The Long Night of Winchell Dear Read online

  Lucinda had set bacon and eggs before Winchell Dear that Memorial Day in 1967, a day that already was warm and gave all indications of heading toward hot. The roadside café in Colorado City, Texas, didn’t have air-conditioning, and the saltshakers had rice in them to keep the humidity from clumping the salt. There were flies on the screens and on catchfly paper dangling from the ceiling on strings, twirling slowly in the breeze from a large fan near the door. Winchell Dear removed his suit jacket, folding it on the empty stool beside him. It was after breakfast and before lunch, so the place was mostly empty except for a group of four paying their bill.

  After ringing up the bill, making change, and thanking them, Lucinda Miller walked back toward where Winchell Dear was buttering his toast.

  “Like jam for that? We have some orange marmalade.”

  “That would be real nice,” he said, liking the easy laugh only just hidden behind the woman’s voice.

  She fetched a jar of marmalade from farther down the counter and put it in front of him.

  “You from Colorado City, here?” he asked, taking a sip of hot coffee, black and good, feeling a little out there by himself and tired of talking to poker players.

  “Now I am. Originally from up near Muleshoe. Then Lubbock after that for a few years, birthplace of Buddy Holly.”

  Winchell Dear looked puzzled, poker face gone now that he wasn’t at a table somewhere. “Don’t believe I’ve heard of…who was that? Buddy…”

  Lucinda Miller laughed straight out. “Hey, mister, where you been? Before he and Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper crashed in a private plane somewhere up in the winter wastes of Iowa, ol’ Buddy was almost as big as Elvis. You know, ‘Every day it’s a’gettin’ closer…,’” she sang in a pretty fair alto.

  “Sorry…” Winchell Dear grinned. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “You need to put a little more music in your life, hombre. Learn to play something, go dancin’, all that.”

  Winchell chewed on a piece of bacon, done crisp just the way he liked it, then reached over to the paper napkin container, pulled out two, and wiped his hands and mouth. “Now you’re jumping to conclusions about me. Matter of fact, I play the fiddle a little bit. Know six songs, working on a seventh—‘Great Big Taters in Sandyland’—haven’t got it down yet, don’t know if I ever will. Doesn’t matter, six songs are enough to get by on in life, if you really like those six songs. Come to think of it, one good song would be enough, if it was really a good song and you really liked it.”

  Lucinda tipped her head, got a crooked smile going, and said, “Now that’s a pretty profound statement for a hot morning in the latter part of a month called May…one good song is enough. Like that idea, got to remember it when I need a little boost, of which I need a little a lot of the time. Play the fiddle, huh?”

  A truck driver pulled up out front with a whoosh of air brakes and came in, taking a seat four stools down from Winchell Dear.

  The man coughed hard, covering his mouth with a closed fist, then opened a menu.

  Lucinda walked in the man’s direction, saying, “You okay there, Ralph?”

  “Howdy, Lucinda. Good to see your smiling face again. Yeah, I’m okay, got me a little shippin’ fever or something in the chest; won’t seem to go away and leave me alone. Don’t know why I even bother to check the menu, already know what I want.”

  “Let’s see if I can remember,” Lucinda said, folding her arms and rolling her eyes up toward the fly-specked ceiling. “Ralph, drives a semi for Seminole Lines, comes in every couple of weeks, and always orders…three eggs hard fried, tall stack of buttermilk cakes, one tomato juice, and a side of ham. Coffee makes his stomach jumpy, so he just sticks with tomato juice. Right?”

  “Lucinda, you’re a natural wonder. You ought to enter one of them TV contests where memory’s important.”

  Lucinda wrote on her small green pad, tore off the order, and plopped it on the high counter separating the kitchen from the rest of the café. A disembodied, hairy male hand clutching a lighted cigarette grabbed the order, with the sound of batter hitting a hot griddle coming a few seconds later.

  “Want a copy of the Odessa-American while you’re waiting, Ralph?”

