Chapter One in which June's husband is dead, Call comes home and finds his Father is Nuts

Chapter One

June’s Dead Husband

Calder Larsen sensed the empty space left by death as they wheeled the man past. The doctors could work on the man for an hour, hammer on his chest, shove a needle in his heart, shock his flesh until the air filled with the smell of burnt skin, but it was too late for the man on the gurney.
While the hospital floor filled with the party sounds, he walked to the waiting area and watched. Nurses, orderlies, and policemen gathered outside the one emergency room in the rural hospital.

At two forty-one in the morning, sheriff Brad Smith strode down the hall escorting June Jackson. She carried herself as a person, who had never experienced a major disappointment.

The low riding wrangler jeans and tight wife-beater purchased at the farm supply store as if she was a ranch hand sharply contrasted with the yellow cowboy boots with an inlaid red, white, and blue American Flag over the toes. The boots would have cost him almost a week’s salary as he knew she had them handmade someplace in Texas. The old guy that shaped them did not work cheap besides June had expensive tastes when it came to her boots.

He looked at her. June possessed everything he liked in a woman. She had a tall angular body, large, firm breasts, a long narrow waist, thick chestnut colored hair with golden undertones, and hazel eyes that wavered between blue and green depending on what she wore. She was not pretty, but striking.

That early morning her eyes were wide, face pale, but what he noticed was the hair. Every shiny strand was in place. It struck him as odd, and it was the type of thing he noticed as an unemployed police detective.
After high school, a track scholarship paid for time at the State University where he majored in history and ended up in law enforcement. His divorce sent him to Cody, Wyoming until a sexual miscalculation with a female inmate forced him to take an indeterminate leave of absence that quickly turned into a lawsuit followed by an affair with a woman much too young for him and then six months of serious drinking.

Brad pulled June next to the chairs by the emergency room entrance before two deputies came over and spoke frantically and walked off. June and Brad stood by the vending machines looking at the door of the emergency unit.

Call walked over.

"Brad."

"Call, Goddamn!"

Call noted the puffiness around Brad’s eyes and lines forming around his mouth and the gray at the sides of his hair that hadn’t been there eight months ago. There was a slackness in his body caused from overindulgence in petty vices of drinking and whoring.

They shook hands. Brad squeezed his hand a little too hard smiled a little too wide in a show of bravado that had never been a part of a friendship that began before birth when their mothers lived next door to each other.
Forty two years.

Brad added, "I wondered when you’d get here. Brad then reached out and took hold of June’s upper arm. The gaze of her green eyes moved from Brad to the emergency room door, and lastly to Call. An easy smile turned up her full lips.

With him under her full scrutiny, she said, "Hell, Call. Sorry about your Dad going nuts. That’s some rough shit."

"Thanks," He turned from her and asked Brad, "What’s going on here?"

"June’s husband of sorts was found unconscious after he called 911. June was at the station so I brought her down. He lives in Groveland and practices here and in Pocatello. It’s a bad deal. No one likes to work on someone they know."

June shook her head and said, "Don’t know why. It’s not like anyone liked him. What a prick. He’s a prick or was. Don’t look at me that way, Call. You didn’t know him. He was a no-good bastard." June watched the door of the hospital room open as another doctor entered and they could hear the rhythmic thumps of hands on flesh. She placed her hands over her ears, bowed her head, and burst into tears. Then she sat on the floor only inches from Call’s boots. He looked down at the part of her brown hair—so, fine and soft. The sent of her skin surrounded him or else he remembered how she smelled.

Suddenly, all his old desire for her overcame him, Call took two steps back to stop himself from reaching down and stroking June’s head.
Brad elbowed him and they left June in the middle of the hall while traffic directed itself around her. A young orderly walked over and tried to bribe her into moving by offering her a Diet Coke as they looked on.

"I’m sorry about your dad. Damn, he’s been crazy these last couple of years."

"Mom always says everything is fine and all he’ll talk about is the weather."

"What could you do?"

"Nothing."

"Well, you’re here now. It’s good to see you." Brad gave him a quick hug. The embrace felt unfamiliar though they had known each others parents and grandparents and worked and lived like brothers until into their twenties.

