Cold in July (20 page)

I told myself I wouldn’t sleep, and to hell with it.

But finally I closed my eyes and it was morning, and I got
up and put on my clothes and went into the living room.

Russel was at the table, drinking coffee, and Jim Bob was
standing over in the kitchen looking out the window at the pig house or the
garden or nothing at all. He heard me come in and turned and looked at me.
Neither of us could hold the other’s eyes. I walked over and got a cup and
poured some coffee.

Russel turned around and looked at us. “What’s with you
fellas? Don’t bull me, something’s up. It’s Freddy, isn’t it? You know
something you haven’t told me.”

“I think I fucked up,” Jim Bob said. “I don’t think this
Fred Miller is him after all. I’ve just been thinking how to tell you, but I
don’t know how. I don’t have any more idea where Freddy is than a goose.”

Russel didn’t quit staring at us. He pursed his lips and
sighed, said, “You’re lying to me, Jim Bob.”

“Wish I were,” Jim Bob said. “It’s embarrassing to be wrong,
and I hate it for you, but—”

“How do you suddenly know you’re wrong?”

“The Mexican at the house.”

“You could have come up with better than that,” Russel said.
“That doesn’t mean a thing. That guy wasn’t Fred Miller. He was a Mexican, like
you said. I read a Mexican name off the inside of his wallet.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Tell me,” Russel said. “Even when I said you might have
screwed up earlier, I didn’t really think so. It was just something to say.
I’ve known you a long time, and even if I haven’t seen you in twenty years,
it’s just like it was yesterday. You haven’t changed a bit. You’re still the
same egotistical bastard you always were. And you’re too good at what you do.
You know it, and I know it. And what about you, Dane? What’s your story?”

I wanted a smooth lie to come out, but nothing did. I just
stood there holding my cup of coffee, not quite looking at Russel.

“If he’s dead, tell me. The worse thing that could happen to
me is not to know what’s happened to him. You know something, I want to know
it.”

“All right,” Jim Bob said. “But there’s worse things than
being dead.”

“Just tell me.”

Jim Bob put his coffee cup down and went out of the room and
came back with the video. He held it out from him, as if it could bite. He went
over to the television and turned it on and put the cassette in the machine.

“What are you doing?” Russel said. “We’re talking about
Freddy. I don’t want to see a movie.”

“This will answer your questions,” Jim Bob said. “Don’t say
I didn’t warn you. Dane, come on.”

He turned on the machine and started walking toward the
front door. I went after him, carrying my coffee cup with me.

“Hey,” Russel said.

“The answer’s on the cassette,” I said.

Jim Bob and I went outside. We stood around on the front
lawn looking out at the blacktop, neither of us saying anything.

There was an oak in the yard near the road, and I focused my
attention on a blackbird in that. It kept hopping from one limb to another,
working itself down. It looked weak and sick. It was missing a lot of feathers.
Maybe someone had taken a shot at it.

An old pickup rattled by and the old black man driving it
waved at us and we waved back.

I looked back to the oak and my bird, but it had flown, or
maybe gotten behind some of the thicker branches.

I looked at my watch but didn’t really notice the time.

I finished off my coffee and let the cup dangle from my
finger like an oversized ring.

It was starting to get hot already, and the coffee I had
drunk and my nerves weren’t helping matters. My shirt felt sticky beneath my
arms.

The front door opened.

Russel came out walking very fast. He went directly toward
Jim Bob.

“Ben,” Jim Bob said.

Ben looped the punch. It wasn’t one of his wise ones. It was
worse than the kind he’d told me not to throw. It caught the wind and made it
whistle. Jim Bob could have ducked it. Hell, he could have walked to town and
caught a bus before it came around.

But he didn’t. He closed his eyes the moment before impact
and Russel’s fist caught him just above the ear and staggered him. Then Ben’s
other first came around and hit Jim Bob on the side of the jaw and Jim Bob fell
to his knees.

Russel turned on me, cocked back his hand. I just stood
there and let him come. Like Jim Bob, I wanted to take it. Cleanse myself with
pain.

But he didn’t hit me. The steam had gone out of him. He
dropped his hand and staggered. I caught him and he hung onto me and hugged me
and started to cry and call me a sonofabitch. He heaved so hard I thought his
chest would crack my sternum. “It was him, wasn’t it?” he said. “It was really
Freddy, wasn’t it?”

