“Should have kept the Mustang,” Fin says, patting the outside of his door as if urging the truck on. The truck’s breath smells green, like radiator fluid.
You tell him that this truck is perfect, actually, and swing up by the Town & Country. Instead of opening his door, Fin fingers up the City of Stanton check he’s been issued. It’s for two dollars and fourteen cents.
“I got it,” you say, and nod for him to follow.
Inside, you point to four of the burritos at the back of the display, get the four at the front instead.
Fin sets a half gallon of milk down on the counter beside them.
“With burritos?” you say, paying quarter by quarter.
“Thought Sherilita kept you fed?” Fin says, pulling the milk back towards him.
You don’t explain to him that the water station was closed all weekend, that you’ve been avoiding it all day. Instead you loosen your broad tie, unbutton your shirt, and sit on the curb under the payphones with Fin, eat one of the four burritos and wash it down with whole milk.
Somehow two or three hours slip away, locals sliding in and out the front door, tail lights time-lapsing around and around the Sonic, the Dairy Queen dead and haunted, you and Fin talking in just a general, spotty way. About the big trucks groaning past, and other trucks those trucks remind you of. About the clouds hanging out over Midland and whether they’re going to amount to anything. About the way Gwen could touch the top of your forearm with the pads of her fingers, and how that could feel like the result of every wish you’d ever had.
At dusk you point through the underpass for Fin, at the Lawler kid, and Fin stands as if tasting the air, watches until a tractor trailer shudders through, all its lights burning.
“Who is he?” Fin says.
You don’t look up to him, say like it’s supposed to explain everything, “You’re not from here.”
He hisses air through his teeth, drains the milk. “And you are?”
You nod, keep nodding, guilty as charged.
Fin stuffs the milk jug into the already full trashcan. “She’s really dead then?”
You study the ground between your feet, and the next time you look up, the Lawler kid’s got his shadow of a hand raised to you, across whatever kind of gulf there is between the living and the dead. Whatever kind of ribbon.
You close your eyes, and inside your head, all your memories are made of the crushed lead of a thousand pencils, the grains washing back and forth against each other, polishing themselves into chrome balls too small to ever hold. But, still, you could drown in them, you know.
Or not.
You stand, follow the line of the Ford’s pocked hood to the door. Fin follows, gets in his side. “What now, chief?”
You lower the truck into reverse, smile, and take him back across the tracks, to Manuel’s body shop.
He opens the door, holds it there.
“Long as I’m in this town—” he says, holding his hand out for you.
Instead of taking it, you look over to him, hold his eyes. “Sure about that?”
Hesitantly, he nods, and you shrug like this is out of your control then. You give him one of Arnot King’s Allegator cards. The one with Toby Garrett’s baby brother’s mother-in-law’s address on the back.
“She needs her cars washed too,” you tell him.
He breathes out through his nose. “Once a cop, always an asshole,” he says, but still, he launches the card away from his forehead in salute. The last thing he does before stepping down is pull the film up from where you’ve let it roll on the dash, set it on the seat beside you.
“A girl?” he says about it.
“A lady,” you say, then back out to 137, ease down to the liquor store, and finally have to go back to Aardvark Custom Economy Storage. On the way you see, behind the water station, Thomas’s truck, the tailgate down. It means he’s brought his equipment back, is maybe already jacked in, warming up, a bottle of warm beer standing on the amp beside him, his sunglasses tight to his eyes.
You have no idea what to say to him, really.
His dad’s service is tomorrow, in the same place Rory’s was. Because Stanton, Texas, it’s a complicated place.
You step through the gate, your case of beer by your leg, and Thomas looks up from his guitar, smiles to you. The girl draped over his shoulder just stares, like you’re the intruder here.
You prop the door to the office open so you can hear the music, not have to say anything, but then, either suddenly or because you’ve drunk more than you thought, the valley between the A- and B-units is full of headlights and voices and shuffling motion.
You make your way to the door and lean against it, your hand holding your beer high on the frame.
The band’s still out there, and the band’s friends, and now, moving among them but not really with them, is Dan Gates, the tails of his white funeral shirt loose.
He makes his way over, just stands there.
“Don’t want to hire me, do you?” you say.
Dan Gates rubs his nose. “Dad says just keep the truck.”
You shrug, were going to anyway, and after that you do the only thing you can: offer cold beer to a minor.
He takes it, nods once like his face is about to spill out, and then spins away right as he’s about to say something, leans headfirst into the sound Thomas’s band is laying down.
It’s not perfect, but then nothing is.
Two hours later everybody’s gone except the band and Dan Gates. Because you’ve been watching, you know he hasn’t said anything to Thomas yet, the same way you haven’t. At one point Thomas’s bass player balances his bass down onto an amp, then, after lifting his chin to the drummer, smiling about something, he sets himself against the cinderblock of the B-unit, pushes off hard, running full tilt for the A-unit.
At the last possible moment, instead of slamming face-first into it, he plants one large sneaker on the wall, then a second, and runs up the wall almost far enough to grab the ledge.
The drummer laughs, likes it, and then the rest of the band is trying it too, falling back into the caliche over and over.
