One Simple Thing

by Warren Read

  16

  There were days when Louis remembered the clouds vividly, the rusty water stains that seemed to float across his ceiling from one side of his bedroom the other. He remembered the way they had tumbled themselves into old faces with mouths swayed open and howling, and how his mother’s breath brushed his ear with a voice that sang low. “There, little one,” she’d said, and then there was the blessed coolness of waterlogged terrycloth, draped over his forehead and chest. He shook until he might come apart at the joints, his teeth tapping a rhythm in his head. His skin burned, the bedsheets soaked beneath his naked body.

  “We need to get him into the tub.” His father, in the doorway, a figure like Jesus. “Get the fever down.”

  “It’ll break soon,” his mother said, the words falling in pieces. “Don’t be rash.”

  The clouds drifted until they found one another to dance against a yellowed sky. His body was weightless, traveling above his bed and across the bedroom on down the hallway, past the framed photos of faces both familiar and not, rigid figures with vacant eyes in sepia-tone, watching as he soared past.

  He recalled a sensation of tumbling then, and the sound of Vinnie’s voice from somewhere calling out, “What’s wrong with Lou?” And there was the smell of his father’s aftershave and worry-sweat, and then the feeling of a thousand needles being plunged into his body and the rattle of ice against porcelain. He screamed and fought, for the edges of the tub, for the strength to pull air back into himself, all while his mother leaned against the closed door and cried into her fists.

  For the third time that week, Louis made the drive up Highway 16 to Twelvemile, and on up the forest service road to the lonely spot beneath the pines where the man’s body had been found. He pulled onto the shoulder and got out to walk a wide circumference once more, covering both sides of the roadway even wider this time, pushing over a dead log with his shoe just because it was something he hadn’t done yet. But there was nothing new, nothing but sand and scrub and the occasional tawny flash of a sagebrush lizard jumping from the shadow of a porous rock. It made no sense whatsoever, that this John Doe would come all the way out here on his own and lay down in that sandy bed. Of course, someone had brought him there, but why make the trip and risk it? Orly Downs had called in the medical examiner from Spokane, who reported the cause of death as inconclusive. “No trauma to speak of,” he’d told Mitch over the phone.

  “They’re leaning toward heatstroke,” Mitch relayed to Louis. “Maybe even hyperthermia.”

  It had been hot, but it was spring, not like an August heat, and they weren’t in the real desert. Louis had been through Death Valley once in mid-June and that was enough to make him understand how people could get sidetracked and collapse within eyesight of their own car, only ten minutes away from water and air conditioning. It hadn’t been more than eighty in Colville that week.

  It was almost one by the time Louis stopped by the house. Hattie’s car was parked at the curb, the driveway wide open for him. As usual, the drapes were closed. Louis came up the steps with some noise in his walk, taking the steps harder than needed, giving a cough here and there. Like a parent, he supposed, warning off a pair of teenagers cozied up on the sofa. He didn’t know what the two of them had between them and he didn’t want to know. He opened the door and let the daylight fall over the room.

  Vinnie was in the recliner, a half-eaten sandwich in his hand and a crumb-specked plate on his lap. On the other side of the room, Hattie sat on the sofa, her legs curled under her, that dirty-gray hair of hers pulled back with a rubber band. There was a big glass of something dark on the little side table next to her elbow. Water pooled from the base of the glass onto the unprotected wood.

  “It’s a Coke,” she said. “Straight up.” She stared ahead at the television, some soap opera with women in dresses too fancy for just sitting around, drinking coffee at a little round kitchen table.

  Louis looked to his brother. “Did you take your pills?”

  Vinnie nodded, and Hattie added, “I made sure of it.”

  The dispenser sat on the counter, the Tuesday AM compartment open and empty. Beside the stove was a football-sized chunk of beef, trussed in string and dusted in green flakes, squeezed into a rectangular pan.

  “Is this meat supposed to go someplace?” Louis asked.

