A crazy kid, working appeals, apt to be around for awhile. Oh, that all sounded just fine. Suddenly the day seemed hotter than ever, and I could no longer put off seeing Warden Moores.
I worked for three wardens during my years as a Cold Mountain guard; Hal Moores was the last and best of them. In a walk. Honest, straightforward, lacking even Curtis Anderson's rudimentary wit, but equipped with just enough political savvy to keep his job during those grim years... and enough integrity to keep from getting seduced by the game. He would not rise any higher, but that seemed all right with him. He was fifty-eight or - nine back then, with a deeply lined bloodhound face that Bobo Marchant probably would have felt right at home with. He had white hair and his hands shook with some sort of palsy, but he was strong. The year before, when a prisoner had rushed him in the exercise yard with a shank whittled out of a crate-slat, Moores had stood his ground, grabbed the skatehound's wrist, and had twisted it so hard that the snapping bones had sounded like dry twigs burning in a hot fire. The skatehound, all his grievances forgotten, had gone down on his knees in the dirt and begun screaming for his mother. 'I'm not her,' Moores said in his cultured Southern voice, 'But if I was, I'd raise up my skirts and piss on you from the loins that gave you birth.'
When I came into his office, he started to get up and I waved him back down. I took the seat across the desk from him, and began by asking about his wife... except in our part of the world, that's not how you do it. 'How's that pretty gal of yours' is what I asked, as if Melinda had seen only seventeen summers instead of sixty-two or - three. My concern was genuine he was a woman I could have loved and married myself, if the lines of our lives had coincided - but I didn't mind diverting him a little from his main business, either.
He sighed deeply. 'Not so well, Paul. Not so well at all.'
'More headaches?'
'Only one this week, but it was the worst yet - put her flat on her back for most of the day before yesterday. And now she's developed this weakness in her right hand - ' He raised his own liverspotted right hand. We both watched it tremble above his blotter for a moment or two, and then he lowered it again. I could tell he would have given just about anything not to be telling me what he was telling me, and I would have given just about anything not to be hearing it. Melinda's headaches had started in the spring, and all that summer her doctor had been saying they were 'nervous-tension migraines,' perhaps caused by the stress of Hal's coming retirement. Except that neither of them could wait for his retirement, and my own wife had told me that migraine is not a disease of the old but the young; by the time its sufferers reached Melinda Moores's age, they were usually getting better, not worse. And now this weakness of the hand. It didn't sound like nervous tension to me; it sounded like a damned stroke.
'Dr. Haverstrom wants her to go in hospital up to Indianola,' Moores said. 'Have some tests. Head X-rays, he means. Who knows what else. She is scared to death.' He paused, then added, 'Truth to tell, so am I.'
'Yeah, but you see she does it,' I said. 'Don't wait. If it turns out to be something they can see with an X-ray, it may turn out to be something they can fix.'
'Yes,' he agreed, and then, for just a moment - the only one during that part of our interview, as I recall - our eyes met and locked. There was the sort of nakedly perfect understanding between us that needs no words. It could be a stroke, yes. It could also be a cancer growing in her brain, and if it was that, the chances that the doctors at Indianola could do anything about it were slim going on none. This was '32, remember, when even something as relatively simple as a urinary infection was either sulfa and stink or suffer and wait.
'I thank you for your concern, Paul. Now let's talk about Percy Wetmore.'
I groaned and covered my eyes.
'I had a call from the state capital this morning,' the warden said evenly. 'It was quite an angry call, as I'm sure you can imagine. Paul, the governor is so married he's almost not there, if you take my meaning. And his wife has a brother who has one child. That child is Percy Wetmore. Percy called his dad last night, and Percy's dad called Percy's aunt. Do I have to trace the rest of this out for you?'
'No,' I said. 'Percy squealed. Just like the schoolroom sissy telling teacher he saw Jack and Jill smooching in the cloakroom.'
'Yep,' Moores agreed, 'that's about the size of it.'
'You know what happened between Percy and Delacroix when Delacroix came in?' I asked. 'Percy and his damned hickory billy-club?'
'Yes, but - '