He was outside standing by the Cadillac, wearing a work jacket now over the T-shirt with the words on it. Waiting to give you some shit about Indians, Armand thought. But could he be that kind of punk? He wasn’t big enough. He said, “I’m looking for a ride.” Starting to grin.
“Good luck.”
“No, you say, ‘What way you going?’ And I say, ‘Any way I want.’ Look it here.” He held open his jacket to show the grip of a revolver sticking out of his pants. A checkered-wood grip on a nickelplate Armand believed was a .38 Special made by Smith & Wesson. He saw the gun and saw IT’S NICE TO BE NICE on the guy’s T-shirt, beneath the jacket held open. The guy was older than he had appeared in the restaurant, maybe thirty years old or more, with that tough-guy stare and a diamond pinned to his ear, things that told you he was a punk. Armand walked past him to get in the car and the guy went around to the other side.
When they were both in the car and Armand looked at him again, the guy was holding the nickelplate on his thigh. It was a Model 27 Smith & Wesson with a four-inch barrel. Armand had used a blue-steel one like that one time and liked it, it was a good gun. The guy held it with his hand resting on his crotch. Armand dropped his left hand from the wheel to push a button. The front seat moved back with the hum of the electric motor and the guy said, “What’re you doing?”
Armand looked at him again as he turned on the ignition. “What’s the matter, you nervous? You gonna hold that thing pointing at me, I hope you not nervous. You want this car? Take it.”
The guy said, “I’ll tell you what I want. I’ll tell you my name too, in case you ever heard of me, Richie Nix, N-i-x, not like Stevie Nicks spells hers.”
Armand shook his head. He’d never heard of either one.
They drove through Algonac away from the river, the guy, Richie Nix, saying turn here, turn there, like he knew where he was going and maybe wasn’t so nervous, though he could still be a punk.
They passed lights in windows of houses, then pretty soon there were only trees, once in a while a house. They were going toward a road that would take them to the freeway. Armand began to think the guy wanted to go to Detroit. They’d get there and the guy would get out. That would be okay, it was the way you had to go to get to Florida. It was strange the way the guy said the word as Armand was thinking of it.
“I was driving up from Florida one time,” Richie said. “I picked up this hitchhiker coming onto Seventy-five from Valdosta. I’d spent the night there. The guy was kind of dark-skinned like you only he was Mexican, I think. You’re an Indian, right?”
Armand glanced at him. “No, I’m not Indian.”
“What are you then?”
“Quebecois,” Armand said, “French Canadien,” giving it an accent. Why not? Half of him was.
Richie said, “Don’t you wish. Anyway we’re driving along the interstate, this Mex tells me how he’s been picking oranges half the year and how he’s going up to Michigan to pick sugarbeets. We’re getting along pretty good, I bought him a Co’Cola we stopped for gas, so then pretty soon he’s telling me how much money he made picking oranges and how he saved a thousand bucks and is gonna send it home once he gets to Michigan and sees there’s work there. You believe it, telling a stranger he’s got all this money on him? Shit, I start looking for the next exit sign, get the guy off someplace on a back road. We’re moving along about eighty, I see this Georgia state trooper parked at the side of the road. Shit, it wasn’t even my car, I picked it up in West Palm . . . a Buick Riviera, if I remember correctly. Anyway I go, ‘Hey, you want to drive?’ to the Mex, and got him to trade places with me while we’re moving, the guy laughing, having a good time. Till he looks at the rearview and goes, ‘Uh-oh,’ seeing that state trooper coming up on us with his gumballs flashing. We get pulled over, the guy tells the trooper it’s not his car, it’s mine. I go, ‘My car? This fella picked me up, Officer. I don’t even know him.’ It was funny there for a while and I almost made it, but we both got taken in. Shit, they find out there’s a detainer out on me and I’m fucked. Next thing, I get charged with attempted robbery and kidnapping. I go, ‘Kidnapping, you think I was gonna hold this fucking migrant for ransom?’ Here’s this Mex, he don’t even know what’s going on. Had no idea, or prob’ly even to this day, I was gonna take him out’n the woods and shoot a hole in him, it hadn’t been for that trooper sitting there at the side of the road. That’s what you call one lucky Mexican, huh?” Richie stared through the windshield and said, “This road coming up looks good. Take a left.”
So they weren’t going to Detroit, Armand decided. They turned onto a gravel road, white in the headlight beams, and could hear stones hitting under the car, no houses in sight. They’d be stopping pretty soon.
Armand said, “So you been to prison.”
“Three different ones,” Richie said. “After I got out of Reidsville they sent me back to Florida on the warrant, but I beat that one, an armed robbery, on account of they couldn’t locate any their witnesses. Then I got sent to a federal joint for one of the banks I did. That was where I killed a guy and then some guys tried to kill me, so I was put in this federal protection program where you change your name and was transferred to Huron Valley. But, shit, I still got made, even with a different name. Some guys I was working with in the kitchen tried to poison me to death, so I was taken out of the population till I got my release. That was about two years ago. . . . Hey, this’s good. See? Where that road is, less it’s somebody’s drive. No, it’s an old wore-out dirt road. Pull in there a ways and stop.”
