Trouble No Man

by Brian Hart

  Sarah stood and ran to catch up, stopped the woman, pointed back at the fruit stand. They returned as a group and Wiley handed over a flat of tomatoes and another smaller one of peppers. Roy hadn’t seen the woman before. Her kids were hungry and they’d cracked open a couple of the red bell peppers and started eating before their mother had finished thanking the girls.

  When they got home, Karen came out to help them unload, her face lighting up when she saw that their crop was gone. “All right,” she said. “Way to go, girls. Another weekend like this and you’ll be rich.” She gave Roy a kiss.

  “We gave them away,” Sarah said, baseball hat pulled low over her eyes.

  “One guy gave us a dollar,” Wiley said. “So not all of them.”

  Roy held up his hands, it was their idea, I didn’t tell them to do it, and Karen gathered Sarah in her arms and lifted her up.

  “Farmer’s market is done,” Roy said. “Mr. Florence shut it down.”

  “That’s too bad,” Karen said. “Maybe next year, huh?”

  Roy sent the girls inside to wash up while he unloaded the table and the chairs into the barn. The dog followed him and gave him the sad eyes so they worked through the commands April had left them with. Roy pronounced everything like he was from South Boston. Whitey Bulger, dog whisperer. Kay-nosa—heel. Set-knee—sit. Zee-radish—attack. The dog shot from his side and launched into the air and seemed to take great joy in ripping into the goat-leather training dummy he’d hung up in the barn.

  Roy let the dog rip and kill and tear while he stashed the sign under the ramp, then poost and kem-yee and he gave him a piece of goat jerky from his pocket. Set-knee. Zoston.

  The dog sat robot still and watched Roy climb the ladder and grab his board. When he dropped in and disappeared from sight, the dog looked toward the ceiling and followed the sounds from rafter to rafter. The ramp was in bad shape, Masonite tears, popped screws, broken coping. The girls used it more now than he did. Wiley was dangerously good and Sarah mostly clowned around but she had her moments. He needed to fix it or get rid of it. This could be said of pretty much everything he owned. He only had two motorcycles left and both needed work to get them running again. The garden looked great though. So did the goat shed and the chicken coop. He was kind of half-assing the pigpen but they were hardly in there anyway. They ran them on paddocks bordered by solar-powered electric fence. If the pasture held up, they’d be able to keep it up. Otherwise, so long pigs.

  At some point Karen had talked him into getting bicycles so they could get out and do things together without burning fuel. No one drove much anymore with the shortages and the high costs so traffic was minimal. It was safe enough. Cycling was tiring and slow but there was something about it that Roy responded to, and after giving it some thought he decided that it was the obvious independence. Sure, a motorcycle or car could take you farther faster with minimal effort, but that was only true to a point. When a motor stopped, everything with it stopped, but when a bicycle stopped, even someone with the most basic knowledge could usually get it going again. Unless the frame broke, it was pretty hard to get stranded. Uphills end in downhills, and tough climbs made you stronger. The dog loved it, chasing the girls all over the countryside, ranging in the barren fields.

  Kay-nosa. They left the barn and crossed the yard to go inside but the lights from the drill rig were still on so he wandered down to check on Sullivan and Jerzy to see if they’d made any progress. They were at four hundred feet that morning and still no water.

  “Revere,” Roy said to the dog, and it was gone in a puff of dust. He hoped it didn’t bite anyone. He kept walking, waiting for the sound, but none came.

  “You’ll see the stars better if you switch off the lights,” Roy said.

  “Wouldn’t see you though,” Jerzy said. He had the dog by the scruff and was hauling him back and forth, playing rough. “I wouldn’t see this monster coming at me.”

  “I don’t know that seeing him would change anything.”

  “He’s a killer.” Jerzy had him in the air now and flung him out into the dirt but he landed like a cat and sprung and body-checked Jerzy onto his back.

  “Kay-nosa,” Roy said. The dog walked right over Jerzy to return to Roy’s side.

