One Simple Thing

by Warren Read

  “I got this thing I have to do,” Otis said, “and I need your skills.” He leaned back in his seat and pointed through the windshield. “You see that road there?”

  Rodney stared out at the thin, white line of dust that wound its way from the paved road up into a landscape of mustard-spotted hills. He said, “Yeah I see it,” and then looked back to Otis. He was leaning into Rodney now, his hands practically against the boy’s legs, as if he thought Rodney might jump from the car any minute and break into a run.

  “I gotta go off somewhere for a little bit,” he said.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Somewhere, I said.” He pointed to the far edge of the parking lot. “You see that phone booth over there?” Just over the curb, under the umbrella of a hearty maple, was a blue-and-silver box. A rickety old picnic table sat nearby, squeezed against the maple trunk. “Now, if you see a big old Lincoln happen to turn up that road after I’m gone,” Otis went on, “I want you to pick up that phone and give the number on that paper a call. You let it ring two times then hang up.” He leaned onto one side and dug his hand into his jeans pocket and brought out a dime, laying it on Rodney’s pants leg.

  The coin was filthy with grease, and the paper smeared with numbers that looked as if a child had scrawled them out. Beyond the blue-and-white phone booth lay a vast field of purple-specked flax, a single wheel move sprinkler parked in the center. From somewhere deep in his gut Rodney felt a tumble. Maybe, he thought, I’ll just throw up, right here in Otis’s car and it’ll all be done.

  “Don’t get yourself coiled up in a knot,” Otis said, sweeping a hand over Rodney’s hair. “The chances of you even having to make the call is almost zero.”

  “Zero?”

  “Almost.” Otis checked his watch. “Now, tell everything back to me.”

  “I heard you,” Rodney said.

  Otis leaned into him. “Tell. It. Back to me.”

  Rodney took hold of the door handle and stared up at the white ribbon road cutting its way between those low brown hills, and he repeated everything Otis had said to him, about the car and the phone number, and the number of rings, two, before hanging up.

  Otis studied him, a look of sleepy satisfaction as Rodney droned out the replay, and when it was finished, he leaned across the seat and pushed open the passenger door. No sooner had Rodney stepped out into the parking lot did Otis punch the accelerator and drive off, his Bonneville lurching straight up the dirt road into the hills.

  Rodney kicked a rock across the parking lot, where it arched past the phone booth and disappeared into the sea of flax. He walked over and settled onto the splintered bench, the table beside it peppered with powdery bird shit and fallen maple keys. The sun’s light pushed through the leaves and flashed in and out of his periphery, but Rodney could see the empty road stretching to and from town, the gentle dips in the topography where a car could easily hide from view if it wanted to.

  In the store window was a clock reading just after eleven. He would be in math class now. Mr. Byers was likely standing at the chalkboard working out a problem and showing everyone the proper steps, something that Rodney would now have no idea how to do.

  There was a crackle of tires on the gravel and a car rolled into the lot, pulling up right next to him, at the phone booth. It was a little orange Japanese car, with a sheet of bunched plastic covering the hole where the rear driver’s side window should have been. The door swung open and a woman climbed out, fish-white legs pouring out of a pair of cutoff jeans, the soft fringe wrapped tightly around her thighs. She slapped her purse down on the hood and snapped back the flap, digging through the bag like everything she ever owned in her life was inside it.

  Rodney stood up and moved toward the phone, fingering the dime in his pocket. The woman snatched up her purse and looked up at him, eyeballing him like he might draw a gun on her at any second.

  “Are you using it?”

  “I might,” he said. He knew that was an answer that meant nothing, but there was nothing else he could really say.

  She rolled a shoulder and moved past him, slipping into the box and dropping several coins into the slot, then punching away at the numbers as if each one was an ex-boyfriend.

  The activity from the highway continued to be unremarkable, and a faint haze of white dust lifted in the hills where the Bonneville had disappeared. A couple cars that were not Lincolns cruised past, headed in the direction of Hope. There was a chittering in the maple branches, a couple of red squirrels circling the trunk and carrying on with one another like an old, tired married couple. Like Rodney had seen a few times in his own kitchen. A few more whirlybirds floated down, spiraling out onto the patchy, yellow grass.

