Hank took a drink and looked back at her. “Well, I suppose trouble is about all there is around here if you’re not working.”
“Yeah, trouble and death by boredom. Living at the end of the world like this, people have too much time on their hands and no hope of ever leaving. It makes people do crazy things.” She glanced back at her brother again. “It’s sad though. I don’t know why he doesn’t get out of here. He’s a wiz of a mechanic—did a lot of work on the old drilling equipment when he was in high school—I’m sure he could make a living anywhere.”
There was his opening. “Maybe he stays for the same reason you do. Why haven’t you gone back to San Diego? What were you doing there, anyway?”
She laughed and shook her head, looking around the bar. “Shit. I guess it’s just inertia.” She smiled at him. “You know, Isaac Newton? An object at rest stays at rest.” Hank gave her a funny look and she snorted a laugh and shook her head with a mixture of remembrance and disbelief.
“What?” Hank asked, draining the last of his beer.
“You won’t believe it, but I was getting a master’s degree in physics at the University of San Diego. Astrophysics, if you can believe that. But then my mom needed help, so I took a semester off and, well, here I am, damned near five years later.” She polished off her drink and waved the empty at the bartender, who started making her another. “Now, hell, I’d have to start all over if I tried to go back to school and, I dunno, that all seems like a different lifetime, someone else’s life. I just don’t think I’m interested in it anymore. I can’t imagine going back to school now.”
Hank watched her talk. She seemed as surprised by her own past as he was. As though she had never discussed it with anyone and was now pouring it out on a stranger in a bar. He felt the need to say something to her, but everything that came to mind sounded like an old man dispensing advice. He found himself resisting the urge to call attention to the generation gap between them. She was probably only thirty; he was nearly fifty. Christ, he could be her father. He shook his head slightly and she saw it.
“What?” She smiled, embarrassed. “I’m talking too much, aren’t I? And to a total stranger too.”
“No, that’s not it. It’s nothing. I was just thinking. That’s all.”
“About what?”
“Oh, nothing really. I don’t know. About how life is funny, or messy, I guess. How listening to you makes me feel like an old man. How old are you?”
“Don’t you know you’re never supposed to ask a woman that?” Hank shrugged at her. Then she said, “I’m thirty-two.”
“I’m forty-nine. And let me tell you, it never gets any easier to figure out the answers. If anything, it gets harder, you start to feel like you’re running out of time and the realization that you might never get it right or figure it out or whatever you think you’re supposed to do starts to get to you.” Hank ordered another beer and Janie sipped her drink quietly for a minute. She watched him shifting the file folder around on the bar, absent-mindedly moving it to the exact center and placing a wicker basket of salted peanuts on either side of it—in perfect balance—then setting his empty beer glass in the exact center of the space between the top of the folder and the edge of the bar away from them, so the entire arrangement made a kind of cross on the bar.
“Very precise,” she said. Hank gave her a confused look and she nodded at the folder.
“Oh.” He smiled. “I do that. I guess I like things organized.”
“Funny coming from a guy who just said life is messy.” She gave him a kind of half-wink and leaned on the bar with her elbows. The curl of hair was still hanging down and Hank felt a sudden urge to reach over and brush it back, but the intimacy of the act seemed horribly inappropriate and he resisted.
“Well, I guess, but we all have things like that, don’t we? I mean, you were studying astrophysics. That’s all about rules and formulas and precision and the ability to calculate the trajectory of objects through space but, in the end, what does it matter? None of us live out there. We all have to get up and deal with traffic patterns and weather systems, and human beings who don’t seem to behave according to any set of rules at all. But I suppose for a physicist, being able to know and prove that a comet is going to pass within a very precise distance from the Earth at a certain precise date in the future makes a physicist feel like there really is order in the universe, like, on some level, everything really does make sense—or at least might make sense if only people would think hard enough about it and figure it out.” Hank took a deep breath and a swallow of beer and added, “But in the meantime, we all have to live in a world filled with people and governments and armies and whatever else, and none of them are particularly predictable, and there isn’t really a set of rules—or if there is, people are free to break them—and you get older and you realize it’s just never going to make any sense. You start to wonder what the hell you’ve been doing with your life.”
