Shedrow (12 page)

“Jesus…I have been around horses though,” Ryan said.

“These are thoroughbred race horses. They’re not your average goddamn pets. Are you sure you want this job?”

“I’m sure.”

“You know, ninety percent of our grooms and handlers are Mexican. You speak any Spanish?”

“A little.”

“Can you get along with a bunch of hot-headed Mexicans?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Things are tense around here right now. Imagine you read about the death of our prized stallion?

“Chiefly Endeavor,” Ryan replied.

“Well I guess you read the papers, even if you don’t know shit about horses.

I don’t know, college boy. Why do you want this job anyway? Pay’s not great.”

“I really need to make some extra money this summer. Plus, I know you need the extra help, what with the immigration crackdown and all. And the whole racing thing fascinates me.”

“Fascinates you, eh! Okay, but just remember there ain’t a goddamn Mexican in this barn who knows what the hell fascinate is. So I suggest you keep it real simple, or better yet, brush up on your Spanish, college boy.”

“Does that mean I’m hired?”

“That means I’m giving you a chance. We’ll both know in a
week if it’s going to work. Be here tomorrow at 6:30 sharp, ready to work your ass off.”

TAKING HIS CUES from some of the grooms he encountered during his interview, Ryan showed up the next day dressed in his rattiest pair of jeans, work boots and a tee shirt. That attire wasn’t all that different from Ryan Fischer’s everyday dress at Colby College.

“Ryan, meet Arturo Lopez. Lopey is one of my best men, been with me for years—except for the few times he returned to visit his family back in Mexico. Lopey, you keep an eye on things here while I take a garbage run with Ryan. Then next week he can do it all by his lonesome.”

“Hola,” Ryan said.

“Hello, Ryan.” Lopey replied with a heavy Spanish accent. He had thick, dark hair gathered into a pony tail under his baseball cap. The grey cap had “Las Vegas” written across the front in large blue letters.

Ryan wondered if the English reply was a testament to his poor dialect, so he tried again. “Como esta?”

“Not bad, you?”

Okay, so maybe my Spanish sucks
, Ryan thought.

“Hey Ryan, get in the truck!” Travers yelled.

For the next half hour they went barn to barn loading garbage-filled bins onto the long-bed pickup truck, then drove to the town dump. They drove to the back end of the landfill, where raw, non-recyclable refuse was piled high in three towering mounds. The stench was strong. As they began emptying the cans, they were greeted by three of the strangest looking creatures Ryan had ever laid eyes on.
Each looked to be around fifty— though with Kentucky hill folks, it’s often difficult to tell.

There were two men and a woman. The woman had long grey and black hair hanging in a tangled mess around her wrinkled face and neck. One of the men was much shorter than the other, and he had on a worn-out fedora that sat on the back of his head. His face was round and plump, his body short and squat.

Travers saw Ryan’s puzzled look. “That’s Crow and Juicy. And over there is Zoom.”

Zoom was the tallest of the lot, more wrinkled and even dirtier looking than Crow. He joined the other two as they all came closer to the truck and began to rummage through the piles, paying special attention to what was thrown off the truck.

Crow, Juicy, Zoom. He has to be kidding
, Ryan thought.
This has to be some sort of first day initiation prank for college boy.

The old woman came to the edge of the pickup and reached in to grab a worn-out bridle from the end of the truck bed. Ryan caught a glimpse of her hand, blackened with weeks of unwashed grime, nails curled and irregular, some nearly an inch long. Her small dark eyes were deeply set and framed by dirty, wrinkled skin. She grabbed her treasure and scowled at Ryan.

No, this was no joke; those hands were real, and she did look like a crow, claws and all.
She clutched the bridle in her hand, turned her hunched shoulders and slowly headed back towards home. Home was an abandoned yellow school bus, propped up on cinder blocks, with shreds of curtain on some of the windows. Outside the bus were a few half-dead potted plants placed amidst the weeds and sand.

“Hey, you working or not,” Travers yelled, reminding Ryan
that he had probably ceased all movement for a short time while he watched Crow trudge on homeward.

