Lake Charles (14 page)
“It’s back on our Gatlinburg estate called Aeaea.” She saw my quizzical reaction. “I wondered too and looked up the name. Aeaea is the island where the sorceress Circe held dominion over her male subjects that, if ever disenchanted, she conjured into swine.”
I cut in on Ashleigh’s mythology lesson. “What about the damn summerhouse?”
“Right, the summerhouse. Well: it’s a birch log cabin. A dark lane winds through the trees, making it secluded and ideal for our dissolute purposes.”
“Then next time we’ll go flop there.”
“Brilliant. I can hardly wait.” Smiling, her expression turned wistful and enigmatic. “I need a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“Will you be my bodyguard? I can afford to pay top rates.”
“I’d be honored. My friend Cobb can lend me his .44s.”
“Hey, I’m not kidding,” she said, miffed at hearing my flippancy.
“All right, simmer down and I’ll do it. Are you in any immediate danger?”
“No, but what I have in mind is very dangerous.”
Wariness served me a dose of caution. “Just how dangerous is it? You see, I charge accordingly.”
“Oh, I’m always sure I can meet your price, Brendan.”
My eyes refocused, I staggered for a step, my boot almost crushing a corn snake sunning itself on a pancake rock before a grove of beeches shaded our progress. Feces in the wallows made by the wild boars rooting for snails, salamanders, and mushrooms to eat burned out my nose hairs. Something of a grub myself, I knew my porcine lore. Unable to sweat, the boars writhed in the mud’s gooey coolness, and the baked on dirt coat also kept off the ticks. The DEET that I smeared on did the same thing.
The boars’ upper tusks scraped on the bottom ones to hone them to a razor sharp edge. During the hottest part of the day, they bedded down, and during the cooler night, they foraged. The butchered wild boars offered nutty-tasting pork chops. Their intestines became tripe, and their livers fixed with onions were edible. Shunning food stamps, our religious cousins had starved enough to go shoot and feast on the wild boars. Right now, so could I.
Our wild boars weren’t native. One tale I heard as a kid said the pissed off scratch farmers during the Great Depression freed their hogs rather than let the bankers seize them in the foreclosures. Or did Ashleigh’s yarn of Circe changing Ulysses’ men into swine enjoy credence in Tennessee? After her lovers bored her, Ashleigh also bewitched them into boar hogs driven to root for survival in the Appalachian outback.
We took a sitting break. Mr. Kuzawa wiped a sleeve over his lips. I followed his quiet study of the distant smoke column skirling into the sky. The firefighters struggled to tame the hellish blazes consuming the ridges. My new worry considered if the blazes had trapped and burned Edna to death.
“August is a dry nun’s cunt.” Mr. Kuzawa flicked his brass Zippo on a Marlboro.
Herzog made a sour face over the earthy metaphor.
“That fire has raged since we got here.” I also lit one up.
Herzog tapped out a Marlboro, lit a match to fire it, sucked down, and had a coughing fit.
Mr. Kuzawa laughed. “Lawyer, you better go easy on the cancer sticks.”
He made another face.
Mr. Kuzawa looked at me. “Did a lightning bolt hit you on a grassy bald?”
My slight shrug downplayed any amazement. “Yeah and Edna said my heart had quit ticking.”
“Did she save your hash?”
“No two ways about it. Lucky for me she knew her CPR.”
“While you lay flaked out there dead, by chance, did you spot any white light pulling you to it?”
“Just the opposite. I remember best the sensation of tumbling head over heels through a pitch black abyss.”
“The fuck you say. But you’re holding up now?”
Again, I shrugged. “The ringing in my ears bugs me the most.” My Ashleigh dreams didn’t get a mention, at least not until I knew better if I could trust him.
He drew down to the filter and exhaled. “Is the dead girl the one who smoked the dope?”
“It wasn’t just her. All of us indulged in her grass.”
“Supporting a big dope habit runs some bucks. How did she finance hers?”
