The Long Night of Winchell Dear Read online

  Just before they reached the four-room house roughed together out of adobe and serving as both a home and a border patrol station, his father spoke again. “Winchell, never drink while you’re gambling, shifts your risk propensity. And never gamble on the blood sports, on a dog or cockfight, or on a contest between a bull and a bear. Those are not honorable.

  “And horse racing, while more noble, still lacks the element of personal control over the outcomes. Same goes for roulette, keno, and the rest of those pure-chance games. Life’s enough of a gamble all by itself without intentionally putting yourself in situations you can’t control. That’s something I learned too late, and why I feel kind of stuck where I am.”

  There it was again. Winchell had heard it all before, from his father, from other men. Not the exact words so much, but rather the sound and feel of the words, the unspoken thoughts behind them. His father, other men, a sense of things beyond their reach, giving off the impression of dreams they’d never got around to living out. But then, it was a time of limits, when things were not going the way everyone thought they would go on forever back in the twenties.

  As they came into the yard, if dirt and sand and cactus passed for a yard, Winchell’s mother was taking down wash from the lines, fighting a late afternoon wind driving grit into the clean laundry. The life of a border patrolman could be hard and lonely, when he might be riding the river for days at a time. But Winchell Dear always thought his mother’s life was even harder and lonelier in ways he couldn’t quite define. Her face, dried and darkened from wind and sun, made her look older than her thirty-eight years, but then all the women who lived in the high desert looked that way. So did the men, of course, but somehow it looked more natural on them, to Winchell’s way of thinking.

  Nancy Dear smiled readily and laughed at times, yet Winchell would catch her staring up at the stars at night or looking long and far out a window toward the north in the quiet of early mornings. She’d come from a big ranching family, the Winchells up near Odessa, and had been accustomed to the bustle and chatter of people coming and going. Hardly anyone ever dropped by their border patrol station, unless it was a Texas Ranger or another patrolman to pick up Winchell’s father and go off with him somewhere in pursuit of smugglers or rustlers or whatever.

  Once every two or three months, the family would travel up to Clear Signal for supplies. While his father met with various lawmen and stocked up on ammunition and bridles and rope at Big Bend Hardware and General Merchandise, Nancy Dear spent hours looking over cloth and buttons in the dry goods store on Front Street. She always seemed especially quiet and lonely on their way back down to the border, not saying much while the coupé rocked and slithered along the dirt road. She just stared through the side window and fretted with the collar of her dress, looking out and up and along the arch of what might have been, while at the same time not altogether dissatisfied with what had come to be.

  Young Winchell Dear was lonely, too, though the fact that he’d been lonely back then never occurred to him until later on in his life. It was simply the way things were and the way things went, and it wouldn’t have done any good to complain about them even if he’d thought about complaining.

  His mother homeschooled him for three hours after breakfast and for another hour after lunch. The rest of each day was his. He fished the Rio Grande, hunted deer and javelina with the family’s .30-30 saddle gun, brought down blue quail and ducks with the shotgun, and collected Indian artifacts. Sometimes he took one of the horses and went off to explore Indian ruins or, in cooler weather, simply watched the shift and blow of clouds streaming down like a river over the top of the Carmens and then hitting the warmer temperatures below and lifting again to hide all sight of the mountains.

  Or he’d walk out of view of the house, sit down at a flat rock, and practice shuffling cards, all the while wondering at how curious it was, the attraction of humans to the desultory lurch and caprice of cardboard slices with numbers and pictures on them. And, even more curious, that you could actually earn a living by mastering the cards and learning to make chance move in your direction more often than not. Every week or so, his father would drive the two of them someplace away from the house and show him the basic poker games and how the hands ranked, dealing cards on the car seats.

  On a Saturday six months after Winchell Dear received the pistol and cards, his father took him out in the desert, telling Winchell to bring along a deck of cards but not to let his mother see him doing it. “We’ll take the forty-four, make it look like we’re going to do a little shooting.”

