by John Brandon
“And I got a right to collect tax when sons-of-bitches come down here from Michigan and treat everybody like shit.”
“I believe he’s from Memphis or St. Louis.”
She was already outside, her keys glinting in what daylight was left. She fell inside her car and revved the engine. Swin let the trailer door slap behind him and hopped in the passenger seat.
“I’m sure he’s closed at this hour,” he said.
“He ain’t ever open,” Johnna said. “Greedy bastard.”
“I don’t know that he’s greedy, exactly. I think he’s kind of content.”
Johnna bumped onto the paved road and used her eight cylinders, gripping the wheel at ten and two.
“Who said he can come down here and be content?” she asked.
Here Swin was, a man who’d traded hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of narcotics, lecturing a nurse who wanted to scream at a stingy shop owner. He decided to let Johnna do what she wanted, to simply watch that she didn’t hurt herself. She was driving steady as a train, doing seventy. Swin saw an object in the glow of the headlights but couldn’t say anything. Johnna gasped. It was an owl. It thumped against the bottom of the car and Johnna eased to a stop, then went in reverse. She and Swin got out and kneeled by the carcass. It had arresting, still eyes. Its talons were mangled.
Swin touched Johnna’s shoulder. “If you didn’t hit it, someone else would’ve.”
“It was plumb crazy.”
“Animals get brain tumors, too. Particularly birds.”
Johnna hoisted the owl by its legs and nested it in her backseat. For the remainder of the trip she muttered under her breath about owls, shop owners, the director of nursing where she worked, and the dime defensive package. When they pulled into the yard of the shop, Johnna killed the lights and stopped short, skidding in the mud. She flopped her hand around in the glove box and came out with a box of matches, then strode to the front door, Swin lingering behind. She knocked harder and harder, then realized she could turn the knob and push the door open. Swin flew up the steps and slipped inside and almost slammed into Johnna, who was already coming back out with an armload of jacketless books. The poetry.
“This is how you get shot,” Swin said.
“Ha.” Johnna dropped the books in a heap and they seemed to splash. She passed Swin on her way back in.
“Let’s try again when he’s here,” Swin said. “Then you can tell him off face to face.”
“You could help, you know.”
Johnna’s next load was too ambitious and she spilled books here and there, not bothering to pick them up. In and out she went, the dormant pyre growing. Swin went to the back room to make certain the owner wasn’t there. It was a dim room with big windows. Baggies of dried fruit rested on board games. A wagon? Swin brought the wagon to Johnna. He propped himself on the porch railing and smiled at her as she worked, keeping one eye on the road.
When the mound of poetry was the size of a compact car, Johnna held a match under a flutter of pages. The flame flared, then disappeared. It whispered around inside the mound and suddenly flexed, licking toward the sky, spitting out half sheets marked with words like “bellicose” and “truncate.” Johnna sat in the mud, yawning. Swin went inside and got two glasses of water and a frosted cookie. When he returned, Johnna was asleep, her cheek on the soft ground. He slipped her glasses off and hung them from his collar, wondering what the pawnshop owner would think when he returned to a pile of smoldering books in his yard. He would think somebody really hated poetry, more even than most people, or that some teenagers had had a good time at his expense, or maybe he’d know what had happened, that a local had finally gotten sick enough of him and his sham shop to do something about it.
Swin carried Johnna to her car and gently unloaded her onto the passenger seat. Johnna was one of those people who looked like a saint when she slept. A hellion awake, a saint asleep. Sexy with her eyes open, innocent with them closed. Swin felt he could spend a long time at Johnna’s side. He felt he could stay fond of her for the rest of his life.
