Ring Game

by Pete Hautman

  “I mean, are you at your hotel?”

  For a moment, Crow thought he’d lost the connection, then he heard her say, “Yes, I’m in my room.”

  “Are you sitting?”

  “I’m standing at the window.”

  “How’s the weather?”

  “It’s warm. The sun is setting.”

  “How are you?”

  “Not great.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing.” She cleared her throat. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  Crow did not doubt that. Laura Debrowski always handled things. He said, “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.” Her voice was stronger now. Sometimes Crow wished she was less capable. Sometimes he wanted to be able to open pickle jars and kill spiders and slay dragons for her. But most of the time he liked Laura Debrowski straight up.

  “How’s the recording coming?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. How’s Milo?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “How are you?”

  “I’m okay.” Crow looked at the foil-wrapped shotgun he’d thrown on his sofa and reconsidered his answer. “I mean, I got shot at this morning,” he said. “But they missed.”

  The telephone was ringing when Hyatt emerged from the shower. He walked out into the living room, screwing the corner of a towel into his ear. Carmen sat on the sofa, inert, staring at the television.

  “You gonna answer that?” he asked.

  “Why? It’s probably Sophie.”

  Hyatt frowned, draped the towel over his shoulder, and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Oh. Hi, Chip.”

  “This is Eduardo!”

  “Oh. Sorry, Eduardo, I forgot.”

  “Those men you shot at could have been hurt. It was not strategic.”

  “Yeah, well it was either that or wait for you guys to do whatever it was you were going to do.”

  “Polly said to break your foot.”

  “Yes.” Hyatt shuddered. “Break my foot.” He was sure that Chip would have gone through with it despite their special relationship. Chip took his job very seriously.

  “Just one. Our strategy would not have been affected. It was not necessary to shoot.”

  “Yeah? Well I don’t plan to walk down the aisle on crutches, Eduardo.”

  “Chip was doing his job. We agreed that he could continue to do his job.”

  Hyatt looked down at his bare feet, still pink from the hot shower, whole and unbroken. “You could have at least warned me.”

  “I was under surveillance not to. My cover might have been broken.”

  “You—what? Never mind. Look, are you—are they going to try again?”

  “Polly has issued no further instructions respective to the matter of the subject.”

  “But you’ll let me know?”

  “Unknown. Circumstances might endeavor alternate strategies.”

  “Let me rephrase that, Eduardo. It is essential and strategic that you keep me informed as to any and all plans, proposals, or efforts to damage my immortal ass. This is absolutely essential and highly strategic. Understood?”

  There were a few seconds of silence, during which Hyatt imagined Chip’s cranial pressure increasing. He half expected to hear a pop.

  “I understand,” Chip said.

  “Good. Are Polly and Rupe still planning their sabbatical?”

  “They will be leaving for Stonecrop on the eighth, as per my earlier intelligence to you.”

  “Good. Report to me if anything changes.” Hyatt hung up. “You subhuman Nazi,” he added.

  Carmen asked, “Who was that?”

  “That was Chip the troglodyte.”

  “Who’s Eduardo?”

  “Same troglodyte.” The phone rang again; Hyatt answered. A shriek of anxious chatter hurtled from the receiver, causing him to jerk the phone away from his ear. He waited for it to subside, then cautiously brought the phone closer to his mouth. “Sophie? That you?” He frowned, listening, then handed the phone to Carmen. “It’s for you.”

  “Thanks a hell of a lot.” She took the phone. “Hi Mom.”

  Hyatt worked on drying the nooks and crannies of his lanky body as he watched Carmen. She was not a good phone talker. She muttered, let her sentences trail off, and often neglected to speak into the mouthpiece. Instead of saying “yes” or “no,” she would nod or shake her head. Hyatt could hear Sophie’s voice more clearly than he could Carmen’s. She was screaming about somebody named “Conita.” Whoever Conita was, and whatever she’d done, she had Sophie ready to pop a vessel.

  After listening to Crow describe his day, and the events that had led up to it, Debrowski said, “Forget about it, Crow. Walk away from those people. Play it the way you’d play a bad poker hand.”

