Cold in July (14 page)

I had to pass in front of the shop before I could make the
turn that led to the lot in the rear where I parked and as I passed, I saw
Russel standing out front, leaning on the glass door. I had hoped to at least
have a little time to get unlocked and get the coffee brewing before I had to
deal with him.

I went on around back and parked and opened the shop and
went through to the front door and tapped on it. Russel jumped a little, and I
unlocked the door and let him in.

“Snuck up on me,” he said.

“I drove by out front and saw you. I thought maybe you saw
my car.”

“No, I was woolgathering. Nice place. It looks like you get
some business.”

“Yeah. We do all right.”

I led him to the back and told him to take a chair and I put
on coffee. When I was finished with that, I turned the thermostat to a cooler
level and went over to the cash register and unlocked it. I had the bag of
money I’d brought from home, just enough small change and dollars to get us
rolling for the day, and I put all that in the register.

“What is it you want me to do?” Russel said.

He had left his chair and was standing at the counter.

“I don’t really know,” I said. “I haven’t thought about it.
I guess you can clean up.”

“All right. With what, and how do you want things done?”

I took him to the back and showed him the closet with the
broom, mop and dustpan. I showed him the bathroom. “You can get water from here
for mopping,” I said. “Somewhere in that closet is a bucket and there’s some
soap and all manner of stuff. I’m not even sure what’s in there. We’re not too
good at cleaning up, actually.”

“I noticed,” Russel said. “There’s glass and wood and
sawdust all over the floor under the work tables.”

“Yeah, well, we’re busy. You just do what you like, but look
busy. I don’t want to make James and Valerie feel like I’m playing favorites.”

James and Valerie came in then, and they looked at Russel,
then looked at me.

“New employee,” I said. “I’ve hired him for a little while
to kind of straighten the place up, since we don’t seem to get around to it.” I
hesitated, wondering if I should say Russel’s name. It didn’t seem likely they
would remember who it was I was supposed to have shot, and even if they did, it
was even more unlikely that they would associate the last names as kin. “This
is Ben Russel.”

James shook Russel’s hand and Valerie smiled, which was good
as a hug any day. She seemed to like what she saw in Russel, and it was obvious
Russel didn’t mind looking at her either.

“Well,” I said, “let’s get to work.”

Russel straightened the closet first, then swept and mopped
the joint until it was as shiny as the White House silverware. When he wasn’t
working, he talked to Valerie, and they got along just fine. A lot better than
James got along with her. It burned James so bad he came up front and leaned on
the counter and whispered, “What’s that old guy got that I haven’t got?”

“A hard-on?”

“Funny, boss. You’re a riot. Maybe you should get your own
television show.”

After about a week, I got fairly comfortable with Russel. I
even praised his work. I wanted to hate him, but I kept finding myself liking
him. Now, when I looked at him, I didn’t get the vision of him on my son’s bed
clutching the boy’s pajama top in one hand and holding a knife in the other. I
couldn’t associate the man that night with the man working for me. I saw a man
that reminded me of my father. And that made me uneasy. I’d force myself to
remember what he’d done so I could get mad. But the anger wouldn’t last.

I got so content with him, I’d slip and say things about him
at home. Nice things. Maybe something funny he’d’ said or done, and when I did,
Ann would look at me as if I were a priest who had just announced the best use
for a crucifix was scratching your ass. But I couldn’t help admiring the old
guy. He was a character. He had style. Like the way he handled Jack the
mailman.

Since our little run in, Jack had been less than friendly.
He would deliver the mail by opening the door, giving us all a look that could
turn bricks to shit, then toss the mail across the floor hard enough to send it
sliding halfway across the shop.

I kept thinking he’d get over it, but finally decided I was
going to have to confront him, or call his supervisor. But Russel took it out
of my hands.

One Tuesday after Jack had done his trick, Russel came over
and said, “So what’s with him?”

I didn’t want to bring up the night of the shooting, but I didn’t
see any way out of it. I told Russel everything. It actually felt good to talk
about it and get it off my chest. As the days had gone by, the incident, like a
lingering chest cold, had built up inside of me again. I was sleeping lousy,
snapping at Ann and Jordan, and thinking about the bad things in my life more
than the good; it was a relief to let the poison out.

