by Susan Sey
He pulled up to the state highway intersection and checked traffic with more than his usual care. Fully loaded logging trucks were as common as minivans up here and his tuna can needed a good while to achieve cruising altitude.
“Interesting.”
“You’ve been there one day, Eli,” Ben said, all bluff and hearty. “How much trouble could you possibly have gotten into?”
Trouble was an old song — Eli’s theme song, actually — sung in the key of boys will be boys. But lately his family had started injecting it with this determined note of hope, like maybe if they sang it loud enough and long enough, Eli would suddenly remember the mischievous kid he’d been. A troublemaker who’d always managed to land just on the right side of true trouble.
“I stopped in town for a sandwich on my way in,” Eli said obligingly. “Got my face near slapped off my head.”
Ben’s laugh was loud and relieved. “I don’t even want to know. But you always did like the ladies.”
Gerte was fifty if she was a day — closer to sixty if Eli was any judge — and he didn’t particularly like her. “Did my first supervised removal, too.”
“That was quick.”
“There was a snake in my toilet.”
Ben paused. “I thought that only happened on the internet.”
“Me, too. Turns out it’s a thing.”
“Who knew?”
“Not me. Willa Zinc did, though, so good on her.”
“Zinc Pest Control is a girl?”
“I believe they like to be called women these days, Uncle Ben.”
“Stuff it, son.”
Eli chuckled. That was the Ben he’d grown up worshipping. A cigar-chewing, scabby-knuckled hotshot who didn’t care how you were plumbed so long as you got the job done. A man who now rode a desk with the same blunt authority he’d once used to run an elite crew of wild land firefighters. A crew that would’ve followed Ben straight into hell, which was essentially what wild land firefighters did.
Once upon a time, Eli had wanted nothing more than to grow up to be Ben. To have his own crew that would follow him to hell and back.
He’d gotten that wish. Half of it, anyway. He’d gotten a crew, all right, and they’d followed him into hell. But only Eli had come back.
Shame gripped him by the throat and his chuckle died. He knew he should say something. Ben was waiting and it was his turn to talk but he couldn’t squeeze any words past the guilt and pain. Ben finally took pity on him.
“So what about the fire potential up there? Did you talk to that bastard O’Malley yet?”
Eli cleared away the old guilt, focused on the job. “O’Malley, yeah. And I did. He’s not the proactive sort.”
“Shit.” Ben’s chair creaked and Eli could picture him shoving away from his desk to pace and scowl. “I knew it. When is the Department of Natural Resources going to get on the stick and force that fucker into retirement? How long does Minnesota keep dementia patients on the job?”
“He doesn’t have dementia, Ben.”
“How else do you explain refusing to do any kind of controlled burn for the better part of four decades then?”
Eli didn’t have an answer for that one.
Ben sighed. “How bad is the fuel load?”
“Bad. Like you said, there’ve been no burns up here — controlled or otherwise — for nearly forty years. I probably pulled better than fifteen miles this morning and if the rest of the forest is anything like the little bit I saw today, this place is teed up for a hundred-year burn. And given the fuel load, it’ll burn hot.”
“Too hot?”
“Borderline. Either it happens by itself and under whatever weather conditions fate ponies up, or you plan the burn, pull in resources and pull the trigger when the conditions are optimal.”
“Wait, don’t tell me. O’Malley wants to leave nature to itself. That way when four hundred square miles of forest is burning at six thousand degrees and all the basalt up there is turning back into goddamn lava, he can play the above-my-pay-grade, act-of-God card.”
Eli nearly smiled at that. “He didn’t use those exact words but that was the impression I got, yeah.”
Ben swore with an inventive fluency that had never failed to impress the boy Eli had been. “Convince him otherwise, Eli. We’re supposed to be good neighbors now, the states and the feds. Convince this cowardly asshole to steward the damn environment, or we’ll do it for him and screw neighborly relations.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“Do more.”
“Goodbye, Ben.”
“Later, kid.”
