A KIND OF PERSON by Ben Nickol

Mindy had been in Josh’s math class freshman year, and as ignorant as Josh was, I can’t imagine how ignorant Mindy, a junior at the time, must’ve been. If I recall, theirs was one of those math classes that was held in a “positive thinking” room, with bright colors and motivational posters and reduced distraction and nine or ten academic staff on hand at all times, helping the students carry out long division in a manner respectful of their individual limitations, which in that room were called “opportunities.” And Mindy at the time was seventeen years old – she couldn’t have been all that bright.
To be honest, I can’t quite bring Mindy to mind. She was one of the blondes who wore makeup and sequined jeans, or else she was one of the brunettes whose jeans had sequins in them and who liked wearing makeup. Concerning the female population at Edwall High School, you could pretty much let any one individual stand for the whole. Which was just as true for the males, I suppose. Anyways, whoever Mindy was, I can picture her and Josh studying math together in that jolly room. They’re kneeling on the floor, counting out wooden blocks. If they get as high as 15, they get a 70‑minute break and a box of apple juice.
The only reason we were thinking about Mindy that afternoon is Josh was obligating us to think about her. We were on the porch of the ranch house Tyler’s family used during harvest, just enjoying some beers and chew. Tyler and I, for our own parts, would’ve been content to leave things at beers and chew, and leave the conversation where we usually left it, which was on the subject of how we might comport ourselves with this or that set of breasts, given the opportunity. That was good conversation for a May afternoon. But Josh, he wanted to talk about Mindy Barnes. “Old Mindy Barnes,” he kept calling her. According to his best information, this girl had moved to Spokane to explore her talents as a prostitute.
Josh had been briefing us on the Mindy situation for ninety seconds or longer, during which interval Tyler had been shaking his head steadily. When Josh finally paused for a breath, Tyler jumped in. “You know what, Joshua Simon?” he said, tapping his temple. “You need to shut the fuck up when you get something in your cranium you think is true.”
“Excuse me?” Josh said, squinting at Tyler. “Excuse me?”
Tyler pinched out some Copenhagen. “Fucking streetwalkers, fucking women of the night,” he said incredulously. “I don’t know how to tell you this, old buddy. But your life has no connection to all that sexy dangerous shit. You are a corn-fed fucking moron from Edwall, Washington, just like everybody else.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tyler,” Josh said. “Mindy Barnes is a hooker. It’s a goddamn fact at this point.”
Tyler tucked the chew in his lip and dusted his hand on his jeans. “Nope,” he said.
Josh sat taller on the bucket he was sitting on. “It’s true, goddamn it!” he said. “She needed to make money for her kid or something. Or she had a drug dependency or something like that.”
“You just want to be that kind of guy knows hookers,” Tyler said. “It’s fucking embarrassing, to be honest with you.”
“Kind of guy knows hookers,” Josh muttered. “Knowing hookers ain’t a kind of guy, Tyler.”
“It sure is,” Tyler said. “Boy and your eyes light up when you think it might be you.”
It was a warm spring day under empty skies, and from the Cope-lands’ porch we could see out over the green fields to the silo and trees marking the Uptons’ farm. We could see north almost to Canada and south almost to Oregon, and crickets were sawing the way they did later in the year, when things got dry. The Copelands’ porch was our preferred location for afternoons such as this one. We couldn’t get into the house, of course – everyone lived in town during the year and kept their farm places shuttered – but from where we sat we could see three miles up the road, and if someone came looking for us we’d have time to finish our beers and maybe another beer, and tuck the bottles in the box and bury the box and brush our teeth before anyone got close enough to see what we were doing. Every so often, one of us pissed off the porch into the sunshine. That was what I was doing at the moment.
“What’s your opinion, Michael James?” Tyler said.
I zipped up. “Knowing hookers is a kind of person,” I said. “No doubt about it.”
“Oh . . .” Josh waved his hand. “. . . what the fuck would he know?”
“Probably he’d know more than us,” Tyler said. “Probably he’s read all the literature.”
“Shit.” Josh spat on the porch.
“I bet he’s studied hooker life cycles. Hooker mating procedures,” Tyler said.
“This fat tub of shit hasn’t touched even a standard pussy,” Josh said, “let alone the industrial model. And it’s not like hooker mating procedures is any secret, Tyler.”
I walked back over and sat at their feet, my back against one of the porch posts. Josh was right, of course. I’d never touched a girl. In fact, the idea of touching a girl was so alien to me that I partially suspected no one touched girls, not really, that they were only for wishing you could touch them, like rainbows. You get to be a fat fuck like I was, and you believe peculiar things.
“Well,” Josh said, easing back against the house, “it’s a true fact about Mindy Barnes. I wish for your all’s ignorant sakes it wasn’t, but it is. You can ask Merle Dobbs about it. He saw Mindy at the bus station down there, all splattered with makeup and all. Skanky little dress on.”
“Man,” Tyler said. “Merle thinks everyone turns tricks.”
