The Mortal Nuts

by Pete Hautman

  Tommy nodded and waved his cigar. They stood for a few moments in silence, surveying the crowd.

  “Look at that pair,” Axel said.

  The two girls were walking, laughing, eating Pronto Pups and drinking Orange Treets. Both were wearing jeans that had been carefully ripped, shredded, and safety-pinned to dramatic effect. They were wearing thin tank tops, one pink and the other yellow. The one in yellow was wearing a Minnesota Twins baseball cap with a fuzzy green plastic butterfly pinned to the front.

  “Easter eggs,” said Tommy.

  “What?”

  “Like four Easter eggs. That’s why all the old cooch shows folded up. Who needs ’em, you got that young stuff struttin’ around for free?”

  Axel licked his upper lip and nodded. “I wonder how they get past their mothers that way. I wouldn’t let my kid go out like that.”

  “You ain’t got a kid.”

  Axel raised his eyebrows. “Now, how the hell do you know that? I might have one someplace.”

  Tommy shrugged. “You know what she’s wearing today?”

  Axel frowned. The thought was doubly disturbing: that he might have a daughter and that she might be half dressed in public. He shook it off. Sophie and Kirsten were starting to get busy. If Carmen didn’t show up soon, he would have to get in there and help them.

  “How’s your help this year?” Tommy ashed his cigar.

  “Not bad. Only one major battle so far.”

  “Yeah, I saw that one. Heard it from way over here.” Tommy chewed his cigar, spat, then said, “You know the old one is H.O.’ing on you.”

  Axel looked down at Tommy, his cheeks slack.

  “I seen her show up this morning with a sack of grocery store tortillas,” Tommy elaborated.

  Axel said, “So? What makes you think she’s holding out?”

  Tommy rolled his cigar in his mouth. “I know when I’m getting ripped on account of I keep a count of the donut bags. I know how many bags I got at the start of the day and how many I got at the end, and I just match up the cash and the bags, and if it don’t come out I know I’m getting ripped. Now, I’m guessin’ you do something like that with tortillas, right?”

  “It’s only approximate.”

  “But it gives you an idea, right? You have ’em give you a tortilla count so you know about how much money you’re supposed to have, right? So I’m wondering, this morning I see the old broad—”

  “Her name’s Sophie.”

  “Yeah, Sophie. I ask myself, why’s she bringing in grocery store tortillas?”

  Axel nodded sadly. He didn’t want to know this stuff. He trusted Sophie. Carmen, he’d have believed anything. But not Sophie. Maybe she was H.O.’ing. Maybe not. Either

  way, he was inclined to ignore the situation, as long as she didn’t take too much.

  As if reading his thoughts, Tommy said, “Look, you want to let her cop a piece, that’s your business. I’m just telling you.”

  “Okay, you told me.”

  “Also,” Tommy continued, “long as I’m telling you stuff you don’t want to know, that little Carmen has a boyfriend she probably don’t want you to know about.”

  “What?” This was new. Carmen had a boyfriend? The thought made his stomach drop an inch.

  “Yeah. A punk kid, followed me on my cash run yesterday like I’m some jerk don’t know any better than to get rolled, like I ain’t been doing this my whole goddamn life.” Tommy sucked furiously at his cigar, his cheeks flaming with the memory. “I’m making my run, and I noticed this bald- headed kid following me—walking right behind me like I’m deaf, dumb, and blind. I’m taking my usual shortcut.” He drew a line in the air with his cigar. “I got about six thousand bucks with me and this weird-lookin’ kid on my ass. So I stop, and he waves one a them yardsticks in my face and says, ‘How you doing?’” Tommy dropped his cigar and ground it into the grass with the tip of a cowboy boot. “So I grab the stick and I give the son-of-a-bitch a little nut massage.”

  “Just like that?” Axel was impressed.

  “Went down like a sack a mix. I got his stick hanging over in my joint there. One a those canes they sell, you know, got markings on it like a yardstick.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He just laid right down.”

  “I mean, what did he do that you hit him for?”

  “He was up to no good. I could tell, the way he was watching me. Watching me pull the money out of the tills. And I seen him with Carmen, sitting with her.”

