SIX
Just knowing the country had Crystal Ice in it made it look different somehow. Sam Neely drove along at forty miles per hour with his left elbow out the window, looking…
He was feeling terrific that Saturday morning when he stopped into Doolin’s for breakfast. Three tables had people at them. He nodded at everyone and selected the table farthest from the door.
He was examining the menu when Junior Grimes came through the door. He stopped at every table. “Mrs. Davis, you’re looking mighty fine this gorgeous morning, so you are. Hello, Mrs. Wilfred. I declare, I like that dress. And how are you, Frank…Bob…Harry…”
Junior pulled out a chair at Neely’s table and sat down. “What are you into today, Sam?”
“Fighting crime.”
“That’s the ticket. It sure needs fought and I’m glad you’re wearing the gloves, ready to wade in.”
They were giving their orders to the waitress, whom Junior addressed as Alva, when Moses came out of the kitchen and joined them. “Cook didn’t come in today. I’m in there doing the damage. Neely, better try the ham today. It looks almighty good.”
Sam Neely ordered ham and eggs.
Moses didn’t smile as much as Junior, but he was the type of man people instinctively trusted. If Moses said something was so, then that was the way it was. Several large firms paid him retainers as a consultant, and about once a month he received a telephone call from out of state, someone wanting advice. It was common knowledge that Arleigh Tate consulted him on political questions, and occasionally Judge Storm invited him to drop by the courthouse for a visit. In short, Moses Grimes was somebody.
This morning he kidded his son a little, then addressed Trooper Neely. “I hear the Barrow boys are getting out of prison.”
“That’s right,” Neely replied. “Sheriff Tate mentioned it this morning. They’ll be out in a few days. What were they in for, anyway?”
“Lester Storm sent them up for burning down some houses. But they’ve been into about ever’ sort of meanness there is, stealing, trashing cars, getting drunk and shooting up Indian River, pounding people. They’re two bad ones.”
“Prison was the best place for them,” Junior declared. “Someone is gonna shoot ’em one of these days. Three or four people were looking to do just that for burning houses when the law snagged them and sent them off. Lester Storm probably saved their lives, so he did.”
“They’ll never thank him,” Moses said.
“Ain’t got it in ’em,” Junior agreed. “Damn fools got into me bad up in the junkyard. They love to go up there at night and strip cars.”
“Maybe you should give them a job in the garage,” Neely suggested. He was feeling mellow this morning and even had a little excess human kindness to spread around on trash like the Barrow boys. Of course, he had never met them.
Junior was all out of charity. “Then they’d have to do an honest day’s work,” he said sourly. “They’ve made it this far without ever breaking a sweat. I doubt they’re in the mood to give it a try. And I’m not going to stand over them forty hours a week like a prison guard to make sure they don’t steal nothin’.”
At the schoolhouse Neely had a decision to make. Should he take the left fork or the right? The right fork toward Vegan, he decided after a tenth of a second’s deliberation. Maybe wave at Crystal if she was out in the yard or garden.
Alas, Crystal was nowhere to be seen around the Ice palace. Oh, well, he and Crystal would cross paths again soon, and the day was gorgeous. The trees were donning their autumn colors, so the hills were a riot of yellow, orange, and every hue of red, all under a golden sun shining down from a deep blue sky.
Sam Neely whistled as he drove along with his left elbow out the window.
He knew when he arrived in Vegan because a road sign proclaimed the fact. The village sat on top of a low ridge, with an excellent view toward the distant Blue Mountains to the east. Vegan also had an abandoned one-room schoolhouse and, directly across the road, a dilapidated little church with a hasp and padlock on the door. Around the church were at least a hundred graves.
Neely parked the cruiser and walked through the cemetery looking at stones. He sat on the fence and surveyed the Blue Mountains and inhaled the spicy, cinnamony aroma of sweet shrubs. The shrubs around the church were full of bees. Their humming seemed almost a song, one with a lilting melody and a rich harmony.
A fellow could get used to this.
Here, he thought, in this place, with these people, he could be content. If Crystal…
“Don’t put the cart in front of the steed, young fellow,” he said aloud. “Better let life unfold one day at a time.”
