A Bright Soothing Noise

A Bright Soothing Noise

185 A Bright Soothing Noise Parked at the scenic vista, Smithy watched the fuel truck through his binoculars.The operator went back and forth as if in slow motion between the gauges and the couplings at the far end of the hose. Smithy put the binoculars down on his passenger seat and lit a cigarette. He sat for a while, staring absently until the long gleaming tanker pulled away, moving east down the canyon. He watched as Mayor Goode drove in to top off his new Power Wagon. Goode got down and no doubt set the nozzle on the slow notch. He circled his truck and kicked the brand-new radials. With a finger he probed for nicks in the paint. He took the squeegee and wiped it with a rag and with an almost effeminate precision pushed it across and through the round corners of the windshield. He set the squeegee back and beamed for a moment through his sunglasses at the mountains mirrored in them like diamonds. Then he released the nozzle, slapped his gas cap on, and disappeared inside the MiniMart. Ijaz Ahmed, the owner, had three big shiny rows of pumps out front. Every other vehicle that came up the valley stopped in to fill up or get beer or bottled water. Half the time there was a traffic jam in the lot—college kids in SUVs, rock climbers in little battered Nissans, construction workers, dump trucks and the state troopers coming in for free coffee with their crullers. By 186 A BRIGHT SOOTHING NOISE Smithy’s calculation, that MiniMart had to net five hundred dollars a day during the week, and twice that Saturdays and Sundays. One-hundred-fifty thousand profit per year easy after Ijaz and his brothers paid themselves a salary. He lit another cigarette and looked across the hills at all the new houses and began to rub his face. It seemed this moment, this bright Sunday at noon, had been ten years in the making. He’d been to the AA meeting in the basement of the Evangelical church, just as he had every Tuesday for ten years and now, for the first time, he wondered, what was the sense in it? He had repeated more or less the same horseshit speech in which he described what hope there was for himself as well as anyone who put his mind to it. Did anyone listen? Had he been lying to himself and the others all this time? He would be as dry as a sidewalk in Arizona for ten years today, he had reminded them, after he tapped the mike with a finger. He went to work, he said, and worked his bones raw and built a business and a new reputation for himself because he didn’t want to end up like his and Lilly’s father who, as everyone there knew, had drowned in his own vomit in his own bed. Or their mother, who caused a head-on only two months before that, leaving not only herself but three Mueller boys—Rick, Randy and Ralph, aged sixteen, seventeen and nineteen, all three of whom had been students of hers in kindergarten—in a blackened heap two miles east of here in the middle of 117. But you all know all that already, he said, and gestured to the doors in back. Despite the contempt he knew was rife for her and therefore himself in this town, he wasn’t going nowhere. As much as he despised everyone in that room and everyone despised him (no one protested , they had given up protesting years ago), he knew perfectly well it wasn’t any different anywhere else. If you’re going to take a stand, and everyone of you out there is going to have to sooner or later, he said, there’s no place like the place where you already are. Steve Hempstead didn’t even look up from his newspaper. A Bright Soothing Noise 187 Sharon Young crossed her arms and glanced at Steve. John Hetnik startled, disturbed by the sound of his own snoring. • • • Almost five weeks before, a Wednesday, Lilly peered out her window, watching for her brother. Satisfied she was alone, she ran back into the hallway and lifted the mirror down from its place above the stairs. What if Smithy caught her messing with his furniture! The bottom edge of the frame...