by Rex Miller
Happy would have his goon break Royce's knees, stand him in a fifty-five-gallon Treflan drum full of Sakrete, and drop him into the deepest part of Bluehole Trench. That is—if Happy was in a good mood. The man had all the forgiving warmth of a napalm strike.
“The thing"—as he often thought of it—hovered over him, even while he slept. Within minutes of waking he'd always be slammed back to reality by the dangerous game he'd been coerced into playing. What had it taken to pressure him into becoming a secret player, this guy approaching the big three-zero whose sum total of accomplishments was the shack of a cabin, cool enough in summer but freezing in winter, and a funky cocaine jones the size of a big fat dog? It hadn't been easy to bollix and jumble up so many parts of a life that had once been brimming with potential, as his parents, teachers, friends, lovers, and employers had often said. It had taken an iron will, a steely resolve, and the flinty maturity of a nine-year-old whacked out on LePage's Model Airplane Glue. It had taken a mutha of a jam-up.
“Yo, Royce,” Vandella the bartender said. “You up early."
“Ten-four,” Hawthorne said, shedding his raincoat and tossing it carelessly in the direction of a Rockhouse coat hanger, holding his fingers apart so Vandella could start pouring.
“Hee ya go.” He wiped the bar around the shot glass. “Beer back?” He asked.
“Yeah.” Royce tilted it back, almost gagging on the taste. Not swallowing the whole shot. The dirty version of “Louie, Lou-eye” blasted from the juke, a three-thousand-dollar Rockola. He gratefully grabbed the cold Oly in his left hand, tilting it and sucking on it, then downing the rest of the shot and washing it down with beer.
“Again?” Vandella jittered behind the bar, singing, “Stick my finger in the hole of love,” as he cleaned a glass.
Royce nodded.
“Happy been in?"
“Not since I been here."
“How long you been here?"
“All fuckin’ day.” They both smiled. They had a routine. Royce drank another shot of tequila. Cuervo in the right, Oly Light in the left, a two-handed drinker he was. None of that lime and salt and ritual, just put down four or five Mex-Tex boilers and get some hair on the bear.
He carried the next pair over to the open blackjack table when he saw who was filling the card shoe. Only one dealer had come in to work so far, the older woman everybody called Tia.
“What's your pleasure, sir?” she asked, professionally. Then she looked up, and his presence registered in her eyes.
She had lots of wrinkles. A bad dye job. White blouse and string tie. Long, Mandarinesque fingernails. But she was his secret ace, and he hoped she was every bit as good as the Feds had promised him.
He got two-dollar chips and bucked heads with the house for half an hour. Making it look good. Getting half-tanked; the Darvon and the tequila and the brewskis all floating around now in the Feelreal Goodzone while he got his balls up.
“Double down.” He had twenty against a bust. Let it ride, and was suddenly sitting with 180 bucks, without help, and feeling the power.
He pushed two hundred out. Caught a pair of face cards and edged Tia by a point. Four hundred and change.
Got chicken and slowed down for about an hour. Eased back on the booze, letting Vandella kick a free Oly over now and again. Nursing six bills.
He lost eight hands in a row. Bet a ten and stood on fourteen and she took it.
Bet ninety and was down one eighty and change. Bet the one eighty. Changed his mind and swept it all back but a dime. Lost.
Pushed it all out again and caught eighteen. She hit seventeen and caught a ten. He won. Ended up with eight hundred bucks.
Bet it all and about crapped when Tia turned over a bright red king. He was sitting there with a nine and a seven, and he put his stack of chips on it and stood. She flipped the hole card, and it was a six. She tapped it and broke her back, and Royce had to go wee-wee real bad. He pocketed his sixteen hundred-dollar chips, toked Tia half his change, and excused himself.
When he came out of the room with “Trouser Snakes” on the door, there was Happy and his bonebreaker, Luis. Luis was a big, dumb goon. He'd been a pro fighter, and the word was he liked to spar with kids and hurt them. He had a face that resembled the bad side of a heavily cratered planet, and fists like cast-iron doorstops.
“Que pasa, amigo?” Happy called to him jovially.
“Nada."
