The Mortal Nuts

by Pete Hautman

  “You think he’s as weird as your friend that was here yesterday?”

  “Who, Dean? Dean’s weird too. How come it’s so dark out? It’s not that late, is it?”

  Kirsten and Sophie looked at Carmen, seeing themselves reflected in mirrored lenses.

  “Take off your sunglasses,” Sophie said.

  Carmen said, “Oh!” She reached up and touched the glasses, pushing them up on her nose, but didn’t remove them. Sophie shook her head, muttering, and turned back to the counter to wait for customers. She had not noticed the purple bruise that showed just past the edge of the right lens, but Kirsten did. “Did somebody punch you?” she asked in a whisper.

  Carmen shook her head. It had not been a punch, exactly. More like a slap. “I ran into something I didn’t know was there,” she said.

  After putting Axel’s room back in order that morning, Carmen and Dean had walked down the street to Denny’s to get something to eat. Dean had Axel’s .45 stuck in his belt, under his motorcycle jacket. He asked the waitress to bring him steak and eggs, Canadian bacon, sausage links, and two glasses of apple juice. Carmen ordered pigs-in-a- blanket, her favorite breakfast when she’d been a little girl. While they waited for their food to arrive, she had asked him what he planned to do next.

  “Next?”

  “Yeah. You going back to Omaha?”

  Dean shook his head. “Can’t do that.”

  “How come?”

  Dean stroked her kneecap with the barrel of the .45. That was when he’d told her about Mickey. Carmen was glad she’d had the foresight to eat the three Valiums.

  “It’s all your fault, you know,” Dean said. “If you hadn’t wanted those Valiums, it never would’ve happened.”

  “Wait a second,” Carmen said. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “And if you hadn’t wanted to go to Puerto Penasco, I wouldn’t even be here. Now it turns out you were lying to me about the coffee can thing.”

  “The money used to be there,” Carmen said. “He must’ve done something with it.” She didn’t like how calm he was acting.

  “What? What did he do with it, Carmy?”

  Carmen shrugged. She didn’t like being called “Carmy,” either. Their breakfasts arrived. She watched Dean eat his meat. He held on to the plate, lowered his face, and forked the food in quickly. He ate the steak, then the bacon, then the sausage, then the eggs. Carmen unrolled her pancake- wrapped sausages and ate a few pieces of pancake, wondering in a distant sort of way what was going to happen next. Even filtered through the Valium, Dean was making her nervous as a mouse in a cage with a sleeping cat.

  She pushed her plate aside. “What are you gonna do now?” she asked.

  Dean drank his second glass of apple juice. “What would you do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe I’ll rob a bank. What do you think?” He lifted the .45 and set it on the table beside the remnants of his breakfast. “

  “You better put that away before somebody sees it.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do, Carmy.” He stared at her, unblinking. After a few seconds, he picked up the gun and put it in his belt. “I just can’t believe you got me all the way up here for nothing.”

  “I didn’t ask you to come,” she heard herself say, knowing before the sentence was finished that she’d made a mistake. She saw his left hand close, then drift toward her across the table. The fist looked large, soft, and inflated. It floated toward her, growing larger until she could see nothing else. Her head snapped back and hit the plastic booth divider. She gasped and slid down in the vinyl seat. Dean stood and walked calmly out of the restaurant. Carmen felt no pain. She touched her eyebrow, saw blood on her hand. She dipped her napkin in her ice water, dabbed at her brow. None of the other customers seemed to have noticed anything. The waitress stepped up to the table and delivered the check, raising an eyebrow but making no comment about the blood-spotted napkin Carmen held against her brow.

  Carmen paid the check and walked back to the motel. Dean’s car was gone. His bag was gone too, but he’d left his poetry book behind. She lay back on the unmade bed and stared up at the thousands of tiny black holes in the ceiling tiles.

  A few hours later, she had awakened, put on her sunglasses, picked up a bus on Larpenteur, and gone to work. It was better than waiting, not knowing whether or when he would come back.

