Elmore Leonard - The Big Bounce

“Listen, I don’t ask you for the money. Billy say that. I want to borrow it from you and we pay you back.”

“You think I have five hundred?”

“You don’t, you can get it. Easy.”

“If I loaned you what I have, you’d pay it back, uh?”

“You know that. Sure.”

“When?”

“Next year when we come up.”

“It’s been nice knowing you, Frank.”

“Man, we got these families. How they going to get home?”

“Come on-I’ve got this family.”

“You don’t care what happens to all those people?”

“Hey, Frank, I’ll see you.”

“Okay, buddy,” Pizarro said. He came off the bed slowly. “Screw you too.”

Pizarro moved past him and opened the door; narrow shoulders and drooping pants seat, checkered pants that were worn and dirty, shapeless, with slash continental pockets and a snappy snap-around elastic waist.

“Wait a minute,” Ryan said. “You got your truck?”

“I tole you, it’s busted.”

“You going to walk?”

“No, I’m going to rent a goddamn Hertz car.”

Ryan hesitated, watching Pizarro holding the door open, but only a moment. He said, “See you, Frank.”

Pizarro noticed the mustang in front of the office. He looked at the car as he walked past it and something about it was familiar. There were a lot of dark green Mustangs, but there was something else about a Mustang that stuck in his mind. He walked down to the first side road beyond the Bay Vista and got his panel truck out of the trees and headed for Geneva Beach as fast as the rusted-out panel would move. But by the time he got there, the bars and liquor stores were closed and the town was locked up for the night. Goddamn Ryan.

Waiting for Ryan and not finding anything to drink in Ryan’s place, he had thought of getting a bottle of something, tequila or gin. Or a bottle of red. If he bought wine, he’d have a few bucks left over. He had four dollars and sixty cents of the hundred Ryan had given him as his cut. Sure he had waited in the truck. But, goddamn, it was his truck; he was the one to drive it. At the time he should have pulled off the road and laid it on him. “Hey, man, where’s my cut? No chickenshit hunnert dollars, my cut .” Lay it on him and let him know. Ryan had been lucky with Camacho; but that didn’t mean he was always lucky.

He had never liked Ryan. Ever since San Antonio, at the gas station: Ryan standing there with his bag looking for a ride, standing there with his hands on his hips looking them over as they pulled in-the bus, the panel truck, and two cars, all migrants; then talking to Camacho for a while and getting in the bus. Ever since then. Ever since, on the trip up, Ryan started going into the stores where they had trouble being served to get the pop and stuff to make sandwiches. Ever since in the town in Oklahoma talking the gas station man into letting them use his stinking broken-down washroom, thinking he was a big shot because he did it. Ever since he started talking to Marlene Desea and before they were out of Missouri had got her to leave the panel truck and ride in the bus with him. Somebody else, one of the other girls, had said, “Frank, I would love to ride with you.” But he had told her nothing doing, nobody was riding with him now.

Camacho was right-what he said after they had reached the cucumber fields-that Ryan only wanted a ride. He got what he wanted and there was nothing to keep him-not Marlene Desea, not anything. He used the truck. He used Billy Ruiz. He used everybody and once he got what he wanted, he left. Sure, that’s the kind of guy.

Beyond Geneva Beach, on the highway south, he turned off on the dirt road that pointed through the fields to the migrant camp.

Goddamn cucumbers. He was through with the cucumbers. He could pick ten times more than the goddamn kids they sent up from Saginaw and Bay City, but if they wanted the kids instead of him, that was up to them. He had drunk a little too much since Saturday, a hundred dollars worth almost, but buying the others a lot of it too. It was gone, the hundred, and he owed Camacho four hundred fifty dollars and he didn’t have a job and San Antonio was sixteen hundred and seventy miles away.

But Ryan wasn’t gone. Man, he had Ryan. All he had to do was think of a way to tell him, a good way to tell him without getting his jaw broken. Like:

“Hey, Jack. You know that beer case with the wallets you tole us to throw away? We don’t throw it away, man. I got it hid somewhere.”

Then Ryan would say something and he would say to Ryan, “How much you give me for that beer case, buddy? So somebody don’t find it with your name on it.”

That would be the difficult part, to tell Ryan so he would see clearly that he had no choice but to buy the case of wallets. “Look, you swing at me, you never see the beer case, you understand?”

The son of a bitch, you didn’t know what he might do. Tell him quick, “Something happen to me a friend of mine take the beer case to the police. How you like that, buddy?”

Then tell him how much. Five hundred dollars for the case. No, six hundred dollars. He don’t have it, he has to work for it then, go in some places.

He had planned to tell Ryan tonight. Begin with the phony story about the bus and see if he could get some money that way, the easy way. Then tell him about the beer case. But when Ryan came in and was standing there, he couldn’t do it.

Maybe get some paper and write it to him. Buy the paper and get a pencil somewhere. Write it clearly and some night put it under his door. But he would have to see Ryan sooner or later, or else how would he get the money from him? Goddamn, why did it have to be so hard to do?

For a reason Frank Pizarro would never be sure of-other than he might have seen the car with the girl in it going past the camp, going past this shed where he was now stopping-he remembered the dark green Mustang and remembered at once who owned it. Mr. Ritchie’s girlfriend. Sure, the same green Mustang with the dents in the front end, the same dents in the same car in front of Jack Ryan’s place.

Pizarro turned off the engine and the headlights, but he didn’t get out right away. He kept thinking about the green Mustang because he knew goddamn well Jack Ryan had something to do with it.

“IT’S A GOOD DEAL,” Mr. Majestyk said. “Thirty bucks a week she comes in every day but Sunday. Sunday I like to cook a steak outside on the grill, nice sirloin, this guy at the IGA cuts it about two and a half inches thick.”

Mr. Majestyk sliced off a piece of kielbasa and dipped it in chili sauce. He pushed the fork into his sauerkraut and heaped it over the sausage with his knife. Chewing, he took a piece of bread and buttered the whole slice. Still chewing, he said, “She bakes it herself. At home, bakes two, three times a week and brings it in fresh. I mean fresh.”

“It’s all right,” Ryan said.

“She keeps the place clean. Vacuums twice a week.”

Ryan was eating fast. He had missed breakfast again and he was hungry. The idea had been to get up early and drive over to Ritchie’s hunting lodge and look it over, before anybody was around. But he’d overslept and missed breakfast. He’d have to drive out there after work, but he was too hungry to think about that now. “She can cook,” Ryan said.

“I wouldn’t let her if she couldn’t,” Mr. Majestyk said.

“You got something going with her?”

“With Donna?” Mr. Majestyk glanced toward the doorway into the living room. “Christ, what do you think, I’m hard up or something?”

“She’s old, but she’s not too bad looking,” Ryan said. “I mean, better than nothing.”

“You’re young, you got it on the brain.”