Offerings Three Stories (2 page)

At the instant Mr. Robbins lost his life, Owen went for his gun, but he took just a whisper too long to pull it clear of his waistband. Gibson’s revolver went off again. Owen’s shot went wild, and he pitched off the landing into the river. I don’t recollect whether Iris had been screaming all the while, but she was making plenty of noise by this time, for sure. Gibson smacked her a good one, started the boat’s motor, slipped it from its mooring, and headed upstream with my sister. By the time they passed out of sight, I reckon I was making as much noise with my blubbering as Iris was with hers. It was only when I stopped to breathe that I heard the gurgling sound in the water.

***

It is a blessing that Owen was shot in the arm, because that left him two legs and one good arm to help me drag him out of the water. I was an unusually smart little girl, but I wasn’t as big as a minute.

He probably needed to sit there for a while and remember how to breathe, but there was no time. Gibson was hauling Iris upstream, but he had to navigate around a big oxbow and I knew a path that cut straight across the bend.

I grabbed Owen by his good arm and hustled him to the spot where he had a fighting chance to save my sister. He was cooperative, which was good, because I was hardnosed enough to twist his bad arm until he saw the light. He moved well for a man whose blood was dripping out and splashing on the ground. I knew that situation probably couldn’t go on much longer, but we didn’t have far to go. The path dead-ended at the river and, praise Jesus, we had gotten there fast enough.

The bank we stood on rose five feet above the river. We could have leaned over and spit on Gibson, but I paused for a second to come up with a more constructive way to use this competitive advantage. Owen was ordinarily a very smart man but, as a thinker, this wasn’t his finest hour. He didn’t stop to plan; he just launched himself, feet-first, at a man holding a gun who had just proven himself capable of murder.

As I’ve said, the boat was fully loaded with cargo. The two men crashed so hard into one box that it busted open and let out a smell like the inside of my grandfather’s flask. Even Gibson wasn’t a good enough boatman to keep his vessel upright under this onslaught. Gibson, Owen, Iris—all three of them went into the river, and the fighting and cursing began in earnest.

I needed to help my sister, and I was going to need a distraction bigger than a cypress ball. I looked around for an idea and was rewarded. The riverbank sloped downward a few yards upstream until it was barely higher than the river itself, and the criminals in the boat below me had made good use of that fact. It was an ideal spot to unload boxes from a car directly into a boat, and the Model T Ford that they used to run their rum was still parked there, waiting for them. It was certainly bigger than a cypress ball, but I didn’t have a clear idea how I could use it to save Iris and Owen. Yet.

As I ran for the car, I learned another curse word. It rhymes with “odd ma’am,” and it is a serious transgression against the commandment against taking the Lord God’s name in vain.

I must confess that the rescue plan I developed was at least as ill-considered as Owen’s, but I was under duress. I was also eight years old.

It seemed to me that Owen and Iris were only a few feet from shore, and that perhaps I could just drive the car out there and get them. The car would provide me some protection from Gibson’s gun, assuming the revolver was even still dry enough to shoot. Once Owen and Iris were in the car, we could flee at top speed—thirty miles an hour, maybe more. It did not occur to me to wonder whether an internal combustion engine would work any better underwater than a revolver would. Cars were, in those days, new and magical beasts.

Like most children, I watched and remembered each move the adults around me made, even when I didn’t understand its purpose. I knew how to “advance the spark” so that the car would start. I knew that I would find the crank on the floorboard in front of the passenger seat. I knew how to fit it into the housing on the car’s front and turn it. I knew that I would need to pull it away fast when the engine started, so as not to have my arm jerked off. However, I did not—and still do not—know much about the braking system of the Model T. At some point in the process, I disengaged the brake and, when I knelt in front of the car, crank in hand, it started to roll.

Iris, God bless her, was in the middle of the worst night of her life when she looked up and saw a car driving over her cherished baby sister. To this day, I can hear her screaming, “Lila! Lila, don’t die—please don’t die!” I have rarely felt so loved.

She might have known that I had sense enough to lay down real flat on the ground between the wheels and let the thing roll right over me.

