Carl said nothing.
“He’s incredible, isn’t he?”
Carl said nothing. He shifted to third. The truck’s rear end swayed on the packed snow.
“That Whiting is incredible. A real character.”
With a slow unsymmetrical rhythm the wipers pushed the wet snow off to the sides of the windshield.
“Friendly, though, once he puts aside his company manners. Not that he ever lets it all hang out, I suppose. You’d know that better than I. But he does like to talk. And theories? More theories than a physics textbook. And one or two of them would set a few people I know back on their fat asses. I mean, he’s not your average run-of-the-mill fiscal conservative. Not a Republican in the grand old tradition of Iowa’s own Herbert Hoover.”
“I don’t know what you’re fucking talking about, Weinreb, and I’m not interested. So why not just shut the fuck up, unless you want to ride that bicycle the rest of the way to town.”
“Oh, I don’t think you’d do that, Carl. Risk a swell managerial position like yours? Risk your exemption?”
“Listen, you god-damn draft-dodger, don’t talk to me about exemptions.”
“Draft-dodger?”
“And you fucking well know it.”
“As I see it, Carl, I performed my service to God and country at Spirit Lake. And while I’ll admit I’m not exactly anxious to go off to Detroit and protect the good people of Iowa from dangerous teen-agers, the government knows where I am. If they want me, all they have to do is write and ask.”
“Yeah. Well, they probably know what they’re up to, not drafting shits like you. You’re a fucking murderer, Weinreb. And you know it.”
“Up yours, Carl. And up your fucking father’s too.”
Carl stopped, too suddenly, on the brake. The truck’s back wheels sloughed to the right. For a moment it looked like they’d do a complete spin, but Carl managed to ease them back on course.
“You put me out here,” Daniel said shrilly, “and you’ll lose that fat job tomorrow. You do anything but take me to my front door, and I’ll have your ass for it. And if you think I can’t, just wait. Just wait anyhow.”
“Chickenshit,” Carl replied softly. “Chickenshit Jewish cocksucker.” But he took his foot off the brake.
Neither said any more till the truck pulled up in front of the Weinreb house on Chickasaw Avenue.
Before getting out of the cab Daniel said, “Don’t pull away till I’ve got my bike out of the back. Right?”
Carl nodded, avoiding Daniel’s eyes.
“Well, then, good-night, and thanks for the lift.” Once more he held out his hand.
Carl took the offered hand and grasped it firmly. “So long, murderer.”
His eyes locked with Daniel’s and it became a contest. There was something implacable in Carl’s face, a force of belief beyond anything that Daniel could ever have mustered.
He looked away.
And yet it wasn’t true. Daniel was not a murderer, though he knew there were people who thought he was, or who said they thought it. In a way Daniel rather liked the idea, and would make little jokes to encourage it, offering his services (in jest) as a hit man. There has always been a kind of glamor in the mark of Cain.
The murder had taken place shortly after Daniel’s release from prison. The father and older brother of his friend Bob Lundgren had been forced off the road on their way back from a co-op meeting, made to lie flat in a ditch, and shot. Both bodies had been mutilated. The stolen car was found the same day in a parking lot in Council Bluffs. The assumption was that the two murders were the work of terrorists. There had been a rash of similar killings all through that winter and spring, and indeed for many years. Farmers, especially undergod farmers, had many enemies. This was the main reason, behind the proliferation of fortress-villages like Worry, for despite their sponsors’ claims they were not provably more efficient. Only safer.
The murders had taken place in April, three weeks before Bob Lundgren was scheduled to be paroled from Spirit Lake. Considering the repeated threats he’d made against both victims, it had been fortunate for Bob that the murders had preceded his release. As it was, people assumed that he’d hired someone to do the work for him — some fellow prisoner who’d been let out ahead of him.
The reason that Daniel in particular had come under suspicion was that the following summer he’d gone to work for Bob, supervising large work-crews of convicts from Spirit Lake. It was a fantastic summer — fraught with tension, filled with pleasure, and highly profitable. He’d lived in the main farmhouse with Bob and what was left of his family. His mother stayed upstairs, locked in her bedroom, except for sporadic forays into the other rooms, late at night, when she would break up the furniture and call down the wrath of God. Bob finally had her sent off to a rest-home in Dubuque (the same one Mrs. Norberg had gone to). That left his brother’s widow and her twelve-year-old daughter to take care of household matters, which they did with a kind of zombie-like zeal.
Every weekend Bob and Daniel would drive up to Elmore or one of the other border towns and get thoroughly sloshed. Daniel got laid for the first time in his life, and for many times besides. As an ex-convict (and possibly a killer) he was generally left to himself by men who would otherwise have gladly kicked shit out of him.
He enjoyed himself (and earned a lot of money), but at the same time he didn’t believe in what was happening. A part of him was always backing off from these events and thinking that all these people were insane — Bob, the Lundgren women, the farmers and whores boozing in Elmore. No one in his right mind would want to live a life like this.
Even so, when Bob asked him to come back the next summer, he’d gone back. The money was irresistable, as was the chance for three months to be a grown-up instead of a high school student, than which no form of life is more downtrodden, disenfranchised, and depressed.
Bob was married now, to a girl he’d met in Elmore, and his brother’s widow and her daughter had moved out. Now instead of boozing only on the weekends they were boozing every night. The house had never quite recovered from the elder Mrs. Lundgren’s jihad, and Julie, Bob’s twenty-two-year-old bride did not exert herself in its rehabilitation beyond the point of getting almost all of one bedroom wallpapered. She spent most of the daylight hours in a daze of boredom in front of the tv.
Once, sitting on the back porch on a rainy August night and reminiscing about the good old days at Spirit Lake, Daniel said, “I wonder what ever happened to old Gus.”
“Who?” Bob asked. The tone of his voice had altered strangely. Daniel looked up to see an expression on his friend’s face that hadn’t been there since those times in prison when the subject of his family would get into his bloodstream and bring out the Mr. Hyde in him. There it was again, that same occluded gleam of malice.
“Gus,” Daniel said carefully. “Don’t you remember him? The guy who sang that song the night that Barbara Steiner let go.”
“I know who you mean. What made you think of him just now.”
“What makes a person think of anything. I was daydreaming, thinking about music, I guess — and that started me thinking about him.”
Bob seemed to consider the adequacy of this explanation. The look on his face slowly faded to mild irritation. “What about him?”
“Nothing. I was just wondering what ever became of him. Wondering if I’d ever see him again.”
“I didn’t think he was a particular friend of yours.”
“He wasn’t. But the way he sang made a big impression on me.”
“Yeah, he was an all-right singer.” Bob uncapped another Grain Belt and took a long gurgling swallow.
They both fell silent and listened to the rain.
Daniel understood from this exchange that it was Gus who must have murdered Bob’s father and brother. He was amazed how little difference the knowledge seemed to make in the way he felt about either Bob or Gus. His only concern was to defuse Bob’s suspicions.