by Lee Lamothe
She lay there a few moments thinking: I’m giving him all the bad stuff. She wondered if she should talk about sudden rivers of fish, kind old men coming by the bright wooden detachment with creels of trout and presenting them in respectful silence, the sickening but soulful smoky smells of sweat lodges, of the open-faced youngest children who came by with beaded god necklaces. Her pre-dawn rounds when she couldn’t sleep, driving the big old cranky four-by-four through the Indian country, through the white trash Christian towns full of churches, wishing she could hate it all but loving it more and more.
“Anyway,” she said, “they call it the Spout up here. If they don’t want you, you go to the Spout and they pour you out.” She turned her head and looked up to see if he was still awake. “Well, they poured me out.”
He had to say something. “And you landed in my cup of love.”
“Oh, Bongo.” She shook with laughter. “Oh, oh, gag.”
Chapter 22
Phil Harvey drove down towards the barn. Frankie Chase flopped in his seat but was secured by the seatbelt. His head lolled and dripped. One of the rounds had passed through and spidered the glass. Blood ran in an intricate pattern in the cracks. Bits of bone and grey matter adhered to the window. Harvey spun the F-250 around and backed the bed up to the barn doors. His arm and shoulder ached. He opened the doors one-handed then walked up to the old guy’s shack.
“Hey, hey, old-timer.”
The old man was snaggle-toothed when he creaked open the door. “Sonny, you got any?” His weak blue eyes scanned Harvey from head to toe, looking for bulges that might be packages of crank.
“First we work, then you can play, okay?” Harvey realized the old man was younger than he was. Crank burned away youth and loaded you up with years you hadn’t lived yet. Harvey never really liked making crank, although the profits were good. Crank took you out into the badlands for customers and you learned more about motorcycles than you needed to know. He preferred ecstasy, the magic X that took you to the cities, to the clubs. Done right, X was a boost to good nature. “I got four oh-zees for you. White as snow. First, though, work. Oh, and bring that little groundhog gun you got. I saw some ferrets in the barn.”
The old man was rangy and had narrow shoulders under a long tank top. The cold had no effect on him. He went inside and came out with an automatic target pistol. He shuffled barefoot beside Harvey, babbling about chicks and crank and the jagged edges on the sky that simply pissed him off. Several times he nodded to himself and said, “What goes round comes round.”
“You stayed out of the house, right? You didn’t go poking around up there?”
“I got my place. I got my own place and I stay to my own self.” He saw the drums on the back of the F-250. “You cooking, boy? You mixing?” He studied the drums. “Oh, that stuff. You’re making the kid’s stuff. That stuff takes you the wrong way. Stuff.” He began a soliloquy that stuff was the perfect word, it could mean anything. Stuff your nose, stuff your arm. The couch in the kitchen of his shack had stuffing coming out. “Stuff. You can stuff a turkey.” He cackled. “But you better not stuff it up your ass, heh?” He wiped something from his laughing mouth.
“I’ll be cooking the crank soon. We’ll get you right, get you through the winter. Right now, we got to get these drums off and inside. My arm’s fucked up.”
“Four oh-zees you said you got for me?” He unlaced the canvas and stood with his hands on his hips as though examining a global-sized problem. He nodded. “I’ll drop ’em off, you roll ’em in with your foot. Then I’ll stand ’em up inside where you want them.”
“Okay, perfect. Gimme the gun, I want to kill some of those little fuckers.”
The forty-five-gallon drums landed with a thump as the old guy edged them onto their bottom rims and rolled them off the bed. He counted each one as he did it. Together they rolled the drums into the barn. The old man repeated, “Day’s work, day’s pay,” over and over again.
When the drums were inside and close to the worktable the old man leaned against one of the electric stoves and fingered the tracks on his arm. “That fat guy coming ’round? Haven’t seen him in a while. How’d you get to be that fat? On purpose, you think? Those girls sure seem to like him. When he came up they’d get all excited like and when he took them back to the city he said they were tired and needed a holiday.” The old guy began a run: “I didn’t mind having them around they never come out he treated ’em good I think there must be somebody for everybody like they say do you think and those four oh-zees I guess you outta get up to the house there and maybe —”
Harvey had seen guys shot in the chest and stay standing while you experienced heart-stopping confusion, thinking that maybe you’d missed, waiting for blood on their shirts to appear and thinking that maybe it wouldn’t.
