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PART III OF A THREE PART STORY

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By the third night, Fate had developed a parking problem.

On Friday it had arrived in Fort Stockton aboard an olive-drab UAZ-69A driven by a Russian cosmonaut who had once been removed from a space mission because somebody saw a suspicious shadow on an X-ray. On Saturday it had returned in a Cotillion White Cadillac Eldorado towing a red-and-white horse trailer containing a palomino, accompanied by a rhinestone cowgirl whose great-great-grandfather, according to family tradition and several bourbons, had won the only horse race in history in which the jockey crossed the finish line already dead.

Sunday night, Fate came in a Pontiac Aztek.

This was considered excessive.

Chad was sitting at the Lucky Lady with Hairless B29 and Angus Hopper, attempting to explain the previous two evenings to Angus, who had missed both of them because cattle, unlike human beings, did not recognize weekends and had developed a particular talent for requiring attention whenever something interesting happened in town.

“So the Russian was supposed to go into space,” Chad said, “but they found something on his lung.”

Angus nodded.

“And the other three went instead.”

“Right.”

“And died.”

“Right.”

“In space.”

“Technically.”

Hairless took a drink.

“Where else would you die in a spaceship?”

“I mean they were the only people who actually died in space. Everybody else died getting there or coming back.”

Angus considered this.

“That’s not better.”

“I didn’t say it was better.”

“You said technically.”

“Technically doesn’t mean better.”

Hairless stared into his beer.

“Usually doesn’t.”

Angus turned back to Chad.

“And then the next night a woman showed up with a horse.”

“Palomino Patty.”

“That’s her real name?”

“We didn’t get that far.”

“Probably wise.”

“And her great-granddaddy won a horse race after he died.”

“Great-great-granddaddy,” Hairless corrected.

Chad frowned.

“I thought it was great-granddaddy.”

“You’ve told it both ways.”

“Well, there were a lot of greats involved.”

“That’s genealogy now?”

“Close enough.”

Angus had just opened his mouth to pursue the matter when headlights swept across the Lucky Lady’s front windows.

All three men looked.

A vehicle turned into the parking lot.

Hairless stopped drinking.

Chad stopped talking.

Angus leaned forward.

There are automobiles that enter a scene and automobiles that interrupt one.

The 2001 Pontiac Aztek was an interruption.

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It rolled beneath the parking lot lights wearing Citrus Green Metallic paint over expanses of gray plastic body cladding that appeared to have been installed by somebody expecting the vehicle to spend considerable time being attacked by shopping carts. Its front end contained several competing ideas about where headlights belonged. Its roof rose toward the rear with the architectural confidence of a municipal recreation center. The back end seemed to have been designed by a separate committee that had not been permitted to see the front.

It parked.

Nobody spoke.

Finally Angus said, “What in the hell is that?”

“Pontiac Aztek,” Chad replied.

“I know what it is.”

“Then why’d you ask?”

“I was hoping I was wrong.”

Hairless studied it through the window.

“Looks like a minivan got drunk and woke up in somebody else’s clothes.”

The driver’s door opened.

The man who stepped out did not improve matters.

He was tall and thin, with a long narrow face, dark hair swept straight back from a high forehead, and sideburns extending farther south than local zoning ordinarily permitted. He wore a green plaid sport coat over a yellow shirt, a bolo tie with what appeared to be a polished stone the size of a biscuit, brown trousers that ended slightly too high above tan boots, and amber-tinted glasses.

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He closed the Aztek’s door, stood for a moment looking at the Lucky Lady, and then adjusted his coat.

Angus watched him.

“Well.”

Hairless nodded.

“Matches the car.”

The stranger came inside.

He paused while his eyes adjusted to the dimness, then walked to the bar and took the stool two places down from Chad. Hank approached with the resigned expression of a man who had spent three consecutive nights watching increasingly improbable people arrive in his establishment.

“What’ll it be?”

“Whiskey.”

“Preference?”

“Brown.”

