“Town’s getting too goddamned nervous to live in,” I said.
—
The desk sergeant who accepted the wallet and my explanation looked vaguely familiar, but behind the bulletproof glass and his professionally calm policeman face, I couldn’t place him. On the wall behind him, a platoon of riot helmets hung in rows, their dark plastic visors gleaming like the eyes of some fearful machine, and below them rows of gas masks sagged like empty faces. After the first protest march in the late sixties, during which only marchers were hurt, our local police officers had been hurriedly trained and equipped to handle riots up to the size of small wars, but nobody had been able to arrange one for them. The smoked plastic of the visors looked expectant, though, and as lethal as the racked shotguns.
When he had finished his report, I asked the distant, barricaded face if Jamison was in.
“Yes, sir,” came the metallic voice. Then he shut off the outside speaker and called Jamison’s office over the intercom.
“He wants to know what you want?”
“To talk to his exalted lieutenancy,” I said. My shin was throbbing, and I wished I had kicked the logger one more time.
“About what?”
“Oh, goddammit, lad, just tell him I need to talk to him.”
“About what?”
“I want to report a crime.”
“What sort?”
“Against nature.”
“What?”
“Down on Main Street there’s a pig fucking a goat.”
—
“Aren’t you ever going to grow up?” Jamison asked after the boys in blue had conducted me to his office. Before I could answer, he asked, “What the hell you want? I’m busy and tired.”
He looked it, his clothes wrinkled and limp, his tie tangled at his throat. I didn’t look like Cary Grant approaching forty, but Jamison looked ten years older than me.
“Yeah, well, you look tired,” I said, trying my best old-buddy smile. “And, hey, I’m sorry about the trouble, but some of your help is a little arrogant. It was nice to see that dignified face get mad.”
“What do you want?” he repeated, having neither the smile nor the conversation.
“A favor.”
“You gotta be kidding.”
“Might help us both.”
“Get out. Get outa my life, Milo. Get outa town. Just get out.”
“Just listen a minute, okay? You owe me that.”
“I don’t owe you the time of day,” he said.
“How many muggings and petty thefts you had in the last month?” I asked, playing it by ear.
“Read the papers, creep.”
“How many? How many kids arrested hooked on smack?”
“None of your business,” he said, but I knew I had guessed right for a change.
“Just go with me to see Lawrence Reese so I can ask him about the Duffy kid without getting killed, and maybe I can help you find out who’s dealing smack in our fair city.”
He lowered his head as if thinking about what I had said. His bald pate was damp and furrowed, his pudgy hands wrinkled with sweat. I nearly felt sorry for him. Being a cop is no fun, but Jamison looked as if he had never had any fun. Then he told me what he had been thinking, and I wiped the pity away like cold sweat.
“Milo, I’ve known you all my life, and you’re a chickenshit, corrupt scumbag, and I’m goddamned tired of knowing you. Get your ass out of my office.” He spoke quietly, which was worse than shouting, which gave me a glimpse of the depth of his disgust. Then he added, “I’m sorry.”
I seldom get angry, but that did it—the pity and condescension in his apology.
“Let’s drive out in the country, motherfucker, and talk about it,” I said as quietly as I could. “Right now.”
Jamison stood up swiftly, then grunted and sank back into his chair, saying, “You don’t know how much I’d like that, Milo, but I don’t have time for you or your kid’s games. Just get out. I’ve got work to do.”
He went back to the reports on his desk. More sad than angry, I left.
“What’s going on?” the desk sergeant asked. He had been waiting just outside the door.
“No charge,” I said. “The lieutenant is too busy to mess with scum like me.”
“How is he?” the kid inquired softly, as if we were standing outside a hospital room.
“Working too hard, but what’s new.”
“That’s for sure. Some goddamned crazy guy stopped two twelve-year-old boys on the Dottle bridge just after the movie let out last night. They didn’t have any money, so he assaulted them. One’s in the hospital; the other’s in the river. They haven’t found the body yet.”
“Catch the guy yet?”
“Nope.”
“Was it a junkie?”
