Arkansas

by John Brandon

  In Crystal River they passed a nuclear plant, then many signs shaped like manatees, some waving a flipper. Swin said the only two animals in the world with no natural defense were from Florida: manatees and love bugs. He detailed the accidental invention of love bugs, which were meant to be mosquito killers. Kyle told him that was fascinating and to get out the map and directions because they were close. They watched for a service station shaped like a dinosaur. They were in Hernando County. This newly populated stretch of the highway contained half a dozen strip clubs, one named Mom & Pop’s. Kyle waited for Swin to suggest stopping at one so he could tell him no. The clubs had no signs, just names painted on the stucco.

  “A place like that is where my sisters will end up.” Swin tapped the window.

  “How many of those you got? Like ten?”

  “Their titties are plumping this very minute.”

  “That tends to happen.”

  “They don’t have their real father around and their stepdad is overly strict. Sounds like a stripper recipe to me.”

  Kyle used his T-shirt to mop his face. “You can never tell.”

  “Did you know that one in four women would agree to be abused if it meant they could eat anything and stay thin?”

  “If they agree to it, it’s not abuse.”

  “I mean they’d be willing to have it happen.”

  “Abused how?” Kyle asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “It would to them.”

  They left the Volvo in the lot of the abandoned movie house, walked to a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts to use a pay phone, then waited in an adjacent pine clearing. Kyle paced about and came upon a chain-link enclosure with two huskies inside. They didn’t even bark at him. They panted a mile a minute and blinked their cloudy blue eyes, reclined pitifully on their sides as if shot. Kyle put a stick through the fence and pulled over the empty water bowl, then went into Dunkin’ Donuts and got several cups of ice, which he carried out and poured in the bowl. The dogs rolled their heads and stared at Kyle, not understanding.

  Soon a dump truck full of pineapple palms bumped into the lot. The driver got out and, as he’d said he would, began smoking two cigarettes. Kyle and Swin shouldered their bags and emerged from the pines.

  Johnna was pawning a scooter with a wooden body that she’d found abandoned near a railroad crossing. The pawnshop was a cement-block building that rested at the bottom of a muddy hill. There was no way to tell if the place was open. Johnna told Swin to make noise getting out of the car, so he slammed his door and loosed a yawn. He didn’t know if Johnna was counting this as a date, but he was. He banged the scooter, which had no seat and was painted all over with bumblebees, up the stairs onto the porch, where Johnna rattled the screen door. Soon a man in a ball cap stepped into the doorway. The man said he was barbecuing shrimp, making dinner for breakfast. Johnna said she wasn’t hungry. She pulled the scooter inside, then leaned it on her leg and touched it here and there, like someone showing a dog. The room was crowded with poetry books and packages of socks.

  “A hundred,” Johnna stated.

  The man removed his cap and looked inside it. “Does it run?”

  “You don’t ride it. Thing’s a curiosity.”

  “But it’s wooden.”

  “Which is curious, right?”

  “I guess it is.”

  “What if you had to buy it?”

  “In that case, I’d give you fifty and sell it for eighty.”

  Swin raised a finger. “You’re able to turn a profit with books and socks?”

  “I don’t have to turn a profit.”

  Johnna huffed. “This sucker’s hand-painted.”

  “The bees don’t look real. They’re smiling.”

  “This scooter is a piece of America.”

  “I don’t care about America. I care about listening to the St. Louis Cardinals on the radio.” He checked his watch and was startled by what it said. He left the room.

  Johnna was stoic behind her glasses. She explained that this man had moved to the area several years before with enough money to open a shop, fill it with useless shit like books, and never make a transaction. All he did was cook breakfast and listen to the radio. He was mean. With all that money, he wouldn’t give you ten bucks for a Rolex. He came back with a plastic-wrap-covered plate of sticky shrimp.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” he said. “You two can take some poetry with you.”

  Johnna sighed. “Tell you what I need is a saw. Handsaw.”

  “Just a minute.”

