The Big Both Ways (6 page)

The room was quiet then. The chairs creaked and men shuffled their feet. A sadness crept into the room.

“I know that you aren’t lazy. I know you want to work. I know you want a decent life in this country that promises you a decent life every time it fights a war and you have to go off and risk your neck.”

An old man coughed, filling the awkward silence.

She paused again until they were all looking directly at her. She seemed bigger now as if their attention made her grow in stature. “You could whip any nation on earth, because you’d be working together. You could march halfway across the world and beat the Germans or the French or just about anybody. And your wives and sisters would be proud and welcome you home with flowers and kisses.” A couple of the men rubbed sore hands on their legs and gulped their coffee without taking their eyes off her.

“Then how is it we’re here today, broke and alone, eating stolen doughnuts and drinking weak coffee? How’d it come to this?” She looked around, knowing that each man was casting for an answer.

“I’ll tell you how it came to this. Those people up in those fine
houses don’t want you asking for what’s yours. They don’t want you to come together and demand a piece of that good life that they all got.” She paused and looked around and some of them looked down at their feet and nodded to themselves.

“You deserve a good life. You know that, don’t you?”

A couple of them muttered.

“You deserve a good life,” she almost whispered.

“Just bring out the coffee,” someone said, and the others laughed.

“It looks like you got what you deserved, lady,” a feeble old tramp called out.

She looked at him and drew in a deep breath, but instead of launching back into her oratory she spoke with a soft, husky voice as if she were alone with the tramp.

“There’s a lot we all deserve, isn’t there?” And she looked at him with her blue eyes that seemed to make shadows wherever she looked. “Yes, we all deserve things. Good things … and then bad things,” and again she gestured toward her face. “We’re all probably due payment from both accounts. But aren’t you getting tired of only getting paid for the bad? I know I am.”

The men shifted in their chairs. The floor creaked under the threadbare carpet, and two of the men took off their hats and stared at the speaker, who looked at them each one by one, and she ended up staring directly into Slip’s eyes and holding him there as if he were floating up out of his chair.

“Ain’t it about time you got some of those good things you deserve?” She looked at them until they could bear it no more. Then she walked around the room shaking their hands.

Most of the men stood up and looked around for the food. The little man brought out a coffeepot and some mugs and they gathered around as if standing at a campfire. A couple of them stuffed extra doughnuts into their pockets to be kept in reserve for the revolution.

Slip looked over and saw two men by the door motioning
Ellie over to where they stood. Ellie refused to acknowledge them. Slip moved between the hungry tramps and tried to get her attention but she purposely ignored him now as well. Finally she handed the coffeepot back to the little nervous man, and walked toward the men by the door.

They were both several heads taller than she was, with wide shoulders, and one had a long, crooked nose that he aimed as if sighting down a barrel. Then he pointed his finger in her face. He appeared to be speaking slowly and urgently. Slip could not hear the words until one of them stepped back suddenly and said, “Fine, then!” And both the big men walked out the door.

Ellie walked slowly back toward Slip. Her hands were nervous once again, tugging at her clothes, and she seemed to have shrunken back to size.

“That wasn’t so good,” she said.

“Who were they? What did they have to say?” Slip asked.

“They’re nobody. I meant that the speech didn’t go so well.”

“I’ve got to talk to you,” Slip said to Ellie.

“I don’t doubt it,” she said softly, putting her hand once again on his lap.

“I got a friend who says you’re going to get me killed.”

“Your friend sounds like the nervous type,” Ellie said. “Besides we got bigger troubles,” and she nodded toward the door.

“You stole my goddamn money, sister.” Slip blew up. “There ain’t no
we
to this.”

“I will give you back your two thousand one hundred and twenty three dollars. Trust me. You don’t have anything to worry about,” she said.

“Why should I trust you?” he asked.

Ellie was standing by the window holding the curtain back slightly so she could keep one eye out on the street. “That is a good question, and I don’t really know the answer. I just know that you do. I know it because you had plenty of chances to walk away and you didn’t. You do, Jack Wilson. You trust me.”

“I do not trust you,” he said with as much conviction as he could muster.

She squeezed his hand again. “We’ll see,” she said.

Slip felt like shaking the girl in hopes of waking her up, for it struck him that she was acting with an odd formality that he hadn’t seen in her before. It was as if she were aware of someone else’s presence and was consciously putting her best foot forward. Then for the first time, he noticed the birdcage on the piano. Inside the cage was a yellow bird with a crest that stuck up from his head and big red spots on his cheeks. To Slip it was an odd and beautiful sight as if the bird had just finished putting too much rouge on its cheeks. There was a little girl standing on the piano stool and poking her finger into the cage. The girl had long braids and glasses tilted forward on her nose.

“Hey, Buddy. Hey, Buddy. You want something to eat?” she cooed to him.

“Annabelle, honey, why don’t you play in your room for a bit longer,” Ellie said.

“Can I take Buddy with me?”

“Sure you can, doll,” Ellie said, still keeping her eyes out on the street.

The girl hopped down and took the little round-topped cage with her and disappeared through the door.

“Oh, my dear.” Ellie whispered, “Excuse me, Mr. Wilson, you still have the gun I gave you?”

“Yes, I do, and I’m not giving it back.”

“That’s fine,” she said, and turned away from the window just as someone began pounding at the front door. “I just recommend that you keep it close.”

Slip didn’t say a word. The pounding continued and the glass window in the door sounded as if it were going to shatter.

“Is that Avery?” Ellie asked as she walked toward the back of the house.

