American Salvage

by Bonnie Jo Campbell

  Slocum unzipped Cole’s jacket, found pockets containing stacks of twenties, fifties, hundreds. He didn’t bother with the envelope full of checks. He reached into Cole’s pants’ pockets, took a wad of bills from each side. The money didn’t all fit in the pockets of Slocum’s jacket and jeans, so he pulled off a hunk of ones and let them fly in the wind, let them slap against the naked-lady statue and catch in the bare bushes.

  He left the man in the snow beside the tow truck and backed down the gravel driveway lined with pines, felt relief when the Jeep’s tires hit asphalt. An hour later, he entered Wanda’s house by the kitchen door, quietly so as not to wake the kids. She was lying on the couch holding a book on her chest. When she sat up, he tossed the cash and a bag of meth he’d bought onto the velvety cushion beside her. She put the book down.

  “There’s your house payment, babe.”

  “Look at you,” she said, but she was looking at the money. With two fingers she lifted a fifty-dollar bill from the stack and held it away from herself. “Willie, this money’s covered with blood.”

  “Sorry about that.” Slocum looked at his hands, which were also covered with blood.

  “We can wash it in the sink,” Wanda said.

  “How are the kids?”

  “They’re not here. My sister took them for the night because some bitch from Social Services came by. I want to know who the fuck reported me.”

  “I can’t imagine who would do that, honey.”

  “Well, somebody did. I told the bitch if she didn’t have a warrant she’d better get the hell off my property.”

  “You don’t got to worry about nothing anymore. I’m going to take care of you.”

  “Yeah, right, Willie. You’re a regular knight in shining fucking armor.”

  When Wanda noticed the plastic bag, she raised her eyebrows, slid out the tinfoil package, and unfolded it.

  “Something’s shining here,” she said cheerfully and patted the couch, inviting Slocum to sit beside her. “Shall we smoke it, my dear? Or shall we shoot it?”

  Some people said Wanda was mean, but Slocum loved his woman, loved that he could enter her house without knocking, loved the smart, funny things she said. He would do anything for her.

  Johnny Cole stopped answering the salvage yard phone the next morning, because he was tired of trekking into the pole building to say King hadn’t shown up yet. It wasn’t any warmer inside, because King wasn’t there to start the fire in the wood stove. At ten o’clock, Johnny began stripping an Oldsmobile: catalytic converter for its platinum, starter to sell to the rebuild guy, aluminum radiator good enough to resell rather than scrap, tires too worn to bother with. On other cars he might save hood ornaments or yank carburetors if they were Holley or Edelbrock. Even stainless steel brake lines sometimes, when the scrap price was high, although the brake fluid would chew up your flesh. Johnny liked that piles of what looked like junk to most people could be worth real money.

  King refused to let Johnny part out foreign cars. Johnny complained about this policy every time somebody came in asking for Honda hubcaps or VW wheels, but King stuck to it. If he towed those cars at all, he took them directly to the shredder, although it meant less money. Johnny didn’t see the difference nowadays, American or Japanese or German. The old diesel VW truck he was fixing up had been made in Pennsylvania, according to the door sticker, and Toyota had recently opened a plant in Kentucky. Slocum had said to Johnny that they should go down there and get jobs, except that Wanda couldn’t legally take her kids out of state.

  At eleven o’clock, King still hadn’t shown up and wasn’t answering his phone—never had that happened in the years Johnny had worked for him—so Johnny closed and locked the yard’s stockade gate and drove out to King’s. There, he found the tow truck with its door hanging open, the bushes decorated with dollar bills, and King Cole lying beside the driveway like a bundle of frozen, bloody rags. Johnny fell to his knees in the snow.

  After three brain surgeries, the doctors determined that Johnny’s uncle was most likely going to live. Johnny’s ma, who was King’s sister, came and went, said there was no sense in just sitting there, but Johnny stayed in the hospital waiting room, drinking coffee and sharing news of King’s condition with everyone who stopped by—mostly women King flirted with and salvage yard regulars. Johnny had never been part of a medical trauma, and he thought somebody should stay alert so that the doctors and nurses would stay alert, too. Early evening on the fourth day, King’s daughter arrived from Virginia, and so Johnny headed to Parker’s garage to get himself something stronger than coffee. When he pulled in the driveway, one bay door was open despite the cold, and Slocum was walking out toward a Ford Bronco. Johnny parked and stumbled in his hurry to reach him.

