Dodgers

by Bill Beverly

  East shook his head.

  “You in a gang?”

  Shook his head again. It wasn’t necessarily a lie.

  “Christian Wolves? Any other gang, known or unknown? You got tattoos?”

  East said, “No.”

  “Do you mind showing me?” the man said. “If you would lift your shirt up.”

  East held up his sweater and the red shirt beneath so that the old pink man could see him, ribs and the two black points on his chest.

  The man was embarrassed too now. “Higher,” he said. “I got to see your collarbones. That’s where they put them.”

  “Who?”

  “The Wolves. Their tattoos. I don’t know,” the man said.

  East stripped his shirt off all the way and turned once, a dull outrage marking his face from inside. But the man, when he turned back, was looking away, with distaste. Maybe for East. Or maybe for having had to ask.

  Maybe his willingness to be seen was all the man needed to know.

  “Good,” said the man. “I can show you how to work here. But I can’t show you how to work. That, you got to know already.”

  “I know it,” East said.

  “I’m Perry Slaughter. I would be the owner. Excuse me.” Now the big man seemed to be wilting in on himself. He turned away and bent down behind the long wooden counter with the thick glass windows at the front and top. He came back up with a thin rig of plastic tubing, which he fit over his ears and into his nostrils. For a moment he stood, taking hits of something through the tube.

  “You ain’t happy with me, I can move on,” East suggested. “I don’t need this job.”

  “Exactly why a person asks for a job,” Perry Slaughter gasped below his tube, “because he don’t need it. No, you’re fine, for today at least.”

  He peeled off the tubing and stuffed it back in the drawer. He regarded East suspiciously over the bristled pink of his cheeks. “I take a little oxygen now and then,” he admitted. “The good shit.”

  —

  There was downstairs, and there was upstairs. Downstairs was the register and the counter and the cabinets full of paints, the front room, the bathroom. Upstairs, out the back door, was a covered deck with lockers and a four-man air station, chrome and shining and eager to hiss out air, and the sidewalk landing atop the plowed-up berm with its observation rail and lifeguard chair where someone could watch over the range.

  The first two mornings East swept the range, raking up heavy litter and the clusters of paints he’d find, burst or spilled or trodden in. He’d board the stranded, wheelless school bus and the jeeps mired and moldering in the center of the range, picking up chunks of new-broken glass or metal. On foot, he pulled a light, knobby-tired tote behind him, emptying it into a Dumpster in the parking lot, which in turn was emptied by a black truck that stopped by and lifted the Dumpster above its head like a trophy, shaking it, the invisible driver jerking the hydraulic levers. At first Perry Slaughter had East taking directions from the other boy: upstairs or downstairs, what he should do. The other boy, Shandor, showed East the blaze-orange coat and helmet for entering the range when there were shooters, what the protocols were for sorting out problems or escorting the injured. Shandor showed him how the register worked, how to charge members, how to charge guests, how to sell time, paints, how to rent guns and headgear and check them back in, how to take a credit card, how to refuse one. Shandor showed East where the bathroom was and how to mop it out. The other boy seemed to prefer the outdoors, at least for the first string of warm afternoons, but then it no longer grew warm in the afternoon, and he left East out to look over the range.

  East did either without complaint.

  The men came every day, especially Sunday, new and curious, or regular, rumbling or limping, tires or boots crunching the frozen peaks of lot mud. They rented their guns or toted them in nylon bags with mighty, treaded zippers. They paid credit or they paid cash—money clips for the ones still working, pads of secret cash like squashed drink cups for the ones who were scraping by, who were no-good squandering, who were pilfering it out of a mattress or a mother or a wife. They came singly and in groups. There were posted hours, but they came before and they came after.

  They paid entry and rentals, and they bought paintballs. Sometimes they bought gear—guns, helmets, pads, bags, military goggles. They bought drinks, crackers, beef jerky, chocolate bars. They lingered downstairs and stared at football on TV, from a skeptical distance or joining others on the sofas. Or they hurried up the stairs and out the back, to suit up and leave their wallets and phones and work shoes in the lockers there, pocketing the locker key or pinning it to a hip. Sweatpants, coveralls, track suits, dirty jeans. Then they went out to play, to shoot one another.

