At last one Monday, East asked where was Shandor, was he sick, knowing that wasn’t the reason.
Perry looked away. His loud bray had, this morning, gone quiet and upset. “All right. I’m going to tell you. Shandor won’t be back.”
East raised his eyebrows.
“I put him in my truck and took him down to Columbus.”
“Columbus? To the college?” He’d overheard the talk on the sofas, the games on TV.
“The university?” Perry said. “Nothing to do with that. It’s what he wanted. He thought it would be a good place to start fresh. He had me turn him out on the street with his little suitcase and a handful of my money.”
He shook his massive head and his body wagged along.
“If somebody were to ask after him,” Perry concluded, “now you can tell them where to look. But I can’t imagine who would, outside of Hungary or wherever.”
“Why not?” East said.
“People don’t connect with someone like that,” Perry said, “who ain’t from here.”
“I ain’t from here.”
“Yeah, well,” Perry said. He counted out twenties for the weekend and pushed them across the counter.
East unlocked the padlock that secured the back of the cabinet. Time to start the day.
“So, you gonna hire somebody new? Cause it’s hard to watch the back and front the same time.”
“I will. Right away,” Perry said. “Never really took the HELP WANTED sign down. You need a day off?”
“I’m fine,” said East. He wasn’t sure of the calendar, but he thought he’d worked fifteen days in a row. “It’s okay.”
“You tell me if you need a day off,” Perry said absently.
Perry didn’t hire anybody new right away. But he began staying around. East figured he liked it: liked seeing the men and peppering them with his questions. Liked muttering in their presence and then holding forth.
Listening to Perry talk, East learned about the place. It was Perry who’d taken his wife’s family’s old field and plowed up the berm, Perry who’d backed the fences with sheeting to keep the noise and stray paintballs in, Perry who’d gutted the old barn and built the store inside. Plus the upstairs landing, where, through the long and dim afternoons until the lights came on at night, East oversaw the range.
Atop the berm, in his lifeguard’s chair with its drop-hinged shield of spotty Plexiglas, East surveyed the men swarming like squirrels across the acres. Scrambled and sighted, scrambled and sighted. East admired some of the players, the small ones, the ones who shot less, who perched and waited, content to stand as rear gunners, hiding, conserving themselves. As Perry had told him, East ejected players whose behavior annoyed the others — cheaters, head shooters, overkillers in groups where overkill was unwelcome. Anyone with smuggled paint, with stale paint that did not break on contact, that bruised and bounced off. He protected the customers and protected the business.
Some of the men slighted East at first, or ignored him. But most came to accept him. They saw that he was always there. In the lifeguard’s chair over the railing he was quiet and watched patiently, never hurrying them. They couldn’t get much out of him. But he nodded once carelessly when a player asked if he was from out west, and that news got around, became the foundation of a dozen tales about who he was. He was no schoolboy. He was a runaway, an escapee. He was somebody Perry was sheltering, somebody’s illegitimate son. He dealt with them directly and calmly, looked boys and men both in the eye, ended problems at once, kicked people out fairly and quietly if they had broken the rules, whether they were one-timers or regulars. He cut people off the way a bartender would. He seemed to have no fear and no body temperature: he sat out on the chair in a cotton shirt when everyone else was wearing a parka.
Some of the younger ones, kids buying paints out of their part-time jobs or the money their parents allowed them, idolized him. They called him Warlord, called him the Ancient, called him Gangsta.
The night the Buckeyes beat Michigan, a carload of Michigan guys had stopped at the range and rented out guns and snuck in a bunch of store-bought paintballs that were as stale as rocks and left bluish bruises where they hit. Then they lit a player up, a regular, mercilessly, four of them on one, fifty or sixty shots all around the back and shoulders, even when he was on the ground. East hadn’t hollered or blown the air horn. He’d just switched out the lights. Then the regulars had all the advantages, knowing the range like a familiar block, like their own yard, and one of the Michigans had his teeth loosened with a gun butt. In the dark it was just an accident, and they got loud with East, and East faced up to all four, took their guns back and saw them, bleeding, out the door. That night East let the locals stay and play the TVs till five in the morning. More men arrived; they brought cold beer, they brought pizza, they watched the game again on a 1:00 AM rerun and sang through it.
They asked East to come and sit, to have a beer, but he mopped up and stayed away, keeping business.
Maybe he wasn’t of age.
The shooters were white, all of them. Some of them had to forget what color he was before they spoke to him. But he had made his place. He was just Antoine, the new boy Perry had, and he was all right. Better than Shandor — they had not liked Shandor. He was something, Russian, Ukrainian, maybe, not from America. And Shandor was an addict. He was always looking past them, looking at something else. It made them uneasy, the men who came here, drank a few beers, went paintballing every day. Antoine, whoever he was, was American. Antoine looked them in the eye. He knew what he was doing, Antoine.
They respected him, stopped watching him all the time. But he never stopped watching them.
19
The shooting, shooting, all the time. It filled his ears, was all he could hear. Then he didn’t hear it anymore.
—
The range was just one of the things Perry ran — his deals, he called them. The range was a deal. He had another deal, plowing — city streets, in one truck, and driveways, which took another, and he got paid on state subcontract for plowing roads that the big trucks couldn’t do. Another of Perry’s deals was bulldozers. He could grade your yard or clear your lot or break your building up into a pile for hauling away. If you had a home and paid tax on it and you wanted to stop, wanted only to be bled for the land, Perry could start on a morning, and the place would be mud by night. He commanded Bobcats and bigger dozers and graders and a couple of backhoes, some of which he owned, some of which the state did, owned and maintained, though they stayed on his lot and bore his name in black letters on the side. BONDED. The truck that emptied the Dumpster every day, that was Perry’s too.
Another deaclass="underline" Perry was mayor of the town. Stone Cottage, Ohio, was what they called it, though they’d stopped quarrying stones, and there was no cottage anyone knew. He did not want to be mayor, but the mayor controlled zoning, and he wanted to control zoning, because no one wanted a paintball range a block from Main Street. Everyone had known that was why he’d run to be mayor. But he had bulldozed them too, one by one, and on voting day a little more than a year ago, he’d won. The range opened that month.
Maybe they’d known, Perry declared, maybe they knew all along how much he’d hate being mayor of their God damn town. Four years. Maybe that was their revenge on him, what they extracted in exchange.
“You could quit being mayor. Now that you got what you wanted,” East said, head down, polishing the countertop glass. The counter was fourteen feet long, from an old candy store. It had glass in the top an inch thick. The glass got smudged under everyone’s elbows, but East liked to keep it clear, keep the pans of paints visible underneath, glowing even without light on them.