The Terror of Living: A Novel

by Waite, Urban

  How had he gotten here? Hunt had been asking himself this with increasing frequency. He didn’t have an answer. He felt a strange pause, looking up at the light, waiting, a pause that didn’t seem to belong to the days that had come before. He’d been an office janitor downtown when he left prison, emptying wastebaskets after everyone had gone, he’d worked as a prep cook in a kitchen, he’d even, for a time, worked as a refrigerator salesman. He had a good face, lean, with thick lines that stretched down and outlined his mouth; it was a trustworthy face, a face that said more than it ever could aloud. People bought refrigerators off that face, went home, lived with what they’d purchased, enjoyed. The job had been honest. There had been only a small chance that he would die, that a fridge would fall over and end his life. Now, sitting in the car, with the windows up and the heater spilling in hot engine air, he felt unsure. Something had gone wrong somewhere; despite all his efforts to lead a good life, to support his wife and make a living, he had failed. What good had running bets and smuggling done him? What had been wrong with an honest job? Jobs that paid him as much as he needed, nothing more, nothing less? But he’d never liked the feeling of answering to someone, like he was back in prison, like he was being watched, like he wasn’t his own man. He wanted his actions to count for something. He didn’t know what that was yet, but he thought that if he could just get free of these drugs, of Grady, maybe he could make a go of it.

  The light changed and he pulled through. He knew life just wasn’t as simple as loving a job, as making money. It didn’t boil down to that. Hunt had chosen his path, known from the beginning what it would be like. Money couldn’t buy everything, it couldn’t buy his safety or Nora’s, it couldn’t protect Eddie and the horses. He’d seen that now, he’d heard it, listening over the phone as Grady executed the things he loved, one by one. There was nothing he could have done, and he was working through that, working it out the best way he knew how, just driving, moving forward, hoping everything would turn out for the better, as he’d always hoped it would.

  Hunt kept driving, swinging his head down side streets, looking for an exit. He was on an island. There was a ferry, and he pulled up to the ferry booth and tucked his left foot into the door and paid the fee. At the loading dock he waited for the ferry but didn’t get out of the car. His pants were half-cut-off, his leg in a bandage. He looked down to see a red stain where the blood had come through. He felt the air from the car vents blowing on his naked thigh. A man in an orange vest directed the other cars into lines. People got out of their cars and waited for the ferry. They stretched, they looked in on Hunt. He was just sitting there. Something strange about him, a man in his car with no book, just sitting there, staring straight ahead.

  Hunt lowered the window. He smelled the ocean again. The calls of seagulls, one landing between the line of cars, the yellow feet dancing on the cement. They looked like little dinosaurs the way they stalked after trash, rolling their eyes, their beaks swinging from one side to the other as they two-stepped through the parked cars. He could understand that specific pursuit, that necessity, stalking after what he desired most. Now, to him, it was safety. It was getting away and not looking back.

  He thought about Thu. He hoped she’d be okay. On the floor of the car he’d found her purse just sitting there. He didn’t know what else to do with it but push it back under the seat. Something suspicious about a man sitting alone in a car with a woman’s purse. From the backseat he fished out the zippered survival bag. He could see the shape of the little pellets in there through the orange material. It hadn’t occurred to him yet to cover it—the gun in there, the bag thin enough to show the shape of the gun where it met the orange material. In his hand he held the bag, worked it over once in his fingers, and felt the little latex balls. A woman passed near the car and looked in at him. He smiled. And when she was gone, he let the bag drop to the floor, where it fell into shadow.

  He wondered if he’d done the right thing back there. What else was there to do? He would have liked to know more about the girl. The pellets on the floor, the heroin, the ninety thousand. He knew some of that was Thu’s. He didn’t know how much yet. But he felt some of it would need to be hers. He hoped she was okay. He looked at the bag. The ferry blew a horn, and if he looked up he might have been able to see it approach, but he didn’t. He kept staring, looking at the bag, sitting there on the floor.

