Crow Fair (13 page)

At length, Dave gave up his pretense and said, “Sounds like you got the job.”

“Maybe so. But here’s what I know for sure: I’m starving.”

“Must be, Ray. You ate like a bird.”

“Couldn’t be helped. That kind of food just grips the chambers of my heart like an octopus. But right behind the house they got a vegetable garden. How about you slip out and pick me some. I’ve already been told to stay out of the garden. But don’t touch the tomatoes; they’re not ripe.”

“What else is there?”

“Greens and root vegetables.”

“I’m not going out there.”

“Oh, yes you are.”

Ray wasted no time reaching for his JanSport to draw the gun.

“Here’s a meal that’ll really stick to your ribs,” he said.

“I’m not picking vegetables for you or, technically speaking, stealing them for you. Forget it.”

“Wow. Is this a mood swing?”

“Call it what you want. Otherwise, it’s shoot or shut up.”

“As you might guess, I prefer not to wake up the whole house.”

“And the body’d be a problem for you.”

“Very well, very well.” Ray went to his pack and put the gun away. “But you may not be so lucky next time.”

“What-ever.”

Dave rolled over to sleep, but his greedy thoughts went on
unwillingly. He had planned to head out in the morning. He was expected at ranches all around Jordan. As it was, he’d have to explain himself at Jorgensen’s. He had a living to make, and were it not for his morbid curiosity about Ray and Morsel, to say nothing of the possible business deal, he might have snuck out in time to grab a room in Jordan for the night. But the rolls of money in Ray’s pack were definitely real, and his hints of more to come made him wonder how anxious he was to go back to work.

“Ray, you awake?”

“I might be. What d’you want, asshole?”

“I just have something I want to get off my chest.”

“Make it quick, I need my z’s.”

“Sure, Ray, try this one on for size: the gun’s a toy.”

“The gun’s a what?”

“A fake. And, Ray, looks to me like you might be one, too.”

“Where’s the fuckin’ light switch? I’m not taking this shit.”

“Careful you don’t stub your toe jumping off the bed like that.”

“Might be time to clip your wings, sonny.”

“Ray, I’m here for you. But I’m not an idiot. Just take a moment so we can agree about your so-called gun, and then we can have some straight talk.”

Ray found the lamp and paced the squeaking floorboards. “I gotta take a leak,” he said, heading out to the porch. “Be right back.” Dave wondered whether he’d been too harsh, sensing defeat in Ray’s parting remark. Dave could see him silhouetted in the moonlight in the doorway, a silver arc splashing onto the lawn, head thrown back in what Dave took to be a posture of despair. Surely, he could squeeze this guy for something.

By the time Ray walked back in he was already confessing … an appraiser in Modesto, California, where I was raised. I did some community theater there, played Prince Oh-So-True in a children’s production of
The Cave of Inky Blackness
, and thought I was going places. Next came
Twelve Angry Men
—I was one of them—which is where the pistol came from. Then I was the hangman in
Motherlode
. Got married, had a baby girl, lost my job, got another one, went to Hawaii as a steward on a yacht belonging to a movie star who was working a snow-cone stand a year before the yacht, the coke, the babes, and the Dom Pérignon. I’d had to sign a nondisclosure agreement. Eventually, I got into a fight with the movie star and got kicked off the boat at Diamond Head, just rowed me to shore in a dinghy. I hiked all the way to the crater, where I used the restroom to clean up and got some chow off the lunch wagon before catching a tour bus into Honolulu. I tried to sell the celebrity-drug-fueled-orgy story to a local paper, but that went nowhere because of the thing I’d signed. Everything I sign costs me money. About this time, my wife’s uncle’s walnut farm went bust. He took a loan out on the real estate, and I sold my car, a rust-free ’78 Trans Am, handling package, W72 performance motor, solar gold with a Martinique-blue interior—we’re talking mint. We bought a bunch of FEMA trailers off the Katrina deal and hauled them to California. But of course we lost our asses. So the uncle gases himself in his garage, and my wife throws me out. I moved into a hotel for migrants and started using the computers at the Stanislaus County Library, sleeping at the McHenry Mansion, where one of the tour guides was someone I used to fuck in high school. She slipped me into one of the canopy beds for naps. Online is
where I met Morsel. We shared about our lives. I shared I had fallen on hard times. She shared she was coining it selling bootleg OxyContin in the Bakken oil field. It was a long shot: Montana. Fresh start. New me. But, hey. I took the bus to Billings and thumbed the rest of the way. By the time I made it to Jordan I had nothing left. The clerk at that fleabag almost wouldn’t let me have a room. I told him I was there for the comets. I don’t know where I come up with that. I had to make a move. Well, now you know. So, what happens next? You bust me with Morsel? You turn me in? I can’t marry her anyway. I don’t need bigamy on my sheet.”

