Short Money

by Pete Hautman

  “I’d like to offer you boys a bonus. Say five thousand apiece?”

  Zizzi ran his tongue over his teeth. “Let’s see it,” he said.

  Bellweather hiked up his pant leg, reached into his boot.

  Five minutes later, he was standing bare-ass naked before the two uniformed men, the money stacked neatly in a metal basket along with his watch, wallet, neck chain, and passport. He couldn’t believe they were doing this to him, and said as much to Zizzi, who shrugged and pointed his thumb toward the corner of the room, where, Bellweather noticed for the first time, a wide-angle video camera was pointed directly at them. Bellweather felt sick. No wonder they hadn’t gone for the bribe.

  “And what else do you have to show us, Mr. Bellweather?” Zizzi inquired politely.

  Bellweather, caught between fury and despair, could only goggle at him.

  “Mr. Bellweather?”

  “What? What more do you want? Do you think I have a bomb up my asshole or something?”

  Zizzi smiled, pulled a disposable rubber glove from a dispenser on the wall, turned to his partner, Al. “You hear that, Al? He said something about a bomb up his asshole.”

  XXXIII

  I figure H. is good for another three, four years before something blows out on him. Most likely, his brain’ll go before his liver or heart. It’s, like, his weakest link, you know what I mean?

  —GLORIA SCHWEP

  GLORIA SCHWEP, AKA PUSS, wearing leather chaps and a down vest, was standing outside the trailer, smoking a cigarette, when Crow and Getter bounced across the field on the sputtering Polaris. Crow parked the snowmobile, waved at Puss, then noticed Orlan Johnson’s squad car parked on the highway behind his Jaguar. “Uh-oh,” he said.

  A shivering, blue-lipped Dave Getter, dressed only in his torn and bloodied suit, looked up from his seat on the snowmobile.

  “Whad’s a madder?”

  “It seems like we’ve got some company.” He looked at Puss, pointed at the cop car, raised his eyebrows. She jerked a thumb toward the trailer. Crow walked over to her. Getter stood up and followed, looking hopefully toward the mobile home.

  “I’m code,” he said.

  “What’s going on?” Crow asked.

  “It’s a mite close in there, but you can take a look,” Puss said. “You won’t believe it.”

  Crow opened the door and stepped into the trailer. The warm air was palpable with alcohol, cigarette smoke, and a melange of unpleasant human excretions. Getter crowded past him and put his hands over the propane heater. Harley was passed out, propped up in the corner of the built-in bed. Orlan Johnson had achieved a similar state, his corpulent body laid out across Harley’s legs. Both men were snoring heroically, lips flapping visibly with each expelled breath.

  “I just wish I had a camera,” said Puss.

  The man with the bloody dish towel wrapped around his right hand wanted to talk. His name, he said, was Bott. He grinned and knocked himself on the forehead with a knuckle. It made a hollow sound, something like bott!

  “Messed up my hand,” Bott said with a forced laugh. Bott was a tough guy. Only his dead-white face and the sweat beading on his forehead gave him away.

  Crow nodded sympathetically.

  “The wife dumped another fork down the In-sink-erator.”

  Crow wasn’t sure what an “Insinkerator” was, but he nodded.

  “I hadda dig for it. Get my feelers down in there, the bitch hits the goddamn switch.” He pushed out his jaw. “I been sitting here half an hour, waitin’ to get it looked at.”

  “That’s rough.”

  “So what’re you in for?” Bott asked.

  “Brother-in-law,” Crow said. “He’s in there getting his nose fixed.”

  “Yeah? Car accident?”

  “Not exactly,” Crow replied.

  “You punch him? I got a brother-in-law I’d sure as hell like to bust his nose.” Bott looked at his In-sink-erated hand. “Only maybe not just now.”

  Crow saw Mary enter the emergency room, coat unbuttoned, hair roughly and badly combed, purse dangling carelessly from one hand. He stood and waved, grateful for the interruption. She stopped in the middle of the lobby, feet spread too far apart, and waited for him to approach.

  Crow put a hand on her shoulder. She leaned into it, and he embraced her awkwardly.

