punctuated by a yellow school-bus carcass with no wheels.
Gurney opened his folder of interview summaries and pulled the appropriate one to the top. He read:
Gurney closed the folder, put it on the passenger seat. Apparently Calvin Harlen’s life had been a prolonged audition for White-Trash Poster Boy.
He got out of the car, locked it, and walked across the trafficless road to a rutted expanse of dirt that served as a kind of driveway onto the property. It forked into two loosely defined directions, separated by a triangle of stunted grass: one toward the manure pile and barn on the right, the other on the left toward a ramshackle two-story farmhouse whose last paint job was so many decades in the past that the patches of paint on the rotting wood no longer had a definable color. The porch overhang was supported by a few four-by-four posts of more recent vintage than the house but far from new. On one of the posts was a plywood sign advertising DEER CUTING in red, dripping, hand-painted letters.
From inside the house came an eruption of the frantic barking of at least two large-sounding dogs. Gurney waited to see if the commotion would bring someone to the door.
It brought someone out of the barn, or at least out from someplace behind the manure pile-a thin, weathered man with a shaved head, holding what appeared to be either a very fine screwdriver or an ice pick.
“You lose something?” He was smirking as though the question were a clever joke.
“You asking me if I lost something?” said Gurney.
“You say you’re lost?”
Whatever the game was, the thin man seemed to be enjoying it.
Gurney wanted to knock him off balance, make
“I know some people with dogs,” said Gurney. “Right kind of dog, you can make a lot of money. Wrong kind, you’re out of luck.”
“Shut the fuck up!”
It took Gurney a second or two-and the sudden end of the barking in the house-to realize whom the thin man had shouted at.
The situation had the potential for becoming unsafe. Gurney knew he still had the option of walking away, but he wanted to stay, had a lunatic urge to spar with the lunatic. He began studying the ground around him. After a while he picked up a small oval stone about the size of a robin’s egg. He massaged it slowly between his palms as if to warm it, flipped it in the air like a coin, caught and enclosed it in his right fist.
“Fuck are you doing?” the man asked, taking a short step closer.
“Shhh,” said Gurney softly. Finger by finger, he slowly opened his fist, examined the stone closely, grinned, and tossed it over his shoulder.
“What the fuck…?”
“Sorry, Calvin, didn’t mean to ignore you. But that’s the way I make my decisions, and it takes a lot of concentration.”
The man’s eyes widened. “How’d you know my name?”
“Everybody knows you, Calvin. Or do you prefer being called Mr. Hard-On?”
“What?”
“Calvin, then. Simpler. Nicer.”
“The fuck are you? What do you want?”
“I want to know where I can find Hector Flores.”
“Hec… What?”
“I’m looking for him, Calvin. I’m going to find him. Thought maybe you could help me.”
“How the hell…? Who…? You ain’t no cop, right?”
Gurney said nothing, just let his expression fade into his best imitation of a dead-eyed killer. The ice-man look seemed to rivet Harlen, widen his eyes a little more.
“Flores the spic, that’s who you’re after?”
“Can you help me, Calvin?”
“I don’t know. How?”
“Maybe you just could tell me everything you know-about our mutual friend.” Gurney inflected the last three words with such ironic menace that he was afraid for a second he’d overdone it. But Harlen’s inane grin removed the fear that anything with this guy could be overdone.
“Yeah, sure, why not? Like what do you want to know?”
“To start with, do you know where he came from?”
“Bus stop in the village where these spic workers come, hang around. They
“How about before that? You know where he came from originally?”
“Some Mexican dump, wherever the fuck they all come from.”
“He never told you?”
Harlen shook his head.
“Did he ever tell you anything?”
“Like what?”
“Anything at all. Did you ever actually speak to him?”
“Once. On the phone. Which is another reason I know he’s full of shit. Last-I don’t know-October, November? I called Dr. Ashton about the snowplowing, but the spic answered the phone, wanted to know what I wanted. Told him I wanted to talk to the doctor, why the fuck should I talk to him? Tells me I got to tell him what it’s about and he’ll tell the doctor. I tell him I didn’t call to talk to him-go fuck himself! Who the fuck’s he think he is? These fucking Mexican scumbags, they come up here, bring their fucking swine-flu AIDS leprosy shit, go on fucking welfare, steal fucking jobs, don’t pay taxes, nothing, fucking stupid diseased bastards. I ever see the slimy little fuck again, I’ll shoot him in the fucking head. First I’ll shoot his fucking balls off.”
In the middle of Harlen’s rant, one of the dogs in the house started barking again. Harlen turned to the side, spit on the ground, shook his head, shouted, “Shut the fuck up!” The barking stopped.
“You said that was another reason you knew he was full of shit?”
“What?”
“You said that speaking to Flores on the phone was another reason you knew he was full of shit.”
“Right.”
“Full of shit how?”
“Fuckhead came here, couldn’t speak a fucking word of English. Year later he’s talking like a fucking-I don’t know, a fucking… like he knows everything.”
“Right, so you figure… what, Calvin?”
“I figure maybe it was all bullshit, you know what I mean?”
“Tell me.”
“Nobody learns English that fucking fast.”
“You’re thinking he wasn’t really a Mexican?”
“I’m saying he was full of shit, pulling some kind of deal.”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s obvious, man. He’s that fucking smart, why the fuck did he show up at the doctor’s house asking if he could rake leaves? He had a fucking
