It was the preacher’s grown but slow son Ladson who found them. When he looked down from the parsonage window about daylight, there stood the red truck with its wheels in the air, and he at least knew enough to know it was wrong, and woke his mother. Soon there were a half-dozen men standing knee-deep in creek water straining to see through the shattered cab windows the dead boys, Johnny Bledsoe and his little brother Tommy, and redheaded Billy Hatcher, who was still alive, but they didn’t know it yet.

  Billy Hatcher was still living because of the buffer the steering wheel made, but though that was certainly lucky, it made him guilty, too, of driving too fast and trespassing (hunk where he shouldn’t have been, and in Roy Ashton’s truck, which he hadn’t even bothered to borrow.

  The Bledsoe boys’ parents vowed never to forgive Billy Hatcher, and as bad feeling spread, families and friends were split apart taking sides, those who thought Billy ought to go to jail, and those who thought he was too young to be responsible. It depended on how you viewed sixteen.

  I didn’t know all this at first, when I bought the bottom fields and moved into Pumpkin Valley — only that there was division and I would be expected to take sides eventually. I was newly widowed, and wanted only to find peace and hope. It was in all innocence that I let Billy Hatcher, by then eighteen, come to work for me — and Betty Bledsoe, the dead boys’ mother, drive for me. I knew she had suffered a tragedy, but I didn’t know what, and I knew Billy Hatcher wasn’t well liked, but I didn’t know why. I sensed there was something explosive waiting to happen in our valley, but I certainly didn’t expect to fuel it.

  The trouble began because I was fond of the groundhogs and I didn’t want anybody to kill them. It pained me to see them in the roadside stands, stuffed as souvenirs, wearing doll sunglasses and little baseball caps. I figured we farmers planted enough to share a little, and now that I owned the bottoms I kept a gate up to keep people out. But boys still slipped down there to shoot at the groundhogs — often just for target practice. Nobody seemed to eat the meat anymore. I resented the killing and determined to put a stop to it. But with the first No Hunting sign I made enemies. Some of my neighbors grew silent, and some of the mothers came at me like bantam hens protecting the rights of their dibs. “My Kenny’s been hunting down there all his life,” they’d say, or, “My Chad don’t bother nobody by huntin’ down there.”

  “It bothers me,” I’d say, “and it certainly bothers the groundhogs!”

  Betty Bledsoe, surprisingly, took my side, taking up the cause of the groundhogs. “I hate to hear all the shooting and noise down there,” she confided. “That place ought to be left in peace.” This she said while driving me to church, prim in her habitual colors, red, white, and blue.

  Granny Endower, our guest in the backseat, observed, slowly and meaningfully, “Groundhogs ain’t got souls. What does it matter?”

  “God instructed Noah to take the animals into his care,” I countered. “That’s what I’m doing.”

  On the way home, once Granny Endower had been let out, Betty Bledsoe, between slow tears, told me about her boys.

  So when Billy Hatcher came to me later that week asking permission to go nights to the bottom fields — he didn’t want to hunt, he said, he just wanted to sit and think and listen to the night sounds — I acquiesced. I thought I understood. It was the place of his guilt, and he needed to come to terms with it. “Of course,” I said, with empathy.

  Now and then I heard a blast or a blam and figured the groundhogs’ ranks were being depleted by some quick trespasser, but not often. It was frustrating knowing I couldn’t get down there quickly enough to catch anyone, living up the mountain above the parsonage as I did, and I could no longer depend on Ladson to keep an eye out, he having been sent away to an institution. But most of the boys seemed to stay away, and whenever I passed the field two or three of the funny furry groundhogs always sat up from their foraging, like alert sentries. I heard an occasional rumor that someone was setting traps for them, but I had no proof.

  Billy Hatcher with his red hair and special guilt was the only one I permitted to go down there, and, in a quiet moment, I told Betty Bledsoe about his request and my reasoning.

