Arkansas

by John Brandon

“Here you go,” she said. “‘A man cannot attain excellence if he satisfies the ignorant and not those of his own craft, and if he be not singular. As for those other meek spirits, they may be found without the need of a candle in all the highways of the world.’”

  “That one’s a load of shit.”

  “What’s the matter with you? You’re mad because we didn’t sleep together?”

  Kyle scoffed. “It’s the quote. First off, attaining excellence is for douchebags. Second, saying one human is ignorant and one isn’t is splitting hairs. Third, the highway is the best place to find singular dudes.”

  The hostess came around the corner in a huff and apologized that Kyle and Wendy had had to seat themselves.

  “Can we have a sober waiter?” Kyle asked.

  “You want Eric. By the fountain.” The hostess handed Kyle two menus and pointed at a stone horseman surrounded by spitting bronze children.

  Kyle and Wendy switched tables. They read the short menus over and over until Eric stopped by. He was deliberate and depressed. He told them the special was New York strip with blue cheese on it, and that the steak enchiladas were bland. Kyle and Wendy ordered the special. Eric nodded and turned on his heel.

  “It’s obvious to me that Bright is no longer affiliated with the Parks Department,” Wendy said. “Why is none of my business, but I have to report it. I have to.”

  “Report what?” Kyle said.

  “That’s he’s missing.”

  “Jesus, I’ll need some time.”

  “Once I process the paperwork, it’s maybe thirty days before you got a new ranger out there.”

  “How will that work?”

  “You can’t let him know your certification is false—him or her. I don’t know it’s false, either. I’m a victim of fraud. And I’m only taking a few more payments.”

  “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  “I can buy my houseboat soon.”

  “Then you’ll quit the Parks Department?” said Kyle. “Hang out in the harbor and paint?”

  Wendy shook her head with self-pity. “I saw a color on the plane the other day, out the window—this seething orange. I knew I would never paint it. I knew I’d...”

  Before she could finish her thought, Eric came with bread, glasses, and a metal pitcher of ice water. He informed them that the butter tabs had been heated, bowed crookedly, and left.

  “Crime is a sinking ship,” Wendy said. “As is art. I’ll have a nice pension from the park people. Insurance. It’s an easy job.”

  “I’m no expert, but I think you lack the balls to be a painter.”

  “Painting is childish, Kyle. I’m a single woman and I have to be smart.”

  “What does being single or being a woman have to do with it?”

  Wendy gave Kyle a withering look.

  “I’m a single man,” he said.

  Wendy looked away, toward the busboys at the far end of the restaurant, and Kyle let her. Neither spoke again until the steaks came. Kyle ate his and most of Wendy’s, then slouched in the booth. Wendy said he could pick any story he wanted about Bright, and Kyle said how about the truth, that one morning he was just gone, his clothes still in his closet, whiskey still in the cabinet, an atlas on the kitchen table open to the state of Alaska.

  “Alaska sounds like a lie.” Wendy handed Kyle a packet of forms. She would be in D.C. for five days, she said, for pamphlet meetings. When she returned home she wanted to find those forms in her mailbox.

  “How come you don’t have sex?” Kyle asked her.

  “For days afterward I can’t do anything. Regular life doesn’t interest me after I sleep with a man.”

  Her answer sounded practiced. Kyle wondered if she did these charades with a bunch of other guys, if she had stacks of scripts lying around amongst her piles of pamphlets.

  “You can pay for dinner,” he said. “I’ll be in touch.”

  Driving home, Kyle knew he’d never see Wendy again. He’d have Swin fill out the paperwork, but they wouldn’t pay her another cent. Bright had made her believe she was blackmailing him, but he had boxed her in. She had a lot more to lose from trouble than Kyle did.

  Kyle took Swin with him. This time they parked right in front of Her’s trailer, two wheels on her lawn. It had been too long since the last packet, and though it didn’t make sense that Her would withhold packets, Kyle couldn’t put it past her. Her’s job was to give Kyle and Swin the packets, and, like everyone else, she didn’t want to lose her job. On the other hand, she was nuts.

