Absolute Zero Page 25

  “Rodney?”

  “Almost,” Rodney panted. “I’m close.”

  “C’mon, Rodney, this is taking all night,” Mavis said. “You’re into deep overtime, my man.”

  “Just a little more,” Rodney said.

  “Rodney, baby, like—I’m getting all chafed raw. You can’t leave that zipper open like that. You know the rules.” She gingerly climbed off him and kissed him on his shiny skull. “Better luck next time.” Rodney held up a handful of bills. She plucked them and jiggled off into the gloom.

  Rodney watched her go, pouting, “Thirty-two, man, and it’s all over. Just can’t get it up anymore.”

  Earl shook his head. “Give up the steroids, Rodney. They’re shrinking your testicles into snow peas.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Morosely, Rodney zipped his fly and struggled to his feet. Six foot three, 260, twenty-four-inch arms. He could bench six hundred. Earl’s war elephant. “C’mon,” he said, “let’s get some grease.”

  They cruised and debated restaurants and settled on a Famous Dave’s.

  “You’re buying, right?” Rodney asked as they settled into a booth.

  “Sure. Go for it.”

  When the waitress arrived, Rodney recited, “I’ll have the giant slab of ribs, double cornbread, two cobs of corn, and bread pudding for dessert.”

  They made small talk about the weight room until the food arrived. Rodney was always more agreeable eating. Halfway through the rack of ribs, Rodney looked up and wiped his chin. “So what exactly you want to do?”

  “Scare a guy,” Earl said.

  “How scared you want him?”

  “Like a broken-knee scared. Louisville Slugger scared.”

  “What’d he do?”

  “He’s bothering Jolene. I want him to go away.”

  “Jolene.” Rodney’s eyes revolved and were dreamy for a moment. “She still quit getting high?”

  Earl nodded. “Started going to meetings.”

  “Yeah, and married some old guy?”

  “Uh-huh, except the old guy’s dying and this other dude is bothering her.”

  “And this is something you can’t handle on your own?”

  Earl leaned forward. “I just want you for backup. I don’t want to work up too much of a sweat.”

  “Right,” Rodney smirked. “You’re the brain, this messy physical stuff is beneath you.”

  “I’m the one using the bat, Rodney.”

  “Sure, right. So who is this guy?”

  “He’s from up north, he guides canoe trips in Ely.” Earl was about to explain the connection, but he decided not to. Rodney had been spooked in Oak Park Heights and had been doing a lot of coke. He didn’t follow stuff the way he used to.

  Like right now. Rodney was staring at the carnage of rib bones on his plate, his eyes kind of misfiring and trying to focus. He said, “You know, I gotta be careful.”

  Earl nodded his head. “Look. This guy is going to take one look at you and shit his pants.”

  Rodney squinted at him. “Yeah? There’s two kinds of guys who shit their pants. There’s the kind who shits and freezes and there’s the kind who shits his pants more like—what it is—a figure of speech that floods him with testosterone and adrenaline, you dig?” Rodney spread his lips in a lazy shark grin with strings of pork and gristle stuck between his teeth. “Then this second kind of guy comes over and kicks the living dog shit out of you.”

  “Not this guy,” Earl said. “This guy is over the hill, almost fifty. He’ll be scared. I guarantee. Then I’ll touch him up a little with the bat and he’ll head back for the sticks.”

  “You ever seen the inside of Oak Park Heights?” Rodney asked suddenly.

  “Christ, Jesus, no,” Earl said indignantly. They sent people who did his kind of crime to Sandstone, the federal lockup north of Hinckley which was a country club compared to OPH. In fact, Sandstone was like a postgraduate seminar in computer hacking; they had some sharp operators in there. A guy could learn a lot.

  “It’s like this big rectangular basement, four levels of meat-locker buried in the ground, and down in the middle they have this yard. There’s a baseball diamond and all, but it’s hardly ever used, and you look out through this narrow window with these two fat bars called mullions and there’s three tiny flower beds and this one tree they just planted. This one skinny little sapling that probably will never make it through the winter. And that’s what you see for the next twenty years.”

  Rodney shook his head. “One fucking little tree. Man, growing up in Minnesota, I always took trees for granted.”

