28

AT THE MOTEL THAT NIGHT, JACK CARPENTER WAS TIRING OF the waiting game. He didn’t want to be implicated in some criminal mess with Stacey, or Penry, but he saw, sitting out on the porch in the dark, while the other three, just down from him, laughing, and farting, and telling jokes too old and stupid to be entertaining, drank themselves blind on Old Turkey, that he’d gotten himself into a worse-than-dangerous spot.

All that was sickeningly clear to him.

Why, after all, should he believe what Carol had told him was true? Or that Stacey wasn’t involved in some way she might not be aware of? For all he knew, the whole thing, aside from Stacey’s charge of assault, might have been engineered to guard their job security. Jack had promoted a Mexican, just the week before, to co-supervise the cutting floor, a man named Joseph Martinez, who was honest, hardworking, and something of a leader. Jack had told everyone under Joseph, especially Stacey, who’d been passed up for the promotion, that he’d had to do it, promote Martinez, because over half the workers on the cutting floor were Mex now, and he needed someone down there to manage them, or there’d be terrible trouble.

But what Jack hadn’t said was this: He’d have hired Martinez anyway.

He worked blazingly fast, almost too fast, really, for safety, but was determined to make life work in the plant, for him and the others there, and not just the Mexicans, and Jack liked the man. Which no way could he say to anyone—nor could Joseph say it of Jack.

But it was true. He liked Joseph, with his deep-set dark eyes, intelligent eyes, and the picture of Mary and Jesus he kept in his pocket. His slow, considered way of breaking up fights. His low mutter at trouble, Haysus, Maree-ah, Yosepha!

And now what? Even if Stacey did run—and was that why they were really up here anyway, given it seemed an almost impossible plan?—he was shouldered with the burden of this theft business. Or was he?

Jack glanced down the porch at Munson, Lawton, and Penry.

Penry had stuck straws up his nose and was braying like a donkey, while Munson and Lawton, laughing, slapped at him.

Jack gave Munson a level look. Munson he’d asked to go with them so he’d have somebody to back him up if it came to that. Munson sobered for a moment, but when Stacey said, “Fuckin’ jackass! Get it?” Munson let go a mouthful of compressed air through his lips, Penry braying again, and making a farting sound, and all three broke out in laughter, nearly falling from their chairs.

“Hey,” Jack said, sharply, “keep it down! There’s other people staying here!”

“Yeah, well, who the fuck are you, our chaperone or something?”

This from Penry, and then the three of them were laughing themselves breathless.

Maybe it was the pot that was making them so stupid, Jack thought. He’d smoked the stuff when he was a teenager, but had laid off after he’d taken management at Dysart. It was some education, not getting loaded, and spending time around people who did, an education and then some.

“We need some pussy,” Penry said.

“Where you gonna get pussy around here, Stupid,” Stacey said.

“Ah, fuck you!” Penry said.

“Let’s get fucked up,” Munson said, and handed the brass pipe down.

“Want some, Hank?” Munson said. It was his one effort at reestablishing his tie to Jack, but the nickname put Jack off.

All the full-timers on the cutting floor at Dysart who hadn’t made management called him Hank, he was never sure why, but he didn’t like it.

“I say we go find the doctor and fuck his little girl, and then fuck him,” Penry said.

There was a shocked silence, even from Lawton and Munson, and then they hit Penry, all the harder, around the head, Penry snorting like a donkey again, but when Penry stopped braying, he turned to look down the porch at Jack, who was glaring at him.

“I don’t want to hear shit coming out of your mouth like that again, you hear me, Penry?”

“Aww, fuck off,” he said.

“Yeah, fuck off,” Stacey said. “You and your fucking management horseshit. I mean, just who the fuck do you think you are?”

Jack, when he’d been captain of the football team, had had to deal with this before. Had dealt with it for years at the plant.

“You think about what you just said,” he told Penry.

“Ah, fuck you all over again. What would you know, anyway, you fuckin’ spick lover.”

This struck Jack with the force of a blow.

“What did you say, Penry?” he said. He was standing now.

“He didn’t mean nothin’,” Munson said, and Stacey shot out, indignant, “The fuck he didn’t.”

“So what is it?” Jack said. “I wanna hear it.”

“Fuckin’ gasbag,” Penry said.

“You want to talk to me, Penry?” Jack said.

“Fuckin’ blown-up fuckin’ Dysart gasbag!”

