Eve's Men

by Newton Thornburg

  “Well, that’s good news,” Brian said. “It’s something anyway.”

  Chester went on shaking his head. “Can you beat it, though—someone jest dumpin’ her like that on the highway, like she was a dog or something’. Guess he was through with her and figured he’d jest dump her like that.” He shook his head, as if in wonderment. “But he’s gonna have to answer, lemme tell ya. Soon as I find out who it was, he’s shore gonna have to answer.”

  Brian, cool as a car salesman, nodded in agreement. “I don’t blame you, Chester. I’d feel the same way.”

  Eve, who had gotten up by now, still held back, not wanting to spook the cowboy. “It’s good she’s young and strong,” she said. “She’ll make it.”

  Ignoring her, Chester kept his attention focused on Brian. “The police, I guess they already took off,” he said. “Doctor told me he’s supposed to call them when she comes to. But I’m gonna be there first, lemme tell ya. Whoever the bastard was, I want to know first. I guess I don’t need to tell ya why.”

  Brian nodded gravely. “You sure don’t.” Holding out the keys to the pickup, he turned to Eve. “Listen, why don’t you go on ahead and wait for us down in the parking lot. Chester and me, we’ve got some business to discuss.”

  This was not at all like Brian, making her feel like some lowlife employee, someone to push around and ignore. Before taking the keys, she made him just stand there, holding them out like a supplicant. But instead of looking embarrassed, he gave her one of his nicer smiles, a combination of guilt and whimsy and affection. She took the keys and headed for the elevator. Chester appeared relieved to see her go.

  Ten minutes later, down in the parking lot, she watched as the two men came out of the building, Brian talking earnestly, his hand on the little man’s shoulder. Chester had his cowboy hat on now and there was something different even in the way he stood there for a moment, slightly bent and still, like a drawn bow about to be released. Then he walked on to his pickup, which was old, red, and gleaming, the opposite of Brian’s filthy, black, new Chevy. As Chester jumped inside, Eve saw the guns racked in the truck’s rear window.

  Brian didn’t get in with Eve until he saw the red pickup roar out of the parking lot. As he slipped in behind the wheel, he looked as if he were trying hard not to smile.

  “Somebody put a burr under his saddle?” Eve asked.

  Brian shrugged. “Not me, certainly.”

  Charley had not actually expected to sleep during the two hours’ reprieve he had given Brian, not to mention himself. He figured he was much too exhausted, too addled, too angry to sleep. But being a cautious sort, he set the radio alarm anyway, which turned out to be a good thing, since he fell asleep immediately and kept on sleeping through the radio part of the alarm, not waking till the buzzer came on like a jackhammer in his head.

  For a time he felt worse than before, drugged as well as exhausted and hungover, in no condition yet to phone the police or anyone else. In time, though, after brushing his teeth, shaving, and showering, he began to feel at least a little like himself again—except for Belinda of course, except for the burden of guilt and remorse he now carried. If only he hadn’t been drunk, he kept telling himself, then none of it would have happened. She never would have popped the door, never would have slipped out of his grasp, never would have had a chance to make her mad dash across the freeway.

  The only problem was, he had been drunk. But why? Why he had let himself go that far? That he still didn’t know, except that it had something to do with Eve, so beautifully sad, sitting so close to him for so long, her husky voice plucking him like a guitar.

  Still, he couldn’t yet bring himself to pick up the phone and call the police, for the good reason that it scared the devil out of him, the prospect of being arrested, fingerprinted, and incarcerated, even if only overnight. Also he had to admit that in this instance Brian for once had made sense. In trying to take Belinda to the hospital, Charley and Eve had only been filling in for him, only doing what he should have been doing. Belinda was his mess, he’d said, and he should be the one to clean it up, a sentiment with which Charley could only agree.

  But even as he was thinking along these lines, protecting himself, the pendulum would start its inevitable swing back in the other direction and he would feel scorn for his faintness of heart, worrying about his good name and creature comforts while poor Belinda lay nameless in some hospital, possibly dying. So he resolved to call within a few minutes, in fact as soon as he was dressed. But just as he as finishing, putting on a clean blue shirt, Eve knocked on the door and he let her in.

