Cold Dish wl-1

by Craig Johnson

  “No, but I have heard that you can.”

  “From who?”

  “Old people like you.”

  “I’m less than a year older than you.”

  He shrugged and read the inscription, “IN GOD WE TRUST. I was going to use a buffalo-head nickel, but it has to be copper to conduct, that much I know.”

  I dropped my board with a clatter. “Well, all I know about this stuff is enough to be scared shitless of it. Is there any reason why this has to be done tonight?” He made a face. “I mean your beer coolers are running, the heat’s on, even the horse out front is working…”

  “Pony.”

  “Whatever.”

  He sighed and looked around the bar. “Only if somebody wants to play pool.”

  I nudged him with my shoulder. “Is your life worth a game of pool?” He thought for a moment.

  “Seems like it has been.” He placed the penny on his cocked thumbnail. “Heads we go for it, tails we go sit in the dark with everybody else.” I nodded, and he flipped the coin to me, whereupon I promptly dropped it in the pile of boards. We looked at each other.

  “I didn’t know I was supposed to catch it.” He peeled another penny from the paper roll.

  “Do not worry, I have got forty-nine more. You ought to be able to catch one of them.” He flipped the second penny, and I snatched it from midair and slapped it on the back of my other hand. I left my palm covering the penny for a few moments, building my own little tension.

  “Is the suspense killing you?”

  “Not really, next we flip to see who puts the penny in the fuse.” I uncovered the coin and thanked the God we trust it was tails.

  “C’mon, I’ll buy you a Coke.”

  I ambled along behind Henry as we joined the others at the bar itself. The walls were covered with the works of different artists who had received residencies with the Foundation. It was a mixed lot, but each piece reminded me of the individual who had occupied the adjacent barstool, and artists are always good for conversation, so long as you want to talk about their art.

  The small group was clustered in the bar’s corner, only slightly illuminated by the dim glow of available light. There were a couple of stray hunters, still dressed in their camouflage and optical-orange vests; evidently the deer were wearing blue this year. I could make out Buck Morris, one of the local cowboys who took care of the Foundation’s nominal cattle herd. He was easy to spot because of his hat; a weather-worn Resistol that some oil executive had offered to buy for $250. General opinion was that Buck had missed the boat. The young man next to him wore a frayed jean jacket and had strong Cheyenne features. He must’ve been from out of county, because I didn’t know him.

  Next was Roger Russell, an electrician out of Powder Junction in the southern part of the county who had come up here to expand his business. Turk said that he was kind of the black sheep of the family and that he had little bastards scattered all up and down the Basin: “Powder River, let’r buck, a mile wide and an inch deep.” I wondered mildly why Henry and I had just been gambling with our lives while an expert nursed a C and C in the next room.

  Sitting next to him was probably the reason why Roger happened to be here. Vonnie Hayes was old school Wyoming; her grandfather had had a spread of thirty thousand acres of good land. Vonnie and I had kind of known each other when we were children but, after her father had committed suicide, she was sent to boarding school and her art life had taken her east for a number of years, where she had become an accomplished sculptress. Much later, she returned to take care of her aging mother. Vonnie and Martha had worked together on the library board and a number of other community projects in the county, and my daughter had worked for Vonnie as a housekeeper one summer. After Martha died, Cady tried to fix us up, an endeavor that Vonnie and I both viewed with equal parts humor and open-handed flirtation. Even in the dim light I could make out Vonnie’s features, strong, with a lupine slant to the eyes, sandy hair pulled back in a casual bun.

  I leaned against the bar beside her, bumping into Roger and giving him my substantial rear. “Jeez, Rog.” I looked around in the darkness. “Don’t you know we’ve got an electrical emergency on our hands here?”

  He carefully placed his drink back and nudged it with his fingers. “I am… retired.”

  Henry appeared on the other side of the bar, slid a Rainier to me, and leaned into Roger. “What about this penny thing?”

  Roger looked at him, attempting to gather himself for an answer. As he did, I looked over to Vonnie. “Boy, the things you find in the dark.”

