One Simple Thing

by Warren Read

  It was almost eleven o’clock when they pulled into the rutted lot of the Hitching Post Tavern. It was the same crippled shack Louis recalled from an ugly biker brawl a few years earlier, the outside walls draped in the familiar ragged horse tack and rusted shoes, the whole place seemingly held together by its slowly peeling coat of filthy white paint.

  “Good things happen here,” Mitch quipped.

  “Now and then, I guess.”

  Louis pushed his way in through the front door, and waited out the momentary haze of coming from sun into sunless. Inside, it was tavern-thick with the smell of last night’s smoke and spilled beer, and today’s after shave vs. underarm. A slow dance ballad groaned from the jukebox, the layers of slide guitar and a remorseful woman. From the back, the crack of billiard balls knocking against one another.

  There were less than a half-dozen people in the joint, most of them belly-pressed to the bar. They turned to look at Louis and Mitch, but paid no real attention, not enough to put down their bottles and stop talking. The bartender was almost as weathered as the siding outside, with a ducktail swept back from a face like a drawn curtain. He looked like he’d not moved from behind the bar since that hair of his had been a thing.

  “What can I do you gentlemen for?” His voice was unexpected, soft like a woman’s, and Louis wondered what kind of trouble that might have brought him over the years. “A couple of beers?”

  Louis thumbed his badge, and the man cocked his head and said, “You ain’t local then, if you’re letting that stop you.”

  “We’re looking for Yvette,” Mitch said.

  “There ain’t nobody named Yvette here,” the bartender answered. And then they all stared at one another. A couple of billiard balls knocked in the back. Finally, the bartender said, “We got a Yvonne.”

  Mitch took out his palm notebook and flipped the pages. “Is she working now?”

  “She’s in the can at the moment.”

  They took a booth, Louis setting a couple of Coke bottles on the table between them. Mitch looked at his watch and asked about the state of things at the Youngman household.

  “Hell, I don’t know,” Louis said. “It’s a slow leak with Vinnie. Like a nail in his tire.”

  “That’s a hard thing to watch happen,” Mitch said.

  “And that woman.” Louis took a drink from the bottle, a drop falling from the bottom onto his trousers leg. “I can’t seem to decide if its good to have her around, or if one of these days I’m gonna come home to find my place in a pile of cinders.”

  “Hattie’s had her bad patch,” Mitch said. “Hell, we all saw that play out. But she’s in a better place now.” Mitch pushed him some more on that, suggesting that Hattie’s company might actually be a good thing. “I imagine she could be a help to him,” he said. “There’s a lot someone can do if they’re willing to just sit around and talk. What’s his recall?”

  “Here and there,” Louis said. “He can tell me all about a stray dog he came across in 1932, or the number of catfish we got on a single day when we were kids. But I’ll be goddamned if he can’t find his way through the same grocery store he’s been going to for the last five years.”

  Mitch leaned over, his elbows propped on the table, a topography of concern over his forehead. It was a shame, he said. He’d had an uncle who’d lost his world in that way. “It was slow at first,” he said. “Almost like someone had pulled a little tiny plug from the back of his head.”

  “That’s what it’s like,” Louis said.

  “Till the end,” Mitch added. “I don’t want to bring you down.”

  “No worry of that,” Louis smiled. “I’m already on the ground floor.”

  “Yvonne.” It was the gentle voice from behind the bar, and Louis looked back over his shoulder to see a woman coming from the back room, wiping her hands over her jeans. She wore her hair in a single, thick braid down her shoulder, and a red flannel shirt that fit her like a cattle rancher. Square and sturdy, Louis thought.

  The bartender nodded his chin toward the booth and Louis raised a hand, as if there were a dozen old cops in the nearly empty place.

  “Oh Christ, hold on,” she said, and then she disappeared into the back again. A dull ache was starting behind Louis’s eyes; he was already wishing he’d just let Mitch come here on his own. Somebody busted into a phlegmy laugh, one of the coots sitting at the bar, and the bartender said, “Settle down you two or I’ll have to put you out on your heels.”

