The Long Night of Winchell Dear by Robert James Waller
“Marty, turn off the light. It shines in my eyes, can’t see good when it’s on.”
“Just a second. I’m looking for the location of that border patrol station. I marked it earlier…yeah, here it is. It’s on I-10, about an hour up the road from us, near Sierra Blanca. Sierra Blanca, that’d mean ‘White Mountain’ or something like that in English, wouldn’t it?”
“Marty, would you please goddamn turn off the goddamn light?”
Marty folded the highway map, tucked away the handwritten map, and flipped off the light. “Once we clear that border patrol station, I’ll feel better. Think they’ll shake us down?”
“Nah, they won’t bother us. They’ll be looking for wet-backs. That’s what I was told.”
“I hope you’re right. I don’t like being without the hardware. Getting under the car and undoing duct tape ain’t exactly what you’d call a fast pull.”
Marty twisted his neck and looked out the passenger-side window, trying to see the sky again and wishing he’d studied the moon more than he had during a messy life, which in a way Marty couldn’t grasp seemed to be disappearing while he lived it. He’d been thinking recently about taking up a religion, something that would provide focus to his time among the living. Maybe the Church of the Latter-day Saints or Jehovah’s Witnesses. Representatives from both sects had knocked on his apartment door in the last month and talked with him. He’d studied the pamphlets they’d left, but it all seemed pretty confusing and involved certain commitments and pledges he wasn’t sure he could fold into his work and lifestyle.
“Dumb idea anyway, taping the guns up under there,” he said, sliding lower until his knees were bent and his rear was on the edge of the seat. “Think that’d fool the Border Patrol if they got serious about us? Shit, no. Dumb idea, right?”
“Well, that’s what we were told to do. Just following orders.” The driver looked over and down at Marty. “Hey, what’n hell you up to, working on your limbo dance or something?”
“I’m looking for the goddamn moon. What you think I’d be doing way down here? Dumb idea, that’s what, taping the guns up under the fender. Christ, I see it now. What a moon out there! See it?”
Marty possessed an irritating habit of ending almost any topic he happened to be on with a question, sometimes requiring an answer, sometimes not. And it could drive you crazy, because if you were around him, you spent half your time deciding whether or not an answer was necessary and, if it seemed that way, the other half thinking one up.
Aside from that, he was a little nutty but generally useful, and the best part of him was his absolute lack of conscience together with being a good weapons man. Marty lacked a certain amount of overpowering intelligence, yet he was cool when the work was in progress and never looked back and always seemed to be hungry after a job. He said killing was like sex in that respect. But he never ate until the guns were cleaned and loaded again. Had a rule about that and stuck to it.
The driver thought about Marty’s complexities, then shook his head and lit a Marlboro, accelerating a little more, pushing the Connie hard into the West Texas night.
Everyone in Clear Signal, Texas, including the morning coffee group down at the Ocotillo Cafe, was pretty sure Winchell Dear didn’t get those seventy sections east of town by doing smart cattle business. That conclusion followed from the evidence before them: Winchell Dear leased out the grazing rights after acquiring the land, and if he’d been a real rancher, he would never have done that. Of course, he’d slapped his brand on thirty head of longhorns he kept mostly as walking scenery, but pets didn’t count. Plus, according to Jack Stark, who held the grazing lease, Winchell Dear was letting an Indian squat on his land.
So they’d figured out that much and wondered why the old Circle F had ever gone over to this stranger from somewhere else in the first place. Somebody did point out, however, that somebody else remembered there had been a border patrolman named Dear stationed around Clear Signal a long time ago, and maybe this Winchell fellow was related to him in some way.
Said one, while they were getting ready to leave the Ocotillo and matching coins to determine who would pay for the coffee: “You know, the Cobblers owned that Circle F from almost the beginnings of West Texas. Old Fayette Cobbler used to say he’d come out here in aught five with nothing more than a horse, a saddle, and a hard-on and would probably leave with nothing more than his saddle. But he killed more’n one rustler, cleared the lions from Guapa Mountain, and worked his ass off, building that place from the ground up…him and his wife and wetback labor. Never was a real big ranch, but forty-five thousand acres ain’t all that shabby as a way of leaving something behind. They took a little silver out of Guapa Mountain, and that helped him get by some of the thin years.”
Said another: “Well, things have a way of deteriorating by the third generation. Young Rick Cobbler always seemed a lot more interested in going skiing up at Ruidoso and hanging around Las Vegas than he did in ranching.”
Said a third: “Something tells me Las Vegas had a lot to do with Rick giving up the Circle F and leaving town. He used to drop quite a bit right here when the nonstop poker game over at the Leland Hotel was still running. Was known as a loose player. Some folks ran into him a while back up in Vegas, at the Desert Inn, I think they said it was. Said he was drinking awful heavy, all roostered up and raving on about card cheats and that, by God, the cheats weren’t getting away with any more cheating if he had anything to say about it, and, by God, in addition he was going to fix somebody’s wagon. Rick always was hotheaded, you know. By the way, notice what that Winchell Dear renamed the place?”
