Arkansas

by John Brandon

  “It’s like Dirty Harry’s gun,” Kyle said.

  “That’s what Sledge Hammer! is a spoof of.”

  Heading across town, Swin perused the envelope and found that the meeting was at nine, not six. He and Kyle couldn’t remember how they’d gotten this wrong, whose fault it was, and this inability to lay blame seemed more indicting than the mistake itself. They stopped for sandwiches, ate sullenly, and still had well over two dead hours in front of them. They got back in the car and meandered into the suburbs, into the tamed hedges, where a Barnes and Noble loomed up.

  The place was a labeled maze packed with women who were not quite good-looking. Kyle traversed the self-help section, head down, then found a table of books about exotic dancing. One was instructional, for wives—wives, apparently, who had fireman poles in their foyers. What kinds of faces was this lady making? He waded into the reference section and selected a volume called Pillars of Statesmanship, then sat in a bouncy chair to try and catch a snooze.

  Swin went straight for the periodicals. He flipped through a magazine that dressed natural beauties up like plumbers, then he scanned the Daily Girardeaun, which featured an announcement that the sheriff’s department was officially giving up on finding a certain murderer, some dude that bashed a girl’s head on a root at a hair-metal festival. Swin got a green-tea milkshake and selected a stack of magazines for back in Arkansas: the New Yorker, the Economist, Premiere, one about Las Vegas, and one full of socialist art. He gathered whatever reviews he could get his hands on and stationed himself on an out-of-the-way bench. He had an almost physical hunger to be made aware of the merits and shortcomings of recent art. This was how Swin could make the most of his time at the bookstore, could cram the most odd, unnecessary, beautiful thought into an hour and a half: criticism. Nothing brought the mind to a brazen pump like criticism. Swin didn’t understand half of what these people were saying about ironic use of shadow and callous formal barriers, but he could feel the words filling small fissures in his psyche. He felt like a stressed-out woman at a spa, reviving herself.

  When the time came, he reluctantly located Kyle, reluctantly woke him up, reluctantly went to the car and off to the drop.

  In the morning, Swin went to a cell-phone dealer. He didn’t want to receive a bill, so he had to pay for a full estimated year of service right there in the store. It put a good dent in his emergency funds, but he considered it a small price for some sweet words from his sisters.

  While a guy in a bow tie tried to sell Swin phone insurance, he indulged in a fantasy in which his mother and stepdad were dead—burned up in a train crash while touring Holland—and Swin swept through in the dead of night and took his sisters to his penthouse in, oh, New Orleans, and got them dresses and tutoring and all the scallops and banana pudding they could eat. They didn’t ever go downstairs, and they waited with bated breath for Swin’s return.

  When they got back to the park, Kyle found a cassette in the mailbox. Richard Strauss (1864-1949), Also sprach Zarathustra. It was a promotion. The company must send out tapes randomly, he thought. Must’ve been random, because Bright didn’t listen to any music. There was an order form, which Kyle balled up and threw out. If you liked Strauss, you could call and order his old buddies.

  There was also a note on Bright’s front door:

  Ranger Pat,

  There were gunshots reported a couple weeks ago. Just reminding you the boar poachers will be out soon. They start tracking the things fifty miles off and lose track of where the hell they are. If you catch any, you get some sort of citation. Don’t mean to be such a stranger. Benson’s elbow keeps hurting him from the surgery, so who gets the extra patrol? Like my back isn’t killing me. Guess I need to complain more. Hey, tell those newbies to come out to Stumbler’s on Wednesdays and play trivia.

  Lawfully,

  Cooper

  Neither Kyle nor Swin had a word to say about this note. They both under-stood that before long they’d have to go to this bar and bullshit with cops. Kyle took Bright’s modest ghetto-blaster back to his trailer and played Also sprach Zarathustra. Kyle believed Richard Strauss was not fond of life, but still had hope. Strauss was angry at himself for believing he could get caught up in life like other people. Kyle, he realized, was hearing himself in the music. He wondered if that was why the company had chosen this particular tape to send out, because people heard themselves in it. It was a dirty trick.