  From behind Rodney the growl of a beefy engine swelled, and a boxy pickup truck pulled in heavy, the cab rocking back and forth. On the door was the stenciled outline of a horse, rearing up on its rear hooves, front legs arched forward, black paint on white. The driver brought the truck to a stop next to the fuel pump, a clang of bells ringing out as it rolled over the cables.

  The woman squawked into the phone with her back to Rodney, and there was anger in her voice, the pitch rising and falling in hard kicks. “He promised,” she said. “A million times already.” It went on like that for some time, the shouting about this man and a baby, someplace, and a pile of bills that sat on the counter at home, all unpaid, not the least bit of care that the ugliness of her life was being flushed right out into the parking lot of the Gas n’ Go.

  “You’re a fair distance out of bounds.”

  Rodney’s stomach gave a knock, like an electric shock. He looked up to see the familiar white flattop and curled mustache of Charlie Kruger. He stood just outside the shade of the maple canopy, those ringed fingers of his bare now, thumbs hooked over his glossy black belt. His blue-striped tie fluttered in the breeze against a pillow stomach.

  “Everything okay?”

  Rodney looked over at the pickup again, at the same horse stencil he’d seen every single day for as long as he’d been going to the feed store. How had he not recognized it when it had pulled in?

  “Are you with her?” Kruger asked, nodding toward the woman in the booth.

  Rodney shook his head. He could not come up with any words to explain what he was doing here, by himself, next to a phone booth in the middle of nowhere. “Otis,” he finally said. The name fell out of his mouth like his body was ridding itself of a virus. “Otis.” Once more, just to be sure.

  Kruger looked around. “Where is Otis? Did he go off and leave you?”

  “He forgot something,” Rodney said. “He’ll be back soon.”

  Kruger ran his hand along the top of his head, the thick, white turf springing back as he passed over the surface. He watched Rodney closely, eyes searching, the loop of his mustache twitching just so. He turned and looked over his shoulder, at the roadway that rolled up into the hills.

  “I’m okay,” Rodney said.

  “All right then,” Kruger said. “If you say so.” Just as he began to walk back to the pickup, he stopped and looked back over his shoulder once more. The flesh of his neck spilled over the collar, his eyelids reddened and tired, and yet—a sense of kindness there. “Is this something I ought not mention to your mother?”

  Rodney glanced back at the woman in the booth, who was, once again, digging into that purse of hers. What would his mother do if she found out where he was, with Otis? There had been secrets—too many. I went through this enough with your father, she’d told him. I don’t need to relive it now.

  Rodney had no answer for him.

  At that, Kruger climbed up into the cab and fired up the engine. He did not put any gas in the tank or get anything from inside the store, but he rolled down his window and put out his arm, and gave Rodney one last look before pulling away from the pumps. He paused only briefly at the exit before crossing the highway and steering on up the dirt road, into the sage-covered hills.

  The woman stood outside th
e booth now, the cord stretched as far as it would go. Rodney moved close to her and held the dime in his fingers, so she could see if it she looked at him. Which she didn’t.

  It had not been a Lincoln, but it was Mr. Kruger, and maybe that’s what it had been about all along. By making the call, who was he helping most? If Otis was up to something—and Otis really was probably up to something—would the call send him running for the hills or would he crouch behind a tree or a closed door, just waiting for Mr. Kruger?

  By doing nothing, though, he’d be leaving the unexpected, the possibility of a nasty surprise. And if he’d learned anything from all those House of Mystery stories, surprise never turned out well.

  Rodney leaned to one side to catch the woman’s eye and, when she finally did look at him, it was a tossed glance, the kind of thing given to a mere distraction. It was only when he moved into her direct line of vision, practically sitting on that orange car of hers, that she finally gave in.

