Criminals (9 page)

“My brother taught me stuff.”

She was watching him take his shirt off. She said, “I don't see how he taught you this.”

“So how did you get like you are?” he said. “Tough. But a little crybaby.” She was as tall as he was and when she played soccer they weighed the same. “My little crybaby.”

“You better hope your dad don't hear what you two are up to.”

Shannon said, “Somebody would have to tell him and they would have to see him to tell him.” Her mother was tired and had a funny little slowed-down shrug that Shannon hated when she was fifteen. People said their hair was the same color but it was not.

She had hold of the back of a kitchen chair and she knew how to fight it out with her mother, but this time she sat down. The cigarette smell rose from her mother as she sat across the table looking down into her bra, undoing the buttons of her UPS uniform. Shannon
leaned forward. For the first time she had the thought of explaining something to her mother: how she loved and would always love Garth Moran. At first it was no more than his back in a white T-shirt, in class. His arms. His eyelashes, mentioned in the yearbook. The feeling changed. Into it came something that slowed her, filled her with a power of her own, like what got into her blood just sitting in the bleachers when he was on the football field, gradually stopped her talking about him to her friends. The knowledge that he gave everybody a chance came into it, that he was generous, that in love his concentration was fierce, yet he was always careful of her. That he was nothing like his dad, wanting to hurt somebody, anybody. He was good.

She looked for words for this love, an enclosure like a tent, with space for two lying down. But the words for the place, the love, did not come, and her mother got up and went to get out of her uniform.

“I have a name for you.” DuÅ¡ka pronounced some long word in her language. “For the golden hair.”

In the rubber band Shannon's hair was thicker than a wrist, streaked with tan and cream. Horse colors, Garth had said, winding it on his arm. Palomino.

“What are you thinking about?” she would say, in the days when she could ask him anything. “My palomino,” he said. Once in the afternoon. He rolled over on his back to show himself to her. That's all we thought about, she recalled in wonder.

A box with five black puppies in it. Her soccer coach said anybody could have one who could get a parent's signed note that it would be neutered. Shannon ran to find Garth; she beckoned him out of practice and he got the last one. This was their junior year, when he had no job because of football. He tore off his gear, wrapped the puppy in his jacket, and nestled it in the bike rack. It was his for a week, but he couldn't pay for the vet or the canned food he planned to feed it and his dad didn't believe in neutering dogs anyway and made him give it back.

His dad did that kind of thing all the time, but he got a pass from Garth. When Garth was a married man about to deploy he was still trying to find some inside track with his dad, sharpening his mower for him or hauling his old couch away in a borrowed truck. The first thing Shannon did with her business loan was buy a truck, a rusted Ford F-250, full of chaff and spiders from sitting in a barn.

Her mother had warned her. “Look out for the dad.”

“I know that,” Shannon said. “Garth's the opposite of that.”

“Where's the mom again?”

“LA. She has a whole nother family.”

“She left those boys. . . .” Her mother sighed.

“Yeah and they were little, too. He wouldn't let her have them.”

“Left them with
him
. She must have been something.”

“I guess. But there must have been something good about her because look at Garth. He didn't get it from his dad.”

“Left her boys,” her mother said again.

“Hey, you kicked Dad out.”

“I did. I know that. I'm sorry.” That was the most her mother would say on the subject. To herself Shannon said,
I would never give up the way you did. Never
.

He would come home to a dog. Nothing was going to get in the way of it this time. At the shelter they talked her out of a puppy and into a full-grown dog, a tan Lab mix with short legs and a dark, expectant face. Her name was Zena, and on the way to work every day she sat motionless beside Shannon, watching the road like a driving instructor. With her tan worried eyebrows she was nothing like the glossy black pup, tumbling and squealing, that had been Garth's for a week. When Shannon ran a floor buffer this dog would sleep through the noise.

On the site she stayed just ahead of Shannon, often looking back at her, and did not have to be leashed. The first time Shannon took her out in the evening when the deer were out she stiffened but did not chase them. She seemed to operate under rules from somewhere.
Maybe she had started out to be a guide dog. Somebody had named her and trained her. Who would have taken such a dog to the pound?

“Knock knock. Mind if I join you?” Mark stepped over the batts of hemp insulation and sat down in the sawdust where Shannon was leaning on a stud eating her lunch. “That's the perfect dog.” Zena panted as she looked steadily away from Shannon's ham sandwich. “Did you train her?”

“She came trained. She's super trained.” A lot of the time Shannon thought Mark was coming on to her. Mark didn't seem to realize it himself; he had a girlfriend from his software days and Shannon had met her.

Mark got up on his knees in the sawdust and hugged the dog to his chest, which she let him do, twisting to give Shannon a flat-eared look.

Every evening the powertrains shut down at the same time and a quiet descended that was as full in the ears as noise. Garth had a wheelbarrow by the handle but there was nothing in it and he wasn't moving. At first she thought he was listening to something but he didn't have earphones any more.

“How's it going?” she said.

“Look at that.”

“At what?” The sunlit green above the dug foundations ran up to the tree line where the woods climbed into foothills. Pink ribbons fluttered among the near trees, where Mark and Dane had found an old half-buried trail. Maybe the cows had made it. The plan was to get it in shape for easy walking, but without cutting any trees. “So . . . wooden houses. Kills me. Wood from someplace else.” There was no way now to tell if Garth was seeing the funny side. In fact, it seemed safe to assume he never was. “Who are the fuckers, anyway?” he said. “Gotta have a place like this to die in?”

It did take money, she could see that. These were not the old you saw in the city with two coats on, pushing a Safeway cart down the street.