Josh was undeterred. “He said he saw a john grab her muff, even,” he said. He sat forward and placed his hands in the air in front of him. “Listen, boys. I ain’t selling you any bill of goods here. Old Mindy, she’s taken to the ancient trade. Sleeping by day and by night trafficking her comforts.” His hands still aloft before him, Josh gazed out over the fields in what happened to be the direction of Spokane, the roof’s long shadow indicating it like an arrow. He dropped his hands. “And boy,” he said, “would that little thing be tickled to see me.”
We were silent awhile, and then Tyler looked at Josh. “What’d you just say?” he said.
“I mean if I were to appear in her life,” Josh explained. “She’d feel rescued, I bet. Boy and she wouldn’t be mistaken, neither. I’d do right by her.”
“Brother, you say so much ignorant shit so quickly I don’t know what to shoot down first. She’d feel rescued?” Tyler said.
“Oh, Tyler, she liked me. Math confused her something terrible, so we just passed the time. We had that . . .” Josh snapped his fingers. “. . . what people get between them. Biology?”
“It’s chemistry you stupid fucking elephant, and no you didn’t have it.”
“She used to look at me?” Josh said. “Boy, you wouldn’t think hookers got by on their eyes, but whew. It was this whole highway of meaning flowing between us.”
“Brother, you scare me.”
“I don’t mean ‘meaning’ in some creepy way,” Josh said.
“Well, yes you do. But that’s not why you’re scary.”
“Oh and why am I scary, Tyler?”
“You just could never understand,” Tyler said.
“Whatever that means,” Josh said peacefully. I didn’t say anything, but I knew what Tyler meant.
“Well,” Josh said after a time, nodding at where the house shadow was pointing, “I’m doing it.”
“Doing . . .?” Tyler said.
“Life’s there for the picking, boys. I won’t stand idly by.”
“Please tell me this has nothing to do with hookers,” Tyler said.
Josh pushed to his feet. “I’m finding that girl,” he said.
“Lord.”
“You coming with me?”
Tyler shook his head. He jetted some chew spit off the porch. Though eventually Tyler pushed to his feet. “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll come with you.” And if Tyler was going, I was going, too.

Spokane was an hour off, and driving there we got loaded off of some whiskey we obtained from Josh’s house. It was his mom’s Old Grand-Dad bourbon, and she wasn’t going to miss it. She was drunk herself, and if it happened that she broke the surface of sobriety for a breath or two before sounding again, like the great whale she was, she would just assume that she herself was the culprit in the case of the missing Old Grand-Dad. It was a simple theft, getting out of Ms. Hall’s house with that whiskey. Maybe Josh wished it wasn’t so easy to fool his mother like that, but I didn’t – and still don’t – credit Joshua Simon Hall with a very complex interior life. Mostly, I think, he liked getting fucked up and doing as he pleased.
We were riding in Tyler’s dad’s truck, Tyler and Josh in the front seat and me in the extended cab, which is where a fat fuck will always end up, counterintuitive as that is. Air thundered through the windows. Mr. Copeland’s David Allan Coe was playing, that old jerky stick yelling on about thirteen kids and bunches of dogs, and houses full of chickens and yards full of hogs. Joshua, God forgive him, was yelling right through the music about how events between him and Mindy would unfold. He was waving that Old Grand-Dad around. Best I could discern, his plan was to inform Mindy that her living days didn’t have to be the tragic disaster she was making of them. She had value as a human being and as a mother, he would tell her. By Josh’s reckoning, these sentiments would cause Mindy to weep and fall in love with him, at which juncture he’d stuff himself inside of her. Watching Tyler’s eyes in the rearview mirror, I knew what he thought of Josh’s plans. Of course I thought the same thing. But we were headed to Spokane – and to where the hookers were in Spokane, no less – and I admit that what I was really thinking was there’d be sex in the air. Maybe we’d find Mindy Barnes, maybe we wouldn’t. But that sex would be floating around, and if I was lucky maybe I’d catch some of it, like coming down with a cold.
Eastern Washington, as I’ve explained, is all distance and wheat and sky, but as we approached Spokane the pine forests closed over us. We lost an hour of daylight in thirty seconds or less. And then there it was out ahead of us: the little city that for some country mice from Edwall, Washington, might just as well have been Shanghai. It lay in its wide valley, its lights shimmering. Even Josh fell temporarily silent. There was a great deal that could happen to us in Spokane. Certainly everything we were wishing for could happen, and that might be only the beginning.
We ate burgers at Dick’s Restaurant, which was where we ate when we came to town with our folks. From our picnic table at Dick’s, we could see the interstate traffic racing by on the overpass, and the bums underneath the overpass, digging through trash barrels and weeds. Now and again, we added a little Old Grand-Dad to our Styro-foam cups of Pepsi. Josh, for his part, was reading a map he’d found in Mr. Copeland’s glove box. He thought it might hold some clues as to the location of Spokane’s pussy-for-hire industry.
Tyler nodded at Josh. “What’re you finding there, pardner?” he said.
Josh lifted the map, and glanced from the page to the street and back again, as if struggling to compare the physical paper to the world it described. “What’s that, Fourth Avenue?” he said.
“Third,” Tyler said. “And they ain’t ‘avenues,’ they’re ‘streets.’”