Now it had gone too far. There was a heavy silence and Munson said, “Ah, Jesus, Hank. Fuck, I mean Jack. It’s just drink talkin’, what him and Stacey’s sayin’.”

“The fuck it is, Munson,” Stacey said.

Munson put a restraining hand on Stacey’s shoulder, pushed him back down when he tried to stand. Stacey caught Munson in the face with his elbow, and then Stacey was up, only a yard or two between him and Jack.

“I’ll tell you something, you . . . fuckin’ asshole. We stood behind you when you said not to strike, and you promised better wages, and better this and fuckin’ that, and ten years down the line, what do we got?”

“I got you better wages,” Jack said, something stentorian in his voice. “You got better working—”

“Sure,” Stacey said, throwing out his arm and pointing his finger at Jack. “Sure, you’re a fine one to fucking talk, dressed up in a monkey suit and tie and in your office, and then after all this goddamn time, some management job comes up, and who do you give it to? The fuckin’ spick—not me, not Munson, not—”

Jack didn’t have to say, Penry? You think Penry could work management?

Stacey was leaning, weaving a bit, toward Jack.

“Siddown,” Munson said. “You said your piece.”

“No, I ain’t,” Stacey said. “I know about you giving Carol those bonuses, and she’s gotta do everything but suck your goddamn dick for ’em, and be nice, and all that shit, and you playing hangdog and sorry Hank with your wife gone and maybe takin’ your kids, and needin’ that huge fuckin’ house for just you, just you in that big ol’ house, and me and Carol in a double-wide, like everybody else here, and every fuckin’ time there’s a management position, it goes to somebody else, and you fuckin’—”

Jack cleared his throat, he was going to say, You forget why we’re up here?

But it occurred to him, he was almost sure now he didn’t know himself. He knew not to say word one about what Carol had told him about the stealing, though.

“You pull it together, show you got leadership ability, you’d get promoted just like anybody else. Cut back on all your bottle flu days.”

But it was a lie. Management had told Jack he was never to promote Stacey Lawton, or Larry Munson. Penry wasn’t even a consideration.

“That all the fuck you got to say?”

They were still standing, but now were just an arm’s length apart.

“What do you want me to say, Stacey?” Jack said, but his heart was racing.

Even Munson, he saw now, was ready to take him down if he so much as moved. All three of them would.

“Hell, even I could tell those spicks just how to get off,” Penry said.

And Munson tossed his head back and laughed, and Stacey with him, Penry, again, not understanding the humor in what he’d said, and Jack uncomfortably moved back, to grip the railing that Penry had gripped earlier, when he’d been looking at the little girl.

“What would you do in management, anyway?” Munson said, and shook Penry.

And Stacey Lawton did the same. Shook Penry.

It had always been like this, and Penry, not quite getting it, glowered, and then made a face, and Munson slapped Jack’s arm. “We were just messin’ with ya, Jack, can’t you take a joke?” he said, and the three of them sat again, and were joking, but when Jack turned his back to them, and stood there with the railing under his hands, he knew what was at stake.

He took a deep breath, the schook! schook! schook! of the three of them opening beers behind him.

Now Munson prodded him with a bottle.

“Jack, ol’ boy, have a beer.”

Jack turned and smiled for the three of them. He took the beer and drank from it, but all the while, as he was forcing a look of calm on his face, something inside him was crawling, and he was thankful he hadn’t suggested they move off into the woods so as not to bother the other people staying at the motel.

And it was time now. Stacey for the last two days had phoned Carol, just after ten, to see if the Mexican had died. They’d taken him off critical, but they still weren’t sure, and then, too, the witnesses to the thing were proving to be unreliable, or so she’d told Stacey.

“You gonna call Carol, Stacey?” Jack asked.

Stacey rocked up out of his chair, then stumbled back into it.

“Ah, shit,” he said.

He tried to get out of the chair again, and Jack said, “Listen, I can make the phone call easy as you. I’ll do it. Anything you want me to say?”

The three of them looked at one another, between them some private joke, Penry trying not to spit it out, and Stacey said, “Don’t, Stupid! Don’t now!”

Jack tried to smile for them, then went down the stairs and off into the dark, and Stacey called to him, trying to suppress his laughter, “Ask about the kids, all right?”

In the dark, Jack tossed his hand high over his head, a will-do wave, and then he was moving up the street, by parked cars shiny in the moonlight, and he was not smiling, and he was moving quickly.

“Joseph?” he said, calling from the phone booth just outside Herter’s.

