When Will asked, “Could it?,” the man snorted, getting mad now, and saying, “How stupid are they making kids these days? Damn half-breed, you must have the IQ of a Twinkie.”
Will said, “Hey!,” and pulled the hammer back. “Don’t talk to me that way. I’ve got a damn gun in my hand.”
The old man snapped, “Well, you sure could’ve fooled the hell out of me. Maybe you’d do better with a bow and arrow.”
“Knock it off. I mean it.”
“Let’s hope you do. My wife’s probably under the dryer by now.”
The old man had looked at Will, seeing the revolver, hammer back, and thought for a moment. He muttered something, then he squared his shoulders again, turned his temple toward Will and focused on the old photos of wrestlers on the wall.
“Do it!” he said. “Or I’m calling the cops.” Then tried to piss off Will, adding, “You being Ethiopian, maybe we should melt the freakin’ gun down and make a freakin’ spear out of it. A weapon not so complicated.”
Will ignored the comment because he knew what the man was doing. He looked at the radio instead. Now the radio guy was saying, “… So here’s how we use this giant magnet. We send fancy metal belts to every sportswriter who thinks Bert should not be in the Hall of Fame. Engraved belts, like presents, get it? When scientists hit the magnet’s switch- Whammo! -a hundred sportswriters are suddenly airborne, flying toward Denver without a plane.”
Will had noticed the old man’s chest moving like he was laughing. The joke was kinda funny. But then Will realized the man was crying again. Geezus, it was embarrassing. A grown man crying, Will had never seen it before. Well… that wasn’t true. On the Rez, some of the older Skins occasionally bawled when they got drunk, but it was mad-crying because they were walled in by their lives, dead broke, with snot-nosed kids who would never amount to nothing.
That wasn’t the sound Will was hearing now, this hopeless weeping without bottom, a despair that had the scent of crumbling paper.
Uncocking the gun, Will went to the radio and turned the volume louder. He wasn’t going to shoot the guy, so the only thing he could think of to say was, “Who the hell is Bert? Why don’t sportswriters like him?”
The old man pretended to cough into his hand. On the bar was a towel. He took his time getting the towel, then coughed a few more times and blew his nose, keeping his back to the boy.
“You ever get tired of asking questions? Jesus Christ, you oughta be stealing encyclopedias instead of hard-earned jewelry and stuff.”
Will repeated the question, feeling the air in the room changing, the invisible gray tint clearing, and he thought, Good.
The old man said, “Bert Blyleven. Bert pitched for the Twins when they won the World Series.” Then he held up an index finger, as if there was something too important to miss, but it was really to give himself more time to stop bawling as he listened to the radio guy saying:
“… Blyleven’s got almost four thousand strikeouts, plus two World Series rings. As if that’s not enough to earn the Dutchman a place in Cooperstown, Bert had nearly three hundred career wins, too, despite playing for underpaid teams.” Being funny, the radio announcer added, “Take it easy, Twinkie lovers, I don’t want you to choke on your Grain Belts-I am not referring to our Twins, of course.”
It was another minute before Will said, “I never heard of the guy.”
The man who only later would introduce himself as Otto Guttersen spun his wheelchair, oblivious to the tinted air flowing through Will’s brain. Like smoke, it drifted upward, the space changing from gray-blue to pearl, as Guttersen said, “You gotta be shittin’ me.”
Will said, “ ’ Bout what?”
“You never heard of Bert Blyleven? He’s only one of the greatest pitchers of all time, which most sportswriters know. But there’re still a few dingleberries out there who won’t vote him into the Hall of Fame. Didn’t you just hear what Joe said?”
Joe, Will would also soon learn, was Joe Soucheray, the host of Garage Logic, a local guy who even Will had to admit was pretty funny for being an old Casper from Minnesota.
Will began to relax a little when Guttersen said, “You don’t follow baseball? Maybe Indian chiefs don’t allow TV on the reservation. Or is it because of the Great White Father?”
Usually, Rez jokes didn’t bother Will. The Skins said a lot worse than that, but they were Skins, not some racist old cripple from the Land of a Thousand Lakes.