  “If he decided to,” Jerzy said, as he picked himself up, “I think he could rip my throat out.”

  “It’s not up to him,” Roy said, gave Jerzy dead eyes. “It’s up to me.” He liked to scare the kid. “Where’s Sullivan?”

  “Where’d you think?”

  “I think you should give me one of those smokes.” Jerzy passed over a cigarette and explained to Roy that they’d only made it another twenty feet and had nothing to show for it but another broken bit, an empty water truck, another empty fuel drum. Jerzy was fifteen. Going on forty. Going on about diesel prices and rock types, aquifers and the nature of displacement, the rudiments of fluid dynamics.

  “What’s your guess, then?” Roy asked.

  “That you’re about as screwed as everyone else. Me and the old boar, we both figured you’d be in luck. With one well still producing. We weren’t planning on wasting your money and our time, but what the hell. There aren’t any guarantees.”

  “Never mind what it says on the side of your rig.”

  Jerzy glanced at the door decal. Guaranteed results. He pulled a red bell pepper from his jacket pocket and took a bite. “Results may vary,” he said, smiled as he chewed.

  “That one of mine?”

  “One of Wiley’s. She brought out a pile of them, tomatoes too.”

  “Are you a gentleman, Jerzy?” he asked. “Because if you’re not, you’re gonna have a hard time walking around taking free vegetables from my daughter after my dog eats your legs. Your balls.”

  Jerzy kind of froze and swallowed hard. “You don’t have to worry about me, Roy. I’m on your side.” He finished his pepper and dropped the stem and seeds into the dirt. “I’m on your family’s side. I’ll end the life of anybody that hurts them.”

  “Did you practice that?”

  “Not bad, huh?”

  “Nah, we’re on the same side. Let’s go skate.”

  “That’s what I’ve been waiting for.” Jerzy shut the doors on the cab and killed the lights and they walked leisurely with the dog running out front toward the barn and the warm lights of home. “Your buddy Barry Miller came by again,” Jerzy said.

  “I hate that guy,” Roy said.

  “I think he gets that, but he still wants us to pack up and go to his place and drill him a new well instead of you.”

  “It’s up to you and Sullivan.”

  “He offered big money. Double what you’re paying.”

  “Yeah, shit,” Roy said.

  “And he said all his militia bros want us to work for them too so we’d be set for years.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’ll never work a well for the Jeffs. Neither will Sully. Not after what happened to my folks we won’t. I talked to him about it. We’re staying here until we get results. If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t care but my wife is gonna murder you in your sleep if she catches you sneaking around with her little girl.” He stopped the kid with a hand on his chest. “I’m serious. Don’t fuck around. This isn’t an empty threat. We were kidding before but I’m sure as shit not joking now.”

  “I know.”

  “You think you do, but you don’t.” Roy ripped the barn door open and hit the lights and they staggered to life and lit the hard-used wooden bowl. Jerzy grabbed his board from where it was leaning against the ramp and hurried up the ladder and bomb-dropped into the deep end with no warm-up.

  “Punk,” Roy said.

  Sullivan, the well driller, made supply runs to Reno that inevitably involved a bar stool and virtual poker so Jerzy mostly ate at the Binghams’. He’d been sleeping at the rig but Roy suspected he and Wiley were meeting up in the night. Neither of them was stupid and life was short was how he looked at it
. Karen thought young love, particularly concerning her eldest daughter and some middle school dropout, skate punk, drill rat, wasn’t anything to encourage.

  “If she gets pregnant,” Karen said. “What then?”

  “She won’t,” Roy said. “She’s too smart for that, so’s Jerzy. I already put the fear into him. He knows what happens if he fucks up. He’s a hundred times better than those fuckheads she was running with before. Jerome. Remember Jerome?”

  “Yes, I remember Jerome. But no fourteen-year-old knows what happens.”

  “He’s fifteen now.”

  “Fifteen-year-olds are even worse, bigger, with more room for hormones . . .” she hesitated, “and sperm.”

