by L. L. Enger
“Ah,” said Gramp Coldspring. He was sweating too and had his braids thrown back over his shoulders. He looked about as happy as Gun imagined he could look. He had a cleanup hitter’s grip on the splintered axe handle, and there was a little of Coach’s scalp up on the sweet spot.
Ah,” he said again, greatly satisfied. Coach was
on his face, limp as a 250-pound rat. Christian was hugging his grandfather’s knees. Gun said, “Thank you. Thank you, very much.”
36
“Home,” said Gramp, lifting Christian into the air.
Gun nodded down at Coach and said, “Go ahead, Gramp, I think I’ll try to bring this big one around, make sure he’s not dead or anything.” If the guy was breathing, you couldn’t tell it. No sounds of pain, no movement between the shoulder blades, nothing.
“Don’t bother. They’ll bury him themselves.” Gramp spit next to Coach’s body and swung Christian up onto his back and headed out of the swamp the way he’d come in.
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” Gun said, and knelt down to feel for a pulse in Coach’s neck. He found it right away, a strong one, too. He turned the man over and slapped his muddy face, heard a small groan. “Okay, time to wake up and talk,” he said.
It was an old trick his father had taught him, an army trick from basic training, wake a guy up every time, no matter how tired or drunk or sick. What you did was grip the sleeper’s thumb between your index finger and your own thumb, and press down hard with your thumbnail on the guy’s cuticle. “Bring him out of a coma, if that’s what you need,” Gun’s father liked to say. And it worked on Coach just fine. Gun squeezed extra hard and Coach sat up like he had springs in his back, swearing fast and well. Then he was holding his head between his elbows and crying tears.
Gun told him to shut up for a minute and Coach bit his lip, jaw still going. “You’re going to take me to see Casper now,” Gun said. “He and I’ve got some things to discuss. Important things. Where’s he at?”
Coach seemed to have lost his language facility, needed help getting to his feet and putting one in front of the other, but in fifteen minutes they’d left the swamp behind and were walking through a lovely orchard of ripening oranges, row after row of heavy-limbed trees. Gun was beginning to wonder, though, if maybe Coach was leading him the wrong way when they suddenly stepped out from the orchard into a clearing. Fifty yards off, in the center of a perfect lawn, was the house, a square, three-storey brick colonial.
“This here is Casper’s,” said Coach, with reverence.
“You can still talk, I’m glad of it,” Gun said.
“Casper’d be out in the garage. Where he spends his time mostly.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Around back,” said Coach.
Gun expected something different that he got The garage didn’t match the house or even come close. It was a small wood-frame structure that would have fit with a middle-class rambler. Two doors in the front, windowless, a four-sided roof that came to a point at the top where a little tin chimney stuck out. The building badly needed paint and one door had been punched in by a bumper. As they neared it, Gun heard the sound of country music coming from inside. Coach knocked on the door.
“Who’s the shithead?” The voice was rough and high.
“Edwood,” Coach answered. He sounded scared, and glanced over at Gun for direction.
“Tell him you got me here, Gun Pedersen.”
Coach took a breath and looked straight up—for courage? Moving his shoulders around. Where the piece of scalp was gone from his head there was a raw wound the size of a half-dollar. “I got a guy here by the name of Gun Pedersen that says he wants to see you, Mr. Leavitt. Sorry.”
“Then bring him in here—goddamnit, Edwood— where he can see me.”
Coach opened the door and stepped out of the way for Gun to enter first, which he did, looking around for the man and finding him on a broken-down sofa in the middle of more garbage than Gun had seen since helping Ruben Caulich, Stony’s junkman, look for a used gas tank for the old Ford. Old televisions and tube radios, rusty bicycles, stacks of molding Playboys and National Geographies and Reader’s Digests, all sorts of clocks, cheap plastic stereo components, record albums without covers, wrecked power tools, old hand tools, lawn furniture made from nylon plumbing pipe. All of it the kind of stuff you could buy for a buck or two at a garage sale, and candy wrappers, too, Salted Nut Roll and Moon Pies mostly, wadded up and strewn everywhere, and empty bottles of Dixie Beer, lots of them.
