Arkansas

by John Brandon

  1987

  Your condo in Little Rock has a bungled Frank Lloyd Wright bathroom. Because the only light in this bathroom comes from a secret window and the floor of the shower stall is on a slight incline, you get the condo cheaper than you should. It’s on the fourth floor, overlooking a river park with dead grass.

  When Thomas and Tim have worked with you for a full year without incident, when the country in them has been sufficiently choked out by the city, you tell them to establish their own farm area, that you will cover the old strip of bars. Nightly, you settle into dim booths, your pockets plump with twist-tied baggies of cocaine, and nurse a beer. At first you run from bar to bar, but soon all your customers come to you, to a basement lounge whose decor centers around the golden age of Hollywood. Sometimes they screen movies and you have to sit by the door and catch your customers before they walk in and disturb everyone. The crowd at this bar is a bit older than at the others. You blend in. You sit under a poster of Humphrey Bogart and watch people get trashed on martinis and manhattans. When the bartenders realize what you’re up to, you cut them in. They require only a thin cut, and some take their payoff in cocaine. The owner is a woman who lives in the country and shows her face at the bar every other weekend. She has inherited the place from her brother and doesn’t know the bar business. You dread the day when she gets wise and freaks out and calls the cops, so instead of waiting for that day, you request a meeting. You explain to her that if it wasn’t you, it’d be someone else, someone flashy, someone belligerent—some asshole. You’ve caused her no trouble and you never will. If you ever get busted, you tell her, she just acts dumb and nothing happens to her. It’s best if she doesn’t take a cut, best for her to stay clean, stay out with the crickets. You can guarantee you’ll be the only dealer in her place, and that you won’t have slobbering junkies in there. You are an honest man, you admit. You finish your coffee and say you have to run.

  Your neighbor in the next condo is your best customer. His day job is carving cedar elves. A big company bought him out of his copyright, but they still sell a select line of elves hand-carved by the inventor. This man hates sleep. He hates to let time pass while he’s not watching, and does not want to say, one day, that his life was short. He measures time in elves.

  The city council offers incentives for certain types of businesses. Soon after you establish two more volume clients, you open a small bakery that also sells art—paintings you get for ten dollars a pop at flea markets. You price the paintings anywhere from five hundred to fifteen hundred bucks and claim to sell half a dozen a week. Your bakery is rarely open, so no one notices that the same paintings hang in it for months. You put your neighbor’s elves up as decorations. You buy raw materials for baking and throw them out, turn the lights on and read the paper every few days. You enjoy owning a shop again, especially because you don’t have to sell anything.

  The clients you drum up are nothing compared to the volume Thomas and Tim do at the University of Arkansas branch. They get plugged in to pot parties, church outings, folk concerts. They are novel because of their size and the fact that they don’t drink. You make them get separate savings accounts and they watch the accounts grow. You buy a VCR. On nights when none of you work, you watch comedy movies and sometimes a Charles Bronson. You look forward to the day when the daily operations move into the boys’ hands and you move to the sticks.

  At some point the monthly letters are not enough. The boys’ aunt comes to visit. You clear your schedule and treat the aunt to ribs and steaks and bacon-wrapped shrimp. The boys’ clients are happy to lend them books and, when the aunt is present, stop by to borrow notes or set up a study group. You are the boys’ sponsoring professor, the man who chose them for their scholarships, a feared critic of Canadian poetry. The boys say they’re sociology majors. They want to learn other languages. Studying makes them whole. For them, there is nothing like thought. It’s fun, lying to a person who would believe anything you say. You even fire up the ovens at the bakery so the boys can have part-time jobs.

  Her’s trailer had plush carpet. Blankets were hung over the windows and in one corner stood a bare coatrack and empty umbrella stand. Kyle and Swin sat on metal folding chairs, happy to have finally gained entrance into Hers little fortress. She presented them with a tray covered with dry crackers.

  “I don’t care for these Ritz.” She rested the tray on the floor. “Go ahead and stare for ten seconds.”

