Ring Game

by Pete Hautman

  “No sir,” he said. “I don’t believe that I want to own this vehicle today.”

  Crow sighed. He felt the weight of the Jaguar on his soul, dragging him down and holding him on the bottom like a three thousand-pound pink leather anchor. He said, “Look, suppose I was to sell it to you for a hundred dollars? Would you buy it for a hundred?”

  “Shee-it, I’d buy ’er for a hunnert,” said the mechanic, suddenly interested.

  Harl the owner gave his mechanic a disgusted look. “Since when’d you have a hundred bucks, Gunner?”

  “I could get it.”

  Harl, of whom there was apparently only one, shook his head and said to Crow, “You sayin’ you’re gonna sell me this for a hundred bucks?”

  Crow shook his head. “I’m just making a point.”

  Harl waited for more.

  “I’m saying,” Crow said, “I want you to buy this car off me. You’ve got me over a barrel here. I’m not going anywhere. We just have to find a price we can both agree on.

  Harl pushed out his lips, then gave his head a quick shake. “Mister, I’m going to tell you something straight out. I don’t need another broken-down car, especially a foreign one, especially one with pink insides. I don’t have the kind of money you want.”

  “I can get a hunnert, Dave,” the mechanic said.

  The owner, whose name was now Dave, said, “He ain’t gonna sell it for a hundred bucks, Gunner, so just shut your yap.”

  Crow said, “Maybe you’ve got something to trade.”

  For the first time, Dave showed a spark of interest. He said to Gunner, “Smitty still trying to sell off his Judge?”

  “Last I heard.”

  Dave said to Crow, “You wait right here, Mister.” He went into his cluttered office.

  Gunner said, looking at the Jag’s ruined engine, “I do believe she’d take a Chevy short block.”

  Crow tightened his lips and looked away. He had mixed feelings about the Jag, but replacing its twelve-cylinder powerplant with an outdated Chevrolet V-8 bordered on sacrilege, like pouring ketchup on foie gras. He walked away from Gunner and the Jag, stood at the side of the road and looked west, thinking again about Las Vegas, about the last hand he’d played, going on a hunch, going all-in, eight thousand four hundred dollars on a lousy pair of jacks. Why had he done that? Crow thought he knew why, but he didn’t like to think it out loud.

  It was the same impulse that caused young boys to leap from high places. The same urge felt by skydivers and war heroes: the thrill of stepping into the unknown; flouting the odds; wallowing in the brief heady moment of “I don’t give a damn.” Even as he now regretted betting those jacks, he felt himself careening toward another such decision. He was going to let these Cornhuskers have his Jag. He was going to take whatever they offered, because he wanted to get into something that rolled, and he wanted it now, and he didn’t give a damn.

  He heard a rumble and screech. A bright yellow, three-decade-old Pontiac GTO pulled up to the gas pumps. The decal on the rear quarter panel read, “The Judge.”

  11

  For as long as Planet Earth shall spin through Space and Time, until the Eternity of Love shall shrivel on the Vine of Life, so Everafter shall our Endless Love shine upon this Universe.

  —Wedding vows of Gerald Roman and Sophie Stevens, 1975

  WITH THE RIGHT STICK or the right carrot, it was possible to turn an Asshole into a Player. Hyatt had seen it happen many times. Businessmen and politicians and cops were particularly easy. What was more difficult, though not impossible, was to turn an Asshole into a Sucker. This was the challenge he faced now, sitting in Perkins over a poorly made vegie omelet, looking into Sophie Roman’s harsh blue eyes.

  The luncheon with Sophie had been Hyatt’s idea. “I just want to get to know my future mother-in-law,” he’d told her. Sophie had accepted his invitation with an ungraceful, “I suppose.” Hyatt had suggested Cafe Brenda, an upscale downtown restaurant with a good selection of vegetarian entrees. Sophie had countered with, “How about if I just meet you at the Perkins?”

  They’d spent the first half hour at Perkins eating and discussing the wedding. Sophie had not been impressed by Reverend Buck.