  “I’m glad to see you,” Johnny said. “I really need to talk to somebody.”

  “Hi, Johnny.” Slocum’s eyes were bloodshot. “You look all dragged out, man.”

  “I’ve been at the hospital for four days, haven’t even taken a shower. Did you hear what happened to my uncle? He got robbed and beat up bad, man, real bad. He’s in a coma.”

  “Yeah, I heard about it. Keep your voice down, Johnny.”

  “There was so much fucking blood, man, and his face—” Johnny choked, but managed to hold back tears. “His brain was coming out through a hole in his head. They’re saying that even if he lives he might be a vegetable for the rest of his life.”

  “It was bound to happen, Johnny, a guy going around with all that cash. You’d have taken the money yourself if you’d had the balls.”

  Johnny had hardly eaten in days, and he felt so dizzy suddenly that he had to reach out and support himself on the Bronco. He said, “You didn’t do it, Slocum. Did you?”

  Because Johnny was small, guys often treated him like a kid, but Johnny had felt a real kinship with Slocum. They’d shared dope and forty-ouncers and stories about missing fathers, about cops and bosses. Johnny had told Slocum how he felt beat down. Slocum had said Johnny had to stick to his principles no matter what. When Johnny had said he didn’t know what his principles were, Slocum had laughed, and Johnny had joined in laughing.

  “People do what they have to do, Johnny,” Slocum said and opened the driver’s-side door of the Bronco. “You can understand that.”

  “Slocum, man, we were just talking that night, you and me, saying crazy shit. I never wanted King to get hurt.”

  “Listen, Johnny, you told me your uncle was screwing you over. Then the very next day he ripped me off on my car.”

  “But the cops are saying this was attempted murder. A person could go to jail for life.”

  Johnny didn’t feel afraid, despite what Slocum might be capable of doing, despite Slocum’s weighing twice as much as he did. Johnny wanted to keep talking until they figured this out, until Johnny could know Slocum was not the monster guilty of this crime. If they talked long enough, they would find the misunderstanding. And King might wake up any minute now and be okay.

  “Listen, Johnny, don’t you think about turning me in. You turn me in, you’re going down, too. If I did it, then you were in on it from the start.”

  “What are you talking about? I didn’t do anything.”

  “I thought you were solid, Johnny. If I think you turned me in, I won’t take it lying down. If I’m taking the stand, you’re going to be the pimple-faced son of a bitch I point out to everybody as my accomplice. Don’t you doubt it for a minute.”

  “But I was just talking that night. We were stoned, Slocum, just saying whatever came into our heads.”

  “I meant everything I said,” Slocum said, “and I wouldn’t have said it if I didn’t think you knew what it meant to be a friend. Listen, Johnny, I’ve got to get back to Wanda now. Social Services is trying to take her kids away, and she’s losing it.”

  Johnny didn’t go into the garage. He watched Slocum peel out of the driveway, and he got into his Nova. On the way back to the hospital, he pulled into a gas station. He cou
ld barely see the numbers on the pay phone when he punched 911. He told the operator Slocum might have beaten up King, and then he hung up. In the hospital parking lot, he imagined Slocum’s hands on his neck.

  He leaned out of the driver’s side door and puked.

  “It’s a miracle Mr. Cole’s alive,” a doctor testified at Slocum’s trial ten months later. He said King Cole survived because he’d been lying on his side in densely packed snow, so that the cold and the pressure had minimized the bleeding. The doctor said that Cole didn’t freeze to death because he’d managed to pull the truck’s seat cover over his body and he’d held his hands against his belly.

  The doctor explained to the jury that Cole would never fully regain his lost verbal and cognitive abilities or his sense of smell or taste. On cross-examination, the doctor said he was indeed surprised that King Cole had resumed driving his tow truck.