“My man,” he told Vandella, who carefully poured tequilas, “whatever my amigo wants."
“Less sit,” Happy said, smiling only with his mouth. “So.” He drank. Licked his lips. Nodded. Said “So” again.
“So.” Royce smiled.
“I think a cold one would go down real slick,” Happy said, pulling the fourth chair out and putting his cowboy boots up on it, getting mud on the chair seat.
“Yeah."
“Cervezas, por favor,” he told Vandella without raising his voice, as if he knew the bartender would hear it. Then, in the same tone, as if he didn't care who heard what, he asked Royce, “You gonna take the weight or what, amigo?"
“Sure!” It caught him off guard. “What you think, Happy?"
“Hmm?"
“Don't I always?” Big smiles all around. Big buds having a pleasant drink together.
“Hub?” Happy suddenly had appeared to have lost his hearing altogether. Very hard to talk to. Luis looming at his side.
“Don't I always?"
“Yeah, bro, but you an ounce-pouncer, senor. No offense. I wanna know you gonna take the weight for true now.” Still the fake smile through Columbian tan and expensive teeth.
“No problemo."
“Okey dokey.” He laughed his loud bray. Looking at Luis. “I like that: no prob-lem-o.” The ferocious-looking dummy beside him tried to look like he was smiling too.
“This is King of Peru now, right?” Royce was going to play it out straight to the end. He even sounded concerned.
“Zorro-d'Oro. El Primo-dreamo. You wanna leetle taste up front?"
“Oh—” he spread hands “—not nec-essary.” Getting into it. “Satisfaction gay-ron-fucking-teed, amigo.” A hand reached into inner recesses, came out, slid across, and laid something in Hawthorne's palm. “Horn some of this li'l girl up your snout."
“Excuse me for a minute?” Royce pushed the chair back and started for the “Trouser Snakes” sign.
“Be my guest,” Happy Ruiz called to him in a loud voice as he headed for the john. Jack Eigen from the beautiful Chez Paree—"Be my guest."
Royce turned with a pinched grin on his face. “Be right back."
“Muy bien."
He went into the men's room again and did some of the blow. It knifed through him, getting his head right for the first time since he'd opened his blinkers. He rubbed his nose, came out, and walked over to the table where Tia was about to deal a customer. He threw his pocketful of chips down on the felt twenty-one layout.
“Let's ride that. You want to?” he asked, those being the magic words. For whatever reason, she wasn't with it. The woman began counting, stacking fifteen chips with 100 stamped on each one in green and yellow. Her eyebrows, painted an inch above where they had originally grown, arched another half an inch as she dealt him in automatically, flipping pasteboards to the three of them.
“You got it, sir,” she said. Half a beat late. The encoded response, all right, but clearly she was just registering what had happened. The end of her first shift, probably. The woman was tired. She was human. What the hell.
He stared at seventeen, really starting to sweat. Maybe that stuff about the unknown capabilities of the human brain has some basis in scientific fact—he felt as if he'd known she was turning up an ace for herself the second she began to turn the card, giving herself a blackjack and him a death sentence all in one move. If she turned up an ace, she might as well break out a tarot deck and deal him a death card and be done with it.
It hit him like a lightning bolt as he visualized her raking
chips. He'd say—what? Can I go shy? She would have to tell him no—sorry. Rules of the house.
He could feel Happy and Luis staring holes in his back. Wanted to whisper What are you doing, honey? You're gonna kill me in the loudest stage whisper in history. Watched her color a little as she snapped back into gear, vanishing the ace and taking another card as smooth and cold as ice—right under the other customer's nose.
Her little red five was like a 10:59 reprieve from the warden. The other guy stood pat. He stacked fifteen hundred dollars on his sorry seventeen. Watched her clobber her fifteen with two taps, the retrieved ace and a natural ten.
“That busts the house, gentlemen, nice going.” He breathed again, raking the chips over and filling his pockets.
He toked her, willing his hands not to shake, and strolled back to the table.
“I thought you was changing your mind. You didn't like my stuff and was gonna play cards for a while.” Happy was not happy.