  “He’s all right, Mary,” he said, wondering which Mary he was embracing. “They’re taking care of him now, getting his nose packed and taped, cleaning the salt out of his thigh.”

  “Salt?” She pulled away, touched her hair with a shaking hand.

  “He was shot, but the gun was only loaded with rock salt.”

  “He was shot?”

  “It was just salt. He’s fine. Let’s sit down.”

  “My God, he was shot?”

  Crow led her to a pair of empty plastic chairs near the television. Mary’s eyes drifted, then locked onto the TV screen.

  “I’ve seen this show,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Do you want to know what happened?”

  She shook her head. They sat for a few minutes, watching the figures move across the screen. Mary looked at her watch. “How long do you think they’ll be?”

  “I don’t know.” He waited. “Are you going to tell me where she is?”

  “Who?”

  “Melinda.”

  Mary bit her lip, keeping her eyes on the television. “She doesn’t want to see you right now.”

  “You talked to her? Did you tell her I’ve been trying to get hold of her?”

  Mary nodded slowly.

  “Tell me.”

  Mary turned and looked at him, her eyes searching his face. She nodded sadly, then shook her head. “She’s checked herself into the program at Southridge Center, Joe. She’s trying to get clean.”

  “She went into treatment? That’s great! Nothing could make me happier. It’s what I’ve wanted for her all along. Why wouldn’t she want me to know?” He stood and paced, clapped his hands together. “How long? When will she get out? I want to see her.”

  “She’ll be in the program for another three weeks, Joe. But I think you’d better leave her alone for a while, even after she gets out.”

  “Why? This is our chance to rebuild. We can start over—get clean and start over fresh and new. Two clean machines. We can make it work.”

  Mary was shaking her head. “Joe, I don’t think Melinda feels the same positive energy you do. She might not want to try again.”

  “Wait till she gets straight. You’ll see. It was the coke and the booze that was wrecking our marriage. All she wanted to do was get high.”

  “Maybe. But you have to remember that you’re the one who got her started. She never used to do coke. She never even drank that much until she met you.”

  “I was a different person then.”

  “So was she. You took her there and then you left her.”

  “I quit! I quit using, and she kicked me out!”

  Mary’s voice hardened. “That’s not the point. You took her…. It’s like you took her to a really bad play with no ending in sight and you were sitting together in the front row and then she turned to you to tell you what a rotten time she was having and you were gone. You got in your car and left.”

  “That’s not what happened.”

  “Don’t you get it? It doesn’t matter what happened on the physical plane. What matters is what Melinda’s soul is experiencing.”

  “You mean, what matters is what she thinks happened. What really happened doesn’t matter.”

  “Just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

  Crow hugged himself. “Anyway, she’s okay, then,” he said. He looked at his sister. “Which Mary am I talking to?”

  Mary shrugged, nodded, looked away, picked at a bit of lint on her coat. She smiled, the corners of her mouth pulled back, her eyes dull. “There’s only one of us, Joe,” she sai
d.

  Crow sat down and deflated. I can handle this, he thought, looking at his sister. But I sure do wish she’d stop smiling like that. He looked for the man with the bloody hand, but he had disappeared, gone to get his digits repaired.

  “She’ll feel different when she gets out,” Crow predicted, convincing no one.

  “That’s great, Crow.”

  “I just wanted to call and let you know how things turned out.”

  “Right. That’s good. I was wondering.”

  “And I wanted to thank you for coming over yesterday.”

  “No problem. Thanks again for the bump. So do you know where she is? I mean, do you know which program she’s in?”

  “Southridge Center. It’s supposed to be a pretty nice place.”

  “It’s nice, considering that most of the people there are dopers.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “I did my time. Hey, Crow?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I gotta go.”

  PART FOUR

  XXXIV

  Querent: Do our light bodies dwell within us as well as somewhere else?

  Ashtar: They are dwelling multidimensionally. That is why you have to call them down in your meditations and feel them reemerging within you. There are light vehicles, your merkabah vehicles, waiting for you to reconnect so you can use them to travel throughout the universe.

