The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

Tom Franklin Grit

From Poachers and Other Stories

Chugging and clanging among the dark pine trees north of Mobile, Alabama, the Black Beauty Minerals plant was a rickety green hull of storage tanks, chutes, and conveyor belts. Glen, the manager, felt like the captain of a ragtag spaceship that had crash-landed, a prison barge full of poachers and thieves, smugglers and assassins.

The owners, Ernie and Dwight, lived far away, in Detroit, and when the Black Beauty lost its biggest client — Ingalls Shipbuilding — to government budget cuts, they ordered Glen to lay off his two-man night shift. One of the workers was a long-haired turd Glen enjoyed letting go, a punk who would’ve likely failed his next drug test. But the other man, Roy Jones, did some bookmaking on the side, and Glen had been in a betting slump lately. So when Roy, who’d had a great year as a bookie, crunched over the gritty black yard to the office, Glen owed him over four thousand dollars.

Roy, a fat black man, strode in without knocking and wedged himself into the chair across from Glen’s desk, probably expecting more stalling of the debt.

Glen cleared his throat. “I’ve got some bad news, Roy—”

“Chill, baby,” Roy said. He removed his hard hat, which left its imprint in his hair. “I know I’m fixing to get laid off, and I got a counteroffer for you.” He slid a cigar from his hat lining and smelled it.

Glen was surprised. The Ingalls announcement hadn’t come until a few hours ago. Ernie and Dwight had just released him from their third conference call of the afternoon, the kind where they both yelled at him at the same time.

“How’d you find that out, Roy?” he asked.

Roy lit his cigar. “One thing you ain’t learned yet is how to get the system doggie-style. Two of my associates work over at Ingalls, and one of ’em been fucking the bigwig’s secretary.”

“Well—”

“Hang on, Glen. I expect E and D done called you and told you to lay my big fat ass off. But that’s cool, baby.” He tipped his ashes into his hard hat. “ ’Cause I got other irons in the fire.”

He said he had an “independent buyer” for some Black Beauty sandblasting grit. Said he had, in fact, a few lined up. What he wanted was to run an off-the-books night shift for a few hours a night, three nights a week. He said he had an associate who’d deliver the stuff. The day-shifters could be bought off. Glen could doctor the paperwork so the little production wouldn’t be noticed by Ernie and Dwight.

“But don’t answer now,” Roy said, replacing his hard hat. “Sleep on it tonight, baby. Mull it over.”

Glen — a forty-two-year-old, ulcer-ridden, insomniac, half-alcoholic chronic gambler — mulled Roy’s idea over in his tiny apartment that evening by drinking three six-packs of Bud Light. He picked up the phone and placed a large bet with Roy on the upcoming Braves-Giants game, taking San Francisco because Barry Bonds was on fire. Then he dialed the number of the Pizza Hut managed by his most recent ex-wife’s new boyfriend, placed an order for five extra-large thick-crust pies with pineapple and double anchovies, and had it delivered to another of his ex-wives’ houses for her and her boyfriend. Glen had four ex-wives in all, and he was still in love with each of them. Every night as he got drunk it felt like somebody had shot him in the chest with buckshot and left four big airy holes in his heart, holes that grew with each beer, as if — there was no other way he could think of it — his heart were being sandblasted.

The Braves rallied in the eighth and Bonds’s sixteen-game hitting streak was snapped, so when Roy came by the next day, Glen owed him another eight hundred dollars and change.

Roy sat down. “You made up your mind yet?”

“Impossible,” Glen said. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t go along. Ernie and Dwight’d pop in out of nowhere and we’d all be up the creek.”

Today Roy wore tan slacks and a brown silk shirt. Shiny brown shoes and, when he crossed his legs, thin argyle socks. A brown fedora in his lap. The first time Glen had seen him in anything but work clothes.

Roy shook a cigar from its box and lit it. “Glen, you the most gullible motherfucker ever wore a hard hat. Don’t you reckon I know when them tight-asses is coming down here?”

“How? Got somebody fucking their wives?”

Roy hesitated. “My cousin’s daughter work in the Detroit airport.”

Glen’s mind flashed a quick slideshow of Ernie and Dwight’s past disastrous visits. “You might’ve mentioned that four years ago.”

“Baby,” Roy said, “I’ll cut you in for ten percent of every load we sell.”

“There’s a recession, Roy. I can’t unload this grit to save my life, and if I can’t, you sure as hell can’t.”

Roy chuckled. “Got-damn, boy.” He pulled out a wad of hundred-dollar bills. “This is what I done presold. I got friends all up and down the coast. They got some rusty-ass shit needs sandblasting. You ain’t no salesman, Glen. You couldn’t sell a whore on a battleship.”

“Roy, it’s illegal.”

“Go look out yonder.” Roy pointed to the window overlooking the black-grit parking lot.

Glen obeyed. A big white guy with a little head was leaning against Roy’s cream-colored El Dorado, carving at his fingernails with a long knife.

“That’s my associate, Snakebite,” Roy said. “He’ll be delivering the stuff. He also collect for me, if you know what I mean.”

Glen knew.

“Up till now,” Roy said, “you been getting off easy ’cause you was the boss. Now that that’s changed...”

