Swing (Gun Pedersen Book 2)

by L. L. Enger

  “Shit, not a bad place to start, I thought, so I said to him, ‘Think about it? Goddamn. A guy’s gotta be able to plan ahead.’ So he goes, ‘All right then, I’ll let you decide. Here’s how it is. The job’s yours if you win everything down there with your old men this winter. Show me what you can do.’”

  Rott took a couple long swallows of beer, half the bottle, then smiled, eyes meeting Gun’s for a moment before looking off again toward the pool, and Louis. “That’s the deal, Gun. I’m showing old Flax what I can do, and I’ll be damned if I don’t get that job, too. And from there it’s up to the top, only a matter of time. Hell, you and I both know about Sirkon. He can’t run a team, the guy’s too soft. Brains, all right. But he’s a pussy, and after the Sixty-six Series everyone knew it, too, how he tried running around Gauge instead of through him. You watch, he won’t last a season.”

  Suddenly Rott took his feet off the table and looked hard at Gun, said, “Hell, though, what matters right now ain’t what’s happening to me. It’s what’s happening to you, my friend. I wanted you out here to get you away from old Mo, and talk some sense into your white head.”

  10

  Cold and tired, Gun pulled into the Gates To Home Motel at nine o’clock. The heater didn’t work in the Beretta, and with the sun gone and a wind brisk off the dark, choppy Intracoastal, the place didn’t feel a whole lot like Florida—more like March in Minnesota. Fifty-five degrees, the radio said, and going down in a hurry. Frost warnings, oranges beware. A guy might just as well have stayed home. At least up north you knew enough to dress for the weather.

  He unlocked his room and found the air not much warmer inside. Attached to the wall behind the door he saw a small oil burner, which he cranked to high temperature. Then he put water on to boil on the little stove in the kitchenette. Turning, he saw a distorted image of himself in a toaster sitting eye level on a shelf above the refrigerator. He spoke to it. “Moses Gates is my friend, that’s what I’m here for,” he said. He’d been saying it all the way back from Rott’s farm and figured he had himself pretty well convinced again.

  It really wasn’t a matter for argument, though. He was doing what had to be done. He knew that. But what you knew in your mind was often the very thing your body wanted to show its backside to, and Gun’s body was tired and hurting. Which seemed appropriate, this being Florida. Stomach, legs, back, throwing arm—they all had personal, painful, spring-training memories, and now the knuckles of his hands would too, not to mention the sore spot on his sternum where this morning he’d taken a punch he couldn’t remember.

  Sitting down at the foot of the single bed he reached his bruised hands toward the vents of the oil burner. No heat was coming. He got up and turned the dial to off then high again, but the unit still didn’t respond, so he knelt on the rippled, lime green linoleum and searched behind the safety plate for the pilot Couldn’t find it. Ten minutes later, on his back, fingertips burned from paper matches, he gave up. He let his body relax against the cold floor, hands lying palms up next to his ears. Then he got up and phoned Moses.

  “I need some heat in here,” he said. “What kind of place is this?”

  Moses groaned. “You’ve got matches in the drawer next to the sink, and the pilot’s underneath of that tin plate on the bottom.”

  “I looked. It’s not.”

  “She’s there. You gotta reach way up behind all those little tube things on the right,” said Moses.

  Behind his voice—right behind it—Gun heard a woman’s, sharp and nicked, like a well-used knife. She said, “Make him do it himself.”

  “You’re going to have to come over, Moses. Look, I can’t find it,” said Gun.

  He heard the woman swear and Moses tell her to put a cork in her face. “You shithead,” said the woman. “Big flabby-cheeked pink little ...”

  “Everything all right?” Gun asked.

  “Twice this good and I’d still be depressed as all get-out. Linda’s here.”

  “I know that. What for?”

  “What do you think for? Hiding out. And I bet it’s a real hot mystery where she’s at too. This is all we need. My hands hurt like hell and my head’s in about ten pieces—Hey, leave that be! Just leave it alone.”

  Moses’s voice strayed from the phone, then came back again. “You know what I’m saying, Gun? My whole body suffers. Don’t need any more of this.”

