The Blues & Billie Armstrong 55
THREE DRINKS & THE TRUTH
Previously in The Blues & Billie Armstrong…
Outside, the sun dipped behind the mountains and the day melted into deep blue. Valentine turned eyes back to the doorway. “There’s a light,” she said. “I see a boat.”
Sonny walked down the bar and picked up the bottle in front of Timmy. “Time for you to clear out, Tim,” he said. “Like I said, private meeting.”
Timmy said, “I ain’t going nowhere. You’d have to drag me out kicking and screaming. I want to see who else is coming to this shindig. Besides, I ain’t done with my beer.”
Sonny started to come around the bar.
“No,” Valentine said. “I know who he is. He stays.” And she went out the back door again.
I didn’t move. I stared into my glass of bourbon and thought again of all the times I’d seen Billie’s face in the faces of strangers in cafés and bars, or her red hair flashing in a crowd, her hips swinging up the street and disappearing around a corner. The many Billies that were not Billie. And now the familiar hope and dread flooded me heart to stomach. I hoped to detect a flicker of the old fire burning in those green eyes—consolation if not reprieve, a sentence of time-served for my guilt-ridden conscience. I dreaded the prospect of cold bitterness in a face mapped by years of gray worry.
Timmy shook a bent cigarette out of a rumpled pack of Kools and fired it up, all the while eyeballing me in the bar-back mirror like some movie psychiatrist lighting his pretentious pipe. He was enjoying this.
She wore a white peasant blouse and a stone-washed denim skirt that flared out above black tights and Birkenstocks, and if I’d seen her across the street in some other town, I might not have recognized her.
Her hair still tumbled in waves around her face but the waves had turned silver. I might have thought she was just another middle aged hippie woman that you could see in any Northern California bookstore or coffeeshop, or at the city council meeting speaking out for a lost cause. But when she entered the room and smiled at me with one hand on her hip—even though I was hoping to see it—I was shocked at the effect. There was a churning in my mind and the blood rushed up to my face. Unseen in the dim light of the bar, I may have blushed.
“I knew it!” Timmy said. “Billie fucking Armstrong. I got to thinking, big city writer Archer King, been shit-talking Lupoyoma for years, all of a sudden he’s back in town? Something’s up. And I was right. Oh yeah, I was right, shit’s gettin’ close to the fan now!”
Close up, Timmy was pitted and withered to an extent I hadn’t noticed before. He looked older than Sonny, who had about fifteen years on him. He was concentration camp thin and sallow gray, the complexion of wet ashes. I recognized the look, the toll of long-term drug use. I’d been pretty far out there myself back in the lost 1980s when it seemed the whole population of Lupoyoma County was wired to the gills. I ran across Timmy a couple times back then, spotted him across a parking lot or a barroom, pretended not to notice and left in the other direction. The legacy of that era was divisible into three categories. There were those who died, and they were too many. There were those who wised up, got clean and moved forward. And there were those who never stopped drugging but somehow stayed alive, all the while dying in front of you. That was Timmy.
“Bilderback, Timothy, juvenile,” said Valentine, stepping forward. “Key witness, according to the files. I don’t know why it didn’t click immediately.”
“Who the hell are you again?”
“I’m Ms. Armstrong’s lawyer.” She stood behind the pool table, hands on the rail in a commanding way that transformed the barroom into a courtroom.
He coughed up a laugh. “Well, I got nothing to say to you… except your client’s in big fucking trouble when they catch her ass. And they will. Soon. Real soon. Everybody knows she killed Hank, and they’re gonna lock her up and throw away the fucking key.”
“Actually, most of the evidence is circumstantial. You were the closest thing to an eye witness. Now it’s been forty years, and you have a criminal record of your own and a court date later this month as I recall—possession for sale, isn’t it? Yes, I can’t wait to get you on the stand.”
Timmy paused for a split second, but he never was one to back down.
“I ain’t afraid of you,” he said. “I know what I saw that night.”
“And what was that, Mr. Bilderback? Pretend you’re under oath now.”
“No big deal—I was in the living room at Trey’s, asleep on the floor. I heard some kinda commotion—glass breaking, Hank shouting. I looked out the window and saw this crazy bitch swinging a bat around. I went to get Trey, but he was passed out cold. When I looked out the window again, Hank and her were both gone, and I thought well, show’s over, and went back to sleep. Then in the morning, bunch of cops showed up. I told them, same as I’m telling you.”
“You were spending a lot of time at Trey’s then, weren’t you?
“Yeah, so what?”
“You were also there on a different night—the night Ms. Armstrong was raped.”
I felt Billie’s eyes on me, measuring my reaction, and I figured there was no point in pretending surprise. Now that the truth had entered the room, it might soon be calling my name.
“Don’t know nothing about that,” Timmy said.
I said, “You remember, Tim. It was the night Nate’s band played on the patio, the night Nate burned his draft card.”
“I went home early that night, the party was still going when I left.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “You were bouncing off the walls. Too much tequila. You weren’t going anywhere.”
“You’re the one who passed out on the couch,” Timmy said.
“Yeah, wonder why.”