  “Don’t say that. I can’t go that far. You always go too far.”

  “They’re all little animals that grow up to be big animals.”

  “All right. Fine. We’ll let Sullivan take one last shot. After that, I’ll tell ’em they gotta go. That’ll be it.”

  “But we can’t let them leave.”

  “What’d you mean? We’ve been paying them to punch dry holes for almost a year. They’ve used way more water than they’re likely to find. And I can’t even think about the fuel. We could’ve run our generator for a decade with all the fuel they’ve burned. If he hasn’t found anything yet, I don’t know—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “We’ve gone over this, and over this. We have enough water now for us and a few animals. Outside of that, I think we need to rethink standing our ground.”

  “I told you a long time ago, I’m here to stay and that means my girls are too. We’ll wait this out. You always want to run.”

  “That’s not true. I’m just stating the facts. As long as our well has water, we’re good. After that, we need to be ready to go. Ninety percent of this valley is dry. To my mind that means it’s only a matter of time.”

  “Back to the matter at hand, Jerzy and Wiley,” Karen said.

  “OK.”

  “I like him, don’t get me wrong. He’s a good kid, and I know he lost his parents and that’s terrible, but he’s just a kid.”

  “He can’t help any of that.”

  “I know he can’t. But, as you may or may not remember, we were just kids once and I think it’s fair to say that we—you a lot more than me—were both total fucking morons.”

  “He skates like a man.”

  “He sucks compared to Wiley, you said so.”

  “She’s been doing it her whole life. He’s only been at it for a year or two.”

  “You said he isn’t any better than Sarah and she’s only a foot taller than her board right now.”

  “OK. I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “‘Skates like a man,’” Karen said, mocking him. “Asswipe.”

  “I’m just saying you can judge a lot about a person from how they skate. He’s smart about it and he’s not afraid.”

  “Anyway, my point is—”

  “Your point.”

  “He doesn’t have a place to go, right?”

  “He has a room at Sullivan’s, but he’s been crashing on that rig so long, who knows if he’s even house-trained anymore.”

  “I think he should move in here,” Karen said. “Stay with us.”

  “Wait, what? He practically does live here already and that seems to be your biggest complaint. Why do you want to give him his own room?”

  “Because that’s the only way the little beast is going to understand what he’s signing up for.”

  “He’s not signing up for anything. He’s in teenage love with Wiley. And if I had to bet, I’d say she was in love with him, too. The fucking idiots.”

  “That’s why I want him under our roof, so I can bend the little fucker to my will.”

  “Is there no one you can’t bend to your will?”

  “You can learn a lot from goats.”

  “About goats.”

  “About getting what you want, and compromise.” She smiled. “But mostly about fences. Goats teach you all about fences.”

  “You’re saying we keep Sullivan going and give Jerzy what? Sarah’s room? She moves in with Wiley?”

  “Yeah, I think that’s the answer.”

  “She’s gonna be pissed.”

  “I know. And she’s gonna watch her sister like a hawk and snitch on her whenever I ask her to.”

  Roy laughed. “Why don’t you give Sullivan our room and we move into the Airstream? Fuck it, hook it up to the truck and we’ll just leave the lot of them behind.”

  “I thought of that.” She took Roy’s hand and kissed his knuckles.

  “Really?”

  “No. Don’t get your gypsy hopes up. We’re staying.”

  That fall, Sullivan went to sleep in his hunting trailer with the heater on and never woke up. He’d called Jerzy before he went to bed and Jerzy said his spirits were up and that he most likely died drunk and happy. He’d been a lifelong bachelor with no kids, not much for real property outside of his drill rig and his junk show of a house, a camp trailer, a few guns and tools, a rusted-out Dodge one-ton with a crane that he used for hauling well casing. His will named Jerzy alone and he got all the money that the Binghams had paid and Sullivan’s savings besides. Then it was Jerzy and Roy, drilling dry well after dry well. What else was there to do? Throw money and material at the problem. America.

