Absolute Zero (20 page)

Most of the wood
was split and stacked when Earl stepped onto the deck outside Hank’s room and waved at Jolene.

“He smells like a Porta Potty at the state fair. I’ll feed him and wipe his nose but I’m not changing diapers, uh-uh,” Earl said.

Jolene removed her gloves. “I’ll be back in a minute.” Broker nodded and resumed work. She followed Earl inside and the first thing she reacted to was the blaring volume on the television. Immediately she searched for the remote. “Very funny,” she said when she found it where Earl had comically inserted it in Hank’s limp hand. She picked it up, clicked off the set, and said, “You know how much he hates the Fox News Channel.” She eyeballed Earl to see which face she was dealing with.

“C’mon, he isn’t there. Allen says if you keep up that kind of talk you’re going to have a problem with acceptance,” Earl said.

Okay. It was his mean face. “I already have a problem with you,” Jolene said flatly.

Earl moved on an oblique angle to her defiance and threw a menacing arm in the cat’s direction. “You should do something about that goddamn cat.” Ambush was now up, back arched at Earl’s loud voice. “If it was up to me, I’d nail that damn cat to a tree.”

* * *

The idea of Earl harming Ambush filled Hank with a normal anxiety that he found comforting compared to the bizarre terror he inhabited. Run, kitty, he thought. Get away from him
.

Which Ambush did. She jumped lightly to the floor and sped from the room.

“I’d watch running my mouth about nailing things to trees,” Jolene said under her breath.

“You know what they say?” Earl grinned. “To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail.”

“I’d watch my mouth if I were you,” Jolene repeated, louder.

“Or what?”

“You said you were going to
talk
to Stovall,” Jolene strained the words through set teeth.

“I did
talk
to him. He wouldn’t talk back.”

“So you got mad.”

“Jolene, whatever I did I did for you. We’re in it together. You told me all about his cutting hangups because he talked about them in AA. How the cops had to come unnail him from the bathroom door in the basement. Same wrist. I used the scar for a guide.”

“You didn’t have to waste the guy, goddammit.”

“Me? He fucking
froze
to death. It wasn’t suppose to get that cold.”

“It was dumb and wrong and unnecessary,” Jolene said. “Milt will be into the trust in a month . . .”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Earl countered. “Hank’s got an ex-wife in Michigan and one in St. Paul. They could tie it up.”

“We’re just lucky no cops have been going around interviewing all Stovall’s clients,” Jolene said.

“Hey”—Earl stabbed with his finger— “if I ever have to do any explaining, I’ll explain the part about you feeding me his cutting habits first. Maybe we don’t make it anymore, honey, but we’re still linked at the hips—just like NoDak.”

North Dakota. As always, Jolene recoiled from the memory of the ice age cold and that cowboy clerk’s scuffed boot soles doing their backward flip. So she changed the subject. She took out a fresh diaper, a baby wipe, and talcum powder. She said, “How could you grow up and never change a diaper?”

Earl made a face. “That isn’t a baby’s butt; that’s a rude old guy’s.”

Efficiently, Jolene peeled away Hank’s gown, removed the diaper and, as she carried it to the diaper caddy, she wrinkled her nose. “Something’s different,” she said, weighing the sodden weight in her hand.

“Yeah, him out there, he’s different,” Earl said, jerking a thumb toward the muffled sound of splitting oak.

“He’s handy,” Jolene said. She dropped the diaper into the can and let the top fall. Then she swabbed Hank with a wipe and dusted him with talc. Then she scooted an arm under the small of his back and levered him up to slide the new diaper under him.

“The Yellow Pages are full of guys who are handy,” Earl said.

“I kind of like this one,” Jolene said, pulling Hank’s gown into place.

Hank watched Jolene smile sweetly, undeterred by Earl’s glower. Something was going on. Maybe some of the things he’d been trying to teach her the last year had taken root
.

“Hey, look,” Earl said, “you’re almost a rich widow. You have this big house and you’re surrounded by these guys who want to get into your pants. Allen for sure, maybe Milt, now this Broker guy . . .”

