Big Hungry: A Novel Read online

  Scrum watched as his millionaire client got up to brew coffee in an old-fashioned percolator on the ancient electric stove. Somehow, it angered the lawyer to see Harlen performing menial labor or doing chores. The man owns an empire, Scrum thought, and he acts like some idiot farmer. The empire that Scrum so admired and envied included two banks, a John Deere dealership, a freight company, two motels, an insurance company, two horse ranches, 109 oil wells, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 quarter sections of land in three states and two Canadian provinces. And those were just the holdings that Scrum could remember without consulting the mountain of paperwork he had on Ackerman back at his office.

  “You’re a rich man,” he said as Harlen poured him a cup of black coffee. Scrum would have liked some cream, but he thought it would be more “cowboy” to take it black.

  "Yeah, I'm a lucky sonofabitch, ain't I.” Harlen said as he doused his own coffee with heavy cream. “What's your point?"

  "My point is that maybe it's time you hired somebody else to stick their hands up some cow's ass and started taking care of business on a…higher level. Hell, you're over 60 years old."

  "You sound just like Rita. She thinks I'm an old man, too. But I'm bettin' you didn't come out here just to jerk my chain about my golden years. What's really on your mind?"

  "Well, the fact is…we need to talk about the Big Hungry project. Things are getting out of hand. Shit, Harlen, somebody took a shot at you the other day. Doesn't that tell you something?"

  "Yeah, it tells me I oughta start carrying my old Winchester."

  "I was thinking more along the lines of getting some security people to stay with you. Just until we can…"

  "Just until when, Odell? Just until I stop pissing people off? Hell, I'll probably continue to do that after they shove me in a box. It's just the way I am. And I don't need any damned security people wandering around behind me worrying about getting cowshit on their wingtips. And that's final. You're my lawyer, not my damned nursemaid." Ackerman drank the rest of his coffee and poured himself and Scrum another half cup.

  "What else you got? Everything going okay on the project? That pissant Cameron still on board?"

  "Yeah, Boyd's solidly behind us, but he called and said that somebody from the Daily Journal wanted an interview. I got the impression that the senator wanted us to tell him what to say."

  "For Hell's sake, Odell, the man's a state senator. You'd think he'd have at least one opinion that wasn't bought and paid for."

  "Don't be too hard on Boyd, Harlen. He's got his weaknesses just like anybody else, but he's also got all the connections he needs to push the Big Hungry project through. And he's very much on our side."

  "I hope to hell he would be. We're paying him enough. He's got more of my money in off-shore accounts than I do. What did you tell him to do about the newspaper?"

  "I told him to dodge the interview as long as he could. It was Jerry Guthrie who called him."

  "Not good. Guthrie knows the territory. And he’s always looking for some kind of smart-ass angle."

  "Yeah, and I think he might have some connection to those damned River Rats. Wouldn't surprise me if he's a member. Maybe he even pulled the trigger on you the other day.”

  "If he did, he'd be the first newspaper man I ever met who had a set of balls. Call the good senator up and tell him to schedule an appointment, but make it in a couple weeks. That'll keep Guthrie off his back for a little while without him getting his hair up. Shit, that'd be all we need."

  Odell Scrum stood up and put his plastic-covered Stetson back on his head. He paused at the door and looked back at his top client and lifelong friend.

  "Can I ask you something, Harlen?"

  "Fire away."

  "With all the property you own and all the money you have access to, why the hell do you want this project so bad? I know I need the money, but you…what possible good would more money do for you?"

  "It ain't just money, Odell. And it ain't just for me, either. We get that big reservoir built, it's gonna be there a long time after you and me are dead and gone. People are gonna be enjoying all that boating and fishing and all those other recreational opportunities for decades. Hell, maybe centuries. Don't it interest you to build something that means something? Something that lasts."

  "So this is your Mount Rushmore? Hell, Harlen, I never figured you for the sentimental type. I figured it was the thought of selling all that future lakeside property that kept you going."

  "Money's just paper, Odell. It only matters if you don't have it. Once you got enough, or more than enough in my case, it don't have the same appeal."

  "Let's hope we all get to that point, Harlen," Odell Scrum said quietly. Then he opened the door and walked out into the heavy rain.

  Chapter 6

  Furman Potter was uncomfortable with death, particularly his own.

  He’d always avoided discussing or even thinking about the eventual end of his mortal adventure. As a young man, he experienced only a faint feeling of foreboding whenever the topic of death came up. Later, in his 30s, he began taking enormous amounts of vitamins and other supplements and following religiously the US Air Force fitness manual. A decade later, he was reading the obituaries to assure himself that he was far too young to die of natural causes. He looked both ways when crossing a street, even the dusty gravel-covered streets of Tulleyville, which sometimes went a full three or four hours without any sort of traffic. As an old man, he took to wearing a shawl and a sun hat in all weather. An unguarded sneeze in his vicinity was met with an instant barrage of profanity and a bandana clamped across his nose and mouth. The rest of the citizens of Tulleyville considered him a bit soft in the head but mostly harmless and therefore left him pretty much to his own thoughts and obsessions.

