You shake your head no, or, yes: no tax. Are too out of breath for more.
“You okay?” she says, not stepping any closer than she already is.
You fake a smile, manage to resist looking through the mail slot.
Horse-woman Betsy Simms nods with you, the larger part of her expression still held in reserve, and says the last thing you want to hear: “Receipt?”
You parrot it back to her like it’s a word you’re not so familiar with.
She shakes her head in disbelief, hooks one side of her mouth up, her hands to her hips. “What’s to stop you from just pocketing it?”
You hold her eyes for a moment, gauging, agreeing with her more or less, then slide one of her crisp twenties up from the cash envelope. On the border of the twenty, you write 190 rec’d / 12mos storage, then sign your name over whichever president that is.
It’s the 190 she’s supposed to notice.
She looks up from it to you, from you to her horse trailer, then to the office door.
“This is a strange place,” she says.
You don’t disagree with this, and just when you think she’s gone, she comes back from her idling truck with a shiny new padlock.
You tell her Aardvark Custom Economy Storage uses its own, to insure the safety of her property in case of flood, fire, or other natural disaster.
She closes her hand around the lock, narrows her eyes at you.
“This is all on the contract?” she says.
You smile. “I’m here all the time, next door”—holding your apron out to show—“can let you in whenever.”
Then she’s gone.
You untie the apron, drape it over the seat of the riding lawnmower. Think maybe you are a PI, just like you’re already a water station attendant, a security guard. A jailbird, a patsy.
You touch your chin, add one more: knot-holer. If mail slots count as knot holes.
Through it the couch is still like you put it, but Arnot King’s not.
Instead of lying unconscious on the floor, he’s sitting on the couch, his head in his hands.
This is what you wanted, right? For him to wake on his own, make his way outside, then either lower his Mustang key down to a door that isn’t there, or not even stop outside the fence, but walk back to wherever he parked.
It was supposed to mean something, what he did, where he walked.
Three hours ago it made perfect sense, had something to do with whether you could trust him—or, yeah: it wasn’t about him at all. You were going to walk up just as he emerged, say thanks for the ride, bub. That way he’d know it wasn’t you who rolled a couch on top of him.
You’re not so sure you care what he thinks anymore, though.
You nod to yourself for courage, close your eyes for exactly three seconds, then step into the office all at once.
Arnot King doesn’t even look up. “Wondering if you were ever going to say anything to me.”
You drag a folding chair over, spin it around, sit down facing him.
“You know who did this?”
He stretches his chin away from his neck like his head’s pounding.
“What was that guy’s name you said was the real killer here?” he asks.
“Payne,” you say. “Goes by Fin.”
“Big Nazi linebacker with Polynesian body art?”
“Not so sure about the Polynesian, but, yeah. Just out of Big Springs.”
“The crazy house?” “Ex-con.”
“Same difference,” Arnot King says, liking this even more. He tries to stand, has to start over, guide himself from the arm of the couch. About halfway up, he purses his lips in defeat. “He got the pictures.”
“Film,” you correct.
“Get out of jail free,” he corrects back.
You give him that. “Not like you were stealing them or anything anyway, right?”
Arnot King glitters his eyes some. “Payment for services rendered. In this business I’ve learned to be flexible in regards to compensation. After I learned I wasn’t working to get a certain VHS tape back, anyway.”
“When scam artists collide,” you narrate.
“Speak for yourself.”
“He can’t even know what they are, though.”
“Except that you wanted to hide them, and I wanted to—well.”
“Steal them.”
“Use them as they were intended to be used,” he says, his words clipped again. Meaning he’s awake.
“He thinks they’re of him and her,” you say.
“You mean your old girlfriend, right?”
“He took your car?”
Arnot King touches the right pocket of his slacks, then the left, then lowers his head again.
“I’ve got to call it in,” he says. “And—assault. Breaking and entering.”
“Not to mention murder,” you say.
Arnot King grimaces and you lead him to the payphone, ball the apron up and walk it back to the water station, hand it up through the drive-through window.
“That him?” Sherilita says about Arnot King. “Monahans guy?”
You nod.
“Don’t remember him,” she says. “He play anything?”
“Probably on the debate team.”
“And he is…?
“My lawyer,” you tell her, hooking your eyes away like you’ve just admitted to gonorrhea.
Ten minutes later, Toby Garrett’s baby brother rolls up, stands from his car into his flat-brimmed straw hat.
“Mr. Bruiseman,” he says, nodding down to you. “Mr. King.”
“So?” you say. “Does Felson believe me now? She going after him?”
Toby Garrett’s baby brother rubs his forehead as if, like the story of his brother, this is too complicated to get out all at once. “I think she does believe you, yeah,” he says, smiling. “But we’re not going after him.”
“Not going after him?” Arnot King interrupts, either truly incredulous or faking it for the jury. “Even without the homicide charge, this is a clear violation of his parole.”
Toby Garrett’s baby brother chews his cheek, lifts his chin to Sherilita. Says what’s making him smile: “No, we’re not chasing Fin, Mr. King. Mr. Bruiseman. We’re not chasing him because, ten minutes ago, he walked into the station, surrendered himself.”
