Bad Man_A Novel

  But Ben still made his rounds. Even walking up the hollow-sounding steps, preparing to insert himself into the lives and minds of these new homeowners, he could hear that taunting, defeatist mantra. But he still climbed. He still slid Eric’s picture on top of his sketchbook and took a deep breath. And, most important, he still knocked.

  8

  Ben had to hustle to make it back to the store in time for his shift. The guy at the new home had been nice, though it was doubtful the conversation would lead to anything. He said he’d tell his wife when she got home from work. From the looks of things, they hadn’t even unpacked yet. Near as Ben could tell, the couple didn’t have any children of their own, but he wasn’t sure that mattered either way. It used to be that Ben thought those with children would be more empathetic, more in tune with this particular kind of crisis. He didn’t think that anymore.

  Still, it had to be the right approach. Catching people who were new to the area was the best thing to do. Maybe they’d keep their eyes open since they now knew what to look for. Maybe they’d even talk about it with the new friends they’d come to make, remind them of something they shouldn’t have forgotten in the first place.

  Ben put his sketchbook in his locker and got to work. Marty was nowhere to be seen. Frank was there, though, standing by the time clock, tapping the butt of his utility knife against his open palm.

  “Heya, Frank.”

  “Big Ben,” Frank said, and nodded, “how was your weekend?”

  Ben had met Frank on his third night and liked him instantly. Although he had a bit of an overbite, Frank’s smile was brilliant, which was a dangerous thing, since he laughed at just about everything. He always dressed a little too nicely for the job he worked—slacks instead of jeans, pressed and stain-free collared shirts, and always light colors: the worst colors a person could wear when moving products from dirty boxes to filthy shelves. His eyeglasses were just a little too big to be fashionable; they were better suited for a much older man, though Frank did have a few years on his coworkers. Maybe ten. Still, he reset his eyewear like a kid would, middle knuckle of a bent index finger pressing against the glass, smudging it each time. Frank’s name tag, which actually took two days for Ben to notice and an extra day to inquire about, said BLACK FRANK.

  The story, as Marty told it anyway, was that when Frank was hired, there was already another employee named Frank who worked at the store. This proved to be only an occasional and minor source of confusion for a handful of people, but at some point the new Frank was mistakenly written up due to the rudeness of the old Frank. In response, new Frank used the label gun to alter his name tag, and it had stayed that way until long after old Frank quit.

  When measured cumulatively, Frank had worked there for almost as long as Marty had. While his work ethic was strong, his dedication and resolve were not. He quit. All the time. Sometimes, in the middle of a shift, Frank would simply resign. The thing was only the rest of the crew ever knew about it. Since Palmer never found out, Frank would show up a few days later and clock in like everything was normal, and the ticking clock would be reset. Everyone always covered for him because he was a nice guy. Ben had been there only two weeks, and he had already seen Frank quit once.

  Ben and Frank made their way into Receiving under the auspices of beginning their nightly project, but in reality they wanted to avoid being asked to retrieve shopping carts from the sprawling parking lot. The back-room doors swished open for Marty at around half past ten.

  “Jesus. What happened to your face, man?” Ben shouted over the air conditioner, tapping Frank with the back of his hand.

  The right side of Marty’s lip was swollen and split, as if someone had pumped it full of air until a seam burst. A dark red line marked the chasm. Dried blood mixed with new and old skin as his body attempted to sort the mess out.

  “Oh, I bet I know,” Frank said, moving closer. “He finally slipped one of his pecker drawings into the wrong person’s locker.”

  “Vat mean that yer the right person?” Marty flashed a crooked smile, the right side of his mouth sagging like it was full of chewing tobacco.

  Frank huffed. “Well, you ain’t makin it easy to feel sorry for you.”

  “Sowee. What I meant wus yur mmamasa veye-ter,” Marty mumbled, saliva spilling out of the stubborn gap between his lips.

  Frank looked at Ben, who shrugged his shoulders. “What?” Frank hollered.

