Blacktop Wasteland

by S. A. Cosby

  “Thinking about what?”

  “Going to Boonie. Looking for a job. You know that’s not an option, right? You were blessed. We all was. You never got caught and you got out and you opened the garage. That’s a blessing, baby,” she said. Her light eyes searched his dark ones. They’d been together since he was nineteen and she was eighteen. Married since they both were twenty-three. Almost fifteen years together. She knew him about as well as anyone did.

  A lot of couples liked to say they couldn’t lie to each other. That their partner could spot their falsehoods from a mile away. That line of thinking was a one-way street between him and Kia. He knew when she had gone out drinking with her girls. He knew when she had eaten the last chocolate chip cookie. Her face was an open book and he had read every page a long time ago. He hated lying to her, but the ease with which he could do it never failed to shock him. Then again, he did have a lot of practice with mendacity.

  “No. I’m not thinking of it. Did it cross my mind? Yeah. Just like buying a lottery ticket crossed my mind,” he said. He hugged her close to him and closed his eyes.

  “It’s gonna be alright. I’ll figure out something,” he said.

  “I got a call from the dentist yesterday. Javon might need braces,” she said. Beauregard squeezed her tight but didn’t say anything.

  “What are we gonna do, baby? I can try to pick up some extra shifts at the hotel,” she said.

  “That ain’t gonna buy braces,” he said. Silence enveloped them both. Then Kia cleared her throat.

  “You know you could sell—” But Beauregard cut her off midsentence.

  “The Duster ain’t for sale,” he said. Kia laid her head on his chest. He slipped his arm around her shoulders and watched the blades on the ceiling fan spin until he drifted off to sleep.

  * * *

  “Daddy. Daddy. Daddy.”

  Beauregard opened his eyes. It seemed like he had just closed them five seconds ago. Darren was standing by the bed. He was holding his favorite toy. A twelve-inch-tall Batman action figure. His tiny brown hand gripped the Caped Crusader in one hand and a rapidly disintegrating biscuit in the other.

  “Hey, Stink,” Beauregard said. His youngest got Kia’s eyes and his complexion. Powerful green eyes that contrasted with his dark chocolate skin.

  “Mama say come get your food before she gotta take us to Aunt Jean,” Darren said. A smile flickered across his lips. Beauregard figured Kia had used colorful language when she had instructed Darren to wake him. Whenever anyone cursed, Darren was overcome with the giggles. They didn’t subside quickly either. Judging by the slight grin on his son’s face, Kia had probably cussed him out nearly an hour ago.

  “I guess I better get my ass up then,” Beauregard said. Darren exploded in a shower of giggles. Beauregard hopped out of bed and grabbed Darren around the waist. He hoisted the boy off the ground and headed for the kitchen, making airplane noises as he went.

  “Bout time you get your ass up,” Kia said, but there was no malice behind it. It was more for Darren’s benefit than anything else. Darren howled with laughter again.

  “Oooooh, you said bad words,” Darren whimpered between deep breaths. “You going down there!” he exclaimed. Javon was sitting at the small table, lost in his ear buds. Beauregard thought Javon could have passed for his twin when he was that age. Slim and tall with sleepy eyes. He put Darren down and gently plucked Javon on the ear. Javon snapped his head up and pulled out his ear buds.

  “Good morning to you too,” Beauregard said.

  “Y’all finish your biscuits so we can go to Aunt Jean’s,” Kia said. Beauregard grabbed a biscuit and dipped it in the gravy that was in a bowl on the table. He plopped the whole thing in his mouth.

  “I knew I married you for some reason,” he said through a mouthful of bread. Kia snorted.

  “It wasn’t the biscuits,” she said as she slipped by him to put her plate in the sink. He saw her in his mind as the young girl she had been when they first met. She had been dancing on the hood of Kelvin’s car to a funky go-go song. Her wild hair in braids and wearing a black jumper with a white T-shirt. They had all been hanging out at the basketball court in the park near the high school. He had been a teenage ex–juvenile detainee with a two-year-old daughter. She had been an eighteen-year-old high school senior. Three weeks later, they were exchanging promise rings. Four years later, they were married and expecting Javon.