Will told the old man, “Screw you, I ride rodeo,” and knew it was okay because the man didn’t say anything as he placed the gun on the counter.
“Screw me?” The man snorted and sniffed. “Screw you, kid.”
“Screw you!”
“Screw you.”
Then Will had to listen to him say, “Every kid in the world should know something about baseball. Hell, stealing bases would come natural to someone with your experience.”
Looking around for the garbage bag, Will gave the man a look: Screw YOU!
“Kid, you wanna talk about a real sport? Here, I’ll show you.” The old guy had wheeled toward the bar, where there were wrestling photos on the wall, then stopped suddenly.
“Whoa… Holy Christ,” he whispered, “I just remembered something: My wife told me we’re getting a juvenile-delinquent kid tomorrow. Said he was gonna be living with us for a month, because she signed up for this stupid program down at church. Some foster-grandparent bullshit.” He had poked his big nose toward Will, the old man’s face now become a face with features. “You have anything to say on that subject?”
Will had used his sullen Why should I care? expression and looked at the floor.
“Are you the delinquent? Seriously, I’m asking.”
As the man moved the chair closer, Will knelt for the garbage bag, changing his expression to read That’s so crazy it’s funny.
Guttersen had pale, piggish blue eyes that lit up when he thought he’d done something smart. “I’ll be go-to-hell,” he said, “it is you! Christ! When she said an Indian kid, I thought she meant from freakin’ India. Like with a turban and a dot-you know, a tea drinker who might get pretty good grades in math.”
Will was looking around the room, thinking, I’ve gotta get out of here, as the man pressed on. “Her Tinkerbell friends wouldn’t have said Indian unless it was India. They woulda said Native American or Indigenous- something. But that’s what my wife meant-a juvenile-delinquent Indian.” The old man was grinning for some reason. “By God, you’re just as advertised. I can’t argue with what’s staring me in the kisser!”
Will had started up the stairs.
“Hey, where you going? I wouldn’t mind hearing about what it’s like robbing houses.”
Will kept walking.
Guttersen raised his voice when he didn’t get an instant response, a habit that would irritate the hell out of Will in the future. “I’m bored, for chrissake! That’s not obvious? Come back and have a seat. We still got half an hour of the radio show.”
Will had turned to look at the man. “You don’t want me here, mister. You’re afraid I’ll tell the church people I caught you trying to blow your brains out. If they hear that, they’ll strap you in a straitjacket and take you to the loony farm.”
“I suppose they might try,” Guttersen replied. “You gonna tell?”
“Not if you don’t tell the cops what I do for extra money.”
“I expect you’ve laid up quite a pile, working with a pawnshop. What do you do with all that money, buy drugs? Saving for college?”
In that instant, Will had realized something surprising: He could answer any way he wanted, even tell the old man the truth, an opportunity that would end when he walked out the door.
“I buy marijuana seeds sometimes,” Will had said, talking slow so he could feel what it was like not lying. “I grow it, then make a bunch more money selling tacote to rich kids. You know, weed.”
“ Weed, you call it. I thought the word you drug dealers used was grass. Or
… maryann.”
“ Grass, sometimes. Smoke or tacote, they called it on the Rez-the reservation, I mean.”
Guttersen said, “I’ll be go-to-hell,” interested, but not as interested as he was pretending to be. Then the man ruined it with flattery. “I was impressed, you knowing about the Mercury dime. Most people, they’d drop a 1940-S in a Coke machine, not a second thought. You’re a go-getter for an orphan delinquent, I shit thee not.”
Will had almost told Guttersen something else true that he’d never told anyone: He was saving to buy Blue Jacket from the snooty Texans with their fancy ranch. Instead, Will had flashed his Whatever expression, then started up the stairs, telling the old man, “No need to shovel it so high. I’ll tell the church people I ain’t living here but won’t mention the gun.”
“Good. None of their damn business anyway.” The man had pushed his wheelchair to the stairwell, waiting until Will was almost at the top, to offer, “We still got thirty minutes of Garage Logic. Wouldn’t hurt to stay until the wife gets back from the hair parlor.”
“I got better things to do, mister.”
