Cold Dish

by Craig Johnson

  I watched with great apprehension as his fingers began twisting one of the rusted fuses from its corroded green outlet. The muscles on his forearm writhed like snakes rolling under sun-baked earth. To my knowledge, Henry had never lifted a weight in his life, but he still carried with him the tone of the warrior and was betrayed only by a very small amount of baggage at the middle. As the applied pressure began to take its toll, the glass knob turned and the remainder of the building went black. “Damn.”

  Hoots and laughter came from the darkness as we stood there trying to see each other. “I don’t think that was it.” I listened to him sigh and replace the fuse, and the lights from the beer coolers once again lit up the far room. There was a smattering of applause from the patrons.

  “She did not say anything about calling you.” He was still staring into the metal box, his odds having improved dramatically.

  “So, what’d she have to say?”

  “Nothing much. We talked about you.”

  “What about me?” Throughout the entire conversation, he studied the fuse box with the half-smile that told me he didn’t take either the electrical crisis or my familial life all that seriously. Cady and Henry had a symbiotic, avuncular relationship that had led her into a quasi-bohemian lifestyle. She was professionally adept at billiards and darts, had majored in Native American Studies at Berkeley, his almost alma mater, had continued on to law school at the University of Washington, and was now an attorney in Philadelphia. When together, they spent the majority of their time whispering to each other, pointing toward me, and giggling. The thought of the two of them conspiring at long distance was enough to worry me but, with Ruby’s involvement, something was definitely up.

  Deciding on the fuse diagonally opposite the first, Henry reached in and boldly twisted. The red neon horses that had stampeded across the parked vehicles outside flickered off to more cheers from the peanut gallery. From his lack of response, I wasn’t sure if Henry had noticed. “The pony . . .”

  “Damn.”

  He screwed the fuse back in. The neon roan paused and then leapt across the hood of the Bullet. The flurries were letting up; the bad weather had decided to whistle on down the Bozeman trail to the rail-heads. The bar held a kind of conspiratorial coziness what with the subdued light of the beer coolers filtering through the cracks in the dividing wall. The soft murmur of small talk provided a buffer against the landscape that was now scrubbed with snowflakes.

  “So, what about me?”

  He tapped one of the remaining fuses accusingly with an index finger. “She is worried that you are still depressed.”

  “About what?” He looked at me, decided better of it, and looked back at the fuse box. I pushed off the wall and stepped carefully over the nail-laden boards that covered the floor. “I need another beer.”

  “You know where they are.” I started to turn, but he caught me by tapping on one of the last two fuses. “The suspense is killing you, right?” I made a quick face, placed the empty beer bottle on the edge of the pool table, and bent over to pick up one of the boards. I spread my feet in a good, open stance and held the bark-covered board on my shoulder with both hands. This got a look. “You are going to knock me loose from this if I get electrocuted?”

  I shrugged. “It’s what friends are for. Besides, I want to see if anybody in this county has worse luck than me.”

  “Not yet.” He twisted the next to last fuse and, to our amazement, absolutely nothing happened. We both looked for any absence of light, strained to listen for any lack of humming from the assorted coolers, heaters, and fans. Henry looked to the ceiling in deep concentration.

  “Well, at least I didn’t have to hit you with the board.”

  “Yes, but now we have to do the penny part.” He nudged one of the coins from the paper roll and held it up for me to view.

  “Where do you get this ‘we’ shit, Kemosabe?”

  “Have you not ever done this before?”

  I lowered my board, careful to avoid the nails. “No.” We had reached the conceptual stage of the project, so Henry joined me in leaning against the pool table. “Have you?” He crossed his arms and considered the single lowest common denominator of legal tender.

  “No, but I have heard that you can.”

  “From who?”

  “Old people like you.”

  “I’m less than a year older than you.”

  He shrugged and read the inscription, “IN GOD WE TRUST. I was going to use a buffalo-head nickel, but it has to be copper to conduct, that much I know.”

