by Chuck Logan
He shook his head, concentrated on driving, turned off the freeway, and threaded through the congested traffic and sprawling strip malls until his wheels struck country gravel. Driving the solitary back roads was an exercise in nostalgia—trying to make time stand still and hold on to the world he'd grown up in. Sometimes he thought that if he stayed out here on the margins long enough, he might come back into style. But truthfully, he knew now that even Garf was part of something new that was passing him by.
Chapter Thirty-five
Amy left a note tacked on the door: WENT FOR A RUN. Her bags were stacked on the porch, ready to go. So Broker phoned Jolene, got the machine, and left a message inquiring when Garf would be home.
Then he went back outside and walked down the gravel road that curved past the barn toward the fields and the paddocks. The wind had picked up. Overhead, fast-moving clouds jammed a busy sky. Sunlight and shadow alternated, slap-dash, on the paddocks' bright tin roofs and the red barn lumber and the mowed green alfalfa fields. Standing on the high ground behind the paddocks, he spotted a flicker of blue and made her out, running the gravel road in a wind suit, on the far side of a long, undulating parcel of standing corn.
He tried to imagine Jolene running. Couldn't see it.
Just wasn't her style.
He lit a cigar, enjoying the bite of the smoke and the chilled scent of alfalfa stubble. A broken V formation of Canada geese passed high overhead, their wild calls plunging down the cold air.
He timed his walk back toward the house so he'd meet Amy as she jogged down the driveway, past the swaying willows. She slowed to a walk and watched him approach as she pulled an earwarmer strip from her head and shook out her hair.
Broker held up his hands and inclined his head. Teeth together
in a wayward smile, he said, "I was thinking . . ."
She measured him with a stare.
He continued, "Maybe next week, when I get back to Ely, we could have dinner."
Amy placed her hands on her hips, not necessarily because of what he'd said; more like that's the way she walked it out, cooling down from a run. But she moved in a wary semicircle around him and her voice was apprehensive. "You were, huh?"
"Sure. You know, go out to a restaurant."
Her chin rose in measured intervals. "You mean, take me out to dinner?"
"That's what I said," he said.
"No. You said, we can have dinner." Her diction was deliberate, hammered.
Broker composed himself. "Amy, could I take you out to dinner?"
"You asking me to go on a date?"
Broker exhaled. "Yes."
"I'll think about it," she said, tossing the reply airily over her shoulder as she walked toward the house. Then, louder, she asked, "Have you had lunch?"
He followed her into the house and they wound up back in the kitchen. She removed her wind jacket and he could smell the sweat simmer in the navy blue fleece that molded her torso. Looking for something to do, he approached the red light on the Mr. Coffee and poured the inky dregs into the cup he'd used this morning.
"That's been warming all day," she said.
Broker shrugged and continued to pour.
She fluffed her hair and faced the cupboards. "It's always a challenge, finding your way around a stranger's kitchen."
Broker took his evil coffee to the table and sat down. She moved to the refrigerator, opened it, and inspected the shelves. She took out a plastic container.
"Ostrich chili?"
"Sounds good."
The social temperature in the kitchen gradually warmed as she found a pot, put it on the stove, played with the gas settings, then pried the cover off the Tupperware container. After she gave him a
second medium-stern look, he finally got it and rose from his chair and searched the cupboards for bowls and silverware and glasses, which he arranged in two place settings on the table.
"So, how did it go with Milton Dane?"
"We talked," Broker said.
"Did you give a formal deposition? I mean, did he ask you questions about me?"
"Like what?"
"You saw Nancy leave her post. You were in the recovery room after it happened."
"No," Broker said. "We never got around to that. Not today."
"The wife," Amy said, spooning globs of cold chili into a black pot.
"You got it. The wife, the boyfriend, the money. Hank adrift in limbo."
She turned. "You left yourself out of the cast."
"I don't belong in it. I'm just passing through."
"What about the accountant?"
"I think he was the victim of foul play, I think it involved Hank's money, and I think her ex-boyfriend was in up to his neck. But I can't prove it. So I have to let it go for now."
Amy set the flame under the pot and looked through the clipboards until she found a package of Saltine crackers. She twisted her lips in a wondering expression and went to the refrigerator. "I saw this article in The New York Times Magazine about black people's kitchens and white people's kitchens."
"Yeah?"
"Whites have Coke in the refrigerator. Blacks have Pepsi." She opened the door. There was a two-liter, plastic bottle of Diet Pepsi in the lower door shelf.
They both shrugged. The small mystery contributed to the gradual warming in the kitchen: tiny taste bursts of tomato sauce and chili powder popped over the simmering pot; a film of steam blotted the corners of the window over the sink.
"You're different today. So what's changed?" she asked.
"I figured out the difference between attraction and propulsion."
"Oh, boy, physics." Amy evaluated him warily.
"Sometimes if you find yourself hurtling toward someone it
might not be attraction so much as what you're running away from."
