Rankin looked at her; her eyes were wet; Rankin couldn’t tell if she was crying. He smelled in the room (each of the odors as separate in his perception of them as each of his fingers were to his hand) something suggesting brine leaking from a busted pickle jar, a scent hinting at death (maybe ant or roach spray), Stitch Marks’s sweaty, heated-up stench, Florence’s perfume, half-masking the smell of her fear.
She took the stick from him.
Rankin looked back down at Stitch Marks, gasping, his flesh around his roseate scar the color of old bones.
“I was stupid,” said Florence.
Little Charlie over that woman, her pushing against Little Charlie’s hand in her hair, whispering, “Please stop.”
“I’d a got through it—I’ve gotten through worse.” Florence smiled feebly at him, her lower Up slightly swollen. “Because of you I didn’t have to.” She kissed his cheek.
Rankin stepped uncomfortably away from her. “He hurt you much?”
She shook her head.
“People ain’t as good’s you think they are.”
She nodded down at Stitch Marks. “I never thought he was much good. I only wanted to buy some buzz off’n him.”
“As bad as he looks to you now, I’m a hundred times worse.”
Florence held his face in her hands. “No, you ain’t.”
“You ain’t got no power to see into nobody. Thinking you do’ll only end you up in a bad place.”
Florence didn’t say anything.
Rankin had a sudden desire to wrap his arms around her, but could no more see himself doing it than he could see himself jumping to the moon. He said, “Where I’m going to from here, you don’t want to go to. Believe me.”
“Why don’t I?”
Rankin kicked Stitch Marks viciously in the abdomen (not from anger, but to make Florence watch him do it and because he found it simpler to show her than to tell her why she didn’t want to go with him even another second) Stitch Marks groaning, gripping his midsection, falling onto his back.
Florence flinched.
Rankin stared hard at her. “And I think you got as good a idea as me where I’ll likely end up for where I’ve been.”
Florence made no response.
Rankin took the cue from her and tossed it atop the boxes.
“So, take care yourself better’n you have been. You deserve to.”
He walked out of the room and turned left toward the emergency exit. He reached the exit and stopped, hearing footsteps behind him. He opened the door onto a garish sunset. He held the door open, not turning around, waiting for Florence to catch up with him, and to pass ahead of him into the dying day, Rankin feeling at once unaccountably blessed and deservedly cursed.
* * *
Wind whistled through the cracked open front windows; the radio disgorged country ballads; Florence’s right foot moved on the floor in rhythm with her wagging head; the smoke from her cigarettes (lighted by her one from another) swirled in a cooling cross-draft.
Trying, on this road vaguely familiar to him, not to see past the Tranny’s headlight beams (in the growing gloom, the dull shafts touched street signs, the backs of cars, trees, scattered buildings) Rankin remembered catching, with his bare hands, a twelve inch trout from a stream in those woods he’d run off into as a boy; he remembered cooking the fish over a fire and eating it, laughing aloud in the darkness from the good feeling it gave him.
Instinct and memory led him away from the city, back through Alto proper, onto a two lane highway derived from the town’s main drag.
An unlighted tractor, suggesting a ghost ship on a fog-covered ocean, cut through a field to their left; on the gravel shoulder opposite it, a convertible carrying screaming teenagers sped past them. Rankin tried to recall, and couldn’t, laughing anywhere again the way he’d laughed in those woods.
He glanced at Florence, facing him with her eyes closed; he imagined her seeing in her head, along with everything else about him she could see, a him no one saw when looking at him, a sliver of himself alive only in a secluded corner of his mind, a not such a bad Charlie Rankin she somehow (angel or sorceress that she was) had divulged.
On the road’s shoulder, a guy hitchhiking stood as still as a statue beneath a high tension wire holding dozens of birds as static as him; in the murky field behind them a crane, looking like the illuminated arm of a half-concealed giant, raised a silo’s domed top into the air; lost in her ballads, Florence gazed blindly at it all.
