The Significant Seven

by John McEvoy

  “Very funny. Go on Ralph.”

  “Okay, Sal and Myrna breed one litter from this female champ every year. Her name is something like Champion Mannheim Mitzi of Blue Island, some damn thing like that. They called her Mitzi. She’d produce anywhere from five to eight pups each litter. These are German short-haired pointers. And the Rizzos sell them all at big prices. Except this one year.”

  Tenuta was smiling, relishing his remembrance. “Five years ago, there was one pup that was a real runt. About half the size of his brothers and sisters. The Rizzos don’t try to sell him, don’t even want dog people to see him, because he could hurt Mitzi’s big reputation. Sal comes to me at the barn one day and says, ‘Ralph, I know I’m behind on my bills to you, sorry, I’ll catch up, blah blah blah. Just to show you my good faith, I am going to give you one of champion Mitzi’s pups.’

  “I tell him, ‘Sal, Rosa and I already have a dog. It’s an old lab-terrier mutt we’ve had for years. He’s so smart, I taught him how to find the TV remote control when I can’t. My car keys, too. Our Sammy, he’s all the dog we need.’

  “Rosa, this is getting to be long. You want to start coffee?” She gave him a look. “Okay,” Ralph continued, “Sal goes on to say that if we don’t take this puny pup, they’ll have to put him down. He shows me a photo of the little fellow, who is plenty cute, but obviously very small against what Sal called the ‘standard of the breed.’”

  Doyle said, “Why would they destroy a well-bred dog like that?”

  “In the dog world,” Ralph said, “you got to have pedigree and conformation. A breeder doesn’t want to reveal to the dog world that he’s got some inferior product like this pup. Now, I’m thinking, our Sammy is getting up there in years. I don’t want to see this young little guy go under. I talked to Rosa, and she said, ‘Yes, take the pup. Give that cheap cousin of mine a month off his training bills.’ And we did.”

  Doyle could feel old Sammy under the table shifting his weight onto Doyle’s feet as Ralph continued. “It took us about four months to figure out that Sammy and the pup were not having happy lives together. The pup was active all day, the old guy wanted his rest. It wasn’t working out. I’m thinking, ‘I’ve made a mistake. I can’t let the pup ruin Sammy’s golden years.’

  “There was a guy stabled near me at Heartland Downs that year named Jimmy Binnard. Nice guy. He owned field trial dogs. He’d race his horses in Chicago six months, then go hunting or trialing or whatever they call it for a couple of months down south each fall. I told him my situation. Jimmy agreed to take our pup that we’d named Shorty. He said, ‘Ralph, I’ve got give you something for him. This is a real well-bred pup. He’s growing pretty good. He’s got a nice look about him, too.’

  “‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘but he’s just a little guy. His big-time breeder didn’t want to keep him.’ Jimmy, God bless him, would not let it go that way. He said, ‘Ralph, if I do any good with this pup, you get half.’ I just laughed. I said, ‘Jimmy, half of what?’ Jimmy said, ‘He looks smart. He could grow more. You never know, he might turn out to be a good hunting dog. If he does, in a year or so I’ll take him with my other dogs to a couple of field trials in South Carolina where they compete for money. Okay?’

  “I said, ‘Sure, Jimmy. Just take care of this little guy.’ So I said goodbye to Shorty.”

  Rosa had slipped away from the table, gotten the coffee pot, and come back to pour. She was smiling. She nudged Doyle with her elbow as she set his cup down. “This is the beauty part,” she said.

  “Over the next year, Jimmy Binnard trains Shorty for the field trials,” Ralph said. “This little guy develops, grows big, turns out to be a multichampion down there in the Carolinas. His second year there, he wins $28,000 in prize money. Jimmy sends me my half! After Shorty had won his first two or three trials, who shows up at the barn one morning but Cousin Slow Pay Sal. He must have heard about how good Shorty was doing. Sal makes some small talk, gives me a check for about half of what he owes me in current training bills. Then Sal says, this is the kind brass balls he’s got, ‘And Ralph, how’s our pup doing?’ I said, ‘You mean the little runt you were going to kill? He’s doing fine. Now get the hell out of here.’”

  Doyle said, “I love it. What a jerk, Slow Play Sal.”

