Yellow Dog Contract

by Thomas Ross

  “I think so.”

  “You know how much money Max left?”

  “No.”

  “He left six hundred and fifty-three dollars and thirty-two cents. That’s what was in the bank. He had ninety-six dollars on him when he was killed. And some change. The police said they’re going to turn that over to me eventually. I told them I could use it now. When he died I had eighty-six dollars in cash and that went for groceries. Murfin said that there’s a check due from the Vullo Foundation. Max’s last paycheck. That’ll be about twelve-hundred after deductions. Maybe a little more. Max was making thirty-six thousand a year plus a car and an expense account. It was a good job, the best he ever had. But he spent it all. Or we spent it all. He didn’t have any insurance. I thought he had insurance, but when I checked, he didn’t. I don’t know what I’m going to do. I guess I’ll kill myself.”

  There are those who claim that there really isn’t any such thing as déjà vu, but suddenly I was back in the coach house on Massachusetts Avenue and it was Sunday afternoon and raining. I think I shuddered a little. Dorothy Quane went on with her monologue, if that’s what it was.

  “I don’t know what happened to Max. When I met him he was a sweet, big-eyed kid who was going to help change the whole world. You introduced us. We even talked about joining the Peace Corps together. What a fucking laugh. The only thing that Max ever changed was himself. He quit being a sweet, big-eyed kid and made himself hard and cynical and tough-minded. That was one of his favorite words. Tough-minded. He found out he liked to manipulate people. He was good at it. He manipulated me. I didn’t mind. I knew what he was doing. But other people didn’t like it and after a while they didn’t like Max. I think they were afraid of him. He didn’t seem to care. Politics suited him. It gave him a chance to manipulate people. After a while, that was about all he cared about. He didn’t even care who he worked for. He even talked about working for Wallace once, but then Wallace got shot, and that fell through. He thought working for Wallace would be a joke. When I asked him who the joke would be on he said it would be on him. Max, I mean. Then he started going into these funny deals. I don’t know what they were. He never told me. But one time he brought home ten thousand dollars in a paper sack and dumped it in my lap. He wouldn’t tell me where he got it. He said it was just a deal he’d pulled off. He was always going to pull off a big deal. He was talking about it just before he got killed. It was going to be the biggest deal of all. He was going to retire at thirty-eight and we were going to take the kids and go to Europe. He seemed excited about it. We even went to bed together, which we hadn’t done in God knows when. It was going to be a big, big deal. He was going to make two hundred thousand dollars, maybe more. Then he got killed and there wasn’t any big deal. There was just Max dead and six hundred and fifty-three dollars and thirty-two cents in the bank. I’m going to kill myself, Harvey, I really am.”

  She started to cry, but she did it silently and I remembered that she had never made any noise when she cried. I got up and went over to her and put my hand on her shoulder. She shuddered a little. It was what she did instead of sobbing. “Come out to the farm Saturday,” I said. “Bring the boys and come out to the farm and we’ll talk about how you’re going to kill yourself. Maybe we can come up with something fairly pleasant.”

  “You don’t believe me,” she said.

  “I believe you.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Here,” I said and handed her my handkerchief. She dried her eyes and looked up at me. “When did you grow that?” she said.

  I gave my moustache a quick brush. “A couple of years ago.”

  “You know who it makes you look a little like?”

  I sighed. “Who?”

  “Don Ameche. You remember Don Ameche?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Don Ameche and Alice Faye.”

  “It makes you look a little like him except for those clothes of yours. What’re you supposed to be?”

  I glanced down at my clothes. I was wearing old faded jeans, which I thought were rather stylish, and a faded chambray work shirt that I’d bought from Sears before I quit buying things from Sears. “I’m not supposed to be anything,” I said.

  “You used to wear suits,” she said. “I remember when you didn’t wear anything but suits and vests. You even had them made in London. They were Savile Row, weren’t they?”

  “No, there was a place in Dover Street that made them.”

  “Max tried to dress like you used to, did you know that?”

