One Simple Thing

by Warren Read

“The situation at the moment, I hate to tell you, is Vinnie,” she said. She cleared her throat into the radio. “I’m sorry to complicate your day.”

  Louis loosened the seatbelt against his stomach. Jesus, he said to himself. He’d rather deal with a kid missing his whole hand than have to grapple with anything related to his brother. His patience for this nonsense had run out long ago. Lately, it seemed, he was barely subsisting on fumes.

  “You there, Sheriff?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Honey, I know this is the last thing you need, but we’ve got him down here at the station. Back in holding.”

  Louis looked up ahead at the roadway as it bent from the pine-riddled hill. The grayed, split rail fencing stretched away from him in dips and rises beneath a lone telephone line that seemed to go on forever.

  “What now?”

  “Shoplifting,” she said. “There’s a couple folks who left callback numbers for you.” She went silent for a moment, and Louis pulled off the highway and steered the car into a U-turn, pausing to let a big horse trailer pass by before punching the gas. A white cloud of dust spun behind him as he directed himself back toward Boone.

  When they brought him out and sat him in the chair opposite Louis, Vinnie would not look his brother in the eye. His hair was a windswept snowdrift, and a wine-colored crescent lay stamped over his dark forehead like a brand. He kept his head down, his whiskered chin almost disappearing into his shirt collar, the skin hanging beneath his eyes like teabags. He inspected his newly-returned wallet, fingering with chalky nails through the photos and plastic cards and crumpled dollar bills.

  “I had a twenty in here.” he said to no one in particular.

  “Vinnie.”

  “Where’s my goddamned twenty?”

  Louis said nothing, sliding forward instead to the edge of his chair.

  Vinnie shook his head and stuffed the wallet into his front pocket. He scanned the perimeter of the room, pausing here and there as if he were making a note of each item: the black-and-white wall clock; the bulletin board, layered with yellowed papers; the overhead fluorescent, vibrating like a hive of honeybees. When he had made the entire journey, he gave a slight nod of satisfaction, and only then did he let his eyes rest on his brother.

  “Here you are,” he said in a near whisper. He moved his wallet from his front to his back pocket and got up from his chair, turning to the front door. “Sure as shit took long enough.”

  Louis steered his cruiser through town, taking the side streets that formed the grid outside the courthouse square rather than the main arterials. Passing through the neighborhoods had a way of refocusing him, of providing a kind of “reset” when he needed one. Simple, yet determined, the houses on these streets were siblings of the houses on his own street, which were the houses you could find anywhere, in whatever dried-up place you happened to land in Eastern Washington, on the sunrise side of the mountains, be it Boone or Springdale or Ford or any other farm-grown town. Cockeyed chimneys, sagging porches and overgrown lawns, and garages with side-mounted wood doors that never quite shut all the way. No different, and that made Louis feel both relieved and exhausted at once.

  “Are you going to tell me what you did this time?” he asked. He gripped the wheel from below, just as their father had done. “How you got that cut on your head?”

  Vinnie put a hand to his temple. He looked out the side window and shrugged his shoulders. “Like you don’t already know,” he groused. “Want to make me say it like I’m some little kid.”

  Louis had spoken to Hal Donagan, the store manager, who did not have a great deal to add about the whole thing.

  “You’re acting like a little kid,” he said to his brother. “Impulsive. Stupid.”

  “To hell with you.” Vinnie opened up the glove compartment and began rifling through the stacks of service envelopes and road maps, digging his bony fingers into the recesses.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Louis jammed his thumb against the cigarette lighter for no reason other than to give himself something to punch that wasn’t attached to his older brother. He was through the letter streets now and was just coming out onto McMahon Street.

  Vinnie shut the compartment door and began calling out the makes and models of the cars passing by. “There’s a Desoto,” he said, pointing a knuckled finger across the dashboard. “I had one of those. Used to pile all the kids in the back of it and drive up to Glacier Lake for the weekend. Remember? Weighed that thing down so much the engine was practically on fire by the time we got there.”

