“Oh, Bongo.” She shook with laughter. “Oh, oh, gag.”
Chapter 22
Phil Harvey drove down towards the barn. Frankie Chase flopped in his seat but was secured by the seatbelt. His head lolled and dripped. One of the rounds had passed through and spidered the glass. Blood ran in an intricate pattern in the cracks. Bits of bone and grey matter adhered to the window. Harvey spun the F-250 around and backed the bed up to the barn doors. His arm and shoulder ached. He opened the doors one-handed then walked up to the old guy’s shack.
“Hey, hey, old-timer.”
The old man was snaggle-toothed when he creaked open the door. “Sonny, you got any?” His weak blue eyes scanned Harvey from head to toe, looking for bulges that might be packages of crank.
“First we work, then you can play, okay?” Harvey realized the old man was younger than he was. Crank burned away youth and loaded you up with years you hadn’t lived yet. Harvey never really liked making crank, although the profits were good. Crank took you out into the badlands for customers and you learned more about motorcycles than you needed to know. He preferred ecstasy, the magic X that took you to the cities, to the clubs. Done right, X was a boost to good nature. “I got four oh-zees for you. White as snow. First, though, work. Oh, and bring that little groundhog gun you got. I saw some ferrets in the barn.”
The old man was rangy and had narrow shoulders under a long tank top. The cold had no effect on him. He went inside and came out with an automatic target pistol. He shuffled barefoot beside Harvey, babbling about chicks and crank and the jagged edges on the sky that simply pissed him off. Several times he nodded to himself and said, “What goes round comes round.”
“You stayed out of the house, right? You didn’t go poking around up there?”
“I got my place. I got my own place and I stay to my own self.” He saw the drums on the back of the F-250. “You cooking, boy? You mixing?” He studied the drums. “Oh, that stuff. You’re making the kid’s stuff. That stuff takes you the wrong way. Stuff.” He began a soliloquy that stuff was the perfect word, it could mean anything. Stuff your nose, stuff your arm. The couch in the kitchen of his shack had stuffing coming out. “Stuff. You can stuff a turkey.” He cackled. “But you better not stuff it up your ass, heh?” He wiped something from his laughing mouth.
“I’ll be cooking the crank soon. We’ll get you right, get you through the winter. Right now, we got to get these drums off and inside. My arm’s fucked up.”
“Four oh-zees you said you got for me?” He unlaced the canvas and stood with his hands on his hips as though examining a global-sized problem. He nodded. “I’ll drop ’em off, you roll ’em in with your foot. Then I’ll stand ’em up inside where you want them.”
“Okay, perfect. Gimme the gun, I want to kill some of those little fuckers.”
The forty-five-gallon drums landed with a thump as the old guy edged them onto their bottom rims and rolled them off the bed. He counted each one as he did it. Together they rolled the drums into the barn. The old man repeated, “Day’s work, day’s pay,” over and over again.
When the drums were inside and close to the worktable the old man leaned against one of the electric stoves and fingered the tracks on his arm. “That fat guy coming ’round? Haven’t seen him in a while. How’d you get to be that fat? On purpose, you think? Those girls sure seem to like him. When he came up they’d get all excited like and when he took them back to the city he said they were tired and needed a holiday.” The old guy began a run: “I didn’t mind having them around they never come out he treated ’em good I think there must be somebody for everybody like they say do you think and those four oh-zees I guess you outta get up to the house there and maybe —”
Harvey had seen guys shot in the chest and stay standing while you experienced heart-stopping confusion, thinking that maybe you’d missed, waiting for blood on their shirts to appear and thinking that maybe it wouldn’t.
He shot the old guy through the left eye and kept squeezing the trigger, tracking that gnarly cap of thin, dead hair as it fell. The sounds of the firing were sudden and like sharp hand claps but he still heard his brass tinkling on the wooden floor of the barn and birds fleeing the rafters as the room seemed to fill with gun smoke.
It was for love, he thought, it was for positive change. He reviewed his mistakes of the day. He had two dead bodies and only one arm that worked. He had a truck to make disappear. He had two guns to lose. Shell casings to gather from the F-250 and from the barn floor. He had a marathon of X production ahead of him. He had to somehow get back to the city to move the X to the Chinamen and to deal with Captain Cook’s romantic desires for the last time. He had to decide whether to square the logs on the house he’d build in the mountains out west, or to leave them rough-hewn. Water would be a problem, maybe, and when he chose his plot of land he’d have to keep a mind to streams and rivers as well as the depth of the water table. It was love that made him ambitious and it was love that could make him careless.
He stared at the old man, blood running freely from his wounds, and wondered if this had been the old man’s dream: to live in the woods with endless crank. And now look at how he’d ended up.
Twice in one day he’d done the hard thing. He still had some winter in his heart. But it wasn’t like the other times. Frankie Chase and the old guy hadn’t died because of money or greed or stupidity or weakness. They’d died for love, he believed, for a greater good.
* * *
He felt tired and sore but, overall, pretty okay. The old man’s truck had pushed the F-250 easily into the lake. The lake was deep and the truck, with the windows rolled down, had burbled and swayed and finally, after a very long time, it had just disappeared in a whirlpool of its own making. The bodies were securely fastened inside by the seatbelts. The guns were buried far apart from each other and he wasn’t sure he could find them if he tried. The brass was scattered. The old man’s truck had become mired in the muck at the lake’s edge, but with fast one-handed juggling of the steering wheel and the manual stick, Harvey had backed it up, turned it, and parked it beside the barn.
He stood in the sunshine looking at the farmhouse with a smile on his face. He could see where the setting sun was igniting the endless trees as they dripped in the autumn changes.
An original thought flitted through his mind. He was a season. He was going to change in increments. The light would shine on him and, given the chance, he too would ignite, he too would glow and change like foliage. Soon he’d be gone like the sun but he’d leave behind a piece of good.
He went into the barn and scattered wood shavings over the old guy’s blood. The ants were already out and feasting. He tied his hair back and began assembling tubing and pails. He turned on two of the stoves, went back outside and tested the wind’s direction.
Chapter 23
They drove north in the morning after a bacon and eggs breakfast at the diner. The same cook was on and he stared at them with deep suspicion. Through the plate glass window onto the parking lot Ray Tate watched drivers unearth themselves from their rigs. They stretched and blew visible clouds of breath. One did some vaguely Asian-looking slow motion movements then lit a cigarette. A middle-aged Native woman slowly climbed down from his rig, straightening her clothing and pulling her inky hair back into a ponytail. The pair talked like pals in the rising sunshine and the trucker gave her a cigarette and lit it. With a curiously tender movement the trucker touched the woman on the arm and she smiled up at him before heading up the edge of the highway, the backwash from southbound traffic whipping at her long baggy coat.
Ray Tate nodded through the window. “Romance.”
Djuna Brown gave him a sweet smile. “Someone for everyone, right, Ray? Even killer beatniks and black dykes.”
They finished their breakfast and while Djuna Brown paid, Tate went to the pay phone on the wall.
“Skip.”