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “He’s got thirty or forty suits and jackets in there. You and he were almost exactly the same size. If you want some of them, you can have them.”

  I thought about it. “I’ll tell you what, Dorothy. I’ll buy a couple of them.”

  “You can have them free.”

  “I’d rather buy them.”

  “Sort of a contribution to the Widow Quane, right?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I can sure as hell use the money. Come on.”

  She rose, carrying her drink, and started back toward the bedroom. She had stopped crying. I followed her. The bedroom was as neat and immaculate as the rest of the house. Dorothy opened a large closet with sliding doors that took up most of one wall. She gestured with her drink. “Take your pick,” she said.

  There were about twenty-five or thirty suits and about fifteen jackets. They were all hung very carefully facing the same way on shaped wooden hangers. Most of the suits were hard-finished woolen worsteds, either blue or grey, although there were several nice tweeds and a couple of light summer-weight gabardines. Max apparently hadn’t gone in for synthetic fibers. The jackets were mostly quiet tweeds or softly woven herringbone. There were also a couple of muted plaids. I decided on a light summer-weight grey worsted suit and a sporty-looking brown-tweed one that looked as if it had never been worn. I thought the tweed suit would go well in the country. It was rough and hairy and all I needed to go with it was a blackthorne walking stick. I also picked out a couple of jackets, a summer-weight one and a nice dark grey cashmere number. Max certainly hadn’t stinted himself on clothes.

  When I was through making my selection Dorothy Quane said, “You want to try them on?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

  “While we’re in here, you wouldn’t want to go to bed, would you—just for old time’s sake?” It was a casual, offhand, deadly serious invitation. Or proposition, I suppose.

  “I’d like to, Dorothy, but I think we’d better not.”

  “Why?”

  That was a good question and the only answer that I could give her that wouldn’t make her threaten suicide or start crying again was a feeble one. “Maybe the boys might come home. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

  “No, I guess I wouldn’t.”

  “Maybe another time,” I said brightly.

  “Sure, Harvey. Another time.”

  Back in the living room she insisted that two hundred dollars would be a fair price for the suits and jackets, which new had probably cost at least eight hundred. Max had never bought anything but the very best, or the next thing to it.

  I wrote out the check and handed it to Dorothy. “If you should need some more, let me know,” I said.

  She looked at me curiously. “You really liked Max, didn’t you, even though nobody else did, except maybe Murfin?”

  “He was a friend of mine.”

  “Do you still like me?”

  I fought back a sigh. “I’m very fond of you, Dorothy. So is Ruth. We’ll be expecting you out at the farm on Saturday. You and the boys.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “We’d really like you to come.”

  “Maybe I will,” she said, “if I don’t kill myself first.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IT WAS A LITTLE AFTER SEVEN-THIRTY when I turned into the dirt lane that led from the road to the house. I stopped the pickup, switched off
the engine, reached into the glove compartment, and took out a pair of binoculars. Through the glasses I could see them moving down to the garden. I counted three of them and recognized the one in the lead. He was a big, twelve-point buck deer, an old and valued acquaintance, the kind that a Texan might say of, “We’ve howdied, but we ain’t shook.” With him were two does. The deer were moving into the garden to eat my corn and grow fat. I didn’t mind.

  A lot of deer hung around the farm. They seemed to sense that nobody was going to take a shot at them. Sometimes they also came there to die after hunters had shot but only wounded them. When that happened Ruth tried to patch them up, if they would let her, and she had succeeded with four or five. But usually I had to finish them off with a surplus M-l carbine that finally I had bought for just that purpose.

  The deer weren’t the only wild animals who thought of the garden as a free lunch. Besides the beavers there were raccoons, wild mink, squirrels, innumerable rabbits, and a swarm of muskrats that everyone told me I should trap, but which I didn’t. The only thing I had ever killed, other than the wounded deer, was a twelve-button timber rattlesnake. There were also a couple of copperhead water moccasins that I might have taken a shot or two at if they hadn’t moved so fast. I left the copperheads for the black snakes, the farmer’s friend, who lived in our attic. At night we could hear them slithering around. Ruth and I found the sound rather comforting, but our infrequent guests said that it kept them awake.

