Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) (3 page)

Luster waited. I waited. Jonathan waited. Somewhere, a turkey buzzard fell out of the sky. Finally, the old man said, “Okay, let's assume it's true, then. And let's assume also that this talent of yours is something I'm currently in the market
for. You know about this business in the Knight Hawk? The body they found down there?”

“It was in my section, so I knew right away. I even got a look at him.”

“Name was Dwayne Mays. Local press, dead-tree division. Someone screwed a pistol in his ear and separated him from his brains, so this won't be one of those things that burns off with the morning dew. The cops are plenty interested in how and why Mays's body ended up down in my Knight Hawk.”

“It makes sense they would be,” I said. “It's their job, isn't it?”

“Backcountry parts, their job is usually stroking their chickens and soaking the local yokels, boy, but this county sheriff might be different. Name of Wince. You know him?”

I said I didn't.

Luster said, “Well, keep clear. He's the worst kind of cop there is.”

“Corrupt?”

“Committed.” He leaned back in his seat and looked at me, about the way a gator eyes the bird on its nose. He tapped a finger on the desk and said, “Lot of bad press for coal mines these days. You follow the Upper Big Branch story?”

“Everybody did.”

“Lot of bad press,” he said again.

“Lot of dead miners.”

Luster considered that. He did a powerful job of considering. For a moment, I was afraid his hair would catch fire. He said, “You got politics, Slim?”

“Some. Some politics, some college.”

“Liberal?”

“Because I don't like a company killing its miners through sheer stupidity? Sure. Liberal as hell.”

Luster looked at Jonathan. Jonathan looked back, his face handsome but empty. Probably he'd been to some fancy school somewhere and they'd taught him the trick of emptying expression from his face. Probably charged him a pretty penny for it, too. He shrugged. Luster looked at me again. I felt my asshole tighten. It was coming, whatever it was.

“I'd like to see about having you do a little work for me. You be interested in something like that?”

I already worked for him, so I didn't say anything. He didn't want me to anyway. I just sat there.

He seemed okay with that. “What we got here is an industry under watch. Handful of things go wrong. Bullshit or bad fortune. Fire breaks out. Meteor strikes. Miners die. Lawsuits happen. You're right: Massey Energy stepped in it good with that UBB thing down in West Virginia. Worse was the way they handled it after. Exposed their shareholders to risk. And now we got a situation where reporters all over the country are looking to make a name for themselves, trying to catch any big mining outfit they can in a slipup.”

“You think that's what Dwayne Mays was doing?”

“I don't know. Maybe. He was up to something, though. Chances are he didn't end up down there by accident.”

“Chances are.”

“Problem for him is, we're not up to anything.”

“That, plus the problem that he's murdered and half buried in a gob pile.”

“That, too. But what I said stands. We're entirely and completely aboveboard, Slim.”

I just sat there.

“You believe me?” he asked.

“You need me to?”

“I do not,” he said. “Meantime, the cops are all over us, stink on a monkey's ass. They've already shut down part of our operation, and it's likely they'll shut down more of it, this thing drags out any kind of time. That's bad for business. These are lean days as it is, and we just can't take them getting any leaner. Plus, a shutdown will attract attention—all kinds of attention, some of it the wrong kind. Before you know it, we're completely under the microscope. All that's not bad enough, we got us another complication here.”

“Which is?”

Jonathan sat there like a stump, except for one hand, which came to life and slid a photograph across the desk: a balding Average, early fifties or so, striking a pose in the Herrin city park. They've got this memorial statue out there of a World War I doughboy, and the Average was standing beneath it and staring off into space like he'd worked out a plan to beat the kaiser.

Luster pointed at the picture. “Name's Beckett. Guy Allan Beckett. He's Dwayne Mays's photographer. Or they paired up on quite a few jobs, anyway. Beckett went missing the same time Dwayne Mays showed up in pieces, and ain't nobody seen or heard from him since. He can't be raised by any means, and his bank card hasn't been used. His wife thinks he's come to evil. The cops are probably thinking the same thing, though they're not talking just yet.”