“Probably, but who knows. They’re sure making a mess out of my social life. We been on double shifts for a week now.”
“Yeah.”
“Say, Milo, how come you said that about the pig and the goat, huh? You were a law enforcement officer once.” The kid sounded honestly hurt.
“That was in another country,” I said.
“Yeah, it sure was. If things keep up like this, I’m moving to British Columbia.”
“Not a bad idea,” I said, moving around him.
“Hey, we recovered your property.”
“Great. How?”
“Two kids showed up at Deacon’s store with all of it loaded in a wheelbarrow, and they got nervous when Deke started to check the hot sheet. When they ran, he pulled down on them with that .44 magnum he keeps below the counter.”
“Hit them?”
“Naw, they stopped too soon. Hell, even the wheelbarrow was hot. Kids had gall but no guts.”
“Yeah. Guess I ought to read the newspaper more often. When did all this happen?”
“Oh, a couple of days after you reported it. Hell, it wasn’t even on the hot sheet yet.”
“How come it took so long to notify me?”
“Well, you know how paperwork is,” he drawled, scuffling the tile floor with his polished boot. “We misplaced your complaint.” Then he grinned like a man who had more important things on his mind than paperwork. But I couldn’t tell if it was Canada or crime.
When I opened the iron door between the administrative area and the front desk, my logger friend was standing there, examining his wallet, counting his money and checking his credit cards. I shut the door quietly and left by the back door. Out of the fluorescent gloom of the station and into the sunny afternoon. It should have been night. Or raining. Or something to account for the sudden lethargy of my legs.
Nine
Youth and strength might fail me and my sense of purpose be altered, but I knew how to get some of it back. I had a bag of whites in my other office; speed wasn’t a good alternative, but it helped sometimes. I always had an odd notion that if amphetamines had been in vogue when I tried to play college football, I would have been an all-American guard instead of a bum. Speed reached inside me somehow, released the angry energy from its hiding place. It made me mean, but in my business that was sometimes necessary.
In Mahoney’s, I ordered a plastic sandwich from Leo, then called my answering service, hoping Helen Duffy had called to take me off the case. But she hadn’t. Mrs. Elton Crider had called and left word to call back, and Muffin had left a message, a song title: “This is my year for Mexico.” I didn’t know what it meant, so I returned Mrs. Crider’s call. We had a brief conversation. Her husband hadn’t come home the night before, but I didn’t know where he was and told her so.
“Doesn’t he ever stay out all night?” I asked, the fatigue making me more cruel than I meant to be.
“Sometimes,” she answered, “but he usually goes to work.” She hung up curtly.
I sat down at the bar, since Simon had already left our booth, and had a beer with the packaged sandwich, wondering what Muffin had meant by his cryptic message.
“You shouldn’t eat t
his kinda crap,” Leo said when he brought me the sandwich.
“You shouldn’t sell it.”
“Caveat emptor, Milo,” he answered. But he didn’t charge me for the sandwich.
I finished half of it, half a beer, then left the mess on the bar. When I came out of the cooler with enough whites in my pocket to start a small riot, Pierre was watching a long-haired kid and his little boy playing the shuffleboard machine, laughing and banging the chrome puck against the back of the machine. They were happy; Pierre wasn’t. As I walked past him, I laid a hand on his shoulder, telling him not to worry, but I might as well have stroked a brick wall. His terrible glower had found focus. I waved at the freak and his kid, their matching ponytails bobbing with glee, and wished them love and luck.
—
In our state, children are allowed in bars. It’s one of the few laws of which I approve. My warmest childhood memories were forged in bars. Not in zoos or camps, not on family outings or at church picnics, not with gracious gray-haired lady English teachers helping me love Shelley and Keats. All those things happened, but the bars counted more. Country bars with bowling machines and little balls that seemed to fit my hand and an endless supply of quarters. Cowboy bars, where all the men wore boots, and all the boots had stirrup scuffs. Darkened cocktail lounges and hushed conversations that had to be important. That’s what I remembered fondly. And an old man, over eighty, whose withered arms were still strong from the years of farming, strong enough for me to chin myself on one of them. And a retired lady trick rider who taught me how to spin a loop, how to dance in and out. And all the stories, the bars and the drunks, and my father carrying me through them as if I were his good-luck charm, his familiar, his pride and joy.
