Junkyard Dogs (8 page)

I said nothing.

After a moment of not looking at me, she continued. “He wasn’t angry—as a matter of fact I think he was surprised and pleased to see somebody. We talked, and he offered to get some paper grocery bags and help me carry the apples back home. The next week I brought him some apple butter.” She laughed again, without any prompting from me. “You know why I like George so much? Because he doesn’t apologize for anything; he just does what he pleases and doesn’t concern himself with what other people think.” She leaned forward and propped her chin up with the palm of her hand. “It seems like I’ve spent most of my life apologizing for things, and it seems to me that if I hadn’t been selected to absorb some of George’s sly yet beneficent spell, my life might now be quite different.”

She stopped talking, started to say something but then changed her mind. We sat there in the silence till I gave her an out. “Could I have some more coffee?”

“Why yes, of course.” She stood, smoothed the elaborate dress, and crossed to the stove where she plucked the white-speckled coffeepot from a burner she had turned to low. She refilled my cup, placed the pot on a knitted holder at the center of the table, and watched me drink. “I guess I should explain that hanging remark, hmm?”

“You don’t have to.”

“It’s been a rough couple of years with Ozzie Senior dying.”

I fiddled with the handle of my cup. “I’d imagine so.”

“I mean, it wasn’t a surprise; he’d had health problems for quite some time.”

I smiled at her with all my heart or as much as was in my throat. “Mrs. Dobbs, you don’t have to explain any of this to me.” I sat back in my chair. “You see, I would file this under personal business. I learned a long time ago that matters of the heart are well outside my jurisdiction.”

She smiled with a little down-curve before the kick at the corner of her lips. It was similar to the smile that Vic had used to a devastating effect. “Thank you for that, Walter.” She looked down at the laced fingers in her lap. “Maybe I just needed someone to talk to about all this.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “In that case, I’m all ears.” I fingered the disfigured one. “Or ear and a half.” I smiled. “Does anybody else know about this relationship?”

She hugged herself and looked out the window, where condensation from the heat of the stove was clouding the view. “Ozzie Junior may have some suspicions, but that’s all.” She continued to try and see through the glass and finally got to the subject she was looking for. “Your wife died a few years ago, didn’t she?”

“Yes, six . . . about six years ago.”

She took a deep breath of her own. “If you don’t mind my asking, in what way did it affect you?”

I told her the truth, because I thought it was something she needed to hear. “I wanted to die, and I don’t mean that figuratively. They take a big chunk of you when they go.”

She nodded, but just barely. “Yes.”

“There’s a friend of mine, an Indian . . .”

She smiled. “Henry Standing Bear?”

I shook my head. “No, another Indian, half Cheyenne and half Crow, by the name of Brandon White Buffalo.” I paused to remember the words the large man had used while I’d eaten his carefully prepared breakfast sandwich in Lame Deer at the Sinclair station that bore his name. “He said that it’s like losing a part of yourself, but worse because we’re left with who we are after, and sometimes we don’t recognize that person.”

She sighed a soft laugh. “So, we’re lost to ourselves?”

“Pretty much.”

She poured herself a little more from the enameled pot with the clear, gemlike percolator top. “Do you still think about your late wife?”

“I do.”

“How often?”

I smiled weakly. “Used to be every minute, then once a day . . . I guess I’ve toughened myself so that I only think about her when I see something that reminds me of her.” She gripped her mug, and I noticed that the thin band of skin at her ring finger was still pale. “That give you hope?”

“Not overly.”

“Well, you might be tougher than I am—most people are.”

She didn’t smile this time, and it was as if the hard edges at the outside of her pupils had become sharper. “I don’t think I believe that.”

I shrugged. “Either way, I’d never be able to get away with a frock like that.” That got a laugh.

“I was wondering how long it was going to take you to get around to asking again.”

“It’s a very nice dress.”

“Thank you.” She was self-conscious now, so I waited.

“George likes it. He found it at the dump. It was in a bunch of boxes that the community theater had thrown out when they stopped doing their annual melodrama.”