“Yeah, so, tell me something I don’t already know,” Jolene said.

“How about you need some protection. And guidance.”

“Earl, what I’m trying to tell you is I don’t need your kind of protection.”

“Hey, wait a minute here,
you
called
me
up. You were all freaked out till I showed up,” Earl protested.

Jolene smoothed wrinkles out of Hank’s sheets. “True. I was. But now I’m better. And I don’t need your protection,” she repeated firmly. “That’s why I have a lawyer.”

Her last remark clearly alarmed Earl. “Hey, Jolene, word of advice. You try going from Wal-Mart to Nordstrom too fast, you’re going to get the bends.”

“Oh yeah? How’m I doing?” Jolene asked, sticking out her chin.

Now Earl threw his change-up and became genial. “Jolene, honey,” he said, coming forward, arms wide as if to embrace her, “who’s always been there for you?”

She moved in swiftly and poked a stiff finger into his sternum. “Right. And I appreciate it.” Another poke. “And I’ll make sure you’re taken care of,” she said.

“Taken care of?” Earl slapped her hand away, his expression curdled. “That sounds on the minimal side.”

“Not at all. I kept track and wrote it all down in a notebook, the amounts you spent putting me through treatment and what you gave me the last few weeks. We’ll come up with a figure we agree on. See?” And she let him have another sharp poke.

“Ow.” The annoyance on Earl’s face quick-fused to anger. He reached out and grabbed her hand below the wrist before she could poke him again. His knuckles blanched white and purple as he powerfully wrenched her toward him.

“You’re hurting me,” Jolene said between clenched teeth.

They glared at each other, Jolene up on her tiptoes, yanking her hand to free her trapped wrist.

Earl pointed out the window with his other hand, in the direction of the woodpile. “Cut the shit, Jolene. Now you get rid of him or I will. And if I do, it won’t be pretty.” He released her hand.

Jolene stepped back and triumphantly massaged the bruising already evident on her wrist. “You know what? I think you better watch yourself around this guy.”

An awkward amount of
time passed. Too long for a simple bed check. Broker had finished the wood and now waited, sitting on the chopping block with the maul across his knees. When Jolene left she’d been breezy and confident. When she finally stepped back out onto the deck and approached him she had washed her face and put on lipstick. And her posture and gait were guarded. She held her right arm tucked close, protectively.

“I think you better go,” she said. Her eyes did not quite rise to his. “It’s got a little tense around here.”

“Uh-huh.” Broker got to his feet.

“I don’t know exactly how to put this.” She glanced back at the house. “I’m afraid you could get hurt.”

Broker ignored her last remark and tugged at the cuff of her right sleeve and saw the bracelet of blood bruising on her wrist.

“That’s going to show,” he said.

“I’ll wear long sleeves.”

“I owe your husband a big favor, more than chopping wood can repay,” Broker said slowly.

Jolene shook her head. “Earl’s my problem. And I have to learn how to handle him.”

He could still walk away. But maybe this was his entry into the curious dynamics of this house. So he said it and went over the line. “How about I just teach him some manners.”

After another of their loud silences, he reached in his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and removed a card on which was printed:

Broker Fixes Things
Carpentry, Electric, Plumbing
Landscaping

The card was history—an artifact of his undercover persona. He was following his reflexes but he was working in midair, without a badge, without authorization.

But it felt good.

He took a pen from his jacket pocket, crossed out the old Stillwater address, and wrote down J.T.’s phone number and handed her the card. “I’ll be at that number for the next two days. You think about it.”

Jolene looked at the card, then at him. “You sure?”

Broker nodded. “Like I say, you think it over. Now, I’m going to put this away and leave.” He hefted the splitting maul, which weighed twenty pounds of forged steel. He carried it into the house and searched for the basement stairwell and followed a rising column of loud music and a steam of sweat, dirty laundry, and a faint under-scent of cannabis down the stairs off the kitchen.