Janie had finished her drink and ordered a third and she leaned her hip against the counter, cocking her head sideways at him. “What did you say you were doing out here anyway?”
Hank hadn’t said, but he responded with, “I’m a surveyor.”
She laughed. “I totally did not expect you to say that. I never thought about it, but I guess surveyors have existential crises too.”
“Why, what did you think I did?”
She paused and took a sip of the fresh drink the bartender had brought and looked like she was giving it some serious thought. “I suppose if I had to guess, I’d have said you were a cop, or maybe a spy.” She grinned.
Hank gave her a wide smile and said, “Is there anything to spy on around here?”
She cocked her head to the side and said, “Not really. The only thing worth looking at is standing right here.”
What could he say to that?
It got late in a hurry. Hank had a few more beers. The crowd thinned out. Three more hours faded into the oblivion of history as Janie fed the jukebox quarters, and Hank and the chemist shot pool and smoked cigarettes and started to feel good and loose. Hank knew it was the worst thing he could do when he was on a job. But why not? What the hell? Everything had gone wrong anyway. The car crash. Everybody talking about him. He was already making a spectacle of himself. It was just turning out to be one of those jobs. And besides, this was the middle of nowhere. By the time anyone started paying attention—if anyone started paying attention—he’d be just another guy people got drunk with one night and no one could remember later.
Hank watched the chemist lean over the table, take too much time to line up a bank shot, and miss badly. The guy wasn’t much of a pool player. “I guess I need to get out more,” he offered, pushing his glasses back up his nose. But that wasn’t the guy’s problem. He wasn’t loose. He tried to make everything too precise. Pool was all about feeling it. Hank smiled and thought of his older brother, years before, in a pool hall near Columbia University. You have to become one with the cue, his brother used to say. You look at the situation. Maybe you walk around the table once or twice. You take everything in. But then you lean over and do it. You just take the shot. Hank always thought that playing pool was kind of like pulling a trigger. When the time came, when the moment finally arrived, you had to be able to get it done without thinking.
“What are you smirking about?” Janie asked from the other side of the table, swaying a little to Rolling Stones’ Let it Bleed.
“Nothing. I was just thinking about playing pool. My older brother and I used to play a lot, back when he was in college.”
“Where was that?”
“Columbia.” Then he added without thinking, “We all went there, everyone in my family.”
“Is your brother a surveyor too?” She winked at him.
“No.” Hank leaned over the table, lined up his shot, and added, “He’s dead.” Then he threw his weight into a two ball combo, filling the room with the crack of colliding balls. He stood and watched them race
around the table for a few seconds. He could see out of the corner of his eye that Janie’s smile was gone. He could see she was wondering what to say next. He hadn’t meant to ruin the mood, it just came out. He picked up the chalk and looked for his next shot.
“It’s not a big deal. It was a hell of a long time ago. Vietnam. It happened to a lot of people. A lot of families.” Hank tried to cut the six in the side pocket and missed.
The chemist had been listening. When he got up to take his shot, he said, “I had three cousins got killed within three months of each other over there. I was just a kid, but I remember going to a lot of funerals that summer.”
Janie didn’t seem to have much to say. She had stopped swaying to the jukebox, and the song had switched to Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen,” which seemed oddly appropriate to Hank. The chemist missed and Hank leaned over the table again. Finally, Janie asked, “How old was he?”
“Oh, I guess he was twenty-one.” Hank thought about it for a second. “Yeah, twenty-one.”
“What happened to Columbia? Shouldn’t he have been in school?” She asked it like there must have been some kind of injustice at play. As though the war itself wasn’t injustice enough, as though the real culprit was the university or something else entirely.