  “I don’t know,” Sophie said. “He seemed kind of strange; laughing all the time. Why did he laugh when he shook my hand? I spent the whole meeting wondering if I had something stuck in my teeth. Besides, we’re Catholic. I don’t know if I like the idea of Carmen being married to a Quaker by a Lutheran.”

  Hyatt had told Sophie he was a Quaker. He’d met a Quaker once.

  “The Reverend’s a marriage specialist,” Hyatt said. “Besides, Lutherans and Catholics and Quakers are pretty much the same these days. A lot of Catholics are marrying Quakers, you know. In fact, the Reverend was telling us that in Europe they go to each other’s churches.” Hyatt didn’t know whether there were any Quakers in Europe, but he knew that Sophie was impressed by anything European. “Whichever one is closer, that’s where they go. Methodists and Lutherans, too. It’s all about creating harmony, and getting people together, you know.” Hyatt had no idea what he was talking about, but he kept talking, watching Sophie, waiting for her eyes to glaze over. “The basic ceremony is the same, no matter what the religion is, and since a lot of people get married outside in parks and like that, it doesn’t matter anymore where you get married, either.”

  “I don’t see why they don’t have Jesus Christ at that church,” Sophie interrupted. “How come it’s ‘Christ-Free’?”

  Hyatt had wondered that, too. He had asked Buck Manelli about it, Buck had laughed. “Ha ha ha ha ha! Jesus, Hy, it’s not like ‘sugar-free.’”

  That had confused Hy.

  Buck had explained. “It’s not like, ‘Christ-Free,’ as in free of Christ. It’s like the Christ … Free-Lutheran-Church. Get it?”

  Hyatt got it, but when he opened his mouth to explain to Sophie, he once again became confused. “It’s just a name,” he said. “They have as much Jesus Christ as any other religion. They have pictures of him on the walls. Did you see the pictures?” He was giving it everything he had, but Sophie, picking at her chicken salad, remained distant and cool.

  Hyatt decided to change direction. “How are you doing on finding a place?”

  “Fine. We found an American Legion hall that’s pretty nice. Axel wants to take a look at it, but I think it’ll be fine. I still don’t see why you two don’t want to get married in a church.”

  “It’s because of the Catholic-Quaker thing,” Hyatt said, once again plunging into the murk. “According to the Vatican, a union between a Catholic and a non-Catholic can be recognized by the church if it’s sanctioned by the state, but not performed on consecrated ground. Remember when they started letting you eat meat on Fridays? That whole deal, with all the new rules, this was part of it. It’s okay for Catholics to marry Quakers, but only if it’s not in a church, and that’s not me talking, it’s the pope.”

  Sophie’s eyes finally glazed.

  Hyatt said, “You don’t like me much, do you?”

  Sophie blinked. “I just don’t know if you’re right for my daughter.”

  “I can understand that. I’m a few years older than Carmen, and you don’t know me. I’m not a doctor or a lawyer. I understand that you want better for your daughter.”

  Sophie lit one of her long brown cigarettes. That was good, Hyatt thought. She wasn’t talking back at him, putting all her energy into forming her own thoughts. She was listening.

  Hyatt said, “I won’t lie to you. I’m no altar boy. But I’ve never asked a girl to marry me before. Carmen is special.”

  “She’s no altar girl herself,” Sophie said dryly.

  Hyatt allowed himself a smile, holding his breath to force a blush onto his face. He said, “I know she’s had her problems. She told me all about that guy she was with before. Marriage will change all that. It’ll be a new life for both of us.”

  Sophie flicked an ash onto the remains of
her chicken salad. “You think so? I got married, that’s when my problems really started to kick in.”

  Hyatt spread his hands, palms forward, and bowed his head, accepting the validity of her experience. Sophie continued. “Gerry had a good job at LeJeune Steel when I married him. He had a seventy-three Buick Electra, and he looked like Robert Redford’s baby brother.” Sophie squinted at Hyatt and frowned. “He was a big guy, about your size. Treated me like a princess. Two weeks after the wedding, I found out I was pregnant. You know what he did when I told him we were going to have a baby?”

  Hyatt shook his head.

  “He hit me.” She touched her left cheek. “Here.”

  Hyatt held his breath again, clamping his jaw, closing his throat, and contracting his abdomen to produce a look of suppressed rage.

