“You learn,” the boy said. “Bugs are different out there—when you see a lot of big old fat grasshoppers stuck in the grille, that tells you they came in from the west.”
“What kind of car was it?”
“A light-blue Escort. Couple of years old.”
Clyde winced. The Escort was a ubiquitous car. “Anything special about it? Any accident damage, any aftermarket add-ons?”
“Except for tinted windows, it was just a plain old stock Escort.”
“Can you describe the driver?”
“Nope. Tinted windows.”
“But didn’t he at least roll the window down?”
“Just about an inch. Stuck a ten-dollar bill out through the crack. Didn’t want any change. Didn’t say a word.”
“Well, did you at least see his hands?”
“He had big old hands. A couple of rings on ’em.”
“Class rings? Wedding rings?”
The boy scrunched up his face, at a loss for words. “Not really either one, come to think of it. Just sort of nice-looking rings.”
“Expensive?”
“Yeah. Kind of flashy. Gold.”
“Thanks,” Clyde said. “Give me a call down at the sheriff’s department if you see him come through here again.”
“Will do.”
But Clyde knew, as he walked back to his car, that the man in the light-blue Escort would never come back to the same place again. A big old crow was flapping around Clyde’s unit with an eye on the sack of food; Clyde ran forward and shooed it away, surprising himself with how angry he was.
Someone approached him from behind, and he turned to see twenty-one-year-old Del Dhont, who was on his team.
“Clyde!” he gasped.
Clyde sped up as fast as he could.
“Clyde!” Del said again, sounding a bit wounded. They were some thirty yards from the goal line now, and the defenders had begun to run toward Clyde, building up speed for an apocalyptic collision.
“Clyde!” Del shouted, outraged by Clyde’s pigheadedness. “Slow down for half a sec and I’ll block ’em!”
Clyde pounded forward another ten paces, then turned back and lateraled the ball toward Del, whose finely honed Dhont reflexes took over; he caught the ball and tucked it expertly beneath one arm before his brain had worked out the implications. One of the defenders—not Desmond—smacked into Clyde and knocked him on his backside. Desmond and the third defender plowed into Del at warp speed, sending him flying backward through the air for some distance before he even hit the ground. The ball bounced loose; the defender who’d bumped into Clyde scooped it up and started running the other way. Clyde stuck around long enough to check Del’s vital signs, then trudged back toward the house. The dinner bell was ringing.
Fried chicken came out borne on an oval platter the size of a stretcher; Mrs. Dhont and one of her daughters-in-law each had to take an end of it as they maneuvered through the doorway from the kitchen. Mr. Dhont had fashioned a table from a single four-by-eight-foot sheet of inch-thick plywood, which was suitable for intimate dinners but nowhere near big enough for these larger family feeds. At such times he had a couple of his sons go down to the rec room, fold up the five-by-ten-foot Ping-Pong table, wrestle it up the stairs, and graft it onto the old four-by-eight-footer. This provided a total of some fifty feet of linear seating space, plus generous acreage in the center for stockpiling of strategic food reserves.
As a rule of thumb Mrs. Dhont liked to slaughter and cook one chicken per guest, and the heap of grayish, blood-flecked feathers in the side yard testified that she had done her best this morning; but there had still been a shortfall, and so she had also heated up some selections that had been mellowing in one of her deepfreezes: a side of roast beef, and a ham the size of a short-block Chevy V8, which continuously orbited the fifty-foot circumference of the makeshift table on their own platters. Clyde was hardly able to eat for all of his platter-passing obligations.
He snapped out of a reverie. Someone had just asked him something, and everyone was watching him and waiting for an answer. They all seemed to have vaguely malicious looks on their faces.
“Beg pardon?” he said.
“I said,” Darius said, “Princess cooked up real good, didn’t she?” He nodded at the big haunch of meat on the platter.
