Authors: Elmore Leonard
"The couple lived here before," Ferris said, "I suspect she wasn't much of a housekeeper. All the woman did was complain. She ran out on him, oh, a few months ago. Then he left, was only last week, right before we found out you all were being relocated here and J. D. Mayer told me I'd be acting-inspector in charge, see to your needs."
"Come here, Ferris, I want to show you something," Wayne said. "I want you to look at the carpeting in the living room. I can't even tell what color it is."
Following Wayne, the deputy marshal said, "I think it's kind of a green."
Carmen watched their candles moving away in the dark. She stepped into the hall to look at the bedrooms, both tiny, twin beds crowded into what would be the front bedroom, the other one empty, cardboard boxes stacked against a wall. Wayne would have a few words to say about the twin beds. She could hear him in the living room telling the marshal to look at the stains and here, look at the drapes, like some animal had been chewing on them, the front of the sofa, the same thing.
The bathroom didn't seem too bad, for a bathroom. Scrub it with a disinfectant, get rid of the shower curtain full of mildew stains. Do something with the window. The windows in the bedrooms, too, all the windows, clean the whole place good . . . if they were going to stay here. Right now it was someone else's house. Carmen followed her candle into the living room. The upholstered furniture, modern-looking, appeared white, the carpeting more gray than green. The walls seemed to be white or off-white.
Ferris was telling Wayne the couple that'd lived here had had a little puppy must not have been housebroken, left its little messes wherever it wanted, little black-and-white shorthaired pup. Looking at Carmen he said, "I know it would try to chew on my shoelace if I wasn't wearing my boots, which I generally do. These here are Tony Lamas I sent away for. I'd give the puppy a little kick, not to hurt it none, you understand, but the woman'd have a fit. She took the pup when she left. Her name was Roseanne--I mean the woman, I forgot the puppy's name." Ferris paused. "It'll come to me. Roseanne, the woman, had real blond hair but was older than you folks. Both of 'em were, her and the guy, her husband."
"These people," Wayne said, "were in the witness program?"
"We call it WitSec," Ferris said, "short for Witness Security. Yeah, they were here when I got assigned last winter, after I finished my thirteen weeks training at the academy. See, I was a police officer in West Memphis, Arkansas, that's my home, before I joined the Marshals Service and was sent to this district."
"You like it?" Carmen said. "I mean Cape Girardeau."
"Yeah, I like it, it's nice. See, I'll work security in the federal court when it's in session, or I'll get a call from the local Bureau office, there two resident agents here, back them up when they make an arrest and then take charge of the prisoner or seize his assets if he's got any, like his car, and arrange for its disposition, you know, sell it at auction or we might use it in surveillance work. Like this house was seized, it was owned by a guy was running dope on the interstate, St. Louis to Memphis, and was using this house as a place to stash it if he wanted, or sell some of it. You know the See-Mo campus is here, Southeast Missouri State? I'm thinking of taking some business courses, maybe computer programming, something like that. I can get home when I want, it's not too far to West Memphis, and there's good deer hunting right over here in Bollinger County."
Carmen watched Wayne. He said, "Is that right?" trying to sound only mildly interested. "Whitetail or mule deer?"
"Whitetail and plenty of him. But getting back to your question," Ferris said, "the one here before you was a guy name Ernie Molina, little guy, had this little mustache. He was a loan shark from over in New Jersey. Ernie and his wife I mentioned, Roseanne."
Carmen was about to speak, but Wayne beat her to it. "That's the guy's real name, Ernie Molina, or the one he made up?"
"His real one. What he changed it to--this's funny--was Edward Mallon, see, E.M., using the same initials on account of he had, what do you call it, his monogram on all his shirts, on the pocket here. Guy had more shirts'n I ever saw in my life, like he musta had a good twenty shirts or more hanging in his closet, I'm not kidding you. The thing was, it was funny, he's going by this name Edward Mallon, but you could tell by looking at him he was a greaser. Excuse me, I mean a Latin. I have to watch that. I come here, Ernie's not doing nothing, living offa Uncle Sam, I took him over to Procter and Gamble's and got him a job, but he didn't care for it, so he quit and got himself one tending bar. Ernie was a nervous type, I think drank a lot."