“It was him,” I said.

“You sonofabitches. Both you sonofabitches.”

Jim Bob came over and put his arms around both of us.

“I’m sorry, Ben,” Jim Bob said. “I’m sorrier than I’ve ever
been.”

“Jesus, Jesus,” Russel said. “My son, my son.”

He melted down then, and I got his shoulders and Jim Bob got
his feet and we carried him inside and put him on the couch. The television was
still on and the tape was still playing, but there wasn’t any picture, just
static. I cut off the machine and turned off the television. Jim Bob sat on the
couch with Russel and held his hand like a little boy.

I went back outside and saw that I had dropped my coffee cup
in the grass. I picked it up and went over to the oak and leaned on it, trying
to draw some strength from the big old thing, but it wasn’t working. I felt
weaker than ever.

When I looked down, I saw what had become of my blackbird.
It lay dead next to the trunk of the oak, its beak open as if the fall had
taken it by surprise.

34

While Russel lay in a sort of stupor on the couch and Jim
Bob sat by him, I got a beer and went out back and walked down to the hog
house. Raoul, a stringy man with oversized clothes and a straw hat that looked
as if it had gone through a fan, was there. I had seen him from a distance a
couple of times, but had never spoken to him. He would come and go like a
ghost, leaving garden and hogs attended to.

I went out there and found a lawn chair by the hog house and
watched Raoul go about his paces of turning on the irrigation system Jim Bob
had devised, and then going into the hog house to do whatever he did there.

He looked at me suspiciously a few times, but if he thought
I didn’t belong, he kept it to himself. When he was finished, he gave ƀ8me a
kind of shy wave, and I waved back. He got in a pickup with one door tied on
with baling wire and drove off leaving at least a quart of K-Mart’s cheapest
oil transformed into a dark, poisonous cloud behind him.

I sat there with an empty beer bottle and blew air into it,
trying to strike up a jug band tune without any success. A blue bottle fly big
enough to need air clearance flew around my head a few times and I swatted at
him with the bottle, but he got away. He was big, but quick. I finally quit
blowing in the bottle and the fly didn’t come back. It was getting hot. I felt
paralyzed. Sweat ran down my face and into my collar. I wondered what the
weather was like on Maui.

Then Jim Bob called to me, “Come on in the house, Dane.”

I didn’t want to, but I did. When I stepped inside, Russel
was at the table and he had a bottle of Jim Beam, and a little glass. I hadn’t
seen the whiskey before, and figured Jim Bob had brought it out. Russel looked
at me and tried to smile, but the muscles in his mouth weren’t cooperating.

“Ben wants to say something,” Jim Bob said. “Sit down, would
you?”

I went over to the couch and sat. Jim Bob poured some of the
Jim Beam in a little glass and brought it over to me. I hated the stuff, but I
sipped at it anyway. I would have drunk cherry dog piss right then. I felt as
if I had been hit with a mallet. It could have been the beer on an empty
stomach, and it could have been poor Russel or the video. All those things most
likely.

“Freddy,” Russel said in an uncharacteristically low voice,
“is out of control. An understatement. He’s off the end. He’s my son, and I
feel responsible.”

“You’re not responsible,” I said.

“Shut up… please,” Russel said. “I feel responsible. He’s
flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, and all that shit. But he’s no good.
There’s nothing about that boy worth saving. He’s not a petty criminal, he’s
the dredge at the bottom of the sewer.”

A tear ran out of Russel’s right eye and went down his face
quick as a bullet and gathered in the bristle of whiskers on his cheek. He
tossed off his whiskey and poured himself another.

I looked at Jim Bob. He looked very old. He was leaning
against the bar holding a glass of whiskey and he was looking at Russel, and he
looked like he might cry at any moment.

I drank some of my whiskey. I wished I hadn’t. It was hot
and nasty, but I sipped it again. It was something to keep my hands from flying
around.

“I think when a man has lost the things that make him a
man,” Russel said. “Then he doesn’t need to live. Jim Bob says the law would be
reluctant to do it. I don’t understand that. I’m a goddamn thief and I don’t
understand that. If the law won’t do it, I have to.”

“You can’t do that,” I said. “He’s your son.”

“That’s why I have to do it. I brought him into this world,
and now, I have to take him out of it. It’s the only thing I can do for him as
a father. He might not know it, but it’s a goddamn gift. Shit, he’s dead
already.”