The next day, Kyle and Swin did park chores. They’d fashioned a sign that said TODAY: FREE ADMISSION, which they used to keep them out of the booth. There was no one to make them do the chores, no boss anymore, and this made the chores seem all the more important. There was nothing productive to do but the chores. The weed-whacker had been out of gas for some time, and Kyle had been lazy about figuring out what fuel/oil mixture its testy two-stroke engine took, but now he found himself digging out the manual, finding a funnel. Once he began weed-whacking, he didn’t want to stop. He ran the thing for an hour and a half, up and back along the edges of the fire road, before he ran the tank dry. Meaning only to drag away a few branches that had fallen in the road, Kyle and Swin ended up clearing more than an acre of the forest floor, building a kindling pile that stood taller than they did. They could do nothing about the mess of death they’d been drawn into, could do nothing to figure out where they stood in Frog’s eyes, but they could clean the damn park. They raked and policed, watered and mowed. Kyle, for his part, felt an unexpected pang of possessiveness toward the park. He’d never felt, as people said, “really at home,” had never felt beholden or grateful to a certain place, but he knew that for the time being, until he was told different, this was his park. It was his lair.
Kyle and Swin put a message on Bright’s phone that said he was away on business. They planned, when the paltry day-use fees were due, to estimate the total and pay it out of their own pockets. They kept doing chores. They kept, whether they wanted to or not, thinking things over.
Kyle ended up with the owl. He had the owner of the produce market clean it, then he cooked the bird into Bright’s muck. It tasted similar to every other meat Kyle had eaten in the muck. He ate the owl muck for six straight meals, then started on Bright’s reserves—instant mashed potatoes, candied nuts, frozen bananas. He and Swin, against Kyle’s better judgment, spent several mornings lounging in Bright’s house.
One day, a UPS man knocked on the door and handed them a padded envelope from the boss in pink. It contained papers about revenue, temperature and precipitation, incidents, pamphlet dispersal. Swin gleaned that these papers were due once a month, and that each quarter a more involved report would be expected. The forms required Bright’s signature, a model for which was easily found in a kitchen drawer packed with forgotten or miswritten forms, and Swin claimed he’d have the signature down cold with a half hour of practice. The package also contained a sheaf of pretty paper covered with pictures of cotton. At the center of each page rested a mournful verse about the days of the boll weevil. The boss in pink had enclosed another quote: I would call that man an artist who from the beginning is endowed with an ideal that, for him, replaces the truth. His life’s task is to realize it completely, and set it forth for others to contemplate.
“Drivel,” said Swin. He carried all the papers to Bright’s chair and began arranging them.
“You just don’t understand it,” Kyle said.
“Everything I understand, I partially disagree with.” Swin pulled a book in front of him and began signing Bright’s name all over it.
“Then what’s your ideal?”
“That no one own or achieve anything except through random luck. An all-encompassing lottery system. And she’s right: I do wish everyone would contem-plate the ideal.” Swin set the book down and flipped on the TV. “Yours is that nobody speak to one another. You want pointing and nodding and, when neces-sary, grunting.”
“I wouldn’t mind having an ideal,” Kyle said.
“You don’t want one,” said Swin. “I can tell. You want to want one.”
Kyle didn’t know what to say. “Why don’t you turn the TV off till you finish learning that signature?”
“My schedule’s wide open.” Swin’s face was gleeful. He’d found the public-access channel, on which a tall man with a rattail haircut argued for the abolition of all insurance. Insurance went
against God, he believed.
Kyle started a pot of coffee and chose Bright’s FUCK GOSPEL SINGING mug. While the coffee brewed, Kyle warned Swin again not to let Johnna in on anything. He told Swin he’d seen her over at his trailer a lot lately. Swin replied that Johnna was closer to Bedford than to him. She’d begun taking Bedford to work with her, to cheer up the sick people.
“Looks like the only bill we’ll get is for cable,” Swin said. “Bright gets reimbursed. The rest of it goes straight to the department. Cable bill should come any day.”
“We can’t get a checking account.”
“We can pay cash at the place.”
“That’ll look weird.” Kyle poured his coffee and sat down with the phone.
“Money order?”
“Answer’s no.”
“We won’t survive winter without cable.”
“You just started watching it this week.”
“You should try it. It’ll make you more normal.”
Kyle dialed the number of Gregor’s shop. Gregor was the only person left that might give up some useful knowledge. It was a long shot. Gregor was a grub, half-crazy, his interaction with the world pared down to unlocking and relocking his door and reading the classifieds. Gregor probably knew less than Kyle, but Kyle had left more messages with Colin and had heard nothing back. Kyle had stalled on calling Gregor because it was a last resort and Kyle didn’t want to be down to a last resort. He knew nothing good would come of calling Gregor, but here he was, calling Gregor.
