blushed and looked down at her coffee cup. He reached over and patted her hand. She was naturally shy, and it was one of the things he had always loved about her.

"Me and Freddie had two good years," she said. "He'd gotten out of the life, and he was working at a straight job and making good money. That was before the cancer hit him."

He sipped at his coffee for a few moments while he stared intently at her across the table, then he said, "Linda, did you know of Freddie pulling any jobs that last year? I mean before he got too sick?"

"I suspected he was doing something. I think he was trying to get some money together for me to have after he was gone."

"That's exactly what he was doing, and that's where Mr. Van Horn comes in."

"How is he?" she asked. "You know, he gave me my first job when I came to Dallas. I'm really surprised he's still around."

"He's almost eighty, and still going strong. But back to our business. Do you happen to remember a heavy-duty thug named Carl Whittle who used to hang around Van Horn's nightclubs?"

"You bet I do. He was a scary guy."

"Right. Well, he and Freddie took down a big bank in Austin about six months before Freddie died. A nightime burglary. Then that fool Whittle got all pilled up a couple of days later and got stopped for weaving all over the road. He had some currency bands and a few bearer bonds from the robbery in the trunk of his car, but none of the cash. He went down for the job, but he never ratted out Freddie. He never gave him his cut of the take, either. I guess he figured that since he was going up for at least ten years there was no reason he shouldn't just hang on to the whole score, especially with Freddie due to check out pretty soon, anyway. He got word to Mr. Van Horn where the money was stashed, and the old man laundered it and invested it for him, taking his ten percent off the top just like he always does."

"I never heard anything about any of this," Linda said. "I do know that Freddie died bitter about something, though. And he was worried sick about me. He even wanted me to look you up after he was gone."

"You should have."

She shook her head. "I couldn't do that, Sam."

He chose not to argue with her. "Anyway, Whittle drew fourteen years. He was lucky. The only evidence that tied him to the burglary was the bearer bonds, and he could have been fencing them. The jury knew he was guilty of something, but they were unwilling to hang the whole farm around his neck. But Mr. Van Horn started hearing rumors about Freddie being his partner on the job. So when Whittle fell out of the joint and came to him for his money, he asked him about it."

"What did Whittle say?"

"He told the truth. Hell, if he hadn't and the old man had found out later that he'd lied, that would have been all she wrote for Carl Whittle."

"Really? Mr. Van Horn was always so sweet to me."

"Sure he was. Because you never gave him any reason to be anything else. But he only let Whittle have half of the money. The other half is yours, Linda."

"Really? How much?"

"Two hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars."

She was stunned. "Two hundred and what?"

"Two hundred and forty-seven thousand. Mr. Van Horn has had it in a blind trust all these years, and the taxes on the interest and appreciation have been paid yearly. It's yours, Linda. You're going to need to come back to Dallas with me and sign some papers, but that shouldn't be any problem. You have a job, I suppose."

She nodded. "I'm the hostess in a real nice restaurant
in Oxford. It's a steak and seafood place."

"Can you take off a few days?"

"I guess so."

He stared at her a minute, then sighed and screwed up his courage. "Linda, I want you to put your money up where nobody but you can get hold of it. I don't want you to spend a nickel of it. You don't have to. I'm rich."

"Huh?"

"We missed one chance fifteen years ago because I wouldn't settle down. I don't want us to miss this one."

"Sam--" she began plaintively.

"Linda, please listen to me. For all practical purposes I'm out of the life now. I haven't pulled a job in years. Right now I own a very lucrative sports book in Dallas. Some of the biggest bigwigs in town do business with me, and I belong to a couple of upscale clubs. Hell, I'm respectable now. I even get invited to a wedding or a party now and then in Highland Park, if you can imagine."

"Gee, Sam. This is all so. . ."

"Are you involved with anybody at the moment?"

She shook her head. He leaned forward and looked her right in the eyes and spoke as persuasively as he could. "Linda, I'm fifty-five years old, and I don't have time to be coy. Hell, there's no need for it. We slept in the same bed for better than a year, so why beat around the bush? I realize now how much I loved you then and how much I still love you and what a damn fool I was to let you get away."

She smiled wistfully. "Aww, that's so sweet of you to say that, Sam."

"You're going to have to come back with me to do this legal stuff to get your money. Mr. Van Horn won't have it any other way. He always liked you a lot, and I think he just wants to see you one more time. While you're there I want to show you my home. I've got a nice house in North Dallas and--"

She laughed. "You own a house? I can't believe it. Back when we were together you didn't even like to rent an apartment. You always wanted to live in hotels. You said your idea of Heaven was around-the-clock room service."

He laughed with her. "Not only do I own a house, but I've learned to cook, too. Isn't that something? I'm really pretty good at it."

She shook her head in wonder. "You in the kitchen. I can't see it."

"Come back with me and you can."

"Aw, Sam. . . If we only could. . ." her voice tapered off.

"I won't pressure you. If you like what you see, we've got a future together. If you don't, then you come back to Mississippi and no hard feelings."

"When would we go to Texas?"

"I'd like to leave here the day after tomorrow. I've had a little something come up that I need to tend to in the morning."

"I guess I could," she said. "I'd have to call work and let them know. I've got some vacation time coming. Maybe I'll just take a week off."

"Do that. I'll make plane reservations as soon as I get back to my motel."

She giggled like a little girl. "I've never flown in a plane in my whole life."

"Never?" he asked in amazement.

"Nope. I'm really kinda scared of flying." Thirty minutes later they were at the door. "Sam. . ." she began shyly.

"Yeah?

"Do you want to stay here tonight?"

He smiled at her and reached up and brushed her cheek gently.

"Of course I do, Linda. But I got a couple of things to do, so I can't. How about if I come and stay tomorrow night? Then we can get up and leave the next morning."

She nodded. He started to give her a chaste peck on the forehead, but she melted into his arms, crying. "I'm so glad you came," she said through her tears.

"Me too, Linda."

#

A mile down the road he pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number in Austin. The man who answered was a supervisor in the state bureau of motor vehicles who had been on Van Horn's payroll for years. "Do you recognize my voice?" Sam asked.

"Indeed I do," the man replied dryly.

"I need the name and address of the owner of a van with Mississippi plates."

"Give me it to me and your phone number too. I'll call you back in a couple of minutes."

Sam rattled off the information. "And see if you can pull up the picture on the owner's driver's license, too," he said. "I want to make sure I've got the right guy."

"Will do."

He drove leisurely on, enjoying the early spring afternoon and the tender green of the world around him. After about five minutes his phone buzzed. "Yeah?" he said.

"That van is registered to one Ronald DeLoach. You want his address?"

"You bet," Sam said and pulled over to the side of the road and wrote quickly on a 3x5 card. Then he asked about the photo.

"Yeah, I got it," his contact said. "Want me to fax it to you?"

"Just describe the guy."

"Skinny, Long black hair, goatee, thirty-three years old. A really scroungy looking young toad."

"You're a good man, Lewis," Sam said. "Forget you ever heard from me."

"Don't I always?"

#

The next morning Sam parked two blocks down and around the corner from the bungalow the skank rented on a narrow, shady street in a blue collar neighborhood in Oxford. The front door lock was a cheap in-the-knob affair. Sam pulled a pair of channel-lock pliers from his coat pocket, and after one sharp twist he was inside.

The place was cleaner and neater than he expected but not as tidy as he would have been comfortable living with himself. The living room took up the whole front of the house. It was furnished with cheap modern furniture, and posters for various heavy metal bands were thumb-tacked here and there about the walls. The largest, at the end of the room, was a large framed photo of Van Halen. A fancy sound system occupied one wall, and in the place of honor right in front of the faux fireplace a small ceiling-mounted spotlight shown down on a coal-black Fender electric guitar that rested on a fancy chromium stand like some ancient pagan god awaiting a sacrificial virgin.

Sam's shoes were rubber-soled, and he was good at what he was doing. He checked the house quickly. Besides the living room and the attached kitchen, it contained only two bedrooms and a small bathroom. The smaller bedroom was empty and looked like it hadn't been used in some time. The larger of the two contained a mammoth king-sized bed fitted with black satin sheets and a black coverlet. In it slept the skank. The girl was nowhere to be seen, for which Sam was deeply grateful. Had she been present, he would have quietly left the house and put the whole matter in the future reference file.

