in her belly, as Jamie usually wheels into the driveway before she ’ s done with her first.
Paul walks into the kitchen, a blue rep tie hanging unknotted around his neck. Because he ’ s got his nose in a pamphlet, he bumps into a kitchen chair. The chair groans across the terracotta tile floor and sends a painful report through his knee and up his thigh. Carol looks over at the noise.
Split annuities. Tax-advantaged cash flow and principal protection. How to sell the concept hasn ’ t really stuck yet for Paul, but he ’ s got to get into new products now. He sits, reaches for toast that ’ s gone cold. Variable whole life; yearly contributions to a policy that pays a death benefit but turns into an IRA-type retirement instrument at age sixty-five, is what got him into this neighborhood. He broadened his base, reached a new level of clientele. He made a solid conservative play and bought a house that he could carry the monthly nut on during his worst month, by virtue of his commissions on those policies alone. Now the plan was to have no worst months.
Paul chews toast. Feeding himself right-handed, he presses his gut with his left. It yields. Thirty-five years ’ worth. It was a cut slab through age thirty-one, but for the last four years he ’ s let it slide. At six-one, he ’ d been lean, a runner, for most of his life. Then he got a bone spur on his heel. Doctors recommended he get it cut out, but the surgery meant a long recovery, so he decided to run through it. They said it wouldn ’ t work, that the thorny spur would continue to aggravate the plantar fascia, that it couldn ’ t be done, but he ’ d gotten the idea it could. Mile after grueling mile he kept on, until something changed and yielded, and the thing wore away to nothing. Then his job did what pain could not and stopped him in his tracks. He started coming home tired in a different way from any manual labor he ’ d done in his youth. A few scotches a week became a few per night, so he could sleep. That, he suspected, added the first girth layer. He switched to vodka, which helped, but he was out of shape and he knew it.
“Paul, I ’ m worried.” Carol stands over him. He looks up. A shadow lies across her face. “Did you see Jamie outside?”
“No. Why?”
“He ’ s not home and I didn ’ t hear him come in from his route.”
“Maybe he left for school early…”
Her face radiates a dozen questions back at him, the most pleasant being: What kid goes to school early?
How can a grown man be so damned dumb? It leaps to the front of her mind. She feels guilty for it immediately and pushes it away. But it had been there.
“No, you ’ re right,” he says. He gulps coffee, pushes together a pile of insurance pamphlets, and stands. “Maybe his bike broke down.” Carol looks at him with doubt, not hope. “I ’ m already late, but I ’ ll drive his route and look for him on the way to the office. Call me if he shows up. I want to know why — ”
“Call as soon as you see him. Call as soon as you can. I ’ ll try the Daughertys ’. Maybe he ’ s over there.”
“Yeah. That ’ s probably it.” Paul gives her a peck and heads for the door. It ’ s like kissing a mannequin.
Mothers know.
Paul ’ s blue Buick LeSabre traverses the neighborhood. Streets that had been empty quiet an hour ago now hum. Minivans tote children to school. Older children pedal in packs. Kids, older still, drive four to a car to the high school. Joggers and dog walkers dot the sidewalks.
Paul coasts up in front of a miniature stop sign held by an aging woman with white hair and an orange sash across her torso. She waves a group of eight-year-olds across the front of the Buick as Paul lowers the window.
“Do you know Jamie Gabriel? Have you seen him?”
“Not by name,” she says, years of cigarettes on her voice. “I know the faces.”
“Have you seen a paperboy?” Paul asks, wishing he had a picture with him. “His bike might have broken down.”
“Sure haven ’ t, just kids on the way to school.”
Unsatisfied, Paul nods and drives on. He makes a right on Tibbs. An oil-stained street. Jamie ’ s not there and nothing ’ s out of the ordinary. Not sure what to do next, he drives the rest of the route and then continues to the office.
Rooster sits and sips his morning beer. Overdriven guitar sounds thunder in his head. He ’ d been playing Mudvayne all morning. He turned it off a minute ago, but can still hear it. He can do that. It is one of many things he can do that others cannot. He ’ s special. He knows he is. But he ’ s not happy. Having gifts is not the same thing as happiness. His mind roils in simulated guitar fuzz — he doesn ’ t want to think about in there — until he hears the van drive up outside.
Tad lumbers out of the panel van clutching a sixer of Blue Ribbon and the reload, the day ’ s second round of food. This time it is McDonald ’ s as directed. He approaches the house, the eyesore of the neighborhood. The paint is falling off in flakes and long curls, and only the windows on the side and those of the room down the hall are freshly painted. Black. It is what they ’ ll call their “music studio” if anyone asks. But no one does. This is the house the neighbors wish would just go away so property values could rise.
Tad enters, pulling off dark sunglasses and sliding them into the chest pocket of his flannel shirt. The living room is dingy. Carpet that is lentil in color and texture, and secondhand green and orange sofas that have gone decades without a re-covering fill the room.
Fast-food sandwich boxes and wrappers litter a dinette area. Rooster sits on a spindly chair across from a dormant twenty-year-old color television with tinfoil bunny-ears antennae that rests on a milk crate. His eyes are on the dead screen and he rocks slightly in rhythm to music that seems to fill his head from an unknown source. He is shirtless.
“You are one lazy bastard.”
Rooster ’ s eyes don ’ t leave the television as he gives Tad the finger.
“You got no work ethic at all.”
“You speak to Riggi?” Rooster asks as if Tad has just entered the room and the previous comments had never occurred.
“Shiftless. Look at you.”
“I ’ ve already been in there two times since you been gone,” Rooster says. Flat. His eyes, also flat, turn to Tad, stopping him up. “You speak to Riggi?”
“Two times? Bullshit, two times…” Tad gets his breath back. “Yeah, I spoke to him.”
“What ’ d he say?”
Tad puts the beer down among the rubble on the dinette table. He opens one for himself and chucks one over to Rooster.
“Mr. Riggi said he needs it for Thursday.”
Rooster opens the new beer and takes a delicate, probing sip. “Thursday. Shit.”
“Yeah,” Tad begins, enjoying his partner ’ s discomfort, “he ’ s got it arranged for Thursday, so you better get cracking.”
“Yeah? I should get cracking? Whyn ’ t you take a turn?” This silences Tad for a moment.
“No thanks. You ’ re the pro.”
Rooster nods slightly, pleased, then kicks a pill into the back of his mouth, drains off a few ounces of his beer, and wearily stands. Vicodin. When you ’ re in physical pain, it takes away the pain. When you ’ re not in pain, it takes away other things. He gathers himself and walks purposefully down the hall toward the back bedroom door.
Tad occupies the chair in front of the television, leans forward, and turns on cartoons.
The sound of a lock being undone from the outside and the door opens, allowing a crease of light into the ugly, darkened bedroom. The blacked-out windows are nailed shut and have metal grating over them on the inside. A sheetless bed is the only furniture. Rooster reaches up and tightens a bare lightbulb into its fixture, illuminating the room. Balled up between the bed and the wall is a tearstained, violence-shocked flash of skin. The man ’ s face sets in a mask that expresses neither frenzy nor madness. The boy ’ s face forms its own mask of pain, and fear, and incomprehension, and so far below the surface as to be invisible, fury. He doesn ’ t even say no but weakly tries to scrabble away from the man.
“Here it comes,” Rooster says. He jerk-steps toward the boy and kicks the door shut.
