Dodgers (24 page)

Leaned up against the wall was a roll of pink insulation. The wall type, fiberglass. He checked it, shook it—dry, no mice or vermin.

He found the largest truck in the yard, a jacked-up Ford with a work bed. He fed ten feet of insulation in between the huge back tires. Then he crawled in on top of it and fetched the rest of the roll around him, like a blanket, like a wrapper, sheltering under the huge round differential with its burnt-syrup smell. The cold and the lights muffled down, and he slept to the knocking of the shots in the yard beyond.

At one point in the night he woke and saw, through the hole in the end of his pink swaddling, the sky. The truck above him had gone. But he was still there.

The morning light startled East, and he struggled to unbundle himself, unwrap, to find his feet and stumble free. Pink strands in his mouth, drying at his lips. Pink fleece in his hair. All his skin crawled.

Then his head cleared. He went back, picked up the insulation, and rolled it carefully, tightly. Leaned it back up where it had been.

He walked down the highway, furtive in the cold air, and revisited the doughnut shop, for its bathroom as much as the food. He washed in the sink with the palms of his hands. A spill of salt at the corners of his mouth, streaks of wet on his sweater. The black eye slowly reshaping itself. His muscles lank and dog-tired under his skin. He could not bear to look in the mirror at what was left.

Purchased two doughnuts but could not bring himself to sit in the warm little shop, among other people. He went instead down the street, to brood by himself outside the little closed motel.

When East opened the door again, there was one person sitting in the big white building of Slaughterrange: an old man, pink like a ham, larger than the bar stool he occupied. Sandpaper bristle of ginger hair. He was holding a small piece of machinery in his left hand and rendering it with the screwdriver in his right.

“You the one Shandor said was looking for a job?” he bellowed without looking up.

East sized the man up, and he stopped short. Six foot five, three hundred pounds, maybe. The sort of man who was used to moving things. He lay down the tool and the chunk of beaten metal, and he brushed his hands on his Carhartt overalls.

“Was that you lying in the yard last night, son?”

East did not lie. “I fell asleep.”

“Cold,” said the white man, “to be falling asleep, under Tim Crane's truck. Where you staying?”

East said nothing.

“You the one, then, that wants the job?”

East nodded. Kept his eyes on the old man's eyes. There was something wrong with them. Sticky. Not high, but lagging a bit.

“I got to ask you a few questions.”

East said, “I know.”

“Name?”

“Antoine.”

“You had a job before?”

“I did security. Two years.”

“How old does that make you?”

“Sixteen.”

“You ain't sixteen and done two years security, son.”

“I got a license,” said East. “It says sixteen.”

The big man shifted on his stool. He did not ask to see the license. He was not in that sort of pursuit. “You get high? You”—his voice became bitter, humorous—“tweak out?”

East shook his head.

“You in a gang?”

Shook his head again. It wasn't necessarily a lie.

“Christian Wolves? Any other gang, known or unknown? You got tattoos?”

East said, “No.”

“Do you mind showing me?” the man said. “If you would lift your shirt up.”

East held up his sweater and the red shirt beneath so that the old pink man could see him, ribs and the two black points on his chest.

The man was embarrassed too now. “Higher,” he said. “I got to see your collarbones. That's where they put them.”

“Who?”

“The Wolves. Their tattoos. I don't know,” the man said.

East stripped his shirt off all the way and turned once, a dull outrage marking his face from inside. But the man, when he turned back, was looking away, with distaste. Maybe for East. Or maybe for having had to ask.

Maybe his willingness to be seen was all the man needed to know.

“Good,” said the man. “I can show you how to work here. But I can't show you how to work. That, you got to know already.”

“I know it,” East said.

“I'm Perry Slaughter. I would be the owner. Excuse me.” Now the big man seemed to be wilting in on himself. He turned away and bent down behind the long wooden counter with the thick glass windows at the front and top. He came back up with a thin rig of plastic tubing, which he fit over his ears and into his nostrils. For a moment he stood, taking hits of something through the tube.

“You ain't happy with me, I can move on,” East suggested. “I don't need this job.”

“Exactly why a person asks for a job,” Perry Slaughter gasped below his tube, “because he don't need it. No, you're fine, for today at least.”

He peeled off the tubing and stuffed it back in the drawer. He regarded East suspiciously over the bristled pink of his cheeks. “I take a little oxygen now and then,” he admitted. “The good shit.”

There was downstairs, and there was upstairs. Downstairs was the register and the counter and the cabinets full of paints, the front room, the bathroom. Upstairs, out the back door, was a covered deck with lockers and a four-man air station, chrome and shining and eager to hiss out air, and the sidewalk landing atop the plowed-up berm with its observation rail and lifeguard chair where someone could watch over the range.

