From his shirt pocket he took the small spiral notebook he always kept handy and thumbed it open to the most recent entry, five names in all. At the restaurant he’d told that asshole Sully he kept two lists — people he owed and people who owed him — but in fact there was just the one. No need to keep track of the second batch. He couldn’t think of a single soul who’d be on it. Sure, his mother-in-law was coming to give him a lift back into town and, yeah, she gave him a cup of coffee and a shitty pastry every now and then, but she’d taken far more from Roy than she’d ever given him. He couldn’t name what she’d robbed him of exactly, but it was something essential, something a man couldn’t do without. By holding him in such low regard, she’d shortchanged him, and wasn’t that thievery? If you were lucky enough to have a good opinion of yourself — which Roy did — and everybody else was forever undermining it, saying things that chipped away at your confidence, how was that not theft? When he was a boy, his father had warned him how it would go. If you had something good, you could be sure some fuckwad would be eyeing it, trying to figure out how to take it away from you. And if they did make off with it, what choice did you have but to take it back? To get even? His old man hadn’t been worth much, but he got that right. If Roy was a thief — and yeah, okay, he was a thief — who’d made him one? All those jerk-offs, that’s who.
No, payback was the only list Roy kept. In the old days, back before he met Bullwhip, it had seemed like everybody he ever met was on it, or should be, but anymore it was short enough to keep in his head. He preferred this shit in writing, though. That was another trick he’d learned from old Bullwhip, who’d been a list-making fool. Write down every last name, he’d advised him. See if that don’t make the person more real. Written-down names, he explained, were a hedge against weakness, against time itself, which would, as the saying goes, heal all fucking wounds. It also led to forgiveness, which Roy wanted no part of. In jail, where time was about all you had, Roy went through a good half-dozen notebooks of forty-five pages each, front and back, five to seven names per page, depending. People whose future suffering he was passionately committed to. Usually the same names, only their sequence subject to revision. When he got out two weeks ago — early, thanks to institutional overcrowding — the first thing he did was steal a new spiral notebook from the Rexall, and he’d spent part of every day since studying and revising his lists to ensure that his incarcerated thinking had been valid, and for the most part he was gratified to conclude that it was. The final entry, composed that very morning, read:
BITCH
MAMA BITCH
NIGGER COP
SULLY
OLD WOMAN
Okay, that last entry did give him pause. This was the old woman’s first appearance, and he’d put her there on a whim. He’d seen her picture in the newspaper and read that the middle school was going to be renamed in her honor this very weekend. For Roy, she raised an interesting philosophical issue: could you settle a score with a dead person? The same problem had come up before in connection with his old man. “I thought you told me he was dead,” Bullwhip objected when Roy brought the matter up. You couldn’t square up with a dead person, Bullwhip maintained, for the simple reason that the dead were past fucking with. That’s what dead really meant, if you thought about it. Beyond caring. At rest. Roy supposed he could see the other man’s point. After all, many of his own most satisfying score-settling fantasies involved putting people in the ground, so if that’s where they were already, why bother? On the other hand, dead people could prosper. Look at Elvis. Earning more money dead than he ever did alive. People loved him more now than before. Same with the old woman. She’d been buried in Hilldale for nearly a decade, but people still remembered her letters to the editor, and the paper had reprinted some of these. Miss Beryl, the article concluded, is still very much with us.
Roy’s initial reaction had been that this was total bullshit, but the longer he thought about it, the more he wondered. What if some part of a person remained after they died, refusing to quit the scene? Like in that movie Janey dragged him to, the one with that sexy white bitch and the bigmouthed black one and the faggot with all the hair. What if some essence of the old woman lingered, still attached to this person or that place, still trying to improve everybody’s grammar and get them to see things her own stupid way. If so, then didn’t it stand to reason that she’d be disappointed when her hopes were finally dashed?
He also thought having her on the list rounded things out. He liked the symmetry of a five-person list and also liked that she was connected to three of the others. For some reason Sully had been a favorite of hers, and once, when Janey had done some fucking thing that made him crazy, and he’d gone looking for her with his deer rifle, the old witch had hidden her and the brat in that big house of hers on Upper Main Street, the same place Sully now parked Roy’s own trailer behind. He finally got somebody to tell him where they were holed up, but he’d somehow gotten mixed up on the street number (his first mistake), so he’d stood out on the sidewalk yelling, “Come out of there, you dumb fucking cunt!” (his second), and when she didn’t come out he’d lost it completely and proceeded to shoot out the windows of the wrong fucking house, scaring the shit out of the wrong goddamn old lady (the fucking trifecta). “Oh, you got it bad, son,” Bullwhip had chuckled when Roy described what had happened. “You got it bad as me.”
Which was true enough. When his blood was up, Roy just did shit. Didn’t think, just did, figuring there’d be time to deal with anything else later. The problem — here again Bullwhip was the dude who’d put his finger on it — was that all too often later arrived in mere minutes, as had been the case that day. One minute flat for the damn cops to respond to reports that a crazy man armed with a rifle was shouting obscenities, not out front of the Morrison Arms where you’d expect it, but on Upper Main where you wouldn’t, and then another minute for the bastards to disarm and cuff Roy and stuff him rudely in the back of their cruiser.
Once again he savored all these names. Janey was on top, of course, like always. Out of sight, out of mind was how it was with her. Every time he went to jail, she’d forget they were made for each other and do something stupid. The first time she sold their trailer and took the brat and moved to Albany so he couldn’t find her when he got out. Like that would ever fucking work. The next time he went in she filed for divorce. Mama Bitch had probably put her up to it, but still. Then a few weeks before he got out, she shacked up with some guy in Schuyler, as if that was going to keep him away. Bullwhip had advised him to go slow, not to give in to his natural desire to beat the living shit out of Janey to get her thinking straight again. Because that would just send him right back inside. Take your time, he said. Enjoy your freedom. Maybe get a job. When things are on an even keel, that’s the time to pay her a visit, talk to her all calm and smiling. Tell her you mean to make things right with her. Tell her you got a job and you mean to win her back. Buy her something nice, or take her out to dinner.