After that she drove to the JCPenny in the new mall on the west side of Fargo and bought herself a jean jacket. She would have to wash it a hundred times to get it as soft as the one that she had wrapped around Dick’s head.
She had noticed that most of the girls at the college were wearing platform shoes. Big clunky shoes with two-inch wedges. On the way out of the store, she saw a pair that kind of looked like work boots but were women’s shoes, with platform heels. She stopped and asked the salesclerk if she could try them on. Cash grew two inches in three minutes. She strutted in front of the mirror, took the shoes off, put them back in the box, folding the white tissue paper over them.
“Should I ring those up for you?” asked the clerk.
“No, I was just looking.”
“Those are the shoes everyone is buying.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen that,” said Cash, “but I just brought enough money to get a new jacket.”
Cash had also noticed that the girls at the college dressed like girls. She had felt out of place standing in line in her straight leg blue jeans, t-shirt, hooded sweatshirt and tennis shoes. She realized that she looked more like a farm boy than a college girl. Even the hippie chick Sharon looked more like a girl than she did.
Cash walked out of JCPennys and into the mall proper. She looked in store windows. She never shopped. Everything she did in life was out of necessity. If it wasn’t necessary, she didn’t do it. She had never even thought about different clothes, different shoes. Now she looked.
At the other end of the mall was a restaurant, with a low brick wall. You could look over it and see the customers dining. As Cash walked past, she saw a familiar head bent towards a little girl in a high chair. When she looked back, she had to think twice about who it was. Seeing Jim here, in a family restaurant, was so out of context that she had to adjust her thinking to the image she was seeing now. Not Jim bent over a pool table or Jim sitting on the edge of her bed slipping off his clothes, but Jim sitting in a restaurant surrounded by three little girls.
Blond hair brushed and held back behind their ears with little plastic barrettes. The woman with him was as blond as the girls, smiling at Jim as he put a spoonful of food in his baby’s mouth. Cash turned quickly before he would look up, spun around and headed towards the main doors leading out of the mall.
She didn’t know what to think about it, so she didn’t. She just got in her Ranchero and drove back to her apartment. As she got out of her truck, there was Wheaton in a brown Chevy station wagon. He smiled and said, “Hey, those federal guys called me this morning and asked me to bring your statement into town here for them. I dropped it off about a half hour ago. Thought I might catch you and see if you wanted to go have breakfast.”
“I already ate.”
“Well, maybe we could walk on over to the Silver Cup. I could buy you a cup of coffee and I could grab a bite to eat. Catch you up on the latest about those two jokers.”
“Alright.” She fell into step beside him on the sidewalk. They didn’t say anything until they were seated in the hole-in-the-wall diner and the waitress had set glasses of water on the table and a cup of coffee for Wheaton. Wheaton pulled out the menu that was slid between the sugar container and the salt and pepper shakers. Cash could see he didn’t really read it.
“I think I’ll just get the hot roast beef sandwich. You sure you don’t want anything? I’m buying.” He looked at her. He was tall and fit just right in his side of the booth. Cash felt like a child with her feet only touching the floor if she stretched the tips of her feet downward.
“I just ate. Maybe a piece of blueberry pie. Yeah, I’ll have a piece of pie.”
“Did you get registered for classes?”
“Yeah.” She stared at the water glass.
“What?”
“I just don’t know.”
“Don’t know what?”
“I just don’t know. Christ, I sound like a whiner.”
Wheaton raised an eyebrow in question. “A whiner?”
“You know, those kids at the Drive-Inn who always want a malt and an ice-cream cone with their hamburger and pout when their moms don’t let them.”
The waitress came over and stood at the booth, pencil and pad in hand. Wheaton placed their order, adding more coffee for himself and a Coke for Cash. When she walked away, he asked, “So what don’t you know?”
“If I can go to school. They’re all so…I don’t know, white.”
“So are the men in the fields.”
