The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (18 page)

The most successful attempts at union organizing always took place within shouting distance of a metropolitan area. Union people organized in the San Joaquin Valley, but they operated out of San Francisco or sometimes Fresno or Bakersfield. The fort was never far away. Did you ever hear of anybody organizing cotton pickers in Mississippi? Why didn’t they? There was no fort. The labor organizers’ life expectancy would have been about five minutes.

Buddy started by distributing leaflets in a bar where a lot of the pickers hung out. The bartender told him to lose the leaflets or hit the bricks. “No problem. Give me a shot and a Grain Belt back, will you?” Buddy said. “Did you know Clint Wakefield was making a movie over on Swan Lake?”

The bartender didn’t reply. He had cavernous eyes and the hands of a man who had pulled the green chain or boomed down fat ponderosa logs on a semi or dug postholes in twenty-below weather. His eyes seemed to smoke when he stared back into Buddy’s face.

“It’s a fact,” Buddy said. “I know Mr. Wakefield personally. He’s looking for a saloon to shoot a couple of scenes in.”

“Wonder why he didn’t mention it when he was in here,” the bartender said. His eyes drifted to the front window. “That’s him, across the street, signing autographs. Why don’t you say hello?”

Buddy and I walked outside into the evening shadows and the coolness of the wind blowing off Flathead Lake. The mountains that loomed over the water had turned dark against the sun and looked edged with fire on the peaks. Clint Wakefield was standing by his 1946 woody, wearing a white western-cut suit and hand-tooled boots and a black vaquero hat that had small white balls hanging from the edges of the brim. I was glad Bernadine was down at the drugstore and in all probability had not seen him. I could only imagine what she would feel looking at the man who had raped her. My own feelings were such that I could barely deal with them. It was like looking at somebody you saw in your dreams but who disappeared at daylight and was not quite real. But here he was, flesh and blood, standing on the same street, breathing the same air we did, people gathering around him like flowers around a toadstool. His trousers were hitched up so you could see the thickness of his penis against his leg. He signed autographs with a grin at the corner of his mouth but glanced at his watch like he had to get on the road in the next few seconds. Even in the gloaming of the day, his eyes were blue orbs that had the brilliance of silk when they settled on a young girl’s face. I had to clear my mouth and spit.

I began to see things that I thought I had left at Gatesville, things I believed were not a part of my life anymore and that were not me and that had been imposed by mistake on my boyhood. I saw myself walking into a concrete latrine in my skivvies, a shoe-polish handle outfitted with a sharpened nail file gripped tightly in my palm, the sound of a flushing toilet as loud as Niagara Falls.

“You got any ideas?” I said.

“I think I’ll get in line,” Buddy said. “I’ve never gotten the autograph of a famous person.”

I couldn’t move. I kept staring at Clint Wakefield, who was no more than 30 feet away from me, my pulse jumping in my throat like a crippled moth. I thought he recognized me, then realized he was squinting into the last rays of the sun and probably couldn’t see past the glare. When it was Buddy’s turn to get an autograph, I stepped forward so Wakefield would see us both at the same time. I heard Buddy say, “Would you write ‘To my pal Bobby James,’ please, sir? Actually the full name is Bobby James Elgin of Pikeville, Kentucky.”

The grin never left the corner of Wakefield’s mouth when he wrote on the back of the leaflet Buddy had given him. He didn’t speak when he handed it back to Buddy, either. Maybe his eyes lingered two seconds on Buddy and then on me, but that was it. Who or what we were and the damage he had done to us either didn’t register on him or wasn’t worth remembering.

I put my hands in my pockets and followed Buddy back across the street and stepped up on the high sidewalk in front of the saloon. Down the street I could see Bernadine coming out of the drugstore. “Let’s get her out of here,” Buddy said. “Did you hear me? Stop looking at Wakefield.”

I wanted to say,
I aim to fix him proper
. I wanted to show people what it’s like to carry a stone bruise in your soul. I wanted to give him a little piece of Gatesville, Texas.

I felt Buddy’s fingers bite into my upper arm. “You get rid of those thoughts, R.B.,” he said. “You’re my bud, right? We don’t let others take power away from us.”