  My comments seemed to make an impression. Betty was — or had been — a mother. Now she had no sons to fuss over. Billy, perhaps because he had so few friends, seemed to be maturing into a responsible if reticent young man. He looked, to me, like an angel ordained against his will, with his fiery red hair and his quick temper suppressed now by determined quiet words and attention to whatever he considered duty.

  I’d heard he had never known much love in his upbringing, and I began to fantasize that he and Betty would between them form some shared bond from their tragedy. It would help assuage his guilt, and her now childless loneliness. And so I was pleased when Betty began coming by afternoons while Billy was still there. That first time she nodded at him, the merest of greetings, I felt my heart lift in a way it had not lifted for years. I almost felt I could believe in peace and hope again, in happy endings. When I saw Billy striking out across the bottoms in late summer, groundhogs making an occasional dark shadow on the stubble before him, and Betty, parked in her car at sunset, looking out and down at that place where her sons drew their last breaths, I felt overjoyed that I’d helped ease the terrible tension between them.

  Not many nights after, the explosion of a double-barreled shotgun woke me. It was the close of an Indian summer night, a faint rosy hue was beginning to lift the darkness, and only my thudding heart spoke of terror. Then Blam! Blam! the gun sounded again, too close. The bottoms? I covered my head with the pillow and must have dozed. I woke to a sound even more unfamiliar to our valley — that of a siren.

  I got up, put on a warm robe and my glasses, and went out on the porch. I could see a flashing light below the parsonage. Then the EMS ambulance started up, returning to town — but slowly, without the siren. I watched it cross the gap. Another siren approached — the deputy’s car? I thought about dressing, going down to the bottoms to see what had happened, but I knew that Granny Endower would call me soon enough with the news.

  Until then, I went into the kitchen to make some coffee, and I was there when Betty Bledsoe knocked at the front door. I might not have recognized her, but for the familiar red, white, and blue she wore. She stood there, disheveled, a stranger in her swaying stance, with the gun and heavy towsack she carried. Blood dripped from it onto the porch floor that Billy had painted and kept so carefully clean for me.

  “There’s groundhogs in here!” Betty’s eyes and face blazed. She must have run all the way from the bottoms carrying the heavy dripping sack, she was so winded and red. “Do you understand me?” she pleaded. “Groundhogs!”

  I looked at her uncomprehendingly.

  “That’s all he was doing, all he was going to the bottoms for, all that time... trapping the groundhogs!”

  “Who?” I asked weakly.

  “Billy Hatcher! One of the traps was right there where the truck went in, where my boys... There was a groundhog caught, chewing its foot off, when along he comes, checking the traps, whistling...”

  She handed me the sack. I staggered back from the weight, blood dripping now inside my clean house.

  “The ambulance?” I asked dully.

  “So I shot him. I killed him! What else could I do?” She threw up her hands wildly. “He was killing the groundhogs!”

  A Script for the President

  by William Bankier

  © 1993 by William Bankier

  A new short story by William Bankier

  This year the real president of the United States was honored by the Mystery Writers of America as its Reader of the Year. The revelation that Mr. Clinton loves a mystery must have brought him a lot of mail from aspiring writers. We hope none of them proves as persistent as the scriptwriter of Mr. Bankier’s story...

  ❖

  Royal Flagg woke up thinking he was back in Smokey Valley. He thought he heard somebody tuning his mother’s piano. Eyes closed, he waited to hear her voice calling from the foot of the stairs: “Roy? You’ll be late for school!”

  The garbage truck in the laneway off Hollywood Boulevard stopped backing up so the repetitive note he had mistaken for a piano came to an end. Connie Seltzer rolled over beside him and made wet noises with her mouth. He was not going to miss school, he was going to be late for the early shift at the restaurant.

  “I am your waiter, Royal,” he rumbled close to her ear, speaking through a filter of her ash-blond hair. “The special this morning is a nibble on the neck.”

  Connie squeaked as she stretched and turned to intrude her tiny self into the cage of his lanky arms and legs. “I don’t believe you!” she murmured.

