Native Tongue (27 page)

When Joe Winder caught his breath, he said: “I work for Mr. Kingsbury. He owns this land.”

“Ain’t the name on the permit. The permit says Ramex Global.”

The other driver spoke up: “Anyway, who gives a shit about some goddamn wolves?”

“Yeah,” the first driver said. “Bury ’em.”

“No,” said Joe Winder. They weren’t wolves, they were gray foxes—six of them, no larger than kittens. The bulldozers had uprooted the den tree. Half-blind, the little ones were crawling all over each other, squeaking and yapping in toothless panic.

Winder said, “If we leave them alone, the mother will probably come back.”

“What is this, ’Wild Kingdom?”

“At least help me move them out of the way.”

“Forget it,” the smartass driver said. “I ain’t in the mood for rabies. Come on, Bobby, let’s roll it.”

The men climbed back in the dozers and seized the gear sticks. Instinctively Joe Winder positioned himself between the large machines and the baby foxes. The drivers began to holler and curse. The smartass lowered the blade of his bulldozer and inched forward, pushing a ridge of moist dirt over the tops of Joe Winder’s shoes. The driver grinned and whooped at his own cleverness until he noticed the gun pointed up at his head.

He quickly turned off the engine and raised his hands. The other driver did the same. In a scratchy whine he said, “Geez, what’s your problem?”

Winder held the semiautomatic steady. He was surprised at how natural it felt. He said, “Is this what it takes to have a civilized conversation with you shitheads?”

Quickly he checked over his shoulder to make sure the kits hadn’t crawled from the den. The outlandishness of the situation was apparent, but he’d committed himself to melodrama. With the gun on display, he was already deep into felony territory.

The smartass driver apologized profusely for burying Winder’s shoes. “I’ll buy you some new ones,” he offered.

“Oh, that’s not necessary.” Winder yearned to shoot the bulldozers but he didn’t know where to begin; the heavy steel thoraxes looked impervious to cannon fire.

The lazy driver said: “You want us to get down?”

“Not just yet,” said Joe Winder, “I’m thinking.”

“Hey, there’s no need to shoot. Jut tell us what the hell you want.”

“I want you to help me fuck up these machines.”

It was nine o’clock when the knock came. Joe Winder was sitting in the dark on the floor of the apartment. He had the clip out of the gun, and the bullets out of the clip. A full load, too, sixteen rounds; he had lined up the little rascals side by side on a windowsill, a neat row of identical copperheaded soldiers.

The knocking wouldn’t go away. Winder picked up the empty gun. He went to the door and peeked out of the peephole. He saw an orb of glistening blond; not Nina-style blond, this was lighter. When the woman turned around, Winder flung open the door and pulled her inside.

In the darkness Carrie Lanier took a deep breath and said: “I hope that’s you.”

“It’s me,” Joe Winder said.

“Was that a gun I saw?”

“I’m afraid so. My situation has taken a turn for the worse.”

Carrie said, “That’s why I came.”

Winder led her back to the living room, where they sat between two large cardboard boxes. The only light was the amber glow from the stereo receiver; Carrie Lanier could barely hear the music from the speakers.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” she asked.

“Moved out.”

“I’m sorry.” She paused; then, peering at him: “Is that a beret?”

“Panties,” Joe Winder said. “Can you believe it—that’s all she left me. Cheap ones, too. The mail-order crap she sold over the phone.” He pulled the underwear off his head to show her the shoddy stitching.

“You’ve had a rough time,” said Carrie Lanier. “I didn’t know she’d moved out.”

“Yeah, well, I’m doing just fine. Adjusting beautifully to the single life. Sitting here in a dark apartment with a gun in my lap and underpants on my head.”

Carrie squeezed his arm. “Joe, are you on drugs?”

“Nope,” he said. “Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

“I think you should come home with me.”

“Why?”

“Because bad things will happen if you stay here.”

“Ah.” Winder scooped the bullets off the windowsill and fed them into the gun clip. “You must be talking about Pedro Luz.”

“It’s all over the Magic Kingdom,” Carrie said, “about the reasons you were fired.”

“Mr. X doesn’t kill all his former employees, does he?”

She leaned closer. “It’s no joke. The word is, you’re number one on Pedro’s list.”

“So that’s the word.”

“Joe, I get around. Spend the day in a raccoon suit, people forget there’s a real person inside. I might as well be invisible—the stuff I pick up, you wouldn’t believe.”

