by Jeffrey Lent
“It was only getting something taken care of at that point. They’d been dead and waiting four months. It was a wet day, Estus, there wasn’t much to it. She always liked you too. I brought these along for you.” Jamie laid the bottles down in the grass growing up through the chips around the chopping block.
“Now that was thoughtful.”
Jamie took out cigarettes and matches, looked off. Smoked. Then said, “I got a setter puppy for my boy off that sawbones Dodge up to Whitefield. They’re all out woodsrunning today.”
Terry ran his hands up and down the tops of his thighs. “I heard you got a new setup.”
Jamie went down on his haunches, still smoking. Looking at Terry. “You heard what?”
“You got a new setup.”
“Nope.” Jamie shook his head. “Same deal it’s always been.”
“Don’t shit me.”
“Shit you? I’m shitting nobody. Same deal.”
“Pelham?”
“What is it?”
“How far is it to Whitefield?”
“Whitefield?”
“From right here.”
“Jesus, Estus, I don’t know. Twelve—fourteen miles?”
Terry nodded. “Close. Now tell me why I’d walk all that way. And back. Most of a day. To ask a man to ask you to come see me.”
“You’re saying you think I got a problem of some kind.”
Terry spat into the grass.
“That Jeeter Carrick’s not worthless as he seems. There’s a streak of gumption to him, just needs to be nudged along. And I already know he’ll get ambitious on me and he already knows I’ll take him down however many pegs I feel I need to, the time comes. Which it will. I’m no fool, Estus, I know it will. But I can manage it for a while. I don’t see the way Carrick could get around me. I’m years away from losing my quickness, I do believe. And he was available, with some advantage to me. Sometimes the right thing happens that way. And I think he’s not so stupid as to not see that.”
“Well yes, I guess that might be right.”
“Binter wanted out. I had to move quick.”
“A course you did.”
Both quiet then. Nothing resolved. A chirp of tension rising in Jamie, reaching around in the dark for something he wasn’t even sure was there. Not unlike those times he’d waked of a sudden, middle of the night, reaching for Joey, not understanding why she was not there, where she could be, not even sure where he was.
Jamie stood and walked to where the horse trough still stood, the water full and clear, running in from a spring-fed line, the overflow a small worn vee in one end of the trough where the water ran off into a small stream. He cupped his hands and lifted water and drank, twice, the water sweet, cold to ache against his teeth. Turned back to Terry then and said, “But Jeeter Carrick’s not why you walked to Whitefield and back.”
“It’s a nice walk.”
“I suppose. This time of year. I expect there’s folks you could thumb a ride with.”
“I like to think I walk everyday then the odds go up for a quick death. Something sudden. I can’t stand the thought of lingering.”
“Healthy living. I wouldn’t’ve guessed it of you, Estus. What happens you miss a day?”
Terry grinned at him. “I try not to. Even bad snows I can go to the river and back and not get lost. It’s not but a mile each way. Not much of a walk but it gets me out of the house. Patrick Jackson was talking about you the week last he came by to see me.”
There we go. Jamie dried his hands on his trousers. “What was Pat Jackson doing over here?”
“Why he brought me a bottle of bonded whiskey. He likes to come around and talk time to time. I imagine he feels he can say whatever he likes with me and most everybody else is watching to see what side of a thing he’s going to come down on. Everybody else has an interest in what he does. He knows it. I think he likes to come by here and blow off steam. And don’t kid yourself, he’s as confused about this prohibition business as the rest of us.”
“I never had trouble with Jackson or any of those Federal men.”
“Patrick’s sound. He’s got no soapbox. And like before, those Federal boys are mostly concerned with the border, what’s coming south. The problem he’s got to deal with is availability, see, now the legitimate business is over with here in the States. You understand? There’s people think this prohibition bullshit will work. And like everything else, there’s people who’ll be watching out for any little way to grease their own skids.”
