Sarah Weinman - Sex, Thugs, Roll, and Rock & Roll

“The sky is part of the color of that bird,” Bob said. “In a blue sky, the bird looks a certain way and in a gray sky, the bird looks another way. The bird doesn’t pick the color of the sky, he just lives in it. He doesn’t try to change it. I remember my grandfather telling me that.” He was crying now. My father and Rich sat close to him and I watched the boat. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Rich stood up and took over, heading back to the dock. My father stayed close to Bob until we were getting off the boat.

“It’s hard to be off drugs,” Bob said. We were headed towards my truck.

“Everything’s hard,” my father said. “You can do it.”

“Good luck,” Rich said.

Bob and I drove back to the farm and when I came out of the house, he was sitting on the porch, looking at the sky. I fixed us some dinner and we both went to bed. I got up at 2:00 a.m. to take a look around. To be safe. The house phone rang and I picked it up.

“Hey,” Bob said. “Are you awake? I thought I saw a light.”

“Yes,” I said. “Checking things out.”

“I’m going back to sleep,” he said.

“See you late tomorrow,” I said. “I’ve got to work.”

“Sure,” Bob said. “I’ll fix dinner.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

We went fishing as much as we could that summer. We went out on the river with my father and Rich. One time, Bob’s pole bent so much, we all thought he’d hooked a sturgeon. It would have been a once-in-a-lifetime catch. Whatever it was spat the hook before he could land it. The next weekend, we were out on the river again.

“What did you do?” I said. Bob had been staying on the farm for five weeks and we were sitting on the porch, eating sandwiches.

“I counted cards at the high-limit table,” he said. He finished his sandwich. “More than once. At more than one casino, all along the Gulf Coast.” He scratched his head. “I learned I could count cards when I was in the Army,” he said. “Wish I never had.”

“How much did you get away with?” I said.

“Not enough to be worth this,” he said. He inhaled his cigarette. “That’s for sure.” He took another drag and then went on. “It used to be like I couldn’t tell if I was awake or dreaming. I had this big pile of chips and I’d cash out and the money would pile up.”

I nodded. The sky was night-dark except for the stars and on the edge of the mountains, we could see the static charges of heat lightning, flashing.

Bob seemed like he was talking to himself. “I had that money and off I’d go, on a bender. I shot dope again. I drank all the time. I did everything I could get my hands on. Until it was like I wasn’t real anymore. I came home to my house at one point and thought people had broken in, that’s what a wreck it was.”

“That sounds bad,” I said.

“Then the pit boss at the one casino, he must have seen me doing something because the next time I went to play, they wouldn’t let me sit at the table. So I went down the street and counted cards there and took them for all they could handle.” He shook his head. “Men followed me out of the casino and tried to beat me up, but I got away. I realized they must have put a price on my head. That’s when I decided to come up here.”

“What would they gain by killing you?” I said.

“Nothing,” he said. “Probably a couple thousand dollars from the casino management firm.”

“Can you pay them back?” I said.

“I don’t even know how many times I won off them, or what casinos I won it from. I took a couple loans from bookies to cover myself. It’s an ugly mess.”

“That sounds bad,” I said.

“I came home one night late and turned on the TV and I think I fell asleep. I woke up and there was a cowboy and Indian movie on and I started to lose my mind. I thought, that’s all they show, is us being killed.” He pointed at his head. “My own mind is my worst enemy.” He looked over at me. “What did you do?”

“Got into a scrape up in Maine,” I said.

He nodded. “Did your father ever tell you about the scrape I got into in the late seventies?”

“No,” I said. “He didn’t.” The lights from planes moved slowly through the night sky, among the stillness of the stars.

Bob put his cigarette out. “I tried to make some money as a big game scout. Signed on with a guy out of Florida named Mackenzie, who arranged hunting trips to Africa for wealthy clients.”

“What did you take them hunting for?” I said.

“When they signed up, supposedly it was for antelope. Large game deer, mostly. But we were really going over to shoot rhinos,” Bob said. “Everybody knew that.” He pointed through the darkness to the little cabins. “Imagine an animal the size of one of those cabins, faster than your truck and basically plated with armor.”

“I’ve seen them on TV,” I said.

“Well, I saw it in real life,” he said. “That last afternoon, a rhino came out of the grass after the truck and we all started shooting. Five men. I had one of those newer Mauser rifles, but it was still bolt action, and I’m slamming that thing home and firing and the rhino hit the truck like a fully stacked freight train, wham .” He made a flattening motion with his hands, then lifted them into the air. “Up I went and down I came.”

“What happened?” I said.

“I couldn’t fire anymore, because I was out of shells. The rhino stomped and gored everyone but me. Put a hole in Mackenzie that I could see through. The ground was so soaked with blood that the natives who rescued me were afraid the smell of death would bring other animals to the spot. The natives took me to a ranger station.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Sometimes,” Bob said, “I used to stay awake for days at a time, so I wouldn’t have to dream about that stuff and what I’d seen in Vietnam. Drugs helped me keep the past quiet, in the short term. Till it got the best of me.” He paused. “Did you ever try to wash someone else’s blood off you?”

“No,” I said.

“For some reason,” Bob said, “it’s hard to get it off. Almost as if blood holds onto your skin, because it knows your skin is still alive.”

We picked up the plates and put them in the kitchen sink. I saw him smoke another cigarette on his small cabin porch before going inside.

It was about 4:00 a.m. when I heard the car door slam in the yard. I flipped the lights on downstairs and outside and opened my bedroom window. I put the barrel of the shotgun out first and racked the slide.

“What do you want?” I said.

The two men blinked against the light. “We’re looking for somebody,” the one man said.

“This is private property,” I said. “I’m calling the cops.”

“We’ll be gone before they get here,” the man said. He had a pistol holstered on his right side.

“Get back in that car or you’ll need an ambulance,” I said. “Last warning.”

I hoped that Bob was awake at that point, ready to back me up if shooting started. They weren’t sure where he was, so he could get off a couple rounds from the middle cabin before they knew what hit them.

Both men walked back to their car, turned it around, and spit gravel going back down the road.

In the morning, I walked to the middle cabin and opened the door. There was nothing there. It looked as though no one had ever slept there at all. I went around to the back barn and found what I was looking for. Under the tarp that used to protect the old Jeep was Bob’s station wagon. A set of New York plates was missing too. Bob was on the road again. I called my father and told him.

I came home from work in the middle of the week and found everything torn apart. Whoever those men were, they must have come back while I was gone. The beds were out of the cabins, stuff spread across the lawn by the pond. The big barn door was open, exposing the cars. The tarp was off the station wagon and the doors were open. The door to the main house had been jimmied open and sat on bent hinges. But there was nothing to find.