Since Call had moved from his hometown, they had kept in contact through an annual elk hunt where the Elk were never more important than the Jim Bean and the Wild Turkey. With what Call read as embarrassment, Brad backed away and touched his badge.

Brad asked, "What’s it been? Eight or nine months since we shot that big bull at Bend?"

"Eight."

"Nothing new around here, except that your ex is remarried."

"How about that."

"Yeah, Carolyn got pregnant and married her live-in. Kate did her cake."

"How is your wife?"

"It hasn’t been good between us. June is always causing trouble." Brad pointed toward June, who was sitting on the floor drinking the Coke the orderly had given her.

"She has a talent for trouble."

"Guess so."

Both men leaned against the wall and listened to the muted sounds of the emergency room. The architects had designed the new addition to incorporate the original building. Old red bricks were exposed and mixed with rough stucco walls while pictures Blackfoot in the early 1900's when it was just getting settled decorated the walls.

Call pointed at the room where they had taken June’s husband and said,

"He’s gone. They’re just running up the insurance bill."

"You’re probably right, you cynical bastard. Small loss. June’s right. He was one sick puppy."

A nurse named Slim, who he knew from highschool and vaguely remembered fucking, walked out of the emergency room and head for the coffee machine. She came over with two cups, gave them each one, and told Brad that the time of death was 3:18. On the tip of her shoe was a drop of blood. Brad signaled to an officer and asked him to call the county coroner.

"Back to your old man, before someone grabs me. We aren’t going to file assault charges or charges for resisting arrest."

Call hadn’t considered that possibility, because he assumed Brad would make sure no charges were filed. He began to look around in a nervous manner that was unfamiliar to Calder.

Brad said, "Now, the bunch of them will get hold of me pretty soon. Local doctor, dead of whatever. I got to go and fill in the blank." Brad pulled a small yellow pad from his pocket and scribbled a few notes. Then he glanced at June who was sitting in the waiting room away from the noise, drinking her diet Coke, looking at her boots.

Brad said to Call, "It’s good to have you home. After the trouble in Cody, I’ve been wondering when you’d call asking for your old job."

"I’ve been busy. I was going to call next month and see if you had a spot for me."

"I’m always short on men. If you want a job come in and fill out the paperwork and I’ll push it through."

"Thanks. I’ll do that in the next couple of days."

"I lost my detective last month. Took a job as a Federal Marshall. Hell of a guy, but it would be great to have you back working for me. The detective position would be a good place for you to start. And with a murder case." Brad nodded toward June.

"Isn’t that jumping the gun?"

"I saw him on a twenty-mile run two days ago. June swore she’d kill him in front of fifty people at their New Year’s Eve party a few years back."
They stopped talking and looked at June, again. She was sitting very still.
In the low voice Brad reserved for business he added, "And I’ve never, and I mean never seen her go back on her word. You remember in seventh grade when she said she was going to run her daddy’s farm and how we laughed. Well, who’s running the farm?"

Call looked down at the floor.

Brad added, "I think June had something to do with this. I don’t know why or how, but she did."
"Does she have an alibi?"

"Damn right. She’s not dumb. She was down at the jail bailing out Ron Sorter."

"Who? I don’t think I know him."

"Ron Sorter belongs to this Sagebrush Brigade group. They march around on the desert, practice their shooting, declare themselves against the Bureau of Land Management. Drink beer until they’re dead drunk."
Calder figured they weren’t up to much harm, just bored and wanting to feel important.

Call asked, "If the jailers are her alibi, how could June have done it?"

"How does she do anything? You know her."

"Yeah, but she looks good." Call studied June. She sat on a beige plastic chair tapping her foot. And by all that was normal, she should have looked a lot worse at 3:30 a.m. the morning of her husband’s death.
Brad asked, "Call, you’re over it, aren’t you?"

"Sure." He hadn’t thought about June more than two or three times a week in years. So by the old standards he was over it. It being something, he never understood. He might as well be over it. If anyone asked, he would tell them he was over it for years. "It’s been years since I’ve even thought about her."

"That’s good because, I think she killed her husband."

"You always hated her. Besides what would she have to gain?"

