Then his head cleared. He went back, picked up the insulation, and rolled it carefully, tightly. Leaned it back up where it had been.
He walked down the highway, furtive in the cold air, and revisited the doughnut shop, for its bathroom as much as the food. He washed in the sink with the palms of his hands. A spill of salt at the corners of his mouth, streaks of wet on his sweater. The black eye slowly reshaping itself. His muscles lank and dog-tired under his skin. He could not bear to look in the mirror at what was left.
Purchased two doughnuts but could not bring himself to sit in the warm little shop, among other people. He went instead down the street, to brood by himself outside the little closed motel.
—
When East opened the door again, there was one person sitting in the big white building of Slaughterrange: an old man, pink like a ham, larger than the bar stool he occupied. Sandpaper bristle of ginger hair. He was holding a small piece of machinery in his left hand and rendering it with the screwdriver in his right.
“You the one Shandor said was looking for a job?” he bellowed without looking up.
East sized the man up, and he stopped short. Six foot five, three hundred pounds, maybe. The sort of man who was used to moving things. He lay down the tool and the chunk of beaten metal, and he brushed his hands on his Carhartt overalls.
“Was that you lying in the yard last night, son?”
East did not lie. “I fell asleep.”
“Cold,” said the white man, “to be falling asleep, under Tim Crane’s truck. Where you staying?”
East said nothing.
“You the one, then, that wants the job?”
East nodded. Kept his eyes on the old man’s eyes. There was something wrong with them. Sticky. Not high, but lagging a bit.
“I got to ask you a few questions.”
East said, “I know.”
“Name?”
“Antoine.”
“You had a job before?”
“I did security. Two years.”
“How old does that make you?”
“Sixteen.”
“You ain’t sixteen and done two years security, son.”
“I got a license,” said East. “It says sixteen.”
The big man shifted on his stool. He did not ask to see the license. He was not in that sort of pursuit. “You get high? You”—his voice became bitter, humorous—“tweak out?”
East shook his head.
“You in a gang?”
Shook his head again. It wasn’t necessarily a lie.
“Christian Wolves? Any other gang, known or unknown? You got tattoos?”
East said, “No.”
“Do you mind showing me?” the man said. “If you would lift your shirt up.”
East held up his sweater and the red shirt beneath so that the old pink man could see him, ribs and the two black points on his chest.
The man was embarrassed too now. “Higher,” he said. “I got to see your collarbones. That’s where they put them.”
“Who?”
“The Wolves. Their tattoos. I don’t know,” the man said.
East stripped his shirt off all the way and turned once, a dull outrage marking his face from inside. But the man, when he turned back, was looking away, with distaste. Maybe for East. Or maybe for having had to ask.
Maybe his willingness to be seen was all the man needed to know.
“Good,” said the man. “I can show you how to work here. But I can’t show you how to work. That, you got to know already.”
“I know it,” East said.
“I’m Perry Slaughter. I would be the owner. Excuse me.” Now the big man seemed to be wilting in on himself. He turned away and bent down behind the long wooden counter with the thick glass windows at the front and top. He came back up with a thin rig of plastic tubing, which he fit over his ears and into his nostrils. For a moment he stood, taking hits of something through the tube.
“You ain’t happy with me, I can move on,” East suggested. “I don’t need this job.”
“Exactly why a person asks for a job,” Perry Slaughter gasped below his tube, “because he don’t need it. No, you’re fine, for today at least.”
He peeled off the tubing and stuffed it back in the drawer. He regarded East suspiciously over the bristled pink of his cheeks. “I take a little oxygen now and then,” he admitted. “The good shit.”
—