A wooden kitchen chair rested in front of a small dressing table to one side of the bed. Very carefully Sam moved it beside the bed and sat down. Then he fired up one of his small Cuban cigars and blew a great puff of smoke toward the skank's face. The boy's nostrils twitched and he stirred a little under the sheet. "Wake up, Rock-Away Johnny!" Sam said loudly.

The skank's eyes opened. "What the. . .?" he began.

"Tell your ma! Tell your pa! Our love's a'gonna grow!!" Sam sang melodiously. "Ole Rock-Away Johnny. Top of the morning to you, Johnny me boy."

The skank shook his head and blinked his eyes a few times. Then they widened in disbelief.

"That's right, my friend. I'm the guy you were so courteous to yesterday on the road out near Water Valley."

The skank blinked some more. "How the hell did you get in here?" he finally asked.

"Through the front door. Getting into locked places is my trade. Or at least it used to be. Where's the girl?"

"Who?"

"The girl who was with you yesterday, idiot. Where is she?"

"Oh, her. She went home to see her mama for a few days. The old bitch is sick."

"The old bitch? That's how you talk about your girlfriend's mother to strangers? You're such a lovely fellow, Johnny."

"My name's not Johnny," DeLoach said sullenly for lack of anything better to say. He was confused. Last night's mixture of whiskey and cocaine had dulled his normally dull senses even more than usual.

"I know that," Sam said. "But as it happens, I didn't care for the name your no doubt genetically defective parents bestowed upon you at birth. So I changed it to Rock-Away Johnny for the short time you have left here on this vast and turbulent globe we call Mother Earth. Any objections?"

The skank was getting his wits about him, and his basic personality was beginning to emerge. "Yeah. I don't like it," he said.

"So?"

"So who the hell do you think you are coming into my crib like this?"

"Who do I think I am? The last time I looked at my driver's license it said I'm some guy named Sam MacCord, so I guess we'll just have to roll with that. You know, like in the old Johnny Horton song."

"Who?"

"Johnny Horton, the king of rockabilly." Sam sang once again:

"Where the river is winding, big nuggets they're finding. North to Alaska! Go north, the rush is on!!"

"Man, I don't like that redneck shit."

Sam smiled and sang on: "Yes, Sam MacCord was a mighty man, and the year was ninety-one."

"Well, you don't look too damned mighty to me. I think I may just get out of this bed and kick your sagging old ass."

"Wrong, Johnny," Sam said happily. He reached deftly inside his jacket and withdrew a silenced Ruger .22 target pistol and pointed it right at the boy's head. "You're not going to do anything of the sort because your ass-kicking days are drawing peacefully to their close."

"Huh?" DeLoach was suddenly mesmerized. He'd never seen a gun from the business end before, and he didn't like it. "What's that thing for?" he asked stupidly.

"When the time comes I'm going use it to blow you right out of your shoes. Metaphorically speaking, of course, since you don't seem to be wearing any shoes at the moment. And a .22 doesn't really have that much blasting power. They're great for brain shots, though."

The great Rock-Away Johnny, nee Ronnie DeLoach, stared at Sam MacCord and his gun while his drug-addled mind tried desperately to get a handle on the unusual situation he was finding himself in. He didn't really believe that this goofy old fart was going to kill him. It just wasn't within his capacity to believe that anybody would kill him for no good reason. After all, he was a cool dude. And even more than that, in his rather limited social circle he was THE MAN, and nobody whacked THE MAN. But he was savvy enough to realize that you didn't just walk into Wal-Mart and buy a silencer for $19.95 or whatever. Silencers were highly illegal, and had been for about a zillion years. In fact, he knew a guy from Shreveport who'd once drawn five years hard time just for having one of the damn things. It hadn't even been attached to a gun. And that definitely looked like a silencer on the end of the automatic the goofy old fart was pointing his way. Which meant that its owner was almost certainly some kind of authentic heavy, maybe a CIA spook who'd gone a couple of turns around the bend with all the Casper The Ghost crap those guys had to put up with. He pulled himself up a little in the bed and gathered his legs in close to his body. It was beginning to look like he was going to have to get physical.

Sam watched his movements, smiling all the while and reading the boy's mental processes with pinpoint accuracy. Rockaway Johnny was getting notions. Ideas, even. Sam loved it. "You're number nine," he said.

"Number nine what?"

"Assholes. You're the ninth despicable, ill-mannered asshole I've been in this very same situation with."

"I don't get it."

"You don't?" Sam asked cheerfully. "It's really very simple. You see, some people hunt. You know, quail, pheasant, deer. Things like that. Others fish or play golf or bridge or refinish antique furniture. Then you have these guys who're into coins and stamps. And I know a couple of little old ladies who collect dolls from all over the world. But with me, it's assholes."

Johnny was authentically mystified. He was having a very difficult time following Sam's logic. "You collect assholes?" he asked in a puzzled voice.

Sam MacCord laughed. He felt great. "In a manner of speaking," he said. "I don't keep them, though. I send them on their way."

"Huh?"

"That's right, I dispatch 'em. I find 'em here and there, and then we have a little chat, after which I send them on someplace else."

"Where?"

Sam shrugged. "Wherever it is we go when it's all over."

The skank grimaced. "Aw, man, let's drop this shit. It's freaking me out."

"What's freaking you out?"

"All this talk about when it's all over when we both know you're not going to shoot anybody."

Sam sighed, mildly exasperated. One of the things truly vexed was when people told him what he wasn't going to do. Which in his view was extremely presumptuous of them since he often didn't even know himself. But at that particular moment it was crystal clear exactly what his next move was going to be. "Wrong again," he said and quickly raised the gun and blew Rockaway Johnny's left earlobe clean off his head.

The fool's mouth fell open and he gazed at Sam like a man hypnotized. He reached tentatively up and felt his ear, which was beginning to bleed freely. "You shot me!" he said, his voice full of wounded dignity.

"That's right. And I intend to shoot you some more in a few minutes, but I thought we'd talk some first."

"You shot me!"

"Didn't anybody ever tell you that repetition is tiresome? Grab a bunch of Kleenex out of that box on your bedside table and squeeze them up against your ear if you want it to stop bleeding." The skank stared at him dumbly. "Go on," Sam said, motioning with the Ruger. "Get some tissues."

Rock-Away Johnny scrabbled a handful of Kleenex out of the box and pressed them gingerly against the side of his head, his eyes still warily on Sam. Finally he blurted, "You're crazy, man! Freaking crazy!!"

Sam nodded thoughtfully. "It's possible, and I'll be the first to admit it. In fact, I've given the matter considerable thought in the last few years." Then he shrugged and smiled. "But finally I quit worrying about it. I just figured, what the hell? I'm happy as a lark, so if it ain't broke, why try to fix it?"

Rock-Away Johnny couldn't formulate an answer to that particular question. The earlobe business was forcing him to drastically reevaluate his previous assessment of the situation. Indeed, he was getting religion where the subject of Sam MacCord was concerned. He was beginning to comprehend that this goofy old fart was one serious dude. "Why have you got it in for me?" he asked. "Why not somebody else?"

Sam sighed once again. "Because you're an asshole, Johnny. I've already told you that once. Can't you remember anything?"

"But there are lots of assholes!"

"Don't blame me. I'm certainly doing my part to rectify that situation."

"You can't just go around shooting people because you don't like them!"

"Can you think of any better reason to shoot them?"

"Uh. . ."

"Now if you were the sort of fellow who was inclined to historical research, which of course, you're not, you might check out the Dallas and Biloxi newspapers from about thirty years back. If you did, you're find me mentioned pretty often. Back in those days the reporters had me linked with an outfit they called the Dixie Mafia. It never existed, really, to be perfectly truthful. The term was just a lurid journalist's creation that was used to describe a bunch of us fun-loving ole country boys who did a lot of robbing and killing back then. Even the Texas Rangers handled us with tongs and gloves, so to speak, and my own name was linked to some pretty heavy scores and a couple of contract hits. But you didn't know any of that yesterday afternoon. You thought I was just some old guy you could get away with treating as shitty as you wanted treat him. Bad mistake."

"Yeah, but. . ." The boy's voice trailed off.

"Yeah, but, yeah but, yeah but," Sam repeated. "You sound like a spoiled first grader." He stood with agile quickness and took one step back away from the bed. "And you're starting to bore me."

