MacDonald had mapped the spot for me.
“How do I get inside the yard?” I asked. “You going to get me some CN company identification and some kind of a guide?”
“Arrangements are being made,” he said.
He’d handed me two of those little yellow stickies. On one, he’d written the names of two container companies and about half a dozen multi-digit numbers. On the other, he’d scrawled something that looked a lot like gang graffiti. Only it wasn’t for any gang around here. “Where from, then?” I’d asked.
“Elsewhere,” he said, and his eyes made clear that was all I was to know.
And then MacDonald told me, his voice conspiratorial: “When you’ve read these, when you have the numbers memorized, and the little gang symbol thing…”
“What? You gonna get dramatic now?”
“Sorry,” he said. “But anyway…eat them.”
9.
19 July, 7:20 a.m.
Breakfast for Two at the Benbow
The lobby. Sunlight through the uncharacteristically open drapes of the east side. Sunlight, in sharp, dust-revealing rays.
I looked for a paper, found yesterday’s. It sat beside Mrs. Patel’s duct-taped clipboard, so I dared not touch it. Or, for that matter, be caught looking. I heard her in the hall. All I could catch safely was a snippet. Inside: Wharton promises task force crackdown on human trafficking.
“LaKenya,” Mrs. Patel said, gesturing. “You are washing the windows now, please.” She had a way of making the word please sound like it wasn’t there at all. LaKenya began, not without the occasional barbed look at Mrs. Patel. Bucket. Squeegee. “Too much soap, you are using.” Another look, as Mrs. Patel turned elsewhere to address the momentous matter of a dropped towel. I’d never known her first name. Even her badge said: Mrs. Patel.
“Mornin’, Mr. Minyard,” LaKenya said.
“Morning,” I said with a forced cheer. “And it’s Jack.”
She turned, whispered conspiratorially. “Fresh coffee this morning, Jack,” she said. “Saw to it myself.”
“Thanks, Kenny,” I said. “Pastries, too, I see, for a change.” I grabbed and unwrapped a cream cheese danish, took a bite, then remembered—weights, diet, new beginning. I tossed the rest, wrapped in a napkin so Mrs. Patel wouldn’t accuse me of wastefulness. It was pretty good, that bite, notwithstanding it was an undersized, cellophane-imprisoned thing bought, the label said, at Fred’s Discount Drugs. Crap food has its virtues. Never spoils. Enough fat and enough sugar can kill anything.
I busied myself fixing my coffee in a styro cup—a big one LaKenya produced from a cupboard, special for me, to replace the thimble-sized styro sample cups Mrs. Patel favoured. I thanked her. Cream. (Powder. Partially hydrogenated soybean oil. White death.) About eight packets of Splenda. (I’d long since started carrying my own, and made sure Mrs. P. knew it, thereby enabling me to escape the lecture. “Using two, using two, please. Two, you are allowed.”)
As I fumbled to find a stir-stick—management preferred guests use the common spoon, laid in the upturned lid of a mayonnaise jar—Mrs. P. reappeared. “Mr. Jack Minyard,” she said—the form she used when, occasionally, she meant to mark respect. “A woman was earlier seeking you.”
“A woman?”
Nobody knew where I lived. Even Eileen had only my box number at the Ellendale post office. Far as I knew, anyway. Four years, and no one had ever called on me. No one, at least, whom I actually knew, from anywhere.
“Yes. Very nice lady. Very stylish lady.”
‘Stylish.’ I wondered what that meant, in Mrs. P’s world. And would that be a good thing? It did seem pretty strange, just after seven in the morning.
“Not ten minutes ago. She is asking suite number, I am saying we are not revealing suite number, according to policy. She ask if you are in, I am saying I don’t know, I think you are not currently on premises. I ask if she is wanting to leave message, parcel, anything. She say no, she is not wishing. But very polite. Very nice, very stylish. Look, now—out veendow.”
I turned, caught barely a glimpse. SUV. Moving rightward past the window, rather too fast for a motel parking lot. Looked like an Escalade. Black. No—maybe an extraordinarily dark purple.
Stylish.
10.
