The Do-Re-Mi Read online

  “Macho thing,” I said.

  On my way into Evergreen, I saw Willis and a partner rousting a trio of Cossacks on the shoulder of River Road.

  Louella’s seemed darker than usual. The juke box was quiet. The owner only glanced at me then looked away.

  Barker sat at the table closest to the entrance. I went to the bar and bought two Dewar’s on the rocks. I sat across from Barker and pushed a drink toward him. “You probably don’t drink on duty. But this time you ought to.”

  “You think you’re going to sue me, do you?”

  “Did you guys decide to take on the bikers?” I asked.

  Barker stared as though hunting for a speck in my eyes. “Sheriff thinks a Cossack dragged Jimmy into the woods.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “They’re the poachers. He knew the forest better than them.”

  I played along. “How do you suppose they talked Jimmy into going along? Money?”

  “Hell no. Not Jimmy. They must’ve scared him.”

  I drank half my Dewar’s. “I don’t buy that.”

  Barker’s clenched fists rapped the table. “What do you know about Jimmy?”

  “Not much. But if it was Cossacks,” I said, “how come it was you that brushed away the tracks from the place where Jimmy got dragged to the river?”

  Barker was halfway out of his seat, his face jutting forward.

  “So here’s the deal,” I said, amazed I didn’t stammer. “You give me the truth. That’s all I’m asking. Convince me. I’ll call lawyer Dalrymple and tell him to go fish. And, as long as nobody’s hunting my brother, what goes on in Evergreen is your business. You give me the truth, I don’t snitch.”

  Barker kicked his chair away. It toppled. Without a word, without picking up the chair, he marched around me and out the door. I swallowed the rest of my Dewar’s then reached for his, which he hadn’t touched. I gulped it down.

  In the car, I realized never before had I drunk two double shots of liquor with hardly a buzz. “Adrenaline,” I mumbled.

  All the way back to Quig’s, I imagined the next second a bullet would zip out of the woods, smash through a window, and put an end to my meddling.

  WHEN Barker pulled into Quig’s, the residents gathered around as though he were a popsicle vendor. He ignored their queries and walked straight to where I sat beside Ava on a stump outside her yurt. He motioned with his head. “Just you.”

  I followed him to the bank of the creek, at least fifty yards from the closest ear besides ours.

  He pointed to the ground. I sat. He squatted beside me and frisked me with his eyes. “That a tape recorder in your pocket?”

  “Wallet.” I showed it to him.

  “Empty your pockets.”

  I complied. He stared at the river. “You’re gonna tell Ava. She’ll get it out of you. I know what women can do. But nobody passes it on to Delene, understand?”

  “Deal. If Ava won’t promise, I don’t tell her.”

  “You’re going to make her swear on her stack of Bibles, hope to die. Word gets around, gets to my sis, I got no reason on earth not to hunt you down. You can tell that to Ava.”

  His face had narrowed, his eyes gone to flame. He kicked a rock the size of a football. It rolled, picked up speed, and tumbled toward the river. “Jimmy was panning for gold along the creek. He heard somebody laughing and snuck up close enough to see who it was, three or four Cossacks. He caught them talking about coming back that night. So he came into town and told me.”

  “Why?”

  “I had a deal with Quig. He was gonna pay Jimmy’s first year tuition to that Whitman college if I’d chase the Cossacks out of town. They’d been costing him plenty, and the big harvest was still to come. Give Jimmy one year at any damned college, he promised he’d keep his nose in the books and win himself a scholarship for the rest. So him and me went out that night. Me to call in the bust. Jimmy for an eye witness. He wanted to do something to earn his money. He was like that. Wouldn’t take something for nothing. The idea was, as soon as they start harvesting, I radio in. By the time they finish and drive the trail up to the highway, Walt and Omar are waiting.”

  “Who’re they?”

  “Deputies. Graveyard shift. That’s all there was to it.” He jumped up and put his hand out flat, meaning if I stood, it would be at my peril. “Like I said, word gets out, not even your smartass ol’ man or the gangster he’s chummy with can save you.”

  “One question?”

  “What?”

