by Chuck Redman
“Shut up, Banacek, you crazy bible thumper.”
“That’s enough now,” hollers the sheriff, and her grim mouth suddenly twists spastic-like around her teeth and fleshy gums. “Either yooz guys shuts your traps, or it’s coitains for da bote a yuz!” She stops and freezes, big-eyed and blinkin, like she’s just been dashed with a cold pail of water. All the guys take on a sheepish aspect and settle down nice’n meek. So she primly picks up her agenda and they move on to other business: vandalisms, teenage drag racing, GTA’s, they size em all up and strategize real professional for about fifteen minutes.
“Okay, listen up,” says Sheriff Healy with a sour smack from a large sip of grapefruit juice. “Something a little bigger on the horizon.” Smack. “We’ve been invited—and it’s a testament to the quality police work that you men do every day—to partner in a sting operation with Riverside P.D. aimed at trying to locate and bust a meth lab that they believe is operating somewhere in rural Riverside or Cottonwood Counties. They suspect that certain rogue workers from the Euphemion slaughterhouse in Riverside have gone into business for themselves, making medium-grade meth at some well-hidden spot. What I’m looking for at this time are two volunteers to participate in the sting operation—”, and no sooner has the word “volunteers” left the sheriff’s pink lips than eight unanimous hands go up like rockets from that bunch of roused-up deputies, almost choking on their last bites of bagel and wiping cream cheese from their mustaches. You’d think they was on meth themselves by the fiery look in their eyes. And that’s where emotion again gets the better of Sheriff Healy. She blinks at that show of hands and it’s like she’s lookin at the very ending of It’s a Wonderful Life for the eighteenth time. “That’s what I’m talking about,” she swallows. “You boys. Around heah we got nuttin but clee-ass up da wazoo!”
Well, Janet don’t give a hoot for the view out her office window, she’s obsessed with that there editorial she’s hammering. But you and me can shimmy up closer to the big window and look out beyond the main streets. Well, jever see a prettier picture of big old houses on wide shady lanes? How about them not-so-old homes farther out that are more ranch-style, and the shade ain’t totally growed yet. Then ya got your newer tract homes. A coupla mobile home parks. Schools, hospital, the public library. Grain elevators? Naturally, down by the U.P. railroad tracks. Agribusiness is King, you better believe it. From this big window you’re lookin at a green speckled community laid out all nice’n neat, with all the ones runnin east to west numbered as streets and them that go north and south are the avenues. Only place you might notice anything off-kilter is them few ritzy streets like Ridgecrest Drive that curves around out by the country club.
What’s more, Cottonwood ain’t so big but what you can’t see some of the countryside from a third-story window. It ain’t easy to tell from here, but the north end of town does rise up gentle, to a grassy plateau of farmland and ranches. After that the sandhills. South of town, a course, the mighty Platte River. Aw, I’m joshin you—the only thing mighty about the Platte is it’s mighty pretty. Outside of Spring, you can wade across her and barely get your knees wet. Full of sand bars and wetlands. And fringed with cottonwoods, like date palms on the Nile. Including Old Grateful and her hangers-on. Oh, the other cottonwoods around’er are a batch of beauties all right, like Cleopatra’s handmaids. But Old Grateful: she’s the Queen of the Nile. Aw, an old-timer like me don’t have the words. But take one look at her gorgeous trunk, and her wavin arms full of the shiniest leaves anywhere stretchin skyhigh—and you’d run outa words just as fast. See if you don’t.
By close around 11:30 Janet finishes her coffee and also the rough draft of her editorial for Tuesday’s Cat. And she looks kinda proud when she re-reads the thing and then she looks almost like a excited school kid when she reads over the last part which she put down in bold letters, where she announces two contests dedicated to Old Grateful and her posse: a photo contest open to all ages, and a essay contest for eighteen and under. The snapshot and the essay which best portray the beauty and greatness of the old cottonwoods will both get published in Saturday’s edition.
“Roger,” she says, when she calls down to the city desk, “I want two columns on tomorrow’s front page for a special announcement. It’ll be in your inbox in thirty seconds. Let me see the final layout ASAP.”
