Shoveling Smoke (9 page)

Half an hour later
I walked out of the house planning to get some breakfast at the Dairy Queen and head for the office. A tall, round-shouldered man in a knit sport shirt and bill cap was rolling my lawn mower—the one I had never gotten around to using on my first night in town—down the driveway toward a pickup. I asked him what he thought he was doing. He stopped and looked at me.

“I’m repossessing what’s mine,” he said, chewing on a dead cigar stump clenched in his teeth. He took the cigar out of his mouth and introduced himself as Glenn Lawson, owner of the hardware store in town. We shook hands, and I told him my name.

“You’re the new lawyer,” he said. “Sorry to hear about your feet.”

“Thanks,” I said. “They’re better now.”

“Well, Mr. Parker, how many people like me have shown up since you moved in?”

“People like you?”

“Creditors. Didn’t you know that the guy who owns this place walked away from all his debts? He moved in, bought up a bunch of shit, furniture and tools and whatnot, and then just stopped paying on everything.”

“Hardwick Chandler didn’t make his payments?”

“Hardwick Chandler don’t own this place,” Lawson replied. “It belongs to that little squirrel dick Bevo Rasmussen.”

“Bevo?”

Lawson nodded. “I was a fool for selling him this mower. If business hadn’t been so damn bad, I’d have kicked his skinny ass out of my store. The little shit broke into my brother-in-law’s warehouse a couple of years back and tried to steal a truckload of electronic stuff.” Lawson bit down on the cigar butt and started pushing the lawn mower again. Then he stopped and said, “You can have the mower, if you’ll pay for it. It’s a handy machine, the best I’ve got on the floor. It’s self-propelled. Three hundred and fourteen dollars, and that’s my cost. You can’t buy it for that at the goddamned Wal-Mart.”

“Mr. Lawson,” I said, “you’re telling me Bevo Rasmussen owns the house I’m living in?”

Lawson chuckled. “I guess maybe old Hard-dick pulled one on you, son. Are you paying anything on it?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s a mercy,” he said. “Though sticking you in a house that’s apt to be stripped and foreclosed on is a low deal, even for Hard-dick Chandler.”

So Bevo had told me the truth: He
did
have something to do with my being in this house. In fact, he had everything to do with it.

Lawson told me that Bevo Rasmussen had bought the house over a year ago, from an out-of-work geologist so desperate to leave town that he accepted Bevo’s offer even though Bevo was an unqualified buyer, and an unsavory one at that. Bevo moved in, outfitted the house, then failed to make payments on most of the things he’d bought.

“The story is, he only made one or two mortgage payments on the house,” Lawson said. “It was a HUD loan, you see, and when the mortgage company saw he wasn’t making his payments and threatened to foreclose, he filed for some sort of HUD extension, and that stopped the foreclosure. HUD is so loaded down with cases that it could be another year or so before they ever get around to taking care of the mess Bevo made.”

“So Rasmussen was living here for free?” I asked.

“That’s right. There are people who do that, you know, buy a house knowing they aren’t going to pay for it. They just stay in it until somebody kicks them out. Then they slink away in the night. Since the loan was unqualified, the house goes back to the first owner, along with the debt. The first owner gets the shaft.”

“Is that what happened to the guy Bevo bought the house from, the geologist? Did he get the shaft?”

“He will if HUD ever gets around to looking him up. I don’t know where he moved to. If I had sold my house to Bevo Rasmussen, I think I’d move to Mars.”

“What you’re saying is Bevo stole this house?” I asked.

“I suppose so,” Lawson replied. “He stole the use of it, anyway.”

“And now
I’m
stealing the use of it? I’m living in it for free while the mortgage debt piles up at the door of that geologist?”

“Ask old Hard-dick about it. Maybe he cut some sort of deal with the owner or the mortgage holder. He’s great at finessing deals.”

I planned to ask old Hard-dick about it, all right.

“Why did Bevo stop living in the house?” I asked.

Lawson shrugged. “So you could move into it, I guess. I don’t really know, just like I don’t know why he bought it in the first place. My brother-in-law thinks maybe he was just tired of being a lowlife. Maybe he wanted to go legitimate, join us happy people here in the middle class. My brother-in-law’s an idiot. I think Bevo was working some dodge, and it caught up with him. I’ve heard he’s got himself into some trouble with a drug dealer. Maybe he’s laying low. You sure you won’t buy this fine lawn mower here? You won’t find a better deal.”

