by Brad Smith
‘During that one meeting, did Mr Filsinger broach the subject of a civil suit against my client?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And were you agreeable to that possibility?’ Browning asked.
‘I wasn’t one way or the other,’ Maria said. ‘If you’re trying to say this is about money, you’re wrong.’
‘Oh, come now,’ Browning admonished. ‘Let me tell you what I think. I think that I’m seeing a young woman who’s looking for a score. A young woman who heard that the police were pursuing trumped-up charges against my client and decided – based on a very brief period of employment at city hall nearly two decades ago – that there was some free cream to be had, and that she might as well dip her spoon in that cream while she could.’
‘I’m lactose intolerant.’
‘That’s very good,’ Browning said. ‘When you’re finished joking, are you going to tell this court that you’ve never considered the possibility that there’s some money to be made from this?’
Maria shrugged. ‘I hear you’re making a nice chunk.’
There was a murmur of laughter throughout the room. Browning was taken aback. ‘But I’m not telling lies to make it,’ he snapped. He caught himself immediately. ‘But you will admit there’s money to be made. Thank you, finally, for your candor. I think it helps us to understand better why you might come forward with an unlikely story like this, after all the intervening years.’
‘I never—’ Maria began, but he cut her off.
‘Or perhaps you’re financially set,’ Browning said. ‘Tell me – do you still work as a stripper?’
‘No. Why – you got a birthday coming up?’
There was more than a murmur of laughter in the room this time. Grant dropped his head and pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.
‘No. My birthday has passed, thank you,’ Browning said. He turned toward the jury, nodding his head as if agreeing to some obvious truth. ‘I don’t think I have anything else for this witness. In fact, I think she has told us all that we need to know.’
EIGHT
Kate was working the afternoon shift at Shoeless Joe’s on Saturday. There was a volleyball tournament in the adjacent sandlot scheduled for four o’clock and Kate got there an hour beforehand to set up the outside bar. Sasha, the manager, was leaving as Kate arrived, heading for a wedding somewhere, and as she left she told Kate that a new kid, Nathan, would be helping her. The kid slouched in minutes later, texting somebody as he came through the door. When Kate introduced herself, he nodded without looking up from his phone.
The two of them went to work, carrying the liquor and the beer kegs and the glasses and condiments outside. The bar itself was simply two rough pine planks atop a couple of aged whisky barrels, beneath a bright Stella Artois awning. There were shelves built to the rear, against the outer wall of the building.
Kate found working with Nathan to be almost exactly like working by herself. When she told him to do something he went about it reluctantly, and when she didn’t he sat on one of the bar stools and played with his phone. By the time they were ready to serve drinks some of the players had begun to arrive and Kate had yet to make up the tournament schedule. Nathan assured her that he could handle the bar so she took the sign-up sheets inside, out of the wind, and drew up the brackets on sheets of Bristol board.
When she walked back outside with the schedule, she stopped short. Carl was there, sitting at the end of the rough bar, drinking a draft beer that was more foam than beer, courtesy of Nathan’s expertise as a bartender. He was sideways to her, looking up at the baseball game on the big screen above the bar, and didn’t see her at first. Watching his profile she was reminded of a hawk, the distinctive sharp nose, the slightly feral aura about him. He was thinner than she remembered, wearing brown pants and a black t-shirt. His hair was scattershot with gray and longer than the current style, falling to his collar. He had a mustache that was somewhat out of fashion too, reaching past the corners of his mouth. He looked fit, though, healthier than when she’d seen him last.
She had an urge to walk back inside before he turned and spotted her. But there was nowhere to run to and, even if there was, she had a feeling he already knew she was there. After watching him a moment longer, she went over and took the glass of beer from him. She dumped the foamy mix into the sink before turning to Nathan.
‘Watch.’