  They went out to Winchell’s flat rock, and his father smiled. “Show me how you handle the cards, Winchell.”

  The boy did as he was told, shuffling, dealing, cutting, and looked up at his father.

  “Pretty good, I’d say. Pretty darn good, in fact. Little more practice is needed on your shuffle, but good enough for right now. Saw Fain Bracquet at the Thunder Butte Store yesterday and told him what I had in mind about him teaching you a few things. Said he’d be glad to do just that. By the way, what’s better, a straight or three of a kind?”

  Winchell Dear didn’t pause. “Straight.”

  “Two pair or three of a kind?”

  “Three of a kind.”

  “Two pair and jacks up, or one pair and aces up?”

  “Always two pair over one pair.”

  “Two pair or high pair?”

  “Two pair.”

  “Flush or a straight?”

  “Flush.”

  “What’re the odds of hitting a royal flush on the opening deal in straight poker?”

  “Six hundred fifty thousand to one.”

  “Good. Might see one or two royal flushes in a lifetime, so don’t count on the big-kill hands. Most of the money over the long haul is made by smart play of ordinary hands. Work things up a bit at a time, keep piling today’s gains on top of yesterday’s, which is kind of a general rule for life, what I call the value of the small increment.

  “Now, what’s the chance of converting two pairs into a full house with a one-card draw?”

  Winchell always struggled remembering those particular odds and hesitated. He looked up at his father and said, “About…eleven to one?”

  “That’s right, but you’ve got to get real smooth with the calculations, so smooth you can concentrate on the flow of the game and not the numbers. You’re coming along. Keep at it.”

  His father smiled again. “Your mother said your math lessons have been picking up lately and that she couldn’t figure out why. Let’s head on over to the store and look up Fain Bracquet. I don’t cotton to his ethics, but I do respect his skill.

  “And let me warn you about Fain. He can talk your right arm off and whisper in the hole. Has a tendency to think he’s something of an expert on everything, including women, horses, and water witching. Concentrate on what he says about card playing and ignore all the rest of the corral dust he hands out.”

  In the autumn of 1938, the temperature was still running over a hundred degrees by midday, though you could tell by the look of things that it would be cooling down a bit in another week or two. Something about how the late afternoon shadows latticed out from the chollas and Thompson yuccas. Something about how the wind felt as it switched around to the north and caused the Texas flag hanging from a pole on the Thunder Butte Store to flutter and occasionally snap with a sharp whuk.

  When they arrived at the store, Fain Bracquet was sitting on the front porch, tilted back in a chair with boots on the railing. He was intently studying a gold watch affixed to a gold chain, as if his world were coming to an end and he was trying to figure out just how much time he might have left.

  In the mind of Winchell Dear, it all felt like a story sometimes, his life when he thought back on it, as if it had never happened yet was being told. Life as a campfire version of someone else’s existence. A devious falsehood of pieces strung together as one fire rose in a prairie night and a second, the same fire but d
ying now, turned to warm ashes while long riders pulled their blankets around them and slept after the telling.

  Winchell Dear shuffled and dealt and arrayed the cards before him, but not feeling like another hand of Virginia reel solitaire, he stood and ran a glass of water. He leaned against the sink, sipped from the glass, and then emptied it in the drain. From a cupboard above the sink, he took a bottle of Old Charter. Tipped the bottle, studied it—a third full. He poured two fingers’ worth and carried the glass with him into the billiards room. It was coming up on one o’clock in the morning.

  A quarter mile northwest, dehydrated and exhausted, came Pablo Espinosa through the darkness, his relentless shuffle evolving into something more like a blind stagger by the time he reached the adobe. Even in the cool desert night he was sweating through his shirt for about the hundredth time on this run and knew he smelled worse than a five-day-old lion kill in midsummer. He rapped lightly on one of the west windows. The woman appeared and slid open the window, holding out her hands and saying nothing. He gave her the pack and followed it in, climbing over the sill.