The phone rang and rang. Kyle redialed the number and waited ten rings. Nothing. But Gregor never left his shop—he could be in the bathroom, or in a deep sleep. Kyle drank his coffee. He told Swin they would cancel the cable the next day, and this sent Swin into an impassioned rant about learning and discovery and history and connection with the outside world. The show he had on now was teaching a dance that glorified camels. Kyle pressed the numbers again and could not hang up. The phone rang thirty, forty times. Kyle smelled his coffee and stared at his watch. On TV, the dancers were stomping out a crude beat. The voice on the other end startled Kyle. It wasn’t Gregor, but a cheerful man who was opening a store for all things spicy. They’d have seven hundred hot sauces. This man didn’t know Gregor personally, but he knew Gregor had been a slob. “Had been?” said Kyle. The man said the cops had come pounding on the place and Gregor wouldn’t open up—had a bunch of inch-thick deadbolts and wouldn’t answer their bullhorn. He holed up for hours until they blew a hole in the door and climbed through, then Gregor burst from a closet and took a leap at them. “Still got the door,” the man said. The cops had wanted to ask Gregor about some car they’d found in a swamp. He didn’t even have anything illegal inside. He had filthy magazines and a periscope, but nothing illegal.
Kyle hung up. He absently emptied his pockets on the table, then looked over to see his partner flipping through the channels with a daffy grin on his face, signing Bright’s name on the book over and over without looking. Kyle thought of Bright’s X-mas bones. He hadn’t buried them like he’d told Swin. The bones were in a deep, covered tray, underneath the kitchen sink of Kyle’s trailer. Kyle saw his park ID jutting out from a flap of his wallet. He’d forgotten all about it. He was Edward Mollar. These identities, Kyle knew, these names, Mollar and Suarez, weren’t intended to help Kyle and Swin. They were insurance for Frog, in case Kyle Ribb and Swin Ruiz were wanted for something. Frog didn’t want anyone who might be tracking down Kyle or Swin to find them while they were working for him. The names were just something to put through the background check at the Parks Department. Kyle examined his picture, next to this strange name that he didn’t even use. Someone could probably yell, “Ed!” for twenty minutes and Kyle wouldn’t answer. He wondered if Frog thought of them as Kyle and Swin or Mollar and Suarez. He knew Frog didn’t care one way or the other what happened to them, what happened to Gregor or Bright or even Colin. Frog had things arranged in a way that kept him unconnected, untouchable. He would stay low awhile, then have them all replaced.
“Gregor’s dead,” Kyle called toward Swin. “Cops killed him at his shop.”
Swin didn’t flinch, didn’t ask for any details. He stared thornily at the TV screen, no longer amused by the dancers.
“He’s dead,” Kyle said, in a softer voice.
Swin looked stupefied. The dancers on TV had no music to guide them. They didn’t look to one another to keep the beat. Most of them had their eyes closed.
“Hear me?” Kyle asked.
Swin’s head stayed just where it was, his expression barren. “I’m employing a little well-timed denial. I’m not up for more death at present, so I’m defending myself with old-fashioned denial.”
Kyle watched Swin for a full minute, during which Swin did not take his eyes from the dancers.
“Fair enough,” Kyle said.
He slipped his photos of his mother out of a fold of his wallet. In one, she was surrounded by dunes, wearing a colorful dress and a hat. In the other, she stood in front of a brick building, her face made up. It was from the day she got her government job. Kyle wondered what his mother had been thinking that day, what she believed that job would mean for her. He wondered what she thought having a son meant, what she’d wanted for Kyle. He wondered what, if anything, dying had prevented her from doing. What was her unfinished business? Kyle heard Swin telling him to answer the phone before he heard it ringing. He said, “Felsenthal Park. How can I help you?” It was Her, the woman from the trailer park who handed off the trip packets. She said the bake sale was a go.