Rankin guessed that to be with him still, sensing what she did about him, she had to be more than a little off—unless in fact she was an angel or a sorceress. He remembered how she’d told him the good in her was more powerful than the bad in anyone else and how, after he’d stopped Stitch Marks from raping her, instead of wanting to see Stitch Marks get some of what he’d given her, she’d stopped Rankin from pummeling the guy.
Something about her frightened Rankin more than did any of the many violent people he knew and had known.
Something else about her (more powerful than whatever about her frightened him) aroused in him a warm feeling (it had not a thing to do with sex) nothing in his experience with people prepared him for.
Unable to find her after coming out of Randy’s Watering Hole men’s room, certain he’d seen her for the last time, he’d felt as if he’d been jettisoned into a cold, desolate outback inhabited by every son of a bitch he’d ever known or might have known, a place where to show warmth was akin to bleeding in a shark tank, sad, enraged, fucked over, obsessing on the sort of violence he remembered or dreamed Little Charlie committing, the way he’d felt (he realized it now) when he’d heard Full Boat was dead.
* * *
“I’m gonna find me another stray,” said Florence.
Rankin turned to her, thinking she’d be looking at him; her eyes, though, hadn’t opened.
“One, like the one that come to me last time out of the blue, that looks lonely and on death’s door and I’ll take this one in too and nurse it back to health and show it how nice it can be to be alive and in the company of good people.”
Rankin became aware in that moment that darkness had arrived; it felt to him as if he’d brought it on with an eyeblink, a blink that had also jostled free something in his brain; a hum like the sound of a high-flying plane to those on the ground beneath it filled his ears; in his mind’s eye he saw himself stepping from the driver’s side of an idling car, toting under one arm a stuffed cloth sack; clouds of cool, visible dampness in the air; the bulbs of half-a-dozen pole lamps dully shining in blue halos around a paved parking lot; a woman cashier reading a magazine in a small glass-enclosed booth attached to a lighted building.
“And if this one dies too”—Florence faced the ceiling, as if making blind contact with someone in or beyond it—”well I’ll miss it like I miss Gold, but at least I’ll know it didn’t leave this world, no more than Gold did, never having been loved by nobody in it.”
Rankin didn’t reply to her (he wasn’t sure she was awake even).
He gazed upward through the windshield; stars and a crescent moon dimly perforated a sheen of papery clouds; a few days after he’d mentioned to Buddha that what he missed most in prison was a view of the night sky, how the sky at night was maybe his all time favorite sight, Buddha had beckoned him into his cell and told him to lie on his back on Buddha’s bunk; Rankin did, to see, on the ceiling above the bed, a hand-drawn, luminescent mural of the heavens (every constellation and star positioned in it exactly where Rankin remembered them being in fact).
“Because the only thing I can still do for Gold,” said Florence, “is to love another homeless cat as much as I did him.”
Rankin wondering if he’d only done what he’d done in Buddha’s bed all those times so that, after he’d done it, he could gaze up for a while at that painted sky, imagining he was lying alone beneath the real one, worlds from anyone, in those dark woods he’d run off into as a child.
“If I could bring in
and love more than one of them at a time I would, but I can’t seem to focus on more than one of ‘em at once.”
Rankin was getting spooked listening to her. “You still high on that shit?”
Her eyes opened at him. “This car’s swaying side-to-side.”
“The car ain’t doing nothing.”
“It feels like we’re on the ocean in a little dingy.”
“You’re fucked up still is all.”
“No. The wheels is out of balance or something.”
Rankin remembered an owl hooing off in the blackness; the solid splash of his footsteps crossing the lot; a gasoline smell; six fuel pumps but no vehicle or person at them; a feeling as if in that fog-covered night he was the only thing of substance, as if everything else divulged by his senses was as ephemeral as a forgotten thought.
The heaviness of a metal dumpster’s lid as he lifted it with one hand.
“There’s the cause of it,” said Florence.
He looked at her.
She nodded to his hands, shaking on the steering wheel, moving it, back and forth, in short jerks.
He squeezed the wheel, stopping the motion. “Another cat’d be lucky to have you,” he told Florence.
