by April Smith
LaSalle followed Buzz into a large utility room with blank walls and a soda machine. Folding chairs were lined up, and that’s where the men who already had their food would eat. LaSalle told Buzz he’d been “set up” by his brother, who promised him a place to live, but when he came all this way from California, it turned out Amos had moved or died or disappeared.
After they ate the chili, they got into another line for a ticket to get a bed, and waited outside against the building in blowing flakes of snow until it opened again at five. The room was stacked with narrow bunks barely two feet apart that looked as if they’d arrived in the days of the railroad. The iron frames were peeling paint and there were no mattresses on the springs.
“Just like the beds you see in some of those jailhouses,” Buzz remarked.
Buzz was hoping for better days. He was on his way to Rapid City, South Dakota, because they had an air force base down there that had “a big hiring going on,” especially for veterans. It was the easy life, he said. You could live on the base and they fed you, too. Buzz heard they were giving vets first preference, which is what they deserved. LaSalle agreed. He was a vet, too. He’d enlisted at Fort Lewis, which was the first place that came to mind. Buzz said he was out of there as soon as his old Chevy got fixed. Presently it was on the street with a disabled fan belt. Buzz wondered idly if LaSalle could contribute in exchange for a ride. LaSalle’s mood rose like a rocket.
“Fan belt, hell!” LaSalle exclaimed. “I can cover that, brother.”
It wasn’t just the fan belt, as Buzz well knew when he lured the white kid in. He figured that fool would be good for something. It turned out the car needed hoses and a water pump and a new battery, plus a full tank of gas, so by the time they left Montana, LaSalle had $267 remaining of his bonanza from San Francisco. Two days later, they arrived at Ellsworth Air Force Base in Rapid City, ready to go to work, but the carefully groomed and shined cadet at the gate, who looked about sixteen, told them there was no “big hiring” going on, not since they built the missile silos back in the 1960s. In fact, they had their hands full right now with the hippies come from all over, wanting to take the missiles out.
LaSalle felt like a clown, standing in the noonday sun outside the gate with this useless codger, who’d purposely taken them 666 miles to the middle of nowhere. Then a voice told LaSalle to kick himself—666—how could he have missed that sign? For about the millionth time, Buzz had to use the “gents’,” as he called it in his quaint, old-fashioned way. They stopped at a gas station with pink and yellow bunnies smirking in the windows because it was Easter. LaSalle followed his friend inside the single restroom, grabbed the old man by the neck, and banged his head against the tile wall, counting to six, six times in a row. He let go, then squatted down, observed eye movements behind the lids and blood from the nose. Buzz had wet himself. Pathetic, thought LaSalle. He washed his hands and flicked the light switch. The room went dark as a TV screen, and LaSalle forgot all about it.
He got into the Chevy and drove off, reaching for the pipe in the glove compartment. By the time he’d hit the interstate he was doing ninety-five, thanks to the last of the crack, a new kind of high that made cocaine look like peanut butter. This, coupled with the dimensionless space of the prairie, caused an agoraphobic reaction in LaSalle. Seized with panic, he kept looking for trees. Cacti. Anything but nothing. Arrows of sun zinged through the windshield directly into his brain. LaSalle gripped the steering wheel and shook it with all of his 230 pounds, howling, “Ray-Bans!” in agony over everything that had been taken away from him, until forced to hit the brakes before he rear-ended a line of vehicles stopped at a state police roadblock at Exit 152.
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” he gasped. “They’re waiting for me.”
No they’re not, asshole, answered LaSalle’s inner voice. Open your eyes.
RAPID CITY, SOUTH DAKOTA
A gathering of about a hundred people was following a priest down an access road into the open plains. One group sang church songs in fervent harmony. They looked like they were in some kind of happy trance. Then he saw the banners: BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS and NO HIROSHIMA EVER AGAIN.
Stalled drivers were angrily honking horns. LaSalle leaned on his, loud and long. He rolled down the window because it was getting hotter and hotter in the car. The air-conditioning wasn’t working for a change.
“God bless America,” said a gruff voice at the window.