“Well, I was stone cold sober,” Sonny said from behind the bar. “And I saw you ducking down the hallway when I came in.”
“I don’t care what you saw, I don’t know nothing about no rape.”
“Oh yes you do,” Billie spoke up. “You know because you were in the room. You and Trey held my arms down.” Her voice was firm, but she was still standing over by the back door like she might want to escape.
Timmy forced a laugh. “No one in the world will believe a word you say.” He pointed like his finger was a weapon. “You’d say absolutely anything to save your ass.”
Valentine said, “According to the police report, there are other potential witnesses. Trey Morgan, of course, and the Quarterman boy—”
“Trey wouldn’t give you the time of day—if you could even find him. Ran off to Idaho last year, joined some fucking militia, gets off on walking through the local Walmart with his AR-15. And Joey Quarterman bought the farm fifteen years ago, OD’d thirty feet out his own back door, face down in Bottlerock Creek with a fucking needle still in his arm.”
Being reminded about Joey’s death made me thirsty, and I signaled Sonny for a second drink. Joey never came clean to anyone about the rape far as I know. I suppose he had his reasons. Like me. But one day, a couple years after the headlines, I was sneaking a smoke on the hill behind the high school football field, and Joey walked up the dirt path, stood next to me, lit a cigarette, kept his eyes on the field below and said, without preamble, “You know, I don’t blame her.” I knew what he meant, and we never spoke of it again, but I knew it was eating him up. Like me.
Sonny filled my glass and left the bottle on the bar in front of me, sighed and crossed his arms. “I found Joey sitting out on the pier that night crying and shaking and hugging his knees, apologizing out-loud to God. Wouldn’t even look at me.”
“Well, I ain’t coppin’ to shit,” Timmy said. “Like I told you, I wasn’t there. I don’t care what any of you say, especially this murdering commie bitch.”
“I wasn’t thinking of Trey or Joey,” Billie said. She came a few steps further into the room, and that perked everyone’s ears up. “I think I saw someone else that night, someone who maybe witnessed the whole thing… through the window.”
Timmy said, “What? What a pantload! What are you even talking about? You were practically un…” Realizing how close his foot was to his mouth, he shut up.
My heart started running in circles. I poured myself another drink, my third. I took a twenty out of my wallet and started to lay it on the bar. Sonny held up a hand and said, “On the house.”
Valentine looked as shocked as Timmy. “I think I’m gonna need another, too,” she said.
Timmy knocked the heel of his empty beer bottle on the bar. “How bout me? I could use another beer over here.”
“You pay in advance,” Sonny said.
Timmy sneered and laid the money on the bar.
“We all know I wasn’t just drunk,” Billie said. “But, even so… there was a moment when I looked across that room and I swear I saw a pair of eyes flash in the corner of the window,” she said. “Someone was there… and I think I know who.”
A ten-thousand-pound silence hung over the room as Sonny poured Valentine’s drink and set the glass quietly on the bar. The ice cubes rattled as he stirred in the tonic. Valentine came and picked up her drink, took it back to the pool table as Sonny slowly went to the cooler, fished out a Bud, popped the cap off and set it down in front of Tim.
Billie seemed to be stabbing me with her eyes. I felt everyone was waiting for me to say something. Or maybe it was only me who was waiting for me to say something. Waiting all the years.
I slammed my empty glass down on the bar, and everyone flinched.
“Oh, what the hell,” I said. “You’re a lying son of a bitch, Tim.” Something solid in my tone alerted him, and he spun around toward me. I faltered for a moment, realizing I’d just dipped my toe in scalding water. Billie seemed to encourage me with a tilt of her head. I locked on her. “It was me, goddammit. In the window… the eyes you saw… it was me, alright?” In Billie’s face I saw a quiet knowing. And grateful relief.
I turned back to Timmy. “I saw what Hank did and I saw you help, Tim.”
“You’re full of shit, King. Still making up your little stories for the newspaper. No one’s gonna believe that crap. Like, why didn’t you tell the cops back then? Hell, why don’t you tell them now? You gonna tell the whole world you watched your sister get raped and you didn’t do a thing about it? Yeah, put that in your big city fishwrap.”
“Archer—you saw?” Valentine said, and the question doubled as an accusation, first against me, and then against her mother. “Mom, why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I wasn’t sure,” Billie said. “I had to be sure. That’s why we came.”
I braced myself with my hands on the bar. I searched Billie’s eyes again. I hung my head. My own eyes brimmed, my defenses tattered.
Billie seemed to read my anguish. “Archer, you were just a boy,” she said. “All of thirteen.”
Valentine had a different take. “But why didn’t you ever tell someone… how could you—”
The cops exploded into the room through both doors at once and were suddenly rushing everywhere in their bulletproof vests marked S.W.A.T. in Helvetica Extra Bold, yelling and pushing, their weapons drawn and zip-tie handcuffs at the ready. My legs were kicked out from under me with no warning, I heard my knees crack on the linoleum and the pain shot up my thighs.
I was slammed to the floor, my head turned to the side, looking over at Billie’s face in the same position. Those fierce, wet jade eyes.
The Blues & Billie Armstrong is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance of the fictional characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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