Greasy Bend

by Kris Lackey

  “Oh, I turn on my headlights just before I fire.”

  “Shit.” The man put two fingers to his forehead.

  “In the light, I can tell a deer from a cow ever time.”

  The man turned from the Ford and walked slowly toward his pickup.

  “Unless the cow’s real poor!” Maytubby called after him.

  The man climbed into his cab, slammed the door, and spun gravel in reverse. He was driving a ten-year-old Dodge Dakota, blue, and he got out again to lock a heavy galvanized gate behind him.

  A mile down the road, in an uninhabited stretch of open prairie, Maytubby stopped, pulled the twenty-gauge pump from its rack, put a single birdshot shell in the chamber, and fired it into the air. Ease the short man’s mind.

  He ejected the spent shell, picked it up off the gravel, and put it in his jacket pocket. He stared up at the gambrels of the sky. Orion was very blue, except for Betelgeuse, that vast dying sun, which was orange. As he was stowing the shotgun, his cell buzzed. A 580 area code, local. “Maytubby,” he said.

  “Bill, it’s June, at the Road House.”

  “You calling to report a slob?”

  “You didn’t have to wait long.”

  “Quickest I can get there is forty-five minutes.” He switched on his headlights and pushed the Ford along the rocky straightaway. “He alone?”

  “No. With a husky middle-aged man dressed nice.”

  “Sticks out among the old turds.”

  “Like a rooster on a mud fence.”

  “Can you send me a picture of them in case they leave before I get there?”

  “I got a crappy phone. You’ll get what you pay for.”

  “Thanks, June.”

  A quarter hour later, Maytubby was driving past the Hewitts’ house. Nichole’s mother’s car was parked behind hers, and the house was dark. A sodium lamp threw amber light on the yard and house. His eyes got hot, and he felt a little queasy. He drove too fast getting to the highway in Mill Creek and then too fast leaving Mill Creek behind. Nichole and her little girls couldn’t drive away from themselves.

  Onan might have been cursed by God, but his parking lot was full. Tim’s was doing a land-office business. Maytubby parked his old Ford at the edge of the concrete, donned his cap, and put in his Billy Bob teeth. As he walked, he looked at the old turds’ pickups. Ten-year-old Chevy, ten-year-old Ford, Crum’s 1991 Ford, fifteen-year-old Ford, ten-year-old Dodge, new Volvo SUV. Whup. Rooster on a mud fence. Maytubby thought of the Blanton’s bottle. He memorized the plate—didn’t call it in to headquarters, because he didn’t want to be caught loitering among men’s trucks in the dark.

  When he walked into the bar, he smiled at June. She frowned and nodded—didn’t recognize him. Crum and the dude sat at a Formica table in a dark corner of the bar. Reflected neon gave Crum’s fish-belly moonface a spectral violet glow. Maytubby thought he looked like the ghost of Pap Finn Future. Of the dude, he could see only a bald patch and a blazer collar that had seen a tailor.

  There were no empty tables. He stood at the far end of the bar and ordered a Bud Light, walked to the juke box, just behind Crum, and knitted his brow with deliberation. The loud whiny country tune rode its final tonic chord to an abrupt stop. The sudden silence caught the dude off guard. His loud last word was “Choc-a-Bubbies.” The “Bubbies” part came out softer.

  Up and down the song menu—a wasteland of country songs. Choc-a-Bubbies? Strange-sounding fodder for criminal intrigue. But pretty damned specific, whatever they were. Crum and the dude talked softly. Maytubby put his mind into his peripheral vision and blocked out the song titles he was staring at. The dude rolled his eyes now and then, once when he said “fucking eagle” a little louder than the words around it. He then frowned and jabbed a finger at Crum, who was smoking. The finger bristled with black hair. Maytubby could see the back of Crum’s head. And wished he couldn’t. “… them all,” the dude said. “I can do that,” Crum said. Then Maytubby saw the dude look up at the jukebox. One random hymn to self-pity coming up.

  When he got to the register, Maytubby turned his back to the room, looked at June, and took out his goober teeth. She squinted at him. “You.”

