Carl looked around at the cars in the slushy parking lot. He was surprised it was so crowded in the middle of the day. He’d kept himself shut up in the apartment for so long that he didn’t think he could tolerate that many people his first time back out in the real world since before Christmas. “Ah, I think I’ll pass,” he said. “I figured I’d just ride around for a while, try to get home before dark.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, opening her car door. “Just don’t forget to pick me up tonight.”
As soon as she went inside, Carl headed straight back to the apartment on Watt Street. He sat staring out the kitchen window until the sun went down, then walked out to the car. He stuck his camera in the dash and the pistol under the seat. There was half a tank of gas in the station wagon and five dollars in his wallet that he’d taken from their travel money jar. He promised himself he wasn’t going to do anything, just drive around town a little and pretend. Sometimes, though, he wished he hadn’t ever made up those goddamn rules. Hell, around here, he could probably kill a hick every night if he wanted to. “But that’s why you got the rules in the first goddamn place, Carl,” he told himself as he started down the street. “So you don’t fuck everything up.”
As he passed by the White Cow Diner on High Street, he saw his brother-in-law standing beside his cruiser at the edge of the parking lot talking to someone sitting behind the wheel of a shiny black Lincoln. They appeared to be arguing, the way Bodecker was slinging his arms around. Carl slowed down and watched them in his rearview as long as he could. He thought about something that Sandy had said one night a couple of weeks ago, that her brother was going to end up in prison if he didn’t stop hanging around guys like Tater Brown and Bobo McDaniels. “Who the hell are they?” he had asked. He was sitting at the kitchen table unwrapping one of the cheeseburgers she had brought him from work. Someone had taken a bite out of one corner of it. He scraped the diced onion off with his penknife.
“They run everything from Circleville clear down to Portsmouth,” she told him. “Everything that’s illegal anyway.”
“Right,” Carl said. “And how do you happen to know this?” She was always coming home with another bullshit story some drunk had fed her. Last week she had talked to someone who was in on the Kennedy assassination. Sometimes it irritated the shit out of Carl that she could be so gullible, but then again, he knew that was probably one of the main reasons she had stuck with him all this time.
“Well, because this guy stopped in the bar today right after Juanita left and handed me an envelope to give to Lee.” She lit a cigarette and blew some smoke toward the stained ceiling. “It was plumb full of money, and it wasn’t all singles, either. There must have been four or five hundred dollars in there, maybe more.”
“Jesus Christ, did you take any of it?”
“You gotta be kidding me, right? These ain’t the kind of people you steal from.” She picked up one of the french fries from the greasy cardboard container sitting in front of Carl, dabbed it into a glob of ketchup. All evening, she had thought about hopping in the car and taking off with the envelope.
“But he’s your brother, goddamn it. He ain’t gonna do nothing to you.”
“Shit, Carl, the way Lee is now, I doubt if he would think twice about getting rid of us. At least not you anyway.”
“Well, what did you do with it then? You still got it on you?”
“Hell no. When he came in I just gave it to him and played dumb.” She looked at the french fry in her hand, dropped it in the ashtray. “He still didn’t seem none too happy, though,” she said.
Still thinking about his brother-in-law, Carl turned onto Vine Street. Every time he ran into Lee, which, thank God, wasn’t that often, the sonofabitch asked him, “So where you working, Carl?” He’d give anything to see his ass caught in a jam he couldn’t get out of by flashing that big fucking badge around. Up ahead, he saw two boys, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old, moving slowly along the sidewalk. He pulled over and shut off the engine, rolled down the window and took several gulps of the cold air. He watched them split up at the end of the block, one going east, the other west. He rolled down the passenger’s-side window and started the car, drove to the stop sign and made a right.
“Hey,” Carl said, when he pulled up beside the skinny boy wearing a dark blue jacket with Meade High School stitched on the back of it in white. “You need a ride?”
The boy stopped and looked at the driver behind the wheel of the dumpy station wagon. The man’s sweaty face was shiny in the glare from the streetlight. A brown stubble covered his fat jowls and neck. His eyes were beady and cruel, like a rodent’s. “What’d you say?” the boy asked.
“I’m just riding around,” Carl said. “Maybe we could go get some beer.” He swallowed and caught himself before he started begging.
The boy smirked. “You got the wrong guy, mister,” he said. “I ain’t built that way.” Then he started walking again, faster this time.
“Fuck you then,” Carl said under his breath. He sat in the car and watched the boy disappear into a house a few doors down. Though a little disappointed, he was mostly relieved. He knew he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself if he got the punk in the car. He could almost picture it, the little bastard lying in the snow turned inside out. Someday, he thought, he was going to have to do a winter scene.
He drove back to the White Cow Diner, saw that Bodecker was gone now. He parked the car and went inside, sat at the counter and ordered a cup of coffee. His hands were still shaking. “Damn, it’s cold out,” he said to the waitress, a tall, skinny girl with a red nose.
“That’s Ohio for you,” she said.
“I’m not used to it,” Carl said.
“Oh, so you ain’t from around here?”
“No,” Carl said, taking a sip of the coffee and pulling out one of his dog dicks. “I’m passing through from California.” Then he frowned and looked down at the cigar. He wasn’t sure why he said that, unless maybe he wanted to impress the girl. The mere mention of the state usually made him sick. He and Sandy had moved out there just a few weeks after they got married. Carl had thought he would find success there, taking photographs of movie stars and beautiful people, getting Sandy some work as a model, but instead they ended up broke and hungry, and he finally sold her to two men he met outside a fly-by-night talent agency who wanted to make a dirty movie. She had refused at first, but that night, after he plied her with vodka and promises, they drove their old beater up into the foggy Hollywood Hills, came to a small, dark cottage with newspapers taped over the windows. “This might be our big break,” Carl said as he led her to the door. “Make some connections.”
Besides the two men he’d made the deal with, there were seven or eight others standing along the lemon yellow walls of the living room, bare except for a movie camera on a tripod and a double bed covered with wrinkled sheets. A man handed Carl a drink and another asked Sandy to take her clothes off in a gentle voice. A couple of them took photographs as she stripped. Nobody said a word. Then somebody clapped his hands and the bathroom door swung open. A midget with a shaved head that was way too big for his body led a tall, dazed-looking man out into the room. The midget wore nice slacks rolled up several inches above his pointy Italian shoes and a Hawaiian shirt, but the big man was buck naked, a long, blue-veined penis as big around as a coffee cup dangling between his tanned, muscular legs. When she saw the grinning midget unhook the leash from the dog collar around the man’s neck, Sandy rolled off the bed and started grabbing frantically for her clothes. Carl stood up and said, “Sorry, boys, the lady’s changed her mind.”