This was the worst cut of all. Nobody had ever told DeLoach he was boring. His buddies all competed for his attention, and the women were his for the taking. When he talked, people listened. "You old bastard--"

"Hush!" Sam said loudly.

Startled, Johnny stopped speaking. He just couldn't get a grip on where this man was coming from.

"Try to exit with a little grace, my young friend," Sam said. "After all, grace is one of those delicate, elusive qualities that separates us from the beasts of the field."

The boy was still puzzled. Wha--" he began, but before he could finish, Sam MacCord raised the silenced pistol, took quick aim and gently squeezed the trigger. And so Rock-Away Johnny passed from this life, a small, neat hole in the precise center of his forehead and a look of profound bafflement on his scraggly face.

#

The Delta MD 80 lifted off the runway at the Jackson airport, bound for Dallas. Sam and Linda were in the first class section where he'd insisted she take the window seat. She was nervous and clutched his hand tightly all through the takeoff roll. "Jeze!" she said once they were airborn. "Do they always climb at this steep an angle?"

"It depends," Sam replied.

"On what?"

"Different things. The load they're carrying, the weather, the type of plane. This Douglas 80 series is real agile. A lot of fun."

"Fun? You call this fun?"

"You'll get used to it after a few flights."

"Am I going to be flying more?"

"If you want to. Have you ever been to Europe?"

"I've never been anywhere, Sam. Heck, I've waited tables most of my life."

"Just relax and enjoy the view. As soon as we get to cruising altitude the flight attendant will be around with the drink cart and I'll get you a scotch. You still like scotch?"

She nodded, and looked out the window. He held her hand and said no more. After a couple of minutes she peered at him again. "Why are you smiling so big?" she asked.

"Oh, I was thinking about something I must have heard my grandfather say a thousand times."

"Yeah? What was that?"

"He claimed that to be really content a man needed a good woman, a rewarding trade, and an interesting hobby."

"And. . .?"

"It sure took me an awful long time to have sense enough to hang on to that good woman."

She squeezed his hand and leaned over and kissed him gently on the cheek, then turned to gaze once again in fascination out the window where the soft, green Mississippi countryside was rapidly falling away as the plane climbed swiftly into the bright spring sky.

Old Ira's Still

by Milton T. Burton

My name is Bo Handel, and I've been sheriff of Caddo County in central East Texas for the better part of thirty years. Like most longtime lawmen, I've had my share of dealings with the federal boys. Even back in the Hoover days, I found the Bureau's agents easier to get on with than a lot of what you read would make you believe. I worked one case with the Border Patrol, and I am convinced that they are some of the best and least appreciated lawmen in this country. And I have no complaints with the U.S. Marshal's service. They are gentlemen, and they always behave in a low-key manner that's soothing to the nerves. But in my opinion, both the ATF and the DEA leave something to be desired. Manners, for example. That was certainly true of at least one of the young ATF hot dogs standing in my office telling me they were going to bust old Ira Blevins's still and that I was going to be expected to help them.

They were both slim and trim and well dressed. The shorter and younger of the two appeared to be in his late twenties. He had the appearance of a man of who could be made into something worthwhile with the application of a little common sense and a few years experience. But I took one look at the tall one and wrote him off as hopeless. In his early thirties, he had the bright, gleeful eyes of the schoolyard troublemaker who always makes friends with the biggest and dumbest guy in class so he can start fights for his buddy to finish while he smirks from the sidelines. He was the one who did all the talking the whole time they were in my office. The other one never said a word. He just sat there and tried not to look embarrassed whenever his buddy stepped in it. I never paid any attention to their names. Instead I just though of them as Lead String and Second Fiddle.

"Ira Blevins, eh?" I asked.

"That's right."

"I guess that's why you two were out at the old McNeil place yesterday."

The tall agent's eyes narrowed. "How did you know about that?"

"Son, this county doesn't have a big population, and them that aren't kin to me are either my friends or they owe me money. Or both. Folks keep me posted when strangers come to town, especially eager young fellows like you who're driving cars with government tags."

"It surprises me that you people have heard about informants this far out in the sticks, Sheriff. And I'm not your son."

I sighed. "That's probably God's mercy on both of us. But don't get your feathers ruffled over it. Down here it's a term of affection. Lets a fellow know when we're taking him more seriously that we would a kid, but not quite as seriously as we would a full-grown man. Understand?"

He turned red, but he held himself in. "Sheriff, do we have to engage in all this verbal fencing? Can't we just get down to business? "

"You tell me. You're the one that started it. And as far as business goes, I'd like to know why a seventy-six-year-old man who makes maybe a hundred gallons of corn whiskey a year that has got the all-powerful ATF so steamed up."

"What he's doing is illegal."

I nodded. "I'll grant you that. But it's hardly a threat to civilization."

"And he's doing it in a barn that you own."

"I rent him that barn and seventy acres to grow corn on, but I don't ever go out there. Besides, he doesn't even sell the stuff. He gives away what he doesn't use himself. He just makes it because he'd good at it. One of the best, in fact, and he's proud of what he does."

"Are you admitting that you allow illegal activities to go on right under your nose here in this county? On your own property?"

I gave him another wheezy, hayseed sigh. The question seemed to call for one since his real reason for being in my office had nothing to do with Ira Blevins' still. But then, I knew some things they didn't know. "Well--" I began, my voice a little whiney.

"That's the truth of the matter isn't it, Sheriff. You allow--"

This time I interrupted him. "Like Bill Clinton said, it depends on what you mean by allow. If you mean am I willing to go out there and tell him he needs to quit, then I'll be more than happy to do that. If you mean if he gets real boneheaded and decides not to quit, which he may be apt to do, then am I going to shoot him to put a stop to it? The answer to that is I'll just look the other way and allow it."

"You could enforce the law and send him to prison."

"For an old country black man his age it might be more merciful to shoot him," I said.

"Sheriff Handel, it's not my job to worry about criminals. My sympathies are with the victims."

"Mine are too. Except in this case there are no victims, and you know it. Besides, Ira has never hurt a soul in his life, so he's only a criminal in the technical sense."

"Be that as it may, he stands in violation of the federal tax laws I'm sworn to uphold. There are at the present time about six stills still operating here in East Texas--"

"Where there used to be hundreds," I said. "Now all that's left are a few hold-outs like Ira who do it more as a matter of art than profit."

"I'll grant you that may all be true, sheriff. But our new regional administrator wants to be able to report to his superiors that the problem of moonshining is over in his district."

I'd heard arguments like that before. They were usually dreamed up by some jackass of a bureaucrat sitting in front of a map somewhere, playing with a bunch of colored pins.

"Moonshining has been over in East Texas as a commercial proposition since the early seventies," I said. "I never give it a thought. I don't get too excited about marijuana either, even though I've busted a couple of big growers in years past. What worries me is the crack cocaine and the crystal meth. They are eating our society up, even out here in these rural counties. Which makes it look to me like you federal boys could do the public a lot more good by going after things that are really harmful."

"We rarely interface with the DEA," he said quickly. A little too quickly, in fact. Then there was that word "interface." This young fellow was so trendy that I was beginning to stand in awe of him.

"Maybe you should a little more often," I said.

He shook his head. "They have their concerns, and we have ours."

I leaned back in my chair, and he leaned back in his chair, and we regarded one another for a few seconds in silence. I glanced over at Second Fiddle, who looked like he'd rather been somewhere else. Not me. I was having a grand old time. Finally Lead Sting smiled and said, "You're an enigma to a lot of people, Sheriff Handel."

"How's that?"

"I've heard that you do most of your arresting by phone."

"I do. It saves the county gas money."

"What do you do when they don't come in like you told them?"

I smiled and met his gaze. "That rarely happens. But as far as being a puzzle goes, I go full-bore after hard drugs and violent crime. Beyond that, I take the 'peace' part of 'peace officer' very seriously. I look at my job as keeping the peace and mediating between conflicting interests so people can live out their lives with a minimum of fuss and violence."

He shook his head and frowned a superior little frown. "That approach won't work any more. It was good in its day, but that day's past. Don’t you watch the evening news? This country is out of hand, and we have to be more pro-active."

There he went being all trendy again. "Pro what?" I asked.

He ignored my question and leaned forward and tapped my desk with his index finger as he made his points. "People simply have to learn to respect the law just because it's the law. And the public has to learn to respect us."