In the silence that follows, you swear you can hear Sherilita’s fingers parting the blinds in the water station, a fine rain of dust sifting down the back side of the window.
“They always come home,” Arnot King says in appreciation.
“He—he saying anything?” you ask.
“That’s just it, Mr. Bruiseman,” Toby Garrett’s baby brother says. “Only person he’ll talk to is you.”
Arnot King whistles, lowers his face to his sunglasses—isn’t he supposed to be on your side?—and this time Toby Garrett’s baby brother lets you sit up front.
9.
IT’S DARK BY THE TIME Toby Garrett’s baby brother delivers you back to Aardvark Custom Economy Storage. You stare through the window at the black shape of the low-slung building
“Were you there?” you ask after a few moments of not getting out of the car.
He turns his head to you slightly. “When he turned himself in, you mean?”
“Out at Rory’s mom’s old place.”
He nods yes, like he’s not proud. Like he’d rather forget.
“Did it—?” you start, can’t find a way to say it, try again: “Was the shotgun still there?”
“It’s an ongoing investigation,” he says.
“It wasn’t,” you tell him.
Toby Garrett’s baby brother considers this.
“All there was was Rory. Dead. I mean, it’s not like it’s out in the open or anything, but still. You kill somebody, don’t you try to bury them or something, at least?”
Toby Garrett’s baby brother shrugs again. “I never really killed anybody, I don’t guess.”
“We were supposed to find him,” you sa
y. “I was, anyway.”
Toby Garrett’s baby brother’s looking at you now. “What are you thinking?”
You smile to yourself, scratch your ear on your shoulder or your shoulder on your ear, you can’t tell so much once you’ve started.
“Nothing,” you lie, then tap the dashboard twice, a rimshot, and open the door, step out into the night with a name you don’t want on your lips: Jim Martindale. He was the one who told you Rory was out there.
You shake your head no, though. Felson was right: this isn’t your case anymore. That you’re not licensed to be on any case, really. That the wheels of justice are turning now, and, for once, not against you but a real live ex-con. The one person in Stanton, Texas with both motive and opportunity to kill Rory Gates.
You say it again, to yourself, that you were supposed to find him dead in that bedroom, then stand in front of Aardvark Custom Economy Storage for too long, staring down 137 to the body shop. The AirStream on blocks down there, your roll of film probably stashed inside, in a cabinet, a block of ice, something.
One way to close a case is to solve it, you know.
The other way is to just step back and let things happen.
What you tell yourself on the way to the body shop is that unless an angel swoops down and stops you, this is what you’re doing: jumping Manuel’s tall fence, getting the film, then drinking for a few days. Nobody expects anything else. After the stunt with the pause button, too—this is what Felson calls it—she’s not going to think twice about putting you in a cell with Fin. It’d be two birds, for her: You’d get beat to within a half inch of the end of your life for not springing Fin, and Fin would get another charge against him—one he couldn’t shake.
And anyway, Rory’s been asking for it since the second grade, pretty much. It’s always been just a matter of time for him. A killer like Fin was bound to show up sooner or later, do what nobody else had the nerve to.
And Gwen, she was just using you.
You nod to yourself, that yes—hell yes, even—this is the only thing you could be doing, the thing that makes the most sense, but then, not even halfway to Caprock, a set of headlights flings your shadow out ahead of you. When the truck—you can hear the lifters clattering—doesn’t pass on by, you turn, have to shield your eyes because the fog lights are on too. And the running lights on top of the cab.
It’s a truck you know, remember: Rory’s.
For an impossible moment you feel your weight shifting, so you can run, because he’s about to step out of the light. Ask for his seventy-five dollars back.
You’re half right: it’s Dan, Dan Gates. The new Rory.
You shield your eyes, see that his pants are tucked into his boots. The way you do when you’re all Billy Badass, looking for a fight. When you’ve got enough in you that nothing can hurt you.
It makes your scalp crawl.
“Dan,” you say.
“You called my mother,” he says back, a prepared line.
“We’re—” you start, but don’t know how to finish: old friends? new enemies?
Dan shakes his head no.
“Don’t,” he says. “I’m asking here.”
You say it halfway on accident, before you can check yourself: “Sorry about your dad, man.”
Dan laughs a bit then shakes his head no, turns away like this is over but runs at you instead, his shoulder down for the tackle-dummy sled, the moment slowed down to a series of instants, like there’s a strobe light around both of you.
He’s the only one moving slow, though. And—and he weighs eighty pounds less than you, at least, and can’t have lost enough fights yet to know how to really win one, and besides, he hasn’t ever had to wrestle drunk men down on their own lawns, with their black and blue wives watching. But then, too, it’s not muscle or experience that counts at two in the morning. It’s how bad you need to do what you’re doing.
You slow down to his speed, let his shoulder catch you, and then let him hit you until he’s crying—just patting you with his fists, more or less—then lie there while he backs his father’s truck away, the stars wheeling above you on some axis you can’t even begin to imagine.