“Her father rich as muck gave her a generous allowance.” I finished my smoke. Again, the nicotine had blunted my appetite.
Mr. Kuzawa flicked away his butt. Knees crinking, he stretched out his legs. “There’s no figuring for the rich.”
I stood up with him. Herzog arose and we left, the inept lawyer again put in the lead. As we moved out, I recalled I still owed the Yellow Snake hospital a bushel of money (we’d no medical insurance). Then I thought how Sizemore had issued his violent threats back in May. Here it was August, four months later, and he’d yet to make good on them. I hadn’t forgotten his prison cell beatdown, a good reason now to go torch him, but first I had to pull Edna out of her riptide.
* * *
Herzog who first entered a meadow cried out to us. “Brendan, you better see this.” On Mr. Kuzawa’s heels, I hurried into the meadow bathed in sunlight. “These plants look plenty robust, don’t they?”
The cluster of a half-dozen pot shrubs reminded me of the Big Boy tomatoes Mama Jo tended in her vegetable plot.
Flicking his brass Zippo to flame up, Mr. Kuzawa beamed at me. “Burn ’em.”
“Not really the best idea,” said Herzog. “The smoke might intoxicate us.”
“The growers will also smell it and know it’s us,” I said.
“Then we’ll shred the damn contraband,” said Mr. Kuzawa.
He and I uprooted the pot shrubs, ripped them apart, and scattered the pieces of stalk, leaf, and stem over the meadow. Our lucky streak extended to the next meadow where we found and demolished more plants. The third meadow had twenty-odd shrubs to trash. Our raid would incense the big bug, and we pulled another step closer to finding Edna. I hurried down and washed off the pot’s sticky resin from my hands. Lake Charles’ scummy water was hardly any cleaner. I returned, and we rested in the shady verge. Ravenous hunger clawed inside my stomach, and I knew I wasn’t alone.
“Kuzawa, I’m on the brink of starvation,” said Herzog.
Mr. Kuzawa said nothing, but his stomach also rumbled.
“That Spam I tossed into Lake Charles sounds good right about now.”
“We’ll make do,” said Mr. Kuzawa, unsmiling.
My brow knitted into a frown. “I’m not eating any fish pulled out of Lake Charles if that’s what you mean.”
“All right, we’ll go to Lang’s Teahouse, leave in your cab truck, and eat in Yellow Snake,” said Mr. Kuzawa.
“Take my keys and go on then,” I said. “Bring me a burger and fries because I’m not budging from here as long as Edna is gone or in danger.”
Mr. Kuzawa gave my stubborn glare a cool reception. “We can search for her on the way to Lang’s Teahouse. Look, we haven’t flushed out any shitbirds. I believe Cobb and you mucking around scared them off, and they took Edna with them. Some yahoo in Yellow Snake might give up a lead.”
True to character, Herzog nodded in agreement. Feeling outvoted, I felt the cramps grinding my hamstrings since we’d stopped, not to mention the blisters worn on the bottoms of my feet. The bullet wound under my ribs seared with each breath I took. Good thing the rage simmering just under my skin deadened the worst pain.
Two hours later, we humped into Lang’s Teahouse unscathed, and I unhitched the double decker trailer. The place had the same odious stench of algae and decay. We took off for Yellow Snake, a carbon copy of Umpire with one notable exception—Yellow Snake fêted its upper crust. Their big money also kept the cancerous sprawl at bay. Piloting my cab truck on the state road, I visualized the wealthy’s rarified world where they languished in their chateaus in and around scenic Yellow Snake.
The daughters of the multi-millionaires took their equestrian lessons, attended finishing schools up north in idyllic New England hamlets, and slummed at local The Devil’s Own rock concerts. They refined the art of walking with their patrician noses canted in the air without somersaulting over them. Then I took note of my cynical attitude and hoped it soon cleared up.
“Herzog, are you set for Brendan’s trial?” asked Mr. Kuzawa.
