Jump came around the truck and over to me and squatted down. He rested his hand on his knee, and the big revolver filled his fist. I could feel the sweat trickling down my face. Jump said, “Shit just got real. You don’t look so good, Slim.”
“Don’t feel so good, either.”
“Yeah, and you shouldn’t. Here I let you off the hook, and look what I get in return for my generosity. You’ve made a lot of trouble for me, cousin.”
I said, “Not me, but I guess I understand why you think that way.”
He nodded at that, more thoughtfully than I imagined him able. He scratched his head and spat into the dirt and said, “The cops are after me, man. They came to my place the other day and talked to my mother.”
“You live with your mother?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. So what?”
“It’s just kinda weird, don’t you think? I mean, given your . . . occupation.”
“I’m a coal miner, man. Nothing else. And the old lady was upset, and when she gets upset her phlebitis acts up. You think that’s funny?”
I didn’t realize I’d been smiling. “It’s kind of funny,” I said.
“It’s not funny,” he said, shaking his head. “You are wrong. It is a very painful and frustrating condition.”
“Okay, I apologize. It just wasn’t what I expected you to say.”
“Top of that, the meds she needs to control it aren’t exactly cheap, you know.”
“I said I was sorry.”
He wasn’t listening. “So she gets mad and she’s already in discomfort. She has to dip into her bingo money, and that makes her even madder, and she takes it all out on me. Guess who I’m blaming.”
“Me?”
“Good guess.”
“Or Galligan.”
“There you go with that Galligan business again,” he said. “We’re talking about Roy Galligan here, right?”
“Less you know some Galligans I don’t.”
“How you figure?”
I shook my head and said, “Look, if you’re going to shoot me, I’d just as soon as you get on it, save me the headache of trying to ram information into that bank vault between your ears.”
“You’re trying to piss me off,” he said. “Get me to do you quickly. I get that. I’m not a zombie, man.”
“You’re close.”
“There you go again,” he said. He laughed quietly under his breath. The piles of meat shuffled nervously. One of them scraped a foot on the gravel path. He was like a horse scraping out the last ticks of my life with his hoof. “You should be careful, though. Guns have a way of just going off. At this range, the Commander here would rip a hole through your throat, and you’d bleed out in under a minute.”
“Pretty thought.”
“I told you the other day I’d hold my fire, and I did, but then someone told the cops that I’d sent some men to shoot you and your daughter, and now I’m on the hook for it. I’m living in one of the mobile labs, and I have to sleep in a gas mask, so if I wanted you dead, Slim, there’d be plenty of reason already to put a hole in your brain.”
“So why not?”
“Why not is, I haven’t built myself into something by going off half-cocked. You deserve shooting, but I know who your old man was and I know who you’re butt buddies with, and I’m not crazy about the idea of any more of my men going missing. Or me.”
“Wait,” I said. “Who went missing?”
“You’re pissing me off, man. You know your boy Mabry pulled one of my men off the count in revenge for the other night.”
“He didn’t.”
“Bullshit.”
“He wouldn’t,” I said. “Tell the hard truth, I’m thinking he wouldn’t need to.”
“What? You think my guys can’t look after themselves?”
I shrugged.
Jump Down said, “You think all that muscle’s just for show, or what?”
I shrugged.
Jump Down said, “You think you could take them? You think you could take even one of them?”
“It’s not my policy to piss off the guy holding the gun, but, yeah, I think I could. Without much trouble, either. Certainly I wouldn’t need to turn Jeep Mabry loose on them. C’mon, look at those two. They’re like something you won throwing baseballs at milk bottles. They’re adorable.”
He said, “So what you’re saying is, you think you could take, say, Lonnie there?” He waved vaguely in the direction of his boys. Both of them showed me mouthfuls of rotted teeth. I didn’t know which teeth in which mouth belonged to Lonnie.
“Tell you what, let’s make a deal,” I said.
“I’m not sure you’re in a deal-making position.”
“Probably not, but here’s one anyway: Let Lonnie and me go a round. He beats me, it’s anything goes. I won’t squawk. Put holes in me if you like. Whatever other wickedness you have in mind. But if I beat him, you give me twenty-four hours so I can go after Roy Galligan and put our troubles to rest. Yours and mine.”
Jump Down thought about that some. He looked at his boys, but neither of them said anything or revealed how they might have felt about my idea. Probably they liked it fine. I didn’t look like much. I was wet and cold and scared and had a bump on my head. My courage was as phony as a three-dollar bill. I’d laughed at an old woman and her phlebitis. Jump Down turned back to me and said, “Why on earth do you think I’d go along with something like this?”
“I don’t know. Meanness maybe. Or boredom. And then there’s always the off chance that I’m telling the truth. You can kill me, but tomorrow your problem is still the same.”
“Galligan?”
“Galligan.”
“Okay, maybe. But you got to put up more. Just not squawking isn’t too much for me to win, and I plan to win anyway. I got the gun, after all.”
