by Bill Beverly
Patiently he listened to her explain the options, the fee-free checking, the online access. She looked intense, friendly but businesslike. Her dark black bob cut hung down. A stud in the side of her nose. She might have been twenty-three. He wondered if she walked or drove in to work, if she rued living here.
At last she concluded her pitch.
“Just the ATM,” East repeated calmly.
“But you can. You could,” she countered. Her hands paused, unsure. Then she lay them on the desk. “Well,” she said. “We’re happy to have you.”
He got up, walked to the post office, bought a pre-stamped envelope, and sent the check to his mother, without a note.
—
The smell of the bleach and cleanser and water East liked to mix together in the mop bucket wasn’t right; it rose and curled inside his nostrils, wasn’t healthy. But it smelled clean. Twice each day, now that Shandor was gone, East made the bathroom clean. Since he’d started cleaning it and mopping cobwebs, wiping fixtures clean of the dust that got in somehow, the men had begun helping out, using the trash can, pissing the floor less. They spat or spattered somewhere else, wiped their blood off the sinktop, picked their bandages up and threw them away. They began to keep it right. They put their returns on the return box, their beer cans in the recycling.
The spiders had stopped coming down out of the ceiling and claiming corners every night.
The barn, East learned, had been the old garage for the farm trucks, before Perry Slaughter had it remade. All that work—the bathroom, the storeroom up top, the stairway out the back, the antique counter with its heavy glass—Perry had bartered.
“For paintballs,” Perry said. “Some people will do anything for paintballs, God help them.” Standing in the bathroom doorway as East mopped, he coughed and laughed both. “When I opened it, I thought it would be a weekend thing. But they wanted to come back. Then another range opened up five miles up the road and stayed open every day. Everyone I had went away. So I stayed open every day, and they all came back.” He scratched his sandpaper chin with a middle finger. “The guys they fought up there, they brought them all back here. Every day.”
“How these guys afford to come in here playing every day?” East said. He pressed the mop out.
Perry snorted. “They can’t. Son, it’s like jerking off. It’s like meth. These boys can’t stop, and they can’t call it what it is.”
“What do you mean?”
“This is what they lie about. Not having a girl. Not were they drinking. They come in here and then tell the world they didn’t.” He looked back over his shoulder: heavy tires rolled past on the road, whining. “It’s the ugliest business I ever been in.”
“If you don’t like it,” said East, “why you got it?”
“You got to sell what you got left.” Vapor rose around Perry’s boots. “You ever heard people talk about Peak America?”
“Peak?”
“Peak. Like a mountaintop, Antoine. Like high as you’re ever gonna get.”
East twisted a knot in the trash bag. “No.”
“Well, that was Ohio, right here, fifty years ago,” Perry said. “What a God damn country. But that’s past now.” He backed out and put himself down on the stool behind the counter, and East followed him out with the trash bag and the bucket.
“All these boys,” the old man sighed. “Their daddies, fifty years ago, they worked foundry jobs, or machinists, or they were white-collar: sales, teacher, bank. Everything. Drove to Cleveland, drove to Youngstown, had a pension, second house. Ohio exported more steel than Japan. Than Germany. Than England or Spain. The whole countries. We were making babies then, believe me. Time you turned thirty, you’d have four or five. These days, most of these boys who come in here every day, secretly, the thing they want is for that girl to turn them out. She can keep the house. The sooner she gets another man, the sooner he is free. He can’t fix nothing anyway. Gets an apartment that’s tiny—the size of that bathroom. That’s all he wants,” Perry said. “Works a little when he can. Got his beer and his PlayStation. Can’t look his dad in the eye. That’s what I mean. We were up there, and we’ve come down to this.”
East stood still. He thought of the road, the towns he’d walked through. “Everything out here is pretty chewed up,” he volunteered.
“You have no idea.” For a moment Perry eyed East, licking his thumb, like someone turning a page. “You think you want to be a dad, Antoine?”
