Metzger's Dog

15 “Where are we?” asked Margaret. “The Park in Rear bar.” Chinese Gordon leaned his left elbow on the window and signaled for a left turn.

“The what?”

“See?” He pointed to the five-foot fire-red neon sign that flashed “PARK IN REAR.” Above it, an unlighted but ornately filigreed script said the something Cafe and Bistro, but Margaret wasn’t sure if she could have read it in daylight.

“Charming.”

Chinese Gordon pulled the car into the shadowy alley and stopped it beside a 1968 Chevrolet painted mainly in gray primer dappled with red rustproofing. As Margaret got out she noticed that the parking lot was vast, stretching in a hundred-yard rectangle along the solid line of plain walls and loading docks, and that at least fifty or sixty cars were sitting at haphazard angles wherever their owners had felt like stopping them. “Looks like a demolition derby.”

“No, just Friday night at the Park in Rear. We’ll be out of here before they all try to get out that alley, so we’ll miss most of the fun.”

“I could pass up all of the fun.”

“If we want to talk to Immelmann tonight, this has got to be it. He only goes to Ma Maison on Thursdays.”

He pulled the door open, and the stale, smoky air of the place rushed out, bringing with it a tenor voice shouting in a southern accent over a driving bass guitar. Margaret shuddered involuntarily and looked around her. It seemed to be one cavernous room dominated by a marble bar that must have been a hundred feet long. She counted seven barmaids scurrying up and down behind it, and four men who stood along the back wall, big men with the hard, scanning eyes of policemen.

All over the room were tables where people sat drinking and yelling against the invincible solidity of the bass guitars. The music had already pummeled her senses so that she didn’t hear it as music anymore. It was like being inside a great chugging engine composed of pounding pistons and some kind of undifferentiated roar. She followed Chinese Gordon through a crowd of tall men holding beer bottles, her face at chest level beside all of these bodies, and far too close, so her view was of plaid shirts and cowboy shirts, pockets with cigarette packs stuffed into them, wet underarms and then a greenish-blue tattoo of something with wings and a sword and some reddish flames. In front of her was only Chinese Gordon’s back, and she felt an urge to cling to him but stifled it and only tried to make herself smaller to thread her way through behind him.

As she passed one man he was shouting along with the music, so she finally had the words blasted into her face along with an odorous, beery mist that seemed to go with the general smell of male sweat: “If that’s all you want, little lady, you already got it.” Perfect, she thought. Immelmann would be right at home. He always called his girlfriends “Little Lady” or “Sunshine” because he couldn’t remember their names.

At the tables there seemed to be a lot of people wearing hats—young women in cowboy hats, a man in a blue Dodger baseball cap, a few that bore trademarks like Caterpillar or Peterbilt. There was even an olive-drab one with sergeant’s stripes stenciled on it in black.

She followed Chinese Gordon to a darker corner, where Immelmann and Kepler sat drinking beer out of bottles and then snapping their heads back to down shots of whiskey. Immelmann stood up when they approached, and he pulled out a chair for Margaret. Kepler nodded and held up a hand to call for the waitress, who seemed to be hovering nearby to watch the hand. She scurried to his side on impossibly high platform shoes that made Margaret wince, leaned over to listen, then strutted away in a parody of efficiency.

Chinese Gordon spoke, and she was surprised when she realized she could hear him. The noise seemed to have subsided imperceptibly. “We came to talk to you about another idea we’ve got.”

Immelmann smiled and waved a big hand in Kepler’s direction. “That’s a coincidence, Chinese. I wanted to talk to you about the same thing. I was just telling Kepler.”

“Don’t listen to him, Chinese,” Kepler said. “The man is a retard. It’s an insult to have to take him seriously, and I do it only out of charity.”

“What’s your idea?” Margaret asked Immelmann.

“Thank you for asking, honey.” There it was, she thought. He was probably too drunk to remember the name. “What we’ve got here is a chance for an investment. You remember I come from farm country.”

Kepler said, “I’d never have guessed.”

Immelmann ignored him. “Well, we’ve got a chance to triple our money—quadruple it in a year or two if we’re willing to invest it now. There’s a chance to buy a whole lot of land in Saskatchewan for very little right now.”

“No doubt,” said Chinese Gordon. “It’s fifty below zero there most of the winter.”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Immelmann said. “That’s why we can pick up prime acreage for the asking. Miles and miles of it.”

“What’s the idea? Oil? Minerals?” Chinese Gordon asked.

“Minerals? Shit!” he snorted, his long face breaking into a grin. Then he glanced at Margaret. “Excuse me, honey.”

Kepler said, “God bless you.” To Margaret he said, “Must be something he ate.”

Immelmann leaned forward, talking barely above the buzz of noise around them. “It’s not oil, it’s not minerals, it’s”—he glanced about and pronounced distinctly—“beefalo.”

“Beefalo?” Chinese Gordon asked.

