antagonize them?”
He shook his head and frowned, wanting her to believe he couldn’t help it. “I don’t know what it is. There’s just something about those guys that irritates me. Cops and insurance salesmen.”
Now he saw Carmen join him in a frown, sympathetic, he was pretty sure. If she didn’t understand him it would be the first time in their married life. She said, “Why don’t you get away from here for a while? Go somewhere. Go back to work tomorrow.”
He said, “I don’t know if I should leave you alone.”
Carmen said, “If you call four different police departments hanging around here being alone.”
Having your windows shot out by gunfire was a hair-raising experience. Carmen yelled his name as it happened, but she didn’t scream or lose control. After, when he said, “They’re just trying to scare us,” she said, well, they were doing a pretty good job, in that dry tone of hers. She said if they were that dumb, to drive by and shoot at the house, the police shouldn’t have any trouble finding them. Wayne didn’t comment on that.
The State Police investigator arrived as he was leaving this morning in the pickup. Wayne had to wait while the guy thought about it, saying he wasn’t sure he liked the idea; he’d have to send a man along. Wayne said, “Up on the iron with me?”
***
He stared out at the river and Canada from the top of the structure thinking:
Okay, after a while nothing happens, the cops get tired and clear out. Now it’s between him and them. He knows they’re coming, but doesn’t let on to Carmen. Except he’d have to stay home and she’d ask him what was wrong.
“Nothing.”
“Then how come you aren’t going to work?”
She would know, yeah, but that was all right, it wouldn’t change anything, except she’d be scared and want to call the cops again. Anyway . . .
Okay, it’s early morning, first light, Carmen reaches over and touches him. “Wayne ...?”
And he says, “I heard it, honey. Lie still, okay? Stay right here.”
“They’re in the house.”
“I know they are.”
He picks up the Remington from the side of the bed and slips into Matthew’s room so that when they come up out of the stairwell he’s behind them. The stairs squeak, here they come. Their head and shoulders appear. They’re careful, not making a sound as they reach the top, and then stop dead as they hear him rack a slug into the breach. “Morning, fellas.”
The cops accuse him of shooting them in the back. No, that would get too complicated. He’d think of another situation. Okay . . .
The two guys are still outside when he hears them. That’s it—he slips downstairs to the kitchen door, opens it a little. Pretty soon two shapes appear out of the woods. As they get behind the chickenhouse he walks out on the porch . . .
Wayne stopped it there. He liked the idea of getting behind them and saying something, taking them by surprise.
Okay, he sees them in the woods and runs out to the chickenhouse, yeah, and is waiting for them inside as they come past it, heading for the house. All the first part would be the same, telling Carmen to stay in bed. Or now he tells her to stay in the house. They go by, he lets them get about ten yards and then steps out of the chickenhouse behind them, that’s it, and goes, “You boys looking for somebody?”
“You boys looking for me?”
“You guys looking for me?”
“Can I help you?”
Something like that. They come around with their guns and he’s got the Remington on them hip high,
“Looking for somebody?”
He’s inside having bacon and eggs as the squad cars arrive flashing their lights. They come because Carmen calls 911 while he’s in the chickenhouse. That would work. He steps out on the porch . . .
“You’re a little late, fellas.”
The cops are looking around. “Where are they?”
“Right over there, where I shot them.”
The star asshole sheriff’s deputy is standing there. Say to him, “You gonna take me in?”
Or maybe something about doing their work for them, without sounding too much like a smartass.
From his perch Wayne looked east along the riverfront to the glass towers of the Renaissance Center, a job that took them seven hundred feet up when he was an apprentice. Get through that one you could work anywhere. The worst winter of his life, scraping ice off the iron before you dared walk upright. He began to think:
Okay, it’s winter, time has passed, the cops are long gone, but you’re still hanging around the house, making excuses there’s work you want to do, well, or you don’t feel good, something. Anyway time passes, Carmen wants to know what’s going on. Nothing. Oh, yeah? You’re up to something. No, I’m not. Yes, you are, what is it?
And you say, “I’m gonna find them.”
She can’t believe it. “But they’re gone.”
“No, they aren’t.”
The idea is it’s dead of winter, the ship channels are frozen over, the coast guard’s breaking ice for the Harsens Island ferry and the one to Walpole and he’s been going over there on a hunch they’re hiding out on one of the islands, in a boarded-up summer cottage or a trapper’s cabin, he can feel it, the people on Walpole are acting strange, they know something but won’t talk and he senses the two guys have scared the shit out of everybody and are making them bring food, maybe holding a kid hostage. Lionel’s wife finally tells him they’re hiding out in an old trailer on Squirrel Island where Lionel used to keep muskrat traps, on the edge of a cornfield right across the South Channel from Sans Souci, the bar where the Indians go. For weeks he watched the trailer from a duck blind near the bar until finally one day he sees two figures coming across the channel, shoving muskrat poles in the snow, poking their way along so as not to go through the ice. He raises his binoculars. It’s them. They’re a mess, filthy dirty fugitives, a couple of human muskrats that have been hiding out on the edge of the marsh, wild looks in their eyes. They don’t see him till they’re almost to the bank. He’s out of the blind, standing with the Remington across his arm, patient, relaxed, wearing his heavy black wool parka with the hood. And he’s got a beard now. They stop dead in their tracks. They don’t know him from Sergeant Preston of the fuck
ing Mounties till he says, very calmly:
“I’ve been waiting for you, gentlemen.”
Wayne listened to it in his mind. He thought calling them gentlemen because of the way they looked, being sarcastic, would sound good but it didn’t, it was dumb. No, leave it off, just say . . . And said out loud:
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
Behind him, the walking boss said, “We’re right here, Wayne. What’s the trouble?”
The raising-gang foreman was behind the walking boss, both of them standing on the open-iron girder. They watched Wayne look up over his shoulder, welding goggles on his hard hat turned backward, maybe a little surprised to see them, that was all. They watched him get to his feet.
“No trouble,” Wayne said. “I’ll move out of your way.”
The walking boss and the raising-gang foreman watched him walk the girder to the column at the south end of the structure, on the corner, swing out around it, gripping the outer flange with his gloves and the instep of his work shoes, and slide down two levels to the decked-in tenth floor. They watched him pause. From where he was now he could take ladders down to each floored level.
Maybe he was going to and changed his mind, favoring the express route. They watched him slide down the column the entire hundred feet or more, all the way to the ground where the guys were standing around watching, and head for the steel-company trailer.
The walking boss looked at the raising-gang foreman. Neither of them said anything.