He shot the old guy through the left eye and kept squeezing the trigger, tracking that gnarly cap of thin, dead hair as it fell. The sounds of the firing were sudden and like sharp hand claps but he still heard his brass tinkling on the wooden floor of the barn and birds fleeing the rafters as the room seemed to fill with gun smoke.
It was for love, he thought, it was for positive change. He reviewed his mistakes of the day. He had two dead bodies and only one arm that worked. He had a truck to make disappear. He had two guns to lose. Shell casings to gather from the F-250 and from the barn floor. He had a marathon of X production ahead of him. He had to somehow get back to the city to move the X to the Chinamen and to deal with Captain Cook’s romantic desires for the last time. He had to decide whether to square the logs on the house he’d build in the mountains out west, or to leave them rough-hewn. Water would be a problem, maybe, and when he chose his plot of land he’d have to keep a mind to streams and rivers as well as the depth of the water table. It was love that made him ambitious and it was love that could make him careless.
He stared at the old man, blood running freely from his wounds, and wondered if this had been the old man’s dream: to live in the woods with endless crank. And now look at how he’d ended up.
Twice in one day he’d done the hard thing. He still had some winter in his heart. But it wasn’t like the other times. Frankie Chase and the old guy hadn’t died because of money or greed or stupidity or weakness. They’d died for love, he believed, for a greater good.
* * *
He felt tired and sore but, overall, pretty okay. The old man’s truck had pushed the F-250 easily into the lake. The lake was deep and the truck, with the windows rolled down, had burbled and swayed and finally, after a very long time, it had just disappeared in a whirlpool of its own making. The bodies were securely fastened inside by the seatbelts. The guns were buried far apart from each other and he wasn’t sure he could find them if he tried. The brass was scattered. The old man’s truck had become mired in the muck at the lake’s edge, but with fast one-handed juggling of the steering wheel and the manual stick, Harvey had backed it up, turned it, and parked it beside the barn.
He stood in the sunshine looking at the farmhouse with a smile on his face. He could see where the setting sun was igniting the endless trees as they dripped in the autumn changes.
An original thought flitted through his mind. He was a season. He was going to change in increments. The light would shine on him and, given the chance, he too would ignite, he too would glow and change like foliage. Soon he’d be gone like the sun but he’d leave behind a piece of good.
He went into the barn and scattered wood shavings over the old guy’s blood. The ants were already out and feasting. He tied his hair back and began assembling tubing and pails. He turned on two of the stoves, went back outside and tested the wind’s direction.
Chapter 23
They drove north in the morning after a bacon and eggs breakfast at the diner. The same cook was on and he stared at them with deep suspicion. Through the plate glass window onto the parking lot Ray Tate watched drivers unearth themselves from their rigs. They stretched and blew visible clouds of breath. O
ne did some vaguely Asian-looking slow motion movements then lit a cigarette. A middle-aged Native woman slowly climbed down from his rig, straightening her clothing and pulling her inky hair back into a ponytail. The pair talked like pals in the rising sunshine and the trucker gave her a cigarette and lit it. With a curiously tender movement the trucker touched the woman on the arm and she smiled up at him before heading up the edge of the highway, the backwash from southbound traffic whipping at her long baggy coat.
Ray Tate nodded through the window. “Romance.”
Djuna Brown gave him a sweet smile. “Someone for everyone, right, Ray? Even killer beatniks and black dykes.”
They finished their breakfast and while Djuna Brown paid, Tate went to the pay phone on the wall.
“Skip.”
“Ray, where the fuck are you? We’ve been trying to raise you.”
“Up in Indian country. Out of range, I guess. No service. No radio.”
“You got my pills and you’re heading back, right?”
