Dodgers (26 page)

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. Marsha 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?”

East stirred. “No, sir.”

“They know if they want to know,” said Marsha. “And if they ask. If they keep paper. If their records are at all legal, they know.” Her son the lawyer gave a listening nod.

“There's paper enough,” Perry said. “Precious little, but enough.”

“If your luck holds out,” Marsha said, spearing a green bean. “But you knew, Perry. You knew, and you didn't even take him anything to make it comfortable. A bed, a hot plate. You could have tried to make it nice. I mean, we must have a dozen toasters in the attic. Arthur gives me one every year.”

“Not every year,” interposed Arthur.

She looked at East then, sad half-moons under her eyes. A silent apology. Maybe she was sorry for watching. But she was watching.

Perry served himself two rolls from the basket. “We'll see what's possible.”

Then she addressed East. “What brings this on is, we received the notice. The state: they'll inspect. Within a month. And if they find you staying there, they'll revoke the permit and close the business.”

“Which would not make her unhappy,” Perry said, chewing. “Which would not break her heart.”

“Antoine.” She spoke up—the loudest sound East had ever heard her make. Her eyes darkened. “He has to find you a place to live. I will make him. There are decent places.”

“Not for what he's paying now,” Perry grunted.

“If I have to remind you who owns the land and the building,” said Marsha, “I will.”

Perry wandered the subject around, mentioning an apartment building he knew, owned by a lady down near Chillicothe; down there they used to make truck axles, and they were once the capital of Ohio. Now they had a storytelling festival.

But Marsha cut him off. “They don't make truck axles now, do they?”

“No, Marsha, they don't.”

“You haven't ever gone to the storytelling festival, have you?”

“No, dear. I have not.”

“It's in September. Almost a
year
away.”

Perry coughed. The dinner had been an effort for him even without the conversation. He was sick, East had recognized from the beginning, but always florid, forceful somewhere back inside. Now he was tired inside.

“All right,” he said under his breath. “I'll find you a place. I can help you pay for it.” He stared at the meat piled before him, then at his wife. “Not tonight. Maybe tomorrow.”

So the attorney son served himself more wild rice. He hadn't had to say a thing. East wondered if he considered it wasted time, coming out here. But his sitting by Marsha's side had given her courage.

Everyone finished in silence. East chewed his last green beans slowly, one at a time, crushing each little seed out and finding it with his tongue. His plate when he handed it over was as clean as if it had never held food. He stood and pushed his chair in square with the table, as if he'd never been there.

It had been difficult, sitting there. A conversation he could never really speak up into. But he would remember this meal—the good food of a family. Even this one, so far from his own, or what had once been his own.

It was the talk of the apartment that unsettled him—the moving, giving up space he knew for something different, threatening. He ruminated and could not sleep. The box was hot with his restlessness. He tipped it off him and listened to the wind creaking the skylight in its frame. He stretched his legs and drew them in again. Finally he sat up and found his shoes.

He locked the front door behind him and walked into town. In the night, the air had warmed, and the snow had thawed to gurgling mush. In the one bright window, a handful of people sat hunched at the doughnut counter. They all looked over at the one at the end, who was telling a story. It was three o'clock in the morning. The street smelled like the sweet, frying dough. The people didn't look up as he passed the little slurry of light.

Near the gas station hung two black pay phones. East picked up a cold handset and stared at the powdery buttons.

It had come back to him, the number off the flyer, seesawing out of that woman's body. He could see it now. He dialed.

“Abraham Lincoln, please.”

“Oh, baby,” the operator purred. “He ain't been to work lately.”

“I got to talk to someone,” he said. “What can you do for me?”

She could have been the operator from before. He couldn't tell. Some males paid a lot of attention to women, but he hadn't paid much.

“If you work there,” he said, “you know about Abe Lincoln. You can get him, or you can't.”