Not for Nothing

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Even Felson, years older, from a whole different generation, knew Thomas Howard right off. And his dad, who had graduated with Gwen.

  Why the charade in the library, then?

  Felson doesn’t give you time to follow it through. “Tom’s not there.”

  “His house is empty?”

  “Rory would know where Tom keeps all his keys, though. And clothes, I guess.”

  You look across the pasture to the idea of Tom Howard’s house, Sherilita’s house, and ask when’s he back from Kansas?

  “That where he is?” Felson says, coming back to you.

  “It’s—it’s late July,” you say, shrugging like that’s an explanation, then narrow your eyes at the ground. “But…but you knew he was gone anyway?”

  “I’ll send a car over,” Felson says, and starts casting around for an officer.

  You say it again, more insistent: “You knew he was gone?”

  “We called him twice the night you were arrested coming back from Big Springs, Mr. Bruiseman.”

  You squint, trying to catch up mentally here.

  She shakes her head in wonder at you. “A dead man was found in a house on land he farms, get it? A house he owns? And then, your cropduster. Whose account do you think he was trying to charge that vodka to?”

  “I thought it was—that he—”

  “Tom,” Felson fills in, impatient with having to explain what, to her, is so obvious.

  “Tom Howard,” you repeat. “Why?”

  “He said Tom owed him.”

  “For what?”

  “That field he was spraying when he saw you? It was the third day in a row he’d sprayed it, according to his logbook. Didn’t you see it in there?”

  “I was looking at—I was looking at times.”

  Felson shrugs one shoulder. “All Darryl Koenig wanted was payment for three applications of whatever he was laying down. For boll weevils, I think. He said Tom’s new wife had been calling him at all hours, telling him he had to spray it again, over and over.”

  “She was calling for Tom,” you say.

  Felson nods, is the one trying to catch up now.

  “What’s Tom’s new wife’s name?” you ask then.

  Felson starts to say it, to say something, then looks down, searching her own brain. Comes back up to you all hangdog. “Guess Koenig just assumed it was a wife,” she says. “Or maybe she told him. He probably won’t fuel up just for a girlfriend, right?”

  You breathe out through your nose, close your eyes. It had been Gwen calling.

  “You said—you said Rory would know where Tom Howard kept his keys, right?”

  “I thought you were in their class?”

  “He came here—” you start, then hear it again, from Jim Martindale: I moved here my senior year in high school. “He showed up after I left,” you finish.

  Felson looks over at you now.

  “What?” she says.

  “They wear the same size clothes, right?”

  She nods, just as aware as you that the thing neither of you has been saying is that if Rory’s out here starting fires and killing wives and not letting his son drink beer, then who’s in his grave?

  “Toby Garret’s little—David.” you start, trying to remember it right. “David says you had to arrest Rory one night back then.”

  Or was it Madelyn who said it? Something about the prom picture—the prom picture not being his first picture of the night.

  Both, then. They’d both been trying to tell you, not even known it.

  You wait for Felson to tell you too: “Him and Tom both,” she says. “For fighting, yeah.”

  “Over Gwen,” you say.

  Felson looks away, at all the new blackness.

  “Rory’s the only one—” you say, then start over. “He’s not the only one who would know that Tom Howard’s fingerprints would be in the system, the same as his. From that night. But he would know that you’d be able to identify him that way, right?”

  Felson shakes her head like this is too much. “Tom was his best friend.”

  “That would kind of make it worse, wouldn’t it?” you say, covering the wedding band on your finger. The wedding band Tom Howard must have never stopped wearing. The 5 on the back wasn’t “May,” it was an S. For Sherilita.

  Jim Martindale was Tom Howard, and Tom Howard is buried in the cemetery now, a headstone on order for him, Rory Gates carved deep into it. And maybe he’s dead now too, like the Town Car. Burned up in the fire. But you know better.

  In the long, rambling statement Felson has you write down before she lets you go, you figure out what Rory meant when he told you you’d been gone too long to figure out how he got away from the old house.