"We were told," Carmen said, glancing at Wayne in the candle glow, "you aren't supposed to talk about people in the program, reveal their identity. Isn't that right?"
Ferris seemed surprised. "Well, you're not gonna tell anybody, are you?" He started to grin. "Being in the same club, so to speak, as him. No, I take that back. Ernie's gone, so he's not in WitSec no more. Now my responsibility, as far as the program goes, is to protect you folks, keep you out of harm. I know there a couple guys looking for you, they have detainers out on them and you're gonna testify at their trial if and when, but that's about all. See, Marshal J. D. Mayer was given the information and told me you were coming and would be in my care. He's on sick leave, his pump acting up on him, and I doubt will be back. He's funny, I ask him things and he says, 'Look, Ferris, I tell you what you need to know and what you don't won't hurt you.' So all I got is a file with not much in it. I don't know if you're actually married or common-law or even what your real names are."
Carmen said, amazed, "Are you serious?"
"Well, nobody's told me."
"We're Mr. and Mrs. Colson. We're actually married, in church, and that's our name."
"What I have in the report, then--that's your Christian name, Carmen?"
She said, "I don't believe this. Yes, it is."
"That's a nice name," Ferris said. "I like it." He looked at Wayne. "And you're Wayne Morris Colson? That's the name on your original birth certificate?"
Wayne took a moment, staring back at him in the candle glow. "What's your problem?"
"Hey, there's no problem. It was my understanding that to be in WitSec you have to take on a new identity. Anybody I've ever heard of in it, that's what they did. I'll study out that file again, satisfy my curiosity. It's possible I could've missed something."
"But you sound like you don't believe us," Carmen said.
"No, I believe you, you tell me your real name's Carmen, that's fine with me. I just want to get it straight in my own mind what you have to do and what you don't. As I told you, I wasn't given much information."
"And you haven't been a marshal very long," Wayne said.
"Be a year come January. I might not be up on all the procedures, or you might say the fine print as to what you agreed to. But let me tell you, I know what I have to do. I'm armed at all times, got a three-fifty-seven Smith and Wesson on me, and I'm sworn to protect your lives to the death."
Wayne said, "You do some deer hunting, uh?"
"Yeah, I go over to Bollinger County along the Castor River track, it's only about fifty miles, full of whitetail in there."
Carmen went outside. She got her sweater from the car and put it on. It was quiet. She held her arms to her body and rubbed them for warmth.
Trees against the night sky could be trees anywhere, but she could feel a difference knowing she was in a strange place. There were people a block or so down the street in the homes where lights showed, but she didn't know them and couldn't see the town now, out here, with its postcard look from the bridge, the church steeple, the courthouse, the friendly town where people might stop you on the street wanting to know you. . . . She thought, How did we get here? How did it happen so fast?
Wayne and Ferris came out of the house and across the yard, Ferris saying, "If you haven't seen one then you wouldn't believe a swamp rabbit. I mean the size of him. He's different'n a cottontail and two or three times bigger. I got me one, was on Coon Island in Butler County, weighed eighteen pounds."
Wayne asked if they were good eating.
"Good," Ferris said, "swamp rabbit's so good to eat people have just about killed him out."
He shook their hands, ready to leave, then spoke for several minutes about motels and places to eat out on the highway, recommending the ones he said wouldn't cost them an arm and a leg, then telling Carmen about West Park Mall, knowing, he said, how women loved to shop whether they needed anything or not. "Hey, Wayne? Isn't that the truth?" He told them he'd be by tomorrow and drove off with a couple of toots from his car horn.
Wayne turned to Carmen. "The guy's a moron."