"Money. I suppose. Damn, I don’t know. I guess that’s your job if you want it. I’ll take you over to the house for breakfast this morning and we can talk about it."

"Sure. I’d love to see Kate. It’s been years."

"Damn, here comes the news woman. Later."

"Yeah, catch you later. "

Brad nodded and walked off to join the crowd gathering in the room of the dead man. Call thought on June and came up empty. However, he needed a job.

Life had never been much in Blackfoot, Idaho, but he had liked it well enough, and he was not one to buck against fate.

He walked over to June and sat beside her, pressing his leg against her thigh knowing she would meet the pressure with equal force.

"I’m sorry, June."

"Thanks."

"I don’t know what to say."

"You said enough." She looked at him straight in his eyes. It was a habit most people found unsettling. It felt as if she looked right into a person and discovered secret needs and was amused.

"Hey, Call, is the poet, treating Gerald?"

"Yeah. Strange deal. He quoted me a poem about old age."

"I suppose it’s no better than the bone one he told me when I had my arm set two years back It’s beyond strange. I used to go to his readings."
"Why?"

"I don’t know. He wasn’t just him. Other men read poetry."

"Why did this interest you?"

"Some literary phase I was in. It was after the art phase and before the exercise phase. They used to try to pick me up. I hated that. And sometimes I let them pick me up. Good hell, I hated that more. Cross-dressing son’s of bitches. They got too weird even for me."

"Really. Who were these men?"

"The Thursday Night Men Only Poetry and Seduction Gathering at The Owl and The Pussycat Bookstore."

"But it’s men only."

"That’s for the Thursday night meeting. They hold their monthly readings on a Saturday at eight o’clock and serve cheap champagne while they read bad poetry about the women they bed,
‘her breast’s were jell-o-ing with each deep thrust.’ Can you imagine that? ‘Jell-o-ing breasts!’ Good hell. And thank goodness my breasts don’t Jell-O. Women competed to see who would be mentioned."

"Were you mentioned?"

"Every Saturday for six months. ‘Sagey woman of the desert.’ Very sad." She leaned into him, pressed her breast against his arm and let out a low breath as she dropped her head on his shoulder. She rested there, closing her eyes. He watched her heartbeat in the blue veins of her eyelids. It was slow. The feeling that came over him from having her close was one of waking after a good night’s sleep.

She asked, "What do you think they’re doing in there?"

"Going over evidence. Seeing if there was foul play."

She looked at him again and held his gaze until he looked away.

"So Call, did that bastard Brad offer you Neal’s old job. His detective just took a job as a Federal Marshall. I’ll miss him. He was a good guy."

"He was a young guy." Call added and laughed as June shrugged her shoulders.

"Yeah."

"I bet he was cute with a nice butt?"

"Yeah."

"Don’t you ever change?"

"No, and I ain’t planning to." She patted his shirt pocket, which contained scraps of paper and a bottle cap or two, and laughed. "I see you haven’t changed much either. Still, picking up junk?"

"A man’s got to have his hobbies. What do you think about this job Brad offered?"

"Power. I bet it makes him feel hot to be able to offer you a job. You know, help out an old friend and all that old boy horse manure. But I don’t like what I see around the jail. Brad is Brad. He got a lucky break with that murder case in 89 which was mostly your work. I don’t know why you didn’t take credit for it. On the other hand, he hasn’t done anything to really piss folks off so he gets reelected. You know how I feel. Brad’s an ass. A horse’s ass."

"Yeah, I think most people know that."

"But he keeps things under control and he does have a certain slick charm. It would be good to have you back. Hell, there aren’t too many like you. You look. . . ." She placed her hand on his jaw, turned him to her, and examined his face the way an artist might.

"Calder, I think you’re the best looking man I have ever known." He considered it quite a compliment since June had known more than a few men.

She dropped her hand from his face and pointed at the floor. He looked down as she asked, "Anyways, what do you think of my boots."

"Trash, pure trash June." The boots were audacious and drew the type of attention to her long legs that a respectable woman would not want.

"Ain’t they cool? They are all hand tooled and inlaid with the American Flag. Cost me over five hundred dollars."

"I didn’t know you were patriotic."

"Of course I am."