“I’ll think about it,” I replied.

Lawson had rolled the lawn mower to his truck. He squatted, rubbed at a scratch in the mower’s red paint. “If I could just sell three of these beauties to everybody in this town,” he said, “I could get halfway out of debt.”

“I’ll pass the word, Mr. Lawson,” I told him. We picked up the lawn mower and put it in Lawson’s truck.

Lawson climbed into the truck’s cab. “Good luck, son,” he said. “If you see Bevo Rasmussen, do me a favor and kick his ass up his throat.” He laughed. “No, don’t do it. He’d find a way to sue me if you did.”

At the Dairy Queen Lu-Anne gave me a cup of coffee and a smile, smacking her gum with the sound of a rifle shot. I asked her how she could chew gum at 7:45 in the morning.

“I got a lot of excess energy,” she replied. She put down her coffeepot. “You see this hand? See how steady it is? It would be jumping all over the place if I wasn’t working my gum.” She picked up the pot and topped off my cup. “You’d have coffee all over you right now if I didn’t have this gum in my mouth.”

She talked me into trying a country ham biscuit. The Jenks Dairy Queen, she said, was the only one in the state that offered country ham, a delicacy smuggled in from Tennessee by a cousin of the owner. Country ham, she said, was different from breakfast ham. She was right: Country ham tasted like the boot sole of a worker in a salt mine. It was something to chew on while I pondered once again the ironies of life in the country.

“You’re the new lawyer, ain’t you?” Lu-Anne asked me as she refilled my coffee.

“What makes you think I’m a lawyer?”

“It’s your suit,” she replied. “You’re either a lawyer or a banker, and we don’t get bankers in here very often.”

“Couldn’t I be a doctor?” I asked.

She smiled. “Doctors dress like golfers. You know, knit shirts, loafers...”

“How about a mortician?”

“A what?”

“An undertaker.”

“We only got one of them, and he’s not hiring.”

“You’d make a pretty fair detective,” I told her.

“You’re that lawyer with the bad feet,” she said. “How they doing today?”

“Maybe I’m a famous movie director thinking about using this town as the setting of my new picture.”

She laughed at that. “Come
on,
what kind of movie would you be making out here?”

“Science fiction,” I told her. “It’s all about an alien who gets trapped in a small town in Texas. Nobody knows he’s an alien because he looks just like everybody else. But he’s not like everybody else. The question is, will he go crazy in the small town or will he adjust and live a peaceful life among the earthlings?”

“What does the alien look like?” she asked.

“He looks just like everybody else.”

“No,” said Lu-Anne, “what does he look like for real, when he doesn’t have on his human disguise?”

“He looks like a giant purple foot.”

A few minutes later, as I got up to leave, Lu-Anne patted me on the shoulder. “You’ll get used to them,” she said.

“What?”

“Mr. Chandler and Mr. Stroud. You’ll get used to them. We’re all used to them. You just have to learn how to duck from time to time. But you’ll make out all right.” She smiled at me and went back behind the counter.

Hardwick Chandler had not checked in when I arrived at the office. “Did you know that the house I’m living in belongs to Bevo Rasmussen?” I asked Molly Tunstall.

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“Well, I didn’t know.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Parker. I’m sure Mr. Chandler was going to tell you.”

I told her to buzz me the minute Mr. Chandler showed up.

“Lu-Anne at the Dairy Queen says I’ll make out all right here,” I said, “if I learn how to duck.”

“That’s good advice,” Molly responded. I had hoped to get a laugh out of her, but she just gave me a woebegone look from behind her desk.

“You’ll help me learn to duck, won’t you, Molly?”

“I’ll try, Mr. Parker,” she said. Under those mournful eyes her face scrunched up, and I realized she was smiling.

The Rasmussen file lay on Molly’s desk,
exactly where I had left it for Wick Chandler the previous evening. Apparently his attempt at reform had not yet gotten truly under way. Neither of the partners was in, so I took the file back to my office and read it through again, trying to brainstorm some way around the problem with the interrogatories. I got nowhere.

