In the beginning East got sixty dollars a day paid in cash—no discussion what a day was or how long it could last. It did not matter. Before the second week was out, Perry had made it a hundred. By then East knew the range. He knew the waiver forms and how to file them and how to talk back to someone who’d twisted an ankle or caught a paintball in the neck and now was angry, now threatened to sue. Soon it was East being asked the questions about how to clear a jammed barrel or punish an offender. Shandor had been there for four months, but Shandor did not work as hard as East or as much. And some days Perry’s instructions were to tell Shandor he was not working that day.
Maybe Perry had begun to trust East, from seeing him, catching him working when he popped in for a few minutes now and then. East worked hard. Or maybe it was that Perry had never liked Shandor in the first place. Shandor was polite and handsome but evasive. He dabbed at his nose constantly. He could not remember, made things up. He had a thin, rabbity nose that was always wet with something.
At last one Monday, East asked where was Shandor, was he sick, knowing that wasn’t the reason.
Perry looked away. His loud bray had, this morning, gone quiet and upset. “All right. I’m going to tell you. Shandor won’t be back.”
East raised his eyebrows.
“I put him in my truck and took him down to Columbus.”
“Columbus? To the college?” He’d overheard the talk on the sofas, the games on TV.
“The university?” Perry said. “Nothing to do with that. It’s what he wanted. He thought it would be a good place to start fresh. He had me turn him out on the street with his little suitcase and a handful of my money.”
He shook his massive head and his body wagged along.
“If somebody were to ask after him,” Perry concluded, “now you can tell them where to look. But I can’t imagine who would, outside of Hungary or wherever.”
“Why not?” East said.
“People don’t connect with someone like that,” Perry said, “who ain’t from here.”
“I ain’t from here.”
“Yeah, well,” Perry said. He counted out twenties for the weekend and pushed them across the counter.
East unlocked the padlock that secured the back of the cabinet. Time to start the day.
“So, you gonna hire somebody new? Cause it’s hard to watch the back and front the same time.”
“I will. Right away,” Perry said. “Never really took the HELP WANTED sign down. You need a day off?”
“I’m fine,” said East. He wasn’t sure of the calendar, but he thought he’d worked fifteen days in a row. “It’s okay.”
“You tell me if you need a day off,” Perry said absently.
Perry didn’t hire anybody new right away. But he began staying around. East figured he liked it: liked seeing the men and peppering them with his questions. Liked muttering in their presence and then holding forth.
Listening to Perry talk, East learned about the place. It was Perry who’d taken his wife’s family’s old field and plowed up the berm, Perry who’d backed the fences with sheeting to keep the noise and stray paintballs in, Perry who’d gutted the old barn and built the store inside. Plus the upstairs landing, where, through the long and dim afternoons until the lights came on at night, East oversaw the range.
Atop the berm, in his lifeguard’s chair with its drop-hinged shield of spotty Plexiglas, East surveyed the men swarming like squirrels across the acres. Scrambled and sighted, scrambled and sighted. East admired some of the players, the small ones, the ones who shot less, who perched and waited, content to stand as rear gunners, hiding, conserving themselves. As Perry had told him, East ejected players whose behavior annoyed the others—cheaters, head shooters, overkillers in groups where overkill was unwelcome. Anyone with smuggled paint, with stale paint that did not break on contact, that bruised and bounced off. He protected the customers and protected the business.
Some of the men slighted East at first, or ignored him. But most came to accept him. They saw that he was always there. In the lifeguard’s chair over the railing he was quiet and watched patiently, never hurrying them. They couldn’t get much out of him. But he nodded once carelessly when a player asked if he was from out west, and that news got around, became the foundation of a dozen tales about who he was. He was no schoolboy. He was a runaway, an escapee. He was somebody Perry was sheltering, somebody’s illegitimate son. He dealt with them directly and calmly, looked boys and men both in the eye, ended problems at once, kicked people out fairly and quietly if they had broken the rules, whether they were one-timers or regulars. He cut people off the way a bartender would. He seemed to have no fear and no body temperature: he sat out on the chair in a cotton shirt when everyone else was wearing a parka.