Dennis Tafoya: The Dope Thief

He kept to the left of a screen of maples, moving quietly and staying aware of his position, ears straining. He began to sweat immediately, his legs getting wet from the high grass. There was nothing to see except the trees and the fields on either side of him. He looked at his watch and back down the way he had come to where his car was just barely visible now and began to hear a dog bark somewhere.

Near the crest of the hill he stopped and swung the knapsack off his back and kneeled down to rummage in it. He lifted the pistol out and quietly racked the slide, putting a round in the chamber and then putting it back in the bag. He took out a pair of binoculars and picked up the bag, moving slowly up the hill. Finally on his right a farm house came into view, partially obscured by pines. A dog was tied up outside to a stake in the ground, barking itself hoarse at nothing. There was a Ford pickup collapsing in on itself by the side of the drive and a kids’ swing set with just the chains hanging, the swings long gone, the chains pinging off the rusted poles. There was a black barn with the doors rotting in.

Ray squatted by a tree and put the glasses to his eyes. The lenses fogged up, and he wiped them with the tail of his T-shirt. The wind picked up, and rainwater ran out of the leaves over his head, soaking his back. A man with a black T-shirt, a leather vest, and a ponytail came out of the house with a beer can in his hand. He threw the can at the dog and lit a cigarette. The dog sat and watched the man expectantly, his ears back. There was a blue van in the driveway and a motorcycle next to the rotting porch. One of the windows upstairs was broken, and a curtain hung through where the glass was gone. After a minute a woman with wild hair and thick hips came out wearing a green T-shirt and shorts and carrying two bottles of water. The guy with the ponytail took one and dumped it over his head and into his eyes, and the woman smoothed back his hair with her hands.

Ray ran the glasses over the house, the van, the yard. He could hear thunder far away, and the rain began to pick up again. He went into his bag and came out with a thin plastic parka and put it on and then settled onto a tree stump and picked up the glasses again. He smelled the faint, acrid odor of charcoal burning. The rain on the parka made popping noises close to his ears. He let his mind drift, thinking about de cades ago when the house was new and someone brought a young girl here to show her where she was going to live. Someone thinking this was the place they would get old and die and maybe being okay with that. Christ, but he was getting strange in his old age.

After a while he walked back down the hill and along the road, back past the driveway and along a fence that bordered the other edge of the property. The ground was more exposed, open to view from the neighbors, and he walked just to the crest of the hill. He sat down in the wet grass and made sketches of the layout: the house, the barn, the dog, the tree line. This side of the hill had a view of a valley dotted with houses, stands of trees. Six or seven cows stood together on a hillside a hundred yards away. Horse -flies found him and began to bite him through his jeans. He retreated down the hill, swatting at his legs.

LATER, RAY DROVE back down through the hills into Doyle stown and parked on a side street. It was a Sunday afternoon, the day quiet and the air thick with humidity. He put a baseball cap over his wet hair and walked the main drag, stopping at a book-store to get a paper. He stood near the door, feeling his wet clothes cool and holding his paper. There was a circular rack with ten- dollar DVDs near the register, and he stood and pushed it around. One of the faces looked familiar, and he picked up the case, finding it to be the movie he’d watched the night before. Gun Crazy.

A woman stood at the register holding her glasses up to the light, and then she breathed on them and wiped them with the tail of her shirt. She put them on and took them off again while Ray watched her. She swore under her breath, then noticed him standing there.

“Sorry about that.” Her smile was crooked, and she looked down. “We’re not supposed to, you know, swear in front of the customers.” He smiled back and shrugged to show he didn’t mind.

She pointed at his hand. “Ring that up?” she said, and he handed her the box, his mind blank. He felt his face coloring.

“This is a good one.”

“I watched it last night. On TV. You know, not the DVD. Or why would I be getting it now?” Jesus Christ. “I never saw them before, the couple in it, but I liked it.”

“John Dall, he never really did anything else that was, you know, famous. The girl, Peggy Cummins, she was in Night of the Demon.”

“A horror thing?” He was conscious of the way he talked, the words forming in his mouth. Of not cursing, trying to seem okay. She had a small mole near her mouth, and her smell was sweet and faint, like an apple smelled when you held it to your face.

“Oh, yeah, a great one, with Dana Andrews. Directed by Tourneur. Great stuff, very…” She waggled her fingers and widened her eyes in mock terror. “You don’t get nightmares, do you?”

Ray thought she must be in her midtwenties, maybe thirty? Younger than him, he thought, but he was no good at ages. She came around from behind the register and went to another display and flipped through some more cases. She bit her lip and pulled her glasses off her face to use like a magnifying glass. Her hair was dark, and she wore it in a braid, something that always caught his eye. He thought of her in a room somewhere braiding her hair in front of a mirror. Putting on makeup, those little pencils and liners a whole branch of knowledge he knew nothing about. Not that she wore much makeup.

“Shit. Sorry. These things aren’t worth a goddamn. Sorry. Doesn’t look like we have it.” She was tall, maybe taller than him, with a slim build under loose clothes. A gauzy skirt, one of those sweaters that looks like it has thread pulls all over it. Dark colors, like he wore. Browns and blacks and dark blues. Did that mean something?

He wanted to keep talking, had nothing to say. He nodded.

“Thanks for looking. I’ll keep an eye out.” He spent a long time looking through his pockets for the right change. “Night of the Demons.”

“Demon, right.” She smiled at him. There were lines by her eyes that made her seem like someone who would be nice to people. Ray looked down. He held up his bag, smiled, and waved on his way to the door, and she watched him go.

He sat in the car a while. The sun wanted to come out, he thought, but then fat drops started hitting the windshield and the roof, loud as pistol shots. It began to hail. Chunks of ice pounded the car, making a muffled roar that was somehow pleasant. He liked being inside and watching it come down. People ran by: two young girls, holding hands; a fat man with a bent umbrella. He opened his paper, closed it again. He was drawn to those women who wore long clothes and dark colors. He thought it meant something, dressing like that. It seemed to him they were protecting themselves against some possible danger, and he thought it wise to be onto the world, to know things could go wrong.

He wondered if he asked her out, how long it would take for her to get on his nerves, or how long until she got bored with him. Isn’t that what happened? She seemed a lot smarter than he was. There were people he met who seemed to have a whole language he didn’t know. He wasn’t stupid, but what he knew was what he had taught himself. He haunted the bookswaps, buying paper bags full of Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey. Books about World War II, black holes. He had opened a book of short stories by a woman named Amy Hempel and couldn’t stop reading it. Bought it for ninety cents and went to the library in Warrington to get more. Something in it made him wish he’d finished school, could somehow get to know smart women who knew there was a terrible joke inside of everything that happened to you.