by Warren Read
“Why would you say that? Of course it matters.”
“No,” Rodney said. “Because I was with him at the start of it all. I was with him, so it’s partly my fault.”
“Oh that’s a crock of bullshit,” she said. “That sounds like something Lester would say. That fellow Otis is the one driving the train, kid. You’re just hooked to the end is all.”
Rodney took the second cookie from his plate and held it out to her.
“Look at you,” she said, taking it from his fingers. “The only gentleman in this place.”
“Nadine!” Lester’s voice raked through the trees. “You put the bed together yet? It’s getting dark.”
“I rest my case.” She stood up and brushed off her lap. “I could use a hand if you’re up to it.” she said to Rodney. “It won’t be the Four Seasons but we’ll make it something you can fall asleep on.”
They carried armloads of musty blankets, burrs and grass collecting to ends that dragged behind them. After they piled it all into the back of the old van, Rodney stuffing the best of the pillows into the corner, Nadine sat down on the floor’s edge and leaned in to the cab.
“Give a holler if something comes up.” It was a tone so low it was nearly a hum. “If something happens, I mean.”
“What’s gonna happen?” Was she talking about wild animals? Were there grizzlies out there?
For a moment she didn’t reply, and he wondered if they just might be in the middle of bear country after all. “I’m sure nothing,” she said finally. “But that rear door opens outward if for some reason you need a quick exit.” Then she laid a flashlight onto the blankets and stepped out onto the dirt, making her way through the tree shadows on back to the house.
Otis had stripped down to his undershirt and sagging briefs, and he waved Rodney to the bedroll against the back of the van. The space was nothing but mattresses, a jigsaw of yellowed rectangles, the occasional cloud of stain bleeding through. The flashlight beam pierced through windows to dart among the pine branches.
“We’ll find the shower for you tomorrow,” he said. “You smell like shit.”
“We smell the same,” Rodney said. Perhaps Otis had forgotten about pissing himself.
Rodney crawled to the back and slid under the wool blanket, bunching it up to his chin just before Otis cut the light. There was the noise of rusted springs and the gentle bouncing of the rig as Otis seemed to struggle with his own bed there by the door. And throughout all of this he was talking, to nobody it seemed, under and over his breath about Lester and his woman, and of money and things owed, and unappreciated. Somewhere, sometime in the midst all that mumbling, Rodney dropped off.
29
“You’d follow a man straight off a cliff if that’s where he led you.”
Her mother never had any use for the men Nadine brought around. There was always something wrong with them: too short, bad skin. They drank too early in the afternoon, or they went out too late at night. She’d heard stories about them from ladies at work, or their tattoos looked suggestive and aggressive. It got to where Nadine gave up on introductions, just walked right past her mother wherever she might be, busying herself with the kinds of nonsense Nadine swore she would never do. Stitching things that should have been thrown out long before, polishing silverware that nobody ever used. Scrubbing vegetables that were perfectly fine as they were. And as right as her mother was about those men, Nadine would never give her credit, not in a million years. And besides, Nadine always managed to stop just shy of the cliff.
With Jimmy, she had known what the trip was about. She had helped with the weighing and double bagging, packing it tight into the sports bags—basketball teams, all of them. He hadn’t appreciated her, though, and while she could forgive an oversight here and there, she found that she had her limits. Even her mother would attest to that.
“You’ve always been a hothead, Nadine,” she said, as her daughter threw the last of her clothes into the plastic garbage bag. That time it was Armand waiting at the curb in his little German coupe. “God forbid someone should give you the smallest bit of criticism.”
Nadine stomped through the house to be heard and slammed the door behind her so hard that old Mrs. Hulburt stood up from her garden bed, craned around her holly bush to try and see what in the world had just happened.
Now, Nadine looked up from her spot on the sofa, from the open magazine on her lap, at the sound of steps coming up onto the porch. It was well past dark, the single gas lamp barely illuminating her reading much less the room itself. She had left the front door open, the screen the only thing keeping the outside where it should be. The figure, dark and lanky, stopped at the threshold.