Slip looked out the window and saw a man in a gray coat
standing on the corner under the streetlight. The two men who had been talking to Ellie by the door were headed back toward the house.

“How the hell would I know?” Slip called out.

Ellie was buttoning up her coat and feeling her pockets for something in a hurry. “It’s probably Pierce and Conner. They’re going to want back in. But don’t you let them.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Slip said, sounding more tired than frightened.

“Back door,” Ellie said and walked out of the room.

“What about the little girl?” Slip called out.

“No time.” Ellie was in the little kitchen peeking through the shade pulled over the window above the sink. A loud pounding from the front door shook the room. “They don’t want her. She’ll be fine. It will slow them down, if anything. We’ll come back in a bit and get her.”

“What do you mean a bit?” Slip stood flat-footed in the living room with his arms folded across his chest.

“One hour tops.” Ellie had her hand on the back doorknob.

The pounding on the door stopped. There was a long pause and then there was the creaking sound of two men taking a step backward.

Then there was a shattering of glass.

“I’m getting out of here,” Ellie said, as the doorframe began to splinter.

The frame gave way and Slip was running right behind the blonde. They were out the back door and into a small muddy yard. They ran to the low board fence and pushed through the gate. As they turned up the alley Slip noticed that the streetlight was not on. He turned and thought of going back to the house, but saw shadows of big men wobbling past the shades. When they went into the neighbor’s yard, a dog started barking. They ran out into the next street over.

There was no one there waiting for them. The streetlight was
on and it poured out a pool of serenity in the night. Slip took three steps backward when a man in a gray suit stepped out of a gate and took his arm. He was joined by others. None of them was the tall man from the dairy, but they were cut from the same cloth: bone breakers in worn-out suits and clean shirts. Nightmares in crepe-soled shoes.

“Easy now, bud,” one of them said.

A slow-moving sedan turned the corner and came to a stop.

“Put ’em in the car. I’m going to take the both of them for a drive,” he said with a growl the other mutts appeared to defer to.

“Want us to come along, Ben?” the man getting out of the car asked.

“Naw, I’m fine. These two don’t have balls enough between ’em. We’ve got some talking to do. I’ll see you back at the office tomorrow.”

“If you say so,” the gray suit said, and pushed Slip into the front seat of the sedan.

“You, logger. You drive,” Avery said, and he pushed Ellie into the backseat, slamming the door behind her.

As they turned the corner on the darkened street where the meetinghouse stood, Slip looked up and saw Annabelle in the top window. She had the yellow bird resting on her index finger. The light from the window slid down the side of the building and spattered out onto the street like paint. As they turned the final corner, the yellow bird ruffled its feathers and looked as if it were going to fly.

THREE
 

Annabelle loved staring at the yellow bird. She could spend hours looking into his black doll’s eyes, thinking about what it must be like to fly through the eucalyptus forests of Australia. Buddy was from Australia, or at least his parents were from there. The lady from the pet store said that Buddy had been born in the store and had never known any other life. He was a cockatiel and he would live a very long time.

Annabelle had won Buddy in a contest. All she had had to do was write her name very carefully on the back of a lid from a box of birdseed and put it in a jar. Ellie had given her the money to buy the birdseed in the first place. Ellie was good for those kinds of things. Surprises. Unexpected parties. Like buying a box of birdseed just out of the blue without much explanation.

Ellie was Annabelle’s aunt, and though she was a good speech maker she wasn’t much like a mother. Ellie was fun, but ever since her mother had died Annabelle had learned to do things for herself.

Annabelle loved Buddy even though when she first got him he would bite her hard enough to break the skin. Annabelle even suspected that the pet store lady had given him away in a contest because he was such a bad-mannered bird. Then the girl decided
that it must have been a result of somebody being horribly mean to him. So Annabelle chose to be exceedingly nice to the cranky yellow bird. She fed him exactly what the books said to give him: nuts and sometimes some pieces of fruit. She gave him his food by lying for hours on the bed with the seeds cupped in her hand and her hand extended into the cage. For the first day Buddy would only shriek and hop from perch to perch, but the little girl would lie still, murmuring his name and saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” By the third day he was eating out of her hand, and by the end of the week she could put him on her shoulder while she read a book.

Annabelle rarely spoke to anyone. It wasn’t out of unfriendliness or fear. It was just that she felt that her words were like money and she wanted to spend them wisely. She loved reading books. In books there was a surfeit of words and to her a library was a kind of Fort Knox. She particularly loved books about animals. More than books and words she loved the animals themselves. There was a drawing of a leopard above the window where she stood and watched the man put Ellie and that other man with the sad face in the car.

They had been living in Seattle for a couple of years. Ellie had been in Aberdeen when Annabelle first came to live with her. They lived in her grandpa’s bar, which worked out fine for a while but Ellie wanted to give speeches in Seattle. Leaving Aberdeen seemed to have been a mistake. There were fewer and fewer men turning out for her aunt’s speeches, and more and more men coming around late in the evenings with whiskey on their breath. It had often occurred to her that one day Ellie might not be there in the morning, and this thought didn’t particularly frighten her. It didn’t frighten her like thinking about Buddy flying away, or thinking about Buddy flying into a windowpane, swooping down from some perch looking at that other yellow bird coming at him in the exact same motion. Annabelle knew about being alone. She just didn’t want Buddy to die or become lost.

So when she heard the men breaking down the door, she took Buddy and hid underneath the bed, and when she stood at the window and watched them drive away she only thought about whether there was enough birdseed in the house.