Valentine's Exile (28 page)

“My bourbon does have a bit of a bite,” Greta said, and Valentine heard chuckles from the far table with the bikers. “How about some food?”

“We'd like to see Hoffman Price.”

“He was up early fishing. He'll be asleep now.”

“What kind of payment do you accept? I have some Memphis scrip—”

She put her hands on her hips. “Strictly barter, Black. I'll take three shells for that twelve-gauge, or five rounds for your pistol. That'll include lunch and those drinks.”

Valentine counted out pistol ammunition.

Fifteen minutes later she brought them fried slabs of catfish and hush puppies, wrapped up in old wanted posters. They read the greasy bills as they ate. “Wanted on Suspicion” seemed to be the most frequent crime, followed by theft and fraud.

When they were finished she added another oily wrap to their table. “Now that you're done, you can take Hoffy his dinner. Saves me the bother.”

“I thought he was sleeping,” Valentine said.

“I saw his tracking Grog up and around. Means he's up. The boathouse is at the end of the dock, just follow the ferry line. You can leave your weapons. No one's going to touch them. Shack rule.”

Valentine picked up the still-warm bag and found the back door. What had been an extensive cypress patio now looked like a piece of modern art made of bird droppings. An assortment of canoes and motorized rowboats lined the bank of the inlet protected by the finger of land.

“And outhouses hanging over the river. Nice,” Duvalier observed, looking at the shacks at the end of the deck.

“Could be worse. Could be upstream,” Valentine said.

They walked down the dock, boots clomping more loudly than usual on the planking. If anyone wanted to sneak up on Price, they'd have to do it in a canoe.

A raft ferry built out of an old twenty-five-foot pontoon craft was attached to lines stretching to a piling in the center of the river. Another set of lines linked it to the other side. Valentine saw a turned-over rowboat there. Some kind of sign stood over the rowboat, but it was too far away to read, even with the binoculars.

Two great wet hands rose out of the river near the boat shack. A Grog, the simple gray variety distantly related to Ahn-Kha, climbed out. It was a female. She rapped something against the dock and then stuck it in her mouth. As she chewed she watched them approach.

“Hello,” Valentine said.

The Grog hurriedly whipped a second crayfish against the dock, then dropped it in her mouth. She chewed and looked at them as if to say “you're not getting it now, flat-face. ”

She let them pass to the door, which sat crookedly on its hinges. Valentine knocked. “Mr. Price?”

“Yeah,” a clear tenor voice answered.

“My name's David. Greta gave me your lunch. Can I have a word?”

“Door's not locked, son.”

Valentine opened the door to the little shack, got a good view of river through the open door, saw a tied-up canoe— —and was hit by a wave of odor that almost brought him to his knees. It was BO, but of an intensity he'd never experienced before.

He saw a man standing at a workbench, a disassembled Kalashnikov spread out on an oil-smeared towel. Smoke rose from a short pipe with a whittled bowl.

Duvalier stepped in behind. “Oh, Jesus,” she gasped. She backed out and Valentine heard retching. Her stomach had never been the strongest—

The filthiest man Valentine had ever seen stepped away from the bench. Hairy shoulders, black with dirt, protruded from mud-stained overalls that seemed clean by comparison. Two bright eyes stared out of a crud-dark face.

Dumbstruck by the man's hygiene pathology, Valentine could only stand and attempt to forget he had a nose.

“I always enjoy the reaction,” Hoffman Price said, putting down the pipe. Valentine tried to fixate on the faint odor of the tobacco, but failed. Price smiled. His teeth were a little yellow, but clean and fairly even. Valentine tried breathing through his mouth. “Greta used to call me ‘breathtaking.' ”

Valentine counted blood-gorged ticks dangling from the region about Price's armpits and ears and stopped after six. “Everready sent me. From the Yazoo.”

“How is that old backshooter?”

“Same as always,” Valentine said, not sure if he'd be able to make it across the river, let alone across two states, with this stench.

