by Brad Land
Go dammit, he said. This is your job. This is your call.
Merrill turned his eyes down, knocked the ground with the tip of one cleat.
Merrill went midfield, stayed with Dillon County’s one good player, the lanky fast kid that scored first. Merrill drifted back a little. The fast kid crossed midfield, caught the ball inside of his left foot, ran a slant to their sideline. Merrill slid at his legs, and then the fast one was up in the air, and then he was twisted on the ground.
At home Terry opened the window in his bedroom and sat beneath it. He spoke to her.
I’ll seek you there, he said. In the still part of the afternoon. In the dry wind. Would you show me your face? Could I touch your dress?
The neighbor’s tabby was plaintive, stalking redbirds in the yard, head jutted over pansy and marigold, butterfly in her mouth.
TERRY BOUGHT a pack of trucker speed for fifty cents at the service station on Irby. The package had a man with a mustache standing on the front who wore a black cowboy hat, a black, point collar shirt and smiled. There was a semi behind him, smoke come from exhaust pipes either side of the cab. Terry got back into the car. Benjamin Webber pulled off. Terry tore the pack at the top of the wrapper; three pills inside. He chewed one, small and white, crossed at the center. His father looked over.
What you got? he said.
Vitamins, Terry said.
His father held a soda over to him. Terry took a swallow, washed it around at his cheeks and cleared his mouth of the crushed powder.
Benjamin Webber drove them through a boarded-up town called Greeley; on the street cotton turned dry and gray, and some buildings missed walls, and some had gone to vine; trees grew on the roof of the old hotel, roots busted the awning. There were crows flying. They landed on roofs and power lines, dropped on fields and ate the ground.
The man on the corner past the hotel was black eyed. He wore a military hat with brass pins, held cardboard signs, shoulder level, painted crows; one had red eyes, and carried a shovel with its yellow feet. Terry was confused by the man, the way he hunched and sang, shoulders and head dotted bird shit.
Benjamin Webber slowed the car beside him and rolled down the passenger side window. Terry didn’t want to talk to the man.
Man, come on, he said. Just keep going.
I want to see what this turkey wants.
Roll your own side down then, man.
Benjamin Webber leaned over Terry toward the window.
Just go, Terry said.
The man stood just past the window. Terry understood his father set his mind at seeing this thing to the end. The man smiled terribly, and didn’t speak. He bobbed and held up a sign. Terry stared and didn’t move, smelled him over the frame; fire, urine, paint. The man wore sunglasses, black and square, the kind Terry saw on old people in wheelchairs, or like ones who did metallurgy Terry saw his eyes move behind the plastic, wobbled, both gone separate of the other; one pushed the top of a lid, the other strained toward the temple. The eyes scared him, shot a lump up his back, and he started to squirm. The seatbelt felt very tight, and bigger than before, metal clasp at his hip heavy and blunt. Terry pulled it away from his chest some and kept turning his head from the man to his father.
Fuck, man, he said. What are you doing?
His father’s eyes were fixed, unwavered, everything in him, blood and bone, pushed toward a moment, and it came, the air sped, his father left the car, noise of all the world so much, so loud he couldn’t sort one sound from any other; he thought it something like going blind.
His father got the man by the shoulders and turned him around and threw him at the sidewalk, all one motion, and then he stood over and pointed down at him harshly, forearm, crooked finger clenched on the end. He put a foot to his ribs and stood over him again, and then he leaned over and jerked the bundle of painted signs and stood up and threw them spinning at the street with the cotton.
The dead man was sixty-eight. Benjamin Webber found him at work, at his new plant, Purcell Uniform, sat down in the break room, black lunch pail open at his lap, one eye closed, the other a squint. The body was watched over in the old man’s house. In the main room there was a large stone fireplace burning high and orange. At one side of it the old man’s body lay flat on a long sheeted table. Terry got close to the table, and then he turned away quick, and left the room. He chewed more of the speed in the hall, ladled a small plastic cup with red punch and drank it in one turn, and then he filled it again and drank it all and set the clear plastic tumbler on the table.
Benjamin Webber came after him, squinted his eyes and took his arm in the hall. His father held him at the bicep, and spoke close to his ear. Right now you’re doing this, he said. You hear me?
Terry looked down on the powdered face of the old man; hair slick wet and white, combed straight back, scalp still a bit pink underneath. His lips were thin, not smiled, or turned down, just a flat line painted lipstick beneath his nose. He still dreamt of certain things; Terry saw that. He wanted to touch his lips, wanted to sit him up on the table. The man with the signs rose up in his head screaming, his father perched and stomping above, cardboard turned in the air like shingles broke during thunder. He couldn’t tell why; looking twisted his face up. He wished to cry, or scream, but neither came, only the sure fact of his father next to him, speaking close in his ear, saying nothing. Terry jerked his arm away, and his father took it again.
Let go, Terry said.
He shook it again. His father kept his hand. Terry could feel heat there, blood in the fingers pried at his arm. He turned then and looked him straight, kept his eyes still, focused a cold fury. Benjamin Webber hunched his brow to lines.