A Model T splashing into a river makes a mighty fine distraction. Owen, who probably should have been more worried about me than he was, though perhaps he already knew me well enough to presume I’d be fine, took the opportunity to wrestle Gibson into a headlock.

The sound of a baying dog and a man’s steady voice reached me, and I knew my daddy had heard the gunshot and had come to set things right. For all the years my father lived, I enjoyed the assurance that he would take care of Iris and me. That night was no different. Watched over by Daddy and also by his hunting rifle, his bird dog Sam, and Owen, Gibson was no trouble to any of us while we waited for the sheriff.

***

Our ordeal should have been long past when the sheriff arrived. Quite a crowd had gathered on the river bank to gawk at Gibson by then—news travels fast in places where nothing interesting ever happens—and a more somber group had gathered downstream to look for Mr. Robbins. The sheriff listened soberly as Owen told his story, shaking his head at his description of how Gibson shot Mr. Robbins in cold blood.

Then Gibson raised his head and said, “The kid’s lying. He shot Robbins, and then he tried to kill me. I shot him in self-defense.”

I did not, at that time, fully realize the jeopardy that Owen was now in. In those days before fancy forensic work, I doubt that anyone in central Florida could have told whether the bullet that killed Mr. Robbins had come from Owen’s gun or Gibson’s. Assuming their guns could be fished up off the river bottom, I imagine the lawmen could have told that they’d both been fired, but that’s about all. This case would be decided based on eyewitness testimony which, in my mind, wasn’t going to be a problem. It wasn’t a question of Owen’s word against Gibson’s. Iris and I had both seen what happened. Once we got the chance to tell our stories, I knew that everyone would see the truth.

I didn’t understand that Jeb Gibson was a man of substance and wealth in our county, and the fact that his wealth was built on rum running didn’t bother people all that much. Truth be told, a lot of the gawking onlookers were his customers. Maybe the sheriff was, too, for all I know.

I also didn’t understand that the word of an eight-year-old child meant nothing then. Still doesn’t, actually. And the testimony of a seventeen-year-old girl who had been caught visiting with her boyfriend in her nightgown could hardly have been taken seriously, not in those days. Women had only been granted the right to vote and sit on juries during my short lifetime, so our word might have been suspect to that crowd, even if we’d been upstanding citizens of legal age. I didn’t understand these matters, but I sensed that things weren’t going Owen’s way, so I leapt into the breach. That seems to have been my lifelong way of doing things.

“I saw him! I saw Gibson shoot Mr. Robbins, right in the chest.”

Women started murmuring about how a child hadn’t ought to see such awful sights. They were right, but that was water under the bridge now.

“Why would he do such a thing?” the sheriff asked, getting down on one knee beside me. I could tell by his tone of voice that he was just humoring me. He had no intention of letting a little girl interfere with the august processes of the law.

“He thought Mr. Robbins and Owen were cheating him. Mr. Robbins explained to him that they weren’t and I believed him. I think—” I hesitated to expose Gibson’s ignorance but he was a murderer and all, so I plunged ahead. “—I think he can’t read and do his numbers, and he was afraid they were taking advantage.”

I saw a couple of people, including the sheriff, flick their eyes at the ground, which told me that I wasn’t the only one who knew Gibson’s secret.

“Tell me exactly what happened,” the sheriff said, so I did. I must have looked like an avenging cherub, standing there in a nightgown wet with riverwater and Owen’s blood. I started at the beginning and I told the story.

Perhaps I went into too much detail regarding the things Owen and Iris were doing at the landing because, for a time, every eye was fastened on my sister’s mortified face. But when I described the two men floating downriver on a boat loaded with contraband, those eyes swiveled in my direction. When I delivered—word for word—the argument between Gibson, Mr. Robbins, and Owen, people listened. When I got to the part where Gibson shot Mr. Robbins, his widow moaned. Still, I had the sense that I was failing. None of these people would decide which man to put in jail based on the word of a skinny girl-child.

