Eve's Men (11 page)

“Just the obvious, that’s all. Belinda and I went our separate ways. Some movie guy I don’t know invited us to a party, and naturally Belinda wanted to go, being young and vital instead of a middle-aged old fuck like me. So she left, and I came on home alone.”

Charley sat there staring at his brother, wondering how on earth he could look so satisfied and carefree, as if Chester wouldn’t eventually learn the truth anyway, if not from Belinda, then from someone else who had seen the two of them leave together. And of course Chester would then have it in for Brian all the more, not just for what he had let happen to Belinda but also for having conned him, for having made a fool of him.

But before Charley could say any of this, the waitress served Brian’s breakfast: wheatcakes, sausages, scrambled eggs, and another glass of orange juice. Charley and Eve ordered only coffee and juice. After the woman left, Eve commented on her lover’s plate.

“I guess lying makes for a good appetite.”

Brian smiled. “Oh, I don’t think I’d call it lying, babe. Creative misinformation maybe. Say, the judicious application of creative misinformation.”

“Sounds impressive,” Charley said. “And when Chester finally learns the truth, he’ll probably give you a lesson in the judicious application of creative gunfire.”

Brian laughed. “Boy, you two are a couple of real crepe hangers. Aren’t things bad enough without magnifying this thing with Chester? For Christ’s sake, I’m out on bail for a couple of felonies, Belinda will probably never be the same, thanks to us, and fucking Damian Jolly is still going ahead with his lying movie. To me, that’s sufficient bad news for the day.”

“You’ve got a point,” Eve said.

Charley did not agree. In his mind, the fact that things were already bad enough didn’t make this new problem any less important. But he said nothing for a time. Outside, the pool had been opened and three preteen boys, all towheads, had begun a frenzy of diving, cannonballing, and belly flopping, trying to impress a sunbathing teenage girl in a bikini. Judging by her total indifference so far, Charley didn’t think much of their chances. At the same time, he couldn’t help noticing that his brother’s behavior was comparably unrealistic, or at least, odd. Time and again, as Brian worked at his huge breakfast, he would start to smile for no apparent reason and then just as suddenly turn it off. Finally Charley asked him about it.

“Just what the hell’s eating you?”

“Eating me?”

“Yes, what’s going on?”

“I haven’t the vaguest what you mean, Charley.”

“You look like you ate a goddamn canary.”

Brian touched the corners of his mouth. “Little yellow feathers give me away, did they?”

“Don’t be cute.”

Eve too had noticed. “You do seem kind of hyper this morning. Why? Because Chester bought your story?”

Brian shrugged. “I guess something like that.”

“What like that?” Charley asked.

Brian didn’t answer immediately. He pushed his food away and sat back, smiling an odd roguish smile made doubly odd by the fact that his eyes had filled with tears. “Christ, what a mess this thing is,” he said finally. “What a stinking, unbelievable mess.”

“Brian, what is it you’re not telling us?” Eve said.

He burlesqued a look of consternation. “What could it be, I wonder. That I’m an asshole? No, because I’m sure you both are already aware of that.” He ran his hands back through his hair, gripping his skull as if to keep it from exploding. “Even when we were kids, right, Charley? And I mean
little
kids. Remember how I could never resist a dare? Some wise guy tells us not to skate on thin ice, I had to zip on out there, right? Jump off a roof? Pick a fight with a gang of black kids? Shit, no problem. Not for crazy Brian Poole, right?”

Charley patiently sipped at his coffee. “Yeah, you were always a caution.”

“We’re waiting,” Eve said. “What the hell has happened? What’ve you done now?”

He repeated her words. “Yes, what have I done now? What in God’s name has the asshole done this time? Well, let me think.” He frowned deeply for a few moments, then grinned in relief. “Ah yes, it comes back to me now, like a haunting refrain. But it’s nothing, really. A bagatelle.”

“We’re waiting,” Eve repeated.

