Bloody River Blues

half. He lifted the other half toward Pellam, who shook his head and dropped two spoonfuls of instant coffee into a Styrofoam cup. “Coffee?” he asked Stile.
    “Naw. I got my wheels. You can have the cycle back. It’s in the trunk. There’s a little teeny dent on the fender. Otherwise it’s in perfect condition. Well, it’s muddy. Well, the rack, too.”
    Pellam poured water into the cup and sat heavily on the bench. Stile told him his hair was all spiky.
    “What are you doing here?” Pellam asked again as he smoothed his hair.
    “Tony needs you. He’s like apoplectic—is that the right word?—and you shut your phone off.”
    “Because I wanted to sleep later than seven o’clock.”
    “I been up for an hour.” Stile did tai chi at dawn. He ate the bagel thoughtfully. “You know, John, I got to admit I was a little curious why you’re working for Tony.”
    Pellam took three sips of scalding coffee. That was something about instant. It tasted terrible but it started hot and stayed hot. He rubbed his thumb and index finger together, designating money, in answer to Stile’s question about Tony.
    Stile’s grunt equaled a shrug, as if he suspected there was more to it. On the other hand, Stile was a senior union stuntman and even at the Screen Actors Guild’s contract minimums, would be well paid. But he was also a stand-in for one of the leads, and because of this and because of his experience, his agent had negotiated an overscale contract. He understood all about the motives for being attached to a big-budget project.
    “Well, Herr Eisenstein has summoned you and I’m delivering the word.” He finished the bagel.
    “He tell you what’s up?”
    “He wants to blow up an oil refinery. For the final scene.”
    “What?” Pellam rubbed his eyes.
    “I swear to God. He’s going to build this mock-up of an old DC-7 and tow it behind a chopper, then—” Stile mimicked a plane diving into the stove “—Ka-boom . . .”
    Pellam shook his head. “He’s out of . . . You son of a bitch. You eat a man’s last bagel and you rag him all the while you’re doing it and here it is not even dawn.”
    Stile laughed. “Damn easy to pull your chain, Pellam. Up and at ’em. Rise and shine. Our master calls.”
    BELL’S BIDE-A-WEE CONTAINED two tents, the Winnebago, which was parked in the row closest to the road, and a Ford Taurus, from whose trunk a yellow motorcycle protruded.
    The camper was surrounded by unoccupied spaces dotted with short galvanized steel pipes and junction boxes for utility hookups that stretched away toward the river like slots in a miniature drive-in movie theater.
    Stevie Flom had turned off River Road and driven a half block through a stretch of boarded-up one- and two-story houses and stores. He had started to park nose-out in an alley between two deserted shops. Ralph Bales had told him not to get fancy—just parallel park on the street and read the paper or something—only leave the engine running.
    Ralph Bales walked down to River Road. It was morning, but he saw lights on in the camper. Then he saw a man’s silhouette walking around inside. RalphBales stepped into a phone booth, whose floor was covered with the tiny blue cubes from its four shattered windows. Three tall weeds grew up through this pile. He picked up the receiver with a Kleenex and pretended to talk while he studied the camper.
    He looked beyond the Winnebago to the river. This morning it looked different still—not silver-gray, not the golden shade of last night. Now the surface had a rusty sheen to it, mirroring a redness in the sky that came, Ralph Bales believed, from garbage pumped into the air by refineries outside of Wood River, across the Mississippi. The wind was steady and it bent grass and weeds on the riverbank but hardly lifted any ripples from the ruddy water, which plodded southward.
    Ralph Bales remembered a song that he hadn’t thought of for years, a sound-track song from twenty-five years ago, the Byrds’ closing number in Easy Rider . He heard the music in his head clearly but could not recall the lyrics, just snatches of words about a man wanting to be free, about a river flowing away from someplace, flowing to the sea . . .
    The door to the camper opened.
    Yep, it was him. The beer man, the witness. He was followed by a tall, gangly man with a droopy mustache. Together they stepped to the back of the Taurus and wrestled the motorcycle out of the trunk.
    The Colt