Chapter 19
Henry knew that most days Bug was out at the railcars at dawn. This morning the day of the week he ran his mother into Pendleton for her medical visit. If it had been a regular day, his regular schedule, Bug would have found Sipe, and Tiffany and Sipe wouldn’t have driven away in Lori’s car, and Henry wouldn’t have ridden Alec’s abandoned bike from the house through town and out to the railcars. Crawling into afternoon, the day heating up, the asphalt smelled molten.
Henry knew he’d been short with Gwen. He couldn’t hide being upset. It was obvious. Not crying, but he got a look on his face when he got upset. Or happy. Whichever emotion, always slow to retreat. Poorest poker player in the world, Lori called him.
Gwen had caught him right as he’d rolled the purple bicycle out the garage. Sipe was sick, he’d said. Then why was he driving Lori’s car? Henry didn’t know. Tiff was with him. That worried Gwen. Some strange guy going off with a girl. Well, she shouldn’t be worried. But she was worried. Then Henry asked just a little too loud didn’t she trust him? Didn’t she have work to do? Teacher face. She wasn’t a teacher anymore, but she’d given him the teacher face. Stone on the outside, stone on the inside. Once those teachers perfected it, they could call on it, easy.
Bug’s pickup was parked on the grass next to the railcars. The tailgate flopped open, a Thermos and a lunch pail shaded courtesy of a flattened cardboard box. Most people assumed Bug stored all kinds of random junk inside the truck bed. He kept it orderly, tight. He had a metal detector laying out on the bed and the storage box bolted to the back of the front cab. Inside the box might be tangle of wire and cord and tools and screw and nails, but it was all contained.
When Henry rode the bike off the asphalt onto the field, Bug sat on his lawn chair in shade on the northwest side of a railcar.
“Henry.” Bug greeted him, not looking at him, focused on his two finger typing attack upon his laptop. The lawn chair weave in some plaid pattern mimicking Bug’s western shirt. One sleeve buttoned to the wrist, the other cuff rolled at the elbow. Disheveled, Tiff’s word for this Little Creek eccentric.
Bug plotted and mapped out every inch of the railcars and the field, his field, or Lester Scoggins’, depending on which camp backer you talked to in town. All he’d tell anyone was that his work at the railcars amounted to a ‘work in progress’. Now what that meant was open to interpretation. Some thought the crazy sumbitch believed a UFO was buried under the earth. Others thought there was some truth to the rumors old timey bank robbers had hit banks in Portland and buried the stash here, only arrests and in-fighting and the cold hand owned by the march of time had stymied the unearthing of treasure.
“How you doing?” Still tapping. Not looking at Henry.
Rumors held when he went into the service right out of high school, Bug singled out at Fort Lewis, funneled into some sort of special ops spook program. That buttoned sleeve encircled a scar induced by a hypodermic needle, some super soldier serum side effect turning the Collar boy’s limb half-lizard. No one called him Bug until he came back, and his own old man shared tales with drinking buddies about how the boy-now-man could sense entrances and exits and the slightest alteration of wind or heat like a bug bearing super-sensitive antennae. ‘Boy could be in the crapper, and tell you which pup out at the Erdrich’s gonna suck on its mamas teats first ‘fore any of the critters even wakes up.’ That sort of hyperbole. Legend building.
“I’m ok,” said Henry.
“That’s good.” Tap. Tap-tap.
“You seen Hope?”
“Come again?”
“Hope Logan?”
“Umm. Which one of you is she again?”
Bug sat right at the butt end of the railcar spray painted with the word ‘HOPE’. He waved the air, scattering insects.
“Tiffany’s friend. Tiff’s asked you about her before. Hope’s pretty. About my height. She has a piercing in her nostril. Least she did.”
“No piercings. Nope. Not out here.” Bug cleared his throat, spat over his shoulder, likely spackling the weathered railcar with something the consistency of tapioca. “Sometimes, over there, the Dobbs’ place? see some female in a white bikini.” He looked back at his laptop and shook his head. “That white bikini spends entirely too much time on her cell phone. Can hear it. Her chatter. The me-me-me-me-me. And her laugh. The kind of laugh you hear and you just know the lady laughing like that is playing with her hair while she laughs.”