  Ralph said, “They were different, Sal and Myrna. The three years I trained for them, they would tell me when they were having Champion Mitzie Schmitzie or whatever her name was bred. They would observe the breeding. Then, and I am not making this up, they would breed themselves.”

  Rosa, blushing, said “Ralph, you don’t have to tell that,” and retreated to the kitchen carrying the dessert plates.

  Doyle said, “Come again?”

  “I am saying that every year for three years when the Rizzos bred their champion dam, bitch I mean, they would be active along those lines themselves. Myrna had a baby a year three years in a row.”

  “The dog breeders breeding after breeding their dog?” Doyle said, laughing louder than perhaps he should have.

  Rosa came back to the table. “That’s enough, Ralph,” she said. “Jack, how about some more dessert?”

  “Don’t mind if I do. Thanks.”

  She said, “Would you like a little grappa to go with it?”

  “I would,” Ralph said.

  Rosa said, “I’m not asking you, hon. I know what it does to you.”

  “I know what it does to me, too,” Doyle said. “I gave up grappa a couple of years back. Used to drink it with my friend Moe Kellman until I had hangovers that made me seriously consider suicide. Wonderful stuff while it’s happening, brutal stuff the next day.”

  “I’ll just get you men coffee, then.”

  Chapter Thirty

  July 11, 2009

  Joe Zabrauskis drove the 323 miles from his Northbrook, Illinois, home to his northern Wisconsin property in six and a half hours, including his stop for lunch in Green Bay at Brett Favre’s Steak House. He loved the place. A life-long Chicago Bears fan, Joe liked nothing better than entering enemy territory and finding Packer backers to josh with. They were almost always good-humored and disrespectful to people they referred to as FIBs, “Fucking Illinois Bastards,” providing great fun for Joe, an Illinois native with longtime ties to the Badger State.

  Zabrauskis began to anticipate his departure days in advance. Rising early as he always did before going to the main office of his extensive beer distributorship, he drank coffee in the early morning mist on the back patio of his house, imagining that he was already smelling the northern pines, hearing the sounds of gently lapping lake water that awaited him.

  The solitude he enjoyed this one summer week each year served to invigorate him, restore his spirits for the other fifty-one. For many previous years, Joe had joined male relatives in Wisconsin during fall deer season. Then had come a marked increase in hunting accidents involving both livestock and humans. Each autumn, some cows would be fatally misidentified as deer by hung-over, once-a-year hunters. Some large dogs, too. Five years before, a man had somehow mistaken his next-door neighbor for a doe and shot her dead from a distance of two-hundred feet. After that, Joe acceded to his wife’s pleas to give up these autumn adventures. He told her he would confine himself to his summer getaways.

  Joe arrived at the cabin that had been in his family for half a century in late afternoon. By the time dusk dropped onto Lake Cedar, he had caught a walleyed pike legal sized enough to be his dinner, plus several less sizeable bass that he returned to the cold, dark water.

  The cabin was isolated on a two-acre stretch of lakefront property, blocks from the nearest home. Across the lake there were hundreds of acres of state-owned land that could not be privately developed, thus promising protection from boating crazies and Jet Ski enthusiasts from the cities.

  As was his custom on these trips, Joe erected a small tent in the clearing north of the old cabin. He kept his beer and perishables inside the building in the refrigerator, an a
ppliance still referred to by his mother as “the icebox.” When he was a boy, there was nothing he enjoyed more than sleeping outside at night, hearing the wind riffling the nearby pines, loon calls resonant across the water. The week after Christmas, when Zabrauskis brought his family north for a vacation of cross-country skiing, ice fishing, snow mobiles and watching college football bowl games, the seven-room cabin was put to full use. But not when he was alone on the property in the summer, his favorite time.

  Even though he was sleeping outside, Zabrauskis spent much of his first night airing out the musty cabin, sweeping up mouse droppings, washing the windows. He hated to think of this cherished place being anything but in great shape.