  They left litter: the spent paints, the husks with their brilliant yolks. The blown bags and wrappers, the coffee cups, the tubes of liniment, the popper bottles, the bandages. The gum they chewed, the tobacco they dripped, the cigarettes they ground out, the gloves they lost. They left papers from the state and from their loans and from their joints and their wives. They left the Plain Dealer and Dispatch and USA Today. They left the penny-saver and the auto ads and their gun magazines and their computer-printed directions to here or somewhere else.

  They scattered and held, playing their battles, dark shirts and light, red bandannas or blue, stalking one another with one paint or another. They scrambled through breaks in the land, burrowing themselves below the bulldozed hillocks and against the dead trailers and trees, the fortresses of fallen tree trunks, the one length of fieldstone wall older than anything. They hid in the school bus, or sometimes they swarmed in or out of it like a hive of bees. They revered the two surplus army jeeps painted army green mired near the trenches at the far end of the range, each with its white five-pointed star.

  They scrambled and sighted, scrambled and sighted. Sometimes the men shouted at one another, coordinated, vague military directions, used phones, used walkie-talkies, working organizations in the brush. They formed teams, crews, alliances, factions. They turned on each other and then won each other back. Sometimes they ran singly, eyes blacked, sleeves peeled back in the cold, panting, waiting, shooting at anything or anyone, guarding their vantage points jealously, their long guns slung spanning their chests rigidly, extended skeletons.

  They died, and they waited on the sidelines, rubbing bruises, watching the others. They died, and they came back to life.

  —

  In the beginning East got sixty dollars a day paid in cash—no discussion what a day was or how long it could last. It did not matter. Before the second week was out, Perry had made it a hundred. By then East knew the range. He knew the waiver forms and how to file them and how to talk back to someone who’d twisted an ankle or caught a paintball in the neck and now was angry, now threatened to sue. Soon it was East being asked the questions about how to clear a jammed barrel or punish an offender. Shandor had been there for four months, but Shandor did not work as hard as East or as much. And some days Perry’s instructions were to tell Shandor he was not working that day.

  Maybe Perry had begun to trust East, from seeing him, catching him working when he popped in for a few minutes now and then. East worked hard. Or maybe it was that Perry had never liked Shandor in the first place. Shandor was polite and handsome but evasive. He dabbed at his nose constantly. He could not remember, made things up. He had a thin, rabbity nose that was always wet with something.

  At last one Monday, East asked where was Shandor, was he sick, knowing that wasn’t the reason.

  Perry looked away. His loud bray had, this morning, gone quiet and upset. “All right. I’m going to tell you. Shandor won’t be back.”

  East raised his eyebrows.

  “I put him in my truck and took him down to Columbus.”

  “Columbus? To the college?” He’d overheard the talk on the sofas, the games on TV.

  “The university?” Perry said. “Nothing to do with that. It’s what he wanted. He
thought it would be a good place to start fresh. He had me turn him out on the street with his little suitcase and a handful of my money.”

  He shook his massive head and his body wagged along.

  “If somebody were to ask after him,” Perry concluded, “now you can tell them where to look. But I can’t imagine who would, outside of Hungary or wherever.”

  “Why not?” East said.

  “People don’t connect with someone like that,” Perry said, “who ain’t from here.”

  “I ain’t from here.”

  “Yeah, well,” Perry said. He counted out twenties for the weekend and pushed them across the counter.

  East unlocked the padlock that secured the back of the cabinet. Time to start the day.

  “So, you gonna hire somebody new? Cause it’s hard to watch the back and front the same time.”

  “I will. Right away,” Perry said. “Never really took the HELP WANTED sign down. You need a day off?”

  “I’m fine,” said East. He wasn’t sure of the calendar, but he thought he’d worked fifteen days in a row. “It’s okay.”

