Not for Nothing

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Not for Nothing Page 13

by Stephen Graham Jones


  “He didn’t show. The dad.”

  “I don’t know why I thought he would. They’d only been planning it for three weeks.” She laughs about this. It’s not a real laugh, or a comfortable one.

  “I’ll talk to him for you,” you say, standing.

  She looks up to you from under her hand. “You can find him?”

  “What’s his name?”

  She lowers her hands, uses her folded-up napkin to clean an already-clean spot on the counter. “Thomas, Nick. What are you…? When I came home that day he wasn’t there.”

  You nod about this. “The father, I mean. Your ex.”

  “Talk to him?” It’s funny to her. “Have to find him first.”

  “It’s what I do.”

  Now she’s laughing, holding her hand up to you in apology, trying to keep her next few breaths in because she’s about to cry, and you look back down to your chopped beef sandwich, rotate it around for the best bite. When it’s to your mouth, a windshield flashes on 137, the car turning in from the north.

  Or not on 137 at all, but in the ditch, the caliche lot that bleeds over to Aardvark Custom Economy Storage.

  The car is a black Town Car. The one Arnot King was driving.

  It’s moving too slow to be him, though. Too deliberate, like a shark hanging in the water, its sleek body full of purpose, of patience, of confidence.

  Jimmy Bones.

  He got the car out of impound already. Wants to take care of some other business while he’s in town.

  Over the counter you’re suddenly sitting under, you hear his voice through the drive-through window. He’s asking about the gentleman who manages the storage facility next door, his voice syrupy and benign.

  “You want to rent a unit?” Sherilita says down to him. You close your eyes, realize that the kickboard behind you—the base of the counter—is just paneling, isn’t any thicker than the hull of a fiberglass boat.

  Jimmy Bones’s reply is muffled and amused, and it ramps up into a question at the end.

  “Just missed him,” Sherilita says, a new flatness in her voice.

  This time Jimmy Bones’s voice come through loud and clear, like he’s leaned out of the window now: “That his drink?”

  From under the counter you can see it: your styrofoam cup of tea, and, beside it, the chopped beef sandwich, its paper still uncrinkling around it, blooming in the heat.

  “Excuse me?” Sherilita says.

  “Forget it,” Jimmy Bones says. “Think he always cleans his plate anyway, that one. He say when he’s due back?”

  “He was going to the liquor store, I think.”

  Jimmy Bones says that sounds about right, says he could use a beer too, blowtorch of a day like this.

  Sherilita directs him south across 137.

  When he’s gone, you’re standing on your side of the counter. Sherilita turns, shakes her head to you, at you.

  “How can you help Thomas?” she says. “You can’t even—”

  You don’t hear the end of it. You’re already moving.

  Standing in front of the office door of Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, Jimmy Bones two miles up the road, maybe—two miles of five, meaning ten minutes for a roundtrip—it comes to you, how to leave Betsy Simm’s horse trailer available and not get the lawnmower stolen: take the mower with you. Drive it, like Rory was saying. Pull a George Jones. That way, when Jimmy Bones gets back, the chain link gate will still be open. He probably won’t even notice the chain at the base of the steel pole, the extension cord still leading to it.

  You would put them up, hide them too, but the clock’s ticking.

  You leave both lights in the office like they were (overhead off, lamp on), take a beer for each pocket and find that your hands are shaking.

  The lawnmower starts on the third try, and you don’t even mess with any of the low gears, just make your fast getaway up in the sixth, the throttle pushed all the way up the rabbit’s ass. At first the PTO’s still on, a helicopter too close to the ground sending up curling plumes of caliche on each side, but you finally find the toggle, click it off and pop the clutch, spin the small tires out through the gate.

  It’s not a yellow Mustang, but it’ll do.

  Your plan is to jump across 137, pull in behind the carwash and make two beers last the afternoon, until Jimmy Bones creeps back to Midland.