  I dropped my board with a clatter. “Well, all I know about this stuff is enough to be scared shitless of it. Is there any reason why this has to be done tonight?” He made a face. “I mean your beer coolers are running, the heat’s on, even the horse out front is working . . .”

  “Pony.”

  “Whatever.”

  He sighed and looked around the bar. “Only if somebody wants to play pool.”

  I nudged him with my shoulder. “Is your life worth a game of pool?” He thought for a moment.

  “Seems like it has been.” He placed the penny on his cocked thumbnail. “Heads we go for it, tails we go sit in the dark with everybody else.” I nodded, and he flipped the coin to me, whereupon I promptly dropped it in the pile of boards. We looked at each other.

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to catch it.” He peeled another penny from the paper roll.

  “Do not worry, I have got forty-nine more. You ought to be able to catch one of them.” He flipped the second penny, and I snatched it from midair and slapped it on the back of my other hand. I left my palm covering the penny for a few moments, building my own little tension.

  “Is the suspense killing you?”

  “Not really, next we flip to see who puts the penny in the fuse.” I uncovered the coin and thanked the God we trust it was tails.

  “C’mon, I’ll buy you a Coke.”

  I ambled along behind Henry as we joined the others at the bar itself. The walls were covered with the works of different artists who had received residencies with the Foundation. It was a mixed lot, but each piece reminded me of the individual who had occupied the adjacent barstool, and artists are always good for conversation, so long as you want to talk about their art.

  The small group was clustered in the bar’s corner, only slightly illuminated by the dim glow of available light. There were a couple of stray hunters, still dressed in their camouflage and optical-orange vests; evidently the deer were wearing blue this year. I could make out Buck Morris, one of the local cowboys who took care of the Foundation’s nominal cattle herd. He was easy to spot because of his hat; a weather-worn Resistol that some oil executive had offered to buy for $250. General opinion was that Buck had missed the boat. The young man next to him wore a frayed jean jacket and had strong Cheyenne features. He must’ve been from out of county, because I didn’t know him.

  Next was Roger Russell, an electrician out of Powder Junction in the southern part of the county who had come up here to expand his business. Turk said that he was kind of the black sheep of the family and that he had little bastards scattered all up and down the Basin: “Powder River, let’r buck, a mile wide and an inch deep.” I wondered mildly why Henry and I had just been gambling with our lives while an expert nursed a C and C in the next room.

  Sitting next to him was probably the reason why Roger happened to be here. Vonnie Hayes was old school Wyoming; her grandfather had had a spread of thirty thousand acres of good land. Vonnie and I had kind of known each other when we were children but, after her father had committed suicide, she was sent to boarding school and her art life had taken her east for a number of years, where she had become an accomplished sculptress. Much later, she returned to take care of her aging mother. Vonnie and Martha had worked together on the library board and a number of other community projects in the county, and my daughter had worked for Vonnie as a housekeeper one summer. After Martha died, Cady tried to fix us up,
an endeavor that Vonnie and I both viewed with equal parts humor and open-handed flirtation. Even in the dim light I could make out Vonnie’s features, strong, with a lupine slant to the eyes, sandy hair pulled back in a casual bun.

  I leaned against the bar beside her, bumping into Roger and giving him my substantial rear. “Jeez, Rog.” I looked around in the darkness. “Don’t you know we’ve got an electrical emergency on our hands here?”

  He carefully placed his drink back and nudged it with his fingers. “I am . . . retired.”

  Henry appeared on the other side of the bar, slid a Rainier to me, and leaned into Roger. “What about this penny thing?”

  Roger looked at him, attempting to gather himself for an answer. As he did, I looked over to Vonnie. “Boy, the things you find in the dark.”

  She took a sip of her chenin blanc. Henry kept a special bottle of the white wine in the cooler for her. I had always wanted to ask her for a sip but had never gotten up the nerve. Her eyes glowed softly, and the corner of her lips curved into a warm, sad smile. “Hello, Walter.”

