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 get the hand you’re dealt and no other, you can’t refuse it. Too late. It was always too late, this was no different.
Brady 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