Presidio

by Randy Kennedy

Harlan got out and went to the phone booth, leaving the folding door open as he pushed back his hat and put a dime in the slot. Troy stayed in the truck and couldn’t hear the conversation but he didn’t need to; it was short and concluded with Harlan returning the receiver slowly to the hook and walking back to the pickup, scanning the sky reflexively. He said nothing by way of explanation except, “You need to piss before we go on?”

  Troy didn’t answer and Harlan reached to start the truck. But when he turned the key this time, after so many thousands of times of turning it with hope and trepidation, it produced no effect beyond the faint electric report of the starter, which Harlan allowed to spin ineffectually for several seconds before taking his hand off the key and putting it with the other one on the steering wheel. He sat still like this, looking toward the plate-glass front of the store, where the honey-colored light caught the face of a blond grocery clerk leaned against a row of shopping carts, shouldering them slowly toward the door.

  “Well, that’s that,” he announced.

  “That’s what?”

  “That’s it, for the truck.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she’s gone. She ain’t moving from here. Ain’t moving anywhere again.”

  “Get out and pop the hood. I’ll try starting it again.”

  “I’m telling you it’s done for, Troy. There ain’t no use.”

  “What’re you talking about? How do you know that?”

  “Because I know this pickup as well as I know anything in this world. I’d say we were lucky we made it into town.”

  Troy stared at the side of Harlan’s head, at the sweat stains extending out onto the brim of his hat.

  “Get out and look under the goddamned hood, Harlan. See what we need to do to fix it. We can’t just sit here.”

  “That’s all it’s made of, is fixes, Troy. And they’ve done all they’re going to do. It’d take a whole new engine to get it going again. And they stopped making new engines for this pickup when they stopped making the pickup. Which was a long time ago.” He continued to sit with both hands on the steering wheel, staring ahead as if he was still driving. He took his hat off and wiped his forehead and put the hat back on and made a chuckling sound. “Who would’ve thought it would be you and me sitting here again in this old son of a bitch when it finally gave up the ghost?”

  Troy shouldered open his door and stomped out onto the pavement and turned and leaned back in threateningly. “Goddamn it, Harlan! We’ve made it thirty fucking miles. What the hell are we going to do now?”

  Harlan reached over and opened his door and got out, too. “I don’t know about you, but I’m going inside to get myself something cool to drink. You want anything?” He looked Troy straight in the eye and walked unhurriedly into the store, taking the pickup key with him and dropping it and its old diamond-shaped leather key chain ceremonially into the outdoor trash can.

  Troy watched him go and stalked up to the truck and smashed the heel of his hand as hard as he could against the high arch of the fender, which received the blow with the solidity of stone despite all the years of rust and bodywork. He hadn’t expected the pickup to get them very far, but he had hoped at least to Midland, maybe Fort Stockton. If they had made it to a motel, he might have been able to do something. But not here in the middle of town on a Saturday afternoon in screaming daylight, with witnesses idling by, finger-waving from their steering wheels, nothing better to do than gape and try to place the two strangers they saw in the parking lot of the Shurfine.

  Troy looked into the store, which was almost empty, save for two women cashiers conversing across their registers. He looked up and down the street and he could taste the familiar taste of fear in his mouth as he walked briskly over to the passenger side of the car on the far corner of the lot, a nicely kept purple Chrysler Newport that probably belonged to the owner of the store. Keeping his head upright, he cast his eyes down through the window at the steering shaft. No key in the ignition. All doors locked, incomprehensibly.

  He went back to the truck and sat crossways on the seat, staring at the Newport, trying to think. After a few minutes a car pulled into the space next to him, a big Ford Country Squire station wagon, powder blue with wood-panel side detail, driven by a woman with a pretty face whose blond hair was pinned up inside a chiffon scarf against the wind. Troy nodded to her as she got out and walked into the store, leaving two little boys behind in the front seat, brothers or even twins who seemed to be Mennonite, though the woman, in a nice pantsuit, did not. The boys, maybe seven or eight years old, had pale complexions and close-cropped white-blond hair. They wore the same, plain Western-pattern shirts worn by other small-town boys their age but their shirts were somehow instantly recognizable as being homemade, marking the boys as members of their sect.