  I sat there in the pickup and rolled a cigarette and watched the sun start to go down behind White Rock on the ridge of the Short Hill Mountains. In the morning it would come up behind me over the Blue Ridge Mountains. The farm was in the very northwest tip of Virginia, in Loudoun County, only a mile or so from West Virginia and two miles across the Shenandoah River from Harpers Ferry. Directly in front of me, to the west and over the mountain, was the Potomac River and Maryland. If I got tired of one state, I could walk to another.

  Sometimes when I turned into the farm I would stop and stare at it and wonder what impulse had made me buy it twelve years before. I was city born, city bred, and city oriented and even after a dozen years I still measured the farm in city terms: two blocks wide and maybe twelve blocks long, most of it straight uphill.

  By trial and error I had turned myself into a pretty fair vegetable gardener and a so-so goatherd. But what I did best was grow Christmas trees. With the aid of the county agent, a proselyter for the John Birch Society, and some additional advice from the Soil Conservation Service, I had eight years ago planted 11,000 white pines. Sentimentalists from as far away as Washington and Baltimore now came with their kids at Christmas to pick out and chop down their own trees. I furnished the axe. If they couldn’t use an axe, they could use my chain saw. I charged five dollars a tree regardless of its size. But this year I was thinking of charging ten. After all, I had had to watch them grow.

  As I sat there watching the sun go down I stopped thinking about Christmas trees and started thinking about what was really on my mind, which was the Vullo Foundation and what I had come to regard as The Mysterious Conspiracy Concerning Arch Mix. The area around Harpers Ferry wasn’t a bad place to think about conspiracies. It had been the scene of a corker on October 16, 1859, when old John Brown seized the federal armory and then waited for 18,000 slaves in the area to join up with him in what he hoped would be a big insurrection and just general hell-raising. The only one problem was that Brown forgot to tell any of the slaves that he was coming so none of them showed up.

  They sent Lee up from Washington to deal with Brown and what was left of his ragtag band of twenty blacks and whites, most of them under thirty and three of them not yet twenty-one. Lee didn’t even have time to change into uniform. J.E.B. Stuart, plumed hat and all, talked Lee into taking him along. Stuart was just a lieutenant then and always ready for either a fight or a frolic.

  A young marine lieutenant actually captured Brown. He wounded him about the neck with a sword, but when he tried to run him through with it the sword bent double. It was a dress sword and not very sharp. Brown capitalized on his wounds. When they tried him he lay on a pallet on the courtroom floor. Most of the time he kept his eyes closed, which was just as well because not too many could hold the gaze of those fierce, strange, grey eyes which nearly everyone said looked quite mad. Brown claimed that he wasn’t crazy, but then he lied a lot. He had an aunt who was crazy, and two nieces and two nephews who had to be locked away in an asylum, so most folks thought it was hereditary. Brown said if anyone should know if he were crazy, he should, and I’m not, he said.

  Crazy or not they hanged him in a field just outside of Harpers Ferry. The field was surrounded by 1,500 soldiers and one of the soldiers was Stonewall Jackson, although nobody called him that yet, and another of them was young John Wilkes Booth, then just a cadet, who would come to know considerable about conspiracy.

  I quit thinking about Brown and Booth and their conspiracies, both of which had changed history, and went back to The Mysterious Conspiracy Concerning Arch Mix. Mix had disappeared and so far no one knew what had happened to him. Two people who perhaps thought they knew had been killed. Furthermore, the labor union that Mix had headed was making some strange moves out in St. Louis and tomorrow I would fly out there to see if somehow that might have something to do with Mix’s disappearance. Maybe it would all turn out to be part of some giant conspiracy. And then again, maybe it wouldn’t, for if my Uncle Slick were right, there was a chance that Arch Mix was still alive.

