Crime Plus Music

by Jim Fusilli

  Balancing her needs with her pride, she sat there huddled in the blanket. “Maybe.”

  I sighed to let her know that my Good Samaritan side wasn’t endless and spoke through the exhaust that the wind was carrying back past the truck. “I was offering you a ride if you’re headed north.”

  She looked up at the empty highway and was probably thinking about whether she could trust me or not.

  “I have to be in Billings in a little over an hour to pick up my daughter—are you coming?”

  The glint of temper was there again, but she converted it into standing and picked something up—a guitar case that I hadn’t noticed before. She tossed it into the bed of my truck, still carefully holding the blanket closed around her with the other hand, her posture slightly off. “All right.”

  “You want to put your guitar in here, there’s room.”

  She swung the door open, gathered the folds up around her knees, and slid into the seat. “Nah, it’s a piece of shit.” She closed the door with her left hand and then looked at some papers, the metal clipboard, my thermos, and me. Her eyes half closed as the waft of heat from the vents surrounded her. “So, are we going or what?”

  “Seatbelt.” She settled in and looked out the window, her breath fogging the glass, and I placed her age as mid-twenties.

  “Don’t believe in ’em.” She wiped her nose on the blanket again using her left hand.

  We didn’t move, and the radio crackled a highway patrolman taking a bathroom break. She looked at the radio below the dash and then back at me, then pulled the shoulder belt from the retractor and swiveled to put it in the retainer at the center—it was about then that Dog swung his giant head around from the backseat to get a closer look at her.

  “Jesus . . . !” She jumped back against the door and something slid from her grip and fell to the rubber floor mat with a heavy thump.

  I glanced over and could see it was a small, wood-gripped revolver.

  She slid one of her boots in front of it to block my view. We stared at each other for a few seconds, both of us deciding how it was we were going to play it.

  “What the hell, man . . .” She adjusted the blanket, careful to completely cover the pistol on the floorboard.

  I sat there for a moment more, then pulled onto the frontage road and headed north toward the onramp of I-90. Thinking about what I was going to do, I pulled onto the highway. “That’s my partner—don’t worry, he’s friendly.”

  She stared at the 150-plus pounds of German Shepherd, Saint Bernard, and who knew what. She didn’t look particularly convinced. “I don’t like dogs.”

  “Too bad, it’s his truck.”

  I eased the V-10 up to sixty on the snow-covered road and motioned toward the battered thermos leaning against the console. “There’s coffee in there.”

  She looked, first checking to make sure the gun was hidden and then reached down, pausing long enough so that I noticed her bare hands, strong and deft even in the remains of the cold. She saw me watching her and lifted the thermos by the copper-piping handle, which was connected to the Stanley with two massive hose clamps. She read the sticker on the side, DRINKING FUEL, as she twisted off the chrome top “You got anything to put in this?”

  “Nope.”

  She rolled her eyes and unscrewed it, pouring herself one. She placed it in the cup holder and settled back against the door, careful not to move enough to reproduce the revolver. She pulled the blanket back off her shoulders and looked at me. “Good coffee.”

  “Thanks.” I threw her a tenuous safety line and caught a glimpse of a nose stud and what might’ve been a tattoo at the side of her neck. “My daughter sends it to me.”

  The radio squawked again as the highway patrolman came back on duty, and she glared at it. “Do we have to listen to that crap?”

  I smiled and flipped the radio off. “Sorry, force of habit.”

  She glanced back at Dog, who regarded her indifferently as she nudged one foot toward the other in an attempt to push the revolver up and onto her other shoe. “So, you’re the sheriff down there?”

  “Yep.”

  She nonchalantly reached down, feigning an itch in order to snag the pistol. She slid it back under the blanket and carried it onto her lap. “Your daughter live in Billings?”

  “Nope, Philadelphia.”

  She nodded and murmured something I didn’t catch.

  “Excuse me?”

  The eyes came up, and I noticed they were an unsettling shade of green. “Philly Soul. The O’Jays, Patti LaBelle, the Stylistics, Archie Bell & the Drells, the Intruders . . .”