  One morning during his 79th year on the planet, at almost the exact time Pooch Eye Ziegler spotted his “floater,” Furman was sitting on his porch enjoying a cup of hawthorne berry tea. He’d read that hawthorne berries had a strengthening effect on the human circulatory system, a bit of information in which he may have placed too much faith. He was sipping the vaguely sweet concoction from a chipped Larson Brothers Radiator Shop mug when a large, scabrous chunk of plaque released itself from a vein wall in his right arm and traveled to a small, but important vessel in his brain. It stopped all traffic and provided Furman with one brilliant, literally breath-taking flash of light before killing him.

  For a man with his morbid fascinations, Furman was remarkably unprepared for his death. When the moment came, he simply sat there wondering what had happened. There was no long, dark tunnel with a brilliant light at the end of it. No fields of ambrosia. No heavenly choir singing him home. No angels whatsoever. In fact, the only winged visitors he had at all for the first two or three hours of his career as a deceased person were half dozen aggressive houseflies who investigated his long, rectangular nostrils as a possible nursery for their young.

  None of this really bothered Furman, who was still not completely aware of his condition. He noticed that he was unable to stand up, for example, or move his hand to shoo away the marauding flies. He thought perhaps that he was dreaming or hallucinating. Maybe a mild stroke had shut down his extremities. Of course, none of these explanations fit the feeling he was experiencing. It was becoming increasingly evident that some major changes had taken place.

  As the truth of his death began to dawn on him, he started worrying. The only remotely comforting thing about dying had been the almost universally held theory that one did hang around in one’s body after achieving death. He imagined a coffin lid closing slowly over his helpless face. He envisioned an eternity of darkness and decay. His despair was such that, if he’d been able, he almost certainly would have wept.

  He was in the midst of this sad reverie when he sensed that he was not alone on the porch. Without turning his head, which would have been quite impossible, he looked toward the porch railing and saw a thin man leaning there, chewing a piece of crested w
heat grass. The man was clad in a blue denim work shirt, a pair of faded jeans, and a well-formed but sweat-stained cowboy hat. He was sort of a handsome fellow with a good chin and a swatch of light brown hair poking out from under his hat. Furman observed that his visitor was lean like a hard-working man and about six feet tall. He also noticed that the fellow was wearing a bright red pair of cowboy boots with sharply tapered Mexican heels.

  The man smiled pleasantly and touched his hat before speaking. “I guess you’re wondering just what is going on about now, Furman. I can’t say that I blame you. It’s always a lot to take in at once. Lot of folks get real confused. I’ll grant you that it’s a new experience. No question about that.”

  Furman struggled to speak to the newcomer. “Don’t even try to talk right now,” the stranger said, pushing himself away from the railing and squatting down beside Furman’s chair. He brushed the adventurous insects away from Furman’s face and shook his head apologetically. “I’m afraid I got some bad news for you. See…ordinarily, I’d take you with me right now. Sort of give you the orientation speech as we went. It only takes about three hours to get there and by then, I’d have had you squared away. Trouble is, though, we can’t leave right now. You wouldn’t believe the traffic we’ve had lately. I haven’t seen anything like it since…oh, heck, probably since one of those world wars we had a few years back. Sure never seen anything to match it in peacetime. We got mudslides in Mexico, passenger ships sinking, airplanes crashing, and all kinds of stuff all at once. And then there’s that mean business constantly going on over in the Middle East. We get a steady stream from them and they’re usually real hard to handle at first. A lot of them have what you could call high expectations of the afterlife…something about harems of virgins just waiting for them. Yeah, no kidding…harems and such. Some of them get real upset when they see the real deal.

  “Anyway, what I’m trying to tell you is that we got a kind of a bottleneck going on. Huge lines, long waits for everything. I know this is real inconvenient for you, but I have to ask you to wait a while before we go. I’ll come back for you as soon as I can.”

  The closing coffin lid flashed through Furman’s consciousness, generating a small purple cloud of panic that was apparently visible to his companion.

  “Oh, hey…don’t worry about that stuff. I’ll get you out of that in a minute.”

  He looked Furman over carefully before standing up again. “Man, I have to tell you,” he said, running his right hand over Furman’s corpse, “you sure got your money’s worth out of this old bag of bones. How old are you anyway, Furman? I forgot to look it up.”

  Furman surprised himself by answering, “Almost 80. Just shy a month or so.” He hadn’t felt his mouth open or his tongue move. Nor had he felt himself stand up. He was, nevertheless, standing and facing his amiable benefactor.

  “Kind of a rush, isn’t it, Furman? You’ll notice that you move a good bit different. It’ll take some getting used to, but you’ll be okay. It’s pretty much just a matter of thinking where you’d like to be and then just ending up there. It’s the same way with talking. You want to say something to me, just think it and I’ll know what you mean. I think you’re going to like it a lot…especially after dragging around in that.” He jerked a thumb toward Furman’s corpse. Furman looked down at his former incarnation and was momentarily distracted by this unusual view of himself. When he turned back, the stranger was gone and a small group of flies had gathered on the spilled hawthorne berry tea.

