Short Money

by Pete Hautman

  “What did you do, hitchhike into town?”

  “You took me.”

  “What? Me? I don’t think so.”

  “I climbed in the back of Doc’s car, and you drove me to Doc’s house.”

  Crow said, “Tell me you’re kidding.”

  “And then we went to stay at Nate and Ginny’s. And then Doc said he was gonna take me home, only he didn’t. He’s really weird.”

  Crow was still working on the suggestion that he had taken Shawn Murphy. He remembered Bellweather showing him the large storage space in the Jaguar, a space big enough for a ten-year-old boy.

  “You know what he likes to do?” Shawn asked.

  Crow cleared his throat. “No. What?” He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear this.

  “He has this little machine. It’s like a little thing that you put batteries in, you know?”

  “Yeah?” Crow didn’t, but he suspected the worst.

  “He, like, he sticks it in his nose. He trims his nose hairs.”

  “He trims his nose hairs,” Crow repeated.

  “Yeah. Isn’t that weird?”

  “Hey, I told you no more of that,” Berdette said.

  Ricky shook out his fist. “Sorry, old man. I had a spasm.”

  Dave Getter wrapped his arms around his belly and coughed. His nose was swollen grotesquely from its encounter with the top of the bar. Ricky had been treating him to the occasional punch in the ribs, whenever it occurred to him.

  “Long as you’re in my place, you keep your damn hands off him. And don’t call me ‘old man.’”

  “No problem, Bird.”

  “And don’t call me Bird.” Berdette didn’t like having these three guys sitting at his bar, and he didn’t like what was happening to the guy in the suit. It was a very strange situation. They would sit there and talk, then all of a sudden Ricky would give the guy a shot for no particular reason. Typical Ricky Murphy behavior.

  George Murphy sat hunched over the bar, staring morosely into a glass of beer.

  “Where is he?” he asked. “It’s almost eleven, and I don’t see my son.”

  “I don’t know,” said Getter miserably.

  Ricky said, “I’m getting sick a waiting here.”

  The telephone rang. Getter’s head lifted hopefully.

  “That better be good news,” George said.

  Berdette answered the phone, listened for a moment. “No, sugar, there’s nothing going on here. You come on in about noon, we’ll be fine.” He hung up. “Arlene,” he said.

  George scowled. Both George and Ricky looked at Getter, who drew back and squeaked, “What? What’s wrong?”

  Ricky’s fist crashed into his cheek, knocked him off the stool.

  “Hey!” Berdette shouted. This was getting way out of hand. They were going to kill the guy. He was getting all pumped up, feeling like he hadn’t felt in years. “I’m talking to you, boy!”

  Ricky ignored him.

  “Let’s go.” George was up off his stool, headed out the door. “Bring him,” he said over his shoulder. Ricky grabbed Getter’s collar, jerked him to his feet, started dragging him toward the door. Getter screamed and tried to pull away. Ricky punched him again, in the belly, propelled him toward the exit. Getter dropped to the floor beside the bar, wrapped his arms around the foot rail. Ricky kicked him in the ribs. “Get up, damn you!”

  “Hey!” Berdette shouted, coming around the end of the bar. “I mean it this time. Lay off him.” He held the shotgun in front of his body, not exactly pointing it at anybody but letting them know it was there. “You hear me?” The shells were loaded with rock salt, a painful but nonlethal alternative to lead shot. Hadn’t fired the thing for years, but he was ready to give Ricky Murphy a load any second now.

  Ricky gave him a slit-eyed look, then grinned, helped Getter to his feet, brushed him off. “You okay?”

  Getter nodded, wincing, wrapping his arms around his rib cage.

  Ricky said to Berdette, “See? He’s fine.”

  “Now you get your ass out of here, Ricky.”

  “No problem, Bird. Come on, Dave. You ready?”

  Getter shook his head. “Please—”

  Ricky gave him a jab, right on the tip of his swollen proboscis. Getter shrieked. Ricky said, “There, that’ll give you something to cry about.”

  That did it. Berdette brought the shotgun up and around. A long-barreled revolver materialized in Ricky’s right hand. Berdette heard a double explosion and suddenly found himself walking backward. The lawyer was screaming. Berdette wondered, Why am I walking backward? The shotgun fell from his hand. Ricky Murphy and his grin were getting smaller, racing away into the distance. Berdette thought, The son-of-a-bitch shot me. A moment before, he had been feeling his oats. Now he didn’t feel a thing.