  “That music’s a little before your time, isn’t it?”

  She sipped her coffee and stared out the windshield. “Music’s for everybody, all the time.”

  We drove through the night. It seemed as if she wanted something, and I made the mistake of thinking it was conversation. “I saw the guitar case—you play?”

  She watched the flakes that had just started darting through my headlights. “You see everything?”

  “Keeps me alive.” I glanced at her lap to let her know I knew. “Are you in trouble with someone?”

  The chromate eyes flicked to me then returned to the road. “Not really.” It was a long time before she spoke again. “Your dog sure has a nice truck.” An eighteen-wheeler, pushing the speed limit just a little, became more circumspect in his speed as I pulled out from the clouds of snow billowing behind him and passed. “It’s funny how traffic slows down around you in this thing.”

  “Uh huh.”

  There was another long pause as 362 horses pulled Dog’s sleigh up the road, the muffled sound of the tires giving the illusion that we were riding on clouds.

  “I play guitar—lousy. Hey, do you mind if we power up the radio? Music, I mean.”

  I stared at her for a moment and then gestured toward the dash. She fiddled with the SEEK button on FM, but we were in the dead zone between Hardin and Billings. “Not much reception on the Rez. Why don’t you try AM? The signals bounce off the atmosphere and you can get stuff from all over the world.”

  She flipped it off and slumped back against the passenger side door. “I don’t do AM.” She remained restless, glancing up in the visors and at the console. “You don’t have any CDs?”

  I thought about it and remembered my friend Henry Standing Bear buying some cheap music at the Flying J truck stop months ago on a fishing trip to Fort Smith. The Bear had become annoyed with me when I’d left the radio on search for five minutes, completely unaware that it was only playing music in seven second intervals. “You know, there might be some CDs in the side pocket of the door.”

  She moved and rustled her free hand in the pocket, finally pulling out a $2.99 The Very Best of Merle Haggard. “Oh, yeah.”

  She plucked the disc from the cheap, cardboard sleeve and slipped it into a slot in the dash I’d never noticed. The lights of the stereo came on and the opening lines of Haggard’s opus, “Okie from Muskogee” thumped through the speakers. She made a face and looked at the cover, reading the fine print. “What’d they do, record it on an eight-track through a steel drum full of bourbon?”

  “I’m not so sure they sell the highest fidelity music in the clearance bin at the Flying J.”

  Her face was animated in a positive way for the first time as the long fingers danced off the buttons of my truck stereo, and I noticed the metal flake, blue nail polish. “You’ve got too much bass and the fade’s all messed up.” She continued playing with the thing and I had to admit that the sound was becoming remarkably better. Satisfied, she sat back in the seat, even going so far as to hold out a hand for Dog to sniff. He did, and then licked her wrist.

  “I love singer-storytellers.” She scratched under the beast’s chin and for the first time since I’d met her seemed to relax as she listened to the lyrics. “You know this song is a joke, right?”

  “Well, I don’t know if it’s a joke . . .”

  “He wrote it in re
sponse to the uninformed view of the Vietnam War. He said he figured it was what his dad would’ve thought.”

  I shrugged noncommittally.

  She stared at the side of my face, possibly at my ear, or the lack of a tiny bit of it. “Were you over there?”

  I nodded.

  “So was my dad.”

  She seemed to want more. “. . . It was a confusing time; we were all kind of uninformed to a degree.”

  “Like now?”

  “Kind of.”

  Her eyes went back to the road. “That’s why I’m going back home; my dad died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  I navigated my way around another slow-moving eighteen-wheeler. “What did your father do?”

  Her voice dropped to a trademark baritone, buttery and sonorous. “KERR, 750AM. Polson, Montana.” I laughed, and for the first time she smiled.

  “I thought you didn’t do AM.”

  “Yeah, well now you know why.”

  Merle swung into “Pancho and Lefty” and she pointed to the stereo. “Proof positive that he did smoke marijuana in Muskogee—he’s friends with Willie Nelson.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “In my line of work, we call that guilt by association.”

