Long Fall from Heaven. George Wier
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obliged,” the man said.
“Want a beer?” Cueball asked.
“Naw. A coke, maybe.”
Cueball’s hand had been resting on the cooler. He slid back the door, reached down and pulled up a bottle, maneuvered it under the church-key out of habit, his pale gray eyes locked with the stranger’s. Cueball didn’t bother to give the man a smile. The fellow was beyond caring about petty things.
The stranger took the coke and wandered over to a table, sat down and stared into the darkest corner of the room, oblivious. And so Cueball Boland went and joined him.
• • •
Micah Lanscomb’s story would come out, fully told, over a five-year period. Over those years, it would take the better part of a full case of Johnnie Walker Black Label whiskey to coax it forth.
As Lanscomb’s tale had it, in 1968 he’d left his family home in a dead end East Texas small town and made his way westward to San Francisco and the mecca of the children of Aquarius, the intersection of Haight Street with Ashbury. After weeks of hanging out with flower children, smoking dope from tall bongs between intermittent readings from Frodo’s passage of Moria and Gandalf’s consequent fall, he awoke one morning with the sure knowledge that his new hippie friends were full of shit to the precise degree they loudly clamored to be heard and understood. Which was not surprising given the fact they were, by-and-large, overgrown children, many of whom had been kicked from conservative nests as awkward and unfit offspring. It was, after all, a time of little understanding.
Experience was what Micah was looking for, experience with life and living. But in the cool California atmosphere of rebellion and irresponsibility there seemed little evidence that anyone else was on the same quest.
And so his quest turned inward. The drugs became harder drugs.
His first disaster came during a group campout on the beach at Malibu. He’d taken the ride down the Coast Highway with a busload of flower children in search of a score. During a particularly disturbing acid trip on the beach, one of the girls who had been traded around was murdered. Micah heard the screams in a starlit, acid-fueled darkness while wrestling with an eerie and ever-shifting reality. The stars overhead had become streaky, violent arcs. The sand beneath his bare feet sucked away at him as if drawing his life force downward from his heart. At first he thought the screeches were that of a peacock from the neighbor’s yard back home and in his distant childhood, but soon they became something else entirely. By the time he gathered himself enough to launch forward to investigate, there was only the still and lifeless body, savaged and torn beneath the cold glare of a cheap flashlight. He hadn’t loved her. No one had loved her, to his knowledge. And Micah Lanscomb hadn’t saved her. She was as much Kitty Genovese as she had been Susan “Sun-energy” Glover of the long, willowy legs and blond, Galadriel tresses. And she was dead.
He walked away that night. Walked away from California.
Death very nearly found him in a jailhouse in a small Nevada desert town at the hands of a sheriff’s deputy who didn’t care to stomach his smell. The deputy had tried to use him for a punching bag. Micah took the blows one by one up to the moment he realized the man wasn’t going to stop until his target ceased breathing. He then reached out two wiry arms past the deputy’s flailing limbs, applied an exact amount of pressure to his carotid artery, and relieved the deputy of consciousness long enough to liberate himself from jail, town, and the sovereign State of Nevada.
Eastward he walked, over mountains and across plains. He swam rivers, camped out with the ragged flotsam of humanity, and stopped when the Atlantic lapped at his ankles. There being no place further to go, he came home to Texas.
Four years had passed in a twinkling. His father was dead and his mother had remarried and moved off to Ohio. The town of Wilford was a husk of its former self. The home place, a two-bedroom shotgun house, was still standing empty. He took up residence. Two weeks after he hit town, he got a job at the local jail. Within five years he was the county sheriff. The locals, insular and suspicious of what they, in this late day, still called “the laws,” liked his diplomatic approach to law enforcement.
In 1979 he attended a symphony concert at Sam Houston State University, fifty miles away. The highlight was a Juilliard harpist named Diana Sulbee. He watched her from the first row, enchanted with her beauty and with the way she merged herself, body and soul, with the music that flowed as clear and crystalline as a cold mountain stream from her precious, slender fingers.
After the concert he went backstage, spoke to her briefly, and then surprised himself by asking her to dinner. Inexplicably, she accepted. They were married five days later before the Justice of the Peace in Wilford.
For two of the briefest and most beautiful years of his life, Micah Lanscomb was happy. That happiness was shattered when Diana was killed by an eighteen-wheel tractor-trailer rig whose driver failed to yield the right of way on an Interstate 45 feeder ramp and plowed over her sports car.
His wife’s death was his penance, Micah felt, for having let Susan Glover die that dark California night all those years before.
After the funeral—which was the largest gathering ever seen in the isolated and insular little town—Micah handed his badge and his gun to his senior deputy and pressed the keys to his truck into the bronzed hands of the Mexican grave digger. Then he began walking, yet again. This time south.
Micah walked until he met ocean once more.
Below the Galveston seawall in the turbulent waters of the Gulf, he purged himself of everything, both ugly and beautiful, and very nearly drowned in the bargain when a rip-current pulled him further out to sea. But he knew, instinctively, anything good that comes must be paid for, and sometimes the price is dear.
The man who emerged from the waves and the rocks was a different man. A man finally at peace with himself. And it was that man upon whom Cueball Boland would, in carefully measured doses over the course of time, ladle out his trust and his devotion.
[ 4 ]
Jack Pense was murdered in a warehouse that belonged to the DeMour family. The DeMours were Old Island Money like the Moodys and the Kempners and the Sealys. In Galveston old money was quiet money—money that kept its own counsel in the shuttered mansions in the city’s historic East End and in a few walnut-paneled boardrooms in the unprepossessing buildings within a couple of blocks of Broadway. Old Money in Galveston was Big Money. Micah knew that back in the fifties the Moody Bank, headquartered in its sedate five-story brick building on Market Street, held a mortgage on every Hilton hotel on the face of this round green Earth. Yet the vast majority of Americans had never even heard the name. People in Galveston liked it that way, that Old Money was both big and quiet. No one would be pleased that the killing occurred at the DeMour warehouse. It would bring light and attention where none were wanted.
It took only one look at Jack Pense’s body for Micah to know what had happened. “Man, oh man,” Rusty Taylor said. “Why would somebody do that? Could’ve been me, you know.” Rusty was the rounds guard. He drove a little Daihatsu pickup truck from site to site, checking on things, making sure there were no open doors or bashed-in windows. Cueball had a definite policy about checking on his stationary guards. The rounds guard had to verify by sight the safety of every stationary guard on each round, which was how Rusty had found Jack’s body.
“I know it could have been you, Rusty,” Micah said, “but it wasn’t. Go get yourself a cup of coffee. You’re going to be awake for the next five or six hours at least.”
“For what?” Rusty asked.
Micah turned and looked at the man and decided not to be sarcastic, which had become increasingly difficult as the years drifted on by. “You’re going to have to answer the same set of questions fifty times, is why.”
“Oh,” Rusty said. But before he turned away he asked the question again, only differently. “Why would anybody breaking in to rob the place, kill the security guard after tying him up? Doesn’t make any sense is all.”
“Because