"I see," I said. "So the United States government has decided in all its majesty that what it needs to do is come down on one poor old colored man for making a little corn whiskey. Just to make folks respect the law. By God, if that don't make a man proud to be an American, I don't know what would."

"You can save your Neo-Confederate rhetoric for the hillbillies who are impressed with it at election time. Our boss has decided that you're going to help us bust this still, and you better be out there."

He got up from his chair and walked around my office, his eyes scanning the walls. There's nothing much to see--just a lot of old-fashioned, knotty pine paneling that holds a few pictures, a couple of mounted deer heads, a Remington Arms Company calendar, and a wall-mounted gun rack. He stopped at the gun rack. "Is this your shotgun?" he asked, eying my Browning Superposed.

"It is indeed."

He reached up and held it around the pistol grip. "Ahhh, to handle the handles that Handel handled," he intoned. "Know who said that?" His eyes were bright and gleeful and his schoolyard smirk was back on his face.

"Virgil Fox."

I thought his teeth were going to fall out. "You've heard of Virgil Fox?"

"Sure. At one time he was one of the world's top concert organists."

He nodded dumbly.

"I've heard him play a number of times, and he always told that same story. He was talking about playing Georg Frederick Handel's organ when he was in England." I looked at my watch. "Just about my suppertime, boys," I said, signaling the end of the conference. I rose and came around from behind my desk. "So where do we meet?"

"Huh?" His mind had wandered.

"Where do you want me to meet you?"

"Uhhh. . . How about at the little store at that crossroads just north of the McNeil farm day-after-tomorrow afternoon."

I could see that this boy didn't have any regard at all for my intelligence. So I just gave him a big dumb smile. ”Sure. What time?"

"Three P.M. We have good information that he'll be cooking then. He better be cooking. If he isn't we'll know somebody tipped him off."

"Talking about fine music," I said, "you might try Schubert's String Quintet. I can't recall the number, but he only wrote one quintet, so you won't have any trouble finding it. Somebody famous once remarked that 'The adagio will tear your heart out.' Know who that was?"

"No, I don't believe so," he said without much interest. Strange that he didn't like playing his own game.

"A man named Reinhard Heydrich. He was the top-dog Nazi who set up the Holocaust over there where they killed all those Jews. Which proves that the ability to enjoy high-class music is no guarantee of anything. That's something you really ought to consider before you go to threatening people."

"It wasn’t a--"

I shook my head and held up my hand to silence him. "No, son. It was a threat, but I make allowances for the feeling of omnipotence that federal ID of yours confers, and I don't take it personal. So don't worry. Nobody's going to tip Ira off."

I was right, of course. Nobody was going to tip the old man off because there wasn't any need to tip him off There wasn't going to be any bust, and this pair knew it.

#

The next morning I had a light breakfast, then pulled on a fresh pair of black Wrangler dress jeans and a starched khaki uniform shirt. Once I got my dark brown Tony Lama boots situated at one end of my carcass and my cream colored western mounted on the other end, I took a quick look in the hall mirror. Same as always, I saw a weathered, sun-darkened face that would never make women swoon. By the same token, it wouldn't make little kids run screeching for their mammas either, so I decided I could live with it one more day the same as I'd done the past sixty-three years. When I opened the front door I found myself peering out into a fine, sunny, spring morning. I was ready to take on the world.

#

But the world had to wait. First I had to take on a very perplexed Ira Blevins. He was waiting for me at the office when I arrived. I motioned for him to sit and closed the door and took my place behind my desk. "What brings you to town this early?" I asked.

"Well, Sheriff Bo, I was down there at that barn I rents from you yesterday afternoon, and some of my property has done went missing."

"What property would that be, Ira?"

We maintained the fiction that I didn't know about his still despite the two gallons of corn whiskey he gave me every Christmas. Which made my question a little hard for him to answer. "Uhhh. . ." he began.

I held up my hand. "Wait a minute," I said. I reached over and picked up the little round plastic snow-scene paper weight off my desk and gave it a good shake.

"Let's see what the auguries have to say about this situation." I cupped my hands over the thing and mumbled a bunch of mystic-sounding nonsense. Once the plastic snow inside had settled, I said, "Ira, the crystal ball tells me that you will get your property back in precisely three days. No more, no less. But you do need to stay the hell away from that barn until I tell you to go back out there."

"I see," he said mildly.

"And don't talk about this to anybody. Not a word."

He nodded and rose from his chair and then stopped at the door and turned back to me. Nothing unique about that. Everybody stops at my door and turns back to say something. It appears to be a sort of lodge ritual, and I'm the only non-member in town. And he was grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

"What?" I asked.

"Sheriff, you the most comical lawman I ever did see."

I couldn't help but laugh a little. "I know, Ira. I'm the George Carlin of Caddo County. But don't you go out to that damn barn no matter what you do."

#

The next caller was no laughing matter--Albert Packer, a gentleman who had been heading up various DEA task forces in East and Central Texas for years. Al was a big, beefy, red-faced piece of work who stayed half-mad at the world most of the time, and completely mad at me all the time. I was right in the middle my monthly budget report when he opened my door and swaggered in like he owned the place.

I barely looked up at him over the tops of my half-moon reading glasses. "Hi, Al," I said, and went back to my figures. In my view, inattention is the best form of contempt.

He took the chair in front of my desk. "I need some information," he said.

"Dial the area code and then 5-5-5-1-2-1-2."

"You smart-assed peckerwood," he growled at me.

"You thick-headed asshole," I growled right back at him.
We sat and evil-eyed one another for about ten seconds, then he laughed and shook his head. "Maybe we ought to make up and be friends again."

"We never were friends, and things suit me the way they are."

"Mr. High and Mighty High Sheriff," he said bitterly. "You know, you could have taken that heat for me back three years ago if you would have. You got a secure position here and it wouldn't have been more than an embarrassment to you. As it is, my career is ruined. I'll never go any further than where I'm at right now."

That was at the root of the problem he had with me. He's fouled up badly up on a bust and I refused to shoulder the responsibility. His logic was that I should have been willing to because my political position was so solid that I hadn't even had an opponent in the last two elections. Which was true. It was also true that he was neither my kin nor one of my own men, and I saw no reason to clean up his mess.

"Al, we've been down this road before," I said. "As you know, I've got two hard and fast rules. I won't hog another man's credit, and I won't take his blame. Besides, if you'd listened to me in the first place it never would have happened. Now what do you need? I'm busy."

He stared at me for a few seconds, his marble-like little eyes hard and full of hate in his round red face. Then he said, "Ryan McNally and Tommy Walsh. What do you know about them?"

"Druggies," I said. "Both of 'em."

"Of course. All you got to do is look at them to tell that."

"Then what more do you need to know?" I asked. "Are you thinking of turning them out as snitches?"

"Something like that. How reliable are they?"

I threw up my hands. "Well, hell, Al. . . They're a couple of dope fiends. How reliable do you think they're going to be?"

"There are dopers, and then there are dopers. Some are more reliable than others."

"You do have a point," I admitted. I decided to give him the truth since it wasn't what he was after anyway. "I think Tommy will stay bought. He's smarter, and he'd clean up if he got the chance. Ryan will go with the flow, which means whatever makes life easier on him. The only loyalty he's got is to his habits."

He nodded and gave me a little smile. "That's about what I thought."

"Then why did you ask me?"

"Maybe I wanted to avail myself of your famous wisdom," he said as he rose to his feet. Then, like everybody else, he turned back at the door. "I've always heard you were awful tough in a fight. You're kinda old now, but I think if we were the same age I could take you."

I couldn't believe he'd said what he said. "Al, life isn't a junior high playground, and it really doesn't matter who can whip who."

"It does to some of us," he said and went through the door.

#

Five minutes later Toby Martin was in the chair that Packer had recently vacated. Toby was my chief deputy, a mid-thirties café-au-lait African-American ex-Special Forces sergeant with a head full of brains and a ton of energy.

"Toby, I need your help bad," I said.

"That's what I get paid for."

I shook my head. "This is a little above and beyond, if you know what I mean, and I want you to hear it before you agree."

He nodded. "If you want it that way, but I trust you, Bo."

"I know you do," I said and leaned forward and cupped my hands together on my desk and said, "Not a word of what I'm about to tell you can leave this room, but tomorrow afternoon I need you to go. . ."

