Absolute Zero (19 page)

Broker drove east on
I-94 and tried to see Jolene as a lush who was one drink away from insanity and death. Dorothy was right; he didn’t have a lot of insight into conditions like chronic drinking. He’d been one of life’s shock troops. He’d met problems fast, in your face, on the street. He knew how to cuff them and collar them; how to stop the bleeding, clear the airway, and treat for shock. Other people toiled over the long haul, behind closed doors, to mend the collateral human damage.

Dorothy’s barbed comment about men who marry younger women still quivered—right next to J.T.’s Peter Pan Principle remark—and he found himself wondering what happened to old shock troops.

He turned off the freeway, drove aimlessly for a few minutes, and wound up on a desolate country road. The steering wheel jerked and the Jeep bounced around like a steel tray full of rocks, and the rusty suspension found every bump and pothole in the stiff gravel road, and each jolt was a shot of gravity reminding him that—although he’d lived an interesting life—right now he was on his way to turning into a statistic. He was joining the forty-five percent of American couples whose marriages would end in divorce.

Broker ran head-on into Doubt on a lonely country road between two chilly, whispering cornfields.

He couldn’t make the pieces fit for Sommer. Was he on a tangent, trying to relive an exciting part of his life?

So maybe it was time to play the cards in his hand, which did not include a wife and a child or any particular detective brilliance. He’d chop some wood and stack it neatly. He’d look at Sommer one last time and make his gesture and bid farewell. He’d go home and wait for the phone to ring.

There was Amy. Well, she had to live with it. There would be no closure on Sommer; there’d always be a place that hurt when you touched it. Like a dead child.

Onward.

Broker drove east toward the only landmark he could see, the tall NSP smokestack south of Stillwater, and found his way back to the main roads.

After getting his directions straight, he pulled up into Sommer’s drive and parked the Jeep next to the Green Chevy van. Then Earl Garf stepped out on the porch wearing a big smirk and baggy skater pants, and all Broker’s good intentions went to hell, because if ever there was a wrong guy in the picture it was Garf. Look at him, so pretty and immortal.

Broker got out of the Jeep and stalked up the steps.

“Hey,” Garf grinned. “It’s the Tin Woodsman. How you doing?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Broker asked in a level voice, in no mood to be trifled with by assholes. Even assholes who went about 220 and lifted weights.

“The Wizard of Oz, you know. It’s a little joke. You came to chop some wood, right.” Without waiting for a reply Garf sauntered down the steps and inspected the Cherokee. “Wow, what’d you do? Drive this through a rust storm?” Genial contempt caked Garf’s voice as thick as the gunk he wore in his hair, and Broker felt his shoulders loosen and drop slightly and his hands started to get hot and his fingers flexed open and closed.

Reacting to Broker’s body language, Garf raised his hands in a mollifying gesture. “Hey, take it easy. Jolene and I really appreciate what you’re doing.” Smoothly Garf inserted two fingers in his jeans pocket and withdrew another of his hundred-dollar bills. “For your trouble, man.”

Broker didn’t think. He reacted and snatched the bill and deftly stuffed it down the neck of Garf’s funky Calvin Klein sweatshirt. “Go ride your bike. Mug an old lady.”

Garf’s smile crumbled and was replaced with a reluctant resolve as he shook his head and said, “I’m opposed to beating up old guys on principle, but . . .” He moved into a stance. “Just so you know. I’ve got a black belt.”

Broker nodded. “Uh-huh. I heard of that. It’s for people who never learn to fight growing up.” A flourish of righteous anticipation swelled his chest and chased away the blues. Here, at least, was something he
could
understand: putting the hurt on this young asshole.

“Earl.” Jolene’s voice shaped the name so it sounded like “bad dog.” She appeared in the doorway wearing jeans, a denim jacket, a light gray turtleneck tucked in, and scuffed leather shoes. No wrinkles or bulges showed anywhere unless they occurred naturally in material.

“This guy . . .” Garf started to say.

“
Earl
. Go inside and wipe Hank’s chin.”

Garf grinned tightly. “Some other time, maybe.” He made an accommodating gesture, skipped up the steps, and went past Jolene into the house. She closed the door and joined Broker in the drive.