“Soon, skip. We got a lead on Phil Harvey. I think he’s up here, a little ahead of us. He went through here yesterday. We’ve linked him to a bush rat who babysits properties for the bad folks. I think maybe the lab’s up here.”
“Hang on, something else for you.” The skipper rattled papers. “That camper truck fire? With the double Chucks and the dead broad?”
“Yeah, Agatha Burns.”
“Nope. The examination showed a woman a lot older who’s had multiple births. The Federal brainiacs have had the initial post mortem for weeks but it didn’t mean anything to them. Now the hammers down the hall are getting DNA from Burns’s parents for comparison to positively rule her out. I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe the truck fire wasn’t related.”
“Except for those double Chucks scattered around the truck.” He watched Djuna Brown standing in the sunshine outside the restaurant. Several truckers making their way in paused to look her over. In her leather jacket, leggings, and khanga hat she looked like a cool chick. Ray Tate had never actually had a cool chick, nor, he thought, had a cool chick ever had him. “Fuck it, skip. It doesn’t matter. Maybe there’s no homicide to put on Harvey, but we need him anyway, to get back to Captain Cook.”
The skipper mulled this. “Okay. Fuck, I dunno. You’re the guy on the scene. Play it the way you want. I can tell the dep you’re on the trail. Did you check-in with the locals? Let them know you’re playing in their pond?”
“We’ll give them a heads-up. This is Djuna’s old turf.”
He hung up and went outside. They climbed aboard the Xterra and she meticulously adjusted the seat and mirrors. She did a fast left out of the parking lot and immediately got bumpered up behind a transport truck heading north to the Canadian border. She drifted in and out peeking for an opportunity to pass. The Native woman from the trucker’s rig sat huddled in her big coat on a lump of rock on the sunny side of the road.
Ray Tate told Djuna Brown what the skipper had said.
“So, she’s alive? Agatha?”
“Dunno that. She could be dead, someplace else. The truck fire might not have anything to do with Phil Harvey or the Captain. It stands the same: she left with Harvey, he had a gun, she left a note that Harvey was going to do her in, she hasn’t been seen since.”
She saw an opportunity and swung out past the transport. The driver sounded a long plaintive horn that faded behind them like a train whistle. “Last night, Ray, that, ah …” She glanced at him. “I’m not like that, all that grim stuff. This place can give you the blues.”
He touched her shoulder. “Indian country. Home of the blues.”
* * *
The Spout was an hour north of the diner. It was a cluster of two gas stations, one opened and doing business with a single pickup truck gassing up, the other closed and abandoned, a variety store set up in a trailer with chicken screen across the windows, a bar that didn’t open until after 8 p.m., a car dealership with four clunkers parked nose out, each with a cracked windshield and no hubcaps, and an Indian souvenir store with carved wooden beavers looking out the window. Two flags sat lank at the end of flagpoles above the Spout office and two four-by-four Ford Explorers were backed in, jammed close to the front door where a piece of plywood covered a busted window that looked like it had been blasted by shotgun fire.
“Nice. This fucking place is an hour away by telephone,” Ray Tate said. “We should check-in with the guys.”
“Fuck the guys,” Djuna Brown said, slowing only momentarily to look at the detachment. “The guys can go roll it. I’ve met the guys, Ray, and I have to tell you: I found the guys wanting.”
“We might need ’em, Djun’, if Harvey’s up there with a battalion of heavily-armed speed freaks. Pull it over. I’ll go in.”
But she didn’t stop. She went past the detachment and rolled into the open gas station almost touching the bumper of the pickup truck. “Let’s look around a little, first,” she said. “We’ll scope it out, see what’s what.”
She tapped at the horn to move the pickup truck forward. A brown Aboriginal face partially obscured by a curtain of black hair came out the driver’s side window and glared. She tapped again and hung the guy the finger. He exploded, burly and pumped, out of the cab with a black tire iron in his fist.
“Djuna, Jesus Christ, we’re working here.”
“Chill, Ray. These guys are pussy. You can kick his red ass.” She leaned out of her window. “My man here will kick your red ass, buddy, you don’t move that fucking beater.”