Pinned between us, Herzog twisted around. “He’ll benefit from my best defense. We only have to meet and prepare.”
“Brendan, are you ready to meet with Herzog?”
A jerk of the steering wheel tried to skirt a purple grackle stripping the red, stringy flesh from a road kill opossum. Reacting late, I felt my tires go clunk twice. The heavy-handed symbolism of trampled on the road to Yellow Snake didn’t escape me.
“No stress. I’ve got it covered.” I’d had a bellyful of talking about my trial for Ashleigh Sizemore’s murder.
Displeasure puckered Herzog’s face. “Your priorities are askew, gentlemen. We left two corpses back there, and the authorities are bound to ask of our involvement at Lake Charles.”
Mr. Kuzawa clattered his window handle and the wind gusted in to beat our faces. “My boy is one of them.” He dredged up something vile from his throat and let it sail out the open window. “Who gives a screw about the dead shitbird?”
Herzog wasn’t mollified. “Remember Mr. Sizemore is a heavy swinger. He has political connections, and I know of his law firm by reputation. His attorneys are the best and brightest who play to win, and they usually do.”
“Fuck ’em. That’s why we’ve brought you, Herzog.”
Flattered, he all but rolled his eyes. “I advise don’t trespass on Sizemore’s estate.”
“If we stay on the state road, we can look to our hearts’ content, am I not right?”
“From a legal standpoint, you are.”
“Then I say legal shaves close enough.”
“You’d be foolish to provoke Mr. Sizemore.” Herzog braced his hands on the dashboard as we sailed around on a steep curve. “Kuzawa, I don’t if you’re aware of it or not, but you’ve got a reputation for raising Cain.”
“People like to talk, but some bad shit can’t be avoided.”
“I disagree. I’m a firm believer it lies within our capacity to turn the other cheek. The choice is ours to make whether to accept or to reject violence as a solution to our conflicts.”
Mr. Kuzawa barked out a laugh, and his voice rasped. “Think so? The day my draft notice arrived, what was I supposed to do? Turn the other cheek and not go serve? No sir, I sucked it up and reported for my military service in Mr. Truman’s police action.”
“You should’ve appealed it as a conscientious objector.”
“Suppose everybody took that ticket out? Uncle Sam issued me an M12 shotgun and said go bag a few renegade gooks in the yo-yo war. So I carried out orders. I lost three toes to frostbite. Korea was cold and it was a bitch to keep your feet warm and dry. The body bags ran up to the ass, but I got back here to the Land of the Big Round Eyes almost intact. A slew of GIs didn’t.”
“Did Cobb go to Viet Nam?”
“Fuck, did you, lawyer?”
Angry vitriol heated Mr. Kuzawa’s words. “We thank you for your service,” I told him, then, “Herzog, screw a lid on your views.”
He took the bloody handkerchief from his hand cut. “A civil debate on the social issues is always healthy.”
“It’s healthier to keep your mouth shut,” I said. “Piss off the wrong vet, and he’ll leave you counting your teeth scattered over the ground. Mr. Kuzawa just has a longer fuse than most of them do.”
“Oh. Right. I get your point.”
My pinching stomach still demanded fuel. Had Edna eaten since her disappearance on the jet ski? A quarter-mile further, I spotted the signboard for Gabriel’s Diner. Soon after, the parking area I signaled and jounced into was deserted and paved with pea gravel.
“Make it fifteen minutes, tops,” I said.
We rolled out. My head throbbed where Sizemore’s palm sap had tried to cleave open my skull. The bamboo wind chimes near the diner’s entry tinkled as my heartbeat lurched in panic. My hand flew back to pat at the small of my back, and I breathed out in relief. My waistband held the .44 I carried under my untucked shirttail. Our 12-gauges stayed racked along the cab seat.
Mr. Kuzawa’s pocket bulge accounted for the other .44 he’d taken from me. His sly wink reassured me.