Arkansas

by John Brandon

  You barely sleep for six nights, dreaming of break-ins, raids, fires. Thomas and Tim volunteer to sleep at the bakery, but this wouldn’t look right. Your bakery/art gallery has been ignored by Little Rock since its opening and will, you tell yourself, be ignored a few days more. You instruct Thomas and Tim to stay in. You will not take them to the deal because their size makes people nervous.

  You are alone at the bakery when the guys pull up, in broad daylight, in an unconvincing FedEx truck. They wear FedEx hats and long shorts. Three load and one tallies everything on a tiny notebook like a reporter would use. The mouthpiece is not with them. The one with the notepad gruffly bosses the others. He asks what you think about stand-up comedy—whether you consider it the highest form of comedy, whether you consider it an art, a living art or a dead art. He’s been performing on a semiprofessional basis for fifteen months. He has nineteen minutes that he’s proud of. It’s all delivery, he tells you. There are no new jokes left, no original wardrobes or catchphrases. You make affirmative noises and nod, hoping he won’t tell any jokes. You are pleased at how fast the loaders work, and by the figures this guy is absently compiling. Punch lines are for hacks, he declares. Hacks and junior-high kids. You have to grab that crowd by the shirt and convince them you don’t give a shit if they laugh or not. Half a dozen bags left. By now the loaders have slowed. While the last bag is loaded and the truck locked up, the guy reveals a formula for jokes per minute. He adjusts his JPM if he’s doing an accent or a silly dance. His disadvantage is he can’t talk about his job in his comedy, and he also gets along with his family. We could talk about this for hours, he says, then raises his voice in some code that utilizes bowling lingo. One of the loaders rolls out a suitcase. The comedian hands you a slip of paper and hops in the truck, and they bounce out of the alley and onto the avenue. On the paper is written the number 421.

  421. Damn near half a million dollars.

  You give Thomas and Tim a share. For a joke, you tape up a roll of hundreds and put them on the toilet-paper dispenser. Lobster brunch. St. Louis for a couple Cardinals games. You leave a waitress with the sweetest smile you’ve ever seen a seven-hundred-dollar tip. Thomas and Tim are inspired. With their new buying power, they get exclusives all over town. This makes you nervous because any of these people could roll over on Tim and Thomas, especially with no one else to roll over on, but being nervous is part of the business. They have a woman at a three-story club, an old man who drives up into the Ozarks, and a company that owns radio stations throughout Texas. Thomas and Tim abandon the university, where everyone knows them too well.

  Tim turns twenty-one, and you take the boys to the top of the Barnett building and have them look out over the brown neighborhoods, the cluster of honeycomb government offices, the four-lane road that leads to the suburbs, and beyond it all, the fields of twisted trees. Just the beginning, you say. You’re trying to hand them managing power in an official way, to create a moment they won’t forget. You touch their shoulders and tell them you will take your own place, a townhouse on the same block as the bakery. It won’t be long before they will need their own laundry.

  You clean and paint your new townhouse. You cook a little something each night and watch the local news. There’s baseball to listen to, and radio hosts who believe the opposite of what you believe. Three times a week, you meet the boys at a place that makes everything a sort of dessert—bacon pastries and sweet-potato hash browns. The boys grow interested in real estate. They order videos through the mail, study textbooks, watch TV in the wee hours, subscribe to trade magazines. With their mouths full of honey-pecan sausage, they explain good debt and bad debt. They want to become level-six investors, true capitalists, poorlooking all the while—little hat, fields of cattle. They finance their cheap cars in order to build credit. They will own everything jointly and keep a separate account for T&T Enterprises, their laundry. To keep things from getting messy between them, the brothers agree never to get married. You laugh. You two can handle this business, you say, but you wouldn’t stand a chance against women.

