Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss

by Loren D. Estleman

  Behind this prefab fairyland, trucks and passenger cars hummed along the charcoal line of the state highway, and fishermen’s shanties dotted the white apron of the lake like houses on Baltic Avenue. It was as surreal as the Thumb area gets, and just the kind of place for the traveler who likes to avoid the main track and blend in at the same time. I had no hope of tracing Jeff Starzek to it. It was too on the nose.

  It was a weekday, and I shared the freshly cleared parking area with a snowmobile chained to a railroad tie and an old station wagon with woodgrain sides and a bumper sticker on the rear hatch reading FISHERMEN DO IT WITH A LURE. A gargantuan CXT pickup, nine feet tall, eight feet wide, twenty feet long, squatted on tractor tires next to the farthest bungalow with a snowplow blade mounted in front.

  I walked around a parked snowmobile, climbed gridded metal steps to the caboose’s door, and opened it to the smell of old wood and generations of cigarettes. Someone had varnished the walls to slow down dry rot, sparing only a knotty-pine partition in back, which presumably sealed off the office from a living area. It looked yellow against the dark shellac of the walls, but did nothing to lift the gloom. Even the four-paned window looking out on the white-on-white landscape looked like a decoration intended to brighten the interior. There was an Indian rug woven by the Taiwan tribe on the floor, some overstuffed chairs no one ever sat in, a display of antique fishing lures locked behind dusty glass, and a yellow-oak sauropod of a teacher’s desk, complete with a crank pencil sharpener mounted on one corner, holding up a small wooden file box, a perpetual calendar and message pad set in matching pebbled brass, and a lethal projectile of a ceramic ashtray the size of a platter, heaped high with squashed butts, some of which continued to smolder sullenly. A side-by-side shotgun with curled brass hammers hung on pegs on a wall behind the desk.

  “Welcome to the Rest! You here for Tip-up Town?”

  The woman seated under the shotgun, with a hand-rolled cigarette gushing smoke in one hand and a wedge of lime bobbing in a bottle of Corona in the other, was the roundest thing I’d seen on feet. Her face, nearly as red as Oral Canon’s, was a mass of bunched globes anchored by a tiny nose that curled like an endive at the tip. Bosom and belly heaved at the buttons of her XXXL flannel shirt. Her hair was an improbable shade of yellow, brighter than the pine partition, flipping up at the sides and mashed flat to her head. Hat hair; I blamed the ear-flapped woolen cap hanging on an antler next to the wall telephone.

  All that bulk, and all those cigarettes, should have given her the voice of a factory whistle, but it was as small and bright as a bird’s. Her eyes stuck out like blue marbles.

  “What’s Tip-up Town?” I asked.

  The eyes started out another sixteenth of an inch. I nearly lunged to catch them.

  “Mister, don’t tell me you haven’t heard about the ice-fishing festival. It’s the biggest thing to happen here since the French landed.”

  “The knob came off my radio. I didn’t even know the French landed.”

  “Don’t be fresh. Come Saturday you won’t be able to steer a bike between the shanties. They pretend they’re fishing, but what they’re really doing is drinking beer and peppermint Schnapps. Their little spring-loaded rods do all the work.”

  “Oh, tip-ups. I tried it once. I’m still thawing out.”

  “Drying out, you mean. If those boys put as much antifreeze in their radiators as they put in themselves, I wouldn’t spend half the weekend giving them jumps to start them back home.” She took a puff and chased the smoke with two ounces from the bottle.

  “You charge for that?”

  “It’s a service of the establishment. I make enough off them in three days to shut down the rest of the winter.”

  “I believe you. That truck outside retails at ninety thousand.”

  “Oh, that. I’m keeping it for a friend. His ex-wife’s on the warpath.” She paled to a brick shade. “I sure hope you’re not her lawyer.”

  “I’ve got an ex-wife of my own. Your sign says you’re extended stay.”

