Theodore Wheeler: Bad Faith

“I’m sorry,” she said. “We don’t even have the machine anymore. But you can take some papers if you want to roll them yourself at home. How’s that sound?”

Aaron started to say that it wasn’t a big deal, but Harry interrupted him.

“What’s she saying?” he asked, pushing Aaron out of the way. “Won’t they do it?”

“I’m sorry,” the teller said. “Is there anything else we can do?” She explained again about the machine being gone. Harry slammed his hands on the counter to stop her. It was frightening how a man so decrepit could make such noise.

“Don’t do me any favors. Just deposit the money. This is your business, isn’t it? Isn’t this a bank?”

“I’m sorry. I’ll get in trouble.”

“Don’t say that again. Okay? Don’t tell me you’re sorry, bitch, because we both know what that’s worth.”

The bank manager rushed to see what the problem was. “Can I help you?” he said, shielding the girl. Harry still glowered at her when she backed away, even as he struggled to catch his breath, as his body deflated to its diseased state.

Aaron had forgotten what it was like to stand there helpless when his dad went off. He was associated with the man. He was the one person in the world who was inexorably tied to Harry Kleinhardt.

“Why do you do that?” he asked later, alone with him in the car.

“What are you talking about?”

“Treating people like that. That’s what I mean. Like you treated the girl.”

Harry wheezed out a laugh, hunched into the bench seat of his Lumina. “Those people don’t care about you. They certainly don’t give a shit about me.”

“What’s accomplished though? What can you gain by—?”

“Nothing,” Harry said. “It’s not supposed to do nothing. There isn’t one damn thing I’d trade for what they got. People like that don’t understand and it pisses me off.”

There was tapping on the roof of the mudroom, the first sleet of the season, Thanksgiving week.

Harry had been in the mudroom a long time and Limbaugh was over. The station was playing country-western music. Behind him, in the window, the atmospheric dust settled in the western sky, burning red and orange in the last sunlight. Aaron knocked on the doorframe to let Harry know dinner was about ready, fried bologna this time, but Harry didn’t move. He’d been smoking in the mudroom with his waders on. The cold ash of a cigarette hung from his lips. His face had gone slack and stiff, his eyes rest shut. His hands were in half fists on the bulge of his coat.

Aaron stopped in the doorway. When he touched his dad’s cheek the cigarette ash collapsed onto Harry’s chin.

“Is it—?” Aaron said. He kneeled into the cushion and whispered within the sleet on the rooftop.

Suddenly there was beeping from the kitchen. The smoke alarm going off. Aaron jumped at the noise but didn’t move away from Harry. “Are you here?” he asked. He put his ear next to his dad’s nose.

“What’s the racket?” Harry shouted. He jerked back from Aaron, arms raised, and knocked his head against the drywall. “What are you doing to me?”

The pan handle scalded Aaron’s hand when he grabbed it, but there wasn’t a fire. It was just the bologna that set off the alarm, the bottom burned black. Aaron tossed the mess in the trash then cooled his fingers under the faucet. He offered to make something else but Harry told him not to. “It wouldn’t be any use if you did.”

Aaron didn’t know what to do with himself. He made a sandwich and ate it. He paced inside the house, in the two rooms, and packed his suitcase. He decided to go into town, to the Congress, and that’s what he told Harry as he walked out through the mudroom to the car.

The Congress was busy, ninety minutes into happy hour. Groups of men talked loudly, a few couples danced, lines formed outside the bathrooms. The top pages of a hot-rod magazine curled off from a stack at the end of the bar.

She was alone. He recognized her. “You’re the teller from the bank, aren’t you?”

“My name’s Emily,” the girl said. She didn’t seem to mind when Aaron hung his messenger bag over the stool back next to her.

“I’m sorry about what happened. He shouldn’t talk to you like that.”

“It’s okay.” She spun a straw in her drink. “We know all about Harry Kleinhardt.”

“Do you?” Aaron said.

He fixed his eyes on different parts of her face until laughter bubbled up out of her nerves. He laughed too and turned away to take a breath. The air was hotter here than it had been earlier that week, the music louder. The neon lights bled brighter. The walls were lined with old men waiting out their liquor, but there were handfuls of young men too. At the other end of the bar were a few women in tight Wranglers, braless under plaid button-downs. Eager men surrounded these few women.

“Let me buy you a drink,” Aaron said. “It’s the least I can do. Consider it compensation for the aggravation my father causes.”

The girl leaned down when she talked to Aaron, showed some cleavage from inside her bank-issued polo, unbuttoned as far as it would go to flash the freckles of her chest. She wore a padded pink bra, her bitties loose inside it.

“Are you really his kid?” she asked.

Aaron nodded.

“I never thought about Harry Kleinhardt having any family.” She glanced at Aaron like she still might not believe it.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “Just back for Thanksgiving?”

“I don’t think you want to know that.” Aaron guided his bangs to the side of his forehead and smiled at her.

“Come on,” she said. “I’m game. You can tell me and I won’t repeat it.”

“You wouldn’t tell anyone.”

“Tell me the truth. Why are you here?”

Aaron didn’t answer for a long time. Emily tried turning away, but she couldn’t stop looking at him while he was looking at her, while he was smiling. His hand found its way to her thigh and she let it stay.

“Do I need an excuse to visit Jackson County?” he asked. “Isn’t the Congress enough?”

She shook her head.

“This place is the worst. Don’t you know that? This is where the lowlifes come when they’re up to no good. Where airheads come to get laid.”

“We wouldn’t want to be like them, would we?”

“No, we wouldn’t. This place stinks.”

Emily pulled a cigarette from her purse and lit it, puckering her lips as she exhaled. Her hair was pulled back. Black curls snuck around her neck. She had a small chin and her face appeared to flare out as it approached the hairline.

“You know,” Aaron said, “you’re really a pretty girl.”

“I doubt that.”

“I mean it. Would it be too much to take a photograph?”

“What do you mean? You and me take a picture together?”

“Of course,” Aaron said. He fingered the strap of his bag, ready to pull out his camera and snap a shot of her.

“You can’t take it here,” she objected. “Who in the world would want to be remembered like this?”

“Come on. Just one. Indulge me.”

“No,” she said, loud enough for Aaron to concede.

“Okay,” he said, his feelings hurt. “But we’ll snap one later. Promise me that.”

“Sure,” the girl said. “We’ll drink a few Long Islands and then take a nice portrait for the Christmas card.”

Aaron heard Emily laughing after he excused himself to the bathroom. A few of the other men at the bar joined her too. “Christmas card!”

“You’re too much, Em. You know that?”

Mangy green carpet covered the floor of the Congress, except in the men’s room, where someone had torn it out. The floor was sticky and wet. At the urinal, Aaron noticed a shirt button in the filter. The bathroom was tiny, a small cinderblock cell, a dripping sink on the wall between the urinal and toilet. There were no dividers, no stalls, just two kinds of toilets, three in a pinch, on the other side of a punched-through black door.