LaSalle almost jumped a mile. “What the hell?”
It was a burly, friendly-looking older guy with long gray hair and a big belly, wearing a red, white, and blue Uncle Sam hat, baggy jeans, and red suspenders over a shirt patterned like an American flag.
“I’m the voice of reason,” he growled.
LaSalle didn’t know what to make of that. Then the guy handed him a leaflet wrapped around a cold can of Coors and LaSalle realized it had been a joke.
“Are you for real?” he asked, grinning.
“Don’t drink and drive,” the dude advised, moving on.
“Hey, wait a minute.”
Since he was stuck there anyway, LaSalle got out of the car, surprised to find the dry prairie air so bitter cold. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“A bunch of faggots protesting the fact we’ve got a defensive missile system in place to protect our country from a surprise attack by Russia. Yeah, good luck. They’re going over to E-5 but they’ll be arrested,” he said with a world-weary sigh. “And you and me’ll foot the bill for their pansy meals in jail. Not too early for you?” he asked of the beer.
“Just in time,” LaSalle agreed, chugging, even though the brew froze his teeth. He looked at the words in big type on the leaflet. “What are they—Communists?”
“Oh, definitely. Without a doubt. Last time they cut through the chain link and sat on the silo lid.”
LaSalle guffawed. “Like it might go off?”
“Pretty weak, if you ask me.”
“So what are you?” LaSalle asked, reading from the pamphlet. “The New Pioneers?”
“We’re a local group,” the man said with the same sigh, the burden of righteousness on his shoulders, “working to keep strangers out of here, along with troublemaking fags and hippies—something wrong with your car?”
Piles of steam were spurting out from under the battered hood of the Chevy. LaSalle reached in and turned off the ignition. The smell of burning rubber hoses stung their noses.
“I put good money into this thing. Never trust a nigger,” LaSalle added with disgust. He received a sympathetic shrug.
“Got a truck. I can give you a tow.”
“That would be much appreciated, sir.”
The red, white, and blue guy offered his hand. “They call me Honeybee. Honeybee Jones.”
“Derek,” answered LaSalle. “Hope I can do something for you one day.”
They shook on it.
—
Honeybee liked to talk and LaSalle liked to listen. While they were driving, the Chevy lashed to the tow bar of Honeybee’s truck, he described the interstate as a cash pipeline. The flow went from the Colombian cartels to Florida, Georgia, and across the West. Quaaludes, weed, synthetic cocaine. Honeybee told LaSalle he’d “been into a lot” and done time, first in South Dakota for stealing cattle when he was a youngster, later in Wyoming for robbing a bank, but in his old age he’d finally figured out the way to get by was slow and easy. A couple of transactions now and again were enough to keep body and soul together, and “Rapid,” as he called it, was a righteous home base because everyone was too stupid and stoned out of their skulls to pay attention, and he could live for free in his mother’s old house.
LaSalle didn’t say much, which after a while spooked Honeybee out, wondering if he’d just spilled his guts to a fed, but he decided the big kid was stressed by his car breaking down and whatever. They left the Chevy on the street. It fit right in with the scruffy working-class subdivision: muddy trucks and broken-down RVs in the driveways, and
rows of mailboxes on posts stuck in buckets of cement along the sidewalks.
Honeybee lived in a dirty white rectangle with greenish aluminum awnings over blind windows. Nothing grew in the yard except trash. There were things in there that had nothing to do with him—blow-up kiddie pools and abandoned pet cages. Over the years, neighbors got in the habit of dropping their crap in his yard, despite the furor of three large mongrel dogs throwing themselves against the fence.
Several years ago, Honeybee had come home after a stint in jail to find his alcoholic mother dead in an armchair, still attached to her oxygen tank. Nothing had changed before or after her demise. Joints, cigarettes, sewing stuff, little baby dolls his mom collected, and odd bits of hardware littered the coffee table. The big TV was always on. In the kitchen, cats had the run of the counters, where piles of dishes moldered for days, and the top of the refrigerator was a wonderland of empty liquor bottles. The cabinets were sliding off the wall; in fact, the entire house sat on a slant.