  “Yeah, well in my line of work we call it a friggin’ fact and Willie’s smoked like a Cummins Diesel everywhere, including Muskogee, Oklahoma.”

  I had to concede the logic. “You seem to know a lot about the industry. Nashville?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, so you’re not a musician. What did you do?”

  “Still do, when I get through in Polson.” Her eyes went back to the windshield and her future. “Produce, audio engineer . . . or I try to.” She nibbled on one of the nails that held the shiny cup. “Did you know that less than five percent of producers and engineers in the business are women?”

  “Can’t say that I did.”

  I waited, but she seemed preoccupied, finally sipping her coffee again and then pouring herself another. “It’s bullshit. We’re raised to be attractive and accommodating, but we’re not raised to know our shit and stand by it.” She was quiet for a while, listening to the lyrics. “Townes Van Zandt wrote that one. People think it’s about Pancho Villa but one of the lines is about him getting hung—the one about the federales letting him hang around out of kindness I suppose . . . Pancho Villa was assassinated.”

  “Yep, seven men standing in the road in Hidalgo del Parral shot more than forty rounds into his roadster.”

  “You a history teacher before you were sheriff?” I didn’t say anything, and the smile lingered on her face like finger-picking on a warp-necked fret. “Maybe Townes was smoking in Muskogee, too.”

  “It’s probable.”

  Silence again, but she continued to watch me drive. “You’re okay-looking, in a dad kind of way.”

  “That’s a disturbing statement for a number of reasons.”

  She barked a laugh and raised one of the combat boots up to lodge it against the transmission hump, but realized she was revealing the pistol from the drape of the blanket before her and lowered her foot. It was another mile marker before she spoke again, her voice a little strained.

  “My dad never talked about it; Vietnam. . . . He handled that Agent Orange stuff and that shit gave robots cancer.” Her eyes were drawn back to the windshield, and Polson. “He died last week and they’re already splitting up his stuff.” The mile markers clicked by like spokes. “He taught me how to listen; I mean really listen. To hear things that nobody else heard. He had this set of Sennheiser HD 414 open-back headphones from ’73, lightweight with the first out-of-head imaging with decent bass—Sony Walkmans and all that stuff should get down and kiss Sennheiser’s ass. 2000 ohm impedance let you plug into a line-level output without loading it down. The big peak was 2 kHz in their frequency response curve and would seriously scour your ears; tough, too. They had a steel cord and you could throw them at a talented program director or a brick wall—I’m not sure which is potentially denser.”

  It was an unsettling tirade, but I still had to laugh.

  “You don’t have any idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  We topped the hill above Billings and looked at the lit-up refineries that ran along the highway as I made the sweeping turn west. “Nope, but it all sounds very impressive.” The power of the motor pushed us back in the leather seats like we were tobogganing down the hill in a softened and diffused landscape, floating on a cushion of air, rushing headlong into the snowy dunes and the shimmering lights that strung alongside the highway like fuzzy moons.

  She turned away, keeping her eyes from me, afraid that I might see too much there. “You can just drop me at the Golden Pheasant; I’ve got friends there doing a gig that’ll give me a ride the rest of the way.”

  Nodding, I joined with the linear constellation of I-94.

  I had a vague sense of the club’s location downtown and took the 27th Street exit, rolling past the Montana Women’s prison, and the wrong side of the railroad tracks as we sat there watching a hundred and sixty coal cars of a Burlington Northern/Santa Fe train roll by. The quiet settled in the cab the way it does when there’s so much to say, and like the muffled tires of the truck had been, the wheels were turning.

  When she finally spoke, her voice was different, perhaps the most approaching sane of the night. “It belonged to my father. When I was leaving for Tennessee, he gave me a choice of those headphones I was telling you about, but I figured I’d have more use for the gun.” She placed her hand on the dash and fingered the vent louvers. She continued talking now, because she had to. “I got picked up by a few guys from Missouri and they tried stuff. They seemed nice at first . . . anyway, I had to pull it.”

