“Now to business, to selling heifers,” he said in my ear. “Not much of a living from telling the future, anymore. Not here.”
“So don’t let Weasel get away,” I whispered back, “your perfect customer.”
“Oh, sure, and this is news,” he said, laughing. “You can write for me the headline.”
Dean reached us first.
“Listen, Izzy,” he confided, “you want to pawn off a cow on Weasel, it’s okay by me. Just don’t let him trade it for any of those magic beans.”
Izzy, again the perfect audience, threw back his head and cackled magnificently.
“So you have an admirer,” said Dean as we walked away and left Weasel to his fate. “I’ve never seen Izzy talk to anyone that long without some sorry-ass livestock changing hands.”
The rising heat gave the cowshit’s ammonia a stinging intensity. The ground seemed to shimmer, and I could hear cicadas starting up in the distance.
“He wasn’t trying to sell me anything. He was . . . I dunno. I think I give off some kind of orphan vibe. Older guys get all worried about me the moment they’re introduced. At least the nice ones.”
He leaned close and put his mouth to my ear. “I think it’s because you make them all flustered,” he whispered.
His breath tickled, and I laughed. “He told my fortune.”
“And how’d you do?”
“Um, actually? I have no clue,” I said. “Let’s go find Johnston.”
“You even know what you want to ask him?”
“Not the least glimmer of an idea,” I said. I didn’t expect anything more than what I’d already read in the paper, and given the man’s health, maybe not even that much.
We walked through a giant doorway and into the cool darkness of the barn.
My eyes started to water. “Couldn’t there be at least a couple of horses?” I asked. “Their shit smells better.”
“Better than this?” He sucked in a great lungful of air through his nose, threw his arms wide. “This is perfect. And horses are so goddamn stupid.”
“Sure, like cows are prize-winning Dante scholars. Darling I love you but give me Park Avenue.”
“Uppity,” he said, grinning and flicking a finger against the side of my neck.
“Uppity your damn self,” I said, batting his hand away.
We came out from the low passageway between cow pens, into a high-ceilinged room where the pre-auction scrutiny was under way. People were milling around, and in a far corner I could see the glint of a wheelchair, a wiry old man hunched down in it.
His knees were drawn up, the stiff cuffs of his new overalls folded back, glossy and high-laced workboots beneath resting on the steel paddles of the chair’s footrests. I always worried about the feet of people in wheelchairs, afraid they might fall off those little ledges and drag without anyone noticing. I felt a sudden bolt of shame for being young, for being able to walk.
Beside him stood a broad woman with hair in tight, short, blue-white curls. She wore glasses, a flowered smock, and dark stretch pants, and had one hand firmly on a chair-grip beside his tilted head. She looked determined.
“There’s your man,” said Dean. “Go easy.”
CHAPTER 10
Dean didn’t have to warn me to go easy. It was all I could do to take another step into the barn. No need to worry that I’d storm over and rudely buttonhole a crippled old man about a decades-old double murder he’d been unfortunate enough to stumble upon—right on the very morning he was going to have to watch his life’s work broken up and carted off by shamefaced neighbors.
“It’s sad,” I said.
“I bet the boys are just as happy to see it go,” answered Dean. “Make a nice clean escape to a house on a cul-de-sac, shiny Buick LeSabre out front. No cows to milk at four a.m. and a desk job where you don’t have to wash off the stink at the end of the day.”
“That what you want?” I asked.
“I can just see trying to talk my fancy wife into a Buick.”
I smiled. “I don’t think she’d go for that,” I said. “But isn’t it kind of hard on the grandfather, giving up the place?”
“Old Johnston?” Dean turned to look me full in the face. He knew me too well. “What’s up—you want to blow this off?”
“It just seems like a harsh time to be going after information.”
“Look, you want to drop the whole thing, I won’t begrudge you dragging me out here. But if you’re going to pursue it, do you think you’ll ever have a better excuse to get a word with the guy?”
