Arkansas

by John Brandon

  1986

  Most of Little Rock is a rotten maze.

  To clear your head, you drive to Hot Springs on a sticky interstate in your spanking new Nissan sports car, listening to a radio show about the act of laughter. You check into the second-best hotel in Hot Springs, into a room that is not fancy but is twenty-five yards long. A balcony runs the length of the room, looking out into the side of a mountain. The mountain is so close, you can’t decide if it’s blocking your view or if it is the view. You walk to the other end of town, to see if you can take the waters. The women’s baths are cramped and have exposed pipes, while the men’s are colorful and full of statues. There are secret pathways that go nowhere. The baths are abandoned, the towel racks empty, the pools dry.

  You return to your room and flop open the thin phone book. There are no listings under Escort Service or Adult Entertainment. Massage has its own two-dozen-page section, but there’s no way to tell which are massage and which are massage. You go to a restaurant called The Faded Rose and eat a trout covered in almonds, then you drink at a karaoke bar, listening to the finest duets you’ve ever heard. In two hours you lose all respect for professional singers.

  Drunk, you wander the streets. Until you have people, you are an amateur criminal. Some guys con people into sending their sons to slaughter, and you can’t even convince skid-row losers to peddle drugs. You go back up to your room and watch people on TV pretend to be dumb and stare at snack food. They are acting stoned.

  In the morning you shave and drink hot tea. You get back on the interstate, wanting a long meal before you get back to Little Rock, a Southern lunch with many side bowls. Magnet Cove will do. The town stores are set in an oval around a crumbling fountain. There are flags everywhere—U.S., Razorback, Confederate. A tanning shop. A shop for benches and swings. Here’s your restaurant, The Heartland Fryer. Is this the heartland? You take the biggest table and order the barbecue platter. You browse a real-estate magazine full of cabins, taking a bite after each page. The old waitress shakes her head. “Nobody expecting this one. Another crazy drifter.” You laugh, but reckon that you are a crazy drifter. You’re alone and no longer have a set residence. It’s fair to say you are living on your wits. You have killed a man while he sprawled sleeping and probably killed another, the man Buttons sent for you, with a fork and a .22.

  After finishing the last of your greens and stopping at the fountain, which houses a family of cats in its basin, you head down a soundless alley toward your car. In the parking lot of an old service station, two boys swing a metal ring which hangs from a string, wanting it to catch on a nail they’ve hammered into a post. They take turns. They’re tall, with thick arms and legs, baby faces—stunning in their pale expanse. They notice you and turn their abundant heads... Jesus, those faces. It’s not a memory at all. It’s a presence in the brain, that moment—a buried planet that casts a pall over everything else.

  “That your slick two-door?”

  “Paid for,” you say. “Free and clear.”

  “Bet you just hit the high spots in the road.”

  “This you boys’ station?”

  “We’re full in our rights to use it.”

  The one speaking has a red earring. The boys might be twins.

  “How much for an oil change?”

  The brother with the earring burps alertly. “No charge.”

  “Has to cost something.”

  “We don’t need money. We live with our aunt.”

  The brothers go in the garage and step into overalls big as tents. You pull in. You stand aside while they raise the car about a foot off the ground with a lift.

  “How old are you boys?”

  “Guess.”

  “No idea.”

  “Yeah, that game’s boring. Seventeen.”

  “You both?”

  They nod.

  “Twins.”

  The one with the earring shakes his head. He identifies himself as Tim and his brother as Thomas. They were born eleven months apart and this month they happen to both be seventeen. You say people call you Frog and they don’t inquire about the nickname, just prop the hood and get to work. They may be the largest teenagers you’ve ever seen.

  “Your aunt know what you do all day?” you ask.

  “She believes anything we tell her.”

  Thomas gets under the car, his legs and boots sticking out.

  “What if you told her you were off to college?”

  “Sad to say, she’d go hook, line, and sinker.”

  “You two could play fullback for the Razorbacks. Fullback’s a good position for corn-fed white boys.”

  “We don’t like sports. We like games.”

  “I happen to be in the black-market game. Happen to be looking for some help.”