  Undaunted by conversing with drunks, Henry continued. “Those old fuses, the big ones, you put pennies in them to get them to work?”

  Roger laughed. “Yes you can, and you can also fuse every bit of the substandard wiring in this shit-hole and burn us all up alive.” I kind of leaned Roger against the bar, stabilizing the listing that had begun as he spoke, and pulled a loose stool from the far side, placing it and myself, between Roger and Vonnie.

  “Vonnie . . .” Her eyes had a way of opening a little wider when you spoke to her, then closing a little like they were capturing what you were saying and holding on to it. I was starting to remember why I had had a crush on her and continued. “You see this heathen, devil red man across the bar here?” Her eyes glanced at Henry for a moment, then returned to mine. “He and Cady are plotting some sort of intrigue against me.”

  Her eyes widened again, and she returned her gaze to Henry. “Is that true, Bear?” It irritated me that every woman I knew was on a cuddly first-name basis with the man.

  Henry nodded toward me. “White man full of shit.”

  We were on a Technicolor roll now. I was Randolph Scott to his . . . I don’t know, one of those bigger than life Indians that either got beat up or killed by the end of the third reel. “It’s true, he’s government trained to be involved in these kinds of covert operations.” I pointed to the framed boxes on the wall behind the bar that contained a burnt map of North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. On this map were Henry’s Special Forces pin, Purple Heart, Army Distinguished Service Cross, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and assorted campaign medals. There were also black-and-white photographs of Henry with his infantry platoon leaders, and one with his friend and team member Lo Chi, whom he had brought back and relocated in Los Angeles. There was even a picture of Henry and me, wearing the two ugliest Hawaiian shirts in Saigon, on a three-day leave in 1968. “You see all that stuff on the wall? He was trained in the war to be the gravest irritation to all those around him. There is no way a common soldier, such as myself, could possibly compete with a hand-picked, combat-hardened pain in the ass like him.” Few people knew the shadowy history of the Special Operations Group that had operated out of Laos, but the numbers said it all: For every American Special Forces soldier that was lost, the North Vietnamese lost between 100 and 150 troops. The Bear had been a part of one of the most effective killing machines on either side of the war.

  Henry’s face pushed up and curved to the side as the weight of his head held steady in the palm of his supporting hand. “Common soldier? The closest he came to any real fighting was when he agreed to meet me for a three-day in Saigon.” Under his breath he continued, but I’m pretty sure I was the only one that heard it, “Except for Tet . . .”

  I left Henry to leverage Roger into doing some free electrical consulting work and turned my attention back to Vonnie. She was staring into the glass eyes of one of the mounted antelope behind the bar. “Pretty animals.” Her eyes remained steady on the pronghorn. “Do you think they feel pain like we do?”

  “Nope.”

  She turned to look at me, seemingly irritated. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She stayed with me for a second, and then, fading into disappointment, glanced at her wine glass. “So, you don’t think they feel pain.”

  “No, I said I don’t think they feel pain like us.”

  “Oh.” The smile slowly returned. “For a minute there I thought you had become a jerk.”

  “No, a blacksmith’s son.”

  She continued to smile and then nodded. “You used to come out to our place with your father . . . Lloyd.”

  I watched her. “Nobody remembers his name.”

  “I think my mother had a little crush on him.”

  “Just another Longmire, plying his wiles. When I was real little, I used to make the shoeing rounds with him. It looked painful to me, so I asked him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Pop used to speak in biblical terms, but what he said was that the brutes of the field don’t feel pain like humans. That that’s the price we pay for thinking.”

  She took another sip of her wine. “Comforting to know that we’re the species that feels the most pain.”

  I half-closed an eye and looked at her for a second. “Is that East Coast sarcasm I’m hearing?”

  “No, that’s East Coast self-pity.”

  “Oh.” I was getting in way over my head. I can do the bull about as well as it can be done, but that edgy buzz-talk makes me weary in a heartbeat. I try and keep up, but after a while I start to drag.