  “Jesus, you just hit him? Did you think about… what if he was just going to ask you where’s the bathroom or something?”

  Tommy grinned. “Probably that’s exactly what he was going to do. He wasn’t actually going to try to roll me, not in the middle of the day like that. But he was thinking about it, thinking how he could do it later on. I figured I could save us both some trouble. You shoulda seen him go down. Now there’s one more son-of-a-bitch knows not to mess with Tommy Fabian.”

  Axel blew out his cheeks and pushed back a thin strand of hair. “You say he’s bald?”

  “Like he shaves his head. Creepy-looking.”

  “You saw him with Carmen?”

  “Hand on her ass and everything. You watch yourself, Ax. Those two are cookin’ up somethin’, and it don’t smell like frijoles.”

  “What does the kid look like?”

  “Like a bald monkey. He’s got this flat face. Used to have these rings in his eyebrow. I even got myself a little souvenir.” He held up his right hand, showing off the two gold rings rattling loose on his middle finger.

  Axel said, “Oh.” He felt sick.

  ##

  Chapter 16

  Carmen set two twenty-dollar bills on the counter, hit the bell with her fist, then went to the coffeemaker and filled two paper cups with “complimentary coffee.” Bill Quist, yawning, near the end of his shift, came out from the office, saw the money, then saw Carmen, then smiled broadly.

  “Why, thank you, darling. I was starting to wonder about you.”

  Carmen added three packets of sugar to each of the coffees. “I told you I was gonna pay you,” she said.

  “That you did.”

  Carmen started toward the door, stopped, and turned back to Quist. “I almost forgot. Axel just called and asked me to bring him his eyedrops. He said you had a key to his room I could use.”

  Quist tipped his head to the side like a robin listening for a worm. “Say what?”

  “I need a key to get in Axel’s room.”

  “Mr. S. didn’t say nothing to me about that.”

  Carmen set the coffees back on the counter, reached in her pocket, and pulled out a handful of bills. She counted out three more twenties. “How about I pay you a few days in advance. Also, I’m gonna need another key for my room.”

  “I could get in big trouble.”

  Carmen sipped one of her coffees, waiting.

  “You just gonna go in and get something for Mr. S.?”

  Carmen nodded.

  Quist swallowed, looking at the money. “I think I need a little more deposit.” He cleared his throat. “I mean, if you don’t want me to bother Mr. S. about it.”

  Carmen said, “I’ll see what I can do. But I need the keys right now. Axel doesn’t get his eyedrops, we’re both gonna be in deep shit.”

  The Coca-Cola crates were stacked against the wall just like she had described. Dean lifted one down from the top row and looked inside. It was full of boxer shorts. He grinned and looked at Carmen, who was standing in the doorway watching the parking lot. She looked scared.

  “What are you worried about?”

  “You don’t know Axel,” she said. “You never seen him get pissed. He finds out we were in his stuff, he’s gonna be pretty mad.”

  “Relax, Carmen. You never seen me get mad, either.” Dean thought about Mickey, something he hadn’t done for more than twenty-four hours. He couldn’t remember what she had done to make him mad. The memory, three days o
ld, had grown fuzzy. He brought another crate down and set it on the bed. It contained several pressed and folded white shirts. This guy is strange, he thought.

  “Why don’t you just look through the sides of them,” Carmen said. “He keeps the ones with the coffee cans on the bottom row. You can look through the sides of the crates and see the coffee cans.”

  Dean got down on his hands and knees and examined the bottom row of crates. Two of them, the two on the end, contained red coffee cans. Dean could feel his heart start up. He stood and lifted another crate off the top.

  “He’s gonna know we were here. He’ll know his crates are all mixed up.”

  Dean ignored her and continued to dismantle the wall of red plastic crates. When he reached the bottom layer, he lifted one of the red cans. There were ten of them. He dug his nails under the edge of the plastic lid and lifted it away.