Glen looked at him. “You threatening me, Roy?”

“Naw, baby. I’m a businessman.” Roy took out his pocket ledger. “As of now, I’m forgetting every got-damn cent you owe me.” Glen watched Roy write paid by the frighteningly high red figure he would’ve been having nightmares about, had he been able to sleep.

Roy started running his phantom night shift Monday through Wednesday nights. To keep the four day-shifters quiet, he gave them a slight payoff — a “taste” — each week. So they clocked in in the mornings and pretended the machinery wasn’t hot, that the plant hadn’t run all night. And Glen, hung over, look his clipboard and measuring tape out and stared at the dwindling stockpiles of raw grit where Roy had taken material. Then he went back across the yard into his office, locked the door, rubbed his eyes, doctored his paperwork, and — some days — threw up.

Staring out the window, he worried that the day shift would rat to Ernie and Dwight. He’d never been close to the workers — in his first week as manager, four years before, he’d confiscated the radio they kept in the control room. Instead of spending afternoons in his office making sales calls the way the previous manager had. Glen had stayed out in the heat with the men, cracking the whip, having the plant operator retake grit samples, watching the millwright repair leaks, making sure the payloader’s fittings were well-greased. He timed the guys’ breaks, stomped into the break room if they stayed a minute past their half hour. If someone got a personal phone call, Glen would go to another extension and pick up and say, “Excuse me,” in an icy tone and wait for them to hang up.

In the plant, they were supposed to wear hard hats, safety glasses, steel-toe boots, leather gloves, earplugs, and, depending on where they worked, a dust mask or respirator. Glen struck here too, because his predecessor had let the guys grow lax. In those first months, Glen had stepped on their toes to check for steel and yelled in their ears to check for plugs. He’d written them up for the tiniest safety violation and put it in their permanent files.

So they hated him. They took orders sullenly and drew a finger across their throats as a warning signal when he approached. They never invited him to participate in their betting pools or asked him to get a beer after work.

Now Glen swore to give up gambling. He locked himself in the office during the day and made halfhearted sales calls: “The unique thing about our sandblasting grit,” he’d say wearily, “is that no piece, no matter how small, has a round edge.” At night, he stayed home and watched sitcoms and nature shows instead of baseball. When cabin fever struck, he went to the movies instead of the dog track or the casino boats in Biloxi. He even managed to curb his drinking on weeknights.

Until early July. There was an Independence Day weekend series between Atlanta and the Cards in St. Louis and the plant had a four-day weekend. A drunk Glen, who when lonely sometimes called 1-900 handicapping lines, got a great lip from Lucky Dave Rizetti — “A sure by-God thing,” Lucky Dave promised. “Take the Bravos, take ’em for big money.” And Glen took them, betting almost two grand over the four games. But the series was filled with freaky incidents, relief pitchers hitting home runs, Golden-Glovers making stupid two-base throwing errors, etc.

So on Tuesday, the holiday over, Glen was back in debt. Then add the fact that the lawyers of exes two and three had been sending letters threatening lawsuits if Glen didn’t pay his alimony. The lawyers said they’d get a court order and garnish his wages. Christ, if Ernie and Dwight got wind of that, they’d fly down and can him for sure.

They came twice a year or so, the old bastards, for spot inspections, speaking in their Yankee accents and wearing polished hard hats on their prim gray crew cuts. They would fly in from Detroit, first class, and rent a Caddy and get suites at the top of the Riverview downtown. They’d bring rolled-up plans to the plant and walk around frowning and making notes. Glen always felt ill when they were on-site — they constantly grumbled about lack of production or low sales figures or how an elevator wasn’t up to spec. They’d peer into his red eyes and sniff his breath. He would follow them around the plant’s perimeter, his chin nicked from shaving, and he’d nod and hold his stomach.

On Tuesday, after Independence Day, Glen sat in his office staring at the electric bill — he would have to account for the extra power the phantom night shift was using — when Roy stuck his head in the door. He smiled, smoking a cigar, and sat down across from Glen’s desk.

“Just come by to tell you we fixing to start running four nights a week,” Roy said.

Glen started to object, but there was a shrill noise.

“Hang on.” Roy brought a slim cellular phone out of his pocket.

Glen shrugged and doodled (man dangling by noose) on his desk calendar while Roy took another order for grit.

When Roy snapped the phone shut, Glen said, “No. You can’t go to four nights. Who the hell was that? They want two loads? Never mind. Your night shift’s gotta stop altogether, end of story.”

“Impossible,” Roy said.

“Impossible?”

“Look out the window.”

Glen obeyed, saw a cute young woman in Roy’s car. She was frowning.

“You see that pretty little thing?” Roy asked. “You know how old she is? Nineteen, Glen. Nineteen. She the freshest thing in the world, too. She go jogging every morning, and when she come back she don’t even smell bad. Her breath don’t stink in the morning.” Roy coughed. “I wake up my breath smell like burnt tar.”

“Roy—”

“You think a fresh little girl like that’s with me ’cause she love me? Hell no. She with me ’cause I’m getting rich. So no, baby, we can’t stop. Business just too damn good. Which remind me—” He opened his ledger. “You back up in four figures again.”