I set down the picture and breathed out heavily and said, “Mr. Luster, I appreciate your moving me upstairs. More to the point, my back appreciates it. You probably saved me
from an early wheelchair. But I'm not a policeman. I'm not a private eye, and I don't know a thing about professional mystery-solving. Top of that, near as I can tell, cops like folks poking around in their business about as much as they like the criminals themselves. And that's just what I get from books and TV. I can't even imagine what they do to you in real life. It's true, I once helped some friends who were having family woes, but I've got a soft spot for that kind of thing—family stuff—and I let them talk me into it. It wasn't maybe the prettiest thing I've ever done, but in the end it was small fuss and the law was never involved in any way. I don't know what I can do for you.”

For the first time, Jonathan spoke. I didn't know he could, frankly, and the sound of his voice shocked me like a clap of thunder.

“What you can do for us, Slim,” he said, “is attempt to locate Mr. Beckett. At least look for him. Use that nose of yours to track him until you find him, then bring him to us.”

“Not the cops?”

“Us first. Remember who got you off slide-back.”

I guess Luster liked that one okay. He nodded. Jonathan nodded. I didn't nod. The whole thing was ridiculous. But these were the type of people you couldn't easily say no to, so instead I decided to go for the stall. I glanced at the picture again. He went maybe five ten or so, Beckett, though it was hard to tell from just a photo. He sported the regulation middle-age gut but otherwise appeared reasonably fit. Nothing interesting about him—no missing limbs or scars or anything like that. From a seek-and-find standpoint, that would probably make things tougher.

I said, “You don't think you ought to give the police investigation
some time? This only happened yesterday. They probably haven't even finished brewing the coffee yet.”

“Not my style, Slim,” Luster said. “I've made my whole life by jumping into the game early and with both feet. You know who stands around waiting for other people to solve their problems?”

“I got a sense of it, yeah. Why me, though? I got to tell you, I can't figure out your angle here. Why not hire a real detective?”

“Hell, son, hire one from
where
? Case you haven't noticed, Slim, this ain't exactly what you'd call a major metropolitan area. Southern Illinois has all of three private investigators, all of them graduates of a community college summer program and not a one of them worth using to scrape shit off your shoe.”

Jonathan said, “We checked into them.” He made a purse with his mouth and shut his eyes and shook his head slowly at me.

Luster said, “Besides, I use some outsider, I have to dick around bringing 'em up to speed on the local terrain. Whereas you already know the territory. And the people. Oh, and then there's your daddy. That's the other reason we called on you.”

“My daddy?”

“Not my favorite person, I admit,” Luster said. “But there's no denying what he was and what he did down here. A lot of folks think he's a damn hero.”

I said, “He'd probably agree with them.”

Luster just shrugged. He said, “I got to think there's not a door in the downstate his name won't kick down. Do more than a badge or a private investigator's ID from godforsaken
Chicago, that's for sure. Slim, I feel pretty sure you can get to places a pro couldn't, and I know you've got contacts it would take someone else months to cultivate. That's time I don't have, son.”

“I wouldn't know where to start.”

“Just start anywhere. Hell, it's what the police do. Pull on some thread, see where it leads. You think they've got a team of Sherlock Holmeses stashed away in the Randolph County sheriff's station? Goddamn, boy, it used to be a Pizza Hut.”

“Pizza Palace.” Jonathan.

“Pizza Palace. Just jump in anywhere. Ask a few questions. See what you turn up. You might get lucky. If not, well, we can at least say we tried.” He fixed me with his frosted eyes. “Like I said, we can do things for you.”

“You already got me off the worst shift-duty of them all,” I said. “That's probably enough.”

“Oh, hell, Slim, that was just for openers. I'm talking about something more substantial. And permanent.”

Jonathan said, “Your job, one. As long as Mr. Luster owns this mine, it's guaranteed.”

“Your pension, too.”

The bit about the job was nice, but that last thing knocked me asshole-over-teakettle. Jonathan produced a glass of water. I drank it. The glass went away. He really was a magician. I waited for him to fart out a platinum coin.

Luster said, “Times are tough, Slim. You know how it is. Lot of pensions guaranteed at one point are disappearing today. And that's health coverage, too. Security for you and your family. You got a family?”

“A daughter.”

Luster nodded. “Security for your daughter. I sell this
place eventually, it gets bought up, and suddenly those pensions aren't worth the promises they're printed on. You've seen it happen before. But yours goes into a special account. Starting today. This afternoon.”

Jonathan said, “It's a generous offer, Slim.”

“This is southern Illinois, son,” Luster said. “Coal country. The best friends to have around here are friends in low places.”