Princess was Desiree’s horse. She’d been presented to Desiree as a Christmas present when Desiree was twelve. She must be twenty-five years old by now; Desiree still came out to fuss over her every week or two. She had not been ridden, nor done any productive work, in a decade. The Dhonts, who liked their humor predictable, could scarcely make it through a dinner without speculating as to Princess’s possible merits as a source of nutrition.
Clyde was obligated to play along. “Finally retired her, huh?”
Much smirking around the table. “No kidding this time,” Darius said. “Go and have a look.”
They wouldn’t leave him alone until he looked. So he excused himself and went over to a window from which he could see the stable that had been Princess’s home.
The stable was gone. A new concrete slab had been poured in its place, bolts and pipes sticking up out of it.
Everyone laughed at the surprise on Clyde’s face.
He returned to the table, eyeing the big piece of meat. “Princess must’ve spent too much time hanging out with the cattle,” he said, “’cause she sure tastes like beef to me.”
More laughter. Clyde continued, “I’ll tell Desiree next time she calls.”
This forced them to own up. “We’re just pulling your leg, Clyde,” Dick said. “We took her over to the vet lab. She’s fine.”
“What are they going to do to Princess over at the vet lab?”
No one was exactly sure. Finally Mr. Dhont spoke up. “She’s doing her patriotic duty. Just like Desiree.”
“What’s that mean in the case of an old horse?”
Mr. Dhont shook his head. “Don’t really know. We weren’t encouraged to ask,” he said significantly.
“They put out a call for old horses,” Dick said. “If you had a horse who was about to end up in a hopper at Byproducts Unlimited, you could just call the vet lab and they’d come around and take it off your hands for free.”
“You were going to knacker Princess?”
“Of course not, honey,” Mrs. Dhont said, “we’d never do that. But the man from the vet lab said that all these horses had to do was give blood every so often.”
“What’re they doing with horse blood?”
“They won’t divulge that,” Mr. Dhont said bluntly. He looked a little miffed at Clyde’s prying.
“We felt that since all Princess ever did was mow the lawn anyway, she might as well do it for a good cause.”
“How many horses they have over there now?” Clyde asked, trying to sound offhanded about it.
No one was sure; all the Dhonts looked back and forth at each other. “Bunch of people have participated in the program,” Dick finally said.
“When did the program start?” Clyde said.
“Lot of questions,” Mr. Dhont grunted.
“Desiree’s going to ask me all this when I tell her about Princess,” Clyde explained, “so we might as well get it over with.”
Dan Dhont, Jr., finished chewing something big and said, “The first time I heard about it was a month ago.”
“Middle or late August?” Clyde said.
“Yup,” Dan, Jr., said.
That put an end to the conversation; Dan had as much as admitted that the mysterious horse program had something to do with Saddam Hussein, and Saddam was a forbidden subject at that table ever since Desiree had been called up.
thirty-three
THE SECURE phone in the closet began to ring just after lunch one Saturday afternoon. Betsy’s first thought was that it must be Kevin calling from the road to give her an update. He’d left a message yesterday morning announcing that he was bailing out of his life: he’d resigned from hi
s job with the Rainmaker, packed some stuff into his Camry, and was about to hit the road, westbound. He wasn’t going to stop until he reached Nampa, or perhaps even the West Coast. The funny thing was that he didn’t sound drunk at all. He sounded more sober than he had in months.
But it was irrational for her to think that Kevin could reach her on the secure phone. Only a few people seemed to have access to that. She picked it up and heard the familiar voice of Edward Seamus Hennessey: “Nice afternoon—the temperature’s not more than a hundred, the humidity’s not more than ninety-five percent, the ozone count is setting records. Meet you at Iwo Jima in fifteen minutes.”
It was a five-minute walk for Betsy to the Iwo Jima memorial. During the summer she went there on occasional Tuesday evenings to watch the Marine Corps color guard do their precision drill—she especially liked the “silent drill” in which, for a full twenty minutes, the beautifully schooled Marines performed with better than clockwork precision while the sunset turned the buildings along the Mall and the Capitol into infinite shades of pink and orange.