  “Who fired the shot that made Van Dyke shoot back?”

  “None of your damned business.”

  While he marched off, a kind of warmth rushed through me. I muttered, “Good for you, Brady.” He was still covering for his dead nephew. Because Jimmy must’ve fired the shot, since Roy took aim at the gun’s flash.

  As some of my grudge against Barker passed away, I felt a shock-like jolt in my right ring finger, the first sensation in that hand since Thursday.

  Barker’s cruiser left a cloud of dust behind. I sat a minute and rehearsed a speech I could give to Quig — “Here’s the deal, big shot. If you want me to keep to myself the news that you tried to lay a bribe on a sheriff’s deputy, you’d be wise to get out of Evergreen and take your damned money with you.”

  But I had promised Barker silence, except to Ava. And long ago Pop had convinced me that unless people hold promises sacred, the world caves in.

  BEFORE I could tell Barker’s story to Ava, a pack of Harleys came roaring our way. Vic and a half dozen Cossacks skidded up to Quig’s gate. The gatekeeper sent a boy running to us. “Um, are you Hickey?” he said.

  “One of them.”

  “These . . . out here . . . the little devil says you better come talk to him.”

  Ava wanted to go alone, as my emissary. I declined her offer. She marched beside me anyway. “Let’s go get Quig and bring him along,” she said. “Quig needs to be here. Or at least we should take a bunch more people.”

  I walked faster, too anxious to stop and explain that in macho confrontations like sports and war, every time you exhibit fear or even concern, the enemy scores.

  The bikers still perched on their Harleys. As we neared them, Ava grasped my arm. Vic was grinning, holding an envelope. He raised it above his head and waved it slowly back and forth like a hypnotist’s prop before he tossed it to me, on the right side. I had to lunge and catch it backhand. He laughed.

  “Pocket change,” he said. “Fix your car with it. Call it a reward for snooping out the guy that shot Jimmy.”

  While the Cossacks behind him nodded and murmured approval, Vic kick-started his chopper. They rode out of sight before I looked inside the envelope.

  Hundred dollar bills. I counted twenty.

  “Thank God!” Ava said. “I mean, not for the money. But Vic is calling a truce.”

  She kissed my cheek and beamed. Probably until now she had feared every minute that her new friend would soon be as dead as the old one.

  We sat on the futon in the yurt while I explained why I didn’t feel safe or relieved. I told her about my friend Toby who liked partying and motorcycles. He joined the Iron Horsemen. One night at an open party at the Hell’s Angels clubhouse, everybody had to check their weapons, put them on a table. Toby was standing by the table when a Hell’s Angel cussed a partner of his. Toby’s partner cussed back. The Hell’s Angel picked up a knife and slashed at him. Toby grabbed a gun and killed a Hell’s Angel. By some miracle, he escaped.

  A few days later, he landed in jail, but when the case came to trial, his lawyer got him off for self-defense, since juries aren’t partial to Hell’s Angels. Months passed. Then, after a concert at the stadium, Toby got found in the home team dugout, sliced to ribbons. He lived, but the surgery lasted two days and cost his mom’s insurance a quarter million. Another year passed, then the Highway Patrol stopped him for reckless driving. When they searched his car, they found a dead Hell’s Angel in his trunk.

  “
Outlaw bikers don’t forgive and forget,” I said. “It’s against their principles.”

  “Then you can’t stay in Evergreen.”

  “I could leave,” I said, “now that I’ve gotten the truth. Only . . ."

  "Only what?"

  "Only you're here."

  She cocked her head. "Oh . . . Clifford . . . So what about Brady?"

  I reached for her hand and she held on firmly I while I told her about Barker and Jimmy going to set up the Cossacks. I told her Quig had offered Jimmy a year’s tuition for his and the deputy’s cooperation.

  Ava dropped my hand, clutched her belly and doubled over. She rolled onto her side and drew her knees up close. I thought she was going to suck her thumb.

  “You okay?”

  She said, “Money. Guns and money.”

  “Yep. I was thinking, we could go to visit my folks.”

  After some silent moments she nodded and attempted a smile.