#

A few minutes later he rose to leave. Like everybody else, he stopped at the door. "The keys, Sheriff."

"Oh, yeah," I said and pulled the spare set of keys to my pickup out of my desk drawer and tossed them over to him. Then I fished around in my shirt pocket and pulled out a short piece of black plastic. "And you'll need this little gadget, too." He came back across the room and took the thing out of my hand. "You know what that's for, don't you?" I asked.

He grinned. "Sure. Screws the center out of a car tire's valve stem."

"Right. And that's the important part of what I want you to do. The rest doesn't matter all that much."

"Don't worry. If nothing else works, I'll stop them on some bogus traffic violation and then shoot their damn tires out."

I laughed. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that."

#

I spent the rest of the day doing sheriff-like things, and ended my afternoon quelling a domestic disturbance at an apartment house on the north edge of town just outside the city limit. That evening I wound up at the Caravan Restaurant having supper. I'd just gotten a cup of coffee and my menu from the waitress when Toby appeared and sat down.

"Have a big steak, Toby," I said. "My treat."

His face lighted up. "Why, thanks. I believe I will."

"You all set?" I asked.

He nodded. "I'll take care of it one way or another."

"Good. Be sure to have your cell phone with you and let me know as soon as you do."

"Sure," he said,

I gazed at his face for a few seconds. He seemed worried about something. "What's on your mind, Toby?"

"That Packer guy. I was glad I was at the office today when he came by. Every time I see you two together I'm reminded how much he hates you. And I'm always afraid that he's going to jump you."

"Tell me something I don't know."

"He's dangerous," he said.

"I'm aware of that too. But as things stand now he's more of a danger to himself than to anybody else."

"What's the problem he's got with you?"

I sighed and told him the story of the little dustup Packer and I had three years earlier. "It was right about the time you were getting out of the army. You weren't working for me then, so you never heard the details. Packer used to be a good officer, but since then he's been on been on a downhill course. And in a way, I feel sorry for him. It's funny how a person's life can take go in one direction for years and years, and then bang! Something happens to change everything, and you wind up being something you never set out to be."

"Like me," he said with a sad smile. "I was going to make a career out of the army and--"

"And then you got wounded pretty bad, which meant desk duty for the rest of your stay. Then on top of that your wife hated all the moving around, and she wanted to come home and be near her family. So now you're stuck as a deputy sheriff in a rural county without much future."

He nodded, "Yes, but a man's home town does have it's advantages."

"Of course it does," I said and turned and gazed out the window into the gathering darkness. Suddenly the full weight of my sixty-three years seemed to settle on my shoulders. "Toby, I know you want my job," I said.

He nodded. "I've never made any secret of it."

I turned back to face him. "No, you haven't."

"But only when you're ready to retire. I'd never bolt and run against you."

"I know that, and I appreciate it. I've got three more years to run on this term, and then I'm going to turn it over to you. This county is thirty-seven percent black, and I think I can get you the other fourteen percent you'll need to win."

He hadn't expected this, though I don't know why not. "Bo, I don't hardly know what to say."

"Then don't say anything. You're the best man for the job, and I'll be doing the county a favor by supporting you." I reached across the table and tapped the can of Skoal in his shirt pocket. "And I'm going to need a little of that when we get through with our meal."

"Sure, but I thought you'd quit tobacco."

"I did too, but I guess I'm fated to backslide every now and then."

The waitress came and took out orders and afterward we sat a while in silence. Then Toby said, "Sheriff, I know your own life hasn't been quite what you planned in the beginning. Do you have many regrets?"

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes for a moment before speaking. "I've missed my wife something terrible since she died five years ago. And I grieve that my only child is practicing medicine in Dallas and I don't get to see him and his family very often. Beyond that, I'm content with my lot. I don't advise anybody to dwell too much on the might-have-beens in this life. You'll just make yourself miserable if you do."

"You're right. . ."

I looked out the window once again. It was almost dark outside, and the streetlights were on. Regrets. We all have them. Even the Albert Packers of this world. And he was fixing to acquire a whole truckload of new ones.

#

When we finished eating, I said goodbye to Toby and drove five miles out onto the country to a crossroads where I'd arranged to meet Tommy Walsh. He was waiting for me, pacing nervously up and down in front of his bunged-up Datsun pickup. He came over to my window and leaned down where I could see his face. I shined my flashlight in his eyes and asked, "You on anything, Tommy?"

He shook his head. "I'm clean as a whistle, and it's hard."

"Good. Any change in plans?"

He shook his head. "It's all go. Ryan will be there, but I'm staying away like you told me."

"You sure he'll show up without you?"

"Yeah, he's scared shitless of that Packer guy."

I nodded. "Tommy, I talked to the feds in Houston and you're getting a clear pass on this deal."

"Thanks, Sheriff," he said, the relief heavy in his voice.

"But you've got to go into treatment."

He tried to protest. "I can't afford anything like that."

"I know you're broke, but they've got this sixty-day program over at Rusk State Hospital, and I can get you in it. Won't cost you a dime, and you're going. That's part of the agreement I made for you."

"Okay," he said dubiously. "I guess I got no choice."

"You don't. "And when you get out I'll give you a job at the lumber yard. Look at this as a last chance to pull up and make something of yourself."

#

I got climbed into bed as early as I could that night. But I was back up at 1:30 in the morning for a trip out into the country. When I got back home I made myself a quick breakfast, then headed on down to the office. The hours before noon were uneventful except for a quick visit by Lead String who stopped by to remind me to be at the store at 3:00. I didn't even look up from my paperwork. I just made a shooing motion with my hand and told him to get lost. As I said, inattention is the best form of contempt.

In the early afternoon I went down to a little joint on the edge of town and had a hamburger, then I went home and hooked my horse trailer to my Ford pickup. Out at my dad's old place I caught my best saddle horse, a dappled gray Quarter Horse gelding. After I'd saddled him, I tied an old pair of saddle bags onto the saddle, then put my binoculars into one bag and my unread Lufkin newspaper in the other. A fifteen-inch, lead-loaded slapjack went into my rifle scabbard.

In no hurry, I took my time and drove slowly. Twenty miles out from town I turned off the paved highway onto an oil-topped county road. Six miles further on I turned off onto a graded gravel lane that wound its way through two looming walls of dense pine and hardwood forest. After a couple of miles, I came to an old logging road that was really no more that a dim trail. But I knew it was just north of the old McNeil farm, and that it led to a low bluff that overlooked the barn.

I'd just pulled over and parked by the side of the road when my cell phone rang. It was Toby telling me that his end of things had been taken care of. I backed the gray out of the trailer, and once I'd mounted up I headed out into the woods down the logging road. I let the gelding walk a couple of minutes to limber up his muscles, then I spurred him into a steady, ground-eating lope. A mile and a half later I stopped at the edge of the woods about two hundred yards above the old barn. I dismounted and pitched the reins over a limb and dug my binoculars out of my saddle bag. It only took me a few minutes to locate the fools hunkered down in the brush at the edges of the woods on either side of the barn. I shook my head and grinned. "Boys, you ain't got what it takes to hide from an old deer hunter like me," I whispered.

I stood leaning on a big gum tree for about ten minutes while I enjoyed the fine sunny day. At exactly 3:20 I stuffed my binoculars back into the saddle bags and pulled out my newspaper. I folded it, slipped it into the back pocket of my Wranglers, then mounted up once again. I took a deep breath, squared my hat on my head, and spurred my horse into a dead gallop.

I couldn't help but laugh at myself a little as I thundered down toward the barn. They were expecting me to cruise up in a squad car, and they were getting a cavalry charge instead. It was sound strategy, though--one I hoped would confuse them long enough to give me time to do what I needed to do inside.

The gelding had once been a roping horse, trained to stop in a most stylish manner. When I hauled back on the reins, he lowered his hindquarters and locked his forelegs and slid to a halt right in front of the barn, churning up a cloud of dust worthy of an old John Ford western. I dismounted in a flash, grabbing my slapjack as I went. A second or two later I jerked to barn door open and stepped inside to find just what I'd expected to find: a very confused Ryan McNally. I let him see me, then caught his right wrist in my left hand, my slapjack held in my right where he could get a gander at it.

"Ryan, you're speedin' and I know it," I said.

"A little, maybe," he admitted. His upper lip was wet with dewy sweat and his were eyes dilated and glazed. That stuff will do that to you. Worse things, too.