  She placed a hand on mine, and I think it was the hottest hand I had ever felt. “Walter, are you all right?”

  It always started like this, a touch and a kind word. I used to feel heat behind my eyes and a shortness of breath, but now I just feel the emptiness. The fuses of desire are blown black windows, and I’m gone with no pennies to save me. “Oh, you mean you really want to talk?”

  Her eyes were so sad, so honest. “Yeah, I figured since we didn’t have anything else to do.”

  So I leaned in and told her the truth. “I just . . . I’m just numb most of the time.”

  She blinked. “Me too.”

  I felt like one of those guys in the movies, there in the foxhole asking how much ammo your buddy’s got. I got two more clips, how ’bout you? “I know the things I’m supposed to do, but I just don’t seem to have the energy. I mean, I’ve been thinking about turning over my pillow for three weeks.”

  “I know . . .” She looked away. “How’s Cady?”

  Here I was floating in the white-capped Pacific of self-pity, and Vonnie threw me a lifeline to keep me from embarrassing myself. Three fingers, bartender . . . “She’s great.” I looked at Vonnie to see if she was really interested. She was. “She’s doing so well in Philadelphia.”

  “She always has been special.”

  “Yes, she is.” We sat there for a moment, allowing the crackle and roar of my parental self-satisfaction to fade into the soft glow of friendly conversation. Her hand was still on my arm when the phone rang.

  “Looks like she’s tracked you down.” The hand went away.

  I watched as Henry allowed it to ring the second time, his tele-signature, then snatched it from the cradle. “It is another beautiful evening here at the Red Pony bar and continual soirée, how can I help you?” His face pulled up on one side as if the receiver had just smacked him. “Yes, he is here.” He stretched the cord across the expanse of the bar and handed me the phone. His eyes stayed on mine.

  I nudged it between my chin and shoulder with one hand, took a sip of beer with the other, and swallowed. “Hello, Sugar Blossom . . .”

  “Hello, shithead,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s not a dead sheep.”

  I stood there, letting the world shift at quarter points and then got a bearing and dropped my voice. “What’ve we got?�
� Every eye in the bar was on me.

  Vic’s voice held an edge that I had never heard before, approaching an excitement under the grave suppression of businesslike boredom. “Male, Caucasian, approximately twenty-one years of age . . . one entry wound characteristic of, maybe, a .30-06.”

  I started to rub my eyes, noticed that my hand was shaking, and put it in my pocket. “All right . . . call the Store and tell them to send the Little Lady.”

  There was a brief pause, and I listened to the static from a radio on 137 patched through to a landline in Durant. “You don’t want any Cashiers?”

  “No, just the Bag Boys. I’ve got a highly dependable staff.”

  She laughed. “Wait till you get out here. These fucking sheep have been marching around on everything; I think the little bastards actually ate some of his clothes. And they shit on him.”

  “Great . . . Past the Hudson Bridge; you got your lights on?”

  “Yep.” She paused for a moment, and I listened to the static. “Walt?”

  I had started to hang up the phone. “Yeah?”

  “You better bring some beer to quiet Bob and Billy down.”

  This was a first. “You bet.” I started to hang up again.

  “Walt?”

  “Yep?”

  “It’s Cody Pritchard.”

  2

  There’s nothing like a dead body to make you feel, well, removed. I guess the big city boys, cataloguing forty or fifty homicides a year, get used to it, but I never have. I’ve been around enough wildlife and stock that it’s pretty commonplace, the mechanics of death. There’s a religion worthy of this right of passage, of taking that final step from being a vertical creature to a horizontal one. Yesterday you were just some nobody, today you’re the honored dead with bread bags rubber-banded over your hands. I secure what’s left of my dwindling humanity with the false confidence of the living, the deceitful wit of the eight-foot tall and bulletproof. Yea, verily, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will live forever. If I don’t, I sure as hell won’t become an unattended death in the state of Wyoming with sheep shit all over me.