Hank accepted this as sufficient guidance.

The stranger took his drink, looked around the room, and raised it slightly toward the three men.

Hairless nodded toward the parking lot.

“Aztek, huh?”

The stranger smiled.

“Purty, ain’t she?”

Hairless stared at him.

Angus turned away and covered his mouth.

Chad, whose position at the Piggly Wiggly required diplomacy with customers who attempted to return watermelons after eating most of them, tried to respond professionally.

“It’s certainly green.”

“Citrus Green Metallic.”

“That helps.”

“Bought it new.”

Now all three looked at him.

“New?” Angus asked.

“Two thousand one.”

“You went into a Pontiac dealership,” Hairless said carefully, “looked at all the cars available to you, and selected that one?”

The stranger took a drink.

“Yep.”

“On purpose?”

“Yep.”

“Nobody had your family?”

The man laughed.

“Gaston Gage.”

Introductions went around.

Angus asked where he was from.

“Been living in Chile.”

That got Chad’s attention.

“Chile?”

“Yep.”

“South America?”

Gaston looked at him over the amber lenses.

“You know another one?”

“No.”

“Then that one.”

Hairless was still studying the Aztek through the window.

“What made you buy it?”

Gaston smiled.

“Family trait.”

“What is?”

“Questionable decisions.”

He took another drink.

“Runs way back.”

And because the Lucky Lady had somehow become the Pecos County branch office for improbable family history, nobody found this particularly unusual.

“How far back?” Chad asked.

“Eighteen forty-eight.”

Angus put down his beer.

“That’s fairly far.”

Gaston nodded.

“My great-great-great-great uncle Phineas.”

“Phineas Gage?” Chad asked.

Gaston looked surprised.

“You know him?”

“Had a psychology class.”

Hairless turned toward Chad.

“You?”

“Junior college.”

“Finish it?”

“That’s not relevant.”

Gaston smiled.

“Well, Phineas was the one started us down the road.”

“What road?” Angus asked.

Gaston pointed through the window at the Aztek.

“That one.”

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There followed several seconds in which everyone attempted to establish a relationship between nineteenth-century railroad construction and Pontiac product planning.

Nobody succeeded.

“But it weren’t his fault,” Gaston said.

That was when he told them.

On September 13, 1848, Phineas Gage was twenty-five years old and working as a railroad construction foreman near Cavendish, Vermont. By the accounts preserved by his physician, Dr. John Martyn Harlow, Gage had been a capable, energetic and dependable man, the sort entrusted with men, explosives and the problem of persuading mountains to make room for railroads. Modern medical histories still describe the accident that followed as one of the landmark cases in the study of the relationship between the frontal lobes and behavior.

Gaston leaned an elbow on the bar.

“They were blasting rock.”

Angus nodded. He understood blasting.

A hole would be drilled into stone. Powder went into the hole. Sand was supposed to go over the powder. Then the charge was tamped down with an iron rod before the fuse was set.

Phineas had his own tamping iron.

“Custom made,” Gaston said.

Hairless frowned.

“He had a personalized crowbar?”

“Wasn’t a crowbar.”

“Looked like one?”

“Long iron rod.”

“Then I’m staying with crowbar.”

The rod was approximately three and a half feet long, a little over an inch in diameter and weighed about thirteen pounds. On that September afternoon, while Gage was preparing a charge, something went wrong. The sand apparently had not yet been poured over the powder. Gage turned his head to speak to the men behind him and brought the iron down. The rod struck rock. A spark ignited the powder.

Gaston tapped the bar.

---

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“Boom.”

Nobody interrupted.

The explosion launched the tamping iron upward.

It entered beneath Gage’s left cheek.

Passed behind his left eye.

Went through the front portion of his brain.

Exited through the top of his skull.

And landed some distance away.

Hairless slowly lowered his beer.

“Through his head.”

“All the way.”

“The whole iron?”

“The whole iron.”

Angus frowned.

“And he lived?”

Gaston smiled.

