The Witch Tree, page 5
Climbing the stairs to Eli’s unit, he slid his hand up the oak railing, scarred and stained with time, and in the hallway the scent of mildew and urine, and the once-red carpet worn through in places, as if scabbed. A baby was crying. On the landing of the third floor, he stopped to look out a window.
In the narrow, bricked-in alley a stumblebum, lean and tall, a baseball cap pulled nearly over his eyes, was digging through a garbage can. Or appeared to be. Or had he been followed?
At Eli’s door he stood at the peephole and a muffled voice came through. “Is that you?”
There was a thump of feet, then the rattle of chains and a clack of deadbolts and the door swung open.
“What are you lurking out there for?” Eli said, grinning. “Don’t you know how to knock? Heard your feet on the floor. It creaks.”
His left eye was nearly swollen shut, his nose off center, and his braids, usually meticulously bound in red cloth, hung now like two sad afterthoughts in blue rubber bands.
He leaned into the hallway, looked both ways. Quicksilver, mercurial, light on his feet.
“Boozhoo,” Buck said, finding his voice. Hello.
Eli pulled him into the apartment and locked the door behind him, Eli darting, left-right, left, until Buck crushed him in his arms. Eli stepped back, that wry, amused look on his face.
“How’d I get this?” Eli asked, pointing to his face. “Decided to punch somebody’s fist with my nose,” he said, “used it to slice some American Velveeta, and this happened, hey?
“Just another danger of being a City Indian in a big bad world of white man’s cut-rate commodity cheese.”
Eli motioned for him to take the chair across the table, and they sat. “So, where’s Ruben?”
“He’ll be coming up soon, I can promise you that,” he said, and, winking, glanced around him.
In everything, in the broken down furniture, in the warped floor and the duct-taped couch, and in the television with foil on the bent antenna, was a runaway desperation. Pizza boxes, stacked five high in the corner, told him Eli had not been out in days. And books, they were everywhere, spilling from cardboard boxes, on ersatz shelves in no order, and on the sofa, layered three deep, all of which spoke of an uncharacteristic lack of focus, and he picked up the nearest, opened it.
Underlined was, “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him – you and I. All of us are murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea?”
Took in the cover: Nietzsche. Yeah, just what Eli needed now, all that Will to Power nonsense.
And to make matters worse, he was juked on something, his hands trembling. Or he had been.
“You got coffee?” he asked.
Eli dodged into the kitchen, where he filled two heavy porcelain cups, then set them on the table. They kicked back in their chairs, as if at ease. As if Eli hadn’t been hiding.
“What’s with the suitcases?” Buck asked.
Eli shrugged. “Those?”
“No, I meant the elephants. What’d you think?”
Crossing his arms over his chest, Eli scratched his shoulders. Amphetamines. They made you itch. Playing ball on speeders, he’d itched all over.
Eli got up and went to the windows on the far side of the room. A bed sheet had been tacked over them, which the street lights bled through. He lifted the lower left corner of the sheet and looked out, both directions, then raised the window, attending to something.
“Waiting for another pizza?”
“No,” Eli said, and laughed. “Got a baby bird here. Found him in the entry in a pile of leaves. That time of year, you know? And this one bein’ a way too-early-bird, and no worms.”
In his cupped hands, he carried the bird to the table, as if holding a flame that could be snuffed out. The bird peeped, its eyes tiny, bright beads. Christ, he thought. Some things never changed. If injured or needy animals didn’t find Eli, he thought, Eli’d have to go looking for them. Back at the cabin, there’d been the one eyed dog and the three-legged cat. The duck with the broken wing and the turtle with the cracked shell. All of whom he’d nursed back to health and, later, released into the wild.
Some returned to the cabin, so there was always something limping around the yard to be cared for. And here Eli was, fighting for his life, and he’d rescued this bird in the middle of it, a–
But he couldn’t recall the name, and he sat up, his mind a hot, just then terrified, blank.
“Got a light bulb in the box to keep him warm – and food, too. Water,” Eli said, smiling.
