Graveyard of the Gods

by Richard Newman

  Egyptian Trails was even darker than when he had dropped by earlier, and it looked smaller and cozier in this light. It was also now filled with people, mostly men, clustered around the bar and filling a few of the wooden tables against the walls.

  All the old faithful, gathering at the village well, Gene thought. He had no idea how that phrase jumped into his mind, or where it came from, but he marveled that it sounded like something Miller might have said. He added, Wonder how long until this well runs dry.

  Gene went up to the bar to order another Bud Light. Despite the fact that he rarely drank these days, that he was cold and wet, and that his belly still bubbled with self-disgust, another beer sounded good. He found a slot at the bar and waited to be noticed by the bartender, the same guy who had served him his roast beef. Helmullet perched in almost the same place he’d sat during lunch.

  “Total bullshit,” said a kid in his late twenties, clean cut and wearing an orange camouflage T-shirt. He’d spiked his hair with so much goop it looked like the rough mats golfers cleaned their cleats on.

  “Oh, hell, Jason, what difference does it make?” said a man in his late thirties who wore a backward Cubs cap, despite being a bit too old to pull off the backward cap look. Gene figured here, like Carmi, there were considerably more Cardinals fans than Cubs.

  “It’s gonna ruin marriage,” said Orange Camy.

  “Now that’s bullshit. It’s not going to affect my marriage one bit—such as it is,” said Backward Cap, to some laughter on either side of him. “We’re all divorced, right?”

  “At least once,” said someone at the bar.

  “Some of us from the same woman,” said someone else, to raucous laughter.

  “If gay people can marry each other,” Orange Camy continued, “pretty soon people will marry anything—their dogs, their horse, dead fish.”

  Backward Cap laughed and lit up a Camel Light.

  “Seriously, what’s to prevent that happening?” Orange Camy pressed.

  “That is what we call in my profession a specious argument. Look at that argument the other way. People are free to eat animals—does that mean the next step is for them to eat people?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about, Marguarita? Are you turning into a fucking vegetarian now, too, as well as a fag-lover?”

  “It’s the same argument you just used. Besides, why do you even care? You plan on marrying any of the women you’ve knocked up?”

  “What can I getcha?” asked the bartender. His face was a little redder than earlier in the day, a little greasier, but he had taken his apron off, changed clothes, and now wore a long-sleeved shirt rolled up to his elbows. If he recognized or remembered Gene, he made no indication.

  “Bud Light, please.” He noticed a few cartons of cigarettes by the register against the facing wall and decided to do something he hadn’t done in a long time. “Can I have a pack of Camel Lights, too?”

  The bartender came back with his beer and his cigarettes.

  “Seven dollars,” he said. “Start a tab?”

  “No, here.” Gene handed over a twenty. “You have a book of matches?”

  The bartender silently lay some matches on the pack of cigarettes. When he came back with Gene’s change, Gene asked, “Can you point out a guy named Hansen?”

  The bartender looked at him blankly and made no movement to help him out.

  “Cora said I should get in touch with him and he’d be here.”

  “Danny Hansen?”

  “That’s the guy.”

  “Down there. Yellow shirt.”

  Gene looked down the bar and saw a short, balding man in his early sixties talking to a couple other men, a large guy in brown coveralls and a wiry guy who looked sun-creased and sunburned. Danny Hansen was about finished with his Miller High Life, so Gene ordered a High Life and one more Bud Light while the bartender was still there.

  “Oh, please!” said Backward Cap, clearly more amused than upset. “I can’t listen to this nonsense any more. Case dismissed with prejudice. Kenny, can I have my tab, please?”

  Gene walked down the length of the bar until he came to the small cluster of what looked like contractors and construction workers leaning against the bar. The guy in the coveralls looked in his late thirties with a salt-and-pepper goatee. The guy with the sun-creased face and neck had older looking skin but was probably in his late twenties. His hair tufted wildly from underneath and out the back of a dirty Pabst cap, and Gene pegged him for a roofer. Most of the roofers Gene knew consumed large quantities of alcohol and crystal meth, and this guy didn’t look like an exception. They were joined by another guy in his early fifties who wore an ironed green plaid cotton shirt and khakis.