Terry went upstairs to the old man’s room. He stood in the doorway, light from the hallway at his feet and into the darkened room. He turned the light switch; framed pictures, chest level on the dresser of the old man and what looked his wife and children. He understood he’d never have a thing like that, pictures or people, a dresser or a house. He understood he’d be an old man, that he would carry much hurt, but that he’d be alone, watching others, waiting on someone to come who never would. He understood this was his lot. He turned off the light.
Terry stepped further into the room and opened cabinet drawers, put two bottles of pills at his jean pockets; from a jewelry box beside the bed he took eight silver dollars, a gold wedding band.
THE GAME was at seven, beneath lights, in a railroad town called I Seneca, an hour and a half west of Echota. The road emptied, the sun weak. They passed a broken house set alone in a field. Francis said an old man lived there, said he killed his family, eight of them, and once a week, on Saturday, brought the gravestones from the backyard into the house and washed them with a toothbrush in a white claw-foot tub. They passed billboards on the highway; on one an elderly man and woman bore teeth, pedaled a red two-person bicycle on a path through fall leaves.
The high school stood all alone in cleared woods. Noah wedged the car between a row of three classroom trailers and a wide brick building. They kept the windows up, smoked a joint. Terry carried the plastic radio along to play the tape, kept it beside him in the backseat. They listened to a record by the Clash called Sandinista! They smoked a few cigarettes after the joint. The music hummed, made his eyes blink a flutter; he felt every vein. What he thought was, cut my wrists, I’ll bleed ash, smoke.
The first goal came fifteen minutes in the first half. Noah got up from the bench, went over to the water cooler and came back with two short paper cups filled with a bright yellow drink, handed Terry one of the cups and then sat back down. He bent forward and reached at his sock, put a blue pill to his mouth. He dropped another in the grass next to his foot. Terry reached down and picked it up, size of a thimble.
Halftime coach made them sit a circle around him. He stood over them with his hands at his hips and mumbled. Terry didn’t listen, went warm from the pill. He pulled grass from around his knees and threw it back down. He put some in his mouth and ch
ewed. He built a small teepee with some twigs and it fell over. The world took a kind light, soft, blue, pale like through stained glass. Terry held his right hand straight in front; a stillness there he never felt, in all of him, eyes and ribs, legs and breath.
The second half started on midfield. Terry stayed sitting crosslegged on the ground near the bench, head lolled with the game and the lights, the grass growing at his thighs. He thought of a blue-eyed, charcoal cat from Issaqueena. It didn’t look him in the eye, but he knew it remembered his face. He found a dead bird in the storage shed, a few days later a squirrel, then a small, stump-eared rabbit, none of them mauled like the ones he saw the cat catch and toss around, but just dead, sat careful, a gift, he thought, maybe just another way to speak.
THEY SPENT hours at Orangepants, a pool hall and fish market, left
I between games for the alley in back of the place. He felt dark, sad, and his eyes watered, and they left him in the alley in the dusk light hung over. He pulled hard on the last of the joint, propped himself at the wall, stayed there and watched the light go.
Noah beat a big man and motioned across the table for his money, ten dollars. The big man was a Lumbee. He put a leg up on the table, yanked the cuff past his ankle, deer knife stuck in the sock. He tapped on it, kept the leg on the rail.
Noah asked the Lumbee to go up front and buy them a box of malt liquor since they couldn’t. He came back and opened the top flap, twelve short green bottles, and then he spoke of his tribe; he was the one that remembered the true name of the big river, but during spring, the water spilled the banks, settled peat black and still, and afterward it was something else, water he couldn’t name.
They ran across Irby with bottles wrapped in their jackets. A few of the bottles fell and broke on the road, and they laughed because the night was cold and blue. They kept a sprint to Noah’s car, drove a few blocks to a red brick church and parked in the lot behind it. Francis knew the place; no one allowed there past dark.
Francis got out. He drank a bottle, two swallows, threw the empty against the wall overhand, like a fastball. The bottle yelled on the brick. Terry and Noah went to drinking theirs, and then Noah broke one, and then Terry did, and then all of them threw bottles three, five, eight. They leapt, arms up, at the cold clear night and the gasoline in their hearts; glass green in the air, busted on the ground.
Then the sirens were all around them.
Terry went to run, and then he stopped.
They stood in a line, held their hands above their heads. Two of the policemen shone flashlights inside Noah’s car, bright as spot lamps for blinding deer at the popped trunk; gun in the glove compartment, under a frayed eastern state highway map, the car title, and lug wrench. One of them dug it out and held it up. It was square, looked like a plastic starter gun. Noah dropped his eyes and wagged his chin, orange hair a kerchief over his forehead. His father left the gun; nights he drove to the bar and hovered at drinks with other men and women who didn’t remember what morning smelled like. On his way home, late, toppled fences, dogs, left the car on the side of the road, skewered on a front yard. Noah nodded to the gun.
Gun’s not mine, he said.
None of this seemed true to the policemen. One asked for other weapons. Francis pointed to the car ten feet off. The one holding his arms behind let go and walked him over. Francis leaned down and reached under the passenger seat, raised back up holding a bundle.