Josh frowned at the map, and then turned it upside down. “Oh shit, okay,” he said, and started trying to fold the thing up. “We’re just around the corner from it.”
“From . . . ?” Tyler said.
Josh smashed the map as closed as he could get it, and then pushed it away from him. He jutted his chin at the darkness hanging over the city. “From all that twat, fool. It should be just up yonder.”
Tyler watched Josh for a moment, and then placed his hamburger, carefully, in its plastic basket. “Joshua,” he said. “Can you tell us again what exactly you aim to do? I know you’re hoping to find Mindy Barnes out here. I know you want to baptize her or whatever. But let me get this straight. There’s going to be some goddamn hooker walking the street. And you’re going to holler out to her, ‘Excuse me, ma’am, can you direct me to Mindy Barnes from Edwall Senior High?’ This is your goddamn plan?”
“Well,” Josh said. “It might be that that hooker is Mindy.”
Tyler stared at Josh. His face was like one of those Easter Island heads.
“Hey.” Josh raised his hands. “Anything could happen. I live under a lucky star.”
“You live under a goddamn retarded brain, Joshua,” Tyler said. “You are a victim of mental retardation. The first piece of tail you see walking the goddamn sidewalk? You think that’s going to be the sole individual in this city you’re hoping to find? I can’t . . .” Tyler gestured at his own mouth, like someone who’d eaten a hot pepper.
“Now just calm down a minute,” Josh said.
“. . . I can’t form with words the degree of your fucking idiocy, Joshua.”
“All we have tonight,” Josh said soothingly, “is a fact-finding mission. Just think about it that way. Maybe we run into Mindy? Maybe we don’t? We’re assembling information here, Tyler. It’ll lead somewhere promising. I’m confident.”
Tyler went back to eating his burger. “Trust me, Joshua,” he said through his chewing. “You not having confidence is not the particular problem we’re plagued with at this moment.”
“Give me some of that fucking Old Grand-Dad,” Josh told me, waving his hand. “Come on, give it up. This is the goddamn time of our lives.”
Despite Josh’s extensive research, there were no hookers to be found around the corner from Dick’s Restaurant. We drove up there when we’d finished eating, but Sprague Avenue through downtown was just an ordinary street. It had galleries on it and places with mannequins in the windows and fancy restaurants. Josh cast his gaze all around, left and right, but nowhere he looked was there any pussy for sale. He was getting irritated, I saw. Finally some ordinary woman walked by, just a woman in cargo pants and a hoodie, and Josh reached across Tyler’s arm and pounded the truck’s horn.
“Jesus.” Tyler batted back his hand. “What the fuck?”
The woman, at the sound of the horn, had leapt back from the curb and now was watching the truck pass, clearly frightened.
“I thought that could be one,” Josh said.
“Jesus Lord,” Tyler said. “Do you think every . . .” But then he interrupted himself. “Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “Nope, I can’t interact with it. I can’t latch in to what you are, Joshua.”
“Would you just stop the truck?” Josh said. “I’m going to get us some directions.”
“Directions?” Tyler’s eyebrows climbed clear up to his hair. “Directions?”
“Look for a nigger or somebody. Somebody’s got to know where these hookers operate.”
“And just like that?” Tyler said. “That’s how you’re going to pose the question? ‘Um, excuse me, sir, can you tell me how to get into some pussy around here?’ “
“Tyler . . .” Josh shook his head. “. . . you know, you’re getting difficult to be around. You just don’t understand a damn thing.”
“I don’t understand?” Tyler shouted. “I don’t . . . Josh, you tie peoples’ brains in fucking knots with the things you think and say. You got that stupidity just paralyzes people.”
“Criminal trades,” Josh explained to him, his fingers pinching the air delicately, “you’ve got to put the matter subtly. You’ve got to know what to say so that the other party understands what to say back. That way information gets exchanged without anybody incrimnifying himself.”
Tyler, I could see, had checked out. There was only so much Joshua Hall a person could admit into his mind at one time, if he wished to retain his bearing on the world around him. Josh, for his own part, seemed to be waiting for Tyler to pull over. When that didn’t happen, I suppose Josh decided he couldn’t afford all that subtlety he’d been talking about earlier. At the next stoplight, he leaned his head out of the window and shouted at a bum who was standing there: “Why, hey, old timer! Where’s a guy go in these parts to get his tip sucked?”
“Fuck, Joshua . . .” Tyler said.
“Where?” Josh shouted to the man.
The light turned and Tyler burned through the intersection, causing Josh to bang his ear on the door. He rolled back into the cab, cupping his ear and shouting: “Back there! Guy said back the other way! Turn around, motherfucker!”

Spokane’s not a small city and it was Friday; there were going to be women around, and they were going to be dressed like women sometimes dress. Discerning what was a hooker from what were ordinary citizens proved more difficult than anticipated. We were east of downtown, where everything was warehouses and switchyards and weedy lots. This was where the hookers ought to be, but anywhere we saw one girl we usually saw several others with her, and usually at least one girl in the pack was certainly not a whore. When we did see a girl on her own, she usually had a fella on her arm. Maybe that man was her john, but maybe he was just a fella taking his girl out on a Friday, and even Joshua Hall knew you didn’t walk up to some fella and his girl and ask if you could bend that hooker’s ear once he was finished with her.
