Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) (5 page)

“Too much curb appeal?”

“You're not funny.”

“I'm not paid to be.”

“There's no other way to say it: The place is a rat trap. Actually, I'm not even sure I can imagine rats living there,” she said.

“So you've seen it?”

She sneered. “Clean your thoughts. I went there with Beckett sometimes, or dropped off negatives when Beckett couldn't get free.”

“You mean photo negatives? I thought they did all that with computers these days.”

She said, “Beckett couldn't stand them. He thought that digital cameras were ruining the art. Or”—she waved a contemptuous hand and changed her voice to what I guessed was an imitation of Beckett—“
diluting
it. Something like that. He insisted on using film. Dwayne transferred everything to a computer.”

“This Mr. Beckett sounds like an interesting fella.”

“If by
interesting
you mean
patronizing misogynist
, then yeah. He was interesting.”

“You've got quite a vocabulary for someone who opens doors for a living,” I said.

“And what do you do for dollars? You work in a hole, right?”

“Touché,” I said. “So, if I'm hearing you correctly, the name Guy Beckett doesn't lift your heart.”

“No, it does not. My gorge maybe.”

I raised my chin back toward the house. “He didn't hit her,” I said. “Her father would have him cut into pieces and melted the bones in a coking furnace. Drinking? Or drugs?”

“No more than the usual.”

“I'm thinking it's women, then.”

“It's women,” she said. “Beckett has a weakness.”

“A lot of men do.”

“Not like him,” she said. “He'd stack 'em five high at a time.”

“He ever make a grab at you?”

“If he did, he didn't do it more than once. But everyone else was fair game. And this was a guy with some hustle. Book clubs, church groups. Name it. He'd join anything if there were women there. Even our local environmental club. Crab Orchard Friends, something like that.”

“Saving the earth is not his thing, I guess?”

“Not his thing. Guy Beckett cares about Guy Beckett and his needs, period, full stop.”

“And what do you care about?”

“More or less the same thing. But at least I'm honest about it.”

“And here your mistress thinks you're loyal to her.”

She glared at me. If she could, she would have unhinged her jaw and swallowed me whole.

“This
is
loyalty. This is what loyalty does. It raises its voice, and it tells a fool that she's running headlong down a dark tunnel toward an oncoming train.”

“Beckett?”

She nodded. “Ruin on two feet. Believe me, she's better off without him.”

“Well, someone must miss him. Family?”

She shook her head.

“Okay, friends, then. There's got to be someone.”

“I don't know, really. Except for Dwayne, I rarely saw any friends. The ones I did see were mostly work people, but they never seemed to like him much, either.”

“Sounds kind of lonely.”

“I don't know that he ever noticed.”

“Okay,” I said. I stepped out onto the front porch. “One last thing.”

“My God, what?”

“You said ‘was' before.”

She was confused. And as stern-looking as a chainsaw sculpture. “What?”

“A minute ago. I said Beckett sounds like an interesting character, and you said, yes, he was.”

She said, “You can always hope.”

She closed the door.

I
drove back through the Estates. I stopped at the check-in box and thanked the old guy once more and got his name—besides Lilac, I mean—something I forgot to do the first time. I tried to imagine what I could do next. I'd asked my questions and learned something about Guy Beckett and his sad story of domestic disquietude. I guessed that, in the best case, he'd just run away from home. That seemed unlikely, but at least it was a possibility.

I'll tell you, though, the more likely angle, the meth-trade
angle, wasn't something I was going to touch with a fifty-foot barbed pole. Hell, a pole of any kind. This isn't some nice, clean drug business with imported suits and orderly accounts like they show on TV. These people were animals; you come between them and their fix or their dollars, they'll kill you dead and lick your bones clean.

I didn't want my bones licked clean. I wanted more coffee. I found a place a few miles up the road and drank a hot cup and made idle chat with a former longwall operator who wanted the government to keep out of his Medicare. I made a couple of polite attempts to explain the situation, but he was impenetrable. After a while, I gave it up and paid for his coffee. I told him I hoped the government kept out of it, but he just sighed and shook his head. Like Susan said, everybody's got a problem.

