by Larry Watson
From outside the trailer comes the sound of a shovel scraping across concrete. “What the hell is he doing?” asks Dean.
“Dad? After he cleared off the walk and the driveway, he started in on the neighbor’s. He won’t be happy until the whole goddamn trailer court is cleared of snow.”
“Where’s Mom?”
“There’s a gal who lives a few trailers down,” says Roy, “and Mom watches her kids some days while this gal works an early shift at the Roundup.”
“Maybe Mom thinks that’s as close as she’ll get to having grandkids,” Dean says. “Edie’s mom has it even worse. She comes right out and asks. Begs, practically.”
“Did I ever tell you how close I once came?” Roy says. “This was a few years after high school. Carla Hall was home from college at Christmas, and she was between boyfriends. Or just bored. Anyway, the two of us got together and we pretty much started up right where we left off. Which meant hot and heavy. Then she went back to school, and a couple months later I get a call from her: ‘Roy, I’m late.’ Well, I’d heard that a few times before, and I knew the best thing was to wait a little. Sure enough, a week goes by, I get another call. Carla. ‘You’re off the hook,’ she said. I had the feeling she was as relieved as I was.”
“But you were ready to do the right thing?”
“The right thing for who?”
“Come on,” says Dean.
“I mean it,” Roy answers. “If you would have asked Mom, she’d say, ‘Whatever gives me a grandbaby.’ But Carla? Not right for her. Sure as hell not right for me.”
“I guess you had it worked out then.”
“You better believe it.” Roy lights a cigarette. “Now what’s this Florent fellow offering?”
Dean holds out a small piece of paper. “I wrote it down.”
Roy examines it. “Well, it’s not like he’s trying to steal it,” he says and hands the paper back to his brother. “But pretty fucking close.”
“His argument is we said ‘or best offer.’”
“That doesn’t mean if someone comes along and offers a buck, we have to sell it for that. Jesus.”
“What do you want me to tell him?”
Roy exhales a cloud of smoke. “Shit. Try to get him closer to what we’re asking.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Don’t let him have his price. I don’t give a damn if you can’t get him higher than another ten bucks. Just don’t let him think he’s winning.”
“Whatever you say,” Dean says and leaves the trailer.
He gets into his car, and for a moment he simply sits behind the wheel with the engine off.
Dean ran the mile and the 880 in high school, and he and Tony Brower, a pole-vaulter, were the stars of their track-and-field team. It’s possible that Dean still holds the school record in the mile. But almost as soon as he started competing, he knew he’d never be a great runner. It wasn’t for lack of ability. He just didn’t care enough. Or, more accurately, he didn’t care about the right things. Running a good race was more important to him than winning. If he won, yet the other runners were slow or the track was in poor condition, he was disappointed. But if he ran a good race—if he hit his splits, if he had a decent kick at the end, if he felt good but lost . . . Well, that was all right. There’d even been times when Dean wished he hadn’t won. Like the race in Miles City when he finished a second ahead of Bob Eagle Staff. Now that Indian kid was a great runner; he’d tripped, but he got up and still damn near won.
What Dean cared about was the activity itself. Practice was more enjoyable to him than the track meets, and he’d put in extra time on the weekends, logging mile after mile for the pure pleasure of it.
Roy had been a decent athlete when they were kids, but he gave up virtually all sports when he was a teenager. Smoking, drinking, chasing girls, and driving fast, he’d often said, were sport enough for him. Yet he was the one who measured almost everything in wins and losses. Even now—his leg in a cast and the rest of his body still under repair, unemployed, and back in his parents’ house—he has to find ways to win.
On the day of Dean and Edie’s wedding, just before the ceremony, Roy handed Dean a flask and offered him a drink of whiskey. Then he clapped Dean on the shoulder and said, “Congratulations, brother. You won the prize.”
Is that what marrying Edie had been—winning? Yes, Dean supposes that’s true. But he ran enough races to know that any competition that can be won can be lost, especially if the competition is stiff.
