by John Straley
“Not that this matters in the least in this instance, fat boy, this being a federal case, but did I tell you, Trooper, that among all of Willa Perlmutter’s lovely features, the loveliest is the fact that she is a member of the bar of both Alaska and Washington? So, you can take this subpoena and hip hop on up to Anchorage, and/or Bremerton, where the LWP has one of her fine-ass offices, and serve her there. And when you do, she and I will begin the months-long process of asserting my Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination by whittling away what questions I can and cannot answer and, when it comes down to it, I will answer the big payoff question that everyone wants to ask and the answer to that is this: Jake Shoemaker is a doof who wants to make easy money and watches too many movies. He is not a federal grunt or a gangbanger. He loves his Second Amendment, but he is no gangster.”
“So you must of shot the warehouseman?”
“What the fuck?”
“Oscar Laurentis, if Jake is such a Gandhi. You must have blown Oscar Laurentis’s knee off.”
Clive wasn’t feeling so smart now. “I don’t know anything about that. Talk with my attorney, talk to Willa. This conversation is over.”
Brown grunted, turned toward the waiting airplane and slammed the door shut. Clive watched the thin door bow out as Brown fumbled for the seat belt and got the ends connected. The trooper slapped the pilot on the shoulder, and the engine sputtered to life.
AT TWELVE NOON, when Mouse Miller’s Love Nest’s doors officially opened to the public, a crowd of people poured into the bar. The turntable was spinning an LP of the Turtles singing “Happy Together,” and Weasel was sitting there at the corner of the bar wearing aviator sunglasses and his best Hawaiian shirt, looking for all the world like a Jimmy Buffett-style drug runner. By twelve thirty, people were dancing to Kitty Wells. By two, they were listening to The Doors, The Kinks, and Marvin Gaye. People brought food, the barbeque was once again set up in the front yard, and Tina and Miles helped tend bar. Ed was learning his way around the tough lies on the pool table, and Clive was behind the bar thumbing through the Bible, brushing up for his first service.
He had considered showing a church service from a television broadcast since he could hook up on satellite, but he decided he was going to refuse to allow a television or any high-tech entertainment in the Love Nest. The Love Nest was to be a haven away from American pop culture. If someone wanted to listen to a sporting event, Clive would try to find it on the radio, but people were going to have to look at each other while they listened. He had an expensive stereo system with a shortwave and FM receiver, as well as a new turntable. Carl Erickson, who had been a logger until he was laid off three years ago, had volunteered to climb the spruce tree behind the Love Nest and place an antenna at the very top. This dramatically improved the radio reception. The first night Clive had tried the shortwave, he listened to dance music from Cuba while finishing the plumbing repairs under the bar.
Since televangelism was out of the question for this church service, he flipped through Luke and John, cruising through the New Testament hoping to find a long passage about the power of love without referring to the need for obedience. He didn’t want to scare off potential customers with his first sermon.
But the music kept distracting him. His head bobbing along with Marvin Gaye, he considered playing “What’s Going On” at the service and throwing the floor open to discussion. He slammed the Bible shut and started thumbing through the LPs.
In his mother’s house, he had found a large collection of vinyl, including his old records from childhood. He envisioned keeping these in a cabinet next to the bar; if customers wanted to hear a particular record, they could ask whoever was working to put it on for them. There would be no video games to ruin the solemnity of the atmosphere.
Clive had done his best to recondition the ancient pool table. The floor had been shored up and the table itself was level, but the felt and the slate top had somehow warped slightly and developed some interesting characteristics that greatly improved the playing advantage for players with local knowledge. One had likened it more to putting on an undulating green than playing pool.