  XXV

  These guys you see walking down the street talking to themselves—they always seem to know what to say.

  —JOE CROW

  LOYAL FITZ, OWNER OF the Sea Breeze Motel, was happy to have his Isuzu back but seemed somewhat alarmed by the legless hog. “What is it?”

  “What does it look like?” said Bellweather.

  “A stuffed pig,” said Fitz. “I thought you said you was going to save some little girl’s life.”

  “I did,” said Bellweather.

  “So what’s with the stuffed pig?”

  “Just help me get it into my room,” Bellweather snapped. He pulled on the pig’s ears until it slid out of the Isuzu and landed with a crackling thud on the ice-coated asphalt.

  “It’s got no legs,” Fitz said.

  “I know that. I had to perform an emergency legectomy. You want to grab on there and give me a hand?” He grabbed the boar’s snout with both hands.

  Fitz grimaced but persuaded himself to grasp the curly tail and help the doctor carry the thing across the parking lot to room sixteen.

  “Thanks,” said Bellweather once they had lifted the pig onto the bed.

  “What you gonna do with it?”

  “Nothing.”

  Fitz frowned at the upside-down porker, his imagination straining but failing to grasp the significance of a stuffed, legless pig in one of his motel rooms. “You ain’t some kind of cult weirdo, are you?”

  “No, I am not,” Bellweather said.

  Fitz nodded slowly. “Checkin’ out today?”

  “Yes. Very soon. Now if you’ll excuse me …?”

  Fitz nodded again, even more slowly, but did not leave.

  “Would you please leave now?” Bellweather grasped Fitz’s arm and guided him toward the door.

  Fitz shook off his grip. “What about my two hundred bucks?”

  Bellweather pulled out his wallet and gave him a handful of twenties. “For the room and the truck. Okay?”

  Fitz accepted the money and said, “I got that pink car of yours all shoveled out. She’s ready to go.”

  “I know, I saw. Thank you.”

  “What you gonna do with that pig?”

  Bellweather gave him a final push out of the room. “I’m going to make bacon,” he said as he slammed the door. He watched through the curtain as Fitz wandered back toward the motel office. He would have to move quickly. There was still the possibility that the kid had got home and spilled his guts. Bellweather opened his overnight bag and extracted a flat black vinyl case filled with medical paraphernalia. Using a scalpel, he began furiously to slice away at the boar, ripping through the tough, dry pigskin with the short steel blade, cutting around the small safe embedded in its side, stopping every few seconds to peer out the window. Within minutes, the bed was covered with shards of pigskin and musty-smelling excelsior, and Bellweather was holding a black metal safe that measured twelve inches on a side, frowning, wondering how the hell he was going to get the thing open.

  “I don’t think my dad’s home,” Shawn said. “Hummer’s gone.”

  “He’s probably out looking for you,” Crow said.

  “I bet Grandy’s home. I’m really hu
ngry.”

  “Grandy’s your grandmother?”

  “Uh-huh. I bet she’s making lunch. You want to come in?”

  Crow was hungry too, but not hungry enough to spend any longer than he had to on Talking Lake Ranch.

  “No, thanks. I have to get going.” He wanted nothing more to do with the Murphys. He would give George his kid back, and that was it. He wanted out.

  “Okay,” said Shawn. He opened the door and ran around the house to the kitchen door. Crow turned the jeep and headed back up the long driveway. He felt ill, whether from the beating he had taken, from the lack of good, quality sleep, or from the bouncing and swaying of Harley’s jeep. His sense of purpose had deserted him. Not that it had been that strong in the first place, but he now felt as if he were falling in several directions at once. He needed desperately to land, to come to rest. Anywhere would do.

  Bringing the jeep to a halt where the Murphys’ private road intersected the highway, he sat there, engine idling. Puss hadn’t been exaggerating about the heater not working so good. As near as he could tell, it didn’t work at all.

  “What am I doing here?” he said aloud.

  “You’re sitting in a damn jeep, freezing your ass off,” he replied. He dropped the jeep into gear and pulled out onto the highway, turning left.

