Downriver Read online

  DeVries spat, rubbing the spittle automatically into the porch boards. Prison habit. “Redneck talk. I didn’t figure to hear it this far north.”

  I said, “The Dodge needs an overhaul. That’s expensive too.”

  “Talk plain,” Hank said.

  “I talk plainer indoors.”

  The forest was quiet. It was too early for crickets. Hank said, “Take his gun, Burt.”

  A horned hand fumbled under my coat, found the butt, and jerked it out. He relieved me of the empty shotgun too. It took some coaxing, but finally he went over to his brother and surrendered the revolver. Hank stuck it in his belt, took the automatic off cock, and went inside, leaving the door open.

  6

  THE PLACE WAS COZIER than it looked from outside. A barrel stove kept the temperature in the middle sixties and someone had erected insulation and drywall over the scrap lumber from which the shack was built. Pictures of the fishin’ hole variety decorated the walls in drugstore frames — Lurleen’s contribution, most likely. She was nowhere in sight, having apparently obeyed Hank’s order and retired behind the hanging quilt. Hank and I sat at an oilcloth-covered table with a half-empty bottle of Seagram’s and a smeared glass on top. He laid the automatic and my revolver on his side of the table like a riverboat gambler and poured himself a drink.

  Burt and DeVries remained standing, the black man hunched a little in front of the door to keep his head from banging the plaster ceiling, Hank’s brother by the quilt as if to guard Lurleen. The useless shotgun dangled at his side.

  Hank was looking at me with eyes no deeper than cigarette foil. His beard was well trimmed and his hair and clothes clean; the unkempt effect was strictly attitude. When the silence got long I peeled two fifties out of my wallet and set the bottle on top of them. Then I slid the wrinkled envelope out of my inside pocket.

  “The man standing on the right.” I showed him the printout. “Is he the one who hired you?”

  He studied the photograph for a tenth of a second. “Wasn’t him.”

  “Sure? That was taken a few years back. He might have changed.”

  He splashed some whiskey down his throat. “Take more’n a few years to turn a colored man white.”

  “He’s lying,” DeVries said.

  “Yeah, I lie all the time when I got the guns.”

  “Any name?” I asked. “What’d he look like?”

  “Like a colored man. He had a black car and green money. He never gave no name. Tried talking to Burt first, but Burt don’t like the coloreds. Said if we helped him follow this here big nigger was getting out of the prison and helped stop him he’d pay us enough to put something down on a new truck.”

  “He say why he wanted to stop him?”

  “Talk, he said.”

  “Believe him?”

  He might have smiled in his beard, or maybe not. It wouldn’t mean much either way. “You seen this place. Man bought the believing.”

  “You weren’t curious?”

  “Some. Not enough to risk scaring him off.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “Sure it is,” DeVries said.

  I looked at him, standing with his hands hanging at his sides. Where he’d been there were no belts to hook your thumbs on and they slapped your hands out of your pockets. “You come from no money you learn to respect it when you see it,” he said. “Your belly’s empty and somebody offers you a chicken leg you don’t turn it over to see did he drop it on the floor.”

  His eyes were on Hank when he said it. Hank was looking back and there was something there that cut through race and environment, a thing I would never share with either one of them. I felt like a husband at his wife’s high school reunion. “I need a description,” I said. “Don’t tell me again he looked colored.”

  Hank emptied his glass. “He had gray hair and a thick neck. Nice suit of clothes.”

  “Tall? Short? How old? Was he solid or just fat? Did he talk like a sharecropper or an arithmetic teacher, and did he have any kind of accent? Did he carry a perfumed handkerchief in his sleeve, or did he spit his tobacco juice just anywhere? Feel free to jump in whenever you like.”

  Burt said, “Want me to knock him, Hank?” A liverish Hush had crept up into the older Wakely’s hairline.

  “Stay put. Mister, you don’t raise your voice in our daddy’s house.”

