by Brian Hart
“I don’t owe you shit.”
Printz raises his eyebrows, sniffs the air, smiles. “How far are you headed? What’s your endpoint? If I had to guess, I’d say Alaska. Everybody out here says that’s where they’re going. Pilgrims. You know how many of them actually make it?” Printz again studies the man’s face. “Canada is the problem. You have to make it to Juneau if you want to go north. The goddamn Canadians hold everything to the south of there. We lost the inland passage. Can you believe that? The United States is losing territory on both borders. This is how it starts.”
“Are you done?”
Printz smiles a tight-lipped smile, continues. “The dog is coming with us, and if you piss and moan about it anymore, I’ll put a bullet in Solomon-fancy-pants-the-third’s nigger head.” He gives the man an aw-shucks wave and a whack on the shoulder. “Uppity bitch, right?”
The man doesn’t argue. He and the dog watch Printz walk away, cross the rocks to where the others are digging into the ragged hunks of venison roasting on a spit over the fire.
“Aren’t you the hot ticket,” the man says to the dog.
The sad, plaintive cry of the bear cub echoes from the stone enclosure.
“Shut that fucker up,” Danish says, “or I’ll shut it up for you.”
“There used to be two,” Sol says.
“So?” Danish says.
“So, it could be worse,” Sol says with a smile.
“What’re you going to do with that thing?” Printz asks Sol, digging a long tan finger into a can of Copenhagen and sliding the dregs into his lip. “Let it grow up and eat you?”
“I could train him to dance, we could join the circus,” Sol says.
“You’re more than halfway to being a freak already,” one of the other militiamen says, Lott is his name. He’s taken his hat off and he has blue and green tattoos on his shaved head. He smiles a half-silver grin and nods to Sol and then to the man. “So are you guys a couple?”
“Traveling companions,” Sol says. “How about you? Is one of these gentleman your special fella?”
“I’m married,” Lott says.
Sol waits.
“To a woman,” Lott says with urgency.
Sol smiles, sure you are. “You know, I read somewhere,” he says. “The Brothers Karamazov maybe, of a man fighting a bear, but they’d pulled his teeth and his claws. That’s not a fair fight, is it?” Sol says. “I like my fights fair. How about you?”
“I like to fuckin’ win,” Sampson says.
“Copy that, brother,” Danish says.
Sampson approaches the dog, kneels down and checks out the scars on his hip. “I didn’t get a chance to ask before but it’s from a shotgun, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Motherfuckers,” Sampson says. “Who trained him?”
“Who says he’s trained?”
Sampson smiles, shakes his head. “Trust me. I know. Been around dogs my whole life.”
“Eats his own weight every week.”
“So do I,” he says, laughs. “Czech?”
“Some.”
“German?”
“No.”
“He takes hand signals. I’ve seen you use them.”
“He’s a pain in the ass.”
The one called Latham, the medic, has his pack open and he’s cleared a place on a large flat rock so he can clean his weapons. He’s sitting cross-legged with his hood up on his gray sweatshirt. “You should let the bear go,” he says. “It’s a fuckin’ bear, right?” In a few practiced motions, almost as if he were playing, or showing them a magic trick, he takes his pistol apart. “How many bears are left?”
“He’ll die if I don’t raise him, though.” Sol holds up his hands. “He’s too young to be on his own.”
“He’ll die anyway,” Printz says, without looking away from the fire. “He’s already dead. Kick those rocks in and walk away.”
The blood is still dark on the ground. The fires have all been left to die and the smoke is punching up the air. The man goes back to stretching and trimming the hide, no one is talking anymore. Later, Sol gives the man a pat on the back and wordlessly returns to his tent and zips the door after him.
Lodged in a tangle of hair on the back of the dog’s neck the man finds the tracking devices, they look like blackened fingernail clippings but when he tries to bend them they snap and he can see they’re made of plastic. He uses his knife to cut them free. When he’s finished he hauls the dog into the coolest pool and dunks him and searches again but can’t find anything.