  YOU FEEL BAD FOR HIM?” SHERI SAID.

  “I don’t feel good.” Drake put his hand up on the wall. He was outside in the hall looking in on Driscoll’s downtown office, talking on his cell phone. The information was coming in, and he could see Driscoll through the glass with the paperwork on his desk.

  “You’re going to try and help this guy, Hunt?”

  “I’m going to see what I can do.”

  “What makes you think he’s any better than that other one?”

  “No one said that other one was bad.”

  “You certainly treated him bad.”

  “He’s dead now. I feel accountable for that. My part.”

  “There wasn’t a piece of that that was your part.”

  “I know. But I still feel it.”

  “Just because your father rode horses doesn’t make you an expert. There’s plenty of other people more experienced than you. Doesn’t mean it needs to be you out there.”

  Drake didn’t say anything. He hadn’t talked to his father in ten years, and Sheri knew his father had done a lot more than just ride horses. He took his hand off the wall and pushed his hat back on his head. “You liking the hotel?”

  “Nothing I say is going to change this, is it?”

  “No.”

  “Will I see you soon?”

  “Soon as I can.”

  “What if I said I was leaving you?”

  “Are you saying that?”

  “No.”

  “Are you worried about me?”

  “Of course I’m worried about you. What business do you have out there anyway?”

  “I’m going to be fine. I’m under DEA protection.” He almost laughed but then didn’t. He didn’t think Sheri would see the irony. He felt bad for the kid.

  “I’m pregnant,” Sheri said.

  “That true?” he said, without skipping a beat.

  Sheri didn’t say anything. Then: “No.”

  “You’ll be okay, won’t you? I’ll come by when I can.” He waited, listening to her breath on the other side of the receiver. He wanted to say more, he wanted to tell her it was all going to be fine, it was all going to work out, but he didn’t know that, not for sure.

  GRADY PASSED THE DAIRY QUEEN. THERE HAD BEEN a bridge, and beneath it a river, dark blue with the setting sun coloring the trees. At the intersection, just a single dangling caution light. He drove down the street and found the motel but didn’t stop. The sun was going and it made everything glow: the lamplight in the office golden, the rooms and the orange shades illuminated from within, car headlights farther down the road. He passed the motel and swung the car into a gravel parking lot a hundred yards off. A girl in a little coffee shack gave him a look but didn’t pay him any mind when she saw he wasn’t buying.

  From the bag he took the small three-inch paring knife and then a little hitch he’d had made in a shop on Aurora. It was a simple thing constructed of leather, button clasps, a spring and a metal slide, and a sort of trigger. With his shirtsleeve unbuttoned, he attached the hitch and then the knife to his forearm. He left his sleeve loose. By shifting the muscle in his arm he could make the knife slide forward on the spring. He’d practiced this, flexing his forearm to release the knife and snap it forward on the slide. It was something he did in his spare time, practicing day after day. The hitch was a little thing of his own design, and he felt proud when he used it. When he looked up from the knife now, he could see the girl watching him. He smiled. The girl looked away. He knew what she had probably been thinking, his arm flexing and his forearm in his lap.

  He put the knife away
in his sleeve and closed the bag. He opened the car door and the dome light came on. He looked around at the surrounding lot, and with the wind rustling his clothes, he got out and closed the door. The river was audible, a rushing sound of water and rock. Across the gravel lot he could see the sporadic growth of grass from between the pebbled lot and green, leafy bushes of stink currant near the river. Higher along the river, on the opposite side, a band of willow. Grady straightened his shirt and walked the short distance to the coffee shack. The girl slid back the glass panel and watched him come.

  “Coffee,” he said.

  The girl looked him over. She was a small thing, with brown, shoulder-length hair, combed straight. “What size?”

  “Medium, black.”

  The girl turned away and filled a cup for him.

  “What time does it get dark around here?” he asked.

  The girl put a lid on the cup. She handed it out to Grady. “It’s dark already,” she said.

