Bad Faith

  Bad Faith

  Theodore Wheeler

  Queen’s Ferry Press

  8622 Naomi Street

  Plano, TX 75024

  www.queensferrypress.com

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  First Edition

  Copyright © 2016 Theodore Wheeler

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior permission from the publisher.

  Cover illustration by Michael Mihok

  Cover design by Brian Mihok

  Interior design by Ryan W. Bradley

  These stories originally appeared in the following publications: “The Mercy Killing of Harry Kleinhard” in Midwestern Gothic; “This Missing” in The Southern Review; “How to Die Young in a Nebraska Winter” in The Kenyon Review; “Impertinent, Triumphant” on Five Chapters; “Violate the Leaves” in Boulevard; “The Current State of the Universe” in The Cincinnati Review; “Attend the Way” in Heavy Feather Review; “Bad Faith” appeared in separate parts as “The First Night of My Down-and-Out Sex Life” in Confrontation, “The Man Who Never Was” in Weekday, and “On a Train from the Place Called Valentine” in Boulevard and New Stories from the Midwest 2015. The between-story vignettes appeared collectively as “Kleinhardt’s Women” on Fogged Clarity.

  Contents

  The Mercy Killing of Harry Kleinhardt

  (Jessica Harding)

  The Missing

  (Elisabeth Hindmarsh)

  How to Die Young in a Nebraska Winter

  (Betsy Updike)

  Impertinent, Triumphant

  (Lorna Chaplin)

  Violate the Leaves

  (Kim Boettcher)

  The Current State of the Universe

  (Carrie Rehbein)

  Attend the Way

  (Tamara Jones)

  Bad Faith

  The Mercy Killing of Harry Kleinhardt

  Aaron helped his dad down the steps and through the door of the Congress. He tried to hurry to a booth before they made a scene, his dad weak, barely upright, but the regulars at the bar had already turned to watch them struggle. Harry’s weight swayed more and more to Aaron’s arm until they got to a booth where Harry could drop into the vinyl and catch his breath. Aaron was breathless too. He wasn’t built to take care of people, but this was what he’d come home to do.

  That afternoon Harry had received treatment at the county clinic outside town, where an IV dripped toxins into his veins. Harry had colon and lung cancer, and he required a stop at the Congress on the way home from the clinic. Aaron obliged.

  “Here,” Aaron said, circling back from the bar to clack a gin and soda on the tabletop. Harry didn’t look up. He slid the drink under his bowed head to sip the top off.

  Harry’s skin was damaged but he wasn’t an old man, in his middle fifties. His pores gaped and were discolored, his fingertips smooth with burns. Harry was a farmer. He’d worked with chemicals his whole life, fertilizers and pesticides. Nothing was capable of saving Harry now, he knew that. He took the chemo because the county was required to give it.

  The Congress was a low-ceiling joint tucked into the side of a motel near the highway in Jackson County. Its patrons were a used-up sort of transgenerational loser. They huddled around dim candles and palmed cocktails. The collars of freebie Marlboro tee shirts lolled around their necks. This was the first time Aaron had been to the Congress, but Harry was known here. Everything in Jackson County was put into context by family—by whose daddy owned what, whose uncle worked where, whose granddaddy died fighting who. These people knew about Aaron because they knew his father.

  Aaron left Jackson when he was fifteen, a runaway, and hopped freights to Omaha. He lived on his own a month before he got sent to Boys Town for stealing a car. Harry didn’t mind Aaron getting sent away to finish his schooling—he thought the boy might be better off far away. They were so isolated out on the farm. They didn’t belong to a church, they weren’t on speaking terms with their neighbors. Aaron had showed up at school as little as the county allowed. It wasn’t a good situation. Aaron had waited at home most every night, growing up, while Harry was at the Congress. He didn’t think anyone would miss him when he ran off. After the state stuck him in Boys Town he didn’t hear from anybody in town, except for sporadic phone calls from Harry that only confirmed to Aaron that his presence wasn’t necessary at home.

