The Devil's Good Boys, page 59
“That's exactly right,” Charlie chirped in, obviously flattered.
The cops clearly found our dishwasher an unlikely candidate for an offender in the overnight massacre. Without a word, they turned to leave. The old man and I followed along.
“Seems like sane law enforcers would pin a medal on whoever shot up that outlaw crew,” opined Blackjack McGrath. “Last winter, the Mountain Boys pulled armed robberies in every restaurant in this town, plus the A&P supermarket. But you Barney Fifes seem hell-bent on jailing somebody for shooting them.”
Ponz drew himself up. “Whoever it was, they broke the law!”
“Bullshit, Ponz!” the old man came back. “As usual, your head is up your ass! Understand this, if I find out who did this, I won’t be telling you! And I’ll fix 'em T-bone steaks, all the trimmings, plus a bottle of Thunderbird and a couple of boxes of jacketed hollow-points in their preferred calibers.”
Annoyed and grumpy, the police chief departed.
Following the old man into the kitchen and out the side door onto the stoop, I was breathing easier. I'd expected to be wearing bracelets and taking a last look at the green Pennsylvania countryside through a police cruiser’s grimy windows.
Outside, Lieutenant Winter paused for a long look at my parked Jeep. Fortunately, I'd taken the trouble to stash the guns and gear in a shadowy corner of the basement and hose off the woods rocket. The red Jeep gleamed like a toy. Shaking his head disgustedly, Winter gave me another suspicious look, got behind the wheel of his cruiser and rolled away.
When I glanced at the old man, his eyes were fierce slits.
“Goddamn you, Gifford! Have you gone crazy? Those scratches on your face and arms! You got ‘em up by Caledonia last night, didn't you? And that fancy wristwatch. Where the hell did that come from?”
He seized my left arm to examine the Tudor Submariner, then roughly tilted up my chin to examine my cuts. Before resuming his tirade, he took a look inside the kitchen, making sure Charlie was drinking a Coke in the snack bar and talking to Rosie.
“Sonofabitch, Gifford!”
“My watch got broken,” I said. “I took this one off a dead Blue Ridge Boy after he tried to shoot me. It wasn’t stealing, exactly. He won’t be needing it.”
Belligerently thrusting out his chin, the old man said, “I checked your bedroom at three this morning, Gifford. You were gone! I figured you were tom-catting with that mackerel-snapper friend of Misery's” – mackerel snapper was a reference to Jane being Roman Catholic, because many Catholics still ate fish on Fridays in those days – “That was fine by me! It's high time you took an interest in girls, which is the reason I didn't say anything to your birdbrained mother! Mama seems to want to keep you and Misery away from the opposite sex forever! Now I'm guessing you were up in the South Mountains killing Blue Ridge Boys.”
“Pretty good guess.”
“What the hell were you thinking?”
“I never do much thinking when I'm shooting.”
“Damn it!” His face was red and he looked like he wanted to clobber me, so I backed up a step. He said, “Stop being a smart-ass! How many of them did you kill?”
“Sixteen or seventeen,” I told him. “Keeping count was kind of difficult under the circumstances ...”
“Sixteen or seventeen!” The old man's face paled and his legs almost buckled. “Gifford, you killed sixteen- or seventeen men last night?”
“Maybe eighteen …One got burned up in a gasoline fire, and another accidentally shot the hell out of one of his buddies trying to get at me. And I heard somebody yelp when I fired into the shadows. But counting those particular assholes might not be sporting ....”
“Sporting?”
The old man lowered himself onto the wooden bench along the brick wall, staring at me. “Sporting? Are you crazy? Goddammit, Gifford, maybe I've underestimated you all these years.”
“Hardly seems possible. Might have to rethink that.”
My amusement was ramping up, remembering all the hard-core rock climbs, parachute jumps and cross-country solo flights over mountains and deserts that my folks’ thumb-sucking, crème puff son had chalked up on weekends and between college classes trying to compensate for his imagined character flaws.
“And you say these men were shooting back at you?”
“Actually, that qualifies as a ringing understatement...”
“Are you tired of living, Gifford? What the hell is the matter with you? Those men are killers ...”