"But a deer hunter," Carmen said. "Doesn't that make a difference?"
"Ferris does push-ups and lifts weights. I'll bet he likes to arm-wrestle, too."
"Why did he say he doesn't want us to think of him as a parole officer? Did you hear him? Why should we?"
"I don't know. He probably meant as far as we don't have to report to him."
Carmen was silent looking at the sky, picking out faint stars. After a moment she said, "I think he meant something else."
After another moment Wayne said, "The whitetail season here's only seven days, the week before Thanksgiving."
Chapter
14
"ALL I COULD THINK OF," Lenore said, "you were in a terrible accident. I've been worried sick."
"Mom, you know we got here okay. I called you from the motel, soon as we walked in the door."
"I mean since then I've been worried."
"And I called the other night. Didn't I?"
"Once, since you got there. Don't your neighbors have phones you could use?"
"We don't have neighbors. We're sort of off by ourselves. I haven't met anyone yet. Anyway, Mom . . ."
"You've been gone six days, almost a week counting today. I have it marked on the calendar. You didn't even come see me before you left."
"I told you, it happened all of a sudden," Carmen said. "Anyway, we have our phone now. Southwestern Bell came this morning--I had them put it in the kitchen, well, actually in the breakfast nook. It's like a little booth, you know, with benches built in? You can look out the window . . . The washer and dryer are in the utility room, right off the kitchen, having the phone here it'll be handy." Carmen letting her mom know she could be seven hundred miles away but was still the happy homemaker, out here baking pies, washing Wayne's coveralls, fixing dinner off recipe cards. "There's a woods behind the house, not like the one we have at home, Wayne says it isn't a woods it's a thicket, but it's nice, you hear birds out there." That might sound as though she was having a good time, so Carmen said, "We've been working since we got here. We had to shampoo the carpeting, the sofa and two chairs in the living room, rent one of those machines, scrub the kitchen floor, do the cupboards, the refrigerator and my least favorite of all jobs, clean the oven. Wayne helped a lot, he didn't report to his job till this morning so, you know, we could get settled. We may do some painting, we're trying to decide, depending on how long we'll be here." Carmen paused to think of what else she wanted to say. . . . Yeah, remind her not to tell anyone where they were. She said, "Mom . . ."
Too late.
"You said a few weeks."
"That's what Wayne thinks."
"I don't see why he has to go all the way to Missouri to get work. Like there isn't any around here."
"It's a change," Carmen said. "He'll know more in a few days. It's not a real big job." He did go see about one this morning, that much was true, though it wasn't structural work. Wayne said he didn't care, he had to be doing something; threw his coveralls in the pickup and took off to meet Ferris Britton at Cape Barge Line & Drydock.
"What's your weather like?"
Her mom would ask that daily, when they were living only thirty miles apart. "It's around seventy," Carmen said, "sort of cloudy, but it's been nice all week."
"It's raining here, and cold. It's suppose to go down to forty tonight. I hate this weather."
"You could move to Florida, nothing's stopping you."
"I don't know anybody in Florida. What if something happened to me? Like one of my back seizures and I can't move, I have to lie perfectly still. There is nothing like that pain when you try to move. I felt one coming on the other day, I called the doctor . . ." Lenore stopped. "I may have to change my number again. Either that or have the Annoyance Call Bureau put a trap on my line, find out where he's calling from and get him."
"You had an obscene phone call?"
"I had two hang-ups the same day. The kind where you know the party is on the line but they don't say anything."
"Didn't even breathe hard?"
"It happens to you, you won't think it's so funny. I thought it was the doctor, I was waiting for him to call me back. You can wait all day, they don't care."
"When was this, Mom?"
"Soon as I started to feel the pain. When do you think? You know they call to find out if you're home, that's how they work it. Call and hang up."
"Or it's someone who got the wrong number," Carmen said. "Have any of our friends called?"
"Why would they call here?"