We drove clear to the end of town, nearly to Idaho, and then came back that same way, peering in parking lots and under all the streetlamps. We were still drinking (Tyler had bought us some Olde English with his fake ID) and Josh was still talking. According to his new view of things, Mindy was going to offer him a free go at her merchandise the moment she saw him, before he spoke a word, just on account of her joy at seeing a familiar face. Afterwards, or maybe after a second free go, they would discuss her liberation. Probably, Josh explained, she’d never be a respectable woman. But they could find her a clean apartment and a job with steady pay, and excepting all of the free goes she’d continue giving him, from that night until eternity, she could develop a degree of moral rectitude. This would be good for her kid, if she had one. Most importantly it would be good for Mindy herself, and also for Josh. “Woo-ee!” he told us, twisting the cap back onto his malt liquor. “Boys, there are fine days in my future!”
The first girl all three of us agreed was a hooker was on the curb near a Vietnamese restaurant, her blonde hair piled everywhere and her pink shirt the size of a dinner bib. There was that shirt, a skirt and some boots, and everything else was tummy and legs. Anyone could see what she was. She watched us cruise by, and I can’t imagine how we looked to that girl: three country faces hovering like moons in the cab of an F‑350.
Up a ways, Tyler pulled into a pawn shop with barred windows and a flashing electric sign. The parking lot was empty. “Well,” he asked Josh, “is that Mindy Barnes, or should I keep driving?”
Josh peered in the rearview, as if he could see the girl back there.
“At your word, Captain,” Tyler said.
Josh swallowed his spit. “All right. Let’s do it.”
“You sure, little cub scout? You don’t seem so confident.”
Josh pushed at the wheel. “Go,” he said.
Tyler eased into the road and drove us back to the Vietnamese place; the hooker revolved into view, standing in the light falling out from the diner windows. I’d never eaten Vietnamese food, and if this place was the standard I never would. It looked like a laundromat in there. Tyler pulled into the parking lot and already the girl was approaching us, walking funny in her heels. She neared Tyler’s window and he lowered it and said: “Not me, darling. It’s this love-struck motherfucker sitting next to me.”
He meant that she should walk around to the other window, but the girl climbed onto the running board and leaned in over Tyler’s lap. The wind blew her hair and she tucked it behind her ear and looked at Josh, then at me, then at Tyler’s face, inches from hers. She chewed her gum at him. “What’s this, the dick taxi?” she wondered. She couldn’t have been even our age. She looked like someone’s kid sister.
“My friend wants to ask you something,” Tyler said.
“Which one?” she said. “Fat ass?”
Tyler jerked his head at Josh. “This one.”
The girl, Tyler and myself all waited for Josh to speak. “Um,” he began, and shifted on the seat to face her. I assumed he would ask the girl something about Mindy Barnes, and where she might be found, but what I didn’t know was that we were finished talking about Mindy for the night. And actually, not in all the years since that night, have I heard Josh say Mindy Barnes’s name.
“So,” Josh said to the girl at the window. “How’re you doing tonight?”
She waited for him to go on, and then lost interest and said to the three of us generally, “You know you boys are the freshest faces I’ve seen down here. Look at your faces.”
None of us spoke.
“It’s a nice change,” she said. “God, we get some trolls.” She rested her elbow on the door and her cheek on her palm, so that she looked dreamy and bored. Her eyes studied us, then went to the bottle between Tyler’s legs. She lifted it out and drank from it, her hair blowing again. She swallowed and smacked her lips. “So you boys go to Ferris,” she said, “or what?”
Tyler said we didn’t.
“I didn’t think so,” the girl said. “But you look like Ferris boys.”
From where I sat, I could see past Josh’s ear to a picnic table in the shadows, positioned along the side of the restaurant. There was a guy there, I noticed, his legs stretched before him. As I watched, the legs drew back and the man stood up into the light. He looked strange. He had a leather jacket on, and had the kind of oblong head Russians have in movies. The girl noticed him and leaned further into the truck. “Hey,” she said quickly, “listen. One of you has to pay, but if you do I know somewhere we can go. Everyone’ll get some, I promise. My friends are easy.”
The guy crossed the parking lot.
“But you got to pay,” she whispered, stepping off the truck and strolling off a ways.
The guy arrived at the truck and knuckled Josh’s window. After a second, he lowered it.
“Howdy, gentlemen,” the man said. Except for his hair, which stood straight up, he had a face gravity seemed particularly fond of. It dragged at his eyelids and cheeks and the corners of his mouth, his ears. I didn’t think he’d said “howdy” before in his life. It was like he didn’t know how the word fit his mouth. None of us had one thing to say to him. The man sighed, like he dealt with such incompetence routinely. “You are satisfied?” he said. “She is . . .?” He twirled a hand.
“We’ll take her,” Josh announced.
The man nodded. “Very good. Two hundred.”
“Two hundred?” Josh said.
