by Rex Miller
“Howdy,” he called out from a distance, beaming a smile in the woman's direction.
“Where'd jew come from?” she asked without interest, her mouth not unlike his, a small slit that opened in a shapeless mass of dough.
“This way.” He gestured vaguely, stepping around toward the front of the house but not going up on the porch. “Michael around?"
“Michael?"
“Yeah."
“Michael who?” she asked with a smart tone.
He thought how easily he could snuff her out. Go up on the porch, chain-snap her once, and butcher the fresh hog.
“Tell Michael Hora it's somebody used to work with him,” he said in a voice loud enough to carry to the surrounding buildings. He felt eyes on him for just a second or two before he heard the flat voice to his left and to the rear, “Bunkowski? Chaingang? Jesus!” he said as Chaingang turned and saw the man standing there. He bad not heard him come out of the building. “Whatchew doin’ here?” He didn't seem that happy at the prospect of a reunion.
“I gotta proposition for ya."
“I ain't in that line no more."
“No. Not that."
“Okay. What?"
“Need to go someplace we can talk in private."
“She don't hear nothin'."
“Uh huh."
“Go on. Speak your piece."
“I need a place to stay."
“So?"
“Someplace where people don't get too curious."
“You're hot then, are ya?"
“Oddly enough—no. But I need time to myself."
“Umm."
“I remembered you had a big place down here. I thought we might work out some kind of a deal."
“Howzzat?"
“I need to have something to do to occupy my time. I plan to go on a, uh, training regimen that will include a diet and lots of hard work."
“Diet. Work.” He repeated the words like they were foreign phrases he'd never heard before.
“Right. And you have work that can be done, right?"
“I cain't afford to pay for no work right now."
“No. You don't understand. I'll pay you. Also I'll do some of the work. Whatever fits into my schedule.” They talked some more and Chaingang pulled out a thousand dollars in cash. “For a month in advance?” Hora walked over and reached for the money. “Oh, and I have a woman with me."
“Where?” Hora looked around as if she might be standing in back of him.
“Back in my vehicle."
“You two ain't runnin'?"
“She knows nothing."
“Umm."
“A thousand a month up front. Anybody asks, I'm help you've hired to do the heavy work."
“Heavy work.” More new vocabulary. “We can try it for a month, I reckon.” He eyed the money. “Jus’ don't bring down no heat on me."
“No way,” Chaingang said.
“Reckon you can use the ole sharecropper shack. It's over yonder"—he gestured—"'tween here ‘n the ditch."
“What work is there now?"
“Say what?"
“What kinda work needs doin'?"
“Shit.” He laughed. “I dunno. Gotta unload these ties.” He gestured at a huge pile of railroad ties. “'N these here timbers.” A flatbed truck was piled with landscape timbers. “Always somethin'. Weeds need a cuttin'. Shit like that.” He shrugged. “Do whatever feels good.” He laughed again.
“Okay.” Chaingang turned to waddle off in the direction of the pastureland.
“I didn't hear the bell go off.” It was a word they used for a certain kind of alarm device they had used to safeguard their nighttime defensive perimeters. Nothing to do with a bell at all.
“I didn't ring it,” Chaingang said without turning. He added as he lumbered off, “Stepped over the trip wire."
Hora looked at the huge fat man's back and said nothing.
BUCKHEAD METRO
“Don't say it. Whatever it is. I can tell by the look on your face. Whatever it is I just don't want to hear about it. Keep it to yourself.” Eichord was half-serious.
“How can you tell anything about anything by the look on my face. Don't you know I'm an inscrutable fucking slope?"
“Not today. You're very scrutable today and I don't like what I see in your scru."
“Scru you, too, G.I.” He twisted in the seat. Paranoid.
“Promises, promises.” Eichord looked in the direction of his old friend's glance. “Chrissakes stop that shit you faked me right out of my shoes, man.” They laughed. Jack had teased Lee for years about his inscrutability and his head fakes.