  “Rodney,” Earl said firmly, trying to bring the guy back on task. “Tomorrow night. I’ll pick you up.”

  “And go where?”

  “He’s staying out on this farm in Lake Elmo.”

  Rodney’s eyes balked and his broad forehead furrowed. “Canoes? Farms? This really is not my preferred line of work.”

  “Look. We get him alone, he sees you and is paralyzed with fear. I whack him around a little and give him his walking papers and that’s it. You earn three hundred bucks for just standing around. How’s that?”

  “That’s fine, if it goes down like that.” Rodney held up a greasy rib bone and gestured. “But if it looks in any way funny, I’m out. If I look sideways they’re going to bust me. I ain’t gonna get raked over on account of something pissant like this.”

  “Don’t worry. Look, I need one favor. Trade cars with me tonight. I have to snoop around to make sure where he’s staying and he knows what I drive.”

  Rodney shoved his car keys across the table, caught Earl’s toss.

  “Take it easy on the wheels, it’s Jolene’s husband’s Expedition. And here,” Earl slipped him a folded hundred. “Go back and get your lap wet. See you tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, and yeah,” Rodney said, snapping a rib bone between his molars and sucking on the end.

  Earl took 94 east to the river, then turned south on 95 and cruised the house in Rodney’s Trans Am. He turned off his headlights and slowly rolled down the driveway. Uh-huh. Like he figured. Broker’s busted-down Jeep was still there. Settling in.

  Okay. His mind raced ahead. First get rid of Broker. That would give Jolene some space to climb down off her high horse. She’d come around. She was bound to come around not sleeping for a week. He just hoped she didn’t start hitting the bottle again.

  So Earl backed up the drive and went up the dead-end access road and waited in a small park where the road intersected the highway. Where he’d have a good view of passing cars. He put on his Walkman and ran some Eminem.

  Three times through the tape, more than an hour later, Earl was shuffling his shoes in the compost of Burger King wrappers clogged around Rodney’s accelerator when a pair of high beams cut the gloom: the beat-up red Jeep. Okay.

  “Got in the cookie jar, didn’t you, you fuckin’ hick,” Earl said grudgingly as he eased onto the road and followed the Jeep, still keeping his lights off, seeing by the faint light of a sickle moon. “So you’re feeling pretty good.”

  He and Jolene weren’t that way anymore and hadn’t been for years. More like weird siblings. Whatever. Think of something more pleasant. Like what a boost it was going to be swinging the bat into Broker’s knee. He visualized the patella and tibia powdering. He would see Broker crawl. See him cry.

  The fantasy brought an agreeable flush.

  This was what he wanted. Screw Microsoft and all the time he spent in that fucking desert over there, never once firing his weapon. Sometimes he figured the only real thing he’d done in his life was finishing off that gut-shot store clerk in North Dakota after Jolene messed it up. He didn’t count Stovall as a kill. That was an accident. Either way, it was Jolene who got him into both of those scenes.

  Just like she was getting him into Broker, who, he hoped, would take a cue and go away with just a broken leg.

  Well, he’d know pretty soon.

  By now the ride was getting tricky, and Earl had to le
t his fantasies go and pay more attention to following the Jeep through a back-road grid until it finally turned into a darkened farm. Earl drove on by and parked behind the first tree line past the house. Just a hundred yards away, he watched the lights come on in the house, probably the kitchen, then the bathroom, then they switched off.

  He waited another ten minutes, then he walked back toward the house, past the tall shadow of the barn where some kind of animals were moving around behind a fence. Earl shivered, nervous now, worried about dogs. But there were no dogs and he used a pencil flashlight to copy the number off the mailbox. Then he stepped onto the lawn and wrote down the fire number. He’d driven UPS delivery in the sticks and knew that fire numbers were the most reliable way to quick reference a residence. Just call up the local sheriff’s office and tell them you’re a lost UPS driver and give them the fire number; the rural cops’ dispatcher would talk you right in. And that’s what he’d do tomorrow.

  Sleep tight, sucker.

