'Guess I was starting to pretend again. But you've put me back on track.'
'It was always good for us, wasn't it, Hap? The sex, I mean.'
'For a little while, more than the sex.'
She picked up my robe where I had dropped it on the floor and put it on. She climbed on the bed, crossed her legs, and sat looking at me.
'Hap, I need your help.'
'I'm tapped out for money. I got maybe fifty dollars, that's it. Fifty cents in change.'
'I didn't come for money.'
'But you always come for something, don't you? Long as it doesn't have anything permanent to do with me.'
'I don't want to argue. It's just that I need your help. I couldn't think of anyone else to ask.'
'Maybe I can.'
'I want you to do it, because this time you'll profit. This time will make up for all the other times.'
'Nothing can make up for those times.'
'This might go a long way toward it.' She put her hand on my shoulder. 'Hap, my love, how would you like to make an easy two hundred thousand dollars? Tax free.'
Chapter 3
Early next morning I left Trudy asleep and rattled my old green Dodge pickup over to Leonard's place. He had a little house off the same dirt road I lived off of, and he was only about five miles away.
I parked up close to the house, got out into the cold morning air, and tried the front door. It was locked. I got the key from its hiding place beneath the porch and let myself in.
There was a fire in the fireplace, though it had dwindled considerably, and the house smelled like coffee. I followed my nose to the kitchen and found the pot and poured a cup. I called Leonard's name, but he didn't answer.
I checked to see how his handiwork was coming. He was rebuilding his sink cabinet due to termite damage. He had precut boards stacked by the sink, a hammer and a bag of little facing nails and a bag of long nails for the wall boards. He'd been doing the work a bit at a time, and as usual with that kind of thing, his craftsmanship was excellent. Me, I couldn't put on a rubber without directions, then I might get it inside out.
I took the cup with me out the back way and walked down to the dog pens and the barn. The bam was an old-fashioned affair, once bright red and now rust-colored with big double doors and a hayloft. The pens were six long steel wire runs, and each held a spotted bird dog, and at the end of each run was a large dog house, built against heat or cold or terrific winds, and they had flap doors that closed off when the dogs went in or out. The dog in the pen closest to the barn was called Switch for some reason, and he was Leonard's favorite. Which is not to say Leonard wasn't crazy about all those big dumb bastards. He went hunting with them as often as he could, not so much to hunt, but to see those spotted beauties run.
I went by the pens and the dogs barked and leaped. I put my fingers through the wire as I came to each run, and the dogs licked them in turn, wagged their tails and yipped.
When I got to Switch's run, I knelt down and spent more time with him. I hated to play favorites, but hell, there was something special about Switch. There was a kind of sad nobility in his eyes, like maybe he had seen some things he'd rather not have, but was the wiser for it. Which was damn silly, of course. Even a smart bird dog is a pretty dumb variety of dog. But he did have some class. He was protective of Leonard, too, and if he didn't know you and he was loose and you were standing too close to Leonard, you had to watch yourself. He'd leap at you and try to tear your face off, without so much as a bark or a warning growl.
From the barn I could hear a steady thumping and knew Leonard was making that sound. He was regular about that sort of thing, even if the night before he had been up until two A.M. drinking.
I downed the rest of my coffee, finished petting Switch, stood up and leaned forward on the pen and looked out at the thick dark woods back there; they seemed to be expanding as the sunlight widened and redefined them. Leonard had a beautiful place here. The creek was maybe a little too close to the house and he'd steadily been losing his land to erosion, something his having trenches of gravel put in alongside the creek hadn't helped. For a while it was okay, but soon it broke down and the gravel started to wash away, and now sometimes in the summer we'd go stand out there on the bank and throw the gravel at the water and later sit on his porch scraping it and the clay out of the treads of our shoes.
When we were really in a Huck Finn mood, we'd go down to the Robin Hood Tree, a big oak in a clearing in the woods behind Leonard's house. I don't know who all that woods belonged to, but in our minds that tree belonged to us. We'd named it that a few years back, after the big tree Robin Hood held his conferences under in Sherwood Forest. We sometimes went there to talk and enjoy the woods. Occasionally Leonard brought his rifle so he could pretend to be scouting for squirrels. But we always ended up at the Robin Hood tree, sitting with our backs against it, talking until nightfall.
My place was nice but I had to admit, I preferred Leonard's to mine. I let the look of the place soothe me while I thought about what Trudy had told me last night, and tried to figure some way to convince Leonard to go in with me. Leonard hadn't been part of Trudy's thinking, but he was damn sure part of mine. I tried to tell myself it was because I liked Leonard and wanted to see him make some money, and though this was true, I knew too it was because I had come to depend on him so much. He had bailed me out of hell so many times, he had become my spirit guide through life.
Inside the barn the light was weak, but I could see Leonard working over the heavy bag he kept hanging from a rafter beneath the hayloft. He was stripped to the waist, wearing a pair of gray sweatpants, low-cut tennis shoes with white socks and a pair of worn bag gloves. His face and hard upper torso looked like wet chocolate, and when the light caught him right, the thick beads of sweat gave the impression of greasy boils covering his skin. He was snorting plumes of cold exhaust.
He had the bag rocking, pounding it with combinations and kicking the sides of it. When he hit the bag it moved a good distance and never quite came back to rest before he hit it again with another round of combinations
