Somewhere a herd of lazy, skinny cows munched dry grass, keeping up the appearance that the Jordans were in the cattle business, and not a bunch of redneck hoods with a finger or two into every disreputable scheme within reach.
It’s true that in high school I had disliked Luke Jordan from a distance, but it was the stories of his older brothers, surfacing here and there in excited whispers, that I remembered most as a teenager. The town toughs, bullies and bad eggs. See them coming down the sidewalk, and you crossed the street. And everyone knew they were generally up to no good, yet somehow they always managed to slide, get off on a technicality or maybe a witness would reconsider what he’d actually seen, sitting up there on the witness stand. Only the oldest, Brett, had gone away to the big house. Can’t win them all. So Brett was known as the heavy criminal, but it was Jason more than any other brother that made me stay clear of the Jordans.
One thing I’ll always remember about Jason:
I was sixteen years old, sitting in my Mom’s Aries K car outside the Tastee-Freeze. Tiffany Davies sat in the passenger seat licking a chocolate ice cream cone like she was in love with it, and the only thing I could thing of was how to get her pants down around her ankles. I’d been working her hard, Saturday night dates three weeks in a row, heavy petting and dry humping, and I’d figured that night was going to be go-time. I had a condom in my pocket, pressing a permanent ring in the leather of my wallet.
Jason roared up on a black Harley Davidson, denim jacket, biker’s boots, wraparound sunglasses, no helmet, his dishwater hair tied back with a blue bandana. He leapt off the bike and jumped onto the car next to mine, a white El Camino. He stomped across the hood, jumped down on the driver’s side, opened the door and pulled Mark Foster out from behind the wheel. Mark was a year ahead of me, skinny in t-shirt, jeans and scuffed Doc Martin’s.
Mark didn’t get a chance to say anything. Jason had popped him in the nose, a smear of bright blood down Mark’s face. It all went downhill from there.
The El Camino’s passenger door flew open and Missy Shaw emerged, some Tracy Chapman song spilling out of the car with her. She was in my biology class. I thought she was hot but strange, so I really never talked to her that much.
“Stop it, Jason,” she screamed, almost hysterical.
“You shut up,” Jason told her.
And she did, shrinking back into the El Camino, eyes so wide with terror.
Jason had Mark back over the hood of the car and just kept beating him in the face.
“Oh, my god, oh, my god!” Tiffany kept bleating next to me.
Jason’s girl. Now Mark’s girl. Maybe nobody’s girl in a second.
Mark had gone all floppy and loose on the hood, Jason still beating down on him. I thought a minute Mark might’ve been dead. It seemed to take forever for people to erupt from the Tastee-Freeze, five of them grabbing Jason, a couple truckers and farmers and Mr. Iverson in his stained apron.
My mom and dad took me to a safari park one time when I was nine years old. You drove through, stayed in your car, lions and zebras and everything all over the place, and a sign about every two inches reminding patrons to STAY IN YOUR CAR. That’s what it felt like sitting there in the Aries K, watching the whole thing through the windshield.
I’ll never forget the look on Jason’s face, his eyes so calm, yet at the same time blazing some cold fire, a man or an animal about the devil’s business.
And that’s how I thought of the Jordans now, a whole family of them going about the devil’s business. The chief always told me if you start thinking of people bigger than they really are, then you’ll never maintain law and order. It’s the man with the star on his chest that’s big. I tried to remember that as I approached the Jordan household.
A light on in one front window. The rest of the house looked dark. I eased around the back keeping to the shadows. The front porch light didn’t cast its glow very far.
The side of the house was cluttered with old engine parts, the rusted hulk of a Pinto, an ancient refrigerator. I maneuvered through the debris, not really sure what I was doing here, hoping answers would present themselves without me having to ask the right questions. I didn’t know the questions anymore than I knew the answers. All I knew was everything was wrong and it all started with a dead Luke Jordan, so maybe the Jordans knew the right secrets to make sense of this mess.
So many secrets and so much history for such a small town. Miles and miles and miles of wide open space, yet it seemed like we were in each other’s pockets every damn day. Hell, I knew the other side of the coin too. Going from gig to gig, town to town, and every single face was a stranger’s. When I was on the road with the band, I felt free, but I often felt lonely too.
I couldn’t say which way was worse. I couldn’t make my brain think about it.
More junk rose up in my way. I scooted around a defunct dishwasher and an empty, pitted beer keg. A fence with a gate half open leading into the back yard. I slipped through, quiet as I could step.
Just inside the gate, the Doberman leapt for me.
Like some sleek rocket made of solid meat, he flew, trailing slobber, his bark sending a panicked chill straight up my spine. His jaws snapped shut two inches from my face, and he landed in front of me, barking his head off. I backed up where the fence and the side of the house made a corner, petrified. The dog didn’t come any closer, and I realized he was on a rope tied to a small tree thirty feet away. There was no way to get around him without coming within range of those teeth. He liked showing me the teeth, his lips curled back in a constant growl.
My hand fell to the revolver, but it never cleared the holster.
“Lucifer, sit!” A new voice from the house.
The dog backed up three steps sat, a low growl still trickling out of it.
An old woman came out of the screen door, little more than a silhouette against the light from inside the house. But I could see the revolver in her hand well enough, an enormous lumpy thing from some old war. She pointed it at me. Compared to the dog, I didn’t mind.
“Who’s that?”
“Toby Sawyer, ma’am.”
She squinted at me, leaned in trying to get a look at me. I could tell she had trouble seeing, but the revolver was so close, I’m sure she’d have no trouble putting one right in my gut.
“You one of Luke’s friends? Or Jason’s?”
“Not quite, ma’am,” I said. “But I was hoping to check with your boys if they were home.”
“My grandsons.”
Holy shit, Grandma Jordan. When I was eleven, my dad told me she’d shot an Indian. I wondered if it were true. I wondered if that was the same gun. I hoped in twenty years people wouldn’t be telling the story about the time Grandma Jordan shot a part-time deputy.
“Are they here, ma’am?”
“No. Come inside.”
“Well, if they’re not here, I don’t want to disturb—”
“I said come inside.”
“Okay.”
I went through the screen door and found myself in a hot stuffy room, stacks of books, magazines and newspapers surrounding an old overstuffed armchair. The place smelled like fried bologna and Ben Gay.
She motioned with the revolver. “Keep going.”
I went through the cluttered room and into a small kitchen. She added a second cup and saucer to a tarnished silver tray, kept the gun on me with the other hand. She added a ceramic pot to the tray. The pot had thin little cracks running up the side, a faded pattern of purple flowers. The cups and saucers matched the pot.
She nodded at the tray. “Bring that please.”
I picked it up and followed her back into the stuffy room with all the magazines. She sat in the armchair, motioned at a footstool nearly buried in newspapers. I cleared off the stool and sat, placed the tray on a clear patch of floor between us. I handed her a cup and took the other one.
I sipped. Tepid. A vague hint of mint, slightly bitter aftertaste. She sipped too, her other hand seemingly casual on the gun in her lap. I appraised the old woman, tried to gauge her ability to plug me before I could jump up and run out the door.
