Marvel and a Wonder (12 page)

“Well, I sure do like your luck. I do. Nobody ever dropped off a racehorse at my place.”

“You don’t ever know. You’re still young.”

“That I am,” Gordon said, grinning ear to ear. “I appreciate you noticing.”

“Couldn’t help it. Wouldn’t nobody but a young person talk a fella’s ear off while he’s trying to drink.”

“How do you like that? I always thought you come in here for the conversation.”

“I come in here to be alone,” Jim said, smiling now, though speaking the truth. “But someone always ends up hassling me with a pile of questions.”

“Well, there’s an empty table over there,” Gordon said, his feelings obviously hurt. “You can be my guest.”

Jim lifted the beer from the counter and stepped over toward the empty table. As it turned out, the whole place was empty except for an ornery-looking couple muttering threats to each other over their watered-down mixed drinks and a boy, not older than twenty-one, twenty-two at most, playing the digital poker machine. The kid seemed to study Jim’s face for a moment, then glanced back down at the game.

Jim paused at the jukebox, pulled a dollar from his wallet, slid it into the machine, and commenced to search for the Tammy Wynette song that had just been playing. Gordon strolled toward the end of the bar and called out, “A fella gets himself an expensive racehorse and then walks around putting on airs,” to no one in particular. “It’s a shame is what it is. An honest-to-God shame.”

Jim found the Tammy Wynette song, which was named “(We’re Not) The Jet Set,” and punched in the number, B-31, then again, then a third time, the jukebox lighting up brightly. He turned, ignoring Gordon standing there, and took a seat at the table, nodding a hello to the kid playing computer poker. The kid, from beneath the bill of his dirty hat, nodded back, his eyes narrow and uncertain.

“You sure you don’t want us to order some caviar?” Gordon called out, mopping the bar’s counter with a dirty blue rag. “I’m sure they got some down at the A&P.”

“The beer’s fine, Gordon,” replied quietly. The song started up again, and he tapped his boot along it.

“You would think a fella coming in here for the last ten, fifteen years would be kind enough not to rub his glad tidings in your face,” Gordon cackled to the empty seats before him. “But then you’d be wrong. Some people, they come into wealth and they change.”

Jim took a tug from the glass bottle of beer and checked his watch, already tired of being hassled. Besides, it was near five o’clock, or at least it was close enough for him to forfeit the songs on the jukebox and the nearly full beer. He stood, pushed in the chair, and made his way up to the bar, wallet in hand.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Who, you? Mr. Moneybags over here? Daddy Warbucks?”

“Yeah. Daddy Warbucks.”

“How about a thousand dollars and we’ll call it even?”

Jim sighed, staring down into his wallet. “Gordon, what do I owe you? I got to meet the kid.”

“One-fifty for the beer. Two each for the shots. That makes about one thousand by my figuring.”

Jim fumbled for a fiver, then a single, set them down on the bar without further comment, and turned toward the door, Gordon’s laughter echoing all the way back into the streaming daylight.

_________________

Afternoon giving way to a purple dusk. The town a wasteland, a desert. Three spent dandelions, their rounded white blooms bowed beneath the arcing sun, growing from between the upset pavement. The red, white, and blue debris of a bottle rocket blown up against the rusty metal gutter.

* * *

On the way toward Main, the boy pondered what else he could do to scrounge up the thirty dollars he needed to purchase the pair of waterborne lizards. Other than robbing a bank or the donut-and-pie shop—the only place in town where anyone still ate—he couldn’t think of anything. He walked along the sidewalk, his snowman-shaped shadow stretching before him and to the left, the headphones whistling with Biggie’s rage, “
Nigga, you ain’t got to explain shit / I’ve been robbin’ motherfuckers since the slave ships.”

He mouthed the words along to the music, the sentences themselves feeling hesitant and small. Then something flew at him from the corner of his eye. In a moment he felt a clod of dirt hit him on the side of the face. He glanced over his shoulder at a shabby-looking A-frame house, the spot where the dirt had been launched. There were two small boys, shirtless, wearing rubber Halloween masks. One was a Devil, the other a Dracula. The Devil had a second handful of dirt at his side; Dracula was holding a pair of nunchakus in a threatening manner. They were maybe eight or nine years old, both of them wearing blue jean cutoff shorts, their skinny white chests bare.

“Hey, O.J.,” the one in the Dracula mask called out.

The one in the Devil mask hit him on the shoulder with the patch of earth but Quentin only shook his head.

