Shots Fired: Stories From Joe Pickett Country Read online

  Yellowstone, like a microcosm of America, was a place of wonders, and it sought Eastern Europeans to work making beds, washing dishes, and cleaning out the muck from the trail horses, jobs that American workers didn’t want or need. Many Czechs Vladdy and Eddie knew had come here, and some had stayed. It was good work in a fantastic place, “a setting from a dream of nature,” as Vladdy put it. But the man in Human Resources had said he was sorry, they were overstaffed and there was nothing he could do until somebody quit and a couple of slots opened up. Even if that happened, the non-hiring man said, there were people on the list in front of them.

  Vladdy had explained in his almost-perfect English, he thought, that he and Eddie didn’t have the money to go back. In fact, he told the man, they didn’t even have the money for a room to wait in. What they had was on their backs—cracked black leather jackets, ill-fitting clothes, street shoes. Eddie wore the stocking cap because he liked Eminem, but Vladdy preferred his slicked-back-hair look. They looked nothing like the other young people their age they saw in the office and on the streets.

  “Keep in touch,” the hiring man had told Vladdy. “Check back every few days.”

  “I can’t even buy cigarettes,” Vladdy had pleaded.

  The man felt sorry for them and gave them a $20 bill out of his own wallet.

  “I told you we should have gone to Detroit,” Eddie said to Vladdy in Czech.

  • • •

  VLADDY AND EDDIE had spent that first unhappy day after meeting the non-hiring man in a place called K-Bar Pizza in Gardiner, Montana. They sat at a round table, and were so close to the Human Resources building that when the door to the K-Bar opened they could see it out there. Vladdy had placed the $20 on the table and ordered two tap beers, which they both agreed were awful. Then they ordered a Budweiser, which was nothing like the Czechoslovakian Budweiser, and they laughed about that. Cherry was their waitress. She told Vladdy she was from Kansas, someplace like that. He could tell she was uncomfortable with herself, with her appearance, because she was a little fat and had a crooked face. She told Vladdy she was divorced, with a kid, and she worked at the K-Bar to supplement her income. She also had a job at a motel, servicing rooms. He could tell she was flattered by his attention, by his leather jacket, his hair, his smile, his accent. Sometimes women reacted this way to him, and he appreciated it. He hadn’t known if his looks would work for him in America, and he still didn’t know. But they worked in Gardiner, Montana. Vladdy knew he had found a friend when she let them keep ordering even though the $20 was spent, and she didn’t discourage them from staying until her shift was over.

  Cherry led them down the steep, cracked sidewalks and through an alley to an old building backed up to the edge of a canyon. Vladdy looked around as he followed. He didn’t understand Gardiner. In every direction he looked, he could only see space. Mountains, bare hillsides, an empty valley going north, under the biggest sky he had ever seen. Yet Gardiner was packed together. Houses almost touched houses, windows opened up to other windows. It was like a tiny island in an ocean of . . . nothing. Vladdy decided he would find out about this.

  She made them stand in the hallway while she went in to check to make sure her little boy was in bed, then she let them sleep in the front room of her two-bedroom apartment. That first night, Vladdy waited until Eddie was snoring and then he padded across the linoleum floor in his bare feet and opened Cherry’s bedroom door. She was pretending she was asleep, and he said nothing, just stood there in his underwear.

  “What do you want?” Cherry asked him sleepily.

  “I want to pleasure you,” he whispered.

  “Don’t turn on the light,” she said. “I don’t want you to look at me.”

  Afterward, in the dark, Vladdy could hear the furious river below them in the canyon. It sounded so raw, like an angry young river trying to figure out what it wanted to be when it grew up.

  • • •

  WHILE EDDIE AND VLADDY checked back with the non-hiring man every morning, Vladdy tried to help out around the house since he had no money for rent. He tried to fix the dripping faucet, but couldn’t find any tools in the apartment besides an old pair of pliers and something cheap designed to slice potatoes. He mopped the floors, though, and washed her windows. He fixed her leaking toilet with the pliers. While he did this, Eddie sat on the couch and watched television, MTV mostly. Cherry’s kid, Tony, sat with Eddie and watched and wouldn’t even change out of his pajamas and get dressed unless Vladdy told him to do so.

