by John Brandon
Stumbler’s was tidy and high-roofed. The only people in the place were cops—seven of them. Cooper wasn’t there; he was pulling an all-night watch at a rest home that had been vandalized, but he’d told the other cops to expect Mollar and Suarez and they’d been greeted affably and offered stools. Everyone crowded the bar, eyes on a TV above the liquor bottles which displayed question after question. Each man gripped a remote answer pad, answering questions about movie stars and rock bands.
The cops sported similar hair and clothing, had names like Jeremy and Jake and Jack. After a few beers, Kyle couldn’t tell them apart. He could not follow their running inside jokes. These cops were treating Kyle and Swin like old buddies, buying Kyle’s beer and allowing Swin to make fun of their boundless knowledge of celebrity feuds. They were trying to show the outsiders that cops were regular, good dudes. Or Kyle and Swin weren’t outsiders. They were fellow low-ranking authority figures. Anyway, it made Kyle nervous, which made him drink faster, one draft Michelob after another. This was another chore, coming down here and pacifying these cops with his presence—always another chore. Kyle would’ve traded a week in the booth to get out of it. Cops made his skin crawl. Luckily, this was Swin’s sort of chore.
Swin was working on a bottle of pink wine he’d brought from home. He’d introduced the owner of the bar, a man with mutton chops who tried to keep his nose in a book about submarines, to the practice of corkage fees. The cops chided Swin for drinking wine and he steered into the skid, swirling and sniffing and holding out his pinkie. Swin guessed at their inside jokes—two remarks in particular they kept repeating: “Somewhere on the seventh floor” and “I’ll be your campaign manager.” The first one, Swin said, referred to a mild hazing ritual in which a rookie cop was told to go check for evidence on the seventh floor of a six-story building. The campaign manager thing had to do with the overblown desire of some cops to be named lead investigator for even the pettiest crime—indecent exposure, truancy. “Lead investigator?” the cops scoffed. They were friendly, dumb guys. Kyle knew he didn’t need to worry about them. The only advantage cops had was time; they waited and waited, not even knowing what for, and then eventually you screwed yourself.
Not Kyle, though. Kyle had no greed and no ego. He took what came to him. A park came, he took it. He would stay alert, go on his trips, cook Bright’s muck, keep the park clean, smile at old ladies, and once in a while bring Swin down here to charm these cops.
1991
Thomas and Tim, now forging through their early twenties, have never killed anyone or beaten anyone or even threatened anyone, and this begins to worry you. Little Rock’s crime rate keeps nudging higher, the bad neighborhoods claiming another street and another. You can feel that you and the boys have competition of the worst kind—unorganized, desperate. To this point, Thomas and Tim have worked around this swell of grubby hoodlums, but it only takes one confrontation, one clash in which neither party has a side alley to sneak down, a face-saving route of escape. The need for animal toughness has not found Thomas and Tim on its own, so you will bring it to them. One far-off day they’ll remember all the pains you took to make them the best, how they rose from farm boys who’d never been on a farm to expert criminals.
You choose Steve, pretty much a drunk, a guy you pay to paint high awnings, clean the basement, do yard work. Steve has a ponytail and symbolic tattoos. He fancies himself to have strong Indian blood, which you doubt. With the thousand dollars you’re paying him, he plans to buy a canoe made of reeds and pitch and also a deep freeze. He will be able to catch fish and freeze them. He accepts the offer without thinking about it, perhaps scared to think about it. You tell him to come back that night, sober.
You call Thomas and Tim and tell them to meet you on a mud road that runs through a swamp east of town, a spot where the city is planning to grow rice. You caught a junkie trying to break into the bakery, you tell them. He’s got to be working for someone. You tell them to bring whatever they’ll need. It’s their show.
They arrive with a canvas beach bag that contains gloves, Clorox, rope, elastic cords, tape, and a few yards of steel wire. You tell them they have until midnight, that a proper Q & A takes no longer than twenty minutes. Steve is relieved at this. You step back and lean on the hood of your car. Steve’s wrists and ankles are already tied, but the boys decide to bind him to a pine tree. They undo and retie the knots three or four times. You point to your watch and say, “Tick, tick.”