  Her had sponges lashed to the soles of her feet and squares of egg crate taped to her palms. Kyle didn’t know if he was supposed to stare at that or at her face, which was gracefully aged and bewitching.

  “Cheekbones like frozen waves,” Swin said. “Lips like rosebuds. Eyes the color of a sheik’s camel.”

  “Ten seconds is up,” she said. She explained that she suffered from a disorder that made her hands and feet sensitive. As a child, her mother had taken her to specialists who’d tried to toughen her so she could compete in pageants and appear in commercials. No one could diagnose the problem. Some said it was all in her mind, to which her mother would reply, “Then fix that.”

  “Very little pain is in the mind,” Swin said. “Possibly none.”

  “It’s not all that bad,” she said. “Basically, I’ll never work in a factory or play handball.”

  Kyle and Swin ate a few crackers. Her went to the kitchen and brought back plastic cups of warm milk. Swin said he wanted his put in the fridge awhile, which Kyle thought was rude. Kyle muscled down a couple gulps. It wasn’t that bad. He wondered when they’d get the packet—if there was a password or some other bit of protocol they didn’t know.

  “I like boys like you,” Her said. “That don’t get hung up on having a long life.”

  Kyle and Swin said nothing.

  “I can’t wait to die, but I’m not going to hell. It’d be a lot simpler if I could kill myself, but I ain’t going to hell. I want the Lord to strike me down.”

  “What does your family think of that?” Swin asked.

  “Mother’s dead. Never had kids. Husband, I divorced him.” She pointed at a porch table in the far corner, which was laden with books about accidents, chaos, suicide. “You can’t be expecting it. You can’t wait for a storm and then go to the middle of a field and set a hubcap on your head.”

  “So,” Kyle said. “That packet.”

  Her cast two tan eyes on him. “Don’t be rude.”

  “Don’t be rude,” Swin said. “There’s a proper way to treat a lady.”

  Swin asked if there was anything Her enjoyed about life. Of course, she said. She liked watching animals hunt and mate on TV. She liked her husband’s blowtorches, which he’d left in a shed behind the trailer when he’d gone to Mississippi.

  “And how does such an arresting complexion come to be?” Swin asked.

  “A Swede owned one of my ancestors.” Her pulled aside her sponge and pressed areas of her foot. “Some get illnesses that take them to the grave,” she said. “And I get this.” She looked upward a moment. “Where’s the ranger?”

  “He went with an Indian,” Kyle said. “Over to Oklahoma.”

  “What kind of car did the Indian drive?”

  “I think it might’ve been a Kia.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No,” said Kyle.

  “Just say, ‘How the fuck should I know?’”

  “It could have been a Hyundai.”

  “Stop that,” Her said.

  Kyle nodded.

  “Here.” Her tugged the packet out from under her chair, where it had been taped, and handed it over.

  In the morning, Kyle found a note on his trailer door that said Swin had come down with the flu and had gone to Bright’s to sit in the big chair and recuperate. Kyle didn’t like them to hang out at Bright’s, but if Swin would be there, he figured, he might as well go, too.

  He walked over, dug fish sticks out of Bright’s freezer, and slid them into the oven on a cookie sheet. Swin drank tea with lemo
n wedges and swallowed a few smelly vitamins, then watched a black comedian in a red vest make fun of the way white people sold things, responded to danger, and shopped for shoes. Swin said he didn’t know why all black guys didn’t become comedians. Kyle asked what he meant, but before Swin could answer there was a knock at the door. Kyle strolled to the window, pulled aside the curtain, and said that he’d known the nurse would become a problem. He sat at the kitchen table and watched Swin theatrically prepare to stand, tossing sections of the comforter this way and that, scooting his teacup and lemon carcasses, muting the black comedian. The knocking came again. Swin blew his nose. He pulled a roll of mints from his shorts and chewed one, then sauntered over and opened the door. Johnna guessed he’d be sick, she said, because she was sick the day before—a twenty-four-hour bug. She’d brought a broth of saw palmetto, which would help Swin pee. She explained that Bedford had wobbled up to her just as she’d given up knocking on the trailer, and he’d led her back to the house. On cue, the dog came out from behind the door. Johnna took a load off near the whiskey cabinet. She looked around herself, at the ceiling and moldings and appliances. What a nice house, she said. Jesus. It was the nicest house she’d ever been in. Except it was plain. It could really use some touches, but wow.