19 July, 8:05 a.m.
Starbucks
Bloody insufferable already. The walk from car to door, all by itself, left me with dark, wet circles under my pits, to match the circles under my eyes.
Left side of the counter, taking all the cushy chairs, what looked to be a pharmaceutical sales team meeting. Easy to spot: impossibly crisp dress shirt, a tall, good-looking salesman type—yeah, there is a type—with five or six thirty-something babes, all with product binders, folding portfolios, expensive purses. Heels, lipstick, skirts at just the right length to get them in some busy doctor’s office door. And not a glance to me.
Right side: nobody. Not till I saw her in the corner chair. Fragile. Dark hair, which she brushed away from averted eyes. Hand curled around a paper cup. A hesitant hand.
From elsewhere: “Jack.”
I had never heard Nikki’s voice so small, so near a whisper. But we’re all small sometimes. I thought nothing of it. “Yeah, Nick, gimme a venti blonde…” I’d expected some smart-ass remark, but it wasn’t there.
“‘kay.”
She slipped behind the capp machine, down to the rack of urns at the far end. I hadn’t yet seen her face, but knew something was off.
“On the house, hon,” she said when she set the cup down before me. I’d been looking in the direction of the pharmaceutical bunch—a pair of legs, I think. When I turned to face her, Nikki was gone, slipped away in the back.
She was whispering—into a phone, I realized. What?…Jesus, no. I can’t go back there…because I can’t…somebody’s after me …no, I don’t…I don’t have the money, I don’t have any fucking relatives…I don’t want to see anybody…I didn’t know who else to call, I…
I busied myself at the counter. Cinnamon, Splenda, half-and-half. Tossed out the wooden stir stick.
“Jack?” Her voice, still small, came from the back room.
“Yeah!”
“Can I…speak with you?”
“Sure, Nikki.”
I stepped up to the counter.
“No. Back here. It’s okay, this once.” It sounded muffled.
The break room. Half a dozen lockers, aprons, clipboards, schedules. And, at the little table, Nikki sat under a NO SMOKING sign, smoking a cigarette, her hand shaking as she flicked ashes.
She turned toward me. The right side of her face bulbed out, black and purple, her right eye a ring of bruises. The J of Jack slurred out from her swollen lips.
11.
19 July, 10:20 a.m.
St. Francis Hospital, Bartlett
Nikki had whatever insurance Starbucks grants to those who tough out enough months or years of twenty-five hours a week or less, part-time, and finally bag full-time and benefits. Not the best plan, I was sure, but I was equally sure it beat the crap out of whatever Wal-Mart did. I’d called ‘Bucks’ district manager, Johnny Broome—a favourite of Lynette’s, from some charity board—and he’d sent someone to cover the store. I persuaded him to cut out the whole gotta-fill-out-the-company-form thing, and got her to ER I’d been afraid she’s busted her zygomatic arch—the cheekbone that buys those supermodels their supermodel money. I’d seen it happen to a big, dumb Newfie sergeant in Cyprus. It wasn’t pretty, and he wasn’t right for months. Luckily, the ER doc said, no breaks—just one hell of a bruised mess.
The doc and Nikki both kicked me out of the exam room, so I called MacDonald from the waiting room, left three messages.
At long last, Nikki came out, a nurse on one arm, orderly on the other. Wouldn’t get in the wheelchair. “No way,” she said. “I’m not some invalid, for—” The look she directed at the orderly said there was no point his insisting any further. Still, she added, “Don’t you make
me talk.”
The pain got to her sharply, suddenly, ripping past whatever the doc had used to dull it. A nurse handed me two prescriptions and some kind of high-end, fancy icebag contraption that would hit her insurance at fifteen times the drugstore price. The doc gave me a shrug and said he was handing off to Nikki’s doubtless nonexistent primary care physician.
A stop at the pharmacy, then I asked her, “Where’s home?” I hadn’t thought till that moment about where she lived.
A deep wince, silent tears, and a hoarse “your place” was all I got.
I did ask questions.
Who? Nothing.
What with? Nothing from Nikki. But the nurse had told me she’d said something about a two-by-four the guy had picked up by the BFI bin back of ‘Bucks.
