“Look,” Parker said, “we all have jobs to do. I did mine. It wasn’t personal.”
Parker waited for an argument. Instead, he felt a sharp blow to his left ear and he saw spangles where a moment ago there had been only snow. That voice that cried out had been his.
He turned in the seat, cupping his ear in his hand.
Clint grinned back. Parker noticed the small flap of skin on the front sight of the Colt. And his fingers were hot and sticky with his blood.
“You say it ain’t personal, lawyer,” Clint said, “but look at me. Look at me. What do you see?”
Parker squinted against the pain and shook his head slowly as if he didn’t know how to answer.
“What you see, lawyer, is a third-generation loser. That’s what you see, and don’t try to claim otherwise or I’ll beat you bloody. I’ll ask you again: What do you see?”
Parker found that his voice was tremulous. He said, “I see a workingman, Clint. A good-hearted workingman who gets paid for a hard day’s work. I don’t see what’s so wrong with that.”
“Nice try,” Clint said, feinting with the muzzle toward Parker’s face like the flick of a tongue from a snake. Parker recoiled, and Clint grinned again.
“That man fucked over my grandpa and set this all in motion,” Clint said. “He cheated him and walked away and hid behind his money and his lawyers for the rest of his life. Can you imagine what my grandpa’s life would have been like if he hadn’t been fucked over? Can you imagine what my life would have been like? Not like this, I can tell you. Why should that man get away with a crime like that? Don’t you see a crime like that isn’t a one-shot deal? That it sets things in motion for generations?”
“I’m just a lawyer,” Parker said.
“And I’m just a no-account workingman,” Clint said. “And the reason is because of people like you.”
“Look,” Parker said, taking his hand away from his ear and feeling a long tongue of blood course down his neck into his collar. “Maybe we can go back to the judge with new information. But we need new information. It can’t just be your grandfather’s word and his theories about Nazis and—”
“They weren’t just theories!” Clint said, getting agitated. “It was the truth.”
“It was so long ago,” Parker said.
“That doesn’t make it less true!” Clint shouted.
“There was no proof. Give me some proof and I’ll represent you instead of the estate.”
Parker shot a glance at the rearview mirror to find Clint deep in thought for a moment. Clint said, “That’s interesting. I’ve seen plenty of whores, but not many in a suit.”
“Clint,” Juan said sadly, “I think we are lost.”
The hearing had lasted less than two days. Paul Parker was the lawyer for the Fritz Engler estate, which was emerging from probate after the old man finally died and left no heirs except a disagreeable out-of-wedlock daughter who lived in Houston. From nowhere, Benny Peebles and his grandson Clint made a claim for the majority of the Engler estate holdings. Benny claimed he’d been cheated out of ownership of the ranch generations ago and he wanted justice. He testified it had happened this way:
Benny Peebles and Fritz Engler, both in their early twenties, owned a Ryan monoplane together. The business model for Engler-Peebles Aviation was to hire out their piloting skills and aircraft to ranchers in northern Wyoming for the purpose of spotting cattle, delivering goods, and transporting medicine and cargo. They also had contracts with the federal and state government for mail delivery and predator control. Although young and in the midst of the Depression, they were two of the most successful entrepreneurs the town of Cody had seen. Still, the income from the plane barely covered payments and overhead and both partners lived hand to mouth.
Peebles testified that in 1936 they were hired by a rancher named Wendell Oaks to help round up his scattered cattle. This was an unusual request, and they learned Oaks had been left high and dry by all of his ranch hands because he hadn’t paid them for two months. Oaks had lost his fortune in the crash and the only assets he had left before the bank foreclosed on his sixteen-thousand-acre spread were his Hereford cattle. He’d need to sell them all to raise $20,000 to save his place, and in order to sell them he’d need to gather them up. The payments to Engler-Peebles would come out of the proceeds, he assured them.
Benny said Fritz was enamored with the Oaks Ranch — the grass, the miles of river, the timber, and the magnificent Victorian ranch house that cost Oaks a fortune to build. He told Benny, “This man is living on my ranch, but he just doesn’t know it yet.”
Benny didn’t know what Fritz meant at the time, although his partner, he said, always had “illusions of grandiosity,” as Benny put it.
Fritz sent Benny north to Billings to buy fence to build a massive temporary corral for the cattle. While he was gone, Fritz said, he’d fly the ranch and figure out where all the cattle were.
Benny returned to Cody four days later, followed by a truck laden with rolls of fence and bundles of steel posts. But Fritz was gone, and so was the Ryan. Wendell Oaks was fit to be tied. Bankers were driving out to his place from Cody to take measurements.
Three days later, while Benny and some locals he’d hired on a day rate were building the corral, he heard the buzz of an airplane motor. He recognized the sound and looked up to see Fritz Engler landing the Ryan in a hay meadow.
Before Benny could confront his partner, Fritz buttonholed one of the bankers and they drove off together into town. Benny inspected their monoplane and saw where Fritz had removed the copilot seat and broken out the interior divides of the cargo area to make more space. The floor of the aircraft was covered in white bristles of hair and animal feces. It smelled dank and unpleasant.
The next thing Benny knew, sheriff’s deputies descended on the place and evicted Wendell Oaks. Then they ordered Benny and his laborers off the property by order of the sheriff and the bank and new owner of the ranch, Fritz Engler, who had paid off the outstanding loan balance and now owned the paper for the Oaks Ranch.
The arch appeared out of the snow and Juan drove beneath it. Parker was relieved to discover how close they were to the ranch house, and just as frightened to anticipate what might come next.
Clint was wound up. “That mean old German son of a bitch never even apologized,” he said heatedly from the backseat. “He used the airplane my grandpa owned half of to swindle our family out of this place, and he never even said sorry. If nothing else, we should have owned half of all this. Instead, it turned my family into a bunch of two-bit losers. It broke my grandpa and ruined my dad and now it’s up to me to get what I can out of it. What choice do I have since you cheated us again in that court?”
“I didn’t cheat you,” Parker said softly, not wanting to argue with Clint in his agitated state. “There was no proof—”
“Grandpa told you what happened!” Clint said.
“But that story you told—”
“He don’t lie. Are you saying he lied?”
“No,” Parker said patiently. “But I mean, come on. Who is going to believe that Fritz Engler trapped a hundred antelope fawns and flew them around the country and sold them to zoos? That he sold some to Adolf Hitler and flew that plane all the way to Lakehurst, New Jersey, and loaded a half-dozen animals on the Hindenburg to be taken to the Berlin Zoo? I mean, come on, Clint.”
“It happened!” Clint shouted. “If Grandpa said it happened, it fucking happened.”
Parker recalled the skeptical but patient demeanor of the judge as old Benny Peebles droned on at the witness stand. There were a few snickers from the small gallery during the tale.