“Yeah, but they’re just men. This is like going back to high school. Cheerleaders and churchgoers. And hippies, lots of hippies in bell bottoms.”
“Cash, we’ve had this conversation before. You’re too smart to let them get to you. All you got to do is get your butt to class, one day at a time, get a degree and you can do something besides drive a damn grain truck the rest of your life.”
And then he played his trump card. The card he never played. “I didn’t carry you out of that ditch for nothing, keep a little girl in jail overnight. I pretend I don’t know about the fake ID that gets you into the bars. I’m a sheriff, for chrissake. I signed the papers as your guardian so you can live off campus. I didn’t do any of that ’cause I have to, Cash. You’re too smart, too good to waste yourself in the fields.”
Cash didn’t want to cry so she grinned at him and said, “I could just shoot pool for a living.”
Wheaton looked at her over his coffee cup.
“I’m just kidding,” she said. “I’ll go. I’ll go. Some hippie chick with an Indian boyfriend showed me how to fill out the paperwork and where the Indian students’ office is. So I just got to show up after the long weekend and start classes.”
“What are you taking?”
“A lot of 101s. Apparently there are required courses you have to take before you can take the classes you really want to take. I did sign up for judo as my physical education class though. I need that after the two times this past week I got my butt kicked.”
“Well, looks like you kicked butt anyways. Glad you’re ok.”
“So what’s happening with those two?”
Wheaton finished chewing the food in his mouth, then he set his fork down. “Well, Clyde kept talking once the feds got him. It’s such a stupid story. I just don’t understand how men could behave so badly. Anyways, they’re both from Canada, Clyde and Richard. They came down here and were working the fields out at Arnie’s. Staying in the bunkhouse. Apparently a couple of the other Indian guys had been drinking with these two bozos on the weekends, and these two would weasel them out of most of their paychecks once they got too drunk. Guess they planned to do the same thing with Tony O. He had been living on money he had brought on down with him, saving his two-week checks to cash all at one time before he went back up north for the winter.”
Wheaton took another bite of his hot roast beef, chewing and looking out the window of the Silver Cup. “They tried to get him to go out drinking with him. He wouldn’t. Said for once in their lives his kids were going to have decent clothes to go to school in. He was going to even stop at some florist shop in Bemidji and get his wife a bouquet of real roses. Apparently Dick lost his head, couldn’t stand the thought of an Indian standing up to him, saying no, so he just lost it from what Clyde says, and when Tony O went to walk away from them, Dick stabbed him. This was over in a dirt field just outside of town here. They didn’t want to leave the body there, lord knows why, so they took it and dumped it in the field where he was found.”
“And what about the other guy?” asked Cash.
“Dick was afraid he was going to talk. He was from some small town over there in North Dakota—Rugby maybe. Small town way up there close to the Canadian border. Guess they killed him just to shut him up. They were going to pick up their last work check and head over the boundary. We would have never caught them then. Just what the heck were you doing out spying on them in the middle of the night anyways?”
“I just had a hunch
, Wheaton. Was just trying to help you out. You said you wanted to figure it out before the feds did. And you did.” Cash filled her mouth with more blueberry pie.
“Well, it’s done,” Wheaton said. “And Dick is going to live. He’ll be over here at St. Luke’s, or they might drive him down to the Cities until his burns have healed, then they’ll both go to trial. The feds will keep the case. With them being Canucks and all, it’s an international situation.”
“Hmmm.”
Wheaton went back to eating his sandwich. Cash finished her pie. As she pushed the plate away, she said, “Did you know that the school has a major in criminal justice?”
From the way Wheaton said no, Cash didn’t know if she quite believed him.
When Wheaton finished eating, he put some dollar bills under his plate. They got up, left the café and walked back to her apartment.
Wheaton stood by his car with the door opened. Cash stood on the sidewalk.
“I called the phone company. Someone should be by later today to install the wiring,” he said.
