—
It seemed a revelation to Perry that East didn’t steal money. He kept the register straight, severe, didn’t take IOUs or cut deals. But he couldn’t see how Perry would know that. To slip out a little—the way Shandor apparently had—would be easy. There was a lot of money. Most of it passed quietly as cash. Sometimes loose bills were offered him to extend someone’s range time, to pay for a gun someone’d broken, or for a handful of stale paints, duds, for laying a hurting on the birthday boy or the boss. He’d take it. But whatever came, he put in the register, included in the deposit. The deposit wasn’t in a bank. It went through the front mail drop of the farmhouse across the highway, where Perry lived.
Perry trusted him. But maybe trust was a trick. Maybe trust was the act that not trusting put on when there was no better alternative.
Maybe trust was the trick that kept him working twelve, thirteen, fourteen hours a day. Mopping, raking, sitting counter on his ass.
“Son, I know you’re gonna take me one of these days. I just don’t know how,” Perry hollered, laughing, as if his loudness could command this place forever.
The hundred per day still wasn’t good money. Just the same, East got his handful every day, paid timely. And in this town he spent little—there was nothing to buy. An egg sandwich every morning at the shop, and fruit from the grocery twice a week. A used coat for outdoors at the resale, used jeans for a dollar or two, warm shirts. A good pillow still in its plastic wrapper. He bought gloves at the hardware—even the men with ragged coats and uncut hair wore good gloves. East studied, bought a pair new, thirty dollars. Warm, elastic, he could work all day in them without a complaint.
The old bank was built of stone with fat sandstone pillars in front but had the same name as East’s bank in The Boxes. He acted trustworthy around banks, and banks so far had trusted him. Anyway, his wad of twenties was getting thick. He wasn’t going to bury his money or squirrel it away, the way he’d buried the two guns behind the edge of the parking lot, plastic-bundled, in a wave of dirt Perry’s bulldozer had left behind.
He asked that five hundred dollars be made into a cashier’s check. He made a new account and deposited the rest. The woman seemed confused that he didn’t want to order checks.
“Just the ATM.”
“But you’ll want the flexibility,” she said. “Not everything can be paid online.”
Patiently he listened to her explain the options, the fee-free checking, the online access. She looked intense, friendly but businesslike. Her dark black bob cut hung down. A stud in the side of her nose. She might have been twenty-three. He wondered if she walked or drove in to work, if she rued living here.
At last she concluded her pitch.
“Just the ATM,” East repeated calmly.
“But you can. You could,” she countered. Her hands paused, unsure. Then she lay them on the desk. “Well,” she said. “We’re happy to have you.”
He got up, walked to the post office, bought a pre-stamped envelope, and sent the check to his mother, without a note.
—
The smell of the bleach and cleanser and water East liked to mix together in the mop bucket wasn’t right; it rose and curled inside his nostrils, wasn’t healthy. But it smelled clean. Twice each day, now that Shandor was gone, East made the bathroom clean. Since he’d started cleaning it and mopping cobwebs, wiping fixtures clean of the dust that got in somehow, the men had begun helping out, using the trash can, pissing the floor less. They spat or spattered somewhere else, wiped their blood off the sinktop, picked their bandages up and threw them away. They began to keep it right. They put their returns on the return box, their beer cans in the recycling.
The spiders had stopped coming down out of the ceiling and claiming corners every night.
The barn, East learned, had been the old garage for the farm trucks, before Perry Slaughter had it remade. All that work—the bathroom, the storeroom up top, the stairway out the back, the antique counter with its heavy glass—Perry had bartered.
“For paintballs,” Perry said. “Some people will do anything for paintballs, God help them.” Standing in the bathroom doorway as East mopped, he coughed and laughed both. “When I opened it, I thought it would be a weekend thing. But they wanted to come back. Then another range opened up five miles up the road and stayed open every day. Everyone I had went away. So I stayed open every day, and they all came back.” He scratched his sandpaper chin with a middle finger. “The guys they fought up there, they brought them all back here. Every day.”
“How these guys afford to come in here playing every day?” East said. He pressed the mop out.
Perry snorted. “They can’t. Son, it’s like jerking off. It’s like meth. These boys can’t stop, and they can’t call it what it is.”