Waltz of Shadows

Part One
The Disaster Club
1

All the blood and disaster began on a Saturday morning when I thought everything was going just right. It was late October in East Texas, and from my recliner I could see out the tall glass that makes up two of our living room walls, and it was beautiful outside. A little cool looking, leaves gone gold and red and brown and starting to fall. Clouds white as angel’s panties could be glimpsed through the tops of the tall pines and oaks that made up most of our two acres. A cat squirrel jumped from one oak limb to another, then leaped out of sight. I felt like I was in a Disney movie.

Then I got the call.

I heard the phone ring, and was about to answer, assuming it would be some minor problem at one of the videos stores I own, when Beverly started downstairs.

I could see her through the stair railing. She was wearing her shorty white bathrobe and flip-flops and had a white towel wrapped around her head from having just washed her hair. Her legs were fairly pale since she didn’t go in much for the sun, and they were lightly freckled, the way redheads sometimes are, but they were long and smooth and muscled and I never tired of looking at them.

She was carrying the upstairs cordless phone, talking and looking at me over the railing and motioning me over, which meant she wanted me to rescue her and talk to whoever it was.

I put the paper down and got out of the chair and met her at the bottom of the stairs.

Our black German shepherd, Wylie, got up like it was part of his job, came over and sniffed my crotch, then went after Beverly, who popped him on the head with her hand. He went back to his spot and laid down with a groan. Crotch sniffing was hard work for a dog, but it was his duty, even if no one liked it.

“Well,” she said into the phone, “let me let you talk to him.”

She handed me the phone and shook her head.

Upstairs I heard the kids yell again about something on a cartoon show they were watching, and I put the phone to my ear and stood at the foot of the stairs and watched Beverly climb back up, enjoying the way her bottom moved beneath her bathrobe. Twenty years of marriage hadn’t changed that for me.

“Hello,” I said.

“This is Bill,” said the voice. I knew then why Beverly had wanted off the phone and why she had the sour face when she gave it to me.

“Hey, how you been?” I tried to sound as happy as possible.

“Not so good.”

He always said that. He’d go six months and I wouldn’t hear from him, then something went rancid, first person he called was Uncle Hank.

But he’s my brother’s boy, so what you gonna do? It’s not like he’s got anyone else. My brother, Rick, got killed in an auto accident when Bill was seven, and when Bill was a teenager his mother remarried and Bill didn’t get along at all with her new husband, then his mother got some kind of weird disease you read about in the back of medical books, and died.

Bill was in many ways like his father. Always certain he was merely a day short of the big success, though you couldn’t seem to put your finger on what it was he was doing to acquire it. And, like my brother, he had a passion for women that sent his judgment and sense of decency packing.

On top of all that, he was a bullshitter and had no more true ambition than a frog.

I hated to get it started, but I said: “Tell me about it.”

Silence hung in the air for a time.

I sat down on the bottom step of the stairs and waited. Wylie got up again and ambled over, nodded his head in the direction of my crotch, but it was just a feint, to keep me honest. He laid down at my feet.

Bill said, “I got to talk to you in private. I don’t want to do it over the phone. I need to see you. Can I come over? I’ll have to take a taxi, but I think I can swing it. We can have a couple of drinks in the study.”

I thought about that one. I wasn’t in the mood to get Beverly stirred up. Telling her Bill was coming over was like telling her I was going to stack and store a wheelbarrow load of fresh pig manure in the house.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Beverly doesn’t like me, right?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Don’t have to. She talks to me like I’m a bill collector.”

“You two just don’t click.”

“We don’t click all right.”

“Look, what she’s got against you is ten thousand dollars you haven’t paid back. Ten thousand you don’t plan to pay back. Some of us work, Bill. Come over with the ten thousand in your hand, Beverly’ll meet you at the door in her panties playing a bass drum.”

“Uncle Hank, you know I’m going to pay that money back.”

“No, I don’t. You got a job? You’re twenty-four years old. It’s time you started footing your own bills.”

“Really, Uncle Hank. I’m not trying to borrow money. I need your help.”

I was going to tell him to find someone else, but the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth. All I could think of was Bill at seven years old, right after my brother was killed.

“Listen,” I said. “Here’s the score. I got plans this morning, and I don’t want to get in dutch with Beverly.”

“I hear that.”

“I’m gonna take a shower and take the family to lunch, then I’ll meet you at your place.”

“I’m not at my place, and I’m not going back there. And if I did go back, you wouldn’t know where to go, because I don’t live where I used to.”

“What?”

“The place I moved to is the place I’m not going back to… Forget all that, okay. I have to see you now.”

“After lunch, Bill, or get someone else. Call Arnold, see what he says.”

Silence again. Arnold was my older half-brother from my Dad’s earlier marriage. Arnold’s mom had died in childbirth. My father was young then and hadn’t done so well with Arnold. Arnold didn’t so much grow up as he got jerked up.

“All right,” Bill said. “Let’s do this. I’m at a motel. Calls itself a tourist court, actuallyem"rt, act. I got it on a match book here… Christ, how could I have forgotten a name like this? Sleepy Time Tourist Courts. I’m in room forty. This place is a hole.”

“I know where it is. Another year or two without paint and repairs, they’ll be holding that place up with a stick. Couldn’t you have found something better?”

“Money.”

“Yeah, well, you did okay then. Listen up. We finish lunch, I’ll drive over. Might be as late as two or two-thirty. We go by one of my stores and pick up a movie for the night on Saturdays. Sometimes we goof around a little. Run a few errands. I’ll move things quickly as possible.”

“What I’m talking here is more important than fucking lunch and a movie. I’m talking some desperate shit.”

“It’ll hold,” I said. “See you after lunch.”

I didn’t give him time to complain. I hung up. I didn’t really think what he had to say would amount to much, figured no matter what he said, in the end it would all come down to borrowing more money.

I was mistaken.