by John Brandon
Kyle didn’t live in a good or bad part of town, where stealing might’ve been difficult. He lived where stores didn’t sell anything too valuable, where shoppers weren’t desperate or emboldened. He molded his diet toward what was easy to take—macaroni and cheese, bacon, packs of trail mix. He stole cigarettes from the convenience store and sold them to his neighbors. At the liquor store, he’d buy a six-pack—they didn’t ID him; no one ever did—and brush out the door with a fifth hidden under his stretched-out T-shirt. He sold the fifths. He sold bottled water. One lucky day a clerk went to take a leak and left a case of metal lighters on the counter. At the level Kyle did it, stealing was no trick. He stole what was available and he stood up straight and spoke to people every chance he got, because shoplifters, everyone knew, were hunched and solitary. Shoplifting for a living released Kyle from any thought of being a stand-up citizen. He didn’t enjoy it. Shoplifting made him feel petty and dependent.
Kyle saw a HELP WANTED sign in a window and carried it inside. It was a bicycle-repair shop. A fat guy made a serious face and said, “Kyle, do you really want to work?” The whole thing took maybe four minutes. Kyle was amused to have a job. He had to show up the next morning at a certain time. Each Friday, he’d get a check. He walked home feeling brisk.
He went outside after dinner and gabbed with his neighbors. He found himself telling them about his new job, found himself feeling proud. Maybe he could be like them: kept happy because of low-stress work that occupied their minds, tired out their bodies, and gave them something to complain about. Their evening beers were all they needed.
The fat guy, Matthew, wore sandals and had a lot of energy. He didn’t know how to fix bicycles that well, but he didn’t mind taking them apart and putting them back together until he got it right. Instead of attempting to teach Kyle anything, he invented tasks that involved cleaning and lifting. The two of them were alone in the shop most of the day, but the radio kept them from having to talk. Often, unprompted, Matthew would show Kyle a new bag of fireworks he’d added to his arsenal under the counter.
Matthew’s sister stopped by several times. She was zealously nice to Kyle, always bursting into the room and halting there with an expectant look, making Kyle feel he was supposed to say, “What a great fucking day!” She would rearrange things Kyle had already rearranged. She would run her finger over flat surfaces. She’d ask Matthew a bunch of questions, and then they’d go in the next room and spit whispers at each other. This woman was older than Matthew. She was a professor at a college in Alabama—a pigeon-toed woman who, naked, Kyle imagined, would’ve resembled a raw turkey. She wore a fanny pack that held a paperback book and rolls of Life Savers. She offered to treat for sandwiches one day and when Kyle said he wanted double meat on his she acted burdened, like Kyle was wily, white trash that would never miss an opportunity to get a lot of whatever was free. After every talk Matthew had with his sister, he headed straight out back to the sun-drenched parking lot and let off a flurry of his loudest fireworks.
Friday, Kyle came in to find Matthew sitting in the middle of the floor, gazing at a wrench.
“Did you fall?” Kyle asked.
Matthew set the wrench down softly. “I’m closing.”
“Closing closing?”
“Afraid that’s the case. I’ve been asleep at the wheel of the American dream.”
Kyle had never seen Matthew gloomy before. He didn’t like seeing a fat guy who was gloomy.
“Sorry,” Matthew said.
“What?”
“About your job.”
Kyle had been startled to get hired and was now startled to get fired.
“But don’t you think it’ll pick up when the weather gets warmer? Or cools off? What’s biking weather?”
Matthew frowned good-naturedly. “This is my sister’s place. I owe her up the wazoo for it.”
“Ah,” said Kyle.
“Look outside that door, why don’t you.”
Kyle pushed the back door open and saw breeze-blown piles of damp confetti. Matthew’s fireworks had been ruined.
“She did that?”
Matthew explained that his sister was a bona fide cunt. She hadn’t given him a birthday or Christmas present in two years, instead deducting the cost of a gift from his debt. She’d told Matthew he needed to cultivate a hippie look, that the sandals were a good start but he needed hemp jewelry and a pot T-shirt.
“I thought hippies liked Volkswagens,” Kyle said. “Not bikes.”
Matthew gripped the wrench, looking like he might laugh. “I hit her in the shin with this thing.”
Kyle stared at him.