  When the fish sticks were done, Johnna got sauce from the fridge and ate a few, dipping with no delicacy, just speed and intention. She started asking questions. Who all lived in this place? Swin and Kyle could use it, but not sleep in it? Who else worked at this park?

  “I knew you’d crack,” proclaimed Swin, coughing. “I knew you’d become fascinated with me and my lifestyle.” He told Johnna that he and Kyle worked for a private firm that had been hired to evaluate the state park system. They had deemed the ranger at Felsenthal unfit, and he’d been shipped to a remedial ranger school on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma. Swin and Kyle had to stay on and put things right until the ranger was replaced—no telling how long that would be. Johnna wanted to know what, exactly, they were putting right, and Swin said it was mostly record-keeping.

  “The house?” she asked.

  “Well, now that it’s vacant—”

  “We can’t live in it,” Kyle said. “Conflict of interest.”

  “But no one would know if we did,” Swin said.

  Johnna sized up the windows and peered down the long hall. “I could do this place up adorable.”

  Kyle set his plate in the sink and ran the water. “We only come here for meals. We were about to leave.”

  More knocking was heard at the door. Kyle shut off the faucet. He looked outside and saw a beefy guy with a backward cap. The guy was maybe thirty-five and had driven his SUV right up to the porch.

  “An old frat boy with a 4Runner,” Kyle said.

  Swin turned up his palms.

  The guy was talking before the door was all the way open, saying not to be disturbed, that he was looking for Patrick Bright, the head ranger.

  “We’re not disturbed,” Kyle assured him. “Ranger Bright isn’t available.”

  The guy’s name was Barry. He was the son of the man who’d given Bright his break in the tree service, who Bright had lived with when he first landed in Arkansas. Barry’s father, before he died, had spoken a lot of Bright, saying he was one of the good guys. Barry was on a cross-county trip, visiting his father’s old friends. The park was just how he remembered it. Boy, was a cute nurse a sight for sore eyes. Hey, were those some of his father’s books?

  Kyle let him finish then introduced himself and Swin as Mollar and Suarez, junior rangers. He said Johnna was a friend of theirs.

  “Junior rangers?” said Barry, eyeing Johnna.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “So the little nurse is only a friend.”

  “Sorry you came all this way,” Kyle said. “He’s at a convention in Tulsa—something about Native Americans.”

  “And he’ll be back when?” Barry lifted his cap up and pulled it on tighter.

  “They don’t tell us. How about I take your number?”

  Kyle picked up a pen and a stray pamphlet. He wrote the numbers Barry recited, set the pamphlet on top of the fridge, then went and held the front door open.

  “I’d like to have her number,” Barry said.

  “We don’t want any trouble,” said Kyle.

  “No trouble.” Swin wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I invite alternative suitors.”

  Johnna perched on the arm of Swin’s chair and tossed her hair, trying to look like a prize. Swin called out her age, weight, and height. He said Johnna was a spunky nurse who enjoyed collegiate football matches.

  “Careful,” Barry said. “I got no problem breaking up a happy couple.”

  Kyle sat at the kitchen table. He peered at the grain of the wood, flattened his palm on it. It was his kitchen table. Whether he and Swin spent their nights in this house or not, it was his house now. It was his living room. A stranger was in his living room, insulting his partner. This was the point when regular people called the police: when a sleepdeprived asshole barged in and tried to steal a woman.

  “Let me try something,” Swin said. “Who’s Gertrude Stein?”

  Barry shook his head.

  “The Medici family?”

  “Never had the pleasure.”

  “What nationality was Copernicus?”

  “Not yours.”

