Arkansas

by John Brandon

  “Now you do it back.”

  “It feels like flirting.”

  “It’s very much like that.”

  Kyle’s eyebrows spread. “Plenty of coffee,” he said, gruffly.

  “None for me. Makes me bored.”

  “Caffeine makes you bored?”

  “Mugs and steam do. Just watching you drink that brings a malaise. Where’s the boss?”

  “Vacuuming.”

  Now Swin heard it. The noise had been blending with countless birds and rustlings and sways. “The shavings?”

  “I can’t see them. He says they’re there.”

  “Wonder if he’s tried it on blow.”

  “You think there’s any chance Bright is Frog?”

  “None,” said Swin. “It’s fresh thinking, though. An original yet dumb thought.”

  “Where do you think Frog lives?”

  “You mean, what city?”

  “You think he lives out on a ranch somewhere?”

  “You don’t get to be a crime boss by being solitary and contemplative; you get to be a crime boss by double-crossing and scheming and inheriting, just like on Wall Street.”

  “I don’t believe you know much about crime bosses or Wall Street.”

  “Not firsthand.”

  “The guy must have something figured out, to go that long without getting caught or killed.”

  Swin scratched the back of his neck. “We’ll have to work in this company for a long time before we find out anything true about Frog.”

  “I heard he has a pool shaped like a lily pad.”

  “That’s what I mean. For a long time, we’ll only know things like that—inconsequential falsehoods.”

  They waited until the vacuum shut off and went in. Bright began putting away dishes.

  “Sleep well? All nested in?” Bright paused, a pair of tongs in hand. “Would either of you like to call me sir?”

  They looked at him.

  “Because you can if you like. I won’t think it’s corny.”

  Bright kept unloading until the drainer was empty, then sat down at the dining room table, which held a stack of newsletters about bobcats.

  “Your first trip is Florida,” he said. “I think the Panhandle.” He picked his eye. “There’s two things you got to hear before I settle in for my Premier League. First, there’s a particularly do-goody cop named Cooper—Cooper the cop. He’ll invite you guys out for beers and leave messages on the phone. Now that you all are here, he’ll be off my ass; you’re closer to his age. He’s harmless. What I do is every once in a while go pal around with him—some charity field day or bake sale or some shit. Second, my park boss could show up at any time, probably today. She’s due. Pretty little thing with a huge nose—wears pink all the time. She knows about us. She takes a cut.”

  Bright said he’d have dinner ready around eight, and for lunch he gave directions to a Hardee’s, a barbecue pit, and a Japanese fast-food joint. There wasn’t a proper town nearby, only a cluster of trailer parks and a large walk-in clinic.

  “I’m going for a jog,” Swin said. “Like the modern intellectual I am.”

  As he got up, a European car glinted past the front windows. Bright peeked outside.

  “See this lady for yourself.”

  The woman knocked, then walked in the house. She had a bow in her hair and a pile of bracelets on each wrist. She was indeed wearing pink. Her hands and elbows looked raw, but her legs were smooth and lightly muscled. She sat at the table without seeming to notice Kyle or Swin, then rummaged through a soft briefcase, jerking out banded stacks of brochures. Bright offered the woman coffee. He poured it in a heavy mug adorned with Irish family seals and set it down in front of her, slipping an envelope underneath.

  “The boys?” she said.

  “Oh, these two. Don’t be rude, guys.”

  “I can tell they’re from your Frogman,” she said. “What are their names?”

  Kyle and Swin told her.

  “Bored, I bet.”

  They shrugged.

  “Mr. Bright’s one of the boredest people I know. I’m lucky. I’ve got my painting. I couldn’t stand this hobbyless camping.” She shook like a wet dog, rattling her bracelets. “Not that painting is a hobby.”

  Bright dumped the coffee pot out in the sink, shook water in the pot, then dropped it in the drainer. She watched him, doing something with her nails.

  “Do I need to check the papers?”

  Bright shook his head.

  This woman, Bright’s boss and therefore Kyle’s and Swin’s, looked Kyle up and down, craning her neck to get a profile view. “You really stand at attention.” She clicked her tongue at Kyle. “Can you believe you’re here?”