  “Wrong way,” he said.

  “I know.”

  A camouflaged Hummer appeared, heading toward the ranch, George Murphy hunched over the steering wheel, staring straight ahead. As the Hummer passed, Crow caught a glimpse of a passenger who looked like … Dave Getter? Nah. He continued down the road, choosing not to waste any of his slim reserves of mental energy on a puzzle that could not possibly have anything whatsoever to do with Joe Crow.

  “Old Joe Crow, he don’t care,” Crow muttered. A former idea bloomed again, sent a seductive surge of endorphins down his spinal column.

  Crow drew a shaky breath.

  “Okay, then,” he said in a hoarse voice.

  George climbed out of the Hummer and opened the door leading into the lodge. The tiger opened one eye.

  “You all alone in here, gal?”

  The tiger yawned.

  George went back to the vehicle. “Take him inside. I’m going to go check my phone machine, see if that little son-of-a-bitch called here.”

  Ricky pulled Getter out of the Hummer and walked him into the lodge.

  “What do you guys want? I keep telling you, I had nothing to do with it.” Getter was limping from the blast of rock salt that had abraded his thigh.

  “That’s right, you keep telling us.” Ricky shoved him into a chair. “Now shut the fuck up.”

  The tiger rose to her feet and walked toward them, her yellow eyes unblinking, until she was stopped by the chain. “You stay real still now,” Ricky said. “She can snap that chain anytime she wants, you know?”

  Getter closed his eyes and shuddered miserably.

  Ricky followed George into the hallway. “I got to tell you, bro, I don’t think he knows nothing.”

  George said, “Yeah, well, we got a whole ’nother problem now on account of he saw you center-shoot old Berdette. He starts screaming bloody murder, old Orlan ain’t gonna be able to smooth things over.”

  “So we just feed him to the tiger.”

  George shook his head. “You’ll make her sick. Keep an eye on him, would ya?” He opened the door leading into the kitchen.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned.”

  Shawn Murphy, sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes, looked up.

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned to hell and back.” A wide smile split George’s face. “Where did you come from, boy?”

  “I just got home,” Shawn said. “That guy gave me a ride home.”

  “What guy?”

  “He’s gone now.”

  “Nelly Bell?”

  Shawn shook his head. “A different guy. I think his name is Crow or something.”

  “Crow?”

  “Something like that.”

  George let his head bob slowly, digesting this new bit of information. He reached out toward his son, let a hand fall on the boy’s shoulder, covering it. “Crow,” he muttered. “I’ll be goddamned.”

  “He said for me to tell you he’d send you a bill.”

  Murphy nodded. “So where you been, boy?”

  Shawn stirred his Frosted Flakes.

  “Were you with that Nelly Bell?”

  “I was for a while. Ow!”

  George relaxed his grip, let his hand slide off the boy’s shoulder.

  “I got away from him,” Shawn said. “He was gonna take me home, but then he didn’t, and so I ran away. He’s sort of weird, y’know?”

  George pulled a chair away from the table, lowered himself into it. “Did he do anything to you? Like you were telling me before?”

  Shawn shook his head.

  George pushed his face forward, getting it between Shawn and the bowl of cereal. “He do anything to you?”

  Shawn’s face went blank. “He didn’t do nothing.”

  George sat back. He wanted to ask more, but he could tell the kid was shutting down, and besides, he didn’t really want to know. His son was back, and that would have to be enough for now. He filled his lungs with air, let it out, looked around the kitchen. Something was missing.

  “Where’s Mandy?” he asked.

  Shawn shrugged. “I dunno. I don’t think she’s around.”

  Bronson’s On/Off Sale Liquors had a sale on Old Milwaukee. Crow nodded to the woman at the cash register, walked through the store, grabbed a case of cans from the cooler. On his way back to the front of the store, he lifted a bottle of Old Crow from the shelf, set it alongside the beer on the front counter. The woman looked up from her TV Guide, smiled briefly, rang up his purchase. Eighteen ninety-two. Crow handed her his last twenty-dollar bill, wordlessly accepted his change, carried his new possessions out to the jeep, headed east. When he reached his upended Rabbit, he pulled over, unloaded the Old Milwaukee at the head of Harley and Puss’s driveway, leaned on the horn. Harley opened the door to his house trailer a moment later. Crow waved and pulled back out onto the highway. He heard Harley shout something.

