Not for Nothing

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Nobody’s heard your shot. Nobody cares.

  You ease back through the gate and pull it shut, chain it down tight, pick the shotgun up by the barrel and say it to Rory in your head: You’ve got a gun now, sir.

  It’s supposed to be funny.

  Two beers later, you finally smile. When the payphone outside rings, you just let it, even tip a third beer to it in appreciation. But then it won’t stop ringing.

  You go out in bare feet, press the receiver to the side of your head. “Ring My Bell Male Escorts, will you be paying cash or cash tonight?”

  The person on the other end laughs a bit, then says back, “Think I have some credit, actually, Mr. Bruiseman.”

  You close your eyes: Jimmy Bones. Arnot King finally pulled the roll of negatives from the black tube for him, held them up to the dome light of the Lincoln. They’re in Midland somewhere. Carlotta’s, probably, or one of the other lots.

  “Jimmy—” you start, wincing inside, but he’s already gone.

  Twenty minutes, then. Twenty minutes for the twenty miles of 20 between you and him. You hang the phone up, pull your lower lip between your teeth, and shrug. It’s not like you haven’t seen this coming, not like you didn’t ask for it. All there is to it now, to save yourself, is to tell Jimmy Bones the real and true score: that the film is in the Property desk of the Sheriff’s offices, in a brown envelope only Anthony Robert Payne can sign for. That, if Arnot King chooses to drop all his charges, chalk it up to mistaken identity or heat of the moment or whatever, then Anthony Robert Payne should be released Monday, sometime. Knowing Felson, at 4:59.

  And, anyway, it’s not like you ever told Jimmy Bones that the film in your chest pocket was the last of the Harkness rolls. If he hadn’t run 110 volts through you, then he could have saved himself forty miles.

  Once he gets the actual film, though, and tries to use it to get Harkness to look the other way on something, that’s when Stanton isn’t going to be far enough away from Midland for you anymore. That’s when nowhere with DPS is going to be far enough away. Nowhere she can touch with radio.

  And now your keen detective senses are telling you it’s past time for you to steal away in a stolen truck. Try to change your name to something even less probable. Disappear until even you forget who you are, who you were, who you could have been, had things played out differently.

  And maybe it’ll be better that way. Maybe Madelyn at the high school can somehow change the yearbook, even, so that your picture is like the Lawler kid’s, the year he drowned: the silhouette of a person, the shape of a life; a placeholder.

  At least now, for your next life, you have some experience to put on an application, you tell yourself. You’re a security guard.

  It makes you want a beer for each hand.

  You lean the shotgun against the payment slot, step into the office, to the compact refrigerator, and stand with your beers clinking together, then just stand there some more, staring into the darkness, something undulating just under the surface of your thoughts, trying to rise.

  When it finally doesn’t, you step back outside, shake your head at the mess Jimmy Bones and Arnot King have made of Aardvark Custom Economy Storage. You drain the first beer down, sling the bottle up onto the roof and set the second carefully on the seat of the lawnmower. Chances are you could unclamp the two jaws biting down on the rear flange of the hood, stop the current. Even safer, though, is just pulling the extension cord from the socket it’s plugged into under the air conditioner in the office. Next time you go for beer.

  Tonight, judging by the mess you’ve got to clean up, that should be about every four minutes. You lean into it with what little energy you’ve got, start picking through the boxes spilled from the storage units, end up shopping in the dark like always, wheeling stuff over to the concrete in front of your storage unit. The first two things you get are a cream-colored exercise bike that uses a brown fan for resistance. The second is a television set so old the glass looks like a bubble. The third is a large painting in a brass-colored plastic frame. It’s a seascape, one wave of a thousand rolling in. You’ll hang it on the nail the calendar’s on now, you think. The nail Rory drove in for you.

  Masonry nail—was that what he said it was? Can you buy those single-serve, or you got to spring for the whole box?