  The second part of Kyle’s mission, aside from recovering a packet if there was one to recover, was as simple as letting Her know that he and his partner were not to be fucked with. Frog was the CEO, but Kyle and Swin were now regional managers and they needed to start doing a little managing on Frog’s behalf. Kyle was sick of Her’s act. He was sick of having to beg for the packets and having to tiptoe around her schedule and walk circles around her trailer and check her little carport area and sick of having her annoying neighbor stare at him. He was sick of her condescending attitude, that she would only deign to allow Kyle and Swin into her trailer if it suited her mood.

  Kyle and Swin knocked a long time before Her unlatched the door and stuck her head out. She said the envelopes were on hold until she talked to Bright, so Kyle forced his way in, sending Her wobbling backward, the indignation in her face drowning out the shock. She was slick with sweat, flushed, beautiful. A squishy, waist-high ball rested in the corner.

  “I was exercising,” she said.

  “Feminine perfection,” said Swin. “Aside from the unprecedented disease.”

  “Why would you be exercising?” Kyle asked. “If you want to die as soon as possible, you shouldn’t exercise.”

  Her ignored Kyle. She looked at Swin. “I wonder what your rude friend wants to do if I don’t have a packet.”

  “I intend to kill you by strangulation. And it will be suicide, because I’m giving you a warning. You won’t be able to say you didn’t know you were about to get strangled.”

  Her brushed her neck with her fingers. “Why not shoot me?”

  “All I brought are my hands.”

  Swin pointed at the big ball. “So, what, you push it around in a circle five hundred times?”

  “Shut up,” said Her.

  “So, is this an order from Frog?” Kyle asked. “Frog said no packets until he finds out what’s happening over here?”

  “That’s right. He wants to know what happened to the ranger.”

  “Right,” Kyle said. “And we’re probably supposed to tell you so you can tell him.”

  Life sprang into Her’s eyes. “That’s right,” she said.

  Kyle sighed. “Bull-fucking-shit.”

  Her’s mouth hung open.

  Swin winked. “Are you the boss of this whole thing?”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Are you the Frogman?”

  “If you want to call him Frog then he’s Frog. Could be Bob Hope’s cousin-in-law, for all I know.” Her dabbed her cheeks with a napkin. “You can lie, but you have no intuition.”

  “Intuition is for women,” Kyle said. “You don’t need to worry about intuition right now. You need to worry about the fact that you’re an unnecessary middleman and we’ve been thinking about streamlining. Frog will be impressed if we can make his operation more efficient.”

  Her looked to Swin and he shrugged. “You are superfluous,” he admitted.

  “You can’t do that,” Her said. “You can’t streamline.”

  “We do a whole bunch of shit we’re not supposed to do,” Kyle said. “Frog doesn’t seem to mind.”

  “I’m a buffer,” Her insisted. “I’m a vital layer of insulation.”

  Kyle cracked his knuckles. “I’m convinced you have a packet sitting in here, and I refuse to tear the place up. You’re going to hobble right over and get it for me.”

  Kyle peered into Her’s eyes, tried to make her understand that he was
indeed a killer and she was helpless. It was working. She was frightened.

  Swin cleared his throat and asked if there were ways to practice intuition.

  “Do you pray?” Her asked him, prying her attention from Kyle. “Most prayers sound hollow inside your head, but every so often a prayer is full and it echoes. That’s the same feeling as intuition.”

  “I’ll pray for you if you pray for me,” Swin said.

  Kyle wrung his hands. “Packet,” he said.

  “It’s stuffed in the ball, you asshole.”

  Kyle and Swin looked at each other.

  “Why would you hide a packet from us?” Swin asked.

  Her considered this. “I’m scared, same as you. I want to know what happened to Ranger Bright. He was my friend, you know?”

  “Your friend?” Swin asked. “You think distributing a manila envelope to someone every two weeks constitutes a friendship?”

  “To me it does,” Her said. “To me and the ranger it did.”

  “You’re never going to know what happened to Bright.” Kyle pointed to the ball, wanting Swin to get the packet, then went to Her’s kitchen sink and splashed water on his face. He used his shirt to dry off.

  “We’re not scared,” he told Her. “You just said we were scared, same as you, but that’s wrong. We’re not.”

  The packet from Her’s exercise ball sent them to Huntsville, Alabama. To find the Celica, Kyle and Swin walked five miles, half down a dirt road that skirted the park, the other half through fields of rotten berries that stained their shoes and the bottoms of their pants. It was hard to know if they were walking the right course; there were no landmarks on the map, only distances and compass directions. The berry fields contained no streams, misshapen trees, barns—nothing of note except a hole someone had dug and thrown hundreds of real estate signs into.

