Hardware

Hardware

I.

The day Julian got out of jail the first thing he did was check into a hotel with the fifty bucks he had in his jeans when they took him in. He slept like he had never even been alive. In the morning, he drove to a hardware store where he purchased a shovel with an oak shaft and a steel spade that was painted blue. Julian put the shovel in the back of the truck, and drove west for twenty minutes, out of town.

He went the speed limit and watched the road behind him through the side view, even though the streets were bare and he knew it didn't matter. He kept the radio off because he was afraid of what music might sound like. The shoulder went from gravel to dirt, and he knew where to stop. Everything around him was farm land, and he tried to think about how many minutes closer the city was now. If his memory was good enough, he could figure out how many feet of land went every year, every month, every week. He opened the door of the truck and let his feet sink into the soil.

The air was saturated with the remnants of an afternoon rain, and everything smelled of fertilizer and wet grass. Barbed wire hemmed off a freshly tilled field, and the boy ducked underneath it and set off across the land. He walked almost a quarter of a mile in, before stopping between two furrows and planting his shovel into the soil, confidently. He inhaled the cool air into his lungs until it bit, and then he started to dig. For ten minutes he dug, watching the fresh blue paint fade into the coffee-colored soil. He kept his eyes to his work and allowed himself to be interrupted only once, to watch a constellation of geese track across the sky. The geese had been migrating for weeks now, and it took him a few moments of watching to realize what was different this time. There was no longer chain link in his peripheral vision.

Julian dug up the money, brushed the soil off the duffle bag it was in, and walked back toward his truck.

II.
When Julian stopped at a gas station, the bag was in the spare tire hatch. The spare tire was on the shoulder of the road where he had dug up the bag. He had fifty dollars of it in his pocket, and another hundred in the glove compartment in case of emergencies. He had put a grand in a paper bag in the trunk.

Julian pumped the gas and then went inside the station asked for a pack of cigarettes. The woman working the register was pregnant and smiled at him over a fishing magazine she was reading, before coughing into her sleeve. She looked sick.

“How old are you, sweetheart?”

Julian had to think about it. It was a question no one had asked him in forever, even though there was a time when it was all they asked him.

“Twenty, now,” he said.

“Do you have ID on you?”

He nodded, fished his driver's license out of the back pocket of his jeans, and placed it on the counter over the glass window that displayed lottery tickets. In the picture, his face was still speckled with acne and his smile was close to earnest.

“Anything else?”

He shook his head, and paid for the gas and cigarettes in cash. On the way out, he stopped in the doorway.

“Is there a payphone?”

“Just around the side.”

The sun had warmed up the earth. He turned the wrong direction and circled the whole store before he found the payphone bolted to the corrugated steel wall. He squinted so he could see where to feed the change in. The number was something he still knew by heart, but the ringing sounded ghostly and it made him nauseous. He didn't expect her to answer, but eventually she did.

“April, it's Julian.”

“I know,” she said.

“How are you? I got out last night and I tried to call you but you didn't pick up.”

“When did you call?”

“I called a bunch.”

“I guess I must've been out.

“I guess so,” he said. He brushed his hair behind his ear. It was almost down to his shoulders now. He knew April would hate it. He would get it cut before he saw her.

“Listen,” he said, running his fingers around the metal keypad, “I was hoping I could come by.”

“Julian, I don't think that's a good idea.”

“I've got something to give you.”

“What is it?”

“I don't want to say over the phone”

She laughed a spiteful, cough of a laugh.

“Whatever, Julian. Couldn't you at least have made something up?”

“What? No, I'm not lying. Look, let me just--”

“No, Julian.”

He could picture her how might have looked right then, running her nails along the denim of her jeans and inspecting the cuticles like she did when she needed to say something hard.

“It's been so long” Julian said, finally.

“What?” April said, impatiently. He could hear her moving around the room now, opening cabinets.

“It's been two years, April. That's a fucking long time. And I've never even met her.”

On the other end of the line, the sound of ice falling into a glass, and liquid being poured. He could hear her breath on the receiver as she took a sip of whatever she had mixed and sighed.

“It doesn't matter. It's for the best, Julian. We've talked about this.”

“When did we ever talk about this?”

A car pulled into the parking lot, and Julian turned to look at it. A boxy, beat up station wagon painted a terrible shade of eggplant. A man emerged confidently from the driver's side with sunglasses on and spat into the dirt as he walked up to the station, leaving the car running and the windows down. Julian turned back to the phone as the man walked inside, and leaned against the wall with his fingers outspread, looking down at his shoes. He was standing in crushed, white gravel.

“Not we as in me and you, Julian.”

“What does that mean? Who is 'we' then?”

“Julian, calm down.”

He hung up the phone, and slammed the palm of his hand against the corrugated steel, keeping his eyes on the soil stuck to his shoes. He pressed his head against the wall, and kept banging the steel. His toes shifted to the side and then fell back in focus every time. Soon, the gas station attendant came around.

“What are you doing, honey?”

Julian looked up at her, startled, not understanding why she was there. She looked sad, like she had come from some place where people were much better. Eventually, he shook his head. He straightened up and said, “Nothing. I'm sorry.”

She stared back at him as if she was expecting something else, holding her hands on her pregnant stomach and smiling weakly.

“I guess I'm just going through a rough patch,” he said.