  I said, “And we could hike to Marlette Lake. Way up high, nobody goes there. We could be Adam and Eve. They didn’t have guns or money.”

  Her smile faded.

  I said, “We'll take swimsuits.”

  She rolled off the futon and stood. Wiping her face, she walked out of the yurt. I followed and watched as she went to the bathhouse. After five minutes or so, she returned with her hair and face shiny wet and her eyes as bright as new.

  WE packed. My gear, including the Hummingbird in its hard-shell case and everything Ava thought she needed for a week in the mountains only required half of the Eldorado’s cavernous trunk.

  When Quig lumbered toward us, he looked so dismayed, I wondered where his smugness had gone.

  He didn’t even glance at Ava. To me, he said, “You’re needed at the hospital.”

  Twenty-three

  IF my folks had done what Pop told me they would, spent Tuesday night in Ferndale, found a sea-view restaurant with good Scotch and T-bone steaks, our family and Ava might’ve spent Thanksgiving counting our blessings. But Pop and Mama worried about me.

  So Pop drove my ball-peened '55 Chevy wagon back to the 101 and turned north, toward Evergreen. And the devil prompted Vic and a pack of his Cossacks to walk out of the Crossroads minutes before my Chevy approached from the south.

  Little Vic was like politicians Phil Ochs wrote songs about, who don’t hesitate to endanger others. He gave the order, or the dare. The one they called Crutch, the guy with burgundy skin, jumped onto his chopper. He kicked the starter, revved the motor, popped the clutch, and roared out of the Crossroads parking lot in front of the Chevy he thought I was driving.

  Pop always swerved to miss deer, dogs and cats, even possum. For a tough guy, he had a wide soft streak. He swerved to miss the biker.

  THE Eldorado took us twenty miles in ten minutes. Ava didn’t flinch or lift her arm from around my shoulders even when logging trucks blasted their air horns as I passed three and four vehicles at once on the two-lane highway.

  The hospital was on the southern outskirts of Eureka. I sped through the parking lot and skidded a turn to stop at the main entrance. We dove out and ran through the doorway and to the information desk. “Hickey, Tom and Wendy,” I shouted at an old lady in a green frock. Her face crimped and her eyes clouded, probably from fright, maybe from sorrow. She couldn’t speak, only shake her head.

  A tall, Indian nurse appeared beside her. “You are?”

  “Clifford Hickey,” I yelped.

  She nodded. “The lady is gone. To the morgue, I'm afraid.”

  She kept talking but I didn’t hear the rest.

  A few beaches get waves that peak but don’t roll. They break like sheer cliffs. If you’re crazy enough to ride one, your legs will fly up while your head goes down and you’ll tumble right and left, spin and flip and splatter on the sand. A wave like that had caught me.

  Ava pulled me out of it. “Tom's alive,” she said. “He’s the one that needs you now.”

  She led me down a hall and into a waiting room and lowered me to a couch where I sat and imagined Pop would implode like Mama had when Claire died. His spirit would perish. He would stay mute forever. Ava sat close and rubbed my neck and shoulders and wept. I didn’t weep, though desperately I longed to.

  When they let us see Pop, he was sitting up. His only visible wounds were covered by a bandage around the top of his head. The only change to his face was in his eyes. They used to be sky blue gems. Now they were granite.

  He let us hug and kiss him then motioned us toward the chairs. “I sure hope there’s a heaven,” he said, his voice parched and scratchy.

  After a few silent minutes, he told us about the wreck. How Vic waved and the biker fishtailed onto the highway. About the soft shoulder that sent them into a spin and a roll before they landed in the ditch. The way Mama’s head crashed through the windshield and her neck twisted half around.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked me.

  I wanted to shout, Why the hell didn’t you run the biker down? But I wasn’t going to stoke the fire of Pop’s misery.

  “You’re already making plans, I’ll bet,” he said.

  “I’ve got to do something.”

  “Well, you know what your mama would want you to do. Right?”

  “What?” I snapped. “Forgive them?”

  Pop made a stiff nod. “She would remind you her savior preached it takes no character to forgive your friends or people who do right by you.”