“Fucking NFL lost a great wide receiver when you joined the cops,” Lee said, shaking his head and laughing. “Jesus, I hate it when you do that to me. I'll be saying something and you look so SERIOUS all of a sudden and those eyes go BOIIINNNG like you just saw a naked lady in a tree and every damn time I look where you're looking. Remind me never to play touch football with you."
“I'm antsy down here. Fucking IAD could tail us ten different ways. Put a beeper under the car like in the movies. Shit. Tap the cigarette lighter."
“I really don't want to hear that shit, man. How many times I got to say it. Keep all that shit to yourself."
“I can't."
“Say what?"
“I can't, Jack. I know you don't want to hear it but I got nobody else I can talk to. I can't put this shit on Dana, you know that."
“Oh, right. You can't put it on precious Dana but old Jack—that's different. You can put it on me all right. No sweat."
“You know that's not what I mean, asshole. Dana, shit, he's like my brother. I love that fat schmuck. But he's ... weak. You know what I mean. He'd fucking go to pieces under this. You're all I got, pops. I gotta talk to somebody. I—I can't put this on Peggy. And Dana. Shit. All he wants to know is should HE take some."
“Uh huh. The question is, why talk at all. I ain't the confessional."
“Shit, I can't help it, man, I'm scared,” and with that this hard-nosed, two-fisted, tough-talking wiseguy-type Detective Sergeant James Lee, the same James Lee who had saved Eichord's butt in the Orient, James Jimmie the Chink Lee, was bawling like a little baby and Eichord was looking at him not believing it and knowing that it was the beginning of something bad. Then again, Lee cried easily.
“What the fuck,” he said in his quietest voice when Lee had gotten the giggles and stopped sobbing. “Just where I want to be tonight. I'm married to the most beautiful woman in the world. She's made me a nice, cozy home. Where am I? Am I home kissin’ my lady? Roasting my toes in front of a roaring bowl of popcorn? Noooooooooo. I'm in the basement of Metro Parking watching you have a fucking nervous breakdown. What did I do to deserve this?"
“It's too hot to roast your toes in front of a roaring bowl of popcorn. Roast your balls on one of these.” Lee popped the tab on a beer can and passed it to Eichord as he snuffled. Lee then realized what he'd done and snatched it away spilling foam on Jack's hand.
“Sorry, man—"
“Oh, thanks a ton.” Jack wiped it off.
“Shit. I forgot,” he said meekly.
“Nu?"
“I took twelve thousand dollars.” Just like that. No preamble. Nothing. Just—care for a beer? Or by the way, I know you don't want to hear this but would you mind becoming an accessory to robbery?
“Ohhhhhh,” Eichord breathed out and tried not to inhale again. Ever. It didn't work.
“I'm sorry."
“You're telling me."
“Okay. So why am I in trouble, you ask. I mean, I'm a big boy. I take twelve kay and I got my reasons. I must know I can deal with it. Am I having guilt pangs? Second thoughts? A troubled conscience? No. I'm scared shitless I'm gonna get caught.” Lee poured out the whole story, Eichord saying, “You goddamn MORON,” or some variation thereof, every few minutes. At the end of the summation Lee said, “So meanwhile, they got the dudes. One of ‘em rolled over for immunity. And you know the
fucking feds, man. So this thing gets tallied up, it's a $28,145.00 bank robbery, and they've backtracked $16,145 up to the doors of Buckhead Mercantile. So somewhere in between the shooting of the guard inside the bank and the front door, twelve grand got lost."
“Ummmmm.” A groan of pain. He just wasn't fucking believing any of it. Not a word. “You ARE going to tell me this is some awful put-on you and the dirigible devised for my torture, aren't you? Say yes even if it's no."
“Yes."
“Wonderful. Just as I thought."
“No."
“Yes."
“'Fraid not, Papa-san."
“Well?"
“What do I do now?"
“You know the answer as well as I do."
“Unnn?"
“No choice."
“What?"
“Don't gimme that WHAT shit."
“What?"
“You know what you got to do."
“No. That's it, man. I don't."
“You don't have a choice. Chink. You've got to tell ‘em."
“Bullshit,” he whispered.
“Tell ‘em you fucked up and give ‘em the money back."
“You know I ain't gonna do that."
