Three Miles Past (5 page)

The paper had said they had camper shells, but it was just to get the hunters in, sell them a gun. William didn’t need a
gun
, though. He used his blinker to get in front of a blue El Camino. What he needed was a
camper
shell. Because if he didn’t get one, he would be back to tarps, and wouldn’t be able to drive on the interstate anymore, because the truckers would see, radio ahead.

Because because because.

William had three hundred dollars in his pocket, part of it an advance on his paycheck, part left over from selling the Ford.

That was another reason he was leaving Houston: every day, he had to see his old truck across the road, cocked at an angle against the chain link, by the parts cars.

Finally, in the classifieds, William found a camper shell. It was supposed to be north of town, and east. Tomball, in the crotch of I-10 and I-45. He had to call twice for directions, then listen for real the second time. Each time, the man who answered the phone thought William was calling about a help wanted ad, somebody to replace his son. One hour later—eight miles—William turned up the long driveway of the farm house, slowed alongside the camper shell. It was on an old Gentleman Jim, had been painted black and gold to match the truck, then had the paint baked on.

William stepped out, ran his hand over the warm fiberglass then looked at his palm. It was glittering. Past it, the old man, picking his way through all the other junked cars. He held his hand out, looked over William’s shoulder at his Chevy. It was gold and white, the colors of some oil company from West Texas.

The old man nodded.

“It matches,” he said. “The gold, right?”

The old man was sixty-eight, maybe seventy-four. A house twice as old as him, at the end of a series of dirt roads that were better than any fence. Most of the land around the house was weeds, some of it on the downslope spongy with swampwater, thick with frogs.

William looked to the Gentleman Jim then raised one cheek, narrowing that eye. He shook his head no.

“You don’t think it’ll fit,” the old man said. “It will.”

“I know,” William said. “But—the paint, I mean. You can’t just spray fiberglass yourself.”

The old man agreed.

“Seventy then,” he said, no eye contact.

William shrugged, looked to the shell again. The ad in the paper had an
OBO
after the
$100
. “I don’t know,” he said. Overhead, one small airplane whined just as another—yellow—broke from the line of trees down the hill from the man’s house.

William flinched backwards, stumbled into the grass.

The old man looked to the plane to let William avoid the embarrassment of trying to stand as if nothing had happened.

“Maniacs,” he said. “There should be a law.”

It was a cropduster. The racks of nozzles, the bitter smell in the air, then, just all at once, no smell at all. William knew the herbicide had numbed his nose. He still couldn’t talk.

“Fifty,” the old man said, toeing the ground.

William opened the envelope from his shirt pocket, counted out the three bills, and then the old man insisted on a receipt, was gone for ten minutes to the house, for pen and paper.

William ducked again the next time the plane came, but this time saw a roll of toilet paper trail down from it. It was how the pilots flew when they didn’t have a spotter—how they marked their passes.

“Maniac,” William said to the plane, low, smiling, then got the wrenches and pliers and flat-head from his truck, started getting the camper ready to move off the Gentleman Jim.

When the old man came back with his receipt the
Sold To
part was blank. William wrote in
Bill Dozier
then laid on his back in the bed of the Gentleman Jim, placed the soles of his boots against the underside of the camper shell. At first, pushing with his legs, it just rained fiberglass down onto him—spun light—but then the foam seal on one side gave, then the other, and the camper shell shifted towards the rear of the truck. The old man stepped forward to take its weight, and, behind him, looking between his legs, there was a large, dark dog, loping through the grass.

The old man followed William’s eyes, turned, then called something out to the dog, a name William didn’t quite catch.
Blanco? Blackie?

“He didn’t hear you,” William said.

The old man laughed without smiling. “He heard me,” he said.

Moments later, the black dog was there. A puppy in an adult dog body, unable to stand still. Excited just to be alive for another perfect day.

William let himself pet it between the shoulder blades. The dog craned its head around, to lick the sweat from William’s wrist.

William looked up, for the plane he was hearing again. It was what the dog had been chasing, probably. The shadow coursing along the ground, blackening a tree for a moment, so that it looked new again when the plane was gone.

William understood.

He stepped down from the tailgate of the Gentleman Jim, all his weight on his left arm for a breath, the shoulder there forever torn.

“What?” the old man asked.

William realized he was making a noise in his throat.

“Nothing,” he said, then took the old man’s eyes away from that side of his body, ran his other hand along the side window of the camper, in appreciation. All that was left now was to back his truck up, work the camper from one to the other, and screw it down. The foam kit, he would get in town. Then he could back the truck into the empty bay at work, chock the shell up on blocks, sand down the bed rails.

