by Larry Watson
Even before Edie knocks, the trailer’s flimsy storm door is rattling in its frame. Her fist is raised to knock again when Mrs. Linderman pulls open the inner door. Edie steps inside, and Mrs. Linderman closes the door behind her but keeps her hand on the knob.
“Roy ain’t here,” she says to Edie.
“I know where Roy is. He and Dean are sitting in a bar somewhere.”
“Them two,” Mrs. Linderman says, chuckling and shaking her head.
“They’re planning the trip they’re going to take. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
Mrs. Linderman leads her daughter-in-law into the small kitchen. “Sit yourself down,” Mrs. Linderman says.
Edie sits but does not remove her coat. “Is Elmer here?” The trailer smells of Sir Walter Raleigh, the tobacco Mr. Linderman uses in his hand-rolled cigarettes.
“He’s gotten in the habit of laying down after supper. Don’t do it, I tell him. You nap now, you’ll be up till all hours. He and Roy stay up and watch the late show most nights. You want me to call him out here?”
Edie shakes her head no. “Let him sleep.”
“So . . .” Mrs. Linderman rests her ample arms upon the table. “What’s this about a trip?”
“You haven’t heard? They’re planning on driving up to Bentrock.”
Mrs. Linderman gives a little start, but she recovers quickly and says, “Do tell.”
“They have some idea of confronting the Bauer family. Who Roy bought the truck from? The ones who followed Roy out of town when he had his accident?”
“I know who the Bauers are. Confronting, you say?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if they expect to be reimbursed for the truck or if they want revenge or what.”
“Not a bad idea,” Mrs. Linderman says. “Especially with the both of them going.”
“It’s a terrible idea,” Edie says. “Roy almost got himself killed up there.”
Mrs. Linderman raises her eyebrows. “Alone. But now with Dean—”
“No. No. Please. You can tell them not to go.”
Mrs. Linderman nods thoughtfully. “I could. But I won’t. Besides, it’ll be good for ’em. Dean especially. He’s always had a tendency to mope, but it’s got worse. And Roy needs to learn that a little limp don’t mean he’s any less than he ever was.”
“A little limp!”
Mrs. Linderman leans forward as if she has a secret to convey. “I don’t think you know what it means to be a Linderman. Maybe nobody ever said nothing like this to you, but when you got the Linderman name you got yourself a good deal, honey.”
“And it’s time,” Mrs. Linderman continues, “those boys remembered what it means to be a Linderman.”
“But you’re not,” Edie says. “A Linderman, I mean. You’re a Hindemith.”
“I used to be. Until them boys were born.”
ROY CARRIES HIS whiskey and water to the booth by the window, where his brother waits with his own glass.
When Roy sits down, Dean asks, “Are you going with the folks to Denora this Sunday?”
“Another one of their damn church suppers? Why would I?”
“I told Mom I’d drive them. I don’t think she trusts Dad driving on the highway anymore.”
“Be careful,” Roy says. “You don’t want to get stuck being their chauffeur.”
“Just on the highway,” Dean answers.
“Well, that should get you the good-son-of-the-month award,” Roy says. “By the way, I got a call from Jerry Krueger today. He’s out, thanks to your comment about shooting the Bauers. He wants no part of ‘any gunplay,’ his words.”
Dean shakes his head dismissively. “He was never going anyway.”
“No?”
“It was never going to be anyone but us. You know that.”
“Do I?” says Roy.
“Come on. Would you be willing to sign on for something like this if you didn’t have to?”
Roy smiles and cracks an ice cube between his molars. “Brother, I don’t have to. Neither of us does.”
The Elk’s Tooth’s side door rattles, and the brothers fall silent and look in that direction. It’s only Dr. Thayer, a Bentrock dentist. He sits on a stool at the bar.
“Are you ready for the Bauers?” Roy asks his brother.
“What the hell does that even mean?”
“I have no idea,” says Roy. “When were you last in a fistfight?”
“Junior year,” Dean says without hesitation. “Lasted maybe ten seconds. I took a swing at Vince Wiens and sort of banged my fist on his elbow. He hit me on the top of the head and put me on my ass.”