  Nobody did. They all thought he was just another southern boy lost in L.A.; one more aspiring actor/writer waiting tables while dreaming of discovery, fame, and fortune. Few people realized that Royal Flagg had friends in high places. He was not a rose born to blush unseen. Soon, very soon, he was going to light up the sky.

  “Don’t do it, Roy.” Connie was driving the car in dressing gown and bare feet. This habit was so Californian, Roy could only tolerate it by writing it into his script. The routine was for her to drop him at the restaurant on Melrose and head back to the apartment. There, she would take her time getting ready for her ten o’clock start at the radio station.

  “Why not do it?” he said. “It’s a golden opportunity.”

  “You’ll be setting your mother up for a big rejection.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You stopped sending her money. You don’t even answer her letters.”

  “She’ll come if I ask her.”

  Roy did not feel guilty about stopping the money. His mother was not the only one chasing him to pay. Anyway, all she did was use it for cat food and vet bills. It was crazy to have ten cats. Last time he flew to New Orleans and did the long drive in the rental car to Smokey Valley, the animals really spooked him. A few of them were normal. But others were ghost cats — old, sick strays that looked like cats made out of pipe cleaners. One orange character teetered on the lawn near the porch and stared at Roy as if he had materialized out of thin air.

  Clara Hunter Flagg was a bleeding heart. Roy classified her this way even though he knew it was only a small part of the truth. He could not afford, not right now, to see her any other way. He needed all his concentration, and what little money he was earning, to push his career. His film script was ready. The fact that two agents had read An Air That Kills and declined to handle it meant nothing.

  “Are you getting out of the car?” Connie said. “Or do you intend to sit here all morning?”

  There was the restaurant door propped open. There was the ditzy sequined sign, Scrump. Behind the big window sat menacing silhouettes, customers who would want their toast taken back because it was not supposed to be buttered. And the ketchup bottle was empty. And always, always, more coffee. When he first arrived in L.A. and was a customer himself, Roy had enjoyed coming to Scrump. In those bragging, swaggering days, he met Connie Seltzer here. He got himself a fine place to live, rent-free.

  “Will you talk to Chatterton?” Roy was balanced on the Melrose Avenue pavement now, high-top training shoes rocking just a trifle, bending his frame to show Connie his worried expression.

  “Can’t you put your mother up in a Best Western?”

  “She won’t come if it’s a hotel. We have no room. Hal has that giant condo.”

  “All right, I’ll ask him.” Connie let the car creep forward. “But you know Hal Chatterton. Don’t be surprised if he says no.”

  The headphones mashed Chatterton’s fuzzy brown hair on both sides. Connie had said once that he looked like a Brillo sandwich. L.A.’s popular talk-show host liked that one. He used it a few times on the air.

  “In the next half-hour,” he said into the microphone, “we have Dirty Berty on the line from London to dish the dirt about the royals. And my aggressive co-host, Connie Seltzer, will review the movie Acid Heart. Did you actually see this one, Connie?”

  “Start to finish. Paid my money and hung in to the end.”

  “Not a rave, I take it?”

  “Not unless you like women in cages.”

  “Save it till after the break. This is Hal ‘Chatty’ Chatterton on 109, KLDD.”

  As the commercial sequence began, Chatterton lowered the volume on the studio speaker. “Give it to me again,” he said to Connie. “His mother?”

  “I met her once in New Orleans when Roy and I first started going together. He drove alone to Smokey Valley and got her and brought her to the hotel. He didn’t want me to see where he used to live.”

  “Smokey Valley.” Chatterton shook his head slowly and half closed his eyes, as if he had just heard of the existence of a lost city.

  “She’s a cheerful old biddy. Taught school all her life. The residents of the town worship her, they all sat in her class. Including you know who.”

  “He really knows Mike Linford?”

  “I don’t think they ever exchanged words. Linford is somewhat older. But Roy saw him around, he used to come to his house.” It was exciting, talking with such familiarity about the new president of the United States. “Mike Linford used to come over to the Flagg residence for piano lessons.”

