Not for Nothing

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Because the truck’s pointed right at it, you pull the headlights on, walk through them across 137. Catching the hose is a shower, but you do it, unwind the duct tape wrapped around the trigger, hold it until the twenty-five cents that started it is used up. Say it out loud: “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  Back at Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, distant, the pay phone starts rumbling.

  You dive across 137 for it, fumble it up to the side of your head.

  “Nicky, Nicky, Nicky,” a voice says.

  You switch ears, close your eyes.

  “Jimmy Bones,” you say back.

  He laughs. “I’m nationwide, right?”

  “What do you want?”

  “What do you think I want?” he says back in a way that you can see him leaning forward, giving you all his attention

  “She took them all back.”

  “Nick,” Jimmy Bones says. Then, lower, “Nick.”

  “Jimmy,” you say back, and feel an 8-ball rising black and smooth in your throat, have to close your eyes, hang the phone up. Swallow.

  3.

  BECAUSE YOU WORSHIP at the temple of bad ideas, you take your disposable camera down to what Sherilita says is Fin’s trailer, in the parts yard behind the body shop on the other side of 80. She packs you a chopped beef sandwich, rolls the bag shut at the top like you’re a kid going on adventures in the backyard.

  You wait till you’re down the road to eat the sandwich. Stop at the IGA for a coke—another expense—then buy a family size bag of chips, too.

  “Carryout?” the checker asks. He’s an old man.

  You keep walking south.

  Fin’s trailer is supposed to be an old AirStream up on blocks, PERMANENT, INC painted over the door in sharp letters. The last place before it, before you’re trespassing, is Caprock Electric, right across from Wheeler’s. You stand in its parking lot for two minutes maybe, winding your disposable camera, letting the flash charge up, and nod to yourself about the parking lot: it’s working hours. You could have pulled the Ford down here if you’d wanted, parked like you were paying your utilities then just stepped across the street, saved yourself some shoe leather.

  Next time.

  Holding the bag of chips in your mouth, you cross 80, feel for a moment that you’re on a high wire, balancing.

  There are no cars for miles in either direction.

  From the hump of the turn lane, you can see most of the body shop, some of the tall fence. From the hump of the railroad tracks, you can see it all, even the AirStream tucked into its corner, the fence to one side of it fairy-tale green with weeds, from somebody peeing there day after day. Fin. Already you’re knowing him, piecing him together. Later, if you can catch Melinda on shift at the Midland switchboard, you might even get his full name, what he was sent up for. Or—you smile to yourself—you might be able to tell just from looking at him. From studying the picture you’re about to take, that he’s never going to know about. You are a detective, after all.

  Cue the music.

  Ace detective Nick Bruiseman swaggers in from the 108 degree heat, checks behind him to be sure he hasn’t been tailed. Zeroes in on a senior citizen with an aluminum walker trying to get across the Caprock parking lot.

  You lift your chips to him so that anybody from the body shop—the roof of the body shop—will think you know him, that maybe he just dropped you off.

  It’s a good enough ruse, except the old dude falls for it too, leans forward to see you better, his walker tilting over to a hinge point you have to look away from, pretend isn’t happening.

  You scrabble down the opposite side of the railroad hump, a hundred years of scorched rocks sliding into the ditch with you, and when you finally stand again, trying to salvage your open bag of chips, a punk without a shirt is watching you from his side of the fence. He claps, smiles one side of his face, the hose tucked under his arm dribbling water down onto the knees of his baggy jeans. Behind him is the Caprice he’s wet-sanding, the primer dusty red, like he’s shaped the whole car from clay.

  “Liquor store up here?” you say, looking south, and he smiles all the way now, isn’t quite looking up 137 in the hopeful way you are.

  “Get to Big Lake, you’ve gone too far,” he says.

  You smile like you don’t know he’s making fun of you, keep walking, the disposable camera hidden in the bag of chips. It was the only place you’d been able to think of.