Clive had reattached the money that had once hung from the ceiling, and people were encouraged to stand on the bar and pin up more. The beautiful barmaid loved by Mouse Miller had died of breast cancer, so Clive pledged every dollar on the ceiling and some percentage of the opening day’s receipts to a women’s health center in Sitka, and he had hung a picture of Kelly at one end of the bar with the only known portrait of Mouse beside it. The photographer had caught Kelly standing behind the bar, gently scolding him, trying to avoid having her picture taken. Her awkward pose and laughing face told Clive that she was a woman almost certainly worthy of Mouse’s unrequited love. She looked both intelligent and modest, a woman with whom it would have been a pleasure to spend a couple of hours on a stormy afternoon. There was also a photograph of Ellie Hobbes and Slippery Wilson, the original founders, at the crest of the roof beams.
The portrait of Mouse was some twenty years old and showed a healthy young man wearing a dirty white cap and grey halibut coat; he was standing in the trolling pit of his little wooden boat and working the gear. He looked strong and capable: one of the last hunter-gatherers. In the photograph, the sun was painting strips of light up the side of the boat and onto the fisherman at work.
The night before the bar was to open, Clive had mounted the two portraits with heavy screws that showed through the frames; he intended them to be a permanent fixture in the bar. He drove the last screw and put the driver into his back pocket, looked at the interior of his new life’s adventure, wiped his hands on a bar rag he had stuck in the front of his belt, and gave a satisfying sigh. The Love Nest would be a dignified shelter for both drinking and prayer.
After dinner, the bar thinned out, and kids ran back and forth with plates of food. Clive changed records, and Weasel kept asking for Frank Sinatra doing “Fly Me to the Moon”; Clive played it twice but when Weasel asked for it a third time, he exercised his imperial discretion.
“No,” he declared. He played one entire side of The Band’s Music from Big Pink while Weasel sat quietly on his stool.
Little Brother didn’t seem to notice all the people. He stayed close to his pad near the corner of the bar, slept sometimes but raised his head whenever he sensed a cross tone of voice or heard the sharp thump of a chair.
“That dog’s going to eat somebody,” observed Lester.
“I just hope it isn’t somebody I like.” Clive set a glass of iced tea in front of him and waved off Lester’s gesture to pay.
“Don’t take this the wrong way …” Lester paused a moment. “But I’ve been thinking about what you asked me about a while back.”
“About the animals … umm … talking?”
Lester nodded and looked around the bar to see the happy faces of the patrons. “You talk to anybody else about that?” He steadied his eyes on Clive.
“Just a couple of mice in my room.” Clive smiled.
“You ever get anything out of the ugly mutt?” and he nodded toward Little Brother. Neither Lester nor the dog were smiling, and both of them were staring at Clive.
“It’s a funny thing …” Clive leaned in and spoke softly. “The big dumbbell never says a thing. Silent like a tomb.”
“Dumb …” Lester said, almost as if to himself. “It’s just this … If he does ever say anything, will you let me know?”
“Sure, Lester, but …”
“To the owner of the Love Nest!” Lester lifted his glass of iced tea, raised his voice. Everyone looked toward him as he said, “And to the best bouncer on the coast.”
“To the Love Nest!” Voices roamed around the room, fell silent. Everyone swallowed and slammed their glasses down.
The evening wore on peacefully enough. The opening day crowd gradually wandered out, and a core group of drinkers and pool players were left listening to Dolly Parton on the record player. Robbie Robertson a
nd Pearl Jam were replaced by West Side Story. Clive cut some drinkers off before they were ready, but no insolence lasted long in the festive atmosphere.
By closing time, Clive was serving more free coffee and soda pop than mixed drinks. Tina and Miles had gone home. Weasel and Ed had left to watch some movies that had come in on a plane that afternoon; they’d invited Clive over to watch The Piano after he got off work, but he’d told them not to wait up.
Finally the place was quiet, and Clive turned off the stereo to listen to the wind washing through the tree limbs above the bar. The place smelled fine, more like coffee than cigarettes, and the furniture didn’t seem tired yet after this first night.
“Good night,” he said aloud to the room and turned to the dog. “What are you going to do? You can come up to the house if you want. Or you can stay here. What will it be?”
Little Brother stood up, stretched. He too cast a glance around the room, although more suspiciously, and walked to the front door and stood there, staring straight ahead.
