by Daniel Pyne
“I see they don’t feel the same way about motor homes,” Rayna observed dryly, already defensive on Lee’s behalf. There were at least half a dozen huge, rusting Winnebagos moored on parking pads within her line of sight.
They fell quiet again. There was the slow meter of crickets, and the rush of wind through the pines. Faint thumping bass notes throbbed from some kid’s maxed-out car stereo. Like a lonely heartbeat.
The tops of the tanks got surreal in the twilight, lost definition, even ceased to be strange.
“What does it make you think of?” Lee asked.
Rayna thought about it carefully before she answered: “Goose bumps.”
Lee looked at her. Something had softened in the way she looked back at him.
“See,” she said slyly. “Start with friends, sky’s the limit.”
There was an ominous, low rumble, rising, and Grant’s Camaro came quickly down the street and slipped into the driveway like a shark.
He shouted from the open window, “Hey you kids get down from there! Somebody could break their neck!”
Grant got out, slamming the door shut and striding toward them. There was something loose-wired about his brother’s grin, so Lee hopped off his bump and made sure to get to Rayna first. He helped her dismount, hands on her waist. She let them stay there, and put her hands over his, evidently to make sure they stayed there, and that’s when he noticed that his wedding ring was missing.
“Taking in the view from the metal mammaries?” Grant asked Rayna.
“Muscle car,” she replied, deadpan. “Why am I not surprised?”
“Like it?”
“No.”
Lee had disengaged and walked back to gaze intently down at the ground around the septic tank he’d just been atop. Rayna and Grant didn’t notice at first.
“Was that you with the Tupac overcranked?”
“No. I got a vintage eight-track. Lynyrd Skynyrd and The Band.”
Rayna laughed.
Lee was down on his hands and knees, searching the stubbly weeds and grass for the gold band. Rayna searched for him in the darkness, calling out, “Lee, I’ve gotta go, bus leaves at seven,” and then, finding him, “What are you looking for?”
“Um . . . ”
“I can take you,” Grant offered. “Hell, I can take you all the way home. I’m not doing anything.”
To which Lee answered, “No, no, no.” He got back up, ringless. “No, that’s not necessary. Thanks, though.”
Grant looked mischievously from Lee to Rayna. Nodded, as if satisfied, as if he thought he had accomplished something. Lee didn’t like it.
“Great,” Grant said. “Well. Nice seeing you, Rayna.” Grant walked inside.
“Everything okay here?” Rayna asked Lee.
“Oh yeah.” It wasn’t, but Lee knew he wouldn’t be able to find the ring in the failing daylight. He needed a metal detector. Was there one in the garage? Maybe. No. A neighbor had given him one to fix, but he’d taken it to school and dissembled it for the electromagnet.
“Lee?”
“Yeah?”
“What were you doing? Hands and knees, on the ground, just now?”
“Nothing.”
“Lee.”
“Nothing. I thought I dropped something, but . . . didn’t. It’s all good.”
They had to go all the way around Grant’s Camaro to get to the Jeep.
The big Trailways bus was already idling, throaty, windows all lit up and cozy when Lee’s Jeep pulled up in front of the tiny depot just down the street from The Little Bear. He left the engine running and got out when Rayna did.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
The awkward pause they’d come to expect.
“See you.”
“You know how to text?”
“I do. I don’t like it.”
“Okay. Well. Call me.”
“I will.”
“No, Lee: Call me.”
To avoid another awkward pause, Lee put out his hand to shake hers. And immediately regretted it. But Rayna’s smile was charmed, cautious, warming. Was it possible she actually liked that Lee didn’t try to kiss her?
“I enjoy seeing you,” she said, as if she was trying the concept out for herself. “It’s weird.”
“Friends,” Lee reminded her.
“Call me.”
“I will,” he said. He said it again, that he would. Call.
“You better.”
Lee watched until the air brakes hissed and the bus rumbled away. Rayna waved to him from a back window. She said something, her lips moving, but Lee didn’t care what it was. He felt all thawed out. And his jaw ached from trying so hard not to just grin like a happy dog the whole time he’d been with her.
