and Perry had quarreled and separated before they reached the
border. Perry turned back, my father went on to Alaska alone.»
«And he hasn’t written you since?»
«No.»
«Then it’s possible your brother may have joined him recently, within the last month.»
«I don’t know. I don’t care.»
«On bad terms?»
«With Perry? Yes. I’m afraid of him.»
«But while he was in Lansing you wrote him frequently. Or so the Kansas authorities tell us,» Nye
said. The second man, Inspector Guthrie seemed content to occupy the sidelines.
«I wanted to help him. I hoped I might change a few of his ideas. Now I know better. The rights of
other people mean nothing to Perry. He has no respect for anyone.»
«About friends. Do you know of any with whom he might be staying?»
«Joe James,» she said, and explained that James was a young Indian logger and fisherman who
lived in the forest near Bellingham, Washington. No, she was not personally acquainted with him,
but she understood that he and his family were generous people who had often been kind to
Perry in the past. The only friend of Perry’s she had ever met was a young lady who had
appeared on the Johnsons’ doorstep in June, 1955, bringing with her a letter from Perry in which
he introduced her as his wife.
«He said he was in trouble, and asked if I would take care of his wife until he could send for her.
The girl looked twenty; it turned out she was fourteen. And of course she wasn’t anyone’s wife.
But at the time I was taken in. I felt sorry for her, and asked her to stay with us. She did, though
not for long. Less than a week. And when she left, she took our suitcases and everything they
could hold — most of my clothes and most of my husband’s, the silver, even the kitchen clock.»
«When this happened, where were you living?»
«Denver.» »Have you ever lived in Fort Scott, Kansas?»
«Never. I’ve never been to Kansas.»
«Have you a sister who lives in Fort Scott?»
«My sister is dead. My only sister.»
Nye smiled. He said, «You understand, Mrs. Johnson, we’re working on the assumption that your
brother will contact you. Write or call. Or come to see you.»
«I hope not. As a matter of fact, he doesn’t know we’ve moved. He thinks I’m still in Denver.
Please, if you do find him, don’t give him my address. I’m afraid.»
«When you say that, is it because you think he might harm you? Hurt you physically?»
She considered, and unable to decide, said she didn’t know. «But I’m afraid of him. I always have
been. He can seem so warm-hearted and sympathetic. Gentle. He cries so easily. Sometimes
music sets him off, and when he was a little boy he used to cry because he thought a sunset was
beautiful. Or the moon. Oh, he can fool you. He can make you feel so sorry for him — «
The doorbell rang. Mrs. Johnson’s reluctance to answer conveyed her dilemma, and Nye (who
later wrote of her, «Through-out the interview she remained composed and most gracious. A
person of exceptional character») reached for his brown snap-brim. «Sorry to have troubled you,
Mrs. Johnson. But if you hear from Perry, we hope you’ll have the good sense to call us. Ask for
Inspector Guthrie.»
After the departure of the detectives, the composure that had impressed Nye faltered; a familiar
despair impended. She fought it, delayed its full impact until the party was done and the guests
had gone, until she’d fed the children and bathed them and heard their prayers. Then the mood,
like the evening ocean fog now clouding the street lamps, closed round her. She had said she
was afraid of Perry, and she was, but was it simply Perry she feared, or was it a configuration of
which he was part — the terrible destinies that seemed promised the four children of Florence
Buckskin and Tex John Smith? The eldest, the brother she loved, had shot himself; Fern had
fallen out of a window, or jumped; and Perry was committed to violence, a criminal. So, in a
sense, she was the only survivor; and what tormented her was the thought that in time she, too,
would be overwhelmed: go mad, or contract an incurable illness, or in a fire lose all she valued home, husband, children.
Her husband was away on a business trip, and when she was alone, she never thought of having
a drink. But tonight she fixed a strong one, then lay down on the living-room couch, a picture
album propped against her knees.