  The woman left the station wagon running but the driver’s-side window was rolled down and over the motor Troy could hear the two boys, up on their knees on the passenger side of the bench seat, peering over the wide dashboard into the store:

  “Hey, Jacob, I’ve a question for you: Which one came first, the chicken or the egg?” asked the nearest of the boys, the bigger of the two, who had a high forehead and wore cheap oval plastic-framed glasses that looked as if they had been made for a girl.

  The other boy, a slightly smaller version of the first except that he was plump, with a cushiony freckled face, ignored the question at first, pointedly, but then he seemed unable to resist playing his part in a ritual he knew would end badly.

  “Chicken.”

  “Nope.”

  “The egg?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “Well which one, then?”

  “Neither one, you dumbass, God came first!” And as the boy said it he swiftly and viciously punched the other boy with a closed fist on the hard, lean stretch of his upper left arm, setting off an ear-piercing wail.

  “You frogged me, you bastard!” the aggrieved brother screamed. “You four-eyed fucking bastard!” The two of them plunged from sight as they wrestled down into the footwell, where their shrieks tailed off into desperate grunts and pants and the sounds of blows that caused the station wagon to wobble on its tires. Then the driver’s-side door burst open and the one with no glasses flew out in a blur, running low to the ground like a quail. He circled the back of the car and broke toward the store, pursued closely by his attacker, who stumbled on some loose gravel but righted himself and then began to apologize loudly, pleading for silence as the first boy struggled to enter the store, hauling back on the heavy glass-and-metal door, whose hydraulic closers seemed to be conspiring to keep him from the arms of justice.

  Troy looked again into the store and saw Harlan standing at one of the cash register counters with his hat in his hand, talking to the woman checking him out. Before the second boy had passed fully through the door, Troy stood up and walked in rapid but measured strides to the back of the pickup and swung his suitcase out of the bed and grabbed Harlan’s canvas rucksack and transferred it into the same hand and then with his free hand he opened the back door of the station wagon and threw both bags onto the seats. He pushed the door shut without slamming it and executed a series of swift, gracefully choreographed movements that would have impressed anyone if anyone had been looking outside to see them. He opened the driver’s-side door and slipped down into the front seat behind the wheel, pulling the door shut gently beside him and dropping the gearshift into reverse. He backed out rapidly, taking the wagon in a right-hand crescent across the empty parking lot and then pulling it forward just past the rear of the pickup into the meager camouflage it provided between himself and the store windows. Harlan had taken two steps out of the store when he saw Troy sprawled across the wide front seat of the station wagon holding the passenger door open for him.

  “Get in, Harlan.”

  Harlan stopped on the sidewalk, holding a Dr. Pepper bottle in each hand by the neck and a bag of Fritos under his left armpit. He bent down slowly and set bo
th bottles on the concrete.

  “Christ, Troy. What in the hell’re you doing?”

  “We can’t stay here to talk it over this time, Harlan. Get in the car, goddamn it. Hurry now.” He was looking up at his brother almost penitently from the awkward posture into which he had contorted himself in order to keep the passenger door pushed partway open.

  “Troy Alan! Jesus, you can’t do this here, in the middle of Tahoka. I probably know that lady in there or know people who do.”

  “That lady’s gonna have her car back just as soon as I can find another one, no harm, no foul. She’ll have a hell of a story to tell people.”

  “I’m gonna go in there and tell her right now,” Harlan said but he didn’t move from the place where he stood between the two full cola bottles, like someone about to perform a carnival trick with them.

  “Your bag’s in the backseat of this car with me, and if I get stopped before we get out of here the first thing I’m going to say is you and I did this together and you went chickenshit and your ass will end up in jail just like mine.”

  Harlan seemed to think about this. “Not for as long.”

  “Long enough.”

  “I guess that’s a chance I’ll take.”

