Not for Nothing

by Stephen Graham Jones

  At the funeral, of course, he’ll be clean-shaven, have different sunglasses. Not be driving the wrecker. Not be anybody you recognize.

  You go there anyway.

  12.

  ON THE WAY, swinging back over the tracks to loop around the two big tanks, turning south again to the caliche road the cemetery’s on, you slow the Mustang for just a moment, know that the detective way to do this is without confrontation. The detective way is just to wait and watch, see who Gwen starts seeing reluctantly a few months down the road, at her friends’ urging. Or maybe she’ll even manage to sit on the money until Dan’s out of the house.

  Though, like Felson says, you’re not a detective.

  And, anyway, if you do it like that, Fin’s up the state river.

  It’s not that you care what happens to him so much, but that, for a few hours, you were him: framed, set up, your life traded in to make Gwen Gates’s more comfortable.

  More than that, this is the first homicide you’ll have actually solved. Maybe it’ll erase your bad run in Midland and the worse stuff it led to. You can be a hero again. In a stolen car.

  This makes you ease off the gas, look around at the leather interior.

  Maybe you can tell them you just found it. Walking up to the Town & Country, it was just there in the cotton field behind the tanks, keys and all. This isn’t a joy ride, it’s a bringing-the evidence-to-the-proper-authorities ride. Sort of. If you happen to get caught.

  You downshift when the evergreens of the cemetery roll into view, lean forward to just coast in, case the crowd, find Jim Martindale, but then—too late—realize what you’ve pulled in with you, high in fourth gear: a hundred-foot tall plume of white caliche dust.

  You stop and it shrouds over you, settles over the cemetery, coating everything with ash, dusting the Mustang’s windshield so that the mourners are all washed pale, ghosts of themselves.

  Instead of stepping out and facing them, you swallow, your eyes narrowed with apology, then stall some more by leaning over the wheel to try to figure out what’s a blinker, what’s a windshield wiper.

  By the time you find it, the thin sprays of Midland water making your windshield muddy instead of just dusty, Sheriff Felson has separated herself from the crowd, is approaching.

  Over her shoulder, for the briefest second, there’s Gwen, coughing like all the other mourners—like a victim—but then Felson’s shoulder moves, raises high enough to dislodge the gun from her hip.

  You want to tell her that this isn’t what you planned, that this isn’t how it’s supposed to have gone. That you’re a hero, you’ve figured it out. The real killer’s here. But then, from the way she’s got her face angled away…she can’t see you, can she? You’re a shape through glass. Anybody.

  What makes you be you again, though, it’s popping the clutch on accident. The Mustang paws forward, becomes, in the eyes of the law, a lethal weapon, a justification for force. A murder weapon brought to the funeral and used in front of a hundred witnesses.

  Felson takes a half step back, but then her training kicks in. She fires once into the windshield.

  Because you’re still leaned over to decode Ford’s wiper-washer assembly, the headrest just over your right shoulder explodes.

  It makes the inside of the car smell new again: foam, plastic.

  You lean deeper into the door panel, grab reverse, and throw the only thing at her you have: more caliche.

  You’re two hundred yards back down the road before the Mustang’s rear tires grab anything like traction, and then you just sit there, looking at the white cloud rising into a column before you and holding like that.

  Slowly, inevitably, the cloud starts to pulse red. To spread.

  “And the party never stops,” you say, and turn left at the tracks, onto the tracks. It’s a thing you’ve always half-wanted to do, since you were fourteen and saw it in a movie. Now you think it might be your last chance.

  When the Mustang finds 137 again, you smoke the tires hard past the body shop just because you can, then shift halfway through a bad fishtail so that one tire hangs in the ditch for twenty yards, leaving the plastic of Arnot King’s right taillight shattered under a mailbox.

  In two minutes you’re out of Martin County, back in Midland County, a shotgun on the passenger seat you really should have left in its cabinet.