About eleven o’clock Molly called on the intercom to tell me I had a visitor. It was a tiny, round lady in a cotton sundress, cowboy boots, and a denim apron stitched with the phrase
I’m with Stupid
in red across the front. She introduced herself as Mrs. Nevah June Balch and placed a quart jar on the desk. The jar was filled with what looked like a meat stew. A hoof of some sort floated in it.

“It needs to be good and hot,” she said. “And never mind the smell. It’ll fix your feet in two days.”

“Do I eat it?” I asked.

“Well, of course you eat it,” she said, giving me a surprised laugh. “What did you think you’d do, soak your feet in it?”

I asked her how much I owed her.

“Don’t you worry about that,” she said as she left. “Bevo took care of this dose. If you need another one, we can talk.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Balch,” I called after her. For maybe fifteen minutes I sat watching the hoof floating around in the herbal stew. Molly came back and stood in the doorway.

“Would you like me to do something with that?” she asked, pointing to the jar.

“Thanks, Molly,” I said. She picked up the jar and left.

Around twelve o’clock Wick Chandler stuck his head in my door. “How about taking a break?” he asked. Before I could answer him, he and Stroud swept into the room, grabbed me under the arms, and whisked me outside. Stroud’s Continental was idling at the curb. “Quick,” Chandler said, throwing open a door to the backseat and pulling me toward it, “get in before we’re spotted.”

“Spotted by who?” I asked.

“Witnesses,” said Stroud, who limped around and got into the driver’s seat. Wick squeezed himself into the passenger’s side.

“Where the hell have you been?” I asked him.

“I have been reforming my character, Clay, just like you asked me to.”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Barbecue!” Stroud roared as he gunned the engine and we peeled rubber down the street.

“Boo’s barbecue,” Wick explained. “Best in Texas. Our treat, Clay. But we’ve got one little thing to do first.”

Stroud drove like a B-movie gangster, swiveling the big car down city streets until they gave way to farm-to-market roads.

“You’re going to kill us!” I said, hanging on in the backseat.

“You see, Clay,” Wick said, “we’ve got to beat the ex-pilots to the Old Platte Road.”

“The who?” I asked.

“We’re on a mission, son,” said Stroud, turning around to give me a sodden wink.

Stroud was very drunk, his withered head bobbing up and down like the head of one of those spring-loaded toy dogs in the rear windows of cars. He hummed tunelessly as we scorched down the road, his eyes incandescent with drink.

“Mr. Stroud, should you be driving?” I asked.

“Hell, no,” he said, smiling at me in the rearview mirror.

“What sort of mission are we on?”

“Wait and see,” he replied.

“So how are things going in the country, Clay?” Wick asked. “How’s our new man doing?”

Bracing against the swerves, I let my employers know how I felt about the housing deal they had set up for me. Wick assured me that nobody was being hurt.

“What about the geologist who sold the house to Rasmussen?” I asked.

“He’s in China,” Wick explained. “He’s making a million dollars looking for oil for the Commie government. Don’t worry, Clay. We’ll make any mortgage payments that devolve on him, if he ever shows up and HUD comes after him. We’ll do right by him. I promise. It was Bevo’s idea in the first place,” he added.

“Bevo’s idea? To give up his house?”

“He saw it as a way to work off some of what he owes us. We’ve got fees charged to him from a couple of years back.”

“Where is Bevo living now?” I asked.

Wick shrugged. “Do you know, Gill?” he asked. Stroud ignored the question.

“I agree with Mr. Parker,” the old man grumbled from the driver’s seat. “You never should have cut that deal with Bevo Rasmussen. It looks like we’re taking advantage of a client.”

“He’s your goddamn client, Gill,” Wick replied. “I’m just trying to get some kind of remuneration out of him.”

For a few minutes as we sped down a section road they bickered about which of them was to blame for their association with Bevo Rasmussen.

“The Stromboli lawsuit was a black hole from the beginning,” Wick said. “You must have been whacked out of your mind when you took it.”

“At least I was working,” grumbled Stroud. “I wasn’t out rooting around for poontang like the distinguished head of our firm.”