“Nadine.” It was, of course, him. His hand pressed against the screen, moving itself like a disembodied object up one side and down again.
“Otis.”
He stepped back from the screen and ran a fingernail over the mesh. “Is Lester around?”
She turned the magazine onto its face, as if she should somehow hide what she’d been reading from him, this man she could not see. “He’s sleeping,” she said. She stood up and stretched, uncurling her arms from her sides like a mantis. “I was just about to—”
“I wanted to thank you, Nadine,” he said. “For letting us hole up here. I’d bet a hundred dollars if you had your way we’d be at ten different places before we’d be here.”
He leaned against the jamb, the profile of his face against the screen now. “You got a Coke or something?” he asked. “I could sure as hell use a Coke.”
Nadine took a step closer to him. With his face pressed like that into the screen, he looked like one of those bank robbers who had forced a pantyhose over his face, his features flattened and childlike. He pleaded with her, with that marble eye of his.
She went into the kitchen, to the ice box where the soda sat stacked near the back, where Lester kept them. She wasn’t going to wake him to ask.
“It’s warm,” she said, passing it through the door. “I can’t start up the generator till tomorrow.”
He thanked her, and took the can with a trembling hand, his fingers brushing lightly against hers, and her stomach did a little turn. He popped the top and took a healthy swig and then she said, “Otis. How do you and Lester know each other?” She stayed close to the door, her face pressed to the screen now.
Otis suppressed a belch, turned his head to the side and blew it out. “He didn’t tell you?”
She shook her head.
“We shared time in Montana State.”
Nadine caught herself. “Prison?”
“It wasn’t college,” he said. “He never told me what he did to land inside there, if that’s your next question.”
Nadine looked over her shoulder at the bedroom door again. As if she could see in there, at Lester sound asleep in that bed, sucking air through the pillow.
“I guess you didn’t know.” He laughed softly. “It was a long time ago. I was practically a kid, running with the devil, you could say. Stole the wrong car and got myself sent up for three years.”
“Some people might say that any car stolen is the wrong car.”
Otis laughed again. “Where were you when I was eighteen?” He ran a finger over the edge of the screen. “Lester, he sort of—” he paused then, giving a kind of humming sound, like trying to find the beginning of some forgotten song. “He sort of took me under his wing, I guess you could say.”
Nadine said, “Lester, the caretaker.”
He stepped close to the screen then, and Nadine could see him clearly for the first time. He was shirtless, his body haggard and pasty, his hair in all sorts like a toddler just hauled out of bed. His mouth drew down hard, lines etched from his nose practically to his chin.
“Lester takes care of things, all right,” he said. “When he wants, and how he wants.”
There was a rattling sound behind her, and the bedroom door swung open. Lester stood there with his hand on the doorknob, his naked tors
o leaning out through the opening, all hair and tattoos and scowls.
“What are you up to?” he said.
“Me?” Nadine smoothed her hands over her jeans, as if she had been doing something with them.
“Yeah you,” he said. “Who else is there?”
She looked back to the front door, through the screen to the empty porch and the quiet night. To the soft sound of bare feet padding quietly in the distance, over sod and dirt, like a runner’s heartbeat.
30
Vinnie had stuffed what clothes were his into an old Samsonite, and then surveyed the house for whatever else seemed familiar or interesting. Next to the suitcase was a single cardboard box with a curious variety of things, half of which did not belong to him.
Louis pulled out a couple of candlesticks, a windup alarm clock and an old framed photo of him and Vinnie as boys, standing at a lake somewhere, Louis couldn’t remember. Vinnie presented an impressive bass by its gills.
“What are you doing there?” Vinnie asked. He held a fistful of Louis’s neckties in his hand.
“These are mine, Vinnie.”
