Pine shouted, “Knock his fuckin’ head in the dirt, boy!”
Horace Sturm shot him a look. Pine got quiet.
The two boys kept circling, throwing short, cautious jabs.
Then Theo got impatient and went for it. He stepped in close, faking with his right, all the while lowering his left shoulder, preparing to bring his left fist up. Ernie saw it coming. Frank saw it coming. Everybody saw it coming. Ernie flicked in close, jabbed Theo in the nose. Surprised blood popped out of Theo’s nose. His head snapped back as his left uppercut went sailing up through empty air.
Ernie hit Theo in the nose two more times before dancing away.
Theo shook his head, spraying blood over the sawdust. Ernie came in from the side, cracked Theo in the left ear. Theo backpedaled, holding his taped fists up over his bleeding face. But Ernie stayed right with him, slamming his fists into Theo’s stomach, doubling the rich kid over.
For the first time in his life, Theo panicked. And without thinking, he tried to kick Ernie in the balls.
The room froze for a split second in a glacier of silence, then erupted in shouting and stomping. Ernie’s brothers leapt onto the gates and screamed up at the two men under the chalkboard. In response, the clowns jumped off their seats and climbed onto the gates that encircled the ring, shouting at the Glouck family. The rest of the crowd rose, as one, to their feet.
But Ernie, after years of getting kicked and kneed in the crotch, was used to this trick, almost expecting it, blocked Theo’s clumsy kick easily. He retaliated by savagely punching Theo in the face. Theo stumbled back, desperately trying to block the relentless pounding. He hit the gates near his father and doubled over, protecting his head. Ernie didn’t let up; now he could take his time, gritting his teeth, slamming blow after blow down, cracking his taped knuckles across Theo’s skull.
Horace Sturm never moved.
Finally Theo crumpled and he fell, curled up, drawing his knees tight against his chest. Ernie rested for a moment, arms shivering, then started kicking Theo. He stopped just long enough to spit on Theo’s back.
The clowns leapt over the gates, swarming Ernie. Instantly, the Glouck brothers flew over the gates and attacked the clowns. For a moment, chaos reigned inside the ring. Grunts, shouts, blows, and curses filled the room. Frank lost track of who was fighting whom. He glanced up, beyond the ring, at Horace Sturm.
Slowly, calmly, Sturm pulled that six-shooter out of its holster and held it tight against his leg. And just as Frank realized that Sturm might just shoot somebody for the hell of it, a gunshot shattered the air and a blue cloud of gunpowder erupted from around Sturm, rolling through the ring like ground fog. The clowns and the Gloucks stopped fighting. Reluctantly.
As the smoke cleared, Frank saw that Sturm had fired directly into the ground, just an inch from the outside of his right foot. If it had been anyone else, it would have looked as if the person had fired the revolver by accident, arm straight down, aiming at the floor, but by the look in Sturm’s eyes, it didn’t look as if he was the type to do anything by accident. Especially around firearms.
The two sides parted quick and suddenly froze, as if unable to admit the gunshot had caught their attention. They backed away from the center of the ring, out of the light. The Glouck boys pulled Ernie back. The clowns helped Theo to his feet.
Sturm stepped forward, fingers still tight around the revolver’s handle. He eyed the men in the ring, his son, and then the crowd, taking his time, letting the silence gather and build. The crowd stood still, afraid to even sit down. Finally, Sturm spoke. “This fight is finished.” His voice was low. “I declare Ernie Glouck the winner, by default.”
The Glouck family erupted in shouts, screams. Everybody else was silent, nobody even moved.
Sturm reholstered his pistol, speaking slow. “My son…my son will regret this night for the rest of his life. These fights are over.”
DAY THREE
Frank didn’t advertise the fact that he’d bet on Ernie Glouck. The clowns were pissed and wanted to go raise some hell. They wanted to get back at the Gloucks somehow, but nobody suggested actually going on over to the Glouck’s house, although Pine and Chuck wanted to go collect their shotguns and at least shoot the shit out of that satellite dish. But Jack wouldn’t let them, pointing out that Sturm would be pissed. In the end, they stood around their pickups in the auction yard parking lot, drinking some more, bitching about those goddamn Gloucks, and chucking the occasional rock out into the night.
