Wyoming (eBook)

Richard G. Tuttle (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
364 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-5973-7 (ISBN)

Infos

Patrick Flaherty is a young man dealing with chrometophobia - an irrational aversion to money. He lives as a subsistence farmer and hunter near Coolidge, Wyoming, a small town nestled between the high plains and the Bighorn Mountains. But Patrick isn't a hermit - he's a part of his community, and his friends and neighbors love having him around. Patrick is arrested outside his cabin by federal agents on a cold afternoon in January, and faces a criminal trial in federal court in Casper, Wyoming. The charge is tax evasion, based upon his alleged failure to report income from bartering. His biggest problem - the law and the facts are pretty much on the government's side. His biggest advantage - Patrick's lawyer at trial is Anita Boyle, a small town solo practitioner who will never, ever back down from a fight.

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Patrick Flaherty is a young man dealing with chrometophobia - an irrational aversion to money. He has chosen to live as a subsistence farmer and hunter near Coolidge, Wyoming, a small town nestled between the high plains and the Bighorn Mountains. But Patrick isn't a hermit - he's a part of his community, and his friends and neighbors love having him around. In Washington, the current administration is fed up with Congressional gridlock on tax reform. To achieve "e;revenue enhancement"e; in the absence of Congressional action, the Treasury Department and the Department of Justice have identified taxable transactions in the deep recesses of the tax code that taxpayers have been under-reporting. The government is determined to pursue high-profile criminal prosecutions to increase voluntary reporting and compliance. Soon after the new policy is disseminated to IRS agents across the country, Special Agent Arthur Bolton finds himself on a barstool in "e;Cousin Clem's,"e; the noisiest bar in Coolidge. Patrick Flaherty is sitting next to him, and they are talking about life and football. In passing, Patrick describes how he looks for opportunities to do favors for his friends and neighbors, and his friends and neighbors find opportunities to feed him and to provide food and fencing for his animals. What Special Agent Bolton sees in Patrick's description is taxable bartering - which, it turns out, the suspect has failed to report on federal tax returns. Bolton alerts his superiors in Denver and Washington, and, at the request of the U.S. Department of Justice, a grand jury in Wyoming quickly hands up an indictment. Patrick is arrested outside his cabin on a cold afternoon in January, and faces a criminal trial in federal court in Casper, Wyoming. His biggest problem - the law and the facts are pretty much on the government's side. His biggest advantage - Patrick's lawyer at trial is Anita Boyle, a small town solo practitioner who will never, ever back down from a fight.

Textauszug

Chapter 8

It was Friday night at 8:00. Every seat at Cousin Clem’s was filled, people were two-deep at the bar, and conversations were shouted. Maybe a hundred people. Two-and-a-half percent of the population of Coolidge, by Pat’s math, although he knew he wasn’t accounting for people who might have come in from inner- and outer-ring suburbs. But there weren’t any – suburbs, that is -- so he stuck with his original calculation.

Clem’s sound system behind the bar was playing country music, but it was drowned out by all the people. On average, the people at Clem’s were happier on Friday than they were on Wednesday or Thursday. Work was done for the week.

The bar was big and L-shaped. There were fifteen seats running down the long side, and four seats around the corner to the right, as you were facing. There was a small stage set in the back wall, so that the patron in the last seat at the toe of the “L,” could swivel all the way around, look a little left, and enjoy the best seat in the house, five feet from the show. Three Toe Joe was setting up, and Patrick had finished his solo set an hour before. There was a 20 x 20 dance floor out in front of the stage, and tables at the back of the dance floor. In the corner across the room from the stage there was a pinball machine, a video poker game, and a dart board.

The entrance to Clem’s was in the middle of the wall facing the bar. There was an outside door and then an inside door, with an alcove-y kind of thing between the doors to keep the weather out. There were a couple of rows of tables between the door and the bar. The bathrooms were all the way to the left as you came in, and the door to the kitchen was between the bathrooms and the end of the bar. The kitchen served burgers, hot sausages on rolls, chicken Caesar wraps, chicken fingers, Buffalo wings, French fries, basic sandwiches, a soup of the day, and pie and ice cream for dessert.

Two bartenders, Clem and Syrena, worked the weekend crowd. If they started to get behind, Claire, Clem’s wife and co-owner, would come out of the kitchen and help pour drinks. Olivia and Edie made the food. The names and identities of the two servers working the tables varied, but they were always teenaged daughters or sons of regulars. There was one dishwasher – Silent Al, who smoked Kools outside on his break, in any weather. Patrick was carrying something out back for Claire one night, when he stumbled over Al’s ankles. They started talking, and Al surprised Patrick with some observations about east-Asian art. Patrick wasn’t surprised that Al knew about east-Asian art. He was surprised that Al had said anything at all. Al, like Pat, was single and lived alone. He had been stationed in Okinawa in the 70’s.

The four seats on the short side of the “L” were referred to collectively as the “dais.” On an ordinary night, the dais held only First Cousins, patrons who had been with Clem since the day he opened thirty years ago. Cousins who had been flagged and ejected were referred to, of course, as “First-Cousins-once-removed,” or “First-Cousins-twice-removed.” Clem’s was not Chicago, and the First Cousins weren’t jerkoffs. If you were new to the bar and you sat in one of their seats, you’d get an earful of stories everyone else had heard a million times, but they wouldn’t ask you to move.

