by D. J. Butler
Just as I was about to open my mouth and invite him in, too, he grabbed the bar’s door and went inside. The bar has its own entrance from the boardwalk, and a glass door connecting the bar itself and the Fun Lanes. The bar doesn’t have an official name, but from the way people talk about it I guess its unofficial name is McCrae’s.
I followed Mrs. Wilding by the clicking of her heels across the Fun Lanes and into the office. “Gladys,” I called. “There’s a customer in the bar.”
Mrs. Wilding sat. I shut the door behind me and grabbed the bowl of M&Ms. I ordinarily keep them on top of the filing cabinet, because if I left them on the desktop, Dad would absent-mindedly eat his way through a pound of them every time he worked. I set the bowl on the desk and sat down.
“Mrs. Wilding,” I began.
“Please call me Marilyn,” she said. “Mrs. Wilding makes me feel like a widow, and I’m…that is, I don’t want to feel like that.”
“Of course, Marilyn,” I said, and then experience kicked back in. “This is probably obvious, but I should point out I’m not an attorney. Things you say to me are not privileged.” This last bit was a joke, but since Marilyn Wilding’s hard look didn’t relent, I felt like I had to make the joke obvious. “So if you get prosecuted, I could be called to testify.”
“I know what privilege means!” she snapped, and then softened. “Sorry. It’s been a hard couple of days.”
I took a box of tissues from the drawer underneath the pistol drawer and set it next to the M&Ms, making a mental note that we were almost out, and I should stock up on my next Costco run to Yakima.
“Sorry, bad joke. How can I help you, Mrs.…Marilyn?”
“Thank you.” She ignored both the tissues and the M&Ms and sat quietly for a moment. She wasn't quite as young as she made out—maybe forty? I’d only seen her once or twice before around town, when Dad had pointed her out to me. Her husband had been older. I let her sit, and while we waited I noticed that she had long fingernails, long and curved and as red as her lipstick. Her nails didn’t make her unique in Howard County, but they did mean she didn’t work with her hands, and around Howard that was unusual among adult women. Two of the nails were snapped off.
Of course, Aaron Wilding had been a rich man. He’d been a feature of Howard County’s local color as long as I could remember. Well, less of a feature and more of a ghost, really. He was some kind of Silicon Valley kid genius in the 80s, one of those guys in the original club that invented computers or something. After he’d hit it big he moved out to Howard to get away from the fast lane, was how I’d heard it. He’d bought a couple of adjacent ranches, sold all the cattle, and built a custom solar- and geothermal-powered house out of sight of the highway. He showed up in Howard shops once in a while, or to fill his tank coming in or out of town, and that was it. I’d heard that the only time he’d ever invited anybody from Howard up to his house was when he held a party for some of the local bigwigs (really, medium-wigs, Howard County being officially, after all, the Middle of Nowhere) so he could bounce the idea off them of his running for office as a candidate for the Green Party. When they told him he was more likely to turn into a badger than to win a Howard County election as a Green, he got married instead. That had been maybe fifteen years ago.
I wondered what sorts of things Dad had done for him. Sued trespassers, maybe—Aaron Wilding was a hiss and a byword among local hunters for the barbed wire and KEEP OUT signs all around his land. Evil claimed that the deer knew it, too, and would deliberately run on Wilding’s land just to taunt hunters.
“Your father helped my husband prepare his will,” the widow finally said.
I took a yellow legal pad and wrote will on it. “When was that?” I asked.
She hesitated. “After we were married, of course. A few years after.”
10 yrs ago? I wrote. “I see.”
“I think your father has the will in his files. I’m not aware of any…amendments.”
Executor? “Okay.”
“And…what comes next?”
I put down the pen. “Well, remember that I’m not a lawyer. But the will needs to be filed with the court so we can start the probate process.”
“Probate?”
“Probate means a test or a trial.”
“Who’s on trial?”