Henry looked towards the Dobbs’. Riding past the house on the bicycle he’d looked, hoping to catch maybe a glance of Brandi Dobbs. Nothing doing. Bug’s mention producing flutters in Henry, memory of what the mere sight of one of Little Creek High School’s premiere displays of eye candy could do.
“How old is she anyways?” asked Bug.
“Brandi?”
“That her name? Wait. Thought it was Hope.”
“No. Hope’s missing. Brandi lives over there. Brandi isn’t missing.”
“No nose piercing on Brandi?”
“No. No. Yeah. Brandi, she’s my age. No. A year younger,” said Henry.
Bug squinted at the Dobbs house.
“I see someone in a bikini outside there sometimes, I thought it’s the mom. The mom’s tall, skinny, yeah?”
“They both are.”
“They both are? Shit. I don’t need to be looking at some kid, and getting all worked up. People say enough bad things about old Bug already, I don’t need to be a Chester, too. Sweet post-pubescent temptation is acid on a man’s soul. That’s good intel, Henry. Thank you.
“Freshening up my specs like this, perhaps I ought to mosey south a railcar or two, put some distance between here and their pool, before the moral majority come for me with the torches and the pitchforks.” Bug cleared his throat and launched one into the dirt. Then he looked at the Dobbs’ place like he dared or even double dared Brandi Dobbs to come on out, showing off all points supple and pouting and/or aroused and arousing.
“You know anything about Quinn Dobbs?”
“No. He the dad?”
“The uncle.”
“Mm-mm. Never seen, never talked to.”
“You know about the place, out at Butcher’s Camp. The ladies. The prostitutes.”
“Here and there I heard some. Heard it was doing great guns for a little while.”
“Hope was out there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like…working out there,” said Henry. “Quinn Dobbs was one of her customers. A regular, I guess you could say.”
“He know how old she was?”
“I don’t know. She can look older than she is. Tiff says Hope’s even gotten into bars before.”
“One of them girls. Oh, I see. Slide on by the bouncer. Put enough mascara on they look like a raccoon, but legal.”
“But no one’s seen her now for about a week,” said Henry. “And this Quinn guy, he was, I don’t know, if she was going to go somewhere with someone, he’s kind of the prime suspect out of everyone. He liked her.”
“Enough to cut and run. Right. You tell the cops?”
“No. Tiff doesn’t think that’s such a hot idea.” Henry relieved that Bug didn’t ask why. He didn’t want to recite the dirt about Hope having relations with the cops.
Bug closed the laptop and rubbed his whisker-covered chin. They never coalesced into a beard. Just constantly hovered on the brink like a pregnant beer foam on the cusp of spilling suds.
“You know the Dobbs’ have a cabin,” said Bug.
“I thought about that,” said Henry. No. He hadn’t. But if someone had reminded him of all the world wonders Byron and Brandi got to experience due to the intrepid foresight of their parents, the cabin would’ve eventually seemed a plum suspect.
“Don’t think it’s done,” said Bug. “It’s not too far out of town, otherwise w
hy build the fucker, but it’s out of the way. Place for hunting, entertaining, what have you.”
Hope stashing, thought Henry. He looked at the asphalt winding into the foothills, the timberline, the instant thickness of green.
Pumping the pedals, standing up off the seat, hard enough on asphalt, but the road regressed to gravel just before it curved out of sight into the trees. Riding back wouldn’t be too bad, all downhill, but by the time he got out to the Dobbs’ cabin, it’d be sunset.
“My nuts get numb I sit too long in this thing.” Bug closed the laptop and stood and snagged the lawn chair in his other hand, popping the chair hinges shut by banging the chair into his hip. “You want, we could run on out, take a look at the cabin.”
“Really?”
“Shit, yeah. I been sitting in the sun too long anyways.”
