Five Hundred Poor Read online

  In the truck, Ralph gave the boy a tongue-lashing, demanding Huck pay back the money he owed him, to which Huck replied that he was nine years old, “and how the fuck do you expect me to have any money?” Good point, Ralph thought.

  “But why’d you do it?” Ralph asked.

  The boy shrugged. “Got to eat, don’t you?”

  THE WINSTAR CASINO WAS A monstrosity, a hodgepodge of buildings that looked like a souvenir shop had vomited out its gigantic wares. There was a replica of the Eiffel Tower and Buckingham Palace and the pyramids and pretty much every other tourist trap known to mankind, and the parking sucked balls. Ralph cruised the rows for what seemed like an hour, intermittently waiting for some gamblers to make their exit, but they just sat in their cars, maybe enjoying a toke or doing something a little more illicit—he wasn’t sure.

  Once they finally found a spot, Ralph parked.

  “Wait in the car,” he told Huck. “I’ll find your mom and bring her back.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t be a pain in my ass. Just stay. A casino isn’t a place for no kid.”

  The kid looked disappointed. It was the first time Ralph had seen him show any emotion besides disgust and anger, and in an instant Ralph felt sorry for the boy. But it didn’t change the fact he couldn’t take him inside.

  “Lock the door when I leave.” He handed Huck the keys. “Unlock it for nobody but me. You hear?”

  The boy nodded.

  “Good.”

  The casino was dark, windowless, the air thick with tobacco smoke. Ralph’s throat swelled and his eyes itched as he snaked his way through the throngs of gamblers. It was a sordid group: rednecks donning ten-gallon hats, young frat girls wasting their parents’ money, overweight men with tucked-in T-shirts, and the elderly, sneaking a smoke between gasps from their oxygen masks. He’d be hard-pressed to find Adeleine here. But hell, he was out of options.

  He had no idea where Adeleine would be. He’d only known the woman for a few short nights several years prior. Back then, she’d been wild. A rodeo junkie with a cheerleader’s flair, she drank and cussed like a soccer hooligan. Fun was what Ralph remembered, dumping an ice bucket full of crickets into the pool; siphoning gas out of the asshole desk clerk’s car, spelling “Fuck You” on the parking lot and lighting it on fire; banging left, right, and sideways in the bathroom, the bedroom, even the unlocked facilities management closet next to the mops and bleach bottles. If she was anything like her former self, then Ralph figured she’d be someplace with the most action, getting into any kind of trouble she could.

  He trekked from one shit-stained smoky enclave to another, all of it wrapped in this god-awful maroon and orange and teal green gaudiness: the carpet, the chandeliers, the flashing neon signs. Ralph had never been much for casinos. It wasn’t that he was risk averse, he just felt he was being conned, from the faux gold sconces down to the free drinks and the ever-so-patient dealers, taking his money with the sympathetic upturned lip of a friend.

  The Texas Hold’em room was large, full of cowboy hats and handsy businessmen, clamping down on waitresses’ butt cheeks, the place vibrating with cards shuffling and chips stacking. If he couldn’t find Adeleine here, he didn’t know what he was going to do. He didn’t have the resources to feed another mouth, buy new shoes, keep Huck bathed and out of jail. No, no matter how much he’d started to like the boy, he’d probably have to turn him over to the DHS, sentence him to ten hard years in the foster system, getting shit-kicked from one dump to the next, hoping the next one might stick, but knowing fully goddamn well it wouldn’t. Ralph had known men who’d had a childhood like that, and he wouldn’t condemn Osama Bin Fuckin’ Laden to that type of abuse, even if his mother was Adeleine Murphy.

  But he couldn’t find her. Not amongst the poker tables, not shadowing some big-stacked spender, teasing her chewed-up fingernails along his collar. He didn’t find her at the blackjack tables either, or slinking around the roulette wheel. She wasn’t in the sports room. She wasn’t at the bar. She wasn’t even camped out in front of the slots, sucking on a burnt-out cigarette. Finding her was a lost cause, like trying to collect a debt from a deadbeat uncle—you knew there was no chance in hell he’d ever repay you, but you couldn’t help but ask.