“Roy, just stick to the subject at hand. I’m not asking you to stop. I’m ordering you to stop.”

“Baby,” Roy said quietly, “you ain’t exactly in a strong bargaining position. Who’s E and D gonna hold responsible if they hear about our little operation? You the manager. You the one been falsifying records. Naw, baby. The ‘subject’ ain’t whether or not old Roy’s gonna stop making grit. The ‘subject’ is what to do about all that money you owe me.”

What they did was compromise. Roy said he’d been too busy to make grit and look alter his bookmaking business. So Glen would go to work for him, at night. Roy would forget about the two grand and pay Glen ten bucks an hour to work nine hours a night, four nights a week.

“I bet you can use the extra bread,” Roy said. “That alimony can eat a man up.”

Then Roy said he needed Glen’s office; the phones were better. It was quieter, he said. He could think. So that night Glen worked in the plant and Roy used the air-conditioned office. Sweating under the tanks, Glen saw Roy’s fat silhouette behind the curtains, and he uncapped his flask and toasted the irony. He spent the night in the hot, claustrophobic control room, watching gauges, adjusting dials, and taking samples; climbing into the front-end loader once an hour and filling the hopper with raw material; on top of the tanks measuring the amount of grit they’d made; and standing by the loading chute, filling Snakebite’s big purple Peterbilt.

At six that morning, with the plant shut down and Roy gone, Glen slogged to the office before the day-shifters clocked in. The room smelled like cigars, and Glen made a mental note to start smoking them in case Ernie and Dwight popped in. He locked the door behind him and pulled off his shoes and poured out little piles of grit. He lay back on his desk, exhausted, put his hands over his face, shut his eyes, and got his first good sleep in months.

Snakebite, six foot five, also slept during the day, in his Peterbilt, in the cab behind the seat, the truck parked among the pines near the plant. He showered every other day in the break room and ate canned pork and beans and Vienna sausages that he speared with his pocketknife. He had a tattoo on his left biceps, a big diamondback rattler with its mouth open, tongue and fangs extended. He wore pointed snakeskin cowboy boots but no cowboy hat because adult hat sizes swallowed his tiny head. To Glen, he looked like a football player wearing shoulder pads but no helmet. He said he “hailed” from El Paso, Texas, but he’d “vamoosed” because his wife, a “mean little filly” who’d once stabbed him, had discovered that he was “stepping out” with a waitress in Amarillo.

Glen knew this and much more because Snakebite never stopped talking. One night, as the truck loaded, Snakebite showed Glen a rare World War I trench knife, a heavy steel blade with brass knuckles for a handle.

“I collect knives,” Snakebite said. “Looky here.” He bent and pulled up a tight jeans leg over his boot, revealing a white-handled stiletto.

“My Mississippi Gambler,” Snakebite said. “It’s a throwing knife. See this quick unhitching gadget on the holster?” He flipped a snap and the knife came right out of his boot into his hand. “This is the one my wife stabbed me with,” he said. He showed Glen the scar, a white line on his left forearm. Glen didn’t have any scars from his ex-wives that he could show, so he uncapped his flask and knocked back a swig. He offered the flask to Snakebite, who took it.

“Don’t mind if I do, Slick,” he said, winking.

“Where’s this load going?” Glen asked, nodding toward the black stream of grit falling into the truck. He’d been curious about Roy’s clients, thinking he might try to steal the business.

Snakebite grinned and punched him in the shoulder. “Shit, boy. You oughta know that’s classified. You find out old Roy’s secrets and he’s outta business. Then I’m outta business.”

“So.” Glen swallowed. “I hear you do a little, um, collecting for Roy.”

Snakebite drained the flask. “Don’t worry about that, Slick. Old Roy ain’t never sicced me on anybody I liked. And even if he did, hell, it ain’t ever as bad as you see in the movies.”

Working nights for Roy Jones Grit, Inc., Glen wore a ratty T-shirt, old sneakers, a Braves cap, and short pants. He turned off every breaker and light he could spare to keep the electric bill low, so the place was dark and dangerous. He began carrying a flashlight hooked to his belt. He tried to cut power during the day, too. He adjusted all the electrical and mechanical equipment to their most efficient settings. He even turned the temperature dial in the break-room refrigerator to “warmer” and stole the microwave (supposedly a great wattage-drainer) from its shelf and pawned it, then called the day-shifters in for a meeting where he gave the “thief” a chance to confess. No one did, and the meeting became a lecture where Glen urged the men to “conserve energy, not just for the good of the plant, but for the sake of the whole fucking environment.” To set an example, he told them, he would stop using the air conditioner in the office.

But not Roy: Roy ran the AC full-blast all night so that the office was ice-cold. Not that Glen had a lot of time to notice. Typically it took one man to operate the plant and another the loader. Doing both, as well as loading Snakebite’s truck. Glen found himself run ragged by morning, so covered with sweat, grit, and dust that the lines in his face and the corners of his eyes and the insides of his ears were black, and his snot, when he blew his nose, even that was black.