  The Celica had no hubcaps. Kyle barely fit in the driver’s seat. There were napkins all over the dash. The console contained a mess of punch cards for getting free coffee and videos and ice cream and such. Kyle dropped these out the window, along with an air freshener shaped like a T-bone steak. Swin popped in a tape that taught basic Russian. To him, there was quite a distinction between being bilingual and knowing three languages. He had chosen Russian because it was the only language tape he could find in the shops near Felsenthal, but Russian was a great language, the language of many strange poets. Swin shut his eyes and mouthed the words. Though the woman on the tape didn’t have a Russian accent, Swin told Kyle, she had a Russian attitude; she held the student in contempt for not being born Russian, for living a portion of his or her life in ignorance of the greatest cultural heritage of the last several hundred years.

  The Celica drove with a whine that got under Kyle’s skin. The window didn’t shut flush. This car, he thought, should belong to an anorexic waitress. It was going to be a long way to Huntsville, and when they got back, Kyle and Swin had nothing to look forward to but the new ranger. They’d have to take orders, would have to act dumb and outdoorsy. Kyle could no longer picture himself with a day-to-day boss. What if the guy wanted to kick them out of the house, wanted them to return to their trailers? What about the nursery Swin had fixed up? What about the baby and Johnna? What if the new ranger blabbed to Cooper about what really happened to Bright, that he’d disappeared without a trace?

  “The best way to throw off a hound dog is hot pepper,” Swin said.

  “Throw off a hound dog?”

  “Like if they bring one out to the park ever.”

  “No one’s bringing a hound dog.”

  “Someday they might.”

  “That works? Hot pepper?”

  “I’m as convinced of it as I am that man walked on the moon.”

  “Meaning you saw it on TV?”

  Swin nodded. “We could test it on Bedford.”

  “Wouldn’t that be mean?”

  “Not very.”

  The drive seemed endless. Kyle’s knees ached from being jammed under the Celica’s dashboard. Swin took restless naps. He awoke at one point and informed Kyle that Johnna didn’t want to get married until after the baby came, to prove some kind of point. Kyle told Swin that Johnna probably knew this was no time to be filing paperwork with the government, that maybe she wanted to wait until they could have an old-fashioned, expensive wedding that would include Swin’s family, that maybe she thought all this stuff with Frog would blow over.

  “It will,” Swin said.

  “I guess,” said Kyle. “Getting a new ranger is going to be a monumental pain in the ass.”

  “Monumental, huh?”

  “Monumental.”

  “You think there’s a chance the new ranger will be a Frog guy? Could his reach be that great?”

  Kyle had not thought of this. The possibility had not occurred to him. He kneaded the steering wheel. “Doesn’t seem likely,” he told Swin.

  “It would be too good to be true,” Swin said.

  “It really doesn’t seem likely.”

  “No, it doesn’t. But nothing about my life seems likely to me.”

  They pulled into the parking lot of the NASA museum and escaped the Celica. Immediately a man with watches on both wrists walked over. He rummaged under the driver’s seat, pulled out a small clipboard full of forms, flipped through them, then tossed Kyle a bundle of cash wrapped in deli paper, marked TURK/PROV. They got back in the car and counted it—twenty-two thousand dollars. They took out a grand for expenses and put the bundle in the glove box. Kyle wasn’t ready to be cooped back up in the car, and said he was going for a walk. Swin said he was going in the museum to see if he could figure out once and for all whether we really went to the moon.

  1998

  You flip through a book about Negro League baseball, wondering, if it was so ignored, where all these wonderful pictures came from. Lately you’ve prepared and cleaned up after three elaborate meals a day, learned about the first half of the twentieth century, listened to politicians on the radio. Your retired life is oiled and humming—operational, at least—but as always, here is another problem, a problem like an iceberg too large to be sailed around, an iceberg that has to be smashed to cinders.

