Chump Change (10 page)

The older woman closed and locked the door. Turned out the
CLOSED
sign.

She looked over at Keith and me. “My daughter’s ex,” she said apologetically. “We got a restraining order out against him, but every time he gets oiled up, he comes round and starts bothering her again.”

An uncomfortable minute passed. No more yelling from the street. I figured things had settled down, so I forked the last of my scrambled eggs into my mouth. I had em about half-chewed when a commotion broke out back in the kitchen. The bang of a door, raised voices, shouts in Spanish, rising above the clatter of pots and pans, in the second before the kitchen door swung open and what hadda be Boyd stumbled into the dining room.

He was skinny as a rail and about as attractive. Twenty-five or so, maybe six-two, wearing the uniform of the day: plaid flannel shirt over a T-shirt, jeans, and dirty green John Deere hat sitting crooked on his head. Looked like he’d first needed a haircut about a month ago.

“You get the hell outta here, Boyd,” the younger woman said.

The older woman tried to step into his path, but he swept her aside and started across the room toward his ex. “Goddammit, Boyd . . . you . . .” she shouted at his back.

I’d already dropped my fork and was levering myself out of the seat when Boyd grabbed the young woman by the arm. She grimaced in pain.

“Oooooow . . . you’re
hurting
me, Boyd,” she said.

Wasn’t rocket science. This was one of those situations where you couldn’t just sit there and wait for this little soap opera to play out. Lord knew, after that Clarkston cop this morning, I wasn’t looking for any more drama, but there was no way I could let this continue. I started to move.

Turned out my help wasn’t needed, though. By the time I slid my big ass out of the booth, Keith was already over there. “Let her go,” he said to the guy. Without waiting for Boyd to comply, Keith judo-chopped the hand from her arm.

Boyd’s face contorted; he took a step back, massaging his wrist. He looked over at the girl, his face fierce and furrowed. “This your new man? This him?”

“Get out,” Keith said.

“Grow up, Boyd,” the girl added, as she rubbed the place on her arm where he’d grabbed her.

Apparently Boyd was a bit sensitive regarding his level of maturity. Without further ado, he reared back and aimed an ill-intentioned right cross at Keith’s face, a move that was, as it turned out, a remarkably stupid idea. To my complete surprise, Keith slipped the punch, grabbed the arm as it flew by, and jujutsued our boy Boyd facedown on the floor in about a second and a half.

He had Boyd’s right arm pushed further up between his shoulder blades than it was ever intended to go. Boyd was paralyzed. “Oh . . . oh,” he
groaned. “You’re breaking my arm, man.” Every time he squirmed, Keith pushed the arm up another notch. Boyd, dumb as he was, got the message and stayed still.

Keith kept him that way until the cops arrived about four minutes later and hauled Boyd out the door in handcuffs. You could tell from the cops’ bemused demeanor that arresting Boyd was a regular occurrence.

Keith dusted off his hands and sat down across from me.

“Where’d you learn that?” I asked.

“Air Force MPs,” he said. “They sent us through a self-defense course at the Shore Patrol Academy.”

“Wow,” I said. “I’m impressed.”

He shrugged. “You get a lot of practice handling drunks,” he explained. “It’s mostly all we did.” He went back to communing with his shredded wheat.

I pushed my plate away from me and ran both hands over my belly.

Keith looked up from his cereal and grinned. “If you sit real still,” he said, “you can actually hear your arteries closing.”

What would have undoubtedly been an incisive retort was interrupted by the arrival of our waitress.

“Breakfast’s on us, fellas,” she announced.

I started the obligatory protest, but she waved me off.

“Sorry you had to see that. Boyd may be a regular occurrence to us, but there’s no reason he’s got to spoil anybody else’s breakfast.”

“Didn’t spoil mine,” I assured her.

She checked out my empty plate and smiled.