“You’ll win,” one of the boys said. Lonnie, I guess. He studied me, and I studied him back. He was the larger of the two, which I found disappointing. Besides being smaller, the other guy moved with just the slightest limp, so I’d kinda hoped Lonnie was him. Lonnie was something else, though. He had arms like tree limbs and a head like a concrete block. His chest was as big around as a Hula-Hoop, and his hands looked like they could palm a Thanksgiving turkey. Fighting him wasn’t my favorite idea.
I said, “What more can I put up?”
“Yourself, one,” he said. “Mabry, two. In other words, after Lonnie there kicks your ass, you’re both on my payroll for, say, a year. Except I ain’t actually paying you, get it?”
“I get it,” I said. “We’ll be errand boys.”
“Errand boys, or whatever else I need.”
“Muscle?”
“Mabry, maybe. You, I ain’t so sure. You’re kinda wiry.”
“Pot, kettle,” I said. “Besides, Mabry won’t ever agree to any such foolishness.”
“He will if you tell him to. Everybody knows he’d strangle his mother for you. Anyway, it’s either this or you don’t walk away from here. So what do you say?”
There was just the one thing to say. I agreed. I figured that if I died, Jeep would murder the boy for killing me, and if I lived, Jeep would murder the boy for being such a lunkhead and hatching such a dim-witted scheme. Either way, he was in a world of hurt. That made things seem slightly cheerier.
Lonnie didn’t do anything to help my mood, though. Jump Down and the other boy stepped back and Lonnie came over to me, cracking his knuckles and shaking a hitch out of his neck and making a noise in his throat like snot boiling. He went maybe six foot seven or so and was basically built like a Sherman tank. I figured him for a solid 325 at least. I’d seen plenty of big guys in my time, but that motherfucker was big enough to project a Charlton Heston movie on. I stood off the ground and got into something resembling a fight stance, and Jump Down barked something, and Lonnie lunged in with a jab that hit me in the top of the chest and sent me over backward.
That hurt like hell, but I’ll tell you, I immediately felt better abo
ut my chances. A single punch can tell a story, and Lonnie’s told me plenty. He’d done some bouncing work and probably some other kind of hard physical labor—mine or farm work, probably—but he’d gotten by mostly on body mass and bad looks, and his fighting style seemed more haphazard than anything. His footwork was a series of stomps, and when he advanced on me he did it with his hands low and his head forward.
I clambered to my feet, and the boy came in again and tossed off a painfully slow right hook. I cut inside the shadow of his big body and kicked him in the gut. I rolled right and went outside and hit him on the left ear so hard he went down on a knee. He looked up and swiped at me with one of his mitts, and I tried to get out of his way but he grabbed the top of my leg and flung me across the road like a rag doll. He laughed. He liked that one okay. I got up and we circled one another. His buddy shouted some encouragement, and the kid got cocky and lunged in again, swiping at my head. This time I got lucky and he missed badly and overextended himself right into my jump front kick. That was a good hit, but not my best, and it sent him spilling slightly sideways but not down. He was stronger even than he looked, though, and he came right back at me, lunging all his weight off his back leg. He hit me a stunner in the left shoulder, and I felt the arm go dead, but the boy’s momentum was too strong and he chased his own punch and lurched forward on his toes. I moved slightly left and turned back into him. I stuck out my foot and tripped him, then grabbed hold of his hair and bounced his face off the side of the maxi-cab so hard he left a shallow dent. He dropped to the ground and stayed there.
Jump Down looked at me and at his boy. He turned his head and spat again and looked at the gun in his hand and did some thinking. His eyes wobbled and shook like boiling eggs and finally I could see him make his decision. He shrugged. He said, “Okay. Like we agreed, twenty-four hours. Then we got to take care of this for good.”
I stood there. Jump Down stared at me. He said, “Goddamn it, I said you got your twenty-four. What the fuck else do you want?”
I said, “I need a lift back to my bike.”
I reached Indian Vale just as the first barks of thunder rattled overhead. That big front was pushing through, and this one was going to be a boomer. The sky darkened some more, and the stars ducked away and hid their bright heads. I got off the Triumph and walked up to the house just as a violent wind stirred and the weather cut loose. Rain slammed the house and rattled the windowpanes and a crack of lightning cut through the sky west of the valley.
Jeep Mabry and Pelzer were waiting for me under the overhang of my front porch.
“I’ll say this for you, Slick,” Jeep said, “you know how to make an entrance.”
They’d already introduced themselves—I’m guessing with a grunt and a nod—but I did the pleasantries again anyway and watched them size each other up. I told them what had happened with Jump Down, and Pelzer laughed and shook his head. Jeep fumed.
He said, “Soon as we’re done with this business here, that little bastard is dog food.”
“I kinda thought you’d say that,” I said. “But let’s take one massacre at a time.”
I walked past them and into the house and found Peggy and Anci calmly doing math homework at the kitchen table. There were some sodas and chips and other supper leavings strewn out, as was Peggy’s Winchester Model 94 short rifle. She put her hand on it when I came in the room.
