Equipment

by Hesse Caplinger

  The answer did not emerge from the antiseptic waters of the gym. It didn’t arrive in the locker room, nor did it come down the long and narrow passage into them: a shadowed birth canal that shuttled its passengers between the worlds of light and virtuous noise, the earnest clatter of plate machines, of the multi-colored aviary; and the urine-spattered, stale man-scented silence of toilet stalls and wet bench pews, of chafed and humid steel lockers, and of the preening nude and monkish cloisters of the private interior. It was here that he snapped off his wet things, exchanged them for presentable street clothes from a sour duffle, and wheeled off in his Suburban.

  Amid the funerary décor of the bank, the access form was signed and dated: March 14th—it was Monday, cool and lazy with the first calendar hours of spring break, and Foster was marked by the stroboscopic hum of morning coke, and that unshorn and wind-lashed bearing of one carried in un-denominated time—that guilt-thrill of bowing a productive and accountable resource to spend as enjoyably in its spoilage. He was led into the vault, asked for his key; the attendant spun them in unison and made crisp and officious clatter with his laden ring against the panel face. He was led to a private anteroom with an office chair, a desk of mounted countertop, a row of electrical outlets, and was left there with his opened box; sat heavily in the chair and considered the tidy rows of neat, ten-thousand dollar bundles in fresh-cut bills, each banded as though they might be fine cigars. But still he had not decided. It was a lingering thing. Nothing about the bulk of notes, their lace of guilloché, their musk of printer’s ink, nor even captivity in their company had armed a resolution as Foster had hoped. He bent over them, looked down fondly, and for just an instant inflated a conceit around them—stepped in with them: for sixty quiet seconds he imagined it was unspent, not a quarter, not the whole—that their fate and his along with them, were free and undetermined—he imagined that they could be together in mysterious isolation, and he imagined that they could be unsought, would be unfound—but when he thinks this thought the quiet image coughs and collapses: he is deposited once more within his cramped confessional—a sort of ordained sinner in communion with his sinful means.

  He looked at his watch—in this space he can hear it tick—and he listened as the second hand swept through the quarter-dial. Foster couldn’t decide. It was as though his certainty was empty—lacked tooth—and his mind continued to slip tractionless along the subject. Lingering beside his choice began to turn his mood, began to bear down upon its delicate joints and features, and so he determined to move his determinations elsewhere. He drew out four bundles into a clasp envelope—the original forty thousand promised August for his task—and haltingly, reluctantly, he separated another three in allowance for unilateral revisions of terms—into the pocket of a separate envelope, and summoned the attendant with a push-button on the wall.

  He was led out of the room, the deposit box was replaced, the keys were turned to the percussion of the attendant’s chain, and Foster thought idly and unaccountably as he watched—of the lockers at the gym. He was led, again, from the vault, and he left with all his funds and decision to make.

  2.

  Charles Foster probed his gums against the mirror. They were pink and numb and wept blood where he flossed. His sinuses were numb as well—taught-smooth and clean from particulate erosion, and had the feel of a borehole through to open air, free from the least trace of moisture. Foster had spent last night’s dinner across a table at MeKong from Kim Soong, a graduate student in a parallel program, and couldn’t presently think of the first thing he’d said. The booths were low. The table was green Formica. He nursed a red curry into cold distraction. There was a low curtain along the window. A setting of soy and Sriracha sat at the shoulder of the table. Kim was Chinese—with the hooded look of a lazy dragon, a loose ponytail of hair like black wire, and other than a pair of nostrils and a small hole for soup, was devoid of the faintest discernable feature. He could picture all of this; even twice visiting the bathroom to smell the paper rose, but could not imagine a singular note of the conversation. He could remember having his curry wrapped for home, even leaving it on the table as they left—could remember it occurring to him as he’d sat there slurping his miso, that he was still carrying seventy thousand in new bills—sitting in the booth of a restaurant along South Grand. But seeing this reflection, he broke away from his leaky gums and dental tape, and hurried from the bathroom to where he’d thrown his jacket over the bedpost. And he was greatly relieved to find it there—the bulging pockets tugging heavily at the nape. He emptied the envelopes onto the bed and fell beside them, dripping naked and already half exhausted by worry. He thought of Sachs as he looked over the bundles, the undelivered check, thought of waiting evenings down the block from Sachs’ apartment without the faintest sign—and for an instant Foster sensed an indiscernible moment had past, a nameless Rubicon had been overshot. But the feeling was brief and intangible: the shrug of scrotal chill, a convulsive sneeze—and it was gone. He freighted the bundles back into their envelopes. He completed his ablutions, and he dressed. He buckled his watch: 8:20 a.m. He loaded the envelopes separately into his hunting jacket, the .38 revolver from the drawer, and checked his phone: Tuesday, March 15th.