For one 1978 quarter, the cold rinse at the car wash cleans you up. You spray the leftover pressure in a silver mist out towards 137, then hook the dripping wand back into its rack, duck behind the car wash when a patrol car eases by, feeling the stall out with a dummy light. You close your eyes against it like that’ll hide you, and, your hands balled at your sides, have to accept the real reason you let Dan Gates go at you: it wasn’t because you’re a good person or anything special, but because that righteous way he was feeling, you’ve always wanted that.
Walking back from lock-up the first time—yesterday?—you’ve already stopped at the corner of your father’s street once. His living room window was blue with television. What you did was hold your mouth in the shape of a word like hello, just one that somehow says everything else too.
You remember thinking, on accident, that maybe he’d even kept your old bicycle in the garage. You saw again Rory Gates, your childhood enemy, shadow-boxing with his grown son on the caliche in front of Aardvark Custom Economy Storage. The way they ducked and weaved. How you had to look away.
Maybe that’s all Dan wanted, really: the shadow-boxing, the reaching across with your fist, not to hurt.
You touch your ear where he tagged it, cock your head over in appreciation, and are glad this happened here, anyway, instead of at the funeral tomorrow. Not that anybody there would be likely to pull him off you. They’d probably start digging a second hole, even.
Stanton, Texas in the middle of July. The clown parade. You step out into it again, point yourself south down 137 and almost make it to the Caprock parking lot before the headlights come back.
You don’t turn around this time, just stand there.
The truck, not diesel, eases up alongside.
It’s Thomas.
“Your mom know you’re out?” you say to him.
“Gonna rat me out?” he says back. “Where you going?”
You point with your chin.
“Liquor store’s closed,” he says. Then, looking closer, “What happened to you, man?”
You climb in.
He pulls away, going nowhere. On the floorboard on your side is a ratty phonebook, Martindale, James probably in there somewhere.
You look away from it, out the side window. Ease past Dairy Treat on 80, then the elementary. “So you just wasting gas out here, or what?”
Thomas trails a line of spit down to his cup. “Staying awake, yeah? My dad’s coming by at five-thirty for a farm sale.”
You nod, understand. He doesn’t want to risk making his dad knock. Letting him down like that. It makes you wonder how long he’s already been awake, trying to be perfect.
“I know him?” you say. “Your old man?”
Thomas spits again too soon, shakes his head no, and you ride with him around Stanton, play a game of slow tag with whoever’s in the patrol car then finally point to Aardvark Economy Custom Storage your third time past it. He noses up to the fence and the garage doors hold the white of his headlights for seconds after he’s killed them.
“That’s Mark’s uncle’s trailer,” he says, about the gooseneck still angled over to the B-side.
“Betsy Simms’ mom’s stuff,” you tell him.
He steps out as if Aardvark Custom Economy Storage has suddenly become sacred. “Mrs. Rankin, right? Taught pre-Algebra…”
You follow him to the trailer. “Her? She’s dead?”
He rests his hand on the complicated latch of the trailer gate.
“I remember her, yeah,” you say, and he nods, keeps nodding, and you don’t even have to ask to get him to help you unload it into what, a few nights ago, was his studio. He takes his shirt off; on the back of his shoulder, the wing bone, his football number is tattooed on.
“Fin?” you say.
He nods, balances a lamp down.
“Thanks,” Thomas says, seeing the shirt balled up on the spare tire of the trailer.
You keep moving, send him into the office for two beers at three-fifteen, then two more at a quarter till four, and don’t miss him until your watch beeps once, on the hour.
You say his name, but in the valley of the two buildings your voice is too large, so you carry one more of Mrs. Rankin’s wooden chairs into 4-B, look through the payment slot of the office. Thomas is asleep on the couch, his face to the backrest, knees curled up. Lying on the only blanket on the property.
You close the screen door quietly then sit against the cinderblock wall across from the horse trailer, dangle your beer between your knees, promise to stay awake until five-twenty-five. It should give him just enough time to get home.
10.
YOU WAKE ALL AT ONCE, exactly one hour before Rory’s two o’clock funeral. In the dream you’re pretty sure you were having, you didn’t work and live at Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, but Aarmadillo Custom Economy Storage. It’s what Stace’s parents should have named the place. Like the old Lonestar commercials—a giant armadillo coiled around a longneck. People would come from miles around.
You nod to yourself, keep nodding, and follow the bright white wall out to the payphone, find Stace’s parents’ number traced over and over into the back cover of the phonebook. Five digits in, though, you slow, stop. Hang up.
It doesn’t matter. Aardvark, Aarmadillo. Aaunt Lily’s Storage Stop. It doesn’t matter, and they don’t need you telling them about it.
You turn away just as the phone rings. Like always, you look around for who else the call could be for.
“Me,” you say, and let it ring fourteen times before picking up.
“Nicky, Nicky, Nicky…” Jimmy Bones says in the way of hello. “This is your wake-up call. Rise and shine. Smell the good life, my man.”
You hold the phone to the side of your head, watch a hot oil truck pull into the Sonic, wonder if the driver’s going to walk up to one of the slots to push the button.
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