Chapter 14
NOT EXACTLY your sit on the phone and chat kind of guys, if ever there were such a thing, the teachers preferred to discuss their plans in person every Saturday night at the Mine Shaft. Besides, they liked beer.
So it was on the weekend after Independence Day that Reuben and Larry nursed their beers at the back table waiting for Buster. He was late but that was no surprise. Once, he accidentally showed up on time so he left and drove around town for thirty minutes before returning – so as to not ruin his reputation.
Reuben and Larry usually used the spare time to discuss whether or not they actually needed Buster for their capers. But they recalled that in each previous one he’d actually done something to save the day, albeit sometimes accidentally, so they always reached the same conclusion to keep him on board. Besides, neither had the kahunas to tell his wife, Candy, if they ever decided to can him. Candy was one of the few with knowledge of their summertime hobby, not because of any value or skills she brought to the table, but because Buster could never lie to her. He valued his testes too much.
For this Candy was not sweet. She was more like a sourball or a hot tamale. Yet she did something for Buster and nobody wanted to even imagine what that might be.
“How about ‘The Rushmores’?” Larry suggested to Reuben as they whiled away more time with their decade-long parlor game of trying to come up with a clever name for their gang – should the history books ever demand one.
“That sounds like a sports team,” Reuben said. “The James Gang or The Sopranos carries more panache.”
“Unfortunately, none of us are named James or Soprano,” Larry pointed out.
“Too bad Lead-Deadwood High School is already named the Gold Diggers,” Reuben rued.
“That connotes manual labor,” Larry said. “Not exactly our cup of tea anyway.”
“Yes, we need something more intellectual.”
“Buster kind of ruins that possibility.”
Reuben nodded affirmatively, took the last swig from his frosty bottle and tipped his head toward the door: “Speak of the devil.”
Buster stood grinning, his lovely bride of ten years at his side. He wore a tan fishing hat with hooks and flies affixed to the brim. His white thermal shirt and blue jeans were spattered and smeared with what appeared to be relatively fresh fish blood and guts and Lord knows what else.
He walked hand in hand with Candy, who still looked like she did when she married him at age 19. A cigarette dangled from her thin lips. If she could read, she ignored the Surgeon General. Her lithe nearly emaciated figure belied Buster’s hankering for large-breasted women. Psychologists do say a man always wants what he doesn’t have. As such, she had no need for a bra. In fact, the only way a person could determine she wasn’t a feminine-featured blonde-haired hippy dude was the tight white tank top she wore which highlighted thick nipples that poked through like cigar butts.
“She could take an eye out with those,” Larry muttered under his breath as they approached the table.
“Hey guys!” Buster said, as Candy swung a leg over the back of a chair and sat down. “You remember Candy.”
“Of course,” Reuben said, nodding to her across the table. “How was the fishing?”
“Great,” Candy replied. “Fourteen big brown trout. They were really biting tonight.”
“Isn’t the limit six?” Larry said.
“What’s the limit on motorcycles?” Candy shot back with a smirk.
“Point taken,” Larry said, rolling his eyes.
“How long you been out here? Reuben asked.
“Pulled the RV out yesterday,” Buster said. “Parked it out at Sheridan Lake. Candy suggested we just keep it out here until after the Rally.”
“Save gas money that way,” she said. “Plus we’ll be closer to the action.”
“Always good to be near the action,” Larry said.
“Hey Shifty!” Candy hollered in a high-pitched screech that no doubt deafened the bats in nearby caves. “We’re ready for some beers!”
She was perhaps the only person who could get under Shorty’s skin. He’d put up with drunks, stoned hookers, antagonistic cops and various members of the FBI’s Most Wanted List, but she was the fingernails and he was her chalkboard.
“The name is Shorty,” he said, bringing four beers. “As in short-tempered, short on patience and ...”
“Short on hair,” she interrupted.
