Country Hardball

by Steve Weddle

  “I guess.”

  “I suppose that’s why I find it, I don’t know, reassuring coming back to the area.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Like you can fit right in. Horace Pennick’s niece. People have some idea what to expect. I’m not just a stranger like I’d be in a big city, say New York or Chicago or Memphis.”

  I said all right.

  “Or that’s what I thought, anyway. I came down here, thinking, you know, I’d get into it. The country. The visiting here when I was a kid. My parents being from here. My family. Kind of like a genealogy thing. Like I could connect with people. Get something real. But I just don’t know anyone. I’m still on the outside looking in. You know? It’s like sometimes I’m all right and don’t think about it, and sometimes I’m like that person who comes in and the guy says, ‘Today the part of Cassandra Pennick will be played by someone else.’”

  “The soap operas?”

  “Yeah. Like that. Like the TV show. I don’t know. I just had this idea about coming back and fitting in. And now I’m feeling like maybe I didn’t even fit in then. I just didn’t know it back then.”

  “Sure.”

  “But there’s this role for me. And I can’t find it. People expect something of me and, I don’t know.” She looked out toward the sun. “Just not like I thought it was coming back here, and I’m not sure what to do, you know?”

  “I think that’s how everybody feels,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Maybe. Maybe everybody thinks about their roots. Like getting back to them. But then you get back and everything has been cut down.”

  “And it’s not like it was in your mind.”

  “If you can really remember what it was like.”

  “I had this list,” she said. “Like a family tree. I was asking people what they remembered of people. You could say, ‘Tell me what you remember of John Doe,’ and one person would say one thing and one another. Like the person only existed in relation to others.”

  “So that’s what you’re writing about?”

  “I don’t know about that anymore.” She looked at me, took a breath. “Roy, when I asked them about your grandfather, everyone said the same thing. Said he was a good man. Everybody. I just thought you’d want to know.”

  “Okay.”

  “And I don’t know, you know, how he died or what happened. But everybody says he was a good man. Just a few people remember, but it’s what they all say.”

  “Your uncle, too,” I said. “I’m sure they were both good men.”

  “He was. Honestly. He really was. He just got caught up in it. I think he thought it was all just little stuff he had to do to keep going. Nothing big. Just little things.”

  “A buck from the tip jar. A five from the offering plate?”

  “Something like that, I suppose.”

  “How’s that?”

  “He got tired of all those little things. One time he said something about looking behind you at all the footprints you’ve left. Like on a trail.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I came down to stay with him after my mom got sick. This was seven years ago. I remember he said that you look ahead, and where the trail should be clear, there’s all these footprints laid out for you. Because of what you’ve already done, all those steps or missteps, you’re just going to keep going. He said he finally understood what your grandfather was talking about.”

  “Talking about what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what he said. Trying to change paths, I thought. He said he finally understood why your grandfather had done it. Had tried to do it.”

  “That’s what happened to my grandfather?”

  “I don’t know, Roy. I wish I did. But I think that’s what happened to my uncle. The more I’m back here, the more I’m talking to people. He was talking about how your grandfather had decided to take a different trail. It was like he wanted to do what your grandfather had done. I mean, I didn’t know your grandfather, and I guess I didn’t remember so much about you and your grandmother. It was like he was just talking about people from a book. But now that I’m back here and talking to you and talking to your grandmother, I don’t know. It’s starting to come together now.”

  • • •

  I got to Cleo’s mid-afternoon, parked over where he’d hung a sign for his bayou tours. I heard a pop-pop and walked around behind his house. He’d set up what looked like archery targets.

  “’Sup, cuz?”

  “Teaching those targets a lesson?”

  “Shit, yeah. You know Elvis himself used to do it like this. This guy was telling me about it. He’s on a tour of the South, this guy. From Chicago. Said he was at Graceland, the whole back of the place is tore up to shit. The King, he’d hang targets on the back wall, stand in the yard, and shoot back at the house. Said it looks like a wasp’s nest back there, all full of holes.”

