Читать книгу Ransom Canyon - Jodi Thomas - Страница 11
ОглавлениеYancy
THE GREYHOUND BUS pulled up beside the tiny building with Crossroads, Texas, United States Post Office painted on it in red, white and blue, and Yancy Grey almost laughed. The box of a structure looked like it had been rolled in on wheels and set atop a concrete square. He had seen food trucks at county fairs that were bigger.
This wasn’t even a town, just a wide spot in the road where a few buildings clustered together. He saw the steeples of two churches, a dozen little stores that looked as though they were on their last legs framed in the main street, and maybe fifty homes scattered around, not counting trailers parked behind one of the gas stations.
A half mile north there stood what looked like a school, complete with a grass football field with stands on either side. To the east was a grain elevator with a few buildings near the base. Each one was painted a different shade of green. Yancy couldn’t see behind the post office, but he couldn’t imagine that direction being any more interesting than the rest of the town.
“This is the Crossroads stop, mister,” a huge bus driver called back to Yancy from the driver’s seat. “We’re early, but I guess that don’t matter. Post office is closed Sundays anyway.”
Yancy stood and moved down the empty aisle as the bus door swished open. He’d watched one after another of the mostly sorry-looking passengers step off this bus at every small town through Oklahoma and half of Texas. He didn’t bother to thank the driver for doing his job. Yancy had been riding for ten hours and simply wanted to plant his feet on solid ground.
“You got any luggage?” the driver asked. “It’s been so long since Oklahoma City, I forgot.”
“No,” Yancy answered as he took his first breath of the dawn’s damp air. “Just my pack.”
“Good.” The driver pulled out his cigarettes. “Normally I stop here for breakfast. That café across the street serves an endless stack of pancakes, but since there are no cars out front, I think I’ll move on. I’ll be in Lubbock next stop, and that’s home.”
Yancy didn’t care what the driver did. In fact, he hoped the fat guy would forget where he left off his last passenger. All Yancy Grey wanted was silence, and this town just might be the place to find it.
For the past five years in prison he’d made a habit of not talking any more than necessary. It served no purpose. Friends, he didn’t need, and enemies didn’t bother chatting. He kept to himself. The inmates he’d met and got along with weren’t friends. In fact, he’d just as soon never see any of them again. One of them, a dead-eyed murderer named Freddie, had promised to kill him every time he’d passed within hearing distance, and another who went by “Cowboy” would skin a dead man for the hide.
And the guards and teachers for the most part were little more than ghosts passing through the empty house of his life. He had learned one fact from every group-counseling session he’d attended, and that was if he was going to stay out of prison, he needed to plan his life. So he’d taken every course offered and planned how not to get caught when he next stepped out into the free world.
He dropped his almost empty backpack on the post office steps and watched the bus leave. Then, alone with nothing but the sounds of freedom around him, he closed his eyes and simply breathed for a while. He’d known he was low-down worthless since he was five, but now and then Yancy wanted to forget and just think of himself as a regular person like everyone else who walked the planet.
At twenty-five, he wasn’t the green kid who’d gone to jail. He was a hardened man. He had no job or family. No future. Nowhere to go. But, thanks to positive-thinking classes, he had goals.
The first one was simple: get rich. After he got past that one all the others would fall in line: Big house. Pool. Fast car.
On the positive side, he had a lot going for him. Without a plan, he didn’t have to worry about holes in his strategy. He wasn’t running away from anything or anyone, and that was a first. He’d also learned a little about every trade the prison tried to teach.
Yancy had bought a bus ticket to a town he’d once heard his mother say was the most nothing place on earth. Crossroads, Texas. He figured that was where he’d start over, like he was newborn. He’d rebuild himself one brick at a time until no one who ever knew him would recognize Yancy Grey. Hell, he might even give himself a middle name. That’d be something he hadn’t had in twenty-five years of being alive.
Sitting down on the steps, he leaned against the tin door of the twelve-foot square post office and looked around at a tiny nothing of a town that sparkled in the early light. He might not have much, but he had his goals, and with some thinking, he’d have a plan.
