“You pitiful bastard!” She grabbed his shirt and shook. “If you think I’m moving to L.A. to be some nobody waiting on tables in a Bob’s Big Boy to support a no talent painter like you well you’ve got another thought coming! To think I wasted seven years on you!”
She released him and he fell back into the posies. She grabbed his feet and tugged off his new Italian boots. Duncan lay back in pain and amazement. He slowly sat up. Tiffy kicked his hat across the porch.
“Hey!” Duncan said, overcome with deja vu, “that’s my hat!”
“Screw your hat!” Tiffy screamed. “Screw your painting!” She flung the boots at his face. Duncan caught them. “And screw you!”
She wrenched the boots from his hands, ran into the house, and slammed the door after her. Duncan stood and slapped a dirty cloud from his jeans. He dusted off his hat and straightened the brim. He walked down the drive to the sidewalk. Tiffy’s words bit into his heart like the gravel bit into his bootless feet. He looked back. The front door remained shut and cold. He got in his van and drove to the corner where Danny skulked. He rolled down his window.
“Go on back, Danny,” he said. “We took care of business.”
“You don’t care?”
“Any reason I should?”
“None comes to mind.”
“Go on, then.”
“Well,” Danny said, “see you.”
As Duncan drove away he saw Danny in his rear view mirror, sprinting as best he could back to the Bradshaw house. Duncan stopped at the corner and closed his eyes, afraid to feel anything lest the feelings overwhelm him, until a restless motorist honked behind him. He opened his eyes, took his foot off the brake, and drove slowly back to the Circle D.
Benjamin was waiting on the porch with his toolbox handy beside him when Duncan arrived home. He looked at Duncan’s feet, but said nothing. Duncan fished his old boots from the garbage can by the back porch and put them on. He got two beers from the kitchen and returned to the van. Benjamin had changed into greasy overalls and was already swapping spark plugs. Duncan gave him a beer.
“I take it she’s not going with you,” Benjamin said.
The enormity of Duncan’s loss commenced to demand notice. He took a deep breath and a profound pull off his beer. A lone tear, a clear dew drop condensed on a cold window to his heart, spilled from his eye and ran down his cheek. He brushed the tear away with the back of his hand.
“Doesn’t look like it,” he finally said.
Duncan packed while Benjamin labored on the van. He crammed a suitcase full with jeans, sweaters, and t-shirts. He loaded another with socks, underwear and tennis shoes. He put his toothbrush, toothpaste, and a cake of soap into an overnight bag along with a razor, deodorant, and a bottle of shampoo. He dismantled his easel and put his paints in a case with his pallet and brushes. He packed his stereo and took his sleeping bag down from a shelf in his closet. He packed like a sleepwalker, and when the Volkswagen was full and he stood dazed beside it, he could not remember having loaded it. Benjamin slid out from beneath the van and wiped the grease from his hands with a rag.
“It runs better,” he said. “It still leaks oil, but if you check it every hundred miles or so you’ll be okay.”
“Thanks, buddy.” Duncan felt overpowering afraid and lonesome. “Why don’t you come with me?”
“I still have six days to serve.”
“Right. I forgot.” Duncan kicked dirt. “I’ll write when I get settled.”
Benjamin faltered, then clumsily hugged Duncan. He let go and got in his truck.
“See you, buddy,” he said. Then he was gone.
Duncan walked through his room one last time. He picked up the photograph of himself and Tiffy at the rodeo. For the first time, he saw that she did not really smile. Her lips were turned up, and you could see white teeth and pink gums, but her eyes were distant and cold. Duncan’s smile should have been wide enough for them both. But that was not how it worked. He set the picture face down on the dresser and picked up the earring beside it. He found a pen and a slip of paper and wrote. He left the note on the kitchen table and the earring on top of the note.
Gone to California, the note said, love Duncan.
Half a mile down the road he saw his mother’s Lincoln coming towards him. Woody was piloting, his arm around Fiona and her head against his shoulder. Fiona smiled as she slept and Woody smelled her hair. Neither spied him. Duncan watched the Lincoln in his rear view mirror until it sank behind a hill. Then he fixed his gaze on the road before him and drove on toward California.
