Trouble No Man

by Brian Hart

  Sarah answers on the fourth ring. He tells her where he is and she starts crying and he can’t understand her. Jerzy is on the phone then. He says they’ll pick him up tomorrow at noon. They’ll be flying in, so he and Karen need to get to the airport, there’s a new one, where the glacier used to be, not the one in the valley, that one is full of bomb holes, blasted by AK isolationists.

  “It’s just me,” Roy says. “It’s just me and the dog.”

  Jerzy is silent.

  “Don’t tell them yet.”

  “You can’t ask me to do that,” Jerzy says.

  “Put Wiley on,” Roy says.

  Silence again and Roy is braced to hear Wiley’s voice when Jerzy speaks again. “Just get to the airport.”

  “OK.”

  “Roy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about Miller?”

  “Dead.”

  “Fuck, man.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Hang in there,” Jerzy says.

  Roy gives the clerk her phone and she takes it and gives Roy a pat on the hand and a heartfelt nod. “You’ve come a long way, haven’t you?” she says.

  “California,” he says.

  “Don’t tell anyone else that,” she says. “I’m serious. People don’t want any more Californians. They’re gonna pass a law.”

  “I need a room for the night,” he says, and before she can tell him that they are very expensive or that they don’t allow dogs or Californians, he slaps down all of his pay from working the kelp boat. She thumbs through the stack of bills and reaches under the counter and comes back with a small gold nugget and a digital scale. She weighs the gold then produces a greasy set of pliers and clips the nugget in two, weighs the pieces separately, then slides the bigger half to him.

  “We got mice,” she says.

  Roy thanks her and takes his change and his room key and mounts the stairs. The dog follows a few steps behind him. He locks the door with the dead bolt. After he’s showered, he sits down on the bed in a threadbare towel with the redwood box in his lap and rests his feet on the sleeping dog. Street noise seeps through the closed window in a murmur.

  “I don’t want to be here without you,” he says to the box, the pain showing on his face. Pecos rolls over and starts licking his toes. “Stop that, goddamnit,” he says quietly. Then he lies down on the floor beside the dog with the box between them.

  [42]

  R>45

  CA 96118

  A filthy gray pickup turned off the main road and came slowly down the driveway toward the house. It had a suspension lift and off-road tires, a camper shell and two spares like eyeballs mounted on the rear bumper, gas cans and camping gear heaped into an open roof rack and held there by a cargo net.

  Roy was kneeling in a hole he’d dug beside the barn, searching for a leak in the water line. The leak had dampened the soil and made the grass grow thick and green. Before he’d stuck the shovel in and started digging, he and the dog had lain down on the cool ground for a while and watched the mudbirds build their nests in the barn eaves. Karen and the girls were with Jerzy at the Millers’ canning tomatoes because they had a functioning AC window unit.

  The driver of the truck got out slowly and shut the door behind him. He was an old man and he walked with a wooden cane like the one Roy had used to herd hogs, back when they’d still had them. He told the dog to stay and climbed out of the hole and walked over, shovel in hand.

  “You lost, bud?” Roy said.

  The old man let go of the screen door and let it slam. “It’s you.”

  “Who’re you looking for?” But he knew the answer. He knew this man.

  “Homeboy Roy,” Mace said. “Look at you. Come up here so I don’t have to come down.”

  Roy leaned the shovel against the porch and went up the stairs and shook Mace’s hand. “Where is she?” Mace asked. The dog was suddenly there and Mace gave it a pat and let it run around him until Roy calmed it down.

  “At the neighbors’. She’ll be back later.” Roy opened the door and let Mace go in but kept the dog outside. “I got tea and water. Goat milk.”

  “Tea is fine.”

  Roy stood at the counter beside the stove while Mace had his tea at the table.

  “Is the old house part of this one or is this brand-new?” Mace asked, craning his neck to see into the living room.

  Roy told Mace about the old house and how Karen had sold it and built a new one. Mace shook his head and rubbed his hand over his forehead. The slow-moving clouds that Roy had been tracking all morning finally arrived and blocked the sun. The kitchen darkened and Mace looked up at Roy with a confused look on his face.