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Sleep and figure it out in the morning. Ill put her in number ten for the night, way down at the east end next to the road. That unit’s got a back door on it, and she hears them coming she can sneak out. Hey!” Gun heard something break, a thrown plate or a heavy glass, then he suffered the sharp blast of a fallen receiver. He massaged the inside of his ear with a finger and waited.

  “Gun? Hey, sorry, man. The broad’s looned out. My favorite lamp, the one my mom had next to her bed? Hey, damn it! Gun, call you back.”

  Holding the receiver a safe distance from his head, Gun said, “Fine.”

  Fifteen minutes later he heard Moses and Linda walk past his door toward number ten, yelling in whispers like people do only if they’ve known each other in a certain way.

  Ten more minutes and Moses tapped on Gun’s door and stepped inside. He wore an orange ball cap too small for his graying head and a T-shirt that showed the broadened and fallen condition of his once-solid torso. He looked like a man who had every right to despise the law of gravity. His face was wider than it was long and, for a heavy man, well marked by wrinkles. His mouth was small and puckered, careful. He was shaking, from the cold or something else.

  “Not used to this kind of weather,” he said. He struggled with his fingers, which wouldn’t hold still to let nun touch the cardboard match to the lighting strip. When he finally had a flame, he sneezed and blew it out.

  “Here, get on the floor,” Gun said. He directed Moses into position at the base of the oil burner. “Okay.” He lit a match and handed it down. In a moment Gun heard the foosh of combustion.

  Moses got to his feet—he had on socks but no shoes, Gun saw—and stood close to the heat louvers, rubbing his upper arms with the palms of his hands.

  “How’d you get rid of her?” Gun asked.

  Moses smiled. “I had this brand-new quart of Comfort I was saving up against the next piece of bad news. She saw it and turned to mush. I let her see it, pretending like I didn’t want her to. Helps when you know a person’s religion.”

  “I belong to this hot chocolate cult,” Gun said. “Want to join?”

  “Owahhh, that heat feels good. Yeah, count me

  in.”

  Gun took two small, robin’s-egg-blue cups from the shelf and filled them a quarter full with powder from the can of Swiss Miss he’d stopped to pick up on the way back from Rott’s. He filled them with water from the top of the stove and stirred. “Tell me something,” he said. “You played ball with Weiler. Tell me about his family. What his dad did, where they lived, stuff like that.”

  Like a fat bird on a vertical spit, Moses was turning himself slowly in front of the heater. He didn’t stop rubbing his bare arms. “Oh, Lord, that woman makes me cold,” he said. “You don’t know ... I’m starting to feel better now, though.” He took a deep breath and released it slowly, his cheeks puffing out. “No, Rott never said a lot about his people. He talked baseball, and women sometimes, and he liked to read quite a bit, history and stuff like that. Considered himself a smart guy, I’d have to say. But personal things? You didn’t jaw about that shit with him, it wasn’t his way. And if it had been, he probably wouldn’t of said anything to me. The boy had a case of the nigger fright^

  “He’s a bigot?”

  “I don’t know what you call it. All I can say is, he had this, need to leave whenever I came around. Who knows why.”

  “So you don’t know his background. Nothing at all.”

  “Did anybody? You know what he’s like, that sneaky way of looking at you, without looking at you.
Look, I know what he thinks of me and the kind of chatter he’s spreading. Fine. He can have his opinion, and tell the world, too, but a bear dont shit in the buckwheat if I’m gonna let that asshole get to me.” Mows took a sip of his cocoa. “Oww, you’re a prince, Gun.” His hands, wrapped around the mug, were so big it was invisible. He leaned down and breathed in steam.

  “One thing I do remember, though. This is funny, too, and everybody knew about it Rott had this hammock he always brought with him on the road. No matter what kind of a bed they give us, and most of them awful nice, too, like sleeping in feathers and perfume—no matter. Rott had this hammock he strung up. We’re in the Hilton or the Ritz, pricey suites with live plants and shit, and Rott strings up his hammock to sleep in, all night. Ties it up to the bedpost, curtain rod, anything. Don’t ask me why. I guess he couldn’t sleep anywhere else. And it’s not even a decent hammock, but this old raggedy thing looks like it’s made of twine or something. He just loved it.”