  “You tell me if you need a day off,” Perry said absently.

  Perry didn’t hire anybody new right away. But he began staying around. East figured he liked it: liked seeing the men and peppering them with his questions. Liked muttering in their presence and then holding forth.

  Listening to Perry talk, East learned about the place. It was Perry who’d taken his wife’s family’s old field and plowed up the berm, Perry who’d backed the fences with sheeting to keep the noise and stray paintballs in, Perry who’d gutted the old barn and built the store inside. Plus the upstairs landing, where, through the long and dim afternoons until the lights came on at night, East oversaw the range.

  Atop the berm, in his lifeguard’s chair with its drop-hinged shield of spotty Plexiglas, East surveyed the men swarming like squirrels across the acres. Scrambled and sighted, scrambled and sighted. East admired some of the players, the small ones, the ones who shot less, who perched and waited, content to stand as rear gunners, hiding, conserving themselves. As Perry had told him, East ejected players whose behavior annoyed the others—cheaters, head shooters, overkillers in groups where overkill was unwelcome. Anyone with smuggled paint, with stale paint that did not break on contact, that bruised and bounced off. He protected the customers and protected the business.

  Some of the men slighted East at first, or ignored him. But most came to accept him. They saw that he was always there. In the lifeguard’s chair over the railing he was quiet and watched patiently, never hurrying them. They couldn’t get much out of him. But he nodded once carelessly when a player asked if he was from out west, and that news got around, became the foundation of a dozen tales about who he was. He was no schoolboy. He was a runaway, an escapee. He was somebody Perry was sheltering, somebody’s illegitimate son. He dealt with them directly and calmly, looked boys and men both in the eye, ended problems at once, kicked people out fairly and quietly if they had broken the rules, whether they were one-timers or regulars. He cut people off the way a bartender would. He seemed to have no fear and no body temperature: he sat out on the chair in a cotton shirt when everyone else was wearing a parka.

  Some of the younger ones, kids buying paints out of their part-time jobs or the money their parents allowed them, idolized him. They called him Warlord, called him the Ancient, called him Gangsta.

  The night the Buckeyes beat Michigan, a carload of Michigan guys had stopped at the range and rented out guns and snuck in a bunch of store-bought paintballs that were as stale as rocks and left bluish bruises where they hit. Then they lit a player up, a regular, mercilessly, four of them on one, fifty or sixty shots all around the back and shoulders, even when he was on the ground. East hadn’t hollered or blown the air horn. He’d just switched out the lights. Then the regulars had all the advantages, knowing the range like a familiar block, like their own yard, and one of the Michigans had his teeth loosened with a gun butt. In the dark it was just an accident, and they got loud with East, and East faced up to all four, took their guns back and saw them, bleeding, out the door. That night East let the locals stay and play the TVs till five in the morning. More men arrived; they brought cold beer, they brought pizza, they watched the game again on a 1:00 AM rerun and sang through it.

  They asked East to come and sit, to have a beer, but he mopped up and stayed away, keeping business.

  Maybe he wasn’t of age.

  The shooters were white, all of them. Some of them had to forget what color he was before they spoke to him. But he had made his place. He was just Antoine, the new boy Perry had, and he was all right. Better than Shandor—they had not liked Shandor. He was something, Russian, Ukrainian, maybe, not from America. And Shandor was an addict. He was always looking past them, looking at something else. It made them uneasy, the men who came here, drank a few beers, went paintballing every day. Antoine, whoever he was, was American. Antoine looked them in the eye. He knew what he was doing, Antoine.

  They respected him, stopped watching him all the time. But he never stopped watching them.

  19.

  The shooting, shooting, all the time. It filled his ears, was all he could hear. Then he didn’t hear it anymore.