  Ralph nodded, and Lucinda slid the paper along the counter to him. She walked back toward Winchell Dear, who was swallowing his last piece of toast and washing it down with coffee. He took another two paper napkins and wiped his hands while Ralph of Seminole Lines unfolded his spectacles and bored in on the latest news.

  “So, what do you do for a living, mister? You a traveling man or something?” Lucinda Miller was smiling at him.

  Winchell Dear never made noise about being a professional poker player. Not that he was ashamed of it; a living was a living, after all, and his way of getting by was as honorable as the next, long as you played the game hard and fair. That’s how he saw it, that’s how he lived it. But somehow, if you told people you played poker as a business, they’d look at you as if you might grab their underwear and run, after which the conversation was likely to shift into poker strategy and what did Winchell Dear think of drawing to an inside straight and the like, none of which he cared to explain.

  So he was about to offer his usual line of talk about being a gun and ammunition salesman. He knew enough about guns to be reasonably persuasive unless pushed too far. But he was never in one place long enough for anyone to get beyond the basic rifle and shotgun questions, and he read one or two gun magazines each month just to keep the nomenclature in his head.

  Before he could answer Lucinda Miller’s question, Ralph of Seminole Lines turned from his paper and looked over the top of his reading glasses toward Winchell Dear.

  “I’ll tell ya what that gentleman does for a living, honey. Thought I recognized him when I first came in, but it required a second look before I was sure. He’s a professional gambler. Watched him play once at a truckers convention a few years ago. He must have walked away with ten thousand from a weekend’s work. I remember because my boss was playing at his table and said the man was either cheating or the best poker player he’d ever seen. So I sat and watched him play on two different occasions and decided my boss was right. This gentleman here’ll just grind you down to road tar and leave you stuck to the pavement.”

  Lucinda Miller canted her head again. Winchell thought it was real attractive, the way she did that and how she smiled her little crooked smile at the same time. “Well, well, a real true-to-life gambler right here in front of me. Ralph correct on that?”

  Winchell Dear sipped his coffee, annoyed by Ralph’s recollections and assessments. “No, I play poker for a living.”

  “That’s gambling, isn’t it?” Lucinda asked.

  “Depends how you look at it and how you play it.”

  Ralph couldn’t resist the opening. “You play straight, right? My boss figured you did, said at least he couldn’t catch you at anything, and my boss is a pretty observant fellow.”

  “I play straight,” Winchell Dear said, giving Ralph a sharp glance. “No need to do it any other way if you know what you’re doing.” He was also pretty sure he could riffle-stack and bottom-deal Ralph’s boss into bankruptcy, if it came down to proving something.

  “Well, probably beats driving a truck for a living,” Lucinda Miller said. “Use your brain instead of your arms and butt. Right, Ralph?”

  Ralph went back to his paper, then picked it up and moved to a booth in the far corner of the room, as if Winchell Dear carried something infectious.

  Lucinda glanced at Ralph’s fat rear walking away, smiled, and shrugged. “So, where you headed next, gambler?”

  “Big Spring.” Winchell Dear usually didn’t tell anyone outside the profession where he was going, but somehow he felt like telling the tall woman. “Kind of hard to ask this—not my nature to be forward—but you married or otherwise tied up in a similar way?”

  The tilt of the head again, the smile again. “No. My husband was in the air force till his car
go plane went down on a training mission over at Reese AFB by Lubbock. Wasn’t much left to bury. That was two years back. I came down here six months ago and been going to night school over in Sweet-water, learning how to keep books and be a legal secretary. Plopping bacon and eggs in front of locals and drifters isn’t all that challenging. You got a reason for asking about my marital status?”

  “Well, thought I might ask you out for dinner sometime if you’re at all interested in having a so-called gambler for a dinner partner. I don’t flip coins or play liar’s poker for the check, in case you’re wondering.”

