Читать книгу In the Course of Human Events - Mike Harvkey - Страница 9

Independence, a loud, cluttered sprawl, gave way in time to Boonville, but at twenty-thousand souls even its population was beyond Clyde’s comfort zone. When he was a boy he’d made the trip to this town with his dad to buy feed nearly once a month. Even though Boonville in those days had been half the size it was now his dad always griped. “These city folks just as soon run you off the road as look at you,” Clyde remembered him saying, though it was possible he’d made it up, he’d been only five or six at the time. Memories of the first half of his life were as unreliable as daydreams. Since the economic collapse, Clyde had heard there’d been carjackings in Boonville, robberies where they intentionally rear-end you to bring you out of your vehicle. Clyde’s thinking was, If I get out, it’ll be with the Colt in hand.

At the Sinclair station, half the day’s pay went right down the fucking tank. Thank you, Obama. Across the road was the Walmart Clyde had to visit next. He hated shopping there but it was the cheapest option. Since high school a few extra pounds had maybe settled in around the middle. Clyde knew this, he wasn’t blind. He knew he couldn’t drive a hard punch into his gut the way Jay Smalls had done. But he also knew that he hadn’t let himself go completely, like most of the Walmart shoppers he saw now. None of them had even paused at the point of no return.

Here it was, a Tuesday afternoon, and the lot was nearly full. Where did these bastards come upon the lucky combination of money and leisure in 2011? In the three years since Mr. Longarm closed, Clyde had almost become a stranger to work. His savings were gone, he’d cashed out of his retirement. To get unemployment he’d had to humiliate himself to some bitch at the government office, only to have it stop when he got the driving job. Apparently $40 was enough to make him ineligible for any government aid, thank you very much. Forget insurance—health, life, truck—he had none of it. All this had beaten Clyde down in ways he didn’t even know. As a boy he’d been an early riser. He remembered winters spent hunting, bundled up to immobility by his dad and uncle and trying to step in their deep bootprints before the sun was even up. He hadn’t hunted in ages, hardly shot his guns at all anymore. These days he slept late, and that wasn’t all. He watched too much TV, avoided his few friends, drank himself to sleep. Work was a hell of an important thing to a man.

Crossing the pavement of Walmart Country, he shook his head at Boonville’s fortunate sons and daughters; the suffering of the people of Strasburg, not forty miles east, was evident: houses lost, yards overgrown, vehicles left on roadsides. Half the town’s residents, no more fight left in them, had thrown in the towel, walked away. Strasburg was the town the American Dream forgot.

The doors parted and Clyde jerked a basket. He needed Spam, baked beans, eggs, milk, hot dogs, white bread, mayonnaise, margarine, whisky, cigarettes. He checked prices, kept track of the total in his head. Then he looked for Esther Hines in checkout.

This was a girl who turned her hair a new color almost every other week. This was a girl who sang Christian songs with a closed-eye passion while scanning your purchases; she thought of Jesus Christ as savior and boyfriend both. This was a girl who smoked up a storm, partied in the woods, drank herself unconscious, and claimed the next morning with a straight face that her body was a temple into which she took nothing unholy. Clyde had happened upon her checkout once, months back, and had been seeking her out since. When she saw him, Esther moved her next register please sign behind his items. “What’d you drive today?” she said, scanning the Spam. Her fingernails, chewed to the quick, held tiny chips of black polish.

“You woulda liked it,” he said. “Firebird.”

“You’re shitting me.” She bit her thin pink lip and cast her eyes to the ceiling. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, scanning the beans. The apology, Clyde knew well enough by now, was for Jesus.

“Sits too low for me though.”

“I know how you like to be up all high to look down on the rest of us.” Esther winked and scanned the whiskey. “Now what do we have here? Baked beans, Spam, and whiskey? Looks like you’re about to have yourself one heck of a party.” She leaned in. “You are nothing but a heathen. I knew it first time I saw ya.” Her voice, now that Clyde heard it up close, trembled. If a baby bird could talk, it’d sound like this.

Clyde pointed at the cigarettes behind Esther and said, “You mind adding a carton.”

“GPCs,” Esther said, going with her key to the cabinet. “I don’t know how your uncle can smoke these.”

Clyde said, “When I asked if he wanted something better he said, ‘Much as I smoke I can’t afford to smoke good cigarettes.’ ” Clyde watched the blue tips of Esther’s white-blonde hair brush her slim shoulders, thinking, again, about trying to see Esther outside of Walmart. So far thinking was as far as he’d got, the right moment never seemed to come and Clyde felt most of the time like he was living under a heavy winter quilt, he had no energy, none at all. She totaled the bill and Clyde groaned. How did this math make sense to anybody? Prices kept going up when the salary went down, it was a conflict of interest he couldn’t see ending well for anyone but the extremely fortunate. He reached into his back pocket and his hand slipped right in. “Shit,” he said.

“What?”

“Wallet’s gone.”

Esther bagged the groceries while Clyde stood around, flushed with embarrassment. In the faces of the other shoppers he saw pity. “Think that stuff’ll be okay for an hour or so?”

“What?” Esther said. “All this was on special today, Clyde. Prices are a-fallin.” Esther squealed like a bat and punched buttons on the register until it popped out with a ding. She tore off a receipt that showed a grand total of nothing. “See?” she said.