  Kyle had a morning appointment with Straight Ralph at his dealership out near the paper mill. Ralph was the only used-car dealer in the area and his inventory was limited, so he would only sell you the car that most suited you. When Kyle and Swin arrived at the lot, Ralph was not in his office booth, so they waited in the Bronco. Kyle wondered how you got a name like “Straight” when you couldn’t even show up for an appointment. Swin turned on the radio to a show about immoral football recruiting. A man with a drawl kept saying, “All comes out in the wash.” Swin turned the radio off before Kyle could complain about it. The Bronco was heating up under the sun, its frame groaning. They opened their windows.

  “All comes out in the wash,” Swin said.

  “We’ll give him ten minutes.” Kyle positioned his visor.

  “What does that mean? It all comes out in the wash?”

  “Everything that’s hidden. Like if you had a nickel or a lighter in your pocket.”

  “Sure it’s not the dirt and odors of your soul?”

  Kyle craned his neck to look around for Ralph. “It’s about judgment day.”

  “You might not know whose pocket something came from.”

  “You can usually guess.”

  “I don’t know,” Swin said. “This would be the whole world’s laundry.”

  “No, just the hypocrites’. So my laundry wouldn’t be in there.”

  “Mine would?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  So what if Kyle was a truer criminal, Swin thought. Kyle was a simpleton. Swin was probably the smartest person for a hundred miles. One of the smartest people in this state.

  “I’ve read more books than you’ve seen,” he told Kyle.

  Kyle spread his eyebrows as if he’d misheard, but Swin didn’t repeat himself. Kyle wouldn’t understand. He couldn’t fathom the trials of an intellectual in exile. Swin needed someone better to talk to. He needed a modern gym, an internet café.

  A breeze picked up, pushing the stale air out of the Bronco. Something smelled funny. More than funny. When the breeze turned to wind, it was laden with the scorched-urine smell of the paper mill. Kyle went into a coughing fit. He closed his window and Swin followed suit. Too late; the stench was in the Bronco. Swin breathed through his mouth until he felt he was eating the industrial stink. He and Kyle jumped out of the Bronco and hurried to Ralph’s booth, which, surprisingly, wasn’t locked.

  “Must’ve got called away for an emergency,” Kyle said.

  “Probably never locks it. Nothing in here but forms and key chains.”

  In a few minutes, the air did not stink. That, or they’d gotten used to it. They agreed to take a look at Ralph’s stock, then come back another day. There was an early-’90s BMW that Swin liked, an extra-cab pickup, a Honda with three hundred thousand miles on it.

  “Finally,” a voice called.

  Kyle and Swin stood still.

  “Around here, girls.”

  They rounded a minivan and saw an older man lying on the ground. He wore a maroon vest and was using his hat as a pillow.

  “I lost my balance.” Straight Ralph had been down on the gravel for two hours. He’d been checking the weather stripping on the back doors of the minivan and had slipped off the bumper.

  “How bad you hurt?” Kyle asked.

  “Whole left side, including the ear.”

  Swin scooped a flask from the minivan’s shadow and gave it a judgmental shake.

  “No, I don’t drink strong liquor,” Ralph said. “I carry that everywhere. Sorority sweetheart gave it to me. She liked
me something awful.”

  Kyle nodded. “You paralyzed?”

  “Back’s locked up. I need a ride to the hospital in Sheck County, if you don’t mind. Could I get that back from you?”

  Swin handed him the flask and he tucked it in his vest. Ralph said he’d chosen the minivan for them because they could carry their friends around on the weekends, and it was a sharp color and had custom rims. He shared his view that a paper mill smelled worse than vulture shit, and that the best type of movie was a sorority horror flick. He’d lost his second wife, in part, due to his fondness for this film genre.

  “We don’t have friends,” Kyle said. “And we can’t take you to the emergency room. But we’ll pay cash for the van.”

  “You don’t have forty-five minutes for an old man?”

  “Afraid not,” Swin said.

  They carried Ralph to his booth and propped him up to the phone. They counted out the money and Swin took the keys and straightened Ralph’s hat on his head. Kyle had the gun in the Bronco. He was going to stop for ammo then meet Swin in an abandoned goat pasture on Route 12.