  “Thanks for the heads-up, June.”

  “I sent you a picture of ’em anyway. You look scroungy in that getup. And those teeth—you scared me.”

  “So the eye patch would have been too much.”

  “I would have called you and told you to hurry up.”

  “Odd pair, huh?”

  “That older guy really sticks out when he comes in here. Which is hardly ever.”

  “He ever come in alone?”

  “No. He meets Pigpen.”

  “They ever argue?’

  She shook her head.

  “Ever see them exchange anything?”

  She tapped a pencil eraser against her teeth and gazed into the past. “No. But I haven’t spied on them. Until tonight.”

  “Who pays?”

  “Soon as you leave, these old turds are going to ask me who you are. Slicker pays. Doesn’t tip, either.”

  “Tell them I’m the beer inspector.”

  “Ffffffff.”

  While he sat in his cold pickup watching moonlight on peach trees, Maytubby weighed which vehicle to tail. The address on Crum’s registration was his mother’s, so where he lived remained a mystery. Probably nearby, whereas the dude might lead him far afield.

  When the tavern’s door swung open and music spilled into the dark orchards, Crum and the dude said no farewells but walked away from each other, toward their vehicles. Watching the lumbering Crum, Maytubby decided to follow the Volvo. Crum drove away while the dude sat in his SUV and talked on his cell a few minutes, the blue glow of the phone illuminating a crescent of his head.

  The dude took it slow through downtown Stratford, but as soon as the city limits sign was behind him, he ate up the prairie. Maytubby had to give him a half mile because the highway was deserted. The Ford’s big eight didn’t complain at a hundred, but the front end floated—took a little too long to obey the steering wheel. He was used to that lag when he was in a cockpit, but it bothered him on the ground. Scanning the road for deer was pointless—he was overdriving his headlights by a thousand feet.

  They went straight south to Sulphur, where there was some traffic around the Artesian Hotel, a replica of the big territorial hotel built to lodge pilgrims to the town’s magical stinking waters. The replica housed a casino and was rumored to lure Texans. Maytubby moved much closer to the Volvo. At the only stoplight, he could see the dude, in front of him, holding a phone to his ear and running his hand over his head. When the light turned, Maytubby gave the Volvo a long lead before he followed it into the Chickasaw National Recreational Area. They wound slowly through the decommissioned national park, between WPA stone shelters, over WPA stone bridges, past rangers. At the park boundary, marked by bison fencing, the Volvo’s exhaust blew sand off the asphalt. The dude quickly hit a hundred.

  The terrain grew hillier, and the Volvo, a half mile ahead of Maytubby, disappeared and reappeared. Sometimes he saw the blue cell glow in the SUV, sometimes not.

  Ten miles south of Sulphur, Maytubby topped a hill, felt his body lift against the seatbelt. Just over the crest, the Volvo’s taillights appeared, not fifty yards ahead of him. He jammed the Ford’s brakes, gripped the wheel to check the old truck’s rightward slew. The taillights came too fast, and he was forced to pass. He honked long, as if he were angry. The Volvo could not have been doing more than forty.

  Maytubby had no choice but to keep the speedometer’s quaint red needle pushed against the 100 pin. The dude would soon speed up, but Maytubby’s cover was blown.

  What had the stubby man stopped himself from saying? “My boss’ cattle”? Maytubby didn’t know every rancher in the Chickasaw Nation, but a new Volvo SUV would ha
ve made its owner conspicuous. Maybe. The Powell Road intersection appeared in the moonlight. Maytubby reprised his earlier U-turn, parked behind a red cedar, and turned off his lights. In less than thirty seconds, a pair of headlights approached, slowed, and pivoted into Powell Road.

  “Well, well,” he said.

  He waited, then followed, as he had before, by moonlight alone. Orion had traversed half the sky.

  When the Volvo neared the galvanized gate, Maytubby stopped on a rise, turned off his truck, and rolled down the driver’s window. The stubby man’s truck was parked across the drive, where the gate usually was. When the Volvo approached, the truck backed off the drive to let it pass. Then the stubby man got out and shut the gate. Maytubby heard no dogs, just gravel popping under tires. Two sets of taillights wandered up and over a rise, disappeared.