  “Fin still live here?” you say on the way past, and the punk just stares at you.

  The front of the body shop is opened wide, a radio on a shelf blaring call letters, particles of bondo hanging in the air.

  Bent over a car in some stage of eventual repair is an old Mexican man, years of sun folded into his face. You know without having to ask that, when a car needs pin-striping, he’s the one they call. He lifts his chin to you, exhales around the cigarette he knows just to touch with his lips, not with his fingers.

  You raise your face back to him, scan across the shop for Fin and find something better: in the corner, its driver’s side rearview mirror dangling, is Gwen’s Town Car.

  As naturally as you can, like it’s the prize in the cereal box, you pull the camera up from your chips, snap a picture of the inside of the body shop.

  The old man stops smoothing down the roof of the car he’s on, narrows his eyes at you.

  “No necesitas el flash,” he says, opening his hand to the sky. “Es día.”

  You tell him in Spanish that you can’t turn the flash off.

  He doesn’t believe you, waves you in.

  You look both ways—the liquor store, Stanton—and duck into the coolness of the shop, leading with the disposable camera.

  The old man takes it, flips it over and back, then nods, pulls a circuit tester from the front pocket of his shirt. Before you can stop him, he’s threaded the point of the probe into the back of the camera, given it a lobotomy.

  “Ahora,” he says, holding it to his face, taking another picture of Gwen’s Lincoln. No flash.

  “Thanks,” you tell him, this time in English, and take the camera back, tilt your head to the car. “¿Qué paso?”

  He shows you with his hands: one car sliding up against the other.

  You push your lower lip out in satisfaction, like that explains it, and start shrugging your way back out into the heat, stop at the last moment.

  The old man lifts his face, waiting for your question.

  “It’s in here a lot?” you say—the Town Car.

  The old man smiles about this, his eyes wet, and nods once, and that’s all you need: in a town of only three thousand people, where the Sherilitas can get a pretty good read on your social life just by who’s parked out front, you need an excuse to park there. So, if your boyfriend lives behind a body shop, you become a sloppy driver.

  If your boyfriend works at a storage unit, however, then there’s just a flat, monthly fee, one he could probably find a way to comp, since the husband’ll already be paying him to find out who his wife’s backdoor man is.

  Insert self-portrait here.

  You crush a handful of chips into your mouth. Up 137 to the north, you can feel the punk kid at the fence, waiting to see which way you’re going to go. You look back to him and he doesn’t look away, just smiles. You wink to him, funnel the dregs of the chips into your mouth, and set off south, your rear pocket full of undeveloped film.

  Twenty minutes later you’re trying to drink from a circle system. It’s not worth the effort, and the water tastes galvanized anyway, but you’re in too far to quit. Soon enough an old gold wrecker slows to a stop, the driver crossing his arms over the wheel to watch you. He’s trying not to smile.

  You walk over.

  He scratches the new buzzcut he’s got under his cap. It’s probably supposed to make him look less bald. He opens his mouth to say something, to tell you something, then loses it, pushes his shades tighter onto his face instead. He finally gets it out with as much tact as he can
muster through the passenger side window: “You know what’s in those, don’t you?”

  You look back to the circle system.

  “Rabbits,” the driver says, biting the end of the word off, smoothing his beard down along his mouth. “Rabbits and rats and possums and skunks. And all their little babies.”

  “It’s too high,” you say, not having to look back to be sure.

  The driver points with his chin deeper into the field, says, “Not at the pivot it’s not,” and you follow the circle system back to there. Picture the single joint of hand line feeding all this water. What a good den it must look like in the winter.

  You throw up all at once, wave the guy in the truck on.

  He pulls halfway into the ditch instead, waits for you to finish.

  “Liquor store, right?” he says, his passenger door open.

  You finger a string of vomit away, look up to him. “It’s that obvious?”

