Bad Man_A Novel

“We had a cashier once. Sweet enough, but dumber than a box of rocks. Broke too. She started skimming off her till. Not too much, from what I understand, but enough that she got caught. Bill fired her, of course. Now dumb as she was, I doubt very much that she listed this place on her résumé, but Bill called every place he could think of and told them what happened, what she did. And when she finally did get a job and he found out, he told the owner, and she got cut loose.

  “She came back here and screamed at him about it. Told just about everybody what he done, even though she couldn’t prove it. But I believed her and believe her still. She was workin at a toy store. Bill’s never been married. Ain’t got no kids or nieces or nephews, so what in the blue hell was he doing in a place like that? Could be for any number of reasons, I guess. But I think he was lookin for her. Still. Weeks after he fired her. Because he’s mean.

  “He’s always been mean. But the state he was in when your brother went missing. The things he said about your family…”

  “What things?” He could feel a warmth creeping up the back of his neck.

  “Nothin kind, son. He’ll fire you. Do the same as he did with that cashier to you and your friends just for knowin you. Maybe find out where your folks work—” The woman pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. “I feel awful for yelling at you and for what I said about your brother. For you to come back here and work for that man…”

  Ben could only nod, and he considered the old woman and her words. “Thank you,” he said at last. “I’ll watch my step some.”

  But Beverly only bobbed her trembling head and frowned.

  “If it makes you feel better,” Ben continued, “I might be workin for him, but I don’t do a very good job.”

  Beverly laughed.

  “And hey,” Ben added with a smile, “maybe me bein here is because I’m supposed to.”

  “Maybe.” Beverly smiled back. “Maybe.”

  And he thu-thought and huh-hhhe thought and he thought until thinkin wasn’t enough no more. But thinkin is all a head c-c-can do. He needed some huh-help.

  So he asked his feet.

  9

  Come the middle of October, the air was beginning to cool, but like every year, it was happening slowly. It was hard to even feel yet. But the woods could tell. The orange-and-red requiem for the hotter months played vibrantly on the leaves of the oak trees that peppered the side of the road, a beautiful and warm foreground for the choir of deep green pines beyond.

  Although Ben never asked, he wondered from time to time why they always took their breaks away from the comfort of mechanically controlled air and in the treacherously thin plastic chairs. Maybe it was the camera that hung in the break room’s corner. Even if it was busted like everything else, it still made like it was looking at you. Could just be a tradition inherited from some previous incarnation of the stock crew—one passed down silently as the result of a single person’s preference that outlived the person who started it—but even in the worst weather they dined just outside the sliding doors with no complaint or objection.

  Even when Ben worked alone, he’d walk all the way from the break room with his lunch just so he could plant himself on the concrete and listen to the quiet dark. Every now and then, a car would drive past, either going to or coming from town, and Ben would close his eyes and see how long he could hold the engine in his ears as it disappeared to nowhere in particular.

  Most nights weren’t that quiet, though. Most nights buzzed with loud chatting and louder laughter. Ben could never remember what they talked about. After the fact, he could never trace where they ended back to where they began. The subjects banked like starlings, the three of them just along for the ride.

  “Tell him what happened!” Marty pleaded to Frank again.

  “No,” he snapped, his head shaking back and forth. “Fuck you.”

  “C’mon, man.” Marty’s voice quivered with suppressed laughter. “It’s cool. Don’t worry about it. Just tell the story.”

  “Yeah,” said Ben, who was tracing the contours of his green utility knife with a black marker, “what’s the big deal, Frank?”

  Frank crossed his arms and shook his head, slower now.

  “He ain’t gonna judge you for it.” Marty giggled.

  “Just a misunderstanding is all it was,” Frank said.

  Marty clutched his stomach and laughed until his eyes watered. Even when he’d recovered, his voice shook and fluttered until the laughter would break through again. It took him almost ten minutes to tell a two-minute story.

