You Only Get Letters from Jail (15 page)

“Nolan, this is Dean. Dean, this is Nolan.” He stuck his palm over the seat and I shook it left-handed and then
he dropped his hand and replaced it with a bottle of beer while Ivy passed her cigarettes back and the car filled with smoke again.

“That's one big-ass knife,” Dean said. He gestured with his cigarette but I didn't have to look. I knew the length. “Ivy said you owe Richie Dobkins money. That's some shit luck, huh? I know that bastard. I heard he fed some guy to the sharks.”

I tasted the burn of puke in my throat again and I was grateful that the beer was opened so I could drink right away. I rinsed my mouth and swallowed the foam. “I know,” I said.

“I'd help you out if I could and all, but I have a hard enough time covering for my skim, you know, and the owner's a nice guy. I don't want to screw him over or anything. He's got a little boy who has to wear these leg braces—can't even bend his knees to ride in the car. So I don't take more than he can miss, you know—he doesn't give raises and I don't ask for one, but I'm not driving that piece of shit for the rest of my life.” He pointed forward over my shoulder but there was no car in front of us, just the storefront, Budweiser banners, and a muddy BMX bike leaning on a bent kickstand. “This ain't a bad set of wheels. What is this? A '75?”

“Seventy-one,” I said.

“Plymouth, right? Damn.” He drained his beer in two swallows and pulled another one out, twisted the cap, and kept talking. “Look at the room in here. It's got the fold-down third seat, right?” He looked over his shoulder at the empty space where the seat could've been. “Plenty of
room to stretch out back there, huh? You know what I mean.” He laughed and hit my shoulder with the bottom of his bottle and beer foamed over the lip and ran down the neck to his hand. “If I had this, I'd drop a performance cam in here and pull all the torque I could get. What is this, about a 360? V8?” He leaned back in the seat and stretched out his arms.

“Yeah,” I said. “Dual exhaust, Edelbrock intake, disc brakes, 6x9 speakers . . .”

“No stereo, though.”

“Yeah, no stereo, but it's got the boxes. Power steering, Progressive rims. Fifteen-inch tires.” As I ticked off the specs Dean kept leaning forward until his face was on the edge of the front seat and I could smell the beer on his breath.

“Damn,” he said. “You want to sell this?”

I knew the NADA guide value on the car—had looked it up a hundred times and bet that money a hundred times over in a hundred different ways—divided it over every game on a weekend or just pushed it all at one game and went for the money shot. I had spent afternoons digging through every fucking envelope in every fucking drawer in every fucking room of our house looking for the pink slip, and I could not find it. At night I stared at the ceiling and saw myself placing that one good bet. I could feel how I'd feel if I won and it felt so good that I wanted to feel it for real.

“I can't,” I said.

“You guys are boring me,” Ivy said. “I hate listening about cars.” She waved her empty bottle at Dean and he replaced it with a fresh one. “I gotta go use the bathroom.”

While Ivy was inside, Dean offered me a piece of jerky and we sat there chewing and drinking without talking. I hadn't eaten since I'd left the house and my stomach was running on cold beer. I drank fast and my head felt warm even though the heat had long since left the car.

“Ivy is a cool girl,” Dean said. “I really like her.”

I wondered if Dean was one of the receivers of her beer-cooler blow jobs, but I didn't want to ask.

“It sucks about her mom, you know. All that shit Ivy went through. I couldn't even imagine.”

I listened without turning around. I didn't know what he meant.

“Her mom starts dying of cancer and Ivy quits school so she can work and pay the bills. I mean, that's some serious commitment. I don't think I could do it. I hate fucking working and my mom isn't close to being dead, but if I could help her take a few steps toward it, I sure as hell would.” Dean laughed and we drank for a while without talking. “Everybody was in love with Ivy and she wouldn't go out with any of us. Drove us crazy, man. When her mom died and she quit, I stopped looking forward to coming to work, you know.”