“Smells like crotch in here,” said Honeybee, as if he’d never noticed it before. “You can have the sofa.”
Honeybee gestured toward a sunken piece of furniture covered with old blankets and crusted with dog hair.
“Could I trouble you for a snack?” LaSalle asked politely.
“Help yourself.”
LaSalle went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. He found a carton of milk that was still okay and was about to pour cereal flakes into a bowl, when a .40-caliber Glock fell out of the box.
“Yeah, the guns,” Honeybee remembered. “Let me show you.”
There was also a semiautomatic M1 carbine under his bed and a .38-caliber pistol on the windowsill above the toilet. Day-to-day he lived like a slob, but he was well organized for the apocalypse. In a lean-to beside the back door he’d neatly stored and labeled a month’s worth of water and dried food, along with a tent and ammunition. This he kept under lock and key and did not mention to guests.
After a couple of days of getting high and playing their favorite video game, Dragon’s Lair, Honeybee’s hospitality dried up. He sat down on the couch next to the young man and asked about his goals. Offhand, LaSalle couldn’t think of any. Honeybee said if he didn’t contribute he’d have to leave. LaSalle came up with an idea about the pipeline. One thing he could do is drive. What if he helped Honeybee out sometimes with a delivery?
“I have skills. I can fix your place up,” he offered, and told about his life in the trees and how—here’s a goal!—his plan, he remembered it now, was to save enough money to get to Brazil and cut trees in the jungle. Honeybee didn’t know much about Brazil, but it had to be close to Colombia, so maybe this could work out. LaSalle bolstered his argument with exaggerated claims of his criminal background, making him sound like a jack-of-all-trades, from burglary to homicide.
LaSalle put on his Boy Scout face, eager to please. He did a huge sweep-out of the rotten little house, carrying truckloads of decaying stuff to the dump. He cleaned out the junk from the backyard and made a place for a bench and a set of weights he found in the garage; got the vacuum cleaner fixed, threw out disgusting things in the kitchen, spent days at the Laundromat watching blankets go around, and got on Honeybee’s nerves with all this endless straightening up. But that was cool because Honeybee drove LaSalle nuts with his constant yakking. Still, by molding himself into a docile shadow, LaSalle fit himself into Honeybee’s lifestyle of drinking at a biker bar, lifting weights, cruising chicks at the pool hall, letting the dogs out, and occasional meets at a Wal-Mart parking lot to pick up a kilo of coke for delivery on the West Coast, with LaSalle doing the all-night driving. Honeybee didn’t mind getting some sleep.
—
The New Pioneers turned out to be the best part of LaSalle’s week. Every Tuesday morning four to eight fat old dudes—even older than Honeybee—turned up at the Kaiserhof Kafe, a German family restaurant, where they got special treatment and were seated in a private room in the back. The walls were covered with murals of medieval castles on the Rhine, painted in lurid, mind-altering colors that made LaSalle feel like he was Dirk the Daring, hero of Dragon’s Lair, rescuing Princess Daphne from Mordroc and Singe, finding himself on the brink of a life-and-death decision between eggs Benedict with Black Forest ham and the big Jack omelet, all of which he found hilarious.
The meetings of the New Pioneers would start with everyone standing for the Pledge of Allegiance, a long boring reading from Scripture, and sometimes a moment of silence for friends who had passed. Then they’d let loose on a rampage that made fascinating entertainment for LaSalle. Sometimes it was the Jewish international banking scheme or insane welfare programs. It could be “keeping Rapid white and free” or the immoral federal income tax. They kept copies of the Constitution on plastic cards in their pockets and made LaSalle stick one in his.
The elders’ mantra was about “justice and the value of human life.” They said everyone is born with “human capital,” although some have less value than others, like Mexicans, blacks, Communists, and Jews—nevertheless, if you killed one of them, you automatically gained their capital, like a bank, ka-ching. The New Pioneers insisted they weren’t a violent bunch, although they did enjoy shooting guns. Honeybee would go out and unload five hundred rounds from the pistol into a target twenty-five feet away, “just to put the fear of God into them.” With his gift for mimicry, LaSalle was able to chime in with these beliefs right on key, but it was the “human capital” idea that stayed with him, tucked away, because it made such obvious mathematical sense. The grandpas treated LaSalle like family. They called him “the big kid” and paid for his breakfasts.
