This Is What I Want (26 page)

THE MAYOR

Promptly at 8:00 a.m., John Swarthbeck walked out of his temporary office on the ground floor of the Sloane Hotel, crossed the street to the Oasis, and turned right. Eight doors and two blocks down, the sidewalk delivered him to Everly’s Welding Service. Tut had the main bay open, just as Swarthbeck had requested.

Getting to the request had been a quagmire. Marian Everly had come into the Sloane the night before like a summer squall, all histrionics and sideways threats, Tut hanging on to the tail of her shirt like she was an unruly child, the mayor closing the door and telling Tut to get control of his damned woman like any self-respecting man would.

So began the playing of the cards, and the figurative didn’t go any better than the literal did for old Tut. Marian said they were mortgaged to the hilt to get the new equipment that was getting them in on some Bakken jobs and the fifty grand just couldn’t be raised right now, not with nuts to make. Swarthbeck set down the trump card, a signed contract with Tut on the amounts due and the consequences of nonpayment. “We’ll have to pull the kids out of UM,” Tut had said, no more convincingly than in the stairwell at the Sloane a few days earlier. And while Swarthbeck thought it a damn shame that the burden was shifting to the kids, he didn’t see how it was his concern. “So you’ll be motivated to make this good,” he’d said.

Marian, by then, had looked thoroughly defeated. She’d grabbed her husband’s arm and pulled him toward the exit, regret writ large on her face.

Swarthbeck held the door for them.
Degenerate-ass gamblers. They spew misery.

Now, Tut stepped through the bay opening and said, “Let’s get this over with.”

Swarthbeck approached and lifted his T-shirt, a show of the revolver tucked into his waistband.

“Jesus, John.”

“I just don’t want there to be any questions,” the mayor said. “This’ll go better if we have complete understanding.”

He moved into the dark coolness of the garage, his steps echoes in the steel building. Tut kept a clean work space, a point in his favor. By the time Swarthbeck would be ready to head back to the Sloane, he’d have the full scope of the place.

“Where’s your crew?”

“Gave ’em the morning off,” Tut said. “Didn’t want anybody to see this.”

“Good thinking.” Swarthbeck ran a finger along the top of a brown acetylene canister, then brought it up for inspection. Nothing. Clean place.

“OK,” he said. “I want an inventory of everything. Anything still being financed, I want to see the paperwork on that, and don’t try to tell me you don’t have it. I want to see the deed on the property and the building, and I want your tax records.”

“Tax records?”

Swarthbeck turned around and faced Tut.

“You misunderstand ‘everything’?”

“No.”

“It sounds like you did.”

“No, I just—shit, John, tax records? They’re up at the house.”

“I want ’em. Today.”

“Jesus.”

Swarthbeck leaned in on the smaller man.

“The son of God ain’t your fifty percent partner, Tut. I am. Get me what I want and stop wasting my time.”

It was the little edge of intimidation Swarthbeck needed to get his reluctant partner moving. Tut scurried out of there to rev up the truck and head up the hill to Marian and a fresh round of her wrath.

When Swarthbeck was sure he’d gone, he turned and started his count. He knew a guy who could get him seventy cents on the dollar for the canisters, and that would be a start.

Later that morning, back at the Sloane Hotel, Pete Rexford came through the door. Swarthbeck looked up from his pile of Tut Everly’s paperwork—a treasure trove, he’d already discovered—and took in the sight of his old friend. Absent were the pressed Western slacks and fine boots Rexford usually wore. Before Swarthbeck stood a sweaty, dirty, bewildered man.

“Jesus, Pete.”

“Where are your goddamn cops?” Rexford advanced on the mayor’s desk. “Can’t get a one of them on the phone.”

Swarthbeck stood. “What happened?”

“Damn debacle, that’s what. My boy’s car is sitting out in front of the house, burned to nothing.”

Swarthbeck came around the desk and closed the distance between them. “Burned?”

“Firebombed. Something. Where are your cops?”

“Day after Jamboree, Pete. I imagine they’re home sleeping.”
Or something,
he added to a thought he’d just as soon keep to himself for now.

“Who’d do this?” Rexford said.

Swarthbeck pushed past his friend and headed for the door. He figured the answer was clear enough to anybody who’d been paying attention. Adair had overstepped for sure this time.