AS SOON AS Roy hears the Volkswagen’s engine whine, cough, and ratchet to life, he picks up the telephone.
“Edie? Now don’t hang up. Don’t. Just listen to me. Dean just left here. He might have a buyer for my Impala, but the guy’s coming in really low. Would you go with Dean? Maybe talk to this guy?”
Roy’s call catches Edie in her bathrobe, and while he talks she reties the belt, tightening its knot.
“If Dean can’t get him to go up a few bucks,” Roy says, “maybe you can goose him a little.”
“I can’t do that, Roy.”
“Yeah, Edie. You can. You damn well can.”
IT WAS EDIE’S idea to start the car and warm it up, and now she and Dean sit on the Impala’s red upholstery and wait for Mr. Louis Florent to arrive.
“He’s going to regret selling this,” Dean says, running his hands around the steering wheel.
“Maybe.”
Edie takes off her wool coat and tosses it into the back seat. Then, while she’s still turned away from her husband, she unbuttons another button on her blouse. It is, she’s sure, what Roy meant when he told her that she could help make this sale. Then, disgusted with herself, she immediately buttons up again. If she can do what he asked, she’ll do it her way, not his.
“You don’t think so?” Dean is staring straight ahead as if the car is in motion and he has to keep a careful eye on the road.
“I think,” says Edie, “it reminds him of something he doesn’t want to be reminded of.”
“And that would be—?”
“That trip to Bentrock really damaged your brother. And I’m not just talking about broken bones and missing teeth.”
“Well, you were there. You’d know.”
There is silence and there is silence, and Dean and Edie wait in the special marital brand.
Dean watches in the rearview mirror, and when he sees Florent climb out of his Chevy Bel Air, Dean gets out too.
“I thought you might have changed your mind,” says Dean.
“I’m still thinking on it,” Florent says.
“Anything I can do to help you decide?”
Florent doesn’t answer. He walks slowly around the Impala, stopping when he comes to the scratch in the finish inflicted by the Bauer brothers.
“You didn’t see that before?” Dean asks. “A little paint will take care of it.”
Florent bends down close to Edie’s window. He stares in at her as though she’s behind a one-way mirror. “I want to drive it again,” he says to Dean.
Dean shrugs. “Suit yourself.”
Florent slides in behind the steering wheel and slams the door, and Dean barely has time to open the back door and jump in.
“Test-drive,” Dean says to Edie.
“You can stay,” Florent says to Edie. The mingled smells of Vitalis and fried onions have entered the car with Louis Florent.
“I wouldn’t think of leaving.”
Louis Florent asks permission to take the Impala out on the highway, and Dean says, “You can drive it all the way to Denver if you like.”
Florent says, “I just want to see what it’ll do on an open stretch.”
Florent recently transferred from Nebraska to work for a petroleum company in Gladstone. He’s twenty years older than Dean and Edie, a businessman wearing wingtips, a white shirt, and a wedding ring. But once he has the Impala out on the open highway, it doesn’t take him long to assume the familiar position. He has his left hand resting lig
htly on the steering wheel and his right arm stretched across the back of the front seat, the open invitation for Edie to give him the gift that every man behind the wheel wants: Come closer.
Florent points casually to the speedometer. “Is this too fast for you?” he asks Edie.
“I’ll scream when it is.”
Florent speeds up to ninety, but this speed frightens him and he slows down to seventy.
They’re heading west, and Dean looks out his window to the south and the buttes where snow clings to a few sheltered ledges making those rock walls look as though they’re striped black and white. What he’d give for it to be just him and Edie in the car, heading not away but to. But where that would be is a place that lies outside the reach of even his imagination.
Finally Edie turns to Florent and says, “I know what you offered for this car. Real proud of that, are you?”
Louis Florent has an awkward smile that jerks up first one corner of his mouth and then the other. “What do you mean?”