  The can was jammed full of black fabric. He grabbed a fold and pulled, extracting a pair of black nylon calf-length men’s stockings. He shook the contents of the can out onto the bed. The can was full of identical pairs of stockings. Dean looked at Carmen, puzzled. Carmen gaped at the stockings with an expression of utter incomprehension. Dean grabbed another can and opened it. It too was filled with black nylon calf-length men’s stockings. They were held together with the original plastic hanger and still had the size and fiber content stickers: 100% nylon, fits sizes 10-13.

  “Those are the kind of socks he likes,” she said. “He must’ve found a sale.”

  The other coffee cans were different. They contained, in order of discovery, nine three-packs of cheap ballpoint pens, several dozen Hav-a-Hank handkerchiefs, and six new decks of Bicycle brand poker-size playing cards. Three of the cans contained fourteen pairs of new white cotton boxer shorts. One held a dried-out and yellowed set of dentures, and strangest of all, the last can was half full of ground coffee.

  By the time he discovered the coffee, Dean had grown a grim little smile. He walked around the bed, stood in front of Carmen, circled her neck with his hands, and gently massaged her throat with his thumbs. She didn’t look so attractive to him now. She looked like any other stupid bitch. “Carmen,” he said, “I am beyond shock.”

  “It was there,” Carmen said, her face gone white.

  “Sure it was.”

  She shook her head. “I have to get to work. We have to put everything back like we found it.”

  “Tell me something—do you like me?”

  Carmen nodded, feeling his thumbs on either side of her Adam’s apple.

  Dean held her for another five seconds, then let go and began repacking and closing the coffee cans. “You think he put it in a bank?”

  “Axel doesn’t like banks. But I don’t know. I never know what Axel will do.” She took the prescription bottle from her purse, tapped out three blue Valiums, swallowed them dry, then watched Dean reassemble the wall of Coke crates. “What are you gonna do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “You just came here to get Axel’s money, didn’t you?”

  Dean paused and stared back at her. He hadn’t thought that was why he came, but now he wasn’t sure. He said, “If I’d a known that you were lying to me about the money, I might not’ve liked you enough to drive all the way up here to see you.”

  Carmen thought about that. “I wasn’t lying,” she said.

  Dean said, “Hey …” He pulled a grease-spotted, khaki- colored canvas bag out of one of the crates and tugged open the drawstring top. Reaching into the sack, he grinned and pulled out something wrapped in an oily rag, unwrapped it to reveal a .45-caliber pistol and a loaded clip. He popped the clip into the handle and pointed the old army weapon at Carmen’s face.

  “Bang,” he said.

  Carmen rolled her eyes and waited for the Valiums to kick in.

  After helping the girls with the lunch rush, Axel poured himself a Coke and left the stand, telling them he’d be gone for a while. He wandered down Carnes Avenue, heading toward the midway. He needed the anonymity that came with the clatter and flash of the rides and games. He kept thinking about Tommy and the bald kid, imagining the scene again and again in his mind, remembering the kid he’d met at the Motel 6. It had to be the same one, the bald monkey with the rings in his head.

  He would not be Carmen’s first boyfriend, nor, probably, her last. He knew he would have to get used to it, and he knew he never would. Like it or not, he was beset by a father’s protective fears and a lover’s jealous rage. Carmen would have men, and they would have her. This one, though, this one was bad news. Even if he could not trust his own instincts in these matters, he could certainly trust Tommy’s.

  Axel sipped his Coke and stared up at the Ferris wheel—what Tommy would call a “chump heister”—rising above the entrance to the midway. The worm turns, he thought. Perhaps this bald monkey was a manifestation of his wicked thoughts. He imagined what Sam O’Gara would say to that, and he laughed.

  Axel liked to walk the midway, a clattering, roaring, flashing, spinning quarter mile of rides, games, and sideshows that dominated the west end of the fairgrounds. He liked the noise and the action, and he liked to stand and watch the carnies work the tip, proving again and again that beneath the tight-lipped, practical exterior of the typical Minnesotan there lies yet another compulsive fool. This year, the suckers were being lured into tossing rings, basketballs, and coins by four-foot-tall Bart Simpson dolls, Inflatable Power Rangers, and Nirvana posters. Axel stopped to watch a clean, athletic-looking young man trying to win a Pink Panther doll for his girlfriend by throwing a highly inflated basketball through an undersize hoop that was farther away than it looked. He watched the kid spend twenty dollars before giving up, shaking his head, embarrassed more by his lack of skill than at his lack of good sense.