To show that the debate throughout the South over whether church services should be held on Saturdays or Sundays was beneath them, Johnna’s church alternated. This weekend the service was on Saturday, and the Razorback game had kicked off at eleven a.m. Johnna had already missed seventeen minutes of the action and the pastor showed no signs of wrapping up. To make things worse, it was the day of the monthly potluck. All the heavy dishes had to be brought out, plates and silverware and cups set up. They’d say grace. They’d have a chitchat session referred to as “fellowship.” They’d say another grace, thanking God for the chance to have fellowship. The whole first half was shot, if not part of the third quarter.
The pastor had a thin, orange beard, and held his Bible aloft when he quoted from it. He’d started the day warning of the evils of jealousy, and was now musing about meekness. Johnna felt bad for the pastor because his children were sad cases. His son shot bluebirds out of trees and entered arm-wrestling competitions in whatever slight weight class he belonged to. The pastor’s daughter wanted to be a slut, but due to her tender age and buckteeth, she had a tough time finding willing boys.
“What does the Bible mean when it says, Inherit the earth’?” the pastor said.
It seemed to Johnna that the people in her church didn’t care if a sermon made sense, so long as it was lengthy and animated. First off, jealousy was needed’, without it, everyone would be swingers. And who were the meek? Meekness as an actual human trait was absurd. None of the famous Christians Johnna knew of, past or present, were meek. Johnna thought of God as a wiry, black-haired man who found amusement in leaving just enough justice in the world to give people hope. Once in a while rich people got in trouble. Once in a while there was no fine print. Once in a while a mechanic didn’t screw you. Slot machines paid out. Once in a blue moon, Texas got called for holding.
When the pastor came down from the stage he seemed surprised his audience was comprised of real people. He waded into the greetings as if not sure what his hands were made of, gripping the women by their upper arms, full of an affection that was infused with arrogance. The crowd was full of florid, fat ladies who could sit around for a month pointing out examples of moral foulness in movies and TV shows. All modern entertainment was devised as an attack on these ladies, and these ladies were the reason Johnna had to stay for the entire service and the entire potluck, why she couldn’t be the first to leave. Once the old ladies
judged you, you might as well switch churches.
There were also a couple of skinny families with numerous sons. These sons had melodious faces, did yard work all day, and made straight A’s. These sons didn’t care for candy. They didn’t let their eyes drift to Johnna’s chest when they spoke to her. They hung around with the pastor’s son out of charity.
There were a few farmers. There was a lawyer. There was a gaggle of retired military. There was a contractor of some sort. There were those who switched jobs often.
Fifteen minutes after the sermon, this group still hadn’t herded itself into the front room, where the food waited. The pastor had started preaching again. He didn’t understand that when you harped on something too much, it became a joke. In her mind, Johnna cursed the fat ladies out. She made a wish that they would break their heels and fall. Outside the window there was even, bronze sunlight. The branches swayed. Johnna drifted toward the main hallway, a lid on her breath, exhilaration swimming inside her. She slipped into the front room, filed several squares of cornbread into her purse, and escaped to her Oldsmobile.
The air that tossed her hair around smelled of honeysuckle. The wildflowers were bright. Johnna would catch some of the second quarter. She waved at an old man with orange gloves who was walking his bike up a hill.
It wasn’t just the Razorbacks and the weather and defying the fat ladies that was making Johnna’s heart smile. Johnna’s heart was full of Swin. He made the world off-kilter. It always tipped toward him or leaned away. There was island magic in his grin. He was a dopey professor. He was rambling, ambitious. It had startled Johnna, having one of these odd boys pursue her, rather than the other way around. It was good to be pursued, good to be the frightened one.
Johnna was two days late. Two days was no big deal. Two days plus the fact that they’d had condom problems their first time. The thing had been bunched up and hard to get on, then it kept slipping. And they’d gone for so long. Afterward, Johnna saw the condom in the trash and it looked lacerated and gummed. Condoms were tough, though. Back in high school, to prove that boys were lying if they said they were too endowed to wear one, the nurse had stretched a condom onto an eggplant. The nurse had filled one with a gallon of water.