"There was no gun by the body."
"No. It's right here, Wally.” Lyle pulled a gun out of his pocket, holding it in his left hand, finger on the trigger, barrel towards Wally. If he pulled the trigger he'd likely break his wrist. Lyle knew less about guns than anyone in the county, except maybe Gene.
Wally felt the wave of determination that lifted Lyle's chin. The look in his eye said he was thinking that he was a man who had done one hard thing and he was ready to do another.
"Why now? After all these years?"
"The IRS was auditing Gene. Augie was helping sort the more recent records from the old records. You know how messy Gene's filing was. Anyway, Augie spotted the entry, got a copy to me."
"You could have waited, until after Pammie..."
"No. I tried waiting but I was just sitting there day after day thinking about what to do about Gene instead of thinking what to do for Pammie. I wasn't going to waste any more time that way."
Wally sighed. He thought of Lyle at Pammie's bedside, wanting to run away, wanting not to watch her die, wanting to watch anyone else die.
Wally reached over and took the gun. It came away easily, old friend that it was. Somehow, he felt better, knowing that Bradley had taken his advice and kept the “extra” gun in the glove compartment of his new truck. Gene must have found it there when he was trying to stuff all that cash in there. Gene wasn't the kind of man to come up with a plan to kill someone, even a blackmailer, but given a gun right there in his hand on the morning he was going to meet a blackmailer, it must have been too tempting. Wally made a show of taking the bullets out of the gun. No need to point out the missing firing pin. He handed the empty gun back to Lyle.
"You go throw this into the ocean, so no one will be asking any questions about it. I'll burn the log-book page. Then we'll see if we can make it to that lighthouse."
Lyle perked up and gave Wally a hopeful little smile, took the gun, and pushed the door open against the storm.
Wally looked over the page from the logbook. There were six entries besides the one for Darren's midlife crisis on wheels. There, at the bottom of the page, was an entry that had a dozen slashes through it. That was the entry Gene thought he was being called to judgment about and it was for Terry's Chevy, in for a routine oil change. If anyone looked at the records for that month, they'd find it was in for a routine this and a routine that every damn Thursday. Wally forgave Terry when she told him about it. What else could he do? She thought he was carrying on with some waitress in the next town and she was angry with him. It was Gene who told her about that waitress and he was lying as usual. Gene was playing on Terry's insecurity but he forgot that she really loved Wally too much to let it go on long.
All these years Gene must have been waiting for Wally to punish him for that month. Wally tried to look at it from Gene's point of view. Terry was gone. Wally wasn't even sheriff anymore and so maybe he had nothing left to lose. Then there was the log with Terry's appointment arriving in his mailbox, followed by an e-mail demanding a meeting in this out of the way place not far from where Wally walked every morning. That Wally was after him was certainly more likely than that Lyle had grown a backbone at this time of life.
Wally tore the log page into little pieces and burned them, one piece at a time, in the ashtray. Maybe if he had run Gene out of town Lyle would be sitting at home next to his wife, waiting for that final breath and hoping she couldn't see how frightened he was of dying alone someday after she was gone.
When the page was gone, Wally closed the glove compartment on the bundle of money and waited for Lyle to come back. Of course, Lyle didn't have to come back. He could just head out for the lighthouse on his own and leave Wally to the storm, if he had a mind to do that.
All in all there was not much chance that the storm would bring the ocean up over the truck. Wally's own odds were better just staying where he was until it blew over. He thought it through, slowly. He and Lyle sitting in the truck until it was safe to leave, going back to town. Then what? Both of them knowing about the hooch, waiting for the other to tell. Lyle trying not to think about it and eventually unburdening his soul. The search through Gene's records, the inevitable discovery of the odd pattern of Terry's repairs that month. Bradley asking questions, secrets guessed at.
The wind was bending the trees in two. They were young and, like rubber, they folded easily. It was going to be a very big blow.
Wally patted his knee and B.D. climbed up on his lap.
