“How do you feel about Wanda Jones?” his lawyer asked him.
“I loved that woman. I gave her everything, all the money I had,” Slocum said. Wanda was no longer in the courtroom, but he tried to conjure her, to get one more look at her. “I never loved a woman the way I loved her. Everything I did was for her or the kids. Them kids aren’t mine, but I took care of them like they were mine.”
Between his words, Slocum could hear himself moaning like an old woman or an animal, as though something wretched in him, something like regret or sorrow, was trying to get out through his voice.
“Did she ask you to rob Mr. Cole to pay her mortgage?”
“I was her one-man army,” Slocum said. He didn’t know how much longer he could keep going without breaking down. His ache felt so big inside him that no amount of meth or pot would soothe him ever again. “I was her knight in shining fucking armor. She needed money so she wouldn’t lose her house. I had to get it for her.”
The judge interrupted. “Please just answer the question, Mr. Slocum.”
“No, she didn’t ask me to rob him.” He should have seen this coming—Wanda hadn’t
written to or visited him in jail for months—but somehow he hadn’t seen it coming. Her betrayal was like punches to the head and the kidneys and the gut, and he couldn’t punch back.
“Were you trying to kill Mr. Cole?” his lawyer asked.
“No, man. I wasn’t. If he just would’ve stayed down when I told him to I would have stopped hitting him,” Slocum said. He needed to be alone right now. He regretted testifying—his lawyer had advised against it, but he’d insisted. “The old guy just wouldn’t stay down.” Slocum looked around the courtroom, hoping, but not expecting, to find someone there who would understand. He saw Johnny staring at him. Slocum met Johnny’s gaze, asked him wordlessly, begged him with his eyes: “You understand, don’t you? You if nobody else.”
Slocum saw Johnny nod, just barely. He saw concern in Johnny’s face. It was the first time anyone had looked at Slocum in this courtroom with anything other than scorn. Slocum wanted to shout that he wasn’t a hateful person, that he’d loved someone with all his heart, but all he could do was look at Johnny. The acne on the kid’s face made Slocum feel sorry for him, for that mean crack Wanda had made, hatchet face.
Johnny nodded to Slocum, not in agreement with anything he was saying, but because he realized that the man was indeed a monster and that he was also a regular guy like Johnny, the same guy Johnny had talked to until four in the morning. Slocum was a screwup, the way Johnny was a screwup, only much worse. Slocum should go to prison for life, but that didn’t mean he was all that different from Johnny or anybody else.
When Slocum’s lawyer asked whether he’d had an accomplice, Slocum finally looked away from Johnny. He did not hesitate before answering. He said, “No.”
“Why would Ms. Jones say Johnny Cole was involved?”
He said, “Maybe she wants to hurt the guy for some reason. I don’t know.”
Johnny squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, he couldn’t believe he was still sitting upright on the long wooden pew, and nobody was looking at him.
Johnny noticed that King, sitting beside him, was abnormally fixated on Slocum. King’s eyes widened and his left hand began to shake. His right hand clutched the seat beneath him. King must have finally realized in his gut that he was facing his attacker. Johnny slid closer to King. He elbowed him gently and offered him a breath mint. King declined, but Johnny saw it was enough to break the spell. It didn’t take much, really, to keep King on an even keel, but the concern he felt for his uncle gave Johnny a tired feeling, like he was growing old fast.
Closing arguments were over before noon—Slocum’s lawyer asked the jury to find his client guilty of aggravated assault rather than attempted murder—and Johnny went back to work and started scrapping out a Lincoln Town Car. King was watching him, and it made Johnny conscious of his own breath forming a cloud that hung around him, a cloud that kept him down here on the oily, hard-packed dirt of the salvage yard, down here wearing his greasy clothes, picking through the piles of engines and axles with his filthy hands, down in this neighborhood of ramshackle houses with dogs barking in the torn up yards.
Johnny jacked up the back end of the Lincoln, pried off the passenger-side hubcap and spun off the lug nuts. The wheel did not come right off, so Johnny swung the sledgehammer. The wheel flew six feet and landed in the slush right next to King, splashing him.
