Poachers (10 page)

They entered a trailer park with rusty cars in every yard and sleepy-looking dogs emerging from under the trailers, barking halfhearted steam. Behind a seedy double-wide Earl saw three blacks standing around a smoking barrel, stamping their feet and passing a paper bag back and forth between them. The names of the streets were biblical: Matthew, Mark, Luke, John. Earl put his cigarette in his mouth and turned left onto John. Jimmyboy

lived at the end of the road, in the trailer of some woman he’d taken up with.

They left the truck chugging and got out and hurried across the dirt yard. On the steps they both pounded on the door, a draft reaching up at them from under the trailer and stinging their dry legs.

“Wake up, you dickweed,” Mace said through his teeth.

A light flared in the rear of the trailer, then disappeared. They heard footsteps down the hall and Jimmyboy frowned at them through the window.

“Hang on,” he said.

The handle clicked and the door swung in, Jimmyboy holding a flashlight, standing behind it with an army blanket on his bony shoulders. They brushed past him and stood in a tight circle in the dark room.

“Where’s your damn lights?” Mace asked.

“Storm come through while ago,” Jimmyboy said. “Knocked the juice out.”

“There ain’t been no storm,” Mace said. “Y’all just ain’t paid your power bill.”

“You ready?” Earl asked.

“Naw, man, I ain’t going.”

“The hell you mean ‘ain’t going’?”

Jimmyboy turned off the flashlight. “My old lady, she say it ain’t right.”

“Bullshit,” Mace said. “You’re going if I have to drag your skinny black ass.”

“Jesus,” Earl said. “Well, did you get the gun at least?”

“Man, you not serious?”

A voice from the back of the trailer silenced them. “Jimmy?”

“It’s okay, baby,” he called. “Man, y’all got to go,” he whispered. “Albertha find out who I’m talking to, she’ll get her razor.”

“
Jimmyboy
?”

“I’m coming, baby.”

Earl said, “Have you got the goddamn pistol?”

Jimmyboy left and they heard a drawer open, then close. Earl felt the gun, heavy and cold, pushed into his hands.

“We’ll see you,” he said.

“Some fucking friend,” Mace added.

He opened the door and cold air swirled in. He went out first and as Earl followed, he felt Jimmyboy’s hand on his shoulder, but he went on down the steps after Mace. They got into the truck. It had started raining; you could see it on the windshield and past the windshield Jimmyboy standing in the door. Earl put the truck in reverse and backed out. They held their cups and sipped at them while Earl drove slowly past the grumbling dogs and over the oyster shells and across the railroad tracks and past the deserted buildings and boarded-up windows and rusting box-cars.

The pistol on the seat
between them.

“Is it loaded?” Earl asked.

Mace picked it up and ejected the clip, then pushed it back in. “Yeah.”

They rode, had each smoked another cigarette before Mace said, “You know what I just remembered? Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve. You think Mike realized that?”

Earl didn’t say anything.

“Couple of weeks ago I seen him in Food World,” Mace went on. “Went up to him and said, ‘Howdy, Mike, how you doing?’ And Mike, he says, ‘Not bad for a dead man.’ That’s a hell of a thing to say, ain’t it? You’re trying to act normal and he pulls that shit on you.”

Mace was holding the pistol. “Fuck, it’s cold,” he said.

They went back through the tunnel and over the causeway, past the fishermen and the seagulls that stood on the concrete railing or perched on light poles. They went under the Bayway.

When they passed Argiro’s Store, Mace looked back over his shoulder. “Did you see that?”

“What?”

“That damn midget. He was putting air in a tire. Not even squatting down, just sorta bent over like.”

They got out in Mike’s
yard. He lived in woods with no neighbors for a half-mile. The rain was gone, leaving a dewy mist that stung their faces as they looked at each other across the hood of the truck. The sky, seen in patches through the trees, was starting to pale.

“It’s good luck to see a midget,” Mace said.

The line of windows across the front of Mike’s house glowed, as if he’d gone from room to room turning on lights. The front door stood open.

They saw him. Through one of the windows, in one of the rooms. Walking. He appeared in another window and disappeared. Earl reached into the truck and got the pistol. He slipped it into his coat pocket. He took one last drag on his cigarette and dropped it into the frost. Mace did likewise. With their hands in their pockets they walked across the yard, past the frozen bird

bath, past a shovel standing upright in the earth. Mike’s dog looked out the door, and wagging its wire of a tail trotted to the edge of the porch and jumped off and came sideways toward them. Its ears flattened as Mace bent to rub its muzzle and allow himself to be licked in the face. His and the dog’s breath mingled, and Earl waited as Mace said soft quiet words that only the dog heard. When Mace stood and they went up the steps, the dog stayed in the yard.

Earl rapped on the doorjamb but got no answer. Knocking the muddy ice from their boots, they stepped into the living room. There was no furniture, not even curtains. Mike’s wife and the kids were long since gone; he’d scared them off. Mace stopped and put his red fingers into a fist mark in the paneling. He pursed his lips.

They heard a toylike whistle from the back of the house and exchanged a glance. Mace shook his head and shrugged, walked back outside. Earl watched him cross the porch and sit on the steps without looking around. The dog nosed up to him and Mace took its face in his hands.

Earl turned and went alone down the hall. Cigarette butts lay on the carpet, filters smashed into black smudges.

The whistle again.

He saw Mike sitting in the den, on a stool at the table before his model train. When Mike had worked at the mill with Earl and Mace and Jimmyboy, they had stood in this room together and eaten barbecued ribs and drunk beer and watched the train circling the tracks. There were women in the next room; you could hear their pleasant voices in the air, and outside the sound of children.

