Justice (2 page)

“The hell.”

“I'm telling you.”

Lester punched Tommy in the shoulder. “Now who's telling stories.”

Tommy cocked his fist but didn't deliver a blow. “Goddamn it!”

“That's right,” said Frank. “I didn't just fuck that little squaw.... I fucked her mama too.”

Tommy fell back laughing. He kicked the back of the seat so hard Wesley could feel Tommy's boots right through the springs and the horsehair.

“No shit?” said Lester. “The both of them? How did you.... Did you do ‘em at the same time?”

“At the same time, Lester? Fellow would have to have two peckers to do that. Besides, no mama and her daughter are that close.”

“What did the old one look like?” Tommy wanted to know.

“She wasn't old. She was actually pretty young to have a daughter that age.” Frank took one hand off the steering wheel and rested it on the gearshift. “She wasn't bad looking. But she was on the plump side. Like squaws can get.”

“Jesus,” said Tommy. “The both of them.”

“It wasn't easy. Cost me three bottles of Ole Norgaard's homemade wine. One for the daugher, two for her mama.”

When Wesley heard that he remembered a day the previous summer when he and his brother had ridden with their mother out to Ole Norgaard's place, a little tarpaper shack just outside Bentrock. Ole, everyone agreed, had a gift for growing fruits and vegetables, and even people who had their own gardens bought produce from Ole. He also made homemade beer and wine, and a good many men in the county swore on the superiority of Ole's products. Once Prohibition went into effect, their father made no effort to close down Ole. Furthermore, if any local man wanted to make a little home brew or buy a couple bottles of gin when he was in Minneapolis and bring it home with him, the sheriff would not object. However, if an outsider tried to come into the county and operate a still or if someone began to run large quantities of bootleg whiskey down from Canada, the sheriff would stop that in a minute. He did not object to a man taking a drink—
he was as fond of Ole Norgaard's beer as anyone—but he would not tolerate an outsider making a profit on the county's residents.

On that day, Frank and Wesley waited by the car while their mother went out to Ole's garden with him. Ole allowed his best customers—and certainly Mrs. Hayden qualified—to pick out their vegetables while they were still on the vine or the stalk or in the ground. Mrs. Hayden had come for sweet corn, and Ole would find a dozen of the best ears for her.

Once they were certain they weren't being watched, Frank and Wesley went inside Ole's shack. The interior was dim, musty, and cluttered with piles of yellowing Swedish newspapers, rows of ripening vegetables, and stacks of wooden crates. The boys knew exactly what they were looking for and found it quickly—the case of bottles of dandelion wine, their corks covered with sealing wax. Frank and Wesley each took two bottles—they had agreed that taking more would somehow escalate their crime into something that would deserve severe punishment if they were caught.

Weeks passed and no occasion arose that Wesley considered fitting to bring out his bottles of wine. Then the baseball team—of which his brother was the star—went to McCoy, North Dakota, to play in a tournament. While the team was gone, Wesley, on a hunch, checked his cache to see if the bottles were still there. They were gone. Now he knew what his brother had done with the wine.

Wesley Hayden had never even kissed a girl, unless you counted the quick little brush on the lips Esther Radner gave him at a skating party last winter. And Wesley discounted that
incident, since Esther had kissed virtually every male at the party as part of an experiment she said she was conducting to see whose lips were coldest. Wesley was shy around girls, and in their presence being tongue-tied sometimes translated into what looked like anger. On more than one occasion a boy or girl came to him saying something like “Rebecca wants to know why you're mad at her.” Ironically, Rebecca was probably the last person in the world he was mad at—why, he was as likely to be in love with her! Yet somehow in his ineptitude he would communicate exactly the opposite message.

Part of the problem was that he couldn't decide what he wanted girls for. It could change within a day, an hour, a minute. One instant he could regard them as helpless creatures who needed his strength and protection. Around them you had to put on your best manners, your most chivalrous attitude. When he thought of girls in this way he wanted only to be with them, to walk down the streets of Bentrock with one of the pretty girls from his school on his arm. Yet in the next second he might think of performing the most obscene, degrading act with this very girl—she would have no more humanity or identity than the hand with which he masturbated daily.

That was why he was so angry to hear Frank's story of the two Indians in McCoy. Damn it, Wesley thought, the wine was his, so the Indian girl should have been as well. The situation was perfect for him. He would have been in a strange community where he knew no one, and no one knew him. He could not have damaged his reputation there, because he had none. And he would not have to worry about facing the girl again.

But in his heart Wesley knew he was deceiving himself. The wine may have been Wesley's, but the audacity to barter it for sex was Frank's. In fact, the incident illustrated perfectly the difference between the brothers. Frank had put that stolen wine to use; Wesely could not think of a reason to take his bottles out of hiding. Wesley hated and loved his brother for being everything that Wesley could never be.

“So let's not be too quick to get into that hooch,” Frank announced to the group. “You never know what we might be able to buy with it.”

“We ain't going to get a taste?” Lester asked.

Tommy punched Lester again on the arm. “What would you rather have—a piece of ass or a drink of whiskey?”

Wesley turned around in time to see Lester hang his tongue from his mouth.

Tommy took his cigar from his mouth and said quietly to the Hayden brothers, “You know, I don't care anymore if I don't get off a shot this weekend. This is turning into my kind of hunting trip.”

Tommy fell back against the backseat, and Frank looked over at his brother and rolled his eyes toward the roof of the car. Wesley pretended not to see his brother's gesture and turned quickly to the window.

