“Want to do something?” Brenda asked. “The day looms . . . empty.”
“Sure.”
The two women paid their tabs and then walked out of the diner and into the hot West Wheaton sun. As if choreographed, they both reached into their purses and put on their sunglasses. Brenda, apparently leading, turned uptown and Eileen followed. “So,” Brenda said. “Tell me the latest with your man.”
“He’s not my man,” Eileen said. “That’s the problem.”
Boy, Brenda knew that one.
“He’s too young, and I’m too old, but the sex is great. What about you?”
“Well, at least you get great sex. I don’t even get that. I met a great guy, I mean a really great guy, but he has a girlfriend. I can’t get him out of my head, though.”
“Forget him.”
“Yeah.” Brenda stopped and shaded her eyes as she looked into the front window of the town’s priciest shoe store. “Cute, those strappy little sandals.”
Eileen agreed. “I haven’t bought cute shoes in years.”
“Yeah,” Brenda said. “Me, neither.”
“I think the guy I’m screwing has the hots for my daughter,” Eileen said, then turned her head and kept walking uptown.
Brenda jogged a couple of steps to catch up.
“He’s all wrong for me, and he doesn’t treat me very well, but it’s like I’m addicted to him. When he’s touching me, when he wants me, I feel like the queen of the universe. Then when it’s over, I feel dirty again.”
“Give him up, Eileen. You can do better.”
“Yeah,” she said, and sniffed.
“In fact,” Brenda said, “having nothing is better than having that.”
“Yeah.” Eileen pulled a wadded-up donut-shop napkin from her purse and blew her nose, but kept walking.
Brenda realized the truth of her words. Having nothing was better than having that. Forget Denny, she told herself. Having nothing was better than having him. He’s too young, and he wouldn’t know how to treat me right. And he’s spoken for.
But like Eileen, Brenda knew she had all that stuff straight in her head, but not in her heart. She couldn’t wait to run into Denny again. She just wanted to take a look into his eyes, to make certain that there was nothing there, that there could be nothing there. He was her only hope for a boyfriend, and that made her sound and feel desperate and horrible. But at least she hadn’t had sex with him. Jeez, poor Eileen. She was stuck on this guy, and it was all the worse because she couldn’t keep her hands off him. And he was too chicken shit to cut her loose. She knew that kind of guy. She hated that kind of guy, the kind that wasted a girl’s life, using his empty promises that came sometimes with and sometimes without words.
They walked on uptown, but the day stretched before them, like the vast empty warehouses of the future.
~ ~ ~
Sly felt the trouble coming on inside his head, but thought that this time he could control it. He knew it was because of the dead guy. Seeing another dead guy after all these years brought memories up to play on the inside back of his skull, and they weren’t good memories. Dead guys and weapons. He pulled the slingshot out of his back pocket and put it in his hand, metal resting on his wrist. He pinched the leather and pulled back on the surgical tubing, aiming it at an exploded thistle head. He let go, the tubing snapped with a satisfying sound, and before he could stop himself, he said, not loud, but loud enough to wake York, “Take that, you gook.”
And the fire in him continued to rise. He felt it, and didn’t like it, but he knew that soon he would start to like it and then the trouble would start.
“You okay, Sly?” York asked.
York knew. York knew everything. Sly looked over at York and wondered if he’d take a bullet for York, or if York would take a bullet for him. Maybe. Maybe not. Hard to figure the allies when they’re not wearing the proper uniforms. “Yeah,” he said in answer.
“You out of money?”
“Yeah,” Sly said. He knew what York was saying. That if he got a job and got some pride going again, he could maybe stop the trouble before it started. But that wasn’t how he felt at the moment. He would much rather have those railroad guys come on down and try to evict them.
“Maybe you could go get me some kind of tomato juice?”
“Tomato juice?”
“Yeah. Got a hankerin’.”
“Okay.” Sly stuck his slingshot under his bedding and walked up the path toward town. Tomato juice. He wondered if they’d have anything like that over at the mission. He could use a shower, too, while he was out. Clean body, clean mind, clean kill.
There was a new guy at the front desk of the mission, and he wanted to give Sly a hard time, but Sly was in no mood, and it didn’t take long for the guy to figure that out. “All I want,” Sly said, slow and careful, “is to take a shower and get some tomato juice. That’s it. Now just exactly what the fuck is your objection to any of that?”
“None,” the guy said, and Sly walked on by him, grabbed a clean towel off the pile and headed for the showers.
But what he saw in the mirror caught him up short. He saw his father. Sly hadn’t seen his father in thirty years, but he saw him right there in the mission mirror, wearing that polo shirt with the multi-colored shark embroidered on it. His hair was long and greasy stringy and gray, and his beard was out of control, and his teeth were going, but it was his father, no question. No doubt about those being the haunted eyes of Sylvester’s dad.
Sly wanted to rip his eyeballs out. Instead, he got a firm grip on his emotions. Save it, he told himself. You’ll need all that later on tonight. Then he stripped down and stepped into a steamy shower. He used a fresh razor blade from the box and gave himself a shave, then took a pair of scissors and a clean comb and whacked off his hair. The cut was uneven, probably especially the back, but at least it was short and it would be another year or so before he’d need another haircut. All the while, he avoided looking at his own eyes.