  “Yes,” Kyle said.

  “I sure as hell didn’t want to get promoted so much. I’d have a show in SoHo by now if these parks suits didn’t adore me.”

  “You look fantastic,” Bright told her.

  “I’m having a good eye day. They’re really expressive. That’s important when you got a honker like this. I’ve got something for you boys to do, which is a blessing in this place. Put ten each of these in the booth.” She tapped a sheaf of brochures about wild boars. “There were four attacks.”

  “Injurious pigs?” Swin said. “I thought those were fiction, like Babe the Blue Ox.”

  The woman huffed.

  “Why do you always wear pink?” Swin asked her.

  “It began as a joke, but then I realized that it is, in fact, the prettiest color. It’s the prettiest color for women to wear.” She smoothed her collar.

  “Every single day?” Swin asked.

  “Every day.” She glanced at her watch. “I bought a book of quotes by painters and I memorized them all. I’d like to share one: ‘Your life should always be arranged just as if you were studying theology, or philosophy, or other sciences.’” Bright’s boss in pink stood and pulled the strap of her big case over her shoulder. She’d only had a sip of her coffee. “‘Eating and drinking moderately, electing light and wholesome dishes and thin wines; saving and sparing your hand, preserving it from such strains as heaving stones, crowbars, and anything else that would weary it. There is another cause which, if you indulge it, can make your hand so unsteady that it will waver like a leaf in the wind.’” She winked. “Which painter said that?”

  “One of the naturalists,” Swin guessed.

  Bright grunted.

  “Cennino Cennini. You boys, I imagine, indulge the hand six, seven times a day.”

  “Six or seven when we have the flu,” Swin said.

  The boss in pink made her exit, pinching Kyle’s cheek as she passed, her bracelets brushing his stubble. Once the sound of her car had blended in with the forest noise, Bright took a deep breath. He explained that she came about once a month, and was supposed to examine all the paperwork and approve the appearance of the place. No one really checked up on state parks, particularly this one, Felsenthal, which was small and not cursed with a waterfall or dying species. The boss in pink wasn’t greedy. If it wasn’t for the greed of criminals, Bright said, cops wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. He told the boys that if they ever got that itch, they should come talk to him about it. Just say “sir” and he’d be listening.

  That afternoon, Kyle repainted the yellow lines of the parking area. This took patience he did not have. He had to get down on his knees and drag the brush impossibly slowly with two hands. Before he put the paint down, he had to sweep each line. Twigs and leaves kept blowing into the wet paint. He dropped the brush a few times. His can ran dry and he had to walk back over by Bright’s house and lug over another one.

  As soon as he got into a rhythm with it, a middle-aged guy in an unbuttoned shirt started talking to him about an endangered toad, asking where he could get a glimpse of one.

  “The far end of the pond.” Kyle pointed with no conviction.

  “I thought they didn’t like water,” the guy said.

  “Not usually,” said Kyle.
“They’ve been acting confused.”

  “I heard they come out when the scrub laurels bloom.”

  “Yeah, they love those.”

  “When do they bloom?”

  “Any time now.”

  When Bright’s dinner was almost ready, he started complaining that he had no radishes for garnish, so Swin volunteered to hit the grocery. He wasn’t about to eat whatever pork and squash concoction Bright kept sniffing. That big pot of food reminded him of his mother, who used to freeze tons of runny casserole. Swin and his sisters would choke down the nuked mush while Swin’s father ate a pressed Cuban twice a day. Swin’s father, when Swin’s mother left the house, would heat up all the casserole portions at once and call the neighborhood kids over. He’d line them up single file and slap a clod on each one’s plate, calling the kids the wrong names. The guy did everything slowly, as if nothing was worth getting excited about. The only thing that pleased him was watching the Gulf.

  The beach was the same for Swin’s father as it was for the millionaire condo-owners—same glare, same shells breaking again and again in the surf. Swin used to sit with him while he smoked his cigars to nubs. He’d never once felt close to the man, never accepted a puff or found a way to impress him. Kyle, Swin knew, would eat Bright’s food and drink his liquor and become the darling.