"There's no 'maybe' to it, and I sure hope it hasn't clouded your judgment because I'm going to have to purely whip the dogshit out of you if give me any trouble."

I could see that he studied the proposition over for a couple of seconds, then the sight of that slapjack and some old memories overruled his worst impulses. "I won't give you no static, Sheriff," he said.

In no time I had him pushed to the back of the barn and cuffed by his right wrist to a metal stall rail. I stood for a moment looking down at him where he sat on a bale of hay. He was a lost young man, and there was no help for him. The die was cast. "You should have followed coach Darryl Royal's advice," I said.

"What?. . ."

"Always dance with the one that brung you."

"I don't get it," he muttered, his eyes unable to meet mine. He looked around stupidly for a few seconds, then said, "Where's the meth stuff?"

I shook my head sadly. "Ryan, you've barely got sense enough to do a good job of being ignorant."

"What did I do?"

"Just sit still and be quiet."

He started scrabbling around in his shirt pockets one-handed, and came out with crumpled pack of Winstons and a lighter. Before he could get one fired up, I reached over and jerked the lighter out of his hand. "You don't smoke in a hay barn, you damn fool," I said.

"That old colored man that makes whiskey out here uses a propane burner."

"Yeah, but he's not an idiot and you are. Now hush and be still like I told you."

I sat down on a hay bale and pulled out my newspaper. We didn't have long to wait. I was just finishing the top story when Al Packer and one of his boys came crashing in through the front door, nearly ripping it off its hinges. He was followed by a thick-set young toad he'd probably purloined off some small town PD for one of his "task forces." Both were in flack vests, and both carried M-16s at port arms.
Two more came in the back door with even more damage.

"On your feet, Handel!" Packer growled. "You're under arrest!"

I laughed at him. "For what?"

"Manufacture and distribution of methamphetamine." He motioned to his flunkies.

"Get him to his feet and cuff him."

Before they could touch me, I rose and said, "Look around, Al. Where's your evidence?"

My calmness rattled him. He licked his lips and glanced around the barn. He didn't see the meth outfit he expected to see, but he did spot Ryan McNally chained to the stall rail, and his eyes narrowed dangerously. He turned back to me.

"I can see the headlines now," I said. "Swat team apprehends man for reading newspaper in barn."

"Don't you mock me," he said, his voice low and deadly and full of rage. He turned his M-16 and pointed it at my belly. "You're one man who better not mock me. I won't stand for it."

For just a second I was afraid I'd pushed him a little too far. His already-ruddy face turned so red that I thought his head was going to explode. "I said cuff that son-of-a-bitch!" he roared.

The two young pups jerked me around by the arms, and the larger of the two was trying to get his handcuffs unlocked from his belt when an old friend stepped into the barn through the shattered front doorway. He didn't have his sidearm in his hand, but he was wearing a dark blue windbreaker that spelled out F.B.I. in bright yellow letters on the chest. "You men stand down and lower those weapons," he said in a deep, calm voice that sounded like its owner was used to giving orders.

"Who're you?" one of the DEA boys blurted out in surprise.

"Mack Reynolds, FBI out of Houston," the man said. He stepped to one side and five young Bureau men poured quickly though the door and took their places on either side of him. They too were decked out in flack vests and carried automatic rifles.

"This is a DEA operation," Packer said.

Reynolds shook his head. "Not any more it isn't, Al. I've got warrants here for your arrest on state and federal charges both."

"What?"

"You heard me. We know you were trying to set Bo up out here this afternoon, and either kill him or send him to the pen. Tommy Walsh ratted you out."

This made him think for a moment, his breathing heavy in the near-silence of the barn. "So who's going to believe some dope-addled punk like him?" he finally said.

"The boy was wired a couple of the times he talked to you, Al. And we know about that coke dealer in Houston who's been paying you off. We took him down at midnight last night, and he was happy to trade you for a little consideration at sentencing time."

Packer's face went pale. The world seemed to stand still while he and Reynolds stared at one another for the longest time. Finally Packer asked in a bitter voice, "And aren't you proud of yourself?"

"No, I'm not. It makes me sick to have to bring in a fellow officer."

"Yeah, I bet it does."

"It's over, Al. Give it up and drop your weapon."

It was dicey for a few seconds, and I was trying to find myself a rathole to scoot into if shooting started. Then the DEA boys lowered their weapons and stepped back away from Packer. He slumped his shoulders and bowed his head and looked down at the ground for a moment, a defeated man. Then he raised his head once again and gave Reynolds a grim smile. "Can't do it, Mack. I'm not going to prison."

"You might get probation, Al," I said. "You're a cop with a pretty good record."

He glanced my way. "If you believe that you must believe in Santa Claus, too," he said.

"A few years in the joint aren't worth dying over," I said. "You're what? Forty-two? Hell, I'll go to bat for you and get the state charges dropped. Don't do this. You got lots of living ahead."

"My life ended three years ago," he said. "I've just been going through the motions ever since." He turned back to Reynolds. "No way, Mack."

"Don't do it, Al!" Reynolds yelled. "I'm begging you."

Packer shook his head and said nothing more. As the muzzle of his M-16 started to rise, I leaped and rolled. When the first shots rang out, I was behind a stack of hay bales, and the din of automatic rifle fire was terrible in the narrow confines of the barn.

#

Forty-five minutes later the paramedics were just rolling the stretcher out when Lead String and Second Fiddle come roaring up in their shiny white ATF Ford. Lead String lunged out of the car and headed our way with long, manly strides. As he approached the expression on his face gradually changed from pissed-off to pure bafflement. "What's going on here?" he barked at me.

"A lot of trespassing, since this is my farm. How did you manage to get those flat tires fixed so quick?"

Instead of answering, he turned to Reynolds and snapped, "And who the hell are you?"

Mack smiled and spoke softly. "Mack Reynolds, FBI. Who are you?"

"Uhhh…. We're ATF." He was quickly losing the wind from his sails.

"Then you need to show some ID. This is a crime scene."

He hauled out his wallet and flashed his badge. "Who's that on the stretcher."

"Al Packer," I said. "He's dead."

He looked around in complete confusion, then his eyes came back to me. "Sheriff, what's this all about?" he asked in a voice that had grown suddenly polite.

"Back yonder in the barn cuffed to a stall rail you'll find a druggie named Ryan McNally. A few months back Packer busted him and his buddy Tommy Walsh with a small meth outfit. Instead of filing the case, he pressured them into helping him set me up for a bogus bust to even up an old grudge he had against me. Ryan went for Packer's deal, but Tommy came to me as soon as he heard about it. That's when I called my friend Mack here, only to learn that the Bureau had been investigating Packer for several months."

"But I don’t understand where--"

"Where the meth lab went that Packer had those two boys plant out here in my barn yesterday, right?"

"Yes," he replied. "Only we'd been told that it had been here all along. Packer said you were behind the operation, too. And that you were deep in the meth business."

"Me and Mack and one of his agents came out here and got it about 3:00 this morning." I shrugged. "And that's whole the story. Except that Packer was so determined not to go to prison that he put these young Bureau men in a position where they had to kill him."

Packer had alerted the press, of course, hoping to make a big splash and embarrass me as much as he could. The Lufkin network affiliate mobile unit was present and accounted for, along with a dozen or so print journalists from various newspapers. Reynolds went over to where two of his agents and a pair of my deputies had the reporters corralled and told them a full press release was being prepared at the Bureau's Houston office and would be available within an hour.

While we'd been talking, Toby Martin arrived with my rig and loaded my gelding onto the trailer. As I walked toward the truck, a slim, fortyish ash-blonde scampered up beside me. Mary Beth Higgins, star reporter and feature writer for the Lufkin paper. And a good friend of mine.

"Come by the house about 7:00 tonight," I said softly. "And I'll give you the whole story. Stuff the rest of these folks aren't gonna get."

"Your house, Bo?" she asked with a grin. "The two of us all alone? You might decide to chase me around the dining table."

"You been there before and I never chased you."

"Always hoping, Bo. Always hoping."

I reached out and put my arm around her and drew her close. "Don't you know you're the daughter I never had, girl?"

"Sure I do. Seven o'clock?"

"There 'bouts. I'll have the coffee pot on."

She shook her head. "I'd rather have a shot or two of that good Canadian whiskey you keep in the kitchen cabinet. It's been that kind of day."

