The Witch Tree, page 17
But what of it, when the real issue, the one none of them talked about, was just surviving.
“You gotta wash out your eyes,” Ambrose said, seeing how his eyes had glassed up from the spray. “It’ll burn for hours, otherwise; it’s made like that on purpose. Believe me, it’ll get worse.”
“So, what about Eli?”
“Got enough on him to put him away for years. Fraud, trafficking, grand theft auto–”
“But he’s a… nobody, isn’t he?” Buck lied, a sinking in his chest. “He just does body work and runs paper for Lester.”
“Yeah, you would say that, wouldn’t you.” Ambrose laughed. “No, it’s Eli we’ve got to thank for getting Miller to come out. And Eli’s in so deep, he doesn’t even know it himself.
“Eli’s fucked with Miller, and so badly, being clever as he is, messing with his paperwork and what all else Miller isn’t sure, Miller thought to just take him out, before you came down.
“That car wreck of Eli’s? Put Jenny in that wheel chair and messed up Eli’s face?” Ambrose said, and Buck nodded. “T-boned them at an intersection, only – Eli swerved, kept goin’, after they were hit, ‘stead of waitin’ there for help, cause, there wasn’t going to be any.
“No, your brother side-stepped a nice little execution. Down in Tennessee, they lined up five kids who were ‘drivin rebadged-totaleds’ and got to stealin’, mowed ‘em down.
“Didn’t even bury the bodies. Left ‘em in the ditch, as a warning, what with the pictures in the paper. So, you see how it is?”
He did. “So, now?”
“It’s out of Miller’s control. The business got too big, too profitable, so that people not so careful came in. And they’ve been making mistakes, ones that Miller knows’ll come back on him.”
“Like with those kids,” Buck said.
“Yeah,” Ambrose replied. “And there’s worse. So Miller’s cutting ties, and everywhere, and we don’t have a shred of evidence, paper or other, and Miller fixing to run.
“Only, it’d look like retirement – he just bought a place in Ft. Lauderdale. Gated, the whole bit.”
In the ruin of the moment, his eyes on Ambrose, a thought came to him; a way to save Eli.
“What if I got you your paper trail?” he said. “Business transactions. Fees paid to doctors and lawyers. All of it.”
“You take it without a warrant,” Ambrose replied, “it’d be Fruit of the Poison Tree. Miller would walk.
“It’d only make things worse, because he’d know to destroy everything, burn things to the ground, if he had to.”
“But what if someone gave it to me?”
It was in the set of Ambrose’s face, the wings of his nose flared, this thing with Miller personal.
“I’ll get you what you need,” Buck said, “but only if you let Eli and his girl, Jen, go when this is over.”
“And you?”
“Me? I’ll leave that up to you.”
They stood an arm’s length apart, eyeing each other. Somewhere distant a siren wailed. After a time, he offered his hand and Ambrose took it, gave it a decisive, hard shake.
“You get between Miller and his business,” Ambrose said, “there’s gonna be hell to pay. He’ll come after you.”
“I got broad shoulders,” Buck replied. “I’ve seen as bad and even worse; let ‘im come.”
Ambrose nodded.
Going out, he paused on the threshold, as if caught there, in it another moment of possibility.
He wouldn’t have Ambrose now to tell Carol what-was-what, but he did know someone who could help with that, maybe. Even though it could get a little… complicated.
“Od’s fixer down here,” he said, “who is it?”
“Shorty,” Ambrose replied, and Buck thought, Of course.
“You stink,” Jenny jibed, when he came through the door. “And what’s that all over your face?”
He stood in the semi-dark, having hung up his coat. He felt, in that moment, found out.
“Let me get a light on,” Jenny said. She’d just come in now, too, tossed her crutch on the couch.
“Just let it alone,” he warned, only knowing she wouldn’t.
She switched on the light. “Jesus Christ! What happened to your eyes? Come here,” she said. She took his hand and tugged him into the kitchen. Ran water up to the top of the sink.
“There,” she said. “Put your face in it.”