Independent insurance agent of the year for Central Nebraska ain’t nothin to scoff at. Looks good up on the wall over your big ebonywood desk. Especially two years running. Uh-huh. The only thing is, though, is that if them two years was 2001-2002, and you ain’t been in the top ten for the last five years—well, now that don’t mean you can’t make a decent living. Now does it? And keep a calm good-humored outlook on things?
Well I don’t know, but maybe you could imagine there’s this practical joker who’s gone and tied a little invisible thread to the right corner of Kenny Smold’s black mustache and, just for kicks, is yanking it upwards every eight or ten seconds. Could be the three cups of coffee, I don’t know. Or could just be the way Kenny’s strung lately. The gal at the other end of the telephone line don’t know the first thing about Kenny’s mustache, or the striped silk tie he’s wearing, or his slick ultra modern office suite next to the bank on First Avenue in downtown Cottonwood, Nebraska where he sits giving her the third degree. The only thing she probably knows, I’m guessin, is that she don’t like the direction this phone conversation has took, and she’s fourteen minutes into her lunch break, and it’s starting to drizzle in suburban Peoria.
“I’ve already spoken to Jack Margolick, Amy.” The way Kenny’s hunched over his desk, you can see from the light of his computer monitor how kinda thin his hair is getting on the top. “I told you, he’s the one that referred me to you. I don’t appreciate being run around in circles, Amy.” The telephone receiver has formed a stationary bridge between his left ear and his twitching mouth. Out the big spotless window behind Kenny two scraggle-haired skateboarders are eyeing that long handrail up the ramp to the back entrance of the bank. The drive-up teller is rapping something furious on her window but that’s thick plexiglass, I doubt if any sound gets through.
“Well, as I said, there’s nothing more I can do. Your wife’s pre-existing condition makes her uninsurable. If anyone should understand underwriting, it’s you, Mr. Smold.”
“I’ve been selling your goddam policies for ten years, Amy. Do you know how much money you people have made off the, the—”
“The company made. I’m on a salary, Mr. Smold.”
“And a big fat bonus!”
“It’s nothing personal, Mr. Smold, and I’m sorry you’re taking it that way. As an independent agent you don’t qualify for our group plan, you know that. You and your wife’s application is treated like any other individual applicant. You might try Schenectady Mutual, I think their underwriting may be a little more liberal than ours.”
“Yeah, they’re the ones who cancelled our goddam coverage, Amy, claiming that my wife’s condition was pre-existing!”
“Well—”
The colorful words that travel to Peoria and the ones that stay and echo in Kenny’s office after he slams the receiver is pretty much the same variety of words, I would have to say, and not the kind that I care to repeat. Anyways, that right mustache is bopping skyward to beat the band when his secretary buzzes him. “Kenny, Mrs. Overton is here. She wants to talk to you about converting her whole life to term life.”
“Oh sure,” says the Independent Agent, ripping his Peoria Life mouse pad to shreds, “like that’s gonna happen. I’ll cut my own throat before I convert any goddam policy.”
I know that 8-tracks went out with straight hair, but Janet’s settin home on her couch tonight, listening to Lionel Richie on her 8-track, which still plays but every once in a while sounds like a space ship landing. She’s got her ratty pooch named Scoop to keep her and her tea company. If an ancient dog’s gentle snore can be called company. Then she’s got a stack of her old high sch
ool newspapers the Cottonwood High Flutter, and The Daily Nebraskan from college, and she was of course the senior editor of both. That looks like the year-end edition from college on her lap, with a wide picture of the entire staff against the wall of the newsroom. It’s funny, don’t ya think, that she was the editor of the paper and here she’s the only one not lookin at the camera when the picture was took. Must a been distracted at the last second, you know how that goes. Ain’t nothing over thataways cept the gangly fella standing next of her with the deep eyes and serious beard.
Maybe it’s the yellow lamplight, I don’t know. But in her pink satiny robe from high school and her legs cocked sidewise on the couch, you can’t hardly tell if this is now or way back then. She’s took her contact lenses off and her old round specs is sliding down her little sniffly nose like she was eight again and tucked in bed with her big storybook. Her eyes has such a castaway look they could be anywhere. It’s a fact, Lionel Richie has the same dang effect on me.
