by Chuck Redman
There’s a good wind blowin outa the west, off the sandhills. I told you how the cottonwoods, with their ten thousand silvery leaves like sails, how they catch the least little breeze and wave and flicker like—well you remember them 1920s flappers in their shimmy dresses? I remember this one gal, oh my, she had the sweetest smile and a pair of—Huh? What in the deuce was I—? You got me off track, buster, I was talkin about somethin. Well sure, I was talking about Janet and how she looks awful small by the side of Old Grateful. And no mysterious strangers around.
She’s havin it out with a red squirrel settin on one of O.G.’s lower branches. I think he maybe just pelted her with seeds from his little jabbering mouth. “You little weasel,” she says, shakin her fist at him like he’s some high-placed news source that just clammed up. Then she throws a look of scorn at Old Grateful herself, who’s standing there minding her own business. “You better appreciate what we’re doing for you, you overgrown fencepost.”
Well, one by one each of her reporters strike out and check in with her on her cell phone. “Come on back,” she barks at em, or tells em get to work on that piece about the new sewer line at the National Guard Armory, or some such breaking news item.
Her cell phone rings again, and she swears like it’s something crawlin up her leg. “He’s where?” she hoots. “What in the—grab him by the belt buckle and hog-tie him if you have to, I’m coming.” She floors it back to the Cat, running two red lights and the town’s got but four to its name. Lord help us. And the stars must a been aligned that all the sheriff’s deputies was occupied elsewhere. Into her parking space plows the publisher, and through the city room she thunders. “Why’nt ya call me?”
“We did—” says poor Beverly, almost choking mid-chew, to the rush of overheated air that lingers in the wake.
In her windblown hair and sweaty T-shirt declarin “Journalists Do It On Deadline”, the Caterwauler’s chief comes out to the front desk and sure enough there’s a lanky one-eyed gent just the way Florene described’m. Except his fancy cowboy hat is sittin on one of the visitor chairs next to his briefcase. Something about this feller’s face, though, don’t go with the cowboy look. But if you was a mite nearsighted and you was squintin, you may just think you was looking at—well, you know that grinnin cowpoke that you used to see on the TV whose name is on the tip of my durned tongue. Hang it all! Oh, one more thing: the eyepatch ain’t black like you think of pirates and all. This here eyepatch is plush and it’s crimson red, the color of—well you just never mind what it’s the color of.
Now, when it comes to faces, Janet’s own has changed mighty fast in three seconds gone by and now she’s as calm and self-assured as a corporate veep. “Morning,” says she. “What can we do for you?” Beverly the receptionist is peekin through the doorway with her mouth open. She’s got crumbs from her apricot danish still stuck there. More on her dress, but they kinda go with the pattern.
“Good morning.” I can’t make out the grin on this feller’s face, but there’s something kinda peculiar. “We’d like to take out a full-page ad for the rest of the week. My company has sketched a layout here.” He’s got a manila folder in his hand. The ring finger’s got a right swanky fraternity ring of some sort. James Garner: that’s the name I was tryin to get at.
She sticks out her hand, and boy, ain’t she the cool cat. “Janet Hinderson, publisher, I run this poor excuse for a newspaper.” She gives a itty bitty bow of the head, and flaps her other hand at her sweaty duds. “I apologize, my personal trainer just left.”
“Steve Cosetti,” says the guy while he’s shakin her hand and eying her like he don’t quite know what to make of her. He pulls out a business card from the little lapel pocket on his eyetalian suit and hands it to her. She always was a fast reader, and the only thing on the card that might of threw her was the “General Counsel” part. That probably explains her little dusty eyebrows goin up for a mere second.
“So what’s the, uh, nature of this ad you want to place?” and she ain’t smiling back as she bobs her head toward the manila folder and fixes her blue high-beams on the feller.
“Basically, my company wants to meet the people of Cottonwood so we’re throwing a barbeque on Saturday, hoping that everyone in town will show up.”
Her features has slightly froze up, only the eyes is blinking like they can’t quite figure the proper focus. She starts to nod. “Fine,” she says, “but we want an interview.”
“You want an interview.”
