by Warren Read
He would say that kind of nonsense to her while he used that precious education of his to sell carpet remnants for his uncle. That and peddle dime bags and single joints between the dumpsters that crowded the alley behind the shop. They drove around in a ten-year-old station wagon and lived out of an old widow’s basement, but it all would have been just fine with Nadine if he hadn’t pushed her as far as he did.
“I told Lester that Jimmy and I had been on our way to Itasca,” she said to the girl, taking a broom from the corner near the henhouse door. The girl set the egg basket on the shelf and reached out to take the broom. Nadine balked, but the girl took it from her anyway and began raking it along the floor slowly, keeping the dust to a low cloud. Nadine went to the feed bin, and sank the scoop into the meal. “But the real story was that we were heading to some dealer he knew in Idaho Falls.” She went to the far end of the house and poured the feed into the tray. Instantly, her legs were swarmed by a dozen chickens, warbling and pecking at the floor around her. “He had probably a couple thousand dollars’ worth of grass in the trunk. Plus at least one pistol that I knew of.”
The girl moved from one end of the house to the other, gently moving the broom in and among the hens without so much as raising a single feather from them. It was getting warm in here now, but Nadine didn’t want to open up the door just yet. She liked the intimacy of the space, of the two of them in there talking, without the men hovering over them. Whatever they might be saying to one another, it was for their ears only.
“The part about the Mexican music was true,” she said. “And the headache. Both of those I could have dealt with, but then he yelled at me from his window all the way across the parking lot.” Nadine moved out of the girl’s way as the broom found its way to her. “I can’t remember if I told Lester that part, but yeah. He yelled at me that I was a fucking idiot, right there in front of everyone at the Rexall. And that was it.”
Nadine then opened the door to the outside and the rush that forced its way in was a blessing. A couple more hens scurried in, wings beating at the air. Down the hillside, the old man was poking around an aging pickup truck that was half-covered in blackberry brambles.
“I called the cops on him,” Nadine said. And the joy that came with simply saying that aloud swelled in her throat like a balloon. “I grabbed that phone inside the door to the drugstore where he couldn’t see me, and I dialed those numbers and told the woman on the other end that there was a drug dealer in the parking lot and that he had a gun on him, and they’d better hurry because he was about to leave and do some serious shit.”
She laughed at that, and took the broom from the girl and swatted the pile out the door in a giant plume of dust. “And then I went out the side door to the access road out the back and stuck out my thumb, and as fate would have it, Lester Fanning just happened to be driving by at that very moment.”
They walked back to the house together, the girl holding the basket of eggs like it was a baby. Lester was waiting for them on the porch, a dewy beer in his hand.
“They’re leaving tonight.” He turned to the girl. “You’re leaving tonight!” he shouted, as if the barrier in the language was merely volume. “Go help her pack so she understands,” he said to Nadine.
Nadine had an almost painful curiosity about these people who turned up from places she knew little about, and would never see. What were they running from that was so bad they had to separate themselves by an entire ocean? What was it that was so bad that Lester Fanning and his palace of wild rabbits, split firewood, and rusted cars was their savior?
She picked blouses from the clothesline and handed them to the girl, and she cobbled a story in her head that would explain her, and the old man. They were chased from their village for a crime they didn’t commit. No, she thought. Maybe they knew too much for their own good, and they were staying one step ahead of assassination. It was something she eventually did with each set of visitors. Imagine that they were something they certainly were not. Deposed royalty, or spies perhaps, who secretly understood every single word she said, yet locked them tightly away with all of the other secrets they had collected over the thousands of miles they’d traveled.
“Thank you,” the girl said. It was like the words of a small child, the repetition of a set of memorized sounds followed with a smile and the expectation of reward.
“You’re welcome,” Nadine said. And when the girl said, You’re welcome, Nadine said it again. “You’re welcome.”
“You’re welcome,” the girl replied back, and then she said, “Bu-ke-qi. Shee-Shee. Thank you. Bu-ke-qi. You’re welcome.”
“Shee-Shee,” Nadine said. “Bu-ke-qi. You’re welcome.”
20
Rodney and Otis sat in the living room watching a bowling match on television that Otis had settled on. Out in the kitchen, Rodney’s mother worked by herself, knocking pots on the stovetop and turning the faucet on and off, muttering the whole time to nobody in particular. There was more noise than usual out there, and if Otis caught this, he gave no evidence of it. His eyes didn’t move from the screen, from the scatter of pins and the pumping fists of thick-mustached men.
“Rodney,” his mother suddenly called out.
Otis broke from the show for a brief moment, giving Rodney a look.
“Come help me wash this pan,” she said, tapping the side of a roaster. It had been lasagna, and she had overcooked it. Cleaning that pan would be an ordeal.
“Can’t it soak?”
“Come in here and keep me company.” Her voice was elevated, high and birdlike. Forced into something that was not her at all. “It sure gets lonely in this kitchen by myself, you know.”
Otis said, “Go on to Mama,” and jutted his chin out at him.
