A raspy voice spoke. “Heya, Ben.”
A shaking one responded. “Hiya, Marty.”
In a single, fluid motion, Marty stepped across the threshold and pulled the door closed behind him. Ben couldn’t help but stare. Red, puckered flesh seemed to undulate around the sutures each time Marty moved his head. Deep black and maroon flecks lay in the creases of his reoriented skin. The gash on his neck had been closed hastily and with no apparent regard for aesthetics.
“You wanna kiss it better?” Marty said with a smirk.
Ben laughed at the joke, but his eyes watered at the fact that Marty still liked him enough to make one. “It doesn’t look that bad,” Ben offered.
“Fuck you. That why you’re cryin? Because you couldn’t never look this good?”
With a step, Ben closed the distance between them and wrapped his arms around his friend. Marty’s body felt so small, so frail, in his embrace. Marty patted Ben’s back, but Ben didn’t reciprocate. “I’m so glad you’re alright, man,” said Ben.
“Thanks,” Marty said, moving his arms from around Ben’s back. “In a few more seconds, this’ll count as cuddling.”
Marty spoke with a kind of precision and care that Ben had never heard from him. Anytime his words tried to move too fast, they would evaporate into airy sounds.
“You bring me a cake as a get well present?”
Ben pulled away. “Something like that,” he said through a chuckle. He wiped his salty eyes with his forearm. “We thought you was dead, man.”
Marty burned the end of a cigarette and winced as he pulled the smoke into his lungs. “Figure I nearly was.” The smoke sputtered out from between his lips, playing stowaway on his words. “Gonna take more than a fucking catastrophic industrial accident to take me out, though.”
“I came to visit. Me and Frank both did.”
“I know. The doc told me.”
“When I came back a few days later, you was gone already. I came by here a hundred times, but I didn’t figure—”
“Don’t sweat it, man.” Marty gestured to his wound with the fingers that held the cigarette. “This shit got all infected. I was running a fever for days.” His voice lowered. “My mom finally took me to the fucking doctor to get some pills. It’s like high school all over again: if you ain’t pukin, you ain’t sick. I been laid up for a bit.”
A piercing scream tore through the house. Marty glanced toward the closed door before turning back to Ben nonchalantly.
“Everything okay?” Ben asked.
“Yeah.”
Ben pulled his shirt away from his stomach. Not wanting to seem insensitive, he hesitated before he spoke. He brought his fist up to his mouth and held it there for a moment before trying to swallow hard enough that the queasy feeling might leave. “Any idea when you’ll be coming back to the store?”
“Been wonderin the same thing. While I was dealing with all this”—he gestured to his neck again—“my momma’s boyfriend tried to get all the workers’ comp bullshit straightened out, but Tim ain’t too good at that kinda shit. They act like I want them to buy me a goddamn boat. I just want them to pay for my medical bills. The whole thing’s a mess. The case is under ‘review,’ ” Marty said, pinching the air.
“Review? For what?”
“That it was their fault and not mine. Some cop come by askin after things.”
“Who?”
“D-somethin.”
“Duchaine?”
“Yeah. Told him what I remembered, which is exactly fuck all. Nice guy. Said that everything looked like it was an accident. Said he was gonna talk to you. Meanwhile I got like eight hundred pages of shit to fill out from the store.”
“Palmer tried to get me and Frank to write something sayin it was you,” Ben said.
“What? What the fuck?”
“I didn’t write nothin.”
“Did Frank?”
“I dunno. I know he talked to that cop. Palmer said he talked to Frank, but I doubt he’d say something against you. I haven’t talked to him since he quit.”
“You’re shittin me. Like quit quit?”
“He was real freaked out, man. Can’t say I blame him.”
“What a total pussy.”
“You didn’t see what he saw. I went off to call for help, and he stayed with you. You just laid down and slept through the whole goddamn thing.”
Marty’s laugh quickly became a cough.
“I kicked in Palmer’s door to try to find a first aid kit.”