“You gotta."
“I can't.” A long silence in the car.
“Sometimes I think I've been in more deep shit than a plumber's friend."
“Yeah? I've seen more shit than the inside of a dinosaur's asshole."
“Well,” Eichord said as he started the engine, “you don't need me for THIS shit. You already GOT both halves of a comedy team.” He pulled out of the shadowy parking stall and started up the ramp toward the street.
Jack said, without looking over at him, saying it one more time just to hear himself say the words, “Think about it, babe. You gotta give it back."
But his friend was snapping his fingers, in Tahoe by now, on stage silently doing Tony Bennett's act: tux, Guccis, Ralph at the piano, rug in place, Basie's guys behind him, a big roll of hundreds in his pocket, singin’ and swingin'. The best thing Eichord could hope for now was that he wouldn't start singing out loud.
STOBAUGH COUNTY
“Sumbitch ain't gonna make it, workin’ that fast."
“I give him three hours,” the wife, who was “slow,” said.
He worked from nine-thirty to four-thirty without a break. Seven straight hours unloading treated timbers as fast as he could. For the first four hours he was lightning-fast, pulling them from the big truck bed as fast as he could touch them. Then he'd grab a timber in each huge paw and waddled over to the slowly escalating stack he was making alongside the building. At the end of four hours he had a large, neat stack of timbers. He'd offloaded more landscape timbers in four hours single-handedly than a two-man crew could handle in a full eight-hour day. He'd lost an enormous amount of water and was replacing it too quickly, drinking too much water from a nearby garden hose.
“Fucker ain't gonna’ last much longer,” the man said. The slow woman only shook her head in disdain. They had been sitting there on the porch watching him for four hours straight, as if he were a television game show. Fascinated. Neither of them had ever seen anything like it. The man got up and stretched. “Ah'm gonna sack out awhile. Fuck it,” he said, and went in, the screen door slamming. The slow wife said nothing but continued to sit on the rump-sprung chair watching the big man from the porch.
The water intake hit him hard. He felt a terrible rush come across him. Vaguely like the red tide that would wash over him and make him do the bad things, but he figured this one was maybe heatstroke or blood pressure. Either way, he thought, I work. He wet a bandanna and tied it around his neck, put on his floppy boonie-rat hat, and slowly went back to work.
He could feel the heat had sapped him. He could no longer pick up a landscape timber in one hand. His fingers would let it go. When he dropped one on his foot he quit trying. But he stayed with it, working slowly, methodically, using both hands to pick up each timber, walking slower now, feeling a little twinge in his back as he set the heavy timbers down on the stack, which was taller and wider than a pair of double beds.
About three-thirty the man came out, yawning. He looked over and said, “Shit. Still at it.” He walked down the rickety steps and across the junk-strewn yard. “Hey,” he called out aimlessly. Chaingang may have tilted his head slightly but he said nothing. “Y’ better ease up ‘air, hoss.” His tone was jovial.
Chaingang grunted and kept working. The man disappeared back into the house, taking the woman with him this time. After another hour or so Chaingang finished.
He was hurting in his back a little, but not too bad. He'd worn a large hole in one of the work gloves. His ankle was sore as always. He had a headache. He was having a little trouble breathing. Just tired more than anything. He went into the sharecropper's shack and drank a little more water from the jug. Hopped down on the mound of blankets and was snoring immediately, fully dressed, filthy dirty, and sweat-soaked. Dead to the world at a quarter to five in the evening.
Sissy had been out in their “back yard” looking at all the sights. There were ducks, two kinds. Turkeys. Pea fowls. Peacocks strutting around. Dogs. Cats. It was something. All the junk fascinated her as much as the animals. She came in and was surprised to find Daniel sound asleep on the blankets. She didn't know what to do next so she went back outside and watched the ducks and turkeys and peacocks and junk until dark. And then she came in and lay down by the snoring mound that was her new mentor.
The next day Chaingang did no work. He couldn't. He could not get off the blankets on the floor, much as he tried. His back felt like it was broken. He had dreamed about this, that two of the blacks in D had taken baseball bats to him and he wondered if his kidneys were bad. He could not get up to piss, so he rolled over and urinated out the door.
