When they’d been kids, growing up in the trailer park, Blue used to be out at all hours because his mother was either entertaining a man or had gone out and forgotten to leave him the key. Back then, Blue had this thing for cockroaches. He’d collect them in a jar, then drop bricks on them to test their resiliency. He told Elgin once, “That’s what they are—resilient. Every generation, we have to come up with new ways to kill ’em because they get immune to the poisons we had before.” After a while, Blue took to dousing them in gasoline, lighting them up, seeing how resilient they were then.
Elgin’s folks told him to stay away from the strange, dirty kid with the white-trash mother, but Elgin felt sorry for Blue. He was half Elgin’s size even though they were the same age; you could place your thumb and forefinger around Blue’s biceps and meet them on the other side. Elgin hated how Blue seemed to have only two pairs of clothes, both usually dirty, and how sometimes they’d pass his trailer together and hear the animal sounds coming from inside, the grunts and moans, the slapping of flesh. Half the time you couldn’t tell if Blue’s old lady was in there fucking or fighting. And always the sound of country music mingled in with all that animal noise, Blue’s mother and her man of the moment listening to it on the transistor radio she’d given Blue one Christmas.
“On my fucking radio,” Blue said once and shook his small head, the only time Elgin ever saw him react to what went on in that trailer.
Blue was a reader—knew more about science and ecology, about anatomy and blue whales and conversion tables than anyone Elgin knew. Most everyone figured the kid for a mute—hell, he’d been held back twice in fourth grade—but with Elgin he’d sometimes chat up a storm while they puffed smokes together down at the drainage ditch behind the park. He’d talk about whales, how they bore only one child, who they were fiercely protective of, but how if another child was orphaned, a mother whale would take it as her own, protect it as fiercely as she did the one she gave birth to. He told Elgin that sharks never slept, how electrical currents worked, what a depth charge was. Elgin, never much of a talker, just sat and listened, ate it up and waited for more.
The older they got, the more Elgin became Blue’s protector, till finally, the year Blue’s face exploded with acne, Elgin got in about two fights a day until there was no one left to fight. Everyone knew—they were brothers. And if Elgin didn’t get you from the front, Blue was sure to take care of you from behind, like that time a can of acid fell on Roy Hubrist’s arm in shop, or the time someone hit Carnell Lewis from behind with a brick, then cut his Achilles tendon with a razor while he lay out cold. Everyone knew it was Blue, even if no one actually saw him do it.
Elgin figured with Roy and Carnell, they’d had it coming. No great loss. It was since Elgin’d come back from Vietnam, though, that he’d noticed some things and kept them to himself, wondered what he was going to do the day he’d know he had to do something.
There was the owl someone had set afire and hung upside down from a telephone wire, the cats who turned up missing in the blocks that surrounded Blue’s shack off Route 11. There were the small pink panties Elgin had seen sticking out from under Blue’s bed one morning when he’d come to get him for some cleanup work at a site. He’d checked the missing-persons reports for days, but it hadn’t come to anything, so he’d just decided Blue had picked them up himself, fed a fantasy or two. He didn’t forget, though, couldn’t shake the way those panties had curled upward out of the brown dust under Blue’s bed, seemed to be pleading for something.
He’d never bothered asking Blue about any of this. That never worked. Blue just shut down at times like that, stared off somewhere, as if something you couldn’t hear was drowning out your words, something you couldn’t see was taking up his line of vision. Blue, floating away on you, until you stopped cluttering up his mind with useless talk.
ELGIN WENT INTO town with Shelley so she could get her hair done at Martha’s Unisex on Main. In Martha’s, as Dottie Leeds gave Shelley a shampoo and rinse, Elgin felt like he’d stumbled into a chapel of womanhood. There was Jim Hayder’s teenage daughter Sonny, getting one of those feathered cuts was growing popular these days, and several older women who still wore beehives, getting them reset or plastered or whatever they did to keep them up like that. There was Joylene Covens and Lila Sims having their nails done while their husbands golfed and the black maids watched their kids, and Martha and Dottie and Esther and Gertrude and Hayley dancing and flitting, laughing and chattering among the chairs, calling everyone “honey,” and all of them—the young, the old, the rich, and Shelley—kicking back like they did this every day, knew each other more intimately than they did their husbands or children or boyfriends.
