by Pete Hautman
Crow found his clothing scattered before the fireplace. He found his coat draped over the back of the upholstered side chair by the front door. He let himself out into the bitter night air and, after three tries, started the Rabbit. He observed himself driving south through town, then pulling out onto the highway, driving perfectly, flawlessly, precisely, holding his hands at the ten and two positions on the steering wheel, breathing in, breathing out.
XVI
For his part, the lion is no seeker of quarrels. His object throughout is to save his skin. If, being unarmed, you meet six or seven lions unexpectantly, all you need to do—according to my information—is to speak to them sternly and they will slink away, while you throw a few stones at them to hurry them up. All the highest authorities recommend this.
—HUNTING BIG GAME IN THE WILDS OF AFRICA—THRILLING ADVENTURES OF THE FAMOUS ROOSEVELT EXPEDITION
THE ROOM WAS SMALLER than most third world jail cells, and far colder. Windowless; unfinished plywood walls; translucent corrugated-plastic roof. A tiny kerosene heater cranked out the Btu’s, but with the outside air temperature hovering around twelve degrees Fahrenheit, it was never quite warm enough. The floor was a solid sheet of ice, about twelve inches thick.
“Son, you got to pretend you is one,” croaked Sam O’Gara, his voice shredded after two days of kerosene fumes, cold feet, and Pall Malls. His diminutive, wiry, gaunt frame was sealed into a pair of lumpy, greasy coveralls stuffed with an assortment of undergarments. He wore a mottled corduroy cap with turned-up earflaps. Several days’ growth of white-and-gray whiskers gave his wrinkled features a silvery sheen; his button eyes penetrated a veil of blue smoke from his cigarette.
“I don’t have to pretend, Sam.” Crow had met Sam O’Gara, his natural father, for the first time at the age of eighteen. Since then, they’d had friendly if sporadic contact. Crow liked Sam. But they just didn’t have a lot in common. He looked down into his fishing hole through the clear winter water. He could see the rocky bottom of the lake nine feet below. He moved his short jigging rod up and down, looking to see that his minnow was still on the line. Not that he gave a damn if he caught anything. He already had more frozen walleye and crappie than he could fit in his freezer.
For the past forty-eight hours, his world had been restricted to a rented cabin on the southwestern shore of Lake Mille Lacs and this six-by-eight-foot ice-fishing house, a half mile offshore. The first day had been interesting for about three hours. He had never spent much time with Sam, not in such close quarters. The old guy had started to repeat himself. Crow figured that was due to the half pint of Jack Daniel’s the old man had sucked down. By midafternoon, the conversation had become solid reruns. Even his questions were the same.
“Getting any nibbles, son?”
“Nope.”
“Got to stick with it. Fuckers’ll be bitin’ soon.”
“Hope so.”
“You betcha.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I lost another goddamn minnow … you getting any nibbles?”
The same short conversational loops, over and over. Sam kept forgetting about the status of Crow’s marriage. Kept going back to it.
“So how’s that little gal you was with, that Melinda?”
“She’s fine, Sam. We’re separated.”
“I figured. Too damn bad.”
“I know.”
“They ain’t worth chasin’ twice.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Your mama couldn’t stand havin’ me around, y’know. Persnickety as all get-out.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I say hell with’m all.”
They must have had that exchange half a dozen times. Crow couldn’t decide whether Sam was drunk, senile, or trying to make a point. Another favorite exchange went something like this:
“Y’know, son, I got no regrets.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not that a guy wants it all carved on his rock, understand”
“I bet.”
“Never let ’em push me around.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Always swung back.”
“Right, Sam.”
“Goddamn bastards. I got no regrets.”
The ice-fishing trip had been Sam’s idea. After his evening with Melinda, Crow had returned to his apartment and spent a long, fitful night, never really sleeping, all his energy going to stanch the flow of images flooding his mind. When the phone rang at seven-fifteen in the morning, he had answered it. Sam’s shredded voice had been a welcome distraction.
