Black Angus (6 page)

“How come you're so cool toward Little?” he asked. “He's just a poor little ex-con.”

“My heart bleeds.”

“Oh I know how he comes on, I mean that horrible pretty-boy face of his, like you took Ronda and chained her to a tree and whipped her for a year and fed her bushels of testosterone, then dressed her up in drag.”

Blanchard could not help laughing. “Is he
that
bad?”

“That's my point. He ain't. He's just kind of creepy is all. And he's not himself with you.”

Finished, Blanchard lit a cigarette. “Well, that sure is tough.”

“For him it just might be. Ronda's probably got you all built up for him, like some kind of big shot, you know? Ad exec turned shitkicker—”

“Oh come on, knock it off. You think I don't know what you two were waltzing around about out there—him with his big quiz about my ranch, and you carrying on about some grand enterprise? You told me what he did time for, remember? So spare me the stroking.”

Shea came out of the stool stall looking wide-eyed and innocent, like an enormous Spanky. “Just what are you accusing me of now? What nefarious suspicions are festering—”

“Fuck off.”

“But you accuse me.”

“Yeah, and you know you got it coming. Your poor litile con out there, he probably thinks you're serious. And why not? That's what he is, a thief and a criminal. It's what he
does
. So how do you explain it to him finally, that you're just playing games? Like that arm-wrestling bit out there. For everyone else it's life and death, and you sit there winking at me.”

Shea still looked dumbfounded. “What can I say, except I don't have the foggiest what you're talking about?”

“Fine. Let's keep it that way.”

“How could I do otherwise?”

“Shea the Innocent.”

“That's me.”

“Then tell me, how come you're suddenly so tight with an ex-con—who might even be a murderer, did you know that?”

“No.”

“It's possible. It's rumored anyway.”

“Even more reason, then.”

“What?”

“To have a few beers with the man. See what makes him tick.”

“Ah yes, the great search. The grand quest. I keep forgetting.”

Shaking his head sadly, Shea came over and placed his hands on Blanchard's shoulders, dropped them actually, like a pair of shovels. And Blanchard felt some small part of that iron grip which had taken down the other men earlier. At the same time he noticed the heaviness in his friend's eyes, the mists of alcohol he was trying to peer through.

“Bobby, you know you're my buddy, don't you? One of the few old Darling hands worth a shit. Which of course is why I'm here, right—abusing your hospitality and getting in Susan's hair. But buddies or not, old fellow, I must say this, in all candor—you are dumb, Roberto. You are one dumb cluck.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Yes, it is. I'm afraid you have much to learn.”

“About life, right?”

“And death too, kiddo. Don't forget the second act.”

“You care to explain that?”

“There you go again.”

“Did I?”

“Right.
Explain
, you say. Because you think life yields to explanation—to reason and to courage—and, God forgive me this gaucherie, to righteousness. But it don't, old buddy. It simply don't. We are on a darkling plain here—and by that I don't mean just the Ozarks, though it is surely darklinger than most—but getting back, a darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night. Matthew Arnold.”

“The Ivy League lifts its hoary head.”

“Now don't sneak off like that. Face it squarely.”

“My dumbness.”

“There you have it. Face it. Deal with it. Overcome it.”

“I'll try.”

“That's the spirit.”

Shea clapped him on the arm and headed out of the restroom, almost taking the doorjamb with him on the way.

Back in the booth, the two of them discovered that they were in the company of a celebrity. First there was a trio of young punks who entered the bar and, seeing Little, promptly came over to say hello. They were what Clarence called goat-ropers, ranchers' sons who had to work in town to support their heavy four-wheel-drive habits, souped-up pickups with special metallic paint jobs and mag wheels and tape decks and CB radios and velvet tasseled curtains in the rear windows. The three actually seemed nervous and giddy talking with Little, as if he were a sports hero or country-rock star home
for a holiday. After they drifted away, two other men, on their way out, stopped by the table to pay their respects, tell Little how great it was to have him back and that they shore hoped he'd be around fer a while this time and not let the goddamn Jew-nigger government railroad him into the pen again. Little did not seem to know what they were talking about, but he went along anyway, nodding and laughing and even slapping hands in the end, evidently in unspoken agreement that if the niggers could steal their country they could at least appropriate a nigger ritual in return.