Then he saw his ankles. Both ankles were swollen. His right ankle, the bad one, was the size of a large grapefruit. He knew there would be no point in continuing this sort of work as long as his weight was so great. The building process might cripple his weak ankles. He'd forgotten what it would be like to carry all that weight on top of his own. He had to be able to walk. This wouldn't get it.
He was finally able to roll into a sitting position, and he pulled himself up by the strength of his upper torso. Using a broken wooden chair for a kind of walker, he hobbled outside with his big fighting bowie, moving toward the ditch that ran through the middle of the property. On the way he cut himself a huge crutch from an oak tree, and he limped through the field of weeds in the direction of the running water.
He removed his clothes and immersed himself in the ditch, which was ice-cold and muddy brown. It felt so good to let his weight push his sore feet and ankles down into the cool mud. He stood motionless for a long time. Then he washed his clothes in the cold water and, pulling himself out with the aid of a nearby, overhanging tree, managed to get back on the bank. He soaped himself thoroughly and went back into the water, washing himself as best he could. His enormous pants and shirt dried like blankets in the nearby willow limbs. The sun was hot and he came back out and sat naked on the bank, thinking of nothing, trying not to feel the pain and soreness and the aches in muscles he'd forgotten he had. He stayed there on the bank through the noon hour when he went back to fetch Sissy.
“Come on,” he told her. It was only the second thing he'd said to her in two days and it was enough to make her smile and start a flood of pent-up commentary about everything she'd done or seen or thought during the last forty-eight hours. He heard not a word of it as they walked toward the hidden vehicle, back through the overgrown fields bordering the junkyard.
“...and he says they're called coots, those little black ones, you know, or mud coots, somethin’ like that, and they'd come up...” And then they were in the car and moving toward town. Sissy was happy again, and her soft stream of chatter was like playing a radio low in the background.
The first stop was at a medium-sized grocery store
in a small would-be shopping center that had a laundromat, a Radio Shack, a video store that was apparently out of business, and a Western Auto. Chaingang went in to get them their lunch. He came out with a can of V-8 juice that he'd paid for, and pockets full of apples, a package of cold meat, and a tomato, which he plucked out of a sealed package. Nobody could shoplift like Daniel. While the clerk was ringing up the V-8 he dropped some mints into a voluminous pocket. He had plenty of money, but he always stole on principle.
He got in the car and handed Sissy her apple. “Here's your lunch."
“Thanks,” she said. “Is this all we're gonna eat?” She wasn't complaining. Just asking.
“Yeah. You need to lose weight for your modeling. Tonight you'll fix the meat, some greens, and tomato.” He had their menu all planned out.
“You know,” she said, telling him for the tenth time, “you're the only guy I've ever known who didn't think I was too thin."
“Ummm,” he grunted as he drove across the expanse of parking lot toward the Western Auto store.
“I went to this one doctor, ya know, and I was getting a physical and he was you know going on about how I was too skinny and all and...” She was so pleased that this man who had actually had professional experience producing model layouts would be truthful with her. She had always suspected she was too heavy for high fashion work, and even though she hardly ate anything she just couldn't lose weight. Chaingang, the ultimate mind-manipulator, had instinctively played to her most secret fear. That she was FAT! A borderline anorexia victim, Sissy could sometimes stand in front of a mirror and look right at those protruding, skeletonlike pelvic bones and see only disgusting bulk. He heard her singsong little-girl voice say with great earnestness, “And I sure do like for ya to be honest like that with me,” and she touched him.
He was turning off the ignition when he felt the little bony hand reach over and rest on his leg, and she almost bought it right then and there. Some miracle stopped that steel shotput from crashing out and stilling her simple brain. He loathed being touched by anyone when he wasn't expecting it and he almost took her down as an involuntary reflex, but somehow he caught his reaction in time. All she saw was a little tremor like a flinch as he slid out of the vehicle, the springs creaking in relief as he removed his bulk from the car. She thought to herself, Interesting, and knew then that they would have something between them.