Earl had converted the finished part of the basement into a computer crash pad. He had a futon, bench press, and weights in one corner. The rest of the space was a spaghetti junction of cables and lines connecting up two computers, two video monitors, a scanner, a TV and VCR, and a CD player set up on three tables. Piles of disks and software manuals littered the carpet.

Earl sat at his central computer nodding to the beat of ’NSYNC. Broker did not know the name of the group and vaguely understood that it was teeny-bopper music, and he wondered why a grown man was into those sounds.

Earl was selecting blocs of numbers off his screen and saving them to a file. Broker took a discreet step closer and studied the spreadsheet. Names. Addresses. Social security numbers. Sixteen-digit numbers grouped in fours. Then the heading: mother’s maiden name. And names, hundred of them.

Hmmm.

Because of the music, Earl did not hear him approach, so Broker watched for a few moments as Earl scrolled up more columns of names and numbers. And it looked to Broker’s cyber-challenged, but suspicious, eyes that Earl was in possession of a whole lot of other people’s credit cards.

Broker reached down and took an envelope with Earl’s name and a St. Paul address from a pile of bills on the desk and tucked it in his pocket. Then he leaned over and tapped off the CD.

Earl spun around, momentarily startled. Broker smiled and said, “Working hard, huh?”

Earl quickly moused an X in a box and closed the screen. “Code,” he said.

“Code, huh?”

“Yeah, I’m consulting on an encryption project for this firm in Bloomington.”

“Sounds complicated.”

“Some people find programming elegant. Actually I think it’s pretty fucking tiring,” Earl said slowly, carefully watching Broker casually swing the maul in his right hand back and forth like a Stone Age intruder in Earl’s little high-tech pod.

“I wouldn’t know,” Broker said.

“Tiring and stressful,” Earl said. “Gets old pretty fast when you go through two million lines of code to find one comma out of place. I used to work for Holiday, you know, the chain of gas stations. Trouble-shooting their network.”

“Sure, Holiday,” Broker said.

“They own you twenty-four hours a day. Beep you in the middle of the night. You’re not your own person.” He positioned his feet to get up, and leaned forward and found the wedge blade of the maul jammed against his chest. “What the fuck?”

“Hey, that’s one of those new, thin-screen jobs,” Broker said, nodding at the trim-line monitor. “That must have cost a few bucks.”

Earl started to get up again and this time Broker thumped him on the chest with the maul, causing him to drop back in his chair.

“I’m done with the wood, thought you’d like to know.” Broker jabbed the maul harder.

Earl was not intimidated. He grinned and shook his head. “Take a minute to think, old man. When you came down those stairs you were looking at a bloody nose. Now you’re headed for intensive care.”

“Nah,” Broker said, “I think you’re just another of those point-and-click pussies.” Broker heaved the maul, and the cool, liquid glaze of the screen exploded in a puff of glass and sparks in Earl’s face. The maul handle clattered, overturning his keyboard.

“You, you,” sputtered Earl as he knelt and yanked the monitor cords from an outlet box.

“Sorry, must be my Luddite tendencies coming out,” Broker said.

Earl was puffed with fury but his shirt and eyebrows and hair and lap were dusted with sticky pieces of broken glass. His hands, which had balled into fists, now opened to wipe the debris away from his face and eyes.

“Don’t touch her again,” Broker said, then he whipped out his wallet, fingered out the hundreds that Earl had given him up north, and flung them in Earl’s face.

Then he turned, walked up the stairs, out of the house, and got into the Jeep. He waited for a minute, watching the door to see if Earl would come out. It occurred to him that he probably needed a weapon if he was going to play these kinds of games again. But Earl didn’t show. So he scribbled Earl’s license plate on a scrap of paper, shifted into reverse, backed up, put it in first, and drove away.

Broker was smiling, enjoying the memory of the shocked look on Earl’s face when his computer monitor turned to glitter dust. For the second day in a row he had come to Hank Sommer’s house for the last time. He had a feeling he’d be back.

On his way to J.T.’s, Broker detoured through Timberry’s main commercial drag and spent half an hour purchasing some items in a CompUSA.