  I lifted a hand and let it drop. Their story held no interest for me, and probably no surprises. An alcoholic father, maybe both parents alcoholic, and maybe too a death or a desertion and then a steady stream of aunts or uncles who smelled of lilacs and who kept missing their buses and having to stay overnight while the kids occupied themselves torturing small animals in the backyard. No one who raised himself ever made much of a job of it. It would be starting all over again with Lurleen’s child. I had a dusty degree in sociology, which meant I could come up with questions for all the answers. It was a runaway hit at cocktail parties, if you liked cocktail parties.

  “What happened when you didn’t get us?” I asked. “Did he stiff you?”

  This time he didn’t smile. “He wanted to. Burt wouldn’t let him.”

  “He didn’t know the shotgun wasn’t loaded, I take it. Then what?”

  “Then nothing. We separated there on the highway after he gave us the money. He’s halfway home by now, most like.”

  “I guess I’d just be catching a cold through my mouth if I opened it to ask if you got the license plate of the Monte Carlo.”

  “Just the last part, D-R-Y.”

  I looked at Burt and reached up and pushed my jaw shut. His face was still flushed but now it looked like its natural shade. A big proud grin shambled across his features at my expression.

  Hank said, “Burt’s partial to letters. Word puzzles are his favorite, if the words ain’t too long.”

  “Buy him some out of the hundred.” I got up. “Can we go, or are you planning to stuff us and mount us out by the road?”

  “I didn’t want you here in the first place.”

  He saw me looking at my gun and picked it up and swung out the cylinder and tipped the cartridges out onto the table. Executing a neat border roll he held it out butt-first. I accepted it and returned it to leather. “If he comes back, save him some trouble. Tell him we’re on our way to Detroit.”

  “He’d best not come back. Burt don’t like welchers worse’n he don’t like coloreds.”

  “Burt isn’t the one he has to worry about.”

  DeVries held the door, covering my back. He didn’t need weapons. Hank could empty his clip into the big man’s chest and still die of a broken neck.

  “Redstick ranger,” Hank said.

  I turned in the doorway.

  “Something the colored said.” He studied the letters stamped on the side of the automatic. “I asked him why didn’t he take the front car, on account of his was faster. He said he’d leave that to us, what’d we think he was, a redstick ranger? Maybe that means something to you.”

  “Not me. You?”

  DeVries shook his head.

  “Well, it’s what he said.”

  I said, “Thanks.”

  “You bought it. Store’s closed after this.”

  When we stepped outside the dog lunged to the end of its chain and set up a howl. Burt came out behind us with the shotgun and swept the stock against the side of the dog’s head. It yelped and slunk back behind the shack.

  On our way back to the highway, DeVries asked what next.

  “Next we sleep. Then if the old lady who runs the motel hasn’t cut our throats for what’s in our pockets we round up some wheels and roll home. Unless you want to troll for salmon or take in the Mystery Spot.”

  “Don’t you at least want Axhorn to run that plate?”

  “I can have that done in Detroit. Something tells me that’s where we’ll find the owner.”

  “Figure he’s working for Andrew-Albert?”

  “I never figure without figures to figure.”
/>   “You some detective.”

  I stopped in the motel office and bought a pack of Winstons from the machine. The old lady was dumped in a chair behind the desk, snoring like a lumberjack. DeVries was asleep on his bed in all his clothes when I got to the bungalow. I sat up smoking in mine until eleven, then undressed and turned in, dreaming of watery graves. I woke up wet the next morning.

  DeVries, accustomed to early rising, was already washed and shaved, his shotgun-pattern beard trimmed to Spartan neatness. I did a sloppier job in the light of the twenty-five-watt bulb over the sink. We packed our things and walked to the same restaurant for eggs and sausage. He had a double portion.

  “Prison’s the only place I ever got all I wanted to eat,” he said, letting the waitress fill his coffee cup for the sixth time. “They like you fat there; harder to squeeze through the bars and jump the wall.”

  “You aren’t fat.”

  “They only gave us twenty minutes to eat.”