“An exclusive, obviously. Just a little article about your company and its, oh, long-term plans.”
“Mmmh.” His voice just got way deeper at the same exact second that his grin shrunk away. “No interview, no ad is I guess what you’re saying.”
I wouldn’t say that a bunched lip is Janet’s best look. “We’re all about the quid pro quo here, as the saying goes.” She glances at his card again and flings it on the counter like a discard in gin rummy.
His black eyebrows (the left of which is just stickin out from the patch) is doing the stuff that eyebrows do when there’s seismic activity epicentered in the brain. There’s another fella, now, come up to the Cat’s big front window, shading his eyes with a huge hand, trying to see in through the tinted glass. Maybe you used to read the sports page once in a while. That’s right—that there is Laertes Norris, the ex-Husker. Second string All Big 12 wide receiver? Didn’t quite make the pro draft, you recall. Looks quite different in a white shirt and tie, though don’t he? Seems to be waitin on this fella Cosetti.
Speaking a which, he finally goes and agrees to be interviewed and says he’ll be back at noon with his limo to take her for lunch. Who has the best chicken fried steak in town he wants to know. From the inside doorway Beverly the receptionist straightens up and raises a hand. “Treadway’s Truck Stop.” I think one of those crumbs just got spit out into the air and I think she knows it.
Cosetti and his one eye look at her funny but says “Good” and to Janet says he’ll see her then. With his hat and briefcase, he’s out the door grinning. Now she grins herself.
“You won’t see me,” mumbles Janet makin the grin turn snotty. “Beverly, get Rossiter in here, tell her she’s having lunch with an exclusive. I got a newspaper to run.”
After lunch Tanya Portillo has a daydreamy look on her rosy face, while she sits in her bedroom paging through a heavy book titled The Medieval Foundations of Neo-Classical Traditions. Oh. Cancel that. The Neo-Classical Foundations of Medieval Traditions. Better. Her hair is a wave of red gold. You’d think she was one of them saints that give off radiance. Until you notice that the light she’s drenched in comes from above, so it must be one of them beams of light sent down special from heaven. And then you figure out that the mysterious light is ricocheted off Tanya’s big trophy for First Place, Nebraska History Bee, which this time of day catches the sunlight off the old slippery slide out in the backyard. Which don’t seem any the less a miracle, when you think about it.
She picks up her cell phone, dials and, with a fingernail that ain’t all that clean, digs a short strand of celery from betwixt her upper right molars. One ring and a idle sleepy voice picks up. Tanya asks Keith to enter the photo contest for the newspaper. He hadn’t read about it.
“Whaja do this morning?” he says.
“Oh, just some research. You know.”
“Local history?”
“I’m a boring person, what can I say.”
“Why don’t you take the photos yourself?”
“I can’t. I start my internship at city hall at two this afternoon. You’re a much better photographer. You’ll need your wide-angle lens. And shoot vertical.”
“Duh.”
“Get the other trees in the left foreground.”
“I thought I was the better photographer.”
“You know I like that spot. The time we took sack lunches down there and the bees chased us for half a mile?”
“I haven’t been able to look at egg salad sin
ce then.”
“I’m the one you threw up on.”
“I don’t see you gorging yourself on egg salad.”
“Mayonnaise is a fascist plot.”
It was luck I gotta say that put the Marble Arch Mobile Home Park at the exact spot where it sits out on East Cottonwood Way, no further from Todd’s Liquor Store than old Sid Haabert can fling an empty pint. That way, Sid can get over to Todd’s and get back to his little trailer without crossing any streets. Sid ain’t wore out the sidewalk yet, but he’s workin on it. I didn’t say it was good luck.
Tuesday is delivery day for Bigelow’s Beer Distributor in the greater Cottonwood area. So while his boss is havin lunch with that reporter, Laertes Norris is in Todd’s buyin his Omaha World-Herald, his Wall Street Journal and his vitamin drink just as the beer truck is pulling up. The beer distributor guy is having a bit of trouble gettin his truck parked properly considering there ain’t usually a limo parked there. And steady Sid is of course happily teetering on the sidewalk and with glazy eyes is wavin the beer truck to keep backing up. Which is when Laertes comes out puttin on his sunglasses and glancing at the news about banks going busted in Ireland and Spain. He looks up and, like a strongside button hook in the fourth quarter, suddenly executes a quick hop and a skip and he’s at the wheel of his limo to make room for that poor Bigelow’s Beer driver. Only he forgits to signal when he pulls his buggy out onto Cottonwood Way. And sheriff’s deputies ain’t that busy around here that they can’t catch a late-model Lincoln Towncar limousine that commits a major moving violation.
