The Best American Mystery Stories 2016

Michael Noll The Tank Yard

From Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

The woman who could have been the love of my life lived in a duplex with a black metal railing held to cement steps by loose bolts. I was nineteen years old and out of my league with a tall blonde who’d already graduated from community college. I wanted to hold the door and let her walk down the steps first the way a gentleman is supposed to do — or that’s what I’d heard, what I knew about dating — but she came outside too fast, purse in hand, on the move, and if I wanted to be polite, it would have meant leaning against the rail to make room for her, and how would it look to fall into a bush before you’d even sat down to dinner? So I cut ahead of her and kept moving all the way to my truck so that I could at least hold that door open. She had on black pants and a sparkly shirt of sequins all sewn together, like she’d been dancing on a stage somewhere and then walked behind the curtain and straight into our town. I tried to sweep the seat clean. All it did was send a dust cloud in the air.

“Well,” she said, “my mom always said not to shoot for the moon.”

Then she said, “I’m kidding.” The maple trees were red and vast over the street. She could have painted every breath I took. “So, what’s the plan?”

I’d given this some thought, which meant I’d asked Rob where to go, and he’d explained that there was only one place in town worthy of a date. “You’ve got those glass lamps and sparkly cups.” Which was true. And also the photos of old people in Italy.

“Pizza Hut,” I said, which made her laugh, and so I laughed too, until she stopped.

“No, really.”

I stopped the truck right in the middle of the street. “Hey,” she said, but I hit the gas and took the next corner too sharp. “Did you, um” — she edged toward the door and gripped the handle — “forget something?”

“Yeah,” I said. “My brain.”

I didn’t want her to jump out and I didn’t trust that I could explain myself, so I sped up. At Walmart, I got out of the truck and threw the keys at her. “You stay here,” I said. “I’m just going to run in and—” I almost said, “get some things,” but part of me knew that if I said that, she’d drive away and leave me there, so I just came out with it. “I’m going to buy a charcoal grill and some charcoal and lighter fluid, and I’m going to buy two steaks and some peppers and onions and a loaf of some kind of bread and some spreadable butter and a bottle of some kind of wine, and then I’m going to come back and we’re going to drive—” I almost said, “to City Lake,” but I was slowing down, listening to my own thoughts and how I’d sound like a rapist, so instead I said, “to the courthouse and we’ll park on the street and put the grill in the back and I’ll cook up that food and then we’ll eat on the tailgate while looking at downtown. Because one thing we’ve got here, if you haven’t noticed, is a pretty nice-looking downtown. Does that sound okay to you?”

We ended up going into the store together. Afterward, we parked on the post office side of the courthouse because the kids don’t drive back there when they’re cruising, which means the cops wouldn’t find our grill, and we cooked everything up and sat on the tailgate in the dark and watched the shadows of the trees and buildings grow long in the dark. You could see the outline of the town clock against the sky.

Nobody was using the word steady anymore, not even me. I don’t even know where it came from. Sure, I was nervous. I’d been going on dates with Marissa and hanging out with her for a month. We were sitting in her backyard, drinking beer because it turned out neither of us knew what to do with wine.

“Did you just call it going steady?”

“Or whatever it’s called. Are we a thing?”

“That depends what kind of thing you have in mind.”

“You know,” I said, and she shook her head.

“You’ll have to do better than that.”

“A together thing.”

“You mean marriage?” she said, and I blushed so hard that even if I’d turned around, the hair on the back of my head probably would have been red. “I’m just messing with you,” she said. “I’m never going to get married.”

“Why?”

“Because my parents got married, and look at them. My dad’s gone, and I don’t talk to my mom.”

“Why?”

She reached into the cooler for another beer but took out a piece of ice instead and threw it at me. “What are you, Barbara Walters? Because when it was time for me to go to college, there wasn’t any money left. That’s why.”

“Times get tight,” I said, and she shook her head.

“It wasn’t like that.”

This was an unheard-of idea, this not talking to someone. In my world, you stuck with people. You sat in the same room, watching the same TV show, and never spoke a word — not talking still counted as talking. But this was something different. “Does she live in town? Does she try to talk to you?”

“She tries.”

“And what do you do?”

Now she threw a bottle cap at me. “You know what I like? Things. Do you like things?”

Sometimes you can feel something happening. You can even see it, I’ve learned, like a thread of spider silk hanging between you, and if you lean forward, and if she leans forward, the thread grows into a window that you can duck into. Other times, someone just barrels you over. I said, “That depends. What kind of things?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Maybe we should find out.” She got up, went to the back door, and turned around. “You coming?”

