Stephen Markley - Ohio

“You’re paying me two grand to carry it, and you don’t know what it is?”

“I guess.” She considered the brick. “It’s complicated.”

Bill pulled his shirt on, popping the buttons back in place.

“Why me?”

“You were in the area, and I knew I could trust you.”

“How’d you know that?”

She motioned for him to follow her to the kitchen. “I’ll get you that drink.”

Her ass swished in front of him through the sweats, juicier with the pregnancy. Her shirt rode up just enough that he could see the butterfly tattoo, the ink now faded. He imagined scraping it away a layer at a time with a razor blade.

Over the last decade he’d followed her movements only through refractions and reflections from other sources. What frustrated him the most was that he knew he could have helped her. After she dropped out of Toledo after just one semester, she returned to the same provincial piece-of-dawdling-shit town that she’d sworn on all those nights in the backseat of his car she would never go back to. He didn’t even want to think of all the one-act men she’d kept busy with. It killed him to imagine what the father of this child must be like, how he must think, dream, behave, and love.

“Drugs?” he asked, nodding to the brick now resting on the kitchen counter.

“It’s not important.” She poured vodka over ice cubes in a coffee mug.

“Except who pays that much money to haul one little brick of coke or heroin or Oxy?” wondered Bill. “No way is that worth two grand on the street.”

Kaylyn’s eyes didn’t move from the package. “Doesn’t matter what it is. Just that we’re getting paid for it.”

She was lying. He went to the kitchen, and she handed him the drink.

“I’m thinking counterfeit thousand-dollar bills,” he said. “Or smuggled Chinese microchips.” She smiled without teeth. He raised his mug. “Or Marsellus Wallace’s soul.” The vodka smelled pleasantly isopropyl and tasted of relief. Out here on the edges of the fracturing economy, people muled mysterious packages back and forth across the scorched American landscape. Getting all the dirty deeds done.

“Not your problem anymore,” she said. She opened the silverware drawer and reached beneath the divider. She handed him an envelope. “You can count it.”

Bill accepted it and wondered at the odds that the other half would still be in his truck. “Not necessary.” He stuffed the envelope in his back pocket. “You didn’t really answer my question. Why not go down and get it yourself?”

“I don’t have a car. Plus, this doesn’t make travel all that easy.” She rubbed her belly affectionately. Bill watched her. This story was such garbage. He wondered how much that even mattered to him. He wondered how blinded he was by seeing her after all this time. He drank.

“So who’s the father, Kay?”

He felt the sensation that people called the heart moving into the throat, but that didn’t exactly describe it. It was more the throat closing off in anticipation of dread.

“It’s such a long story, Bill. Let’s just say he’s still deciding if he’s sticking around, and I’m pretty far from sure I even want him to.”

Her face morphed into those of his dead friends: Rick and Ben. For a moment she looked like Lisa, until her freckles and eyes returned. He blinked and tried to keep his voice even. “What does that mean?”

Her eyes darted to every part of the narrow kitchen: the saucepan soaking in the sink, an owl clock on the wall shifting its eyes back and forth with each tick of a second. She palmed her swollen belly. “Sometimes I’ll sneak a glass of wine. The doctor said it’s okay every once in a while, you know? Why don’t we go out back and you just let it lie. Okay?”

And because it meant she’d spend a drink’s worth of time with him, he accepted.

Out on her back stairs, beneath the frozen ligature of the stars, she sat a couple steps up from Bill facing the yard while he reclined against the faded spindles of the railing. He told her about visiting Rick’s grave earlier in the night. “A mostly purposeless endeavor,” he finished, with a shrug and a chug.

Kaylyn bit her thumbnail, peeled it off, and flicked it to the cement. “I haven’t been out there in a while. I’ll see his parents around sometimes, but…”

Marty and Jill, prototypical kind, plainspoken midwesterners. He thought of Marty with his white walrus mustache giving him shit about staking out salmon night. The backyard looked out over a cement walkway leading to a dingy single-car garage. This path was flanked on either side by strips of pale grass. The fence obscured almost any view of the neighboring homes, so they only had the dome of the sky above. There were stars in this dome, and they were mighty and beautiful.

“Do you miss him?” said Bill, though he did not want to hear the response.

She was quiet for a long time. “Not sure I know how to answer that. It’s messed up but when I heard, I was… relieved, I guess. He’d never come home, and I’d never have to face him again. I got to see my dad drop dead at dinner, but having to spend all that time with Marty and Jill at the funeral, then the parade, was one of the worst things. I don’t know. Just how hard parents can cry.”

“Do you think Rick knew about us?”

She sipped the wine she’d poured from a box. Delicately licked the purple stain off her upper lip. “I don’t know. I know he would’ve forgiven me.”

He scrambled the ice cubes at the bottom of his mug, then cradled it gently in both hands, the way you would a baby chick. Bill thought of how he’d felt when she stopped returning his calls, that cold, comingled rage and grief. He and Rick had that in common till the end.

“He had our lives here planned out down to when he’d get the head coaching job. Then you and I got, you know, close. And you always wanted to go out and live life. You won’t remember this, but one time, maybe junior year, we were all at Vicky’s after a dance and you were going on about how you wouldn’t stop before you’d seen both the northern lights and the Antarctic ice. That’s exactly how you put it: the northern lights and the Antarctic ice.”

“Haven’t seen either.”

“Yeah, but it mattered to you. It sounded very brave and romantic to a girl who’d never been on an airplane.” She bit into a nail. “You had this hunger that Rick never did.”

He felt that pang in his throat again and the cool bore of the wind. He knew seduction was just another con.

Bill took the photograph from his back pocket. He unfolded it, handed it to Kaylyn.

“Senior year. Homecoming.”

She took it like it was made of ethylene glycol, held it in that way people hold old analog photos, with their fingers on the sides, afraid to get their smudgy prints on the surface.

She studied it a moment before handing it back, voice anodyne. “We look like babies.” He folded the picture, his eye catching Lisa’s sultry squint, Kaylyn’s purple pornographic kiss, Rick’s playful menace, Harrington’s goofy-ass fedoraed smirk, his own vanishing face flaking into oblivion.

He pulled the pack of cigarettes from his pocket and chucked one between his lips. Lit it, sucked in yet more poison. Kaylyn did not object.

“I was at the bar tonight and ran into a bunch of people from high school. And you know, I found Dan Eaton while I was driving around. He was just walking along the side of the road, looking like a ghost crawled up his ass and into his eyes. Wouldn’t surprise me if he’s homeless in five years living under a bridge. That’s what happens to kids like him. Sometimes I can’t believe how much we’ve lost. And even that’s only a fucking omen for what we might have left to lose.”