Once the truck was emptied, Ryan slowly walked back to the cab, still hypnotized by the sight of the two men, who remained in the garbage piles.

“What’s wrong, college boy?” Travers asked as they drove out.

“Nothing, I guess. Just that Zoom dude, he looks like one mean bastard.”

“Don’t expect any of them to be friendly, and don’t let them ever hear you say the nicknames: Crow…Juicy…Zoom. I don’t even know their real names, town folks gave them those names and they stuck. Heard a kid once called the lady “Crow” by mistake in the Midway General Store and Zoom about scared the kid half to death, threatened to kill the poor son of a bitch.”

“They live in that bus, all three of them?”

“For as long as I can remember. Town pays them something, peanuts I’m sure, to maintain the dump. Benefits must be okay, though. They keep what they want and sell the rest, I guess. Story has it that Crow and Juicy are common law husband and wife. And Zoom, well, I’m not really sure how he fits in.”

“Is there a bathroom or running water in that thing?” Ryan asked.

“Doubt it, but the dump has water.”

“Why do you suppose Crow grabbed that bridle out of the truck?”

“How the hell should I know? Probably to hang in her kitchen for a goddamn decoration.”

“Did you see Zoom snap it out of her hand a little later?” Ryan asked.

“Zoom is the meanest of the three, meaner and stranger than he looks even. You know he was picked up outside the main gate of the farm the same day our young stallion was found dead. The local cops dragged him in and grilled him for a few hours, but I don’t think they came up with anything. Don’t know for sure if the feds have looked at him yet; they’re on the case too. Still, he’s one weird bastard. You’ll make this run yourself next week. Just don’t plan any trips after dark. If the black bears don’t kill you at night, Zoom just might.”

John Pawlek felt empowered by the wire he concealed under his shirt. Instructed by the federal agents, he was confident in his ability to conceal it from his father. Once activated, it would record his father’s confessions, just like the ones John had mentally recorded when he would sit in the hallway down from his parents’ room.

He planned the visit to his home in northern New Jersey in the early evening. Such visits were becoming less common since John had begun his freshman year at Rutgers, but an evening visit would not be totally unexpected either. Usually John stopped to see his mother, though tonight he knew she was still visiting her sister in Savannah. Chet, more likely than not, would be half in the bag by six in the evening, having gorged himself with leftovers and booze.

Pulling through the stone markers at the end of the driveway, John felt a blend of that familiar sense of dread and anger. He announced his arrival with two rings of the bell, another habit he had acquired since leaving home. He no longer considered it his home. He
wouldn’t just walk in, or use the keys that were still on his keychain, the ones that opened the double deadbolt locks. Normally his mother would answer and then Chet would bellow out,
“Jesus Christ, you’re our son. You don’t need to ring the goddamn doorbell, John.”
Tonight there was no answer, so he let himself in with the keys.

Shit, I hope he’s not already passed out on the couch. If he is, I’ll just wake the old bastard up, and he’ll probably babble on even more than usual.

He wasn’t on the couch, so John walked through the kitchen and looked out the glass doors at the lagoon-shaped swimming pool. He thought about some of the better days, the earlier times with his father when they first had the pool built. Did he actually love his father then, or was he just too young to know any better? Probably the latter, because what he remembered most right now were all of the sadistic beatings, the countless trips to the Emergency Room, and the stories that always had to be told to cover up the truth. His mother had become a master at that.

He called out, “Dad? It’s me. Are you here?”

The Mercedes wasn’t in the garage, so he wondered if his father was out somewhere. But the alarm wasn’t on. More likely, his mother drove the Mercedes to the airport and left it.

The house was incredibly quiet. John thought about a quote he had read for a journalism class, a quote from Fran Liebowitz. Something about how money can buy privacy...and silence. When you walk into the home of a rich person, it is invariably quiet. But if you don’t have money, your walls are thinner, your neighbors closer, and your house is noisier.

Then he thought of the backstretch at Belmont Park, a place he
loved to visit. The backstretch huts were invariably noisy. John looked at the foyer floor, with its expensive tiles that had been imported from Italy. He thought of his father’s wealth and how it had been acquired. How many people had been abused or actually killed? He remembered how his father mistreated all the little people who were so important to his success in the racing business, one of his few legitimate business ventures.