Why? Any idea? The slightest shake of her head, and another wince.
Why the hell did you keep working? I asked her, and got “It’s what I do.”
Then: Who were you talking to on the phone in the break room?
Her face said: Don’t you know?
Dumbly, I didn’t.
I knew better than to protest the destination. Safe enough—my room held two queen beds. I laid her out in the spare, gave her three of the pills she was only to have one of, and that was that.
Save for the little kiss on her forehead and the pained little smile that came in its wake.
12.
19 July, 10:08 p.m.
Raines Road, South Memphis
Saskatoon, on a hot day, cools at night. Memphis, on a hot day, doesn’t. And South Memphis, somehow, stays even hotter. Sometimes, during the night, you can hear gunfire.
The neon sign out on Raines said grocery. No name. The neon sign by the door said open, but the look of the place said closed. Till the kid, eleven or twelve, came out, hopped on his banana-seat bike and pedaled across the gravel lot into the dark with what looked like a clutch of red licorice sticks in his shirt pocket and a brown bag with a couple of quart Colt 45s. You’d see these little groceries everywhere in South Memphis, even where the regular streets gave way to long stretches of what looked like countryside, hiding shotgun houses here and there amid the brush. Rattletrap little oases, if you will. Beer. Cigarettes. Lottery. Food stamps…ok.
A stunned streetlamp hung high, alone, on a telephone pole. In the trees looming about, insects scratched, hummed, sang, in bass, tenor, soprano, the higher voices at random, the lower in layers of rhythm, rise and fall, counting the seconds and counting, I suspected, the age of the earth. We humans, here, I’d come to realize since embracing the South, were merely tenants. I was standing here alone, listening to the landlords. Across the broken concrete where I’d parked, hundreds, thousands of small, identical beetles—it was that time of year again—hastened on errands too urgent for them to give me any notice. I crushed no small number of them underfoot, but it made no difference. A light in the store’s barred window flashed. Miller time.
Oddly, given the heat, I shivered.
Cars came. Cars went. Car doors slammed. Pairs of men, often as not. Some laughing. Some silent. Some who looked my way. One who started to walk over. Then thought better of it.
Then MacDonald.
“Could we not meet in a more respectable place, Mac? The Starbucks at Winchester and Hack’s Cross is open till eleven, you know.”
“This on the low-down, brother.” He sounded more hood than Germantown, tonight. He’d been to see her. Oh, hell, I wasn’t even supposed to know.
MacDonald walked over. “Gimme one a those.” He didn’t even smoke. Not really. But I’d seen this before. It usually meant something. I held out the pack, BiC. He did the dew. Coughed.
“Smoke up now,” he said. “I don’t want you smokin’ on the job.”
“Oh, the railroad yard is no-smoking?” I said dumbly.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Got my ID?”
“I got everything you need.”
I gave him that look.
“Got your shit together, Jack?”
“You mean my binocular shit, my night-vision shit, my middle-of-the-night lunch-in-a-bag shit?” I asked.
“All that shit,” he said.
“So you gonna take me to the gate, give me the ID, introduce me to whomever will be—”
“Something like that.” Which, in MacDonald-speak, means: Nothing like that.
I was to leave Mitzi at the grocery, though MacDonald had me pull her around back, by the open rear door. “I know the guy,” he said. “Owes me a favour. Your car be all right.”
My stuff loaded into Mac’s car, we drove past what I’d always thought was the main south entrance to the CN yards.
“Uh, Mac—”
“Yours not to reason why, brother.”
Brother, I knew, meant I was getting in deeper.
MacDonald pulled in to an anonymous, recessed gateway in the chain-link fence surrounding the yard. A forested stretch of Raines. Got out, reached in the back seat for a massive pair of bolt-cutters, at which point the last drop of illusory legitimacy in all of this drained away.
“I suppose I’d best not ask,” I said as Mac got back in, pulled the car through the gate and a couple of car-lengths along the wooded road.
“Best not,” he said, walked back, drew the wings of the gate shut, and returned. The car rocked in the ruts, splashed through a couple of pools of water, the car frame creaking as the road roughened. Presently, as the woods began to open, he killed the lights, but still crept forward, just into the open area, parked behind a weedy pile of sand awaiting resumption of some forgotten construction project.
