Макс Коллинз - Spree

Angie McFee was wary of the Comforts, certainly, but dying violently never crossed her mind. She’d dated Lyle, after all. Well, “dated” wasn’t the word, really. She’d slept with him a few times. Sex with Lyle was energetic and fun, like your average aerobics workout. Unfortunately, conversation with Lyle was equally aerobic.

Before she drove out to the Comforts’ on this cool October evening, she got her little silver Mazda gassed up and washed. The car wasn’t quite dry, and beads of water glistened on the hood in the moonlight as she pulled off the main drag onto an asphalt road, perhaps twenty miles outside Jefferson City, Missouri. She was a petite pretty brunette of twenty-seven years, watching the moon on the hood of her car, a car the Comforts had helped buy.

It had been a shock when Lyle first suggested she meet his “pa.” Christ, it had been a shock to hear anybody in this day and age refer to their father as “Pa,” particularly without a trace of irony. It had similarly been a shock to see Lyle’s brow furrowing in something akin to thought, that thought manifesting itself in this suggestion that she meet his “pa.”

And Pa had been a shock, too. A tall, leathery farmer in coveralls and a plaid shirt with a shock (another shock!) of white hair and pale blue eyes with laugh crinkles. He had a pretty smile, Pa did, the only resemblance between him and Lyle, other than their basic lanky frame. Brown-eyed Lyle, whom she’d met in a trendy little singles bar, looked like a fashion page out of Playboy , he wore a creamy Miami Vice silk sport coat over a grayish-blue T-shirt, gray jeans, Italian shoes with no socks, a tanning spa tan, and a twenty-five-dollar haircut, when Jefferson City remained a six-dollar-haircut town. It was all so right for the fashion moment that it was a little wrong, but he had a great smile and curly brown hair and a fantastic bod and no sores on his lip. And so to bed.

Only Lyle also had a farmer drawl and a remedial reading vocabulary and a certain vacancy behind his eyes, all of which took a while to catch on to, because he was the strong silent type, the sort of brooder you assume is hiding deep thoughts behind all those pregnant pauses, when in fact those pregnant pauses prove never to give birth to anything at all, and within that pretty cranium there was, Angie had no doubt, a low and constant hum.

She had tried, on their third night together — each previous night being a month or so apart, no steady thing developing between them, just her own occasional need for some really terrific sex in the midst of her thus far fruitless search to find a better husband than the first one — to make some human connection with Lyle. She’d told him about her father’s store.

“It’s really pitiful,” she said, smoking nervously, sitting up in bed, pillow at her back, sheet pulled up but barely covering her small, pert breasts. At least she liked to think of them as pert. “Dad had this great little place, little hole-in-the-wall, where he sold nothing but meat.”

“Meat,” Lyle said, nodding. Lyle didn’t smoke.

“He’s a terrific butcher, Dad is, but a lousy businessman. When he had that hole-in-the-wall, strictly a butcher shop, with choice cuts and all, he was doing fine. Mom was keeping the books. It was great. Then he got ambitious.”

“Meat,” Lyle said.

“He thought he could do better in a bigger store — you know, a small supermarket. He thought people would come in for the great meat and buy their other food as well, save a trip, even if our prices were a little more expensive than the big discount supermarkets. Going in he knew that — knew he couldn’t compete with the prices that the big boys were able to give, because of, you know, volume.”

“Volume?” Lyle said. He narrowed his eyes, apparently wondering what noise levels had to do with the grocery business.

“Anyway, Dad’s dying with that white elephant...”

Lyle touched her arm. “I’m sorry,” he said. It was clear he had taken the word “dying” literally, and that “white elephant” was some rare disease.

“No, I just mean he’s losing his shirt,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t take that literally, too. “Our savings are gone, Mom’s too sick to work, he’s mortgaged up the wazoo. And there I am, with my business degree, stuck in the middle of a family business that can barely afford to pay me half of what I could get elsewhere.” She sighed. “But, what the hell. You got to be loyal to your family, right?”

“Right,” Lyle said, nodding again.

“So I’m keeping the books. Working in the store — sometimes behind one of the registers, which is demeaning, let me tell you. I’m glad my little boy can’t see me.”

“You have a boy?”

“Yeah, he lives with my ex. Steve’s remarried and I’m a lousy mother. I don’t think I ever want another. I mean, I love my son, but kids do get in the way.”

“Kids,” Lyle said, smiling, nodding.

“How old are you, Lyle?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Where do you work?”

“Like you. Family business.”

“Yeah, I know — you’ve said that a couple of times. But what do you do exactly?”

And that was when Lyle’s brow had furrowed suddenly, shockingly, in apparent thought.

“You keep the books?” he said.

“Yes...”

“At a grocery store?”

“Yeah, that’s right. So what?”

“You should talk to Pa.”

Pa, as it turned out, was Coleman Comfort, but, as he’d said, pale blue eyes twinkling like a slightly demented Walter Brennan, “My kith and kin all call me Cole.”

Cole Comfort’s farm, where all of their meetings had been held over the past year and a half, was off a back gravel road, on a cinder path. The two-story farmhouse seemed ramshackle somehow, despite being freshly aluminum-sided. Maybe it was the weedily overgrown yard, in which the remnants of various vehicles rusted in the process of becoming one with the universe, or the dense looming woods behind the house, where owls’ eyes and nameless critter howls seemed to invite you in but not out. Or maybe the sagging barn and decaying silo, which created suspicion as to what the house itself was like under its aluminum face-lift. Whatever the case, the Comfort place was hardly comforting and no place Angie wanted to visit.

And yet she had, once a month, for many months.

That first time, even though she had long since full well realized how thick Lyle was, the sight of the farm (and there was farmland adjacent, it just wasn’t worked by the Comforts) had made her suck in a quick breath of disbelief. “There’s money in it,” Lyle had said, “big money.” But how could there be big money here, in this Dogpatch dump? This looked like food stamp territory.

“Food stamps,” Cole Comfort had said, pouring her some Old Grand-Dad, straight up, in a fast-food restaurant giveaway glass with the Road Runner on it. They sat in the living room, where reigned a giant-screen TV on which, at the moment, Billy Joel’s face was the size of a card table. The pores in his nose were like poker chips.

Lyle was watching MTV. Cole, it seemed, hated MTV, so Lyle was listening through headphones. Giant images of singers silently shouting, dancers moving to invisible beats, were an oppressive flickering presence. Other images fought MTV for attention: six, count them, six black velvet paintings of John Wayne, paintings of various sizes but all in rough rustic frames with Wayne in western regalia, beat out the mere three jumpsuited Elvis Presleys, all of them riding walls paneled in a dark brown photographic wood grain. Against one wall, with snakes of cable crawling out of it toward the big-screen TV, was an open cabinet on wheels, in which stacks of stereo and video equipment perched, red lights dancing and sound meter needles wiggling. The furniture, all of it expensive, varied in style — from Early American to modern — but the chairs and several couches were consistent in one thing: they were covered with clear vinyl. The carpet was a green shag, like grass from outer space.