  • • •

  VLADDY WAS TAKING THE GARBAGE out to the dumpster when he first saw Cherry’s neighbor, a man whose name he later learned was Bob. Vladdy thought it was funny, and very American, to have a one-syllable name like “Bob.” It made him laugh inside.

  Bob pulled up to the building in a dark, massive four-wheel-drive car. The car was mud-splashed, scratched, and dented, even though it didn’t look very old. It was a huge car, and Vladdy recognized it as a Suburban. Vladdy watched as Bob came out of the car. Bob had a hard, impatient look on his face. He wore dirty blue jeans, a sweatshirt, a fleece vest, and a baseball cap, like everyone else in Gardiner.

  Bob stepped away from the back of the Suburban, slammed both doors, and locked it with a remote. That’s when Vladdy first saw the metal briefcase. It was the briefcase Bob was retrieving from the back of the Suburban.

  And with that, Bob went into the building.

  • • •

  THAT NIGHT, after Eddie and Tony had gone out to bring back fried chicken from the deli at the grocery store for dinner, Vladdy asked Cherry about her neighbor Bob. He described the metal briefcase.

  “I’d stay away from him, if I was you,” Cherry said. “I’ve got my suspicions about that Bob.”

  Vladdy was confused.

  “I hear things at the K-Bar,” Cherry said. “I seen him in there a couple of times by himself. He’s not the friendliest guy I’ve ever met.”

  “He’s not like me,” Vladdy said, reaching across the table and brushing a strand of her hair out of her eyes.

  Cherry sat back in the chair and studied Vladdy. “No, he’s not like you,” she said.

  • • •

  AFTER PLEASURING CHERRY, Vladdy waited until she was asleep before he crept through the dark front room where Eddie was sleeping. Vladdy found a flashlight in a drawer in the kitchen and slipped outside into the hallway. He went down the stairs in his underwear, went outside, and approached the back of the Suburban.

  Turning on the flashlight, he saw rumpled clothing, rolls of maps, hiking boots, and electrical equipment with dials and gauges. He noticed a square of open carpet where the metal briefcase sat when Bob wasn’t carrying it around. He wondered if Bob wasn’t an engineer, or a scientist of some kind. He wondered where it was that Bob went every day to do his work, and what he kept in the metal briefcase that couldn’t be left with the rest of his things.

  Vladdy had taken classes in geology and geography and chemistry. He had done well in them, and he wondered if maybe Bob needed some help, needed an assistant. At least until a job opened up in the park.

  • • •

  CHERRY SURPRISED THEM by bringing two bottles of Jack Daniel’s home after her shift at the K-Bar, and they had whiskey on ice while they ate Lean Cuisine dinners. They kept drinking afterward at the table. Vladdy suspected that Cherry had stolen the bottles from behind the bar, but said nothing because he was enjoying himself and he wanted to ask her about Bob. Eddie was getting pretty drunk, and was telling funny stories in Czech that Cherry and Tony didn’t understand. But the way he told them made everyone laugh. Tony said he wanted a drink, too, and Eddie started to pour him one until Vladdy told Eddie not to do it. Eddie took his own drink to the couch, sulking, the evening ruined for him, he said.

  “Cherry,” Vladdy said, “I feel bad inside that I cannot pay rent.”

  Cherry
waved him off. “You pay the rent in other ways,” she laughed. “My floor and windows have never been cleaner. Not to mention your other . . . services.”

  Vladdy looked over his shoulder to make sure Tony hadn’t heard his mother.

  “I am serious,” Vladdy said, trying to make her look him in the eye. “I’m a serious man. Because I don’t have a job yet, I want to work. I wonder maybe if your neighbor Bob needs an apprentice in his work. Somebody who would get mud on himself if Bob doesn’t want to.”

  Cherry shook her head and smiled, and took a long time to answer. She searched Vladdy’s face for something that Vladdy hoped his face had. When she finally spoke, her voice was low for a change. She leaned her head forward, toward Vladdy.

  “I told you I’ve heard some things about Bob at the K-Bar,” she said softly. “I heard that Bob is a bio pirate. He’s a criminal.”

