9.
 Only one thing marred his two weeks at Antonio's and that was the arrival of Patrolman Oliver Hawkin. "Hello again my ass."
"I'm only trying to be polite."
"Yeah. Me too. Look, I know somehow, somewhere you've been an asshole, only I don't know how or why, and I aim to find out."
"Okay."
"That car you were riding in. It was stolen in Kansas City."
"I paid a guy two hundred bucks for it."
"Where's the receipt?"
"In the car. Burned."
"How convenient."
Tom thought to himself—and it must have radiated from his eyes as he stood by the hole holding a pickaxe—you just don't have enough to do, do you?
Hawkin looked at Tom's eyes and at the pickaxe. "I know you're an asshole and sooner or later you're going to make your move. And I'll be faster and smarter and better than you, and I'll enjoy locking your ass up. You hear?"
"I hear you, sir."
"You always stay on the edge, don't you? I warned Antonio about you but he's a thickheaded Arab from Argentina and thinks he knows it all. So you watch yourself."
"All the time, Sir."
"Smart ass. You get a little food in your gut, you start feeling full of yourself. I'll have my eye on you every minute."
Get a life, Tom thought. "I've got work to do." He turned, ignoring Hawkin, and continued working on the footing for a wall Antonio wanted to build along the edge of the asphalt apron, where it dropped down into a gorge.
After a month, Antonio said: "You been here now a while. Don't you get tired? Want to take a day off? See some sunshine?"
"I was up on the high meadow," Tom said in a sort of protest. He felt warm, dry, fed, rested, and treated well. It was the best he'd felt in a long while. He felt no higher ambition. Sundays Antonio let him off the whole day. Nobody around but Tom and the occasional stray dog. On Sunday Tom had climbed up out of the canyon on the winding, crumbly country road. Except for the occasional passage of a car, it had seemed like a thousand years after the end of the world. The silence was as balmy as the soft sunlight that captured it. Butterflies twirled in groves of trees. Insects everywhere. From the high point, you could see for miles. The air below eye level far away had a mossy tinge, almost a dusty obscurity. Yellow erosion lines gleamed on distant mesas. Closer up, the blue mountains sparkled in the sun. Carpets of yellow and orange flowers hung on sloping hillsides. The ear, starved for sound, was massaged by a mumbling wind. The grass at his feet waved in time with the rushes in his ears. It wasn't peace. He'd never find that, he knew. But this peacefulness took him out of the trouble in his soul, outside of himself, where it didn't hurt all the time.
"Sure, Sundays you been," Antonio said. "I like for you to stay, keep an eye on the place. A month you been, and I sleep good at night knowing you here. But I can't ask a man to stay like a dog."
Tom shrugged. "I've been feeling pretty good."
"I know, I know. But you young. How old you?"
"Thirty two."
Antonio's leathery face widened and his white frizzle of hair seemed to flex. "You a young man, Tom. You got a lot you can do. Hey, we make a deal. You like it here in Cougar, you stay as long as you like. Work for me as long as you like. I pay you a buck an hour more."
"That's nice of you."
"Under the table."
"Of course."
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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