S
o far it's kind of virtual, she told her friends. Her mother drove out in the UPS truck to see inside a house. “This would be OK with me,” her mother said, opening a refrigerator. “That new smell in everything.”

“Except where the raccoons get in the garbage.”

“They have garbage here?”

“Compost, I mean.”

After that they took the dog up the hill and at the top her mother looked down on the rooftops and lit a cigarette. “Guess I better not leave a butt.”

“Ha. Garth empties the truck ashtray in the parking lot.”

“I didn't see him down there.”

“He goes off at lunchtime.”

“Look at all the little green fire plugs. That's cute. Is he doing OK?”

“Yeah. Yes and no.”

Her mother smoked for a while and then she took a dog biscuit out of her pocket and Zena sat. “Good dog. Look how polite. And they don't ever bring you to see me.”

“This is the only place she goes. He has her ride in the truck bed, and this is where we go.”

“Ivan Krall.” DuÅ¡ka would repeat the name as if Shannon should recognize it. “He was my professor. A boy, just like your husband. In his classroom that year, he was the youngest. ‘We see—' he would say. ‘We see here—' But of course we did not see! Ah, but I saw that boy, with his chalk.” Her made-up eyes sparkled and narrowed at once, over the boy who would be hers. And for life, a long life. Though without all that much of it ahead of them, or ahead of her, to be exact, as she had let Shannon know with what seemed like pride.

To Shannon, Ivan Krall did not seem like a professor of mathematics, a man with chalk. He would have looked good on a horse. But he had won a prize, an international prize, Duška said, in the field of manifolds.

“Wow,” Shannon said. That would not be an engine. Garth would know. “My husband was good at math. I'll tell him. They had him tutor the football players.”

“Yes, your husband when he is digging, he stops, he thinks, he forgets what he is doing. He is a thinking boy.”

“Maybe he'll win a prize,” Shannon said. She didn't like the sound of her voice. She sounded like his dad. “He works hard,” she said.

Half the time in the two rooms she seemed in her own ears to be chattering loudly as if they had an upstairs and Garth was up there. When she told him about Ivan Krall's prize, he said, “No shit.”

“But what's a manifold? Where are you going?”

“Gonna go get a phone. Phone died.” He never used his phone and his driver's license had expired. She did the driving to work, but he would take the truck to the Asian grocery for beer. Since he got home he had gained ten pounds because of not working out. His collapsed cheeks had filled in and he couldn't get his wedding ring off.

“Why are you trying to get it off?” she said when he was twisting it. “Could you . . . could you just sit on the couch?” If they had a movie on he would be up and down, or go out and smoke on the sidewalk, or if he stayed put for a while it would be in the Goodwill armchair, lying with his eyes shut unless he heard the faint scratching she thought might be a mouse. That would get him up—a mouse.

“Here, really, I won't grab you or anything.”

“No, don't grab me,” he said without a smile.

Dozens of them in desert camo were streaming off the escalator. Who thought up those runny splotches that made people stop and look? Somebody had to design that exact thing, ugly and at the same time stupid. Halloween. But serious and real, in another place, something that hid you. Necessary. You had to remember that. There was Garth at last. Others were hurrying past him, waving, kneeling with arms out to kids. Some of the kids hung back.

Garth took a long time to get the duffel in behind the seat. He knew about the truck but he didn't say anything about it and he didn't
want to drive. She had finished laughing and crying and reaching for him with one arm while she drove. When Zena ran up to him at the door he did not squat down to greet her. He said, “Is this ours?” She was sniffing his legs, wagging her tail. “Look, she knows your smell!” Shannon said. “She knows you live here! I swear she knows you've been away.” The dog ran into the bedroom and came back to drop her worked-over knucklebone at his feet with a thud. Maybe she had been a man's dog. “And I mean, yeah, she's ours if you like her. I know you will. I bet you will.”

“Sure,” he said. Later, when the dog sat panting beside Shannon, he said, “Could you get it to lie down? Could you get that bone out of here?”

The custom refrigerator had a huge drawer. DuÅ¡ka rolled it all the way out on its quiet tracks. “We do not yet require the morgue.” She pushed the ice lever and ice in the shape of orange sections clattered into the drawer. She knows I have the kind with two ice trays, Shannon thought. “This thing, this factory!” DuÅ¡ka went on. “It is as someone, someone, says, is it not? Factories in the private life. Isn't that right, Ivan?” Ivan didn't answer right away because he was looking at Shannon. Then he said, “The private life!” spreading his arms wide and smiling at them both.

“Oh, he is a bad man,” said DuÅ¡ka.

“You, my dear,” she said to Shannon when they were on their own, “I think you will not judge Ivan. About women, he is a like a little boy who will not come in when we call him.”

Unpacking boxes for the Newell sisters, whose hands trembled and whose bright landscapes stood propped in every room, Shannon said, “Wow, you must have a hundred brushes. And both of you are artists? That's amazing.” The shy sisters appeared to be twins, but she didn't ask in case one was younger and didn't look it. Mark came in and spread out street plans for them to look at.

When he reappeared she was sitting in the truck half asleep and had to start it to get the window open. Garth didn't like power windows;
you could go off the road into water. She had tried for wind-up but you couldn't find them even in a truck like this, parked in a barn with seeds sprouting in the liner. Mark said, “So Shannon, at the Newells' today. I was thinking. I wonder when social services are up and running if you might want to think about that. You'd be good. Oh, I don't mean quit your crew. Just, you'd let the others do that stuff.” He didn't say “clean.”