  Joe’s practice was to rise very early each day, make a fire in the outdoor pit, and cook a big breakfast of bacon, eggs, and brew coffee improved by a shot of Christian Brothers brandy, a staple of many northern Wisconsin diets. After scouring Lake Cedar for fish from his small motor boat until late morning, he’d go into nearby Antigo for a couple of glasses of beer and a sandwich at Weasel and Betty’s tavern. Everyone there knew him, Big Joe from Chicago. Early in the afternoon, he returned to the cabin for a nap. His favorite time of the day was late afternoon, when he went out again to fish, this time from a canoe in the pools of water beneath a stretch of overhanging pines on the west end of the lake.

  ***

  After spending most of the day replacing some rotted portions of his pier, Orth was relaxing inside his cabin, watching a DVD of Ultimate Fighting Championship highlighted bouts. He looked on appreciatively, gripping his bottle of Leinie, as that brutal sport’s current heavyweight champion, a big, blond man from nearby northern Minnesota, dismantled his opponent. Orth’s cell phone went off just as the bout concluded in a cascade of loser’s blood.

  “Yeah.”

  Sanderson said, “He’s there, Number Four.”

  “Got you.”

  Two hours later, Orth followed Sanderson’s directions to Zabrauskis’ remote cabin. He parked two miles down the road in a stand of trees just off an old logging road. Put on his camouflage outfit, blackened his face, and began almost two days of boring, scrupulous observation of his target, equipped with binoculars, a sleeping bag, dried food, and a vault of patience. The second night, he used his cell phone to call Sanderson. As usual, they kept it short. “Things okay?” Sanderson said.

  “He’s in my sights. I’ve got it figured. I’ll be done by dawn.” Orth buried the phone under a tall pile of brush.

  Observing Zabrauskis for those two days, Orth had come to admire the man’s discipline, sense of order, qualities that Orth respected. Joe Z followed the same routine each night. He set the outdoor fire that he would light the next morning, prepared the battered iron coffee pot to be set upon the grate over the flames. “This guy is as regular as a master sergeant,” Orth whispered to himself the second night. “All the better.”

  Zabrauskis that evening had caught a bunch of pan fish. He cleaned them and fried them in the black iron skillet he always used for his meals here. After dinner, the big man sat in a camp chair next to the fire pit, watching the night advance, completely content in his northern retreat. He stomped the glimmering fire out at just before eleven. Orth watched as Zabrauskis stripped to his shorts and duck walked through the flaps of the canvas tent, just as he had the previous two nights at about this time.

  Orth waited until half past midnight. He slipped on his night vision goggles and stepped out of the nearby woods on his way to the tent. A cloud mass briefly obscured the bright moon, and Orth dropped to his belly and crept forward. He heard snoring as he neared the tent entrance. Carefully parting the tent’s opening, he saw Joe Z deeply asleep on his side. Orth crawled forward. He stopped when he was next to the big man. Orth reached over his shoulder and took from his back pack the weapon he’d brought. He had thoroughly tested it during his two days and nights of waiting and observing. It did, indeed, transmit a powerful electrical pulse affecting the nervous system. Orth was convinced that this was the real deal, what police officers all over the country were now grateful to have in their hands. The recipient of voltage like this was immediately rendered incapacitated.

  Zabrauskis stirred, sensing something. He had been sleeping on his left side. He turned his head and saw the night-goggled, black-faced figure crouched beside him to the right. For an instant, Joe Z imagined he was in the midst of a science fiction-driven dream. He shook his head to clear it. He felt a pressure on his back as he attempted to turn over.

  Orth was quick. He jammed the Taser X21 into the middle of Joe Z’s back and pulled the trigger. Zabrauskis shuddered as he was hit by the electrical charge, then lay still.

  Orth turned the Zabrauskis onto his back. He straddled his torso. Zabrauskis was stunned and helpless. Orth grabbed the small pillow that had lain under the big man’s head and clamped it down over his face. For a second or two, the powerful old lineman instinctively attempted to fight his way out of this death trap. No go. Orth pressed down and took Joe Z’s breath away.

  As he’d predicted to Sanderson, Orth was out of the woods well before dawn. He drove the speed limit south, not to his cabin, but to Wittenburg, where he pulled into a highway rest stop and went to sleep. When he awoke, he had breakfast at popular local diner. Before leaving Wittenburg, he bought ten pounds of the famous smoked bacon sold at the Neuschke’s outlet. It was a breakfast treat once described by the late New York Times critic R. W. Apple as the “beluga of bacon.” Orth never read what he knew to be the leftist Times, but he enjoyed this smoked meat. He’d seen the quote from Apple in the meat company’s promotional material. Orth found it humorous that he was for the first and only time in his life in agreement with the fucking liberal media, at least on this subject.

