~ * ~
The one-bedroom house in Potlatch was fine. It sat fifty yards off the main road. Dan and Rose were an older couple who lived next door in a trailer with a redwood porch, and he showed me around the place. He wore a bright flannel shirt and a wide-brimmed Australian cowboy hat. He must have thought I was okay, because he let me keep the keys.
“You send the rent to Carl?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “An hour after I talked to him.”
We stood on the porch of the house. The one-bay garage was a concrete-block building next to the road. I had told Dan I hoped to fix some chain saws out of it, sharpen and sell chains to loggers.
“Do you need extra work?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Always.”
“I can give you some work, but it’s a little out of season, know what I mean? Still good work, though. Easy.” He watched me.
“I shoot ‘em when I see ‘em,” I said. “I worry about the regulations after. I’ve been known to keep one or two I shouldn’t have. They taste the same.”
Dan smiled. “You bet they do.” He pointed at the garage. “See the pump behind the garage?”
I nodded. “It looks like an old gas pump.”
“I’ll give you the key for it. There’s about ten or fifteen guys who come around and get gas from us, a dollar a gallon cash, we only sell one grade, unleaded regular, and we don’t advertise.”
“Where do you get the gas from?” I asked.
“A couple years ago, some big wheel from one of the universities’ administration saw all the maintenance trucks pulling in and out of the gas station where both schools had their accounts. Apparently some of the boys were buying a lot of beer too, on the school card that was issued with each truck, and they were looking at the girls— the point is they weren’t working. Washington State is the biggest school west of the Mississippi, so that’s a lot of gas and beer.”
“That must have caused a problem.”
“Oh, it did,” Dan said. “The two schools got together and solved it by buying a mini-tanker, just five hundred gallons. And the schools bought their own big stationary tank and pump service, just to fill the mini-tanker.”
“I can see where you’re headed,” I said.
“There are over a hundred trucks and vehicles that take gas in that fleet, not to mention lawn equipment, straight gas for the cans of mixed fuel, every single thing comes out of that mini-tank and they don’t track it. They just pay the bill on the big tank and since it’s less than the card system they were using, they’re saving money.”
“So the mini-tanker comes here once in awhile?”
“Old friend of Carl’s ended up with the job and as long as he’s behind the wheel, we’re golden. That’s tax-free retirement, right there.”
“How does the money work?”
“Never raise the price on the boys, it’s always a dollar a gallon. Never take on any new customers, I don’t care if it’s your aunt Mabel. Let her get gas in town. Push the gas a little, if you’ve had a slow week, sell a couple cans to some loggers, just say somebody dropped it off or something. But every Friday, there should be an envelope on my porch with three hundred seventy-five dollars in it. Nothing bigger than a twenty, never take anything over a twenty and the boys know that.”
“What about the driver?”
Dan smiled. “A couple years ago, he got himself into quite a fix with a woman and that woman’s husband and Carl and some of Carl’s friends sorted that out, so he’s paying back, we’re not paying him.” He thought for a minute. “You know George Beck, the big fellow?”
“No,” I said.
“You’ll meet him, maybe. Anyway, he fixed it.”
“And the rest of the money is mine?”
“Call it salary,” Dan said.
“That sounds good to me,” I said.
Dan patted the top porch rail. “Then welcome home,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned.” He walked across the gravel back to his place and Rose waved to me through the window.
I turned the garage into a fix-it shop. It had the one-car bay, three stools, and a room in the back with a cot. Lots of tools and the woodstove on one side. I sharpened chains and sold new ones for the loggers and fixed their saws. Sold bar and chain oil. The garage air compressor worked and guys were always stopping by for air in their tires. The business brought in enough to pay the rent and the one twenty-five I kept from the gas business felt good in my pocket. I listened to the loggers talk about Montana fires and wealthy landowners who had set up their own fire stations and association. A sort of committee on wildfire vigilance. But the summer fires burned regardless and having spotters in homemade watchtowers didn’t help.
At night I slept in the house and looked at the stuffed heads on the walls. Carl’s small house was filled with antlers and wall mounts. A ratty-looking brown horse and a burro were penned in the field next door and behind. Sometimes a sleek black horse came out and ran through the field. I fed them apples. Dan and Rose were friendly. A warm apple pie sat on my porch two days after I moved in. I watched their lights go on and off in the night. If I got up early enough, I could listen to one of them snore through the thin trailer walls. I sent Carl’s mail to Alaska for him, what little there was of it, and made sure the envelope was on Dan’s porch every Friday.