This was the case and I said so to Luster, but I wasn't really listening to me. I was thinking about that pension and all that it meant. For a coal miner—or any working person, really—a pension means just about everything. Luster was right: a pension was health insurance into your dotage and financial security after you retired. It was a monthly paycheck and food in your tummy and a roof to keep the sun off your bald spot. But more than that, it was a promise kept. That pension was the reason a lot of miners went into the mines in the first place, and it was the reason a lot of them stayed longer than they should. It was, in a very real sense, the light at the end of a very long, very dark night.

Luster picked up my thoughts and carried them forward. “So do it for that. Do it for your daughter,” Luster said. “Hell, Slim, do it for Beckett's wife.”

“Beckett's wife?”

Luster cleared his throat. “You told me you have a soft spot for family, Slim,” he said. “Well, this woman, her name's Temple.”

Jonathan said, “Temple Luster Beckett.”

Luster said, “She's my daughter. This Beckett who's gone missing is my son-in-law.”

I
t was a Saturday afternoon in the springtime, and my mother was crying in the kitchen with a gun in her hand. My sisters were huddled on the floor away from the windows with their backs to the stove and they were crying, too. I was crying. I was six years old. The door opened. My sisters screamed and my mother screamed with them and discharged the gun into the floor, and then my father walked in.

Like I'd be one day, my father was a coal man, but unlike me he was an important one. Maybe the most important in the downstate. He was a union leader and strike organizer and an inspiration to every other coal miner in the area. His name opened doors, or closed them, sometimes slammed them. He was an organizer or a bureaucrat or a thug, depending on whom you asked, and I hated him and was afraid of him. He was tall and skinny like I was becoming and had slightly stooped shoulders and a hawkish nose on an angular face. His eyes were gray and his hair graying prematurely. He looked at us now without expression and stepped smartly to my mother and took the gun from her.

He said, “You'll hurt somebody,” but he might have been chiding her for being careless with a potato peeler.

My mother said, “There was a person here.”

“A person?”

“A man. A big man. He had red hair and a mark on his cheek. Like a birthmark.”

My father said, “His name is Deaton. He's a company goon. What did he want?”

“Just to say hello,” she said. “And that he knew us. He wanted us to know that he knew us. He said the girls' names.”

My father nodded slowly and then turned and walked further into the house with the gun, and that was the last that was said of any of it, at least in front of us. We were in the midst of a strike that year, a monster that had stretched on since early in the winter, and my father was leading the local UMWA. His friends had been beaten. His truck had been set on fire. But no one had ever come to the house before. No one had ever said my sisters' names. In another few weeks, the strike had ended—quietly, the way those things always seemed to end—but it wasn't until late summer that I happened to hear a news report on the radio, the discovery of a body in the waters of the Hog Thief, shot full of bullets. The man had been missing since sometime in the spring, and his name was Deaton.

U
ntil further notice, I had been reassigned to my current task: finder of missing photographers. I'll be honest: as career changes go, it was jarring. I left the Knight Hawk around twelve-thirty and headed south and east along the IL-13/127 corridor. The thinking was, I should at least talk to Luster's daughter and get some sense of this Guy Beckett and what he might have been working on and where he might have gone. Way I saw it, the most likely explanation for Mays's murder and Beckett's sudden disappearance was that Beckett's committing the former—for whatever motive—had necessitated the latter. I had a feeling that the cops were probably thinking the same thing. I had a second
feeling that Luster and Jonathan were maybe thinking the same thing, too, but neither had said so. We can get as advanced as we want as a species, but something in us will never let go of the idea that giving voice to an unpleasant possibility will somehow make it real.

I rolled the bike past Grubbs, Vergennes, and Grange Hall. Like a lot of rural places, southern Illinois is basically a bunch of small towns knit together, a Babel's Tower mix of rednecks, rubes, freaks, tweakers, gun nuts, and aging hippies––real hippies, not the newfangled crunchy kids they're turning out these days––who'd fled into the dark-licked hills sometime during the bloodiest days of a war that wouldn't stop shaping their lives and had never come out. The land they occupy is low farmland, or river basin, or rock-clotted hill country, evidence of the Illinois glacial advance of some two hundred thousand years ago.