Of course not. The question was whether I had the guts to do it at all and the brains to finish it right if I started.
But then I pictured the Rose Girls themselves. How vibrant they’d looked in the last pictures taken of them alive. How they’d looked dead.
You gonna take the hardest road. Only thing you can do.
“No, you’re right,” I said. “I can’t drop it.”
“Well then, you’re burnin’ daylight.” He took my hand and led me into the room.
My stomach shrank to an acid fist. “Tell me about the rabbits, George.”
That made him laugh. “You are the rabbit, Bunny.”
As we drew closer to Johnston and daughter, I saw a clear, thin oxygen line snaking across his face, with little side-segments of plastic spurting enriched air up each nostril. I could hear the rattle and whistle of his ruined lungs. He didn’t look at Dean, just stared at me.
Dean introduced the daughter, Mrs. Ulene, and they started to chat. She didn’t bother including her father.
Johnston was still staring at me. I stared back. He looked mean as a cornered ferret.
“What you want?” he finally wheezed at me.
“I wanted to ask you about the Rose Girls,” I said.
“Can’t hear you,” he said, then coughed for a minute. “Get down.” He pointed to the ground next to his left foot with a shaky hand. I squatted, rocked back on my heels.
“I wasn’t sure you could still talk,” I said.
“Dying,” he said. “Not stupid.”
“The Rose Girls,” I said. “That’s who I want to ask you about.”
“Outside.”
“You found them outside . . .” I coaxed.
He squinted his eyes shut, impatient, then flapped his hand toward the doors of the barn. “Take me.”
His eyes opened again. He reached a claw toward his daughter’s hand, pointing at me when she turned to look. “Outside,” he said.
“Now isn’t that nice,” said Mrs. Ulene. “Dad doesn’t like just anybody. Why sure, honey, you can take him outside for a while.”
She fitted a too-large hat on his head, a stiff-brimmed Agway gimme cap.
I got behind his chair and grasped the warm black rubber handgrips. It rolled along pretty well, but then Johnston couldn’t have weighed more than about ninety pounds. It was impossible to reconcile him with the bulk of his daughter.
The minute we cleared the barn doors and got around the side of the building, he scraped my hand with his yellow nails. I put the brake on the chair and hunkered down next to him.
“Smoke,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Get me one.”
“A cigarette?”
He nodded, looking fierce.
“You’ll blow up,” I said. “The oxygen.”
“Haven’t yet,” he said, and smiled, revealing too-perfect false teeth.
Where the hell would I find a cigarette? I looked around the yard. Weasel.
“Get a light,” Johnston said. “Don’t forget.”
I found Weasel on the other side of the barn, and he looked at me funny, but finally parted with a Marlboro and a match. I trotted back around to Johnston, put the butt in his mouth, and dragged the match along the barn’s cement foundation. He had barely enough breath to suck the thing to life as I held the flame to its tip, but his eyes narrowed with bliss as he gummed it and puffed down a drag.
“Be
tter,” he said.
I was certain a spark was going to rush up his tubes and into the little tank of pure oxygen. Serve me right.
“What you want to know?” he asked. The nicotine seemed to ease him a little. He could say more words at once.
“You found them,” I said, and he nodded. “What do you remember about it? Maybe, you know, something you didn’t think to tell the police right off?”
“You family?” he asked.
“No,” I said, at least not the girls’.
“So, what then, Lois Lane?”
“Sure,” I said. “Lois Lane. What the hell.”
He coughed up a little laugh, took another drag. I waited.
“Haven’t seen too good for a long time,” he said. “Can’t tell you if I saw something right, even back then.”
“You seem pretty sharp to me. I mean, especially for a guy who’s had a stroke.”
“Didn’t have no stroke.”
“And here you’ve got everyone convinced you don’t know what day it is. Even Fleischmann.”
