Short Money

by Pete Hautman

  Amanda shook her head and set about cleaning up the broken coffee cup. “I don’t know for sure,” she said. “Only I think I better cook him up a batch of prunes, just to be on the safe side.”

  On the third ring, Crow awakened. He counted the rings without moving, without opening his eyes. The phone rang eight times. After the echoes faded, Crow slowly opened his mouth and worked his jaw from side to side. Yes, it hurt. He opened his eyes and blinked at the ceiling until the texture came into focus, rolled his eyes from side to side. He turned his head to the left, toward the kitchenette. No Murphys there. Sunlight glared through the window over the sink. He lifted his head and looked at the locked and chained door. He looked to the right. Nothing. Nobody here but Joe Crow. He looked down his body. His right arm ended in a hand, in the hand was a revolver, the Taurus, his index finger on the trigger. He pulled his finger out of the trigger guard and let his head fall back. He was lucky he hadn’t shot himself in the foot during the night. He imagined what it would be like to wake up that way, two or three toes suddenly blown to hamburger and bone chips.

  He didn’t want to move. To move would hurt. It would probably hurt a lot.

  The telephone started to ring again. This time he turned his head and watched it, two feet away on the end table. It looked exactly the same ringing as it did silent. It persisted for ten rings. Crow closed his eyes.

  Inevitably, boredom overcame inertia. He rolled onto his side, swung his feet out past the edge of the mattress, and sat up. The pain from his injuries was not as great as he had feared, but a wave of nausea caught him by surprise. He staggered into the bathroom and vomited a few paltry ounces of bile into the toilet.

  The telephone rang. Crow sat naked on the cold floor, fascinated by the patterns he saw in the bathroom tiles, listening.

  Sally Jessy had found two couples who had been married over ten years without ever consummating their marriage. Somehow, they had felt the need to go before a national television audience to defend their lifestyles. The two men did not have a lot to say. Uniformly wooden-faced, they both said, in so many words, that they simply were not interested in sex. They wanted a friend, a cook, and a companion. The wives both took somewhat more complicated positions. They claimed to be interested in sex but not in having intercourse. They claimed to like to “cuddle,” whatever that was, and they wished their husbands would do more of it. One of the women was an avid reader of romance novels, the other a family counselor.

  The studio audience was aghast. The spectacle of four married middle-aged virgins brought forth a tide of concern. Had they consulted physicians? Didn’t they want children? Were they saying that sex was bad? The two couples became defensive and angry. Sally Jessy looked tired.

  Hillary Johnson did not understand what all the fuss was about. She understood completely. And so did Orlan, for the most part, although in the early years of their marriage things had not been so clear. Perhaps if she had laid down the law, so to speak, on their wedding night, their marriage would have had fewer difficult moments. Even now, even after her change of life, she occasionally found it necessary to rebuff his drunken probes. She envied these television couples the purity of their relationships. There was something holy about it.

  Conveniently, Sally Jessy went to a commercial just as the telephone rang. Hillary hit the mute button on the remote and picked up the phone. It was her mother.

  “I don’t know about that, George. I mean, I appreciate you calling me, but—” Steve Anderson, the phone pressed to his ear, nodded, then nodded again. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. It’s really that big? Jeez, where would I put it? Just a minute. Hold on.” He punched the hold button on his phone and sat back to think a moment. An eight-by-eight elk, guaranteed over 400 Boone and Crockett points, his name in the Records of North American Big Game. He pictured it, the seven-foot-wide rack, hanging over his fireplace. How would Patty deal with that? He smiled and looked around his new office, with its window. He could see the frozen Mississippi winding through downtown Minneapolis. It had been a good year. If he kept on pulling in the big checks, Patty would deal with it just fine. The mounted bison head had been a tough sell, but once he got it into the house she didn’t mind it so much. It wasn’t as though he was asking her to put the damn thing in their bedroom. She even seemed to enjoy it when he told dinner guests how he’d bagged it with a single well-placed shot, right to the heart, from three hundred yards. Ollie, the taxidermist, had done a terrific job of concealing the thirteen bullet holes the MAC-10 had left in the buffs face.