  “I’ve been meaning to take that down. I don’t get much business by the week now that divorce is so easy. Hiding out from the wife used to be a bigger deal. I’m Miss Maebelle.” She thought for a second, then decided to park the cigarette in a notch among the old butts and stuck out a hand.

  I shifted the cane to my left and took it. It was like shaking hands with pizza dough. “A woman who does as well as you must be able to afford a husband.”

  “I buried two. Well, one, if you want to be technical; they never did find Jim after he took his Subaru out on the ice five years ago April. I was Miss Maebelle when I taught school. I never did get used to Mrs.”

  “You gave up teaching for innkeeping?”

  The globes rearranged themselves into a scowl. “The school seems to be getting along fine without me. They just don’t have an art or a music program. Don’t let anyone ever tell you the arts have any importance in our society. They’re the first thing the boards find they can do without when money gets tight.”

  “Which one did you teach, art or music?”

  “Art, and the timing was a dirty shame. We were just getting into the expanding world of computer graphics. Another semester or two and I might have turned out the first Picasso to compose all his work on a keyboard. Don’t forget, all the great twentieth-century artists came out of rural America.”

  “I think Picasso was Spanish.”

  “I should have said Pollock. Not the point.” She put the cigarette back between her lips. “At least I had the Rest to fall back on, thanks to Jim. Poor old Arthur Weeks gave thirty years to the district. Thirty nails in his coffin when it came to finding someone who’d employ a sixty-two-year-old academic with an MA in Renaissance music. He moved in with his daughter and son-in-law and just faded off at the end like an old song. All because someone in Lansing couldn’t balance his own checkbook, let alone the budget.” She squirted out bitter gray jets as she spoke, the cigarette bobbing on her lower lip.

  “I’m not here to fish,” I said. “Not with a pole.”

  She stiffened. The globes that made up her face jiggled for a few seconds after she went motionless. Maybe she thought I represented CXT truck’s ex-wife after all.

  I showed her my license and the deputy’s badge I got in a box of Cocoa Puffs. “I’m working an inheritance job.” I traded the folder for the picture of Jeff Starzek and Rose Canon.

  She put down her beer bottle to take it. “I don’t get many couples.”

  “The woman’s the client. It’s her brother I’m looking for. The family can’t settle the estate without him present.”

  “How big is the estate?”

  “It isn’t the Illitches, but there’s a consideration in it for anyone who shortens the search.”

  “How much?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “Horse trader. Is he a fisherman?”

  “He’s in sales, spends most of his time on the road. This is part of his territory. He likes the quiet, out-of-the-way places.”

  “It won’t be so quiet come the weekend. Those anglers can drink, and then there’s the snowmobiles, waking people up at all hours and scaring away the fish.”

  “I see you’ve got one of those, too. Unless it belongs to CXT Truck.”

  “A woman in my condition needs a little help getting around the cabins. I never take it out on the ice. One of these years someone’s going to say something at the Air Horn and it’ll be bloody as all get out. I haven’t seen him, mister.” She gave me back the picture.

  “What’s the Air Horn?”

  “Truck stop up the highway, only you won’t find room to park a Peterbilt between the pickups and snowbuggies this weekend. I don’t mean to say the place is a bucket of blood. Fifty-one weeks out of the year you can take your kids there, buy ‘em a Coke and a bag of chips while you drink suds with your friends. Mix the snowmobilers with the fishermen and anything goes.”

  “Would it be okay
if I talked to your staff?”

  “You already are. You might have noticed this isn’t the Trump Tower.”

  I wrapped a five-dollar bill around a card and slid them under the edge of the mammoth ashtray. “This will cover long distance if you see him. There’ll be more if you do. You can get a new sign painted. The one you have could use touching up.”

  “I painted it myself. I was a magazine illustrator before I got the call to teach. No work there now. You have to be half my age and know how to use a camera.”

  “Norman Rockwell’s spinning in his grave.”

  She brightened. She looked exactly like a cartoon sun.