  “Okay, but —”

  “And she’d say how you deal with your enemies proves whether you’re the kind of man she wanted you to be.”

  “Come on, Pop,” I said, “remember Danny Katoulis.”

  His eyes hooded like most always when he had to think about the years during the world war, just before he met Mama.

  “In the story I heard," I said, "you didn’t have a lot of mercy on that slime.”

  He stared without blinking at me, then at Ava. When he spoke, he accented most every word. “Then what it comes down to is, are you going to be like me, or like your mama and Jesus?”

  I felt Ava staring at me. “Hey,” I said, “Jesus could turn the other cheek and walk away and then sentence the guy who socked him to hell.”

  “Even so,” Pop said, and raised his voice to command tone. “When it comes to following examples, you’d better look at Jesus. Or at Wendy. Not at me.”

  I sat a while, pounding my bandaged hand against my knee, glad for the pain that shot up my arm, through my shoulders and all the way to my skull. “A couple days ago you said we don’t get to choose who we’re going to be, on account of life has ways of making us become who we are.”

  His granite eyes locked on mine and stayed there until they closed and the Indian nurse informed us she had slipped him a heavy sedative just before she let us in.

  POP was wise. I believed in him. But he was mighty wrong if he imagined I could act like anything like Jesus. If I resembled God in any way, I thought, it was the one you can find in the Old Testament who apparently created hell so he could send his enemies there.

  For the first time since I had come to Evergreen, I felt no doubt or compunction about what to do. Pop had spoken for Mama, not for himself. One of us would kill Vic. And if anything stopped Pop and me, as soon as Alvaro found out, he would run across the mountains or through machine gun fire to avenge our mama. If Alvaro failed, Harry Poverman would pawn his casino before he would let Vic keep living. Vic was a dead man.

  Outside, I marched straight to the trunk of the Eldorado. I dug through my gear and Ava’s bags and grabbed the holster and gun Pop had left me.

  When I pulled it out, Ava yipped, “What’s that thing? How’d it get there?”

  I slammed the trunk lid and walked around the Cadillac to the driver’s door strapping on the holster. Ava grabbed my arm. “Take that gun off,” she shouted. “I hate guns.”

  “Shhh,” I said.

  “No,” she screamed. “Don’t you get it? If there hadn’t been a gun with
Jimmy in the woods that night, Roy wouldn’t have shot him. And if Roy hadn’t shot him, Alvaro wouldn’t have needed to run. And then your folks would still be in Tahoe, alive and well.”

  “Roy isn’t Little Vic,” I said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you can blame what Roy did on his having a gun, if you want. But Vic doesn’t need weapons. He’s like a germ. A plague.”

  She reached for the holster belt and unhitched it so fast, I didn’t move quick enough to stop her. “I’ll keep the gun.”

  While I tried to think of ways to get it back without hurting her, she said, “Because men can’t be trusted with guns, that’s why.”

  I didn’t argue. I knew better. All the lawyers in D.C. couldn’t win that argument. Besides, I would be more lethal with the sawed-off shotgun.

  “You know how to use a gun?” I asked her.

  “Come on,” she said. “Didn’t I grow up in Evergreen?” She stomped around the car to her door, climbed in, threw the belt and holster onto the floor and crammed the gun into her purse.

  As I pulled out of the lot and turned south on the highway, she asked, “Who’s Danny Katoulis?”

  “Way back during World War II, before my dad got drafted, before he met Mama, he chased a hit man all the way to Denver. Pop knew the guy from when he was a cop in L.A., and he knew the slime had gotten away with plenty. Now Katoulis had a contract to knock off a certain swami who was on the road raising funds for his cult. Pop’s friend Cynthia Jones had hired Katoulis. She was a jazz singer and quite crazy. She claimed the swami raped her. Pop didn’t want to see her become a murderer. So he found Katoulis in Denver and killed him.”

  “Self defense, I bet.”

  “Nope. He played God.”

  She turned her head and stared at the moonlit forest. After a minute, she turned back and touched my arm. “Well, I bet he wouldn’t do it now.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe thirty years with Mama made him more like her than like his old self.”