I imagined Ivy on her knees in the cold walk-in, tucked behind the cases of Miller Genuine Draft, blowing Mr. Montgomery in his tight red shorts, and then Mr. Montgomery changed to Dean, with his hair hanging in his eyes and his leather jacket zipped to his chin, and then I saw Debra Winger in a hospital bed, waiting for her kids to come in, and I closed my eyes until the pictures drained
and I could taste salt in my mouth and hear the waves and the boat and the sound of things cutting the water.

Light rolled across the side of the car and I heard an engine gun and drop before the driver cut it and I opened my eyes and saw a bunch of guys step out of a Chevy truck beside us and walk toward the door.

“Well,” Dean said, “I guess break time is over. Gotta go ring up beer and smokes and porn and make sure those assholes don't graze the chip racks or pocket shit when my back is turned. Never a dull moment, you know?” He patted me on the shoulder and opened his door. “I'm gonna leave you the beer. I bet you can use it.” He gave me a thumbs-up and if he had made a joke about swimming or keeping my head above water, I probably would've thrown a bottle at him. I watched him give Ivy a hug as he went inside and she whispered something in his ear and then she was back again, inside the car, and smelling like smoke and soap.

“It's all taken care of,” she said.

I watched Dean round the counter and stand behind the register. “Good,” I said.

She picked her beer up from the floorboard. “So let's go,” she said. “You know how to get there, right?”

“Back to your car?” I said. “Sure.”

Ivy rested her beer between her thighs and dug a tube of ChapStick out of her purse. “Not my car, Nolan. Richie's house. You know how to get there?”

The fluorescent lights turned the knife a sick yellow color and every now and then the shadow of a small bug crossed the blade. “Very funny,” I said.

“I just got off the phone with him. We had a nice little talk and came up with a deal.”

I turned in my seat and my elbow cracked the steering wheel but I didn't care. It was a good pain. “What are you talking about?”

“I told you. I made him a deal. But we have to get over there before his mom gets home from work. She does graveyard at the mill, so we're running out of time.”

My hands were shaking and I wanted to squeeze them together, but one of them was choking the life out of a green glass bottle and the other one was pulling uselessly at my jeans. “I don't have the money,” I said.

“It's okay. I worked out a trade with Richie.”

“You don't know him,” I said. “You didn't talk to him.”

“Don't be so paranoid, Nolan. I talked to Dean when I was in there getting the Luckies. He used to do some collecting for Richie and had his number, so he gave it to me. I called him while you guys were out here. Everything is fine.”

I didn't believe her but I wanted to.

“If you don't believe me, go ask Dean.”

I looked through the windows and Dean was blocked by the squared shoulders of the men from the truck, who were pointing at things behind the counter.

“I don't understand,” I said.

“Look Nolan, I like you. I don't know if it's something left over from junior high or if there's something about you now that is working on me, but the point is that maybe you're thinking in too much of a straight line, you
know? You owe Richie some money, so you think you have to pay him with money, but you haven't given too much thought to trade. Get it?”

“No,” I said.

“I offered him something of value. That's it. So take me over to his house and let's get this settled before sunrise, okay?”

I looked at the six boxes of cigarettes on the seat between us and I did the math and their grand total came up way short of the figures Richie had added up for me. “This isn't enough,” I said.

Ivy looked at the cigarettes and then she looked at me and she smiled. “You really don't get it, do you?” She exhaled and pushed the hair off her forehead. “I told him that I'd fuck him if he washed what you owed him—cleared the books, whatever—and he said I'd better be good, and I told him that I am, and he said he'd be the judge of that and so there—you're off the hook.”

I didn't know what to say to her so I said nothing.

“It's easy money,” she said. “I can take anything for five minutes, and there's no way he can last. Maybe I'll just blow him and get this whole thing done in two minutes like a fucking drive-thru. You'll come in two-minutes-or-less or it's free.” She laughed but I couldn't see her face. She was staring out her window at the dark field and waves of trash in the weeds.