“Shit no, bro. That was outray—! Hey! What chew talkin’ about?’ Royce was now happy enough for the pair of them. “You want some now—” he made the money sign with first finger and thumb—"or what?” he asked in an innocent tone.
“Whatever makes everybody happy,” Happy said, as Royce Hawthorne reached for the three thousand in Rockhouse money. All according to somebody's master plan, right? Right.
6
WATERTON
Mary Perkins, only half-awake, first wondered if it had all been a bad dream, hoping that it had and she'd be able to shake herself out of this darkly imagined history. But the knowledge that it was real, Sam being missing, came and enveloped her in its cold arms, and she shivered, reluctantly getting out of bed, and struggling into her housecoat.
It was not cold enough to turn the heat on yet, but the October night air had turned chilly, and she went to the bathroom, peed, looked at her badly tousled reflection, and drew the bedroom curtains open. She was still in their house at South Main and Park, and her husband was still gone.
Her reflection in the bathroom mirror had been no help. Normally Mary Perkins was an extremely attractive woman, but at that moment, in her eyes she closely resembled the Bride of Frankenstein. Her hair was standing straight up, as if shocked by a mad scientist, and sans makeup, she looked wan in the rude light. The rumpled sheet she'd clung to in the night had impressed deep sleep lines into her face, and they crisscrossed the right side of her cheek and forehead like ancient knife scars.
One morning—it would be a week tomorrow—Sam had taken a shower, dressed in his charcoal suit and red and black rep silk tie, eaten a nonbreakfast of half a glazed donut, a juice glass of OJ, four cups of coffee—black—and, suitably caffeine-wired, had kissed her and headed out the door. Presumably for work.
That was last Friday morning at roughly seven twenty-five A.M. He was invariably the first one there. Myrna Hyams, the elderly receptionist-secretary, was always on time at eight-thirty, when the office would officially open for business.
Sam was successful as only you can be when you're the “real estate man” for a small agri-community. His was, in fact, one of only two local agencies, and he'd just finished putting together an incredible deal for several of the local farmers. He was a great provider, well liked by all, and his health had been generally excellent.
But the preceding Friday morning he'd left the house, driving down Main, northbound, turning left on Maple Avenue and going around behind the block of buildings in which Perkins Realty was situated between Ed's Gulf Station and P.J. Thatcher's State Farm office, and parked their car. Somewhere between the time he'd locked the car door and started to unlock the back door of his office, Sam had disappeared.
She'd called the office, worried, when he hadn't returned home that evening, and got the standard recording. She went over and asked Owen Riley's wife, Alberta, would she mind running her down to see if Sam was working, late and had forgotten to call? She saw the office dark, assumed he'd become involved in a deal somewhere, and had Alberta run her back home. But when he hadn't shown up by ten-thirty, she was on the telephone calling the police and every hospital within fifty miles.
A guy out East she didn't know, someone named Lenny who'd gone to school with Sam, had phoned and left word for him to return the call. She didn't tell the caller anything.
She phoned the Waterton chief of police, Marty Kerns, at home. Tried the regional highway patrol unit out at Satellite J. Called all over town, phoning everybody she could think of. Nobody had seen Sam that day.
Around midnight Myrna Hyams's party line cleared up and Mary learned that Sam had never made it in to work.
“Myrna, how is it you never called the house to ask if he was ill?” she'd asked, rather more pointedly than she'd intended.
“I just assumed he was out showing properties or something. And then when he hadn't shown up by late afternoon, I did try to phone, but your line didn't answer."
“I'm sorry, Myrna. I went to get groceries about three-thirty."
“So I just assumed maybe he'd had to run you somewhere or something. I guess I did wrong. I should have called—"
“No. That's perfectly—"
“I should have called back. Did you call the hospitals?"
“It was the first thing I thought of. He's probably okay. I better get off the line in case he'd try to phone. I'll let you know if I hear anything. You do the same, okay?"
“Sure, Mary. I will. Call me when you find out something. Please?"
“Course I will. Sorry to phone so late. I'll let you know."
The women hung up. Neither of them had thought to mention—was Sam's car out in the parking lot? Later Myrna would admit that she'd stayed so busy with paperwork, she never thought to look around for his vehicle. In the morning the police noticed his car, and it became an official investigation.