After Bug threw the chair into the Toyota bed, he helped Henry load Alec’s bike in. There was a trick to getting the dented tailgate shut and Henry just took a step back on Bug’s advice, letting the wiry little man slam and pull back on the tailgate at the same time.
The cab interior was mildly dusty, a slight oily sheen on the seat fabric, but nothing hideous. Both windows rolled down so the only smell just a continuation of outsides dried out state. Back in Redmond, the inside of Paul Salerno’s car was more cause for concern. Paul telling Henry and any male in their crew the sickening sweet smell permeating the used cruise mobile the result of all the pussy juice sopping out of crotches and drying into the backseat. Tim Hayden asking Paul point blank just how long did Paul stimulate those cat anuses with his tongue and fingers before the torrent.
Center of the dash, facing the occupants, a Beeper. Henry thought it looked like a zombie. A woman half-starved or something, ribs and the outline of boobs showing.
“That’s Dezzy. Back in high school, had something with an older girl. Started in March, ended in June. Desdemona, like out of the Bible if you can believe it.” Bug scritched the Beeper’s beaver-sized buckteeth. “Found Dezzy out here. Someone had busted up a bunch of ‘em, but Dezzy survived. Ugly. So ugly. But you look long enough, who isn’t?”
Bug didn’t buckle up, and neither did Henry. The first curve beyond the asphalt towards the forest maw turned slightly sludge-like courtesy a kingdom of gravel, but if Bug showed no open concern at the prospect Henry bit down on his, wanting to be grown up acting as a pacifier to the obvious safety step.
The Jaguar came out of the woods at a crawl then ramped up speed so that by the time tires hit asphalt, the car fairly roared. It wasn’t prolonged, but it was loud. The car zipped in towards Little Creek proper, downshifting to make the sudden turns, left off Old Woods, left off of Kautz and park in the Dobbs’ driveway. Cessation of the engine left the world seeming Eden-like. The unmistakable slam of a single car door sounded as Henry looked at Bug and Bug looked in the rearview mirror like habituated in its confines existed tech capable of piercing the southern end of the Dobbs’ house, any and everything interior and exterior on display and for his perusal.
“I think that was him,” said Henry. “Quinn. His car.”
“Weird.”
“I mean I’m not sure. I couldn’t see. The windows are all dark on that car. Did he go by earlier?”
Some vestige of the laptop work remained. Bug’s index fingers tap-tap-tapped the steering wheel ridge, Bug thinking. He turned the engine over. His head bobbing, maybe a confirmation, as thoughts passed in bubbles like saline out of an IV drip.
Before heading out of town, they did a drive-by.
Quinn Dobbs’ car the only vehicle parked in front of the house, the lawn just two days shy of Henry’s next appointment. No one in sight. No one on the deck, modeling swimwear.
“I don’t even know what that ding-dong looks like,” said Bug. “But it seems weird, him pooping on out from the woods like that. I don’t know. Could be that cabin. Could be he had some squirrel killing to get on out his system. Could be this. Could be that.”
Nodding, Henry looked out the cab rear window at the Dobbs’ house, retreating fast as Bug headed for a cross street then one, two, three turns through town, and acceleration, Auntie’s in the rearview, then past the Dobbs house again, past the railcars, one last throat clearing and then a hucking of a fat one out onto the pavement before the considerably rougher ride Bug greeted by telling Henry and maybe himself, “Hold on to your hat. Here come hemorrhoids.”
Bug stayed with the truck, butt resting against the hood, smoking a cigarette. Henry walked the cabin perimeter.
