Camacho was right-what he said after they had reached the cucumber fields-that Ryan only wanted a ride. He got what he wanted and there was nothing to keep him-not Marlene Desea, not anything. He used the truck. He used Billy Ruiz. He used everybody and once he got what he wanted, he left. Sure, that’s the kind of guy.
Beyond Geneva Beach, on the highway south, he turned off on the dirt road that pointed through the fields to the migrant camp.
Goddamn cucumbers. He was through with the cucumbers. He could pick ten times more than the goddamn kids they sent up from Saginaw and Bay City, but if they wanted the kids instead of him, that was up to them. He had drunk a little too much since Saturday, a hundred dollars worth almost, but buying the others a lot of it too. It was gone, the hundred, and he owed Camacho four hundred fifty dollars and he didn’t have a job and San Antonio was sixteen hundred and seventy miles away.
But Ryan wasn’t gone. Man, he had Ryan. All he had to do was think of a way to tell him, a good way to tell him without getting his jaw broken. Like:
“Hey, Jack. You know that beer case with the wallets you tole us to throw away? We don’t throw it away, man. I got it hid somewhere.”
Then Ryan would say something and he would say to Ryan, “How much you give me for that beer case, buddy? So somebody don’t find it with your name on it.”
That would be the difficult part, to tell Ryan so he would see clearly that he had no choice but to buy the case of wallets. “Look, you swing at me, you never see the beer case, you understand?”
The son of a bitch, you didn’t know what he might do. Tell him quick, “Something happen to me a friend of mine take the beer case to the police. How you like that, buddy?”
Then tell him how much. Five hundred dollars for the case. No, six hundred dollars. He don’t have it, he has to work for it then, go in some places.
He had planned to tell Ryan tonight. Begin with the phony story about the bus and see if he could get some money that way, the easy way. Then tell him about the beer case. But when Ryan came in and was standing there, he couldn’t do it.
Maybe get some paper and write it to him. Buy the paper and get a pencil somewhere. Write it clearly and some night put it under his door. But he would have to see Ryan sooner or later, or else how would he get the money from him? Goddamn, why did it have to be so hard to do?
For a reason Frank Pizarro would never be sure of-other than he might have seen the car with the girl in it going past the camp, going past this shed where he was now stopping-he remembered the dark green Mustang and remembered at once who owned it. Mr. Ritchie’s girlfriend. Sure, the same green Mustang with the dents in the front end, the same dents in the same car in front of Jack Ryan’s place.
Pizarro turned off the engine and the headlights, but he didn’t get out right away. He kept thinking about the green Mustang because he knew goddamn well Jack Ryan had something to do with it.
“IT’S A GOOD DEAL,” Mr. Majestyk said. “Thirty bucks a week she comes in every day but Sunday. Sunday I like to cook a steak outside on the grill, nice sirloin, this guy at the IGA cuts it about two and a half inches thick.”
Mr. Majestyk sliced off a piece of kielbasa and dipped it in chili sauce. He pushed the fork into his sauerkraut and heaped it over the sausage with his knife. Chewing, he took a piece of bread and buttered the whole slice. Still chewing, he said, “She bakes it herself. At home, bakes two, three times a week and brings it in fresh. I mean fresh.”
“It’s all right,” Ryan said.
“She keeps the place clean. Vacuums twice a week.”
Ryan was eating fast. He had missed breakfast again and he was hungry. The idea had been to get up early and drive over to Ritchie’s hunting lodge and look it over, before anybody was around. But he’d overslept and missed breakfast. He’d have to drive out there after work, but he was too hungry to think about that now. “She can cook,” Ryan said.
“I wouldn’t let her if she couldn’t,” Mr. Majestyk said.
“You got something going with her?”
“With Donna?” Mr. Majestyk glanced toward the doorway into the living room. “Christ, what do you think, I’m hard up or something?”
“She’s old, but she’s not too bad looking,” Ryan said. “I mean, better than nothing.”
“You’re young, you got it on the brain.”
“Well, it’s natural, isn’t it?”
“Natural doesn’t mean you got to think about it all the time.”
“Is that right? What do you think about?”
“I got plenty of things,” Mr. Majestyk said. “For example, should I stay up here year-round? I mean, what’s in Detroit? I might as well live here. I mentioned keeping the place open for hunting season?”
“You said something about it.”
“Well, I got another idea. A hunting lodge.”
“Like Ritchie’s?”
“Naw, that’s a farmhouse he fixed up. You know what an A-frame is?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Like a Swiss-looking place-a steep roof almost comes down to the ground? For people who ski. They’re building them all over up north. Prefab.”
“I’ve seen pictures.”
“Take two of them,” Mr. Majestyk said. “Big ones, each sleeps about ten with the loft upstairs, and join them together with a central heating system.”
“You already got the cabins,” Ryan said.
“I’d have to put in new heating units. It gets twenty below, them little units in there would quit. No, I don’t mean here. There’s some property I know a guy wants to sell-off by itself, woods, a lake. You know the road there it goes through the migrant camp and up past Ritchie’s lodge?”
“Yeah?”
“Go past it about a half a mile, you see a sign, ROGERS, turn left and follow the road up the hill through the woods.”
“Out away from everything.”
“Right. Build the A-frames there, get twenty hunters, twenty-five bucks a day each-three full meals, all the mix and ice and everything included for twenty-five bucks a day.”
“That’d be all right.”
“In the heart of deer country. But you see with the lake you got the bird hunters too. These guys-Christ, I know a dozen guys I could call, they wouldn’t hesitate. And they all got friends who hunt.”
“Why don’t you do it?”
Mr. Majestyk stared at Ryan, then shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.”
“You’d make five hundred bucks a day.”
“Gross. Yeah, but I’d need a guy, maybe a couple of guys who could cook, you know, and knew how to handle guns.”
“What’s the problem?”
“No problem, just finding the right guys. You know anything about guns?”
“I used to sell them,” Ryan said. “Hunting rifles, shotguns, at this sporting goods store.”
“I thought you were a cook?”
“Yeah, I did that too. Fry chef.”
“Are you a good cook?”
“Sure. It was mostly these chefburgers, but lunchtime you’d have everything going-filets, fried eggs, pancakes, club sandwiches. The waitresses would call the orders and you had to keep it all going.”