The Axman Cometh (10 page)

"That's good, Perry," Shannon says, opening the door of the hardware store to the accompaniment of a little brass bell announcer. "See you." As the door shuts behind her she leans against it. "Whew!" Maybe he'll get over his crush on her, or just move on when his father's leg heals. But now he knows two places to find her, with school out. Should she give him a big thrill and—no; one of her hard-and-fast rules is not to date boys who drive pickup trucks. The other is more vague but implicit, having to do with status in her peer group and boys with serious complexion problems. She's in love anyway. Last night Robert called, from Pittsburg, Kansas, his last stop on his sales trip before heading home to Chicago. Mentioned something about her coming up for a visit to his family's summer place in northern Wisconsin. Shannon can just imagine what her folks would have to say about that. Hopeless. But in another sixteen months—fifteen-and-a-half months—she will be eighteen, and there are scholarships available from the Chicago Art Institute. In the meantime, she loves being in love.

Dab is angry about something, on the telephone in the office behind the store, or with a customer. Which startles Shannon, who almost never hears him raise his voice.

"I personally don't guarantee the merchandise, because the merchandise comes with a perfectly good guarantee from the manufacturer. I'm saying if you've got a complaint about the quality of that saw, and I must've sold a hundred of '
em
in the last six years without hearing another single complaint, then you need to ship it back to the factory. The condition it's in, Leon, looks like it was run over by a road grader or dropped off a roof, and the guarantee specifically excludes that kind of careless wear and tear. You been around tools your whole life, and you know what I'm telling you is true."

"I'm saying this chainsaw's a no-account piece of shit, and I want my money back from the one I give it to in the first place, and that's you!"

Shannon lays her school notebook down beside the cash register and drifts toward the back of the store, which is narrow and deep and only about fifteen feet wide, crammed with floor-to-ceiling bins and shelves, smelling
mustily
of nails, varnish, raw rope, cold steel. There are no other customers at the moment. She can see Dab with the dissatisfied chainsaw owner, a chronic sorehead and town troublemaker named Leon
Burtis
, behind the pebbled-glass partition.

"Dab? It's me!" Shannon calls to her father, thinking her presence may cool the dispute, because she's afraid of Leon
Burtis
and some other
Burtises
, younger, who are marking time at the high school until they are old enough to be excused from formal education. Both heads turn momentarily, but they

can't see out and she can't see in.

Dab says, "With you in a minute, honey." The
watercooler
belches a big floppy bubble inside the five-gallon bottle and Shannon heads toward it for a drink.

Leon
Burtis
says, "I don't have no more time to waste on this matter. Do I get my money back or not?"

"Not from me," Dab says firmly.

"Well, you are a
cocksucking
son of a bitch, and God damned if I'll ever do another dime's worth of business in your fucking store."

"You won't use that kind of language in here as of right now, because that's my daughter outside!"

Shannon steps back from the water- cooler near the office door, tilting her head a little to see inside. Leon
Burtis
has long sun-reddened forearms and his
knuckly
hands have formed fists. Dab, not small by any means but a couple of inches shorter, just stares him down. Leon's nostrils are flared as big as his ears. His eyes have no definition, they are just an electric blue glow of rage, and sweat beads stand out among the few reddish hairs still sprouting from the crown of his head. Shannon can't swallow; rage and violence in others always chokes her up, freezes her in place. Leon looks at her looking in on him. His taut mouth flinches as if he is going to spit out more choice profanity. Dab won't look away or back off an inch but there is no truce between them, the air they breathe is laced with black powder close to the flash point. Shannon hears the little bell over the front door, but she doesn't look around to see who it is.

Shannon says, "Could I get you a cup of water, Mr.
Burtis
? You look awfully hot."

Now she has his full attention; before he can say yes or no or refocus on Dab, Shannon quickly pulls a pleated cup from the dispenser and fills it, enters the office as Dab, lowering his hands, takes a step back to make room for her. Once she is more or less in between the two men, the tension of their confrontation lessens and Leon, with a faint show of politeness but no apology, dampens his ire with the cup of Mountain Valley spring water. Then he crushes it in his fist.

Shannon smiles and moves back toward her father, leaving the doorway open.

"We were all sorry to hear about Leona," Shannon says.

He clears his throat and there is something besides rancor simmering in his eyes, not grief but defeat: despite all the anger he can muster, the world will have its way with him. His daughter, a pretty fair barrel-racer, hung around with some of the bigger names in
bronc
and bull-riding until she was accidentally kicked in the head by a mustang; recently she passed on after two years in a coma. Leon stares at the unworkable chainsaw he has dumped on Dab's desk, is reminded, perhaps, of Leona, clears his throat more loudly and contemptuously, brushes past Shannon and goes quickly down the single aisle of the store, veering past the customer who entered a little while ago.

Dab whistles in a low tone through his

teeth.

"Arguing with Leon is like trying to nail Jell-0 to the wall."

"I thought he was going to hit you," Shannon says, still worried, a tingling in her hands and around her heart.

Dab cradles his right fist affectionately in his left. "Well, if he had," he says. Dab fought in the navy, and was
runnerup
in his division, the Fifth Fleet championships in '43. Overweight now, he knows he could still give a good account of himself. But the trouble with fighting a
Burtis
is that it's like issuing a challenge to the whole clan: they just keep coming around looking for satisfaction.