She drew a fresh draft, tilting the glass so there was a half inch of head. Pouring, she glanced over at her father, who was watching her in turn. He was the same but different somehow. There was something worn about him, as if some of the sharp edges had been filed off, but only slightly. She has always thought of him as a coiled spring, but now it seemed as if that spring had lost a little of its temper. That happened with springs over time. Did it happen with people? Maybe it was just that he had lived longer. As simple as that.
‘Hello, Kate,’ he said when she set the beer in front of him. His voice cracked when he said her name and he coughed, clearing his throat.
‘Hello, Carl.’
He indicated the draft. ‘Thanks.’
‘Got a rookie on the tap.’
‘I figured that.’
‘I’m surprised to see you, Carl,’ she said.
‘Thought I’d stop and say hello.’
‘Yeah. That’s the part I’m surprised about. Is there something I can do for you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing you can do for me. I just … stopped by. I’ve been following the trial.’
‘Frances told me.’
‘I thought she might fill you in.’
‘She didn’t fill me in, just said that she talked to you.’
‘I guess there wasn’t much filling to be done.’
Kate thought about that, what it meant. ‘You still live in the city, then?’ she asked.
‘No. I’ve been over in Dundurn, last ten years or so. I’ve been following the trial though and I’ve been thinking about you. I thought I would … well, I don’t know. I guess I’ve just been wondering how you’ve been.’
‘I’ve been fine.’ She wasn’t sure why she was so intent upon giving him nothing, but that’s what she was doing.
He took a drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Frances said you have a boyfriend?’
‘Yeah, I do.’
‘Well, that’s good.’ He drank again. It seemed like a stalling tactic while he pondered how to keep the conversation moving. Not that she was helping in that regard. ‘What does he do?’
‘David?’ she asked. ‘He works at a recycling place.’
‘That would be a good thing to get into,’ Carl said. ‘Nowadays.’
‘Seems to be.’
Kate glanced down the bar, where Nathan was again texting on his phone. Denny was coming in at four, she knew. He could help with the bar and then Nathan could go off and do whatever he considered to be gainful labor. She turned back to her father. ‘So you thought you would stop by and what – offer me some moral support? Is that it?’
‘I guess that’s it.’
‘No offense, but you’re a little late in that regard, Carl.’
He exhaled heavily and looked around. Some of the volleyballers were putting up the nets now, uncoiling the anchor ropes, stretching them out.
‘Frances told you I worked here?’
‘Depends,’ he said. ‘Is she in trouble if she did?’
Kate paused, then shook her head. ‘No.’
He smiled. ‘Good.’ The smile changed him, made him younger. His craggy brows lifted and she could see the startling blue of his eyes. She remembered that blue very well.
One of the players walked over to ask Nathan where the mallet was to pound the stakes into the sand. He might as well have asked Nathan for directions to Jupiter. But it gave Kate an excuse to go back to work.
‘We got this tournament going on,’ she said.
Carl nodded and she walked away. She was aware of him watch
ing as she provided the players with what they needed and then went about pinning the sheets with the brackets to the fence. Under his gaze, she kept on the move, as if to show how busy she was. Denny arrived and Kate asked him to take over the bar while she went inside. There was a round window there, an old porthole, in fact, that someone had salvaged from a wrecked ship at the bottom of the lake. Kate stood just to the side of it and watched Carl as he sat at the bar, drinking the beer, staring straight ahead. She didn’t know what to feel. Of course, he hadn’t taken her completely by surprise; Frances had told her he’d been around. But that didn’t mean she was comfortable with his showing up. Hell, she wasn’t even comfortable about the thought of him. It had been too long, and it had become too easy not to consider him. She saw him drink off the beer and, after glancing at the door to the bar, get to his feet to leave. On an impulse, she decided she would walk him out to the parking lot.
She picked his truck out long before they got to it. Among the Hondas and Jeeps and Chryslers was an older Ford pickup, with no hubcaps and red primer over the rear wheel wells. If her father was a vehicle, Kate thought, this is what he would look like.
‘Well,’ she said when they reached the truck, and that was all she said.