He bent over the sink, held his head under, then opened his eyes and dashed back up.
“Christ, that only made it worse,” he said.
Jenny went into the living room and swept up her keys. “I’m taking you to a doctor,” she said.
“No,” he replied, “but you can call the Paradise in the morning, let them know I’m not coming in. I can’t go in like this, see?”
37
Out of the rain, and up the block from The Kruller, he waited, trying not to rub his eyes – they itched, which made waiting a trial.
Inside, Shorty was jabbering at a table with another shinob, Shorty colorful, animated as a parrot.
Then Shorty was up, and he and the shinob went out opposite doors, and Shorty, as if by some magic trick, was gone.
In the rain, he peered up an alley, then backtracked, until he found the fork where Shorty’d veered to the left, on the broken pavement, Hedstrom Land Purveyors 1913, and he made a circle and shot off again, across a stretch of concrete broken like chalky teeth to yet another yard. Dipped under a laundry line dinging in the breeze on a post. In the yard were two dilapidated garages, the space between them barely wide enough for him to fit through. There was a length of barbed fence at the back of it, the garages angled in a V and no exit.
It looked like a sluice, the kind they’d used in his boyhood to trap white tail during hunting season.
Shorty appeared right there, something held behind his back, a gun or knife or pick.
“Yes?” he demanded. In the rain, the two regarded each other. “Ambrose told me to come,” Buck said.
“Well,” Shorty said in a reedy voice. “In that case, don’t stand on ceremony. Step in, why don’t you?”
The room was tiny, the walls nowhere near square. A light fixture of heavy, green glass hung from the ceiling. On the walls were pressed tin ceiling sheets in an antique pattern, painted silver. Where the ceiling tin didn’t cover, the silvered insulation under it mirrored the room which, now, reminded Buck of a funhouse he’d been in traveling through South Dakota to a game in Rapid City.
Gravity Vortex, the roadside sign read. See the mysterious house, feel its cosmic energy!
He stood with his hands clasped in front of him, thinking to ask what he couldn’t even guess.
“Take a seat,” Shorty said, and motioned to the bed, a cobbled together two by four affair in the corner.
Buck obliged, and Shorty took a beaker from a hot plate on a board that ran the length of the wall behind him, on it shelves. He filled the beaker with water, then set it, again, on the hot plate.
“I get my water from a yard a few blocks over. Glassware I get from the University Medical School dumpsters. I spend a great deal of my time elsewhere. Can’t be here much.”
The room was stuffy and smelled of camphor and pine – and now the hot plate, a metallic, burned something.
“My palace, my abode, my hole in the wall,” Shorty said, and made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “ My wati, yes?” His den. He got out a tin and a metal ball with holes in it.
“Tea,” Shorty explained, “having grown up on the Canadian side of all things aboriginal, I’m partial to it.”
Buck studied the framed photos on the wall. An elephant. Five men balanced precariously on a motorcycle, one with streamlined fenders. An enormous, chambered tent. The pictures were old and yellowed. In another, a group of acrobats, dark-skinned – Gypsies? – posed by a ticket booth festooned with flowers as if some confection, a ring of painted orange and red flames around the window there. Under it were photos of dark-haired, attractive people, a man and his wife, two girls, and a small boy, who stared into the camera.
Leaning closer, Not gypsies. In the photos upper left, they wore traditional garb, beaded floral vests and moccasins, their hair in dark braids and their eyes dark-pupiled and up-slanted.
In one of the earliest, sepia toned, the girls juggled banded pins while the boy did a head-stand on a bicycle.
“This your family?”
Shorty nodded.
“This isn’t you,” he said, pointing to the boy.
“No.”
Shorty set out spoons and a package, on it a tinti-colored scene of a boy and girl on a pony.
Shorty, tearing the digestives packet open, glanced over his shoulder. “You’re good. I didn’t leave much to follow. Skidded there on that ice by the broken concrete. Otherwise?”
He handed Buck a cup – blue willow, and old – then reached into a hole in the wall and took out a handful of thimble-sized creamers. He looked into his cup. Sniffed at the tea.
