Blackbird - Tom Wright

Скачать книгу

intense as it was, the image had no staying power, dissolving almost immediately to leave me staring at the chessboard behind it. All my life I’d had what my grandmother called a ‘touch of the Sight’, beyond ordinary intuition but rare, unpredictable, and almost always short of useful clairvoyance, and I assumed I’d just been touched. But as usual I had no idea what it meant. I sat for a minute, thinking about it and waiting for my heart rate to subside. Nothing occurred to me.

      Then, remembering that as usual lately I’d skipped breakfast this morning, and wondering about the relationship between blood sugar levels and a runaway imagination, I found a couple of fairly crisp singles in my billfold and headed for the break room. Finding it deserted, I walked across and stood at the window for a minute watching the rain from a new angle. It seemed to be coming down harder now, and though I couldn’t hear anything through the thick double-paned glass I actually thought I could smell it, the two facts seeming, for no reason I could put my finger on, strange and wrong to me.

      I pulled the knobs for a couple of candy bars, poured coffee into a Styrofoam cup and picked up a copy of the Gazette somebody had left on one of the small Formica-topped tables against the wall. No surprises here: everybody supporting the proposed new rehab facility and halfway house as long as it wasn’t in their neighbourhood, evangelical commandos in a sweat over sex education and Huckleberry Finn in the high schools, Louisiana Quarter politicians angling for a cut of the new highway bill. A tenth anniversary retrospective on the unsolved rape and murder of a local eleven-year-old named Joy Dawn Therone, the coverage then transitioning into a rundown of all the uncleared murders and disappearances of girls and young women in this part of the state over the last thirty years. I folded the paper and pushed it across to the other side of the table.

      Then the vision of Bragg Field returned, this time superimposed only on the background of the break room and persisting as an accurate replay of something that had actually happened. Now the stands and the field were no longer dark but rocking with life and light and sound inside the cold grey roar of the rain soaking the county and threatening to drown out the marching bands and the screams, cheers, whistles and air horns from the stands, never letting up from the kickoff to the last play. Our Homecoming game, the field now nothing but a hundred yards of churned mud and turf, the District championship and our shot at the State title on the line, and time running out on us. We stood in a ragged, dripping circle, eyes on number 16, quarterback Eldrew Cleveland Dasbro, brutally forcing himself to stand straight in defiance of the two cracked ribs that would show up on the x-rays after the game.

      ‘Red Hook Toss?’ he gritted through clenched teeth at Johnny Trammel, who’d just brought the play in from the sideline. ‘Are you shittin’ me?’

      Johnny, my closest friend at Bragg, was a magician. He’d played Dr Prestidigito in the drama club’s fall presentation, and I’d seen him make all kinds of things appear and disappear – the coins from his collections, golf balls, even on one unforgettable occasion a gerbil that had first vanished, then somehow gotten out of Johnny’s coat pocket and down the neck of Janie Cochran’s sweater. But, as quick and elusive as he was, Johnny could never pull the Red Hook out of the hat, not in conditions like these, or against the kind of speed the Hawks’ defensive end had. We were down seven points with two and a half minutes left in the game; this was the only shot we were going to get. Johnny shook his head miserably.

      But Daz was through with bullshit. ‘Okay, listen up, you lesbians,’ he said. ‘This here’s your higher power telling you Fake Twenty-two Boot Right is what Johnny-boy said, and that’s what we’re gonna run on these limp-dicks.’ Winking at me, he leaned aside to spit through his facemask, flinching and showing his teeth at the movement, then clapped his hands to break the huddle. Then as he stepped in behind centre I saw him do what he’d always done when he had to – send his pain to some other dimension and become an uninjured version of himself, nothing now to show he was hurt but the blood on his hands.

      At the snap I feinted left toward the line as Johnny blew by me to wrap his arms around Daz’s phoney handoff, Daz sideslipping back from the line with the ball still on his hip in a perfect bootleg fake, me kicking out and swinging downfield through the right flat and Daz floating the ball over my shoulder with flawless touch. I cradled it in twenty yards downfield, just out of the corner’s reach, and a few seconds later I was in the end zone, bringing us to within a point of the Hawks. We went for the two-point conversion and got it, me going off-tackle this time, nothing fancy, just hitting the hole as hard as I could. We were up by one.

      Our kickoff carried to the back of their end zone in spite of the downpour, and four hopeless plays later the Hawks were done. Daz took a knee a couple of times and the District championship was ours.

      The coaches all agreed that if he could stay healthy Daz was a sure thing for a major college scholarship, and would probably go no later than the middle rounds of the pro draft, but as it turned out he was a dead man walking. Halfway through a season when it looked like the Aggies’ were on their way to the Cotton Bowl, Daz on the roster as the freshman second-string quarterback, he would crash head-on into an eighteen-wheeler out of Beaumont while driving the brand new Audi an alumni dealer had let him ‘borrow’, his death instantaneous.

      The memories popped like bubbles when Ridout stuck his head in the door, holding up his right hand splayed like a chicken’s foot. ‘Cueing Squarepants in five,’ he said.

      ‘I thought it was your turn?’

      ‘Nope. We traded back when you took the girls to Sea World.’ He disappeared, leaving behind a suggestion of Stetson aftershave on the air.

      A former Texas-side chief had come up with an idea he called Conference Day, designating a media room where the departments announced toy drives, made excuses in high-profile murder cases, warned against drunk driving and issued tactical lies. My old partner Floyd Zito had called it the Officer Squarepants Show, and the name had turned out to have legs. This morning Channel Six wanted a two-minute spot on the dangers of burglar bars.

      By now the Tri-State sky had darkened to the colour of wet slate, the rain still steady and hard, beating silently at the window and branching down the glass in miniature rivers. I looked at the candy bar I’d just taken a bite of. I couldn’t see anything wrong with it, but it had no taste. I tossed it in the trash, checked the time and headed for my rendezvous with the cameras.

      When I stepped into the media room the reporter rose from the metal folding chair she’d been sitting on and walked over to meet me. I knew her from a couple of past interviews, a thin, tense woman named Mallory Peck with a big arrangement of black hair and a parsimonious smile. As Mallory stuck out an icy little hand to shake, a production assistant wearing tight, scruffy jeans out at the knees and a Soundgarden T-shirt appeared from somewhere with a makeup kit, tilting her head as she approached, assessing the angles and shadows of my face with an expert eye.

      Mallory said, ‘So, Jim, ready to reach out to the masses?’

      I was about to answer when I saw Ridout making his way toward us from across the room, wearing a crooked little grin of defeat as he cocked and fired an imaginary six-shooter in the air. He tipped his head toward Chief Royal’s office as he joined us, Mallory smoothly transferring her attention to him, saying, ‘Well, looks like I get the bull rider instead.’ Her smile notched up a few watts as she inventoried Ridout’s muscles.

      ‘Steer wrestler,’ he corrected, his own expression brightening. ‘Bull riders are those crazy-eyed little dudes that walk crooked.’

      ‘Mallory, Danny,’ I said. ‘Danny, Mallory.’ I headed for OZ’s office.

      Nobody who’d worked out of Three for more than a day would have misunderstood Ridout’s six-gun gesture, which harked back to OZ’s thirty years with the Texas Rangers, an outfit founded by characters who hunted their man until they got him and didn’t talk much about it; silent, fearless, incorruptible men who never complained, never explained and never quit. Superstitious nineteenth-century border bandits and Comancheros, watching them ride alone through the true valley of the shadow of death, the only law in a quarter of a million square miles of the most dangerous ground on earth, called them demons.

      The

Скачать книгу