One clear morning in October everything changed. You might say it was the first sign of the End of Days that was long predicted to happen. A book had just come out called Loyalty, written by Harold Wheeler, the judge in a famous trial twenty-five years ago. It was famous because it was the first time a politician had sued a member of the public for libel and won. The politician was a state legislator named Calvin Kusek. He’d brought a lawsuit against one of their idols, Senator Thaddeus Haynes, and received $30,000 in damages. A lot of the New Pioneers had been around at that time, and they were still incensed by the verdict.
Calvin Kusek, they explained to their youngest member, was a liberal Democrat married to an avowed member of the Communist Party, a sick combination, and if he thought Communists were gone he was dead wrong. The enemy was still among us. Cal Kusek, who lived in a fancy house on West Boulevard (you could see the sign), was “regional director of the Communist Party”—right under our noses. Haynes was some guru type they all worshipped, LaSalle figured out, who, sadly, was in his nineties and gone in the head with dementia. Back in the day, according to the elders, he was as great as Senator McCarthy, whom LaSalle had never heard of, but okay. Senator Haynes had pointed the finger right at Kusek but nobody would listen. Honeybee had known both men pretty well and agreed the whole thing was a perverse travesty of justice.
The group chipped in for a copy of Loyalty and passed it around. For weeks they couldn’t get off the subject. The Kuseks still lived in town, two miles away but a world apart from Honeybee’s. LaSalle didn’t understand how a blatant enemy could be allowed to live out in the open. Well, they explained, he was a lawyer, tied to the banking conspiracy—what do you expect? Like many things, Calvin Kusek slipped from LaSalle’s mind, until he had cause to remember.
Around Thanksgiving, Honeybee told LaSalle he’d have to start paying his share in cash money or move on. Tree topping wasn’t an option in the prairie, and he had no other prospects. LaSalle really didn’t want to go back to living on the street. That raunchy sofa was the sweetest place he’d ever known. He wanted to prove to the New Pioneers that he was a good soldier. In that case, Honeybee would be proud of him and let him stay. He decided to kill Calvin Kusek and his family.
29
Every morning on his run, Lance Kusek made sure to go by the ball field. He ran on a median b
etween two wide streets, empty at six a.m., just the lonely slapping of his shoes on wet pavement and the pleasant hot-cold sensation of sweating skin and freezing air. On gray wintry mornings, it gave him a lift, in a melancholy way, to pass the field where his dad had taught Willie to hit a ball. Passing it was like saying hello to Grandpa. This would be the first Christmas since Cal died that anyone really felt like celebrating.
Lance reached the halfway point in his run and realized he had no awareness of where he was. He’d been ruminating on Christmas at the ranch when he was a kid, how they’d had to wait to open presents until the cows got fed, but Mom always had hot cocoa with peppermint sticks for when they came in. He passed the silent infield, where the unbroken banks of snow flecked with breaking sunshine brought a memory of how on Christmas Eve they would scatter oatmeal in subzero weather to feed the reindeer…and the golden sparkles he and Jo would find the next morning, proof that Santa had been there. The cheerful idea hit him that he and his wife, Wendy, could do the same for their boy. They left cookies for Santa; why not oatmeal for reindeer? That would be radical!
Lance felt happier then, comforted by the thought of a family tradition rolling forward in time. He’d found himself sentimental lately. The season brought wistful recollections of how much Willie had meant to Cal. Given him new life, really. Lance was amused to remember how his intellectual father had been transformed into a clown with a repertoire of goofy faces, and a regular customer at Who’s Hobby House downtown, never showing up without a Matchbox car for the boy’s collection. When Willie was four, he’d even gone so far as to dress up like Santa Claus. There was a knock, and Lance and Wendy swooshed Willie toward the door with excited whispers, “Who can that be?” The boy opened it and stared up at the figure wearing a red nylon costume and fake beard.