  ‘The guy grow up sleeping in those things?”

  “Like I said, I don’t know anything about him. But I’m a country boy, and growing up, I knew kids slept in hammocks, homemade ones, on account of their parents couldn’t find beds for everybody. Didn’t know about real beds till they were shaving and planting seeds. But Rott, no. He always had manners, seemed to know how to eat in fancy places. Wasn’t like he came in from the hog house. Tell me, Gun. Has he got a hammock out there on his little farm?” Moses laughed, showing two rows of gold molars on the bottom deck.

  “Back porch,” said Gun, “and well used, it looked to me.”

  “That boy is weird, all I’m gonna say.” Moses shook his head and drained his mug. “Now I’m going to bed. I deserve it, don’t you think?”

  “No more than I do.”

  “See you tomorrow,” said Moses. When he left, the cold wind jumped inside.

  Gun went to the phone and dialed information. Michigan area code. “Traverse City,” he told the operator. “William Stanton.”

  11

  A better fisherman than ballplayer, Billy Stanton had done fifteen years with farm clubs and never reached the big leagues. Good glove, no stick, is what people said, and they were right. Now he owned a forty-seven-foot boat that could handle Lake Michigan any day of the year, and he ran the best fishing outfit on the eastern shore. The major leagues, finally. And no retirement in sight.

  In the early sixties Gun had spent a single season with Billy in the Coast League, triple A. They got to be friends: patrolling the outfield on workdays (Gun in left and Billy in center), ocean fishing on days off, rooming together on the road. Then Gun went up to Detroit, where he did what he’d always planned to do with his life—hit baseballs very hard. He did it for seventeen years and made a point of never losing touch with his old friend.

  Lucky for Gun, Billy—who had also roomed a year or two with Rott—was home tonight, and Gun was able to pick his brain. Weiler, Billy said, was Missouri-made, southeast corner, tiny town the name of which Billy couldn’t recall, though he’d seen it in writing probably a hundred times on letters Rott got from his mother, a faithful writer.

  “Money in the family?” Gun asked.

  Billy laughed at this. “Those letters she sent him? They always came in used envelopes. You know, they’d been turned inside out and addressed in pencil. I’d say white trash.”

  “If that name comes to you, give me a call back,” Gun said.

  “What’s up? You sound serious.”

  “Nothing, probably.”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  Half an hour later—it was past midnight and Gun had fallen asleep—Billy phoned with the name. Harristown, Missouri, population six hundred fifty-eight, according to the atlas he’d looked in. Gun wrote this down, thanked Billy, and went back to bed.

  The scratching came from way off in the distance at first, then it was much closer, and finally right up against the edge of Gun’s sleep. He woke with no idea where he was but sure that someone was at the window next to his head. He opened his eyes and saw a silhouette behind the curtain, crouching. Whoever it was was working something sharp up and down against the louvered plexiglass. Gun lifted the curtain and saw a woman outside, smiling at him. She held up a knife no bigger than a bottle opener, its blade narrow and twinkling in the light from the yard lamp.

  “Been here five minutes,” she said. “You sleep hard.”

  Gun just stared. He saw she had rotten teeth and

  full lips. A lot of hair, and a lot of nose, and a lot of eye.

  “You inviting me in or letting me freeze my jeans off, or what?” she said. “Come on, slugger, find your manners.” She stood up and moved toward the door. Gun sat up and thought, First get out of bed and put your pants on, and by then you’ll know what’s going on. He followed his own instructions, and sure enough it worked.

  He opened the door and said, “What do you want, Linda?”

  She pushed past him into the room. He looked for the knife but didn’t see it. In her hands was the bottle of whiskey.

  “It’s warm in here, thank goodness. My room’s cold as hell on Sunday. Hey, you’re safe. Loosen up, smile, you’re in Florida.”

  “I just figured that out,” said Gun, glancing at the clock. It was five-thirty.

  “And my friends call me Treasure. Moses, too, but not anymore. Now he’d like to be rid of me, so it’s Linda.” Her face had a ninety-proof glow that more than did justice to the smell of her breath. Gun angled across the floor toward the phone.