“That’s the part where the story gets peculiar.”

Chad stared at him.

“The part where it gets peculiar?”

Gaston ignored that.

Phineas Gage did not merely survive the initial blast. Accounts say he remained conscious enough afterward to speak, and he was transported by ox cart to his lodgings, where physicians confronted an injury that should have rendered the question of future employment largely academic. Infection nearly killed him afterward, but Gage survived that too.

Hank had drifted closer.

He had stopped polishing glasses.

“You saying this man got an iron bar blown completely through his skull and then rode into town sitting up?”

“Pretty much.”

Hank looked at Hairless.

“Yesterday we had the dead jockey.”

“I remember.”

“Day before that, dead cosmonauts.”

“I was here.”

Hank looked at Gaston.

“I’m closing early tomorrow.”

Gaston continued.

Before the accident, Gage had been regarded as efficient, capable and responsible. Afterward, Harlow recorded marked changes in his behavior. He could be profane, impatient and disrespectful of social restraint. His friends famously said he was “no longer Gage.” The case eventually became one of the most famous episodes in neuroscience because it appeared to offer dramatic evidence that injury to the frontal regions of the brain could alter behavior and personality.

Chad nodded.

“That’s the part I remember.”

Hairless looked at him.

“From the class you didn’t finish?”

“Will you let that go?”

“No.”

But Gaston raised a finger.

“Here’s where folks get it wrong.”

The stories that accumulated around Phineas Gage became larger than the surviving evidence. Generations of textbooks and popular accounts turned him into everything from a violent brute to an irresponsible drunk, even though the historical record supporting many of those claims is thin. Modern scholarship has repeatedly warned that Gage became something of a blank screen onto which later writers projected theories about the brain. Evidence also suggests that he achieved a meaningful degree of social recovery.

“And that’s where Chile comes in,” Gaston said.

Angus glanced at him.

“Your Chile?”

“Same Chile.”

Years after the accident, Gage went to South America and worked as a stagecoach driver in Chile. That mattered. Driving a coach was not work for a man incapable of routine, responsibility or planning. He had to manage horses, passengers, schedules, roads and whatever South America decided to throw beneath the wheels. Researchers have suggested that the highly structured nature of that work may have helped him relearn social and behavioral skills after his injury. The idea remains a hypothesis, but his ability to hold such employment is part of the evidence that the cartoon version of a permanently ruined Phineas Gage is too simple.

Gaston finished his whiskey.

---

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“So he got better.”

“Some,” Angus said.

“Enough.”

Chad pointed toward the parking lot.

“I still don’t understand the Pontiac.”

Gaston nodded gravely.

“Neither does General Motors.”

Hairless laughed first.

Hank followed.

Even Angus surrendered.

Gaston looked through the window at the Citrus Green Metallic object beneath the parking lot lights.

“Family always said Phineas’s accident changed the Gages. Made us more willing to take chances.”

Chad stared at the Aztek.

“That’s not a chance. That’s a cry for help.”

“She’s got a tent.”

This silenced Chad.

“A what?”

“Tent. Fits over the tailgate.”

Hairless leaned back.

“Well, hell. Why didn’t you lead with that?”

Gaston became animated.

The rear seats came out. There was a removable cooler between the front seats. The cargo area had speakers, stereo controls, a rolling organizer tray and a cargo net. With the optional tent attached over the split tailgate, the Aztek could become a campsite.

“You can sleep in it.”

Angus looked toward the window.

“I’d want to be unconscious too.”

Gaston laughed.

Under the hood was a 3.4-liter V6 producing 185 horsepower, driving the front wheels through a four-speed automatic transaxle. It had air conditioning, cruise control, a Pioneer sound system and both cassette and compact-disc capability, which Chad admitted provided the driver with several entertainment options while waiting for people to stop pointing at the exterior.

Hairless walked to the window.

He stared at the Aztek.

The others joined him.

From the side, it looked no better.

That somehow helped.

“You know,” Hairless said, “I think I understand.”

