Nobody said anything. Sturm walked over and ripped open a box. “That’s it then. From now on, you listen to me. I’m goddamn running this show.” He started pulling bottles of Jack Daniels out of the box, all smiles now, as if black clouds had passed over the sun momentarily, but now the light was back, sizzling and brighter than ever. “This calls for a celebration.”
Everyone took a tiny, hesitant breath.
Sturm tossed bottles at the men. “We got ourselves a lot of hard work ahead, but you done good. Tonight, you earned yourselves a good time. Theo’s got a keg on ice in the back yard. Let’s go outside and have ourselves a drink.”
* * * * *
Two blocks east of the park in the middle of town, the First Lutheran Church of Whitewood stood guard over the corner of Fifth street and Elm, a heavy, rectangular building flanked by two strips of dead grass. It reminded Frank of a fortress; tiny stained-glass windows were sunk into the thick concrete walls and it didn’t take much imagination to picture rifles sticking out of the slits. Even the steeple was short and squat, plopped on the roof like a relative who’d had too much pork stuffing on Thanksgiving. The steeple was capped off by a wooden cross; the redwood timber, black from over a century in the sun, was two feet thick and over ten feet tall.
Four pickups congregated in the street below, headlights splashed against the granite steps and double oak doors. The men gathered on the steps, beer cups in hand. Pine and Chuck had thoughtfully loaded the keg into the back of Chuck’s pickup. Chuck drained his cup, belched, and started taking a leak against the wall of the church.
Sturm watched this silently for a moment from the open toolbox at the back of his truck. He spit, then jerked a crowbar from the toolbox.
Everyone flinched as the crowbar bounced off the concrete wall next to Chuck in a burst of burst of concrete chips and sparks. The stream of piss dried up and died.
“Show some respect, dammit,” Sturm shouted. “I was fucking baptized in this church.”
Chuck carefully zipped up, ashamed. The crowbar had landed in the puddle of urine, so Chuck wiped it off on his jeans before he handed it back to Sturm who was stomping up the steps. “Sorry, Mr. Sturm. Won’t happen again.”
Sturm took the crowbar. “You gotta take a leak so goddamn bad, do it on the fucking lawn. Christ Jesus.” He jammed the tip of the crowbar into the gap between the double doors and shoved the other end sideways. The wood split and cracked with a sound like bacon grease popping. Sturm swung the doors wide and tapped the blade of the crowbar on the steps, knocking off the splinters.
“Theo. Get my chainsaw.” Theo ran to the truck. Sturm eyed the men. “You wait here. Show a little respect, for God’s sake.” When Theo ran back, huffing and lugging the thirty-pound chainsaw, Sturm and his son melted into the darkness of the church.
There was an unspoken decision to wait down the steps at the back of Chuck’s truck. More beer was drained from the keg. Boots scuffed the asphalt. Sideways glances were cast at the church.
“Gotta say, I dunno ‘bout that fucking family helping us out,” Jack said softly, trying to salvage a little pride. “Didn’t think we needed any help. I wasn’t trying to start trouble. I just don’t fucking know about that family.”
“Me neither,” Chuck said, still smarting from the ass-chewing over taking a piss on the church. “Far as I’m concerned, they should have left town with everybody else. Hell, I got half a mind to go on over and burn their house down.”
Jack shook his head. “Mr. Sturm says shit, I say how much, that’s a given, but I honestly can’t see what the hell he’s thinking here.”
“They had their shit together, that’s for sure,” Frank said, and instantly wished he hadn’t. That was goddamn dumb. He should have paced his drinking better, shouldn’t have hit the Jack Daniels that hard. He should have saved it for later instead, like he’d been doing the other nights.
“Who had their shit together?” Jack demanded.
Frank shrugged. “We had dinner over there last night. Me and Mr. Sturm.”
“No shit?” Chuck asked.
“No shit.”
“Why?”
Frank shrugged again, wondering how the hell to climb out of this hole. “You could say it was an audition. A demonstration, I guess. Very professional.”
“Professional? Them? Bunch of fucking vermin.” Pine said.
“Well. Food was damn good.”
“So why weren’t we invited?” Chuck asked.
From deep inside the church, the muffled whine of the chainsaw growled to life.
“I can understand Mr. Sturm being there. But how’d you happen to get invited?” Jack asked, resentment slowly creeping into his voice like the sleepy spiders crawling up the vet office walls.
“Hell, I know,” Pine said. “It was Annie, wasn’t it?”
Frank could feel the dynamics of the clowns shifting slowly, as if they were squeezing their anger, their resentment, their confusion out of their minds and pushing it towards Frank. They couldn’t turn their emotions loose on Sturm, and so Frank became the target.
“’Course it was. Fuck me. Of course. She gave you one for free, didn’t she?” Jack said. His dry lips had split in three places. “Chuck told us all about it.”
Frank felt the anger rolling at him, just gentle nudges at first, like rising waves pushed before a storm, but growing stronger. The whiskey and beer in his head decided he should push back. Just a little. After all, he knew something about all of them. None of their dicks had ever touched Annie’s lips.
“Yeah. It was Annie. She invited me.”
“I fucking knew it,” Jack said, and drained his cup.
“Goddamn. You’ve been hitting that shit hard. Got any money left? Or she give you another one for free?” Chuck refilled Jack’s beer. “You ain’t gonna get all possessive and jealous on us now, are you? I mean, let’s not forget, she’s a working girl. Gotta let us have a piece, right?”
* * * * *
Frank had been practicing smiling in the mirror in the bathroom at the vet office. He’d get an image in his head, something disturbing, something awful, something like the animals trapped in their cages out in the desert zoo, or Sturm gutting the tiger on Main Street, or Theo fucking the lion, and work at forcing the muscles in his cheeks to stretch up and out. In the beginning, it looked like he was trying to shit a bowling ball. When he got better, it started to look like a truck had parked on his foot and he was too drunk to really notice. He’d refocus his eyes, shakes his head, clutch the sides of the pitted porcelain sink, and grin at the mirror again and again and again.
The practice paid off. The clowns bought it. They hooted and hollered. But Frank didn’t say anything; he let their imaginations do all the heavy lifting.