Джо Горес - Cases

“It’ll be fun,” said Penny. “And since he’s your friend I want to meet him before he goes off to Frank Lloyd Wright’s place in Phoenix. Do you think he could design a dude ranch house?”

“Sure, and the stables. And he specializes in outhouses.”

She patted her horse’s shoulder. “Sound good, Yankee?”

Dunc almost said it then, what had been growing in his mind. Ask her to stay, skip that last year of college; but he couldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair to her. Or to him, either.

A lion roared in the nearby zoo, and he thought of Hemingway’s African stories. Christ, he wanted to be a writer!

On Sunday Gus drove them down through a broad flat sprawl of little houses in South-Central L.A. east of the airport. “Just a couple of years ago this area was more white than black.”

From blocks away, they could see a strange openwork tower thrusting far above its surroundings, glinting in the noonday sun as if studded with jewels.

“What is it?” asked Penny in awe.

“A tower a guy named Watts has been building for years.”

The base of the tower was heaped with broken glass from bottles of every description — pop bottles, beer bottles, wine bottles. There was also a hand-lettered sign, “Admission, 25 cents.” Watts was a short middle-aged man who knew Gus and shook hands with him. Inside the tower, Penny and Dunc gazed up at its spires in amazement. Crazy wooden scaffolding flanked its sides.

“Concrete and broken bottles,” said Penny in surprise.

The concrete looked almost liquid, as if still dripping down the sides of the tower like candle wax. But it was totally dry. They spent over an hour there, gawking, touching.

“What a strange thing to spend your life working on,” said Penny as they headed home.

“He works alone, it just came to him that he had to do it.”

“He’s driven to it,” said Dunc, and hoped he would be that driven to writing when the time came.

That night, after Goodie and Carl had gone to bed, as they drifted back and forth together on the creaking porch swing, Dunc was surprised to hear Penny chuckle to herself.

“I was just thinking, maybe Gus isn’t the right architect for the ranch house. Even less for the stables. Can you imagine how a tower like that would spook the horses?”

“His drawings are nothing like the Watts towers, honest.”

Suddenly sober, she hugged him close. “Oh, Dunc, time’s getting so short.”

Dunc was driving over to see Penny every night and getting home at one or two in the morning. Each day he knew he’d have to stay in and sleep that night; but when quitting time rolled around, he could hardly wait to go see her.

They took long rambling walks along darkened neighborhood streets, making up stories about the people behind the lighted windows. They’d see a movie, sit in a soda fountain, watch TV, swing on the old-fashioned porch glider. Always they ended up parked in a little wooded area across the parkway, feverish and excited, going a little further each time in mutual need.

Friday, Gus’s last day in L.A., he skipped work to spend time with his relatives, particularly Grandma Trabert; she had aged over the summer. Donovan gave Dunc a big ration of shit about the missing Gus, but labor was plentiful, he’d have no trouble getting a replacement for Monday’s pour.

Without Gus, Dunc went to Joshua for help getting the Mexicans hidden away in case Immigration came earlier. The lanky Negro gave his high laugh and clapped Dunc on the shoulder.

“Osvaldo!” he yelled. “Mr. Donovan says you an’ me, baby, we gotta go wait for the truck to bring the ce ment.”

Dunc led the others out to the edge of the field farthest from the building site, in case Osvaldo had learned where they’d been hidden last time. And sure enough the immigration agents arrived at 9:15, an hour early. When they saw no Mexicans, they stormed right over to Dunc. Osvaldo obviously had been talking.

Thick-Neck’s close-set eyes were angry slits.

“Okay, wise guy, where are they?”

Again, Dunc was all innocence. “Who?”

This time all four agents ranged around him like the hyenas around the dying writer in The Snows of Kilimanjaro. And like the hyenas their jaws were mighty: scavengers, Dunc thought with a touch of alarm, but also government men.

“We know you hid them in the cornfield last time.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Thick-Neck said, “We can arrest you for obstruction of justice and aiding and abetting federal fugitives.”

“I have to get back to work. We’re shorthanded today.”

Just then Joshua, shaking his head over the cement truck that mysteriously hadn’t arrived, returned with Osvaldo. The immigration agents halfheartedly poked around in the cornfield without success, finally drove off in a cloud of dust.

Dunc felt shaky. This had been just a game to him, but the agents’ anger had been personal and vindictive. Maybe they did have a quota. What worried him even more was Osvaldo. Dunc had expected open hostility from the Judas goat, but Osvaldo just looked scared. Of what? Of whom?

At the hod carriers’ office were just the deskman and the chairman, whom he had learned were Tony and Luigi. He laid down his check. “Take out thirty, I’m paying Trabert’s dues, too.”

Tony counted out his money, stamped the union books. His eyes shifted, and a heavy shoe slammed into Dunc’s kidney. He yelled in pain and arched back at the same time that he was driven forward, half running, into the wall. He fell down.

“Smart little fuck!” exclaimed Tony.

They were advancing on him, coming in from either side. Dunc staggered to his feet and backed up against the wall.

“We’re gonna show you what happens when you fuck around in union affairs,” said Luigi.

Suddenly, too late, Dunc saw it all with blinding clarity. Who Osvaldo was afraid of. Who had worked out the scam in the first place, who had been profiting from turning in the illegals every two weeks, even why the immigration agents’ anger had been so focused and personal. He held up placating hands.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute, I didn’t know—”

“Well you’re gonna know now, fuckface.”

He charged them as he’d done so often in football when double-teamed by blockers protecting the quarterback, hoping to burst out between them and run for his life. He didn’t make it.

Luigi smashed an elbow into his jaw. He used his own elbow, felt a satisfying jar. But Tony’s arm was around his neck from behind in a chokehold, he was hauled bodily upright; Tony outweighed him by seventy pounds.

Dunc clawed at the tree trunk arms, couldn’t get any leverage. The kidney kick had weakened him, the half nelson was cutting off the blood to his brain; Luigi, in front of him, looked blurry.

“Hold him still. Fucker broke my nose.”

A pile-driver fist smashed into Dunc’s gut. His abdominal muscles were so work-toughened it didn’t quite rupture anything.

Tony said behind him, “Shit, you can hit him in the gut all day. He’s tough from working, this baby. Go for the face.”

Luigi’s right cross to the side of his jaw sagged his knees and blurred his vision even more. The next one would put him on the floor, where they could kick him to death if they wanted to.

Then Dunc heard a grunt of effort and Luigi drifted up off the floor in slow motion. He was spun into Samuel’s rising boot at the apex of his kick. It put him on the floor flat as a pancake, arms and legs wide, face full of blood.

In his place was Joshua, a surprisingly baleful grin on his ebony face.

“You bes’ let go of him,” he said to Tony.