Blanchard meanwhile settled down with his vodka to kill the remaining half hour till Ronda got off. He never really felt at ease drinking at the Sweet Creek, not only because he was an outsider there and knew he always would be, but also out of simple old middle-class gut fear. For the clientele was not just redneck but the meanest cut of it, thieves and deadbeats and boozers and brawlers, most of whom carried small arsenals in their pickups: pistols and sawed-off shotguns and automatic rifles, and not just for looks either. In the four years Blanchard had lived in the area there had been a half-dozen shootings at the tavern, most of them in the parking lot, indoor fights that Reagan had driven outside with his baseball bat, a Louisville Slugger he kept under his cash drawer, next to a loaded forty-four magnum pistol. Two of the shootings had ended in deaths, one of a drunken local trapper who, after casually beating up on two young goatropers, had unwisely chosen to sleep it off in his pickup right there in the parking lot, a sleep interrupted—no, prolonged, forever—by a twenty-two caliber slug fired point-blank into his head. The second death was of a black man from Kansas City. Refused service, he had gone off his rocker, according to Ronda, cursing her and Reagan and everyone else in the place. He had been thrown out of course, that was all Ronda knew, all she had seen. But two days later the man's shotgunned body had been found in the creek,
about a mile from the inn. Afterward there were the usual inquests—and that was all. No one was charged with murder, no one was arrested, no one was suspected. The county sheriff and state's attorney had what Susan termed a laissez-faire approach to certain crimes. Murder and mayhem did not upset them half so much as pornography. In Rock County you might shoot a man and get away with it, but you could not buy a copy of
Playboy
.

So Blanchard did not just relax and drink up when he was at the Sweet Creek. He kept one eye peeled for trouble and if he saw it coming he moved to avoid it. But this evening everything seemed peaceful enough. A week night, there were only about a dozen men in the place besides Little, Shea, and himself. Most of them he recognized as livestock dealers and truckers, a few ranchers, a few others. Almost all of them wore cowboy boots and denim outfits, jeans and brass-buttoned jackets worn pale and shapeless by time, almost as rough-looking as those sported by art directors in Saint Louis. Only here the cowboy look came with much shorter hair and big knobby hands and also that special Ozark cigarette-smoke squint, that air of torpid menace Blanchard never would get used to.

Nevertheless they were men who fitted perfectly into the Sweet Creek, with its ascetic lack of decoration, its plain wood floor and cheap assortment of furniture—wooden booths and plastic tables and chairs that did not match, like the stools facing the Reagan-built bar and the crude plank shelves of beer bottles and mugs lined up behind it. In fact the only typical barroom artifact in the place was the jukebox, a funereally lit Wurlitzer from which boomed the sound of country singers picking and wailing their sad ballads of broken hearts and lonely roads.

It was a sound that Shea did not appreciate, and he fished some change out of his pocket now and pushed out of the
booth, saying that there had to be something else on that “cruddy machine,” something besides country and western. Blanchard wished him luck, but Little could offer only puzzlement

“Hey, what's wrong with what's playin'? Why, that's Johnny Cash, for Christ sakes.”

Blanchard shrugged. “What does Shea know? He's never done time.”

If Little had any reaction to that, Blanchard missed it, for his attention had been drawn to the table where Shea had arm-wrestled the locals. There were four men crowded around it, including the Rockton mechanic and the man who had bitched at Shea. Now the center of attention, this man had just returned from outside, from his pickup probably, carrying a small and very nervous beagle dog, which he placed in the middle of the table, facing an empty plastic popcorn bowl that one of the other men was filling with beer. Despite the racket in the place, Blanchard could catch a little of their conversation, or more accurately, their shouting.

“He gotta drink it all,” the mechanic insisted. “And I mean
drink
it, not just git his snout wet.”