He learned something whenever he talked to June. Generally it just wasn’t anything he wanted to know.

Then the door to room 101 opened and the gurney rolled into the hall. June reached out and stopped the orderly. Gently, she lifted the sheet and looked down at her dead husband. Lust, hate, anger, showed on her face the moment she felt them, and he believed she’d be shocked to know that simple fact about herself. However, looking at her dead husband, June was unreadable.

She kissed her fingertips, put that kiss on the lips of the dead man, dropped the sheet, and motioned the orderly to continue down the hall. She followed them.

Call sat still for a moment, breathing, and thinking. He watched Slim go into his father’s room. After a few more minutes he followed and sat by the bed and watched as the nurse took readings and measurements.
Slim bent over the bed and her green cotton pants pulled taut across her buttocks. There weren’t too many backsides like that, not in that town. He knew big women weren’t lusted after or at least few men admitted to lusting for big women, but she was all right.

Personally, he valued enthusiasm over beauty.

Call remembered Slim as limber for a big woman and making love to her had been an experience full of strange, soft, wet pleasures.

He asked, "How’s he doing?"

"Sleeping, finally." Slim pulled up the sheet and walked to the foot of the bed to mark the chart. Then with a hearty sigh, she slid down into a chair, reached over to the night stand, poured two glasses of water from the brown plastic pitcher, and handed him one. Both took a drink.
She said, "That was something about June’s husband. Man, she hated him."

"Why do you say that?"

"The way she looked at him on the gurney. Most people feel something when a person dies. I don’t know. There was no grief. Nothing."

"That’s not June."

"What do you know? You love her. You always did. You wouldn’t believe who she’s sleeping with."

"I didn’t know you disliked her."

"I don’t. She gave Jose money to start his business after every bank in town turned us down. Even Rodney Anderson, over at Key Bank, wouldn’t okay our loan." She stopped talking and pointed at him. "You remember Rodney. We went to school with him. Then when things took off at the restaurant, June sold back her share." Slim took another drink of water, reached out and patted his knee, then said, "June’s crazy, Call. You know that. She’s got some odd ideas about what’s right and what’s wrong. You don’t want to cross her."

They sat in the eerie light of the hospital room, drinking water, listening to his father rock back and forth in his sleep and whimper, "Oh, boy." Call winced at the cry. Later, decisions would have to be reached about his father, his mother, the farm, the job Brad offered, and June, always June.

However at that moment, he enjoyed the silent company of Slim now the unit was quiet and June’s husband was dead and hauled off to Foreman’s Funeral Parlor where the coroner would search for a cause of death. In stillness and relative solitude, Call waited for the doctor. At six o’clock, the doctor opened the door, asked about his father, and told him what tests they would perform over the day. Then he said he was going up two floors to check in on his mother.

Call said, "If you don’t think you’ll need me, I have some business to take care of. I’ll be back later today."

"There really isn’t anything you can do right now, but I’d like to talk to you about your father’s test results. Your mother said I was not to mention Gerald Larsen to her." The doctor smiled at an old woman’s whim.

While Slim and the doctor talked, Call patted his Dad’s hand. His father opened his eyes looked around as if he was surprised.

"Call, what are you doing here?"

"Dad, we talked last night, don’t you remember?"

"Of course. You finally came home for Thanksgiving?"

"Right?"

"You going to take me home now? We’ll have to get the turkey in the oven."

"I’ll take care of the turkey. They are going to run some tests and I’ll see you tonight."

"Did they tell you about your mother?"

"Yeah, Dad they did."

"She started making decisions. Then she would watch those musicals on video all day long. I had to put a stop to it."

"We’ll talk about it later."

"Everything is fine. I fixed it with Rene. She’ll be home today making the pies. There’s nothing to talk about."

As his father drifted off to sleep, Slim gave him a weary smile, and Call left the room.

He still had no clear idea of what had happened between his parents to land them both in the hospital. A forest ranger found him in fishing on the banks of Flathead Lake and told Call there had been some sort of accident involving his parents and they were both in the hospital. That was the most lucid explanation he had received.

Calder walked out of the hospital into the chill of an early summer morning just as Brad pulled up in his new white Chevy Tahoe with the Sheriff’s logo on the side.