“I already got a dozen envelopes I stuff with cash every month. I don’t see what else I can do. I got everybody covered that will let themselves be covered. Those others, all I can do is steer clear.”
“I think what Patrick was concerned about. His boys are pulling a big quota off the Canadians. They got no problem with that. Plenty gets by them and they know it. That don’t really matter. As long as they haul enough so it looks good. So maybe he was thinking you might see an opportunity, a hole to try and fill. And was saying let that hole be. Stick with what you have, what you know. You do that, you should be fine. And it looks to me, what you have is enough. Is that right?”
“Maybe I should visit with Jackson.”
“No. Patrick’s the rare thing. He doesn’t get caught up with fashion. He knows the nature of man. And he’s not one of these small-town shitsuckers looking to line his pocket wherever he can. What I think, you’re best leaving him be.”
“Well, I don’t have any big ambitions but to keep what I got rolling along.”
Terry nodded. “You or me, we could predict the future, we’d have different lives anyhow. Any man would. But I’d hazard sometime, might be a year or two, there’ll be new faces around, trying to tie up the market. You understand what I’m saying? I’m not talking about honest men like ourselves, just trying to make a living. This’ll be a new breed is what I think. But I think there’s some time before we see them much. Until then you should be fine.”
“You think that? Is that the feeling you got from it?”
Terry shrugged. “Like always. Watch your back. Keep your head down. All that’s changed is there’s more people keeping their eye out.”
“I believe I’m good that way.”
“But there’s complications behind you now as well as out front.”
“I know it. But I got reins on Carrick pretty tight. I believe I’ll see it coming he tries to slip the bit. And he knows what I have in store for him, he takes a mind to. That’s enough for now. Everything else, I wait and see. The biggest problem with him is I got him milking cows and tending sheep.”
Terry smiled. “He thought he was off the farm.”
“What I thought was I’d nose around the hotels. Find some girl waiting tables or working in the kitchen. Some big strap of a girl homesick for the homeplace. One just good enough looking so Mister Carrick’s little head takes over for his big head. One thing I know: A smart woman’s smarter than a lucky man.”
“There’s no end of people looking to get back to where they came from.”
“Those are the ones made us the wealthy men we are, Estus.” Jamie grinned at the older man.
Terry did not smile. After a moment he said, “I was curious also about the farmer. And his wife. They can’t be happy with the arrangements.”
Jamie nodded. “The money’s good for them. And the work is being done, someway at least. It’s not his worry anymore. I think I got him cornered up pretty good. For now at least. It’s a slippery time, is what it is. I’m jumping from rock to rock. But I know it.”
Terry stood, stretched his arms up toward the sun. Gray wet ovals under his arms on the white shirt. He bent, took up the whiskey from the grass, held a bottle close to read the label, his eyes pinched. Then looked at Jamie. His eyes still pinched but the focus changed. Something near to affection. He said, “Even an old rat, caught in a barrel, you’d be surprised how high he can jump.”
Throughout the early fall when school let out Foster
would come through the house shedding some clothes and adding others, sitting only long enough to eat a slab of bread while he laced up his boots and then would take up the silver whistle on a cord and loop it over his neck and be out the door into the afternoon, the puppy Lovey dancing around him in a steady bob and weave and lather of tongue. Both boy and dog over the summer had sprouted, spindles of arms and legs, both clumsy-gaited and agile at once. Foster already shoulder high to his father. Jamie had not felt so small since he was Foster’s age. And some afternoons felt himself near anger with the boy, as if he could give up his mother and sister so easy as this. And steadied himself, recalling he had no clear notion of what went through the boy’s mind. Anymore than the boy did his. What frantic urge took Foster off into the woods, into the bleak beautiful mystery of the world? He did not know. He did know there was a tremble in himself, an uncertainty that had not been there before. Was this circumstance, or growing older?
Other things did not change. He still could not leave the house of a night without the boy. And the puppy. They could be sleeping and he would not even have the car cranked and they would come out the door, ready to go. As if the door itself, opening and closing, was all that was needed to rouse them. He considered it but in the end could not forbid them.