Earl looked funny with
shards of computer glass dusted in his hair and his eyebrows, so Jolene left him sputtering in the kitchen and went downstairs. She saw the chopping maul lying in the havoc of the computer screen like a collision between Earl’s and Broker’s worlds, and she laughed harder. Coming back up the stairs she continued to laugh. So he yelled at her to clean up the mess and she told him to go fuck himself and he started to come at her.

So she stabbed the straight finger in his chest again and said, “See, dummy, I told you not to mess with this guy.”

Then that mean glower came over Earl’s face that made him look like a blond Klingon on
Star Trek
. And he stomped off, and to make some kind of point he took the keys to Hank’s Ford Expedition and drove off and left her alone.

Which suited her just fine and she had to smile. Broker, swinging his axe.

Feeling a little light-headed, she wandered into the living room and allowed herself one twirl. Whee. Sort of. When Hank had been . . . normal, the house was more like school and he was the teacher she got it on with between classes. Not really hers.

Now she liked being alone in the house; well, alone with the wreckage of Hank. She liked to walk through the rooms, trying them on.

The idea slowly forming.

Her house.

She turned the volume up on the baby monitor in the kitchen so she could hear Hank. Then she paced the living room and touched the old-fashioned couch with its fat arms outlined with fat brass tacks. For months they’d trolled the St. Croix Valley and western Wisconsin, hitting all the antiques shops, finding Mission Oak furniture and Tiffany lamps. Funny man. He’d worked hard to make the whole place look like an old Humphrey Bogart detective movie. She understood what Hank was trying to do, how he had made up this house like a movie set and arranged her among the furniture. He had reached a certain age and made some money, and he had tried to live his life like entertainment. Which was similar to trying to stay high all the time. Trying to make your life into a story that was smoother or more exciting than it really was.

What, in treatment, they called delusion.

The thing about stories, she thought, was that they have beginnings, middles, and tidy conclusions where they wrap up all the loose ends. But what if you’re thinking you’re in the long, happy middle and real life suddenly comes along.

She’d cut hair with a perky born-again named Sally during her hair-stylist phase, and Sally had two neat kids and a dutiful husband, and one day she opened her kitchen cabinet to reach for the cornflakes and found Death sneering her in the face.

Breast Cancer. Snap. Just like that it zipped through the lymph glands and into the lungs, the liver, the pancreas. And Jesus turned out to be on a different page of her story. Maybe he could raise the dead and turn water into wine in the Bible. But through a frigid Minnesota February he sat back and watched Sally wither and die in slow, irradiated nausea.

At the end of Sally’s story they had to pour gas on the frozen dirt to warm it enough for the backhoe to dig her a hole to be buried in.

“Poor Hank,” she said. She wasn’t sure what Hank believed in, but she didn’t think it was anywhere near Jesus.

To get sober you were supposed to admit you were powerless over alcohol and turn it all over to a Higher Power who could restore you to sanity. So far she’d faked her way through the Higher Power part, saying it was just other people. Mainly it had been Hank. Now he was gone and she wasn’t sure about God, big G. God sounded like another man she’d have to deal with at some point down the line.

So, with Hank gone, it was just natural that her Higher Power was going to be the Almighty Dollar. Until something better came along.

But right now her Higher Power was playing hard to get.

She walked through the living room into the alcove den and confronted the stack of bills on the desk. She’d sorted the envelopes into two piles. The first contained all the maintenance expenses that kept the house running, that Earl had paid for the month of October: mortgage, NSP, phone bill, cable TV, garbage and water, and three VISA cards.

The biggies went in the second pile; the hospital bills from Ely and Regions; the helicopter, the neurologist workup; and the consult, the MRI, nerve testing, the stomach feeding tube. They all had three zeros after the commas.

It all came down to the money. Hank knew that. Realistically, would she have married him if he were going to AA twice a week, working on a loading dock, and holding on by his fingernails?

Her dad had been
like that—a good guy who drank a little too much and worked with his hands. Mom changed the locks and got a lawyer and then, when Dad was gone, she went to work as a secretary for the lawyer. Jolene was seven.

