She tried to squint past the glare, which was now on her face. He lowered the beam so it fell across the shoulders of her threadbare T-shirt. She blinked hard, trying to see him around the void burned into her retinas. “What?”
“You a Reinhardt?”
Pam nodded, cast her eyes downward, and dug her nails into the itching jean thread. When she looked up again, his image sharpened like he was rising from murky water. Below his dark-eyed squint and cheekbones, dark caverns emerged into a pair of thick sideburns ending at a broad, hard jawline. As he formed and surfaced, the hair at the back of her neck tingled with the sense she knew his face. That she knew it intimately.
“How do I know you?” The question came quieter, breathier than she’d meant it to.
He straightened and turned the beam of his flashlight across the distance. “Don’t see how you would.”
“No—but I do.”
“Everything all right? Car troubles? Not waiting on somebody, are you?”
“No, it’s—I’m fine. Did you go to Madson?”
His lip crooked up on one side, deepening a crease between his cheekbone and mouth, and his head dipped a bit. She knew that smile. It was a smile in spite of itself. A half smile that was part sad, part something else. Something that made Pam’s face warm. Something that froze her like the sudden sight of a downed wire in her path.
“Sure,” he said. “Graduated about the year you were born, probably.”
The trophy case. From the hallway right outside the gym. In a black-and-white picture, he’d already had a five o’clock shadow. His hair was a thick Brylcreem wave. He’d looked like a darker, rougher James Dean. “Harley Jensen?”
He nodded. He pulled a cigarette from a soft pack whose foil poked from his shirt pocket. He clanked open a lighter. When he spoke, cigarette lit, he exhaled puffs of blue that rose in the air. He asked if she wanted one. She said she did.
She took the cigarette as the lighter clanked open again. His thumb raked the barrel. He brought the flame to the tip, shielding it with his cupped hand so his palm glowed gold. She puffed, and the flame grew and diminished in small pulses. When it was lit, he still held the flame at the tip, and she caught herself scanning his bare ring finger. Her eyes rose to meet his, and she sensed that downed electric wire again, felt heat in her face.
“Which one of the girls are you?” he asked.
“Pam. The youngest. How’d you know?”
“There’s a resemblance.”
She pictured Dad, all ligament and bone in worn cowboy plaid and denim. The permanent sunburn of his oversized old man ears jutting from the sides of his Cargill cap.
“The eyes,” he said without looking at her. “And the lank.” His flashlight’s white haze traced across tips of nearby stalks and disappeared short of the distant uphill rise, short of the trees and brush steadily overcoming the abandoned farmhouse. “So what brings you out at two in the morning, Pam Reinhardt?”
She didn’t correct him. “Needed some air.”
He eyed her without turning his head, gave her a look that was unsure. Like he was reading her. Then he seemed to see whatever it was he was looking for. Or decided whatever he was looking for wasn’t there. “You haven’t seen anybody else out here, then?”
“No, why?”
His words rose in winding sheets of blue smoke. “No matter.” His light was trained on the pavement now, casting a long, thin spotlight there. “Not sure you want to be out here all by your lonesome, though.”
She reminded herself she was talking to a cop. “I guess no place is as safe as it used to be.”
“Not sure when it used to be.”
The night’s quiet broke with a squawk that made Pam twitch. His CB. He excused himself and walked back to the cruiser.
Pam waited and looked toward the black rim of hills against the sky. She saw visions of threshers, of necks beneath tractor tires. She felt that strange, wretched smile coming on and tightened her teeth against it. A chill ran down her back despite the temperature.
He came to the window again at a quick clip. His voice was deep, sturdy. “Not sure where you’re headed, but you want to get there. There’s a fire, half mile from here. All it needs is a little breeze.” His eyes were cast downward, into the car. She looked. Her thighs were white against the dark vinyl, a ghostly pale trailing down to her calves, her bare feet. When he made eye contact again, he tapped the car roof. “Next time, be sure to wear some shoes.” The half smile crooked. “Catch you again, I’ll have to cite you.”
Pam hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath till she exhaled. She nodded.