  Once alone in the minivan, Swin saw that it had a small entertainment center drilled into the floorboards. There was a TV with a built-in VCR. Swin felt the urge to watch movies. He knew a video store/tanning parlor/candy shop not far out of the way. He went in and scoured the aisles. Class-clown comedies. Insufferable cop drivel. Cameron Crowe crap. To Swin’s shock, they had a Woody Allen movie— Manhattan. Neurotic Jews were just the thing Swin needed. There were no Jews in Arkansas.

  At the goat pasture, Kyle and Swin walked into a live-oak grove and Kyle loaded bullets into the gun’s spinner. He lifted the pistol slowly, appreciating its balance and weight, then aimed at a shed roof that leaned against a tree. He squeezed the trigger tentatively, then as hard as he could. No blast came. Kyle frowned at the weapon and tried it with two hands. He unloaded the gun, cleaned it, reloaded. The thing still refused to fire. Kyle wasn’t going to deny what had happened. He said “I got taken,” wiped the mute hunk of metal hard with the cloth, and tossed it in some weeds. He faced the distance.

  “Why do people keep doing stuff?” he said, talking to himself, it seemed.

  Swin hesitated.

  “Wiping counters down and taking pictures. Cheating. Defending things.”

  Swin couldn’t see Kyle’s face. It appeared he was about to say more, then thought better of it. It seemed he was going to laugh or cry; of course, he was going to do neither. It was a moment of defeat, nothing more. Kyle looked back toward the woods, where he’d thrown the gun. Swin felt he had to speak.

  “It’s involved,” he said. “Many schools of thought. In layman’s terms, being the most sophisticated monkey makes you the most confused monkey. Taking action, any action at all, is a way to alleviate that confusion. You, you’re one of the least sophisticated of us sophisticated monkeys, and therefore suffer less confusion, and have less use for the empty actions that alleviate confusion. I don’t mean that as a put-down.”

  Though Kyle didn’t move, Swin knew he was listening, knew the explanation was somehow helping.

  A resolute knocking came at Kyle’s trailer door. He eased to the window and aligned his eye with an opening in the blinds. Johnna. She knew he was home. He opened the door and she hoisted him a Big Gulp. She had one for herself, as well, which she now took control of with both hands.

  “How’d you knock?” asked Kyle. “That didn’t sound like kicking.”

  “Sharp hip bone.”

  Kyle stepped aside, presenting a small, round table. Johnna set her soda down and dropped her purse on the tabletop, causing the table to skid on the vinyl floor. Kyle sipped his Big Gulp, some orange drink, and watched Johnna yank bag after bag of candy from her purse: circus peanuts, Boston baked beans, blow pops. As Kyle was about to let the door shut, Bedford padded in and sniffed for a moment, confused. He’d never been in Kyle’s trailer. No one had ever been in Kyle’s trailer.

  “I was hoping on giving out candy.” Johnna sat and Bedford settled in under her chair. “Then I was like, Do I want to sit on the porch all damn night?” Johnna’s face dulled in thought. “I really should like kids more.”

  She opened a chocolate cookie and ate it in measured bites. Bedford looked up at Kyle doubtfully, and Kyle thought of putting him in Bright’s muck. When Johnna finished the cookie, she began nibbling a circus peanut. Kyle asked where Swin was and she said he was on a long jog. He’d strapped on his sun goggles, his ankle weights, and a little satchel of protein bars and trotted off.

  “Can I help you with something?” Kyle said. He knew he should be having a hard time controlling himself in the presence of this sexy nurse. He knew he wouldn’t come on to Johnna, but he wanted to be tempted. Her neck was firm, giving way to cleavage as it slipped behind her scrub top. Her ears were perfect, her arms and hands brown as a berry.

  “I need to know how long you’re staying,” she said. “Don’t say to ask Swin.”

  “Impossible to tell right now,” Kyle said. “That’s the truth.”

  “He doesn’t tell me a thing. He won’t even tell me where his family lives.”

  “At this moment we don’t have any plans to leave.”

  Johnna’s eyes bounced around behind her glasses, nothing to settle on but Kyle. She arched her back in her chair and looked at the ceiling, her breasts pressing their shape into her shirt, a strip of her midriff grinning at Kyle. She positioned her forearm and plowed the mound of candy toward him, but he shook his head. She was still working on the same circus peanut, guiding it past her lips tentatively. Kyle moved in his shorts and it gave him a start.