  “Ruby told me. ‘Crazy gringo thinks he can walk five miles.’”

  You get in, checking yourself for chunks and strings like’s polite. “You know Fin, then.”

  “Big bad Fin…” the driver says, checking his rearview, accelerating.

  “I know you?”

  He looks over fast, says, “Where you from?”

  “Here.”

  “Maybe, then,” he says. “I moved here senior year.”

  You think about it, tell him he’s no older than thirty-six, then.

  He spits into the cup between his legs. Says, “My shop back there.”

  You shake your head no, aren’t even sure what question he thinks he’s answering. “I mean, I’m thirty-six,” you say. “I moved away with my mother my senior year. That’s why we don’t know each other.”

  The driver extends a hand. “Jim Martindale.”

  “Nick Bruiseman.”

  He doesn’t question it out loud, but, by the way he’s focusing on the dashboard instead of the road, you can tell he’s thinking about it, saying it in his head: Bruiseman, Bruised Man, Bruise Man. Bruise, Man.

  It’s nothing new to you.

  You sit back and wait for the liquor store you’ve only seen once. It’s five miles out, wasn’t there twenty years ago. Just a little modular tan shack—a lean-to, practically. Barely big enough for the one cooler it has. The kid behind the counter isn’t old enough to drive, much less drink. You give him another one of your hundreds, pick up a case of longnecks, a six-pack for the road.

  “Thanks,” you say back in the wrecker, your door closing at the same time as Jim Martindale’s. He angles the two of you back to Stanton, puts his foot in it, racking the pipes.

  “You’re going this way too?” you say.

  “Every day’s a yo-yo.”

  You don’t really have an answer for that.

  “That Lincoln,” you say on the way past the body shop. “What happened to it?”

  “Today, you mean?” Jim Martindale says, not having to look over to know which car you’re talking about. “She says she left it on the curb last night, and bam, some kid sideswiped it.”

  “Insurance?”

  “What?”

  The wrecker rattles over the tracks, stops at 80. Jim Martindale’s studying you again.

  “Does insurance cover that kind of stuff?” you say.

  “You a cop or something?”

  You shake your head no, no. “Just seems Rory would—I don’t know.”

  “You know them?” he asks, his voice going that kind of nasal usually reserved for out-of-staters.

  “Still only one school here, right?”

  Jim Martindale eases past the IGA, lets the wrecker coast the rest of the way to Aardvark Custom Economy Storage. Finally says what he’s been working over under his beard: “Rory wouldn’t be—it’s not him junking her car up, I mean. He’d be suspect numero uno, wouldn’t he? It’d be too obvious.”

  “How?”

  “Since she kicked him out. I thought you knew them.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  You stare straight ahead, aren’t sure how this changes things.

  “Where’s he been living, then?” you say.

  “You tell me.”

  “His truck?”

  “His mom’s old house still out there by the dump?” he says, directing his face east, to the idea of the landfill.

  You remember the place. But it was boarded up as early as your junior year. You only remember because, for a while, it was the place to drink.

  You’re about to ask Jim Martindale if he’s sure about this, but then, pulling up to Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, he laughs through his nose a bit, lets it wind down to a hiss.

  He’s looking out his window, at the front of the Ford.

  “What?” you say.

  “I never saw anything, man,” he says back, shaking his head to cover his smile, no eye contact.

  After he’s gone you walk to the front of the Ford, see what he was smiling about: a streak of maroon-black paint on the outer edge of the aluminum grill. Just at the height of a Town Car’s side mirror.

  You touch the paint away, use your shirt tail to get what your fingers can’t. Stand all at once when you realize that you never told Jim Martindale where you lived.

  By the time you get to the turn lane of 137, his wrecker’s groaning up over the tracks, disappearing down the other side.

  4.

