Chapter 28
The bucktoothed Beeper fastened onto Bug’s dashboard resembled some last-second compromise between career barfly and shaved squirrel. Draped across the ceramic figurine’s practically skin-bursting bone work some slinky spaghetti-strapped dress in gross approximation to the number Marilyn Monroe made famous, the thigh displayer, whirling up over the air vent, only any sexiness on display here the kind appreciated by the genus of perv seeking release from improbable niche porn titles like The Girls of Auschwitz. The Beeper easily midpoint in the skin flaying process, some invisible sandpapery tongue wearing the dermis down in pursuit of a promised chewy candy core. Sipe wondered how Hope liked it, her latest would-be savior zipping around all points Little Creek, one of her parents’ devised despicable dolls so prominently displayed.
The intersection checkpoint wasn’t much of a hiccup. Some regular town folk had been drafted, wore Deputy badges, checking on vehicles before they were waved through. East and west travelers were few. It was those north- and southbound folk having to sit through a surprise wait.
The old boy peering in through the driver side window had known Bug by name. No problem there. The old boy performed a lengthy squint over Sipe. The sunglasses were left behind, back at the Collar place, in the Honda jockey box. Anyone in town that had seen the driver attacked by Millie would remember the sunglasses.
Bug noted the staring match between men. He cleared his throat.
“That’s just Carver. Buddy of mine back in Kuwait,” coming out flat and disinterested as if Bug were motoring towards town escorting a bag of groceries, not a guy sporting the mother of all head bruises.
Sipe just a lump, his head elsewhere, thinking about the too many moving parts in all of this. Once one stilled, another clicking clacking hissing steaming issue birthed. Connie ok, Connie doing recon, Connie securing Sipe’s gun and wallet from Tiff and Norm’s. And then, justlikethat, Gwen’s call to Tiff. Panic. The black car. The bad man Sipe had told everyone about.
Sipe considered the possibility it might all be a dream, the snarl of incidents. Sipe actually still on his back on the brown grass, bees and flies and mosquitoes alight around the railcars the only players in orbit around him.
The traffic snarl still in sight in the rearview mirror, roof lights flickering on the cop car parked at a tilt, practically sliding into the ditch. The road ahead of them curved, that bisected hill directly in front of them. Two kids on bikes shot out around the curve. Laughing. Having fun. Off to watch the oddity. The roadblock.
Sipe waiting for his scalp to stop tingling, Bug said, “I can shoot. If you need me to.”
“You want to?”
“No.”
“Then don’t offer.”
“Well. The situation calls for sacrifice. Last time I aimed a rifle at anyone…Never here. Never stateside,” said Bug. “But I could drop you off. Then easy enough head to Mountain Road, get to high ground, work my way down and have Henry’s house covered. Five minutes, tops.”
Sipe thought it over. He thought fast.
“Doesn’t have to be shooting,” said Bug. “Sometimes just the potential of it is enough to keep everything from going all higgedly-piggedly.”
They were through the hill. Little Creek spread out right ahead. The sign at Don’s Automotive glowing, the highest point in town.
“If you want, now’s the time to give the word.”
“Drop me off. Up there. The road. On the highway. Then do your thing.”
“You got it.”
Sipe popped his seat belt buckle.
“What kind of signal you want?”
“Put both hands in the air,” said Bug.
“All right.”
Driving past the ‘Entering Little Creek’ sign, Bug took his foot off the gas. They slowed down even more.
“You don’t move a lot, I noticed,” said Bug. “Something that demonstrative, hands I mean, I’ll know it’s hit the point between you and this other fella nothing reasonable is going to be accomplished. Yep. When words die, bullets fly.”
Gravel crunched under Sipe. Somewhere nearby a dog barked. A day ago he’d been driving. Connie talking him into taking a little side trip off the way home.
There were lights on inside the Forest Service, a modicum of illumination, security, to keep the tempted from breaking in. The living room light in Henry’s house on. The basement window gave on a lit up room. The air smelled like dust and this clean scent wafted in off the fields. Wheat. Barley. He bet if he closed his eyes he might move back through time, and if he wasn’t careful, find himself back inside his little boy body, surrounded by so many things he’d known, common, familiar things. Greta and Roxanne, Mom and Dad, the million or so cats that used their place as a way station, the swing set, the old plywood hunk with a bull’s eye painted on it, the target for Sipe the future all-star ace to throw at until his arm ached or he tired of running to gather up the whole three baseballs he owned.