  “I met him once, showed him my portfolio. I wanted to study with him.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He told me to paint signs.”

  “What’d he know?”

  “Those who can’t, teach,” she said. “Only those who can can’t teach. Try telling that to the governor.”

  I zipped up my coat. “Okay if I walk around outside and smoke? My doctor says I have to exercise my leg. I fell on some ice.”

  “Don’t sue me if you fall on mine. I can give you a key if you want to check out one of the cabins. All but Twelve. Furnace broke down and I had to drain the pipes and turn off the water to keep ‘em from freezing. All the repairmen are busy till next week. Biggest weekend of the year and I’m taking a beating because I can’t sell out the shebang.”

  “I counted only six cabins.”

  “I started at seven. Makes it sound like a bigger place.”

  “Thanks. I’ll just walk around.”

  “Too bad. You look as if you could use a little peace and quiet.”

  “Except for the snowmobiles.”

  The globes parted in a sweet smile with the cigarette growing out of it. “Jim always said you have to take a little snake with your Eden.”

  “A wise man.”

  The smile went behind a cloud. “Not so wise he didn’t take his car out on the ice during the thaw.” She picked up her beer.

  Something caught my eye on the way out, a wall rack with display pockets containing pamphlets and flyers advertising area attractions. I pulled out one. “What’s the Church of the Freshwater Sea?”

  “You got me. People are always sticking things in there without asking. I ought to charge for the space.”

  “Can I keep it?”

  “Knock yourself out. You don’t look the born-again type.”

  “You never know. I almost died last November.”

  Outside I lit a cigarette and let the smoke warm my ears as I stumped around the grounds. The ache in my leg eased a little after being in one position so long, and I’d put together a happy meal of painkillers and a fish sandwich near Lexington. Far out on the ice, the angry spitting sound of one of the promised snowmobiles rose and fell above the constant whirring of wheels on the state highway. I stood in watered-down sunshine and watched a full-scale blizzard slap up against the sides of the fishermen’s shanties, flexing them like animated Disney houses. It was over in seconds, leaving behind a crystal carpet that sparkled like shattered windshields in a sudden break through the overcast. The Great Lakes is a region like no other, brutal and beautiful.

  The paper in my pocket didn’t have to mean anything. It was printed on regular stock, and such things do circulate, hence the name. Still, I was forty miles north of Port Huron, and if what the old woman there had told me was true, most of Paul Starzek’s congregation could barely make it to morning services from down the street. It seemed a long way to go to proselytize.

  The wind reached me in a delayed effect, stiffening my cheeks and striking matches off the tips of my ears. I stood my collar on end, stuck my free hand in my coat pocket, and got my circulation moving. The snow squeaked underfoot, a sure sign the thermometer was brushing bottom.

  The cabins and bungalows, identified by curlicue brass numerals tacked to the doors, were heated independently, but fueled by a common propane tank as big as a whale, beached on a concrete slab down from the caboose-office. The thermostats would be cranked down in the unoccupied buildings to conserve energy, which explained the heavier than usual frost on the windows. I went down to Twelve, one of the modulars brought in on flatbeds, next to which the leviathan CXT was parked. You needed to carry a lot of cargo or push a lot of snow to justify the payments.

  This was the building Miss Maebelle said she couldn’t rent because it was without heat. In that lake climate, the hoarfrost on the windows should have been as thick as plaster of paris inside and out. It wasn’t. I looked up at the chimney vent that pierced the roof just below the center ridge and stared at it a long time before I decided I could see a shimmer of escaping heat.

  I turned my back on it and gazed out across the lake, dragging smoke deep into my lungs to slow down frostbite. I wanted to look through a window, but I didn’t want to be seen paying the place too much attention.

  My instincts were sound. When I snapped away the butt and turned back toward my car, a broad shadow that could only be Miss Maebelle’s face slid away from the window in the caboose.

