Boot Tracks

  BOOT TRACKS

  Matthew F. Jones

  Copyright © 2006 by Matthew F. Jones

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. First Print Publication 2006 by Europa Editions

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-0-9903997-2-8

  Cover design by Mayapriya Long, Bookwrights.com

  For all the old souls in my life

  PART ONE

  Rankin walked into the place and over to the desk. He asked the little bitty Mexican-or-Indian-looking guy at it if he knew Billy.

  “Billy who?”

  “Billy.”

  “I ain’t sure if I do.” Two silver teeth at the front of the guy’s mouth caught the light as he talked around a half-a-thumb-length cigarette. “What’s he look like?”

  “Like Billy.”

  “Who’s asking if I do?”

  Rankin said his name.

  “Figure this snow’ll amount to anything, Charlie?”

  Rankin didn’t say what he figured.

  “I don’t either. And I’ve spent my whole life here.”

  Rankin couldn’t tell if the guy was busting chops or was making lame conversation; he didn’t like it, anyway, him jerking Rankin around on the Billy thing (What’s he look like?, for Chrissake) instead of giving a flat-out yes like he’d been supposed to. A fake gold tag on the guy’s lapel labeled him Ornay Corale. “You got a room for me?”

  “How’s 417 sound, Charlie?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I’ll put ya down for a night?”

  Rankin nodded. “And give me a call at four-fifteen.”

  The room’s high ceiling was faded yellow suggesting whoever had recently painted off-white three-quarters of the way up to it hadn’t had a ladder high enough to finish the job. Rankin heard coming from behind a door left of him pool balls clacking together; a fried-food smell seemed to have its source in there too. He scrawled his name in the register. The deskman handed him a key, told him the elevator was broke, then nodded to a metal door behind him. “One way up for now, Charlie.”

  * * *

  Scrawled names, curses, dates, stick figures fucking and doing whatnot to each other covered the cement walls enclosing the unheated stairway. The heavy, metallic clang of his footsteps reminded him of prison, where every sound, like every emotion and every slight, was magnified. The door out to the fourth floor hallway lacked a spring; the bang it made shutting still rang in his ears as he entered his room, the fourth one left of the stairs.

  He put down his bag, tossed onto the bed his peacoat and watch cap, then went into the bathroom. He removed the toilet’s ceramic top, reached with one hand into the water beneath it, and felt around until he found a rolled up baggie taped to the underside of the ballcock. He brought out the baggie, unsealed it, and took from it a small scrap of paper wrapped around a key. He unraveled the paper, read the few words on it, folded the key back into it, slid the paper into his wallet, tossed the baggie in the trash, and replaced the toilet cover.

  He went back into the main room and unpacked his bag.

  He placed his underwear, socks, and sweater neatly in the bureau; hung his two shirts and one extra pair of pants in the closet; put his toiletries in the bathroom medicine cabinet. He took from his front pants pocket his gravity knife and slipped it between the bedspring and mattress. He tried the television, found he could get eight channels on it. He sat down on the edge of the bed, pulled back the window curtain, looked out at the falling white flakes, not one like another he remembered his mother saying. Gaping holes where windows had been made a grotesque smile in the brick side of an abandoned building across from him. John Lee Hooker’s voice moaned past the left wall. He pictured time as acres of land under untrod upon snow he’d been dropped in the middle of. He flopped down on his back on the mattress. He put his hands behind his head, studied on a phalange of cracks in the center of the plaster ceiling. He closed his eyes. He saw in his head the impressions left by the cracks.

  * * *

  In the growing darkness nothing appeared concrete. He saw only abstractions in the room’s shadows; in the snow swirling like frenzied piranha amid the greasy light coming from the street side of the adjacent building; in the remnants of a dream in which he’d been in some way churning and rolling—down a hill? in a woman’s arms? in the grip of a current? He wasn’t sure if he’d been digging or hating the churning and rolling. To stop a harsh ringing in his ears he picked up the phone. “You’re a deep sleeper, Charlie.”

  “What do you want?”

