Shawn and I came up together. Bunny Willman didn’t lift the gate to let us in, which seemed odd to me. He reposed comfortably outside the shack, tilted back against the wall in a beat-up chrome and vinyl dinette chair, chewing on a twig. Though he was not exerting himself, beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.
“That dog ain’t coming in here,” he said.
“He always comes in,” Shawn said.
“Not today with me here he don’t.”
“I’ve got to load the cart.”
“You can drag it in yourself and hitch him back up when you come out.”
“What’s the problem with the dog?” I said.
“Are you with him?” Bunny said.
“Yeah,” I said, even though it wasn’t strictly so.
“I don’t like the way that dog looks,” Bunny said. “Like he has the rabies. It’s all over the county. Raccoons and coyotes is full of it. It’s this damn heat. So get him the hell away from me.”
“I’ll watch the dog while you’re inside,” I said to Shawn.
“No, you go, Robert. It’ll be better if I stay out here with him.”
“Okay, I’ll get both of our stuff,” I said.
“Lookit, here,” Bunny said and paused to spit to the side. “However you two work this out, just get that damn dog away from my shack.”
“He doesn’t have rabies,” Shawn said, letting a little too much disdain creep into his voice.
“How do you know?”
“I’m with him all day long.”
“He’s foaming at the mouth.”
“It’s the breed. They slobber a lot.”
“You just take him over to there right now,” Bunny said with mounting impatience and pointed at a maple tree down by the road. Like all our maples, it had a lot of dead branches. We didn’t know whether it was the heat or a disease, but they weren’t getting on well and sugaring was way off. We went down to the tree with the dog.
“What did you need, then?” I asked Shawn.
“Fifty pounds of roofing nails,” he said. He took a roll of bills out of his pocket and peeled off a thousand dollars in fifties and twenties. “Take the cart in, why don’t you.”
Shawn unhitched the dog and held onto it by its leather harness. A hot breeze rattled the dry leaves above us. He took a seat on the ground against the dying tree and the big dog lay down peacefully beside him. I pulled the cart by its harness up to Bunny’s guard shack. He raised up the gate, and I entered the general.
Wayne Karp himself was back behind the long counter in the store. I was surprised to see him there. He didn’t often work the customer end of his establishment. That was usually left to an underling. He was sitting in a battered easy chair in a tranquil pool of dimness, sorting through a splint basket of steel springs. In a peculiar way, he was about the only person who qualified as a celebrity anymore in our locality, more potent in his remoteness from things than in his actual presence, larger than life when he wasn’t around. In reality, he was physically unassuming, wiry, with close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair, droopy mustache, and a goatee. You wouldn’t pick him out of a crowd as a natural leader. His left eyelid was a little droopy from an old motorcycle accident, it was said, but he had a set of wings tattooed over his eyebrows that sort of evened out the look of them. I suppose it was designed for that purpose, and it set a fashion trend for those under his sway. He didn’t get up when I entered, or more than glance my way.
Wayne had access to things you hardly ever saw anymore. His crew came up with all kinds of stuff scavenging, and being their boss he often got the pick of their gleanings. This day he had on a pair of blue jeans that looked well broken in but not raggedy, while his camouflage T-shirt might have come off the shelf at the WalMart the day before yesterday, if Wal-Mart had still existed. The short sleeves were rolled up so as to display his lumpy biceps. He wore a pair of red clip-on suspenders too, apparently to emphasize the bulge of his pectorals, not to hold his pants up. He was well nourished and fit and renowned as a fighter for defeating men much larger than himself. On the rare occasions when I saw Wayne, the phrase with his bare hands always echoed in my mind. I waited for him to indicate that he was aware of me standing there, but he seemed oblivious, so I spoke up.
“When you’ve got a moment,” I said.
He held a spring up to the window as if sizing it up in the light.
“Time passes slowly these days, don’t it?” he eventually said.
“The pace is different,” I said.
“Move slower, you live longer, I always say.”
“I’m not in any tearing rush, but I’ve got things to do.”
He finally looked over my way.
“You’re the fiddler, ain’t you?” he said, and chucked the spring in a wooden box, which was actually an old drawer.
“That’s right.”
“I seen you fiddle last fall one time up in Belchertown, didn’t I? Some levee up there.”
“That would have been their harvest ball.”
“Those plowboys can party.”
“Yes they can.”
“It’s a harsh life, though. I wouldn’t want it.”
“Well, you’ve got a situation for yourself, after all.”
“That’s true,” he said. “We all got ourselves a situation, don’t we?”
“It’s not what I expected of life earlier on.”
“Me neither, but you play the hand that’s dealt to you. Say, you remember Charlie Daniels?”
“He was a hell of a fiddler.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You said you remembered him.”
“I remember the name. I never listened to his records, though.”
“Never listened to Charlie Daniels? And you call yourself a fiddler?” Wayne finally got up and took a winding way to the counter, as though he were trying to elongate the trip as much as possible so I might observe how he moved. He did have a sinuous way of carrying himself. It was obviously intended to be intimidating. “Too bad,” he said. “Those recordings are hard to find nowadays.”
“Well, the electricity’s hardly on anyway.”
“Yeah, you’re right about that. Remember Guns n’ Roses?”
“Never listened to them either.”
“What the hell did you listen to?” He finally looked straight at me.
“Mostly old-time. String band stuff. What they used to call folk music.”
“You just plain folks?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
“What’d you do back in the real world?”
“Computers.”
“Oh? Well that shit’s down for the count, ain’t it?”
“Looks like it.”
“Funny how the old times came back with a vengeance.”
“You’ve got a point there.”
“Well, I just miss rock and roll like crazy, I do,” Wayne said. “Things have got a little too old-time for me in every way. I suppose you came in here for a reason today, Fiddler. What do you need?”
“To start with: fifty pounds of roofing nails and ten of tenpenny common, galvanized if possible. You got any mason jar lids?”
“By the dozen.”
“I’ll take two dozen.”
’We can do that. Let’s say thirteen hunnert altogether. What did you have against Guns n’ Roses, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“They made my ears hurt,” I said. While I was counting out the bills three gunshots rang out sharply from outside. My heart flew into my throat.