Chuck Logan - Absolute Zero

He was just a little too good to be true, with his killer Wolfman Jack eyebrows.

Given her experience, he should therefore be rejected out of hand as suspect. But this morning she had dressed carefully, choosing a practical look, just the simple jeans and shirt. She had caught herself starting to reach for a tube of lipstick and stayed her hand. Cosmetics were not appropriate right now, and she decided they were not necessary for Broker. In fact, she figured the opposite.

And she had allowed her heart one skip against her rib cage when she saw him hose down Earl with wolf pee. But she’d tucked her heart back in its Valentine envelope and coolly appraised Broker. And she was thinking how maybe Earl had run into someone out of his league, someone who was quietly and competently dangerous. Clearly Broker didn’t get that way of moving on people in a gym.

So why did he come back?

Maybe, like Allen, he was lonely and had found a woman in a vulnerable situation. No. This was not simple boy-girl. So maybe, like Earl, he smelled the pot of gold at the end of Hank’s tragedy. If so, he was very good at concealing his intentions. Or maybe he was just performing a samaritan courtesy, putting up a winter’s wood.

What intrigued her was that she couldn’t tell.

And she sensed a hint of melancholy. The first thing she’d noticed yesterday was his newly naked ring finger; the dent of the missing wedding band still pressed into his skin. So that was the loose string she’d pull on when the time was right.

So far he was looking good at chopping wood. She wondered how he’d be at trimming Earl down to size.

Intuition told her Broker could accomplish that task. But the roots of her intuition were still soggy with booze. She had to be careful. And even if he could chase Earl off, at what price? So she’d see if Broker could be useful. So no double messages. No games. She’d just see if there was a next step.

So she stooped, picked up, carried, and stacked the kindling. She ignored the pain in her arms and lower back. She assumed he was like Hank and put a premium on the ability to perform manual labor with a minimum of complaint. A quality that was fast departing from the realm of TV babies and PC nerds.

When half the shed was filled, Jolene straightened up, removed her gloves, and patted at a flush of sweat on her forehead. Broker put down the maul and said, “You’ll feel it tomorrow, using muscles in a new way.”

She smiled and arched her back. “Coffee break. It’s in my union contract,” she joked. He nodded, removed his gloves, and reached for a cigar as she poured coffee into two cups.

“You mind?” he asked, holding up the cigar.

She responded spontaneously from the brief happy life she’d known before her dad left when she was seven. “Actually, I kind of like cigar smoke. It reminds me of my dad and the old Met Stadium. When I was a little kid we’d go see the Twins. It smelled like beer, peanuts, and cigar smoke.”

Broker smiled, approving of the remark.

They sat side by side in the unfilled half of the woodshed. She had taken pains to make sure the other half was stacked with industrial precision. Jolene took two sips of her coffee and made her move.

She touched his left hand, the ring finger. “Kind of shouts,” she said.

He held the hand up, fingers out, inspected it, then let it fall into a fist. “Yeah,” he said. “I thought of putting a Band-Aid over it.”

Jolene raised her eyebrows eloquently, mocking, Does it hurt that much?

He waved off her concern, “I married a younger woman,” he said.

“A lot of that’s going around.”

“There’s risks.”

“Yeah. Younger men,” she said.

He nodded. “In my case, about twelve of them.”

That stopped her and it was his turn to grin. “She’s in the army, the only woman in a squad of guys.”

“Oh.” Jolene didn’t see that coming.

And their eyes tangled up in that specific way when two people know they are both thinking the exact same thing about losing a person. About being lonely.

He held up his hand. “You know all about me. I don’t know anything about you,” he said.

And she said, “All I know about you is that you used to wear a ring on that finger and it’s not there anymore.”

He poured out the dregs of his coffee, stood up, pulled on his, gloves, and nodded toward the woodpile. “Let’s finish this,” he said.

“And then?” she asked.

He looked into her eyes and they shared another quiet moment that began to throb in her temples like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And she thought, this guy is trouble and you have enough trouble, but she didn’t turn the music off.

And after a Hallelujah Chorus worth of eye-fucking, he said, “And then we’ll see if you need any more help around here.”

Hank toured hells he had known-Detroit got him ready for the hill, in the hammer shop at Huron Forge and Machine. Twelve drop hammers blowing out your eardrums in an acre of fiery steel forgings. The men and machines all hot, loud, dangerous, dirty, and sharp .

Mainly he thought Sartre was right in No Exit; hell was just other people, especially if they were Jolene, Allen, and Earl Garf.

Right now hell was Wisconsin, which was all he could see out his studio windows, and the Wisconsin river bluffs looked like a mass grave of dead technicolor porcupines.

And then, along came Garfinkle. The made-up man who hated his name and his past and was trying to reinvent himself as Brad Pitt from The Fight Club or Keneau Reeves from The Matrix.

He walked up to the bed and greeted Hank with the nickname he thought was so funny: “So how’s the Big Lebowski today?”

All Earl’s wit came from the movies, and Hank figured that’s what Earl and his whole slacker generation had instead of experiences. But he had not seen The Big Lebowski, so he was at a loss. It was the least of his problems .

“Know what?” Earl said. “Your old lady has another suitor. First Doctor Allen and now the canoe guy from up north. .”

The canoe guy.

Broker’s back.

“. . he’s out there in back of the garage knocking the wood in little pieces. I think he’s practicing up to knock a piece off of Jolene. Just like Allen is. But, for my money, I think the sleeper candidate has the inside track. When I took her to Milt’s office yesterday, Milt kissed her hand. It was very suave.”

What’s Broker doing back here? This could be a case where Earl was right.

“At any rate, we’ll know who rings the bell.” Earl walked over to the bedroom doorway and Hank could barely see him fumble around at shoulder level on a bookshelf next to the doorjam. He moved some books aside and pointed. “State-of-the-art miniaturization, batteries, and transmitter. This baby is what the CIA uses. I cut a little hole in the wall and trained this camera on her bed. The camera transmits to long-playing tapes on a VCR in the basement. Forget voyeur TV; this is the real thing. I was thinking lighting would be a problem if it happens at night. But you know what? Jolene always sleeps with a night-light. So I upped the wattage in the night-light bulb. When she does the dirty, we’ll have broadcast-quality audio and pretty good video. Unless, of course, she does it in the cot at the end of the bed. I didn’t think of that.”

Earl scratched his head briefly, then grinned, proud of himself as he tented the books back over the concealed camera. “You know what would have been good? I should have got your buddy Stovall on tape. He was a riot, a regular worm. Except he loved the hook.

“It was his fault, you know. I gave him every out. All he had to do was come up with some bread to pay the hospital bills. You know what he said? He said, not as long as I was hanging around. Can you believe that shit? I rented that hospital bed you’re laying on. Me.”