Said the first: “Damn, you might be right, Jake. I never put all that together. Hell, yes, calls it the Two Pair. That makes some kind of sense, don’t it?” He sketched Winchell Dear’s brand in the air while he talked.
“And talking about pairs, did that woman he brought out here with him ever have a set!” Jake rolled his eyes upward and let out a short whistle of appreciation for the content of images still recalled. “What the hell was her name…Jemima, Janene, Jarrel, something like that? How old you figure she was, forty maybe? She sure as hell had the Clear Signal T-shirt-and-tight-jeans prize well in hand all the time she was here.”
The others nodded, conjuring up their memories of Jarriel Piper pushing a grocery cart up and down the aisles of the Food Basket. Seemed she was always followed or met by a line of cowhands pushing carts and grinning back and forth at one another like schoolboys exchanging dirty pictures.
Said the third, “Yeah, heard one time she was Miss Montana in a beauty contest. When she was younger, of course.”
Said the fourth, “Well, getting back down to earth, in a manner of speaking, two pair ain’t much of a poker hand, and that land’s about the same caliber. Deep-well place. Need to drill twelve to fifteen-hundred feet before you find anything. Ol’ Fayette used to say about his water out there, ‘If I don’t get it from heaven, got to pull it up from hell.’”
Everybody laughed as they stood up, ready to leave.
“Goddamn, miss old Fayette since the lung cancer, I guess it was, got him eighteen, twenty years ago. Let’s see, wasn’t it about ten years after Fayette passed on that Fayette junior died when that snorty son-of-a-bitching gelding of his went over on him in Diablo Canyon?”
One and two nodded.
“That was one oily bronc. Fayette junior used to say that hisself. Said if he didn’t know better, he’d’ve sworn they’d never cut the horse. Gelding came back over on him and saddle horn broke his breastbone and four ribs. Wasn’t enough chest structure left to help him breathe. Six hours passed before Rick found him dead and the horse grazing off to one side, just quietly towing along Fayette junior, whose boot was all tangled up in a stirrup.”
The shadows outside the café were sharp and clean in the desert sun as they said good-bye, and each pulled his hat low and went his own way on the morning of the day that would bring the long night of Winchell Dear.
And the hands of Winchell Dear: fingers long, running slim to bony. The hands, liver-spotted but still light and feathery and like a magician’s, doing the old classic shuffle his father had taught him. Half the cards from the top of the pack with his right hand, other half in the left, put both halves end to end. Thumbs on the side of the cards toward him, forefingers on the cards with knuckles bent, other three fingers supporting the cards opposite the thumbs. Riffle the halves together with the thumbs, loosen grip, slide them into a single block. Cut, pull out the bottom half, lay it on the top half. Do it again, then once more and once more after that.
Winchell Dear could execute a four-shuffle in slightly more than fifteen seconds, including the cuts, and never looked as if he were hurrying while he was doing it. He’d had a lot of practice. And while he riffled the cards, he thought of Lucinda Miller and hoped she was doing well. Lucinda was a hell of a lot better woman than Jarriel, and on nights like this, especially on nights like this one, he mourned the passing of what they’d had at one time. Quiet snap of cards and Winchell Dear thinking he ought to give Lucinda a call and check on her general well-being.
FIFTY-TWO YEARS BACK along the curls and wobbles of a chancy life and on the occasion of Winchell Dear’s fifteenth birthday in 1938, his father took him into the desert. They sat in a Ford coupé and looked across the Rio Grande toward the Carmens rising high and rocky in northern Mexico, dirt and sand riding hard on a late afternoon wind and pinging against the car’s metal parts. Little cyclones of dust spurted up and twirled across the ground in front of them, flamenco quick and dying even as they formed and danced.
After lighting a cigar and puffing on it for something near a minute, his father pointed the cigar toward Mexico. “Mexicans are basically good people. Like ’em. They’ve got a screwed-up country, but I like the people.”
He smoked for another minute, then spoke quietly. “Winchell, the reason I brought you out here is to talk a little about your future, so I’ll get right to it. To my way of thinking, there’s only three things a man needs to know about as a way of getting on with his life, and they all start with p: pistols, poker, and fast Pullman trains. Those’ll protect you, sustain you, and get you where you need to go.”
His father reached behind the front seats and pulled out a .44-caliber revolver, an 1887 Remington that had been hard used by the look of it, and three boxes of bullets along with two decks of playing cards still in their wrappers. “The cards are new, the pistol belonged to a friend of mine, Leo Dawkins…you’ve heard me mention him a time or two, I think.”
Winchell thought he’d heard the name before, but it seemed as if his father knew everybody scattered along the 1,300 miles of river separating Texas and Mexico, and Sam Dear was always telling one story or another, the pieces of which kind of ran together and lost their separate identities after a while. Winchell probably had heard about Leo Dawkins somewhere in all of that, and as he thought on it, he was pretty sure he remembered something about an abortive cavalry charge.