  Now, standing in front of the prep table, her hands greasy from the ground beef and spattering oil, reliving the morning in her mind, she was surprised to discover that it was making her slightly aroused. She could still feel the warm gun barrel touching her knee. The sensation ran up the inside of her thigh into her belly. He could have shot her. He had considered it—she had seen it in his eyes—but he had chosen not to. His fist had cut her, given her a black eye, but it had felt solid and real, and compared to what he might have done, what might have happened to her, the blow had felt like a caress.

  Dean might be dangerous, but he wasn’t boring. He really did like her. He’d killed his own sister, but the way he told it, it wasn’t exactly his fault. A part of Carmen hoped he would disappear from her life, but another part wanted to see him again. And somehow she knew she would.

  Chapter 17

  After Dean paid his five bucks and pushed through the turnstile, he bought a Harley-Davidson painter cap and a pair of cheap, dark sunglasses from one of the souvenir kiosks. It was late, ten o’clock at night, and everybody else was moving the other way, out the exits and into the parking lots to search for their cars. Dean moved against the flow of bodies, toward the center of the fairgrounds. His new sunglasses blurred the details of the late-night fairground action. A bank of low clouds had moved in over the city; the air was warm and moist. At the corner of Carnes and Nelson, he bought a foot-long hot dog, piled high with onions, and ate it while he watched the flickering, wheeling lights from the midway reflect off the clouds. When he had finished, he strolled up Carnes to the mall, where he bought a blue-raspberry sno-cone and found a comfortable bench where he could suck on the flavored ice and watch the donut guy.

  Tiny Tot Donuts was surrounded by people picking up their final snack of the night. Through occasional breaks in the crowd, Dean could see the black cowboy hat bobbing up and down. It didn’t look like the stand would be closing anytime soon. Dean finished sucking the blue juice out of his sno-cone and dropped its flavorless remains on the trampled grass. The trash bins were overflowing anyway, nearly invisible beneath mounds of greasy paper. Two hundred thousand people had come to eat and spread their refuse over the three hundred acres. Dean strolled farther up the mall toward Axel’s Taco Shop. He watched Carmen serving a small group of hungry customers. He waited a few minutes for a break in the action, then walked right up to Carmen with his new cap and shades and ordered a bean tostada.

  Carmen took his order without recognizing him.

  “Hey,” he said. “How late you think that donut place’ll stay open?”

  “What?” she asked. She looked tired. A long strand of hair was pasted down one cheek. The blond girl brought his tostada and set it on the counter.

  Carmen’s mom had her head in the sink, cleaning it or something. Dean leaned in over the counter and said in Carmen’s ear, “Wake up, Carmy. It’s me.”

  Carmen jumped back, bumping into the blond girl.

  “Hey!”

  Dean laughed.

  Carmen said, “Dean?” She looked quickly back over her shoulder at her mother.

  “I just need to know how late the donut guy stays open.”

  “Probably eleven-thirty or so. Why?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Quarter to. Why? What are you gonna do?”

  “See you later.” He turned and walked away.

  Kirsten Lund, still holding her arm where Carmen’s elbow had hit her, yelled, “Hey! Don’t you want your tostada?”

  Dean kept walking. Sophie turned away from the sink and asked, “What happened?”

&nbs
p; Carmen picked up the tostada and put it back on the prep table. “Some guy didn’t want his food.”

  Sophie looked at the rejected tostada. “Something wrong with it?”

  “No. He was just some weirdo. He decided to have some donuts instead.”

  “Did he pay for it?”

  Carmen shook her head.

  Sophie frowned. “Anybody hungry?” she asked. Carmen and Kirsten shook their heads and watched Sophie regretfully push the tostada over the edge of the table into the trash can. “Another one wasted,” she sighed. She looked tired, and sad.

  One of the things Axel always said was, “You got to leave a little for the next guy.”

  Not too many years ago, he had stayed open until the last customer had left the fairgrounds, sometimes until after midnight, unable to bear the thought of a missed sale. To let even one customer walk away hungry was an opportunity forever gone, or so he had believed. In those days he had been younger, able to function on three or four hours of sleep. And he had been hungrier, more desperate for the green.