  “So you’re up and around,” she said. “Didn’t succumb after all?”

  “Afraid not. Where’s Brian?”

  “Downstairs in the coffee shop. Claimed he was going to pass out if he didn’t get some java immediately. So I’m here to collect you.” She was still wearing the same clothes, the same jersey and jeans and boots. And somehow, despite all she’d been through in the last twelve hours, she looked reasonably fresh, unreasonably beautiful.

  “Breakfast, huh?” Charley said.

  “That’s right. Food.”

  “Well, I’ll admit I could use a few gallons of orange juice. But I thought we had some other business, you know? Belinda?”

  Eve smiled slightly. “I know. But you asked where Brian was. As for Belinda, it seems your brother has taken care of everything. He phoned Chester at his motel, and we met him at the hospital. He ID’d Belinda. And whatever it is Brian told him, it sure worked. The two of them are tighter than Lewis and Clark.”

  “She’s alive, then.”

  “She’s in Intensive Care, in a coma. The doctors think she’ll pull through, though.”

  “And Chester just accepts all this? He leaves his sister with Brian, she winds up half-dead in the hospital, and he doesn’t have a problem with that?”

  “Evidently not.”

  Charley held the door open for her. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said.

  Eve shrugged. “Well, maybe Brian can explain it.”

  Though it was only a little after eight in the morning, the coffee shop was virtually deserted. In a row of booths that looked out on the pool, Brian was the sole occupant, leaning back in the corner of one, basking in a shaft of sunlight while he smoked a cigarette and drank his coffee.

  As Charley and Eve sat down across from him, he shook his head admiringly. “Hell, Charley, you’re looking almost chipper,” he said.

  “Chipper, my ass. You mind telling me what you said to Chester?”

  “Just the obvious, that’s all. Belinda and I went our separate ways. Some movie guy I don’t know invited us to a party, and naturally Belinda wanted to go, being young and vital instead of a middle-aged old fuck like me. So she left, and I came on home alone.”

  Charley sat there staring at his brother, wondering how on earth he could look so satisfied and carefree, as if Chester wouldn’t eventually learn the truth anyway, if not from Belinda, then from someone else who had seen the two of them leave together. And of course Chester would then have it in for Brian all the more, not just for what he had let happen to Belinda but also for having conned him, for having made a fool of him.

  But before Charley could say any of this, the waitress served Brian’s breakfast: wheatcakes, sausages, scrambled eggs, and another glass of orange juice. Charley and Eve ordered only coffee and juice. After the woman left, Eve commented on her lover’s plate.

  “I guess lying makes for a good appetite.”

  Brian smiled. “Oh, I don’t think I’d call it lying, babe. Creative misinformation maybe. Say, the judicious application of creative misinformation.”

  “Sounds impressive,” Charley said. “And when Chester finally learns the truth, he’ll probably give you a lesson in the judicious application of creative gunfire.”

  Brian laughed. “Boy, you two are a couple of real crepe hangers. Aren’t things bad enough without magnifying this thing with Chester? For Christ’s sake, I
’m out on bail for a couple of felonies, Belinda will probably never be the same, thanks to us, and fucking Damian Jolly is still going ahead with his lying movie. To me, that’s sufficient bad news for the day.”

  “You’ve got a point,” Eve said.

  Charley did not agree. In his mind, the fact that things were already bad enough didn’t make this new problem any less important. But he said nothing for a time. Outside, the pool had been opened and three preteen boys, all towheads, had begun a frenzy of diving, cannonballing, and belly flopping, trying to impress a sunbathing teenage girl in a bikini. Judging by her total indifference so far, Charley didn’t think much of their chances. At the same time, he couldn’t help noticing that his brother’s behavior was comparably unrealistic, or at least, odd. Time and again, as Brian worked at his huge breakfast, he would start to smile for no apparent reason and then just as suddenly turn it off. Finally Charley asked him about it.

  “Just what the hell’s eating you?”

  “Eating me?”

  “Yes, what’s going on?”

  “I haven’t the vaguest what you mean, Charley.”

  “You look like you ate a goddamn canary.”

