Mad River

them Tom the Barbarian . . .
    Tom didn’t know what to think about the killing of Ag O’Leary or the black guy. He did know that he had nothing to do with it. He was just walking along and Jimmy suddenly went crazy and killed them. He was clean.
    Would he stay clean if he hung around with Jimmy? If Jimmy went down for a couple of murders, where would that leave him and Becky? With Jimmy out of the picture . . .
    After he got kicked out of the navy, Tom had gone to work for a desperate home security agency, which mostly meant he drove around dark suburban neighborhoods looking for false alarms. He never did find a house that had been broken into—in fact, he’d found a fairly small percentage of the houses he’d been sent to, because he got lost easily. That shortcoming got him fired—or laid off, as his supervisor put it.
    When the unemployment ran out, he had a two-week job as a pizza delivery man, but had the same problem as he did with home security. When he got fired by the pizza joint, he landed a job as a door-puller for another security company. Door-pulling was exactly what it sounded like: he spent the evening driving around to suburban office complexes pulling on doors to make sure they were locked. He got fired from that one when a late-working accountant found him sitting on a step smoking a joint.
    After that, things got tough. He tried sitting at an interstate off-ramp with a cardboard sign that said: “Homeless Navy Vet, Please Help,” but on an average six-hour day, pulled in only twelve dollars. On the other hand, the work wasn’t onerous, and he might have stuck with it, if he hadn’t met Jimmy and Becky at a Taco Bell.
    They knew each other from the countryside. Tom had been born on a farm five miles east of Bigham, and met Becky and Jimmy in high school. They’d run into each other again in the Twin Cities, where Jimmy and Becky had gone looking for work. Six weeks after their reunion in the Twin Cities, here they were, cutting cross-country in the dark, and Tom, in his own dim way, was thinking over the possibilities.
    •   •   •
    A COLD CLOUDY April night in the Minnesota countryside is darker than the inside of a coal sack. They sped along through the night, right on the edge of outrunning their headlights, missing a coon running down the road, the animal glancing back at them with amber eyes.
    They got to Shinder in the middle of the night, pulled into the yard. The old man’s truck was sitting there, and Jimmy pulled around it and said, “Tom, get out and open the garage doors. Let’s get this thing out of sight.”
    Tom got out in the headlights and pulled open the garage doors; a snowblower was blocking the entrance, and he jacked it around until Jimmy could squeeze by. They were pulling the doors shut behind the Charger when the old man hollered down from an upstairs window, “Who the hell is that?”
    Jimmy called back, “It’s me.”
    “What the hell do you want?”
    “Need to come in for a while. We could use some breakfast.”
    “Get the hell out of here, you little fart. I don’t have anything for the likes of you. Now, scat.”
    “Scat, my ass,” Jimmy shouted. He turned to the other two and said, “C’mon. Door’s never locked.”
    “Get the fuck away from my house.”
    Jimmy went through the back door, Becky behind him, Tom holding back. In the kitchen, Jimmy flipped on the light, went to the refrigerator, pulled it open, took out a plastic bottle of milk, and said to Becky, “There should be some oatmeal there in the bottom cupboard, next to the sink.”
    She pulled open the cupboard door, and there was a cylindrical box of Quaker Oats on the shelf. She took it out and was holding it in her hands when the old man came storming down the stairs and into the kitchen.
    “You fuckers get out of here,” he said. He waved his hand at Jimmy, a dismissive gesture. “You got no rights here no more. Give me that oatmeal.”
    “Stay away from her,” Jimmy said.
    “Shut the fuck up.”
    “No, you shut the fuck up. I’m tired, and we got some trouble over in Bigham, and I’m not putting up with any shit anymore. We’re gonna have breakfast and figure out—”
    “I’m gonna throw your ass out,” the old man said. He took two steps toward Jimmy, and Jimmy pulled out the gun and pointed it at his forehead. The old man stopped, and sneered at him and said, “You got a gun? You think that makes you a man?”
    “Don’t know about that, but