  “Danny Hansen?” Gene asked, holding out his High Life.

  “Who wants to know?” asked the man. He already seemed both a little agitated as well as drunk. He came up to Gene’s shoulders but Gene could tell his shoulders and back were solid from decades of hard work.

  “Cora said I should talk to you about a job.”

  “Cora! Sure, what’s the job?” he asked, taking the bottle and knocking back a few swigs. “Thanks for the beer!”

  Gene sidestepped back down the bar a few paces away from the group and said, “Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  “Here’s good,” said Danny. “What’s the job?”

  Gene finished his beer and ordered two more from Kenny. The nicotine cravings never entirely disappeared after all these years, and when he could feel them stirring in his blood after the beer, he thumped the Camel Lights against his palm, turned the pack, thumped it again, took one out, and lit it. It tasted worse than he’d remembered, but the smoke felt good streaming into his lungs. He immediately grew light-headed from the nicotine, which he hadn’t had in his system since he’d been in the hospital six years ago.

  “The job already happened. My name is Gene Barnes. Maybe you can help me.”

  Danny Hansen paused for a long time and finished off his High Life, sizing Gene up.

  “This about Miller?” he asked in a high, thin raspy voice in the back of his throat. “You his brother?”

  Gene nodded and took another swig and another drag.

  “I got nothing for you. We all been wondering what happened to him.”

  “He was shot in the head, that’s what happened to him,” Gene said.

  “Sons of bitches,” said Danny Hansen through his teeth, shaking his head. “Those sons of bitches.”

  He looked around him to make sure no one had heard. Gene handed him the other High Life, which he took, and said, “Thanks. I’m sorry about your brother.”

  “Cora said you might be able to tell me a little bit of what happened.”

  “Your brother was a good man. Smart as hell, and he had a good heart.”

  “Well—can you?”

  Danny Hansen’s praise for Miller seemed sincere, but he also seemed to be stalling, pondering what he should or shouldn’t say, and Gene saw his eyes sweep quickly across the room.

  “I’m not going to go do anything stupid,” Gene added. “I don’t want to make trouble. I just want to know what happened to my brother and why.”

  “Come here.” The stocky man walked over to one of the two-person tables by the wall. As they walked past the little group of other contractors, he pulled out a small notebook and said, “Who you say you worked for in Paducah?”

  Gene felt eyes on them both as they headed for the table, unsure whether they were real or imagined, but Danny was making a bit of a show with scribbling in his notebook.

  “Sons of bitches,” he said again through his teeth. He cast one more glance down the bar before he looked Gene right in the eye. “OK, I’ll tell you exactly what happened. Son of a bitch Dickie Shoats is what happened.”

  “Who’s he?” asked Gene, imagining various faces to match the name, mostly cartoonish villains with bristly mustaches.

  “He’s the D&D guy.”

  “I don’t know what
that is.”

  “Director of Design and Construction.”

  “He works for Five Star?”

  “He is Five Star, at least around here he is. Manages new construction and renovation for Five Star in the Midwest. I’ll tell you exactly what happened. Concrete and rebar, 2.9 million. But it’s not, see? It’s 3.5 million. Get it?”

  Gene had no idea what Hansen was talking about. He wondered if he’d sucked in too much beer and nicotine too quickly or if the guy was talking gibberish. “Five Star paid you 2.9 million to pour the concrete?”

