Dodgers (25 page)

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.

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.”

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.