Western Swing

by Tim Sandlin

  I stood with my hands visible, watching the man inspect my elk head. He ran his hand down the right antler to the button at the skull. Then he brushed some pine needles from the nasal cavity. I took him for a maniac, which meant I was safe for the moment, he would be in no hurry to kill me. Maniacs always explain themselves before they blow your brains out. They want you to agree that killing you is the proper course of action.

  However, the timing confused me. The guy’s appearance was awfully convenient to the theme of the Vision Quest. It’d been six years since Buggie left and almost four since Ann’s death. Why did this character show up on the one day I’d planned for explanations?

  “Why today?” I asked.

  He paused to eye me again. “I’ve observed you for the last four weeks. My vacation ends tomorrow.”

  “You’re killing me today so you can get back to work?”

  The man nodded.

  Even my assassins are tacky. “What kind of job do you have to get back to?”

  “I own a Dodge dealership.”

  “I’m being stalked by a vengeance-crazed car salesman?”

  “You have no idea who I am?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I was Annie’s family, the only person who loved her. And she loved me. And you don’t even know my name. She was a stranger to you, wasn’t she?”

  “She never mentioned talking to an old guy.”

  One-handed, he dug out his wallet and handed me a card.

  I was embarrassed for him. “Listen, mister, killers don’t pass out business cards.”

  “Just read the damn thing.”

  WALT SMITH DODGE/OLDSMOBILE in twenty-four-point type above the logos of both companies. Then underneath, it read HIGHWAY 101 AND GLENWOOD, COOS BAY, OREGON. I couldn’t recall a Walt Smith from Oregon. Ann was so long ago and in a completely different life and frame of mind, but I’d remember anyone as close as this guy claimed. The name Smith was familiar.

  “Holy shit, you really are family.”

  He smiled, showing capped teeth. “Ann is my daughter.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “She told me about you. You’re nuts.”

  He swung the rifle in my direction, but I was too blown to take the threat seriously. “Didn’t you once shoot at some guy on the freeway?”

  “I’m going to shoot at you now.”

  For the first time, I spotted the resemblance to Ann and Buggie, especially Buggie. It was in the brow and forehead area, and the stubborn look of his eyes. “Why the grudge, Mr. Smith? We both loved her and she’s gone. You and I should be empathetic companions.”

  He jerked the bolt action back, then forward. “You abandoned Annie when Fred disappeared. You killed her.”

  He’d said what I sometimes late at night suspected. However, at the time, it seemed the opposite. From the moment we lost Buggie, Ann had fallen into a closed-off trance, almost a spell. I tried to talk, tried to touch her. I cried at the same times she did. I was there for Ann, at least through that first summer while we searched. But then we returned to Denver and I started Buggie’s book. She started barbiturates.

  I said, “You abandoned her when her mom died.”

  Smith pulled the trigger. Dirt belched up next to my right foot.

  “This is too Western for me, Walt. What say we cool it?”

  Another shot bit tree bark behind my head. I froze, hoping not to piss him off any more. My mind, however, raced. He’d worked the bolt before the first shot, which meant, like most hunters, he didn’t walk around with a shell in the chamber. My Ruger down in the cabin had a three-shot magazine. I wondered what the odds were of all Magnum rifles being the same.

  Walt shouted, “My little girl loved me, you hear that? I mattered, not you. When Fred died, you ignored her and she turned to her daddy.”

  “So where was her daddy the afternoon she killed herself?”

  He fired again.

  Lana Sue stepped from behind a tree. “Stop frightening my husband.”

  • • •

  Holy Christ, was I glad to see Lana Sue. She had on a rainproof poncho and this floppy hat we’d bought in Venice. She carried my daypack in one hand with the sleeping bag bunched under her arm. Her eyes were beautiful.

  “Aim that thing somewhere else,” she said. “I’ve had it with men and guns.”

  Walt lowered the rifle so it pointed into the ground a couple of feet in front of me. With his left hand, he pumped three more shells into the magazine. “Who are you?”

