Perry came through about noon in the small plow, turned off the highway, pushed clear a rectangle of the buried lot. He jumped down then and left the truck idling outside.
“Jesus,” Perry chuckled. “Not bad for a Saturday. I think you can take the rest of the day. I’ll put a sign up, pay you anyway.”
East could not contain his alarm. “It’s supposed to be like this?”
In the disastrous cold, Perry seemed as young and happy as East had ever seen him. “Yeah. It’s supposed to be just like this.”
—
The men were just as pleased to go shooting in knee-deep snow. That Sunday after the Browns game there were twenty, thirty guys. Perry brought in a large red plastic drum of coffee, handing out cups. “Don’t know what I did round here before this boy showed up,” he said to the older ones who just came to lounge away the evening, talking not about paintball but things they’d done and why their knees and backs and hearts didn’t work. Why they were retired but none of the younger ones would ever be able to do that. Why staying here in Ohio was what they’d do even if it was a bad idea. They’d be in it to the end or be damned. That was what they told each other.
The Browns game was replayed late, and the men stayed and talked and watched them lose again. Their season would end in a couple of weeks. But it was over a long time ago.
East swept the stamped-out snow from their boots out the door, mopped up the melt, repeated it once or twice an hour until at last they stopped coming. Menial work. Sometimes he tired of it, felt a bubble of resentment. But it was also true that Perry’s praise gave him a soaring, stinging pride. With Fin, he supposed, it had been more or less the same way. It was the first time in a while he’d let himself think of Fin.
Sometimes when he was looking out over the range, watching the men hide and mass and surge and shoot, he thought of Ty, thought of The Boxes. But he no longer could find the phone number Walter had given him, and he didn’t try to remember it. What was in The Boxes was safe without him.
—
At the top of the stairs, the back door onto the landing, the lockers, and the air-compressor station was to the right. To the left, latched and rarely used, was a little storeroom. A utility sink, a green skylight. All these weeks, East had been sleeping there. He could lay down a certain double sheet of cardboard on a pallet — it was comfortable, smooth, had a give to it. He had the pillow, a used blanket. And along the roadside he had found a box that a dishwasher had come in, still clean and dry. He could fold it flat, slide it behind the cabinet in the day. At night he opened it and slept underneath, the dark string humming quiet in his chest, in blackness, encased.
If Perry knew about this, he had not let on.
Sometimes in the night East dreamed of the Jackson girl. Or of the judge’s daughter, screaming. Or of being here at the range with Walter and Michael Wilson, the three of them searching, hunting somebody. Or of nothing, just the yellow line broken on the road, a line of nothing, of questions. Sometimes in the day, watching the men stalk one another, he dreamed these things too.
—
But one day in December, when the players had left because of a steady rain, Perry came and called East to dinner. Refusing didn’t seem to be an option. Perry counted the bills into a leather folder, then counted back change for tomorrow’s register and hid it where they always did. East swept quickly and locked the back door. Then they hurried across the road, bent under their coats, Perry explaining. Marsha had a son. He couldn’t make either holiday, Thanksgiving or Christmas. This was going to have to do. He had come in that day from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “Sorry,” Perry concluded, “to spring this on you.”
East took this to mean it was not Perry springing it at all.
The son was named Arthur. He was tall, an attorney — as he pointed out — and he sat to Marsha’s left. They were already sitting when he and Perry came into the dining room. Perry brought the food from the kitchen and then sat down on East’s side of the table. The room was dim, like for a celebratory dinner, but an overhead light shone down on the table, bright enough that someone might clearly read a document.
Marsha had made the butternut squash, green beans, and wild rice, Perry pointed out.
“But the turkey is from IGA,” said Marsha soberly. “They do a nice job.”
East nodded. He couldn’t tell what this was about. Perry stood and carved the turkey with a long knife burnished black. The son said a tight little prayer, and meat was served onto the plates. It was warm and tender, the first real meat East had eaten in almost a month. He felt his stomach get confused about it, cramping dully.
Marsha waited until they had all refilled their plates before she spoke.
“You need to put Antoine in a decent place,” she said. “Not on a sofa that others crouch on all day.”
So this was the ambush he was in for. The lawyer son was Marsha’s version of a gunner. Had she come in and looked at the range, at the storeroom? When he was out, getting breakfast, maybe? Did she guess that the sofa was his bed? Or had she found his nest, his box and bed?
“That is a garage, not a decent place for a human to live,” Marsha said, “but you have one living there. I look out at night — he does not leave. I look out in the morning — he does not come back.”
Perry, mayor of the town, looked down at his fork, then made parallel digs through his mashed potatoes. “All right. I didn’t know where he was staying. I didn’t know. Say the quarry hires a guy: they don’t ask, where are you staying?” He coughed again and removed something from his cheek with cupped fingers. “Antoine. Did I know where you were staying?”
East stirred. “No, sir.”
“They know if they want to know,” said Marsha. “And if they ask. If they keep paper. If their records are at all legal, they know.” Her son the lawyer gave a listening nod.
“There’s paper enough,” Perry said. “Precious little, but enough.”
“If your luck holds out,” Marsha said, spearing a green bean. “But you knew, Perry. You knew, and you didn’t even take him anything to make it comfortable. A bed, a hot plate. You could have tried to make it nice. I mean, we must have a dozen toasters in the attic. Arthur gives me one every year.”
“Not every year,” interposed Arthur.
She looked at East then, sad half-moons under her eyes. A silent apology. Maybe she was sorry for watching. But she was watching.
Perry served himself two rolls from the basket. “We’ll see what’s possible.”
Then she addressed East. “What brings this on is, we received the notice. The state: they’ll inspect. Within a month. And if they find you staying there, they’ll revoke the permit and close the business.”
“Which would not make her unhappy,” Perry said, chewing. “Which would not break her heart.”
“Antoine.” She spoke up — the loudest sound East had ever heard her make. Her eyes darkened. “He has to find you a place to live. I will make him. There are decent places.”
“Not for what he’s paying now,” Perry grunted.
“If I have to remind you who owns the land and the building,” said Marsha, “I will.”
Perry wandered the subject around, mentioning an apartment building he knew, owned by a lady down near Chillicothe; down there they used to make truck axles, and they were once the capital of Ohio. Now they had a storytelling festival.