  13.

  ARNOT KING MEETS YOU at King Burger. They have the best coke floats in town.

  “I know who you work for,” you tell him.

  He looks the place over, sits down where he can see out the front window.

  “Where’s my car?” he says.

  “You don’t want it.”

  “That so?”

  You lean forward, brush broken glass from your hair onto the scarred tabletop.

  He understands. “Just what have you stepped into, Mr. Bruiseman?”

  “More like what I have not stepped into, Mr.…King Burger?”

  “I wish,” he says, leaning back into his slick seat. “They won’t even give me a discount.”

  “Can’t win them all.”

  “Just the important ones.”

  “Speaking of?” you say, watching every muscle of his face. “You call Jimmy about this little meet-up? Should I be baking a cake, trying on suits?”

  “He doesn’t know about the car yet, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  It’s not, but that’s good to know.

  “So tell me,” he says. And you do, all of it: Gwen, Fin, whoever Jim Martindale is. Your high-speed exit. The fast yellow slash through Greenwood, like an arrow Stanton shot at Midland. How that one bridge out there still smells like sewage, if he’s wondering.

  He’s not. “So you’ve—you’ve actually and really got the murder weapon now,” he says. “You being the last person in Texas who should want to have it, I mean.”

  It makes you cast around King Burger for who might have heard. For a terrible moment, a woman with her fingertips to the glass of the door is Judge Harkness leading a steely-eyed formation of bailiffs, DPS, and Rangers, but then she’s just another redhead with a torpedo job on her chest, the men behind her just men.

  Arnot King sees you looking, looks too. Comes back with a smile. “And you’ve come to me why?”

  “Because I didn’t have anybody else. I’m not even supposed to be in Midland County.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Ever.”

  “Then I’ll say it again. What do you think I can do for you, Nick?”

  You stare at him, slurp your third coke float up through the straw.

  “All this—my theory,” you say. “None of it works without that insurance policy, I don’t think.”

  “Or the shotgun.”

  “That kind of works the other way, I think.”

  “Against Payne.”

  “Or me.”

  “Accessory after the fact, obstruction, operating without a license—”

  “Okay.”

  “To say nothing of your, your willful unbanishment,” he sneaks in anyway then leans forward, heating his eyes up somehow, a vaguely feminine gesture you can’t really track. “And you’re wanting me to—to, I don’t know, get that insurance policy for you with my magic wand, for what, exactly?”

  “Because you’re my lawyer.”

  He smiles about this. On accident, it looks like, then covers his mouth with a meaningful flourish, his eyes trying to keep yours on him, his flicking up at the last instant as a cop passes your table, back from the bathroom.

  “Officer,” Arnot King says to him, tapping his knuckles on the fake wood table like he was going to do it anyway, even if the cop wasn’t already stopping. For a breath, it draws the officer’s eyes down to the tabletop, but then he comes up, to Arnot King, then you, and all you can do, think, be, is a coke float drinker, your mouth clamped onto the straw, whatever it takes to keep your face at a bad angle for him.

  His name is Rodriguez. The reason you don’t even have to see his face
to recognize him is that he was never a face to you at all, but a utility belt worn a particular way, a shirt untucked just so much—all you could see through the dry fiberglass of the boat, still sparkling down over you, your hand to your chest, trying to hold all your blood in. He was the first one to respond, didn’t even stop to put gloves on. It was the last time you felt clean, really.

  Seeing him here, now, doing what you’re doing with the life he saved, it’s—you don’t know. Almost like shame, or embarrassment, or, no: welshing on a nothing-bet, that ten-spot you know you owe somebody, and know you’ll only have to pay if they ever call you on it. Which they won’t.

  Just don’t let him see your eyes, you tell yourself.

  Above you, he’s already starting things up with Arnot King. “Thought you hung around the hospital this time of night, Arnie.”

  Arnie?