“Waiting for very little, as it turns out. Really, it’s no big deal. It’s just that, in misinforming Chester, I guess I was a bit more specific than I indicated earlier. You might even say I didn’t misdirect him—I
pointed
him.”

“Pointed him where?” Eve asked. “At who?”

Charley was afraid he knew. “At Damian Jolly, right?”

Brian shot him with his finger. “Bingo! Give the man in the pink eyes a kewpie doll.”

Eve didn’t want to believe him. “Oh, you couldn’t have, Brian. You couldn’t have been that stupid.”

“Afraid so,” he said.

“Knowing the mess you’re already in?”

“Knowing that.”

Eve turned to Charley, as if she expected him to explain his brother. But he begged off.

“Don’t look at me. He’s the one with the answers.”

“I can’t even figure out
how
, “she said, turning back to Brian. “How on earth could you rope a gay man like Jolly into this thing?”

“No problem. Didn’t you know that the worst queers like girls too? No? Well, Chester knows it. Now he does, anyway. Beyond that, though, the story I gave Chester was basically just what I told you—that someone who saw us at the Purple Sage last night called and told me about the accident. Only difference is I gave that person a name—Jolly’s angel, Rick.”

Charley already had a pretty good idea what else Brian had told Chester. Nevertheless he sat there patiently listening as his brother spread it out for them.

“Yeah, it seems Rick came up to our table again after you two and Chester left, and he invited Belinda and me up to the house for one of Jolly’s notorious little orgies—you know, the kind where sexy young girls like Belinda get ravaged after being pumped full of drugs and promises. Naturally I didn’t want to go, but Belinda did. Trotted right off with Rick, she did.”

“And Chester bought it?” Eve said. “My God, Rick came over to our table. Certainly Chester knew Rick wasn’t in the market for females.”

Brian was patient with her. “Well, as Chester understands it, Rick simply does what he’s told. And since Damian swings both ways, sometimes Rick has to perform as a kind of roper—one of Jolly’s eunuchs who go out and round up girls for the old lech. And come to think of it, I might even have mentioned where the great director’s house is. Yes, I think I probably did.”

“Which still doesn’t tell us
why
,” Eve said.

“You mean why do it in the first place? Why sic Chester on Jolly? That ought to be obvious—to get even for yesterday. To give Jolly as much hassle as I possibly can.”

“And it never occurred to you that it would all come right back on us?” Eve said. “No matter how much hassle you cause him, you cause yourself more. The police will want to know where Chester got his information, and—”

“The
police!
” Charley cut in, having finally heard all he cared to. “And
hassle!
Just what do you two think Chester Einhorn is anyway, some middle-American suburbanite who eats quiche and calls in the police when he’s got a problem? Didn’t you hear him last night?” Already getting up out of the booth, Charley looked at his brother with curiosity more than anger. “Those guns in his truck, what’d you think they were there for? Show?”

Brian shrugged. “What guns?”

“In his pickup,” Eve said. “That’s right. I saw them this morning.”

Brian threw up his hands in mock amazement. “Wow, this is shocking—a country boy with a gun rack in his pickup. What’s the world coming to?”

“Where was he when you last saw him?” Charley asked.

“In his truck,” Eve said. “He was leaving the hospital parking lot.”

“Do you know where he was going?”

“Back to his motel, I think,” Brian said. “He had to phone his family about Belinda, and I think he didn’t want to do it from the hospital. Pay phones scare him, I gather.”

Charley drained the last of his coffee. “You sure he wasn’t on his way up to Jolly’s?”

Brian looked out at the pool, away from his brother’s searching gaze. “Who knows? He didn’t really say. But I can tell you this. If he did go up there, it wouldn’t be to shoot the bastard.”

“What then? Punch him out? Hundred-and-thirty pound Chester Einhorn is going up there and brawl with Jolly and his angels? Or maybe, with his great gift for language, maybe Chester would prefer to remonstrate with them. Beat them down with words. That what you think?”