  YOU BELLY up to the bar of the drugstore. It’s been four days, maybe five. Because you don’t work on the weekends. Like everything else since Midland, this is a joke: after going to all the trouble of not working on the weekends, which involves some recovery time, you don’t work much during the week either. Nothing to tell the IRS about, anyway. Or your so-called clients.

  The Ford is parked out front, where you can watch it through the plate glass. All you had to do to gain its trust was rub the water spots off that Rory’s son had left, adjust the rearview mirror some. After that, the truck started for you on the first try. The only thing broke on it besides the right blinker, both exhaust donuts, the dome light, the air conditioner, the carrier bearing, and the passenger side window crank is the odometer. But you’ve only driven it five blocks, too. Maybe the odometer only kicks in at highway speeds.

  You study the handwritten menu set under the smoky plastic surface of the drugstore’s bar, try to read through all the additional letters scratched there with keys, realize all at once that you can hardly even remember your other life anymore, in Homicide.

  Going by the calendar on the wall of the storage unit you’re claiming as your own, it’s January. Just, one that’s 107 degrees in the shade. And there’s not any shade.

  You order a vanilla coke from the fountain, and a cheeseburger with a green chili on it, no onions, then slide your disposable camera to the kid not needing to write all this down, really.

  He looks to the empty stools beside you, comes back even less sure what you mean.

  “Want me to take your picture?” he says, drying his hands on his apron. “This your first hamburger or something?”

  “Develop it,” you say.

  He narrows his eyes as if to suggest you’re in the wrong town, maybe. Or—you get it, now—the wrong decade: what he’s looking at for you is a Kodak kiosk by the door.

  You put the camera in its envelope, push it through the slot.

  The last eleven shots on it, just to use the roll up, get your money’s worth, are of the tall Motel sign that’s already going invisible, you’re so used to it.

  The first ten or eleven shots, you can’t account for.

  Thomas, probably. Whenever he joyrode the truck that first night.

  It doesn’t matter. All you need are the ones sandwiched between, the two with Gwen’s car where it shouldn’t be. To her, those two pictures might be worth a hundred each. More, even: the eight that will get Jimmy Bones off your payphone. The eight that’s probably already sixteen, the way he counts.

  You wonder if she has a tattoo now, Gwen. And where.<
br />
  If she’d come to her screen door if you pulled up in the Ford, just like old times.

  When she was still with Rory, it had been complicated. Now that he’s gone, it’s not: just get Fin out of the way, and she’s available. You take for granted that she’s willing. Why else would she have been all over you that first day?

  But then there’s the boy, Dan.

  Maybe he’s the one who would come to the screen door, stare at you parked in front of his house. In his truck.

  You eat your cheeseburger and drink your coke and study the poster boards of pictures from Old Settlers, two weeks ago. For you it wasn’t trying to find shade by the bank but standing in the door of the storage unit you want to be a living room someday, standing there with a beer, listening to the sirens of the parade downtown. The better part of you was still peddling your bike in it, streamers streaming from your handlebars, your mom and dad watching you from the thrift store’s overhang, your mother with a scarf pulled down over her hair, your father lifting his hand once to you, as if to say there you are, yes.

  But that was eight thousand years ago, Nick.

  A lifetime.

  “So what’s the turnaround?” you ask the kid in the apron.

  He squinches his whole face up, says, like he knows he’s going to be wrong again, “For another burger?”

  “For the film.”

  “Depends on what you checked,” he tells you.

  You look at one of the blank envelopes on the way out. See that you could have requested one-day. The default’s two to three.

  You step back out into heat, slope over to the bank.

  Because the seventy-five dollar check is made out to St. Nick, they can’t cash it. The teller, Janet, just shrugs when you ask her what you’re supposed to do, then.

  “Have you already rendered the services this is in payment for?” she says.

  You study the bullet pen chained to the counter. Open your mouth to tell her kind of, yeah—you took some pictures like he wanted, anyway—but then say instead, “It’s Rory Gates’s.”

  Janet nods that, yes, she knows whose check it is.