Starr County Line Read online

  “That was when they made the drop,” JD said.

  “I guess you’re right there, Sheriff,” Hodge agreed.

  “When did you see this boy for the first time, Hodge?” JD asked.

  Hodge scratched his head.

  “It was yesterday,” he told him. “He was walkin around in the yard, lookin at all them old window units and lawn mowers. I come home for lunch and there he was. I went back to work and it kept stickin at me. I knowed Boles had some kids, but I ain’t never seen em and I didn’t think it was likely any one of em was Mexican. I called Roe this mornin, but I guess I done it too late.”

  “He must of been lookin for the dope,” JD said.

  “I guess you’re right there, Sheriff,” Hodge said again. He lit a cigarette and walked to the porch. “You want a Coke? I got some in the icebox.”

  “No, I’m all right,” JD replied, “thanks. I gotta go take another look around Boles’ place. Listen, you see anything, you stick to the indoors, all right?”

  “I will, Sheriff,” Hodge promised.

  “I know you got that shotgun in there by the door,” JD said, “so don’t go and do nothin stupid if you do see somethin. If theys comin to look for this boy or the money or the dope or all three, they ain’t gonna be messin around and I don’t want to have to bury you, too.”

  “All right, Sheriff,” Hodge said.

  He got in the Blazer and drove over to Boles’ house and stopped twenty yards or so from the porch. He could see his tire tracks from earlier, and those from Roe’s cruiser, but crisscrossing them was a new set of tracks, like those of a big four wheeler.

  The big vehicle had pulled in and parked, then backed out and crossed the tracks again and headed to the road, best he could tell. He parked the Blazer and got out. He figured there wasn’t anyone around, but he unsnapped the safety strap on his gun just the same.

  Cicada twitched on every bush branch in the late day simmer. Weeds so high around Boles’ house they nearly covered all the rusting oddities he had scattered around the yard. Old air conditioners. An engine block. A half-scavenged tractor. There had to be a hundred snakes in and amongst them.

  He stopped to pick up a cigarette butt in a pothole. Marlboro. Not Boles’ brand. He stuffed it into his shirt pocket. Right hand resting on his gun, he walked up the drive to the porch. The yellow police tape had been cut. It fluttered in the hot breeze.

  He climbed the steps and stopped at the door.

  “Sheriff’s Department,” he called out.

  He pushed in on the door. It was now unlocked and only half-closed. He opened it with his boot toe and listened as the old hinges whined. He waited for the knob to bump the wall. The house was a swelter. Fresh footprints in the carpet. Boots with dirt on them. These boys weren’t trying to cover their tracks, he thought. They were real bold or not real smart, he pretty much decided. Neither one of the prospects settled right in his gut. He pulled his gun.

  “Sheriff’s Department,” he called again.

  He headed for the attic door and pulled the string. The smell was still strong. He pulled the ladder down and unfolded it and climbed up inside. He didn’t have any reason to believe there might be more dope hidden in the attic, but he didn’t have any reason to believe there wasn’t. He had just put his gun back in the holster when he heard the distinctive sound of short exhaust pipes and bad shocks coming up the driveway.

  “Sonofabitch,” he whispered to himself. “Why didn’t you just set out in the yard and butt a stump and wait for em.”

  He could hear the engine idle, the throttle wide open. They’d parked behind the Blazer. He could hear a truck door open and shut. He pulled his gun and eased back the hammer. Anybody coming in would know now where to look for him, that’s for certain. He looked around for some place to hide, but there wasn’t one. Boxes of clothes, probably belonged to Boles’ wife, were stacked everywhere. He could hear a mouse squeaking inside one of them.

  “Hey, I’m right up here, see?” he whispered, as he reached for the rung on the ladder and almost fell out of the attic. He set his gun down on the platform 2x4’s and leaned out, his fingers just brushing the fourth step. He finally stuck two fingertips to it and pulled up with all his strength and the door began to slowly rise. There was no way to retract the ladder. He stopped the door from banging closed against the ceiling as best he could and he sat there in the crawlspace waiting with the ladder sticking out.

