“Lunch,” the deputy said.
“What’s going on?” Gus asked. “How long do I have to be here?”
“Have to be here?” The desk sergeant exchanged winks with his deputy. “You don’t have to be here at all. The Assistant County Attorney is still laughing at your so-called confession. We checked up on you, son. You don’t even have a car, much less a new Plymouth Belvedere. Why did you write such a foolish letter?”
“Runkle asked me to,” Gus said. “He didn’t want his mother to find out he was rolled behind a whorehouse.”
“Very decent of you, but you could have bought yourself a world of trouble. The attempted murder, assault, and resisting arrest charges have been dropped—besides, a jury would never believe a mild-looking blue-eyed boy such as yourself could do such grisly work. Anyone can see your mama raised you right. Stay for lunch. We feel we owe that much for inconveniencing you.”
“I’m really free to go?”
“If you were in that alley we have no evidence that puts you there—no witnesses, no weapon, nothing. We should have had footprints, but the snow melted away before the scene was examined.”
Gus was grateful that the jack handle he’d hit Runkle with was on its way to La Jolla.
“The victim had a fracture of the left side of the occiput,” the desk sergeant said, “with bruising of the left occiptal lobe of the brain. In short, he was hit with a blunt instrument while kneeling. It was an odd place to pray, outside a whorehouse, but perhaps the victim had a religious experience inside. Who can say? Whatever the case, anyone could have done it—an abused whore, a juvenile delinquent—or you.”
“Why did you lock me up in the first place?” Gus said.
“Sparks seemed a sincere enough fellow, though not overburdened with intelligence. We try to cooperate with your air police as much as possible. It’s just good policy.”
The desk sergeant was sweating even though it was cold in the jailhouse. His shirt was ringed at the armpits, his rolls of neck fat glistened. He leaned close to Gus, close enough that Gus could smell his sour sweat.
“Tell me, son,” the desk sergeant said. “Did you do it? Just between you and me. It will go no further than this cell.”
Gus froze.
“Ah. You did do it then. I’m sure you had a good reason.”
Solomon Coe rose up from his cot as if propelled. “Say nothing, lad!” he said, his voice a clarion of mixed tones. “You’re dealing with a clever man who lays a thoughtful trap.”
The desk sergeant’s constant smile faded. “Solomon exaggerates as usual,” he said.
42
Gus went back to the Athenian. Tracy wasn’t there. It was hours past the time they were supposed to meet. The ice cream parlor was now packed with high school students. A few boys identified Gus as an airman and began to make hostile remarks. Gus left.
He went to the Stockmans Bar and Café, ordered a beer and a hamburger. He sat in an empty booth. Stockmans catered mainly to farmers and ranchers, the jukebox loaded with country tunes and polkas. Airmen usually avoided it. A few ranch hands sat at the bar drinking dime-glasses of tap beer. No one paid any attention to Gus.
Norrie, from the whorehouse behind the Moomaw Dairy, came in carrying a large brocaded traveling bag. She took off her heavy wool coat and hung it on the coatrack near the door. In street clothes she almost looked respectable. She wore a red jumper over a white, long-sleeved blouse. She seemed less saggy, less used up. With her dime store pearl necklace, hoop earrings, fur-trimmed boots, she reminded Gus of Flora on a good day. Gus figured she was wearing a girdle and an uplift bra to shore up her figure. She spotted Gus and came over to his booth.
“Hey, if it aint Little Britches,” she said. She set her bag down, slid into the booth opposite Gus.
Gus looked around to see if anyone was looking their way.
“You afraid someone’s gonna see you with me, Sunshine?”
“Heck no,” Gus said, looking around the room again.
“Don’t worry. Nobody in this dump’s gonna tell your mama.”
There was something different about Norrie. Her face seemed sunk in on itself a little. Her cheeks were hollow. Her thin lips were sucked inward as if there was nothing behind them to keep them firm. She had too much hair. It coiled on her head like a bright red helix. No steel barrettes. Gus realized then that she was wearing a wig.
“You look real good, Norrie,” Gus said.