One evening in mid-July Glen trudged to the office to complain. He opened the door and came face-to-face with the young woman from Roy’s car. She had lovely black skin and round brown eyes. Rich dark hair in cornrow braids that would’ve hung down except for her headband. She wore bright green spandex pants and a sports bra.

“Hello,” Glen said.

“Right.” She flounced into the bathroom.

Glen hurried to Roy’s desk. “What the hell’s she doing here?”

Roy had his feet and a portable television on the desk. He was watching the Yankees. “Your new assistant,” he said. “You just keep your got-damn hands off her.”

“She can’t work here.” Glen glanced at the TV. “What’s the score? What if she gets hurt? She’s just a girl.”

“Woman,” she said from the door.

“Tied up,” Roy said.

“Sorry,” Glen said. “Miss...?”

“Ms.”

Roy cranked the volume without looking at them. “You been whining about having too much work every night,” he told Glen, “so Jalalieh gonna start driving the loader for you.”

Jalalieh.

Ja-LA-lee-ay.

As Glen instructed her in the operation of the Caterpillar 950 front-end loader, she stayed quiet. It was crowded in the cab and he had to hang on the stepladder to allow her room to work the levers that raised, lowered, and swiveled the bucket. She smelled good, even over the diesel odor of the payloader, and he soon found himself staring at her thighs and biceps.

“You work out a lot?” he asked.

“Careful big bad Roy don’t see you making small talk,” she said.

“Pull back on the bucket easy,” he said. “You’ll spill less.”

“That’s better, little man. Keep it professional.”

So with great patience and fear he instructed her on how to gain speed when heading in to scoop raw material, how to drop the bucket along the ground and dig from the bottom of a pile, locking the raise lever and working the swivel lever back and forth as it rose to get the fullest bucket. He showed her how to hold a loaded bucket high and peer beneath it to sec, how to roll smoothly over the rough black ground and up the ramp behind the plant to the hopper. How to dump the bucket while shifting into reverse so the material fell evenly onto the hopper grate, and how to back down the ramp while lowering the bucket. She caught on quickly and within a few nights was a much better loader operator than most of the day-shift guys. Glen watched from the ground with pride as she tore giant bulging bucketfuls from the piles and carried them safely over the yard. And as he noticed the way her breasts bounced when she passed, he felt the hot, gritty wind swirling and whistling through the caves of his heart.

A few nights later, while Glen and Snakebite watched the truck load, Snakebite explained about his tiny head.

“Everybody on my daddy’s side’s got little bitty heads,” he said. “It’s kinda like our trademark. We ain’t got no butts, either. Look.” He turned and, sure enough, there was all this spare material in the seat of his blue jeans. Snakebite laughed. “But me, I make up for it with my dick.”

“Pardon?” Glen said.

“Well, I ain’t fixing to whip it out, but I got the biggest durn cock-a-doodle-doo you liable to see on a white man. Yes sir,” he said, lowering his voice so it was hard to hear over the roar of the plant, “when I get a hard-on, I ain’t got enough loose skin left to close my eyes.”

Glen, whose penis was average, took out his flask. He was unscrewing the lid when Jalalieh thundered past in the loader. When Glen glanced at Snakebite, the truck driver was looking after her with his eyes wide open.

The next night, as the truck loaded, something clattered behind them. Glen unclipped his flashlight and Snakebite followed him around a dark corner to the garbage cans. An armadillo had gotten into the trash, one of its feet in an aluminum pie plate.

“Well, hello there, you old armored dildo,” Snakebite said. When it tried to dart away, he cornered it. “Tell you what, Slick” — he winked at Glen — “you keep a eye on our friend and I’ll be right back.”

He trotted toward his truck and Glen kept the flashlight aimed at the armadillo — gray, the size of a football, just squatting there, white icing on its snout. Soon Snakebite reappeared with a brief-case. He set it on a garbage can and opened it and rummaged around, finally coming out with something bundled in a towel. He unwrapped it and Glen saw several different-colored knives.

Snakebite grinned. “I bought ’em off a circus Indian chief used to chuck ’em at a squaw that spun on a big old wagon wheel.”

He look a knife by it’s wide blade and flicked it. The armadillo jumped straight up and landed running, the handle poking out of its side. Snakebite fired another knife, which ricocheted off the armadillo’s back. Another stuck in its shoulder. A fourth knife bounced off the concrete. Glen glanced away, ashamed for not stopping Snakebite. When he looked again the armadillo lay on its side, inflating and deflating with loud rasps.

“I hate them sum-bitches,” Snakebite said. He stepped forward and drew back his foot to punt the armadillo.

Suddenly a light flared, catching the two men like the headlights of night hunters: Jalalieh, in the loader, bore down on them, the bucket scraping the ground, igniting sparks. Glen dove one way and Snakebite the other as she plowed in like a freight train, sweeping up the armadillo, the garbage cans, the knives. In a second she was gone, disappearing around the plant, leaving them flat on their bellies with their heads covered like survivors of an explosion.

“That’s a hot little honey,” Snakebite said once he was back on his feet. He dusted off his jeans. “You reckon old Roy’d sell me a piece of that? Add it to my bill?”

It wasn’t Glen’s jealousy that surprised him. “You owe Roy money?”