  “When I was three months pregnant, he got fired from LeJeune and never worked another day as long as I knew him. We stayed married three years,” Sophie said. “The worst three years of my life.” She stabbed out her cigarette on a lettuce leaf.

  Hyatt said nothing. He was still holding his breath.

  Sophie said, looking at Hyatt’s red face, “It was a long time ago.” She let a hand flutter into the air, releasing him from his silent fury.

  Hyatt let his breath out slowly, let his shoulders drop down. “I don’t hate anybody,” he said, “except a wife-beater.”

  “He came back a few years later, and we gave it another try, but it was the same story all over again. He hit me, and I stuck him with a paring knife. Stuck it right in his cheekbone.”

  “Jesus!”

  “The funny thing was, I missed him when he left. Both times. But only for a few months. A man—even a terrible man—can make a woman need him. Even when he’s the last thing she needs.”

  Hyatt nodded, not entirely sure where this was going.

  “What do you think Carmen needs?” she asked.

  Hyatt hesitated, letting the question hang tantalizingly before him. He believed he knew the correct answer, the answer that would make her happy. Carmen needed what Sophie craved for herself. It wasn’t romance, or excitement, or intellectual stimulation, or children, or fame. Sophie was fifty years old, unmarried, and living in a mobile home. She wanted one thing above all others.

  “Security,” Hyatt said. “I want her to have a good home and a secure future.”

  Sophie smiled.

  “I want what’s best for everybody,” Hyatt added.

  “Good. Because you know what would be best for Axel? You know what he’d really, really like?”

  Hyatt shook his head. Axel Speeter was a complete mystery to him. Like Carmen, Axel embodied qualities of the Sucker, the Asshole, and the Player—all rolled up into one.

  What would Axel really, really like? Hyatt didn’t have a clue, but he was sure that Sophie was about to enlighten him.

  “Swedish meatballs,” Sophie said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “He would like Swedish meatballs at the reception.”

  “That’s it?”

  Sophie nodded.

  “I’ve got no problem there.”

  “Good!”

  They looked at one another, enjoying the warm feeling of having successfully communicated. Hyatt wasn’t sure where to go next, so he said, “Did Carmen tell you that I got a job with Hard Camera?”

  Sophie’s eyes widened. “The TV show?”

  “Yes. I’m a reporter now, working directly for Drew Chance, the host.”

  “I know who Drew Chance is.”

  “It’s just part-time. I’m what they call a stringer.”

  “You’re going to be on TV?”

  Hyatt nodded seriously. “Oh yeah. I’m gonna be on TV.”

  Joe Crow found Wes Larson sitting in the rearmost booth at Garrity’s, nursing a mug of pale coffee.

  “You’re late,” said Larson.

  Crow had known Wes since college. Hadn’t seen him in more than ten years, and this was the greeting he got.

  “Sorry. I got a speeding ticket.” He resisted the urge to prove it by showing him the citation.

  Wes frowned as he digested Crow’s excuse. Physically, he had not changed much. He still looked like a giant thumb with beady, unblinking eyes. Only nowadays, the thumb had less hair, wore a cheap gray suit, and was employed by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. The thumb said, “You must have been driving too fast.”

  An unimaginative, suspicious, and humorless man, Wes Larson’s view of the world had much in common with that of a laboratory rat memorizing a maze. By way of compensating for his negative qualities—all of which he easily admitted to—Wes had become methodical, punctual, scrupulously honest, and profoundly frugal. Crow liked Wes, but he had never particularly enjoyed his company. There had been a year in college when they had almost been friends, but it hadn’t lasted. Being so different, they found each other fascinating to behold, but ultimately intolerable. Wes knew that he was boring, and that he made people uncomfortable. That was okay with Wes. He was who he was.

  Having been born without an ounce of charisma, Wes had wisely married an ebullient, extroverted woman who did everything she could to preserve his existing relationships. For the past ten years the only contact between Crow and his old college acquaintance had been the birthday and Christmas cards he received every year from Wes and his wife. The cards always arrived in a timely fashion, and always included a short personal note in the wife’s handwriting—despite the fact that Crow had never met her.