It's a pretty place, too, at least it is when it's not turning itself into a mudhole. By the time I reached Spillway Road, the clouds had rolled over to show their dark bellies, and the rain was coming down in sideways sheets, sucking little plumes of white smoke from the asphalt. The wind picked up and snakes of gray water slithered across the paved ribbon of highway. I tell you, at this point, I started seriously regretting my decision to ride to work. I soaked down to the skivvies in seconds, and the rain buffeted the bike across the lane and nearly off into the woodsy roadside. Somehow I held on, but there were moments in there when I felt like a spider clinging to her web during a typhoon.

The address Jonathan gave me was inside something called the Crab Orchard Estates. I wasn't sure what that was—it sounded like some kind of nineties real estate agent's
wet dream—but I had a sense of where it must be. I aimed the bike toward the Crab Orchard wildlife preserve and took the shoreline road until I spied a gated community spreading its way west and north along the edge of the water. There was a check-in box with a black man sitting inside. When I pulled up, he leaned closer to the window and slid back the glass.

He said, “Little damp today.”

“I don't know, I'm thinking of building an ark.”

“Probably more practical than, say, a motorcycle.”

“Probably,” I said. Everybody was a comedian. “Let me ask you, you know where I can find Temple Beckett's place?”

“She know you're coming?”

“What I'm told.”

This was getting down to business. He produced a clipboard and looked holes in it. He flipped some pages and put the clipboard back on its hook. He picked up a phone and dialed, but I guess no one answered because after a moment he set it down again, too.

“She ain't called down about anyone, and I can't raise the house. What'd you say your name is?”

“She'd probably have called me Slim.”

“That a coal mine thing?”

“How'd you guess?”

“You got a bucket tied to your scooter there,” he said. He sighed. “I let you go up and something happens—something ain't supposed to happen, I mean—I'm the one's gotta answer for it.”

“Well, maybe I could leave something here with you. You know, some kind of collateral.”

He lifted an eyebrow.

“Leave something? Like what?”

“My union card, maybe.”

“You even got a union card?”

“Nope.”

“Didn't think so. These days, I don't know anyone's got one. They're like unicorns.”

“Getting to be.”

He waved his hand at me.

“Go on up. Just don't do anything come back on me,” he said, and gave me some sense of the direction I should go. Then he said, “You know, I used to be in the mines my own self. Worked a scratchback mine up at Olney years ago. My father worked it, and his brother, and some cousins of mine, and I swore I never would but damned if I didn't. I'll tell you, that was something like a hell on earth.”

“Five-foot seam?”

He leaned forward in the window a little. The rain beaded on his short, silver hair and eyebrows.

“Lemme tell you, we'd have strangled our mothers for five-foot coal. You ever heard of Kelvin's Scratch-Ass Mine?”

“Can't say.”

“Well, that was us. The Scratch-Ass Boys. Four feet in most places. Couple three-and-a-half foot spots. Like that old song, ‘Thirty Inch Coal.' You know that one?”

“I heard it once or twice.”

“
Ridin' on a lizard in thirty-inch coal
,” he sang. His voice was soft but deep, and it sounded like history. “It was like that. You raised your eyebrows, you'd hit the ceiling. You got so you had scabs all up and down your back and spine and on your knees and hands. My wife ain't like those scabs
on my hands. Calluses, neither. Bought me this cream to use. Smelled like some kind of flower, lilacs, and wouldn't you know that's what those other Scratch-Ass sonsofbitches ended up nicknaming me. Lilac. I couldn't wait to get out of there, and after twenty years I finally did, and it's nice not being Lilac anymore, but look where I ended up. Sitting in a damn box all day.”

“Least it's got a high ceiling,” I said.

“Yeah, but it's dull. Go on up, Slim. But behave.”

I promised to behave. I thanked him and started to roar away. He started to push shut his window. I stopped and said, “Hey, one more thing. I grew up around here, but I've never been to this development before. You happen to remember what used to be here?”

“Sure. Once upon a time, this was the old Grendel Mine company town.”

“I thought I knew it. That was a Roy Galligan mine, memory serves.”

He nodded.

“Still is, technically. The mine's up the hill there apiece, across from that King Coal outfit. You can kinda make out what's left of the tipple. It's dead, but Galligan still owns the land lease.”

“Galligan and Luster. I guess they own most of them around here these days.”

“Don't know,” he said. “Don't know Luster. Heard his name, of course, but that's the extent of it. Roy Galligan, though, him I know.”