“Sorry, man,” Johnny said, but he thought he couldn’t take King’s silence. At least Slocum would have guys to talk to in prison, probably some bored cellmate who’d be awake at four in the morning. Johnny said, “I don’t know if I can stay here, King. Every day there’s guys coming through that gate who’d kill me for the money in my pockets. And it ain’t even my money.”
King’s phone rang, interrupting Johnny, and Johnny was glad. He hadn’t known what was going to come out of his own mouth next. King listened blankly to the first ring, stroked his beard on the second ring, picked the phone out of his pocket on the third, and answered on the fourth. All the while he stared at the sledgehammer in Johnny’s hands.
“Okay, half hour,” Cole said into the phone. He became alert in matters of towing, often sounding like his old self. “Hold on, let my nephew write down the address.”
He held the phone out to Johnny, more hesitantly than usual. Johnny left the sledgehammer standing up by itself and wiped his hands on his jeans. He spoke to the woman on the other end for a while and wrote down directions. He told her, “If King don’t show up in an hour, you call the shop.”
He handed the phone back to his uncle and said, “King, that woman has a Honda with a blown engine. Why don’t you bring it here instead of taking it to the shredder?”
King was forming a response, but Johnny didn’t wait as he usually would have.
“Please King, just tow the damned Jap scrap back to me. Guys are coming in here all the time asking for parts we don’t got. Something’s got to change around here.”
After a long pause, King said, almost without slurring, “Sure. No big deal.”
King did not get right into his truck. He stood watching while Johnny hoisted up the Lincoln’s front end and hacked away at the pipe on both ends of the catalytic converter, practically brand new. Johnny twisted it free and tossed it across the yard. Both he and King watched the cylinder arc ten feet in the air and momentarily capture the cold sunlight. It landed with a resounding clang on the pile of catalytic converters—mostly they were dirty and rusted from the slush and mud and road salt, but each of their bodies contained a core of platinum.
Storm Warning
Big Bob stood at the prow of Doug’s sixteen-foot MerCruiser with the rebuilt 302 engine and offered up a cold, dripping can. Doug kept his right hand on the wheel and caught the beer left-handed with a wet smack. He glanced behind him to see if his girlfriend, Julie, had witnessed his fine catch, but she was engrossed in her magazine article about the history of salt. On the other side of the back seat, Bob’s wife, Sharon, clutched a plastic tumbler and stared dully toward the center of Big Foot Lake.
At slower speeds, Julie, who’d been on the college swim team before dropping out, had been known to slip over the side without warning, so Doug liked to keep an eye on her. While she read, Doug admired her curving legs and her shoulder muscles and the contours of her face, all of which made him think of Lake Michigan dunes. He had read enough Popular Science to be aware that the universe might be curved and finite, but he didn’t realize until now that the great expanse was probably shaped like a woman.
Doug took a crisp draw from the beer and tried to dismiss such a stupid thought, telling himself the universe was just stars and planets and the empty space between them. He looked through his binoculars toward shore. Cocoa-buttered girls were stretched out on the public beach in apparently random alignments, but maybe if a weather satellite zoomed in on one of those bod
ies and then zoomed back out, the photos would show the curving beach itself was another woman, a fractal image made up of the particulate sunbathers. All the beaches pressed together might form female landmasses, female continents, female planets and galaxies. No wonder men felt tense.
Doug glanced at Sharon, whose skin was peeling around her bikini line from last weekend’s burn. Julie, who was by no means modest, nonetheless always wore a plain tank suit. When Julie looked up from her magazine, Doug was certain she would suggest he stop looking at fifteen-year-old girls on shore and pay attention to operating the boat.
Instead, she smiled at him and squinted against the sun. He’d gone out with her for six months, and until that moment he hadn’t loved her. Maybe he’d loved her muscular ass and her long body, and possibly her laugh, which was like waves smacking the beach. But her teeth were crooked, after all, and her feet were big, and her temper was terrible, as bad as his. And sliding over the side of the moving boat was only the most dangerous of her disappearing acts: sometimes she’d get bored at a party and leave without telling him, or else she’d take off her clothes and jump into a strange lake or river. Julie apparently suspected nothing new in the way Doug looked at her; she shook her hair out of her face and went back to reading about salt.