  He didn’t walk, didn’t hitch, didn’t fly. He drove. You’d even stood in one of his tracks, chipped a dirt clod up. It was shaped like a tractor tread, was what Tom Howard—Jim Martindale—had driven to the house that day. It was part of his and Gwen’s perfect murder plan: nobody would question that he was plowing his own field, so the tracks wouldn’t even be considered, would be like the fingerprints you already know at a scene, the ones that get eliminated. And since he wasn’t going to be the witness, nobody would even know he was there, really, as long as he didn’t drop his plow into the ground.

  Maybe that was what had cued Rory in that Tom Howard wasn’t meeting him there for whatever reason he’d said—probably to finally pay for the blue and silver Ford; maybe Rory’d seen Tom Howard’s tractor coming across the field, its plow lifted. What it would tell Rory, who’d grown up farming, was that the meeting wasn’t about convenience—the old house sitting in a turnrow Tom Howard was going to be using anyway—but isolation.

  It was why Rory had killed him so violently, probably. Where he’d been expecting Fin to be orchestrating the whole insurance scam, all at once his best friend from high school was involved. The one guy he was supposed to be able to trust, the guy he was supposed to have already won Gwen from.

  And then he walked into the house he’d grown up in, felt the ghosts rise all around him.

  You almost feel sorry for him.

  After your statement—three legal-size pages, the yellow pad left on Felson’s back seat—nobody notices you walking to the Davidson place, and nobody hears the Ford crash down from the wrecker’s tow straps, and nobody sees the smoke when it starts, because there’s smoke everywhere.

  One more grand theft auto isn’t going to break anybody, you tell yourself.

  And anyway, the rightful owner of the truck is a fugitive now. Unless it’s still in Tom Howard’s name, in which case the rightful owner is dead, meaning you’re just taking back what’s yours, by deed if not by title.

  Because you’re not ready to face Sherilita yet—to tell her that her son’s father, you found him all right, his ring anyway—you take the Ford downtown, to the drugstore, belly up to the counter.

  “Cheeseburger?” the same kid in an apron asks, and you nod, watch it cook. Hope Felson doesn’t question that the shotgun Rory said he had was the one he shot Tom Howard with.

  If it is, or if she believes it is, that’ll be one less thing Jimmy Bones has on you, at least.

  Your cheeseburger pops and hisses, the kid balancing it on his chrome spatula like a trick then arcing it back down into its own grease.

  After he slides it over to you he leans against the counter behind him, crosses his arms, and opens his mouth like he’s going to say something but pushes back off the counter instead.

  What he comes back with from the office is a packet of photographs.

  “They finally turned up?” you say, wedging them under your plate, chewing gloriously.

  “You can only fill out a form so wrong,” the kid says.

  You nod, would like to agree, then don’t open the green-on-white envelope until your plate’s empty. Because you already know what the snapshots are going to be: Thomas taking smeary pictures from the window of the Ford, Gwen’s car twice, then you, screwing aro
und in front of Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, in the daylight.

  You’re half right.

  The first of the middle shots you flip to is of nothing—a misfire when you fell down off the railroad tracks, probably. Then the next two, the ones you wanted, are inside Manuel’s body shop.

  But it’s the ten before that that make you close your eyes: they’re of Gwen and a man you think is Rory at first, but finally isn’t. They’re in the parking lot of the IGA afterhours, arguing, glaring at each other. It’s more intimate than anything you’ve ever seen, you think. They’re all you needed to have given Rory to have stopped all this.

  And you didn’t take those pictures, you know. Not even twenty cans into a case.

  At first you think what you thought last week, when you saw the camera advanced ten shots: Thomas, a joke.

  Now you know better.

  It was Dan Gates. He was the one who took the Ford that first night, the one who grazed his mother’s Lincoln with it, trying to strand her, keep her home. The one who, after that didn’t work, had tried to take all his disappointment out on you with his fists. Because you were the one who could have stopped it all. You were the one who should have seen those pictures, should have told his dad what he couldn’t.

