Stinking Rich

by Rob Brunet

  Judy focused on her bag of spinach, selecting the yellow leaves and picking them out with the tongs. Brenda stood stock still staring at the tourist lady, one eyebrow cocked in disbelief. She said, “Judy don’t boat much. Her dog is liable to get yappy on the water. I’m kind of a landlubber myself.”

  “Oh, but you live in such a wonderful land of lakes.”

  “It’s nice to look at,” said Brenda, “and plenty of folk fish. Me, I like my water in the bathtub—hot and full of bubbles. Preferably with candles, good white wine, and a fireman to soap my back.”

  Judy thought she saw the woman blush, or maybe it was just the light reflecting off her pink top. “I’d better get moving. Wort will be getting antsy.”

  Walking away, she wondered if Brenda had it right about men—that the good ones all smelled of hard work, yet still had hands soft enough to give a good sponge bath.

  Terry had been called to a grass fire again, this one next to a bridge where day-fishers liked to cook their catch. He was back on the trench-digging crew which left him covered in mud and smelling decidedly unlike a hero. He headed straight to his rendezvous with Cindy on George Meade’s cruiser. She hadn’t arrived, so Terry stripped to his underwear and dove in to splash off the worst of the crud. He figured he could handle the cold water, having swum at least once every day right from the May long weekend to Thanksgiving. Even for him, though, today’s water was frigid. He felt his lungs contract and barely got half a breath before grabbing the boat’s ladder and hauling himself back aboard.

  Cold water swimming was the kind of achievement Terry figured would impress the right kind of girl on the right kind of bar stool in the middle of winter when the pickings were slim around town. After all, the line about “I been inside, y’know” had worn kind of thin kind of quickly. The women who hung around country bars after tourist season took it for granted most locals had spent a few nights in a cage for one reason or another.

  Terry’s brief fling with the justice system had been pretty run of the mill. The night of the big bust, he had wound up in a holding cell at the OPP station in Peterborough. Early next day, after questioning, the cops determined he knew nothing at all about the grow op and set him free.

  It wasn’t until a week later that Officer Ainsley showed up at his trailer, with three other policemen, and arrested Terry for the murder of Lester Freeden. Not about to take a rap like that, he told them everything they wanted to know. By the time Danny pled guilty to manslaughter, he’d been in provincial holding a few months. He was surprised how many of his old high school buddies he ran into at the detention center in Brockville. The potheads seemed to like it well enough. Dope was more expensive than on the outside but at least the supply never dried up.

  Real time like what Danny was doing, now, that was a badge of honor. Chicks were bound to be impressed when he got out. Terry might almost have felt jealous were he not so damn comfortable lounging on George Meade’s Sea Ray. Cindy found him there, stretched across the bow soaking up the three o’clock sun, when she showed up with her arms full of groceries.

  “What are you doing here so early?” she said. “Someone could see you. George is already suspicious. He can’t believe how fast we’re going through beer and Doritos.”

  “Tell him you’ve made a new friend in town. Lots of ladies around here can pound ’em back pretty good.”

  “Funny you should say that. I just ran into a couple of women over at the grocery store. One of them says she knows you. Says you saved her dog the other day at that fire you ran off to. You really are a hero, aren’t you?”

  Terry puffed out his chest and said, “Part of the job. Doing my bit for the community and all.”

  “How’d you save her dog?”

  “I, well I, er, it was all on fire, like, and I...well, I chased it over to the hose and we sort of put out the fire together. It had long hair. Guess that’s why firemen always have Dalmatians, eh? Their hair is short and they already kinda look burned up a bit with all them black patches and stuff.”

  Cindy struggled with the key in the latch on the door to the boat’s cabin. “And then, she says you made a pass at her?”

  “A what? Who? Me? No way, doll. I mean, you’re my babe. Some ladies just can’t see a man in a uniform without getting all hot and bothered.” He grinned his shiniest grin. “Here, doll, let me carry those groceries below decks for you.”