He wasn’t sure, but he thought his mother met his dad here. She never talked about the man who’d fathered him except to say he’d been a hand on one of the big ranches around. She’d fallen in love with the hat and boots before she knew the man in between. Yancy liked to think that, once, she might have been happy in Crossroads, but knowing his mother, she wouldn’t be happy anywhere unless she was raising hell.
Yancy warmed in the sun. The café would probably be open in an hour or two. His first plan was to eat his fill of pancakes, and then he’d think about what to do next. Maybe he’d ask around for a job. He used to be a fair mechanic, and he’d spent most of his free time in the prison shop. There were two gas stations in town. One might have an opening. Or maybe the café needed a dishwasher? He’d worked in the prison kitchen for a year. If he was lucky, there would be a community posting somewhere around for jobs, and he’d bluff his way into whatever was open.
If nothing came up, he’d hitch a ride to the next town. Maybe he’d steal enough lying around here to hock for pocket money. Six years ago he’d caught a ride with a family in Arkansas. By the time they let him out a hundred miles down the road, he’d collected fifty dollars from the granny who rode in the back with him. The old bat had been senile and probably wouldn’t ever remember having the money in the first place. That fifty sure had felt good in his pocket.
Another time, when he was about sixteen, he’d hitched a ride with some college kids. They’d been a fun bunch, smoking pot as they sang songs. When he’d said goodbye, they’d driven away without a camera that was worth a couple hundred. Served them right for just wandering around the country spending their parents’ money. No one ever gave him a dime, and he’d made it just fine. Except for one dumb partner and one smart cop in Norman, Oklahoma.
Yancy pushed the memories aside. He had to keep his wits about him. Maybe try to go straight this time. He was halfway through his twenties, and hard time would start to take a toll on him soon. He’d seen guys in prison who were forty and looked sixty.
Taking a deep breath, he let the air sit in his lungs for a minute. It felt pure and light. Like rain and dust and nothing else.
A few cars passed as the sun warmed, but none stopped at the café. Yancy guessed the place might not open until eight or even nine on Sunday. He’d wait. With twenty dollars in his pocket, he planned to celebrate. Maybe if they had pie out early, he’d have it for breakfast.
One man in a pickup stopped and stuffed a few letters in the outside drop. He tipped his hat in greeting, and Yancy did the same with his baseball cap. It had been so long since he’d been in the free world he wasn’t sure how to act. He needed to be careful so no one would recognize him as an ex-con. Most folks probably wouldn’t anyway, but cops seemed to have a knack for spotting someone who’d served time.
Yancy went over a few rules he’d made up when he was thinking about getting out of jail. Look people in the eyes but not too closely. Greet them however they greeted him. Stand up straight. At six-one he wasn’t tall enough to be frightening or short enough to be bothered. He continued with his rules. Answer questions directly. Don’t volunteer much information, but never appear to be hiding anything.
About eight o’clock he heard one of the church bells. The day was cold but sunny and already promising to be warm. The dusting of snow from last night was blowing in the street like a ghost snake wiggling in the frosty air. In an hour it would be gone.
He decided to set his first freedom goal. He’d buy a coat. After all, winter was already here. The first year in prison he’d been either hot or freezing. If he had a good wool coat, he could be warm all winter, and then if he ever got hot, he’d just take off his good coat. He sighed, almost feeling it already covering his shoulders. The old sweatshirt he’d found in the lost-and-found bin at one of the bus stops last night was too worn to last the winter.
Yancy smiled, knowing that if anyone passed by, they’d think he was an idiot, but he didn’t care. He had to start somewhere. Daydreaming might not get him anywhere, but a goal—now, that was something he could sink his teeth into. He’d listened to all the tapes. He had to think positive and do it right this time, because he was never going back to prison.
Two old men came out of a couple of the small houses across the street. One had a saw and the other carried a folding chair. They must live in the cluster of little bungalows surrounded by a chain-link fence. The sign out front, looking as old as the two men, said Evening Shadows Retirement Community.