  Most people in Jackson had forgotten about Aaron Kleinhardt by the time he came back to help his father die. He was thirty-two. He wore his hair shaggy, like he had in college, so he looked younger. The bangs hung over his eyes.

  Among the regulars at the Congress was a guy called Little John. Little John had a crew cut that made a strange frame for his face. There wasn’t enough hair to balance his jowls, so his chin looked even fatter than it already was. It was Little John’s presence that perked up Harry. Once he came over to their booth, Harry lifted his head and scowled in an excited, mischievous way. Little John flipped a pack of smokes to the table.

  “How do you know him?” Aaron asked.

  “I have a blind on your dad’s land,” Little John explained. “We’re buck hunters.”

  “LJ’s a crop adjuster,” Harry added. “But he’s not too much of an asshole for an insurance man.”

  “What’s your line of work, Harry’s boy?”

  “I studied history in college,” Aaron said. “Plains history.”

  “You mean like Nebraska?”

  “Not exactly. There’s plains lots of places.”

  “He unloads trucks,” Harry said. “There’s trucks full of shit lots of places too.”

  Aaron didn’t want to explain why he was out of work. He’d been tramping, living with women he met. He glanced around the barroom and grinned dumbly when they talked about work. Aaron didn’t know how to explain what it was he did. He sat there and played along, hoping no one asked why someone who claimed to make a living from lifting and moving cargo had such measly arms.

  “You live in Omaha?” Little John asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Your dad goes on about it sometimes—how his boy’s smarter than the rest of us, if for no other reason than he don’t have to live in Jackson County.”

  Harry snorted at this, like he didn’t believe he’d ever brag on his boy. “It don’t take smarts to move boxes.”

  “I doubt that’s true.” Little John smiled. He waited until Harry closed his eyes again then leaned across the booth to Aaron. “It’s nice what you’re doing for your dad. It means a lot, you being here to take care of him.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Listen. You’re doing the right thing.”

  “It’s an errand,” Aaron said. He refused to explain what he meant.

  They drove through town after leaving the Congress, Aaron and Harry, idling in a Chevy Lumina over the red brick streets that surrounded the town square and the Jackson County Courthouse. The courthouse was small, merely two stories high, but Aaron had been in awe when he was a little boy, afraid to even gaze up at its moss-covered spires because the courthouse was such an important building in Jackson. A German preacher was tarred-and-feathered there, a long time ago. The old clock in the tower boomed out the time as they passed. It was four o’clock. There were shops along Main Street for household goods, for insurance, Little John’s name painted across the glass, for rock candy and candles, for baby clothes on consignment. There was an old lumberyard with stacks of boards and plywood housed in slumped, open buildings, all of it enclosed by chain-link fence. At the edge of town was a towering Co-Op silo, plaster wh
ite and ominous. Because there was nothing else tall around, the silo swayed when Aaron looked up, the Lumina’s tires humming as they hit county road asphalt. The house was eleven miles outside town.

  Harry needed help settling into the mudroom when they got to the farm. Aaron set him up in his chair, its ratty green cover all but gone, then covered his legs with a blanket and spun the dial to Limbaugh.

  “I’m fine,” Harry said. “Go leave me alone.”

  It was a cool November day, but not cold. Sunlight shined through the storm windows and made the dust in the air swirl. Harry melted into the cushion and closed his eyes. A cigarette burned between his fingers. He could have been asleep but Aaron knew he wasn’t. Harry was a reptile warming his skin.

  This was the farmhouse Aaron grew up in, a gray cottage near the highway. There was a small bathroom off the kitchen, a yellow blanket that covered the doorway to Harry’s bedroom, and the living room where Aaron slept on a cot as a boy. A pull-out sofa was in the living room now, that’s where he’d been sleeping. The mudroom was the main venue of the house, where Harry rested and smoked and listened to the radio. Harry used to pull on his rubber waders in the mudroom before going out to work, when he still farmed. He spent most of his time there, sipping drags off cigarettes and gulping gin.