A half hour later, the rain finally slowed down, till it was nothing more than a light mist, and I got on the bike and rolled east on IL-13 toward 148. Crainville was along the way, but Dwayne Mays's house would still be sealed off, most likely, so I decided to leave that for another day. Or never. Honestly, my real plan was to stall for time and hope the cops worked the whole thing out. Either Beckett would show up dead, or he'd turn himself in for the Mays murder, or he'd get caught. Less likely, he'd stumble home with a hangover and a crotch full of rot and a paternity suit. However it happened, I'd collect what had been promised me and that would be the end of it.

I thought it over for the next mile or so. I rehearsed it a couple times in my mind, the way you do when you're satisfied with yourself for outwitting the world. I passed the lake and its troubled waters. Some fool was out in a fishing
boat, and the boat had gotten swamped and filled nearly to the gunnel, and another boat was on its way out to save the day. Probably he'd get swamped, too, and then they'd have to send another one. Life was like that sometimes. The only thing worse than the accident was the rescue. I didn't want that to be true of this thing I'd gotten involved in. I wanted what was best for my daughter and the family I was trying to build, sure, but there was a line I wouldn't cross—and places even my father's name wouldn't get me out of. I was still philosophizing about that, and life, and Guy Beckett, when my rearview mirrors winked red and blue at me, and I glanced back to find myself being pursued by a sheriff's department prowler.

Well, I wasn't speeding. It was too wet for that, and I'm always cautious on my bike. Illinois is one of these states that honors your right to severe brain damage in the name of personal liberty. But despite the lack of a helmet law, I always wear one, and I'm never one of these dummies you see riding in shorts and sandals or whatever other nonsense they dream up on their way to third-degree burns. A motorcycle is lethal in all kinds of ways, but weather and other motorists are the real risk. So I wasn't speeding. Maybe my brake light was out. I'm usually good at my pre-ride checks, but you never knew when something was going to go wrong and fuck you over. I pulled off 13 and onto the wide neck of Greenbriar Road where there's nothing but a dark cut of forestland and some empty fields. I switched off the bike, put down the stand, pulled off my helmet, and sat there.

Cops usually make you wait while they call in the stop, but this one kicked open his door and marched directly over. He was a tiny thing, five foot six at most, with a round
face and a gut that would swallow punches like jellybeans. He was wearing the tan-and-brown and widescreen shades, despite the lack of sunshine, but everything was too small on him. His uniform hugged him like a second skin and revealed far too much of his manly side for my liking, like it'd been cut down to size to fit him but cut down too far. His pale wrists hung out of his sleeves a good two inches, and the temples of his sunglasses spread almost flat across the expanse of his face.

“Taillight?” I said.

For a moment he looked confused, or startled, that I'd spoken. Then he gathered himself again and shook his head and said, “You Slim?”

I said that I was Slim just as it dawned on me that he shouldn't know that yet.

It was too late. He said, “Okay. Good. This is for you, you sonofabitch.”

“Wait,” I said, but he wasn't paid to wait, I guess. His hand swept up and hit me upside the head with something hard. A baton, maybe, or a bank safe. I dropped sideways off the bike and hit the street and rolled down the hill and right into a ditch, where I belonged.

T
he ditch water was filthy and reeked of rotting vegetation and road muck washed over by the rain. Good stuff. Worse, someone had dumped a deer carcass there. That was pretty common: They'd bag a buck or doe and field butcher it and dump the rest in some lonely place, the way you'd throw away an apple core. This one was skinned and dressed, and its exposed insides were as pink and bloody as a newborn. My mouth sucked up some of the swirling, greasy blood.