  I put my cigarette out in the ashtray, started the engine, and eased the car forward over the grave of The Proper Villain. There was a scream in the distance, and then another, but it was only Really Rotten Roger, the peacock, letting the world know that he had finally decided that it was okay for the sun to go down.

  By the time I reached the house and parked the pickup it was twilight, although there would be plenty of light to see by for almost another hour. I picked up the neatly folded suits and jackets, the clothes that I had bought off a dead man’s widow, and went around the house and climbed the steps to the porch.

  Audrey and Ruth were sitting around the spool table drinking what seemed to be ice tea. Audrey looked drawn and a little pale. Her eyes were red-rimmed as if she had been crying, probably about Sally, I decided. After I said hello to both of them and told Audrey I was sorry about Sally, I plopped down into one of the canvas chairs, looked at Ruth, and said, “Get me a drink, woman.”

  “Tell him to get it himself,” Audrey said.

  Ruth smiled and when she did I was glad I was married to her and not to Audrey, although I was very fond of my sister in what has been described as my own peculiar way. “He’s only teasing,” Ruth said, rose, came over, and gave me a kiss on the head. She then looked at me searchingly for a moment and said, “It was really bad, wasn’t it?”

  “Godawful,” I said.

  “Where’d you get those?” she asked, noticing the suits and jackets that I was holding in my lap.

  “I bought them off the Widow Quane who may or may not come to stay with us for a while on Saturday, if she doesn’t decide to kill herself first.”

  “Is Dorothy very bad?”

  “I’ve seen her better.”

  “I talked to the police,” Audrey said. “After I got out here I called them and talked to a Detective Oxley. I talked to him for a long time about Sally. He told me what happened. He said you’d been down there, to police headquarters, you and Ward Murfin.”

  I nodded. “We were down there for quite a while. We told them what we saw. Oxley wasn’t too much impressed with my description, but he thought Murfin’s was superb.”

  “Sally didn’t have to—well, I mean she didn’t have to hurt for a long time, did she?” Audrey’s voice broke a little when she asked.

  “No,” I said, “she didn’t have to hurt. I think it was instantaneous or at least as instantaneous as death ever is.” I saw no reason to tell Audrey about the cigarette burns that Detectiv
e Oxley said they had found on Sally Raines’s body. Nor did I tell her about the gag that the police had found in the room that Sally had rented. I didn’t really want to talk about Sally Raines any more or Arch Mix or Max Quane.

  Ruth must have seen how I felt because she said, “What can I get you?”

  I sighed, rose, and put the clothes down on the spool table. “Nothing, thanks, I’ve got to go milk the goats.”

  “They’re already milked,” Ruth said.

  “You’re a remarkable woman,” I said and sat back down again.

  “I had some help,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Your French-speaking niece and nephew. Their French is really quite good, especially Elizabeth’s, although Nelson’s is very good, too.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “Still out with the goats.”

  “How did the kids take the news about Sally?” I said.

  “Almost matter of factly,” Audrey said. “Children are often like that. Elizabeth was somber and I suppose Nelson was grave. I was the one who broke down and cried all the way out here. I went on crying most of the afternoon. After that I talked to Ruth. That helped. I think the kids were worried about me.”

  “And they’re still out with the goats?” I said.

  “I think they’re trying to get them to speak French,” Audrey said.

  I smiled. “Maybe they’ll succeed.”

  “Now that the goats are milked, what would you like to drink?” Ruth said.

  “I think I’d like some gin,” I said. “I think I’d like some gin and then I think I’ll sit here and drink the gin and look at the fireflies and listen to the frogs and the crickets. After that I’ll have some dinner and then I’ll take my wife to bed, if she’s of a mind to.”

  “Be still my heart,” Ruth said, batted her eyelashes at me, and then went into the house to fetch my gin.

  Audrey and I sat in silence for a moment until she lit a cigarette and her paper match made a little popping noise. The slight breeze blew some of the smoke my way. It was marijuana. “You two really like each other, don’t you?” she said.