  Brian touched the corners of his mouth. “Little yellow feathers give me away, did they?”

  “Don’t be cute.”

  Eve too had noticed. “You do seem kind of hyper this morning. Why? Because Chester bought your story?”

  Brian shrugged. “I guess something like that.”

  “What like that?” Charley asked.

  Brian didn’t answer immediately. He pushed his food away and sat back, smiling an odd roguish smile made doubly odd by the fact that his eyes had filled with tears. “Christ, what a mess this thing is,” he said finally. “What a stinking, unbelievable mess.”

  “Brian, what is it you’re not telling us?” Eve said.

  He burlesqued a look of consternation. “What could it be, I wonder. That I’m an asshole? No, because I’m sure you both are already aware of that.” He ran his hands back through his hair, gripping his skull as if to keep it from exploding. “Even when we were kids, right, Charley? And I mean little kids. Remember how I could never resist a dare? Some wise guy tells us not to skate on thin ice, I had to zip on out there, right? Jump off a roof? Pick a fight with a gang of black kids? Shit, no problem. Not for crazy Brian Poole, right?”

  Charley patiently sipped at his coffee. “Yeah, you were always a caution.”

  “We’re waiting,” Eve said. “What the hell has happened? What’ve you done now?”

  He repeated her words. “Yes, what have I done now? What in God’s name has the asshole done this time? Well, let me think.” He frowned deeply for a few moments, then grinned in relief. “Ah yes, it comes back to me now, like a haunting refrain. But it’s nothing, really. A bagatelle.”

  “We’re waiting,” Eve repeated.

  “Waiting for very little, as it turns out. Really, it’s no big deal. It’s just that, in misinforming Chester, I guess I was a bit more specific than I indicated earlier. You might even say I didn’t misdirect him—I pointed him.”

  “Pointed him where?” Eve asked. “At who?”

  Charley was afraid he knew. “At Damian Jolly, right?”

  Brian shot him with his finger. “Bingo! Give the man in the pink eyes a kewpie doll.”

  Eve didn’t want to believe him. “Oh, you couldn’t have, Brian. You couldn’t have been that stupid.”

  “Afraid so,” he said.

  “Knowing the mess you’re already in?”

  “Knowing that.”

  Eve turned to Charley, as if she expected him to explain his brother. But he begged off.

  “Don’t look at me. He’s the one with the answers.”

  “I can’t even figure out how, “she said, turning back to Brian. “How on earth could you rope a gay man like Jolly into this thing?”

  “No problem. Didn’t you know that the worst queers like girls too? No? Well, Chester knows it. Now he does, anyway. Beyond that, though, the story I gave Chester was basically just what I told you—that someone who saw us at the Purple Sage last night called and told me about the accident. Only difference is I gave that person a name—Jolly’s angel, Rick.”

  Charley already had a pretty good idea what else Brian had told Chester. Nevertheless he sat there patiently listening as his brother spread it out for them.

  “Yeah, it seems Rick came up to our table again after you two and Chester left, and he invited Belinda and me up to the house for one of Jolly’s notorious little orgies—you know, the kind where sexy young girls like Belinda get ravaged after being pumped full of drugs and promises. Naturally I didn’t want to go, but Belinda did. Trotted right off with Rick, she did.”

  “And Chester bought it?” Eve said. “My God, Rick came over to our table. Certainly Chester knew Rick wasn’t in the market for females.”

  Brian was patient with her. “Well, as Chester understands it, Rick simply does what he’s told. And since Damian swings both ways, sometimes Rick has to perform as a kind of roper—one of Jolly’s eunuchs who go out and round up girls for the old lech. And come to think of it, I might even have mentioned where the great director’s house is. Yes, I think I probably did.”

  “Which still doesn’t tell us why,” Eve said.

  “You mean why do it in the first place? Why sic Chester on Jolly? That ought to be obvious—to get even for yesterday. To give Jolly as much hassle as I possibly can.”

