Elmore Leonard - The Big Bounce

Nancy was watching him. “You didn’t give it much of a look.”

“I want to see if we can get up behind it,” Ryan said.

He saw the sign down the road before he was able to read it. The sign was on the right, a painted board pointing across the road into the woods. Ryan wasn’t looking for a sign and it didn’t mean anything to him until they were close enough to read it-ROGERS-and then he remembered Mr. Majestyk telling him about the place up in the woods that would be perfect for a hunting lodge, his plan to have a couple of big A-frames stuck together with a central heating unit; that was it.

As he turned left into the dirt road Nancy said, “Now where?” She must have seen the sign, but that was all she said.

“This ought to get us up there,” Ryan said.

It was a dirt road with deep ruts, narrow and winding, so narrow in places the brush and tree branches scraped the sides of the car. They moved slowly, the springs squeaking and the flat shape of the hood out in front of them rising and dipping through the chuckholes. The road began to climb, curving into switchbacks, the trees high overhead, quiet in here and dim, with patches of sunlight and glimpses of sky up through the branches. All the way up neither of them spoke, not until they were at the top and the road opened up, ending in a cleared area, and Nancy said, “Well, now that we’re here.”

God, it was quiet, a quiet you could feel. Ryan’s door slammed loud and he stood there after he got out. Then moving and hearing only the sound of his shoes in the leaves. It was a good-sized area; it had been cleared and people had been here. He noticed a few rusted beer cans and a brown whiskey bottle and bits of paper around. Some people knew where it was, but God, it was quiet and away from everything. The only woods he had ever been in were in Detroit, in Palmer Park and on Belle Isle, and in those woods you could always hear people outside of the woods having a picnic or playing baseball. He had never been in real north-country woods.

“Now what?” Nancy said.

He didn’t answer her. He walked around, over to one side of the clearing that looked down on a lake, a narrow curved lake that sat down there by itself with thick trees growing up from its banks. He walked along the edge of the clearing, looking down into dense woods that you would have to cut your way through, to the other side, and here through an opening he could see the hunting lodge and beyond it part of the cucumber fields and the migrant camp, way down there far away, the buildings neat and orderly in the sunlight and edged with clean shadow lines. He could see the junk-heap cars back of the buildings and a little square of yellow, Luis Camacho’s bus.

God, with about a hundred and twenty thousand miles on it.

“You can see the camp,” Ryan said.

Nancy was still in the car, about twenty feet away. She said, “Really?”

“Come here, you can see it good. There’s the bus we rode up in.”

“Some other time,” Nancy said.

“I don’t know how that bus ever made it. It was the craziest ride I ever took. I mean, it wasn’t like a bus ride, it was like living on a bus for four days.” Ryan looked toward her, then walked over. “I’ll have one now.”

She poured Cold Duck into a glass and handed it to him. Ryan held it up, looking at the dark red color, and smiled.

“It reminds me of Billy Ruiz; he always drank rock and rye. You ever taste it? It’s awful.”

“Pop?”

“Terrible. It’s got a reddish color.” Ryan smiled again, looking at the stemmed glass. “He was always holding it up to see how much he had left. He’d be eating a lunch stick or something, take a bite, take a swallow, and then hold the bottle up and look at it, trying to make them come out even. It reminded me of that.”

“Let’s go,” Nancy said.

Ryan had turned from the car. He was looking off into the trees, in the direction of the migrant camp.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The way they live and all, they always seem to get along. They don’t really bitch about anything, they kid about it. I mean, I think of them as being pretty happy. I don’t mean simple, fun-loving folk, you know-”

“No,” Nancy said. “What do you mean?”

Ryan looked at her now. “I mean, they can take it. Maybe they take more than they should, I don’t know. But even living the way they do, they still have something not many people have.”

“I know,” Nancy said. “Dignity.”

“Forget it.”

“How about nobility?”

Ryan finished his drink, trying to do it calmly.

“Come on, I want to know.”

“Go bag your ass,” Ryan said.

She smiled and started to laugh, then put her head back and laughed louder. Ryan watched her. Something was strange and he kept watching her until he realized what it was. In the three days he had known her this was the first time he had heard her laugh.

A fellow by the name of A. J. Banks, from the Growers Association, called Bob Jr. and asked him what it would cost to have the labor camp torn down and hauled away so they could plant that whole area next season. Bob Jr. said he wasn’t a wrecking company, why ask him? And A. J. Banks said if he could build it, goddamnit, he could estimate tearing it down, couldn’t he? Bob Jr. said he’d look it over and see what he thought. That’s why he drove up to the camp and would have sworn he saw Nancy’s Mustang heading out the back road as he reached the migrant buildings. Maybe not.

But maybe it was her car. After he looked over the buildings and got an idea how many truckloads it would take to haul the lumber away, he drove out the back road. Her car wasn’t at Mr. Ritchie’s lodge. Beyond the lodge the road didn’t lead anywhere; it cut through pastureland and woods and finally reached the lakeshore about fifteen miles from Geneva Beach. Bob Jr. hadn’t been back here since spring, since they decided to sell the woods property and he put the sign up on the road. Once in a while somebody, like Mr. Majestyk, would look at the property, but usually the only ones who came by were kids looking for a place to make out. The tire tracks could be anybody’s; old ones. But then he remembered it had rained the day before yesterday.

When he saw the good clean impression of the tracks turning into their private road, he knew somebody had been back here recently. He wasn’t thinking of Nancy now. He’d decided it couldn’t have been her car he’d seen. But he was curious about the tire tracks. That’s why he shifted into first and headed the pickup truck up the private road.

The first thing Ryan did when he saw the pickup, hearing it first and knowing it right away as it came out of the trees, he placed his glass on the hood of the Mustang and looked around. He wasn’t trying to be casual about it, but he wasn’t hurrying either. He spotted a tree limb on the ground, over just a little way, and by the time Bob Jr. was out of the pickup, Ryan had snapped off a branch the size of a broom handle and stood resting on it in his spearman pose.

In the car, holding her glass, her arm resting on the doorsill, Nancy said, “Hi, Bob,” and waited to see what would happen.

Bob Jr. looked over the situation. He saw Nancy and the empty glass on the hood and out beyond the car Jack Ryan holding his staff or club or whatever the hell it was. They were both waiting for him to do something, like it was up to him to make the next move. Ryan was standing there asking for it and that part of it was simple: he’d told Ryan to leave and Ryan was still here, so he’d have to teach him a lesson. But with Nancy watching, he’d have to make it look easy, like this bird wasn’t any trouble at all. Bob Jr. took off his cowboy hat and his sunglasses and put them in the truck, through the window.