"Sorry, old boy. We're going to take our chances with the storm. Just as soon as Lyle gets back, we'll head out for the lighthouse. Then we'll all just leave this one in God's good hands."
* * * *
They found two bodies the next day, when the storm had blown itself out. Wally and Lyle hadn't made it to the lighthouse, but they had held on to each other somehow and together they were wedged into the branches of the only really big tree for miles around. B.D. fared better. He dragged himself into town two days later. There was no sign of Gene's body, but the pictures that Wally had sent told the story well enough. There was even that flask, just visible, under his right hand. No surprises there.
A week later, they pulled Bradley's red truck out of the ditch where the ocean had deposited it. It was full of silt and battered beyond repair, but still in one piece. More than one of the old-timers, who missed Wally and Lyle, shook their heads and thought, what if the two men had found and taken shelter in that truck? A wild ride, but any that had been through storms before figured the two of them would be alive to tell the tale.
Bradley sat in his truck for one last time, amazed at how well it had held together. He even reached over and pried open the glove compartment to retrieve that “extra” gun Wally had given him. It wasn't there. Instead, he found the money. He just sat there and looked at it. The last time he saw that stack was about a week before the storm when he gave it to Gene as payment for the rigged election.
Bradley told them to haul the totaled truck to the salvage lot. He stood in the sunshine, the money safe in his pocket. It was as if he'd really won fair and square, and who knew, maybe he had. It was Gene who approached him, Gene with the plan to entice a few old-timers to vote for Bradley. In a way, it was more of a threat than an offer. If he hadn't agreed, for sure Gene was going to sabotage him with those same old-timers.
Now, with the money back in his pocket, it felt like it had never really happened at all. As he thought about it, Bradley decided that Gene was just looking for a way to get some drinking money. After all, it was hard to imagine Gene paying out good money for votes. By the time the truck was out of sight, Bradley couldn't even imagine why he'd bought Gene's story in the first place.
Well, the money would go into a new truck. For the first time in a long time, Bradley felt confident that he'd be the man he once set out to be and a better sheriff than folks deserved. It was a nice feeling, like he'd been given another chance.
The new sheriff was not a religious man, so he contented himself with the observation that it's an ill wind that blows no man good and he never thought back on that storm without feeling thankful for it.
(c)2008 by Amelia Symington
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Fiction: THE PEAHEN by Twist Phelan
"'The Peahen’ is an homage to Peter Dexter,” Twist Phelan told EQMM. “In the 1970s and ‘80s, before he earned ac-claim for his novels Paris Trout and Deadwood, Dexter was a newspaper columnist. Every week, in a few hundred words, he cut to the heart of the American character.... My story is based on one of those columns, which looks at the tension that arises from the influx of things foreign on all-American endeavors.
The peahen appeared in Dex's barn the same day he had trouble with the tractor. It was there when he came back from scraping the driveway. The gravel was always rutted and uneven after a winter under the snowplow. So every year, three weeks after the last melt, Dex ran the scraper over it. He liked how a farmer's life was regular that way.
Dex knew what kind of bird it was because he'd seen a picture at the library. Not that Dex was a reader. It was August, and there were three patrons ahead of Maeve in the checkout line, and the library was air-conditioned. Dex had flipped through a book that had been left out on a table so the librarian wouldn't ask him to leave. The book had thick pages, and photos, all of birds.
The Peterses only needed one car. Dex drove Maeve on her errands—to the market, to the doctor, and, once a week, to the library. He had never liked the idea of her alone in town.
The book said a peahen was a female peacock. That didn't make sense to Dex. It was like saying a doe was a female buck, instead of a female deer. There had to be a word that applied to both. Otherwise what was a peacock? A male peahen?
The peahen in the barn was a dull green. At least it would have been dull on a peacock. For a peahen, it was probably average. Could even be spectacular, for all Dex knew. The book hadn't said anything about that.
Maeve hadn't been one for bright colors. At least that's what Dex had thought. But then she'd started wearing that scarf. Red and purple twined around, colors that raised his pulse just looking at them. The store in town didn't sell anything like it.