“Didn’t break a bone or anything. Got rid of her, though.”
Kyle smelled the grease and the dust. A clock ticked behind him. He had attempted working in the straight world and doubted he’d ever attempt it again. He couldn’t believe people crammed their lives into belittling routines just for steady money. What was the big deal about getting money steadily? Was that so enticing, getting a tiny check made tinier by taxes every two weeks for the rest of your life, continually voicing the same stale complaints that working stiffs have been voicing for centuries, that the people in Kyle’s apartment complex voiced each evening? Alarm clocks, layoffs, cigarette breaks, backaches, carpal tunnel syndrome, company parties, and always the steady little checks.
Kyle sometimes drank in a bar—in the afternoon, when bars were empty, when there wasn’t some wailing band in Converse sneakers. He sat in the shadowy corners and tried not to talk to anyone. People in irreverent T-shirts would trickle in, making faces and using long words while discussing the local music scene. They could spend forty-five minutes comparing one noisome quartet to another. What made one of these bands better than another, aside from their outfits or how high they jumped, Kyle had no idea.
One day a tall guy drinking Gibsons started giving Kyle a hard time. He was an anthropology PhD. He was pissed off about something remote, about the way of the world. Kyle tried to ignore him but the bar was quiet and the guy was looking right at him, saying he wanted to radiocarbon-date Kyle’s hairstyle.
“Ask me if I’m a lumberjack,” he said.
“Are you?” Kyle asked.
“No, say the whole question.”
“Are you a lumberjack?”
“Nope,” the anthropologist said. He exploded in laughter.
Kyle raised his eyes at the bartender. “Check.”
She wrote on a pad and punched the keys of a calculator. Kyle looked at what was left of his whiskey, threw a little back, and concentrated on the taste of it.
“Don’t you say ‘please’?” The anthropologist raised a finger in the air. “The expression is ‘Check, please’”
Kyle took his time getting over there, but still the guy froze as if a tiger had sprung down from the rafters. His face bunched up as Kyle cocked his arm. The anthropologist didn’t even get his hands all the way up. Kyle meant to hit him in the chin but got him in the throat. The guy toppled off the stool in hacking spasms. Kyle had never hauled off and decked someone before. He didn’t know what to do next. Drop down and keep swinging? Ask the guy if he’d learned a lesson? Say something dashing to the bartender? There was no telling what the guy would do when he got up, so Kyle got his balance together and booted him in the ribs. The gasp came not from the anthropologist but from the bartender.
“It’s done, baby,” she said. “If I was you I’d leave. I wouldn’t even pay.”
Kyle met a woman named Ester and within a month gave up his apartment and moved in with her. He didn’t understand this decision of his, but he wasn’t troubled by it. Ester lived in a neighborhood of tall, restored houses that all seemed to have dozens of people in them. These people shared cars and bikes and clothes and gave each other massages. Ester was crazy about dogs, but they had to be mutts. She had a gray tooth and wonderful hips. Nothing felt permanent around her. Time was malleable. Ester and her friends hung around in suffocating, screened rooms, listles
sly figuring out the world. Ester wore bulky rings on her toes. She organized small parades. When a parade occurred that she hadn’t organized, she deemed it amateur and listed its faults.
Ester had a boyfriend in Nebraska that Kyle never met, a guy she’d been with for eight years who was studying to be a surgeon. She said this thing with Kyle was a fling and had nothing to do with her long-term plans. Kyle was someone to hold her at night, someone from the real world who she could learn from. She was scared of becoming insulated from the real world. She was wary of corporations. She was terrified of pregnancy and wouldn’t have regular sex with Kyle. Whenever they made out she waited about three minutes and then fell upon him with her mouth.
Someone from Kyle’s old apartment complex introduced him to a man named Ron, a man with salt-and-pepper sideburns who would buy almost anything you had to sell. The guy could unload coffee beans, cases of pants, air fresheners. Ron owned a crappy gym with a big basement. He ate protein bars and listened to speed metal.
Kyle took to trolling parking lots, looking for booklets of CDs, radar detectors, cell phones, sporting goods. The gold mine was golf clubs. Kyle would put on a pastel shirt and go into a Nevada Bob’s, take some practice swings, mention the names of a couple courses, buy a three-pack of balls, slip a driver down his pant leg and breeze out. Kyle paid no rent and soon saved enough to get a car. He didn’t get one, though. He didn’t want to share it with all of Ester’s friends.
