“Why, Mommy?”
“Something is wrong with him…up here,” she said, tapping her temple with a finger.
“Ah’m awful sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just careful.”
Her warning delivered, Buster was released into the company of his brothers. The younger ones were delighted. Maybe they would no longer be on the receiving end of the games Cookie invented for them to play. In those games, the younger boys played the role of Hapless Law Enforcement to Cookie’s Sadistic Criminal Mastermind. No matter how hard Hapless Law Enforcement tried, they always wound up crying.
“You know how to play DEA Man?” Cookie inquired of Buster.
“Nope, ah shor don’t.”
“Well, you’re gonna be the DEA Man. He’s the man with the badge.”
“Gosh, thanks!”
In the game of DEA Man, Cookie and his younger brothers had to move several five-pound bags of tile glaze around the compound and keep it hidden from Buster who was the green agent sent to the West from Washington, DC. There wasn’t much more to the game than that. The fun part for Cookie was when Buster discovered the drug cache. He would then jump him or descend from a rope somewhere and employ different faux martial arts moves. Unfortunately, the bullets in Buster’s imaginary government-issued sidearm had no effect on Cookie. Buster endured being karate chopped and flipped on his head too many times to count, but he never complained nor tattled on him.
When Fridays rolled around, the Dominguezes would load all the kids into the back of the truck for a drive into town. Buster liked to sit above the rear fender of the pickup with his nose in the wind like a dog. All the kids had a few bucks in their pockets from chores and an idea of how they wanted to spend it—even though it always came down to the same things, candy for the boys, teen fashion magazines for the girls.
Vanadium’s Main Street had resisted paving for over one hundred years—almost as if the town was holding out for the return of horse-drawn carriages. People passing through on their way to Utah drove slowly, not to enjoy Vanadium’s down-on-its-heels Victorian architecture, or raised wooden sidewalks, but rather to avoid potholes that were deep enough to conceal a man on horseback wearing a stovepipe hat.
Dominguez guided his Dodge Power Wagon into an empty space in front of the Buttered Roll, the town’s only restaurant without a bar. In those days, before Mr. Mallomar came to town, Vanadium hadn’t any need for more than one restaurant. The prevailing attitude was that paying for a meal outside the home was a useless extravagance. Buster could see Sheriff Dudival in the window booth having a cup of coffee and a cigarette with a crusty-looking cowboy. They both took notice of him. In fact, they seemed to be talking about him.
“Have your asses back here in forty-five minutes,” Dominguez said.
The kids all jumped off the truck and left on their predetermined missions. Cookie lumbered out the back with the difficulty of a fat kid. It didn’t help that he insisted on wearing a big woolen overcoat whenever he went to town—even in the broiling heat of summer. No one talked about it, assuming it was his sad way of concealing his weight problem.
The pockets of Cookie’s coat were slit on the inside to allow his hands to reach all the way through. To the proprietor of a shop, it looked like he was just standing by the merchandise with his coat open, but inside the coat, his hands were grabbing whatever he desired. Cookie, alone, was responsible for 75 percent of Vanadium’s retail “shrinkage.”
It was time to get going. He only had forty-five minutes. His parents insisted they be back at the house on Fridays by sunset. He started walking off by himself, then noticed Buster.
“Hey, fuckwad. Come with me.”
Happy to be included, Buster followed his brother into the hardware store. Cookie made a cursory inspection of plumbing supplies, power sanders, fuse boxes, rattraps, and poison. He was not really interested in any of that. He knew the owner of the store was watching him and that diddling around long enough would tax the proprietor’s attention span. When he saw him go back to reading his paper, Cookie headed to the real object of his desire—a pyramid of .22 caliber ammunition in the gun department. Dominguez had, ill advisedly, given Cookie a single shot J. C. Higgins rifle without ever bothering to ask why it seemed he always had an unlimited supply of ammo for it. Cookie opened his coat and slipped a few boxes into his shirt, then hissed at Buster.
“Get over here, moron.”
Buster came over and stood next to him.
“Unbutton your shirt.”
“Gosh, why?”
“Just do it, numbnuts.”
Cookie stuffed two more boxes of .22s into Buster’s shirt.
“Okay, follow me. Not too fast. Stop and look at some shit like you’re shoppin’.” Buster took him literally, and on the way out, stopped to stare at some bags of steer manure. Cookie looked at him sangfroid. “¡Si no eres el idiota más idiota que he conocido!”
When the forty-five minutes were up, everyone returned to the truck that was already loaded with groceries. On the way out of town, a truck that had the logo of a contractor’s company on the door panel, pulled up beside the Dominguez’s. The person on the passenger side of the moving truck rolled down his window.
“Hey, Dominguez, the boss wants to redo the floor of the Vanadium Hotel lobby.”
“Tell them to call you at the office,” Edita said nervously. She didn’t like this kind of communicating on the highway. Dominguez ignored her.
“How many square feet?” He yelled back to the men, further aggravating her.
While this mobile business meeting was being conducted, in the back of the truck, Cookie cornered Buster.
“Let’s have ’em.”
“Have what?”
“The shells we boosted, gringo.”
“Ah put ’em back.”
“You what?”
“If ah’da kep’m that woulda been stealin’.”
Cookie wanted to throw him off the truck, but he knew he couldn’t lift him. Instead, he grabbed Buster’s cowboy hat from his head and angrily Frisbeed it into the back of the truck conducting the business conference at forty miles an hour alongside them.
“Hey…!”
His other brothers pretended not to see it, but Buster’s sisters immediately came to his defense.
“That was mean!” they both said.
“Mommy gave me that hat for cleanin’ the house.”
“So go get it, if you want it so fuckin’ bad!”
Buster looked at his hat fluttering around in the back of the adjacent pick up truck.
“Better get it now while you