I didn’t think I should follow that line any further and it was getting late, so I stood and pulled my pocket watch from my jeans as an indication: ten-thirty-seven. One of the dogs raised a red-rimmed eye to glance at me as I collected my hat from the adjacent chair. “I assume you’ve fed the naked bird and the raccoons?”

She looked out the window through her reflection. “I have.”

“Then I should be going.”

She looked up at me but didn’t move. “I was hard on you, wasn’t I? I mean in school, back when you were a student of mine. I was hard on you.”

I lied. “I’m afraid I don’t recall.”

“I do. I was always harder on the students I didn’t think were living up to their abilities.”

I wasn’t thirteen anymore, so I asked. “Their abilities or your expectations?”

She smoothed her hands over her dress. “I always had the greatest expectations for you, Walter.”

“I’m not so sure if I want to hear how I turned out.”

She patted the table in front of her. “Quite nicely, now that we’ve mentioned it.” Whether she was thinking out loud or assigning me a final grade, I figured the least I could do was respond. “Thank you.”

She continued to study me. “Do you feel old, Walter?”

I laughed and thought about my medical exam, only this afternoon. “I guess we’re not trading compliments then.”

“No.” She stammered. “No . . . I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant. I think you’re a very handsome man, very attractive, and certainly younger than I am, but there is a certain melancholy about you.”

I decided to answer half of the question, if for no other reason than to relieve her embarrassment. “It’s relative. When I’m with my daughter, Cady, I feel aged. When I’m with my old boss, Lucian Connally, I feel like a spring chicken.”

She waited so long to speak again that the big dog’s eye slowly closed, and the large, lean head went back to the tile floor. “Is there anybody you love?”

“I beg your pardon?”

She smiled and quickly added, “You don’t have to answer, but I wonder how you feel when you are with them.”

 

 

I recognized the nine-year-old unit parked behind my truck. More important, I recognized the brunette sitting on my hood despite the frigid cold, her back against my windshield and her head tilted up to examine the silver underbellies of the clouds. The moon was hidden, but her light showed through the strips of cumulus that stretched to the horizon like the heavens had been harrowed.

Even in tech boots, jeans, and a nylon duty jacket, she looked good.

“So, are you here for the environs?”

“Yeah, reminds me of the water treatment plants in South Philly.” The blue-black fur collar of her jacket framed her lupine features, and she reminded me of the wolves I’d just left. The tarnished-gold eyes dipped into me. “So, you find the rest of Jimmy Hoffa or what?”

I laughed. “So, you’ve heard about the case of the century.”

“A Felix Polk called in to the office to check for his lost thumb.”

“Damn.” I hooked my own thumbs into my jeans and watched my breath trail off south and east along with my words. “Was Sancho there?”

“No, he’d already gone home to check on his wife and the Critter.”

Vic had taken to calling Antonio the Critter. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Critter cries, she calls, he goes.”

“You get a statement from Polk?”

“Yeah, but the finger is taking the fifth.” She shook her head at me. “Walt, what are you doing? I mean you’ve done some crazy shit before, but hiding people’s body parts?”

I studied my boots and rolled my sore foot, giving it a little flex; it responded by hurting like hell. “It’s the end of a thumb, and it’s not like he’s going to glue the damn thing back on.”

She pursed her lips and continued to shake her head at me. “By the way, the thumb in question is resting comfortably, yet not so appetizingly, in the commissary refrigerator butter dish. Now, I’ll ask again. What the hell are you up to?”

I placed an elbow by her boot. It was still piercingly cold, but evidently she didn’t feel like being inside. “The Basquo quit today.”

She folded her arms over her chest and looked back at the sky. “Hmm . . .”

I spoke to her lean throat. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“I guess I saw that one coming.”

I tipped my hat back and gave myself the luxury of studying her some more; the hard curve of her jaw, the sassiness that her face carried even at rest. “You spend more time with him than I do. What’s your prognosis?”