  Louis tried to recall this. The Desoto, the lake. Vinnie’s wife and kids, and the days before Lucy finally packed up the girls and left for good. It was all so muddy and distant. “Who cuffed you upside the head, Vin?” he asked, nodding his chin at his brother. “Was it the security guard? At the Safeway?”

  Vinnie rubbed his finger over the swelling bruise.

  “Did someone in the jail clock you?”

  His brother said nothing.

  “If they did, I need to know. We can’t be having that kind of thing going on.”

  “No,” Vinnie finally snapped. “None of that.”

  They turned off McMahon and wound through Cherry Grove, the neighborhood of stucco bungalows and hard-packed, powdery yards with empty swingsets, and half-filled soccer balls littering the edges of curbs. A rust-stained pickup truck crowded the driveway of a corner house, its hood raised, an overall-clad fellow hunched over the grill and almost swallowed by the engine compartment.

  “You made me look like a damned fool back there, Vin,” he said, “Again, I might add.”

  “I’m the one who got knocked on his ass.”

  Lou felt a blooming warmth under his shirt. He cracked the window some, and let the outside spill in, to mix with all the nonsense that hovered in the space around them. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  Vinnie stiffened, his words barely pressing through clenched teeth. “I get it just fine.”

  “Do you?” And then Louis said, “So who the hell beat you up?”

  “Nobody beat me up, for Christ’s sake!” Vinnie said this as if he had wadded the words into his fist and thrown them across the dashboard. “I ran out of that store with a half dozen cashiers and box boys on my ass. Goddamned parking stalls all marked up for those little Jap cars, you couldn’t get a real vehicle in there if you tried.”

  He glared at Louis as if he had been the one to cause it all to happen. The contraband. The chase scene through the parking lot. The skinny parking spaces.

  “I cut between a couple rigs and ran head-on into the side mirror of a goddamned pickup truck.” He shrugged and looked out the window, toward the rows of cherry trees that pushed back from the road’s edge. “They’d of caught me anyhow,” he said. “The mirror just made it easier.”

  Louis turned to get a gander at his brother, at this shiner of his that was suddenly more than just a worry, or a sad embarrassment. He bit down on his lip, holding the laugh fighting to push its way out. Serves you right, he thought. Old sonofabitch.

  They traveled the last distance in silence, down the road as it veered gently to the north, and the Polk Street sign peeked out from a clump of overgrown rosebushes. Louis made a hard right, following the parched lawns and sun-beaten pickets to the clapboard rambler shaded by a big, weeping willow, three blocks in.

  A little boy pedaled his bicycle on the sidewalk toward them, a boy Louis recognized from a family of Mexicans who’d moved in down the street a month or so earlier. White tassels swished from the bike’s handlebars, a big shiny, pink basket right there in the front, coming straight at them. Vinnie tracked him as they drove by.

  “That girl looks like a boy,” he said.

  “It is a boy.”

  “What’s he doing on a girl’s bike, then?” Vinnie wasn’t laughing at him. He sounded sweetly concerned.

  “It’s probably the only one he’s got,” Louis s
aid.

  “Someone ought to get him a boy’s bike.”

  Louis looked at his brother, at the ridiculous worry lines over his eyes. “What do you care, Vinnie? It’s got wheels and a seat. He’s a little kid, for Christ’s sake.”

  Louis pulled on into the driveway and killed the engine. He had originally chosen the bungalow on Polk Street so he could be under the streetlights; the lack of prying eyes up in the hills outside of town—for a man who could sometimes be a target for others—was fuel for insomnia. He’d lived alone by choice, the feeling of “shared space” never really allowing the sense of stability he craved. He’d tried this a couple times in his life. Sharing his life with another person. It only ever ended with a litany of regretful words and an ego scattered in pieces at his feet. With Vinnie, it was no different.

  The two of them sat there for a bit, just staring at the paneled garage door in front of them. Bits of dried grass spilled out of the gutter like unkempt hair.

