Wild Town (2 page)

M
cKenna’s first name was David, but he had been called Bugs for practically as far back as he could remember. It fitted the awkward lummox of a kid who, though only ten years old, was almost as big as his fifth-grade teacher. It fitted the actions of the frightened child, the self-doubting, insecure youth, and the introverted, defensively offensive man. He seemed to have a positive knack for doing the right thing at the wrong time. For distrusting his friends, and trusting his enemies. For being ridiculously uncompromising over the trifling, and seemingly indifferent to the nominally vital.

The guy was just nuts, people said, as bugsy as they came. He couldn’t take a joke. He didn’t want to be friendly. He’d climb a tree to make trouble when he could stand on the ground and have peace. That’s what they said about him, the man he eventually became. And it was reasonably descriptive of that scowling, sullen, short-tempered man. Only his eyes belied the description; angrily bewildered eyes. Eyes that seemed wet with unshed tears, as, perhaps, they were.

When he finished his five-year prison stretch—and he served every minute of it, thanks to the outraged and insulted parole board—Bugs McKenna drifted into Dallas. He got a job as night dishwasher in a greasy spoon. He spent most of his daytime hours in the public library. It was a good way of keeping out of trouble, he thought. Moreover, it didn’t cost anything, and there was nothing that he would rather do.

Well, though, there was a “furtive” look about him, in the opinion of the librarian. Also, as she pointed out to the police, he couldn’t possibly have any interest in the books he selected, Kafka, Schopenhauer, Addison and Steele—now, really, officers!

The cops asked Bugs a few questions. Bugs responded with a wholly impossible suggestion involving their nightsticks and a certain part of their anatomy.

Skip the details. Bugs got a rough roust out of Dallas, leaving town with new knots on his head and fresh bruises to his spirit.

Walking through the outskirts of Fort Worth, he saw a little girl fall off her tricycle. He picked her up, and dusted her off. He hunkered down in front of her, joking with her tenderly, getting her to smile. And a patrol car drifted into the curb…

Bugs spent two weeks in the Fort Worth jail. At Weatherford, the next town west, he was jugged for three days. In Mineral Wells, he drew another three days of “investigation.” He was spitting blood when he emerged from it, but it hadn’t softened him a bit. His last words to the cop who escorted him to the city limits were of a type to curl the hair on a brass monkey.

Still, he knew he couldn’t take much more; not without a little rest anyway. He had to get the hell away from the cities, the heavily settled areas, and do it fast or he’d damned well be dead. So he left the highways, and took to the freights. He stuck with them, moving inconspicuously from freight to freight, moving steadily westward. And eventually he arrived at the place called Ragtown. That was about as far west as a man could go. As anything but a jack rabbit or a tarantula would have reason for going.

Thirty minutes after his arrival he was in jail.

It was partly his own fault, he admitted reluctantly. Just a little his own fault. Having dropped off the freight, he was in the station rest-room washing up, when a leathery-faced middle-aged man walked in. A silver badge was clipped to his checked shirt. He wore a gunbelt and an ivory-handled forty-five.

As he started to bend over the drinking fountain, Bugs turned from the sink and faced him. He stared at the man, his eyes hard and hateful. Leather-face straightened slowly, a puzzled-polite frown building up on his face.

“Yeah, stranger?” he said. “Something on your mind?”

“What do you mean, what’s on
my
mind?” Bugs said. “I’m not stupid. You saw me drop off that freight. You’ve got me tagged for a bum. So, all right, let’s drop the dumb act and get on with the business. I’m David McKenna, alias ‘Bugs’ McKenna; last permanent address, Texas State Penitentiary; recent addresses, Dallas city jail, Fort Worth city jail, Weatherford city jail, Mineral Wells city—”

“Now, looky”—the man made a baffled gesture. “I mean, what the hell?”

“Come on! Come off of it! I suppose you just followed me in here to get a drink, huh?”

The man started to nod. Then, his squinted gray eyes turned frosty, and his voice dropped to a chilling purr. “Lookin’ for trouble, eh?” he said, the words cold-edged but soft. “Just ain’t happy without it. Well, I always like to oblige.”

The gun whipped up from his hip. Bugs hesitated; nervous, oddly ashamed, wondering why it was that he always had to be in such a hell of a hurry with the mouth.