Rodney gave Otis a twist of his lip and shuffled over to the sink. He let the water run and dropped in some soap, moving his hand over the topography of the pan bottom. His mother remained next to him, sponging the countertop in slow, circular movements that hardly resembled any real cleaning.
“So?” she said.
“So what?”
“So, how is school?”
“Fine.” When did she ever care about school?
“Who’s your teacher again?”
“Miss Carr.”
She whispered, Miss Carr, and then she started swirling the sponge again. “Otis says there’s a teacher at the school who has a wooden leg,” she said. “I never heard that before. Have you?”
Rodney had never heard anything of the kind. A wooden leg. He ran through the faces of every teacher he knew, and tried to picture them walking in the halls, across the playground toward their students all lined up against the wall. There was no one he could think of who could have a leg made of wood.
“It sounds like a lie to me,” he said.
“It might not be true, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a lie,” she said. “It could be that Otis is just teasing.”
“Same thing,” Rodney said, “A lie is a lie.”
“Teasing is supposed to be fun, like a joke. Lying is”—she paused—“deceptive. Wrong.” She stopped with the sponge and turned to face him. “Let’s say that someone told you to keep the truth from me,” she said, “or to give me an answer that wasn’t true, even though I asked you point-blank.” She pointed the sponge at him. “That would be lying.”
Where was this coming from and, more important, where was it going?
“Sounds like a couple of old ladies gossiping.” Otis had come into the kitchen and pulled a chair from the table and slid into the seat, his legs stretched all the way to his filthy socks.
“She said you told her someone at my school had a wooden leg,” Rodney said.
“That’s what I heard,” he said. “Some woman named Brown or Green, or something like that.”
“There’s no one at my school with a color for a last name.”
Otis snorted. “Oh you’re the expert all of a sudden?” he said. “You’ve been in this place not e
ven a year and you know all about who works at that school and who doesn’t.”
The lasagna pan was clean now, but Rodney kept on scrubbing.
His mother dropped the sponge in the sink and turned around to look at Otis. “I get the feeling sometimes there’s some secret between you all that I’m being kept out of,” she said, “What do you say to that, Rodney?”
Otis said, “What do you say to that, Rod? Mama wants to know what secrets you’re keeping from her.”
Rodney could feel eyes on him, like spider legs on his neck. They’d had a deal, right? Rodney had done what Otis had told him to do, and he hadn’t whispered a single word to anyone else about it. Every night he lay in bed with the payment for that loyalty hidden less than a foot beneath him. What was Otis trying to do here? Test him?
He picked up the pan from the sink and handed it to his mother. “It’s all done,” he said. He wiped his hands on his jeans and kept his eyes locked on hers. “I don’t have secrets.”
“You’d better not,” she said. “I went through this enough with your father; I don’t need to relive it now.”
She glanced quickly at Otis, who laughed and said, “I don’t know what you think could happen right under your nose that you wouldn’t know about.”
“Yeah, well, I notice you’ve got a lot of pocket money lately. And what about all that stuff in the garage? I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much crap in my life. Why anyone would be willing to pay good money for it, I’ll never understand.”
“I’m a resourceful man,” Otis said. “I’m a mover and a shaker. You should be happy.”
“I’ll be happy when I know what the hell is moving and shaking under my own roof,” she said. She took the pan and dropped it into the lower cupboard with a pointed racket, then stomped from the kitchen and to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
Rodney wiped down the counter and turned to leave, but Otis was right there, standing in his way. His arms hung loosely at his sides, fingers wiggling like he was typing on a typewriter. Rodney stepped to one side, and Otis mirrored him. A simple curl raised at one side of his mouth.
“What?” Rodney took a step back. “I didn’t say anything.”
“Good. You’d be smart to keep it that way.”
Rodney pushed off from the counter and moved to circle past Otis. He didn’t get one step beyond before Otis grabbed hold of his arm.
“That night …” He squeezed down, his fingers working themselves into the muscle. He leaned in close, his breath hot against Rodney’s ear. “You didn’t exactly come away empty-handed.”
“I didn’t ask for anything.” He pulled back against Otis’s grip, but those fingers held tight.
“You sure as hell didn’t refuse what you got, either.”
Rodney pulled back again. “You’re hurting my arm,” he said. “Otis—”
There was the sharp sound of the bedroom door clicking open, and Rodney’s mother’s voice calling down.
“Otis. Come and talk. Please.”
Otis reached over and gave Rodney a little shove in his shoulder. “I guess you can’t pick the rose without getting pricked by thorns,” he said with a wink. “Don’t stay up too late reading.”
21
Nearly the whole of Boone still lay sleeping as Louis drove himself into town, chimneys smokeless and windows blackened, streetlights flickering over empty streets still littered with last night’s tossed beer cans and burger wrappers. To the east, the Iron Range was barely visible, with only the drowsiest of blue opening up over the ridge line.
