Mausoleum by Justin Scott Page B

who.
    â€œSomething from inside?”
    â€œNaw. I didn’t have any problems inside.”
    That I believed. Sherman was just too ornery for fellow prisoners to bully and too anti-social to hook up with a gang.
    â€œSo how’d they try to kill you?”
    â€œHack-sawed the brake cables on the Harley.”
    â€œAre you sure?”
    â€œYou’d be sure if you lost both brakes doing 90 on Route 7, came round a bend, and found a semi jackknifed across both lanes.”
    â€œHow come it didn’t work?”
    â€œWhat do mean?”
    â€œYou’re still living.”
    â€œOh. Yeah, well there’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
    â€œHow’d you stop?”
    â€œCouldn’t stop.”
    â€œThen what happened?”
    â€œI went under him.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œSlid.”
    I tried to picture Sherman and seven-hundred pounds of motorcycle sliding sideways under a trailer truck like a runner stealing second base. Failing, I asked, “How did you pull out of the slide?”
    â€œGot lucky,” said Sherman.
    â€œSo you’re still a little shaken up.”
    â€œI ain’t shaken up.”
    â€œYou just said you were stressed.”
    â€œI’m stressed, ‘cause I don’t know what he’s plannin’ next.”
    â€œDid you tell Ollie?”
    â€œYeah, right. Tell Ollie.”
    â€œCould I see the cables?”
    â€œAlready changed them out.”
    â€œWhere’d you put the broken ones?”
    â€œOn the junk pile.”
    â€œLet’s have a look.”
    â€œYou don’t believe me?” Sherman asked dangerously.
    â€œI want to see for myself.”
    We said good-bye to Wide Greg and drove to Sherman’s junk pile which contained enough parts to build half of many vehicles and machines. It was in and around the sagging barn behind his mother’s house trailer. Any Chevalley worth his name had a heap like it, though rarely as deep. Sherman’s had been started by his grandfather, who had inherited items from his grandfather, so that the green 1975 Jeep pickup front fender visible under a defunct cement mixer represented a mid point in a buried time line that probably originated with a chrome bumper from a ‘37 De Soto. We found his discarded Harley brake cables tangled in a coil of copper cable that looked suspiciously like a grid element strung between poles to transmit electricity. “Aren’t you taking a chance keeping this ‘scrap?’ What if Connecticut Light and Power comes looking?”
    â€œI gotta sit on it. Copper just took a nosedive. Goddamned commodity speculators, biggest thieves on the planet.”
    We untangled the Harley cables and had a look in the daylight. There were three lines, two for the front brake calipers, one for the rear. Sherman showed me where they had snapped. If it were only one I would have suggested they just broke from wear. But all three had broken. “See this little nick?” said Sherman. “That’s where they cut it—you see here’s the cut, here’s the break. And look at this scrape. The saw slipped, and he went back and finished here. Right?”
    â€œYou really ought to show this to Ollie.”
    â€œI’ll handle this myself.”
    I asked how, if he didn’t know who was after him. But there was no talking to Sherman when he made his mind up. I was quite sure that he knew exactly who had done it. I asked again who it might be, but he still wouldn’t tell me, so all I could say, “If I were you I’d keep my eyes open.”
    Sherman yawned and pressed large fingers to his temples. “Man, my head hurts.” Then he changed the subject. “Wha’d you want to talk about?”
    â€œRemember Sunday you had the gas engine at the Notables?”
    â€œNotables?”
    â€œIn the Cemetery.”
    â€œSure. I had the saw, too. Really cool. Did you hear that sucker