“The spy wore a tail! And now you hear Pedro’s irritated.”

“I got it from two of the other guards on lunch break. They were doing blow behind the Magic Mansion.”

Winder was struck by how wonderful Carrie looked, her eyes all serious in the amber light. Impulsively he kissed her on the cheek. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “You can go home.”

“You aren’t listening.”

“Yes, I—”

“No, you aren’t.” Her tone was one of motherly disapproval. “I warned you about this before. About sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

“You did, yes.”

“Last time you were lucky. You truly were.”

“I suppose so.” Joe Winder felt oppressively tired. Suddenly the handgun weighed a ton. He slid it across the carpet so forcefully that it banged into the baseboard of the opposite wall.

Carrie Lanier told him to hurry and pack some clothes.

“I can’t leave,” he said. “Nina might call.”

“Joe, it’s not just Pedro you’ve got to worry about. It’s the police.”

Winder’s chin dropped to his chest. “Already?”

“Mr. X swore out a warrant this afternoon,” Carrie said. “I heard it from his secretary.”

Francis Kingsbury’s secretary was a regular visitor to The Catacombs, where she was conducting an athletic love affair with the actor who portrayed Bartholomew, the most shy and bookish of Uncle Ely’s Elves.

Carrie said, “She mentioned something about destruction of private property.”

“There was an incident,” Joe Winder acknowledged, “but no shots were fired.”

Under his supervision, the two bulldozers had torn down the three-dimensional billboard that proclaimed the future home of the Falcon Trace Golf and Country Club. The bulldozers also had demolished the air-conditioned double-wide trailer (complete with beer cooler and billiard table) that served as an on-site office for the construction company. They had even wrecked the PortO-Lets, trapping one of the foremen with his anniversary issue of
Hustler
magazine.

Afterwards Joe Winder had encouraged the bulldozer operators to remove their clothing, which he’d wadded in the neck of the gas tanks. Then—after borrowing the smartass driver’s cigarette lighter—Joe Winder had suggested that the men aim their powerful machines toward the Atlantic Ocean, engage the forward
gear and swiftly exit the cabs. Later he had proposed a friendly wager on which of the dozers would blow first.

“They spotted the flames all the way from Homestead Air Base,” Carrie Lanier reported. “Channel 7 showed up in a helicopter, so Kingsbury made Chelsea write up a press release.”

“A freak construction accident, no doubt.”

“Good guess. I’ve got a Xerox in my purse.”

“No thanks.” Joe Winder wasn’t in the mood for Chelsea’s golden lies. He stood up and stretched; joints and sockets popped in protest. Lights began to flash blue, green and red on the bare wall, and Winder assumed it was fatigue playing tricks with his vision.

He squinted strenuously, and the lights disappeared. When he opened his eyes, the lights were still strobing. “Shit, here we go.” Winder went to the window and peeked through the curtain.

“How many?” Carrie asked.

“Two cops, one car.”

“Is there another way out?”

“Sure,” he said.

They heard the tired footsteps on the front walk, the deep murmur of conversation, the crinkle of paper. In the crack beneath the door they saw the yellow flicker of flashlight as the policemen examined the warrant one more time, probably double-checking the address.

Winder picked up the semiautomatic and arranged it in his waistband. Carrie Lanier followed him to the kitchen, where they slipped out the back door just as the cops got serious with their knocking. Once outside, in the pale blue moonlight, she deftly grabbed the gun from Joe Winder’s trousers and put it in her handbag.

“In case you go stupid on me,” she whispered.

“No chance of that,” he said. “None at all.”

A thin coil of copper dangled by a string from Carrie Lanier’s rearview mirror. Joe Winder asked if it was some type of hieroglyphic emblem.

“It’s an IUD,” said Carrie, without taking her eyes off the road. “A reminder of my ex-husband.”

“I like it.” Winder tried to beef up the compliment. “It’s better than fuzzy dice.”

“He wanted to have babies,” Carrie explained, shooting into the left lane and passing a cement truck. “A baby boy and a baby girl. House with a white picket fence and a big backyard. Snapper riding mower. Golden retriever named Champ. He had it all planned.”

Joe Winder said, “Sounds pretty good, except for the golden. Give me a Lab any day.”