“Son!”
“Hi, Sam.”
“How come you don’t never call me?”
Crow had sat up in his bed, moving slowly, feeling twangs, stabs, and thuds throughout his body. “Uh,” he said.
“Hell, I ain’t seen you in so long I can’t remember what you look like, son! I’m thinking about making a rim up to Milly today, do some fishing. You want to come?”
Every year, Sam invited him to go ice fishing. And every year, Crow declined. Ice fishing? A sport that served only to get the feebleminded off the streets for three months a year. Much to his own astonishment, Crow had agreed to go. Why not? What else was he going to do?
Now here he was, sitting out on the ice holding a line and staring down through a hole in the ice, listening to a wrinkled, chain-smoking, whiskey-drinking gnome tell him that he had to pretend to be a damn fish.
Sometime during the morning of their second day on the ice, Sam stopped talking. At first, Crow was relieved. They had a run of action and landed three small walleye each, then endured a long silence punctuated only by the sounds of Sam fighting his Pall Malls and unscrewing the cap to his Jack Daniel’s. Crow leaned close over the hole and stared into the dark, fluid world. His minnow, impaled on the hook, hung motionless near the bottom of the lake. The silence grew in length and breadth. Crow raised his head. Sam was quietly smoking, staring down at his hole. A layer of thin blue haze, about two feet thick, cut across his chest. Crow felt a numbness in his ears and wondered whether he was losing his hearing. He cleared his throat, producing a faraway, muffled sound. Suddenly he needed to hear his own voice. He began to speak. He started by telling Sam about the doctor. He spoke slowly, enjoying the way his voice echoed off the corrugated-plastic roof. Sam listened, nodding and grunting at appropriate moments. Crow told him about Ricky Murphy, about feeding the pigs with George Murphy. Told him about Melinda, and about the beating he had taken from Ricky Murphy. Sam sat sipping his whiskey and smoking his Pall Malls, making no comment. After what seemed like a long time, Crow ran out of things to say. He felt as if he’d been pissing for hours and had no fluids left in his body. He looked down through his hole. His minnow twitched. How do they stay alive for so long? he wondered. He tried to imagine himself hanging from a giant hook. How long would he survive? Five minutes? Ten? The giant hook was vivid in his mind, so he put a few other people on it, just to see how they’d look. Bellweather, Ricky Murphy, and Orlan Johnson all expired within seconds, but George Murphy just looked pissed off.
His thoughts drifted, and before he could catch himself he’d slipped back a decade and a half. At the age of nineteen he had devoted himself—briefly—to the study of Zen Buddhism. It took him an entire three weeks to grow impatient with the leisurely pace of Eastern philosophies and opt instead for the more dramatic results available through the magic of the purple microdot. One hit of LSD, and Zen Buddhism came to seem irrelevant. Some of the stories, however, had stayed with him. He recalled one in particular, about a young Japanese student who, seeking enlightenment, sought out a teacher deep in the wilderness. He found the teacher sweeping leaves in the forest, apparently oblivious to the young man’s presence. The young man tried speaking to the teacher but was completely ignored. Eventually, the student went to another part of the forest and began sweeping leaves himself. Years later, he was enlightened. He ran back through the forest to the teacher and said, “Thank you!”
Crow lifted his g
aze from the hole in the ice and regarded his father, who appeared to be transfixed by the sight of his fishing line entering the icy water.
No way, he decided.
Something tugged at his line. Crow gave it a yank. No resistance. He reeled in the line. No minnow.
“Got a nibble there, son?”
“Did have.” Crow scooped another minnow from the galvanized bucket and affixed it to his hook.
Sam pulled in his own line and examined his despondent minnow. He lowered it back into the icy water and watched it sink. “That George Murphy fellow, ain’t he the one got you arrested?”
So Sam had been listening after all.
Crow said, “It was Johnson who busted me, but Murphy was behind it. The whole thing was just a way to get back at me for messing with Ricky. I always knew that it was George pulling the strings, but I never met him till a few days ago.” A few days? It seemed like weeks. “When I think back on it, it was just as well. If George and Orlan hadn’t nailed me, I’d’ve done it to myself.”