“Jack?”

There was an awkward silence. Jack had never called him at home. Even his name felt a little strange in Jack’s mouth, or he felt as if he weren’t pronouncing it quite correctly, and felt like a fake if he tried.

“Listen,” Jack said. “I want you to check the weights on the trucks independently, have somebody spot-check up the road.”

“Only the police can do that.”

“I know,” Jack said. “You’re friends with Barrera, aren’t you?”

Barrera was the officer doing the investigation on the beating, the one Mexican officer in town.

“When?” Joseph said.

“On shift tonight.”

“Tonight?”

There was another awkward silence.

“You aren’t gonna tell me what this is all about?”

“I can’t.”

“Does it have something to do with Lawton, or is it Penry?”

“It might,” Jack said, intentionally being ambiguous. He didn’t want to implicate anyone just yet.

Joseph swore on the other end of the line.

“You know something I don’t?” Jack said.

“I don’t have to tell you how it is down on the floor, you were there years back.”

This struck Jack as something new now, though.

“You think this wasn’t just some bar brawl?”

“The witnesses have all gone off, Jack. Without them, what’s Jesus’s wife got?”

“Gone off? What do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean. Each and every one’s disappeared.”

“He gonna make it?”

“Maybe, but even then . . .”

Jack heard steps on the wooden planking down from Herter’s.

“Don’t forget what I said,” he spoke sharply into the phone, and pressed the lever down with his finger, still holding the phone to his ear, then fed more coins into the slot, his back turned, punching out the number, and had Carol on the line, and, in a loud voice, was blathering about the weather, and what they’d done, even as Munson came up behind him, his eyes glassy and hard.

“Wanna talk to Carol?” Jack said, and Munson smiled, as if relieved at something.

“Stacey sent me down, forgot something,” Munson said, and when Jack lifted the phone to Munson’s outstretched hand, he worried Munson would feel he was shaking.

Jack stepped back into the dark.

“Carol?” Munson said. “Yeah, sure. Great weather. Sure. You didn’t?”

Munson looked at Jack, then nodded.

“No, Jack didn’t say. They really think he’s gonna make it? Surgery? Uh-huh. But that’s goddamn great news. Sure. Yeah.” Munson was about to put the phone down, when he said, abruptly, “Oh, Carol, Stacey said— No, he’s not here, he and Penry went off to get some stuff. Right. Anyway, he wanted me to ask you to have Stan over at Conoco check the radiator, make sure there’s enough antifreeze in it, he plumb forgot.” Munson pressed the phone tighter to his ear, his eyes narrowing. “What?” There was another pause. “All right. I’ll tell him,” Munson said, and he hung the phone up, but even as he did, Jack could hear Carol talking on the other end. “Jack? Jack, are you there?”

“What’d she say?” Jack asked.

“She wanted me to tell you your insurance agent called at her place, looking for you, he wants you to call when you get back. A Dick Lutz,” Munson said, and Jack shrugged, but his heart was kicking something awful.

“Dick Lutz” was a code he and Carol had used when there was something to say between them and someone was within earshot, or sometimes at the table, over dinner. They’d done it since they’d been kids. Dick Lutz had been a neighbor who’d put out poison in his yard for cats. I do feed the birds, he’d warned. Still, when Jack and Carol’s cat, Tiger, a tom that liked to roam, disappeared, they’d blamed Lutz, and hadn’t forgotten.

So it was all at once a warning, and a finger pointed in some direction, and now, a forgiveness.

Jack didn’t want to move from the phone, and his head tangled with excuses to go into town so he could find some way to call Carol again.

He had to get to another phone, but here Munson had his elbow, was steering him back toward the motel.

“What were you waitin’ on there, Jack?” Munson said, in his voice something sharp. “You should’ve told me the good news right off!”

Jack, for a second longer, resisted moving from the phone, feeling the rush of blood in his neck, and his eyes thick with it, and his mind a hot nothing, and then, shrugging, he moved up the road with Munson, and just when Jack’s breath began to come evenly, Munson slapping him on the back, they were met on the road by Penry.

“Stacey’s off!” Munson said, and added, “Who you got to call now?”

“Girlfriend,” Penry joked, his teeth white in the dark.

“You’re lookin’ a little hangdog,” Penry said, slapping Jack’s shoulder as he went by. “We gotta celebrate! Ol’ Stacey’s off the hook! Soon’s I get this call over, okay? We’ll make a night of it, hey?”

“Right,” Jack said.