West of Here (19 page)

When his drink arrived, he left it in front of him on the bar like a challenge, where it stayed until the ice melted and the fizz went out of it and dew drops formed on the outside of the glass. Knowing all the while that if he drank it, the fierce determination to win would come surging back immediately, but knowing also the boomerang effect morning would bring, all the terror and madness and self-loathing. What was this compulsion to escape, to be beholden to no man? And why was it he could only seem to achieve freedom in the reeling, slobbering stages of drunkenness, those very stages he could never remember in the morning when he awoke in holding cells with his zipper unfastened and lumps on his skull? Why, like old Walt, could he not be afoot and light-hearted upon the open road, healthy and free with his path before him? Where were his hearty appetites, his slumbering passions? Where betwixt these green islands were his subtle refrains?

When his steak arrived, Timmon had no appetite for it. He could do nothing but ponder the dim prospect of his future. Eight hundred and forty bucks. Eight twenty-five after the steak and the vodka, both of which would remain untouched. Beyond this paltry sum separating him from total destitution — amassed under the state’s supervision at the wage of $1.15 per hour, collating Wal-Mart circulars as a means of personal empowerment and social elevation — the future was even bleaker food for contemplation. The infernal struggle. The paperwork. The standing in lines. The people with their suspicions, and worse, their charity. The smell of those curtains.

At least Don Gasper gave him a couple of leads. Gasper said he was coming back to P.B. himself when he was sprung. Said he knew everybody. Said it was a kick-ass town. But then, look at Gasper. Guy couldn’t even burgle his own grandmother.

AN OFFICE, THE
first of many, thought Timmon. Well, sort of an office. More of a cubicle with mottled brown carpet and a fishy smell. A
guy in a rubber apron and boots was leaning back in his chair, looking at Timmon’s letter of recommendation without really looking at it. He kept looking instead at the gingerbread man.

“So, wait a minute,” the guy said. “Didn’t I see you at the Bushwhacker last night? Shit yeah, I thought you looked familiar. I was eyeing your steak.” Krig handed the letter back to Timmon. “I don’t need this shit. What are you gonna steal? Goddamn halibut?”

“Don Gasper mentioned that —”

“Don Gasper’s a tool. I played JV with the guy. He’s what we call a go-left. No fucking right hand. Just box the fucker in at the top of the key and force him right. He’ll settle for some weak-ass jumper every time. Gasper. Pfff. What a prick. I haven’t seen that guy since our ten-year.”

Thornburgh came striding down the corridor toward Krig’s cubicle. Krig promptly swung his feet off the desk.

“Where’s my wet-locks, Krigstadt? I’ve got two hundred pounds of coho sitting down there and no wet-locks.”

“I’m on it, I’m on it,” said Krig, with a salute. “Done and doner, sir.”

Jared heaved a heavy sigh. He thought about saying something but decided, exhaustively and at length with a rather drawn expression on his face as he appraised Krig, that it just wasn’t worth it. Turning on his heels, he marched across the hall to his office.

“Prick,” mumbled Krig, who replaced his feet on the desk. “You’re one lucky sonofabitch, Tisdale, you know that? And I’ll tell you why. We got a hundred and twenty thousand pounds of salmon coming through here next week, and I’m short-handed on second crew. You think you can hose down fish? Spoon out guts? Maybe drive a forklift if you’re a good boy? It ain’t brain surgery, but you’d be surprised at how some of these dumbfucks could screw something up. Do these sound like skill sets you possess, Tisdale? Because if you can do that, I don’t care if you tattoo a pentagram on your forehead. I need fast, reliable processors. In fact, I might even be able to shuffle some things around. Better hours. How does first crew sound?”

It was apparent even before Timmon donned his apron the following
morning in the locker room that Krig had decided to take him under his wing, a fate Timmon would have cheerfully traded for eight hours of solitary confinement. Krig was intent on grooming him. Krig believed in second chances.

“I figure you give a guy a break, right? Even the playing field. P.B.’s all about fresh starts. Used to be, anyway. Hell, look at Thornburgh’s great-great-whatever. Guy got here with a plug nickel after they ran him out of Seattle, and now half of P.B.’s named after him.”

Krig was inexhaustible. He kept talking about his Goat. Three times he commented on Timmon’s stature. “You
sure
you didn’t play any roundball?”