  Axel walked to the end of the midway, where Serpentina, the Snake Woman was doing a teaser routine with a reticulated python on a small stage in front of the freak show. The freak show had evolved over the years—now it was called the Cavalcade of Human Oddities. Three-Legged Lonna, the Siamese Twins from Darkest Africa, and Bigfoot, Monster or Mutant? were no longer featured acts. The “freaks” were now performance artists. Serpentina could be any of three women, depending on what time of day it was. The one up there now was wearing thick eyeglasses, her thighs spilling past the edges of her faux-snakeskin leotard. Two of the women who played Serpentina also did duty as Tortura, the Puncture-Proof Girl. The third woman, a gaunt, hollow-eyed blonde, was occasionally featured as Electro, Mistress of the Megawatt. Axel preferred this modern approach. It seemed kinder than the ogling of physical deformities that had gone on a decade or two earlier. Down in the South—Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana—the freak shows were still popular, but up here the fascination with birth defects had given way to other perversions. He had to admit, though, that watching a sword swallower, a contortionist, or a woman who could stand on an electrified plate that made her hair stand on end was not as powerfully evocative as staring at the man with feet swollen to the size of watermelons, or the young girl with an extra leg jutting from her inner thigh.

  He paused at the Dump Bozo joint, watched a trio of small-town football heroes spend ten dollars for the privilege of trying to dump the obnoxious “Bozo” into a tank of water. The carny playing Bozo hurled taunts and insults at the players, driving them into a frenzy. When one of the players hit the target and dropped Bozo into the tank, Bozo would be back on his seat in seconds, spitting water and imprecations back at the ball throwers. It looked like a tough job, making people hate you so much they’d pay to get you wet. Tommy would have been good at it.

  Axel was feeling fine. The buzz and clatter of the midway made him fed sane and normal. And he felt good about what he’d done with his money. He felt he could relax a little now, not be worrying about it all the time. Carmen always had been a little too interested in his money. Dipping into his coffee cans last year, thinking he wouldn’t notice. He’d meant to talk to her about
that but had kept putting it off, thinking about things he had done when he was her age, half a century ago, thinking she would change as she got older.

  Change into what?

  Yesterday, when he’d learned that she’d been blabbing it around, mentioning it to Tommy and who knew who else, he’d finally moved it all to a new, safer location. Now the entire $260,000 rested three feet underground, wrapped in two layers of Hefty bags, beneath his old pickup truck in Sam O’Gara’s backyard. Axel smiled, remembering the way Sam’s supposedly vicious guard hounds, Chester and Fes- tus, had quickly lowered their hackles when presented with a half-dozen Bueno Burritos. The Bueno was a great product—even the dogs knew it. They’d wolfed the burros, then lain in the shade and watched contentedly as Axel dug the hole, dropped in the money, covered it up, and returned the old pickup to its original position. Except for the fact that the dogs were a little fatter, there was no evidence that he’d ever been there. Only he and the hounds would know. The money was safe, for now.

  Axel stared sightlessly across the sea of bobbing faces moving in and out of the midway, drifting comfortably on the familiar current.

  A few minutes after 4:00 P.M., Carmen stepped into the back of the taco stand. She put her purse under the counter but did not remove the mirrored sunglasses she was wearing. Sophie stood at the front counter, waiting for a customer. If she noticed Carmen’s arrival, she gave no sign.

  “You guys been busy?” Carmen asked.

  Sophie jerked her head to the side, like she was shaking a fly off her nose.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Carmen offered after a moment. “Axel didn’t wake me up. I overslept.”

  “Eight hours,” Sophie said.

  “Where’s Axel?”

  “He didn’t say,” Sophie said.

  “Axel’s weird,” said Carmen. “Probably went to sit in his truck and space out.”

  Sophie arched an eyebrow and regarded her daughter. “He’s not so weird.”

  “Yes he is. He’s one of the weirdest guys I ever knew.”