“Look,” he mumbled. “I-I’ve been catching it pretty rough. I didn’t mean to—”

“You look.” The hammer of the gun clicked. “Look real good. Now, you want to move or do you want me to move you?”

Bugs moved.

The jail was in the basement of the ancient brick courthouse. The ventilation and the light were bad, but the bunks were clean, and the chow—brought in from one of the town’s restaurants—was really first class. Each prisoner got three good meals a day, as opposed to the twice-a-day slop in most jails. He was also given a sack of makings or, if he preferred, a plug of chewing.

Bugs supposed there was a gimmick somewhere in the deal. Probably you’d have pay off with a road gang at twelve hours a day. But such, according to the other prisoners—no local talent, all floaters like himself—was not the case.

“These folks are different out here,” an oilfield worker explained. “They throw you in jail, they figure they got to look after you. They might shoot a guy, but they won’t starve him to death.”

“What about the rough stuff? Working you over until you clean the slate for them?”

“Uh-uh. You ain’t done nothin’, they won’t try to pin it on you. You won’t get roughed unless you cut up rough yourself…At least,” the man added carefully, “they’ve always played fair with me. This is my fifth time in for drunk and disorderly, and the boys have treated me real nice every time.”

“But? There’s more to the story?”

“We-el, no, not exactly. Not as far as the treatment of the prisoners is concerned. But the way this town is run”—he shook his head—“I got an idea that there’s at least one of these laws, the chief deputy, Lou Ford, that’d just about as soon kill you as look at you. The place is wide open, see? Gambling houses, bootleg joints, honky-tonks. And some very bad babies runnin’ ’em. But they don’t give any backtalk to Ford. He rides herd on ’em, as easy as I can ride a walking beam.”

“He’s the chief deputy, you say. What about the sheriff?”

“Sick and old. Hardly ever see him except at election time. So Ford’s the man, and I
do
mean the man. He’s got the town and the county right in his pocket, and it don’t do nothing without his say-so. The funny part about it is, he don’t look tough at all. Young, good-looking, always smiling—”

“But a good gunhand, huh?”

“Uh-uh. The only law here that doesn’t wear a gun. But, well,” the man spread his hands helplessly, “I don’t know how he does it; I mean, I couldn’t explain. You’d have to see him in action yourself.”

Bugs had been jailed early in the morning. The following afternoon, the turnkey took him out of the bullpen and up the stairs to the street floor. He assumed he was being taken into court. Instead, the turnkey handed him a ten-dollar bill and gestured him toward the door.

“That’s from Lou Ford,” he explained. “Wants to see you, and he figured you might want to spruce up first.”

“But—well, what about the charges against me?”

“Ain’t any. Lou had ’em dropped. He’ll be out to his house when you’re ready. Anyone can tell you where it is.”

“Now, wait a minute!” Bugs bristled. “What does he want to see me about? What if I don’t want to see him?”

“Easy to find out for yourself, mister. If you do see him or if you don’t.”

Bugs got a shave and a haircut. He bought a white shirt and a tie, and had his worn suit sponged and pressed. Boomtown prices being what they are, that took practically all of the ten. He used the remainder for a shoe shine and a package of cigarettes, and headed for Lou Ford’s house.

There were two “old” residential sections. One was the traditional wrong-side-of-the-tracks settlement of the Mexicans and “white trash.” The other was up the hill from, and overlooking the town: a few blocks of tree-lined streets, and roomy two-storied houses. Except for color difference—they were usually light blue, white or brown—the houses were almost identical, a comfortable combination of Colonial and Spanish-Moorish architecture. Each had a long porch (“gallery”) extending across the front. Despite the area’s always uncertain water supply, each had a deep shrub- and tree-shaded lawn.

Ford’s house was on the corner. A new Cadillac convertible stood in the driveway. McKenna stepped up on the porch and knocked on the door. There was no answer. He punched the doorbell, discovering that it was out of order. He knocked again. Stooping, he studied the age-dulled brass plate affixed to the door:

The doctor was Lou’s father, Bugs had learned. An improvident, kindly man, he had died several years before, leaving nothing to his son but this house, heavily mortgaged at that. Obviously, the sign no longer meant what it said; for visitors to enter, that is. It had been left on the door out of sentiment or shiftlessness. On the other hand…

Well, there it was, wasn’t it? And why shouldn’t a stranger in town take it at its face value? What was he supposed to do—stand out here and beat the skin off his knuckles? He’d been told—
ordered
—to see Ford. Now this sign told him to enter.