  Chapter 7

  The Taylor children were watching Jonas Johnston take a piss.

  He was a big man, strong from years of doing other people’s work, lean from living poor. His face was fierce…with bushy white eyebrows and a drooping white pistolero mustache.

  On any given day, a dirty gray army of week-old whiskers crawled out from under the buttoned collar of his checkered work shirt and marched north over a prominent Adam’s apple. It would spread out from his chin, overrun the sunken topography of his cheeks, and finally come to a halt an inch short of his pale, watery blue eyes. He never seemed to grow a complete beard, yet no one in the Tulleyville area could honestly claim to have seen him clean shaven, either.

  Jonas was an odd man in other respects as well, given as he was to staccato bursts of random speech. This gibberish, to which his neighbors had become so accustomed that it seemed a normal part of life, followed no predictable form. From his mouth would leap the campaign slogans of long-dead politicians, or perhaps a long-lost brand name somehow imprinted on the worn and faulty circuits that formed Jonas’ brain. Fragments of sentences or short descriptions of everyday items also frequently reported up from Jonas’ near or distant past.

  “Fifty pounds of chicken feed,” he would shout without breaking the rhythm of whatever task he was performing. Or maybe he would push a hand skyward in a mock Nazi salute and cry, “Kaiser Bill went up the hill.”

  Despite his strange habits, Jonas was a universally tolerated, even cherished part of Tulleyville society. He served as a sort of “quart low” mark on the dipstick that measured the quality of life in those parts. When the shoppers at Hudson’s Piggly Wiggly store, for instance, heard Jonas exclaim, “Model A, Model A, Model A,” they could roll their eyes and know without a doubt that things in their lives could definitely be worse. Or, in the surprisingly frequent occasions when they would hire Jonas to shovel grain or pitch manure around their own farms, they could pay his meager wages and know that Tulleyville always took care of its own no matter how strange and disheveled they might be.

  The Taylor family lived just a quarter mile south of the ramshackle farm from which the Johnston clan had made their unique contributions to the community for nearly a century. Their father, Charlie Taylor, often hired Jonas to do work around his place, which gave his children ample opportunity to stalk Jonas and maintain a long, fascinating list of his idiosyncrasies. Sometimes he would appear to be stepping over things that weren’t there. On many occasions they had heard Jonas solemnly announce to no one in particular, “Labor Day tomorrow,” even though that particular holiday may have been a good six months away. This was usually preceded by a short snatch of song that sounded to the children like, “Doo tee doo tee doooo.” Years later, long after Jonas had gone to his reward, they would call each other the day before Jonas’ favorite holiday and tell each other “Doo tee doo tee doooo, Labor Day tomorrow.” It would become a contest to see who called whom first with the news.

  On that particularly warm and damp spring day, however, they were viewing something altogether different from that of their previous sorties. Artfully camouflaged behind a tangle of chokecherry bushes and pig weed, they watched Jonas unbutton his Levis, haul himself out, and launch a voluminous stream into the new and almost shockingly green grass behind the stack of bales he had so meticulously unloaded for their father. The urine steamed a little, even in the relative warmth of that fine vernal morning, then disappeared among a variety of roots and insect trails.

  Jonas, completely unaware of his audience, shook himself three times and, with his back slightly hunched over, pushed the object of the Taylor children’s scrutiny back into his pants and returned to his work with his usual strong, steady pace.

  Chapter 8

  Ben Mooney was sitting on a picnic bench at Thompson’s Bend on the Big Hungry, drinking warm beer and listening to Droop Hornsby lie about having sex with California women.

  Droop was recently back from a Greyhound Bus trip to the Golden State and was eagerly sharing his alleged experiences with his younger and, in his view, less worldly pals. Nearly all of his tales were, of course, rank prevarication and poorly constructed fantasy, a fact evident to everyone present. This somehow made his increasingly shrill and absurd claims even more enjoyable to his audience.

  Droop was in the middle of a vivid narrative describing an improbable encounter with an African-American “babe” who “had a muff like steel wool,” when Ben, generally considered to be Tulleyv
ille’s only living psychopath, reached a sort of mental critical mass. He stood up slowly, drained his beer, and hit Droop with a crisp right hand to the forehead that knocked him backwards over a folding lawn chair. Dazed, yet fully aware of Ben’s reputation, Droop stayed on the ground while his attacker walked off into a stand of poplar trees.

  Droop’s real name was Andrew. He had, however, decided in high school that he preferred to be called “Drew.” At this point, his classmates began calling him Droop, a sobriquet that had stuck with him ever since. The name’s staying power derived from the fact that Droop was six-foot-four, weighed about 150 pounds, and slouched through life with his pants and his ambitions hanging at about half mast. He was the oldest in a large, low-income family who operated the Tulleyville Thrift Shop. Unfounded rumors abounded regarding the shop, including that the proprietors regularly sold stolen goods, trafficked in marijuana, and frequently sold liquor and beer to teenagers.