Saturday and Sunday Mary Perkins had stayed close to the phone. But when he was still missing on Monday, she started reaching for straws: phoning the FBI for one thing, and then getting in the car and starting her own hunt.
By midweek she'd been everywhere she could think of, asking around, asking friends, casual acquaintances, Sam's beer-drinking buddies of old, anyone she could think of who might have remembered seeing Sam on Friday morning. She stopped in every merchant's on North Main: First Bank of Waterton, O'Connor Motors, the doctor's office, Judy's Cafe. She went back down South Main to Wilma's and Joe Threadgill's and Dale's Tires. Nobody had seen Sam.
Mary had worn out her welcome with the local cops, and she could tell Marty Kerns hadn't learned a thing. The FBI had blown her off, and everybody else sort of shrugged and said—"We're doing everything we can. He's gone up in smoke and we can't figure out what happened to him."
After six days of it, she was very tired and very worried. She'd slept “like the dead,” as her deceased mother used to say, and yet she felt as if she'd been up for thirty-six hours straight. Exhausted, red-eyed, and sick to her stomach with fear, she picked up the phone and called her old boyfriend.
7
WATERWORKS HILL
Royce Hawthorne was shaking. It was cold in the tiny hillside cabin, but he didn't feel like building a fire. He was sure it would be warmer outside. The brightness of the day shone through the grimy windows. He threw some clothes on—the same old shirt and greasy pair of jeans—pulled on his scuffed cowboy boots, splashed icy water on his face, grabbed sunglasses, and lurched out the cabin door.
Outside it was summertime! The sun was blazing hot on his face. The sky was as blue as it ever gets, at least over North America, and it was a day for the fast movers: the jet jockeys from Scott AFB, and the T-38 pilots out of Eaker all overflew Waterton regularly. This morning there was a big tick-tack-toe game overhead; a crosshatching of contrails covered the blue. The fresh lines were as bright as white paint, as white as pharmaceutical cocaine. Where they began to dissipate, they had the look of downy cotton pulled out in a long strand.
Hawthorne stood eyeballing the perfectly
crossed vectors, their straight-arrow pathways intersecting and then softening, dying, vanishing back into nothing.
He took off his shades and rubbed sleep or whatever it was that was gumming up the corners of his eyes. Still a little groggy and hung over, he needed to brush his teeth. Drink a brewski. His mouth was foul from too many tequila shooters and ghetto gang-bangers.
Royce could scarcely believe his deal had gone south on him. That was supposed to be later. But this business with Drexel was too off the wall for words. He felt that old Rockhouse anxiety attack that he'd experienced at the blackjack layout trying to resurface. He had trouble grasping what had happened. Drexel! Of all people to fuck him over, it's Mr. Straight. That preppie hippy dippy yuppy wimpy pimpy prince. Folding on him. Then with the melons not to take his calls.
He'd phoned maybe a dozen times, each time getting the two rings and that suck-face recorded message that he was “unable to come to the phone right now, but if you'll leave your name and number when you hear the tone—” It had tested all his willpower not to leave a screaming threat on his machine, but fortunately he wasn't quite that stupid or that high.
He tried to analyze what it meant. He couldn't. The guy had been golden. Golden. Where did this leave him? It left him between the hardscrabble and a rock crusher was where it left him: high and dry and broke and owing and holding serious weight. A whole mothering load of that Peruvian flake. Happy was right. He was an ounce-pouncer, señor. He should have stuck to twenty-one. He'd stepped into the deep end of the pool, this tadpole.
What in hell was he going to do? Call the cops? Sue Drexel? He couldn't move that kind of weight for that kind of dough. And giving it back to Happy was out. There had to be a way to save the deal. He blinked his glazed eyes, massaged his aching temples, ran his fingers through his long, stringy hair, and put his shades back on.
The edge of Waterton Cemetery was visible from where he stood. Just the extreme northeast fringe, where they buried the paupers. Unlike its manicured, golf-course green sister burial ground to the southwest, this edge was over-grown with weeds, and covered in a carpeting of dead grass and rotting mulch. There was a thick tree line to the right.