Lawrence Block - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 137, No. 2. Whole No. 834, February 2011

The big one, Jane, rested on the sagging bed, back against the water-stained wooden headboard, her tremendous arms crossed over her equally massive chest. Her hair, red streaked with black, had been fashioned into an improbable pageboy cut, an unfortunate choice that further accentuated the fleshy features on her round face. Part of a tattoo on her right bicep peeked out below the sleeve of her faded yellow T-shirt. It looked like the forepaw of a dog, and for some reason Dan imagined the dog was a frisky, bright-eyed poodle. Tiny bottles of nail polish, cylinders of mascara and eye shadow, tubes of lipstick, and several compacts of face powder lay scattered on the bed before her. She slowly bent forward and wagged a stubby finger at the gaudy containers as if selecting the right one would solve an important problem.

Dan’s courage had weakened a little after that last punch from Brucie, but he still managed to convince himself that he could wait them out. He’d probably already suffered the worst of it. Hell, if he just got a chance, he could talk his way out of this. They only wanted a little traveling money, and since he had given them all he had, they’d soon grow bored with their little game and let him go. Still, he should try to do something. Maybe the story, maybe he could reduce the tension by telling them the story.

The story, which had come to him just a few hours before, had been forming in his mind even as he’d been sitting there tied up. It had an urgency of its own and despite the discomfort and pain from his numb hands and the scuffs on his face, its tenuous threads began to knit themselves into a ragged tapestry and suddenly he could see the outline of it and knew enough to begin the telling. He had nothing to lose, and maybe it would help somehow. So he worked up a few drops of saliva and prepared his swollen tongue to make words.

They’d been sitting in silence since Brucie pounded on the TV to remove some static from the sound, resulting in a blank screen and no sound at all. That had been an hour or more ago. He’d been told to be quiet and he knew that Brucie had a short fuse, but Dan had faith in his own skills as a storyteller.

“It’s raining like hell out there, like it’s never going to stop,” he said tentatively. There was no reaction to these first few words, so he continued. “It reminds me of a story I heard about a flood. It happened about twenty years ago, right here in eastern Colorado, though I’m not sure if it was up north on the South Platte or down on the Arkansas. Both rivers flood sometimes in the late spring when the snowmelt has already filled the river and a rainy spell sets in.

“So the rains came and swelled the river over its banks and into the pasture of this farm that was usually a half-mile from the river. The farmer had his cows penned up by his barn, but the river was rising steadily, so he let them out and herded them up onto the prairie sandhills above his farm. He struggled through the mucky soil, but he and his dog got them out and up into the hills with only one of the cows running off. When he was sure the others were safe, he and the dog took off to find the lone cow, a young milker who had always been a little skittish.

“Let me tell you about this dog. It wasn’t the kind of dog the farmer would have picked for a work dog. It had come wandering into the farmyard a couple of years earlier and after a week of tossing rocks and shouting at it, the dog was still skulking around. Against his better judgment, the farmer began to leave food scraps in an old Ford hubcap behind the barn, and soon, the dog began to follow him around as he did his chores. He soon found that the dog had a touchy and unpredictable nature. The farmer sometimes caught a gleam in the dog’s eye that seemed like a challenge, as if it would as soon go for you as listen to what you had to say. But the dog learned to handle the cows so the farmer put up with it and let it live in the barn.

“The dog’s mongrel collie coat hid the splashes of mud that stained it as he roamed about, searching for the cow. They worked well together, covering a lot of ground. The signs they found pointed to the brainless cow heading right down into the flooded cottonwoods that bordered the swollen river.

“When they came to the edge of the flood, the farmer waded into the slow- moving, muddy water. He looked back and saw that the dog had hesitated. He cursed it and commanded it to come, but it only paced at the water’s edge. Finally he went back and picked up the unwilling animal and carried it with him. When he was fifty yards from the edge and still only up to his ankles, he dropped the dog. It looked back anxiously to the muddy land, but moved on as the farmer did, staying by his side.

“It was too close to dark for the farmer to search for very long, as he didn’t know when the flood crest would hit the area. For all he knew, it would reach clear to his farmhouse, but he was stubborn and single-minded and as the gray sky turned to black, he kept up his search, slogging along in his rubber work boots, already fighting his way through waves of uprooted plants and small trees and drowned varmints. He had no luck spotting the cow, and only turned back when it was dark enough that he needed the yard lights up by the house to guide him home.

“He didn’t notice the loss of the dog until he waded onto the bog that had been his alfalfa field. The animal had been alternately swimming and scrambling onto branches and raised clumps of grass as they wended their way through the flooded cottonwood forest. The farmer remembered the dog being near him only ten or fifteen minutes before as he heard its whine when it traversed a long log and didn’t want to jump into the water again, and he had cussed it and chided it along. He looked back at the huge dark expanse of the murmuring flood and whistled a couple of times and then trudged up to his house. What a mess the day had turned into. He told himself that if the cow and the dog survived until morning, he’d find them then.”

“What the hell does this have to do with anything? Who gives a damn about a lost dog or cow?” Brucie said. He stood up and put the carpenter’s pencil behind his left ear. He was small and thin, maybe five-four and 140 pounds, and he wore dirty jeans with holes in the knees and a red flannel shirt over a black T-shirt. His hair was black and thick and he needed a shave. He had a mean kick and hard, fast fists.

“I think it’s a good story,” said the big woman, Jane. Dan had heard Brucie call her Jane several times, usually with a nasty descriptor in front of Jane, like Lard-Ass or Two-Ton. “You know I love dogs. I don’t think I ever been closer to a cow than a hamburger or a glass of milk, though.” She laughed heartily, shaking the whole bed so that the headboard banged against the wall.

“How do you know it’s a good story? You ain’t even heard the whole thing.”

“Well, let him finish it, then.”

“Nah. I’m tired of hearing him talk. Besides, if he has something to say, I want it to be that he remembers the number for the cash machine so we don’t have to wait for the goddamn bank to open.”

“He said he didn’t remember. Even when you hit him,” she said. Then she lowered her voice. “When are you going to learn that hitting never helps?”

Brucie didn’t say anything for a minute, just cocked his ear toward her like he was waiting for another stupid remark. Then he slowly turned his head and looked across at her, his blue eyes turning to slits so all that showed was a venomous, milky grey. She tried to evade his stare, but wasn’t able to: The smile behind that hearty laugh disappeared and her heavy shoulders descended lower and lower until she sagged into a sad, rounded lump.

Brucie had her intimidated all right. Dan had noticed how quiet she was in the car, but it hadn’t meant much to him then. He generally never picked up hitchhikers, especially when he had a full slate of appointments and an order book with too many blank pages, but today he’d been bored and out there. Out there , where the wind and the rain put him. He could go for weeks without doing a stupid, crazy thing, and then along would come a blow and suddenly he would decide to take a two-hundred-mile detour to find some ribs cooked just the way he liked them, or that he needed a rest and he would end up spending three days in a motel room, drinking whiskey all night, crying to every sad song on the radio.