Dex noticed the peahen when he was maneuvering the tractor into the barn (tricky with the scraper attached on the front). While it was the first exotic bird ever to wander onto his property, Dex wasn't in the frame of mind to appreciate it. His barn and house sat on a slight rise. When he was driving up the incline, the tractor had started making that horrible racket.
The noise upset Dex. He needed the tractor to plow his acreage, plant his seed, harvest his crops. A farmer's whole life depended on his tractor.
The tractor hadn't been all that quiet to begin with. Even before the noise started, it was so loud, Dex had trouble hearing anything else when he was driving it. Not birds, not the occasional car down the dirt road, not a person walking to the farm next-door.
It seemed to Dex that the noise meant big trouble. The engine, like the rest of the tractor, was Italian, as notoriously temperamental as those people.
And it wasn't just the noise. The tractor was a Bendorini, a company that had gone into bankruptcy right after Dex bought the tractor. Another company had bought the name and liabilities. The closest authorized dealership was in Boise.
Dex didn't live in Boise. He lived in Stanley, a small mountain town almost four hours away. By car. It would take longer if he had to go by tractor.
Not that he expected it would help if he did get there. Dex was pretty sure the dealer wouldn't repair the tractor, at least not without charging him. That's because he'd bought the tractor secondhand from his neighbor, Victor Rossi. A used tractor was like a used car. Buy a Bendorini from Victor Rossi, and you had to go back to Victor if there was a problem. Unless Victor had printed As Is on the bottom of the bill of sale. And Victor had.
Dex suspected the problem was either in the engine or the transmission—a flaw in the heart of the machine. The noise—a humanlike scream of pain or pleasure—had occurred half a dozen times as he climbed the hill to the barn. Dex never wanted to hear that sort of noise again.
Dex drove his Italian Chapter 11 tractor to the rear of the barn. He killed the engine—with a Bendorini, you didn't turn a key, you pulled a lever that strangled it. He popped the hood and touched a piece of metal and burned himself. While he held his reddened fingers under cold water, he thought about how things might have been different if he'd bought a John Deere like everybody else.
John Deere was American through and through. No parts from China, no Mexicans putting it together. The company had been founded in Illinois by a blacksmith turned plow-maker nearly two hundred years ago. Dex had worn the company's kelly-green trucker hats all through high school.
The Bendorini was red. Dex remembered the first time he saw it. It had been last fall, the second week of October. Victor was sitting on the tractor, parked beside the road where his property adjoined Dex's. Maeve was there, too. Every day except Sunday she walked down the dusty track to check their mailbox, even though there were usually only bills, and those arrived toward the end of the month. Later, Dex would find out Maeve walked other places, too.
His wife had her head tilted back, her hand raised to shield her eyes from the sun. While Dex watched, Victor said something to her, they both laughed, then Maeve walked back up the driveway. Right then, Dex decided he wanted a Bendorini.
"I'm buying a Bendorini,” he'd told Maeve that night when she was putting away the laundry. He liked how she folded his T-shirts so they lined up like kernels of corn in his drawer.
A new tractor cost sixty thousand dollars. Dex didn't have sixty thousand dollars. Neither did the bank, at least not to lend to him. So Dex had walked down the driveway and bought the Bendorini from Victor for a little cash, plus an acre of plum trees Victor said he'd had his eye on. Dex's father had planted the trees when he bought the farm fifty-nine years ago. Maeve used to make jam from the fruit.
While Dex ran his hand under the faucet, his eyes adjusted to the dim light in the barn. The peahen had moved to the corner.
If she was bothered by the noise of the tractor—it had stopped screaming now that it wasn't climbing hills—she didn't show it. She stared at Dex. He stared at her.
Dex walked over to see what the peahen thought she was doing in his barn. While she wasn't exactly friendly, she did sidle over so he could see what she was looking at. They both stared at the washing machine.