  Johnny was sitting beside King. He took off his VW cap, wished for King’s sake he had worn his Chevy Like a Rock hat. He put his cap back on, tried to stop his foot from tapping. King sat motionless beside Johnny, and although the courtroom was plenty warm, he wore a new insulated leather American Salvage jacket like the one he had been wearing when he was beaten up, but Johnny carried the cash now, deposited it in the bank each night. Scars the color of power-steering fluid stood out along King’s hairline on the left side, from Slocum’s pipe and the surgeons’

  tools. His hair and beard were coming in gray, and Johnny needed to remind him to go to the barber to get his black touched up—King seemed to feel better when he at least looked the same as before.

  For King Cole it had been ten months of learning again how to dress himself, how to shop for food, and how to force his mouth and tongue around words that used to come easy.

  For Johnny it had been ten months of working by himself in the salvage yard, scrapping out metal, cleaning up and organizing the place. It had been ten months of sick anticipation, waiting for the cops to pick him up, but they never did, and Johnny never heard a word from Slocum, who was no doubt saving everything for the courtroom. Johnny’s acne kept getting worse, and he’d weighed only a hundred and twenty pounds last time he stepped onto the scrap scale.

  King took the stand on the first day. Under questioning, in his slurred speech, he said, “I guess my brain’s messed up. I don’t talk right anymore.”

  “How are you doing with your alphabet?” the prosecutor asked.

  “I got a, b, c, but not what comes next,” King said, stroking his long beard and then shaking his head in frustration. “I know it, but can’t spit it out.”

  “What about writing? Can you write?”

  “My nephew Johnny has to write shit down for me.”

  When the prosecutor asked King how his life had changed as a result of the beating, King said, “The ladies don’t act the same with me. They don’t want nothing to do with me except to feel sorry for me.”

  Johnny knew that several women had offered to help King, even to stay with him when he first came home from the hospital, but he told them he needed no help. Now that King’s daughter had gone back to her husband and kids in Virginia and Johnny’s ma had moved to Ohio with Johnny’s little sister, King would accept help only from Johnny, and then only if Johnny made it seem like no big deal. First thing Johnny did every day, since they had reopened the salvage yard to regular business three months ago, was call King and tell him to wake up and eat some breakfast.

  When King got to the yard, Johnny checked that his buttons were buttoned right and his paperwork was in order for the shredder, where he hauled the cars after Johnny stripped them.

  The defense lawyer looked like a drinker, Johnny thought, like someone who would come home with his ma from the bar and slip out before morning. He asked King, “What do you remember about the afternoon and night of the assault?”

  “I don’t remember nothing after lunch,” King said. Johnny could see he was making an effort to pronounce each word.

  “So you don’t remember seeing Mr. Slocum at all that day. Is that right?”

  King always claimed to remember nothing, but Johnny wondered if someday a brain cell would reignite, the way a fire you thought was out sometimes left a spark that could rekindle and burn a house to the ground. When Johnny had finally charged up his phone a week after the assault, he’d gotten the message from King, saying, “Johnny, some big dumb friend of yours is outside here saying you need a jump. Why the hell don’t you keep your phone charged?” He plugged in his phone every night now, had not missed a single night since King was home from the hospital. He kept saving the message from King, month after month. At first he’d intended to share the message with the police, but cops scared Johnny, and he never could bring himself to tell them about it.

  Johnny slipped his hat off when he went up to take the stand and wished he’d combed his hair once more. He had bought new jeans for the occasion, but he still felt as though he were stained with grease and oil.

  “King was curled up in the snow,” Johnny said under oath and choked on his voice. He felt Slocum’s eyes on him, but he was afraid to look back, afraid of what monster he might see there.

  “He was beat so bad I didn’t recognize him. Head swollen big as a basketball, his hair and beard was soaked with blood and his face was mashed.” Johnny’s heart pounded as he spoke. “I begged him to be alive. I turned him over and there was gray stuff coming out the hole in his head, and I could smell the blood. Then I saw he was breathing.” Johnny had thought the blood and brains smelled like metal and chemicals, something from the salvage yard.

