Oklahoma tonight turned into a ride on the red-eye to St Louis at four in the morning. The St. Louis airport is like every other airport at such an hour: deserted. I stashed my bags in a locker outside the all-night coffee shop and waited for the world to open reading the dolled up prospectus about my new home, the Cordlin Industrial park and it's main attraction, Zanchem Inc. High dollar production with too many views of the same installation, choke full of flowery catch phrases about civic involvement and partners in progress and such shit. Every third page had a chorus line of locals all grinning like someone was tugging on their yang. I ran forward to the EOF chimes not gleaning a thing but suspicions. I waited for the shuttle welding names on the faces in the brochure. Sometimes having a name to go with the shadow at Miss Mollies back door does wonders to restore memory.
The shuttle jump to Stillwater was a dozen college kids returning from a weekend at play, plus me. I sat over the wing and ignored their chatter, memorizing a map the airline provided. We had started down into the pattern when the box chimed. The ID was both local and immediate, so I flipped for return vision, but it was a nickel wasted: just a holly on the screen when I opened the box. "A message from Cambell," the holly said, and then paused to smile before looking down to read from her papers . "Your wife called and said to tell you to get in touch with your sister when you get to Stillwater." Another machine made smile and a phone number, and the feed went dead. I pegged the number, and closed the screen. Since I don’t have a sister in Stillwater, or a wife for that matter, there was no question about calling from the plane. I never talk about anything on someone else's link I wouldn't tell my sister. Whatever or whoever the phone number belonged to would have wait on an anonymous line.
The airport in Stillwater is not overly large, a small lobby and ticket desk with only two airline decals, a coffee shop serving more staff than passengers. The local rent-a-ride sported a free phone in the lobby, which I used to call the mystery number. Old school landlines aren't nearly as likely to be on someone's watch list as your cell.
The number was answered by a boy, voice just a shade high for full maturity. I identified myself as Uncle Carson and waited. The line went muffled while the boy yelled out to someone, and then returned to clear. “Hang on, Mom’s out back, she’ll be here in just a second.”
I stuck my tongue in my cheek and wondered. Coincidence? Hard to judge. ‘Out back’ was a Cambell standard. I never have gotten a handle on how large an organization Cambell works for. Sometimes I allow myself to suspect he still works for Uncle. In any case I put my wonders on hold when a mature female voice came on the line.
“Carson, where are you?” The warm glow of greeting a brother.
“In town, at the airport.” Stick to the truth, but add a touch of mischief, be the bachelor brother pulling an afternoon pot luck drop-in on sis.
“Well, give me five minutes, I’ll jump in the truck and be right there.”
“Thanks sis. I owe you.” Make her the elder.
“No, you owe me about twenty,” she said with a beautiful stage laugh. “But who’s counting? See you in a minute.” A smile that echoed, and the line went dead.
Almost exactly five minutes later a truck pulled up in front of me with a throbbing exhaust note that means to much horsepower to hide. The driver made me on sight: she stopped, leaning over to open the passenger door right in front of me.
Red hair, green eyes with tiny wrinkles. Slender but not skinny. Last years beauty queen, this years den mom. I tossed my bags into the corner of the bed. The door hadn’t been latched a quarter second when Mom tapped the throttle and we were leaving the parking lot at forty.
“Do you always just jump right in?” Mom asked, cutting us into the flow of traffic.
“Hesitating doesn’t usually help. I’m Carson. And you are...”
“Dorothy. But call me Dee.”
“OK, you’re Dee. The colonel called you?”
“At an ungodly hour, yes. To go to Wichita and pick up this truck. You do have some ID for me, don’t you?”
“I need to show you an ID?”
Dee laughed, and I noticed first how much room there was between her shirt and her belly. And when the shirt fell back there was a pistol in her left hand.
“‘Yes, cause if you don’t I’m going to shoot you and swear you were trying a carjack.”
“A plausible story. Not true, but plausible. And anyway, I’d be delighted to show you any ID I have. All of which are in my wallet. May I reach inside my jacket?”
“No,” she said, punctuated by a small wave of the pistol. “Right hand on the dash, jacket off, one arm at a time, left arm first. I’ll fish out the wallet. Carefully, please.”
Never argue with someone who says please while pointing a pistol. I leaned forward and began to shrug off the coat. It wasn’t really a surprise when her hand left the steering wheel pinned against a knee to dart over and snatch the wallet. “Now just relax and keep the hands out front,” she said, stuffing the wallet under the far thigh.
Dee drove not even a mile before pulling off into a neighborhood. She flipped the truck around three corners without slowing, ended up in the driveway of a nice brick home. I really didn’t think I was supposed to get out of the truck, so I sat and made sure I did nothing threatening while she flipped through the wallet. After three passes she handed the wallet back.