  Marty leaned in, speaking slowly and loudly. “Your momma’s a biter.” His smile grew wider as Frank started yelling about how his momma didn’t take to rednecks.

  “You okay for real?” Ben asked.

  Marty nodded, wiping the spit from his chin with his forearm. “No vig deal,” he said. “We gohtta make a vale.”

  This would be the fifth bale that Ben had helped make—well, the fifth that he had watched Marty and Frank make. Most accurately, this would be the fifth bale that Ben had watched Marty make pretty much by himself. Frank hated the baler, hated every rusted, unreliable inch of the thing.

  There were two parts to the machine: the box and the ram.

  The box was simple, maybe six feet across by five feet deep. Each side was about a foot thick: solid steel that was further reinforced with welded slats about three inches wide. Graffiti covered almost every surface—names, insults, drawings—scribbled on and among the flaking green paint and deep rust spots. The front was adorned with a lock-wheel that looked like it belonged on a submarine. Its spokes and rim were more black than green from the wringing of rough hands. The whole front face of the baler was a door. Shorter than the left and right sides, the front rose only to the middle of Ben’s rib cage. There, it met with a heavy slide gate, a pinecone-seed tessellation, through which Ben could see mangled cardboard that seemed to cower below a brutal rectangular plate. That was the ram.

  A cylinder that was more than a foot thick rose out of the plate and ran parallel with what looked like steel girders to well above Ben’s head. It seemed almost like the ceiling itself had moved to get out of the way of the beast’s support beams and the small pipes and boxes and wires that completed tasks that outpaced Ben’s mechanical understanding. But he knew enough. Every aspect of the machine—its density, its thickness—was built to mangle.

  The power of the thing was even greater than its size, and the way in which it loomed wasn’t something that seemed to diminish with time, nor was it something that was altogether tangible. Like standing near the low railing of a tall bridge, it imposed itself, extending a mad invitation that couldn’t help but be heard. Climb in, it seemed to say. Just sit down inside. There’s room. Experience the procrustean wonder.

  When there was so much cardboard in the chamber that not even the ram could budge it, the machine would be run through a half cycle. With the heavy plate pressing down, Marty could spin the lock-wheel and open the front of the monster, and the pressure was more than enough to hold the crushed boxes in place. It was then just a matter of keeping them that way. This was where the wires came in.

  Looped on one side, they were about fifteen feet long but only about an eighth of an inch in diameter—nowhere near thick enough to inspire confidence in anyone. Ben slid seven of them out of the repurposed PVC pipe next to the baler. Marty hadn’t asked him to do this, but Ben didn’t want to volunteer to punch tunnels. On Ben’s very first bale, Frank had taken on that job. Whether it was his turn or he was just trying to make a good impression on the new guy, Ben would never know. What he saw, however, was a pretty nervous and well-dressed man stab what looked like a bent piece of rebar into the small slots between the cardboard and the bottom of the baler so that there’d be room for the wires, jamming and spearing until his knuckles inevitably cracked against the invincible machine.

  Frank couldn’t even watch as Marty cleared the tracks in preparation for Ben’s wire, walking away, yelling that Marty’s hands were going to match h
is face. Marty called him a chickenshit, and Ben laughed, despite the fact that he wasn’t looking either.

  “He break his hands yet?” Frank asked as he dragged a pallet past Ben, letting it slam in front of the baler.

  Marty cursed through clenched teeth as he continued to ram the gullies clear. “I’m workin on it,” he grunted. “This vuckin bitch.”

  “You want help tying it up?” Ben asked.

  “No. And don’t you vorry neither, Frank—I’d just as sthoon step into the machine than be anyvhere near it after you ran the wire.”