After his death, I missed the bars just as hard as any alcoholic drying out. Perhaps my long quest after his discarded clothing was just an excuse to hang around the bars. Whatever, I guess I’m glad that children can be in bars here. It keeps them off the street, keeps the family together, and shows the children a world where the natural accidents of life can be forgiven with a shrug and an “Oh, hell, he was just drunk.”
As I watched the father and son plumb the depths of Pierre’s infernal machine, scattering lights and mechanical noises across the afternoon like golden coins on a table, I felt happy. But confused too. I’d seen the other side. I hoped nobody ever had to cover their torn bodies with a gray blanket or explain to a befuddled drunk driver that he had just killed somebody’s son. Maybe there should be laws against automobiles, not drunks, but…
And the confusion stayed with me, a fierce muddle of mixed emotions and memories that gave me absolutely contradictory propositions. I wondered if only the simple-minded could keep one thing in mind, the simple-minded and the purposeful. To hell with it. I went to the bar for a whiskey. My hand trembled slightly as I raised it.
“How did you get to be a drunk, Leo?”
“Oh, Christ, Milo,” he answered, then stomped away on the duckboards as if he couldn’t stand the sight of me.
I glanced at my tired face in the old muddy mirror behind the back bar. I didn’t like it any more than Leo did, but I watched it, working on my drink, trying to think through things. It was difficult. I’d never spent much time thinking, depending usually on action akin to instinct—act instead of think. But now I was out of my depth; action wasn’t enough. I needed a theory about Raymond Duffy, right, and a plan, a plan of action, right. Wasn’t that how the world was conquered? With plans and theories, right? Decisions arrived at after due consideration of relevant data, right? But I didn’t even know what constituted relevant data. I could, however, turn around to see Mindy, who was watching a brigade of flies march through dried beer foam.
“Mindy,” I said rather loudly. She looked up. “Mindy, do you know where Lawrence Reese is living now?”
“Sure, man. He’s crashed up at the Holy Light Hog Farm,” she answered quickly, not so stoned anymore. The Holy Light Hog Farm was a capitalist commune up in the Stone River Valley about forty miles north of Meriwether—a real, live, working hog farm, where pigs lived as daintily as princesses on acres of immaculate concrete. “You going up to see him? Can we catch a ride?” she asked, nodding toward the boy sharing her table.
I wanted to talk to the girl and didn’t need the boy along, but then I wondered if he knew Reese.
“Does he know Reese?”
“Naw, man, he’s new in town.”
“Then he can’t go,” I said. They shrugged and accepted it without a moment’s rancor, just as if it had been a command from their guru. I wondered how far I could carry it.
Mindy stood up, I finished my drink, and we left. It wasn’t a theory or a plan, but it was movement. Out of the bars and into the real world.
“You gonna kill him?” she asked calmly as she lit a joint on the outskirts of town.
“Hadn’t planned to,” I answered, chuckling like a jovial insurance salesman. “I just want to talk to him, that’s all.”
“Well, don’t ask him no questions, man,” she said, holding the hit and passing the joint to me. “He ain’t a bad dude, really, but he don’t like questions worth a shit.”
I looked at the joint, then took it, had a small hit, just to relax. I could stop at the Willomot Hill Bar for beer, wash down two whites, smoke some more grass, and dope my way into courage. A noble American tradition.
We smoked the number silently, then I asked her if she lived at the Pig Farm.
“Hog Farm,” she corrected. “No, man. I thought I’d crash up there for a few days, get some meals, then hit the road.”
“Where you headed?”
“Just on the road, man, outa this crazy place. The freaks out here are weird, man. Everybody into speed and pills and smack and pure damn meanness. I been lotsa places, man, but I ain’t never been no place like this. There ain’t no grass in town but homegrown, all the acid is cut with speed, and I ain’t seen so many smack freaks since I left the East Coast.”