  Harry moved carefully when he came into the kitchen. His feet slid across the linoleum. He tossed his smokes on top of the refrigerator.

  “Sit down,” Aaron said. “I’m making dinner.”

  Harry brushed the newspaper off the table to the floor then needed help easing into his chair, Aaron’s hands in his armpits. His mouth was open, his breath phlegm-heavy. “Take it easy,” he said. “Don’t have to goddamn manhandle me.”

  Aaron pulled the bread and a couple eggs out of the refrigerator.

  “You need to go soon,” Harry said. “Nobody asked you to stick around.”

  “You can’t get rid of me. I got a good reason being here.”

  Aaron couldn’t tell if his dad actually wanted him there, but he thought he did. Aaron melted a tab of butter into the pan and waited until scorched dairy hit his nose, his cue to crack the eggs. There were salt and pepper shakers, an old metal spatula, the balancing of bread at the edge of the pan to soften. The rasping whistle of Harry’s breath as it cut through the exhaust fan rumble.

  It rained and the breeze blew droplets against the window, washing dust off the pane. Aaron watched puddles form in the clay beyond the driveway where red water mixed in a boot print, and farther on still, where rain pelted the empty quonset that used to hold tractors, seeders, and sprayers before his dad was forced to sell his implements and partition his land. Aaron liked cooking for his father, to let the eggs sizzle. Harry wouldn’t eat much, but they’d sit together at the table.

  “You should go,” Harry repeated. “This…” he swept a shaking hand over the table. “This is happening whether you’re here or not.”

  Aaron laid the bread out on saucers. The eggs slid off the spatula like jelly and landed on the toast. From the center of the table Harry pulled a napkin from a box and tried to unfold it in his lap. His fingertips pinched at the napkin to separate its edges.

  “Are we going to eat or what?”

  Aaron never actually knew his mother, not in any real way. When he was a boy he fantasized about her coming back to rescue him from Nebraska, to take him with her to L.A., New York, wherever she’d landed. Aaron knew so little about her that these dreams seemed like they could somehow become reality. His dad never told what actually happened to her. If Aaron pestered him enough Harry would say, “She’s alive. That’s all you need to know. That woman you like to call your mom is still breathing somewhere.”

  Aaron didn’t learn much about the world outside Jackson County until later, but even as a boy it seemed pretty obvious that things were better elsewhere—and that this was the reason his mother left. There was an old joke about how Jackson was the only county in this Union state to be named after a Confederate general, and that about summed up how out of step Jackson was with the rest of the planet, Aaron thought.

  More than likely his mother met a man in Sioux City and took off from there. Maybe a friend of hers had a lead for some quick money, liquor, or drugs, or a chance to work a back room at a horse track. Over the years Aaron convinced himself of a thousand scenarios. She was a nomadic bounty hunter in Texas, a piano teacher in Vienna, an Amazon explorer searching out El Dorado, an African missionary. That she was the wife of an extraordinarily rich man was a recurring theme. They were ridiculous dreams. Aaron didn’t have much to work with in creating them.

  He had a vague recollection of when she left, of being dropped at a neighbor’s one evening for dinner. He was five. His mother drove off with a woman and left him. Aaron ate with the neighbor family. They watched TV. He sat on the floor with a kid his age, between the couch the neighbors sat on and the TV. The kid had a Richard Petty matchbox racing set, but he wouldn’t share. The only thing Aaron had with him was a plush stuffed elephant.

  Aaron stayed up late that night because his mother was late coming for him. He fell asleep on the floor and at some point the neighbors moved him next to their kid in bed.