“Oh Shivers,” says Laertes, only he picks just a little nastier word to let out when them flashers and police megaphone go off. But he pulls over and eyes his sideview mirror where a slow-moving mass of official neck and torso rolls out of the patrol car and gets bigger and bigger.
“Afternoon, Sir,” says the blond monolith. “Let’s take a look at your license and registration.”
Laertes takes off his sunglasses and squints up in some amazement. He mutters somethin that could be “Aw fumbles” but I suspect a different word was audibled. “Oh no, it ain’t,” he says and his brow and jaw do what they can to assist, the one reporting denial and the other disbelief. “I thought I recognized that ape-like amble.” Claims he thought it was a bad mirage.
“And here I thought it couldn’t get any better than Wildcats thirty-one Huskers seventeen,” says the oversize deputy lookin down with one of them smiles you gotta go out to the midnight horror picture to see. “Just look what the Good Lord has raised from the dead. What in God’s name put you on my beat, loser?”
Laertes sticks his sunglasses back on and shakes his head. “Just my lucky day, flunky. I get to spend it in this one-horse ghost town, and then I get pulled over by the biggest—”
“Say, you might wanna watch your language, Mister Norris. We don’t appreciate the use of profanity here. This isn’t North Omaha.”
“No? I coulda sworn.” Laertes decides he would like to know how come the big fella is dressed up like Barney Fife in Mayberry USA.
“Living the dream, hotshot.”
“No, you done lived your dream when you broke my damn shoulder, Banacek. I never did properly thank you. Weren’t for you, I’d be playing pro ball and never had the chance to land this cushy gig.”
“Oh, no. I never could take credit for something I didn’t do. You broke your precious shoulder all by yourself, man.”
“You just stick with that alibi, Deputy Dog. Don’t never let the truth get in your way.”
“You’re a riot, Norris. So—how’d you end up driving for rich city slickers?”
“Much as I’d love to stay and chat, Banacek, I got to be someplace. So I’ll just—”
“You failed to signal.”
“The damn beer truck was—oh come on, now. You’re not writin me a ticket!”
“Got to. Haven’t met my daily quota of sassy black has-beens.”
“Oh, now—”
“Any problem here, Deputy Banacek?” Both fellers look up and there’s the sheriff pulled alongside in her unmarked vehicle, gazing at them quite intent. Two school kids caught covering up some kind of mischief is how them two big fellers look at the moment. Sheriff’s gazing and Banacek’s mumbling some response and Sheriff says she’ll take it from here as she locks eyes with Laertes the instant he takes his shades off. He just swallows. Now, you know how sometimes there’s one of them cheesy scenes with the lonely gal and the downhearted fella, and the two of em catch sight of each other across some smoky room of noisy people? And how their eyes lock together for the first time like they was magnets? And how they keep inching and winding toward each other and are full in love by the time they get nose to nose and speak their first hellos? Well, this ain’t like that at all.
This is more a case of two creatures bumpin snouts over a half-rotten apple, and rubbing their beady eyes. Not sure if one another is fish er fowl. In fact, somethin that sounds like “I’ll be a fricken chowdahead” spits out of the sheriff’s little mouth as she shifts her unmarked buggy into park without taking her round eyes off the lawbreaker currently under investigation.
“You owe me eight dollars and fifty-eight cents.” If I give it any thought, I’d have to say that Peg Rossiter is the only living soul with the guts to talk back to Janet, let alone startle the poor publisher when she’s sittin at her desk and checkin herself in her little compact mirror with the crack that looks like the fork between the South Loup and the Middle Loup before they trickle down into the North Loup. Anyways, she’s took her shower, I can tell that, and cleaned up good. Now if she’d just do somethin with her—aw, nevermind.