  “Well, as long as you got something to aim for.”

  “Got some bananas and peanut butter and shit, gonna make me some fried Elvis burgers here in a bit.”

  “Ah, just ate,” I said. “Got your message. What’s going on?”

  Cleo put the pistol in his waistband, bumped a cigarette out of a pack. “Let’s go inside.”

  We stood around his kitchen table as he laid out the peanut butter, the honey. Pulled a banana from the top of the fridge, started slicing it.

  “Randy Pribble,” he said.

  “Yeah. Heard about that.”

  “Smart guy. A fucking prodigy, that guy.”

  “Maybe he shoulda smartened up a little more,” I said.

  “Hell, Roy. This shit don’t make you smarter. Just makes you older.”

  I said all right.

  “Thing is, alan H he was supposed to do this thing with me. He kinda started to chicken out ’cause of this new girl he was seeing. Getting pussy-whipped and shit, I guess. Figure it doesn’t matter now, but I still gotta do this thing.”

  “What thing?”

  “You know Chet Dalton?”

  “Ballplayer?”

  “No. Hank Dalton’s son. The mini-mart store that got robbed a while ago.”

  “Yeah. Seems vaguely familiar, I guess.”

  “Guy thinks he’s big shit, right? Figure he’s been skimming here and there. Randy and I had a couple things lined up, but first we were supposed to go visit with the guy.”

  “To do what?”

  “Shit, have a talk with the guy. Show him the error of his ways. Thou shalt not steal fromest thou employer and shit like that.”

  “Seems simple.”

  “Yeah. People get to complicating this shit, that’s when you’re fucked, man. Gotta play it smart.”

  “Simple and smart. Got it.”

  “You want to hear something smart? So Randy and that Crawford guy from the grocery store, we were doing this job about a month ago. So the Crawford guy goes into the house, unplugs the fridge, turns off the AC, opens all the windows.”

  “What for?”

  “That’s what I said. Turns out, they make the house dead quiet so they can hear if someone drives up.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah. Then it’s like everything slows down and you get your shit done, know what I’m saying? It’s like everything stops for you.” Cleo tapped the table in broken rhythm. “Maybe this shit does make you smarter.”

  • • •

  We parked my truck along the road in front of the house with no front yard, got out, walked to the house.

  Cleo asked if I was ready. I nodded, felt the heaviness of the shotgun I was carrying.

  I walked around back of the house, waited on the steps of planks and milk crates. When I heard the front door open, I walked in through the back. Through the kitchen of brown jars and rags and a trash can towered with paper plates. I set the unloaded shotgun on the kitchen counter, walked into the front room, a mess of potato chip bags and CD cases where rugs should have been. “Sorry to interrupt your afternoon
nap,” Cleo said as Chet stood up from the couch. “We just wanted to have a visit. A mutual friend asked us to stop by.”

  Chet worked his tongue around his bottom teeth, looked at Cleo, then back at me. Maybe he was seeing if we were armed. Maybe he was seeing where the closest door was. Maybe he was planning how to get to wherever his gun was.

  He asked us what the fuck we thought we were doing, coming into his house. Said we’d just made a big fucking mistake.

  “Chet Dalton?” Cleo asked, turning back to me. “This is Chet Dalton, right? We got the right address from Sawyer, right?”

  “Shit,” Chet said. “Sawyer?”

  “Yeah. ‘Shit’ is right, pal. Which is what you’re in right now.”

  Cleq,an Ho hiked his chin at me, and I pulled the shotgun with me into the room. Racked a shell into the chamber.

  Cleo turned back to Chet. “Here’s what going to happen. I’m going to ask you a couple of questions. They’ll be easy fucking questions. You don’t do anything but answer those questions. You don’t say shit, all right? That clear?”

  Chet said it was.

  “Nice TV,” Cleo said, nodding at the big screen against the wall.

  “Just got it yesterday.”

