The Mortal Nuts

by Pete Hautman

  He realized now that this had been his mistake. The farther from the hotel they got, the bolder and more confident the cowboys became. What he should have done, he should have forced a confrontation right outside the lobby, before the cowboys were ready, while they were still maybe undecided. Odds were, they’d have backed down. It was always best to be the instigator. You couldn’t just wait for shit to happen to you, or sure as shit, shit would happen to you.

  One of the cowboys yelled, “Hey, we don’t even got twenty bucks left to get our willies dipped. How about you boys buy us each a lady, just for good feelings’ sake, hey?”

  Tommy, who was apparently even drunker than Axel had given him credit for, stopped and turned back toward the trio, unzipped his Wranglers, and unleashed a stream of urine. A cloud of steam rose from the frozen concrete.

  “You can dip ’em right here, suckers!” he crowed.

  At that moment, Axel abandoned any hope that they were going to make it out of Deadwood intact. The cowboys dropped their pretense of cheeriness and picked up their pace. Tommy let out a cackling howl, waved his cock at them, then took off running. He made it about twenty feet before tripping and skidding on his belly down the icy sidewalk.

  Axel planted his feet and, trying to look as large and menacing as possible, waited for the cowboys to come to him. Sometimes it worked. But not that night. The two younger cowboys didn’t even slow down. The first one ran straight into him, landing a glancing blow to his jaw. Axel hooked an arm around him, throwing him against a light pole, but the other one leapt onto his shoulders, slamming his fists into Axel’s temples. Axel started spinning, trying to throw the cowboy. He caught a flash of Tommy being lifted by Bum, feet first, his tiny fists flailing without effect at the rancher’s prominent abdomen. He saw Sam trying to get into the Lincoln, discovering that the car was locked. Then something hit Axel on the side of his knee, sending him sprawling. He heard something pop. His face hit the sidewalk.

  The next thing he remembered was Sam breathing whiskey fumes in his face, asking him if he was all right. Axel’s knee felt decidedly wrong. He tried to straighten his leg. It moved a few inches, then something caught. Tommy sat on the sidewalk in a daze, exploring a bloody mustache with his tongue.

  “How come you look so fucking good?” Axel asked Sam.

  “Me? Hell, once you bit the dirt, Ax, I just handed ’em the dough,” Sam said. “What the fuck you expect?”

  The cowboys were gone, along with most of their money. Sam still had his original poke, a few hundred dollars he’d tucked in his underwear, and Tommy had a C-note in his left boot. Axel didn’t have a dime.

  Sam said, “You got to learn to protect your poke, Ax. You might just as well give it away. And you—” He turned his attention to Tommy. “You got to learn when to keep your yap shut. You hadn’t been riding that Bum fella, this never woulda happened.”

  Tommy said, “Hey, you’re the ones just let ’em take us. Didn’t even fight back. Where the hell were you while they was shaking me upside down? Besides, you shouldn’t’ve let me drink so damn much. I mean, don’t you boys know nothing?”

  Axel stood up, ignoring the spikes of pain from his knee. He limped over to Tommy and put his hands on his shoulders.

  Tommy said, “What?”

  Axel still felt bad about putting Tommy in the trunk, but it was a lot kinder than what Sam had suggested. They let him out an hour later in Rapid City, had a few drinks, and by the next night they were driving through Wyoming—Axel stretched out on the backseat with his knee wrapped in Ace bandages—looking for another game. They’d kept their partnership going for a few more months, but after the Deadwood incident Axel knew he’d lost his edge. He just didn’t have the heart for it anymore. Then Tommy got into the mini-donut business at the Minnesota fair, and Sam took off for Alaska to try and win a fortune off the oil jockeys—an ill-fated adventure that had lasted less than a month. Axel spent a few years in the hotel business, and a few more selling land in the Dakotas, before letting Tommy talk him into getting himself a joint at the Minnesota State Fair. He’d bought the taco concession in ’69.

  Now they were all a lot older, all living in the Twin Cities, still friends. They talked about getting together for a little three-man, just for old times’ sake, but it never happened. They were all busy doing other things.