Eli disconnected. Half an hour later, he trundled into Devil’s Kettle proper. It was about three colorful blocks of courageous charm curled up next to the fierce glitter of that vast inland sea the locals called a lake. A great one, to be sure, but still just a lake. That was what you got, Eli mused, when you threw a bunch of French fur trappers and Scandinavian farmers into the local Native American population. They’d name everything with an oddball combination of radical understatement, sly humor and stylish insouciance.
He could actually learn to like it up here.
His stomach rumbled as he parked on the street in front of the Davis Gallery. It was a glass-and-pine building that stretched the entire length of the northern-most block of Main Street, and it glowed with a soft light that made even Eli who knew exactly nothing about art want to investigate. Oh, he’d heard of Diego Davis. Who hadn’t? But he’d never felt any inclination to visit a gallery before. He’d have to swing in sometime.
It was more likely, he had to concede, that he’d be visiting the hot-pink doughnut shop on the north end of the block first. Maybe even today. But today’s hike required more fuel than a bear claw could provide so he locked up his tuna can, hit the sidewalk and headed south. He squinted at the sun, consulted his mental map. Southwest, he amended. The lakeshore ran from the northeast to the southwest, and Main Street followed suit.
The middle block of town started strong with a giant papier mache fish leaping through what Eli assumed was a false second story of the cinderblock building that ran the length of the block. It was Soren Buck’s idea of advertising, and since the guy ran a bait and tackle, it was a good one. Eli had made it a point to skim lightly over the towns and trails he’d visited these past couple years. He didn’t want to know them, and didn’t want them to know him. But even so, he knew where to go if he needed a bucket of night crawlers in Devil’s Kettle and who to ask for them. Which meant Soren Buck knew exactly what he was about.
There was a pretty little gift shop nestled between Buck’s Bait and Tackle and the Wooden Spoon, but Eli skipped all three and aimed for the Devil’s Taproom. It was the last business on the block and while he wasn’t typically a day drinker, he wouldn’t say no to a beer if it came with a cheeseburger.
It was early, just after noon, but maybe he’d get lucky and the place would be open for lunch.
He pushed through a heavy wooden door and stopped dead. Because Willa was there, behind the bar. She was all but glowing with the golden sun pouring in through a generous plate-glass window fronting the bar. It ran over her like a river, picked out reddish strands in that midnight ponytail of hers, spotlit a filthy t-shirt that spoke of an epic battle with…something, and given her line of work, Eli didn’t even want to hazard a guess as to what.
But none of that mattered because what struck Eli was her stillness. It was wrong. This wasn’t her usual stillness. There was nothing of that blessed peace or centered calm in it. This was the frozen caution of a prey animal when a shadow glides by overhead. It wasn’t quite fear but it was something close. He could all but smell it hanging in the air.
A tall man stood with his back to Eli, and he was the opposite of still. He shifted on cheap running shoes, twitched inside clothes so new they still looked creased and stiff. His hair was prison-guard short, a look Eli appreciated and cultivated himself but when you put it together with the twitch and the brand
new clothes it added up to the other side of the coin. Not prison guard. Prisoner.
“Hey, Willa,” he said and moved into the empty bar. He kept himself at the stranger’s back, trusting the guy’s prison instincts to do the heavy lifting for him. Sure enough the guy turned to put Eli in his peripheral. It backed him off Willa a few feet but it also gave Eli a good look at the guy’s face. He was somewhere between fifty and seventy, Eli judged, depending on how hard the miles and the years had been on him. Still a good-looking guy but weathered. Used. But there was something child-like and wounded in those dark eyes that gave him pause. He’d known guys who’d done time and for all sorts of reasons. Some came out hard, some came out mean but they all came out damaged. This guy just looked sad.
But something about him had Willa worried and that couldn’t be an easy thing to do. She knew something Eli didn’t know, clearly, and Eli wouldn’t leave her alone with it.