In the morning, the man packs his rig, loads it with not-quite-dry bear jerky and bones for Pecos. He’s leaving what’s left of the venison for Sol and the bear cub. Lott and Danish walk down to the road and return separately, an hour later, roaring up the hill like off-road racers in a matched pair of late-model Hi-Jet troop carriers, carbon-fiber frames, three feet of travel, spool-up power like an RC car. Sol helps the man get his bike and trailer into the cargo cage and gives him a hug goodbye.
“Take care of yourself,” Sol says. “Maybe I’ll see you up the road.”
“I hope so.” The man secretly passes him a piece of paper with the coordinates of where he’ll be in Alaska. They part ways with a final handshake and it isn’t until miles later, riding in the back of the STT rig with the dog, his bike and trailer, that the man digs for a fresh water bottle and discovers that Sol has given him three of the six lead aprons.
[31]
R<25
CA 96118, CA 95605
Roy kicked off his shoes and socks and worked the pedals barefoot as he motored along in Carl, listening to High on Fire. The snow in the passes was turning to rain. The heater, along with the stereo, was cranked. He had his one hitter out and things were feeling a little better, weed blurring the hard edges of Karen’s absence. The ski-area traffic absorbed him into the herd.
There was a new indoor skatepark in Woodland, a suburb of Sacramento. Yuri had mentioned it on the phone, then Roy remembered that he’d read about it in some magazine. It was the only place he could think to go. He asked directions from a woman in a Raiders jacket with a tiny tattooed star on her cheek like a beauty mark. She thought he was talking about a roller rink until he reached back and held up his board. He changed clothes in the parking lot and ran through the rain with his board and helmet and went inside.
The kid working the gate was a stranger but once inside Roy recognized a few of the guys on the eight-foot ramp, two pros killing it and an old guy who wasn’t, an editor at a skate magazine in SF. Roy had met the editor years ago, when he was working on an article about him and the DEK8D guys. He’d skated with the two pros, Jim (Nessy) Nestor and Justin (FBI—fucking big Indian) Gilles, as recently as last summer in Portland.
Roy said his hellos, gave a couple of bro hugs and a handshake, waited his turn, then dropped in. His legs were tight from driving so he worked the ramp for speed, loosening up, laid down a few long grinds, but on his fourth wall he boosted a hefty back stair, and from then on he charged, went for whatever showed up in his mind as he pumped for speed down the opposing wall. He was out of shape though, and he reeled it in before his legs gave way and he bailed.
“Off the bench,” Nessy said, as if he were impersonating Sean Connery. “From the corridor, if you will, Mr. Bingham delivers.”
Roy took off his helmet and scratched his head and watched the editor run through his limited bag of tricks, stiff and not very fast, kind of spazzy. He was better on the page.
“You still live in Portland?” FBI asked.
“I’m in between.” Roy clicked his helmet back on. “Don’t know where the fuck I’m going.”
A photographer that everybody knew, George Pacecek, was coming up the stairs to the deck. George set down his camera bag and gave Roy a high five. “What the fuck, Roy? What’s the occasion? I haven’t seen you farther south than Klamath Falls for ten years.”
“Not that long,” Roy said, and had to step back because FBI was b
oosting and making the whole ramp shake.
George opened his bag and worked on getting set up to take some photos. The editor went over and talked to the photographer, pointed at the lights and at some kids skating the street course.
With the camera equipment it was a little crowded on deck so Roy crossed over to the other side of the ramp and waited for his turns. Later in the session, after Roy had made the nosepick off the handrail at the back of the deck and hauled his body once again, smoothly with a frontside grab, into the transition, Nessy came over to his side to shoot the shit.
“George got that whole sequence,” Nessy said, swigging a beer with a rubberized, transferable Coca Cola label on it. “Roy Bingham murders.”