“A man like you . . . you know what this car’s worth. And that offer was an insult.”
“Lady, do you know how this works? Buying a car?”
“Edie. My name is Edie.” She doesn’t move any closer to Louis Florent, but she twists around in her seat until she’s facing him. “I know what it means to be fair. And you’re not being fair.”
Florent glances over his shoulder, but of course Dean Linderman is sitting directly behind him and can’t or won’t be enlisted in the discussion.
“Lady—”
“Edie. Linderman. Edie Linderman.”
“Edie. I made my offer—”
“And you look like a fair man to me.”
“I brought a check with me,” he says and pats the black-leather checkbook in his shirt pocket. “For the amount I said I’d pay.”
“Oh come on,” Edie says. “You expect me to believe you’re carrying around a check made out for that much money? That’s a line, Mr. Florent. A pretty good one. But it’s a line.”
Dean moves over in his seat and leans forward as if here is a performance he can’t miss.
Edie reaches up and puts her hand on Louis Florent’s arm. Certainly it’s an innocent touch, but Florent risks a glance down at her hand, trying hard to read meaning in her gesture.
“Besides,” says Edie, “you could always make out another check.”
This time Louis Florent’s smile seems to arrive at both sides of his mouth simultaneously. “Checks cost money.”
“Mr. Florent,” Edie says, with a laugh, “I work at a bank. I know what checks cost. I’ll reimburse your ten cents out of my own pocket.”
Negotiations cease. The land has flattened out to the south and the north while ahead a series of hills, half covered with snow, hump up from the prairie. But before the road begins to rise, Louis Florent slows and, with no traffic coming from either direction, turns the car around.
As he heads back toward Gladstone, he asks Edie, “So what’s your idea of a fair price?”
Edie says, “That amount you said you made the check out for? Add a hundred dollars to it. And you’ll still be getting a damn good deal.”
Florent says nothing for a mile or two. Then, with both hands still on the wheel, he says, “I got this cousin in Omaha. Quite a bit younger than me. Good-looking guy. Kind of a goof if you want to know the truth, but the ladies seem to go for that. Anyway. He’s got a car just like this. So when I saw this Impala for sale, I suppose I thought, you know, fresh start. But hell, I’m no Stan. I know that.”
Edie says softly, “But that doesn’t stop you from wanting his car.”
Florent barks out a laugh. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
Before they reach the Gladstone city limits, they’ve agreed on a price—they call it Florent’s but with Edie’s hundred added on so everyone can feel as though they’ve won—and settled on the final arrangements: Once the check clears, Florent can take possession of the Impala. In the meantime the car will remain parked by the high school.
After they watch Louis Florent drive away, Dean hands the keys to the Impala to Edie.
“I’ll walk back,” he says.
“Oh come on, Dean.”
He shakes his head and backs away. “It’s all yours,” he says. “And be sure to tell Roy what a good job you did.”
Edie climbs inside the Impala. The interior still smells faintly of Vitalis. Edie puts the key in the ignition, but she doesn’t turn it. She watches Dean walk away, his shoulders hunched against the cold. At this moment Mr. Louis Florent seems less a mystery to her than her own husband.
The ignition has not sparked to life. The gears are not engaged nor are the wheels revolving. This automobile is as motionless as every house up and down the block. Yet, Edie thinks, it’s possible to feel as though something is carrying you away from your own life at a speed faster than any speedometer can measure.
DEAN ENTERS THE trailer on this Sunday afternoon and finds his brother in his usual place and posture, sitting in front of the television with his injured leg up on an ottoman. The cast looks dirty, and at Roy’s foot and upper thigh the plaster is chipped, and a few strings from the inner lining dangle loose.
Weeks have passed since the sale of the Impala. Roy had his father cash the check for him, but he hasn’t spent the money on anything but cigarettes and beer, plucking a few bills from the stack on top of his dresser whenever his supply of either begins to run low.
“Who’s winning?” Dean asks.
