James Hynes: Kings of Infinite Space

He slung the pillowcase into the back of the car and went back inside the apartment. He still hadn’t made up his mind whether to take the TV or not. On the one hand, he was tired of cat shows, but on the other hand, if he ended up in the middle of nowhere someplace, Charlotte’s programming might be preferable to whatever he could pull in from some podunk local station. So he tugged the plug out of the wall with the toe of his sneaker, lifted the set in his arms, and carried the TV out to his car. He tread carefully; it was still painful for him to walk, or even to stand for too long. Inside his sneakers, his lacerated feet were taped up in gauze, which he had to change twice a day at least. Preston had doctored him in the narrow living room of his trailer, picking the glass out of Paul’s soles with a pair of tweezers and painting the cuts deep purple with Betadine. Friday night, as they had raced away down empty streets under traffic lights blinking yellow, Preston and Nolene had explained why they couldn’t take Paul and Callie to the emergency room.

“The docs’d take one look at y’all,” Nolene said, watching Paul in the rearview mirror, “and call the po-lice.”

“Why the hell shouldn’t they?” said Paul, still trembling from fear and exhaustion.

“And tell them what, chief?” Preston sagged in the deep passenger seat up front, daubing the sweat off his forehead with a massive red bandanna. He turned and focused his tired eyes over his shoulder at Paul. “Huh?”

“Shouldn’t they know?” said Paul. Callie’s palm lay limp in his, and he squeezed it, glancing at her for moral support. But she was crumpled against the door, taking shallow breaths and gazing at nothing out the window.

“We know,” said Nolene. “And we know how to take care of ’em.”

“But. .,” said Paul.

“ ‘Nuff said, Professor,” said Preston.

In the end Nolene didn’t even take him home but dropped him off a few blocks away from TxDoGS, where Preston had parked his truck in the empty lot of another state building. By now the adrenaline had worn off, and the walk across the pavement to Preston’s pickup had been excruciating. Even so, Paul had shaken off Preston and limped back to the van to crawl back in next to Callie. He kissed her sweaty temple, but she said nothing. She didn’t even look at him.

“Nolene’ll look after her,” said Preston, and Paul let himself be led away again, leaving bloody footprints on the asphalt.

“I told you, didn’t I,” Nolene called after him. “I told you not to go in that building after dark.”

Preston took Paul to his small but fastidiously kept trailer in a little park tucked behind a taqueria and a boot repair shop, where he cleaned and dressed Paul’s feet and then gave Paul his own bed while he slept on the sofa. Paul slept all day Saturday and into Sunday, waking up at noon to the smell of slow-roasted meat. He limped out of the cramped bedroom at the end of the trailer, past a row of framed commendations and pictures of Preston and other men in fatigues, and found his host in the kitchenette.

“Sit,” Preston said, hooking Paul under the arm to help him into a chair. “I got you some ’cue.”

But as soon as Paul popped open the large Styrofoam takeout shell and saw the barbecue steaming before him — a limp heap of crumbling brisket and bias-cut slices of hot sausage — he put his hand to his mouth and began to gag.

“Whoa there!” said Preston, whisking it away. “Sorry, bud, I wun’t thinking.” He snapped the shell shut and buried it deep in his little dollhouse fridge, and then — rather expertly, Paul thought, once his stomach settled — steamed some vegetables for Paul, broccoli and peppers and squash. As Paul ate, Preston sat with him and nursed a cup of coffee, shooting concerned glances across the little table.

“Colonel approached me once,” Preston said quietly, without any preamble, “back when I first came to TxDoGS.”

Paul said nothing; he kept his eyes on his plate.

“Nearly took him up on it, too.” Preston pushed his coffee cup to one side and rested his forearms on the table. “I was a career marine, a colonel by time I retired. A real one,” he added, his eyes flaring. “I commanded men in battle, Paul, and now, here I was working as a security guard for minimum wage.” Paul met his eyes, and Preston must have seen something in his look because he added, “Let’s just say that from the bottom of a bottle, security guard looked like a step up.” Preston held Paul’s gaze. “But in the end,” he said, “I couldn’t stand that jumped-up little pastry chef. He was plenty pissed when I turned him down, but there wun’t a whole hell of a lot he could do about it.”

Preston explained how he had watched Bob Wier and J.J. fall into Colonel’s orbit. “I didn’t try hard enough to talk ’em out of it,” he said with some regret. “The way I was raised, Paul, I don’t hold with self-pity. You play the cards you’re dealt. Like the man says,” Preston went on, lifting his eyes to the ceiling as he quoted from memory, “ ‘I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, I won’t be laid a hand on. I don’t do these things to other people, and I require the same from them.’ ”

“Who said that?” Paul looked up from his vegetables.

“John Wayne.” Preston blushed. “In The Shootist . His last picture,” Preston added helpfully.

Paul resisted the urge to smile or roll his eyes, but he couldn’t help wondering how many East Texas platitudes he was required to endure. Still, it would be impolite to accept a man’s generosity and then call him on his clichés.

“When you come in Monday morning,” Preston was saying, “I think you’ll be surprised at just how little has changed.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Paul said. “Why would I ever go back there?”

Preston opened his mouth, but then resigned himself to a smile. “I could tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me. You’ll just have to come in and see for yourself.”

“I don’t understand.” Paul sagged in his seat. “I don’t understand any of it.”

“I wouldn’t work too hard at it,” Preston said, smiling.

“How can I go on working there?”

“You don’t have to.” Preston gazed hard at Paul. “If I was a young fella like you, with no ties, I’d come in, collect my pay, and take off.”

“You stay, though.”

Preston nodded. “Yeah, well, me and Nolene, we’ve sorta made it our business to keep an eye on things.” He lifted an eyebrow at Paul. “You might say, I got myself a mission. More vegetables?”

That afternoon Preston offered to take Paul to his apartment to pick up some clean clothes and his car, but Paul wanted to see Callie first. He directed Preston up South Austin Avenue to Callie’s complex, but her truck was not in the parking lot.

“Maybe she’s at Nolene’s,” Paul said.

“She ain’t,” said Preston. “I talked to Nolene, and she said Callie insisted on coming home yesterday.”

Even so, Paul made Preston stop. He got out of the truck and limped up the stairs to Callie’s door. He rang the buzzer and knocked, and finally tried the doorknob. It was unlocked, so he opened the door a crack and called her name. Then he pushed it open all the way and stepped into Callie’s empty living room. He limped to the window and looked down to see Preston walking across the lot towards the manager’s office. Then Paul made his painful way to the kitchen, where the cupboards stood open and bare. His heart began to beat a little faster, and he hobbled to the bedroom and propped himself in the doorway. In the glare of the overhead light, the bedroom seemed even emptier than the living room; the mattress and chair were gone, the closet was empty. Not a scrap of clothing remained on the floor. The only thing in the room, in fact, sitting square in the center of the floor under the overhead fixture, was Callie’s copy of The Norton Anthology of English Literature . Fixed to the cover was a square, yellow Post-it, and Paul limped to the center of the room and stooped for the book. The only thing on the Post-it was a three-digit number, so Paul hefted the spine of the book in his left hand and thumbed through the tissuey pages to the number. It was Love’s Labour’s Lost , and one line of a speech was highlighted in bright yellow: “Love is a familiar; Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love.”