“Yep. Borrowed it to get my truck painted.”

“Roy’s a loan shark too?”

“You ever see Jaws?” Snakebite asked.

Glen said he had.

“How ’bout The Godfather?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, if Michael Corleone waded out in the ocean and fucked that shark, then you’d have old Roy.”

Later, as Jalalieh climbed out of the loader, Glen stood waiting in the shadows.

“A what?”

“Tour,” he repeated. “See the Black Beauty, it’s a state-of-the-art facility.”

“This dump?”

“With cutting-edge technology.” He grinned. “Get it?”

She folded her arms.

“Okay,” Glen said. “The unique thing about our grit is that no piece—”

“Has a round edge. So what?”

Nevertheless, she allowed Glen to lead her around the plant, explaining how the raw material from the loader fell onto a conveyor bell, then into a machine similar to a grain elevator. From there it rode up into the dryer, a tall cylindrical oven which used natural gas to burn the moisture out. Next, the dry grit flowed into the crusher, a wide centrifuge that spun the grit at high speeds and smashed the grains against iron walls, pulverizing any outsized rock into smaller pieces. Finally, atop the plant, Glen showed her the shaker, a jingling, vibrating box the size of a coffin. Raising his voice to be heard, he explained how the shaker housed several screens and sifted the grit down through them, distributing it by size into the storage tanks under their feet.

Staring at the shaker, Jalalieh said, “It’s like one of those motel beds you put a quarter in.”

Every night and day the dryer dried and the crusher crushed and the shaker shook, sifting grit down through the screens into their proper tanks. To keep pieces from clogging the screens, rubber balls were placed between the layers when the screens were built. Little by little, the grit eroded the balls, so they’d gradually be whittled from the size of handballs down to marbles, then BBs, and finally they’d just disappear so that, every two weeks or so, Glen’s day-shift guys would have to build new screens, add new balls. Since Glen had begun sleeping during the day, the workers had gotten lax again. While the grit clogged the shaker and gnawed holes in chutes and pipes and elevators and accumulated in piles that grew each hour, the day shift played poker in the control room, sunbathed on top of the tanks, had king-of-the-mountain contests on the stockpiles.

One morning, Glen was snoring on his desk when he heard something thump against the side of the office.

He rolled over, rubbing his eyes, squinting in the bright light, and he looked out the window at the plant shimmering against the hot white sky. Then he saw his entire four-man day crew and some tall guy playing baseball with an old shovel handle. There was a pitcher on a mound of grit with a box of the rubber screen balls open beside him. There were two fielders trying to shag the flies. There was a catcher wearing a respirator, hard hat, and welding sleeves for protection. The batter was Snakebite, and he was whacking the pitched balls clear over the mountains of grit, nearly to the interstate.

Glen closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

Every night Glen scaled that ladder up between the storage tanks — quite a climb in the dark, over a hundred feet with no protection against gravity but the metal cage around the ladder. At the top, catwalks joined the tanks. Out past the handrails, darkness stretched all around, and in the distance blinked the lights of radio towers and chemical-plant smokestacks. The Black Beauty had its own blinking yellow beacon on a pole high above, a warning to low-flying aircraft, the one light Glen feared shutting off — certainly that would be illegal. It blinked every few seconds, illuminating the dusty air, and Glen followed his flashlight beam from tank to tank, prying open the heavy metal lids and unspooling over each an ancient measuring tape with a big iron bolt on its end.

A few nights after Jalalieh’s tour, Glen climbed the ladder to take measurements. It was nearly dawn, and he’d just finished when he saw her. Hugging her knees, Jalalieh sat overhead, atop the tallest elevator platform, appearing and vanishing in the light. Glen crept over and scaled the short ladder beside her, the first faint smear of sunrise spreading below them.

“Pretty,” he said.

She shrugged. “Don’t tell that asshole you saw me here.”

“Snakebite?”

“Roy.”

Glen gripped the ladder hopefully. “You love Roy?”

She shook her head.

“So you’re with him because he... buys you things?”

“What things? My little brother owes him money. Roy and I came up with this arrangement.”

Glen felt a rush of horror and glee. Her affection suddenly seemed plausible. He hung there, trying to say the right thing. He wanted to explain why he hadn’t stood up for the armadillo — because pissing Snakebite off might be dangerous — but that made him sound cowardly. Instead he said, “What would Roy do to your brother if you didn’t honor your arrangement?”

Jalalieh glanced at him. “He’s already done it.”

“Done what?”

“He had that truck driver cut the toes off his foot with wire cutters.”

Glen was about to change the subject, but she’d already swung to the tank below. By the time he descended, she was gone. He thought of the armadillo again, the knives, how Jalalieh had barreled in and taken control. It reminded him of the first time he’d accompanied his second ex-wife’s father to a cockfight, which was illegal in Alabama. What had unsettled Glen wasn’t the violence of the roosters pecking and spurring each other — he actually enjoyed betting on the bloody matches — but that several hippie-looking spectators had been smoking joints, right out in the open. Later he attributed his discomfort to that being his first and only experience outside the law.

Until now. Now the Black Beauty was a place with power up for grabs, a world where you fought for what you wanted, where you plotted, used force.