He rapped the roof again, twice, and stood back. He glanced toward the distant abandoned farm before he went to the cruiser.
Her keys rattled with a tremor as she turned them, and the roar of the engine filled her head with a jolt. She revved, and it settled. She waited to see if he’d pull out and head down the highway first. He didn’t. The car sat there, no lights inside or out, save the dim cherry of his cigarette. It pulsed once, like an orange lightning bug.
She put the Nova in gear but watched her rearview, even as she dipped down into the Bowl and up again. She made a point not to slow by the windbreak, by the dense cloak of a yard. The yard where one early evening, she knew, he played in the grass till a shot rang out from the kitchen.
6
RICK FELT BURIED ALIVE. He lay on the flat dirt, floor joists two feet above him. It was morning but cellar-dark and dank beneath the mobile home. The batteries in his good flashlight were about to go.
He’d been on edge since he woke and drove to Dad’s. Paul strolled in late, and when Rick stared hard at him for some hint, some update on Mom, Paul stared back just as hard. Dead-eyed. Then, when they took off, Paul insisted on driving separate. They never drove separate on jobs more than an hour out. Never. It was stupid, spending that much on gas. Maybe it meant he planned to take off and deal with this Mom thing. Get her back home.
Then again, maybe it had something to do with Rick stealing the drugs.
Whatever it was, was a gray area, and Rick didn’t like gray areas a whole lot.
While Paul took his sweet time getting to Arnold, Rick saw the trailer was a mess. The belly was in miserable shape. The pipes froze last winter. Copper pipes, good pipes, but they’d thawed, broke open, and flooded the place. It’d sat empty for months, insulation bloated behind the tarp like fiberglass boils. They’d been tore open, either by rot or some animal. Now the insulation hung down in woolly pink shreds.
While Rick moved the flashlight beam across the joists, Paul’s pickup pulled up and parked. “When the Levee Breaks” blasted from the cab. The engine and the harmonica both cut. Then the music blasted again. He must’ve planned to listen to the full seven goddamn minutes.
Rick worked his box knife at a dangling scrap of tarp, the blade gnawing through the pink batting. He spit dust from where it fell and settled in his mustache, and he made the mistake of thinking, for a split second, what his lungs must look like. Caves of pink fiberglass, sparkling like quartz.
When the song ended, Paul’s pickup door squealed open and slammed shut. He yelled, asked where Rick was. Rick called back and heard Paul shimmy under the trailer. Rick asked how it looked down his way.
“Like cotton candy.” Paul rustled against the dirt. “Tastes like shit, though.”
“Dad wants it done in two days. Three, tops.”
“Want it done in fifteen minutes?” Paul said. “You kick over the turpentine, I’ll drop the match.”
Rick was almost tempted. He knew Paul sure as hell would. All Rick wanted was to turn around and go home. Except when he got there, he wanted it to still be before dawn. And he wanted Pam to still be in bed, asleep, like he’d left her this morning. He’d crawl back under the sheet and bury his face in her hair. It usually smelled like warm soap. This morning he thought it smelled a little like stale smoke. He wondered if she’d been out sneaking cigarettes again. Right about now, sh
e’d be watching Donahue, vacuuming during commercials, brain motor stuck in high gear so she’d be good and pissed about nothing by the time he got home, whenever that’d be.
The ray of the thick-bodied flashlight shrank to a pinhole. He gripped the handle and thudded the back of the lamp against the ground at his side. The beam spread wide again, brighter for the dust. “So nothing, then? No news?”
“I said I’d take care of it,” Paul said. “What’s your assessment of this shit hole?”
“You can’t leave her wandering the countryside, Paul. She ain’t right.”
“You’d like to think she ain’t,” Paul said. “Sure would be tidier.”
Whether or not Mom was all there wasn’t worth fighting about. Rick gripped the lamp so tight his knuckles ached. “That why you drove the pickup out? So you could take off, keep looking?”
“Unrelated.” He was messing with the crossover duct. “Something went missing. Decided to keep my shit where I can see it. Feeling a little violated, I guess.”
