“I guess it’s to your credit, but you’re the poorest excuse for a liar I’ve ever known. I heard a car out in the woods last night. Did that same bunch come back here after I told them not to?”
“They’re not on our property. The driver was hurt. The fellow named Raymond was fixing a tie rod.”
“Did the driver have a gunshot wound?”
“No, they were in a car accident.”
He had tied a napkin like a bib around his neck; he wiped his mouth with it and set down his oatmeal spoon. “Did those people threaten you?”
“The lady with strawberry-blond hair said my mother was going to come home and be okay. I think she’s a good person. Maybe they’ve already took off. They’re not out to cause us trouble.”
He got up from the table and went to the phone. It was made out of wood and attached to the wall and had a crank on the side of the box. He picked up the earpiece and turned the crank. Then he turned it again. “It’s dead,” he said.
“Maybe a tree fell on the line.”
“I think there’s something you’re not telling me.”
“The driver asked if we had a phone. I told him we didn’t. He said he saw a line going into the house. I told him we couldn’t afford the service anymore.”
“So you knew?”
“Knew what?”
“That these people are dangerous. But you chose to pretend otherwise,” he replied.
My face was burning with shame. “What are you aiming to do?” I asked.
“Let’s clear up something else first. Why were you talking about your mother to a bunch of outlaws?”
“I wondered if they could help me get her out of the asylum.”
I saw a strange phenomenon occur in my grandfather’s face. For the first time in my life, I saw the lights of pity and love in his eyes. “I called the doctor yesterday, Satch,” he said. “I told him not to put your mother through electroshock. I told him I’d made a mistake and I was coming down to Houston to get her.”
I stared at him, dumbfounded. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was waiting on him to call me back, to see if everything was ready to go.”
I got up and went to the sink and looked at the woods. I felt like a Judas, although I didn’t know exactly whom I had betrayed, Grandfather or our visitors down by the river. “The woman’s name is Bonnie. The driver had a Browning. I think he might be Clyde Barrow.”
“Are you trying to give me a heart attack?” he said.
HE TOLD ME to take our Model A down to the store at the crossroads and call Sheriff Benbow.
“Go with me,” I said.
“While they burglarize our house?”
“We don’t have anything they want.”
“It must have been the tramp in the woodpile. That’s the only explanation I have for it,” he said. “Were you hiding behind a cloud when God passed out the brains?”
I drove away and left him standing in front of the porch, his khaki trousers stuffed into the tops of his stovepipe boots, the wilted brim of his Stetson low on his brow, his thoughts known only to him. I turned onto the dirt road that led past the woods where our visitors had camped. Our telephone wire was hanging straight down on the pole. There was no tree limb on the ground. A dust devil spun out of a field and broke apart on the Model A’s radiator, powdering the windshield, almost like an omen. The crossroads store was still two miles away. I did a U-turn and headed back home.
Grandfather owned two horses. The Shetland was named Shorty and was blind in one eye. When Grandfather rode Shorty through a field of tall grass, all you could see were his shoulders and head, as though he had been sawed in half and his upper body mounted on wheels. His other horse was a four-year-old white gelding named Blue who was part Arabian and hot-wired to the eyes. All you had to do was lean forward in the saddle and Blue would be halfway to El Paso. A man Grandfather’s age had no business on that horse. But try to tell him that.
I parked by the barn. Shorty was in the corral. Blue was nowhere in sight. I looked in the kitchen closet, where I had replaced Grandfather’s double-barrel shotgun. It was gone.
I took the holstered Colt from the drawer and walked into the woods and followed Blue’s hoofprints along the riverbank to the end of our property. Through the trees I could see the Chevrolet and four people standing beside it, all of them looking up at Grandfather, who sat atop Blue like a wood clothespin. They were all grinning, and not in a respectful way. None of them looked in my direction, not even Bonnie.
Grandfather had bridled Blue but hadn’t saddled him. Blue was sixteen hands and had the big-footed, barrel-chested conformation of an Arabian, and he rippled with nervous power when he walked. If a blowfly settled on his rump, his skin twitched from his withers to his croup. I could hear Grandfather talking: “Times are bad. But that doesn’t mean you’re going to use my place for a hideout or be a bad influence on my grandson. I know who y’all are. I also know it was y’all cut my phone line.”
“We’re plain country people, not no different from y’all,” Raymond said. “We’re not on your damn property, either.”