Amy smiled cynically. "The wife."
"No, someone," Broker protested.
"So this is hypothetical?" she asked.
"Not exactly."
"The wife," Amy repeated.
"Okay, for the purposes of argument. Say I go over to Jolene's place to return Hank's vehicle and I have suspicions about the accountant's death which I can't make pan out. But I'm feeling bad about what happened to Hank and I see her dealing with these problems so I sort of step in . . ."
"Step in?" Amy was amused.
"Yeah, you know . . ." Broker gestured with his hands.
"I got an idea what you stepped in," Amy said.
Broker objected. "That's not the point. What I'm trying to say is I have all this . . ." His hands attempted to manipulate an invisible object in the air. ". . . stuff in my life that's hanging fire—Nina leaving with my kid, my marriage—and I wasn't dealing with it. So I'm rebounding off that. It explains, but does not excuse, getting involved too quick in—"
"Oh, so now you're involved?"
"No, I mean, if my life were in order I probably wouldn't have stuck my nose in."
"Oh, now it's your nose?" On the stove, the chili was starting to simmer.
"You're not listening to me," Broker said, getting a little hot himself.
"Sure I am," she said too casually. "You went to bed with her; what's the big deal?"
"Amy?"
"That's not an answer. You went to bed with her and now you feel bad about it and you expect me to give you . . . sympathy? Now suddenly you want to take me to dinner."
Amy flipped the box of Saltines across the room. It hit Broker's chest and spiraled to the floor. "Make your own goddamn lunch."
She paced the length of the room, wheeled around, and quipped, "So what did you do with Hank? Stuff him in the
closet?"
"I thought we were having a serious conversation," Broker said, standing up suddenly, rattling the bowls and silverware on the table.
"How can we have a serious conversation when you won't tell me the truth," Amy said.
They stared at each other as a cloud of scorched chili reared in the air.
"The truth," Broke
r said with a perplexed look on his face.
"A basis for trust," Amy said, speaking in her best practical voice.
"Look," he gave in, "it only happened—"
"How typical," Amy smiled sweetly as she spun, walked from the kitchen, through the living room, and up the stairs.
The pot on the stove puffed out black fumes, the smoke alarm on the ceiling began to shriek. He heard her footfalls continue to stomp in the hall upstairs. A door slammed. Broker got up on a chair and hit the reset button on the alarm. Then he jumped off the chair, grabbed the pot of burnt chili, and—Ow—immediately drew back his hand. He looked around for a towel, found one hanging over the sink, grabbed the pot handle a second time with the towel, and carried it out to the porch. When he came back in, the alarm was screeching again, so he opened the window over the sink, searched for the switch to the ceiling fan, found it, turned on the fan, then climbed back on the chair and turned the alarm off.
Wreathes of smoke hung in the air like the aftermath of battle. Okay. Get out of the house. Feed the birds.
The nimble clouds of an hour ago now massed into cold gobs. The wind had acquired knuckles.
Hunched over, Broker walked through little squalls of swirling leaves toward the outer paddocks. As he neared them, a crowd of curious hens drifted along the fence line, their stubby wings slightly lowered to warm their long legs. Their big eyes fixed on him like cartoon question marks.
He glanced up at winter clouds in October and very much wanted this detour in his life to be over. He ducked into the first paddock and was soon busy, elbowing his way through clumsy hens
who crowded around him as he dumped five-gallon plastic buckets of feed into bins. The bigger males hung back while their harems fed. If one put in an appearance, mindful of J.T.'s warnings, Broker exited the pens and just heaved the feed sidelong at the bins over the gates. In each paddock he checked to make sure the water reservoirs were full.
Half an hour later he came back up the gravel path toward the barn. A grind of downshifting gears drew his eyes toward the road and he saw a flash of an auto chassis streak over a dip and disappear behind a tree line. Then a gust of wind stood him up and he looked at the sky which was darkened to the point where he wanted to check out the weather channel. He'd lost track of the speeding car. Probably the wind.
His last chore was to feed Popeye in the barn.
"How you doing today, you and hit-and-run punk," Broker said, as he carried a last bucket of feed toward the pen and saw Popeye's big stupid eyes bob more than nine feet in the air at the end of his skinny neck.
The wind groaned through the barn's wooden walls and somewhere hanging farm equipment clanged like Gothic wind chimes, and at first Broker didn't hear it. Then he did—the sound of something hard pounding the fender of the tractor parked behind him. A mean cadence, off the rhythm of the wind.
He turned. The source of the noise was a shiny new baseball bat in Earl Garf's hand.
Another guy stood behind Earl, a big guy who also wielded a bat. Broker looked past Earl, at the big guy who was wearing a baggy leather bomber jacket, extra large to allow room for his massive arms. There was a fake bomber-group insignia on the left breast of the coat. A diving vulture. Broker had seen the jacket before.
