“Those’re his dimensions. What’d he do?”
“Went down for third-degree battery on a list of assault indictments, but all he got was a year in the Lonoke County jail.” Preston Raincrow laid his notes on the table. He said, “Ben, these people are into hijacking trucks.”
“We know Hazen tried it,” Ben said.
“I see it as their criminal enterprise. I bet they keep those barns closed tight and locked.”
“I never got close enough to tell,” Ben said.
Preston took his time. He said, “Maybe I could look into it. Go out there, tell ’em I’m checking on Lyme disease for the county.”
Ben said, “Or mad cow.”
It got Preston nodding his head. “Yeah, I like mad cow. Say I need to check the feed and the cow shit.”
“You think they’ll believe you?”
“I wear my exterminator uniform and bring Eddie Chocote along with his sidearm. Tell ’em this mad cow business could be a terrorist plot, like anthrax. Eddie’s cool, he’ll go along. We find stolen property, we tell the sheriff. We find a meth lab working—speed’s big around here—we call the DEA. They’ll go out there with marshals. But if we don’t get to peek in the barns . . .” Preston shrugged. “You ever in a movie had this kind of situation? Guys you think are bad won’t come out of the house?”
“I was one of the guys,” Ben said. “I made a run for it and got shot.”
“You were good at dying.”
“We played guns enough when we were kids. Get shot and go, ‘Unhhh, I’m hit,’ and fall in the river.” Ben thought of what he’d say next, hesitated and then said it. “I almost got shot for real one time, taking a midnight dip in the country club pool.”
“And they put you in jail—I remember that. You were with some girl we went to school with.”
“Denise Patterson,” Ben said.
“That’s right, she’s Denise Allen now, married twice. The first time to some country singer came through with a show and Denise ran after him. The second time to a guy in Tulsa with oil money left over from the ‘80s. They got divorced and she come back home. Her folks moved to Hawai-ya and let her have the big house on Seminole Avenue she grew up in. That’s where she’s at now. Yeah, Denise Allen, in the real estate business, sells farms, sells lake property—”
“How do you know all that?”
“Ophelia does her cleaning. She says Ms. Allen isn’t like any other ladies she works for.”
“I believe it,” Ben said. “One time she wanted me to take pictures of her bare naked, she’s sixteen years old, and send ’em to Playboy.”
“You keep any?”
“I never took the pictures. I was hardshell Baptist at that time,” Ben said, “account of Carl had found Jesus. I was reading scripture so I wouldn’t go to Hell. I’d go skinny-dipping with Denise and leave my underwear on.”
“I remember in school,” Preston said, “some guys called her Denise the piece. They said she’d let you screw her long as you were Caucasian. You still Baptist?”
Ben said, “More Unitarian if anything,” thinking of Kim. Thinking of her for the first time in hours.
Preston said, “Yeah, Ophelia told her me and you write to each other and she’s always asking what you’re doing.”
“Denise?”
“Who we talking about? I was you, man, I’d give her a call.”
IV.
The way Denise met Hazen Grooms: one night in that dark, smoky bar at the Best Western, months ago, he asked her to have a drink with him. He was scruffy, but there was something about his pose she liked, his cool, sleepy eyes, and shrugged, why not, and said she’d have a Margarita. He told her he was a cattleman. Denise said, “You mean you shovel cow shit?” Hazen said he speculated on cattle, oil and land development—looking like he might have five bucks in his jeans. He asked her with his sleepy Jack Nicholson look, “What’s a hot number like you doing in Okmulgee?” Denise kept a straight face and laid her OK Realty card on the bar. If this cowboy was into land development he could put up or shut up. Hazen said, “Hmmm,” studying the card. He said he had run into a relative of his operated a pecan farm and was talking to him about working shares. He asked Denise if she could put together a lease agreement. When he told her it was the Webster property out in the Deep Fork bottom Denise almost came off her bar stool.
Oh, really?