“Vince Wiens? Jesus. Did you have some kind of fucking death wish?”
Dean ignores the question. “‘Now don’t get up, Linderman,’ Vince said, ‘and I won’t have to kill you.’ But I tried. My legs just wouldn’t work.”
“And you threw the first punch, huh? At Vince-fucking-Wiens. What the hell got into your head?”
Dean stares into his whiskey for a long moment. “I had the crazy idea I was defending someone’s honor.”
A sheaf of newspaper suddenly blows against the window, flattened as though giant hands have opened it and held it there for the brothers to read. In the next instant it’s gone.
EDIE SITS IN the Volkswagen while two tumbleweeds, tightly tangled balls of Russian thistle, scrape slowly along the aluminum outer wall of her in-laws’ home. Inside the trailer it must sound as though a creature is scratching to be let in.
The wind gusts and the tumbleweeds pick up their pace, rolling away from the Linderman home and out to the open land beyond the trailer court. Tattered masses of high white clouds move rapidly past the sun. Then the sun blinks brightly into view, and still Edie waits. She has turned off the Volkswagen’s engine, but the key remains in the ignition, and she flicks at the key ring, making a discordant little chime inside the car. Her fingers are right there; it would take hardly any effort at all to turn the key again, start the Volkswagen, and drive away. All the effort would be in making the decision. “Fuck it,” she says and gets out of the car.
Edie knocks on the door of the trailer. From inside a voice calls out, “Yeah, come in!”
She walks in. From out of the little kitchen Roy Linderman appears, the dog waddling along behind.
“Hey, Edie! I wasn’t expecting company,” Roy says. He’s wearing a plaid flannel bathrobe and moccasins, and he has an open Budweiser in his hand. “How about that wind, huh? What’s it been now—the fourth day of it?” He raises his beer can. “Can I get you one?”
“No thanks.”
“Something stronger? A whiskey and Coke maybe? Or something weaker? I can put on a pot of coffee.”
“No, I’m fine. Thank you.”
“Sit yourself down,” he says. “But I have to tell you, if you sit in that chair, you’ll come away covered in dog hair. Rusty’s sort of made that his.”
She smiles at the dog, and then she finds a place for both herself and her coat on the sofa. Roy sits at the other end.
“Everybody else has gone up to Denora,” he says. “One of Mom and Dad’s beloved church suppers. Beats the hell out of me why anyone would drive seventy miles just to eat a stranger’s fried chicken.” He reaches into the pocket of his robe for his cigarettes and lighter. “Hell, you look like you just came from church yourself.”
Along with the white blouse she wore when she was trying to sell Roy’s car, Edie’s wearing the navy blue wool skirt that she bought with the Penney’s gift certificate that Dean gave her for Christmas. She’s also wearing more makeup than what’s usual for her, though not nearly as much as she wore that night she and Bunny danced at the Elk’s Tooth. She sits up straight, perched on the edge of the sofa cushion with her hands folded in her lap. She looks as though she’s been called into the bank manager’s office for her annual job review.
Roy lights a cigarette. “But you knew they wouldn’t be here.” He blows a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “That me
ans you’re here to see me. I’m flattered. To what do I owe the honor of this visit?”
Another of those cloud-frigates drifts in front of the sun, and the room suddenly dims and the shadows thicken, then just as quickly, the brighter light returns.
Edie tugs at the hem of her skirt. “I want to ask you for a favor.”
Roy leans back. “Let’s hear it.” Something in his voice and manner has turned hard.
She clears her throat. “Don’t let Dean go to Bentrock.”
“Don’t let him? Dean’s a big boy. He does what he wants.”
“You can stop him.”
“And you can’t?”
She shakes her head no. “I thought I could. I can’t.” Her eyes glisten with tears, but she blinks them back.
“Maybe you’re giving me too much credit.”
“You could tell him you won’t go. He won’t go without you.”
“Yeah,” Roy says. “Yeah, you’re probably right about that.”