“The Browns. I think. But this picture is so shitty I can’t be sure. Once the ball is in the air, I can’t see it worth a damn.”
“So much for the new antenna.” Dean looks around the trailer. “I didn’t see Mom and Dad’s car.”
“They drove out to Harville. Another church supper.”
Dean smiles. “Mom and her church suppers. ‘Better food than you get in any restaurant.’ Jesus, how I hated going to those.”
“And she’ll probably come home bitching about how lousy the food was.” Roy motions for his brother to sit down.
Dean perches on the edge of a sofa cushion as someone might sit in a doctor’s waiting room, ready to be called in for judgment.
“You never told me,” Roy says to his brother. “What did Edie say to get Mr. Florent to come up on the price?”
“Damned if I know,” says Dean. “I was right there watching the whole thing, and I still didn’t see it happen.”
“You have to make them feel like they’re getting a good deal. No matter how bad you’re screwing them, they can’t know it. And you sure as hell can’t let them know how good it feels to screw them.”
“If it gave her any particular pleasure, it didn’t show.”
“It didn’t show? Or you didn’t see it?”
Dean stands abruptly. “Can I bring you a beer?”
“You ever heard me say no to that question?”
Dean returns with two cans of Budweiser and hands one to his brother. For a moment he stares at the little mound of foam that has bubbled out of his can. Then he takes a deep breath and says, “I think we should go up to Bentrock.”
“Why the hell would we want to do that?”
Before he answers, Dean crosses the room to turn down the volume on the television. He sits back down. “We should look up the Bauer brothers.”
“Oh we should, should we?”
Dean nods. “You know it.”
“I’ve already met the Bauers. I’m not sure I care to renew the acquaintance.”
“I don’t mean now,” says Dean. “Once you’re up and around.”
Roy shakes a Camel out of the pack. He lights it, inhales, and exhales before he asks, “Anything more to this plan of yours?”
“I’m working on it.”
“You didn’t think much of this idea when someone brought it up at the park that night.”
“This time it would be coming from us.”
Roy blows a stream of smoke in his brother’s directi
on. “Us? Sounds like this is all yours, brother. What do you propose we do when we get up to Bentrock? Assuming we can track down the Bauers.”
Dean shrugs. “Maybe tell them they owe you the money you put out for the truck.”
Roy laughs and shakes his head. “I can’t imagine that’ll go over too well!”
“Well, if they won’t listen to reason . . .”
Roy leans toward his brother. “What the hell’s got into you? I don’t know where any of this is coming from.”
“We can’t let them think they put the run on the Lindermans.”
“You know what that is? That’s cowboy talk. Or even worse—cowboy movie talk. Either way it’s bullshit. You think we just roll into town, kick some ass, and then ride out again? Jesus.”
“Hey, if you don’t want to—”
“What? You’ll go up there alone? I’d laugh if that wasn’t so fucking stupid. Let me tell you what’s just as likely to happen. The Bauers will cut off your nuts and feed them to you one at a time.”
Dean realizes that he’s wound himself so tight in working up to present this plan that he must find a way to loosen the tension. He rises and walks to the trailer’s front door, then looks out the small window where a curtain of dripping water falls before his sight.
Roy stares at the television set, watching the blurry figures collide with each other. “Maybe,” he says to his brother’s back, “we should see how many former football players we can recruit. Who was it suggested that at the park?”
“Jerry Krueger,” Dean replies.
“Jerry. Yeah. And what was he—the fucking student manager?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You’d for sure want some help. I mean, that’s the Bauers’ territory up there. And who the hell knows how many of them there are? We could be going up against a goddamn army of Bauers, not just the two of them.”
“So we ask around,” Dean says, returning to his seat on the couch. “I’m sure there are guys who’d want to get in on something like this.”
The dog waddles into the room and flops down on the floor between the brothers. “Hey, Rusty,” Dean says softly, his voice entering that register usually reserved for animals and babies.