“Yeah,” I mused, either stoned or drunk, trying to be casual. “Does Lawrence Reese deal smack?”
“Man, he’d deal pigshit if you could get off on it,” she answered, giggling. “And there’s loads of pigshit up there. I went up with Lawrence, but the dude who runs the place wanted me to work, and I told him I didn’t leave the farm to end up shoveling pigshit for some goddamned hayseed freak.” She giggled again. “Burned the hair right off his ass—he got mean around the eyes just like my old man, and I thought he was going to try to whip me, but he just threw me off his wonderful fucking farm, right off, no dope and just the clothes on my back, but then, that’s the way I showed up. I used to travel with a lot of shit, man, back when I first split, but now, man, I don’t carry nothing but the clothes on my back—”
“I’ve got a friend like that,” I said, hoping to slow her babble. It didn’t work.
“Hey, man, I kinda like Lawrence, and I wouldn’t want to give him any grief. I ain’t scared of him, or anything like that, but I wouldn’t like it if you were going to shoot him or something,” she jabbered, twisting on the seat to face me, the white rims of her thighs above the tan slipping out of the legs of her cut-offs. She had an inflamed mosquito bite on the inside of her right thigh and she scratched at it with a dirty, broken fingernail. “He’s sorta silly sometimes, but he ain’t a bad dude. Just unhappy a lot, man. He’s so goddamned big and strong, sometimes it’s hard to remember he’s got feelings just like anybody else, man. He’s an ex-con, you know. That’s where he got hooked on dudes. He says he can’t get off too good no other way, and what the hell, man, I don’t mind dudes getting it on, if that’s what they like—like they say, different strokes for different folks—but I don’t think it makes Lawrence happy, you know, not very happy. That’s why he got into that glitter crap, I bet, and started hanging around with creeps—that must be amazing, man, balling in make-up, I ain’t had make-up on since I was eleven, that’s weird, man. I balled him a few times, and he kept wanting to do silly t
hings, you know, tie me up and make me give him head, which is okay, I guess, if you like that sort of crap, but my wrists always started to hurt and I like to move around some, man.” She bounced up and down on the seat to illustrate movement, the nipples of her small breasts scribbling around her T-shirt nicely.
“Yeah,” I said, no longer hoping that she would stop, just wishing she would slow down, but she went right on, rattling like a loose pebble in a hubcap.
“But he’s all right, man, and I hope you don’t shoot him or anything, but you can shoot that goddamned hayseed freak if you want to.” She grinned, pleased at the idea. “You can blow his fucking head off for all I care, except let me know and I’ll split because dead people are a hassle. I was at a party once, somewhere in the Midwest, and one of the dudes fell out of a tree—we were all wrecked and sitting in this big old tree, and this guy fell out and killed himself, broke his neck or something, and the pigs came and busted all of us, but I jumped bail and I’ll never go that way again, man, if I can remember where the fuck it happened.” She wailed laughter, pounding the seat and my arm, bouncing and pounding and laughing harder and harder. “What the hell,” she coughed, coming down, “maybe I saw it in a movie, man, that happens to me sometimes, that’s why I had to quit going to the movies, man, I had to give up dope or movies, man, I couldn’t handle both, so I gave up movies.”
I looked at her. She was grinning widely.
“You’re okay for an old man, you know. Lawrence is an old man too, maybe older than you, but sometimes he’s a kick in the ass. Are you a kick in the ass, old man?”
“Right now, baby, I’m so stoned that I don’t know,” I said, feeling as if I had been standing in a strong wind for hours. “I just don’t know.”
“Well, don’t you go hurting Lawrence, old man, ‘cause he’s a kick in the ass.” She loved that, barely able to hold back the spurts of laughter. “Sometimes.”
I sighed and promised that I wouldn’t, under any circumstances, hurt a kick in the ass, which set her off again.
“You ain’t all that bad-looking for an old kick in the ass,” she said when she came back. “Hey, man, you ever find old El Creepo?”