“Were killers. Past tense. Most of ‘em won't ever kill anybody ever again, the rotten bastards. They won't shove this family's faces into our deep fryers, either. I took care of that.”
He continued to stare, having real difficulty processing this. I found myself enjoying the spectacle. He finally got out, “This has to be the stupidest thing you've ever done!”
His reaction mystified me, and I told him as much. “In my considered opinion, I held up my end pretty well.”
“It's a miracle they didn't kill you!”
“Agreed. The deal is, I only went up there to make sure the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys were still in that house. My plan was to tell you and then sic the cops on ‘em…”
This conversation, of course, was conducted in whispers. I took a deep breath. “The fight started when one of ‘em spotted me. He had a Thompson and I had my Model 50, so I flattened him. After that, everybody began blazing away like they’d been buying ammunition wholesale. I was shooting people as fast as I could, just to get away.”
“You should have told me that crew was up there!”
“I went up to have a look, that's all! We needed to do something! If I'd said anything, you'd have given me hell and told me not to go. Or you'd have gone without me …”
And maybe gotten yourself killed, I thought. The realization that I now regarded my own combat prowess as equal or superior to the old man's took me by surprise. But there you go, we all move on, don’t we?
He grunted. “I'd have taken Jimmy Peach and Doc Prophet and a couple of others who were in the war, Gifford! Grown men who can handle themselves in a fight.”
“Oh yeah?” I tried to sound interested in a philosophical concept not yet entertained. “Like maybe I don't?”
He regarded me for a long time. “I almost hate to ask, but did you get ‘em all?”
“Most of ‘em. It helped that they were falling-down drunk. I didn’t connect with their asshole leader. He’s a big ol’ bony guy called Major Spiker, one of those clowns you put a bullet in last Sunday, the one with the mason jar of moonshine. He's still on his feet, although he's crippling around on a crutch and missing one ear. A few others were still ambulatory when it ended.”
The old man was reduced to speechlessness.
Lowering my voice, I added, “You're not gonna believe who else was up there. Those cops don't know anything about what I'm telling you next.”
“Enlighten me.”
He sounded exhausted. So, I told him about LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, Texas Oil and the CIA's Locksmith, Crow and Cyclops. Also mentioned in passing was the president's promise to provide Stoner 63 machineguns to the Mountain Boys, aka Operation Group Forty, to help rid the world of the pesky and bothersome McGraths.
Then I explained about the Mountain Boys’ on-going murders of Kennedy assassination witnesses.
“Son of a bitch, Gifford! Damn it, this is worse than I thought! This better not be one of your goddamn stupid tall tales!”
“Everything I'm telling you is legit.”
The old man mulled that over.
“Everybody knows Lyndon Johnson is as crooked as a dog's hind leg, that Texas brush-popper! Him and his crooked pals Bobby Baker and Billy Sol Estes! I didn't vote for him or for Jack Kennedy, who was too rich, too Catholic, too pretty-boy Harvard University liberal for my tastes. Besides that, Kennedy was too palsy with all those commie civil rights types. But I dislike Johnson a whole lot more.”
For those just tuning in, this was classic Blackjack McGrath: Advanced thinker. Tolerant. Sensitive. Ecumenical. Culturally and racially inclusive. Incisive judge of character.
Not!
He stared at me accusingly. “Until this minute, I thought J. Edgar Hoover was a great American.”
“Yeah, well, sorry to pop that soap bubble. He's a damned tiger shark and I’m pretty sure he's been using the FBI to cover up assassination evidence.”
Inside, a breakfast order was being clothes-pinned to the wire. Lucy hit the bell and the old man and I went into the kitchen. Two customers: One wanted hotcakes, bacon and home fries. The other, scrambled eggs, whole wheat toast, spuds and fried ham. I peeked into the almost-empty dining room, half expecting to see a weary Major Spiker and his hung-over power-lifter sidekick. Instead, a paunchy guy with bulging eyes and his wife were seated up front, wearing matching luau shirts.
We got the eggs and flapjacks on. I dropped bread in the toaster. The old man kept his voice low. “So, you left a handful of them alive, right? Do they know who they shot it out with?”
