“How many people in our line of work do you know that live long enough to die of lung cancer?” he asked as he rolled the window down and hung his arm out. The night air blasted through the car, warm and oily from the road. “It’s a young man’s game.”
Grade turned his head to look at Clay. He raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. After a second, Clay snorted. He flicked the butt of the cigarette with his thumb, and spark and ash sprayed out like a low-rent rainbow.
“I’m thirty-five,” Clay said. “You want to give me funny looks, you need to wait another five years…. and be a bit less dependent on my good will.”
That was a fair point.
Grade slouched down in his seat. He had a choice of what to watch, the nervous jiggle of his knee as he bounced his heel or the view out the dusty windshield of the dawn as it broke over the scabby outskirts of Sweeny.
A long stretch of broken, pot-holed road, the markings faded and worn off the concrete. The gas station that had been on its last legs when Grade last lived here had given up the ghost, the forecourt empty and the station’s windows bricked up. Weeds grew out of the foundation and crawled up the side of the building. A poster, just about legible through the age-scratched plastic, promised the best BBQ in town.
That had always been a lie.
Along the side of the road, set on lots cut out of the tree line, there were run-down shacks and slightly better-condition trailers. Pickups sat on most of the drives. The difference was if they had wheels or were up on blocks.
This wasn’t the part of town that Grade had grown up in. He came from the shithole on the other side. Mining vs. loggers. No one had won that one.
Well, no one in town had. The companies involved had come out pretty loaded at the end of the day.
“Fucking Sweeny,” Grade said as he tilted his head back and closed his eyes.
Clay chuckled, a sound full of lazy humor. “Think you’re too good for us, City Boy?”
“For this town? Yeah,” Grade said. He opened one eye to look over at Clay as he asked. “You don’t?”
There was a pause as Clay lifted his hand to his mouth and put the cigarette between his lips. The end of it glowed dully as he flicked the indicator on and spun the wheel to take the hairpin turn onto the main road into town.
“People find their own level,” Clay said as he plucked the cigarette from his mouth. He stubbed it out against the side of the car and flicked the butt toward the scrub that lined the edge of the road. “I guess Sweeny is mine. It could be worse.”
“Yeah, that just means you’ve not been here long enough,” Grade grumbled.
The words escaped before he thought better of it. He bit the end of his tongue in annoyance at himself. Clay wasn’t his friend or his peer, and Grade needed to remember that. He didn’tneedto share his thoughts on the man’s health, habits, or habitat. It wasn’t like he had back in LA. Plenty of his clients behaved badly—to themselves and others—and Grade kept his opinion of them to himself.
Except when it involved invoicing, of course,
“It’s treated me well enough,” Clay said. He paused as they both watched the picked-over carcass of the old processing tower come up on the left. The scaffolding listed, and the corrugated iron siding had warped and rusted into holes and crevices. Clay hung one hand over the steering wheel, fingers relaxed, and shrugged as he glanced at Grade. “What? I was never gonna be a miner, and there’s still plenty of demand for men like me.”
It was the perfect time for Grade to shut his mouth. So, of course, he didn’t.
“People need crime done in LA too,” Grade said. “And they also have Korean BBQ and gay bars. So…”
“Good to know,” Clay said.
He left it at that. Which was good. Grade definitely hadn’t just brought that up because he wanted Clay to know he was gay.
“Why did you, then?”the snotty mental voice that always sounded a bit like his sister asked.
It was a good question. The answer was that Grade’s taste in men had always run to tattooed and bad news. He did not make good choices, and he preferred it that way. But this wasn’t the time or the place. Grade needed to find his van, save his ass, and build up enough of a nest egg to fund a second start in the big to middling city. He’d prefer LA, but at this point, he’d work with anything on the West Coast. And there would beplentyof unreliable, untrustworthy men to fuck himandhis life up out there.
He didn’t need anything to be more complicated right now. And maybe Clay was straight, or just not interested. Not everyone was into high-strung nerds.
Grade bounced his knee in silence as they drove into Sweeny with the dawn. Dusty old buildings and more storefronts boarded up than there had been when he left. Half of the big old redbrick buildings were empty too, doors sealed and windows bricked up. The bank had left with the mining company, and the rest of the town had been trickling out after it ever since.
“Where are we going, anyhow?” Clay asked as he braked at the crosswalk to let an old woman hobble over the road, her weight braced on her walker. “Not like you can go to the cops and report that someone stole the corpse you chopped up.”
“I used a saw,” Grade said. He stretched his arm over Clay’s chest and indicated the street corner ahead of them. “Turn there. Stop at the pink house with the muscle car outside.”
Clay took the corner tight and waved what could have been an apology or a fuck off at the wrecked-looking man in the Toyota with a primer-red hood. He cruised past the back lots of the store and pulled up in front of the black-topped purple Dodge.
