Arkansas

by John Brandon

  He makes to get back in his car and you tell him to hold on. You rummage on the porch, looking for something to give him. The best you can find is a platter with a picture of Elvis on it. You find it facedown in some leaves, pick it up, and give it a hearty dusting-off with your hands.

  “Take this,” you say.

  He accepts it with two hands, feeling how heavy it is.

  “This used to belong to a crime boss,” you say.

  He wants to believe you, wants to believe this piece of tacky kitchenware he’s been handed was once the property of an important criminal.

  “What was his name?” he asks.

  You nod toward the platter. “People call him Frog.”

  “How long ago did this belong to him?”

  “Till right now.”

  His mouth opens. He really wants to believe you. He wants to believe, but he can smell you and see what’s going on in your yard. Most likely you’re delusional and never broke the law in your life.

  You’re coming out of it. You begin reading the newspaper each morning. There’s an article about Felsenthal. The article doesn’t draw conclusions, just details all the oddness that’s transpired at the park. It starts with Ranger Bright, a fixture at the park, who disappeared mysteriously and never turned up, moves on to Bright’s underlings, two youngsters who also disappeared and never turned up, then moves to the new ranger, Bright’s replacement, who claims to have been accosted and tied up by one of the disappeared youngsters, then untied, later in the day, by some stranger he’s never seen again. The article mentions a woman named Wendy Vasgar, a person you know nothing about, who is in charge of all South Arkansas parks and recently purchased an extravagant houseboat. The article presents all these occurrences as coincidence, but is sure to imply that a smart reader would know better. The readership of this paper, you think, all the bored bumpkins of Union County, are like the guy with the aspirin in his shirt pocket—hoping, for once, to have a claim on something out of the ordinary.

  You need to get moving. They may not be there tomorrow or next week, but cops will descend upon Felsenthal. You don’t know what they’ll find, but whatever it is, it’ll bring them a step closer to you. You never know what scrap they’ll connect to what other scrap. The ranger would remember you. Kyle, if they ever turned him up, would remember you.

  You go inside and take a look at the coffeemaker. The cream is bad. The sugar is all gone; you ate every packet. You look everywhere for your keys and finally track them down in the freezer. You remember stashing them in there, one of the first days you were feeling bad. You go start your car, the old Nissan, and the engine rumbles. You head for the market. You need cream and sugar, but also something else. You’ll have to stop at the electronics store. You need a tape recorder. You have to rid yourself of the snapshots in your brain. You have to translate them to audio and reclaim the space in your mind. There is no deal in place, you know; you won’t trade the tapes for a full mental recovery. They’re separate events, both inevitable. Your mind will recover. The tapes will be made. You’ll shower. You’ll eat at a restaurant. You’ll give voice to the countless pictures of your life. You’ll make a plan.

  And all of it does happen, except the plan. You buy new clothes and get a car wash. You buy an inflatable mattress and move back into the house. You hold one last fire, and in goes your old mattress, your box spring, your trusty chair. You eat seafood and vegetables. You keep the coffee flowing. You have a mug that you keep filling and taking into the bathroom with you. The bathroom is your recording studio. You look into the mirror and think of yourself as a stranger. You don’t sit down while you speak. Each time you enter the bathroom, you fall into a trance, a good trance, a bright one, the kind of trance artists must fall into. You are excited, but patient. There is Memphis—the barbecue and the blacks and the Baptists. Buttons. There is Pine Bluff—the foggy hills, Almond, the casserole dish. There is the empty fountain in Magnet Cove, the waitress who calls you a drifter. There are the trips to the flea market to buy art for the walls of your bakery. There is the insomniac elf-carver. And Steve. Your move to the boonies. There is the smell of Johnna’s apartment, the smell of the caged birds in Bright’s living room. There is the dainty precision of the Asian nurse. There is your time in the yard, which, though it just ended, seems distant. There is this morning, when you clipped your nails and ate a mess of sautéed scallops with sourdough toast, and this afternoon, when you paid a tow truck to take the U-Haul to Little Rock. There is the last session in the bathroom, at the end of which you enjoy the sigh of all sighs and soberly press the stop button.

  I go to the bank and get a cashier’s check for $ 150,000. The banker thinks I’m a real-estate speculator from the city, and I let him think that. He talks up the loan department and I nod and smile. I mail the check to Delta Corporate Entertainment, an outfit Colin uses from time to time to scrub Thomas’s and Tim’s money. It’s just a PO box. I enclose instructions for Colin to keep forty-five grand and give ten grand each to the Tennessee runners, ten to the Alabama runners, ten to the Mississippi runners, ten to the Little Rock guys, five to the guy who replaced Gregor, and twenty to Her. On the envelope I write SEVERANCE. Colin will give the runners the money. He’s that kind of person. There are some other folks who will feel it when I pull out, but they’re freelance types, people with options, people who’ve never directly put their necks on the line for me.

  I pack. I want to bring only what will fit in my car, and this is no big trick now that I’ve burned all my things. I go to the drugstore and buy one of everything they have in a travel size. I buy a miniature TV. I buy a couple maps, the smallest ones they have. I almost buy a heated pillow to put behind my back while I drive. I don’t, though; I’m not planning on more than a day on the road. I go to the electric company, the gas company, the phone company, and tell them what day to cut the service. I leave them each a hundred bucks and tell them to keep, as a tip, whatever’s left over after the last bill. I tell the post office to hold my mail for a month. I check the fluids in my car—oil, brake, power steering, antifreeze, washer—and none of them are a drop low. My car is getting better with age.

