“On account of the hair. I gave up trying to have a name because everybody called me Red anyway, so why fight it? Now, what can I do for you?”
Chris withdrew a notebook and a pencil from her handbag and tried to look professional. “I believe you know Mr. Tynan. Do you know where he is now?”
Red laughed. “If I know Ty, right now he’s in a bathtub with three of my best girls.”
Chris was so shocked that she dropped her notebook and pencil and bent quickly to retrieve them, trying to cover her distress.
Red sat on the other end of the sofa. “Oh, dear, it’s like that, is it? How long did you spend with him?”
“Just a few days,” Chris said, smoothing her skirt, not lifting her red face.
“And you fell in love with him,” Red said flatly.
“More or less,” Chris mumbled then lifted her head, started to say something then stood. “The man is driving me crazy!” she said with passion. “I thought you might know something about him. He seemed to talk to you as if he knew you.”
“I guess I know him as well as anyone. I helped raise him. Look, honey, women fall in love with Ty on a daily basis. He’s so damned good lookin’ and that voice of his can talk a woman into anything. But I can tell you that, as far as I know, he never has anything to do with good girls like you.”
“That’s just what he said. Oh, Miss Red,” she said, moving back to the sofa. “I’ve never been in love in my life and I don’t even know if I am now, but there’s something intriguing about this man and I want to know all I can find out about him.”
Red looked at her a while. “He deserves more than what he got dealt in life. He’s a good boy and he ain’t never had a chance at nothin’ but bad. If I tell you about Ty, will you tell me how come he’s out of jail?”
“My father got him out. Have you ever heard of Delbert J. Mathison?”
“About as often as I’ve heard of beer. Tynan ain’t got hisself mixed up with the likes of him, has he? That man will eat Ty alive.”
“He’s my father,” Chris said, then waved her hand in protest as Red started to apologize. “I know him better than anyone. For some reason, he got Ty out of jail to kidnap me from where I was visiting and take me home. Tynan said that it was because he knew the rain forest, but I don’t think that’s all of it. I think my father had another reason and I have no idea what it is.”
Chris lowered her head. “I never met anyone like Ty and I like him a great deal. I sense that there is more to him than one can see right away. I…I’m afraid I threw myself at him. He told me that if he touched me my father would send him back to jail. Needless to say, I stayed away from him for the last few days of the trip.”
“I told you that Ty never touches innocent girls. The last time he did, he got thrown in jail and would be dead now if some of us girls hadn’t stepped in.”
With an expectant look on her face, Chris waited for the woman to speak. She was older than Chris had originally thought, but her skin was well cared for and soft looking.
Red got up to get another drink of well watered whiskey. “I don’t usually drink this time of day but seein’ Ty again and havin’ him to worry about makes me wanta get drunk and stay that way. You were right when you said that I seemed to know him. I’m one of four women that are the closest thing to a mother that boy ever had.”
She sat down across from Chris. “He wouldn’t like me tellin’ you this but you give me a lot of pleasure in them articles of yours and I wanta do somethin’ for you. About twenty-nine years ago when I was just startin’ out in this business—and I was little more than a kid myself—a miner brought a newborn baby to the house where I was workin’ and left him to us girls to take care of. That old man was as bad as they come, nobody could stand him. He’d cheat cripples if he could. Well, he brought this baby in and he hadn’t even cleaned it, it still had the birth filth on it and it was weak from hunger. We ran around real fast and found a woman to feed the baby and we took care of him as best we could for as long as we had him.”
“And that was Tynan? How had the miner come by him?”
“He wouldn’t tell us until we’d given him free whiskey, but he said he’d found a pregnant woman wandering in the forest, out of her head. She stopped in front of him—I’m sure he didn’t volunteer to help her—and delivered the baby herself. She whispered the single word of Tynan, then died. Knowing the miner, it’s a wonder he didn’t just walk away and leave the dead woman and the baby. But I guess he had plans to get what he could so he wrapped the boy up and brought him to us.”
Red stood, her back to Chris. “We did the best we could but a whore house ain’t no place to raise a kid. All the girls adored him and I’m sure we spoiled him rotten, but we had problems we couldn’t help. When Ty was about two, we dressed him up in a little suit and escorted him to Sunday School. The ladies of the congregation ran us off. They wouldn’t believe that Ty wasn’t one of our byblows.”
Red paused a moment. “He stayed with me until he was six years old. I never loved anybody more than I loved that
boy. He was all that I had.”
“What happened when he was six?”
Red gave a resigned sigh and looked back at Chris. “The miner that’d found him came back with a lawyer, said Tynan was legally his and took him away. Two towns away, he stood Ty on a table and auctioned him off to the highest bidder.”
Chris sat still for a moment as she let this sink in. A little boy stood on a table and auctioned off as if he were an animal. Slavery had been abolished years ago. “Who, ah, bought him?”
“Some farmer on his way east. I didn’t see or hear from Ty for twelve years. By then he was the strappin’ big, good-lookin’ thing that he is now, but he’d changed. I got him to tell me some of what had happened after he left the farmer’s.” She paused to smile. “I don’t think the farmer was too happy with Ty’s leavin’ ’cause Ty had a couple of scars on his legs and when I asked him where he got ’em, he said it was caused by differin’ opinions about whether he should leave the farmer’s or not. I think the man worked Ty like a draft horse. After he left, at twelve, he was on his own. He traveled around, took odd jobs, got into a bad crowd a couple of times, learned how to use a gun, all the things a boy does. Then for a while he seemed to be headed for real trouble but something changed him. I don’t know what it was or if it was anything special. A friend of his, an outlaw, got hisself hanged and that may have had an effect on Ty, I don’t know, but whatever it was, somethin’ made him go straight.”
Red closed her eyes for a minute. “Goin’ straight just about killed him. He took all the jobs nobody wanted or was too afraid to take on. He’d even go into towns run by outlaws and clean them up. But, since he always left dead bodies behind him, one after another, the good townspeople would always ask him to please leave.”
“But that’s not fair,” Chris said.