“Born to kill,” Roy said.
“What’re you doin’ tonight? Wanna get some beers with me and FBI?”
“Sure.”
In the morning, Roy was in the back of the van in a bar parking lot, hungover, cash reserves down to ones, stripper rich, with maybe a quarter tank of gas. He found his phone and it said “service unavailable.” Karen paid the bills and she wasn’t going to keep his phone on. He knew it would happen, but not today. Nessy and FBI were expecting Roy to call so they could caravan to SF, but with no phone and no phone numbers, he couldn’t. So here he was, in fact, penniless and living in a van in Sacramento. At least it was raining.
Not knowing where else to go, he went back to the Woodland park, but he wasn’t going to spend the money to get in until he saw someone he knew that might be able to get him in for free. He smoked the last of his weed and napped in the back of the van. Late in the afternoon a pickup pulled into the parking lot across the street. A black guy got out wearing a hoodie, shorts, and two knee braces, and grabbed his board and a duffel bag and headed for the door.
Roy got out of the van. “Liston,” Roy said.
When he saw Roy he stopped, held his bag up to get some shelter from the rain. “Bingham?” Roy nodded. “What the fuck you doin’ here?”
“Waiting to skate.”
“Well, come the fuck on, man.”
Roy went back to the van and grabbed his shit and followed Liston inside. The kid at the door knew Liston and remembered Roy from the day before. He waved them in for free.
Liston lived in West Sacramento in a run-down tract home on a double lot with a big corrugated steel shop. He offered Roy a spot to park his van beside the shop until he got situated. He was married with two kids but his family was in Florida for the holidays. Liston couldn’t get time off work to go with them. He had a miniramp in the back corner of his shop and they went there to skate some more after they left the park.
“You’re a mechanic now?” Roy asked, working the lever on a drill press.
“Machinist,” Liston said.
“What do you machine?”
“Whatever they tell me.”
Liston had a beer fridge in his shop and an old oil furnace that kept it toasty. After the first night in the van, Roy moved into the shop and slept on the ramp.
“How’d you get into this?” Roy said, passing a hand over the workbench.
“I got locked up for a while.”
“I heard.”
“When I got out, my PO got me a job at an auto body place and the owner thought I was less retarded than his other employees—which is hardly a vote of confidence—but he helped me get into some classes. I did the community college thing for a year but my daughter was born so I quit and got a job.”
“Is it good money?”
“It’s fine. My wife works too.” Liston put down his beer and tried a kickflip to noseblunt for the twentieth time and failed again. He hit the flat bottom hard and was slow getting up. “Weren’t you married?” Liston asked.
“No, me and Karen never got married.” Roy dropped in and nailed Liston’s trick on his first try.
“Fuck you, Bingham. I’m turning the heat off tonight.”
“Come on, man.”
“Fuckin’ lockin’ up my beer too.”
Roy couldn’t bring himself to ask Liston for a loan so he asked if he wanted to buy some skate decks and wheels he had floating around in the van.
“No, man. I don’t need that shit. And my family comes back day after tomorrow so you need to get sorted.”
“Do you know anybody that wants to buy a van?” Roy said. “I’m kind of stuck right now.”
Liston shook his head. “I know a guy that might be able to give you some work.”
“As a machinist?”
“Fuck no, Bingham. Laborer. Shovel and broom. Pala y escoba. Nada mas.”
“Laborer?”
“As in, to labor. Jornalero. The bottom, brother.”
Roy squirmed a little. “I don’t know, man.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“What?” Roy said. “I’m not saying no, am I? I just want, like, more information.”
Liston went to his workbench and wrote something down on a greasy piece of steel with a chalk pencil, came back and handed it to Roy. “If you call him, you can say I gave you his name. But don’t call him if you’re just gonna dog out on him and bail without warning.”
“I’m not looking for a career,” Roy said.
