21
I tried to sort through the bills and shove them into the papers while I drove between addresses, but it was almost impossible to mess with the papers while driving. I hated the fact that my route was taking so long, and I replayed both the phone conversation with my wife, and Carl’s challenge, over and over in my head, savoring my anger. When I reached the boy’s house, rolled to a stop, and looked through the screen door to see a woman holding him in one arm while she smoked a cigarette with her free hand, I slammed the car into park and got out. The gravel ground beneath my shoes as I walked up the drive, but the woman turned and walked deeper into the house as if she heard nothing. When I reached the door and knocked on the wooden frame, two men sitting on the couch inside-they might have been brothers-looked over in surprise. The one closest to me, who had a dark mustache and a thin strip of beard that followed his jawline, stood and came to the door. He wore a plain gray T-shirt and blue jeans that were turned up at the ankle above his bare feet, and as he came closer I could see that his hair hung to his shoulders in the back. “Can I help you?” he said through the screen.
“I’ve got a bill here,” I replied, “for your newspaper.” He opened the door and I handed him the envelope.
“Who is he?” the man on the couch said.
“It’s the newspaper boy, delivering the bill.”
“Ask him if he wants a beer,” the man on the couch said, raising his bottle as he returned his attention to the television. Though I was at an angle to the set, I recognized the images of a motocross race. Motorcycle after motorcycle flew into the air from behind a dirt hill, the riders in gear and helmets that made them appear only slightly less mechanical than the machines they rode.
“This isn’t due right now, is it?” the man at the door asked.
“No, I just wanted to make sure you got it,” I said. “A lot of people don’t notice it in the bag.”
The woman I’d seen earlier stepped back into the room. “Who is it?” Her cigarette was gone, but the boy was still curled in her arms. He was in his sleeper as always, and I could see that it was gray, with a pattern of small blue cars and red trucks. His head lay on the woman’s shoulder as if he were ready to go to sleep there, but his brown eyes were open, and he looked at me with a combination of curiosity and fatigue. Both he and the woman were younger than I’d thought-the woman seemed in her early twenties, and the boy murmured unintelligible babble as he ducked his head further into the point between her shoulder and neck.
“The newspaper boy’s dropping off the bill,” the man said.
“Does he take checks?”
“We don’t have to pay, he’s just delivering it.”
“We have the money, though,” she said. “He’s standing right there. I’ll get the checkbook.”
The woman left the room again, and the man looked at me uncertainly before opening the door a bit wider with his foot. “All right,” he said. “You might as well come in.”
I stepped inside and heard the screen door bang shut behind me. The man tore the bill open and examined it. “We don’t even read it,” he said.
“You’re collecting money all night?” the one on the couch asked.
“No, I just saw you were awake.”
“Aiming for a tip, huh?” he said, and laughed as if he’d made a tremendous joke.
22
The woman returned, holding a checkbook in the hand she wasn’t using to hold the boy. She tried to press it open on the back of the couch, then stopped and leaned toward us. “Go with Daddy now,” she whispered to the boy. He raised his head obediently and stretched his arms to the man at the door, who took him. The boy curled up on the man’s shoulder the same way he’d been on the woman’s.
“I’ve seen your son in the doorway sometimes when I deliver the paper,” I said. “He’s cute.” I reached to ruffle the boy’s hair then, but the man twisted away, moving the boy just beyond my reach. Both of our movements had been automatic, I think, but my hand was left in the air in front of the boy and his father until I dropped it back to my side.
The man looked harder at me. “Sometimes he has a hard time sleeping,” he said, and then, studying the bill, added: “And this isn’t due today.”
“It’s not,” I said.
“What’s wrong?” the woman asked.
The man on the couch slapped his leg and laughed wildly. He pointed at the television, where a number of motorcycles were tangled on the ground and riders scrambled to pull themselves from the mess. “Always the same turn,” he managed between laughs, “they always fuck up the same turn.”
“How much is it?” the woman asked.
“We don’t have to pay,” the boy’s father said, looking at me as if I’d claimed otherwise.
“But he’s right here,” the woman said.
“Take the baby and put him in his crib.” The man’s voice was tense, determined. “He should be sleeping.” He handed the child back to the surprised woman, who looked at me once more, and then headed from the room, patting the boy’s back and whispering to him. When she was gone, the man turned to me. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Travis,” I told him.
“Listen, Travis. Next time you have a bill for us, just deliver it the same as you do to everyone else. I don’t care if you see our light on, and I don’t care if you see my son. Just throw the paper on the fucking lawn and move on. Understand?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I don’t give a shit if you’re sorry. You don’t knock on our door in the middle of the night asking for money.”
I nodded and closed the screen door behind me as I let myself out, then walked up the drive to my car. I didn’t look back until I put the car in gear and pulled away, and when I did, I saw the man standing in the doorway, watching me leave.
23
My hands shook so badly as I made my deliveries to the next few houses that I could barely manage to get the bills into the bags, and when I pulled back onto the highway again and headed further north, I drove past the turn I was supposed to take. It was just a small access road that led back down into the industrial area where I would deliver to a couple dozen more warehouses before being done for the day, but suddenly it was behind me, and I was still going. It was easier to drive straight and fast on the highway instead of continuing to struggle with the newspapers, whose plastic bags snapped in the breeze roaring past the open window. After a few minutes, as an experiment, I dropped one of the papers out the window of the car and turned for a moment to watch it tumble crazily along the road behind me.
The sky was starting to brighten in the east, which meant that I was way behind schedule. I knew that if I just kept going north, though, I would cross the Columbia River soon, and would be somewhere new when the sun rose. I pressed the gas to the floor, and the car strained to pick up speed. And when I tossed the stack of bills out the window, I watched in the rearview mirror as they exploded into a mass of fluttering shadows, like a flock of birds in the night.
PART II. CROOKS & COPS
THE WRONG HOUSE BY JONATHAN SELWOOD
Mount Tabor
I’m working the pry bar along the north side of Mount Tabor Park trying to scrape together enough to make a buy off the Mexicans on 82nd. Normally I cop from Voodoo Mike downtown, but I’m already into that dreadlocked cock-sucker for almost a hundred.
The neighborhood is practically virgin this far up the hill, without a single security door along the whole block. I start off with a well-kept dark blue Victorian that looks like it got flipped right before the housing market went to shit. There’s an old Sam Adams campaign poster still on the lawn and not one but three of those stupid plastic horses wired to the iron hitching ring on the curb. One of the smaller side windows is painted shut, but not latched, so I loosen it with the bar and slip in through what turns out to be a bathroom.