  Later that afternoon, while Cindy slept in the afterglow of fireman sex, Terry borrowed the keys to George Meade’s boat and slipped over to the hardware store to make a spare set for himself. No sense getting Cindy in trouble by hanging around outside on the boat the next time he showed up early. Always thinking of others, he was.

  Danny slumped forward, his forehead pressed into the steering wheel which he gripped white-knuckled. The horn blared non-stop, its ear-splitting shriek washing in through the Volvo’s open windows. The dead Volvo. He’d realized he’d screwed up the fuel as soon as the engine coughed, sputtered, and seized. As the fumes cleared, he could smell the fallen leaves, wet wood, and damp earth that meant autumn was well advanced and night would be cold. He sucked the musky air deep into his lungs and fought off the sobs that threatened to tear his chest apart.

  The horn raged on.

  He sniffled, felt tears stream down his cheeks, and began banging his head onto the steering wheel over and over. Snot splattered from his nose and mixed with his tears until Danny’s face was smeared with slippery goo that stuck to his eyelashes and pasted his hair to his forehead. With each bang of his head, the horn sounded another piercing yelp but Danny’s ears had gone numb with the rest of him. How could he have been so stupid?

  Finally, he threw his head back onto the headrest, let his arms drop to his sides and wailed. The anguish pouring from his chest and throat was perversely soothing. When he gulped for air, his wail changed to a sob, and Danny’s shoulders began to shake. He hummed to himself loudly, like he had never done since he was a kid, like he’d wanted to night after night in prison but never did, like all little boys do when they want their crying to be heard by their mother, or by someone, anyone, who’ll go tell her her baby needs her.

  A car drove past, startling his stupefied brain back into gear.

  He grabbed the bag of food and beer from the passenger seat, wiped his face on Woody’s, and set out on foot. The third car to pass him was a bright orange dune buggy with pink and purple blossoms painted all over the bulbous body. A minute later, it came back the other way, did a U-turn behind him and headed back again. It pulled up alongside him and stopped.

  “Gorgeous day for a walk, isn’t it?” the driver asked, all bright white teeth and surprisingly well-coiffed silver hair for all its blowing in the wind. The hair looked like a helmet.

  “Yep,” Danny said, pasting on his criminal frown.

  “How’s about a ride?” Silver Mane said.

  Danny hadn’t spent all those years inside without learning how to spot a come-on. This dude couldn’t have found a tighter pair of white Capris if he shopped in the children’s department. Which is exactly where the dune buggy looked to come from, right down to the “Flower Power” stenciled in bulging pillow-shaped lettering on the oversized rear fender.

  “Nice car,” Danny said. “I had a Tonka toy just like it.”

  The man looked him up and down through burgundy sunglasses. The soft amber lenses barely concealed the eyes of a wolf.

  “Hop on. Rides smooth as silk.”

  The tuft of hair peeking out of the man’s turquoise polo shirt was too close a match to the hair on his head not to have come out of the same bottle.

  “Ride sounds good,” Danny said. He jumped in thigh-to-thigh with Silver Mane, half expecting to feel the older man’s hand land in his lap right away. The car’s manual gear shift was on the steering column, allowing for a puffy single bench seat. The engine popped out of a cutaway in the rear hood, and exhaust fumes swirled around them while the car stood still. The wind blew all that awa
y as soon as the dune buggy roared back onto the road. It was too loud to talk, so Danny settled into what felt like a boat ride on a windy day, mouth open, eyes squinting, heart racing like a dog’s.

  The heavy-duty seat springs came in handy when Silver Mane pulled off the road and the car bounced across terrain best suited to a Hummer. The oversized tires, shocks, and extra-high independent suspension did their trick. Danny bounced up, down, and sideways. He grabbed hold of the mini roll-bar where the windshield otherwise would have been.

  “Where the hell we going?”

  “Gonna show you what this baby can do.” With a glance at Danny’s billowing sweatshirt, Silver Mane added, “Hang on to Woody’s Pecker.”