“The will, really. The court tests the will. That will take a few months. The executor and the court will have to work together to give notice to anybody your husband might have owed money to, and pay any debts, and then carry out the instructions in the will. The court also needs to make sure the will we have is the last will your husband made, because it will only enforce his last valid will and testament. People change their minds over their lifetimes.”
“Can I see it?” Her lip trembled slightly. It must be rough to lose your husband. I couldn’t imagine my lip trembling at the thought of Evil, even if he was dead. Another reason I had to stick to my guns today. “The will, I mean.”
“I think so,” I said. “If my dad has it”—I nodded at the filing cabinets nearest me, the ones holding the New Files—“then I think he’ll bring a copy by to discuss it with you and explain the process.” I thought as much because that was exactly what I was going to tell Dad to do, right after I prepared the filing to submit the will and kick off the probate proceedings.
That makes it sound like I’m the lawyer, and I’m not, but a lot of court filings are just form documents. If you know the right form to use and what to attach, you can mostly fill in the blanks. That’s convenient, because I can do a lot of administrative stuff to free up Dad for other things. Like landing new clients.
Marilyn Wilding looked at the New Files cabinets too, and then bit her lip. “That will be fine, of course.” She stood to leave.
My phone buzzed in my shirt pocket: incoming text message. I ignored it and walked Marilyn to the door. The sunglasses guy had already left, but the two bottle tops and twenty-dollar bill sitting on the small bar told me we’d made a few bucks off him first. I followed Marilyn out to the boardwalk.
“Don’t worry about the will,” I told her. “That’s complicated stuff, and that’s what the lawyer is for.” It wasn’t nice of me, but I secretly hoped that Aaron Wilding owed a lot of tricky debts, or that his heirs would fight over what he’d left. A long and bitter probate could mean good fees for a year or more. It might even mean being able to afford hiring someone else who could help Dad, someone who wasn’t a creepy liar from out of state. I shut the idea out of my mind before it could go any further. “Have you thought about funeral arrangements?”
“All in hand.” She smiled a little smile at me, got into her yellow monstrosity, and drove off, cutting the corner so tight as she exited the parking lot that she nearly drove off the road. Among the pickup trucks, Jeeps, hammered SUVs, and beaters on the roads of Howard County, the H3 looked like an alien. Straight from Planet California. It couldn’t have looked more out of place if it had been flying six feet above the surface of the highway. The fact that it barely fit in the lane didn’t help.
I checked my phone. Dad: Really? Too bad, I thought his resume looked good.
I sighed and put the phone back in my shirt pocket, just as Evil came stomping up the boardwalk.
Objectively, Gladys was right; Evil Patten was a good-looking young man. He wasn’t tall, exactly, but he had a lot of masculine charm in his broad shoulders and narrow hips. He walked confidently. His nose was crooked, but his teeth were good and he smiled a lot. He couldn’t ever manage a normal hairstyle—either it was buzz cut like his Marine older brother’s, or it was long and ragged, like he was auditioning to play the stoner kid in some 1980s movie about teens making out a lot and finding themselves. There was no middle ground, and his hair seemed to jump from the one state to the other without warning. Right now, it was long, and that was the better situation, because when it was long it hid the fact that his skull was kind of funny shaped, too flat in back. Dad said it was because the Pattens had so man
y kids, and Evil hadn’t been held enough when he was a baby, had just lain in a car seat all day.
His name wasn’t really Evil. His first name was Ronald and his middle name was Evil. His parents, God bless them, had named Evil after one of their favorite presidents, Ronald Reagan, and their favorite stunt motorcycle rider, Evel Knievel. Only on the birth certificate, they’d misspelled ‘Evel,’ and by the time they figured out the mistake, it would have been too much work to change it. It could have been worse—Evil had a younger brother cursed with the name Abraham Hulk Patten. On the first day of school, teachers just looked at the boy’s name on the roll and laughed out loud.
