Bad Man_A Novel

  “And she wants me to pay for it! You believe that? I didn’t put that nail there!”

  “Weren’t never’ve happened if I didn’t take your route.”

  “You said you was happy to do it!”

  Brandy sighed in exasperation. “So that’s it. That’s what happened.” She lit another cigarette. “And yeah, I do think he should pay for it. Pitch in at least. I mean, damn. Ain’t never got no flat tires on my route, and I been driving it, what? Five, six years?”

  “Yeah, but neither have I,” Reggie said wryly. “It was a freak accident. An act of God. I can’t be held responsible for that.”

  “If you say ‘act of God’ one more time, I’m gonna put a nail in your damn head,” Brandy growled.

  “So waddya think there, chief?” Reggie gestured toward Clint. Brandy’s eyes were averted as she drew on her cigarette.

  “I think that this is really none of my business,” he replied evasively. A metallic clamoring rose up behind the small group, and the door slowly receded into the building. Truck and car doors whined open and thudded shut as several dozen feet shuffled up the concrete steps, onto the platform, and into the building, hurrying out of the cold. Ben could see the relief in his father’s face as he retreated glacially, hoping Reggie and Brandy wouldn’t notice until he was already gone.

  “Ah, don’t be like that,” Reggie pestered.

  Clint sighed with resignation through smiling lips. “Well, if you wanna know what I think,” he teased as Reggie nodded intently, “I think that Bran was doing you a favor, so you might do her one in return.”

  “Ha!” Brandy shouted.

  “I had to pick Frank up,” Reggie pleaded. “She didn’t have to run over no nail!”

  “How’s he doin?” Ben asked.

  Reggie pressed his lips together. “He’s doin good.” He nodded, pushing his glasses up his nose the same way Frank had always done, with the bend of his index finger against the glass. “He’s okay. Makin good money at that new superstore. How’s Marty doin? He doin alright?”

  “He seems to be getting better. Out of the woods anyhow.”

  “Good. That’s good. I know Frankie really liked him a lot. Still rips him up, what happened.”

  Reggie wasn’t going to offer, so Ben had to push. “You think it’d be alright if I came by to see Frank sometime?”

  “You’d have to check with him. I know he’s beat. More than even when he worked at your store.”

  “We gotta get goin,” Ben’s father said, scratching at his beard.

  “Good seeing you, Ben,” Reggie said.

  Ben thanked the man and said good-bye to Brandy.

  “Alright then,” the woman said. “Pay up.”

  “What? Oh, because Clint said I should? I don’t give a damn what he says.”

  Ben’s father heaved thick bundles of newspaper down to Ben, who ferried them to the bed of the truck. The whole time, Ben watched Reggie haul bundles by himself, smiling and muttering to himself, pushing his glasses up each time he had to bend down for a new stack. Every now and then he glanced skyward at the black clouds that everyone seemed to think were nothing more than a bluff. If the rain did come, Clint would have to cover their cargo with the tarp from the toolbox in the back of the truck.

  Ben’s movements were more graceful than in previous summers. His lungs seemed more resilient as well. It was his father who finally asked for a quick break, and when he did, Ben suggested that Reggie might need some help.

  “Heya, Reggie,” Ben called as the man dropped a bundle into the trunk of his car. The whole body of the vehicle sagged at the new weight. “You need a hand?”

  “Oh, hey there, Ben. No, I think I got it.” Reggie smiled and craned his neck. “Where’s your daddy at? He tell you that I needed your help more than he did?”

  “Nosir.” Ben grinned. “He’s takin a break himself.”

  Reggie pushed his glasses up and huffed. “Hey! Get back to work, old man!”

  Ben could hear his father’s laughter in the air. This wasn’t the right time—not for the whole thing—but Ben could start something here, open a door.

  “I meant to ask you,” Ben said. “You know if Blackwater is still around?”

  “Blackwater?” Reggie replied, passing Ben with a bundle of papers. He didn’t speak again until he’d set it in his car. “Don’t think I’ve ever heard of it.”