The black sedan blocked in Gwen’s car. Lexus. Like the Old Man owned stock in the company. Sipe didn’t see any signs of life. The bedroom windows beyond Gwen’s car were dark unlike the rest of the house. He wondered if the Wub would shoot him even if there might be an audience. But it wasn’t the Wub. Unless Gwen was hallucinating.
“Hey. Sipe. Goddamn.”
The chill encapsulated all his flesh. Caught with his pants down.
Sipe looked over his shoulder, towards the voice, the corner of the house. The man come into view had scampered up that intense, steep mound at the southeast corner. Meaning he might’ve been watching the highway the whole time, maybe from the safety of the picnic table at the lawn edge. Sipe hadn’t seen him. Neither had Bug.
Zeke crossed the lawn, his age, those bones, giving him a kind of rolling motion. His suit jacket off, hung over his forearm. Shadows, sweaty half-moons, soaked into his armpits. His hat was on, a short brimmed model like a ‘50s-era businessman would wear.
“Where’s the Wub?”
Zeke laughed. “That’s our Sipe. All business. You have the great misfortune to deal with me and me alone. Our buddy, our mutual friend is probably still barfing his lungs out.”
Zeke came to a halt right on the edge of the lawn. He made a ‘woo’ noise like he’d been working his way up hill quite some time now. He took the hat off and swiped it through the air, fanning himself. Zeke smiling under the thin mustache clung to his upper lip. His mouth was long and the lips were thin. One of those mouths easily graduated to a maw, wide enough it could accept an entire pie, tin included. He put his hat back on his sweaty scalp.
Sipe pointed at Henry’s house. “They ok?”
“I don’t know any they. There was a woman in that car when I drove up, but she scampered on into the house. I haven’t seen anyone since then. I tried calling you, you know?” Zeke flicked his knuckles against Sipe. Zeke a toucher. He did it to everyone with the exception of the Old Man.
Sipe recited the number he’d seen on caller I.D. out at Bug’s.
“That’s the one. I tried all the numbers I had on file. Wasn’t sure which burner you might have on you. My goddamn battery is so low though it didn’t do a thing for me. There’s something screwy with the charger I got. I’m trying to charge it up, but it might be a fat lot of good it’s doing. I decided ‘fuck the thing’, left it in my motel room.”
“I thought the Wub was coming.”
“He was. He started to come out, well, I called him, and he was already out near the airport. It was very serendipitous up to the point it wasn’t. There’s some Men’s Warehouse down in SeaTac, and the Wub was helping his nephew find a tuxedo for a wedding. The kid’s slated to be the best man at a wedding, and I guess they met down there, ate lunch right before the tux shopping. Whatever the Wub ate didn’t agree with him. I called him about you, you and Connie, and even then, the Wub was having to talk
, barf, talk, barf. In no shape to go anywhere except maybe the bathroom. So me, all I’ve got on the docket is maybe going to a Mariners game. No one else available. No one I trust, not with Connie involved. So I bust a hump, fly to Walla Walla, and here we are. Doesn’t matter. I didn’t miss anything I would want to see. Caught it on the radio. M’s got lit up by Milwaukee.”
“Connie’s fine.”
“What’s that?”
“Connie’s fine.”
Zeke waved his hand like ‘c’mon, Sipe, everyone knew that’.
“I mean, things are messy. Connie…His lady went berserk. I mean, you know that.”
“Me? The whole world knows that. She beat up a cop. You don’t do that. I mean, you can, but if you do, you do it quietly.”
“How pissed is he?” Not having to say who. Connie knew the ‘he’ in question.
“I haven’t talked to the Old Man. Sipe, come on, he doesn’t know who I am. If I worked for him another 10 years he still wouldn’t know me. He wouldn’t know me if I took a bullet for him. Closest to him I’ve gotten is Susan.”
“What does she say?”
“What do you think she says? She says, ‘Do your job Zeke’.”
