He noticed the movement of an animal through the aluminum slats of the horse trailer, most likely a horse. He felt a nudge of nostalgia, remembering cowboys stopping here after gathering cattle, saddle horses growing restive in old trailers while their owners had a beer before heading home to supper. His mom was always into cowboys, any cowboys; and Scott had long, and not implausibly, fancied himself the son of a cowboy. Perhaps he had startled the animal, and he moved close to reassure it. He pressed his face to the side of the trailer and looked in.
A kangaroo gazed back at him through the slats. It looked like a deer, a sort of candid fearless deer with hindquarters so substantial as to give it the appearance of being seated in a chair, forepaws curled close to its chest offering its service. Once he had accepted that it was not a horse, Scott was surprised at how great it was to look at a real kangaroo, and he had to pull himself away. A what? He looked again.
A cowgirl in a Qantas Air windbreaker, a black Stetson drawn down over her face, sat at the bar securing a drink with a couple of fingers around the glass. You couldn’t sit far enough away to avoid contact, but she didn’t seem to want it anyway, so Scott ordered a Rainier and gave the bartender a quick nod. The bartender looked off into space and the cowgirl stared straight ahead. “That your kangaroo?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Heading to Utah?”
“Any business of yours?”
“I’ve always wanted to meet a girl with a kangaroo, but I’ve never gone to Utah and believe you me I never will.”
“Looks like your lucky day.” She gazed at him for a long moment. “Are you African American? Looks like you got you a drop or two.”
“Well, my mom was sure white enough. Could of been something in the woodpile.” He pressed his hand against the spring of his hair. “Just died, n’that. I’m supposed to go down there and pick up the…whatever.”
“Don’t look too broke up.”
“It’s been a week.”
“So who’s your dad? Where’s he at?”
“No idea. Four lane with a divider ran right behind our house and guys’d come down off the highway.”
“Musta been wasn’t too white come off that highway. Look to me like she could of fixed your teeth.”
With that, she got up, slapped down some money, and walked out of the bar. Scott thought it was just the two of them day-drinking the afternoon away with a shot at getting lucky. Anymore, you couldn’t come on to them: you had to build a trap and watch them fall in, but not today. Scott, suddenly talkative, directed a question to the bartender. “What do you suppose she’s doing with a kangaroo?”
“I know what she’s doing,” said the bartender, inspecting his row of bottles. “Charging people to look at him. In other words she stays broke.”
* * *
—
A conflict between Howell and the sniper resulted from Howell’s attempt to humanize Scott as just an American kid trying to make a buck. The sniper was having none of it, saying his job would be impossible if he went there. In Iraq, an insurgent on a Vespa was no different than a clay pigeon; his job had its source in marksmanship not psychology. In America’s future, intoned the sniper, the only survivors would have a thousand-yard stare: he was glad he’d got his early and avoided joining the collaterals. “Let the collaterals elect the president. I’m into survival.”
Howell just let this pass: why bust this drip’s balls, knowing perfectly well that he was nothing but a local gun nut who had wheedled his way onto the force and had never been to Iraq or really anywhere outside the state of Washington, except on that one trip to Idaho to shoot a Paiute holed up in a Chuck E. Cheese with a BB gun. “Why negotiate when you can perforate,” the sniper had remarked to big approval around the cop shop.
* * *
—
Scott was ready to head to the mortuary. Calves were frolicking in the pastures along the road, and he called to them, “Live it up, you got a year to go!” What a marvelous day, he thought. Birds flew over the car, their wings glinting on the hood. His spirits began to sink again. He thought, Oh my God, I’ve had such a terrible life.
Scott’s grieving didn’t really begin until he had to negotiate the cremation, which required temporary retrieval of the name “Travis,” and even so he wouldn’t identify it as grief so much as something that was engulfing Travis, child of the deceased. He pictured himself as a newborn in the arms of a young, pretty mother. I’m sure she loved me, he thought. He tried to imagine how her voice might’ve gone, I love you baby, Travis. No, he thought, I was just any old baby that smelled like tobacco and Guckenheimer discount rye.
