by Allen Eskens
The man in the Pink Floyd shirt, the one Vicky called Harley, stood up and walked the three paces to the bar. I could feel his eyes on me as he picked up the bottles of beer. Then he returned to his booth.
“Any update on who killed your old man?”
It struck me as odd that she asked that question with the same nonchalance that she had when she asked me if I wanted a beer. “They’re not telling me much, but I believe you were right when you said that they have their sights set on Moody Lynch.”
“Nathan Calder would blame Moody for the Kennedy assassination if he could,” she said.
“Why’s that?”
“Them two have a history.” Vicky leaned on the bar and spoke in a voice just above a whisper. “And it’s a juicy one.”
“Do tell.”
“A couple of years ago, Nathan busted Moody for some minor possession. I think it was just pot. After that, Nathan started pulling Moody over every chance he got: window tint, loud muffler, that kind of crap. And every time, Nathan would search for drugs. Well that started to piss Moody off, so Moody took up watching Nathan. Spying on him. And Moody Lynch ain’t gonna be seen if he don’t want to be. He can disappear into the leaves like one of them lizards that change colors.”
“Chameleon?”
“Yeah, a chameleon. So Moody’s watching Nathan every day, and pretty soon he figures out that Nathan’s been sneaking off in his squad car with Janice Meyer from the Court Administrator’s Office. He followed them out to the river and found where they liked to get it on. Well, the next time they decided to sneak off, Moody was waiting with one of them infrared trail cameras. Caught Nathan and Janice in the act. The next thing you know, a copy of that footage shows up in the mail, addressed to Nathan’s wife and Janice’s husband. It was a huge scandal. Nathan got divorced over it—almost lost his job. I think if he had the chance, he’d put a bullet through Moody’s head.”
Again, from the booth behind me, Harley yelled, “For Christ’s sake, Vick, will you stop flirting with that douchebag and do your job?”
“What the hell you squawking about?” Vicky said.
“I want another beer. The service here sucks.”
“I just gave you a beer.”
Harley stood up and walked to the bar, slamming his empty beer bottle down. “As you can see, it’s empty.”
He slid the bottle toward Vicky, and it fell behind the bar, landing on a rubber mat without breaking. Again, I could feel his eyes on me. Instead of getting Harley a beer, Vicky went to the opening between the bar and the kitchen and got the attention of the cook. As they spoke, Vicky kept glancing over her shoulder at Harley. But Harley didn’t notice; he kept his eyes locked on me.
“Are you really Toke’s kid?” he said, his words slurred and dripping with contempt.
I didn’t answer.
“I said, are you Toke’s kid? Are you Little Toke?”
“Who I am is none of your business.” I said it as calmly as I could.
“The hell it ain’t. If you’re Toke’s kid, you owe me some money.”
I pinched my lips and slowly shook my head and said, “I don’t owe you shit.”
“Harley, go sit down,” Vicky said.
“Not until Little Toke here agrees to pay me my money.”
I could tell that Harley had been drinking for a while: one hand on the bar to steady himself, eyes as glassy as frog’s eggs.
“Your old man screwed me out of fifteen grand. You’re gonna get some of that Hix money, so the way I see it, you can pay off his debt.” He gave a shove to my shoulder that nearly pushed me off my stool.
“Damn it, Harley!” Vicky yelled. “Leave him alone.” She reached across the bar, grabbing Harley by his shirt. He swatted her hand away.
Now I stood up and faced him. “I don’t know you,” I said. “And I don’t owe you any money. Go sit down.”
Harley looked at his buddies, who, I suspected, were ready to jump into the fight if Harley needed them. Then he turned back to me. “Are you calling me a liar?”
“No. You’ve made a mistake, that’s all. Just go back to your friends.”
“Are you a cheat like your old man?” Harley took a step into me—although I think it was more a matter of losing his balance than anything else. I stepped back to keep an arm’s length between us.
“You’re drunk, Harley,” Vicky said. “Go sit down.”