  Frank sucked his teeth in annoyance and snatched a cable out of Ben’s hand. Squatting, he fed it into a channel that Marty had already cleared, then walked to the back of the machine to push it through an opening at the top. Ben watched as Frank fed the wire through its loop, then bent it around itself in a kind of metal knot. It really did seem like Marty had just chided Frank into doing a job he didn’t want to do. But when Marty tugged on the wire, pulling it off the cardboard like a handcuff off a small wrist, Ben saw that Frank was just genuinely bad at it.

  “Don’t matter none,” Frank said as Marty ran a fresh wire.

  “Not to you. You hide in the other room every time.”

  “I still say we’d be better off letting Big Ben here squeeze the boxes. Prolly wouldn’t even need no wires after.”

  “I guess,” Ben said, chuckling. “If they wanna pay me extra to sit my fat ass on the boxes, then that’s fine by me.”

  Frank looked at Ben with a confused expression until the sound of the baler being started made him flinch. The massive cube whined as it struggled against the wires. The whole block shifted, turned ninety degrees, and slammed onto the empty pallet Frank had placed in front of the machine. The wires held.

  With the machine empty, the crew set about stocking the store, taking far more breaks than they needed, but that was fine. It gave Marty a chance to nurse his lip with a bag of frozen peas. As long as the shelves were full and the aisles were clear when the store opened, Bill Palmer couldn’t give less of a shit about what went on between midnight and six in the morning. They moved faster with better music, or at least the night did. After the doors were locked, Marty jammed a paper clip into the intercom button and put the receiver in front of his boom box, and the three boys became DJs for the duration of their shift.

  At just past five in the morning, a harsh clatter burst through the store’s speakers and T. Rex’s “Metal Guru” stopped abruptly. Ben, Marty, and Frank looked at one another curiously before walking toward the intercom they had rigged in Customer Service.

  “Welp, that’s it for you, Marty,” Frank muttered.

  “This ain’t yer house!” Ms. Beverly yelled across the gulf that shrank between them as she rounded the corner of the counter. “You can’t just…just do whatever you damn well please here.” Her deeply southern voice seemed off-key, if such a thing were possible when simply speaking. There was a dull, unnatural tone to her every sound.

  Frank retreated a step or two, as if he could use Marty and Ben as human shields. Ms. Beverly’s feet moved as swiftly as her legs would allow, her shoes stomping against the tile. Her white hair rested in a loose but tidy bun on the crown of her skull. A single curl of sugar-string hair bobbed against the wrinkled skin of her scowling face.

  Ben could see Marty attempting to prepare his uneven lips to communicate clearly. “We didn’t know you was here, Ms. Beverly,” Marty offered, his palms turning upward while his shoulders shrugged faintly. “We woulda turned it off.”

  “Well, I am here,” she snapped. There were tremors in her hands and head. Her eyes darted among the three men before she closed them tightly and brushed a white curl behind her ear. Ben could see the large hearing aids that seemed to grow out of the sides of her head.

  “I just thought that was yer favorite song is all,” Marty pleaded carefully over his swollen lip.

  A smile brought new wrinkles into the ancient woman’s face. “Just please be mindful, wouldja?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Marty said. He smiled and winced at the pain in his lip.

  She narrowed her eyes. “Boy, what in the world did you do to your face?”

  “You don’t like it?” he asked, feigning insult. “Magazines said full lips are in this year.”

  Ben and Frank chuckled.

  “Always got something to say.” The old woman sighed, walking away from the counter and back toward her own department.

  “Let’s wrap it up, boys!”

  Marty and Frank kicked and shoved their trash down the aisle. Ben looked again at Beverly, who paced the bakery department making small, imperceptible modifications to containers of pastries, taking her time to work against the unhelpful tremor in her hands. Every step was deliberate—a thing that Ben sometimes understood all too well. It was more than just a quirk of old age, though. They were the same shakes that Ben had seen in his grandmother. Beverly had Parkinson’s disease.

  “Ms. Beverly,” Ben said softly.

  When she didn’t turn, Ben said it a bit louder. Still, she didn’t react. He reached a hand out to touch her shoulder, thought better of it, and slid his feet to the side so that he might occupy Beverly’s peripheral vision. Finally, she turned toward him with a jolt.