Since high school she had not stopped thinking of Ben Webster. Not every day, but a lot; in fact more than ever while she was married to those two jerks. She was sure this lease deal would put her in touch with him again. They’d talk about it on the phone and she’d say, “By the way, I’m coming out to the Coast soon.” Ben could even come here to look over his tenants and she’d act grown-up for a change, try to be more subtle than she was dreaming up ways to seduce him. Like the skinny-dipping. Like asking him to take nude pictures of her. Like doing a Sharon Stone, sitting with her knees apart in a miniskirt. Nothing worked. Finally she put the question to him in a soft voice, “Ben, are you gay? It’s okay if you are.” It wasn’t, but that’s what she said. He looked surprised and told her no, of course not. She said, “Then why don’t you want to do it?” He said, “ ’Cause it’s a sin.” It was that fucking Carl’s born-again influence. She wondered if it was still a sin now that he lived in Hollywood and was in movies, an Indian, in Dances with Wolves, but which one? She caught glimpses of him in other pictures, once she learned which ones he was in. He looked great, even getting shot.
She was dying to see him. He’d called and was coming to the house and she wasn’t sure what to wear, if she should go smart or hot.
First Hazen calling with “Guess who just came by.”
No, “Guess who jes come by here,” and knew right away who he meant—without knowing why she knew it—and felt a twitch in her stomach, or even lower. Hazen said he was calling because now he wanted to buy the property and needed his offering drawn up before the movie star went back to Hollywood, California. He always called Ben the movie star, getting it from Lydell, who hadn’t seen a movie since Gone with the Wind and assumed any picture Ben said he was in he must’ve been the star.
“Since you and him are old school buddies,” Hazen said, “I bet he’d want you to be in on it and get a nice commission, huh?”
It sounded fishy. Where would he get the money for the down payment, sell his repainted Cadillac?
Hazen said, “I’ll find out where he’s staying and let you know. See, then you can invite him over, say you got an offer for his property you want to talk to him about.” Hazen said, “I can come by your house tonight with the figures. You gonna be home?”
“Tomorrow at the office,” Denise said, and wouldn’t let him talk her out of it.
She had never allowed him in the house. Several times they had drinks and dinner together because she had nothing to do and was curious about him and would listen to Hazen tell how he’d once rustled cattle with a semi-trailer and had done some prison time in his wild youth, but never associated with the perverts or hogs inside and had kept himself clean, Hazen eating his dinner with his cowboy hat on. Hazen wanted her to know he’d had an outlaw streak in him but now was a straight-shooter looking for the girl of his dreams. If she ever told anybody she’d add, “You have to hear him say it.”
Finally, the last time they went out together and he took her home, he started putting the moves on her in his car, the backseat full of engine parts and trash, Hazen kissing and feeling, the straight-shooter smelling of cigarettes, tequila and Aqua Velva, breathing hard through his nose till Denise shut him down with a quiet tone of voice.
She said, “Hazen, please don’t,” and thought of telling him she was a lesbian, but couldn’t bring herself to say the word. So she said, “I’m not used to a man like you. Twice I was talked into getting married, not giving myself time to realize what I was doing, and both times I made an awful mistake. You’ll just have to be patient with me.”
She didn’t have to tell him
to get his hand off her tit. He grumbled something and withdrew it. So she didn’t have to pull the SIG Sauer .380 she kept in her handbag and shove it under his nose.
It was time to dress for Ben.
The way it turned out it didn’t matter what she was wearing.
Denise opened the door. Ben came in. They looked at each other, neither one saying a word. They went into each other’s arms for a hug after all these years, kissing each other on the cheek, on the mouth, on the mouth hard, and ended up on the oriental that covered the living-room floor, scrambling to get enough of their clothes off, Ben’s windbreaker, his boots—goddamn it, a pair of the newer ones, hard to pull off—his jeans, Denise her cotton sweater, no bra but the panties beneath the skirt, and love was made in a fever that lasted only a few minutes after twenty years of it never having happened.