  Age had mellowed him in many ways. He could now close his restaurant before eleven, sometimes before ten-thirty. When the weather was bad he could close it earlier yet. The toll demanded by the late, long hours he had once worked was not commensurate with the few paltry dollars they had generated. He could leave that business for the other, younger concessionaires. Or for the next day, or the next year.

  He could see, as he approached the restaurant, that his girls were beat, moving slow, their faces lacking animation. He stepped in through the back door. Sophie gave him a look but didn’t say anything. She hated it when he disappeared. She sent Kirsten home, then the three of them proceeded with their evening wrap-up, packing the perishables into the cooler, sweeping, making everything ready for the next day. Carmen wore sunglasses. Axel wondered why, but chose not to ask. He went outside and hooked up his hose and started spraying down the grass and cement around the taco shop, sending bits of tortilla, lettuce, and miscellaneous jetsam flowing into the gutter. Axel enjoyed this part of the cleanup ritual, seeking out invading bits of cheese curd, cigarette butts, and candy wrappers, sending them on their journey into the sewer system. A pair of large, round young men stopped and tried to order a couple of burritos. Axel smiled and held out his hands helplessly.

  “Sorry,” he said. “We’re closed.”

  Dean watched from a bench at the other side of the mall. The blond girl left the stand and walked toward the east exit, giving Dean a cautious look as she passed him. Stuck- up suburban bitch. He could tell she didn’t like him. He returned his gaze to Axel and his women, watched them closing up. The old guy had a thing going with his hose, like he was taking the world’s longest piss. The longer Dean watched him, the more he became convinced that Carmen’s story about the coffee cans had been a fabrication.

  Funny how that had changed the way he felt about Carmen. He still liked her, but now it was more like John Donne had said, like she was an extension of his self.

  It took Axel, Sophie, and Carmen twenty minutes to close up. None of them noticed Dean. He watched them walk away, then turned all his attention toward Tiny Tot. The black cowboy hat was moving around the machines, bobbing up and down. Now and then he could hear Tiny Tot shouting at his employees. Dean reclined on his bench, crossed his arms, and watched through dark lenses, waiting patiently as the donut machines shut down one by one.

  Chapter 18

  Tommy Fabian claimed to be the hardest-working guy in the concession business, and he never got any argument. He opened his three Tiny Tot stands every morning at a quarter to eight, worked them all day long, and stayed until closing every night. During the Minnesota State Fair, he figured he got maybe four or five hours of sleep a night. He would hit the sack sometime south of midnight, then be up with the poultry for his first cup of sugar-saturated coffee.

  The first two days were always tough. By the third day, Saturday, he would find his groove. Pacing was the secret. Plenty of coffee in the morning, sip a little JD starting around ten, and make sure to keep sipping all day long—but keep it low key. Two or three half pints was about right. A sip here and a sip there, just enough to keep the earth level, the gears meshed, and the engine humming. He never got stumbling drunk, although by the end of the day his motions became noticeably deliberate, and while he always remembered having locked his stands, he rarely recalled the long nightly walk back to his Winnebago.

  Back in the old days, he’d actually slept in his donut stand. That was how it had been when he was growing up, working the county fairs with his old man, running alibi joints. Six Cats, Cover the Spot, String Game—they’d run them all. Whatever the game, they’d always slept with it. It was the carny way. But the last few years, as his limbs stiffened and his digestive system began to assert itself, Tommy had compromised by spending nights in his Winnie, which had all the comforts of home—a soft bed, a shower, and, most important, a toilet. Much as he hated to leave his stands, it was worth it.

  The thirty-foot RV was parked way out at the end of the southern lot, back in the middle of the horse trailer ghetto. This year he was sandwiched between a Peterbilt semi- tractor and an old silver Airstream occupied by the Mexican candlemaker and his harelipped daughter. The Peterbilt had a high red wind deflector that was easy to spot from a distance, even late at night. After closing up, he could point himself at the Peterbilt, and the next thing he knew, he would be asleep in the Winnebago. His legs carried him home like a good horse.