  In hopes of a hug, I took a step toward Lana Sue, but neither she nor Walt encouraged the gesture. “This is my new wife, Lana Sue. Lana Sue, this is Buggie’s grandfather.”

  “You must be kidding.”

  “He says I killed Buggie and caused Ann’s suicide and now he’s on his vacation to kill me.”

  “Jesus, Loren, I leave you alone for four days…”

  I shrugged. “Anything interesting happen to you while you were gone?”

  She stared at me a moment, then dropped my pack on the ground and turned to look at the elk. “And who’s this?”

  “I thought maybe it was God, but I was wrong.”

  She studied the elk without comment, then slid out of her own daypack and bag. “You hungry?”

  “Starved.”

  “We could both use a drink.”

  Alcohol sounded awfully good right then. “How did you know where to look for me?”

  Lana Sue pulled a fifth of Jim Beam from her pack and tossed it to me. “Marcie. I figured you’d trundle on down there soon as I topped the rise.”

  “I returned her bundt pan.”

  As she leaned over her pack, Lana Sue eyed me under the brim of the French floppy hat. “You hit on her.”

  Was this wifely intuition or had Marcie ratted? Marcie was a sport, she wouldn’t rat. “I deny it,” I said. “Marcie’s only sixteen.”

  “So?”

  The Beam went down like liquid battery acid. I loved it. “Why did you come looking for me?”

  Lana Sue tore the seal off her own bottle of scotch. That’s one of the things I admire about her. Even in the backcountry, she’ll haul one bottle of my drink and one of hers.

  “Lana Sue,” I asked, “why are you here?”

  She poured scotch into a Dixie cup. “I missed you.”

  Men with rifles hate to be ignored. Walt Smith thumbed another shell into the chamber and fired up at the pine tops. “You two don’t seem to understand what’s happening here. I am going to kill Loren now, so let’s cut the chatter.”

  Lana Sue drained her Dixie cup. “What about me?”

  “I don’t know. You’re a problem.”

  Lana Sue offered him the scotch bottle. Without lowering the rifle or taking his eyes off me, Walt took a long swallow. From the way he drank, I could tell the last couple days of pure living had been just as hard on him as it had on me. I poured more Beam down my throat into a stomach that had had nothing but Fig Newtons for four days.

  He drank again. “I don’t believe in killing anyone who doesn’t deserve to die.”

  “Good attitude,” Lana Sue said.

  “And you don’t—so far as I know yet. Did you ever abandon anyone?”

  Lana Sue reached for the bottle to refill her cup.

  Walt continued, “I don’t suppose you’d promise not to tell anyone I shot him?”

  “I’d promise anything to stay alive.”

  “Lana Sue,” I said. She smiled at me.

  “But you wouldn’t keep your promise.”

  “Suppose not.”

  “This is a fix. I’ve never had to execute anyone from selfish motives before.”

  More items spilled from Lana Sue’s daypack—a bundle in white butcher paper, a box of Noodle-Roni, a pack skillet, a Glad Bag with what appeared
to be real coffee. Lana Sue talked as she sorted. “I’m not the one to help you. I don’t want me or my husband shot because I love us both and don’t think either one of us deserves to die.”

  Mr. Smith pointed at me with the gun barrel. “He does.”

  “You have a name?” Lana Sue asked.

  “Walt Smith.”

  “Okay, Walt Smith. What say we eat something and have a few drinks, you can explain to me why Loren should be shot. Maybe when you’re through, I will promise not to tell.”

  I said, “Lana Sue.”

  • • •

  I was put in charge of the fire. Lana Sue had supper detail while old Walt retired with the scotch bottle to the far side of the clearing where he rested on a rock and kept an eye on me; Lana Sue was allowed occasional Dixie cup refills.

  “You look tired,” she said on one of her trips to his rock.

  “I am tired. Chasing that fool has played havoc with my body clock. Can’t wait to finish him off and go home.”

