TWENTY-TWO

The next morning I arose at four and got an early start to Tulsa. The previous Friday a small box that bore a Virginia postmark had come in the mail. Inside the box were three keys and a stiff note card that contained a carefully typed address and nothing else. I knew then that it was time for another talk with Chicken Little.

The week before we’d decided that sharing one car was becoming too much of a burden. Della frequently drove out to the basin to check leases on her own, and I often found myself desperately needing transportation when she was gone in the Lincoln. We went shopping for her for a vehicle, and a few hours later she drove away from the local Ford agency with a new woody wagon whose metal was painted a deep maroon.

“It goes good with your convertible,” she said.

As I watched her swing out into the street in her new car that day I could only laugh inwardly. Not that long ago I’d been a lone eagle, answering to no one besides myself and responsible for nothing beyond my car and several suitcases of clothing. Now I’d not only acquired a woman eleven years my junior but a house and a station wagon as well. The previous fall I’d had a modest income from a trust, and now I was well on my way to becoming an oil baron. Things had certainly moved fast since I met that girl; I was on the verge of becoming domesticated, and much to my surprise I didn’t find the prospect all that unpleasant.

It was a long drive. Around noon I made a quick stop for a light lunch at a little roadside café about fifty miles north of the Red River, and then pushed on until I finally pulled into Little’s yard not long before suppertime. I’d known the old man ever since I was a kid. My father was a bred-in-the-bone Cajun from a little town a few miles outside Lafayette, Louisiana. He’d come to East Texas not long after the turn of the century and gone into the timber business. Dad was a ruthless but likable man, and in a few years he had established a sizable fortune that included a controlling interest in a thriving bank in Lufkin. But like many Cajuns, he was addicted to gambling in general and cockfighting in particular. Though my devout Presbyterian mother finally succeeded in getting him weaned off gambling, he never gave up his love of cocking. In his later life he watched avidly even though he no longer bet. He and Chicken Little were lifelong friends, and some of my finest memories were of the many summer weekends I’d spent at Little’s place during my youth.

The house was a sprawling structure of whitewashed clapboard with a tin roof that stood on a wooded bluff overlooking a wide bend in the Cimarron River a few miles out from town. The old man occupied one of a pair of deep hickory rocking chairs that sat on the front veranda. He wore khaki pants, a much-washed and much-darned white dress shirt and a weathered fedora. A stoneware demijohn with a cob stopper sat on a small table beside his chair, alongside a sugar bowl, a saucer of lemon halves, and a pair of heavy mugs.

“Come on up here and set a spell,” he said as I climbed the steps. “I was just fixing to make a hot toddy. Have one with me.”

I took the other chair and shook his thin, bony hand. “I’ll have a drink, but not a toddy. Haven’t you got any ice?”

“Ice,” he grumbled, getting to his feet. “A grown man that don’t know how to drink whiskey.”

He disappeared into the bowels of the house and returned in a couple of minutes with a steaming kettle and a mug of cracked ice. I pulled the cob from the demijohn and poured a good dram over the ice. The liquor was almost clear, with only the barest trace of amber coloring. Little put two spoonfuls of sugar into one of the other mugs, then squeezed in half a lemon. He partially filled the mug with hot water and gave it a stir with the spoon. When the sugar had dissolved, he topped it off from the whiskey jug. I took a pull of my own drink and gasped.

Little grinned. “Pure corn. It’ll do the job, won’t it?”

“Yes,” I answered once I’d gotten my breath. “But there are easier ways to get it done.”

He laughed. “I’m running three stills right now near Waverly over in the Cookson Hills,” he said. “Big stills. Got men hired to tend ’em for me.”

“What in the world do you do with that much corn whiskey?” I asked.

“Take it over to Little Rock and sell it for five dollars a gallon. The man that buys it from me cuts it, doctors it up and flavors it, and then sells it to bars for two and a half a fifth. Then they sell it by the drink for bonded stuff. They say this fellow can make green corn whiskey taste like eight-year-old bourbon. It more than doubles a bar owner’s profit on a bottle.”

“Why don’t you flavor the whiskey up yourself and get all the profit? Just run it straight from Cookson down to Hot Springs.”

“I hear what you’re saying,” he replied, nodding slowly and raising his head to gaze off at the horizon, a faraway look in his eyes. Chicken Little had numerous theories about life, some of them deeply theological, and I sensed that he was about to expound on one of them.