  Like you’re going to be here long enough. Furnishing your office like this, it’s—it’s standing outside, a comet blazing down out of the sky for your side of the earth, and nodding up to it as you angle your water hose over to the tomato plants you’ve been coaxing up their sticks for two months already.

  Not like you have anything better to do, though.

  You keep the television on your hip under one arm and duck under the mostly-open door of your unit, stand into the inky blackness, your free hand automatically grubbing above for the pull chain of the light. It just rains glass down. You look down to the sound, realize how barefoot you are, and then what’s been just under your thoughts rises all at once: the glass on the pool table that you had to brush into a pile, sweep up onto a piece of paper.

  The reason you did it was because a table shouldn’t be treated like that. It’s one of the few standards you’ve got left. But—

  But Jimmy Bones didn’t do that. Jimmy Bones wouldn’t do that. And he wouldn’t have Arnot King do it either. To a pool player, trashing a table like that’s inviting bad karma, missed shots, balls that the banks will hold onto for a moment too long, soaking up all the English on that most important shot.

  If not Jimmy Bones—

  You don’t get to finish. In a flash of heat, the television under your arm explodes and the storage unit is full of sound, and, for an instant, light. Standing in the back corner, at the other end of the stab of flame, it’s Rory Gates.

  Slowly, time pieces itself back together around him, spins you around by the arm that you’re only now realizing has caught a pellet or two. And—and the side of your face, under your jaw: the glass from the television screen is embedded there, a thousand tiny slashes.

  You fall down in the door, look to your other hand still holding the pull chain of the light, and then Rory racks another shell into the chamber, lowers the gun at you and steps forward to show that the light at the end of this tunnel, it’s going to be coming through at fifteen hundred feet per second.

  You shake your head no, pleading, and roll back, roll again, the caliche rock sticking to the blood already coating your face.

  Rory steps forward again, all the way into the half-light. He’s holding his shotgun in one hand, one of your beers in the other.

  The beer he throws down on you. It’s empty, clatters away.

  “Brusha brusha brusha,” he singsongs. Meaning he watched you clean the pool table. He was there the whole time, probably could have reached over and tapped you with that goose barrel.

  You follow the beer with your eyes, realize too late that that’s the wrong move, and when you come back to Rory again, he fires. Not right at you, but right in front of you, gouging caliche dust up into your face.

  Two shots, you count in your head, rolling again, holding your eyes.

  If that shotgun has a plug in it like it should, he should have two more, maybe. If that first shot was already racked.

  Rory takes another step onto the concrete skirt in front of your storage unit. He looks over to the exercise bike and smiles about it. “Finally joining the human race, Nabby?”

  You clear your eyes, rise to one knee. “Anything to be more like you, Rory.”

  It stops the smile he had building, brings the gun up to your face again.

  “Be careful,” he says. “I might just—”

  “Do me like you did Tom?” you interrupt, standing now, a handful of caliche in your left hand, down by your thigh.

  “He was my friend,” Rory says, leaning away from the gun to spit.

  “I’d hate to see what you’d do to somebody you don’t like, then.”

  In answer, Rory fires again, t
he pellets whipping past your head into the contents of whatever unit’s behind you.

  He takes another step forward.

  “Go ahead,” he says about the fist your left hand is.

  You look down to it too, and over to your shotgun by the office door, then shrug, hold your hand out for him and open it, blow like what you’ve got here is fairy dust.

  Rory smiles and you sling the caliche you have in your right hand.

  It catches him full in the face, swings his head around, and you’re diving and scrabbling for the office door, already arcing your body away from the birdshot he must be using. Shell number four.

  It never comes.

  You place your hand on the fancy shotgun, lean it away from the payment slot, and look over to Rory.

  He’s motioning with his gun for you to get yours, and the way he’s smiling you know that he’s had a bead on you for the last few steps. That he wants you to have the gun, wants you to have a chance.

  Or he wants it to look like that, anyway. For this to be self-defense on his part.