Vastly pleased with himself for being so wise, Neely strolled back to the police car and aimed it toward Goshen and Canaan.
After passing through Goshen, he stopped to watch a farmer mowing hay in a meadow that covered the top of the low, wide ridge. The tractor moved at a stately pace as the sun rose toward its zenith and the sweet scent of freshly cut grass enriched the breeze, which was noticeably stiff here on this ridge.
Neely leaned on a fence post and took it all in. There was paperwork awaiting him in the office, but it was Saturday and he wasn’t in the mood. Monday would be soon enough. He sucked in lungfuls of the laden breeze and watched it ripple the tops of the tall grass.
After about five minutes the man on the tractor stopped it, killed the engine, and walked through the grass to the fence where Neely stood.
“Anything I can do for you this morning?”
“No, sir,” Neely said. “I’m just enjoying a look at paradise. You won’t charge for it, will you?”
The man chuckled and pulled a pipe from the pocket of his overalls. “If somebody charged for looking, I’d have been broke all my life.”
They introduced themselves and were passing the time of day as the farmer puffed his pipe when a black sedan pulled to a stop behind the cruiser. A big, German-made car, Neely thought, the first one he had seen in the Eden country.
The driver was a short, pudgy fellow. He nodded at the trooper, then addressed the farmer on the other side of the fence. “Are you Jared Kane?”
“Yep.”
“My name’s Richard Hudson.” He offered his hand. Neely also introduced himself.
“Moses Grimes said you might be available to do some plowing,” Hudson told Jared Kane.
“Yessir. Charge by the hour. Got a garden you need turned over?”
Hudson’s face flushed slightly. “Well, it’s not much of a garden. Just a patch, really. I want you to turn it over and do another ten acres or so besides.”
“Going to plant some corn next spring, are you?”
“Haven’t thought that far ahead. No, Mr. Kane, I’m plowing for arrowheads. Found several in my garden and I’m hoping there are more of them.” He pulled two from his pocket and passed them across. Neely scrutinized them carefully; he had never before held one in his hands. After a careful examination he returned the artifacts to Richard Hudson.
“Guess I ought to show you my lucky arrowhead,” Jared Kane said, and produced it from an inside pocket. “Found this when I was just a boy and carried it ever’ day since.”
The flint was leaf-shaped, about three inches long, delicately made, exquisite. Hudson and Neely oohed and aahed over it as the sun warmed their faces and the breeze played with their hair. Richard Hudson held it the longest. He returned it to its owner reluctantly.
“I once showed it to a professor of archaeology,” Jared Kane told them. “He said it was at least five thousand years old. I take it out and look at it when life gets to bogging me down. Helps me keep things in perspective, so it does. Reminds me that I’m only here for a little while, just a visitor passing through.”
“So it does,” Richard Hudson echoed fervently.
The old car sat under a giant oak near the road. When Neely rounded the curve, there it was, not ten feet from the mailbox.
Sam Neely pulled the cruiser off the road and looked it over. Most of the glass was gone from the windows, large splotches of rust scarred the hood and fenders, and there were weeds up to the door handles. It was only after he looked for a bit that he realized the car was sitting on the ground. No wheels.
Beyond the car was a neatly mowed lawn, and beyond that a small, well-kept white house. The name on the mailbox was J. S. KLINE.
Neely backed the cruiser up, then turned into the driveway and parked.
The driveway led to a garage behind the house. A man was visible through the open door working at something on a bench. Neely stood in the doorway of the garage. The man at the bench never looked up.
“Good morning,” Trooper Neely told the man’s back.
“What do you want?”
“I’d like to talk to you a minute about that car out front, if I might. It’s Mr. Kline, isn’t it?”
“The car ain’t for sale.”
“I don’t want to buy it.”
Now the man turned around. If he was surprised to see a state trooper in uniform standing there, it didn’t show on his face. “Junior Grimes send you?”
“Junior? No. He didn’t.”
“Humpf.” The man turned back to the bench. He was sharpening a lawn mower blade with a file. He had the blade clamped in a vise and was working the file back and forth across the cutting edge.
