Chump Change

by G. M. Ford

  “How’s Ginny?” I asked.

  “Concussion,” Irene said. “Doc wants her to stay off her feet for a coupla days.”

  Keith grinned. Irene bopped him in the arm.

  “Hey,” Keith said. “That’s off her feet.”

  “I don’t think that’s exactly what the doc had in mind.”

  She looked from him to me and back. Picked up on the fact that I had something I wanted to say to Keith.

  “Gotta go,” Irene said as she hustled over to the table by the door.

  “I’m gonna be gone for a while,” I said to Keith.

  “What’s ‘a while’?” he wanted to know.

  “Coupla, three days,” I said.

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  “Probably best I don’t,” I said.

  He thought it over. “I’m good with it,” he said finally.

  “See ya.”

  “You comin back?” he asked.

  “Depends on a couple of things,” I said.

  “I’m all right here,” he said.

  “You’re better than all right, kid. Trust me.”

  As promised, they were waiting for me in Fred’s law office. Sarah Jane looked paler and thinner than I remembered. Looked like whatever weight she’d lost, Fred might have found.

  Took the better part of twenty minutes for the two of us to sign and initial the paperwork giving her back The Flying H. We waited another ten while Fred ran next door to the bank to get everything notarized. He was huffing and puffing by the time he got back to the office.

  “Soon as we sell the ranch, we’ll take care of you out of the proceeds,” Fred assured me as he plopped down into his chair. He pointed at the pile of papers. “It’s all in there, in black and white,” he said.

  I was out the better part of two hundred grand. Wasn’t the end of the world, but wasn’t chump change either.

  “I’m not worried about it,” I told him.

  “That barn burning down turned out to be a blessing,” he said. “Insurance company paid out yesterday. Nice little influx of cash for Sarah Jane.”

  “You got any takers other than Keeler?”

  Fred rolled his eyes. “We’re sure as hell trying,” he said.

  “I’ve got an idea.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sell it to Keeler,” I said.

  Fred looked at me like I’d slipped a cog. Sarah Jane stopped pacing.

  “Milk em for every dime you can get, and sell em the damn ranch,” I said.

  “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “Probably best it stays that way,” I said.

  I pulled a blue sticky from a pad on his desk. Wrote down my cell phone number. “Call me as soon as it’s a done deal,” I said. “Soon as everything’s signed and recorded.”

  Fred looked me up and down like I was wearing a balloon hat and no pants.

  “Are you crazy?”

  Sarah Jane smiled for the first time since I’d been in town.

  “He’s a full-time troublemaker is what he is.”

  You spend enough time in another person’s company, and you start to write your own mythology together. That time you did this, the vacation in Cabo, a favorite bench in Volunteer Park, the great Sunday-morning breakfast joint over by Green Lake. A thousand seemingly minuscule moments that, when woven together, form the fabric from which our lives are fashioned.

  I’d known Rebecca Duvall since I was twelve years old. I still remembered the first time I’d touched her and how she felt beneath my hand. They’d made us dance together. We were both a head and a half taller than anybody else in our respective classes, so it was pretty much a natural. Stayed that way for better than twenty-five years, until my lack of ambition, and childish behavior, proved too much for her to bear.

  I had no illusions. If what I had in mind today came to pass, this could well be the end of the story. I’d be cashing in the only marker I had, and we’d be at the place where myth ended, and real life began.

  I’d parked the Blazer under the enormous spruce tree for which the street was named. Back when she was fresh out of UDub Medical and our hearts were young and gay, we used to meet over here for lunch. I’d bring the food and drink, and we’d while away the hour with pickles and deli sandwiches and a little harmless slap-and-tickle.

  And then, six or seven years back, some guy named Gavin McGowan had showed up at the King County Medical Examiners office waving a gun around, trying to claim the remains of his ex-wife, of all things. I remember watching the security tapes later and noticing that tree was as far as the cameras could reach. I remember because, for some reason, I’d felt better knowing our little trysts hadn’t inadvertently become some stranger’s source of amusement.

  Just before eight P.M., she came out the side door. I whistled. Our whistle. The “I’m over here” whistle we’d used as kids. She stopped dead in her tracks and turned my way. Picked me out of the shadows with a single sweep of her eyes.

  I used “our” hand signals. “Come over here, but go around the block. Come up from behind me.” Even at this distance, I could see that she knew exactly what I meant.

  She turned her back on me and got into her shiny new BMW. I watched as she backed out of her parking space and rolled out onto Eighth Avenue. Instead of turning my way, she turned right and rolled downhill toward Yesler Terrace.

  As I contemplated the possibility that I was fresh out of goodwill, a pair of low-riders came bumping down the street in an old Crown Vic. One of those rides where the stereo was worth more than the short. Where they’d removed the backseat in favor of enough subwoofers to stop a pacemaker from half a mile away.