“Well, he wanted to get me pregnant,” Carrie went on. “Every night, it was like a big routine. So I’d say sure, Roddy, whatever you want, let’s make a baby. I never told him about wearing the loop. And every month he’d want to know. ‘Did we do it, sweetie? Is there a zygote?’ And I’d say ‘Sorry, honey, guess we’d better try harder.’”

“Roddy was his name? That’s a bad sign right there.”

“He was a screamer, all right.”

“What happened?” Winder asked. “Is he still around?”

“No, he’s not.” Carrie hit the intersection at Highway 1 without touching the brakes, and merged neatly into the northbound traffic. She said, “Roddy’s up at Eglin doing a little time.”

“Which means he’s either a drug dealer or a crooked lawyer.”

“Both,” she said. “Last month he sent a Polaroid of him with a tennis trophy. He said he can’t wait to get out and start trying for a family again.”

“The boy’s not well.”

“It’s all Oedipal, that’s my theory.” Carrie nodded at the IUD and said, “I keep it there to remind myself that you can’t be too careful when it comes to men. Here’s Roddy with his Stanford diploma and his fancy European car and his heavy downtown law firm, everything in the whole world going for him. Turns out he’s nothing but a dipshit, and a dumb dipshit to boot.”

Winder said she’d been smart to take precautions.

“Yeah, well, I had my career to consider.” Carrie turned a corner into a trailer park, and coasted the car to the end of a narrow gravel lane. “Home sweet home,” she said. “Be sure to lock your door. This is not a wonderful neighborhood.”

Joe Winder said, “Why are you doing this for me?”

“I’m not sure. I’m really not.” She tossed him the keys and asked him to get the raccoon costume from the trunk of the car.

Bud Schwartz and Danny Pogue helped Molly McNamara up the steps of the old house in South Miami. They eased her into the rocker in the living room, and opened the front windows to air the place out. Bud Schwartz’s hand still throbbed from the gunshot wound, but his fingers seemed to be functioning.

Danny Pogue said, “Ain’t it good to be home?”

“Indeed it is,” said Molly. “Could you boys fix me some tea?”

Bud Schwartz looked hard at his partner. “I’ll do it,” said
Danny Pogue. “It don’t bother me.” Cheerfully he hobbled toward the kitchen.

“He’s not a bad young man,” Molly McNamara said. “Neither of you are.”

“Model citizens,” said Bud Schwartz. “That’s us.”

He lowered himself into a walnut captain’s chair but stood again quickly, as if the seat were hot. He’d forgotten about the damn thing in his pocket until it touched him in the right testicle. Irritably he removed it from his pants and placed it on an end table. He had wrapped it in a blue lace doily.

He said, “Can we do something with this, please?”

“There’s a Mason jar in the cupboard over the stove,” Molly said, “and some pickle juice in the refrigerator.”

“You’re kidding.”

“This is important, Bud. It’s evidence.”

In the hall he passed Danny Pogue carrying a teapot on a silver tray. “You believe this shit?” Bud Schwartz said. He held up the doily.

“What now?”

“She wants me to pickle the goddamn thing!”

Danny Pogue made a squeamish face. “What for?” When he returned to the living room, Molly was rocking tranquilly in the chair. He poured the tea and said, “You must be feeling better.”

“Better than I look.” She drank carefully, watching Danny Pogue over the rim of the cup. In a tender voice she said: “You don’t know what this means to me, the fact that you stayed to help.”

“It wasn’t just me. It was Bud, too.”

“He’s not a bad person,” Molly McNamara allowed. “I suspect he’s a man of principle, deep down.”

Danny Pogue had never thought of his partner as a man of principle, but maybe Molly had spotted something. While Bud was an incorrigible thief, he played by a strict set of rules. No
guns, no violence, no hard drugs—Danny Pogue supposed that these could be called principles. He hoped that Molly recognized that he, too, had his limits—moral borders he would not cross. Later on, when she was asleep, he would make a list.

He said, “So what are you gonna do now? Stay at it?”

“To tell the truth, I’m not certain.” She put down the teacup and dabbed her swollen lips with a napkin. “I’ve had some experts go over Kingsbury’s files. Lawyers, accountants, people sympathetic to the cause. They made up a cashflow chart, ran the numbers up and down and sideways. They say it’s all very interesting, these foreign companies, but it would probably take months for the IRS and Customs to sort it out; another year for an indictment. We simply don’t have that kind of time.”

“Shoot,” said Danny Pogue. He hadn’t said “shoot” since the third grade, but he’d been trying to clean up his language in Molly’s presence.