“What do you mean?”
“This is what they lie about. Not having a girl. Not were they drinking. They come in here and then tell the world they didn’t.” He looked back over his shoulder: heavy tires rolled past on the road, whining. “It’s the ugliest business I ever been in.”
“If you don’t like it,” said East, “why you got it?”
“You got to sell what you got left.” Vapor rose around Perry’s boots. “You ever heard people talk about Peak America?”
“Peak?”
“Peak. Like a mountaintop, Antoine. Like high as you’re ever gonna get.”
East twisted a knot in the trash bag. “No.”
“Well, that was Ohio, right here, fifty years ago,” Perry said. “What a God damn country. But that’s past now.” He backed out and put himself down on the stool behind the counter, and East followed him out with the trash bag and the bucket.
“All these boys,” the old man sighed. “Their daddies, fifty years ago, they worked foundry jobs, or machinists, or they were white-collar: sales, teacher, bank. Everything. Drove to Cleveland, drove to Youngstown, had a pension, second house. Ohio exported more steel than Japan. Than Germany. Than England or Spain. The whole countries. We were making babies then, believe me. Time you turned thirty, you’d have four or five. These days, most of these boys who come in here every day, secretly, the thing they want is for that girl to turn them out. She can keep the house. The sooner she gets another man, the sooner he is free. He can’t fix nothing anyway. Gets an apartment that’s tiny—the size of that bathroom. That’s all he wants,” Perry said. “Works a little when he can. Got his beer and his PlayStation. Can’t look his dad in the eye. That’s what I mean. We were up there, and we’ve come down to this.”
East stood still. He thought of the road, the towns he’d walked through. “Everything out here is pretty chewed up,” he volunteered.
“You have no idea.” For a moment Perry eyed East, licking his thumb, like someone turning a page. “You think you want to be a dad, Antoine?”
East laughed.
Perry said, “Maybe you are already. Sometimes you act like it,” he added mysteriously.
East lugged the bag out the door into the cold parking lot and tossed it over the side of the Dumpster. He breathed the cold air, scanning the trees opposite, their damp black and bare white. One large bird perched, watching the road below.
His two guns lay in the wave of dirt just there. Every day he reminded himself of them. But rain kept packing the dirt down.
Back inside, East changed the subject. “What about you? You ever had any kids?”
“Early I did,” said Perry. “With my first wife. Not much of a father. Sooner or later, every kid is gonna want to kick your ass.” Wetly he coughed. “I gave them every opportunity back then.”
East looked forward to these talks with Perry—he wasn’t sure why. They went forever and everywhere, and the old man moved from mumbling to hollering about things as if they were East’s fault: World War II. Miners who died. American steel and Japanese steel. All about lumber and what happened when the trees weren’t old anymore. Perry had spent his life knowing what things were made of. He would talk about those things all day. Sometimes East caught himself thinking about it, wondering about things he hadn’t even known he was listening to.
—
Perry was dying. It was not something he ever mentioned to East. It was something East slowly stopped denying to himself. Perry took a battalion of pills each day. All colors, all shapes, counting them out from a box he kept in his pocket. Under the counter were other pills he didn’t want his wife knowing about. He’d count out a handful and chase them with a can of root beer, and he’d wince and clench his eyes.
No one took pills like that if they had a choice.
Perry’s cough was a variable thing, like an engine that some mornings started and on others refused. Some of his teeth were coming loose. One day he pulled one out and lay it on the glass countertop. Then he was called away on his little silver flip phone, and he forgot about it. East didn’t know what to do with the tooth. A tiny blackening spot of blood peered at him from between the roots. After a while he picked it up and put it in the register.
Perry hadn’t hired anyone yet. East reminded Perry how he was stretched thin, running the place by himself. After that, Perry came and worked four full days in a row—from ten or eleven in the morning to helping East clean up at closing. It was fine with East this way. He didn’t need some new kid to be the boss of. He’d had plenty of that.
—