I shook my head. “Not much chance of that. It was dark, everybody was drunk, and I was standing behind a twelve-gauge shotgun stoked with double-ought buck. Plus I used one of their .45 Thompsons for a little while, until it ran dry. By the way, we need to get one of those, they are really cool. But I'm guessing everybody who saw me died.”
Critically appraising his underachieving son, Blackjack McGrath just shook his head. “You killed a lot of men last night, Gifford,” he said wonderingly. “A hell of a lot of men! Doesn't this bother you?”
I shrugged. It probably should have, but I’ll have to admit right now that it didn't. My fight was for my family, and those killers brought it on themselves. All the lead they collected, they had coming.
“Those men were coming back down here today to kill us. My only regret is I didn't stick a double handful of buckshot into the major and his sidekick.”
He shook his head. “Gifford, I never would have expected something like this from you! You've had your head up your ass or in a goddamn book ever since we got down here from Alaska.”
I didn't reply.
“... and things went totally gunnysack after you started all that body-building bullshit, which is damned near guaranteed to cut off the blood supply to a man’s brain and turn him into a fairy. I’ve told you that before. I was braced to find out you’d taken a summer job in a flower shop and started lisping and picking up sailors.”
My thoughts had drifted to Jane Shaughnessy. “I have only a limited interest in flowers, sailors and speaking with a lisp. Dismaying as this may be to the many intellectual elites in this town, girls, guns and airplanes suit me pretty well, thanks.”
He shook his head, disbelieving. “After we left Alaska, you just kind of went to hell ....”
“When we left Alaska, I was ten years old.”
What had come next, of course, was a rocky and potholed adolescence aggravated by a lot of weird parenting. Without exaggeration, I can say the old man and Mama were the strangest parents I’d ever heard of. Had Tennessee Williams and Erskine Caldwell moved in with us for a summer for some inspiration, their literary careers would have gotten a terrific shot in the arm.
The old man continued to fume. “Having you pull a stunt like this is just damn near impossible to believe, Gifford! You're sure you were alone up there?”
I was buttering toast, and began laughing at the turn this conversation had taken.
“All these compliments. I'm starting to blush. How will I manage? For the record, yeah, it was just me.”
But the old man had moved on. “Those Mountain Boys will guess it was one of us, Gifford! Who the hell else besides a McGrath would do something like this? Nobody, that’s who! This corner of Pennsylvania would be a dry hole in the ass-kicker department without the McGraths!”
Curious, I said, “Am I now included in this ass-kicker assessment?”
He glanced at me without replying. It seemed I'd finally made the grade as a stud duck, at least temporarily and by a hair's breadth. Of course, this was accomplished at a terrible price. That everybody didn’t raise up sons this way was a real good thing, I was thinking, because sixteen to eighteen dead guys per grudging expression of paternal approval would run the human demographic straight off a cliff.
The old man said, “I'm betting what's left of that crew will want payback. They’ll hit us again.”
“They intended to square accounts, anyway. Like I said, I heard them talking. They planned to kill you and me and shove Mama's and Tuffy's and Jane's faces in the deep fryer. Those werewolves were even going to kill Mitzie.”
“Our dog?” He was shocked.
“Yep.”
“Goddammit! They said that?”
“They sure did. I heard ‘em.”
I’d never before seen Blackjack McGrath quite that outraged. There's no way to exaggerate the value some rural men put on a good hunting dog. My grizzly-killing old man’s face turned to granite.
“Well, goddammit!” His voice was lethal. “The gloves are off now!”
I had to laugh. He frowned, not comprehending my amusement.
During the next hour working over the slicer, I thought about our curious father-son relationship. Had I been Mozart, the old man would have told everybody his kid was tone deaf and couldn't whistle Dixie in the shower. He'd inform young Wolfgang Amadeus that scribbling half-ass symphonies was a profligate waste of ink, parchment and homemade turkey quill pens and he should find himself a real job.
As Blackjack McGrath prepped a ham for the oven, I remarked, “I read in one of my PLU Western Civ texts last winter that Philip of Macedon thought his son was a no-account bookworm, too.”