"I doubt if they will, but if you do get a call . . . See, we didn't tell anyone we were going. Wayne doesn't want the guys in the local to know he's working out of state. I don't understand it myself, but if anyone calls just say we're driving down to Florida and you haven't heard from us yet. Okay? So Wayne won't have to worry about it."
"You don't know when you're coming home?"
Getting an old-lady quiver in her voice. Lenore was sixty-seven years old, she could be tough as nails, dance on a table after a few vodkas with grapefruit juice, or she could sound utterly helpless, real whiny, when she wanted something.
"Wayne says he'll know pretty soon. He just started today, but as soon as we find out . . . We're gonna be talking anyway."
Lenore said, "If I get one of my seizures . . ."
"Try not to think about it."
"I don't know what I'd do, being all alone. I don't even have your number. What's that area code, three-one-five?"
"Three-one-four."
"Are you sure?"
"It's right on the phone," Carmen said, looking at it.
"All right, give me the number." After a moment her mom said, "Carmen, where are you? What're you doing?"
She was looking across the kitchen, through the open doorway to the hall. She said, "Just a second, Mom," raised her voice and called out, "Wayne." She waited.
Lenore was saying, "What? I didn't hear what you said. Area code three-one-four, then what?"
"I thought I heard Wayne come in," Carmen said. She paused before giving her mom the number, listened to her repeat it, said, "That's right." And in that moment looked up again. Sure of the sound this time. Someone closing the side door.
"For all the good it will do me," Lenore said, "if I'm flat on my back and you're down in Missouri somewhere."
Ferris Britton appeared in the hall, looking into the kitchen, looking right at Carmen.
"You remember the last time?" Lenore said. "I was in bed two weeks, I couldn't move and you came every day? You took care of me, you took care of the house . . ."
Ferris Britton, wearing that tight sport coat, thumbs hooked in his belt, grinning at her.
"I don't know what I would have done without you. I couldn't even go to the bathroom alone, remember?"
"Mom, I have to go. Somebody's here."
"Who is it?"
"It's work we're having done."
Ferris was grinning and shaking his head now, showing some kind of appreciation, enjoying himself.
"I'll call you tomorrow, okay?"
"Tell me what time, in case I go out."
"The same time, around eleven."
"I could call you. No, if Wayne's making good money down there, at least I hope he is, you call me."
"I will, don't worry."
"What're you fixing for dinner?"
"Mom, I have to go. Bye."
Carmen hung up, Ferris still grinning at her.
He said, "That was your mom, huh? I don't know if it's a good idea giving her your phone number."
Carmen took a moment. "You walk right in someone else's house?"
Ferris was looking at the electric coffeemaker, over on the counter by the sink. He moved toward it saying, "Excuse me, but this isn't exactly someone else's house. It belongs to the Justice Department through seizure by the U. S. Marshals Service and is in our care. I thought I told you that." He raised his hand as Carmen started to get up from the table. "Stay where you are, I'll help myself." Ferris took a cup from the dish drainer, filled it with coffee and came over to the table. "Smells good and strong. I don't use sugar or cream, nothing that isn't good for me." Still grinning at her.
Maybe always grinning, Carmen remembering his boyish expression in candlelight, wavy brown hair down on his forehead, country-western entertainer or television evangelist. She said, "Are you gonna walk in anytime you want? If you are, I think we'll find another place." She had to look almost straight up at him standing close to the table and it made her mad. "Maybe we will anyway. I didn't come here to be a cleaning woman for the Justice Department."
Ferris stopped grinning. Carmen watched him squint at her now, squeezing lines into his forehead, another one of his expressions. Carmen believed he had three or four: deadpan, mouth open, this one and his gee-whiz grin.
He said, "You mean you aren't a cleaning lady?"
She watched him set his cup on the table, turn and inspect the kitchen in a studied way, nodding, before looking at her again.
"Well, you sure could do my house anytime."
There was the grin back again and now he was taking off his sport coat, folding it inside out, making himself right at home.
