Billy Summers

Donnie smoked. I don’t know if the same person who got Glen his beers got Donnie his cigs, but he kept a pack of Marlboros behind a loose board under his bed. He mostly did it out back by the kitchen, but one day he pulled out his smokes when we were sitting in a big old Buick Estate wagon and pretending to drive to Vegas where we would play roulette and shoot craps. Ronnie said don’t you dare light up out here where there’s all these dry weeds and spilled oil. Donnie said what are you on the rag or something. Glen turned around and made a fist and said take that back unless you want to eat your front teeth. Later on, when I was in Fallujah, this one time I saw Sargent West shoot an RPG into an insurgent safe house in the part of town we called the Pizza Slice, and it blew sky-high because of all the ammo inside. Lucky we didn’t all get killed because we weren’t expecting it. That made me think of how Donnie also used to smoke sometimes in the supply shed, where the Specks stored all their paint. That was probably a lot more dangerous than out in the Demo Derby.

Donnie took it back but Ronnie punched Glen a good hard one on the shoulder. I don’t need you to stand up for me Dutton, she said.

When Ronnie called you by your last name, you knew she was mad. She turned around to the back seat and said I don’t need to be on the rag to worry about fire Wigmore because I got this. She held out her arm and showed the shiny burn scar there. We all seen that before. It went from halfway up her forearm just about all the way to her shoulder. Her parents got burnt up in a housefire, you see. Ronnie, she jump out of a 2nd story window just about in time with her arm burned and part of her leg on that side and her hair on fire. That’s how she wound up in the Speck House of Everlasting Paint when her one relative, an aunt, said I am not taking her. The one time she visited Ronnie in the hospital she said I raised two of my own, both hellions, and that’s enough. Ronnie said she couldn’t blame her for that.

I know what fire can do, she said. If I ever forget I only need to look at this arm to remember. Donnie said he was sorry, and I did too. I didn’t have anything to apologize for, I just felt bad because she got burned but also happy because it wasn’t her face, which was pretty. Anyway we was all friends again after that, although Donnie Wigmore was never a friend to me like Ronnie and Glen were.

4

‘We had some good times in the Demo Derby,’ Billy says.

He’s looking out the window at the courthouse again. August has given way to September, but still the heat shimmers. He can see waves of it coming off the street. It reminds him of the way the air used to shimmer above the big incinerator behind the House of Everlasting Paint’s kitchen.

The Specks were the Stepeneks, Ronnie Givens was Robin Maguire, Glen Dutton was Gadsden Drake. Gadsden after the Gadsden Purchase, Billy figured. He had read a book while still in the Marines, Slavery, Scandal, and Steel Rails, which had covered the purchase of that arid chunk of land from Mexico. He’d read it in Fallujah, between Operation Vigilant Resolve in April of ’04 and Phantom Fury in November. Gad said that before his mother died of lung cancer, she’d told him that his long-gone daddy had been a history teacher, so it made a degree of sense. I might not be the only Gadsden in the world, he said once while they were out in Demo Derby, pretending to go somewhere, but I bet there’s not more than a dozen. With it as a first name, that is.

Billy has changed the names of his friends, but Demo Derby was always Demo Derby, and they really did have some good times there before Gad joined the army and Robin ran off to … what did she tell him?

‘To seek my fortune in seven-league boots,’ he says. That was it. Only her boots hadn’t been of the seven-league variety, just scuffed suede with tired elastic sides.

I loved her among the wrecks, Billy thinks, and goes back to write another paragraph or two before calling it a day.

CHAPTER 8

1

Two bad things happen on Labor Day weekend. One is stupid and alarming, the other casts a light on the rather unpleasant person Billy never meant to become. Taken together, they make him realize that the sooner he gets out of Red Bluff, the better. I never should have taken a job with such a long lead time, he thinks when the weekend is over, but there was no way to know.

To know what? That the Ackermans and the others on Evergreen Street would take such a liking to him, for one thing. That he would take a liking to them, for another.