The Spot: Stories

Long days of windblown dust and cold nights beneath starlight and yet somehow they stayed together, watching over each other, taking turns, trying to maintain a balance. For his part, at a campfire near Kansas City, Ronnie confessed to having abandoned a bride back in Ohio, a girl named Rose who had been with child — knocked up, pregnant, take your pick. As beautiful as a fucking voodoo doll, he added. He went on with his confession until his voice gave way and he slipped away from the fire and stumbled off into Kansas City — all cowpoke delusion and gunslinging hee-haw! — where he found himself, in the end, after a long binge, bloodied with a broken jaw (wired shut) and a ten-day jail stint. During which time Hambone, using the incarceration as an excuse (ten days in a K.C. pen is equal to a month in a Chicago clinker), hooked up with a hayseed named Stills and went on a ten-day burglary spree. (The old lady I burgled ain’t gonna miss what I took, he explained, escorting Ronnie out of jail. She was demented and hardly knew what was what. In any case we kept things even and didn’t go too far and left her a pearl brooch, a pair of earrings — silver plate — and her reading glasses. We burgled the old lady and then Stills robbed me and now I have just enough to buy a few bottles and to hold a little cash on the side to give someone else out there something to rob from us if they come along and feel so compelled.)

From K.C. they wandered east again, skirting town centers while between them a tension formed. If the price were high enough, one man would rob the other if he could, if enough funds entered into the formula, Ronnie began to admit to himself. A structure had formed around this possibility of betrayal. A tightness entered the way they spoke to each other, wedged apart by the fact that even after the drinking binges, Ronnie was still youthful and the old man was still old. To go off alone would be to stretch the you-did-this-and-then-I-did-that fights they sometimes had, mostly in Indiana, a state too prim and proper and boring around the edges to exploit. In any case, the old man’s health was going downhill fast. At a free clinic in Indianapolis a doctor pressed the cold cone of his stethoscope to the caved rib bones and said, Breathe deep, deeper. Is that what you call breathing deep? When he slapped the X-ray film onto the light board in his office, it showed not shadow but rather ghostly white furls of tumor, billowing like smoke. In contrast, Ronnie remained limber and quick, fast on his toes, with lean skinny arms — only a few track marks and one hookshaped scar from a knife fight in Akron — and a brightness in his eyes that stayed on the edge of being hopeful. A spark still burned when he spoke about ideas he had on how to make a buck, heists he might pull if he could get his old buddies back together: a forlorn gas station, not far from the Ohio Turnpike, with a single attendant behind the counter, just begging to be stuck up, just asking for it when the time was right; a blueberry farm in Michigan that would yield up a month’s worth of sweet eating if you felt like heading up that way.

You got something to say on blades, the man named Vanboss said that night, outside Toledo. The silence had continued to open around the men, stretching down to the shore of the river and past that to the refinery, wagging its burn-off plume into the sky. It was a wide silence that spread out in concentric circles with Ronnie at the epicenter and the men just one ring out. It was the kind of silence that formed around a given, and the given was that Ronnie had a good blade story to tell, most likely a blade/fight story, and — this was pure speculation, but they sensed it was possible — even a terminal act of violence on Ronnie’s part, because he seemed the type: gaunt, tight-lipped about his past. He had uttered the name Hambone once or twice before going on to some other subject, as if testing to see who might’ve known the man.