Today was not a day to be out at the monument. As Hennessey had pointed out, the weather was typically appalling. But Betsy had been indoors since yesterday afternoon, doing laundry and cleaning house, and she needed to get out even if the day was miserable. She walked around the base of the statue and read the names of all the battles the Marines had fought. She stopped at the south end of the statue, looked up the flagpole, and saw the hands reaching to plant it in the forbidding soil of Mount Suribachi.
At times like this, or when she walked the Vietnam Wall searching for the name of her cousin who had died there, or went to the Lincoln and read the walls, she loved her country. And when she loved her country, she could actually wax indignant about what she’d been going through. She should have felt that way all the time, of course, but nowadays it took a trip to a major national monument to get her into the right perspective.
She knew that to be seen having a private tête-à-tête with Hennessey was a career-ender, but that hardly mattered at this point. It was time to get out of D.C. Time to bail, just as Kevin had bailed.
She didn’t know what she would do in Nampa. But as she read the names of the battles and thought of the young people who had died, sometimes wastefully, for the U.S., she began to understand. Wars were more than battles between declared enemies; they went on at all levels at all times, and sometimes the innocent got killed. She had given her best, she had taken it in the neck, but she was still alive, and there was a whole world outside the beltway where her name had not yet been sullied and where her career prospects ought to be fine. She turned to look through the ozone and pollen and humidity across the Potomac, across the Roosevelt Bridge, and saw the different shades of gray on Lincoln, Washington, and the Dome, the beautiful Dome, and then on to her right at the rolling waves of white headstones at Arlington. The thought that others may have died in these wars, some needlessly and stupidly, didn’t make her feel justified—merely not alone.
She kept walking around the Iwo Jima reading the battles, and she ran into Hennessey, who did not see her.
“Nice day,” Betsy said, aiming for a certain sense of irony.
Hennessey didn’t answer. He was smoking a cigarette, looking nowhere in particular, and then he said, “My brother’s up here.” He motioned at a name. “He would have ended up drunk and in jail if he hadn’t gone into the Marines and become a national hero. My family drinks too much. Always has. But we do interesting things, too. I’ll never get my name carved in stone, of course.”
He still hadn’t looked at Betsy, and she moved over to lean against the rail around the monument. They were both exhausted, pained, frustrated. “Why do you stay?”
“I don’t know. I guess I’m one of the few people around here who remembers what it was like to be proud to work for the government.” Hennessey paused a bit. “You’re a good kid. I wish you could have experienced this town during Truman—when I came onboard—or even under Kennedy.” He paused again. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I brought you here so you could have some privacy.”
“Privacy?” Betsy grinned and looked over at the line of idling tour buses in the parking area, the gangs of American and European tourists going to and fro.
“You know what I mean,” Hennessey said.
“Isn’t the phone in my closet good enough?”
“The enchanted telephone isn’t appropriate for what I’m about to tell you,” Hennessey said. He threw away his cigarette, turned to face Betsy, and drew himself erect, suddenly looking very much the government official.
Betsy remembered getting a tooth pulled once when she was a girl. Once the decision had been made and the go-ahead had been given, the dentist and his assistant had suddenly shifted into a higher gear and got the job done with startling speed. Ruthless, practiced efficiency. In a way, it seemed cold. But it was better that way.
Hennessey was operating in that mode right now, doing something he had obviously done many times before. He’d made the decision and nothing could stop him. He took a step closer to Betsy, reached out, and grasped her upper arm firmly, looked her straight in the eye. Then he spoke some words to her that she didn’t hear. But that didn’t matter, because at some level she already knew, had known the moment Hennessey had reached her on the enchanted telephone.
