Ross Thomas
Yellow-Dog Contract
For
John and Mary Lou Burwell
with thanks
for the loan of the farm
Chapter One
The Proper Villain slowed them down. I heard the car when it turned in and I could tell it was going far too fast, but I didn’t look around because I was up in the tree fixing the swing. The tree was the huge old cottonwood, probably fifty feet high, that grew on the other side of the house next to the pond.
The swing was a long single length of three-quarter-inch manila rope and to its other end I had already wired a gunny sack stuffed with rags and an old army blanket. The idea was to swing off the porch rail out over the pond, let go of the gunnysack, and drop into the deepest part of the pond with a fine, cool splash.
I looked around after they ran over The Proper Villain, or rather his grave. There had been the usual harsh clatter and clank followed by the screech of rubber bruising itself against metal. If it had been going five miles per hour faster, the car might have broken a shock absorber or two and maybe even an axle.
But that was what The Proper Villain’s grave was for — to make cars slow down so that they wouldn’t run over our five dogs, eight cats, two goats, six ducks, and a pair of the meanest peacocks in three states and probably the District of Columbia.
When alive The Proper Villain had been a nine-year-old yellow tomcat, alley born and bred somewhere in the freak haven that then lay just east of Dupont Circle in Washington. I had found him late one night in the alley back of the Sulgrave Club on Massachusetts Avenue. I had almost stepped on him and he had spit at me and swatted at my ankle, and the girl I was with, a Londoner from around Maida Vale, or maybe it was Paddington, had giggled and said, “Now there’s a proper villain, in’t he?” At the time he was six weeks old. Maybe seven.
The Proper Villain lived five years in the carriage house in Washington and four more on the farm near Harpers Ferry before the Sears service truck flattened him on the quarter-mile dirt lane that led from the road to the house. It was the last time I ever bought anything from Sears.
I buried him on the spot, in the middle of the lane, and to mark his grave I built a bump out of rocks, dirt, and some old railroad ties that I found in Charles Town. The bump was a deceptively rounded ridge that stretched across the lane, but if you went over it at more than ten miles per hour, you were in for some front-end work.
Later, still mildly obsessed, I built twenty more of the bumps about fifty feet apart and put up signs reading “Five Miles Per Hour — This Means You” and “Posted — No Hunting” and “Keep Out — Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted” and “Beware of Vicious Dogs.” Nobody ever paid any attention to the signs, of course, but they all slowed down to a crawl after they ran over The Proper Villain.
The car that had turned in was a new Mercedes 450 SEL sedan that had that rented or leased look to it. You can always tell. The driver was negotiating the lane cautiously now but I couldn’t see who it was because the afternoon sun bounced off the windshield creating a glare. Still, I kept on watching until the car disappeared beneath the pines in front of the house.
I went back to tying the last square knot into the swing’s rope and I remember thinking that perhaps I should get a book and teach myself to tie at least one or two other kinds when Ruth came out on the porch and looked up.
“You’ve got visitors,” she said.
“I have or we have?”
“You have. Mr. Murfin and Mr. Quane.”
“Ah.”
“Yes,” she said. “Ah.”
“Well, maybe you’d better tell them I’m not here.”
“I already told them that you are.”
I thought about it for a moment. “Okay. On the porch. We’ll do it on the porch.”
“You want a little something?”
I thought again, trying to remember. “Bourbon,” I said. “They both drink bourbon.”
“The good bourbon or the other?”
“The other.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said and went back into the house.
Murfin and Quane came out on the porch and looked around — to their left, their right, then down, and everywhere but up. I watched them for several seconds, maybe even as many as ten, thinking that they both were older and heavier and even greyer, but carrying their triple burden fairly well, all things considered, although it would take much more than ten seconds to consider all things.
“Up here,” I said and then they both looked up a little surprised.
“Harvey,” Murfin said and then Quane said, “How the hell are you?”
“Okay,” I said. “And you?”
“Not bad,” Murfin said and Quane said that he was all right, too.
We looked at each other some more. What I saw were two men in their late thirties whom I had known for twelve years but hadn’t seen for three, possibly four. That made Ward Murfin about thirty-eight or thirty-nine. Max Quane was younger, probably thirty-seven. It was the middle of August and hot and neither of them wore coats, but they both wore shirts and ties although the ties were loosened. Murfin’s shirt was pale green and Quane’s was white with thin black stripes and a tab collar. I remembered then that he had always worn tab collars with a neat little gold pin in them.
“A swing, huh?” Murfin said.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
Murfin quickly saw how it would work. “Right off the porch. Right off the rail here and then out over the pond. Shit, I’d like to try that.”
“Why not?” I said and started climbing down the tree. I had to go hand over hand along the final branch and then drop about three feet onto the porch rail and balance there without falling. I did it quickly and smoothly, showing off, I suppose, and I could see both Murfin and Quane watching carefully, probably hoping that I’d fall on my ass, and perhaps even wondering if they could do it like that after maybe a bit of practice. I decided not to tell them how many times I’d practiced it.
We shook hands then and they both still had their quick, firm, professional handshakes — the kind that preachers, politicians and most labor organizers have. After that was over I told them to sit anywhere and they decided on two canvas chairs, the kind that they call directors chairs in Hollywood and safari chairs in Africa. I’m not quite sure what they’re called in Virginia.
I chose the bench swing, which was the old-fashioned kind suspended from the porch ceiling by thin metal chains. We sat there for a moment inspecting each other, probably for signs of dotage and infirmity, and none of us would have been unhappy at the discovery of a tremulous jowl here or a mild tic there.
Finally Murfin said, “I like your moustache.”
I gave it a couple of strokes before I could stop myself. “I’ve had it a couple of years,” I said. “Ruth says she likes it.”
“It makes you look something like that old-time movie actor,” Quane said. “Hell, he’s dead now and I can’t even remember his name, but he used to be in a lot of pictures with... uh... Myrna Loy.”
“William Powell,” Ruth said as she came out on to the porch with the tray. She put the tray down on the huge old wooden industrial cable spool that we used as a porch table. “It makes him look very much like Mr. Powell in My Man Godfrey, although I don’t think Miss Loy was in that particular film.”
That was how my wife talked about almost everybody, with a kind of grave, gentle formality that I found reassuring and others found disarming and even quaint. She was one of the few persons in the country who, despite her deep personal revulsion, had never referred to him as anything but Mr. Nixon. People sometimes asked me if she were always like that, even in private, and I assured them that she was although I could have added, but didn’t, that in private we giggled a lot.