  The man left the room once again. Johnna rolled the scooter onto the porch and Swin followed with the shrimp. The air was hot and crowding. Swin told Johnna that if she needed money, he had some. She shook her head, said she simply wanted to be able to sell something she’d found, to rightly trade an interesting object for U.S. currency.

  When the man returned with the saw Johnna let the scooter tip over, sat Indian-style beside it, and went to work on the handlebars, savagely yanking, a layer of sawdust forming on the porch floor, a droplet of sweat clinging to her glasses. Despite her strain, she wasn’t cutting through the wood. Swin and the man looked at one another and the man winked. For a moment, Swin thought the man knew what he was thinking, that Johnna’s current hotness and frustration were indicative of other hotnesses and frustrations, and that she was looking forward to their fifth date as much as he was.

  Lightning flashed, followed by a barrel-filling rain. Bright said it would last all night, that the trails would flood. He told Kyle and Swin if they didn’t start the mile-long walk to their trailers now they’d be stuck with him until morning. Kyle said he’d wait it out; Swin, cracking open the door and peering outside, nodded agreement. Bright told them to do the dishes, then settled in front of his TV to watch tennis, mumbling against a young American who faked injuries and walked like a peacock. After a couple commercials for stock funds, Bright’s cable cut out. He kept looking at the screen for several minutes, a patient man or a man in denial, then he lobbed the remote control into a corner of the room, where it broke into pieces. He got himself up and cut off the pot of coffee Kyle was brewing. He snatched two glasses and opened his cabinet. Half the plastic whiskey bottles had been opened, all drunk down a different amount. Their labels read FILED TALON.

  “As the English say, let’s push on through till dawn.”

  Swin said, “Dawn?”

  Bright stopped what he was doing. “Why don’t you hit the sack, Abigail? Sleep in my bed if you want.”

  Bright handed Kyle a whiskey, the last thing Kyle wanted. Since the ride home from Florida, he’d had heartburn.

  The phone rang and Bright answered it. After a few moments, without speaking, he hung up.

  “Got to pick up the new orders.”

  “That was Frog?” Swin asked.

  Bright sighed. “That was Her. She calls herself ‘Her.’” This was a black woman who lived in a nearby trailer park and always called with the orders. Bright hoped Kyle and Swin would get to meet the woman, but often she left a packet outside her door and sat inside, ignoring any knocks. Kyle and Swin were to go to her trailer day after next, in the afternoon. They were to park down the block and walk. One reason Bright didn’t go out much was that Her refused to leave phone messages.

  “Why does she call herself’Her’?” Kyle slugged more whiskey.

  “She thinks if someone infiltrates the company and wears a wire or taps the phone or something, all it’ll be is someone saying ‘her’ this and ‘her’ that, and ‘her’ could be any woman at all.”

  “Hmm,” Kyle said. “I guess so.”

  “It’s slightly more vague than a regular alias,” Bright admitted.

  Swin yawned demonstratively. “Got a radio?”

  “I do not. Got some CB equipment in that closet that I never took out of the box.”

  “You said we’d get rifles,” Swin said.

  “You will. I still need to dig them out.”

  “I hope you n
ever find them,” said Kyle.

  “I wasn’t sure what to do with that birdseed,” said Swin. “There’s like three different kinds, I think for different seasons.”

  “The rest of the chores need to be done right.” Bright sat down on a footstool next to his cabinet and reached up for a bottle. “Far as the seed goes, I don’t care if you dump it in the pond. Now, you want a real chore, try getting all those damn wood shavings out of the bedrooms. They breed.”

  Raindrops pinged off the awnings. Swin slumped to the floor and did a set of push-ups, then crawled to the corner and reassembled the remote, snapping circuits together, pressing tight-bunched wires into place, finding the batteries. He did not try to turn the TV on, to check his work, just set the remote on a table and perused the short stacks of books scattered about the room.

  “Journey of the Snail. This’ll do.” Swin got back in Bright’s chair and flung open the book cover. “I predict this snail will overcome adversity. Slowly.”

