HE HEARD SHEVAUNNE’S TV THROUGH the thin walls. You always you never you don’t love you cheating bitch you broke my I hate I love I never you always never— The soundtrack to her life was the hearty laughter of strangers, the violent haranguing of jilted lovers. She could not stand silence, she could not stand solitude—those long, cold minutes when she had to live with herself.
He thought about what he’d read today in her file about Jake. What had been done made beating a child merely dull. The report didn’t say if Shevaunne had been directly involved, but that did not matter. She was guilty. She had carried on living with the man who hurt her son, scoring with him, until Jake was found and the cops were hailed and Shevaunne went to prison.
How readily she’d come with him, just the whiff of smack, and she got into his car with her child. He’d thought, then, that she was just a junkie and neglect of her child was the worst of it, malnourishment, filth, sour milk. But the consistency—he recalled the words—the consistency of abuse. And the precision of it. How particular, how thoughtful. And consistent. Day after day.
Through the walls he heard her snuffling sounds as she turned in her sleep. She slept so well in her vast cavern of sleep, the sleep of the innocent. She was innocent, heroin made her innocent, it was the junk, the smack to blame. But she knew exactly how much a boy of five was worth. And to whom.
Ben began to wonder how he could live with her through the long months to guardianship. But this was part of a larger question: why she lived at all. Her body sucking oxygen, the blood cycling obediently through her veins. Nature culled the useless, but humanity was brimming with it.
When she first moved in, he’d hidden the bills. No one would get far with his credit card details, but junkies would steal anything, sell anything, even the screws you had the TV screwed to the wall with. He remembered his mother removing the light bulbs, the shower curtain, the sheets, and selling them to a tweeker who would sell them on to a different motel across town. Ben kept the bills in an envelope taped to the back of the fridge. He kept other papers here, the logging manifests, his gun licence. This was no guarantee she wouldn’t find them. She might notice faint skid marks on the floor from where he’d moved the fridge. Junkies were cunning.
He was so deeply in debt, he was tens of thousands in debt, the repairs on the equipment, the cost of the new processor, the small-business taxes, the insurance, the property taxes, the hospital bills from five years back when the crummy lifter broke and a log cracked down on his head, serious concussion, ambulance, overnight in the hospital, high deductible, 15 grand owed. He added up all the years it would take him to pay off his debt if he continued to pay the minimum—297 years.
Carefully, he placed all the bills to his left and discarded the envelopes on the floor. Then he divided the bills into three piles. One pile had red letters or heavy block letters and always exclamations, words like FINAL and COLLECTION AGENCY softened by imploring notes, “If you need assistance please, please, please contact our customer service agents please.” Then he added and subtracted, he moved one bill to another pile, like a shell game. Perhaps he could phone Visa once more, perhaps they would give him another month. Or he could reduce his payment. Again. Thousands, thousands and thousands. He could not make the numbers stretch or shrink. Numbers were solid, like stones, pebbles, boulders. He was buried under the weight of them, a grave.
He wrote out the checks. He was particularly careful with the check for the feller buncher: he left out his signature. It had been a year since he last did that, so he could probably get away with it. If he was nice to Juanita or Susie in customer service—“Jeez, I’m so sorry, ma’am, I forgot to sign the check? What a dumb mistake”—he could get another two weeks without the late penalty, the 24.9 percent screw-you interest.
The light on the ceiling created a cocoon, softly spun around him. He could not see out into the night. He imagined Ed down the road sitting at his kitchen table, wondering how he would pay for a new baler. And all along the road, through town and across the country, kitchen table lights connected people like him, the bill payers, with their cups of coffee, their check books and calculators, the cold pits in their stomachs.
When he paid what he could pay, he carefully put stamps on the envelopes. Then he took the outstanding bills, tapped them into a neat stack, and put them back behind the fridge.
This next shipment would be his last, he knew that now. He couldn’t trust Shevaunne or “undercover bitches.” Things were shifting, Slim had warned him. He hadn’t cared before. Prison might even be a relief to be stripped of all responsibility—three hots and a cot. For a moment Ben simply stood. Anxiety prickled up his arms, swarmed across his face with special heat, then down through his chest, clamping around his groin so he felt his sphincter tighten.
He went into Jake’s room. He sat on the side of the bed, watching the sleeping boy. Children reveal who we truly are, he thought. The best and the worst we are. They bring us home to ourselves. He lay down, curling his body around Jake, as if in a storm, he would take the brunt of it on his back.