At six foot six, Timmon was weary of this assumption. The answer was no. No, no, no. He never played basketball. He was gangly, having grown all at once one excruciating sophomore year that saw his pants cuffs ascend halfway to his knees and his Adam’s apple push against the inside of his neck as though it were trying to break through. Everything grew but his dingus. He’d gone out for JV and was the first man cut. He ran the court like a wounded marionette. He launched hopeless bricks at the rim. He couldn’t even set a decent pick he was so skinny. He hated basketball. And still, the whole world insisted on foisting basketball upon him, as though it were beyond the realm of possibility that a tall guy related to the world as anything but one big fucking basketball game.

Krig walked Timmon through every phase of processing: demonstrating with knives and spigoted spoons various feats of prestidigitation upon fish carcasses as they made their way up the line, station to station. At lunch, Krig insisted on sitting with Timmon on the loading dock. He insisted on showing him the Goat, stipulating that Timmon sit in the driver seat. For one merciful hour, Krig left Timmon slitting necks on the line unattended, but even then he was a lingering presence, frequently prairie-dogging over his cubicle and peering through the smudged Plexiglas window to check on Timmon’s progress. Worse, he insisted on driving Timmon to the Wharf Side in the Goat, spiriting him away instead to the Bushwhacker for happy hour, where Krig proceeded to describe in stultifying detail
the texture, scent, and miraculous size of what he determined to be Sasquatch dung at a nearby lake.

The second day was hardly better. Krig’s presence was suffocating. He persisted with the basketball. His growing familiarity toward Timmon was harder to endure than anything Gooch had ever visited upon him in the darkness of their cell. At least Gooch didn’t like basketball. It hardly mattered to Timmon what Krig’s intentions might be or what doors Krig might open for him. Timmon didn’t want a break. He just wanted to be left alone.

At lunch, he narrowly escaped Krig under the pretense of meeting his parole officer.

“No prob,” said Krig. “You can take an extra hour if you need it. You need a ride?”

FRANKLIN BELL WAS
the first black person Timmon had seen since he left Clallam Bay. He was a little guy with salt and pepper hair, whose stature was diminished still further by a giant avocado-colored desk, in whose squeaking bowels he presently scanned for Timmon’s file. It was soon apparent that Bell compensated for his size with a hard-nosed exuberance.

“Taylor, Temple, Thatcher, Tillman,
bam! Thankyouverymuch.
” He pulled the file out, kicked his feet up on the desk and perused the contents of the manila folder, humming all the while a tune vaguely familiar to Timmon. Was that Don Henley? Was the black dude humming Don Henley? Bell tapped his foot in time, bobbed his eyebrows up and down, and kept on humming as he scanned the file. It
was
Don Henley! “Boys of Summer.”

Thirty-six, thought Franklin, doesn’t look it. Same age as the boy would be right now. Had it really been that long? Chasing the thought from his head, Franklin continued his humming survey. String of priors and two strikes. Nothing violent. Kid doesn’t look so tough when you get past the ink. Mother deceased, father deceased. Couple of community college classes. No driver’s license.

Finally, right about the time Henley saw a Deadhead sticker on a
Cadillac, Bell slammed the folder shut on the desktop. “Free at last! So whaddaya gonna do with that, Tillman? You gonna squander that opportunity?” But before Timmon could answer, Bell answered for him. “Hell no, you’re not. I’m here to make sure you don’t.” Bell spun around in his chair and opened a brown mini-fridge from which he produced a green and red carton. Kicking his legs up once more, he took a long pull from the carton, which left a thick white mustache upon his upper lip. Bell was apparently oblivious of the mustache.

“Mm-mm. I like me some eggnog, Tillman.
That’s
goodness. Like mothers milk. I know what you’re thinkin’, too, you’re thinkin’, ‘Now, what kinda dude drinks eggnog in June?’ Well, now, you take one look out that window and you tell me it looks like June, Tillman. Looks like goddamn Christmas to me.” Bell offered the carton to Timmon, and when Timmon declined, he took another pull himself. “
Damn,
that’s good. I gotta special order this shit. Damn near four bucks a carton this time of year.” Bell set the carton down and picked up the file again. “Native son,” he observed. “South-side boy myself, Tillman. South Halsted, one-bedroom apartment with four brothers and a sister. They tore that pesthole down, good riddance, paved it over with an interstate. Where you from?”

“Lincoln Park,” lied Timmon.

“Mmm,” commented Bell, doubtfully, glancing down at the gingerbread man and the blotch on Timmon’s wrist. But it didn’t bother him that Timmon was lying. He could empathize with the guy. Franklin knew what it was like to want to shed one’s beginnings. He’d been running out from under shadows as long as he could remember. “Been a long way down, eh, son?”

“Didn’t take long,” said Timmon.