Benjamin parked in front of the Lazy Rancher Market right about the time Duncan passed Fiona and Woody. He sat in the Purgatory Truck and listened to a country station on the radio. He rolled a cigarette and let it hang unlit from his mouth. He had not smoked in years, but he found it easier to forsake the actual act than to give up the associated rituals. Through the window he watched Leroy Kern serve a woman. He waited until she left and Leroy Kern was alone. He got out and spit the cigarette onto the asphalt. He adjusted his hat and walked slowly inside.
Leroy Kern, one hand beneath the counter, warily watched Benjamin lift a six-pack of beer out of the cooler. Benjamin selected a turkey with potatoes and gravy frozen dinner from the freezer. Microwavable, the package said. He resolved to one day get himself a microwave. He dropped the beer and the frozen dinner on the counter. Leroy Kern was pale and sweating and his hand remained beneath the counter.
“How much white man?” Benjamin asked.
“I got a gun.”
“And I got a dick. Who do you think has the bigger balls?”
“I ought to . . .”
“Yes, but you won’t.” Benjamin was enjoying this. “Now get off your fat ass and ring me up.”
Leroy Kern looked miserable but he punched the requisite buttons on the register with his free hand.
“That’s eight ninety-five,” he said.
Benjamin laid eight one-dollar bills on the counter. He took a handful of change from his pocket, counted out ninety-five cents, and dropped the coins on the counter a half a foot to the right of Leroy Kern’s outstretched hand. Quarters rolled off the edge and hit the linoleum with a sound like metal raindrops. Benjamin smiled.
“Sorry,” he said. “Now bend over like a good boy and pick those up.”
Leroy Kern pulled the gun. Benjamin knocked his arm aside and boxed him hard in the face. The gun went off and Leroy Kern went down. Glass fragmented in the dairy section as the bullet pierced the cooler and a one-gallon jug of skim milk before coming to rest in a quart carton of low-fat cherry yogurt. The discharge was deafening, and Benjamin’s ears commenced to ring. Leroy Kern shook his head and slowly stood. It was then Benjamin noted that he still held the gun.
“Uh oh,” he said.
Benjamin dove behind the chip display as Leroy Kern fired a second round. The bullet whispered a lethal song beside his ear and a Frito rain fell around him. Leroy Kern jumped the counter with adrenaline assisted agility. He fired again as Benjamin ducked around the magazine rack. A woman opened the door, screamed, and ran out. Leroy Kern chased Benjamin through the narrow aisles, firing a fourth and a fifth time as Benjamin ran through the frozen foods, only to discover he had reached a dead end. He reached into the freezer and grabbed something small and hard and cold. Leroy Kern came around the soap aisle and smiled when he saw Benjamin trapped beside the poultry.
“Say goodbye, red-skin,” Leroy Kern said as he raised his gun.
That’s when Benjamin threw the frozen Cornish game hen.
Back when he and Duncan were growing up and playing ball, Benjamin was the Cheyenne Dodgers’ star pitcher, until he was thrown out of little league for beaning Whitey Carpenter, Danny’s brother, three out of three times at bat. Whitey was two years older than Benjamin and forty pounds heavier, and for no real reason had regularly trounced Benjamin. Benjamin always was deadly accurate, and even at that age he brushed back little leaguers with such skill that he co
uld impart a greasy coat to the ball by running it through the part in the batter’s hair. So no one believed the three bean balls were accidental, and Benjamin’s mother drove him back to the reservation during the bottom of the seventh, and he had not pitched again.
He threw the bird with all his might. It hit Leroy Kern center forehead with a sharp crack. The gun dropped from his hand and clattered to the floor. Leroy Kern’s eyes rolled up into his head. He did not quite fall. Benjamin grabbed the fat man’s shirt and gangster slapped him ten times fast. He let go. Leroy Kern crumpled to the floor. Benjamin picked up the gun, took out the clip, and racked the round from the chamber.
“Drop it, Lonetree!”
Two deputies stood at the end of the soap aisle, pistols drawn and pointing. Benjamin dropped the gun. One deputy holstered his weapon. It was Billy Masterson. Benjamin and Duncan had attended high school with Billy.