“Home it is, then.” Clive grabbed his cash bag full of the night’s receipts, and they walked out into the night.
The late summer sky was dark. There was a hint of silver on the western edges of the horizon, and Clive stood for a moment looking at the dark outlines of the islands humped up to the west. The wind continued sighing, and he thought for a moment about going to watch the movie with Ed and Weasel; then he thought of hunting up the girl who worked at the cold storage but he had heard that she had found her parrot and had gone fishing with a guy from the longline fleet and wouldn’t be back until the fall, if she came back to Cold Storage at all.
So he turned and walked south toward his mother’s house. The alder trees and the thick bramble of salmonberry vines darkened the way, and the great ugly dog stopped at the steps to Annabelle’s house to wait for Clive.
Except for when they’d flown into town six months ago, Clive had not touched Little Brother, nor had anyone else in Cold Storage as far as Clive knew. Little Brother was clearly a fixture at the bar and it could not be said he was a feral dog, but neither could it be said that he actually “belonged” to Clive.
Now he saw the dog watching something hidden ahead of them. A deep growl, like grinding rocks, came from his chest. His eyes were fixed on some phantom in the brush. Clive moved to walk around him, but the dog took two steps ahead and blocked his way.
“I’m going to go to bed. You can take care of whatever’s out there.” He stepped around the bristling dog. “But if you kill another cat, it’s coming out of your wages.” He tried once more to walk around him, but the dog would not let him pass. Clive reached out and nudged him three times with the toe of his right shoe, but the dog would not move.
Clive took a step back and raised his leg as if to actually kick at him. That’s when Little Brother turned and looked straight at him and said, “What have I done to you that you have struck me these three times?”
Clive froze. Along the boardwalk, footsteps padded toward them.
“What did you say?” Clive asked, surprised mostly by the dog’s strange diction.
Then Little Brother said, “Look up.”
And he did, straight into the high-caliber revolver at the end of Jake Shoemaker’s outstretched arm.
“Hey, Clive,” said Jake, businesslike. “I really need to talk to you about something.”
Little Brother showed an alligator smile of teeth.
“You should have stolen a better dog.” Jake pulled back the hammer on the big six-shooter. “He’s sure enough ugly, but he isn’t worth a damn for protection.”
“What did you say?” Clive asked again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LITTLE BROTHER LEAPT for the arm holding the gun. Clive ducked and rolled off the stairway into a tangle of salmonberry bushes, rolled until he came up hard against a thorny stalk, and looked back to where the big dog was standing over the fallen Jake, shaking the man’s arm back and forth as if it had come unhinged at all of its joints. Jake was crying out in a wordless howl, his head thumping on the decking, while the dog worked almost silently, breath heaving out of nose and jowls as he tore at the limp man’s arm.
Clive circled back down under the boardwalk near the water, taking his time, listening to the animal grunting into his work. Jake’s voice became more and more faint.
For a moment, Clive considered walking down the beach to Miles’s house, letting the dog finish what he had started. He even considered going back to the bar and listening to records for a while.
But then he heard Jake’s voice floating out over the tide flat, calling for help in the same kind of faltering voice Clive used to hear from under the door in his old cell block. It was the last bleating of a dying animal. Clive didn’t want to have to explain to anyone how his former partner in the drug trade had had his throat torn out on the steps of Clive’s new home, so he walked back toward the boardwalk, found a cross brace to climb, and lifted himself back onto the decking.
The gun lay just under the stairs of the house; Clive stepped over Jake and picked it up. The dog had stopped trying to tear Jake’s arm away, but he still clenched what was left of the arm between his teeth. In the thin light from the porch, Clive could see that the forearm was broken, the wrist and hand flopped at an unsettling angle, and the shoulder was dislocated. Little Brother blew air from his massive lungs like a racehorse at full sprint.
“Get … him … off,” Jake managed.
“Jeepers, Jake!” Clive knelt down beside his head. “I’m sure he’ll let go when he’s ready. There’s not that much I can do.”