  It was going to be a long drive back to the house, so he stopped by the shitter before hitting the road. It was rank in there, smelling of pretty much every single body secretion Ralph could think of, roasting in a pot full of cigarette smoke. There wasn’t anyone at the urinals, but he could hear a guy grunting in one of the stalls. The sound he made was something canine, deep and guttural and rhythmic. Ralph couldn’t tell if the guy was trying to push out a large one or perhaps preparing to bark. He wouldn’t have been surprised either way, really.

  Ralph figured he’d take the boy back, then contact DHS in the morning. He didn’t want to do it, but he didn’t really have any choice in the matter. His disability check wasn’t going to cover the two of them, and what would happen if Adeleine showed back up, maybe with a couple cops, accusing him of kidnapping her kid? What would he do then? It’d be her word against his, and Ralph didn’t like his chances. A mother’s word was gold in the eyes of the court, at least in Ralph’s experience. Best to just hand the boy over to the authorities. Granted, he’d never been one to do things by the book, but it seemed like the only course of action. Rip off the Band-Aid, he thought, and be done with the whole mess.

  He zipped and was about to wash his hands when he noticed something funny: two high heels sticking out from underneath the stall door where he’d heard the man grunting. Turned out he wasn’t trying to unload that night’s buffet dinner but was getting a slob knob right there in the bathroom. That’s when the man groaned something incoherent, a string of vowels and consonants that couldn’t quite form the hard edges of language. He sputtered three times, then there was a zip, some shuffling, and the click of the lock. Ralph turned toward the sink and stared at his hands lest he make eye contact. The last thing he wanted was to be accused of being a voyeur. Never knew which way it might go—he could be punched in the gut or he could be asked to watch, neither one of which Ralph was willing to do.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ, Ralph Banister.” No. No. No. No. “Thought you were supposed to be watching our kid?”

  “You got a kid?” the man asked.

  Ralph hoped, he hoped beyond hope, he’d heard them wrong.

  “Sure do. With this handsome son of a bitch right here.”

  Ralph turned around to find Adeleine with a stick of a man. Adeleine’s voice was slurred, face bright red, mascara running down her cheeks, hair disheveled, and she stank of gin and spunk.

  “Oh man, oh shit. Is this your old lady, dude?” the guy asked.

  The man was smaller than Ralph had expected, given the decibel level of his orgasm, just a dry-skinned guy with dangly arms and a round paunch poking over his oversized belt buckle.

  “Ha!” Adeleine laughed. “This guy? I wouldn’t be caught dead with this guy, let alone be his old lady.”

  “My toilet’s just not nice enough for you, is it, Adeleine?”

  “The fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Never mind.”

  She chewed on that for a while, literally, eying him as she did so. Ralph didn’t want to think of what she might be chewing on.

  “Where’s our kid, anyway?”

  “In the car.” Ralph motioned with his thumb like he was hitching a ride.

  “In the car? Here? Alone? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Ralph had half a mind to defend himself—she was, after all, the deadbeat who’d left her son with a stranger, but he decided not to get into that here. It wouldn’t do any good. Plus, maybe she did have a point. This wasn’t the place for a child, especially one like Huck, a little bit of delinquency running through his blood. There was no telling what sort of trouble the boy was capable of getting into, and, Ralph thought with a sinking feeling, he did have Ralph’s keys.
He already knew Huck was capable of theft—odds of his truck still being in the parking lot may be slim to none.