  The open-air grocery was crowded with barrels of nuts and peppers. Swin eyed a black-haired nurse with a fake tan while she filled a bag with chestnuts. The nurse wore blue scrubs and thick glasses. Something about her full bottom lip made Swin believe she must dig sex. She cracked two nuts together and put them in her mouth, and Swin went over and asked if she knew where radishes were. She located Swin’s forehead through her bottle lenses and swallowed.

  “With the vegetables? That’s an educated guess.”

  Swin leered as if she’d said something naughty. “New in town,” he said. “Name’s Swin.”

  “Your name’s about as dumb as mine: Johnna.”

  Swin conspicuously looked this nurse named Johnna from sneakers to barrettes. She had big yet uncrowded teeth and polka dots of blue polish on her nails. Her high breasts barely tented the front of her scrub shirt.

  “There’s no telling how long I’ll be in the area,” Swin said. He leaned against a barrel of fragrant chilis. “I’m a freelance government auditor.”

  Johnna was blushing through the brown of her cheeks, which created the effect of a blown disguise. She adjusted her glasses.

  Swin said, “Let’s get this courtship under way.”

  “I’m on shift tonight.”

  “Tomorrow night.”

  “Church.”

  “I’m out of town this—church?”

  “You should try it.”

  “I have,” Swin said. “We all have.”

  They agreed to meet for lunch on Thursday, right before Swin’s departure for Florida. Johnna touched Swin’s elbow and squeezed past him, maneuvering her hips through the barrels toward the checkout. Swin stepped into the produce room for the radishes. When he returned, Johnna was hissing at the clerk, a hairy individual with a thin neck. She ran down a list of his failures in life, which included community college, carpentry, and a run at the county board. Swin hoped she’d never had sex with this overall-draped dude. He wasn’t fighting back. He totaled her order and made change. Johnna put the bills in her back pocket and told the clerk to feel free to die. Swin was convinced this woman had profound appetites. He slipped the radishes in his pocket and followed her outside. At her car, she turned on him with a stern look.

  “What’s with all the little muscles?”

  “I stay ready to perform.”

  “It’s creepy. The radishes and the tight shirt and the Duracell tattoos.”

  “Do you like creepy?”

  Johnna unlocked her door and Swin opened it for her, ushering her with his arm. She started her car with much gunning of the engine, then traded out her glasses for a pair with tinted lenses. “You can’t so much as kiss me for five dates.”

  “Then what?” Swin asked.

  “Then you can.”

  1985

  You always think of Ken Hovan as the same person, while Froggy often changes. He has gone from a roofer to a bouncer to a man who squats around his store, wondering when he’ll change again, watching dust float through light, making his eyes ache with coffee.

  Testament is clockwork with his bootlegs—shipments every third Thursday which sell out in two days. Like before, you begin socking money away. The kids who buy the tapes also buy speakers and cigarettes. Sometimes you give the cigarettes away. Ghetto mothers start buying the tapes to give as presents. In the winter, on a day of jagged wind that finds its way up through your store’s flooring and down through its attic space, Testament says the tapes are over. You tell him it kept up longer than you expected. You ask, with a nod toward a worn leather bag hanging on his shoulder, where he’s headed. Illinois. But not with the bag. Either you take the bag, he says, or it’s in a dumpster. It contains nineteen pounds of PCP and the phone number of a man named Buttons who, though he will not pay well, will not shoot you or steal from you. Testament is in a hurry. You shrug and take the bag, then stash it under a loose corner of the floor. The winds from outside pour in until you stomp the floor flat again. Within five minutes of Testament’s departure you know you will sell these drugs. For the rest of the week you dust and mop and scrub your store. You peek once at the leather bag. You buy a pair of potted plants for the front window.