  “Frank told me that you used to work there. Blackwater School? Before you was at Bradley Park, he said.”

  Reggie smiled and furrowed his brow. “I think either you or Frankie got mixed up about somethin there, Ben. I worked at a lot of places, but not no place called Blackwater.”

  Ben stood there for a moment under the low sky while Reggie ferried his stacks.

  “Before Bradley Park, I was at a place called Mikey’s Auto. Then…what was it. Shoot, I can’t remember the name. Some crew that did lawns. Lawngrow. Something like that. Lawnpro Incorporated. That was it. Just some guy with a mower. Stuck ‘Incorporated’ on the end just for the sound.”

  “Ben!” Clint shouted from behind the truck. “Let’s hit it.”

  “Guess I must’ve heard it wrong,” Ben said. “Tell Frank I said hey, would ya?”

  “I sure will.” Reggie smiled.

  “He let you help?” Clint asked. The door to his truck squeaked as he pulled it open.

  “Nope,” Ben replied.

  Ben couldn’t remember exactly what Frank had said. He had been certain back at Beverly’s house, certain enough to let the memory carry him right up to Reggie. But now he couldn’t keep hold of Frank’s words.

  As Clint pulled the truck out of the lot, Ben looked over at Reggie. There were still a few bundles left, but he wasn’t carrying them. He wasn’t moving at all now. Leaning against his silver car, Reggie stood staring into the glossy windows of a delivery van. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

  45

  There were times, especially when driving on long dirt roads, that Ben had to remind himself that he and his father weren’t the last two members of a long-dead race. The isolation at the store was less severe and certainly less quiet—even now that Ben worked alone—but there was something about moving through the stillness that felt odd to Ben. Sometimes the feeling lasted for miles, stopping only when papers had to be slung or someone spoke. But their stops were few and far between, and for the most part the only noise was the wind streaking in through the partially lowered windows.

  Beverly’s home sat in Ben’s mind unsteadily, its details fuzzed and fleeting to the point that it almost felt like a dream. Of course, it hadn’t been a dream. It couldn’t have been, because Ben could still feel that yellow-haired boy standing at the edge of the tree line. Ben could still feel him in his sinking gut every time he thought that maybe that boy looked just a little familiar, even out there, even without features that Ben could make out. Staring at a house that had been condemned for years, a house with windows so muddy, he would have been invisible were it not for the strung gold that hung from his head. Staring until Marty chased him even deeper into the trees. He must have been very fast, that boy—so fast that Marty had just given up. “I couldn’t find him anywhere,” Marty had said.

  They rode for a long time slinging papers on a route that Ben had never seen before. Many of the locations were buried on remote roads. They didn’t say much, and that was fine, for a while anyway.

  “I’m sorry.” Ben let the words hang. “For what happened last night.”

  “Yeah, that was somethin.”

  The brakes squealed as Clint rolled the truck to a stop at a deserted intersection. He glanced down the black roads, then coasted forward.

  Two songs played on the radio before Clint spoke again. “I see how she is. I see it. How she’s changed. And I know I’ve changed…” He tapped his palm lightly against the steeri
ng wheel. “I don’t think she can move on. And I don’t think that makes her weak. Everyone’s got that line. What do you do? Just what in the holy mother of fuck is a person supposed to do when life says to you, ‘Hey, I see what you’ve built there. And I don’t like it.’ Everyone’s got that line.”

  “Like Momma.”

  “I talked to her, you know?” Clint said. “Ran into her a few years ago. She said she was sorry. For the drinking. For a lot of things. She always tried to be a mother to you. I don’t know if you remember it none. She seems to be a much better one now, for whatever that’s worth. Happy. She couldn’t believe that any of us were holding it together with all that was going on. Wanted me to say that she was sorry to you too.”

  “How come you didn’t tell me?”

