31
THE BAD Moon Saloon was overflowing before dinnertime. Even nondrinkers showed up, drunk on relief. The more people came, the faster word spread, and the drinking, smoking and laughter soon spilled out into the lot and beyond to where cars coagulated along the overgrown shoulders of H Street.
Norm rolled up on the throng sleepless and unchanged. He’d had all he could handle of monitoring the health of his shrunken herd. He’d lost eight, including Pearl, and felt lucky that more hadn’t died, though the future productivity of some survivors remained unclear. The fact that Ray Lankhaar had lost twice as many meant that Norm and three other dairymen could piggyback on whatever redemption he and his Bellingham attorney bullied out of Palmer’s insurance company, which, knowing Ray, would dwarf the value of the cows—not that you could put a price tag on an animal like Pearl.
He’d wheeled a backhoe to the corner of the property with the best view of Mount Baker and dug her a roomy hole. He dragged her over, dropped her in, covered her up and left her with a one-word eulogy: “Thanks.” Then he’d talked Roony into dealing with the rendering truck so he could skip that grim routine and grab himself a drink.
He considered driving on when he saw the size of the mob, but he’d already lit his fuse with the vision of a whiskey twinkling on the bar top. And he’d always found it hard to roll past the Moon even when it was empty. It was the only bar that served the whole valley—smack between Lynden and Blaine, Holland and Iceland, or heaven and hell, if you listened to Lynden drinkers. He limped past youngsters who so closely resembled older acquaintances that he nodded hello, getting nothing in return. Strangers, he remembered, can tell you how old you are without trying. The looks you get or don’t get let you know exactly where you’re at, where you’re headed and where you can never go again.
Inside, it looked more like New Year’s Eve or V-Day than some Sunday in late August. He was relieved and pained to spot Dirk, Shit-to-Power and a few other geezers his age. Hell, they were all older than plastic, older than television. But everyone was there. The Erickson punks, of course, but even Alexandra Cole, for Godsakes, laughing so fast and hard that people were backpedaling. There were dozens more he didn’t recognize or else hadn’t seen since they were kids. Almost everyone was half his age or younger, radiant and impervious to time. He covered a stool without drawing attention to his first public drink in over a year, ordering a shot of Crown and a bottle of Pabst to grease the first round of greetings. And another shot as Dirk and the others sidled up. “Great to see ya, Norm! Luck’s gotta turn here somewhere, huh?” Even the great Morris Crawford sauntered over to give Norm his due, as if he’d done something heroic by poisoning his cows with cheap feed from some Everson yahoo. Part of it, he knew, was the Lankhaar factor. Hell, if Ray fell for the scam, anyone could. Chas Landers—his fifteen minutes already in the rearview—sidled up with whitened teeth and a heavy gold necklace to pay his respects. “Good for you, Norm,” he echoed, as if hobbling in for a couple Crowns showed remarkable courage, everyone nodding like they’d been waiting months, maybe years, to drink with their old pal.
“What can ya do?” Norm said again and again with a gunslinger’s wince, not really knowing what he was implying, yet every head bobbed as if bad luck had made him profound. A Deming dairyman he barely knew asked about his boat, then whistled at its dimensions and grinned like he was one clever son of a bitch to build an ocean yacht in his back barn.
Norm spotted Clint Honcoop and Cleve Erickson in the swarm, their bald, sun-fried heads shaking with laughter, as if they’d been pardoned and their arrests were all part of the great mix-up.
People took turns impersonating grave newscasters from the night before while others spoofed Patera, giggling themselves blind after Dirk cautioned them not to underestimate the difficulty of what the chief had accomplished. “You have any idea how hard it is—how goddamn flexible you have to be—to get both feet in your mouth at the same time?”
“Seriously, Norm,” Shit-to-Power bellowed from three stools away, “at your lowest, darkest moment yesterday you still couldn’t have thought terrorists had targeted your farm.”
He leaned back into a do-I-look-nuts grimace and everyone busted up, the laughter out of all proportion to the humor.
“Well, how ’bout ole Lankhaar?” Chas asked. “What was he thinkin’?”
All Norm had to do was lift his left eyebrow and they lost it again, mirth radiating in a half circle around him. What was that? What’d Norm say?
He felt his aches and worries dissipating. Even now, his straits clearly weren’t nearly as dire as he kept telling himself they were. He made a silent vow to go out more often and toss back a couple if for no other reason than to get out from under his self-pity.
Chas bought him and a dozen others another round and waved off the gratitude, but Norm gripped his shoulder and pulled him close. “Why don’t you just admit you kept at least ten grand instead of pimping around like this? We all know what cranberries are selling for.” He cuffed Chas’s stiffening neck as if to complete some inside joke.
“So what do you think’s gonna happen to your buddy Patera,” Dirk prodded, “now that he screwed the pooch?”
Laughter bounced around again until the riot of bar noise rose so high that Norm almost had to shout. “We’ve all screwed the pooch a time or two, haven’t we, Dirk?” He threw back the free Crown and basked in moist smiles from women in their thirties and forties. Just three shots and he’d already drunk his way back two decades. “The chief was just trying his damnedest to do the right thing,” he drawled, dragging out the attention. “Only thing he did wrong, in my opinion, was to expect the media wouldn’t hang him out to dry. That and putting too much stock in the hasty conclusions of a certain high-strung vet we all know.”
He felt his mouth running loose on him. Sober, he’d never take a shot at Stremler. That was one of the main reasons he didn’t drink in public anymore—the self-loathing that followed. His father was a different drinker altogether. He had two whiskey sours every night in the privacy of his den. The first for arthritis, the second to examine his finances and the rest of his world in a more measured light. Norm drank to get drunk.
“You must be excited about the casino going up down the street,” Shit-to-Power said.
“I don’t like anything about it, but I don’t blame ’em for a minute. If I was them, I’d stick it to us as hard as I could, then twist it a few times,” he said, suddenly borrowing Wayne Rousseau’s rant verbatim. “And this whole self-righteous, anti-casino crusade has a racist aftertaste to it, if you ask me.”
There were grumbles but plenty of nods as well. “Right on,” crooned a slender brunette with a reflective sheen of sweat in the hollow of her neck. “Somebody finally had the guts to say it out loud.”
Norm felt like an oracle. Through his tangled audience, he spotted Sophie making the rounds, lathering men with the intense close-talking attention he’d hoped she reserved for him. He looked back at the brunette, who was still nodding in his direction, and experienced a fleeting notion that Sophie Winslow was too old for him. His fourth Crown went down like apple juice.
The next thing he knew, another young woman he didn’t recognize strutted through the bar, amid booming laughter, wearing what looked like a bomb. “Make way for the suicide bomber!” she shouted. As she got closer, Norm could see it was just a computer circuit board strapped to her chest and something like Play-Doh in her hands. She tried to offer a drunken speech but kept saying “tourists” when she meant to say “terrorists,” which doubled everybody over, including herself.
“So what’s the story with that Space Needle bomber your boy caught?” Chas ventured once the moment passed, a payback bite to his voice. “Sure don’t hear anything about him anymore.”
Norm started to answer but didn’t know what to say now that the conversation had swerved toward Brandon. And before he could coax words to the surface, he was distracted by the ever-present flash of Sophie’s camera, snapping photos of the Jack Daniel’s mirror behind him that reflected the side of his sun-spotted head and all the anxious pink faces hanging on his pause, leaning in for another hit of Norm Vanderkool, the room starting to list slightly, pleasantly, like a seaworthy ship in gentle seas.