“It’s a parrot,” Cory said.
“Goddam, it is a parrot! That’s what I oughta have.” Leaning toward Parker, gesturing at the patch that covered his left eye, he said, “You can see how that would go with me, can’t you?”
“It belongs to Tom,” Parker said.
Taking a step forward, Cory said, “Cal doesn’t mean he wants it. It just tickled him, that’s all. You know, because of the patch.”
“I don’t want a goddam bird,” Cal said, and now he was discontented again. Leaning forward ever closer to Parker, he said, “I bet you don’t know we’re twins.”
“I knew you were brothers,” Parker said.
“Yeah, but not twins. It’s because of this goddam—” He made an angry swiping gesture toward the patch. “If I could get,” he started, then erased that in the air, and sat back, showing himself calm and logical. “The situation is,” he said, “if I could get the plastic surgery and the glass eye, I could look just exactly like this handsome fella here.”
“The insurance wouldn’t pay,” Cory explained.
“I wasn’t that drunk!” Cal yelled, angry again. “And it was that other sonofabitch’s fault, anyway.” Leaning forward toward Parker again, now confidential, he said, “All I need’s a little money, Ed, you can see that. Where’m I gonna get that kinda money, Ed? I’m a carpenter at the modular home plant over in LeForestville, me and Cory both, where we gonna get fifteen, twenty thousand dollars?”
“I don’t know,” Parker said.
“I bet you got some money, Ed,” Cal said, smiling like he was friendly, showing crooked teeth. “I bet you could help out a fella, if you wanted.”
“Quid pro quo,” Cory said, to explain things.
So the artist’s renderings had done their work, after all, at least with these two. Parker said to Cory, “What’s the quo?”
“We don’t need to go into all that,” Cal said, impatient, sitting back, waving that idea away. “We’re just friendly, that’s all, a couple friendly guys, helping each other out. Just Cal and Cory Dennison and good old Ed—what was it? Smith?”
“That’s right,” Parker said.
“Funny kind of name, that, Smith,” Cal said, twisting the name to make it sound strange as he winked his good eye at his brother and said, “You don’t hear it much. Not around here, you don’t.”
Parker said, “Get to the point.”
“The point?” Cal seemed surprised, as though he’d thought they’d already reached the point. “It’s just to be pals, that’s all,” he said. “Be of, you know, use to each other. Like if we could do something for you. Or like, it should happen, you might have a stash of money around somewhere, you’d probably want to help a friend with this bad fucking eye here.”
Parker said, “That’s Tom Lindahl’s sofa you’re sitting on.”
Cal grinned and shrugged. “So?”
“Get up from it.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” Cal spread his arms and legs out, settling into the sofa. “Everybody’s gotta be somewhere, you know. Even those—”
“No, they don’t,” Parker said.
Thrown off, not getting to make his clever remark about how even the missing bank robbers have to be somewhere, wink, wink, Cal blinked his one eye at Parker and said, “What?”
“Some people,” Parker said, “don’t have to be anywhere.” He got to his feet, aware of them both tensing up as they watched him. To Cory, he said, “You’re the one with brains. What do you do now?”
“Hey, listen,” Cal said.
But Cory patted a hand downward in his brother’s direction, looking at Parker as he said, “Maybe we’ll talk tomorrow. Maybe with Tom here.”
“Ask him,” Parker said.
Cory nodded. “We’ll do that. Come on, Cal.”
Cal looked up at his brother and decided not to argue. He moved to get up, but the sofa, rump-sprung and saggy, was hard to get out of. As he tried to get to his feet while making it look easy, Parker made a small fast gesture with his hands, nothing in particular, but Cal lost his balance and sprawled back onto the sofa.
“You want to be careful,” Parker told him.
“Come on, Cal,” Cory said, and stuck a hand out, which Cal angrily took, to be hauled up out of the sofa.
They moved toward the still-open door, Parker following, seeing their battered red Dodge Ram out there, with the fitted steel toolbox bolted to the bed. They stepped through, and Parker stood in the doorway behind them. “Always be careful,” he told Cal. “You wouldn’t want anything to happen to that other eye.”
As Cory pulled him toward the pickup with a hand on his elbow, Cal glared back, face distorted, crying, “Never mind the good one! What about this one? What about this one?”
Parker shrugged. “Ask the parrot.”
14
Cory drove, so there was no squealing of tires, burning of rubber. Parker watched the Ram go, then stood in the open doorway another five minutes, listening to an absolutely silent night, before he stepped outside, shut the door, and walked down the driveway.
There were two tall streetlights at diagonal corners of the intersection down to his left, but otherwise the road was dark, with here and there the dull gleam of lights inside houses. Parker walked first to his right, past a dark house, then a house where an older couple played some sort of board game in a brightly lit living room, then another dark house, a boarded-up house, and then the last on this side, where a woman muffled up in robes and blankets as though she were on a sleigh in Siberia sat alone to watch TV.
This first walk through the town was simply to get a sense of it, and the sense was of leftovers, of people still in the stadium after the game is done. There were no children watching television, no toys on porches, never more than two people visible in any house. These were the respectable poor, living in retirement in the only place they’d ever known. They wouldn’t have much that would be of use to Parker, though there might be one thing. Older not-rich people in an isolated community: Some of them might have handguns.
Down the other side of the road, Parker passed the gas station, closed for the night, with light from a soda machine in front of the office illuminating the pumps and a small night-light gleaming on the wall above the desk inside.
Up till now, there had been no traffic at all through this town at this hour, the blinking signal lights at the intersection controlling nothing. But as he walked just beyond the gas station, Parker did see a car coming this way from the blackness outside the town. He continued to walk, continued to look at the houses, and the car rapidly approached, its high beams becoming troublesome just before the driver dimmed them; which meant he’d seen Parker and was doing the polite thing.
The car slowed, coming into the town, then went on by Parker, who kept walking at a steady pace. A few seconds later he heard the tire-squeal as the car made a U-turn, and here it came again, the opposite way, slowing beside him.
Not a cop. A beat-up older Toyota four-door, some dark color. The passenger window slid down as the car came to a stop beside Parker, and the driver alone in there, a woman, leaned toward him to say, “Can I help you?”
He could keep walking, but she’d just pace him, so he stopped and turned to her. “To do what?” he said.
She didn’t seem to know what to do with that answer. She looked younger than the people of this town, probably in her thirties, dashboard-lit in such a way as to give her face harsh angles and extremes of light and shadow. She said, “Are you looking for an address or something?”