  “It’s going in the oven, when this show is all done,” Hattie called back. “I got some potatoes peeled for you, too.”

  He leaned over the round pot sitting in the sink, at the clutch of white, stone-like things looking up at him from the milky water. The counters were clear, and a blue hand towel lay neatly folded over the oven handle. There was a nice smell in the kitchen, like cinnamon and brewed coffee. No hard liquor that he could sense.

  He went to the refrigerator and counted the cans of beer in the door, then fished one from the rack, popping the top and going to the living room, where a car loan commercial was now playing loudly on the television. It seemed like everything that was on the tube during the day had to be shouted.

  “You ain’t got work?” Vinnie asked.

  “I always got work,” Louis said, taking a drink. “I’ll be gone soon and then you all can get back to your show.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Vinnie said.

  Hattie went into the kitchen with her purse on her shoulder, and took the roast from the counter, sliding it into the already warm oven. Louis considered that she ought not be doing any of this, and he did not like that she was cooking his food in her way. Helping herself to the refrigerator and cupboards, and to the toilet. Yes, that, too.

  “This isn’t necessary,” he said, following her back in there.

  “I know that.” She bent over and peered at the clock dial, turning it slowly. “You want to know how he is?” she said. “When you’re not here to watch him?”

  “I suppose,” Louis said, and he did.

  She stood up. “You suppose.” Then she crooked a grin and gave him a little shove with her shoulder. “He’s still Vinnie,” she said.

  “A pain in the ass,” Louis said, taking a drink from his beer.

  Hattie laughed. “He’s called me Lucy once or twice, but I don’t mind that, and he corrects himself when I call him on it. He don’t remember the names of his old tavern buddies. Probably a good thing. He gets confused over the TV. Forgets all the shows I know he’s watched a hundred times. But mostly all he wants to do is talk about the old days, anyway. He could do that in his sleep.”

  “God knows he remembers every damned detail of them,” Louis said.

  Hattie nodded in agreement and turned up the oven dial another notch. “Vinnie told me about the guy from the other night,” she said quietly.

  “What guy?”

  “The one-taillight guy.”

  Louis peered into the living room at his brother, who continued to gawk at whatever stupidity was playing out on the screen.

  “If you’re gonna let him in on anything, you might as well invite the world,” Hattie said. “It was Lester Fanning, right?”

  When Louis didn’t answer, she pushed air through her closed lips. “I wouldn’t trust that sonofabitch to walk my dog,” she said. “He comes into the wrecking yard every so often. Tip swears that for every part he pays for, he probably pockets two. Slippery bastard.”

  “So, you know him pretty well.”

  “We don’t know him,” she corrected, with a half grin and a wink of her eye. “We just know him.”

  She reached into her purse and produced a lone cigarette. “I ain’t been up there at his place, but I hear people say it’s something of a wrecking yard in itself. A little bit of everything, including a different lady friend every few months or so.”

  Louis knew a good deal of this already. Lester’s name was often mixed in with miscreants Louis had had dealings with—shoplifting, drunk driving—the kinds of things that yielded court dates and fines that needed chasing down. Up to now, there hadn’t been anything yet about Lester Fann
ing to warrant a good deal of attention, but he was often there on Louis’s list of wonders.

  “He likes to play at being Mister Nothing-To-See-Here,” she went on. “But believe you me, that man’s got his fingers in all kinds of pies.” She dropped her purse onto the counter and continued to dig around inside it.

  “Such as?” Louis took the cigarette from her fingers and set it on the counter next to her purse.

  “For starters,” she said casually, “he’s a fencer. But you probably know that.”

  “Fencer?” He’d not been aware of this, and her assumption that he did only compounded the embarrassment.

  “Yeah, a fencer,” she said, looking down at that cigarette. “Not like a picket fence kind of fencer. A mover of stolen property. Piddly stuff, though—the kind of stuff addicts take: TVs, stereo systems. I’d bet my left eye that every pawn shop from here to Spokane has at least ten things with Lester’s fingerprints all over them.”