  “It’s easier with cards,” Crow said. “But this is a family thing.” His hand was cramping from gripping the phone, and his ear was getting sore. He switched sides.

  “Family? My god, Crow, you’ve said yourself you aren’t one hundred percent sure that Sam is really your father. And we’re not even talking about Sam. We’re talking a friend of his that has a girlfriend with an idiot daughter who happens to be getting married. That’s not exactly what you’d call ‘family.’”

  “You take what you can get.” Crow was surprised to hear Debrowski telling him to back off. He thought of her as more the act-first-regret-later type. He said, “Besides, Hyatt Hilton has me sort of curious. I can’t figure out what he’s up to.”

  “Do me a favor, Crow. Forget about it. I don’t want to come home and find you full of buckshot.”

  “It was birdshot. And by the way, when are you coming home?”

  “Listen, you did what Axel asked. Just tell him what happened and let him sort it out.”

  “I’m not sure I even want to mention it to him at this point. I was thinking I might pay a visit to that church, see what the immortal nuts have to say about him. Just to bring some closure.”

  “Closure? Why? For who? Axel? You know that every time you try to do somebody a favor you get screwed. They taught us that in AA, remember? You can’t fix other people. All you can do is fix yourself.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “I am telling you. Walk.”

  “Tell me when you’re coming back.”

  Debrowski let a moment go by. “Maybe pretty soon. I’ve got a situation I might need to walk away from myself.”

  “Who are you trying to fix?”

  Crow thought her laugh sounded a bit hollow, but perhaps it was the distance.

  22

  You get old or you die. Take your pick.

  —Sam O’Gara

  BACK WHEN HE HAD lived by himself in the Motel 6, Axel had led a more disciplined life, allowing himself one twenty-minute nap every afternoon, setting his clock-radio to make sure he didn’t oversleep. Since he had moved into Sophie’s mobile home, all that had changed. Most days, he didn’t get his nap at all. Sophie would be puttering around making noise, or she would have him out driving around doing errands, or the phone would be ringing; or Harvel, the guy in the trailer behind them, would decide to mow his twelve by thirty-foot lawn with his four hundred-dollar, self-propelled, mulching LawnBoy. Then he’d start with his weed-whacker, an oversized, gasoline-powered trimmer that produced a whine even more annoying than the roar of his mower.

  As a result of these disruptive influences, Axel took his naps when and where and for however long he could. Whenever he found himself home alone, and Harvel wasn’t mowing, and the phone wasn’t ringing, he would hit the sack without so much as looking at his clock-radio. Usually something would wake him up within the hour, but if nothing did, he could dream on for hours.

  The depth of Sophie’s feelings about his plans to serve Conitas at the wedding reception had taken him completely by surprise. Of course, she got her way. She always did. In the face of Sophie’s offensive, Axel had crumpled like a shot dove. They would
be serving vegetable timbales and stuffed mushrooms and a bunch of other stuff nobody would eat if they weren’t stuck at a wedding reception and had nothing else to do with their hands. At least there’d be some Swedish meatballs. He’d agreed to give up his Conita plan, then gone into a sulk, drinking multiple Coca-Colas and reading back issues of Fair Times until Sophie finally left, saying something about going to Dayton’s with Carmen. Axel didn’t care where she was going. He just needed to be left alone.

  Axel had planned to spend the afternoon working on some variations on the Conita, but as soon as the door closed behind Sophie, the narcotic lure of an afternoon nap proved irresistible. Within five minutes he was deep into a dream about the state fair, selling tacos at the top of the Ferris wheel. He had been asleep for nearly three hours when a slamming door brought him back to consciousness. He heard the crackle of Sophie’s voice, then Carmen’s low mutter. The shaft of sun grazing the curtains told him it was late in the day. Maybe they would leave him alone for a while, let him wake up slowly.

  Almost the moment he had that thought, the bedroom door opened.

  “What are you doing?” Sophie demanded.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?”

  “Are you sleeping?”

  Axel struggled to sit up, but his body refused to bend. He twisted to the side, swung his legs over the edge of the mattress, and let their weight pull him up into a sitting position.

