“Not when we’re on the road. He needed his own place. We fixed him like his own little room in a corner of the van. Mattress and box springs. A desk for his computer. A hookup for electricity. He’d shower over here, eat with us whenever he wanted, but most of the time he was pretty much on his own. It was what he wanted.”
I wondered how he and the younger boy had gotten along. An eight-year age difference with no linking siblings in between?
“It was the usual,” said Tally. “Val thought Braz picked on him. Braz thought we babied Val.” She shrugged and lit another cigarette. “And there were girls, of course. He was twenty-four, okay? A grown man. What could I say?”
Indeed.
“Dennis told me his face was smashed in. That his mouth was full of quarters. You’re the one found him like that, weren’t you?”
I nodded. “Why would anyone do that to him, Tally?”
“Polly said she saw a black guy hit him. Maybe he came back later.”
By the sudden set of her jaw, I knew there were things she wasn’t telling. Dropping the sodden paper towels into a nearby wastebasket, she went over to the refrigerator and pulled out more ice cubes to replace the ones that had melted while we talked.
“You said he wasn’t an angel,” I reminded her as she closed the refrigerator door. “They’ve already run his record, you know. It’s standard procedure.”
She dumped her ashtray and rinsed it out. “Your deputy friend tell you what they found?”
“Yes.”
Her back was still to me as she tore off another wad of paper towels, dried the ashtray, wiped a few stray drops off the counter, then wiped it a second time.
“He took against being on the road for a while, okay? Once he hit high school, he wanted to stay in Gibtown year-round. My friend Irene lived down the block from the new place Arn and me bought after Val was born. She said she’d keep an eye on him. She was like his grandmother, so I gave in and let him. Tell you the truth, it seemed easier than having him with us and listening to him bitch all the time, okay? He wasn’t a bad kid, but he could be a real pain in the butt when he put his mind to it.”
“Most teenagers can,” I said. “You’ve got a bunch of cousins who are living proof.”
“Yeah? Anyhow, Braz was a follower, not a leader, and even though he was my son, he couldn’t seem to read people the way you need to be able to read them if you’re in the life. So he started running with some wrong kids, broke into some pawnshops, and they left him holding the bag. Twice. He was a slow learner, okay? And I guess you know he served a few months for trying to sell a digital sound system a so-called friend of his gave him to pay off a debt. He forgot to tell Braz the stuff was stolen, and with his record, the judge didn’t believe him.”
She turned to face me and the sadness in her smile made my heart ache for her. “But he’s been clean for the last eighteen months, ever since he got his own laptop and started buying and selling online. He got along all right with everybody here this summer, our crew, the other agents. You ask any of them. ‘Course, he did like to stick his nose in everybody else’s business, like he was the boss, not Arnie. And other times he’d get on that computer when he was supposed to just be going to the donniker.”
“Donniker?” I asked.
“Toilet,” she translated.
I remembered her exasperation last night when she thought he’d deserted his post.
“Somebody probably had too much to drink and got pissed off about something. Braz could mouth off without thinking and sometimes he’d let the marks get under his skin. A couple of times—if Arnie hadn’t been there...? You’ll see. If it wasn’t that black kid that hit him the first time, it’ll be something as stupid as a drunk cake eater punching him out because the Dozer took all the rent money.”
I didn’t know whether to say “Oh, surely not” or “I hope so,” but it didn’t really matter. She was back to beating up on herself again.
“Oh God! If I’d only let him go to the auction last night instead of making him work!”
“What auction?”
“One of those self-storage places was having an auction down in Makely but we were shorthanded and I told him if he went, he could just keep on going ‘cause we were counting on him here.”
“Storage lockers like the one the Lincoln brothers had their tools in?”
“Those guys that put a knife through my ride? Yeah, I told you. People don’t pay the rent on them and they get put up for auction. A lot of time, it’s just junk. Old clothes. Ratty furniture. You’d be amazed at the garbage people’ll pay thirty-five dollars a month to hang on to. Sometimes, though, you can wind up with some interesting things. Braz took the bid on a locker last year stacked with books. None of them were all that old, but they were all first editions, okay? He bought them for like two-fifty, and by the time he sold the last lot on eBay, he made almost four thousand clear profit. The first year we started doing it, Arnie found an antique pocket watch with a solid gold chain. It was just crammed into a box full of buttons someone had cut off old shirts. That locker cost us seventy-five dollars, okay? He and Braz put a picture of that watch on eBay and the bidding went to just shy of eight thou.”
“Braz thought Arnie ought not to sell it so fast, get it appraised first. But Arnie always says that a quick dime’s better than a slow dollar. He’d rather make his profit and move on to the next lot. Braz, now, he always put a reserve on his stuff. He didn’t mind sitting on it till he got the price he thought it ought to bring.”
I listened to her talk some more about the odd things people abandon in self-storage lockers, everything from bicycles and surfboards to clothing and family photo albums, even wedding gifts still in their original gift boxes. All the time, though, I couldn’t help noticing her likeness to other members of my family—the way she held her head like Robert, the unconscious hand gestures Reese and Lee always use, the curve of her lips when she smiled and the sweep of her eyelashes that were both like Herman’s Annie Sue and Haywood’s Jane Ann.
Several of the kids were probably out there on the midway right now, squealing on the Tilt-A-Whirl, throwing darts at a balloon board. I wasn’t sure if all of them knew that Andrew had fathered a child before he married April,