Sure enough. His father waved the cigar in a direction that could be described as generally west and said, “Leo was the only one killed when the Seventh Cavalry made its famous assault against Pancho Villa near Juarez. Last true and great cavalry charge in American history, led by Colonel Tommy ‘Pink Whiskers’ Tompkins no less. They tell me it was really something, starting out as a thing of beauty and grandeur, before it degenerated into chaos. Leo’s horse went into an irrigation ditch at full scoot, broke his neck—Leo’s, that is. Don’t know how the horse came out of it. Leo was a good man to make horse tracks with, and I can tell you that’s not the way he would’ve picked to die if he’d been given any choice in the matter. Anyway, his gun came over to me through his sister, and I’m giving it to you. It’s a little more iron than you’re ready for right now, but you’ll grow into it.”
Winchell turned the heavy pistol over in his hands and noticed how the late desert sun reflected off the barrel, while his father smoked and looked toward Mexico.
After a time, the man who loved the river and thought well of the Mexican people, and carried his badge and revolver everywhere he went, talked some more. “Winchell, don’t tell your mother about all this. She’d have a fit. She won’t mind about the gun; that’s just part of a man’s ordinary tool kit out here. But the cards are something altogether different.
“Your mother keeps thinking you ought to be a doctor or lawyer or such. She’s never understood men all that well, sees things from a woman’s perspective, which I suppose is natural, and what I’m trying to get across is the notion of independence. I’ve worked for the government most of my life, and I’m here to tell you that’s not the way to go. And doctors and lawyers are just retail merchants, in most ways, dependent on people walking up to them for their services.
“Now”—his father became expansive, his language broadening and his gestures growing until they swept across the border and back again, along the big river and over all the spaces where latitude and leeway might be found—“learn to play poker and learn it better than anyone else…there’s a way to earn your living. Free as that Harris’ hawk circling over there and beholden to no one. Got that?”
Winchell nodded, a little confused and never having given one single thought to playing cards for a living and not at all sure that was how he wanted his life to turn. He’d been leaning toward becoming a cowboy or a border patrolman like his father. Maybe even a mining engineer, like the men in high lace-up boots and broad-brimmed hats he’d seen over at the Terlingua cinnabar diggings. He didn’t know for sure what mining engineers did, but he admired their clothes and the way they walked around with papers in their hands, giving directions to those who did the dirty jobs. Being a mining engineer had its appeal, outdoor work and giving orders. Hard to beat that combination.
Sam Dear went on, “I’m not a real expert, but I know a few things, and I’m going to start by showing you how to shuffle cards. After that, I’ll teach you the basics of the various poker games. But the mark of a professional is being able to handle the cards in a light and easy way, make ’em dance and talk, make ’em go where you want ’em to go and do what you want ’em to do.
“When you get halfway decent with the basics, I’ll introduce you to Fain Bracquet…you’ve seen him, the slick-looking fellow who hangs out at the Thunder Butte Store. They don’t call him a chaparral fox for nothing. Fain’s one of the great card cheats in the Southwest, and he can show you what to watch for in that line of bad doings. You’ll notice he always dresses up like a sore toe and never seems to work for a living. That’s because Fain Bracquet knows things other people don’t. When he’s through teaching you the tricks, you’ll be able to spot most card cheats and hustlers right off. Get good enough and you won’t need to cheat, and you shouldn’t ever do that anyway. Like I said, all I want you to learn from Fain is what to watch out for.
“Got to make do for yourself out there, Winchell. It’s called capitalism, I guess, and this so-called Great Depression ain’t showing much sign of ending. Always people gambling, however, hard times or not. That seems kind of odd, but it’s true. Something to do with faith in investing a little money to try to make a lot of money in spite of all the odds against them, usually losing their little money on the dreams of big money when they could’ve been investing their little money in something better and slowly working up to big money.”
Young Winchell was pretty clouded up by what his father was saying. It all sounded like a risky and somewhat scary adult world of cheaters and cardsharps and tough men who probably wouldn’t tolerate excuses or inexperience. Sounded like a pretty uncertain way of making a living compared with being a cowboy
“Well, Winchell, what do you think about all this?”
At fifteen, the boy was still a little gawky in the movements of both his mind and his body. He gave his father a half-shy grin and shrugged, not knowing what to say for sure and staying quiet.
“Well, you can give it a try, and if it doesn’t work out, that’s okay, too. Winchell, I’m not saying you got to do the things I’ve been talking about. Just offering some different choices from those you might be considering.”
They drove back toward home, Sam Dear holding the wheel with both hands, cold cigar clenched in the left side of his mouth. The coupé bounced over rocks and cactus while Winchell held the big pistol in his lap and studied it.
“It’s a gate-loading gun, Winchell.” His father was talking past the cigar, wiggling it up and down with almost every word. “Doesn’t flip open like my service revolver. Move that little doojiggy back of the cylinder, and you’ll be able to see one chamber at a time. Ejector rod under the barrel pulls back, kicks out the empty shell, and you’re ready to stick a new one in the chamber. Single-action, too, so you got to cock the hammer before it’ll fire. It’s a little slow on the reload but still one of the best old-time pistols ever made. We’ll go out behind the house tomorrow, and I’ll show you how the whole thing works.”
Winchell Dear moved the doojiggy and looked into the hollow space of an empty .44-caliber chamber. It was a big space, and his little finger fit partway into the opening.