Chump Change

by G. M. Ford

  I kept my eyes on the ground and lumbered on, slower now. Counted till I was out of numbers and then started over and counted some more. With a Sousa march blaring in my ears, above the shouted numbers and the roar of my own breathing, I ran until that’s all there was, the next stride, the next breath.

  And then the first of the shadows swished by, and all the noise and clatter ceased. I stumbled to a stop and looked behind me. The lights that had originally attracted me were no longer visible. But the two sets of headlights bouncing across the prairie in my direction sure as hell were. I groaned.

  They were bouncing up and down, throwing spotlight beams up into the roiling clouds one minute, and sweeping back across the open prairie the next. They were moving slowly, making sure they didn’t drive into a ditch and break an axle.

  I began to run again. Veering off to the left now, moving what I imagined to be parallel with the ditch system, so I could run with full abandon.

  As I put my head back and gave it everything I had, my hips felt as if they were going to rotate right out of the sockets. Like whatever sinew had heretofore held me together had finally decided it had had enough and was leaving town.

  And then the headlights suddenly enveloped me. I veered further left, flying for the darkness with every fiber of my being.

  No matter, though. He’d seen me and was closing in. I could hear the roar of the engine now, and above that, the barking of a dog, before the lights swung my way, and I found myself chasing my inky shadow across the silver field.

  The barking was frantic now, more urgent than the roar of the engine or the labored rasp of my breathing. And then I was airborne. Like running off the roof of a building in the dark. My legs kept right on churning, trying to run on air, right up until the moment I hit the water.

  I came up flailing and sputtering. The water was waist deep, brackish, and cold as hell. To my left, an enormous culvert yawned. I began to force myself in that direction, wading through the muck and weeds, paddling with my hands and struggling forward, one exhausted step at a time.

  Above me, I heard the engine approaching and the feral yapping of the dog, in the seconds before the headlights bobbed to a halt at the edge of the ditch.

  I bent my head and waded farther into the culvert, using my hands to help propel me deeper into the dank, galvanized recess.

  A voice yelled something, but I couldn’t make out what. I kept pushing, up toward the bend in the pipe about twenty yards ahead of me, when I heard the splash and looked back. It wasn’t just a dog. It was the same dog as the other night. Coming my way like a freight train.

  As I angled around the bend in the culvert, the water suddenly got deeper and colder, chest high now and bone-numbingly frigid. I waded as fast as my numbed muscles were able. I could hear the mutt getting closer, and redoubled my efforts, and then it came to me. Probably my first intelligent thought in a week. Where I was standing was way over the dog’s head. He’d be swimming when he got to me. That was my edge. With his feet under him, he’d tear me to pieces, but they wouldn’t be under him, they’d be paddling, so I turned around, spread my feet for balance, and waited.

  Five seconds passed, and I could hear him breathing, then I saw his big head as he paddled around the corner and began barking like a lunatic at the sight of me. His ears were back, his teeth bared. Took every ounce of my resolve to stand my ground.

  You have to train attack dogs to believe they can beat a person, because they’re not naturally inclined to think they can. A pack of them? Sure. Cornered? Sure. But one on one, they’re like the rest of us. They’ve got their doubts. This one had been well trained. Despite the fact that I’d already whipped his ass once, he didn’t hesitate for a single second.

  Neither did I. The minute he paddled within reach, I grabbed him by the ears and forced his head under the water. I threw a leg over his broad back and used my weight advantage to push him toward the muddy bottom, but he was god-awful strong. When he flipped completely over, I lost my hold on one of his ears, and he sunk his teeth into my arm, just below the elbow. The pain was blinding.

  I screamed as his nails repeatedly raked my chest, but refused to let him go. I forced my head above the surface, pulled in one huge gulp of putrid air, and pressed downward again, keeping my bulk between the dog and the surface.