  “It wasn’t the speed, it was the car.” Crow went on to tell Wes about his GTO, thinking he might get a kick out of it.

  Wes said, as if explaining something to a child, “The newer cars get much better gas mileage, Joe. You should consider getting a Toyota.”

  “Next time I save up twenty grand I’ll do that, Wes.”

  “Actually, the Corollas aren’t that expensive, Joe.” Two faint lines appeared on Wes’s brow, effecting an extraordinarily earnest expression. “They are rated very high by the Consumer Union.”

  “I’ll check into it.”

  “I’ve got two hundred thirty thousand miles on my Camry. The secret is to change the oil every three thousand miles.” Wes was squeezing his coffee mug. His nails and fingertips were white from the pressure.

  “Amazing.” Crow decided to forget about bonding. It was too painful to watch Wes Larson talk about nothing. “Wes, let me tell you what I’m doing here.”

  Wes’s chin bobbed once. He relaxed his thick fingers and rested his hands on either side of his mug. Blood returned to his fingertips. He remained upright and rigid, but Crow instantly sensed a lessening of tension in the booth. Wes Larson was happiest when he had a mission, a plan, a goal to achieve. Small talk had always been his personal nightmare.

  Crow explained that he had been asked as a favor by a family friend to investigate the background of one Hyatt Hilton. “All I really need to know is if he has any sort of criminal record. No big deal.”

  “That’s all?” Wes asked.

  “Yeah. I’m just trying to do this guy a favor.” Recalling Axel’s concerns about bigamy, Crow added, “Also, I need to know whether he’s currently married. That’s easy to do, isn’t it? A simple computer check?” Crow cringed at his own words. He must sound to Wes the way Axel had sounded to him—begging a favor while minimizing the difficulty of the free services he was requesting.

  “What do you have?” Wes asked.

  “Name and address, that’s all. He used to work at a place called Ambrosia, but I think they went out of business.”

  “And you want to know if he’s a bad guy, and to know whether or not he’s married, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Tell me this. If I do this for you, does it take care of the time you dragged me out of the Viking and drove me home?”

  “The Viking?” Crow hadn’t thought about the Viking Bar in years. He wasn’t sure what Wes was talking about. It could have described any number of
drunken nights.

  Wes said, “I always felt I owed you one there, Joe.”

  “You never owed me, Wes. But sure, this would definitely take care of it.” It made a kind of weird sense, he supposed, that Wes would think this way. That thumb-shaped brain case must contain a complex array of scales—good and bad, assets and debits, income and expenses, right and wrong.

  “When do you need it?” Wes asked.

  “Sooner is better.”

  Wes nodded. “I’ll call you,” he said.

  Val Frankel squared up the three-page contract and placed it face up on Polly DeSimone’s black glass desk.

  “I’ve never seen a contract like this before,” she said.

  “It’s perfectly straightforward,” said Polly. “You make two appearances, one week apart. We pay a flat fee of four thousand, eight hundred dollars. And you agree to complete confidentiality. We discussed all this on the phone. Is there a problem?”

  Val lifted her cup of tea, touched it to her bright red lips, set it back on the desk. She could have been anywhere between thirty and forty-five years old. She had a narrow waist, surgically enhanced breasts, and the muscular legs of a dancer or waitress. Her makeup had been generously applied, giving her skin the look of calfskin. Most important, her hair was a rich, dark brown—its natural color.

  “I understand that,” said Val. “But what’s this: ‘Provider agrees not to reveal the trade secrets of ACO Ministries, nor to describe any ACO Ministries practices, rites, or beliefs to any person or entity, living or dead, until such time as provider shall die, or until the end of time, whichever shall come first.’ I mean, isn’t that kinda over the top?”

  Polly tapped her pen on the glass surface of her desk. It was always something with these actors, but this was the first time she’d actually seen one read the contract.

  “Is that a problem?” she asked.

  Val smiled and shook her dark brown mane. “Not really. I mean, I already signed a confidentiality agreement before you even told me what the job was. I just think it’s kinda weird is all.”

  Polly returned Val’s smile, leaned forward, and placed the pen on the contract. “You’re an actor. You should be used to weird.”