  The shotgun you woke with, it wasn’t from a storage unit, hadn’t just fallen there for you to fall on top of. It’s from Rory Gates’s gun safe, his least favorite twelve-gauge, probably. A gift from Gwen’s dad, something like that, to make it all poetic in his head.

  You let the shotgun fall back to the ledge of the payment slot.

  “That Ford you gave your son?” you say, not looking around to him.

  “What about it?” he says.

  “Gwen ever tell you that that’s where, after the Colorado City game, y’know? Kind of funny, I mean, that of all the trucks—”

  Before you can finish, he lets loose his fourth shot. Not at you—like you know he doesn’t want to do yet, not really—but past you, into the radiator, hood, and windshield of the Ford. Like it’s the truck’s fault.

  A crying shame is what it is.

  You take your shotgun by the barrel, like you’re just toying with it. “Can you see him up there?”

  “Who?” Rory says, sweeping his eyes around. Following yours, up into the sky.

  “The Lawler kid,” you say. “Up by the ‘T’, in the Motel sign. He likes it there, I think.”

  “Dane’s little—?” Rory gets out, his head automatically tracking over and up, to the boy who’s been dead for thirty years, to the empty space where the sign should be, where he, like you, just forgot it wasn’t, and in that moment of inattention you bring your shotgun around by the barrel, that six-hundred-dollar stock connecting with the side of his head.

  It sends his shotgun skating away, drops him like a sack of dead cats.

  You step in, roll him over to—you don’t know, something—but he’s Rory Gates. Like Toby Garrett’s baby brother said, like you should have guessed, him working with his hands day in, day out: it takes more than a sucker punch to keep him down.

  He takes the foot you place on his chest and he holds it, connects his work boot with your sternum in the worst possible way, and suddenly you’re flying again, crashing back into the broken lamps and boxes of clothes you’re being paid to protect.

  You throw as much of it as you can at Rory but he keeps coming, and then he’s on you, holding your shirt with one hand, pounding your face with the other until you’re able to knee him away. He backs off, wipes his mouth with the back of his arm. “Should have been riding that exercise bike for years already if you wanted to take me, Nabby.”

  You stare at him now, no smiles.

  “That’s not my name,” you tell him, and he shrugs, crashes into you with his shoulder, and now you’re rolling together toward the front of Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, and the only reason you’re able to resist him even a little is that you outweigh him by fifty pounds.

  Soon enough he’s on your chest, trying to work on your face, getting your forearms instead. You tell him his son hits harder than that, and manage something like a laugh.

  It slows him down. Not the good kind of slow. He pulls you up with both hands, tells you to leave Dan the hell out of it and slams his forehead into your nose. It makes the world explode, starts your hands and feet and teeth doing their own thing until, for a hard-breathing moment, you’re away from him somehow, falling into a run, crashing down over that shotgun by the office.

  You roll over, the butt in your stomach, the barrel angled just generally behind you—it’s not called a scattergun for nothing—and pull the trigger.

  Nothing happens.

  Rory lets you stand. Doesn’t move out of the way even an inch.

  “Think you’ve got to pump it there, Detective,” he says. “You should be used to that kind of action, right?”

  He scoops his dip out on his index finger, slings it away in a clump that sticks to the cinderblock of the B-units like a dirt-dobber nest, if they built out in the open.

  You rack the next shell up into the chamber, settle the long gun on him, and he stares at you over it.

  “Well?” he says.

  “What?” you say back.

  He narrows his eyes at you in reply, holds one finger up, and works his can of dip up from his pocket, packs some into his lip.

  “Surgeon general my ass,” he says, his mouth full of spit, sirens wailing in from north of town, all the local law enforcement still out at the Rankin place.

  “There’s always lead poisoning,” you say, stepping in, leading with the shotgun.

  “Didn’t get a chance to tell you about my cute little wifey,” he says, shrugging. “You know what she said the second time I brought her up from the water?”

  You raise the barrel, fire over his head, right into the heart of Stanton.

