My mother went over to sit beside him and put an arm around him. “It’s for the best, Buckman,” she said softly. “You’ll see.”
Later on I’d realize she knew better than the rest of us how much he loved that woman and what terrible things it could mean.
But because he was in love he could not let it lay. He had to try to find her. He made inquiries around the neighborhood, thinking that maybe she’d told somebody where she was meaning to go. What he learned from several of the nosier folk on the street was that she’d frequently had a visitor these past weeks. A man, yes, they told him—sorry to say, but yes. An insurance salesman named Wilkes who one day had called on several houses along the block until he got to the LaSalle place and then called on no others. He came back almost every evening. Drove a green Lincoln. Always parked it at the end of the street and then walked up to the house and knocked on the door and was let inside.
Buck went to some people who knew how to find out things and in about two weeks he had it all. Roman Wilkes worked for a life insurance company that had branches in Texas and Mississippi in addition to Louisiana. He had recently requested and been given a transfer to the Beaumont, Texas, office. Buck even had the man’s home address.
We learned all this from him one evening when he and Russell had supper with me and my mother. Daddy was out to sea. Buck told it in a voice I hadn’t heard from him before—sort of flat, like he was talking about somebody else’s troubles, somebody he wasn’t all that much concerned with. My mother said for him to please not do anything foolish, and he looked at her like the request was too strange to comprehend.
They disappeared for a while after that, both of them, without having told us where they were going. When Daddy next came home we hadn’t seen them in over six weeks. I checked at their place a few times but the landlady didn’t know anything except they were paid up through the next two months.
Then one breezy Saturday morning when Daddy had been back about two weeks and the Spanish moss was fluttering in the oaks and the banana leaves swaying in the courtyard, right after my mother left for the library, Russell showed up.
My mother had said all along that they’d probably gone to Beaumont to look for Jena and maybe do something to the Wilkes fellow. She hoped they wouldn’t find either one—which they probably hadn’t, she said, and that’s why they were taking so long. Daddy’d said maybe they were just off larking somewhere. But my mother was right—Beaumont’s where they’d been.
It was the second thing Russell told us after the hugging and backslapping. The first was in answer to Daddy’s questions of where the hell was Buck and was he all right.
“He’s okay,” Russell said, “sorta.”
But that was as good as the news got. It’s why he’d waited for my mother to leave for the library before he came to the door. He told us the whole thing over a couple of pots of coffee.
They’d arrived in Beaumont late at night and checked into a hotel, but the next morning Buck insisted on going to Wilkes’ house alone. He wouldn’t even tell Russell the address. He left his car at the hotel and drove off in a Dodge they’d stolen the day before. Russell waited all day, and when Buck still hadn’t come back by sundown he had a bad feeling. Then he went down to the dining room for supper and there it all was in the evening edition.
Russell had torn the report out of the newspaper so Daddy and I could read it for ourselves. A local businessman named Roman Wilkes had been assaulted in his home by a suspect who identified himself to police as Ansel Mitchum. The victim was reported to be in a coma and suffering from “severe facial disfigurement.” Police had been alerted to the fracas by neighbors who reported screams from the Wilkes residence. On arriving at the scene, police found Wilkes unconscious on the living-room floor. They followed “a trail of blood” out the back door and found the “severely injured” Mitchum crawling across the yard toward a car parked in the alley. Mitchum had been taken to the hospital but refused to give any information other than his name. Police were “not specific about the nature of his injuries.” The car, they said, had been reported stolen in Orange the day before.
Neighbors told investigators they’d seen the suspect peeking into Wilkes’ windows just prior to entering the house and that “a godawful screaming” ensued shortly after he went inside. According to neighbors, a woman—“a real looker”—had been living with Wilkes for the past several weeks, and police speculated that the assault may have been provoked by a “love triangle.” A search was underway for the woman, last seen by neighbors when she ran from the house with a suitcase in hand and drove away in Wilkes’ car.
Mitchum had been arraigned in the hospital and stood charged with attempted murder. If Wilkes should die of his injuries, police said, they would amend the charge to murder or manslaughter, depending on the facts brought out in their investigation. Mitchum would remain in the hospital under guard until he was well enough to be transferred to the city jail and there held for trial.
Ansel Mitchum was an alias I hadn’t known Buck to use before. Ansel was his middle name and Mitchum was Russell’s. Russell’s favorite phony name was Caesar Smith—God knows why. Both of them had a slew of names they went by. The idea was never to give the cops a name you already had on a jail record somewhere, even in another state. Most cops couldn’t find their ass with both hands, Buck always said, but sometimes they got lucky and came up with a previous-arrest record. You wanted always to be a first-time offender.
The next day Russell had put on a coat and tie and gone to the hospital. He told the uniformed cop guarding Buck’s door that he was Luther Sammons of Houston, Texas, a cousin of Ansel Mitchum and his only living relative. They’d lost touch with each other over the past years but had been very close when they were younger. He was in Beaumont on business and had read in the paper about his cousin’s awful trouble and that he was badly hurt. He’d brought a basket of fruit and wondered if it would be all right to visit with him for a few minutes. The guard examined every piece of fruit in the basket and then gave Russell a good frisk and said all right, ten minutes.
Russell said Buck’s face was orange with iodine and all scabbed up with deep scratches over his eyes and on his cheeks. One hand was manacled to the bed by a yard of narrow chain. A catheter hung down from under the sheet and drained red piss into a plastic bag.
“He got a kick out of me just waltzing in there,” Russell said. “I asked him could he go along with me taking down the guard and busting him out, but he said hell no, he was too stove up to even stand.”
Buck told him in a whisper how he’d snuck up to Wilkes’ house and looked in the windows and saw them together on the sofa. They were in their underwear and laughing at some damn thing on the radio like they didn’t have a care in the world. He’d been ready to kick down the door but tried the knob first and found it unlocked. He was practically on top of them before they realized he was there. He got Wilkes on the floor and hit him over and over in the face with a big marble ashtray. Jena was hollering and clawing at his eyes and he snatched her by the hair and slung her across the room. Then he started stomping on Wilkes’ head and meant to keep at it for a while except Jena came up from behind and stuck him in the short ribs with a steak knife. He grabbed her by the throat but she swung the knife underhand and stabbed him in the thigh and then swung it up again and got him between the legs.
“He said the pain of it beat all he’d ever known about pain,” Russell said. “Said he couldn’t holler for the want of breath.”
He yanked out the knife but must’ve fainted because next thing he knew he was on the floor in a mess of his own blood and Jena was gone. Wilkes looked dead. The pain was something to reckon with but he managed to get on his feet and make it out the back door before he fell again and couldn’t get up. Then the cops were there. He