  Troy looked wildly behind Harlan into the store and gritted his words down into his teeth. “You know, Harlan, that Boy Scout uniform you’ve been wearing your whole goddamned life is getting pretty small on you, don’t you think? Have you got any better ideas? Do you want to keep losing everything in your life?”

  A new-model two-tone Dodge pickup rolled slowly into the parking lot, driven by an elderly man hunched under a silver felt cowboy hat, alongside a hunched woman who was clearly his wife. As older couples in small towns sometimes do, they pulled into a parking space and stopped and sat with the engine idling and the windows rolled up, showing no signs of speaking to each other or preparing to go into the store. The air-conditioned pickup cab seemed to serve as an extension of the seating arrangement in their living room, where they probably sat most of the day in the same proximity, rarely speaking there, either.

  The man looked across toward Harlan standing in the parking lot and the wife looked, too. They both nodded at him and turned to face placidly forward again, either failing to notice Troy in the car or being unable to make immediate sense of the scene that presented itself to them.

  Harlan nodded back to them instinctively. Keeping his feet planted as if they were wedged down inside a hole, he turned his upper body awkwardly to look behind him into the store. He heard Troy’s voice again over the station wagon motor. “You’ve got about ten seconds before she looks out here and sees her car with somebody else driving it and starts to scream. And you’ve got five seconds before I drive off and leave you here to explain it all.”

  A sound nearby caused Harlan to start. The old man had finally opened his door and stepped down from his pickup and was making his way slowly to the front of it while his wife remained inside. Except for the addition of a khaki zippered windbreaker, the man wore clothes identical to Harlan’s—khaki pants, khaki work shirt, black belt, black boots. But his clothes looked new and his hat was a dress Stetson, crisply blocked, straight and high on his head. He was very old but something about the way he carried himself, about the pitch of the hat, conveyed an air of authority that announced him as a rancher. Ranchers exuded this kind of imperious air in West Texas because they knew the land had once belonged to them, before it was fenced and parceled out by plow hands. They still spent their lives having to answer to almost no one but themselves and the land—to God also, presumably; maybe to their wives and children, but not often, and not necessarily; maybe to cattle buyers, though in good years it was the other way around; and to the sheriff if they got into trouble, though that was a rite of manhood. Looking at the old man as he ambled slowly forward, fixing Harlan with an implacable gaze, Troy thought: You’re the one, aren’t you? I come from farm people. It was always going to be one of you fucking ranchers. You’ll get me caught, won’t you, you arrogant old horse-riding prick?

  “How y’all?” the man called out loudly to Harlan as he rounded the pickup and headed in his direction, a vacant friendly look on his face.

  Harlan stared back at the old man with a look of mounting panic in his eyes.

  “Just fine and you?” he replied.

  “Oh fine, just fine.”

  The man had thick green-tinted eyeglasses, the kind worn by old men with glaucoma, and large flesh-colored hearing aids looped over his ears. He stood rigidly erect but took careful little child’s steps in his polished riding-heeled boots.

  “This heat get y’all yet? Sure is something, ain’t it?”

  “It sure is,” Harlan replied, hearing himself say things he had said his whole life except the words seemed to come from a script now. “Never seen anything like it.”

  “Boy howdy,” said the old man, approaching.

  Every platitude landed like a bullet fired at close range, just missing. The man stopped to look at Troy and nodded to him but he continued to address Harlan, as if he was uncertain how to converse with a grown man lying across a station wagon seat. “Your buddy over there looks like he’s in a hurry.” Troy stared at Harlan without moving or displaying any acknowledgment of the old man’s presence.

  Harlan couldn’t believe what was happening to him. He couldn’t believe what he knew he had to do. He bent down suddenly and retrieved both Dr. Peppers and carried them at an awkward loping clip across the parking lot toward the open station wagon door.

  “Yes sir, we are in kind of a hurry. We was supposed to be all the way down to Big Spring by now. Got a late start.”

  Putting his hands on his hips, the old man shook his head warily. “Well, you watch. Highway patrol’s real bad down there, just a-layin’ in wait,” he said. “Don’t you get yourself no ticket.”

  Harlan answered without looking back at the old man. “We’ll sure watch. You take care now.”