“He has a good side,” she said. “But you kind of have to lead him to it.”

Broker said nothing and they observed his silence carefully. And he knew that she knew that a lot of guys would have left by this point.

It was just nippy enough to encourage them to keep moving, so, after about thirty seconds of looking each other over, they walked around to the back of the garage. She took the lead. Broker approved of the way her jeans were not too tight, more like a comfortable second skin with a pair of leather work gloves tucked in the wallet pocket.

Around in back, a tray sat in the empty wood lean-to built under the eaves of the garage. It held a fat thermos, two cups, a creamer, sugar, and two spoons. She poured a cup. Broker shook his head when she pointed to the cream and sugar.

It was the kind of very good coffee that made you want to stay in her kitchen forever. So he sipped and surveyed the pile of wood. The rounds were uniformly cut from straight trunks. “This is really clean oak,” he said. “You found a good supplier.”

“Hank cut it on his friend’s land.” She paused. “Late friend. I guess he committed suicide, but the cops didn’t call it that. The accountant. I told you, remember?”

“I’m sorry,” Broker said, who definitely remembered. He was tempted to ask about Stovall but that would be out of character. Instinctively, he was back playing a role. He’d wait.

“It’s pretty gruesome all around. See, Hank had two sets of friends: his old screwed-up AA buddies and his new poker-party friends who he goes on his extreme vacations with, mainly Allen and Milt. Cliff, the dead guy, was from the AA group.” Then she added, deliberately, eyes steady, “I met Hank in that group. He used to say AA was a spiritual journey.”

Broker cocked his head at her language.

She smiled briefly. “He’d say the difference between religious people and spiritual people is religious people are afraid of going to hell. Spiritual people have already been there and meet on the road back.”

Broker nodded. “So you’re in the program?”

“I don’t go to meetings anymore.”

“Sounds like it wasn’t a real lucky group you were in,” Broker said.

“I hear you. But, the fact is, I’ve been sober for fourteen months.”

“It must be working, you look healthy; tired but healthy,” Broker said.

She smiled bleakly and said, “Considering.” She put her coffee cup back on the tray and pulled on her work gloves. “I’ll stack.”

It was turning into a nice afternoon. A residue of frost glistened on Broker’s boots and there was just a faint ghost of condensed moisture trailing off his breath. He pulled on his gloves, picked up a round, set it upright on the block, and hefted the maul.

Jolene watched Broker work
and saw how he was a natural, easing into a steady rhythm; each swing of the maul originating from his planted feet, bent knees, whipping up through his hips, and smoothly arcing into his arms. Whack. The oak split and flew apart. He set the halves up and gave them another lick, making each round into four pieces of kindling. When he positioned a new log, she picked up the split pieces and took them to the shed.

After five minutes he striped off his jacket and she got a better picture of how he moved. He was like Hank—his body didn’t telegraph his age. He could be anywhere in his forties.

And she thought how a lot of men self-consciously attacked work, among other things, with a jerky, almost angry, intensity; what Hank had jokingly called the need for man to demonstrate his mastery over nature. Broker had progressed beyond the amateur need to audition for her benefit. Or his own.

He was just a little too good to be true, with his killer Wolfman Jack eyebrows.

Given her experience, he should therefore be rejected out of hand as suspect. But this morning she had dressed carefully, choosing a practical look, just the simple jeans and shirt. She had caught herself starting to reach for a tube of lipstick and stayed her hand. Cosmetics were not appropriate right now, and she decided they were not necessary for Broker. In fact, she figured the opposite.

And she had allowed her heart one skip against her rib cage when she saw him hose down Earl with wolf pee. But she’d tucked her heart back in its Valentine envelope and coolly appraised Broker. And she was thinking how maybe Earl had run into someone out of his league, someone who was quietly and competently dangerous. Clearly Broker didn’t get that way of moving on people in a gym.

So why did he come back?

Maybe, like Allen, he was lonely and had found a woman in a vulnerable situation. No. This was not simple boy-girl. So maybe, like Earl, he smelled the pot of gold at the end of Hank’s tragedy. If so, he was very good at concealing his intentions. Or maybe he was just performing a samaritan courtesy, putting up a winter’s wood.

What intrigued her was that she couldn’t tell.