“You making fun of me?”
“No.”
“Did you hear me say something about a cat just now?”
“You said you was gonna get another one.”
She nodded, as if he’d verified what she’d been wondering about. “The truth is, loving one of ‘em gives me at least as good a feeling as one of ‘em gets being loved by me.”
“How’d you end up being so good from being treated so bad?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
Rankin shrugged. He imagined a wave forcefully breaking over him. His eyes fixated on a glowing, yellow Sunoco sign ahead of them. He heard in his mind a crash, louder than a gunshot, from the dumpster’s lid closing after he’d dropped it. He put on the Tranny’s right blinker. He told Florence, “We’re here.”
* * *
Half-a-dozen pumps under a lighted awning; a little grocery/ food mart; a separate booth holding a girl gas clerk painting her fingernails; a scowling bald guy in combat fatigues fueling up a Ford Windstar packed with dogs and kids; two rednecks (brothers maybe) with billygoat beards, going with wrenches at a Ram Charger’s exposed engine; a pretty woman, dressed nice, putting air in a Saab’s tires; “Long Tall Sally” over someone’s radio; gas fumes; cigar smoke; the dispensing whine of the pumps.
Rankin, circling the building slowly, picturing a zigzagging trail of all-night pit stops, any or all of which might have been the one he was now at, leading back to the day he’d left behind him for dead his Mother and Chester Rhimes.
“You’ve been here before.” More a statement than a question from Florence.
In those first years of being on his own (from fourteen to maybe eighteen) jacking open concession machines for food, snatching unattended wallets, purses, coats, hats, car keys, briefcases, cleaning his teeth, dick, balls, ass, armpits in public cans, playing rest stop video games until he’d used up his quarters or was made to leave the premises, sleeping on secluded patches of grass or in stolen or borrowed cars.
“Was it last night you were here?”
Rankin didn’t answer her. They rounded the building’s left, rear corner.
“What is it you’re looking for, Samson?”
He saw it exactly where, in the same moment, he remembered it being; snug to the section of wall farthest, on that side, from the store’s front. He stopped the Tranny a ways past it, then backed up to within five feet of it. He put the car in park, directly facing the pumps. Florence took a cigarette out of her sweater pocket; watching him, she lit it from the nub burning in her mouth; she snubbed the nub out in the dash ashtray. Rankin lowered his window completely. He gazed up into the darkness, the engine’s vibrations beneath him forming in his mind a picture of someone pushing weakly against him in an attempt to avoid suffocating under him. “How is it that in one mirror a girl can look beautiful to herself and in another one like a skinny-assed little junkie whore?”
He lowered his eyes to see Florence gazing into the vanity mirror beneath her visor. “Do you think it’s more the mirror or what’s in your mind when you’re looking at it?”
Rankin didn’t say.
Florence ran a tube of bright purple lipstick around her lips, smacked her lips, then put the lipstick away. She faced Rankin gravely. “Who do you see?”
“A girl who looks better than any girl I’ve ever seen.”
“Not a skinny-assed little junkie whore?”
“No.”
“This good-looking girl you’re looking at named LuAnn?”
“Her name’s Florence.”
Florence nodded straight-faced to him. “You’re not blowing smoke up my ass?”
Rankin shook his head.
“Guess that must make you something special”—she pushed up the visor and reached for her door handle—”having a girl better than any girl you’ve ever seen choosing you, out of all the men living under the eyes of God, to fall for and believe in.”
A baby started crying in the night, creating to Rankin a picture of that woman Little Charlie had strangled at the golf course house, gazing into an empty crib. He abruptly turned to the Tranny’s rear window.
“Samson?”
He heard in his mind, while looking past the window at the dumpster (a blue metal box the Tranny’s height and maybe half its length), the woman telling Little Charlie, “There isn’t one.”
“I’m going to look in it,” he said.
“In the garbage bin?”
Rankin nodded.
“What for?”
“To know I ain’t dreaming now.”
