Kings of the Earth: A Novel (17 page)

Del

I
WANTED TO HAVE
a witness from outside. You don’t necessarily have to do it that way, but it can carry more weight if there’s any question. I also wanted to get Creed out of the barracks and back home. That was an enormous priority. Keeping him around wasn’t doing anybody any good, and at that point there was certainly no urgency about making an arrest. The clock would start to run and the district attorney would have forty-five days and he’d probably use them all up. There was no need to stretch it out like that. Vernon wasn’t going anywhere, arrested or not. I had some more questions to ask other people anyhow.

So I said why don’t we get in the car and bring the papers with us and just shoot on over to McDonald’s across the street. I thought we could kill two birds with one stone. We could find somebody to watch him sign, and we could pick up something for his brother while we were at it.

The night was still pretty warm when we went out. Creed kind of shook himself when we got outdoors in the fresh air. He was clearly happy that we were on our way, and I was very glad to see that. It had been a long day. We went out through the back and got in the car, but when we drove around front the restaurant was closed. The golden arches weren’t even lit up. They usually stay open pretty late, but now there was just one light on in the back and one car. I admit I must have lost track of the time. Rather than stop and knock, we kept going. The Mobil station has a little convenience store attached to it and I figured we’d stop there and accomplish pretty much the same thing.

Creed said he didn’t think he had to sign anymore if he couldn’t get McDonald’s for his brother and I told him no, that wasn’t the case at all. That was never the case. He only had to sign because the document was his accurate statement. He didn’t have to sign in order to get something for his brother to eat. There was never any relation between the two, never any
quid pro quo
. Of course I didn’t put it exactly that way. I can’t say how he’d gotten that idea into his head, except we’d had a long day and he was pretty tired out. He certainly hadn’t mentioned it earlier, if he’d been thinking it.

He said all right, he understood, but he didn’t want to sign now anyway. He’d changed his mind.

I think maybe just being outside in the car had done it. Being on the way back home. I wished we’d signed in the office when we had the chance. I certainly didn’t feel that we could go back. Even if that weren’t coercive, it might give that appearance.

We got to the Mobil station and I got out all by myself and bought some microwave pizza for his brother. When he saw me coming back his face lit right up, and when I opened the car door he said he’d changed his mind again and he would sign the confession after all. Just like that. I have to admit that it might have been the microwave pizza that made the difference. I didn’t want to take him out of the car so I gave him the pizza and went back in and got the cashier and switched on the dome light and all three of us signed right there in the lot. We signed four copies and I gave one to Creed. After that I got him home just as quickly as I could.

Tom

T
HE PARKING LOT
alongside the Woodshed faced the beach but there was a fifty-yard stretch of dead trees and scrub in between. Low grass and a couple of junked cars and garbage blown over from days when the wire baskets on the beach overflowed, which was most of the time. Tom and Nick went out to the edge of the lot and over the little concrete barrier and down toward the beach, crunching over dead grass and newspapers and increasing amounts of sand. Tom always marveled a little at this part, how you went from ordinary upstate dirt to beach sand just like that. Who needed the ocean, he always said, when you could walk to the lake? Not that he ever convinced himself. The lake was dirty and hot and it had all this crap around it. Still, it was close to home.

They sat on a couple of concrete blocks and smoked, passing the joint back and forth. Tom said it was decent stuff and Nick said he knew that.

Tom asked where it came from.

Nick said he couldn’t say.

Tom said couldn’t or just wouldn’t.

Nick laughed.

Tom said maybe that black onion muck behind Nick’s half of a house was all right for growing dope.

Nick said he wouldn’t know anything about that.

Tom said maybe just around the edges.

Nick said what, did he look like the agricultural type or something.

Tom said well shit you could go and turn the same question right back on him, couldn’t you. And then where would you be. How far would that get you.

Nick said maybe farther than you’d think. He said Tom didn’t look that long from the farm when you came down to it.

Anybody else, Tom might have gotten his back up.

