Old Friend

OLD FRIEND

by Paul Poulsen

Old Friend

Paul Poulsen

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © Paul Poulsen, 2011

http://www.PaulPoulsen.com

First eBook edition: October 2011

ISBN: 978-0-9878024-0-8

All rights reserved.

The following story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, locations, and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance or similarity to actual places, locations, events, or persons living or dead is unintended and purely coincidental.

No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the express written consent of the author.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For Valerie.

You’re patient, supportive, and my best friend. I love you.

Chapter 1

By the time I stepped out the door, I was already aware that my day was not going to plan.

I thrive on a routine. Go to bed at the same time. Wake up at the same time. Eat breakfast at the same time and then have a shower at the same time. When my morning is on schedule, I leave the motel at the same time each morning and arrive at the work site at the same time each morning. One little misstep can screw up my routine and, by extension, my whole day.

My routine wasn’t marred by ‘a little misstep’ that morning. My routine had come completely off the rails.

The night before was one of those nights where after a long day at work, a beer before dinner goes down so smoothly. The first one is so good that it only makes sense to follow it up with a second. Then things get out of hand. You’ve had three beers on an empty stomach and suddenly it seems like a bad idea to ruin a good drunk by putting food in your stomach. In what is seemingly a blink of an eye, it’s after midnight and all you had for supper was 15 beers.

While that happens more than I care to admit, I’ve worked hard to eliminate 15 beers from my aforementioned routine. But, the previous day had hit me hard and, despite my best intentions, a case of beer (and change) seems like a really good idea.

It should go without saying that when your morning routine requires precision and a lack of surprises, consuming a bunch of beer only hours earlier has a negative impact on your ability to successfully execute said routine.

So by the time my key hit the lock to secure the door behind me, I knew my day had already been shot to shit. That’s why I can’t say I was honestly surprised when I arrived at my truck.

Falhden is a small town of about 800 residents in North Dakota. The town recently succeeded in luring an all natural, organic soup factory to town. The plan is to build a factory that will transform locally grown ingredients into antioxidant rich gourmet soup that will be shipped all across North America. This is, of course, a boon for Falhden. The town exists to support area farmers and as such, there’s not a whole lot of new growth or new businesses. That’s why when Theodore Turk and his soup factory came calling, Falhdenites were quick to offer free land, subsides, and any other perk the town council could think of to ensure that the factory came to their town instead of any one of a number of other interested communities.

When the factory is done, it will create 30 new jobs. Depending on where you’re sitting when you’re reading this, 30 new jobs may sound like nothing but in a town of 800 people, it’s a lot. It’s so many jobs that there’s no place to house these new workers. That’s where I come in.

I’m 31 year old Marvin Crow Crowley and I build houses. Actually, I build all kinds of things but I specialize in single family dwellings. The same person that’s invested in the soup factory is also building a new subdivision to go along with it. There just wasn’t enough existing housing to absorb a bunch of new workers, their spouses, and their kids. Even if we work on the assumption that eight or nine Falhdenites will take a job at the factory, that still leaves 21 positions unaccounted for. If each of these still vacant 21 factory jobs brings three people to Falhden (employee, spouse, and one kid) that’s still 63 new citizens or a population increase of almost eight percent. Imagine if your city suddenly grew by eight percent over the course of a summer. Where would you put all these people? This was the issue facing Falhden.

So while a small preliminary crew of equipment and their operators worked to prepare the raw land along the secondary highway for the construction of the factory, I was in charge of building 21 new homes in Falhden’s first new subdivision in, well, ever.

I’d only been at work for about a month but my end of the project was progressing nicely. I was in charge of three crews of 20 workers. Bringing 60 guys to town to work is a lot like invading the town with a small army. As the first guy to arrive in town, I managed to grab one of a limited number of available hotel rooms. The Sundown Motel is a small, 12 unit motel right in town. When that filled up, there were eight rooms up for grabs at the bar/hotel called Daddy’s Farm along the main highway. There were also a handful of locals that offered to rent out rooms in their houses and the single apartment building in town offered to rent its suites on a month-to-month basis. To my knowledge, only one of these apartments came available. Some of the rest of the workers brought campers or holiday trailers with them and four or five guys actually brought tents with them and were camping at one of the nearby campgrounds. But the majority of the guys were staying at hotels/motels up and down the main highway that ran past Falhden. Some of them had a 45 minute commute each way but really, when you think about it, that’s no worse than spending an hour (or two) trapped in commuter traffic on the freeway each day as you inch your way to your job.