  Yvonne reappeared, carrying a sandy leather satchel. “You got here pretty quick.” She laid the bag on the table like it was captured game, a shot pheasant or a rabbit.

  Louis fingered the laces at the top as Yvonne stood with her legs pressed against the table’s edge, her arms folded over her chest, eyes ticking between Louis and Mitch.

  “What have we got here?” Mitch asked.

  “I figured you’d know.” She glanced over her shoulder to the bar, at the gin-blossomed faces looking back at her. “Why don’t you all count the ice cubes in your glass?” she snapped at them. “Jesus.”

  Louis drew open the top and looked down into the bundle of crap inside—envelopes, folders, loose papers—all stuffed in as if someone had had to go somewhere with no time to waste. He pulled out an envelope and thumbed through the contents. It was writing he didn’t recognize, some letters familiar, others unlike any kind he’d ever seen.

  “The morning cleaner found it a couple weeks ago and stuck it back in the office. Didn’t tell nobody about it.” Yvonne said. “I only noticed it in there yesterday when I was looking for a lost set of teeth.”

  Mitchell laughed at that and Yvonne said, “You think I’m joking.” She nodded her chin at the papers. “Anyway, after taking a gander inside I figured it was more than just a local yahoo’s shit.”

  “Passport,” Mitchell said, and he pinched out a small, red booklet.

  “Russian, ain’t it?” Yvonne reached over and tapped it with her finger. When both men gave her a look, she said, “What? You think I was born in this place? I know a thing or two about the outside world.”

  Louis flipped through to the photo, to the familiar face that stared somberly back at him. The full, rounded jawline, the bridge of the nose that fanned out like it had been pressed. He passed it to Mitch.

  “Oh well, now.” He looked back up at Louis, then glanced over to Yvonne.

  Louis said, “You have any idea how this got here, Yvonne?”

  She shrugged. “Nobody remembers this guy,” she said. “Someone like that, talking Russian like he probably would have. You couldn’t hide that shit.”

  Louis thanked her and asked her to keep quiet about it, at least around anyone who didn’t already know.

  Neither man said anything more about it until they were back onto the clean asphalt of the highway. It was then that Mitchell finally asked about the papers, and Louis said he didn’t know what to make of it, but that he could try to track someone at WSU, that they probably had a professor there who could translate. Mitchell said that was all fine and good, but what he really wanted to know was what Louis’s gut told him, as if Louis’s instinct had ever been any kind of divining rod.

  He reached over and took up the passport, looked at the man’s face again, working to superimpose it to the one that had gazed vacantly up at him in the pines. The knuckles grated and dried like little strips of rawhide. Russians didn’t just show up in Stevens County like this.

  “My gut is, this fellow didn’t come into the country all by himself. He was likely brought over up at Kettle River.”

  “Smuggled.”

  Louis gave a heavy nod. “Smuggled over and then something went sideways.”

  “What would he be doing up in Twelvemile, though?”

  “I’d guess that it happened somewhere else,” Louis said. “Twelvemile was just a dumping spot. Probably hoping he’d be picked clean before anyone found him.”

  Mitchell seemed to consider this, his fingers curled into his palm,
picking at one fingernail with the other.

  “Well this sure turns a funny page, doesn’t it?” he said, looking up at Louis.

  “How’s that?”

  “In all my years wearing this badge, I’ve never had to deal with an actual murder.”

  22

  On that September morning, after a long bicycle ride through a hard, unrelenting rain, Rodney sat in a crowded classroom that reeked of wet wool and unwashed underarms. If Miss Carr, his teacher, noticed the smell, she gave no sign, but instead casually walked up and down the aisles reading aloud from a textbook opened at her chest, something about Thomas Paine, and the idea of government being both lousy and important. “Necessary evil,” she called it. She went on like that, her voice a metronome, the classroom a sea of eyelids and jaws slowly losing battle with gravity. Suddenly, she stopped midsentence and turned to face the door.

  “Rodney,” she called out, her eyes trained on the window to the hallway.

  He straightened in his seat. What had he done?