  His struggles became frantic. His nails were shredding my skin, but the pressure on my arm began to lessen, and that gave me hope. The longest thirty seconds of my life passed before he shuddered twice and then stopped moving altogether. His mouth relaxed. I pulled my arm out. I counted to ten, got my feet under me, and stood up. The mutt floated to the surface right in front of my face.

  “Pistol,” somebody was calling. “Get im, Pistol.”

  I floated the dog’s carcass behind me and peeked around the corner of the culvert. The guy was no more than ten feet away, his head on a swivel, holding a handgun high out of the water, as he slogged along. “Pistol,” he called again.

  He was way easier than the dog. I floated up under him and had a death grip on his nuts before he ever knew what hit him. The pressure paralyzed him long enough for me to grab his gun arm and pull him under the water. A minute and a half later, he and Pistol were floating side by side in the fetid pipe, and I was wading toward the light.

  Took me three tries to climb the bank. I had to rest on my hands and knees, until I had the strength to lever myself to my feet and stagger over toward the red truck.

  Good thing the truck was running. I’m not sure, at that point, I could have managed to slide the key into the ignition. As I climbed into the seat, I shuddered so hard, and I had to hug myself. My teeth were chattering like maracas.

  When I could pry an arm loose, I turned the heater up to high, slammed the truck into reverse, and turned it around. And then, for the second time tonight, realized I had no idea where I was, or which way salvation lay.

  Didn’t matter, though. That’s when the lights bounced over me, and I looked out to my left. The other set of headlights was speeding in my direction. Must have seen his buddy stopped and decided this was where the action was.

  “Ah, Jesus,” I groaned, as I slammed the truck into drive and put my foot to the floor. The truck rocketed forward, shaking its ass like a go-go dancer as we raced across the prairie at full throttle. I held the wheel in a death grip, trying to stop my hands from shaking, and get my vision to stand still. I kept my eyes glued on the prairie grass as it disappeared under the truck.

  The other driver was veering hard in my direction, trying to cut me off before I could find a way over the next irrigation ditch. I had no idea where I was headed, but I kept on keeping on. Standing on the accelerator, with The Blasters rocking “Red Rose” in my head at top volume as I bumped across the humps and hillocks, going airborne once in a while, slamming back to earth, the back of the truck dancing the Watusi every time we thudded down hard.

  At the outer range of my headlights, a line of darkness appeared. The kind of straight line that seldom appears in nature. Told me I was approaching another ditch. My exhaustion and terror said to turn right, to turn off the lights and flee into the darkness.

  My anger, however, had other ideas. Something akin to a roar came pouring out of my mouth as I swung the wheel hard to the left and tromped the pedal to the metal.

  The trucks were speeding right at one another now. I took aim at his headlights and looked down at the dashboard. I was doing fifty-three miles an hour across a rutted field, in the dead of night, locked on a head-on collision course.

  Turned out to be one of those moments when all those public service announcements about wearing your seat belt suddenly paid dividends. Without ever willing it so, I took one hand off the wheel, and buckled myself up. The “Buckle up for safety, buckle up” jingle began to scream in my head.

  When I looked back up, no more than a couple hundred yards separated the speeding trucks. I could see the other guy’s silhouette in the driver’s seat. I’d never played chic
ken with anyone before, and it was every bit as scary as I’d always imagined it to be. Looked like a 747 was coming right at me. Every hair on my body stood on end as we raced ever closer.

  I began to scream as the vehicles closed on one another. Some kind of “fuck you, motherfucker” battle cry came boiling out of my chest like summer thunder. I could make out the chrome insignia on front of the other truck when the guy finally lost his nerve and swung off toward the canal.

  By that point, something in me snapped. I just couldn’t let it go at that. Couldn’t go rocketing past my pursuer and allow yet another chase to begin. Just didn’t have it in me. This shit had to end.

  I cut the wheel hard to the right and T-boned him right behind the front wheel, going better than fifty. The impact threw me violently forward. My air bag deployed, saving my life and blocking my view of whatever happened next.

  By the time the roaring in my ears subsided and I managed to push the air bag out of my way, I had come to a complete stop, and the other truck was no longer in view.