  “What is this bio pirate?”

  He could smell her whiskey breath, but he bent closer.

  “In Yellowstone, in some of the hot pots and geysers, there are rare microorganisms that can only be found here. Our government is studying some of them legitimately, trying to find out if they could be a cure for cancer, or maybe a bioweapon, or whatever. It’s illegal to take them out of the park. But the rumor is there are some people stealing the microbes and selling them. You know, bio pirates.”

  Vladdy sat back for a moment to think. Her eyes burned into his as they never had before. It was the whiskey, sure, but it was something else.

  “The metal briefcase,” Vladdy whispered. “That’s where he keeps the microbes.”

  Cherry nodded enthusiastically. “Who knows what they’re worth? Or better yet, who knows what someone would pay us to give them back and not say anything about it?”

  Vladdy felt a double-edged chill, of both excitement and fear. This Cherry, he thought, she didn’t just come up with this. She had been thinking about it for a while.

  “Next time he’s at the K-Bar, I’ll call you,” she said. “He doesn’t bring his briefcase with him there. He keeps it next door, in his apartment, when he goes out at night. That’s where it will be when I call you.”

  “Hey,” Tony called from the couch, “what are you two whispering about over there?”

  “They talk fornication,” Eddie said with a slur, making Tony laugh. As far as Vladdy knew, it was Eddie’s first American sentence.

  • • •

  VLADDY WAS WIPING the counter clean with Listerine—he loved Listerine, and thought it was the best disinfectant in the entire world—when the telephone rang. A bolt shot up his spine. He looked around. Eddie and Tony were watching television.

  It was Cherry. “He’s here at the K-Bar, and he ordered a pitcher just for himself. He’s settling in for a while.”

  “Settling in?” Vladdy asked, not understanding.

  “Jesus,” she said. “I mean he’ll be here for a while. Which means his briefcase is in his apartment. Come on, Vladdy.”

  “I understand,” Vladdy said.

  “Get over there,” Cherry said. “I love you.”

  Vladdy had thought about this, the fact that he didn’t love Cherry. He liked her, he appreciated her kindness, he felt obligated to her, but he didn’t love her at all. So he used a phrase he had heard in the grocery store.

  “You bet,” he said.

  Hanging up, he asked Eddie to take Tony to the grocery store and get him some ice cream. Eddie winked at Vladdy as they left, because Vladdy had told Eddie about the bio pirates.

  • • •

  THE METAL BRIEFCASE wasn’t hard to find, and it was much easier than shinnying along a two-inch ridge of brick outside the window in his shiny street shoes with the mad river roaring somewhere in the dark beneath him. He was happy that Bob’s outside window slid open easily, and he stepped through the open window into Bob’s kitchen sink, cracking a dirty plate with his heel.

  It made some sense that the metal case was in the refrigerator, on a large shelf of its own, and he pulled it out by the handle, which was cold.

  Back in Cherry’s apartment, he realized he was still shivering, and it wasn’t from the temperature outside. But he opened the briefcase on the kitchen table. Yes, there were glass vials filled with murky water. Cherry was right. And in the inside of the top of the briefcase was a taped business card. There was Bob’s name and a cell phone number on the business card.

  Vladdy poured the last of the Jack Daniel’s Cherry had stolen into a water glass and drank most of it. He waited until the burn developed in his throat before he dialed.

  “What?” Bob answered. Vladdy pictured Bob sitting at a table in the K-Bar. He wondered if Cherry was watching.

  “I have an important briefcase, full of water samples,” Vladdy said, trying to keep his voice deep and level. “I found it in your flat.”

  “Who in the hell are you? How did you get my number?”

  Vladdy remembered a line from an American movie he saw at home. “I am your worst nightmare,” he said. It felt good to say it.

  “Where are you from that you talk like that?” Bob asked. “How in the hell did you get into my apartment?”

  Vladdy didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Damn it,” Bob said. “What do you want?”

  Vladdy breathed deeply, tried to stay calm. “I want two thousand dollars for your metal briefcase, and I won’t say a word about it to anyone.”