“It’s safe,” Shorty said, only now in a woman’s voice, one reedy, and so singular it sent a shiver up his back.
Shorty smiled. His – or her? face had softened. She’d become more rounded, less compact. He had heard of them, but had never met one. A true backwards/forwards, him/her.
“You’re a winkte,” he said.
“So, Ambrose didn’t tell you, eh?” Shorty said. She moved in her abbreviated way.
She pointed to the older of the two girls in the circus photo. “That’s me. The girl on the left.”
He cautiously bit into the cookie she’d given him, on the box McVitties’ Digestives. He could not take his eyes off her, Shorty, or whoever he – or she – really was.
“I so very much like photographs,” she said, “but they lie, don’t they? Like this one.”
She pointed to a photograph behind him. In it, Shorty stood by an elephant, dressed like a boy.
“Lost the toes on my right foot that morning,” she said. “Broke my spine. Hard to walk without a big toe.”
She held up her stockinged foot, badly misshapen, a hole in the toe, and Buck laughed, nervously.
“Sweetie, our elephant, changed my life in the space of a breath.” She drew her hand through her hair. “It made me what I am. Or, I became… useful, you could say, after.”
She slipped off the bed, rummaged through a crate under her makeshift table and hot plate. Threw things from the crate onto her shelves, tin toys, glassware, a packet of cards.
Lifted her hand, then flourished the cards in a fan, as if out of thin air, and said, “pick.”
He did. A young man in an amber robe, a sideways eight over his head, in front of him a cup – a golden chalice.
“You’re thinking force will solve things,” she said. “A gun. Or, better guns. Or, possibly, bigger guns.”
“Won’t it?”
“You know it won’t. That would be suicide. It’s Dr. Miller’s wife, Carol, you need to persuade. And, anyway, if you want this to end the way you want it to, you have to get all-the-way inside.
“And once there, you have to change their, Dr. Miller’s and the others’, perception, of everything.
“Look,” she said, and reached behind her ear. She held out a well-worn ace of spades. “This is what you want. Your Ace-in-the-hole. Your one-time, fixes-it-all winning card.
“Your father, Od, he had to learn, too, he couldn’t just go up against the powers-that-be. He had to use a… bit of sleight-of-hand, a kind of magic. As Joe did, too, and pride be damned.
“Let me ask you something,” she said. “Why do you think Od chose to use, of all people, someone like me – here?”
With a shrug, he said, “In plain sight you’re invisible. No one looks at a midget, and much less a–”
“Crippled one?” Shorty said.
She leapt from the bed, went through that transformation, the queer midget again. Affable, but other.
“Now, OUT!” Shorty said, and caught his forearm, swung him, dumbfounded, into the alley.
“And don’t come back until you’re stuck again!”
38
In the apartment, Jenny came out of the bathroom in her yellow rain coat, a hat held forlornly at her waist, favoring her good leg, making a point of navigating without her crutch.
“How do I look?” she said, but meant, See? I’m mobile. I’m ready. I’ll do it, whatever it is.
“It’s THE big day,” she said, “don’t you want to go with?” She was driving over to the hospital to get Eli.
“No?” she said, then, in that hitched, awkward way she had of moving, she was in front of him.
She stood on her toes, kissed his cheek and went out, pulling the door shut behind her.
The kiss could have been a coal, it burned so badly.
Later, he heard voices. “Honey, I’m home!” Eli called from the hallway, then threw the door open. “Well, there he is, our Big League Pitcher, Michael Fineday, once Rookie of the Year!” Eli winked, putting a bright spin on it all. “Missed you, brother, did you miss me?”
Jenny, hanging Eli’s coat behind the door, gave him a warning glance. She put her gloves into her purse and snapped it shut. “You,” she said to Eli, “have got to take it easy. Doctor’s orders.”
Eli’s face was sallow, and he looked almost skeletal, but Buck caught him in his arms.
“Anything new?” Eli asked, “other than I can see you got that cast off your hand?”