  “It’s not what I want, Charlie. It’s what you want. It’s four-fifteen.”

  The Hooker album that had been playing two hours earlier was still playing. “Okay. Call me a taxi, will ya?”

  “Sure, Charlie. Accommodations all right?”

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “Find everything you need?”

  This guy’s familiarity toward him made Rankin nervous; or that he had information about Rankin did; or the guy in total did. Rankin, instead of answering him, said, “Corale, Ornay, what is that?”

  A hesitation on the line. “It’s Ornay Corale.”

  “I’m saying though what sort of name, Ornay, is Corale?”

  “Spanish.”

  “You got to be with a name like that in the White Pages all alone—or close to it—ain’t ya?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Charlie.”

  “I mean it wouldn’t be like tracking down a guy named Smith or Jones in a small city.”

  “What wouldn’t be?”

  “I’m just making conversation, Ornay.”

  Another silence.

  “Hold that taxi for me I don’t get down there in time, will ya, Ornay?”

  Rankin hung up, not waiting for an answer.

  He wiped the sleep from his eyes. He gazed out the window. Now he saw each fracture of dull light as a finger on a hand shaping the greyness, giving it a form as the whirling snow gave it life and the wall of empty windows gave it its hideous face. He got out his knife. Standing up he shoved it beneath his sweater, into his belt. He went into the bathroom, pissed, cleaned his teeth, combed his hair. He came back out and dressed for outside.

  He went downstairs to meet his taxi.

  * * *

  The whirling snow gave the impression of being a single group of suspended flakes. Only a dusting of white powder covered the ground. The temperature hovered at around freezing. Tires hissing over wet pavement; the thump and squeak of windshield wipers; heat blowing loudly through the front vent; crackled voices over the short-wave radio.

  He found it odd people emblazoning their names to the world. Ornay Corale.

  Edith Icks. Her soft, squishy-looking body brought to his mind cumulus clouds; vats of congealing butter. She had a white lady’s Afro; a brown, hairy, quarter-sized mole behind her left ear; a sweet and sour stench suggesting fresh fruit and fish sharing space at an open air market. Determined to tell him things, about the weather, corruption on the local police force, road rage, she didn’t care—or took no notice—that he had no interest in hearing them. He said, “Stop at the first shoe store.”

  “Now you’ve hit upon an important item.” Edith Icks in the rearview mirror nodded knowingly to him. Rankin closed his eyes. She seemed to take his doing so as an indication of his rapt interest in her views on proper footwear. She took off on the value of it to not just the feet, but to the joints, the back, the entire body. Rankin envisioned himself tracking an unidentified quarry through the snow, of following it with the sense of never drawing any closer to it, with a growing suspicion that it, in fact, was pursuing him. He opened his eyes in fear that he was overlooking something, a
detail in the here and now that could be his undoing. The cab came to a stop.

  Opening his door and stepping out into a blare of voices, horns, engines, he told Edith Icks, “I’ll be back in five.”

  He shouldered his way across the slush-marred sidewalk, through commuters heading home, predators, peddlers, vagrants, shoppers, into a leathery-smelling Payless store that, tucked amid that commotion, suggested to Rankin a snug, underground nest. A beak-nosed clerk in an egg-stained sweater led him at Rankin’s insistence to a wall of boots. Rankin elected to try a pair of GoreTex-lined Timberlands. He sat down in a vinyl chair facing the clerk, who perched on a knee-high stool. Rankin took off his running shoes to find them soaked through to his feet. “You carry socks?” he asked the clerk.

  The clerk already had in his hand a plastic-wrapped wool pair. He unwrapped them and passed them to Rankin.

  Rankin got off his wet socks. He tossed them in the trash. He put on the new socks, then the Timberlands. He stood up. The clerk, a yellow-skinned mulatto with a tired breath and a hunched posture, bent forward and felt Rankin’s toes. Rankin walked up and down on the rug between the aisles. The clerk watched him. “Plenty of women will let you down ‘fore those boots will.”

  “They act some pinchy.”