“The hell they are.” He came over and draped the ties over the sofa arm, taking the photo from Louis. “I picked up the frame here from the Pay ‘n’ Save over on Sprague Avenue,” he said.
“Vinnie—“Louis closed his eyes and gave himself a breather. Logically, he knew none of this mattered. They were things, nothing more, and chances were he’d wind up with it all before long, anyway. But still, it got under his skin in the way that only Vinnie could make happen.
“Where was that at?” He nodded his chin to the photo.
“What, you don’t know?” Vinnie laughed softly, shook his head at his brother’s short-circuited recall. “It was Cricket Lake, up near Mead, remember? The same summer I got this.” He held up his arm, turned it so the scar caught the light from the table lamp. Louis remembered the scar but goddamn if he could bring back what exactly had happened.
“Right,” he said anyway. He took the photo and studied it some more, those cheeky faces smeared in dirt. The way Vinnie’s chest puffed out like a turkey, holding that bass as if it was the greatest thing to have ever happened to him.
Louis laid the picture back in the box, along with the candlesticks, the clock and the ties, rolled neatly into a tight coil. “I’ll give Hattie a call now,” he said. “Let her know you’re ready.” And before the hour was up, Vinnie was gone.
It had been nearly a week, and Louis couldn’t shake those last moments when Vinnie shuffled down the walkway and climbed into Hattie’s Fairmont. He’d paused at the door and looked up at Louis, scanning the house as if he’d just been released from prison or something; the only thing missing was a final salute, or maybe a defiant middle finger. It had been his brother’s choice to leave, there was no denying that, but Louis couldn’t help thinking that he’d pushed the decision along, having never gotten a decent hold on the resentment and irritation, the old coot being under foot and nerve every waking moment.
As he rolled out of his drive and watched the house shrink behind him, the windows all black and cold, Louis tried to turn over that sense of liberation that had been waiting for him all that time, the relief of being alone again. But it was nowhere to be found.
It was just after seven when he pulled into the station. Holly’s VW was in her usual spot, the stubby, yellow Beetle crowded under the low branches of the cedar. It was the only place in the lot that guaranteed shade for the bulk of the day, and she’d claimed it as hers the minute she came on board, timing her arrival well before the earliest of early birds.
This morning she was already at it, standing at the bulletin board, shuffling papers around, sticking pushpins in flyers received through the mail drop. There was a wild-eyed drugstore thief thought to be heading east with his underaged girlfriend; a hippie fellow who’d walked off from a work camp over in Yakima; a kid missing from out of Wyoming, likely kidnapped, information to follow.
“Always running,” Louis said.
“Why can’t folks just stay put?” Holly said, pulling down a yellowed sheet of paper and wadding it in her hand. “It’d make it a heck of a lot easier to catch ’em, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, it would, as a matter of fact.”
Louis went straight to the coffee pot and fished his mug from the stack, stealing a cup while it continued to brew.
“I’m gonna hole up in my office,” he told Holly. “When Mitch gets in, have him give me a holler, will you?”
“It’ll be the first thing out of my mouth when I see him.”
He had the folder laid out on his desk when Mitch poked his head in through the door. There were yellowed papers, thin as tissue, text unreadable what with the blots of bleeding purple ink and script that looked to Louis like a child’s jumbling of random letters. In the center of it all he unfolded the passport. Staring back at him, that face, almost exactly the way it had looked up at him under the pines. Eyes vacant and tired, the face a roadmap of lines and folds from his hairline to his chin, nothing whatsoever to suggest that the man had had a single bit of joy in his life. Louis had seen plenty of passports in his life and while they could never be mistaken for a Sears portrait, one could typically get a sense of hope. A passport usually meant something good lay ahead, a journey somewhere better, perhaps. This one, in its grainy black and white, head bent forward as if he’d been hit from behind just before the flashbulb, was more like a mugshot for a man about to step before the firing squad.
