Two

 

Perko Ratwick stood at the kitchen counter in the Libidos’ clubhouse and cracked two eggs into a mug of beer. He splashed in some Tabasco sauce and drank the mixture in one long gulp.

“Can’t see why you wants to use them Nasty Nancies for protection, Perk,” said Mongoose. He reached over Perko’s head to pull a jar of marmalade off the shelf. Even at ten o’clock on a hot August morning, both men wore heavy black leather jackets with identical patches on the back. The patches said “Libidos” in ornate lettering, under which was embroidery that looked like a penis riding a chopper, a testicle on either side of the fork. The hairs in particular looked realistic.

“The gang’s name is Nancy’s Nasties, Mongoose. And you know the drill as well as I do. I use Libidos muscle, this becomes a hometown operation. I have to give up half my twenty percent. This is my gig, my sale, my points, and my call. And I say, back off.”

Besides, thought Perko, he wasn’t about to have Marty “Mongoose” Muldoon or any other fellow gang member steal the show when the deal went down. He’d put in nearly fifteen years trying to make Road Captain, and nobody but nobody was going to ruin his big moment.

“Alls I’m saying, Perks, is those pussies from Nancy’s crew won’t have your back the way we does. What kind of heavies got names like Bernard and Frederick, anyways?” He slathered marmalade on half a chocolate muffin and tucked it in his mouth with two fingers.

“I could care less what their names are, Mongoose. They’re only charging me five hundred bucks each for the night.”

“You best be hoping they’s worth more than what they’s charging you is alls I can say.” The chocolate crumbs that didn’t spray into Perko’s face got caught up in Mongoose’s three-day beard. “And what about the farmer? You think some punk ass kid’s gonna keep his mouth shut if ever the cops get at him?”

“The cops can grill him all they want, far as I care,” Perko answered, wiping his face and taking half a step backward. “He’s never met anyone but Frederick, and only once at that. I give him all my instructions over the phone and I use a voice distorter when I do it. The shithead doesn’t know a thing except he has to get the hell off the property when I drop off his weekly pay packet.”

Mongoose scratched his red-orange stubble and smelled his fingertips. His nose wrinkled. He licked off a few crumbs and wiped his hand on Perko’s shoulder. “I hope you’s right for your own sake. You screw this up and you’ll be wishing you wore a picture of your granny on your back.” Mongoose turned and tramped out of the kitchen.

Perko’s stomach roiled. He raised his arm to shoulder height, about to give Mongoose a cheap shot face mash into the door jamb. At the last second, he dropped his hand to his side, fingers limp.

It wasn’t so much Mongoose’s put-down that made his skin crawl; it was his implied threat. Everyone knew gang promotion worked in one direction only. If you were kicked out of the Libidos, you knew too much to be demoted to a lower tier gang. When you lost your patch, you lost your jacket, your face, your teeth, your hands, and your balls along with it.

 

 

Much as he needed a smoke, Danny decided to deliver the lasagna to Ernie before heading back to Lester’s. He could bum a cigarette off the old man and make sure Lester was gone for the day by the time he showed up.

Ernst McCann lived in an axe-hewn log cabin high on a hill over Pigeon Lake. The view out his living room window would have been worth a million bucks to some clown from the city. Except they’d like as not build a three-story “country home” and cut down sixty or seventy trees to show it off. The view didn’t matter one whit to Ernie McCann: he was all but blind, able to make out swathes of color and movement but no detail. To him, the green of the trees was at least as interesting as the blue of the lake. That, and the pines and cedars smelled nicer than grass.

The man was on his hands and knees in his garden when Danny pulled up. He said, “Still driving that beater, I hear,” when Danny killed the engine.

“Mom sent lasagna. Got a smoke?”

“On the picnic table. Heard you pull in, thought maybe you’d treat me to a tailor made.”

“Ran out.” Danny pulled a pinch of Drum tobacco from the old man’s pouch and dropped it into a paper. He stretched the shreds, fluffing them between thumbs and index fingers and rolled it the right amount of tight. Sparking a light, he took a puff and walked the cigarette over to where Ernie had sat himself on a cut sixteen-inch log. Heading back to the table to roll another cigarette for himself, he said, “Garden’s looking good. You’ll have a nice haul of tomatoes in a couple weeks.”

“It’ll take three. Haven’t had much sun this summer.”

The two men smoked in silence for a while. Then Ernie said, “Your mother tells me you applied for a fork lift course. Offered by the government?”

“Didn’t get in,” Danny lied. “They only took ten guys. I must’ve been number eleven.”

“Don’t worry. Something will come along. Always does. You still got the unemployment check coming in?”

“Yep.”

“Well, that’s something, anyways,” Ernie said.

Danny knew from his mother that Ernie lived on disability, on account of his blindness. They’d been friends forever, since before he was born, and she helped him out now and then with a meal or some grocery shopping. In return, Ernie gave them basket-loads of cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, and garlic; just about every other thing you could grow. How the old man managed it—barely able to see like that—forever amazed him. He and his mom would come by at harvest time to help out some, but otherwise Ernie worked the plot alone, guiding the heavy work with steel wires run for that purpose, and weeding by feel on his hands and knees.

“How’s her cough?” Ernie asked, meaning his mom.

“Worse.” Danny told him how the doctor had said winters were going to get harder on her each year. “Just wish I could earn enough to send her south. Maybe even move there.” He saw Ernie stifle a grimace. “’Course that’ll never happen,” he said, wondering who’d be around to help the old man if he and his mom were gone. He wished he could let him know about the pile of dough he was making and how it was going to change everything. He wished he could tell him there was more to life than collecting a government hand-out, and how he’d finally hit it big. He wished he could talk—to anyone really—instead of lying all the time.