Bugs did so.

He was standing in a narrow foyer, quite dark since the doors to the rooms on either side were closed. The only light streamed down from the stairway; from an open door, apparently, right at the head of the stairs. Muted sounds also drifted down the stairs. Scuffling. The creak of bed springs. A man’s sardonically soothing drawl, and a woman’s quiet, quickly furious voice:

“Aw, now, Amy. You know I—”

“I know you, that’s what I know, Lou Ford!”

“But she don’t mean a thing to me, Amy! Honest. It’s just business.”

“You’re a liar! What kind of business? Well? Go on, I’m listening!”

“But I done told you, honey! It’s pretty confidential; somethin’ I can’t talk about. Now, why’n’t you just leave it at that, and—”

There was an outraged sob. The sharp
cra-ack
of a hard-swung palm meeting flesh. Then, the girl came rushing out of the room; weeping in blind anger, clutching a handful of undergarments.

Highlighted by the glare from the door, she began putting on her panties. She got them on, hopping from foot to foot. Then she slumped her shoulders, dropping her breasts into the cups of her brassiere.

That was all that Bugs saw, all that he allowed himself to see. He got quietly back out to the porch, blushing deeply, shamed and embarrassed by what he had seen.

He was like that, oddly. Modest. Excruciatingly old-fashioned, one might say, although he could not regard such things as a matter of fashion. He had killed. He had worked in shabby, disillusioning jobs. He had been penned up with degenerates for years. That had been his environment; violence, foulness and filth. And yet in all his life, he had looked on no more than three naked women. And of the three, one had been his wife.

He wished the third had not been this girl. He wished, with a kind of gnawing hunger, that he had not seen her in her nakedness.

And he wished, longed to see her again: to cherish her, treat her with love and respect. Because, yes, by God, she deserved it! No matter what she’d done, regardless of how things looked.

He’d noticed more than her nakedness—and off-hand he would have said she was not much different than hundreds he’d seen: just a small, well-rounded young woman with a good-featured face and sandy brown hair pulled back in a bun. But then he had gone on looking. And suddenly he had almost gasped at what he saw.

You know how it is. A three-hundred-dollar suit doesn’t knock your eye out. A Ming vase doesn’t shriek for attention. But the ultimate beauty, the perfection, is there; and you’ll always see it if you look long enough, see it and recognize it, regardless of whether you’ve ever seen it before.

Even if you’ve caught so much crap in your eyes that you’re half-blind in one and can’t see out of the other…

Bugs must have been standing on the porch for ten minutes, kind of dazed and dopey, lost in his own sad thoughts, when he heard the back door close. That snapped him out of it, recalled him to the gray facts of what he was and why he was here. And he knocked again, hastily and loudly.

Ford responded almost immediately with a hail of, “Right with you.” A moment later there was the
click-tap
of boots in the hallway, and he opened the door.

“McKenna? I’m Lou Ford. Come on in an’ set.”

Bugs followed him down the foyer, and into what apparently had been the doctor’s one-time office. Ford looked as out of place among the rows of glass-doored bookcases as a man could look.

He was about thirty, the chief deputy. He wore a pinkish-tan shirt, with a black clip-on bowtie, and blue serge pants. The cuffs of the trousers were tucked carelessly into the tops of his boots. In Bugs’ book, he stacked up about the same—in appearance—as any county clown.

His black, glossy hair was combed in a straight-back pompadour. His high-arched brows gave his face a droll, impish look. A long thin cigar was clamped between his white even teeth.

He waved Bugs to one of the comfortable leather chairs, then sat himself down behind the desk. He said politely, “Like a drink? Well, how about a cigar, then?” And, then, when Bugs shook his head, “Now, that’s right. You’re a cigarette smoker, aren’t you?”

He said it very carelessly, a man seemingly making conversation. But Bugs was sure that he wasn’t. He was saying that he had seen the two cigarette butts which Bugs had flipped onto the sidewalk.