Here is where the difference between the boys fully shows up. Thomas looks Steve in the eye and his movements are certain and rigid, while Tim seems to have shrunk, capable only of grunts that answer his brother’s questions. Steve sees it, keeps his attention on Thomas. Steve’s eyes blink crazily and he sweats, wanting to be asked something, wanting to get on with it already.
When all the knots are secure, Thomas reaches in the bag for the steel wire. Tim starts to speak but doesn’t. Steve says, “What’s that—” and Thomas slugs him in the stomach. Steve wants to double over but the ropes hold him tall. It wasn’t Thomas’s best punch; he drifted on it. He tries again, stepping into it, and Steve spits up and looks over at you through his hair.
“That’s our boss,” Thomas tells him. “Now who’s yours?”
Steve gets his breath lined up, presses down his foot to stop it from tapping. “I’ve never had a boss for more than a month.”
“How about this month?” Tim asks, feeling his way.
“I was hungry is all,” says Steve.
Thomas holds the wire up, giving Steve a chance to say something that will save him.
“I hate twins. One’s always mean.”
“We’re not twins,” Thomas tells him. He frees Steve’s arms and winds wire around one wrist. Steve wants to lash out in this untied moment, break Thomas’s nose, but all he can do is shake and look at his hands. Thomas puts on a pair of gloves like ranch hands wear and gives a pair to Tim. They each hold an end of the steel wire. Thomas begins to pull and Steve gasps. Tim yanks back and the wire sinks into Steve’s wrist, replaced by a neat line of blood. Tim puts his head down and clenches his teeth. You have to stop this before the guy’s hand is on the ground. You wish you hadn’t said that about the twenty minutes. You hop off the hood and slap Thomas on the back, tell him to slow down; it’s a delicate act, a session like this. If you go too fast, you tell the boys, the tortured man has no time to doubt his toughness.
“Hit him in the face a few times. Nothing like intimacy to get them yapping.”
Tim steps up and Steve spits to the side. Tim swings sidearm and glances his fist off Steve’s forehead, drawing no flinch.
“He thinks you’re a pussy,” you say. “Thinks you’re pink as bubble gum inside.”
Tim wraps Steve’s hair in his fist and pulls it to the side, holding the guy’s head in place, then pushes a straight right into his eye. Tears fall down Steve’s cheeks. Tim hits him again, busting Steve’s lip, catches him a good one in the jaw, a good one in the temple. Steve goes limp in his ropes. You produce a pocketknife and order Tim to nip off the end of Steve’s tongue. Tim tells Steve to open up, but Steve’s eyes are closed and he pretends not to hear.
Tim is calm but impatient. “Piece of the tongue or the whole ear.”
He presses the flat of the blade onto Steve’s earlobe, perking him up. Steve works his mouth and manages to say he doesn’t know nothing, doesn’t work for nobody. Tim clutches him by the chin and you see Steve wondering if he should give up the secret, say it’s all staged. He knows you’ll kill him. As miserable as his life is, he still wants to live. You nudge Tim out of the way and kick Steve in the balls. You steady the knife against his Adam’s apple. Steve loses his legs and his eyes roll. He whispers something you can’t make out.
You hold him there a long moment, then shrug and close up the knife. “Telling the truth. It happens.”
You tell Thomas and Tim to scat, that you’ll take it from here. They round up their wire and gloves, disappointed,
and lower themselves into their car at the same time, making it crouch. When their taillights vanish, you untie Steve and sit him down, a shivering heap, blood running from his wrist and face.
“Now you have to make sure they never see you,” you say. “Avoid them around town.”
Steve nods.
You get a six-pack of beer from your trunk, peel one off, and set the rest in the mud before him. You’re happy for Steve; these will be the best beers of his life. And you’re proud of yourself. You still have the old nastiness in you.
By 1992, Thomas and Tim have people at Memphis State. They avoid Frayser and Orange Mound, instead making the campus their western border and creeping toward the chipper, white, suburban high schools. They have a guy in north Mississippi who makes speed and a guy who runs back and forth from Paducah. Thomas and Tim send a boy they met in Little Rock, a chubby finance major named Colin, to clean the Memphis money. Colin founds a company that promotes underground parties, then he expands to the motivational-speaking market. He rents out ballrooms in downtown hotels, then cancels the events. Sometimes he caters these events and lets the hotel staff chow down.
