by John Brandon
In the morning, Kyle bumbled around a gift shop and picked out a shark’s jaw, a gift for his new girlfriend back home. He drove a Toyota Tundra to Tallahassee, stayed the night in a motel with a dry pool, then took a Ford Probe to Little Rock. He parked the Probe in the loading alley of a strip mall and knocked on Gregor’s door. Kyle got buzzed in and found Gregor chewing pita and tomatoes, daubing mayo with a long fingernail. Gregor’s hair looked shellacked. He pointed at a dolly, then flipped a page of the classifieds and put his face close enough to smell the ink. The room was full of brass parts that looked like prehistoric insects. Kyle left the dolly. He went to the Probe and retrieved eleven slim boxes covered with packing tape and labeled SHEET MUSIC.
“What kind of town is this? All I want is a periscope.” Gregor rattled the classifieds, then dropped a wad of spit on them. His face lit up. “I read a book. Did I tell you?”
“You might have.”
“It was about farmers. Four hundred thirty-six pages long. You start on page thirteen, though. They count the table of contents and the part where the other writers say, ‘This man, by damn, is a writer. If he was here, I’d give him a nut scrub.’” Gregor was grinning, full of himself. “Here’s the trick.” He pulled a paper shredder from under his table. “Every page I read, I tear it out and shred it.”
Kyle told Gregor he was a unique individual, then he stood there and waited for his three thousand bucks, looking forward to feeling the tight lump of it in his pocket as he sat on the bus.
Kyle’s new girlfriend, Nora, watched movies made in war-torn countries and was fond of the word “eclectic.” Her jewelry was dangly and her tan lines out of whack. She often looked at Kyle with mild confusion, as if he were the wrong month of a calendar. She implored him to get a normal job and he replied that people held normal jobs because they’d been brainwashed to believe they wanted things. He wished he were brainwashed, he said, but for some reason brainwashing didn’t work on him. He knew that no amount of possessions or height of position would make his life worthwhile.
The first time they’d met, to satisfy Nora’s desire for sharing, Kyle lied and said his mother had molested him as a child. Nora bought this story and pampered Kyle for days, yet she thought he was lying when he claimed he’d lost a necklace he’d bought her. This amused Kyle. The truth was, his mother had raised him in an even-tempered, resigned way before being electrocuted when Kyle was a teenager. Kyle didn’t feel that Nora deserved to know anything true about him. In time they would break up and then Kyle would never see her again. She would be no different from the people he’d known in Athens—Ron, Ester, Matthew—or the kids he’d gone to school with back in Lofton. They all came and went.
1974
After graduation, you, Ken Hovan, stock groceries and build prefabricated sheds in the yards of rich guys out in Germantown. You work part time at a gas station and put vinyl siding on new brick houses. You snag a weekend doorman gig at a Memphis State bar and, during the week, mow lawns in the remote suburb of Collierville. Winter comes and the call for lawn service dries up. The bar where you work, whose owner can’t contrive a drink special that’s both profitable for him and enticing to college kids, goes under.
That February, the city of Memphis announces it’s too broke to continue contracting repairs to its housing projects and will assemble its own low-paid troupe. You apply to be a roofer. You’ve never done roofing work but you know which tools are involved and that roofing, like stock brokerage or scooter repair or coffee-shop management or exotic dancing, can be learned in about three days. You work this job for over six years, applying for every bouncer spot that opens and getting turned down each time. As a roofer you acquire bulbous forearms and calves, and also the nickname Froggy, for the ease with which you spring from one project roof to another. You’ve always been the type of fellow people dare to eat the noxious and say the inappropriate, and you are now daily egged to leap ten-foot alleys and fling hammers into distant dumpsters.
In the spring of 1982, riding the goodwill of disco, a man from Mobile opens what he hopes will be the first multiracial dance club in Memphis.
This man has bought a former coat factory on the west edge of Midtown and has sunk a million dollars into it. He hires twelve black bartenders and twelve white bartenders, white and black managers, a group of deejays that includes a Mexican and a Frenchman, and a total of thirty bouncers, one of which is you, Ken “Froggy” Hovan.