“Hey,” he said. He wore a flannel shirt not so different from mine, over a t-shirt that read Marines Never Die, They Just Go to Hell to Regroup. His boots were steel-toed Redwings. Evil was spending the summer working with a highway crew. He got paid pretty well for standing on the side of the road holding a stop sign, especially since he was willing to work nights and weekends. He waved a DVD at me. “The Last of the Mohicans. Your favorite. With that English guy.”
“Not my favorite.”
He looked surprised. “Really? I could have sworn.”
“Not my favorite,” I repeated. “Which I already told you, the first three times you rented it.”
“I guess we could stream something.” He reached past me for the door.
“I think you better not come in, Evil,” I told him.
“Gladys will be disappointed.” He snickered, but not in a mean way. Evil he might be, but he didn’t have a mean bone in his body.
“She’ll have to be disappointed,” I said. “It’s over.”
“Aw, man.” He frowned. “Are you dumping me again?”
“Yep.”
“What is it this time?”
“It isn’t anything, Evil. That’s the point. Just like it was last time, and the time before. It just isn’t anything. You’re a nice guy, but there’s no reason for us to be anything but friends.”
“There’s how I feel about you,” he protested.
“You’re not in love with me.” I pointed at the DVD case. “You’re in love with Daniel Day-Lewis.”
“Ha!” He looked thoughtfully at the case and then shook it in my general direction. “What am I going to do with this?”
“Return it?”
“I won’t get my three bucks back.”
I sighed. “Fine. You can come over to our house tonight. I’m not going to watch it with you, though.”
“Dinner?” He looked hopeful.
“Whatever we’re eating, you can have. I can pretty much guarantee it will come either out of a can or out of a box.”
“Just the way I like it.” Evil turned and ambled back toward his muscle car, a restored Buick GSX he was actually in love with. He waved The Last of the Mohicans over his head. “Say hello to Gladys for me!”
“Ten o’clock!” I called after him.
“I know when you close!” he yelled back.
Ten o’clock sounds late, but in Howard County in the summertime that’s when the sun is just starting to set. Staying open late lets us catch a few extra customers, including the folks who want a tuna melt, a Coke, and a basket of fried mozzarella sticks for dinner. When there isn’t actual work to do in the office, I can catch up on course work, which is what I did that night: I took an online mid-term for American History 201. Aced the multiple-choice section, which was graded immediately by the computer, and felt pretty good about the essays. Andrew Jackson is definitely our most underrated President.
The kids from St. Joe’s bowled two more games and left, and later there were a couple of families. I didn’t know any of them; Howard’s not that small a place, especially when you take into account all the farms out on the Flats and all the little places like Hooper, Three Pines, Finnegan, and Lost Bend. The smallness of Howard County isn’t so much that it’s tiny as that it’s isolated. When your nearest big cities are Boise and Spokane, and they’re both hours away, you know you’re in Nowheresville, even if your town has a population of thirty thousand, all in.
Gladys and I closed down at ten. Of course, she had to stay until the end—even in Howard, you can’t have a sixteen-year-old running a bar and serving alcohol. She left first, squeezing into a parka as she trundled out the front door. I washed the restrooms and finished cleaning up in the kitchen, and then I did one last circuit to check all the doors and windows. Just because Howard’s a small town doesn’t mean we don’t have break-ins, given that we keep booze and cash on the premises; I locked everything up tight. Throwing on my wool poncho—don’t get into your head images of a chic New York girl playing Mexicana, my poncho is dust brown and more Clint Eastwood than Cecilia Prado, I wear it because it’s warm—I took the last half cup of coffee from the pot, baked almost solid, and headed out into the parking lot.
Even at the edge of town, with the yellowish hum of light pollution from Howard itself, the stars punched me right in both eyes. That’s one of the things about Howard that’s hard to explain to someone who’s only ever lived in a big city. The stars in the mountains are ten times bigger than they are anywhere else, and there are a hundred times more of them. Drive an hour into the Ups, even less, and you hit what they call Dark Sky country, where there is almost no light pollution at all, and there it’s like…well, you know that scene in Star Wars where the Millennium Falcon jumps into hyperspace out of Mos Eisley, and the first time you see it on the big screen it just blows your mind? It’s like that, only real.