Looking perfectly comfortable in the midst of this disorder was a fat man with deep-set eyes that looked even deeper because of the heavy thicket of gray brow exploding above them. His features were distorted by excess flesh and he wore bib overalls with no shirt underneath and a pair of rubber thongs that displayed his yellowed toenails. To Gun, though, the most surprising thing about his appearance was his nose. Remarkably well-formed, long and narrow with articulated nostrils, it didn’t belong in this face, in this garage, but rather on someone with a body and a sense of beauty to do it justice. Probably looked all right, Gun thought, in Leavitt’s soap-opera house.
“Casper Leavitt,” the man said. “Pleased to know you, Pedersen. Edwood, you can take your ass out of here, thank you very much.” Leavitt pointed to a chair next to a small humming refrigerator, leaned over and flicked the off button on a boom-box.
“Doesn’t seem right, you in here looking so comfortable, and your boys out molesting kids,” Gun said.
Apparently Leavitt thought this was funny because he laughed, or tried to. It was more like a cough with a smile behind it. “Them Coldsprings are all children, Pedersen, you gotta understand. And like children they need the rod once in a while, otherwise they get outa hand. You got kids, right? Oof, Indians, they got no respect for property. Live on my land like it’s their own private reservation and take my fowl with impunity. I can’t let it happen, can’t let ’em walk over me whenever they please. I gotta stand up for myself once in a while. Oof, shit.”
“And every so often you’re obligated to go out and kill one to teach the rest a lesson. Is that about right?”
“You been kissin’ the wrong asses, baseball man. You do that and you hear the wrong side of the story—or just one side. Ask them Indians about killing, they can tell you some stuff. I won’t deny their blood’s been spilled some, too, like ours, but we’re not talking murder. Oof. Anybody turns up dead and it’s a war casualty. Different ethics at work there, ask anybody with a college degree. Course, human life is human life and precious, and all that happy horseshit, and I regret the tragedies. But the fact is, them people can leave any day they want Pack up and go. I’m not saying stay. Hey, reach into that icebox there, and grab me a coupla them Moon Pies. Have one yourself.”
“No thanks.” Gun opened the fridge and tossed
Leavitt the candy he wanted, watched the man peel away the wrappers from both before he began to eat the first one.
“But let’s be honest, here. Reason you want to see me isn’t the Indians. Oh, you love them, too, but it’s that black friend of yours, Gates, right? You want to know what the dead reporter was scratching away at here.”
“I want to know about Rott Weiler, too,” Gun said. “And Neil Faust.”
“Oof, Robert.” Leavitt shut his eyes and paused for a moment in his chewing. “And Neil’s a piss-ant.”
“Are we going to talk?” Gun asked.
“Course we are.” Leavitt’s eyes snapped open, his eyebrows shook. “I don’t have nothing to hide. But we got to back up a little, slow down, let you hear the whole thing, not just part, you know what I mean? People’re always settling for part and it makes me goddamned upset. Oof, shit.” He pointed at the refrigerator again, his tongue going over his lips, and Gun tossed him two more Moon Pies.
“First I gotta establish something, bottom line. You’re sittin’ here, already thinking it comes down to the almighty buck, and that’s not how it is. No, it’s princ
iples well be talkin’ about now. I’ve got ’em and you’ve got ’em, and they’re sure as hell not the same, yours and mine, but that’s okay. I happen to believe in the separation of the races, not die killing off of people, understand, but the integrity of bloodlines. Now I don’t give a shit what you think. I’m tellin’ you what I think. And the red people and the black people and them there Jews and Italians, and all that, I say they have every right to live and be happy and shit, but they can go do it some other goddamn place. That’s what I believe, and have ever since I was just a little bastard. And sometimes it’s not easy, having convictions that’re unpopular. Hasn’t been for me, I’ll tell you. But I stuck by my principles, and it paid off. Paid off real good.” Leavitt took a half a Moon Pie in his mouth, chewed twice, and smiled. “Here’s how it went for me. Now listen up.”
