crackers. She twisted her lips in a wondering expression and went to the refrigerator. “I saw this article in
“Yeah?”
“Whites have Coke in the refrigerator. Blacks have Pepsi.” She opened the door. There was a two-liter, plastic bottle of Diet Pepsi in the lower door shelf.
They both shrugged. The small mystery contributed to the gradual warming in the kitchen: tiny taste bursts of tomato sauce and chili powder popped over the simmering pot; a film of steam blotted the corners of the window over the sink.
“You’re different today. So what’s changed?” she asked.
“I figured out the difference between attraction and propulsion.”
“Oh, boy, physics.” Amy evaluated him warily.
“Sometimes if you find yourself hurtling toward someone it might not be attraction so much as what you’re running away from.”
Amy smiled cynically. “The wife.”
“No, someone,” Broker protested.
“So this is hypothetical?” she asked.
“Not exactly.”
“The wife,” Amy repeated.
“Okay, for the purposes of argument. Say I go over to Jolene’s place to return Hank’s vehicle and I have suspicions about the accountant’s death which I can’t make pan out. But I’m feeling bad about what happened to Hank and I see her dealing with these problems so I sort of step in. .”
“Step in?” Amy was amused.
“Yeah, you know. .” Broker gestured with his hands.
“I got an idea what you stepped in,” Amy said.
Broker objected. “That’s not the point. What I’m trying to say is I have all this. .” His hands attempted to manipulate an invisible object in the air. “. . stuff in my life that’s hanging fire-Nina leaving with my kid, my marriage-and I wasn’t dealing with it. So I’m rebounding off that. It explains, but does not excuse, getting involved too quick in-”
“Oh, so now you’re involved?”
“No, I mean, if my life were in order I probably wouldn’t have stuck my nose in.”
“Oh, now it’s your nose?” On the stove, the chili was starting to simmer.
“You’re not listening to me,” Broker said, getting a little hot himself.
“Sure I am,” she said too casually. “You went to bed with her; what’s the big deal?”
“Amy?”
“That’s not an answer. You went to bed with her and now you feel bad about it and you expect me to give you. . sympathy? Now suddenly you want to take me to dinner.”
Amy flipped the box of Saltines across the room. It hit Broker’s chest and spiraled to the floor. “Make your own goddamn lunch.”
She paced the length of the room, wheeled around, and quipped, “So what did you do with Hank? Stuff him in the closet?”
“I thought we were having a serious conversation,” Broker said, standing up suddenly, rattling the bowls and silverware on the table.
“How can we have a serious conversation when you won’t tell me the truth,” Amy said.
They stared at each other as a cloud of scorched chili reared in the air.
“The truth,” Broker said with a perplexed look on his face.
“A basis for trust,” Amy said, speaking in her best practical voice.
“Look,” he gave in, “it only happened-”
“How typical,” Amy smiled sweetly as she spun, walked from the kitchen, through the living room, and up the stairs.
The pot on the stove puffed out black fumes, the smoke alarm on the ceiling began to shriek. He heard her footfalls continue to stomp in the hall upstairs. A door slammed. Broker got up on a chair and hit the reset button on the alarm. Then he jumped off the chair, grabbed the pot of burnt chili, and-Ow-immediately drew back his hand. He looked around for a towel, found one hanging over the sink, grabbed the pot handle a second time with the towel, and carried it out to the porch. When he came back in, the alarm was screeching again, so he opened the window over the sink, searched for the switch to the ceiling fan, found it, turned on the fan, then climbed back on the chair and turned the alarm off.
Wreathes of smoke hung in the air like the aftermath of battle. Okay. Get out of the house. Feed the birds.
The nimble clouds of an hour ago now massed into cold gobs. The wind had acquired knuckles.
Hunched over, Broker walked through little squalls of swirling leaves toward the outer paddocks. As he neared them, a crowd of curious hens drifted along the fence line, their stubby wings slightly lowered to warm their long legs. Their big eyes fixed on him like cartoon question marks.
He glanced up at winter clouds in October and very much wanted this detour in his life to be over. He ducked into the first paddock and was soon busy, elbowing his way through clumsy hens who crowded around him as he dumped five-gallon plastic buckets of feed into bins. The bigger males hung back while their harems fed. If one put in an appearance, mindful of J.T.’s warnings, Broker exited the pens and just heaved the feed sidelong at the bins over the gates. In each paddock he checked to make sure the water reservoirs were full.
Half an hour later he came back up the gravel path toward the barn. A grind of downshifting gears drew his eyes toward the road and he saw a flash of an auto chassis streak over a dip and disappear behind a tree line. Then a gust of wind stood him up and he looked at the sky which was darkened to the point where he wanted to check out the weather channel. He’d lost track of the speeding car. Probably the wind.
His last chore was to feed Popeye in the barn.
“How you doing today, you and hit-and-run punk,” Broker said, as he carried a last bucket of feed toward the pen and saw Popeye’s big stupid eyes bob more than nine feet in the air at the end of his skinny neck.
The wind groaned through the barn’s wooden walls and somewhere hanging farm equipment clanged like Gothic wind chimes, and at first Broker didn’t hear it. Then he did-the sound of something hard pounding the fender of the tractor parked behind him. A mean cadence, off the rhythm of the wind.
He turned. The source of the noise was a shiny new baseball bat in Earl Garf’s hand.
Another guy stood behind Earl, a big guy who also wielded a bat. Broker looked past Earl, at the big guy who was wearing a baggy leather bomber jacket, extra large to allow room for his massive arms. There was a fake bomber-group insignia on the left breast of the coat. A diving vulture. Broker had seen the jacket before.
Rodney had been wearing it more three years ago when Broker busted him for selling machine guns.
“Hiya, shithead,” Earl sang out. “I believe you have something that belongs to me.” Earl had dressed for the occasion in black leather-a long belted trench coat. As Broker’s gaze shifted from Rodney to Earl and back again, Earl loosened the belt on the coat and flexed his shoulders.
“Binds the arms,” he said. Then he raised his bat like a hitter warming up and took an experimental swing at the air. His tongue played along his lower lip in anticipation. Earl didn’t see Rodney, behind him, getting a good look at Broker and crinkling his wide forehead in surprise.
“Eyebrows?” Rodney said. “Oh, fuck me.”
Chapter Thirty-six
Eyebrows.
Broker’s nickname in the world of snitches, gun dealers, and dope entrepreneurs, where his last official act had been to arrest Rodney. And he now recalled Rodney’s parting words, screamed as they stuffed him into a