He went to the window, carefully set the bird back in the box. Sat at the table, his right eye, the good one, darting, taking Buck in. He feigned punching him and grinned. “Christ,” he said, “you don’t need to look like it’s the end of the world, you know? A little ice on the eye’ll fix me up. And Ruben, he’ll straighten things out, you’ll see.”
“Pikwakokweweshi,” Buck said, and he caught his breath, relieved, as if the very world had reappeared under his feet.
“What?”
“Blue jay,” Buck said and Eli, shaking his head, crossed his arms over his chest and looked away.
It was just too painful, Eli’d said once, to speak the old language. He just would not do it.
In the kitchen, behind him, dishes were piled high in the sink; pots balanced one over the other on the stove. There, too, delivery sandwich boxes. A light fixture, a gray lozenge, hung from a strip of duct tape over the table, and somewhere in the apartment water was running.
Eli squinted at him, tilting his head. He reached up, toward Buck’s ears, fingers outstretched, and Buck caught his hand.
“Don’t,” he said.
“That part of some clown suit, or what’s the deal? What’s with the big ears, brother?”
“Frostbite.”
“Well, I can see that. I mean–”
“Car broke down.” Buck shrugged. “Drivin’ here to the Ritz ‘n’ all.”
“What, you didn’t have a hat?” Eli said, a puzzled look crossing his face, then added, “Look, I’m sorry you came all the way down for nothing,” as if his face weren’t battered almost beyond recognition. As if they weren’t talking around the matter of Ruben.
“Maybe you should have somebody look at those ears?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll just call Dr. Wellby, hey?”
Eli took a sip of his coffee. His face swollen, his usually infectious, winning grin was now an unsettling, piratical leer. He was trying to keep it together, and it was showing.
His heart fell at it, Eli’s desperation.
“Great location we got,” Eli said. “Close to everything. Around the corner there’s The Modern Art. And there’s the Guthrie, and the fairgrounds, and the lakes are nice in the summer.”
Buck grimaced; he hated what was coming. What he had to do. Eli had always been stubborn.
“So,” Eli said, “what are your plans?” As if they’d just take in some sightseeing now.
“Plans?”
The water that was running stopped with a rusty screech of a turned faucet. Whoever was in the apartment would be coming out. He had to do it, and now, he thought and, reaching across the table, as if for his cup, he caught Eli by his braids and yanked his head close, a ball on a tether.
“FUCK!” Eli shouted. “What the – !”
He punched at Buck’s arm, and Buck bore down on him, twisted his head around until their noses were nearly touching.
“Now you listen, and you listen good, you too-wized-up, smart ass little fucker,” he said.
“Let go!”
He shook Eli, and hard. “Cut – the shit, Wabooson.”
“What… shit?!”
“What’s up with Ruben?!”
“God- dammit, let go! And how the hell would I know? And why’n’t you ask him yourself?”
He let go of Eli’s braids, and Eli, glaring, shot back in his chair, affronted, breathing hard.
“You,” he said, and pointed with his finger, “I didn’t ask for you to come down here! I asked you to talk to Ruben. And if you’d just… for once, just once done what I asked, we wouldn’t be fucked up like this.”
“‘Like this’ how?”
“Over Ruben,” Eli shot back.
“Is that what we’re talking about here?”
“No, Jesus-Fucking-Christ himself. Yes, fucking Ruben!”
“Ruben’s dead, Eli,” he said. “He was burned, all over, then blinded and put on the B & N tracks to get hit by the Warroad freight, or so the cops said when they came to me to ask why.”
Eli scratched at himself, huffing, his eyes blinking, trying to contain the disaster it was.
“I asked you to talk to Ruben, not to come down here,” he said, a catch in his voice.
“You already said that.”
“You don’t get it, do you,” Eli replied.
“What don’t I ‘get’?”
“I didn’t want you coming down here. To me, goddammit! Don’t you see what you’ve done?!”
He thought of the rangy character who’d been in the alley. Sure enough, he’d been followed.
“So, I’ve been seen,” he said, “what of it?”
