Ben Winters - World of Trouble

“Oh, and Billy, what I wanted to ask: Do you know anything about the station itself?”

“Nah.”

“When it was built? Whether there’s a basement?”

“Man, I just said I don’t know anything about it.” Billy’s big tailgate-party smile wavers. Sandy wanders over to the home-brew setup, smiling vacantly. Billy is asking himself, how long am I supposed to give this guy? How many minutes out of however many minutes remain for the stranger with the notebook and the questions, who can offer nothing in return?

“Thank you, Billy,” I say, and close my notebook. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“No sweat, brother,” he says, walking away. “I gotta go and kill Augustus.”

Now it’s time to leave, it really is. The moon is up.

But I stand inside the RV with Sandy, watching Billy select and slaughter the final chicken of this twenty-four-hour period. Houdini remains outside, at the edge of the coop, his chin lowered in his paws, staring warily at Billy as he stalks among the waddling birds. Now there’s nothing left. Billy has got long yellow gloves on, pulled up almost to his elbows, and a heavy butcher’s apron over his bare upper body, tufts of black chest hair sprouting up over the top of the apron. The coop looks new; the crossbeams, connecting from post to post to post and strung with chicken wire, are of pine wood, smooth and regular two-by-fours, newly cut and precisely measured. The posts themselves are concrete. At the base of one of the posts of the coop is stamped a small three-letter logo, the single word JOY in all caps.

“Hey. Hey,” I say suddenly. “Hey, Sandy. That chicken coop.”

“Nice, huh?” She’s transfixed, watching Billy in his yellow gloves lift doomed Augustus out of the crowd.

“Sandy, who built that coop for you all?”

“The chicken coop?”

“Yes, right. Who built it?”

“This guy,” she says through a yawn. “This Amish guy.”

“Amish guy?”

Billy and the chicken a blur at the periphery of my vision. My mind rushing and racing. Billy lifts the bird by the neck, lifts it high as if considering the weight. Houdini’s eyes follow the squawking, flapping victim.

This Amish guy, Sandy says, Billy encountered down in Rotary proper. “He was in town, putting up signs, basically. Odd jobs, concrete work. Will work for food, you know.” She looks at me, sees my intent expression—concrete work, I’m thinking, just two little words, concrete work—she keeps talking. “It was funny, actually, I was just telling Billy we had to make ourselves a coop for these damn things, and he says he’s got no idea how to do that. Half hour later, we run into these guys.”

“These guys? There were more than one of the Amish guys?”

“No. One Amish guy. A big guy, older guy, big thick beard, black with gray in it. Must have come from down county, that’s where they live out here. But he had a couple of foreigners with him, you know?”

“Foreigners, as in CIs.”

“Yeah. Exactly. CIs. Confused-looking sons of bitches. Chinese maybe? I don’t know. But they didn’t say a word, they just worked. Worked hard, by the way. The Amish guy, though, he was calling the shots.”

“Did you get his name?”

“You know what? I did not. I know Billy didn’t. I think we just called him Amish Guy for the four hours he was here. He didn’t laugh, but he answered to it.”

Billy presses the chicken’s small pinched face down on the top of an upside-down wooden crate to hold it still. The chicken angles his head upward by instinct so it seems to be staring straight ahead, while Billy’s big hand steadies the wriggling round body. He brings the axe down in one long sweeping arc, slams the blade through the chicken’s tiny neck, and blood shoots out in all directions. Billy turns his head away, just for a second, an expression of pure horror and disgust. The chicken’s body jumps and he holds it steady with his hands. Houdini comes to life, barking like mad, watching the twitching corpse of the chicken, the blood spouting from the open neck.

I pick up the pencil again and I get back into it with Sandy, taking everything down, writing quickly, all the new information, progressing rapidly toward the end of the notebook. Amish guy, up from down county—how far away is down county?—down county is forty miles. Two catastrophe immigrants on the crew with him—Asian men, anyway—but you’re sure he was the boss—he was the boss. Concrete work—you asked him to do the coop in concrete—no, he suggested it, he knows concrete, the hell do we know…

My fingers gripping the pencil in the old familiar way, my heart doing the thing it does when I’m working, soaking up facts like a sponge, really gunning and going. Sandy’s eyes are wide and amused as I nod and nod and echo her words, circle back to get things right, breathing fast, experiencing a welcome burst of self-confidence, a belief in myself as possessing the instincts and the intelligence to do this work properly. Five years? Ten?

I realize that my eyes are closed, I’m thinking hard, and then I open them and find that Sandy is staring at me—no, not staring, gazing, looking me over with a kind of abstract interest, and for a brief strange second it’s like she can see into my skull, watch the thoughts in there rotating and spiraling and orbiting each other in patterns.

I clear my throat, cough slightly. There is a trickle of sweat running down her chest, disappearing into the space between her breasts.

“What was her name?” she says.

“Who?”

“The woman. Any woman. One of the women.”

I blush. I look at the floor, then back up at her. She had reminded me of Alison Koechner, but it’s Naomi that I say. I whisper the name—“Naomi.”

Sandy leans forward and kisses me, and I kiss her back, pressing myself against her, my excitement about the investigation rolling over, accelerating, transforming into that other big feeling, that exhilarating and terrifying feeling—not love, but the thing that feels like love—bodies rising to each other, nerve endings opening up and seeking each other—a feeling I know, even as it floods into my veins and my joints, that I will probably never feel again. Last time, for this. Sandy smells like cigarettes and beer. I kiss her hard for a long time and then we pull apart. The moon is up and full and bright, coming through the kitchen windows of the RV.

Billy is there. He’s watching in silence, holding the chicken by the stump of its neck, the plump body rotating in his fist, steam rising from the hot dead animal. Billy’s taken off his apron and there is a slick of sweat on his neck and shoulder muscles, blood flecked on his bare chest, blood splattered along the hem of his underpants. He smells like charcoal and dirt.

“Billy,” I begin, and Sandy shivers slightly beside me, drunk or fearful, I don’t know. How absurd it’ll be if I just die here, right now, the end of the line, how ridiculous to die on day T-minus five from a shotgun blast in a lover’s triangle.

“Hang out another half an hour,” he says. “Eat more chicken.”

“No, thanks.”

“You sure?” he says. Sandy crosses the small space of the RV kitchen, hugs him around the waist, and he squeezes her back while he holds the chicken aloft. “I just gotta pluck him.”

I could stay, I really could. I think that they would have me. I could stake out a space in the dirt by the Highway Pirate, slump down low in it, and wait things out.

But no, that’s not—that’s not going to happen.

“Thank you. Really,” I say. New facts. New possibilities. “Thanks a lot.”