A photograph of her father dominated the first page — a studio portrait taken in 1922, the year of
his marriage to the young Indian rodeo rider Miss Florence Buckskin. It was a photograph that
invariably transfixed Mrs. Johnson. Because of it, she could understand why, when essentially
they were so mismatched, her mother had married her father. The young man in the picture
exuded virile allure. Everything — the cocky tilt of his ginger-haired head, the squint in his left eye
(as though he were sighting a target), the tiny cowboy scarf knotted round his throat — was
abundantly attractive. On the whole, Mrs. Johnson’s attitude toward her father was ambivalent,
but one aspect of him she had always respected — his fortitude. She well knew how eccentric he
seemed to others; he seemed so to her, for that matter. All the same, he was «a real man.» He did
things, did them easily. He could make a tree fall precisely where he wished. He could skin a
bear, repair a watch, build a house, bake a cake, darn a sock, or catch a trout with a bent pin and
a piece of string. Once he had survived a winter alone in the Alaskan wilderness.
Alone: in Mrs. Johnson’s opinion, that was how such men should live. Wives, children, a timid life
are not for them. She turned over some pages of childhood snapshots — pictures
made in Utah and Nevada and Idaho and Oregon. The rodeo careers of «Tex & Flo» were
finished, and the family, living in an old truck, roamed the country hunting work, a hard thing to
find in 1933. «Tex John Smith Family picking berries in Oregon,1933» was the caption under a
snapshot of four barefooted children wearing overalls and cranky, uniformly fatigued expressions.
Berries or stale bread soaked in sweet condensed milk was often all they had to eat. Barbara
Johnson remembered that once the family had lived for days on rotten bananas, and that, as a
result, Perry had got colic; he had screamed all night, while Bobo, as Barbara was called, wept
for fear he was dying.
Bobo was three years older than Perry, and she adored him; he was her only toy, a doll she
scrubbed and combed and kissed and sometimes spanked. Here was a picture of the two together bathing naked in a diamond-watered Colorado creek, the brother, a pot-bellied, sunblackened cupid, clutching his sister’s hand and giggling, as though the tumbling stream
contained ghostly tickling fingers. In another snapshot (Mrs. Johnson was unsure, but she
thought probably it was taken at a remote Nevada ranch where the family was staying when a
final battle between the parents, a terrifying contest in which horsewhips and scalding water and
kerosene lamps were used as weapons, had brought the marriage to a stop), she and Perry are
astride a pony, their heads are together, their cheeks touch; beyond them dry mountains burn.
Later, when the children and their mother had gone to live in San Francisco, Bobo’s love for the
little boy weakened until it went quite away. He wasn’t her baby any more but a wild thing, a thief,
a robber. His first recorded arrest was on October 27, 1936 — his eighth birthday. Ultimately, after
several confinements in institutions and children’s detention centers, he was returned to the
custody of his father, and it was many years before Bobo saw him again, except in photographs
that Tex John occasionally sent his other children — pictures that, pasted above white-ink
captions, were part of the album’s contents. There was «Perry, Dad, and their Husky Dog,» «Perry
and Dad Panning for Gold,» «Perry Bear-Hunting in Alaska.» In this last, he was a fur-capped boy
of fifteen standing on snowshoes among snow-weighted trees, a rifle hooked under his arm; the
face was drawn and the eyes were sad and very tired, and Mrs. Johnson, looking at the picture,
was reminded of a «scene» that Perry had made once when he had visited her in Denver. Indeed,
it was the last time she had ever seen him — the spring of 1955. They were discussing his
childhood with Tex John, and suddenly Perry, who had too much drink inside him, pushed her
against a wall and held her there. «I was his nigger,» Perry said. «That’s all. Somebody he could
work their guts out and never have to pay them one hot dime. No, Bobo, I’m talking. Shut up, or
I’ll throw you in the river. Like once when I was walking across a bridge in Japan, and a guy was
standing there, I never saw him before, I just picked him up and threw him in the river.
«Please, Bobo. Please listen. You think I like myself? Oh, the man I could have been! But that
bastard never gave me a chance. He wouldn’t let me go to school. O.K. O.K. I was a bad kid. But
the time came I begged to go to school. I happen to have a brilliant mind. In case you don’t know.
A brilliant mind and talent plus. But no education, because he didn’t want me to learn anything,
only how to tote and carry for him. Dumb. That’s the way he wanted me to be. So that I could
never escape him. But you, Bobo. You went to school. You and Jimmy and Fern. Every damn
one of you got an education. Everybody but me. And I hate you, all of you —