Doug tried to breathe normally, tried to tell himself that he could take Julie or leave her, that it was all the same to him. He lifted his binoculars and struggled to focus on the shining bodies on the beach. He considered that this new discovery of his about the female universe would shake up the study of geometry. Triangles would no longer lie flat on math book pages, but would bulge before terrified schoolboys like the sides of Sharon’s turquoise bikini top stretching across breasts too large and soft to be contained by anything in two dimensions.
Big Bob had told Doug more than he wanted to know about sex with Sharon, but Doug had known Bob since childhood, and Bob’s generosity and friendship more than made up for his crudeness. Later, Doug would wonder if maybe Bob’s big figure at the front of the boat had created a blind spot and that was why Doug did not see a purple Jet Ski approaching, or maybe the boy driving the purple Jet Ski really had come out of nowhere. In any case, Bob yelled, and Doug stood and swerved right, crashing the MerCruiser not into the Jet Ski, but instead into an oil-barrel float covered with artificial grass carpeting, moored for distance swimmers.
Julie, Bob, and Sharon flew forward and to the port side, launched from the boat as if by ejector seats to the relative safety of open water, and the boy on the purple Jet Ski continued on his trajectory unharmed. But from behind the wheel, Doug was propelled through the Plexiglas windshield and over the prow to meet a metal ladder and wooden planking in a bone-splintering moment of twisting motion halted.
He awoke feeling peaceful under the water, didn’t mind that he wasn’t breathing, that he was sinking to the bottom. Julie somehow found him, swam to him with those smooth, even strokes of hers. She lifted his face to the surface, and he gagged and coughed. When a teenaged lifeguard from the public beach arrived, she and Julie strapped Doug to a Styrofoam stretcher resembling a surfboard. Doug felt weirdly calm as they towed him to shore. Despite the restraints, despite the stares of the oiled women and girls on shore, he felt relaxed, experienced a magnitude of quiet that not even the morphine could later reproduce. In the hospital, Bob told Doug that Sharon had gone into shock in the water and had forgotten how to swim, but that he had gotten Sharon safely to the remnants of the oil-barrel float.
Doug had eight hours of emergency surgery, after which he spent seven days in the hospital with a morphine pump. He would walk again, almost certainly, the doctors said, although they admitted learning to walk would be hell for a grown man. He might begin serious physical therapy in six weeks if all went well, but for now he should lie in bed and make tiny repetitive movements with his toes. In part because of the stitched and scabbed gashes up the front of both his legs, mid-calf to mid-thigh, the doctors decided against plaster casts, so Doug was fitted with braces that snapped on and off, their removal accompanied by the tearing sound of Velcro, and he was told he must keep his legs completely straight, even while he slept. Vicodin would control the pain once he was home.
Julie was waiting at Doug’s house the afternoon the nurse and orderlies delivered him, and she directed the hospital workers to place the bed at the corner of the living room to give Doug a view of the kitchen door and the lake, as well as the TV. The younger of the two orderlies kept staring at Julie, who was not wearing a bra under her sleeveless shirt. Doug wanted to smack the kid on the side of the head and tell him to pay attention to what he was doing.
Later that evening, Julie cooked a couple of T-bones on the outdoor gas grill and then took a shower and climbed naked onto the edge of his rented bed. Her bruises had already faded, and she was refusing to wear her whiplash collar. She stretched beside Doug on the bed as though she were the shore of a calm body of water.
“It’s supposed to storm tonight,” she said.
Because the bed angled into the room, Doug had to turn his head to look over Little Foot Lake, which connected to Big Foot Lake. He felt Julie reach into his cut-off sweat pants and stroke him. He saw himself growing hard, but it may as well have been somebody else.
“See, it still works,” she said.
