by Warren Read
It wasn’t long before the windows fogged over thick like cotton. Rodney reached up and rolled down the window, and the space was filled with the gift of fresh air that had never touched Otis. He leaned out and took in the scent of juniper and sage and, maybe from far off in the distance, the smallest hint of wood smoke.
The car settled and rocked slightly as he straddled the open window and lowered himself gently to the ground. Outside it was nearly full dark, but from where he stood he could make out a hint of openness, of the roadway in front of him, and he walked slowly from the car up the slope of the drive, the packed dirt and ruts guiding him forward. Overhead, the night sky was a view up into the underside of a colossal umbrella, a million pinholes poking through. A single point of light drifted from star to star in a straight line, and Rodney knew it was a satellite up there. But for a brief moment he imagined it might be a spaceship, an alien craft way up there looking down upon them out there in the middle of nowhere.
“What in the hell are you doing?”
Rodney looked back at the car, at the dull stripe of yellow, the illuminated interior of the Bonneville. The stick silhouette of Otis ambled up the roadway toward him, arms drifting at his sides in broad circles.
“I had to go pee,” Rodney lied.
“All the way up here?” Otis came within spitting distance and stopped. He put his hand over his brows as if in salute, then looked back in the direction of the car. A little unsure, Rodney thought. As if perhaps he ought to have felt for that gun before he got out of his car.
“Did you look up?” Otis said, tipping his head back almost to his shoulders. “Look at how goddamned clear that sky is. There must be a million stars up there.” He stood up tall and straight, lifting on his toes like he was trying to reach for them. “I wonder if maybe there ain’t some Jack up there on one of those things looking right back down at us. Maybe a couple of Martian fugitives just like you and me, kid. Standing on a Martian road looking up at the Martian sky. You ever think that?”
“I guess.” Of course Rodney had wondered this.
Otis went on. “I think sometimes a fella could live a thousand years and still never do a single thing worth a damn, something that would make a real difference, anyway. Not in a universe of a million stars. Think about it. One minute we’re here taking in air, the next we’re nothing but worm food, rotting under a pile of dirt. Gone and forgotten.”
“Anyone can make a difference,” Rodney said. “It doesn’t take a thousand years.”
“Says you.” Otis moved a little closer to Rodney, shuffling a couple little steps and leaning into him, like he was preparing a secret. “I don’t wanna talk about what happened back there,” he said, almost a whisper.
“You mean with Mr. Kruger.”
Otis shook his head and then he produced a lone cigarette from his shirt pocket and fired up the tip, his face lit in an orange hiccup. For an instant, almost like a snapshot come and gone, it looked as though he had been crying.
“I said I don’t want to talk about it,” Otis said, his voice like split wood.
“I didn’t say—”
“Don’t push me, goddamn it!” He reached down and took up a rock then, and hurled it through the air, the impact against the tree trunk like a gunshot in the night.
Rodney jumped back and Otis took a swing at him, grazing his sleeve with his open hand. “Get back to the car,” he ordered, then he turned and stumbled his way down to the Bonneville, the windowlight flickering now from the inside, as if lit by candle.
26
It was in the late afternoon when the man Lester had warned her about finally came rolling up the drive, his face staring up through mirrored sunglasses like he was some giant housefly. He leaned in close to the windshield and Nadine could see there was someone next to him, a kid, it seemed. When the car came to a stop and the man climbed out, the kid did not follow.
“You Otis?” Nadine asked. She stayed a safe distance up on the porch, her arm firmly around the post.
Lester pushed through the door behind her. “You dirty son of a bitch,” he said, stomping past her, down the steps and straight over to the man, clapping him hard on the shoulder. “Christ almighty, you smell like an outhouse.”
“It’s been a hell of a time,” Otis said.
Lester nodded at the kid in the passenger seat. “I see you got company.”
“Yeah, well. Things kind of spun out.”
“That’s a detail I’d have liked to know about ahead of time,” Lester groused.