She nodded, and moved her left hand slowly over her belly.

“It's alright,” she said. “But, get moving along now. We don't get many earthquakes around here, and, to be honest, that's the way we like it.”

“I understand, ma'am.”

They parted silently. The boy walked toward his car, and the woman turned back and slipped inside of the building. The station wagon was still there, baking in the heat with its engine idling noisily, as the boy crossed the parking lot. On the dashboard, there was a bouquet of lilies beginning to wilt in the sunlight. Julian stopped walking and looked at the flowers. Watching the petals absorb the sunlight, he felt incredibly old. He walked to his own car, unlocked the passenger's side door, and took twenty dollars out of the glove compartment.

Through the windows, he could see the man in the store chatting with the pregnant attendant and drinking a tallboy. At one point, he touched her hand and she smiled in a way that made Julian wonder who the flowers were really for, if he didn't bring them in. He considered not leaving the money, then, but remembered that he was reformed. He put the bill under the windshield wipers and took the bouquet with him.

III.

An hour later, Julian climbed the concrete steps with one hand on the black, metal railing. He had a thousand dollars in a paper sack, and the flowers in the other. As he numbered off the final few steps, he mused to himself about how it was just a fraction of what he could give to her.

The apartment number was 3C, and he knocked on the door. He heard activity, the sound of a girl giggling. His heart went up like a sodium flare and he burned until a man opened the door. Julian didn't know the man, but the man knew Julian, and Julian could tell that the man knew him by the way he grabbed him by the collar of his shirt. There was an instant in which Julian thought he saw April over the man's shoulder, in some high resolution daydream, grabbing a beautiful little girl wearing a floral print dress and carrying her out of view, but it was over in an instant and replaced with the feeling of his back hitting the concrete landing. He coughed hard, and rolled over onto his side.

“She's my fucking daughter,” he gasped.

The man didn't even kick him in the ribs. Julian wanted him to so badly. He wanted the man to break his bones, and kick his nose into his face, an roll him down the stairs into the street. But he didn't. He didn't need to. Julian knew it as he pressed his face against the cool concrete and tried desperately tried to catch his breath.

“No, she's not,” the man said, his voice surprisingly gentle.

“Of course she is,” Julian spat.

“I'm sorry, man, but not really. Everything in Maggie's life that's mattered happened without you.”

The man who had thrown Julian to the floor had a surprisingly gentle, almost sheepish voice, a barrel chest and huge hands of an auto mechanic. Even with his eyes stinging with tears, from the pain and the glare of the sun, Julian could tell he had an honest face.

Julian's breath evened, and he sprawled his body out on the concrete. He felt as if his spine had dissolved. The man looked at Julian sadly, for a moment, and then turned to go inside.

“Just get out of here,” he said over his shoulder. “You don't want us to call the cops. ”

Julian stared at the bottom of the railing and the texture of the concrete, so close to his eyes.

“Wait, hold on.”

The man stopped and turned around slowly. Julian took a few more deep breaths, and then forced himself up onto his feet. The man watched as Julian gained his balance, but did not move to help him. Julian gripped the black steel railing with a clenched fist and dragged himself to his feet.

“Are you two married now?” he asked, as he moved toward the man.

“Engaged. We'll be married in May.”

Julian nodded. He noticed that the man couldn't help but smile as the words left his lips, even in these circumstances. He bent down, one hand still clutching the railing, and picked up the paper bag from next to the flowers.

“I want to give you some money,” he said. “For Maggie, I mean.I want to give Maggie some money,” he said.

“Is it drug money?”

Julian stopped for a moment.

“It used to be.”

The man shook his head, and said, “I appreciate it, but we talked about it and decided that was a bad idea.”

“You talked about it?”Julian asked.

The man nodded his head. Julian picked up the flowers off the ground, and left.

IV.
Julian drove back to the gas station he had come from. He parked at a pump, and then walked into the station and put the flowers down on the counter, and said, “I think these are for you.”

“What do you mean?” the woman said.

“I mean, I hope these were for you,” Julian said.

The woman said something, but Julian wasn't listening.

“Do you have a pair of scissors?” he asked.

“What?”

“A pair of scissors. Do you sell them? Or have them for opening boxes or cutting tape or something.”

The woman looked at him blankly until Julian grew uncomfortable, and then she weakly gestured toward an aisle. He walked in the direction that she pointed, grabbed a pair of scissors off a shelf of cheap school supplies, went into the bathroom, and locked the door. He took the scissors out of their packaging and left it in the sink. The blades of the scissors were dull and tarnished, but he didn't care. Lock by lock, without paying much attention to what he doing, he cut his hair off. Instead of watching his work, he studied his face and tried to place his features in the blur of a creature he had seen over that man's shoulder. Soon, his hair was short and he was the one who looked like his father. He left the scissors in the sink with their packaging and walked out of the bathroom and then out of the gas station. He took the shovel out of the back of the truck and walked back into the gas station, and said, “I'm sorry,” before he held the spade of the the shovel to the attendant's throat.

“Please relax,” he said to her. “I don't want to her hurt you, or your baby. Will you please just press the silent alarm button, and put some money in a bag.”

She did as she was told. Julian left the store and sat quietly on the curb outside of the station with two hundred dollars in a plastic grocery bag, waiting for the police to come.