  “She thinks you’re dead.”

  “Not yet.” Mace turned and looked out the window. “Is it gonna rain?”

  “Not likely,” Roy said. “We had a hell of a winter and then it rained on the snow and caused havoc, but since then, nothing. You heard about the bombings, the flooding down south?”

  Mace nodded. “Everybody heard about that.”

  “Clouds don’t do anything but gum up our solar.” Roy picked up a tomato from the glass bowl next to the cutting board, sliced it, and sprinkled salt over the slices and picked one up and ate it. He wanted to save the bread for when everybody got home but he made Mace a sandwich anyway. He waited for a compliment on his sourdough but it never came.

  “I didn’t think I’d be away so long,” Mace said. “I got married. We had a kid. Then I got locked up. Did almost fifteen years in Spring Creek. When I got out, me and my wife renewed our vows, built a place on the Kenai together, homesteaded. I have two grandkids. Got my pilot’s license but I wrecked my plane. I always meant to call.”

  “Here’s to excuses,” Roy said, held up his glass of tea.

  “Yeah.”

  “They say it’s better in Alaska.”

  “It won’t stay that way with all of the people flooding in. Roads to nowhere now go somewhere and more roads all the time.”

  “We thought last winter was gonna end the drought but our groundwater is too far gone. It’d take twenty years of rain just to break even.”

  Mace shook his head. “I was in Seattle trying to buy a Cessna from a guy but it fell through.” He looked down at his hands, back at Roy. “I left some pictures in the old house. They were stashed in the ceiling with some other stuff. I never thought I’d be gone so long.”

  “You should’ve called,” Roy said.

  “Yeah.” His eyes roamed around the kitchen. Mace was old, slow. He pushed his plate away. “I knew that she got married, that her husband died. I looked her up. And I knew they had a kid. I didn’t know about you, that you came back.” The sun was low enough now to be below the clouds and the haunting light shining in was red from the smoke and the dust. “So one of them isn’t yours, right?” Mace said.

  “They’re both mine,” Roy said. “Nobody else’s.”

  They heard the truck on the road and stood and watched it unload from the big window in the living room. The dog was sniffing everyone out and stopping for belly rubs and ear tugs. Sarah jumped out of the back with a flying karate kick but miscalculated the drop and the steepness of the slight embankment and ended up on her ass. Jerzy picked her up and dusted her off.

  “Who’s the boy?” Mace asked.

  “That’s Sarah. She decided to shave her head since I did.”

  “I’m talking about the other one. The young guy.”

  “Future son-in-law.” They watched Jerzy walk around Mace’s truck, checking it out. He opened the passenger door and looked inside.

  Mace smiled and whacked Roy on the back with an open palm, then walked outside without his cane and held up his hands to Karen. “Hey, pipsqueak,” he said.

  Karen saw who it was and set down the box of jars she was carrying and walked quickly toward him. The girls watched her. When Roy came onto the porch, Jerzy gave him a look and Roy nodded that
it was OK.

  After the hugs and the introductions, they followed Karen inside. Later, Roy and Jerzy brought in the tomatoes and the canning stuff and put it away in the pantry. Mace took the girls out to his rig to help him unload. He’d brought presents. They had smoked salmon for dinner. Mace had mellowed with age, was tucked in and asleep by 7:30.

  In the morning, after they’d had breakfast, Karen and the girls took Mace on a tour of the property. While they were gone Roy and Jerzy finished disassembling the drive motor on the drill rig and then Jerzy drove it over to Miller’s to rebuild it in his shop because it was better outfitted. Jerzy and Miller often worked together now, solving the endless mechanical problems of each household.

  Roy filled his coffee cup in the house and then pulled his pickup into the back of the machine shed and popped the hood. He plugged it in to charge and ran a diagnostic check on it and changed the number three coil because it came up fried on the computer.