  Cleo lifted his arm, blasted a shot into the screen. “That wasn’t a question I asked, motherfucker.”

  Chet said “Jesus” and sat down into the couch.

  I sat down on a desk against the wall, the shotgun in my lap.

  • • •

  “You know the payday loan place up on 82?” Cleo said to me the next day.

  “Couple of them.”

  “The blue and gold one. By the old grocery store.” Cleo pulled a knife from his kitchen drawer, reached into his fridge, and came out with some cheese.

  “Yeah.”

  “They cash in and outta there all the time. Randy and me been watching the place. Couple days, it’s like the planets lining up. Government checks hit in the morning. And their weekly delivery from their corporate office gets there in the afternoon. The money that went out comes back in. The money going out ain’t left yet. Only happens every so often like that. Pull this off, got one more lined up next week, maybe lie low for a couple weeks after that.”

  “Sounds like you got it figured out.”

  “Yeah. Randy had it all worked out. Until he up and got himself killed.”

  “Any idea what happened with that?”

  “No.” He looked away, shook his head. “None. My guess is he was playing both sides of the fence, you know? Kinda squirrelly like that.”

  “Guess I didn’t know him that well.”

  “Weren’t missing much. But he woulda loved to shoot that Dalton boy’s TV.”

  “Guy seemed pretty attached to his TV,” I said.

  “Probably pissed he won’t get to watch Oprah. You see him start to cry?” Cleo bit a piece of sliced cheese from his knife. “Anyway, Randy and me was going to do this payday loan thing. Was figuring, seeing how the Dalton thing worked out, maybe you and me might do this one, too. Two-man job.”

  “You got a plan?”

  “Step one: Walk in with guns. Step two: Walk out with the cash.”

  I said that sounded easy enough. Then I asked about the job the other day, where they’d unplugged the refrigerator, turned off the air-conditioning. “Where was that?”

  “Old lady Dawson. Lives out past that Methodist church that burned down.”

  “Dawson? Ettie May Dawson?”

  “I don’t know. Sounds right. Why?”

  I wanted to tell him she’s a friend of my grandmother’s. That she was fighting cancer. Pancreatic. I wanted to tell him Iq,an H’d seen her not two weeks ago with my grandmother and they were both talking about how expensive coffee had gotten. How she was saying her grandson didn’t like to come over to her house because she didn’t have any video games to play. “That’s out by my grandmother’s,” I said.

  “No shit? You wanted us to stop by and say ‘hello’?”

  “She’s a friend of my grandmother.”

  “Oh. Well, fuck me, Roy. Just say so. Just give me a list of people who are off-limits, then.” He laughed, shook his head. “Shit, man. You serious? Jesus, Roy.”

  “I don’t know. Just getting a little too close.”

  “Yeah. Ain’t everything? Hell, Roy, you gotta know by now you got something people want then people gonna take it away at some point. Woman had two rings in her underwear drawer must be worth something nice. Planning to head over to Texarkana this weekend and see, you wanna come?”

  “That’s all right.”

  “What the hell’s eating you?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Hell, you been sounding like a pussy last week or two. Something got into you? I mean, shit, the Dalton thing was pretty easy, you know. But this payday thing. Fuck, man. You gotta be on your game. Fuckers take this shit serious.”

  “Naw,” I said. “Just thinking about what it is we’re doing, you know?” I pulled a sleeve of crackers from a box, popped two at a time into my mouth.

  Cleo pointed the knife at me. “That’s your goddamn problem, right there. You don’t think, man. You just do the thing.”

  I rolled my eyes, said yeah, fine.

  “I ain’t shitting you, Roy. You get to a point in your life, it’s called growing up. You don’t think about what you’re doing. You just do it. Some shit you gotta do ain’t easy, right? It’s the adult shit.”

  I said I guessed he was right.

  “You don’t have to believe in what you’re doing, man. You don’t gotta build up a big church to it or fuck it and shit. You just have to do it. Hell, you can think about it later. You just do the shit you gotta do. That’s what being a fucking grownup is all about.”