Even though it was only Thursday night, there was a band working the back room. An old-timey outfit called Luke and the Smoky Mountain Boys. Tom went through on his way to the men’s and he was pretty sure the guy introducing himself as Luke wasn’t the same guy he’d seen doing it during the first set. This one was a dignified little dude who looked like a bookkeeper and the other one was a big galoot with coke-bottle horn-rims under a white cowboy hat. Maybe there were two Lukes. Maybe there was no Luke at all and they let everybody in the band have a turn like they thought it was funny. Then again it could have been just the dope. Regardless, he hated that scratchy old-time music and it wasn’t worth waiting through a whole other set to find out who the hell Luke was. It wasn’t even worth asking Sal or somebody. He used the men’s and that was that.

Back out in front he found Nick talking to somebody he didn’t know. A tall guy, dark, with a little mustache that looked like a scar. He had taken Tom’s stool, and he was smoking a long thin cigarette and leaning over to give Nick a look that could have hypnotized him. Very intense. Tom thought he was probably an Italian. He saw plenty of Italians at the job site in Utica every day, and he always figured they must be connected to the dope business somehow. Just because. He kept a low profile around the job site on that front. He had his hands full already.

He came around the bar and slid in next to the tall guy and said something on the order of that’s my beer right there if you don’t mind.

The tall guy didn’t even turn to look at him. He just ducked his shoulder a little bit to give Tom access to his beer. He certainly didn’t make any effort to give the stool back. Tom decided he looked like Xavier Cugat. He had that Cuban’s arrogance.

Tom drank a little and tried to listen in on their conversation, but Cugat was talking in something below a whisper. Plus he had an accent that made his voice kind of dip and rise and slur around the corners, like the coaster over in the amusement park. Tom drank a little more and lit a cigarette. After a minute or two Cugat left off and Nick stuck out an elbow and pushed him back a little. He said while you’re at it this is Tom. This guy right here. The guy I was telling you about.

Cugat swiveled slow, like a cat stretching, and he fixed his hypnotic eyes on Tom. He eased out a slow smile. It made that skinny little mustache of his slide outward and up at the edges and get even thinner. Like a paper cut that hasn’t healed over.

“Hey,” said Tom through his cigarette.

Cugat slid a hand toward him. “Tom,” he said, “I am very pleased to meet you.” He was still using that roller-coaster voice, but he’d turned up the volume on it a little. “I am Henri.”

A Canuck, then. That explained a few things. The Canuck bowed like some kind of old-time parlor magician, his black hair parted up the middle and slicked back. Tom half-expected him to reach over and fish a quarter out of his ear.

Nick said Henri was from Canada and Tom said he’d figured that out.

Nick said hey he could be from France couldn’t he or he could live right around here and still have an accent since there was no law against having an accent that he knew of, and Tom said he guessed that was pretty much true but he’d been thinking Canada anyway for some reason.

Henri reached inside his jacket and took out his cigarettes—a flat box of those Matinées—and Nick looked from the pack to Tom and back again as if this were the secret, as if Tom possessed X-ray vision and had looked through the Canuck’s jacket and identified his country of origin by his smokes. Fine.

“So, Tom”—here Henri paused to light up, making everybody wait for the rest of what he had to say as he fitted the Matinée between his lips and hunted down his Zippo and spun the thumbwheel and fired up the cigarette and squinted against the rising smoke and inhaled dramatically and held it for a second and then another second and then finally blew it out again—“I have heard a great deal about you.” It was turning out that Henri wasn’t big on getting his sentences out all at once.

Nick bounced his eyebrows up and down and said yes, Tom was the guy he’d been talking about all right. Henri’d come all the way down here from Montreal and he couldn’t go home without seeing Tom. Yes, sir, the three of them sure as shit had a little something to do if Tom was willing.

Tom was pretty sure he was. In the back room Luke and the Smoky Mountain Boys were caterwauling about some guy tracking a dead girl’s footprints in the snow, but he blocked it out of his mind and took a quick look at Henri’s Matinée cigarette and began to envision for himself a future in international trade. Then they had a few more beers and didn’t talk about anything for a while.

Preston

Y
OU’D THINK AFTER
all this time you might start looking at it as a turkey coop, but I don’t guess anybody ever will. It’ll always be just a school bus with turkeys in it. I guess it’s the color. There’s nothing else in this world the color of a school bus. They call it yellow but it’s not quite yellow, and it’s not orange either. I’d say it’s something somewhere in between margarine and Velveeta. It’s not a natural color. Then again I guess if we wanted kids to grow up natural we wouldn’t put them on a school bus in the first place.