  Danny cursed. He’d been ready to fend off the advances he knew would come soon enough and didn’t doubt he could deal with Silver Mane in a more determined struggle off in the woods if it came to that, but this little detour did nothing to put distance between him and the stolen Volvo. He seriously considered leaping into the tangle of poplar saplings and underbrush at the side of the trail. Before he could make up his mind to jump, the dune buggy emerged from the forest into a wide-open sand pit flooded with sunshine. Three more dune buggies were busily chasing each other up and over piles of sand and rock in a grown-up version of a sandbox.

  In spite of himself, Danny felt the exhilaration of a ten-year-old. Right about now, he should have been boarding the caged minivan for transport back to the penitentiary, smelling the stale sweat of anxious men. Instead, he was bucking through the air on a jalopy straight out of the sixties, surrounded by the carefree hoots and hollers of men with time to burn and gas to go with it. He shot a glance at Silver Mane, teeth bared to the wind, sunglasses glinting in the late afternoon light. Pride, passion, and appetite rolled into a tight column of power fueled by the dune buggy’s deep-throated throttle.

  And it was over as soon as it started. Without a word or a sign, Silver Mane steered his beast out of the off-road park and back down the trail to the highway. Halfway there, he made his move. Danny let him grab his thigh, even parted his legs a little. Once the guy was good and distracted, Danny reached across and twisted the steering wheel hard right. The underbrush at the side of the trail caught the undercarriage and they came to a hard stop. Silver Mane was tossed up onto the forward roll bar, winded.

  Danny used his feet to push the man to the ground. He said, “When you hear tomorrow’s news, you’re going to realize you got off easy. Do yourself a favor and come up with some kinky story about how you lost your ride in the woods. I find out you gave me up, I’m liable to come back for your nut sack. And not the way you’d want me to.”

  The dune buggy had enough gas to carry him about an hour closer to Buckhorn. He managed to run it down an embankment into a woodlot before the engine coughed its way to silence. By then it was dark, the temperature dropping fast. He wolfed down the stolen sandwiches and beer and crept under the engine for warmth. Commuter traffic had picked up with dusk and he didn’t like his odds as a hitchhiking fugitive. Better to wait an hour or two, then see if he couldn’t find another car to steal.

  He fell asleep trying to convince himself the authorities wouldn’t be all that pissed. It couldn’t be all that big a deal to skip out on barely three months of easy time.

  Twenty

  Perko Ratwick sat in the holding cell with no laces in his running shoes and no belt. It was what he hated most about getting arrested. Giving up his belt. When he paced in his eight by ten foot cell, he had to keep tugging up the brown slacks like some overweight teenager wearing low-rider jeans. Handcuffed and walked through the corridors to interrogation rooms, he’d clutch and tug at the back of his pants every few steps. Frequent arrest was part of the job and it got so this humiliation almost made him try to lose weight. But not quite. His beer belly was too much a badge of biker honor.

  He’d always assumed they painted cell walls puke green so real vomit would blend in. But they were actually quite clean, hosed down and squeegeed on a regular basis. The combination toilet and sink was seatless and made of stainless steel. It was in the back corner, visible to anyone walking past the bars at the front of the cell. The classic barred door had three-quarter inch vertical bars on two-inch spacing. Perko could stick his hand between two bars, but his forearm would jam well short of his elbow.

  Two metal cots protruded from the wall one above the other, each two feet wide with no mattress. He had a thin blanket in case he wanted to sleep. Since his jacket had been taken from him, he could either roll up the blanket to use as a pillow, or cover himself and lie pillowless on the metal slab. Past experience told him to expect a stale ham sandwich and a half-pint of warm milk if he stayed more than ten hours.

  On this particular visit, the cops hadn’t asked Perko much on the way in other than who it was he had roughed up at the bus station. They dismissed his version: that he’d been the victim of two random attacks, one outside by a stranger and one inside from the ticket agent. Instead, they assumed it was a simple collection exercise gone wrong. That Perko had followed a bad debtor to the bus station and roughed him up before he ran out of town. They spent most of their interrogation razzing him for letting the punk get away, for getting plonked in the nuts for good measure. They had a good guffaw imagining the reception Perko would get on his return to the Libido’s club house. Then they threw him into the holding cell to wait for a morning arraignment on two charges of assault.