Was the snow letting up? Wesley had been gauging its intensity all day by looking at the snow against a dark background, an occasional tree trunk or telephone pole or fence post, and as the snow came down harder it became harder to see any sharp, dark outlines. But now his vision seemed to clear slightly. Maybe the snow would stop or let
up enough to let them spend these days as they had originally planned.

In his bedroom, tucked into the frame of his mirror, Wesley had a photograph taken on this trip two years earlier: Wesley, Frank, their father, Len McAuley, their father's deputy, and Arnold Spence, a friend of their father's, are standing in front of the camp tent. They are dressed in hunting gear, and since they have been gone for a few days their clothes are rumpled and dirty. The adults have three days' growth of beard. They are all holding rifles in their gloved hands, and they are smiling widely. They are standing next to four freshly killed deer. The deer—two of them with impressive racks of antlers—are strung up from a tree limb. Their heads are tilted to the sky at such strange angles it looks as though they have been hanged to death. A dusting of snow covers the ground, and you can tell by the expressions on the men's faces——their smiles are tight, their noses and cheeks are a darker gray in the photograph—that the day is cold. You can also tell that not a single one of them would rather be anywhere else in the world. Wesley had hoped that he would be able to take a similar photograph to commemorate this trip. He doubted now if he would even unpack his gun, much less his camera.

They drove into McCoy in early afternoon. The snow had subsided, but, as if to support their decision to stop, the wind
had increased, clearing the highway of snow in one place and then piling it high with drifts in another. As the snow whipped across the road, the asphalt itself appeared and disappeared under those rolling, waving, ghostly snakes.

They parked in front of the Overland Hotel, a square two-story building of unevenly laid reddish orange brick. Two rows of windows, unnaturally small for the building's size, stared down at the snowy street.

The old woman at the desk regarded the boys suspiciously when they came in. She was short and squat and had tiny dark eyes. The blanket she kept wrapped around her shoulders like a shawl dragged on the floor as she moved around behind the desk. She gave them the key to a room but warned them, “You boys. I got other guests. Make trouble and you go.” Her accent was thick, Germanic.

Frank asked her, “Where should we put the car?”

“Where you got it now?”

“Out in front.”

“What's the matter with there?”

Their second-floor room had a bed with an iron bedstead, a dresser with a porcelain pitcher and washbowl, a straightbacked chair, and a small table beside the bed. Over the bed hung a small framed picture of the Last Supper that looked as though it had been cut from a magazine. The window shade was up and the lace curtains tied back, but the window looked out on nothing but a snowy field.

Lester lifted the hem of the chenille bedspread and peered under the bed. “Is there a slop bucket or somethin'? As long as
there isn't a biffy.”

Wesley recalled that Lester's family did not have indoor plumbing.

“Bathroom's down the hall,” Frank said.

Tommy pointed at Lester and laughed. “You never stayed in a hotel before, have you?”

“What the hell for?” Lester answered angrily. With his boot he shoved his canvas duffle against the wall. “Don't bother me to sleep outside. I'll do it tonight if you like.”

“Nobody has to sleep outside,” said Frank. “But we do have to set up a plan.”

Tommy bounced up and down on the edge of the bed, making the springs whine. “What kind of plan?”

“Let's say one of us wants to bring a guest up here,” Frank explained. “The others are going to have to clear out for a spell.”

“A guest?” asked Lester.

Wesley felt sorry for Lester. He stood in the middle of the room, still wearing his coat with the dirty matted sheepskin lining and with the earflaps on his fraying wool cap tied down. Lester was the most skilled outdoorsman of the group, a crack shot with a rifle and a shotgun and a fisherman who could land a cast within inches of a lily pad. If they brought down a deer Lester would be invaluable; he could field dress a deer with a speed and efficiency that a butcher might envy. Yet if a tree were growing up through the floor of the hotel room it would not look more out of place in these surroundings than Lester.

Tommy stopped bouncing on the bed. He looked up at Lester. “You know, you're so fucking dumb sometimes it
hurts. You know that—it
hurts
.”

Lester looked to Frank like a dog appealing to its master.

“If one of us gets a girl,” Frank said slowly, “we've got to have a plan so he can have the room to himself.”

“If he wants to keep her to himself,” said Tommy.

Lester snorted. “You ain't too cocky, are you. Where the hell you going to find you a girl?”

Tommy started bouncing on the bed again. “You know her name, don't you,” he said to Frank. “Goddamn. You know her name!”

Frank shrugged his shoulders. “I remember her first name. That's all.”

With a bound Tommy was off the bed and at Frank's side. “Come on. Get her over here. Her and her mama both. We'll have us some red meat for supper.”

Frank shoved Tommy aside. “You wouldn't know what to do with it.”

Tommy put his head and shoulders down like a football lineman and pretended to run into Frank. He stopped his charge short and came up grinning. “You try me. Get her up here. Try me.”

“Get your own.”

Lester was searching through the pile of duffels and packs. “Where's those fucking cigars.” He came up with one in his mouth. “You're going to look for girls. Don't make me laugh. You ain't going to find any. In the meantime we ain't supposed to get into that liquor. Shit. We'll end up taking it back home. Three days and I won't get off a shot or pull a cork.
Shit.”

Wesley suddenly felt ill. After those long hours in the cold car the hotel's warmth was too much for him. There didn't seem to be enough air, and he couldn't take a deep breath because of the strong smell of camphor in the room. He tried moving away from the chest of drawers but the odor followed him. He knew he wouldn't be able to take the smell of Lester's cigar.