  End of September and the weather was foul with hail and wind. The drill rig was hammering away in a muddy pit, a dirty island in the white, hailstoned landscape. Roy had driven the rig down the hillside into this small clearing, a quarter mile from the house, knowing they wouldn’t get it back up such a steep hill, but also knowing that it was the last section of the Binghams’ land to be drilled, the last of their well casing, their last chance at hitting water.

  “We’ll work until it gets too shitty,” Roy said loudly, wincing at the hailstones pelting him in the face.

  “I think it’s too shitty right now,” Jerzy said.

  “This is the good stuff, right here. Exfoliating weather. People used to pay big money for this shit.”

  They returned to their stations on the rig and went about their work mechanically. Jerzy was on the controls, face turned up to the vent. Roy was swinging steel well casing from the Dodge with the crane and welding them up as they went. Then something changed, the tune of the hammer and the drill and even the motor shifted to a higher register. Jerzy killed the hydraulics and whooped at Roy, threw his hat at him to get his attention. They’d finally hit water.

  Two days after they’d capped the new well, Barry Miller, the neighbor, was in the driveway with his hat in his hands. The weather had turned hot again. Dust clouds on the horizon. Roy and Jerzy did a fine job of ignoring Barry and climbed the porch stairs and sat down in the rickety ladder-backs against the wall. They’d been in the machine shop all morning trying to figure out how to power the pump in the new well. Solar needed to be pilfered from another system and a secondary pump would be required to feed a yet-to-be-built uphill cistern. They’d been about to go inside for lunch.

  The boy stretched out his legs and wiggled his stockinged feet. “My boots are killing me today. My insoles are like crepe paper.”

  Roy peeled off his socks and stuffed them into his boots and shoved them under his seat, looked at Barry. He had the face of a younger actor that had been made up to play an older version of himself in the later scenes, but it wasn’t makeup. It was just his fake-ass, older-than-you, wiser-than-you white-guy face.

  “You had some luck, huh?” Barry said to Jerzy, with his phony smile. “How about you come over to my place next?”

  “How ’bout you leave the kid alone, bud,” Roy said. “I think he’s already said everything he has to say to you.”

  “I’m waiting,” Barry said, earnest now. “I’ve been waiting patiently.”

  “First thing that you learn,” Roy said. “Is you always have to wait.”

  “There’s human decency too,” Barry said. “Not to m
ention the logical sense it would make for all of us to be on water. It would strengthen your position too, not just mine.”

  “Go home, and quit leaving all that militia shit in my mailbox.”

  “You’re making other people—meaning me—secure your sector. It takes a lot of work.”

  “My sector?” Roy said. “Shit, here I was thinking we had a place or a spread or a farm, maybe even a ranchito, and this whole time all I’ve had is a lousy sector? That sucks.”

  “I’ll tell you right now,” Barry said. “The sooner you understand that you can’t trust the feds or even the state government anymore, the better. Jefferson is it. This is the new state. The Preservation is real. We’re the only ones you can trust. Period.”

  “Most of those kooks, Jeffersonians, roadblock dipshits, National Guard rejects, they aren’t even from here,” Roy said. “I don’t know any of those guys.” He looked at Jerzy. “Do you know any of them?”

  Jerzy shook his head. “Not really.” He pulled the insoles out of his boots and gave them a once-over before stuffing them back in upright so they would dry.

  “Everybody I know,” Roy said. “The people I trust, that still live here—except for you—they take care of themselves and help their neighbors when they need it. They don’t have any use for sectors.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” Barry said. “Pretty soon, I’d wager, you’ll be glad to know me.”

  Roy pointed at Jerzy. “You think he owes you something? That he should take his rig to your place and get to work? Fuck that, is what I say. You talk about preparedness and security? You’re the only ones I need security against. I never saw you at the water meetings or any other community meetings, soil conservation, schools, none of it, and now it’s all gone and you didn’t do shit to help. Fuck you, Barry. You don’t know shit about this valley. That’s a fact.”