Otis said, “I guess it slipped my mind.” And then Lester reached up and smoothed a thumb over Otis’s forehead, over the crusted patch over his eye. Otis winced, and slapped Lester’s hand away.
“Looks like you had a conflict,” Lester said. “That slip your mind, too?”
Finally, the passenger door swung open and the boy climbed out. He was a skinny thing, mostly arms and legs, barely a teenager, if at all. His face was a mosaic of freckles and dirt, and he stood there as if he was waiting for someone to tell him what he ought to do next.
Nadine took the steps to the bottom of the porch and motioned to him. “You want something to drink?”
Otis said, “I’ll take a beer.”
“I wasn’t talking to you,” Nadine said. The boy said nothing, and Lester hooted a laugh, and punched Otis in the shoulder again.
Nadine said to the boy, “Come on in with me.” And when he didn’t move, she walked toward him and put out her hand. And though he was too old for hand holding, he reached over and took hold of hers.
They went up to the porch together and she gave him Lester’s seat, and then she went inside and pulled a Coke from the cooler, still halfway cold. He took it without hesitation, offering a quiet “Thank you” as he popped it open, drinking down nearly half the can in one take. Nadine took the seat next to him and tapped him on his knee. “What’s your name?” she asked, and when he told her, she said, “I have a sense, Rodney, that you and your dad are in some kind of trouble.”
“He’s not my dad.”
Nadine nodded, a pinch of relief at that bit of news. “What is he, then? To you, I mean?”
“He’s nobody. Him and my mom”—Rodney stammered. “They’re”—and then his voice trailed off.
Down the slope at the car, Lester and Otis stood at the open trunk, Lester with his hands on his hips and Otis touching that bloody patch on his head.
“What happened to him?” Nadine asked.
Rodney shrugged. He took another drink and looked back at Nadine. There was something hiding in there, in those eyes of his, something that he was holding onto tightly. She knew that look. Hell, she’d been there—desperate to share the burden but terrified to hand it over. He leaned in close to her, a wary glance toward the car.
“Can I call my mom?”
“Nadine!” Lester was at the front of the car now, thumbs hooked in his trouser pockets like an old farmhand. “Go to the garage and pull out that big green suitcase for me, would you?”
Nadine got up and took the steps down from the porch, and she did not turn to go up the path to the garage, but went to Lester instead. He dropped his head back and let out a rattled sigh. “Here we go.”
“He wants to call his mom,” she said. She looked down into the car’s trunk, at the mounds of linen in there. They looked like pillowcases, lumpy and knotted. At the edge of the space was what looked like a kid’s suitcase, the red stitching of a cowboy and his rearing pony over a white panel. Lester stepped between Nadine and the trunk.
“He does, does he?” Lester looked back at Otis. “I don’t suppose that’s an option?”
“I’d say it ain’t a good idea. Not right now, anyway.”
Nadine kept her focus on Lester, not saying anything at first, just dipping and craning her neck to try and catch his eye. Finally he looked up at her, and cocked his head.
“You heard him,” he said with a half grin. “Not a good idea.”
“Is that so?” she
said, then she turned to Otis. “You kidnap him or something? What’d you do to him?”
Otis drew his chin back, as if she’d slapped him across the face. “I didn’t do nothing, lady,” he said. “I didn’t do nothing,” he repeated.
“He’s just a little kid, Lester.” Nadine leaned in real close to Lester, almost to the point of touching. “Can’t you see he’s scared out of his gourd?”
Otis cut in. “I said he’s fine,” he snapped. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of everything.”
Nadine looked over her shoulder at the boy, who leaned back in Lester’s chair now, his eyes closed, the empty Coke can lying on its side at his feet.
“Just like you’ve taken care of everything up to now?” she said.
“Lady, you don’t know shit from shine-ola.” At that, Lester swung his arm from his side, cuffing the back of his hand squarely against Otis’s forehead. Otis stumbled back, catching himself against the rear fender of the Bonneville.
