Equipment

by Hesse Caplinger

  Gamlin had phoned her in recent days, but hadn’t seen her in weeks, and doing so seemed an abridgement both parties might happily forego. And so it was in this spirit of occasion that Gamlin thought to compliment her attire.

  “You look a pussy in a windsock,” he said.

  “Pussy?”

  “Cat. On a day in equatorial January you’re running about in a bed quilt, and now it’s shitting cold, and you think a piece of nylon kite looks just the trick.”

  Soong blotted her face in her jacket lining. “I was inside all day. And don’t work your bellows on my account: you’ll just fog the windows.”

  Gamlin smiled and set off.

  “Did you talk to him?”

  “Not today. Yesterday. And I saw him in passing a few days before that.”

  “And? How was it?”

  “I was nice and impressed.”

  “And he was?”

  “Like he was getting spotty reception: preoccupied and aloof with short windows of nervous attention. Also . . . he’s just so fucking tall: feel like I should be waving semaphore. It’s kinda too much.”

  “Not your thing, is it?”

  She shook her head.

  “And what is?”

  “What’s opposite a sunburn-swollen albino?”

  “A squint of black-hair drain rat, thinks it’s a zoo panther,” said Gamlin. “But that’s just a guess. I give up, tell me.”

  But Soong made a pool of breath in the door glass, and touched it with the back of her hand.

  “Where’s he now?” he asked.

  “He’s got office hours for another thirty minutes or so. He likes to park behind the building off Throop.”

  “Then let us go see him there.”

  4.

  Kim Soong averted her gaze. When that seemed inadequate she fixed her brow in the visor of her hand. “He’ll see me, Gamlin, this is stupid.”

  Gamlin laughed. “Are you hiding or guarding your eyes?”

  She lifted her visor to see him, and replaced it. And Gamlin laughed again.

  “No. He won’t,” said Gamlin. “That’s a promise. You could shake his hand, and he’d be none the wiser.”

  “What?”

  “I said: He’d never see you here.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “You’re shepherd’s pie at a cookery fair. You’re deluded. He’ll never, ever, see you.

  “Hey! Oi! Don’t be a fool, get that hand out your face!—I said, he’ll never see you—but you look a cunt with your hand up,” said Gamlin.

  Soong removed the hand and lay the matching pair in her lap.

  They’d tucked into the deck-shade of a parking garage with favorable view and watched Charles Foster emerge forty minutes later to his black Suburban from the service doors of Bryan Hall. Twice Gamlin had her confirm it: clothes and car and man. From there they’d followed to a private gym on Forsyth near the parkway. Parking lot of slippery Europeans and second-life economy tuners in wings and flares, together in aspirational contrivance. It was sloped and broad and they sat within clear sight of the entrance. They’d watched him dismount and teeter off with his bow-stepped cowboy hitch, head tipped to the rain; and marked collecting water on the windscreen until his return. An hour and a half Gamlin wondered why he wouldn’t use the campus facility; wondered it out loud to Soong, who floated indifferent shrugs at it: contract or privacy or habit. Maybe he just likes it here, she’d said, and he’d thought on it over a sideways glance.

  They’d trailed him up the pea gravel streets where he lived. He’d pulled up to his house, wrong-way against the curb, and run in. He’d stopped for drive-through and then he’d streamed east out the dive and jog articulation of Highway 40, across the river and down the plunge of Route 3; the gas candles and flood-green haze of refinery light, drop-stitch pavements and crush-stone lots, and the metastasizing cairn of architectural leavings.

  They’d arrived after dark and watched him park up and go inside: struggle to brush the last bit of damp from his hair, and throw the door wide, as he might an old familiar shed. She’d turned to him as they rolled off to the side and out of lamplight: You’ve gotta be kidding, she’d said. He’d held out his fingers in illustration: You’ve got five minutes to find it, and then you’d best believe: and she’d shook her head violently all the walk in.

