As soon as he spoke he wished he hadn’t. Travis was about to say that he reckoned fifty dollars would be fine but Leonard spoke first.
“I’ll give you sixty dollars, and I’ll give you even more if you bring me some that doesn’t look like it’s been run through a hay bine.”
“OK,” Travis said, surprised at Leonard but more surprised at himself, how tough he’d sounded. He tried not to smile as he thought of telling guys back in Marshall that he’d called Leonard Shuler a cheater to his face and Leonard hadn’t done a damn thing about it but offer more money.
Leonard pulled a roll of bills from his pocket, peeled off three twenties, and handed them to Travis.
“I was figuring you might add a couple of beers, maybe some quaaludes or a joint,” Shank said.
Leonard nodded toward the meadow’s far corner.
“Put them over there in those tall weeds next to my tomatoes. Then come inside if you’ve got a notion to.”
Travis and Shank lifted the plants from the truck bed and laid them where Leonard said. As they approached the door Travis watched where the Plotts had vanished under the trailer. He didn’t lift his eyes until he reached the steps. Inside, it took Travis’s vision a few moments to adjust, because the only light came from a TV screen. Strings of unlit Christmas lights ran across the walls and over door eaves like bad wiring. A dusty couch slouched against the back wall. In the corner Leonard sat in a fake-leather recliner patched with black electrician’s tape. A stereo system filled a cabinet and the music coming from the speakers didn’t have guitars or words. Beside it stood two shoddily built bookshelves teetering with albums and books. What held Travis’s attention lay on a cherrywood gun rack above the couch.
Travis had seen a Model 70 Winchester only in catalogs. The checkering was done by hand, the walnut so polished and smooth it seemed to Travis he looked deep into the wood, almost through the wood, as he might look through a jar filled with sourwood honey. Shank saw him staring at the rifle and grinned.
“That’s nothing like the peashooter you got, is it?” Shank said. “That’s a real rifle, a Winchester Seventy.”
Shank turned to Leonard.
“Let him have a look at that pistol.”
Shank nodded at a small table next to Leonard’s chair. Behind the lamp Travis saw the tip of a barrel.
“Let him hold that sweetheart in his hand,” Shank said.
“I don’t think so,” Leonard said.
“Come on, Leonard. Just let him hold it. We’re not talking about shooting.”
Leonard looked put out with them both. He lifted the pistol from the table and emptied bullets from the cylinder into his palm, then handed it to Shank.
Shank held the pistol a few moments and passed it to Travis. Travis knew the gun was composed of springs and screws and sheet metal, but it felt more solid than that, as if smithed from a single piece of case-hardened steel. The white grips had a rich blueing to them that looked, like the Winchester’s stock, almost liquid. The Colt of the company’s name was etched on the receiver.
“It’s a forty-five,” Shank said. “There’s no better pistol a man can buy, is there Leonard?”
“Show-and-tell is over for today,” Leonard said, and held his hand out for the pistol. He took the weapon and placed it back behind the lamp. Travis stepped closer to the gun rack, his eyes not on the Winchester but what lay beneath it, a long-handled piece of metal with a dinner-plate-sized disk on one end.
“What’s that thing?” Travis asked.
“A metal detector,” Leonard said.
“You looking for buried treasure?”
“No,” Leonard said. “A guy wanted some dope and came up a few bucks short. It was collateral.”
“What do you do with it?”
“He used it to hunt Civil War relics.”
Travis looked more closely at the machine. He thought it might be fun to try, kind of like fishing in the ground instead of water.
“You use it much?”
“I’ve found some dimes and quarters on the riverbank.”
Leonard sat back down in the recliner. He nodded at the couch. “You can stand there like fence posts if you like, but if not that couch ought to hold both of you.”
A woman came from the back room and stood in the foyer between the living room and kitchen. She wore cut-off jeans and a halter top, her legs and arms thin but cantaloupe-sized bulges beneath the halter. Her hair was blond but Travis could see the dark roots. She was sunburned and splotches of pink underskin made her look wormy and mangy. Like some stray dog around a garbage dump, Travis thought. Except for her face. Hard-looking, as if the sun had dried up any softness there once was, but pretty—high cheekbones and full lips, dark-brown eyes. If she wasn’t all scabbed up she’d be near beautiful, Travis figured.
“How about getting Shank and his buddy here a couple of beers, Dena,” Leonard said.
“Get them your ownself,” the woman said. She took a Coke from the refrigerator and disappeared again into the back room.
Leonard shook his head but said nothing as he got up. He brought back two cans of Budweiser and a sandwich bag filled with pot and rolling papers. He handed the beers to Travis and Shank and sat down in the chair. Travis was thirsty and drank quickly as he watched Leonard carefully shake pot out of the baggie and onto the paper. Leonard licked the paper and twisted both ends.
“Here,” he said, and handed the marijuana to Shank.
Shank lit the joint, the orange tip brightening as he inhaled. Shank offered the joint back but Leonard declined.
“All these times I’ve been out here I never seen you mellow out and take a toke,” Shank said. “Why is that?”
“I’m not a very mellow guy.” Leonard nodded at Travis. “Looks like your buddy isn’t either.”
“He’s just scared his daddy would find out.”
“That ain’t so,” Travis said. “I just like a beer buzz better.”
He lifted the beer to his lips and drank until the can was empty, then squeezed the can’s middle. The cool metal popped and creaked as it folded inward.
“I’d like me another one.”
“Quite the drinker, aren’t you,” Leonard said. “Just make sure you don’t overdo it. I don’t want you passed out and pissing my couch.”
Travis stood and for a moment felt off plumb, maybe because he’d drunk the beer so fast. When the world steadied he got the beer from the refrigerator and sat back down. He looked at the TV, some kind of Western, but without the sound he couldn’t tell what was happening. He drank the second beer quick as the first.
Shank had his eyes closed.
“Man, I’m feeling so good,” Shank said. “If we had us some real music on that stereo things would be perfect.”
“Real music,” Leonard said, and smiled, but Travis knew he was only smiling to himself.
Travis studied the man who sat in the recliner, trying to figure out what it was that made Leonard Shuler a man you didn’t want to mess with. Leonard looked soft, Travis thought, pale and soft like bread dough. Just because a man had a couple of bear dogs and a hotshot pistol didn’t make him such a badass. He thought about his own daddy and Carlton Toomey, big men who didn’t need to talk loud because they could clear out a room with just a hard look. Travis wondered if anyone would ever call him a badass and wished again that he didn’t take after his mother, so thin-boned.
“So