He nodded to the stranger, propped a dirty boot on the rung of a barstool and dropped an elbow on the bar. It put his fingers within brushing distance of the hunting knife he kept in the side pocket of his cargo pants.
“Hey, Eli,” she said. She snugged her cap down on her head and seemed to gather herself. Whatever he’d smelled on her — worry, caution, unhappiness — she gathered that up, too, and wrapped her cloak of stillness around all of it. “What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
She flicked a glance at the man standing silently at Eli’s side. His eyes were wide and inexplicably wounded, his mouth in a tight line that was the next thing to a flinch. As if he were waiting for Willa to hurt him, not the other way around. As if he’d almost welcome it.
“My family owns this place,” she informed him shortly. “I pull the early shift on Saturdays.”
Eli blinked. Her family owned a bar? And not just a bar but one of Devil’s Kettle’s flagship institutions? He couldn’t digest it. Willa was so alone, so perfectly self-contained. Running a family restaurant was a messy, loud, complicated, twenty-four/seven endeavor, as Eli well knew. He’d grown up in one, hadn’t he? He’d bused tables, done dishes, taken orders, run the bar. He’d helped his mom build something she’d hoped to pass along to him, and the whole time he’d just been waiting for the moment when he could break her heart and follow Uncle Ben into hell.
So he knew exactly what a family business was, how it wrapped you up and held you fast. He hadn’t sensed any of that on Willa. He hadn’t sensed anything on her but that deep, complete aloneness. So he asked the only question that made sense.
“You have family?”
“Not much.” Beneath the brim of that damn cap, her mouth went tight. “Just a brother. You’ve probably met him. Peter Zinc? The Donald Trump of Devil’s Kettle.”
“Haven’t had the pleasure.”
“Lucky you.”
“So it’s just you and Peter?”
“Was.” She tipped her head toward the strange, silent man to Eli’s left, a gesture so slight somebody not used to her stillness might’ve missed it. Eli slid his hand into his pocket to touch the hilt of his knife. “Have you met my dad?”
CHAPTER 8
“YOUR DAD,” ELI said carefully. He didn’t know what the hell was going on, only that something was and it wasn’t anything good. “No, I don’t believe I have.”
“You wouldn’t have,” Willa informed him. “He just got out of prison.”
“I see.”
“He’ll be staying with me until he gets himself squared away.”
“You’re all right with that?”
“He’s not dangerous.” She smiled but it was anything but amused. “You might hear otherwise but people in this town like to talk and they aren’t overly attached to accuracy.”
“I see,” Eli said again. He eyed the man silently watching Willa with all that bewildered pain and tentative hope. He took his hand from his pocket and held it out. “Eli Walker.”
The man cleared his throat, like speaking was a new thing and he was still trying it out. “Brett Zinc,” he said and took Eli’s hand. The guy was easily six-two, if not six-three, with the beefy sort of build that said he’d probably been a football hero once upon a time. But he took Eli’s hand with determined gentleness.
“Good to meet you, Mr. Zinc.” He turned to Willa, who was still standing serenely as a tree in the forest on the other side of the bar. He wondered how she did that. How she pulled it all in and wrapped it all up like that. She was like a black hole, all impenetrable darkness wrapped around the mysteries of the universe. That craving seized him unexpectedly by the throat again, that desire to know her. “Hey, I was wondering, do you do food here? I’m starving to death and I’m afraid of Gerte.”
She considered him. “I was just flushing the tap lines when Brett showed up, so I can’t give you a beer but I could do a burger and fries.”
“Make it a cheeseburger and you can have my firstborn.”
“You have a firstborn?”
“Not yet. It would have to be an IOU. Unless you’re offering?” He leaned into the bar and gave her a roguish twinkle he hadn’t tried since before…well, since before.
She blinked slowly. “No. I’m not.”
“An IOU, then. I’m just racking those up with you, aren’t I?”
She gazed at him impassively. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“I disagree. Especially if there’s a cheeseburger in the offing.”
“I’ll go start the grill. It’ll be a few minutes.”