  EIGHTEEN

  You never know what kind of music will greet you when you enter a bar up north. The closer you get to the Arctic Circle, the evener the mix of bluegrass, reggae, heavy metal, and polka. It all depends on whose quarter is in the slot.

  Chet Baker sobbed at me as I opened the door of the Air Horn on a puff of overheated atmosphere and rubber galoshes. The place was an island built on the truss principle in a sea of diesels, clearing their throats in puffs of blue smoke that hesitated from time to time but never quite stopped; in that latitude, you burn less fuel letting the engine run than trying to start it back up. A row of refrigerated cases separated the bar and grill from a convenience store stacked high with canned soup, windshield-washer fluid, prepackaged sandwiches, pinetree-shaped air fresheners, cases of Bud Lite, and blunt instruments designed to test tire pressure and stave in skulls. There were showers and lockers in back. “My Funny Valentine” followed me to a booth made of molded plastic, where an exposed port in the wall had accommodated a telephone until recently, for the convenience of homesick truckers; the cellular revolution had made it redundant. I was either going to have to break down and get one of my own or brush up on my semaphore.

  The place took the long-haul theme as far as it would go. Antiqued tin signs advertising Mack Bulldogs and heroic watercolors of Freightliners climbing icy mountain passes decorated the walls under a continuous shelf of oilcans, toy trucks, and wooden battery crates, and the juke was shaped like the front end of a 1930 International; an engine revved quaintly between selections. A bullet-headed bruiser and a lean coyote with a cigarette stuck to his lower lip clacked balls around a green felt table to no apparent purpose and the owners of a row of exposed butt cracks seated at the bar were watching Duel on video and rooting for the truck. There were still six hours of daylight and the place was more than half full.

  Ambience seemed to be the chief sell. I waited five minutes for service, then got up and took a stool at the bar, far enough away from the truckers to spare me most of the cheering when the demon tanker obliterated Dennis Weaver’s telephone booth.

  The bartender was a fresh-faced kid with freckles and an ancient soul peering out through windows as blue as dime-store sapphires. I ordered a beer and asked him if the owner was present.

  “Present.” He stood a bottle on a paper mat with a square grille bearing down on the viewer.

  “What’d you do, run the trifecta?” I drank ice-cold beer and waited for the heat. The British had the opposite theory about hot tea in India.

  “Pluck and luck—and a trust fund that’d choke an elephant. Go ahead, call me a rich little snot. I’m used to it.”

  “Everything’s relative. You probably had to fight your way out of dance class. This whole part of the country seems to be run by one-man shops. You know the Sportsmen’s Rest?”

  “Miss Maebelle.” He grinned a flin
ty little grin. Whoever straightened his teeth had used a plumb line. “I went to her husband’s funeral, not that there was anything to put in the ground. Everyone’s related here, or friends, or enemies of long standing. How is the old tub?”

  “Healthy as a hippo. Drinks her weight in fresh lime every day.”

  “I guess that makes you a friend.” He swept a drop off the bar with his thumb and sucked it clean. “What’s the beef? You with Triple-A, checking up on her star-and-a-half?” He looked as suspicious as Opie Taylor.

  I gave him a card. Proprietors of saloons don’t like it when you flash a folder in front of the clientele. “A guy came into money. I’m trying to find him for the family. She hasn’t seen him, she says.”

  He read the card. A lot of people just make a show of it, but he seemed to be looking for a watermark. “I get you guys from time to time,” he said. “It’s always a guy came into money. What’d he do, duck out on child support?”

  “I do that kind of work too. This is legit. The family wants to find him.”

  “No inheritance, though.” He slid the card back my way with a fingertip.

  “I’ve got an expense sheet.” I showed him the picture.

  “Hey, Buzz! This a business or a hobby?”

  “Excuse it, please.” He snapped a finger at the photo and went over to the bunch watching Duel. He hadn’t given it more than a glance. He filled two fresh glasses from the same bottle of Old Setter, parked it under the bar, and came back my way, mopping the top with a cheesecloth as he came. “How big’s your sheet?”