The man had a big stomach but was massive through the chest and he held the tire iron loose at his side and seemed to be timing his steps into a windup. He bobbed his head sideways around the driver’s window at the driver. “Da June Ah, my girl.”
“Buck, I told you, move it, right?”
He grabbed his crotch. “Move this world, girl, cause it’s moving for you.” He was laughing and came up on the driver’s side. He looked insanely happy. “You back? You going to bring law and order to Dodge? Run the bad guys out of town?”
“Absolutely, Buck.”
He shook her hand through the window and seemed reluctant to let go of it. “You back, really, you going to come back?”
Djuna Brown was radiant. She introduced Ray Tate to Buck, calling him the last honest man. “Just here on a job, Buck. Looking around a little. We’re looking for some guy. Anything going on?”
Buck shook his head. “Nope. Been pretty quiet. Some city folk in their fancy cars, that’s all. Some of them go in the woods for a while, then come out and head home.”
Djuna Brown nodded. “Nature lovers.”
“Maybe some of them. The others?” He gave Ray Tate an empty face. “Heap bad medicine.”
“You see a big black double-cab Ford? Lots of chrome?”
Buck shook his head.
She asked, “A guy, face all burned up with scars?”
“I didn’t see nothing, Da June.” He studied the sky for a few seconds then looked at her. “Didn’t hear nothing.” He seemed to be waiting for something. He said, again, with emphasis, “I didn’t see nothing, I didn’t hear nothing.” He looked at her expectantly and rubbed his nose.
She listened twice to what he was saying. “Smell, Buck. You smell anything?”
“Well, the smell. Maybe up by Passive there’s a smell. Like old eggs. Used to be we’d go in there and hunt and fish, but now there’s signs and an old white devil with a gun. Some fences.” He gave Ray Tate a gapped smile and spoke sonorously, “The ancestors moan. The earth mother, she weeps. You shouldn’t fence in your mother.” He winked.
Ray Tate met his eyes. “I’m hip.”
Djuna Brown nodded. “Passive. Up past or down before?”
“Up past. The smell is bad especially when the grandfather wind blows from the west.”
Ray Tate asked if he knew a bush rat named Paul. “Drives an old pickup.”
“You already been up there, seen that old devil with his gun? So
you know.” He turned to Djuna Brown. “You should come back up here, Da June, you’re closer to us than to them white devils down there.” He smiled again at Ray Tate. “No offence to your man, there.”
“He’s a beatnik, Buck.” She gave him a business card. “My man’s a man of peace to all people.”
With a solemn nod, Buck said to Ray Tate, “Good luck to you with that, sir.”
“Call, Buck, if you need me.” She put her hand on his on the doorframe. “I miss the mornings.”
“The morning says she misses you.” He stepped back, got into his truck, and left the gas station in a rush of engine. Djuna Brown put the Xterra into gear, waved a complex finger sign at Buck’s departing truck, and rolled forward. She gassed it up herself, went inside with the credit card, and came out with an armload of treats.
* * *
She seemed in deep thought as she drove and Ray Tate watched their passage through the cut rock on both sides of the road. There were small stacks of stones on top of the rock cuts, Indian-looking designs. He saw a small shrine at a crossroads with trinkets and some cracked pots arranged in a design around them. There was an abandoned trailer that had undergone scorching fire. Four children, two of them dark brown with black hair and the other two dark but blond, ran down a hillside chasing wobbly tires.
As though talking to herself, Djuna Brown said, “They didn’t care that I was a dyke, even if I wasn’t. They said the mother was a woman, so how bad could it be, to love the mother of the earth? When I did the dawn patrols, after I took the teeth out of my partner, they’d come out in front of their trailers and wave me down, blow smoke onto the truck for my safety. Very mystical stuff, very loving. They’d invite me out on Fridays and Saturdays so the guys from the detachment wouldn’t go too far. All the bad stuff, all the dead children, the dead old folks, the head-ons on the blind curves, none of that moved me like how they accepted me. When I left here, I cried. It was the worst thing they could do to me, transferring me out of the worst place.”