“I can tell from your tone you don't like him,” I said.

He chuckled. “He ain't on my holiday shopping list, no. You might think you've met a sonofabitch in your time, but
let me tell you, you ain't. That old man is so bad, they'll have to come up with a new definition of the term just so ordinary bad men won't get all full of false piety.”

“That's pretty good,” I said.

“Thanks. You sit in this box all day, you have time to think about stuff like that and how to say it. Good old Roy,” he said, but he didn't mean it. Nobody who said “Good old Roy” ever meant it.

I thanked him again and waved and puttered through the gate, which opened for me on its mechanical arm. Even with his directions in mind, it took a bit of getting lost on the shiny loops of paved road before I found my bearings. Sure enough, this was the old Grendel Mine company town. Way back when, it'd been the largest and most modern of its kind in the area, basically a self-sufficient community. There'd been company housing and a company store and company script stamped with the name of the company president and streets named after the important coal men of the time. The town had a mayor—who reported directly to the mine owner—and its own police force. The only thing it didn't have was a bill of rights for the residents. That's what the union was for, and the rifles. Anyway, it was gone now. The streets were renamed things like Candy Cane Lane and Golf Club Way, and the old lake shanties and company shacks had been torn down and replaced with starter mansions. South was the Duck Neck, and the marina with white boats resting uneasily in their slips, and more of the preserve. Up the piney slopes to the southeast was another mine, the old Grendel colliery, closed now these twenty years or more.

After a while, I managed to find Temple's address. It was at the far end of the development, abutting a wall of shingle
oaks and, closer to the lake, bald cypress and tupelo and piles of duckweed. The house was an imposing gray foursquare with a lot of big, rectangular windows and a triangular projection like a silver toque near the back of the house. A mahogany-hulled Chris-Craft runabout bobbed near the quay, and a little red sports car with an eggshell ragtop and beaming chrome side pipes crouched in the bricked driveway. There didn't seem to be any airplanes or rocket ships around, but maybe they were in the back. I went up and knocked. After a moment, the door opened and a woman appeared.

She didn't look happy. That was the first thing that struck you. She was a small woman with white hair and wrinkled eyes, though she didn't look old enough for either, and her mouth was clenched like a fist. She was dressed in jeans and a blouse with a light pattern, and there was a wooden disk on a twine cord around her neck. She put a hand on her hip and frowned and said, “You the man from the mine?”

I told her I was the man from the mine. I said, “You're Temple Beckett?”

“Don't be an idiot.” She closed the door, leaving me in the downpour. Bad guess, then. I stood there, getting as wet as a fish's teeth. A long time later, the hard-bitten woman opened the door again.

“All right, come in.”

I came in. The hallway was dark wood and blue tile painted with little flowers, and it was what you'd call a good-size space. I've been on smaller runways. A life-size painting of a redheaded woman on horseback took up one wall. The other was partially covered by some kind of woven wall hanging, African or maybe Honduran. On either side of the doorway, widemouthed vases coughed dried
ornamental grass, and the ceiling was fitted with a segmented skylight that ran the length of the space and let in the day's stormy light.

“I didn't know any of this was back here,” I said to the woman.

She handed me a towel and said, “That's what the gate is for.”

The sitting room was pretty big, too. You could have parked a bus in it and not missed the space. The ceilings couldn't have been higher than twenty feet. The furniture was farmhouse, but expensive-looking farmhouse, and tasteful, as were the knickknacks and framed pictures. There were photos of an older woman—Temple Beckett's mother, maybe—but none of the old man. At least none that I could see. The floors were polished walnut, stained very dark, and the walls were lined with bookshelves so tall you'd need a man from the circus to bring down the high volumes. Like in the hallway, the ceiling was pitted with skylights, these as deep as wells, and the floors were draped with worn Oriental rugs. As I often was, I was again struck by the sheer amount of money in the world and how much trouble the world went through to make sure none of it ended up in my pockets.

I stood there, dripping on a rug. The wrinkle-eyed woman frowned at me, then told me to wait and went out again. I missed her immediately and consoled myself drying my hair with the towel. There was a picture of Guy Beckett on the coffee table, and I picked it up for a better look. He looked the same. The doughboy was nowhere to be seen. Maybe it was missing, too. I was still thinking about it when the door opened again and a second woman came into the room.