The undertaker was a middle-aged woman with a picture of herself on her office wall indicating that she had once participated in a beauty pageant. Seeing that she still hadn’t lost the fight with gravity, Scott felt that it was too soon to cross her off. She said, “Do I know you?” and he said no so abruptly she was taken aback before settling down to speak warmly about his late mother, loss, and grief. There was little latitude in these recitations, but they still succeeded: he liked doing it and it felt recreational to think up shit about his mom. The undertaker gave him the feeling that she cared very much about his needs while trying to sell him things, cremation jewelry, deluxe urns, and a coffin that was going to burn up anyway. Scott was already worn out from the legal business of getting his mother released to the funeral home, but he was sufficiently atop things to pick the optional cardboard coffin and indignantly declined viewing the cremation itself. The former beauty said, “Oh? Travis, I wouldn’t miss it for the world.” Not until then had he noticed that she was losing her looks.
“Really?” said Scott. “You’re sick.” He paid no attention to the urn slide show nor to the undertaker’s suggestion that his mother’s size might run things up a bit. He hadn’t realized she’d put on so much weight before the undertaker invoked the surcharge. Since Scott had declined embalming, the refrigeration fee was unavoidable, payable on receipt of ashes, and so what? It would all be mailed anyway and nothing prevented him from supplying a false address. Maybe he’d give Goody Two-shoes Howell’s. Because his mother was without friends, the viewing took place in the anteroom of the furnace and, desperate to avoid being swept away by his feelings, Scott focused instead on the packing tape employed to hold the cardboard coffin together. There was a minor kerfuffle about his debit card, and he left with his hands over his ears, in case the roar of the furnace could be heard in the parking lot. Without question, Scott was not doing well, and he regretted failing to point out that while his mother may not have had friends at the moment, she’d once had tons of them. She’d been a curious person, and he would have loved telling her about the kangaroo and the carrots it ate from the Hutterite Colony up past Martinsdale. Oh God, he thought, oh God.
Still, he felt ready to see his school, the big test he hoped to pass before returning to Issaquah, and drove to it hunched over the steering wheel, uncertain where it was; but he got there so directly, so swiftly, as to feel like his own slightly unwilling passenger. He noticed the truck and trailer parked at the school yard, the cowgirl leaning on the hood, hands in the pockets of her quilted vest, talking to some older students. He didn’t know what sort of luck it was to see her there again. The kangaroo was out on the playground.
He stood among the children happy at the antics of the kangaroo. My mother loved animals! She would have loved a kangaroo! She lived hard and never had the chance to see one, not even in a zoo. Never saw one fucking kangaroo her whole life! By now the kangaroo was hopping in a big circle, the children skipping behind it. Scott was instantly caught up in this scene and skipped along with them. Old Howell oughta see me now. They didn’t like this and began drifting off, looking back over their shoulders at him. One small boy with a homemade crew cut turned and waved goodbye. The children drifted toward the school, and Scott found himself alone on the windy playground; even the kangaroo was leaving, hopping toward its trailer and a refill of carrots. The cowgirl
was smiling at him, but it was unclear what she meant by it.
Scott began walking, hardly picking a direction, but the effort took him past the Carnegie Library. Not the worst idea, getting out of this town. But he wasn’t ready to go yet, and the town seemed changed with a kangaroo in it. No one recognized him as he sat on a bench next to a planter filled with red and white petunias. He diverted himself thinking how much he hated petunias. Yes, he thought with anguish, this is my issue: hatred of petunias as I run from the law. An old woman stopped and bent to smell them. Scott said, “There’s no smell, they’re petunias.” She stood sharply and hurried off. Scott whistled to himself and looked up and down the street as though the kangaroo could appear at any time. Scott thought he could mention some things he’d done in these lost years, if only someone would recognize him. Eyes closed, head in his hands, he heard a voice.