You have a stout, agile build that enables you to avoid ever being hit flush by a punch or body block. Like all small men who can fight, you are thought of as crazy. You allow the black bouncers to call you honky and cracker. In two months the club’s patrons are all black. The white employees, other than you, quit, a development the owner doesn’t mind because his black staff doesn’t realize they’re expected to steal. You attain a certain fame as the only white guy at the club. Everyone knows Froggy and asks how you’re living, to which you answer, “Fat like Thanksgiving.” You go to bed with black women and they do not act strangely in the morning. They roll over, stare at the clock a moment, curse, and matter-of-factly tell you they love you on their way out the door. They will not cook or even pour their own drinks. They demand that you sing to them and they striptease without being asked. You envy black dudes their women but not their business sense. When the club goes under, as all clubs do, the black bouncers will be the owners of Coupe de Villes for which they can’t afford gas. They will march to the pawnshop and get ripped off by 60 percent on their chains.
It’s March 1984 when the club dies. You find that your credit with the black bouncers and their women, as well as the feeling of being a vital cog in a scene, does not endure without the club. A new feeling you can’t identify may be the grip of adulthood. You know you will not return to working in Germantown, slaving in the yards of Baptists who wear pastel shirts and live off investments. You doubt, in fact, that you will again have a boss or do anything you are dared to do. A space in a crumbling strip mall comes open and you think of leasing it. Over the next few days no better idea occurs to you and you want to have saved money for a reason so you pull the trigger, rent the space, paint FROGGY’S PAD on the front window, brush out the cobwebs, mop the floor. You buy a cash register and drink coffee behind it. You assume you need some sort of license, but you will not look into this unless you’re forced to. You think of yourself one minute as a man who at twenty-seven owns his own business, then the next minute as a man who got so bored in his apartment, avoiding work, that he bought himself a place to be.
You put up a sign that reads BUY & SELL ANYTHING and soon realize you know the market value of very few things. Your shelves fill with all manner of dolls, wreaths, teacups, ashtrays, pocket knives, and hand tools. You lose money for seven weeks until the beat-up guys start shuffling in. They’re unshowered, bandaged. You sense degrees of desperation in their twitches and coughs and hollow smiles. They sell you car stereos and cigarettes. A black guy with freckles who calls himself Testament comes in day after day, like it’s a coffee shop. This worries you because he is not a junkie. He sells you collectible items one at a time—Elvis plates and German steins. Could be a cop. Could be casing the place. One day you dump your coffee out a window and tell him you know where a fellow could get ahold of some boxes. “Then you can bring all your crap up at once.” You enjoy calling your inventory crap.
“I can get something you can move,” he says. His lips are brown and stiff, like cardboard, his eyebrows unruly, one of his ears scabbed over.
He tells you he got the name Testament as a child. His parents liked to smoke a ton of opium and read Bible passages. He shakes your hand and tells you he is not a cop and wouldn’t bother with you if he was. He will soon come into 140 cases of bootleg tapes and will split the profits with you for the use of your back-room shelves. You are happy for the prospect of customers. You were expecting this fellow to talk guns or pot, so the thought of trafficking unreleased pop music does not spook you.
When Kyle arrived at the lot, he saw a flatbed truck. He’d never operated anything bigger than a van, and had to hide his nervousness over this fact when a beige guy appeared and said his name was Swin. The guy tried to make small talk, but Kyle kept quiet until they were on the interstate. Something was up. The day before, Colin had told Kyle he’d have a partner for this run, something he’d never had before. Colin had told Kyle that a gun would be provided in the vehicle’s center console, something which had never been provided before, and now the vehicle turns out to be a flatbed truck. Kyle didn’t like the idea of having guns around when a deal was being made. He didn’t know if Swin knew about the gun and didn’t want to check the console with him watching. Kyle took a good look at the guy. He was a weights freak, with little muscles popping up where they shouldn’t, on the back of his neck or his fingers. His T-shirt was a size too small.