  She took a sip of her chenin blanc. Henry kept a special bottle of the white wine in the cooler for her. I had always wanted to ask her for a sip but had never gotten up the nerve. Her eyes glowed softly, and the corner of her lips curved into a warm, sad smile. “Hello, Walter.”

  Undaunted by conversing with drunks, Henry continued. “Those old fuses, the big ones, you put pennies in them to get them to work?”

  Roger laughed. “Yes you can, and you can also fuse every bit of the substandard wiring in this shit-hole and burn us all up alive.” I kind of leaned Roger against the bar, stabilizing the listing that had begun as he spoke, and pulled a loose stool from the far side, placing it and myself, between Roger and Vonnie.

  “Vonnie…” Her eyes had a way of opening a little wider when you spoke to her, then closing a little like they were capturing what you were saying and holding on to it. I was starting to remember why I had had a crush on her and continued. “You see this heathen, devil red man across the bar here?” Her eyes glanced at Henry for a moment, then returned to mine. “He and Cady are plotting some sort of intrigue against me.”

  Her eyes widened again, and she returned her gaze to Henry. “Is that true, Bear?” It irritated me that every woman I knew was on a cuddly first-name basis with the man.

  Henry nodded toward me. “White man full of shit.”

  We were on a Technicolor roll now. I was Randolph Scott to his.. I don’t know, one of those bigger than life Indians that either got beat up or killed by the end of the third reel. “It’s true, he’s government trained to be involved in these kinds of covert operations.” I pointed to the framed boxes on the wall behind the bar that contained a burnt map of North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. On this map were Henry’s Special Forces pin, Purple Heart, Army Distinguished Service Cross, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and assorted campaign medals. There were also black-and-white photographs of Henry with his infantry platoon leaders, and one with his friend and team member Lo Chi, whom he had brought back and relocated in Los Angeles. There was even a picture of Henry and me, wearing the two ugliest Hawaiian shirts in Saigon, on a three-day leave in 1968. “You see all that stuff on the wall? He was trained in the war to be the gravest irritation to all those around him. There is no way a common soldier, such as myself, could possibly compete with a hand-picked, combat-hardened pain in the ass like him.” Few people knew the shadowy history of the Special Operations Group that had operated out of Laos, but the numbers said it all: For every American Special Forces soldier that was lost, the North Vietnamese lost between 100 and 150 troops. The Bear had been a part of one of the most effective killing machines on either side of the war.

  Henry’s face pushed up and curved to the side as the weight of his head held steady in the palm of his supporting hand. “Common soldier? The closest he came to any real fighting was when he agreed to meet me for a three-day in Saigon.” Under his breath he continued, but I’m pretty sure I was the only one that heard it, “Except for Tet…”

  I left Henry to leverage Roger into doing some free electrical consulting work and turned my attention back to Vonnie. She was staring into the glass eyes of one of the mounted antelope behind the bar. “Pretty animals.” Her eyes remained steady on the pronghorn. “Do you think they feel pain like we do?”

  “Nope.”

  She turned to look at me, seemingly irritated. “Really?”

  “Really
.”

  She stayed with me for a second, and then, fading into disappointment, glanced at her wine glass. “So, you don’t think they feel pain.”

  “No, I said I don’t think they feel pain like us.”

  “Oh.” The smile slowly returned. “For a minute there I thought you had become a jerk.”

  “No, a blacksmith’s son.”

  She continued to smile and then nodded. “You used to come out to our place with your father… Lloyd.”

  I watched her. “Nobody remembers his name.”

  “I think my mother had a little crush on him.”

  “Just another Longmire, plying his wiles. When I was real little, I used to make the shoeing rounds with him. It looked painful to me, so I asked him.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Pop used to speak in biblical terms, but what he said was that the brutes of the field don’t feel pain like humans. That that’s the price we pay for thinking.”

  She took another sip of her wine. “Comforting to know that we’re the species that feels the most pain.”