It was just getting light, time to shut down the plant, but Glen stood under the tanks, watching the dark office across the yard, where no doubt Roy slept like a king.

“Got-damn it, Glen,” Roy said. “Ain’t I told you to get some damn cable in here?”

Glen stood in his sneakers and baseball cap, Jalalieh behind him in the office door. “This is a business, not a residence,” Glen said. “There’s problems getting it installed.”

“Then you better nigger-rig something by tomorrow night.” Roy rose from his chair behind the desk, which had two portable TVs on it. “What?” he said to Jalalieh. “The little girl don’t like that word? ‘Nigger’?”

“Try ‘African American’,” she said stiffly.

“Fuck that,” he said. “I ain’t no got-damn African American. I’m American American!”

She turned in a clatter of braids and vanished.

“And you,” Roy said, “you got to clean this pigsty up.”

Glen went cold. “Oh, Christ,” he said. “When?”

“They flying in Wednesday night. Be here first thing Thursday.”

Ernie and Dwight.

So in addition to his other work, Glen spent the night cleaning his plant. He patched holes and leaks with silicone. He welded, shoveled, sandblasted. Replaced filters and built new shaker screens and greased bone-dry fittings and paid Jalalieh fifty bucks to straighten the stockpiled material with the loader. By daybreak the place was in sterling shape and a solid black, grimy Glen trudged over to the office. He hid Roy’s TVs in the closet. Sprayed Pledge and vacuumed the carpet and Windexed the windows and emptied an entire can of Lysol into the air. He flipped the calendar to — what month was it? — August.

No time to go home, so Glen showered in the break room, using Snakebite’s motel bar of Ivory soap and his sample-sized Head & Shoulders. When he stepped out, cinching his tie, it was seven, nearly time for the day shift to begin. He hurried to the plant to see things in the light. Perfect. Not a stray speck of grit. Gorgeous. In the office, he took out the ledgers and began to fudge. An hour later he looked up, his hand numb from erasing. Eight o’clock. They’d be here any second.

By ten they still hadn’t arrived. The day-shifters had clocked in and, seeing the plant clean, understood there was an inspection and were working like they used to. For a moment, staring out the window at the humming plant and the legitimately loading trucks and the men doing constructive things in their safety equipment, Glen felt nostalgic and sad. He grabbed the phone.

“I said don’t be calling this early,” Roy growled.

“Where the hell are they?”

“Chill, baby. I had ’em met at the airport.”

Images of Ernie and Dwight fingerless, mangled, swam before Glen’s eyes. “My God.” He sat down.

“Naw, baby.” Roy chuckled. “I told a couple of my bitches to meet ’em. Them two old white mens ain’t been treated this good they whole life.”

“Hookers?” Glen switched ears. “So Ernie and Dwight aren’t coming?”

“I expect they’ll drop by for a few minutes,” Roy said. “But Glen, if I was you, I wouldn’t sweat E and D. If I was you, baby, I’d be scared of old Roy. I’d be coming up with some got-damn money and I’d be doing it fast.”

True to Roy’s word, Ernie and Dwight showed up in the afternoon, unshaven, red-eyed, smelling of gin and smiling, their ties loose, wedding rings missing. They stayed at the plant for half an hour, complimenting Glen on his appearance and on how spic-and-span his operation was. Keep up the good work, they said, falling back into their Caddy, and standing in the parking lot as they drove away, Glen saw a pink garter hanging from the rearview mirror.

Glen spent the rest of the day and most of his checking account bribing one of his ex-wives’ old boyfriends, a cable installer, to run a line to the office. Then he went to apply for a home-improvement loan. Sitting across from the banker, who looked ten years younger, Glen stopped listening as soon as the guy said, “Four alimonies?”

Back at the plant, he hoped the new cable (including HBO and Cinemax) would ease Roy’s temper. He filled the hopper and fired the plant up early. From behind the crusher he saw Roy drive up, saw him and Jalalieh get out. They didn’t speak: Roy went into the office, carrying another TV, and Jalalieh stalked across the yard to the loader. She climbed in and started the engine, raced it to build air pressure. She goosed the levers, wiggling the bucket the way some people jingle keys. Catching Glen’s eye, she drew a finger across her throat.

Just after dusk Snakebite’s Peterbilt rumbled into the yard. It paused on the scales, then pulled next to the plant and stopped beneath the loading chute. Glen had the grit flowing before Snakebite’s boots touched the ground. He stuffed his trembling hands into his pockets as the trucker shambled toward him.

“I’m real sorry, Slick,” Snakebite mumbled, his eyes down. “It’s nothing personal. Have you got the money? Any of it?”

Glen shook his head in disbelief, which also answered the question.

“I’ll give you a few minutes,” Snakebite said, “if you wanna get drunk. That helps a little.”

Glen glanced at the dark office window — Roy would be there, watching.

“It won’t be too bad,” Snakebite said. “Roy needs you. He only wants me to take one of your little fingers, at the first knuckle. You even get to pick which one.” He jerked a thumb behind him. “I keep some rubbing alcohol in the truck, and some Band-Aids. We can get you fixed up real quick. You better go on take you a swig, though.” Snakebite had moved so close that Glen could smell Head & Shoulders shampoo.