The daughter was still massaging the sore spot on her arm when she arrived tableside. She was long-limbed and lithe, but otherwise pretty much a younger version of her mother, who introduced herself as Irene Coulter and the girl as her daughter, Virginia.

A couple of loose tears had spoiled the girl’s mascara, giving her that winsome, waiflike quality of bad art. “Hey, thank you two so much,” she said.

I shook my head, and jerked a thumb at the kid. “Not me. Him.”

She leaned out over the table. She smelled of strawberries as she spoke directly to Keith, who was using his spoon to play Spanish Armada with the few remaining shards of shredded wheat. “Thanks for helping out there . . . er . . .”

He looked up as though he’d only just noticed she was there. Which might’ve worked, if he hadn’t been blushing like a middle-schooler. “Keith,” he said. “Keith Taylor.”

The chemistry between them was forming waves in my water glass.

“Well, thank you, Keith Taylor,” she said with a smile. “I’m Ginny Coulter. Boyd seems to be having a hard time coping with adulthood.”

“And damn near everything else,” her mother muttered.

Ginny straightened up. “Momma never liked him,” she said. “Not from the beginning.” She shrugged. “What can I say? He said he was gonna join the Air Force. I figured anything was better than being stuck in this town for the rest of my life.”

“Till the Air Force wouldn’t take him and he started beatin on you,” Irene added.

The girl looked away, annoyed. We were in the middle of a long-term bone of contention between mother and daughter, and it wasn’t someplace I wanted to be, so I changed the subject.

“We’re looking for something called The Flying H Ranch.” I gestured with my fork. “Somewhere up north, on the other side of the river.”

“Sure,” Irene said. “Over by where the town of Silcott used to be.”

“Used to be?”

“First fruit orchards in the state of Washington were planted there,” she said. “Then they built the dam, and most of the place went under water. Nothin left out there but the Chief Timothy Recreation Area and The Flying H. The Hardvigsens. Olley and Sarah Jane. Good people.” She started to add something, but stopped herself.

“What?” I prodded.

“Long story,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You’ve already gotten more than your fill of our local color, I’m sure.”

“From where I sit, the local color’s just fine,” I said with a grin.

She blushed and looked away.

“You were saying about the Hardvigsens?” I asked.

“They’re the last holdouts,” she said.

“To what?”

“The almighty Keeler Group,” she said with a sneer.

“What’s The Keeler Group?”

“Buncha local hotshots and wheeler-dealers put together a syndicate,” Irene said disgustedly. “They’re trying to build a big fly-in resort/casino up between the two reservations. Over on the west side of the Snake.”

“And the Hardvigsens won’t sell out,” Ginny added. “Everybody’s all worked up about it. Say they’re holdin back progress. Keepin the town down.”

“Why’s that?” Keith asked.

Mom sighed. “Keeler’s promising hundreds of jobs, and if there’s anything this town needs it’s more jobs.” She rolled her eyes. “Wouldn’t have so many idiots like Boyd hanging around with too much time on their hands if we had a way for them to earn a decent living.”

“Who’s this Keeler guy?” I asked.

“There’s no Keeler,” Irene said disgustedly. “At least not anymore. Bobby Keeler was an old-time mayor of Lewiston . . . way back in the fifties. Really beloved by a lot of local people. They just co-opted his name for this half-assed project of theirs.”

“And the Hardvigsens are the only ones against the idea?”

“Other than the Indians.”

“What Indians are those?” Keith asked.

“Coeur d’Alenes to the north and the Nez Perce to the south. Nez Perce really didn’t like it. Spent what hadda be millions fighting the project in court. They got their own casinos and resorts, so they hate the idea of anybody horning in on their business. Specially a bunch of fat-ass white guys,” she said with an ironic grin. “You know . . . since that’s who cheated them out of the land in the first place.”

“No sense of humor, those folks,” I said.

Irene laughed out loud.

“Why does Keeler need the Hardvigsen place?” I asked. “Lewiston’s got an airport. I saw it on the map.”