Florence, showing no reaction to his answer and acting as if searching through a public dumpster was a normal activity, said, “Should I help you?”
Rankin shook his head.
“I’ll go inside then.” Florence opened her door and stepped out of the car. Rankin envisioned a person who looked just like him concealed in the darkness beyond the arc of the rest stop lights, watching her, as he was. In the cooling air, she hugged herself crossing the lot; her exhalations trailed her in white puffs; a line of near-naked saplings, clinging to the last of their leaves, stood left of her on the grass bordering the building, until she vanished around its front corner.
Rankin got out of the Tranny, as a woman carrying a baby appeared from where Florence had disappeared; the woman walked to a station wagon parked at the pumps, put the baby (Rankin guessed it was the one crying earlier, though for all the noise it was making now it might have been asleep or dead) into the rear seat, recalling to Rankin how Little Charlie had been transfixed by the neatness of that empty crib’s freshly made sheets, the mobiles hanging above it, its sweet, powdery smell, the woman’s soft hair like Little Charlie’s mother’s hair, her warm breasts—
The woman at the station wagon got in behind its wheel. She started up the car and drove off. Feeling as if he were in a narrowing corridor in which a third wall was forming to his rear, Rankin made his way to the dumpster (it stood directly under a pole light). He opened it; the bang its cover made landing on it was as familiar to him as the memory of punches hitting him.
Smells of gone milk, rotting vegetables, fast food, festering flesh.
He peered into the dumpster.
Five or six full trash bags partially hidden amid drink containers, hamburger cartons, Styrofoam coffee cups, a cat cadaver, its black and white head, streaming with maggots, grotesquely misaligned, facing the air immediately over its spine.
In a lightless night a big tom’s screech, a fox drowned or about to be drowned in a sinkhole, Little Charlie’s ghost laughingly traversing a slush-covered fairway.
He took in a breath and, holding it, leaned into the bin; its narrow dimensions allowed him, where he was at, to reach into all of it. He looked under each trash bag; he searched in the bi
n’s every corner; he found no half-full duffel bag; he found no duffel bags at all, no clothes, no gun.
* * *
In the station’s men’s room he washed and dried his hands and face. He entered the store. Florence stood before a big wall cooler, staring into it. “I don’t want more beer,” she said. “Do you?”
“No.”
“How ‘bout a Coke. A Coke and some Twinkies. You ought to eat something or you’ll faint dead away.”
“I ain’t hungry still.”
Florence took a sixteen-ounce Coke from the cooler and from a rack next to it two twin-packs of Twinkies. She touched a finger to her and Rankin’s reflections in the cooler’s glass door. “It’s odd to be standing here looking at yourself and to be in another place watching yourself doing it.”
“Who you talking about?”
“The one of us who’s flying.”
“What other place you mean?”
“I don’t know. It’s a nice place though.”
“I didn’t find in that dumpster any of what I should of.”
“You looked at least.” She made it sound as if that was a good thing, as if the God she claimed to know so well would think so too. Rankin took from her the Coke and Twinkies. He carried them to the front and paid for them. He passed to Florence the bag the cashier handed him. They walked back outside and got in the Tranny.
“A garbage truck, Samson, like as not came and emptied it earlier today.”
Rankin started the engine. He put the car in drive; he headed it toward the road.
* * *
Darkness like black paint in a drawing of night perforated by a monster’s illumined eyes; a deer flashing before the headlights; coolish air, a pine scent, the tires whine rushing in through Florence’s cracked window, her tossed cigarette butt a dying ember in the gloom. A visible shiver in her delicate bones. A lighted object appearing too big for the road suddenly coming at them like a suppressed nightmare (A crew of A-block Thugs on his second day inside ambushing Charlie Rankin in the shower, twelve of them taking turns fucking him up the ass, the ones awaiting their go at him keeping him pinned to the floor, Rankin never crying out, speaking, even moaning so that but for his breathing and his wide open eyes watching his blood swirling in the drain he could’ve been dead) the object passing them, revealed to be only a truck, smaller than it had seemed; words from Florence.
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