  On Ben’s day off, Marty had finally convinced Frank to talk to a girl he’d had a crush on since long before Ben worked his first shift. Frank hadn’t tried to hide it. Or if he had, he’d done a poor job: staring at her and occasionally offering to “help her with her bags,” even though she only ever had one or two and Frank was a stocker, not a bag boy. Marty’s comments had either worn Frank down or built him up enough that he decided to act on his feelings.

  “I was sittin right here,” Marty said. “I was sittin right here, and Frank was sittin where you are, and she comes out, and Frank just gets up. He walks after her, and I’m like, ‘Well, goddamn,’ ya know? Fresh Prince comin through. So he walks up to her. But he doesn’t say nothin, and he doesn’t stop walkin neither. He just kept on walkin behind her. Dude, he kept walkin until they were both out of the parking lot and around the corner.

  “And then…” Marty leaned forward in his chair and laughed so hard he coughed. “And then I just hear, ‘Help!’ ” Marty’s voice strained through his whimpering giggles. “ ‘Help me!’ She thought…She thought she was gonna die! What a stud!”

  Ben didn’t want to laugh at Frank, but he couldn’t help it. Even Frank smiled as he cleaned the lens of his glasses with his shirt. Finally, Frank couldn’t help it, and the three were lost to laughter.

  Through his waning, tearful chuckles, Ben could hear a familiar sound echoing across the parking lot, rumbling and shrieking. “What the…” he mumbled to himself, as his dad’s truck pulled up parallel to the curb.

  “Hey, Pa. Everything alright?” Ben said, approaching the vehicle. “This ain’t on your route, I don’t think.”

  “Is now. I switched with Reggie so I could take the store. Saddles me with a few extra stops on top, but that’s alright.” There was a brief but not at all uncomfortable silence. “I figured you and me could have lunch.”

  Ben glanced back at his coworkers. “Yeah. Yeah, I guess that’d be okay.” He climbed into the truck beside his father.

  Clint pulled to the far side of the parking lot and set a brown sack with a rolled-over top on Ben’s lap, then produced one of his own. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be hungry,” he said over the rustling paper bag. “Hell, I wasn’t even sure how I’d get your attention when I pulled up.”

  “Didn’t have much of a plan, did ya?” Ben joked as he opened his lunch sack.

  “Well, I brought the sandwiches. That’s about as far as I got.” Clint killed the engine and the stridulation of cricket legs seemed to rise up in its place. “So how are those guys?”

  “I like ’em,” Ben said, unwrapping his sandwich. “Funny. Nice guys.”

  “You ain’t gonna believe this,” Clint said, pointing through the windshield, “but I just found out that Frank is Reggie’s boy.”

  “No kiddin?”

  “Nosir. Came up yesterday in the lot. Small world. You know, they live just a little up the way, Reggie and Frank.”

  “Everybody does, I reckon.”

  They ate in relative silence for a while. Clint brushed the crumbs off his hands and into the brown paper bag between his knees. “Deidra’s having a real hard time with this…” He tugged on his beard lightly. “You made some friends, and what with them livin close by…”

  “You want me to quit?” Ben asked, though it sounded more l
ike a statement than a question. “What am I supposed to do for work?”

  “You can come back and work with me again…”

  “I don’t want your money, Pa.”

  Clint shook his head. “We could get you your own route; Reggie’s looking to shave off more stops as it is, and he ain’t the only one.”

  “I ain’t got no car, though. Did she say somethin? I never even said anything about any of my shifts. I don’t even leave my name tag out where she can see it.”

  “She didn’t have to say anything. She’s been in that damn room near every night. Day too sometimes. She hasn’t done that in ages. We gave this a shot. But you been here for near two months, and I think that’s enough. C’mon, Ben. You know how hard this is on her.”

  “It ain’t easy for me neither, Pa.”

  “Don’t remember saying it was, Ben. But this was a choice that you made.”

  “Yeah it was,” Ben said sharply.