“I see,” Russel said when I finished, and he went back to
work.

Wednesday at mail time, Russel was up front, waiting by the
door, smoking a cigarette. It didn’t occur to me what he was planning until an
instant before it happened. Jack came walking along like clockwork, opened the
door, stuck a mail-filled hand in and cocked his wrist in preparation of a
toss. But Russel grabbed the hand and bent it back and stepped outside with
Jack.

Russel put his arm around Jack’s shoulders, and Jack
shrugged sharply, but the arm didn’t go away and suddenly Jack and Russel were
moving past the display window and out of sight.

I got nervous and went outside, and at the corner of the
building I found Jack’s cap and our mail, and when I went around the corner I
found the mail pouch and Jack and Russel. Jack was on the ground and there was
a trickle of blood running out of his nose.

“This is against the law,” Jack said, “fucking with the U.S.
Mail.”

“Next time,” Russel said, “I’ll shit in your cap and make
you eat out of it. I expect you to deliver the mail right from here on out. Got
me?”

Russel’s voice had been so low and straightforward, it
scared me. It was the tone he had used that day in the parking lot of the day
school.

“Yeah,” Jack said. All the bravado had gone out of him. He
was just a big bully that had finally met his match.

“You aren’t so tough,” Russel said. “I’m a sixty-year-old
man and I just kicked your ass. Get up and git.”

Jack rolled to his hands and got up. He saw me standing at
the edge of the building and he turned red. I handed him his mailbag as he
walked by.

“Don’t forget to pick up that mail you dropped,” Russel
said. “Deliver it the way it’s supposed to be delivered. Now.”

Jack turned around and looked at Russel, and there was a
hint of showdown in his eyes. But just a hint. It faded like an ice-fleck on a
stove.

“Now,” Russel said in that menacing voice.

Jack swallowed, went around the corner, got his hat and
picked up our mail. We followed him and watched him open the door and drop the
mail inside, gently.

“Very nice,” Russel said.

Jack squared his shoulders as best he could, and walked past
us. Before he was out of earshot, Russel called after him. “You have a nice
day, hear?”

25

Lunch time I drove Russel over to Kelly’s, ordered
hamburgers, fries and beers. I couldn’t help myself. There was something about
the guy.

After lunch we had a couple more beers and Russel said, “I’m
going to ask this straight out. You feel any different about me, Dane? I guess
I’m saying, do you forgive me?”

“Does it matter to you?”

“It matters.”

I thought a moment. “I don’t know exactly how I feel.
Obviously part of me likes you, or I wouldn’t be here with you buying you lunch
and shooting the breeze with you.”

“Part of you.”

“I feel guilty liking you. Maybe I like you because you
remind me of my father, or the way I remember my father. He killed himself when
I was very young. Then, there are times when I think about that night you had
hold of Jordan with one hand and had a knife in the other. You didn’t use it,
but I still think about it. It’s like a snapshot in my head.”

“You know what I saw when I was holding your son’s shirt
that night, Dane?”

“No.”

“My son. For some reason I saw Freddy, or the way I remember
Freddy. I haven’t seen him since he was a boy, except that picture of him older
that his mother sent me in prison. I don’t know if I really remember that much
about him, or if I made it up in prison. But that’s what I thought of that
night. Freddy.”

“Tell me about Freddy,” I said.

“I don’t know if there’s any more to tell. His memory is
more like a parasite than anything else. It eats at me. He had little hands,
blond hair, the same freckles on the back of his hand that I have.”

“And blue eyes.”

“Yeah, and blue eyes. I remember noticing that he had such
little hands. Not just little for a baby, little hands. Not deformed, just
small. My mother had hands like that. She also had the freckles on the back of
one, just like me and Freddy. You know, the last thing I really remember about
him is sort of sappy. It was Christmas and I bought him a red truck and I
remember him on the floor playing with it. Even now, when I think of him,
that’s the first thing that comes to mind. I have to look at the older picture
of him and concentrate real hard to imagine him any older than five, and then I
don’t do it so well.”

