The two men inside the shop are calmly purposeful. Michael hates the older one already for his cracks about Michael’s clothes and hygiene. The two men will torch the place. Someone somewhere gets the insurance payout. Michael gets a small cut. Nothing too complicated. No one gets hurt. His job earlier was to watch from across the street: the shop girls turning up chairs on tabletops, the shop girls counting the register drawers, the shop girls mopping the floor. Then the lights went down; a little later, the front door opened and he thought he could hear their singsong voices. Much later, it will occur to Michael that he should have seen in the two men’s measured strides, in their coiled energy, even in their acceptance of him, something else.
He doesn’t know the two men’s names. They don’t know his. That’s one of the rules. He knows he’s on the bottom rung of this thing. But he senses that for the first time he’s working with real adults who mean something in the world, who know what risk is and how to manage it. So can we count on you? the younger man in the gray wool overcoat asked over dinner at Fran’s Hamburgers the night before. He said it as if it was hardly worth the asking. A formality. He was kind and attentive, even if the clothes he wore were out of date. A funny slender tie, a wool overcoat in a style Michael had seen in old movies. The younger man’s face was smooth and pale, and Michael thought he’d probably never had acne but could understand the trials of those who had. He’d asked if Michael was working on his GED and Michael lied. The older man, whose hair was thinning, laughed ruefully and said, Sure, that’s you. Overachiever. The younger man tilted his head in a disappointed way as if a favorite uncle said something racist at the dinner table. Then the younger man had asked the girl bussing tables about the photographs of local celebrities on the wall as if it meant the world to him to know all about them. The girl had a nice smile and Michael realized that it was the young man’s guileless face that drew the smile out of her. His undivided attention. His voice, a gentle plumbing of her depths.
The two men told him they’d be inside the ice cream shop ten minutes tops, but they are edging into twenty already. A wave of nausea breaks over him and passes. He hadn’t eaten before taking the pills. He feels in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes and finds the conch shell. He’d broken it off the art car earlier when they were casing the shop and the art car man had tried to tackle him in the parking lot. Knocked him back against a car hood. The man had blubbered and sobbed, making no sense. Michael punched him. Busted his lip. Chipped a tooth. One of the ice cream shop girls, tall, freckled, had come out to calm down the art car man. A Mexican-looking girl passed a bag of ice through the drive-through window for his mouth. A few random people from the parking lot bunched around them, not knowing what to do. The art car man blubbered to Michael about returning the shell to its legal and rightful owner. His teeth were flecked with blood. “Shame on you,” the freckled girl said, turning to Michael. “Shame.” Michael stammered out something about self-defense. The girl said, “Just look at what you did.” Michael shrugged. “He started it,” Michael said, feeling small. He glanced around at unfamiliar faces, felt his own flush with hatred and embarrassment. The parking lot seemed to stretch out in the twilight. The girl’s eyes burned. Standing on the curb, holding the ice pack to the art car man’s mouth, she had a kind of self-righteous grace that made Michael want to kiss her and hit her all at once.
Above the Volvo, pecan branches lace low, silvered clouds. A billboard for a radio station with a large lipstick kiss rises over the florist shop next door. Michael lights a cigarette, examines the conch shell under the lighter flame. He decides that it looks like a vagina. Its undulating pink folds. He tries to put it out of his mind, tries to concentrate on the back roads he’s memorized, the drop-off street for the car. A job well done, he hears the younger man tell him. He claps Michael on the shoulder, hands him a beer. Even the older man Michael hates is impressed. Never flinched, he says. I was dead wrong about you. The younger man gives him a look that bridges the gap between them until it hardly seems there at all. You are not a child, the look says. And then—and the change is only noticeable at the drifting edges of things—it’s not the young man at all but Michael’s dead brother, Andrew. He’s sitting on top of a picnic table near the pecan tree, a hand pressed to his face where his jaw used to be before he was shot. It’s a tender moment, Michael thinks, Andrew thinking of him while he thinks of Andrew. Blood summoning blood. Concern flickers over Andrew’s half face. Then he smiles with what he has left, smooths out the edges. Well, look at you, he says. He walks to the car, bums a cigarette from Michael. Andrew fumbles a bit to find the corner of his mouth, lights his own cigarette from Michael’s. Steps back in a kind of appraisal. Michael still remembers him like this, shambling and slouchy, in a movie antihero kind of way.
You are one doomed motherfucker, Andrew says matter-of-factly.
In the dim glow of the shop’s back door light, his fleshy opening looks like the raw insides of the conch shell. Michael is thinking of the implications of this, Andrew’s return, his own seething hatred and love for his brother’s absence, when he hears the first muffled gunshots inside the ice cream shop.
6