pulled the key off the ring and unlocked the freezer room. Inside, Igor dropped the body on the floor, stood up straight and stretched his back. The body, slick and shiny like a newborn foal, reeked of blood. Igor hit the wall switch and after a few hesitant sputters the overhead light kicked in to full capacity; the body lay flat on the tiled floor on his stomach yet his face pointed toward the ceiling.
Igor unlocked the freezer door, then pulled the body to the back wall. He turned on the shower and stood underneath the stream of cold water as if it could wash him clean of all his sins. With his eyes closed, the brackish water ran off him, over the dead body below him and down the drain. He pulled the body toward the freezer and opened the door, his hands hooking the body by the armpits. A visible cloud of cold escaped the freezer and migrated into the room. Igor shoved the body into the freezer and the loud hum resumed as soon as he closed the freezer door.
Igor walked away, down the hall and toward the back door. “Clean up,” he called out and Brady heard a door slam and a car take off.
Brady gathered a bucket, mop, bleach, and mopped the hallway three times to get all the blood up. As he wiped, he felt the old temper grow inside of him. He kept wiping but that only made it worse, all that rage gathered and consumed him. The men at the ranch, Igor, the dent in the Bronco. He was surprised by the way he made no attempt to calm himself, how he saw no need for his feelings to be reduced. Trapped is what he was, trapped in this gas station, would be at Igor’s mercy, had incriminated himself, gotten himself into trouble yet again. But this time his temper wasn’t to blame, he was guilty of no crime, yet he wasn’t any better off. He was an accomplice, subject to the same punishments, as if he had killed the man himself—he knew the law, had studied it in prison and then he recalled a Russian word—toska—but being an accomplice in a murder is nothing like writing bad checks for those gambling debts that ended him up in prison. Toska, a suffering one feels deep within, a lingering pain he couldn’t put a finger on. A dull ache of the soul, a longing. Yet he didn’t know what he was longing for, a pining, nebulous at best, of opportunities lost, roads not taken. It dawned on him that every single time he tried to do better, be better, he kept digging this hole deeper and wider and one day it would swallow him up.
* * * *
Every night Brady was aware of the body in the room next to him. He imagined it covered in a layer of ice, waxen and frozen in time. Less than five feet from where he slept, there was the body of a man just like him, a man who wore boots to work. He never dared ask Igor what the fallout had been, not knowing was best, was always best. The vibration travelling through the wall into his brain made his hands tremble and his heart pound.
He seldom slept longer than three hours, his brain in a loop, an endless recap of that night. He’d lie awake in the dark, aware of his hands, calloused and rough from ranch work, joints aching and stiff from the air-conditioned room he slept in night after night. His life made itself available to be interpreted, no longer a matter of short foresight, no, but a matter of involvement. It wasn’t his temper that got him in trouble, no, his hands were the guilty part of him, not his mind. They got involved when they shouldn’t, had written the bad checks that ended him up in prison, had punched and pounded and left bodies like bruised fruit in its wake.
His thoughts kept him awake for the better part of those nights and when morning came, he knew he had to think really hard. Make a plan. Time to move on.
* * * *
His first paycheck was more than he’d expected—Igor was generous—and he bought minutes for his phone, boots, a new pair of jeans and t-shirts. He had some money left over, a nice chunk even, but he had gone out to the race tracks and played some Texas-hold’em down at the Sunland Park, and he shouldn’t have done that, knew it the moment he got in the car. And at the end of the day he was back to zero, right where he had started.
Brady was about to lock up for the night when the glass door swooshed open and the kid from the Mustang walked in. A memory the shape of a dent in his Bronco flashed. Brady pretended to straighten the cigarette lighter display on the counter. The kid disappeared between towers of beer and display cases and aisle shelves just to return with a six-pack of Budweiser and a bag of chips.
“Hey, shorty, what’s up?”
The kid’s voice was soft, not unlike his own. Brady stared at him, mumbling something, then began ringing up the beer and chips.
“Where’s the big guy? The owner, your boss, whatever … I need to talk to him.”
Outside, the parking lot was deserted but for the kid’s Mustang.
“What about?” Brady asked. “Maybe I can help?”
“I don’t need to talk to you. Where is he?”
The old rage, there it was. What Brady wanted—if he could have it his way—what he wanted was the kid to make a wrong move, say the wrong word. He wanted to pound his face, feel bones crack …. He caught himself, remembered to keep calm, hoped the kid wouldn’t insist on talking to Igor, would just leave with his kid beer and his kid bag of chips.
“Why don’t you tell me, maybe I can help you?” The radio was scratchy, stuck between two stations, aggravating him.
“Last week, you were out of my favorite beer,” the kid said in that snarky way, his lip pulled up on one side. “The bathroom always looks like shit and your donuts are stale. And if that isn’t bad enough, there’s no phonebook outside. I need to make a call and I can’t. Is that how you treat your customers? You don’t give a shit about your customers, do you?”
He gave a shit all right. But all the shits given didn’t change the fact that everything in life gets stolen, pissed on, torn up. The best intentions will end you up in deeper shit than you even thought possible. Nothing was ever enough. If every shelf was stocked and the bathroom was clean, the kid would have found another fault, another something to complain about. His hands twitched, calling on him to do what he did best: fight. Draw blood. He felt his fingers squeeze his thumb within the fist that had formed. He remembered his first fight, how he’d punched and almost broke his thumb and realized it needed to be on the outside curled between his first and second knuckles, kept tight, but also fluid. Powerful.
Time froze. There was the day he had asked a man in prison for a tattoo, he even remembered his name—they called him The Painter—and when he asked what kind of tattoo Brady wanted, he told him the face of a demon. The Painter paused with the needle suspended in midair, inches above his chest. “You’ll have to draw that for me. I don’t know what a demon looks like,” he had said and lowered his hand.
Brady had never been able to draw that demon. It wasn’t something that had a likeness in this world, maybe it was just the thing that bubbled inside of him, ready to strike. Brady looked down at his hands, warped, sunburnt, broken. His fist relaxed, opened up like the blossoms of a flower. He smiled; he had fought for composure and he had won.
“I’ll get the owner for you,” Brady said, forcing his voice to remain calm even though he felt the words tremble in his throat. He cocked his head to the right, pulling up the left side of his lips. The curtain beneath the counter hung in dusty and uneven folds.
“Hurry up. I ain’t got all day.”
“He doesn’t speak any English. He’s Russian,” Brady lied.
“Wait, wait. How do I tell him about my complaints? He speaks Spanish?”
“No.” Brady shook his head.
“How