  Lucinda Miller folded her arms and looked straight at Winchell Dear, a look worthy of a first-class card player giving the once-over to a stranger who had just sat down at the table. He appeared to be all right, a decent package in a plain wrapper. No Clark Gable or anything close to it, but neatly done up in a nice dark suit and well-barbered hair, thin in the body and eyes sagging a bit, good strong nose and chin. Looked like he could use a shave and a little sun, though. And she liked his blue suspenders.

  A gravelly voice sounded from the kitchen: “Eggs, cakes, and ham up.”

  While Lucinda delivered Ralph’s breakfast, Winchell Dear stood and walked to the cash register with his check, reaching for his billfold.

  Lucinda returned and met him on her side of the register, took his five-dollar bill, and handed change back to him. “Since you’re asking, I’d be pleased to have dinner with you. Don’t get invited out much here in Colorado City. But it’d help to know your name.”

  When he told her, she reached out and shook his hand, saying, “I’m Lucinda Miller. I go to school on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights. Other than that I’m a free woman. Got a preference?”

  “How about Thursday? Need your address and phone number…uh, so I know where to pick you up. Seven o’clock about right?”

  “Just right.” She scribbled on the back of a green order ticket and handed it to him. “There you are, name, address, phone number.”

  “See you Thursday evening, then.” Winchell Dear smiled at her and shoved his billfold into his left hip pocket.

  “By the way,” she said, “we going low down or fancy or in between? Just so I know what to wear.”

  “Big Spring’s got a couple of nice places if you don’t mind the ride. I guess by West Texas standards, they’d be called fancy, so let’s go fancy.”

  “Fancy it is,” Lucinda Miller said, that pleasant laugh lying just behind her voice.

  Winchell Dear backed his Cadillac out of the café lot and pointed it again toward Big Spring, feeling better in some indefinable way than he’d felt for a long time, as if maybe the music hadn’t died with the untimely passing of someone called Buddy Holly.

  So it came, twenty-three years after Memorial Day in 1967, Winchell Dear stood in a darkened billiards room and played “Silver Bell,” remembering Lucinda. The wind had risen quick and hard, as it often did in the high desert, and the blow of it rattled the French doors on the south wall of the billiards room.

  Across the room, beyond and below the French doors, seven feet of diamondback rattlesnake moved slowly along the ranch house foundation. The snake was not angry or sad or frustrated or afraid. The snake was hungry, that was all. Yet, as is characteristic of Crotalus atrox, its behavior carried the symptoms of an edgy and nervous temperament.

  Somehow aware of rising wind but deaf to the airborne sound of a fiddle playing “Silver Bell,” the diamondback hunted on through the night, alone and black eyed and searching. The tap of a fiddler’s boot on a wooden floor was transmitted to a cement pad below the floor and thence to the ground below it. Stopping then, the snake rose and stared through the French doors, tongue flicking. Whether it could see Winchell Dear standing in darkness and looking in its direction was not certain, but the snake soon returned to its hunt, moving past the doors and along the foundation, alert and ready for whatever might come its way. And, as before, the diamondback was not angry or sad or frustrated or afraid. The snake was hungry, that was all. And a little edgy, in the way of its nature.

  Winchell Dear adjusted the .380 in his boot and took up his fiddle again, playing this time the song a Las Vegas musician had written about him, humming some of the words as he bowed and fingered:

  …as all we dreamers know,

  it’s not the winning it’s the game.

  We all stay the same,

  it’s just the dreams that get older.

  Peter Long Grass circled the foot of Guapa Mountain until he was due west of the main house and a hundred yards north of the place where Sonia Dominguez lived. He climbed two hundred feet up the shallow slope and settled himself. From there, he could see both the main house straight down from him and the rough outline of the woman’s smaller, darkened building off to his left.