Then the policemen put them facedown beside the car and locked their hands. They laughed, lit a few of the smoke bombs Francis fished from beneath the seat, and dropped them hissing on the lot. Terry lifted his face to see the smoke and the policeman pressed his boot harder at his back.
Stop moving, he said.
This is a bunch of shit. What kind of operation are you running here?
The policeman put a hand to the back of Terry’s head and pushed his face down, gravel spiked to his cheeks.
They put the three of them at the backseat and drove to the sheriff’s department and locked them in one of the two cells for drunks. One of the policemen called them ruffians, and then he called them vagrants. There was a toilet in the cell, benches on two sides, walls painted yellow, names scribbled in black pen and lead. There were chipped places on the slick gray floor like liver spots. They sat, feet down, and none spoke. End of the hall a door slammed, then boots, loud and final, stomped toward the cell. The policeman who put Terry down turned the lock and slid the bars, motioned for Noah and Francis to stand and they did. He pointed them down the hall. Francis moved past the open cell door then stopped. Noah lingered inside the bars and looked down at Terry.
What do we do here? he said.
Terry shook his head and fumbled at his hands set between his thighs, bottom of his forearms close to the bent knees.
Go on, he said.
Noah pinched his eyes and stood mute.
I’ll be alright, Terry said.
They called his house for an hour, and after another hour one of them let Terry from the block with a loud key and led him down the hall, and then he drove him home, when there stayed a few feet back and watched Terry turn the deadbolt. The house was dark. Terry switched on the light and pointed down the hall. The officer leaned his head past the doorframe and had a look.
I told you, Terry said.
The policeman looked again.
If he doesn’t call man you know where I live alright?
The officer nodded.
Here man, if you don’t believe me or whatever.
Terry went to his back pocket and dug out his wallet. He peeled the driver’s license from beneath the plastic and held it to the policeman.
THE JUDGE gave them forty hours of community service; Noah read to children at the town library and picked trash in the yard. Francis painted the elementary school canary yellow. Terry came to the aluminum finishing plant at first light, and on the way he passed a graveyard for soldiers, the headstones small white tablets. At the north end a group of old buildings, weathered brick and white paint; during the states’ war, one was a prison on the blue side. Terry listened hard, for chain rattle, for the sick and dying.
The plant was out on the old state highway, beside the county airport. He parked the car and studied the field next to the building, a deep stretch of cut grass between blacktop and control tower, rotted planes laid in rows after the great world wars.
He walked up and pushed the door at the front of the building, and it held and then he pushed some more and it scraped open. It was dim inside, an old airplane hangar open at both ends.
There were no shifts on the weekends; Monday the boxed aluminum shipped and the rigs shook impatient at the north end. He hole-punched a card past the front and set it to a slot, his last name penciled on top. He worked alone, punched holes to long and thin strips of aluminum used to stay carpet. He made boxes from sheets of seamed cardboard and staples and stacked the fresh punched aluminum to the boxes and stuffed the extra space in thin, pink paper. The sky was clear, and the sun high through holes rusted in the ceiling.
Terry came Tuesday, after practice and the main shift over and gone at three-thirty It went dark. He spotted cats with no tails, leering at him from beams at the hangar walls. He left a bundle of punched aluminum on a sheet of the pink paper, went outside and gathered small rocks in the truck bay and came back through the front and threw them and scattered the cats and the rocks shook the metal.
He took a half hour for break. He went out back of the place and sat on a metal boat that faced the plane yard. He chewed a candy bar, and then he smoked a cigarette, and a few of the old planes were painted a new white, and someone stood beneath a bomber with no wheels, arm raised to the belly.
Terry went to him across the yard, and the kid didn’t turn, not even when he stood a few feet close. He’d seen him at school a few times in the parking lot, sat down in the front seat of an orange hearse. He was shaped like a bulldog; flat shaved head, neck mostly shoulders. He held a square-headed bru
sh and moved it careful over the underside of the plane, four cans of paint open in the grass around him, black shirt and jeans blotted white, bits of paint in his hair. He smoked a cigarette.
You’re going to make a fire, Terry said.
The kid turned and kept the cigarette at his mouth and then he dropped the brush against a hip.
The fuck are you? he said.
His voice was even, unmoved. He raised the brush and went back on the plane.
I was just over there making boxes.
No shifts past three-thirty
The judge put me there.
The kid blew smoke, thumped the butt under another plane.
Probably the same one put me here painting these fucking birds, he said. I’d beat the wrinkles out of that one. You steal something?
I was throwing bottles against that church downtown. They found a gun.
The kid dropped the brush and checked his hands.
Cats still there?
He bent down to a knee, wedged lids back on the cans.
I did summers in that plant, for pay, he said.
I’ve seen some. I throw rocks at their heads.
They’re fast.
The kid put some things in a storage shed and kept an open can. He made to leave, and started at the highway, and then he threw a wide smile of white against the wing of one plane. Paint beaded and dripped, and then he dropped the can, spilled white on the old grass.