  Now they sat against a Formica table in the inaudible dip of vinyl booth-seats, and Gamlin watched Soong not watch the bare-breasted duo on stage as though the avoidance bore some needs for overt demonstration. The room smelt to him of Rosco Fog and markdown cologne. He said: You’d better have a drink ‘fore you irritate piss out of me. She said: What?—and he waved to the cocktail waitress though the viscid air: tacky he imagined, with the same agents kept it aqueous clear.

  “Where is he now?” she asked when the drinks came.

  “You know, I was certain I’d see the hind ‘aneath all your furs at some point, but I wouldn’t have guessed it’d be this that bared it.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s there,” said Gamlin. “With the girl, near the stage. See? There. Standing—they’re the ones going off to the hall.”

  “What’s down there?”

  “You are joking?” Gamlin turned and leveled a stern look, but she tapped him on the sleeve.

  “Look,” she said. “He’s not watching the girls either.” And they both looked. And there was a man seated away from a stage and to himself. Drinking from a plastic beer cup. And he was not watching the girls, but followed Foster intently, until he’d passed entirely from view.

  5.

  Hoyt Gamlin sat past the corner of Keokuk and Nebraska. By his Luminor’s counting he’d been idling there forty-three minutes. He’d slept fitfully. He’d risen early and gracelessly. He’d bathed in slow, unconscious gestures. He’d prepared bitter coffee in the urn. And he’d left alone, with bottled waters and cereal bars dangling in thin grocery plastic. Mercifully, Soong had internship duties. She’d spend the day lifting Boeing memoranda like office supplies. He’d been free of her several weeks and was perfectly glad: free of her and her special frisson of dark silence.

  He’d set up that morning again cross Clayton from the Cheshire. But he hadn’t been long before the white dually had rolled in once more to fill the porte cochère—filled it like a mastiff in a travel crate. August Reams had joined the truck. There were two already packed into the extended cab, and his company made four. The quartet gave Gamlin the impression of a purposeful socializing. Today they were up to business, and with the addition of eyes Gamlin let out the cord and followed from altitude.

  They stopped for drive-through coffee, deftly edged the truck through the slip, and cackled off to Dutchtown trailing soot from the stovepipe exhaust. They’d parked and waited, and eventually stacked into a four family beside a vacant service station, and when they’d been awhile he’d moved up and past and settled across the corner at Keokuk for better view. And now he’d sat forty-four minutes with the engine turning a bass note played somewhere from the audible cusp and vents whispering warmth into the cabin, and a side mirror focused back at the building, and he tried to settle on his next move when he heard something like a nail gun.

  And again.

  Like a nail gun, but higher and sharper: more lash in the tail. Gamlin peered from the side glass, and back at the building.

  And again. And again.

  Two whiffs of red masonry lifted near the corners of a window.

  Again.

  Gamlin craned over and between the seats to see. A puncture in the broadside of the second story wall.

  And again, and again, and again, and again, and again.

  A tidy row of them opened up with a small incendiary knock. “Jesus Christ!” he said and sat crouched in the car. The last report melted from the air, and it was still. Then t
he tall one, the bald one with the topcoat burst from the door. The driver—LeFrance; Edmund LeFrance—burst through the door and stumbled down the stairs. His black coat was pale with plaster dust and it seemed to hang in the air where he’d been. He tripped out alone and rushed to the truck and unlocked the truck and bent over the column with the key and turned the key and the diesel groaned to recalcitrant life and he slapped down the shifter and the truck lurched from the curb and past in a clamorous belch of coal dust.

  Gamlin noticed a figure. A man. He emerged from somewhere on Keokuk and moved behind the service station. He bore a sling over his shoulder with paint rollers and extension handles. He was clad in painter’s white. Booties and blue disposable gloves. And he moved swiftly behind the service station and beyond Gamlin’s sightline. He’d let the truck leave without giving chase and now he’d run onto a flat spot for choice. He rubbed his head vigorously with both hands. “Bloody hell.” He sipped water from a bottle. He checked his watch—and wondered what it could possibly hope to tell him. He leveled a sightless gaze at the dash. I’ll have to work this out on the heel, he thought. And he heard a tire chirp from behind.