  The next ten pictures are the ones you took of the Motel sign. Only there’s nothing there, just sky.

  You lay them down in a row the kid behind the counter has to look at.

  “What?” he says, finally, watching your eyes.

  “The—the Motel sign,” you say. “The big one, like a truck stop. For the Bellevue.”

  “Bellevue like the Church of Christ?”

  “Before your time, I guess.”

  “No, I remember the sign,” the kid says. “It’s gone, though, man. Up in sign heaven.”

  You shake your head, tamp the black tube of negatives into your chest pocket and snap your pocket over them. Tell him you’ve been gone a long time, you guess. Maybe too long.

  He smiles one side of his face and you leave twenty dollars for the burger, take the long way back to Aardvark Custom Economy Storage. The way that loops through all the roads you chased up and down on a bike as a kid—then, later, in old trucks.

  It spits you out by the Town & Country, like always.

  Toby Garrett’s baby brother is there, his window down, binoculars fixed on the underpass.

  You look through it, maybe see the dim shape of a boy sitting on a missile, swinging his legs.

  He can see the Motel sign, you know.

  Maybe that’s enough.

  At Aardvark, every light is on.

  You coast the Ford in, turn the headlights off.

  All fourteen doors are open, the locks cut, the boxes and exercise equipment pulled out.

  Through the open window of the Ford, you hear the distinctive crack of Jimmy Bones breaking a tight rack.

  He found the quarter table, then.

  You step down, nod to yourself that this is good. That you would have showed it to him anyway.

  On the pale caliche outside that unit, you can see his shadow leaning over the edge of the table. Arnot King steps into the doorway, his back to you, the butt of his cue planted between his feet.

  You can take him on a short table, maybe.

  And Jimmy Bones?

  He is used to playing regulation, you tell yourself, then almost smile when he steps out, running one of the sticks through the chalk in the web of his hand. He nods to you, his face and neck a sheen of sweat, and steps back in.

  An instant later, he shoots too hard from the other end. It sends the three-ball spinning out through the caliche and boxes, leaves it against the yellow grass shield of the lawnmower.

  Without ever breaking stride, you jog after it, have to step around to the other side of the lawnmower to get the right angle, and see at the last instant not Jimmy Bones, the .22 by his leg, or Arnot King, his pool cue raised, but the battery charger. It’s been hooked up wrong. Instead of clamping onto the two little terminals, the jaws are biting down on the hood panel, scratching the paint.

  “Gonna rust like tha—” you start to say under your breath.

  It’s something your father used to tell you.

  When you place your hand on the hood to brace yourself, lean under for the three-ball, the current running through the metal throws you back, leaves you awake but unable to move.

  Jimmy Bones stands above you, leaning on his cane with both hands. Laughing without any sound.

  25.

  IT HAD BEEN DUSK when you’d pulled up to Aardvark Custom Economy Storage. By the time you can stand again, after the lawnmower, it’s full-on dark. You’re pretty sure that you’ve either slept or passed out. It only felt like a blink, a long blink maybe, but when you open your eyes again, things are different.

  First: Jimmy Bones and Arnot King are gone.

  Second: all the lights of all the storage units are turned off. So nobody would find you, you tell yourself. Lights draw attention. Bodies in the caliche draw attention. Even yours.

  Third—and you’re not sure if this different or not—under your left arm is the pistol grip of a shotgun. One with a shimmery walnut stock, with…with ebony tips and mother-of-pearl accents? What the hell? Who puts a high-dollar weapon like this in storage? And just behind a single padlock? More important, how’d you miss it when you went through that unit?

  Answer: you’re pretty sure you didn’t.

  But what other explanation is there?

  You pull it close to your side, try to be quiet about standing but then cough like you’re going to throw up, end up dry-heaving on your hands and knees, your eyes watering.

  So much for stealth.