  “What are we doing?” Vinnie finally said. “Ain’t you taking me back to the center?”

  “What center?”

  “Cedar Glen. The center.”

  “Vinnie. Come on, already.” Louis leaned back and rubbed his fingers into his forehead, felt the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed slowly. “You don’t live there anymore,” he said. “Remember? They put you out months ago.”

  His brother pushed a breath of air through his teeth. “Yeah, I know.” And yet he stared at Louis confused, those teabag eyes pulling down like a hound. “Bastards.”

  “There’s no one left in this town that wants you under their watch,” he said. “Delores Jackson—she’s done.”

  “The hell she is.”

  Louis said it once more. “Delores Jackson is done with you. I guess you finally got what you wanted on that front, so congratulations.”

  Vinnie looked down at his hands, spreading them out over his lap as if he were examining the cause of every problem he’d ever had in his life. “I guess I don’t know what to say to that,” he said.

  Finally. The man was without words.

  They spent the rest of the evening avoiding one another, Vinnie keeping mostly to his room and Louis cleaning out the weed patch behind the garage and listening to the voices of a batch of kids from down the street, trying to put together in his head what was supposed to happen next. He hadn’t heard back from home support and he wouldn’t be surprised if they left him and Vinnie to fend for themselves, not that he could blame them. How much punishment did one person have to take?

  He slept in fits and starts all night, at one point awakening with the feeling of a great weight pressing against his chest, as though two stony fists were forcing his body deep into the mattress. He shook his mind loose and pulled himself up on his elbows and felt his T-shirt snap from his back, soaked and warm, then quickly cooling to ice in the willful draft of the open window. He took in his breath and counted the beats in his chest and they were like the ticking of a clock, and in time everything seemed to settle back to where it should be.

  He lay back down and listened to the sound of Vinnie’s snores in the next room, and gazed at the wash of the ceiling as it slowly began to fill with the breaking daylight. Now and then there was the bell-like chirrup of a thrasher somewhere outside. Like him, an early riser but a hell of a lot more optimistic about the day, he imagined.

  It was just shy of ten years prior that Louis had gotten the first call about his brother, when things really started to kick up. Vinnie had been wandering through the parking lot of the South Town Plaza in Colville, looking for his car. He was nearly seventy then; Louis was just three years younger and even he forgot where he parked his car sometimes. No, what made this tough was that Vinnie was searching for his old Studebaker—a rig he hadn’t seen in almost twenty years.

  It was after he’d called the operator to report it as stolen, and the local police had come to take a report, that Vinnie mentioned his kid brother being the sheriff. When Louis showed up and walked Vinnie through the situation, reminding him that he’d put the truck in a ditch back in ’52, his brother had tried to laugh it off as the stains of a whiskey hangover. But Louis could tell he was pretty stirred up—the shaking, the circle of sweat that ran from his underarms to his waist.

  From then on, every few weeks or so, it was one thing or another with him. Somebody had come into his apartment and moved things around. There was gas missing from his tank. He’d forgotten to pay for the pint bottle found in his coat pocket. After a while the Colville dispatch just started running those calls directly to Louis. After he walked off with some woman’s poodle, and then took a swing at her when she came after him, Louis arranged to have him moved into the Cedar Glen home. It was a situation that held up less than six months.

  It was still an hour before his alarm would sound, but Louis crawled from the bedclothes anyway and peeled off his sweat-logged T-shirt, slapping the thing onto the floor. Before he could fish a new one from his bureau drawer, before he could put together what this new day was going to resemble for him and his brother, the air was cleaved by the sharp ring of the telephone.

  “Hope I didn’t wake you, Sheriff.” It was Holly, down at dispatch. Was there a time she was not at that station?

  “I’m up,” he said.

  “Us and the birds,” she said.

  “So I hear.” He waited. There was the sound of tapping on the other end. A pen against the desk, probably.

  “So the thing is,” she said, “I just got a call from the ranger up at Twelvemile Ridge. She’s a young gal, pretty new on the job I think. I haven’t talked to her before.”