“That’s right. Beefalo are a hybrid animal that has been developed by crossing beef cattle and buffalo. The meat tastes just like beef, but the animals themselves thrive in the roughest climate. I’ve been looking into this, and Saskatchewan is perfect. Way up north where cattle can’t live and land is cheap.”

Chinese Gordon stared at Margaret. She looked down at her hands in her lap.

Kepler leaned forward and said, “Immelmann, you are a grown man. When somebody tells you something tastes just like something else, you ought to know better than to believe him. You’ve been through survival school in the Marines, haven’t you?”

“Sure.”

“They told you snake tasted just like chicken, didn’t they? Well, you know goddamn well it doesn’t. It tastes like snake. Armadillo doesn’t taste like—”

“That’s true,” said Immelmann. “It’s not like that. Everything disgusting is supposed to taste like chicken. If they said beefalo tasted like chicken, I’d know they were lying. It doesn’t. It tastes like beef.”

“That’s what they say about horse, too,” Kepler said. “You ever eat horse?”

Margaret looked up to see the heavily padded bust of the waitress appear between her and Kepler. The conversation was beginning to make her queasy, but maybe the drink would help.

Immelmann was insistent. “Look, at this moment the world is starving for beef.”

The waitress eyed him uneasily. “Would you like to order something to eat?”

Kepler shook his head and handed her a bill.

Chinese Gordon sang, “I see by your outfit that you are a beefalo boy.” Immelmann stared at him, one eyebrow lifted, so he moved on into “I’m an old beefalohand,” which he changed quickly to “Beefalo gals won’t you come out tonight and dance in Saskatoon.”

“You’re not a normal person, Chinese,” Immelmann announced. “I’m offering you a chance to quietly convert your assets, which are a little precarious, if you know what I mean, into substantial holdings in land and stock.”

“You know,” said Kepler, “if you just took it to Las Vegas and played blackjack you’d have a little less than a fifty-fifty chance of making more.”

“Is that what you’re going to do?” asked Margaret.

“I’m not doing anything except drinking up some of the interest until I hear what you two have to say,” Kepler said. “Chinese told me how to get it. Maybe I’ll let him tell me what to do with it.”

“I don’t think we’re going to need much money for this,” said Chinese Gordon. “I just don’t want to see you sink into inactivity, moral degeneration, and premature senility.”

“Not more night classes?”

“I’m thinking about it. By the way, Immelmann, if you moved to a ranch in Canada you’d be able to take that big mutant—”

“Chinese!” said Margaret.

“Right. Yeah. It’s an idea Margaret had, and we wanted to see what you thought.” He leaned forward and spoke quietly. “All that paper I got Sunday night turned out to be some stuff the professor was doing for the CIA. Most of it’s kind of long winded, but there’s enough of it that’s readable to make pretty good headlines.”

“Blackmail them?” said Immelmann. “And you’re afraid of a dog?”

“It has certain advantages. Secrecy is their middle name.”

“No,” Immelmann interrupted. “Intelligence is their middle name.”

Kepler held up his hand. “I get it. I see what you’re saying. They’d be more worried than anybody about keeping things secret. And because they’re secret, they can pay off.”

“That’s what we were thinking,” Chinese Gordon said. “If you try to hold up the mayor of Los Angeles, he can’t pay even if he wants to because he—”

“They’ll just kill us all,” Kepler said. “Until now I was wondering who took that professor out.”

“That just proves our point,” said Margaret. “What we’ve got is important enough to be worth something to them.”

“Get rid of it, then,” Immelmann said. “Pretend you never saw it, Sunshine. Free yourself of this maniac and come with me to the land of the midnight sun.”

“Isn’t that Sweden?” Margaret asked.

“Who cares?”

“Shut up,” Kepler said. “It is an interesting idea. Is the paper good enough to work with?”

“Within limits,” Chinese Gordon said. “I figure if we don’t ask much more than it would cost to hunt us down, we might have a deal.”

“What price range, roughly?” Kepler asked.

Margaret said, “I read in the paper it costs about five million dollars each time the President spends a weekend in Los Angeles, with the security and servants and things.”

“I’d say in the ten-to-twenty range,” said Chinese Gordon, holding his drink up to the light as though he were scrutinizing it for impurities. “No sense in pricing yourself out of the market.”

“Let’s go over to the shop and do some reading,” said Kepler, tossing a sheaf of bills on the table.

They all stood up and began moving through the crowd. Margaret turned to Immelmann and whispered, “I thought you weren’t interested.”

He leaned down and answered, “First they’ll get you, but it won’t matter because your birth certificate has already disappeared so you don’t exist. But then there may be people like me who think they might remember there was such a person. Only they couldn’t be right, because pretty soon their birth certificate disappears and they don’t exist either.”

Margaret edged past a man who seemed to be wearing the skin of a woolly animal as a vest. “I suppose you think what you’re saying makes sense?”

“No, I just think I’d better come along in case you need somebody tall.”

“Tall?”

“Pretty soon you’re going to be in deep trouble.”