  “I’m smarter than you, Barry. And younger.” Swin pulled his blanket aside and lifted his shirt. “Girls like abs.”

  “I’m rich. And I’m not a junior anything.”

  Swin pointed vaguely toward the front of the house. “I could buy that pretty truck out from under you with hundred-dollar bills.”

  Kyle burst up from the table. “The fun’s over.”

  He held Barry with a stare until the guy backed out onto the porch and down to his 4Runner. Kyle guided the door shut and Bedford belatedly hopped into sight and growled.

  “That true about the hundreds?” Johnna asked.

  “It’s complicated,” Swin answered.

  “Junior rangers?”

  He shrugged.

  “I thought Bright was at remedial training.”

  “He is,” Swin said. “It’s all pretty complicated.”

  Another call from Her. Another packet. Another car.

  Shuttling to Cape Girardeau in the spare comfort of a Mitsubishi Galant, Kyle did not feel easy or strong. He couldn’t even enjoy an interstate run. The road followed the Mississippi up to Missouri, but never came in sight of the river. Kyle agreed to listen to singing on the radio as long as it wasn’t in English, so Swin dialed up a Danish woman who belched out noises like a humpback whale. Swin called the music a “sonic landscape.” When that ended, two guys came on and answered trivia questions about cars. Kyle and Swin ate lunch in a place where the waiters juggled rolls. They discussed Bright’s Bronco. Maybe there was no need to get rid of it. Best to park it behind the house and put it out of mind. And it was about time, Kyle and Swin agreed, for them to get their own car. If they pitched in, they could buy it with their own money. They needed a way to get around town, to escape the park once in a while. And they trusted each other now; each felt reasonably confident that the other wouldn’t drive off in the car and never come back. If an occasion arose that forced them to run from the park, it would be a surprise to both of them, and both of them would leave together, and not in Bright’s Bronco. Registering a car under their park names would be a breeze—a lot easier than finding a clean gun. They could drop six thousand on a car without having to dip into the money in the dryer. They would hold that money, along with the bag from this trip, until someone came for it. Kyle had no doubt someone would come. Frog would be impressed if Kyle and Swin held all the money for weeks, months, and hardly touched it.

  “He probably already counted it as gone,” Swin said.

  “How much do you think he knows?”

  “Maybe only that something’s not right.”

  “Or maybe he k
nows about every piss we take.”

  “Also a possibility.”

  “I wonder if he’s a genius,” Kyle said.

  “Like most people, you have an elementary understanding of that word.” Swin grunted. “I think six grand is low for a car.”

  “You do, do you?”

  “If we get a clunker, we’ll end up opening the bags to pay mechanics. My vote is for a late-model Saab.”

  “I don’t believe we’ll have a vote on it,” Kyle said. “Maybe we can swing eight or nine, though.”

  At a gas station, Swin bought a scratch-off and won a dollar. He decided to keep the dollar instead of getting another ticket, and this annoyed the clerk, a small woman with lofty hair.

  “You’re no better than when you walked in here,” she told Swin.

  He and Kyle went out to the phone booth and found what street the pawnshops were on. They had time to stroll in and out of as many rundown establishments as they wanted, looking for a merchant who didn’t take gun regulations to heart.

  Kyle parked in a pay garage and he and Swin took opposite sides of the street. In the second place Kyle hit, he found the merchant he was looking for. The guy said he was the only one in town who dealt in orphans, and that he only had one, a .45. He was open about charging Kyle double, and insisted that Kyle never come back to the shop or send him any business. He took Kyle’s bills, then handed him a heavy newspaper. Kyle retrieved the Galant and found Swin, who hadn’t had any luck.

  “People like their Ricans unarmed,” Swin told him.

  Kyle unfolded the newspaper.

  “Sledge Hammer!” Swin said.

  “What?”

  “It’s a spoof cop show.”

  Kyle held the monstrous gun. “You could drop it on someone’s head.”

  “Or set it in front of their car,” Swin said. “Block their getaway.”