Winter Kills Read Online Free PDF Page A

and walk in the windy halls late at night instead of letting her sleep.
    Fletcher hadn’t been without some money coming in since he was twelve years old. He was scared. He didn’t tell himself what a good batting average he had as a steady earner. He never reminded himself that he had one hundred and two thousand, four hundred and six dollars in four banks around the state. He just said to himself that he was forty-four years old and his momma needed him, but that he didn’t have any son to take care of him when he was old like Momma.
    His stomach got so bad he could eat only chili. They had to stop eating in all the expensive places because he couldn’t stand to see all that money being paid out just for cooked food. By the week after he was fired they were having dinner together three times a week at the Spanish Village in Cedar Springs or out to Joe Garcia’s in Fort Worth. Casper had got so he just didn’t want to talk about anything except how Turk was heading straight for the history books.
    “You know what I found out?”
    “What?”
    “Fletcher means ‘maker of arrows.’”
    “I didn’t know that,” Turk said. “I’m good with a rifle, but I never handled a bow and arrows in my life.”
    “No. That ain’t it. It’s a meaningful symbol. You are a maker of arrows who is going to pass into history because of the way you can shoot. A rifle, that is.”
    “I always knowed I was meant to do big things,” Fletcher said. “My momma taught me that from the time I was about fryin’ size. That was my heartbreak. I mean, I can shoot a rifle, but I was never stretched. I mean, I got all the shitty details in the army. My momma used to tell me I might be Viceroy of India,so, what the heck, anything I ever did never seemed like anything to me. I never seemed to be able to climb into the real money. They was like fifty bandidos around Dallas and Houston and ten other Texas towns all bulgin’ into the big money while I was just a workin’ stiff, and I ain’t even that now. I been turned down for three jobs in a row, and that never happened before. They ain’t any crane work left for five hundred miles around. All I have to keep me goin’ is what is keeping Momma alive—we both know I’m gonna pass into history. But when?”
    “Turk? I know a man who’ll make you rich and push you into history if you’ll point your rifle and shoot Tim Kegan when he rides by.”
    “I guess we both know a coupla hundred of them,” Fletcher said glumly. “Right here in Dallas.”
    ***
    One Sunday afternoon on the way back from a big country rifle shoot at Fort Peters, where Fletcher made himself five hundred and twelve dollars betting on himself and Casper made maybe ten times that much, they were rolling along home in Casper’s big sand-colored Cadillac with the thin red stripe all around it when Casper said, “Seen the papers, Turk? Kegan is beggin’ the Russians to be nice to us again.”
    “I never read newspapers,” Fletcher said. “They say one thing today, then they say something all different a week from now.”
    “Don’t you care what happens to your country?”
    “Pew, Junior. Everybody in Dallas cares about that. Let them take care of it. I don’t have a head for politics.”
    “Well, you can write this down in your little book,” Casper said. “Kegan is just asking for it.”
    “Ever’body in Dallas knows that too.”
    “All right. Then you know where the people of Texas stand. And the whole oil-depreciation allowance.”
    “Junior, first I got to get me a job, then you’n me can talk about politics. Okay?”
    “Would you take twenty-five hundred dollars and all expenses to spend a little time on a ranch?”
    “Doin’ what?”
    “Showin’ a man how to shoot a Garand rifle the right way so’s he can run it good enough to pot Tim Kegan ridin’ past in a car?”
    “No shit?”
    “Twenty-five hundred dollars cash. And here’s where the class comes in. My boss doesn’t blink an eye at