  Why he had done this, had gathered up his tools and jogged through darkness to sit on the side of Guapa Mountain, he still wasn’t certain. Though anyone who has ever awakened to the sound of banging shutters or an imagined footstep in the hall might understand what had brought Peter Long Grass across the night to this place of watchfulness. We all are yet driven by old fears and the sound of creatures unknown snuffling around the cave mouth, held in abeyance only by the wall and the fire and the weapons beside us. And, therefore, so was Peter Long Grass.

  And something was out there, something incalculable about this night. The smell of the wind as it had risen and swept the land in the last two hours, bringing with it an indistinct, lingering ambiance of all the bad Peter Long Grass had tried to leave behind. Given only that much, and only is sometimes enough, he had come to defend whatever he now had, even if it was merely a wood-and-canvas shelter in Diablo Canyon. But there was more to it than rock and stone and wood and canvas. The woman, Sonia, and the old man, Winchell Dear, and he, Peter Long Grass, had reached a kind of equilibrium out there in the high desert, and he was determined to preserve what passed for contentment in this time of his life. For Peter Long Grass, there was simply nowhere else to go.

  Perhaps none of what he felt there on the side of Guapa Mountain was real; perhaps the night would pass and the dawn would come and the day would bring nothing more than the ordinary. If so, he could look back and smile at his fears. For now, he assumed the role of prudent sentry, a one-man picket line in the windblown cedar and mesquite of the high desert.

  A group of javelinas drifted toward him, snorting as they rooted and grubbed. At fifteen feet he gave them a low, sharp “Hah!” and the pigs crashed off through the underbrush.

  In the adobe, Sonia Dominguez turned in her bed and looked at the clock beside her. She was tired from the day just passed and even as tired from the restless sleep she’d passed through in the last three hours. It was three o’clock, and the alarm would ring in another half hour. On the other side of her bedroom door, Pablo Espinosa snored loudly enough almost to override the sound of night wind whining through the cedars, the wind sometimes close to the sound of a woman’s scream as it found the cracks where her windows were not properly fitted.

  She lay down again and let her thoughts run. Often, as they did in these morning hours, her thoughts went to the baby she’d given up at fifteen. The young San Diego sailor she had loved was handsome, and in the few days she had known him, she’d been fascinated with the contrast of his red hair and light freckled skin against the black and brown of hers and had found in that a kind of eroticism all its own. The boy-child would be into his thirty-eighth year now, and she wondered if he had grown to be as large and strong as his father had been. She remembered the young sailor’s muscular forearms and how he’d walked on the biggest feet she’d ever seen—size EE and length thirteen. He’d told her that when she’d asked, and it was one of the many random things she carried in her memory.

  When she’d last written to find any news of her youngest son, perhaps thinking she might at least send a letter to him, she’d been put off by what relatives still remained in Los Angeles and told only that he ha
d a nice family and was doing well as a salesman of computer parts. And on this night, as was true of many nights, she wondered where he went and how he went and if she would ever see him again.

  THE DRIVER SLOWED and let the Connie roll nearly to a stop before touching the brakes. The headlights shone on the bridge sign ahead of them: “Slater’s Draw.”

  “Okay, this is it,” the driver said. “The ranch gate is supposed to be another mile or so farther on. Read me those notes again at the bottom of the map.”

  Marty again unfolded the sheet of paper they’d been given, using the flashlight to study it. “Says there are two houses on the place, and our target’ll be in the adobe one a little way from the main house. What the hell is adobe? Some kind of cement or brick or something, ain’t it?”

  The driver moved the Lincoln slowly along Route 90, looking for the ranch gate. “Yeah, I think so. Kind of an old-fashioned cement block, I think.”

  “How we gonna tell adobe from cement or whatever in the dark?”

  “I guess we’ll use our flashlight, Marty, unless you got a better idea. Hey, here we go.” He turned right, pointing the car into the beginning of a ranch road. The headlights illuminated an iron ranch gate with two “NO TRESPASSING” signs on each side.

  “What’s the lock, Marty?”

  “It’s electronic. Can’t pick it ’cause there’s nothing to pick. I can probably disable it with a burst or two from the Beretta.”