  That first hunt had hooked him, despite its strange aftermath when Dr. Bellweather got clobbered by Ricky Murphy. Anderson had returned to Talking Lake Ranch to hunt pheasant and duck, this time as the host, with one of his other clients. That had been fun, but nothing like shooting something really big, something you could hang on your wall, something really impressive. He’d been thinking for weeks about arranging another big game hunt, thinking along the lines of a Russian boar, which was available for under a thousand bucks, but this elk sounded like a onetime opportunity, get his name in the record book and everything.

  Of course, it would all be a write-off. He’d find time to talk a little business, maybe lay a sales pitch on George or Ricky.

  It was too damn bad about Doc Bellweather, what had happened to his account. Anderson felt awful about the whole sorry mess. The only good thing was the eighty grand in commish he’d netted.

  The telephone beeped, telling him his call had been on hold for sixty seconds. Anderson punched the blinking button.

  “George? Sorry about that. Okay, you said you wanted how much? Ouch! I know, I know. You were asking thirty before, I remember. Uh, you want to tell me how come the discount? Uh-huh. So you need to get it on the books by next week…. Oh! You mean the safari club books. Okay, I get it. That’s great. You need an answer right now, or can I call you back tomorrow? Yeah, I’m pretty sure. Uh-huh. Okay, I’m your man. Just let me call you back tonight to confirm it, and I’ll let you know when I can be there for the hunt. This is guaranteed, right? We don’t get the elk, I don’t pay, right? Good. Thanks for thinking of me! Bye now!”

  Anderson disconnected, enjoying the breathless thrill a man gets who has just spent twenty thousand dollars on an ego trip. He’d felt this way when he’d signed the sales agreement for his 7-series BMW. Of course, he wouldn’t be able to drive a dead elk. On the other hand, he couldn’t shoot his Beamer.

  George hung up the phone and settled back into his pigskin chair and waited for the warm, bubbly feeling that usually accompanied the closing of a good sale. He shifted his butt around, looking for the good spot. The crudely fashioned chair, made by his father, was not altogether comfortable. He was having trouble getting settled. The lumps in the chair seemed sharper and more insistent than usual, and he had the distinct sensation that little bugs were flitting around his head, just out of sight.

  He had sold an already dead elk for twenty thousand dollars. He should be feeling good, but he wasn’t. It was Shawn and that doctor. George squeezed his eyes closed and tried to imagine where they were and what they were doing. Shawn’s face appeared for an instant, then the doctor’s superior little smile, then all was obliterated by rage, a bright-yellow light tinged red at the edges. George forced his mind back to neutral and made a conscious effort to think.

  What would his old man have done? Suppose he, George Murphy, had been kidnapped as a child. What would old Sean have done about it? George tried to imagine his father’s rage, but all he could see was the old man tipping back his quart bottle of Cabin Still, wiping his mouth on his shoulder, blinking his squinty eyes, maybe taking a swat at him. What his old man would have done, before he did anything else, was he would have gotten shit-faced. Maybe driven over to Birdy’s and bragged about it, like having his boy kidnapped made him a big man in Big River.

  George tightened, then relaxed, at the thought. At least he was a better man than his father. He had that.

  He still half expect
ed the kid to show up at any moment, come walking in out of the woods. Or maybe he’d get a call from Orlan Johnson. “Yeah, George, we found ’im walking down the highway. He’s fine, just a little cold and scared. …” Shawn’s disappearance seemed unreal. As unreal as when Shawn had been born, and when the child had spoken his first words. George had never entirely believed that the boy existed—now he was supposed to believe the boy was gone.

  Shawn had run away. George could appreciate that. He had run away himself at that age, two or three times. Kids did things like that. But why had he run to Bellweather? The thought of his boy running to see the doctor made the bright light come back. What would he do when Shawn returned? When George had run away as a boy, he had always returned home to a whipping from his old man, a hot meal from Mandy, and then life would go on. Why did he keep thinking about his father? His father had been a drunk, lazy and irresponsible, and had spent his entire life half broke. George hadn’t respected him as a child; why did he keep thinking about him now?

