He worked at the building and the yard in the warmth that might not return, he knew. He worked like it was his own. He aired the building, cleaned the storeroom where the many jugs and trays of balls gave out their waxy smell. He put the stepladder up—sixteen feet, it frightened him to climb it—and cleaned the lights, replacing two old tubes that spat and flickered. These were the lights that would kill you—that’s what Fin said once, dull your eyes, take the color out of paint. He dropped the old tubes into the bin and watched them break into curls of glass, puffs of white powder rising from them.
In the afternoon he put on a pair of hip boots Perry had left and wheeled a Dumpster around the range. In shadows lay thick slush like the kids drank with syrup, and it still lay heavy in the lee of the berm with its shading fence. But where the sun hit the ground, he could find the litter in the mud: chips bags, candy wrappers, sandwich papers, sweat towels, plastic flasks, cigarette packs, bloody socks, popper vials, zipper pulls, beer cans, stray gloves. Some of it windblown, most of it dropped. Each time he cleaned the range, he learned things he hadn’t known: what they brought and dropped was what the range didn’t sell. Cherry cigars, green tubs of chew. Wrappers from Chicken Lively—what was that? Glass pipes, someone getting high—he had ideas who. He pinched the pieces with the picker and raised them high for a look. The boots were enormous on his feet, and he tightened the laces until they bit rings around his ankles.
The streak of yellow-orange across the south. A rent in the clouds, or maybe their end.
He filled two bags with trash before dark. The bags weren’t right. Some awkward, shifty plastic, thin and bulgy, not tough like the regular bags. Maybe they were for something else, not trash. But Perry wasn’t here to ask about it. East lugged them out one at a time, opening the gate and scuffling down the shrubby bank to the bigger Dumpster. Then he stood outside eating a bagel dry and looking at the daylight dwindling down the road to his left. A thin, worried-looking dog came padding down the edge of the road from the east as if it were following the fading light. It looked at East and lowered its mutt head. East tossed the rest of the bagel, and it gave it a sniff, then picked it up and took it along. Silent thing, intent.
He left the boots outside the door. Inside, he put the roll of weak black plastic bags away in the storeroom and took his good gloves off.
He vacuumed the sofas and the two raggedy rugs. Swept out the corners.
The next day, just as warm. He allowed himself to sit for a few minutes at a booth in the doughnut shop. Ate his sandwich. A napkin holder of rust-speckled chrome. The morning light played over the salty lot like a single, insistent note.
He found the paint that Perry had used to paint the door and its frame white and, while the sun was bright, painted them again. He painted until the paint ran out; then he soaked the brush in thinner and cleaned the windows with a blade.
It wasn’t clear what he was going to do next. It was clear to East that he was waiting for something, some sign, some sudden clearing that would allow him to glimpse his desire. Clear that he deserved to wait. Not clear that he deserved such a sign.
But the day was fresh, and the air moved through, dusty, hopeful. At dusk he sat outside again, watching the house, Perry’s house. Marsha hadn’t come or gone. Two days now without customers, without cold. He regarded the driveway curiously, the hump of the yard above the roadside ditch.
He tried not to feel left out.
After a little while, the dog passed by again. East saw it coming. Careful, stepping quietly along the roadside, skirting stones. It knew what it was doing.
He had saved a part of his lunch this time, egg and cheese with the bread. He called to the dog, not a word but a sort of yelp. The dog stopped, eyed him uneasily. He threw it a chunk of greasy bread, and after the dog wolfed this, it stood squarely, assessing him now. It came for the handful of food he held out. He did not touch the dog. He could see the worn path something had rubbed around the dog’s neck, part scar, part dry riverbed. Like a landmark in the fur. He watched the dog eat, eyeing him shrewdly, and then move away.
He took a shovel from the locker atop the landing, and he dug his guns out of the piled dirt where they’d waited for him.
—
Long before midnight he was asleep, curled on his pallet, the single pillow. He slept the long and grateful sleep of men who work—a breathing sleep, a dreaming sleep of childhood, or flying, or pathways leading somewhere. He burped and shifted, and steadily inside him, like the ocean’s tide, one great muscle drew air and pushed it out, drew it again.
It was late December, a Tuesday. It had been a busy day.
—
The back door was open, as if someone were minding the range, as if the building were still airing. East slept. Beneath his box he did not feel the air. And he had been in the air all day, this southern air, which did not feel or smell so different from the air that he’d grown up in.