“O.J.!” the boy wearing the Dracula mask shouted, his red mouth armed with gigantic white fangs. “What you doing here, O.J.?”

“My name’s not O.J.,” the boy finally said.

“But you’re black. You’re a nigger.”

“I’m not a nigger. I’m not black.”

“What? You’re not black?”

Quentin looked away for a moment, a red splotch of embarrassment spreading across his shiny face. “I’m not black.”

“What are you then?”

“I’m Italian.”

“What?”

“Forget it,” Quentin said.

“The police gonna get you,” the boy with the Dracula mask declared, leaning against the white fence. “I’m gonna tell them you’re black, and then they gonna get you.”

“I don’t give a shit.” And then borrowing a line from Biggie, “I kill cops for target practice.”

Both young boys looked at him, stunned.

Quentin started walking again and then paused when he saw the boys’ mother step out quietly onto the front porch. “Randal, who was that?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest. Quentin did not turn back to glare at her, only shuffled on like an outlaw in his own mind, the steady thump of the bass and drums marking his unstoppable forward momentum.

* * *

Gilby stole inside the adult bookstore, Private Pleasures, the glass door banging behind him, a faint buzz ringing out, the sound of which had once been something like a bell but was now a sort of electronic gasp.
Leg Show. Barely Legal. Creamers. On Golden Blond. Dirty Lancing. Jurassic Pork. ET, the Extra Testicle
, the box covers and magazines all agonizingly slick, glowing in a Plasticine haze. Freddy Saps was behind the counter, a giant of a man with large bifocal glasses. He was sipping from a Big Gulp and watching the Detroit Tigers on a small black-and-white television set. He nodded silently at Gilby, taking a long draw from the bendable red straw.

“My brother been in here?”

Freddy nodded again, arching his eyebrows and tilting his head in the direction of one of the private booths. Gilby glanced over, feeling a little conspicuous, a nettle of red bumps rising along his neck. Whistling, he approached the two doors at the rear of the store, marked with the gold-plated numbers
1
and
2
. He peeked over his shoulder once more, scratching at his itchy neck, and then, with some hesitation, knocked on the first door. There was no answer. He knocked again, heard what seemed to be a handful of quarters fall to the floor, the sound of a pair of pants being jerked up, a belt buckle being tightened, followed by two quick steps before the door swung open. His brother’s face was splotchy and red, the way it looked when he was embarrassed or mad about something. It looked like his nose was running too.

“What the fuck do you want?”

“I got something.”

“You got something, huh? You got a dick in yer ass is what you got.”

“No, I got something, man.”

“I oughta blacken your other eye.”

“Go ahead then.”

The older brother sniffed, his nostrils flaring large for a moment, as he inspected the bruise he had made on his younger brother’s face. The sound of a porno flick still running on the close-circuit television echoed in the background. Some person unleashed a low, deep-throated moan, the kind someone undergoing a major operation without the luxury of anesthetic might let out.

“You’re a runt is what you are,” the older brother decided, sniffing again.

“What I got to say is important.”

“I bet.”

Gilby glanced around once more. “It’s money.”

“What money?”

“Money.”

“What kind of money?”

“A couple thousand. Maybe ten. Got to be.”

The older brother squinted, his nostrils still flaring, glanced up at the front counter, at the empty aisles and glossy covers, and seeing that they were alone, he led his brother into the private booth. Originally, the booth must have been a bathroom, as there was the mounting for a sink and the remnants of cut pipes. A small color television was bolted to the wall, in front of a rough-looking vinyl chair. In the corner was a garbage bin, a box of tissues sitting above it on a narrow shelf. There was his brother’s jacket and a pair of black gloves lying beside the chair. What his brother was doing with black leather gloves Gilby did not know. He took everything in, and just then noticed that the flick his brother had been watching featured an enormous black man with a preposterously large dick. He had on a white cowboy hat and was, with his penis, aiming at a target of some kind.

“What are you watching?” Gilby asked, amused, but his older brother was not having it.

“Mind your own business. Now what the fuck do you want?”

“I was in the bar down the street—Mr. Peel came in and sent me home early.”

“Make your point or leave me to my considerations.”

“I’m getting to it.” Gilby glanced up and saw two women tied to a tree, naked. The cowboy, outfitted with a holster and chaps, found them and immediately began to take charge of their happiness. “So I went to the Bide-A-While because it was early and there was nobody but the old-timers inside. I was playing that poker game and then I overheard Gordon behind the bar talking to this guy, this old one, and they start chatting about this old fella’s horse, how it’s a racer, but the old guy ain’t got the time to run it. Someone he didn’t even know gave him the horse, and it’s a racehorse just sitting out there all by itself, and there’s nobody out there but the old guy and his grandson, this half-nigger kid that comes into the store all the time, and I don’t know, all of a sudden, I thought of you, I guess.”