Sam Neely took off his hat and looked around the garage, taking everything in. The place doubled as a workshop. Tools hung along every wall. Every tool had its own place.
He wished he hadn’t stopped. He’d turned to go when the man said, “Say what you came to say.”
“About the car.” Neely twisted his hat in his hands. “It’s an eyesore. Looks like it’s been sitting there a lot of years. I’m sure your neighbors would be grateful if you’d junk it or at least haul it around back of the garage here, where everyone wouldn’t have to look at it.”
The man laid down the file and faced Neely. He was at least seventy, Neely realized with a start, perhaps older. “You looked that car over careful, have you?”
“Well, I saw that the windows were broken and the wheels missing.”
“You a collector?”
“Ah, no.”
“A car nut?”
“No. I was just thinking about the way it looks, rotting there by the road.”
“That car is a 1967 Camaro Z-28, with the 302 engine and a Muncie gearbox. Chevy claimed 290 horsepower for that mill, but it made an honest hundred more than that. It’s sort of rare. Chevy only made six hundred Z-28s in ’67.”
“Too bad nobody’s taken care—”
“That one’s got a grand total of twenty-eight miles on it. Ordered it for my boy and it arrived at the dealer in Indian River two weeks before he was due home. From Vietnam. I went down and paid for it, drove it home, washed it and waxed it and parked it out there under that tree. He never came home. It’s been sitting there ever since.”
“I see…”
“Was sitting on the porch looking at that car when they brought the telegram. On the twenty-third day of June, 1967, so it was. Said he was missing in action.”
Sam Neely waited for the old man to say more, but he didn’t.
“Long time ago,” Neely finally said.
The old man didn’t seem to hear. He stood looking through the open garage door at the trees bathed in sunlight. At last he said, almost to himself, “It was foggy that morning. Then the fog burned off and the sun came out. That evening it clouded up and rained.”
He took a deep breath, then glanced at Neely. “He had a girlfriend waiting for him. She waited a year or so, then started seeing another guy. Married him. Lives up near Detroit, I hear, has three or four kids.”
After a bit he added, “Her kids must be grown by now, with children of their own.”
Neely nodded and looked at his feet. Why on earth did he stop? He was going to have to learn to keep his nose out of other people’s lives.
“His mom didn’t want me to buy that car,” J. S. Kline continued, speaking slowly, remembering. “Said it was too much. Said we couldn’t afford it. Said it wasn’t right.”
“Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with—”
“She died about ten years ago. Don’t think she ever got over not knowing. Wondering. If he was alive or dead or a prisoner or tortured or starved or crippled or out of his mind. Toward the end there she went out of hers.”
Sam Neely kept his mouth shut and stood rooted.
“I ain’t selling that car. I ain’t gonna junk it and I ain’t moving it. Not a goddamn solitary inch. It’s gonna sit right there until that boy comes home or they put me in the ground.”
“I’m sorry.”
J. S. Kline turned back to the blade in the vise. He bent down to examine it. Over his shoulder he said, “It was in pretty good shape until one night a couple of years ago when the Barrow boys stopped by. They stole the wheels because they’re thieves and smashed out the windows because they’re mean bastards.”
Sam Neely settled his hat on his head at the angle specified by state police regulations and took several steps toward the large open door.
Kline straightened and pinned Neely with his gaze. “I hear they’re getting out of prison. You tell ’em for me, if you see ’em. If I ever see ’em within fifty feet of that car I’ll kill ’em. Both of ’em. Keep a loaded rifle right there in the house for that very purpose.”
“It’s against the law to—” Neely began, then bit his lip.
J. S. Kline looked him straight in the eye. “I shoot ’em, I’ll call you. Don’t worry. You’ll be the first to hear.”
Elijah Murphy walked slowly up the dirt road that led to his shack at the top of the hollow. Delmar Clay had brought him out from town and stopped at the turnoff from the hard road. “You can walk from here,” the deputy said. “Exercise will do you good.”
Murphy got out of the car without a word. He wouldn’t ask a favor of Delmar Clay if he were dying of thirst.