  A heavy Suburban had just rounded the corner from Keokuk onto Nebraska. It turned the opposite direction—north, back toward the apartment—and almost immediately it checked brakes and lurched to an artless stop against the curb. It sat stationary for a moment before whelping backward and up half onto the curb. Is that Foster? “Is that Foster?” It dropped off the curb, spun round in the street, and sailed off in the direction it had come.

  “Foster!”

  There were sirens in a distance. Gamlin peeled round after the Suburban. But then Gamlin saw what Foster had seen. The apartment was on fire. White smoke pressed from window frames and ruptured glass and vented riotously from serial penetrations in the solid brick. And it was in this awe-ceded instant that Gamlin noticed the crisp white panel van. It crossed Nebraska down an alley at the far end of the block. Almost at the edge of view—along a trough in the landscape before the street lifted to join the horizon. It bounded down off the worried brick pavers and across and up the other side: a tidy white panel van.

  The painter . . . The painter. “The fucking painter.”

  Gamlin cut right; east down Keokuk and along Foster’s path. But wherever he may be, it was out of sight and far from Gamlin’s thought. Just now, it was the van; running quick and parallel—just the van. At Oregon he looked left up the block, and once again the white tail of the van bounded across and up the alley. He sped to the next street: it was just visible, cross California and into the alley: across Iowa, and up the alley. Gamlin leapt through the intersection, but at the next half-block a large truck and trailer had swung out from an alleyway and failed to clear a parked car. Gamlin launched the brakes and swore and honked and swore. He watched painfully as the truck threaded back, lining for a better approach. Each instant brief and incandescent. The truck rocked back in guileless spasms and Gamlin reached for the shifter to abort, when; end of the block—far side of the truck and trailer—there it was. There it was, at the next intersection—the crisp white van: paused at the stop…and then crossed. Gamlin waved furiously at his impediment through the windshield: “Move! Move! Move! Move! Move! Move! Move!” When there was a gap one centimeter to the good, Gamlin rumbled through and onto the full stop of the intersection. But he did not hurl himself out. He inched up; craned up over the wheel; an inch; an inch; a foot—until he could see the tail of the white van slipping south down Ohio. Another foot. And another—until the van was several blocks out and there was an infill of traffic and it was safe.

  He followed at a terrific distance. Down Ohio, till it had dumped into South Broadway. Under 55, down South Broadway till it had given up shotgun lodgings for warehouses in corrugation gray and penitentiary glass block. Scrap yards and cyclone fence. And it was in this spread of industrial bottoms that the van pulled off. It pulled into a gap Gamlin could not see from distance, behind a storehouse he could not read. Gamlin turned off to wait, but moments later they were underway again. They traced a looping circuit down 55, north on 270, and east again on 40. At 170, they split north to Ladue, and there the van turned in at a car rental and Gamlin watched closely from the grocery parking across the way.

  The driver loaded out some kit to a silver sedan and thirty minutes later snapped decisively into traffic and through the light and Gamlin wrestled out after him. On the highway again, he’d immediately dipped off and down the parkway and Gamlin knew he’d tipped his hand in haste to keep up. He’d paced the sedan, paced in behind to the light at Big Bend—an M5 with a fitted exhaust murmuring vaporous dew. He sat back at a cautionary standoff and lamented his mistake. And he waited for the light.

  XI.

  Charles Foster had camped three days in the nursery. The nursery with its bare white walls and empty crib—an historical castoff—bumpers laced carefully to the bars and tied in bows of rabid maternal perfection. Symbols of a boundless measure in custodial care. Love knots of geomagnetism. He had slept there and sat there and lain there unsleeping—throbbing empty wakefulness—with cut-down boxes, the tipped prow of ironing board deck to the wall, the lost meter of electrical cord unjacked by head and tail, toothless and dead against the baseboard; the carpet-pile registry of footsteps and laden boxes and changing tables and mover cleats and the course of dolly casters and his own hand prints like monkey tracks in a post-industrial Pleistocene—a paleogeography in sedimentary wool-tuft and underlayment—the place-marks of his water glass, his phone, his shoes tumbled in the corner, his coat with banknotes over the crib-rail; the paper rose and straw, weightless and ephemeral; and the .38 and box of shells, just there.