  “You don’t need to tell me anything exact, but how bad is it, what you two do? I mean, if you got caught, how long a sentence we talking?”

  Kyle waited.

  “Rangers in training? Park auditors? I’m not stupid.”

  “I should check you for a wire.”

  “Right.”

  “I like you, but truth is I don’t know you.”

  “Where would I hide a wire?”

  Kyle knew he wasn’t important enough to have to worry about someone wearing a wire. He tapped his chest. Johnna smirked then shimmied her shirt up far enough that Kyle could fully view her bra. Kyle felt like a bully, but that didn’t stop him from pitching a tent. Flush with gratitude, he adjusted himself as slyly as he could.

  “It’s impossible to tell about jail sentences.”

  Kyle turned sideways in his chair and leaned against the wall. He hadn’t felt this sort of want since coming to the park, since maybe back in Athens.

  “Rapists get off,” he said. “Potheads go to prison. Depends what kind of evidence, or who rats on you. Sometimes you can buy a way out.”

  “Still, I don’t know if you’re smuggling piranhas or baby girls.”

  Johnna tried to smile, but her eyes moistened. Kyle didn’t know what was going on. He suspected he was confused because of his hard-on, which, with Johnna basically crying, was losing steam. Kyle had never seen this side of her, unsure and mired.

  “What is all this?” he asked.

  She drank her soda down to the bottom, jabbing at the ice. Kyle wasn’t thirsty and his cup was sweating all over the table, so he carried it to the fridge. While his back was turned, Johnna said she was pregnant.

  “I’m trying to figure out how to tell Swin. I could always make something up and dump him.”

  Kyle sat down gingerly. He was in foreign territory. He’d never had a female friend, had never been compelled to speak frankly to a woman. “You can’t leave us,” he said. “You have to face us.” He wasn’t sure what he was trying to say. “Should you be eating all that candy?” he asked.

  “I just want to know where I stand,” said Johnna. “I’m not scared of being a mother. It’s the most natural thing in the world.”

  “I guess.”

  “A lot of people think parenting is impossible because their parents were lousy.”

>   “I don’t know anyone who had good parents.”

  “I didn’t and I still turned out all right.”

  “Better than all right,” Kyle said. “Way better than all right.”

  Johnna took the lid off her soda and began eating the ice doughnuts one by one, trapping them cautiously between two fingers.

  It was a bad idea to tell Johnna anything, but Kyle knew he would— anything she wanted to know. It was beginning to seem to Kyle that his actions weren’t of much consequence; trouble came from obvious causes or no cause at all, every once in a while or in a bunch. Kyle’s life had been secret for a long time, one big omission, and now here was someone looking him in the eye and being straight. He told Johnna about his and Swin’s trips, about what had happened to Bright, where Bright was buried. Johnna’s eyes bulged but she kept quiet, not wanting, Kyle knew, to break whatever blabbing spell he was under. He told her what he’d done to the boy’s uncle, and that he and Swin were now flying blind, taking the assignments as long as they kept coming and doing their best to save the money. If they were ever going to run away from the park, Kyle said, they’d have done it the first day, the minute they found Bright and Nick. They would’ve done an about-face and got in the Bronco and drove far away.

  When Kyle stopped speaking, a pressure built in the trailer. He got up and opened the door. Bedford dragged himself outside to the dappling shade. Kyle tried to set the stopper that held the door open, but it kept slipping.

  “Who am I kidding?” he said. “These trailers are pieces of shit. We might as well live up in Bright’s house.”

  1989

  After three years of steady business in Little Rock, you are approached by a mouthpiece who wears the bad suit of an insurance agent. He is not an insurance agent. He tells you a conglomerate will buy everything you can get your hands on in the next ten days. You have no idea how much you can get your hands on, and he says to find out. You stay up all night and have your arrangements made in less than thirty hours—so many pounds of PCP and cocaine and marijuana that you have no place to store it but the kitchen of your bakery. You go to a sporting-goods store and wipe out their stock of gym bags. The salesman thinks you’re a wrestling coach.