DESERVES TO BE DEAD
VIRGIL FLOWERS AND JOHNSON JOHNSON sat on the cabin’s narrow board porch, drinking coffee and looking out at the empty golf course. A fine mist was sweeping down from the mountains and across the tan grass of the first fairway. The dissected remnants of three newspapers lay on the table between them. Four fly rods hung tip-down from a rack on the wall.
Two other fishermen, whom they’d met the day before, wandered by in rain jackets, aiming in the general direction of the bar, and Johnson said, “We got like a gallon of hot coffee.”
“We’ll take some of that,” Rich Lang said, the shorter of the two guys.
He looked soft around the middle with about a week’s worth of graying stubble on his face. The two guys took the other chairs on the porch, and the four of them sat around talking about fish and politics and personal health, as they admired the rain.
The other guy, Dan Cain, said, “Shoulda gone to Colorado.”
“Can’t afford Colorado,” Lang said. “Besides, the fish are bigger here.”
The personal health issue involved Cain, who’d taken a bad fall on a river rock the day before, shredding the skin on his elbows and upper arms. Nothing serious, but painful, and his arms were coated with antiseptic cream and wrapped in gauze.
“Pain in the butt,” he admitted.
“That’s what happens when us big guys fall,” Johnson said to Cain. They were both six six or so, and well over two hundred pounds. “Virgil falls down, it’s like dropping a snake. I fall down, and it’s like Pluto rammed into the earth.”
“Pluto the planet, or Pluto the dog?” Virgil asked.
It went back and forth like that for twenty minutes, Lang and Cain browsing halfheartedly through the abandoned newspapers.
Cain eventually said, “It’s looking lighter in the west.”
Virgil, Johnson, and Lang said, almost simultaneously, “Bullshit.”
Johnson checked his cell phone and a weather app for a radar image of the area.
“We won’t get out this afternoon,” he said. “It’s rain all the way back to Idaho.”
“What about tomorrow?” Lang asked.
“Thirty percent chance of rain,” Johnson said. “When they say thirty percent chance of rain, that usually means there’s a fifty percent chance.”
“We could go into town, find a place that sells books,” Virgil said. “Check the grocery store, get something to eat tonight.”
“Or find a casino, lose some money in the slots,” Johnson said. “Did I ever tell you about the casino up in Ontario? I was up there last month with Donnie Glover, and it was raining like hell.”
Johnson launched into a rambling story about a Canadian casino in which the slot machines apparently never paid anything, ever.
The four of them were at WJ Guest Ranch outside of Grizzly Falls, Montana, possibly the smallest dude ranch in the state at seventy acres. Sixty of those were dedicated to a homemade, ramshackle executive golf course. The other ten acres had nine tiny chrome-yellow cabins, a barn with four rentable horses, the equine equivalent of Yugos, the owners’ house, a larger cabin with a bar that had six stools, three tables, one satellite TV permanently tuned to a sports channel, and a collection of old books and magazines that smelled of mold. The place had two secret ingredients. Access to a trout stream stuffed with big rainbows and browns, and price. The WJ was cheap.
They were all half listening to Johnson’s story when a girl started screaming, her shrill voice rising from the owners’ house.
Not screaming in fear. She was out-of-control angry.
Johnson broke off the story to say, “That’s Katy.”
“Sounds a little pissed,” Cain said.
Katy was the oldest of the owners’ kids, a skinny blond fifteen-year-old about to start high school. She was in charge of horse rentals and, on sunny days, ran a soda stand on the fifth hole of the golf course. At night, she worked illegally as a part-time bartender. They hadn’t had much contact with her, but from what they’d seen, she wasn’t a girl you’d want to cross.
“More than a little pissed,” Lang said. “Hope she doesn’t have a gun.”
The angry screaming, peppered with a few choice swearwords, continued, and Jim Waller, the owner, stuck his head out of the bar, then trotted over to his house, holding a piece of cardboard box over his balding head to fend off the rain. Tall and lean, he disappeared into the house, where the shouting got louder.
Two minutes later, the side door exploded open and Katy charged out, heading straight for their cabin. Rain splattered the ground around her, creating puddles, but she didn’t seem to notice. A moment later her father ran out behind her, trying and failing to catch her. She climbed up on the porch, looked straight at Johnson, and demanded, “Did you steal my money?”
Jim Waller arrived, shouting. “Katy. Stop it.” And to Johnson Johnson and Virgil he said, “I’m sorry, guys.”
“I want to know,” Katy said, her eyes snapping fire. “Did you?”
“Shut up,” her father shouted.
“You shut up,” she yelled back.
Johnson Johnson jumped in. “Whoa. Whoa. Why do you think I stole your money?”
“We know everybody else here, and they wouldn’t do it, and you look like a crook,” she said.
“What?”
“You heard me.” Her hair was damp, darkening the blond strands, rain drizzling down her face.
Jim Waller grabbed his daughter’s arm and tried to drag her off the porch.
Virgil shouted, “Hey, hey. Everybody stop.”
He could see Waller
’s wife, Ann, and another one of the kids, a girl, peering at them from the screen door of the owners’ house.
He was loud enough that everybody stopped for a moment, so he said, to Katy, “Johnson does look like a crook, but check his truck. It’s a Cadillac. He’s rich. He owns a lumber mill. He doesn’t need your money. And I’m a cop.”
Johnson turned to Virgil. “Wait a minute, did you say—”
Virgil said to Johnson, “What can I tell you, Johnson?” And to Katy, “What about this money?”