“I don’t know what, like he’s used to knocking people on their ass, that’s what. And he don’t look local. He was wearing one of Harry Griffin’s crew coats. Everybody says Griffin has some dark bullshit in his past. Maybe this guy is part of that. Point is, he don’t fit up here. Making laborer’s pay, paying the rent on a lakefront cabin, driving a brand-new green Tundra.”
“Okay, okay; slow down, back up. Who is he? Where does he live?”
“I heard him talking to Keith.”
“Oh, great, Keith was there. Wonderful. What’d Keith do?” Cassie had paused to organize her thoughts. So Gator read between the lines and said, “Jimmy tried to get smart with the guy, right?”
“He was upset seeing Teddy all bloody,” Cassie said.
“C’mon, Jimmy bit off more than he could handle.” As usual. When she didn’t answer, Gator said, “Cassie, who wound up sitting in Keith’s car afterward?” Still no answer. “Never mind. So where does he live, again?”
“It’s the old Hamre place, off County Twelve on the west side of the lake. Griffin bought it way back and fixed it up.”
“Gotcha. I know the property. You got a name?”
“Uh, his name is Phil. Phil Broker. Another thing. I called Madge Grolick at the school, and she said nobody’s ever seen the guy’s wife. He brings the kid, picks her up.”
“You ask how long they been here?”
“Transferred in January, right in the middle of the school year.” Having delivered the information, Cassie’s voice launched into her basic global plea. “Gator, I could use a little help here to make it stop, you know how hard I try…”
Gator smiled, loving her palpable need vibrating in the cell phone. Damn. It was like…fan mail. “Jeez, Cassie, you gotta back off on that stuff. Don’t want to use too much, know what I mean.”
“Please, Gator, What do I have to do, beg or…what?”
Gator shut his eyes and listened to his sister’s voice, like she was right there with him, shrunk down and imprisoned in the oblong Motorola slab of cell phone plastic in his broad hand. Locked in and pleading to get out, his own private genie in a bottle, all mixed up in with the tiny jit-jit lights and chips and shit. Like she was under a spell. Yeah, he could see that. So he let the ambiguity dangle on the connection for several delicious seconds, and then he said, “Okay, I’ll check this guy out, now you just calm down. It’ll be all right. You did good.” Then he paused, letting the stress compound on the other end of the connection. When the silence was closer to snapping, he soothed. “I’ll bring you something. But you gotta treat me right, understood.” Then he ended the call before she could blubber thanks. He set the cell phone aside. He leaned back against his workbench, arms thrust back for support.
Gator stood five feet ten and a half inches in his stocking feet. He weighed 185. Once a month he went into town and had old Irv Preston run clippers over his scalp so his hair resembled a dark cap. Excess hair could get caught in moving parts.
Get him out of the greasy work overalls into decent clothes, and he’d be handsome in a saturnine way. His blue eyes could have a devilish Gallic twinkle. Had metis in his blood; his people sprang from the nomadic mix of French and Cree out of Canada. A lifetime working with machinery had given him a taut, dense body. His hands were square and powerful, with at least one signature mashed fingernail in evidence.
When he was in the Navy, a woman in a Pocatello, Idaho, barroom told him once he had a Steve McQueen look going for him, but darker, and he could see that-if McQueen packed more muscle, from a year lifting weights in Stillwater Prison after getting busted for transporting a kilo of cocaine with intent to sell.
Gator Bodine looked around his shop. Years back he’d had dreams of crashing the mechanic elite; getting on a pit crew at NASCAR or the Indy. When that goal proved out of reach, he had to face the facts. The most he could hope for was a berth at an auto dealership with a benefits package. Or start his own shop. And that required capital. His first attempt at alternative financing had fizzled when the cops kicked in his door.
He had tried real hard to learn from his mistakes. Brooding in jail, he’d realized he was sitting on a modest gold mine. All the antique tractors his dad had pack-ratted into the big junkyard behind the shop for forty years.
His eyes traveled to the wall where he had a centerfold page taped up out of a slick color Minneapolis Moline coffee-table-type book: looked like a hot rod with the distinctive flared tinwork, the fender sloping over the big rear wheels, grill, and cab. It was a rare 1938 Moline Model UDLX. Painted in an orange they called Prairie Gold. Gold was right.
Barnie Sheffeld, who displayed one of Gator’s restored tractors at his implement lot in Bemidji, told him a UDLX, restored to mint, would bring a hundred grand.
The stripped-down tractor sitting in the shop under the picture on the wall didn’t look like much now. He had the rusted cowling and the gas tank pulled off. Had unbolted the front half, legged it up, and pried it away from the rear section. Took out the engine. The cam and crank. Had the back end up on blocks and bottle jacks and had spent the day pulling the clutch.
But it was a vintage UDLX, and when he got done, it would look exactly like the one in the picture.
As perfect as he could make it.
Then he’d paint it the same color-Prairie Gold.
Methodically, he shook some Boraxo into his hand and worked it into his hands and forearms. Scrubbing up to the coiled green-and-red alligator tattoo that ran the length of his left forearm. When he wiggled his fingers, the bunched muscles rippled and the tattoo moved.
He shook his head and used a rag to worry the deeply ingrained grease from his thick fingers. As he cleaned his hands and arms in the work sink, he glanced out the window, at the sign planted in the yard in front of his shop. Next to a red 1919 Fordson with giant steel-treaded wheels.
Bodine’s Old Iron.
The corner of his lips tipped up slightly as he imagined an invisible hand coming down out of the restless gray sky and painting a letter Y at the end of the sign. Bodine’s Old Irony…
Except for the dark perpetual four o’clock shadow that stubbled his cheeks and dimpled jaw, Gator Bodine resembled the garage bay in which he stood. On the outside, he was a compulsively tidy, meticulously organized man. The inside was more difficult to chart.
He had always loved machines. Loved taking them apart, putting them together. Loved puzzling out how they worked. Could spend hours watching the moving parts.
Sometimes he wished he could take people apart and put them back together. Be nice if he could see the moving parts behind their eyes. His own eyes. His sister’s…
Thing about Cassie; she’d just keep working on a guy. It was like some wacko relentless religion with her; in the beginning God created pussy. He shook his head, took a fresh towel from the rack by the sink, dried his hands.
She’d been just about the most perfect-looking women he had ever seen in his life. Until she opened her mouth.
Until she fucking moved…
…toward some man…
Gator, make it stop.
He shook his head. Gotta fight her battles for her. That turd she married sure wouldn’t. And besides, he needed Jimmy to make the plan work. And he needed Cassie to keep her mouth shut. And, who knows, maybe she’d actually spotted something out of line with this new guy.
Due diligence dictated that he go see.
He was Cassie’s twin, born eighteen minutes after her. He always joked, half serious, about that. He always thought he should have been first.
Not born really, more like hatched.
He had seen this show on the Discovery Channel about how baby alligators get born in a swamp, and the trick was not getting devoured by their daddy. By the time he was a junior in high school, he had no doubts that he was living in his own private Everglades set down in the middle of the glacial lake country of northwestern Minnesota. He had come to view his father as a reptile subspecies of the Bodine strain of jack-pine savage white trash. Mom was no help at all; hell, she was outa the same stagnant pool, the old man’s first cousin.