And she sensed a hint of melancholy. The first thing she’d noticed yesterday was his newly naked ring finger; the dent of the missing wedding band still pressed into his skin. So that was the loose string she’d pull on when the time was right.

So far he was looking good at chopping wood. She wondered how he’d be at trimming Earl down to size.

Intuition told her Broker could accomplish that task. But the roots of her intuition were still soggy with booze. She had to be careful. And even if he could chase Earl off, at what price? So she’d see if Broker could be useful. So no double messages. No games. She’d just see if there was a next step.

So she stooped, picked up, carried, and stacked the kindling. She ignored the pain in her arms and lower back. She assumed he was like Hank and put a premium on the ability to perform manual labor with a minimum of complaint. A quality that was fast departing from the realm of TV babies and PC nerds.

When half the shed was filled, Jolene straightened up, removed her gloves, and patted at a flush of sweat on her forehead. Broker put down the maul and said, “You’ll feel it tomorrow, using muscles in a new way.”

She smiled and arched her back. “Coffee break. It’s in my union contract,” she joked. He nodded, removed his gloves, and reached for a cigar as she poured coffee into two cups.

“You mind?” he asked, holding up the cigar.

She responded spontaneously from the brief happy life she’d known before her dad left when she was seven. “Actually, I kind of like cigar smoke. It reminds me of my dad and the old Met Stadium. When I was a little kid we’d go see the Twins. It smelled like beer, peanuts, and cigar smoke.”

Broker smiled, approving of the remark.

They sat side by side in the unfilled half of the woodshed. She had taken pains to make sure the other half was stacked with industrial precision. Jolene took two sips of her coffee and made her move.

She touched his left hand, the ring finger. “Kind of shouts,” she said.

He held the hand up, fingers out, inspected it, then let it fall into a fist. “Yeah,” he said. “I thought of putting a Band-Aid over it.”

Jolene raised her eyebrows eloquently, mocking,
Does it hurt that much?

He waved off her concern, “I married a younger woman,” he said.

“A lot of that’s going around.”

“There’s risks.”

“Yeah. Younger men,” she said.

He nodded. “In my case, about twelve of them.”

That stopped her and it was his turn to grin. “She’s in the army, the only woman in a squad of guys.”

“Oh.” Jolene didn’t see that coming.

And their eyes tangled up in that specific way when two people know they are both thinking the exact same thing about losing a person. About being lonely.

He held up his hand. “You know all about me. I don’t know anything about you,” he said.

And she said, “All I know about you is that you used to wear a ring on that finger and it’s not there anymore.”

He poured out the dregs of his coffee, stood up, pulled on his, gloves, and nodded toward the woodpile. “Let’s finish this,” he said.

“And then?” she asked.

He looked into her eyes and they shared another quiet moment that began to throb in her temples like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And she thought, this guy is trouble and you have enough trouble, but she didn’t turn the music off.

And after a Hallelujah Chorus worth of eye-fucking, he said, “And then we’ll see if you need any more help around here.”

Hank toured hells he
had known—Detroit got him ready for the hill, in the hammer shop at Huron Forge and Machine. Twelve drop hammers blowing out your eardrums in an acre of fiery steel forgings. The men and machines all hot, loud, dangerous, dirty, and sharp
.

Mainly he thought Sartre was right in
No Exit;
hell was just other people, especially if they were Jolene, Allen, and Earl Garf.

Right now hell was Wisconsin, which was all he could see out his studio windows, and the Wisconsin river bluffs looked like a mass grave of dead technicolor porcupines.

And then, along came Garfinkle. The made-up man who hated his name and his past and was trying to reinvent himself as Brad Pitt from
The Fight Club
or Keneau Reeves from
The Matrix.

He walked up to the bed and greeted Hank with the nickname he thought was so funny: “So how’s the Big Lebowski today?”

All Earl’s wit came from the movies, and Hank figured that’s what Earl and his whole slacker generation had instead of experiences. But he had not seen
The Big Lebowski,
so he was at a loss. It was the least of his problems
.

“Know what?” Earl said. “Your old lady has another suitor. First Doctor Allen and now the canoe guy from up north . . .”

The canoe guy.

Broker’s back.