"Hey, I'm kidding with you. Don't you know when I'm kidding?"
She watched him slide into the breakfast-nook booth, bringing the sport coat across his lap. His wavy hair, his weight lifter neck and shoulders in a short-sleeve white shirt, red-print tie hanging in front of him, seemed to fill the space on the other side of the table. He brought his cup to him and hunched over to rest his arms on the table edge.
"I knocked. You must not've heard me."
"You didn't knock or ring the bell," Carmen said, "you walked right in."
"I hear you talking to somebody I want to know who the person is, or if you're in some kind of trouble, need my help. That's what I'm for."
She watched him pick up his cup and hold it in two hands as he took a sip. He held it in front of him, looking over the rim of the cup at her.
"Mmmmm, that's good. I was in court all week was why I haven't come by. I take that back, I mean during the day. I come by two different nights like around eight, but you weren't home either time. The pickup was here--I looked in the window, saw how you'd cleaned the place up. Man, I thought I musta had the wrong house."
Carmen said, "You looked in our windows?"
"Just the living room. No, I went around to the kitchen too. Where were you?"
"If we weren't home then we were out."
"Well, I know that. Where'd you go?"
Carmen took her time, wanting to tell him it was none of his business, but wanting to excuse him, too, because he was dumb, because he was overprotective, took his job very seriously and didn't realize he was blundering into their privacy. She wanted that to be the only reason he was here, sitting close across the table with those huge arms and shoulders, staring at her.
"Let's see," Carmen said, "we shopped, bought a new shower curtain, some dish towels. I called my mother. . . . Oh, Wayne bought a pair of work gloves." She paused, staring at the marshal's innocent irritating expression, and said, "We thought about going to a show, but didn't know if we were allowed to."
Ferris said, "Sure, that's okay, you can go to the show. But call me and let me know which one. See, I have to know where you are, you know, in case something comes up. I think I got your old man a job over to Cape Barge, if he don't mind getting filthy dirty crawling underneath towboats. A drydock's the last place I'd ever want to get hired. He told me he was an ironworker before. I didn't ask him, but is Wayne an Indian?"
Carmen said, "An Indian--why would you think that?"
"I heard one time they could only get Indians to go up on those high buildings, either 'cause they're crazy enough to do it, not afraid of heights, or 'cause they're surefooted--I don't know, maybe they wear moccasins and aren't as likely to fall."
"I'm told they fall like anyone else," Carmen said. "I'll bet you also heard you're not supposed to look down when you're up pretty high."
"Yeah, you get the urge to jump."
"If you do, you're not an ironworker. It's looking up that can get you in trouble, if you start watching the clouds moving."
"I imagine it takes getting used to," Ferris said. "What'd your old man do before he was an ironworker?"
"He's not my old man, he's my husband."
"I know he's older'n you are, I saw it in the file. He's forty-one and you're thirty-eight, only he looks it and you don't. You look more my age. I turned thirty-one this past July, but I keep in shape. I work with weights I got at home in my exercise room. I can do those one-hand push-ups, I can do nine-hundred and sixty-five sit-ups at one time without stopping. I'll run now and then but I don't care for it too much, I do leg exercises instead. You ought to see my workout room. It was the den before I got divorced. My ex-wife went back to Hughes, Arkansas, that's near Horseshoe Lake, not too far from West Memphis, where I was born and raised."
"I have a nineteen-year-old son," Carmen said, "in the navy. Right now he's on a nuclear carrier in the Pacific Ocean."
"Yeah, I saw in the file you had a boy in the service I expected you'd look like an old woman, but you sure don't. I can tell you take care of yourself, like I do. I respect my body. Watch this." Ferris raised his right arm, cocked his fist and his bicep jumped out of the short white sleeve. "See? Does a little dance for you." He looked from his arm to Carmen. "You like to dance? Get out there on the floor and shake it?"
"At times," Carmen said. "Why don't you put your arm down?"
"You want to feel it?"