  From there we went to the garage where they had towed my car, spread out now in a hundred pieces on a concrete floor slanting down toward a drain at the back. The seats had been removed and the carpet draped over a pair of sawhorses to dry. Major Axhorn was standing in the middle of it all in the same Stetson and leather jacket with his hands in the slash pockets. It was a dank morning.

  “Breaks your heart, don’t it?” he said. “Like going to the emergency room in the middle of the night and a nurse handing you your son’s clothes.”

  “A cop with a son.” I put down my valise and lit a cigarette. “I thought you just split in two like amoebas.”

  “I didn’t say I had one. My wife works. Keeps the books on an avocado ranch.”

  “Someone told me all the avocados in this country were grown in California.”

  “He was right.”

  A tall white-whiskered man in a greasy blue flannel jacket and matching greasy workpants approached me, wiping his hands on a clean rag that was greasy when he finished with it. “You’re Mr. Walker?”

  “How’s it look?”

  “Fuses all need replacing, and maybe the wiring. We won’t know what else till we find it. This turned up under the dash.” He pulled my Luger out of his hip pocket and extended the grip. I took it. “Better swab it out and oil it,” he said.

  I thanked him and thrust it under my belt opposite the Police Special. “When will the car be ready?”

  “Sometime next week.”

  “Last night you said Monday.”

  “Maybe Monday. Where can we reach you?”

  I gave him a card, as if he were really planning to call and I were really expecting him to. I got his card, which was the one that counted, and he stuck mine in his shirt pocket behind a plastic pen holder and went back to the gutted chassis. I asked Axhorn if he’d been waiting long.

  “Just about twenty minutes. I figured you’d swing by here before or after you rented a car. That gun registered?”

  “My CCW’s up to date,” I evaded. “What’s the squeal?”

  “State police found an abandoned black Chevrolet Monte Carlo about three o’clock this morning outside Mackinaw City. Thought you might like to know.”

  I dropped some ash on the floor and stepped on it. Up there they like you to keep track of fires. “Orphans don’t usually turn up that quick.”

  “Fellow from Lansing come up for a long sailing weekend and found it in his driveway. I got it off the wire when I opened the office and called the Mackinaw City post.”

  “They run the plate?”

  He nodded. “City woman there reported it stolen night before last. Three-oh-six-D-R-Y. Folks started remembering their license plates when the Secretary of State’s office started using vowels. You get some good ones.”

  “Helped the time go faster when we was stamping them,” DeVries said. He was hardly paying attention to what he was saying. I raised some dust to draw Axhorn’s attention from the big man’s excitement. “Could be the car. Those new full-sizes get boosted all the time.”

  “I didn’t say this one was new.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” He surrendered the point. “Man from downstate parks his car below the bridge, lifts one, then dumps it close by when he’s done so he don’t have to walk too far to get his. That spells professional. That fit in with how you worked it out?”

  “We don’t have anything worked out,” I said. “It might not even be the same car, like I said.”

  He changed the subject. “Went out to the Wakely place, did you?”

  “Nice family. Mean dog.”

  “Got back all of a piece, too. Must of been that gun on your other hip.”

  “You’ve got sharp eyes.”

  “Comes with being an Indian. Hope I don’t got any cleaning up to do down White Road. Lurleen being in a family way she might have an idiot child.”

  “If she does you can blame genetics. Nobody did any bleeding, although I can’t answer for the pooch. It’s shotgun trained.” I blew smoke. “I thought you preferred to be called native Americans.”

  “I never heard one call himself that. I think a white liberal invented it. They’re the ones fizzing all over about the land that got stole. Only you can’t steal land, it belongs to everyone. That was the whole idea. I grew up on the La Pointe reservation, served with the Indian police. We drove the drunks home, talked the husbands and wives out of carving on each other, drove the drunks home, bailed the brawlers out of jail in Ironwood, drove the drunks home. Nobody wanted to be there, including us. It never was that we wanted something, just what we didn’t want, and we didn’t want to be there.”

  “So you left.”

  “I joined the army and became an MP. That choice wasn’t there for the old ones and the young ones that didn’t measure up. They’re still there, getting drunk and carving on each other and going to jail. You stay where they feed you.”