He’d knocked on the front and back doors. No answer. The roof kind of complete, the windows set in place, but the porch wasn’t quite complete, shingles missing from the overhang, the pillar supports the color of wood just purchased off a lumber company lot. Pressing his face against windows, cupping his head and squinting revealed unfinished walls, exposed wires, insulation. Not the surroundings someone like Hope would endure. The dirty little secret, the joke here, Henry didn’t really like Hope. Not a hate. She was definite eye candy. But Henry didn’t have anything to say to her. Tiff always did. Tiff could talk to anyone. Henry could barely tote the conversational kindling to communicate with his mom. Instead of Hope seeing Henry as someone she could trust, another freak or geek out in the boonies, he was dead weight. Even if he saved her from some life-or-death scenario, he bet she’d wish it were someone a little bit cooler, a hero with cache certain to rub off, increase her worth.
Henry rounded the cabin’s western side, passing bags of cement, spots for flowers and other ornamentation blocked off by rebar and planks shunted into the loam. A mound of beauty bark loomed at the rear of the lot, a smaller peak filled the wheelbarrow adjacent, hand tools littered the wheelbarrow perimeter, work abandoned sometime ago. He couldn’t picture Hope out here, biding time courtesy of intensive labor. He could picture someone loading the wheelbarrow for her, and Hope considering the labor ahead, sighing, and poking at bark before finally freeing up her hands for the more soothing and familiar work of texting.
On the drive out he’d received a text from Tiffany. They were in Pendleton, Sipe inside some condo, Tiff sitting in Lori’s car. Bored. Fighting off sleep. Naptime anytime, right? Her arm felt fine. She wasn’t mad at Henry. Like she’d said. She could never be mad. Their places swapped out, she would’ve watched Sipe tear Henry’s arm off before coughing up the keys.
She didn’t say anything about kissing him.
It’d been dry and platonic. More like a smooch his mom would plant.
Right after Sipe took Lori’s keys out and got into the car, Tiff told Henry she was going with Sipe. She started towards the living room door and Henry grabbed her. The left shoulder, the wing Sipe hadn’t nearly ripped off. Still, a spasm went through her. Henry let go, stepped back, hands up, but right away Tiff laughed. Told him her brains were messed up. Like both shoulders hurt, sheezus. It was ok. Really. Put her hands on his shoulders, told him it was going to be fine, all of it, she promised, then she arched up, and put one on his lips. And then she ran out of the house.
Henry knew he should shake it off. It wasn’t on her radar. It didn’t mean anything. He could imagine Paul Salerno, pointing and giggling, ‘Look at Henry, sporting a permanent stiffy, all because Aquagirl’s sweater bunnies mashed up against him for all of a half-second. Virgin.’
A power line buzzed. Henry looked up at the cord sagging between the cabin and the pole at the lot perimeter. A few people lived outside of Little Creek proper. He hadn’t really noticed the power poles on the ride out. A few more miles into the woods there was the first fire lookout. Lori had taken him out to it this spring, just as a mom-son weekend activity. She’d pointed out the next lookout, a little blip out on the rim of the world. Henry thought it might be a pretty cool job, at least the being alone aspect. Thinking of the forest being on fire, even if you were perched up top in the loo
kout, that scared the shit out of him.
Deep down the throat of the access road, a rumble started and gathered force, gravel churned up and clicking like dud popcorn kernels canon shot from a popper, caroming around the rim of a waiting bowl. The Jaguar rolled into view, kept coming in slow poke pace and then turned sharp, slowing, perpendicular to Bug’s truck, the sporty cars front tires angled so that if the car decided to make a break for it, only a sapling or two would be sacrificed.
The engine died. The driver side door opened. The whole time Bug remained sitting on the hood, looking over his left shoulder at the Jaguar.
Henry recognized Quinn Dobbs, that razor-sculpted goatee had been in the big brown house at least once prior to Alec’s run. Henry home from school, the Jaguar parked in the driveway, a late last winter snow melting soon as it landed on the car, on the gravel. Quinn barely ever speaking to Henry, just nodding at him before leaving the house, Alec going out for a spin with his one Little Creek pal.
Whenever Quinn cropped up as a topic at the dinner table, Lori just nodded. Alec ignorant that the Lori-nod indicated the mistress of the shit-brown castle was only putting up with one of her guys’ poor taste in friends. Paul Salerno had been a former frequent recipient of the nod.
