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The boss sent them, her three henchmen who wore suits and hoods and carried smart black duffel bags for their tools. When they arrived at the house in Pine Valley they removed the knobs and deadbolts from the front and back doors. Once inside they screwdrivered divots into sheetrock and knifed all the linens. They urinated in the toilet tanks and the upstairs bidet. They took a ballpeen hammer to the linoleum floor as if to prove they could. The dishes they found and smashed, but they left windows intact. To shatter windows seemed to them crass and lowbrow, a teenaged sort of vandalism. They were professionals. They drew hacksaws from their bags and cut notches in the legs of every chair in the house. Also from their bags they produced magazines such as Bear Cub Stud, Hundred-Knuckle Shuffle, and Fags Fucking and placed them in the bedrooms, in the safe, in the breakfast caddy. An imitation Rembrandt watched in horror.
They were delivering a message. The house belonged to the boss’s brother-in-law, an incapable man who had lost a great deal of the boss’s money on sprees at the Casino Queen. The brother-in-law had taken his Suburban to Little Rock three days before, and was to return in the morning with twelve pounds of vacuum-sealed marijuana, a strain known as Creeping Jaundice, after both its psychoactive stealth and the color of its hairs. For their final act, the henchmen scattered an assortment of gold jewelry, twelve-carat, herringbone; none too expensive but none too cheap either.
When they finished they shut the doors and replaced the knobs and deadbolts. Afterward they ordered ninety-nine hamburgers at the White Castle drive-thru, then spent an hour at Hanlow Park eating in the back of their van with the dome light on. Rain began to fall. No one who might be at the park at three-thirty on a Thursday morning would bother the occupants of a brown cargo van with no back windows. The henchmen worked well together in a professional capacity, but aside from the fact that the boss had involved them in her personal family problems, they had little to discuss, little in common. They finished their hamburgers and drove to the safehouse in Eureka, where their tools would be cleaned and their suits and duffel bags destroyed. They each hoped—in secret from one another—that the boss would not have to send them to the brother-in-law’s house a second time. Family disputes made them uncomfortable, the way children and witnesses made them uncomfortable. In the safehouse basement they showered then rested, each on his own cot in a room behind a false wall.
At half-past ten they traded the van for a less conspicuous car with clean plates and drove to see the boss at the highrise downtown. Tourists with fanny packs and cameras and Cardinals paraphernalia rode by on a diesel-powered trolley. A St. Louis metro cop pulled in behind the car and followed for a city block before turning down a restricted alleyway. At the highrise they parked in the reserved stall in the underground garage. The building had an open lobby full of sunshine and a three-tiered fountain and a glass elevator they were forbidden to ride. The freight elevator carried them up to thirty, to Greater Metroland Courier & Transfer. Behind a low-walled partition the secretary glanced up from her typewriter and nodded once at the three men whose existence she had been instructed otherwise to ignore.
They entered the corner office, as warm as though under a magnifying lens. In full sunlight beside a marble-topped desk the boss was squinting closely at her banana tree. Her lips were pursed tight, bunched as if by a drawstring, and her eyeglasses dangled around her neck by a gold thread. The banana tree grew in a gilded pot decorated with faux hieroglyphics and walking Egyptians. She fondled the fronds between her thick fingers. A jet pushed across the skyline, a panorama framed between the legs of the Gateway Arch and across the river to the industrial landscape of East St. Louis. The Casino Queen glittered at its mooring not far from the tangle of highway ramps and interchanges. The boss asked if any of them would like some strawberries. The henchmen declined, but thanked her nonetheless. Already sweat trickled down their backs and behind their knees.
The boss was a very fat woman and wore a navy suit with platinum butterfly cufflinks. She herself sweated to profusion for the sake of the banana tree’s well-being. She finished her inspection of the tree and plucked a strawberry from the platter of them on the desk and bit off all but the stem leaves, which she replaced among the surviving strawberries. She motioned the men forward.
They saw then that she had been crying. There was puffiness around her eyes and the telltale glisten at which she dabbed a monogrammed silk neckkerchief. She told them that her brother-in-law had not shown up from Little Rock this morning, that his car had been impounded in Charleston. She snatched her glasses up from her chest and fit them to her head and her eyes filled the lenses. She said that the course of her little sister’s life should not be dictated by that simian ignoramus of a husband and his failures, that it was a blessing the marriage had not produced children. The boss’s neck and forehead reddened as she spoke. Pigeons looped past the window from a great height. A hawk plummeted in pursuit. The boss looked down suddenly, her brow creasing. She combed her fingers over the smooth black surface of the desk as though parting hair. The henchmen could hear her soft breath.