He was perilously close to that condition just now. Fortunately he had half a bottle of whiskey stashed under the bed at home, and that would take the edge off. And there was a six-pack of beer in the refrigerator. If he hadn’t drunk it. He tried to remember.
The problem with being a drunk was that half your life was a daze that you couldn’t remember in the other half. Or maybe that was the advantage.
As he hiked up the road Elijah Murphy thought about being a drunk. He had been one for a lot of years.
It would be nice if he had an excuse, some sort of traumatic experience that he could use to justify his addiction to the bottle—maybe a woman who betrayed him or a fortune squandered or great ambitions turned to ashes, something along those lines. Alas, Elijah Murphy had no colorful failures in his past. There had been no great loves, no squandered fortunes large or small, no ambitions, burning or otherwise. He was a humble man who had always lived pretty far down. His life had been hard, dreary work, long nights, and the bottle.
He thought about that past now, about his old man, who had been a first-class worthless son of a bitch, and about his mother, who died when he was thirteen. He hadn’t seen the old man in forty years, at least. No doubt he was dead, and good riddance. Come to think of it, he couldn’t even remember what he had looked like.
No, Elijah Murphy admitted to himself now, he was a drunk because he enjoyed it.
Ol’ Judge Storm, now there was a character! Saying the widow Wilfred might have some romantic notions about him, Elijah Murphy. Why, it was laughable. Widow Wilfred?
Not that she wasn’t a fair figure of a woman. She was no spring chicken, of course, but she wasn’t all that bad. Mature, fiftyish, pleasant face, always dressed nice and neat, probably a good cook when she took the notion…and armed with a tongue sharp enough to shave with. But all women have sharp tongues. Elijah Murphy had never met one who lacked a whetted appendage.
Widow Wilfred gave him a hard time because he irritated her. And he irritated her because he enjoyed seeing her irritated. That was the truth of it, he acknowledged to himself as he rounded the turn in the road and his shack came into view. Two steps farther on he saw the widow Wilfred’s house, a hundred feet from his. She wasn’t in sight, and her car wasn’t there.
He trudged up the path to his place, crossed the porch and opened the door. The door wasn’t locked. There was a lock on the door, all right, but if there had ever been a key Murphy had lost it years and years ago.
Once inside he headed straight for the bedroom. Got down on his hands and knees and reached under the bed. There were enough dust balls under there to decorate Oklahoma, but no bottle.
Murphy lowered his head to the floor and looked. No bottle.
Damn.
Did he drink it?
He got into a sitting position and tried to remember.
That whiskey bottle was under that bed the afternoon Trooper Tutwiler took him to jail; he was sure of it. And it was at least half full.
Well, it wasn’t there now. That was a fact.
The beer.
He went to the corner of the main room with the sink and refrigerator. Flies hovered over the sinkful of dirty dishes. Murphy ignored the flies and opened the fridge.
No beer.
He closed the door and closed his eyes. He stood there swaying, breathing deeply, in and out, in and out…Then he opened the door again.
Still no beer.
He slammed the door and wandered out onto the porch and sat heavily on the edge.
Saturday morning and he was sober as a judge. Sober as Lester Storm. Probably more sober. Lester kept a bottle in his desk that he could nip on from time to time, whenever he got a little dry. Of course, the judge never suffered from the raging thirsts that afflicted Elijah Murphy.
Murphy sat on his porch racked by sobriety as the sun climbed to the zenith and thought about the injustice of it all, how fellows who didn’t get thirsty but once a week had access to oceans of whiskey and fellows who were so desiccated they were in danger of blowing away didn’t have a solitary drop to dampen their tonsils.
Finally his gaze came to rest on the widow Wilfred’s little white cottage. Wilfred…
Was it possible? Had she been over here? Could she have taken the whiskey and beer? Not to drink—the very idea was ludicrous—but to deprive him of it?
Naw.
Yet the notion didn’t go away. Lester Storm was nobody’s fool, Murphy reminded himself.
The judge had planted a seed in Elijah Murphy’s mind. Now that seed germinated and began to grow.