My day continued on its downward trajectory as I approached my pick-up in the parking lot that morning. Not having access to a shed or a garage meant that I got to leave my tools in my truck’s toolbox at the end of each day. When I first saw my truck that morning, I could see that the lids on the toolbox weren’t latched and as I approached, I came to the realization that someone had busted the locks and taken everything I had. Basics like hammers and screwdrivers were gone along with levels, drills, circular saws, you name it. The thief didn’t even leave me my tool belt.

Hungover, late, and tool-less is not the way I want to start my morning. So, suffice to say, I was in a less than chipper mood when I arrived at the construction site that morning.

Each morning, each of my three crews would gather for a safety meeting. These meetings are typically the source of scorn and ridicule where you often hear one liners like If nobody works, nobody gets hurt, and Why do we have to wear hardhats? In case we fall off the roof and land on our head? I was the first to admit that the meetings are somewhat ridiculous but we’d have them each and every morning first just to remind everyone to think before they act and, in all truthfulness, to cover Teddy’s ass in case someone did get hurt and to limit his (and my) exposure to lawsuits relating to managerial negligence. A third reason to hold the daily meeting was so that I could get a look at each of my crew members and see if anyone was in an altered state and was unprepared to work. I myself was nearly in that very state and was relieved to know that I didn’t have to answer to anyone for my bloodshot eyes and the smell of alcohol oozing through my pours.

Codie Markus was a young guy of 18 who had just finished high school in the spring. He was thinking of going to college but signed on as a general laborer on one of my crews to pad his bank account before heading off to the bright lights of the big city. If you needed an extra set of hands with a project or if there was an especially dirty job to be done, you called Codie. He’d grown up in Falhden and was counting down the days until he would get to explore the world beyond northern North Dakota. He was an outgoing, friendly kid with shaggy long hair shoved under a baseball cap. When he saw me arriving late in less than optimum operating condition, he decided to rib me. Some of the other guys started snickering. I was still in a foul mood when I curtly explained that I’d been robbed and my good tools had been stolen. The laughing stopped immediately and the crew exchanged nervous glances with each other.

What? I asked, knowing that some unsaid was passing between my crew. They looked at each other hesitantly. What? I repeated a little more firmly.

I think I know who took your tools, Boss, said young Codie nervously. He didn’t offer anymore information.

Who? I asked in my same firm tone, my head pounding with the effort.

Larry Fillips, he finally said sheepishly. Larry came by early this morning just after I got here and asked if I wanted a good set of tools for cheap. I said no and saw him go to the next house to ask the guys there.

Work didn’t start until 7am but most of the guys got to the job site half an hour early each morning so they could drink coffee, bitch about the wives they left behind at home, and to tell tall tales about all the other projects they’d built. It was pretty common to have ambitious opportunists arrive on site with tools or pre-made bagged lunches for the boys. This morning, Larry Fillips came by looking to sell some used tools. Presumptively MY tools.

Lawrence Fillips Jr, or Lethal Larry as he liked to call himself, was what passed for trouble here in Falhden. At 6’4", 175lbs, Larry was a tall, lanky looking young man. He tried to pass off that height as a gift from the Heavenly Father that allowed him reach things on the top shelf and run quicker than the wind using long, lumbering strides. He sported a stubbly shaved head that I’m sure he imagined made him look menacing and like a convict. It did the opposite. The haircut combined with small, beady eyes set too far apart in his face made him look like a simpleton that should be guessing your weight at a State Fair. What it boiled down to was that Larry was a 22 year old kid with a lack of confidence that overcompensated by carrying on like he was some kind of thug or gangster. He bought booze for underage kids, chased after high school girls, and drove a noisy old Camaro that he delusionally boasted could outrun the cops. Not that he had ever been chased, mind you. This was just part of his self-imagined tough guy image.

