He said, “I’m guessing I don’t have to tell you what this is about.”
I gurgled out some blood and muddy water, and he dropped me back in, faceup this time. He sneered down at me. He had the kind of face kids have nightmares about: dog turd eyes and a small, round mouth like a lamprey’s. His nose had been broken at least once, maybe half a dozen times. His hands were thick and soft but as strong as steel clamps, and I might as well have been fighting drop-forged steel when he picked me up again and tossed me onto the road.
He squatted down next to me and said, “I’ve been told not to hurt you too bad yet, Slim, and that’s a shame. I want to hurt you. I want to hurt you and keep on hurting you. Then I’d hurt everyone you know and love, too.”
“Lot of hurting,” I said. Something like that. My tongue wasn’t exactly in top working order, and my voice sounded like Latin in a blender.
He shrugged. “That’s what you wandered into with this. World of pain. And one more thing.” He stood and stepped back a half step and wound one up and kicked me in the head. If it was a field goal attempt, he would have hit from eighty yards out. The world snapped to black, and I found myself dreaming of headache pills and angry redheads. Peggy appeared before me, holding a butter knife and calling me dirty names. Anci shook her head and went back to reading about dystopian futures and young girls with bows and arrows. Susan had me arrested for stealing a towel. When I woke up again at last, the women were gone. The bad man, too. I was lying in the rain, and some pecker behind the wheel of a yellow pickup was blaring his horn at me like I was a turtle crossing the road.
I called Jeep Mabry and asked him to meet me at my doctor’s office. Some reason, I decided against ordering up an ambulance. Probably I was embarrassed about getting bushwhacked like that. It’s a stupid man-thing. I pried myself up and climbed on the bike and rode slowly into Herrin. A couple of times, the traffic blurred out around me, or the road did, but eventually I arrived at my destination. I parked in the lot and went inside the little building on Lincoln Drive. It was a slow morning, and the staff looked at me and the blood on my swollen head and swallowed their tongues and sprang into action. After a while, I found myself in the examining room. A nurse was cleaning the cut on my lip with a cotton swab and some alcohol when Dr. Cooper came rumbling in. He was a fat man with thinning hair and sharply intelligent eyes. He had this little pinch on his top lip that twisted his mouth slightly upward and made him look like a smart-ass, which was just as well, because the rest of his mouth did that, too.
He said, “Fun times on that hog of yours?”
I said, “Not exactly.”
“Listen to me, it’ll happen sooner or later. What’s it got in it?”
“Engine?”
“Yeah.”
“Thirteen-hundred.”
He said, “Not enough to outrun statistics. I tell you what, if I could get rid of one thing in my professional life, it’d be those wicked contraptions. Worst man-killers I ever saw.”
“Women, too.”
“True. They get everyone eventually. Equal opportunity carnage. I got a pamphlet around here somewhere I could let you see. You want to see it? Got some real pretty pictures. One guy ran off the road into barbed wire, came out looking like a sliced weenie.”
“I’ll be honest, I’m not too interested in that.”
“You guys never are,” he said. He thought for a moment. “I’ll try again. This ain’t something domestic, is it? Get hit with a frying pan?”
“That seems kinda sexist to me.”
“And yet it happens,” he said. “Besides, I always assumed they grabbed a frying pan because it was the object most likely to knock the sonofabitch’s head clean off.”
“There is that,” I said.
“Gets the job done. Speaking of which, I had a situation up at the hospital a year or so back I’ll tell you about.”
“Isn’t that violating some kind of doctor-patient thing?”
“Usually, but this thing was in all the papers later anyway. I was pulling a shift at the ER. Woman comes in with her arm all cut up. Ugly stuff. Torn to strings. Looked like she’d run it through a thresher.”
“Did she?”
“Did she what?”
“Run it through a thresher? Because that’s a common thing around here.”
