fact that he was not struggling. In fact, with the free house and the little bit of money he had squirreled away over the years, and the new business he and Darren had been working these past eleven months, Hal felt like he was doing just fine, thank you.
Right out of high school, Hal had gone in the military. For four years, he had seen his chunk of the world. He went to Louisiana, to the Philippines, to South Korea, to Germany. On leave he checked out Southeast Asia and lots of Europe. What did he learn from all that traveling? Apart from the eye-opening food choices, he learned there are whores wherever you go. Some are a little more expensive than others, but in general, they’re all pretty cheap if you get the right ones. Sometimes it’s out of the goodness of your heart that you pay them all – he learned that one, too.
But these photo-shoot girls were the best.
Hal had a guy down in Florida who could sell anything Hal could shoot. In fact, the guy wanted more all the time. Especially these modeling agency interview shoots. People went nuts for it, and the girls lined right up to participate. Hal put up these ads, these flyers, looking for women and men. When men called, he ignored them. He didn’t want men. He wanted girls.
Saying he wanted men made the girls think he really was planning on a calendar shoot, or a catalog shoot. When they found out otherwise, they didn’t usually complain. Instead, they went limp. They obeyed. It was like, “You want me to take my clothes off? Uh, okay. You want me to put that in my mouth? Uh, okay.” Girls were passive. It was in their nature.
Hell, maybe they even liked it.
After each shoot, he’d send them out with a “We’ll call you if we need you,” or “We’ll send you a check.” He hadn’t sent anyone a check yet, and nobody had complained. What were they going to say? Some of the girls really did seem to enjoy themselves. He figured the rest of them just tried to put it out of their minds.
In case of any future trouble, Hal took precautions. He moved the office around all the time, taking short leases. He had changed the name of the business three times so far. When he transferred the video from the Mini- DV tape to the computer, he always edited his own and Darren’s faces out of the movie.
Then he would upload it to a secure web site the guy in Florida kept for submissions. Like magic, the guy would send back money. It was fun, and they were starting to make a very decent living. But this whole episode with Lola, it could jeopardize everything.
“I don’t know if you’re just talking trash or not,” Hal said. “But we do have to go back down there and talk to Ms. Lola.”
“Yeah? Why’s that?”
“She took the digital tapes, kid. We’re on there. A brawl like that, you can hardly say she was begging for it, then changed her mind later. She decides to go to the cops, how much more evidence are they gonna need? We need to get those tapes back.”
Darren shrugged. He blew a smoke ring. “I got no problem with seeing her again. I’ll look forward to it. You know how to find her?”
“Well, she filled out that release with her address. I still have it.”
Now Darren smiled. His lumpy raccoon eyes glittered. He flexed his chest and his shoulder muscles. “Like I said, I’m gonna put a hurtin’ on that girl. I’m gonna split her wide open. And you know what? She’s gonna like it.”
They’re coming to get you.
The thought came to Smoke Dugan unbidden. It interrupted every quiet moment, ruining even the best of times. The more he tried to ignore it, the more he sent it back to where it came from, the more forcefully it resurfaced the next time. It was paranoid. It was stupid. But there it was – some part of him was convinced that they had found him.
He sat in his favorite outdoor chair, trying and failing to enjoy the early afternoon sun and the slight autumn chill in the air. The chair was a metal patio chair set before an ornate iron table in his backyard. The chair had three brothers, although rarely did anyone join him at that table.
Normally, he would have no problem enjoying the day.
The setting was perfect. It was fall and all around the neighborhood, the trees were turning. He wore a pair of baggy workpants and a bright blue Carraig Don wool sweater. He had just clipped, and now held in his gnarled hands a small Romeo y Julieta cigar. It came from the Dominican Republic, not Havana. In his present circumstances, Havana cigars were not easy to come by. That was all right. In the meantime, these Dominicans did a good job. He held the stogie to his nose and inhaled. It smelled sweet.
He had a bottle of Concha y Toro in front of him, a heart-healthy and tasty Cabernet Sauvignon from Chile. Here in Maine, the vagaries – some might call it the corruption – of the wine industry meant he couldn’t get the New York Long Island wines he had once favored. So now he experimented with the stuff from abroad, and much of it was to his liking. He had a bit of the red wine in his sparkling glass, which itself was imported Waterford crystal. Lola always cringed when she saw him using the crystal – how could he drink his everyday wine from such an expensive glass?
“Quality,” he would say, “makes it taste better.”
Nearby, Lorena Hidalgo was working in her garden. The whole backyard, except for the stone patio where Smoke now sat, the small grave plot with the tiny headstone that said, “Butch – One Smart Dog,” and the work shed in the very back, was Lorena’s garden. It was some fantastic garden. Smoke sometimes sat back there and marveled at it. It had tomatoes, cucumbers, green beans, hot peppers and herbs. It had all the easy stuff. It also had carrots and cabbage and sure enough, she was growing a few pumpkins as well.
“Hey Lorena,” Smoke said. “Do me a favor and don’t go in the shed, okay? I’m working on something in there.”
Lorena looked up and made a face. “You know I never go in there. That is your place.” She went back to her gardening.
Lorena was a miracle and a menace rolled into one. She was an older lady from Guatemala. They had met a few months after Smoke had moved into the basement apartment of this house. He was sitting in the backyard at this same table, which had come with the apartment, skimming through a text on generating wind power. The backyard was a mess, and although he had toyed with the idea of clearing it, he hadn’t made any move yet. At first, he hadn’t trusted his new surroundings and was ready to leave at a moment’s notice. But after a while – for instance, after he buried that smart dog Butch – Smoke began to settle in. By the time Lorena called to him over the fence, he had decided to forget about the backyard and focus on making himself a little workshop in the old disused shed way at the back of the yard.
He closed his eyes and imagined the yard the day she had first shown up, in late March some three and a half years before. It was overgrown in places by high grasses and thick brush. In other places it was shallow mud from melting snow. Snow that hadn’t melted sat in clumps here and there. A ripped plastic bag from Shaw’s supermarket hung like a flag at the top of a bramble. Three cases of empty Pabst Blue Ribbon bottles crouched by the door – reminders of the previous tenant. A rusty shovel and hoe leaned against the fence – the very tools Smoke had used to lay ol’ Butch to rest.
It was cool that day, but Smoke was in his shirtsleeves.
“Excuse me, mister sir!” someone called.
Smoke had a cigar that day as well, and he seemed to remember it was a dollar cigar he had bought at a highway rest stop. A man running for his life wasn’t always picky about cigars. His new name was James Dugan, and although he himself had created the name years before, he wasn’t comfortable with the first name. It seemed too bland to him. James. Everybody was named James.
He looked up from his reading and across the fence at the woman who was about to change his name for him. She was a small woman, round, impossible to tell her age, with gray and black hair and Mayan or mestizo features that seemed to have traveled time to arrive at his fence. Indeed, she wore a kerchief on her head and from the neck up could just as easily lived in 1399 as 1999. But that’s where the illusion ended. She also wore a big bubbly winter parka. It was bright red and had the words TRIPLE GOOSE DOWN stenciled in white on one of the sleeves.