  “Otis Dell is standing there in the hall.” Miss Carr turned her head toward Rodney. “I’m guessing he’s here to see you?”

  From where he was seated, Rodney could see nothing against the door glass but the reflection of the white sky from the opposite window. Chairs groaned under the weight of the other kids as they craned their necks to try and get a look at the man in the hallway.

  “Why do you think he’s here for me?” he asked. “He’s not my dad.”

  “I thought he and your mother …” Miss Carr stopped then as her cheeks flushed, and a wash of pink spread down her neck to her chest. “Perhaps you should go and see what he wants.”

  Rodney scanned the faces around him, some still gawking at the door, the rest staring him down, this silent majority agreeing with Miss Carr that, yes, he had better go and see what Otis Dell wanted.

  His scarecrow body was resting against the lockers opposite the classroom door, like he belonged there. His hands were in his pockets, and he sported a yellow baseball cap with a picture of a hammer on the front, the bill pushed down so that it practically hid those black eyes of his. Hair fell out from the edges of his hat like burnt grass, and the work shirt he wore did not even have his own name stitched on the front.

  “What’re you doing here?” Rodney asked, closing the door behind him and moving out of sight of the window. Otis did not belong there. By that classroom, in that school. Nowhere.

  “I figured we’d play hooky, you and me.” Otis took his hand from his pocket and held out a scrap of paper. It was a note of some kind, with his mother’s name scratched at the bottom.

  “That’s not her handwriting,” Rodney said.

  “They don’t know that,” Otis grinned.

  “Who’s Leroy?” Rodney asked, stepping back and nodding to the stitching on Otis’s shirt pocket.

  Otis looked down and rubbed his thumb over the patch. “Leroy’s a guy who wears the same size shirt as me.” He pushed off from the lockers and began to walk down the hallway in long strides. “Trying to be a nice guy here,” he said over his shoulder. “But whatever. I don’t give a rat’s ass what you do.”

  The boots on linoleum were like fists beating against the walls. In the classroom, Miss Carr’s voice had started back up, ticking away facts and dates and sleepy asides. At the end of the hall, just before the double doors, Otis stopped and put his hand up in the window light. One finger, then two. Three.

  Rodney grabbed his backpack from his locker and slammed the metal door shut, the snap of two dozen eyes looking up at him from the classroom as he left. He ducked past the office and out the front door, climbing into Otis’s Bonneville just as he kicked it into gear, and the two of them pulled away from the curb with a roar of the engine and tires screaming like a kicked dog. They shot through the neighborhood streets, avoiding the downtown core, hardly slowing for the countless intersections they crisscrossed along the way.

  Rodney held his backpack to his stomach, watching the blur of houses through his window. His bicycle was still chained to the rack next to the gym doors, and he had left his notebook on his desk.

  “Where are we going?” he asked.

  “Crazy,” Otis said, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. “Mom doesn’t know you took me.”

  “I didn’t take you. You walked out on your own two legs.”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “And she won’t. Not unless you blab to her.” He looked at Rodney. “You gonna do that?”

  Otis spun the wheel hard to the right, and they doubled back onto McMahon Boulevard, heading out where the warehouses and stockyards sat on the far end of town. “Let it ride, kid,” he said, slapping Rodney on the knee. “It’s gonna be a hell of a day.”

  They cruised past the old brick buildings that stuck to the edges of McMahon, the tall, thin-paned windows blinking the late morning sun. People lingered in doorways or against the fenders of parked cars, some nodding their chins at the Bonneville as it went past, as if they had been expecting a drive-by. As if, whatever big secret there was going down, they were all in on it.

  Otis swung the car around and reached over Rodney’s lap into the glove compartment. He fished around in there for a few seconds, finally coming back with a pair of mirrored sunglasses that he slid onto his face. And at the end of the block he pulled off the road, into the parking lot of the Fine Boy Drive In.

