Read Online The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of by Joseph Hansen - Free Book Online

Anita started coming around all the time. When that car of hers would pull up at the curb, there’d be groans, you know? She was into revolution, right? Like a lot of rich kids. We didn’t lay back till she went off to join Cesar Chavez, the farm workers. Only it didn’t last. Her old man dragged her home. Then she started coming in with Lester.”
    “Did that relax anyone?” Dave asked.
    “Like something ticking in a briefcase. By luck, it didn’t go off here. It went off when they stopped Lester’s Kawasaki and untaped that lid of grass from under the fender.”
    “Did she come back after that?”
    “What do you think?”
    “I think La Caleta is a small town,” Dave said, “and Sangre de Cristo isn’t that far off and isn’t that much bigger. Ben Orton had to know his daughter was going with a black boy. What suddenly made him interfere? What was it your editor friend next door had?”
    “You want me to guess?” blue glasses asked.
    “I don’t see how you can miss,” Dave said.
    The boy drew a breath. “Marriage license,” he said. “But nobody gets married anymore. That’s crazy.”
    “That’s why it fits so well,” Dave said.
    Inside the grapestake fence, the humidity climbed. Long ribbons of flat green plastic, shiny as new snakes, hung in lazy swags across redwood beams and dripped water on boxed trees and shrubs below. The smell of earth was thick. Farther on, high yardages of cheesecloth bellied white above flats of seedlings. In a wide gravel square, cacti soaked up sun. In a wheelbarrow, cropped rose canes stuck thornily out of burlap-bundled root clumps.
    Dave came to a neat, flat-roofed shed building with big new front windows. Planter boxes, fresh and empty, were piled around it, big heavy terra-cotta pots, glazed pots, garden figurines. Inside, canaries sang among hanging ferns. Shelves held bottled plant food and insect killer, bright colored watering cans, bundles of cotton gardening gloves. New trowels, rakes, hoes hung against the wooden walls. Sacked potting soil and fertilizer banked a counter. But nobody tended the store.
    The acre grew jungly toward the back. He passed a battered pickup truck without side window-glass and found, almost hidden by bamboo that rustled high and sunlit in a breeze he couldn’t feel, a shingle-sided cottage with deep eaves and a low porch. The door stood open and inside a slim brown kid in ragged shorts lay on his stomach on the floor using a telephone. Beyond him, a silent color television set showed tear-glossy soap-opera faces. It was a big set and looked new.
    “That is the most fucked-up way to run a business I ever heard of,” ragged shorts said, and slammed down the receiver. He rolled over and sat up. He was one of those pretty boys who grow old fast. His skin was toughening. His jaw hinges were developing knobs. His eyes had begun to back off under too much brow ridge. They saw Dave. “What’s the matter?” he said.
    “Does something have to be the matter?” Dave asked.
    “Around here it does.” He stood up. “You want some help? See the old man.”
    “The old man is across the street at Jack in the Box, drinking Thunderbird out of a paper sack,” Dave said.
    Ragged shorts muttered, “ Cabrón. ”
    “There aren’t any customers,” Dave said. “I didn’t come to buy. I came to talk to Hector Rodriguez.”
    Light flickered in the shadowed eyes. “What about?”
    “Cliff Kerlee. Why he’s in jail. Are you Rodriguez?”
    “Who wants to know?” He had work-hardened hands. They made fists like clubs. Dave told him who he was. The fists relaxed. With an amazed shake of his head and a sad laugh, he left off blocking the door. “Come in. Man, you are a hard man to find, you know?” He bent for the phone and set it on a low white wrought-iron table whose glass top was strewn with gaudy seed catalogues. “Come in, sit down, Mr. Brandstetter.” There was a beanbag chair. There were two chairs of green canvas slung in iron