parlor women, the strippers he had briefly dated or just fucked for money. Something about killing a man with his hands, or almost getting killed himself, or turning thirty, or talking to his father had changed the way he saw things. The way he saw himself, moving through the world. Maybe it had just been the house on Jefferson Avenue, the picture of the girl in her cap and gown looking so much like Marletta, and her voice in his head again. The way she had looked at him and the things he had let himself want when he held her.
People were weak and stupid, and he had used that knowledge to get over on them. The things they needed, the people they loved, made them vulnerable. This special knowledge he had spent his lifetime accumulating he realized now was absolutely obvious to anyone alive in the world, and it made him ashamed to see it so plain. Anyone who wasn’t crazy or greedy or stupid knew it. He shifted to get his hand in his pocket and took out his money and handed it to the girl. He lifted his head and told her to go home, and she unfolded herself from his lap and got up and was gone in a few seconds. He had wished for a moment that she would stay and talk to him. The smell of cigarette smoke and perfume hung in the air for a minute. He had wanted to tell her something, but what ever he had to say she already knew it.
When he closed his eyes he could get glimpses of Marletta, and of Michelle, the two of them sometimes getting mixed up in his head. They were like two lights on a dark horizon, and if he could stay fixed on them, move toward them, he thought he could get away from all of this. Not just out from under this trouble but away from everything he knew, be something different, do some thing with his life, maybe. He stayed up through the night, drinking vodka and tonic to bring himself down off the coke and reading the book he’d bought. He thought, not for the first time, about the land in the westerns he read, the way the men in the stories found their way by the col- ors and shapes of rocks and canyons. Everywhere he had been in ten years had looked the same to him. The Philly suburbs were hills rolling out monotonously, every inch covered with weedy industrial lots, Wal- Marts and Kmarts and malls, and you couldn’t fix yourself in them. The stars were lost in a milky sky lit orange by sodium lamps. Sometimes he dreamed of himself on a horse in the desert, navigating dry wash canyons by the color of the sand and riding in the blue shadows of massive rock formations like pyramids grown from the earth.
He lay with Marletta in his small bed, naked on the covers, heads close. He pulled a pillow from the floor and put it under her head, and she smiled at him. She was larger somehow out of her clothes, the fact of her working on his head, his need for her moving in the muscles of his arms and legs. Her eyes were shining and wide as if desire were a drug moving in her blood.
She touched him, and he closed his eyes, moving his hips against her hand, and she kissed him and rolled onto her back. She caught his hand and guided his fingers to her, and he felt where she was wet and his breath came harder and he moved over her and balanced there.
She put her hands on the small of his back and, lifting herself, drew him down onto her. He watched her eyes close, and fat tears rolled from the corners and she bared her teeth, and he stopped moving. Her eyes opened, and she saw there was something frantic and afraid in his face and put her hand on his cheek.
“I don’t want to.”
“No,” she said. “It’s okay.”
“I don’t want to hurt you. I can’t hurt you.”
“No, I love you.”
“I don’t know what to do.” His voice was horse.
She drew his head down and put her lips to his ear. “I need you to be with me. I love you. Everything beautifu l is on the other side of this. Everything is coming for us.”
At dusk the next evening Ray went to a small strip mall in Trooper and waited for Cyrus. He got out of the Honda and paced, drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and wanting a cigarette. At eight thirty it was still hot, and he wiped at his eyes with the heel of his hand. The phone buzzed in his pocket, and he looked at it. Manny again, wanting him to relent and let him be there to watch Ray’s back. He turned it off.
He watched people go in and out of a convenience store, watched a man with tattoos and one wandering eye come out of a thrift store carrying an armload of scuffed toys. Moths and mosquitoes came out of the dark and thrashed against the green lights overhead. The man got into a worn El Camino and two small girls lunged at him, clutching at the toys with wide smiles.