“Goddamn, Lester!” he hollered. “Like I don’t already got issues with my head!”
“Don’t forget who here is the guest, and who’s the host,” Lester said. “You’d be wise not to get on the wrong side of this woman here.” And with that, he said, “Suitcase, Nadine,” then moved on back to the open trunk and started moving who-knows-what from one place to another inside there.
27
It was eighteen minutes after twelve when Louis pulled his cruiser onto the rut-laden lot that fronted the U-Pick salvage yard. There were four cars parked up against the tall fence, one of them Hattie’s root beer-colored Fairmont. He snapped up his field jacket and leather gloves from the passenger seat and pushed on in through the heavy steel door. Tip Moody looked up from his rollaway chair behind the plywood counter, his thick fingers working a pocket knife at an apple.
“How do, Sheriff,” he called out. A long, snaking red peel wound over his lap and onto the floor. “What brings you here on this fine day?”
“Meeting Hattie.”
“Oh, what kind of trouble has that woman gotten herself into now?”
Louis laid his gloves on the counter and fished his arms through his jacket sleeves. “No trouble,” he said. “Not that I’m aware of, anyway.”
Tip curled his lip so that his missing tooth-hole peeked through. “Hattie!” he hollered. “The police have come for you.” He looked at Louis and gave a little lift of his eyebrow.
Hattie appeared from the back carrying a set of hubcaps like it was a stack of pancakes. “You’re late,” she snapped.
Tip said to her, “What are you up to now, lady?” He gave Louis another eyebrow crook. “You know she’s supplied about ten percent of them totaled cars out there.”
“Ha ha, you sure are a kick in the pants, Tiparillo.” She shook her head at Louis. “And people wonder why I cut you loose.”
She and Louis went out the back door together, to the expanse of the yard where long-forgotten cars lay stacked like cordwood, mashed, flattened roofs, branches of rust spreading over the hulking piles in creeping orange veins. Every car in the place was a story, of course. A fanfare birth off the factory line in some rust belt state. That joyous run over a long stretch of interstate, handled with kid gloves in those first weeks like it was a newborn babe. Maybe there was a family trip to the mountains, or a long haul to the ocean, the noise of hollering children, a precarious pass over a rain-soaked highway. No matter the story in the middle, all of it ending in a horrific tragedy, blood and glass and broken bones. It was something to consider that for each metal carcass in there, a person’s day, or perhaps their entire life, had been ruined in the blink of an eye.
“I already looked it up,” Hattie said. “You were so late I figured I might as well make use of the time.” She led him past the smooth, cracked ground, among makes and models of rigs that spanned decades, some built in factories that didn’t even exist anymore. Along the perimeter of the yard the more usable units sat parked, a vast car lot crowded with its mangled inventories. Crippled vehicles with holes where doors should be, sliced upholstery showing through, fenders ripped from the frames. Mechanical roadkill, all of it being slowly picked clean.
“Bullseye.” Hattie thumped Louis on the arm and pointed to a sedan about a half-dozen cars from the end of the row. It was a burgundy Skylark with the telltale gouge of a tree or telephone pole kiss at its front end. Where the trunk should have been, an empty space stared black up into the sky. There was no evidence of the old lid anywhere nearby; nothing leaning against or lying next to the car. Louis knew that people typically pulled the parts and took them home to do the install in the space and comfort of their own garage. But for the bigger stuff—doors, fenders, trunk lids—it wasn’t unusual to just pull on into the yard and do the work there, pitching the old piece to the side, to be compacted later.
He dug his hands into his pockets. “Looks like whoever it was that swapped it out must have hauled the old one away with him.”
Hattie snorted. She walked from the car and stood in the drive, hands planted on her bony hips like it was a piece of her own car that had up and disappeared. “He could of,” she said with a shrug. “But I doubt it.”