~ * ~
She pulled in one Friday evening, right next to the garage. She had a tan cowboy hat pushed back on her bright blond hair. “Put this in the garage,” she said. “Close the door. I’m Carl’s sister Penny from Lewiston.” She paused. “Is Carl here?”
“No,” I said. “He’s in Alaska.”
“Lucky you.” She winked at me. “He doesn’t do me a damn bit of good in Alaska. “
Her tits swayed in her denim shirt just a little as she shut the car door. Tight jeans with a big silver cowboy belt buckle that showed off her small waist. She was gas on the fire. She walked down the driveway, into the house, and I watched her the whole way and she knew it.
I put the car in the garage, turned the lights off, and made sure the place was locked. I went into the house.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Penny sat on the couch in the front room and took the cowboy hat off. “My boyfriend’s after me,” she said. “Boyfriend” didn’t sound right, coming from her. She was a woman, not a girl, probably in her late thirties. “I’m staying here tonight.”
“Okay,” I said. “Do you want to go to Moscow for pizza? I was just going.”
“You get it,” she said. “I’m staying here.”
~ * ~
On the drive to Moscow, I thought about my chances of going to bed with her and decided that they weren’t good and that it might screw stuff with Carl. The whole arrangement, the rental with no paperwork, the gas business, the garage. I couldn’t let that slip away for big tits and a hot ass. I got to the pizza place and ordered and watched the college girls while I waited. Penny ranked right up there. I put the pizza on the front seat and drove back.
When I got there, a big guy I didn’t know was sitting on the front porch smoking a cigarette. He threw it into the gravel and stood up. I guessed he was six seven or more, close to three hundred pounds. The type of man you have to shoot twice. I figured it was Penny’s boyfriend and this could get mean in a hurry.
“I’m George Beck,” he said. “Good friend of Carl’s.”
We shook hands. I said, “What can I do for you?”
“You must be Ed Snider.”
“That’s right.”
“You going to be here tonight?” he said.
“Yeah.”
“Good. Penny’s staying here until we can get a handle on her boyfriend.”
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Tim Shipman,” he said. “You don’t know him, do you? We all call him Ships.”
“No, I don’t know him,” I said. “What makes you think he’ll come here?”
“You’ve seen Penny,” he said.
“If you thought she was here, wouldn’t you drive up here from Lewiston?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’d have already been here.”
“You can see I came right away,” he said, “and Penny and I broke up years ago. She’ll look at you and fuck up your brain.” He reached inside his coat and brought out a pistol, nine-millimeter, and tried to hand it to me. “Here,” he said. “Ships is violent. This is in case he needs convincing.” He held the piece out to me, butt first.
I wouldn’t touch the gun. “I’ll be here,” I said. “And that’s all that’s necessary.” Never touch another man’s gun, because you never know what its bullets have hit. I was trying to get out of the habit of handling guns.
George slipped the pistol back inside his coat, “Suit yourself,” he said, “but Ships will be strapped, so I’m just telling you.” He scratched his head. Something about this wasn’t quite going as planned for him.
“I’ll be here,” I repeated.
“Carl will appreciate that,” George said. “I mean, the other thing you ought to know about Penny is that she probably did cheat on Ships or rip him off or whatever.”
“I’ll keep an eye out.” I noticed that some makeup stained the shoulder of his jacket.
“Good,” George said. “We’ve got some buddies in Lewiston and around and we’ll take care of this.” I stood looking at the ground and George went on. “Wouldn’t have happened if Carl hadn’t gone to Alaska.” I wanted to ask why but didn’t. “I’m the guy around here that gets shit done,” he said. He took off and I went inside the house.
That night Penny stayed with me at Carl’s place. As soon as George left and we ate the pizza, she wanted the lights off. We sat in the dark on the couch. There were only the cars passing on the main road. The lights reflected off the marble eyes of the stuffed animals. We sat there for two hours without saying a word. I watched the back field. The moon shone bright and full. The black horse was running around for some reason, but I couldn’t tell which was the horse and which was the shadow. They both looked alive. Penny dozed off and I watched her small breathing, her lips and perfect nose.
Then a car pulled off the road. The door slammed and I heard footsteps over to the garage and then up to the door. The handle jiggled.
“Carl?” a man’s voice asked the night. “Carl, it’s me, Ships. Is Penny here?” There was a pause. “Penny?”
She was up now. She pulled me close and put her mouth on my car. “Pretend you’re Carl,” she whispered. “Use a deep voice, he won’t know.” Her hand was on my thigh.
I tried to use the voice I’d heard on the phone. “What?” I said in Carl’s voice. “Who is it?”