“That Jew?” he said. “Why’s it matter?”
“Seems like it matters to you.”
“How’s that?” he said.
“Why else you talking to me?” I said.
“Wanted a smoke.”
“Why else you hinting you know something?” I asked.
“Want another after this one.”
“Might have to tell me something to get it, then.”
“Figured as much,” he said, and hacked-laughed again. “Saw a man.”
“That morning?”
“Nope. Near dark that same day. I come back up there by foot with a jar . . .” The old man paled, breath whistling. He closed his mouth and his eyes and sucked the straight oxygen into his nose until a little color came back into his cheeks.
“A jar?” I asked, when it looked like he might live.
“Holy water,” he wheezed, “from that Catholic church up West Yates. Never . . . been in one before. Methodist.”
This made perfect sense to me. How could he not have wanted to purify the ground from which his family’s sustenance came? Grape juice in little paper cups might be fine for his spare, demystified Wesleyan communion of a Sunday. Removing the taint of that much blood and malice called for deeper, older measures.
“And you’re, what—coming through the woods?” I asked.
He nodded, settling his head back. Didn’t embellish.
“So,” I went on, “you see some guy—”
Another nod.
“Recognize him?”
Nothing.
Johnston closed his eyes.
“Maybe a cop, following up?”
I didn’t want to say “soldier,” not unless he brought it up first. “Like if he was in some kind of uniform—”
His eyelids moved, just a bit of twitch.
“Dressed regular,” he said, a little spacey, like he was actually picturing it.
Not a rookie cop, then. Not a soldier, either—or at least not one who could risk anybody knowing it.
“What’s he look like?” I asked.
“Dark hair. Brush cut,” said Johnston, wheezing a little.
“Big guy?”
The cigarette was burning down between his fingers, ash an inch long. “Can’t see him any too clear. Gettin’ on towards night.”
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
“Looking for something.”
“Where?”
“In the woods, behind where them girls was, then out front in the furrows. Cursing a blue streak.”
He snorted more oxygen.
“What was he looking for?” I asked.
He opened his eyes, smirking up at me.
The cigarette’s spent length of ash quivered and fell across his fingers, revealing a fresh hot point of orange. Johnston raised the receiving end to his mouth and sucked hard, then tossed it at my feet.
He’d smoked down far enough to singe the filter’s dappled golden-brown paper.
“Step on that.”
I mashed it under the ball of my foot, grinding back and forth until there was nothing left but a mat of shreds.
“Now pick your mess up,” he said.
I didn’t.
“Scared it’s gonna bite? G’wan . . .”
I raised my eyes to his. “Deal’s a deal. You got your smokes, now answer the question.”
He smirked. Made like he was locking his mouth with some invisible key, which he then pretended to flick at me.
“Mr. Johnston? You sure you want to be pissing me off, here?”
Old man hadn’t expected that. Liked it even less.
I crossed my arms. Waited.
He started wheezing a little harder.
I looked around. Took my time inspecting the whole yard, inch by inch, like we had all day.
“People’re starting to head for the barn,” I said. “Bet it’ll get kind of loud, once things are under way. Hard to get someone’s attention, from out here.”
Johnston closed his mouth, lifted a hand to push the tube tighter against his nose.
“You’re not sounding any too good, there, sir. Probably shouldn’t smoke, you don’t mind my saying. . . .”
He stared at me. Didn’t want to blink.
“Anything I can do?” I asked, voice sweet with concern.
He shook his head.
I eyed the fat black knob on his oxygen tank. “Wouldn’t be any trouble, and your daughter must have her hands full.”
“No need,” he said. Kind of a whisper.
“Okay, then. . . . You need help, though, just say the word.”
Johnston was inhaling with vigor, now: quick hard draws off his plastic lifeline.
He watched me, I watched people amble inside.
Nobody was in a rush, yet. Just ones and twos, looking for shade, maybe, as the sun picked up steam.