  Roy saw the shadow so he ducked down and circled around the truck and chucked a shop rag at Wiley while she crouched by the rear tire.

  “You can’t creep on me, kid,” Roy said. Then something wet hit him in the side of the head, another shop rag but this one had been dipped in the goat trough. Sarah jumped on his back and tried to put him in a sleeper hold. Wiley was coming at him so Roy flipped Sarah over his shoulder and held her like a battering ram and chased Wiley out of the shop. Mace came toward them, limping with his cane, with Karen and the dog on either side of him.

  “Are these two with you?” Roy asked.

  “Never seen them before,” Karen said.

  Sarah was laughing, trying to get free.

  “Where’s Jerzy?” Karen said.

  “Millers’,” Roy said. He put Sarah down. To Wiley: “You can take mine if you’re going to meet him. Just shut the hood. It’s ready.”

  “She doesn’t need to drive over there,” Karen said.

  “I’m going too,” Sarah said.

  “Take your sister,” Roy said to Wiley.

  “C’mon,” Wiley said.

  “Can I go?” Mace said.

  “Sure,” Roy said. “It’s only down the road a little.”

  “Do you want to drive?” Wiley asked Mace.

  “Nope,” Mace said. “I’ve been driving enough, but we can take my truck. Leave your dad’s in the shop.”

  “Did you not hear me?” Karen said. “Take the bikes, or walk. You don’t need to drive.”

  Mace smiled. “I haven’t ridden a bike in thirty years.”

  “It keeps you young,” Karen said.

  Roy helped them get the bikes situated and gave them a quick shot with the compressor for dust and lubed the chains and they were off. Mace went first, stiff and worried, bowlegged as a rodeo cowboy. The girls followed him, laughing and weaving all over. Sarah rang the bell on her handlebars. Wiley rang back.

  As soon as they were out of sight Roy and Karen went inside. Without saying anything Karen headed directly for the bedroom.

  “I gotta wash up first,” Roy said.

  “Better hurry.”

  Roy shut and locked the bedroom door behind him. Karen was sitting up in bed naked with the blankets off, one leg pulled up. The curtains weren’t all the way closed and the morning sun edged by them and brilliant blocks of light cut the bed and struck her extended leg and lit one of her breasts. She touched her nipple, held her hand up to the sun, and smiled. Roy hadn’t forgotten how beautiful she was, never would, but in the moment he was shocked anew by her attractiveness. He undressed quickly and Karen lifted the sheet over them as he got into bed. He pulled her to him and they tangled themselves together, savoring the warmth and smoothness. It was nice not to have to be quiet but they’d gotten so used to it that being free and loud seemed kind of funny and afterward they laughed for a moment at their moans and the sounds the bed had made bashing against the wall.

  They fell asleep and woke to the sound of the truck starting. Roy dressed quickly and watched from the kitchen window as Mace pulled his truck into the machine shed. Roy’s bike was in the yard. Karen came into the kitchen and gave him a kiss on the cheek and made a French press of coffee and Roy took a cup out to Mace.

  “The girls are catching a ride back with the neighbor.”

  “Too lazy to pedal,” Roy said.

  “I doubt that,” Mace said. “Can I use your welder?”

  “Sure. What’s broken?”

  “Hole in my exhaust, thought I’d patch it.”

  “I can do it.” Roy rolled out his welder and unspooled the lead. “I have to switch the breaker off at the house to run this,” he said.

  “I’ll do it. Where’s the panel?”

  “Top of the basement stairs.”

  Mace’s truck was high enough that he didn’t need to jack it up to get underneath. He hooked the ground to the frame and put on his hood and gloves and switched on the welder. Footsteps approached and then Mace’s feet were next to the welder.

  “Where’s the hole?” Roy asked. “I don’t see it.”

  Mace got stiffly down onto the ground and pointed his flashlight at a broken weld in the pipe near the transfer case. Roy climbed out from under the truck and stood and took off one glove and sorted through the flatstock scrap he kept on top of the woodstove until he found a suitable piece. At the anvil he beat the scrap against a pig iron dowel of approximately the same radius with his ball peen hammer. Under the truck he scraped and tapped on the exhaust with his hammer to clean it, then used a chain clamp to hold the flatstock in place. He dropped his hood and made four quick tacks.