“Haven't seen him in . . . it's three year now. You looking for someone?”

The Grog hooted outside, and Valentine heard Duvalier say, “No, thanks. I like them cooked.”

“Just a guide,” Valentine said.

“Uh-huh. To where?”

“Just across the Ohio River. A place called Laurelton. I'll show you on a map.”

“That's quite a trip, son.”

“That's why I need a guide. Myself and two companions. ”

“That little gal out there up for mileage like that?”

“I've been to the Rockies and back with her,” Valentine said, which wasn't quite true by about two hundred miles but sounded good.

“I'm on my summer holiday. Hope you've got a wheelbarrow full of incentive.”

Valentine dug out the Reaper teeth. “Everready said he was calling in your debts.” He held out his hand with the teeth in his palm.

“I'll be damned,” Price said. He took them. Valentine resisted the urge to smell his hand to see if the odor had transferred.

“Pretty,” Duvalier said, and the Grog hooted.

Price cocked an ear to the sounds outside. “Nice young gal you got. Some of the titty trash that gets brought into the Shack, they scream at her. But I have to say no, son. Too far, too long since I've been over the Ordnance ground.”

“Ordnance?” Valentine asked.

“Big stretch of ground between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes,” Price said. “They make the Kentucky Kurians look like amateurs. Decent bounties, but I like to spend autumn and winter down here.”

“But those teeth,” Valentine said.

“I'd do anything for old Everready. But you aren't him. That particular debt isn't transferrable.”

“Money, then. I have some gold.”

“Hard to spend when you're getting gnawed on by a legworm. I'll put on the ol' thinking cap, son, and try and come up with someone crazy enough for a round cross Kentucky. But no names come to mind.”

The Grog came back in, leading Duvalier by the hand. She deftly opened a tackle box and showed her collections of costume jewelry, interestingly shaped pieces of drift-wood, and some old United States coins. The two men stood in silence at the strange, interspecies feminine cooing.

“I see Bee's making herself agreeable,” Price said. “Nice to see someone being kind to her.”

“Dzhbee,” Bee agreed, looking up at Price.

“He doesn't want to do it, Red,” Valentine said, wondering if Grogs operated on a different olfactory level.

“What about the teeth?”

“That deal's with Everready; you got nothing to do with it,” Price said.

Duvalier looked at him sidelong, as though afraid to stare. “That makes you a welsher,” she said. “As well as a skunk.”

“Ali!”

“You've got no paper on me,” Price said. “And nothing I want. The door's just behind, unless you want to swim outta here.”

She put her hands on her hips. “When's the last time you had a woman, Price?”

Valentine felt the boathouse spin.

“What's that talk for?” Price barked.

“I'm talking about a bonus. You can have me for the duration of the trip. Interested?”

A tar-fingered hand passed through the knots of greasy hair. Valentine saw some things he guessed were lice fall out. “Get out of here, both of you. I've had my fill.”

She passed her right hand down her breast, to her crotch. “We'll be up in the shack if you change your mind. Till tomorrow morning. I'm a limited-time offer. C'mon, Black, let's get out of here.”

They walked back up the noisy planks.

“What was that all about?” Valentine asked.

“Don't tell me you're jealous? Oh shit, I think some of that smell got in your hair.”

“And you were talking about sex with him?”

“Val, I let that pig Hamm drip all over me in bed. This guy's just dirty on the outside. That Grog's sweet. There's no way he can be that bad or she wouldn't be that way. He'll come round. He just needs to think about it.”

“Just when I think I know you.”

“Ah, but you didn't hear my conditions. I would have insisted that he take a bath, first. I'm not interested in hosting a flea circus in my crotch all the way to Ohio. I only just got rid of the Memphis brood.”

They negotiated a room with Greta (“It'll be cool enough to sleep about three in the morning.”) and then went out to bring in Ahn-Kha.

Which turned out to be a mistake.

“We'll feed and water him, but he can't stay inside,” Greta insisted. “Grogs are strictly outdoor animals.”