He pointed toward the control room, and when Snakebite looked, Glen bolted for the ladder, and shot up through the roaring darkness.

It was breezy at the top, warm fumes in the air from nearby insecticide plants. Backing away from the edge, Glen slipped and fell to one knee. He felt warm blood running down his bare leg.

“Jalalieh?” he whispered. “You up here?” Searching for a weapon, he found the measuring tape with the bolt on the end. He scrambled to his feet and watched the side of the tank as it lit and faded, lit and faded.

In one flash of light a hand appeared, then another, then Snakebite’s tiny head. His wide shoulders surfaced next, rubbing the ladder cage. On the tank, he wobbled uncertainly in his boots. He looked behind him, a hundred feet down, where his truck purred, still loading.

Glen let out a few feet of the measuring tape. Began swinging the bolt over his head like a mace.

“Slick!” Snakebite called. “Let’s just get it over with. It won’t even hurt till a few seconds after I do it. Just keep your hand elevated above your heart, and that’ll help the throbbing.”

He took a tentative step as a gust of hot, acrid wind swirled. He bent to roll up his pants leg, then disappeared as the light faded. When he appeared again, he held the Mississippi Gambler. “It’s real sharp, Slick. Ain’t no sawing involved. Just a quick cut and it’s all over.”

Glen moved back, swinging his mace, the shaker rattling beside him, the tank humming beneath his sneakers. He stepped onto the metal gridwork of a catwalk and the ground appeared for a moment, far below, then vanished. When the light came again Snakebite loomed in front of him. Glen yelled and the mace flew wildly to the right.

Snakebite struck him in the chest with a giant forearm that sent Glen skidding across the catwalk, his cap fluttering away. He tried to rise, but the truck driver pinned him flat on his belly, his right arm twisted behind him.

“Hold your breath, Slick,” Snakebite grunted.

Glen fisted his left hand and felt hot grit. With his teeth clenched, he slung it over his shoulder.

Snakebite yelled, let him go. Glen rolled and saw the big man staggering backward, clawing at his eyes.

There was only the one ladder down, and Snakebite had it blocked, so Glen began to circle the shaker. A glint of something white bounced off the rail by his hand — the Mississippi Gambler — and Snakebite charged, the trench knife gleaming.

Glen dodged and, running for the ladder, got pegged in the shoulder by the shaker. He spun, grabbing his arm, and fell, kicking at Snakebite, who swiped halfheartedly with the trench knife. Glen scrabbled to his feet and feinted, but the truck driver moved with him, and Glen was cornered. Snakebite, pulsing in and out of the darkness, lifted his giant hand as if someone had just introduced them.

Glen slowly raised his right hand, balled in a fist. “How could you cut off her brother’s toes?” he yelled.

“Whose brother?” Snakebite grabbed Glen’s hand and forced the pinky out. “Don’t watch,” he said.

Glen closed his eyes, expecting the cut to be ice-cold at first.

But the howl in the air was not, he thought, coming from him. He opened one eye and put his fist (pinky intact) down. The truck driver, clutching his tiny head with both hands, still had the trench knife hooked to his fingers. Behind him, Jalalieh was backing away with an iron pipe in her fist. Snakebite dropped the trench knife and fell to his knees. He rolled on his side and curled into a ball.

Glen picked up the knife.

“Come on,”Jalalieh hissed. “Roy’s on his way!”

They hurried across the tanks and the spotlights flared, as if the Black Beauty were about to lift off into the night. Glen knew Roy had flipped the master breaker below. Jalalieh took his arm and they crept to the rail. Roy was pulling himself up, sweaty, scowling, a snub-nosed pistol in one hand. Glen began to kick grit off the edge to slow him.

“Got-damn it!” Roy yelled, and a bullet sang straight up into the night, a foot from Glen’s chin.

“Jesus!” He pushed Jalalieh behind him and they stumbled back. Glen remembered a proposal he’d sent Ernie and Dwight a year ago — one that called for another access way to the top, stairs or a caged elevator.

A long minute passed before Roy finally hoisted himself onto the tanks, grit glittering on his cheeks and forehead. Breathing hard, he transferred the pistol to the hand holding the rail and with the other removed his fedora and dusted himself off. He took a cigar from his shirt pocket and chomped on it but didn’t try lighting it.

“Girl,” he said to Jalalieh. “Get over here.”

She left Glen, careful of the shaker, more careful of Roy.

“Get your ass down there and fill up that got-damn hopper,” he ordered. “It’s fixing to run out.”

She shot Glen a look he couldn’t identify, then disappeared down the ladder.

“Snakebite!” Roy yelled.

The big driver stirred, grit pouring off him. He rubbed the back of his head with one hand and his eyes with the other. There was blood on his collar and fingers. He blinked at Roy.

“Shit, baby,” Roy laughed, “we wear hard hats in the plant for a reason, right, Glen?”

Snakebite, his eyes lowered, limped across the catwalk and stuffed himself into the ladder cage.