  As he passed Birdy’s, he noticed a silver Mercedes parked there. It looked a lot like Dave Getter’s.

  “Old Crow, he don’t care,” he muttered.

  For the next seventy miles, Crow’s mind stumbled through the wreckage of the past week. The days played back like a nightmare, a directionless, purposeless, painful journey. Melinda was missing? That was her problem. He no longer believed that Orlan Johnson or the Murphys had anything to do with it. Bellweather had skipped town? So what? It had been a lousy job anyway. Debrowski? Just another ex-doper in a motorcycle jacket. No matter how he diced and re-formed events, he was still broke and adrift. The nearest he would get to happiness lay within the unopened bottle between his legs. He could almost feel the promising burn of raw bourbon flowing over his tonsils. He rubbed his thumb on the smooth glass bottle, felt its square shape, picked with his fingernail at the edge of the label, gripped the knurled screw top, felt the hollowness inside his body grow. Unlike the people in his life, bourbon could be relied upon. He would drink it; he would feel better.

  He kept going. The bottle remained sealed, but he was getting drunk, absorbing the alcohol right through the glass. The barrage of unwanted thoughts slowed; he had to concentrate to keep the jeep traveling in a straight line. His feet were getting numb. He hunched his shoulders to hold in the warmth and squeezed the steering wheel hard, forcing sensation through his gloves, into his fingers. The image of his apartment beckoned. He would let himself in, pour himself a civilized drink, sit down, and douse his mind. As the snowy countryside flashed by, he blotted recent memories with thoughts of anticipated pleasures. Passing through the small town of Clara City, he counted three liquor stores and seven bars. A nice little town. He could stop in at any one of those businesses, have a few drinks, tal
k about the Vikings, and see not a single familiar face. It would be warm, and friendly, and easy. Warmer and friendlier than his empty apartment—but not as easy. He continued on through the town.

  By the time he reached the outer suburbs of Minneapolis, a new headache had formed at the base of his skull, and the bouncing and yawing of the jeep was making him acutely aware of his knotted, empty stomach. He frowned and swallowed. The Murphys appeared in his mind again. A smiling George, arm around his prodigal son. The ache rolled over the top of his head and began to throb in rhythm with the jeep’s laboring engine.

  “It’s not fair.” His words were sucked out of the jeep by the wind. It really wasn’t fair. He hadn’t even opened the bottle, and already he was suffering from a hangover. What kind of world is this, he wondered, where a man has to suffer for sins he has yet to commit? An angry impulse urged him to fling the bottle out onto the highway, but another voice told him that as long as he was already having the hangover, he might as well get loaded. A third Crow, the one driving the jeep, observed this dialogue with sour amusement.

  “Too many Crows,” he muttered.

  “I agree.”

  A road sign became legible, CTY RD 40. For a moment, Crow rode alone in silence. That exit would lead him to Bellweather’s house—actually, Bellweather’s former house, since it now seemed to belong to the U.S. Government. It was not an exit he had any reason or desire to take, yet he found the jeep edging toward the ramp. Apparently, one Crow still cared about the whereabouts of the missing liposuctionist. The curious Crow. The one who was always getting him in trouble.

  Another Crow retained control of the vehicle, passed the exit, and continued on toward his apartment, the bottle of Old Crow warm between his legs. The bottle was real. You could say a lot of bad things about alcohol, but one fact remained: It worked every time. Just thinking about it made him feel solid. He could fall apart again later.

  XXVI

  Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  ORLAN JOHNSON WAS HAVING a lousy day off. His belly ached where Crow had hit him, he’d tossed and turned all night, and first thing he gets up, Hill wants him to go out and snowblow the driveway. He’d managed to stay in his bathrobe and grumble around the house all morning. All he really wanted to do was sit in front of the tube and have a few beers, let her bitch. It wasn’t until she threatened not to cook him lunch that he put on his insulated bib overalls and fluorescent orange down vest, went out to the garage to fire up the Toro. He’d just gotten the snowblower moving, started his first sweep down the driveway, when Hillary started shouting and waving to him from the house.