“Josh . . .” Tyler warned, but Josh wasn’t the sort of person who was inhibited by warnings. “Two hundred for that?” he said. “What’s she, a goddamn figure skater?”
“One hundred per,” the man said. “Third, I throw in free. Yes or no.”
“Oh,” Josh said. “Sir, I believe you’re mistaken. These boys . . .” he hiked a thumb at Tyler and me. “Why, they’re just my transportation. They’re virgins, I assure you.”
“One-fifty,” the man said. He snapped his fingers. “Come on.”
Josh considered the man’s offer, but I wished he’d consider it quicker. The man at his window was getting nervous, glancing over his shoulders and such, and if his nerves got any jumpier I wanted to be somewhere else entirely. “Shit,” Josh said finally, digging out his wallet.
“Hurry up,” the man said.
Josh counted his bills, then counted a second time. He glanced at Tyler. “I got seventy,” he said.
Quick as that, the man left the window and whistled for the girl to follow. Without a glance our direction, she clicked her heels along after him. “Now hold on!” Josh shouted to them. “We’re getting it, hold on!”
The man stopped, looked at us, and then walked back fast. Josh told Tyler to hurry. “Come on, we need eighty bucks.”
“You fucking dickhead,” Tyler said. “I don’t have any money!”
“What?”
Tyler lowered his voice. “I wasn’t budgeting for hookers, you faggot!”
The man arrived at the window. “Where is it?” he said, holding out his hand. “Give it to me.”
“Well.” Josh chuckled. “It seems my friend . . .”
I handed the money over Josh’s shoulder. He was stunned a minute, and then added the bills to his own and gave them to the man. The man counted the money, and then folded the bills into his pocket. “Two hours,” he told us, holding up two fingers. He stepped away, and there was the girl walking towards us.

Her name, or leastways the name she gave us, was Kris, and riding in the back with me she could’ve been any of the girls Tyler and Josh brought around on weekends and that I knew from tagging along. The only difference between Kris and those girls was Kris’s inadequate clothing and overabundant perfume (though there were girls like that in Edwall, too). There was also the difference of my paying Kris, which I’d hoped would give me a feeling I could do as I pleased to her at any moment, but which hadn’t yet.
Where Kris brought us was to a blue duplex in a poor part of town, on a street without streetlights. We had our cowboy music blaring and were drinking in the cab and shouting, but when Tyler stopped the truck and we stepped out into the night, everything was completely silent. There was only some dogs barking somewhere. The duplex’s lawn was mostly dirt and there were kids’ toys scattered through it. Just one of the building’s windows was lighted.
Kris had called ahead, and when we went inside the two friends she’d told us about waved at us from the sofa. They were sharing a pipe back and forth, and I remember thinking that the pipe’s contents could’ve been anything at all – any of the chemicals I’d heard about in music and movies, or even a chemical I had no idea about. They weren’t much to see, these girls Kris had brought us to. They wore sweats and t‑shirts, and beer cans and the cardboard from microwave pizzas were littered around them. But they were girls, sure enough, and so Josh and Tyler dropped down next to them, Josh on the sofa and Tyler in an armchair. Kris went upstairs to change.
The four of them were talking for some time before the fatter girl, the brunette, glanced at me, and then glanced at me a second time. I was drunk, but there’s a kind of drunk where shyness is worse and I was standing by the door. “You can sit down with us too, you know,” the girl said.
“Yeah,” Josh said. “Sit down, Michael, Jesus. Don’t lurk by the door.”
The girl moved over and I sat beside her.
“Mike’s what you’d call the cerebellum type,” Josh informed our hosts.
“Cerebral,” Tyler corrected him, but Josh paid him no mind.
The girl who’d invited me to sit had a chubby face and greasy pony-tail, and just in how she looked at me I saw her weighing my pros and cons. She was trying to figure out if there was any upside to me. And I wanted to tell her not to do that. I didn’t want to be something some girl in a shitty duplex had to talk herself into. But also, I admit, I hoped it’d work: I hoped she’d talk herself into it.
Kris came down the stairs in sweats like the other two, but with her lips and eyes still painted. Josh made room on the sofa, but she squeezed onto the armchair with Tyler. That, I knew immediately, was going to be the start of trouble. From where I sat, I could feel Josh’s dead stare floating past my nose on its way to the girl he’d paid, but who wasn’t sitting with him now. I wondered, with a bit of detachment, just how exactly this would go. But it didn’t go anywhere for the time being. Instead of telling Kris she had to sit with him, and not with Tyler, Josh decided he would just poke the girl sitting next to him. He poked her a second time, jamming his finger into her tummy. “Say,” he asked her. “You ever heard the one about the Chinaman well digger?”
The girl rubbed where he’d poked her. “No,” she said.