Matilda Elkins came downstairs with the brunch tray that Mrs. Carcano had taken to her room about ten. “Mrs. Carcano, I don’t know how to thank you.” She headed straight for the kitchen with the tray, her host following behind. She wanted to wash the dishes, but her host wouldn’t let her.
“All that talking we did last night, and I never learned your Christian name.”
“It’s Cecile.” The minister poured coffee, and the two women sat at the kitchen table to drink it. The sun shining through the window made a bright square on the floor.
“The temperature fell to thirty last night,” Cecile said after a while. “We’ll have another frost tonight.”
“Cool nights, foggy mornings, sunny days with the leaves turning, this is the most beautiful time of the year,” Matilda said wistfully. “I am wasting it fretting over this mess.”
“How do you feel this morning?”
“Much better. I guess I really needed to talk to a woman about my troubles.”
“Occasionally we all need someone to listen,” Cecile Carcano murmured.
“You didn’t judge me. I appreciate that.”
Mrs. Carcano sipped her coffee and remained silent. She was a good listener, which is a rare quality in any age.
“I hope you like living here in Eden,” Matilda said.
“I’m sure I will.”
“A fine welcome I offered you.” Her lips twisted sourly.
“Will you be offended if I offer some advice, Matilda? I learned long ago that the most worthless commodity on earth is an opinion about how someone else should handle their problems or live their life. Having been the recipient of too many unwelcome gifts of that sort, I try to refrain from bestowing them upon others. Alas, I am human, so occasionally one bubbles up and begs to be voiced.”
“Please do.”
“I think you should stop blaming yourself for the situation you find yourself in. Nor is it productive to blame your husband or Anne Harris.”
“That’s it?” Matilda asked incredulously. “All that buildup for that little thought?”
“That’s it,” she was assured.
Matilda Elkins patted the other woman’s hand. “Cecile, you are a rare treasure. One way or the other I will survive this, and I hope that then I can be your friend.”
“You already are.”
“I made a decision this morning. Up in your guest room. I want you to be the first to hear it.” Matilda finished the last of her coffee, then continued. “I’m going to let Hayden and Anne stew in their own juices. I am going to do as you so wisely suggested—stop blaming myself—and let them wrestle with an impossible situation created by their own foolishness. The mess is their fault. Whether I blame them or not, they created it. They are going to have to clean it up.”
Junior Grimes was removing a transmission from a wrecked pickup that Saturday afternoon when Billy Joe Elkins found him. Junior’s friend Arch Stehlik was sitting on a nearby fender nursing a beer and lending a hand when something needed to be held.
Of course, Billy Joe had visited the junkyard many times before. Here in the splendid isolation of Junior’s junkyard on a low ridge above Eden, the intricacies of the human dilemma could be discussed man to man, free from inhibitions created by the presence of women.
For women rarely came here, and when they did, they didn’t stay long. The hundreds of junk cars tastefully arranged around a mountain of worn-out tires in this garden of weeds seemed to create angst in feminine hearts. Or maybe it was the numerous snakes that inhabited the place. Whatever, here teenage boys could drink beer and smoke cigarettes and talk dirty and tell lies about their sexual exploits free from the possibility of being spied upon by members of the opposite sex. For some reason most males needed places like this, and in modern America they were getting harder and harder to find.
“Whatcha doin’?” Arch asked Billy Joe as he settled onto a nearby fender.
“Oh, nothing much,” Billy Joe replied.
Junior poked his head out from under the pickup to see who Arch was talking to. “Hey, Billy Joe. Whatcha doin’?”
“Nothing much. What are you doin’?”
“Nothing much, and that’s a fact. Hey, Arch, how about holding this wheel here for a second while I pull these bolts.”
Arch Stehlik winked at Billy Joe and climbed down off his fender. He flipped away his cigarette and handed Billy Joe his can of beer. Billy Joe took a swig.
As usual, Arch looked dirty. He did small logging jobs for a living and apparently every stitch he owned was hopelessly impregnated with oil, grease, and dirt, for Billy Joe had never seen him in clean clothes. His hands were always grimy, too. His hair was long and unkempt and he wore an equally well groomed beard. When he ate at Doolin’s, as he often did, the occasional tourist usually looked at Arch with misgivings and tried to stay out of his space. One day a year or two ago it had dawned on Billy Joe that Arch probably enjoyed their reactions.