East laughed.
Perry said, “Maybe you are already. Sometimes you act like it,” he added mysteriously.
East lugged the bag out the door into the cold parking lot and tossed it over the side of the Dumpster. He breathed the cold air, scanning the trees opposite, their damp black and bare white. One large bird perched, watching the road below.
His two guns lay in the wave of dirt just there. Every day he reminded himself of them. But rain kept packing the dirt down.
Back inside, East changed the subject. “What about you? You ever had any kids?”
“Early I did,” said Perry. “With my first wife. Not much of a father. Sooner or later, every kid is gonna want to kick your ass.” Wetly he coughed. “I gave them every opportunity back then.”
East looked forward to these talks with Perry—he wasn’t sure why. They went forever and everywhere, and the old man moved from mumbling to hollering about things as if they were East’s fault: World War II. Miners who died. American steel and Japanese steel. All about lumber and what happened when the trees weren’t old anymore. Perry had spent his life knowing what things were made of. He would talk about those things all day. Sometimes East caught himself thinking about it, wondering about things he hadn’t even known he was listening to.
—
Perry was dying. It was not something he ever mentioned to East. It was something East slowly stopped denying to himself. Perry took a battalion of pills each day. All colors, all shapes, counting them out from a box he kept in his pocket. Under the counter were other pills he didn’t want his wife knowing about. He’d count out a handful and chase them with a can of root beer, and he’d wince and clench his eyes.
No one took pills like that if they had a choice.
Perry’s cough was a variable thing, like an engine that some mornings started and on others refused. Some of his teeth were coming loose. One day he pulled one out and lay it on the glass countertop. Then he was called away on his little silver flip phone, and he forgot about it. East didn’t know what to do with the tooth. A tiny blackening spot of blood peered at him from between the roots. After a while he picked it up and put it in the register.
Perry hadn’t hired anyone yet. East reminded Perry how he was stretched thin, running the place by himself. After that, Perry came and worked four full days in a row—from ten or eleven in the morning to helping East clean up at closing. It was fine with East this way. He didn’t need some new kid to be the boss of. He’d had plenty of that.
—
One morning, before the range opened, Perry invited East over to the tall, yellowing farmhouse to eat. East did not want to go but did not know how to refuse. So he sat down to breakfast with Perry and his wife, sitting in a straight chair where the wicker curling around the back didn’t make it any less uncomfortable.
Perry served out eggs and ham and potatoes and talked to various ends.
His wife, Marsha, sat mostly mute. She asked East a few polite questions about not much, then broke off, as if she’d prodded enough.
Perry talked about her as she sat, occasionally nodding assent. The land had been hers, her family living on it a hundred years: grapes once, and apples and cucumbers and pumpkins and squash and corn. Animals that fertilized the soil, soil that fed the animals. “That’s done for,” Perry said, and she got up then, cleared her plate, and sat back down with a glass of water into which she’d stirred something that sank and swirled.
Her sister had gone to California and was never heard of again. Two brothers
were killed at war and the third driving drunk on the highway. When you could no longer hire men to work the fields, then not boys either, waves of Mexicans kept the farm for ten or fifteen years. But now the Mexicans were gone, and the farms up this road were farms no more: it cost more to run them than any crop could bring in. The windbreaks had grown out and filled the old furrows.
The paintball range, East guessed, was something Marsha had agreed to without knowing what it was, without knowing how high the bulldozers would cant the walls, or that a large red and white banner reading SLAUGHTERRANGE.COM would be her view out her front window thereafter, that her home would rock each afternoon with the sound of gunshots and idling trucks. She too had said yes to her husband with only a vague idea of what his bulldozers would do. And now, East could see, she was a woman whose business it was not to look out the window at how her money was made.
The walls of the dining room were lined with photographs of the white people who were Marsha’s ancestors. Fierce faces in gray, the women with hair in elaborate plaits, the men always a little smaller than their suits. The children he could barely look at, wondering if they were the doomed ones.