It was a joke I’d heard Josh tell on any number of occasions. Maybe eighteen times I’d heard him tell this joke. He hitched up straighter on the sofa, inviting the room’s attention. “Well,” he began. “So this farmer’s dog, he falls in a well. Stands to reason the chink well digger’s responsible. So old boy, this farmer, he drags this chink up the hill. ‘You got to fetch my dog!’ he cries out. ‘My dog’s in the goddamn well!’ So this chink well digger, he looks down in the darkness there, shaking his head. Chink says, ‘I no know. It hard job.’ ‘Hard job?’ the farmer says. ‘What’s so hard about it? Get down there in that dark-ass well and fetch me my dog back!’ ‘No,’ this old chink says. ‘Job very complex. Job require much ketchup.’ ”
No one in Josh’s audience, excepting Tyler and me, understood that that was the end of the joke. But Josh had stopped talking, and so the girls laughed a little out of politeness. For his own part, Josh howled like a hyena. He shoved the girl sitting next to him. “That’s about as funny a joke as you’re ever gonna hear,” he told her.
“It was funny,” she admitted.
“Them chinks’ll eat dogs,” Josh said, “cats, raccoons, you name it.”
One of the girls went into the kitchen and came back with beers for us. We drank those, and shared a bit of what was in the pipe. I didn’t know what it was until years later. All I knew that night was my eyelids felt like they’d been peeled back onto my head, like one of those swimming caps.
I noticed Kris was holding Tyler, her leg on his and she purring in his ear, and I noticed Josh was trying real hard with the other one, nuzzling her neck and whispering cowboy jokes to her. I was noticing a lot of things, I noticed. The room had become extremely vivid. After a time, Kris rolled off of the chair and pulled Tyler to his feet. They went upstairs, Tyler almost bored with the whole charade but climbing those stairs behind Kris, sure enough. Josh pretended not to notice. He nibbled his girl’s ear until she squirmed away from him, and then he wriggled along after her. I heard him whisper, “I think I’m falling for you.” And likely he whispered other such bullshit, but it was about that time that the girl sitting next to me, who I’d realized was probably an Indian, pulled me off of the sofa and led me through the kitchen to another room.

The ways I’d imagined fucking had all been versions of closeness, like passing through door after door you’d thought would be shut to you forever, until you couldn’t believe how near the center you were, how nearly like everyone else. But fucking, it turned out, pushed you away from the center, until you were farther off than ever.
I stood at the foot of the bed, watching the Indian girl, by the closet, lift her feet and push off her socks. After that, she pushed down her drawers and lifted off her shirt, just mechanically like that. I un-dressed with her, and it wasn’t so different than before a football practice, getting out of my school clothes. Naked, the girl crossed to the bed and climbed on her knees. Even in the dark, I could see that this girl didn’t look like what I’d believed a naked girl would look like. I’d seen magazines and videos, of course, and I knew a girl in real life wouldn’t resemble those girls they arranged for the cameras. But I had assumed there’d at least be some shared characteristics, what with one girl belonging to the same biological species as the other. There wasn’t. The girl before me, I saw in that dark room, had bulges of herself where there oughtn’t to have been bulges, and her tits, I noticed, were entirely independent of her control. They were less like tits, to be truthful, than like two tennis balls stuffed down in a pair of long socks. I wondered what this stranger could possibly think of me. I couldn’t have been the man she was hoping for.
“What’s your favorite way?” she asked me, just directly like that. When I didn’t answer, she walked over on her knees and reached for me, so abruptly I flinched. She waited, and finally I put myself into her hand. Her touch wasn’t gentle, and didn’t carry messages like I’d thought such touching would’ve. Instead, it was like she was digging for something in a drawer. Not finding it, she hunched and put her mouth on me. I remember not liking that. The girl was this big form doubled over before me, and I was wicking off from that form just this little dribble of wetness.
When I was how she wanted me to be, or as close to that as I would get, the girl pulled me onto the bed and began kissing my mouth. Her lips, I remember, were slick, and tasted like the smoke from earlier. The next thing I knew, she swung her leg past me and bent forward, turning her ass up in the dark. I didn’t realize she was reaching under herself until something under there gripped me, which caused me to flinch again. She held me there. “Go,” she said.
“Go?” I asked her.
“Fuck me already. Hurry up.”
I pushed into her some, and then pushed in farther and it was like the moment pushing a truck out of mud, when nothing’s happening and then it gives. “Oh,” the girl said, and I slipped all the way inside of her. With nowhere else to place them, I set my hands on her ass. The girl was bigger in my hands than I’d reckoned with my eyes. And it was happening then, back and forth, and even happening in a manner I’d imagined it might happen someday, from behind like that, with the girl kneeling forward. And it felt good to be fucking, absolutely it did. As a physical sensation, there was nothing like it.
But it didn’t take long for our moment in that room to become something the moment oughtn’t to have been. I thought initially it was the odor. No one had ever explained to me that fucking had an odor, and certainly the magazines and videos were of no assistance in that regard. But pussy had a stench to it. It came at me in waves, these sharp, tangy pangs that brought to mind the taste of metal from a bad drinking fountain. It wasn’t the odor, though, really. Really, finally, the problem was just who I was. Because fucking someone, I had believed, would mean that I was all right. I was good enough that someone would fuck me, at any rate. But, looking down, it was the same Michael James kneeling there, with his same old folds and sags, and his same arms and hands with no texture to them – arms and hands that were just blank fat. I wasn’t all right. I was exactly who I’d been beforehand. In fact, I was even more that person, more emphasized, on account of my fucking. It was like fucking was what I might’ve been if I were something better, and here instead was the actual me, just this tubby mess wailing away at a stranger.