  “Don’t call him, slugger, please. Let him sleep. What I got is for you, anyway. I gotta tell you something confidential. Moses finds out and I’m hamburger.”

  Gun pulled a chair out from the desk and offered it to her. She sat down and quickly stood again. “What is it?” Gun asked.

  “That light just kills me, you know?” She was squinting up at the fluorescent ceiling fixture Gun had snapped on, protecting her eyes with a hand. He reached over and killed the switch.

  “God, thank you.” She moved over and sat down on the rumpled bed, nestled the whiskey bottle be-

  tween her thighs. “I’m so glad you were up,” she said. “I’ve been thinking all night how I had to see you, and grew about fourteen ulcers.” She rubbed a hand on her flat belly, lifting the gray T-shirt that covered it. Her black leather biker’s jacket was unzipped, and the T-shirt was cut low to show her wide loose cleavage. She leaned forward and attached her huge brown bloodshot eyes to Gun’s. “You know why they call me Treasure?” she asked.

  “No idea, sorry,” Gun said, thinking, It’s probably not your teeth, your charm, or your taste in clothes. Moses, Moses.

  “It’s when I was little and liked to hide things in the sandbox, and once Antie Bernice who raised me like her daughter had this pearl necklace she got from her fiancé that ran off and got killed, and I buried it in the sandbox out back of her trailer. Actually it wasn’t a sandbox, it was a sand pit her daddy owned, no good anymore, all used up and half full of water. So I buried that necklace of hers and couldn’t find it again.”

  Linda got up from Gun’s bed and walked to the cupboard above the sink. “You got anything to drink with?” she asked. “I can’t stand the feel of this thing on my lips.” She traced a finger around the glass mouth of the bottle. “Makes me feel cheap and awful, you know?” She opened the cupboard and took down a high clear glass stenciled with pheasants in flight She half filled it and returned to the bed. He didn’t move from where he sat at the small table. Linda frowned at the glass for a while then took a swallow.

  Gun said, “You were going to tell me something.”

  “How I got my name.”

  “No, before. You said Moses shouldn’t know about it.”

  “I’m working up to that, damn it. Can’t you tell?” Her voice was sharp all of a sudden, her wet eyes dark and crazy. “A woman that’s worth anything doesn’t just lay it all out there, does she? No, she sets a nice table, everything just so. That�
�s what my Aunt Bernice always says. And then when it’s time, and she’s ready, she says so. But it’s up to her.” Linda took another swallow of the whiskey and Gun watched her eyes roll up into her head. They came back even brighter than before.

  “Finally I told Antie Bernice that I lost her pearls in the sand and wasn’t sure where. After that, we started this game called Treasure Hunt after supper every night where we’d go outside and dig with a couple of cooking spoons and pretend we’re hunting for pirate treasure on this island full of fruit trees and naked people. We found the pearls after a couple days that way but then I kept hiding them again because of how much fun the game was. And pretty soon I’m the Treasure Girl to Antie Bernice, and then just Treasure.

  “Antie’s the only person that ever believed in me. She’s the one that said I’m worth something and shouldn’t just give it away like milk at the dairy show. She said, Treasure, you wanna watch yourself. Men don’t go payin’ for the cow if they can get the milk for free.’ And I’ll tell you, Mr. Slugger, I do watch myself. Nobody gets to me just like that, oh, no. You wanta see something?”

  Gun said he wasn’t sure. Probably not.

  “Show you anyway.” She took another gulp from the glass, then stood up and unzipped her jeans. Gun sat, a prisoner of surprise. Her panties were white, and with the fingers of both hands Linda pushed them down just enough so that Gun could see a fine-link gold chain that encircled her hips. With a single finger she reached down farther and flipped out a tiny leather sheath that held the little knife Gun had seen earlier.

  “Antie gave it to me, to protect myself. ‘Put it someplace safe,’ she said, ‘and use it only if you have to.’ And I’ve had to. Cut those sniveling weasels.” She smiled, opening her lips to show the blackened tips of her teeth. Then she plucked the knife from the sheath and held it out in front of her on one palm. “Not now, though. I trust you, slugger. I don’t need this with you.” She set the knife on the table in front of Gun, who decided it was time to leave.