She stops you with a finger across your lips, the nail just brushing the underside of your nose. It’s intimate, almost. “You,” she says, standing on her toes, so her mouth can brush against yours, her lipstick dry now, a red taste you want to catalogue too, particle by particle.
“Gwen,” you either say or think, it’s hard to tell, your hand groping out for the wall behind her so the two of you don’t fall over. But then, at the last possible moment, the bench seat already an important part of what you’re fast-forwarding to, wondering if you’re still athletic enough for, she pushes away, forces the sunglasses back over her eyes.
“What?” you say.
“I—” she starts, then opens her purse instead, pulling out an alligator wallet that matches her sunglasses. It makes you linger over what she might be wearing under her dress. But then there’s the wallet, the sheaf of bills pressing up from it that, for the first time in your life, make you think bank notes. Two separate, distinct words.
“Ten dollars off if paid in full, right?” she says, laying three hundred dollar bills down on your wooden spool that still isn’t a desk.
In a trance of some kind, like you’ve just been paid for something you would have done for free, you nod, remember an interview you saw on late-night once. It was some past-his-considerable-prime porn king, and he’s talking about how, just after Deep Throat came out, all the up-and-comers—the girls not so fresh off the bus—would walk up to him and say they could do it, deep throat. Did he want to see? No names or hellos or anything, even.
In the interview, this is where the guy just kind of shrugs, helpless, and says it perfectly, the way you’re feeling now: I’m a pig, what can I say?
“So?” Gwen says, still holding the money across.
You’re not a good person.
The bills are folded into your wallet before she even makes it back to her Town Car.
Two beers later—bent nails scattered on the concrete floor of the storage unit, your thumb pounding, the air thick with profanity—another vehicle noses up to the chain link fence that’s either supposed to keep other people out, or you in.
Without looking away from the open door, you set the hammer down onto the calendar, crack open a sixth beer—could be eight, depending on how you count—think to yourself that you should call Guinness, maybe. Two customers in as many hours has to be a record for Aardvark Custom Economy Storage.
“How am I supposed to get anything done around here?” you say out loud, trailing off some at the end because you hear it for what it is: the exact thing your father used to say every afternoon of every weekend of your childhood. The childhood that happened exactly three blocks east of where you are right now, one street up. Your dad’s probably still there in his faded green recliner, his right hand dropped down to the wooden lever like he’s about to eject from this life he never really planned.
For a flash you have to look away from, you think it’s him at the fence, that he wants a reconciliation, an explanation, an apology. But then, too, you know he’s you, more or less, just older. Even at thirty-six, you wouldn’t ever drive three blocks for any kind of gratification that wasn’t immediate, and you can’t imagine you’d be any different at seventy-three.
It’s funny enough that you smile a bit, then feel bad about smiling, then suspect maybe you’re just faking your way into a laugh because the silence has become uncomfortable. When that happens in a movie, it’s because the person on-screen’s being watched, isn’t alone. This is real life, though. The wide door’s still just an empty block of light, a diesel engine clattering in the heat out there. Under that, footsteps crunching through the caliche.
You hook one side of your mouth up, know without having to think about it that the missing sound here is a truck door closing. That the person walking up didn’t want to announce himself like that, give you time to prepare. That it’s a man is just a feeling. Gut feeling, you correct, in your head. That little voice every detective worth his salt has learned to listen to over the years. That little voice you never could hear in Midland, on the bunny slopes of the homicide beat. It’s loud and clear in your hometown, though: those crunching footsteps are male. You nod, smile. It’s already starting then, the case. In the only way it can. Because you don’t have any wheels, any way to get around, all the players are going to have to start delivering themselves to your storage unit: Gwen’s tattooed, lovesick ex-con; her mother, with a plateful of cookies; your dad, even though that’s not what you want; some local badge to cramp your style, put a damper on your big homecoming. Most of all, Gwen, her skirt getting shorter with each visit.
It’s your case, after all.
Part of her’s still with you—in the muscles under your lips, on the pads of your fingertips. On the circle of red on the half-smoked cigarette drifting up onto the slick concrete of your storage unit, like the caliche out there’s lapping, a sea of chalk.
It’s then that you realize the footsteps have stopped, become a pair of work boots.
“St. Nicholas,” a man says, and this one you know without even having to look up: Rory Gates. It’s from the way he has of making the St. Nick longer, dragging it into something more painful than it already is. Like he’s letting it out some, just to get it all the way around you. In elementary school, his way of saying it made you fail a spelling test once, because you got St. Nicholas and Santa Claus mixed up, spelled your own name Nicklaus. It wasn’t part of the test, but you spent so long erasing it that you didn’t have time for any i-before-e games.
It was Rory Gates’s fault. Along with a lot of other stuff.
“Rory,” you say.
He laughs a breath out, and you know there’s not a single thing you could have said that could have kept him from it, because he’s not laughing at what you said. He’s laughing at you.
“Been a while, yeah?” he offers.
It’s another set-up.
“You must be lost, I mean,” he finishes. “Motel’s a bit north, I believe.”