“I’m just delighted to meet you,” she said, and the pistol was nowhere in sight.
“Likewise, I’m sure. Can you recommend a good motel?”
“In good time,” she replied, sliding out of the truck, taking the keys with her. My choices became follow her into her house or bake in the sun until she came back. The second choice might have been safer, but not enjoyable. I caught her at the door.
She installed me in a recliner in the den, and went to fetch us a beer. While she was in the kitchen I took a good look at the room, and wondered. The chair I sat in was one of only a few masculine things in the room. The usual family photo gallery on one wall, but in the opposite corner over the mantle a framed holo of a man in uniform, handsome, perhaps thirty five. The kind of photo a new widow puts where she can see it. The kind of photo a lot of us had taken in San Diego before shipping out. Dee returned before I’d gotten past the first few possible connections to Cambell.
Dee is a very direct woman. She set a frosted tall boy on the table beside me, and dropped the keys on top. “The truck is yours, it came with a notarized title. Get it transferred soon, just in case McGee neglected to expense it.”
The tone said she knew more about Cambell than just his name. I covered a touch of curiosity by popping the beer and waiting politely for Dee to get seated, with a nagging thought playing among the bubbles. I took a pull on the brew, and opened conversation around the one thing I knew we had in common. “Sounds like you’ve known Cambell for a while,” I said.
“Only about a hundred years,” Dee said, and I couldn’t for the life of me read the tone of voice. Maybe bitter, maybe wistful. Definitely riding a custom cradle. The suspicion gained a bit. I rechecked the line of photo’s, this time with Dee handy for comparison. Sure enough, there she was, fifteen years younger and blonde, shadowed between two tall boys. I didn’t look long enough to even guess at the boys, but it was long enough for her to read the sweep of my eyes.
“You’re getting there,” she said, “So I’ll spare your eyes. Me in the middle, Cambell on my right, Jack on my left.”
No doubt on the last. The scar from that kind of loss is a tone that never goes away, not in fifty years. I had a name for the man over the mantle, and a desire for quick cover. “Cambell never mentioned Oklahoma,” I said.
“That’s Illinois behind us,” Dee said, and the suspicion settled into its berth with a soft click. Dee short for Dorothy, Sandra Dorothy something. SandyDee, pronounced as one word, half the time through clenched teeth. SandyDee from Chicago, center of Campbell’s outrageous ramblings that million hour night he fought his outfit from a shot out command com with a shoulder full of morphine and a leg full of shrapnel.
“Jack was ROTC even then. Cam swore he’d never join, right up to the day he signed on. Jack damn near fell off when I told him Cam had stood for OCS.”
I didn’t ask what Jack nearly fell off of. Me, I was glad for arms on the recliner. Cambell as a pacifist would shake the world of any man who’d met him in the army. The beer bought me a good ten seconds. Ten hours would not have helped, because the question had to be asked. “You're saying Cambell used to be a pacifist?”
Dee laughed right out. “Yea, he used to stay up all night writing letters about how to avoid giving away the baby with the bath water. He really worked at it. Like I said, I’ve known him a long time. I think he turned so ferocious in outrage for being ignored.”
This rang true, strange as it might sound. Cambell might cut out a man’s innards to make bootlaces, and everyone who noticed them would be told the story. And there would always be just a touch of sadness for the poor ‘raki who was in the wrong place to take his innards home with him.
“Well, if I don’t learn anything else the days not a waste,” I said.
Dee cocked her head around a grin, and did the brew a healthy pull. “A man who measures his days in what he’s learned,” she said, green eyes flashing over the silvered top of the beer. “I think we’ll get along famously.”
Something about her tone made me feel like I’d just passed a test no one bothered to inform me of. The thought of tests pulled the focus back into the present. I matched her on the brew, and set the can on a knee. “So,” I began, turning the can to read the label, “are you involved beyond fetching me at the airport?”
“Perhaps,” she answered. “Cam asked me if I’d tend to a few things while I'm officially on what I laughingly call a vacation.”
I should have known Dee was a working woman. That Jack was over the mantle said that much. “What are you vacationing from?” I asked.
“You mean, what do I do for a living when Cam’s not spreading someone else’s money around?“
“Yea, that’s the gist of it,” I said, turning the beer up to get the last.
“I investigate people. Background checks, deadbeats, cheating husbands and lying wives. That sort of thing. Nothing dramatic, mostly just tawdry and boring.”
Tawdry and boring most of the time I could believe, but there had to be times that were anything but boring seeing how her little pistol was such a comfortable friend.
No comments:
Post a Comment