“What was the fly in the ointment, Russel? What happened?”

“I was the fly. I think from the day I was born I’ve been
damaged goods. No bad cracks, but some hairline fissures. My dad was a night
watchman at a factory and my mother took in sewing, later she had her own shop.
They made a decent living and they were decent people. I can’t blame them for a
thing. They did everything they could to encourage me, put me off in the right
direction.”

“But it didn’t work?”

“Nope. I just couldn’t stick with anything. I got bored. I
wanted everything now, not later.”

“We all think we’re smarter than the other guy,” I said.

“I thought it more than others. I know better in a way, but
hell, I still think that deep down. There’s a part of me that just can’t
understand why I’ve got to go the slow route like the Philistines.”

He drank some of his beer and smiled at me. “I’m a case,
aren’t I?”

“Yeah, but you don’t sound so different from a lot of
others. That still doesn’t explain what happened.”

“Maybe it’s just a lazy streak Dane, I don’t know. But I’d
be working in some factory, making some machine mash aluminum pipe into lawn
furniture, and I just couldn’t see beyond that. It was like whatever it was I
was looking for was hiding and it could hide real good. I felt like I had been
sent to hell. You know what hell would be to me, Dane? Working in an aluminum
chair factory, mashing that goddamn monotonous aluminum pipe into chairs, the
sound of those fucking machines going, cachump, cachump, and some redneck
standing over me telling me to do it faster. That’s hell to me.”

“Lot of people have done shit jobs,” I said. “Me included.
You don’t have to do them all your life.”

“I don’t doubt that, but for me I could never see beyond
them. No future window, I guess. As time went on I started feeling empty, and
then I got into the quick money.”

“Stealing?”

“Yep. I didn’t get caught when I was young. Just luck, no
other reason. I fell in with some guys and we knocked off filling stations all
over East Texas. Carried water pistols that looked like guns and we’d split the
take. Even then I felt it was just something I was doing until I found what it
was I was supposed to do. The thing that would take that part of me that was
empty and fill it up.”

Russel raised his beer very deliberately and took a long,
slow sip from it.

“To shorten this story up,” Russel said, “I didn’t stop
doing it, and I did a little stretch later on for a grocery store robbery. I
went in with my water pistol and the owner had a pistol under the counter, and
his didn’t shoot water. He just held the gun on me while one of the clerks
called the police. I did some time. Not much. I was young and the judge was
lenient, and they didn’t know how long I’d been robbing places. To them it was
my first offense.

“Anyway, I graduated to the big time when I got out. I went
to Florida and got in with this professional hotel robber named Mick. He had a
perfect scam. He had bellboys and elevator operators on his payroll, and when a
good mark checked in, they’d call him.”

“Just business to them.”

“Exactly. Then he and I would come over at the right time,
go to the mark’s room, beat the lock, which is something I got good at—”

“I know.”

“That guy gypped you. Those locks and bars he gave you might
keep a twelve-year-old kid out, but any burglar could go through that stuff
like a worm through shit. You ought to get your money back.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. What about the Florida stuff?”

“We’d go into a room and take what we wanted, put it in the
mark’s suitcase to add insult to injury, and just walk out. We knew all the
back routes and we had the inside help. It was nothing. Got so we were making
big bucks.”

“But you weren’t satisfied?”

“Nope. Same old story. I couldn’t see beyond what I was
doing. I always wanted to, but couldn’t. It was like the moment was it, and
once I realized that, everything just sort of closed in on me. Robbing beat the
hell out of factories, but after a while it just didn’t do it. And I could
never get over the guilt. I wasn’t really a born criminal. I couldn’t
rationalize it the way Mick and others could. I always saw it as wrong. My
upbringing, I guess. I mean I knew I was a crook and a sleaze. I didn’t feel
like a debonair cat burglar, I felt like a scumbag. One time we were robbing
this hotel room, and on the way out I saw myself carrying the suitcase full of
loot in one of those full-length mirrors, and it hit me. It was like a picture
of my life and I didn’t care for it.”