  Sweat began to pour off him. It was in his eyes and his ears and running down his neck. He held the gun and tried to ease the pain in his knees. He could hear the muffled sounds of someone entering the house. He heard them jack a round into a shotgun. A dark shape crossed the gap of light in the door frame. Footsteps beneath the attic door. They moved down the hall, stopping at the bathroom doorway and then that of each bedroom. Just perfunctory checks really. They already knew where he was.

  He tried to track in his mind the actions of the gunman. The grim, confident smile that would come with knowing he had someone cornered up there in the crawlspace. That feeling a man with a gun gets when he knows the person on the other end sees in a blink that life is finite, that it ends, and that it might end right now. He’d pick a place to stand so to get the best shot and level the scattergun at his waist. No need to shoulder fire and take that nasty recoil. He’d hold for that anxious moment between raising the shotgun and making the decision to pull the trigger, followed by the sharp intake of breath and that slow exhale.

  Seconds passed. He heard the footfalls again and they stopped beneath the attic door. He leaned back and turned his head to one side. The attic door exploded with a gaping hole and splinters and lead shot peppered the roof. A cloud of sawdust erupted and he shut his eyes tight. It was in his mouth and his nose. He fired blindly back through the hole twice, the retort of the Magnum echoing in the bare attic space. Footsteps, cowboy boots, thudding towards the front door. He’d missed.

  He put his boot to the attic door and pushed down on it and when it opened, he fell down the broken ladder to the floor. He landed hard on his shoulder and the wind was knocked out of him. He lay for a moment and tried to get his wits. His shoulder felt like it was broken. He looked up at the yawning cavity in the attic door and blinked slowly.

  He could hear the truck’s engine rev and throw dirt as it accelerated in reverse. It banged over a pothole and broke a shock absorber and the fender sank into the knobby tire as the driver floored it. He got up and ran through the front door and stumbled when he crossed the threshold. He fired a clumsy shot at the truck as it hit the road and peeled out.

  Hodge came running through the bushes brandishing his shotgun. JD was leaning against the pillar on the porch, his chest heaving.

  “Sheriff, you all right?” Hodge called out.

  JD waved him off. “Yeah, Hodge, I’m all right,” he told him.

  He limped to the Blazer and got in.

  “Roe,” he called on the radio, “get on out here to Boles’ place.”

  He dropped the mike and slumped in the seat.

  He watched from the front seat of the Blazer as Roe emerged from the house with Polaroid snaps of the scene. He stuffed them in his shirt pocket and walked over.

  “You all right, Sheriff?” Roe asked.

  “Yeah I’m all right,” he told him. “Fell out of the damned attic. Thought I busted my shoulder.”

  Roe swallowed like something was stuck in his throat.

  “That hole in the attic door’s as big as a watermelon,” he said.

  “Yep,” JD replied.

  “Measured nearly twenty inches across,” Roe said.

  “What’re you drivin at, Roe?” JD asked.

  Roe kicked at the dirt.

  “They certainly wasn’t afraid to shoot at you,” he said. “Men not afraid to shoot at the law’ll do a lot of things.”

  JD got out of the vehicle and put a hand on Roe’s shoulder. He never really knew what to say to the young man about these dramatic shifts in the lan
dscape. There was a time when they worried more about teenagers on Friday night beer runs and vandalism. Maybe a stolen car.

  Now they faced this and JD knew things would never be the same. Roe was right. Men not afraid to shoot at the law would do a lot of things. He tried to push it to the back of his mind. The knots in his stomach did not relent.

  “Get on back to the station house and file the report,” JD told him.

  He watched Roe ease the cruiser over the bad ground and roll slowly out onto the road. The radio in the Blazer crackled.

  “Sheriff,” the voice called, “this is Pink. I found that truck you’re lookin for. Mile north on Alamo from Boles’ place.”

  He thumbed the mike and said, “Okay I’m on my way.”