As he watched the men, he almost felt sorry for them. In Yancy’s mind the place looked little better than prison. The homes were in bad shape. One roof sank in at a corner. One porch was missing a railing. The yard had been left on its own for so long it looked like nothing but prairie grass and weeds. A few of the homes had flowers in pots with leftover Christmas greenery, and all had tiny flags tacked up by the door as if they’d been put up as Fourth of July decorations, and no one had bothered to take them down.
Yancy stopped studying the place and decided to pass his time watching the old men. One at a time they each tried to stand on the folding chair to cut dead branches off the elms between the little houses. One kept dropping the saw. The other fell through the opening in the back of the chair and would have tumbled to the ground if his partner hadn’t braced him.
Yancy laughed. The two were an accident about to happen, and he had a front row seat.
The second time he laughed, one of the old men turned toward Yancy and pointed his cane like a rifle. “You think you can do any better, mister, you get over here and try.”
“All right, I will.” He headed toward them. “If one of you break a leg I’ll probably get blamed.” With nothing to do until the café opened, he might as well lend a hand. That’s what normal people did, right? And Yancy wanted to be nothing but normal.
Sawing a branch that had been scraping against the house was no problem, even with both the old guys telling him how. Yancy had planned to stop there, but they pointed to another branch that needed cutting and then another. As he moved from house to house, more old people came out. Everyone had elms bothering their roof or windows or walls. Before long he felt as if he was leading a walker parade around the place. Every time he cut a branch down, one of the residents would grab it and haul it outside the chain-link fence to the lot beyond.
Listening to them chatter and compliment him was like music to his ears. None of the senior citizens ordered him around or threatened him. They all acted as if he was some kind of hero fighting off the dragon elms that had been torturing them when the wind blew or robbing them of sleep.
“We should pile them up and have us a bonfire,” yelled the one old man with Cap written on his baseball hat.
“Great idea,” his friend said, joining in. “I’ll buy the hot dogs and we can have us a weenie roast.”
“Won’t that be a fire hazard?” Yancy asked as he used a stool to climb high enough to cut the last of the dead branches off a tree.
Cap-hat puffed up, making him about half an inch taller. “I was the captain of the volunteer fire department here for twenty years. I think if I say it’s all right, nobody will argue.”
To Yancy’s shock they all agreed, and now the rush was on to collect firewood.
In general, Yancy hated people. He thought of some of them as evil, like Freddie and Cowboy who’d threatened to murder him for no reason, and others he feared were simply fools. The rest were stupid, destined to be played by the evil walking the earth. That pretty much summed up the population he’d been living with for five years, and those he’d grown up with were no better.
Only, these folks were different. They treated him as if he were a kid who needed praise and direction. Each had stories to tell, and each, in their way, appeared to have lived rich, full lives. None suspected the crimes he’d committed or regrets he had in life. To them he was a hero, not an ex-con.
Yancy swore he felt like Snow White stumbling into the elderly dwarves’ camp. All of them were at least a head shorter than him, and most offered him a cup of coffee or something to eat. One little round woman dressed in pink from her shoes to her hair even brought him out a slice of pie. Mrs. Butterfield was her name, and she claimed her husband always ate pie for breakfast.
She also giggled and told Yancy that he reminded her of her first husband when he was young. “Black hair and strange eyes,” she whispered. “Just like you, young man.”
“Yancy,” he said. “My name’s Yancy Grey.” He didn’t want her thinking he was the ghost of husband number one returning.
All agreed that was a strong, good name, except Mrs. Butterfield who’d gone inside to look for a picture of her first husband.
An hour passed, and the café still wasn’t open, but Yancy felt stuffed. By now the trees were trimmed and the eight geezers pulled their chairs around a crumbling swimming pool full of tumbleweeds and dead leaves. The pool deck was one of the few places that was out of the wind and offered sunshine.
Yancy used the tree-trimming chair to join them and was welcomed with smiles. Thank goodness Mrs. Butterfield had forgotten what she’d gone to look for and returned with another slice of pie for him.
The short senior citizen who’d fallen through the chair earlier introduced himself as he offered Yancy a wrinkled hand. “Leo is my name and farming was my game until I settled here. I used to grow pumpkins so big we could have hollowed them out and used them for carriages.”