  As the Boeing 727 settled into its final approach, Carmen thought again about the Valiums in her bag. She dug out the vial and shook out three of them, then reconsidered and put one back. She’d had four miniature Smirnoffs during the flight. She didn’t want to pass out in the terminal. She swallowed the two pills dry, closed her eyes, and imagined that she was landing someplace else. Puerto Penasco.

  After the plane landed she stayed in her seat and let the other passengers file past her. There was no hurry at all. Axel would wait. Once the aisle cleared, she gathered her bag and made her way carefully toward the front of the airplane. The cabin, empty now, seemed tiny and toylike. She thought she could feel her hair brushing the ceiling, and she liked it. The stewardesses waiting at the front had shrunk to four-foot-high Barbie dolls. Carmen grinned at them, mirroring their mouth-only smiles.

  “Bye now,” they said, their mouths moving in tandem.

  Carmen laughed.

  Axel was wearing a pair of red suspenders. The tufts of white hair around his ears were trimmed back, as were his nose hairs. He reeked of Mennen Skin Bracer. His dentures gleamed in the fluorescent light. Carmen, still wearing her stewardess grin, stepped into his arms, pushed herself up onto her toes, gave him a quick kiss, then stepped back and forced her eyes to focus.

  She was always surprised by his size. The Axel in her memory was a medium-size old man. The Axel of the present stood three inches over six feet. She could see way up into his nostrils. And she always forgot his freckles. He had freckles like a little kid; when he grinned he sometimes looked like a balding, wrinkled, green-eyed, oversize eight- year-old.

  “Well, here I am,” she said, staring up at the mole on his eyelid.

  Axel frowned. “You smell like liquor.”

  Carmen shrugged and set her bag on the floor between them. “I get tense. I hate airplanes, you know? Besides, don’t I deserve a drink to celebrate my first year of school?”

  “You’re too young to drink hard liquor.”

  “I’m twenty-one now, Axel.”

  “Too young,” he repeated stubbornly. If he had his way, the legal age for drinking would be forty-five.

  Carmen changed the subject. “So how are you doing? How’s your blood pressure?”

  “All over hell. Goddamn doctor has me eating stuff you couldn’t give away in Ethiopia. A guy can’t live on leaves and roots, you know?” He looked at her uniform, pointed a big, speckled hand at her chest. “They let you wear that now?”

  “I wore it for you. How’s Sophie? How’s the Taco Shop? How are the chips this year? Are they rancid again? I don’t want to be serving rancid nachos this year. Come on.” She moved off down the concourse. “I got a suitcase at the baggage claim.”

  Axel watched her move away in the white dress—wrinkled and slightly damp now from the long flight, sticking a little to the back of her thighs. He could tell by her walk, as if the floor was covered with foam rubber, that she’d had more than a couple of drinks. He picked up her bag and followed.

  “That goddamn Helmut tried to give me that same shit all over again,” he said. “Rancho Rauncho or whatever it is all over again, and you know they smelled the same as last year? I think he must make them in his basement, probably changes his oil about once a year. Teach me to buy Mexican from a Norwegian. I told him a guy ought to make chips a guy would want to eat. Told him to cornhole his corn chips. I’m buying from the Garcias this year.”

  Carmen laughed. “Good for you. Did you really say that to him? Was Sophie there? You telling Helmut to shove his corn chips. I bet she about shit.”

  “Where do you learn to talk like that?”

&nb
sp; “From you,” she said over her shoulder.

  Axel muttered to himself as he followed Carmen toward the baggage claim, his eyes moving from her white shoes to her white cotton dress and back again. He hated it when she teased him. But he liked the uniform a lot. She looked good in it. He liked the idea of her flying in to help him. And this year he would make sure his nachos were the best. Twenty- five years in the business, he had learned you do not cut corners on product quality. People come back a year later and tell you you got shitty chips, you better have an answer for them.

  It took forever for Carmen’s bags to arrive. Axel tried to ask her about school, but Carmen’s bubbly energy seemed to have deserted her. She replied in monosyllables, yawning repeatedly. After a few minutes, she sat down on a bench and stared at the baggage carousel, her eyelids almost closed, until her bag arrived.