Suddenly Kyle had been living with Ester for a year and a half. Many of her neighbors had moved on and been replaced, but the new ones talked about the same things in the same screened rooms. The conversations seemed to belong to the rooms and not to the people—conversations whose very appeal was that they never yielded answers. There were fewer and fewer dogs. Ester got angry with Kyle, something she never used to do. She got angry about Kyle’s hair, about what he did with his time, about his ignorance of certain music and certain books. She demoted him from blow jobs to hand jobs.
One morning she announced she was going to visit her boyfriend and Kyle asked if he should water the plants while she was gone.
“Water the plants.” She seemed exhausted. “Water the plants?”
She threw her version of a fit, a grave lecture with a lot of pauses. She put her thumbs to her temples and whispered the word “fuck.” She wanted Kyle to be jealous. She wanted him to say enough’s enough with the hand jobs, throw her down and screw her brains out. She wanted him to hate people and get sad about things, to tell her how he felt about her, to make her feel safe and feminine.
Kyle said, “What happened to the whole fling deal?” and Ester hurled her keys at him.
After this, even the hand jobs stopped. Ester wouldn’t kick him out, though. She quit talking to him. She brought guys around. Kyle figured out that the guy in Nebraska didn’t exist and wondered where she’d gone all those weekends. He knew it was up to him to leave, to dig out his green bag, fill it, hump it downtown, and sign a lease.
He could get a car now.
Ron asked Kyle if he was busy on Thursday. He knew a guy that needed a guy on Thursday.
“Who’s the guy?”
“Colin.”
“Don’t know him.”
“Guy from Memphis. He’s under a few other people in a pretty good outfit.”
“Oh, yeah?” Kyle said.
“Meet him at the kebab place at four.”
“Did you have to vouch for me?”
Ron peeled open a protein bar and held it up to his eye. “No, no.” He sniffed the bar, pinched it and rubbed his fingers together. “No, it’s all between you and him.”
Colin was cutting grilled vegetables into dainty bites when Kyle sat down across from him. Colin was pale and wore a tie. When he crossed his legs, Kyle saw his ankle socks. He said he’d been to Athens twice, once to do something with Ron and once when he was seventeen, when he’d dropped acid and spent a whole night staring at shop windows. He laughed, his head held still while his shoulders quaked. He explained what Kyle was supposed to do and it seemed simple enough. Kyle’s only question was why Colin didn’t just do it himself, but Kyle didn’t ask. That seemed like a question you didn’t ask.
That Thursday, as he’d been told to, Kyle walked into the Marriott hotel, stepped calmly into the EMPLOYEES ONLY area beside the check-in desk, took a long hall and some steps down to the laundry, opened the second dryer, and pulled out a small suitcase. He took it across to the kebab house, waited in line with it, ordered a big combo plate, and settled into a booth. He ate slowly, savoring the marinated meat hunks, watching for a wop with a yellow shirt. Kyle had been told that the wop would show up for the suitcase before Kyle could finish eating. Kyle paused between kebabs. He went and got one of every condiment packet the place offered, tore open each and squeezed it dry. He took the suitcase with him to piss, then sat back down. He ate all the vegetables, even the squash. He got a refill on his soda, sat and slurped it and let out a string of soft belches. No wop. He kept looking at the clock on the wall. Five, ten, fifteen more minutes passed. The guys behind the counter were starting to wonder about Kyle. It felt like the place was getting smaller. For a while he was the only customer and he couldn’t get a full breath in his lungs. Kyle put his hands in his pockets and made fists. The zipper of the suitcase was secured with a tiny padlock that was meant to look inconspicuous. Kyle thought about busting it off with a hammer. He thought about going back to Ron’s. He thought about taking the suitcase to the hotel and putting it back in the dryer. The wop was almost three hours late. Kyle slipped out of his booth, pins and needles in his legs, and carried the suitcase to his apartment. He put it out of sight and watched an awards show on TV until he dozed off.
