Armadillos & Old Lace (6 page)

I went over to the office, picked up the blower, and heard Pat Knox’s secretary, Paula, tell me to hold on for the judge. I hadn’t thought about the judge for about nine hours and I was feeling pretty good about it.

“Have you gone over the material I gave you?” Pat asked.

“I’ve started,” I lied. “Been kind of busy here lately unpacking my Frisbee. Doing squat thrusts in the parking lot.”

“Get crackin’,” she said. “There’s gonna be a full moon out tonight. Lots of strange critters’ll be stir-rin’.”

I walked out of the office, past two new counselors I didn’t recognize who were taking down the big WELCOME RANCHERS sign on the bulletin board. Walking along the dusty road to the green trailer I heard a New York angel whisper in my ear. “Don’t get involved,” it said.

I opened the door to the trailer and saw that the cat was in precisely the same position she was lying in when I left. As I walked across the floor to the little desk she opened her eyes.

“Pat Knox is as crazy as a betsy-bug,” I said.

The cat looked at me, yawned, then closed her eyes.

“I know what you mean,” I said.

It was almost Gary Cooper time and I was sitting out behind the trailer in the hot sun alternately watching the river flow and forking through the folder Pat Knox had given me. It wasn’t clear that I was getting anywhere but at least I was working on my tan. All I was wearing were my Jesus boots, the same bathing suit I’d owned for twenty-five years, and an increasingly surly expression.

“I don’t understand the purpose of the exercise,” I said to the cat, who sat on the large wooden spool that served as a table.

The cat said nothing. She didn’t understand the exercise either. She didn’t even understand why we’d come to Texas.

“If I keep reading these morbid, stultifyingly dull coroner’s reports,” I said, “I’m going to jump in the river and drown.”

The cat stared at me, then gazed out at the river. Her placid, agreeable expression seemed to indicate that she thought it might not be such a bad idea.

“We don’t really consider it a river,” I said. “Around here folks call it a crick. Big Foot Wallace Crick, to be precise. Named after Big Foot Wallace, a famous frontier scout who lived with the Indians.” The cat took on a very bored countenance. The only remote interest she had in Native Americans was that they occasionally wore feathers.

Reluctantly, I returned to Pat Knox’s papers. They didn’t exactly make for riveting summer reading. As she’d already told me, three of the four deaths had occurred outside her bailiwick, and there was no firsthand information here relating to them. What there was were sketchy, hearsay little short stories that you could’ve read to a bunk of kids if you wanted to bore them to sleep. Worse, from my point of view, there was not even the whiff of a nuance of foul play in any of the three. The closest to it was the first case, the lady who’d drowned in her bathtub in Bandera. A neighbor of the deceased told Pat’s mother, Dot, that she could’ve sworn the woman never took a bath.

The death by fire in Pipe Creek was nothing but smoke and mirrors, and every time I looked into one of the mirrors I saw Pat Knox staring back at me like the Mad Lady of Chaillot.

“She
is
crazy as a betsy-bug,” I said to the cat. The cat lay like a waxen figure on the tabletop.

“One
of us is crazy as a betsy-bug,” I said.

The cat did not respond.

The description of the third death, near Mountain Home, in which a gun was found near the body, at least demonstrated a colorful command of the vernacular on the part of that town’s octogenarian justice of the peace, John Hill. “The bullet,” Hill reportedly had said, “didn’t have no reverse on it. It went in the back of her head like it had eyes, but when it went out, I’ll be damned if it didn’t have a nose.”

The fourth death, the one that had taken place in Judge Knox’s precinct, was the most recent, having occurred just two weeks earlier. The good judge had not only composed a mordant document that was as interminable as a Homeric lyrical poem; it might as well have been Greek. Her notes looked like they’d been written by a mariner crab.

The cat got up, stood on the paper, and gazed down with a quite perplexed expression.

“Jesus,” I said. “Somebody gave me the wrong Torah portion.”

The cat said nothing. She was of an extremely secular bent and could not be drawn easily into conversations of a religious nature. This was, quite possibly, to her credit. I’ve known a lot of cats in my life who’ve gotten all worked up on the subject. Of course, when you have nine lives, it doesn’t matter if you’re dead wrong eight times.

The lady who’d died recently, the fourth in the supposed string that stretched between Pat Knox’s ears like the lonely string of colored lights they always hung across the road in Medina at Christmastime, was seventy-five years old and had required a special oxygen supply. Maybe the bottle had become disconnected accidentally, or maybe someone had deliberately ...

“Goddamnit,” I said. “Move your foot!”

The cat glared at me, then, rather grudgingly, moved off the paper. Cats have an uncanny ability to find precisely that particular patch of paper which you’re trying to read. They find it and they proceed to stand, sit, or lie down on only that portion which is germane. Indeed, if editors, lawyers, and amateur private detectives were more patient, they could avoid reading reams of irrelevant material. They could just light up cigars, sit back, and let cats settle on the document in question.

In this case, it wouldn’t have worked. There was nothing in the judge’s papers that suggested any pattern, any foul play, or, I might add, any particular grasp on reality. The part the cat had obscured merely noted that the victim, Prudence South, had, as a hobby, made little hats for cats. The fact that the cat had chosen this information to obfuscate might be cosmic, or might’ve had a certain significance to the cat, but it meant nothing to me. Except that I was damn sure going to let Pat Knox attack her own windmills.