“And you’re the closer?”
“Am I the closer?” Zeke made a pistol with his hand, the index finger the barrel. He squinted and produced an explodey noise.
“Consider yourself closed, Sipe. Permanently.”
Zeke opened that pie-eating hole and laughed.
Before trying to get inside Henry’s house, Sipe called Connie. Connie on the line, Sipe handed the burner phone to Zeke and let them arrange a meeting. Sipe handed Zeke Millie’s stun gun. Zeke gave it a look like a caveman handed a hair dryer.
“Give it to Connie. Tell him to put it somewhere handy. The magazine rack,” meaning this totem pole Connie reported acted as a magazine rack and hat stand on the way to the restrooms inside The Outpost. Zeke invited to join in on the night’s meet up with the Butcher’s Camp Massage crew, but Zeke brushed Sipe off, told him he knew an old hand like Sipe didn’t need Zeke watching his every move. Zeke did ask about The Outpost’s breakfast. Zeke loved a good breakfast, practically forcing Sipe to agree to a date in the morning before they left Little Creek for good.
Once Zeke backed out of the driveway and headed down the gravel road and turned left onto Main Street, Sipe called Bug. No answer. He left a message. He figured Bug already humping it back towards his truck after playing almost sniper. Then he called Tiff, got Gwen’s number and called that. When she unlocked and opened the front door of Henry’s house she gave him perplexed.
“You could’ve just knocked.”
“Didn’t want to scare you.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Ok. Can I come in?”
She looked through the screen door past him like she didn’t trust him. Zeke or whoever it might be posing the threat could materialize out of thin air and rush around the front of the garage and push in behind Sipe and then into the house.
“Yeah.” She pushed the door open. “You can come in.” Gwen still sounding about as friendly as Roxanne or Greta back in the day when little Sipe was tasked knocking on a closed bedroom door to try and usher them towards the dinner table or with a much steeper degree of difficulty, out of the kingdom of dreams. One time Roxanne feigned sleep so well she seemed dead and lured him in and grabbed him, dragged Sipe in under the covers where an almost completely naked lipless god waited to num and yum a little boy.
Henry sat on the lip of the couch. He didn’t appear afraid of Sipe, but Sipe knew he needed to maintain a certain low level of movement and promise of movement otherwise the kid might go on high alert, anticipating some replay of the earlier living room struggle.
“So you know, it’s ok,” said Sipe. “That was a different guy out there than the one I thought was coming.”
“Not the Wub?” asked Henry.
“No. Not the Wub.”
“It’s a nickname,” Henry said for Gwen’s benefit. “Like rub, but instead he can only say wub. He has a speech impediment.”
Gwen nodded.
“Is there anyone else I need to worry about?” she asked. “Speech impediment or otherwise?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Zeke,” said Sipe. “No. He’s more reasonable. All he cares about is Connie being ok. And Connie’s ok. So it’s ok.”
Henry stood up.
“So wait, so I don’t have to stay with Gwen?”
Sipe shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“No,” said Gwen. “No. We need to hold on here. You still need someone with you, Henry. At least right now.”
“But Sipe said it’s ok.”
“There’s a madwoman running around here. We’ve got cops all over.”
“She doesn’t want me.”
“No. But.”
“Look. She’s out in the woods. She’s not coming back to town. I mean, fuck, I can see the cop car from here.”
“Language.”
“Whatever. Look.” Pointing out the window towards the woods, the south end of Little Creek. “You can see the cop’s roof lights spinning. At least, you know, the reflection and all. If she tries to come back to town they’re going to shoot her.”
“Henry. That’s only part of it. Could you tell me, could you promise me that you wouldn’t try and help Tiffany anymore tonight? Or Hope?” Gwen looked at Sipe. “You’re still having your powwow?”
“Yeah.”