At a quarter after ten, Toby Garrett’s baby brother eases past the gate, flashes his lights once, and you lift your hand in acknowledgement, go inside to pull the extension cord from the air conditioner socket, hold your face against the two vents until your face hurts with cold.
When you turn around again, Arnot King’s standing in the door.
Opposite the couch is Jimmy Bones.
“Heard you dropped the charges against our boy,” you say to Arnot King.
“Case of mistaken identity,” Jimmy Bones says back, rotating the rubber foot of his cane into your carpet like being really sure a bug is dead.
Outside, Thomas is doing something acoustic, it sounds like, his fingers falling down across the strings at about the speed of fifty-weight motor oil. Beading, dripping, beading again.
In your chest pocket are the two pieces of the Brock & Associates insurance check signed by William the Kid. On the back, even, it’s still signed over to you.
For two hours today, after lunch, you sat outside the bank, unsure what to do with it. If it was even good anymore, taped together, or if you can sign one over like that, or if it automatically becomes Dan Gates’s.
If it is his, he owes you five dollars. That’s what it cost for the clerks at the Town & Country to let you go through their weekly drawing.
In your other chest pocket are all fourteen of the Allegator cards from the beef jerky jar. Because he owes you, you told yourself while doing it, but really it’s the other way around, right? You pulled his business card out of the soup so somebody local could win. Somebody from Stanton.
It’s about the last thing you expected from yourself, standing up for this place. And it felt good.
“So’s it in the couch again?” Arnot King asks.
You laugh a little, scratch the back of your neck. “Here for the competition, gentlemen?”
>
Jimmy Bones angles his head over, as if to be sure he’s hearing you right. And then he smiles the way a wolf must at certain times, on certain nights.
You nod to him, see that Arnot King’s still watching you, not getting you now any more than he was two nights ago after all the sirens had showed up to haul Rory off. Then, he’d sat by you on the bench seat of your living room, his hands cuffed too, and told you in his lyrical, vaguely ethnic way that you should have just shot the lover down, yeah? Because you can blame anything on a dead man.
What you’d told him back was that it was all Rory’s blame anyway.
Arnot King had leaned his head back, said if you really believed that, then you would have shot him, yeah?
“You saying it’s my fault, all this?” you’d asked.
“I’m saying maybe you think it is,” he told you back, shrugging like fault mattered a whole lot less than reasonable doubt.
At the time, you shook your head no, didn’t explain. Not because you didn’t want to, but because you couldn’t. It had something to do with how you can’t help thinking that Rory was holding back Friday night, just goading you. Suicide-by-cop, something like that. By security guard, anyway.
Felson said it had probably just been a John Wayne thing, blaze of glory, all that. Blaming you for what he did to his own wife. The pretty shotgun, anyway, it wasn’t from his gun safe at all, had been registered to Tom Howard. Is Thomas’s now, you guess. Along with a lot else.
So, maybe Rory was trying to get you to off him. Shooting all around you until you looked down, had this convenient shotgun right there in your hands. Maybe after being dead for a week, he’d decided it was easier like that. For everyone.
Or maybe he just didn’t know Tom’s guns well enough, or lost his nerve right at the end, kept seeing Tom instead, or Gwen. Or maybe you really did just outsmart him at last, after all these years. You don’t know, and you probably never will. It could be any stupid thing. Not a single one of which matters right now, with Jimmy Bones stepping over, still with that look in his eye from what you’d said: competition.
“That little table, you mean?” he says, tilting his head over to the B-unit.
You lean down to the fridge for a beer, grab three instead, then the keys on the way out. They’re spray-painted the same green as the lock. You hold them in your hand and stare at them, follow Jimmy Bones out onto the caliche then look up when he does, his hand sliding into his jacket on instinct.
You touch his elbow to tell him it’s okay, it’s nothing. Just Thomas Howard, running from a three-point stance from the B-unit to the A-.
You track his progress, know that this is going to be another bad thing, that he wants it too much, that he’s made some deal with himself about reaching the top—something to do with his dad. You reach your hand out to stop him, tell him no, that—not to let his forehead touch that cinderblock. That some things you can’t undo.
But then you remember what it was like to be sixteen in this town.
Some nights you felt like Thomas must now—that if you could just run fast enough, push off hard enough, want it bad enough, that you’d rise above, maybe.
From the entry of the unit he’s staked out, a long-nursed beer tilted back, Dan Gates, who could do this without the wall, he’s watching too, neither of you breathing for as long as it takes for Thomas’s left hand to grab the crumbling top lip of Aardvark Custom Economy Storage. For an impossible series of seconds he manages to hold on, then—more impossible, Dan Gates’s fist balled tight, like urging Thomas on—Thomas hoists himself up by willpower alone, stands with his back to you for five seconds, as if he doesn’t believe it either. Like he can see for miles, now.
“This is what you do for fun out here?” Arnot King says, taking the green keys from your hand, squatting down to the lock.
“Yeah,” you say, watching Thomas walk deeper onto the roof, disappear, “yeah,” and then all at once the garage door of E swings up and Arnot King’s pulling the chain light on, touching a chip of paint up from the felt.