  The clerk again pushed on his toes. He shook his head. “You wouldn’t want ‘em any bigger.”

  Rankin nodded. He dropped his running shoes in the boot box. “You got gloves?”

  “A whole rack full of ‘em up front.” The clerk picked up Rankin’s sneakers and walked ahead of him to a stand-up display of cold weather hand and head gear next to the cash register.

  Rankin selected and gave to the clerk a pair of tan, fleece-insulated driving gloves. The clerk nodded approvingly at his choice. Rankin took a black ski mask from the rack and passed it to the clerk. “You must be expecting the real deal,” said the clerk.

  Rankin, not saying what he was expecting, followed the clerk to the cash register. A beanpole of a woman who’d been filing her nails rung him up. The total was eighty-nine-fifty. Rankin paid the bill out of his last one-hundred-forty dollars. With a doleful smile, the clerk who’d waited on him handed him his purchases, saying, “You’re ready for whatever now.”

  * * *

  The usual sorts of people, it appeared to Rankin, were entering and exiting the terminal; in a fenced-in lot left of it several parked buses wetly glistened under fluorescent pole lights fracturing the near-dark; a couple of the buses were loading or unloading; one was pulling onto the street through the open gate; down the steps of another two cops escorted a madly gesticulating, shouting man in a torn T-shirt and shorts, his words registering in the taxi’s backseat only as a single, enraged bellow. “Let me out a block down,” said Rankin.

  As he paid her the discomfiting thought occurred to him that he would remember Edith Icks, that he would remember other apparently insignificant faces and happenings from his stay here more clearly and far longer than he would want to. After she drove off he crossed the street. He walked back up the sidewalk until he was directly across from the terminal, before a bar and grill called The Depot. He went into The Depot, took a table facing the front window, sat his shopping bag in the chair opposite him, and from a washed-out blonde waitress anywhere between twenty-five and forty ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a Dewar’s with a Budweiser back.

  He sat watching the station’s revolving front door, not for a particular person or occurrence, but for something out of the ordinary; a thing (unless and until it happened he wouldn’t know what) he half-hoped to see and half-hoped not to. He took out and counted his money: forty-two dollars and a small jangle in his pocket. He thought of how little forty-two bucks and change would buy. He studied on the mixture of snow and rain now descending; he tried to picture himself sleeping somewhere out in it. “Bad to the Bone” came out of the jukebox. Two urban cowboys in sundowners playing air hockey left of him yipped and yahooed. A viable-looking body of turbid smoke inched across the ceiling. Placing his order down in front of him, the waitress said of the precipitation, “Nastiness.”

  Rankin watched her hand, each of its fingers including her thumb wearing a brightly colored ring, pour his beer. “I hate the cold,” she said.

  Rankin picked up his shot; he tasted it with his tongue.

  The waitress placed the half-empty Budweiser bottle on the table. “Not that it does me any good to.”

  Rankin downed the whiskey. The waitress was still at his back, watching him or watching something outside, beyond him. He chased the shot with some beer. He picked up his sandwich. He realized he wasn’t hungry or he was but not for what he was holding. He put down the sandwich and looked up at the waitress. “You got a phone?”

  “You mean do I personally”—she smiled at him in a way that might have meant anything—”or do we?”

  “Does this place have one?”

  She chin-pointed to the far end of the bar. “Between the little girls’ room and the little boys’ room.”

  Pushing back his chair, Rankin stood up.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I’ll have another Dewar’s,” said Rankin, heading toward where the waitress had directed him. At the phone he dialed local information and asked for the listing of Maynard Cass. He wrote down the number, put a quarter in the phone, and dialed the number. A female voice answered, throwing Rankin. “Hello?” the voice said for the second time.

  Rankin pulled the phone back from his ear.

  “Is anyone there?”

  Rankin hung up.