  Sitting there, he heard the door to the second holding cell clang open and shut.

  “You two had better keep cool now,” he heard a cop say. “Or one of you is gonna go next door...and that dude doesn’t like company.”

  Perko figured himself to be “that dude.”

  “Well ain’t this jes’ one somnabitch mess. Good for nuthin’ little crapper.” The crackling voice sounded like it had been soaked in bourbon and roasted over a smokey fire. “I knew I shoulda creamed ya but good when I had the chance. Dumbhead.”

  “Like it’s all my fault.” The second voice was much younger, just a boy’s. A whiney twang that Perko could feel in his teeth. “Couldn’t a kept it in your goddamn pants, could ya? I done told you she didn’t want you no more. Jes’ who the hell d’ya think you are? Casa-fuckin-nova?”

  “She was my damn girlfriend afore she was yours and you shoulda shown her respect. She was practically yer STEP-MA.”

  “Step-ma? She’s only three years older’n me, Pa. You’re too damn old for her. Look in the mirror when you brush your damn tooth and face the facts! She’ll be warmin’ my bed from now on.”

  “Not under my damn roof she won’t. You’re the one shoulda gone lookin’ for someone else to cuddle your bones at night. I been kissin’ and huggin’ and havin’ her and I ain’t gonna stop on your say-so.”

  “We’re gonna be together, Pa. We’ll jes’ move the hell outta the house. You can kiss both our damn social security checks goodbye is what you can kiss. Mama and Cousin Billie gonna give us a room.”

  “You try that, Jonah, and I’ll break every bone in yer body, startin’ with the one in yer head and ending with the one ’tween yer goddamn legs.”

  “Try me, old man.”

  The next thing Perko heard sounded like a bag of flour landing with a thud against the floor. Then a groan, and the younger voice saying, “Oh shit...” and then, “GUARD.”

  Perko heard the duty cop step back into the corridor. He grabbed his waistband and crossed to the bars to watch as the guard peered into the cell next to his.

  “How the hell did you do that?” the cop asked.

  “He’s gonna need a doctor or something,” said the kid. “Whole lotta blood coming out from his head...and he ain’t none too smart to begin with.”

  “Next door, punk. In with Mr. Ratwick. I can’t have you killing your father on my shift. The paperwork will keep me here all weekend.”

  A moment later, Perko was joined in his cell by a scrawny wretch with peach fuzz on his chin. Blood, both fresh and
dried, smeared the front of his Slipknot T-shirt. He looked like he hadn’t bathed in a month and Perko figured that was being generous. The kid smelled worse than beached sunfish.

  “Stay on that side of the cell, over near the bars,” Perko told him.

  “But there ain’t no bunk here. I’m supposed to get one of the bunks. Top or bottom, longs there’s just two of us in here.”

  “Good for you, shit-for-brains. But you see, that’s my invisible friend, the jolly green incest machine, lyin’ up there on that top bunk. And he don’t like sharin’ it with people who have a different last name. I’m sure you can relate. Stay in the corner and I may not give you a toilet bath.”

  The boy named Jonah hesitated for a moment. He looked at the top bunk and back at Perko as if to confirm that anyone lying up there was invisible for sure. He looked ready to argue the point, but Perko watched him glance at his biceps and then down at his own thighs, which were considerably thinner. It took a moment or two to sink in, but ultimately the boy seemed to accept that sitting on the floor in the corner up against the bars was his most comfortable option.

  “Jes’ you wait,” he grumbled.

  “Shakin’ in my boots,” said Perko. He gave his pants a tug and lay down on the bottom bunk, feet toward the toilet, the top of his head confidently pointed at the river rat by the cell door.

  The boy sniffled and pulled his knees to his chest. For a while, the only sound came from the cell next door. Two cops swore under their breath as they prepared to drag the old man out of the cell and down the hall to where he could wait for paramedics.