What he’s talking about is the peeling green Bellevue practically next door, on the other side from the water station. Even when the two of you were kids it had been closed down. Not haunted like the convent, but that’s just because it’s only one story tall. For a moment, walking up from the south two months ago, past the IGA, you’d even thought what he’s saying, that Aardvark Custom Economy Storage was the old motel in a second life. But then the storage units turned out to be a pair of buildings running alongside each other for seven units, not a pair of buildings connected into a horseshoe at the bottom.
“Thanks,” you say. “Was starting to wonder where the ice machine was.”
Rory laughs, extends a hand, and you take it, hope you’re not sucking your gut in. What you’re wishing is that you hadn’t had to turn your service revolver in, and then the next moment you’re glad that you did. Better to just let him say what he needs to say, see him off.
“So you gonna let me see it?” he says, catching your eye just before he leans over to the caliche to spit, holding his hand to the brim of his straw hat so it doesn’t blow away.
“Been talking to the girls in Midland?” you say back, a thin smile curling your lips just the right amount.
Rory hisses another laugh. Fingers a grain of dip off the end of his tongue, studies it before flicking it down to the concrete.
“Your war wound, man…” he says.
You rub your shoulder.
“Never known anybody who got shot in the line of duty,” he says. “What was it? Thirty-eight, right?”
You look away, lower your forehead to your hand in what he can take as a yes, if he wants. Just because .38 sounds so much better than .22, almost justifies your four months in Midland General, then the two more on disability, when everybody knew you were milking it but couldn’t say anything, because you were the hero the department needed. At the end of the six months there’d even been a detective shield waiting, a scrapbook of all your newspaper clippings, four chances to ta
ke the Homicide test—the one that had no room at the bottom to pen in the main thing you’d learned: that, when a bunch of punk kids start shooting at you, the worst place you can hide is behind a fiberglass boat. And that, if you have to get shot in the back, a .22’s not that bad. Not as good as a BB gun, maybe, but far enough from a .38, anyway.
But .38 does sound better. Especially for Rory. You would have even smiled yes about .44, given the chance, raised your shirt the same as you are now, to show him the puckered scar below your right nipple that looks like an exit wound but is really just where the hot .22 slug stopped, unable to push through after riding one of your ribs around under your arm.
Rory smiles, steps closer, and then you realize what you should have already seen: that there are set-ups within set-ups. Instead of touching his index finger to the scar, which would have been weird enough, he cups your belly in his warm hand, gives it a shake.
“Haven’t changed at all, have you?” he says, winking.
You let your shirt fall back down, lift your chin to him.
Inspecting the storage unit, he says, “So Stace’s parents let you just stay here?”
“Up front,” you say. “The office.”
“That couch folds out, right?”
Yes.
He shrugs, pushes his lower lip out in appreciation. “Not bad. I mean, after…”
After Midland.
If he wasn’t in faded jeans and work boots in the middle of the week, you’d think he was a lawyer, never asking a question he didn’t already know the answer to.
“So you needing to store something?” you say.
He laughs again, looks around again. Says, as if in wonder, “People just leave shit here they don’t really want, but feel bad about throwing away—” He fake-cuts himself off, eyes wide, fingertips over his lips like this is a tea party.
In your mind, you’ve got him in various headlocks, are casting around for a video camera to get him on tape like that: beaten, begging, trying to tap out. In the real world of the storage unit, though, the two of you are still four feet apart. Far enough for Rory to squat down, finger one of the bent nails up from the concrete. Rotate it, study it, follow it to the chips and gouges in the cinderblock wall over the wooden spool.
He stands, says as if it’s the natural next thing, “Correct me if I’m wrong here, Nicky boy. But when you got busted, it was for taking pictures, yeah?”
Another already-answered question. Like Gwen, like everybody, he read it in the papers months ago: Midland Homicide Detective Nicholas Bruiseman Questioned for Distributing Explicit Photographs.
“He told me she was his wife,” you say.
Rory smiles, shrugs. “You shot four rolls, right?”
You shrug with him, like you’re proud, like it was worth it, like you can’t still hear an 8-ball rolling over the warped slate of the quarter tables at Riley’s, the corner pocket yawning open to take it, Jimmy Bones looking at you after the break, his chin resting on his cue. In trade for the eight hundred dollars the shot cost you, he’d said you could use your detective skills, figure out who was banging his friend’s wife.
It was supposed to be cake.
“Good to see you again,” you say to Rory, lifting your beer to him, toasting him away, then turn to the wooden spool. Like you have something to do here. For once, too, it works. Rory Gates becomes what he was before: Vibram-soled boots crunching through the caliche.
Forty seconds later, he’s back, silhouetted in the door like a gunslinger, his fingers waggling over his work belt. It’s bulging with torpedo levels and stubby T-squares and tape measures. He jacks the hammer up to his palm by touch, digs with his other hand in the bag just in front of his balls, even angles his hips back like he’s playing with himself. You look away, grin displeasure, and the next thing you know he has a medieval looking black nail lined up in the middle of all the gouges you’ve already made.