When Dottie Leeds looked up from Shelley’s head and said, “Elgin, honey, can we get you a sports page or something?” the whole place burst out laughing, Shelley included. Elgin smiled, though he didn’t feel like it, and gave them all a sheepish wave that got a bigger laugh, and he told Shelley he’d be back in a bit and left.
He headed up Main toward the town square, wondering what it was those women seemed to know so effortlessly that completely escaped him, and saw Perkin Lut walking in a circle outside Dexter Isley’s Five & Dime. It was one of those days when the wet, white heat was so overpowering that unless you were in Martha’s, the one place in town with central air-conditioning, most people stayed inside with their shades down and tried not to move much.
And there was Perkin Lut walking the soles of his shoes into the ground, turning in circles like a little kid trying to make himself dizzy.
Perkin and Elgin had known each other since kindergarten, but Elgin could never remember liking the man much. Perkin’s old man, Mance Lut, had pretty much built Eden, and he’d spent a lot of money keeping Perkin out of the war, hid his son up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for so many semesters even Perkin couldn’t remember what he’d majored in. A lot of men who’d gone overseas and come back hated Perkin for that, as did the families of the men who hadn’t come back, but that wasn’t Elgin’s problem with Perkin. Hell, if Elgin’d had the money, he’d have stayed out of that shitty war too. What Elgin couldn’t abide was that there was something in Perkin that not only protected him from consequences but that made him look down on people who paid for their sins, who fell without a safety net to catch them.
It had happened more than once that Elgin had found himself thrusting in and out of Perkin’s wife and thinking, Take that, Perkin. Take that.
But this afternoon, Perkin didn’t have his salesman’s smile or aloof glance. When Elgin stopped by him and said, “Hey, Perkin, how are you?” Perkin looked up at him with eyes so wild they seemed about to jump out of their sockets.
“I’m not good, Elgin. Not good.”
“What’s the matter?”
Perkin nodded to himself several times, looked over Elgin’s shoulder. “I’m fixing to do something about that.”
“About what?”
“About that.” Perkin’s jaw gestured over Elgin’s shoulder.
Elgin turned around, looked across Main and through the windows of Miller’s Laundromat, saw Jewel Lut pulling her clothes from the dryer, saw Blue standing beside her, taking a pair of jeans from the pile and starting to fold. If either of them had looked up and over they’d have seen Elgin and Perkin Lut easily enough, but Elgin knew they wouldn’t. There was an air to the two of them that seemed to block out the rest of the world in that bright Laundromat as easily as it would in a dark bedroom. Blue’s lips moved and Jewel laughed, flipped a T-shirt on his head.
“I’m fixing to do something right now,” Perkin said.
Elgin looked at him, could see that was a lie, something Perkin was repeating to himself in hopes it would come true. Perkin was successful in business, and for more reasons than just his daddy’s money, but he wasn’t the kind of man who did things; he was the kind of man who had things done.
Elgin looked across the street again. Blue still had the T-shirt sitting atop
his head. He said something else and Jewel covered her mouth with her hand when she laughed.
“Don’t you have a washer and dryer at your house, Perkin?”
Perkin rocked back on his heels. “Washer broke. Jewel decides to come in town.” He looked at Elgin. “We ain’t getting along so well these days. She keeps reading those magazines, Elgin. You know the ones? Talking about liberation, leaving your bra at home, shit like that.” He pointed across the street. “Your friend’s a problem.”
Your friend.
Elgin looked at Perkin, felt a sudden anger he couldn’t completely understand, and with it a desire to say, That’s my friend and he’s talking to my fuck-buddy. Get it, Perkin?
Instead, he just shook his head and left Perkin there, walked across the street to the Laundromat.
Blue took the T-shirt off his head when he saw Elgin enter. A smile, half frozen on his pitted face, died as he blinked into the sunlight blaring through the windows.