  I dropped my cigarette and squashed it out. “I was an MP.”

  “Same job only different. It’s always different when they’re not your own.” He looked at DeVries. “You still waiting to get talked to?”

  “Why talk?” he said. “Ain’t nobody listening.”

  “You been in too long. They’re listening now.”

  It was the second time in twelve hours I’d been shoved outside. I elbowed my way back in. “What’s the phrase ‘redstick ranger’ mean to you?”

  “Sounds like a slur. I been called most of the others but never that one. Where’d you hear it?”

  “Around.”

  “Yeah?” He waited, then shifted his attention to the polished toes of his boots. “Well, I guess you know it all now. No need for a big dumb blankethead to come around sticking his horns in.”

  “We appreciate the help,” I said. “It just isn’t a local fight.”

  The brim of his hat came up. His face was as calm as a Red Man label. “I live here, mister. This isn’t just a place to stretch my legs and pee like it is for you. Next time don’t take your fights into my county. I got all I can handle with the natives.”

  7

  “YOU BETTER HOPE you never need Axhorn’s help,” DeVries said.

  We were on I-75 heading south in a new rented Renault that was built about as well as the Maginot Line. Afternoon sun was spreading and the Mackinac Bridge hove in sight, looking at that distance more like cobwebs strung on a row of mop handles than the world’s fourth longest suspension bridge. The little motor chugged along on two cylinders most of the time, then squirted ahead on all four without warning before cutting back again with a little Gallic cough. We were saving gasoline but I missed the V-8 dinosaurs they used to sing about on beaches. There just aren’t any catchy rhymes for “transverse-mounted engine.”

  I said, “You have to watch the human ones like Axhorn. Pretty soon you forget they’re cops and there you are in a broom closet down at the station telling everything to a tape machine. We didn’t have that kind of time.”

  “Bullshit. You was worr
ied about busting my parole.”

  “It’s something to think about. Even if it’s not your fault it doesn’t look good for an ex-convict fresh out of the wash to be involved in high-speed chases and confronting known troublemakers in their homes. If they dug and found out you threatened the Wakelys with the girl you’d be back inside quick as spit. If I’d thought Corporal Hale hadn’t seen more of what happened on the highway I wouldn’t have told them as much as I did. I overcompensated there. One of the first things you’ll notice about me is I fall down as often as I get up.”

  “You looked okay in front of Hank’s pistol.”

  “So did you. We’ll make a couple of brave corpses someday.”

  He tried sliding his seat farther back. He was practically sitting in the trunk as it was. “At least we know it’s Albert-Andrew behind it.”

  “How, do we know that?”

  “What Axhorn said about the job being professional. Guy palling around with Tim Marianne could hire all the muscle he needed.”

  “I want to check out something else first.”

  “What else is there to check?”

  “What Davy Jackson’s relatives are up to these days.”

  “Davy got hisself killed trying to take down that armored car. I didn’t have nothing to do with that, why’d they care about me?”

  “The law thinks you had everything to do with it. Maybe he left behind someone who agrees.”

  “His folks was shit-poor. They couldn’t afford the trip up here, never mind paying somebody to take it for them.”

  “Twenty years is a long time to get rich in.”

  “Not in my old neighborhood.”

  Our tires whistled on the bridge. Last night’s fog had cleared and the water of the straits flashed metal-bright between the struts. On the center span we were skyscraper height above the surface, yet it looked close enough to dip a hand in. Here and there workers with coveralls on over their coats hung on the cables like spiders while they scraped and painted the sandy steel. They were there every day all year long except when it rained or snowed, painting and scraping and painting again, never finishing before it was time to start all over. They’d have made good detectives.

  On the other side I paid the toll and we negotiated the broad crooked streets of Mackinaw City with fudge shops and billboards advertising tours on either side. Behind us an ore carrier as long as a football held was gliding under the bridge. The gulls were as thick as pigeons. While I followed the signs back to the expressway, DeVries filled me in on Davy Jackson’s family. It sounded like “Roots.”