  “Can I go to the shop with you today?” Javon asked. Beauregard and Kia exchanged a glance.

  “Not today,” Beauregard said. A long time ago, when he had worked in a different industry, he had taken great pains to make sure his private and professional lives never shared the same space. He didn’t want that world to touch his family. He didn’t want it to sully them with its filth. He was three years removed from that place, but he knew it still had teeth. He didn’t want it to reach out and bite his boys or Kia. He kept them away from the shop just in case someone from that world came knocking.

  Javon popped in his ear buds and got up from the table. He went and stood by the door. Beauregard knew the boy wanted to hang out with him. He liked cars and he was good with his hands. He hoped Javon would still be interested in cars by the time it was safe enough for him to come by the garage.

  “Come on, Darren, let’s go,” Kia said. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed Beauregard on the lips. He could taste peppermint on her breath. He slipped an arm around her waist and returned her kiss tenfold.

  “Eww,” Darren said. He stuck his tongue out and rolled his eyes.

  “Watch your mouth, boy,” Kia said after she had pulled away from Beauregard.

  “I’ll call you on your lunch break,” Beauregard said.

  “You better,” she said. She and the boys left. School was out, and Kia worked the ten-to-six shift at the Comfort Inn over in Gloucester. Javon wasn’t quite old enough to watch out for himself and his little brother, so while Beauregard and Kia were working, she took the boys to her sister’s place. Jean Brooks ran a hair salon from the back of her house. The boys got to play with their cousins the way Beauregard used to play with Kelvin and his brother Kaden at his Aunt Mara’s house. Kaden had been dead for seven years. He’d been murdered when he was just twenty-three years old in a motel robbery. Word on the street had been that it had been a setup. Kaden and his buddy had been lured to a motel in Church Hill by some party girls they had met in the club. Church Hill was one of the roughest neighborhoods in the city of Richmond. It was so bad the postal service had stopped delivering mail there. They had gone there expecting some casual sex and some bomb-ass weed. What they had gotten were two bullets to the head and a closed-casket funeral.

  When Kelvin and Beauregard had found the two guys that had popped Kaden and his friend, they had tried to shift blame to the girls. Then they had blamed each other. Finally, they had cried for their mothers.

  Beauregard slipped out of his underwear and padded down to the bathroom. He was going to take a shower and head to the garage after making a few stops. As he turned on the water, he heard a chirping coming from the bedroom. It was his cell phone. Kia had taken it out of his pants and put it on the nightstand. He ran to the room and picked it up off the nightstand’s scarred surface. He recognized the number.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello, is this Mr. Beauregard Montage?” a slightly nasal voice asked.

  “Yes, it is, Mrs. Talbot,” he said.

  “Hello, Mr. Montage. It’s Gloria Talbot at Lake Castor Convalescent Home,” she said.

  “I know,” Beauregard said.

  “Oh yes, I’m sorry. Mr. Montage, I’m afraid we have a problem with your mother,” Mrs. Talbot said.

  “Has she verbally abused another aide?” he asked.

  “No, it’s—”

  “Has she peed on someone on purpose again?” he asked.

  “No, it’s nothing like—”

  “Did she call 10 On Your Side again and tell them the staff was beating
her?” he asked.

  “No, no, Mr. Montage, it’s not her behavior … this time. It appears there is a problem with her Medicaid paperwork. We were hoping you could come by in the next few days to discuss it,” Mrs. Talbot said.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “I think it’s best if we discuss it face to face, Mr. Montage.”

  Beauregard closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

  “Okay, I can come in a few hours,” he said.

  “That would be fine, Mr. Montage. We will see you then. Goodbye,” Mrs. Talbot said. The line went dead.

  After his shower, he put on fresh jeans and a button-down short-sleeve shirt with his name over the breast pocket and MONTAGE MOTORS over the other. He made himself a cup of coffee and stood in front of the sink taking quick sips. The house was as quiet as it ever got. Through the window over the sink he could see his backyard. A wooden shed to the right and a basketball hoop to the left. Their property went back into the woods for nearly two hundred yards. Two does were walking across the yard. They stopped every few moments to nibble at the grass. It was so quiet around the house this time of day that the does didn’t seem skittish. They were taking their time, like shoppers at a flea market.