“No—” you say, reaching, sure this is going to come out of some deposit you never laid down, sure that the cinderblock he’s about to shatter is a load-bearing one, but then he hits the nail once with authority and it just slides right on in.
“Masonry nails,” he explains, tapping it deeper, the perfect depth. He picks up your calendar, hooks it onto the nail.
“It’s not January,” you say.
“Never January here,” he says back, running the handle of his hammer back into its loop. Then, before you can get anything out, “This is what I do, Nicky. I hammer, I saw, work with my hands, and shit gets built. My specialty, you could say. Get it?”
You realize this is another set-up.
He leads off “And what you do—”
“…is work security at a storage facility in a town of three thousand people,” you say.
“And a few old soreheads,” he adds.
It’s what the billboard out on the interstate says.
“You think I’m in business,” you say.
“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, you’re famous for it and all. Might as well use it, right?”
To be sure you know what he’s talking about, he lifts an invisible camera to his face, takes your picture.
“I should have never come here,” you say, quiet enough that he angles his head over. “I’m not a private investigator, Rory. Sorry.”
“Well you’re sure not a public one anymore,” he says back. “What kind would you say you are, then?”
“Listen,” you tell him. “Even if I were licensed, and…interested. Even if I were all that, any of that, what can I do from here, unless your wife conducts her affair in one of my storage units?”
Rory stares at you about this.
“So that’s all you got, George Jones?” he says, hooking his head down the front of the storage units, to the riding lawnmower chained to the steel post by the office door, its battery charging.
Yes.
“Guess you need me same as I need you then,” he says, stepping out, waiting just long enough for you to follow him. The only reason you do is so he won’t have to lean back in like a dad, ask if you’re coming or what.
He doesn’t stop at his supercab like you expect, but steps out to the gravel edge of 137 and looks both ways, down to the Dairy Queen and Town & Country first, then south, to all the shiny new Chevrolets at Wheeler’s, and you let yourself think for a moment that that’s what he’s talking about: he has some kind of in there, redid one of the salesmen’s offices maybe, so he can get you something fresh off the assembly line, its tires still nubbly. But then he’s looking just straight across the road, pretty much. Not at the high school or Graves Plumbing or the church or Franklins’—still Blocker Oil, to you—but at the two-stall carwash.
Under the suds, overspray arcing rainbows across all of Stanton, is an old blue-on-silver Ford.
You try not to smile, would know that truck anywhere—know that no matter how hard the kid washing it scrubs, there’ll still be the print on the inside glass on the passenger side, where a girl once laid her head back, ruined you.
“Got it at a farm sale last week,” Rory says, then waves his hat at the kid washing it. A boy, maybe fifteen, obviously a Rory-clone—stamped from that same football star material—just the fact of him, that he exists, it cuts right to your heart, doesn’t it? It’s like—it has a lot to do with that particular truck, really. Had things gone different with Gwen, then that kid might not be a quarterback. He might be drinking under the bleachers instead.
Probably better this way.
On the fourth try he gets the truck started, coasts across the street with the door open, the sole of his boot skating over the hot asphalt.
“Remember being that cool?” Rory says to you.
For once Rory doesn’t make you answer, just collects the keys, fake-boxes the boy a couple of times then clamps his hat down, nods to you for his son.
“Watch yourself,” he says to the boy, about you. “This guy’ll lock you up.”
You smile, a cop again, and nod to the boy.
The two of you leave him there, ease back to the storage unit.
“She runs,” Rory says. “All I can say for sure. But go gentle. He hasn’t even paid for her yet.”
The keys to a truck you’ve maybe been in love with for half your life are already in your hand somehow.
“Just until you get the—” Rory says, filling in the blank with a new-in-the-bag disposable camera he ghosts up from his tool belt.
“And you’re sure she’s your wife, right?”
Rory laughs, claps you on the shoulder, and takes out his checkbook. “Name’s right there with mine,” he says, writing. “For better or worse. Fifty keep you in beer and Slim-fast long enough?”
You take the camera, don’t even feel his words anymore. “Seventy five,” you say, already calculating what you can make from this job if you offer to sell the wife the pictures first.
Rory raises his shoulders like seventy-five hurts, but writes it anyway. He passes the check to you, touches the brim of his hat in farewell. “Be seeing you,” he says.
You nod, can feel the Eiffel shadow of the tall motel sign next door falling across the roof of the storage unit you’re in, the gravel and tar up there making it blurry, indistinct. Past the Dairy Queen and the bridge there are parachuters floating down from the sky.
Three-hundred and seventy-five dollars in one day, you tell yourself. Three hundred of it cash money, even.
The other seventy-five you unfold, study.
In the top left corner of the check is Rory and Gwen Gates.
You close your eyes, press the check to your forehead.
2.
THOUGH you DON’T CONSIDER yourself hardboiled, you spend the next twenty-four hours in a bottle. Standing in the sun between the A and B storage units, staring down the Ford still nosed up to the fence. It stares back, daring you.
Towards the end of it—back to two o’clock in the afternoon again—you play a little telephone roulette, call the number printed on Rory Gates’s check.
Not for Nothing Page 2