  I half-closed an eye and looked at her for a second. “Is that East Coast sarcasm I’m hearing?”

  “No, that’s East Coast self-pity.”

  “Oh.” I was getting in way over my head. I can do the bull about as well as it can be done, but that edgy buzz-talk makes me weary in a heartbeat. I try and keep up, but after a while I start to drag.

  She placed a hand on mine, and I think it was the hottest hand I had ever felt. “Walter, are you all right?”

  It always started like this, a touch and a kind word. I used to feel heat behind my eyes and a shortness of breath, but now I just feel the emptiness. The fuses of desire are blown black windows, and I’m gone with no pennies to save me. “Oh, you mean you really want to talk?”

  Her eyes were so sad, so honest. “Yeah, I figured since we didn’t have anything else to do.”

  So I leaned in and told her the truth. “I just… I’m just numb most of the time.”

  She blinked. “Me too.”

  I felt like one of those guys in the movies, there in the foxhole asking how much ammo your buddy’s got. I got two more clips, how ’bout you? “I know the things I’m supposed to do, but I just don’t seem to have the energy. I mean, I’ve been thinking about turning over my pillow for three weeks.”

  “I know…” She looked away. “How’s Cady?”

  Here I was floating in the white-capped Pacific of self-pity, and Vonnie threw me a lifeline to keep me from embarrassing myself. Three fingers, bartender… “She’s great.” I looked at Vonnie to see if she was really interested. She was. “She’s doing so well in Philadelphia.”

  “She always has been special.”

  “Yes, she is.” We sat there for a moment, allowing the crackle and roar of my parental self-satisfaction to fade into the soft glow of friendly conversation. Her hand was still on my arm when the phone rang.

  “Looks like she’s tracked you down.” The hand went away.

  I watched as Henry allowed it to ring the second time, his tele-signature, then snatched it from the cradle. “It is another beautiful evening here at the Red Pony bar and continual soiree, how can I help you?” His face pulled up on one side as if the receiver had just smacked him. “Yes, he is here.” He stretched the cord across the expanse of the bar and handed me the phone. His eyes stayed on mine.

  I nudged it between my chin and shoulder with one hand, took a sip of beer with the other, and swallowed. “Hello, Sugar Blossom…”

  “Hello, shithead,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s not a dead sheep.”

  I stood there, letting the world shift at quarter points and then got a bearing and dropped my voice. “What’ve we got?” Every eye in the bar was on me.

  Vic’s voice held an edge that I had never heard before, approaching an excitement under the grave suppression of businesslike boredom. “Male, Caucasian, approximately twenty-one years of age… one entry wound characteristic of, maybe, a. 30–06.”

  I started to rub my eyes, noticed that my hand was shaking, and put it in my pocket. “All right… call the Store and tell them to send the Little Lady.”

  There was a brief pause, and I listened to the static from a radio on 137 patched through to a landline in Durant. “You don’t want any Cashiers?”

  “No, just the Bag Boys. I’ve got a highly dependable staff.”

  She laughed. “Wait till you get out here. These fucking sheep have been marching around on everything; I think the little bastards actually ate some of his clothes. And they shit on him.”

  “Great… Past the Hudson Bridge; you got your lights on?”

  “Yep.” She paused for a moment, and I listened to the static. “Walt?”

  I had started to hang up the phone. “Yeah?”

  “You better bring some beer to quiet Bob and Billy down.”

  This was a first. “You bet.” I started to hang up again.

  “Walt?”

  “Yep?”

  “It’s Cody Pritchard.”

  2

  There’s nothing like a dead body to make you feel, well, removed. I guess the big city boys, cataloguing forty or fifty homicides a year, get used to it, but I never have. I’ve been around enough wildlife and stock that it’s pretty commonplace, the mechanics of death. There’s a religion worthy of this right of passage, of taking that final step from being a vertical creature to a horizontal one. Yesterday you were just some nobody, today you’re the honored dead with bread bags rubber-banded over your hands. I secure what’s left of my dwindling humanity with the false confidence of the living, the deceitful wit of the eight-foot tall and bulletproof. Yea, verily, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will live forever. If I don’t, I sure as hell won’t become an unattended death in the state of Wyoming with sheep shit all over me.