  He returned to his table. He drained his second Dewar’s and the Budweiser. He pictured William Pettigrew sitting on his bunk, his eyes, those big, doleful eyes, hitting Rankin straight on. A few more people came into the bar, after work types. The waitress started to look pretty good to him, which told him he’d drunk enough. His cheese sandwich sat untouched before him, an orangey blob between soggy bread slices. William Pettigrew owned two houses, one in Florida, one up here, and he couldn’t even beat Rankin in a game of checkers. The waitress came by and swooped up his empties. “Had enough?”

  Rankin nodded.

  The waitress pointed to his food. “Bag it or heave it?”

  “Heave it.”

  The waitress slipped his bill under his beer glass, then picked up his plate. “You want more later of whatever you come back, got it?”

  “Sure.”

  “You live local?”

  “No.”

  “That don’t matter either.”

  He left the bar, went across the street, and joined the thickening stream of humanity flowing into the terminal.

  * * *

  An urge hit him to—before it was too late, before things had gone too far to stop—cash out on a ticket to anywhere; well, to anywhere warm. The Keys maybe. Or L.A. He studied on the ticker flashing destinations above the counter. He experienced the milling crowd around him as one gigantic, circular-shaped serpent, its head connected to its tail, from all its slithering going noplace. Inaudible shouts, bangs, smells reached him. A palpable greyness infected the air. The cities revolving before him—Miami, Minneapolis, Seattle, Cleveland, Houston— struck him, in his flat broke state, as being at once the same city and exactly where he was.

  “The storage lockers?” he asked a lady behind the counter.

  “Keep heading like you are.” The lady’s crackly, high-pitched voice, her lips never moving, came at him out of a little gizmo in the center of her throat; it was as if another person lived inside her. Rankin thought of those dolls from which came directionless words in response to being squeezed.

  “How far?”

  “Take your first Louie,” answered a voice at his feet. He looked down and saw a one-armed legless man on a plywood plank with wheels.

  “Thanks.”

  The guy nodded to a jar pinched between his stubs. “Got a buck?”

  Rankin got out a dollar and dropped it in the jar, which looked to be fatter with them
than was Rankin’s wallet. He resumed walking.

  Down the corridor to which he’d been directed, in a widened space also containing vending machines, neatly aligned benches, entrances to a men’s can and to a women’s can, they filled the left wall, maybe a few hundred of them all told. Around a dozen people in the area stood, sat, filtered about. For what—or who—were they waiting? Or were they just lounging? A tightening in Rankin’s belly; moist heat on the back of his neck.

  He thought again of William Pettigrew

  The sack-like body; the bird-claw hands; the whitish, loose lips tightening only when William the Buddha sucked on one of his little inhalers; the whispery voice, never rising, showing emotion, betraying the thoughts behind it; how the Buddha pissed-off sounded and looked to Rankin like the Buddha petrified, the Buddha Happy, the Buddha joking, the Buddha whatever; how Rankin had often suspected he’d won all those checker games only because the Buddha had wanted him to.

  He sat down, facing the lockers, on a bench between a perspiring black guy reading a racing sheet and a yellow-skinned white lady in earmuffs and a pink sweatsuit that reeked of piss. He thought, this shit under the daisies life—people thick as thieves, scarcely a quiet, unsmelly place to perch, smoke-filled air cloying as a close-up dog’s pant—live it you become it and the only way not to live it is to beat it, to rise above it, to take your chance it comes and don’t look back. He brought out his wallet and took from it the paper-wrapped key he’d pulled from his room toilet. He got off the paper, re-read what was on it, returned it without the key to his wallet. He replaced his wallet in his right hip pocket. He glanced down at the key in his palm; he twice tossed up the key and caught it. He looked at the rows of lockers. He considered how the anonymous masses most times to him were faceless, nearly invisible, then suddenly one of them, like the sloppy-Joe type in an unbuttoned trench coat and Popeye Doyle Hat leaning on the Coke machine across from him, would jump out and become all he could see.

  One of the guy’s hands was in his coat pocket; the other held before him a half-folded newspaper he kept glancing at then away from as if instead of reading it he was pretending to. A pervert, thought Rankin, a cop or somebody with an even darker agenda than a pervert or a cop, staking out the men’s room or staking out the lockers.