  “Oh Jesus,” the woman yelled, putting the handpiece to her breast and expelling an intentional, heavy sigh. “What is your problem, kid?”

  “I need to use that,” he said, nodding to the phone.

  “Too bad. I’m using it.”

  “You can’t hog.”

  “Watch me,” she said, and at that, she snapped the booth door behind her and spun around, turning her body completely away from him.

  A tumble of white dust rose above the roadway, heading further up the hill. Rodney pushed through the station door, the man behind the counter giving him a reflective look at best. “Can you believe it,” the man said. At the opposite end of the store, an old codger moved packs of Marlboros from a carton into an open glass case. “Apparently he drove a little Volkswagen bug. That’s what they knew about him. Drove a VW bug, and wore a fake cast on his arm. To trick the girls into going off with him.”

  The guy looked to be something of a hippie, stringy hair past his shoulders and a grassy brown beard that he had tied off with a tight red rubber band. He leaned against the back counter, tattooed arms folded over his chest, his fingers tapping out each punctuation. “A gal I used to date swore to God she met him up at Vail, at the ski lodge there,” he continued. “Said he had cast on his arm, that he tried to get her to carry his gear to his car. Acted all sad sack and charming. But there was something about him that didn’t sit right with her.”

  “Intuition,” the old man loading the cigarettes said. “Probably saved her life.” He opened up another carton and began pulling out packs.

  “Son of a gun.” The hippie guy looked over at Rodney. “You lost, my friend?” Behind him, tucked to the corner near the window, was a chunky black rotary.

  “Can I use the phone?” Rodney asked. “That lady won’t hang up.” His shirt had started to stick to his skin, and there were the beginnings of his own sour odor starting up. “It’s kind of important.”

  The cashier leaned forward and looked out the window. “Phone hog?” he said. “God, I hate phone hogs.” He reached over and took the phone and set it on the counter. “Keep it local and keep it short.”

  Rodney brought out the scrap of paper and unfolded it on the counter. There were no low numbers, the dial just turning and turning forever in slow motion with each digit. He finally finished up on number eight, and there was a clicking sound before the first ring finally broke in. The cashier leaned himself against the back counter again and stared out the window. The second ring sounded, and Rodney set the hand piece back in the cradle.

  “That was short.” The man behind the counter took the phone and returned it to the spot behind him.

  “He said he’s coming,” Rodney announced, nodding to the phone. “He’s on his way, now.”

  “That so,” the cashier said. “You didn’t say nothing.” He furled his lip and searched Rodney’s face like it was a riddle. Like Rodney’s mother had done, that day in the kitchen, with all the talk of one-legged teachers and keeping secrets.

  “I did so say something.” Rodney watched the man’s eyes, the lids drooped, unsatisfied. The guy tipped his head toward the old man and Rodney took the moment to escape, turning and pushing through the door to bolt across the lot to the backside of the maple tree where he crouched on the small patch of weed grass and waited. Waited for whatever might eventually come down from those hills.

  Three cars and a pickup truck came and went before the woman finally slammed the phone down and stomped out. Rodney did not look at her except to curse at the tail end of her car as she tore out of the lot.

  The longer he sat there under those leafy branches, the greater the story unraveled in his mind, of what might be happening up in those hills. He expected any minute a parade of lights and sirens tearing up there, and the sound of his mother’s voice, the piercing wail on the other end of the telephone when she found out where he was.

  And then the cotton clouds began to lift from the high hill and the Bonneville rose briefly into view at last. It dipped then reappeared again as the roadway descended to the highway. The car did not stop when it reached the intersection, but sailed directly over the roadway into the lot, coming to a hard stop in front of the maple.

  “Get in the goddamned car!” Otis screamed at Rodney through the open window. The top side of his head was wet and shiny, a small trail of red running down from his ear. His breath was winded and breaking, his eyes bulging as if they might squeeze right out of their sockets.

  For a moment, Rodney could not move. His feet were spiked to the ground, his brain sending orders that his body could not receive. It was only when Otis leaned into the steering wheel, clenched his eyes shut and gave off a grisly, mournful wail, that Rodney snapped out of his trance.