  They took a spot some distance from the window. Otis told Rodney to keep his ass in the car and wait, that he’d go on over and order for the two of them. He strutted up there like he always did, like the world was waiting on him, and he stood at the window talking up the girl who probably lived her days behind that register, under a folded paper hat. Otis leaned on his elbows and pushed his head into the window opening some, and the girl moved back, turning to one side as if she was talking to someone else. Before long a man came out from the back with a cup in his hand and gave it to Otis.

  “You’re welcome for the milkshake.” Otis swung the cup over to Rodney’s hands and squeezed his shoulder. Then he took a look at his watch and leaned back in his seat, staring out the window into the empty parking lot. The way he had that cap pushed up on his head made Otis appear to be a different person, as if he should be throwing a baseball with Rodney, or teaching him to fix his bicycle. The line of his whiskered jaw pulsed, and when he glanced at Rodney, he smiled through tobacco-stained teeth, as if there was some great need to reassure that the two of them were indeed there together, like buddies. That there was not a hidden reason for this whole thing.

  “Am I going back to school or what?”

  “Do you want to?” Otis asked.

  Rodney didn’t know that he wanted that, and he said so.

  Otis cocked his head and pushed his knee against Rodney’s. “Well shit, boy. If you don’t know then who the hell does?” He looked at his watch again. “Tell me about that teacher I saw through the window,” he said. “She wouldn’t be bad to look at all day.”

  Rodney thought of Miss Carr still in that classroom, still reading that book, or maybe passing out dittoed maps for everyone to fill in with the wrong names, noticing but not caring about the abandoned notebook on his desk. He had not thought of her in that way, though. Like Otis was suggesting.

  “She’s all right,” he said.

  Otis said, “She’s got nothing up top, though.” He patted his chest. “I had a teacher when I was your age, Mrs. Tallow. Now that was a woman. The hands in that class were like pistons, boy. Going up right and left just so she’d come over to you. Lean over your desk to help. Those things’d be right up against your face before you knew what was what.”

  He laughed and then looked over at Rodney. “Don’t tell your mother that story, either.” And when Rodney didn’t say anything to that, he continued. “There’s things she won’t understand, Rod. Stuff she just can’t, being a woman and all. Things like ditching school now and then. Having a milkshake at ten o’clock in the morning. Certa
in things we might keep just for ourselves. Things … things we might, say … hide under our mattress.” There was a snake grin on his face, the lips stretched to the edges, lines raked into his face. He jabbed his hand out and said, “Deal?”

  Rodney didn’t respond, but Otis took his hand anyway, and did the shaking himself. Then he fired up the engine and drove off from the diner. They did not turn back in the direction of the school, but rather steered onto the county road that would take them north up into the hills toward the Indian reservation. Otis turned on the radio and punched at the dials until he settled on a country western station, a low band of static crackling beneath the yodeling singer.

  By this time Rodney had decided there would be no point in asking any more questions. Otis had the day mapped out and any further needling would only end in a fight, with Otis shouting and Rodney in tears.

  They wound through spreads of cheat grass and spruce-pocked groves, and past skinny roadways that split off the highway to snake toward lone, sun-beaten farmhouses. On they went, the radio still swaying, whizzing by tilted fence posts connected by taut lines of barbed wire, and when they came up over a saddleback in the road, a Gas n’ Go sprang into view, curly letters and a faded picture of a hot dog on the plywood sign. Otis turned off, bringing the car to a stop in the gravel lot, next to a giant pill-shaped propane tank.

  “You know what a Lincoln looks like, right?” he said, producing a scrap of paper from his pocket, handing it to Rodney. “It’s a big, long car.”

  “Like Mr. Kruger’s.” Rodney said. He remembered.

  Otis thumbed the paper. His jaw pulsed and twitched, and he looked at Rodney as if he had struck the nail precisely where it should have gone. “I guess he did have a Lincoln,” he said. “Yeah. Like Kruger’s.”

  A pickup rolled in from the highway, coming to a hard stop at the fuel pump. A Paul Bunyan guy climbed from the driver’s side door, barrel-chested with a charcoal shock of a beard. He stepped from the running board to the ground, took a sweep of the lot, and lumbered on into the minimart.