They got into a fight about Wick’s involvement with Mrs. Starns, the emu lady. “Every time I look up, there’s another tart leading you around by the ying-yang,” said Stroud. “Deirdre Starns tells you to piss in the wind, and you unzip and let ’er fly.”

“At least I can control my stream,” Wick said. “At least I’m not dribbling boozy piss out my pants leg every time I sneeze.”

“Enough!” roared Stroud. The car swerved off the road, and for a moment I thought we were going over. Stroud regained control, and I let out a long sigh. Both of them looked back at me.

“We almost killed our new lawyer, Gill,” said Wick, “on his third day on the job.” They both thought that was hilarious.

Next to me on the seat was a battered rattan suitcase with which I kept colliding as the car zigzagged down the road.

“Jesus, Clay,” Wick said, “be careful with that suitcase!”

“You don’t want that thing to come open, son,” Stroud told me.

“Why not?”

“Just don’t fool with it,” Stroud replied. I pushed it away from me on the seat.

“This mission we’re on, does it have something to do with former pilots?” I asked.

Stroud thumped Chandler on the shoulder with a liver-spotted fist. “He’s a quick lad, Mr. Chandler!” The old man laughed.

Stroud turned onto another road, bordered by cultivated fields on one side and a wilderness of high grass on the other. He slowed the car down, and Wick scanned the new road in both directions.

“I think we made it,” Wick said.

Stroud stopped the car. “Mr. Parker,” he said, “could I trouble you to set that suitcase on the side of the road?”

“Carefully,” said Wick.

I opened the car door, reached over, and picked up the suitcase by the handle. Something heavy slid to the bottom of it, and I heard a muffled, low-pitched whirring noise. The suitcase pulsed with pent-up energy.

“Jesus, what’s in here?” I said. “Is this a bomb?”

“Set it upright,” Stroud instructed. “Hurry, son!”

As soon as the case stood on the asphalt, Stroud hit the gas, and I almost fell out onto the road as the Lincoln sped away. Stroud drove about fifty yards, then pulled off the road behind a thick grove of pines and oak trees that gave way to a sheer wall of grass and weeds over six feet high. He plunged the car into the grass, and we rocked crazily through the crackling stalks. In a few seconds the car stopped, and I could see that we had come to the other side of the grass patch, where a dirt road snaked along toward the woods.

“We’re here!” said Wick. “What do you think, Mr. Stroud?”

“Let us try it before the bar,” Stroud replied, shutting off the engine. They climbed out of the car and pushed their way back through the trail that the Lincoln had made in the grass. Mystified, I followed them toward the grove of trees until, just before leaving the grass, we came upon a wooden frame, maybe ten feet high, made of faded, rotting planks. It looked like a gallows. A wooden ladder was nailed to its side.

“After you, Mr. Chandler,” said Stroud.

“After
you,
Mr. Stroud,” Wick replied. Stroud climbed slowly, wheezing by the time he reached the top. I saw him put his aspirator in his mouth and trigger it. Wick followed him up the ladder.

“What is this thing?” I asked.

“A duck blind,” Wick said. I climbed up after him. At the top was a narrow walkway and a bench, approximately five feet long, all made of planks. A waist-high railing bowed treacherously when I took hold of it. The whole frame wobbled whenever any of us moved. I sat down slowly next to Wick on the bench. Grass shoots and tree limbs had been fastened to the railing for camouflage. My colleagues peered through the foliage at the road, and so did I. There was the suitcase, standing at the side of the road.

“Are there any ducks around here?” I asked.

“Nope,” said Wick. “We had the blind moved here last week.”

“Why?”

“You’re about to find out.”

“God almighty, it’s a hot one,” said Stroud, taking out a handkerchief and rubbing the back of his neck. The blind was shaded by oak trees, but the air was heavy and hot. Locusts sang in the trees all around us.

“Boo did a good job of setting this thing up,” Wick said.

“He might have gotten us some more shade,” Stroud griped.

“What are we doing, guys?” I asked.

“We’re here to prove a point,” Stroud replied.

“You see, Clay,” said Wick, “there’s a gentleman of our acquaintance who thinks himself an ace trapper but who is, in reality, a tenderfoot shithead of the first water.”