“He dropped out and signed up. I think he did it to spite our old man. You know, I’ll show you, I’ll join the Marines. That kind of thing.” Hank said it matter-of-factly, because that’s all it was now, after so many years, just a simple fact like so many others.
She said she knew what he meant about spiting the old man, but Hank doubted she did. They watched each other across the table, each asking themselves what the evening had been about. There was nothing between them but twenty years and a pool table and a few thin strands of conversation running wispy and delicate as a spider’s web. Was that a connection? Was it anything at all? Janie could feel herself getting tired. Perhaps it was the hour or the beer or this strange man she’d met who at once seemed odd and interesting and deeply saddened by a past she knew nothing about.
He was fascinating and frightening. He had a past he was hiding, or shielding, and at the same time it seemed to ooze from his pores. He was thoughtful and reflective in a way that just didn’t seem right for a surveyor named Hank. There were contradictions everywhere. He walked around the pool table like a shark. He was precise, deliberate, focused, and then he talked about being lost in a universe that made no sense, almost a nihilist. And somewhere, at the center of it all, Janie could sense power, a fierceness, a dangerous disregard for playing it safe. Somewhere inside him was a different set of rules, a universe governed by laws that did not include inertia.
XV
No more wake ’n bake.
That was the deal, at least on work days, when they woke up earlier than usual.
Well before dawn, when the desert was quiet and the air held a brief, matutinal cool, they were making coffee and trying to shake out the cobwebs. Sounds seemed magnified in the small kitchen, and for some reason they kept trying to be quiet despite there being no one to disturb but each other. Eddie filled a thermos with coffee. Eli scrambled half a dozen eggs with cheese, and the two of them ate at the rickety dinette like a domestic couple preparing for work.
“Why make it hard?” Eli asked, out of nowhere. “We can just shoot him and bury him out in the desert.”
Eddie responded like they were talking about remodeling the kitchen. “We don’t have a gun.”
“Getting a gun is easy.” Eli rubbed his puffy cheek and lip, then added, “I got a feeling using it will be easy too. At least on that son of a bitch.”
Eddie didn’t say anything. He finished his eggs without talking and then spoke again from the sink where he washed his plate. “But how do we get him out there? What do we do with his truck?” Eddie took a pipe down off the fridge and lit it. Wake ’n bake rule be damned. This was serious. He held the smoke in and waited for Eli to come up with something. But Eli just sat there, looking perplexed, trying to figure out how to do it. Eddie couldn’t believe they were talking about it so casually. But he was convinced it would never happen, especially if he could keep pointing out the problems with their plans.
Finally, Eddie exhaled and added, “That’s the problem. We gotta get him alone to do it, but he’ll never travel anywhere with us.” He handed the pipe to Eli.
“What if we poisoned him?”
Eddie laughed. “What the fuck do we know about poison? How the hell do you get him to eat something? Just invite him over for dinner? Then he’ll be dead in our house instead of out in the desert, and we’ll still have to deal with his fucking truck.”
Eli didn’t have an answer for that one.
Then it was out to the car in the dark. The sun wouldn’t be up for an hour and a half. By then, Eddie would be well on his way to Los Angeles and Eli would be filling the second truck for a trip of his own. They drove through town. Main Street was dead quiet. Pools of streetlight dangled like inverted cones from the telephone poles, stalactites of photons against a desert ghost town. Past the café, the Golden Dragon, the Super 8, into the desert and then down the dirt road toward the property.
As they passed the spot where Ron had beaten him senseless barely twelve hours before, Eli said, “What if we broke into his house and made it look like a burglary?”
It was a good suggestion, and Eddie wasn’t prepared with an easy deflection. He thought about it for a minute, then said, “Killing a guy during a burglary would raise flags. What if we got caught in the middle of it?”
“That’s the beauty of it. He lives in your family’s old house. You used to sneak in and out of the place all the time when you were a kid. We can surprise him, kill him, mess the place up, take some shit just to make it look good, and we’ll be out of there before anyone knows any better.”