  Instead, coming south down the turn lane, Toby Garrett’s baby brother flashes his lights at you.

  You pull over as far away from Aardvark Custom Economy Storage as you can, wave back to whoever it is driving by, cheering you on with their horn. It dopplers away, leaves you with Toby Garrett’s baby brother. You keep both hands on the wheel, stare straight ahead.

  “So,” you say.

  He hooks his left boot up onto the painted diamond plate under the clutch.

  “I’m supposed to be watching you,” he says, turning to look down towards the tracks. It’s the direction you’re already looking.

  “If you’re tailing me,” you say, “I don’t know. I’m not on the force anymore or anything, so could be everything’s changed, but is this really how it’s done? So up close and personal?”

  He nods down to the lawnmower. “What are you doing?”

  “Little freelance landscaping?” you say. Before he can answer, you lift your chin to the carwash. “Can’t bring water to the horse, then bring the horse to the water, right?”

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother shrugs like that’s good enough, he guesses.

  “You’ll want some bags, though,” he says.

  “Bags?”

  “For the air filter,” he says, then steps back to his cruiser, comes back with three Town & Country shopping bags.

  You take them, lift them to him in thanks, and the beer in your offside pocket slips out, clatters on the fender, thunks into the gravel at the side of the road.

  This would be a good place to cough into your hand. Or run away.

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother keeps his eyes up and far away, says, “Serious about that landscaping?”

  Two minutes later his mother-in-law’s address is scribbled on the back of one of Arnot King’s Allegator business cards—the only piece of paper you could paw up.

  You tuck it into your shirt pocket like you’re thankful for it. “Ever heard of a Jim Martindale?”

  “That’s the guy you say…Mrs. Gates’s backdoor man?”

  “Twice removed,” you add. “But, yeah.”

  He purses his lips, shakes his head no then looks over you. “Madelyn’d know, though. If he ever went here.”

  You follow his line of sight to the pale brick of the high school, nod. Of course. Madelyn, the Sherilita of your father’s generation.

  “Yeah,” you say, nodding thanks for real this time. You hold your hand to the key of the lawnmower until Toby Garrett’s baby brother has reached down under his dash to engage the autopilot installed in every law enforcement vehicle in Martin County. It delivers him down to the Town & Country.

  If he’s lucky, four kids won’t be walking out with their faces lowered to 44-ounce drinks. Or, no: if he’s lucky, four kids will be, and they’ll run like water for the safety of some other street, and their motion will be so beautiful that Toby Garrett’s baby brother will just sit there behind his wheel, not give chase, not make them shoot him.

  If this case is ever over, you want to sit at the Town & Country again with him, look through his binoculars at the Lawler kid. Ask him about his big brother Toby. What ever happened to him? What ever happened to any of you?

  You turn the key on the lawnmower, see the black Town Car just as it crests the railroad tracks, too close now for any more fast getaways. So you do what you can: toggle the PTO back in, let the dust and grass rise on either side of you like pale, smoky wings.

  They carry you to the high school. To Madelyn.

  16.

  SHE CATCHES you tucking your shirt in, tsk tsks her way over.

  “Nicholas,” she says. �
��Catherine said she saw you.”

  “That was this morning?” you say, having to study the floor to dig Cath from ‘Catherine’—Brock & Associates; cat-eye glasses under a beehive do.

  “Along with that boy from Monahans,” Madelyn adds, leading you by simply not breaking stride. “He’s trouble, you know.”

  You nod, have a pretty good read on Arnot King, yeah.

  “You hear about the excitement at the funeral?” she asks, touching the side of your right arm with the back of her fingers, and you keep nodding. “That was his car,” she whispers, as if this makes her case about Arnot King.

  “He was in—” you start, meaning to say Midland, but then don’t. Because what she’s probably getting at anyway is that, at the cemetery yesterday, through the mourners, through the dust and grief and roses, the twenty years since you’ve skulked these halls, she recognized you. She’d never say it straight-out, though.