Finally, around three or four in the morning, the clowns passed out. They had offered a bunk to Frank, but he declined. Something was itching, gnawing at the inside of his skull like a trapped, hungry rat, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. Jack offered to give him a lift back to the long black car at the fairgrounds, but Frank decided to just walk, see if he couldn’t figure out what was eating at him.
He headed back, along dark, quiet streets of abandoned houses and dead lawns. The air felt mercifully cool. Thanks to the beer and Seagrams, Frank felt pretty good. Confident. Almost even optimistic. His sense of humor was back. But even in that condition, he had to admit to himself that the possibilities of a future safe from Castellari were getting slimmer.
Maybe that’s what was bugging him. The sinking feeling that he would be looking over his shoulder for the rest of his life. But he wasn’t sure. It didn’t feel right; that didn’t seem like that was the little tickling thorn in his brain. Maybe it was the alcohol, dulling the effects of fear.
He kept walking, through the center of town, down buckled sidewalks along a Main Street wide enough to fit four or five lanes of traffic. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a town this small, and the silence surprised him.
An honest-to-God tumbleweed bounced lazily along the curb. To Frank’s eyes, it seemed small for a tumbleweed, maybe only two feet straight through, but it didn’t matter, not really. It was a sign.
An overwhelming sense of being in the West washed over him, stopping him short and leaving him weaving slightly in the center of the wide street. It wasn’t just the geographical sense of being in the West either, it was more like stepping into a land of myth and legend. A landscape that never truly existed, except in dreams. This was a land of possibilities, a land where someone quick, someone sharp, someone willing to do whatever it took, this was a land where someone could make something of themselves. The wave of civilization had crested out here, to be sure, but it hadn’t crashed yet, hadn’t flattened out and receded, settling everything into place. Everything was still topsy-turvy; the silt was churned and the waters muddy. A man could establish himself in the murk, where people couldn’t see clearly, and when the waters did calm, and the silt finally settled, that man would have something to stand on. He’d be ready. Frank nodded to himself, flush with the drunken importance of a heavy philosophical realization, and started walking again.
Nearly every building was empty, either gutted and hollow, or had large sheets of particleboard over the windows and a ‘For Rent’ sign nailed to the front door. Apart from an ancient grocery store, the only other place still in business had a carved wooden sign, hanging motionless in the still air, that read “Dickinson Taxidermy.”
Frank stopped for a moment, cupping his hands on the dusty, cobwebbed windows and peering inside. A long workbench stretched along the right side, under a wall full of various knives and hatchets. A sign had been tacked up in the back, “You shoot it, we’ll stuff it.” Large boxes littered the rest of the room. And the heads. Deer, elk, antelope, and boar. Some complete, hung up on the left wall, frozen in an eternity of blank, open staring. Other heads were in a reversal of decay; after being stripped down to the bone, they were being built back up, antlers bolted to skulls, hide tacked to frozen backbones, glass eyes popped back into sockets.
The itching thorn was suddenly yanked from his brain as an idea hit him.
Frank held the thorn, all sharp and glistening in the starlight, up in front of him. A sequence of possibilitie
s clicked into place like the tumblers of a padlock, and suddenly the future didn’t seem quite so tight. He started moving again, not seeing the street anymore, instead sifting through the variables, the difficulties, and the risks. Deep down, he didn’t think it would work. He made his way to the fairgrounds and crawled into the backseat of the long black car and watched the stars slowly fade into the sky as morning broke.
* * * * *
He drove back to the gas station and brushed his teeth with his finger, tried to straighten out his hair a little, shaved using a disposable razor and spit, and put on the fresh suit from the trunk. Then he followed the highway out north of town, past the fairgrounds, past the auction yard, out into the flooded rice fields, watching for the cluster of buildings that he’d seen last night. It took a while, but he finally found the driveway.
It was more of a private road, really, lined with towering palm trees. Frank suddenly remembered that he was still in California. The driveway stretched for over a mile. There had to be more than a couple hundred palm trees; they were sixty or seventy feet tall at least, rising above the walnut and oak trees that surrounded the rice fields.
