“Dance?” I repeated, stupefied. But before I could go into my hard-of-hearing-with-a-touch-of-brain-damage routine, she jerked my arm like a puppy’s leash, spun me around and propelled me toward the dance floor. This was no time for argument: I danced. She pressed me to her — breasts like armaments, big grinding hips — then made the mistake of releasing my hand as she fell into momentary rapture over the musical miracle of her own rhythmically heaving body, and I dodged behind a barefoot lumberjack with beard, belly and ratchetting beads, and clawed my way to the beer booth.
The bartender had his back to me, bending to crack a fresh keg. “Two beers,” I said. “When you get a chance.” I stole a look over my shoulder to see if my dancing partner had missed me, but there was no sign of her. I was safe. I would give the dance floor a wide berth on the way back, hand Petra her beer and then suggest that we go to my place — or rather her place. Yes, that’s what I’d do. We’d been here long enough, I’d taken foolish risks, and now it was time for my reward.
Absently, I studied the work-hardened hands of the bartender as he positioned the spigot over the cork, screwed the collar tight and rammed the plunger home. Somewhere behind me a raft of firecrackers snapped and stuttered. And then, in the half-conscious way we register minor changes in our environment, I saw that this bartender, with his sun-ravaged neck, graying hair and outsized ears, was not the good-natured cowboy of two and a half hours ago, but someone else altogether, someone who from this angle almost looked … familiar.
Before I could make the connection, Lloyd Sapers spun around, spigot in hand, and said, “Two beers coming up.” The beer was already hissing into the first cup, yellow as bile, when he glanced up and found himself staring into my stricken face. There was a moment of shocked recognition during which his eyes fell back into his head and his lower jaw dropped open to reveal teeth worn to nubs and a lump of shit-colored tobacco, and then his face lit with a sort of malicious joy. “Well, Christ-ass, if it isn’t Ernest Hemingway. Gettin’ a bit dry up there on the mountain, hey?”
My first impulse was to laugh in his face in an explosion of nerves, like the killer at the denouement of a Sherlock Holmes movie (Ha! You’ve caught me! Ha-Ha! Yes, yes: I did it! I killed her! Choked her with my own hands, I did. Ha! Ha-Ha, Ha-Ha! Ha!). Fortunately, I was able to stifle that impulse. What I did manage to do, after struggling to get a grip on myself, was force my face into the jocular it-wasn’t-me expression of a good ole boy caught in a minor but quintessentially manly transgression. “You know how it is,” I said, grinning sheepishly, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”
“Don’t I know it,” he roared and nearly choked on his own laughter. I watched as the level of beer rose in the second cup, already shifting my weight to turn and make my escape, when he leaned forward and said, “You didn’t bring that big fella with you, did you? The one that shoved me around?”
I shook my head.
“Good,” he said, dropping his voice from the usual roar. His straw hat was askew and he smelled as if he’d been dipped in used Kitty Litter. “I don’t like him,” he said confidentially, capping off the beer with a crown of foam. “The man just ain’t neighborly.”
I hooked two fingers over the lips of the plastic cups, preparatory to lifting them from the table and making my exit, but Sapers wouldn’t release them. Held fast, I could only mumble something to the effect that Gesh was sometimes hard to get along with.
“Ha!” Sapers bellowed. “Now that’s an understatement.” And then he snatched the beers from my grasp and swished them in the dust; “You got a couple of chewed-up cups there, friend — what’d you do, pick ’em up off the ground?”
“No, I—”
“Here,” he said, producing clean cups and clicking them down on the table, “I’ll fix you up with some fresh ones,” and I watched as he prolonged my agony by pumping up the keg and meticulously tipping each cup to accept a slow steady stream of headless beer. I was sweating. I closed my eyes a moment and watched a dance of red and green paremecia on the underside of my eyelids. “Here you go,” Sapers said, and pushed the two full beers toward me.
Could it be this easy? I reached for the beers, about to thank him and go, when he ducked his head slyly, spat out a stream of saliva and tobacco juice and said, “So I hear you boys been doin’ a little gardenin’ up there. …”
I stood stock-still, my hands arrested, like a man at a picnic who glances up from his sandwich to find a two-inch hornet circumnavigating his head. Sapers was regarding me steadily, his eyes keen and intent. I remembered that first morning in the cabin, the way he’d dropped the mask of the yokel for just an instant and the foreboding I’d felt. He was clever, he was dangerous, he bore us ill will. And I was half drunk. As nonchalantly as I could, I lifted one of the beers to my lips, took a swallow and said, “Whatever gave you that idea?”
“Marlon,” he said, blinking innocently, the hick again. “He says you got all these drums of water and hoses and—”
I cut him off. “Marlon?” Illumination came in a rush: the big lumbering half-wit had been spying on us, slipping through the woods like a cousin to the bear, fingering our hoses and sniffing our plants. “You mean he’s …?” I couldn’t quite frame the words.
Sapers looked apologetic. “Oh, listen, I hope you and your friends’ll understand — the boy’s a bit, you know,” he said, tapping a gnarled finger to the side of his head. “He don’t mean no harm.”
“But our place is private property — we’ve got signs up all over the place.” My voice was a squeal of outrage. “Vogelsang would hit the ceiling if he heard about this.”
Sapers spat again, then picked up my beer and took a long swallow. “Aw, come on,” he said, “it’s no big deal, is it? What have you got to hide?”
“Nothing,” I said, too quickly. “But it’s the principle. You see, Vogelsang’s afraid somebody’ll get hurt on the property and sue him — he’s got a real hang-up about it. And Gesh, you know how Gesh is.” I shrugged. “Me, I could care less. I mean, shit, we’ve got nothing to hide.”
Sapers was watching me like a predator, no hint of amusement in his face. “So what have you got in the ground over there anyways — sweet corn?”
What was he doing — playing games? Making me squirm? I didn’t know what to think — maybe I was having a paranoid episode and he knew nothing at all — but at least I had the presence of mind to play along. “What else?” I said, as if in epicurean contemplation of that succulent, many-kerneled farinaceous vegetable. “Nothing but cattle corn in the supermarket, right?”
Sapers was impassive, his face locked like a vault.
“Of course, we’re growing other stuff, too — for the exercise, you know? Beets, celery, cucumbers, succotash — you name it.”
Stroking his chin thoughtfully, Sapers shifted the wad of tobacco from his left cheek to his right. “The only reason I ask is because I been havin’ the devil of a time with the coons this year — for every ear they eat they spoil five. They hittin’ you pretty hard, too?”
“No,” I said. “I mean yes. Or we didn’t know it was coons. Something’s been getting into the garden, anyway — Phil thought it was bears.” I chortled at the absurdity of it, but the joke fell flat. Something made me glance to my right at that instant, and I saw to my alarm that I was flanked by the immensity of Marlon and the wiry whiskery spring-coiled figure of George Pete Turner.