  Immediately, she began haranguing him about how bad he smelled, telling him to get out of her bedroom and into the kitchen. Pablo noticed the bedroom didn’t smell all that good, either, drenched with the heavy and commingled scents of sex and sotol and sweat generated from something other than honest labor. The bed was unmade and rumpled, with an empty bottle lying on one of the pillows. On the table beside the bed was the stub of a candle, with cold drippings surrounding it like a skirt and flowing from the candleholder onto the table itself.

  While the woman named Sonia heated frijoles and rice and goat meat of the form called cabrito, Pablo Espinosa sat at her green-painted table. The table had drop-down leaves and was scored deeply in several places, the scars and stains coming from years of steady use by the Cobblers and later by those who worked for them. He drank three glasses of water and then sat quietly with his head in his hands, not being able to recall ever having been so tired. The run north required a young man’s legs and a young man’s spirit. Pablo Espinosa owned neither and knew his days of packing for the cartel would soon come to an end. But not before a piece of land in the high, cool, and watered Sierra Madre was his, so he hoped. And in spite of his fatigue, Pablo Espinosa once again forced bleary hope into a contract with himself as he sat at the woman’s table, reinforcing the covenant with visions of green trees and running water.

  By the time his food was ready, he’d folded his arms on the table, put his head on the fold, and was sleeping.

  The woman shook him harshly, saying, “Wake up, old man. Eat your food, then sleep for a few hours and be gone from here.”

  Groggy, Pablo Espinosa slowly wrapped the frijoles and rice and cabrito into a tortilla and began to eat, looking down at his plate and not at the woman. She leaned against the stove and watched him, thinking she ought to report how fatigued this one called Pablo Espinosa was each time he arrived and perhaps suggest he be replaced with someone more able. There was much law in this area—Texas Rangers, the Border Patrol, DEA people, state troopers, and other police. They knew the Pablo Espinosas were running through the days and nights toward places in el Norte, and Sonia Dominguez did not want this old man to be caught and talking freely about his drop point.

  He glanced up at her, eyes watery and hands shaking from fatigue. Mother Maria, Sonia Dominguez thought, it looked as if he might go to sleep with a tortilla in his hand and be sitting there like some statue carved as a tribute to the peasant life.

  “I have placed a blanket on the floor beside you. I will wake you two hours before dawn.” She pinched her nose. “Do you smell this bad when you climb on your wife? She must be a forgiving woman if you do.”

  “I think I have a fever,” Pablo Espinosa said.

  “You need sleep, old man, that’s all.”

  So saying, she carried the pack into her bedroom and closed the door behind her. Later she would redistribute the load into a suitcase, after skimming two ounces for her own stash in Long Rifle Cave. The young musician who dealt the skim in Clear Signal always told her what good mota it was when he paid her for a new batch, at a rate of one hundred and fifty dollars for each quarter pound and for which he would collect four hundred dollars by parceling it down even further and selling it to his friends, who smoked it and escaped for a while from lives going nowhere or giving every appearance of leading in that direction. After a while, though, the comfort became the cause, its magic obscuring that shift even as it happened.

  In three nights, Sonia Dominguez would pack two suitcases in a wheelbarrow and take them to a hiding place under the highway bridge running over Slater’s Draw. The man called Norpie would come at two A.M. in his new Buick, timing his approach so his would be the only car on that desolate stretch of West Texas highway. He would stop on the bridge, honk quickly four times as a signal, and take the suitcases. He would leave her two empty ones in their place, pay her, and the cycle would begin again. In a few more years, even though she sent a third of the money back to Mexico for her mother and sister, Sonia Dominguez would have enough saved to buy a house in the nicer part of Clear Signal and be able to live into a decent, quiet old age.

  Through her bedroom door, she could hear Pablo Espinosa snoring and shook her head in disgust. He even held to the old-fashioned sandals instead of the lug-soled hiking boots or sneakers worn by the others. None of the coyotes demonstrated any estilo, any style, including the Anglos who came through occasionally. Well, except for the young one named Franklin. He’d been a professional surfer at one time, so he said, though Sonia Dominguez wasn’t quite sure what that involved. He’d seemed to show interest in her on his last run and perhaps thought some possibilities existed out in the future, only after he had bathed and eaten, of course. But that would not come about, the mixing of business and pleasure. Sonia Dominguez had her own rules and stuck to them.