Second Cousins were long-time regulars who sat on the long side of the bar. Pat had only been coming to Clem’s for seven years, but he considered himself a Second Cousin.

This was a mid-September Friday, the 18th. Patrick picked up his conversation with Harry where it had left off the day before, each shouting in the other’s ear to get over the sound of the music.

“Fuck if I know why the Broncos didn’t draft a cover corner. They’re getting killed deep.” Harry Detmer, standing by Patrick’s stool to make his point, was upset about the defense in the first two games.

“They had other needs,” replied Patrick. “I’m more concerned about the D-line. They’re not generating any pressure, and you’re gonna get hurt deep when you give ‘em all day to throw.”

Their conversation would still be going on tomorrow. In eastern Wyoming, the “home” teams for professional football, as determined by the live feeds provided by the networks, are Denver in the AFC and (usually) Minnesota in the NFC. But there are as many Green Bay, Dallas, and Seattle fans as there are Vikings or Broncos fans, and no strict lines. Coolidge is different – only the Broncos matter in Coolidge. On an average Sunday, the town might as well sit in the parking lot of Mile High Stadium in Denver (no one calls it Empower Field).

Clem clicked wooden nickels onto the bar in front of Harry and Patrick. “Frog,” he said. Frog Adderly was a First Cousin who had bought a round for all of the First and Second Cousins. “Thanks Frog,” said everybody. The wooden nickel signified the recipient’s impending entitlement to a drink of his or her choice. The other bars in Coolidge used an upside-down shot glass to signify the same thing, but Clem had learned to use wooden nickels in Montreal, and he stuck with his system. Frog had no special reason to buy a round. He was looking at his friends around him, and was moved to the gesture. He owned one of the town’s two gas stations, the Cenex, and he could afford it. Every one of the First Cousins, and many of the Second Cousins, would buy a round that evening, because they wanted to, and because they could afford it. The wooden nickels accumulated quickly, even for somebody who was drinking fast.

After he finished the beer that Frog had bought, Patrick headed over to the stage and helped Three Toe Joe finish setting up. Patrick ran the sound check at 8:45, making sure that the vocals and guitars were balanced. They didn’t usually mic the drums in Clem’s, because the room wasn’t big enough to call for it. Toby made himself heard without amplification. Patrick plugged Ray Tillson’s iPhone into the sound board, so that they’d have recorded music before they started and during their breaks.

Looking around at ten minutes of nine, Patrick noticed that the Girls were out in force – no AWOL’s. When the band started, they would form their circle on the dance floor, eight women in all, all facing inward. Ranging in age from 25 to 41, and in height from 5’0” to 6’0”, they would move to Three Toe Joe’s standard opening number, “Pour Some Sugar on Me” by Def Leopard. Toby Ernst, the drummer, sang the lead vocal, which would be the only lead vocal he would sing all night. “Sing” in a loose sense. He was able to shout it, which was why the song fit his voice. Their second song was usually “Put Some Drive in Your Country,” by Travis Tritt.

The Girls used to call themselves the “Wonder Women,” but a consensus ultimately formed within the group that they were going out on Friday nights to be with the girls, not with the “Women” – too formal -- and the new group identifier evolved. They were aware that their circle discouraged requests from any male in the room to ask one of them to dance. But Friday at Clem’s was their group time. They looked forward to it all week, and they took charge of the bar while that circle lasted, typically less than an hour, till the band’s first break. One would have thought – or at least Patrick would have thought – that the symbiotic dependence between the Girls and the band would have resulted in one or two relationships between individual Girls and band members. Strangely, only one or two Girls had ever known one or two Joes in the Biblical sense, and only very late in the evening after other options had been exhausted. The fact is, Ray, Ray and Toby were playing music on a Friday night because their social skills were notably weak – hiding behind drums or a guitar is easier than making conversation, and the higher-status males in the room were throwing darts, not singing. And besides, Ray Bando and Ainslee had been together for almost a year at that point, and Ray was loyal.

Patrick, at the sound board, actually had a better relationship with the Girls than did any of the other three. After the circle dancing was done, they would come to talk to him at the sound board in ones and twos, yelling over the music. He didn’t know it, but he was the subject of frequent conversations among the Girls, and most had considered the “what ifs.” They thought Patrick was hot, but he was also different, and they liked that. He would ask for a dance every once in a while, which they liked even more. But for well-known reasons, he had never bought drinks for any of them -- which they didn’t like.

Occasionally, the Girls would go on road trips to Sheridan, Billings, Buffalo, or even once to Casper. On those occasions, they would refer to themselves as the Coolidge Girls, because they were proud of their town. The trips made for great stories. Like the one when Andi McIntyre, their acknowledged Queen Bee, threw her drink on a bouncer in Billings, with the owner standing right there, because the bouncer called her a bitch. Such was the force of Andi’s personality that she persuaded the owner to tell the bouncer to apologize, and the Coolidge Girls were allowed to stay. Andi had once asked Patrick out, despite the difference in their ages (she was 38 at the time, and he was 27). But Patrick was going out with Doreen, and had to say no. Andi never took it personally, and continued to ensure that Patrick was viewed with high approval among her group.

What was really fun about the Girls, finally, and what everybody acknowledged, was that they danced the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 2.4.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-5973-9 / 1098359739
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-5973-7 / 9781098359737