‘Are you going for the birds, Dave?’ Derek asks. It’s been quite awhile since they stopped calling him Mr Lockridge. ‘Like you told Dad?’
‘Absolutely,’ Billy says. He takes a breath, lets it out, takes another and lets it out, takes a third and holds it. He makes no effort to use the little rifle’s sight, which will be wildly out of true. He just snugs his head against the rifle’s stock and fires quickly – pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. The first one misses; his next four knock over four tin birds. He knows he’s doing a stupid thing and should quit, but he can’t resist knocking over one of the rabbits when it rises from its hole.
The Ackermans applaud. So do the other shooters. And, to his credit, so does Mr Barber Shop Quartet before grabbing the pink flamingo and handing it over to Shanice, who hugs it and laughs.
‘Wow, Dave!’ Derek says. His eyes are shining. ‘You rock!’
Now Jamal will ask me where I learned to shoot like that, Billy thinks. And then he thinks, How do you know you’re an idiot? Because if everyone is looking at you, like they are now, you’re an idiot.
It’s actually Corrie who asks him, as they resume their stroll to the Bingo tent. Billy tells her it was in ROTC. That he was just naturally good at it. Telling her he killed at least twenty-five mujin in Fallujah, shooting from rooftops during the nine days of Operation Phantom Fury, would be a bad idea.
Oh, you think? he asks himself with a sarcasm that’s very unlike him – in his thoughts or aloud.
The other thing – the character-check – happens on Monday, the actual holiday. Because he’s a freelance writer working his own hours, he can take off when he wants and also work when others are enjoying a federally mandated day of rest. Gerard Tower is all but deserted. The lobby door is unlocked (such trusting souls in the border south), and no one is at the security stand. When the elevator passes the second floor, he hears no shouts as the denizens of Business Solutions psych each other up and no ringing phones. Apparently debtors are also getting the day off, and good for them.
Billy writes for two hours. He’s almost up to Fallujah now, and wondering what he should say about it – a little, a lot, or maybe nothing at all. He shuts down and decides to put in an appearance at Pearson Street, re-establishing his existence with Beverly Jensen and her husband, who will no doubt be taking the day off. He drives over in his leased car, wig, mustache, and fake pregnancy belly in place. Don is mowing the lawn. Beverly is sitting on the stoop in unfortunate lime green shorts. The three of them bat the breeze a little, talking about how hot the summer has been, how glad they are it’s over, and Dalton Smith’s impending trip to Huntsville, Alabama, where he’ll install a state-of-the-art computer system at the new Equity Insurance HQ. Shouldn’t take too long. After that, he says, he hopes to be back for awhile.
‘They sure do keep you on the hop,’ Don says.
Billy agrees and then asks Beverly about her mother, who lives in Missouri and has been poorly. Beverly sighs and says she’s about the same. Billy says he hopes she’ll be better soon and Beverly says she sure hopes so. As she’s telling him this, Billy looks over her shoulder and sees Don slowly shaking his head. That he doesn’t want his wife to know what he thinks about his mother-in-law’s chances makes Billy like him. He thinks that Don Jensen would never tell his wife that her lime green shorts make her look fat.
He goes down to his pleasingly cool basement apartment. David Lockridge has his book and Dalton Smith has his laptops. Smith’s work might not matter, but because it might matter a great deal somewhere down the line, he does it carefully (even though after working on Benjy Compson’s story, it seems boring and mechanical). He finishes up with a quick review of the three screens. 10 FAMOUS CELEBS WHO ALMOST DIED; THESE 7 FOODS CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE; THE 10 MOST INTELLIGENT DOGS. Good clickbait. He posts them on facebook.com/ads. He really could do this for a living, but who would want to?
He shuts down, reads a little (he’s currently on an Ian McEwan binge), then checks the fridge. The half-and-half is holding out, but the milk has gone spunky. He decides on a trip to the Zoney’s Go-Mart to replace it. When he finds Don and Beverly still on the porch, now sharing a can of beer, he asks if they want anything.
Beverly asks if he’ll see if they have any Pop Secret. ‘We’re going to watch something on Netflix tonight. You’re welcome to join, if you want.’
He almost says yes, which is close to appalling. He tells them instead that he’s going to make it an early night because he’s driving to Alabama first thing in the morning.
He walks down to the sad little strip mall. Merton Richter’s blue SUV with the scratched side is nowhere to be seen and the office is closed. So is the Nu You Tanning Salon, Hot Nails, and the Jolly Roger Tattoo Parlor. Beyond Hot Nails is an abandoned launderette and a Dollar Store with a sign in the window reading VISIT OUR NEW LOCATION IN PINE PLAZA. The Zoney’s is at the very end. Billy gets his milk out of the cooler. There’s no Pop Secret, but there’s Act II, so he grabs a box of that. The clerk is a middle-aged woman with hennaed hair who looks like she’s been down on her luck for awhile, maybe twenty years or so. She offers him a carry sack and Billy says no thank you. Zoney’s uses plastic bags, which are bad for the environment.
On the way back, he passes two young men standing outside the abandoned launderette. One is white. The other is black. They are both wearing hoodies, the kind with kangaroo pockets in front. The pockets sag with the weight of what’s inside them. Their heads are together as they murmur to each other. They give Billy identical glances of narrow assessment as he passes. He doesn’t look at them directly but sees them perfectly well from the corner of his eye. When he doesn’t slow, they go back to whispering together. They might as well be wearing placards around their necks that say WE PLAN TO CELEBRATE LABOR DAY BY ROBBING THE LOCAL ZONEY’S.
Billy walks out of the sad little strip mall and back to the street. He can feel them looking at him. There’s no telepathy involved in that, unless it’s the ordinary telepathy of someone who has survived a war zone with only a half-gone great toe and two Purple Hearts (long since discarded) to show for it.
He thinks of the woman who sold him his goods, a hard-luck mama from the look of her. Her luck isn’t going to change on this holiday, either. Billy never considers going back to brace them, judging from their cranked-up expressions that would be a fine way to get killed, but he does consider calling 911. Only there are no pay phones in the vicinity, not anymore, and the phone he’s carrying is Dalton Smith’s. If he calls the cops, he’ll burn it. Then the rest of his identity will catch fire, because what is it made of? Just paper.
He goes back to the apartment building instead and tells Beverly they didn’t have any Pop Secret. She says Act II is fine. There’s scant traffic on Pearson Street at the best of times, and it’s even scanter on this holiday. He keeps his ear cocked for gunshots. He doesn’t hear any. Which means nothing.
2
Billy downloaded an app for the local newspaper shortly after arriving in this city he can’t wait to put behind him, and the following day he looks for a Zoney’s robbery. He finds the story on the Close to Home page, just a snippet in a roundup of minor news items. It says two thieves armed with handguns made off with just under a hundred dollars (which would include my dollars and Beverly’s, Billy thinks). The clerk, Wanda Stubbs, was alone in the store at the time. She was taken to Rockland Memorial, where she was treated for a head wound and released. So one of those scumbuckets hit her, probably with the butt of his gun, and probably because she wasn’t emptying the register fast enough to suit him.