Rodney had been wearing it more three years ago when Broker busted him for selling machine guns.
"Hiya, shithead," Earl sang out. "I believe you have something that belongs to me." Earl had dressed for the occasion in black leather—a long belted trench coat. As Broker's gaze shifted from Rodney to Earl and back again, Earl loosened the belt on the coat and flexed his shoulders.
"Binds the arms," he said. Then he raised his bat like a hitter warming up and took an experimental swing at the air. His tongue played along his lower lip in anticipation. Earl didn't see Rodney, behind him, getting a good look at Broker and crinkling his wide forehead in surprise.
"Eyebrows?" Rodney said. "Oh, fuck me."
Chapter Thirty-six
Eyebrows.
Broker's nickname in the world of snitches, gun dealers, and dope entrepreneurs, where his last official act had been to arrest Rodney. And he now recalled Rodney's parting words, screamed as they stuffed him into a cruiser—"I'll kill you, motherfucker, if it's the last thing I ever do."
Now here was Rodney shifting a bat in his ham-sized hands. Teamed up with Earl. Getting his wish.
Not good.
But then—Rodney developed instant eloquent possibilities as a mime; recognizing Broker, he shook his head, pleaded with his eyes, and took a step back all in the same second:
You don't know me, I don't know you; this is a mistake; I'm outa here.
Broker nodded ever so slightly and Rodney started backing away, flipping a very abbreviated wave good-bye, close to his hip and behind Earl's back.
"What'd you bring him for, Earl—to block the sun?" Broker asked, encouraged by the changing odds. His eyes took in everything in the barn garage in half a second and came up with a plan. He had one chance not to wind up in an emergency ward, or worse. Even with Rodney opting out, barehanded, even in his prime, he
couldn't go up against a bat wielded by a street monster like Earl and hope to come out unscathed.
"I don't like it," Rodney yelled, backing away. "I highly suggest we get the fuck outa here."
"No way; it's gonna cost him at least a knee." Earl stepped forward in a modified batter's stance, gauging his target.
Broker was not about to show Earl anything like fear. He was pissed about his spat with Amy. And he could still smell burnt chili. So he stuck out his chin and taunted, "Earl, be a good little computer nerd and take his advice, because this is just the wrong time to mess with me."
The facts of his situation were far less nonchalant. So, as he moved back to keep the same amount of distance between himself and Earl, he raised the bucket of feed to port arms, to protect himself. He was exactly where he wanted to be—within an easy reach of the dead bolt that fastened the gate to Popeye's pen.
J.T., buddy; I hope you weren't putting me on.
Earl stepped forward, menacing. The bat gleamed in the overhead sodium vapor light. Brand-new, not a scratch on the scripted logo or the clean-grained ash. Earl heaved his shoulders, feinting a swing. Broker moved as Earl moved, tossing the feed bucket at Earl's face.
Whack! Earl swung. Feed pellets exploded from the shattered plastic container.
"Yeah," Earl giggled, an hysterical wheezing giggle on the far edge of control. He had feed pellets in his hair, he had a pale, berserker light in his eyes. Broker instinctively realized why Earl had brought Rodney as extra muscle.
It wasn't to help work Broker over.
It was to pull him off when he lost control and was beating Broker to death.
But Rodney had disappeared out the door into the gray afternoon and Earl, sans backup, had cocked the bat again. Trembling with pleasure and rage, he took another step forward.
Okay. Life had become very simple. If he tried to close the distance and grapple, Broker would for sure take at least one blow going in. So that was out. He needed to get something between his skull and that bat. Broker's hand reached back, seized the bolt, yanked it, and pulled the thick, chest-high gate open.
Earl let go a blinding overhand swing and Broker went to his knees, ducking as the bat smashed down, denting the framing on the top of the gate just above and behind Broker's head. As Earl recovered, Broker scooted around to the other side of the gate and pulled it full-arc on its hinges, so he was squeezed behind it, tight against the plywood outer wall of the pen.
"What a chickenshit," Earl sneered, trying another overhand swing that harmlessly glanced off the gate and thumped the wall. Broker was contorted sideways, one shoulder back, flattened against the wall; his other arm folded against his chest, his hand gripping the simple handle under the bolt, holding the door against him.
Earl could prod into the limited space with the bat, but he could no longer swing. So he tried to p
ummel Broker, but Broker grabbed at the end and tried to twist it away. With difficulty, Earl yanked it back out of the cranny.
"Give it up, Earl!" Broker yelled. "Walk away now and you won't get hurt."
"Can you believe this guy, Rodney . . ." And then, "Rodney?"
And then.
The high hissing sound Earl and Broker heard was all the more unnerving because its source was not mechanical but animal, because it issued from the quilled throat of an infuriated fourhundred-pound male ostrich. Popeye's massive thigh muscles trembled, tensing, at about the same level as Earl's shoulders. The bird's wings flung up, rampant, and the stiff plumes lashed the doorway of the open stall.