Joe LaMer came through it all right, all things considered. He had stiff legs and a sore ass, the products of nine hours handcuffed to the oven in Adair Underwood’s abandoned kitchen. He had a knot on his head from the butt end of her revolver, and when at last he could speak again, he complained of a hell of a headache as residue. And he had the indignity of waiting on John Swarthbeck to read the note on the kitchen table before the mayor fetched the key and freed LaMer and pulled the duct tape from the deputy’s mouth. The mayor hoped that hurt most of all.

Swarthbeck pushed the note at the officer, who took his time climbing back to his feet.

“This all true?”

LaMer didn’t take the offered piece of paper. “Yeah.”

Swarthbeck pulled it back and read again.

John,

I know about Alfonso, I know about the explosion, and I know some other things, too. LaMer here can tell you all about that.

You make it right with Alfonso. I’ll be checking in with him, and if you don’t, I’ll bring the fight back to you in ways that will really hurt. You make it right with him, and you leave me be. Those are my terms.

Your man gave it up without a fight. I threatened to make him a gelding, and he spilled it all. You might want to choose your henchmen a little more carefully.

Adair

Swarthbeck crumpled the note and stuffed it in his pocket. LaMer, rubbing his dented head, said, “John, I . . .”

The mayor hunched over and took a powerful step forward, driving his fist into LaMer’s nuts, and the younger man fell again.

OMAR

Omar scanned the horizon, from the bald knobs on his right to the sloping valley on his left that met the Yellowstone off in the distance, running along the scoria stacks. He did it again, as if he weren’t aware of the bleakness—both in the landscape and in the situation. It was him and Clarissa and the grasses in the summer wind and the occasional big rig and a whole mess of trouble, as if there weren’t enough of that already.

He’d told her—
told
her—that she should stop and have the car looked at when he saw the engine light, and Clarissa had said, “No, it’s fine, it’s just an electrical short,” and she’d kept her foot planted damn near to the floorboard on the drive between Grandview and Glendive. Not more than twenty minutes after they’d joined the interstate headed west toward Billings, the car had hocked up a god-awful noise and had lain down and died on the road’s shoulder.

“What are we going to do?” Clarissa now asked him, that tremor again in her voice. He wanted to wheel around on her and tell her to stop crying about shit and just deal with it. This was her show, her decision—her decision from way back, when she’d tossed Omar to the side as if she could just deny what had been welling inside him.

“We have to call someone.”

“No,” she said.

“We have to.”

“We can’t.”

He brought the fingers of his right hand to his nose and breathed in, same as he’d done intermittently since they left Grandview. He still couldn’t believe it, the way John Rexford’s car had erupted in flames. He’d shoved the gas-soaked kerchief into the tank and lit the end, same as he’d seen Javier Bardem do in that movie. The petroleum scent was a delicious reminder that maybe he wasn’t completely inept, a bit of assurance he needed just now.

“Clarissa,” he said, his voice rising into the wind, “it’s over. This isn’t a flat tire. The car is dead.” He knew this not because he had a particular way with automobiles—he did not—but because even Omar could push his head under the front end and see the cracked pan and the flood of life-giving oil spreading across the asphalt.

She sat in the open door frame, set her face into her hands, and sobbed, and he’d had enough of that, too. And yet he made his way around the car and stood beside her, gently clearing his throat to let her know that she should calm down and join him in the moment.

“I can’t just go back,” she said at last, the sniffles muffling her words. “Can’t we just give it a little bit? Maybe we can catch a ride into Billings, right?”

He crossed his arms and then turned to her.

“What about your car?” He didn’t see any way around it now. When the car got dealt with, so would they, and so would the lies about where they’d gone today.

“I don’t care,” she said. “We can call someone after.”

Omar considered that and found the answer worked for him, too. For all he knew, Gabe was gallivanting around Grandview now, blowing Omar’s already-thin cover. And then, of course, there was John Rexford and his car, both problems for another time. Maybe by now Gabe would know about it, too, and maybe he’d even consider that Omar had done what he could to set things right.

He moved against Clarissa, forcing her over, and he shoved in next to her and waited. For something.