  On the way out to the parking lot, Axel carrying both her suitcase and her overnight bag, she stumbled twice, nearly falling.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  Carmen smiled dreamily and nodded. “Just a little tired,” she explained. She didn’t seem to notice that Axel had a new truck. She got in it the same way she would have climbed in his old one, didn’t look around it or ask him anything, just planted her ass on the seat and waited for him to drive. He was disappointed. He had hoped to impress her with his new wheels, hoped to show her he wasn’t such an old fogy after all. Wow her with the AM/FM radio and the sport wheels and the lariat stripes.

  He had to laugh at himself. What difference did it make what she thought? She was just a kid. He wished she wouldn’t drink so much. A girl shouldn’t grow up so fast. He pulled out onto the freeway and brought the F-150 up to fifty miles per hour. He wanted to turn on the radio, show her how you could turn a knob and make the sound go from one speaker to another, something he’d figured out on the way over, but when he turned his head to say something she was slumped against the door, her mouth open, snoring. She looked young, her face smooth and childlike. He remembered the day she had come to work for him—a bright-eyed, elfin high schooler overflowing with girl energy. That was five years ago, but he remembered it like yesterday.

  It had been a few days before the fair. He’d been scrambling to get the restaurant ready, trying to get a crew lined up, interviewing the kids sent over by the State Fair Employment Office. He always asked them to send him all the Mexican girls, because it gave his taco stand that authentic south-of-the-border look. The employment people always gave him a bunch of shit about equal opportunity. Most years he ended up with a stand full of tall, blond, blue-eyed boys and girls.

  The day he met Carmen he had been down under the counter, scraping up some congealed grease from the previous year, when he heard a voice say, “Hey, anybody named Axel in there?”

  He stood up, to discover a dark-haired girl chewing gum and smoking a cigarette, shoving her burgeoning breasts up against the edge of the counter. “You Axel?” she asked.

  Axel watched her blow a bubble.

  “That’s right. Who are you?”

  The bubble popped, leaving a tiny cloud of cigarette smoke floating in front of her face. She grinned and said, “My name’s Carmen. I think you’re supposed to give me a job or something. How much money will I make?”

  It had taken him all of five seconds to fall for her. She wasn’t Mexican, but he hired her anyway.

  Two days later, when he caught her pocketing a five-dollar bill, he did not love her less, though he watched her more carefully. And now? He had to be honest with himself. She wasn’t a girl anymore. She was a full-blown woman, practically bursting out of her nurse’s uniform, reeking of alcohol and cigarettes, snoring. Still, a wave of tenderness passed over him. She was someone he could nurture and protect, someone with whom he could share his seven decades of wisdom and experience. Like a daughter. Although it was hard not to stare at her tits sometimes.

  He wished she could be trusted. He was still waiting for her grasping, childlike impulsiveness to mellow into responsibility. Maybe someday she would appreciate all he had done for her, maybe take care of him when he got old. That felt good. He liked thinking of her as a nurse, pressing a cool hand to his forehead.

  The blast of a horn sent Axel back into his lane. Some kid in a Chevy, asshole kid driving too fast, swerved around him. Axel gripped the wheel and focused on his driving, his heart hammering. He wasn’t used to this new truck. All the dials were in the wrong places. The steering wheel felt stiff, and you had to put on the seat belt or it would beep and flash at you. And the engine: he’d taken one look at it and closed the hood—you had to have a goddamn computer to change the spark plugs. At least Sam had taken care of the air bag situation. He drove, listening to Carmen’s snores, happy not to have to worry about the thing blowing up in his face.

  Chapter 6

  Mickey Dean, dressed in her Go Big Red gym shorts and tank top, sat curled up on the upholstered rocker, reading a book, holding it between her bony knees. She didn’t look up when her little brother clomped into the apartment, dragging the toes of his big black boots as he crossed the room. Her cat, Isabella, tensed up, a ridge of fur rising on her back. James shrugged out of his jacket, let it fall to the floor, and walked past Mickey into the kitchenette. She saw fingernail scratches on his back. She thought she knew whose. The cat fled into Mickey’s bedroom.

  Mickey heard the sound of a pop top.