“You didn't get fired from here,” I said. “Dean told me.”

Ivy took a drink from her beer but didn't turn to look at me. “Dean is crazy,” she said. “He's a good guy, but he's fucking
nuts. You know why Dean works the night shift here on the weekends? Because the owner, Gary, keeps this big wooden baseball bat behind the counter—one of those slugger ones, you know, and this one time these two guys came in and tried to muscle Dean for the money in the till, and you know what Dean does? He grabs that bat and beats the shit out of both of them.
Both
of them. He beat one of them so badly that they didn't think he was going to live, and the other one didn't get out of the hospital for three days.” She turned to look at me and I realized that she had nice eyes and that was something about her that I remembered from junior high. “And the funny thing is that Dean didn't think about it like he was a hero or he saved Gary's store or something like that. Dean got a taste for it after that. Every time a customer walks in Dean has one hand hovering over that bat and he's just waiting for somebody to look at him sideways, you know? Next time somebody tries to take the cash or a pack of chewing gum, they're not gonna get lucky with a coma. They're gonna get killed. All Dean wants is that one shot.” Ivy finished her beer and set the empty on the floor. “The fog's getting thin. We better get going to Richie's, but I gotta get some candy first,” Ivy said. “Something hard. You want something?”

I shook my head. Ivy leaned over and kissed my cheek and I let her. Her lips were sticky with ChapStick wax, but I didn't wipe the smear away until after she was inside the store.

The Chevy truck of men reloaded and backfired to life and I could hear the blast of their music until they rolled backward and turned toward the road. There was a dead rat in the place where the truck had been, a dead river rat
stretched to its full length and stiff on the asphalt. It was untouched and whole despite all of the wheels that had rolled across that spot, and it was on its side, in its entirety, tail extended, and I couldn't help but stare at it. In the light I could see the way its gray hair blended to white on its belly, peppered like a squirrel, and its tiny claws were curled into fists and tucked beneath it. The only thing that I couldn't see was its head because of the angle I was sitting and the shadow of a Little Debbie wrapper that covered it.

I reached over the seat to take another beer while I waited for Ivy and I grabbed her open pack of cigarettes, which Dean had left behind. All the cigarettes were the same, filters facing up, and the two lucky ones were gone. I set the pack on the dash and picked up the knife. The handle was cold and heavy. Ivy's purse was on the seat next to me, so I poked at it. It was open and if I sat forward I could look inside. I could see shadows and shapes of things that looked familiar, pieces of paper, sheets and wads. I dug the knife in and tried to find the cash.

When I was a kid, the old lady who owned Geraldine was married to a guy named Charles and on Saturday nights my dad would go next door and stand in his garage and drink with him, and when it got dark and late and they were drunk, they'd take me to the backyard and let Geraldine off her chain. Charles would give me ten bucks to go five minutes with the dog, and he'd hold her by the collar, jerk her around, and lift her off her feet until she was whining and spitting and there was foam on her mouth even though she was old and white-muzzled,
and then I'd take off running and he'd let the dog loose. There'd be a lot of noise after that from my dad and Charles shouting drunk encouragement until the money changed hands and they backed their pick—but in the yard me and Geraldine were silent and the only sound we made was contact.

I got two of Ivy's twenties on the end of the knife, and I fished them up the side and over the zipper and out. Inside the store I could see glimpses of her walking the aisle and Dean at the register, but behind the cluttered glass I could not see them completely.

When we hit the middle of the yard, I'd let Geraldine take me down, but I was double her weight and had a lot of kick in my Chucks, and I could take the shaking a lot longer than she could give it, and in time I would wear her down, take her fight, and she would turn. Even when her teeth dug in and took a piece of me, and my ankle went warm and I knew there was blood, I had that ten bucks in my pocket that kept me dead to pain, made me want to win, and she might take me for a minute, bring us close to even, but on those Saturdays they were right to put their money on me, because I didn't know how to give up, and probably wouldn't have even if I could.