  Because he didn’t know what to do next. He had actually considered going to the Minneapolis cops, but what would he say to them? My son has run away with this faggot doctor? And what if they found the doctor and arrested him? Bellweather, being a doctor and all, would probably claim that he had rescued the boy from an abusive environment.

  George wrenched his thoughts away from Bellweather and thought again about the twenty thousand dollars he would be getting from Steve Anderson. He opened his eyes and looked out across his desk at Louise, the pedestal-mounted Russian boar his father had shot back in ’44. He remembered old Sean, even more shit-faced than usual, telling him that Louise would be his one day. “M’legacy t’you, Georgie. Fuggin’ Louise.” He remembered his father showing him the safe built into the stuffed pig’s hollowed-out interior. “Yer m’oldes’ boy, Georgie. She’s all gonna be yers. Ever’ las’ fugging dime. Secret, you an’ me. E’en yer mama don’ know boudit.”

  After old Sean died, his skin yellow, abdomen distended with diseased liver, his heart a sack of collapsed muscle, it had taken George three hours to find the combination to the safe. He’d finally discovered the magic numbers in an envelope taped to the bottom of a desk drawer. He remembered his excitement, locking the door to his father’s office, his hands shaking as he pulled the hog away from the wall, dialed in the combination.

  George’s mouth turned down at the memory.

  His father’s legacy: a half-filled pint bottle of Cabin Still, an IOU for ten dollars from somebody named Fred, and a handful of pennies, nickels, and dimes—no quarters—that added up to one dollar and nine cents. A notebook half filled with largely illegible entries. His father’s precious thoughts. George recalled the first thing he had read in that journal:

  Today I got a buck off the lick in the south 1/4. He was a 6-pointer, and big. Later on I smacked Georgie on account of the little shit would not shut up. Amanda blew her stack on account of I knocked off a tooth, but it was just a baby tooth. The problem with women is, they will get upset over anything. A boy needs to be hit sometimes.

  George remembered that day. Did Shawn need to be hit? Perhaps, but until he came home, there was no point in thinking about it. The next scrawled entry, covering most of the page and nearly impossible to read: If God didn’t mean for a man to drink, he wouldn’t of invented Amanda.

  In a few places, Sean Murphy had tried his hand at poetry.

  Once was a gal name a Mandy

  Use to be sweet as candy

  And when she got old

  All wrinkled and cold

  Mandy was still pretty randy

  George found such observations about his mother disturbing. He still kept the notebook in the safe. From time to time, he would pull it out and force himself to read a few more lines, but it never made him feel better. The only part of his hog-encased “legacy” that George had got any use out of was the safe itself. The idea of a giant, hairy piggy bank amused him, as it had his father. He still used it to store his ready cash. In this business, you had to have cash money on hand. You never knew when you’d get a chance to pick up a good animal.

  The tiger, for instance.

  If he hadn’t had cash on hand the day Jack Wild’s Wild Animal Show had passed through Alexandria, he’d never have got it. Jack Wild, the proprietor of the small traveling circus, had called George the morning his troupe of misfits were loading up their beasts and props into two beat-up semitrailers, getting ready to leave for a show in Wisconsin.

  “Hear you’re looking for a big stripy cat,” Jack had said.

  Of course, George had been interested. He’d been trying to get his hands on a tiger for months. Dr. Nelson Bellweather—at that time one of his best customers—had been calling him up every couple weeks, asking when he was going to get a tiger. Nelly Bell had a hard-on for the big cats. Wanted one of each. George had been putting him off—there just weren’t that many tigers around.

  “What do you got?” he’d asked Jack.

  “I got an old female, good looking but mean as hell. She fucked up one of my guys last night, caught a claw in his arm and ripped the sucker open. Cost me a hundred eighty bucks to get him stitched up. Nobody wants to work with her.”

  “How much?”

  “You get a truck and a cage out here in the next couple hours, she’s yours for ten.”