I spat it out. I tried to spit out my tongue, too, but it was still tied on. Behind me, I could hear the little bastard sliding down the grade on grass that had bowed over with the weight of the rain. Soon, though, he lost his footing and fell on his ass and shouted out in anger. I took that moment to attempt to pry myself from the mud pie, but it wasn't any good. Nothing was working. Arms, legs, brain. Nothing. The bank safe had done its work. The little dude clambered to his feet. He swore again and swatted in irritation at the mud on his clothes. Maybe he was worried about losing his deposit at the costume shop. I don't know. He came the rest of the way down the hill, and he was fuming. He'd suffered a professional setback, and he wasn't the least happy about it. The sunglasses were cockeyed on his face. He seized me by the scruff and spun me over and punched me in the mouth.

He said, “I'm guessing I don't have to tell you what this is about.”

I gurgled out some blood and muddy water, and he
dropped me back in, faceup this time. He sneered down at me. He had the kind of face kids have nightmares about: dog turd eyes and a small, round mouth like a lamprey's. His nose had been broken at least once, maybe half a dozen times. His hands were thick and soft but as strong as steel clamps, and I might as well have been fighting drop-forged steel when he picked me up again and tossed me onto the road.

He squatted down next to me and said, “I've been told not to hurt you too bad yet, Slim, and that's a shame. I want to hurt you. I want to hurt you and keep on hurting you. Then I'd hurt everyone you know and love, too.”

“Lot of hurting,” I said. Something like that. My tongue wasn't exactly in top working order, and my voice sounded like Latin in a blender.

He shrugged. “That's what you wandered into with this. World of pain. And one more thing.” He stood and stepped back a half step and wound one up and kicked me in the head. If it was a field goal attempt, he would have hit from eighty yards out. The world snapped to black, and I found myself dreaming of headache pills and angry redheads. Peggy appeared before me, holding a butter knife and calling me dirty names. Anci shook her head and went back to reading about dystopian futures and young girls with bows and arrows. Susan had me arrested for stealing a towel. When I woke up again at last, the women were gone. The bad man, too. I was lying in the rain, and some pecker behind the wheel of a yellow pickup was blaring his horn at me like I was a turtle crossing the road.

I
called Jeep Mabry and asked him to meet me at my doctor's office. Some reason, I decided against ordering up an
ambulance. Probably I was embarrassed about getting bushwhacked like that. It's a stupid man-thing. I pried myself up and climbed on the bike and rode slowly into Herrin. A couple of times, the traffic blurred out around me, or the road did, but eventually I arrived at my destination. I parked in the lot and went inside the little building on Lincoln Drive. It was a slow morning, and the staff looked at me and the blood on my swollen head and swallowed their tongues and sprang into action. After a while, I found myself in the examining room. A nurse was cleaning the cut on my lip with a cotton swab and some alcohol when Dr. Cooper came rumbling in. He was a fat man with thinning hair and sharply intelligent eyes. He had this little pinch on his top lip that twisted his mouth slightly upward and made him look like a smart-ass, which was just as well, because the rest of his mouth did that, too.

He said, “Fun times on that hog of yours?”

I said, “Not exactly.”

“Listen to me, it'll happen sooner or later. What's it got in it?”

“Engine?”

“Yeah.”

“Thirteen-hundred.”

He said, “Not enough to outrun statistics. I tell you what, if I could get rid of one thing in my professional life, it'd be those wicked contraptions. Worst man-killers I ever saw.”

“Women, too.”

“True. They get everyone eventually. Equal opportunity carnage. I got a pamphlet around here somewhere I could let you see. You want to see it? Got some real pretty pictures. One guy ran off the road into barbed wire, came out looking like a sliced weenie.”

“I'll be honest, I'm not too interested in that.”

“You guys never are,” he said. He thought for a moment. “I'll try again. This ain't something domestic, is it? Get hit with a frying pan?”

“That seems kinda sexist to me.”

“And yet it happens,” he said. “Besides, I always assumed they grabbed a frying pan because it was the object most likely to knock the sonofabitch's head clean off.”