He turned and stomped away. Reuben and Larry looked at their laps shaking their heads. Buster looked embarrassed and was quick to change the subject.
“You guys talked to Selma?”
“I have,” Reuben said. “Everything is still a go.”
“You come up with a plan?” Buster asked.
“We have,” Larry chimed in.
“Care to share it with us?” Candy snipped.
“We will share it with Buster,” Reuben looked at her calmly, unfazed by her obstinance. Reuben had no nerves so she couldn’t rub them one way or the other and knew better than to try. You could light his clothes on fire and he’d simply order two beers and calmly wait for their arrival before dousing the flames with them, secure in the knowledge that on fire or not he was still the smartest guy this side of the Mississippi.
“Then I’ll go play some pinball,” Candy said, pushing her chair back from the table. “Got some quarters for me Buster?”
He swept a handful off the table and handed them to her. She rubbed his chest as if to say, “Good puppy.”
Chapter 15
“FIRST THING I NEED to know,” Reuben said after Candy left, “is can either of you ride a motorcycle?”
“Never have,” Larry said, bothered that he hadn’t considered it might be a useful skill for their plan.
“No way,” Buster added. “It was four wheels or nothing for me. How about you, Reuben?”
“Once when I was 12, but I wiped out and broke my nose.”
“What’d you hit?” Buster asked.
“My brother’s fist when he found out I wrecked his bike.” He smiled, amused at his humor.
“That could be a problem for us,” Larry said.
“I agree. We’ll need some help.”
“Shorty!” the three shouted in unison.
The barkeep trudged back over.
“Got us a predicament,” Reuben said. “You have a friend who could give us riding lessons?”
“Horses?”
“No, motorcycles. Harleys. Hogs. Pigs. Whatever they call them,” Reuben explained. “Somebody who knows them inside and out, can teach us quick and with the usual discreetness we sometimes require.”
“I believe I do,” Shorty said scratching his chin. “A fella owes me a favor. Lemme see what I can do.”
“Think you could have him here next Saturday for a sit-down?” Reuben asked.
“Probably, but ...” Shorty hesitated.
“But what?” Larry asked.
“But I’ll have to see if he’s out of jail.”
Chapter 16
LARRY’S HOME sat atop a cliff near downtown Hot Springs, the county seat of Fall River County on the southern end of the Black Hills, a 60-mile wide, 100-mile long stretch of forested hills that features Mount Rushmore in the middle. The sandstone colored bungalow was a quaint but classy bachelor pad with a wooden swing and hanging plants on the deck and a kick-ass view.
While Larry had a nice, simple home; he had a precarious, complicated love life. He probably would not admit it but he liked it that way. Larry thrived on walking the relationship tightrope and wouldn’t know what to do if on Valentine’s Day, for example, he had merely one filly to send roses to.
The few who knew of his proclivities were often amazed at his successes and the subsequent fixes he sometimes found himself – for Larry was no debonair Laurence Olivier or dashing Errol Flynn nor even a witty Bill Murray. He was actually quite homely in a handsome feel-sorry-for-him sort of way, but Larry had what might be called pizzazz; and he could charm the wool off a sheep and pizzazzed his way though the uppity social circle and subsequent bedrooms of a plethora of Hot Springs maidens – some unmarried, some not so much.
At 47, as he was since 17, Larry was tall, slender and gangly. He had more of a lope than a walk. The bounce in his step made his curly red mop bop up and down like a deer bouncing through an alfalfa field. His twinkling green eyes were no longer hidden behind eyeglasses, as he’d undergone that LASIK surgery five years ago after the particularly lucrative fireman’s larceny had padded his pocket book.
Presently, Larry’s love life included only two gals. Auburn Thrice was one of them and she was home for the summer after finishing her junior year at Augustana, a Lutheran college in Sioux Falls. The vivacious blonde put the “angel” in “evangelical” and Larry was trying like the devil to get rid of it. She’d been a student of his literature classes in high school and they shared an affinity for Robert Frost. Larry continually quoted Frost’s “Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired,” but Auburn preferred Frost’s “The only lasting beauty is the beauty of the heart.”