“You pretty sure on the business end of this thing?” Dave asked with surprising coldness. He could see things going his way.

“A hundred percent, but Morsel’s got issues with other folks already being in it. There’s some risk, but when isn’t there with stakes like this.”

“Like what kind of risk?”

“Death threats, the usual. Heard them all my life. But think about it, Dave. I’m not in if you’re not. You really want to return to what you were doing? We’d both be back in that hotel with the comets.”

Ray was soon snoring. Dave was intrigued that these revelations, not to mention the matter of the “gun,” had failed to disturb Ray’s sleep. Dave meanwhile was wide awake, and he began to realize why: the nagging awareness of his own life. So many risks! He felt that Ray was a success despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary. What had Dave accomplished? High school. What could have been more painful? Yet, he suffered no more than anyone else. So even in that he was unexceptional.
There was only generic anguish, persecution, and lockdown. He didn’t have sex with a mansion tour guide. His experience came on the promise of marriage to a fat girl. Then there was the National Guard. Fort Harrison in the winter. Cleaning billets. A commanding officer who told the recruits that “the president of the United States is a pencil-wristed twat.” Inventorying ammunition. Unskilled maintenance on UH-60 Black Hawks. “Human resource” assistant. Praying for deployment against worldwide towelheads. Girlfriend fatter every time he went home. Meaner, too. Threatening him with a baby. And he was still buying his dope from the same guy at the body shop who was his dealer in eighth grade. Never enough money and coveralls with so much cow shit he had to change Laundromats every two weeks.

It was perhaps surprising he’d come up with anything at all, but he did: Bovine Deluxe, LLC, a crash course in artificially inseminating cattle. Dave took to it like a duck to water: driving around the countryside (would have been more fun in Ray’s Trans Am) with a special skill set, detecting and synchronizing estrus, handling frozen semen, keeping breeding records, all easily learnable; and Dave brought art to it. Though he had no idea where that gift had come from, he was a genius preg tester. Straight or stoned, his rate of accuracy, as proved in spring calves, was renowned. His excitement began as soon as he put on the coveralls, pulled on the glove lubed up with OB goo, before even approaching the chute. With the tail held high in his left hand, he’d push his right all the way in against the cow’s attempt to expel it, shoveling out the manure to clear the way, over the cervix before grasping the uterus, now that he was in nearly up to his shoulder. Dave could detect a pregnancy at two months, when the calf was smaller than a mouse. He liked the
compliments that came from being able to tell the rancher how far along the cow was, anywhere from two to seven months, according to Dave’s informal system: mouse, rat, cat, fat cat, raccoon, Chihuahua, beagle. He’d continue until he’d gone through the whole herd or until his arm was exhausted. Then he had only to toss the glove, write up the invoice, and look for food and a room.

Perfect. Except for the dough.

Morsel made breakfast for the men—eggs with biscuits and gravy. At the table, Dave was still assessing Ray’s claim of reaching his last dime back at Jordan, which didn’t square with the rolls of bills in his pack. And Dave was watching Weldon watching Ray as breakfast was served. Morsel just leaned against the stove. “Anyone want to go to Billings Saturday and see the cage fights?” she said at last, moving from the stove to the table with a dish towel. Dave alone looked up and smiled; no one answered her. Ray was probing the food with his fork, still under Weldon’s scrutiny. The salt-encrusted sweat stain on Weldon’s black Stetson went halfway up the crown. It was downright unappetizing in Dave’s view and definitely not befitting any customer for topdrawer bull semen. Nor did he look like a man whose daughter was selling dope at the Bakken, either.

At last Weldon spoke as though calling out to his livestock.

“What’d you say your name was?”

“Ray.”

“Well, Ray, why don’t you stick that fork all the way in and eat like a man?”

“I’ll do my best, Mr. Case, but I will eat nothing with a central nervous system.”