When Cash tilted her head in question, he said, “Well, I figured you’ll need to be putting more time into studying, not running back and forth between Ada and here. This way, if you need something, you can just call. I put the phone in my name. That way if the school checks, they’ll see that both the phone and the rent are in my name. Proof that you’re not living some wild single life.” He laughed and got into the car, then leaned back out. “And A’s. I expect A’s.”
With that, he backed out and drove off.
Cash went upstairs. Cleaned her rifle. Cleaned her bathroom. Cleaned her bedroom/living room. Cleaned her kitchen. When the phone company showed up late in the afternoon, the floors were swept and mopped and the bathroom gleamed. Cash asked for a pale beige phone installed with a cord long enough so the phone could sit on the dresser in the bedroom, but she could walk into the kitchen with it.
After the phone guy left, she sat on the edge of her bed next to the phone. Without lifting the receiver, she put her index finger in the little round holes over the numbers and starting at one, spun each number around. It made a small clicking sound. Then she picked up the phone book the guy had left. She looked up the number for the appliance store she lived above. Huh, she thought, she could call the landlord and tell him to turn up the heat this winter, instead of going downstairs and asking him face to face.
The only two numbers she knew, in the whole wide world, were the Norman County Jail and Wheaton’s home number. She lifted the receiver and listened to the dial tone. She dialed a one and listened to the sound the number made inside the receiver. She hung up the receiver and set the whole thing back on the dresser next to her alarm clock.
Tonight was also the pool tournament over at the Flame. Cash got up off the bed. An hour later she was bathed, dressed in jeans tucked inside the cowboy boots with a clean shirt on under the new jean jacket. She brushed and braided her hair in two long braids down her back, which she then hooked together with a rubber band at the end of the tails.
Then, instead of driving, she walked on over to the Casbah. She kicked the screen door back behind her to make sure her hair didn’t get caught. Keep those old men pushing the same quarter back and forth between them. No sense letting one of them win all the time.
Ol’ man Willie had a head start on her by a long shot. Shorty put two Buds on the bar so all she had to do was put her money in his hand, take the bottles and head on over to the tables. No other players were there yet, which was just how Cash wanted it. She wanted to get in a few practice games before heading over to the tournament at the Flame.
She dropped her quarters in the slot, kept kneeling while the balls dropped and she put them up in the table in the rack. She practiced her bank shots the first game against herself. The second game she focused just on her English, hitting the cue ball a little left or right of center, trying to control the spin of the ball it hit. By then another player had come into the bar and put up his quarters. When she was done playing herself, she chalked up while he racked and then broke the rack with a solid thwack. She won solidly but drained her second beer and conceded the table to him. She broke down her cue, put it back in its case and waved to Shorty that she was out of there.
She walked the six blocks to the Flame just for the hell of it. The lights were low all except up on the stripper stage, where some blond wearing silver sparkly remnants gyrated to an Elvis tune. Whereas most bars had one—at the most two—pool tables, the Flame had eight tables which allowed them to host larger pool tournaments. Cash found the registration table and signed in, noting that Jim had already signed them up and paid the ten-dollar registration fee. All the money went into a pot that was allocated for first, second and third place. If they won tonight, she would walk out with next month’s rent. She looked around and saw him bent over a table along the farthest wall.
She stood and looked at him bank the 9 and cut the 2-ball into the side pocket. This is how she was used to seeing him—until this week she hadn’t thought of him outside of the context of smoke, beers, hardwood floors and green velvet with blue chalk stains on his index fingers. Hm. She hoped the image of him leaning over and feeding his daughter wasn’t imprinted in her mind forever. She walked over to join him. She took her cue out of its case and chalked up.
“There you are, Cash. I was starting to get a little worried you wouldn’t show up.”
“I gotta make next month’s rent,” Cash said, rolling her cue on the table behind her, making sure it hadn’t warped.