“Hey, Billy. About time you got here.” He pointed at Leroy Kern’s unconscious body. “This asshole nearly killed me.”
“Turn around and put your hands behind your back, Ben.”
“Sure, Billy.” He did so, felt cold steel encircle his wrists.
Billy put him in the back seat of a patrol car and belted him in. Two more deputies arrived and went inside. One revived Leroy Kern. Benjamin began to see how this thing looked. The other deputy went behind the counter and took a surveillance videotape out of a VCR. He came out and put the videotape in the trunk of his car.
“Hey, deputy,” Benjamin called out just before Billy Masterson shut the door, “you take good care of that tape!”
They drove him to the county jail where they strip searched him and took his picture and put him in a cell with a drunken rodeo clown. They did not bother taking his fingerprints. They had several copies on file already. Benjamin sighed deeply and sat on one of the cell’s two bunks. The rodeo clown looked up and promptly vomited.
“Ain’t this some shit?” he asked miserably.
“Yup,” Benjamin allowed. “It sure is.”
Three
Duncan topped off his tank in Fort Collins and put in a quart of thirty weight. He stopped at a diner and bought a burger and a coffee. He put another quart in when he reached Denver. He slept beside the van, rose with the sun, gassed up, and bought a case of oil at an auto parts store. He crossed the Rockies that afternoon. He stopped only for food or gas or to put oil in the engine or to relieve biological demands. He was a driving fool. He would have driven non-stop, but the bus blew a tire at four a.m., and Duncan pulled off the road in the heart of the Mojave Desert. It was then he determined that the Volkswagen had no spare. He wrapped a blanket around his shoulders and slumped against the van. He watched his breath and listened to the wind in his hair. He waved at passing cars but none stopped. He tensed when a coyote yelped nearby. But the moon and stars revealed nothing but Joshua trees so ultimately he relaxed.
Half an hour later, a star close to the horizon became two stars hurtling towards him. Duncan’s head whipped from west to east as a Porsche raced by in a cold rush of desert wind. A coyote stood transfixed in the middle of the highway, its eyes reflected red in the Porsche’s lights. The car jerked left. Duncan heard a dull thud and the coyote sailed into the desert. The Porsche’s wheels lost traction with a nauseating screech. The car spun cartwheels end over end, impacting the asphalt in a flurry of sparks like electric snowflakes, finally coming to rest upside down in the dirt by the side of the road, headlights bright and horn sounding sickly flatulent in the otherwise silent desert night.
It took Duncan a minute to run to the Porsche. He knelt beside the inverted vehicle and looked inside. The driver was twenty-five years old, her head bent in an unlikely angle, her blonde hair wet and red. The steering wheel was broken and the post impaled her chest. He knew she was dead, but she did not look it. She just looked disgusted. He tried both doors but they were jammed shut. The engine caught fire. Duncan backed away. He heard something wail.
Oh my god, he thought, there’s a baby in there.
Duncan saw movement in the back seat. He kicked out a window and pulled something warm and hairy out. He staggered from the burning car and collapsed in the brush beside the road as the gas tank exploded. He looked at the squirming bundle in his arms and groaned. He had risked his life for a bright orange cat.
“One down,” he said to the cat as the Porsche burned like a bonfire among the Joshua trees, “eight more to go.”
“Judging by the skids,” the Highway Patrolman told Duncan after the fire burned itself out, “she must have been going over one-twenty.”
He gave Duncan hot coffee from a thermos and radioed for a tow truck. He measured the skid marks and filled out a report. Then he wrote Duncan a ticket for having two bald tires and a burned out brake light. Two coroners arrived and took the woman, now reduced to a stick figure in charred crepe, out of the smoldering car. Her blond hair was gone and her clothes were melted to her skin. They put her on a gurney and covered her with a white sheet. An arm broke from the corpse and fell to the ground. A coroner tossed it back on her chest beneath the sheet. Duncan threw up.
“You okay, bud?” the man asked.
“Just great,” Duncan replied. “Thanks for asking.”
He picked up the cat and wandered into the desert. Not far off the highway he stumbled across the coyote. One leg was gone and there was blood across its matted fur, but it was alive enough to snap at his leg. Duncan dropped the cat and walked up to the Patrolman’s car.