He said, “I know. No. Shut up. Anyway, I take her back and start looking at the arm, and it’s cut up good by these little fragments embedded in the skin. Oddly shaped fragments. Like bits of china, but rough, not smooth. I start tweezing them out. Know what they were?”
“How much can I give you not to tell me?”
“Bone. Skull bone, to be precise. Few bits of scalp, too. Some with these little hairs still attached.”
“I’m maybe not liking this story so much,” I said. “Anyway, my stomach isn’t.”
“Uh-huh. Anyway, this woman, she’d been scheming with her sister to kill her husband. He was an abuser. Wife-beater, I mean. Was beating her like a men’s group drum for twenty years or so. Finally, she has enough. One night he comes through the door, three sheets to the wind as usual, ready to treat his wife like a speed bag, only this time her sister’s there, too, with a shotgun. Crouched behind the dining room table, waiting to do the deed. You understand? She got her sister to pull the trigger. Couldn’t do it herself.”
“I get it.”
“Thing is, though, it’s a twenty-eight gauge.”
“Oh, shit.”
He shrugged and said, “Yeah. You know how it is, though. You inflate terrible things in your brain, make them out to be more than they are. Stronger, I mean. Twenty years of hitting and kicking and biting and worse, this sonofabitch must have seemed like a Godzilla to these two. So they choose too much weapon, thinking they’d need it to put him down. Damn thing is practically a cannon. Bastard’s head explodes like a piñata, only there wasn’t any candy inside.”
“Doc . . .”
“So these bone fragments hit the wife in the arm and tear her up like she’d gone a round or two with a woodchipper.”
“That’s a pretty story.”
“Thought you’d like that.”
“It’s not a domestic,” I said. “I had a run-in with someone, but not with Peggy. Or any other woman, for that matter. And there weren’t any shotguns involved.”
He shook his head and grunted. The nurse finished what he was doing and hustled out without looking at either of us.
Dr. Cooper said, “Reckon we shouldn’t be talking like this in front of him. He’s young and unwise as yet in the ways of the world. Something like this, a fight or an assault, I’m supposed to call the law.”
“I was kinda hoping I could talk you out of that.”
“I was kinda thinking that’s what you were kinda hoping. I’ll try one more time. This something happened at the mine?”
“Why do you ask?”
He hefted his shoulders and said, “’Count of I get about as many of you guys in here for fighting as I do for work-related injuries. I tell you, Slim, think I’ve about seen it all. Had a guy in here couple weeks back had part of a rock-bolt stabilizer stuck in him.”
“Ouch.”
“That’s what he said. Repeatedly. And that’s just the violence cases. You guys are always doing stupid stuff down there, too. You happen to remember a guy went by the name of Bug Nuts?”
“Sure. Crazy little asshole, works that Gateway mine up near Red Bud.”
“Not anymore. He’s gone.”
“Dead?”
“No, dummy. He went on vacation to hooker Disneyland. Yes, he’s dead.”
“Hooker Disneyland?”
Cooper ignored me. “Kid was, what, twenty-eight, twenty-nine? It ain’t right, is it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Your name gets to be Bug Nuts—and this is underground coal miners calling you this—a bad end is more or less in the cards. “What happened?”
“Well, you know, that little guy was loony as a Turkish hermaphrodit
e. He pissed on the man-trip rail, set himself on fire through a stream of his own piss.”
“Why in God’s name did he do that?”
“On a dare,” Cooper said.
That rang true. Ignorant idiots at coal mines were always daring one another to do lethally dangerous shit. And not just the inby men, either. I once saw a mine owner “prove” that filter masks were unnecessary by shoving his face into the longwall pan and sucking in heaping lungfuls of coal fine. When he died—and he would—he was going to die hard.
Cooper said, “That’s the guess, anyway. Ain’t no one took responsibility yet, and probably no one will. Hell, it’s practically murder.”