  The butcher bundle was a pound of hamburger. Lana Sue’s daypack also held salt, pepper, and dried onion flakes. “Hand me my pack,” I said. “There’s paper I can use to start the fire.”

  Lana Sue brought the pack to where I squatted placing rocks into a fire circle. “If you’re looking for the knife, he shot it.”

  “Shot it?”

  “I checked when I found the pack. The blades are bent to hell—won’t open.”

  Lana Sue was right. The bullet had passed through my notebook and lodged in the Boy Scout knife. I wadded some back pages for the pit.

  “I also read that stuff,” Lana Sue said.

  “These are my private thoughts.”

  “You nearly broke up our marriage for being happy is nicer?”

  “Was a revelation to me.”

  “Loren.”

  “I never thought in those terms before.”

  “Any cow knows being happy is nicer.”

  “I’m not a cow.”

  Later, while I sat cross-legged, feeding the fire, Lana Sue showed me the soft side of herself that not everyone is allowed to see. As she knelt beside me and broke hamburger into the frying pan, she touched my hand. “I’m sorry I took off when you needed me, Loren.”

  “I’m sorry I went spiritual and didn’t pay attention to you.”

  Her hand squeezed once, then let go. “It’s my own fault. I knew you were a ding when we married. In fact, that deep crap was one of the things I loved most about you—never understood your thought process, or wanted to for that matter, but I loved you for it. I just didn’t think you’d ding out on me.”

  I watched her hand moving over the skillet, stirring the burger. She held the spoon like a pencil with her index finger pointed into the pan. “I fixed the vacuum cleaner.”

  She stopped. “Come on, Loren, I apologized and meant it. You don’t have to lie to me.”

  “I fixed it. The belt was on backwards and was rubbing that center doohickey that spins. I even cleaned up the mess afterwards.”

  “Amazing.”

  “You underestimated me again. You always underestimate me and every now and then I don’t deserve it.”

  She leaned the skillet to drain the grease. It made a sputter sound on the wet grass. Walt sat up. “What’s going on over there?”

  “Supper,” Lana Sue called. She balanced the skillet back over the rocks and continued talking to me. “It’s just that you act like such a stupid genius sometimes, like a college professor or a poet, all cerebral and no brain.”

  “I can wash dishes and I can clean bricks. Don’t call me a poet.”

  Lana Sue poured water from my canteen into the skillet. Then she added the Noodle-Roni. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re in the right this time.”

  “Did that ever happen before?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  I scouted around the clearing for more sticks. There wasn’t much deadfall in sight of Ann’s father, but whenever I drifted behind the trees, he made throat-clearing sounds and thumbed his bolt. I think the alcohol affected him more than it affected me or Lana Sue. The person at the barrel end of a gun hardly ever gets as drunk as the guy on the trigger—even if he drinks a lot, which I did.

  Up close, the elk’s gray eye sockets didn’t seem nearly as knowing as they had from across the clearing. Maybe Lana Sue and Walt Smith affected it. Mystic beings don’t normally reveal themselves to more than one person at a time. I rubbed that flat forehead, then spread my hand so my thumb went in the right eye hole and my middle finger in the left. His head had a petrified calcium feel to it, like chalk in a pool hall. The tree had grown a full half inch around the base of one antler, which meant the skull hadn’t moved in a long, long time. If this was an aware-of-itself entity, I imagined whoever was in there must have been bored stiff before we came along.

  Back at the campfire, Lana Sue lowered her voice. “You think this is best dealt with blasted?”

  “The only way.” I threw on a whole stack of wood, hoping Walt was the kind who mesmerizes on flames.

  Lana Sue sipped her drink. “What’s the odds this murder thing is for real?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. He’s had plenty of chances and hasn’t killed me yet.”

  “I didn’t like the part about never having had to execute from selfish motives before.”

  That word before had been ominous. “Let’s not play it as a bluff and wind up dead fools.”

  Lana Sue blew across a spoonful of the skillet mess. “There’s no plates and only one spoon. We’ll have to share.” She tasted and made a face. “Wish we had some basil.”