She asked me, of course, what I did for a living, and I told her about delivering pizzas and newspapers, going door-to-door with vacuum cleaners. “I guess you could say I’m into sales.”

“A real go-getter,” she said, and I smiled.

“I’m actually picking up a fourth job. Seasonal work at an elevator.”

“You saving up for something?” she asked. “Like, maybe, a ring?”

“Or baseball cards,” I said. “You never know.”

She leaned over, nibbled on my ear, and whispered, “I bet a baseball card can’t do this.”

The elevator job started with unloading grain trucks, but grain wasn’t the point, not to me. The elevator was in one of the small towns out in the country, the kind with a closed grocery store, closed post office, and closed school. The only business left was the elevator, and for six months out of the year there was just one guy working, the foreman. During harvest, he hired another guy to help and kept him on through the first part of winter, when farmers applied anhydrous ammonia to their fields.

Anhydrous is a liquefied gas that, when released from the tank, immediately bonds to the first water it can find: in the ground, ideally, or, less ideally, in your eyes or lungs. It comes in big white tanks that slosh around when you’re pulling them and come to a stop. The foreman showed me how to connect the tanks to the blue applicators that we rented out, like plows with hoses that injected the ammonia into the ground as fertilizer. He said farmers sometimes sent their kids to pick up the tanks, and the kids could barely walk and chew gum, so you had to make sure they didn’t get themselves killed in case their dads told them to hook the tanks up to the applicator. “If you value your life, you won’t mess around with this stuff.” He went through the whole process again. “You think you got it?”

“Don’t get myself killed,” I said, and he clapped me on the back.

“Good boy.”

The tank yard wasn’t next to the elevator but instead miles away, in a square of dirt carved out of a field, with a temporary chain-link fence set up around it and a little tin shed with a stack of forms I was supposed to check off for every trade, empty for full. I’d sit in the shed until the farmers showed up, and when they did arrive, just before dawn, there’d soon be a line of them, pickups idling and me doing the work of an automated machine: bending over, pulling the pin, dropping the tongue, walking to a full tank, lifting the tongue, dropping the pin, stepping back, waving. At the end of the day, I’d lock up. The first day, the foreman came by to make sure I’d done it right. He shook the gate and then reached up and grabbed the points where the wire was tied off around the top bar. He had to stand on his toes to do it. When he was done, he looked sad and beat down.

“How much you want to bet we come out tomorrow morning, there’ll be part of somebody’s pants caught up here.” He looked at me. “Meth. They steal the gas and put it in those little propane tanks that are on your grill.”

I asked what I should do if I noticed something like this happening.

“Oh, you won’t,” he said. “See it, I mean. Maybe you’ll smell the ammonia if they don’t close the valve all the way, and if that’s the case, keep away. And if you see a body on the ground, definitely stay back. I don’t want to have to call the morgue for you too.”

“What a bunch of idiots.”

“Oh,” he said, “you’d be surprised. Some of them you probably know.”

The sun was setting as we drove away, and when he turned down his road, I went another mile before turning around and driving to the culvert where I’d stashed the half-dozen propane tanks that Rob and I used. I took them to the yard, filled them, and drove through the dark to Rob’s house, where he was waiting to cook.

In the evenings, when I got off work and before I went over to Rob’s, I’d meet up with Marissa, and we’d walk. She knew all the neighborhood kids and dogs from the loops she’d made on her own, in the time before she met me. Dogs would run up, wagging their tails, sniffing her hand, which she’d let them do once and just once. Then it was my job to scratch their ears so they’d leave her alone and not get her hands smelly. All of her clothes looked like somebody’s thoughtful mother had ironed them. She filed paperwork at the hospital, which meant she had to look professional. It also meant she knew private things about people I knew. I’d say, to make her laugh, “Tell me something I won’t believe.”

“Like what?”

“Like, who’s got an STD?”

“Everyone. You should never have sex.”

“You sound like my mom,” I said.

“She’s one of them that I’m talking about.”

One night I asked if the hospital ever saw meth addicts. Maybe cooks who’d gotten themselves hurt?

“Hurt how? You mean burned up? I’ve heard of that, but not here.”

“Or blinded.”

“Blinded! What do they do, shove it in their eyes?”

“It’s just something I heard once.”