“Yeah? You think so? How about you buy this pretty lady a cup of coffee. Cream, no sugar, a shot of Four Roses.”
Gus went to the bar and came back with a steaming mug.
“You’re wondering why I’m out on the street instead of working out of my crib,” she said. She kept her lips almost closed as she talked, and she was lisping.
“What happened, Norrie?” Gus said.
“I got let go,” she said. “ ‘Over-the-hill,’ Syndicate people said. They give me fifty bucks severance then cut me loose. So I work on my own hook now. Trickin for street trade like any two-bit punch. I might get cribbed-up again with a house in Wallace, Idaho. The silver miners over there aint too particular. Meantime, I got a five-dollar a week room at the Y Bar U roadhouse.”
“I’m sorry,” Gus said.
“I don’t need you to feel sorry for me, young’n. I got into the profession twenty-plus years ago of my own free will. My Pa sold me to an old beet farmer. Ma was dead by then. The rank sodbuster was so ugly he had to buy himself a wife. Gave Pa a hundred bucks. The farmer was fifty-eight years old. I was twelve goin on thirteen but my tits were in full bloom. I hated gettin hitched to that old hardleg son of a bitch, him expectin me wash his clothes, cook his meals, and suck his cock seven days a week for no pay. I was so innocent I believed him when he said cock suckin was part of what wives pledged to do at the altar. Ask any reverend, he said, which I wasn’t about to do. So I ran off to Kansas City when I was fourteen, still mainly a virgin since the beet farmer wanted it one way only. In KC I hooked up with an honest pimp name of Jeremiah Jukes. JJ, we called him. Had me some good years working for JJ. Then the syndicate that owned us farmed me out to Milk River. Now it’s come down to this. Don’t care much for backseats and alleys, but over-the-hill is over-the-hill. I turn forty tomorrow. Once in a while some kindly gent will take me out on the west highway to a nice road house and next mornin order breakfast in bed. It don’t get much better than that for a workin girl my age.”
As she went on her lisp became more pronounced.
“What happened to your teeth, Norrie?” Gus said.
Norrie compressed her lips. It made her mouth look like a coin slot. “Dadburn teeth went bad,” she said. “So I got ’em pulled. Dentist wanted forty bucks up front to do the work.”
“A dentist here in Milk River?” Gus said.
“This cheap sack of crap—Warsaw, Whiplash, Wickdick.”
“Winshaw?”
“Yeah, that’s the jackass.” She sipped her coffee, made a slurping sound. She eyed the cowboys at the bar. A telephone lineman came in and she gave him the eye, too. Trolling. The fish ignored the bait.
“Wickdick, he asked me what I did for a livin,” she said. “Nosy bastard. I told him I ship and receive. ‘Ship and receive?’ he says. ‘What’s that involve?’ I told him it involved shipping and receiving—like I was talking to a simple child—and that I did it in Seattle and I was here to visit my sister, Chloe. I guess if I’d a told him I was workin my moneymaker on the street for two cartwheels a trick he’d a refused to put his clean fingers in my mouth. As it was he put his paw up my dress. I told him, ‘Give me back the forty, doc, and you can have all you want of that.’ But all the cheap hump wanted was a free feel.”
The thought of Tracy’s father slipping his hand up Norrie’s skirt made Gus smile. He finished his coffee, put out his cigarette. He got up.
Norrie tugged his sleeve. “Wait a minute, Little Britches. I don’t get to talk to many folks these days. Sit with me a while.”
>
Gus got another cup of coffee and came back to the booth. He found himself admiring her, her toughness, her ability to adjust to hard new circumstances. She was able to take anything the world threw at her and not break. No teeth, no crib, her youth and good looks gone, but her spirit had not withered. She seemed more alive than anyone he knew. Her spirit would eventually crumble in the onslaught but wouldn’t everyone’s, eventually?
She leaned close to Gus and whispered, “I saw you knock that peckerwood cuckoo, Sunshine.”
Gus’s admiration switched to fear. “What?” he said.
“He needed it.”
“I guess I’m not sure what you mean, Norrie.”