“Lift up a little more, Arch.”
“Takes two experts for these delicate operations.”
“Seen this one on General Hospital.”
“That’s what we are, a couple of brain surgeons.”
“You did real good in that game last night, Billy Joe,” Junior said from under the wrecked pickup. “That last pass downfield was as good as I ever seen anyone throw a ball, and I mean that.”
“That was a hell of a fine throw,” Arch agreed. “Right on the money. And the Blankenship boy caught the ball, too. Usually he drops the long ones that come right at his numbers, so he does.”
“Seems like if the ball goes over ten yards in the air he has too much time to think about it,” Junior said, his voice slightly muffled.
Billy Joe laughed. Yeah, it was sure good to sit here in the junkyard with Junior and Arch. They always knew the score.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw something brown, something that moved. A doe. She came ambling toward them, stopped once to look them over, then came up to Billy Joe and sniffed his hand. Flecks of orange paint were visible on the ends of the hairs on her flanks, but other than that, she was a big, healthy doe in the prime of life.
“Junior, Mary is here and wants a treat.”
“There’s a couple of Snickers bars in the cab of my roll-back,” Junior said from under the pickup. “Give her one.”
Billy Joe unwrapped a candy bar as the doe stamped her feet and twitched her tail. He fed it to her bite by bite and rubbed her big soft ears as she chewed.
“She’s looking real good, Junior.”
“Mary’s my sweetheart,” Junior declared. Arch grinned at Billy Joe.
One spring night several years ago when Junior and Arch were running the roads, a doe had jumped in front of Junior’s pickup. The pregnant doe was eviscerated by the impact. As a devastated Junior bawled like a baby, Arch freed the unborn fawn from its birth sac and blew air into its nostrils. Fed milk from a bottle and cared for like a human baby, the fawn survived. And thrived. And developed a taste for candy bars.
Due to the unusual method of its arrival—“an immaculate reception,” Junior called it, although the birth had been a bloody mess—when he was pondering names he wanted something biblical. Alas, his knowledge of the Bible was confined to a few poorly remembered, garbled stories from Sunday school. He settled on the name Mary.
When Mary was grown, Lula Grimes insisted she go to the junkyard. The deer liked candy and made a royal commotion in the store every time she managed to get in, which she did on a fairly regular basis. When an unsuspecting person opened the door, she would dart inside, charge straight for the candy display and gobble candy, wrappers and all, as humans fluttered and tittered nervously, unsure of just what to do, until Lula arrived to shoo the deer out.
The flecks of orange paint were the remnants of last fall’s racing stripe. Afraid someone would shoot the doe, which had no fear of humans, Junior painted an orange stripe completely around her body parallel to the ground.
“You’re going to have to freshen up this racing stripe,” Billy Joe said as Mary munched candy.
“Yeah. Gonna get to that pretty soon.”
Billy Joe petted the deer and the men talked about football while Junior finished the transmission. Billy Joe helped them inch it from under the pickup and put it on Junior’s roll-back. Then Junior produced more beer from a cooler in his truck cab. After checking for snakes, they found places to sit. Mary accepted a good petting from each of them, then wandered off.
At an appropriate place in the conversation, when they were ready for another subject, Billy Joe got around to the reason he came looking for Junior. “I had a little problem last night after the game,” he began.
“Oh,” said Junior.
“Huh,” said Arch.
“Me and my girlfriend, Melanie Naroditsky, were parked up on the Canaan road and engaged in a little romance.”
“Getting some, were you?”
“Trying to. Then ol’ Delmar Clay came sneaking along.”
“That Delmar…”
“The son of a bitch sneaked up on us. We were heavily engaged when all of a sudden camera flashes started going off. He said, ‘Hold that pose,’ and took a couple of pictures.”
“I’ll be damned,” Junior said. “Never heard of anything like that. Delmar drives up on people all the time at night and runs them off, like it was illegal to get laid, but I never heard of him taking pictures before.”
“Junior, he really embarrassed Melanie. Made her cry. Shamed her. It was a damned mean thing he did.”