  George did some quick math in his head. He’d told the doctor a tiger would run him about forty K. To make his standard endangered-species markup, he would have to get the price down.

  “I can go eight,” he said.

  Jack waited a few seconds before replying. “You bring me cash and get up here before eleven, you got yourself a cat.”

  Having a pile of cash around the house was more than a matter of convenience. It was a business necessity. Of course, Ricky didn’t know about the safe. George told him that all the family money was tied up in investments and property. Ricky was an idiot when it came to money—if he knew about the safe, he’d be asking for money constantly.

  Other than George, the only family member who knew about Louise was Shawn, who had been hiding under the desk a few years ago, playing some six-year-old game, when George pulled the pig out from the wall and made a deposit.

  Shawn. The kid was always getting himself in trouble. The day Shawn had discovered the existence of the safe, George had smacked him a good one for spying on him—then immediately regretted his action. He’d had to calm the kid down, promise him a Popsicle or something, then show him how the safe worked.

  “You just lift up this flap, and there’s the door, see?”

  “How do you open it?”

  “You have to have the secret combination.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a secret. But one day, when I’m gone, you’ll have it. Then it will be your secret. Everything will be yours.”

  By two-thirty in the afternoon, Crow had showered, dressed, eaten half a pizza, and let seven phone calls ring unanswered. He had stripped away the tobacco-soiled bedding and taken it downstairs to the laundry room. He was sitting on the folded sofa bed, wearing the Taurus in its shoulder holster, thinking about calling Melinda, wishing he felt a little better—or a little worse. How sick was he? Too sick to attempt a reconciliation with his wife? Sick enough to check into a hospital? Mortally wounded?

  The truth was, after taking a few aspirin, he didn’t feel so bad. There had been no visible blood in his urine. His ribs were sore but lacked the stabbing pains associated with shattered bone. Even his genitals seemed to be recovering.

  He wished he felt just a little bit better.

  He kept thinking about George Murphy. Not Ricky, but George. Eating his “Haygun Days.” Each time the thought intruded, a shiver traveled down his body, briefly visiting his wounds as it passed. When he thought about Melinda, the same shiver plucked at other wounds.

  He had been sitting on the sofa for over an hour when the intercom buzzed. The telephone calls had been easy to ignore. S
omeone at the door, however, was a more immediate issue. He got up and pressed the button on the intercom.

  “Yeah?”

  “Crow? Are you okay?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Debrowski.”

  Crow stared at the intercom.

  “You gonna buzz me in?”

  Crow hesitated. He hardly knew this woman. He didn’t want her to see him in this condition.

  “Crow?”

  He buzzed her in. When he opened his door, it took her a few seconds to absorb his battered appearance.

  “I tried to call you,” she said. “No answer. I was in your neighborhood, so I thought I’d stop by. So what the hell happened to you?”

  Crow shook his head. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “That’s right, Crow, make me feel welcome. You’re doing great so far.”

  “Sorry. I’m a little confused.”

  “Then quit trying to think. I had a feeling is all.”

  “A feeling?”

  “Yeah. You know. Woman’s intuition.” She fired up a Camel. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “Yes,” said Crow.

  “I’ll just finish this one up, then.”

  “Fine.” Actually, it smelled pretty good. Crow sat down on the sofa. “Have a seat.”

  Debrowski remained standing, puffing on her cigarette. A pillar of blue smoke drifted toward the ceiling. “So I’ll tell you what. I was thinking about you this morning, and I had this feeling that you were, you know, fucking up or something.” She squinted her eyes against the smoke and crossed her arms.

  “And?”

  “It was just a feeling. Sometimes I think … sometimes I make things up in my head that I know are probably wrong, but I can’t stop thinking them. You know what I mean? Anyways, I decided to call just to say hi, see how you were doing. You didn’t answer the phone. I thought maybe you were still at work, so I called again later. Then I was out driving around and I thought, what the hell, I’d stop by. You got any coffee?”

  “I’m not fucking up,” Crow said. “Not that it’s any of your business.”