  “I dunno. Maybe I should’ve. But she could have tried just a little harder. Instead of leaving when it got too tough, she could have tried. I’m not gonna deliver her sorries to you just so she can feel like she really done something.”

  “You just did, though. You just told me.”

  “Shit,” Clint said with a bit of a smile. “I’ll tell you this, though. As hard as this has all been, we’ve handled it. Right way or not, I don’t know, but we’ve handled it. And we still are. You at that store. I don’t get it, but you do, and that’s enough.

  “We’re still together,” Clint added after a while. “Even when you leave home and go start you a life, we’ll all still be together in the ways that matter. Your momma…”

  “What?”

  The man shook his head. “I don’t want to badmouth your mother.”

  “I ain’t seen her since I was little, Pa.” Ben shrugged.

  “She had this look of relief in her eyes when I told her,” Clint said with disgust. “For just a second. Like she was glad she got out before it could happen to her—like that makes any damn sense at all. I dunno, maybe I read too much into it, saw something that wasn’t there.” Clint exhaled heavily. “We got dealt a hell of a hand, Ben. The lot of us.” His father cleared his throat. “And if you…if you ever needed to talk to someone…”

  “Someone who?”

  “Anybody. Like a doctor.”

  “About Eric?”

  “About anything. Anything at all.” Clint opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it. Then he opened it again. “We saw one. Me and Deidra.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Never thought I’d pay someone to just sit and listen. Seems like that’s all she did, anyhow, but I reckon she must’ve done somethin or other when I wasn’t lookin, because it worked.”

  “Worked how?”

  “I came to terms with some things, let go of some other ones. Like this dream I’d been havin.”

  Cold wind moved like a banshee through the cracked windows. Needles danced on Ben’s skin. “What dream?”

  “I had all kinds. Dreams and dreams. Good ones, bad ones, and everything in between and on either side. But there was this one…” Clint trailed off, shaking his head as he turned the truck. “He just came back one day. Just walked through the door like it weren’t nothin at all. We was all sittin there, in the house I mean, and I look up and there he is. Older and different, but still him. Still Eric. You’d think that everyone woulda been flippin their shit, but no one made much of a fuss at all, including him. He just says, ‘I win,’ and sits down at the supper table and puts his head down.

  “And we all just kinda go about our business like either he never even left or we didn’t understand that he come back. But then he starts countin. Up. Not down like you always did with him when you played your games. Shrink made a big fuss about that one. I can’t remember if she said it or if she made me say it—cuz that’s what she always did: made me say the thing she figured out like it was my own damn idea—but I spent damn near three weeks talkin to this lady just to find out that Eric countin up was supposed to mean that I was scared of losing you too.”

  “Why?”

  Clint tugged and scratched at his beard. “Because it was your turn.”

  The truck rocked back and forth over the uneven road. Its yellow headlights washed over a thin man ambling along the shoulder. He stuck his thumb out and glared into the glass as the truck rumbled by. Ben wondered where he could possibly be heading that he needed to go deeper into nowhere.

  “I miss it sometimes. The dream. Strange thing…”

  “How come you’re telling me all this?”

  His father stared out the windshield and shrugged. “Because you’re my boy. You’re a good son. And a good brother.”

  Ben thought about the tape in Palmer’s filing cabinet. “Thanks, Pa” was all he said.

  The old truck turned onto a road that Ben’s eyes met with vague recollection.

  “Hey, Pa. You ever heard of a place called Blackwater?” Ben asked.

  “The river? Yeah, sure. Runs from up somewheres in Alabama down to the Gulf, I think. We used to take rafts out and coolers of beer.”

  “No, I meant the school. Blackwater School.”

  “Blackwater School. Black. Water. School,” Clint repeated slowly, as if trying to coax the information from the words themselves. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “I think that was a school for live-ins up in Alabama. Or was it…Where’s Blackwater Park? The state park, I mean.”

  “I got no idea, Pa. What do you mean ‘live-ins’?”

  “Orphan kids. Some of ’em. Or maybe abandoned kids.”