  The Suburban swayed left out onto Delmar—left down Hanley, and through the lights Foster thought only of how to play the money: would he carry it on his person?—would he leave it in the car? When he came to Forsythe, however, he was taken by another thought, and he turned left again, passed down along the unfortified verge of the university, across Skinker, and into Forest Park where he stopped beside the Grand Basin. A grim wad of cloud slipped in sheet along the sky and let down strakes of light. Foster left the car to the bite of the gravel underfoot, the cool behind his ears, and the first bench along the basin. The water was still and green and where the fountain spigots blemished the surface, they were idle. Light drifted up the hill toward the museum and shown upon the sepia of the fallow grasses.

  This was the sight he imagined, the location he expected, and as he’d come to the intersection at Forsythe he’d found himself answering a compulsion—coming here out of step, sitting at the waterside with the clock running out—as though the act itself might throw some illumination, might balm his inarticulable discomfort, might anneal or correct the dislocation. 9:14.

  These things happen, he thought: locations are moved, times revised, dates are pushed out, motives change and strategies realign. What was puzzling then, was that he’d seized now and out of nowhere on this detail as though it were imbued with some metaphysical dysfunction. The diversion had only half-worked, however. The gravel paths were empty. The roadway was clear. Coming had placated something, but what it was Foster struggled to tell. The whole matter shifted beneath his concentration: the date and venue—the more he’d perseverated over these angles the more he’d left his own fingerprints upon the subject, and now as he sat looking into the wood beyond the basin where leaves tacked noiselessly on the air, the more he could no longer tell the subject clearly from the marks of handling. 9:15.

  3.

  Foster bounded cross-town with his knees nuzzling the dashboard and the seat tuned to its furthest pitch. The money itched oddly in his pockets, air buffeted smartly at his eyes through the window gap, the pistol stitched with the onset of bad digestion where it poked his rib, and the Suburban trimmed and porpoised as he rounded the cape of the Interstate 55 exchange: beneath the mulchy-scented plumes of beer wort, through the loose brocade of gas silos, and down the chute of the Gasconade exit.

  He bent back up to Keokuk, waited out the metronomic tock of the indicator; glided past the hospital; the ratchet-lick progress of stops; the row houses bald and narrow; two and four family flats; tumbledown garage stalls; weed lots; half-blocks vacant as Anasazi pueblos in red brick and pressboard patches; and at every curb, workaday rust-hulks with donor limbs and delaminated rubbers. Once a coal-fire ventricle of America’s victual-class hear
t, now feculent and forgotten.

  North up Nebraska: a listing right at the service station—blue, abandoned, and rot-swole; and round the corner he leaped on the brakes with a slippery shudder and jounced to a halt off the curb. For a moment Foster sat blinking uncomprehendingly in the muted cabin; the faint lope of the engine pulsing through the seat cushion, and through the wheel. The street was an ancient blacktop, colorless and weather-beaten as the ashen sky, mottled with oil stain, and a vestige of pinstripe along its high center spine. To his left, a scrabble of pavement ran from the service station to the broadside of a four family flat, and as Foster looked on, a heat shimmer danced above the pitch roof; wisps of steam seethed through invisible fissures at the roofline; through the crowns and cracks of the second floor glazing; and through a windowless span of brick, the gaps of six tidy punctures respired with brilliant white smoke in a spluttering unison. It was his destination, it was the location for his meet with August, and it was on fire.