When she was ten, Mom married the lawyer and they moved from North Minneapolis to Robbinsdale. Mom had a bigger house with plastic covers on the upstairs living room furniture; she had new friends, she had parties and vacations.

When Jolene was fifteen the lawyer’s eyes would follow her up and down the hall as she got dressed in the morning to go to school. But the lawyer never touched her. Neither did her mom. Jolene always had clean clothes and food and shelter and about a foot of Plexiglas between her and Mom. Jolene broke the suburban plastic pattern and ran away with Earl when she was sixteen.

She stirred the bills with her hand, willfully messing them up. She’d seen this show on the Discovery Channel; these experiments with orphaned chimpanzees where they’d put the apes in cages with mother surrogates which were these constructions and one of them, the wire mother, had food and water but was made of cold steel mesh. The other, the cloth mother, had no food but was heated wood and fabric. The baby chimps would go to the warm mother and hug her and stay there even when they started starving.

And that was the bottom line on drinking right there, it was hugs in a bottle.

Yeah, well, the last Jolene heard, her wire mother was living in Sarasota, Florida, and the lawyer had oxygen tubes in his nose, and fuck her for giving up on Dad.

Jolene fluffed her short-cropped hair, straightened up the bills, found a note she’d written to herself, and said “details.” Then she picked up the phone and called the information desk at the Timberry Public Library.

An hour later, she was in the studio sickroom, turning Hank when the phone rang.

“Jo, it’s Allen.”

“How are you doing, Allen?”

“Well, Earl called me and he said he was a little worried about you. Apparently Broker came back today and they had a run-in.”

“Yesss,” Jolene said slowly.

“Earl did some checking. Have you heard of NCIC?”

“The national crime computer.” She chided herself for knowing the answer a little too quickly.

“Well, before he was a friendly canoe guide he was something else. He’s in the computer. Or someone with the exact same name is who did time in Stillwater Prison in 1989 for assault. There’s some other charges about drug possession and stolen property.”

“And?” Jolene was cautiously curious. A reformed con was a nice concept but was pretty much a liberal myth.

“I just want to make sure you’re all right. Do you want me to drop by?”

Jolene evaluated the courting urgency just below the surface of Allen’s voice and clicked her teeth. Dutiful Allen. Useful Allen. Everybody assumed Hank would die.

What if he didn’t, what if he stayed there for years and years. What were her options, medically?

Allen could tell her when the time came, maybe help her through IT. Briefly she imagined Allen, naked, in bed and she wondered if sex was more natural for him because he was used to putting his hands inside people’s bodies.

“So you think it’s serious?” she asked frankly.

“A police record is nothing to joke about.”

“I could make a pot of coffee if you can get free.”

“I’m in the clinic today, so I could come over for a while in about an hour,” Allen said quickly.

After Allen hung up Jolene turned to Hank and said in a practical voice, “I have to think about the future now. And I don’t want you to suffer any longer than necessary.”

Jolene brewed up another
pot of coffee in Hank’s Chemex, following the procedure Hank had taught her. She ground the beans—Cameron’s Scandinavian Blend, distributed in Hayward, Wisconsin—for exactly seventeen seconds. Then she put one of the round white paper filters in the glass beaker pot that looked like something from her high school chemistry lab, added the coffee, and poured in the boiling water.

She stepped back for a minute to let the grounds bloom.

It was the second pot of coffee for the second male visitor of the day.

Moving right along. Her timing was perfect; the last of the coffee was dripping into the pot as Allen’s Saab roared down the drive.

Okay.

She met him at the door wearing her brave smile but, when they came into the kitchen, he saw the twinkle of glass on the floor. Must have dropped from Earl’s clothes and she’d missed sweeping it up. She told Allen what had happened and, at the end of her story, she leaned forward and rested her forehead briefly on his chest.

Like the hot water and the coffee grounds, Allen bloomed.

Then they sat down at the kitchen table and had their coffee, and she confided in him. She told him how she’d got off to a bad start letting Earl back in her life, and now, Broker was just trying to help out and send Earl packing.