  Johnny wiped at his face and felt Slocum still staring at him, probably enjoying dragging all this out. As far as Johnny could figure, until a year ago, nothing he had ever done or said had made any difference in this life. But what he’d said to Slocum that night at Parker’s about his uncle’s money being in his jacket meant everything, and what he said in this courtroom today meant everything else. Johnny testified that King was different since the assault, that he hardly joked, that he got frustrated and sometimes got lost. Johnny said, “King can’t say ten no more. He says two fives.

  He can’t say radiator. He says that thing in the car you put water in.”

  The prosecutor asked, “Did you know the defendant, William Slocum Jr.?”

  Johnny meant to say yes, he knew Slocum, and then he would say, yes, he’d told Slocum about the money, but that was all. Johnny would explain how he would never have hurt his uncle.

  He tried to form the word yes.

  “No,” Johnny said. “I mean, I know who he is, but I don’t really know him.”

  Slocum crossed his arms over his chest. In his creased green dress shirt, Slocum was the biggest person in the courtroom, bigger even than the cop sitting next to the prosecutor.

  The case against Slocum hit its stride on the second day, when the prosecutor introduced into evidence the galvanized pipe. On the third day, Wanda Jones took the stand. Her cola-colored hair curled neatly onto her neck, her little shoulders pressed out against a soft-looking white sweater, and her make-up was perfect. She had a degree in accounting and had worked at a finance company, she said, before she lost her job and took up with William Slocum Jr.

  “Yes, he brought me the money that night. He tossed the bloody money down on my couch.

  I had to wash the cushion afterward.”

  Wanda chewed on the inside of her cheeks as she answered the questions. She pointed out Slocum when asked to do so.

  “What happened to your children, Ms. Jones?”

  “Social Services took them away.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the meth.”

  “Do you still use methamphetamine?”

  “No, I’ve stopped. I’m trying to get my kids back.” Wanda’s hand trembled when she pushed her hair over her ear. She would not look at Slocum. She kept her eyes downcast in a way that Johnny thought made her look pretty, and she hardly opened her mouth when she talked.
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br />   Slocum stared at her as though she were a life raft out of his reach and drifting farther and farther from him in the water.

  Her testimony went long, because the prosecutor had her read aloud from a letter Slocum had sent from jail suggesting that he might try to escape during the trial. “Have your car parked on a main road. Please be ready to help me, Wanda. Please don’t betray me,” the letter said. “Burn this letter. I love you more than my own life.”

  “Do you love Mr. Slocum?” the prosecutor asked.

  “No. He’s a pig.”

  “Why were you with him?”

  “For the meth.”

  “Did you encourage Mr. Slocum to rob Mr. Cole to make your house payment?”

  “No. I told him to get a job.”

  On cross-examination, Wanda Jones admitted that she hoped testifying would help her get her kids back. When asked again if she had encouraged Slocum to steal money for her, she said, “I never told him to steal it. He got the idea from the junk man’s nephew.” She pointed at Johnny.

  “Hatchet face over there.”

  The prosecutor and the big police officer glanced over at Johnny.

  Johnny shook his head no. Wanda crossed her arms, and her lips peeled back to reveal gray-brown teeth to the courtroom. She said, “Oh, you think you’re so good and holy, taking care of your uncle. You’re just as bad as Slocum.”

  The judge, a slim, gray-haired man about King Cole’s age, said, “Please just respond to the questions, Ms. Jones.”

  People in the room looked at Johnny. Everybody except King looked at Johnny. King kept staring at Wanda, as though fascinated by her doll-like figure. The judge announced that Slocum, the final witness, would testify after lunch recess. Johnny considered getting into his Nova and driving south to Ohio or Kentucky. Instead he drank a bottle of pop and smoked cigarettes with a courthouse custodian. When it was time, he slogged back into the courtroom and sat beside King.

  Slocum felt like a bull for slaughter swaying above his shackled ankles as he shuffled to the witness stand. His dress shirt and khakis were wrinkled. He had demanded a jury trial on principle, had refused a plea bargain, but now the evidence against him was overwhelming. They’d found the pipe with fingerprints and bloody hair where he’d dropped it through the ice on the Kalamazoo River—who could have known there were two layers of river ice with an air space between them?