  I waited.

  “I didn’t shoot anybody.”

  “Good.” I turned down a side street and took a right where I could see the multi-colored neon of the aforementioned pheasant spreading his tail feathers in a provocative manner. I parked the truck in the first available spot—it was still sifting snow—slipped her into PARK and turned to look at the girl with the strange eyes.

  “Maybe I should’ve taken the headphones.”

  “Maybe they’re still there.”

  She smiled and finished the dregs of her coffee, wiped the cup out on her blanket, and screwed the top back on the thermos. She placed it back against the console as the revolver slipped from her leg and onto the seat between us.

  We both sat there looking at it, representative of all the things for which it stood.

  “If you take that back to Polson, what are you going to do with it?”

  “Probably throw it in the lake up there. It’s never done anything but bring me bad luck.”

  I leaned forward and picked it up. It was a nice one; S&W Chief’s Special with not much wear. “How ’bout I keep it for you?”

  She didn’t say anything for a long time but finally slipped through the open door and pulled the guitar case from the bed of my truck, standing there in the opening.

  The plaintive words of Haggard’s “A Place to Fall Apart” drifted from the speakers and she glanced at the radio as if the Okie from wherever might be sitting on my dash. “I’d give a million dollars if that son of a bitch would go into a studio, just him and a six-string guitar, no backup singers, no harps—and just play.”

  I watched her face, trying to not let the eyes distract me. “Maybe you should tell him that sometime.”

  The eyes sparked. “After I get those headphones, maybe I’ll look him up.”

  “I wouldn’t look in Muskogee.”

  The wind pressed against her, urging departure. “He lives in Redding, California.”

  She shut the door and clutched the blanket around herself, dragging the guitar case and walking away without looking back. She disappeared into the swinging glass doors with swirls of snow devils circling behind her, and all I could think was that I was glad I wasn’t in Polson, Montana, a
nd in possession of a set of Sennheiser HD 414 open-back headphones.

  I emptied the pistol into my center console and then carefully wrapped the revolver in a bandana from my liner pocket, placed it beside the loose rounds, and locked the lid.

  Twenty minutes later my daughter climbed in the cab. “Please tell me we’re not staying at the Dude Rancher.”

  I didn’t say anything, and waited for her to put on her seatbelt.

  She pulled the shoulder belt around in a huff, but then smiled back at me. “Oh, Daddy.”

  “Merry Christmas, Punk.” I pulled the truck in gear, as Haggard softened his tone in my stereo with one of my favorites, “If We Make it Through December.”

  She was now ruffling Dog’s hair and kissing his muzzle, and it must’ve taken a good thirty seconds before she remarked. “Did you get a new stereo in the truck? It sounds good.”

  I nodded as we held hands over the console, driving down from the airport. “Yep, it does.”

  A BUS TICKET TO PHOENIX

  BY WILLY VLAUTIN

  OTIS WOKE THAT MORNING TO Lenny in the bathroom yelling on the phone. It was past 11 a.m. at Winner’s Casino in Winnemucca, Nevada. Under the covers he shivered in the cold and could see his breath fall out and disappear into the room. He got up to find the window open and the heat off.

  He set the thermostat to high, shut the sliding glass window, and looked out to see snow falling. It covered the van and trailer and the houses behind the motel. He stood seventy-seven years old, thin and tall with greasy brown hair. He found his clothes on the floor, dressed, and walked across the street to the casino. He used the toilet, lost five dollars on video poker, and went to the casino restaurant for breakfast.

  In a booth he sat alone and filled out his Keno card, ordered a Denver omelet and a draft beer, when Lenny came in and sat across from him. Lenny was twenty-nine years old also tall and thin. He had short black hair and his face was red from the cold and snot leaked from his nose onto his handlebar mustache. He wore a black felt cowboy hat and two Levi coats on top of each other.

  “Bet you got a Denver omelet and pancakes. You gotta be way too hungover for oatmeal and toast.”