I said, “Easy there, deadeye.”
She said, “Good lord, you gave me a fright. What the heck happened to you?”
“Ran into an old pal.”
“And he kicked your ass?”
I said, “He had a momentary upper hand, but things evened out in the end.”
Peggy said, “That’s Tony Pelzer out there.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Well, he can’t come in here. Apologies to whatshisname . . .”
“Jeep.”
“Apologies to whatshisname, but I don’t want him in here with us, and me and this rifle here told him so.”
“They can wait on the porch,” I said, and told her what there was of it to tell. She took it in and looked at me a long time. She ruffled Anci’s hair and whispered something in her ear, and Anci hopped down off her chair and went quickly and quietly out of the room with a worried glance at me.
When we were alone, Peggy said, “You’re going to leave that little one behind.”
“Just for a while.”
“That’s not what I mean, Slim. What I mean is, you’re going to go off and get yourself shot to hell and leave her behind for good and permanent. What kind of a father would do something like that? I didn’t know better, I’d think you were enjoying this thing a little.”
I don’t mind telling you, that got me a little warm under the bandages, and I said so. Days of bad sleep, worse food, and hot-and-cold-running beatings had got to me some, I guess. I said, “And I think you’re forgetting that our alternatives aren’t too attractive, either. I let this thing go, I got to spend my midlife crisis looking over my shoulder for stray bullets. Anci, too.”
“You could run.”
“Run where? Another town? Another state? And what would that teach Anci?”
“It’d teach her that sometimes you get in over your head. That sometimes it’s okay to cut your losses.”
I said, “And someone taught you that, Peggy.”
She stepped to me and hit me in the mouth. It was a pretty good shot, too, and I stepped backward twice and hit the wall. Thing like that can go one or two ways. Sometimes a punch makes you madder and sometimes it knocks your mad right out of the room, and Peggy’s hit did the latter. We both looked at each other in that shocked way you get under such circumstances, and then we laughed a little.
Peggy said, “Goddamn it all. Look at me.”
I touched my bloody mouth with my fingers.
“It’s okay.”
“I ain’t apologizing, you asshole,” she said, but she smiled sheepishly. “I’m just pissed I didn’t knock your sorry ass out.”
“Oh. Can I say that you’ve got a pretty good swing for a schoolteacher? Or will that just lead to more violence?”
“I grew up on a chicken farm with four brothers,” she said, proud. She got her purse and dug until she found some scraps of pink tissue for me. “And I was the oldest. My mom made sure I knew how to fight.”
“I knew all that,” I said, “except the part about your mom. She sounds like a hell-raiser.”
“You would have liked her,” she told me, and smiled sadly at her memories. “She was as ornery as a Republican mule, and she could drink all the men in the county under the table.”
“Sounds tough.”
“She was. Maybe too much so. But something gets everybody, eventually. You sure you got to do this thing?”
“Pretty sure.”
She picked the rifle off the table. She said, “You want some backup?”
“I want Galligan and his men in one piece at the end of this,” I said. “You come along, there won’t be enough left to fill an ashtray.”
“Say that again. I don’t know the last time I was so mad.”
“Me, either. You mind keeping watch over Anci?”
“We’ll be here when you get back.”
“Thank you.”
We kissed, and she touched my face and said, “I know I said I wasn’t, but I am sorry about before. About hitting. I guess there’s been some tension between us lately.”
“Maybe a little.”
“This is all my fault. Everything that’s happening.”
“It’s nobody’s fault. Or it’s all our fault. Or something. It’s the way we built our world, and I guess it was inevitable that it’d come to tears one day.”
“Maybe,” she said. She paused and looked into me deeply for what seemed a long time, and then she said, “And Slim, my answer is yes.”
“Your answer?”
“To what you’ve been asking me. You and me. Let’s build that family together.”
> “You’re sure?”
“Damn sure.”
We kissed again and said our good-byes and a few other things, and after a moment I went out. Jeep and Pelzer were waiting. Pelzer was smoking a cigarette.
He said, “You’re bleeding again.”
“I know.”
“You bleed more than a nun’s vision. It makes a body nervous.”
Nervous or no, we gathered up our things and moved out into the swirling night. Pelzer drove his beat-up van. Jeep and I shared my truck.
Jeep said, “Hell of a night for this.”
Hell of a night for anything. The rain came down hard and pelted the windshield, and the wind shoved our vehicles around like scraps of tin. We’d settled on checking Galligan’s De Soto residence first, but about halfway there Pelzer’s van slid off the road into a ditch. He was banged up some, but when we stopped the truck and ran back through the washer to rescue him he seemed not much worse for wear.
“This is crazy,” Pelzer said over the noise of the rain.
It was crazy, but it was the plan, such as it was. It took us a half hour to pull him out of the ditch and get back on the road, time we keenly felt. When we finally reached Galligan’s place, we found the house dark and seemingly empty, something Jeep Mabry confirmed with a quick reconnoiter.
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