  “And?”

  “Said she came across a body up off Ferry Creek Road. Mitchell’s on his way up there now.”

  “You called Mitch first?”

  “Mitch was here when she called.”

  Louis sat down on the bed and took a pen from the night-stand and listened as Holly threw out one detail after another: the rattle in the ranger’s voice, the lousy connection wherever she had called from, the way Holly had calmed the gal down by telling her she was sending the best guys in the county her way. Once Louis was satisfied that he’d written down the most important items from what she had to tell him, he thanked her and hung up the phone, and went to wake his brother.

  “I might be tied up the whole day,” Louis said. “I’ll find someone to come by and check on you later.”

  “I don’t need some stranger to come check on me, goddamn it,” Vinnie said, rubbing his hand over his face. “I ain’t a baby.”

  “This is not negotiable, Vin.”

  Vinnie rolled over onto his side and faced away from his kid brother. “I’ll give Hattie a call,” he grumbled. “She can come keep me company.”

  Louis shook his head, slow and heavy. “I don’t want Hattie in this house,” he said. “Not when I’m gone.”

  “She’s a fine woman.”

  “I have a file downtown that suggests otherwise,” Louis said. “I don’t want her here.” Vinnie said nothing to that.

  Louis knew that the woman would be there by noon.

  It was a ten-mile drive over a back-crushing forest service road of ruts and tilled rock before he reached the site. The sun was already out and the dust he brought with him billowed like smoke over Mitchell’s cruiser and the ranger’s pickup, both vehicles crowded together in a flattened turnout. Mitch stood with his back to Louis about twenty yards off the roadway, stick-like arms moving back and forth, pointing out different places situated among a small grove of Ponderosas. And that sculpted hair of his was always something worth a minute or two. Brylcreem or mineral oil or whatnot, catching the overhead sun like the whole top of his head was shellacked. Louis brought his cruiser to a stop in the middle of the road and the deputy turned only briefly, giving a quick, three-fingered greeting.

  The air was thick with the familiar smell of turning flesh and feces, and the curious sweetness lacing through it all. It was an assault on the s
enses that Louis had learned to stand, even if he had never been able to explain it. In his forty-plus years of law enforcement, he had come upon a human corpse six times and each time the scent was almost the same, no matter if the person was young or old, broad or gangly.

  The ranger stood facing the deputy, her arms folded across her chest, nodding to him and glancing uneasily at Louis as he walked to them. Mitch turned to the sheriff.

  “Morning, Lou,” he said. “This here is Jackie. She’s from the station down at Twelvemile.”

  Louis had been by Twelvemile many times but had not met this ranger. Like Holly had figured, she was a young gal, probably not yet thirty, her hair kept in a long, red ponytail, like a teenager. Too young to be seeing things like this.

  “Nice to meet you, Sheriff.” She dropped her arms and stepped toward him. Her smile was one of regret, twisted, as if they had all been dropped into an unfortunate situation that she was somehow responsible for.

  Louis took her outstretched hand, then turned to Mitchell. “We can take it from here,” he said.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. Now, disappointment.

  “What are we looking at?” He turned back to his deputy.

  “It’s an odd thing,” he said. “I’d be more interested to get your take.”

  Mitchell King had been Louis’s deputy for ten years now and even though he probably knew Mitch better than anyone, there were moments when Louis didn’t want to let go of the label completely. That Mitch was part Alaskan native, and even though he never dwelled on it, Louis still found himself wishing for the kind of thing that might show up in a pulpy cowboy story or an old B movie. The listening for spirits and feeling the lick of wind in your hair and holding the sorrow of the earth in your hands as you squatted next to the bloated, ashen body of some lonely old man who had collapsed in his garden days before. The truth was, Mitch was just a guy—a solid lawman and loyal as any fellow could hope for, and there would be no cryptic chants or the waving of smoldering sage, or wise, mystical theories hummed in from the netherworlds. But damn; it would make things a hell of a lot easier if there were.