The reality was that Larry Jr was just the dipshit offspring of equally dipshitty parents. Larry Fillips Sr owned and operated the local honeywagon. A honeywagon, for the uninitiated, is a truck with a vacuum tank that pumps the waste out of outhouses, septic tanks and the likes. It’s a dirty, filthy job that not many want to do. In a small, rural community like Falhden, the demand for such a service was high. The vast majority of the farms and acreages weren’t on the town’s water and sewer system. They needed to have fresh water trucked in and waste trucked out. Larry Senior was one half of that equation and made a hell of a living sucking and trucking waste.

Lucinda Fillips fancied herself an entrepreneur and invested her husband’s money on a series of failed small businesses. First she tried a dog grooming boutique on Main Street. That lasted months. Not only is Lucinda perpetually sloshed, she’s rarely seen without a cigarette dangling from her lip (at least I have the common decency to at least make an effort to appear sober). Dogs came out of her grooming store worse than they went in. Their hair would be cut unevenly or worse, the animals would come home with a burn roughly the size of a cigarette butt. It didn’t take long for the locals to learn that they’d be better served to find another provider for their dog care needs. After the dog grooming, she tried her hand at running a flower store. That ended when she would deliver flowers A) drunk off her ass and B) with cards addressed to the wrong recipients. Most recently she spent (wasted?) a substantial sum of money opening a luxury day spa. Unsurprisingly, the local townspeople chose not to frequent her new endeavor. If she couldn’t pamper a little dog, the consensus was that she would fail equally as miserably at pampering bipeds.

With parents like that, the deck was stacked against Larry Jr right from the get go. While Sr may have been a meathead, he was at least a meathead with a solid work ethic. Jr, on the other hand, was a lazy meathead. After five-and-a-half years of high school, Sr had seen enough and finally bought a second honeywagon and put Jr to work. Taking after his mother, Jr immediately found new and exciting ways to fuck up and alienate clients. How intolerable must one be that those with a tank full of liquid excrement tell you to leave their property WITHOUT emptying the septic tank? Sr’s self preservation kicked in and he fired his kid. It was rumored that Sr now paid Jr a monthly allowance to stay the hell away from his business and cause trouble elsewhere. Jr lived off this money and whatever extra scratch he could come up with bootlegging booze for underage drinkers and, apparently, by fencing stolen property like car radios, bicycles, and my tools.

I thanked Codie for letting me know and made a mental checklist of what I’d do to Larry Jr when I eventually got my hands on him.

I spent the day bouncing back and forth between all three crews looking to give direction or answer questions. By and large everyone on the entire project was pretty good but I had learnt from previous experience it’s a good idea to let everyone know that the boss is keeping an eye open and maintaining quality control.

By the time quitting time rolled around at 5:30pm, I was chomping at the bit to track down Larry Jr and wring his pinheaded neck. I couldn’t just stroll up to his parents’ house and ask if Jr was around and then slap some sense into him when he arrived at the door. I knew I was in the right and that the little prick had stolen from me but I also knew I was a guest in town and that I was supposed to be setting an example of what is and isn’t acceptable behavior from the rest of my crew. Dealing with Larry Jr would require some discretion.

I knew all I had to do to track down dummy was to look for his ‘83 Camaro. When the car rolled off the assembly line 25+ years ago, it shouldn’t have been called a sport scar. Now, two-and-a-half decades later, it was worse than it had been when it was new. This particular example smoked through too-loud exhaust and rolled around with its ass up in the air thanks to a set of oversized rear tires. The car looked like a dog in heat waiting to be mounted. Larry probably thought it made the car look fast and aggressive. I thought it simply added to his meathead image.

There aren’t many places in a town the size of Falhden you can hide a car. After making a couple of passes on Main Street, driving past the school’s parking lot where Larry liked to hold court for the uninitiated and easily impressed, and even driving by the Fillips’ residence, I came to the conclusion that there was only one place left for me to look for young Larry. I made the five minute drive out to Daddy’s Farm. The sun was just started to set as I pulled into the parking lot. I parked right beside Jr’s Camaro.

Chapter 2

Daddy’s Farm is essentially an over sized two-story farmhouse set back a 100 yards or so from the main highway in the middle of a huge gravel parking lot and nestled among the trees. There’s a big neon sign that you can see from the highway along with a street light behind the building as well as one out in front so that you’re able to stumble your way back to your car after a rambunctious night of hell raising.