  That’s when you should’ve stopped treating them like the same person, when you should’ve shed the illusion that they had identical souls. But how could you have known? At that point, as far as you knew, they were identical. You should’ve made Tim the straight-business manager and put Thomas in charge of the dirty business. Other than hanging out in an unlicensed secondhand shop, selling stolen Michael Jackson tapes out of your back room, you didn’t know what straight business was. You still don’t trust it. You still don’t think, for a drug dealer, there’s such a thing as good debt. But you should not have forced Tim into a race he wasn’t suited to run. Once it became obvious Tim wasn’t what his brother was, it was too late. You weren’t paying close enough attention. You can’t treat brothers differently if they know the reason, if they know it’s because one brother can’t hack it.

  Kyle was sick of people knocking at his door. This time he was in Bright’s house, alone, and he knew who it was when he glimpsed the dusty Audi convertible. He could hear the jangling of bracelets in the knock. Kyle did not like to meet with people or attempt anything that might be stressful with bare feet. He slipped his socks and shoes on and pulled back the door. There were those eyes, shackling Kyle. The boss in pink was, today, the boss in purple. Kyle felt a familiar floatiness, like what he’d felt with Johnna. He resolved to masturbate, whether he wanted to or not, as soon as he got rid of the pink boss. He let her in and explained that Bright had gone to the University of Oklahoma with a professor of Indian Studies.

  “American or Hindu?”

  “I didn’t see the guy.”

  “Well, shit. He already mailed me the paperwork, but I need my payment early. Won’t be back this afternoon, will he?”

  “I doubt that.”

  “I’m going to California for eight days.”

  “What part?” Kyle asked.

  “Like, the boring part.”

  “Park stuff?”

  “Old friend that wants to show off her husband and her baby and her shutters and, you know...her fruit tree.” She leaned on the back of Bright’s easy chair and stared at something. “You got nice wrists,” she said. “You should wear dress shirts and roll the sleeves a little.”

  “I used to have a dress shirt. I spilled gasoline all over it and burned it.”

  “You should make some effort in your appearance.”

  “No one sees me.”

  “Am I no one?” She jutted out a hip.

  “How much does Bright owe you?” Kyle asked.

  “Four grand.”

  “I can get that for you.”

  Kyle went down the hall to the laundry room, to the forty-four grand still sitting in the dryer, and counted out forty fifty-dollar bills and twenty hundreds. He didn’t like using any of this money, but he didn’t have enough of his own to go around paying people off at four thousand a pop. He rolled the bills tightly and wedged them down in a thermos, then handed the thermos to the pink boss.

  “My name is Wendy.”

  “Wendy?”

  “Doesn’t fit, right?”

  “No, I think it does.”

  “Cali-fucking-fornia.” She put her face in her hands and her nose poked through between her palms. “Last week I had to see this bitch from art school. Chicago.” Wendy began berating a layout her friend had gotten published in a journal. The girl’s work featured historic scenes drawn from a society of porcupines.

  “Can I ask you to do something?” she said. “I want you to grab me by my elbows and jerk me around, like you’re shaking sense into me.”

  Wendy stepped out of her shoes and composed herself, offering her arms reluctantly, turning herself in. Now Kyle was conscious of his wrists—pale and covered with tame swirls of hair. They were not muscular or bony. He wrapped his fingers around her elbows and tightened his grip until she made a noise. She was looking down as if ashamed, letting her hair cover her face.

  “I deser
ve it,” she told him.

  Kyle moved her stiffly from side to side, feeling like Frankenstein. He steadied himself and pushed her forward and back, enough that her head couldn’t keep up with her body and her lavender blouse fell from her shoulders. She made a halfhearted attempt to get free, and Kyle knew this was his cue. He shoved her back against the armrest of the chair, not letting her fall, then he jarred her about in a rhythmless way, tossing her hair and sloshing her bracelets. There was no expression on her face. Kyle lifted her off the ground, digging his fingers into her flesh to keep hold, and the two of them nearly fell.

  “Now throw me in a heap,” she said. “Toward the carpet, not the steps.”

  Kyle put a hand on her ribs and a hand in her armpit and slung her with all his might. She was upright in the air a moment, as if she’d leapt off a cliff, then she tumbled and splayed on her back, her skirt bunched around her hips. She took a couple breaths, then sat up. She put a hand through her hair and it regained its form. Now her face was stirred. Kyle imagined she’d wanted to ask someone to do that for a long time. She bounced up and collected her things, gave her skirt a tug, slipped back into her shoes, and swished toward the door. Kyle stopped her on the porch to get an art quote. He wanted her to stay a little longer, wanted to hear her speak more. He half-expected she wouldn’t have a quote ready, but she turned pertly and began.

