“You boys looking for me?”
“You guys looking for me?”
“Can I help you?”
Something like that. They come around with their guns and he’s got the Remington on them hip high, wham, hits one, the Indian, pumps and fires, wham, knocks the other one on his ass, those mag slugs blowing them right off their feet. Or he waits till they get the ten yards, steps out, all he says is ...
“Looking for somebody?”
He’s inside having bacon and eggs as the squad cars arrive flashing their lights. They come because Carmen calls 911 while he’s in the chickenhouse. That would work. He steps out on the porch . . .
“You’re a little late, fellas.”
The cops are looking around. “Where are they?”
“Right over there, where I shot them.”
The star asshole sheriff’s deputy is standing there. Say to him, “You gonna take me in?”
Or maybe something about doing their work for them, without sounding too much like a smartass.
From his perch Wayne looked east along the riverfront to the glass towers of the Renaissance Center, a job that took them seven hundred feet up when he was an apprentice. Get through that one you could work anywhere. The worst winter of his life, scraping ice off the iron before you dared walk upright. He began to think:
Okay, it’s winter, time has passed, the cops are long gone, but you’re still hanging around the house, making excuses there’s work you want to do, well, or you don’t feel good, something. Anyway time passes, Carmen wants to know what’s going on. Nothing. Oh, yeah? You’re up to something. No, I’m not. Yes, you are, what is it?
And you say, “I’m gonna find them.”
She can’t believe it. “But they’re gone.”
“No, they aren’t.”
The idea is it’s dead of winter, the ship channels are frozen over, the coast guard’s breaking ice for the Harsens Island ferry and the one to Walpole and he’s been going over there on a hunch they’re hiding out on one of the islands, in a boarded-up summer cottage or a trapper’s cabin, he can feel it, the people on Walpole are acting strange, they know something but won’t talk and he senses the two guys have scared the shit out of everybody and are making them bring food, maybe holding a kid hostage. Lionel’s wife finally tells him they’re hiding out in an old trailer on Squirrel Island where Lionel used to keep muskrat traps, on the edge of a cornfield right across the South Channel from Sans Souci, the bar where the Indians go. For weeks he watched the trailer from a duck blind near the bar until finally one day he sees two figures coming across the channel, shoving muskrat poles in the snow, poking their way along so as not to go through the ice. He raises his binoculars. It’s them. They’re a mess, filthy dirty fugitives, a couple of human muskrats that have been hiding out on the edge of the marsh, wild looks in their eyes. They don’t see him till they’re almost to the bank. He’s out of the blind, standing with the Remington across his arm, patient, relaxed, wearing his heavy black wool parka with the hood. And he’s got a beard now. They stop dead in their tracks. They don’t know him from Sergeant Preston of the fuck
ing Mounties till he says, very calmly:
“I’ve been waiting for you, gentlemen.”
Wayne listened to it in his mind. He thought calling them gentlemen because of the way they looked, being sarcastic, would sound good but it didn’t, it was dumb. No, leave it off, just say . . . And said out loud:
“I’ve been waiting for you.”
Behind him, the walking boss said, “We’re right here, Wayne. What’s the trouble?”
The raising-gang foreman was behind the walking boss, both of them standing on the open-iron girder. They watched Wayne look up over his shoulder, welding goggles on his hard hat turned backward, maybe a little surprised to see them, that was all. They watched him get to his feet.
“No trouble,” Wayne said. “I’ll move out of your way.”
The walking boss and the raising-gang foreman watched him walk the girder to the column at the south end of the structure, on the corner, swing out around it, gripping the outer flange with his gloves and the instep of his work shoes, and slide down two levels to the decked-in tenth floor. They watched him pause. From where he was now he could take ladders down to each floored level.
Maybe he was going to and changed his mind, favoring the express route. They watched him slide down the column the entire hundred feet or more, all the way to the ground where the guys were standing around watching, and head for the steel-company trailer.
The walking boss looked at the raising-gang foreman. Neither of them said anything.
11
CARMEN HAD TO WAIT to tell Wayne about the FBI man calling.
Wayne came home talkative, now with another reason to be on the muscle. The squad car parked in the yard wasn’t enough. Now they didn’t want him at work because they said he almost caused an accident that could have killed a man. “Almost,” Wayne said. “The whole goddamn job, anything you do on a structure can almost kill you, it’s the way it is.” Having their beers he told her this guy Kenny never looked where he was going was the trouble, it wasn’t the first time he dropped a beater, everybody knew Kenny worked in the morning hungover, it was why he went out at noon. Didn’t matter. “The walking boss, guy I went to apprentice school with, says take some time off till I get my head on straight. Says nobody’ll work with me. You believe it?” Wayne turned to the range, asked what they were having for supper.
Carmen told him Oriental stir-fried chicken and said, “Wayne? Scallen called.” There, she had his attention and could take her time now and watch his reactions to what she was going to tell him.
“He wants us to come down to the Federal Court Building tomorrow.”
“Detroit?”
Carmen nodded. “And see a man named John McAllen, with the U.S. Marshals Service.”
“What for?”
“I thought maybe they had the two guys. Scallen said no, this was something else.”
“What?”
“I asked him, he said it would be better to wait and let John McAllen tell us.”
She watched Wayne take a drink of beer. He didn’t seem worried. He said, “Tomorrow, huh?” He didn’t seem the least concerned, or even curious.
“They’re gonna pick us up.”
“That’s all right, long as it isn’t a squad car.”
Carmen hesitated. “What do you think it’s about?”
“I don’t know—what do marshals do? Guard prisoners, take them to court ...I don’t know. What do you think it’s about?”
She said she couldn’t imagine and after that was quiet, because she couldn’t tell him what she was thinking, the awful feeling that the “something else” was about Matthew. Wayne would act amazed and say, “Matthew? Why would you think it’s about him?” Because she was thinking it, that’s why. Because she couldn’t help it. Because if it wasn’t about the two guys but had something to do with the government, someone in the government wanting to talk to them... She could see them walking into an office with a flag on a stand where the government official is waiting to tell them, is sorry to inform them, there was an accident on the flight deck of the Carl Vinson, CVN 70, their son got between an aircraft and the JBD, or their son had been swept overboard and was missing, not drowned, they’d never say that, they’d say he was out somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean missing, as if to say, well, he could turn up, you never know.