  Gregor was killed. The cops busted into his shop and shot him. This is not good. Gregor was dependable, well suited for his sunless, solitary duty. The cops have been slithering around Little Rock for weeks, questioning every hoodlum they can grub up, emboldened by the fact that they have a specific, large object to ask about, a car they dragged out of a swamp, and a specific, smaller object, a body, a toothless boy from Louisiana. Most of this was on the news, but Thomas and Tim can find out anything they want to find out in Little Rock. The boy was identified even without his teeth—probably had a juvenile record with fingerprints—and tracked back to his uncle, who was found dead, and the uncle, the cops figured out, was connected in some way to the Little Rock drug trade. None of this is good.

  Ranger Bright’s body has not turned up, but you feel he too has been killed. You know he would never up and leave. He would never abandon his park. You don’t know how, but these new boys, Kyle and Swin, had something to do with it. Possibly everything to do with it. Bright lives almost fifty years, not a scratch on him, then the boys show up and boom: dead. Then they come sniffing around for guns and Swin asks you if you want to purchase a set of human bones. The boys don’t know who you are. They couldn’t. Swin couldn’t have been taunting you, offering you Bright’s remains. Could he have?

  Kyle and Swin had something to do with Bright and the sunk car and the uncle and the nephew and, indirectly, with Gregor. Her called the other night and said she couldn’t sleep because she was scared of Kyle. These two are supposed to be working for you, but they’re about the worst enemies you’ve ever had. You’ve never had anyone kill your associates and steal your money. Whether they are accomplishing these things according to a plan, or whether they’re lost in a maze of their own fuckups, you cannot say. And it doesn’t matter. What could you think but
the worst when they kept trying to contact Colin? They don’t contact higher-ups. Everyone knows that. They can’t genuinely believe they’re going to be able to speak to you directly. More likely, their idea is to turn your organization against you, to feel Colin out, see if he’s turnable, get him and the other runners to break off on their own. Those idiots think the park is theirs now. They think they’ve found a weak branch of your company and they’re going to lop it off and replant it for themselves. Maybe this is true and maybe it isn’t, but what can you assume but the worst?

  And then there’s the book bonfire. You watched from the woods one night, more amused than shocked, as Swin and Johnna went into your shop, into your home, and took half your poetry books outside and burned them. You know it’s not possible that those jackasses know you’re Frog and are pretending not to know. You know it was Johnna who wanted to burn your books and Swin was along for the ride, too weak to say no to a pretty woman. But that’s just it. These guys are stupid and that’s what makes them dangerous.

  If Kyle and Swin are stupid enough to let all this happen, there’s no telling what else they’re up to. They will be caught, soon, and brought up on serious charges, and it will somehow lead back to you. Every minute that passes, you are closer to jail. Every minute you sit idle, you deserve jail more. There are troubling questions everywhere you look, and they all have the same simple answer.

  You will keep this job close. You will instruct Her to give Kyle and Swin one last trip, to keep them comfortable—something not far away, maybe Fort Smith. You will run into them, casually, and tell them where they can get as many orphan guns as their little hearts desire. They will feel lucky, like something has gone right for them, but nothing will ever go right for them again. They will not get orphan guns. They will get Thomas and Tim. You’ve wrestled in circles about sending Thomas and Tim, knowing all the while, hard as you may wish to wrestle, that you would lose. You can guide your boys, but you can’t shield them. This is what they’re for and they know it. They know that the practice of dealing drugs is always, at its core, a reward for violence. That’s how you see it; that’s how you taught them. If you allow them to dodge this live-bullet assignment, their entire ascent will ring hollow. You know all this, so why is it so tough to send them? You’re more attached to them than they are to you; that’s something you have to face. This assignment is a standard aspect of the business they’re in, and you’re treating it like sending your sons off to war. You’re making an opera out of it. It’s not that big a deal. You’ll make sure it’s done right. You’ll have the boys scout the place out, have them lying in wait, prepared and resolved. Thomas will lead. He will look after Tim. They’ll corner Kyle and Swin and separate them. Thomas will carry a shotgun. Tim will be better off with his size as his weapon, a weapon that can’t be taken and used against him. They’ll have to practice frisking. Thomas will have to be ready to shoot, in case they charge him. One shot for Swin, right there where they are, then drag Kyle off for a few questions ... drop him—whole thing over within a half hour. The boys will be back in Little Rock by dinnertime, where you’ll meet them for ribs and begin the fun work of keeping your heads down.