  ’“I am a believer and a conformist. Anyone can revolt; it is more difficult silently to obey our own interior promptings, and to spend our lives finding sincere and fitting means of expression for our temperaments and our gifts—if we have any. I do not say ‘Neither God, nor Master,’ only in the end to substitute myself for the God I have excommunicated.’”

  Kyle had no way to keep her any longer. She hopped in her car and was gone.

  Kyle’s interior prompts were not loud or clear, he reflected; they were muttered by his gut. The type of expression that fit his temperament was no expression at all. His gift, realism. Kyle had never had occasion to cast God out because God had never been interested in him. Like the bums of Little Rock, who had never asked him for change, God knew better than to bother with Kyle.

  He took a towel to the attic and kneeled before it, imagining a continuation of the episode he and Wendy had shared. He saw her pick herself up from the rug and begin giving him orders. She was on top of him, pinning him, slithering in ways that made her clothes fall off. She said not to worry now. She said Kyle would keep them all safe.

  It had been three weeks since Bright had been killed. Swin figured he didn’t have long before the cable bill went unpaid and he was left with two fuzzy networks to choose between. He’d had his keys in his hand for two hours and could not set down the remote or pry himself from Bright’s easy chair. Murphy Brown. Robots fighting. South American stock reports. How hats were made, once.

  Swin fired up the minivan and aimed it toward Feston, the town where he and Johnna had seen the kids from Nova Scotia sing. Johnna’s pregnancy had given him his first sense of the rushing-by of life. Swin could count the steps to his death: have kids, raise kids, get old, die. He felt tricked—not by Johnna but by luck. You weren’t supposed to get a girl pregnant the first time you slept with her. He’d gotten Johnna pregnant because he’d been distracted by Bright’s death; the pregnancy was a punishment for not paying attention to one of life’s sweet moments. Well, not a punishment; luck didn’t care what you thought of it. If your mind was fit enough, you could think of all luck as good luck. Swin’s mind did not feel fit. His mind felt like a man in a backward country who’d ingested tainted drugs and hadn’t slept in days and had an important meeting to attend. Each attempt to get a grip on himself only thickened this man’s disorientation. This was no way to think, Swin thought. Why was he rushing his mind into this news instead of trusting it to get its bearings? His mind always got its bearings. And his mind would figure out why Kyle had chosen to tell Johnna everything. There must’ve been a reason. Kyle, unlike Swin, did not have an unruly mind.

  The baby store was three stories, with low-hanging mobiles and lots of cradles in the way. Swin went down an aisle of scrapbooking gear and high-stepped over a stuffed elephant. He saw a narrow door marked BOOKS and when he pushed it open, it revealed a dark staircase. He made his way down and found a light. He was in the basement. He arranged some crates into a chaise longue and opened a window that looked out at ground level onto a drugstore and a flagpole. He made a casual sweep of the stacks. Many of the books could be eliminated by their physical condition—falling apart or warped or emitting a urine smell when moved. Swin felt the reverent calm he always fell into in dim rooms of ignored books. He wished he’d brought a sack lunch, so he could hide down here for the night, approving of himself, validating the toil of these authors.

  He began with the books meant for children to read. He planned for his son or daughter to have three or four toys, minimal sports equipment, and a thousand books. He didn’t care for the rhymed nonsense of Dr. Seuss, but preferred anything that instilled basic knowledge sets. He could abide a talking animal, but not an inanimate object that spoke. Swin would be careful not to spoil the kid for serious reading; he didn’t want books that were mostly pictures or had pop-up images or offered some visual reward for reaching the final page. He found a complete set of biographies about famous thinkers and a set about how different inventions had come to be. None of the books were priced. Swin figured they’d been purchased in one lot, for next to nothing, and the owner of this baby store didn’t consider them hot enough items to pick through and price and shelve upstairs. Swin could likely get them for a quarter apiece. Twenty cents. Whatever he offered. And he had a van. He went on to check the entire back wall, discovering books about musical instruments, forms of government, dinosaurs, Roman deities, bullies. He piled the books on the staircase, leaving a passage in the middle.