Valentine, watching flies buzzing in one window and out another, thought the distinction between inside and outside largely moot. Especially with goat droppings under one table.

“Sorry, Ahn-Kha. They're big on rules here.”

“Your poet Kundera said ‘Only animals were not expelled from Paradise,' my David. I am not an animal, save in the same biological sense as that woman.”

“And this isn't paradise, old horse,” Valentine finished. “I'll sit outside with you.”

Duvalier joined them on the porch with the goats, drinking ice water from a pitcher that had to be refilled every half hour.

Valentine watched the Goat Shack's dubious clientele trickle in as the sun set. He heard the ferry wheels creaking twice. Greta disappeared, replaced at the bar by a gap-toothed relative who shared her peppery hair color.

Duvalier produced a deck of cards scavenged from the casino where they'd interrogated Rooster with an eggplant. The idle evening on the porch passed pleasantly enough. Muscles sore from weary days on the road stiffened.

Perhaps a dozen patrons now passed time and swatted flies in the bar. Precious little commerce seemed to be going on; most of the groups of tables were swapping drinks for tobacco, or old newspapers for a pocketful of nuts. Many of the men smoked. Peanuts and jokes cracked back and forth across the tables.

Valentine watched a man in deerskin boots swap a pipe for an unfinished bottle. A sheathed knife dangled from a leather thong around his neck, and his belt held no fewer than three pistols. Considering the clientele and the quantity of weaponry, the Goat Shack was surprisingly peaceful. Or perhaps it was due to the clientele and the quantity of weaponry. . . .

Valentine felt guilty lazing on the porch. He should be doing
something
. Arguing about the nature of promises with Hoffman Price, wandering through the barroom asking for stories about Kentucky—instead he was looking for another heart so he could lay down a flush and take the pot of sixteen wooden matches.

Two men wandered up from the riverbank, one bearing a dead turkey on a string. They wore timber camouflage, a pattern that reminded Valentine of the tall, dark, vertical corpses of buildings that he'd seen in the center of Chicago. The one with the turkey turned inside with a word about seeing to a scalding pot. The other, a pair of wraparound sunglasses hiding his eyes, watched their game. Or perhaps them.

“What manner of Grog is that?” he asked.

“We call ourselves the Golden Ones,” Ahn-Kha said.

The bird hunter took a step back, then collected himself. “The who?”

“Golden Ones.”

“Golden Ones?”

Ahn-Kha's ears went flat against his head. “Yes.”

“Didn't know there was them who spoke that good of English of your sort.”

“Likewise,” Ahn-Kha said.

“Definitely see you later,” he said, staring frankly at Duvalier. She ignored him. The hunter followed his friend in. Ahn-Kha squeezed out a noisy fart, Golden One commentary on the stink left behind by unpleasant company. Valentine heard a couple of welcoming hallos from the inside.

“The mosquitoes are getting bad,” Duvalier said, putting down two pair and taking the pile of matches.

“I'll see about dinner and DEET,” Valentine said, rising.

Greta's generator ran two lighting fixtures, both wall-mounted, both near the bar. One was the lit face of a clock—someone had broken off the plastic hands, and whether the remaining stubs still told the time Valentine couldn't say—and the other a green neon squiggle of a bass leaping out of the water, a bright blue line projecting from its mouth. Perhaps a dozen customers sat in the gloom, save for the two huntsmen, who were looking at a wanted poster under the clock-light.

Valentine felt the stares of the company. Because they were outsiders?

“You wouldn't have a bottle of bug repellent, would you?” he asked the slighter version of Greta at the bar.

She shook her head. “No, sir. You and your girl could come inside. The tobacco keeps them out.”

“If you don't like the skeeters, you could relocate off-river, tag,” a shaggy woodsman suggested. “Take your pet and go.”

“Earl,” the bartender warned. “Goat stew and biscuits will be up soon, mister.”

A third man joined the other two by the clock, getting a light. He joined in the inspection of the bill.

“I'll buy four servings,” Valentine said.