  You flip the shotgun around so its butt’s to the ground and use it to push yourself up, careful to keep your face away from the business end. Not that it’s loaded—even in Stanton, Texas, nobody would put a loaded gun in storage. You look at the stuff spilled out of unit 4, on the off-chance it fits with the shotgun, but instead of duck decoys or hunting photographs or more guns or bricks of cash, there’s just three identical lamps, a cardboard box of old letters, and a pair of skis that probably haven’t been to Colorado since Cadillacs had fins.

  Still, maybe you weren’t thinking right. Weren’t looking right. It was dusk, you tell yourself. It was dusk and Jimmy Bones had just hit the brightest ball on the table into the white caliche, so that even you could track the flashing orange over to where he was leaving it for you: the lawnmower.

  Your eyes had been looking for round things, not gun-shaped things.

  And, anyway, you’d just spent thirty minutes holding your dead ex-girlfriend up out of the water of a stock tank so she wouldn’t burn up. Give yourself a break already. And maybe you did see it, even—the memory of it just got electrocuted out of you.

  By the lawnmower, yeah.

  You look to it again, to the storage unit with the pool table in it, then touch your chest pocket.

  The black tube of film is gone. All the pictures you didn’t take of the Motel sign.

  “Have at them,” you say out loud to Jimmy Bones, wherever he is, and cross to the pool table. In the corner with the cues is a brush. For ten minutes, like therapy, you brush the table down until it’s perfect, until all the glass from the broken bulb is gone, and then a car or truck streaks past on 137, the driver leaning on the horn, the sound dopplering away to the south, like they’re going to hit the hump of the train tracks, just blast off. It’s over, you tell yourself.

  Rory’s not dead, but he’s known, is living in barns now. Maybe trying to make Mexico in one of Tom Howard’s old trucks. Or—

  You narrow your eyes at 137.

  Or he’s here in town again. For his son, for Dan. To try to explain it all, maybe. To apologize for calling him from his truck the day he had to shoot his best friend, Tom Howard. Calling Dan and telling him to meet him at the far end of the field out by the old house, where the rows would spit a tractor up, where a tractor could sit f
or weeks and nobody would care.

  It almost was the perfect murder.

  Except Tom Howard was going to have been missed eventually. Kansas isn’t that big.

  You pull the door down over the pool table. To keep the birds out, you tell yourself. This is what you do, this is your job. So you did a little moonlighting. But it all worked out. At least you got a fancy shotgun out of the whole deal, right? On permanent loan now, for security purposes. The shotgun’ll help you keep the shotgun safe, something like that. Anyway, how bad could the owner need it if he was keeping it in storage, right?

  You raise it to the roofline of Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, sight in on the full moon, make the sound once with your mouth then pull the trigger.

  The sound is what you imagine a cannon would make in a small room, the kind of sound that you associate with pressure, with visible sound waves.

  You tilt your head—your right ear canal—over maybe five degrees, all you have time for.

  The shot pocks the top corner of the B unit, the pellets leaving little grey craters in the painted-white cinderblock, the gun itself falling from your hand so you have to fumble it back to your chest.

  It’s loaded.

  You look left, to where a few houses are, then right, west to 137. Lean the gun up against the chain link before stepping out by the Ford, to see if the sound’s drawn anybody. To act for Felson like, yeah, you heard it too—some fool’s shooting inside city limits?

  There’s nobody, though. Some kids down at the Sonic, a truck or two at the Town & Country. All the shiny new windshields at Wheeler’s, a parts truck or something at Blockers—Franklin’s. It’s Franklin’s now. You nod to it in apology, the gas station. The only other vehicle even slightly out of place is the front-end loader from the Davidson sale this morning. It’s pulled into the carwash across the street. But it’s not out of place, either: you buy something as high-dollar as that, you want to clean it up before taking it home to the wife. Right now the farmer driving it back to his place—who has a lowboy trailer that big?—is dodging carhops down at Sonic probably, treating himself to a vanilla coke.