  Louis leaned back against the stove and considered this. He’d need to dig through the dozen or so burglary reports over the last couple of years, see what he could draw from it. Maybe make a run up to Whiskey Hills.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t know.”

  “Well, I didn’t.”

  “It ain’t really a well-kept secret.”

  “I guess I must be the town idiot, then.”

  Hattie gave a soft laugh and swatted her hand at him.

  “Anything else about Lester Fanning that I ought to know but don’t?” Louis asked.

  “Oh, I’m sure there is, but I ain’t in the habit of spreading unsubstantiated gossip and hearsay,” Hattie answered, picking up the cigarette and tapping it against her wrist. “But I’d think any kind of poking around under that fella’s bed is bound to turn up something.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because that’s the kind of person he seems to be.”

  “And you know him,” Louis said through his teeth.

  She nodded, gave him a wink, and lit up the end of her smoke with a flame that was big enough to start a forest fire.

  17

  The story she’d told Lester was mostly true, with a few crucial details taken out, the holes filled by her imagination. It wasn’t the first time that she’d reshaped a story for a man, and she knew it wouldn’t be the last.

  What Nadine told Lester was that she had been a couple of days into a weeklong vacation with Jimmy, who was not yet her husband. The plan had been for the two of them to drive from Seattle to someplace near Itasca, Minnesota, to visit a cousin of his, a big family of alcoholic Catholics that she had no desire to see in the first place. But she went along with it, she told him, because that’s what couples do. Nadine was a better driver than a passenger, but Jimmy was never one for sharing, not even the steering wheel. He was happy to share his secondhand smoke, though, going through one cigarette after another, with the windows rolled up, singing along with the radio even when he didn’t know the song and couldn’t hit the notes. They’d done three road trips like this already and each one had ended with a two-week separation starting the moment they rolled back into their own driveway.

  On this trip, they had barely reached Boise when Nadine decided she was finished once and for all. Jimmy had settled on a radio station some twenty miles earlier, one of those Mexican Hombre Music things, and Nadine’s head started pounding about five minutes into the mariachi.

  “It’d help if you turned off that noise,” she said. “And crack a window for Christ’s sake.”

  He gave her a side-eye and dialed down the window barely a notch, ignoring the radio.

  Nadine rolled down her window about halfway, the racket of the wind tumbling in to muzzle at least some of the music. A Rexall sign rose up over the ridge at the next exit.

  “I need a bottle of Excedrin,” she said. “Pull off here.”

  Jimmy threw his head back and howled, “Seriously?” then steered hard from the highway, winding his way through a rope of roadway, finally bringing the car to a stop a good distance from the front of the drugstore.

  “Make it quick!” he snapped as she opened the door. “I’d like to make it to Montana by dark.” He then rolled down his window all the way, and kicked up the trumpets another notch.

  Nadine had on her favorite pair of jeans and a button-down blouse, and not much more if you didn’t count the hoop earrings and the cheap, gold-plated promise ring that she slipped into her pocket after she went out the side door with her brown leather purse weighing on her shoulder, sixty-seven dollars in her possession and a credit card that was already overextended. She told Lester that she had thought she’d just be making a point when she went out that door, that Jimmy would get tired of waiting and see that she was not in the store, and he’d circle the block a few times looking for her. But then she felt herself suddenly put out her arm and raise her thumb and within a few moments, Lester Fanning practically ran his pickup off the road to get to where she stood. He leaned out the passenger window, a mop of sandy gray and brown in need of a cut. And that radiator grill smile, a single tooth missing along the top, near one side.

  “Where you headed?” he had asked. This part, he remembered.

  “It’s complicated,” she said as she climbed in next to him and looked into the side mirror as they pulled away, the neon Rexall sign dropping below the ridge.