  “How can you sleep? It’s almost seven o’clock at night!”

  He could tell that Sophie had had a few drinks.

  “Did you already eat dinner?”

  “No.” Axel rolled his shoulders, feeling the blood start to move again.

  “You were in bed with your shoes?”

  Axel looked down. He was fully dressed. “I just laid down for a minute. I fell asleep.” He scratched his head and was surprised to find that he was bald on top. He’d been bald a good thirty years, but it still took him by surprise sometimes. Sophie was giving him her look, the one she gave him when she felt she’d been wronged—arms crossed, jaw set, nostrils flared.

  Axel licked his lips, fighting off remnants of sleep. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “We have to talk.”

  Axel groaned. He had no idea what she wanted to talk about, but he could tell he wasn’t going to like it. “Now? I’m half awake. I need a Coke.” He stood up, hoping his knee wouldn’t lock up on him again. “What do you want to talk about?”

  Sophie looked back through the doorway at Carmen, who was sitting in the kitchenette drinking a beer. Returning her attention to Axel, she said, “We have to talk about Joe Crow.”

  The dinner menu that evening at Chez Crow included Grape Nuts with milk, one egg lightly scrambled, and a pint of chocolate Haagen Dazs. As he worked his way through the tub of ice cream, Crow let his eyes rest on the red notebook lying open at his elbow. The items listed on the page were numbered nineteen through twenty-six, the latest in the list of poker rules he had begun recording several months earlier. The most recent entry, number twenty-six had occurred to him during the first course of the evening’s meal: If you don’t know the rules, don’t play.

  After an indefinite period of blank thought, Crow drew a picture of Mickey Mouse’s head next to the numeral 27. He had learned to draw Mickey in the fourth grade and had never forgotten. He could also draw Yogi Bear, Donald Duck, and Spiderman’s hands. Unfortunately, he had failed to fulfill his early promise as a cartoonist, and by the time he turned ten years old, the other artists at Cedar Manor Elementary School had surpassed him. Now he revisited his talent only when he happened to have a pencil in his hand and nothing whatsoever in his head. He drew spikes around the circumference of Mickey’s ears, and a little lightning bolt at the end of each spike. Mickey on LSD.

  “Well, shit,” he finally said, stabbing the pencil into the lone grapefruit in the fruit bowl. So much for personal goal setting. He’d been living in a motivational limbo for most of his thirty-five years. Maybe it was time he got used to it.

  Seconds later, when the phone rang, he went for it like a drowning man lunging for a lifesaver.

  “Joe?” It was Axel, the closest thing he had to a taskmaster.

  “Axel! How’s it going?”

  “It’s going fine, Joe.” He sounded tired. “I just called to tell you, you know what we were talking about before? About Hyatt?”

  “Yeah. I, uh, I talked to him today.” He hadn’t yet figured out what to tell Axel, if anything.

  “I heard.”

  “You did? You talked to him, too?”

  “No. I talked to Carmen.” Axel cleared his throat. “She said you were pretty rough on him.”

  “Did she tell you he took a shot at me?”

  He heard Axel say something to someone, then a sharp squawk that could only be Sophie Roman. “Listen, Joe, I’m not saying you did anything wrong—”

  “That’s good, ’cause I didn’t.”

  “But I want you to leave him alone now, okay?”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I had no business asking you to investigate him. So let’s just forget about it, okay?”

  “Sure. Whatever you say. By the way, I’ve arranged for your limo.”

  “You did? What’s it going to cost?”

  “It’s my wedding gift to the bride and groom.”

  “Oh! Well, okay then. Thanks.”

  “Yeah, you’re welcome.”

  “Uh, look, I gotta go, Joe. Talk to you later.” Axel hung up.

  Crow looked at the phone, set it back in its cradle, and returned his attention to his list. He retrieved his pencil from the grapefruit and drew a speech balloon coming from Mickey Mouse’s mouth: Don’t try to make people like you.

  23

  Once you fold a hand, you are better off never knowing what you would have got.

  —Crow’s rules

  “YOU OUGHTA GO FISHING,” Sam said. “Ax ain’t worried about you, no reason you oughta be worrying about him.”