  “You’d think he couldn’t kill someone he’s shared a spoon with.”

  • • •

  The mist lifted as we ate supper so I stretched my damp sleeping bag out next to the fire and sat on the foot end. Lana Sue took off her floppy hat, letting her dark hair tumble across her shoulders. As she leaned over the fire, she cupped her hair back with her left hand the way a girl will when she drinks at a low water fountain. I caught Walt staring at the back of her head, but I don’t blame him. Lana Sue is beautiful.

  He ate considerably more of the burger-Roni mix than either one of us did—another sign that killers are less nervous than victims. I saw no evidence that he carried a pack or a sleeping bag, or anything, for that matter, other than his ever-present Winchester. I wondered if he’d slept on the ground for four nights.

  “How long you been up here?” I asked.

  He looked at me through the heat waves over the fire. “I lost you on Sunday.”

  “He was with Miss Pimply Seducer.” Lana Sue wasn’t about to drop that subject, even in the face of death.

  “Be that as it may,” Walt continued, “I found your car that afternoon and remained next to it, hoping to execute you there, until yesterday, when I grew fearful you might not return before I was due in Oregon.”

  “I never heard of an assassin on a deadline,” I said.

  “Our midsummer clearance sale starts this weekend.”

  “Where’d you sleep last night?”

  “I didn’t.”

  I took a deep pull on the Beam. We were all sucking down whiskey at an alarming rate. Walt and Lana Sue appeared to be in a scotch competition, which meant they’d soon run dry and make a transfer to my bottle. I figured to process my rightful ounces before the time came for sharing.

  Walt cleared his throat. “This must be disappointing slop for a last meal.”

  “Look at the sunset,” Lana Sue said. Dutifully, I turned to admire the pink fluff in the west. The sun dropped between the mountains and the cloud layer, sending out orange-gold fingers the color of Miller beer in a dark bar.

  “Real nice,” I said.

  Walt looked at me instead of the sky. “Annie wrote me a letter.”


  “I’ve never seen so much pink in a sunset,” Lana Sue said.

  I leaned way back, making a pillow out of my daypack. “It’s the altitude. Down below, the pollution gives it a purple glint.”

  “Three weeks before you made her kill herself, she sent me a letter.”

  Lana Sue’s temper flashed. “Are you going to appreciate the sunset or not?”

  “Don’t interrupt me.”

  “Don’t threaten me.”

  They stared at each other with all kinds of unspoken communication. I jumped in to ease the tensions. “She’s upset because you called supper slop.” That didn’t defuse either of them, so I went on. “Ann and you didn’t communicate the whole six years I was with her. Why at the end?”

  “Because you betrayed her.”

  “Did you write back?”

  Walt jerked and stood up. Even though the Winchester rested in the crook of his arm, it was aimed through the fire, directly at my crotch. Gave me a sudden need to pee.

  “She wrote that your carnality caused the loss of her child.”

  “Ann never used the word carnality in her life.”

  “She said Fred heard you screwing her and ran away and something got him.”

  Lana Sue said, “My cooking isn’t slop.”

  “Then after you’d robbed her of her child, you decided to cash in on the grief. You were writing a book that would sell her private hell to the reading public.”

  “Did you write back?” I asked again.

  He took a step toward me. “Fred was gone, you were as good as gone. All Annie had left was his memory and you stole that.”

  The last pink in the west turned ruby as the sun flattened on both the bottom and top. His accusation about Buggie stuck. I drove him away. Making love had never been the same since. Just when I’m supposed to let go and live the moment, I always wonder who my dick is killing this time. But this idea that I caused Ann’s suicide was one step too far. I wrote the book to purge grief and guilt, not steal her memories or make money.

  “I deny it,” I said.

  “Annie claimed that if you finished the book she would never hold her son again and she would die. She said she burned it once but you didn’t care.”

  Lana Sue asked, “What did you do when you got the letter?”