“The coyote’s out there. It’s hurt pretty bad.”
The Patrolman considered Duncan from behind the mirrors of his glasses. “What do you expect me to do?”
“Take care of it, I guess.”
He followed Duncan into the desert. They stopped beside the coyote and regarded the dying animal. The Patrolman was not much older than Duncan, though he was bigger in the arms and chest, with a black crew cut and baby fat in his cheeks. He looked like a life size Ken doll in a tan uniform. He sighed and drew his pistol and shot the coyote in the head. He holstered his gun, picked up the cat and handed it to Duncan.
“Consider it taken care of,” he said.
The tow truck dropped Duncan off at a garage in Baker where he bought a retread and a spare. He bought two hamburgers and a chocolate shake at a diner and cat food at a market. He bought a map of Los Angeles and charted a course to Angela Moncini’s office. He reached Los Angeles at dusk. He exited the freeway at Sunset Boulevard when the van began to lurch and sputter. He parked in a lot in front of a mini-mart just as his engine died. He got out, opened the engine hatch, and pulled the dipstick. It burned his hand and he dropped it. He had forgotten to check the oil. He sighed and stared at the engine. But it looked as it should and no amount of staring could make it run again. A small, dark man came out of the mini-mart and tapped Duncan’s shoulder. He was five and a half feet tall, slim, with Hindu skin, a sharp nose, and a lone thin eyebrow across his forehead. He spoke perfect English with an accent that spoke of opium fields in his native Pakistan. He had been a lawyer in Islamabad until his religion made him the target of an extremist group who butchered his wife and five year old son and set fire to his house while he lay bleeding from a gut shot beside the front door he had innocently answered. Once healed, he went straight from hospital to airport to Los Angeles, and had never looked back.
“Excuse me,” he admonished, “you cannot park here if you are not patronizing my store.”
“My girl dumped me,” Duncan said. He was not making sense but he found it difficult to care. “My van just died, I have no place to stay, and I really need a beer. Can you understand that?”
The small man nodded and smiled. His teeth were bright and clean and a gold cap sparkled to the left of his incisor.
“My name is Assan, my friend. I will help you.”
He led Duncan to a stairway behind his mini-mart. A rag pile lay beneath the steps. It moved and Duncan realized the rags contained a human. Assan led him up
the stairs. At either end of a dark hallway lay two doors. A pipe crossed the hallway at head level. Assan walked under it but Duncan had to duck. Assan threw open the door on the left.
“Your new home, my friend.”
The room was half the size of the store below, with a small kitchen and a bathroom beside it. The floor was dirty hardwood and the walls peeling gray. A couch sat by a wall, a rip in its red vinyl cushion revealing foam the color of Assan’s skin. An old typewriter sat atop an older metal desk. Two lights hung by rusty chains from a water-stained ceiling. It was a dingy room that smelled of dust and mildew. Assan had tried to rent the studio at two fifty a month, with no luck because of the noise from the bar across the street. But what Duncan noticed were the windows facing east, with all the morning sun he could want. He looked out. Across four traffic lanes and next to a hardware store stood the Hollywood Bar and Grill. There were no windows in front, just a steel door set in a dirty, brick wall and the name spelled out in blue and red neon. Three Harleys were parked in front between a BMW and a Toyota truck. Rock music drifted from the door as three men sporting leather and long hair emerged from the bar. They got on the Harleys and thundered away.
“For you, my friend,” Assan said, “three hundred dollars a month.”
Duncan sighed. It was not much, but it was his only prospect, and the windows and open space appealed to him. Plus his van was dead and he had nowhere to go and no way to get there.
“I’ll take it.”
“Very good. But no pets.”
“Sure,” Duncan said. “No, wait a minute. I have a cat.”
“One cat then. But no dogs. Dogs are very messy.”
“They’re not nearly as bad as horses.”
“No horses!”
“I was kidding.”
“Horses are messy. Cats are clean. Have you ever given a cat a bath?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“It is not necessary. They clean themselves.”
Duncan Delaney and the Cadillac of Doom Page 3