My truck was the only car in the parking lot. The starlight downplayed the fact that the truck was seven different colors. I actually don’t know which was the original—Javier at the Jalopy Graveyard, Howard’s pick-a-part auto shop, pieced it together from multiple different wrecks. He claims it’s a Toyota Tacoma, but I don’t know how you’d know. It was the closest thing to a homemade car I’d ever seen, and getting it a consistent paint job had not yet climbed to the top of my list of financial priorities. It looked like a calico cat.
The truck opened the old-fashioned way, key in the lock. I started the engine and gave the truck and my hands, wrapped around the coffee, both a minute to warm up. This high up, nights are cold in any season. I wondered how far into The Last of the Mohicans Evil had gotten. It was true that it wasn’t my favorite movie, but it wasn’t bad, especially the jumping-through-the-waterfall scene.
I was just about to put the truck into gear when something slammed against the driver’s side window.
I spilled the coffee on my leg. “Sheesh!”
It was the crazy bum. He leaned against the window and hammered on it with one fist. “McCrae!” he yelled. “You’re McCrae!”
Not worth going for the gun, I decided. My heart was pounding and I was shaking like a leaf, but I kept my head, put the truck into first, and started driving away.
The bum threw himself onto my hood. He dug his fingers under the lip of the hood where the windshield wipers are and yelled again. “The trailer! I went to the wrong one!”
I could have just gunned the engine and driven home. Somewhere along the way, the crazy old guy would have fallen off, for sure. It probably would have killed him, though, and I didn’t want that on my record or my conscience. I jammed the truck back into neutral and pulled up the hand brake.
Then, for his sake, I went for the gun.
The gun Dad keeps in the truck’s glove compartment is a .38 special. If you’re not a gun person, that’s a small, lightweight pistol with a short barrel. It’s not particularly accurate, but it’s got a pretty good-sized bullet and it packs a punch. That makes it a good defensive gun for someone who doesn’t have a lot of arm strength and doesn’t want to go target shooting. Like me.
It’s Dad’s gun, because I’m a minor and I’m not supposed to drive around with a gun. It’s also loaded, which is a no-no…but “better judged by twelve than carried by six” is a pretty common saying around Howard, and it’s one Dad uses mostly when it comes to my
safety.
I grabbed the pistol. My hands shook a little worse now—I wasn’t scared, I told myself, I was royally pissed off.
“McCrae!” the bum roared.
I stepped out of the truck and pulled back the hammer.
“Get away from the car, asshole!” I yelled. The word asshole caught in my throat and came out sounding a bit like gashole. I don’t usually curse, not a lot, anyway. But Dad always tells me that if I’m going to point a gun at someone, I have to be prepared to use it. So maybe swearing was my way of convincing the bum I was serious, or maybe it was my way of convincing myself.
The bum, at least, believed me.
“The trailer!” he yelled, backing away.
“This is no trailer, jerk!” I toned down the cursing because I was clearly winning. “And I don’t know anything about your bears and balloons! Stay away from me!” I pointed the gun at the center of his chest.
He turned and ran, past the corner of the building. At the edge of the slope he jumped, disappearing down into the trees and brush around the river.
In the glow of the headlights I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like there was blood on the back of his head.
“Crazy old man.” I got back in the truck.
No one else tried to jump me on the drive home. We lived even farther outside of Howard than the Fun Lanes, right on the border between the Flats and the Ups. Technically our address was on Ranch Road, but that was the name of the highway that cut up into the hills, and our house was one of half a dozen on an unnamed paved drive that turned north off Ranch just before it entered the canyon. We called the nameless road the Stub. The area had once been pasture, and had been subdivided for something like a hundred houses, and Mom had spent a lot of time with the developer looking at his plans for a playground and a charter school. When only six homes had been built the recession kicked in, house sales went through the floor, and the developer went bankrupt. Dad bought one of the houses cheap because he thought Mom would like it, and then Mom ran off to Texas with the developer.