“You stay out of this, Vick. This is between me and Little Toke here.”
He reached out to poke me on the chest, and I swatted his hand away. “Don’t go there,” I said.
With that he perked up like I’d just slapped his face. “Oh, you want to have a go, do ya?” He took another step into me, this time on purpose. I again stepped back.
“Don’t do it, Harley,” I said. “I don’t want to fight you.”
“I bet you don’t.” He stepped at me a third time, and before I could step back, he reached out for my shirt.
I grabbed his hand with both of mine and twisted his arm upside down so that the knot of his elbow pointed at the ceiling. I pulled his upturned elbow under my armpit, lifted my legs, and let gravity take us to the floor. He landed harder than I had intended, and the sickening crack of his face hitting the wood worried me a bit.
One of Harley’s friends, the smallest of the three, began to slide out of the booth, so I yelled, “Don’t move, or I’ll break his arm.”
The kid stood up, unsure of what to do next. I raised my foot to kick the kid if he came any closer and cranked Harley’s arm some more. “Tell your friend to stay put!”
“Ow! Son of a bitch!” Harley hollered.
The kid moved a step closer, his eyes darting around, looking for a way to come at me.
“Tell him to sit the fuck down!” I leaned into Harley’s twisted arm, taking his wrist and elbow to the edge of breaking.
“Sit down! Fuck!” Harley screamed.
The guy moved back to the booth. I eased up on Harley a bit to stop his screaming.
“Now here’s what we’re going to do,” I said. “You boys can either leave peacefully out that back door, or I can keep Harley here in pain until the law arrives. It’s your choice.”
“Fuck you!” Harley said.
“Law it is.”
“No, man,” said the kid. “I’m on probation, and hell, so are you. Let’s just go.”
The third guy, the one who sat quietly while the fight went down, dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table, got up, and walked out without saying a word. The guy on probation hesitated for a couple beats but relented and followed his friend out the door.
With Harley alone, I felt pretty good about my situation. I loosened his arm a bit. “Harley, I got nothing against you. I’m going to let you up. You can walk out of here or you can stay and fight, but you should know that Vicky has already called the cops.”
Vicky picked up her phone and held it as if that were true. With his face against the floor, Harley didn’t know the difference.
“You can walk out of here and let it be, or we can go another round. It’s your choice.”
I let go of his wrist and scrambled up. Harley climbed to his feet, his face almost purple with rage, his eyes watering. He held his right wrist, working his fist in a small circle, probably gauging its strength. Then he looked at Vicky, who still held her phone halfway up to her ear. He spat at the floor near my feet and walked away.
Most of the patrons looked at me with a mix of fear and surprise. The lady doing Charlie’s background study seemed particularly shocked by what I’d done, her eyes popping, mouth hanging open. Charlie remained at his table in the corner, a strange smile on his face like he’d just bested me somehow.
I sat back down on my bar stool, my fingers shaky from the adrenaline rush. Vicky stood across the bar from me, leaning in close enough so that I could smell her perfume and catch a glimpse of the black lace of her bra behind the V-neck of her T-shirt. “Where’d you learn to handle drunks like that?”
“I used to be a bouncer,” I said, averting my eyes away from Vicky’s cleavage. I looked at the tattoo on her arm, the candle with the cursive writing below it. From this close I could read the words under the candle: my mother, my light.
“You were a bouncer? And here I thought you were just some desk-jockey reporter. Damn.”
“Don’t be too impressed. I mostly just checked IDs.”
“The way you handled Harley Redding just now—you may not be burly, but you got some moves.”
I took what she said as a compliment, even though I didn’t like being reminded that I was a bit undersized. “I’ve had my ass handed to me plenty of times,” I said. “My luck was bound to run out sooner or later, so I went to college. You don’t need survival skills when you sit behind a desk.”
“What I wouldn’t give to go to college and get the hell out of this hole. You have no idea.”
“You should do it,” I said, sounding like the jackass that I often was. “When I was at the U, I knew people who went to school by day and bartended at night.”