I guess when Janet gets to lookin through her old treasures after a hard day at work, she don’t much care how cold her tea turns. Scoop’s asleep at her feet, he don’t know that time is driftin by.
White shiny wisps, scores of em. Snowing gently down upon the peaceful teepee village by the dabbling creek. Quite fetching, ain’t it? Snow is a lovely thing, all the poets say so. Only this ain’t snow. Oh, along after midnight you still might feel a pretty sharp chill in these parts even now in late spring. But this ain’t no freezin weather, and what’s snowing down in the night is the cottony fluff of the cottonwood seeds. Them cottonwoods fling their seeds out in the breeze like confetti on Broadway. The seeds’ll drift near or far until they decide to stick somewheres. And if they stick somewheres with good soil and water, they got a fightin chance.
Lark Laying Eggs turns in early, but she don’t really sleep to speak of. She lays still with her head on her pillow of doeskin stuffed with deer hair, waitin and watchin the rest of the slumbering clan spaced around the teepee wall swathed in their buffalo robes. Lark is layin there in the wee hours staring upwards into the tented shadows when she sees, floatin down through the air vent at the top, one of them cottonwood seeds. By the low firelight she watches fascinated as the little cottony parachute settles down into the embers and then suddenly spurts upwards on a wave of heat. It glides about for a second and then descends toward the gaping cavern that is the mouth of Lark’s pop, Eats No Breakfast, who ain’t breathin whatsoever. All at once he snorts in a huge gulp of air pulling the bit of fluff halfway down his windpipe, then just as suddenly expels a giant gust which sends the charmed seedlet back up into the stratosphere, so to speak, of the teepee. Well, it spirals down and hovers a bit above the peaceful head of her young cousin who’s visiting from the Hunkpapa Sioux up north. Some airy whisper puffs it gently toward her sis, who’s lying back to back with a big hairy dog named Scout. Running Water’s doing some shuddering in her sleep, having one of them disturbing dreams, I would venture. Her hand starts batting in the air—must be flies in that there dream—and she bats the little filament, which soars over Lark’s face, takes a spin around the plump pretty cheek of her mom, who sighs in her sleep, and finally wafts down between Lark’s wide eyes, which cross for a second, and lights on the tip of her over-complacent nose.
She sits up straight as a shot, flicks the tiny cottony vagabond into the fire, and gingerly crawls out of her bedroll. Throwing a buckskin blanket over her shoulders and clutching a big stuffed satchel, she touches the sacred bundle hanging on the lodgepole above her pop’s head. She puts her hand to her heart, then tiptoes out the teepee flap.
Now, things is quite laid back among the Oglala, as you might of already figured out. Rules is few, personal freedom is the norm and folks can pretty much wander where and when they want. But by the way Lark creeps among the still teepees and keeps lookin around her every direction, you kinda get the feeling she’d just as soon not have company at the moment. Just as she’s passing by the second teepee on the left, the flap opens and old Pale Dove sticks her wrinkled face out and tosses the contents of a big clay pot sideways toward her next door neighbor. Fortunately, Lark sidesteps and dodges the glop, which appears to be remains of the nightly stew of roast elk and prairie turnips, with boiled dog thrown in as a filler. Fortunately again, Pale Dove is stone blind, so Lark continues on her way with the old wife none the wiser.
Making a left turn, Lark exits the teepee circle and heads for the creek. As she steps from the shadows of the teepees onto the grassy downward path she stops dead in her tracks: coming straight at her and showing not a trace of recognition is a giant human. She stares the huge feller in the eye and then she begins to smile. Back into the shadows Lark softly steps, and the village Contrary with his fake face heading west and his real face blinking at an upside down east, stalks by on his hands. With no inkling that he and a malcontented maiden just crossed paths.
And toward the trickling creek the maiden creeps, her black hair shining in the moonlight, til a dark cloud passes over. Right on cue, a westerly wind stirs up and shakes loose a flurry of cottonwood seeds to fly and chase after the hasty young runaway.
