“Use. That’s the word I would think on, Rev. A lot of using going on.”
Andrade’s smile fades.
“And I’m sorry. I’ll be sorry forever. But what I’m also telling you is that these folks you visited up at the compound, they know about your ties, and they certainly suspect me, although not for any of the right reasons. Because I put some solar panels on the church roof with an FBF grant and raised money for people in the border concentration camps.” He chuffed a laugh. “Heck, even if I’d never met Allen, the militias would still suspect me. That’s the foul irony.”
You stand.
“Far as I’m concerned, Rev, you ain’t nothing more than another peddler. Another user.” You proceed down a couple steps before turning back. “Whatever you do, don’t fuck this up for me, Rev. I never needed a gig worse in my life. Whatever your concerns, do me a favor and keep ’em to your fucking self. Stay away from me and my family. You’re a predator, man. Just like I thought.”
You spit in the grass, an ugly green splat of phlegm, and set off down the church driveway without looking back.
The glass doors of the Kroger have been pried apart, a mattress stuffed in the gap to keep them open, its coils bursting through casing. Whatever chaos visited your former employer, the madness has passed. The parking lot is empty, scattered trash and salvaged food items smeared over the asphalt: trammeled microwave dinners, exploded boxes of cereal trailing crumbs, a rotisserie chicken gripped apart by fingers. You step through the sliding doors and make your way past the produce into the heart of the store, picked entirely clean, and it makes you think of ants going to work. Bare shelves gleam under fluorescent light. What’s incredible is you just walked by the day before. All this has happened today, the place stripped bare in a bottomless panic. The chaos reminds you of working search and rescue in Missouri. You piled the dead animals together, tossing drowned dogs, cats, varmints, and getting teams to move the big ones. Horses, cows, and pigs had all washed down from nearby farms, all of them bursting with water and decaying in the sun, an eye-watering smell. Then you think of that old Mexican man in St. Louis, floating on his back. Dead people have fake faces. They look stuffed, taxidermied.
You find a canvas bag someone dropped and fill it with whatever doesn’t look too dirty: a frozen chicken tikka masala now mushy, a small bottle of olive oil, an instant noodles punctured, partially spilled, but salvageable. You hear people at the back of the store and clutch your bag close, wishing for Kelly’s gun, but then you’re upon them and their eyes are as frightened as you’ve ever seen. A young couple, the guy maybe all of five feet tall, the woman half a foot shorter. They’re pushing a shopping cart with a car seat stuffed inside, a baby buckled into that, filling up the edges around the seat with supplies. Your eyes fall to the items, familiar to you from after Toby was born: formula, diapers, wet wipes, hand sanitizer, tearless shampoo, Band-Aids, hydrogen peroxide, and an electric breast pump no doubt looted from the back pharmacy.
“Just doing some shopping,” you tell them because they look so scared of you. “Carry on.”
You turn to go the other way, but the guy calls out, “Hey, man.” And those two words are so full of grief and fear you almost don’t want to turn around. The buzz of the fluorescent lights is dizzying and loud. “If you see any of that earache medicine, will you give a shout? You know what I mean? The pink stuff.”
“Yeah,” you say. “Will do, kid.”
But you move through the aisles quickly because outside dark lakes of night have set in, and you don’t want to be here if the power goes out. What was revealed to you years ago when you were picking through the ashen wreckage of the megafire or the soggy detritus of the floods was the simplicity with which everything unravels. How one second you’re living your life, and the next, if you don’t run, you’ll be rotting, waiting for some other poor sucker to find you and haul you out in a plastic bag. Now everyone was getting a glimpse of what you long knew: the fragility of all those things that seem so permanent and steadfast. How very simple it is for everything and everyone to go away.
On the twelfth, you get a text from Tawrny on the burner to let you know things are good to go. In two days, you’ll meet a woman at the Commodore Perry Service Plaza on the Ohio Turnpike, 8 a.m. sharp. This presents a problem because you and Raquel no longer have a functioning car.
“You could always thumb it.” Pierre hoovers up dip juice from his lip. “Pretty soon that’ll be the standard mode of transport.”
Still, when you tell Raquel you need to hitch up to Toledo, she’s rightfully suspicious.
“I don’t understand what the job is. You’re being all murky about it.”
“No, for real, I’m not. They told me more scrapping. There’s tin sheets coming off all these farm buildings up there, and they sell for about two bucks apiece.”
“Who’s they?”
“Casey and some of them.” But this phrase is familiar to her from all your lying, all your drinking and drugging. “I’m clean. Plus, if I had any intention of getting high, I could do it without hitching a hundred and fifteen miles.”
This actually does seem to satisfy her. The next day you go see Tawrny.
“I need to know what this is,” you demand.
“If I knew, Keeper, I’d tell you. Honest. From the way it sounds, by you doing your time and keeping quiet they know they can trust you, and that’s why they wanted you so bad.”
He’s at least shaved since you last saw him, but his shirt is filthy, pit stains leaching into white fabric.
“Then I need to know how much.”
“Ah.” He holds up an index finger. “A good piece of knowledge to settle for.” And he slides a scrap of paper across the table to you. It’s got an account number and a password. “It’s only got fifty bucks in there now, but as soon as they pick you up, it’ll get another nine thousand or so.”
“Or so?”
“Yeah, to stay under IRS eyes if it comes to that. Then they’ll load another nine grand a month until it hits fifty K.”
You look from the scrap of paper to Tawrny’s rheumy eyes. “No shit?”
“No shit. You gotta complete the jay-oh-bee of course, but that shouldn’t be no problem, whatever it is.”
This number fills your mind so completely, it is such total and utter salvation, that it blots out every other question or concern. The things you can do with fifty thousand dollars. The safety and security you can provide for Raquel and Toby. Hearing aids and an apartment, cereal and beds to sleep in, asthma inhalers and clothes without holes. Suddenly, you are overwhelmed, so grateful to this man you might cry. You swallow to keep the lump down.
“You know, T, you really always have looked out for me. I don’t want you to think I ain’t realized that.”
Tawrny nods, his eyes far away and utterly forlorn.
“Well,” he says. “I’m close to nursing-home ready. Maybe you’ll come see me from time to time.”
Coming home to the Walmart, you’re thinking about how you should find a paper map, so you can bushwhack your way up county highways. Just as you’re walking into the parking lot, you spot a bright orange Dodge pickup. You know only one guy who drives that color RAM 1500 because you were with him when he bought it used, paid way too much, and proceeded to sink the cost of another used truck into fixing it up. Casey Wheeler hops out, hitching up his jeans with no belt, baseball cap protecting his bald spot from the setting sun, wearing his shirt that says WORLD’S OKAYEST FISHERMAN, and you call his name. When he spots you, he starts hustling your way. You’re happy to see him. You two haven’t talked much in the last few months, but he’s a good friend, and you’re feeling light. The thought of that fifty K is making you feel good about everything.