“I swear to God,” I told her. But there are different ways of swearing, aren’t there, Spence? And I didn’t tell her which one I was using.
Next morning I crawled out of bed with a good idea of how it feels to be a zombie. I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep all week. It was another nice day outside, but neither the sunshine nor the bike ride to work chased my cobwebs away, so I pulled in at the convenience store a few minutes from the plant. First thing I did was to gas up, then I left my bike at the pump and went inside and filled the biggest cup available with the blackest coffee available. I knew I’d have to drink at least half of it before attempting to ride to work with the cup tucked into my crotch, so I’m standing there sipping through the lid hole when I noticed a pretty girl coming through the door. And I guess I did what all guys do when they see a pretty girl, I checked her out.
But only for maybe three seconds total. That’s all I needed. Because even with clothes on, she was impossible to not recognize.
She went straight to the doughnut case and started filling up a box. Suddenly I didn’t need the coffee anymore, so I set it down beside the coffee pots and headed outside without paying. I passed within a foot of her on my way to the door, plenty close enough to see the yellowing bruise under her right eye and to notice the way her hand was shaking as she worked the tongs under a doughnut.
You know that state of being hyperalert you used to talk about? That’s where I was all of a sudden, moving in what felt like slow motion toward the door, keeping myself out of her peripheral vision while seeing every detail of her as I passed. You said there’s a knowledge that comes from being in that state when all the details of observation come together, and that it’s important to trust that flash of knowledge because it’s almost always true. Well, I can tell you without a glimmer of doubt, Spence, that I knew somebody had kicked the shit out of that girl. I knew with an absolute and awful certainty that she had been going through hell ever since that rainy day I first saw her, same as I had, except that hers was a physical hell and mine was a mental one.
More importantly, I knew why.
I’ll tell you the truth, brother. If I’d had the money on me at that particular moment, and if I’d known which vehicle was hers, I would have dumped the money in her front seat and hightailed it out of there while she was still picking out her doughnuts. That might have stopped the dominoes in your catastrophe theory from banging into each other.
But I didn’t have the money with me. And the dominoes didn’t stop falling.
After seeing that girl at the doughnut case, I pulled into work so out of breath and confused I didn’t even notice the SUV until I walked right up to it. I parked my bike behind the office same as always, not far from Jake’s pickup truck, but the SUV didn’t really register on me until I started walking toward the office door. And that’s when it hit me. I turned around and looked straight at the shiny black vehicle and I even said out loud what I was thinking. “The fucking Chinese are here.”
Up until that realization sort of poleaxed me, I’d been trying to figure out how to get in touch with you. I felt like I was stumbling around blindly, like I had my goggles on but they were caked with sand and the wind was blasting so hard against me that I was losing ground moving backward. I needed somebody to talk to and you were the only likely candidate. I wasn’t ready to bring either Pops or Cindy into this mess, and you were the only other levelheaded guy I’d ever been close to. You always had an answer, Spence, even if it was only something like, stand still, nimrod, and think! Which way were you headed? Which direction is the wind blowing? One plus one equals the way back to camp. So stand here a minute and use the brain God gave you.
Still, it had been almost six years since I’d seen you, and those couple of e-mails we exchanged after I was back home was the last I knew of your whereabouts. The last one from you said you were headed to SFAS at Mackall and that you’d be hard to reach for a couple of months. Then a good while later I had one from Rainey telling me about the hell you guys went through in Korengal, and how he was back home now and had lost touch with you too. I thought I could probably track you down though, and even if all we talked about was the weather, maybe that would be enough to quiet the sandstorm raging in my head.
But then there was that SUV all of a sudden, so shiny black in the morning light. Up until then I’d never noticed how quiet and clear the air could be when the crushers and separator are shut down. Everything was absolutely motionless all of a sudden, except that I was so furious I wanted to take a sledgehammer to that vehicle. I wanted to break out every inch of glass and beat that black metal into the ground.
Silly, I know. Absolutely useless.
I go into the office and there’s Jake sitting at his desk and staring out the window same as always. I don’t even bother to sit down. “Any reason I need to be here today?” I ask him. “What I really need to be doing is looking for a job.”
It takes him fifteen seconds or so to turn his head my way. “I was thinking of leaving myself,” he says. “It’s eating me up to see this finally happening.”
“So let’s both leave,” I tell him, and now I’m thinking maybe I can talk about the girl and the money with him, maybe he’ll have an idea or two I can use.
“One of us has to hang around in case they have any questions,” he says. “You know the operation as well as I do.”
“I’ve been here half a year, Jake. You’ve got forty years in. You built this place.”
“You don’t have to do anything,” he tells me. “You can look for jobs on the computer, can’t you? Make phone calls. All I’m asking is that you hang out here until they leave.”
I blow out a breath. “You’re still the boss,” I say.
He stands up, pats his pockets, finds his key ring in the letter tray. “Do me a favor and don’t answer the phone if it rings,” he says. “The newspaper called first thing this morning.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“I hung up. That’s why they keep calling back.”
“You got to talk to them sometime, don’t you?”
“I don’t owe them anything. Let them talk to the Chinese if they want a story so bad. Damned if I’ll volunteer to be their whipping boy.”
Three minutes later, I’m standing there alone.