  —“ASCENSION, FINAL INSTRUCTIONS,” A CHANNELED INTERVIEW WITH THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL MASTER ASHTAR (ASHTAR IS CURRENTLY SERVING AS COMMANDER OF THE CONFEDERATION FLEET IN OUR SECTOR OF THE UNIVERSE)

  SCHEDULED FREE TIME, AN HOUR to read and reflect. Melinda had started by reviewing the twelve steps but quickly became bored. For nearly a month she’d been studying that same book, from front to back. She reread a chapter in The Celestine Prophecy, searching for substance, finding empty words. She wished she had brought a deck of tarot cards. She would ask Mary to bring some next time she visited.

  Free time was the worst.

  She sat on the edge of her mattress and gazed at her reflection in the full-length mirror beside the door, breathing consciously, deeply, regularly. She concentrated on gathering the positive energy. Today’s center was high, a few inches above her sternum, between her breasts. Her eyes were clear. The lines that had appeared on her forehead were fading. She could feel every part of her body; the numb spots had returned to life, humming with electromagnetic energy. She almost looked like an athlete, in the purple-and-green silk warm-ups she had borrowed from Mary. She felt better than she had in years. And more bored.

  And fatter. Four weeks’ clean living with unlimited access to Southridge Center’s vending machines had added ten pounds, most of it going to her already burgeoning thighs. She stood up, dropped her warm-ups, looked at her legs. Big, white, and a bit bumpy, like Tonya Harding gone soft and curdled.

  But she was drug free. Soon she’d be going home, back to Big River, back to her cat and her looms. Then she could get her thighs fixed. She’d heard from Mary that Dr. Bellweather was no longer in business, that he’d been arrested or something, but he wasn’t the only liposuctionist in town.

  The door opened. Melinda yanked up her warm-ups.

  “I think you have the wrong room,” she said coldly. That was one of the things she didn’t like about Southridge. It was supposed to be the best chemical dependency treatment facility in the state, but they didn’t even put locks on the doors.

  The woman standing in the open doorway crossed her arms and let her shoulder rest against the doorjamb. Chains swung across black leather. Sunglasses with tiny purple oval lenses. Red lipstick. Slim thighs tightly wrapped in black leather jeans.

  “You’re Melinda Crow, aren’t you?” the woman said.

  “What do you want?” Melinda asked.

  The woman smiled humorlessly, red lips stretching across her face, showing a set of neat white teeth.

  “I just wanted to have a look,” she said. “See what we’re dealing with here.” She turned, chains scraping the doorjamb, and walked back down the hall toward the exit.

  Melinda shivered. She sat on the bed, tucked her legs into a half lotus, concentrated on her breathing. Ten minutes later, she began to wonder whether the visitor in black leather had been real or a noncorporeal manifestation of her fears and desires. She wished again that she had her tarot cards. A quick consultation with the Empress, and she would know for sure.

  Laura Debrowski spun out of the Southridge Center lot, winding the engine out in second gear before slamming the gearshift into third. She jammed a random cassette into the tape player, cranked up the volume to the distortion point, then beyond. Iggy and the Stooges. Debrowski blew through the traffic control light on the entrance ramp and hit the freeway at eighty, her jaw pulsing.

  “Why do I do this shit?” she shouted over the roar of the music.

  Iggy Pop answered, “Now-I-wanna, be your dog.”

  She pulled up in front of her duplex, shut down the abused Honda, banged into her apartment, threw herself on the sofa.

  Silence, but for the buzzing of the refrigerator and a faint ringing in her ears.

  She lit a cigarette.

  A minute later, a soft thump. A black cat, yellow eyes, came padding out from the bedroom, jumped onto her lap, looked intently at the tip of her nose, purring. Debrowski raised a hand, brought it gently down onto the cat’s back, stroked.

  “God damn your fuzzy face,” she said.

  XXXV

  When I play with my cat, who knows whether she is not amusing herself with me more than I with her.

  —MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

  ONE OF THE FIRST things Crow learned about serving paper was that above all he must not look like a guy who earns his living by serving paper.