“I know you, Henry. You’d try and help Hope or Tiff or try and help Hope because Tiffany cares about her. Your mom’s car is thrashed, ok? I already have to tell her about that. I can’t tell her the same thing, I mean, I can’t face the possibility of potentially having to explain the same thing to her but have it be about you. Can you understand that? This meeting? Their meeting? It’s not for you. It’s not for me. Hope is the only kid that’s going to be there, and quite honestly, given the little that I know or that I suspect she’s gone through, she’s left being a kid behind. And left you behind. And Tiffany. And, honestly, me, in a lot of ways. Where she is, where she’s been, there aren’t a lot of maps out there that cover getting through that kind of shit. Stuff. It’s messed up. She’s messed up. So don’t ask me to let you just run loose. Because I can’t. You know I can’t. The meeting isn’t for you. It’s for him-“ pointing at Sipe, “-and those other people directly involved. After tonight, after today, if it ends, God let it end, we can go back to how it’s been. Hands off. You’ll have the run of the house and of the town, I promise. But right now, I’ve got you. And you can wiggle all you want, but I swear, the more you wiggle, you little fucker, I’m just going to grip you all the tighter.”
Outside, Gwen walked Sipe down the driveway. Bug had called. Sipe told him he’d meet Bug down where Old School Road terminated at the asphalt.
“Can you tell me something? Mr. Sipe?”
He stopped and turned around. It surprised Gwen how just a hand on his shoulder had caused him to tense up so much, like her hand had simulated tarantula legs aiming for the back of his neck.
“Sorry.”
“It’s ok,” he said. “Long day. I’m jumpy.”
“How’s it going to go tonight? Do you know?”
“No.”
“And you will keep Tiffany out of it, right?”
“She won’t be anywhere near it.”
“I’ll try and call Norm. See if we can kill two birds with one stone and somehow watch Tiffany and Henry together. They’ll hate that, but…”
Two kids on bicycles raced down Main Street and passed the line of demarcation. Little Creek shed. Shouting, reflectors hopefully keeping them safe as they humped it eastbound for the curve through the hill and then sight of the Zippy Mart roadblock. Sipe couldn’t tell if they were the kids he’d seen earlier or a different ent
husiastic pair.
“Did she tell you…Did Norm talk to you at all about her situation? Her mom?”
“No.”
“She’s alive,” said Gwen. “The mom. The dad, too, it’s just…You know Chinatown? The movie? No? Huh. That’s always what I think of when it comes to Tiffany. Right at the movie’s end it comes out the main female character’s daughter is actually fathered by, well - I’m laughing. I don’t know why. It’s actually really awful, but it turns out the woman’s been raped by her own father and so it’s a question of whether this teenage girl is her daughter or her sister or both. And it’s not quite that bad. Tiff is a product of lust, I mean, maybe some love, but definitely lust and definitely not violence. But it’s…It was an uncle. A kind of crazy uncle. Tiffany’s mother was all grown up, in her mid-20s even, and somehow she ended up falling in love with her own uncle. He left his wife for his niece. He was some sort of…I don’t know. Both of them saddled with some artistic bent. I guess if you can make art then sometimes those social conventions fencing in the rest of the cattle don’t mean as much. But the mother is in some halfway house or on the loose at some artist’s colony over closer to Portland. I don’t know where the father is. The uncle. Maybe he’s with her. Maybe it’s the fairy tale ending, but without the daughter. The niece.”
Headlights glowing, Bug’s truck rolled eastward down Main Street.
“You have to go,” said Gwen.
“Lots to do.”
Sipe started walking down the gentle decline towards Bug’s truck, idling in the lane.
No cars drove down the westbound lane, but Sipe started to run for the truck. He didn’t seem the sort of man who ran willingly or well. He looked like a funeral director desperate to catch a departing hearse before the still-open trailer gate led to certain fiasco. Running one of many activities he’d come off alien in performance. Opening Christmas presents. Doing laundry. From behind a podium, introducing a longtime inspiration. Sex. Any kind.
Gwen watched Sipe get in the truck and shut the passenger door. Something inelegant occurred and Bug’s truck gears shifted, produced a sound like a combine snared on a long forgot sprinkler system. Minor snafu. The truck lurched forward and the men drove out of town.
Up in the house, the TV was on, muted. Henry wandered the kitchen in long loose figure eights, one hand to his ear, looking at Gwen the Fun-Killer, pausing long enough to relate, “It’s Tiff. We’re just talking, not plotting,” then dismissing her, returning to his distracted geometry.