“That’s fine. I’ll sit here and chat with your dad.” He took a stool and Willa disappeared into the kitchen. He nudged another stool with one boot and cocked a brow at Brett. “Seat?”
Willa’s dad eyed the stool with a resigned sigh. “Spent a lot of time on one of those in my misspent youth.”
“Too much time?”
“Yeah.” He glanced at the kitchen door. “She suffered for it.” His mouth tightened. “A lot of people did.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Couldn’t be sorrier than I am.” He shook his head. “Not that sorry’s worth a damn. I was always sorry once I sobered up. Then one day I sobered up in jail and learned I’d near killed a man.” He gave a weary chuckle. “To this day, I don’t even know what for. We were both black-out drunk but I woke up in a jail cell with a hangover for the ages. He woke up in the ICU with a brain bleed. I got ten years for it, served eight. He got a life sentence, though, didn’t he?”
“Sounds that way.”
Brett sank onto the stool finally, eased into it like it was an old friend, a perfectly broken in pair of jeans. “I haven’t had a drink in over eight years but God help me, when I sit here I can almost feel the glass in my hand.”
“The worst habits are the hardest to break.” Eli rose and walked behind the bar. Found the coffee pot he’d smelled and poured them both a cup. “Start by changing the whiskey glass to a coffee mug. Cream? Sugar?”
“Never did acquire a taste for coffee.”
Eli ripped the tops off at least five sugar packets and dumped them in. Found creamer in the little under-bar fridge, added a generous stream of that, too. “Acquire it now.”
Brett eyed him. “You look comfortable behind a bar.”
“I am.” Eli slid the coffee Brett’s way.
“I am, too. Or was.” Brett lifted the coffee, sipped cautiously at it. “That’s not bad.”
“My barista sister would weep bitter tears over the abomination I just served you.” He lifted his own coffee, black as night, for a taste of his own. Angels sang in his mouth and he found himself smiling. “She might actually like your daughter, though.”
“Do you?”
Eli set down his coffee and met Brett’s eyes. They were dark and cool and watchful. “You asking about my intentions, Mr. Zinc?”
“You’ve been here long enough to piss off Gerte, so longer than five minutes, but not long enough to know if we serve food or to meet the guy who
runs this place day to day, so probably not quite ten minutes. And yet you’re awfully comfortable behind my bar, and awfully friendly with my girl. And she’s not the friendly sort.”
“She isn’t, no.”
“I know I don’t have the right to ask. Gave it up years ago, way before I woke up in that jail cell.” Brett met his eyes steadily, and there was regret in them but also grim determination. “But I’m asking anyway.”
“I don’t have any intentions toward Willa, Mr. Zinc. I hardly even know her.”
Those dark eyes were shrewd. “But you want to.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Hell if I know. She doesn’t want me to.”
“Don’t take it personal.”
Eli laughed at that. “Wasn’t planning to.”
“Plan to be kind to her, then. Plan to treat her like she’s worth something.”
“She is. I don’t know much but I know that much.”
“You’d better. I learned some shit in prison.”
Eli laughed again. It was a goddamn record. “Do I want to know what kind of shit?”
“Pray you don’t find out.” But he smiled with the faded charm of a guy who’d stopped drinking but had bartender in his bones.
Eli propped his elbow on the counter as the blessed scent of hot grease wafted in from the kitchen. “So Willa says you’re staying with her until you get squared away?”
“Yeah.” Brett sipped cautiously at the coffee again. “I could get used to that,” he decided and went back for another sip. “According to my parole officer, I’ll be squared away when I have a permanent address and gainful employment.”
“What kind of work are you looking to do?”
“Any kind I can get hired for.” He gazed into his coffee cup. “Keeping a bar’s the only thing I was ever any good at, the only thing I know how to do. But it’s not anything I’m looking to do again. I’m not going backward, Eli. Not ever. I wasted too much of my life looking at this place through the bottom of a whiskey glass. And after the last eight years? I don’t even want to be inside four walls again if I can help it.”