  “Beg your pardon? Of all the goddamn places—”

  “Weren’t no other places to go. We ain’t got no money, Pa. The roof leaks. One of the bathrooms don’t work. We got no money, and Deidra hasn’t worked in five years. She only leaves the house like once a year for that stupid present thing she does—”

  “Ben,” Clint snapped.

  “I didn’t wanna work here. I didn’t want to, but I gotta work somewhere. Someone has to do something.”

  “I am doing something.”

  “That ain’t what I meant, Pa. I know you are. But now there’s two of us. I make almost as much as you do. I can help out—”

  “This ain’t help, Ben. This is selfish, what you’re doin.”

  “What about when I sign my checks over to you? That still selfish of me?”

  “You think you can fix things by bouncin from one fuckup to another?”

  Ben exhaled slowly. He wiped a few tears away with the heels of his hands. “Thanks for lunch, Pa,” he said, tossing the remains of the sandwich back in the bag and opening the door.

  “Yeah. Anytime.”

  Ben shut the door and heaved a bundle of newspapers out of the back of the pickup before walking into the darkness of the parking lot. Ben felt the truck’s headlights on his back only briefly as they swept across him like spotlights. The papers’ plastic binding ribbon dug into his fingers, and the limp in his leg made the heavy stack bang into his good knee. Truck tires squealed as they transitioned from parking lot to road. Marty and Frank had gone back inside.

  Ben let the stack of newspapers slam on the Customer Service counter. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands again, then scraped his fingernails against his scalp, back and forth, faster and faster, until he could feel it burn. He tried to curse but made only stunted sounds through his clenched teeth. Pounding his fists against the counter, Ben hurled his foot against a cardboard box that hung over the lip of a shelf below, sending it skidding and rocking along the tile. He drove the knee of his bad leg into the lower cabinet. The pain was blinding. So he shut his eyes and did it again.

  He pressed his forehead against the counter’s plastic laminate and tried to breathe, wincing at the throbbing in his leg. For all his objections, Clint sure had cashed Ben’s checks in a hurry. Ben hadn’t expected a parade in his honor—hadn’t even really expected a thank-you—but for his dad to just show up like that…

  Fuck them, Ben thought. His father hadn’t said it, but he’d come close enough: Every little bit of this is your fault, Ben. Everything that’s led us here, and everywhere we might end up. It’s all because of you. Ben struggled to even out his breathing, struggled even harder to lean into the indignation he thought he should be feeling.

  His leg screamed, and Ben hissed through his teeth as he turned and braced himself against the counter, sliding down until he sat with his back against the fractured cabinet door. He tapped the back of his head against the drawer behind him, then rolled it from side to side.

  On the floor to his left were a pair of eyeglasses and a set of keys. The side of the box he had kicked was collapsed, but he could still read that it said LOST & FOUND.

  Ben stared at the box for a long time. A strange kind of hum was collecting in his ears, low and constant like the feedback from an amplifier, a deep static inside his brain. He sat there in dumb silence as the buzzing built and built until it finally broke across his chest like a gray wave. With a hollowness that he hadn’t felt since his first night in the store, Ben sat there and stared into the large black eyes of an unreal thing.

  Even as his fingers touched the box to pull it closer, his mind tried to push it farther away, back where it belonged—some other place, some other world. Not here. Not with him. It didn’t feel right in his hands. The last time he’d felt it, it had been soaked.

  The last time he’d felt it, it had belonged to Eric.

  Ben couldn’t help but laugh as he cradled the small stuffed rhinoceros and tried to conceive of what slow series of steps would have been necessary to place it here in this box after all this time. They were unimaginable to Ben. The last place he knew it to be was in this store, so in some way it was right where it should be, wasn’t it? It would actually be more confounding to find it literally anywhere else in the world. Right? No. That wasn’t true, and Ben knew it. He knew it because he had seen this box before—more than three times in the weeks following Eric’s disappearance—and there hadn’t been any goddamn rhino in it.

  “Where did you come from?” Ben muttered to the toy, like it might answer. Stampie just smiled. And just like Ben’s first night, it felt almost as if the store were smiling back.