For a long time neither of them says anything. He drinks his beer, and he smokes his cigarette. He looks appraisingly at Edie. She says nothing, wondering how much will need to be said.
“All right, say I do this for you,” Roy says. “Are you prepared to do something for me in return?”
Well, there you have it, Edie thinks. Not much at all.
“I asked you for a favor,” she says and smiles. “I didn’t propose making a deal.”
“But you asked me, Edie. And you know me. Hell, we started dealing the minute you walked through the door.”
“I didn’t think it would be quite so quick,” she says. “And I wasn’t sure if it would be with words.”
“You thought I’d just throw you down and have my way with you? That’s a joke, by the way. In case you can’t tell.” Roy finishes his beer, crushes the can in his hand, and drops it on the coffee table. “But we can close this deal right now. They won’t be back for hours.”
Edie knows the trailer’s arrangement of rooms, and she looks down the hall in the direction of the bedrooms. The hell of it is, she still finds him appealing. She always has. Easy to be with. Handsome. And yes, sexy. Even now, reeking of beer and cigarettes, looking like a slob in that ratty old bathrobe, if he’d only smile his Roy Linderman smile instead of staring at her as if he were calculating her worth on the open market.
“I sat out in the car for a long time,” she says, “until I was sure. Until I was ready.” She picks up her coat, and though she doesn’t put it on, she lays it across her lap and smooths the fabric. “But it turns out, I’m not. I can’t do something to save my marriage when that something would actually cost me my marriage. I’m sorry.”
“What are you apologizing for, Edie? For being you? Come on.”
She stands up and puts on her coat. “I guess I’m not as good a negotiator as you once thought I was.”
Roy shrugs. “It’s a gift. Not many people have it.”
Edie leaves the trailer. When she opens the car door, she has to fight the wind to close it. It was that last gust, she tells herself, that finally caused her tears to spring free.
DEAN KNOCKS ON the bedroom door. When there’s no answer, he opens it a few inches and peers inside. “Hey, you in there?”
Roy sits up a little higher in the bed. “I’m here.”
Dean steps inside. The room smells of whiskey and cigarette smoke. “Jesus. Sitting in the dark feeling sorry for yourself?”
Roy raises a pint of Jim Beam. “I got a little project here I’m working on.”
Dean switches on the overhead light.
“Fuck!” Roy cringes and tries to tuck his head inside his bathrobe. “Turn it off. God damn.”
Dean turns the light off. He crosses the room and sits on the foot of the bed. “Well, Dad got shit-faced. You remember Bud Rodenbaugh? The old foreman on the Howell ranch? He and Dad got to reminiscing. And drinking someone’s home brew out in the church parking lot. Damn near had to carry him to the car. Then he slept all the way home.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So Mom’s on the warpath. You’re better off staying in here. Especially if you’re stinking too.”
“Exactly my intention. Exactly.”
“I’m thinking next Saturday,” Dean says.
“Saturday?”
Dean’s voice drops to a whisper. “Bentrock. We can head out early. Be back maybe by nightfall.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Christ, what’s with you? If you don’t want to do this . . .”
Roy raises the bottle to his lips and pulls hard. A shudder runs through him. “You talk to your wife about this?”
“This is ours,” Dean says and stands up from the bed. “She’s been to Bentrock. Remember?”
“Oh, I remember. I surely do.” He screws the cap back on the bottle of whiskey and sets the bottle on the chair next to the bed. “Saturday. Gotcha. The brothers Linderman ride again.”
Dean has his hand on the doorknob. “You better write it down,” he says. “You’re too fucking drunk to remember.”
DEAN SITS IN the Volkswagen outside the Linderman trailer, with the engine running. After a few minutes, the trailer door opens and Roy steps out. The vapor of his breath in the morning cold mingles with the smoke from his cigarette.
He climbs into the Volkswagen. “Fuck,” he says, “I thought it was supposed to get up to fifty today.”
Dean puts the car into gear and eases away from the trailer. “Is Dad up?”
“You know it.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“That we’re driving up to Jordan. That I have a lead on a Chrysler with low miles up that way.”