They started at the closest cars, both of them haunching down and leaning one way or the other to try and get a glance underneath. Louis ducking into the narrow spaces between bodies that had been dropped haphazardly in place. There were the piles of twisted metal, only the littlest bit parts still left deep inside them. An engine block from a ’52 Nash, maybe. The steering column of a mid-forties model International—things like that. About five minutes into all of this, Hattie called out.
“Here it is,” she said. She waved Louis a few rows in, back to the skeleton of what had been an old pickup truck. She took hold of the blue tarp that had been draped over the bed and yanked it free, the sweep of a magician in some great reveal.
It was, in fact, exactly what he had wondered about all this time, what he imagined he might see. If what might have happened with the Russian indeed did happen to the poor fellow. In the center of the trunk panel were two or three raised points, like rocks had been thrown from the backside. But not rocks at all. These dents were less specific. They’d been made not with a hard object or concentrated force, one that might create a pinnacle, or a central point. These were softer, divots surrounded by a wider circumference. As if pressed, or pounded with a rubber mallet, rather than a hammer.
He took hold of the lid’s edge and flipped it, setting it down on the outer rim of the truck bed. Squatting down close, he leaned in tight to the gray fabric insulation on the underside, torn and loose, hanging like skin from a rotting fish. It did not take long before he spotted the rust-colored smudges, blotted in and among the linty fabric.
“Damn it to hell,” he said. “I’m gonna have to call for someone to come pick this up.”
“If you say.” Hattie hovered over him, her shadow a slender stripe over the panel. “Should I keep this from Tip?”
“I need you to not say anything to anyone,” Louis said. He stood up and turned to face Hattie. She held her arms folded at her chest, gazing at the trunk as if it was a discovered fossil, an artifact of something she had absolutely no concept of.
“Nobody?” she asked.
“Nobody.”
28
The sky was cut into ribbons of purple, the mosquitoes out and feeding like they were starved. Rodney slapped at them when he could, but his hunger outweighed his annoyance, and the spread of sandwiches and potato chips was the best food he’d had in days.
Otis sat on the bottom porch step with his knees pressed together, a paper plate on his lap, picking at a slice of bread. “You got any mayo in there?” he said over his shoulder.
“Who are you talking to?” Lester stepped down and took the plate from Otis’s leg, and tossed it out onto the ground. “Walk with me to the shed.”
And the funny thing was that Otis didn’t say anything at all to that, he just sprang to his f
eet like he’d been poked with a stick. For a quick moment he looked at the ground, where his supper lay scattered over the dirt. Then he simply walked on down that boot-made pathway, between the sap-specked pines and those rusted-out cars that lay dead behind everything.
No sooner did they disappear through the trees did Nadine come out onto the porch. She pulled a folding chair from the wall and sat down beside Rodney, holding two Oreos out onto his plate.
“How are you holding up?” she asked.
Rodney squinted up at her, at the way she twisted a cookie in her fingers, turning it like she was opening a jar.
“I’m fine,” he said. “Better than Otis.”
“Amen,” she said over a whispered laugh. “From where I’m standing, I think we’re all doing better than Otis.”
Rodney took a bite of the cookie and let it stay in his mouth awhile, tasting the choclate while he leaned back to watch a flurry of moths knock against the porch lamp. It had cooled down quite a bit, and he thought of how nice a blanket would feel around him then. But then the last thing he needed was to be wearing something on his body that he hadn’t been wearing before. To create a thing that would give reason for Otis to ask him about. He shoved the rest of the cookie into his mouth and brushed any evidence of it from his shirt onto the ground.
“You’re up to something,” she said. “The two of you.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because nobody comes up this drive unless there’s a hundred miles of shit behind them, pardon my cuss.”
Rodney peered through the trees. He could see the dirty white paneling of Lester’s shed out there, the door swung wide open, no clear sight to what lay inside. The great mystery happening in there between Otis and Lester.
“I already told you,” he said to her. “I don’t know all of what he did. But it doesn’t really matter anyway.”