Though sometimes they robbed you. Not often, but now and then. “Cooperate,” Crush said, concluding my week of training over a cup of black coffee in the shop. “Hand it all over and never call the cops.”
I asked him why.
“In my experience, the same ones who rob you, you often meet again, and when you do, you find out it wasn’t personal. They needed something and had no way to get it. Tires for their car, child support. Who cares? Is money your god?”
“Not exactly. Maybe sometimes.”
“Not mine,” said Crush. “My god is love.”
Was Crush a Christian? I braced for a full sermon. They spring them on you, I’d discovered over the years, usually just when you think you’re safe with them. I was only nineteen, but I’d done a lot of living, some of it on a juvenile work farm, thanks to a shoplifting ring I got drawn into during my sophomore year of high school. The work farm was full of religion. I’d learned to fear it.
“Do you have a lady?” Crush asked me. “A lady beautiful?”
“Not right now,” I said.
“Well, I do. You’ll meet her sometime. She lights my way. She’s the reason I work here, to give her what she needs. I very much hope that you find one of your own. I’m saving to pay off her Jeep Grand Cherokee.”
“That’s a lot of deliveries. A lot of tips.”
“Fortunately, I’m highly disciplined.”
“What’s her name?” I asked.
“Beth. Beth Louise. But she dances under Cassandra.”
A stripper. Poor Crush. I found it hard to look at him. It would have been better if he were born-again.
“I love it at night,” he said, gazing out the window, which was fogged from his coffee breath, and dusty too. The stacks of the refinery flared red and orange. “Or maybe it’s that I hate the sun.”
“How come?”
He shrugged his big shoulders inside his army jacket. It smelled of oregano and it fit him wrong, suggesting that another, smaller man had earned its profusion of stripes and patches. “Because I’m a true romantic, I suppose. Sunlight diminishes people. It steals their dreams.”
Ray Rogers liked to raid the till to gamble. The Magic Diamond Casino — half gas station that sold sundries, half liquor store — stood kitty-corner across the street from us, allowing him to pop over at any time — he just locked the front door for ten minutes and disappeared. That’s why the empty cash drawer didn’t faze me. Our pizzas had been cheese-free for a month, indicating that Ray was on a spree. With video keno, the way Montana laws worked, you couldn’t bet more than eight quarters at a time, but as my great-uncle, a bank manager, once told me, it’s slippage that bankrupts people, not huge mistakes.
I was making good coin, having mastered Crush’s system. One night I earned 180 bucks. Some delinquents were throwing a party in a parked bus. It took me a solid hour to find the thing because, of course, I had no address, just a treasure-map set of directions based on landmarks: a billboard for a dentist, a row of garbage cans, a tree with a plastic bag stuck in its branches. The pizzas were cold and hard when I arrived but mounded with cheese from the two-pound bag I carried. The kids were impressed. They were snorting ketamine. They passed a hat around to pay the check and collected three times what they owed. I’d learned to count money with a glance by then. I refunded them fifteen dollars to seem honest and pocketed the extra sixty-two.
I boasted to Crush when I got back to the shop, thinking he’d be proud of me. Instead he acted weird. “If you were a decent guy, with principles, you’d have given me half of that when you walked in here, without me even asking, as repayment. Was I not your mentor?” he asked me. “Yes, I was.”
I peeled a twenty off my roll, not because I felt indebted to him but because of his wrinkled, disgusted look. It scared me. I wondered if he was getting sick. He’d lost weight in his face but bulked up around his hips. Plus, he was losing his eyebrows. They’d gone patchy.
“Thanks,” he said, taking the money from my hand. I didn’t expect it. I’d thought that he was bluffing. He brought out his own roll from his jacket, wrapped it in my ransom, and put it back, keeping his hand in his pocket afterward as if to go on fingering his loot.
Hoping to calm things, I asked, “How’s Beth Louise? You two still going out?”
“Cassandra and I don’t go out. We keep things private. She has to seem unattached, for business reasons.”
I said I understood.
“She’s a child,” said Crush. “Incredibly naïve. We’d be married already if it were up to her.”
“Really?”
“She’s in her earning years. No reason to blow it. Our love will always be there.”
Behind us, the phone started ringing, but with Ray at the Magic Diamond for a quick game, it was okay to lose the order. Our cook had just quit and neither Crush nor I liked the smell of garlic on our hands. The caller hung up but tried back a moment later, and this time, out of annoyance, I picked up.
“Is Crush there?” a young woman’s voice asked. She sounded angry, like someone who’d been tricked and wanted vengeance. Her tone was the reason I didn’t have a girlfriend and wasn’t seeking one.
I covered the phone with my hand. “I think it’s her.”
“It can’t be,” he said. “She only calls my cell.” He spoke in a whisper, as though he feared discovery. Was he ducking another girlfriend? A wife, perhaps? I realized I knew very little about my pal — I couldn’t even guess his age. His smooth, undamaged skin made him look thirty, yet his air of prolonged rumination on major life themes seemed to fit a man in his midforties. But how could that be? He delivered pizzas. At nineteen, I was already plotting my next move: helicopter flight school. My dad used to fly one before a rocket got him when I was eight years old. His Marine Corps buddies sent me pictures.
“Who is this?” I said. “I’ll pass along a message.”
“Tell him it’s me and his phone’s dead and I’m done. Tell him he missed his last payment. They’ll take the Jeep.” The woman — Cassandra, obviously — hung up then. She hung up hard, in a way that hurt my ear.
Crush felt this somehow and slipped off to the bathroom. I didn’t hear a flush, just running water, which was still going when Ray returned from keno. His eyes were twinkling, which meant he’d lost a pile.
It was two in the morning, when the bars clear out, and in ten minutes, as happened every night, big orders from all over Billings would pour in. It would be my best night since I started, as I said, but not for Crush, who clocked out early, complaining of diarrhea and a stiff neck.
He didn’t come in the next night either, a Saturday. This told me his lady troubles were truly grave. Saturdays at Oasis were cash bonanzas, so much so that Ray kept his gun on him while cooking instead of leaving it stashed beneath the counter. When Crush didn’t show or answer when we called him, Ray fell quiet, a brooding, fretful silence that lasted until the calls stopped around dawn.
“I’ll be honest,” he said. “I thought he’d stick us up. He hasn’t missed a Saturday in years. Plus, he’s been pilfering lately. Something’s wrong.”