“You don’t fuck with these people,” Eli said. He went to the sink, pulled out a drawer to the left of it, and lifted up a handgun, a .38 revolver. No doubt, Buck thought, the gun Eli’d held behind the door, minutes earlier. Eli grimaced, then set the gun back in the drawer and sat.
“Seriously,” he said, “if they try to come through that door before we’re out of here? I’m ready. So, if I were you, I’d–”
“I’m not you, Eli,” he said. “And I’m not going anywhere, and they’re not coming here, to this–” he was tempted to say hellhole, but didn’t. “–and if you try to run, like Ruben did, you’re dead.
“It’s money, isn’t it? Is that what they want from you? You steal their money with Ruben?”
“If it were just… money,” Eli shot back, his voice shrill, “do you think I’d be here? In this… place?!”
“So, what is it?”
A door opened and a girl’s voice came from inside the apartment. “Eli?” she said, her voice rising.
Eli glared. “You can make this worse, or you can shut up, just for now. Okay? For once, could you not barge into it?”
A girl in a wheel chair, in a turquoise robe and her hair knotted in a matching towel, spun herself to the table. Big, wide-set brown eyes and a full, though crooked, mouth. Here a reservation beauty. A heartbreaker, one with her own agenda, something she wanted, too.
“I interrupt?” she said.
“Jenny, Buck,” Eli replied, motioning to him, “my brother, down from Red Lake. Buck, Genevieve.”
They shook across the width of the table. That Eli hadn’t let her know he was coming said volumes. So, this – Jenny – knew something of what was going on, but not the half of it.
“Was Eli telling you about our wreck?” she asked, a cutting tone in her voice, “just last week?”
“No,” he said.
She spun around the table, then dug in her purse and slapped a photo onto the table. Pinned it there with her index finger. Under her scarlet nail was Eli’s car, a bucket-sized dent in the passenger door.
“It’s in back,” Eli said. “In the alley. Just a hit and run. Some glass and bodywork and it’ll be fine.”
Jenny glared. “Just a ‘hit and run’? I was almost killed, Eli, and look what it did to your face.”
“Come on, Beautiful, we weren’t going to talk about this, remember? You promised.”
“Did I, Sweetheart mine?”
Eli took her hand, gingerly, and she snatched it away, swept up the photo and wheeled down the hallway.
“Awww, come on, Jen!” Eli called after her. “What’s going on at the shop and gettin’ hit, it’s just a coincidence.”
She held up her left hand, the middle finger extended, then spun into their bedroom and slammed the door.
In the corner, the radiator ticked, then let off a plume of steam, hissing, made an iron clank.
Eli went to the drawer with the .38 in it. Stuffed it into the belt at the small of his back.
“Why don’t you… just tell me what you and Ruben’ve gone and gotten mixed up in. It can’t be that bad, can it?” he asked, and Eli, his voice thick with all he needed to say, but couldn’t, replied,
“I’ll do you one better, I’ll show you.”
9
They parked in an alley up the street and across from the Paradise, the engine running and alongside a brick wall, so they couldn’t be seen.
It was shortly before noon, and down from them the street-facing doors of the shop were open, two gaping mouths. Here, off Cedar during business hours, was a hum of activity. Men in mechanics’ overalls passed each other on the sidewalk. A call girl begged a light from a passerby, got her cigarette going, the cigarette like an exclamation in her too-red-mouth, then loitered. At the far end of the block, outside Moby’s, a kid clocked dope. There was a broken logic to it, and in the middle of it all, smack-dead-center, was the Paradise.
He cracked his window open and cool, damp air, smelling of exhaust and wet pavement, spilled into the car.
“Just watch,” Eli said, and jabbed his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose and pointed.
He shifted in his seat, trying to get comfortable, the gun at his back, while up the street business went on as usual, pedestrians threading past one another, all bent slightly in the chill.
“See it yet?” Eli said.
Buck didn’t know what he was supposed to be seeing. At the Paradise, a squat, moon-faced shinob in cobalt-lensed welders’ goggles jockeyed cars from the lot to repair bays.
“Here comes another one,” Eli said.