“What kind of name is Swin?”
“A girl’s,” Swin said.
The load was faucets, more than a hundred cases, stuffed with bags of powder and plugged. This was another thing: Kyle knew what he was hauling. The way Frog ran his operation, his drivers simply drove a car to one place, got in another car, drove somewhere else. Sometimes the drivers handled money, sometimes not. Sometimes when Kyle returned to Little Rock he stopped off at Gregor’s and unloaded something, sometimes not. Kyle preferred to be kept in the dark, but Colin had made a point to tell him about the faucets. Of course, he’d left out the amount. He hadn’t let Kyle know he’d be captaining a highway barge.
Besides the faucets, Swin had also thrown on some miniature orange cones because, he explained, the randomness might throw off a cop. Their destination was South Padre, Texas. At a red light, rain started. Kyle knew the boxes wouldn’t stay dry with Swin’s shoddy cover job, so they pulled into a shopping center that included a hardware depot. The truck took two spaces. While Swin went for a tarp, Kyle bought rope and hurried back to the truck. He flipped open the console and there was the gun, reclined on sugar packets and ink pens and a tire gauge. Swin returned and they did their best with a roll of blue plastic that was meant to protect a small fishing boat. They got moving again and hit 1-30. Swin took off his shirt and draped it on the seat to dry. A plus sign was tattooed on his right bicep, a minus sign on his left. Kyle asked if the left arm was weaker.
“It takes both for a charge. Step to me, you catch the voltage.”
Kyle knew he could beat Swin up. “I’ve never wanted a tattoo,” he said. “I’ve never seen one that didn’t look stupid.”
“You’re not a sexy dude. If you’re already sexy, a tattoo can enhance it.”
“Don’t tell me you’re one of those witty people.”
“I’ve been told that I am.”
“You remind me of a game-show host.”
“That’s another way to say I’m brimming with charisma.”
“No,” Kyle said. “It’s not.”
“If you want to be the strong, silent type, you need to keep yourself from commenting on things.”
Kyle tipped his chin back until his neck cracked. “It won’t be right away, but at some point I’m going to knock you on your ass.”
“You say that now, but soon we’ll be friends. Everyone who meets me wants to be my friend.”
Noonish they got a booth in a Southwestern restaurant with World Book place mats. Kyle’s described belomancy, a process by which local Indians read the future by shooting arrows. Swin’s was about Ford v. Wainwright, the ruling that made it unlawful to execute a crazy man. Kyle ordered a #7 combo. Swin was picky—didn’t eat sour cream and didn’t eat guacamole unless it was fresh. He and the waitress discussed what “fresh” meant. A woman with a baby sat down in a nearby booth and began nursing.
“That’s good to see,” Swin said.
“You’re sad.”
“A lot of women don’t breast-feed anymore, which is a shame. Breastfed kids get fewer syndromes. I was a formula baby. You, I’m guessing, had a mouthful of the real deal.”
“No idea,” Kyle said.
“Yup, I think you did.”
“I lied about my mother once to get out of trouble with a girl. What do you think of that?”
“How much trouble?”
“Does it matter?”
“Is your mother in trouble now?”
“She’s dead.”
“Because you lied about her?”
“No. She’s been dead.”
Swin looked toward the ceiling, thinking. “A conversation this vague, really no point in having it.”
“She was a great lady,” said Kyle. “Great lady.” He ate a chip.
“When people act sappy after someone’s dead, that means they feel guilty.”
“What do I feel guilty about?”
“How would I know?”
“I was always good to her.”
“Not guilty about how they treated the person; guilty to have life and not know what to do with it.”
When Kyle envisioned his mother, she was in a white bed, bandages on her left elbow and wrist where the shock had burnt off the skin, fingertips black, head shaved. Her face looked as though she’d been informed of a rude change of plans. Kyle would return from a walk to find her arms in a different position, and always it was just that a nurse had shifted her.