  He flipped the cylinder on the Magnum and put in three rounds to replace those spent earlier. He laid the gun in the seat and backed around. He slowed at the driveway entrance to look at a leaning steel pole from a chainlink fence Boles once had on the property. It had a six-inch long stripe of blue paint on it about three feet up from the ground.

  Once on the blacktop, he floored it. Alamo Road was just two miles out. The breeze fluttered the picture of him and his father down from the sun visor. He slowed down and parked so he could pick it up out of the floorboard. It was taken the day he shipped out for Iwo and his old man beamed in the yellowed snapshot like he’d struck oil in the backyard.

  He’d managed to live through that wretched campaign without getting killed or doing something stupid, he would tell people on the occasions they were bold enough to ask, but his old man always acted like he had single-handedly raised Old Glory on Mt. Suribachi himself. He would stand dutifully by and listen as the stories unfolded at each Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

  He registered for the draft again in 1948 as required by law, and got the expected 4-A classification. His old man had seen the writing on the wall in 1949 and urged him to join the police academy in nearby Lubbock. That and some motherly handwringing outside the Baptist Church one Sunday got him a deferment when America entered the Korean conflict in 1950.

  He’d harbored some resentment towards the old man at the time for pushing him in the direction he had, but looking back he could see why he’d done it. World War II was everyone’s war, it seemed back then. Korea and stopping the spread of communism was something his old man just didn’t understand and he didn’t know why American boys had to be involved.

  He’d made twenty-six arrests as a uniformed officer and lost his first wife to greener pastures in Dallas before he left Lubbock in 1955 for Starr County. He wrote a letter to the sheriff inquiring about a job as a deputy. The sheriff had written him back just two days later and asked when he could start. The opportunity to work alongside the vaunted Texas Rangers and be a part of the force that tamed the Texas Mexico border was just too good to pass up.

  He joined the Starr County Sheriff’s Department in ’55 and married a Mexican woman in ’59. He wore the badge with pride and understood what came with it. He pulled the 24-hour stretches to get a leg up and work with Sheriff Von Franklin, who quickly took him under his wing and recognized in him a work ethic for the badge that would forever be unflagging. The Mexican woman left him in ’62 after one too many late nights waiting for word that he’d been killed kicking in someone’s door.

  He spoke with his old man by phone often and regaled him with stories about cattle rustlers and high speed car chases down back country roads, most of which were embellished to just short of unbelievable. Every year the old man would get a new department issue photograph of his only son in his starched white shirt and Stetson, gold badge pinned proudly on his breast. He buried the old man in Lubbock in ‘66. He didn’t recognize the town anymore and the town sure didn’t recognize him.

  He blinked back the memories and looked at the prairie surrounding him. Brown and yellow flatland seemed to reach beyond the horizon. It could swallow him and this town and more and no one would know. Aside from the barbed wire and the plow lines, no one would know people had been here. A trailer here, a frame house there. Hard scrabble living down on the border. He wondered about all those who were here before him. Why they chose this place. He could never answer that question himself when he was asked.

  He put the photo back in the visor and shifted into drive and moved on to meet Pink.

  He knew it was the truck the second he laid eyes on it. Lift kit over the big off-road tires, cheap roll bar in the bed. Primer gray almost all over, right rear suspension sagging on the big knobby tire where the shock broke in Boles’ driveway. Bullethole near the stepside. Likely a police issue .38, best he could guess. No license plate.

  It was dripping oil all over the blacktop. They’d busted the pan. He wondered how many of them were out there now running through the brush. Roy Pink was standing in the road by his tow truck, the look a fisherman gets when he’s hooked a big one all over his face. He parked a few yards ahead of him and got out.

  “You can keep any money you found in there, Pink, but I get the guns,” he joked.

  “Hell, Sheriff, ain’t nothin in there but a map of the town,” Pink said. He held it out for JD.