They knew they would leave the office with orders to meddle further, that the boss intended to make the most of the worst. She pushed on the desktop, then straightened and smoothed down her suit with three curt strokes. She asked if they knew how many bricks one might need for laying a path, for example through a Japanese garden, and precisely what sort of bricks they might use, whether standard masonry bricks, or flagstones, or surplus railroad ties, or machine-cut granite octagons; or would they opt instead to pour a path of gravel or tumbled river stones, shredded rubber, cedar chips; which materials, she asked, would they select, and in their judgment how much extra material would seem a wise amount given the task?
A silence followed. The act of bludgeoning debtors’ fingers beneath cinder blocks in order to make what the boss called a soft impression did require a certain discipline, much the same way as did the efficient use of lockpicks and pry bars and small arms. But the henchmen had little experience in outdoor aesthetics, and even less in landscaping, where Mexicans were far cheaper and much better qualified. None of the men dared to answer nor did the boss wait for one, but instead revolved to face the window. She gestured to give her a moment. Once she had mulled over her words she told them to never mind that, forget she had asked. Just get the Suburban out of impound, and in a few days they would have to go back to Pine Valley to rectify the brother-in-law problem.
In the shabby gray dawn they headed south on a state highway past fields bursting with cotton. A fine mist speckled the windshield. In the trunk they had what tools they thought they might need: a set of chauffer’s plates, saws and chisels, an acetylene blowtorch, a lockfucker, and a stainless steel selection of Craftsman’s best. Each of the men went armed with a semi-automatic pistol and a last-resort sidearm according to his own taste and preference. The backseat henchman wondered aloud what exactly they were to do with the brother-in-law if they happened to find him, a possibility the boss had not addressed. On the shoulder crows leapt from a deer carcass into the gunmetal sky and fell away behind the car’s passing. The driver said he never lived anywhere with so many goddamned deer all over the place.
On two formal occasions they had exchanged banalities with the brother-in-law: once at a baptism at the Presbyterian church downtown, and another time at the reception when his wife opened her gallery, and so would recognize him by the hairless scar in his eyebrow, or by the cluster of ovaloid moles on his Adam’s apple, or by the habitual manner in which he kept one hand on his belly. The backseat henchman said that he thought the boss had brought up the Japanese garden as a way to suggest something metaphorical, a desire for a more peaceful existence maybe. And what had happened to all that Creeping Jaundice after the Suburban had been impounded?
The henchman riding shotgun produced from his pocket, then unrolled, a package of Big-League Chew and pincered strips of gum into his mouth. The driver asked for some, took a small amount, and inspected it for a moment before squeezing it into a mass. The other stashed the gum package away and wished aloud that the Bootheel radio stations would play something other than shitkicker tunes. The fine mist fattened and began to knock on the windshield. They crossed a county line with a noticeable bump onto reddish asphalt that buzzed under the tires like cards in bicycle spokes. The driver asked how much farther to Charleston, then set the wipers to medium speed. The shotgun henchman turned to face into the back and said that Japanese gardens had cherry trees and little ponds or streams where giant koifish swam and grew fat eating bread that bored rich people threw at them, that the boss had asked a rhetorical question and had not in fact wanted their opinions on how to go about landscaping such a garden, and that the Creeping Jaundice had vaporized into the black market ether. He then exhaled a large purple bubble which deflated and promptly shriveled into his rotating jaw. They approached an intersection overstrung with a flashing yellow, and sped past a cab-over semi waiting to turn, its trailer a rusted cage filled to capacity with tires.
After some disagreement as to their priorities, they decided to stop for breakfast at the Choo-Choo Diner at Boomtown before heading to the impound. They parked and swallowed their gum and went inside. A country song played from the ceiling in the lobby and echoed with a curious doubling effect from the gift shop to the right, beyond which, past the displays, past the Taiwanese-made dreamcatchers slowly turning, past the glass shelves of injection-molded dragons, past the many novelty flyswatters with fly-shaped heads, lay the fireworks warehouse outlet, Boomtown, which sold Fourth of July 24-7-365.
The henchmen entered the diner proper and lined up at the buffet counter and one at a time took trays from the stack and pushed them along the stainless steel rail toward the sneeze guard and the warming trays steaming underneath. At a round table old men ate donuts over cups of black coffee. An electric train ran along a shelf-mounted track near the ceiling. The server, an old black woman with sad, gentle eyes, greeted them with a nod of familiarity and spooned breakfast sausage and fried okra and runny eggs onto their plates. She addressed them each as they passed her station: Hello Hon, How you doin Sweetie, Ain’t you a Cutie. Cutie looked at the food, which swam in grease, and his stomach soured. In the past month they had eaten this breakfast six times, on their way to or from the boss’s bidding.