  He tried to hand one of the bottles to Troy but Troy had already put the car in gear and started it rolling toward the road and Harlan had to jump in, holding the bottles in one hand and pulling his legs in, swinging the door closed while somehow keeping the bag of Fritos clamped against his body. The tires of the station wagon momentarily lost traction on the gravel and kicked up a caliche cloud that rolled around the legs of the old man. The man didn’t wave but just stood and watched the station wagon wonderingly as it tore away.

  Troy goosed the gas and looked over at Harlan to make sure he was really in the car.

  “Okay!” he said. “Okay now!”

  Harlan’s breath heaved as if he had been sprinting. He looked out the window, watching the old man recede. “Jesus Christ. What’s okay? You tell me what’s okay. Where the hell are we going to go now?”

  Troy reached up to adjust the rearview mirror and looked behind him. “Not through Big Spring, for damned sure. That old man will have us pegged around there. We need to double back to a place where I left something we need. Look behind us, Harlan. Tell me what you see.”

  Harlan’s heart thundered in his ears. His brain swam in fury and exhilaration, the exhilaration intensifying the fury. He turned around on the seat and scoured what was visible through the big back window, onto which his mind projected scenes from movies he remembered, scenes that never ended well. But out the window he saw only what he had seen his whole life, wherever he had been in West Texas: a flat, straight road leading between scattered buildings into a featureless plain, with a single traffic light flashing yellow at the edge of town, cautioning nobody because there was nobody around.

  Sept. 17, 1972

  AAA-approved vacancy welcome clean rooms clean beds reasonable rates Route 66 weekly quiet color TV by RCA cable 100 percent refrigerated air heated pool thermostat-controlled direct dial phones free local calls coffee shop open late steaks chops Mastercard and Diner’s Club sleepers longboy beds cribs kitchenettes guest laundry truck and U-Haul parking in rear le
ft turn okay welcome senior citizens no pets!!!

  In Amarillo, the Arrow and the Plainsman, with its big fenced pool and pink-and-yellow doors like pastel piano keys; the True Rest, the Town House, the Skyline, the Palo Duro. In Dalhart the Texas. In Lubbock the Koko Inn and the 89’er, with fond memories of the Western Ways and the Astro now gone, blown away by the big tornado in ’70. The Rambler and the Ranger in Shamrock. The Plainsman in Lamesa. The Westerner and the Imperial in Odessa. The Catalina in Wichita Falls. In Monahans, the Sunset and the Cowboy. In Happy the Hitching Post. In Tucumcari, the Blue Swallow. In Sweetwater the Palomino. And in Cummings the Starlight Motor Hotel with its monogrammed hand towels and bedside lamps in the shape of bronze cowgirls on horseback forever twirling their little bronze lariats.

  I’m in room number 38 of the Lamplighter in Hobbs, N.M., where I’ve been for the last three days under the name of Nolan Sackett, a character from a Louis L’Amour Western. It’s been six months since I last stayed here and those months seem to have given my face a new lease. I can probably manage at least a few more days before people start getting too friendly, the way they always do.

  I’ll give you a brief physical description: I’m of medium height. I have a medium-size rounded face on which my unexceptional features seem to take up no definitive positions. My hair is light brown but in pictures it sometimes looks dark brown, sometimes blond. I’m agreeable-looking but just short enough of handsome that people tend to forget my face because it doesn’t turn out to be what they expected. My voice is mild and as easy to tune out as an accountant’s. I’ve escaped two near-arrests in my life, the only times I’ve ever been taken in, because the victims weren’t able to pick me out of a lineup.

  Sometimes I realize I’ve been by myself for too long, locked up in my own head. I drive through a thunderstorm and find myself thinking every lightning bolt forking down into the fields has my name on it. I worry about being tracked down not by the police or somebody I’ve robbed but by somebody I’ve never met, somebody I can’t even imagine. I try to ease my mind by going to the movies or walking the aisles of variety stores, just to be around people. Sometimes I go into post offices and leaf through the state posters, looking to see if there’s a sketch resembling me, a description of what I’ve done—but there never is.