“Yeah, but that’s not the kind of thing that happens around here.”
“What are you talking about? People get robbed all the time. Some meth freak runs low on cash, next thing you know somebody’s house gets broken into. Dude, the fact that someone hasn’t been killed yet is a miracle. It’s just a matter of time. It’s perfect. Then we’re rid of that motherfucker and we can make enough runs to line our pockets and then get out of town.”
Eli was getting excited. And Eddie had to admit it was a good plan. The only problem was he didn’t want to do it. He stared out the window into the darkness and watched the headlights bob along, spilling off into the sage and Joshua trees and then back onto the roadway until, at last, they dropped over the hill and the headlights reflected for a moment off the roof of the warehouse, sitting by itself down in the dark gully.
Eli parked the car and shut off the lights. They sat in the silence for a second. Then Eli said, “Shit, I’ll bet the guy hasn’t even changed the locks on the doors. We might be able to just walk into the place.” He laughed and smacked Eddie on the shoulder. “Fucker won’t know what’s happening until it’s too late.” He said it like it was a done deal, like the decision was made. Then he opened the door and got out.
One of the two 1968 model tanker trucks was already inside the warehouse. They set to work quickly, silently. Two young men raised on a dying oil industry tapping into their own past and following routines laid down by their grandparents, and the generation before them. It was easy work. All the hard stuff had been done already. Now it was just a matter of hooking up and filling up.
Eli fastened the hose to the tank and clamped it on, testing it to be sure it was secure. Eddie checked the pump—the fluid levels, the power connections. When it was ready, they stood around the shaft of dirt and peered into it. Eli ran the beam of a flashlight around the edges of the hole and then down into it. Nine feet. A surprisingly short distance, it seemed to him. Eddie had questioned the need to bury it at all. It seemed like a lot of work for nothing.
Altogether, it had taken only three days to dig. Quick work. The hole was ten feet across at the top, tapering to only three at
the bottom where the dull steel of the pipeline sat exposed. Eddie had cut a hole in the top of the pipeline and tack welded a three-foot length of six-inch pipe to the hole. They dropped a four-inch hose down into the pipeline. The hose ran up out of the hand-dug pit, into an industrial pump that siphoned the oil out of the pipeline and through the other hose that Eli had attached to the tanker.
Eli fired up the pump and the two of them smiled at each other and laughed at the simplicity of it while the truck filled with oil. Twenty thousand gallons. With oil prices the way they were these days, they were clearing damned near ten grand a trip. Stealing it from the Monarch station made them feel a little better about the layoffs. Selling it back to Monarch’s parent company, Southwest Petroleum, made them feel like geniuses.
They’d been nervous about the first loads they’d taken. Setting up the account, waiting for the wire transfer to go through. Ron breathing down their neck, making sure everything worked. It was nerve-racking. The second, third, and fourth runs had made them feel better about the process, more confident. But they’d all been half loads, and only one truck each time because they wanted to work out any kinks on quick, simple runs. The process was smoother each time. And better still, Ron only knew about the first one. Now, there in the morning darkness, it seemed so simple. It was such a small amount of oil that no one would ever notice, and by the time anyone did, they’d be long gone. And once Ron was out of the way, they could do whatever they wanted when they shut the operation down.
When the tank was full, they shut the pump off, unhooked the hose, and let the truck warm up. The old diesel rumbled and coughed black smoke, but it ran well enough. It was Eddie’s handiwork. He was savant-like when it came to fixing things, which was a necessary skill set given the age of the equipment Eli’s father had left behind.
As they stood around outside, Eli felt a strange pride come over him at having the oil outfit up and running again. Being up early, working with his hands, using the tools and the gear, getting black crude on his clothes, the smell of oil and diesel and greasy machines—it was all part of the work he grew up doing. He had never been lazy, despite recent months, and standing outside in the early morning, listening to the truck idling behind him made him nostalgic.
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