“So you ain’t still mad about it?”
Crow considered. “Oh, yeah. I’m still mad,” he said. “The worst part of it was having to ask that son-of-a-bitch Getter for help.”
Sam grinned, showing a set of long yellow teeth. “Don’t like ol’ Dave much, eh?”
Crow shook his head.
“Sort of a priss-butt, ain’t he?”
“Something like that.”
“That doctor fellow. You think he took that kid?”
Crow said, “I don’t know if he took him, but my guess is he has him. Murphy said that they found the boy’s hat at Bellweather’s place. I don’t know why he’d lie about something like that.”
“Don’t make sense to me. Even if the guy is a goddamn pre-vert it don’t make sense. There’s kids all over the place. Why grab one could get you killed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where you think he went to?”
“I figure he’s left town.”
“Don’t make sense. You say he’s rich?”
“He sure acts like it.”
“You think so? Seems to me, rich guys don’t just disappear. They own too goddamn much stuff. It’s like they got a leash on ’em.”
“You sound like Debrowski.”
“Who?”
“A friend of mine.”
“What is he, Polish?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sounds Polish. I bet he’s a hairy mother.” Sam had an enormous collection of such gems. Poles are hairy. Finns always carry knives. Scots are inveterate liars. Crow steered the conversation back to Bellweather.
“Something must’ve happened that scared that doctor, Sam. He must’ve grabbed the boy and took off. Maybe he thinks the kid will buy him some kind of insurance. Maybe he thinks he can cut a deal with George Murphy. Whatever it is, it’s not my concern. I’m out of it.”
Sam nodded and reentered his ice-fishing trance. After a few minutes, he lifted his stubbly chin and asked, “You playing much cards these days?”
“Not much, Sam. You need money for that.”
“That a fact? I ever tell you the time I won a bundle offa Amarillo Slim?”
“I thought it was Johnny Moss you won the bundle off of.”
“Yeah, well, I played ’em both.”
Sam claimed to have been a high-stakes player in his younger days. Claimed to have won millions playing no-limit poker from roadhouses in Brownsville, Texas, to the card clubs of Gardena, California. Crow believed maybe ten percent of it, sometimes less. Sam said he’d had to give up the road because of his stomach. “One thing you got to have, you want to sit in those games, you got to have an iron gut. Mine got rusted out. I play a few close hands, I get all twisted up inside. Poker’s for you young fellows.” Crow thought that the whiskey and cigarettes might have had something to do with his father’s stomach problems, but he knew better than to argue.
“Down in Tulsa, must’ve been about nineteen hundred sixty-two, we was playing lowball back of a truck stop, me and Slim and a couple of the local ranchers, plus the old guy owned the truck stop. I can still see it, five guys sitting around with these big hats on. We always use to wear our Stetsons down there. Everybody wanted to be a damn Texan. Anyways, this trucker hears there’s a game going, and he comes on back and wants us to deal him a hand. Only thing is, we’re playing with a fifty-dollar ante—understand, that was big money in those days—and this boy only had three hundred dollars in his pocket, wants to sit in a few hands. Course, I don’t want no part of that, but Slim says, Hell, boy, I’ll take your three bills. Slim never could say no. So I say to the trucker, Fine, you just sit right down here and play. I’m going to take a walk. And that’s what I did, goddamn it.”
Sam jogged his line up and down, lit a cigarette. Was the story over? Crow couldn’t be sure. Sam’s stories often just trailed off without making a point. Crow unscrewed the top of his thermos and poured the last of the coffee into a plastic cup. It was still slightly warmer than body temperature. A few minutes later, as if a button had been pressed, Sam resumed his story.
“So I come back an hour later, and wouldn’t you know it, the trucker’d got lucky and was sitting back of the biggest stack on the table. Ol’ Slim is down to the ones, pulling bills off his roll looking like a dentist made to yank his own choppers. So I sat down and got back in the game. I busted that boy in about an hour.”