The doctor came three more times in September, Saturday mornings, to take Foster and Lovey for the day. Those evenings, when they were returned to him, Jamie asked nothing of their days, the fatigued pleasure so clear in both boy and dog that there was nothing more he could know, no understanding available to him. One of those afternoons he decided he should feel some jealousy. But there was none in him.
As if the boy were already gone from him. As if he might only watch manhood overtake his son.
In the Stodd Nichols store in Littleton he allowed the clerk to probe more personally than he’d allowed a man in years. And so came away with a single-barrel .410 shotgun and two waxed cardboard cartons of shells. The gun, he understood, perfect for partridge and timber-doodles, up close, the right thing for a boy. Make him work for it now, the clerk had said, and he’ll only like everything else better as he grows up. Also, the clerk made clear, a boy could only do minor damage with the small-gauge shotgun, if mistakes were made. Jamie wasn’t worried about mistakes. But he liked the idea of the minimal start. Of giving something that implied a beginning. Of working toward a passion. He could not kill a bird himself but he understood the rest of it. And stood with the new gun in a case under his arm, leaning against the glass countertop studying the small array of pistols, revolvers—he didn’t know what they were really called. And would not ask. A couple of little numbers flat without the bulge of cylinder. He liked those. Something for a pocket. And for a moment looked up at the clerk who was watching him. And Jamie felt known. Not at all like a father buying a first hunting gun for his son. He pulled his right elbow tight against the long case and spoke to the clerk. “You’ve been a help. Nice day.” And walked out of the store.
Foster ran both boxes of shells through the gun with nothing to show for them. Coming in afternoons with his face set, grimly carrying his failure silently. When the shells were gone Jamie went back to Littleton and bought this time half a dozen boxes and then spent an afternoon in the sheep pasture tossing up tin cans for the boy until like a singular magic the blast of the gun sent a can spinning hard away from its arc. Foster shot up three boxes of the shells, with the last box hitting near as often as he missed.
“I can feel it,” he told his father. “The instant I pull the trigger I know I got it.”
“Maybe we’ll have partridge for supper one night then. Once they’re empty, these cans don’t make much of a meal.”
“What it is, is just looking at the can. Nothing else.”
“Is that what it is?”
“It’s my brain stopping, is what it is.”
Jamie ran his hand quickly over the boy’s head. Said nothing. The short autumn afternoon gone to evening. Twilight. The leaves of the trees along the meadow edge a soft glow in the half-light, the maples like coals in a fireplace.
Early October, the middle of the night, rain like warfare, the telephone went off like the end of the world. Jamie in the hall in the dark, one hand holding up the mouthpiece stand, the other pressing the earpiece against his ear, listening. Even with the line static and the storm he heard the shrill rise in Carrick’s voice. And so responded with a deep calm, his voice easy, saying, Yuht, and Sure, sure. This calm against the screaming little-rat-bomb going off inside his own head. Finally said, “Sit tight. Don’t call another soul. I’ll be there half an hour. How’s the old woman?” Listened. Then said, “Of course she is. Listen: make her some tea, put some liquor in it. No, fuck that. Just give her a little glass of liquor. Not much, just some. You understand?” And did not wait to hear what Carrick replied but had already hung up, was going back up the hall, pulling off his pajama bottoms. Heard the rustle of noise at the top of the stairs. Boy or dog. Likely both. Snapped up the hall switch for light.
Two reasons for gratitude: Binter died if not in his sleep at least in bed, sitting up with a racking motion, waking his wife, both hands first gripped tight to his chest as his voice rattled broken out of him, then his hands reached out, groping, before him. And so there was no culpability upon Carrick. None to be laid at least. And this: the surprise that the Binter woman, that angry figure hovering for the past near-dozen years whose job it seemed was to glower at Jamie, this woman of garbled gibberish actually spoke American at least as well as her husband had.