Armand slowed and made the turn, headlights sweeping the corner of a plowed field and coming to rest in a tunnel of trees.
“Okay, now lemme have your wallet.”
Armand leaned against the steering wheel to dig it out of his hip pocket, brought the wallet along his thigh and let it drop on the floor. He reached for it with his head turned, seeing the guy past his shoulder. The guy wasn’t even looking. The guy was hunched over trying to get the glove compartment open.
“This thing locked?”
“Push the button,” Armand said, his hand finding the grip of the Browning automatic, right there with the seat pushed back. He brought the pistol up between his legs and was reaching down again when the guy looked at him.
“The hell you doing?”
“You want my wallet?” Armand came up with it. “Here.”
But Richie was holding the car registration in one hand and his revolver in the other. The glove compartment was open now, a light showing inside. He said, “Shit, this isn’t even your car. What’s L and M Distributing, Limited?”
“They sell pepperoni,” Armand said, “to places they make pizza.”
“Yeah? You work for them?”
“Sometimes, when I feel like it.”
“And they let you use this car?”
“They gave it to me. It’s mine.”
“Gave you a Cadillac, huh?”
Armand watched the guy take the wallet and try to open it with one hand. He watched the guy lay the revolver on his lap and hold the wallet with one hand and take the currency out with the other and then hunch over, holding the money close to the glove-compartment light, to look at it.
“What’s this, all Cannuck?”
“Most of it.”
“It’s pretty but, shit, what’s it worth?”
Armand laid both hands on his lap as he watched the guy riffle through the currency, counting numbers, getting an idea of how much was in the wad.
“Man, you got about a thousand here.”
“Same as that lucky Mexican, ‘ey?”
The guy, still hunched over, said, “The hell you do they pay you this kind of dough?”
Armand felt himself changing back, no longer Armand Degas, dumb guy taken for a ride. He was the old pro again as he came up with the Browning auto and touched the muzzle to the side of the punk’s head.
“I shoot people,” the Blackbird said. “Sometimes for money, sometimes for nothing.
”
Without moving his head or even his eyes, staring at that wad of cash, Richie Nix said, “Can I tell you something?”
“What?”
“You’re just the guy I’m looking for.”
3
* * *
THE DAY THE REAL ESTATE SALESMAN showed the Colsons the house, five years ago, he told them it was built in 1907 but was like new. It had vinyl siding you never had to paint covering the original tulipwood. You had your own well, you had a Cyclone fence dog-run there, if the Colsons happened to have a dog.
Carmen Colson said, “No, but we have a car and a pickup truck and I don’t see a garage anywhere.”
They were standing on the side porch off the kitchen, toward the rear of the two-story Dutch Colonial. The real estate man said, well, it didn’t have a garage, but there was a marvelous old chickenhouse out there. See it? Carmen’s husband, Wayne, said, “Jesus, look at that!” Not meaning the chickenhouse. There was a whitetail doe standing way back against the tree line, off beyond a field growing wild. As soon as he said it Carmen knew they were going to buy the place. It didn’t matter the front hall was bigger than the sitting room, the closets were tiny and wasps were living upstairs in the bedrooms. There were deer on the property. Twenty acres counting the field that ran nearly a quarter of a mile from the house to the tree line and all the rest woods connecting to other woods the real estate man said, you bet, were full of deer.
Carmen said to her husband, after, “Hon, I was born in a house newer than that one.” At this time five years ago they’d been living in one a lot newer, too, a crackerbox ranch in Sterling Heights, ever since they got married.
Wayne said sure, it was old, but look at its possibilities. Knock out a wall here and there, do a little remodeling, the kind of work he could handle, no problem. Wayne said, “You sit in that back bedroom window upstairs. It’s like looking out a deer blind.”
Their only child, Matthew Colson, transferred to Algonac High, where he starred three years as a wide receiver, power forward and third baseman for the Muskrats, won nine varsity letters, graduated, joined the U.S. Navy and was now serving aboard a nuclear carrier, the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, in the Pacific. The front hall was still bigger than the sitting room and the closets tiny; but the wasps were gone from upstairs, Carmen had removed all the paint from the woodwork and they now had a two-car garage. In one half of it was Wayne’s sixteen-foot aluminum fishing boat on a trailer. Their Oldsmobile Cutlass went in the other half, because Carmen got home from work a good hour before Wayne’s Dodge Ram pickup would pull into the drive. Wayne was an ironworker and ironworkers stopped to have a few once they came down off the structure.