I stacked the papers neatly and placed an eighty-million-year-old fossil on top of them as a paperweight.

“Wish I was that well preserved,” I said.

The cat did not reply. Tact was not her long suit, but she knew better than to poke fun at the middle-aged.

I leaned back and lit a cigar and for a while the two of us sat peacefully behind the green trailer in the sunshine of that little valley and watched the river flow. It flowed under a little red wooden bridge, past sycamore and cypress trees, past beautiful banks of natural rock, over the dam that Earl Buckelew had built over fifty years ago, and on down to Big Foot Falls, also of course, named after Big Foot Wallace.

As I sat there, a great sense of peace and calm invaded my somewhat weatherbeaten spirit. The travails of New York City, the urgent scrawlings of Judge Knox, my own private loneliness of heart, began to float away on the currents of the little sunlit stream. It seemed almost to be murmuring to me, and I thought of the old camp song my mother had always liked: “Peace I ask of thee, O river, / Peace, peace, peace.”

The next thing I knew the bell was ringing and the quiet of siesta was over. What appeared to be at least three bunkhouses of ranchers began boisterously descending upon the green trailer and the little stream beyond for their shallow-water swimming tests. The cat, a black and white cartoon character, shot off the table and into the bowels of the trailer like a missile seeking peace. But peace, as so many children of the world have learned, is harder to find than tits on a mule.

The first few days of camp went by like a scorpion skittering across a bunkhouse floor. The troubled outside world disappeared and was replaced, for all practical purposes, by cookouts, water fights, horseback riding, softball games, and isolated spates of homesickness that soon gave way to unbridled fun. The gray, desperate adult world all but vanished in the world of sunshine and childhood at Echo Hill.

As for me, the specter of murder and mayhem had been pushed to a dark corner table of my mind and the cruelty and suffering that grown-ups routinely inflicted upon other grown-ups was simply not on the menu. The most serious altercation I’d allowed myself to become involved in was one night when I entered the Bronco Busters bunkhouse and broke up a pillow fight. My universe was demarcated by a circle of hills; the only things that mattered were the ones that occurred within that little green valley.

“It’s so peaceful,” I said to Pam as I stood by the window of the Crafts Corral. “Makes you want to just resign from the human race. Maybe I’ll retire.”

“What is it you’d retire from?” she said.

“That’s a good question. I see you’re ignorant of my talents.”

“Totally,” said Pam, but she smiled a quick, mischievous smile to mollify what she imagined to be my wounded ego. She didn’t realize that I’d left it on a curb in New York many years ago.

“Had a country band once. In the early seventies. Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys. We toured the country and irritated a lot of Americans. Now I sing mostly at campfires, whorehouses, the occasional bar mitzvah.”

“The only thing I remember about the seventies,” said Pam, “was getting my first tricycle for Christmas.” She turned her back to me for a moment and bent down to select some paint from a cabinet. I almost swallowed my cigar.

“It stands to reason you never heard of me,” I said. “You were jumping rope in the schoolyard when I was ordering room service. Also, Oklahoma isn’t the bar mitzvah capital of the world.”

“Not like Texas?”

“There’s a lot of Jews in Texas, actually. I’m just the oldest living one who doesn’t own any real estate.

But I’m glad you never heard of me. I’ve had my share of groupies.”

“I don’t think you’ll have to worry,” she said.

I had her right where I wanted her, I thought, as I wandered away in the direction of the Nature Shack. She probably didn’t realize that, after a few more weeks of isolation from the outside, Echo Hill took on almost the sexual ambience of a bar at closing time. All I had to do was play my cards right. I didn’t know of anyone who’d really done that yet, but there was always a first time. In life, they don’t always remember to cut the deck.

That night I stood in the shadows of the campfire and watched the children watching the fire. Their eyes reflected a bright hope you didn’t see much on the streets of the city. Any city. I was about to play a song for the kids and Marcie was introducing me. The atmosphere backstage was quite relaxed, more so even than when I drank a very large amount of Jack Daniel’s at the Lone Star Café in New York and had to be rolled onstage on a gurney.

Except for the few kids who always shine their flashlights in your face, it was a pretty good crowd. Some familiar faces, some new ones. Not your glitzy New York-L.A.-type audience. Just a large, cheerful group of young kids sitting on blankets in their bunkhouse groups, far away from home but close to the campfire. The ceiling was glittering with stars and the crickets provided a nice little rhythm section. It was a good room to work.

I sang a song that was always quite popular at camp. I’d written it when I was just eleven years old, standing backstage rehearsing for my bar mitzmas with my little yamaha on my head. The lyrics went as follows:

Or Ben Lucas Had a lot of mucus Cornin’ right out of his nose.

He'd pick and pick 'Til it made you sick But back again it grows.

When it's cotton-pickin' time in Texas Boys, it's booger-pickin' time for Ben.

He'd raise that finger
;
mean and hostile,

Stick it in that waiting nostril

Here he comes with a green one once again.

Everybody sang the “01’ Ben Lucas” chorus several more times, then I ankled it out of there with Marcie shouting, “Let’s give Kinky a big 1-2-3 HOW!!!” The ranchers all joined in on the 1-2-3 HOW part, which was the equivalent of applause in the city, and they shouted it as loudly and as sharply as they could, an act that generated coundess echoes off the surrounding hills.