  “He’s trying to impress us,” Tim calls down to his brother.

  “Ain’t working, is it?”

  “Sure ain’t.”

  “How long you been out of school?”

  “We can read,” says Thomas.

  “We can read plenty.”

  “It’s hard to find gainful employment without a diploma.”

  “We got the one oil here. It’ll have to do.”

  Thomas, still under the car, warns that whatever you want from them, it better not turn out to be sweeping and rearranging. Every job turns out to be sweeping and rearranging.

  “You’re squatting on this place?”

  “We’re trying out being mechanics, to see if we like it.”

  “What do you think so far?”

  “We think it isn’t going to work out.”

  Thomas squirms out, dragging a shallow bucket of used oil with him, and gets to his feet. He hands new filters to Tim, who puts them in place and lets the hood fall closed. They lower the car to the ground.

  “So, what do you say?” you ask. “You guys want to try working for me?”

  “What’s the official title?” Thomas asks.

  “Oh... Senior Distribution Executive.”

  “Senior,” Tim says, seeming to like the ring.

  “Executive,” adds his brother.

  There’s a pause in which the brothers don’t say anything or even look at each other, each giving the other an opportunity to protest. The moment passes.

  “Won’t your aunt come looking?” you ask. “You’re not really college types.”

  “It don’t matter,” Tim says. “She thinks not believing someone is un-Christian.”

  “You ever meet anybody truly wants to be like Jesus?” Thomas opens a steel cabinet and pulls out some small boxes—Life, Four Corners, Jenga. “She don’t keep jewelry or decorations. Prays for people she don’t like. When she goes for groceries she calls it a ‘journey.’”

  “Does she do carpentry?”

  “She tries,” says Tim.

  Now the brothers look at one another. In unison, they shrug.

  “Pop the trunk,” Thomas tells you. “For the games.”

  The boys load in the boxes and some tools and a bottle of fancy garage soap. They say they’ll return in half an hour with clothes and toilet supplies.

  “Don’t you want to know where you’re headed?”

  “Sure.”

  “Little Rock,” you say. “Ever been?”

  “No.”

  “What weapons you got?”

  They shake their heads.

  “No guns?”

  “Never shot one.”

  “All right. Get your gear.”

  In less than ten minutes, they return. They load themselves into the backseat, each holding a canvas sack on his lap, and you pull out of the garage, speed up the interstate ramp, and explain things to them. You are the boss. They may never quit, may never refuse an order. If they ever run off, you will hunt them down and kill them, no matter how much you may have grown to like them. Things may move slowly at times, you say, but they may not complain or second-guess you. You are a killer, they are not. You are smart, a city slicker from South Memphis. They ma
y not tell a soul what they do or who they do it with. They are not allowed to drink or get a side job. They are not allowed to bring girls around. Tim will no longer wear his earring. You will get a condo for the three of them, and in a year or so, if things pan out, you’ll move out and give it to them. In time, they might take over the operation, cutting you in for a percentage.

  They sit stunned in the rearview like harvested crops, realizing they are different people now that they’ve ducked into your car and been spirited out of the hills and onto the groggy plains of Arkansas, the flatlands, where there’s no place to hide.

  PART TWO

  THE BODIES

  It was after ten before Kyle, Swin, and the blue dog, Bedford, got themselves together and strolled to Bright’s house. Bedford, drunk on the scent of rotten plants and critter tracks, would not use the trail, opting for the dried mud and patchy new grass of the forest floor. The house came into sight and Bedford jogged toward it. He scratched at the door, then turned loops. Kyle knocked. When he got no answer, he tried the knob and found that it wasn’t locked. They went inside, where Bedford cocked his head and whimpered, then arranged himself in Bright’s chair. Swin said Bright must’ve gotten into the old whiskey.

  “Nothing in the sink but a coffee cup,” Kyle said.

  “He doesn’t take walks.”

  “No.” Kyle turned down the long hallway toward the bedrooms and almost smacked into the hanging attic stairs. He called to Bright again while Swin checked the rooms.