Holding the pistol loosely at his side, Roy watched Glen. “You want something done right,” he muttered, “don’t send no stupid-ass Texas redneck.” He slipped the gun into his pants pocket and turned, walked toward the ladder. “I’m gonna garnish your salary,” he called over his shoulder, “till your debt’s paid off.”

Glen followed him, his heart rattling in his chest. When he lifted his hand to cover his eyes, he saw the trench knife.

Roy was crossing the catwalk, holding the rails on either side, when Glen lunged and hit him in the back of the neck with the brass knuckles. The cigar shot from his mouth and Roy was surprisingly easy — a hand on his belt, one on his collar — to offset and shove over the rail. Falling, Roy opened his mouth but no sound came out. With eyes that looked incredibly hurt, he dropped, arms wheeling, legs running. He was screaming now, shrinking, turning an awkward somersault. Glen looked away before he hit the concrete.

On the ground, Glen could feel the tanks vibrating in his legs. He took deep breaths, hugging himself, and felt better. His heart was still there, hanging on, antique maybe, shot full of holes and eroded nearly to nothing, but still, by God, pumping. He went to a line of breakers and flipped one. The spotlights died.

He heard footsteps, and Jalalieh ran past him in the dark. Glen reached for her but she was gone. He followed. They found Snakebite standing by Roy’s body. He’d thrown a tarp over him.

“He slipped,” Glen said.

“Right.” Jalalieh ran her brown eyes over Glen, then looked up into the darkness. “He must’ve.”

“God almighty,” Snakebite said. He rubbed his nose. For a moment Glen thought the truck driver was crying, but it was just grit in his eyes.

Jalalieh knelt and pulled back the tarp. There was blood. Without flinching, she went through Roy’s pockets and found his gun, the keys to his car, his roll of money, and his ledger. She stood, and Glen and Snakebite followed her into the control room. Inside, she studied the ledger. Looking over her shoulder, Glen saw an almost illegible list that must have been Roy’s grit clients. He strained to read them but Jalalieh flipped to a list of names and numbers. Glen’s own debt, he noticed, was tiny in comparison to Snakebite’s, and to Jalalieh’s.

Jalalieh’s?

Glen frowned. “What about your little brother?”

“What brother?” She licked her thumb and began counting the money. Behind her, Snakebite sat heavily in a chair.

“So, wait,” Glen said, “you were paying Roy by, by —“

“By fucking, Glen.” She glanced at him. “You want it spelled out, little man? He was fucking you one way and me another way. And the truth is, you were getting the better deal.”

“What now?” Snakebite asked, his voice like gravel.

“You deliver, same as always,” Jalalieh said. “And keep quiet. Nothing’s changed.”

With the truck driver gone, Glen grew suddenly nauseated. He crossed the room and took a hard hat from the rack and filled it with a colorless liquid. He closed his eyes and breathed through his

At the control panel, Jalalieh tapped the dryer’s temperature gauge. “How hot does this thing get?”

Glen had cold sweats. “Thousand degrees Fahrenheit,” he said, which didn’t seem nearly enough to warm him.

She smiled. “Shut the plant down.”

Half an hour later things were very quiet, only the fiddling of crickets from nearby trees. Jalalieh came in the loader. Glen looked away while she scooped Roy, tarp and all, off the ground.

He walked through the plant, pausing to kick open a cutoff valve that released a hissing cloud of steam. At the dryer, Jalalieh lowered the bucket and dumped Roy’s body. One of his shoes had come off. In heavy gloves, Glen turned the wheel that opened the furnace door. It took them both to lift the fat man and, squinting against the heat, to cram him into the chamber. Jalalieh pitched his fedora in, then sent Glen after the shoe. By the time they’d closed the door and locked the wheel, they could see through the thick yellowed porthole that Roy’s clothes and hair had caught fire.

Jalalieh followed Glen into the control room and watched him press buttons and adjust dials, the plant puffing and groaning as it stirred to life. She said she wanted to ignite the dryer, and when it came time to set the temperature she cranked the knob into the red. For an hour they sat quietly, passing Glen’s flask back and forth, while Roy burned in the dryer, while his charred bones were pounded to dust in the crusher and dumped into the shaker, which clattered madly, sifting the remains of Roy Jones through the screens and sending him through various chutes and depositing the tiny flecks, according to size, into the storage tanks.

Two weeks later Jalalieh called the plant, collect. She told Glen that Ernie and Dwight were slated for another surprise inspection on September fifth. She gave him the phone numbers of two reliable hookers. Then she read him her account number in the bank where Glen was to deposit her cut. She wouldn’t give her location, but said she lived alone, in a cabin, and there was snow. That she jogged every day up mountains, through tall trees. That she’d taken a part-time job at a logging plant, for the fun of it, driving a front-end loader. “Only here they call it a skidder,” she told him.

“Ja—” he said, but she’d hung up.

He replaced the phone and leaned back in his chair. Propped his feet on his desk. It was time to throw himself head, body, and heart into work. He speed-dialed Snakebite on the cellular phone and told him to be at the plant by eight. Tonight would be busy. You’d think, from all the sandblasting grit they were selling, that the entire hull of the world was caked and corroded with rust, barnacles, and scum, and that somebody, somewhere, was finally cleaning things up.