  In the months since she had been with Lester, living in that ramshackle house, Nadine had rebuilt the chicken coop using lumber they’d salvaged from a collapsed barn near town, and she’d repaired the diesel generator three times, once in the middle of a downpour that hit the tin roof so hard she thought she might go crazy with the racket. She could figure things out if she had to; it wasn’t hard to do. As resourceful as Lester was, he was no use as a handyman. Maybe he’d built all this under the watch of a more skilled craftsman, or perhaps he’d just given up by the time Nadine came on the scene. Whenever she asked how he’d ever managed to survive without her, he’d just laugh and say, “I did a lot of things before you that would make that pretty head of yours spin off its shoulders, lady.”

  Now he sat in a parking stall out front of A&L Auto Parts while she stood against the wood counter, a single clear light bulb in front of her. The old gal behind the register was a weathered thing, probably Nadine’s mother’s age or close to it. She’d colored her hair a crazy shade of orange that most definitely was not her own. But it was something to look at, that much was true. She picked up the bulb and turned it over in her hand, holding it by edge of the plastic casing.

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “Off the hook back there. It’s a taillight. For that Buick out front.”

  She glanced at the window, grabbed a ringed binder and began flipping through the pages.

  “I’m guessing it’s the right one,” Nadine said. “I’ll know for sure as soon as I get out there.”

  Then there was the sound of Lester’s booming tone from outside. Nadine turned to see a guy bent down into the driver’s side window. He practically had his head inside the car, and yet the two of them were talking so loudly that Nadine could hear them all the way inside, though she couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  “Cash or charge?” the woman asked. She slid the bulb across the counter to Nadine.

  “Account,” Nadine said. “Under Lester Fanning.”

  The woman stopped and gave Nadine a look. The smell of solvent lingered in the air, sweet and fragrant. Behind her, a ridiculous array of tubes and fan belts hung like skinned, black pelts.

  “Lester, huh?”

  Nadine looked back outside. The man had stood back from the window. He was a greasy sort, with hair shiny and hanging loose over his profile so Nadine could not make him out. He was practically shouting as he thumped a finger into his palm.

  “He’s right there,” she said.

  “You family?”

  “No,” Nadine said. “But I am staying up there.”

  “By choice?”r />
  Nadine cocked her head. What kind of question was that?

  “Never mind,” the woman said. “Me being nosy. That’s what I do.” She grabbed a bound book and opened it, and scratched a pen across the page. “Tell Lester he’s due to settle. Sooner’s always better than later.”

  “He’s right out there,” Nadine said again. “I can have him come in.”

  “By mail is just fine.” She waved a hand. “Or he can come in when Edwin’s here.”

  “Are you sure?” Nadine said. She tucked the bulb into her pocket and pulled on the heavy glass door.

  “I’m sure,” the woman said. Her voice was sharp enough to split firewood. She sucked in her breath and gave Nadine a smile and put out her hand. And then she closed the book and pulled a newspaper from somewhere behind the counter, snapping it open and thumbing through it, a newspaper that Nadine could see was well over a week old.

  PART THREE

  The Ogre does what ogres can,

  Deeds quite impossible for Man,

  But one prize is beyond its reach:

  The Ogre cannot master speech.

  About a subjugated plain,

  Among its desperate and slain,

  The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,

  While drivel gushes from his lips

  —W.H. Auden, August, 1968

  18

  Rodney and Otis sat in the living room on opposite sides of the cherry coffee table, their hands resting on their knees like schoolboys. Rodney’s shirt collar scratched at his neck, and his trousers bunched in places he was not willing to adjust in front of Otis. They were his “church” clothes, though his family hadn’t been to any kind of church since coming to Hope. His mother had insisted he dress up nice. It was a special night.

  “What’s this guy like, anyway?” Otis shifted in his seat and tugged at his collar. He wore a white button-down shirt that still showed the creases from its life in the package.