‘I’d like to … I don’t know … buy you dinner or something,’ he said.
‘I’ve got a lot going on right now,’ she said. ‘I work two jobs, and the trial and everything. So I don’t know when I’d have time.’
He opened the truck door. ‘OK.’
‘Listen, Carl. Whatever happens, I’m not going after a settlement. That’s not why I’m doing this. OK? There’s not going to be any money.’
The instant the words were out of her mouth she knew she’d made a mistake. She told Frances later that she couldn’t have hurt him more if she had plunged a knife into his chest. He never spoke a word. He got into the truck and drove out of the parking lot and was gone.
Bud stood naked in front of the mirror in the en suite bathroom. He had showered and just finished drying himself off. Ignoring the clothes hamper three feet away, he tossed the towel into the corner, then stood there looking at himself, something he did infrequently of late. His belly was quite a bit larger than he would have guessed it to be, even though he was well aware that he’d gone from a thirty-four to thirty-six inch waist when buying pants recently. He pulled his stomach in and turned sideways, throwing his shoulders back. That was better. He found, however, that he couldn’t hold the pose for very long. Turning toward the mirror again, he stepped closer to examine his face. He’d grown the goatee a couple of months earlier in an effort to hide his double chin. It had worked well enough, he thought, but now he could see a lot of gray in the whiskers. Was it there before? Surely he hadn’t gone gray over the course of a couple months. Whatever the case, he didn’t want a gray beard. Either he would have to start coloring it, as he did his hair, or he would have to lose some weight. Dyeing his goatee held about as much appeal as did dieting.
Bud had been down this road before, albeit thirty years earlier. In high school he was a fat kid who wasn’t good at sports. Back then he was still known as Delmar, the name his father had burdened him with before taking a powder when Bud was four. He had no memory of his father and his mother claimed that she couldn’t remember where the name had come from. To her knowledge, nobody in Bud’s father’s family had a name like that. They were all Joe or John or Ralph. Whatever its origin, the name Delmar was bound to attract some ridicule in high school, particularly when the kid wearing it was fifty pounds overweight and couldn’t throw a baseball across a room. And it did attract ridicule, in fairly large amounts.
Bud eventually took his nickname from an uncle on his mother’s side, a loud, fast-talking ladies’ man who never seemed involved in any kind of employment. Bud didn’t adopt the new name or drop the weight until he was finished high school, and working a dirty job in a pulp mill along the canal. The work was hot and involved heavy lifting. Bud hated it but he had decided he was sick of being the fat kid named Delmar and over the course of a year he gained a new name and lost nearly sixty pounds. He never had a girlfriend in high school; in fact, he rarely had a conversation with a girl in high school but now, with money in his pocket and new clothes on his back, he found that women were attracted to him. He made up for lost time and, in spite of marrying Deanna in a weak moment after she’d led him to believe that her father was the owner of a Chrysler dealership and not just the fucking head salesman, he’d been making up for it ever since. But now, having turned fifty-one a month earlier, he was looking at a physique that was beginning to remind him of the fat kid Delmar. And the high-school years.
Bud couldn’t go back to that. He had to take charge and he had to do it in a manner that didn’t involve going to work again in a pulp mill.
From the front room of the condo he heard Deanna come in and a few moments later she walked into the bedroom, removed her shoes and joined him in the bathroom, where she hoisted her skirt and sat down on the toilet to go. She didn’t comment on him, standing there naked in the bathroom in front of the mirror.
‘Where you been?’ he asked.
‘We had dinner at Brady’s.’
‘We?’
‘Me and Selma and Lily.’ He could hear the dribble of her urine in the bowl.
‘I gotta lose some weight,’ he told her.
‘Then do it.’
He turned to face her. ‘Look at my gut. It’s fucking huge. All the extra weight is concentrated right there. Everything’s out of proportion.’
‘Talk to a nutritionist,’ she told him. ‘Get on a plan.’
