Robert Bennett - The Company Man

His eyes closed a little. “A bastard.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” she said slowly.

Hayes stared into the corner of the room. His eyes were wide and empty, no doubt seeing faces that he wished he could forget. “She was with child when she died,” he said. “We were going to have a baby together. Can you believe that?”

Samantha nearly shook her head, but stilled herself and stayed quiet.

“A baby girl, maybe,” he said. “I would have liked a baby girl. With fat baby hands and fat baby feet. I don’t know what I would have named her. Gloria, or Susan, or something. And I don’t know if she or he or it would have been like… like me. But I often wonder about it. About how it could have been. Two children, raising a child. I’d have never left, never seen the world. Just me, and the wife, and the little one. Fucking momma and poppa. What a crazy thought. Fuck me. Who knows how things could have been.”

“Is that why you do this?” she asked.

“Do what?”

“Follow people. Try to set things to right.”

“I don’t set things to right. Not ever. Usually I just make them worse.” He squinted at her. “You’re sure you want to come tomorrow?”

She smiled a little. “Yes. I miss my job.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I miss running around with you.”

“I never ran.”

“No.” She laughed. “That’s true. You didn’t.”

Garvey returned with the blankets. “Here you go,” he said, and handed them over. “Do not vomit in the middle of the night. Do you understand me? If you do, I’m not cleaning it up.”

“I understand perfectly,” Hayes said, and he took the pillow and stuffed it behind his head. Then he spread the blankets out across his legs. “Where’s my address?”

Garvey took an envelope from his back pocket and handed it to Hayes, who snatched it greedily. “It took a lot of weight to pull that, you know,” said Garvey. “Your friend is a hard man to find. He was barely recorded at all.”

“Yes. He wouldn’t be.” Hayes opened the envelope and peered at it owlishly. “Good. Now. You can all stay here watching me if you want. But I do intend to sleep. Very hard and very soon, so…” He waved toward the back bedroom. “Go away.”

“Jesus,” Garvey said.

Hayes rolled over and stuffed his face in the corner of the sofa. He lay there perfectly still until they could only assume he was asleep. What an odd little family we have, Samantha thought to herself. Two jobless parents taking care of a wayward son. She almost laughed.

“What?” said Garvey. But she shook her head and led him away.

Garvey and Samantha sat in his darkened bedroom, the box of files set on the mattress between them like a needy child. Garvey opened the lid slightly, peeking in through the crack at the papers within, then put it back and looked away.

“It’s all there?” he asked.

“It looks like it, yes,” said Samantha.

“Jesus. Jesus Christ.”

“It’s enough to hang Brightly,” she said. “And Tazz. Probably more.”

“But there’s nothing on the murders?”

“Not on the murders, no. Hayes is just guessing there. But Mr. Hayes is terribly good at guessing.”

“Yeah. Yes, he is.” Garvey placed a hand on the box again and took a breath. “I’m afraid,” he said.

“I know. I am, too.”

“You know, I lied to you.”

“What? When?”

“When I was talking about my gun. I told you I forgot it all the time. But that’s not true. It’s just heavy. It’s got this heaviness to it. When I put it on, it just drags me down. I hate it, so I leave it behind. But this…” He tapped the cover of the box. “This is heavier than anything. It hurts just to have this near me.”

“Are you going to do it? Go to Collins with this?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Well, no. I just have to. People have gotten killed over Tazz. And it was all nothing. Someone needs to tell people about that.” He blinked slowly in the darkness. In the alabaster light from the lamps outside he looked bloodless. “I suppose it’ll have to be me.”

“And then what will happen?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that’ll be the chink in the armor. The chance to wipe all this shit from our backs and stand up clean. Or maybe not. Maybe it’ll just be papers, to be burned and forgotten.”

He opened the box and began taking out the files, carefully looking over each of the notations she had made. It somehow pleased her to see his methodical approach, carefully raising each sheet to catch the lamplight from outside, then squinting to read it, then laying it back down. She could see the librarian in him then, handling these little papers as though they were desperately important and fragile, and yet she could also see something of a priest in him as well, doing his daily rituals for some unspoken higher power, and hoping that with each repeated action he could enforce a structure on the world around him.

After a while he noticed her looking at him. “What?” he said.

“Come here,” she said.

And he did.

She awoke before dawn and slipped out of the bed. She turned, naked, and looked at him where he lay, curled in the cream of the blankets, pillow pressed to his face. She smiled in spite of herself. He was a supremely awkward man lying down, too large for any bed and all elbows and knees when a bedmate. She did not want to wake him, so she dressed silently and then leaned down and placed one gentle kiss beside his ear. He did not even move, still deep in slumber.

When she walked out Hayes was gone from the couch. She thought for a moment, then opened the front door as quietly as she could and walked down to the street. As she passed the courtyard statue she suddenly became aware that someone was walking beside her. She glanced to her left and saw his little blond head bobbing along at her shoulder, cigarette jauntily dancing in his lips.

“I’ve already called us a cab,” he said.

“All right.”

They went far to the southwest of the city, to where the land became rocky scrub scarred with abandoned paths. Hayes directed the cabbie up past one field to where the roads turned from pavement into dirt and gravel, the sort of roads that had only recently come to know cars.

Samantha reached into her bag and took out a folded sheet of paper. She opened it slightly. Garvey’s sketch of Skiller looked up at her, its graphite eyes blank and empty. “This man that we’re seeing,” she said. “You haven’t told me anything about him.”

“No,” said Hayes. “That’s true, I haven’t.”

“Who is he?”

Hayes looked out the cab window and sucked his teeth. “You know what I did before Brightly? Before McNaughton?”

“Well. Yes, a little.”

“He was there with me during all that.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Long, long ago.”

“Will he be glad to see you?”

“Oh, I very much doubt it. But right now the main issue is if he’s alive, to be frank.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“Well, if my hunch is right, and those boys from the Three Ring were involved in whatever the hell all this is, and if Tazz is gone, too, then whoever set this all up would dearly like to get rid of the last witness, wouldn’t they?”

Samantha’s mouth opened in horror. “Oh, my God, I’d never thought of that. Aren’t you worried, Mr. Hayes?”

Hayes thinned his eyes, thinking. “Mm. No. Not especially.”

“Why is that?”

“Because Spinsie was always very good at staying alive, and staying careful. He was almost as good as me, in fact.” He returned to looking out the window, but glanced back and added, “Almost, but not quite.” Then he saw the sketch in her hands and frowned. “Where did you get that?”