  Harry was driving trucks overnight then, during the winter, a route between local swine lots and Omaha. The neighbors got ahold of him, but it was morning before he could make it back to town. The neighbor mom was making breakfast, pancakes and eggs, the other kid not yet awake, when Harry pulled his semi into the yard. Aaron forgot his plush elephant there. His dad never talked to the neighbors much, so he never got it back.

  Aaron’s mother must have slipped the neighbors some money when she dropped him off, $25 or so, which was a lot for watching a kid in those days, or else they wouldn’t have taken him. Aaron always wished they hadn’t. It seemed like it would have been better if his mother had brought him with her, wherever she went off to. That was when Aaron still believed she was a glamorous type, before Harry threw out her things. A half bottle of perfume. The water cooler she’d won at the county fair. Her clothes still in the cedar dresser. There were pictures Harry forgot in the storm cellar, though, in a box under some cans of spray paint. Pictures of Harry and her sitting in each others’ arms on the hood of an old Dodge, a field of corn behind them, or smiling together in the dim lamplight of some party or another.

  Aaron drove around after Harry fell asleep that evening—on brick-paved streets and asphalt county roads, on the gravel access spurs between fallow fields. There wasn’t much else to do if he didn’t want to be at home or sit in that dreary bar. He’d return home later to the sofa bed and listen to his dad’s breathing from the other room.

  Aaron was driving his dad’s car because he didn’t have one of his own. There were other ways of traveling. Aaron was an expert at distance walking and hitchhiking and hopping trains and stealing cars. It was easy for him to get around if he had a purpose. He’d hitched to Jackson County this time, but would drive the Lumina while he was here.

  Most nights he just parked on a country road between the windbreaks. A gun sat next to him on the seat. It was nothing special, a small pistol, nickel-plated with a handle of hard black rubber. He kept it in his messenger bag, along with the other things he needed. His wallet and ID, a stick of deodorant, a change of underwear. Things that belonged to other people too. A wedding band. A locket with two thumbnail photographs inside. An infant’s sock.

  His camera was in the bag. Aaron won the camera a couple years before, betting on college football in a Lincoln barroom. He never would have guessed how much he’d come to depend on the thing. It was a small digital camera, blue and silver, and fit in the palm of his hand. Aaron used the camera to pick up women—saying he’d like to snap a picture of one as an excuse to call her pretty. It was an old bit, one that almost always worked. He was small and skinny, and for reasons he never really understood, women trusted him. He found that most of them would do what he asked if he was persistent enough.

  They
went to the bank the next morning. Harry wanted to deposit some coins he’d saved in a coffee can, something he’d always called Aaron’s college fund. It was a joke only Harry was in on. Even though Aaron had gone to college, he’d never seen a dime from the coffee can.

  A woman and her two boys were ahead of them in line. The boys were toddlers and held to their mom’s legs, each pinching the panty hose that stretched below her hemline. They stared at Harry’s scars, the way he winced while standing, the dead skin that stuck out through his short hair, and the open sores on his neck. Harry wore a pin on his coat that said Cancer Sucks.

  Aaron watched the teller in the cage at the front of the line. She must have been new in town, she didn’t look like the other county women, young, with a dark complexion and greasy black hair. She was dumpy in a way that Aaron could tell she drank too much—the thickness of flesh around her cheeks and neck, hollows below her eyes. When they got to the counter, she explained that the bank didn’t accept loose change like Harry wanted to give.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “We don’t even have the machine anymore. But you can take some papers if you want to roll them yourself at home. How’s that sound?”

  Aaron started to say that it wasn’t a big deal, but Harry interrupted him.

  “What’s she saying?” he asked, pushing Aaron out of the way. “Won’t they do it?”

  “I’m sorry,” the teller said. “Is there anything else we can do?” She explained again about the machine being gone. Harry slammed his hands on the counter to stop her. It was frightening how a man so decrepit could make such noise.

  “Don’t do me any favors. Just deposit the money. This is your business, isn’t it? Isn’t this a bank?”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll get in trouble.”