“How old does that make you?”
“Sixteen.”
“You ain’t sixteen and done two years security, son.”
“I got a license,” said East. “It says sixteen.”
The big man shifted on his stool. He did not ask to see the license. He was not in that sort of pursuit. “You get high? You”—his voice became bitter, humorous—“tweak out?”
East shook his head.
“You in a gang?”
Shook his head again. It wasn’t necessarily a lie.
“Christian Wolves? Any other gang, known or unknown? You got tattoos?”
East said, “No.”
“Do you mind showing me?” the man said. “If you would lift your shirt up.”
East held up his sweater and the red shirt beneath so that the old pink man could see him, ribs and the two black points on his chest.
The man was embarrassed too now. “Higher,” he said. “I got to see your collarbones. That’s where they put them.”
“Who?”
“The Wolves. Their tattoos. I don’t know,” the man said.
East stripped his shirt off all the way and turned once, a dull outrage marking his face from inside. But the man, when he turned back, was looking away, with distaste. Maybe for East. Or maybe for having had to ask.
Maybe his willingness to be seen was all the man needed to know.
“Good,” said the man. “I can show you how to work here. But I can’t show you how to work. That, you got to know already.”
“I know it,” East said.
“I’m Perry Slaughter. I would be the owner. Excuse me.” Now the big man seemed to be wilting in on himself. He turned away and bent down behind the long wooden counter with the thick glass windows at the front and top. He came back up with a thin rig of plastic tubing, which he fit over his ears and into his nostrils. For a moment he stood, taking hits of something through the tube.
“You ain’t happy with me, I can move on,” East suggested. “I don’t need this job.”
“Exactly why a person asks for a job,” Perry Slaughter gasped below his tube, “because he don’t need it. No, you’re fine, for today at least.”
He peeled off the tubing and stuffed it back in the drawer. He regarded East suspiciously over the bristled pink of his cheeks. “I take a little oxygen now and then,” he admitted. “The good shit.”
—
There was downstairs, and there was upstairs. Downstairs was the register and the counter and the cabinets full of paints, the front room, the bathroom. Upstairs, out the back door, was a covered deck with lockers and a four-man air station, chrome and shining and eager to hiss out air, and the sidewalk landing atop the plowed-up berm with its observation rail and lifeguard chair where someone could watch over the range.
The first two mornings East swept the range, raking up heavy litter and the clusters of paints he’d find, burst or spilled or trodden in. He’d board the stranded, wheelless school bus and the jeeps mired and moldering in the center of the range, picking up chunks of new-broken glass or metal. On foot, he pulled a light, knobby-tired tote behind him, emptying it into a Dumpster in the parking lot, which in turn was emptied by a black truck that stopped by and lifted the Dumpster above its head like a trophy, shaking it, the invisible driver jerking the hydraulic levers. At first Perry Slaughter had East taking directions from the other boy: upstairs or downstairs, what he should do. The other boy, Shandor, showed East the blaze-orange coat and helmet for entering the range when there were shooters, what the protocols were for sorting out problems or escorting the injured. Shandor showed him how the register worked, how to charge members, how to charge guests, how to sell time, paints, how to rent guns and headgear and check them back in, how to take a credit card, how to refuse one. Shandor showed East where the bathroom was and how to mop it out. The other boy seemed to prefer the outdoors, at least for the first string of warm afternoons, but then it no longer grew warm in the afternoon, and he left East out to look over the range.
East did either without complaint.
The men came every day, especially Sunday, new and curious, or regular, rumbling or limping, tires or boots crunching the frozen peaks of lot mud. They rented their guns or toted them in nylon bags with mighty, treaded zippers. They paid credit or they paid cash — money clips for the ones still working, pads of secret cash like squashed drink cups for the ones who were scraping by, who were no-good squandering, who were pilfering it out of a mattress or a mother or a wife. They came singly and in groups. There were posted hours, but they came before and they came after.
They paid entry and rentals, and they bought paintballs. Sometimes they bought gear — guns, helmets, pads, bags, military goggles. They bought drinks, crackers, beef jerky, chocolate bars. They lingered downstairs and stared at football on TV, from a skeptical distance or joining others on the sofas. Or they hurried up the stairs and out the back, to suit up and leave their wallets and phones and work shoes in the lockers there, pocketing the locker key or pinning it to a hip. Sweatpants, coveralls, track suits, dirty jeans. Then they went out to play, to shoot one another.
They left litter: the spent paints, the husks with their brilliant yolks. The blown bags and wrappers, the coffee cups, the tubes of liniment, the popper bottles, the bandages. The gum they chewed, the tobacco they dripped, the cigarettes they ground out, the gloves they lost. They left papers from the state and from their loans and from their joints and their wives. They left the Plain Dealer and Dispatch and USA Today. They left the penny-saver and the auto ads and their gun magazines and their computer-printed directions to here or somewhere else.
They scattered and held, playing their battles, dark shirts and light, red bandannas or blue, stalking one another with one paint or another. They scrambled through breaks in the land, burrowing themselves below the bulldozed hillocks and against the dead trailers and trees, the fortresses of fallen tree trunks, the one length of fieldstone wall older than anything. They hid in the school bus, or sometimes they swarmed in or out of it like a hive of bees. They revered the two surplus army jeeps painted army green mired near the trenches at the far end of the range, each with its white five-pointed star.
They scrambled and sighted, scrambled and sighted. Sometimes the men shouted at one another, coordinated, vague military directions, used phones, used walkie-talkies, working organizations in the brush. They formed teams, crews, alliances, factions. They turned on each other and then won each other back. Sometimes they ran singly, eyes blacked, sleeves peeled back in the cold, panting, waiting, shooting at anything or anyone, guarding their vantage points jealously, their long guns slung spanning their chests rigidly, extended skeletons.
They died, and they waited on the sidelines, rubbing bruises, watching the others. They died, and they came back to life.
—
In the beginning East got sixty dollars a day paid in cash — no discussion what a day was or how long it could last. It did not matter. Before the second week was out, Perry had made it a hundred. By then East knew the range. He knew the waiver forms and how to file them and how to talk back to someone who’d twisted an ankle or caught a paintball in the neck and now was angry, now threatened to sue. Soon it was East being asked the questions about how to clear a jammed barrel or punish an offender. Shandor had been there for four months, but Shandor did not work as hard as East or as much. And some days Perry’s instructions were to tell Shandor he was not working that day.
Maybe Perry had begun to trust East, from seeing him, catching him working when he popped in for a few minutes now and then. East worked hard. Or maybe it was that Perry had never liked Shandor in the first place. Shandor was polite and handsome but evasive. He dabbed at his nose constantly. He could not remember, made things up. He had a thin, rabbity nose that was always wet with something.