Over dinner, he made an effort to be cheerful. Jenny was playing wife and host, was being nice. He marveled at how nice she could be. Nice talk. Nice table. Nice manners.
“This is great,” Eli said, playing happy to be home.
Jenny nodded, and they passed the salt and bread, being nice, and he being the nicest of all.
39
“Hey, you’re dreaming,” Eli said, shaking him, and Buck peered up at him from his cot, confused. The clock on the stand read: 6:45.
“You’re not due back at the shop yet,” he said. “Not until you get those bandages off, right?”
“It’s nothing like that,” Eli said. “Just an errand or two, and I need somebody to be my legs, all right?”
Eli driving, the car hammered over an expansion grid, the shock coming up through the seats. Granted how Eli winced at it, he was aware of every jolt, and here, just off Highway 100, as good a time and place as any, where Eli could pull over, once they were in it.
“Just my luck,” Eli said, and slowed for a light.
An elderly woman hobbled into the intersection, her hat clapped to her head like a crown. The light changed, and she froze behind her shopping cart, cars advancing on her, by increments.
Now one honking, then swerving around her.
“Christ!” Eli said, “really?” and before Buck could get his door open, he’d dodged out into the intersection, where he took the woman’s elbow, escorting her across, then seconds later was back in the car, smelling of wet cloth, and rain, and they were moving again.
“Sorry,” Eli said. “You got a Noko like that on foot and they never have enough time.”
The road narrowed, now split level homes and broad flat lawns greening in the rain. They passed a wholesale carpet store, in the front windows in white soap Buy Now and Save! Here a sporting goods store. Spring Season Sale 50% Off All Winter Merchandise.
“Pull over,” he said, and Eli turned to him.
“What?”
“I said, ‘Pull over,’” he said.
“This is some kind of joke, right? We’re not there yet. Okay?”
He elbowed him in the side, where he’d been stabbed.
“Hey?!” Eli said, peeved, “what gives?!”
“That hurt?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Eli said, “it hurts. And what’d you think it’d feel like, having your guts all cut up?
“I got sepsis, I almost died, if you didn’t hear.”
When Eli didn’t swing over, Buck punched him in the side, and Eli screamed, the car swerving, so Buck took the wheel, Eli trying to turn from him but unable to, caught in his seat belt.
“MOTHER FUCKER!” he said, as much terror in his voice as pain. “WHAT THE–”
“I told you, ‘Pull over.’”
A park was to their right, here and there in the brown grass patches of green, and Eli parked along the curb. A mother, and her son and daughter, crossed the park. When the boy’s mother wasn’t looking the boy jumped up and down in a puddle, splashing his sister.
“If you so much as touch me like that again,” Eli said, “I will positively- fuckin’- kill you, okay?”
The rain came down, and Buck put his hand on Eli’s back and pushed him forward against the wheel, gripping his neck, his pulse there like clock, ticking off the seconds.
“Why are you still here, Eli?!” he said. “What are you waiting for? What is it you’re after? What’d you take from Miller?”
“Nothing!” he cried out, and Buck hit him hard, his knuckles thumping off his bandaged ribs. He threw the driver’s door open, and Eli bent out and was sick. When it was over, he pulled him back into the car.
“You’ve got something that’s keeping Miller from breaking your door down, but he’s got to have, and I want it.
“What is it, Eli?!”
“You go fuck yourself,” he said.
“I’ll count to three,” Buck said. “ONE, TWO–” That stubborn set to his chin, Eli grinned.
“All right. DAMMIT! It’s the MONEY,” Eli nearly shouted. “It’s the GODDAMNED MONEY, I SWEAR!”
Buck hit him, so hard he passed out, and he propped him behind the wheel again, disgusted.
When Eli came to, he was weeping, for the pain. “Okay, all right, JESUS CHRIST,” he blubbered, “it’s not just the money.”
“So?”
“It’s all the paper we jockeyed to do it, too. What we used to skim off Miller’s operation. It’s everything we had.”
“Right,” Buck said. He stared out the windshield, for the first time seeing Eli’s predicament.
“So, where is it,” he asked. “Your – everything?”