  —

  The range was just one of the things Perry ran—his deals, he called them. The range was a deal. He had another deal, plowing—city streets, in one truck, and driveways, which took another, and he got paid on state subcontract for plowing roads that the big trucks couldn’t do. Another of Perry’s deals was bulldozers. He could grade your yard or clear your lot or break your building up into a pile for hauling away. If you had a home and paid tax on it and you wanted to stop, wanted only to be bled for the land, Perry could start on a morning, and the place would be mud by night. He commanded Bobcats and bigger dozers and graders and a couple of backhoes, some of which he owned, some of which the state did, owned and maintained, though they stayed on his lot and bore his name in black letters on the side. BONDED. The truck that emptied the Dumpster every day, that was Perry’s too.

  Another deal: Perry was mayor of the town. Stone Cottage, Ohio, was what they called it, though they’d stopped quarrying stones, and there was no cottage anyone knew. He did not want to be mayor, but the mayor controlled zoning, and he wanted to control zoning, because no one wanted a paintball range a block from Main Street. Everyone had known that was why he’d run to be mayor. But he had bulldozed them too, one by one, and on voting day a little more than a year ago, he’d won. The range opened that month.

  Maybe they’d known, Perry declared, maybe they knew all along how much he’d hate being mayor of their God damn town. Four years. Maybe that was their revenge on him, what they extracted in exchange.

  “You could quit being mayor. Now that you got what you wanted,” East said, head down, polishing the countertop glass. The counter was fourteen feet long, from an old candy store. It had glass in the top an inch thick. The glass got smudged under everyone’s elbows, but East liked to keep it clear, keep the pans of paints visible underneath, glowing even without light on them.

  “What I wanted then, son,” Perry said. “There’s always a new thing to want. And I’ll get it too, but they’ll make it hell on me.” He withdrew the oxygen rig from the drawer and slipped it on. A cannula, he called it. “It’s only fair.”

  “Hell is forever,” said East bravely. “Not just four years.”

  Perry coughed wetly. “If I make it four years,” he said, “it will be the devil’s last miracle.”

  —

  It seemed a revelation to Perry that East didn’t steal money. He kept the register straight, severe, didn’t take IOUs or cut deals. But he couldn’t see how Perry would know that. To slip out a little—the way Shandor apparently had—would be easy. There was a lot of money. Most of it passed quietly as cash. Sometimes loose bills were offered him to extend someone’s range time, to pay for a gun someone’d broken, or for a handful
of stale paints, duds, for laying a hurting on the birthday boy or the boss. He’d take it. But whatever came, he put in the register, included in the deposit. The deposit wasn’t in a bank. It went through the front mail drop of the farmhouse across the highway, where Perry lived.

  Perry trusted him. But maybe trust was a trick. Maybe trust was the act that not trusting put on when there was no better alternative.

  Maybe trust was the trick that kept him working twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day. Mopping, raking, sitting counter on his ass.

  “Son, I know you’re gonna take me one of these days. I just don’t know how,” Perry hollered, laughing, as if his loudness could command this place forever.

  The hundred per day still wasn’t good money. Just the same, East got his handful every day, paid timely. And in this town he spent little—there was nothing to buy. An egg sandwich every morning at the shop, and fruit from the grocery twice a week. A used coat for outdoors at the resale, used jeans for a dollar or two, warm shirts. A good pillow still in its plastic wrapper. He bought gloves at the hardware—even the men with ragged coats and uncut hair wore good gloves. East studied, bought a pair new, thirty dollars. Warm, elastic, he could work all day in them without a complaint.

  The old bank was built of stone with fat sandstone pillars in front but had the same name as East’s bank in The Boxes. He acted trustworthy around banks, and banks so far had trusted him. Anyway, his wad of twenties was getting thick. He wasn’t going to bury his money or squirrel it away, the way he’d buried the two guns behind the edge of the parking lot, plastic-bundled, in a wave of dirt Perry’s bulldozer had left behind.

  He asked that five hundred dollars be made into a cashier’s check. He made a new account and deposited the rest. The woman seemed confused that he didn’t want to order checks.

  “Just the ATM.”

  “But you’ll want the flexibility,” she said. “Not everything can be paid online.”