  At the end of the week, when Joe Z’s frantic family asked local authorities to locate him, animals had gnawed Joe Z to little but bones. The report was “dead for two or three days, cause unknown.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  July 17, 2009

  Most of the way on their trip to downtown Chicago was taken up with talk about Joe Zabrauskis’ sad fate, reported in that morning’s newspapers. Jack drove as Cindy speculated about the “chances that four guys, four friends, of about the same age, could pass away in such a short period of time. I don’t get it.”

  “Neither can I,” Doyle said. Earlier in the week, Doyle had persuaded Cindy to take a weekend off from her rigorous, punishing schedule. “We’ll go to Grant Park to the Chicago Jazz Fest, then have dinner in the Loop. What do you say?”

  She said yes, after her mother agreed to give up church bingo to stay home with Tyler; after Doc Jensen told her, “Enjoy yourself. You work too hard.”

  Her decision delighted Doyle. Glancing sideways at Cindy, Doyle thought, She looks so good this afternoon, I wish I had a convertible to show her off in. Cindy was dressed casually in a short-sleeved, light blue dress, light brown sandals. Her hair was tied in the pony tail she used when working horses in the dawn racetrack hours.

  He parked in the huge underground garage off Michigan Avenue. Cindy was excited. She hadn’t been to this part of the city for several years and had not seen the Grant Park additions, including the famous “Cloud Gate,” or “the Bean” as it was called, the massive glimmering sculpture where delighted visitors waved at their distorted reflections.

  “These other two pavilions are new this year,” Jack pointed out. “They’re temporary. Commissioned to commemorate the 1909 Plan of Chicago laid out by Burnham.”

  “Who was Burnham?” she asked, putting her arm through his as they strolled.

  “Daniel Burnham was a famous urban planner early in the twentieth century here. He designed the chain of parks that run along Lake Michigan. Big public works program. Burnham said, ‘Make no little plans.’ He sure didn’t. Chicago has benefited ever since. There’s no American city, maybe none in the world, that has as much open lakefront acreage running for miles and miles
.”

  “I want to go back to the Bean,” she said. “I should have brought my camera.” She waved at herself in the reflection, then clapped her hands in delight. Dozens of other visitors were doing the same.

  Doyle said, “Wait here.” He trotted west across Michigan to a Walgreen’s. He was back within minutes with a throwaway Kodak camera and had no trouble persuading a Japanese gentleman to take their picture. “This is great,” Cindy said. “I’ve got to get out more. When I can afford it,” she added, so softly Doyle did not hear her.

  The main stage Jazz Fest music began at five o’clock. Doyle had scored some good seats from the woman in charge, an old friend, Penny Tyler. He and Cindy were three rows from the front, center aisle. The Kelly Brand Sextet kicked things off in rousing fashion, followed by the trio of the amazing Chicago pianist Willie Pickens. Then came one of Doyle’s favorites, Eric Schneider and his quintet, Schneider being one of the latest in the long line of tremendous Chicago saxophone players.

  At intermission, Cindy’s head was on Jack’s shoulder. When the crowd rose to move about, she shook herself awake. “Hey, I’m sorry,” she said. “I loved the music. But that’s what happens when you’re used to getting up at four in the morning, getting to sleep early at night. Who plays next?”

  “It’s one of those Free Jazz groups that the Trib’s critic keeps promoting. Not for me. Sound to me like lost souls screeching. Shall we go? Maybe we can get to dinner a little earlier than the reservation.”

  “I’m ready if you are.”

  They worked their way through the large crowd. Minutes later, they were at their table in Trattoria 10 on Wabash Avenue. “I’ve been here,” Doyle said. “You won’t go wrong, whatever you order. They have terrific ravioli dishes here. I wish,” he smiled, “I could have brought Ralph Tenuta here with us.”

  Cindy said, “Why?”

  Doyle went on to detail the unusual, Kentucky-cookbook dominated menu schedule in the Tenuta home. Cindy laughed as she listened. “He misses his Italian dishes, but he won’t revolt?”