Bernadine was walking toward us, her dress swirling around her knees in the wind, proud of the new silver belt she had notched tight around her waist.

No, we just take away our best friend’s girl
, I thought.

“
What
did you say?” he asked.

“Not a dadburn thing,” I replied.

That night Buddy did something that I thought was deeply weird, even for him. He sat down at the small table in our motel room and studied the inscription Wakefield had written on the back of Buddy’s leaflet, then took out his wallet and removed the business card he had found tucked into the mirror above the lavatory in Wakefield’s barn. He started writing on the back of the business card, then realized I was watching him. “You’re standing in my light,” he said.

Two days later we started seeing new pickers on the job. All of them were white and looked like hard cases; a Gypsy said they were from the stockade down in Sanders County, working off their sentences at a dollar and a half a day. That night we saw a new ’53 Ford parked across the two-lane from our motel. Dried mud was splattered on the fenders and tags, and two guys in suits and fedoras were sitting in the front seat, smoking cigarettes. Buddy came away from the window and turned out the light.

“Goons?” I said.

“No, feds.”

“How do you know?”

“County cops don’t have vehicles like that. Climb out the back window and get Bernadine and stay gone for a while. I’ll handle it.”

“We’ll handle it together.”

“You’re an interstate fugitive. Maybe these guys have already found your jacket. They can put you on a train to Huntsville.”

I tried to hide my fear by clearing my throat, but I felt like somebody had just dipped his hand in my chest and squeezed my heart into a ball of red gelatin. “Well, what’s stopping them, then?” I said. “Let them do whatever they damn want.”

“Your thinking powers are questionable, R.B., but nobody can say you’re not stand-up. Before those guys knock on the door, I want to know what’s been eating you. I thought you’d be happy when Bernadine arrived.”

“She likes you more than she likes me.”

“That’s not my perception.”

“You see things out there in the world other people don’t. So does she. Y’all are a natural fit. It’s just kind of hard for me to accept that.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“She believes in stuff about primitive people eating flowers instead of killing animals and the wind singing in the grass and something called the Book of Ezra, whatever the hell that is.”

“That sounds like you talking instead of her.”

“I just repeat the kind of stuff you and other crazy people talk about. Mastodons and sea monsters and cave people throwing rocks at each other and such. You ought to listen to yourself. You put me in mind of somebody living in a comic book.”

“Bernadine didn’t tell me any of this, R.B. She told it to you. You sure she’s right in the head?”

I didn’t know what to say.

The knock on the door shook the wall.

The agent who entered the room didn’t bother to remove his hat or give his name; he smiled instead, as though that was enough. He was so tall he had to stoop under the frame. He had long fingers and knobby wrists and small teeth and no color in his lips, unless you wanted to call gray a color. He opened the flap on a government ID and closed it quickly and returned it to his coat pocket.

“Could I see that again?” Buddy said.

“No,” the agent said. “You must be Elgin.”

“That’s me,” Buddy said. “Why’s the other guy standing outside?”

“He’s got a fresh-air fetish. He doesn’t like places that smell like a locker room. You know what the McCarran Act is?”

“Something a senator down in Nevada put together to keep working people in their place?” Buddy said.

“No, more like a law that requires representatives of the Communist Party to register as such.”

“Then I guess I’m not your huckleberry. Sorry you had to drive out here for nothing.”

“Who are
you
?” the agent said to me.

“R. B. Ruger.”

“Wait outside.”

“This is my room.”

“It
was
your room. It’s mine now.” He smiled again.

I sat down on the side of the bed. “If you don’t mind, I think I’ll stay.”

The agent opened the bathroom door and looked inside, then looked in the closet.

“When did you start rousting guys like us?” Buddy asked.

“You’re like a bad penny, Mr. Elgin. Your name keeps going across my desk. We don’t have labor problems here. I think you’d like Seattle or Portland this time of year. Or even Salt Lake City. Or did something happen in Salt Lake City?”

“Yeah, Joe Hill got shot by a firing squad,” I said.

