— Yes. Is there anything else on your mind?
— No.
— Good. Now get out or I’ll sell you to the gypsies. I wouldn’t even get two bucks but I’ll sell you anyway.
Luke slouched out of the bedroom. Pete sat on his bed and chewed through another ten pages of the paperback. By nine-thirty the house was quiet. Pete rose from the bed and opened his wallet and counted out twenty-five dollars in rent money. He went out of his bedroom. His grandmother was in her chair in the living room, beside the radio. She often listened to evangelical cassettes that she got through the tabernacle library but now she was asleep.
Barry was in his office with his study bible open on his desk. He had a yellow legal pad he wrote his sermons on. Pete could see Barry’s tight handscript, almost glyphic, words and sentences, bible references written in bold. Pete tapped the door frame.
— Peter, said Barry.
Pete gave him that week’s twenty-five dollars. Barry took the money and counted it and put it in a little strongbox inside his desk.
— I’m grateful as always, said Barry.
— What’s the sermon about? said Pete.
— Think of your Romans. 12:16. That we should not think of high things but of keeping company with the humble. It’s the kind of thing that makes me think of Lee.
— You think Lee thinks of high things?
— What? Oh no. I think Lee is a lesson in how we ought to interact with each other as servants of Christ. Serving Lee has helped me learn a great deal.
— Serving Lee.
— Was there anything else, Peter? I’ve got a lot of work to do.
— One thing. Mrs. Adams. She teaches Sunday School.
Barry pressed his hands together: Sheila Adams, yes. I’ve got a lot of work to do.
— Do you … I mean … Did she get some kind of training before she got to be a Sunday School teacher?
— Peter, would you speak plain?
— Oh, ask Luke. I’m going to bed.
The next day was quiet at the Texaco. At half past three, Pete stocked up the jugs of washer fluid on the service island. Duane was in town for a doctor’s appointment.
It was the kind of workday when the hours went by slowly but when Pete got home he would wonder where it had all gone. Once, when he was new, a customer had driven away from the pumps with the gas nozzle still in the filler neck at the back of the car. The hose pulled off the pump and flapped like an obscene rubber tail. Gasoline sprayed everywhere. A woman walking by just stopped and stared. She was smoking a cigarette. It was an hour or two before the customer returned, whipped into a rage. He went on about how they all would be held financially liable for the damage to his car. Even then, new as he was, Pete guessed you couldn’t go long here before you were a veteran.
After he’d restocked the washer fluid, Pete went to change the trash bags in the washroom. He put on a pair of dish gloves they kept along with the other maintenance supplies. The gloves were pink and felt clammy inside. Pete was just stepping out with the bag of trash. He didn’t even see Billy.
— Hey, man.
— Jesus Christ, Billy, you scared the hell out of me.
Billy was leaning against the back wall of the store.
— What are you doing out this way? said Pete.
— I got my brother’s car. I kind of felt like driving around.
Billy spat out a little wad of saliva. He looked away at the bracken on the far side of the property: Emily, man. I don’t even know.
— What happened?
— Oh, what does it even matter.
Billy spat again. He kicked at the gravel. Pete felt an instinct to reach out, put a hand on the shoulder. He was halfway to doing this before he recalled that he was still wearing the pink dish gloves. Instead, he said: I’m sorry to hear that, Bill.
Even as he said it, he felt the lie for what it was. He was sorry that his friend was hurting, but he could not even pretend to feel bad that Emily had broken it off. He wondered what this meant, what this told him about himself. He cleared his throat and looked at the sky, looked anywhere but at Billy.
— Everything happens for a reason and all that other shit my brother’s wife always says, right? said Billy.
— I’m working tomorrow but not the next day. If you want we can get drunk.
— Yeah, maybe. You know what? Maybe when you skip town I’ll come with you. Fuck it.
— You bet.
No, Stanley, said Dick. Like I said before, this Gilmore, he’s not anybody at all. He told Len Gleber that the work he had was groundskeeping around EZ Acres down the highway. His story checked out fine. He told Gleber when it got cold he might head down to the city.
They were sitting in the front of the unmarked patrol car, rubbing the chill out of their hands in front of the heater. Stan’s truck stood alongside the unmarked car and both vehicles were parked outside of Western Autobody. A cold autumn storm was brewing.
Dick went on: As far as it looks, all this guy did wrong was have another gal on the go. I’m glad Eleanor talked to you. Not just because of her sister but because of all the rest of it. Aurel and the brothers.
— I’m glad she let me tell my side. I think she’s had a lot of sadness in her life.
Dick had a cup of coffee he’d brought with him from the garage. He tasted the coffee and then he cracked open the driver side door and poured it onto the wet pavement.
— One thing Eleanor said was how ordinary he was, said Stan. She said he didn’t look like he worked in an office or anything like that but otherwise he was just ordinary.
— Ordinary, said Dick.
— They never look like anyone in particular, not like in the movies.
— You remember back when Fran and me were living in the city, said Dick. I never loved it at that time and I don’t miss it one goddamn bit. But you remember I was on the Metro force. I was doing prisoner transfers from the provincial courthouse downtown out to wherever those sons of bitches ended up. There’s not so much I care to remember, because when your job is to drive those kinds of men around, those men who rape or steal or harm children or kill for money, you’re best to not pay them much mind. They don’t deserve it. But I do remember one from all the men I transported, I remember one above all the others. Because he didn’t have none of that desperation about him. He was just ordinary.
— Who was this?
— I don’t have any memory of his name, though I suppose I read it a time or two on the paperwork or in the newspapers or on the radio, because his name was around for a little while. He was just a man with a plain face. We were taking him to Kingston. He’d worked in an Italian restaurant. He was a cook in the kitchen. He lived with his wife in the east part of the city. And one day this ordinary man, well, he goes into work, into the kitchen, and gets the biggest carving knife he can find and goes on into the manager’s office and he sticks that carving knife into the manager’s throat and cuts it wide open. Just like that, this manager sitting at his desk with his head, you know, hanging backwards just by the bones. Anyhow, the man went home on the streetcar and when he got home he got another carving knife from his own kitchen and tried to do the same to his wife. He would of, too, if he didn’t cut her arm open first. They said he slipped in her blood and hit his head on a chair when he went down. The gal got herself out of there. God knows what she must of thought of the turn of events. I never even heard him raise his voice, is what she said at the trial, and that was all the witness she ever beared against him. Anyhow when the city cops- boys I knew, some of them-got to the house, the man didn’t resist at all. They found him, they said, holding a towel full of ice to the back of his head. You know what he said on trial? He said the manager just talked too much. He