Each Wednesday, he’d put her favorite program on, a game show about finding fake bombs. He began to settle into a routine, to get used to having his mother that way. It wasn’t a bad way to be. She’d made an escape. For a time, Kyle hadn’t wanted her to die or wake up, but to remain in peace, away from her life.
Swin opened a travel-size lotion and rubbed some on his elbows. “If one of my sisters died, I wouldn’t care.”
“What a stupid thing to say.”
“I just don’t care for women.”
Kyle stared.
“I like them for that” said Swin.
“How about we both shut up.”
They munched on chips for a time and slurped their drinks, the restaurant filling with nurses. Swin pointed without raising his hand off the table. “Caregivers.”
They weren’t far past Dallas before the tarp came loose again. They pulled into a truck stop and bought duct tape. The boxes were fraying. They did what they could with the tarp and got back on the highway, Kyle staying in the right lane and doing five over.
When Swin woke up, the sun was setting and the rain had stopped. He pulled the map out and did some measuring with his fingers. “If we go eighty-three the rest of the way, we won’t be late.”
“Getting pulled over with drugs makes you really late.”
Swin looked over more maps from the glove box. There was one for each state, plastic booklets. “Here I go again,” he said. “I’m learning again. You don’t get this smart by accident.”
The sky became a weak yellow, then abruptly it was night. They got off the interstate at a cluster of fast-food restaurants that all shared one lot, and parked in the far corner. They chose an all-you-can-eat restaurant where waitresses circled with bowls of pasta and salad and breadsticks. Kyle ate himself stunned. He planned to sleep away a good chunk of the remaining drive. The check came, with two peppermints, and he took care of it. Kyle and Swin were chewing the mints when they walked outside and saw a tall bald man snooping around the truck. He leaned over and peeked under the tarp. The man wasn’t dressed as a cop, but he had a badge patched on his sleeve. Kyle told Swin to do the talking. When they got close, the guy stood up past straight, hand to his chin. Swin shook his hand and introduced himself as Mike. Kyle said, “Hey, now,” then climbed in the cab.
“First-aid kit’s in the seat console,” Swin yelled.
He knew about the gun. Kyle kept still and listened. The guy’s name was Pat Bright. He was some kind of ranger.
“Headed far?”
“Corpus Christi,” Swin told him.
“I noticed your rig needs some help.”
“Not sure I agree with that a hundred pe
rcent. Though all things give out eventually, don’t they? If you’re patient.” Swin’s voice was even.
Kyle opened the console and lifted out the loaded nine-millimeter with two fingers. “What’s better for a headache?” he called. “Tylenol or—” he tucked the gun under his leg, “Aleve?”
“Got to get more rope,” Pat Bright was telling Swin. “Go corner to corner.”
“We were in a hurry this morning. Still are.”
“What’s the haul?”
“Faucets. Some computer tycoon’s place. Used to be oil, now it’s computers.”
“There’s no faucets in Corpus Christi?”
“He’s got to have that adobe-marble core.”
Kyle pushed the mirror out and saw Bright beaming with tolerance.
“Let me take a look how you’ve got them stacked,” Bright said.
“How many styles of stacking are there? To me, stack always meant one on top of the other.”
“I’m a safety expert in this state.”
Kyle heard the tarp crinkling.
“See there,” said Swin. “Now we really need to haul ass.”
This wouldn’t be a huge deal, Kyle thought; they would pull the body in the cab and be on their way, then dump Bright in some field. The only trouble was the shot. Kyle and Swin could act confused and run back into the restaurant, asking if anyone knew where that shot came from. Then again, this was Texas. The diners might just look around for a moment, then continue stabbing their battered vegetables. This wouldn’t be a big deal. It wasn’t that complicated, was it? The biggest worry was that this ranger already knew what they were moving and was stalling until his backup showed. Shit, Kyle thought. Shit, here goes. Kyle stepped down from the cab with the gun showing. “Enough questions.”