Marty laughed harder, wincing and holding his neck. It took a few seconds for him to compose himself. “So it’s just you? Palmer hasn’t gotten no one else?”
“Not yet. I’m not even sure if there’s anyone to get.”
“Horseshit,” Marty said incredulously. “We used to move through stockers so fast some of ’em didn’t even have time to get name tags. I’ll bet that cheap son of a bitch just wants to see how strong your back is. You working every day, then?”
“Yup. Don’t care about overtime anymore neither.”
“Hey.” Marty tousled his own hair. “If you want me to come by and help out a little—just for a few hours here and there—”
“No. No, that’s nuts.” Ben swallowed and tried not to think about his dinner. “So, listen. I wanna tell you what happened.”
Marty flicked his cigarette into the dead grass, then ran his finger against the cake, scraping off some icing. “I know what happened,” Marty mumbled around his finger. “That bale was way too big.”
Ben drew his handkerchief against the back of his neck and breathed out heavily. The air was chilled, but Ben was still sweating. He felt queasy. “You yelled for me to stop, and I didn’t.”
Marty shrugged.
“That symbol, the one from Eric’s flyer, it’s on the baler. Carved right into the side of it. I saw it that night.” Cold needles pricked at Ben’s hot neck from the memory.
“Fuck off.”
“It’s just I can’t get my head around any of this, man. And I been trying.” The quaver in Ben’s voice had shaken away any control he still had. “Palmer knows we lied about my CD player to get into his office. This morning, he calls me into his office and tells me to write something about the accident. Then when I won’t do it, he fires Beverly. He called her in and fucking fired her just so I could see it. I don’t…I don’t understand what’s happening anymore, man. She’s so old, older than my granny was even, and she was on all kindsa pills for her Parkinson’s. I don’t know if unemployment covers those kindsa things. Jesus, man. Can you even still get things like that if you got fired?”
Marty drew on his cigarette and shook his lowered head.
“Oh, good. Good goin, Ben!” he shouted at himself through clenched teeth as he squeezed his stomach with his hands so hard that he couldn’t hear the mania in his own sobbing voice. “Jesus Christ, man. I gotta talk to her. To say sorry. To figure this all out. I don’t understand, dude.” There was pleading in Ben’s voice.
“Ben.” Marty glanced over his shoulder toward his door. He spoke quietly and deliberately. “She’s gonna be fine. Look at me, dude. I’m sure she’s on Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security or all three even. Okay? Maybe even some extra ones that only grouchy old ladies know about.” A small laugh escaped from Ben’s mouth and Marty leaned into it. “She’s old enough that she probably knows the guy who invented money. That’s a good friend to have if you ask me. She’s gonna be fine.
“But you? You gotta get a handle on yourself, man. You can’t be savin all this shit up for my porch once a month. You talk to anyone other than the goddamn bread lady? Anybody? Your folks? The police?”
“I talked to my dad some, yeah. Not about much, I guess, but I’ve talked to him. The cops, that one that came by here, he knows pretty much everything.”
&n
bsp; “And?”
“And what? He don’t care. I mean, what in the world, man?” Ben put his hand on his stomach. There was a wet feeling in the back of his mouth. “I need to use your bathroom.”
“My yard is your toilet,” Marty said, bowing and sweeping his free arm across the breadth of his domain.
“Dude, please,” Ben urged. He felt cold.
Inside, the air was still. Sour. The smell of air freshener was draped like a piece of tissue paper over the overwhelming stench of nicotine and kitty litter. There wasn’t any cat, though, not that Ben could see.
Darlene and Aaron sat at a small white table in the kitchen. Their chairs looked like the ones the crew took their lunches on back when there was a crew. The longer Ben looked, the more certain he became that they more than just resembled those chairs. Cigarette smoke hung calmly in the air above the family, pooling around the yellow ceiling lights like a foul lake.
“Ben’s gotta take a piss,” Marty said matter-of-factly as he walked past the kitchen and down the hallway.