After a while, I glanced back at him. “Your color’s a little better,” I said.
He nodded, wary.
I looked at the barn. “Want me to run inside, see if they’re starting? Happy to, unless you’d rather just chat. . . .”
“Chatting suits me fine.”
“Well then.” I smiled at him. “Guess when we left off, I was asking whether you knew what that guy was looking for.”
Johnston let go of the tube and lowered that hand to his lap, considering. “Might’ve been after them dog tags.”
I flinched, and he shot me this mean-edged flicker of smile.
“What,” he said, “you think your father-in-law didn’t trot over and squawk, soon as he churned ’em up? Bent my ear about you, too, minute you come upstate.”
So the guy’d strung me along like a champ this whole time, and made me cadge butts for the honor.
From Weasel, goddamnit.
“Called you a ‘buxom heifer,’ Cal did,” he went on, squinting to make a closer inspection. “Guess that’s true enough.”
Had there been a cliff handy, I would’ve whistled “Farmer in the Dell” and shoved him over, chair and all.
“Now run-go-fetch-me another cigarette,” he said.
He flapped a claw to shoo me along.
I stomped off, muttering “prick” under my breath until I nearly plowed into Fleischmann.
“No,” he said, looking past me to Johnston, “I’d call him a mensch.”
The way he leaned on the word made it no compliment.
“More like mamzer,” I said.
“So, the gezinta shiksa knows the Yiddish for ‘bastard.’”
“The gezinta shiksa is ticked.”
He grinned. “Go on inside, then. Cool off a little.”
“Think Johnston’s daughter’d notice that I came back alone?”
“Let me bring him,” he said. “You go find your nice husband.”
“A generous offer, Mr. Fleischmann.”
“It would be my pleasure, Mrs. Bauer,” he said.
“You’re very kind to say so.”
“Not at all,” he said. “In fact I am being quite sincere. Would you like to know why?”
“Yes indeed.”
He leaned closer, dropping his voice. “Because in about ten minutes, Johnston will lose everything. And for that he should have a front-row seat, the old shit.”
I wondered aloud over dinner who’d been wandering around Johnston’s field that long-ago night.
Dean just patted me on the head and said he was sure I’d figure it out. He had a dreamy look, and when I asked him what was on his mind he said he thought he might have worked out the enduring conundrum of how to construct his railgrinder linkage at long last.
“Trapezoids,” he said, and I knew I was on my own for the rest of the night.
I cleared the table, and he went to work at our big desk in the front room, X-Acto-blading up more minuscule pieces of balsa wood with Teutonic precision and gluing them to odd shapes of cardboard. If I’d tried anything like that, I would have ended up wearing it all in my hair for the next week, but I knew he’d happily putter with it for hours, and that he should be allowed to try out his theory in peace, his last night before he was back in the crew car.
Later I lay awake in the dark, worried that I’d revealed too much without knowing enough, that I’d talked to too many people. Izzy, Johnston, Kenny . . . even Weasel, for God’s sake.
I hadn’t made measurable progress, out at Johnston’s, but something in the pit of my belly told me I’d caused a tiny shift, had dislodged the first grain of sand in some Rube Goldberg universe.
Dean, dead asleep, muttered and turned toward me, his well-muscled arm wearing bracelets of light from the street window.
Already, it felt like I’d put something precious at risk.
CHAPTER 11
Dean was gone the next morning and the rest of the week dragged ass. I knocked around the apartment at night, talking to myself, staying up way too late reading and then slamming into work all cranky and fogged in.
Mom sailed in Saturday morning, having left Centre Island before dawn.
She was now standing on top of our kitchen-stool-stepladder thing with a half-dozen nails in the corner of her mouth, arranging folds of faded peach silk moiré around the living room’s biggest window. In profile, Mom looks exactly like Queen Elizabeth on the Canadian penny, but head-on she’s way more of a babe.
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