Clyde shook his head. “Whiskey alone’s ten. Cigarettes too.”

Esther lowered her shaking voice. “It was on . . . special. Now, don’t make me have to call the manager on your perky little butt.”

Clyde remembered what remained of his driving pay and slapped it on the scale. Twenty bucks. “I appreciate it,” he said. “But I don’t need no handouts. I’ll come back with the rest.”

Esther threw up her hands. “You’re more honest than I am and I been born again!”

Clyde went into the bright outdoors. All those vehicles like hard candy in the sun. He searched his truck but didn’t find the wallet. This was the last thing he needed, the last goddamn thing. On the way back he pulled off at Ekland Field and walked in the grass among the empty beer cans and bottles and cigarette packs and dry food wrappers. He picked up a beer bottle and threw it over the fence. It skidded across the baseball diamond. He heaved another at the bleachers. It went high, but the next one smashed into a million pieces. Clyde yelled, “Bull’s-eye, motherfuckers!” He broke three more the same way before his shoulder started hurting. Then he drove to his uncle’s.

Since his visit last week, Willie had repainted the deck that wrapped the trailer, a deck he’d built himself two summers after he broke his neck. He had only one working arm and walked slow as a turtle leaning on a rubber-tipped cane the pharmacy had sold him for ten times what it was worth. Out on the deck now with a cigarette, Willie raised his good hand, seeing Clyde pull in.

“Uncle Willie,” Clyde called. John Wayne, Willie’s fourteen-year-old bird dog, lifted his droopy head to eyeball Clyde through a milky cataract film. “How you doing?” Clyde said. Willie made a thumbs-up; he couldn’t nod anymore. On the deck, Clyde waved the GPCs. “Got your food,” he said, waving the whiskey. “And your water.”

“I thank you.”

Clyde put them down on the raw pine table next to his uncle. “This is new.”

“S’morning,” Willie said, running his thumb along the edge with a hand that was dried up, tanned to leather, its thumbnail black from some missed impact. “You all right?” Willie said, turning at the waist to look in Clyde’s direction.

“Yeah, why?”

“You’re fidgeting.”

“Oh.” Clyde squinted at the yard. “Lost my wallet.” Willie began the difficult chore of reaching into his back pocket. Clyde said, “That ain’t what I’m sayin, Uncle Willie, come on.”

Willie let the wallet open, dug out a twenty, and slapped it down. “I don’t want no back talk neither. More where that came from too, if you need it.”

Clyde sighed and picked up the bill. It was fresh from the bank. Willie had already given him grocery money last week and Clyde had already spent it. “Probably just left it at home this morning.”

Willie worked to open the cigarette carton and slip out a fresh pack. “Smokin and drinkin are two occupations that are almost gettin to be more trouble than they’re worth. I don’t know what this country’s coming to; half this is tax.”

Clyde watched Willie get the pack open, pinch a cigarette in his teeth, and light it all with the one hand. He exhaled a cone of smoke out the one working channel of his nose across a moustache that was yellow down one side and light brown down the other. When the cigarette was finished, Clyde helped him into the house and put some hot dogs in water on the stove. Looking out back he saw the shooting range he’d built out there years before. He made a pot of coffee for the week and decided why the hell not? “Mind if I fire off a few rounds while the wieners are cooking?” he called from the kitchen. It had been almost a year since he’d discharged a weapon.

“Let me alert the neighborhood watch,” Willie said, and Clyde heard him punching buttons in the tan tabletop phone.

Clyde huffed. “Your property,” he said, loud enough for Willie to hear. Going out to get his Colt from the truck, Clyde burned all over again with anger about the run-in he had the first time he shot a gun in his uncle’s yard. Willie’s neighbor to the west had come running over like the place was on fire, waving his arms, screaming about how dangerous this was. Dangerous? You ever even held a gun? Why was it that the people pitching shit fits about what you were up to were always the ones who knew the least about it? Hell, before firing a single shot Clyde had built a large berm at the back edge of Willie’s yard. Beyond it was a field of twenty acres, and this complainer’s property bordered that on only one side. He said he had pets, a family, a wife with the jitters. He would sue, goddamn it. When Clyde didn’t immediately throw down his weapon and beg forgiveness, the neighbor said, “You’re an asshole,” which still made Clyde spit whenever he remembered it. And that was four years ago. Clyde was the type to hold a grudge.

The Colt was fully loaded and Clyde fired all six shots in a minute, reloaded watching the distant field, and came back to the house. These days guns were for Clyde like cigarettes and whiskey for Willie: a habit that was getting too damned expensive to maintain. Clyde brought in their supper and set up the trays. On the TV, a pretty blonde in a low-cut red, white, and blue dress was singing her guts out. Clyde poked his uncle and nodded at the screen. “What do you think, Uncle Willie?”

Willie chewed his hot dog, eyes on the screen. “What do I think about what?”

Clyde pointed. “What it’d be like to screw her?”

Willie swallowed his food, it looked like it hurt. “Mm,” he said, drinking beer and dimpling the can in his fingers. Pa-tink. “Probably about the same as screwin any woman, I reckon.”