“Fast worker. That’s good, Tillman. At least you’re decisive. We can work with that.” Bell drained the carton, spun around in his chair and let a jump-shot fly. It clunked off the rim of the green garbage can. He shrugged it off, and smiled. He still had an eggnog mustache. “Well,” he said. “Least I’m still in the game. Let’s talk turkey.” Bell folded his arms and leaned back even farther in his chair, which issued some plaintive squeaking. “Just what do you plan on doing with your life, son?”

“Gettin’ by.”

“That it?”

“That’s plenty.”

“That what they taught you in corrections?”

“Somethin’ like that.”

“Why Port Bonita? Says here you were in Aberdeen before your last stint.”

Timmon glanced out the window at the rain and shrugged. “Why not?”

“Plan on settlin’ down, do you?”

“Suppose so. Can’t go too far now, can I?”

“This ain’t no land of milk and honey, Tillman. I’m just warning you. A man needs to create his own breaks around here, a man needs to show a little hustle if he plans on gettin’ anywhere, you follow? Ain’t squat for work, and plenty of competition. Consider yourself lucky to have a job.”

Timmon nodded.

“Plenty of riffraff in these parts, too. How are you at resisting temptation, Tillman?”

Timmon cast a vague glance out at the rain once more. “Why comes temptation, but for man to meet and master and crouch beneath his foot.”

“Say what?”

“Browning.”

“The pitcher?”

“The dreamer.”

Franklin looked impressed, nodding his head slowly and hoisting an eyebrow. “Reader, huh?”

“Not by choice.”

“Says in the file you’re not a big talker.”

Timmon gave a nod.

“Well?”

“What’s to say.”

“Fair enough, I suppose. How about listenin’? Do much of that?”

“I hear a lot.”

“Good start, Tillman, I like your style. You’re a man who bides his words. A listener. Good set of ears can get a man a long way. Don’t stop listenin’ to them dreamers in your head, boy. They know some-thin’. And I know a thing or two, myself. And I want you to listen up, and listen good, because sooner you realize what I got to tell you, sooner you can make your life a masterpiece.”

It did not occur to Timmon to envision what sort of masterpiece Bell had created out of his own life, that is, a sixty-hour workweek, peptic ulcer, studio apartment behind a bowling alley, twenty-three consecutive months of excruciating celibacy. Instead, Timmon found himself clinging to Bell’s exuberance. And why not? Maybe there was a fresh start awaiting him at the end of Bell’s soliloquy. Maybe Port Bonita would prove to be a departure from Aberdeen. Or Lawrence, Kansas. Or Chicago. Gaspar said it was a kick-ass town. Krigstadt had made the place out to be some kind of Shangri-la for self-starters and misfits. So why not lean into Bell’s enthusiasm, why not listen to his promise of fresh starts, even if it meant setting certain realities aside?

Franklin could feel it, too — the kid was listening. These were the moments when he scored his victories. These were the moments that sustained the sterling record. This is where you broke a guy’s patterns, convinced him to try new approaches to the same old shit. This is where you convinced him to run a different team out there for the second half, convinced him to believe. These were the moments when the momentum swung. And if Franklin could push hard enough, he could turn a guy around, undo the first half as though it never existed.

“You’re the master of your own destiny, Tillman, and that’s a fact. Wrap it in all the poetry you see fit. Because that’s the truth. A man can pick his destiny. I’ve seen it. And he can do it right here in Port Bonita, too — with or without the shit economy and neverending rain. This is ground zero for your life, Tillman. So whaddaya gonna do with it? You gonna foul the nest, again? You gonna ignore your past mistakes? Surrender to your own apathy? Or”— here, Bell swung his legs down off the desk and practically had to stand on his chair in
order to reach across the desk and seize Timmon by the collar — “are you gonna reach into the future and grab life by the
nutsack
?”

Bell made it seem tactile. Almost like an act of aggression. Timmon could do aggression.

“You gotta dare to dream, Tillman. I got dudes like you comin’ in and out of my office all week long, smellin’ like fish — down in the face, angry folks. And you know why? ’Cause they’re chickenshit motherfuckers! I say, shit or get off the pot, Tillman! Quit wastin’ this bureau-crat’s time and go waste some more of his tax money sittin’ your white ass in a jail cell.” Releasing his grip, Bell lowered himself back into his squeaky chair then stood, walked to the corner, picked up the eggnog carton, and dunked it. He sat back down in his squeaky chair. “That there’s a high percentage shot. And that’s how you do it, Tillman. You gotta slam dunk your life. Think about the future you want for yourself. When you figure that out, the rest is easy. Find a hole, get yourself a head full of steam, grip that rock, and drive to the hoop. And like the man says, ‘Don’t look back, you can never look back!’”