Land Run. Mark Graham
Please stop. Look. I’m sorry.”
But Jules had hung up. Cort closed his cell phone and drove on toward Spurs Restaurant. He was always baffled that apparently God was consistently at odds with his thinking and seemingly so concerned with his little Willow Springs world. He knew that he got married in a church but never expected it would follow him around for the rest of his days.
Ted Levin and another man were talking in the back booth of Spurs. Ted was the councilman of the Fourth Ward. As he approached, Cort could see that their conversation was not a lively one. Ted saw Cort and stood up, placing a quick smile on his face. “Cort, this is Frank Howard with Howard and Associates. His firm is in Tulsa.”
“Hello,” Cort said as friendly as he could muster up.
“Hi. Nice to meet you. You got a nice town here. Been talking to some locals today outside the IGA. That’s the best place to get a feel. Democracy at its best. Everyone has to eat.” Frank laughed.
The man appeared to Cort to be watching for Cort to look enlightened, drawn into the philosophical and sociological implications of his statement. “Sounds good. Y’all order yet?” Cort asked.
He learned a great deal about Frank over dinner. It seemed to Cort that the man was under some kind of truth serum or maybe hopped up on cocaine. He was a land man for Carlton Oil before the bust in the early eighties. Then he finished law school, but he could not leave his love of land acquisition. Cort figured that he must have used the word acquisition at least fifty times. There was something about that word that really impressed Frank. As of late, he had a big contract doing right-a-way work for Continental Telephone, getting tower sites and land for cable line runs. Frank said he learned a lot with it, said that he had big hopes for the government’s untapped powers of eminent domain. Cort still preferred this one-way conversation to his living room, where Jules would sulk and tell him in a sigh that she was fine.
Ted helped the conversation to finally turn to the Montgomery land.
“Frank, you seen the Montgomery place yet?”
“I certainly have. Rusty Watson sent me some aerial photos. Nice little spread.”
“We think so too. Don’t we, Cort? This town needs the recreation and a draw to some right kind of folks, folks who will need a club to congregate at and a gated community.”
Ted had caught a vision and was spreading the good news. Cort found him to be almost evangelistic about the land deal. Cort was a banker and liked money as much as anyone but was cautious. He had only met a handful of straight arrows in his years of banking. It seemed that most everyone that came across him was a gambler, and he hated risk. That was the dance, the drama of small-business finance. You had to be good to get Cort Johnson to ride the roller coaster with you.
“Elijah Montgomery owns that place. Been in his family since forever. He is a nice man and the town loves him. Most folks anyhow. Thing is, the Industrial Trust Committee has sent him several letters with offers. Ted here even spent some time with him at the nursing home just getting to know him,” Cort said.
The lawyer jumped in, saying, “But he won’t budge. I know the type. And heard some talk down at the IGA. I even went to his church Sunday, asking around.”
Cort could tell that Frank felt he had finally got the interested look he wanted from him. The lawyer seemed to him to be the kind who liked to rip the wings off flies, watch them squirm.
“Mr. Howard, is the ITC paying you? Ted, we don’t have the investors lined up yet. You and the council forking over traffic ticket money to this guy?”
“Don’t worry, Cort. In fact, I won’t officially work for the town or the ITC. I’m just kind of a drifter.” Frank said and then winked and added, “Drift in and drift out. We can work out all the details later, probably in Tulsa.”
His wink froze Cort. He could take small talk, rudeness even. But the wink was a call to arms. He wouldn’t go as far as the bus stop with this guy. Things at the table got a bit quiet.
“That reminds me of something Mr. Elijah said.” Ted laughed ingenuously. “He goes on a bit. You know, he is eighty-eight years old. Elijah likes to quote that Kenny Rogers song and says, ‘You got to know when to hold ’em and know when to fold ’em.’”
“Those old farts are something, huh, Cort?” Frank said, throwing a broad smile.
“I hear that Elijah is still pretty sharp,” Cort replied.
“Of course he is. Let me get this, guys. It’s been great.”
It was dark when Cort stepped back outside the restaurant. The evening blackness gave Cort that uneasy feeling of leaving a movie theater after dark, when the world he saw was not what he expected because it was not the world he left. What to do about old Elijah Montgomery? Rusty sent this guy photos? he wondered to himself.
He hoped she would call but never expected it. The cell phone didn’t reveal who called, but somehow he just knew it was her. Rusty didn’t want to answer it but couldn’t take a chance on her not calling again. It had to be important. His wife never said anything overtly about divorce, but he could see it coming. This is it, he thought. This is where God is going to rub my face into the mud he made of my life. That was the thought that made him ready to answer. He wasn’t going down without a fight.
“Yes.”
“Hi, Russell,” she said.
“Yeah. Hi. Your number says unlisted. Afraid I would call you? I didn’t.”
“I know. No. Not you. Just anyone. I just wanted to see how you are doing.”
“Fine,” Rusty relented.
There was a longer silence than Rusty wanted there to be. He didn’t want time to think. He didn’t like time to think before he acted on anything. That wasn’t his training. He was trained to act while knowing. And thinking only brought questions and doubt that he normally could not afford.
“Okay. I heard you went to Mexico,” she said.
“A couple times. Look. In a few months you’re gonna see a lot of money run through our account. After that, you should see a few million get stuck there.”
“Okay.”
“This is the biggest one ever. It’s a major golf course community. More units than you can shake a stick at,” he said.
“Okay.”
“What do you want from me? This is it, the grand slam,” Rusty said, finally stopping his mad pacing back and forth.
“It’s not going to make it better, Russell. It just won’t. You’re not ready to talk, are you?”
Rusty could only repeat his question again in his head. What does she want from me? I left the boy by the pool, and it can’t be undone. And killing myself will only signal defeat. All that’s left to me is to sap all the money I can from this hated town and move on. Get her back and move on.
“I need to go to bed. Just call me when you can I guess.” She hung up.
He went into a kind of coma for a moment after she hung up the phone. But it was more personal than her hanging up. Somewhere deep in his being, he was grateful to her. But he wanted rather, on some level, to be abused. If she had only cursed him, yelled maybe, then he could feel it, the retribution he deserved. If he could just be made to feel worse than he already did, something total and final, then he would know what he should do. But she didn’t do that, and Rusty knew that just wasn’t her. She probably forgave me, he thought, and that only cheapened his self-loathing. He wondered if that was why she didn’t tell him; no one knew him like she did. He would still get to wallow in his mess but was forced to go on living. Well, he thought, I sure as hell am not going to do it sober. Then it hit him. Call her back? How?