East thought of the pictures in the gun house in Iowa. The same fierceness, white people with hard eyes, keeping still the faces that their hard lives had made.
After Perry picked up the dishes and washed them, still holding forth from the sink in the kitchen, East half bowed quietly and thanked Marsha before leaving her quiet dining room. He had barely heard a dozen sentences from her, but he knew he had wandered into a battle about what was left, about what could and could not be sold. He could see the fragile stacking it was not in his interest to upset.
—
His ATM card arrived. This new ATM, he could feed cash right into it, no deposit envelope. It counted it up. East was suspicious, but the machine was always right.
The little eye in the window above the keypad, observing him, the camera under the roofline—he didn’t even hide his face anymore.
—
“Warmest day in thirty years of Decembers.” Perry was drinking off a bottle of Old Crow. “There’ll be a front down from Canada next,” he added. “Then I’ll have to be out in the plow. I’ll get someone in here to help you.”
“All right.” To East the promise was already empty. To get Shandor any help, it had taken him walking in half dead.
They sat together in canvas chairs at the end of the landing, away from the building, where the sky paced above them, great clouds, barely tinted from below, coiled like the entrails of some great creature.
“Another hour,” Perry said, “these clouds will run out, and we’ll have nothing but stars. If you can stay awake.”
And truly, the shelf of cloud passed, unveiling a long, clear black road of sky. The number of stars was more than East had ever known. Like something scattered. He doubted his eyes.
Perry slugged from the bottle, sleepy and content.
“You ever do astronomy? The constellations and so forth?”
“What’s a constellation?”
“You know, in the stars. Say, the Dipper. Say, the North Star.” Perry turned his bull neck around with difficulty. The north was behind him. “You know the North Star? Underground Railroad stories and all that?” He pointed vaguely. “By the Dipper, there?”
East laughed. “What’s a dipper?”
Perry’s finger stopped tracing in midair. “A water scoop. A dipper. What do they call it? A ladle. There. Handle, handle, handle, then the box of four stars.”
“Which box you mean?”
“Damn, son. That one. Then the last two point at the North Star.” Perry took another drink and stopped before he said something else.
East wasn’t sure. But did it even matter? So many stars. This is what old men did, sitting out in chairs, staring at these. In the morning, when East woke up slumped and startled in his chair, Perry’s whiskey bottle sat empty on the ground. But he had gone.
—
The cold front rolled in as Perry had said. For two days the clouds gnarled and darkened; then it snowed, the sky trying to blot out the world.
East had seen flurries before—twice since he’d left The Boxes, and once when he was there, a strange cloud that came south off the mountains and glittered the air over The Boxes for five minutes one January day. But never anything like this. The road a foot deep, the trucks slipping, helpless, thunder roaring behind the farmhouse. No one came, and he was glad that they didn’t. He didn’t trust it to be safe, going out.
Perry came through about noon in the small plow, turned off the highway, pushed clear a rectangle of the buried lot. He jumped down then and left the truck idling outside.
“Jesus,” Perry chuckled. “Not bad for a Saturday. I think you can take the rest of the day. I’ll put a sign up, pay you anyway.”
East could not contain his alarm. “It’s supposed to be like this?”
In the disastrous cold, Perry seemed as young and happy as East had ever seen him. “Yeah. It’s supposed to be just like this.”
—
The men were just as pleased to go shooting in knee-deep snow. That Sunday after the Browns game there were twenty, thirty guys. Perry brought in a large red plastic drum of coffee, handing out cups. “Don’t know what I did round here before this boy showed up,” he said to the older ones who just came to lounge away the evening, talking not about paintball but things they’d done and why their knees and backs and hearts didn’t work. Why they were retired but none of the younger ones would ever be able to do that. Why staying here in Ohio was what they’d do even if it was a bad idea. They’d be in it to the end or be damned. That was what they told each other.