“I think you’re keeping the wrong kind of company.”

“The life of sales,” I said. “There’s people out there you’ll never set eyes on unless you’re in line for the Tilt-a-Whirl at a carnival. Try selling them a vacuum cleaner, and they have to go get a dictionary to look up what you’re talking about.”

“They have dictionaries?”

“Self-preservation,” I said. “Otherwise they’d just grunt at each other.”

“Must be scintillating conversation.”

I said, “Oh, there are other ways to be — what’d you call it? Scintillating. Besides conversation.”

Rob and I had gotten into the meth business together when we were seventeen. For a long time he’d lived with his grandmother, a brittle old woman who threw saltines at you when you walked in front of her soaps. When she died, Rob stayed in the house and nobody thought much of it. In those days, a sixteen-year-old could be his own guardian, and so he dropped out of school and spent the day dreaming up bad ideas.

I was still in school, a B to C student but vice president of the business club, which was where I picked up the lingo. I’d go up to kids between classes, shake their hands, and say, “I’d like to discuss an opportunity with you.” Or, “Have you considered investment plans for your hard-earned cash?” The language caught on — there’s no thrill like euphemisms that teachers don’t understand: mission creep and hostile takeover. We’d do the deals after school, in somebody’s house, and eventually I expanded the market. I’d go out, find the worst houses, and knock on the door, unlock my briefcase, pull out a small amount of crystal, and say, “Try this.” Because we had a surplus, we didn’t need to cut it. “If this is detergent,” they’d say, “you know I’m going to kill you, right?” Then they’d snort it, and their eyes would roll back.

“Exactly,” I’d say. “Now, I’d like to discuss an opportunity with you.”

Afterward, Rob and I would throw our money in the air and hump the furniture and walls. That last part was his thing, his trademark. He came up with it before he dropped out, and he stuck with it for a couple of years, humping the lab and the propane tanks full of stolen anhydrous and the Maxwell House can where he kept his money. Sometimes he’d hump me, and I’d have to push him off. “Rob, you know they put dogs down for that.” He’d laugh and laugh. He was a funny guy. He didn’t take showers a lot, didn’t eat regular meals, didn’t wear shoes. He picked at the dead skin on his heel while the lab bubbled away. He didn’t go out in the world, and so seeing him was like seeing a fox. You stopped what you were doing and watched until he was gone. I’d be delivering meth and guys would ask, “Who cooks this stuff, you or that filthy partner of yours?” and I’d say, “Oh, look, it’s the world’s first fussy addict.” I knew they’d fork over the cash. Even if I’d said that the stuff they were snorting had little bits of dead skin mixed in, they’d have paid me and begged me to come back with more.

Between deliveries, I’d stop by Marissa’s house. We’d fool around, watch some TV, eat something, and then I’d have to go.

“Why? What could you possibly have to do right now?”

“Those newspapers won’t roll themselves.”

It was like going off to war, an act, sure, but too dramatic for my taste. She’d grab a wad of my shirt, and I’d have to pull her along with me to the door, smiling and being serious about it at the same time. It was hard not to think about Rob, alone on his couch in his underwear, thumbing sack. Once Marissa kept giving me crap even after I’d got out the door, and so I said, “You know what? After I leave, call your mom. It’s not okay to give up on people.” She slammed the door, but I was already down the sidewalk, figuring this was one of those moments that tell you something. We’d make up, or we wouldn’t, and that’d be the end of it. Either way, I told myself I was fine with what I’d done.

After six months with Marissa, I drove to Topeka, to the mall where the white people used to go, and bought a ring outright, with cash. I thought the clerk might give me some flak, but I guess he was used to such things. I carried the ring everywhere, all of the time. When I was making deals, I’d think about it, tucked away in my left pants pocket, and when the door closed and I was walking back to the car I used for deliveries, I’d reach in to make sure it was still there. Sometimes it felt like a ticking clock: I’d have to introduce Marissa to my parents, and both of us would have to answer their questions. What were we going to do with our lives? What are you going to be? I’d answered them plenty of times on my own, and it wasn’t a big deal: “I’m going to be an astronaut. Or a baseball player, not sure which.”

“You deliver pizzas,” my dad would say, and my mom would chime in. “You’re too smart for this. You need a career. You’ve got to pick one. What are your skills?”

“Talking,” I’d say.

“There you go. You should go into sales.”

But that was beyond what my dad could abide. He’d slap his head and say, “Jesus, anything but that.”