“You all right?” It was the cowgirl. She looked at him skeptically, fist to her cheek.
“I inherited my mother’s house. I can’t look at it. Follow? That’s where she died.”
When she lifted her hat, her hair fell out. “Why can’t you look at it?”
“How about you get outta my face?”
“You need to look at that house. How many mothers do you think you had?” It felt like a month that she stared at him without saying anything. Finally, “I need a house. I’m about to get kicked out because of him.”
Back in Issaquah he’d be able to picture the kangaroo kicking over the motherfucking furniture. Possibly, a rent-to-buy but off his hands anyway. He had little interest in entanglements, but the opportunity to help a kangaroo touched the quizzical part of him that was the good part of an otherwise criminal mind. He was drawn to plans like this one that had no chance of working out. He gets her in the house; there’s gratitude, et cetera.
* * *
—
Howell and the sniper spent the night in town and had breakfast at the farmer-rancher hangout. The sniper thought the biscuits and gravy “were enough to gag a maggot.” They were immediately spotted as strangers and talked quietly to keep the hicks out of earshot. The sniper enjoyed catching people staring so that he could fix them with an intimidating penitentiary eye-lock. He had the tightly wound body that Howell, a big fat guy with wet lips, associated with the sniper’s imaginary deployment. They had already driven past Scott’s inherited new home and noted squatters bolting the new ownership and the mess, but they would wait for the situation to ripen, open up a bit, so they could see into it and, like, act.
Howell was disappointed in himself for getting made at the pier and giving Scott the idea that absconding was his best option. He should have stayed out of sight and let him keep the knockoff Rolexes: now that Howell had fished them from the green can, he didn’t know what to do with them; stocking stuffers, he guessed. In this he disagreed with the sniper who felt that a convicted felon who cuts off his tether is a dangerous criminal and should be treated as such, and given the smallest possible margin of error. Those container ships were all rubbish. What difference did it make how it got distributed?
“I’ll pop him in the jail here, and we can extradite him later. He was just running crap off container ships. Never made enough money to fix the ShitMobile. Cased sake, motor parts, sex toys. All the time it took to fence he could have made a better living stocking shelves at Wally World. He’s a petty criminal, garden variety. We don’t shoot those.”
The sniper called to another table, “I know you?” Farmer shaking his head. “Didn’t think so.”
In the patrol car—fun watching the farmers at the window: It is a police car—Howell said, “You are very, very aggressive, beyond what I think suits the situation.”
“I’m forceful but in a measured way.”
“Oh God, it’s on me for mentioning it, you’re so full of shit.”
“Roll yours down, please, it’s all steamed up. You need to just let things be, Howell. It’s all about peace on earth.”
* * *
—
The next day Scott picked up his mother’s ashes. The old beauty presented him with a measly urn with its embossed harp containing the remains. Scott wanted to break the ice despite getting zero warmth from this washed-up contestant. “You live around here?”
“What’s it to you?”
“Nothing, I guess.” Scott felt as he had in recent days, days of freedom after all, rising defeat, something he didn’t remember feeling but that seemed to look toward a kind of void. He stared again at the urn and wondered what it was made of, a granular surface that seemed of some vegetable material. “What is this—this is like a—is it a locket or what?”
“It’s an eternal embrace heart,” she nearly shouted.
“Why would anyone want that?”
“You wanted the cheap urn! That’s the cheap urn! It’s papier-mâché. It comes with the eternal embrace heart period. Cheaper you get a shopping bag.” She must have realized she’d gone too far with this last and made a final attempt to draw his attention to the embossed lilies before pulling herself up, crossing her arms, and with a stiffened face gazing toward the door. Scott gathered up his urn leaving nothing on the desk but a book of golf tips, an emery board, and a picture of her cat.
“I assume my mother died in peace…”
“Yes. In bed. Goodbye.”
