This is Just Exactly Like You (35 page)

On the way home, they pass a man screaming at a telephone pole. They pass two dead deer. Closer in to town, they pass a church with a sign out front that says FORGOTSO LOVED THE WORLD.

Rena bumps into PM&T and coasts to a stop in front of the pile of cedar. Butner and Ernesto are not out front. No one’s over at the Shell, either. The lot’s empty except for the dump truck and a jacked-up Nissan pickup past the office. It’s that kid’s, Jack thinks, Butner’s friend from the overturned loader. The kitten tattoos. The office says OPEN, but the door’s shut. Almost the entire front of the lot is under water from yesterday’s rain. No customers. There’s a gunshot. “What the hell was that?” Rena asks.

“I think it was a gun,” Jack says. He gets out of the car. He says, “Stay here.”

Rena says, “What, are you crazy?”

“I don’t want anybody getting hurt,” Jack says.

“Why are you talking like that?”

“Like what?”

“For fuck’s sake,” she says, and gets out. She opens the door, lets Hen and Yul Brynner out. The dog’s ears are flat back on his head. He hates loud noises. Rena takes Hen by the hand and Yul Brynner snugs up close to her leg and she starts walking all of them back in the direction of the mulch bays.

“What are you doing?” he asks her, following behind.

“We are going over here,” Hen says, over his shoulder. Jack can’t get used to these outbursts. Each one’s a flashbulb going off. Maybe the doctors will tell them that he’s pulling himself into sharper focus, like some kind of eye exam: This? Or this? This? Or this? There’s another gunshot, a thin, sharp crack that comes echoing off the bricks of the Shell station. The dog bellies down onto the ground, tail between his legs, then slinks under the pickup, curls up under a front tire and hides. Hen lets go of Rena, covers his ears, turns in a circle. Jack tries to decide whether or not he should throw his body in front of him, whether or not anybody should be
hitting the deck.
He feels like he should be in slow motion. Slow motion shot of pigeons scattering up out of the parking lot. Off the telephone wire. Up from the piazza. Rena shouts out, “Hey!”

From behind the mulch piles, Butner and Ernesto shout
Hey
back. Ernesto comes around the retaining wall, smiles when he sees Hen, heads right for him. “
Hola,
” says Hendrick.

“
¿Como estás, jefecito?
” Ernesto holds his hand out for Hendrick to give him five.

Hen puts his fist into his hand instead. There’s something solemn about it. He repeats it: “
¿Como estás, jefecito?
” Then he says, “
Estoy bien.
” His accent is even getting pretty good.

Ernesto looks at Jack. “We found rats in the tomatoes.”

“You’re shooting rats?” Rena asks.

Butner walks out, the tattoo kid with him. They’re both grinning. It’s the kid who’s got the gun, a rifle, on his shoulder. “Two already,” Butner says. “Big ones. Randy, you remember Jack Lang, and his son, Hendrick. And this is—”

“Rena,” she says.

“This is Randy Troxler,” Butner says, meaning the kid. Rena shakes his hand. “He works the kitchen at Sandy’s, over by Kinnett. You probably know the place. And he helps us out sometimes.”

“Not just the kitchen,” Randy says. “I’ve been saving up. As soon as I can afford some speakers, Sandy’s gonna let me DJ on the weekends.”

“That’s cool,” Rena says.

“I’m a good DJ,” Randy says.

“You guys want a shot?” Butner says.

“You bet,” says Rena, and holds her hand out for the gun.

“Fantastic,” says Butner. He smiles big at Jack. Randy hands her the rifle without asking her if she knows how to shoot one. Back behind the bays, they’ve got the lawn chairs set up facing the tomatoes, a cooler full of beer. Rena sits down, and Butner and Ernesto and Randy stand behind her. Ernesto’s got Hendrick, holds him by the shoulders. Jack says, “You guys are really back here shooting rats?”

“Found ’em while we were tying everything back up after the rain,” Butner says. “Saw one walking along the caging with a cherry tomato in his mouth like he was just going home to share it around. Bright goddamned red tomato, little black motherfucking rat.”

“Where are they?” Rena asks, sighting down the rifle.

“They’ve been back in there, on the left,” Butner says, leaning over and steering the barrel toward the far end of the garden. The gun goes off.

“Oops,” Rena says. “Fuck.”