  He ran around the back end of the car and jumped in, but then it was Otis who just sat there, rattled breathing tight in his chest, his fingers drumming on the steering wheel, his back arched over and eyes panning upward.

  “Otis,” Rodney whispered. “Your head …” The blood was at his collar now and soaking into the fabric.

  Otis kept rolling his fingertips over the wheel. He looked from one end of the highway to the other and then he reached back and pressed his fingers into his hair and brought them back, all blood and nerves. “Oh Jesus,” he said. He gave a fugitive look to Rodney then settled back in his seat. “This is just fucking great,” he said, and there was a sad tremor in his voice, as if he might collapse into tears at any moment. Spinning the wheel hard to the right, he slammed the gas.

  They had gone at least twenty miles, the car moving like ocean waves as Otis alternated between rocket speeds and a near crawl. They were heading north; Rodney knew that much—farther outside Hope than he’d ever gone before. All the while, Otis continued to scan the left and right vistas, muttering to himself with each directional that came into view.

  “Where are we going?” Rodney finally asked.

  “Where we’re not going, you mean.” Otis whooped a throaty laugh, eyes clicking like a bird’s from the horizon to the mirrors, to the gauges. “We’re sure as shit not going back where we came from.”

  And that was it—the punchline that had been a mere, fleeting thought to Rodney when he left school that morning. That Otis’s appearance in the hall—and the slow drive through town, the milkshake—could have been nothing more than an impulsive whim, an effort toward some desperate kind of friendship on Otis’s part.

  As if he had been kicked from the inside, it all burst forth. Tears and mucous and gasping for air that wouldn’t come, ugly and hideous, and the more Rodney fought to contain it, the harder it forced its way out of him. It broke against him like a pounding surf, his breath coming to him in only in choppy, stingy rations.

  And just like that his head snapped to the side, the blinding crash of Otis’s hand against his face, striking him just above his mouth.

  Rodney shook clear and shrunk back, retreating as far from Otis as he could, his body crouching against the door, hands curled to his mouth. He looked over at the bl
oodstained hand still raised, just hovering there in the space between them, those fingers shaking, ready to go again.

  “What in the holy fuck happened?” Otis screamed at him. “You had one simple thing to do!”

  “I did,” Rodney cried out, his voice breaking. “The lady …” In his mind she was still there in that phone booth, laughing and swearing about some boyfriend, and their baby, while she kept stuffing dime after dime into that slot.

  They held steady for a time, sticking to the road beneath them and meandering through a sparse forest of pine and red-spotted shrubs, and Rodney could see in the distance the towering GAS sign, red, white, and blue letters shouting over the trees.

  Otis slapped the dashboard and eased up on the accelerator, swerving the car into the lot and steering them past the red Fire Chief pumps to the back of the building, just outside the toilets. He made a hard stop a few feet from the split, weathered siding and threw open his door. Leaning out, almost laying himself onto the ground, he sucked in a chestful of air and pushed it out through his teeth, a pitched whistle.

  “You better go on in there,” he said. “It’ll be the last chance you get for a while.”

  Rodney pushed on the door with Otis right on his heels, crowding him into the small bathroom. It was a one-person outfit, a rust-smeared basin bolted to the wall and a single toilet sitting all by itself in the corner.

  “Don’t worry,” Otis said. “You got nothing down there I’m interested in.”

  Rodney turned himself away from Otis as much as he could. Behind the sound of his zipper he heard the click of the lock behind them. He stood over the bowl and watched his stream roil the water, and scanned the graffiti around him, the phone numbers and words about sex and women, and war and drugs.

  After what may well have been the longest piss Rodney had ever taken, he finished up and flushed it all away and did up his pants before turning back to the door. Otis stood there at the mirror with the flickering fluorescent lighting against his face, shadows and cuts gouging a kind of death mask over him. He held a small stack of paper towels against his head, and mooned at his reflection, as if the face looking back at him was someone he had never in his life seen before.