It is a panel truck half-full of cocaine, heading from Texas toward Little Rock, that gets lost and pulls into a park and causes you to meet Bright. The driver is a new guy named Gregor, who you plant in a shop in the bad part of Little Rock and forbid to ever drive again. Gregor’s blunder is for the best, though. Bright is steady and able. He lives away from everything, doesn’t haggle. He wants everyone to get their fair share and stay out of trouble.
In 1994, the biggest supplier in New Orleans is chased off when one of his warehouses floods and tons of drugs go floating down the streets of a blue-collar neighborhood. The ports now crawl with DEA and NOPD and Coast Guard, strolling with coffee and flashlights, tossing sandwich crusts to their dogs. Without the water or I-10, which shoots across from Jacksonville on one side and Texas on the other, a road that now teems with highway patrol, the only way left is from Memphis. The boys spend a month in New Orleans, a place they despise, securing three good-sized customers.
Thomas and Tim have taken over the business. Little Rock keeps embarrassing itself by trying to attract tourists, claiming to be a technological hub and cultural capital. Capital of what? The Northwestern Mid-South? Certain areas, to compensate for other areas that have gone to shit, have been made cute, and now no one wants to go to any area. Filthy or antiseptic—those are the choices.
You take your time about moving, enjoying it. You sell the townhouse to the boys and go to the boonies, out near Bright’s park, a quiet place where people aren’t nosy. Bright doesn’t know you’re his neighbor and you see no reason to tell him. He wouldn’t know you if he saw you. You make your new place into a sort of curiosity shop. For the second time in your life, you are a shop-owner. In Memphis you struggled upstream against the currents of commerce, making ends meet, saving. Now you live in your shop, your inventory existing only for your amusement. You put the shop in the yellow pages, post hours, and make no effort to sell anything—in fact, refuse to sell anything. You’re like the mob bosses in movies who sit around in pizza joints. The word semiretired sounds privileged, luxurious. The boys have made this possible—Thomas and Tim. You can snooze all afternoon, cozy in the knowledge that they won’t do anything stupid. Your snores are full of confidence in them. You let them grow the business the way they wish to grow it. You don’t demand or forbid. Unless there are people stupid enough to provoke you, to create a threat to your business, to the boys, or to yourself, to, through ignorance or youth or cockiness or whatever brand of idiocy it would require, rankle you and draw you out, you’ll gladly stay warm in your shell.
PART THREE
ONE-WAY TRIPS
November began peacefully, with Kyle, Swin, and Johnna falling into a domestic routine shaped around Johnna’s work schedule. Whether they wanted it to or not, the park had become Kyle and Swin’s stomping ground. They weren’t watching over this place for someone else, weren’t placeholding. When they did chores, they did them for themselves. The leaves were floating down in drifts, and with each stroke of the rake, Kyle and Swin staked more claim. Swin was able to relax while he exercised or read, and Kyle took long drives and listened to Also sprach Zarathustra, hearing all the instruments distinctly, beginning to get the strategy of the thing. He understood that there was no way to know what was going on with Strauss. The music was a cover; it was how Strauss wished to be.
Kyle cooked each day, and it didn’t take long for Bright’s presence in the kitchen to fade away. Kyle made pork dishes for himself and Johnna and steamed things for Swin. Swin had put Johnna on even more supplements, which Kyle mixed up for her in fruity desserts. Using chicken, olive oil, wine rather than beer, and carrots instead of potatoes, Kyle made a version of Bright’s muck that was agreeable to Swin.
Swin took one book at a time out of the minivan, read it, and stacked it in a corner of the living room. Sometimes he only scanned the words, thinking of the book he would one day write. He’d decided that having a child in the narrative would make it more human. His and Johnna’s child would be the moral touchstone. Swin would be honest about the child’s faults, and honest about his and Johnna’s faults as parents—honest about everything. Swin didn’t feel he’d have to make anything up to improve the book. He would simply record all that had happened in a diary format. When Swin’s kid was in high school, he or she would be assigned Swin’s book, The Mule to Emeritus Diaries, and all the other students would marvel at his or her crazy Arkansas upbringing.