  “Book bag, but no books,” Swin said. He stood in the hall, suspending the backpack from its top loop. Inside it were shoelaces and loose bullets. The smug look was gone from Swin’s face. His eyes were wide. Kyle knew that whatever had gone on might’ve just happened; last night, when Kyle had put the bag of cash in the dryer, all had been normal. That was only, what, eight hours ago?

  He told Swin to stay put and keep a lookout, then scaled the short ladder until his top half was in the attic. Nick? The kid from last night? What was he doing here? He was dead. Bright was dead. The deceased men appeared to have fallen asleep cuddling. Kyle got to his feet and saw the blood-soaked insulation. One of Bright’s cheeks was bunched, pulling his mouth into an ornery smile. Nick looked as though he had something left, like a battered snake that could still strike. Kyle got the unwieldy pistol from the two of them and noticed a quarter of light on Bright’s pant leg. The roof had been shot. Kyle wondered if Frog was involved in this, or if Bright had a side deal. Did Bright know this kid? Where was the goddamn uncle? Kyle heard whistling wind. He was surrounded by boxes of holiday crap, old exercise devices, an ironing board made of PVC. Kyle realized the noise he heard wasn’t wind, but the whistling of his mind. He felt rushed. He had to listen hard to hear anything over the buzz in his skull. What had to be done first? He heard Swin calling him, then saw his partner’s face pop into the attic.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Kyle told him.

  Swin made a noise.

  “Nothing but a busy day. We thought we had the day off, but we have to work.”

  “Can I hold the gun?”

  “Sure you can. Keep the safety on.”

  Kyle handed Swin the gun and Swin tucked it in his pants.

  “Cold.”

  “There’s two rounds in it.”

  “We can’t keep it, can we?”

  “Nope.”

  Swin stared at the embracing men and Kyle let him. Swin needed something horrid in his guts, something to chill his blood, something that would help him think in terms of alive or dead, breathing or not breathing. After a minute, Kyle took him by the elbow and told him to lock the front door and bring up a pad and paper. Kyle dictated, making up his directions as he went. They had to untangle the bodies and bring them downstairs in plastic bed sheets, shower and scrub them, then put them in fresh sweats from the dime store down the road. Did that store sell sweats? They had to turn the AC all the way up and fix the hole in the roof. Right? Turning the AC up couldn’t hurt. It would keep the bodies fresh, keep Kyle and Swin from sweating all over them. Wipe down the door handles. Clean up that bedroom. Rip out and replace the drenched insulation. They had insulation at the hardware store by the clinic. Kyle knew that. Burn the dead men’s clothes and shoes.

  They did all of this wearing gloves and hats and long sleeves. They buffed the hammer and clothes hanger until they shone, tucked the kitchen chair back in its spot. Bedford yelped, not willing to leave Bright’s chair. Swin washed the coffee mug and set Nick’s wallet and keys on the table. The money from Nick’s uncle was still in the dryer. Kyle didn’t know what to do but leave it there. He searched the park, found the gate locked, found Nick’s Datsun. There were his stupid wristbands. Nick had followed them last night. While Kyle was asleep and dumbass Swin was at the wheel, Nick had tailed them for two hundred miles. Kyle backed the car into a dry grove and returned to the house. He told Swin that his sole duty for the rest of the day was to not let anyone near the house.

  Kyle was speeding east toward the Louisiana border in Bright’s Bronco. The whirling in his mind had died out. He could hear the ticking tin roofs of the roadside shacks, the panting of hidden dogs. He smelled the insect carcasses deep in the oak trunks. His memory felt sharp. There were a lot of details from particular days of Kyle’s life that he hadn’t known he still possessed. There were days that, for better or worse, meant something.