When he came into the farmhouse that night out of the rain with his boy and the dog shut out in the car the woman had come to him and held his elbows with her hands and studied his face and then she crinkled; her face folded into itself and she moved in and laid her face against his chest and held him and wept. As if he were her son. And he stood there holding her, patting her back, ignoring the eyes of Carrick, seated at the kitchen table with the open bottle of whiskey before him, the pair of glasses. The woman shuddering against him. He looked down at the top of her head. Her hair loose for the night, down over the shoulders of her nightgown. And he stopped patting her back and slid both hands around her back and pulled her close to him and she tightened against him and they stood there, holding each other. His chin in the furrow of her hair. Her chin a small sharp jab into his breastbone.
Later, after Jamie had telephoned the Franconia doctor to drive down and complete a certificate of death and telephoned a telegram to the new widow’s sister and family in New York and then carried a heavy basin of water up the stairs so the woman could wash her dead husband, pausing a moment beside the bed, Binter in death smaller, composed, calm—after all this Jamie sat at the kitchen table and took up the woman’s untouched glass with three fingers of whiskey in it and drank it down and looked at Carrick, who had been waiting for him.
“So what do we do now?”
“Do? We don’t do anything. I’m going home. I don’t need to be here for the doctor or when the neighbors start coming in. You’re fine; you’re the hired man.”
“Not what I’m asking.”
“I guess it depends then.”
“On what?”
“On how much you managed to learn these three months.”
“I know it. Start to finish. He was good that way. Slow, explaining things just enough but not too much. I’m set. I’m good to go.”
“Where’s things stand?”
“We got a run barreled off and a new one just started.”
“Well, we’ll see then.”
See.
“How it turns out.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Pelham, you’re fucking with me.”
“How’s that, Jeeter?”
Carrick spread his arms wide. “I’m talking about all this. We don’t need this setup anymore.”
Jamie shook his head. “What I’m going to do is, wait a decent time, a week, maybe tw
o. Then make her an offer. And you, you’ve learned your business, then stick to it and do it well. Not fuck with me. You’ll be able to pay me off for the farm, three maybe four years, you look sharp to things. It’ll be gravy then. Pure gravy.”
“Aw shit, Jamie. These shitty cows. I can’t stand it.”
Jamie leaned forward across the table, his forearms flat on the surface. Looking at Carrick. “Wake up boy. Never again in your life will anybody offer you something as good as this. Pull your eyes out of your asshole and look around.”
They were driving, Jamie and the girl, a weekday afternoon, Foster in school. The first thing she told him, going out the long uncurling drive of the Mount Washington in Bretton Woods, was that she liked children. A plainfaced girl with a soft mouth, redblond hair, not pretty but for her youth, something reptilian in the beak of her nose, her arms soft, freckled—they would thicken quickly—Amelia Hewitt. Amy, she liked to be called. Finding her had not been so hard as he’d feared. He’d gone to Bretton Woods, where as far as he knew Jeeter Carrick was unknown. It was October; everyone was thinking of what came next. He told her, “And you’ll have a raft of your own one day soon, I’d bet. But all I’ve got in mind is a nice drive on a pretty day. I’d like to tell you about a friend of mine. That’s all.”
She looked at him quickly. This was not the same look she’d given him earlier, that one a variation on the look women all the summer season had shot over him: some skewed blend of carnal sympathy, as if the death of his wife eliminated some intermediate steps. As if he were a vessel abandoned, ripe for captain and crew. Now though she was appraising the situation quickly. He liked that. When he’d talked to the dining room manager at the Mount Washington the man had known right away the girl Jamie was looking for. Now, he thought, he’d find out if they were both right.
“I wondered why it was me you singled out.”
He said nothing.
“What’s wrong with your friend he can’t find a girl on his own?”
Now he looked at her. “Jeeter? Why there’s nothing at all wrong with him. I’d guess he’d be fighting them off he was out in circulation.”