“I can’t feel this, Julie. I told you at the hospital, I can’t fucking feel it.” Her legs seemed impossibly long and smooth beside his braces. Julie had probably shaved them with his razor. She’d done it once before when she slept over, and he hadn’t said anything, although it had dulled the blade.
“Don’t worry,” Julie said. “The doctor says it might take a few more weeks to get the feeling back.”
“For Crissakes, Julie. You talked to the doctor about my dick?”
“Just relax and enjoy this.”
“I’m not your dildo.”
She pulled her hand away.
“I want to be alone,” he said, and just then he meant it. For seven days he hadn’t been by himself longer than a few minutes. There had been no privacy from doctors, busy nursing assistants, and X-ray technicians, not to mention a series of elderly roommates who coughed and mumbled.
For almost a week, visitors had stared piteously down on him. The universe had become a dull, stupid place with his broken body at the dull, stupid center of it. Julie had come every day after work and stayed past the point when she began to fidget—God, she was like a teenager. Each time she had come to him in the hospital, though, the room had brightened and become almost tolerable.
For a moment, however, here in his own house, he wanted to be alone.
“You want me to leave?” She swung her legs off the bed.
“Good idea,” he said.
“You need somebody here.”
“I don’t need anybody.”
“I’m not leaving.” She stood and crossed her arms.
Doug picked up the binoculars from the nightstand and looked out at some boys in a paddleboat. They moved toward shore a few houses down and stepped into knee-deep water to drag the paddleboat onto a lawn. Doug turned to Julie. “Move my bed.”
“Move it where?”
“Push it against the wall.”
“Then I can’t get around it.”
“You don’t need to get around it,” he said.
“To open and close the window.”
“I can open and close it myself. I still have arms.”
“Fine.” She unlocked the wheels and eased the bed against the wall with her naked hip. She was beautiful naked, more interesting to him than girls in magazines, which might explain why she wasn’t shy walking around his house that way, despite the possibility of the neighbors seeing in or someone stopping by to visit.
“And bring me my magazines,” Doug said.
“What magazines?”
“The ones Bob brought me yesterday. What’d you do with them?”
“Those are disgusting. I should’ve thrown them away. Let me go b
uy you a Playboy.” She locked the wheels and wiggled the bed to assure it was fixed in place. As her muscles flexed, her body suddenly reminded Doug of a man’s. Her shoulders were almost as wide as his, her arms muscular. After the crash, she had held him up in the water with those arms until the lifeguard arrived from the public beach.
“They’re my magazines,” Doug said. “Hand them over.”
Julie picked up a plastic bag with handles from a chair near the television. “Don’t look at those while I’m here, Doug. Please.”
“Then leave.”
Julie tossed the bag onto the end of the bed, barely missing his leg, and some of the magazines slid down between his bed and the wall. She looked at him as though she might spit.
“Just fucking leave, Julie. I don’t need this.”
“Fine.” She stepped into her shorts and, after a cursory search for her shirt, put on her jean jacket with nothing under it. The naked strip of breastbone showing through her jacket gave Doug a feeling like a kick in the chest. She apparently wasn’t going to button it. He felt his mouth moving, but couldn’t speak. He looked away, out onto the lake, at the curved shape of the opposite shoreline.
He imagined he could feel the water sloshing around his bed.
Julie knelt and buckled her sandals, one then the other. She slung her purse over her shoulder, grabbed her half bottle of beer from the counter and slammed the door behind her. The room smelled of her perfume, a flower smell and also peppery, like carnations, maybe. He asked himself since when in the hell did he know how carnations smelled? It was that goddamned hospital.
As Julie’s car squealed away, Doug realized he was no longer angry. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been angry, despite what he’d said to Julie, and he definitely didn’t want to be alone. He remained very still, worrying that each exhalation would send her farther from him. His morphine was wearing off, but he had no pump to give himself more. Beside him on the nightstand, Julie had lined up his antibiotics, painkillers, sterile dressings, and lotions with their labels facing him. A registered nurse would be here at eight in the morning to help him establish his routine of care and self-medication.
American Salvage Page 14