Tuesday
Tuesday morning after dropping her Caterwauler off at Nickano’s and scooping up her coffee-to-go, Janet jogs across the street and turns into Flo’s Family Shoe Store. The store’s got one of them front doors with bells that jingle whenever it opens or shuts. Florene, she’s probly the calmest easygoingest person you’d ever meet. I’m not even one hundred percent sure she’s got face muscles that work. That’s how rare it is to see any emotion on Florene. Right now she’s running a feather duster over her display shoes along the walls. Janet catches her cradling a beige dress pump in her left hand like she’s fixing to wipe the pablum from its chin.
“Morning, Florene.” Not breathing hard just deep and thoughtful she lets herself roost upon the first fitting stool she meets.
“Hey Janet,” says Florene in a voice in harmony with her face, “did you hear that Candy Swoboda is pregnant with twins?”
“You’re kidding, she’s my age.”
“Well, here she thought she couldn’t get pregnant at all, and now she’s having twins.”
“Good for her.”
“And you know Randy Jansen. Tom Sizemore’s son-in-law with the sort of hunchback?”
Janet nods just enough to show she ain’t clueless.
“Well, he got fired from Albrecht’s yesterday.” Somebody has went and mismated a couple pairs of men’s sneakers on Florene’s display. She rights that terrible wrong with little fanfare.
“How’d he manage that?”
“Just guess. They caught him having hankie-pankie with some woman in the dressing room in their Lady’s sportswear department.”
“Who was the woman?”
“Don’t know yet. I’ll have to swing by at lunch and see what Esther in their shoe department has to say.”
“Keep me posted.” Janet picks a Brannock foot measure up off the carpet and starts flipping the width indicator back and forth, back and forth. That might get on my nerves pretty quick, but Florene just gazes down at her as she tickles a whole row of kid’s sandals with two or three sweeps of her duster. “Florene, you know that job as gossip columnist is there for you anytime you want it.”
“Oh, honey, I don’t go in for gossip. I just like to keep up on things. Oh, one more thing, and you might be interested in this: some guy rode into town yesterday in a limousine and checked in at the Best Midwestern. Him and his black driver. Albert the night manager told Lydia from housekeeping—she’s my across-the-street neighbor—that the guy is some honcho from whats-its-name meat company. You know, the company that the Caterwauler’s been saying wants to put a packing plant here?”
Well, if you’d a guessed that the newspaper gal might resort to profanity at such a moment, then your instincts is good and you win a free facial at the Cinderella Spa and Salon. Did you also foresee her grabbing a work boot off a display
by its steel-toe and banging its heel down on the rubber ramp of the fitting stool like she’s cracking the world’s hardest walnut? Florene just nods slightly and stares at the outburst. She twirls her feather duster. Janet simmers down quick, glances up and wonders if anybody got the guy’s name.
Florene says Lydia didn’t get the name. “But he wears an eye patch, a fancy cowboy hat, and boots that sound like Tony Llamas.”
“Well—he shouldn’t be too hard to track down. Thanks, Florene. I better scoot, I’ll see you later.”
“Bye sweetie. I’ll call you as soon as that new running shoe comes in.”
Janet gives her a thumbs up and is out the door with such force that even Florene jumps at the ferocious jingling of the bells.
Even before she hits the shower in her office—meanin she’s sweaty as a outlaw’s horse—Janet ropes in every darn reporter and editor on the staff and shoos em to the four corners of Cottonwood to try to track down that one-eyed beef honcho. Them reporters don’t hafta ask what for: they know she wants em to corner that rascal and grill him good. When Ms. Hinderson assigns you an interview, she wants you houndin that varmint til he spills his guts to the world. So her people scatter to all the likely places: the Best Midwestern, of course, Nickano’s where he’d smell the freshest coffee and yum yums in town, city hall maybe, Walter’s gas station and garage and auto detail. And anywheres else they could think of along the way. Meanwhile Janet skedaddles herself down to Old Grateful to see if maybe the dude come down there to look over the property. Florene stands out in front of her display windows with her feather duster and watches the unusual amount of traffic emanating from the Caterwauler building up the street.
