“No,” you say, “where it belongs,” and twist the top off the pipe by the office door, drop the gun in.
It doesn’t catch on anything, just keeps falling down and down, the way things do in West Texas.
Tomorrow you can pour some of the concrete from the animal cage unit into the pipe, arc a couple of recycled beers down to set the concrete.
“Staying up there or what?” you call to Thomas on your way back to the pool table, acting for all the world like nothing’s happened here, and that maybe you’re a little disgusted with him being up there, and Thomas smiles, steps back, then comes flying over the edge, hugging his knees to his chest.
If he lands—a thing you doubt—you never hear it, have already stepped back into the storage unit with Jimmy Bones and the short table. Arnot King stands in the wide door out of the way, his lips a deadly-thin line, the new and hardly steady bulb barely pushing enough wattage down to show the nappy green of the felt.
You run the stick he hands you along the calloused side of your index finger once, twice, and then Jimmy Bones says it: “So you bring it tonight, bad man?”
It’s what he always calls you when you have a stick in your hand.
You reach into your pocket, balance the film canister on the table where a challenger’s quarters are supposed to go.
“This do?” you say, guiding the cue ball over to the right bank, leaning over to line your stick up.
“It might,” Jimmy Bones says, his voice already far away, and just as you cock your elbow back to break you’ll look over the triangle of balls, to the back wall, the outer edge of the pool of light, and see that, while you were disposing of a murder weapon, somebody’s dragged a folding chair into the corner, is sitting in it. You won’t be able to see her face, just her bare knees, her hands balled up between them, nervous because her son still hasn’t touched down outside, but you’ll remember what she looked like in the fifth grade, washed in the brake lights of her father’s tractor, hay dust spiraling up into the night sky. You’ll nod to her like she’s your girl, here, and maybe remember what Jimmy Bones said the first time he ever racked for you, when you asked just what the two of you were playing for here. He never even looked up, just said it like the most obvious joke—not for nothing, baby—and standing there, you knew it wasn’t your night, that you should stay away from that table. But you didn’t. You couldn’t. You never can. Worse, you’d do it all over again, given half a chance.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my Aunt Tami and Uncle Bruce, for helping me keep the Stanton details straight. And thanks to them and my Uncle Randall and my mom and my dad for telling me all the stories when I was kid. Of races and wrecks and snakes and dead kids and bumblebees and horse liniment and cats that came to bad ends, fights and dances and fires and friends, and people without names sleeping in their cars in the middle of the road, and ghosts. Those stories made Stanton a magic place, just five miles up the road. Someday I was going to make it there. And thanks to Gene Louder, for a story about driving a fence line with me when I was five, to see a flattened UFO cow. I don’t remember it, but I kind of think I do. I can still feel it wriggling inside me. And thanks to my grandmother, for letting me run around White’s Ford while she worked, and for teaching me colors, and thanks to my granddad, for taking me for all the best coke floats I ever had. I don’t drink them anymore, now. They wouldn’t compare. And thanks to Guy Intoci for stepping into West Texas with me again. It’s real and forever and bigger than legend in my head, deeper than blood, but without Guy’s steady hand, I don’t think it’d ever get on the page the right way. And thanks to whoever it was back in 2005 or so who asked me how the detective novel works. I answered, but walked away feeling like that wasn’t the whole story. That I’d only really know how the detective novel worked if I wrote one. A couple of hundred thousand words later, there was this novel. It’s as close to my heart as anything I’ve written. Fiction for me is a lot like sneaking up to the attic to try on the old clothes your parents have forgotten they ever wore, only the attic door catches and you have to make a life up there now. I wouldn’t have any other life. Thanks to my wife Nancy for coming up to that attic with me. It’s dusty and there’s spiders, and probably a scary clown back in the corner, but we’re fast, aren’t we? We’ll be all right.
The Dzanc Books rEprint Series
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Copyright © 2014 by Stephen Graham Jones
Book design by Steven Seighman
978-1-4804-9356-8
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