“You can skate, but you’re a fucking moron.” Liston dropped into the ramp and kept talking. “You’re gonna be homeless. That’s gonna be your career.” Liston raised his voice an octave. “I’m not looking for a career,” he said. “I’m just gonna fucking mooch off my buddy Liston until I win the lotto.”
“All right,” Roy said. “That’s enough a that.” He dropped in on Liston and snaked him and made him fall, kept skating and locked in at least five tricks in a row that Liston would never be able to do in his whole life, before he finally wadded up and slid to a stop in the flat bottom.
“Call him,” Liston said. “But only if you’re gonna work. Hear me?”
“I hear you,” Roy said. “I fuckin’ hear you.”
The man’s name was Clem and he lived in a mossy sailboat at the marina with two Scottish terriers named Swerdlow and Mankowitz. He never asked how Roy knew Liston or why he was living in a van. He invited him on board and had him fill out an employment form in the surprisingly tidy galley. While he was doing that, Clem went to the marina office and photocopied his license. When he returned he gave Roy his license and a piece of paper with G-9 written on it.
“You can park there if you want.”
“OK, thanks.”
“You can use the bathrooms but if you’re going to shower try and do it after they lock the gate at ten.”
“OK.”
The next day at dawn Clem drove Roy to the new bridge that was being built upriver from the failing I-Street bridge. The dogs went with them, tugging on their yo-yo leashes, and stopping constantly to piss and sniff at turds and trash. The river was diverted by a series of dams around the construction project. Barges were anchored in the water end-to-end in a continuous chain that created a temporary work platform. Clem explained that once the ambient temperature had fallen enough to slow most of the runoff the engineers had shut the upstream dams and weirs and built the temporary dams in sections so the crews could work on the bridge without being underwater. Only one of the bridge columns had been poured so far but Clem said there were three more that would go in before they could start on the deck.
“I’m in the office until they have the columns done,” Clem said.
Roy got a bit of a thrill imagining himself working high above the river with Clem, but Clem got him a job in the yard instead, driving a telehandler in the mud, fetching materials that were ordered over the two-way radio. He never left the shore. His foreman, Enrique, was from Chihuahua and he could speak English—Roy had heard him—but he wouldn’t speak it to Roy or any of the other peckerwood laborers working in the yard.
Clem went to Thailand for two weeks in March and let Roy stay on his sailboat to watch the dogs. On a moonless night he borrowed Clem’s Zodiac and motored out to the new bridge. He t
ied up to the piling nearest the power plant and scaled down the back side of one of the temporary dams into the dark pit below.
He stood out there in the middle of the river and listened to the water and thought about Karen Oronski. He thought about his life but in an unchangeably distracted way that took him nowhere. He was lousy with decisions. He was only good when he was moving. He was only good with Karen and when he was moving.
When he returned to the marina he put the dogs and their food, their dishes and beds in the van, then went back to the boat and disconnected the batteries and locked the doors and hatches. He took the dogs to Liston’s and left them in the shop, figuring Liston would find them first thing. They had food and water. They’d be fine. Roy was northbound, a little bit of money in his pocket, free.
[32]
R<45
CA 96118, CA 94015
The baby had just gone to sleep and the sun would be up in an hour.
“I need to get out of here,” Roy said.
“Why?” Karen said. “Why don’t Wiley and I get to get out of here? Why do you?”
“Give me a few days. I need out. I need sleep.”
“Don’t talk to me about sleep. You get more sleep than anyone.”
“I’ll bring presents.”
“I don’t care about presents.” Karen touched her painfully swollen breasts through her sour-milk T-shirt. “Take these and feed the baby and let me go. How about that? Take my tits and set me free. I don’t want them anymore and you probably won’t either once the milk is gone and they sag and I look old and ugly.”
“Never.”
“You better still love me when my tits go wrong.”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t make fun of me.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Not so loud, you’ll wake everyone up and then we won’t even be able to argue in peace.”