  Time for something he could read. He snatched a dozen volumes at random and reclined on the crates he’d set up. He learned about infant sleep, infant coordination. He read about behavioral disorders that struck at random and had no cure, little sociopaths who had the same feelings for humans as they had for plastic grapes. Swin was happy to learn that parents with diverse genetic material made better babies, like the opposite of inbreeding. He wondered what Johnna’s IQ was, and whether he would consider her well adjusted. He was going to be a fucking dad. There would be a brand-new family in existence and Swin would be its leader.

  He loaded hundreds of titles into the minivan, filling the entire back cargo area, and handed the old woman a wad of bills. Once back on the county road, he checked his phone and saw a message waiting. He knew the area code: Kentucky. It was the private investigator. Swin had built up the courage to ask for a report on his mother and sisters. The PI started with Swin’s mother, who, as Swin knew, did not work. She did go somewhere each afternoon from say one to three-thirty, returning just before the girls got home from school. Wherever it was she went, she went simply dressed, carrying a small, black case, and always waited until Swin’s stepdad, who came home for lunch each day, had gone back to work. Both parents were home in the evenings—content, almost sedate. His mother had come out on the porch last night with something to drink and stared at nothing for an hour until one of Swin’s sisters disturbed her. But, the investigator reassured him, all middle-aged women were wistful—every single one. He said he could contact the oldest sister, drop a note somewhere only she would get it. The note could advise her to skip school on a certain day and meet Swin at a remote spot. Drop a note? No way, Swin thought. Swin didn’t like the idea of the investigator doing more than observing. He didn’t want the guy contacting his sister. Rosa took walks at night, the investigator’s message continued, around the block, when the neighborhood was quiet. As for the other sisters, the youngest was a small version of the mother. The tenth-grader was in the clouds—distracted and skinny, a long-distance runner who did no primping and was still the beauty of the bunch. The one that was thirteen was
involved in everything. She always came home right at dinnertime, laden with boxes and outfits and posters. None of them seemed to have any major problems. The PI signed off, saying he needed to take a monthlong nap.

  Beauty of the bunch? Swin didn’t want this scumbag getting attached to one of his sisters—a professional stalker. It was time to give him specific questions and forty-eight hours to answer them. Swin wanted to know where his mother went in the afternoons and whether his two oldest sisters had boyfriends. He simply wanted to make sure his sisters were how he’d left them, which for the most part they seemed to be, except that Swin’s stepdad must have relaxed the rules. Before, each child was forced to participate in two extracurricular activities—no more, no less—and no one was allowed to take walks at night. The girls weren’t permitted to leave the house unless every hair was in place, and there were constant chores.

  The dark thought Swin couldn’t resist, blowing through a short tunnel and past a gang of weary sheep, was of the private investigator jerking off to fantasies of four island sisters dressed in tight outfits, play-fighting one another for the right to sponge his wrinkled old pecker.

  Kyle had been calling Her for days with no answer. It had been a long time since the last packet. Kyle was worried that he and Swin had been cut off, or that something had happened to Her.

  Saturday morning he drove the minivan to her trailer park, parked a couple blocks away, and strolled past the pampered parcels of lawn. Kyle knocked several times and heard no stirring. The stand by the door was bare. He circled the place, the grass resilient under his feet, looking for nothing in particular. And finding nothing—blankets on the windows, resounding silence. Maybe she got her wish, Kyle thought. He remembered her speech about wanting to be struck dead, about being afraid to commit suicide and wanting the Lord to strike her dead. Maybe it had happened. Kyle stood under Her’s carport, wondering whether he should break into her house, and there he saw the packet, almost touching his knee, sitting atop a case of organic soap. Her wasn’t dead. She was sitting in there being difficult. Why the hell hadn’t she called? Or maybe she had and Kyle and Swin had missed the call. Kyle, frustrated, spat forcefully onto Her’s doorstep.