“So, what's your goddamn point, Gifford?” He was still cranky. “Philip of Macedon, whoever the hell that is, doesn't eat here.”
“Philip hired the Greek philosopher Aristotle to tutor the kid,” I informed him. “The bookworm was Alexander the Great. After Philip’s death, Alexander decided a life strictly of the mind somehow lacked sex appeal. He put together an army of 30,000 infantry and 4,500 cavalry and set about conquering the known world all the way to India.”
“Gifford, I don't get your point!”
The old man's voice was testy.
Fathers and sons, I thought. Sheesh!
“No point. Forget it.”
Chapter Three
Shanghai McGrath
Present Day
Nita and Casey hazed their runaways into Lucifer's corral. Their saddle horses, a medicine hat gelding and a paint mare that Shanghai remembered were named Thornton and Chism, were tied at the lodgepole hitching rail beside the corral.
Shanghai forked down hay from a stack. Craning to watch Juliette's departure, he tripped and fell down. Embarrassed, he dusted off his britches and resumed feeding. Nita left Casey with the horses and sauntered over.
“Okay, Shanghai. What the hell's goin' on?”
“What are you talking about?”
“What am I talking about? When you and that chocolate-brown, red-haired glamour girl get inside fifty yards of each other, I can feel the air crackle!” She lowered her voice. “Which is close to how things were between you and me, remember? Meantime, her fiancé, or whatever the hell that prissy, dimwit city dude claims to be, looks at you like you ate his lunch, shot his dog and owe him money.”
“Juliette and I are friends.”
“Friends? No, you ain't, Shanghai! Get real! And that galoot’s not fooled for one second, either! Damn, I'd advise keepin’ your sidearm handy when he’s around.”
Shanghai felt his face burning.
Nita continued, “Did you happen to notice her reaction when I took that innocent jab at you? She bristled like a cornered wolf, fist-city in her headlights! And the second they drive off, Shanghai McGrath stumbles over his feet and falls on his face like a freakin’ beer-tavern drunk.”
He smiled ruefully. “Okay, you got me. But there's no way I can compete with a guy who flies around in a 45-million-dollar business jet.”
“Probably true. But that kinda depends on her, don’t it, Shanghai?”
Nita’s brow knitted, and she looked around.
“And what else do I find? You and Barnabas and Saph are baby-sittin’ a billionaire drug addict! A goddamn nitwit who maybe snitched off his cocaine dealer because somebody showed up here with an assault rifle to air-condition his candy ass. All of this is insane!”
When Shanghai looked into Anita's familiar brown eyes, her normally fearless demeanor was chinked with worry. Leaning on the pitchfork, he explained how Kingsley came to be on the Estoque.
When he finished, Nita summed things up. “Somebody wants this Kingsley dude in the ground, Shanghai! That tells me that more shooters are headin’ this way. Have you thought of that?”
He nodded. “Probably true. We’ll need to be ready.”
Casey joined them as they went inside. Removing his battered hat – which had been brand new the last time Shanghai saw him – he wiped his brow with a bandanna. The hat looked like it had been run over by a stock truck. Grateful for an excuse to change the subject, Shanghai asked about that.
“Got this hat last September in Pendleton, strollin' among the food concessions under the Round-Up’s South Grandstand,” Casey said. “I had on my beat-to-hell old Triple X Stetson. Suddenly, a hand reaches out of the crowd, snatches the Stetson off my poor old bald head. Before I got my fist cocked to punch a dirty hole in the thief, this brand-new 24X silver-bellied buckaroo lid gets jammed down in its place!”
Shanghai began laughing. “What was that all about?”
“Some rich city dude wanted an authentic, sweat-stained buckaroo hat to wear at the Round-Up. So, he grabbed mine and gave me his new one.”
“Does it fit?”
“Fits pretty good! Though I've gotta admit it's gettin' a mite boogered.”
Shanghai poured coffee and caught them up on the death of their intruder and the pro forma grand jury proceedings. They discussed Kingsley Armaros and Kingsley's prophesy about wholesale cattle and human deaths within the year.