  Half an hour later he quietly let himself into Hank’s house and tiptoed down to the basement. Immediately, he hit the rewind on the long-playing videotape in the VCR that recorded from the hidden camera in Jolene’s bedroom.

  He tapped on the monitor and punched play, got an empty bed illuminated by just enough night-light to make it interesting, even arty. He ran rewind, hit play, more bed; so he went back and forth until on his tenth or eleventh try . . .

  “Oh, wow.”

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Something shook him and he opened his eyes.

  Oh-oh.

  Right in front of him, a man and a woman grappled in the dark. His eyes rolled past the flickering carnal image, then lurched back. Really worried now—not sure if he was dreaming or awake, or even alive.

  Worry ran into panic.

  It was a sign. Get ready, it’s time.

  Stay calm. Stay calm. The only part of his life he had any control over was the moment he left it. He understood he must stay alert and focused.

  But it was hard to concentrate because his eyes were fixed on clutching knees and a sweaty, plunging back. He could almost smell the hormones popping in their armpits.

  The watching made him dizzy and dizzy was sensual. Almost like moving. His thoughts strained for sensation, to rise up and swarm, like fruit bats he’d seen once, leaving a jungle cave at sunset. He yearned to touch the sweaty skin.

  With the whole goddamn black void to aim at, he was drawn to one hot spot of jerky flesh.

  Distractions.

  He’d tried to prepare for this moment. He had meditated on the mechanics. And now it was unfolding just like the Buddhists said it would. Leaving the physical body, he was distracted from his journey to a higher plane by scenes of intense intercourse.

  These were the diversions.

  Hadda be. So this was IT.

  The big night jump.

  Don’t mess up your death with distractions, Hank. Stay focused one hundred percent in the moment.

  . . .

  The last blinders of shock crumbled and Hank recognized Jolene out there tugging on Phil Broker’s business, with one elegantly muscled leg crooked in the air, like a snob’s little finger as she held a dinner fork. Except that wasn’t no fork she was holding.

  Broker. Comforting Jolene the widow not widow to Hank’s dead not dead. And, like back in the canoe during the storm, Broker paddling hard, trying his best to keep up. Hank could sympathize.

  Then—

  “I could kill you now and these pictures would be the last thing your brain would ever see. God, I wish you could see them.”

  Pictures.

  Earl’s voice established perspective and Hank realized the screwing was confined. Screwing in a box.

  Earl had recorded it, like he said he would, and now Hank was watching the video on television.

  “Okay, Lebowski,” Earl said. “Sit back and enjoy the show. Just for you, I’m going to run the part again where she blows him.”

  So Hank treaded in his ebbing life and watched Jolene’s deathless youth flicker on the screen. He could almost hear her voice again.

  Shit! He did hear her voice.

  “What’s going on in here?”

  Jolene stood in the doorway; her bare shoulders licked by the silent, shimmering video in which she wore nothing at all.

  Earl grinned, getting off on seeing her, split-screen; doing Broker on the video and, in the flesh, in the doorway a few feet away. She couldn’t see the front of the set and had no idea. Then Earl stopped the tape. Blip. Hit the reject on the VCR. Took it out.

  “Ah, nothing; just checking him. I thought I heard something but he’s all right.” Earl polite, smiling. “I, ah, see you’re sleeping in your own room tonight.”

  Jolene waved vaguely and went back to bed.

  Earl, as usual, switched on the Fox Channel, muted the sound, and left Hank with the TV remote stuffed in his dead fingers.

  Ha-ha.

  Hank, alone now, worked a venomous edge, lashed on by the silent fulminations of Sean Hannity. Then he steadied his eyes, looked beyond the TV, and fixed on the blackness out the windows.

  He wondered how many more times he would see the sun rise over the Wisconsin river bluffs. He felt no rancor for Broker. He pitied the man his innocent lust because he could not attribute innocence or spontaneity to Jolene.

  What’s she up to?

  Hank focused the fury he felt on his body mass. The body was mostly water, wasn’t it? And water conducted electricity. His thoughts became electric swimmers, thrashing toward the first and second fingers of his right hand.

  Just before the indifferent sun heaved up, the dead flesh of his index finger moved a fraction of an inch.

  Thank you, Earl.