“Go ask Galen for the petty cash box, he was the last—dammit, did the big shot talk or didn’t he?”
Rossiter talks worse’n me, but writes like Longfellow and Thoreau put together. “Goose egg, sweetie. Gave me nothin I couldn’t a got from the company handout. Didn’t apologize, said he was deliberately misled. Why’nt you tell me he was expecting you?”
“Damn. What difference does it make who—. Now I’m going to have to put on a dress and take the bum for dinner. Did he get his chicken fried steak?”
With her thick arrow-straight hair, her buckskin dress, and almost everything she brung with her soaked clean through, Lark Laying Eggs has been threading the weedy shallows of that serpentine creek the whole entire night and now pert’ner the whole day. Every little bit she looks around northward up the creek. Not a human being anywheres. She ain’t rested but once or twice, to munch a little pemmican under the vault of some weeping willow. Nothing ain’t colder than a cold rain.
She’s slowed down, as the day’s worn on, shivering and moving stiffer and wearier. I don’t care for the sound of that cough. At last she’s sloshed to the very junction with the Shell River—her people’s name for the Platte—and wades across. Just as she’s up on the south bank, panting and wobbly, rain lets up, clouds break for a second, and the sun pours down on a small slice of Sioux Lookout up ahead southeastward. Sioux Lookout: it don’t look like much. Just a gentle rocky rise above the Platte River valley. But for yours truly, well—let’s say for instance I’m a flat dry buckwheat cake. That’s okay, it don’t bother me. Then Sioux Lookout is a pretty good lump of buckwheat.
Lark’s poor feet, though they was always calloused by nature, are scraped and blistered up pretty bad. She puts on her sodden moccasins and heads for the point that the sun seems to’ve spotlighted. It’s a trifle steep up that rocky north face. Her feet is dragging, her eyelids drooping, but she’s wearing a brave smile as she gets higher, drier, and nearer to that sunbathed bluff. Along with the little scrub junipers scattered about, Lark’s long damp hair starts to flap in the gusty wind. Wind up here whistles extra shrill, showin off her upper vocal range. The young maiden cuts quite a picture against the rough sky and endless me stretched below: no highways, no cattle feedlots, no neon signs—just little old moi.
No more’n twenty feet from the top s
he stops with a look of puzzlement, then a low indrawn gasp of “Uhh!” At Lark’s feet the blunt tailend of a dusty rattlesnake vanishes behind a sunny white rock, and she quick hobbles to the top. She drops upon a flat boulder and yanks her left foot up and sure enough there’s red bite marks on her brown ankle and very little color left in her face. For a long moment she winces skyward like she’s tryin to make meaningful eye contact with old Sol through the parting clouds. Then she opens up her big satchel and starts to rummage for two or three small pouches. Well, she sprinkles some herbal concoctions—probly old snakeroot, horehound or some such—into a hollowed-out gourd cup. Then, lookin mighty grim but not scared, Lark takes her water bag which was once a buffalo belly and pours some into the mix. After stirring with her middle finger she applies a plaster to the swelling bite, then adds more water and imbibes the rest. She pulls her buckskin blanket over herself, lays down shivering on the flat rock and closes her eyes to the coy Sun that’s still in his jammies and only once in a while peekin out through a ragged stormy curtain.
Well, all around the still maiden the wind’s awhistling like she couldn’t care less: high and sharp, to my ear. Nothing else ain’t stirring. Unless you happen to notice some low moans in a minor key, an occasional sigh in a hoarse baritone. Some muffled snickering like a broken fiddle being plucked? The thing I didn’t tell you about Sioux Lookout: just that it’s haunted.
Late that afternoon Keith calls Tanya. “I know what you did, and it won’t work,” he says point blank.
“Yes,” she says. “It will. Even if it doesn’t.”
“I shouldn’t even be talking to you,” His bleached blond hair rustles in the light breeze of his folks’ front porch. “You used me. Me and my twenty-eight-two hundred mm telephoto zoom lens.”
“You angled like I said?”
“When have I ever not done what you’ve asked me to?”
“You don’t have to send it. Or put my name instead.”