Sweating, Ben waved but didn’t look in their direction long enough to see if the gesture was returned. He moved around an old, stained couch. More holes than fabric, the upholstery both clung to and sloughed off the frame like skin on a starving body. Black stains peppered the white popcorn ceiling. Marty stood in the corridor and gestured to a doorway.
“Flusher don’t work, so you gotta jiggle the chain when you’re done. I swear to God,” Marty said as he left the room, “if I wind up with a face full of your turds…”
Marty shut the door. The chill was worse in here. Shards of broken tile teetered under Ben’s feet near the toilet. Two roaches scurried across the mantel into the wall. From what sounded like the kitchen, Darlene shouted Marty’s name.
As Ben knelt in front of the toilet, Iron Maiden’s “Purgatory” suddenly pounded through the wall so loudly that Ben couldn’t even hear himself vomit in the stained bowl. He heaved twice, then lowered his head onto his forearm and breathed heavily. Ben pulled the chain and his dinner was washed away.
The pipes rumbled when Ben turned the faucet handle, and after a second or two, water sputtered out and into his hands. He wet his face twice and rinsed his mouth. As he watched the water twist down the drain, he could see it shimmer in the light, and he lost himself for a moment. Or maybe longer than a moment. Long enough that Ben’s whole body jerked when someone began slamming their fist into the bathroom door.
Ben had to slide sideways into the hallway, his path guided by Aaron’s body. The boy’s Thin Lizzy shirt was full of holes and billowed over his small frame—an obvious hand-me-down from his big brother. Aaron moved to the side, clearing a path back to the front door, which Ben stepped slowly toward.
The music was so loud that it made Ben’s ears ache. That was the only reason he turned back toward Aaron, to ask him to turn it down a little, and that was when he saw the padlock. It dangled lazily behind Aaron, nestled against the cracked molding and peeking over the boy’s shoulder like a chrome eye. “The other one,” little Ellen Cotter had said. “A mean boy.”
Ben raised his arm with his index finger extended limply, like his bones had turned to taffy. “What’s in there?” Ben found himself muttering. Of course, Aaron couldn’t hear him. But then he didn’t seem to need to.
Aaron shifted his weight and glanced behind himself, toward the end of the hall. When he faced Ben again, he sighed and then hollered, “Marty!” Ben took a step deeper into the hall and felt Aaron’s hands on his chest, but what actually stopped him was the hand on his shoulder.
“You clog it up? I ain’t plunging your shit, buddy,” Marty shouted into Ben’s ear.
Ben turned. Marty’s shirt was missing. Scars pocked his friend’s stomach. There might have been a dozen or more, pea-sized and scattered like an ugly constellation. When Ben didn’t respond, Marty stepped next to his brother. He shut the door to his bedroom, which muffled the music enough that Ben could hear himself talk.
“I was just asking what’s in there is all.” Ben shrugged, pointing past Aaron at the padlock.
Marty’s face looked briefly as if he’d smelled something slightly off. “Can’t see what business that is of yours.”
Marty studied Ben in much the same way that Aaron was, though not quite as intensely.
“That’s Tim’s room,” Aaron said finally. “Where he keeps his things.”
“I thought that was your room,” Ben said to Marty. “On account of the foil on the windows. For keepin the light out while you sleep? I just ain’t never seen a lock like that on an inside door is all.”
“You ain’t never lived in this neighborhood neither,” Marty replied, shaking his head. He was smiling now, and Ben felt less like a scolded child. But he also felt, somewhere deep in a place that was older than him, that if he tried to take even a single step forward Marty’s smile would die on his lips and something very bad would happen.
When Ben turned, it seemed as if the whole hallway decompressed. He let the current take him. Aaron was smiling now too.
On the porch, Marty dug a cigarette out of his pack and tapped the butt against the bottom knuckle of his thumb. “I was thinking—if you really wanted to, I think I know how you could talk to Beverly.”