Jewel said, “Hey, we got another helper!” She tossed a pair of men’s briefs over Blue’s head, hit Elgin in the chest with them.
“Hey, Jewel.”
“Hey, Elgin. Long time.” Her eyes dropped from his, settled on a towel.
Didn’t seem like it at the moment to Elgin. Seemed almost as if he’d been out at the lake with her as recently as last night. He could taste her in his mouth, smell her skin damp with a light sweat.
And standing there with Blue, it also seemed like they were all three back in that trailer park, and Jewel hadn’t aged a bit. Still wore her red hair long and messy, still dressed in clothes seemed to have been picked up, wrinkled, off her closet floor and nothing fancy about them in the first place, but draped over her body, they were sexier than clothes other rich women bought in New York once a year.
This afternoon, she wore a crinkly, paisley dress that might have been on the pink side once but had faded to a pasty newspaper color after years of washing. Nothing special about it, not too high up her thigh or down her chest, and loose—but something about her body made it appear like she might just ripen right out of it any second.
Elgin handed the briefs to Blue as he joined them at the folding table. For a while, none of them said anything. They picked clothes from the large pile and folded, and the only sound was Jewel whistling.
Then Jewel laughed.
“What?” Blue said.
“Aw, nothing.” She shook her head. “Seems like we’re just one happy family here, though, don’t it?”
Blue looked stunned. He looked at Elgin. He looked at Jewel. He looked at the pair of small, light-blue socks he held in his hands, the monogram JL stitched in the cotton. He looked at Jewel again.
“Yeah,” he said eventually, and Elgin heard a tremor in his voice he’d never heard before. “Yeah, it does.”
Elgin looked up at one of the upper dryer doors. It had swung out at eye level when the dryer had been emptied. The center of the door was a circle of glass, and Elgin could see Main Street reflected in it, the white posts that supported the wood awning over the Five & Dime, Perkin Lut walking in circles, his head down, the heat shimmering in waves up and down Main.
THE DOG WAS green.
Blue had used some of the money Big Bobby’d paid him over the past few weeks to upgrade his target scope. The new scope was huge, twice the width of the rifle barrel, and because the days were getting shorter, it was outfitted with a light-amplification device. Elgin had used similar scopes in the jungle, and he’d never liked them, even when they’d saved his life and those of his platoon, picked up Charlie coming through the dense flora like icy gray ghosts. Night scopes—or LADs as they’d called them over there—were just plain unnatural, and Elgin always felt like he was looking through a telescope from the bottom of a lake. He had no idea where Blue would have gotten one, but hunters in Eden had been showing up with all sorts of weird marine or army surplus shit these last few years; Elgin had even heard of a hunting party using grenades to scare up fish—blowing ’em up into the boat already half cooked, all you had to do was scale ’em.
The dog was green, the highway was beige, the top of the tree line was yellow, and the trunks were the color of army fatigues.
Blue said, “What you think?”
They were up in the tree house Blue’d built. Nice wood, two lawn chairs, a tarp hanging from the branch overhead, a cooler filled with Coors. Blue’d built a railing across the front, perfect for resting your elbows when you took aim. Along the tree trunk, he’d mounted a huge klieg light plugged to a portable generator, because while it was illegal to “shine” deer, nobody’d ever said anything about shining wild dogs. Blue was definitely home.
Elgin shrugged. Just like in the jungle, he wasn’t sure he was meant to see the world this way—faded to the shades and textures of old photographs. The dog too seemed to sense that it had stepped out of time somehow, into this seaweed circle punched through the landscape. It sniffed the air with a misshapen snout, but the rest of its body was tensed into one tight muscle, leaning forward as if it smelled prey.
Blue said, “You wanna do it?”
The stock felt hard against Elgin’s shoulder. The trigger, curled under his index finger, was cold and thick, something about it that itched his finger and the back of his head simultaneously, a voice back there with the itch in his head saying, “Fire.”