  Beauregard finished his coffee. Once upon a time, he had dreamed of living in a house like this one. A house with running water and a roof that didn’t leak like a sieve. A house where everyone had their own room and there wasn’t a slop bucket in the corner. He put the coffee cup in the sink. He didn’t know what was sadder. That his dreams had been so modest or that they had been so prophetic. That was in the days before his father had disappeared. Seeing him again had taken over the top spot on his wish list. But after all these years, he had learned to accept that some dreams don’t come true.

  He grabbed his keys and his phone and walked out of the house. It was only ten and it was already as hot as hell. When he stepped off the porch, he could feel the sun beating down on him like he owed it money. He hopped in his truck and revved up the engine to get the AC cranking. He backed up, turned around and drove down the driveway, leaving a cloud of dust in his wake.

  He hit the main highway, but instead of turning left toward the garage, he turned right toward the outskirts of town. He cut through Trader Lane and drove past the desiccated husks of several deserted houses. A little bit farther up the road, he passed the abandoned Clover Hill Industrial Park. Years ago, the Powers That Be of Red Hill County tried to reinvent the former farming community as a mecca for manufacturing. They offered fat tax breaks to the corporations, and in turn the corporations offered the town hundreds of jobs. For a while it was a mutually beneficial relationship. Right up until the 2008 recession hit. This was right about the same time the corporations realized they could ship their plants overseas and cut expenses by half while doubling profits.

  The empty buildings stood like forgotten monoliths to a lost civilization. The ice plant, the insulation plant, the flag factory and the elastic plant were hardly discernible anymore. Mother Nature was reclaiming her land with steady, implacable persistence. The pine trees and the dogwoods and the honeysuckle and the kudzu were slowly but surely enveloping the old buildings in an arboreal embrace. Beauregard’s mother had worked at the elastic plant from the time it opened until its untimely demise. Which just happened to be two years before her retirement, but only a week after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. A month later, he had taken his first job. Boonie had set him up with a crew out of Philly who needed a driver. Since he had been the new guy, his cut had only been five grand. That was the going rate, or so they had told him. He had only been seventeen so he didn’t really question it. That was a mistake. He would learn that the going rate was a full share or nothing at all. He didn’t really dwell on it too much. A mistake is a lesson, unless you make the same mistake twice.

  As he got closer to the county line, fields of corn and beans began to dominate the landscape. Residential encroachment hadn’t yet reached this part of town. Eventually some enterprising developer would drop a dozen or so narrow rectangular boxes out here and call it a trailer court.

  He rolled through a narrow curve and spotted the sign. A five-foot-wide saw blade attached to a three-foot-tall metal pole. RED HILL METALS was spelled out on the sign with sections of rebar painted bright red. The saw blade had been painted white, but the paint was peeling like a bad sunburn. Beauregard turned down the gravel driveway. The driveway was buffeted on both sides by enormous blue and white hydrangeas. At the end of the driveway was a set of fifteen-foot-tall chain-link gates. As Beauregard approached, the gates began to roll on large metal caster wheels. Boonie had attached a motion sensor to the gate a few years ago. He’d gotten tired of having to stop working every time someone pulled up with their mama’s old wood stove. Rusted razor wire topped the gate and the equally tall fence that was attached to it. Two dark-skinned men nodded at Beauregard as he drove past them. They were both wielding massive reciprocating saws. A mangled AMC Gremlin appeared to be their intended target.

  Beauregard drove over the ten-foot-wide scale that was embedded in the ground, took a hard left and parked in front of the main office. He got out of the truck and immediately started sweating. The heat had gone from volcano to Hell in the span of twenty minutes. Metallic screams of agony filled the air as the two compactors crushed cars, trucks and the occasional washing machine. Cubes of steel and iron were stacked across the yard like giant dominoes. A graveyard of vehicles rose up from behind the office building as they waited their turn in the maw of Chompy Number One and Chompy Number Two. Kaden had named them on a summer day long ago.

  Beauregard’s Daddy had taken him, Kaden and Kelvin out riding in the Duster that day. “Gotta go see ya Uncle Boonie for a minute, then we can go to the Tastee Freez. Y’all want some whiskey with your milkshakes?” his father had asked with a wink.