“If only it were that easy,” she said.
“If I can do it, anyone can.”
“No,” she said, looking at me through wistful eyes. “Not anyone. For some of us it’s just not in the cards.”
The heaviness in her words told me to let it go, and I suspected that the ground we were covering had become hard-packed long before I arrived in Buckley. She moved down the bar to serve drinks to some of the other patrons, and by the time she returned, I had prepared a question for her that had nothing to do with college, or bartending, or being stuck in a small town.
“Do you have any idea what that guy, Harley, was so mad about? What’d Toke owe him money for?”
Vicky’s playful side came back. “I don’t know, but I bet I could find out. A small town like this, someone’s bound to know.”
“And how’d he know about me being in line for Toke’s money?”
“Toke’s murder is a big deal around here. It’s all people are talking about. And if you’re Toke’s son, then you and Angel get the Hix farm, right? At least that’s the gossip.”
“Gossip? I just got here.”
“Oh, honey, this place is nothing but dry grass and tinder waiting for a spark of gossip to set it on fire. Nothing stays a secret in Buckley.”
“If it works out that I get a dime, I’ll be surprised,” I said.
“Have you seen the farm—the Hix place?”
“No.”
“I’m off after the dinner shift. Stick around and I’ll take you out there.”
“I wouldn’t want to put you out.”
“It’s no big deal,” she said. “That’s my neck of the woods. I could show you around.”
I thought about her offer. What could it hurt? If nothing else, I’d have an idea of what Uncle Charlie had at the center of all his scheming. If it turned out that I was, in fact, Toke Talbert’s son, it might be nice to have some perspective on the tides moving around me. If not, all I would have wasted was a couple hours of my time. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do that. But I’m going to take my supper back to the motel and eat it there. I don’t want Harley rethinking his decision and coming back here for me. I’m staying at the Caspen Inn.”
“I know, room eight.”
“How’d you…?”
“I told you, nothing stays a secret in Buckley.”
Chapter 14
In July, the evening sun can linger in the sky until nearly nine o’clock, so when Vicky showed up at my motel at eight, I figured that an hour would be more than enough time to drive out to the Hix farm and back before dark. When the knock came, I answered the door to find Vicky in a black leather jacket, black gloves, and her hair tied back in a ponytail.
“You got a jacket?” she asked.
“A sweatshirt,” I said, giving a quick glance to the cloudless sky.
“You may want to put it on.” She nodded toward a motorcycle parked across the lot. It was a mean-looking thing, black and sleek, arched like a running back ready to shoot the A-gap. It reminded me of something from a Transformers movie, an evil robot just waiting to stand up and spit lasers. I grabbed my hoody and a pair of sunglasses, and followed her across the parking lot.
“Quite the bike,” I said, sounding a little more nervous than I’d intended.
“That’s my baby.” She rubbed her hand down the seat as though it were a pet. “It’s a Triumph Tiger—as good in the dirt as it is on the road.”
She jumped on and nodded to me to mount up behind her. When she fired the engine, I could feel the power surge against my thighs and groin. I wrapped my arms around Vicky’s waist, the strength of her stomach muscles apparent even through the leather jacket. As if she sensed my apprehension, she turned her head, her lips curled up in a sly smile, and said, “Don’t worry, I got my first dirt bike in fourth grade. I’ll take care of you.”
We headed out of Buckley on a two-lane highway that cut through a vast plain of green fields. When we came to a long straightaway, Vicky opened the throttle, and I tightened my hold on her waist, pressing myself into her as she leaned forward. Over her shoulder, I could see the speedometer climb to a hundred and ten before she let off. Despite wearing sunglasses, tears streamed across my cheeks as we settled back down to the speed limit.
I have to admit that her acceleration scared the hell out of me. A single pothole or startled pheasant would have been enough to kill us both—Minnesota being a no-helmet state. But at the same time, the rush of adrenalin caused my skin to tingle and my breath to stay high in my chest. It was like one of those carnival rides, the kind with rust on the bolts and grease trailing across peeling paint, whose hinges groan and pop for want of repair. Eventually something is bound to go wrong; yet having survived it once, I wanted to do it again.