  In middle school, Kyle’s counselor had forced him to apply for something called State Camp. She’d kept stressing that grades weren’t very important to the application process; character and potential were. Only one boy from each middle school could attend the camp. It was an honor. It took place in a well-to-do suburb of Atlanta, at a community college. The boys all brought razors and displayed them prominently on their sinks, though few of them needed to shave. Kyle’s roommate had a box of cigars he kept talking about smoking but never did. Mornings at State Camp were spent in an auditorium, listening to officials with odd titles like Comptroller. In the afternoons, the campers endeavored to set up a mock political system. Each boy was supposed to either run for an elected position or claim a support duty, but Kyle knew no one would elect him and didn’t want to be anybody’s assistant, so he did neither. He avoided the meetings. He stayed in his room doing push-ups or wandered down to a rushing stream that ran through campus. The second-to-last day, while Kyle was sitting off by himself in the courtyard, he was pelted by an orange. It hit his forearm and exploded onto his shirt, one of five dress shirts he’d brought for the five days of the camp. He looked in the direction the orange had come from and saw only a roving mass of laughter and slick hair—no way to tell which one had thrown it. The mass of boys tripped around the corner and was gone. Kyle stared into some tree branches awhile, then flicked the shards of pulp off his arm. He peeled off his shirt and went to the laundry room of his dormitory, dropped the quarters in, and propped himself in a chair. Not a minute later, two boys in the next room started talking about the orange-throwing. Kyle could hear every word through the vent. They referred to Kyle as “that weird dude.” They exaggerated the distance the orange had flown. They said the orange had hit Kyle in the head, not the arm. Most important, they said the name Brent Hodge. That night, Kyle eased open the door of Brent Hodge’s room. Brent had the bottom bunk. His mouth was wide open and one arm was flailed off the bed. Kyle went to the closet and poured orange juice over all the clothes. He poured some in the shoes, poured some in the sock drawers, and used what was left on the spare sheets and blankets. He rested the empty juice carton in the sink. He turned, but couldn’t take a step toward the door. The mission was complete, but he couldn’t leave. He kneeled beside Brent and listened to the catches of his breathing. All he had to do, Kyle thought, was stop those slight noises, stop that push and pull of air. It was much too easy to kill a person. Kyle knew it was only the hassle it would create that stopped him from fetching Brent’s unused razor from the sink and slitting the kid’s throat.

 
He turned onto the country road, minutes from Nick’s uncle. Here were the falling mailboxes, the tree with fishing net strung in its branches. Here was the trailer. Kyle shut the engine off and stepped down from the Bronco. He pushed the screen door open and stepped inside, where he saw Nick’s uncle at the sink in his slippers, back turned to Kyle, sudsing spatulas and skewers and piling them in a hubcap. The soccer balls had been flattened out like hides and stacked. The uncle shook his hands off.

  “Here is prodigal nephew.”

  When he turned around, Kyle shot him twice in the chest and watched him come to the ground, looking here and there like he didn’t recognize the place. He left the world in thought—confusion, anyway. He’d underestimated them. Well, he’d estimated Swin correctly, but he’d underestimated Kyle. He hadn’t known Kyle was a person who would clean a mess thoroughly, who would not allow someone who killed his boss to live. Kyle knew the uncle had given the order. That fat Greek couldn’t be allowed to let his nephew and Bright die, then proceed larkily with his scumbag life, filling his trailer with close Mediterranean aromas, waiting for another chance to be a scumbag. He was a spider, and Kyle had squashed him.

  Kyle measured his steps back to the Bronco and drove. He turned on the radio and listened to a patriotic story that was told over brush drums. Bright was dead. Just like that. Nick: dead. The uncle: dead. Was it over? Would this storm blow out to sea now? Kyle, unable to stop himself, imagined Swin dead, imagined finding him cut up and bled dry on the floor of his trailer. There was a specific feeling the thought of a dead partner should bring, Kyle knew. He could sense the feeling was near, but couldn’t grip it. It was a wily eel that was slipping around Kyle’s heart, teasing it, knowing it wouldn’t be nabbed. Kyle’s heart was fumbly.

  Kyle saw that Swin was right; Kyle hadn’t cared about his mother. He’d been angry when she passed, had felt the furious disbelief of awful luck, but no part of him had gone into her coffin. Her death was mere verification to Kyle that the world had no intention of offering him a worthwhile life. If his mother were alive, Kyle knew, nothing would be different. He would have left Lofton, left her, would’ve gone from Athens to Little Rock, would’ve ended up a fake ranger with a dead boss, and would’ve shot some Greek guy who’d just gorged himself on kebabs.