“He drink it, all right,” the dog's owner said. “My hard-earned money says he drink it all. That good enough for ya?”

The mechanic nodded. “Okay then, two bucks. Two bucks says he don't.”

“He shore as hell will.”

For ten or twelve long seconds the dog's owner waited, glaring down at the tiny animal as it stood trembling on the table, its tail between its legs. When it was obvious that the dog was not going to touch the beer, the owner angrily grabbed the animal by its nape and drove its head down into the bowl and held it there while its legs skittered helplessly on the beer-wet tabletop. The other men jumped back from the splashing.

“'At don't count, Jiggs!” the mechanic laughed. “You lose. You and that beer-guzzlin' hound of yers, you lose.”

Furious, Jiggs continued to hold the dog's snout down in the bowl while the other men laughed and hooted. Beyond them Blanchard saw Shea at the jukebox, giving up on it and turning away, coming back past the dog's table now, still unaware of what was going on there. Then, as he saw, he hesitated for a moment, looking more puzzled than anything else. And Blanchard could see the thing coming as the look of puzzlement gave way to one of disgust. Abruptly Shea reached out and took hold of Jiggs's skinny neck and brutally drove his face down into the bowl in place of that of the dog, which scampered off the table, yelping and sliding, heading for the door. Jiggs tried to free himself, pushing wildly sideways along the table until the bowl toppled to the floor, but Shea effortlessly stayed with him, somehow continuing to hold his face down in the bowl with one hand while he snatched a beer pitcher off a nearby table with the other and refilled the bowl, sloshing the beer against the man's face. And none of Jiggs's friends made a move to help him, not one good old boy in the place, and Blanchard could see why, feeling intimidated himself by Shea's great size and strength suddenly magnified by rage. Then he saw the burly Reagan coming out from behind the bar with his baseball bat.

“Behind you, Shea!” Blanchard called, getting up.

And Shea heard. Standing, he placed his foot on the dog owner's rump and sent him sprawling across the floor. Then he turned to face Reagan, seemingly indifferent to the bat, not even lifting a chair to defend himself. And the meaning of this indifference must have gotten through to Reagan, that you could hurt a bear with a baseball bat, you could get in your lick and maybe even break a bone or two—but then what? Nevertheless habit almost carried him through. He had raised
the bat and even started his swing, gone that far before his arm turned to jelly.

Shea took the bat as if it were an offering. Then he walked over to the middle one of three pillars running the length of the room, rough six-by-six timbers that reached from the floor to the ceiling. Blanchard imagined that it was Shea's intention merely to break the bat, that he did not like the idea of Reagan having it there to discipline innocent inebriates like himself. But as he drew back and then followed through his swing, it was the pillar that broke, splitting in two along an old crack, and as it fell, the ceiling dropped a few inches at that point, spilling dust and straw and old feathers all across the floor.

“
Get him out of here!
” Reagan cried. “
Out of here!
”

But Shea was not ready to go. First he had to come back to the table and finish his glass of beer. Only then did he leave, hefting the bat to his shoulder as he walked out.

Reagan immediately came charging over to Blanchard to save what face he could.

“He's your friend, ain't he!”

Blanchard said that he was.

“Yeah, well you tell that horse two things—one, he's got damages to pay, and two, he better not show his ass around here or he'll get it shot off. You got that?”

Blanchard did not answer. He too was bigger than the Irishman. Little, getting up, tried to cool things off.

“I know the big guy, Pat,” he said to Reagan. “I'll talk to him, make sure he knows he can't mess with you. He just lost his head, that's all. He's had a lot to drink.”

“Yeah, well you tell him then, Little. You make sure the bastard understands—I want damages and he keeps the hell out of here.”

“Right.”

As Reagan angrily bulled his way back to the bar, Blanchard
picked up his pint of vodka and went to the door, where Ronda stood waiting for him, ready to leave. With Little trailing behind, they went outside and into the parking lot just in time to see Shea give the baseball bat a mighty toss out into the creek, which was running fast and bright in the moonlight.