RICK FELT BURIED ALIVE. He lay on the flat dirt, floor joists two feet above him. It was morning but cellar-dark and dank beneath the mobile home. The batteries in his good flashlight were about to go.
He’d been on edge since he woke and drove to Dad’s. Paul strolled in late, and when Rick stared hard at him for some hint, some update on Mom, Paul stared back just as hard. Dead-eyed. Then, when they took off, Paul insisted on driving separate. They never drove separate on jobs more than an hour out. Never. It was stupid, spending that much on gas. Maybe it meant he planned to take off and deal with this Mom thing. Get her back home.
Then again, maybe it had something to do with Rick stealing the drugs.
Whatever it was, was a gray area, and Rick didn’t like gray areas a whole lot.
While Paul took his sweet time getting to Arnold, Rick saw the trailer was a mess. The belly was in miserable shape. The pipes froze last winter. Copper pipes, good pipes, but they’d thawed, broke open, and flooded the place. It’d sat empty for months, insulation bloated behind the tarp like fiberglass boils. They’d been tore open, either by rot or some animal. Now the insulation hung down in woolly pink shreds.
While Rick moved the flashlight beam across the joists, Paul’s pickup pulled up and parked. “When the Levee Breaks” blasted from the cab. The engine and the harmonica both cut. Then the music blasted again. He must’ve planned to listen to the full seven goddamn minutes.
Rick worked his box knife at a dangling scrap of tarp, the blade gnawing through the pink batting. He spit dust from where it fell and settled in his mustache, and he made the mistake of thinking, for a split second, what his lungs must look like. Caves of pink fiberglass, sparkling like quartz.
When the song ended, Paul’s pickup door squealed open and slammed shut. He yelled, asked where Rick was. Rick called back and heard Paul shimmy under the trailer. Rick asked how it looked down his way.
“Like cotton candy.” Paul rustled against the dirt. “Tastes like shit, though.”
“Dad wants it done in two days. Three, tops.”
“Want it done in fifteen minutes?” Paul said. “You kick over the turpentine, I’ll drop the match.”
Rick was almost tempted. He knew Paul sure as hell would. All Rick wanted was to turn around and go home. Except when he got there, he wanted it to still be before dawn. And he wanted Pam to still be in bed, asleep, like he’d left her this morning. He’d crawl back under the sheet and bury his face in her hair. It usually smelled like warm soap. This morning he thought it smelled a little like stale smoke. He wondered if she’d been out sneaking cigarettes again. Right about now, she’d be watching Donahue, vacuuming during commercials, brain motor stuck in high gear so she’d be good and pissed about nothing by the time he got home, whenever that’d be.
The ray of the thick-bodied flashlight shrank to a pinhole. He gripped the handle and thudded the back of the lamp against the ground at his side. The beam spread wide again, brighter for the dust. “So nothing, then? No news?”
“I said I’d take care of it,” Paul said. “What’s your assessment of this shit hole?”
“You can’t leave her wandering the countryside, Paul. She ain’t right.”
“You’d like to think she ain’t,” Paul said. “Sure would be tidier.”
Whether or not Mom was all there wasn’t worth fighting about. Rick gripped the lamp so tight his knuckles ached. “That why you drove the pickup out? So you could take off, keep looking?”
“Unrelated.” He was messing with the crossover duct. “Something went missing. Decided to keep my shit where I can see it. Feeling a little violated, I guess.”
Rick absently picked at the head of a framing nail. He needed to come clean or commit to playing dumb. “What’s gone?”
“Know the stuff behind the horn pad? Shit I told you about yesterday?”
A sliver of joist slipped into Rick’s finger with a pinch. “Yeah? Sure?”
“Gone.”
“What?”
“Damnedest thing.”
Rick’s heart beat hard in his chest, but he didn’t say anything. He waited.
Paul seemed to be waiting, too. “Well,” he said, finally breaking the silence, “guess Jensen must’ve took it.”
“What? Why?”
“Not to worry. Nothing that can’t be squared away.”
“Why you think it was him?” Rick still had the pills in the van, beneath the seat. He’d opted not to throw them out, mainly in case some shit like this came up and he needed to put them back to keep Paul from being an idiot. Better for him to go to jail for possession than whatever he might like to do to that cop. Paul was like Dad that way. The kid held a grudge.
“Deduced it. Besides you and me, nobody knew it was there.” The ductwork crinkled to the ground on Paul’s end, and his voice came clearer. He said Jensen got in the pickup the other night, dug through the glove box, and the horn went off. Paul figured it was an accident. “But then I went to sell some to a couple inbreds from Junco last night, and what do you know. Poof—they’re gone. And like we already established, nobody besides you and me knew they were there.”
Maybe Rick could say he had to take a piss, shove the pills deeper in the steering wheel so Paul would think they’d moved. No. There wasn’t enough space. “You can’t go running after a cop. Not with this Mom shit going on.” Maybe Rick could throw the pills under the seat.
“I had a hunch you’d feel that way. But you see, what we’ve got here is a case of illegal search and seizure, brother. There’s principle involved.”
“They probably just fell out. Landed somewhere in the truck. Like that putty knife we couldn’t find for a month,” Rick said. “I’ll help you look when we’re done.”
“Oho, but I learned from that putty knife. Checked every inch of floorboard, every crack and crevice and cubbyhole. Them pills is absent.”
This was no good. That cop was enough to worry about without Paul having an excuse to fly headlong at him.
Rick thought he’d best come out and say it. Say he took the pills, because wherever the hell Mom was, she didn’t need a kid in jail. Not on top of another kid killed and a husband who paid her bills but wouldn’t step foot in the same room with her. Rick pictured her yellow pile of curls leaning from the side of her head as she roamed the ditches, warbling on and on to some George Jones song like a little bird. Shit tore him up.
“You’re awful quiet over there, partner,” Paul said. “Contemplative.”
“What?”
“What what? I’m waiting on you. You got a call to make here.”
Rick’s lamplight drew down to a speck. He slammed the butt at his side again and the lamp lit back up. He scanned the ruined tarp. The truth was they could do it in a day. He had more pride than that, but they could. They could leave the shredded insulation in, cover up the whole mess. Switch out the pipes and patch the son of a bitch with bigger sheets of tarp. It’d always stink like mildew, but hell. If they laid new carpet, the place would stink like new carpet for a few months first. Long enough for Dad to sell the thing.
On the other hand, they could stretch the job into two days if they put up a new belly, three if they did the place right. It’d mean leaving Pam overnight, frying and popping fuses till he got home. It’d mean leaving Mom out wandering around, God knew where. But an extra day might cool Paul off.
Rick tilted the lamp to the right of the clean hole he’d made. More shreds hung a few inches away.
“Just start tearing shit out,” Rick said. “Nothing down here to salvage.”