The fat man had been sliding lower in the sofa and now, with effort, he moved himself so he was lying down, head propped on one armrest, his hands folded over the top of his belly like a man in a casket. He kept one eye on Gun as he talked, a hyperalert eye that recorded every reaction then reacted itself: widening, narrowing down, rarely blinking. “I’m a poor kid from Missoura, right, and I come down to the hot state to find my fortune. Actually I’m in the service, navy, and I’m stationed at Cape Canaveral, and I meet this old gentleman at a nice little whites-only gathering one night, and we hit it off good. He’s crippled up and needing help and I’m the guy that offers. This is just about the time I get my honorable discharge and I didn’t know shit about him ’cepting that he and I, we see the world the same way and he needs somebody younger than himself to take care of stuff he can’t. He’s got this orange farm and wants a guy to drive him around, put some of the help in their place once in a while, shit like that. And I’m his guy.
‘This goes on for a year and when he dies I find myself holding the bag, and buddy, it’s gold. He’s got kids but they’re liberals now, bleeding all over themselves, don’t ask me how, and he gives it all to me, right down to the nickel. The orange farm and his stash and hell, every little piece of this world he can’t take with him. I am truly set up, and it’s a fairy tale, and I’m grateful, too. And I tell you all this because later, when my nephew Robert comes by needing help—and I see that he’s got hold of the same principles I do—well, it’s not easy for me to say no. It goes pretty hard on my conscience, being I’ve got it in my power to make his life one hell of a lot better, jus like old Henry’d done for me.” Leavitt turned full toward Gun and scowled, his eyebrows gathering like thunderheads on his forehead. You did know Robert was my nephew, yes?”
“I thought so, Gun said. “But what did he want from you, exactly?”
“Oof, shit, it wasn’t so wise of me, looking back. But he had good reasons, and now I keep telling myself this. You know of course that Robert was playing ball then, the Minnesota club, and not playing well at all. Very depressed. And he’s like a son to me, you gotta understand. We think the same about the really important things. Goddamn it, he knows where the real threat comes from, not the communists— hell, they’re all eating hamburgers now and crapping in pay toilets, tell me about them. No, it’s a genetic holocaust we’re headed for. The destruction of the one race in history that managed to bring mankind out of the jungle and into civilization.” Leavitt swept his arm through the air and Gun took another look around the man’s garage. “Rott understands this and it makes me sympathetic. What he wanted was help disgracing an idiot that fully deserved it. A guy that promoted racial integration and not only that, was disloyal to his teammates.” Leavitt sighed and relaxed again on the couch.
Gun said, “Ferdie and Rott also happened to want the same job, don’t forget that.”
“I know. That made it more complicated, I should have thought about it more. I also didn’t mean for it to end like it did. Honestly didn’t have any killing in mind.” Leavitt’s eye narrowed at Gun. You knew about that, too, of course.”
Gun nodded. “But what did you do?” he asked.
“Me? Robert wasn’t into the big contract yet, so I gave him the cash he needed in order to make life better for Faust. That’s all I did. Then Robert got carried away, scared Millevich’d get the thing figured out. Panicked like the dumbass he is.”
“What about Billy, though? And Ibbins?”
“Oof, shit. I don’t know. You gotta ask Rott about them. I’ve got nothing to do with it. Rott’s on his own now.”
“Just a minute,” Gun said. “I don’t think he is. You just told me yourself that Billy wasn’t out here only for the sake of the Coldsprings. Finish your story.”
“I’m finished with my story. Billy was out here because he learned I was Robert’s uncle, and figured that little fact would lead to more. He was wrong. What killed him, I suppose, was trying to get Faust to talk, which got back to Robert who must’ ve panicked again. But that’s only theory. Like I said, Robert’s on his own now. I don’t know diddly about this latest mess of his.”