"Do you want a drink of water?" Shannon asks him.

"I'll get some myself," Dab says, laying a hand on her shoulder for a moment. "See if you can help that man that came in."

"Sure."

Like half of the adult males in town, their customer on this Monday afternoon is wearing a plain Western-style shirt and jeans, a pair of boots with bulldogger's heels and a rancher's straw Stetson. His hair is coarse and worn in a style known locally as military Mohawk. But, although he has the cheekbones, he's too pale to be tribal. His sleeves are rolled up. He has powerful forearms without a trace of hair on them. His hands are long, but not those of a workingman. They're well cared-for, the nails clean and neatly clipped.

"I wonder if you dropped this?" he says with a smile, extending one of the invitations to Dab's surprise birthday party.

"Oh, it must have fallen out of my notebook; thanks," Shannon says, retrieving the invitation. She lowers her voice. "I wouldn't want Dab to see
this.
Trying to keep it a secret, and so far it's working."

He leans against the counter near the cash register. "Oh, a surprise birthday party." He glances at the back of the store, remembering to keep his voice as low as Shannon's. "Mr. Hill? That's your father?"

“'Uh-huh. Dab's going to be fifty."

"That's an important milestone, all right. I'm Autry Smith. Nice to meet you—"

"Shannon." His voice is deep, cultivated. Like a radio announcer's. No
placeable
accent. Not a Kansan, as far as she can tell, nor a Westerner, although he seems at home in the rig he's wearing. She shakes his hand, looking into his eyes, which are a dark chocolate color. His face is widest at eye level, his brows heavy but plucked, only a millimeter of space between them over his high-bridged nose. He has an easygoing smile and not a tooth out of line. He must be about thirty, Shannon thinks. Unlike the recently departed Leon
Burtis
, a man furiously at odds with himself and everyone else, Autry Smith has an unmistakable air of competence, even command. So that could be it: he's one of the jet jockeys from the nearby air base, enjoying an afternoon out of uniform. She glances at the class ring on his finger.

"That's not KU, is it?"

"No, West Point."

"
Ohhh
."

"I'm stationed at Fort Riley," he says, obligingly holding up his hand so that Shannon can get a better look at his ring.

"What brings you down this way?"

"I had some time off, so I'm visiting an old friend of my father's, Colonel Bark Bonner. He's retired now, has a place ten miles south of here. The colonel's got a bad hip and hasn't been keeping his place up, so I thought I'd do a few repairs." Autry Smith takes a list from his breast pocket, which Shannon scans.

"Just take me a couple of minutes to get all of this together. Would you like some cold water,
uh—sir—I
don't know what your rank is."

"Captain, but why don't you call me Autry?"

"That's like Gene, right?"

He hums the first few bars of "Back in the Saddle Again," and they both laugh.

"Same spelling, even if I can't carry a tune. Autry's an old family name. We could be distantly related. But I'm from Rhode Island, not Tioga, Texas."

"No kidding," Shannon says, bustling around, picking up flashlight batteries, tape, twine, safety goggles, a hard hat, a hammer, a chisel, and four different kinds of nails, including a quarter-pound of four-inch-long cement nails which she pours into the scoop of an old-fashioned scale on the counter. "You're the first person I've met who's from Rhode Island."

"There aren't all that many of us."

"The ax handles are over there in that barrel. You should pick out a couple you like the feel of."

"Thanks."

"What do you think of Fort Riley?"

"I like it a lot better than where I was last year. Ankara, Turkey."

"You certainly do get around. I guess your family's used to all that traveling."

"I'm not married," Autry Smith says, pulling a hickory ax handle from the barrel and running his fingers along the smoothed grain. "My father was a major general, so I was an army brat. I've seen what the life does to women. I won't get married until I can settle down, earn a living at what I really like to do."

"What would that be?"

"I'm a composer."

"Really? What kind of music?"

"Serious music."

"What instruments do you play?"

"Piano, flute, cello."

"Where'd you find time to learn all that?"

"I never had to work very hard. When I wanted to learn an instrument, I just—picked it up. It's as natural as breathing to me. So is composing."

"That's how I learned to draw. Just did it. I've never had lessons."

"Oh, you're an artist."

"Well, I like to think I am."

Autry Smith chooses a second ax handle, glances toward the office in back where Dab can be seen indistinctly, swimmingly, behind the pebbled glass, as if it is one side of an aquarium. He returns to where Shannon is checking off items on his list and puts the handles down on the counter.

"We seem to have a lot in common."

"I'd like to hear some of your music."

"So would I. I've never heard any of it the way it should be played; that would require a full symphony orchestra. The London Philharmonic would be ideal." He shrugs, smiling. "I like the Cleveland Symphony too, since Szell took over. But so far, no one's shown much interest in what I send them."

"It'll happen."

"I know it will. I just have to be patient, and confident of my talent. Get through the dry spells. Well, that does it for me, Shannon, did you find everything on the list?"

"I'm sorry we don't have the three- hundred-pound test fishing line. Not much call for it around here. A five-pound bass down at the reservoir is big news."

"That's okay."

"Let's see—including the ax handles, comes to thirty-six eighteen, with tax."