  After winding her bedside clock and setting the alarm, Sonia Dominguez took off her cotton robe and lay down on rumpled sheets, naked and fanning herself with a magazine. The alarm was set for well before dawn, but the loutish hombre called Espinosa would be sleepy, and it would take a good rousting to make him get up and leave her wallpapered kitchen on time.

  She raised and parted the curtains on a south-facing window. The old man, Winchell Dear, apparently was still awake, since there were lights on in the main house. But she had learned his ways and knew him to be a night person. Tomorrow she would cook his food and clean his rooms and make his bed, in the way she had done for the last two years, being careful not to disturb the mean-looking little pistola hanging from the right-hand post of his headboard.

  He was a strange, quiet man of few words, often handling cards, the sound of them riffling behind her sometimes while she worked. She watched him secretly and marveled at the light, easy touch he had with the cards. And she wondered about the pistola, if he really knew how to use it or only kept it near him for assurance, like a baby with its blanket or a traditional Mexican woman with her home.

  A year had passed since he had thrown out the loud and demanding gringita—and what a fight that had been, the woman screaming obscenities and saying he’d known how she was when he’d brought her out here.

  But, all of it considered, looked at six ways and accounted for, Sonia Dominguez had a pretty good deal and knew it. Unlike that wild Rick Cobbler before him, Winchell Dear was unfailingly polite, lenient in what he asked of her, and often gone for a week or two—sometimes a month—in that dark blue Cadillac of his, which made her night work even easier. She thought of all those things as she drifted into sleep just after midnight. The Comanche’s scent remained on her pillow, and she smiled, thinking about him and how lean and hard he felt.

  But she smiled even more when she started thinking about the house she would someday buy in the nicer part of Clear Signal, Texas. Not bad for a woman who had groveled and feared deportation for years, until the 1986 amnesty allowed her to become an
American citizen. Not bad at all and some better than that.

  Slightly more than ninety minutes southeast of El Paso, the cream-colored Lincoln Continental rolled easy through the little town of Corvalla, Texas.

  Marty pointed. “Look over there. Sign says, ‘Electrical Supplies and Fresh Ostrich Meat.’ What the hell kind of business combination is that? Hey, there’s a convenience store still open. Really think we need gas already?”

  “Can’t be too careful out here, Marty. It’s about a million miles between gas stations. Notice, we haven’t been able to get even shit-kickin’ music on the radio for the last forty miles. Nothing, just static.”

  “That’s true,” Marty said. “What kind of place don’t even get one radio station at night?”

  “This place,” the driver sighed, as he pulled alongside the pumps at the Amigos store.

  “We should’ve flown to El Paso and rented a car. Why didn’t we do that?”

  The driver was opening his door. “Marty, checking as airline baggage what we got in those metal boxes taped to the engine struts would have been a little risky. Might have gotten lost.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Marty was opening the passenger-side door. “I forgot about that. Didn’t have any problems at the border patrol checkpoint at Sierra Blanca, though, did we? Waved us right on through like you said. Glad I’m a white man, ain’t you?”

  The driver, whose mother was Mexican and birthed him at fifteen, inserted the nozzle in the Connie’s tank, looked up at the Texas night, and didn’t answer. He’d never known his mother. She’d crossed the border early in her fifteenth year and delivered, in that way making sure her child would be an American citizen. Afterward, she’d been sent back to Mexico for reasons never explained and left him to be raised by a distant aunt and uncle. He’d heard it said that his Anglo father was of fair complexion and worked the fishing boats out of San Diego.

  Marty walked to the front of the car and stretched his arms over his head, rising on his toes and bouncing slightly. “My back’s bothering me a little, all this riding. Back problems run in my family. Your back ever bother you on long drives?”