“That it was,” Arch agreed.
“That isn’t the worst part. He recognized Melanie. Said something to the effect that her dad would have a cow when he heard about this. And he had just taken pictures. So she’s scared to death that he will send the photos to her father.”
“He won’t,” Junior said. “He knows better than that.”
“You think?”
“Delmar hasn’t got the guts. I know Frank Noroditsky. He’d be ticked at Melanie, all right, but when he heard the whole story he’d go after Delmar Clay with his fists. Beat him within an inch of his life. Maybe kill him.”
“So he would,” Arch muttered.
“I don’t want him to find out about it,” Billy Joe said fervently.
“Don’t sweat it. Neither does Delmar. He wants to keep living.”
“So what do you think he’ll do with those pictures?” Billy Joe asked.
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Arch said. “I think the bastard will have them developed and look at them and not show them to a soul. If he shows them around, Frank will hear about it eventually, and then Delmar won’t be able to run far enough or fast enough.”
“Forget the pictures,” Junior said, nodding his agreement.
“Tell Melanie she has nothing to worry about,” Arch advised. “ ’Course, that won’t do much good, but it’s about all you can do.”
After a bit Billy Joe said, “Boy, I’d sure like to get even with Delmar Clay. Lay one on him.”
“You aren’t the only one,” Junior said. “He doesn’t have a friend alive.”
“Except his wife,” Arch noted.
“Can’t figure her,” Junior mused. “What does a nice girl like her see in Delmar?”
“There’s no telling about women,” Arch declared. “For some reason the girl must have figured she couldn’t do no better. Maybe one of those inferiority complexes. There’s just no way of knowing.”
“Arleigh Tate told Dad that the only reason Delmar’s a deputy is politics,” Junior told his friends. He explained the voting power of Mrs. Clay’s relatives.
“Still, there must be a way to teach Delmar a lesson,” Billy Joe insisted.
“Let’s think on it,” Junior advised. “Maybe me and Arch can come up with something.”
Billy Joe left a half hour later. Arch and Junior helped themselves to another beer. As they sipped, Junior lay back in the weeds and stared at his mountain of old tires.
“I gotta get rid of those tires, Arch. Near as I can figure, I got eight thousand of the damn things. I’m running out of room and a fellow from the environmental has been sniffin’ around askin’ questions.”
“Haul ’em to the landfill.”
“I tried that. Loaded up a truck and hauled ’em down there, but they wouldn’t let me dump ’em. Said they didn’t want me filling up their landfill with old tires.”
“Eight thousand tires. That’s a lot.”
“That it is.”
“I hear there’s companies now that melt them things down and make rubbers out of ’em, or some such. Why don’t you call one of them outfits?”
“Going to. On Monday. I saw a couple ads in a mechanic’s magazine and wrote down the phone numbers. I gotta get rid of them tires before the environmentals haul me into court.”
“Who’d have ever thought that tires would be a problem?”
“Well, I never did!” Junior stated emphatically. “I’ve been taking them off cars for years. Been lettin’ people come up here and just throw ’em on the pile. Been picking ’em up outta cricks and offa hillsides whenever I see ’em and hauling ’em up here. Never charged anybody a nickel, and now the gover’ment is after me. Don’t seem fair, so it don’t.”
“Life never is,” Arch told him.
They were each working on their fourth beer when Junior asked Arch, “Where do you think Delmar will get those pictures developed?”
“He ain’t got a lot of choices. There’s Doolin’s—”
“We send ’em away. And any tit shots would be commented upon by the developer people, and my mom would raise holy hell. Remember Tom Saperstein? Took an artsy shot of his ol’ lady buck naked and Mom told him he ought to be ashamed. Told him to get his dirty pictures developed someplace else.”
“The food stores in Indian River send them to the same lab your mom uses,” Arch continued. “I know the guy who drives their pickup and delivery route around here.”
“That’s right.”
“But Benny Modesso at the Indian River Drugstore offers two-day service. I think he sends film to a custom lab in Capitol City. ’Course, he costs more.”
“Benny Modesso…,” Junior mused, and reached for another beer.