  Bright replaced the whiskey bottle in the cabinet and turned the label square out. He let out a petite cough. “Let me say something here about boredom. Boredom is a beautiful thing. A bored criminal is a good criminal. If you ever catch yourself complaining about boredom... well, you’d rather look for something to do than have something to do find you.”

  A heavy scratching came at the front door, cutting Bright off and causing Swin to jump up.

  “You get that when it rains,” Bright told them. “It’s only a dog.”

  Swin looked out the window. He clicked on the porch light. “It might be a dog.”

  Kyle slurped some whiskey, then joined Swin at the window. He tapped the glass and the animal looked up at them. It was certainly a dog. They opened the door and a fat bulldog mix with black teeth and bright blue fur tottered inside. Someone had dyed the thing. Swin offered it a bowl of baked beans with a hot dog cut up in it, but the dog would not so much as sniff this meal. He wandered to a window with open blinds and, like an old prisoner, coolly stared outside.

  “Do we have to call him Blue?” Swin said. “Or can we do like the Romans and name him after a Civil War hero?”

  “Your dog,” said Kyle.

  “Bedford,” Swin called toward Bright. “Dog’s name is Bedford, okay?” Swin set water down beside Bedford and he butted the bowl, spilling on the carpet.

  “Give him time,” Bright said. “Being beige is no picnic, but imagine being that color.”

  Over the next hour, the rain somehow got harder. It was near midnight. Bright and Kyle drank and drank. Swin asked if Bedford could sleep in Bright’s bed and Bright said he’d sooner have the dog in there than the owner. A feisty, inconstant wind picked up, adding to the noise of the rain, lashing it against the windows. Swin prepared a fruit salad and shared some with Bright and Kyle. After Bright had eaten his fill, he threw himself into telling his story. It seemed the right time for a story—no cable, rotten weather, middle of the night. Swin came over and he and Kyle looked down on Bright, perched on his footstool.

  He told them he’d struggled a good while in Arkansas before renting the garage of a man who owned a tree service. The guy didn’t need Bright’s money but his wife had died and he needed to talk to another bitten man. Bright knew, even before he’d gotten a taste for this man’s whiskey, that listening to his laments could improve Bright’s position in life. Bright started going out with the tree crew, he told Kyle and Swin, volunteering to sit in high branches and convincing customers to get more trees removed than they’d planned on. One guy in the crew, a kid with beefy knuckles and the hair part of a news anchor, made a comment about what lewd favors Bright must be doing for the owner in order to earn his keep. Bright asked the kid to clarify what he’d said, then grappled him to the ground and drove a knee into his ribs.

  A three-month job began at the park. Bright’s landlord put him in charge, promoting him with the title Crew Chief. The important thing with tree-service work was not to act unsure. If an operation turned dangerous or created a mess, Bright would act as though he’d set it up that way so they could have some fun. The kid Bright had beaten up made a big show of holding no grudges and remained on the crew.

  The head ranger, a friend of Bright’s landlord, had a huge family and had pursued the ranger position in order to secure a vast play area for his kids. These children loved Bright. They handed him gifts of glittered pine cones and paper birds. After the park job ended, the head ranger, who was the type of man who could disarm you with the enthusiasm of his greetings, created a position for Bright at the park—Landscape Coordinator. This was the only time in Bright’s life that he’d enjoyed legal work. He didn’t have set hours and was free to destroy nature.

  After the birth of his next child, the head ranger was called to a cabinet position under the new governor. Bright was promoted. He thanked his former landlord by giving him unnecessary tree work in the park and still sometimes getting drunk with him. The man had died a few years back and had left Bright most of the books that now rested on every flat surface in his living room.

  “Then what?” Kyle asked.

  “Then Gregor got lost and pulled into the park and the rest is history.”

  “Gregor used to be a driver?” Swin asked.

  “Until that night.”

  “I’d like the gig he has,” Swin said. “Sitting amongst disassembled tubas, reading the newspaper. I don’t mind the solitary life. Of course, I would wash my hair.”

  “Being a holder is punishment.” Bright made a sound in his cheek, then bela-tedly laughed. “Maybe you’ll screw something up, then you can be a holder too.”

