Tom Kennedy was at the store. He smelled like beer. He was in the back, looking at the coolers full of beer.
“Hey, Tom Kennedy,” I said. “The Pride of Saint Jay.”
He turned and stared at me. Sometimes when people drink a lot, they have a certain look about them, a fog they have to get through before the world reaches them, and Tom’s gaze had retreated into that phase. He didn’t know who I was.
“Hey, mister,” he said. His jeans were ripped and he wore an old flannel shirt.
“I’ve got El Rey on ESPN over at the house,” I said. “Want to come over and watch?”
“What?” Kennedy said.
“You know, El Rey,” I said. “That guy you fought over at Thompson’s.” His hearing seemed a little weak too.
“I haven’t been in a fight,” he said.
“No,” I said. “Three years ago.”
He looked at me. “Three years ago? What the hell’s three years ago got to do with today?”
The question hung there in the air. I had the luxury of thinking about three years ago, of a TV, or having a fight with my wife. “Nothing,” I said. “Just thought you might be interested.”
“I’m interested in getting some fucking beer, but that asshole won’t sell it to me.” He pointed at the high school kid behind the counter. “Says I’m already drunk. Right?” Tom Kennedy gave him a deadly stare.
“I’ll call the cops if you don’t leave the store,” the kid said. “I’ve done it before on him,” the kid continued. “He makes me.” A phone hung on the wall behind him. Tom Kennedy headed back to the beer cooler. He grabbed a six-pack of bottles and ran out of the store, into the snow. I tossed a ten-dollar bill on the counter and ran after him. He was already headed down the sidewalk.
“Hey, Tom,” I called. “Wait up.”
He turned fast. His face seemed to come clear out of the snow and I knew that he remembered me.
“I shot him,” he said. “He begged me to do it, and if you had been a good friend to him, you’d have done it.”
“What?” I said.
“I blew his head right off,” he said. “What was the point of him living if he didn’t want to live?”
“What?” I said. “You mean Bill?”
“That’s right,” Tom said. “But it should have been you. To pull the trigger.”
He hit me in the side of the head with a full bottle of beer. I lay there in the snow and went in and out of it. I heard a police siren going through the night, a sound you don’t hear very often in Saint Johnsbury, through the quiet streets and houses, echoing out into the huge forest of the Northeast Kingdom and beyond.
Аngеla Zeman
Green Heat
From A Hot and Sultry Night for Crime
Tyree Garcia arrived late in the afternoon. For the last twenty miles he’d ridden State Highway 6 all alone and so felt free to indulge in a leisurely survey of Rushing River Hollow by riding the brakes of his black Cherokee van down the final hill. At a Mobil station, by all appearances the official western border of the town, he pulled over and rolled to a stop next to a gas pump. According to tattered and faded ads pasted across the office’s windows, the Mobil supplied repair services, gas, tires, beer, sodas, cigarettes, and tobacco in chewable form. Tyree guessed the strips of paper served to shade the Mobil’s glass-walled office from the merciless sun as much as to list the services offered.
The narrow asphalt highway flattened out and disappeared into the town’s main street, which was as neatly obscured beneath a layer of dirt as if deliberately coated. While he sat massaging sleep-deprived eyes, he noticed the occasional pedestrian scuff down the middle of the street, raising dust that obscured his or her feet in little dun-colored clouds.
He wondered if avoiding the sidewalks was a local habit. His was the only vehicle in sight. For all he knew, the tourist trade infused the Hollow with bustling life in spring and fall, and maybe even winter, but the intense summer heat drove them away — if this was a normal summer. Was this brain-sizzling heat unusual for the Hollow? Like a drought? He didn’t know that either. Country, especially genuine country like Rushing River Hollow, baffled him, was beyond his experience. Heat waves shimmered up from the concrete slab sidewalks bordering each side of the road. Maybe the thick layer of dirt was kinder to tender feet than roasted cement.
He just didn’t know.
To a Chicago kid born and raised in and devoted to its crowded neighborhoods. West Virginia looked like a foreign kingdom of crystalline creeks and river rapids and green, softly rounded mountains. An occasional ramshackle cabin propped up on a webbing of raw, unpainted four-by-fours dotted the sleep slopes. A paradise — unspoiled, vast, and rich — which accounted for the sprawling luxury resort hotel he knew from his AAA map occupied the other end of this dirt-crusted road. Pinebrook Resort offered — if one paid outrageous fees — hunting, golf, tennis, skeet and trap shooting, river rafting, nature hikes, even lessons in falconry. He’d picked up a travel agency brochure before driving all the way down here. He wondered if the privileged lives of the guests — outsiders — invited jealousy and comparison to the obviously scratch-scrabble lives of the residents.
Tyree finally swung his long, stiffened legs to the ground and began a series of stretches. He was a tall man, heavily muscled, and moved without haste.
As he reached for the fuel pump handle, he noticed a small sign propped against the second of the Mobil station’s two pumps (one for diesel fuel, but he’d happened to park beside the one dispensing gas: a sign he interpreted as a favorable omen; in his profession, he constantly looked for favorable omens). The sign, weatherbeaten almost to illegibility, said Rushin River Hollow, Population: the 421 was crossed out, 303 crossed out, 112 crossed out, then 427. A graph of the town’s fortunes. Had the millennium brought about a baby boom here?
Suddenly, a short, thick man with roughened skin so red his neck and face resembled a turkey’s wattle rushed up and grabbed the pump handle from Tyree’s grasp and inserted the nozzle into the Cherokee. “High test, I’d say, right?” He moved fast but talked slow.
Tyree nodded. The man punched a square plastic button on the pump, then turned on the juice. He apologized that he’d been “out back,” his slight flinch telling Tyree that “out back” meant the men’s rest room, then introduced himself as Emil Powers.
“Tyree Garcia,” Tyree said politely, nodding down at the top of the little man’s head. He saw no reason to lie about his name; nobody would’ve heard of him in this wilderness.
For no reason other than to open a conversation, Tyree asked what had happened to the gin Rushing on the population sign. The gap from its loss was obvious.
“Aw,” said Emil, sounding deeply distressed, “if’n you don’t mind a long story?”
Tyree shook his head, eyebrows lifted.
“Ya see, it ain’t in truth Rush-ing River. It’s Rooshion River. Like the Rooshions that come from Moscow. And somehow, ’cause we do a lot of business river rafting, y’know from the hotel, it got mangled over the years inta Rush-ing River. By the tourists, I guess.” He shrugged his narrow shoulders, jiggling the gas pump handle. “We need them tourists. So we jes’ didn’t know, should we change it legally or what, or did it even matter? So when the sun bleached the g off n the sign, we left it. I got maps in the office, legal ones from the gov’ment, they even call us Rushing River Hollow now. How they got aholt of the wrong name, nobody knows, or gives a hoot. Well, except for the Rooshions what established the town. They’s pissed. But,” he waved his free hand, dismissing them, “just Joey and Eban left, and they’s ninety something. Be gone by the time we decide anything. So we’re kind of relaxed about it. Now the sign itself, though—”