Elmore Leonard - Up in Honey's Room

Honey said, “Are you afraid to be alone with me?”

He looked over. She was taking a cigarette from the pack. “You want me to come right out and tell you?”

She said, “Of course,” and flicked her lighter.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea, you and I start keepin’ company.”

She snapped the lighter shut and drew on her cigarette before saying, “If that’s how you feel, okay, let’s call Kevin.”

It was quiet in the car for a couple of minutes, Honey waiting for Carl to say something. It was his turn.

He surprised her.

“When you told Walter we met on a train-”

“I thought of it as I said it.”

“You ever meet somebody on a train?”

“I sat in the club car on the way to New York, for the Bund rally. Walter stayed in our seat to take a nap. He can sleep sitting straight up, like he’s at attention. I had a cocktail and began thinking of myself as a mystery woman, the guys in the club car wondering who I am. I’m wearing sunglasses and a nifty cloche down on my eyes, I must be some body. A couple of different guys offer to buy me a drink, I say no thank you. I’m reading Newsweek . Finally a guy sits down next to me I think is interesting. He’s in his forties, not bad-looking. He’s wearing an expensive pinstriped suit. He tells me he’s a real estate investor in New York City, and for the next couple of hours he buys me cocktails, whiskey sours in the afternoon, while he guesses what I do and why I’m going to New York.”

“Did you tell him?”

“He wanted to see me. I told him to stop by the German-American Bund rally at the Garden, he’d get to hear Fritz Kuhn talk about Jews and Communists.”

“The real estate guy’s Jewish?”

“Yes, he is. So then I had to tell him about Walter and the reason I married him.”

“What’d he say to that?”

“He still wanted to meet me, so we did. We met for a drink and talked. He wanted me to leave Walter and stay with him in New York.”

“He’s married?”

“Divorced.”

“You trusted him?”

“He said I woke him up. Made him feel alive again.”

“I imagine so,” Carl said and waited while Honey took her time.

“I went back to the Garden to see Walter sieg heil ing Fritz Kuhn and I thought, What’s wrong with me? Outside of being young and dumb.”

They were quiet again.

She said, “You know Kevin’s had his supper by now.”

Carl said most likely, his eyes on the road.

“Are you taking me to supper or dropping me off home?”

“We’ll stop somewhere.”

“I ask since you don’t care to have fun with women other than your wife.”

“If I can help it,” Carl said.

Jurgen watched the Pontiac creep past the front of the house, a green four-door, out of his view for several moments, now it appeared on the far side of the house and the trees in the yard, turning onto the road Darcy had made coming through the field with his trailers of cows. Jurgen watched the Pontiac coming across the barn lot now to creep past the stock pen. Then stop and back up. So the ones in the car could look at the cows? He watched the window come down on the passenger side and saw a young woman’s face, quite a lovely face, smoking a cigarette. He couldn’t see the man who was driving. Only his hat.

He remembered a green four-door Pontiac at the camp in Oklahoma. Watching through the fence to see who was in it. As he was doing now, watching from the cattle entrance to the barn, the chute where the cows and heifer in the pen would be prodded inside later tonight to lose their hides, their heads, their hooves, and finally all their parts.

He watched the Pontiac make a wide turnabout and leave the yard in Darcy’s tracks across the field, turn on to the main road and come this way, again out of view on the front side of the house. Jurgen waited. The Pontiac didn’t come past the house. It must have turned into the driveway that circled and came out again. But the car didn’t appear. It told Jurgen they had looked over Walter’s cows and now they were going to drop in for a visit.

He didn’t think they were friends of Walter’s.

Walter had only three friends he ever talked about: Vera Mezwa, the Ukrainian countess, and her houseman Bohdan; Michael George Taylor, the doctor who supplied Vera with invisible ink; and Joe Aubrey, the official of the Ku Klux Klan who owned restaurants and a light plane. Months ago he had asked Walter, “You’ve told them about Otto and me?”

Walter said, “You know what happened to Max Stephan and the Luftwaffe pilot.”

Jurgen said, “‘Loose lips sink ships.’”

Walter said, “What?”

The girl in the car was too young to be Vera Mezwa. The guy driving, only his hat visible on the other side of the lovely girl, but something familiar about the way he wore it-of all the ways there were to shape a felt hat-and thought of the marshal, Carlos Huntington Webster, Carl at the table in the department store with another man and a girl who could, yes, very possibly be the girl in the car smoking a cigarette. He liked her beret. If this was the same girl, the one driving could very well be Carl, Carl coming closer each day. He had thought earlier, Where will you see him the next time?

Here, where he was standing at the chute entrance to Walter’s slaughterhouse. Jurgen stepped inside.

Walter’s cutters would arrive after dark and set to work on the cows and the heifer, have sides of beef hanging before morning. Darcy would arrive in his snub-nosed refrigerated van he’d bought at auction, and get the sides out of here before any government inspectors showed up with their meat stamps. He’d take the load to Walter’s market where they’d hang and chill for twenty-four hours before Walter dressed them out. There were sides usually hanging in the barn’s chill room, from cattle bought at legal sales for inspectors who dropped by unannounced.

“That’s what they do,” Darcy said, “sneak up while you’re trying to make a living.”

Jurgen had never met anyone like Darcy Deal, a former convict-they had imprisonment in common-who worked now as a cattle rustler and looked the part in his sweaty cowboy hat and run-down boots with spurs. Darcy had a hard, stringy build and seemed to prefer looking mean. Jurgen was hesitant the first time he approached him.

“Do you ride a horse?”

“You askin’ if I can?”

“When you rustle the cattle.”

“I work afoot. Shake out a rope on the cow, put a feed bag on her and lead her to the truck, if I don’t use a trailer.”

“Then why do you wear spurs?”

“I walk in a bar, they hear my spurs jingle jangle jingle they know who I am.” Darcy grinned, three or four days’ growth on his face. “My boots are about worn through, but I never once had these can openers off ’em.”

Jurgen said, “I like the sound they make, that ching... ching, with each step you take.”

“You hear it,” Darcy said, “look out. They’s a cowboy come in the bar.”

Jurgen smiled. “Instilling fear in the hearts of the customers, uh?”

Darcy said, “Somethin’ like that.”

Jurgen asked him, “Do you know who I am?”

“You’re one of the Kraut prisoners broke out of somewhere. Walter says you stole a truck and drove out the front gate in it.” Darcy said, “I never tried to escape. I looked at gettin’ out in two years and I did, got paroled, but then busted my foreman’s jaw- we’re workin’ down in a mine and he give me some lip-so I was thrown back in to finish my time. This prison’s on a hill, two thousand yards from the Cumberland River, if you ever got a chance to see it from inside. Eddyville, named for a Civil War general.”