Swin said he wanted to choose the baby’s name by process of elimination. He told Kyle to call out names that he had even the slightest negative association with. As a child, Kyle shared, a boy named Clay had ratted him out for knocking down mailboxes.
“That’s a bit Keifer Sutherland, isn’t it?” said Swin. “Stand by Me”
“I don’t know that one,” Kyle said.
“Skip it. Give me more names.”
“At my high school there was a male cheerleader named Ivan.”
“Those guys are smart,” Swin said.
“In seventh grade I kissed this girl named Dana, then some kid asked me if I’d kissed her and I said, ‘Yeah.’ The next day she made a whole opera out of it, like I’d dishonored her. Me betraying her was the hot gossip for a whole week.”
Swin jotted the name down.
“I truly hated that girl,” Kyle mused.
“For making you seem like a scumbag?”
“For making me the subject of gossip.”
“I guess you knew enough not to apologize or deny it.”
“I never said another word to her.”
“At my high school, girls were deemed either two-faced, conceited, sweet, or shy. Those were the choices.”
“You were probably popular,” Kyle said.
“Very,” said Swin. “Weren’t you?”
“What do you think?”
“I honestly couldn’t say.”
“Nobody bothered me. Put it that way.” Kyle drew himself into an erect posture and belched. “Your turn.”
Swin said a girl named Tess had ruined a scam he had where he checked books out of the public library with a fake ID and kept them. He’d gone to school with a kid named Dean who had webbed toes and was a notorious kiss-ass.
Kyle began regarding his and Swin’s situation less darkly. He and Swin had a house and some money. If the Parks Department got wise and Kyle and Swin had to leave the house, they’d still have the money. Frog’s people, though they might come for the money, had no claim on the house. Someone might come to kill them, of course, but to Kyle that seemed like a condition of life, like the price of doing business. You could get killed anytime. There were a lot of other ways to die than by the order of a drug boss. Florists and teenagers and princesses got killed. Hikers and firemen. Mothers. One thing was obvious: neither Kyle nor Swin would be able to get a setup like this by his own devices. If they left Felse
nthal, they’d be poor. They’d have the same chance of ending up in jail or dead, and they’d also be poor.
The fact was, Kyle could feel his fear of Frog dwindling. His fear was now a mighty oak tree so rotten under its bark that a child could push it over. One of these mornings, Kyle would awaken to find his fear of Frog toppled over onto some power lines. Kyle wanted to know about Frog, wanted his questions about the man answered, wanted to know what Frog thought of him, but it was as much for curiosity’s sake as for self-preservation. Kyle couldn’t see himself dying. He found it hard to believe anyone could extinguish him.
One morning Kyle brewed coffee, filled a thermos that read TEXAS: NOT JUST STEERS AND QUEERS ANYMORE, and walked up to Bright’s grave. When he got there, he was annoyed with himself. He had no idea what to do or how to feel. He could’ve brought some whiskey to pour out, but that was stupid. Kyle’s mild sorrow for Bright had settled, had joined the other disheveled shadows of Kyle’s brain.
Swin spoke to the private investigator for the last time. It turned out there was nothing untoward about his mother’s afternoon jaunts. She was bored in the house and liked to spend time at the wine shop and the quilt museum and at a new shark aquarium that had been constructed at a defunct racetrack. She carried a disposable camera and took pictures without aiming. Swin’s second oldest sister, Rita, who was in tenth grade, “sort of” had a boyfriend. It was one of those best friend/boyfriend deals where the two, although not fully dating, scare potential dates away from each other. Swin could not have wished for better; the best friend/boyfriend rarely scored, and if he did, it was a shaky grope session the girl wasn’t hot to repeat. Rosa, the oldest, had a jock and a nerd after her. The PI said nerds weren’t like they used to be. Today’s nerds had knowledge about obscure music, marketable computer skills, and a fashionably unfashionable way of dressing. These days, the PI asserted, a varsity jacket was as much a hindrance as a help.