  In return, Arnot King fakes a long, tolerant, open-mouthed laugh, spreads his arms to encompass all of King Burger. “The people, Jayme. I’m here with the people, cabrón…”

  Rodriguez shakes his head in disgust, breathes out something like a laugh, and is already turning to go when you accidentally look far enough up to lock eyes with him for a moment.

  He stops, angles his head over to see you better. Smiles.

  You nod hey, know that if you try to run—the Mustang’s just behind King Burger, two streets up, the little shotgun stuffed under a dumpster—he’s going to slam you back into the booth before you’ve even stood the whole way, and Arnot King will just fade from the scene, never have been there.

  Better to just offer your wrists, maybe. Do the six or nine months Harkness has been saving for you. Let Stanton, Texas forget you again.

  Instead, Rodriguez massages his jaw in wonder. “How’s the shoulder there, cowboy?”

  You’d forgotten this about him, that he lives in a world of Cowboys and Indians, shoot-outs and dry gulches.

  You touch the old bullet hole—dent, really—shrug, and Rodriguez nods like he’s nodding with you, then lifts his chin to the counter. “You’re paying cash, right?”

  It’s not a question.

  You reach back for more, for him, but that’s not it. He’s not even looking at you anymore, is already pretending you’re not there. Saying over your head, as if to the wall, “Good, cash. Nothing with that comic book name of yours on it. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”

  To show you he’s serious, and to make sure you know what he’s giving you here, he locks eyes with you again for an instant, and you thank him with the slightest, most grateful nod in the long and colorful history of nods, and then he’s gone.

  The thing is, unless you live next-door, King Burger only takes cash.

  “He’s saved my life twice now,” you say, once the door’s closed.

  “Jayme?” Arnot King says, turning in the booth to make sure Rodriguez is really backing out. “He couldn’t save ten cents.”

  Remember to thank him inside for reminding you how much you’re worth.

  “We were talking payment,” Arnot King says. “Compensation.”

  “Say I did have a tape from that Christmas?”

  “Doesn’t make it true.”

  “Your car?”

  “Do you think I really want that now?”

  “You’re going to have to explain it being shot up to Jimmy.”

  “What’s one more car between old friends?”

  You turn sideways in your booth so that your back’s against the wall. “You might be able to…to stay friends, if, say, you brought him something else instead.”

  Arnot King smiles. “Nazi boy gave it back to you?”

  The film.

  “He will. If you can help me here. That’s the only reason I’m helping him, really.”

  Arnot King slides your cup over to his side of the table and makes a show of holding your diseased straw to the side so he can drain the last of the coke float.

  Ten minutes later, the little shotgun recollected because it has a serial number, the Mustang parked on the wrong side of the street with the keys in the ignition, the window down in invitation, Arnot King eases back from Carlotta’s #3 with a Lincoln Town Car. He stops where you’re waiting, the street behind him red with his brake lights.

  You just stand there.

  “Well?” he says, opening the passenger door.

  Close your eyes. Step in.

  Because you’re not sure you could navigate all the back roads south of Greenwood to loop you around through Sprayberry, over to Garden City, up to Big Spring, to creep back into Stanton from the east, you have Arnot King take you the north way out of Midland, up 349 to the Andrews highway. It crosses 137 a few miles north of Stanton, is a straight shot down. Like falling into the throat of the beast. Again.

  “Sure about this?” Arnot King asks at the four-way stop.

  You shake your head no, let him turn back south anyway. In a paper bag on the seat between you is a fifth of Jim Beam, unopened. Twenty years ago it was your father’s favorite.

  The receipt is burned in the ashtray. For tonight to work, it’s very important there not be any back trail.

  When the bridge rolls into view, the lights of the Town & Country glowing on the other side—the only place even half awake in Stanton—you clamp your hand onto the shotgun, tell Arnot King to slow.

  He lets off the accelerator, passes beneath the hanging legs of the Lawler kid and never knows it.