But that was all later. Everything was later, nothing was now. Just the sound of that cropduster, the black dog streaking across the field.

William was sure the plane wasn’t going to clear the trees this time.

He opened his mouth to tell the dog, but the old man was still watching him, following his arm out to the dog, an acre away already.

“Need one?” he said.

It was a joke.

Across the field, the yellow plane crashed up into the sky again, tearing away from the earth.

“Not yet,” William said, swallowing his smile.

Not yet.

~

Three six-packs later, William sat up against the sink of his apartment and cried and cried. Like a baby, like a goddamn girl.

The one name he never gave anybody was William H. Bonney. Billy the Kid.

Surrounded by couch cushions in the living room, he had been Billy the Kid, his brother Jesse James, because his name had started with a
J
.

Their father’s Indian name was Bites All the Way Through, was Kicks Open the Door Until the House Falls Over, was Born With Teeth, was Custer. This was when they didn’t understand, thought Custer was Indian.

William rubbed heat into his shoulder and drank another beer, promised Julia that it was going to be all right this time. That he didn’t have to do anything. And then he said it out loud, like a defense, like the only logical answer—
cowboys and Indians, Dad
—but heard again his shoulder tearing, like the sound had never even left his body after all these years, had just been traveling back and forth along the guitar-string tendons of his neck, burrowing into his inner ear.

The reason his dad had been jerking him up from the couch was because they weren’t supposed to play on the couch like that anymore. Because their mom was going to be home soon.

William reeled his pocket watch up, studied it.

Julia was in the eighth hour of her shift, probably. Holding the pad of her middle finger to a patient’s pulse, counting under her breath. The clock ticking, moving, each second two cents to her maybe, or more—a nickel? William had no idea how much a nurse made.

He said it again, cowboys and Indians, then put himself back into the pound. As Pinzer. Walking down the hall behind the caramel-colored attendant who’s already off the clock. The pound where she has her keys zipped out from her belt, is twirling them around her index finger, letting them swing back to her palm again and again.

William follows, follows, all the dogs in their runs barking and barking, but no sound.

“This one,” he says, about a Husky, then, about a chocolate Lab with child eyes, “No, this one.”

The attendant in front of him smiles, keeps swishing back and forth,
knows
, and William follows her around one corner, then another, and then she’s waiting for him with a hose. It’s on, just trickling because she knows how to work it. She asks if he’s thirsty and he says yes, drinks. When he looks up, she’s unlocking an empty run.

He walks in behind her because she wants him too. She’s already stepping out of her scrubs, using her feet to pull the loose pants down each leg.

William smiles at the tan lines he wouldn’t have expected on her, how close the top line of her bikini dips to her nipple, how close her aureole is to the sun—how wide it is, spreading like a stain, like she was dipped in something then laid out on her back—then sees that his hand is in his pants, like he told himself to do in the parking lot, and then she comes to him, hooking one brown leg around his side, grinding her warmth up against him, breathing into his ear, and that was the way he came back to his kitchen: hard, all the air in his apartment compressed in his lungs. Pushing with his heels on the linoleum.

He barely made it to the hospital in time, then came just as Julia stepped into the crosswalk, gushing onto his chest and stomach so much he thought that maybe he was bleeding somehow, that he was shooting spinal fluid, then gagging from the thought of it, splashing hot vomit into the tilted well of the speedometer, down along the steering column to the firewall. Crying still, because he knew from the way he’d taken the caramel-colored pound attendant, from the way he’d been
about
to take her, the way she turned around for him, resting the tips of her fingers on the stained concrete, he knew she was pregnant now with a litter of puppies that were going to eat her the first chance they got.

~

Two days later Al called him from the shop, to ask where he wanted his check mailed. What there was of it, after the advance.

“I’ll come get it,” William said.

“Not a good idea, hoss,” Al said back, low enough that William knew Mitch was standing in the bay by the phone.

“Sorry,” William said, when it seemed like Al was waiting for him to say something.

“Where you been?”

“My shoulder,” William lied.

Al laughed—shaped his breath into a laugh, it sounded like. So he wouldn’t have to smile.

“This a workman’s comp issue?” he said, quieter, the punchline.

William shrugged.

After that, Al said something, William said something—none of it mattered, was like other people talking—and then William put the phone back on its cradle.

He hadn’t been back to the hospital since the night he’d thrown up all his love for Julia, then fingered it back in. Off his chest too, the strings matting his beard. Since the night he’d started his truck when it was already running, the metal-on-bone sound of his flywheel jerking her head around in his side mirror, her hair in the brake lights sideways from her body for one perfect instant—a communion. A moment they’d shared, the rabbit recognizing a blind spot in the trail it had been walking for weeks now.