  “And it never occurred to you that it would all come right back on us?” Eve said. “No matter how much hassle you cause him, you cause yourself more. The police will want to know where Chester got his information, and—”

  “The police!” Charley cut in, having finally heard all he cared to. “And hassle! Just what do you two think Chester Einhorn is anyway, some middle-American suburbanite who eats quiche and calls in the police when he’s got a problem? Didn’t you hear him last night?” Already getting up out of the booth, Charley looked at his brother with curiosity more than anger. “Those guns in his truck, what’d you think they were there for? Show?”

  Brian shrugged. “What guns?”

  “In his pickup,” Eve said. “That’s right. I saw them this morning.”

  Brian threw up his hands in mock amazement. “Wow, this is shocking—a country boy with a gun rack in his pickup. What’s the world coming to?”

  “Where was he when you last saw him?” Charley asked.

  “In his truck,” Eve said. “He was leaving the hospital parking lot.”

  “Do you know where he was going?”

  “Back to his motel, I think,” Brian said. “He had to phone his family about Belinda, and I think he didn’t want to do it from the hospital. Pay phones scare him, I gather.”

  Charley drained the last of his coffee. “You sure he wasn’t on his way up to Jolly’s?”

  Brian looked out at the pool, away from his brother’s searching gaze. “Who knows? He didn’t really say. But I can tell you this. If he did go up there, it wouldn’t be to shoot the bastard.”

  “What then? Punch him out? Hundred-and-thirty pound Chester Einhorn is going up there and brawl with Jolly and his angels? Or maybe, with his great gift for language, maybe Chester would prefer to remonstrate with them. Beat them down with words. That what you think?”

  “Could be,” Brian said. “It’s a helluva lot more likely, I’d say, than that he’d go up there with murder on his mind.”

  Charley knew that Brian was probably right. It was one thing to advocate reliance on firearms over government, but quite another to take your gun in hand and exact personal justice. The consequences tended to be dire. Still, there was this problem Charley had when it came to small Ozark men with guns. A problem born of experience.

  “You’re probably right,” he said now, getting up and dropping a ten on the table. “But just to be on the safe side, I think I’ll drive up there and have a look.”

  Brian got out his key
s and tossed them to Charley. “Then you better take my truck. Remember, the road gets pretty hairy near the top.”

  Eve scooted out of the booth after Charley. “Well, I think I’d better go along. If we run into Rick or Jolly, I’m not sure they’re ready for another tête-à-tête with one of the Poole brothers.”

  Brian didn’t move from his corner of the booth. “Have fun,” he said.

  In the sixties, when Charley and Brian were still in their teens, they had spent a week or two each summer at the southwest Missouri hobby farm of their mother’s sister, Aunt Sarah, and her ex-Air Force husband Randall Hoag. The Hoags’ house sat on a lovely, leafy hilltop that on its easterly side looked down on the squalid farm of Smiley Moon, a part-time auctioneer, marijuana grower, and livestock thief.

  In his favor, Moon had three teenage boys who each summer locked onto Charley and Brian as if they were their long-lost cousins and taught them the lore of the Ozarks: how to hunt, fish, trap, steal, and swim naked. For Charley, though, it was not the good times with the boys he remembered as much as the bad times with their peppy, wisecracking father, who liked to beat his sons with ropes, chains, cattle canes, whatever was handy. More gentle with his wife, he usually hit her only with his hand, sometimes open, sometimes not.

  The one thing Smiley Moon cared for was guns. He loved to buy and steal them, and he loved to polish them and show them off. And above all, he loved to fire them. Charley would not soon forget the day Smiley came home with a new assault rifle and decided that there were just too many dogs around the place, both strays and pets. Smiling happily, wandering among his ramshackle buildings, he hunted down and killed four dogs in all, including Orville, the boys’ ten-year-old border collie.

  “Don’t fret it,” he advised. “Old dog like thet, he’s better off dead, he really is.”

  On another occasion, driving the boys to the swimming hole, Smiley stopped the truck and shot a full-grown bald eagle out of a distant tree as if he were plinking a varmint. But his real claim to fame was that he once had shot and killed a local cattle dealer who foolishly sold him a “banger,” a cow with deadly brucellosis. Since the disease could wipe out a rancher’s herd—if he’d had a herd, which Smiley did not—and since no one really wanted to cross the defendant, the jury decided that it was a case of justifiable homicide.