  “I’m not worried about him, Sam,” Crow said. He leaned against the battered grill of a thirty-year-old Ford flatbed, one of the many unfinished restoration projects filling Sam’s backyard.

  “You wanna hold this here?” Sam held out a thick, black extension cord. Two one-inch-long twists of bare copper wire protruded from the end.

  Crow accepted the wire without thinking. “I was just saying that if I was Axel I’d go with my first instinct and take a closer look at Hyatt Hilton. The guy’s up to something. Why do you think Ax told me to lay off? It’s not like I was costing him anything.”

  Sam lowered himself to his hands and knees, rolled onto his back, and pulled himself under the faded red truck. “Maybe it was the shotgun,” he said, his voice filtering up through the engine compartment and echoing from the open hood. “Ax don’t like guns.”

  “I don’t know,” Crow said. “It feels wrong is all. I’ve been thinking about it all week.”

  “You a hundred percent sure he don’t want you to keep doing what you was doing?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “On account of Ax don’t al’ys say what he wants a guy to hear.”

  “You think he wants me to keep investigating Hyatt?”

  “Could be. You want to feed me that cord? Just run ’er under the truck here, and don’t let it touch nothin’. She’s hot.”

  Crow looked at the bare copper wires, then followed the extension cord with his eyes across the lawn, up the steps, and into the back door. He returned his eyes to the bare copper with new respect.

  “This is plugged in?”

  “Just slide ’er in here, son.”

  “Jesus, Sam, how come you didn’t tell me? I could’ve killed myself.”

  “Just feed her to me slow, son.”

  Crow crouched and peered under the truck. Sam had somehow managed to light a cigarette. Smoke curled around the starter motor.

  “What are you doing, Sam?”


  “Got a jammed-up starter.”

  “What’s the juice for?”

  “Gotta break ’er loose, son.” He reached out with a grease-rimed hand. “Give ’er here, son.”

  With some misgivings, Crow slid the end on the cord across the dirt toward Sam.

  “Thing you got to remember is Ax has got what you call your infernal conflicts.” Sam grasped the cord. “He’s got his own private thoughts, and then he’s got Sophie’s thoughts mixed in there. That’s the problem with living with a gal. A guy spends half his day trying to figure out if what he done on his other half the day is gonna get him in trouble.” Sam brushed the wire against the frame, producing a miniature flash of lightning.

  Crow jerked his hand away from the bumper. “You sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Son, I been fixin’ starters since hand crankers.” He squinted his eyes down to slits and jammed the bare wires against the starter connections. Instinctively, Crow jumped up and backed away from the truck. The engine roared and turned over once, followed by a metallic scream of protest, a loud popping sound, and a flurry of sparks. A cloud of smoke rose up through the engine compartment.

  Crow crouched down and peered under the truck.

  “Sam? You okay?”

  As the smoke dissipated he could see his father’s soot-blackened face. Sam’s eyes were open wider than usual, and his cigarette terminated in a frayed mass of tobacco shreds.

  “Way-ell,” he said, “she’s cooked now!”

  For the past two weeks, Crow had been working out afternoons, in part because he’d been having trouble getting out of bed, and partly because he wished to avoid Beaut Miller, whose latest intimidation technique was to wear a pair of dark wraparound sunglasses and stare at Crow from across the room while lifting some outrageously heavy weight. Beaut’s workouts had become alarmingly vigorous, and his overall size seemed to be increasing on a daily basis. Crow had considered confronting him again, but his more rational self decided that avoidance was a better long-term strategy.

  Bigg Bodies, at two o’clock in the afternoon, was nearly deserted. Only one other person was using the facilities—a desperately pedaling woman on the recumbent stationary bike. Bigg had shut himself away in his office. The heavy metal tapes that blasted from the sound system mornings and evenings had been replaced by a talk radio station. Afternoons lacked the energy of mornings and early evenings, but Crow liked it. He’d been doing less lifting and putting more time in on the aerobic equipment, reading Sports Illustrated or Vogue or whatever he found in the box near the door. Today he’d lucked onto a nearly complete copy of the Star Tribune, only two days old.