“Don’t worry,” says Butner. “It’s only a pellet gun. You can’t really hurt anybody unless you’re trying.”

“How do I reload?”

“Like this.” Butner slides the bolt out and back, and pulls a pellet from his pocket, chambers it. Pellet gun or not, all this seems terribly unsafe. Yul Brynner’s curled up even smaller under the tire.

Rena says, “I don’t see anything in there.”

“Maybe they got them all already,” Jack says, hoping.

“No,” Ernesto says. “There are always more.
Siempre.
”

“
Siempre,
” says Hen, serious.

“Are they gray?” Rena wants to know.

“Those are squirrels,” Butner says.

“Please do not shoot the squirrels,” Hendrick says.

“Yeah,” says Randy. “I like those guys.”

“Eastern gray squirrels breed twice a year, typically,” Hendrick says. Jack just looks at him.

“What?” says Rena, and the gun goes off again. Everybody jumps and Rena says, “Shit. Sorry.” A couple of vines lean over at the far end of the garden. She hands the gun to Butner. “I’m a menace with this thing. You take it.”

“Suit yourself,” Butner says, and takes it, takes her seat. He puts his left foot up on one arm of the chair, steadies the gun across his raised leg. He waits. He says, “Tell us more about the Eastern gray squirrel, little man.”

Hen says, “Eastern gray squirrels are the most frequently seen mammal in our area. They are members of the rodent family, and spend most of their lives in trees.”

“That kid’s like a computer or something,” Randy says.

“That was nothing,” Butner tells him. Ernesto says
Bueno, hombre,
and Jack reaches out to touch Hen, make sure he’s still real.
The fruit is, of course, the acorn.

“You should tell them about your giant catfish,” Rena says to Jack.

“Your giant what?” asks Butner.

“Tell them,” she says.

“I bought a catfish,” Jack says. “I’m going to. Tomorrow. We found this putt-putt with all the animals for sale. So I’m buying them.”

“You are?” Butner asks.

“I am.”

“What the hell for?” Butner says.

“Is a catfish an animal?” Randy wants to know.

“A catfish is a fish,” Hen says.

“I’m pretty sure a catfish is an animal,” says Randy. Hendrick doesn’t say anything back to that.

“What are you planning on?” asks Butner. “Building him a putt-putt?”

“I don’t think so,” Jack says, waiting for whatever’s going to come out of Hen’s mouth next. “That seems like a lot.”

“You could put it here in the parking lot, man,” says Butner, looking around. “That would be sweet. A whole putt-putt. Give us something to do.”

“We have something to do,” Ernesto says.

“I don’t want to build a putt-putt,” says Jack.

“Why not?”

“That’s what went out of business in the first place.”

Butner sights the rifle back into the tomatoes. “You got me there, I guess,” he says.

Randy rolls up one sleeve, flexes his bicep, looks at it a while. He’s got a new-looking tattoo, the skin red around its edges. It’s a footprint. Butner holds one hand up for everybody to be quiet, goes very still. “I got one,” he whispers. He takes a long breath, lets it out. Hen puts his hands over his ears. This is either more or less crazy than anything else. Less, maybe. Butner fires, works the bolt, reloads, fires again. He makes a kind of whoop, gets up, lays the gun across the arms of the lawn chair and walks into the tomato patch, his feet crunching gravel down into the wet mud. Jack notices for the first time that they’ve used the skid steer to dig a shallow moat around the garden, pull some of the water away from it. It looks to be working pretty well. Butner leans over into the vines, then stands back up, holding what looks like a huge mouse. “Shit,” he says. “It’s a baby possum.” And then it comes back to life, and Butner jumps back, screams, drops it, and starts stomping it, his leg and foot hidden by the tomatoes. It had just been stunned. Or wounded. “Gross,” says Rena.

Randy and Ernesto are laughing, and Hen laughs too, along with them, but it’s a forced laugh. This is probably not the kind of thing Jack should let him watch, but he’s not sure what to do. There’s no way he’ll let him cover his eyes. Butner leans down into the vines again, picks up the possum, finds his way out of the tomatoes. He tosses the body into the Dumpster on his way back. He’s got his hand wrapped into his shirt, and he’s squeezing it. “Motherfucker fucking bit me,” he says, sitting back down.

“Gross,” Rena says again.