  “I have to admit it, I’m impressed. All this time I’ve considered your friend to be a Louisiana con artist. Sammy Glick with Spanish moss,” Chatterton said, referring to Schulberg’s famous antihero. “Now I have to concede he’s a con artist who knows the president.”

  “Royal Flagg is just a name to Linford.” Connie hurried as the commercials rolled through. “But Clara Hunter Flagg would be an important person from the president’s past. We’ve all seen what an approachable character Linford is. If his old piano teacher were to show up, he’d see her.”

  “And I’m to house the widow Flagg for how long? A weekend?” The producer in the control room had her finger raised, one eye on the clock. “What does she take on her bran flakes?” Chatterton said, preparing his mind for Dirty Berty from London.

  Royal Flagg was hovering by the cashier’s end of the counter, doing what he liked best. He was counting his tips. He pressed a sheaf of ones on Frederico and waited for big bills in exchange. Frederico was from Guatemala. When Roy came aboard, Freddy was a busboy. Now he wore a burgundy cummerbund and a black moustache.

  “You must be about ready to buy your house,” he said as he handed the waiter his money.

  “Got to fly my mother in from New Orleans. She’s coming next weekend.”

  “That’s nice.” Frederico’s mother would never come to L.A. She was in a common grave near their village along with a dozen other women and children.

  Roy emptied his eyes and showed the cashier a limpid smile. For his own amusement, because he was certain Freddy had never seen the movie Psycho, he used a Norman Bates voice as he said, “A boy’s best friend is his mother.”

  Frederico tapped the wall calendar. “Linford will be in town. Your mother can see the president.”

  “I’m working on it,” Roy said. He stuffed his wallet down into a front pocket of his jeans and left the restaurant. Connie was waiting in the car three meters along the street. Roy fought off an urge to kick in one of the doors. She had finished the show and then had driven all the way from the studio on Cahuenga. She would chauffeur him to the apartment and then head back to the studio to prepare tomorrow’s program. Roy felt like a school kid. Once in a while she missed and he took a cab. And then only after a delicious wander, looking at people and at himself in windows.

  She reached across the seat to open his door. “Okay shift?”

  “So-so. Do a good show?”

  “Like the curate’s egg,” she said. “Good in parts.”

  Connie had lots of these literary-type things to say. Roy disliked them. “Talk to Chatterton?”

  “Not yet.” She had predicted Hal would not agree to put up Roy’s mother. It bothered her to admit she had been wrong about that. “I’ll try this afternoon.”

  They wheeled into traffic. One good thing about his prisoner-status in Connie’s car; she was a conscientious driver, she tended to shut up. This left Roy free to think about his script. Whenever he was feeling down, a few minutes dreaming about An Air That Kills would lift him into a state of euphoria.

  The movie would open with footage shot from a helicopter. The camera is racing at low level across a wooded area, a blur of dark branches. Now we see open pasture with two horses galloping flat out. The horses are terrified, of course, because the chopper is making a ferocious noise. But the viewers don’t think of that. They’re just watching those elegant stallions running, shoulder to shoulder.

  Then the camera lifts and we see the village, the house with the green roof. And we see the boy standing in the open gateway, not waving as a pickup truck raises dust on its way to the paved road.

  “You’ll be all right now?” They were in front of the apartment building. She always asked him if he’d be all right.

  “Soon as I get the booze and the marijuana. And telephone the gang to come on over.” She drove away, leaving him with a glimpse of her tolerant smile. Roy went inside. He was going to use the telephone, not for anything as sterile as partying. He was going to put a call through to Ellis and Fanny Temple. It was one thing to leave everything to his mother. But what if she could not get through to the president on the day? It would be prudent to prepare the ground.

  “This is Royal Flagg speaking. I’d like to talk to Ellis Temple. It’s in connection with the president’s visit next weekend?” He had opened a new barrel of Southern Courtesy and was letting the sweet stuff flow. Asked to wait, he passed the time making faces at himself in the mirror beside Connie’s desk.

 

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