  I got out. Had to circle around the front of the truck because the ground was littered with broken glass, and I still wasn’t wearing shoes. I limped over to the bank of the canal and looked down. The other truck was floating, upside down. Nobody was in sight. I waited. No driver. No dog. No nothing. I turned and walked away.

  The truck was still running, but had seen better days. A crack ran diagonally all the way across the windshield. Steam was hissing out from under the buckled hood. The passenger-side front tire was pointed off at an odd angle, and I was down to one headlight. No matter. At this point, I was like an old-time outlaw and his horse. Long as it had a breath of life, I was riding it.

  I got in slowly. Seemed like every part of me was bruised or broken or punctured as I dropped the truck into first gear and began humping along parallel with the canal.

  Quarter of a mile on, I came to another culvert and crossed the ditch.

  And then another and another, until, after what seemed like light-years, I finally found myself staring at a road. I almost cried at the sight of it. I turned to the right and rolled slowly along the fence until I came to a three-rail gate. I could see the rusted lock and chain from the driver’s seat, so I looped out into the field, got a running start, and ran over it like it wasn’t there.

  Had to stand on the brakes to keep from bouncing all the way over the narrow lane and ending up in the other ditch. The gate was still attached to the front of the truck as I backed up and pointed her down the road.

  Turned out I wasn’t dragging just the gate, but also about fifteen feet of barbed wire fence and a couple of rough-cut wooden posts that had opted to come along for the ride.

  All the bumping and scraping sounded like a car wreck as I took off down the road. A trail of sparks lit the night on either side of the truck. Half a mile down, the misaligned front tire blew. I gave it more gas. The tire began to shred itself, banging against the wheel well as, piece by piece, it tore itself from the rim and fell behind the truck.

  And then I was riding on the rim, and the sparks really got hairy. I looked like a giant bottle rocket scraping down the road. I peeked at the dash. I was doing forty. The temperature gauge was pinned in the red.

  Up ahead, the horizon was illuminated by the lights of Lewiston. The engine was beginning to knock. Sounded like it was about to swallow a valve, but I didn’t care.

  I white-knuckled the steering wheel and gave it full throttle.

  That’s when the mangled gate shook itself loose and disappeared beneath the truck. The Dodge bucked like a bronco as the gate ripped off part of the exhaust system on its way by. I kept moving forward, louder now, screeching and scraping along the road with the exhaust roaring like a fighter plane as we rolled into the outskirts of town.

  I horsed the truck around two corners. Then two more. The Lewiston Police building was half a block in front of me when the engine crapped out altogether, and I clunked and smoked to a halt in the middle of the street.

  Lights were going on all over the neighborhood.

  I sat for a minute, collecting my wits, and then popped the door.

  I’m sure that sometime in the history of the world, a stark-naked guy, bleeding from nearly every pore, must have walked into a police station somewhere at 3:10 in the morning and asked to see the chief. But from the look on the duty officer’s face, I was willing to bet it hadn’t been in Lewiston, Idaho.

  “Found your rig out at the airport,” Nathan Wilder said as he slid my overnight bag across the table to me. “Been wiped clean.”

  I nodded toward his office. “May I?” I said.

  He nodded back.

  I pulled the shiny thermal blankets tight around my naked body, grabbed the bag from the table, shuffled into Wilder’s inner office, and closed the door. I was sore as a stubbed toe all over. Took a lot of grunting and groaning to get dressed, but a set of clothes never felt so damn good. Had to take the laces out of my sneakers because my feet were swollen up like sausages, but all in all, my world-class collection of scrapes, scratches, cuts, and contusions felt better with something covering them up.

  When I came back into the outer office, Deputy Fire Chief Peter Gallagher had joined Wilder in the office. His face was sooty. Great beads of sweat rolled down his forehead faster than he could wipe them off.

  “Conflagrations seem to follow you around,” he commented.

  “What’s burning now?” I asked.