About fifteen minutes outside of town, the fields gave way to thick woods, where we dropped into a river valley, crossed a bridge, and climbed back up the opposite valley wall. At the top, she let off of the gas, and we coasted.
Up ahead, two farms emerged, one on either side of the road. On the right stood a farmhouse painted a handsome blue with bright white trim. A row of dormer windows jutted out from the roof, and a porch ran along its entire front, the kind of porch that beckoned company to come and sit. The house stood amid a cluster of barns and a grain silo, all painted bright red.
On the left was a smaller house, a one-level rambler squatting in front of a silo and barn, both in need of a fresh coat of paint. A faded metal shed, white with a gray sliding door, stood next to the house, completing the hodgepodge of mismatched structures. Weeds had invaded much of the property, and a patch of scrub in front of the faded, red barn grew unchallenged. The contrast between the two farms told a story of boom and bust, separated by a single stretch of blacktop.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the rich colors of the farm on the right, even as Vicky turned into the farmstead on the left, following the gravel driveway around the side of the house and parking in the metal shed.
“Come on,” she said, waving me to follow her.
As we walked toward the front of the house, I heard the sound of a door creaking open. We turned the corner to find a man in his late fifties, unshaven, his shirt pitted from days of wear. He held a cup in his hand, and although I was still fifteen feet away, I swear I could smell alcohol seeping from his body.
“Hi, Pop,” Vicky said.
“Who’s your friend?” he asked, pointing his whiskey mug at me.
“This…” Vicky looked at me with a strange expression of betrayal on her face. “This is Joe Talbert, Toke’s son. Joe, this is my father, Ray.”
I started to take a step toward Ray, my hand reaching out in greeting, but the old man pulled back and glared at me.
“Get off my property,” he said.
“Dad, he’s not Toke. He didn’t even know Toke.”
“He’s a Talbert, ain’t he? I’ll have no Talbert on my land. Never! Get him out of
here.”
For a second, I thought Ray might throw his mug at me. His hands trembled as he snorted air in and out of his bulbous nose.
“Calm down, Dad. I’m showing him the Hix farm.” Vicky’s tone remained tranquil, dismissive, replying to her father as though she were telling him how her day went. “I’ll be back in a little bit.”
“Don’t you go over there,” he said. “You got no business on that farm.”
“Just go watch some TV. I’ll be in to fix your supper later.”
“Don’t you be bringing that Talbert back here—you hear me?”
“Go inside, Dad.”
Vicky walked down her driveway with me in tow. I looked over my shoulder and saw that Ray remained on the porch watching us. He pointed at me, I suppose to let me know that he’d be keeping an eye on me. I could tell that he had been a big guy at one time, but his build, like his silo and barn, had succumbed to the ravages of time. His big hands were knotted and bent, his back curved.
“Don’t worry about him,” she said. “He wasn’t a fan of Toke’s.”
“I could tell.”
As we were about to cross the highway, a car came from our right, a red Lexus. I had seen that car parked at the Caspen Inn a couple doors down from my room. We waited for the car to pass, and as it neared us it slowed. Uncle Charlie sat behind the wheel, looking at us—at me—like my mere presence on Earth irritated the hell out of him. After he passed, he kicked the accelerator and sped away.
“That was creepy,” Vicky said.
“You know who that was?”
“No, but he’s been at the bar all day.”
“That’s Toke’s brother, Charlie,” I said.
She looked at the car as it shrank into the distance. “Should have guessed that was Toke’s brother. He kept staring at my ass every time I walked past him.” We started across the highway, but Vicky stopped, and again she looked in the direction of the disappearing car. “You know, now that I think about it, I’ve seen him before. Yeah, he was at the bar a few weeks ago with Toke, arguing about something or other.”
“Does the sheriff know that?”
“I only call in the law when things get really out of hand. They were arguing, but it wasn’t a fight.”