  “So,” she says, at her desk again, in front of the principal’s office, “what can I help you with today, Nicholas?”

  Suddenly unable to make eye-contact, you say, “Just looking for somebody, I guess.”

  “From your class, I take it?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Name?”

  “He—he said Jim Martindale, but I don’t think that’s it.”

  Madelyn tilts her head over in thought, shakes it no. “There was James White, Standford’s oldest son, but—Martindale?”

  “I think it was a fake name.”

  “And you didn’t recognize him?”

  “He had a beard, glasses.”

  “But he recognized you?”

  You nod, hear what she’s trying to tell you, to make you see: he recognized you. From where? If he needed you to wind up out at Rory Gates’s mother’s old house, then he needed to talk to you at some point, sure, lie about Rory living out there now. But—but maybe he didn’t recognize you. Maybe it was just that he knew jolly old St. Nick was back in town, and because he didn’t know you, you became the best contender?

  You rub your eye hard with the heel of your hand, look at your hand afterward.

  “Thanks,” you say to Madelyn, and start to stand, except now that you’ve asked her a question, she’s not letting you leave without an answer.

  Five minutes later, you’re in the library with her. She sits you down at a table, brings two copies of your yearbook over.

  In one series of nightmares you think you might have had, or are definitely going to be having now, this is what you’re doing: looking at your old yearbook, then looking out of the yearbook too, at yourself. Signing it: Better luck next time. Watch out for the 8-ball.

  But then you smile, look up to Madelyn. “I’m not in this one. It’s the year I left.”

  “Your senior year,” she says, nodding like this is obvious—like the mistake you’re trying to call her on isn’t one she’d ever make—“but we’re not looking for you, right? But for somebody who might have had access to the annuals you are in. Somebody necessarily forward in time from then.”

  You raise your eyebrows about this and push your lower lip out. “Ever tried police work?”

  “I don’t know how to use a camera so well,” she says back right in step, licking the pad of her middle finger to page through the yearbook.

  You’re seventeen again. Mute. Pretending to do what she’s doing for real: running your finger up one row of names and down the other. You try not to stop at Tracy, Gwen. Madelyn doesn’t say anything about it, about her. To you anyway.

  Soon enough the two of you are back to prom night, and the next part of this happening nightmare is Gwen and Rory, king and queen.

  This time Madelyn can’t help herself, reaches over to touch Rory on the face, “The first picture he would be in that night,” and then leaves her finger there but turns her head to the side, thinking. Is about to let you in on it when the door behind you opens. It changes Madelyn’s expression completely.

  “The queen herself,” she says, rising from the table, and suddenly, more than anything, you’re afraid to turn around, not because it’s Gwen, but because it’s going to be Gwen in her senior varsity cheerleading outfit, her black pom-poms drooping in front of her, and then you’ll be helpless. She’ll lead you out to the Ford probably waiting in the parking lot, and it’ll be night, the sound of the band still ringing in your head, the smell of October in the stadium lights, and—

  You’d be helpless. Unable not to get into that truck, even though you know what she is, what she’ll become. It doesn’t change the way she looks, the way she can look at you.

  “Ms. Tracy,” Madelyn says curtly. It doesn’t match how dismissive her eyes already are. She knows about Fin.

  “Madelyn,” Gwen says back, her voice tea-party sharp. “I didn’t realize you were still up here.”

  Somehow, Madelyn keeps the smile on her face. “I believe you, um, know Mr. Bruiseman here…”

  “Yes,” Gwen says, holding her purse in front of her with both hands. “Sherilita said he might have gone this way.”

  “Sherilita,” you say, closing the yearbook, hiding the prom picture.

  “She told me she thought you were going to mow a lawn or something?”