“Why?” she’d ask. “Someone has to do it.”

While they debated the merits of sales, I fingered the ring in my pocket and thought about drugs. They were like cars — you tried to find that fine line, the moment where the trouble they’d give you was mostly in the future and not in the past. You never wanted to hang on too long. You didn’t want to spend more on them than they were worth. I had about thirty thousand dollars saved up in cash that I’d stuffed in a sun-tea jar and rolled under the front porch of the house I was renting. This was a sizable amount. I could make more, but how much more? For all our business acumen, Rob and I hadn’t figured out a better system for what to do with the profits. He kept his money buried somewhere in his backyard. We’d talk about what to do with it: buy cars, buy houses, leave the country and never come back.

“I’d have to come back,” Rob said. “Can you imagine me in England, in some castle?”

“I don’t think all the Brits live in castles.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Or,” I said, waving generally at the travesty of an abode where we found ourselves. “You could do something about this.”

“Do what?” he asked, and for a moment I thought he was joking. The roof leaked in the bathroom. Half the windows had long cracks running diagonally across the panes. One in the bedroom was broken out entirely, and Rob had covered it in tinfoil, just like all the windows in the kitchen, where he cooked. He squinted at me and stuck his hands in his underwear. He kept squinting and rubbed his balls.

“Fix up the house. Upgrade from shithole to hovel.”

“Why would I do that?”

Some things you just can’t explain. I gave up. “No reason,” I said.

Unlike me, he used our product. I’d told him it was unprofessional, and he said, “You never eat Pizza Hut?” Of course I did. “Well, there.” He’d gotten thin and edgy, had picked up a gun somewhere. He wanted me to get one too, and he was right. A drug dealer needs a gun like a car owner needs a mechanic. But whenever I held the pistol, it felt heavy and potent, as if it had already made its mind up to go off. I worried about shooting myself in the foot. So when customers called on the phone, I made it clear that I was like the cashier at a convenience store. I didn’t carry much cash or product. And in case that didn’t work and they robbed me anyway, I made it clear that Rob was the heavy. “He’ll crack your eyeballs on your forehead like they’re eggs,” I said. Mostly I hoped that everyone would play nice.

“They won’t play nice,” Rob said over and over again. “And I won’t dig out their eyes. I’ll just shoot them.”

“What difference does it make?” I asked. “The point is that we don’t want to shoot anybody.”

This was when he got pissed. “It’s got nothing to do with wanting,” he said. “You do what you have to do.”

It was a pretty fundamental disagreement, and it wasn’t going to get solved in one argument or probably ever. But he put up with me — the latitude you give a friend. The truth was, he was just biding his time until the inevitable happened and I quit.

Sometimes I’d call in sick, and Rob would say, “Drug dealers don’t get sick.”

“Lovesick,” I’d say, and then I’d spend the evening with Marissa, talking and dreaming and naked.

One morning I woke up to find her showered, dressed, and curling her hair in the mirror. “Big plans?” It was Sunday. She was going to church.

“Why?” I asked, but this wasn’t an argument she wanted to have. For some reason, I did. “Is this something your mom got you into? Is she going to be there?”

She didn’t take the bait. “You can come if you want.” Then she left, and I realized that it really didn’t matter to her if I came or not. So I ran home and got dressed. The choir was singing when I walked in. The whole church got a good look at me stopping beside each row, looking for Marissa. Afterward people I knew by name only, bankers and doctors and other important Methodists, came up to us and said hello. The women smiled, and the men put their arms around Marissa. “Been awhile. We were worried about you,” they said, staking their claim to her. They were her community. She was on her own in life, trying to make great things on a small inheritance, and they weren’t going to let anyone get in her way. “And who is this?”

“Oh,” she said, “just somebody I met.”

“Do you think we’ll be seeing him here again?”

She shrugged and bumped her shoulder into mine. “You never know.”

That was on Sunday. On Monday I went back to work. Rob was pissed. “You know how much money we lost last night? You know we just drove good customers into the arms of the competition?”

I said, “God didn’t mean for us to work every hour of every day. You’ve got to enjoy life.”

Rob said, “You don’t know shit about what God wants.”