  On this night, only the second day of the fair, Tommy felt that something was not right. After locking up, swinging shut the plywood front, and fastening it with a Yale padlock the size of a hockey puck, he stood beneath the wooden eaves and watched the late-night action.

  Most of the people still on the grounds were late-closing concessionaires and the state fair cleanup crews. With all the grab joints closed, there was no food available, and the few fairgoers still wandering around the grounds were finding little to entertain them. The late-summer air cooled quickly, the greasy, beery fairground odor pinged by breezes sweeping across the grounds from the north. The garbage trucks were out in full force now, every few seconds he could hear the groan of a dumpster being upended, the wet crunching of paper and uneaten food being crushed by powerful hydraulics. The gutters ran with greasy water someone up the hill was hosing down the picnic tables. He watched a waxed cardboard carton float by, carrying fragments of cheese curds.

  Everything looked perfectly normal.

  Tommy reached into his hip pocket and extracted the last half pint of the day. He unscrewed the plastic cap and took his usual moderate sip, then said the hell with it and had a good belt. He still felt funny. The carpetbag slung over his shoulder held nearly three thousand dollars in bills and change. Most of the day’s receipts were already in the bank; the cash in his bag was from the last few hours of operation. It was too late to make’ another deposit. A couple of swallows remained in his bottle. He finished it on his way to the gate, tossed the bottle into a trash can, and pushed out through the wooden turnstile. The Peterbilt was easy to spot, even from two hundred yards away. Tommy sighted on it and launched himself out across the desolate parking lot, trying to ignore the bad feeling, hoping for another forgettable walk home.

  Dean could not believe how long it was taking the little son-of-a-bitch. First he stands around like a stunned gopher, doing nothing, then he decides to have a couple. When he finally gets moving, he’s walking like the earth is made of Jell-O, holding his arms away from his body like an ape on a tightrope. Dean stayed well behind him, invisible in his black hat and sunglasses. This time, he would make sure he was not spotted.

  He followed Tiny Tot out through the turnstile and across Como Avenue. There were only a few cars dotting the main parking lot. He could see the trucks and trailers parked at the back of the lot, four football fields away. Tiny Tot seemed drawn toward a big red-and-chrome semi. Dean stayed fifty yards back and to the side. Tommy disapp
eared behind the semi and did not emerge from the other side. Backtracking, Dean circled the semi until he could see what had not been visible to him before—an old Winnebago motor home tucked in between the semi and a big silver trailer. As he watched, a light came on in the Winnebago. A shadow began moving about inside.

  After a few minutes, the light went out. Dean turned away and began the long walk to his car. He’d hoped for a chance at the little bastard tonight, but it hadn’t worked out. He let his mind explore the details of his future, feeling himself take things one step at a time, being smart. He watched the fairground lights grow crisp and brilliant in the cooling night air.

  Axel stopped the truck outside the door to number 19, put his hand on Carmen’s shoulder, and gave it a gentle shake. Her head came up slowly and turned toward him; she blinked and licked her lips. “We here?” she asked.

  “We’re here.” He watched Carmen fumble for the door latch, then step out onto the Motel 6 parking lot. She moved sleepily, like a little kid awakened from a nap. She wouldn’t remember this in the morning. He waited until she let herself into her room, watching to make sure she got home okay. When she was safely inside, he drove around the building to his own room.

  He kept thinking about her boyfriend. He didn’t see the green Maverick in the lot. That was good. But he couldn’t escape the feeling that he was losing her. Anger and sorrow flickered in random bursts—he was too tired to edit his emotions.

  Axel unlocked his door and flipped on the light, wanting nothing more at that moment than to turn on his television and let the networks do his thinking until he could fall into sleep. He dropped the canvas money bag on the bed, sat down on the wooden side chair, bent forward, and untied his shoes. Lately, it seemed, his feet were farther away than he remembered. He pulled off each shoe after untying it, set it beside the bed, toes pointing out, then sat back and shrugged out of his suspenders.

  That always felt good.