He asked, “Anything you need done? Before I take off, I mean.”

Ernie thought a moment and said, “There’s a bag of lime needs carrying from the shed over to the kybo. I can handle it, but if you don’t mind...”

Danny lugged the twenty pound sack across the yard and dumped it into the barrel inside the outhouse. He couldn’t understand why Ernie insisted on living so completely off the grid. A little running water could go a long way to making life simpler. He put it down to stubbornness. He gave Ernie a tap on the shoulder and said goodbye, pausing only to grab a baseball bat he’d noticed in the shed. He didn’t like the idea of facing Shooter empty-handed.

By the time he pulled into Lester’s yard, it was just after noon and he knew he could count on his pal being gone fishing with his cousin. It was a manly ritual boys learned from their dads, a weekly reward for hard work shirking whatever job they were pretending to hold down at the time. A perfect way to avoid the missus and the yapping kids. Until the kids were old enough to fish and the cycle began again.

Lester had no missus and no kids he could name, but his cousin had got himself a wife named Mary Lou and three brats under eight; Lester went along for moral support. Since his friend would be off somewhere on a fourteen-foot aluminum boat with a two-four in the cooler and worms in a cardboard box, Danny figured it would be easy to let himself into the trailer and take back his carton of smokes.

The yellow-fanged Rottweiler crawled out from under the trailer before Danny had even stopped the engine, taking up a position between the car and the front door. Danny got out and walked toward the dog, slapping the bat loudly into his left palm as he advanced. Maybe he ought to have borrowed Ernie’s shotgun instead.

Shooter backed up, tail down, a tuft of long black bristles standing up on the back of his short thick neck. He was growling but didn’t try to stop Danny from going up the steps. The door’s lock wasn’t quite as flimsy as the rest of the trailer and it didn’t give way to Danny’s pull. As he leaned his knee into the wall for leverage and yanked harder, car tires crunched on the gravel behind him. He turned to see Lester’s hand-me-down Ford drive into the clearing.

“Shit.”

Lester stepped out of the car with a grin.

“Hey, Dannyboy. How’s it hangin’?”

With his master’s arrival, Shooter straightened up, stopped cringing, and started creeping back toward Danny, snarling loud now.

“Hey, Lester, uh, what are you doing here? I thought you’d be fishing.”

“Mary Lou told my cuz she’d cut him a new one if he didn’t finish cleanin’ out the basement for some garage sale she wants to have tomorrow. But, hey, Danny, nice of you to drop by and...what’s with the baseball bat? D’you...” And then Lester started to put two and two together.

“I want my smokes, Lester.”

“Screw you and your smokes, numbnuts. What are you doin’ at my door?”

Danny was still standing on the trailer step, turned halfway around. He looked from Lester to the dog and back. Shooter’s lips were peeled in a snarl, showing off his pink and black gums and hungry-looking teeth. Danny slapped the bat into his hand but it no longer seemed to have any effect on the dog. He was sweating hard. Shooter lowered his shoulders into a crunch and moved forward.

“Tell him to back off, Lester,” Danny said, thinking his voice sounded a little squeaky. “Back him off or I’ll hit him.”

“Bullshit, Danny. He’ll bite your balls clean off before you touch him. Shooter, go. GO.”

The dog leapt forward. Danny jumped. His right foot caught on the bottom step and he fell onto his back, right leg up in the air, presenting a tempting target for the dog. Shooter snapped and missed. Danny kicked him in the head. The dog yelped and jumped back, then prepared to attack again. What was it his mother always said about dogs? About not letting them know he was afraid? How could he not be afraid, lying there, waiting for Shooter to rip his calf open?

“Call him off, Lester. He’s gonna tear a chunk outta my leg.”

“Like I care, Dannyboy. He’s just doin’ his job.”

“I swear, that mutt puts his teeth into me, I’m going straight to the cops. No fucking SPCA nice guys. They’ll put a bullet in your damn dog.”

That gave Lester pause. “Shooter,” he said. “Down, boy. Back down.”

Lester lunged forward and grabbed at the plastic-covered clothes line attached to Shooter’s collar. The dog escaped his reach and leaned into Danny. Danny flung his leg to the right and swung the bat as hard as he could from his prone position. His palms were sweaty and the bat flew from his hands. It shot like a rocket over Shooter’s head and struck Lester right between the eyes. He fell like a bag of rocks on top of his dog, giving Danny enough time to jump to his feet.

Before the dog could get loose, Danny sprinted to his car and jumped in. He slammed the door behind him, and realized he’d wet his jeans. Whimpering, he watched for five minutes as the dog leapt at the car over and over. Somehow, Shooter managed to get his teeth into the side mirror. He tore it off.

The Rottweiler seemed to feel wrenching the mirror from the car made his point. He stopped lunging and barking. Still growling, he moved off a few feet and lay down in the shadow cast by Lester’s car, doing his best to gnaw on the mirror’s chrome arm.

Lester hadn’t moved.

Danny rolled his window down a couple of inches and yelled at him.

“Lester. Moron. Get up. Think I’m coming out with your freaking dog?”

Lester lay still. Danny honked the horn. No movement.

Danny started the car and drove slowly to where Lester lay. He looked at the pool of blood around his head. Lester’s eyes stared at the space under Danny’s car. Danny could swear he was grinning. The bat had crushed his nose flat, and all his teeth showed, tongue peeking out the gap. Pebbles and pine needles pressed into his cheek. Sticking halfway out of his shirt pocket was a pack of Players Special Blend. Kings.