Gaston smiled.

“Phineas?”

“No. Pontiac.”

“Oh.”

“They built the thing they wanted to build.”

Angus nodded.

“Whether anybody wanted them to or not.”

“Exactly.”

Chad looked at Gaston.

“So your theory is that a tamping iron went through your ancestor’s frontal lobe in 1848, he moved to Chile, and a hundred fifty-three years later you bought a Pontiac Aztek.”

“That’s the family version.”

“Scientifically?”

“Not strong.”

“Historically?”

“Worse.”

“Genetically?”

“Probably insulting.”

Chad nodded.

“I like it.”

The three men returned to their stools.

And for the third night in a row, the Lucky Lady became quiet enough for the strange machinery of coincidence to be heard turning somewhere behind the walls.

The Russian had been taken off Soyuz 11 because of a shadow on an X-ray that turned out not to be tuberculosis. Three other men took his place and died when their capsule lost pressure in space.

Frank Hayes had punished his body to make weight for a steeplechase, suffered a fatal heart attack during the race, remained in the saddle and won anyway.

Phineas Gage had been standing over a hole in Vermont when iron struck stone at precisely the wrong angle, producing a spark no larger than the head of a match. That spark launched thirteen pounds of iron through his skull, destroyed part of his frontal lobe, altered the course of his life, helped alter medicine’s understanding of the brain, sent him eventually to Chile and, through a chain of reasoning that should never be examined by anyone holding a graduate degree, ultimately resulted in a Citrus Green Pontiac Aztek parked outside the Lucky Lady.

A shadow.

A heartbeat.

A spark.

Tiny things.

Then everything afterward.

Gaston ordered another whiskey.

Nobody objected.

The next morning, I was back where most mysteries in Fort Stockton eventually went to be misunderstood.

The big table at Grounds for Divorce was already filling up when I arrived. Angus and Hairless had beaten me there, which wasn’t unusual. Angus was a rancher and therefore considered sleeping past sunrise an early symptom of moral decline, while Hairless operated according to a biological clock that apparently required coffee before most people had completed their first trip to the bathroom. Rex Hall was working on his first cup. Trixie was working on everybody else’s business. Pastor Peterson had taken the chair that gave him the best chance of hearing something requiring either prayer or clarification, and Mayor Goodman sat at the far end with that ridiculous red tie of his hanging almost to the floor.

Chad came in behind me, looking tired.

Lucinda was on him before he made it three steps.

“You’re late.”

“Frozen-food case.”

“Again?”

“Making a noise like an asthmatic tractor.”

“What’d you do?”

“Told them not to unplug it.”

Lucinda considered this.

“Management.”

“Exactly.”

Chad dropped into the empty chair beside Hairless.

I took my usual place.

Lucinda came around with the coffee pot before I had completely settled in.

“You hear about last night?”

I looked at her.

“Lucinda, I was there.”

“Never stopped anybody in this town from telling you about it.”

She had me there.

She filled my cup.

Behind her, Delgado could be heard in the kitchen committing acts against bacon. The griddle hissed, dishes rattled, somebody dropped something metallic and followed it with a Spanish expression that required no translation. Morning sunlight came through the big front windows and laid itself across the tables. Beyond the glass, Fort Stockton had resumed pretending to be normal.

Across the street, RUSTY HAMMER HARDWARE was open for business, prepared to sell the citizens of Pecos County all manner of objects which, if improperly handled, could conceivably alter the direction of a family for generations.

After the weekend we’d just had, that struck me as less theoretical than usual.

The review began before I’d taken my second sip.

Three nights.

Three strangers.

Three vehicles that no sensible person would ever have expected to converge on Fort Stockton within the same calendar year, much less the same weekend.

We started with Valeri Kubasov.

Then Palomino Patty.

Then Gaston Gage.

From there we moved naturally to the UAZ, the Eldorado, the horse trailer, Sugarfoot, Frank Hayes, Phineas Gage and, finally, the Citrus Green Metallic Pontiac Aztek.