The electric train passed overhead. The locomotive made a continuous noise like the buzzing of an exceptionally large insect. The freight cars clicked their patterns and rhythms behind it. Hon paid for breakfast in cash and they sat at a table near the old men, five in total who said nothing to one another and were slumped, slouched, bejowled, looking at their hands or into their coffee. Hon and Sweetie proceeded to eat. In the ceiling a melancholy singer crooned. Cutie gripped his knife and fork and watched the whirls of yolk mixing reluctantly with the grease, the color not unlike recycled motor oil. He asked for the salt and pepper. Sweetie handed the shakers across and said he didn’t know how anyone could eat this stuff, it was death deep-fried and fit for a vagrant.
The electric locomotive whistled through a decorative trestle above the restrooms sign. In the hallway the men’s room door opened and a man in a gray sport coat emerged, rubbing his belly, cheeks puffed out in the expression of relief. Cutie recognized the half-inch-wide scar in the man’s eyebrow. The brother-in-law caught his glance and stopped mid-stride. A grimace of panic crossed his face before he broke for the emergency exit. Hon turned in his seat, his mouth full of sausage. Sweetie tipped back his coffee cup and watched over the rim. The brother-in-law stumbled, and something hard and plastic clattered on the floor. Cutie cocked his head and stared as if witness to an incomprehensible breach of etiquette. The old men stirred at the disruption. The brother-in-law whirled and grabbed up what he had dropped, then leapt the last few strides to the emergency door.
The buffet server draped her arms over the sneeze guard and said: Look at that crazy fool about to run out the fire door. The brother-in-law fell against the handle and a feeble ringing sounded from the alarm box and he plunged out into the gray morning. Hon rolled his eyeballs and frowned. One of the old men scratched a pocketknife blade over the stubble on his neck. Sweetie dabbed a napkin around his mouth and said: that was unexpected. The emergency door came to and latched. The alarm ceased. The electric train skittered along the track over the buffet. A plump fly landed on the table and ran in a circle, then lifted and settled upon Cutie’s eggs. Hon and Sweetie groomed the last bits of soggy okra off their plates, into their mouths. At the next table an old man grunted up a rumbling tremor of a cough. Cutie pushed his utensils into his uneaten food and the fly spiraled away. Hon took a final sip of coffee. They debated with their eyes over who should leave the tip. Sweetie produced a twenty, folded it once, and placed it tentlike atop the napkin dispenser. The old man’s cough would not abate; the respiratory violence clutched at his chest and bent him over the table, each cough rattling his cheeks like drumskins. The henchmen traded nods and glances, gestures of hand, and agreed that the impounded Suburban could wait a half hour. A strained wheezing arose from the old man. The others looked on at their companion as if with growing concern. The henchmen headed out of the diner and toward Boomtown to a steel guitar accompaniment.
They idled caddy corner from the impound, a thunderstorm throwing down rain that bounced off the car like plastic bottles. Hon leaned over the wheel, peered through the windshield. The wipers bailed off water as fast as it fell. He noticed a tiny scab on the knuckle of his pinky, then sat erect and nibbled the scab until he tasted blood. Three boys whose shorts and long T-shirts stuck to their bodies pedaled through the downpour on dirt bikes. The last boy divided a puddle into brackish hands and stood on his pedals and wagged out of sight. Cutie squeezed the seat’s upholstered foam like a stress ball. That they had not even entertained the possibility of chasing down the brother-in-law worried him.
Opposite the impound a frontage of warehouses lined the street, the Carpet Wizard and the Pipefitters Local and the Unity of Christ Bible Fellowship Church. Sweetie opened, shut the glove compartment, then addressed the Carpet Wizard sign in a prayerlike incantation: O Carpet Wizard, unroll forth thy trimmest shag in this hour of need, for the Dew Drop Inn layeth upon the interstate and chargeth by the hour. Praise be. Amen. Hon said he would never stay overnight anywhere in this part of Missourah. Headlights squared through the rain and a pickup gunned toward them and past in a roaring wash. Cutie said that the rain looked like it wouldn’t let up for hours.