Eventually, the road split in half around a huge lawn. The house loomed behind the half acre of perfect grass, two-stories, in a strange amalgamation of styles. Southern pillars out front, flanking the front door. Farmhouse windows, sunk into stuccoed walls. Red clay shingles, Mediterranean-style. Frank pulled around to the right and parked the car in front of the door.
He climbed out and felt like someone was watching him, but the windows were blank mirrors, reflecting the morning sun. He buttoned the top two buttons of the suit jacket and walked briskly up the front steps. He pushed the doorbell and stepped back from the large, wooden double-doors to show respect. The sun climbed higher, and sweat collected in his sideburns, rolled down his armpits.
The right door opened and Theo glared up at Frank. He had a split lip and two black eyes. One nostril was swollen shut. “What do you want?” It sounded like he was trying to talk and swallow melted cheese at the same time.
“Your father home?”
“Why?” Theo’s breathing sounded painful.
“I’d like to talk to him.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the guy who wants to talk to your father.”
Theo glared at Frank for a while but eventually said, “Wait here.” He shut the door and Frank respectfully stepped back, off the front porch, and prepared himself.
After a few minutes, the door opened again, wider this time. Theo tilted his head. “He’s in his office. C’mon.”
Frank followed Theo into a modest foyer. Carhart jackets hung from an oak coat rack. Cowboy boots lined the walnut paneled walls. Theo glanced at Frank’s feet. “Take off your boots. Dad don’t like outside boots inside.”
Frank didn’t want to, but he pulled off the snakeskin cowboy boots, settling his bare feet on the smooth, warm wood floor.
Theo watched Frank a moment. “You got something against socks?”
“Yeah.”
Theo shrugged, then led Frank through a gigantic kitchen. The house was silent, save for the slow, deep ticking of a grandfather clock. They went down a long hall that ended abruptly in a closed door. Theo knocked quietly, then opened the door.
The first thing that hit Frank was the books. Thousands of them, lining the walls, stretching from the wood floor to the wood paneled ceiling. Sounds seemed to sink into the pages and vanish. Dozens, possibly hundreds of small picture frames surrounded the window. Frank couldn’t see what was inside the frames because brutal sunlight sizzled into the room, slicing through the dancing dust motes and falling full upon Frank’s sweating face. He blinked several times.
“Something I can do for you, mister?” Sturm’s voice sounded tired, raw.
Frank made his way over to two antique chairs. They faced an oak desk large enough to bury four people comfortably. Sturm waited behind the desk, his back to the window, fingers loosely clasped on the bare wood. His skull reminded Frank of a bare bulb in the sunlight.
Frank wasn’t sure if he should sit or remain standing. He chose to stand. “My name is Frank Winter.” He took a step forward, extending his hand. Sturm didn’t rise, but grasped Frank’s hand in a quick, perfunctory shake. Frank marveled at the size of the man’s hands; they seemed disproportionately large, as if Sturm’s hands and head belonged to another, bigger, body.
“I am here under…unusual circumstances.”
Sturm’s face remained in silhouette, except his eyes, as if they were lit from inside by a cold fire. Frank’s prepared speech crumbled and fell to pieces around his naked toes. He would have rather tried to talk to the Glouck’s mutant pit bull, Petunia. “And uh, with that in mind, I, uh, would like to offer you a business proposition.”
Sturm leaned back. “Is that so. Well, then. Guess it would depend on these special circumstances.”
Frank nodded, pinned like a dead moth under the weight of Sturm’s hairless stare. Either he told the truth, confessed his sins, or he thanked Sturm for his time, climbed back into the long black car, and kept running. “Mind if I sit down?”
“I’m a busy man, Mr. Winter. ‘Case you haven’t heard, I don’t have much time left.”
“I have heard, and I appreciate your, uh, situation.” Frank sat. “In fact, that’s why I am here today. I may be able to help you.”
“I have cancer, Mr. Winter. Unless you got a cure for one fat brain tumor, I’m afraid you can’t help shit.”
“No sir. I don’t claim to have the cure for cancer.” Frank met Sturm’s glacier eyes. “But I might just have a way to make the days you have left around here,” Frank made sure Sturm understood he was talking about the town, “a bit more enjoyable. Maybe even more…worthwhile. Respectable even.” Frank knew he was pushing it.