The Aztek consumed more time than Phineas Gage.

I don’t know what that says about us.

Probably nothing good.

“I’m just saying,” Chad told the table, “it had some interesting features.”

Hairless stared at him.

“Here we go.”

“Removable rear seats.”

Nobody responded.

“Built-in cooler.”

Angus drank his coffee.

“Still a Pontiac Aztek.”

“It had a tent.”

Rex looked up.

“A tent.”

“Fit over the back.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“You could sleep in it.”

Angus nodded.

“I’d want to be unconscious too.”

Trixie laughed into her coffee.

Chad looked around the table for support and found none.

“Premium Pioneer sound system.”

Lucinda passed behind him with the coffee pot.

“Give it up, Chad.”

“Cassette and CD.”

“Chad.”

“Cargo speakers.”

She kept walking.

I watched him for another second.

He wasn’t finished.

“Rolling organizer tray.”

Hairless closed his eyes.

“Dear God.”

Pastor Peterson looked at him.

“Leave me out of this.”

That ended the Aztek discussion for nearly thirty seconds.

Then Rex cleared his throat.

“What you’re all describing is coincidence.”

Pastor Peterson looked across the table.

“Perhaps.”

Rex knew that tone.

We all knew that tone.

It was the tone Pastor Peterson used when he was about to disagree with you while remaining sufficiently pleasant that Jesus could not be called as a hostile witness.

“Perhaps?” Rex asked.

“I’d call it providence.”

Rex put down his coffee.

“Three unrelated people coming through Fort Stockton isn’t providence.”

“Three unrelated people with three extraordinary stories.”

“Still coincidence.”

“On three consecutive nights.”

“Statistically unusual doesn’t make it divine.”

Trixie lifted one shoulder.

“I still want to know who did Patty’s hair.”

Nobody acknowledged her.

She looked at me.

“I’m serious.”

“I know.”

“That kind of volume doesn’t happen by accident.”

Rex pointed at her.

“Now that is causation.”

Mayor Goodman had been listening with the grave expression of a man waiting for the conversation to wander close enough to municipal government that he could claim jurisdiction.

“Tourism,” he said.

The table went quiet.

We all looked at him.

“What?”

Angus frowned.

“Tourism?”

“People coming to Fort Stockton. That’s tourism.”

“One was from Russia.”

“International tourism.”

“One had a horse.”

“Equestrian tourism.”

“Gaston lives in Chile.”

Mayor Goodman brightened.

“International again.”

Hairless rubbed his forehead.

I took another drink of coffee.

The mayor’s tie had worked its way beneath the table and was lying across the floor like a red carpet nobody had requested.

Rex returned us to the matter at hand.

“Coincidence.”

“Providence,” Pastor Peterson said.

“Tourism,” Mayor Goodman repeated.

“Hair spray,” Trixie said.

Chad raised a finger.

“Tent.”

Lucinda stopped beside him.

“Do you want more coffee?”

“Yes.”

“Then don’t.”

She filled his cup anyway.

Sitting there listening to them, I kept thinking about the three vehicles.

A UAZ.

An Eldorado towing a horse.

And a Pontiac Aztek.

I had lived long enough to know that Fate rarely announces itself in advance, but if it ever did, I doubted anybody would have guessed those were the company cars.

Angus looked across the table at me.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“What do you think?”

The table got quieter.

I looked around at them.

Hairless with his coffee. Angus beneath his brown hat. Rex waiting for an answer that could be supported by peer review. Pastor Peterson waiting for one that couldn’t. Trixie still mentally reverse-engineering Palomino Patty’s hair. Chad apparently wondering whether this was an opportunity to mention the Aztek’s removable cooler again. Mayor Goodman waiting to declare the entire weekend an economic-development initiative.

Lucinda stood nearby with the coffee pot.

I took my time.