“There is that,” I said.

“Gets the job done. Speaking of which, I had a situation up at the hospital a year or so back I'll tell you about.”

“Isn't that violating some kind of doctor-patient thing?”

“Usually, but this thing was in all the papers later anyway. I was pulling a shift at the ER. Woman comes in with her arm all cut up. Ugly stuff. Torn to strings. Looked like she'd run it through a thresher.”

“Did she?”

“Did she what?”

“Run it through a thresher? Because that's a common thing around here.”

He said, “I know. No. Shut up. Anyway, I take her back and start looking at the arm, and it's cut up good by these little fragments embedded in the skin. Oddly shaped fragments. Like bits of china, but rough, not smooth. I start tweezing them out. Know what they were?”

“How much can I give you not to tell me?”

“Bone. Skull bone, to be precise. Few bits of scalp, too. Some with these little hairs still attached.”

“I'm maybe not liking this story so much,” I said. “Anyway, my stomach isn't.”

“Uh-huh. Anyway, this woman, she'd been scheming
with her sister to kill her husband. He was an abuser. Wife-beater, I mean. Was beating her like a men's group drum for twenty years or so. Finally, she has enough. One night he comes through the door, three sheets to the wind as usual, ready to treat his wife like a speed bag, only this time her sister's there, too, with a shotgun. Crouched behind the dining room table, waiting to do the deed. You understand? She got her sister to pull the trigger. Couldn't do it herself.”

“I get it.”

“Thing is, though, it's a twenty-eight gauge.”

“Oh, shit.”

He shrugged and said, “Yeah. You know how it is, though. You inflate terrible things in your brain, make them out to be more than they are. Stronger, I mean. Twenty years of hitting and kicking and biting and worse, this sonofabitch must have seemed like a Godzilla to these two. So they choose too much weapon, thinking they'd need it to put him down. Damn thing is practically a cannon. Bastard's head explodes like a piñata, only there wasn't any candy inside.”

“Doc . . .”

“So these bone fragments hit the wife in the arm and tear her up like she'd gone a round or two with a woodchipper.”

“That's a pretty story.”

“Thought you'd like that.”

“It's not a domestic,” I said. “I had a run-in with someone, but not with Peggy. Or any other woman, for that matter. And there weren't any shotguns involved.”

He shook his head and grunted. The nurse finished what he was doing and hustled out without looking at either of us.

Dr. Cooper said, “Reckon we shouldn't be talking like
this in front of him. He's young and unwise as yet in the ways of the world. Something like this, a fight or an assault, I'm supposed to call the law.”

“I was kinda hoping I could talk you out of that.”

“I was kinda thinking that's what you were kinda hoping. I'll try one more time. This something happened at the mine?”

“Why do you ask?”

He hefted his shoulders and said, “'Count of I get about as many of you guys in here for fighting as I do for work-related injuries. I tell you, Slim, think I've about seen it all. Had a guy in here couple weeks back had part of a rock-bolt stabilizer stuck in him.”

“Ouch.”

“That's what he said. Repeatedly. And that's just the violence cases. You guys are always doing stupid stuff down there, too. You happen to remember a guy went by the name of Bug Nuts?”

“Sure. Crazy little asshole, works that Gateway mine up near Red Bud.”

“Not anymore. He's gone.”

“Dead?”

“No, dummy. He went on vacation to hooker Disneyland. Yes, he's dead.”

“Hooker Disneyland?”

Cooper ignored me. “Kid was, what, twenty-eight, twenty-nine? It ain't right, is it?”

“I don't know,” I said. Your name gets to be Bug Nuts—and this is
underground coal miners
calling you this—a bad end is more or less in the cards. “What happened?”

“Well, you know, that little guy was loony as a Turkish
hermaphrodite. He pissed on the man-trip rail, set himself on fire through a stream of his own piss.”

“Why in God's name did he do that?”

“On a dare,” Cooper said.