  “They’re supposed to use local contractors because the city negotiated it into Five Star’s contract before they would approve it. But they have all their own ‘expert’ contractors who go all over the country building their casinos. They subcontract me for 2.9, but I find out the ‘expert’ sold this piece of the job for 3.5. OK, so where’s the other $600,000? I’d like to know. My crew did all the work, see? Everything. So I show up at the trailer with a change order—”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Like a bill adjustment, for extra work done. Anyway, someone must have told Dickie Shoats I was coming with my change order, and he’s in there and it’s August, and that son of a bitch has the heat on full blast, and he’s filling the place up with his cigar smoke, and when I walk in he’s got his feet up on the desk, these gator skin cowboy boots—he always wears cowboy boots—and he’s smoking this goddamned cigar. He’s got these other contractors there, the guys that work with him all over, and a union guy and a couple other guys I don’t know, probably ‘educators,’ and they’re all gagging from the smoke and no one can breathe. I hand him my change order and he says, ‘Danny, you eat lunch yet?’ and I says, ‘Nope,” and he says, ‘Good, cuz you can eat that fuckin’ change order and get the hell out of here.’ And they all laughed, like it was pretty funny, but I just stood there for a while, kinda waiting to see what would happen, mostly cuz I was still pretty mad, and Dickie Shoats says, ‘Why are you still here?’”

  Danny Hansen paused a moment and took another huge swig of his beer. He was getting more and more worked up the more he talked, and Gene could see sweat starting to bead up on his forehead. It was easy to place him in the hot smoky trailer.

  “So I stand there for a while, sweating like a pig before a hog roast—Christ, we all were, except him—and I says, ‘what happened to that other six hundred grand?’”

  “‘Everybody’s been paid,’ he says. ‘I’ve been paid. You get paid, Chas?’ he asks. And Chas goes ‘Yep.’ ‘You get paid?’ he asks someone else, and he goes around the whole room, asking everybody if they been paid, and everybody says yes. Then he asks me, ‘You been paid, Danny? You got a nice fat check to bring home to your family?’ And the son of a bitch even mentioning my family, I get the picture, so I says, ‘Yeah, I been paid’ and leave. Ain’t that some shit?”

  “Jesus,” said Gene. “So what happened?”

  “Ain’t nothing happened. Turns out that’s how it was with everybody, see? The electrical work—subcontracted at 3.9 mill. Total job: 4.2. Everything was like that—painting, roofing, everything. Some of the money went back to Five Star so they could show the shareholders what a good job they did. The rest of it went to them, the contractors—new Cadillac, new truck, new swimming pool, World Series tickets, condos on Marco Island, their girlfriends, whores, you name it. Even the tile, the flooring, the doors. Turns out Dickie Shoats’s ex-wife owns the company that makes the doors, but she’s only his ex-wife on paper. They still live together—or at least when they happen to be at one of their half a dozen houses together. But shit—there’s over a thousand doors in that casino and hotel. A hundred or two on each door—that’s a lot of money.”

  “And you told all this to Miller?”

  “He found out about it, confirmed some things with me, connected some of the other dots. He couldn’t believe it. Especially, see, ’cuz a lot of it was state money, or tax credits, see? And these sons of bitches do this everywhere, all over the country.”

  Gene finally had a focus for the anger that had been slowly percolating in his system since he started this trip, since he first sat staring at his brother on the floor of the hog shed, and it was cigar-smoking, boot-strutting Dickie Shoats with his fake ex-wife and several houses. He was the guy responsible for killing Miller, and, the way Miller saw it, this whole town and probably towns all across the country.

  “So who’s Chas Maier?” Gene asked.

  “Another contractor. One of the so-called ‘expert’ contractors that builds casinos all over the country.”

  “They’re not local?”

  “Fuck no. They’re out of St. Louis.”

  “OK, another thing—if Miller was on to all this stuff, why did he run so many ads for all those guys in the paper?”

  “Look, see, everybody just wants their little piece. I do, those guys do.”

  Danny Hansen nodded to the contractors a few tables away.

  “Hell, everybody in this fucking bar wants his little piece. Miller wasn’t any different. Even after he sold them some ads he was still digging around. Don’t ask me why or what he was going to do with it. But he was still digging.”

  Danny finished his beer and started to get up for another but then sat down again.

  “Lemme tell you something,” he said. “I was in Nam. You know what a tunnel rat is?”

  “I was in Kuwait, Desert Storm, 1st Marines.”

  “I could tell you was service.”

  “I know what a tunnel rat is. Shitty job.”