A few rusty red hairs waved at the top of Leo’s head as he laughed. “Let me fill you in on the protocol here. Every Sunday we get up early and sit out here, if the weather permits, until ten-thirty when two vans drive up. Until then we eat Mrs. Ollie’s deliciously sinful banana bread and Mrs. Butterfield’s pie if she remembers it’s Sunday. Of course, we do this so the Catholics will have something to confess and the Baptists will have something to sing about. Those feeling the calling load the vans for church and the rest of us finish off the bread before our kin drop by to take us to their low-fat, no sugar, high-fiber Sunday dinners.”
“Which van you climbing into, Mr. Leo?” Yancy smiled as he took another piece of the best banana bread he’d ever eaten.
“Neither,” Leo snapped. “I was married twice. Once to a Baptist. Once to a Catholic. After spending twenty years in each church I gave up religion for superstition.” Mr. Leo leaned forward. “Like, I’ve been noticing something about you, Yancy. You may be a good-looking fellow, but you got one gray-colored eye and one blue. Like Mrs. Butterfield said, that’s strange. Some folks might think you to be the son of a witch, or maybe a witch yourself. I’ve heard tell a man with two colored eyes can see death coming for any one he stares at. Gypsy blood in you, I’m guessing, with that black hair. They say every Gypsy is born with a gift, and yours just might be death’s sight. Am I right, Yancy?”
“That’s me,” Yancy lied. He had no idea where his people came from, but seeing death hanging around these folks wouldn’t be too hard. He was surprised the Grim Reaper didn’t make regular minivan stops by this place.
Miss Ollie passed by to offer him the last slice of bread. “Don’t believe a word Leo says,” she whispered. “He ain’t never farmed in his life. He taught drama at the high school for forty years, and if he had two wives he must have kept them in a box, because no one in town ever saw them.” She laughed. “We don’t know if his brain is addled, or if he’s just trying to make life more interesting. Either way, he’s always fun to listen to.”
It took Yancy a moment to wrap his mind around what he heard. He’d known many liars but not one who did so for fun, and nobody in the group seemed to care.
“Don’t rat me out, Ollie,” Leo grumbled, “or I’ll tell him about when you came to town as a lazy streetwalker and settled here just so you’d only have to walk a few blocks to cover the whole town.”
The very proper baker hit him with her empty banana-bread pan. Crumbs showered over him, but Leo didn’t seem to notice. He just grinned and winked at her because he knew he’d flustered her. “She’s Baptist,” he whispered. “Never confesses to a thing she’s done all her life. Taught home economics down the hall from me, and I can tell you there were some wild parties in that food lab.”
She raised the pan as if planning to hit him again, but decided to laugh.
Yancy studied the circle of people. “How many of you taught school?”
To his surprise all but one raised his hand. A tall, frail man in a black suit, wearing hearing aids in both ears, finally lifted his hand to join the others. “I think I qualify, even though I was the principal. I’m Mr. Halls. Many a student made a joke about my name.” His announcement was a bit loud. “A man’s name sets his course at birth.”
They all nodded as if he were the bravest among the brave. Battle-scarred veterans of decades of fighting their grand war against ignorance might have honed them, but age now left them crippled and alone. One to a house. No husbands or wives surviving, apparently. But they had each other. Somehow in the middle of nowhere, they’d found their place, like a flock of birds huddled together on a tiny lake.
When the two church vans arrived, most of the group climbed on. Only Leo, Cap and the principal remained in the circle with Yancy. When the principal went inside to get his cap, Yancy had to ask, “Isn’t he going to church? He’s all dressed up.”
Cap shook his head. “He dresses like that every day. Old habits are hard to break. He’s almost deaf, so whoever sits on his right tends to yell.”
When Mr. Halls returned wearing his very proper hat, he didn’t seem to notice they were still talking about him.
Yancy leaned back in his metal chair and relaxed. This is it, he thought, my river of peace that prison preacher used to talk about. They might not know it, but these old folks were offering him the bridge to cross from one life to another. He listened as they told him of Crossroads and their lives growing up, of growing old in the Panhandle of Texas, where canyons cut across the flat land and sunsets spread out over miles rich in history wild and deep.