  Thank you, Allen.

  Thinking about killing you is the only thing keeping me alive.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Jolene slept through the alarm and missed turning Hank three times. Now, as a thin spoke of sunlight eased between the drapes, she stretched out on the king-size bed, lazing in and out of the first good night’s sleep she’d had since . . .

  She sat up and hugged herself, and she could feel the memory of Phil Broker’s body still imprinted in her arms. Another comic-book hero, like Hank. Briefly she fantasized that he would put Earl Garf back in his place, back in her past. And then . . .

  “THE DOW JONES CLOSED DOWN FOUR HUNDRED POINTS IN REACTION TO A SHARP RISE IN OIL PRICES . . .”

  The burst of frenzied audio catapulted her upright in bed. Jangled, she stared at the door to Hank’s studio, muttering “Earl” under her breath. Had to be. Playing his TV games with Hank. Not even taking time to pull on her robe, she scrambled off the bed and stalked into the next room.

  “. . . AGREE THAT ONLY EXTERNAL FORCES CAN THROW OFF MARKET FORECASTS . . .”

  “Goddammit, Earl,” Jolene yelled.

  Huh?

  The raucous blare and the driving musical background vanished the moment she entered the room. And there was no Earl in sight. Just Hank, propped on his side in bed, staring right at her with Ambush curled in the curve of his lap and the TV remote where Earl had left it, jammed in his fingers as a joke.

  Jolene. Naked.

  Even with the short hair, she was a serious meditation on original sin.

  Hi, honey.

  And in his head he was playing “Thus Spake Zarathustra” from 2001, like when the ape figured out he could use the tapir bone as a weapon, because Hank was using his index finger to traverse the buttons of the TV remote a big half-inch and touch the mute control. The set sizzled on at max volume. A hyper-verbal group of Fox talking heads were in full cry, puzzling over lurching stock prices, unrest in the Middle East, and terrorist attacks on a U.S. barracks in the Gulf.

  Smug Yuppie pukes having their adventures in capitalism; they really thought life was a fucking Mercedes ad. Too bad. Globalization wasn’t running like a smooth computer program guaranteed to enhance their portfolios. Hank coldly wishe
d them several million tough, bitter, third-world peasants armed with AK-47’s.

  Back to Jolene. He switched off the set.

  Jolene said, “Wait a minute.” She peered at the motionless figure on the bed. She took a few cautious steps forward.

  Hank’s eyes did not depart on their usual loopy circuit; instead, they remained fixed, burning, on her. They were riveted in a way that made her aware of her nakedness, so intense was the stare that she began to feel the sweat drip cold in her armpits and dribble down her rib cage. It smelled like the fear of men she’d learned in puberty.

  Pissed, hungry eyes, looking right at her.

  Tap.

  The TV came alive again in a shout of static.

  Jolene screamed and ran from the room.

  * * *

  Allen had expected more than this for fifty bucks.

  It was his first private tango lesson and he assumed there would be a little flavor of the slums of Buenos Aires—dark hair, cleavage, at least black tights and posters on the wall. Something sexy, like the dance itself. He found himself standing in a spotless Scandinavian kitchen. The windowsills were lined with cactuses, and beyond the prickly pear, Allen had a view of an exhausted gray sky, shredding birch trees, and a smudge of White Bear Lake lying flat as a dirty mirror.

  The instructor, Trudi, was a well-preserved, petite matron in her sixties whose perfectly coiffed white head barely cleared his shoulder. She wore a white sweater and gray slacks and looked more like a senior Lutheran angel than an aficionado of a steamy dance that originated in Argentine whorehouses. Her only concession to the dance was pointed black dance shoes. Allen was in his stocking feet. He got her number from a Timberry adult-education brochure. In this, his first stab at self-improvement, he didn’t want other people watching, as in a studio class. He’d wanted anonymity.

  He watched Trudi move her kitchen table against the wall to make her dinette into a dance floor.

  Her husband sat in the den just down the hall with the door ajar. He was watching the History Channel and so, instead of pulsating Latin music, Allen heard the rumble of massed Soviet artillery spelling doom for von Paulus’s encircled Sixth Army in Stalingrad.