“It was a possum?” Jack asks, because somehow the taxonomy seems to matter.

“Yeah, I mean, I feel bad, but they’re no better, right?”

“They get big,” Randy says. “My brother says the problem with your average baby possum is that it grows up into a possum possum.” He leans over, looks at Butner’s hand. “You up on your shots?” he asks.

“They give dogs rabies shots,” Butner says. “Not people.”

“What do they give people?” asks Randy.

“Shots,” Ernesto says. “In the stomach.”

“You think that thing had rabies?” Butner asks. He squeezes his hand harder, then looks at it. “I’m fine,” he says. He picks up his beer, drinks it down in a few swallows, crushes the can and tosses it on the ground. “I’m still gonna be fine for playing putt-putt,” he says. “List me as day-to-day.”

“I’m not building a putt-putt,” Jack says.

“I think it’d work,” says Randy.

“Actually, I was thinking of building a racetrack,” Jack says. “For Hendrick.” He hasn’t been thinking that at all. It just comes out of his mouth.

“A what?” Butner asks.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Something like a loop, maybe, for Big Wheels. Or bicycles. That kind of thing.”

“Oh,” Butner says. “Sure. I can see that.” He squats down next to Hendrick. “You think you’d like that, little man?”

Hen pops his lips together once, twice. He says, “I do not know if I would like that or not.”

“That’s fair,” Butner says. He looks at Jack. “Kid’s thinking it over,” he says. “He’s working shit out.”

“Working shit out,” says Hendrick.

“There you go, man,” Butner says. “There you go.”

Ernesto says, “Where would you build it?”

“In my yard,” Jack says. It’s coming to him all at once, like a kind of vision. It could be a sidewalk. He could pour Hen a sidewalk in the back yard, set in all the undersea creatures around that. There’s room back there. What kid wouldn’t like something like that?

“Your front yard?” Ernesto asks.

“No,” says Jack. “The back.”

“Yeah,” Randy says. “Front yard would be crazy.”

Butner picks the rifle up, clicks the safety on, sets it back down. He pulls on his chin. “Are we talking about like some kind of asphalt situation?”

Jack says, “What about concrete? Like a sidewalk?”

“Cool,” Butner says. “I know a guy we can call. Concrete guy. I’ll call him in the morning.”

“Hang on,” Jack says. “I didn’t say I was going to do it. All I said was I was thinking about it.”

“No man, you gotta do it,” Butner says. “It’s done. You gotta do it.”

“I like it,” Rena says.

“When are you going to get them?” Butner asks. “The putt-putt things?”

“Tomorrow.”

“I’ll definitely call my buddy, then.”

“Just don’t commit to anything,” Jack says. “I need to think about this.”

“What’s there to think about?” Butner wants to know. “We could cut it in with the skid. In and out. Bang.”

“What’s that?” Randy asks, pointing into the tomato vines, and they all look. Ernesto takes the rifle. It’s his turn. Hen sits down on the ground in front of the pickup, and Yul Brynner slides out, puts his chin in Hen’s lap. Hendrick lays both his hands on the dog’s head. Jack goes and sits, too. The ground is wet. A few clouds are coming across the sky south to north, and the light seems half-finished, like there’s something not entirely right with it. Rena brings Jack a beer, brings a lawn chair over. Ernesto mutters something else, sights down the rifle, but then leans back, relaxes. Butner holds his bitten hand in his shirt. Rena says, under her breath, “A racetrack? Really?”

“Why not?” Jack says.

“No reason,” she says.

Butner points out into the garden, and Ernesto sights again, then shakes his head, rests the gun across his knees. Randy flexes his tattoo until Ernesto gives in and asks him about it. Randy gets all excited, rolls his sleeve up further, says,
It’s my baby girl. Her footprint, from the hospital, you know? From the birth certificate?
Randy seems nowhere near old enough to have a girl of any age. Jack works on what a sidewalk racetrack might look like, how it might operate. Bicycles, Big Wheels, tricycles. He’s going to need some tricycles. Red ones. A catfish with an eye patch. Ernesto leans in to get a closer look at the footprint, says,
When did you get it done?

Last week,
the kid says.
It was her second birthday. It hurt like hell, too.
Ernesto picks the gun back up, aims once more into the tomatoes. They wait. They all wait.