Finally when one of the old men got around to asking what he was doing here in Crossroads, Yancy pointed to the post office and explained that he was looking for a job.
“I’m traveling light. Just a pack.” As he said the words, he stared at the steps and noticed his pack wasn’t where he’d left it.
“My pack!” he yelled as he stood and ran toward the post office.
By the time the three old men caught up to him, Yancy had been around the little building twice. The pack was nowhere to be found. No one was around. He’d been in sight of the post office all morning, and he hadn’t seen a soul walk past. The only person he’d observed stop had been the guy in the pickup, and he’d been long gone before Yancy walked across the street.
“I’ve been robbed,” he said, more surprised that a crime had been committed against him before he’d had time to commit one himself than he was worried about his few possessions.
“Everything I had was in that pack.” He didn’t mention that most of it was stuff the prison had given him. A toothbrush. All his socks and underwear. The bloody shirt he’d worn when he was arrested and a deck of cards he’d spent hours marking.
“This is serious,” Cap said, passing like an elderly, short General Patton before his troops. “This is a crime right in the middle of town. This is outrageous.”
Leo didn’t seem near as upset. “What’d you have, sonny?”
Yancy didn’t move. He couldn’t tell them how little he had. They’d probably figure out he’d come from prison. All he’d walked out with were his goals. “I had a good winter coat made of wool,” he lied. “And a great pair of boots. A shaving kit in a leather carrier and three hundred dollars.”
All three old men patted him on the shoulder. They all agreed that that was a great deal to lose.
Cap spoke first. “Come on home with me, son. We’ll call the sheriff, then you can join the few of us who are lucky enough not to have family dragging us to Sunday dinner. Mrs. Ollie always cooks for us.”
Yancy was getting into his lie now. “I don’t have the money to make it to Arizona. A friend of mine said if I could make it to Flagstaff I might have a job waiting.”
They patted him again. “Don’t you worry,” Mr. Halls said. “We’ll take up a collection if we don’t find who did this. And do you know, my daughter gave me a winter coat that’s too big for me. You can have it. I got half a dozen in the closet. She sends either that or two sweaters every Christmas.”
“Is your coat wool?” Yancy asked. After all, it had to match his dream.
“It is,” Mr. Halls said, “and if I remember right, it’s got one of them heavy zip-out linings.”
Yancy tried not to sound too excited. “I think it’ll do, thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s the least I can do for a man who was robbed right under our noses.”
“I can cover the shaving kit,” Leo added. “I have four I’ve never used. If you need gloves, I got half a dozen you can try on. Can’t seem to convince my daughter-in-law that I don’t like gloves. Why waste time on gloves when you got pockets, I always say, but I swear that woman never listens. Since my birthday is in November, she mails gloves every year. Lucky I wasn’t born in July or I’d be getting a swimsuit.”
Yancy choked down a laugh. This was better than stealing. These folks were giving him more than he could carry off. “One thing, Mr. Leo, I’d rather not call the sheriff. You see, it’s my religion to forgive any wrong done me.”
Leo swore. “Hell, I knew you was one of them van riders all along. Well, if you won’t consider converting to my religion of superstition, I’ll have to be tolerant of yours. But I got to tell you, son, that forgive-and-forget kind of thinking will lead you down a penniless path.”
Yancy did his best to look thoughtful. “I’m set on my faith, Mr. Leo. For all I know, whoever stole my pack thought he needed it more than I did.” Yancy didn’t add that was usually his philosophy when he robbed someone.
Leo saw the light. “You’re a good man, Yancy Grey, and we’d all be lucky to call you a friend. It’ll be our pleasure to help you out with anything you need. We might even offer you some handyman work around this place to help you get back on your feet.”
“Thanks,” Yancy managed as he started a list of things that he’d forgotten were in his pack. A watch. A new wallet. “I’d be thankful for any work. I’ve been laid off for a while.”
Everyone jumped as Mr. Halls shouted, “A man on a mission is a man who can’t be bested.”
Leo and Cap nodded, but Yancy had a feeling the old principal was walking the halls in his mind reading quotes he’d seen along the walls of the high school.
