rose to the top but the red Mustang was long gone. Brady counted—remembered a trick he had heard of in prison: first, anchor yourself, look around, find something you can see, something you can touch, something you can hear, something you can smell, and something you can taste—to slow the scorching heat behind his eyes. A sign in the door—one of the things he forced himself to see—made itself known: Help Wanted, it read.
* * * *
Three hours later the Russian knew his life story: his love for horses and his hate for ranch work, his gambling habit, the stint in prison, the dent in the Bronco.
His name was Igor, he said, just Igor.
“Listen,” Igor said, “I need someone to stock shelves. Scan merchandise, that sort of thing. You can sleep and shower in the back. There’s a cot in the back room. Good enough, you are young. Not so good for an old man.” He smiled and exposed his upper teeth encased in gold.
Brady wanted to somehow indicate his level of trustworthiness but came up empty—had just told him about the bad checks and the gambling habit—but Brady knew to steal from him, to take anything without asking, would result in dire consequences. Even Texas wasn’t going to be big enough to hide from a man like Igor.
“I know you understand. Your time here will be what you make of it.” Igor’s eyes focused on some invisible target in the distance and his thoughts seemed to trail off to memories not meant for the faint of heart. “We need to talk about what I expect from you working here, living here, money and customers. Following orders.” He spoke without contractions, his English grammatically flawless yet it was the accent he couldn’t shake, substituting the ‘w’ for the ‘v’-sound.
“One more thing,” Igor added and pointed at the curtain below the counter. With a swift swipe of his hand he parted the fabric and exposed the wooden barrel of a shotgun. “Under this counter, there is a gun. Never touch my gun. Never. Do not speak of it, do not handle it, do not even look at it. Just know it is there and leave the rest to me.”
“You’re the boss, shishka.” Brady shrugged and lifted his hands, palms facing out.
Three rooms in the back of the gas station: Igor’s office—a desk and a chair, a few shelves stuffed with papers, boxes piled up on the floor, and a pin-up calendar—and a square room with a cot and a shelf. The third room was next to Igor’s office, rectangular and tiled from top to bottom. It contained two showers without partitions or shower curtains. Igor referred to it as the freezer room because it contained two sub-zeroes with large stainless steel doors reaching from floor to ceiling. The two doors had separate locks and Igor handed Brady the key to the door on the left, which contained frozen foods and ice cream products. Igor never so much as mentioned the right door and he didn’t ask.
The next morning, Brady stocked soda and beer, and scanned low inventory in a handheld scanner. The work was easy enough yet Brady felt himself drift off into a strange place of discontent. He missed the creaking of the barn door on its worn-out hinges as he lugged it open, the stuffy musk of animal fur and old, dried-out dung and droppings, and the sharp smell of sweaty horses. The way his eyes struggled to get used to the darkness of the barn, how he had to allow his sight to compensate for the lack of light. He missed the squeals and the nickers of the horses, the scent of hay, the dirt underneath his boots. Even the banter and teasing of the men didn’t seem so harsh now that he was trapped in the unforgiving fluorescent light of a concrete building day in and day out.
He never rested. At night, any sound would do. A car alarm, loud music, voices, and on his cot in the otherwise bleak room he awoke with his heart racing and his brow covered in sweat. He felt the starkness of the flickering lights and the smell of bleach seemed to seep into his pores. The gasoline scent from the pumps and exhaust from the cars was much harsher than the scent of oily metal and iron farm machinery. Sometimes he longed for some sort of release, crying maybe, even sensed something resembling tears well up in the back of his throat but they never collected.
A week passed with those strange feelings Brady couldn’t quite place until one night a commotion awoke him. There was a thump just after four in the morning. He recognized the sounds as the delivery door slamming against the crates stacked in the back of the building. Then the sound of boxes toppling to the ground. Something continued to bang against the walls of the narrow hallway leading toward his room. Brady pulled a sweater over his shirt and slipped into his jeans and boots. He opened the door and poked his head into the hallway.
A light bulb swung back and forth, its blinding light making it difficult to see what was coming toward him: a shadow of a man with keys jingling on his hip carrying a heavy load over his back.
Brady blinked, hoping for the vision to disappear. The shadow on the walls grew and there was a scent he couldn’t quite place.
Brady wasn’t a religious man, could hardly be bothered to lower his head before picking up a fork, yet he couldn’t shake the image of someone hauling a large cross on their back. He’d seen men carry deer and other large animals over their shoulders after hunting—he himself had hauled foals over his shoulder just the same, had seen sheep carried that way—yet someone carrying a deer on his back into a building with underground tanks and freezers stuffed to the gills with ice cream just didn’t make any sense.
The lightbulb swung just right and he recognized a face: Igor. His chest, drenched in crimson, glossy in the light of the bulb swaying like a ghostly pendulum. His face was distorted, he struggled under the weight of the load, and every step seemed to take more strength than the one before.
As Igor toppled toward him, the smell of metal and salt struck Brady like a hoof, making his stomach churn and his knees started to give.
Brady recognized the mass on Igor’s back: it was the body of a man draped over his shoulder. Judging by the trail of blood leading down the hallway, the man must have bled out between the back door and this very moment. Below the crimson and the ashen skin Brady recognized a neck tattoo, or rather parts of it: a blade had severed the man’s throat, cutting straight through the writing. Like a Halloween prop, the man’s head swung back and forth, barely attached, hanging on by tendons and spinal cord. The dead man was at least the size and weight of Igor himself.
Brady saw the dead man’s muddy boots and his heart sank. They were nothing like the ones Brady wore—there were no double welts and detailed stitching—but simple working boots of a plain working man and Brady felt some sort of kinship with him.
Igor stepped to the right and tipped his head downward.
“Get the key off the ring, the silver one …” His breathing was labored, he all but choked on his words, the weight of the load over his shoulder overwhelming him.
Brady didn’t want to touch the man’s blood, wanted this moment to never have happened. He should have stayed in his room, on the narrow cot that made his back ache and his neck stiff. Should have stayed at that ranch, should have … what? Just another regret, another moment of remorse, so many, weighing him down.
Everything inside of him said no, loud and clear, assertive. But could he decline, he wondered, could he refuse to participate? Brady wanted time to think before he made a decision, wanted to weigh the pros and cons. He also knew he was fooling himself, he wasn’t used to weighing his options, had always operated shooting swiftly from the hip.
“The key,” Igor insisted, staring at Brady, his eyes without emotion.
Think, Brady told himself, think it through. He had a moment of clarity, a moment of reality forcing itself on him: hopeless it was—like gambling, you could tell yourself you call the odds, yet you