  Parking off the road, on the rise, Maytubby got out. In white spray paint, keep arched over the top of an old tire; out smiled from the bottom. The tire hung on a fencepost. In the moonlight, the words seemed to float in the air. Maytubby pushed down the lowest strand of barbed wire and swiveled through the fence. No climbing. His father had been rough with him on the subject of fences. Climbing strained the staples and posts. Making fence was hard work, not to be undone by fools.

  Following the fence-line cow path to dodge prickly pears and rocks, he watched for a branch off that would lead to water or a feed trough. He walked softly and fast. He had almost reached the driveway when a new path opened to his right. It took the course of least resistance around the base of the hill that the driveway climbed straight up. Then it joined the driveway (separated from it by a fence) and paralleled it for a half mile or so, disappearing into a shining lattice of leafless trees. Beyond the grove, he could make out the bobbing horse head of an oil pumpjack.

  Maytubby began to run. He soon relaxed into his stride, and the fumes of Onan were dispelled by winter night air, which smelled faintly of chlorine and straw. Miles to the west a BNSF freight blew for the Redwing crossing before it settled alongside the Washita rapids in Big Canyon.

  He went under the lattice and lost the moonlight, slackened his pace. Another half mile, then a cluster of buildings appeared in the middle distance, all of them beneath the winter canopy—a sprawling blond-brick ranch style, a double-wide manufactured home, a large metal building, and a long, narrow metal shed that garaged a half-dozen trucks. He didn’t think he saw the Volvo, but it was pretty dark, and he was a long way off. There were no sodium lamps, only the pale glow of shaded light in a few windows.

  The cow path angled off to the right before it came up against fence and headed away from the compound. Before Maytubby could stoop to push down a strand of barbed wire, a match flared against the blond brick. It jitterbugged and went out. The orange cigarette tip was dimmer, but Maytubby could follow it and see the shadowy form of its owner, who did not stand in one place like someone going outside just to smoke. The smoker walked around the house, then around the garage, then around the other buildings. He didn’t stop, either. Maytubby would need a warrant to get any closer.

  When the smoker walked behind the garage, Maytubby walked slowly back down the cow path until he was out of sight of the buildings. Then he ran again, listening to coyotes yodeling in the wash.

  * * *

  A little metallic light in the east. Maytubby was parked in the Ardmore Municipal Airport public lot, waiting for the man in the gray-and-white mobile home to leave for work on his bike. A BNSF freight hauling titanic blades for wind turbines blew for the Highway 53 grade crossing across from the parking lot. Maytubby ate a handful of pecans and drank cold water. He awakened his phone and found a text from Jill Milton: “If any harm comes to this man, you will be sorry you were ever born.”

  He typed, “To late ladie.”

  Maytubby was looking at his phone screen when he heard the bike rev up between train horns. When the train had passed, the biker threaded the crossing gates before they lifted, and was almost to the Washita bridge before Maytubby got out of the parking lot. A few minutes later, Maytubby was close enough to see the bike turn onto Powell Road. The plume of dust in gathering light made the tail easy. When the biker passed the compound, Maytubby was relieved. Beyond Oil Creek, they broached a little galaxy of strip mines. The biker slowed and rattled over a cattle guard at the entrance to the X-Silica glass sand mine. Steady day job.

  Maytubby’s house was cold. He laid his camo hat and Billy Bob teeth on the kitchen table but still wore his jeans jacket and running shoes when he fell into bed.

  CHAPTER 14

  Hannah Bond waited impatiently until the decent hour of 8 a.m. to ring the doorbell of Cathy Barker, retired Supreme Court justice for the Chickasaw Nation. The judge volunteered at the food pantry with Bond and Alice Lang. If anyone remembered the James embezzlement, Barker would. Bond didn’t know when she had fallen asleep. Her laptop was tented on the floor beside the couch, its cord draped over her neck. She had spent most of the night in a fruitless search for details in the James case. She did learn that in the United States there were more than two thousand people named Richard James.