“Hell if you’re not, kid. I was in the doorway about to come out and blow holes in the son of a bitch myself. Then there you were, layin his head open with a lead pipe.”
Gus scalded his throat with hot coffee. “Not me,” he said, hoarse with burn. “Somebody maybe looked like me.”
“Listen, I’m glad you did it, Little Britches! He wrecked my new teeth. Now I got to save up for another set. I gave Wickdick a handjob for ten percent off of what he wanted but it still’s gonna run me a hundred-twenty.”
“Why did he wreck your teeth?”
“I never liked to see them come in drunk like that. Crazy and mean. He wanted head for openers but didn’t like my new teeth. Called them ‘choppers.’ Said they scared him. He yanked them out of my mouth and stomped them, busted them all up. Said he wanted me to gum him. Me along with the other girls threw the drunk asshole out. That’s when you come up on him with your lead pipe.”
“Jack handle,” Gus said.
“You give it to him good, Little Britches!”
“You going to turn me in?”
“Aint you been listenin? I was gonna do it myself with the sawed-off twelve-gauge shotgun I kept in my crib. You saved me from a stretch in the state prison. I owe you, kid.”
“You don’t owe me anything, Norrie,” Gus said.
“If I had extra money I’d give you some of it. All I got is a few dollars and what’s in my bag.” She reached down, set the brocaded bag on the table.
“Is the shotgun in there?” Gus asked.
“All I own is in here,” she said. She opened the bag, pulled out the short-barreled shotgun, set it on the table.
Gus had to ask but didn’t want to know: “You got Wayne in there, too?”
She took the jar with the pickled baby out of her bag, set it on the table next to the shotgun. The baby turned in the disturbed brine, the vacant eyes coming to rest on Gus.
“Wayne and my chopped scattergun go where I go,” she said. “One’s for protection, the other for reminders. Got nothin else in the bag but some clothes. I’d like to give you a present for what you did, but aside from the shotgun and my trick baby, all I got is girlie stuff. I expect you get all a young feller needs, so I don’t figure you’ll be wantin any jelly roll from old Norrie, but I’d like to do somethin for ya anyways.”
“You could do something,” Gus said.
“Name it, Sunshine.”
“Put Wayne back in the bag.”
“Sure, kid.” She returned the jar to the bag, carefully, as if the trick baby in it was asleep.
Gus said, “Norrie, the guy who broke your teeth is Staff Sergeant Loftus Runkle. He’s in St. Bonaventure’s. Go see him. Tell him you need a new set. Remind him what he did. I think he’ll spring for it. He’s not the skunk he was.”
“Skunks don’t lose their stripe, Little Britches. I see him I might work my twelve gauge up his ass and ventilate him some.”
“I think Runkle’s changed, Norrie.”
“How does me going to see him do anything for you?”
Gus thought about it for a minute.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
43
After his sixth bourbon ditch Gus decided he was a nihilist. Life is a waste of time and effort, Lyle Dressen’s father had said. Or something like that. It was the underlying rule of the game no one tells you before you suit up. Nothing mattered, nothing meant anything. There were no winners, no losers. Everything was exactly and only what it appeared to be. The future was a dice roll and the past was a graveyard. Opinions were exercises in educated bullshit. Nil and Null ruled the fucked-up world. Why pretend otherwise? Blah blah blah and then you die. “It’s all shit,” Gus concluded aloud.
Solomon Coe, two stools away, overheard him. “You’re partly right,” he said. Coe slid off his stool, moved next to Gus.
Gus, depressed at being kicked out of the air force, said, “I’m going to be a nihilist, Mr. Coe. That’s what I was meant to be. I’m signing the enlistment papers tomorrow.”
“I doubt that very much, son,” Coe said. “The minimum age for nihilism is thirty-five. At your age all you are allowed to do is hope for the best.”
“Doubt all you want, sir. It’s all fresh dung piled on old manure. Put a scoop of ice cream on top, it’s still steaming green shit underneath. What they knew for sure a hundred years ago looks like nuthouse babble today. What people think today is gonna look just as lame a hundred years from now. And so on and so forth until it all blows up and we go back to square one. You got proof otherwise, Mr. Coe? The whole world is the shithouse. That’s what Ray meant. And Ray Springer is a very wise man.”