  “Warren Shotson’s old bomb shelter,” he said. “Somebody poured in about two hundred gallons of diesel down there and torched it. Got so hot it melted the containers right down into the muck. Nothing left now but a coupla steaming sinkholes out in the middle of a pasture. Probably be burnin for a week.”

  “Who’s this Shotson guy?” I asked, as I repacked the bag.

  “Either the last of the mountain men, or the first of the survivalists,” Wilder said with a chuckle. “Owned that property back in the forties and fifties.” He smiled. “Ol Warren was one hundred percent convinced the Russians was gonna come and get us, any day. Built him a bomb shelter so he’d be one of the survivors.”

  “What about Bain and Moon?” I tried.

  “Claim to have been out at the ranch all night. Got affidavits from four or five ranch hands to prove it.”

  “The Indian?”

  “They’re saying he had some family trouble back in Oklahoma. Had to leave real sudden. Said he’d call when it was settled.”

  Wilder shrugged. “Got that info you asked for,” he said.

  Not a clue. He could tell.

  “The hookers from the fly-in parties.” He dropped a packet of photos in front of me. I pushed my bag aside and slid the photos from the folder. Professional glamour head shots. Beautiful young women. She was the fifth one down. Leaning on a satin pillow, looking out at the camera like she was gonna get an ice cream cone. Missy Allen . . . real name Alma Johansen. I slid Missy’s photo toward Wilder.

  He looked down. “Pretty girl,” he said.

  “They beat her to death,” I said. “On videotape.”

  “Who beat her to death?” he asked.

  “The Indian. Dexter. Rockland . . . he . . .” I found myself at a loss for words. I settled for “Rockland helped out.”

  “Don’t suppose you have the tape,” Wilder asked.

  I shook my head. “Shotson’s bomb shelter.”

  He shrugged again.

  “They beat your other victims to death too,” I said. “The farmworkers nobody bothered to report missing. That was them too.”

  “Why would they do that?” he asked.

  “Stress relief,” I said.

  “Check out the one on the bottom,” he said.

  I fingered my way through the stack. Jeannie Palmer. Five foot six. Hair: brown. Eyes: blue. Spectacularly endowed. Looked like two bald-headed men sitting close together. When I’d met her, she’d been introduced to me as Cassie Moon, Roland’s shiny new wife. “Nice to know . . . thi
ngs get tough . . . she’s got a career she can fall back on,” I commented.

  “One of the other girls says she still hears from Jeannie now and again. Says she’s not really married to Moon. They pretend they are for appearances. Says Moon uses Jeannie hard. Treats her like a concubine. When he ain’t happy with her, he lends her to his son, Rockland, which, according to her friend, Jeannie really don’t like.”

  “She could leave,” I said.

  The chief shrugged. “It’s the money, Waterman. The lifestyle. The bling. After a while you can’t do without it. It’s like a drug or something.”

  I made it a point not to think about it.

  I tapped Cassie’s face. “Can I have this?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said.

  I got to my feet and picked up my bag. “You’ve got my number,” I said to the chief.

  “Where you going?” he wanted to know.

  “Gonna speak to a coupla people. Gonna buy a new cell phone, and then I’m going home.”

  Conspicuously, neither of them tried to talk me out of it.

  “I put your Israeli weed whacker in the car,” Wilder said. “See if you can’t get all the way back to Seattle without hurting anybody.”

  I promised I’d try.

  The Chat ’n’ Chew was packed to the rafters. Had to settle for a stool way down at the end of the counter, next to the kitchen door. Keith was bussing tables. Irene was working the front of the store by herself, moving from table to table like a whirling dervish. At the sight of me, they both stopped what they were doing and came over to where I was seated.

  “Where you been?” Keith asked.

  “Took a little detour,” I said.

  “Looks like they dragged you behind the car,” Irene said. She reached out and ran her fingertips over a bruise on my cheek. “You gotta take better care of yourself, Leo,” she said. “Some of us are gettin pretty fond of you.”

  I was trying not to think about how I looked or felt, so I changed the subject.