I imbued my description of the shooting with every lurid detail I could recall. The red spray of blood from the victim’s chest. The smell of gunpowder and mud. The lonely splash of a body striking water. They were there with me, watching the murder. I could see it in their eyes. Yet they could not muster the faith they needed to act. I was still not a plausible witness.

Then I dropped the final fact onto my teetering pile of details, and they believed. I told them what Gibson had said when he pulled the trigger.

Everyone there knew me. They knew my mama and my daddy. They could well believe that Iris was capable of misbehaving in the way I described, but they were equally certain that no eight-year-old girl from a good family could possibly know that loathsome word. Some of the women in the crowd turned uncertain eyes on their husbands because they, themselves, had never heard it.

Later, when I told my story to the judge, I had been advised of how singularly unsuitable that word was for a young lady. Or an old lady or a gentleman of any age, for that matter. I refused to say it again, but the sheriff had heard my testimony the first time, and he explained things to the judge for me. Justice was served.

Owen did a little time for his rum running, but it was nothing compared to what he would have gotten for killing Mr. Robbins. I don’t know if Gibson ever got out of prison. They may have hanged him, for all I know. That was not the kind of information that was shared with little girls in those long-ago times. Everyone concerned agreed that it was best to let Owen and Iris get married before he went off to jail. Just in case. She was waiting for him when he got home, and they lived together in a little house on the riverbank for the rest of their long lives.

Eventually, I stopped being a little girl and people started listening to me when I talked.

I take that back. After that night on the river, people paid heed to what I said, because I had proven myself. I believe some of them were a little afraid of me, which may have been why I came so near to being an old maid. Webster Simpson was the only man, other than my father, who could take me seriously without being afraid of me, so I married him. We lived next door to Iris and Owen for the rest of his long life, and we were happy.

Webster was a roofer by trade, but he was an artist at heart. There was nothing that man couldn’t make with a piece of galvanized roofing and a pair of tin snips. He made Iris a toy Model T, complete with tires that rolled and a tiny little crank on the passenger floorboard. She hung it on her Christmas tree every year until she died.

It’s hanging near the tip-top of my own Christmas tree, right this minute.

####

Mouse House

By Mary Anna Evans

If Peter Pan had expired less flamboyantly or, better yet, if he had not expired at all, the murder of Paolo Arrezzo might have remained forever unsolved. If Peter Pan had stayed alive, it is possible (though unlikely) that Mr. Arrezzo’s death certificate might always have read “cardiac arrest.” Medical examiners tend to take special care with the post-mortem examinations of high-level Mafia officials who find themselves without a pulse at the tender age of 42, but there are many chemicals capable of rendering one dead. While the crime lab would certainly have looked for the poison that left him face-down in his apple strudel, some of them are damn hard to find unless you know precisely what noxious agent you’re seeking.

Young Mr. Pan’s cause of death was much easier to pinpoint. When a human being covered in fake fairy dust leaps out of a castle window, trusting that his safety cable will guide him gently to the ground, it’s best for that cable to be in one piece. I was in my office, using a dozen security cameras to scan the excitable crowd below the unfortunate Pete, when the cable failed and sent him to his fate.

Parents snatched their children—some of them teenaged and quite large—and carried them bodily toward the park exit. Within ten seconds, Main Street was a bottleneck with the potential to kill hundreds of panic-stricken guests. In the array of security monitors, I could see my staff, efficient and well-trained, leap into action. Opening seldom-used gates, they began funneling guests down into the basement that serves as the backstage for the biggest show in the world. Each guest who was shuttled through the basement and out an emergency exit was one more person who would not trample someone else or be trampled themselves. If our luck held, Mr. Arrezzo and Pete would be the only people to die in the park today.

Two deaths in one day. In a single morning. Mr. Arrezzo had expired over breakfast, and Pete had been flying the pre-noon show designed to welcome latecomers into the park. It was also timed to make the earlybirds stop in the tracks and wonder whether it wasn’t time to grab an overpriced hot dog for lunch. The sooner they ate, the sooner the Corporation would have a chance to sell them another meal.