I made a plan. When there was thirty-five thousand dollars in the jar, I’d quit. It’d be the start of summer, a good time for new beginnings. I wanted the change to be neat and tidy. So I started hanging out with Rob more. He’d go for a day without eating, and I’d say, “Don’t get up. Let me get the groceries. Let me get toilet paper. Really. It’s no big deal.” In a way it was the right move, because if anyone had seen him, they might have asked around: Is he okay? Is he sick? He looked like a corpse. He was meth-ly ill. His eyeballs were starting to stick out. When he looked at you, it was like he could see all the way around his body. He knew things, those eyes said. Can’t sneak anything past us.

“This lady friend of yours,” he said once, “when you going to bring her around here? If there’s going to be a wedding, shouldn’t I meet her first?”

I reached for the ring in my pocket but stopped myself. He was sprawled out on the couch, no shirt, no pants, in just his stained white underwear, the leg holes so stretched out that his balls fell through.

“I know you’re going to ask her,” he said. “It’s not a secret. You got that puppy-dog look all the time. You’re even going to church with her.” He winked at me. “What? People talk. It’s a wonder they don’t walk up and pat your little puppy head, scratch your ears. C’mon, bring her around.”

There was no good answer to this. So I didn’t give one. He looked down at himself, at his balls, and held out his arms. “Afraid she’ll like this too much?”

Some nights I prayed for a delivery just so I could get out of there. We had our regulars, people who called like clockwork every night or every other night. They’d have a nice little routine set up, particular ways they’d rub their hands before they took out their money, a certain kind of music playing on the tape deck. Those were the good ones. Other times I’d get called out to a place I’d never been. Once it was a competitor, another cook, and he opened the door and stuck a steak knife in my face and said, “You’re not going to come around here anymore.” This was early on. We were encroaching on his territory. I said, “Okay,” stepped back, tossed the meth at him, shut the door, and ran. I kept looking back, and he wasn’t chasing, so I slowed down, gave it some thought. That guy, I thought, he’s probably not even for real. He probably just wanted some free drugs. So I slashed his tires, broke his windshield with a rock, bashed off his side-view mirrors, cut his seats open and gave them a good piss. He must have come out not long after that. Maybe he decided to hunt me down. I don’t know. Wherever he was going, on his way there, the highway patrol pulled him over for driving a car that was all beat to hell. He was high. He had a gun without a license. He went to jail. Sometimes I thought about him when I was fingering the ring in my pocket. I’d do some quick math: three thousand to go. Two thousand eight hundred. Two thousand.

“Thank you,” I started saying at the end of a delivery. “Be sure to call us again.” Given my math, if we had enough nice customers, I could take a pass on the bad ones.

One lady was particularly regular. Like clockwork, every Friday night she’d call, and I’d come by her place. There were some soft boards on the porch and no doorbell, but if that’s the worst a person can say about your place, you’re doing okay. She always looked nice: recently showered, trim and put together. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she was a first-grade teacher — she just had that look, like my mom but on meth. A weekend warrior. She didn’t even need to call. Her needs were understood. So one night I pulled up like usual and knocked on her door. It was late, and no lights were on except for one deep inside her house. In the moonlight filtering through the bare tree branches, you could just make out the car and the Pizza Hut sign on top.

The door opened, and I put on a smile.

“Well, hey, stranger.” It was Marissa, peering at me and then throwing the door open. Both of us looked at the box in my hands, and she gave me this funny look before yelling back into the house, “Mom, did you order a pizza?”

From way back down a hallway came the reply. “Oh, shit.”

“What is this?” Marissa said, and I could have pointed at the box with its cold pizza and my shirt and hat. I could have said, “Pizza delivery, ma’am.” But instead I just stood there too long. Even after her mom came out and things got ugly, I just watched it all like an idiot. I’d never seen Marissa so mad. Her mom kept apologizing and asking how Marissa knew me. “I don’t,” Marissa said. “I have no idea who he is.” Then she went inside and screamed, “Well, might as well get what you ordered.”

Even then I didn’t move.

Her mom held up one finger, stepped into the house, and then came back outside. “When you leave,” she said, “just be sure to drop it in the bushes where I can find it.” Then she tucked some bills in my pocket.

I drove around town for a while, pounding my fists on my steering wheel, worried that Marissa might call the cops. So I switched out the delivery car for my truck and drove out of town. I probably covered half the county, maybe more, until I wound up at the tank yard, dark except for a single utility light that shone from a pole over the tin shed. I hadn’t come with a plan, but one came to me when I saw a blanket spread over the top of the fence and a guy sprinting away into the fields. I waited for his partner, the one inside the fence who would lift the full tank over. I got out of the truck, slammed the door so he’d hear it, and walked right up to the fence. “Did you get yourself killed? Either way, I want you out of there now.”