She hoped it didn’t get rough.

She said she was really getting tired of having these kinds of guys in her life. Then she and Allen took their coffee to the study and Allen quickly did an examination of Hank, whose lungs were still clear and whose blood pressure was still normal, and clearly he was going to live forever that way.

And so Jolene just blurted it out, not caring how horrible it sounded, how she was afraid when all this was over, the court case and everything, how Hank could go on and on and she’d be—a few real tears creeping out now—a nun married to breathing cadaver for the rest of her life.

And she let Allen take her briefly in his arms. “Don’t worry,” he murmured, “I can help, if it comes to that.”

“Shhh,” she placed her cool finger to his lips and felt them flutter in a faint kiss. “Not now,” she said. “Someday, but not now.”

She could see Allen conjure intimacy in the tone of her voice and in her moist eyes.

Jolene withdrew her finger from his lips and took a step back. “Details,” she said, brightening, blinking away tears. “And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.”

“What?” Allen asked.

“The poem you mentioned, remember? It’s anonymous. A doggerel, not really a poem, it’s part of the
Real Mother Goose Rhymes
. I looked it up.”

Allen was impressed.

As he drove away,
he placed his right hand across his heart, like a civilian saluting the flag; except he was touching the place where Jolene had rested her head against his chest.

She had definitely reached out to him on a very delicate matter. And it wasn’t as simple as a Do-Not-Resuscitate or a Do-Not-Intubate order. Hank’s heart and lungs showed no signs of failing.

And he wasn’t hooked to a ventilator, so it wasn’t a case where the care provider could elect to end medical support and flip a switch.

Jolene could try to get a court order to withhold nutrition but that looked mercenary, and there would be a gruesome time element.

But if she did get a DNR-DNI order as a precaution against a future incident, and if he discreetly induced a respiratory arrest—that would work.

Yes, it would.

Earl came in around
supper time smiling sweetly and carrying a deluxe Domino’s pizza and an armful of flowers, which he proceeded to place in makeshift vases around the kitchen. She gauged the depth of his insecurity by his needy cow eyes; he was actually watching her for signs that she might be willing to fool around with him.

“What do you have now, friends in the cops? How’d you get on the national computer?” she asked, ignoring his eyes tracking her movements around the kitchen.

“Allen must have called,” Earl said in a distracted voice, arranging flowers, sniffing them like Ferdinand the fucking bull.

“How’d you come up with a police record on Broker?” Jolene asked as she turned on the oven.

“Easy. Those ads on TV for the online background checks: ‘See if anyone you know has a criminal record,’ ” Earl mimicked a hyped broadcast voice. “Well, they’re jacked into NCIC, so, since Broker came on a little stronger than your run-of-the-mill canoe guy, I typed in his name.” Earl folded his arms and looked very concerned. “I think you have to be real cautious around this dude.”

“He
likes
me.” She held up her bruised wrist. “It’s assholes who molest women that he’s down on.” She put the pizza in the oven.

“Ah, I’m thinking, if he gets rough again, I may need to bring in a war elephant.”

“Who?”

“I was thinking Rodney.”

Aw, God, a name that brought back the dumb old days. While she drove, Earl and Rodney would act out their comic-book fantasies with the guns, and they picked off three desolate 7-Eleven’s in the outer-ring burbs before she and Earl went off on their own and had the bad experience in North Dakota that ended their stickup-artist phase. Jolene shook her head. “Earl, Rodney’s in jail. Remember his bright idea about stealing machine guns from the National Guard?”

“He copped a plea and gave up a bunch of redneck militia types in Alabama, so he’s on probation.”

She shook her head, then narrowed her eyes, calculating. “Rodney’s got bad genes, he’s a second-generation crook, and, for my money, I see him as way too slow to handle Broker.”

“What? Are we taking bets?”

“I’m just saying, Earl, that Rodney is a muscle-bound klutz, and I see Broker as quicker and smarter. And another thing, I don’t want him anywhere near this house. I don’t want Rodney to know where I live.”

“C’mon Jolene. He’s a friend.”