I glanced through the front window. The other agent was gone. I could hear my blood start to pound in my ears.

“Is there a problem, Mr. Ruger?”

I stood up from the bed, my ears ringing, the backs of my legs shaking. I wasn’t good at going up against guys who wore suits and badges. My words were clotting in my throat.

“You worried about your shine?” the agent said.

“What?” I said.

“You heard me.”

I wanted to believe he had said something about a shoeshine girl, but I knew better. “She doesn’t have anything to do with unionizing people,” I said.

Buddy took his billfold from his back pocket and thumbed open the pouch where he kept his paper money. “Did you know we have friends in high places?” he said.

“Dwight Eisenhower, somebody like that?”

“No, better than that. A famous Hollywood actor. You don’t believe me? He’s one of us, not just up there on the screen but down here in the trenches.” Buddy took Clint Wakefield’s business card from his wallet and handed it to the agent. “Check it out. See what happens if you try to push Clint around.”

The agent held the card in the flat of his hand and stared at the words written on the back. I leaned forward just long enough to read them too:

Dear Buddy,

Keep up the good work. Call me if the feds come around. I’ll have them transferred to Anchorage.

One big union,

Clint

“Keep it,” Buddy said. “See if that’s not his handwriting. He’s over on Swan Lake. Go talk to him. Get in his face and see what happens, Mack.”

“I might do that. By the way, we talked with your boss about you guys. You might get a cigar box to go with your guitar.”

“We were looking for a job when we found this one,” I said.

The agent laughed to himself as he left. I went down to Bernadine’s room. When she opened the door, the side of her face was filled with creases from the pillow. “I’m sorry I woke you up,” I said.

“I was having a bad dream,” she said. “Land crabs were trying to tear us apart.”

The neon
VACANCY
sign in front of the motel lit up in orange letters. Maybe it was coincidence. Or maybe I was losing my mind. “I killed a kid when I was fifteen. It’s haunted me all these years,” I said.

I went inside her room and told her all of it: the boys who wrapped a horse blanket around my head and arms and dragged me into a stall and stuffed my shirt in my mouth and spread-eagled me facedown over a saddle; the staff member who gave them permission because I sassed him, and smoked a cigar outside while they did it; the boys who spit in my food and put chewing gum in my hair when I was asleep and shoved me down in the shower and called me Anybody’s Pork Chop; the ringleader nicknamed Frank the Blank because he had only one expression and it could make you wish you hadn’t been born.

Frank’s upper lip wedged into an inverted
V
when he smiled, exposing his teeth. His face was as white as a frog’s belly and sprinkled with purple acne, his eyes like wide-set green marbles. When I found him in the concrete latrine, he was sitting on the commode, his jeans and Jockey underwear bunched around his ankles. He looked at what I was carrying in my right hand and couldn’t have cared less. He stood up and tucked in his shirt and buckled his jeans. “Go into the shower and wait for me,” he said.

I didn’t know what he meant. That’s how dumb I was. No, that’s how scared I was.

“This is your big night. It’s just you and me,” he said. “You can fold one of those rubber mats under your knees.”

Then I saw myself going outside of my skin, just like I had left half of me behind to be a spectator while another me attacked Frank and did things to him he thought would never happen. I saw the surprise and shock in his face when the first blow hit him; I saw the meanness go out of his eyes and I saw the helplessness in his mouth when he realized something had gone wrong in his voice box and that his cry for help had become a gurgling sound he couldn’t stop. I broke off the shank inside him and pulled the cover off a shower drain and dropped it down the pipe.

I told Bernadine all these things while she sat on the side of her bed and trembled with her hands between her knees. “Don’t say any more,” she said.

“I’m not the guy you think I am,” I said. “I feel ashamed because I left you behind in Sheridan. I feel ashamed of what I did in Gatesville.”

“If you hadn’t left, they would have killed you. Lie down next to me.”

“I see Frank the Blank in my dreams sometimes. He still has that surprised look on his face, like he’d gone backward in time and was a little boy again and couldn’t believe what was being done to him.”

“You’re a sweet boy, R.B. Now lie down and go to sleep,” she said.