  “Sorry,” Grady said. “I mean real dark. Does it get that way around here? Like you can’t see your hand in front of your face without a light?”

  “Sometimes,” the girl said. She looked confused.

  Grady held out his hand and looked at it. He felt the knife beneath the cuff of his sleeve. “I like that,” Grady said. “Doesn’t get like that in the city, too much light all the time.”

  “Usually the stars are out, and it’s pretty light with that and the moon. Not much else out here. Nothing like the city.” She put the numbers into the register and gave him his total.

  He dug a bill out of his pocket and gave it to her. He put the change in for a tip. “What do you think it’ll do tonight?” he said. He held the coffee cup out in his hand at a right angle, and the girl leaned over the counter to look at the sky. He could smell her perfume, a mix of apples and fabric softener. He guessed her to be seventeen, maybe eighteen.

  “If it clears, there might be some stars.”

  “How old are you?” he said.

  “Seventeen.”

  “You going off to college soon?”

  “Next year.”

  “Thinking about the city?”

  “If my parents let me.”

  “They will,” Grady said. The girl looked at him. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “Just be careful,” he said. “It’s nothing like this coffee shack.”

  The girl laughed. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Dark out now,” he said. He smiled at the girl and raised the coffee.

  He didn’t go back to the car; he walked along the edge of the gravel, where it met the cement of the road. One car passed and he watched it slow into the blinking yellow caution light. The coffee was hot and he sipped at it as he walked.

  Around behind the motel he found the horse trailer and the truck. He looked in on the passenger side and then again on the driver’s side. Dirt all over the undercarriage and up into the wheel wells. He went over to the horses and stuck his knuckles in and let them nuzzle around on his hand and look for food. “Nothing for you,” he said.

  He took a sip of the coffee and watched the back of the motel. A line of small, square bathroom windows, all of them placed high. The windows would be like mirrors now, the dark outside and nothing to see in them but a reflection. He counted the rooms down. Two lighted windows next to each other.

  When he had finished the coffee, he put the cup down in the gravel and walked around to the front of the motel. He watched the woman in the office. She was sitting, looking at her computer screen. The front desk blocked most of her. Grady went down the line of rooms until he found the Lincoln. He was careful with his shoes, careful not to make noise. At the door, he knocked lightly. A car passed behind him. It was the second car to have passed in ten minutes.

  When Eddie opened the door, Grady could see the silenced muzzle of a small gun peeking out at him from Eddie’s hand.

  “What is that, a twenty-two?”

  Eddie stepped aside and let Grady into the room. Grady heard the sound of a television from the next room over. Eddie was standing at the door, holding the gun on him.

  “Is that the wife?” Grady said. He was looking at the door leading to Nora’s room.

  “Would you mind?” Eddie said. He made a circling motion with the point of the gun.

  “Round and round,” Grady said. He raised his hands and made a slow rotation so that Eddie could see he wasn’t carrying anything.

  Eddie pointed at his boots.

  Grady raised the right leg of his pants. “Nothing here.” He raised the left leg. “Nothing here.” He held out his hands, palms exposed. “Nothing up my sleeves,” he said. He was smiling. He didn’t pull his sleeves up but waited, watching Eddie.

  “That’s fine,” Eddie said. “Turn on the television, would you? I don’t want Nora to hear us.”

  Grady flipped the television on.

  Eddie went to sit at the cheap veneer table. He kicked out the other chair for Grady. “I was told you would be coming here for Hunt.”

  Grady sat down. “That’s right.”

  “His wife doesn’t know anything, so we can leave her out of this.”

  “Makes sense,” Grady said. Eddie had dropped the gun, and he let it rest on his lap.

  “They said you had a history with Hunt.”

  “We were in Monroe together.”

  “You don’t look like you’re old enough,” Eddie said.

  “He was getting out, I was going in. Technically, I was a minor, but they said the crime warranted an adult conviction.”

  Eddie looked at him. “That can be rough. How long were you in there?”

