= THE UNDERDOGS 
  by Scott Wolven

  Co-published with Plots With Guns
  http://www2.netdoor.com/~ansmith


After my wife divorced me last August, I left upstate New York and drove west. I passed gray cities and towns and felt sort of numb, with an intense desire not to see anyone I knew. My steady relationship with pills and booze was as close to a true marriage as I'd ever get, and as any drunk will tell you, real intimacy with liquor is best achieved in solitude. My plan was to hole up in Seattle, but money wore thin before I made it. I took a job as a fence cutter on a three hundred acre farm outside of Moscow, Idaho. The country out there was just mile after mile of grain and lentil fields, surrounded by the Rocky Mountains. The hard work suited me fine - I'd done a couple construction jobs back East and was handy with a chain saw. I rented a one bedroom, cinder block apartment that bordered some trailers on the north edge of town and settled into the lifestyle of a functional alcoholic. I drove out to the farm early every morning, worked all day, and bought my whiskey and beer from the package store on the ride home. In the space of two weeks, I was giving a neighborly wave to recognizable trailer tenants and making sure I didn't hit their children with my pickup truck when I pulled in front of my apartment in the late afternoon. And although I'm no prince in this life, I passed on a midnight offer of drunken sex from one of the semi-married women who always seemed to be out on their trailer porches, sitting, waiting for something. Life had lost a lot of its shine at that point and I didn't think encounters with angry husbands or boyfriends would be the right way to polish things back up.

I'd been there about a month when somebody knocked on my door around lunchtime on a Saturday. I opened the door and it was Gary-Greg. He was a big, sumo wrestler of a man, with curly brown hair and massive arms. He was wearing jeans, a denim long-sleeved shirt and a tan hunting vest, with black cowboy boots. He'd introduced himself to me one afternoon when I was drunk on my front porch, said he lived in one of the trailers with his girlfriend and her infant son and sold real estate for a living. I couldn't remember if his name was Gary or Greg and silently referred to him as Gary-Greg every time I saw him. He was one of the people I occasionally waved to as I pulled past the trailers. I smiled and he half smiled back. He nodded.

"Busy?" he asked. His voice was deep.

"No, not really," I said. "Come on in." He stepped over the empty case of beer and sat on my ratty couch. I sat in the chair across from him, sipping my beer. The once-blue fabric on the chair was so threadbare, the wood frame showed through. "Want a beer?" I asked.

"No," he said. He looked at his watch. "I got a proposition for you and I need a fast answer," he said.

"Go ahead," I said. "I'm listening."

"Good," he nodded. "Want to make five grand?" He watched me.

I scratched my chin. "Legal?"

"Sure, it's all legal," he said. He pulled out a wallet and handed me a business card. Greg Newell, Bounty Hunter and Skip Tracer, the card read. There were license numbers on the card, indicating he was registered with the State of Idaho.

"I thought you sold real estate," I said. I sipped my beer.

"I do. I also have an Amway distributorship. But this bounty hunting thing, that's where you make money." He nodded.

I looked at the card again. "How do you pronounce your last name?" I asked.

"It rhymes with jewel," he said.

"Newell," I said, rhyming with jewel. "Newell."

"You've got it," he said.

"Greg Newell," I finished.

"Right," he said. He smiled.

"So what's this about five grand?" I asked.

"There's a guy downtown right now, he's wanted by the US Marshal's." He pulled a small post office wanted poster from his vest. It was the tear-off type, half the size of sheet of typing paper, printed on thick, white card stock. He handed the poster to me. I looked at it. The wanted man's name was Ed Hurd.

"How do you know it's him?" I asked. I finished my beer and set the empty bottle on the carpet.

"I saw him. I'm trained to be observant. He's Ed Hurd. I recognized him from the picture." He pointed at the wanted poster in my hand. 

I looked at the poster again and read what Ed Hurd was wanted for. He'd shot some cops during a Providence, Rhode Island, bank robbery in the middle nineteen eighties. A couple years ago, he'd shot three more cops in Chicago when somebody recognized him and tried to arrest him. I looked at his picture. He was a short, muscular white guy, with a crew cut and a flat face. The poster said there was a twenty-five thousand dollar reward for his capture. "What do you want me to do?" I asked.

"I want you to help me take him in," Greg said. "We've got to deliver him to the US Marshall's office in Spokane." He paused, then continued. "I need a partner on this one. And I've seen you come in and out, you're a big, strong guy. I might need some backup." He lifted his vest slightly to show me he had pistol holstered at his waist. "In case things get touchy."

If it was Ed Hurd, five thousand dollars was a lot of stops at the package store. I stood. "So what do we do, partner?" He stood and stuck out his right hand and we shook.