“An animal trapper?” I asked.

“Hah!” bellowed Stroud. “The only thing he’s ever trapped is his own ass.”

“Captain Jack is one of the ex-pilots,” Wick continued. “We’re waiting for them now. They usually eat Boo’s barbecue on Thursday, and they usually take this road to get there.”

“Who are the ex-pilots?” I asked.

Stroud let out a grunt of pure disdain. “A support group for morons,” he said.

Wick filled me in. It seemed that Jenks sat on the easternmost edge of what had been one of the prime recreational areas in East Texas. The interstates made travel to and from Dallas easy, and many wealthy city types had bought land and built houses by the small man-made lakes bulldozed into the greenery. In the early eighties, these urbanites mixed on the streets of the local towns with farmers and cattle ranchers and oilmen, who were doing pretty well back then. The small area towns boomed. But along came the late eighties, and business went bust for just about everybody. The locals lost their farms, cattle, and oil, and the little towns started drying up, Jenks included. All the urbanites put their country homes up for sale and went back to the city. All, that is, except for a group of airline pilots from Braniff and TWA who had built big houses among the hills west of Jenks and couldn’t move back to Dallas because they’d all been laid off.

“Those nitwits getting fired was the best thing that could have happened to the friendly skies,” Stroud said.

These ex-pilots, ten or eleven in number and wealthy from their years with the airlines, formed a roving pack of disgruntled outlaws who went through phases of middle-aged despair together. During what Wick called their Guns-’n’-Ammo phase, the ex-pilots hung out at a gun repair shop that Captain Jack, their ringleader, built on his land, where they would drink all day and shoot at anything that moved in the woods.

“Delmar Spruggs lost two cows that summer,” Wick said.

“Idiots thought they were
bears!”
said Stroud, laughing.

Wick explained that in the spring of ’92 most of the ex-pilots bought Harley-Davidson motorcycles and took to roaring through the streets of the local towns, raising dust and irritating the natives. The Hells Angels phase of their therapy was cut short, however, by Gilliam Stroud.

Stroud was city attorney for Jenks then, and he prosecuted five of the would-be rebels for traffic violations stemming from a drunken parade they extemporized one Saturday afternoon in downtown Jenks. Gilliam Stroud was no reformer; in DWI cases he usually erred on the side of leniency, recognizing the folly of throwing stones from the porch of his own glass house. However, the arrogance of the cycling ex-pilots so incensed Stroud that he pressed the case hard and got the offenders a few days’ jail time along with their stiff fines. Captain Jack’s incarceration, brief though it was, damaged the enthusiasm of the whole group, and within two weeks they had sold their Harleys. Captain Jack and his boys had never forgiven Stroud his persecution of them. Stroud, for his part, delighted in trading insults with the ex-pilots, who were now also ex-bikers.

“I would have put them away for good,” Stroud explained, “if only they weren’t such fun to bait when you come on them in the wild.”

“Look!” said Wick. Up the Old Platte Road came an enormous Range Rover, painted in camouflage colors. It passed our hiding place, and I made out the shapes of five men inside. The duck blind made a perfect observation post.

“It’s our boys!” said Stroud.

“There’s something weird about their faces,” I said.

“It’s camouflage paint,” Wick explained. “They’re into a survivalist phase right now. They all think they’re Rambo, waiting for the end of civilization. I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t half a dozen assault rifles in that buggy.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “We’re sitting here in this heat to play some sort of joke on a bunch of armed psychos?”

“It’s not a joke,” said Stroud, “it’s a mission. We are here to dispense a little moral instruction.”

Stroud explained that the last time they had found themselves together—in a bar, as usual—he and Captain Jack had gotten into an argument about which one of them knew more about the local fauna. Jack, who cured animal skins at his gun shop, fancied himself a trapper. He boasted that he had trapped the last bobcat in the county years ago, and Stroud had explained to him that he was full of shit.

“I take it you’re a backwoodsman yourself?” I asked Stroud.

“Hell, no,” he said, “I don’t know a goddamn thing about the goddamn woods. I didn’t even know what a bobcat looked like until I got hold of the one we put in the suitcase.”

“There’s a bobcat in that suitcase out there?”