Thirteen
Maybelle Bullock was a pretty lady of about fifty, trim and blond. She reminded me of that long-ago actress Donna Reed, the way Miss Reed had looked in It’s a Wonderful Life. When we entered from the back porch, Maybelle was standing at the kitchen sink, peeling fresh peaches, wearing a housedress of the kind that few women wore in recent years, with saddle shoes and white socks.
She didn’t at first favor me with a smile, but her handshake was firm and her manner welcoming. Her direct stare probed, as if the story of my life were written in my eyes in a few succinct lines that she could read.
To her husband, she said, “He’s not fully smooth and blue, but he sure is close to it.”
“I figured you’d see him that way,” said Deacon Bullock.
“Don’t you?”
“I’d be a fool to argue it.”
In the seventh volume of these memoirs (this is the eighth), I have written about the mysterious organization into which I had been welcomed by Edie Fischer, who will appear before much longer in this book, as well. Although I’d been told by her and others that I was remarkably smoothed out and blue for someone my age, I had not been able to get from them an explanation of that apparent compliment. I was a novice among them, and evidently the full truth of who they were and what they hoped to achieve would be revealed to me only in stages, as I earned the right to more knowledge of them.
Maybelle’s smile, when now it came, was as warm as any I had ever received, one of those that makes you feel like long-loved kin. She took my hand in both of hers, not to shake it again, but to squeeze it gently.
She said, “It’s purest pleasure bein’ a help whatsoever way we can.”
“Thank you, ma’am. I don’t want to be a bother.”
“You couldn’t be a bother if you tried.” Picking up the paring knife once more, she said, “I’m makin’ a peach pie to have with lunch, your favorite.”
I didn’t ask how she could know the variety of pie that I most enjoyed. She would tell me or she wouldn’t. Among these folks, a novice had to live by their rules, even if they chose not to share some of those rules with him.
“Peach pie. That’s kind of you, Mrs. Bullock.”
“Please, you call me Maybelle.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you. But I’m afraid I’ll probably sleep right through lunch, not having slept last night. What I need most now is a bed.”
“Then we’ll have us a late lunch or early dinner.”
Deacon Bullock said, “He don’t got a gun.”
His wife looked first astonished and then severely disapproving. “Why would a fine young man such as yourself not carry a gun?”
“I don’t like them.”
“Guns don’t feel nothin’ about you, one way or t’other. No fair reason for you to feel bad towards them.”
“I guess that’s one way to look at it.”
She picked up a pistol that had, until now, been lying on the counter on the other side of the basket of peaches. “Had this Colt since my weddin’ day.”
“How long have you been married, ma’am?”
She cast a loving look at her husband. “Be twenty-eight years come August nine. And only six bad days in all that wedded bliss.”
Deacon Bullock’s grin went flatline. “Only five bad days by my calculation, sugar.”
Picking up the paring knife to slice the peach that she had just peeled, his wife said, “Even if it was five by both counts, won’t all of them be the same five for each of us.”
Mr. Bullock appeared mildly stricken. “How many of your six you think don’t match my five?”
“I’d guess two.”
“What two days did I think we was good and you felt we wasn’t? That’s goin’ to trouble my sleep till I figure it out.”
Mrs. Bullock winked at me but spoke to her husband. “It’ll do you some good to reflect on it.”
Taking off his Stetson and fanning his face, her husband said, “Guess I got my assignment for the day.”
To me, his wife said, “From what I heard, whether you like guns or don’t, you got the skill and guts to use ’em.”
“Unfortunately, it’s been necessary.”
“So it will be again. What gun was it you most recently used?”
“A Glock with a fifteen-round magazine.”
“What caliber?” she asked.
“Forty-five ACP.”
“That be model twenty-one, Deke?”
“I suspect so,” her husband said.
“We got one for this young man?”
“More than one,” Mr. Bullock said.
“One will do,” I assured them.
“Oddie, Deke’ll take you up to your room. You sleep like a bear if you can, don’t worry yourself none about when is dinner. When it is will be when you’re ready for us to put it on the table.”
“Thank you, ma’am. You’re very kind.”
“The mister here has five days when he mightn’t have agreed with you on that. And you call me Maybelle.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Mr. Bullock led me through rooms where mohair-upholstered sofas and armchairs were graced with antimacassars, where mantel clocks—and one grandfather clock—ticked, where well-tended ferns cascaded from decorative plant stands. On the walls hung framed needlepoint scenes that seemed to have been inspired by Currier and Ives, and between panels of brocade draperies hung lacework sheers, so that I felt as though I’d been dropped backward in time one hundred years or more.
My bedroom offered more of the same, the kind of room where I might have stayed during a visit to my grandmother, if the only grandmother I’d ever known had not been a professional gambler and hard drinker who spent most of her life on the road in search of one illegal high-stakes poker game or another. I loved Pearl Sugars, my mother’s mother, but Granny Sugars would have curled up like a pill bug and died rather than have to live a single day in such Victorian orderliness and calm.
I, on the other hand, could have stayed contentedly in that room for a month, because it was such a welcome relief from the chaos and violent drama of my life. Not that I would be given that much time. I would probably have to settle for eight hours.
The bed had been turned down. A drinking glass and an insulated carafe of ice water stood on a tray atop the right-hand nightstand, and beside the carafe waited a crystal decanter containing Scotch whiskey. Mr. Bullock informed me that many other libations were available on request.
The small en suite bathroom lacked a tub but had a shower.
“A relaxin’ hot shower might help you sleep the sleep of the innocent,” he suggested.
“I believe you’re right, sir.”
“You just go ahead and call me Deke. Every mother’s son does.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“While you’re showerin’ up and brushin’ your teeth, I’ll be back here with your gun, so don’t go lockin’ me out. I’ll put the little darlin’ in the top drawer of that there nightstand.”
Later, when I came out of the steamy bathroom in the robe that had been provided, I opened the nightstand drawer and found the Glock plus two loaded, fifteen-round magazines in addition to the one that was already in the pistol.
The sight of the weapon depressed me. Well, not the sight of it, but the hard fact that I would almost certainly need to use it.
Both windows provided a view of the colonnade of velvet ash trees and the driveway leading to the state route. Here beyond the city limits of Pico Mundo, there were no sidewalks, no streetlamps, only a few hardscrabble farms, an occasional ranchette where people bred one kind of horse or another, mostly quarter horses for racing, lots of dust, and a sky paled by bleaching sun and dry desert air.
I drew shut the draperies, locked the door, took off the robe, and slipped under the covers, grateful that the house was well air-conditioned. I left the nightstand drawer open to be sure that I could have the pistol in hand quickly if I woke and needed it.