“You got her phone number or somethin?”
“Nope,” Marty said, pinching the cold cigarette between his smirking lips, “but I bet Palmer’s got that and a lot more.”
37
Ben clocked in early and started throwing the truck. By the time Chelsea began telling customers to get out, Ben had already finished almost a quarter of the stock. If he wasn’t about to stop—wasn’t just biding his time—there was a chance that he might actually finish before the store opened.
“Do you want a walk out to your car?” Ben asked Chelsea.
“No thanks, I’m good.”
“Fine by me,” Ben lied. “I’ve got some pretty big responsibilities around here anyway.” He tapped the handle of the cart in front of him.
“Well, don’t let me slow you down.” Chelsea smiled. Ben locked the doors behind her and dropped the key into his pocket.
Ben made one stop by the photo center before walking into the back room. Surrounded by the thrumming of machines upstairs, Ben pushed the cart of go-backs so deep into the room that he could reasonably claim that he’d never even seen them. Then he hustled up the metal stairs as quickly as his leg would let him.
Palmer’s door still sagged on its hinges. White light—the only thing of its kind in the long darkness of the upstairs corridor—flickered through the opening. Ben’s steps were quiet. He spied the television monitor through the jagged gap in the door, stuttering silently in the black box of Palmer’s office.
Taking care to move the door as little as possible, Ben squeezed into the room. His box cutter snagged on the frame and rattled loudly as Ben jerked it free. He paused and collected himself, his eyes stinging a bit as he looked into the room’s only light source. The deli cooler sat motionless on the screen. Ben brushed his hand against the wall until it found the switch.
The overhead lights beat back the weak glow of the television, and all at once the room became exactly what it was—just a box where a sad little man sat hatching schemes that would serve him and him alone. Yesterday, Palmer had called Ben into his office just so he could set one of those schemes in motion, and Ben had felt in a very real way that he would have liked to beat the man to death—something he had never felt in all his life.
James Duchaine said he’d talked to Bill Palmer a number of times. Ben had no reason to doubt that. Nor did he doubt the nature of those talks—that Duchaine may have actually leaned on Palmer some and found that he was empty. Of course, it didn’t matter if either of those things was true. Ben didn’t need to speculate. Because there were a few things that Ben knew. Palmer had fired Ben just as soon as
he’d learned who Ben was. When that didn’t take, he tried blackmail, and when that didn’t take, he’d fired an old woman.
Near as Ben could tell, Palmer had fired Beverly either out of spite or self-preservation. Whatever the case, Ben needed to talk to her.
On the desk was a wire container for pens and a nearly full coffee cup, on the corner closest to the door. Everything else was paper: hundreds of sheets, some in folders, some loose. And Ben believed that Palmer did in fact know where every single sheet belonged. He walked around the desk twice, just looking. Ben tried to take mental pictures of everything so he’d know where it all went. But for other things, Ben had a much better camera.
It was disposable, but it had a flash and twenty-seven exposures. Ben needed to find Beverly’s address; he reckoned that should be on her termination form, which might have other information worth seeing. The other pictures were for quite literally anything else that seemed important. A little bit of time and just over ten bucks to fuck up Palmer’s world? What a bargain.
Ben moved next to Palmer’s chair and looked over the stacks of paper. He tried to get acquainted with the forest enough that he could tend to the trees. Most of the papers were meaningless to Ben, but he ran his eyes slowly over each one of them. Then he lifted each page, one at a time, and read the one below it. He stopped after every piece of paper, stepped back from the desk, and surveyed. He took his time.
After about an hour, Ben found Beverly’s termination letter. There was no address on it. It wasn’t even signed yet. He squared it in the eyepiece anyway. Click.
Slowly and methodically, Ben combed through every piece of paper on the desk, reading each one. And when he was done, he still had twenty-five pictures left. The papers—the whole lot of them—were all receipts and order forms, applications and inventory reports. The copy of the letter blaming Marty was gone.