“. . . he’s out there in back of the garage knocking the wood in little pieces. I think he’s practicing up to knock a piece off of Jolene. Just like Allen is. But, for my money, I think the sleeper candidate has the inside track. When I took her to Milt’s office yesterday, Milt kissed her hand. It was very suave.”

What’s Broker doing back here? This could be a case where Earl was right.

“At any rate, we’ll know who rings the bell.” Earl walked over to the bedroom doorway and Hank could barely see him fumble around at shoulder level on a bookshelf next to the doorjam. He moved some books aside and pointed. “State-of-the-art miniaturization, batteries, and transmitter. This baby is what the CIA uses. I cut a little hole in the wall and trained this camera on her bed. The camera transmits to long-playing tapes on a VCR in the basement. Forget voyeur TV; this is the real thing. I was thinking lighting would be a problem if it happens at night. But you know what? Jolene always sleeps with a night-light. So I upped the wattage in the night-light bulb. When she does the dirty, we’ll have broadcast-quality audio and pretty good video. Unless, of course, she does it in the cot at the end of the bed. I didn’t think of that.”

Earl scratched his head briefly, then grinned, proud of himself as he tented the books back over the concealed camera. “You know what would have been good? I should have got your buddy Stovall on tape. He was a riot, a regular worm. Except he loved the hook.

“It was his fault, you know. I gave him every out. All he had to do was come up with some bread to pay the hospital bills. You know what he said? He said, not as long as I was hanging around. Can you believe that shit?
I
rented that hospital bed you’re laying on. Me.”

Earl pointed an accusing finger. “I mean, she didn’t have shit. She couldn’t pay the fucking mortgage, man. Jolene told me about his hangups so I left his dumb ass pinned to a tree so he could think about it. I figured if he did it, he could undo it and Jolene could get access.”

Earl paused. “It was kind of a mellow day when I lured him out there. You know the place. Where you cut wood. In fact I used a trunk from a tree you cut down. And I left him with the hammer and two quarts of Johnny Walker Red.”

Earl grinned. “I thought that was a nice touch.” He shrugged. “Any rate, I never figured it’d snow and get below freezing. I thought of going back out there but I didn’t have the right shoes, and I figured the van would get stuck. Besides, snow is good. It covers evidence. They already closed the investigation. They aren’t even calling it suicide, man. He just fell in over his head getting his weird kicks. You sure know some real degenerates.”

Suddenly Earl frowned and stared at Hank and Hank realized that he’d stopped roaming his eyes and was glaring at Earl. He let his eyes droop and roll. Then, like a tiny yellow cloud, the smell of urine seeped up from his diapered crotch. Just a few drops
.

“Lookit you, you pig; you’re pissing yourself, aren’t you,” Earl accused, wrinkling his nose. “This is where I draw the line, like I told Jolene, I’ll turn your ass, feed you, and wipe your drool, but I definitely don’t do diapers.”

What a horrible experience it was to watch an idea slowly form on Garf’s face
.

“On the other hand, maybe I do,” said Earl as he crossed to the windows and looked off to the left. Reassured, he came back to the bed and pulled Hank’s gown aside and opened the Velcro stays on his diaper.

“That was hardly a sprinkle, so tell you what I’m going to do.” Earl swung his eyes in a mischievous look over his shoulder and unzipped his fly. “This is for the time you fucked with me, Lebowski.”

Hank watched Earl take his Average White Boy dick out of his pants and aim a stream of pee onto Hank’s crotch.

I can feel that, fucker.

The urine splashed hot-chrome yellow and smelled like greasy rotten eggs. It pooled briefly between Hank’s thighs and then soaked into the thick, absorbent material. Earl went up on tiptoes and stretched forward to shake off the last few drops. Then he put himself away and refastened Hank’s diaper and straightened the gown. Very satisfied with himself, Earl picked up the TV clicker off the cabinet, zapped on the TV, and thumbed up the volume. Carefully, he inserted the remote under the clay fingers of Hank’s right hand.

Another of his little mockeries.

Then Earl left the room.

Fucker pissed on me.

Helplessly soaking in Earl’s urine, Hank tried to remember in detail the night more than a year ago when this cyber punk had walked into his house for the first time. Like some pimp, he’d ordered Jolene out into his car. Called her bitch, cunt, whore.