  He steps closer. “What she said, Nabby, is that that first time with you, she could hardly find it, man. That dewlap you got going?” You lick your lips, lower the gun onto him, because he’s asking for it now. “Ever hear what the old men at the gin call it? ‘Dicky-do.’ Like, your belly, it hangs out further than your—”

  This time you fire close enough to him that the pellets tug at his right shirt sleeve. It spins him around a bit but he never looks away from you, even when the blood starts seeping out from under his cuff.

  “Afraid to do it, Nicholas?” he says, smiling. “It easier like this?” he adds, thumbing a shell up from his pants pocket, casting around for his shotgun. He locates it, bends to pick it up, giving you the whole wide expanse of his back for what you know is longer than he needs to.

  When he stands again it’s with the shotgun in the crook of his arm like it’s the breakover kind, like he’s a pheasant hunter on a magazine cover. He looks down to the gun the whole time he thumbs the shell in.

  “Two seconds,” he says, holding the gun just by the slide, chambering the stubby red shell. “Two seconds and it’s high noon for you and me, Nabby. Been a long time coming.”

  “My beer,” you say. “We can split it first, think?”

  He follows your eyes around to the lawnmower, the bottle still there on the seat somehow, after everything else in the world has been trashed.

  “Like gentlemen,” he says, nodding.

  “For old times,” you say, never quite lowering your gun. “Just a couple of old Buffaloes, put out to pasture.”

  He keeps his eyes on you, reaches back for the beer without looking, his attention split just long enough for you to fire one more time.

  This time, instead of above or beside him, you shoot below him.

  The rocks and dust cut up into his face, pushing him back, off balance, his hand that was reaching for the beer going palm down onto the hood instead, for support.

  The electricity there arches his back, pushes him up onto the toes of his work boots, and he sticks for a few seconds, lit up until the charger sparks out, dies.

  The silence afterward crackles, hisses.

  Rory Gates wavers, the steel toes of his boots smoking, and then he collapses forward onto his face, and you start the kind of breathing that always comes after, the kind that came i
n the shade of that fiberglass boat, once. It’s like crying from the mouth, and you’re not too old for it, never will be.

  When Rory moves again, pulling in all the air he can, turning his head to the side, you pivot the gun around your hip, pull the trigger without even thinking about it.

  The hammer falls on nothing, and you smile at yourself, lean over to the side of the A-unit of Aardvark Custom Economy Storage, finally realize that the whole place is bathed in halogen light.

  You follow it back to the twin headlights of an idling Lincoln Town Car.

  And the gate, it’s open, the lock clipped with the bolt cutters Arnot King must have reclaimed.

  He’s nowhere to be seen, though. Because of all the sirens, you tell yourself, your face slack. Some lawyers run to them. Others duck.

  But Jimmy Bones.

  When you look back to Rory Gates, Jimmy Bones has one leg propped up on Rory’s back. Descending from his hand like a long finger is something black and metal that you know is his mythical .22.

  The barrel’s nestled just behind the hinge of Rory’s jaw.

  You tell Jimmy Bones that that won’t be necessary. Rory Gates has been dead for a week already. One more bullet isn’t going to change anything.

  26.

  SHERIFF FELSON RELEASES FIN at five o’clock Monday evening. You’re still wearing the dark brown 1978 suit you found deep in the same storage unit you got the bench seat from. You’re pretty sure it doesn’t smell. It was for Gwen’s funeral.

  Felson escorts Fin as far as the front door. She doesn’t nod to you or smile to you and you don’t nod or smile back. Standard operating procedure.

  The Ford shifts and complains when Fin climbs in. It’s the first time you’ve seen him close-up, outside an interrogation room.

  He nods once to you, in thanks—all you’re ever going to get, you know—and sets the canister of undeveloped film on the dashboard, right under the rearview mirror.

  “Don’t guess you’re going to be telling me what’s on it,” he says.

  “State secrets,” you say, and pull across the rest of the handicapped slots, unfocus your eyes to see the road. With the new, shattered windshield, it’s the only way to drive.