“Motherfucker,” Troy said in a growl, pointing the gun gansta-style. “You talking to me?” They were into their third beer before the truck shook. They stuck their heads out howling like they used to, trying to spot the jet, but it was lost to a starless gray sky. Troy crouched in the seat with his knees on the dash, balancing the beer on his chest. It rose and fell. The gun was back on the dash in its holster. “You know,” Troy said. “I’ve been pretty pissed at you,” he said.
“Yeah,” Clyde said. “I figured.”
“Me and you, man. Way we were supposed to. Me on drums, you selling merch.” Troy shook his head. “I woulda gone a fuckin year ago if I’d known you never meant it in the first place.”
“Really?”
“Maybe.” Troy shrugged. “Don’t matter.”
“My mom,” Clyde said.
The wind picked up and moved through the truck, disturbing the wrappers on the dash. “Your fifty bucks make a big difference?” Troy said.
Clyde resisted the urge to correct Troy’s too-high assessment of his earnings. “Still got the house,” he said.
Troy grunted. “So,” he said, adjusting his position. “Fucking.” He squirmed again. “What.” He finished the beer and chucked the can. Clyde heard it land with a hollow scratch in some brush. “You two own that house? Or does the house,” Troy poked a drunken finger at Clyde, “own you?”
Clyde laughed. “That don’t even make sense,” he said. “It’s a house. We live in it. We either pay the bank, or we pay somebody else who pays the bank. Ain’t that complicated.”
“Only words you said twice in that statement were ‘pay’ and ‘bank.’ Just sayin.”
“You go to Nashville and you get all . . . ” Clyde’s thoughts petered out. Troy could fill in the blanks if he wanted to.
“What about you?” Troy said. “Longarm’s gone. Strasburg’s fucking dead. You gonna marry this chick? Work at Walmart your whole life? There are Walmarts in Nashville, you know.”
“There are Walmarts in fucking China,” Clyde said.
Troy scrunched up his face and said, “The row plice reader,” and they both cracked up. When they settled down, Troy said, “You got any, you know, plans? For like, the future?”
The future had always been a sore subject for Clyde. “I don’t know. Right now I’m just taking it day to day.”
“You in AA now?”
“What?”
“Takin it day to day, goin with God,” Troy said in a pompous voice. “You could take some classes at Longview.”
“In what?”
Troy grinned. “Music production. You can learn how to mix an’ shit, move down to Nashville next year. That’d be perfect, man, give me time to get something going.”
Clyde drank some beer and looked at a blinking light beyond the high stone wall. He would never enroll in college, he would never move to Nashville. “Maybe,” he said.
“Look into it.”
“I will.”
Troy groped around, got another can open. “You know, man, I actually can’t believe you still buy all that bullshit after Longarm and everything else that’s happened to you. How many times you have to get fucked in the ass before you buy a pair of pants?”
“What bullshit?”
“That if you just,” Troy slipped into a presidential voice, “work hard and play by the rules, you can be one of them.”
“One of who?”
“Whoever, man. Successful. Middle-class. Last few years have made it pretty fucking clear that there’s the bankers, the CE-fuckin-Os of the world, and they’re up here.” Troy raised his hand high, then dropped it below the seat. “And everybody else is down here.”
Clyde laughed.
“What?” Troy said.
“Nothing, it’s just, you think Jay’s crazy but he said pretty much the same thing to me the other day.”
Troy raised his eyebrows, his hand was still up near the ceiling. “Maybe he’s actually pretty smart,” he said. “Anyway,” he moved his hand up and down, down and up. “There’s no honest way to get from here to here no more.”
Clyde guessed that Troy had a point, but he didn’t like to embrace this hopeless attitude. “So what are we supposed to do, then?”
Troy shrugged. “Own nothing.” He spread his arms across his lap. “Be free.”
Clyde made a point of getting to Liberty Ridge half an hour early on Wednesday. Troy was busy with family the next two days and Clyde had no obligations except a four-hour shift at Walmart the next day, for which he would make $31 before tax. Tax would take fifteen, twenty percent, say, $5. So, $26. Just to get there and back would take four gallons of gas. At $3 a gallon, that was $12. Subtract $12 from $26 and you’re left with $14. How much money will Walmart make in those same four hours? Clyde wondered. In Liberty Ridge, he waited in his truck until Tina came out in her bare feet. “You here to see me,” she called across the street, “or my dad?”
“Both,” Clyde said. It was enough of an answer to bring Tina across the remaining ground. Even though no one drove in the Ridge but the Smalls, Tina looked both ways before she made it to Clyde’s door. “Thought I’d kill two birds with one stone,” he said, but Tina didn’t laugh.
“I thought I was your girlfriend,” she said.
Clyde didn’t say anything for a moment, then told her, “You are.”
Tina shook her head. “You didn’t even call me back.”
“You leave me a message?”
Tina shrugged. Her fingernails, bright pink, clung to the last inch of Clyde’s window. “Didn’t think I’d have to.”
“A friend came up from Nashville,” Clyde said.
“A friend?”
“Yeah.”
“What kind of friend?” Tina said.
“My best friend. Troy.”
“Troy.”
“Yep.”
“Troy a girl?”
“A girl?” Clyde said. “Uh, no. Troy’s a dude. Ain’t seen him in two months, either.”
Tina nodded and looked out at the street. “I guess that’s all right,” she said, bringing her gaze, those bright emerald eyes, to his face. “Wish you’d called me back, though.”
Clyde had had about enough of this. He hoped Tina wasn’t one of those feminist types, wanting to keep his balls in her bedside drawer. He saw on his watch that it was close to six and grabbed his gym bag. He bowed out the window so that his forehead fell upon Tina’s knuckles. “I’m so solly, belly belly solly,” he said, and Tina cracked up and stepped back so he could get out.
They kissed in the middle of the street and Jay, who obviously had some kind of radar for catching these moments, yelled from the doorway, “No kissy face in training, Clyde-san. Class starts in four minutes.”
“Osu!” Clyde yelled, hurrying into the yard.
It was Clyde’s first full class, and he was the only one there. The first hour he faced Jay doing kihon. When they were done, Jay said they’d thrown a thousand reps. “We train until we’re exhausted, then the real training begins,” Jay said. They did conditioning drills next, and the swollen middle knuckle