Earl cleared his throat and Mike looked around. His left eye was sewn shut. Earl had heard he’d gotten a sliver in his eye, and

since he couldn’t feel anything on that half of his face, he hadn’t noticed until it was too late. It was one of the things a brain tumor could do.

“Hey, Mike,” Earl said.

Mike wore his camouflage coat and a stocking cap. Earl went to the corner of the table and put his fingers on the cold wood and he and Mike watched the train go around.

Dirt and grass spread across the table had made it a miniature landscape, like the view from a fire tower. There were rocks the size of footballs that were like mountains to the train that passed them and sped around the track into what became a town—little buildings made of wood and cardboard, a block of two- and three-story buildings with windows cut out and names of stores penciled on signs, a barber shop with a striped pole, a Western Auto with a row of toy bicycles before it. There were streets of packed dirt and stoplights and stop signs and light poles strung with fishing line. There were Matchbox cars. On the outskirts of town was a forest of weeds and twigs like tiny trees, and then the rock mountains, and beyond the mountains there were more trees. At the edge of the forest was a white church with a steeple, and beside the church a graveyard with a spiked fence.

Earl studied the train as it passed through the town without stopping, as it shot over a railroad crossing. The black engine was old-timey, with a smokestack and a large cowcatcher. The coal car behind it held black pebbles and another hauled twigs whittled to resemble logs. There was a tank car, a boxcar, a passenger car. A red caboose.

“They don’t use cabooses any more,” Mike said. “Used to have a fellow with a walkie-talkie rode on it, that was his whole job.”

Earl watched. On the edge of town the train passed a ranch: a barn and house, a windmill, a tractor. A row of pens held toy

cattle and in a toothpick corral were plastic horses, the kind you buy in a bag. Some were bucking and others were calm. Inch-high pewter cowboys stood around the fence, watching. Then something caught Earl’s eye.

“You got you a blue one in there,” he said, pointing to the corral, to the horse that stood a little taller than the rest.

“That’s my stallion,” Mike said. “It’s what them cowboys are talking about. He come from out past the mountains over yonder. The caboose man saw him and they went caught him.”

Earl nodded, digging his hands in his pockets, imagining the cowboys going after the blue stallion. They would choose their fastest horses, he thought, and pick the best roper from among them to lead the chase. They would rise before dawn and slip quietly out of their barns with shouldered saddles, smoking cigarettes and laughing nervously. They knew a blue stallion would mean a dangerous chase of speed and dust and jumps and ducking of tree limbs like thick arms swatting at you as the earth thundered by. A chase that might go for miles, hours. The blue stallion ahead at a full gallop, losing the cowboys one by one to fatigue or injury or death, until at last the only cowboy is the roper, a young man with short hair and a tan face, his hat beating against his shoulders, spurs bloody, a tall young man with a pretty wife at home asleep, a wife whose thighs he parted the night before, who held him knowing of his dangerous morning race. With her lips open and her eyes closed as he moves over her, she is thinking of him on his horse, his head low, sweat streaming in muddy tracks down his skin. She sees the blue stallion before him and his fist rising and circling and the loop rising in the air over him, lashing from his open palm at the straining stallion and settling over its neck, its flowing blue mane, its frothy nostrils and teeth, its wide glaring eyes.

“Never rode a train when I was a boy,” Mike said. “Now none of ’em have cabooses.”

The train whistled as it passed the farm and turned with the track.

“Listen,” Earl said, “I gotta go. We’re late for work.”

He stood a moment, watching Mike watch the train, then he slipped the gun out of his pocket and set it on the table, near the church.

Mace and the dog sat
in the truck, waiting. When Earl shut his door, the dog got up and turned circles until Mace made it lie down and put its head in his lap. “Shhh,” he said. Earl lit his last cigarette, and smoking it, drove through the woods and out to the highway and soon pulled onto the causeway. The early morning traffic was thickening, cars headed to work starting to turn off their lights.

Mace hugged himself. “Don’t your damn heater work?”

They took a right and got on the bridge. Over the rail the mill glowed in the fog like something that had risen smoking from the depths and now sat seething and wracked there, among the ruins.

“I’m freezing to death,” Mace said.

For Randall Duke

the ballad of duane juarez

Ned uses dynamite
to fish with. They come swirling to the top, stunned and stupid. You lean over the rail of Ned’s expensive boat and scoop them. You drink his beer and smoke his grass. Stay out all night and lie to your wife. Sometimes Ned brings girls, and we know from experience that the moon on the water and the icy Corona from Ned’s live wells and the right Jimmy Buffett song on the CD make Ned’s girls drip like sponges. You can crawl inside these soft wet girls that Ned finds and sleep there all night. They’re intelligent, Ned’s girls. They read novels. They’re real estate brokers or paralegals or college students.

Where does Ned find these girls?

He’s rich. They find him.

I’ve done the boat thing with Ned like four times, but I’m not rich. In fact I’m poor. I don’t shave but I do drink too much and sometimes in the evening I throw moldy fruit through the windows of the house Ned lets me rent, one-fifty a month, though I can’t remember the last time I paid. Ned understands. He buys
Playboy
magazines and looks through them once, then gives them to me. That’s what it’s like to be rich.

Here’s what it’s like to be poor. Your wife leaves you because you can’t find a job because there aren’t any jobs to find. You empty the jar of pennies on the mantel to buy cigarettes. You hate to answer the phone; it can’t possibly be good news. When your friends invite you out, you don’t go. After a while, they stop inviting. You owe them money, and sometimes they ask for it. You tell them you’ll see what you can scrape up.