“I could do that,” he said thoughtfully. “But it might take some killin’ to get things set up right, and that kind of behavior is liable to lead to hurt feelings. Besides, I’ve always had this notion that the Good Lord wants each man to make his living in certain ways that he laid out for him in the days of his youth. I believe that if a man strays into other fields he’s asking for trouble from Above. That’s why I didn’t want to buy into none of that oil business when you mentioned it, even though I did appreciate the offer. The only time in my life I ever went to the pen was because I strayed from my appointed course and got into some activities the Lord had reserved for other folks.”

“I saw you down at the Weilbach,” I said, changing the subject. “How do things look?”

“Good. I don’t believe it’s going to be any problem at all. That stairway being so close to the door helps. And the deputies they got hired to guard the thing are awful careless.”

I nodded. “Yeah, they’ve gotten even more so since the oil boom blew in. So are we on?”

He laughed his ready laugh, his pale blue eyes dancing. “Why, hell yes, we’re on. I told you that when you first come up here last year.”

“I know that’s what you said then, but you hadn’t had a chance to look the situation over at that time. I don’t mean to ask a friend to commit suicide for me.”

“Ain’t no suicide to it, so you stop talking that way. That kind of talk’s bad luck. Don’t you worry. I know what I’m doing.”

“How about the other crew?” I asked. “Are they in?”

“I think so. The main man is a fellow named Tobe Perkins. I’ve known him forever, and I guarantee that he’s one of the best. But he wants to meet you.”

I considered for a moment. “Sure, why not?”

“Good,” he said with satisfaction. “I’ll set it up. He says that he wants to meet the man who’s steering the deal. It’s a prudent move on his part, and I don’t blame him.”

“Me either,” I said.

We fell silent and stared off to the west where the setting sun was a blood red half circle in the hills beyond the broad silver band of the Cimarron River. I could smell the rich odor of the river bottom in the distance, and somewhere nearby a dove called to its mate. A soft breeze had been blowing, rippling the grass and fluttering the leaves of the blackjack trees that surrounded the house. Suddenly the wind lay and a hush fell on the world. I reached for the jug and poured another dram of moonshine over my ice. Down in the river bottom an owl hooted twice, and from somewhere behind the house came the muted clang of a cowbell. It ceased and the silence reigned once again. Finally Chicken Little spoke. “Willie has been crabbing about the long wait.”

“What’s wrong now?” I asked with a sigh.

“He claims he’s short of money and he needs to get something going pretty soon. Says he’s had bad luck here lately in other ventures and needs a little money to live on.”

“Is there any truth in that?”

Chicken Little shrugged. “I wouldn’t be surprised. You see, Willie’s got some very odd tastes and they can get expensive.”

“You realize that he’s already been down to Texas bothering me about money, don’t you?” I asked.

“No, I didn’t know that.…”

I nodded. “I gave him a thousand that time. What would it take this time?”

“I think a couple of thousand would shut him up till Christmastime, at least. It’s come to the point that we’re going to have to either do something or cut loose from him. And if we do, we’ll need to find somebody else.”

“No, we don’t want that,” I said, shaking my head. “I suppose it’s reasonable since it’s taking so much longer than we thought. We can’t expect anybody to thrive on air and goodwill.”

Little nodded. “I believe it’s a wise move. And fair. He claims that keepin’ himself free to jump on this deal when the time comes has caused him to miss some opportunities, and I don’t doubt it. I’ll be glad to front the money, if you want me to. That’s no problem. I would have went ahead and give it to him already, but I didn’t want to make no kind of move without checking with you first.”

I pulled out my money clip and stripped off the two thousand. “Just make sure he knows the wait is going to be worth it. That game is getting hotter and richer all the time.”

Chicken Little nodded again and took the money.

“Willie ain’t really a close friend of mine,” he said with a sigh. “And I regret the trouble he’s caused you. I wouldn’t have picked him in the first place except that I didn’t have much to choose from. Most of my old cohorts have fallen by the wayside.”

“You’re the last of a vanishing breed, Little,” I told him seriously.

He nodded sadly. “I guess so. Besides, Willie will be rock steady when the time comes, and that’s worth some aggravation. He won’t talk, and he won’t never rat out his partners. That you can count on. The Little Rock police beat him half to death a few years back over a chickenshit burglary, and they never got a damn thing out of him.”

We lapsed back into silence once more and sat watching the growing dusk. From somewhere behind the house a dinner bell clanged loudly and I heard a woman’s voice call us to supper. I’d started to rise from my chair when I felt Little’s hand on my arm. “Sit back down a minute,” he said softly. “There’s one more thing you need to know.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

He sighed. “Your friend’s coming up here for the cockfight tomorrow night.”

“Which friend?” I asked.

“Clifton Robillard.”