  On Sunday you call the number and the name “Buttons” is spit into the other end of the line. It’s him. He’s black and his voice is not impatient. There’s a game on in the background. You say that Testament has given you a suit and it turns out it doesn’t fit. “Maybe it’s more your size,” you tell him. “You sound big.” He tells you he’s skinny as fuck, that he sounds this way because he’s been smoking pot since age seven. You agree to meet him that night, a block north of Frayser High School. You wonder if the PCP was stolen and why Testament was fleeing, but you can’t pin down a thought long enough to finish it. You have the eerie feeling of being in a movie, of having wandered into a movie. You don’t know your lines. You don’t know what happens to your character.

  That night, when you pull up next to Buttons’s car, a fat white woman gets out of the passenger side and passes you a JCPenney bag with a mess of cash in the bottom. You hand her the hefty leather satchel, resting it on the door frame so she can look inside, then she’s back in the car and the car is leaving. The driver, who is probably not Buttons because Testament said he has bad glaucoma that makes his eyes look like bird shit, doesn’t even glance at you. You sit there a few minutes, to dare this menacing slum. There are no dogs barking. No sirens. You have an impulse to sit there until morning, then walk into the greasiest diner in Frayser and buy everybody breakfast.

  The next afternoon, Testament is on every local news show. He’s been chased by cops onto the bridge, has gotten out of his stolen Maxima and perched himself on a railing high above the Mississippi River. The experts employed by the news shows agree that because Testament, identified as Nat Terrance Nailon, has been on the bridge for hours now, he is unlikely to jump. He’s confused and wants attention. He throws his coat off into the wind and later tosses his T-shirt as well. With each passing minute, because of hunger, thirst, and fatigue, the cops have a better chance of talking him down. The news shows broadcast their shot of Testament serenely rocking, shivering, sometimes whistling, on a delay. If he jumps, they won’t be allowed to show it. The picture cuts back to the studio and a somber anchor informs you that the experts have been proven wrong, that Mr. Nailon was not just looking for attention.

  Kyle and Swin drove a brown Volvo to Florida. They didn’t know what they were hauling or where on the car it was hidden. Kyle took the first driving shift and Swin slept for five hours while Kyle chugged the unwieldy wagon down Interstate 10, stickers for sappy rock bands and politics all over his bumper. There w
as no notable change in the surroundings until Pensacola, where every building had a deck and the air stank of burning tires. Swin awoke and demanded they stop in Panama City for dinner. He assured Kyle that the one-time Panhandle backwater had surpassed Daytona as the beach party capital of Florida.

  Low, spiky palms. Neon. Gift shops giving away three T-shirts for five dollars. Kyle and Swin ate in a shotgun building with sand on the floor, a place that offered endless beers from California and turned muggy any breeze that passed into it. They walked up the strip asking about wet T-shirt contests and got only chuckles and stares. Where were the women? Kyle asked. A dude wearing boots with shorts? What were those three guys doing?

  Kyle and Swin gathered that something gay was happening in Panama City. Swin cornered an older man who seemed the same beige race as himself and found that they’d wandered into a convention of elderly homosexuals. Every man in sight—fat, foreign, disabled—was gay. Swin asked if Kyle wanted to hold hands. Kyle, sick of Swin’s joking, reached down and seized Swin’s nuts, causing him to backpedal and stumble over a curb. They stared at each other a long moment. Kyle, satisfied, extended his hand to Swin, who looked at it skeptically before taking it. Swin had scraped his arm and gotten his pants dirty. He put on his best smirk, took a couple peppy steps.

  “I’m surprised your hand fit around those boulders,” he said. “You’re lucky you didn’t break your fingers on those cannonballs.”

  “Always with the jokes,” Kyle said. “Jokes, jokes.”

  “What’s really lucky is that the old skin cannon didn’t go off.” Swin’s ego was almost fully intact again, that quickly, snapped back like elastic. “People have been maimed.”

  Most of the land on Highway 19, covered with dry oak trees and vines, was being sold off in parcels of five to twenty acres. There were no streetlights. The later it got, the hotter. By ten p.m. Kyle and Swin were running the air full blast and getting headaches from the bit of beer they’d drunk. The Volvo labored. They stopped at a gas station for high test and cold water and popped some Excedrin. Kyle said this state wasn’t meant for white people and Swin answered that the whole country wasn’t.