  “Do you want something to cover my fuel tank and my batteries?” Mace asked.

  “I’m not going to blow us up,” Roy said, taking off the chain clamp. He dropped his hood without warning and finished his welds.

  Roy switched off his welder and plugged Mace’s truck into the charger. “I can’t run the welder and the charging station at once either or my breaker goes. Kind of a single-stream thing we got going.”

  Mace pulled up a stool at Roy’s worktable and sat down. “Your neighbor,” he said.

  “Miller.”

  “He acts like a cop.”

  “He’s OK. We didn’t get along at first but he’s all right.”

  “Is he a cop?”

  “No, ex-government. Ex-military. He has militia pals that he hangs out with but he’s OK.” Roy hung his welding hood on its hook and took a drink of his tepid coffee. “We have a don’t ask, don’t tell thing going.”

  Mace picked at the random bolts and washers on the workbench. “You know, if you could get that drill rig up north you’d be sitting pretty. With all the new folks, you’d have more work than you could handle.”

  “Karen isn’t going anywhere. I’ve tried.”

  “This is the ragged edge, Roy. You guys can’t stay here. What if that neighbor and his pals decide they want to keep your rig? What then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What if he wants to take your water, your whole show?”

  “We’re friends. We help each other out. I’m not worried about Miller. Not anymore.”

  “What are you worried about?”

  “I got plenty to keep me up nights.” Roy spat out the grounds from the bottom of his cup.

  “How many people live in town?” Mace said.

  “It’s not much of a town anymore, not really. After the drought and then the winter of doom, everybody bailed. We got—what—drunk mechanic that keeps a junkyard of useless shit, an undertaker, a newspaperman that doesn’t leave his house. Weird bachelors, militia culls, no families, really. Out here, it’s us and Miller, we’re on our own.”

  “The ragged edge,” Mace said. “I’m gonna talk to Karen.”

  “About getting your pictures?”

  “Yeah, and about leaving too. You can’t stay here.”

  “Good luck.”

  Karen agreed to help Mace if he would shut up about them going to Alaska. They took his truck.
Roy drove. Jerzy and Wiley stayed at the house with Sarah and the dog.

  The first and only roadblock they came to had been destroyed. The fifth-wheel trailer at the roadside was burned to its axles and the steel gate was wide open. Brass on the road, but that wasn’t uncommon. They had to leave the pavement and drive over the exposed railroad tracks because the subway had collapsed during the winter. From there, they gained elevation and entered the blackened pines. In a few shady places, where the topsoil hadn’t been washed away by the rain, the burnt ground was tinted green with new growth. Karen pointed proudly and Mace shook his head.

  In the hills the land was barren, nothing worth claiming. This was militia territory. The riverbed was already dry. The snowmelt had gone fast with the rain and he could see where the water had shot through the blasted floodgate and torn a hole in the hillside below. When they topped the hill they could see the puddled pan of Frenchman Lake. Roy was ready to turn around and go home but he didn’t say anything.

  The fence was chain-link, eight feet high with two feet of concertina wire on top. They followed it for a quarter mile and came to a lowboy trailer attached to a dump truck parked in front of a massive steel archway. A bullet-pocked Jeffersonian Militia sign hung from the arch. The gate below the sign had been thoroughly destroyed by the track hoe parked on the other side of the fence. Beside it was a wad of twisted wrought iron that had once been the gate.

  Roy parked with their tailgate facing the archway and turned off the truck. Karen got out to look around, kicked at something on the ground near the trailer’s loading ramp, scooped it up and held it out for Roy to see—a handful of brass shell casings. Mace got out of the truck and walked to the shredded keypad and plucked at the wires to see if they were live and got shocked. He shook it off, spat in the dust, and shuffled to the tailgate and sat down.