  You smile, look up to Madelyn, let her hold your eyes long enough that you understand she’s telling you she can save you here, if you want. She can kick you out of the library, escort you down to some made-up appointment with the principal, something.

  In return, still with just your eyes, you ask where she was three months ago. Where she’s been all your life.

  “Thanks,” you say, and pat the yearbooks. “I’m sure they’ll be enough.”

  She nods once to you, once to Gwen, and leaves you there.

  For thirty seconds after you’re alone, Gwen doesn’t sit, just stands there, her hands crossed over her purse, her alligator sunglasses still on. They go with her widow weeds: the tight black skirt, the charcoal blouse with billowy sleeves like a veil.

  “I know what you think of me,” she says, finally.

  You stare down into the cover of the yearbook. “Doesn’t matter. Felson doesn’t believe me. Not like I have proof, anything like that.”

  “Look at me, Nick.”

  You do, again, then focus on the spines of all the books beside her, their labels all at random places on the spines, no progression at all, no carryover from one year to the next.

  “Ask me how I know,” she says.

  You catch her eye again, and she tells you. “William called me. From the insurance place.”

  “Junior’s son,” you say.

  She nods, her mouth hard, painted. “You’re better than I thought, Nick. Better than I planned.”

  “I hear that a lot,” you lie.

  She shakes her head. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “Get what?”

  “That you’re right. The life insurance. Fin. All of it.”

  “Jim Martindale?”

  “Who?”

  You close your eyes. “What’d William tell you?”

  She takes her sunglasses off, doesn’t have any eye-makeup on. “That you were telling Felson that it was a plan. To get Rory out of the way. Collect the money.”

  “Except?”

  “It came yesterday. The check.”

  You look back to the yearbook. “Did you even cry at the funeral, Gwen?”

  “Because you ruined it?”

  “You don’t know that.”

  She shrugs, gives your words back to you. “Not like I have proof, anything like that.”

  “Why’d you even come here?”

  “To tell you you were right, I guess. And that I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  You lower your head now, close your eyes to get this part right. Both parts can’t be true—either you’re right or Gwen’s innocent.

  You tell it to her like that. Add that either way, Rory’s not around anymore.

  “That picture Fin took,” she says.

&n
bsp; “In your bedroom.”

  “In my bedroom, yes. It was insurance, he said. For if—”

  “If he wound up in jail, without you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he’s making it up to—frame you back, for framing him. Making it up about Jim Martindale.”

  “Jim Martindale?”

  “The other man, Gwen. The other backdoor.”

  This purses her lips, gets her cheeks sucked in, and for a fraction of a second her mask slips, and you see that she’s scared here. That she’s barely holding it together.

  “I don’t have to listen to this,” she says, already straightening her mask.

  You lean back in your chair. “That’s just the two I know about, too.”

  If she were closer, she’d be slapping you again. Instead, at her distance, all she can do is stare.

  You rub the side of your nose as if you can’t feel the weight of her eyes. “But we’re not here to talk about your love life, are we? I mean”—looking at your watch—“I don’t have all day here.”

  She comes to the table, sets her purse between the two of you, sits in Madelyn’s wooden chair.

  “You recording this?” she says.

  “Are you?” you say back.

  She rubs a spot on her forehead. “We thought of it in Big Springs. Fin and I. He even wrote a paper on it. A hypothetical situation. It sounded too good, too easy. I guess I was in love or something. Or out of love enough with Rory. You can understand that, I think.”

  “But.”

  “But then—I don’t know. It’s not as easy as it is on Matlock, right?”

  “Killing somebody?”

  She nods. “I told him that we weren’t going to do it, that I would try to pay him or whatever. That it was over. And then”—she laughs about this part—“and then guess who swoops back into town?”

  “You wanted—”

  “Just to make him feel watched. It was supposed to be enough to—to get him to leave, I guess. I don’t know.”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  “And he went through with it, too,” you add.

  She nods.

  “And you can prove this somehow?”

 

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