‘My belly makes my penis look smaller than it really is. Look.’
She didn’t look but reached for the toilet paper.
‘Look at my penis,’ he said. ‘It’s the same size as it always was but it looks smaller. It’s relativity. You know that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Look at little Bud. Look at him.’
‘I’ve seen him. Seventeen years now.’
She stood up, tugged her skirt back down and walked to the sink to wash her hands. Bud stepped behind her and put his hands on her hips.
‘You know,’ he said. ‘As my darling wife, you should be willing to help boost my self-esteem.’
‘How would I do that?’ Now she was looking at herself in the mirror, top lip pulled back to examine her teeth.
‘You can make little Bud bigger,’ Bud said. ‘You have the power.’
‘No thanks,’ she said. ‘Shit, I have fucking parsley or something between my teeth. Why wouldn’t someone tell me?’
‘We don’t have to fuck,’ Bud said. ‘A blow job would be nice.’
‘I said no thanks.’
She squeezed a line of toothpaste on a brush and began to clean her teeth. Watching her work the foamy toothbrush vigorously in and out made him grow hornier. Strange, he’d never considered it an erotic act before.
‘It will only take a couple of minutes,’ he predicted.
She spit and rinsed, then spit again. ‘I’m too tired,’ she said.
‘Not too tired to go out for dinner five fucking nights a week.’
‘Girl’s got to eat,’ she said, turning to him. She kissed him lightly on the lips. ‘A week from now we’ll be in Portugal. I’ll suck your cock in Portugal.’
She walked out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, where she turned on the TV before starting to get undressed. Bud followed. As he watched her, still aroused in spite of her rejection, his cell phone began to ring. He found it in his pants, on the chair. Hank Hofferman was on the other end.
‘Got a gitch in the plans,’ Hank said.
‘You mean glitch?’ Bud asked.
‘Yeah. Glitch. We gotta meet.’
By the time Bud got off the phone, Deanna had changed into baggy pajamas and was back in the bathroom, smearing some sort of cream on her face. There would be no action tonight, for either of the Buds.
They met the next
morning in a truck stop called Brannigan’s, on the highway at the north end of town. Hofferman was sitting in a booth, drinking coffee, when Bud walked in. Bud asked the waitress for a Hires root beer and when he was told they didn’t have any he ordered tea instead.
‘What’s going on?’ Bud asked.
‘John McIntosh,’ Hofferman said. He announced the name like it would mean something to Bud.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Farmer out on the Irish Line. He called me up, wanted to know what I was doing with the concession.’
‘What’s it to him? I thought you had the whole thing bought up,’ Bud said.
‘I do. But he’s across the road. His family has been there for something like a hundred and fifty years. There’s this rumor out there I’m gonna put in more sow barns. You heard Frances Rourke the other day.’
‘What does he care?’
‘All these old-timers are against intensive livestock operations.’
Bud’s tea arrived, just the bag in a cup of hot water. Bud dunked the bag a few times and took it out. ‘Why are these old-timers against intensive livestock operations?’
Hofferman made a face like he was experiencing gas. ‘Old people, they don’t like progress. I had a hell of a time putting those first barns in, years back. These people got together – called themselves Hogwatch – and they petitioned to stop me. Dug up all these stories off the internet, about manure lagoons overflowing, steroids in the feed, shit like that. Tree huggers. Council backed me in the end, though. They had no choice, I met all the zoning requirements. When I was building my first barn, though, one of these Hogwatch guys put a torch to it one night. A fireman was killed fighting the fire. Guy went to jail for it. Guy named Carl Burns.’
‘An arsonist named Burns?’ Bud said. ‘That’s a hoot.’
‘The dead fireman didn’t think so,’ Hofferman said.
‘A dead fireman wouldn’t think anything, would he?’ Bud asked. ‘So what’d you tell the old guy?’
‘Told him that’s not what I’m doing.’
‘You tell him about the landfill?’ Bud asked.