“Dad? Where are you?” He was on a tour of the house now, walking upstairs, looking in the various rooms. “Dad?” Peeking in the upstairs den, he smelled the faint odor of cigar smoke, but still heard no answer.

It has to be too early for him to be passed out on the bed
. He walked into the master bedroom and noticed a stepladder in the large walk-in closet. The ladder was lined up to a trap door that opened into the attic. A faint light shone through the opening into the darkened closet.

“Dad? What the hell are you doing up there?”

No answer. Now he could hear a creaking sound, like an old wooden floor under footsteps, or like the sound of rafters creaking with the wind.

He climbed the stepladder partway then boosted himself up the rest of the way into the attic crawl space. A single bulb lit the entire expanse. Old furniture and cardboard boxes sat on the wood planking near the trap door. Further down it was darker and more difficult to see clearly. The creaking seemed louder. Where the wood planking ended, the roof line became steeper. It was dark enough here that John could see light from outside filtering through the soffit vents. His eyes then moved from the vents, up the rafters on the
underside of the roof.

He looked in the direction of the creaking sound and saw movement…back and forth, with the creaks, swaying. His eyes adjusted to the darkness at that end. A rope hung from the rafters. A body, dangling from the rope, lifeless. John gasped in horror and quickly turned his head away from the hanging corpse.

Ryan had made enough trips to the dump, at varying times, so he figured he had a reasonable idea of the daily routines of Crow, Juicy and Zoom. The heaviest traffic into the landfill came from early morning through early afternoon. Any time a truck would come in, the trio would meander over in the direction of the truck to check out their wares. If enough traffic came in, they would be occupied for some time and would be away from their bus. Ryan knew he had to get a closer look at their roost.

So he figured mid-day, in the midst of the heaviest traffic, he’d likely have his best chance. It would also have to fall on one of his days off, as Travers left him little leeway for goofing off. He worked a six day week, and his day off could fall on any given day. A weekday would be best, no doubt.

It was a Thursday in August, scorching hot, when Ryan set out in his own car for the landfill. He selected an inconspicuous spot about a half mile down the county road where he could pull his
vehicle into a clearing off to the side. Then he could climb the fence a hundred feet from the main gate so he wouldn’t be noticed. He had scoped out a path from there, through a lightly wooded area, which would give him an entry to the rear of the school bus. If he saw the three scavengers in the refuse piles, then he would assume the coast was clear.

At the rear of the bus, Ryan saw several tall piles of newspapers and magazines, neatly piled against the rear of the bus, right up to the level of the bus windows. Were they being sorted for recycling by one of his three friends? Not likely, as the paper recyclables were collected and deposited in a separate area of the landfill, he knew. On top of one of the stacks was a
Blood Horse Magazine
, the trade journal. He picked it up and noted that it was several months old. He fingered through the next half dozen or so in the pile. They were all issues of
Blood Horse
, all slightly dated, but all in the current calendar year. On top of the adjacent pile was a
Daily Racing Form
, and he quickly determined that, like the other pile, this one contained a stack of slightly dated papers, all of them
Racing Forms
. Did the school bus residents collect them and save them for reading? More likely they kept them to start kindling wood on fire, or for cleaning or some other utilitarian function. But they seemed to be perfectly sorted, which was odd.

Ryan stood on his toes in order to be able to peek into one of the windows at the rear of the bus. The bus had been gutted and old mattresses were on the floor, collected from someone’s trash, no doubt. He stretched his neck to look down the bus at a tiny table with three chairs, then he suddenly felt something tighten on his neck. He fell to the ground, his shirt collar still held tight around his neck,
half choking him. He struggled to turn his head and saw that it was Zoom who gripped his collar and now had a boot to Ryan’s spine as he pulled the collar even tighter. Ryan looked up into the bug-eyed gaze of a crazy man.

“What the hell are YOU doin here, KID?”

“If you let me go I can talk,” Ryan sputtered.