Dennis Navarro Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Dennis Navarro Proctor was born in 1963 at San Antonio, Texas, and is living today in San Antonio, where he has worked for most of forty years as a lineman, climbing the poles and working the wires in the barrios, river walk and military bases of that city. He belongs to the House of Proctor, the Yorkist line that keeps the White Ledger, and through his mother he carries the blood of the Navarros who guarded the missions, but he is not a hunter, and he has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of his own. He is the eldest son of the Air Force mechanic Wendell Proctor, who spent his career at the Kelly field and died in 2018, and of the laundry supervisor Elena Navarro, who died in 2002. His sister Loretta Proctor, born in 1966, and his brother Travis Proctor, born in 1974, both became slayers. In 1981 he married the nurse Lisa Watson, and the marriage was childless. The family remembers him as the man who kept the lights on, the Ledger's lineman, who could put a whole street into darkness or into daylight at a quarter of an hour's notice, and who never once went out at night without coming home. He was born in the family house on the south side, within sound of the runways at Kelly, on a night in the summer of 1963 when the base was running its transports around the clock, and his father, who was on the engine line, was fetched from the hangar by a corporal in a jeep. Wendell came into the bedroom in his oil-black coveralls, took off his cap, looked at the baby and said that it had a good strong chest for an engine man. Elena, who had been on her feet at the laundry until the day before, said that she would thank him not to touch it until he had washed. He went and washed. It was the first of what became a family routine, in which the child arrived in a house that smelled of starch and jet fuel and was passed from hand to hand, and where, by the time that he could walk, it was understood that he was the careful one. He was an observant, tall, slow-moving child with his grandmother Catalina's wide forehead, which she lived long enough to remark on, and a way of looking up. This was, as it turned out, the key to his trade. He climbed everything. At six he climbed the pecan tree in the yard and sat in the fork of it for an afternoon, watching the wires, and at eight he was found, by a neighbour, on the roof of the garage, looking at the line that ran to the house. He wanted to know where it went. His father, who was a mechanic and who respected a boy with a question, took him on a Saturday to the end of the street, where a crew from the city utility was working a pole, and the lineman, a large, cheerful man in a hard hat and spurs, let him hold the end of a rope. The boy decided there and then. His mother said that it was a trade for a man with a very good head for heights, and the child said that he had one. He had. It was observed in the family that none of them had ever seen him afraid of a height, and that he had been afraid, all of his life, of exactly one thing, which was an unlit stairwell. His uncle James Proctor, the electrician of Houston, took him in the summer of 1977, at fourteen, to the house on Telephone Road, where he spent six weeks carrying a ladder, holding the other end of a coil of wire and learning that a house has a nervous system. James taught him to read a circuit, to trace a fault and to draw a wiring diagram on carbon paper in three copies, as his own father had done with the ditches. He taught him something else, in an evening at the bench, with a soldering iron in his hand and the door closed. He told him the truth about the family. It was done without ceremony. His cousin Scott, who was fourteen too, listened from the corner, with an air of having been told already. Dennis asked whether he would be required to hunt. James said that he would not, that it was not a trade for everybody, and that the family had need of men who could make a light go on. He said that it was the most useful sentence that he had ever spoken, and Dennis agreed. He left the high school in 1981, in the same month that he turned eighteen, and married on the same weekend. Lisa Watson had sat beside him in the fourth row of a history class for two years, and had been asked to the spring dance in the second, and had said that she would think about it, and had thought about it for eleven months. She was a quick, dark-haired, brisk girl of eighteen, the child of a south-side family of tailors and nurses, who intended to be a nurse herself and who said so, on their first evening out, over a plate of enchiladas. He said that he intended to be a lineman. She asked whether he knew what a lineman was. He said that he did, and that it was like a nurse, in that you were called when things went wrong. They were married in the church on the south side, in the heat, on a Saturday in June, with his mother Elena in a dark blue dress that she had sewn herself, and his father Wendell in his uniform, and the cousins of both houses on opposite sides of the aisle. It was a short engagement and an enormous party. Nobody could have known, one of the Navarros said, that the pair were eighteen, because they behaved like a couple of fifty. The work was harder to get than the wife. He apprenticed with a contractor that strung wire for the city, in the first years of the eighties, and he was at the top of a pole in the autumn of 1983, in the rain, with his mouth shut and his belt on. Then the oil bust came to Texas, and San Antonio, which depended on the military and the oilfield supply trade, felt it more than it let on. The contractor laid him off in the spring of 1986. For two years he worked on a road crew, and drove a delivery van, and wired barns, and took a night course in the theory of three-phase power, with Lisa, who was then a young nurse on the night shift, picking up the textbooks and testing him at breakfast. In 1988 he was taken on by the city's electric utility, as a journeyman lineman, and he stayed with it for the rest of his working life. A lineman is a person who goes out when everyone else is going in. In an ice storm, a hurricane remnant, a grass fire or a night of high wind, the call comes at three in the morning, and he goes up the pole in the dark, in the weather, with a hot stick and a rubber glove, and he puts the wire back. It was this, in the Proctor view, that made a lineman a natural friend of the Ledger. The hunters of the White Ledger worked at night, in the barrios and along the river and in the long, dark streets near the bases, and they could not work at all in a street that was lit like a stage. Dennis could not do the work of a hunter. He could, however, if asked, tell them which transformer served which block, how long a repair would take and where a street would be dark for an hour on Tuesday. And on the bad nights, when a hunter needed a light, he could arrange one. He never abused it. In forty years he put out a block of the Westside, by request, four times, and each time he had a work order. His sister Loretta was called as a girl of fifteen, and his brother Travis a quarter of a century later, in 2007, and he watched both of them go out of the door with a bag. He did the sensible thing, which was to be the one that they could ring. He had a telephone in the cab of his truck and a flask of coffee on the seat. He gave them a lift at two in the morning, without a word, on a dozen occasions, and sat outside a certain building on the Southside with the engine off and the lamp dimmed, as a man waits for his sister to come out. He never asked what the building was. He observed that she came out looking pleased. His mother Elena died in 2002, in the spring, at the laundry, with a stack of sheets in her arms, and it was Dennis who drove his father to the funeral, in the family's old pickup, and who found, in the glove box, her pocket rosary and a note in her hand reminding him to check the oil. His father Wendell, who had spent forty years at the Kelly field and had seen it closed in 2001, lived another sixteen years, in the house on the south side, with a chair on the porch pointed at the empty runway. Dennis took him to Mass. In the great freeze of February 2021, in the middle of the pandemic years, when half the state lost power in the cold and San Antonio went dark for days, Dennis, who was fifty-seven, worked forty hours without a break on a pole in the sleet, and came home to find that Lisa, who had been working a ward full of the sick, had made soup. They sat in the kitchen in their coats and ate it. Dennis is a large, quiet, grey-eyed man of sixty-three, with a lineman's slow tread and a pair of hands like leather. He and Lisa have lived in the same house for forty years, and the family says that nobody has ever seen them quarrel and that nobody has ever seen them idle. Dennis Navarro Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the lineman of the White Ledger, the quiet son of the laundry supervisor who climbed the pole and put the light back. In the Slayerverse he stands for the trades-people of the old houses, the ones who were never called and who kept the streets lit, the telephone answered and the truck running for the hunters in their family.