  I stood under the tree and waited for the boom of the bass to fade into the damp afternoon air. Once the thumping began to subside, I could make out two different sirens wailing their way in my direction, which wasn’t surprising since I was standing a scant half a block from Harborview Medical Center, Western Washington’s trauma destination. Sorta the siren capital of the Pacific Northwest, when you thought about it.

  I gave it ten minutes. When she still hadn’t showed, I got back into the car and started the engine. Seemed like I may have seriously overestimated my boyish charms.

  When I checked the mirror to make sure the street was empty, she was standing there at the curb. No blue BMW. Just her. I turned off the engine and got out.

  She leaned back against the trunk of the tree, folded her arms tightly across her chest, and looked around. I watched her remember. Then watched as she caught herself and declared the nostalgia-fest null and void.

  “What do you want, Leo?” she asked.

  I told her.

  She laughed in my face.

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Sure you can.”

  “You must be crazy.”

  No point denying it. Especially to her. So I shut up.

  “This is a new low,” she said. “Even for you.”

  She turned around and stalked off up the street.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She kept walking.

  I opened the door, reached into the Blazer, grabbed a photograph from the passenger seat. “Take a look at this,” I said.

  She stopped and turned back my way.

  “What?”

  I walked over and handed her the picture. When she gave up trying to stare holes in my forehead and took a gander at the head shot, her demeanor changed in an instant.

  I watched her stiffen with anger. She tapped the photo with her finger.

  “This is her,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “She said she was his sister.”

  “She’s a hooker from Vegas.”

  She turned the photo over and read: “Jeannie Palmer.”

  “That’s her real name.”

  I watched her throat turn radish red. Happens whenever she’s seriously pissed off. Trust me; I’d seen it a coupla thousand times.

  “Why would she want a body?”
<
br />   “You sure you want to know?”

  “Damn right I do.”

  So I told her the whole sorry-ass saga. From Gordy winning the lottery, to the casino access road, to how Gordy got those god-awful scars. All the way up until six hours ago, when I climbed into the Blazer and drove back to Seattle.

  No matter that she spent her days cutting up cadavers, the story I told her seriously rattled her cage. Somebody beating somebody to death for the fun of it was way beyond Little Miss Straight Arrow’s most morbid imaginings.

  When I’d finished my tale, she reached over, unbuttoned my sleeve, and pushed it up a few inches. The arm was covered in enough bright blue horse tape for the Kentucky Derby. I knew what she was going to ask.

  “I had all the shots,” I assured her.

  We stood there in silence, while she wrestled with what she’d heard.

  “I can’t do it,” she said finally. “I just can’t. It’s unethical.”

  I kept it simple and to the point. “You owe me,” I said.

  She winced and looked away. There was no wiggle room here. Without me, she’d be dead. Period. End of story. Sometimes the truth is hard to hear.

  “A gentleman wouldn’t bring that up,” she said.

  “Well, we both know where that’s at, don’t we?”

  Another unwieldy silence enveloped us.

  “What would happen to the remains?” she asked finally.

  I told her.

  “Wait here” was all she said.

  I slept in my own bed. Felt like I’d been away for a year. I was still puttering around the kitchen the next morning when my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but picked up anyway. “Leo here,” I said.

  “Mr. Waterman?”

  “Yep.”

  “It’s Fred Simmons,” he said.

  “Hiya, Fred. What’s up?”

  “We sold Keeler The Flying H this morning. Got us a million and a half over assessed value, too.” Fred sounded pretty damn proud of himself.

  “Nice work.”

  “The Great Roland Moon himself showed up for the title transfer.”

  “Like havin an audience with the queen,” I said.

  He laughed. “From what I hear, he had to take a second on his ranch to come up with the cash. Little birdie told me he had to go all the way to Vegas for the money. Kinda people who don’t listen to excuses when it comes time to pay the piper.”

  “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

  “Where do you want the check sent?”

  I gave him my Eastlake P.O. box number. Getting my mail someplace other than the house was something else I’d inherited from my old man. His driver, Bermuda Schwartz, would pick up the mail every morning on his way over to get my father. That way, if need be, the old man could claim he never got whatever the hell it was.

  Fred cleared this throat. “Gotta be honest with you, Mr. Waterman. I don’t quite understand how this whole thing shook out, but far as I’m concerned, if it works for Sarah Jane and Olley, then it works for me.”

  “That’s what lawyers are for,” I said.

  “Damn right.”

  I pissed away the whole day before it occurred to me that maybe I was looking for an excuse not to go back to Lewiston. I’m never more creative than when I’m making up reasons to procrastinate.

  I left the vacuum standing in the middle of the front room and called Rachel.

  “I’ve got to finish up a couple of things, over in Lewiston,” I said.

  “I thought you were coming over tonight,” she said.

  “I’ve got to do this,” I said.

  “Or else things just wouldn’t be right.”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “It’s late.”

  “I can make it by morning.”

  “Be safe.”

  I promised I’d try.

  Herbert Lean Elk slid down from the truck’s seat and gently closed the door. He looked around. In the first throes of daylight, the southern Rocky Mountains loomed around us like jagged jack-o’-lantern teeth.