The bus where the Proctor boys keep turkeys isn’t quite that original color but it’s close. At least most of it is. They got it thirdhand or maybe fourth from an old hippie over near Whitesboro. I understand he got it special for that big show down by Woodstock. The show wasn’t really in Woodstock but everybody said it was. That’s what they called it. Woodstock.

Where that old hippie got the bus to begin with I never heard. After the show was over, though, he came back and drove it around for three or four years—you’d see him in it here and there, just going to the grocery store or something or maybe to work, if he worked—and then I guess he got sick of putting gas in it. This was during the energy crisis. He pretty much junked it in a field out behind where he lived. You could see it from the Thruway if you knew where to look, especially during the wintertime when the leaves were all down. He’d painted it up psychedelic for that concert, so it got to where it was kind of a landmark.

Then one day it just wasn’t there anymore. I was coming back from Herkimer on business and I always kept an eye out for it but it wasn’t there that time. I didn’t know where a person would take a junked school bus all dolled up like that or who’d want one, but from then on every time I’d go by I’d miss it. It was kind of like a pulled tooth. You’d notice it by its not being there. Anyhow a week or or ten days later I was taking Margaret out to supper at a place over on the road to New Hartford and I thought we’d go by where that old hippie lived and just take a look on account of we were there anyway and I was curious about it. Sure enough. Wouldn’t you know that bus was in the barn and he was giving it a fresh coat of paint. It was pretty much that original school-bus yellow or as close to it as he could get. I don’t think you could match that color without the specs on it. He was using a roller on a pole, just rolling it on like he was painting a house. He was covered with it himself. I think he had as much on himself as he had on the bus. I said to Margaret I bet that’s latex house paint he’s using and sure enough it turned out later that it was. It didn’t stick for beans and you can still see the psychedelic paint job in places. I guess he was trying to reform that school bus. He figured he’d take the hippie out of it so somebody’d buy it from him. But you can’t cover up a school bus with latex house paint. I figured even an old hippie would know that much, but that one sure didn’t.

Tom

T
HEY LEFT THE
W
OODSHED
and stood around in the parking lot. The lake was making some little lapping noises out past the scrub and the junk but they could hear it only when the wind turned the right way. Otherwise all they could hear was the noise from the amusement park. Bells ringing and rollers screeching on rusty tracks and that awful circus music from the carousel.

Nick asked Tom if he had his car with him and Tom said he thought he was still man enough to walk the four blocks from the body and fender place under his own power.

Nick said the two of them would go back there with him then, but Tom said no. Business and pleasure. Whatever they were going to do they would do right here in this lot or maybe in some other lot even emptier than this one, but they wouldn’t do it at home.

Nick said that was pretty much what they had in mind and he was just trying to make it easier. He thought they could do it in the body and fender lot, maybe. Tom said was he nuts. The body and fender lot was lit up like they were selling used cars over there. The body and fender guys had a thing about security. They had a couple of closed-circuit television cameras set up. No way they’d do any business in the body and fender lot, not unless Henri here wanted to end up in a foreign jail. By which he meant, you know, an American jail. Which would be foreign to him.

Nick said fine you go get the car and come back and pick me up, and we’ll follow Henri. Tom said where to and Henri said that Tom would most assuredly find out soon enough.

Tom went and got the car. He didn’t fetch any more dope from the closet upstairs because what he had in the glove box would do for a sample. If Henri wanted to buy more they could work it out based on that. When he got back Nick was waiting and Henri was behind the wheel of a big Caddy whose idle was even lower than the inaudible lapping of the water in the lake. Henri put the lights on and Nick jumped into the VW and they took off. Tom asked how long Nick had known this guy Henri and Nick said forever. Nick said he appreciated Tom’s help and Tom didn’t know what he was talking about but he didn’t pursue it. He kind of appreciated Nick’s help in connecting him up with this guy, but he let it go. After a few minutes and a half-dozen false starts where Henri would touch his brakes to size up some parking lot and change his mind at the last second and hit the gas again, they came to a campground that seemed to suit him. It was dark. There were a few trailers there but not many, most of them permanently dug in. None of them had any lights on. They belonged to summer people, gone home to Syracuse or Rochester, though Henri didn’t know that. Henri cut back to his parking lights and Tom did the same and they drove among the trailers until they were out of sight of the road.