  “That better not be the last one,” she shouted.

  James shuffled back into the living room, holding a Pepsi.

  “If that’s the last one, you better go out and buy some more.” Mickey glared at him, her oversize red-plastic- rimmed eyeglasses pushed up on top of her brittle blond hair. She was a big girl, nearly six feet tall, hard and lean, elbows and knees and shoulders sticking out everywhere, weak blue eyes, small mouth, and a beak like a roadrunner. She and her brother looked as unlike as any two people on the planet. Even their skin color. Hers was pale, while James’s skin had a dusky, almost khaki tint. Different fathers. Possibly different mothers as well—the Dean family history was somewhat muddled. Sandra Dean, their mother, looked like a seriously obese Barbra Streisand.

  All Mickey knew for sure was that she’d grown up with James in the same miserable Council Bluffs rambler, watching Sandra drink herself unconscious daily. Mickey hadn’t been back, hadn’t seen her mom in six years, not since she took off on her seventeenth birthday and got herself a job printing T-shirts, a job she still held. A year after Mickey left home, her brother James had dropped out of school and quickly established himself in the Omaha-Council Bluffs drug trade, selling weed and acid and a few other items to former classmates. He’d lasted about five weeks before landing in the youth rehab center at Geneva, Nebraska, for six months. When he got out, Mickey found him a job with the T-shirt company, working in the warehouse. That had lasted a few months, until the warehouse manager found James asleep, again, on a stack of red 50/50 XXL raglan- sleeve sweats. James had disappeared from her life for more than a year after that. The next time she heard from him he was in jail, about to be sentenced for trying to sell three ounces of North Platte Green to an Omaha narcotics officer. That time he was nineteen, an adult, and they’d sent him to the state penitentiary in Lincoln. Mickey had approved of the sentence. Maybe that would be what it took to open his eyes.

  For the past several weeks, since James had been released from Lincoln, he’d been staying with her. Sleeping on her couch. Eating her food. Being mean to her cat. Leaving the toilet seat up.

  He had definitely changed. For one thing, he was shaving his head nearly every day now, leaving little hairs all over her bathroom. He had those gold rings in his eyebrow. Something else had changed too. James had never been a particularly caring or empathic young man, but after thirty months in Lincoln he didn’t seem to give a shit about anything. He especially did not give a shit about his big sister, who happened to be supporting him.

  Mickey said, “You’re a parasite, James, you know that
?”

  He dropped onto the cat-shredded couch, put his boots up on the coffee table.

  “You look for a job today?” she asked, staring at his boots.

  “Sure. I looked all day long.”

  “You can’t stay here forever, you know. I said you could stay for a few weeks, just till you got a job.”

  James Dean shrugged. “What you reading?” he asked. He tipped back the Pepsi and let a quarter ounce of cola slip into his mouth, held it there, enjoying the sensation of bubbles on his tongue.

  Mickey held up the book, one of her poetry books, a big fat brown one. He leaned toward her and read the title: The Complete Prose and Poetry of John Donne.

  “Read me something,” he said. Mickey liked to think she was the smart one. It calmed her down when she could show off her education, act like she knew everything.

  “Are you going to go look for work tomorrow?”

  “Absolutely. C’mon, Mick. Read me something. Maybe it’ll make me a better person.”

  Mickey frowned, trying to stay mad. Dean turned his mouth into a smile, giving her his cute big-eyed little brother look. It got her every time. She flipped through the book, looking for something. She cleared her throat and lowered her chin, just like when they were little kids and she would read to him.

  “Any man’s death diminishes me,” she read, “because I am involved in mankind.“

  Dean interrupted. “What’s that supposed to mean?” He liked to ask her what poems and things meant, see what kind of bullshit she could come up with.

  “That means that we are all brothers. And sisters.”

  “I met a lot of guys in Lincoln weren’t my brothers,” Dean said.

  “You just don’t get it.”

  “Sure I do. Let me see that.” He grabbed the book. “Show me where you were.”

  Mickey pointed at a highlighted paragraph. Dean furrowed his brow and read. “The guy can’t spell for shit,” he said. “No man is an Iland. No s. That’s not how you spell it.”