  He had tried several looks before arriving at what he called “The Coach.” The Coach was an athletic fellow, usually dressed in a University of Minnesota sweatshirt and sweat pants, with a beat-up letter jacket he’d picked up at a vintage-clothing store. He was clean shaven, his hair was cut short, and he was always smiling, as if remembering his last victory. He had a Nike athletic bag slung over his shoulder. The Coach did not look like a process server. He looked like a guy who was trying to find his softball team. Also, it helped to be driving a pink Jaguar, which tended to confuse people and to make them curious about him.

  Another thing he had learned was that Saturday morning was prime time for catching his targets at home. They were usually muzzy enough to answer the door, usually a little hung over, usually with only one thought in mind, which was to tell the doorbell ringer to stick his doorbell-ringing finger up his ass and fuck off.

  Crow liked to make his calls early. Five or six in the morning was about right.

  By eight o’clock on Saturday morning Crow had served three residents of South Minneapolis and one Saint Paulite. He’d been serving papers for three weeks now, trying to get his head above financial waters, and had quickly picked up enough clients to keep him busy two or three days a week. It wasn’t a bad way to make a buck. Better than working for a plastic surgeon.

  Contrary to the usual midwinter deep freeze, the first week in January turned out to be mild, almost balmy, the weather going from subzero to blustery sunshine, with highs reaching the mid-forties. Banks of snow receded, exposing their black, greasy cores. Oily rivers ran in the gutters. People walking around with their coats flapping wide open, smiling, telling anyone who would listen what a nice day it was. Pseudo springtime in Minnesota. It wouldn’t last long.

  Crow had heard nothing from George Murphy since he left Talking Lake Ranch with Dave Getter on the back of Harley’s snowmobile. Murphy no doubt had his hands full, now that Ricky was gone. The more time passed, the more Crow was inclined to think that George wasn’t really such a bad guy. Just another dumb bastard caught up in a series of unpleasant events. At least you knew where he stood.

  Dr. Nelson Bellweather, the last Crow had heard, had made bail by convincing his brother Nate to ta
ke out a second mortgage, after which the doctor had promptly disappeared. Nate had been quite upset. He had even called Crow and tried to hire him to fly down to Costa Rica and find his brother.

  Crow had turned down the job.

  Today he was going to call Melinda. Her course of treatment at Southridge Center would be complete. She was probably home already. He felt his heart lift in his chest, hammering too quickly. Was it excitement or fear? He rolled down the window and took several slow, deep breaths. Did he really want to see her? He no longer knew who she was, this woman he had married. The thought of living with her again, should she agree to it, was as terrifying as the prospect of life without her. The problem, he feared, was that he really didn’t like her anymore. The thought that he might have fallen out of love with his wife came with an ocean of guilt.

  He hadn’t seen Debrowski in almost two weeks. Their last contact, a lunch at Emily’s Lebanese Deli, had been horribly uncomfortable. Crow had been distracted, his mind ping-ponging from the memory of Ricky Murphy’s death to the imagined image of Melinda sitting in a small white room, hugging herself and hating Joe Crow. He’d picked at his cabbage roll and said hardly a word. After a while, Debrowski had stopped talking too. They’d sat eating in silence. Finally, like a jerk, he’d started to talk about Melinda, the way she used to be. He had failed to keep the hope out of his voice. Debrowski had paid the check.

  She’d said, “Give me a call when you get your shit together, Crow.” She’d walked out of the restaurant, climbed into her little yellow Honda, spun the wheels making a U-turn, headed back up University Avenue.

  Crow had felt as if he’d just eaten a bowl of warm concrete.

  But he hadn’t called her.

  He pulled the Jag to the curb in front of his building. A man in a blue Dodge Aries parked behind him and got out of his car.

  The man was wearing a gray suit with highlights on the knees and elbows. The suit looked like it might have fit him forty pounds ago, but now the waistband was buried between rolls of flesh. Eight inches of yellow shirt protruded from between the left and right lapels. He wasn’t wearing a tie, having opted instead to bury a gold-plated chain in the abundance of chest hair sprouting from the open collar of his shirt. On his head, the hair was locked in place by some shiny chemical substance, was combed straight back, not quite covering the pink scalp on top, and did a sort of loop-de-loop over a pair of excessive ears. The man was holding a sheaf of papers in his ringed fist.