The heater began blowing warm over his hands at last, just as he steered himself into the station lot. He held his fingers to the vents, letting them thaw as he leaned forward and stared up at the old ranch-style building, at the security light as it stuttered blue over the clapboard. The faint layer of frost on the shake roof was not something he had expected, though he wasn’t surprised by it. For a brief moment, the scene pushed him back into January, when the freeze would have stayed up there all day and Vinnie still had that little room of his own over at Cedar Glen. Before things had gone to hell.
Louis let himself into the station, his key fighting the old lock like he was busting into the place. The waiting room had its Tuesday morning haze of pine cleaner and floor wax, with the blinking of Holly’s phone message light casting a rhythmic orange over the walls. He ignored the wall switches, instead going straight to his office in darkness, where he snapped on his little desk lamp and unrolled the morning Tribune beneath its glow. In this moment, in this place, it wasn’t about last night’s news or the brewing coffee in the kitchen next door. It was about the quiet, the solitude. Too often he found himself forgetting what it was like to be all alone, without the constant burden of some other soul in the next room draining the life out of him. He thumbed through the usual articles about gas shortages and the souring economy, drawing out the sports section for a deeper study to be done at a later time.
He had emptied his first cup of coffee when his serenity was violated by the swing of the front door and the mumble of Holly’s answering machine cycling through the calls. The harsh fluorescents snapped on and spilled in, soon followed by footsteps. Mitchell poked his head into the office doorway.
“There’s a message from some gal up in Blind Horse,” he said, that hair of his catching the new cut of sunrise breaking in through the window. “Says she came across a bag of something we might want something to do with.”
“Why’s she calling us? Tobias isn’t more than fifteen minutes from there.”
Mitchell shrugged. “Maybe she figured it was too important to hand over to a part-time fella,” he said. “Wanted the big guns.”
“Tobias is a sturdy lawman.”
“Barney Fife,” Mitchell grinned. When Louis didn’t respond, Mitchell wagged a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll go ahead and run up there if you want.”
Louis leaned back in his chair and smoothed his palms over his eyes. It was early still, quiet to the point of sleeping. The drive might do him some good. He took his hat from the rack and turned it over in his hands.
They took Louis’s cruiser, Mitch hugging shotgun, the window cracked just enough to bring in a whistle of cold from outside. The mustard fields were lit up now from the asphalt to the ridge, an endless plane of gold as far as the eye could see, occasionally interrupted by Volkswagen-sized boulders, prehistoric remnants of the great Missoula floods.
“I’ll never get over those,” Louis said, nodding to a lone sphere off in the distance.
“It sure would have been a sight to see,” Mitch said. “Forty foot wall of water, they say. Coming at sixty miles per hour.”
Louis glanced down at his speedometer and considered this fact. They were moving at a good clip.
“How’s Trudy?” he asked.
“She misses you. Wishes you’d come out for dinner sometime.”
In the early years, Mitchell and his wife were always trying to get him to come up for a meal or whatnot, excuses to sit on the porch of their big, pitched cedar house drinking wine and staring down at the green ribbon of the Columbia, as it lazily wound its way through the craggy basalt columns. They’d talk about Mitchell’s teenage years reeling in sockeye off the Kenai Peninsula, and Louis would unpack the old stories of him and Vinnie working to build the Grand Coulee Dam, back before the war, before he threw in the pickaxe for the badge and Vinnie ran off to Tacoma, where he’d spend the next decade or so burning a whole slew of bridges.
“Tell her I said I’ll try and make it out before too long.”
Mitch gave a quiet laugh. “I’ll tell her you said that.”
What Louis couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say was that he could never really find a way to get settled in that house, with the two of them and that daughter of theirs chirping about vacations and church and school, things so foreign to him. After the same few conversations were exhausted, Louis was always mapping his steps to the exit, an escape from his role as the proverbial thi
rd wheel, a possible suitor for Trudy’s widowed mother, or some gal or another from the bank or the hair salon, prospects always described as having the best senses of humor, just a few years younger than Louis.
“The greatest wonder is in Uncle Sam’s fair land …” Louis made no attempt to find the tune, just spoke it out like it was a poem. “It’s that King Columbia River, and the big Grand Coulee Dam.”
Mitch nodded. “Woody Guthrie.”
“Woodrow Wilson Guthrie,” Louis said.
The sun was well in the sky now, and Mitch had let the window creep down a little further, so they had to raise voices to hear one another over the incoming wind. Mitch thumbed toward the north. “I read somewhere that the power company paid him to write that. Try and sell the public on the big dam.”
“It was a different time.”
“Yes, it was.”
“You say that like you remember.” Louis glanced over to Mitch, whose eyes were fixed away from him, just staring straight out at the fields.
“I remember what my folks told me,” he said. “What they still tell me. I don’t suggest I know better than you, Lou.”
They left it there, and took to filling the rest of the space with work, of Mitch’s recent call on the Wyatt twins, and the shiner Cecil had given Calvin. It was a woman who’d come between them this time, and Mitch mused that it seemed a better reason than a motorcycle, as the previous call had been.