Some of the younger ones, kids buying paints out of their part-time jobs or the money their parents allowed them, idolized him. They called him Warlord, called him the Ancient, called him Gangsta.
The night the Buckeyes beat Michigan, a carload of Michigan guys had stopped at the range and rented out guns and snuck in a bunch of store-bought paintballs that were as stale as rocks and left bluish bruises where they hit. Then they lit a player up, a regular, mercilessly, four of them on one, fifty or sixty shots all around the back and shoulders, even when he was on the ground. East hadn’t hollered or blown the air horn. He’d just switched out the lights. Then the regulars had all the advantages, knowing the range like a familiar block, like their own yard, and one of the Michigans had his teeth loosened with a gun butt. In the dark it was just an accident, and they got loud with East, and East faced up to all four, took their guns back and saw them, bleeding, out the door. That night East let the locals stay and play the TVs till five in the morning. More men arrived; they brought cold beer, they brought pizza, they watched the game again on a 1:00 AM rerun and sang through it.
They asked East to come and sit, to have a beer, but he mopped up and stayed away, keeping business.
Maybe he wasn’t of age.
The shooters were white, all of them. Some of them had to forget what color he was before they spoke to him. But he had made his place. He was just Antoine, the new boy Perry had, and he was all right. Better than Shandor—they had not liked Shandor. He was something, Russian, Ukrainian, maybe, not from America. And Shandor was an addict. He was always looking past them, looking at something else. It made them uneasy, the men who came here, drank a few beers, went paintballing every day. Antoine, whoever he was, was American. Antoine looked them in the eye. He knew what he was doing, Antoine.
They respected him, stopped watching him all the time. But he never stopped watching them.
19.
The shooting, shooting, all the time. It filled his ears, was all he could hear. Then he didn’t hear it anymore.
—
The range was just one of the things Perry ran—his deals, he called them. The range was a deal. He had another deal, plowing—city streets, in one truck, and driveways, which took another, and he got paid on state subcontract for plowing roads that the big trucks couldn’t do. Another of Perry’s deals was bulldozers. He could grade your yard or clear your lot or break your building up into a pile for hauling away. If you had a home and paid tax on it and you wanted to stop, wanted only to be bled for the land, Perry could start on a morning, and the place would be mud by night. He commanded Bobcats and bigger dozers and graders and a couple of backhoes, some of which he owned, some of which the state did, owned and maintained, though they stayed on his lot and bore his name in black letters on the side. BONDED. The truck that emptied the Dumpster every day, that was Perry’s too.
Another deal: Perry was mayor of the town. Stone Cottage, Ohio, was what they called it, though they’d stopped quarrying stones, and there was no cottage anyone knew. He did not want to be mayor, but the mayor controlled zoning, and he wanted to control zoning, because no one wanted a paintball range a block from Main Street. Everyone had known that was why he’d run to be mayor. But he had bulldozed them too, one by one, and on voting day a little more than a year ago, he’d won. The range opened that month.
Maybe they’d known, Perry declared, maybe they knew all along how much he’d hate being mayor of their God damn town. Four years. Maybe that was their revenge on him, what they extracted in exchange.
“You could quit being mayor. Now that you got what you wanted,” East said, head down, polishing the countertop glass. The counter was fourteen feet long, from an old candy store. It had glass in the top an inch thick. The glass got smudged under everyone’s elbows, but East liked to keep it clear, keep the pans of paints visible underneath, glowing even without light on them.
“What I wanted then, son,” Perry said. “There’s always a new thing to want. And I’ll get it too, but they’ll make it hell on me.” He withdrew the oxygen rig from the drawer and slipped it on. A cannula, he called it. “It’s only fair.”
“Hell is forever,” said East bravely. “Not just four years.”
Perry coughed wetly. “If I make it four years,” he said, “it will be the devil’s last miracle.”