The main floor is a pretty good restaurant and on Friday and Saturday nights, it turns into a night club (or a honky-tonk as it’s called around these parts). The crowd is typically made up of young locals from Falhden and a few of the surrounding communities. Every once in awhile, some of the old timers will make their way out to the Farm (as the locals call it) and show the whippersnappers how it was done back in their day.

Upstairs, there are eight hotel rooms. Typically, the hotel doesn’t get much use. The odd long-haul trucker will occasionally shut down for the night and spring for a room and a shower or some stranger on his way from somewhere to nowhere will need a place to crash. However, since we came to town to start building houses, each room was occupied consistently. I had a place in town and as such, the only time I made an appearance at the Farm was for a hot meal. I preferred to do my drinking by myself.

I pulled into the parking lot and there among a smattering of vehicles was Jr’s ‘83 Camaro. I parked immediately beside the car and had a peek inside. There in the backseat, as plain as day, were my tools. He hadn’t even bothered to try to cover them up or hide them from view. He was too cocky, too stupid, or a combination of both to know that he should at least make an effort to keep stolen property out of plain sight.

I left the parking lot and made my way to the building. As I stepped through the wooden screen door and into the restaurant, I was somewhat shocked to discover that the place was busier than expected.

The interior of the restaurant matched the exterior. The inside was dimly lit and beams of sunshine were streaking in through the windows as the sun was setting. The decor was rustic and rural. Wide wood plank floors ran the full length of the restaurant/bar and there wasn’t a matched set of tables and chairs in the place. Behind the bar made from reclaimed bar lumber and in the middle of the wall hung a chalkboard that was updated each morning with that day’s special. Tonight it was hamburger steak, mashed potatoes with gravy, and a side of veggies. Flanking each side of the chalkboard were hunting trophies in the form of animal heads and under a mounting of a bear’s head hung a worn and battered Louisville Slugger. That baseball bat was what made the owner of Daddy’s Farm something of a legend in the area.

Gary Blok had a physique that matched his name. At 5’11 and 295lbs, he was as wide as he was tall and he sported a magnificent dark handlebar moustache the same shade as his shaggy hair. Because of his prominent beer belly, his broad shoulders and tree trunk arms typically went unnoticed and if there was ever trouble in the bar, the antagonist didn’t realize what kind of hurt he was in for until Gary reached out with heavy hands that clamped down like a bear trap. If things got too rowdy on a Friday or Saturday night, Gary would give you his patented 1,000 yard stare. The sight of his steel gray eyes drilling a hole right into you was usually enough to return you to earth and convince you to conduct yourself in a more respectable manner. Failing that, your second chance was a verbal warning from Gary (this usually consisted of him yelling at you and telling you to SMARTEN THE FUCK UP!"). Should his warning go unheeded, he’d throw you out. I don’t mean tell you to leave. He’d literally pick you up and THROW you through the front door. If things were too out of control and Gary felt that the stare or a verbal warning wouldn’t accurately convey the gravity of the situation, he’d grab that old baseball bat down from the wall. At that point, the bar would get real quiet, real fast.

The story goes that Gary was on his way to a softball tournament in Falhden when out of the corner of his eye, he saw something moving in the ditch. As he slowed down, he saw that a black bear had somehow gotten itself tangled up in a barbed wire fence. Although (or maybe because) Gary’s an outdoorsman and a hunter, he didn’t like the idea of that animal suffering and trapped. He pulled over on the side of the road, dropped down through the steep ditch and slowly approached the trapped animal. Needless to say, when the bear saw him it was pissed. Gary tried for a few minutes to free the bear from a distance. He released the barbed wire from nearby fence posts in the hope that the additional wire would give the animal the slack it needed to free itself. When that failed, he jumped back and forth through the fence and circled the bear in an attempt to untangle the animal. That did the opposite of what Gary was trying to do and just proceeded to further entangle the beast. To make matters worse, the wire was digging into the bear and opening up large, ugly cuts. Not only was the bear mad, it was scared and hurt. Finally, in desperation, the bear just decided to extricate itself through brute force. Big mistake. The wire was by this point wrapped around its face and the more it pulled, the more damage the barbs did. The bear sliced its cheek wide open and tore a huge gash in its snout. When one of the barbs gouged out one of its eyes, Gary had seen enough and knew that the bear would have to be put down. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a gun with him (the redneck with a gun rack in the back of his pickup truck is little more than a stereotype). All he had a hunting knife, his ball glove, and his Louisville Slugger.