“Define ‘shit,’ define ‘wise,’ define ‘square one,’ ” Coe said. “And while you’re at it, my young philosophizing buckeroo, define ‘Ray Springer.’ Take ten years to dismantle and define your headstrong metaphors. When you understand them, you can then decide if it’s all a waste rather than a highly refined mystery with no solution.”
Gus regarded Solomon Coe. The old lawyer’s voice sounded, to Gus, like two flutes piping a very old tune. Gus laughed, but not in a mean-spirited way. “You are very severely drunk on your very severely drunk ass, Mr. Coe, your honor,” he said.
“I’ve had a few,” Coe admitted.
“Define a few, your honor,” Gus said.
“More than two, less than twelve.”
“What do you call over twelve?”
“The beginning—or the end—of a career.”
“I think I’m there,” Gus said.
“The end? The beginning?”
“Both maybe.”
“Good luck to you, my boy,” Coe said.
“Barkeep!” Gus said. “Two more Jim Beam ditches here!”
“I need a ride,” Gus said to Tracy. He’d found her at the Athenian sitting with Josh. “I am very drunk.”
“Failed another existential test, did you?” Josh said.
“If getting your ass kicked out of the air force is a flunked test,” Gus said.
“An antiestablishment hero!” Josh said. “I mean that sincerely, mon ami.”
“I’ll drive you to the base,” Tracy said. “Give me your keys, Josh.”
“Do not let him behind the wheel, Trace,” Josh said.
In Josh’s car, Gus said, “I can’t go back to the base but you can drive me to Great Falls. They’ll let me stay in the TDY barracks a couple of weeks while I process out. But I don’t think they’ll let you stay in the barracks with me.”
“Don’t worry about me,” she said.
“Come to think of it, maybe you shouldn’t drive me. You don’t want them to see a Communist driving a nihilist to an American air force base.”
“You’re not a nihilist. You’re a victim of the system.”
“Is that why you won’t fuck me? You don’t want to pity fuck a victim of the system?”
“That’s not it.”
“Then it’s because I’m a nihilist.”
“A nihilist is someone who doesn’t believe in anything. I don’t think that describes you. Besides, you haven’t read enough to call yourself a nihilist. It’s about as dumb as calling yourself an existentialist or a subjectivist or a Buddhist, without having studied any of those things.”
“I am a shithouse rule-ist,” Gus said. “I ne
ed ten years in the shithouse to define my headstrong metaphors.”
“Is that one of your jokes?”
“It’s a very funny joke. The world is a big stinking shithouse, see. Nothing works out like you figured. Sometimes that’s good, sometimes that’s bad. Either way the joke’s gonna be on you. You’re a good example, Tracy—you’ll go to bed with me but only if you’ve got three layers of clothes on. That’s pretty funny, don’t you think?”
“And that’s what you believe in? A philosophy of low expectations?”
“That sounds about right.”
“It’s stupid.”
“So far it’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“What about love? You believe in love, don’t you?”
“Define love,” Gus said.
“You want the bourgeois definition, or the no-nonsense dialectical one.”
“Either one since both are bullshit.”
“According to you everything is bullshit.”
“Definitions are bullshit.”
“Is there anything at all in the universe that is not bullshit?”
“Bodies. Your body. My body. What our bodies would like to do to each other. Also good food and good drink and a warm bed—those things are not bullshit. A good ole nurse told me that once. A nurse should know, right?”
“Then you’re a hedonist, not a nihilist,” she said.
“Is that bad?”
“Not if you believe the capitalist notion that the world is the rich man’s playpen.”
“The world is a shithouse.”
“Yes, that’s why we have revolutions.”
“Whatfuckingever,” Gus said.
Gus retrieved his pint of brandy, unscrewed the cap, guided the bottle to his lips. He swallowed in gulps as Josh’s old DeSosto lurched down the road on its tired springs.
They stopped at a roadhouse in Black Eagle, just short of the city. Gus flopped on the bed.
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