He was bent on driving by the house, the one down by the river, not the one by the tracks and not the one forty fucking yards from the loading docks of the elevator and certainly not the one up in Snob Hollow, where, when he was eleven, the bony chain-smoker had dressed him up like a girl while her husband was at the Cats-Griz game because she’d always wanted a daughter. Those were foster homes. Ma’s home was downwind of the stockyards. Scott was seeing some sort of payoff for his three-year Gold’s Gym certificate, this foster kid the chain-smoker had called a pencil-wristed weenie. Remembering that caused to him to daydream of the cowgirl. The three of them could—hey! this is way down the road—move into his old house, a real fixer-upper, no lie, but with possibilities. Most landlords probably weren’t overjoyed about kangaroos, but he was different. He was the landlord, he felt drawn to them.
No problem getting in the house: the front door was open. Scott stood in the doorway without entering, surveying slowly as though something would jump him, then walked in—a mess, intense tobacco smell, broken glass that looked like bong remains, and no immediate sign a family had ever lived here. Did I live here? Someone had painted a swastika on the Farrah Fawcett poster covering the chimney hole where the heater had stood. Not his mother’s work, maybe a vandal. Mousetraps that hadn’t been emptied of their victims, Tony Orlando and Dawn album sleeve, Crock-Pot full of sludge. By turning himself around in the near-empty space of the living room, he was just able to identify doorways: bathroom, his old room, his mother’s room. He awaited feeling something other than a sensation he had hit his head or had snorted something questionable. He didn’t go into his old room but remembered vividly being really fat in there and being Travis. He’d kissed fat Travis goodbye a long time ago. He tried his mother’s room where the sagging bed must have been where she died. She was never alone, so nothing too macabre about that. Maybe the bedclothes beside it were where somebody had cleared the decks to lift her out. A couple of items caused him to cover his face, bend over, and make gruesome noises: his Tonka T-Bucket Roadster and his Evel Knievel wheelie lunch box. How many years must she have saved them? How many? How many? How many?
* * *
—
Pat Howell and the sniper sat in their car behind a shelter belt of Russian olives and looked in the direction of Scott’s inherited house. “It never was a nice house,” said Howell. “And now it looks like it will fall in. Maybe he doesn’t have to claim it. It’s obviously a hazard.”
“Yes,” said the sniper, “just like the new owner. He ought to set fire to it and stay inside when she goes up.” But he was too stupid for that to have been a prophecy.
* * *
<
br /> —
Scott was sorting through a cigar box full of old postcards when the rooms lit up with a white phosphorous light and the first bullhorn blasts were heard from outside. Howell’s amiable voice, grossly magnified, came through the walls. “Scott, Pat Howell here. I guess you know what’s up—big help to both of us if we take this nice and quiet and head back to the coast. We’ve got a lot to talk about. I know we can work something out. I got an eager-beaver sniper with me. Let’s not give him anything to do.” Scott pushed over a curio cabinet filled with the worthless things his mother had gathered over the years and was walking through broken porcelain. “—have explained to my backup here that I’ve known you a long time and this is going to be very very very uneventful—” Scott fought off the soothing effect of Howell’s voice, such a nice fat man and Scott had let him down again. “Scott, is that you? Scott, it never had to come to this. Scott? Jared, put it down please?”
“Looks like to me we’re gonna sit this one out.”
“No prob,” said the sniper, “I’m on the clock.”
Howell thought, based on what he knew about Scott’s impatience, that the run time on this deal would be short, except for possible mind games, which he also knew Scott enjoyed. He was inclined to think of Scott as a waste, but then he was inclined to think of himself as a waste. That was the trouble with this job. If you cared about helping these guys, the distance between you and them disappeared. You were warned against this. There were enablers all through the system, and it wasn’t always about money. The job was easier when you were dealing with an actual terrible human being. They’d usually been in a long time. They were hard; they were cold; they saw through you. You’d be lucky to keep them from cutting one more throat. They never got on your side of the desk. The Scotts of this world? Another story entirely, propelled down a crooked road by their own crooked history, a closed system, a carnival ride, only happy when they’re scared.
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