George Pelecanos - Nick's trip

On one of those dull gray days in late February, as I was sifting through the mail at the Spot, I opened an envelope addressed to me from Billy Goodrich. Inside the envelope a check had been made out in my name for services rendered.

The bar was slow that day, and it gave me time to sit next to the register and consider the check. As I did, I looked into the bar mirror, stared at my reflection between the bottles of Captain Morgan’s and Bacardi Dark, and I thought about the night that Billy Goodrich had walked into the Spot, and how I had been staring into that same mirror, between those very bottles, that night.

The moment gave me the feeling that there was something dangling, something left to do. I stared harder, and my eyes began to burn from it, and I heard someone ordering a drink from far away, but now I wasn’t listening.

I turned the bar phone toward me and punched Billy’s number into the grid.

“Hello.”

“Billy, it’s Nick.”

Billy paused. “Nick, how you doin’?”

“Good.”

“You get my check? I sent it-”

“I got it.”

“It’s okay, isn’t it?”

“It’s fine.”

Billy cleared his throat. “What’s up, Nick?”

“We got some unfinished business, Billy.”

There was another pause, longer this time. I listened to the sounds of the Spot. “I’ve been waiting for your call,” he said.

I said, “It’s time we settled up.”

“That’s what I want too.”

“Where and when?”

Billy thought things over. “Down at April’s property, at Cobb Island. That’s where it is, right?”

“That’s right, Billy. That’s where it is.”

“You working tomorrow?”

“I’m off.”

“I’ll pick you up, then, at your place. About eleven?”

“Eleven’s fine.”

“See you at eleven.”

“All right.”

I hung the receiver in its cradle, waited for a dial tone, and phoned Hendricks at the station in La Plata. When he told me what I needed to know, I said good-bye, and stood there for a long while, running my finger along the thin scar on my n scar ocheek, a permanent reminder of the bungalow on Gallatin Street.

I went to the men’s room to wash my face. When I was done I stood outside the bathroom door, rubbing my hands dry on the blue rag that hung on the side of my jeans. I walked back into the bar and finished off the remainder of my shift.

Billy’s white Maxima pulled up in front of my apartment the next morning at eleven sharp. On the way out the door I scratched the soft area behind my cat’s gnarled ear, felt her head push into my hand, and watched her eye slowly shut. I left her outside on the stoop with a dish of salmon mixed with dry meal and locked the door behind me.

The sun that day was weak, high above an unbroken sheet of gray clouds, and I zipped my jacket to the neck. I walked to the Maxima and opened the passenger door, sliding onto the leather seat. Billy offered his hand, and I shook it.

“Where’s Maybelle?”

“I took her back to the pound,” Billy said. “I’m not a dog lover to begin with, you know that. Anyway, she was never mine.”

Billy wore his logoed royal blue jacket with blue jeans and Timberland boots. His hair was long now, blond and disheveled, almost exactly as it had been fifteen years earlier. But there was a stretched quality to his smooth face, a pained tightness around his azure eyes.

“Let’s stop for some coffee, Billy, on the way out.”

“Sure,” Billy said, looking me over. “You can take that jacket off, man. I’ve got this heat workin’ pretty good.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

We drove down North Capitol, cutting east around Union Station, following Pennsylvania to Branch Avenue, past car dealership row at the commercial hub of Marlow Heights, then down Route 5 through the ruin that was Waldorf. The road flattened as 5 became 301, the strip malls and antique dealers breaking the brown, leafless countryside.

Billy pulled over in La Plata for a couple of burgers, and a few miles farther on we stopped again at the unmarked pool hall that advertised on/off sale. I bought a pint of Jim Beam from the woman with the raspberry birthmark and made a phone call from inside the bar and then returned to the Maxima. Billy gunned it back onto 301, and we continued south.

At 257 Billy turned left across the highway, passing the hardware-and-bait store with the John Deere sign in the window. We stayed on the highway this time, Billy keeping the Maxima at sixty-five. He hadn’t spoken much on the ride down, though the silence was not uncomfortable; there was little between us left to damage. I pulled the pint of Jim Beam from my jacket, cracked the seal, and had a taste. I offered the same to Billy.

“Too early,” Billy said. ght Suit yourself.” I looked out the window at a row of evergreens blurred against a brown stretch of tobacco land and pasture. I had another drink and tightened the white cap onto the neck of the bottle.

Billy downshifted at the gravel road that marked the entrance to April Goodrich’s property and turned left. We took the road into the woods and out through the open field, toward the creek. Billy coasted and came to a stop beneath the hickory tree that stood next to the trailer.

“We can walk from here,” he said.

“Walk where?”

“Into the woods, right?”

I looked out toward the creek. “Whatever you want, Billy.”

Billy said, “Wait here. I’ll be right out.”

Billy got out of the car and went to the door of the trailer, where he used his key to enter. I watched him step inside, and after a while I got out of the Maxima and closed the passenger door.

I stood with my hands in my jacket, facing the creek. A circle had opened in the sheet of clouds, and a tubular shaft of sunlight shot through the circle, illuminating a section of the creek. Some barn swallows darted through the light, just off the dock. The clouds closed and the light was wiped away. I heard the trailer door shut, and I turned.

Billy stepped across the concrete patio, the old Remington shotgun from the trailer cradled in his arms. He stopped, reached into his pocket, and withdrew two shells. He shook the shells next to his ear, heard the rattle of buckshot, and thumbed the shells into the shotgun’s broken breach.

“We going hunting, Billy?”

“No,” Billy said. “Guy got killed on this property, two years back, in those woods. Fuckin’ rednecks get drunk, shoot at anything. I don’t walk back in there without this shotgun, not anymore.” He nodded toward the line of trees, three hundred yards west across the field. “We’ll go in over there.”

“I’m with you. Let’s go.”

We walked over the winter wheat ground cover, through pockets of mud spotted in the hard earth. The sun broke through again and retreated. In the open field the wind was damp and cold, and it blew Billy’s hair back on his scalp.

At the end of the field we cut right and walked along the tree line, passing a matted deer carcass in a ditch at the edge of the woods. Fifty yards later there was a break in the brush and trees, and we took it. I looked behind to get my bearings; the trailer, the hickory tree, and the car sat dwarfed on the open land, very far away.

The trail narrowed and dipped, and ended at a thin stream that ran down toward the creek. We followed the stream northwest, deeper in the woods, to a marshy area, where tadpoles swam through leaves beneath the last of the winter’s ice, and then on through a section of high grass that had been flattened by sleeping deer. After that the ground became a bed of soft needles, and we were in a forest of oak and tall pine, the thickness of the pine of the trees broken by the occasional holly that grew underneath. We walked through the forest for nearly a mile, until it seemed as if we were deep inside of it, and we reached a small clearing near another marsh. Billy said then that we should stop, and I had a seat on the trunk of a fallen oak that had begun to rot before the freeze.