Auburn’s heart currently rested at daddy’s $500,000 house next to the golf course. Daddy was also the school board president, so you see the sticky wicket Larry picked there – juggling the passion for Auburn’s chastity on one hand and the desire of a retirement fund in the other. Ah well, he’d threaded tighter needles than that before.
His more immediate problem was Deidra Deeds, wife of Lawrence County Sheriff Denny “Dirty” Deeds. Larry found her sobbing on his sofa when he walked in the front door to his house.
“Deidra!” Larry said, inattentive to her tears. “How did you get in here?”
“I used the key under the plant on the porch,” she sniffed.
“Oh,” he said, reminding himself to find a new hiding spot. Larry and Deidra had been sharing carnal knowledge and intimate secrets for a good six months or so. He’d forgotten that he also shared the hiding spot for the key.
“What’s the matter?” he said, sitting next to her.
“Denny is cheating on me!” and she continued to sob.
“But honey bunches, you’re cheating on him too,” Larry reminded her.
“So! I’m not cheating on me. He’s cheating on me.” The sobbing continued.
Larry knew better than to argue with or speak common sense to women in this condition, so he just put his arm around her and rubbed her shoulders. Deidra had soft shoulders. Heck, she had soft everything. She wasn’t skinny, wasn’t fat, just right in the middle. Long black hair with librarian-style glasses, she was 52 but sultry, curvy, nervy and every other “y” word that hints she could steam up a broken sauna just by walking inside it.
“How’d you get here? Where’s your car?”
“I jogged,” Deidra said, which explained the dark blue jogging suit and Nike visor.
“Jeesh it must be three miles,” Larry said.
“My pedometer says three and a half. I was upset,” she sniffed. “I’m leaving him.”
Larry was quick to recognize a potential problem there.
“But you’ve been married for thirty years,” Larry said. “You can’t just throw that away because he had some fling with his secretary or something.”
“He didn’t have a fling with his secretary, Helen,” she said. “He’s having a fling with his deputy, Herman.”
Larry didn’t have much of a response or condolence for that bombshell so he settled for the always useful and noncontroversial: “Oh.”
“So I’m moving in with you,” she blurted.
Larry expanded a bit on his previous response with: “Ohhh, no.” But that probably wasn’t the best time to start practicing a new honesty-is-the-best-policy approach.
“What do you mean ‘no’?” she asked. “We’ve been together for most of the year. I just assumed.”
“Well you know what they say about assuming. I’m not a settling-down kind of guy, plus I’m not going to be around much until school starts.”
“Where are you going?”
“I just have a lot of projects I’m attending to. Besides, Denny has a hell of a temper, a badge and gun. That’s not a good combination.”
“You don’t have to tell me that,” Deidra said, dabbing her eyes with her sleeve.
“But remember Alexander Pope, ‘To err is human; to forgive, divine,’” he said, drawing on his ace in the hole with women – poetry.
“Oh, you and your damn poets,” she said. “I bet Pope never found his husband in bed with another man.”
“Now you would probably be correct, but it’s the idea of the thing. Forgiveness. Acceptance. Those are all admirable traits.”
“And traits I don’t have,” she said.
“Maybe you have them but don’t know it.”
“Oh, jeez, you’re no better than him. You are about as understanding as a porcupine,” and she stood up and walked to the door. Turning toward him she said, “Remember Shakespeare: Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!”
“Actually, that wasn’t Shakespeare who said that.” Larry couldn’t help correcting her. He hated mis-attributed quotes. “It was actually Seventeenth Century poet William Congreve.”
“How about this then: Up yours, Larry!” and she slammed the door.
“Not very original,” he muttered to himself. “Not very original at all.”
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