Rick absently picked at the head of a framing nail. He needed to come clean or commit to playing dumb. “What’s gone?”
“Know the stuff behind the horn pad? Shit I told you about yesterday?”
A sliver of joist slipped into Rick’s finger with a pinch. “Yeah? Sure?”
“Gone.”
“What?”
“Damnedest thing.”
Rick’s heart beat hard in his chest, but he didn’t say anything. He waited.
Paul seemed to be waiting, too. “Well,” he said, finally breaking the silence, “guess Jensen must’ve took it.”
“What? Why?”
“Not to worry. Nothing that can’t be squared away.”
“Why you think it was him?” Rick still had the pills in the van, beneath the seat. He’d opted not to throw them out, mainly in case some shit like this came up and he needed to put them back to keep Paul from being an idiot. Better for him to go to jail for possession than whatever he might like to do to that cop. Paul was like Dad that way. The kid held a grudge.
“Deduced it. Besides you and me, nobody knew it was there.” The ductwork crinkled to the ground on Paul’s end, and his voice came clearer. He said Jensen got in the pickup the other night, dug through the glove box, and the horn went off. Paul figured it was an accident. “But then I went to sell some to a couple inbreds from Junco last night, and what do you know. Poof—they’re gone. And like we already established, nobody besides you and me knew they were there.”
Maybe Rick could say he had to take a piss, shove the pills deeper in the steering wheel so Paul would think they’d moved. No. There wasn’t enough space. “You can’t go running after a cop. Not with this Mom shit going on.” Maybe Rick could throw the pills under the seat.
“I had a hunch you’d feel that way. But you see, what we’ve got here is a case of illegal search and seizure, brother. There’s principle involved.”
“They probably just fell out. Landed somewhere in the truck. Like that putty knife we couldn’t find for a month,” Rick said. “I’ll help you look when we’re done.”
“Oho, but I learned from that putty knife. Checked every inch of floorboard, every crack and crevice and cubbyhole. Them pills is absent.”
This was no good. That cop was enough to worry about without Paul having an excuse to fly headlong at him.
Rick thought he’d best come out and say it. Say he took the pills, because wherever the hell Mom was, she didn’t need a kid in jail. Not on top of another kid killed and a husband who paid her bills but wouldn’t step foot in the same room with her. Rick pictured her yellow pile of curls leaning from the side of her head as she roamed the ditches, warbling on and on to some George Jones song like a little bird. Shit tore him up.
“You’re awful quiet over there, partner,” Paul said. “Contemplative.”
“What?”
“What what? I’m waiting on you. You got a call to make here.”
Rick’s lamplight drew down to a speck. He slammed the butt at his side again and the lamp lit back up. He scanned the ruined tarp. The truth was they could do it in a day. He had more pride than that, but they could. They could leave the shredded insulation in, cover up the whole mess. Switch out the pipes and patch the son of a bitch with bigger sheets of tarp. It’d always stink like mildew, but hell. If they laid new carpet, the place would stink like new carpet for a few months first. Long enough for Dad to sell the thing.
On the other hand, they could stretch the job into two days if they put up a new belly, three if they did the place right. It’d mean leaving Pam overnight, frying and popping fuses till he got home. It’d mean leaving Mom out wandering around, God knew where. But an extra day might cool Paul off.
Rick tilted the lamp to the right of the clean hole he’d made. More shreds hung a few inches away.
“Just start tearing shit out,” Rick said. “Nothing down here to salvage.”
7
HARLEY WAS PULLED OFF THE COUNTY OIL, a road of bare, dusty gravel that hadn’t been actually sprayed with black pitch since people stopped saying “macadamized.” He’d watched the sun rise and waited for the volunteer fire department to finish soaking the abandoned Jipp place. The blaze had been small, contained to the house, but dry as it’d been, they couldn’t take a chance on flare-ups. When they were done, he’d head over, see what started it.
