The staked Goat

brother.”
    The Button wagged his head. He didn’t even look surprised.
     
    An auto graveyard is a busy place during a New England winter. The average car-owner now keeps a car something like seven and a half years. That’s a lot of road salt, sand, and skids to work on a car. Toss in drunk middle-aged drivers and inexperienced teenage drag-racers, and you have a junkyard’s bonanza.
    I followed two late-model Japanese cars being towed inside Eddie Shuba’s gate. Eddie was from Lithuania, and in 1945 he was seventeen years old. That was when Eddie and thousands of other refugees were sandwiched between the Red Army pushing west across Germany and the American forces pushing east. By some miracle, he’d had a little English and got enlisted in our army. He received citizenship, served in Korea, and qualified for a disability pension which he parlayed into the auto yard.
    ”Johnnie, Johnnie, good! Very good to see you now!”
    He came humping over to me, his war leg inflexible in the cold. He wore a brand-new olive-drab field jacket with a U.S. flag stitched carefully where a unit patch should be. The driver of one of the tow trucks honked to get his attention, but Eddie ignored him.
    ”How are you, Eddie?” I said, shaking the hand that pumped mine.
    ”Oh, good, good. Stiffer in the leg and older is all.” He had a crew cut more gray than white and a few facial scars, but still a grip like one of his mechanical car-crushers, screeching and grinding off to the right. ”So how are you?” he said, openfaced and smiling. I smiled back. No need to worry about Eddie reading ”disquieting” news in the papers,
    ”I’m fine, Eddie, but I need a favor.”
    ”A favor? For you, anyt’ing. You t’ink I forget? My arm, my business, what you need?”
    About seven years ago, some high-level car strippers were using Eddie’s yard, through a dishonest foreman, to shelter some of their skeletons. My old employer, Empire Insurance, was underwriting a lot of theft and vandalism policies then, and an overly eager assistant DA tried to connect Eddie to the ring. Eddie was clean, but he also knew that I was the one who steered the assistant straight with some help from a Holy Cross classmate who was one of the assistant’s superiors. The only time I ever saw Eddie in tears was when he became convinced that his foreman had betrayed him by fronting for the ring.
    ”Just a small—” I said, when I was cut off by the tow truck driver, who shoved me aside and started to beef to Eddie. The driver was maybe thirty, at 220 about thirty pounds overweight. He came complete with a freely running nose and body odor, even in the cold, like a month-dead moose.
    Eddie just swung his wrecking ball of a left fist fast, hard, and upward into the driver’s stomach. The driver went down on his knees, gagging, and Eddie cuffed him alongside the head with the heel of the same hand, toppling him over into the slush and mud.
    ”Swine!” bellowed Eddie. ”You wait until Eddie Shuba ready for you. Now, get your rig and get out. Forever, move!” Eddie kicked him rather gently for punctuation, glared at the other driver, who was obviously in no mood for the same, and then gave me a forward march gesture with his right arm.
    ”Come, Johnnie, we go into my office. Where there is peace and men can talk.”
    I followed him into the shack. The driver’s dry heaves weren’t quite drowned out by the compressors that seemed never to stop.
    Eddie closed the door behind us, which shut out most of the noise. He offered me vodka.
    ”Only if I can sip it,” I said.
    He roared laughter and an epithet about how I had to learn to drink vodka properly. He poured us each about two ounces of 100 proof into styrofoam cups. He handed me mine, we toasted the U.S. of A., and then he threw his drink off in one gulp, smacking his lips without a hint of coughing.
    I took a polite slug. He seated himself in a big worn leather office chair, using both hands to position his bad leg at a more comfortable angle.
    ”So, Johnnie, how can Eddie Shuba help you?”
    I prefaced my request with an abstract explanation of how I was helping the widow of a war buddy and was dealing with a very bad man. Eddie nodded gravely.
    ”So basically I need an old car that’ll drive maybe thirty miles competently at highway speed. I’ll also need a key to your front gate.”
    ”Sure t’ing. I got a four-door Chevy Nova that run.”
    I shook my head. ”No, I need a bigger car,