The Browns game was replayed late, and the men stayed and talked and watched them lose again. Their season would end in a couple of weeks. But it was over a long time ago.
East swept the stamped-out snow from their boots out the door, mopped up the melt, repeated it once or twice an hour until at last they stopped coming. Menial work. Sometimes he tired of it, felt a bubble of resentment. But it was also true that Perry’s praise gave him a soaring, stinging pride. With Fin, he supposed, it had been more or less the same way. It was the first time in a while he’d let himself think of Fin.
Sometimes when he was looking out over the range, watching the men hide and mass and surge and shoot, he thought of Ty, thought of The Boxes. But he no longer could find the phone number Walter had given him, and he didn’t try to remember it. What was in The Boxes was safe without him.
—
At the top of the stairs, the back door onto the landing, the lockers, and the air-compressor station was to the right. To the left, latched and rarely used, was a little storeroom. A utility sink, a green skylight. All these weeks, East had been sleeping there. He could lay down a certain double sheet of cardboard on a pallet—it was comfortable, smooth, had a give to it. He had the pillow, a used blanket. And along the roadside he had found a box that a dishwasher had come in, still clean and dry. He could fold it flat, slide it behind the cabinet in the day. At night he opened it and slept underneath, the dark string humming quiet in his chest, in blackness, encased.
If Perry knew about this, he had not let on.
Sometimes in the night East dreamed of the Jackson girl. Or of the judge’s daughter, screaming. Or of being here at the range with Walter and Michael Wilson, the three of them searching, hunting somebody. Or of nothing, just the yellow line broken on the road, a line of nothing, of questions. Sometimes in the day, watching the men stalk one another, he dreamed these things too.
—
But one day in December, when the players had left because of a steady rain, Perry came and called East to dinner. Refusing didn’t seem to be an option. Perry counted the bills into a leather folder, then counted back change for tomorrow’s register and hid it where they always did. East swept quickly and locked the back door. Then they hurried across the road, bent under their coats, Perry explaining. Mars
ha had a son. He couldn’t make either holiday, Thanksgiving or Christmas. This was going to have to do. He had come in that day from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “Sorry,” Perry concluded, “to spring this on you.”
East took this to mean it was not Perry springing it at all.
The son was named Arthur. He was tall, an attorney—as he pointed out—and he sat to Marsha’s left. They were already sitting when he and Perry came into the dining room. Perry brought the food from the kitchen and then sat down on East’s side of the table. The room was dim, like for a celebratory dinner, but an overhead light shone down on the table, bright enough that someone might clearly read a document.
Marsha had made the butternut squash, green beans, and wild rice, Perry pointed out.
“But the turkey is from IGA,” said Marsha soberly. “They do a nice job.”
East nodded. He couldn’t tell what this was about. Perry stood and carved the turkey with a long knife burnished black. The son said a tight little prayer, and meat was served onto the plates. It was warm and tender, the first real meat East had eaten in almost a month. He felt his stomach get confused about it, cramping dully.
Marsha waited until they had all refilled their plates before she spoke.
“You need to put Antoine in a decent place,” she said. “Not on a sofa that others crouch on all day.”
So this was the ambush he was in for. The lawyer son was Marsha’s version of a gunner. Had she come in and looked at the range, at the storeroom? When he was out, getting breakfast, maybe? Did she guess that the sofa was his bed? Or had she found his nest, his box and bed?
“That is a garage, not a decent place for a human to live,” Marsha said, “but you have one living there. I look out at night—he does not leave. I look out in the morning—he does not come back.”
Perry, mayor of the town, looked down at his fork, then made parallel digs through his mashed potatoes. “All right. I didn’t know where he was staying. I didn’t know. Say the quarry hires a guy: they don’t ask, where are you staying?” He coughed again and removed something from his cheek with cupped fingers. “Antoine. Did I know where you were staying?”