There’d been busier nights, but the last one clung to his skin like sweat-damp clothes after a short, deep sleep. The last call was a one-car accident near the Oakview line. Harold Zurcher hit one of Frank Tvrdy’s cows. Zurcher was three sheets to the wind, so he was loose when the grille hit. The only one hurt was the cow.
He’d been barely bigger than a calf, a red Angus. His back was broken, bony rear half nearly torn off. Harley finished the job, stopped the panicked, confused eyes and choked bawls with a shot he hadn’t relished any more than Tvrdy had. Then the men cleared the road, rolled and dragged the body by its legs into the ditch. They’d done a makeshift job of driving in the downed fence posts so they at least stood upright.
Now another snatch of static sputtered from the radio and grated like a rasp. “Harley? Carol.” He checked the urge to switch her off. Whenever he left the station, he forwarded calls to Carol’s broom closet of an office in the courthouse. Sometimes he had to remind himself she was more than a squealing pitch through the speaker. He grabbed the handset from the cradle and said go ahead.
They needed a welfare check on an older woman in town, Doris Luschen. Her daughter-in-law from Omaha called, said Doris hadn’t answered the phone in a day. Harley started the cruiser and headed for Madson.
Beneath the shade of a tall cottonwood, he knocked twice at the woman’s back door, then tried the knob. Unlocked. He knocked again anyway. No answer.
He heaved a short, bracing breath and went in. He’d never grown used to it, walking into a person’s house uninvited.
He called out, said who he was, hoping not to give her a heart attack if she hadn’t already had one. Above a pounding in his own chest, he heard what sounded like a mewling kitten. He took a few steps and called again. It repeated, faint. Deadened by the floor. The sound came from a cracked cellar door behind him. He’d taken it for a pantry.
He pulled the door open. At the base of the steps lay a pale foot. The sight made his mouth go dry. A thick knot, one that had nothing to do with Doris Luschen, formed in his throat. He swallowed it away.
He said to stay put, not to move. She said she was planning on staying in tonight anyway, thanks, and managed a feeble laugh. Harley jogged out to the car, radioed Carol for an ambulance, and went back in.
Under the dim glow of a hanging bulb, Doris Luschen’s hair looked freshly cropped, short and smart and colored like champagne, but her legs splayed from her hitched-up skirt. The bottom half of her beige underwear shone. Her gnarled knuckles worked to pinch the fabric of the dress, to pull it down and conceal herself. “I got it,” Harley told her. He d
id his best to get her covered without moving her. “Stay still.”
“Getting a little too good at that,” she said and gave another weak laugh. She didn’t know how long she’d been down here. She thought this morning was still last night. And she was scared she’d broken a hip. Her legs wouldn’t move, she said. It was clear her left arm wasn’t doing so well, either.
She strained and twisted to see the length of her body. Harley remembered the rolling eyes of Tvrdy’s calf.
It’d be all right now, he told her. Paramedics were on their way. “You’re just lucky you’re so popular.” She asked who’d called. He said her daughter-in-law down in Omaha.
“Oh, yeah,” she said dryly. “Yeah, she’d be the one.” Then she tilted her face and strained again to see, to survey the damage. “Don’t look too good, does it?” She searched him then, studying him for what he thought. She had a set of thick, pronounced teeth that likely always made her more striking than pretty. Her eyes had a steely swiftness, a depth to them.
“Let’s wait and see what the paramedics say.”
“Probably say it’s time to take me out back, put me down.”
Harley’s eyes darted to the poured-concrete floor.
She broke into a cackle that subsided to a rattling cough. “Hell of a first date.”
When the paramedics from Wilton carried her out on a stretcher, she seemed to be on the mend, raising hell about leaving her breakfast dishes in the sink. She asked Harley if he wouldn’t mind washing them.
It was probably the least he could do, he said, in exchange for the peep show. That garnered another good cackle as the EMTs shut the ambulance doors.
When they pulled away, Harley left the cottonwood’s shade for the Fury. It sat in the morning’s full sun, and already, less than two hours into daylight, the car’s air was too thick. He slipped into gear as soon as the engine started, eager to get the wind running through.
Pickard County Atlas Page 6