Anyhow, I couldn’t connect what I was doing with fucking as I imagined it would be, which it turns out you have to do. I went soft, a problem I’d heard about but had thought would be the least of my worries. We wound down, the girl and I, like a thing low on batteries. We laid together in the bed. After a time, she reached into her drawer and handed me a pill from it. She said I needed that with what we’d smoked earlier. And she said she didn’t care about the fucking. “It’s just a fuck,” she told me. I didn’t care about it any more than she did, I just thought by that point of the night I’d feel a little better.

* * *

The smoke, the pill the girl had given me, the liquor – I lay in the darkness in a kind of suspended nausea that wove in and out of sleep. When the shouting out in the living room started, I thought at first I was dreaming it. Then I thought it was the Russian pimp from the parking lot, and that we’d gone over our time and were about to be punished for it. But I’d only been asleep for a minute or two. We had more time yet, and by God we were going to need it. The shouting out there was Josh, and I was pulling on my jeans and stumbling to the door, the Indian girl mumbling and trying to get herself upright.
The first thing I saw, when I ran into the living room, was Josh kneeling on the sofa with the blonde girl pinned underneath him. He reared back his fist like he was starting a lawnmower, and then he crashed it down; the sound against the girl’s face was like when you drop eggs and know they broke. She had been shrieking, but the hit stopped it flat.
“That better?” Josh screamed at her. He reared back to hit her again but I had him in my arms and was pulling him off of her. “Fucking liar!” he screamed at the girl. She slumped to the floor just as the girl I’d been with, who was still naked, ran into the room and fell beside her and started touching the blood. “Emma?” I remember her saying. “Emma?” I couldn’t process how things had gotten to where they were from where they’d been a few minutes earlier.
Kris came running down the stairs in a bra and sweatpants. She knelt with the Indian girl over the third girl, their friend. “Em?” Kris said, her hands fluttering at the hurt girl’s face, like two birds looking for a place to land. Then Tyler came downstairs, buttoning his shirt. I still had Josh by the arms, but he shrugged me off and started pacing along the back wall of the room, watching the girls.
“What the fuck happened?” Tyler said.
“He’s fucking crazy,” said the girl I’d been with, but Tyler told her to shut up.
“She wouldn’t do it,” Josh told us.
Tyler looked at Josh. “She wouldn’t do what, Josh?” he said.
“Oh, come on, Tyler, Jesus,” Josh said. “You know it’s what’s fucking fair.”
Tyler closed his eyes. “Jesus,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
“I’m not going to pay for it and not get it,” Josh said.
“She’s not a whore!” screamed the Indian girl. Josh went at her then, but Tyler stepped between them and walked Josh back. Josh pointed over Tyler’s shoulder at the girls. “I want my fucking money,” he told them.
“No,” Tyler said. “They’re going to keep that money. That’s their money, Josh.”
Kris was holding the hurt girl’s face, but beyond holding her face she seemed at a loss as to what to do. She took her hands away, and saw the blood on them. She shook her head. “Fuck it,” she said. “Fuck this.” She sat back on her heels, and reached into her pocket for her phone.
“Call him,” the Indian girl said. “Call Viktor.”
“Fuck Viktor,” Kris said. “I’m calling the cops.”
She’d begun to dial, but Tyler at that moment left Josh where he was standing and crossed the room to Kris. Without speaking, he took the phone from her hand and closed it. He seemed sad, I remember, like all at once he’d realized everything we’d have to do that night. “Give me that,” Kris said, reaching for the phone; Tyler held it away from her and told her sit on the sofa. When she reached for the phone a second time, he slapped her face calmly, his expression unchanged. “Get on the fucking couch,” he said. “You too,” he told the girl I’d been with. They glanced at each other, and then climbed onto the sofa. With the two of them out of the way, I could see the face of the girl Josh had hit. I remember thinking: that face is not the same shape as it was before. He altered that girl’s face.
Tyler told the girls to help their friend sit up; they lifted her by the armpits, her head swinging and blood roping from her eye. They had to keep their hands on her to keep her from slumping over, and I thought then that it was entirely possible the girl would die. And it was, I think.
I heard a cracking sound, and saw that Tyler had snapped Kris’s phone in his hands. He tossed aside the pieces. “She got one?” he said about the hurt girl, and Kris dug a phone out of her injured friend’s pocket. She surrendered it to Tyler. He broke that phone like he’d broken the first, and stood awhile thinking. I was starting to think, too. I thought that I should go in the bedroom and break the Indian girl’s phone, which was probably in her sweatpants. And I thought that Kris and the Indian girl, if we didn’t cover their mouths, might scream, and that their neighbors would come or maybe call the police. I wondered what we could find in that house to put on their mouths. But then I remembered that there’d been screaming already, and that screaming in that section of town probably wasn’t uncommon. No one, I realized, was going to come through that door and help these girls.
Tyler crouched, his arms hanging off of his knees, and stared at the floor. Behind him, Josh moved about in little steps, his hands worrying his pockets. “Man, we need something,” he kept saying. “We need something.”