“Shoot … it,” Jake wheezed.
“Aw, cripes! I can’t do that, Jake. I mean, you were going to shoot me through the head. Probably would have, too, if my dog hadn’t helped me out. I can’t just shoot him now that he saved me. That just doesn’t seem fair.”
“Do something …” Jake’s voice grew fainter.
“I tell you what.” Clive sat cross-legged on the decking with the pistol resting in his lap. “This dog likes to hear good news. You can’t boss him, but you can use a nice tone of voice on him and tell him that all the money in that storage container was rightfully mine.”
“Fuuuugghhhyewwww,” Jake sighed.
“And tell him that I will be keeping all that money to help run our new enterprise here in Cold Storage.”
“Fine,” he said weakly.
“And that you will never ever try to hurt me again for the rest of your life.”
“Yes … I will never try and hurt …”
Little Brother still held on.
“Then I don’t know.” Clive shrugged. “You could tell him he’s a good dog.”
“Good dog.” Jake’s eyes closed. His head rolled to the side, his cheek nearly flat against the planking. Little Brother’s breathing eased, and the boardwalk grew silent; Clive could hear the wind in the trees up the hill but nothing from his former employer.
Clive looked over at the dog. “I think you killed him.” His voice was somber.
Little Brother stared up with sad brown eyes, looked almost sheepish. “No,” was all the dog said.
Once Jake’s body had gone limp and the tension of the fight was over, his floppy arm had dropped from the dog’s jaws and fallen to the deck with a slap like a dead fish.
Little Brother studied Jake, contemplated Clive. He looked tired of the conversation. Without saying another word, the ugly dog shouldered past Clive, padded up the steps, scratched the outer door open and went inside.
“I’M SURPRISED HE didn’t kill him!”
Clive stood under the clinic’s unduly bright lights and watched Miles wipe away the blood on his former partner’s arm.
“This is an amazingly clean break,” Miles was saying. “I mean considering that the dog snapped his arm, then pulled his shoulder out of the socket.”
Jake was hooked up to an IV and a blood pressure monitor. His eyes weren’t focusing; they were open but rolled around as i
f he were lying back in a convertible, driving through a tunnel of trees in autumn.
“I’ve got him on so much Demerol that he shouldn’t be feeling much of anything,” continued Miles, “which is a good thing because he’s got a little bit more to go through before we get that shoulder back in place.”
“Well, I’m just going to leave him here,” said Clive. “I need some sleep before I have to open up in the morning.”
“I need you here.” Miles’s voice was calm but firm. “First to stitch him up and watch his BP, but then to pull this shoulder back so we can pop it in. It’s going to take at least two of us.” Miles looked around. “Unless you can get your dog to do it.”
“Come on, I can’t get that dog to do anything.” Clive took his jacket off. “Except eat and pass gas.”
“That,” Miles added, “and chew up men who want to kill you.”
“Hey! I had nothing to do with that. Whatever happened was between Jake and the dog. They had some old business.”
“All right,” said Miles. “Just stick around to pop his shoulder back in.”
“Sure. I’ll help. Just lose the tone with me, okay? I didn’t do anything criminal.”
“I’m sorry, brother. I know. Let’s just get this back in, then do the stitching, all right?” Miles stood up on a chair, grabbed the injured arm below the break and wedged his knee behind Jake’s shoulder. “You better hold him,” he said gently to his brother. “He’s apt to flop around some.”
BY THE NEXT afternoon, Jake’s eyes were beginning to focus. He writhed, tried to get away from where his splinted arm was suspended, and saw Clive and Miles standing at the foot of the bed; they were smiling. Jake closed his eyes and reopened them; felt as if half his body had been stung by bees; closed his eyes again. The room spun, and a vague electric current pulsed up and down his arm.
“I’m going to have to get you to a hospital so they can take a look at my handiwork,” Miles was saying. “Get you a bed where you can heal up for a bit before you travel.”