  I want to make a clean break from the people I work with, the people Thomas and Tim and Colin work with. I don’t want to be found. I don’t want to be hounded by people who expect something from me, who have hard feelings toward me. Any thoughts I had of going legitimate were clouds over my mind, gloomy fluff. One day my story will come to light, and it will have a grand final act. I am a drug dealer. No one knows they’re a drug dealer until they become one, and once you do, there’s no resigning the post.

  I have only one good connection left, a guy I haven’t talked to in years but who I know is still active. I dial his number. One ring and here he is. He’s got a voice you don’t forget—deep, but squawky and struggling. It makes me think of a crippled hawk.

  I can find no other way to identify myself than as Frog, Froggy, Froggy from Memphis. It feels undignified, referring to myself as Frog. It’s something other people should call me. He’s not sure. Colin’s boss, I say, and that brings him around.

  “I thought Colin’s bosses were two big twins,” he says.

  “That’s right,” I say. “I’m their boss.”

  “Okay, I know who you are. I figured you’d be retired by now.”

  “I was, but it didn’t suit me. I make a lousy lazy man.” I know what he’s thinking, that I blew all my money. I blew some of it, sure, but not all. Not hardly. If I lived a certain way, I could stretch my savings out fifteen, twenty years—if I ate generic bran flakes and went to matinee movies and kept a penny jar. I’d rather die than put myself on a budget, and it’s not because I like spending money; it’s because going on a budget now would make my whole life to this point meaningless. I might as well have been working in a supermarket all this time.

  I tell the guy I’m getting my hand back in, attending some meetings personally, doing some runs. What I need, I tell him, are w
eekly shipments to Oklahoma City.

  “Oklahoma City?” he asks. He leaves it at that, dead air on the line.

  He doesn’t trust me. I called him out of the blue, for one. It’s me calling, for two. A regular, volume customer seems too good to be true. I don’t blame him; it’s fishy. If I try to convince him it’s not fishy, it will stink all the more.

  “Look,” I say. “I’m trying to stay in shape. I don’t want to get fat and get ripped off. I want to be able to do what my people do.”

  “Makes sense,” he says. “I’m not taking new clients right now, though. I can hardly please the ones I already got.”

  “Is there some kind of shortage I don’t know about?”

  “It’s not like the old days,” he tells me. “Supply dips and rises from month to month.”

  “What old days?”

  “The eighties.”

  “Don’t worry about your other customers,” I tell him. “Whoever used to be your biggest customer, now they’re your second biggest.”

  “Can’t,” he says. He gives me another number to call, and I act like I’m writing it down. He says in Oklahoma it’s all meth, and meth is all local. He says Oklahoma’s a bad choice. He says these days there are nothing but scumbags in the business.

  “There’s always been scumbags,” I tell him. “I’m a scumbag.”

  He doesn’t chuckle at this. He apologizes again and hangs up.

  I hold the phone up and turn it this way and that in the light.

  “Oklahoma’s whatever I say it is,” I tell the phone. “If Arkansas is what I say it is, Oklahoma’s what I say it is.”

  I’ll go to Oklahoma with nothing arranged. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ll tell them what they like and when they like it. I’m not frustrated or scared or excited or determined; I’m simply ready to do what I do. Maybe I’ll get new boys, maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll work for somebody; that’d be a fucking hoot. Maybe I’ll leave right now. I’ll put some coffee in a travel mug and throw the tapes of my life, these tapes of an unfinished tale, in the trash can. Tapes aren’t a proper home for my story. My story should never be recorded. It should be pieced together and passed down, exaggerated, doubted, insisted upon.

  After Johnna left Union County, it took her six hours to get a hold of herself, to grasp the situation, and only then could she take a break from driving, at a dusky truckstop exit a ways past Jackson, Tennessee. She put her Oldsmobile in park and pushed warm breath after warm breath against the windshield. She brushed her fingertips through Bedford’s fur. She ate a couple handfuls of smoked almonds that tasted like meat, drank a bottle of something called vitamin water. A team of semis were lined up dutifully across the way, all parked at the same slight angle, their lights glowing. They were watching over Johnna, daring anyone to mess with her.

  When Johnna reached Gray Cypress, she was going to tell Swin’s family exactly what had happened, leaving nothing out, answering any and all questions, and they were going to respect her for this. She would hand the cash over to Swin’s stepdad, however much it was, and let him do with it whatever he thought was right.

  Before that, she would get a hotel room a couple miles from Gray Cypress and relax for a day or two, get her nails done and go for a tan. She would get her car washed and waxed, get a new dress. When she rang the doorbell at Swin’s stepdad’s house she would be stunning. She would be as beautiful as any of Swin’s sisters, but she would be a grown woman with a small, insistent, radiant belly. They would know in a glance that she hadn’t come to take, but to give. They would know she was a gift.

  Johnna had never been more alone than now, pregnant and unemployed, pulled off the road in a foreign state, night falling, but she’d never felt more secure. She had surpluses of toughness built up, and it was an embarrassment of riches. She’d never need as much toughness as she had in her right now. Things had gone bad and she was handling it. She had Kyle’s grit in her guts and Swin’s cleverness in her brain. The next time things went bad for Johnna, and the time after that, the badness would be no match for her. Bedford nuzzled his nose into her thigh. His tail was twitching. He was a wuss, this dog; thank God he had Johnna to look out for him. Johnna rolled down her window. The air had sharp notes to it—the exhaust from the semis, the cold night on its way, a nearby cow pasture. She tilted her head out the window and there were the stars, faint but numerous, pushing everything that ever happened before tonight further into the past.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author thanks Paul Winner, Anna Keesey,

  and Heather Brandon. Their help was invaluable.