Before dawn, there was a knock. Kyle looked out the peephole and his stomach dropped. It wasn’t the wop. It wasn’t Colin. It wasn’t Ron. It was some guy with thinning blond hair and a toothpick in his mouth. Kyle kept quiet. The guy knocked a couple more times, then stepped back from the door and pulled something from his belt—something to pick the lock with. Kyle stepped into his shoes and leaned against the wall. The guy jabbed the knob unlocked and started working the deadbolt over. In a matter of seconds he’d be in Kyle’s living room. He’d have a knife open and his eyes peeled. Maybe he had a gun. Kyle crouched, coiling his strength. The deadbolt wiggled and then flipped. The knob turned. When the door was open a foot, Kyle yanked it the rest of the way, tugging the guy off balance, and toppled him over the arm of the couch. Kyle used his knees and his weight. The guy made whining noises, spitting on the carpet. Kyle groped but could not find a knife or a gun. He dug in his elbow and demanded the guy’s weapon.
“I don’t got one,” the guy said.
“What do you got?”
“Nothing I could hurt anybody with.”
“Someone that fights like you should have a weapon.”
“Trespassing is a lot different than armed robbery, smart guy.”
Kyle made the guy take his pants off. He tied him up and put him in the closet and not fifteen minutes later Colin was outside the door, soaked in sweat, a gun in his waistband. There was nothing Kyle could do but open up and see what happened. He went over the events in his mind and knew he had nothing to hide. He swung the door open. Colin, seeming too tired to take a step inside, said, “Tell me you still got it.”
Kyle nodded.
Colin came in and sat on the couch while Kyle got the suitcase. Kyle didn’t know if he should tell Colin about the man he’d tied up, but what was Kyle going to do with him? If Kyle didn’t tell Colin, then he was stuck with the guy. Colin asked for a glass of water and turned on the news. A freckled guy was announcing birthdays.
“You might want to go out for a while,” Colin said. “Get some pancakes or something.”
“Why’s that?”
Colin held out his water glass and Kyle went and refilled it.
“A gentleman might stop by,” Colin said. “If so, I have to shoot him.”
&
nbsp; “I got a guy in my closet.” Kyle was relieved. “I don’t know if it’s the same one you’re thinking of.”
“Unarmed? Blond hair?”
“That’s the one.”
“Alive?”
“So far.”
Colin ogled Kyle. He slid his water glass around on the coffee table, leaving a wet trail, then rested a paw on the suitcase.
“Got a car?” he asked.
“Just got it.”
“Pack. Get out of here and meet me at Ron’s in two hours.”
“I have a job, don’t I?”
“Yup. You’re going to Arkansas.”
Months later, many runs under his belt, Kyle found himself driving a Firebird to New Smyrna Beach, Florida, from his adopted home, Little Rock. He located a wet T-shirt contest. The contestants, most of whom looked better before the water was poured, whispered to each other instead of playing to the sparse crowd. The best-looking one had wide-set breasts and tanned feet. After the contest, Kyle told her she should’ve won and mentioned renting a Jacuzzi suite at the Sheraton. The woman declined with a twang. A half hour later, out of fascination with this woman who was acquainted with everyone in the bar but friendly to none, he gave her another try. She was sitting at a table singing along with “Wind Beneath My Wings.” When she finished Kyle clapped, trying to appear as though her singing had touched him. She glanced at him, embarrassed, and left.
Kyle suspected that, as with many desirable things in life, he didn’t want women as much as he should. He was just as pleased to get drunk, or to drink a bunch and not get drunk. He plopped down at the back of the bar and alternated between Bud and rum runners. He thought of his past, and none of the events seemed more distant than any of the others. All of them could have happened yesterday or a hundred years ago. Kyle tried to find some design in it all, in the things that he’d chosen and that had -chosen him. This was impossible. His mind wasn’t up to it. He wondered how long he’d live in Little Rock. He thought of Frog, Colin’s boss, the dealer they all worked for. This guy, Kyle had heard, had a lake house so big that parts of it were closed up during certain seasons. He grilled steaks by his lily-pad-shaped pool, had money creeping all through the stock market. Kyle didn’t feel jealous of him, and knew he should. Maybe Kyle didn’t need a philosophy of life. Maybe it was only people who wanted things, who felt guilty about getting things and frustrated about not getting things, who needed a philosophy.