“And he bought it?”
“‘Back to wheeling and dealing,’ he said. ‘Your mother will be pleased.’”
Dean drives slowly through the narrow, curving streets of the trailer park.
“And what’d you tell Edie?” Roy asks.
“I left her a note.”
“Saying . . . ?”
“The truth.”
“Must have been a hell of a long note.”
“Not really,” Dean replies. He exits the park and accelerates onto the street that will take them to Highway 16, the road that runs all the way to Bentrock.
EDIE LINDERMAN WAKES up from an alarm that goes off only in her own mind. The sheets cooling at her side. The mattress no longer tilting from her husband’s weight. His touch is now nothing but a memory—as if he were training her not to feel his presence at all . . .
Edie throws back the blanket and sheet and leaps from the bed.
Frantically she searches the apartment, though she’s not surprised that Dean isn’t there. Then she sees on the kitchen table the pencil and the notepad on which Dean records his and Roy’s gin rummy scores. But there are no numbers written there. Just words: Roy and I are driving up to Bentrock. Back tonight. Dean
Edie pulls on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt, and steps into her loafers. She grabs her coat and purse, but at the door she stops and looks back at the rooms she has called home. Then she hurries out of the apartment and down the stairs.
Their Volkswagen is gone. But in the alley is a white panel truck with FLIEDER’S BAKERY—TASTY AND GOOD emblazoned on its side. One man sits behind the wheel while another stacks metal racks of bread loaves in the back of the truck. When he slams the back doors of the truck, the clang echoes up and down the alley.
Edie knocks on the driver’s window. He’s an older man, swarthy, balding, unshaven, and he looks at Edie with rheumy eyes that register neither annoyance nor pleasure, as if a pretty woman banging on the window of his truck is simply one more thing he must face before his morning duties are done. He rolls the window down.
“Where are you going?” Edie asks him. “Can you give me a ride? Please?”
“I got deliveries, lady. And we ain’t supposed to take on riders.”
“Do you go out to the highway? To Sixteen?”
“I got a drop-off a
t the Oasis.”
“Close enough,” Edie says. “Please. I’ll pay you.”
“Keep your dang money,” he says. But he reaches across the front seat to open the passenger door.
AS THEY TRAVEL Roy and Dean keep the silence of men who have a long road and a hard day ahead. The neon red of the rising sun has finally made an appearance, while at the same time the bone-white sliver of the setting moon hangs low in the west. One of these is visible out Dean’s side of the car and the other out Roy’s.
Roy turns on the radio. But at this hour he can’t find anything but livestock reports and Swap Shop, and he soon switches the radio off.
After a few more miles of silence he says, “Look, when we get back home? I’m thinking of packing up and heading out.”
“Yeah? Where you headed?”
“Not sure,” says Roy. “Maybe I’ll flip a coin. Heads, I go east. Tails, west.”
“North and south are out, huh?”
Roy swats at his brother. “Smart-ass.”
“And this is a permanent move you’re talking about?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“How’re you going to make the move?” Dean asks. “Without a car, I mean.”
“I’ll pick up something cheap. Something I can sell somewhere and make a buck.”
Dean says, “I told you before. Edie and I could give you a little cash to tide you over.”
Roy laughs. “No, brother. I don’t want your money.”
Dean looks off into the distance as though he’s trying to determine which direction would be best for his brother to take. “Funny,” he says, “Edie wants to move too. I came home from work the other day, and she jumped me with it. ‘Let’s move,’ she says. And just like you, she doesn’t give a damn where. Just somewhere else.”
Roy shakes a cigarette from the pack and raises it to his lips, strikes a match, and lights the cigarette, “Why does she want to leave?”
“She says she wants to get me away from you.”
Roy inhales deeply and allows the smoke to drift from his nostrils. “But here we are,” he says.
THE BAKERY TRUCK pulls into the parking lot of the Oasis, a restaurant on Gladstone’s northern edge.
“Far as I can take you, missy,” the driver says to Edie. “Where’d you say you’re going?”