When their old dryer had given out and they had to buy a new one, Maeve asked if they could get the matching washing machine, too. Dex had put the old washer in the barn. Maeve had used it to wash his overalls and rags and other really dirty stuff. But even on the Sanitize setting, it couldn't get all the stains out. Dex had to burn the shirt and pants he'd been wearing two weeks ago.
Dex put some rags into the washer, added detergent, and pressed the On/Off button. The light above the button changed from green to red as the washer filled with water. He and the peahen stood there for a while, enjoying the On/Off light. When Dex began to imagine them as a married couple watching the sunset, he realized it was time to go back and look at the tractor.
The peahen stayed where she was. Dex admired her for knowing what she liked and sticking with it. People should be as constant.
He got out his toolbox and looked for his favorite wrench for a few minutes—the big one with the oversized head—before he remembered he didn't have it anymore. So he took out another wrench and tried to tighten a bolt.
The wrench didn't fit. Dex went through two more wrenches before he realized the bolts were metric, and he didn't have metric wrenches. So he went inside and called the dealership in Boise. They referred him to the regional distributorship in Salt Lake, who gave him a number to call in Los Angeles.
Dex called the number. It was either the company that had bought Bendorini out of bankruptcy or a law firm, he wasn't sure. By that time he was using bad language, language so bad that he felt he should call up his best friend Tommy DeFillipi to apologize for what he'd been saying about Italians. But it had been awhile since he and Tommy had been in touch.
Before he hung up on Dex, the person in Los Angeles suggested the problem might be the tension in the belt. Having no one else to call, Dex went back to the barn to check.
The peahen didn't move as he walked past. She was completely involved in the washer light.
Dex reached under the tractor. This time he didn't burn himself because the metal was cool. He fingered the belt that connected the engine to the mower part. It felt all right, but it was hard to tell for sure. Things that he thought should be within his grasp weren't always. He tried again, then gave up. Dex figured some people were born to fix certain things, and some weren't. It was like being born Italian. Either you were, or you weren't.
He thought some more, then decided that if he sharpened the scraper, it wouldn't have been a wasted afternoon. So he got out a pair of pliers—his wrench
es were still useless—unfastened the scraper deck, and slid it out from underneath the tractor.
It weighed about a hundred and thirty pounds. Dex distinctly remembered Victor telling him how easy it would be to take off the deck for sharpening. A couple of bolts, a couple of linchpins, and that was it. Victor hadn't mentioned how hard it was to maneuver a hundred and thirty pounds. Dex had found this out for himself two weeks ago.
Dex sharpened the scraper blade, caressing the edge with the file, doing it more gently than he usually would. When he was finished, he decided to put the scraper back on. An hour later, sweaty, arms shaking, he finally got one of the linchpins in place. After that, it was easy to reassemble everything else. He'd found nothing that might explain the scream. He had bashed his right hand, though, the one he'd used to swing the big wrench with the oversized head.
After putting away the file, Dex went to the barn entrance. He pressed his palms against his aching back, looked toward his neighbor's farm. Victor's place was much larger than Dex's. Next to the silo was a green tractor. Beyond was five thousand acres of soybeans. Dex had twelve hundred acres of corn.
Soy was a more profitable crop than corn. Easier to grow, too. But Dex's father had served in the Pacific. “I'm not growing Jap food,” he had told the seed company rep. Dex could see his point. Three months ago, when Maeve started making the new red sauce, he had stopped eating spaghetti.
It would take Dex twenty minutes to walk down his driveway, along the road, then up Victor's driveway to the big house in the trees. A trail cut behind Dex's barn in the direction of Victor's place, but Dex had never used it. New grass was sprouting in the track. Soon the trail would be overgrown. Lifting the keys from the peg by the door, Dex got into his pickup.
Victor's eyes narrowed when he saw Dex standing on his porch. He didn't ask him in, but instead talked to him through the screen door. Victor lived alone. From what Dex could see through the screen, his house was tidier than Dex's. Not as nice as Maeve would have kept it. But close. Dex wished his house was tidy again.
EQMM, September-October 2008 Page 24