  10

  Ben was the first one to leave for once. The truck wasn’t all the way unloaded, but he hadn’t been that big of a help anyway. He couldn’t even remember if he’d clocked out.

  As Ben limped through the ratty grass, the plastic bag swung and the small rhinoceros thudded softly against his leg. The sky was only just beginning to tease morning. Occasionally, headlights would cut through the dark, and Ben would try to tuck himself closer to the clutching shadows of the tree line. Whatever his father’s new route was, Ben didn’t want to risk being spotted.

  By the time Ben approached the police station, he had to squint against the sun. Had he even told Marty and Frank that he was leaving? He couldn’t remember. He’d talked to Marty, though. Alone in the back room, he’d asked him about the toy, if he’d ever seen it before. But Marty had only shaken his head.

  There were two chairs in the small lobby. The relief Ben’s leg felt when he sat was immense. Ben swallowed against a sore throat. It stung like he’d been screaming. Ben glanced around the room for a water fountain but found none. A young deputy scribbled on what seemed like an endless cascade of papers. Those shuffling pages and the crinkling of Ben’s plastic bag were the only sounds in the building, aside from the infrequent squawking of a radio somewhere.

  Almost like a tic, Ben turned and leaned to look out the glass entrance doors. Sometimes he’d see a car. More than once the door rattled open, and Ben’s head jerked to look at someone he didn’t recognize. “Duchaine’s on a call,” the deputy had said. “He should be back shortly.”

  Ben stretched the thin bag over the face of the stuffed animal inside, making the rhinoceros’s coal eyes the color of dirty milk. His hands moved back and forth over the plastic, slackening and tightening. Slackening. Tightening. Bringing the toy into existence and then sending it away. Only sometimes did he take it out, turning it over in his hands, examining it, confirming what he already knew and then doubting it right away. When he fell asleep, the bag was clutched in the crook of his elbow.

  His heart was pounding when he woke up. He thought he might have yelled, but the deputy at the desk was still scribbling onto his papers, paying Ben no mind at all. Gasping, Ben patted his hands against his stomach and legs, then snatched up the bag, which had rolle
d onto the seat beside him. Ben stood and glanced outside, then looked into the room behind the deputy. And there he was, James Duchaine, sitting at his desk, pecking slowly at his keyboard.

  “You coulda woke me up,” Ben said as he walked past the counter.

  “Tried,” the deputy replied.

  It had been a long time since Ben had seen Duchaine, and Ben had seen him so seldom back then that it was hard to tell whether time had been kind to him. His hair was perhaps a little grayer. The wrinkles seemed to cut a little more harshly into the sides of his eyes. But he still had the same resting frown on his mouth and the same twisting burns on his left forearm.

  He didn’t look up right away when Ben took a seat across the desk. He glanced from the papers in his lap to the monitor in front of him, stabbing his fingers awkwardly into the keys.

  Ben adjusted his shirt away from his stomach and waited for the man to finish. Or at least he tried.

  “Deputy Duchaine.”

  “Lieutenant,” the man said absently as he concentrated on his typing.

  When he was finally done, Duchaine took off his glasses and tossed them on his cluttered desk. His mud-colored eyes ran over Ben’s face. “You lost some weight,” he said, squeaking back in his chair. “Or moved some around anyway.”

  Ben shifted in his seat and bit his tongue. James Duchaine wasn’t going to mock him out of the station. Duchaine laced his fingers over his stomach, then after a moment nodded and moved his thumbs apart, encouraging Ben to please hurry up and get to the point.

  “I want to talk to you about Bill Palmer, the store director over—”

  Duchaine nodded. “I know him.”

  “I work there now,” Ben said. Duchaine raised his eyebrows but didn’t interrupt. “Started about two months ago. Back when everything happened, back when…he wasn’t no help at all to us—to me and my dad and…Always seemed real lazy about everything, annoyed and mean all the time. He’s not no different now.