When there wasn’t an answer, I banged the fence good and yelled, “I’m not the cops. I work here, so get over to this fence now. And bring the tank with you.”

The guy skulked out from behind the tank where he’d been hiding. He came up to the fence. Even in the moonlight, I could see the sickly color of his skin and his rotted teeth. He smelled like he hadn’t showered in a year.

“You’re really not going to turn me in?” His wedding band shone in the utility light. So did the burns on his hand. “I’ve got kids.”

“Give me the tank,” I said. He flipped it over the fence, which isn’t easy with seventeen gallons of anhydrous, and then scrambled over. I gave him the tank back, and he stared, incredulous.

“You’re giving it back?”

I said, “That’s right, I am. What am I supposed to do with it?” I followed him to his car. When he was over the hill, I jumped back in my truck and drove after him. I kept my lights off. The gravel had a soft gray light under the moon, and I stayed right in the middle of it, watching the dark for the man’s headlights.

He pulled up to a farmhouse and went inside, the screen door slapping the wood frame behind him. I parked on the road so that I wouldn’t have to back out of the drive and crept through the yard, past a dozen or so cars on blocks, the grass dead and tall around them. Through the window I saw the living room, the TV, and two kids lying on the floor in blankets. A woman was standing in front of them, yelling into a room out of sight. I couldn’t hear her. Those old farmhouses are soundproof: storm windows, plaster walls. It was a good place that they were letting go down the drain. I walked up to the porch and knocked. The guy’s wife answered.

“Your husband here?” He must have recognized my voice, because from inside the house I heard the sound of footsteps and then a slammed door. I went inside and shut off the TV so that the wife could hear me crystal clear. I was standing close enough to the kids that I could have kicked them.

“Nice kids,” I told the wife. They were asleep. I held my shoe over the fingers of the smallest one. “Tell your husband I said so.”

Then I walked out the door. I stopped at the guy’s car and dug around until I found an empty bag of meth. It was the sandwich kind with the opening that you had to fold over. The idiot didn’t even use a Ziploc.

Rob was awake and cooking when I came in. He didn’t jump or start when I let the door slam, just turned around with the gun tucked in his underwear. I went to the fridge, got a beer, and sat down in a chair that had materialized in the living room, one of those old-fashioned wooden kinds.

“Nice chair,” I said. “Where’d it come from?”

He shrugged.

I said, “I met some of the competition tonight.”

“That’s not what I heard,” he said. He didn’t look at me when he said it. Instead he acted like he was busy with the lab, but it was running. He wasn’t fooling me.

“Well?” I said.

“Your girlfriend called. She wanted to give you a message.” He turned around, and whatever look was on his face made me stop looking at it and start watching his hands and their distance from the pistol.

“Expecting somebody dangerous?” I asked, nodding at it.

He took the gun out of his waistband and held it up so we could both have a good look. “You mentioned some competition. Did you mess him up?”

“He had kids.”

Rob said, “We sell to kids.”

“Small kids.”

“So you’re saying you let the guy get away.” He batted the gun barrel in the palm of his hand, like he was thinking something over, and then he walked back into his room. He came out in a pair of jeans. “I’ve got to go back and take care of what you should have done. Otherwise, everybody’s going to think we’re weak.”

I stepped in front of the door.

“I can’t let you do that.”

He put his hand on the butt of the gun.

“Or what?”

“Or nothing. You don’t know where he lives, and I do. It’s going to stay that way. Now tell me what Marissa said.”

We were standing eye to eye. The gun was there, in his pants, and I could have grabbed it. I wanted to. I was stronger than him, and he was grinning at me. He shook his head. “You can ask her yourself.”

“Okay,” I said, and he smiled in a way that I didn’t like.

“Well?” He looked at the door. “You’ve got work to do.”

It was three in the morning when I drove past Marissa’s house. The lights were out, but her car was gone. I went to her mom’s next: lights on, at home. No Marissa, but maybe she’d gone for a drive, gotten mad, and walked back here. Or maybe she’d parked out of sight so no one would know she had a tweaker for a mom. I parked down the street and planned out my strategy: “I quit. Done,” I’d say. “And you” — I’d point at her mom. “You’re done with meth. I’ll make sure that every cook around knows that if they sell to you, I’m coming at them.” Then I’d point to Marissa. Maybe I wouldn’t point. I’d lower my voice, get softer. “I’m sorry,” I’d say. “I should have told you.”