“Could be,” Brian said. “It’s a helluva lot more likely, I’d say, than that he’d go up there with murder on his mind.”

Charley knew that Brian was probably right. It was one thing to advocate reliance on firearms over government, but quite another to take your gun in hand and exact personal justice. The consequences tended to be dire. Still, there was this problem Charley had when it came to small Ozark men with guns. A problem born of experience.

“You’re probably right,” he said now, getting up and dropping a ten on the table. “But just to be on the safe side, I think I’ll drive up there and have a look.”

Brian got out his keys and tossed them to Charley. “Then you better take my truck. Remember, the road gets pretty hairy near the top.”

Eve scooted out of the booth after Charley. “Well, I think I’d better go along. If we run into Rick or Jolly, I’m not sure they’re ready for another tête-à-tête with one of the Poole brothers.”

Brian didn’t move from his corner of the booth. “Have fun,” he said.

In the sixties, when Charley and Brian were still in their teens, they had spent a week or two each summer at the southwest Missouri hobby farm of their mother’s sister, Aunt Sarah, and her ex-Air Force husband Randall Hoag. The Hoags’ house sat on a lovely, leafy hilltop that on its easterly side looked down on the squalid farm of Smiley Moon, a part-time auctioneer, marijuana grower, and livestock thief.

In his favor, Moon had three teenage boys who each summer locked onto Charley and Brian as if they were their long-lost cousins and taught them the lore of the Ozarks: how to hunt, fish, trap, steal, and swim naked. For Charley, though, it was not the good times with the boys he remembered as much as the bad times with their peppy, wisecracking father, who liked to beat his sons with ropes, chains, cattle canes, whatever was handy. More gentle with his wife, he usually hit her only with his hand, sometimes open, sometimes not.

The one thing Smiley Moon cared for was guns. He loved to buy and steal them, and he loved to polish them and show them off. And above all, he loved to fire them. Charley would not soon forget the day Smiley came home with a new assault rifle and decided that there were just too many dogs around the place, both strays and pets. Smiling happily, wandering among his ramshackle buildings, he hunted down and killed four dogs in all, including Orville, the boys’ ten-year-old border collie.

“Don’t fret it,” he advised. “Old dog like thet, he’s better off dead, he really is.”

On another occasion, driving the boys to the swimming hole, Smiley stopped the truck and shot a full-grown bald eagle out of a distant tree as if he were plinking a varmint. But his real claim to fame was that he once had shot and killed a local cattle dealer who foolishly sold him a “banger,” a cow with deadly brucellosis. Since the disease could wipe out a rancher’s herd—if he’d
had a
herd, which Smiley did not—and since no one really wanted to cross the defendant, the jury decided that it was a case of justifiable homicide.

So Charley had a problem when it came to small Ozark men with guns. Evidently, though, it was a problem with its comical side, for he became aware now that Eve was looking at him and smiling, in amusement.

“What is it?” he asked. “Do I have a fly on my nose?”

“Oh, I don’t know—you look so grim. Do you really expect Chester to come up here gunning for Jolly?”

“If I didn’t think it was possible, I wouldn’t have bothered.”

Eve shrugged. “
Possible
, okay. I can buy that. But listen, if we don’t see any sign of him, we just let it go, okay? No warning to Jolly. No explanations or anything like that.”

“In other words, you want to keep Brian’s name out of it.”

“Well, sure. Don’t you? If Chester hasn’t done anything yet, Brian can still fix things, can’t he? Just tell Chester the truth. Brian can do that at least. We’ll make him do it.”

Charley had his doubts. He knew from long experience his brother’s gift for procrastination and dissembling. Still, he also knew he had to agree.

“You’ve got it,” he said.

Eve smiled again. And he realized now that she was sitting as far from him as she could get, leaning back against the passenger door, her arm resting on the window sill, a cigarette burning in her hand. Whenever she dragged, she would turn her head and exhale out the window.