  The retired justice poured coffee into old Frankoma Pottery mugs. A Paul Walsh acrylic still life with persimmons hung next to a rack of aprons. Barker stood at her kitchen bar; Hannah Bond sat. That made them the same height.

  “Poor Alice,” Barker said. “In courtrooms, I’ve listened to many a ghastly tale in this country, but what happened to her. Her last hour. I can’t think about it. And you have to.”

  “Technically, I don’t. Sheriff Magaw turned the investigation over to OSBI.”

  “Well,” Barker said, looking down at her coffee. Then, looking at Bond, “OSBI has a spectrometer. It also has a time clock.”

  Bond slid a printout of the Ada News story across the bar. Barker plucked reading glasses from her short gray hair and slid them up the bridge of her nose. Four seconds later, she pushed the article back and removed her glasses. “You and I never talked about that. You and Alice?”

  Bond shook her head.

  “Alice was not easily disturbed. But that case—the investigation, the arrest and trial—it rattled her. She had trained that boy. And he did seem like a boy—cherubic, naive, impulsive, eager to please.”

  “What’s ‘cherubic’?”

  “Like a baby angel. As time went by, Alice began to take a maternal interest in him. Brought him food, nursed him when he was ill, helped him with practical things. He didn’t ever speak of a family. She convinced her boss to give him more responsibility.”

  “Mmmm,” Bond growled.

  “I know you’re thinking about that disturbed nephew.”

  Bond looked out the window and nodded.

  “Yes. The first time she found a crumpled envelope in the angelic boy’s trash from a vendor she didn’t recognize, she wrote down the address—a post office box in Wichita Falls. There was no such company in that town. Purchasing had never heard of it. She told me she was sure it was some sort of rogue phishing expedition by an outsider. But the same day, Friday, after work, she followed him past his apartment in Marietta, down I-35, across the Red—”

  “That must’ve cost her. Long honking bridge.”

  Barker tilted her head and narrowed her eyes. “You know what, Hannah? She told me she was so upset she didn’t even notice the bridge.” Barker sipped her coffee. “An hour later, James walked down the steps of the downtown post office in Wichita Falls, carrying a single legal envelope. He drove to Green National Bank in Ardmore, made an after-hours deposit, and went back to his apartment. Alice told her boss, who called the US Attorney’s Office in Muskogee. The investigation didn’t take long, but Alice lost a lot of sleep. She told me she felt guilty, knew that was irrational. After his plea deal, James never showed his face again. But his court-ordered restitution payments always arrived on time.

  “When he was stealing, did anyo
ne see him spending it?”

  “No. And where all that money went remains unclear. He made large withdrawals and claimed to have a gambling addiction. I’ve never heard of anyone seeing him at a casino. His defense attorney—who was not, by the way, a PD—produced some receipts from the Golden Play. Nobody in security there or at any other casino stepped forward. Once the feds had compiled enough evidence to convict James, I don’t think they cared how he spent it.” Barker crooked-smiled. “That isn’t to say they were happy about the sentence.”

  “Did Alice care how he spent it?”

  “She hates gambling, period—something about a fallen cousin—but she did her best not to think about him.”

  “Do you know what bank the restitution checks were drawn on?”

  “I saw it. The first check passed through my office. Let’s see. Generic bank name. In Tulsa.” She studied the fine acrylic still life with persimmons on her kitchen wall.

  “You don’t forget much. Maybe James picked that bank because it has a name that disappears.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Did Alice think he was smart?”

  “She never made a point of it. He did leave that crumpled envelope from the false vendor lying around.”

  “Maybe somebody else picked the bank.”

  Barker frowned and looked at her friend.

  “Do you ever run the alphabet when you’re trying to remember something?”

  “Oh, yes. Shoot. It’s the first three letters, Hannah. American Bank of Commerce.”

  Bond wrote the bank’s name very carefully in the margin of the printout and added “Tulsa.”

  “So, you are suggesting that James conspired to embezzle?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “After the plea, no business is ever letting that kid get anywhere near its books. What other kind of job could a felon get? And even if somebody gave him a decent job, these peckerwood thieves are never real particular about deadlines.”