  “Thought you left town,” he said casually.

  “I came back.”

  “Who told you about this place?” he asked.

  “Picked it off a map,” I said. “Seemed like we wouldn’t have a lot of company way out here.”

  He nodded his approval. “Don’t nobody come out here these days,” he said. “Used to have sweat house ceremonies out here, way back in the day.” He pointed to the west. “Used to be a little creek run down through there. Dried up about twenty years ago.”

  “How’s things at the casino site?” I asked.

  “Nothin but dirt and more dirt,” he said.

  “How long till they’re done with the assessment?”

  “Maybe a week and a half.” He made a disgusted face. “Keeler already got all the equipment sittin there. Leased every bulldozer and backhoe in the whole damn state. Got em all lined up and ready to go the minute they get the okay from the Feds.”

  “Sounds like somebody might be counting their chickens, to me.”

  “They got good reason to,” he said sadly.

  “Could be a snag,” I suggested.

  The old man shot me a quick sideways glance and then pretended to study the mountains. “How’s that?” he asked.

  “The land might suddenly take on added significance.”

  “Significance?”

  “You know . . . something historical.”

  “It’s possible, I suppose,” he conceded.

  I walked over to the Blazer. Came back carrying a plain, white cardboard box. When I offered it to him, he hesitated and then took it from my hands.

  “It’s not my birthday,” he said.

  “Maybe in sidereal time,” I said.

  “What’s that?”

  “No idea,” I admitted. “It’s one of those things hippie girls used to say all the time. I was never exactly sure what it meant.”

  “Must be an astrology thing,” Herbert said. “They were big into that.”

  He peeled back the lid and looked inside the box. “What’s this?”

  “An indigenous brother looking for a home.”

  He stared into the box again. “Looks old,” he said.

  “Six hundred years or so.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “Just that they’re six hundred or so years old and Native American.”

  I told him how, at the present time, with the bones being that old and all, those two things were all that modern science could say for sure. Then told him how Harbor Island had been created by washing the silt from the Duwamish River delta, which, in turn, filled the newly created voids with the silt of the White River, the Green River, and the dearly departed Black River. So the bones could be from a member of any of two dozen coastal bands known to have inhabited those areas in antiquity.

  “He’s been adrift all these years,” I said finally.

  Herbert thought it over for a long time.

  “I’m having trouble staying stoic,” he said after a while.

  “Huh?”

  “Indians are supposed to be stoic.”

  “Why’s that?” I wondered.

  “It’s that Chief Dan George thing,” he said. “All those damn movies.”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  He closed the box. “How many people know about this?” he asked.

  “You, me, and the person I got them from.”

  He cocked a thick eyebrow at me.

  “And that person has a whole lot more to lose than either of us,” I assured him.

  “And the science . . . it’s good?”

  “No doubt about it. It’s just like I said.”

  He stood there, weighing the box in his hands.

  “The person I got them from,” I said, “is very particular about the way remains are handled. This person would really like to know that”—I nodded at the box—“those were treated with great dignity and respect.”
<
br />   “I’ll have my wife sing a proper mourning song,” he promised.

  “My . . .” I searched for the proper word. “My friend would like that.”

  Ginny and Jasmine had the front of the house pretty well covered. Most everybody left in the Chat ’n’ Chew was on the backside of breakfast, finishing the dregs of their coffee and mopping up the last of the egg yolk, by the time I limped through the door.

  I’d felt a lot better. Everything I’d bruised, battered, concussed, and cut over the past week was throbbing simultaneously. My eyes felt sandy, my mouth like I’d eaten a running shoe. I stretched. Despite my best efforts, a deep groan came rolling out of me. Several of the other diners shot sideways glances in my direction. I silently bemoaned the ravages of time as I eased myself into the seat.

  I was perusing the menu, like there was gonna be a test, when Jasmine came trotting by with a glass of ice water.

  “Can I get you something?” she asked.

  I told her what I wanted and how I wanted it. Breakfast is most everybody’s fussiest meal of the day. Folks know how they want everything, and they want it cooked just that way. Over real easy. Scramble em soft. Sourdough toast. Short stack. Sausage patty, not links. Eggs any old which way and whatever meat you got lying about just don’t cut it for breakfast.

  She wrote it all down.

  “Keith around?” I asked.

  She grinned. “Is Ginny here?”

  It hurt to laugh, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “I’ll get him for you,” she said.

  Breakfast arrived before Keith did.

  I was loading my mouth with more Denver omelet when he sat down beside me at the table. “That was quick,” he said. “I thought you’d be gone for a while.”

  “Me too,” I said around the egg.

  I swallowed and then wiped my mouth.

  “So . . . this thing is over,” I said.

  “So you’re satisfied you know what happened to Gordy?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I decided to let it go at that. Couldn’t see any sense stuffing that degree of human evil into a young man’s mind. So I made a quick segue.

  “You decided what you want to do?” I asked.

  He gave me a deer-in-the-headlights look.

  “Like with the rest of your life,” I added.