“Carl,” the voice said, relieved. “Carl, look, is Penny here?”
Now I was Carl. “What the hell’s going on, Ships?”
“She owes me a lot of money,” he said, “and she’s going all around town talking.”
“Talking about what?” I asked.
“About stuff she shouldn’t be, is what, about you and me and George Beck and she needs to shut her mouth.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t have anything to do with you guys, you know that, and she’s all over town with it. She’s loud wrong, is what she is.”
I knew that I had been right not to touch that gun Beck had offered me. “Where is she now?” I asked.
“I thought she was here,” he said. “Open the door, will you?”
“Ships, I’m busy,” I said.
“If she’s here, you better talk to her,” he said. “And if not, I’m going to find her. She knows the whole story, I don’t know why she’s lying, unless she’s just scared of George.” He crunched gravel back to the car. The car sat there for a minute and then started again and spun out on the road.
I turned to talk to Penny, but she was already unbuttoning her shirt, standing up and pulling off her jeans. The plan I’d been following vanished and we barely made it to the bedroom. She straddled me and her whole body was smooth and tight.
~ * ~
The sex was fast and terrible. We sort of mutually stopped after a while. Just lay there. She was already pregnant, she said, which is the best birth control there is. She said it was why she was so horny. But both of us had other things on our minds. It really hadn’t been worth it.
She sat on the edge of the bed, brushing her hair. “All this trouble is because Tim gave me a watch. That watch creeped me out. It was a present because I was always late. It was a man’s watch, okay, but it was weird because every time I looked at it, it showed the same time. Twenty to six. It wasn’t that the watch had stopped or anything, it just happened to be twenty to six when I looked at it.”
She was fixing her makeup now. “Well, one month I came up short and pawned the watch. Tim and I were broken up, so what did I care? I had to write my address on the pawn slip and I bet it was a week later and two detectives and an officer came to my apartment about that watch. It belonged to an old man named Elmer Cooley from way up in the Panhandle. He’d been missing for about a month and they wanted to know how I got that watch. Cooley, they told me, had a grandson in prison who was head of a group of militiamen that live in the mountains and did I know a George Beck, they wanted to talk to him about a murder and where was my brother? So I told them the watch came from Tim Shipman and I didn’t know anything else.”
I had just half-fucked a woman who was involved in a possible murder, who was lying to me and lying to the cops and being actively questioned by them. She stood up to put her jeans on and I couldn’t believe her body was that good, but now the whole thing was gone south. “I’d try not to worry about it,” I said. “Bad coincidence.” I was enough of a liar to know when I was being lied to. I’d leave at the first possible chance.
“It’s on my mind all the time,” she said. “What do you think Tim did?”
“I have no idea,” I said. The room was much darker than the moonlit field.
“I tell people I’m married so they won’t hit on me,” she said.
“Does it work?” I asked. I shifted around to lean on my elbow.
“No,” she said. She paused. “Men used to sit around and talk about me when I was gone. I used to be beautiful.”
“You still are,” I said.
“George Beck was the only man who could keep them off.” She looked out to the black field. “I just didn’t like some of the things he did.”
It popped in my head that George Beck had been involved somehow in the disappearance of the guy named Cooley and that was what the cops were after. The watch probably came from him, not Shipman, who was trying to save his own hide.
“I’m going back to Lewiston,” she said. “Tell George that’s where I am and don’t tell him we screwed.”
“There’s not much to tell,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “It just didn’t click. We’ll have to try again. I’d like to.” She showed me a fake smile. “We just have to make sure George doesn’t find out.”
I knew she’d tell him the instant she saw him. I had half-fucked myself into a real problem. “Sure,” I said. “Keep George in the dark.”
“You bet,” she said. “Count on it. Trust me.”
When I woke in the morning, she was gone.
~ * ~
The next day I met Carl Larson. There was a knock and the door opened. I was sitting on the couch, having coffee, thinking about leaving.
“Hey,” the man said. “I’m Carl. You must be Ed.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” I said. “I didn’t expect you back.”
“There were some problems.” He waved his hand.
“That’s too bad,” I said.
“Is that your truck by the garage, the black one?”
“Yes,” I said.
“How did that happen?” he said.
“What?” I asked.
“I think you’ve got four flat tires,” he said.
I stepped onto the porch. My truck sat lopsided by the garage and the rims rested ri
ght on the ground. I wouldn’t be running anywhere too soon. I went back in.
Carl walked around the place. I suppose he wanted to see if I’d moved anything. I hadn’t. Then he came out to the living room and sat in the chair by the door.
The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Page 42