A car, the fenders different colors and a dream catcher swaying from the rear view, stopped at the dumpster in back, then went up the alley. A res mobile. And with Tonto Town nearby, what of it? Lester, at his desk in the front window, lifted his head. He’d seen the car, too.
He called over his shoulder and a mechanic, tall and bent-looking, in gray overalls, snatched an envelope from him, wove with it to the dumpster, then dodged inside again.
“That’s Cleve, our bondo-man; he does welding, too,” Eli said. “And you met Lester.”
Moments later, another car came up the alley, paused at the dumpster, then rocketed away.
“So, what is it?”
Eli cocked his head to the side, mirroring his, Buck’s, impending comprehension. “I said, ‘Just watch’.”
On the sidewalk, a woman rushed by, a newspaper held over her hair against the rain. It’d begun raining, the rain raking the storefronts and the sidewalks shining, iridescent, and now yet another car came up the alley. It, too, paused at the dumpster, then shot away.
“You in dope?” Buck said.
“You think?”
“So, then… who are they?”
“Accident victims, collecting monthly payouts. They’re all on physical therapy, treatments, tests, rehab, you name it.
“They’re not injured. Or, they’re not supposed to be. So, you figure it out, what do you think?”
Eli bent into the windshield, to peer around the brick building they were parked alongside.
He pointed with his chin to the Paradise. “What’s going on over there is an injury mill.”
“Injury mill?”
“Yeah, generated out of staged accidents.” Eli frowned, his mouth set in a hard line. “You get two drivers,” he said. “And maybe a third – a… sidewinder – to keep your mark, the driver you’re after, pinned into his lane. Look–” Eli said, and lifted his hands, one trailing the other. “Lester’s guy, the swoop, gets out in front of the mark. The mark’s the guy you’re after. The squat, the second car, pulls in between, cozies up to the mark, his bumper to the mark’s grill–” Eli stopped his left hand, brought his right hand up behind it “–and the guy in front, the swoop, he lays on his brakes and Lester’s squat jams on his, and since the mark’s tailgating, you have a guaranteed chain reaction big time rear-ender.” Eli slapped his hands together. “POW! The mark hits the squat, and the swoop, who’s caused the whole thing, he’s long gone.
“And it’s always the fault of the vehicle hitting from behind, right? So, the mark’s fault. The cops show, get it all on paper.”
“And then?”
“Then?” Eli laughed. “You have a bunch of shinobs in your squat, say, a pregnant… squaw, one with six screamin’ kids all sayin’ they’re injured, whiplash, and migraines, and blackouts – ‘n’ they’re not even her kids, but who knows that? Or, you got some… breadwinner with a family of six, and the ambulance runs ‘em off to a clinic….”
He felt himself frowning. “So, it’s not about the cars.”
“No,” Eli said, “it’s in the insurance, and, sure, Lester uses the wrecks for Vehicle Identification Numbers for the cars he steals; or he rehabs wrecks from his staged accidents, after the insurance companies write them off, sells ‘em for top buck at auctions. Overnight, a big Mercedes, Lincoln, or Cadillac’ll net you… thirty, forty thousand dollars. But the big money – the real money – that’s in the insurance, and in the lawsuits.
“This here? With the cars? This is just… chicken shit.”
Lester, as if he were aware he was being watched, leaned into the office window. His was a lean face, his cheeks hollowed, feral. His eyes raked the street, fixing on something, then not.
Had he seen them? Buck thought. And if so, then what? Or, did Eli want them to be seen?
“So, what’s in it for Lester?” he asked, “if this here is all so much chicken shit, why take the risk?”
“Six figure kickbacks, as the stager,” Eli said. “Your mark? He’s carrying a five million dollar liability. Maybe more. And there’re trucks. They’re the most dangerous, but the biggest money. You got… sometimes… fifty million or more in coverage for an eighteen wheeler.
“It’s the doctors who rake it in, on procedures they don’t perform on fake injured patients.
“And the lawyers? It’s a gold mine for them, too. But the ‘hands dirty’ part? That gets done… right- from- here.”