  Foster stared on, and struggled to bring a crystalline thought to form. It was a distended instant—a filament drawn long and perilously thin. He shook his head in confusion, as though puzzling a mirage. At last, however, it was not the smoke jets or furnace light in the windows which registered, but some wordless intuition rang out to him from the penetrations through the brick. And with the shrill of sirens playing up from some invisible edge of the landscape Foster threw the Suburban into reverse, bounded unsteadily up over the curbs and off again, slung the nose round heavily into the intersection, and sped away.

  VIII.

  Cards were fed him, one up, one over. A pair of fives he split, and with all the deliberation of brushing crumbs from a place setting toss a weighted fifty marker to stake it. Edmund LeFrance sat among the gaming tables of a paddleboat casino along the banks of East Saint Louis. The air was heavy and granular and blue as oil smoke. The peaty dew of cigarette and whiskey evaporate was upon his skin, and he was cautious to keep it from his eyes when he smoked or braced his temples in the tactile mudras of contemplation.

  Now a king joined the five and the dealer watched as LeFrance turned his glass—it was a mechanism of consideration, stretched his back, and fetched a crooked hand-rolled cigarette from his coat over the chair back. Another five was sprung at his tap, and LeFrance stayed on twenty with a limp flick of his wrist. The dealer’s arm skipped to the open hand where she indicated his lone card with a taught recurve of chapped and double-jointed fingers. Her emphatic paw gave LeFrance the loose impression of a hound performing sums at a breeder’s show. He knocked again: nine. Again: ace. The ace startled him and he regretted the split and he stood on sixteen with a gentle shake of his head. The dealer turned seventeen. She swept up the one hand and paid out on the other, and as she changed the shoe LeFrance attempted to unlace the elaborate embroidery of her epaulets.

  It was Thursday, March 17th, Saint Patrick’s Day, and since noon Edmund LeFrance had borne his place upon the anachronistic riverboat fetish, festooned with tinsel streamers and cardboard shamrocks; amidst the chain smoking retirees from collar-stain suburbs huddled over chiming Kino consoles and braced with coin buckets and low price libations. But for the special on Irish whiskey, however, LeFrance had little of the occasion in him, and while normally talkative and wry, had taken to trading cards and chips with a dire form which had spoiled the play and left a turn of dealers to ply their cards in an uneasy and avertive silence.

  Through the day the tables were cool and empty. A dealer change had been tonic. A couple had played in with brightly-laminated spirits and strict ecclesiastical strategy while they could summon it. They hadn’t a mote of luck between them, but they were good for LeFrance’s cards, and for a time he prospered by them. But this was not to last. The cards were evasive. The dealers were toxic and confounded his attempts to mount a rhythm, and in the end he’d spent the evening working to halve back the five thousand he’d been down at the bottom. It was slow and measured work, but eventually a focus had risen up through the depths of his distracted mood and he’d gradually begun to string together hands. Hours on, round the itchings of eight o’clock, by his bracelet Timex, the dealer served from the new shoe: twenty against his comfortable-seeming eighteen. LeFrance didn’t like the shoe already, and already the dealer brushed her palms and stepped out for a change. Her replacement was a man with sculpted brows and a high viscosity and fragrant hair product, and was a spoiler—a cooler, who’d dealt LeFrance such pestilential cards just hours earlier, LeFrance thought he should be emblazoned with a hazardous materials warning. Now, at the sight of his return LeFrance thought of cashing a chip against his grin. Instead, LeFrance toss back his drink in two stern plugs, gave him the heated grimace for tip, collected his chips, and sauntered off for the cashier.

  At the cage he changed for bills and a hundred in two chips he’d taken to keeping for the mysteries of habit. In the restroom he washed his face with hand soap, dried with a rasp of paper towel, and disembarked for the parking lot where his truck stood in a far and empty corner beneath the cowled yellow haze of a ticking sodium lamp.

  2.

  Edmund LeFrance drank warm Corona from a pottery cup—he’d flicked the bottle from the window—and reined his great white draft horse cross the bridge and past the towering vaginal curve of the Saint Louis Arch. LeFrance was somber and nervous and alone with Tuesday’s events at the apartment and he spun up some of what he had: put Bowie doing “Black Country Rock” into the dash speaker to stave off the chill of his wandering mind.