COLD HARBOR
SEVENTEEN
Flag of surrender, flag of shame.
Dawn bruised the darkness, stirring the legion of sleepy speculators milling outside storage unit 444, and the angry red tag pasted across the lock latch fluttered in a stiff wind that coursed through the long, narrow aisle. A broad-shouldered man came through the crowd politely, dressed in a tan-and-brown flannel over a filthy Drive-By Truckers T-shirt, saggy jeans that hung improbably from his hips and teased some paisley boxers, sunglasses cocked back on his crewcut, a clipboard in one fat hand.
“Okay. Make space, ladies. Ten feet back from the door.”
Feet shuffling, the milling mass shifted, flowed, and Lee and Grant found themselves moving without meaning to. A woman with a garbage-bag poncho that hung to her knees crinkled awkwardly full-tilt back into them. Lee caught her and kept her upright.
“Whoopsie.” She went rigid under his hands, a mongrel dog that didn’t like being touched. “I’m wearing alpaca,” she said somewhat apologetically, and it took Lee a moment to understand she was explaining her plastic overgarment: “I didn’t want to get it all sooty,” she continued, “what with the Denver dew and the dirt and the just, you know, general grime that comes of interrupted lives and long-term storage.”
Lee nodded and, once he’d stabilized her, took his hands back and shoved them down in the pockets of his jeans.
“Here we go,” Grant told him.
Lee had read somewhere about people who lived in storage units because of unemployment and the economy. Everyone around him this morning looked as if they could have emerged from a storage unit. And Grant had literally been in storage: Territorial Prison. He wouldn’t talk about it. Everything in that hard drive has been lost, he had said, when Lee asked. You can’t retrieve it, so let’s move on.
The broad-shouldered man held both hands up and fluttered the clipboard. If he could have their attention, please. He could, and did, and proceeded to explain the rules: ten-minute viewing period, after which the bidding would begin; no crossing the ten-foot DMZ; no flashlights; no stools or height-enhancement devices; all sales final; the winning bidder would have forty-eight hours to empty the storage space after which the management team would load it up and haul it away and assess a ten-dollar-per-cubic-foot penalty for which said successful bidder would be required to leave a credit card imprint as assurance.
A question arose from a thin man who didn’t have a credit card but brought his checkbook. No was the quick answer; unfortunately, there were no exceptions. It was a rigid formula, and the big man was sorry but the credit card imprint procedure was required. He toggled the crotch of his pants as if there might be a small animal in there, the inseam was hanging so low. He glanced at the display of his cell phone, and then he spat out something lumpen onto the pavement, and rubbed it with his boot.
“Any other questions?”
“Who are all these people?” Lee asked his brother.
“The key to this, as I understand it from some reality TV show I watched once with these OG lifers down in Cañon City,” Grant said, ignoring him, “is to look for the suggestion of spaces behind what’s up front. It’s a geometry problem. Negative space. Pockets, cavities, where, I dunno, th
ere could be a motorcycle hiding. Or an ATV, or a Wedgewood stove, or a pinball machine. Or some antique furniture, or, well, anything valuable, really. You want to be able to cover your bid and then some.”
Lee said he wasn’t planning on bidding.
Grant said he’d heard of people claiming contents of a foreclosed container with a bid of fifty dollars and finding over a hundred grand worth of pristine early Jack Kirby comic books preserved in plastic sleeves.The broad-shouldered man had produced a giant pair of red-handled bolt cutters from somewhere, and as the first glint of sun shivered over the slotted steel roofs of the Lock’n Go Self Storage lot, the padlock snapped, dropped, clattered to the pavement, and the unit’s door yawned open.
Lee squinted and craned to see over the crowd in front of him. The inside of the container looked as if somebody had backed up to it a dump truck filled with clothes and broken things, emptied its load into, and then crammed the door shut. A flat basketball flopped out and wobbled down the driveway.
“Fuck a duck,” barked the alpaca woman, aloud. “Criminy. They been through it and took away all the good stuff.”