  “Two thousand?” Bob said in a dismissive way that instantly made Vladdy wish he had asked for ten thousand, or twenty thousand. “I don’t have that much cash on me. I’ll have to get it in Cody tomorrow, at my bank.”

  “Yes, that would be fine,” Vladdy said.

  Silence. Thinking. Vladdy could hear something in the background, probably the television above the bar.

  “Okay,” Bob said. “Meet me tomorrow night at eleven p.m. on the turnout after the tunnels on the Buffalo Bill Dam. East entrance, on the way to Cody. Don’t bring anybody with you, and don’t tell anyone about this conversation. If you do, I’ll know.”

  Vladdy felt an icy hand reach down his throat and grip his bowels. This was real, after all. This was American business, and he was committed. Stay tough, he told himself.

  “I have a partner,” Vladdy said. “He comes with me.”

  More silence. Then a sigh. “Only him,” the man said. “No one else.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll be in a dark Suburban, parked in the turnout.”

  “Okay.” Vladdy knew the vehicle, of course, but he couldn’t give that away.

  “If you show up with more than your partner, or if there are any other vehicles on the road, this deal is over. And I mean over in the worst possible sense. You understand?”

  Vladdy paused, and the telephone nearly slipped out of his sweaty hand like a bar of soap.

  “Okay,” Vladdy said. When he hung up the telephone, it rattled so hard in the cradle from his hand that it took him two tries.

  • • •

  VLADDY AND EDDIE sat in silence on the couch and listened as Bob crashed around in his apartment next door. Had Vladdy left any clues? he wondered. Would Bob notice the cracked plate in the sink and determine Vladdy’s entry method?

  Eddie looked scared. After an hour, the crashing stopped. Vladdy and Eddie watched Cherry’s door, praying that Bob wouldn’t realize they were there and smash through it.

  “I think we’re okay,” Vladdy said finally. “He doesn’t know who took it.”

  • • •

  VLADDY KEPT HIS CHEEK pressed against the cold window as they left Yellowstone Park. He closed his eyes temporarily as the van rumbled through the east entrance, and noted the sign that read ENTERING SHOSHONE NATIONAL FOREST.

  Eddie was still talking, still smoking. He had long ago worked his way into the front so that
he sat next to the driver. A second marijuana cigarette had been passed back and forth. The driver was talking about democracy versus socialism, and was for the latter. Vladdy thought the driver was an idiot, an idiot who pined for a forgotten political system that had never, ever worked, and a system that Vladdy despised. But Vladdy said nothing, because Eddie wouldn’t stop talking, wouldn’t quit agreeing with the driver.

  They went through three tunnels, lit by orange ambient light, and Vladdy stared through the glass. The Shoshone River serpentined below them, reflecting the moonlight. They crossed it on a bridge.

  • • •

  “LET US OFF HERE,” Vladdy said as they cleared the last tunnel and the reservoir sparkled beneath the moon and starlight to the right as far as he could see.

  The driver slowed, then turned around in his seat. “Are you sure?” he asked. “There’s nothing out here except for the dam. It’s another half hour to Cody and not much in between.”

  “This is our place,” Vladdy said. “Thank you for the drive.”

  The van braked, and stopped.

  “Are you sure?” the driver asked.

  “Pay him, Eddie,” Vladdy said, sliding across the seat toward the door with the metal briefcase. He listened vaguely as the driver insisted he needed no payment and as Eddie tried to stuff a twenty in the driver’s pocket. Which he did, eventually, and the van pulled away en route to Cody, which was a cream-colored smudge in the distance, like an inverted half-moon against the dark eastern sky.

  “What now?” Eddie asked, and Vladdy and Eddie walked along the dark shoulder of the road, crunching gravel beneath their shoes.

  “Now?” Vladdy said in English. “I don’t know. You’ve got the gun in your pants, right? You may need to use it as a threat. You’ve got it, right?”

  Eddie did a hitch in his step as he dug through his coat.

  “I got it, Vladdy,” Eddie said. “But is small. What if it don’t even shoot?”

  • • •

  VLADDY’S TEETH began to chatter as they approached the turnout and he saw the Suburban. The vehicle was parked on the far side of the lot, backed up against the railing of the dam. The car was dark.