On the floor side by side looking at each other, both at peace, smiling a little, she said, “Well . . . how’ve you been?”
He said, “You look better than ever.”
She said, “I like your hair like that.”
He said, “You’re not married, are you?”
“Would it matter?”
“Not now.”
She touched his hair. “Where’s your cowboy hat?”
“I’m not a cowboy anymore.”
“I still have a picture of you I cut out of the paper, riding a bull.”
He said, “You want to know something?”
“What?”
He hesitated, but had to say it because it was the reason he was here.
“I think about you all the time.”
She said, “Aw, Ben,” in a soft way, touching his face, kissing him. Soon they were kissing each other without making a sound as they settled in.
They got cans of beer from the kitchen and took them into the library where they used to kiss and fool around sometimes, but without ever getting too close to doing it. She said, “I guess it’s not a sin anymore.”
“You remember that?”
“I’d say, ‘Why don’t we see what it’s like.’”
“You already knew.”
“Yeah, but not with you and I had to find out. But I wasn’t jumping in the sack with everybody. You know how many guys I did it with? Two.” She paused. “Actually three while we were in school and I’m Denise the piece? You must’ve wanted to.”
“Sure I did.”
She said, “I was absolutely insane over you,” and stopped for a moment, looking at him next to her on the cracked leather sofa, her dark hair and part of her face in lamplight. “You’re not married, are you?”
He said, “Almost, once,” and saw Kim on the beach at Point Dume, what seemed now years ago.
“Why didn’t you?”
“I thought I wanted to—”
“But you weren’t sure. I wasn’t sure, either,” Denise said, “when I married Wayne Hostetter, the second-biggest mistake of my life, but it was a chance to get out of town.”
Saving Ben from having to talk about Kim, what happened to her, and what he felt now about ever getting married or even serious with a woman, because they didn’t have to be married to have something awful happen to whoever she might be. He wasn’t convinced that it would, no, but here it was on his mind while Denise was telling him about the country artist, Wayne Hostetter and the Wranglers in their cowboy hats. “I called them Wayne and his Wanglers. He’s the only guy I ever heard of puts lifts in his cowboy boots.”
“He was your second-biggest mistake,” Ben said. “What was your first?”
She said marrying Arthur Allen, an investment banker, the most boring man she’d ever met. “He played golf every afternoon and talked about it all night. It’s what golfers do.”
“Why didn’t you play?”
“It’s boring. I saw every movie you were in.”
“Space Sluts in the Slammer Two?”
“I missed that one.”
“I was killed by a space slut. How’d you know about the movies?”
“My cleaning lady.”
“Right, Ophelia. Preston told me.” He said, “You were interested, huh?”
Denise stared at him. She said, “You big lug, don’t you know it’s been you all the time? What’s that from?”
“A lot of old movies, not any I was in.”
She kept staring, not just looking, studying him. She said, “You’re a stuntman. That’s pretty cool. Do you want to act?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Stay here and grow nuts? Grow, not go, but you can do both.”
“I want to get the place in shape, hire a family to work it and take care of Lydell. I’m thinking of the Raincrows, make Preston the working partner. I thought of that driving over here.”
There was a silence and Denise said, “I have a confession to make.”
Ben had told her, while they put their clothes back on and went out to the kitchen, the situation with the Grooms. Forty-eight hours to get out, and he didn’t think they’d budge.
“I know those people,” Denise said. “I wrote the lease.”
“That’s your confession? If you hadn’t,” Ben said, “I doubt we’d be sitting here. Look at it that way.”
“But now Hazen says he wants to buy your place, and he’s using me to get you two together. You know he’s a criminal, or was?”
“I think still,” Ben said, “the whole family. Preston looked them up.”
“Hazen wants to kill you, doesn’t he?” her voice quiet as she said it.
“Any one of them,” Ben said. “And if they do and you know about it and can put them away for life . . .”