Guttersen didn’t argue-a surprise. Just sort of shrugged as he spun the chair, then settled in by the radio, his indifference saying Leave if you want, I’m not begging.
Will had stood on the stairs, thinking about it. He didn’t like the man-who would? But there was something comfortable about being with an adult you could tell to go screw himself and he’d say it right back, no hard feelings.
But the craziness with the gun was scary. And the wife sounded like most foster grandmothers, tight-cheeked do-gooders who worked so hard pretending to be sweet, they were a pain in the ass.
No thanks.
As Will reached the top of the stairs, though, he heard the old man call, “If you steal the jewelry, at least close the damn freezer door tight. Hear? But if you’re staying, there’s a can of beef jerky on the cupboard, and grab me a beer. Two beers, if you’re thirteen or older.”
It was a couple of months before Guttersen’s wife, Ruth, gave them permission to open the gun safe-Guttersen, of course, pretending he didn’t have an extra key-and drive to the shooting range. That’s where Will heard the pearl-handled revolver fired for the first time.
Loud, yeah, but as expected.
Back in Oklahoma, even shrinks and preachers packed guns. On the Rez, Christ, the Skins still had machine pistols hidden away from the days of the American Indian Movement. Will had grown up carrying a sidearm, provided by whatever ranch was paying him to ride fence. He could shoot.
Even so, he had to listen to Guttersen run his mouth, offering advice about the finer points of marksmanship, which Will had assumed was bullshit because competent shooters didn’t buy cheap weapons like a pearl-handled knockoff.
A misjudgment, he discovered.
“This shiny piece of junk’s got sentimental value,” Guttersen explained, shucking brass from the cylinder, then laying the gun aside. “It’s a fake peace-maker I used in my wrestling shows. Sheriff Bull Gutter and Outlaw Bull both. Good for close range, if you catch my meaning. But I woulda never used it in the field.”
When Will asked, “What field?,” the man didn’t answer, too busy locking the wheels on his chair, then producing a gun case from beneath his seat.
“This,” he said, “is what I used in the field. Not the sort of weapon I’d want some cop to snatch because they took it as evidence. Savvy?”
It was like that all the time, now, Geezus. Cowboy Bull and his Indian sidekick, Pony Chaser.
Inside the case was a pistol Will had read about but never seen, a custom. 45 caliber semiautomatic Kahr, polished stainless steel, with custom sights. A beautiful weapon, even though the gun had had some use.
“Where’d you carry it?” Will asked again, but Guttersen was loading rounds into a magazine, then turned his attention to a combat range. There were targets at twenty-five yards, fifty yards, and one target seventy-five yards away.
“If I had a rifle,” Will said, making conversation, “I’d take the far target and show you something.”
Guttersen shucked a round into the Kahr, and replied, “I’ll show you something right now,” then did.
Bull Guttersen could shoot.
It was another ten months before the man answered the question, “What field?,” confiding in Will something that even Guttersen’s wife was forbidden to mention: Bull’s wrestling career didn’t end in the ring, as he commonly told people.
Truth was, he had been crippled six years before in Afghanistan, at age fifty-one, after being recalled as a sergeant with his mortar unit in the Minneapolis National Guard.
Hearing that confirmed something else Will had begun to suspect. Guttersen wasn’t as old as he looked. He was old but not old. Something had happened to the man that aged him.
“I saw some action around Kabul, slept in a tent and put on a couple of wrestling shows for the USO. Didn’t even mind the scorpions too much, but then the Hummer I was in hit an IED outside Mazar-Sharif and it all went to hell.”
Guttersen didn’t tell Will that until days later, the two of them staying up late one night watching The Angel and the Badman, sitting in La-Z-Boy recliners, the fancy ones with beer holders built right into the armrests.
Guttersen had offered the information in a mild, damn-near intelligent voice Will had never heard the man use before… and might never hear again.
“Don’t ask for details, Pony Boy,” Bull had said, ending the conversation. “If you bring it up, or tell a soul, I’ll say it never happened, because, once folks find out the truth, they never stop asking me about it- What was it like? Musta been hell -as if they knew something about hell. People don’t know jackshit about hell, not the Real McCoy hell. Trust me on that one.”