“Slim?”
“No. The trucker. He had so goddamn much fresh money he didn’t know what he was doing. See, one thing you always got to know is, who’s got the money? Ol’ Slim, he finally came back, but he didn’t win a dime offa me. I took down close to twenty G’s that game.”
“That’s great, Sam.”
“Only reason I won was, I knew not to play against short money. A guy like that sits down at your table, what reason have you got to play against him? What do you think you’re gonna win? He’s got nothing to lose, and you’re sitting there trying to protect your big stack. You might take his three hundred bucks nine times out of ten, but the tenth time he’s going to rob you.”
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
“Thing is, a guy that’s got nothing to lose, he can afford to stir things up. Never know what a guy might turn up.”
“A guy might turn up dead.”
Sam shrugged. “You feelin’ better today, son?”
Crow considered the question seriously. Physically, only a faint aching in his side remained. And he was having periods measured in minutes when he did not think about the Murphys, Bellweather, or Melinda. He thought he was feeling pretty good, considering that he had no resources, no money, and no hopes. Actually, that was no more true than it had ever been. He still had his VW, twenty pounds of frozen walleye, fifty-some bucks in cash, and the hope that his cat would come home. He’d left a bowl of food out on his apartment balcony.
“I feel fine, Sam.”
“Like hell you do. You felt fine, you wouldn’t be sitting in a damn icehouse with your old man. You’d get in the goddamn game. And if you’re playing against a New Yorker, watch out he don’t short the pot.” Sam fixed him with a glare, daring him to agree—or disagree.
Crow reeled in his line. “Okay, Sam.” He smiled, remembering a poem written by a Japanese monk who, after years of study, had attained his spiritual goal:
Now that I’m enlightened
I’m just as miserable as ever.
PART THREE
XVII
Never give a client advice regarding a decision he has already made for himself.
—RICH WICKY
GEORGE MURPHY HANDED HIM a beer. “Get you loosened up for the hunt. You know what they say. One steadies the eye.” He laughed. “Two, you’re good looking. You ever hear that one?”
Anderson said, “Heard what one?”
“Three beers, I’m brilliant. Four, I’m bulletproof.” Murphy tipped his head, his fleshy face sliding toward his left ear, and grinned. �
��Five, I’m invisible.”
Anderson laughed politely and sipped the beer. It tasted sweet and wasn’t quite cold enough, but he planned to drink it quickly. Midafternoon, only a couple hours of light left, and he wanted to get on with the hunt.
Murphy, however, seemed to be in no hurry. He leaned his butt against the edge of his desk, his muddy eyes fixed on Anderson.
Anderson held the opaque gaze for two seconds, then let his eyes slide away. Murphy seemed like a nice enough guy, but he made him uncomfortable. He looked around the office, which managed to be both spartan and cluttered at the same time. Other than the old desk, the homemade leather chair, a few hundred old magazines, potato chip bags, empty coffee cups, and a gun cabinet, the only notable feature in the room was an enormous stuffed pig.
“That’s a big pig,” Anderson said.
“Those are the real tusks. Six-inchers.”
“So you think this elk is going to run over four hundred points?” Anderson asked.
“I guarantee it.” That was when the interrogation began. “So what do you hear from your friend the doctor?” Murphy asked.
Anderson looked confused.
“Bellweather,” Murphy prompted.
“Oh!” He had been trying to forget Dr. Bellweather altogether, put him out of mind.
“You talk to him lately?” Murphy had a funny look on his face.
Anderson said, “Not for a few days.”
“You sure?” Murphy crossed his arms.
Anderson blinked. What was going on here? There was a distinct edge to Murphy’s voice. He said, “I’m sure. We aren’t doing business any longer.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
The conversation was getting very uncomfortable. Anderson took a long swallow of beer. He had come here to hunt, not to talk about Dr. Bellweather. The beer foamed in his belly.