“You guys do know that this is private property, right?” asked Quinn. The look he gave Henry like with a single stroke of some pen on some parchment he’d strike down any current or future lawn mowing work the boy might otherwise have performed in the entire kingdom Dobbs.
Pushed off the hood, Bug cleared his throat and hucked one onto the gravel. He gestured at Henry, rubbed at his ball cap like some titanic itch had arisen, and after fidgeting with the ball cap bill asked Quinn, “You guys got a kid out here? A girl?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know what a girl is, right?”
Crickets. Quinn a mannequin.
“Hope? Henry? Hope? That’s the name? Right. So, look, this girl’s missing. Looked all over for her, in town and whatnot, but figured we ought to look a few other places. You seen her?”
“No,” said Quinn.
“Know who she is?”
“Not really.”
“Kind of a cutie. Kind of like most kids these days, showing off a little more then might be advisable.”
“No,” said Quinn.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“By my count, well, yeah, by my count, you’ve been out here twice today. You doing work out here or something?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m just asking. This is quite the set-up. Tell the truth, I’d build somewhere there weren’t quite so many trees though. They’re gonna shit on your shingles constantly.”
Quinn patty caked the Jaguar roof. A nice tight polite smile tugging the goatee.
“Like I said, you shouldn’t be out here. Either of you.”
“We go you can get back to work?”
“Something like that.”
“Huh. ‘Cause honestly, you don’t look dressed for labor. You look like you might be going to work at one of them Indian casinos maybe, but you don’t look like you got a date with beauty bark, son.”
“I think you need to leave.”
“Sure. Certainly. Pop them doors open. Let us into your cabin. Make me believe there isn’t a kid out here.”
“That isn’t going to happen. Now, please, I’ve been more than accommodating,” said Quinn. “You can pack up, you can beat it, or, I can call the cops.”
“Tell you what. Tell. You. What. Lets have a race. I’ll whip out mine, you whip out yours, fuck, Henry, whip out yours, and we’ll see who gets Deputy Dawg out here first. You do know how law works around here, right? Out in the boonies? They mosey through town once or twice a day, and it’s all about their tummies. Which one’s on duty and whether or not they enjoy the hash they serve up at The Outpost. What day is this? Henry, what day? Tuesday? Right. It’s Tuesday. So probably neither one of us, any of three of us, is going anywhere anytime soon. Deputy Lueck won’t be anywhere near Little Creek another 3 or 4 hours.”
“You won’t get a signal,” said Quinn.
“What’s that?”
Quinn pointed towards trees, his finger ticking back and forth like a frenzied windshield wiper.
“This. The trees. There’s no reception out here.”
“Got a phone inside?”
“Maybe.”
“So go call.”
Quinn scratched his face.
“Huh,” said Bug. “Not so quick to have the law out here. Huh on top of huh. That’s something.”
Bug had worked the pack from his breast pocket. Tapped out a cigarette, and took the lighter out from the other breast pocket. Hands occupied he spat. Waggled the smoke and the lighter at Quinn.
“Long as I got access to flavor country, sport, I can wait all day, all afternoon, and on into the gloaming. You wanna try and make me and Henry leave you’re welcome to it, but I’m kind of settled in for at least the next little bit. Maybe not like a tick on a well-digger’s balls, but close to it.”
Quinn opted out of the tight turn and backed the Jaguar up, incrementally, just missing mashing bumpers, and once aligned with the access road he peeled out, gravel spraying all over. The kind of unnecessary noise and violence that sent squirrel and bunny hearts into race mode. A slight haze rose, drifted into the trees, the gustiness of the take off complete with industrial perfume.
Once the Jaguar’s roar edged into a slight insect-like hum, Bug stretched, and motioned at the cabin.
“Those doors locked?”
Henry shook his head.
“Don’t know. I knocked.”
Bug gave the cabin a once over.
“Well, let’s knock, again, and then if we have to huff and puff and blow the house down, well, we’ll just apologize to the little piggies later on.”
The Lipless Gods Page 20