#

The next morning about 10:00, Second Fiddle came calling at the office. He wanted to apologize.

"Think nothing of it," I said. "As far as I'm concerned, you were wrongly influenced. But you need to let this be a lesson to you that you better do your own thinking from here on out."

"It was pretty hard to come in here this morning, too."

"I don’t doubt it, and I respect you for it. I can't help but notice that your buddy didn't make it, though."

"I'm sorry about that, Sheriff."
I waved my hand in dismissal. "By the way, did you happen to see that pretty blonde reporter I was talking to yesterday?"

"Sure."

"I told her to get you two boys names and print 'em in the paper because you were quote, 'of invaluable assistance in the apprehension of a rogue DEA agent,' unquote"

He looked relieved. "We don't deserve that, Sheriff.'

"Of course you don't, but if folks started getting what they deserved, they'd hang us all."

"Thanks, and if you ever need any help--"

"I'll come calling. Count on it."

A couple of minutes later he rose and stuck out his hand. We shook, but when he reached the door he turned back like everybody else. "Can I ask you a personal question, Sheriff?"

"Why not?" I replied with a shrug.

"How is it that you know so much about classical music?"

I laughed a little. "It does seem a bit out of character, doesn't it?"

He nodded.

"Well, I was raised Presbyterian, and they put a lot of stress on good music. Then I went off to Rice University on an academic scholarship--"

"Rice?" His voice sounded amazed.

"Yep. Anyhow, right before my last semester my daddy died and I had to come home to support my mother who had MS. I took over the family timber business, and I'm still in it. I own two sawmills and a lumber yard, which means that I'm well enough off that for the past twenty years I've rebated my salary back to the county treasury. That's a powerful campaign advantage in a poor county like this."

"So you were majoring in what down at Rice? Music?"

I nodded. "Piano."

"Do you still play?"

"Only when I'm drunk enough not to care how bad I sound. I minored in theater, too. I took one drama course as an elective and got myself hooked. I would loved to have been an actor."

He smiled then. He thought that explained things. But it didn't. No doubt he was the child of corporate vagabonds who'd dragged him all over the country since the day he was whelped, and he just didn't know how right Toby had been when he said a man's hometown has its advantages. Or how comforting he old rituals and patterns of small town life really are. I didn't say anything, though. It was just good manners to let him leave with an explanation that made him comfortable.

When he was gone, I hollered out to my secretary, "Maylene! Close the door to my office and don't bother me for the next hour unless somebody steals the courthouse."

"We're in the courthouse, Bo," she hollered back. "So even you ought to have sense enough to notice if it got swiped."

"We are? It must have slipped my mind."

I flipped through my rack of CDs, took one out, and slipped it into the little portable stereo that sat on the shelf behind my chair. I'd just got myself tilted back with my feet on my desk when the first notes of the Schubert String Quintet came through the headphones. You should listen to it sometime. The adagio will tear your heart out.

VESSEL UNTO HONOR

A Short Story by Milton T. Burton

I'd been sheriff of Smith County, in East Texas for seven years when the Reverend Booker T. Olmstead phoned me and asked me to come out to the Stanton community. He didn't call from home, of course, and that's because he didn't have a telephone. Back in 1927 the sheriff's department itself barely had one, and I didn't have but three deputies. The department didn't own an automobile, either. I used my own personal Buick touring car and fought the county commissioners every quarter for enough mileage money to try to cover my expenses. Sometimes I didn't get it. No, Reverend Olmstead called from Stripling's Grocery Store in Bullard, one of the few retail outlets outside the county seat to have a telephone. And that told me something. Bullard was three miles from where he lived. No small distance in a day and age of muddy, rutted roads when most country people traveled by horse or mule or buggy. Especially most colored folks. You didn't casually "run to the store" for a gallon of milk or a package of smokes back then.

"We need the law," I heard him say in his deep pulpit
voice.

"You want me to send a deputy out there?" I asked.

"No suh. We need the high sheriff himself."

Olmstead was a decent man and a friend, besides being something of a powerhouse in the large colored community where he lived and preached. For two elections I'd carried that box by better than ninety percent. The first time I ran seven years earlier my opponent had been a long-serving and popular but corrupt man, and I'd only won by sixty-three votes. There had been just over two hundred votes counted in the Stanton precinct, and I knew that Reverend Olmstead and his deacons had gotten their people out for me. My first couple of years in office my opponent and his cronies called me the "nigger sheriff" because I'd squeaked in with colored votes, but by the time my second election rolled around I'd built up enough support that the Stanton box didn't matter. Still, I was mindful that the time might come when it would once again be the deciding factor. Besides, not even my worst enemy could accuse me of being disloyal to those who'd helped me. So when the Reverend said he needed me and nobody else, I went.

There was nothing unique about that. Back in those days a Texas sheriff often found himself in the curious position of having to arrest some of his strongest supporters. The wise among us--and by that I meant the ones who managed to hang onto the office beyond one term--soon learned tact and diplomacy. Back then you also came to understand that when someone of substance went to the trouble to travel three miles to a phone and then said he needed the "high sheriff," he meant business. I've gotten out of bed many a time at 3:00 A.M. when so summoned, and it was never for a false alarm.

It was a warm day in late spring. The side curtains were off my Buick, and I enjoyed the drive out into the country, happy to be out of the office for a few hours. It may be that I'm a fatalist like my wife claims, but early on in this job I quit worrying about what I'd find when I got to the end of the road on calls like this one. The fact is that whatever is going to happen is going to happen, and that's all there is too it. It's also a fact that you can't work each call that comes in with three deputies and a carload of Tommy guns. So you can either fret yourself to death every time the phone rings, or you can take life as it comes and enjoy what you can of it. But little did I know on that fine, unsuspecting spring afternoon that for the first time in my seven years as sheriff that I was going to cross the line.

If you're not in law enforcement you may not know about the line. Just about every officer comes up to the line at some time in his career, especially here in Texas. And I'm not talking about getting a little rough with a safecracker or an armed robber or a killer---usually by putting a well bucket on his head and whipping it with a piece of chain---to convince him that a confession is in the best interests of everybody involved, himself included. Nor do I even mean the "East Texas Merry-Go-Round," a procedure of doubtful legality wherein we move a sleepless prisoner (usually a murderer) from county jail to county jail, one step ahead of a his lawyer, while we interrogate him in relays. No, the line is different. When I first got elected, an old retired sheriff of my acquaintance told me about the line.

"You'll get there someday if you're any count at all," he said. "And I can't tell you whether you should cross it or not. Every man has to make that decision for himself, and I don't think any less of them that pull back and go on about their business. But I can tell you this: if you do cross that line, nothing will ever look quite the same to you afterwards."

#

I took the Bullard Road out south a mile or so past the small community of Flint, and then turned east onto a rutted muddy trail. After about two miles I passed the Stanton Colored School, which was little more than a collection of tumbledown shacks. A half mile beyond the school I drew up in front of Zion's Rest CME Church, Reverend Olmstead's church. One ramshackle buggy stood just inside the gateway to the churchyard, it's horse tethered to a chinaberry tree. Beside it I saw two worn Model T Fords and a rundown Reo stake-bed truck. I'd no more than turned off my ignition when Olmstead emerged from the front door of the small sanctuary, his face grim and drawn. He came down the steps to meet me, and we shook hands.

"What's going on, Reverend?" I asked.

He motioned with his head. "They're in the church house," he said. "My deacons got him."

"Got who?" I asked.

"Him that done it. You'll see."

Inside the window shades had been pulled all the way down and it took my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the dim light. It didn't take me long to figure out what had happened without being told. The terrified, weeping girl who couldn't been older than fifteen. The couple holding her, obviously her parents, looking like they'd just heard their own death sentences pronounced. The three solemn deacons ringed around the trussed-up man sitting on the floor at the base of the rude pine pulpit. And the man himself with his bright, gleeful eyes and the smirk that had hung mockingly in the air like the Cheshire Cat's grin through two long, dreary trials three years earlier.

I turned to Olmstead and said softly, "Why don't you have them take her on home?"

As she the poor girl passed me, I gave her the most sympathetic smile I could summon and what I hope was a reassuring pat on the arm, then I watched as her parents led her out the door. When they were gone, I turned and nodded at the men holding Wells. "Did you manage to stop him before the fact, or did he?. . ." I let my voice taper off.