He went out to his ugly truck and came back in with a small, almost flat nickel-plated pistol, a Beretta. He set it on the coffee table. "Strap that on yourself someplace where you can get to it fast," he said. "He's no girl scout. I've got a decent crowbar in the front seat, but you can really hurt your hand smacking somebody around with that thing. Better to wing 'em and let 'em bleed a little."

I checked the safety on the Beretta and slipped it into the pocket of my tan work coat. I laced up my boots, put my folding knife in the right pocket of my jeans and a pack of cigarettes in my shirt pocket. I put my work coat on. "Let's go," I said. We climbed into Greg's ugly truck, an old four-door Toyota Land Cruiser that he'd rigged with Plexiglas separating the front from the back like a cop car and the tires kicked rocks pulling onto the highway, headed right for town.

Greg spoke as we rode toward Main Street. "Okay," he said. "Benny owns the place, the diner - he and his family came from Mexico years ago, and I've known them a long time. He knows we're coming, I called him." We ran out of farm fields and now houses passed by on the side of the road. We were in town. Greg went on. "Anyway, if you're ever short cash, you can go in and have breakfast free. He'll trust you for it as long as he knows you're working." I nodded. It was a handy bit of information to have.

"Thanks," I said.

"No problem," Greg answered. He turned down a side street and pulled into a parking lot. There were a couple pickup trucks and a few cars sitting in the sun. We were at the rear entrance to the diner. Greg got out of the truck and so did I.

"I'm going in the front," Greg said. "Stand back here and count ten, then go in. He's sitting along the wall, facing the main street and he's got a ball cap on." Greg checked his pistol. "You sit in front of him, I'll sit next to him. Then we'll get him out the back door and into the truck."

"Okay," I said.

We crossed the parking lot and Greg walked around the corner. I stood next to the back door of the diner and counted to ten. Then I pushed the door open and went in. Right away I saw the man he was talking about. A Mexican - Benny, I figured - gave me a nod from the corner of the kitchen by the grill. Greg walked in the front door, walked right down the aisle and sat down next to the man in the ball cap. I walked up the aisle from the back of the diner and sat across from both of them. The man stopped eating his eggs and looked up.

"Who the hell are you?" the man we thought was Ed Hurd said to Greg. He lifted his cup and drank a mouthful of brown coffee.

"Greg Newell," Greg said. "I'm a bounty hunter and this is my partner John Thorn. And you're Ed Hurd. We're taking you up to Spokane to the Marshall's."

The man we thought was Ed Hurd started to laugh. "I don't know what you're talking about," he said, chuckling. He shook his head. "My name's Bill Glass." He paused. "You've got me confused with someone else." He stared, smiling, at Greg. He drank some coffee.

"No, I don't," Greg said. "You're Ed Hurd." Greg pulled the wanted poster out of his vest. He looked at it and looked at the man who called himself Bill Glass. Then he handed the poster over to me. I looked at it, and looked at Bill Glass. He looked like he might be Ed Hurd, but I couldn't be sure. The hair wasn't right. I handed the poster back to Greg.

The man calling himself Bill Glass started to slide on the vinyl seat, as if he were going to get out of the booth. He motioned at Greg to move. "Come on, move it," he said. "I'm leaving." He had a tattoo of a parrot on his right arm.

Greg looked back quickly at Mexican Benny working in the kitchen. "The only place you're going is out that back and into my truck." Greg nodded. He looked at the back door and then at the man next to him.

"You're crazy," the man we suspected of being Ed Hurd said.

"That's right," said Greg. "I'm nuts. But I don't see you yelling for the cops to get me off you, either." The silence was hot. Pots and pans clanged in the kitchen.

"That's because I'm Bill Glass, I live right up the road, and we take care of our own problems out here." The man who referred to himself as Bill Glass tightened his jaw. "Let's go out back together and see what all this dick and grinnin' is about."

"Sure," said Greg. He slid off the vinyl booth seat and stood, waiting.

"When I get you outside," the angry man who was calling himself Bill Glass said, "I'm going to run your teeth along the curb." He slid off the vinyl booth seat and stood in front of Greg. The man who called himself Bill Glass was a little smaller than Greg, but had arms almost the same size. He looked mean. Greg looked soft next to him.

Greg nodded. "Sure. You give it a go," he said.

The diner patron who called himself Bill Glass reached into his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill. He put it on the table and then walked toward the back door. Greg and I followed. The diner patron who called himself Bill Glass nodded to the Mexican man - Benny, I figured - in the kitchen and went out through the back door. He started to walk across the parking lot, heading for a dark blue pickup truck.

"Hey," Greg called to him. "What about my teeth and the curb?" The man who called himself Bill Glass got into a blue pickup truck he apparently owned or at least drove and started the engine.

Greg ran after him. The truck started to move forward and Greg shot the front driver's side tire, practically blew the rim off with his big magnum revolver. Now the truck was running on the rim, and Greg blew out the back driver's side tire. The pickup truck slammed into a parked station wagon. 

