Edwin Proctor

Spy slayer of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline (House of Proctor), known as The Iron Otter. Craft: Procedural Trapping.

Edwin Proctor was born in 1945 in the Westside of San Antonio, Texas, and lived seventy-four years as a machinist and, for forty-seven of them, as a vampire slayer of the White Ledger. The family book knows him as The Iron Otter, and it classes him as a Spy, a hunter who works by watching, listening and keeping a cover, and who would sooner know where a creature sleeps than meet it in the street. His craft was Procedural Trapping, the art of building a situation so that a creature, following its own rules one step at a time, ends up somewhere it cannot leave. His gear was a pistol and a case of silver rounds. He was the elder child of the machinist Clifford Proctor and the bookkeeper Dorothy Schleicher, and the brother of Ethel Schleicher Proctor. In 1971 he married the telephone operator Vera Dawson, and they raised two sons, Timothy Proctor, who was not called, and Terrence Dawson Proctor, who became a slayer in his turn. He died in 2019 of a long illness, aged seventy-four. He was born in the last months of the war, in a rented frame house on the Westside, within sight of his grandmother Ada Menger's old shop, which by then repaired shoes. His father was at Kelly Field on night shifts, and his mother was doing the household sums with the radio turned low, and the child arrived on a hot Sunday in August with the neighbours already on the porch. He was a small, quiet, observant baby, and he grew into a small, quiet, observant boy who counted the porch steps before he climbed them. His mother noted, in the cash book, that he had never once asked why. He simply looked until the answer arrived, which she thought was either a good sign or a bad one, and which proved to be the Ledger's kind of sign. San Antonio in his childhood was a city of barrios, bases and river bends, and he learned it on foot. He knew the Westside streets by the sound of their dogs, the Southside by the smell of its bakeries, and the river by the way the water thickened where the old acequias had once come in. His father, who said nothing, taught him the lathe at twelve, on Saturday mornings in the garage on the Nogalitos Road, and the boy took to it as an otter takes to a creek. He liked the fit of a thing. He liked a tolerance held to a ten-thousandth, because it was a promise that could be checked. His mother taught him the other half, which was to keep a record of everything and to total it twice. He had both by fifteen, and the family was fairly sure that he would be a hunter before anyone said so. He was told what the Proctors were in the kitchen, at fourteen, with his father silent and his mother reading the entries aloud. In 1960, the year his great-uncle Norman died in a falling barn in north Texas, his father drove up to bring the body home, and the boy rode along. It was the first time he saw a hunter's funeral, and he said afterward that what struck him was how little noise it made. He finished at a vocational school on the Southside, and in 1963 went to the engine depot at Kelly, where his father had been a leading hand for twenty-three years, and became a machinist there as well. They worked a bench apart for eleven years. Neither ever mentioned the other work at the shop, which was exactly as it should have been. HemisFair opened in 1968, when he was twenty-three, and the city tore down half of a neighbourhood to make a lake, a tower and a fair. He went on a Saturday in May, alone, to look at how the crowds moved, as he explained, and stood in a queue at the Texas pavilion counting the heads. In front of him a young woman in a yellow dress was doing the same. It turned out that she was an operator at the telephone exchange, that her name was Vera Dawson, that she had grown up in Alamo Heights and that she counted crowds because she counted everything. They agreed that they had been counting the same crowd and that neither had got the same number. They compared totals over a beer, and they were married three years later, in April 1971, at a church near her parents' house, with his father in his only suit and his mother, with a notebook, in the second row. His sister Ethel was married in the autumn of the same year, to a postal clerk from Bandera, and Dorothy complained that the family had left her only one season to be sensible in. The calling came a year later, in the autumn of 1972, at Bandera, where Lloyd Lamar's uncle kept a riding stable on the Medina river and where the two couples had gone for a long weekend. Edwin was out at the stable before dawn to help with the feed, and he heard the horses before he saw anything, a scream that he had never heard from an animal and never forgot. He went in with a lantern. The groom, a young man of nineteen, was lying in the straw, perfectly cold and perfectly white, and the horses were pressed against the far wall with their eyes rolled back. Something moved in the loft. He did not know what it was. He knew that it moved as a thing moves that is not accustomed to being seen, and he did what a machinist does, which is to look at the geometry. The only way down was the ladder, the door was on a latch, and the latch was his. He put the ladder out of reach and the lantern on the post and waited, which in a spy is half the work. It was dawn when the thing came to the edge of the loft and found, as a creature must, that the sun had arrived at the door. It is not recorded what it said. Edwin, who had not been taught, had arranged the doors, the light and the ladder so that every step led to the next one, and the last one led to the sun. He told his father that night, on the telephone, in the flat voice that he used for bad news and measurements. Clifford was silent for a moment and then said that he would turn him a better latch. That was all of the ceremony. The family book dates the calling to that morning, and records the first taking to the same date, and calls it the cleanest piece of work that the Ledger had seen in San Antonio for forty years. He was trained, in the next year, by his father's cousins and by his mother's notebooks, and he took the Spy's way, which is cover, patience and a very good filing system. By day he was a machinist, and a dull one. By night he had the contacts of a telephone operator's husband, who knew from his wife which numbers rang at three in the morning, and the quiet respect of a hundred men at the shop who would not have said that they were informants. Procedural Trapping was his own improvement. He built jigs. He drew up fixtures for doors, thresholds and rooms, small interlocking pieces of steel and chalk and silver, and set them in empty houses on the Southside so that a creature that came in by the door would find itself, in a dozen reasonable stages, in a room with no exit. The Ledger's cousins called him The Iron Otter, because he slipped in and out of the river city without a ripple, and because, as someone said, he treated a vampire as an object to be machined. The oil bust of the middle eighties took the business out of half the machine shops in the city, and he was moved, with a hundred others, to a small engine overhaul crew at Kelly. He stayed there until the base closed in 2001, in the summer, and he was fifty-six when the attacks of that September convinced him, he said, that the gate was no longer the only place that mattered. Vera, who had by then trained half the operators in the city, watched her old exchange give way to a computer room, and went on in the training office. His sons grew up in the house on the Southside with the lathe in the garage, and Terrence, the younger, followed him out in time, learning from his father to look at a building as at a drawing. Timothy was not called, and said that he preferred the quiet. Vera was killed in 2012, in a car accident, on a wet night on the Loop. He identified her and drove home, and sat in the kitchen with the cash book open until morning. He never recovered his full ease, though he went on for seven years, working a bench at the new shop, writing in the Ledger and putting up fixtures. He lost his sister Ethel in the spring of 2019, and was driven to her funeral by Terrence, who held his arm. He died that November, of a long illness, at seventy-four, in the house on the Southside, with his sons in the room. The last thing that he said was that the tolerance on the door had been correct. Edwin Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as The Iron Otter, the machinist who went to work with a lunch pail and a pistol and who treated every night's hunt as a problem in fit. In the Slayerverse he stands for the quiet craftsmen of the White Ledger, the spies of the barrio and the river walk, who watched, measured, built the trap and let the rules do the work.