“That’s it?” Gun asked. “You don’t seem to care a whole lot what happens to your nephew. Or to you, for that matter.”
“Nothing’s gonna happen to me. All I did was give a kid some money a long time ago. They don’t arrest a guy for that, even if he is a goddamn bigot. Now Robert, he might try to pass the guilt around, the boy’s got no loyalty. But that’s fine. He won’t be able to put a thing on me. You watch.”
“I will,” Gun said, standing. “First, though, I’m going to have a talk with your nephew. There’s going to be a lot of people wanting to talk with your nephew.”
Be my guest, all of you.” Leavitt sat up halfway on the couch and motioned for Gun to throw him more candy.
“You need the exercise,” Gun said. He walked toward the door, pushed it open and looked back once more at Leavitt.
The man sighed loudly and shook his large head. “Edwood!” he called.
37
Gun waited until late morning to visit Rott, too late as it turned out. He figured there was no hurry now, and he needed the sleep after all, but when he arrived at the farm at a quarter to twelve the man wasn’t home, and he had to settle instead for Louis, who was out in the front yard using rope to stake down newly planted palm trees against the threat of wind.
“Where do you think he’s at?” Gun asked. “They’re not playing till tonight, are they?”
Louis tied off a knot expertly and slashed away the extra length of rope with a small razor knife. Think he went to the park early. Some of them guys can’t hit as good as they should. Them guys need more batting practice.”
“You’re handy with that rope, Louis,” Gun said, watching him tie another knot.
Louis looked up then and Gun saw pride, and something else, too, in his eyes. “Rott, he counts on me,” Louis said.
Gun didn’t find Rott at the ballpark, not on the field and not in the locker room. But leaving the clubhouse he found someone else.
Jacobson Cleary was, as usual, blocking the way with his chair. Today he wore a tie with a photograph of himself silk-screened onto it. The image of his head was elongated, making him resemble a grasshopper, the dark-rimmed glasses a pair of insect eyes.
“Roll,” Gun said. “I’m in a hurry.”
“And why might that be?” Jacobson Cleary withdrew his hand, empty, from beneath the seat and placed it courteously in his skinny lap.
“I’m looking for Rott. You know where he is?”
“Rott—yes, of course. Ah, that’s wonderful. You figured it out, I can see it in your face. Robert Weiler.” Cleary rubbed his palms together fast enough to create heat.
“Do you know where he is?”
“I do.” The old man leaned his narrow head against the backrest of his chair and sighted down through the black-framed glasses resting on the tip of his nose. “Please, I’m dreadfully curious—tell me everything at once.”
“Later.” Gun stepped around the chair and, as he did, Jacobson Cleary opened his mouth impossibly wide—it looked like
a cavern appearing out of nowhere—and let out a delighted laugh.
“Please, not so quick, Mr. Pedersen. You tell me and I’ll tell you. Fair enough? You do want Weiler, don’t you? Today?”
Gun’s hands wanted to wring the old man’s frail neck, but they had to settle for being jammed into pockets.
“You wouldn’t lay a hand on me,” said Cleary. “You’re too civilized for your own good.” He smiled up at Gun, his face wide open, expectant, full of pure happiness. “So, what was it? The card I got from Rott the night Ferdie kicked off?”
“That was a good part of it,” said Gun. “How’d you know?”
“No, you go first. Then me. What made it click for you? Come on, man. Tell me about it, I’ve been waiting ten years.” Leaning forward, licking his lips,
blinking, Cleary was all attention, the devil at a deathbed.
“Billy Apple’s interview tape with Ibbins,” said Gun. “Seems Ibbins got a phone call that night from Rott, early evening, probably not long before you got him to put his Hancock on the card. Thing is, Rott claimed to be down in Miami with a girlfriend. Rott was just trying to build himself an alibi.”