Jimmy Bones nods to himself about the new high-watt bulb and runs his cane through his left hand like a pool stick, probably isn’t even aware that he’s doing it.
“What are we playing for—” he starts, but before he can finish, Arnot King pulls you back out, directs your eyes up.
Thomas is standing at the edge of the A-unit again, only now he has a little sawed-off, double-barrelled shotgun. It’s the one from Fin’s trailer. The murder weapon.
He holds it out at the moon like a pistol.
“You said it was somewhere safe,” you tell Arnot King where nobody can hear.
“It was,” he hisses back, and then, like he knows it’s the worst thing he could possibly do with this particular shotgun, Thomas takes drunk aim, starts picking his friends off one by one, making the sounds with his mouth, the recoil slow motion each time.
On cue, the rest of the band falls back into the caliche clutching their stomachs, dying like people do in the movies. But then he gets to Dan Gates, standing now, his beer spilling beside him, and all at once, from the way Dan’s watching that gun, from the way he’s not breathing, from the way he’s holding his right hand, you know that Thomas can’t shoot him, even with make-believe birdshot. Because Dan’s already dying on the inside.
All night long he’s been here, saying nothing. Hanging close to Thomas of all people instead of going over to Midland with his football friends.
He hasn’t been hanging close to apologize, you realize.
He’s been staying close to explain. To drink enough that he finally throws up the right words.
Ten years later, him and Thomas will be the new Rory Gates and Tom Howard of Stanton. Best friends. All these secrets between them, all this history.
But not tonight.
Tonight you step forward, hold your hand up to Thomas for the shotgun and snap once, your eyes hard, no joke.
Thomas shrugs, drops it down easy, goes looking for other treasure on the roof, and you announce in your party’s over voice that it’s yours, this old thing. That you’ve been meaning to throw it away.
“Where?” Dan Gates says, and everybody hears. It’s maybe the first word he’s spoken all night.
You study Dan Gates, trying to see under the hood of his question, to why it would matter to him.
“You want it?” you say, flipping the shotgun around butt-first, and he holds his hands up fast, steps back.
“Not loaded,” you say, cracking it open to show, and you’re wrong, sort of.
There is a spent shell in the left barrel.
In the right, though, there’s a tight roll of cash.
The night crawls to a stop, slow enough for you to catch up a little.
Rory was trying to get you to kill him the other night.
He was trying to protect his son.
Dan Gates nods down to your hand, to the wedding band you guess you’re still wearing, the one Thomas’s mom gave to Thomas’s dad, and he says it: “You’re smarter than any of them figured, aren’t you?”
No.
Because if you were you would have seen it all along, you would have seen it that day at the drug store counter. Rory’s truck probably even pulled past you.
If you’d just turned around, you would have seen Dan, sitting proud in the passenger seat, trying to slit his eyes just like his dad’s.
Where Rory was taking him was out to meet Tom Howard. So Dan could pay for the Ford himself, like a man. It’s what you do, if you’re trying to grow your son up right.
Goddamn Rory Gates.
Dan had already been there that morning, finally got tired of waiting in the truck and walked into the old house, careful to bring the little shotgun his dad kept under the seat for rats.
But then there was only one rat in the house, wasn’t there?
One Dan already knew was stepping out with his mom. One that must have talked Rory up the creaky stairs somehow. At gunpoint, or knifepoint. Or because th
ey were best friends.
Of course Dan followed the voices.
After that, one twitch of the finger was all it took. One twitch of the finger is all it ever takes.
Then it was just a matter of hopping Tom Howard’s tractor, stepping down into the gold wrecker he’d never traded Darryl Koenig.
Only, what Rory never saw, it was his son over in the passenger seat, trying not to cry. His son confessing, slipping that roll of truck money he’d worked all summer for out of his front pocket and stuffing it into the breech of the shotgun.
Seven hundred dollars, probably. Maybe seven-fifty.
It doesn’t even get close to what that particular truck is really worth, and that’s still what it all comes down to, at least for you—that Ford. An instant before you saw Dan Gates washing it across the street last week, you saw the truck, and it was like looking through a tunnel to twenty years ago. For an instant you were there, still in high school, before all this, mist hanging in the air all around. Shining the truck for the drive to Colorado City. Thinking it was your lucky night, finally. Having no suspicion even that the whole rest of your life, it could come to hang on one thing, on a pool ball rolling this way instead of that way, on one person being in a motel room instead of another.
A whole life sawed-off there in your hands, the barrels still hot from the day’s heat. Thick with prints.
“Rusted on the inside,” you say back to Dan Gates, for Thomas, for all of them, for the rest of the world that’s never going to know, and you hold your thumb over the roll of bills, shake the left shell out. To show how rusted it is, you stick your finger down where the shell was. Not your index, but your ring. Deep enough that wedding band wedges in, deep enough that the gun oil slicks your skin above the ring.
You jerk your hand out like you’ve hit a rusty snag and shake your fingers, bite the tip of your middle one so you have to hold your finger out.
Dan Gates grins in spite of himself.
“Trash?” he says, opening his hand to catch the gun because he’s standing right by the barrel Thomas drags out each time to dispose of all the bottles.
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