  LeFrance rode the exuberant buck of the leaf springs down the long jogging straight into the city and contemplated going home. He was tired and what of him could not subsist on nicotine and worry was hungry. LeFrance let a small drive-up bungalow on Zephyr at Big Bend and he wanted to go there. He wanted to bathe and he wanted to eat and he wanted to sleep the rest of the week. But he’d only been to the house a few hours at a time since Tuesday. He’d avoided private places. He’d sent his lover off to her apartment, and had diligently preferred the company of congregations. And so it was that LeFrance left off the notion of home, left the highway too, and thread the truck by its bulbous hips down the narrow lines of Skinker, to the Delmar lounge, where he left it for a station at the bar and half the counter to himself. He cleared a pasta plate and traded up the jewelry polish of the casino for a respectable whisky, and by degrees he began to lend himself to the mollifying ease of food and drink. He rolled a cigarette from his pouch of Drum and lit it on the barman’s match, and opened the slim volume of Rilke’s letters in a further effort to hide from his cares where they were unlikely to seek.

  LeFrance read and he smoked and he knocked his ash into a clear glass tray.

  So you must not be frightened, dear Mr. Kappus, if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud-shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do.

  LeFrance leaned back in the stool and closed his eyes beneath his mind’s working mass. And through closed eyes he saw the bar back: its amber bottles arranged on illuminated glass shelves. He saw the vivid tendrils of a smoky uncertainty in his thoughts. He saw a place in his chest that ached with a tumor of nervous discontent. He watched a heavy man in a bleak law office drop forward onto his desk with the sudden weight of four stories; and he saw himself seeing the figure of August slumped against the wall: a shadow cast without a light.

  When LeFrance opened his eyes he rubbed them, rubbed at their sleeping tang and their cloying, mortal indifference. The room was brighter now, and more red, and he closed the book and held it by his fingertips—held it as he might a plate or a plaque or an antiquity—and considered it; marveled that it was not precious, or boiling off half-life, or carved from sheer granite leaves. And when he set it beside his glass, he thought of the envelope in his coat. He’d opened it Tuesday evening with a sense of expectation as though some answer were held within, some transmission from A
ugust detailing where it had all gone wrong. There was no such thing of course, only a small black thumb drive. He withdrew the envelope to examine it now. It was—he presumed—or was related to what he’d been sent into the Clayton office for, but had failed to turn up. It was nothing: a piece of industrial flotsam, a bit of buffed-up plastic. LeFrance had the vague notion August had gone to Mexico for it, but had otherwise no idea from where it had come, who had wanted it and for what purpose, or what it might contain—if it even touched the disaster at the apartment in anything but his imaginings. He rest his cigarette to turn it over in his hands. He was curious, but curious with the blunted edge of a practicing technophobe. Not a luddite—that looked too formal a position—but rather simply a disinterested party: he had a phone, of course; his lover had a laptop she trudged around—he’d used it: a talentless box, like a compact typewriter that remembered with electricity in place of indelible marks—a backlit screen with backlit windows with backlit pages with backlit type—a goddamned marvel of the age. “How did we ever make it without the electric typewriter?” he said through the hook of a sneer—to himself, and the drive in his hand, and to the barman who smiled benignly from his place.

  LeFrance dropped the drive contemptuously into the envelope and slipped it beneath the book and beside the pouch of Drum on the bar. It was someone’s tax filing, or illicit photos, or August’s memoir preserved in eternal backlight, or whatever the hell it was LeFrance would never know, because he wasn’t perfectly sure how such things were opened, and he hadn’t the least intention of plugging it into a computer to find out. For LeFrance the real question was what to do with it. Dispose of it? Anywhere? Anyhow? Or to keep clinging to it as an inscrutable totem: a deadman’s final and secret testament? It was a point LeFrance tried again to put down, and seeing the nub of his cigarette resting now in ash, LeFrance took up the Drum and his papers and set to fashioning another. And it was then a man took up the stool beside him.