“Holly said you’re antsy to see me,” Mitch said.
“‘Antsy’ is a bit much,” Louis said. He waved Mitch in, motioning for him to close the door behind him.
“You getting sleep?” Mitch asked.
“Some.”
“You don’t look like it,” he said. “Missing Vinnie, I suppose.”
Louis laughed at that one. “If it wasn’t for all the little clean spots on the shelves where he swiped things from me I wouldn’t even notice.” He picked up the passport and turned it to face Mitch. “If it’s all the same, I like to bounce a little something off you,” he said. Mitch didn’t say anything, so Louis went on. “This fellow. He’s taking up an awful lot of head space.”
“The Russian.”
“There’s something about it that I can’t seem to let go of.”
Mitch took the passport from Louis and thumbed the page. “You sound anxious.”
Louis turned in his chair to look out his window, to the bank of trees that shielded his view of the highway. “I feel like there’s a story out there,” he said. “It’s got a beginning, middle, and end that I’ve somehow cobbled together in my mind, and I don’t know if it’s just this crazy old man’s misfire, or if it’s the most obvious goddamned thing there ever was. I already got myself halfway convinced, but I want to be closer to damned sure before I do anything further with it.”
“Okay,” Mitch said, pulling a chair up to the desk. “I’m listening.”
31
Rodney stood in the shade of a crooked larch while Nadine worked a load of laundry, humming a tune he knew, but couldn’t name. It brought back memories of his mother singing along with the radio in their kitchen back in Hope, when she still sang to herself, while his father sipped a beer at the table. Rodney pinched the towel around his waist and bunched the oversized, smoke-scented T-shirt of Lester’s that Nadine had given him to wear. He looked down the open slice of the gravel drive, through the trees and tufts of sage brush, the rocky landscape rolling all the way to the highway. In the distance, farmlands spread flat sheets of green, and a single water tower poked through a cloud of treetops, proof of a town somewhere over there.
Lester and Otis had been in the shed most of the afternoon, digging around and moving boxes, the noise of knocking metal and glass tumbling out and over the hills. They kept the door shut the whole time, even though it had been hot enough outside that the towels pinned to the line a half hour earlier were already stiff as tree bark.
“So, tell me,” she said, nodding her head back at the shed. “What’s his story, anyway.”
“Otis?” Rodney said, and then he shrugged his shoulders. “He’s just some guy my mom—” He stopped, not entirely sure how to finish.
Nadine smiled so her teeth just barely showed through her lips. “I get it. You could easily say the same about Lester and me if you wanted to. He’s my question mark.” She draped the sheet along the clothesline and clipped the edges, the low sunlight shining through like it was a movie screen. “He mean to you?”
Rodney looked through the trees to the shed. Someone had propped open a side window halfway, but he couldn’t see inside. “I’m not scared of him or anything.”
Nadine went back to the barrel and turned a spigot near the bottom. A stream of water poured from the nozzle, running in a tiny, gray river down the slope into the weeds.
“What about Lester?” she said. The front of her blouse was wet, and Rodney could tell from the way things settled that she was not wearing a bra under that shirt. He had heard his mother say things about women who did that. She asked, “Does he scare you?”
Rodney considered this. He’d not had reason or opportunity to feel one way or the other about Lester. Not yet. “He scares Otis,” he said finally. “He acts different when Lester’s around. Funny. When he talked about him, too, before we got here.”
Nadine looked at the ground and nodded, as if she were pairing two things in her mind. “He took the phone out,” she said all of a sudden. “When I asked him about calling your mom. I went into the kitchen not twenty minutes later and the whole thing was missing from the wall.”
“Did you ask him?”
She coughed out a laugh. “I don’t need to,” she said. “It’s just the sort of thing he does. I don’t know why I was surprised.”
The sky behind the tree line was sinking into purples and grays, and Rodney could see the flash of what looked like night birds zig-zagging from branch to branch with no clear pattern.