Cyrus showed in the huge red pickup, the kid with the shaved head riding shotgun. Ray made eye contact with Cyrus, and the older man took his hand off the wheel and pointed down the road. Ray got back in the Honda and headed out. They snaked over low hills, the pickup hanging back. Ray kept it slow, keeping them in his rearview. After a few turns he noticed there were more cars behind them and Cyrus was talking into a cell phone as they made the turns, his big head silhouetted against the slewing lights of trucks and SUVs.
On Forty Foot Road Ray slowed and then pulled over. He got out and walked back to the pickup, kicking gravel and empty plastic soda bottles.
The skinhead jumped out and moved out front. He had big, wired- looking eyes and thick rings on his knuckles. “What’s up?”
“What is this? I thought I was taking him to look it over.”
“Mister, you and me just do what we’re told.” He stepped back, pointing ahead.
“You don’t need me. To look it over.”
“You’re the one called this deal. You’re done when he says you’re done.” The big skinhead pointed back at the cab, where Cyrus cocked his head and pointed his red hand down the road.
Ray shook his head but got back in the car and started away. Two vans and another pickup stayed close behind Cyrus. He turned down a long dirt road leading around a hill and watched the moon slide between clouds. At the bend he stopped. The road led into a copse of trees, and ahead he could see the lights on the pointed roof of a tall old farm house and the blank side of a white barn. He opened his window and heard music and a loud, rough laugh. Cyrus pulled up and got out, and Ray watched as the two vans and the truck pulled into the grass. A dark Taurus made the turn from the road and parked behind the other cars. Ray went under the passenger seat and retrieved the Colt and put it under his jacket at the small of his back. His breath was coming harder, and he put a hand on his chest. He got out of the car but left it running.
To the north he could see heat lightning flash soundlessly. There was a din of crickets; a hot wind pulled at his shirt and hair, and sweat began to run on his neck and chest. Men came out of the vans wearing embroidered colors. They crowded around the trunk of the Taurus and talked to each other in low voices. Ray wanted to jump back in the car and get out.
Cyrus moved over and put his ruined hand on Ray’s back, moved him forward away from the car. He closed the door and reached in through the open window and pulled the keys out of the ignition and pushed them into Ray’s hand. “Let’s go see what’s going on.” He nodded down the road toward the farm house.
Ray looked behind him and got a glimpse of men carrying long guns and someone hefting a cardboard box. “This isn’t what I thought.” He made a gesture at the crowd of men filling the road now, kicking up dust that looked blue in the moonlight.
“What did you think?” Cyrus leaned into him in the dark, and Ray backed up.
“I thought you were just…” Ray licked his lips.
“Bullshit.” In the dark, Ray could only see the liquid whites of the older man’s eyes. “You knew exactly what I was going to do.” Ray shook his head, and Cyrus pushed him hard against the car door with a rigid arm that compressed Ray’s chest and stopped his breathing. “Don’t lie to me, yardbird. You knew. You knew the minute you looked in my eyes.” The other men crowded around them, their eyes reflecting the blue glow of a distant light pole.
Ray’s voice was thin and breathless. “I can pay them the money.”
Cyrus reached into the skinhead’s jacket and came out with a pistol, a fast move like a magic trick in the half- light. He stuck the gun under Ray’s chin. He saw the skinhead wince a little, as if he were expecting to hear the flat, detonating pop and to see Ray’s head come apart. After a long moment, Cyrus pulled Ray off the car by his shirt and pushed him down the road.
“Now fucking move.”
Ray began to walk, pulling weakly at his clothing to recover himself, keeping the low hill on his left, between him and the house and barn. He left the gravel road and went into the grass, followed by Cyrus, the rest strung out in a line leading back to the cars. It was impossible to know how many there were in the dark. As they moved around the hill the music got fainter. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, and he could begin to make out junked farm equipment shrouded by tall grass, broken bottles catching the flashes of lightning. A pile of tires loomed and