“Daddy, leave Ray alone. There’ll be plenty of time to get acquainted and find out what Ray enjoys eating.”

Weldon continued to eat without seeming to hear Morsel. Meanwhile, Dave was making a hog of himself and hoping he could finish Ray’s breakfast, though Ray by now had seen the light and was eating the biscuits from which he had skimmed the gravy with the edge of his fork. He looked like he was under orders to clean his plate until Morsel brought him some canned pineapple slices. Ray looked up at her with what Dave thought was genuine affection. She said, “It’s all you can eat around here,” but the moment Dave stuck his fork back in the food, she raised a hand in his face and said, “I mean: that’s all you can eat!” and laughed. Dave noticed her cold blue eyes, and for the first time he thought he understood her.

She smiled at Ray and said, “Daddy, you feel like showing Ray ’n’ ’em the trick.” Weldon ceased his rhythmic lip pursing.

“Oh, Morsel,” he said coyly, pinching the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger.

“C’mon, Daddy, give you a dollar.”

“Okay Mor’, put on the music.” A huge sigh of good-humored defeat. Morsel went over to a low cupboard next to the pie safe and pulled out a small plastic record player and a 45, which proved to be a scratchy version of “Cool, Clear Water” by the Sons of the Pioneers. At first gently swaying to the mournful dehydration tune, Weldon seemed to come to life as Morsel placed a peanut in front of him and the lyrics began, luring a poor desert rat named Dan to an imaginary spring. Weldon took off his hat and set it upside down beside him, revealing the thinnest comb-over across a snow-white pate. Then he picked up the
peanut and with sinuous movements balanced it on his nose. It remained there until near the end of the record, when Dan the desert rat hallucinates green water and trees, whereupon the peanut dropped to the table, and Weldon just stared at it in disappointment. When the record ended, he replaced his hat, stood without a word, and, dropping his napkin on his chair, left the room. For a moment it was quiet. Dave felt he’d never seen anything like it.

“Daddy’s pretty hard on himself when he don’t make it to the end of the record. But,” she said glumly, thumbing hair off her forehead as she cleared the dishes and went into the living room to straighten up, “me and Ray thought you ought to see what dementia looks like. It ain’t pretty and it’s expensive.” Soon they heard Weldon’s airplane cranking up, and Morsel called from the living room, “Daddy’s always looking for them cows.”

Dave had taken care to copy the information in Ray’s passport onto the back of a matchbook cover, which he tore off, rolled into a cylinder, and stashed inside a bottle of aspirin. And there it stayed until Ray and Morsel headed to Billings for the cage fights. She’d left Dave directions to the Indian small-pox burials, in case he wanted to pass the time hunting for beads. But at this point, by failing to flee in his own car, Dave admitted to himself that he had become fully invested in Ray’s scheme. So he seized the chance to use his cell phone and 411 connect to call Ray’s home in Modesto and chat with his wife or, as she presently claimed to be, his widow. It took two tries a couple of hours
apart. On the first, he got her answering machine, “You know the drill: leave it at the beep.” On the second, he got Mrs. Ray. He had hardly identified himself as an account assistant with the Internal Revenue Service when she interrupted him to state in a voice firm, clear, and untouched by grief that Ray was dead. “That’s what I told the last guy, and that’s what I’m telling you.” She said he had been embezzling from a credit union before he left a suicide note and disappeared.

“I’m doing home health care. Whatever he stole he kept. Killing himself was the one good idea he come up with in the last thirty years. At least it’s prevented the government from garnishing my wages, what little they are. I been all through this with the other guy that called. Have to wait for his death to be confirmed or else I can’t get benefits. If I know Ray, he’s on the bottom of the Tuolumne River just to fuck with me. I wish I could have seen him one last time to tell him his water skis and croquet set went to Goodwill. If the bank hadn’t taken back his airplane, there wouldn’t have been even that little bit of equity I got to keep me from losing my house and sleeping in my motherfuckin’ car. Too bad you didn’t meet Ray. He was an A-to-Z crumb bum.”

“I’m terribly sorry to hear about your husband,” said Dave mechanically.

“I don’t think the government is ‘terribly sorry’ to hear about anything. You reading this off a card?”

“No, this is just a follow-up to make sure your file stays active until you receive the benefits you’re entitled to.”