MacDonald looked around nervously as I gathered my stuff, now mostly shoved into a big daypack. “Ready?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I said.
“Good,” he said.
He walked me about fifty yards ahead, a narrow sand-and-gravel walk alongside a deep ditch emitting a rather rancid aroma. What little we said was whispered. We stopped beside an old barrel, a couple of staves missing.
“Another fifty yards,” he said, pointing. “You’ll see a second barrel, like this one, only tumped over. That’s where you’ll cross the ditch and go inside the fence. You’ll see a dirt pile and a big bush beside. You can set up there.”
“And how do I get across this ditch? Can’t really tell, but that water looks deep.” I said.
“You’re always telling me you’re ‘infantry,’ “he said. “Death-dealing son of a gun. First in the field, second to none, up the Guards, all that.”
“Yeah, but I’m old infantry.”
“Always thinking of you first, Jack. I done built you a little bridge myself, yesterday. Big old wide plank. Sturdy, too. You can’t miss it.”
“Don’t suppose you made me a gate in the fence on the other side.”
“Time, as it happens, Jack, did not permit. But, then, I know how much you enjoy the whole do-it-yourself thing.” I hadn’t even seen him carrying the bolt cutters till he handed them to me.
“Lucking fluvvly,” I said. “Break-and-enter.”
“I envy your ever-increasing repertoire of occupational skills,” MacDonald said. “Speaking of which…”
“What?”
“You’re not carrying your piece, are you?”
“Course I am.”
Even in the dark, I could see him hold out his hand. I pulled the clip-holster off my belt, handed it over.
“Geez, MacDonald.”
“Break and enter with a weapon?” he said. “That’d be like…”
“Burglary,” I filled in. “Can I keep my folding knife?”
“If you promise to think of it as a letter opener.”
“Remind me why I’m doing this?” I asked.
“Uh…truth, justice, and the American way?” MacDonald said.
“I’m not even an American, remember? What else?”
“Chinese buffets,” he said. “Saville Row shirts. Dates with fabulous babes.”
There was nothin
g I could say.
Except: “When will you be back to pick me up?”
MacDonald shrugged. “When I’m done.”
Her, again. The bugger was going back. I’d be out here, and he’d be—
Now there was absolutely nothing to say.
I found the barrel, the plank-bridge. Got across without so much as a dampened boot. As luck would have it, a slice of fence was actually down, and I could step across. I stashed the bolt cutters back on the safe side of the ditch, under a piece of ancient scrap plywood, crossed back to the trouble side, set up my folding stool, and settled in for the night.
I knew what I was watching for. Watched. Yawned. Watched. And didn’t see a damn thing.
MacDonald came at dawn, as I sprang from half-awake to full, courtesy of some howling cur, somewhere behind, quite a way off.
I was dog-tired, soaked in sweat, my socks were soggy inside my old combat boots. I’d spent the night vaguely unnerved by things moving in the brush behind me, sometimes right past me in the grass and gravel beside the dirt pile. Armadillos, I suspected. Not cute. And the damn things carry leprosy. I felt scratchy and filthy, and wanted nothing more than a shower and bed. Best I’d get, though, was a shower and a trip out to the Bartlett stretch of Summer to see Eileen—she’d texted me to come in, early as I could. Not asked, mind you. A summons. There was a difference. Ask…you could wander in whenever. Summons…be there, bells on, oh-dark-thirty.
I mumbled some crap as I walked across the downed fence and the ditch toward MacDonald, the straps of my daypack dragging on the ground.
Then I saw it. Rooftop, gleaming in the morning sun. An old, ramshackle two-storey house on a rise behind the trees, maybe a quarter mile distant from the containers I’d been watching all night, watching them stacked, unstacked, restacked at the hands of the two huge moving dolly cranes, most of the containers left standing, still, waiting all night, as I had, for Lord knows what.
The house, once yellow, but mostly peeled, looked like it was still occupied. The light in the upstairs window said so, as did the car parked between the house and the swing-less, rusty swing set.
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