  We had pretty much done our work, secured the area, lit it up, and finished taking pictures. There’s a kind of cocksure attitude that overtakes a man in the presence of the dearly departed, a you’re-dead-and-I’m-not kind of perspective. There’s something about a carcass of an animal like oneself, the post-shuffled, mortal coil that brings out the worst in me, and I start thinking that I’m funny.

  “I’ve been thinking about a search-and-rescue sheep squad.” I picked some of the dried shit from my pants and flicked it from my fingernails. “The way I figure it, the sheep would work up a damn storm and never raise any hell about working conditions. Might even get rid of some of this leafy spurge.” I looked around at the frosted milky-yellow plants that had been half eaten by the baahing attending witnesses we had corralled at the base of the hill. I had been here for nine hours, and the sun was beginning to scatter the gray blocks that made up the eastern horizon. The crime scene was a slight depression at the middle of a wreath-shaped ridge. “What do you think?”

  T.J. raised an eyebrow from her clipboard. “Cody Allen Pritchard.” She returned the eyebrow to the hunting license and wallet that were clipped to the official forms. “DOB, 8/1/81. Kind of has a ring to it.”

  Cody had looked better. Whoever had dispatched the young man had done so with a smooth and consistent pull-off as center shot. From the back, it looked as though someone had drilled a perfectly round hole between Cody’s shoulder blades; from the front, it looked as though someone had driven a stagecoach through him. The body was lying facedown, all the limbs arranged in a normal fashion, arms at the sides with palms turned to the lemon-colored sky. I was tempted to see if Cody’s lifeline was abnormally short, but his hands had already been bagged. A green John Deere hat with an adjustable strap in the back had been carted off with the unfired Model 94 Winchester 30–30 that had been found at his side. His clothes were in bad shape, even for a person who had had more than ten cc’s of lead pushed through him at approximately twenty-five hundred feet per second. The sheep had done a number on him. The orange vest was torn where they had tried to eat it, the sleeves of his flannel
shirt were shredded, and even his work boots looked as though they had been nibbled on. They had slept on him, gleaning the last energies of the late Cody Pritchard as his body cooled. Finally, much to the dissatisfaction of the crime lab people, they had shit on him.

  I gestured to the sheep down the hill. “I’m assuming that you’re going to want to question all the witnesses.”

  T.J. Sherwin had been the director of the Division of Criminal Investigation’s lab unit for seventeen odd years. I had always called her the Little Lady, as opposed to many of the other nicknames that periodically circulated through Wyoming’s law enforcement community: Bitch on Wheels, the Wicked Witch of the West, and Bag Lady. The last referred to the Division of Criminal Investigation’s home away from home, a converted grocery in Cheyenne, commonly tagged as the Store. Hence, DCI lab personnel were routinely called Bag Boys, and criminal investigators were Cashiers.

  When I first met T.J., she had informed me that I was just the kind of dinosaur she was going to make a personal career of eradicating. As the years passed and we worked numerous cases together, I remained a dinosaur, but I was her favorite dinosaur. “So, what do you think?” She had finally lowered the clipboard.

  “He doesn’t look like a deer.” I gave Cody another study.

  “Walt, let’s drop the aw shucks bullshit. This is one of the boys that was involved in that rape case two years ago.” T.J. had held my hand through the Little Bird rape investigation, introducing me to the world of secretors, medical swabs, and gynecological exams.

  “Yeah, well, I’ll follow up on the home front; he wasn’t any angel. We’ll go through the licensees, and, hopefully, find some poor, dumb bastard from Minnesota that got a little trigger happy.”

  “You don’t think it was an accident?”

  I thought about it. “Like I said, he wasn’t an altar boy.”

  “You have a feeling about this?”