"He done what he meant to do," one of them said.

"How did he get out here?" I asked.

"Brand new Ford roadster," Olmstead said. "We got it out behind the building. You need to see it?"

I shook my head. "I take it he was caught in the act?" I asked.

All three men nodded. "It was down by the spring house," the tallest of the men said. "That's when me and Dewitt here come along. We the ones that nabbed him. I reckon he was layin' in wait. Don't guess he thought no grownups would be at the spring house that time of day."

I shook my head. "I doubt that he cared."

"How's that?" Olmstead asked.

"Don't you know who this sorry bastard is?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"Titus Wells. That name rings a bell, doesn't it?"

He closed his eyes in resignation and nodded.

I guess a lot of officers have had to contend with characters like Titus Wells--a psychopath with wealthy, doting parents who believed anything he said. He was in his late twenties now, and so far as I knew he'd never worked a day in his life. My predecessor and the officers on the city police department had all had their troubles with him in the past. It began with shoplifting when he was just a kid, things he invariably claimed he'd "forgotten" to pay for. As he grew older, his career progressed up through minor burglaries and vandalism to assault and battery. His parents always believed his excuses, no matter how outlandish they were, and they bought him out of every jam he got himself into. To them, his accusers and the law were always wrong and Titus was always right, poor misunderstood boy that he was. They could afford the best lawyers, of course, and I honestly believe that in at least one instance money changed hands under the table.

Then he raped a fourteen-year-old girl named Emily Morgan. As you might expect, he was cunning in his choice of victim. He knew better than to fool with girls of his own class or even the middle class. Emily wasn't exactly from the wrong side of the tracks, but her folks were awful poor. Her dad was partly disabled from an accident at the cement factory where he'd once been a foreman, and he did what day labor he was able to do, which wasn't much. Her mother took in sewing and laundry. It's an old story, and I know you're heard it before--rich boy takes advantage of poor girl. Only Titus didn't seduce Emily. He raped and brutalized and ruined her. Ever see the eyes of a rabbit caught in a trap? That was Emily Morgan, and that's the way she was until the day she died--shy and fearful and unable to meet your gaze. She'd been a pretty girl, but she never married and had kids. She never really had a life after that. Titus Wells took all those things from her.

To defend Titus his parents hired Lon Overton out of Dallas, a man reputed to be both the best and the most corrupt criminal defense attorney in the state. The words "oily" and "shyster" seemed to have been invented especially for him, along with "mean" and "vicious." He lacerated the poor child on the stand, of course. And he cast severe doubt on her memory, her truthfulness, and even her morals. That, combined with sworn testimony from one of Titus's like-minded buddies that Titus was with him when the attack occurred, was enough for a hung jury in the first trial and an acquittal in the second.

When the verdict came in, Leo Bishop, the Texas Ranger who had worked the case with me, leaned over the aisle of the courtroom and said to Mr. & Mrs. Wells, "You better get that boy out of this state and keep him out if you know what's good for him."

Bishop was a tall, thin West Texan with a fearsome reputation and cold blue eyes that told anybody who looked into them that he wasn't given to idle threats. That had been three years ago, and nobody had seen Titus since that day. Until now.

#

"You know the story as well as I do, I guess," I said to Olmstead.

He nodded.

"Then you must realize that if a slick lawyer like Lon Overton can get him on rapin' a white girl, we don't stand the chance in hell of convicting him on this. See the problem? Don't misunderstand me. I'd love to see him in the electric chair, and so would the DA. But I won't mislead you. It would surprise me if the grand jury even indicts him on the say-so of a little colored girl. And there's something else to consider. This ain't a rich county, and the DA can't afford the time and money it takes to try a case he knows he can't win."

"So what you're saying is--" Olmstead began in a voice that was flat and dull and full or resignation.

"That ain't nothing going to be done about this no matter how hard we push. That's what I'm sayin'."

It was a bitter pill for them, and it was a bitter pill for me as well. I'd never felt more useless in my life. I mean, if little girls can be raped with impunity in my county, what was the point of me even pinning on a badge in the first place? That was the only thought in my mind as I stood there gazing at those sad, stoic, black faces. That, and feeling their disappointment in me as a man, and already dreading what I'd see in the mirror when I went to shave the next morning.

Then a light went off in my head, and I remembered that I'd been the one who answered the phone when Olmstead called. I realized, too, that not a soul on this earth besides the ones gathered right there in the church knew where I was at that particular moment. My secretary had been out on an errand, and I hadn't bothered to wait till she got back so I could tell her where I was going. I'd just put on my hat on and walked out the door.

I let my eyes rove around the room, past the Reverend and his friends, and then I let them fall on Titus Wells. I stared at him for a long time while he smirked back at me. Titus was on top of the world, he was. He'd beat the High Sheriff before, and he knew in his heart he could beat him again. But he was wrong. Without taking my eyes away from his, I smiled a slow, cold smile and said, "Reverend Olmstead, to tell you the truth, I don't see nothing here that you good folks can't take care of all by yourselves."

"Suh?"

"I said this is your problem. You handle it. You don't need me after all."

Olmstead's voice was full of confusion. "Beg your pardon?"

But Titus Wells wasn't confused. He was sharp as a tack and he caught on the second I said it. His eyes went wide, and the same face that had smirked at me all the way through two trials was suddenly full of fear. And may the Good Lord forgive me or not as he chooses, but I drank in that fear the way a field hand drinks a glass of cold water on a hot August day.

"Sheriff, you can't let them--" he began.

I cut him off. "Not another word, Titus. Not another word." I motioned to the other men. "Gag that worthless son-of-a-bitch with something. Don't nobody want to hear anything he has to say."

One of the deacons pulled Wells's head back by the hair and stuffed a dirty rag into his mouth. Then he began tying it in place with a short scrap of rope. I nodded my head toward the door and Olmstead followed me outside. We ambled a little ways away from the church and wound up beside my Buick, my foot on its running board. Olmstead waited patiently while I managed to get my pipe filled and lighted. Finally he said, "I'm not certain I understood what you meant in there."

"What I meant is that I was in my office all by myself when your call came through, so nobody knows I'm out here. In fact, I'm not really here, am I? So I don't see no reason you men can't handle this business on your own."

Comprehension was creeping into his face. "I don't want to misinterpret you, suh. Could you be just a little more clear?"

I took my pipe from my mouth and looked him squarely in the eyes. "Reverend Olmstead, are you familiar with what it says in the Book of Deuteronomy about of crimes of this nature."

"I believe I am."

"And it prescribes what?"

"We both know the answer to that question, don't we?"

"Indeed we do," I replied.

"So if God commands it, then who are we to question His--"

"Exactly," I said. "Or who is a slick lawyer and twelve damn fools?"

He drew himself up to his full height. "Is it not His right to make one vessel unto honor and the other unto dishonor?" he asked.

I nodded and climbed behind the wheel. "Be careful and see to it that nobody talks. And tend to that car he came out here in, too. Like I told you, I'm not here, and that means all of it will fall on you people."

He nodded. "Colored folks know about keeping silent. Haven't we had enough practice at it?"

"Goodbye, Reverend," I said and drove away.

#

What I'd done that afternoon hung like a dark cloud at the back of my mind for a couple of months. Not so much for myself as Olmstead and his people. It helped that no one knew that Titus Wells was back in the county. Of him it may be said that he never harmed another young girl, and that is all that needs to be said.

Reverend Olmstead and I met many times in the years between that fine spring afternoon and the day he went home to his reward, and while we always locked eyes for a moment and gave each other a faint nod of acknowledgment, we never spoke of what had happened. And I'm glad of that. There was nothing more that needed to be said there, either.

You might ask if my old retired sheriff friend was right and if things do indeed look different on the far side of the line. Yes, I believe they do. There's more clarity over there. And I hope there's a little more humility, too. Once you've crossed over that line, you know that you can only hide so long behind laws and rules and procedures. And you learn that the important decisions are always made by flesh-and-blood humans like yourself, frail vessels though we are.

As for myself, I served two more terms, then retired undefeated and went to work for the Texas Cattle Raisers Association as a stock detective, chasing cow thieves. These days I don't think about that line much any more. I'm eighty-nine now, and the only crossing I study is the River Jordon. It looms near. And when I stand before the Great Judge I will have that verse back there in Deuteronomy to point to in my defense. After all, He's the one who wrote it.