The sweating, tired tourists circling dutifully around the Iwo Jima memorial were distracted, for a moment, by a woman’s scream. It was a cry of anguish, not of fear. A heavyset female had collapsed to her knees and thrown both arms over her head and was clenching her thin auburn hair with both hands, as if she wanted to rip it all out. An older gentleman was bent over her with one hand on her shoulder, talking to her quietly. Some of the older tourists, who included many Marine veterans, felt a strange sensation of jumping back in time to the late 1940’s, when the young widows of America’s war dead had gone to the dedications of monuments such as this one and suddenly been overcome by grief.
This woman was far too young to have known anyone who had died in the war. The milling tourists could only speculate. But the older ones knew what they were seeing.
thirty-four
OCTOBER
COLUMBUS DAY weekend was nearly over, and Tab Templeton still had not shown up for work. Clyde had arranged with him last week to help out with some demolition in the basement of the apartment building. Demolition always went quickly when Tab was involved.
Clyde had encountered Tab at Hardware Hank a couple of weeks ago, pushing a cart loaded with PVC pipe. Rumor had it that Tab had been working regularly, doing odd jobs for someone or other, and Clyde had learned that he could no longer simply cruise the streets, pick him up off a park bench, and put him to work; he had to have an appointment.
But for Tab to make an appointment and for him to remember it were two unrelated propositions. He’d apparently forgotten this one. Clyde had spent the weekend dithering. He would pound away with the sledgehammer for a while, grow tired, and remember that Tab could get this work done four times faster; so time spent searching for him should be time well spent. He would get in the car and cruise by Tab’s usual park benches, vacant buildings, bars, and restaurant Dumpsters, then become despondent after an hour or two when he thought of all the time he had wasted. He would go back to the sledgehammer and repeat the cycle. Now twilight was approaching on the last day of the three-day weekend. He had an appreciable heap of debris in the back of his truck but nothing close to what he’d planned on. And he was due to pick up Maggie from one of the Dhonts in another hour or two.
He did something so unexpected that he surprised even himself: he went out for a beer. All weekend long he had been driving past the old Stonefield Brewery, a blazing red-sandstone building in downtown Nishnabotna that might have passed for a fortress if it hadn’t been so ornate and Victorian. Jack Carlson, a descendant of one of the less august branches of the Stonefield family, had bought the place ten years ago after it had gone out
of business trying to make the same sort of thin yellow swill that came out of the big Milwaukee breweries. All the old copper vessels were still intact. He had begun brewing darker, heavier stuff and had succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.
Jack Carlson and Clyde Banks had known each other since they’d been kids, and Jack was always urging Clyde to stop by and have a beer. Clyde rarely did, but tonight he was tired and dirty and lonesome and thirsty and felt that he could consume a beer without being racked by guilt.
Besides, he could always claim it was a campaign appearance.
He sat at the bar, a nice mahogany one that Jack had scavenged from a failed tavern in Chicago, and ordered a pint of bitter.
After a few minutes Jack Carlson himself came out from the office in back and made a fuss over Clyde. He drew himself a beer, reasoning that this was a special occasion, and then the two went to a booth and sat down to catch up with each other. Clyde had to explain why he was covered with Sheetrock dust, and this led him to the subject of Tab Templeton.
“Saw him a couple of times last month,” Jack said.
“He was here?”
“A few times,” Jack said, savoring Clyde’s astonishment.
“Heard he was working for someone. Wouldn’t think he’d earn enough to drink here.”
“He wasn’t drinking,” Jack said. Then, seeing the look on Clyde’s face, he corrected himself. “Well, he was, of course, in the general sense. But he didn’t come here to drink beer. He came to pick up yeast.”
“He came to pick up yeast,” Clyde repeated.
“Brewer’s yeast,” Jack said. “Forms quite a thick layer of sludge down there in the bottoms of our fermentation vessels. We clean it out and try to find something to do with it besides just throwing it away and polluting the water. Lot of times we sell it to health-food companies—it’s full of vitamins. Last month we sold some to Tab.”
“How much?”
Jack shrugged. “Maybe half a dozen steel drums full.” Jack grinned at the memory. “You should see Tab sling a drum around. He’s like a human forklift.”
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