For the next three hours, they shot pool and drank beers. Quite a number of the guys lost early, too distracted by the dancers on stage to stay in the zone required to keep winning. There were a couple other women players, regulars at the tournaments. Cash was on a nodding and good shot basis with them. They wore their jeans tight and their hair ratted and sprayed up in Dolly Parton curls. But a couple of them were damn good pool players. Kept Cash on her game.
Cash was focused. Jim was distracted. He missed a couple easy runs and they lost and had to play in the elimination bracket. Less win money but still the rent if they came in first. At least she was drinking free. Her stomach knotted, apprehension did cartwheels in her stomach. The headache that had threatened to rise full force at the college was back at the base of her neck. Cash was getting mad at how sloppy Jim was playing.
“Come on, Jim,” she said, “get in the game. This is my rent I’m playing for here. I don’t have daddy’s farmhouse to go home to.” The beer in her talked.
She could tell by the way his face reddened she had hurt his feelings. “Aw man, come on, Jim. I was just kidding. Come on, let’s just win this one.”
When he finished a short run, but short of the 8, he walked back to the wall and took a long swig of his beer. Cash walked over to him and put her arm around his waist. “Come on, I’m sorry. I just want to win. You know how I get.”
Jim put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, kissed the top of her head. “Just got a few things on my mind, Cash. Grab that waitress to bring us a couple more beers.”
Cash took his money and held it up for the waitress to see. She nodded and headed back to the bar. A new stripper, this one wearing red lingerie, was just walking on stage. The men lining the stage were catcalling and whistling. One of the women pool players mocked the stripper’s walk getting the guys she was playing against hooting and hollering. She then proceeded to run the table on them.
Cash laughed and handed the waitress the money in exchange for two more Buds.
Cash handed Jim his beer. They stood drinking, smoking and waiting until their game was called. Jim wasn’t playing any better. They were coming up on closing time and last game and last call and he had to either make it or break it and he goddamn broke it by sinking the cue right behind the 8-ball on the last game that would have had them place in the tournament. Cash had ordered her usual two at closing time. She had tucked one in the waist of her jeans at the small
of her back, intending to drink it on the way home. As she broke down her cue, Jim kept apologizing and trying to put his arm around her and kiss her neck and she just kept getting angrier. Goddamn loser, she was thinking as she swatted away his arm.
When he said, “Come on, let’s go,” Cash answered, “Nah, I’ll get myself home tonight.”
While Jim just stood there, the waitress walked up to Cash and said, “You need to leave those beers here.”
“What?”
“That beer you stashed in your purse. You need to leave the beer here. No one can leave the bar with an open bottle.”
“I don’t have a goddamn purse. Never carry a goddamn purse,” said Cash, all the while aware of the cold bottle pressed against her lower back.
“No trouble, just get the bottle out of your purse and set it on the table,” said the waitress, as a third stripper dressed as a nurse danced to Chuck Berry.
“Let it go, Cash,” said Jim. “Just do what she says.”
Cash felt the headache and alcohol and loss explode into her skull. “I don’t have a goddamn purse!” she yelled, flinging her arms wide to show she didn’t have one.
The waitress was way dumber then she looked. “Just get the bottle out of your purse and put it on the table,” she said again.
All the while Jim was babbling to Cash to calm down and give the woman the bottle and just take it easy.
In one motion Cash grabbed her cue case and swept all the bottles and glasses off the table in front of her. She then proceeded to run out of the bar, clearing any tables of beer bottles and glasses within her reach with her right forearm. She heard yelling and screams of stop! behind her but she was still running when she hit the sidewalk and turned through the Flame parking lot. She dodged around cars not bothering to look back to see if anyone was chasing her. And then smack, she ran straight into a much taller body than hers.
“Whoa, girl! Where you going?”
It was Long Braids. What the hell was he doing here? She grabbed him by the forearm and said, “Run.”
Murder on the Red River Page 16