Ben watched her cross her legs as she thought about it and reach over to pick up her can of beer from the coffee table. Now she was looking at him again.
“I’ve been ready for Hazen since the first time I met him. He comes here with intentions of doing us harm I’ll shoot him. My dad gave me a gun a long time ago, and I’m licensed to carry it. But you know what? You better move your car from the drive. Park it in town somewhere.”
“It won’t be here,” Ben said. “I’m meeting Preston later on. He’s looking into the Grooms, see if he can find out, as he says, what kind of criminal enterprise they’re in. I always like talking to Preston.”
“So you can stay a while?”
“I’m not in any hurry.”
“Tell me some Hollywood stuff.”
“Jack Nicholson always carries an ashtray in his pocket.”
“What about—like I heard some stars actually do it in their love scenes?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised, but I’ve never been needed on that kind of set. What else you want to know?”
“Ben, have you really been thinking about me?”
V.
Preston Raincrow got home and threw a football around with his two boys, went in the house and kissed Ophelia and his little girl, smelled what was cooking and poured himself two ounces of Jim Beam. He sipped on the drink thinking of Avery Grooms and his two white trash boys, thinking if Avery was picked up on the detainer and held for Arkansas, it could cause his boys to act stupid and become nasty and they could be picked up, too. Preston had one more drink for the pleasure of it—he didn’t need courage—and phoned the young sheriff of Okmulgee County, a reasonable-enough Caucasian boy Preston had played football with this time, and told about the detainer. “Avery Grooms, done most of ninety months, come out and must’ve blew his parole.” He said, “You know the Webster place. That’s where he’s at.” Preston suggested the young sheriff bring some backup along, the man had his two sons with him and they weren’t likely to sit still, watch their old dad taken away cuffed. He listened and said, “Anytime. I’m always glad to help you out.”
The Raincrows were finishing their supper when the phone rang. Preston listened to the young sheriff say it was on for tonight and he could come if he wanted. Preston sat at the table again and ate the rest of his rice pudding before calling Eddie Chocote.
Hazen
put aside the early part of the evening to check motels, see where a Ben Webster was registered, came to the Shawnee Inn and the desk clerk said, “Yes sir, he sure is,” but wouldn’t give up the room number till Hazen flashed a federal badge and ID he’d bought in Biloxi, Mississippi, and used from time to time and was told, “Room two-twenty, overlooking the patio and the swimming pool.” The clerk wanted to know if Mr. Webster was in some kind of trouble and was told, “He sure is, partner.”
Hazen returned to his favorite bar, the dark, smoky one at the Best Western, and drank Margaritas while he thought about what to do with Denise. If she’d have come across once or twice he’d feel better about her. As cold sexu’lly as the woman was he believed he could set her afire and bring her to her . . . get her to come. Hazen thinking now that if Brother took care of the movie star that’d be out of the way and he’d have had nothing to do with it. He could stay around and take his time with the real estate lady. If it ever came to putting a pistol on her, like a last resort . . . Hell, he didn’t even know where he’d aim.
His cell phone made its noise. It was Brother trying to keep his voice low. “They come and put handcuffs on Daddy, saying he’s going back to Arkansas.”
The Margaritas worked to Hazen’s favor, allowing him to believe he was cool. He asked Brother, “You say anything stupid to ’em?”
“They want to know who I was, see my driver’s license. Asked could they look around. Daddy told ’em they could go fuck theirselves.”
Hazen said, “Shit.” That kind of talk could bring ’em back with warrants. “They still there?”
“Yeah, they’s still here. Jesus Christ, you coming?”
“A bunch of ’em?”
“Three Crown Vics, ‘Sheriff’ on the doors big. A Taurus with ‘Muskogee Nation Lighthorseman’ on it. They got their headlight beams on the house, lightnin’ it up. The deputies are wearing vests and carrying shotguns, like they expect we’s armed. Daddy’s saying, ‘I never detained nobody. The hell you talking about.”’