“I think if a Russian cosmonaut, a rhinestone cowgirl with a horse, and a man from Chile driving a Pontiac Aztek all show up in Fort Stockton on the same weekend, we’re entitled to call it whatever we want.”

Pastor Peterson nodded.

“Fate.”

“Coincidence,” Rex said.

“Tourism,” Mayor Goodman offered.

We all looked at him again.

“What?”

Nobody answered.

Delgado came through the kitchen door carrying a plate piled high with biscuits split open beneath enough cream gravy to render the underlying architecture theoretical.

“Who ordered biscuits and gravy?”

Six hands went up.

Delgado stopped.

He looked at the hands.

Then at the plate.

Then back at the hands.

Without a word, he walked over and set the plate in front of Hairless.

Hairless looked down at it.

The other five looked at Delgado.

“Why him?” Chad asked.

Delgado shrugged.

“Fate chooses.”

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He went back to the kitchen.

That settled the matter about as well as anything was going to.

I wasn’t sure Rex was wrong about coincidence, or that Pastor Peterson was wrong about providence. Maybe they were simply two names for the same thing depending on whether you were carrying a prescription pad or a Bible.

What bothered me was how little it had taken in every case.

A shadow.

A heartbeat.

A spark.

Tiny things.

Kubasov had spent years preparing to fly into space. Four days before Soyuz 11 launched, somebody saw a shadow on an X-ray and decided it might be tuberculosis. It wasn’t. But that shadow kept him on Earth while three other men took his place, flew to Salyut 1 and died when their capsule depressurized on the way home.

The capsule landed perfectly.

The men inside it were dead.

Frank Hayes had punished his body to make weight for a horse race. Somewhere along the course at Belmont Park, his heart stopped. Sweet Kiss kept running. Hayes remained in the saddle. Horse and dead jockey crossed the finish line first.

He lost his life and won the race.

Then there was Phineas Gage.

A railroad foreman in Vermont. A hole in the rock. Blasting powder. An iron rod. One tiny spark produced at precisely the wrong moment.

The tamping iron went through his head.

Phineas lived.

Not only lived, but lived long enough to cross continents, drive stagecoaches in Chile and leave doctors, psychologists, neurologists and historians arguing over what happened to him for generations afterward.

A shadow.

A heartbeat.

A spark.

None of them looked important until afterward.

Maybe that’s how Fate works.

Not with trumpets or thunder or a handwritten notice delivered by certified mail.

Maybe it doesn’t kick down the front door.

Maybe it slips in through the cracks.

Maybe Fate is nothing more than the name we give coincidence after coincidence has done something interesting enough to deserve capitalization.

I didn’t know.

Still don’t.

But there I was in Fort Stockton, Texas, sitting over coffee and biscuits with a pharmacist, a preacher, a beautician, a rancher, a grocery-store manager, a bald man named after a bomber, a mayor whose necktie required its own ZIP code, a waitress, a cook and enough accumulated opinion to bring lesser municipalities to their knees.

And we were discussing a Russian cosmonaut, a dead jockey and a man who had an iron bar blown through his brain.

All because three strangers had come to town.

That had to count for something.

Chad broke the silence.

“The Aztek also had a cargo net.”

Hairless pointed a fork at him.

“Stop.”

I laughed.

Lucinda came around behind me and topped off my coffee.

I looked through the front window.

Nothing unusual had pulled into the parking lot.

No Russian military vehicle.

No Cadillac towing livestock.

No Citrus Green Pontiac designed during what I could only assume had been a prolonged electrical outage at General Motors.

Just a pickup.

A Buick.

Something Japanese.

Ordinary traffic moved along the street. The courthouse dome caught the morning sun. Across the way, somebody was carrying a sack of fertilizer out of Rusty Hammer Hardware.

Fort Stockton had returned to normal.

Or what passed for it.

I went back to my coffee.

Maybe Fate was finished with us.

Maybe it had moved on to Alpine.

They’d never know what hit them.

Ten minutes later, I checked the parking lot again.

Still nothing.

By noon, I began to relax.

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