She made the next statement cheerily. “He’s fucked in the head.” She shrugged. “Look, this is not the first time you or I have ever seen this. Maybe it would be best for him to go back to corrections.” She looked straight at me. “Hey, did I just miss something or is there some kind of connection between Felix Polk’s thumb and Saizarbitoria’s future career path?”

I gently tugged at the lace of her boot. “Maybe.”

“Oh shit, is this another one of your salvage operations?” I didn’t say anything, and she sighed with a sense of finality. “All right, I’ll leave that one for now—but in case you forgot, you were supposed to go look at a house with me and buy me dinner. So, I repeat, what the fuck have you been doing?”

“I left you a message on your cell.” I looked up at her. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Doc Bloomfield said you’d gone to feed those dire wolves of Geo Stewart’s, and I thought they must’ve gotten you instead, so I came out here.”

“Somebody had already fed them.”

She glanced in the direction of the peaked gables. “It wouldn’t happen to have been Betty Dobbs, would it?”

I made a face. “How did you know that?”

“Her son, Tweedledum, called in a missing person’s.”

“Great.”

She studied me and smiled, revealing the canine tooth that was just a shade longer than the others. “Is there more to this story?”

Vic loved dish, so I pulled my hat off and rested my forehead on her thigh—I was the picture of abject despair. “Betty Dobbs, my ninth-grade English/civics teacher, is having an affair with Geo Stewart.”

Her leg jumped, my head bounced, and I looked up at her as she covered her mouth with a hand. “Get the fuck out of here; Daughter of the American Revolution, P.E.O.,
Who’s Who
, grand matron of Redhills Rancho Arroyo is
shtupping
the junkman?”

“I think Municipal Solid Waste Facility Engineer is the title he prefers.”

“Ozzie Junior is going to prefer to put a bullet in his unwashed ass. Is he aware?”

I put my hat back on. “Who?”

“Tweedledum.”

“No.”

“Can I tell him?”

“No.”

“Why?”

I sighed and turned my back to her. “Because if he has to hear about it, I’d just as soon he heard it from somebody other than us.”

She nudged my shoulder with her boot. “So how long’s the old schoolmarm been getting her holster polished?”

I looked back at her. “Since apple season.”

“Fuck me.” I watched as her eyes played across the desolate landscape of the dump, and she distilled the situation to one wicked phrase. “Love among the ruins.”

“You do not golf.”

“No, but you do.” I wasn’t making much headway with the Cheyenne Nation. “It’s for a good cause—the American Indian College Fund. You’ve probably heard of it—you being an American Indian and all.”

“Yes.”

I sipped my coffee and took another tack. “I’ll carry your golf bag.”

I could see that my best friend was desperately trying to find an excuse as he stared into his own mug. “Is it a foursome?”

“A what?”

He sighed a long breath like he always did when I was trying his patience. “Generally, these tournaments are played in groups of four.”

Damn. “That means we have to come up with two more people?”

He paused and, even with his apparent reluctance, I had a feeling he was weakening. “Golfers, two more golfers.”

“Right, golfers . . .”

He set his mug down, and his hands covered his face. I studied him, his neck and shoulders so full of muscles that it was a wonder he didn’t creak when he turned his head. He was looking a little tired, and I was beginning to wonder if the winter was getting to him, too.

The recent storm had swept across the Wyoming/Montana border, taken more than a dozen Powder River Energy poles with it and, in a fit of perversion, had left all the water pipes on the Rez and the contiguous area to freeze and bust.

The Bear’s bar, the Red Pony, was one of the first to succumb, and his home had rapidly followed suit. Henry had been our guest for the last two days and, with the rush on qualified plumbers, it was looking as if he was ours for the next week.

He dropped his hands and stood, walking to the window and staring with his dark eyes mirroring the gray light.

“You all right?”

He didn’t move, but the voice sounded in his chest. “Yes.”

“You don’t seem all right.”

He nodded, just barely. “Which is better, being all right or seeming it?”

I let the rhetoric settle in the room like mist after a rain. I knew better than to try and read the weather in him. Like the rest of the high plains, if you did he’d just change.