"For Christ's sake, help me," Greg said to me. I grabbed the crowbar off the front seat of Greg's Toyota and followed. Bill Glass was getting out of the truck. I swung the crowbar for all I was worth, right into his shin. It hurt my hand, but he went down, grabbing his leg. I yarned on it again, as hard as I could. I'd never hit anything so hard in my life. Greg was there, flipping the injured man who had referred to himself as Bill Glass over and putting a set of handcuffs on him, so both hands were locked behind his back. Greg grabbed the cuffs and used them to pull the injured man who was moaning to his feet. He stumbled him across the parking lot and tossed him in the back of the Toyota. Greg climbed in behind the wheel and I jumped in at co-pilot. I'd brought a bottle of whiskey with me, just in case, and used this moment to take a swig. I offered the bottle to Greg.

He shook his head. "You drink a lot," he said.

"I'm no fun sober," I said. I took another swig from the bottle and put it on the floor of the truck.

The man we were pretty sure was Ed Hurd sat up in the back seat.

"Fucking scumbags," he said through the Plexiglas. "I'll sue the shit out of both of you. My name's Bill Glass, you've got the wrong man." Then he moaned. His right leg, the one I hit, rested at an odd angle. I must have shattered it.

We drove north in silence. Fields of grain and lentils spread out from the road on either side, an inland sea that waved with the breeze. Farms and beautiful fields, right to the outskirts of Spokane. The drive took a little over an hour and a half. We started to see the outskirts of Spokane, starting with The Hangman Golf Course. Just after we passed the sign, the man in the back spoke.

"I'm Ed Hurd," Ed Hurd said.

Spokane is the land that time forgot. As we drove into the city, I read the old advertisements from the walls of the brick buildings. Lion Overalls, The King Over-all, A Free Pair If They Tear. Henry Strong, A Good Cigar, For A Nickel. Drink Nehi. We passed under a set of train tracks and Greg maneuvered through downtown until we were in front of the Marshall's office. He left the truck running while he went inside. In a minute, he came back out with four US Marshall's, all in plain clothes. They took the man out of the back seat of the truck and led him inside. Greg went back in too and then came back out. He hopped in the driver's seat and started back south to Moscow, Idaho. On the way home, he told me that the Marshall's gave him a check for the reward and he'd go to the bank with me on Monday, to settle up. And we watched the fields roll by again. We talked about being partners, and how well the capture had gone. We were partners and we'd have to do it again. Soon. Fugitive life in the West was no longer the cakewalk it had once been. Newell and Thorn were on the job. Let all the hardened criminals take notice. Somewhere on the ride home, I finished my whiskey.

* * *

Sunday came and I decided to eat breakfast at Benny's. I sat at the counter, facing the wall. Some people were eating, but it wasn't crowded. An older, Mexican man moved slowly down the counter and sat next to me, on the stool to my left.

"How is your breakfast?" he asked. He spoke with a thick Spanish accent.

I was eating a Western omelet. "Good," I said with my mouth full.

"That's good," he said. He smiled. His teeth were bright white. He kept on. "You're Greg's partner, right? He came in yesterday late and told me you were his partner. That you and he would hunt men together."

"Yeah," I answered. "We're partners."

"In hunting men, you are partners?" 

I nodded. "Yeah, yes - I mean, in hunting men. We're partners."

We sat at the counter. A picture of a Mexican woman in a very colorful dress hung on the wall behind the counter. She was dancing. The old man looked at the picture as he spoke.

"When I first came to this country, I was one of those men. One of those men who never had a chance to start over. In Mexico, they call them los de abajo. I think the best translation I've ever heard is "the underdogs." You hunt the underdogs." Even though there were other people in the diner laughing and talking and eating, all I could hear was the old Mexican man. He kept on.

"I am Benny and this is my place. For today, eat your food, finish what you have, enjoy your meal. Do not pay - for this meal, since I have talked to you so much, you are my guest." He turned to look at me. "But from now on, you always pay. I know sometimes my son, he trusts. He trusts Greg when he has no money, because he knows Greg works, and now he will probably trust you, because you work with Greg." He shook his head. "Well this is Benny talking. You hunt the underdogs and that is your business. But no more trust. Hunting men is not working, in my eyes." He got up from the stool and walked slowly toward the kitchen. He stopped and looked at his son, sweating behind the kitchen grill and I heard the old man's words. No more trust.


 
SCOTT WOLVEN has a fellowship in creative writing at Columbia University. His fiction appears in Emerging Voices Online (http://www2.netdoor.com/~rief) and Permafrost and is forthcoming in CrossConnect and Mississippi Review. The title "The Underdogs" comes from Mariano Azuela's great 1915 novel Los De Abajo.

Copyright (c) 2000 Scott Wolven