“Maybe not,” said a goateed man next to her, who Lee guessed was some relation. “Don’t be a negative Nelly.”
“Why are we here, again?” Lee asked his brother, but Grant had pushed to the front of the viewing area and didn’t hear him.
Ten minutes proved to be shorter than Lee thought. Half of the prospectors drifted away, grumbling like the alpaca lady, not interested. Another third just stood and speculated about shapes under bedspreads, the contents of a stack of sturdy U-Haul moving boxes, the viability of that microwave (or convection oven?) just becoming visible in the back shadows of the container as the new day brightened, and whether the curve of chrome that some thought they saw exposed in the tangle of some blue jeans and work shirts was the handlebar of a carbon fiber racing bike or just the front curl on the grip bar of some geezer’s shitty walker. But there were a few quiet, purposeful doyens who sipped from steaming Dunkin’ Donuts coffee cups and kept prowling, back and forth, restless but purposeful, changing angles of observation and scribbling notes and adding columns of figures that Lee guessed were attempts to guesstimate the value of everything visible to hedge their losses in the event that under all the junk in plain sight was just more junk and disappointment.
For a moment, Lee wished they’d brought Rayna, as Grant had suggested when he announced the Denver storage space excursion. But nothing good had ever come of Grant suggesting Lee bring a girlfriend anywhere, and while Rayna wasn’t really a girlfriend yet, whatever Rayna was, she was not someone Lee wanted to overexpose to his brother’s cheerful and relentless ruination.
“I seen you at the Centennial Swap Meet,” the woman in the trash bag was asking and telling. Lee shook his head. “I think yes,” she said. “I think I never misremember a face. Mmm-hmm. You’all was selling liquid cinnamon extract and stinky incense from Whereverthehellistan. You got that Ford with the TruckNutz hanging from the hitch, which is hilarious.”
Lee drifted away from her. Disappointment. Right. Suddenly he’d figured out why Grant had brought him.
“I’m thinking we set a limit of no more than a hundred fifty dollars,” Grant said sotto voce, moving in front of Lee. “Unless it’s just pure garbage underneath.” Grant estimated they could get most of their investment back by selling the blue jeans to this guy he met in prison who bundled used denim and took the bundled lots to Mexico where they hired little kids to rip the pants apart and sew them back together as distressed fashion jeans and then market them to East Coast hipsters for unholy profits.
“This is not the same as a gold mine,” Lee said.
Grant stared at him blankly, as if he didn’t know what Lee could be talking about.
“Time’s up!”
The storage door swung shut and the broad-shouldered man angled back to the front of the gathering, holding up his pants with one hand; the crowd pressed in on him, impatient to begin their bidding. And so it began: minimum bid of $50 rising in $5 increments steadily up to $135 and then a pregnant pause as people gut-checked their credit card balances and appraisals of the contents of the unit. The lady in the trash bag and alpaca shook her head regretfully and walked away. The goatee man stayed. Maybe they weren’t related.
“One forty. Do I hear one and a half? One fifty in the hat. One fifty-five. One fifty-seven? You sir, one sixty, thank you. Is that it?”
“One seventy.”
“Two!”
Grant was bidding. Oh Jesus. Lee pushed to the front to find him.
“Two ten.”
“I like where you two’re going with this,” said the big man. “I like your fire and conviction.”
Lee found Grant locked eye-to-eye at ten paces with a rail-thin dude whose handlebar mustache had to be a disguise. It was waxed to a fine, ridiculous point and took two lazy turns from each side of the fiercely misshapen nose before pointing skyward. Grant was grinning his you-wanna-fuck-with-me? grin, and Lee tensed for the likelihood that if Grant didn’t win the bidding he might want to punch the mustache man out. Or worse.
“Two twenty.”
Lee nudged Grant, and Grant shook his head. “Two thirty.”
“Two forty.”
“It’s Rollie Fingers all over again,” Lee observed, whispering sidelong to his brother. “Remember what happened to the Dodgers in ’74.”
“Three hundred dollars,” bid Grant; he had never been much interested in baseball history.