Then he brushed his teeth with a new toothbrush out of the box, and when he was fresh and clean from top to bottom, he looked at himself in the mirror.
He had become his father. He had become the man he hated.
The trouble was seeping closer, Sly could smell it. But it was still far enough off that he remembered York’s tomato juice, snagged a can of it from the kitchen, and left the mission. He tightened his right fist over and over again, liking how his muscles and tendons looked when they were tense. He liked the feel of the tension. He wanted to hit something. He wanted to hurt, to punch, to smack, to damage.
He was ready for a kill.
~ ~ ~
Denny came home while Sly was gone, to find York shredding newspaper. York shredded newspaper into his lap when he worried about something, and he had a fair pile going over his knees.
Denny’s head hurt like he never believed a head could hurt. That pool-cue crack had probably done some permanent damage inside. When he looked at anything light colored or shiny, he thought his eyes would explode. If he moved his head too fast, he thought he was going to throw up. Every step down the path made his teeth jar, and with every jar of the teeth, someone took a sledgehammer to the back of his head. He just wanted to give York the things he’d stolen from Walmart, then lie down and die.
But that wasn’t going to happen, because York was shredding newspaper. That worried Denny a lot more than any railroad goons. When York wasn’t right, the world wasn’t right, and York clearly wasn’t right.
“York?” he said, then emptied his pants of stolen booty.
“Sly’s in trouble,” York said, and the way he said it, Denny knew exactly the type of trouble he meant. It had been a long time. A long time they had lived in peace and quiet down there by the tracks, but the combination of dead guy, railroad hassling—and probably the full moon, if York’s theories held true—added up to something about to spurt, and of course it had to be Sly.
Denny had never actually seen Sly be the legendar
y way he got, but he’d heard, and what he’d heard hadn’t been good.
“My head hurts, York,” Denny said.
York just reached for another sheet of newspaper and began tearing it into long strips.
“Where is Sly?”
“Gone to get me some tomato juice.”
“How do you know he’s in trouble?”
“I can sense it, is all. He needs us now. He needs to know he can count on us.”
“Shit. He knows that.” Denny saw shooting lights when he spoke.
“He needs to be reassured.”
“Okay,” Denny said, and then lay down on his blanket and put a new, clean pair of socks over his eyes to block out the light. In spite of the pain in his head, he liked the store-bought smell of those clean, new socks. He wished it was evening. The sun was hot and blazing down at him from directly above. That didn’t help the sickening pounding in his skull. “Got any aspirin?” he asked, but York didn’t answer. Clover would be the one with aspirin, not York. York didn’t have anything. Jesus Christ, Denny thought to himself as he squinted at a new round of poundings. I’d sell my soul for a couple of aspirin. It was even worse than before, now that the world was dark and silent and he could see and hear the pain more clearly.
He lay as still as possible, feeling his head rock with every beat of his heart, and wished he was lying naked on some suede sofa in a cool, dark room with a beer in his hand and his head in Clover’s lap, while she played with his hair. If he concentrated, maybe he could get himself there. He almost could, if it weren’t for the sound of newspaper being ripped into strips.
At the moment, dying seemed like a step in the right direction.
~ ~ ~
York kept his fingers busy while he tried to think of himself as a resident of an old-folks’ home. Could be that the good lord was thinking it was time for York to spread out with his ministry. There would be more people to reach in a place like that than there were here in the weeds. Personally, he thought that those who came down to the train tracks needed his particular type of ministry more than those who lived Christian lives and ended up brainless and tended, but it was not up to him to judge who were the spiritually thirsty. He’d go to a home if God wanted him to, and it appeared as if that’s exactly what God wanted.
There would be no fighting the railroad guys and the mayor. Denny was down for the count, Sly was missing in action, Clover, bless her heart, was off doing girlie things, exactly the way she ought to be doing them, and York felt as though a regular bath and regular meals and maybe a little arthritis medicine now and then might do him some good. Yep, perhaps it was time for York to retire.
But he didn’t want to. He’d still stand fast; he wouldn’t go willingly. They’d have to take him by force, but he wouldn’t resist much. He took another Sunday edition off the stack of brittle newspapers that served as a wall around his room and flopped it into his lap. It was damp from soaking up years of winter rain and smelled wonderfully moldy. He began to shred the pieces that didn’t either crumble or crisp in his hands. He’d miss that smell.
He tried not to think about Ed, and what would happen to him if he didn’t have a safe haven every now and then, and of Chris, and all the other young’uns who needed his type of direction. He could see Ed, too drunk to get up some hot California morning, dried to a husk by afternoon. He could see Chris messing with drugs, messing with those fast girls looking for babies, messing with crime and police and a continual stream of jail cells.
And Sly? Well, Sly would move on down the line, and he’d be all right. He’d keep doing what he’d been doing all his life, being angry at everything, and that anger would see him through. Denny, too, always seemed to be able to land on his feet. Clover had a good head on her shoulders. No, it wasn’t the home team that York fretted over. It was those faceless, nameless ones the lord steered his way who needed his old-fashioned talk. And he needed them.