“Spit it out, son.”
Frank sat. “I am, well, used to be anyway, a vet. Horses, mostly. I worked on a few racetracks for, well, let’s call ’em businessmen. Businessmen that didn’t like to lose. They didn’t see much sport in racing thoroughbreds. They just saw…opportunities. And, well,” Frank shrugged, “I don’t get around so well anymore since I got kicked in the head. It didn’t help my finances. So I helped these gentlemen take advantage of these opportunities.”
Sturm clasped his thick, stubby fingers in front of his chest and waited patiently.
“Anyways, one of these opportunities didn’t work out.” Frank looked down at his bare feet on the wood floor. “It didn’t work out at all.” He looked back up, met Sturm’s eyes again. “In a place not too far from here. A place with a lot of animals. Exotic animals. Lions. Tigers. Monkeys. Even goddamn alligators.
“Now,” Frank leaned forward, “you seem like a man who can appreciate the finer things in life. I’m not talking about material things. No. I’m talking about things like skills. I’m talking about things like the relationship between a predator and its prey. I’m talking about instinct. I’m talking about hunting. I can provide you with an opportunity for the hunt of a lifetime. A hunt like this town has never seen. A goddamn safari in your own backyard. A chance to hunt—and eat—and mount—lions. Tigers. Monkeys. A rhinoceros. And all the gators you can shoot.”
Frank leaned back, crossed his legs. “But I don’t want any misunderstandings here. These animals aren’t for sale. We’d have to go in there…and take them.”
Sturm didn’t say anything for a while. “So…basically, you’re talking about a, a heist? Is that it?”
“Basically, yeah.”
“You’re asking me to break the law.”
“Technically, yeah. But, and this is the important thing, this, this heist, is unnaturally safe. There’s no law enforcement involved. None at all. There’s only one man. One man that feeds the animals. And I’ll take care of that element. Of him.” Frank realized he wasn’t talking in complete sentences anymore, but he didn’t care, he just wanted to spit it out, to get all the details on the tab
le. “All you gotta do is go pick up these animals. And they’re yours.”
“And what’s in it for you?”
“Finder’s fee. A safari’d set you back ten grand, easy. I’m looking for ten percent.” Frank figured a grand would get him to Canada.
“So, you want one thousand dollars, just to point me in the direction of these animals.”
“And to make sure the keeper doesn’t bother you.”
Sturm watched Frank for a long time. Finally he lowered his steepled fingers. “Son, you’re either telling the truth or you’re so full of shit it’s about to start dripping from your ears.”
Frank didn’t say anything.
Sturm drummed his fingertips on the desk. “Will Rogers used to say he never met a man he didn’t like. I’d say he never got out much.” He barked out a harsh, quick laugh.
Frank stood. “I’m sorry to have wasted your time. Good day and good luck with the time you have left.”
“Now hold on just a minute, son. Didn’t mean any disrespect. No sir. None at all. Just a little short on patience since my boy fucked up the fights this year. But that don’t mean I got to take it out on everyone.” He stood as well, and looked up at Frank. “You say you’re a horse doctor?”
“Yeah.”
“Then come with me. Afterwards, maybe we’ll talk about this hunt of yours.”
* * * * *
Sturm led Frank through an elaborate garden. Frank couldn’t see any weeds, not even a tip poking through the rich black soil, as he passed through rows of tomatoes, squash, and corn. But the plants themselves were wilted and dying. The squash looked like used condoms and the tomatoes like raisins. They went through a white picket gate at the far end and walked up to a bright red barn.
Inside, a tired, still horse waited within a spacious stall filled with pine shavings. “This is Sarah.” Sturm fished in the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a peppermint. He crackled the wrapper, catching the old horse’s attention. The horse was old. She was a deep red quarter horse, appearing startlingly thick and stocky to Frank, who was used to the lean, long-limbed thoroughbreds. Sturm gently stroked the horse’s neck as he popped the peppermint free from the wrapper. He expertly caught the clear plastic wrapper between his thumb and forefinger and rolled the striped candy into the center of his palm as he offered it to the horse. Sarah tenderly took the peppermint in her teeth, crunching it, then bouncing her head slightly in pleasure.
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