“You could hire someone,” I said

“No,” Russel said.

“I offered to do it,” Jim Bob said.

“No, I’ve got to do this thing.”

“You do,” I said, “and you won’t be able to live with
yourself.”

“I can’t live with myself now. Not knowing this.”

We sat there in silence and sipped our whiskey. A clock
ticked somewhere and there was a hum I hadn’t noticed before. Probably the
refrigerator.

“What is it you want to do, Ben?” Jim Bob said. “I mean,
how?”

“I don’t know yet,” Russel said. “Just walk up and do it, I
guess.”

“There’s the big Mex,” Jim Bob said, “he might be with
Freddy.”

“I guess I’ll shoot him too,” Russel said.

“Might not be that easy,” Jim Bob said.

Russel looked at Jim Bob. “You trying to count yourself in?”

“Yeah,” Jim Bob said. “Backup. Help you scope things out. If
you’re going to do it, I want you to come out of it alive and away from the
law. They might not want to come down on Freddy, but they would you. You’d end
up making them look bad. It’ll be said the FBI can’t take care of their
charges, or that they’re double-crossers. They won’t like that, and they’ll
clobber you but good.”

“You know you could get your ass shot off,” Russel said.

“I know,” Jim Bob said. “I’m not an ignoramus. But I won’t
get my ass shot off. I’m fucking immortal.”

Slowly they turned their attention to me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I got a family.”

“And a good one,” Russel said. “Go back to them and take
care of them. This isn’t a thing for you, and I wouldn’t want it to be.
Something were to happen to you, and I’d have it on my head from here on out.
Things are bad enough without me adding that.”

“I think maybe if I didn’t have a family—”

“You don’t need to explain yourself,” Jim Bob said. “We
won’t think the worse of you.”

“And what if we did?” Russel said. “We’re just a thief and a
hog-raising private eye.”

“You’re sure this is something you want to do?” I asked
Russel.

“It’s the first thing I’ve ever been sure of in my life,”
Russel said. “Bad as it is.”

Jim Bob came over and poured me some more whiskey I didn’t
want, poured Russel and himself another.

“What I’ll do,” I said, “is stay with you guys until you've
looked things over, seen how it’s to be done. You might need me for something.
When it comes time for… when it’s time, take me to the bus station.”

“Fair enough,” Russel said. “And thanks.”

35

“This here,” Jim Bob said introducing us to the man, “is
Manuel Rodriguez. He’s in the country legal, but he ain’t a legal doctor.”

“That was a nice introduction,” Rodriguez said shaking our
hands, “I hope to do the same for you another time, Jim Bob.”

“Important here everyone knows how we stand,” Jim Bob said.

“Ah, business,” Rodriguez said. He was a little guy, maybe
four feet eight with black hair going gray at the temples. His eyes threatened
to close even as he looked at you, as if he had been awake too long. He had
some ill-fitting dentures, and I kept wanting to hold my hand under his chin
lest they fall out while he talked. We were at his house. A hot little
wood-frame place he shared with Raoul, three other women and a little girl. The
place smelled of sweat and cabbage, and mildew that came from the old straw
that backed the almost worthless water fan in the living room window. Two of
the women looked to be in their thirties, the other, perhaps Rodriguez’s wife,
was closer to fifty. They all wore clothes that were too small or too large.
Jeans and blouses and flat-heeled shoes fresh from garage sales. The little
girl wore a stained yellow dress and had a doll without any clothes. She sat on
the floor and looked at me. I smiled at her. She smiled back, but she didn’t
come over to see me.

Jim Bob had brought meat and vegetables with him, and he
gave those to the older woman and she thanked him in Spanish and gave him a
nod. He said something back to her, and she took the meat and put it in the
freezer compartment of a bullet-shaped refrigerator and put the tomatoes in the
bottom. She took the okra to the sink and started washing it. One of the
younger women got a pan out from under the sink and set it on the drain board
and the younger woman took a knife and cut the okra up and put it in the pan.
The third woman stood by, as if on sentry duty. She had a stern face, like she
had seen much and hadn’t liked any of it. I wondered if this was Raoul’s wife,
the one whose pussy hair he didn’t want to plant. Raoul himself, after a
friendly greeting, had gone outside.