  “Yeah!” Kelvin had spoken up. Of course it was Kelvin. He had even raised his hand.

  Beauregard’s father had laughed so hard he had started coughing.

  “Boy, your Mama would have both our asses in a sling. Maybe in a few years.”

  When they had pulled into the yard the three of them had leaned over the front seat to watch the belching, groaning claw crane drop a car into the crusher. It tumbled trunk over hood before slamming into the compactor.

  “Chompy Number One, finish him!” Kaden had howled. Beauregard’s Daddy had told Boonie and the names had stuck. They’d never had that shot of whiskey, though.

  The word “OFFICE” was spelled out on the door using lengths of copper tubing. Beauregard knocked three times on the door in quick succession. You never knew what kind of business was being conducted in there, so it was best to knock.

  “Come on in,” a raspy voice said. Boonie was sitting behind his desk. A slab of iron on four wide metal cylinders. A ragged AC wheezed from the window over his shoulder. It was making more noise than cool air. A smattering of file cabinets and shelves ran along the walls. Boonie smiled.

  “Bug! How the hell you doing? Boy, I ain’t seen you in what? Six months? A year?” Boonie said.

  “Ain’t been that long. Just been busy at the shop.”

  “Aw, I’m just fucking with you, boy. I know you working your ass off over there. I ain’t mad atcha. I just … just seems like you ain’t around like you used to be,” Boonie said. He took off his oil-stained baseball cap and fanned himself. His iron gray flattop contrasted with his coal black skin.

  “I know. How things been around here?”

  “Aw, ya know. Steady. People never run out of junk.”

  Beauregard sat down in a folding chair next to the desk. “Yeah, always got shit to throw away.”

  “How you been? How’s Kia and the boys?”

  “They alright. Darren had to get some glasses and now Javon gotta have some special kind of braces. Kia doing alright. Coming up on five years at the hotel. Anything else going on?” he said.

  Boonie replaced his hat and c
ocked his head at Beauregard. “You asking?” he said.

  Beauregard nodded his head.

  “Not that I ain’t glad to see you cuz you know I am, but I thought you was done,” Boonie said.

  “I’ve just hit a rough patch. Things been kind of tough ever since Precision opened up,” Beauregard said.

  Boonie entwined his fingers and laid them on his prodigious belly.

  “Well, I wish I had something, but things have really dried up these last few years. The Italians got pushed out by the Russians, and the Russians only using their own crews. Shit, Bug, it’s been real quiet. Them Russians coming through sounding like Ivan Koloff trying to be all scary and shit,” Boonie said. He made a face like he had bitten into a rotten apple.

  Beauregard let his hands hang between his knees and lowered his head.

  “You ever thought about going out West? I hear there’s still some work out that way for a fella who know his way around a steering wheel.”

  Beauregard grunted. “My Daddy went out West and didn’t never come back,” he said.

  Boonie sighed. “Your Daddy … your Daddy was one of a kind. I only seen two other men who could handle a car under the hood or behind the wheel like Ant Montage. You one of them. The other one is locked up in Mecklenburg. Your Daddy was as good a driver as he was a friend. And he was a damn good driver,” Boonie said. He pushed his baseball cap back on his head and stared at the aluminum beams in the ceiling.

  Beauregard knew he was seeing it in his mind. Seeing him and his father flying down the road moving moonshine or speeding away from a bank robbery on the streets of Philadelphia, hooting and hollering all the way.

  “You still think he might come back?” Beauregard said.

  “Huh?”

  “Daddy. You still think he might show up on my doorstep one day? Carrying a basketball and bottle of Jack so we can go catch up,” Beauregard said.

  Boonie blew some air between his full lips. “Men like your Daddy, like me, like you used to be, we don’t die in hospital beds. Ant wasn’t perfect. He loved driving, drinking, and women, in that order. He lived life at 100 miles per hour. Men like that, well, they go out on their own terms, usually with a bang. But I tell you what, if he did go out that way, you can bet your ass he took some boys with him. You look so much like him. It’s like he spit you out. But you different. Your Daddy, he just won’t the settling down type. That made things hard for him and your Mama. How is Ella these days?”