  Here the nightlight fizzed its residual glow. But elsewhere he’d kept the lights out. Elsewhere he’d stalked the house in dress socks and robe tugging with gun. He’d ventured from the room at random—in hunger, in thirst, in vain invisible defiance. He’d lurked in the curtains wherever the house bore portals—and cast watchful suspicions against light-fall in the street, the company of branches in wind, furtive leaves through coughing winter grasses; dog walkers; and against the field-song of high, unbounded children. Charles Foster was fear-sick and hiding.

  The house was stale and close as summer bedding. Foster had cancelled the furnace. It played his nerves when it started and threw haunting silence when it stopped and its duct-rush and tapping louvers taunted him when it ran. Tree vermin clattered in the gutter eves; plaster snapped in distant corners with every shallow sigh of earth mantle; and coils of the slim elevator plucked groaning pentatonic chords each time the search lamps of his imagination were turned upon them. Worry rose like caustic belch in his throat, and Foster confided in himself a headshaking, deep uncertainty. He had seized vividly on the image of the burning apartments. The wheezing penetrations in the brick had reached out and clasped enervating hands at his shoulders. They pressed his intuition indelibly, but illegibly: they were images he could not resolve; emergent conditions he could not achieve with a calculus of known ingredients.

  Charles Foster lay on his belly and his elbows and pushed back his oily forelock and prized open the paper rose—the remaining tenderness still employed to him—and combed out two long arrow shafts of potential chemistry and deployed them with a captive nostril, and they lifted against his parietal arch in vortices of dry lavender fog, and he took up his phone. And he stare at August’s number. Again he stared—as he’d done many times in the past few days—cued on the screen and waiting. As though the act were a summoning, a resolving. Foster felt somewhere he must have parted lockstep with sense. He could not, for all his great labors of imagination, understand what he’d seen—what it meant. He could only feel intimations of tectonics in slip—this he could taste in his pores, feel in the irritable quaver of follicular root. This was a certainty, but a meaningless, inarticulable certainty—and it was with a strong urge to dispel it that he longed to hear fro
m August; longed to receive the call; receive the explanation of it all; explaining the random accident; or his gang’s misbegotten betrayal; or the call with threats and accusations; even a vague and belated text messaging insinuations of a last minute change of heart—a new expensive and unfavorable deal. Few were desirable scripts in their right, but Foster pined desperately for any or every one of them. Even the worst of these was the wound to heal him; the worst of these were injuries he could survive—injuries he could comprehend.

  But the phone did not ring.

  Foster held the fine black text—the chroma-green pulse of a solution in his hands—the afterglow of living possibility. But it refused to speak—day after day—choked in stubborn silence. And so Foster decided he would call.

  He would call. He would call. Him. He would call August. He would call. He would call him now—stupid and careless and irresistible—he would call—him! Foster shook with resistance to the impulsive stupidity—but he would do it—he was doing it—pressed the call button in a paroxysm of flagging restraint—and it was ringing.

  Now it was ringing . . . Ringing . . . Still ringing . . . And it rang . . . and it rang

  . . . never went to voicemail, but . . . just rang . . . and rang.

  Until he snapped the phone closed in a gesture that felt weightless and empty—an aping mockery to the freighted casters and thunderous shuttering passages; a barring of ways which he felt at his navel.

  “Fuck . . . you . . . Fuck . . . you, August!” The invocation had only just loosened his bindings, but before he could retighten them he was standing; had snapped the phone through the doorway with the full range of his arm, and it exploded against the hallway. “Fuck . . . you! Fuck you, August!—and your moron crew! You sad, dumb, hopeless, son of a bitch!” Foster shouted. He shouted and thrust his long finger at the end of his long arm; thrust his finger at the place of detonation, the place where August was, or had been, had exploded, had vanished.