  Adeleine followed Ralph to the exit, the stick man, oddly, still in tow. When they made it outside, it was dark out. Sporadic lampposts dotted the parking lot, but mostly it was pitch black, the small halos of light too thin to get a grip on his surroundings. They meandered a bit, Ralph zigzagging through Ford F-150s and Z-71s, Adeleine griping at him all the while, running her mouth about how stupid it was to lose his truck, that only a moron could ever do something like that, some brain-dead fucktard not worth the two-cent boots he was wearing, yelling that if he lost her kid, she swore to God he’d pay, she’d call the FBI and have him arrested right there in front of everybody, and on and on and on, and Ralph just kept mumbling to himself that he hoped the kid was okay, please, dear sweet Jesus, just let the boy be okay. He couldn’t help but imagine all the terrible things that could’ve befallen him: some drug-addled con artist could’ve broken out the window, sold him to some sick pimp trafficking youngsters across the border, or he could’ve taken off, hightailed it out of there with one thought on his mind, freedom, but not getting a mile down the road before getting knifed by an eighteen-wheeler doing ninety-five on the highway, trapped underneath a crumpled mess of steel and burning alive under the flames. If anything bad had happened to the boy, Ralph didn’t think he’d be able to live with it. He’d lose himself on the south end of a bottle and the action end of a twelve gauge.

  Luckily, though, none of that came to fruition. Eventually they came across the truck, parked where he’d left it. Huck was asleep in the front seat, his head propped up on a phone book and his hands tucked between his knees. Lying there, he looked two or three years younger than he actually was, just some innocent babe trying to cope. Ralph had the urge to scoop him up, hold him, comfort him, tell him everything would be okay. Didn’t even matter if he believed it; he just wanted to feel responsible for someone else. He wanted to be obligated. He wanted to be needed. It was a strange feeling, one he didn’t exactly welcome, but it was there nevertheless, like the pull on a smoker’s lung tissue, yearning for just one more drag.

  Adeleine beat on the window, and the boy stirred awake. He seemed confused at first, swiveling his head, trying to discern the source of the noise. When he found his mother, he sat there a moment. He looked at the stick man, then to Ralph, and then back to his mother. Adeleine tried to open the door, but it was locked. Her hand slipped off the handle, and she stumbled backward, her ankle rolling before she could regain her balance.

  “Open the door!” she yelled, but Huck didn’t move. “Open it! Open the goddamn door, Huck.” He didn’t budge. Just blinked at her. “Fine,” she said. “You don’t want to come? Fine then. See if I care.”

  Adeleine limped away, muttering under her breath. The stick man looked confused. He stared at Adeleine, then back at Huck, his mouth puckered, like he wanted to say something on the boy’s behalf, but couldn’t, no matter how hard he tried, form the right words. He then walked away in the opposite direction.

  Ralph tried the driver side door. It was unlocked.

  “What are you doing?” he asked Huck.

  “I don’t want to go with her.”

  Ralph filled his lungs. The air was cold, but clean. “Sometimes, son, we don’t have a choice in what we do.”

  “But I want to go with you.”

  “You can’t go with me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not your father.”

  “But Mom says you are.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “But you could be. Couldn’t you? Isn’t it possible?”

  “It’s not, Huck. I’m sorry.”

  “Not even a little bit?”

  “Your place is with your mother.”

  Ralph pointed, but Adeleine had already disappeared into the darkness.

  Huck screamed. He screamed, and he kicked, and he flailed his arms about. He punched the dashboard and honked the horn and howled like a coyote. Ralph wanted to be mad at the boy, thinking it might be easier, but he wasn’t. He knew what it felt like, complete and utter helplessness. It permeated him. Always had. It started out in his bones and flowed through his tissue all the way to his fingernails. He could feel it throbbing, reproducing, growing stronger, and he didn’t want that for Huck. He didn’t. And if Ralph was to take him, it would latch onto him, spread to him like some contagious disease. So he did the only thing he could think of: he grabbed the boy.

  “You may never understand this,” Ralph said. “I may never understand it. I might not ever want to understand it, but this is how the world is.”

  Ralph pulled the boy from his truck. Huck stood there, his face the color of ripe raspberries.

  “You see up there?” Ralph pointed, and the boy followed his finger. “There’s a gas station in about a hundred yards. You remember us passing it on the way in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. You get there and you tell them to call the police, okay? Say you need help. You tell them your name; you tell them you’re alone. They’ll know what to do. I promise.”

  Ralph pulled his last remaining twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket and gave it to the boy. Huck took it and jammed it into his pocket. He didn’t seem surprised, or angry, or dejected even. There was only the unmistakable look of resignation. He was on his own, just like he’d always expected, twenty bucks in his pocket and beholden to nobody—it was, Ralph figured, about as good a start as any.

