George Wier - The Last Call

My ears weren’t working, by my eyes saw everything, captured it all.

And the lightning dared not strike.

I rolled over.

My hand came to rest on the gun in my waistband. I pulled it out. What good was a gun when the world was going ka-blooey?

I pushed down against the mud. Got up on one knee, shakily.

Somebody else was trying to get up as well.

Freddie.

He turned towards me. Half of his face was gone.

“Freddie,” I said. “You ain’t gonna make it.”

His eyes stared into mine for an instant in the glow of the fire that had once been some horse stables. I thought he was going to say something-he certainly looked for a moment like a fellow who had something on his mind-then he fell over, face first into the mud and never moved again.

I stood up, reeling.

A hand closed around my ankle.

It was almost too much like the dream.

Hank, I thought, but when I looked down, it was Archie Carpin. A long, tapering piece of wood was imbedded in his mouth. The point of it had exited well past his right ear and he was strangling on his own blood. Also, he was trying to talk.

The fingers on my ankle thrummed out a rhythm for a moment and then went still.

Both Hank and Jake were trying to get to their feet.

Jake’s gun came up, pointed right at Hank.

I was cold inside. I’d never known such cold.

Gun up, I pulled the trigger without thinking. Just looked and then-

Crack!

— a spray of blood and bone in another herky-jerky lightning flash.

Jake began to fall amid another flash

Crack!

— and there was fire in the rain, leaping from the muzzle of Jake’s gun, then gone.

Hank jerked like he’d been hit by a charging bull, fell back into the water with a splash.

The hand around my ankle thrummed again, almost as if it was trying to tap out a message in Morse.

I lifted my leg and stomped it, once. Twice.

There were lights, suddenly, cutting across the nightmarish landscape.

A pickup truck. It roared to a stop, slewing mud everywhere.

The front door of the Dodge Ram came open. A cowboy hat with a plastic rain cover emerged. Sheriff Thornton.

I didn’t wait. I got in motion.

Around the manure pile and the concrete chimney, the next lightning flash revealed Jake’s body. I sailed over it, my feet splashing into water.

“Bill!” Sheriff Thornton called out. I ignored it.

Hank was face down in the mud and the runoff. His face was underwater.

I grabbed him by the shirt, took one shoulder and rolled him over.

At least his eyes weren’t staring at me like

— the nightmare -

like he was maybe dead already.

There was a hole in his side right through his ribcage. I turned him again. No exit wound.

His eyes came open. He smiled. His mouth opened. Water and blood spilled out.

“Nice”- cough -“shootin’,”- cough -“Tex.”

“Goddammit. Shut up, Hank. If you talk you’re likely to die.”

He half-nodded, slowly.

“Bill!” The voice, again. Not as loud. Insistent, though. Trying to reach me. It was Agent Cranford.

I ignored it, pulled Hank over to the Sheriff’s truck. Opened the passenger door.

There was a shape beside me. I didn’t know who. Didn’t care. “See to Julie and the kid,” I said, and gestured in the direction of the house.

By the time I got Hank loaded into the back seat, I noticed that the rain was beginning to slack off.

“You’re not gonna die, you sonuvabitch,” I told him. I guess I was a little loud.

His eyes were following me. I didn’t want to look at them. How things like that almost always seemed to go: if I looked into his eyes, he’d die. Superstitious of me, I knew, but I didn’t care.

“Don’t worry,” he said.

Dock had said that.

I shivered. It was cold and I was shaking.

“What?” I almost screamed it at him.

“I ain’t gonna die,” he said. “Not yet, anyway. Hurts…like…hell. But I ain’t gonna give up yet.”

Emergency rooms are possibly my least favorite places to be. Aside from funeral parlors, that is.

It was 12:20 a.m. in Wichita Falls, Texas.

I suppose I’ve been lucky most of my life. I don’t know why. I’d like to think it has something to do with the fact that I haven’t hurt so many people in life, but then again, you never know. My mother used to say I should count my blessings. I suppose if I ever do get back to saying my prayers again like I did as a child, then I’ll include a special thanks for watching over me during that week of hell. And for that night of the storm.

Hank was still in the operating room. I kept my hands clenched the whole time. The young lady doctor with the drab-green scrubs and elongated neck had said that it depended upon whether or not the second lung collapsed, and how much he bled. If he pulled through this one, his life was going to be a little slower for awhile.

I had an eleven-year old on my lap, trying to go to sleep. Her name was Jessica, and I was already smitten with her.

Julie sat up on her E.R. bed. Fortunately she only had a few contusions. Her hair looked like a chopped up sort of butch all the way around where it had to be cut away from the electrical tape. It would grow back. I found myself hoping that if everything with her and me and the law resolved the right way that maybe the two of us would also have a chance to grow back together. Foolish of me, I know.

So there I sat, holding her hand and looking into those enchanting eyes. She had an alcohol-soaked rag in her other hand, doing her best to remove the remaining patches of tape glue that were still there around her cheeks and mouth. The alcohol vapors must have been getting in her eyes because they were tearing up. Or maybe it was something else.

There were the tips of black cowboy boots pacing slowly back and forth just the other side of the privacy curtain. Sheriff Thornton, probably.

Another set of boots walked up and there was a brief, whispered exchange. I caught one bit of a sentence, though, and I liked the sound of it: “…thinks he’s gonna pull through.”

“Julie,” I said. “Sounds like Hank’s gonna make it.”

She started crying.

“Don’t cry,” Jessica said. She got up from my lap and put her arms around Julie. I stood up from my chair and sat down next to her.

I waited until the sobbing subsided. She leaned into me and I held her.

So much death, so much suffering, I thought. Why is the beauty in our lives tempered with such sadness?

“Anything you want to tell me before you have to tell everything to the Feds?” I asked her.

“Be with me,” was all she said. “Both of you.” I guess she said it loud enough to be overheard outside the curtain. The two pairs of boots turned and walked away.

“We’re here,” Jessica said.

You don’t just pull a magic trick and switch bags with a fellow who is carrying home two million dollars. That kind of stunt requires careful planning, follow-through, quick-thinking, and terrific dumb luck. Fortunately Julie had each of these elements going for her the night Archie Carpin was paid off in a small town of seven hundred souls five miles north of the Red River, just across the state line in the furthest southwest corner of Oklahoma and only fifteen miles from the Carpin ranch.

El Dorado was a farming town dependent for survival upon two things: the muddy waters of the Red River for irrigation, and upon keeping the kids who were graduating high school from moving off.

The heart of the town centered around Jill’s Diner, where a farmer and his family could stop by on Sunday for the buffet and expect to eat about as well as they could expect to eat at home. Jill’s was a greasy spoon, in the noblest tradition of that label. The air was laden with the scent of deep-frying oil-possibly in need of a change-and cigarette smoke.