The first two mornings East swept the range, raking up heavy litter and the clusters of paints he'd find, burst or spilled or trodden in. He'd board the stranded, wheelless school bus and the jeeps mired and moldering in the center of the range, picking up chunks of new-broken glass or metal. On foot, he pulled a light, knobby-tired tote behind him, emptying it into a Dumpster in the parking lot, which in turn was emptied by a black truck that stopped by and lifted the Dumpster above its head like a trophy, shaking it, the invisible driver jerking the hydraulic levers. At first Perry Slaughter had East taking directions from the other boy: upstairs or downstairs, what he should do. The other boy, Shandor, showed East the blaze-orange coat and helmet for entering the range when there were shooters, what the protocols were for sorting out problems or escorting the injured. Shandor showed him how the register worked, how to charge members, how to charge guests, how to sell time, paints, how to rent guns and headgear and check them back in, how to take a credit card, how to refuse one. Shandor showed East where the bathroom was and how to mop it out. The other boy seemed to prefer the outdoors, at least for the first string of warm afternoons, but then it no longer grew warm in the afternoon, and he left East out to look over the range.

East did either without complaint.

The men came every day, especially Sunday, new and curious, or regular, rumbling or limping, tires or boots crunching the frozen peaks of lot mud. They rented their guns or toted them in nylon bags with mighty, treaded zippers. They paid credit or they paid cash—money clips for the ones still working, pads of secret cash like squashed drink cups for the ones who were scraping by, who were no-good squandering, who were pilfering it out of a mattress or a mother or a wife. They came singly and in groups. There were posted hours, but they came before and they came after.

They paid entry and rentals, and they bought paintballs. Sometimes they bought gear—guns, helmets, pads, bags, military goggles. They bought drinks, crackers, beef jerky, chocolate bars. They lingered downstairs and stared at football on TV, from a skeptical distance or joining others on the sofas. Or they hurried up the stairs and out the back, to suit up and leave their wallets and phones and work shoes in the lockers there, pocketing the locker key or pinning it to a hip. Sweatpants, coveralls, track suits, dirty jeans. Then they went out to play, to shoot one another.

They left litter: the spent paints, the husks with their brilliant yolks. The blown bags and wrappers, the coffee cups, the tubes of liniment, the popper bottles, the bandages. The gum they chewed, the tobacco they dripped, the cigarettes they ground out, the gloves they lost. They left papers from the state and from their loans and from their joints and their wives. They left the
Plain Dealer
and
Dispatch
and
USA Today
. They left the penny-saver and the auto ads and their gun magazines and their computer-printed directions to here or somewhere else.

They scattered and held, playing their battles, dark shirts and light, red bandannas or blue, stalking one another with one paint or another. They scrambled through breaks in the land, burrowing themselves below the bulldozed hillocks and against the dead trailers and trees, the fortresses of fallen tree trunks, the one length of fieldstone wall older than anything. They hid in the school bus, or sometimes they swarmed in or out of it like a hive of bees. They revered the two surplus army jeeps painted army green mired near the trenches at the far end of the range, each with its white five-pointed star.

They scrambled and sighted, scrambled and sighted. Sometimes the men shouted at one another, coordinated, vague military directions, used phones, used walkie-talkies, working organizations in the brush. They formed teams, crews, alliances, factions. They turned on each other and then won each other back. Sometimes they ran singly, eyes blacked, sleeves peeled back in the cold, panting, waiting, shooting at anything or anyone, guarding their vantage points jealously, their long guns slung spanning their chests rigidly, extended skeletons.

They died, and they waited on the sidelines, rubbing bruises, watching the others. They died, and they came back to life.

In the beginning East got sixty dollars a day paid in cash—no discussion what a day was or how long it could last. It did not matter. Before the second week was out, Perry had made it a hundred. By then East knew the range. He knew the waiver forms and how to file them and how to talk back to someone who'd twisted an ankle or caught a paintball in the neck and now was angry, now threatened to sue. Soon it was East being asked the questions about how to clear a jammed barrel or punish an offender. Shandor had been there for four months, but Shandor did not work as hard as East or as much. And some days Perry's instructions were to tell Shandor he was not working that day.

Maybe Perry had begun to trust East, from seeing him, catching him working when he popped in for a few minutes now and then. East worked hard. Or maybe it was that Perry had never liked Shandor in the first place. Shandor was polite and handsome but evasive. He dabbed at his nose constantly. He could not remember, made things up. He had a thin, rabbity nose that was always wet with something.

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.