  Status Zero

  THERE WAS BLOOD EVERYWHERE. IT HAD SPLATTERED ONTO THE YELLOW CURTAINS AND THE NEW BERBER carpet and dried into the little fibers so that he had to scrub with a wire brush. Skull fragments were lodged into the wall. He had to pry them out with pliers. Later he would have to smooth the wall out with plaster and paint over the cavities. He found bits of skull underneath the bed. He found brain tissue, the texture of beef jerky. These would be collected and then incinerated in a large furnace back at the office. Being the new guy, Max figured this would be his responsibility.

  A middle-aged man, director of the local food bank and father of two, had shot himself with a recently purchased 9mm semiautomatic Beretta. He’d left a note. Officially, the cops weren’t allowed to share that sort of information with Apex BioClean, Max’s new employer, a crime-scene/suicide cleaning agency, though his co-workers said they almost always did. This one, it was rumored, had simply said, “I’m sorry—I can’t provide for you any longer. Please contact Michael Thomas, our insurance agent, about collecting life insurance money. If they refuse to pay, hire a lawyer. There’s a two-year exclusion on suicide. Afterwards, they have to pay. I checked.”

  He couldn’t imagine finding such a note, then finding his spouse with half her face missing. It made Max not feel so bad about his own circumstances. Such trauma made your problems all of a sudden feel trivial and unimportant. To remind him of this, he pocketed a piece of molar. It was just a shard really, only distinguishable from other bone fragments because of the tiny bit of silver filling that remained.

  “Excuse me,” a voice said behind him. “I didn’t realize anyone would still be here.” He looked up. The voice belonged to a teenage girl, probably fifteen or sixteen. She wore glasses much too large for her face and stood behind the half-opened door. He must’ve looked a bit frightening. He wore a hazmat suit, made of nitrile rubber and an aluminized shell.

  “I’m sorry.” He really didn’t know what else to say. He was on all fours, brushing commercial-grade disinfectant soap into the stains her father had made.

  “No. Don’t be. I’ll get out of your way.”

  She left him to his work, which took two hours more. When he was done, he gathered his supplies and exited. He found her sitting at the kitchen bar. She wasn’t watching television or eating a bowl of cereal or reading a magazine. She sat staring at nothing, the blank look of someone whose vision had blurred, lost in thought. Max wouldn’t have been surprised if she
’d been sitting there the entire time he’d been working. He’d never lost anyone before. His grandparents were still alive. No cousin had died in a tragic car accident. A friend hadn’t passed away unexpectedly while on a ski trip, perhaps a little tipsy before flying headfirst into a fir tree. He had no idea what that was like, to mourn someone.

  She smiled when she noticed him. “Finished?” she asked.

  He’d taken his mask off even though he wasn’t supposed to; he still carried human remains. “Yes,” he said.

  “My name’s Alice, by the way,” she said as if they’d bumped into each other twice in one day, two strangers, under normal, though improbable, circumstances.

  “Max,” he said.

  “You been doing this long, Max?” she asked.

  “My first job by myself, actually.”

  “They let you do this sort of thing by yourself?”

  “We’re shorthanded.”

  “I see.”

  An awkward silence followed.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I won’t tell anyone.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  She pointed to his pocket. “I saw you pocket part of my dad.” He froze. He could feel himself turn pale in embarrassment. “Don’t worry,” she repeated. “I’m not going to tell anyone.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Stop.”

  “Really, I—”

  “It’s okay. Honest.”

  Without knowing what to say, he excused himself and began packing the biomaterial and cleaning supplies into the van. Through the bay window, he could see Alice watching him, her head cocked and turned, reminding him of an ostrich. She was studying him, like a scientist might a newly discovered species. In his hurry to leave, he hadn’t properly closed the container holding the remains of the deceased, and as he threw the supplies into the back of the van, the container tipped over and spilled dried gray matter. He should’ve immediately disposed of the remains and decontaminated the van, but he didn’t, uncomfortable under Alice’s close scrutiny.