He picked up the cotton and alcohol and finished cleaning me up. He plucked a piece of gravel out of my ear the nurse had overlooked. He shined his light in my eyes and put his thumbs on either side of my nose. “This here don’t look so bad. Eyes are working okay, and your face ain’t broke. Maybe we’ll just chalk this one up to household clumsiness.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
He accepted my gratitude with another grunt and gave me a shot. I don’t know that there was any medicinal value in it. I sort of got the feeling he liked giving shots to assholes who dragged him into the office on his free time. He gave me another little lecture about motorcycles and forced me to take the pamphlet he’d mentioned with the guy cut up like a weenie. Then he shook my hand and let me go.
I hopped down from the table and went out into the waiting room, where they were waiting on me like a pack of hyenas. As soon as I was in sight, they jumped on me with armloads of paperwork and insurance forms. I was still working my way through it when, something like three or four years later, the office door opened and Jeep Mabry appeared.
Lemme tell you a thing or two about Jeep. This was a friend of mine from way back. Friend’s maybe not the word, exactly. More like the brother I never had, the kind of brother who’d kill for you, or die. We came up together, dated the same girls, flunked the same classes, haunted the same haunts. Mostly, though, we raised all manner of hell together for so long that a lot of folks got to thinking of us as brothers. Which, like I said, in a way we were.
Jeep went six-eight or nine, four inches taller than me, and weighed in at 275 at least, not a bit of it fat. His head was as big and hard as one of those cast-iron tourist binocular stands, but his face was movie-star handsome and his eyes flashed with something might have been backcountry meanness, or cunning. We went back so far neither of could remember a time when we weren’t attached at the hip, and we had a long-running agreement to ruin the funeral of whichever of us went first. We were pals, fellow coal miners, comrades in arms, and best buds.
“Jesus, Slick, you look like shit,” he said.
“Thanks.”
He said, “Correction: You look like shit took a shit.”
“What?”
“I’m trying out some new lines.”
“Keep trying.”
“Motorcycle?”
“I’ve already done this routine with Cooper,” I said. “You don’t have a pamphlet, do you?”
“No. What?”
“Never mind.”
“Coffee?”
“Buckets.”
I rode into town and met him at the little restaurant on the corner of North Park and Poplar. Little place called Hardee’s. I checked in by phone with Peggy at school—neglecting to mention my trip to the doctor’s office—and then Jeep and I sat in a booth and ate a late breakfast of biscuits and those hash browns they serve in a paper sleeve and black coffee strong enough to kick your ass on Friday night and laugh in your face about it till Saturday morning. We barely spoke over our food. I had trouble chewing, but was hungry from my beating. Jeep was just hungry. Jeep was always hungry, like a locomotive furnace. We finished our meal and cleared our table. We chatted with a couple of the old-timers who seemed to gather there every morning and afternoon to mull over the state of the world. No shots or angry words were exchanged. It felt good, but temporary.
When we were settled again and ready to get down to it, Jeep said, “Maybe you should start at the top.”
Which is what I did. I started at the beginning and told him all of it—the crazy, confusing all of it—and when I was finished he settled back and sighed and said, “So you’ve got yourself tangled up with Matt Luster, have you?”
“Looks that way.”
“And his daughter.”
“Yup. Well, by extension anyway.”
“I’m going to be straight with you, Slick. This was maybe not your brightest idea.”
“Hell, I know,” I said, “but they dangled that pension in front of me and I snapped at it. Making it worse, there’s at least a chance I’ve gotten myself involved in something has to do with those meth dealers.”
“You’re right. That would make things worse. Did you at least catch the department name on your friend’s uniform?”
I shook my head. It hurt and I winced with it. I got the feeling I’d be wincing with it for weeks to come. That was an impressive kick.
I said, “No. Now that I think about it, though, the uni was too clean, like maybe he’d just unwrapped it, and I’m starting to think the badge was some kind of kid’s toy. It all happened kind of fast.”
“And you’ve never seen him before?”