“Yeah, what about me?”

“How it might interest you and all.”

“How the fuck would you know what interests me?”

“I don’t. I just was . . . I was just . . .”

“What?”

“I was just thinking is all.”

“Thinking, huh.”

“Yeah.”

“Say what’s on your mind.”

“I was just thinking . . . we could take it. I heard they got a fancy trailer out there. All you’d need to do was lead it to the trailer, hook it up to your truck, and drive off.”

“What the fuck do you know about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“All you know about that kind of thing is what I told you or what you seen on TV.”

“That ain’t true.”

“Really.”

“I’ve done all kinds of stuff.”

“You’re soft, Gilby. You run when you get scared. You’re candy.”

“You don’t know about me.”

“I don’t?”

“No, you don’t.”

“I know you don’t open your eyes when you fight. I know you ain’t hard enough to go through something like stealing a horse without crying to Mom.”

“Fine. Forget it. And fuck you.”

“Fuck you too, candy-ass.”

“You’re the candy-ass.”

“Really?”

“Really. You fuck men.”

“Say that again so I can stab you.”

The older brother reached over and got his hand on his younger brother’s throat. Gilby gagged and sputtered.

“You ain’t nothing but a child in this world,” the older brother said. “You’re all talk. You say you’re gonna cook meth for me. You’re a hot-air balloon, Gilby. That’s how you always been.”

“I don’t care what you say,” Gilby muttered. “I heard you crying the other night. You ain’t as hard as you act.”

“What you heard was the prayers of a lost soul coming to grips with the failure of the American dream.”

“What?”

“If you ever cracked a book you’d know what the fuck I was talking about.”

“You think just ’cause they made you get a GED, you’re some kind of professor. I don’t think you know half of them words you throw around.”

“That’s the plague of ignorance you’re describing.”

“I’m leaving,” the little brother announced. “You got too weird. California made you somebody else.”

The older brother’s face went soft then. There was something in his eyes, an unsteadiness in the pupils, that showed just how frightened he really was. “I think you’re right. I think maybe I got bit by something out there.”

The younger brother smiled uncertainly, the grin hiding behind his unshaven face.

“What kind of horse is it?” the older brother asked, turning serious.

“I don’t know. Some kind of racehorse. Thoroughbred or something.”

“And there ain’t no one on that farm but the boy and the old man?”

“No. They out there all alone, off Route 20. They might as well be on the moon.”

“You know the way out to their place?”

“Yep. I been out by there a couple times. It’s on the way to the lake.”

“Okay, little brother,” the older brother said, smiling. “Show me.”

* * *

Jim stood on the corner, feeling as if he were at sea. Now he was tipsy. He found the boy waiting near a pair of train tracks that hadn’t seen a working locomotive in six or seven years; his grandson had his headphones on and was nodding along to the music, the boy’s shadow lengthening before him in the afternoon’s dim light. The town’s buildings stretched away from the sun in brief shadows, dividing the street into several parallelograms of lusty darkness.

When they climbed into the cab of the pickup, the grandfather wondered if he ought to ask the boy to drive home but he was feeling a little steadier, so he inserted the key on the red plastic Indiana-shaped key chain into the ignition without trouble. He started it up and listened to the eight cylinders hum. The fact that the pistons’ capacity was judged in horsepower—
horse power
—made him smile
.
He thought he ought to tell his grandson this, and other things—like how at that very moment he’d decided that the white mare would one day be the boy’s, not just part of a meager inheritance to be divided equally with his often-absent mother, but the boy’s alone, as there was nothing else—not the land nor even the chickens themselves—that would provide much in the way of a future life worth living. He wanted to tell the boy how the horse would have to do, as it was the only thing of value the old man had to offer, and how the two of them standing there, watching the animal run in the morning or at night, was the closest he had been in a long time to not feeling like a failure. Because he was certain the boy’s mother would try to sell the place as soon as he was in the ground, and spend whatever paltry sum she was able to get for the land and equipment on the useless entanglements of her various maladies, which would be only the latest in her lifelong adventure of mistakes, and he wanted the boy to keep the horse if he could; and if he couldn’t, then it would be all right to sell it too, if that was what the boy wanted, though again, the grandfather hoped the boy would not. He hoped the boy would hang on to the horse for as long as he could.