“
Cause The Flying H is over on the Washington side of the border. If they land over here in Idaho, they not only gotta bus em ten or twelve miles over to the casino, but they become subject to taxes in both states. They claim the whole thing isn’t profitable if they got both states gouging em.”

One of the Mexican guys poked his head out of the kitchen. He fired off a volley in Spanish. Mom nodded. “
Un momento
,” she said.

She looked over at her daughter. “Dishes ain’t gonna do themselves.”

Ginny heaved a sigh. Then sulked across the room, stiff-armed the kitchen door open, and disappeared inside.

Keith’s eyes followed her all the way.

Irene was right. You couldn’t miss it. All you had to do was cross the river and then get yourself onto U.S. Route 93. The Flying H was easy to find because it was the only damn thing out there. The odometer read 8.7 miles out of Clarkston, and we hadn’t passed so much as a prairie dog when the ranch gate finally came into view.

Looked like it had been cut out of a single piece of half-inch steel by somebody who really knew what they were doing. Cutout of the state of Washington in the middle. The Flying H Ranch on top. And the year 1891 down at the bottom.
NO TRESPASSING
sign tacked to the nearest fence post.

I turned the Blazer under the gate and started up the rocky track. A thin film of dust clung to the air, as if someone had come this way in the not-too-distant past. Gravel pinged against the underside as we rolled along.

If the map could be believed, we were rolling across the northernmost section of the Intermontane Plateau. An arid no-man’s-land nestled between the North Cascades and the Rocky Mountains. In all directions, the horizon bristled with craggy peaks, most of them snowcapped, a few bare and black in the morning light.

Keith hadn’t uttered a syllable since we’d left Lewiston. Been sitting over there in the passenger seat, chewing his lip, lost in his own thoughts.

“Pretty girl,” I tried.

For a second, I thought he was going to try the old “What girl?” routine on me. Instead, he nodded and made a wry face. “Yeah,” he said, “. . . she was. Can’t believe she was married to that hoople.”

“Small towns,” I said, philosophically. “Limited choices.”

“That’s why you get the hell out as soon as you can,” he said.

Out in front of the Blazer, the quality of light had changed. It was like when you get close to the ocean, and somehow your senses pick up on some inarticulate property of light, and you intuitively know that the familiar world is about to end, and something new and different is about to enter the picture.

Half a mile and a long, sweeping left-hand turn later, a big grove of leafless trees appeared on the horizon. Another half a mile and I could see the old house nestled under the bare, black branches.

The ground was falling away from us now, moving perceptibly downhill as we approached the house. I eased off the gas, so’s not to arrive in the proverbial cloud of dust. Country folk hate it when you do that.

Three huge barns stood sentry across the back of the house, shielding it from the relentless north wind. What looked like a hay baler under repair filled the south end of the yard. A red Dodge pickup truck sat directly in front of the arbor that served as a gate to the yard.

Three men and a woman appeared to be involved in a heated conversation as we pulled up. Fingers were being pointed, chests were being tapped. Even from a distance, I could feel the anger in the air.

As I shut down the Blazer, Keith popped his seat belt and looked over at me.

“Is it just me, Leo, or does it seem like trouble is following us around?” he asked.

“Might just be the other way,” I allowed as we stepped out of the car.

I could hear them now. The one with the white hair and the suit jacket was yelling at the old lady. He was maybe sixty. Trim and sporting a hundred-dollar haircut.

“You can’t do this anymore!” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “That damn baler is right where it was two weeks ago. You two can’t do this on your own. You’re just too damn old.”

On Suit Jacket’s left, standing by the passenger door of the pickup, was what had to be the muscle. Little short fireplug of a guy with a ponytail halfway down his back. Native American. Thick like an upright freezer. His narrow eyes tracked our approach.

The old lady looked to be made of tanned leather and sinew, and she was having none of it. “Maybe so,” she fired back. “Then we’ll die out here and be damned happy to do it . . . long as we die on our own damned land.”