“I think I’d remember. He had a face even Mother Mary would love to hit.”
“I know I will, I ever catch up to him.” He paused a moment to think. “This thing, you think you can just walk away from it now?”
“That’s the idea. Run away from it, actually,” I said. “Just as soon as I make a final report and get what’s been promised to me.”
“Noted. Maybe some good will come out of it.”
“I’m hoping.”
“Be nice for you and Anci.”
“It would.”
“How is she anyway?”
“Changing topics.”
“Changing topics.”
“As wonderful and terrifying as always,” I said.
“Nice to know.”
“You know,” I mused, warming to the topic, “I was thinking the other day about her getting older and maybe moving away one day soon.”
“No offense, Slick, but you always were too sentimental for your own good.”
“Well, there’s gotta be a right time for sentimentality sometimes, right?” I said. “Anyway, I was thinking about that, and how I might be looking at some time alone soon . . .”
Jeep said, “And you started to wonder whether asking whatshername to move in with you might have something to do with fear of being by yourself in that old house of yours.”
I looked at him, slightly amazed. “How’d you guess?”
“Mostly because I’ve known you all my life, and I know you better than I know pretty much anyone,” he said. “You’re a worrier and an overthinker. Like that business with Dooley-Bug last year.”
“That keeps coming up these days.”
“Well, you fretted about it, didn’t you?”
“I think something like that’s worth fretting over. There was like to be trouble.”
“Bad men, drugs, money, and guns, hoss. That always equals trouble. And what’d I tell you at the time?”
“You told me I’d end up doing it. I told you you were nuts.”
“And?”
“And I ended up doing it.”
Jeep nodded. “Because it was the right thing to do, whether Sam knew it or not.”
“Doesn’t mean you’re not nuts, though. I just want to point that out.”
“How’s she doing anyway?”
“The girl? There’ve been some bumps along the way, but I hear she’s getting along okay. Trying a little college these days.”
“You look pleased with yourself.”
“More like satisfied it wasn’t all for nothing.”
Jeep nodded again. “And that’s just the way you are, but there’s always a downside. You’re a tough guy, Slim, and in
a pinch there’s no one I’d rather have around, but you’ve got a lonely man’s heart and you always will.”
“Lonely? What’s lonely got to do with doing the right thing?”
Jeep shrugged. “It’s a tough old world. To be honest, you must live outside the law.”
“You got the line backward, I think.”
Jeep said, “Whichever. Works both ways. Anyway, good people are always kinda lonely, because almost everyone else is either full of wickedness or just full of shit. And that’s your fate.”
“There’s a happy thought.”
“I didn’t bring it up.”
“Fair enough,” I said, but I didn’t feel particularly good or virtuous. “Maybe I’ll change the subject now.”
“Fine by me.”
“How’s Opal?”
At this mention of his wife, Jeep smiled as much as Jeep ever smiles, which is not much. He said, “Beautiful. Mean. Beautiful.”
“You said beautiful twice.”
“I did.”
“Couldn’t help noticing the mean, either.”
He nodded, but didn’t say anything. We sat there a moment. Finally, I said, “Peggy’s fine, too.”
“Who?”
“Whatshername.”
Jeep grunted. I never knew why, but Jeep and Peggy didn’t like each other. Not that they didn’t get along, really. And they’d never come to blows or anything like that, but there was ice between them that had never melted. It was just one of those things: two people you love don’t love each other, but you’re never sure why and neither of them will, or can, explain. We went out into the parking lot and shook hands.
He said, “You want to borrow Betsy?”
“I’m hoping that won’t be necessary.”
“Might as well, though,” he said. “I brought her.”
“I had a feeling you might.”
He went to his truck and opened the door and brought out Betsy. He put her walnut stock in my hand, and I felt the cross-hatching on the grip rub my thumb and palm. She felt solid and powerful. I felt more like an American. I broke her in half and stowed her and some ammo in the saddlebag on the bike.
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