Billy Summers

By the time Billy starts up the steps to the porch, Metallica has been replaced by Tom Waits croaking ‘16 Shells from a Thirty-Ought-Six.’ Billy stops in the doorway. Bucky and Alice are dancing in the middle of the big room. She’s wearing a new shell top, her color is high and her eyes are bright. With her hair in a ponytail – really a horsetail, it goes all the way down to the middle of her back – she looks like a teenager. She’s laughing, having a ball. Maybe because Bucky is a pretty fucked-up dancer, maybe just because she’s having a good time.

Bucky gives Billy a double V and keeps shuffling off to Buffalo. He does a twirl and Alice spins the other way. She sees Billy leaning in the doorway and laughs some more and gives a hip-shake that makes her tied-back hair flip from side to side. Tom Waits ends. Bucky goes to the stereo and turns off Bob Seger before he can get a grip on that song about Betty Lou. Then he collapses on the couch and pats his chest. ‘I’m too bushed to boogaloo.’

Alice, years from being too bushed to boogaloo, turns to Billy, almost popping with excitement. ‘Did you see the truck?’

‘I did.’

‘It’s perfect, isn’t it?’

Billy nods. ‘Nobody would remember it five minutes after it passed them by.’ He looks at Bucky over her shoulder. ‘How does it run?’

‘Ricky says it’s fine for an old girl that’s already made one trip around the clock. Burns a little oil is all. Well, maybe a little more than a little. Alice and me took it for a test drive and it seemed okay. Suspension’s rough, but you gotta expect that in a truck that’s been around as long as this one. Ricky let it go for thirty-three hundred.’

‘I drove it back,’ Alice says. She’s still high on the shopping or the dancing or both. Billy is so glad for her. ‘It’s a standard, but I learned on a standard. My uncle taught me. Three on the tree, up to the side when you want a backwards ride.’

Billy has to laugh. He learned to drive at the House of Everlasting Paint, so he could be more help with the chores after Gad – Glen Dutton in his story – left to go in the service. Mr Stepenek – Mr Speck in his story – taught him those same two rhymes.

‘I got you something,’ she says. ‘Wait until you see.’

She runs into the other room to get it, and Billy looks at Bucky. Bucky nods and makes a quick thumbs-up sign: A-OK.

Alice comes back with a box that has SPECIALTY COSTUMERS embossed on the top in scrolly letters. She holds it out to him.

Billy opens it and lifts out a new wig, probably twice as expensive as the one he mail-ordered from Amazon. This one isn’t blond, it’s black threaded with plenty of gray, and longer than the Dalton Smith wig. Thicker, too. His first thought is that if he’s wearing it and gets stopped by a cop, it won’t match his DL photo. Then another thought comes, a much bigger one that drives all other thoughts from his mind.

‘You don’t like it,’ Alice says. Her smile is fading.

‘Oh, but I do. Very much.’

He risks a hug. She hugs him back. So that’s all right.

7

The day Billy and Alice came was like summer, but their second night at Bucky’s is cooler, and the wind hooting around the house is downright cold. Billy brings up some split chunks of maple from under the porch and Bucky fires up the little Jøtul stove in the kitchen. Then they sit at the table looking at the pictures Bucky has printed, some from Google Earth and others from Zillow. They show the exterior grounds and the interior rooms and amenities of a house at 1900 Cherokee Drive in the town of Paiute, which is actually a northern suburb of Las Vegas. It is the residence of one Nikolai Majarian.

The house backs up against the Paiute Foothills. It’s snow white and built on four levels, each one stepped back from the one below so it looks like a giant’s staircase. The view of downtown Vegas must be pretty spectacular at night, Billy thinks, especially from the roof.

On Google Earth they can see a high wall surrounding the property, the main gate, and the driveway – actually a road, it’s got to be almost a mile long – leading to the compound. There’s a barn about two hundred yards from the house. A paddock and an exercise ring for horses nearby. Three other outbuildings, one big and two smaller. Billy thinks the help must stay in the biggest one, which would have been called a bunkhouse in the old days and maybe still is. The other two are probably for maintenance and storage. He sees nothing that could be a garage and asks Bucky about it.

‘Built into this first slope would be my guess,’ Bucky says, tapping the wooded rise behind the house. ‘Only it’s probably more like a hangar. Room for a dozen cars. Or more. Nick’s got a taste for the classics, or so I heard. I guess everybody’s got an itch that only money can scratch.’

There are plenty that money can’t scratch, Billy thinks.

Alice is examining the pix from Zillow. ‘God, there has to be twenty rooms. And look at the pool out back!’