  “Long enough.”

  “You know something about Hunt?”

  “I know he’s getting to be a headache.”

  “He’s a friend.”

  The light from the television flickered on the wall behind Eddie and hung up in the curtains. An old movie with cowboys and Indians was on. “This must be sad for you.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Did they tell you they would kill you, too?”

  “If I made this difficult.”

  “Have you?”

  “I’ve tried not to.”

  “Can you tell me where Phil Hunt is?”

  “I don’t know that.”

  “You said you wouldn’t be difficult.”

  “I don’t know where he is. I haven’t even talked to him. Nora talked to him, not me.”

  “Sounds like I should talk to her.”

  “I was told that wouldn’t be necessary.”

  “We’re just talking, nothing more yet.”

  “Will you be the one to do it?”

  “It?”

  “Hunt.”

  “I’ll be the one.”

  “Do me a favor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t draw it out.”

  Grady had been watching television, nothing but guns and smoke. An Italian actor dressed up as an Indian took a bullet and made a stiff fall. Grady looked over at Eddie. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Why are you carrying around that twenty-two?”

  “Protection.”

  “That thing can’t protect you.”

  “I think it could do its job if needed.”

  “How quiet is that silencer?”

  “The whistle of the bullet is the only thing you hear.”

  “As well as what it hits.”

  “Yes.”

  “Looks small enough to fit in a coat pocket.”

  “Probably could.”

  “This isn’t your thing, is it?”

  Eddie looked across the table. “I’m more of the handler.”

  “You sit around at bars and make connections, make phone calls, handle things?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a bar trick for you, sort of a magic trick.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Watch.” Grady placed his arms straight out in front of him, fla
ttened his hands, and turned his palms up, then down. “Nothing in my hands,” he said. Eddie sat transfixed, watching the hands. Grady flexed his forearm, and the knife came forward on the slide. Eddie made a quick movement with the gun, but the blood was already appearing in a line across his neck. The gun went off. It was quiet and the round hit the wall just above the television and made a solid thunk. “Magic,” Grady said.

  THE LAWYER SAT IN FRONT OF THE FLOOR-TO-CEILING windows that ran the two walls of his living room. The stereo was on, and the sound of the singer’s voice echoed high up in the living room rafters. The ghost shapes of boats and islands took form out of the gray fog in front of him. The smell of smoke from a fire, rich cedar burned into points of glowing embers. Weather calling for snow, the cold coming now and the weather changing. He had sent his driver out for a girl. The girl, half his age, curled in the bed of his lap. A dark half nipple showing from the open neck of the robe he’d given her. Dark hair dyed blond, eyebrows like two sharpened sticks, penned over and held straight. He drank from the glass of whiskey in his hand and sat watching the sound materialize through the windowpanes before him.

  A crash of glass, the girl startling. The lawyer watched as one head-size boulder of granite from his retaining wall rolled end over end into the living room. He felt the tremor of it through the floor. The boulder stopped halfway to him, the lawyer too scared to move. Cold wind was coming through the jagged cut the boulder left in the glass, all the warmth in the room sucked back out into the world beyond. No alarm at all. No siren. Nothing. Wires cut. The lawyer still sat on the couch with the girl close by, too dazed and surprised to move. Hadn’t he known this was coming? Didn’t he know it the whole time?

  He saw the dark shadows of men beyond the glass. The wooden handle of a sledgehammer popped through the hole in the glass and swept the frame clean, glass spilling onto the hardwood.

  The lawyer stood, holding the whiskey still, dumbly. A living room with a large wraparound couch, the girl on it, a fire, windows letting in the last light of day, some oldies song playing on the stereo, the lawyer just standing there. The two Vietnamese men entered his living room, climbing through the hole they’d left in the window frame. He heard the crunch of glass beneath the men’s feet. Saw their cold, untroubled eyes, practiced in the art of terror. He knew these men, knew they’d had a deal at one time, knew it had come to this.