That was the bad part.
“Hey, York?” Denny’s voice cut through the noisy daytime silence.
“Yeah?”
“Who do you suppose killed the dead guy, anyway?”
Good question. “Don’t know,” York said, and got busy again with the shredding the newspapers. Who killed that dead guy and why? And why weren’t the cops looking in that direction instead of at them?
Good questions. Very good questions.
~ ~ ~
“And now,” Milo Grimes said to the shamefaced deputy standing in front of him, “if you think you can keep your dick in your pants for the next ten minutes, we’ve got some things to talk about.” Grimes enjoyed making this little weasel squirm. He had use for him, and when this ugly situation was complete, he’d dispose of the worm. It would be his great pleasure. Maybe he’d put paid to both this little creep and Susie Marie both. Together. The thought made his lips draw up in exquisite distaste, and he had to clamp down on his emotions in order to deal with the task at hand. “Okay now,” he said to Travis. “Sit down and listen very carefully to what I have to say. If things go well, they go very well for you, understand?”
Travis didn’t, but he nodded. He was amazed he still had a job. He was amazed he still had his balls. At the moment, he couldn’t think that anything could ever go better for him than to sit in front of the mayor, career and body still intact, and with the taste of Susie Marie still on his tongue.
And then he started to get the gist of what the mayor was asking of him. Not in plain English, of course, that wasn’t his style, because that would be prosecutable. No, what the mayor was asking was far worse, and would leave him holding the bag.
The mayor stopped talking and looked at him, and Travis realized he was waiting for an answer. The answer was going to have to be either yes or no. The answer was either going to be to save his job and jeopardize his soul and trust that the mayor wouldn’t blow the whistle and send him to prison for the rest of his sorry life, or to clear out with a black mark on his record and his tail between his legs.
Then the mayor smiled at him, and like the dog that wagged his tail as it gulped down poisoned meat, he smiled back and nodded.
They shook hands, and Travis left the mayor’s office. That’s when Travis realized that Mayor Grimes had no reason at all to go to bat for him. Travis couldn’t implicate that suck-face Grimes, because he had no proof. Unless and until he could get proof, he’d just let the mayor think he was on his side, but he wasn’t about to wear gray for the rest of his life just for screwing that slimeball’s tarty wife. Nope, he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to do, he just had to wait until he had a little insurance policy against Grimes selling him out.
And with that decision, Deputy Travis felt in control again. The day just got a little bit brighter.
He jumped into his cruiser and went to the station to check in with the sheriff.
~ ~ ~
Clover always sang to her plants when she watered them. She thought they responded positively to the quiet energy. She was pleased about all the baby spider plants that hung down from the mother spider plant. It had grown enormous under her careful tending. She knew she ought to clip the little ones off and let them start lives of their own, but that was hard for her, maybe because she’d rather not have been clipped off her own family. She had a Boston fern that she misted twice a day, and four different-colored Christmas cacti crowded into one big pot that bloomed in glorious profusion every holiday season. On the railing in the back were thirty different cacti, all in identical little terra-cotta pots. Each had a name, each had a personality, each had a flower in its own time. In her bedroom she had a philodendron that snaked across the floor, and in the kitchen, she had an oxalis. A four-leafed clover. The little leaves opened every morning and closed every evening, and it bloomed with little white flowers almost continuously. Clover found many metaphors for life in her plants. Sometimes she pinched them back when they were getting too far ahead of themselves, sometimes she decorated their pots, sometimes she just found comfort in t
heir company. They weren’t heartbeats in her little cottage, but they were friends and roommates nevertheless. They certainly communicated in very strong, vivid language. And their needs were uncomplicated.
“You ought to open up a damn plant store,” Eileen said as she opened the back door and helped herself in.
“Hi, Mom,” Clover said, stroking the leaves of a baby spider descendant and then setting the watering can down in the kitchen sink. “Want a baby spider plant? It’d add a little life to your place.” Clover knew that sending one of her babies to her mom’s house meant a slow, dehydrating death, but then, maybe not. You never know.
“Nah. I’d just kill it. Plants are meant to be outside, know?”
“Well, you can come over here and enjoy mine anytime.”
“Came to show you my new shoes.” Eileen hadn’t polished her toenails in a month or more, so the bright-red polish was scraped and uneven, and grown out from her cuticles. Her new pink shoes were high-heeled sandals and looked to Clover like torture devices for her feet.
“Are they comfortable?”
“They were on sale.” Eileen sat down in a kitchen chair and took them off. “Hell, no, they’re not comfortable. I already got a blister, I think.” She examined her foot while Clover filled the teakettle and put it on the little stove to heat. “Got any polish?”
Clover fetched clippers, nail file, polish remover, cotton balls and a light-pink nail polish from the bathroom. They sat at the little table in companionable silence and polished their respective toenails. The pink Clover chose was a perfect match for Eileen’s new sandals. Then Clover poured them each a cup of tea, took one of her mother’s wearied hands and began to file her fingernails.
“I turn forty next week,” Eileen said.
“I know.”
“My hands look like it.”
“You should moisturize them before going to bed.”
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