What you could never talk about down at the bar to people who hadn’t been there, to people who wanted to know, was what it had been like firing on human beings, on those icy gray ghosts in the dark jungle. Elgin had been in fourteen battles over the course of his twelve-month tour, and he couldn’t say with certainty that he’d ever killed anyone. He’d shot some of those shapes, seen them go down, but never the blood, never their eyes when the bullets hit. It had all been a cluster-fuck of swift and sudden noise and color, an explosion of white lights and tracers, green bush, red fire, screams in the night. And afterward, if it was clear, you walked into the jungle and saw the corpses, wondered if you’d hit this body or that one or any at all.
And the only thing you were sure of was that you were too fucking hot and still—this was the terrible thing, but oddly exhilarating too—deeply afraid.
Elgin lowered Blue’s rifle, stared across the interstate, now the color of seashell, at the dark mint tree line. The dog was barely noticeable, a soft dark shape amid other soft dark shapes.
He said, “No, Blue, thanks,” and handed him the rifle.
Blue said, “Suit yourself, buddy.” He reached behind them and pulled the beaded string on the klieg light. As the white light erupted across the highway and the dog froze, blinking in the brightness, Elgin found himself wondering what the fucking point of a LAD scope was when you were just going to shine the animal anyway.
Blue swung the rifle around, leaned into the railing, and put a round in the center of the animal, right by its rib cage. The dog jerked inward, as if someone had whacked it with a bat, and as it teetered on wobbly legs, Blue pulled back on the bolt, drove it home again, and shot the dog in the head. The dog flipped over on its side, most of its skull gone, back leg kicking at the road like it was trying to ride a bicycle.
“You think Jewel Lut might, I dunno, like me?” Blue said.
Elgin cleared his throat. “Sure. She’s always liked you.”
“But I mean…” Blue shrugged, seemed embarrassed suddenly. “How about this: You think a girl like that could take to Australia?”
“Australia?”
Blue smiled at Elgin. “Australia.”
“Australia?” he said again.
Blue reached back and shut off the light. “Australia. They got some wild dingoes there, buddy. Could make some real money. Jewel told me the other day how they got real nice beaches. But dingoes too. Big Bobby said people’re starting to bitch about what’s happening here, asking where Rover is and such, and anyway, ain’t too many dogs left dumb enough to come this way anymore. Australia,” he said, “they never run out of dog. Sooner or lat
er, here, I’m gonna run out of dog.”
Elgin nodded. Sooner or later, Blue would run out of dog. He wondered if Big Bobby’d thought that one through, if he had a contingency plan, if he had access to the National Guard.
“THE BOY’S JUST, what you call it, zealous,” Big Bobby told Elgin.
They were sitting in Phil’s Barbershop on Main. Phil had gone to lunch, and Big Bobby’d drawn the shades so people’d think he was making some important decision of state.
Elgin said, “He ain’t zealous, Big Bobby. He’s losing it. Thinks he’s in love with Jewel Lut.”
“He’s always thought that.”
“Yeah, but now maybe he’s thinking she might like him a bit too.”
Big Bobby said, “How come you never call me Mayor?”
Elgin sighed.
“All right, all right. Look,” Big Bobby said, picking up one of the hair-tonic bottles on Phil’s counter and sniffing it, “so Blue likes his job a little bit.”
Elgin said, “There’s more to it and you know it.”
Playing with combs now. “I do?”
“Bobby, he’s got a taste for shooting things now.”
“Wait.” He held up a pair of fat, stubby hands. “Blue always liked to shoot things. Everyone knows that. Shit, if he wasn’t so short and didn’t have six or seven million little health problems, he’d a been the first guy in this town to go to The ’Nam. ’Stead, he had to sit back here while you boys had all the fun.”
Calling it The ’Nam. Like Big Bobby had any idea. Calling it fun. Shit.
“Dingoes,” Elgin said.
“Dingoes?”
“Dingoes. He’s saying he’s going to Australia to shoot dingoes.”
“Do him a world of good too.” Big Bobby sat back down in the barber’s chair beside Elgin. “He can see the sights, that sort of thing.”