A few minutes later a streak of sunshine broke over the steaming pavement. Hon drove ahead, slowed parallel to the gate, a chainlink fence on rollers that no one had bothered to close. Sweetie inventoried three unmarked white cars, a State-Patrol-brown cruiser, one Corrections van with a busted headlight, a pea green pickup, and, farthest from the gate, the black Suburban. A brick wall backended the lot and contained a security door. From the high corner a CCTV camera surveilled the lot and probably the street. Sweetie also noted the sodium floodlamps that would light their way. Hon pressed the accelerator and said he was not one for broad daylight, not this job. Sweetie uttered a snort and said did they remember the job in Alton two winters back, when they broke that fixer’s arm in three places and were about to toss him facefirst into a dumpster, but just before they did, a garbage truck pulled in?
That evening they parked beside a rust-blighted hay baler in an alley behind a tavern, the impound three blocks away. A country ballad leaked through the tavern’s corrugated walls and blacked-out windows. Sweetie grunted in disgust and shouldered the toolbag out of the trunk. At the corner by a fire hydrant Hon and Cutie waved away mosquitoes. They started for the impound. The day’s storms had rumbled east and left a sky streaked with clouds and a humid stillness in which Nighthawks wheeled and charped. Trucks howled on the interstate as if overdue with nightmare cargoes. The henchmen skirted the rain puddles like black mirrors on the sidewalk and trod earthworms stranded there. Storefront windows gave only darkness when they passed, and they rolled their footsteps out of habit and practice. The traffic signals flashed red. Hon and Sweetie said nothing. The long discipline of city life had made them suspicious of small towns’ lack of traffic. Cutie kept pace behind. He tried to picture the Japanese garden.
There would be a lawn with a sand trap and smooth round rocks and a rake for raking perfect lines in the sand, a stream where Koi fish hung like torpedoes in the water, and maybe a cherry tree in full blossom, its petals flapping in the breeze like tongues. He felt lightheaded. A giddy sensation came over him. The tongues flapped at him with the same snickering sounds made by three pairs of boot-treads on rain-soaked asphalt. He shuffled out of the daydream, his gaze wandering. Across the street a man stood in the doorway of the Unity of Christ Bible Fellowship Church. The man had just locked the door and he carried a sweater folded in the crook of his elbow. The man noticed them and came trotting and called out, Brothers! Hon and Sweetie turned to see what new distraction had come forth. At the curb the man splashed in a puddle whose depth immersed him to the ankle and he yelped in surprise and hopped onto the sidewalk, there lifting the soaked shoe and chuckling in apparent good humor. Hon and Sweetie had reached the chainlink fence a dozen or so paces ahead. They looked on without patience. Cutie shrugged at them. The man from the church again addressed them as brothers and said that he was blessed to have been sent to them on this night of clearing storms, that the way to the everlasting garden lay clear. What good fortune, the man said, to have crossed paths. He looked back and forth in an effort to include everyone and said: friends...and after the dramatic pause he asked if they could spare a few minutes to hear the good news of Jesus Christ. Cutie inhaled the deep stone smell of wet pavement.
A nighthawk chirped above the street. The man had jet hair and wore a white vest over a white silken shirt. He shifted his weight; water squished in his shoe. Hon cursed at the man, his voice hissing, then backswept his suit jacket and braced a hand on his hip so the strap and shine of the holster winked from beside his heart. The man from the church either ignored the holster or did not recognize the threat to his life or simply grew emboldened at the sight and the implications of its open presentation. Cutie said that a man has few things but time, even if only a minute or two. At this the man gaped in joy and the arms of his sweater unfolded and danced, frantic then limp, and he replied with a shout: What’s a man’s time compared to eternity? and he raised a hand to the sky, his jaw hanging open as if in wonder, and Cutie followed the hand skyward, the night dark but for a sourceless glow, the koi had sunk out of sight and the stream licked and glistened like blades of knives, and the tree of tongues twisted and shook and moaned in the same strange way invalids moan their discomfort, and the tongues stretched and lowered into fronds and tiny bunches of bananas sprouted and fell on his back, the burden now his to carry—but still there was only the night and the clouds and a few winking stars.
After staring far too long at the proselytizer Sweetie hunched up the tool bag and nodded a particular way, a signal to ignore the man, that they had a job to do, they were professionals. Hon closed his jacket and gestured his agreement and the two henchmen went through the gate without a look back. An upwelling began in Cutie’s throat, a painful lump that made him want to cry yet was constricted by a hard ring of fear as tough as a bone. Did he have the courage to ignore his path? Or, greater still, the courage not to? He asked the man what path he would walk through a Japanese garden, on what sort of material if given the choice; or would he lay his own path, and if so, then of what materials, no matter how fantastic, would that path be composed? Where could he find the answer? Would he walk on water, if he could?