The way he tells it, he knew the glove was useless and that there was no way any reasonable man was going to take on a bear with a hunting knife so his choice was clear: kill the bear with the bat. When I questioned the reasonableness of going after the bear with the bat instead of going home to get a rifle, he just gave me his icy stare and I decided that, yup, he was 100% right. The bat WAS the absolute right tool for the job.

So he kills the bear, uses his truck’s winch to drag it up to the road and then somehow gets the animal in the box of his truck and shows up late for the tournament looking like a guy that just killed a bear with a Goddamn baseball bat. He’s covered in blood and fur and God knows what else and ends up hitting a grand slam to win the game in extra innings using the same bat he used to kill the bear only a few hours earlier. After that story got around, it didn’t matter how drunk you were or how tough you thought you might be, when you saw Gary Blok standing there with his bear killing, grand slam hitting, extra inning game winning baseball bat, you calmed down real fast.

After shortly surveying the restaurant, I grabbed myself a vacant table in the back corner. Gary dropped a menu off at my table. Busy place tonight, I said to him.

Yup, he said, Suzie convinced me I should have a karaoke night and tonight’s the night. Lots of wannabe Johnny Cashes here tonight. Suzie was Gary’s waitress (or server, as she preferred to be called). In her early 20s, blond and long-legged, she was a favorite among customers and Gary alike. Gary had a not-so-secret crush on his young barmaid and made a special point of asking her for her opinion or advice in an attempt to win her favor. So when Suzie says karaoke, Gary makes it happen.

I ordered a Corona and told Gary I’d take the special. He grunted his approval and left my table without writing my order down. He returned moments later with an icy bottle of beer. Lethal Larry had invited himself to an already occupied table and was being his usual charming self. Two guys and two girls that I didn’t recognize sat at the table and the guys were taking turns verbally abusing him and making fun of him. The girls scolded their boyfriends but they couldn’t help but laugh at the cruel jokes and Larry was sufficiently inebriated that he mistook laughing at for laughing with. To anyone watching, Larry was the obvious butt of the joke.

Only a few minutes passed before Gary came back to my table with a hot special. How long has Junior been here? I asked nodding my head in the direction of Lawrence Jr.

Few hours. He showed up late this afternoon with a burr in his saddle. He’s trying to sell some tools but ain’t getting no bites from anyone in town so he came out here wondering if I wanted to take them off his hands. Maybe he’s got something you’d be interested in.

My mouth was full with hamburger and gravy. I stared at Larry as I finished chewing and washed it down with my Corona. I’ll guarantee you that I’m interested, I said flatly.

Gary nodded knowingly. I kinda figured it was something like that. He looked at Larry than looked back at me looking at Larry. No starting trouble in here, he warned.

I shook my head and told Gary I had no intention of stirring anything up. Gary grunted in acknowledgement and went back behind the bar. He spent a few minutes pretending to dry glasses. I knew he was watching to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid.

Dinner was good and I took my time, eating slowly and savoring each mouthful. Nothing fancy about the meal; just good food. The hamburgers were handmade right there in the restaurant and the gravy was thick and brown and flavorful and the mashed potatoes were smooth and didn’t have any chunks in them. Even the veggies were good. Fresh broccoli grown undoubtedly by one of the locals. Gary’s secret was to steam the broccoli in chicken broth until it was bright green, tender but still crisp. I cleared the plate and pushed it away from me over to the other side of the table. I caught Gary’s eye and motioned toward my empty Corona bottle. He nodded almost imperceptibly and brought another beer to my table.

Anything else? he asked as picked up the empty plate.

Give Junior another of whatever he’s drinking and put it on my tab, I said.

What did I tell you? Gary said sternly.

I spread my hands innocently in front of me. Just following your instructions and trying to be friendly. Gary grumbled to himself as he took my dirty plate back into the kitchen. Seconds later he emerged, still talking to himself, and swung behind the bar to grab a bottle of Coors. He opened it with the dirty dishrag he had slung over his shoulder and thumped the beer down in front of young Larry and pointed toward me. There wasn’t even a flash of guilt or discomfort on Larry’s face when