  “The shittiest. I’m short, see, so it was my job to crawl down there with the flashlight and the shotgun and flush the gooks outa them holes. Never knew what was waiting for ya down there. But Miller knew exactly what was down there. He probly thought he had an escape hole once he was in, but no. There ain’t but one way to get in and out, see.”

  “All right, you said enough, Danny,” said the guy in the brown coveralls. Gene had been so caught up in the story he only now realized they’d been standing there for at least a minute.

  The roofer added, “You better shut the fuck up or you gonna get hurt. We don’t need no one else hurt, do we?”

  “Danny? More visits from them ‘educators’?” asked Brown Coveralls.

  “This man has a right to know what happened to his brother,” said Danny Hansen, whose sweat had begun to bead on his bald head.

  “He knows enough,” said the guy in the green plaid shirt and khakis, “and if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll get the hell out of here. Out of town. People are talking.”

  Gene could see shoulders elbowing to get close—either to make trouble or to see better—and he stood up from the table and moved toward the bar.

  “We’re not hurting anybody,” Gene said. “We’re just sitting here talking, having a beer.”

  “We know you talking, dumbass,” said the roofer. “That’s the fuckin’ problem.”

  Danny Hansen had been shouldered out of the way.

  “We’re asking you nice,” said Green Plaid. “Why don’t you get on out of here before somebody gets hurt.”

  Gene could feel the tension ratcheting up. He had been a bit drunk, but his adrenaline quickly cleared the clouds from his head. He counted three guys, none of them terribly big except the guy in the brown coveralls, but his rage was on a high simmer at this point, fueled and not yet slowed by the alcohol.

  “C’mon, boys, let’s simmer down, huh?” Kenny clucked from behind the bar.

  “I don’t guess you heard these fellas,” said a voice behind him. Gene turned and saw Orange Camy, whose blood was up at the smell of a fight, especially one that wasn’t particularly fair. Gene figured he was going to get it whatever he said or did at this point, so he decided he’d at least strike quickly and go down swinging.

  “How ’bout five seconds to turn your ass around and get the fuck out of here,” Orange Camy said. His mouth curled into a sneer, and his tone of voice indicated he wo
uld clearly prefer that Gene didn’t take him up on the five-second offer.

  “Hey, boys, not here, OK?” Kenny tried again. “We don’t need trouble.”

  “Five seconds or what?” Gene turned to face Orange Camy, his gaze flickering behind the man’s left shoulder as if someone were hovering there.

  Orange Camy hesitated just a bit, turned his head slightly to his right in the direction where Gene was looking, and said, “Five seconds or I’m going to fuck you up so bad your whole family will f—”

  Still holding his beer and cigarette in his left hand, Gene arced his huge cinderblock fist into Orange Camy’s chin and sneering mouth, sending him crashing into the bar, turning over two bar stools and knocking over several beers, a mixed drink, salt-and-pepper shakers, and a stack of coasters. Orange Camy slowly peeled himself off the bar and rubbed the left side of his mouth, then searched the area inside of it with his tongue. Damn, Gene thought, realizing if he’d hit him an inch lower, he’d have knocked him out instead of just sending him to the dentist.

  Dropping his Bud Light and cigarette to free both hands, Gene suddenly felt someone grab each arm, and it looked like it was Brown Coveralls on the left and Wild-Haired Roofer on the right, but he wasn’t entirely sure because as soon as Orange Camy recognized that Gene was pinned, despite his struggling, he came charging at Gene with a fist aimed for his kidneys. Gene had just enough room to turn his torso and take the blow with his gut, but it was a wallop nonetheless, followed quickly by another that bent him over, ripping the wind out of his lungs and bringing acidic beer up into his mouth along with soggy chunks of burger and bun, which Gene spat out onto Orange Camy’s jeans.

  “C’mon, fair fight,” said Green Plaid.

  “How ’bout no fight!” Kenny glared. “How ’bout all of you get the hell out of my bar before I call the station house.”

  “Just let the guy go,” said Danny Hansen, pushing his way back into the midst of things. “He wasn’t hurting nobody.”