  He took the map and unfolded it as Pink hooked the truck up and started the old winch to get the front end off the ground and secured. The map had red pencil lines drawn on the backroads to Boles’ house. Pink let go the winch stick when he had the truck lifted.

  “How much you work this part of the county, Pink?” JD asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Sheriff. I’d say forty, fifty percent of my work is out this way,” Pink told him.

  “How many people out here you reckon got blue cars or trucks?” JD asked.

  “Lord, Sheriff, I don’t know, that could be a lot,” Pink answered.

  JD put a hand on his shoulder. “Let’s trim it to a five mile radius then,” he said.

  Pink thought it over for a moment. “Well, Sheriff,” he said, “I can’t come up with but just one.”

  “Who’s that?” JD asked him.

  Pink spat some tobacco juice on the road.

  “Lyle. Lyle Forsythe,” he told him.

  He put the Blazer in park and sat in the drive for a minute. She pulled back the curtains to see if it was him but didn’t come outside. He looked at himself in the mirror. The man staring back was tired and angry. He unlocked the shotgun and got out and went inside, the big weapon under his arm.

  “Don’t you bring that thing in my house,” she called out.

  He stopped just inside the threshold and quietly stuck the .12 gauge in the hall closet.

  “All right, no need for yellin,” he told her.

  She appeared in the hallway from the kitchen. She was still wearing her waitress uniform, rough around the edges from the day, but she cut through his hard boundaries quick no matter how she looked.

  “I ain’t yellin,” she said, smiling softly. “I just don’t want that cannon in my house.”

  “Well, it’s in the closet,” he told her.

  “What are you bringin it inside for, JD?”

  He walked over to her and cupped her face in his hands and kissed her.

  “I love you,” he told her.

  She pushed him away.

  “Your dinner’s gettin cold,” she told him.

  They ate and sat in the cool of the front room. He turned on the TV. They watched The Waltons and Ellery Queen. He stood in the yard and listened to the trees in the late hour of the evening. One cicada called to another. He listened to them go back and forth until one fell silent. He saw the mockingbird leave the tree and head out into the night.

  “Come on, baby,” she called from the porch. “Let’s go to bed.”

  He walked to the porch and held her hand. She squeezed his tight, like she always did. He winked at her and she laughed at him. Nothing, not one damn thing, he thought, has changed between them since they first met. It always made him want to cry when he thought about it. They watched the high, thin clouds pass in front of the
moon and went inside.

  He arrived at the station house the next morning a little after seven a.m., as usual. Roe was there waiting, coffee was brewing and the town was beginning to come to life. He stood outside and watched as the boy from the courthouse raised the flag on the pole. The boy at the flagpole waved at him. He nodded his head and waved back.

  The Wagon Wheel was opening. Ange would be along soon to start her shift. Hollis would open the Tinsel at 10 AM. He’d show Three Stooges shorts and Bugs Bunny cartoons to the kids. Jeannie Pruitt would open the Burger Stop and wait for the mill shift to come get lunch. He smiled at the regularity of it, but sensed that somewhere it was all slipping away.

  “Mornin, Sheriff,” Roe said as he walked in.

  “Mornin, Roe,” he told him. “How’s our prisoner?”

  “He’s fine I guess,” Roe said. “He didn’t eat nothin, still ain’t said nothin.”

  “Anything from Albert?” he asked, looking at the stack of papers on his desk.

  “Yeah,” Roe said, “you got a report on the teletype overnight. It’s settin there on top. The DA called. He wants you to call him.”

  “Can’t wait,” JD said flatly. He picked up the report and read it. He looked down the hall to the jail cell.

  “Roe,” he said, “you remember that story we heard about Agualeguas?”

  Roe thought for a minute. “Some town in Mexico,” Roe said, “where the police chief was killed and the jail burned down couple years back?”

  “That’s right,” JD told him. “Our boy in there is Miguel Terlingua. Wanted for questioning by the Mexican Federales in connection with that very event.”

  “No shit,” Roe said.

  “Watch your cussin,” JD said. He took a sip of his coffee and frowned.