East lugged the bag out the door into the cold parking lot and tossed it over the side of the Dumpster. He breathed the cold air, scanning the trees opposite, their damp black and bare white. One large bird perched, watching the road below.
His two guns lay in the wave of dirt just there. Every day he reminded himself of them. But rain kept packing the dirt down.
Back inside, East changed the subject. “What about you? You ever had any kids?”
“Early I did,” said Perry. “With my first wife. Not much of a father. Sooner or later, every kid is gonna want to kick your ass.” Wetly he coughed. “I gave them every opportunity back then.”
East looked forward to these talks with Perry — he wasn’t sure why. They went forever and everywhere, and the old man moved from mumbling to hollering about things as if they were East’s fault: World War II. Miners who died. American steel and Japanese steel. All about lumber and what happened when the trees weren’t old anymore. Perry had spent his life knowing what things were made of. He would talk about those things all day. Sometimes East caught himself thinking about it, wondering about things he hadn’t even known he was listening to.
—
Perry was dying. It was not something he ever mentioned to East. It was something East slowly stopped denying to himself. Perry took a battalion of pills each day. All colors, all shapes, counting them out from a box he kept in his pocket. Under the counter were other pills he didn’t want his wife knowing about. He’d count out a handful and chase them with a can of root beer, and he’d wince and clench his eyes.
No one took pills like that if they had a choice.
Perry’s cough was a variable thing, like an engine that some mornings started and on others refused. Some of his teeth were coming loose. One day he pulled one out and lay it on the glass countertop. Then he was called away on his little silver flip phone, and he forgot about it. East didn’t know what to do with the tooth. A tiny blackening spot of blood peered at him from between the roots. After a while he picked it up and put it in the register.
Perry hadn’t hired anyone yet. East reminded Perry how he was stretched thin, running the place by himself. After that, Perry came and worked four full days in a row — from ten or eleven in the morning to helping East clean up at closing. It was fine with East this way. He didn’t need some new kid to be the boss of. He’d had plenty of that.
—
One morning, before the range opened, Perry invited East over to the tall, yellowing farmhouse to eat. East did not want to go but did not know how to refuse. So he sat down to breakfast with Perry and his wife, sitting in a straight chair where the wicker curling around the back didn’t make it any less uncomfortable.
Perry served out eggs and ham and potatoes and talked to various ends.
His wife, Marsha, sat mostly mute. She asked East a few polite questions about not much, then broke off, as if she’d prodded enough.
Perry talked about her as she sat, occasionally nodding assent. The land had been hers, her family living on it a hundred years: grapes once, and apples and cucumbers and pumpkins and squash and corn. Animals that fertilized the soil, soil that fed the animals. “That’s done for,” Perry said, and she got up then, cleared her plate, and sat back down with a glass of water into which she’d stirred something that sank and swirled.
Her sister had gone to California and was never heard of again. Two brothers were killed at war and the third driving drunk on the highway. When you could no longer hire men to work the fields, then not boys either, waves of Mexicans kept the farm for ten or fifteen years. But now the Mexicans were gone, and the farms up this road were farms no more: it cost more to run them than any crop could bring in. The windbreaks had grown out and filled the old furrows.
The paintball range, East guessed, was something Marsha had agreed to without knowing what it was, without knowing how high the bulldozers would cant the walls, or that a large red and white banner reading SLAUGHTERRANGE.COM would be her view out her front window thereafter, that her home would rock each afternoon with the sound of gunshots and idling trucks. She too had said yes to her husband with only a vague idea of what his bulldozers would do. And now, East could see, she was a woman whose business it was not to look out the window at how her money was made.
The walls of the dining room were lined with photographs of the white people who were Marsha’s ancestors. Fierce faces in gray, the women with hair in elaborate plaits, the men always a little smaller than their suits. The children he could barely look at, wondering if they were the doomed ones.
East thought of the pictures in the gun house in Iowa. The same fierceness, white people with hard eyes, keeping still the faces that their hard lives had made.
After Perry picked up the dishes and washed them, still holding forth from the sink in the kitchen, East half bowed quietly and thanked Marsha before leaving her quiet dining room. He had barely heard a dozen sentences from her, but he knew he had wandered into a battle about what was left, about what could and could not be sold. He could see the fragile stacking it was not in his interest to upset.
—
His ATM card arrived. This new ATM, he could feed cash right into it, no deposit envelope. It counted it up. East was suspicious, but the machine was always right.
The little eye in the window above the keypad, observing him, the camera under the roofline — he didn’t even hide his face anymore.
—
“Warmest day in thirty years of Decembers.” Perry was drinking off a bottle of Old Crow. “There’ll be a front down from Canada next,” he added. “Then I’ll have to be out in the plow. I’ll get someone in here to help you.”
“All right.” To East the promise was already empty. To get Shandor any help, it had taken him walking in half dead.
They sat together in canvas chairs at the end of the landing, away from the building, where the sky paced above them, great clouds, barely tinted from below, coiled like the entrails of some great creature.
“Another hour,” Perry said, “these clouds will run out, and we’ll have nothing but stars. If you can stay awake.”
And truly, the shelf of cloud passed, unveiling a long, clear black road of sky. The number of stars was more than East had ever known. Like something scattered. He doubted his eyes.
Perry slugged from the bottle, sleepy and content.
“You ever do astronomy? The constellations and so forth?”
“What’s a constellation?”
“You know, in the stars. Say, the Dipper. Say, the North Star.” Perry turned his bull neck around with difficulty. The north was behind him. “You know the North Star? Underground Railroad stories and all that?” He pointed vaguely. “By the Dipper, there?”
East laughed. “What’s a dipper?”
Perry’s finger stopped tracing in midair. “A water scoop. A dipper. What do they call it? A ladle. There. Handle, handle, handle, then the box of four stars.”
“Which box you mean?”
“Damn, son. That one. Then the last two point at the North Star.” Perry took another drink and stopped before he said something else.
East wasn’t sure. But did it even matter? So many stars. This is what old men did, sitting out in chairs, staring at these. In the morning, when East woke up slumped and startled in his chair, Perry’s whiskey bottle sat empty on the ground. But he had gone.
—
The cold front rolled in as Perry had said. For two days the clouds gnarled and darkened; then it snowed, the sky trying to blot out the world.
East had seen flurries before — twice since he’d left The Boxes, and once when he was there, a strange cloud that came south off the mountains and glittered the air over The Boxes for five minutes one January day. But never anything like this. The road a foot deep, the trucks slipping, helpless, thunder roaring behind the farmhouse. No one came, and he was glad that they didn’t. He didn’t trust it to be safe, going out.