  • • •

  “I don’t know, Roy,” McWilliams said. “Not like we can just call up those records. They’re not digitized.”

  “So how would you find out?”

  “We’d request the files. Send it through the department. Somebody might want to know why all the interest in your grandfather all of a sudden.”

  “Not all of a sudden.” I set the air hose to the side, shut off the compressor. The sun was right overhead, putting you right in the middle of your shadow, the gravestones an occasional sparkle of granite.

  Deputy McWilliams was standing in the doorway. He leaned into the shed a little more, squinted. “Well, that’s how it might look, you know. How much equipment you got in here? Someone must have spent a small fortune at one time.”

  I walked to the building, looked around at the walls, the shelves. A couple push mowers, weed whacker, w). The like heelbarrow with a tire I needed to plug. Chainsaw. Axe. This and that. “Whatever they spent, it was a long time ago.”

  “Guess you’re right. You keep all this running?”

  “Yeah.” I shut the door, snapped the padlock.

  “Didn’t know you were a mechanic.”

  “Not really.”

  “Takes something to handle all this. Engines and all. Must be good with your hands.”

  I shrugged. “Just do what’s gotta be done.”

  “Right. Roy, speaking of that, you wanted to see me about something.”

  “I did.” I wiped a layer of oil off my palm, slid the rag into my back pocket. “You talk to Randy Pribble lately?”

  “Kind of a one-sided conversation, I’d imagine.”

  “Before he died, I mean.”

  “Now, Roy, that’s an odd question to be asking.” He stretched his arms, let his right hand rest on his holster. “What would cause you to ask a question like that?”

  I wasn’t sure exactly why I was asking, but I was starting to regret locking the door to the axe. “I heard Randy was what you might call a double agent.”

  “Well, it’s possible from time to time he had information that might be useful in an investigation, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  It wasn’t. “Snitch?”

  “Som
e people help when they can. You know, see the error of their ways. And some get locked up. Something you’re getting at?”

  “Just thought maybe somebody found out, maybe something happened.”

  “You got a somebody in mind?”

  I said I didn’t. Said it wasn’t much my concern.

  The deputy agreed with that much. “That what you wanted? Tell me about the Pribble boy? Something you’d heard from your cousin?”

  I’d been thinking about what Cassie said, how her uncle had been looking at a different path. How maybe that’s what my grandfather had done.

  The path Cassie had talked about, each choice is a step. I wasn’t so sure about that. In Haven House each choice was a pebble. Each choice is a lot of mumbo jumbo for the self-help crowd at church. The problem is you don’t really know which choice is going to help, which one is going to get you in deeper. I could do fifty different things at the moment, and there’d be no telling which one was the right one.

  “Something like that,” I said, giving as much thought as I could to what my grandfather would have done. Another job with Cleo. Then another, until we ended up at some old lady’s house, taking her wedding ring from her drawer.

  Or push it to a point and decide you’re not going any further. Find a new trail, like Horace Pennick had said. Maybe that’s what happened to my grandfather on the road from Bradley. Or maybe I could figure out what my dad would have done. Doing the straight thing all along, by the rules. Rotary Club. Coach baseball. But it was too late for that. At some point, it doesn’t matter what you do. You get far enough down one trail, doesn’t matter much which way you go from there—they’re all the wrong). The like choices. Some days you just do what you learned to do, what you’ve lived your life doing. A body tumbling down a hill, into a ravine.

  When you’re on your own, standing in front of a deputy in the middle of a cemetery, I guess it doesn’t matter as much. When everyone knows what you’ve done, what kind of person you are. You’re in the dark, with no one around. At Haven House, they’d say they can tell if you’re a good person by what you’d do at a stoplight at three in the morning, no one around. Do you follow the rules when no one is looking? I asked the lady why was I out at three in the morning, all alone. She said it didn’t matter. But it does. How you got into the middle of the darkness is what matters the most, I told her. Why you were alone. She wrote down that I refused to answer.