That rang true. Ignorant idiots at coal mines were always daring one another to do lethally dangerous shit. And not just the inby men, either. I once saw a mine owner “prove” that filter masks were unnecessary by shoving his face into the longwall pan and sucking in heaping lungfuls of coal fine. When he died—and he would—he was going to die hard.

Cooper said, “That's the guess, anyway. Ain't no one took responsibility yet, and probably no one will. Hell, it's practically murder.”

He picked up the cotton and alcohol and finished cleaning me up. He plucked a piece of gravel out of my ear the nurse had overlooked. He shined his light in my eyes and put his thumbs on either side of my nose. “This here don't look so bad. Eyes are working okay, and your face ain't broke. Maybe we'll just chalk this one up to household clumsiness.”

“Thanks, Doc.”

He accepted my gratitude with another grunt and gave me a shot. I don't know that there was any medicinal value in it. I sort of got the feeling he liked giving shots to assholes who dragged him into the office on his free time. He gave me another little lecture about motorcycles and forced me to take the pamphlet he'd mentioned with the guy cut up like a weenie. Then he shook my hand and let me go.

I hopped down from the table and went out into the waiting room, where they were waiting on me like a pack of hyenas. As soon as I was in sight, they jumped on me
with armloads of paperwork and insurance forms. I was still working my way through it when, something like three or four years later, the office door opened and Jeep Mabry appeared.

Lemme tell you a thing or two about Jeep. This was a friend of mine from way back. Friend's maybe not the word, exactly. More like the brother I never had, the kind of brother who'd kill for you, or die. We came up together, dated the same girls, flunked the same classes, haunted the same haunts. Mostly, though, we raised all manner of hell together for so long that a lot of folks got to thinking of us as brothers. Which, like I said, in a way we were.

Jeep went six-eight or nine, four inches taller than me, and weighed in at 275 at least, not a bit of it fat. His head was as big and hard as one of those cast-iron tourist binocular stands, but his face was movie-star handsome and his eyes flashed with something might have been backcountry meanness, or cunning. We went back so far neither of could remember a time when we weren't attached at the hip, and we had a long-running agreement to ruin the funeral of whichever of us went first. We were pals, fellow coal miners, comrades in arms, and best buds.

“Jesus, Slick, you look like shit,” he said.

“Thanks.”

He said, “Correction: You look like shit took a shit.”

“What?”

“I'm trying out some new lines.”

“Keep trying.”

“Motorcycle?”

“I've already done this routine with Cooper,” I said. “You don't have a pamphlet, do you?”

“No. What?”

“Never mind.”

“Coffee?”

“Buckets.”

I rode into town and met him at the little restaurant on the corner of North Park and Poplar. Little place called Hardee's. I checked in by phone with Peggy at school—neglecting to mention my trip to the doctor's office—and then Jeep and I sat in a booth and ate a late breakfast of biscuits and those hash browns they serve in a paper sleeve and black coffee strong enough to kick your ass on Friday night and laugh in your face about it till Saturday morning. We barely spoke over our food. I had trouble chewing, but was hungry from my beating. Jeep was just hungry. Jeep was always hungry, like a locomotive furnace. We finished our meal and cleared our table. We chatted with a couple of the old-timers who seemed to gather there every morning and afternoon to mull over the state of the world. No shots or angry words were exchanged. It felt good, but temporary.

When we were settled again and ready to get down to it, Jeep said, “Maybe you should start at the top.”

Which is what I did. I started at the beginning and told him all of it—the crazy, confusing all of it—and when I was finished he settled back and sighed and said, “So you've got yourself tangled up with Matt Luster, have you?”

“Looks that way.”

“And his daughter.”

“Yup. Well, by extension anyway.”

“I'm going to be straight with you, Slick. This was maybe not your brightest idea.”

“Hell, I know,” I said, “but they dangled that pension in front of me and I snapped at it. Making it worse, there's at least a chance I've gotten myself involved in something has to do with those meth dealers.”