“Just leave,” Kris told us. “It’s not like any of us know you.”
Tyler considered that proposition. He shook his head.
“We won’t say anything,” said the Indian girl. She looked awful like that, naked and scared and with that drinking fountain odor still in my mind. She said something else and Tyler told her to shut up. “I’m thinking,” he muttered.
All of us were quiet then, the three of them on their side of the room and Josh and me standing behind Tyler. The girl Josh had hit woke up a little, and watched us with her other eye. And what I began to know then, standing in that room (though maybe I didn’t know it completely until years later), was this: there are people in this world who, no matter the circumstance they find themselves in, will discover automatically their own specific advantage. They’ll discover it just as water in a cracked glass will discover that crack and seep out. And I began knowing this, too: I am one of those people, because I’m smart and because I’m a coward.
In other words, I knew already what needed to be done. I was just hoping Tyler would think of it first, and take care of it himself, so that it wouldn’t be on my conscience. But also I was afraid of what Josh’d do if we didn’t hurry. So I said, “One of them’s got a kid. There’s a kid here somewhere.”
Tyler looked at me.
“There’s toys all around in the yard,” I said. “Someone’s got a kid here.”
“You son of a bitch,” said the girl I’d been with.
I couldn’t look at her. I said to Tyler, “Just have her show us where it is. That’d be enough.”
Tyler looked at the Indian girl and seemed to get it. I glanced at Josh. Even he got it, I think.
Now the Indian girl was crying. I thought, as Tyler lifted her off of the sofa and told her to show him where the kid was: You know what, this is what’s best for everyone. This is what needs to happen for all of us to carry on with our own lives. And maybe that was true, but I don’t think it would’ve needed to be.

The kid was down the street. Tyler told us about it later. It was asleep in its crib with nursery music playing, and because Tyler couldn’t think of what else to do, he showed the girl his dad’s pistol in the glove box of the truck and said that’s what he’d use if she said anything, if any of them did. She cried, which Tyler took as a good sign. Back at the house, we mostly sat without looking at each other. At one point the doorbell rang, and Josh jumped to his feet and started fidgeting, gripping and releasing the front of his jeans. Kris said not to worry about it. It was just her friend, she said.
We’d turned off most of the lights in the house. A shadow appeared on the curtain, lingering there.
“What the fuck’s he doing?” Josh whispered.
“It’s just Connor,” Kris said. “He wants to smoke.”
“He’d better not try to come in here,” Josh said.
“He’ll go away,” Kris said. “He’s just sad.”
The shadow vanished eventually. Later, when Josh went to the bathroom, things in that house got to be too much for me. I apologized to the girls, especially the hurt girl, and told them I didn’t know how this had happened. I didn’t want it to have happened, I said. I was sorry, I was sorry. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d taken my wallet out and was handing them money. It wasn’t very much, and certainly wasn’t enough for whatever it was I’d hoped to buy from them. They took the money, but there was no sense of transaction. Eventually Tyler came back with the Indian girl. We wanted to tape their wrists, but couldn’t find tape anywhere in the house. Instead, we just reminded them of what we were willing to do.

Some days later, we wrecked the truck. Probably we didn’t need to, but the girls had seen it, as had the Russian guy and whoever else, and it was a truck Mr. Copeland drove into town twice a week. Spokane wasn’t so big you could bet against a coincidence. Anyways, the insurance money would cover it. We took the truck into the pine woods south of Cheney. With Tyler and I watching from the side of the road, Josh climbed behind the wheel and buckled his seatbelt and raced the engine. He saluted us through the window, which neither Tyler nor myself had any patience for. “Go on and do it!” Tyler shouted. Josh kneaded his hands on the steering wheel. And then the rear tires spun hard, smoking a little on the asphalt, and with the bed skating sideways, the truck squatted and took off. Josh got himself up to speed – maybe 30 or 40 miles an hour – and then lined the right headlamp of the truck into an old Ponderosa standing near the shoulder. The impact tore off that corner of the truck and spun it so it was facing what hit it, like a wheeling dog. Steam hissed up and there was shit leaking everyplace, but Josh trotted away, healthy as a doe. As he had always been fond of saying: he lived under a lucky star.
But that first morning, getting back to Edwall, we didn’t know what to do about the truck or about anything. It was dawn. No one wanted to go home, and so we sat in the diner on Main Street. But no one wanted to talk, either, and so we sat over our pancakes and bacon, no one eating and no one looking anywhere but out the windows. It was the same diner on the same Main Street, with the same people outside strolling in the sunlight. I’d known those people all of my life. But they were changed somehow. I get now, of course, that I was changed and they only looked different because I saw them from a new vantage. But all I got then – and that just dimly – was that someday, on a dark day, the wrong door was going to open, and there wasn’t very much that’d keep me from stepping through it.

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Ben Nickol is the author of the novel, Adherence (Outpost19, 2016) and a story collection, Where the Wind Can Find it (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2015). His stories have appeared in Boulevard, CutBank, Hotel Amerika, Fiction Southeast, and Fugue.