“Goddamn right you should have told me.”

Whatever grief she wanted to throw at me, I’d take it. I wasn’t a Methodist, but I’d gone to church as a kid, and I knew how it went: there was an angry God and a forgiving God, and you had to go through the first to get to the second. I’d just have to sit there and listen and nod and agree. Eventually she’d get tired. It was already so late. She’d slump over. By that time, maybe light would be coming through the windows. The birds would start chirping. “You need to eat,” I’d say. “I’ll make breakfast.”

Just in case Marissa wasn’t there, I grabbed a ski mask that I kept under the seat and stuck it in my pocket. This time I didn’t knock. I tried the door. “Hello?” No answer, but there was a body on the floor. Her mom. The bag of meth was on the floor beside her, so I picked her up and carried her to my truck. The hospital would ask questions, and besides, she was still breathing. So I took her to the only place I could think of.

The tank yard was quiet at this late hour. Marissa’s mom was still unconscious but starting to mumble as I taped her to a chair with a roll of duct tape I found in a drawer. I thought about gagging her but didn’t want her to suffocate. Her eyes rolled in their sockets. She twisted her head around and found me, sitting on the floor against the wall, but she couldn’t hold her head steady.

“Pay up,” I said.

She struggled at the tape but gave up almost immediately. “Who are you?” she demanded.

“Somebody you owe.”

She said, “I don’t owe anyone. Now let me go. I’ve got to take a piss.”

“Not till you pay.”

Her eyes got wide. “I really have to go.”

I didn’t want a puddle of piss in the shed. It wasn’t a big place, and even if I opened the windows, the smell would be terrible. If I opened the windows, we’d both be cold. So I dragged the chair outside, pulled her pants down. She screamed, and I said, “That is not what’s happening here.” I tipped her forward and said, “Now, go.”

She pissed in the gravel and then I pulled up her pants and dragged her back inside. “You want something to eat?”

She shook her head.

“Thirsty?” She nodded, and I went out to the truck and got the jug that I kept in it. Luckily there was some water inside, and I let it run into her mouth.

“Anything else?” I asked, and she nodded.

“Let me out of here.”

But that wasn’t going to happen. I said, “I’ll be back in a while. If you try to escape, I’ll kill you.”

Then I went to find Marissa.

It was seven o’clock. The sun wasn’t up, but there was enough light to see to drive without headlights, which I did. I pulled right in her driveway. It went along the side of the house, where her car was parked, and I blocked her in. She’d deadbolted the door, but I gave it a good kick.

“Go away,” she said, through it.

“Hear me out first.”

“Don’t want to. I’m calling the cops.”

“I’ve gone straight. No more drugs, I promise. I’ll be such a straight arrow you’ll think I’ve gone native.” She didn’t laugh. “Sorry,” I said. “No more jokes. Just give me a chance.”

“Never come back here again. That’s your chance.”

“Do you remember how we met?” I asked.

“I’m not messing around here,” she said. “Get out.”

“It was only seven months ago, but it feels like forever. You know?” Of course she remembered. It was only seven months ago. It was at the courthouse, on the lawn. Saturdays in the Park, the city called it, even though there was no park, just grass and marble. Some kids from the high school jazz band were playing up by the courthouse. People had set up lawn chairs. They were lined up at tables where some organization of old ladies was selling homemade ice cream. Marissa was lined up. She ordered peaches and cream, and I came up to her and I said, “You should have picked vanilla. Always pick vanilla when it comes to homemade.”

“Says who? You?”

She dipped her spoon in the soft ice cream and took a bite. She made a face and spit out a chunk into her cup.

“The peaches are like rocks, aren’t they? It always happens.”

She said, “Are you an ice cream salesman?”

“Nope, just an interested party.”

Now I stood back so that I could kick in the door. “Seriously,” I said, “do you remember that? Are you there?” When she didn’t answer, I kicked as hard as I could, right under the knob, and felt the jamb crack — not all the way, but enough. I got ready to kick again, and she screamed at me to stop. Please, just stop.

So I stopped. I put my mouth right up to the door so she’d be sure to hear me.

“You know what I was doing that day? I was on my way to a delivery, and I had my windows rolled down. I rolled through downtown, and I heard the music and saw all those people there and the old buildings around them and the trees. And I said to myself, ‘What would it feel like to be like them?’ So I stopped and got out. And I met you.”