“Sold,” said the broad-shouldered auctioneer with a tug of his pants.
And that was that.
Later, knee-deep in what proved to be not junk covering hidden treasure but simply junk covering more junk (as the alpaca woman had suspected), Grant banged his hand on top of an old Protontube TV and kicked halfheartedly through the piles of blue jeans, which were threadbare and worthless and riddled with mold.
“Story of my life,” Grant said, but not bitterly.
“Not really.”
“What?”
“The story of your life: It isn’t about taking chances that don’t pan out,” Lee said. “If that’s what you mean. That’s not what you do, Grant. That’s what I do.”
Lee watched his brother stalk around the container without saying anything for a while. A panel van rattled down the driveway between the containers, flashed momentarily past the square opening of theirs, speakers muffled and booming. Jay-Z. Lee recognized the beat and bark from the hallways and parking lots at the high school.
“And this isn’t the same as a gold mine,” Lee added.
“I don’t know why you keep saying that.”
“We came here,” Lee continued, “because you think that all I want from the gold mine is the payout. And you wanted to show me that maybe there were easier ways to get that thrill.”
“We came here,” Grant disagreed stubbornly, “to bid on a big box of Cracker Jack and hope there was a prize inside, that’s all. If you want to make some correlation with your as-yet-unproven-to-have-any-value-whatsoever hole-in-the-fucking-ground, go ahead, Lee. It’s mental masturbation. I don’t do metaphors.”
His foot hit something and he stopped and bent and pulled from the denim sea an old double-bore shotgun.
“Hey.”
Lee considered his brother with the shotgun and thought: Oh, great, just what he needs.
“See what I mean,” Lee said.
He walked out into the sun. Classic. The endless serendipity of Grant. Sometimes, uncharitably, it made Lee wonder even about the assault felony and the prison term and what golden parachute that adventure had engendered that Lee couldn’t quite gauge because there had to have been an upside in it for Grant; there was always an upside for Grant.
“This baby has got to be worth three hundred bucks, huh?” But Grant wasn’t looking at the shotgun with the eyes of a man intending to sell it.
The Front Range of the Rockies leaned away, panoramic against cartoon flu
ffy white clouds and the pristine robin’s-egg sky like some cheap cardboard painted scrim for a community theater musical. The big dance number at the end of the first act. Impossibly grand and beautiful. Not to be trusted or believed. Lee didn’t like Denver. It tried too hard to impress him. Turn your back to the mountains, and Denver was just Dallas with less oxygen.
“Hey,” Grant called out, chipper now, from the depths of the container. “Get a loada this: complete set of Bronco bobblehead dolls, 2002 season. Sweet. Now we’re talking.”
And Lee was always a little unraveled down here: the thin-set spread of housing developments, the creeping foreboding he felt—he knew—without cause. But Grant was fiddling with the shotgun again. Breaking it open, checking the bore, testing the triggers, lost in some byzantine calculation that was sure to raise havoc sometime soon.
“I don’t see any cartridges, do you?”
Lee wanted, needed, to get back to his high ground.
EIGHTEEN
The following Friday, to the wobbly rhythm of the Junior Orchestra’s wan “Pomp and Circumstance,” a sea of black squares shuffled, shuffled, shuffled down the steep center aisle of the Evergreen High School football stadium grandstands, a nervous mosaic. Graduating seniors descended to the track, spilling off single file to sit in folding chairs that faced a temporary stage.
And little more than a mile away on the diagonal, Grant’s black Camaro was parked across the street from Lorraine’s split-level, and he leaned against the front fender, watching the house and frowning as if he was disappointed in himself for even being there. Due to the eccentric vagaries of canyon acoustics, over the shoulder of forest that separated river from lake he could hear the faint strains of the graduation march mingled with the soft bubble and hiss of the river bending behind him.
It’s yours.
Lorraine finally passed in front of a bedroom window upstairs, holding her baby. She stopped when she saw Grant. She stayed there for a moment, staring back at him, almost truculent. She waved and smiled.
It’s yours.