  “Sorry,” Ben said. “Sorry, I wasn’t tryin to sneak up on you. I hope you ain’t too mad about the music.”

  “No harm done.” Ms. Beverly tugged on a latch until a large metal door swung open.

  “And…” Ben began. “And I guess I might as well fess up for the other week. My first night, I moved a bunch of your displays. I thought…Well, I’m sorry is all, and you can bet that if it happens again, it wasn’t cuz of me.” Ben managed a laugh.

  “Alright,” the woman said, squinting at heat that even Ben could feel, despite the shield that the metal door should have provided. She pushed a tray cart of raw bread dough into the walk-in oven. “That everything?” she asked, turning back toward Ben. “Any more sorrys?”

  “No, ma’am.” Ben smiled. “But if you ever need something, just ask. Happy to do something other than stock shelves.”

  The woman wiped her hands on her apron. She had to raise her eyes a bit to look into Ben’s, her head shaking just enough that the steadiness of her eyes seemed almost surreal. “I remember you,” she finally said.

  “Yes, ma’am. I been here for about a couple weeks.”

  Beverly shook her head. “I remember you, that was a terrible thing. He was your brother?”

  There was a quivering in Ben’s stomach. “Still is,” Ben said, forcing a smile. “Yes, ma’am.” He pinched the edge of the stiff sleeve in his back pocket. “His name’s Eric.”

  Ben handed her the photograph, and her eyes lingered on it for a while, long enough that Ben eventually lowered his hand and let her take her time.

  “He was so young.”

  “He was three. He’ll be eight years old now. In a few months, anyhow.”

  “God.” Beverly sighed. “I got two grandchildren of my own. I just can’t imagine…It’s all I can do to keep these two eyes on ’em. And there hasn’t been any news in all this time?”

  Ben shook his head, but had to speak it aloud since Beverly was still studying the photograph, adjusting the distance of her quivering hand like a microscope stage. “No.”

  “Bill Palmer ain’t said nothin to you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “It must be so hard for you to be here,” she said in a quiet voice. “In this place.”

  “I’ve done easier things.”

  “I couldn’t even hardly look at the house where my daddy died. But he’s in a better place. That’s what I tell myself, anyhow. That makes you brave, I think. You bein here.”

  “He…” Ben chewed the inside of his lip and considered Beverly. “Eric ain’t dead, Ms. Beverly.”
>
  “I wasn’t trying to say that he was…that the boy had passed, and I think you know that,” she said sternly enough that Ben actually tensed. After a moment she continued with a softer voice. “I’m sorry. I see you wandering around here after all this time…I just know that must be a hard thing for you. I’ll pray for you and your family. No matter what, everything will be fine, Benjamin. I really do believe that. Things happen like they’re supposed to.”

  Ben nodded uncertainly and rubbed his hands with his kerchief. “Like God’s plan and all that?”

  “Makes you think, don’t it?” The woman smiled.

  “I think maybe sometimes things just happen. They just happen and that’s it.”

  Beverly pressed her lips into a slight frown. “Well,” Beverly said, turning back toward her department, “you’re certainly entitled to believe that, son.”

  “Ms. Beverly? My picture?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Eric’s picture.” Ben gestured at her apron.

  “Oh,” she said with a confused look, her trembling hand slipping into her pocket. She handed the photo back to Ben. “I’m sorry about that…Listen,” Beverly whispered as she placed her hand over Ben’s, “you look different, enough that I almost didn’t know who you was, and maybe Bill never will. But you can’t let him see you with that.”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t think he’d be too happy.”

  “It’s more than…” She sighed and seemed to try to steady one trembling hand with the other. “This ain’t none of my business. I don’t like gossip, talkin behind people’s backs and such. But…” She rubbed the tip of her index finger against her philtrum. “But I believe that you got some kinda right to know what kind of man you’re working for.