  The next day, the boss in pink, Associate Director of Parks Operations— Southern Arkansas Region, dropped by with more pamphlets. She’d gotten a massage from a deaf woman in Hot Springs and felt beat up. In her rose suit, she drifted from window to window in Bright’s house, then announced that she’d found a gray hair. Being an old biddy, she would officially never become a renowned painter—would, in fact, never again touch a brush. The last thing she’d do was make painting a hobby. She had another quote. “‘Do the light and air change? The passions of the human heart? I will not change with my century. Because my neighbor does good, must I? Because he misunderstands, must I? Having no more of sophistry is my crime.’”

  After she left, Kyle found himself wondering how soon she’d return. He pictured her driving her little car with the windows down, singing along with the radio, and wished she were not his boss’s boss, that she didn’t know he was a criminal. A woman like that would consort with criminals but she wouldn’t date one. Oh, well. If she ever became his girlfriend, it would be a matter of days before he got bored with her. And her with him.

  “What’s sophistry?” Kyle asked.

  Swin said, “It’s when something seems reasonable enough, but it’s full of evil.”

  In the afternoon, Bright showed Kyle how to make his “muck,” which was a sort of unspicy chili. He said one could substitute any meat. Swin, watching the two of them bond over onions and dried herbs, became depressed and thought he should learn to drink. He got a bottle of Bright’s whiskey, picked up his lethargic dog, and went to his trailer. He mixed the whiskey with apple juice and downed cup after cup, careful to use less juice each time. Bedford begged for some juice and Swin gave him a bowl. The thing loved apple juice. Swin felt this was the time to teach the dog a trick. He said, “Sit, boy. Sit.” He demonstrated sitting, whispered the command then nearly screamed it. Swin tried to make Bedford beg, roll over, shake hands. All dogs liked to fetch. Swin grew unsteady on his feet and felt a generalized sense of nostalgia, perhaps for events that hadn’t happened yet. His mouth was profoundly dry. He had no ball for Bedford to fetch, so instead he threw paper plates across the trailer like Frisbees. He got much drunker all at once and collapsed on his side with a bag of organic vegetable chips. He chewed one for minutes without swallowing.

  At dawn, Swin awoke to his first hangover. He stood, hunched, and pu
t one foot in front of the other until he reached the tiny refrigerator, where he drank a gulp of skim milk and vomited effortlessly. He called Johnna, then slumped at the table and had a dream where men in overalls removed his entire brain, assuring him that his peripheral nerves would compensate. The brain was not strictly necessary, they told him. Swin drove himself home from the surgery and, despite their explanation, felt sluggish. What was that? Johnna was knocking. Her mouth was lovely. Her arms were full. She set Swin up on the couch with a cold eye-press shaped like the Lone Ranger’s mask. She had a system for hangovers and was happy for a chance to use it. One liter lukewarm water. Cold shower. Orange juice. Eye drops and lip balm. Then, a liter of cold water. Steaming shower. Bagels and coffee. Stretching. When Swin felt better, they made several slow laps around the trailer for fresh air. Swin’s eyes welled. He told Johnna he missed his sisters, then said he didn’t want to talk about them. Johnna said she hadn’t asked him to talk about them.

  “Want to know something?” he said. “One in four women would trade having their husbands cheat on them for the ability to eat whatever they want and stay thin.”

  “Might as well stay thin,” Johnna said. “They’re cheating anyway.”

  “I’m curious to see how wonderful this stepdad is when they start showing up pregnant with their credit cards run up and needles in their arms.”

  “He’s your stepdad, too.”

  “But they listen to him. They’re impressionable.”

  “I’m sure they miss the shit out of you.”

  “I hope they cry over me.”

  Johnna stroked Swin’s head for a few minutes, until his eyes grew calm. She vetoed his idea that a morning of medical care counted as a type of date. She had to hurry up and go tan before her shift. Swin said that could be a date, if he went tanning with her.

  “In progressive cities, men tan and women cultivate their paleness.”