“No, there’s nothing ordinary about you, son. You’re a smart-ass. And there’s no cure for your kind,” Grandfather said. “You’re going to end up facedown on a sidewalk or fried by Old Sparky. I’d say good riddance, but somewhere you’ve probably got a mother who cares about you. Why don’t you try to change your life while you got a chance?”
“We’re leaving,” Bonnie said. “But don’t be talking down to us anymore. Your grandson told us what you let happen to your daughter.”
“Enough of this. Let’s go,” the injured man said.
“You’re Clyde Barrow, aren’t you?” Grandfather said.
“I told you, the name is Smith.”
“You were born in Telico. You tortured animals when you were a child. You got your brother killed up in Missouri. You’re a certified mess, boy.”
“Yeah, and you’re a nasty old man who’s going to have tumbleweed bouncing across his grave directly,” said the man who called himself Smith.
They all got in the Chevrolet, slamming the doors. That was when Blue went straight up in the air, his front hooves higher than the Chevrolet’s top. Grandfather crashed to the ground, the shotgun flying from his hands, his face white with shock, his breath wheezing from his throat. I thought I heard bones snap in his back.
Bonnie and her friends drove away with Raymond behind the wheel. One of them spat on Grandfather. In the shadows I couldn’t tell who it was, but I saw the spittle come out of the window like wet string and stick on Grandfather’s shirt. In seconds the Chevrolet was going up a dusty rise between the trees, the sunlight spangling on the windows.
I let the holster and belt slide free of the revolver and pulled back the hammer and aimed with both hands at the back of the automobile.
“Don’t do it, Weldon,” Grandfather said.
I didn’t aim at the gas tank or a tire or the trunk. I aimed ten inches below the roof and squeezed the trigger and felt the heaviness of the frame buck in my palms and heard the .44 round hit home, whanging off metal, breaking glass, maybe striking the dashboard or the headliner. Inside the report, I thought I heard someone scream.
The car wobbled but kept going forward and was soon gone. I shut my eyes and opened them again, unsure of what I had done, my ears ringing.
“Why didn’t you listen to me?” Grandfather asked.
My right ear felt like someone had slapped it with the flat of his hand. I opened and closed my mouth to get my hearing back. “I didn’t think. Was that a woman who screamed?”
“No, it was not. You heard an owl screech. Do you understand me?”
“I heard a woman scream, Grandfather.”
“The mind plays tricks on you in a situation like that. That was a screech owl. They’re blind in the daytime and frighten easy. Get me up.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell me what you heard.”
; “An owl. I heard an owl.”
“From this time on, you don’t look back on what happened here today. It doesn’t mean a hill of beans. Don’t you ever stop being the fine young man that you are.”
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, three of Grandfather’s old friends came to our house. They were stolid, thick-bodied men who wore suits and Stetsons and polished boots and had broad, calloused hands. One of them rolled his own cigarettes. One of them was a former Texas Ranger who supposedly killed fifty men. They sat in the kitchen and drank coffee while Grandfather told them everything he knew about our visitors. He made no mention of me. I was in the living room and heard the former Texas Ranger say, “Hack, I’d hate to bust a cap on a woman.” But he smiled when he said it.
Grandfather glanced up and saw me looking through the doorway. Something happened in that moment that I will never forget. Grandfather’s eyes once again were filled with a warmth that few associated with the man who locked John Wesley Hardin in jail. The lawmen at his table were killers. Grandfather was not. “Go upstairs and check on your mother, will you, Weldon?” he said.
I read later about the ambush in Louisiana. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow were blown apart with automatic weapons fire. Later, their friend Raymond would die with courage and dignity in the electric chair at Huntsville. His girlfriend, Mary, would go to prison. None of them was struck by the bullet I fired into their automobile.
It rained that summer, and I caught a catfish in the river that was as reddish-brown as the water I took it from. I slipped the hook out of its mouth and replaced it in the current and watched it drop away, out of sight, an event that was probably of little importance to anyone except the catfish and me.
The story of Weldon Holland continues in James Lee Burke's atmospheric thriller Wayfaring Stranger
“Burke’s evocative prose remains a thing of reliably fierce wonder.”—Entertainment Weekly
Wayfaring Stranger
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Chapter 1
James Lee Burke, A Dust Bowl Tale of Bonnie and Clyde: A Short Story
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