  You spin your head, look behind you. From his silhouetted perch on the missile, the Lawler kid doesn’t wave, just tracks you with his head. Like he remembers, understands that he should have been in your grade, understands how the two of you are tied together: the day his brother Dane found him in the stock tank was the first day of your new life as Nabby. Meaning you left the child you had been behind that day. In a stock tank, it feels like now.

  It didn’t matter that you gave the milk money back, that your dad took his belt off and made you understand certain things, say them back to him word for word. You were Nabby. Unlike St. Nick, it wasn’t a seasonal name, something you could wear a red hat for. To make Nabby fit, you had to keep stealing the milk money, pretty much. Only the milk money kept changing into other things, and other things.

  “Here,” you tell Arnot King, and he turns left after the Town & Country, onto St. Peters. The next turn, though, your father’s, he doesn’t take. Just keeps going.

  “What—?”

  You follow his eyes to the rearview, then through the back glass.

  “It’s just a truck,” you say.

  He shakes his head no, says, “Watch,” and takes a turn right, like he’s going down to the Methodist church.

  Seconds later, the truck turns too, and you know it: the Ford. Yours and Gwen’s, if the world was any kind of fair.

  “It should be in impound,” you say, your face scrunched up. “Right?”

  “It?” Arnot King watches his mirrors more than the road, then, like he’s done this before, sucks the headlights back into the front of the car and accelerates hard.

  The truck switches to brights, catches you by the museum.

  “It’s him,” you say. “Jim Martindale.”

  Arnot King looks over to you.

  “Want me to stop?” he says, nodding down to the little shotgun. You look down to it too, finally shake your head no.

  Up by the baseball field, Arnot King backs into somebody’s carport, lets the truck flash past, the driver just a shape hunched over the wheel, looking. Maybe Jim Martindale, maybe not.

  Arnot King eases the Town Car in behind him but then the Ford sees you, slows to a crawl. Arnot King slows with it, a standoff, and then one of the truck’s reverse lights glows on.

  “I didn’t even know they worked,” you say, smiling.

  Arnot King backs into another driveway to turn around. It’s a slow chase, like playing tag with the cop the other night in Thomas’s truck.

  You let it go for three more minutes or so, the truck just followi
ng, not really wanting to catch up, then direct Arnot King up to Rory Gates’s old house.

  Like you hoped—she was always taking in strays—the garage door is propped up to let the cat go in and out as it wants.

  “Shine your lights there,” you tell Arnot King and he sweeps them around, settles them on the garage door. The rear license plate of Gwen’s Town Car winks back. On cue the Ford’s headlights fade down to yellow worms, then ash.

  “He thought we were her,” you say, patting the dashboard of the Town Car you’re in. “That she’s got somebody else already…”

  Arnot King follows the Ford east but then stops at the city limits for your decision. You watch the one dim taillight. Big Springs is that way. The dump. The scene of the crime.

  You shake your head no to Arnot King.

  “Your town,” he says, shrugging, and it’s maybe the first time anybody’s ever said that to you.

  You show him the insurance office on St. Peters. It’s where he’s supposed to meet you tomorrow morning. He finds your father’s street on his own, after that, the window bleeding television light.

  “Thanks,” you say, your finger to the inside handle of the door. “Really, even if this—” but then, when you start to pull the shotgun over, to hide somewhere in the tomb of your father’s house, it doesn’t move.

  You look down: Arnot King holds onto it with one finger, a napkin between his skin and the stock.

  “Insurance,” he says, smiling a thin smile at you, and you finally just shake your head, only light him up with the dome light for a flash before pushing the door shut just enough for it to catch, not quite enough for any noise.

  He eases away, doesn’t even use the brakes at the corner, and you say it again to him—thanks—then walk with the bottle to your father’s front door, step in without knocking.

  Your father looks up, trying to place you, then nods at last, lifts his hand to show you you’re in the way here. That he can’t see the television.