Called Hank geezer.

Yeah, well—a few minutes later Earl wound up on his ass in the driveway with a bloody nose—Hank’s attention suddenly wrenched away from the pleasant thought of thumping on Garf. Christ, his hand was on fire.

This stinging in his right hand. Jesus, his right index finger, like something hot was under the skin squirming to get out.

Hank tried to turn his eyes into a magnifying glass and his mind into the sun. He tried to concentrate his thoughts into a beam of flame on the finger. If. If . . . he could move his finger an inch he could . . . hit the red button on the top of the remote—the one with the two letters: TV—and turn the sucker off. The red button was right between his first and second fingers. If he could do that, he could message. He could communicate. Maybe find a way to fight back.

Then he shut his eyes and drove his thoughts into his dead flesh. He visualized wrecking crews beating through debris, pushing against collapsed tunnels and fried nerves, searching for something that could hook up.

Just give me one thing. One thing.

Nothing.

Just Earl’s taunts and his wet piss.

And the cryptic snatches of Jolene’s and Earl’s conversations that confirmed Cliff was dead. Lost in the woods in his special pain, with the cold shadows lengthening, the snow creeping over his shoes, and the booze for comfort.

Allen, Garf. They were coming in with cold, blunt noses, sniffing like jackals, tearing off hunks of him, thinking he was a corpse.

The question mark was Jolene; would she land heads or tails? She’d shown signs of empathy since his accident in the way she attended to him, talked to him, played music for him, left the TV on. She kept looking into his eyes and believed that he was looking back.

Could he trust her?

Or Broker?

Okay. Okay. Get squared away. Nothing good is going to happen. It’s a question of how much bad you have to eat before it ends. Those are your options.

If he didn’t dangle just so on his single thread of sanity it got like Auschwitz in his head. C’mon, Hank, don’t overwrite, he chided himself.

Cliff was dead but he’d done his job. But Jolene wasn’t strong enough to stand up to Garf. He’d take everything if it wasn’t locked away. Milt would score his legal settlement. Allen had seen to that.

Then Ambush the cat appeared in midleap, lightly dropped on the bed at his side, sniffed the wet diaper, and moved a distance. Then she curled up at his hip and purred like a big, warm fur cricket.

Hey, kitty. At least we’re still pals.

Ambush stretched against him and nuzzled the hand that covered the remote. Then she concentrated on the first two fingers, licking them methodically with her tongue.

Needles.

Jesus. I felt that. More than before. An excruciating but wonderful thawing sensation in his index finger brought on by the pink sandpaper of Ambush’s tongue.

C’mon.

Hank sent all his thoughts back into the dead spaces of his right arm and commanded them to fight their way down through the wrist and the palm to link up with the painful tingle in the finger.

Right now it all seemed to depend on a cat’s tongue. Keep it up, Ambush. Good kitty. And then he was gone—deep inside again, with random movies flickering in his head.

After the hill.

Her name was Mai, a slender former medical student at the University of Hue, who spoke French and English and left it all behind to get rich running the laundry concession at Camp Eagle. Mai, who sometimes threw a fuck his way. She didn’t really need the carton of cigarettes he brought for her.

But it wasn’t going to happen, maybe never again. The hill had definitely busted his dick string, so she lounged back and smoked a Salem while he tried to explain that Americans were going to the moon.

“Bullshit, Hank.”

“No, I swear, in July they’re going to the moon.”

“How can you go to the moon? You can’t even go to the Ashau Valley? You can’t even get a hard-on.”

And then in July he came out alive and was back in Michigan, in a darkened motel room, not sure who the naked woman asleep next to him was, not remembering her long white body or her long brown hair. The TV was on just like it was the day he left to go to the war thirteen months before. Back during that time he’d come to and squinted through the dirty windows of another hangover, and they kept showing the pictures over and over and the volume was off and it took him forever to get up and focus, and then he realized he was looking at the churning footage of Bobby Kennedy lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen of a Los Angeles hotel and that was the going-away party.

And this was his coming home. A discarded champagne bottle on the floor blew its cork and he came up all jangled and alert just in time to hear Neil Armstrong say that’s one step for mankind.