Carmen’s dad, now retired and living in Florida, had been an ironworker. Her parents were divorced when she was seventeen, the same year she graduated from high school a straight-A student and her dad took her to the Ironworkers Local 25 picnic. This was where she met Wayne Colson, a young apprentice they called Cowboy, blond-haired and tan wearing just athletic shorts and work shoes, and she couldn’t keep her eyes off him. She watched him look over his bare shoulder at her as he put on his gloves, getting ready for the column-climbing contest. It was where they used just their hands and feet to go straight up a ten-inch flanged beam staked to the ground and held in place by a crane. Carmen watched Wayne Colson climb that thirty-five-foot beam like it was a stepladder and fell in love as he came sliding down the flange in seven seconds flat, muscles tensed in his arms and back, and looked over at her again.
That summer Carmen would borrow the car, drop her mom off at Michigan Bell, where she worked as a telephone operator, then drive forty miles to happen by the building site where Wayne was working. She could pick him out—standing up there on that skeleton of red iron, shirt off, hard hat on backward, God, maybe nine or ten stories in the air—because once he spotted the car he’d wave. Then he’d stand on one foot on that narrow beam, the other foot out behind him, his hand flat above his eyes in kind of an Indian pose and she’d just about have a heart attack. Sundays they’d go for a ride and he’d show her office buildings in Southfield he’d bolted up, Carmen imagining him climbing columns, walking beams, fooling around way up there in the air. Wasn’t he ever scared? Wayne told her there was no difference between being up forty feet or four hundred; go off from either height it would kill you. If you had to fall, he told her, try to do it inside the structure, because they decked in every other floor as they bolted up. But either way, falling inside or out, it was called “going in the hole.” Wayne let seventeen-year-old Carmen heft his tools, his spud wrench, his sleever bar, his bull pin, the sledge he called a beater they used for driving the bull pin to line up bolt holes that weren’t centered. He buckled his tool belt around her slim hips and she could barely move with the weight of it. He handed her a yo-yo, the thirty-five-pound impact wrench they used for bolting up, and Carmen had to tense her muscles to hold it. He told her, hey, she was pretty strong, and said, “Don’t ever get hit on the head with one of these, some Joe happens to drop it.” He told her a Joe was an ironworker who couldn’t hack it. If you were in the trade and your name was Joe you’d better change it. He told her an apprentice was referred to as a punk. If a journeyman called you that, it wasn’t anything to get uptight about. He told her she was the best-looking girl he’d ever met in his entire life. She smelled so good, he loved to stick his nose in her dark-brown hair. He’d tell her he wanted to marry her, the sooner the better, and Carmen would get goose bumps.
Her mom, Lenore, said, “You’re crazy to even think about marrying an ironworker.” Carmen said, well, you did. Her mom said, “And I got rid of him, too, soon as you were of age. Ironworkers drink. They don’t come home from work, they stop off. Don’t you remember anything growing up? Us two eating alone? Doesn’t Wayne drink? If he doesn’t, they’ll throw him out of the local.”
Wayne said to Carmen, “Well, sure ironworkers drink. So do painters, glaziers, electricians, any trade I know of the guys drink. What’s wrong with that?”
Lenore said, “You are a lovely young girl with your whole life ahead of you. You’re smart as a whip, you got all A’s in school. You could go on to college and become a computer programmer. You keep seeing that ironworker he’ll talk you into doing things you’ll be sorry for. You’ll get pregnant sure as hell and then you’ll have to get married.”
Wayne said, “I would never make you do anything you don’t want to,” giving Carmen a wink.
Lenore said, “A girl as attractive as you, with your cute figure, can do better than an ironworker, believe me. You know what’s going to happen? You’ll be stuck in a house full of babies while he’s out having a good time with the boys. Once you’re married you’ll never see him.”
Wayne said, “What do I do? I go fishing once in a while, deer hunting in November. I’m in a softball league but you come to the games, and I bowl, yeah, but that’s all. No more than what other guys do.”
Lenore said, “At least live in Port Huron, so I can be nearby when you need company, ’cause you’re gonna.”
Carmen had taken a course in handwriting analysis, A Guide to Character and Personality, at the Y when she was a senior in high school. One evening in a bar, just to double-check her own judgment, she asked Wayne to write something, for instance about the job he was working on, and she’d analyze it. He didn’t even hesitate. She watched as he wrote fairly fast with a moderate right-handed slant, forming large letters of uniform size. Carmen was relieved to tell him his writing showed he was reliable, enthusiastic and sociable—Wayne nodding—and that his big middle zone indicated the size of his ego, but was probably necessary for anyone who did structural work. She told him she liked his upper-zone dynamics, the way he crossed his t, putting the bar above the stem, pretty sure it meant he was witty in a satirical kind of way. The even pressure of his writing showed he had a strong will and that when he was told what to do it had better make sense. She said uneven pressure meant emotional instability. Wayne
said, “Or your pen’s running out of ink.”
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