  “Was it a religious school?”

  Clint shrugged his shoulders. “Probably. Back then a lot of places like that were, I reckon.”

  “It still open?”

  “No. No, I don’t think so. Been a long time since that place shut down as I recall. For the life of me, I can’t remember what for, though. You ask me, we still need places like that.”

  Stop after stop, the men delivered their stacks of newspapers, and before long, the arrangement of the trees and nuanced curves of the asphalt began to look familiar to Ben. Unending woodland gradually disintegrated into flat fields. A light glowed with an exaggerated halo through the faint fog, and Ben knew what it was before it pierced the mist.

  “Check your watch, boy. We made pretty good time tonight,” Clint said with a great deal of pride.

  Ben wasn’t sure if he had ever seen the store so dark. The parking lot loomed like a black lake in front of a store vacant of life and light. Overlapping shifts ensured that the windows shined perpetually fluorescent, but now the only remaining employee who worked overnights was riding through the gloomy parking lot in wonder.

  The truck idled as Ben reached into the bed for two large bundles of newspapers. The plastic ties gouged angrily at his hooked fingers, pinching and pulling more with each waddle of a step he took toward the front door.

  “Lemme give you a hand,” his father called from the driver’s seat. Slow applause echoed off the side of the store.

  “Good one, Pa,” Ben grunted over his shoulder. He walked over to the spot where Marty used to sit. Pocked with scorches from his cigarettes, the concrete looked like a cratered moon.

  “Classics are classics,” Clint shouted as Ben unloaded his cargo in front of the entrance. The imperfect glass of the doors bent the truck’s headlights at odd angles. Cupping his hands, Ben pressed them against the glass and peered inside, though he wasn’t sure what he expected to see in the abyss. Ben’s stomach tightened at the thought of Beverly’s file and the idea that whoever knew that Ben would see it might know by now that he had.

  Aisles and aisles of murky darkness stared back at Ben. Dull banners and signs hung frozen in the black air. And something else. Something curious. A light.

  Not fluorescent, or even anchored to the ceiling, it flickered near the back of the store, peeking out like a flashlight’s bulb through splayed fingers. Though that wasn’t the image that moved thr
ough Ben’s mind. He thought only of the boy’s golden hair shining through the twisted bones of old trees. Wrapping his hand around the protruding lock, Ben tugged against the doors until the bolt rattled. But the light remained, staring.

  Ben shouted for his father to turn the headlights off, and when they clicked off, Ben turned his attention back to the window and stared into the store for what might have been a full two minutes. There was nothing to see now; like the golden boy, the light had fled. But Ben knew he’d seen it: a light blinking closed like a glaring eye.

  Ben rubbed his dirty handkerchief against the back of his neck. “Turn ’em back on!” he shouted to his father over the idling engine.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Just hit the lights real quick, Pop.”

  The bright lamps flooded Ben’s thirsty pupils, stinging like cold water hitting a parched throat. Squinting, Ben peered back through the glass and moved his body, trying to force the reflection to resemble what he had just seen, but it never did. He checked his watch. Just after four in the morning.

  “What is it?” his father called.

  Ben walked briskly toward the truck and slid back into his seat. “Nothing,” he said, brushing off the chill. “Thought I saw a light on inside.”

  “They got someone else workin this shift now?”

  Ben could only shake his head and stare out his window, still searching for that golden light.

  46

  Ben slept for a few hours, dragging himself out of bed just before one in the afternoon. He lay there for a while, listening to the sounds of the house. The soft murmurs of the television through the door. The hum of a lawnmower somewhere farther away. He moved in stages, first sitting on the edge of his bed, then standing in his boxers and shirt, staring at the clutter of his room.

  Quietly, Ben pulled the Bible free from the shelf, then spaced its neighbors to make it look like they weren’t down by one. He pulled on his jeans, then purposefully turned away from his mirror as he took off his shirt. He paused. Then, still holding the balled-up shirt in front of his chest, Ben turned back toward the mirror.