The sun made its push toward the high point in the sky and beat down on them, and Omar crawled into the backseat and lay on his back, his knees bent into acute triangles and very nearly brushing the headliner, and he dreamt of basketball and all the opportunities that were on an inexorable march toward him.

His body twitched. The basketball dreams were pure dopamine, a place where the ball was always small, the basket always vast, and his moves always correct. He chanced to dream of final-second shots and championships and victory parades on teammates’ shoulders.

And then Omar’s eyes fluttered open. The car seat smell and the sweaty stench from his lying in the sun flooded his senses. Perspiration leached into the shirt on his back.

“Clarissa.” He turned onto his side and saw her in the driver’s seat, her head dangled off to the side.

“Clarissa.”

She lurched forward. “Huh?”

“Somebody’s here,” he said. He sniffed his fingers again.

Tires rolled along the rumble strip behind them, the crunch of gravel accompanying, and then came to a stop.

“Who is it?” she said.

Omar tried to pull his knees in while simultaneously shoving his torso upward so he could get a look out the back window. The confines of the car left him precious little room to move.

Outside, the sound of a door opening and then slamming shut. Footsteps on the pavement. Long strides from the sound of it.

“Oh,” she said, “it’s that guy.”

“What guy?”

“You know, that author guy. From Jamboree.”

The sound of the steps fell off. A shadow loomed in Clarissa’s open window, and then a face peeked in.

“You guys need some help?”

SAMUEL

He found his father in the old tack room, a pencil in Sam’s chewed fingers taking inventory of what had been left behind. There hadn’t been a horse on the spread since before Big Herschel spun off into the cosmos, and there hadn’t been anyone keen to deal with the detritus until now.

The door to the shack had lain open, and Samuel found his way in without rousing the old man. He figured he’d just stand there a spell and wait for recognition to register. Might even be able to throw a scare into his dad, and that would be a nice reversal from the many years when Sam had lurked around darkened corners after a scary movie, ready to separate his son from his sense of security all in the name of a good laugh.

On and on it went, Sam counting riggings and horseshoes and time-beaten boxes of nails and the rest of it, quick jots in his notebook. Samuel held still and silent, and then he whinnied, deep and throaty and loud, like an old draft horse, and Sam’s notebook went flying as he whirled around to fend off an intruder.

When he saw his boy, his face moved through surprise, confusion, anger, and then relief in about the space of a breath.

He listed about, Fred Sanford-style, and said, “The ol’ ticker hasn’t got many of those left in it,” and then he smiled, and Samuel knew he’d hit the mark.

He brought his forefingers to a point and thrust them forward at his father. “Gotcha,” he said.

At the house, Samuel poured two glasses of Coke and carried them into the living room. Sam sat stretched across the sofa, Blanche’s window unit blowing frigid kisses his way.

“You got it all accounted for?” Samuel asked. He handed his father one of the sweaty glasses.

“Just about. Some good stuff. Lots to keep, but some things to get rid of, too. Make for a nice weekend sale this fall.”

Samuel took the seat across from him and savored a sip.

“And the rest?” he asked.

His father sat up straight, snapping his fingers. “Forgot about that. Talked to the guy today.” He leaned forward and fished in his back pocket for his notes. “So we’re thinking conservation easement, all right? The two farms adjoining this one don’t want the rigs here, either, and they’ve got their mineral rights. In fact, they came to me, because they were nervous I’d cash the place out.”

Samuel wrinkled up his nose, confused. “So no sale?”

“I’m giving it away,” Sam said. “Satisfies what your grandma wanted, and it keeps those things”—he waved in the direction of the east wall and the rigs that rose in the distance beyond it—“at bay for a while.”

Samuel watched his father as he talked. He couldn’t tease out whether it was an idea driven by inspiration or anger. He supposed it didn’t matter, at that.

“Sounds like you’re solid,” he said.

Sam nodded. “I am. I really am.” He smiled, and then it crumbled. “How’s your mother?”

“You should ask her yourself.”

“Come on.”

“You should.”

Sam sat up farther and drained his glass, then he pushed himself erect and grabbed his cap from the hook beside the door.

“You have some time before you go?” he asked.

“Yeah, a little.”

Sam reached for the door. “Well, come on, then.”