The winter solstice was almost upon us. The sunset was a purple melt beyond the live oaks in the yard, the Christmas lights in the neighbor’s house flashing on and off. I couldn’t look at Grandfather’s face.
“Anybody I know?” he asked.
“Dalton Wiseheart, for openers. I thought I might throw in Hubert Timmons Slakely for good measure.”
He placed his taco on his plate and cleaned the corner of his mouth with his thumb. “Did you learn that from me?”
“Learn what?”
“That it’s all right to shoot an old man or maybe one you have to sneak up on.”
“They’re turning Rosita’s case over to the Department of Public Health. You know what for, don’t you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” He lifted his finger at me. “You killed German soldiers in war because you had to, not by choice. Don’t you dare let these worthless people make you over in their image.”
“You were fixing to drop the hammer on Slakely.”
“I wanted to do it. But I didn’t.”
“I wish you’d parked one right in his mouth.”
“The men you kill stand by your deathbed. Did you know that? I’ve seen them. They’re out there. Waiting on me.”
“They’re going to take Rosita from me, Grandfather.”
He looked into space, a great sadness in his eyes.
Chapter
24
THAT NIGHT, AS I drove down to Galveston Island, I could not free myself of images that seemed to have nothing to do with my situation. The moon was up, the clouds lit like silver plate, the sand dunes on the roadside spiked with salt grass. When I passed a lonely filling station, I thought I saw a boxlike vehicle with a lacquered black top and fenders and a maroon paint job on the body parked at the pumps. It had white sidewalls and chromed-wire wheels. I was almost sure it was the 1932 Chevrolet Confederate, the same model driven by Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker shortly before they were cut into pieces by automatic weapons fire in Arcadia, Louisiana. I thought I saw a man wearing a slug cap fueling the tank.
Almost fourteen years had passed since my encounter with them. Was I imagining things, a man my age? Or did I want their ghosts to pursue me? Did I secretly admire their cavalier attitude toward the law, their indifference to the lives they took? No, that was not the case. My fascination was not with them; it was with Bonnie Parker. Someone from the car spat on Grandfather, and I had always prayed that it was not she. It was the kind of thing Clyde might do, or Raymond Hamilton, or Mary, with her cleft chin and mean-spirited, downturned Irish mouth. Miss Bonnie wouldn’t do that, I told myself.
They had been despised by the law. The four lawmen who went after them never intended for them to survive the trap they created with a broken-down truck on an isolated piney woods blacktop. What had always bothered me most in the aftermath of Bonnie and Clyde’s death was the newspapers’ failure to mention they had shot their way into Eastham Pen to honor their word and free a friend, with nothing to gain and everything to lose. How many law-abiding people would be willing to do the same?
The odds were stacking up against Rosita. Her immigration status had become suspect; her father had been an official in the leftist government of the Spanish Republic; she was related to Red Rosa Luxemburg; and she had assaulted a plainclothes detective. I had no doubt the referral of her case to Public Health was an attempt to circumvent the legal process and place her in a mental institution.
Where do you go for help under those circumstances?
That night Grandfather had our maid, Snowball, drive him to a pay phone from which he called me at the motel. “Your old commanding officer was here,” he said. “He gave me a number in Houston for you to call.”
“Lloyd Fincher was at the house?”
“That’s the one.”
“What’s he after?”
“He says it’s got something to do with Garth McQueen. Fincher wants to he’p you.”
“What’s your opinion of him?” I asked.
“I’d say he’s a ladies’ man.”
“He had a woman with him?”
“She put me in mind of a Yorkshire pig that’s been shampooed at the county fair—pink all over and fresh-smelling as a rose. She had a laugh just this side of an oink. You gonna be all right, boy?”