I waited for her to say something.

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” I said, “but that wasn’t one of them. I can be a good person if you’ll let me. Now, are you going to let me in so we can talk?”

“I’m holding a knife. Go ahead. Kick the door in the rest of the way.”

It was a relief, in a way. It’s good to know where things stand.

“Fine,” I said. “But I should probably tell you where your mom is right now.”

Marissa drove her own car and followed me. At the tank yard, I told her to wait at the gate. “Not until you tell me what’s going on,” she said, but she’d followed me this far. She wasn’t going anywhere. I held a finger to my lips and crept up to the office, listened at the door, and then opened it. Her mom was still tied up as I’d left her except that she’d tipped the chair over and was lying on her side. She had a bruise on the side of her forehead that you could see as soon as I set her upright again. I went back out and called Marissa over. When she saw her mom, she ripped off the blindfold and the gag.

“Apparently she owed some other dealers money. They weren’t as nice as me.”

Marissa stood with her back to the wall, next to the door, as far from her mom as she could get. “How did you know that?”

I sighed. “Because I’m a caring person who looks out for his customers.” She opened her mouth to tell me what she thought of that, and I said, “Because I know things. That’s why. After I heard, I went by her house to check on her, and I found this.” I held up the sandwich bag. “This had meth in it, now it doesn’t. And I didn’t leave it there. Now, you want to get her out of here or what?”

Together we carried her to Marissa’s car and slid her into the back seat. I followed her back into town, to the hospital, though I didn’t go in. I had thirty-three thousand dollars in a jar under my porch, and that was what I could do, I realized. I could pay for her mom to get clean. So I went home, got down on my hands and knees, and reached under the porch. I reached as far as I could but felt only dirt. I went and got a flashlight. Only dirt. The jar was gone.

I waited until after dark, way after, closer to sunrise than sunset. I wanted to make sure Rob was done cooking, that he was asleep, that he was alone. First I went back to the tank yard, filled up a propane tank with anhydrous, and put it on the floor on the passenger side of my truck, close enough that I could hold on to it around curves so it wouldn’t roll around. When it was almost morning, I went over to Rob’s. I carried the tank to the back of the house, where his bedroom was. With my finger, I poked a hole in the tinfoil covering his window. There was some old tubing in his backyard, stuff we’d thrown out because of wear and tear, but it was good enough for this. I slid the tubing through the hole until I felt it hit the floor. I connected the other end to the tank and turned the valve. The smell of the ammonia was unbearable, even from twenty feet away, where I stood listening for him to wake up, which he did. He thrashed and threw himself against the wall. He screamed. But he couldn’t see, and so he never did find his way out of the room.

When it was over, I went to the back porch to start looking for my money. It wasn’t much of a porch, not much bigger than a bathroom floor. He’d moved the new chair onto the middle of it, and I stood there looking at that chair. Somebody had spent a lot of time on that chair. The owner probably had a flower garden with a trellis and a climbing rose, and maybe there were kid toys in the yard and a basketball hoop and one of those lawn-art roadrunners with legs that spin in the wind. You work hard, pay your property taxes, paint your siding when it peels or invest in vinyl, and somebody runs off with whatever isn’t chained and bolted to a concrete slab. I climbed on top and stuck my hand up through the soffit hole where there should have been a screen but now was open. I reached around until I found my jar and the Maxwell coffee can. I took both back to my truck, and then I came back for the chair. He didn’t deserve something so nice, and neither did I, but I intended to one day, so I took it.

The woman who could have been the love of my life got her mom straight again. She went to college. After three years, she graduated and got a job at a bank in Overland Park, a nice suburb of Kansas City where no one is poor and everyone looks cut out of a magazine advertisement for IAMS dog food. She met a man, married him, had three kids, and sometimes her mom comes to stay with them. Her mom, so far as I know, doesn’t use drugs anymore. I’d like to take credit for the change, but it turns out that lots of people give up drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, candy, dairy, gluten, poor choices, dead-end jobs, bad partners, the places they live, their pasts, their futures. There’s no end to what willpower can achieve. You just have to want things, I guess. Every year, around Christmas, I send her a card. I just write my name. The message is whatever the Hallmark people dreamed up.

A lot of people are able to become exactly the kind of person they want to become, good and upstanding, pillars of the community, a benefit to all who know them. There are gifts in life to those who deserve them. And some people are there to take it away. I like to think that they get exactly what they have coming.