In the same mild voice, Bull had explained, “Even if I don’t answer their damn questions, I still end up thinking about the answers. And I don’t want to recall how truly shitty it was. Just don’t got the energy for that no more.” Bull had added, being very serious, “Pony, you’d have to be a POW yourself to understand.”
Buried alive, Will wondered now, his eyes open in darkness of his coffin. Does that count?
24
I gave up on asking Barbara for help. Made a phone call from the cab, got lucky and hitched a ride on an Army training flight to MacDill Air Force Base, Tampa. The plane was a C-130, similar to the aircraft that was being loaded with the Castro Files. No movie but a cargo hold the size of a gymnasium where I could stretch out and sleep.
“The military’s standards begin where your standards end,” I enjoyed telling Tomlinson over the phone, breaking the news that he would have to find his own way home.
By eight p.m. I was standing on the patio of Nelson Myles’s winter estate, near Venice Beach, watching the man through his kitchen window. He was pouring himself a scotch and soda, mostly scotch. The sober horseman was back in the saddle.
Good. He would be loose, possibly even talkative. What I had to decide was my approach. Knock on the door and introduce myself? Or lure the man outside, then drive him to a secluded spot?
If the police weren’t already looking for me, I might have played it straight. But their low-key inquiries were becoming more frequent, and they’d hinted about a subpoena. Mack, owner of Dinkin’s Bay Marina, had updated me on the phone, as I drove a rental car south on I-75, looking for an exit near the Sarasota County line and a development called Falcon Landing.
There are hundreds of gated communities in Florida and many hundreds more to come. Gate or no gate, few are communities. Developers bulldoze an oversized patch of scrub, truck in sod and palms to damper the stink of bruised earth, then mask their domino trap with a woodsy name-Cedar Lakes, Cypress Vista, Oak Hills-and presto!, instant habitat for people in search of instant lives.
Falcon Landing was different. It was a thousand-acre enclave, a private retreat isolated by fencing, security and almost two miles of bay frontage and beachfront. Prices started in the
eight figures, execs who owned planes were the targeted demographic and there was a strict low-density covenant that catalyzed demand and guaranteed a waiting list of buyers. Even I had heard of some of the celebrities who owned homes at the place.
There were only two entrances to Falcon Landing. The southernmost was just north of Port Charlotte, the other near the pretty seaside town of Venice.
I approached from the north. The entrance was a limestone arch with a waterfall and a Learjet logo. At the guard station was a Wells Fargo security car and two uniformed men. The place took security more seriously than most, so I parked at public-beach access a half mile away. After changing into shorts and a long-sleeved T-shirt, I belted a fanny pack around my waist and jogged back to the entrance. The guards replied to my wave with slow, uncertain salutes, but they didn’t stop me.
I can go without sleep for a couple of days, if I work out. But I hadn’t had time to do much of either in the last forty-eight hours. It felt good to be outside, alone and running in the Gulf-dense night. So good, I didn’t want to stop. Running is the best way I know to scope out an area. I picked up the pace-my way of making the run last-and mentally logged details that might be useful later.
Falcon Landing was a well-planned package: multimillion-dollar estates on ten-acre parcels, homes that looked as if they’d been layered from a tube of chocolate icing. There was a country club, clay courts, a banquet hall and restaurant that was open but not busy on this balmy, blustery January eve.
Every structure was efficiently screened by ficus or hibiscus hedges. Green zones were spacious, and there were trails and tree canopy enough to create the illusion of a Caribbean island retreat. The exception was the western edge of the property where more than a dozen small jets and prop planes were hangered on an FAA-licensed airstrip-seventy-two hundred feet long, according to signage. Members only, night traffic by appointment, corporate pilots must register with the attendant at Falcon Landing.
I wondered how tight airstrip security was.
The Myles estate was beachside, the house not visible from the road. It was shielded by islands of foliage: helicoids, birds of paradise, citrus and frangipani. There was a twelve-foot gate, wrought iron on electric tracks, with a horse-sculpture cap and a small brass plaque: SHELTER COTTAGE.
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