In the Course of Human Events. Mike Harvkey

in your shoe. “I’m just joshin. Hell, I like the occasional sticky bun myself.” He drove a fist into his own stomach to a hard thud. “I just work it off is all.”

      “I used to, uh, play baseball,” Clyde said, feeling like an idget, because Jay’s daughter, now that she was right in front of him, was pretty in an odd-looking way. She was a big girl, not chubby exactly, her eyes up close were a striking pale green and set wide on her face, too wide, really. Her mouth was enormous, full of tiny little teeth that locked together in two straight rows. She wore a full face of makeup, a clear orange line running along the jaw, making her look more alien or animal than human. Clyde was intrigued.

      “Great American pastime, they tell me,” Jay said. “You drove the Firebird?”

      “Yes sir,” Clyde said.

      “Anything I need to know? My daughter gonna be driving it and I don’t wanna have to worry about the front tire falling off on I-70, know what I mean?”

      “Uh, Dad,” his daughter said. “You won. Pretty sure that means you bought the car.”

      Jay dug a hand in his pocket and withdrew a wad of hundreds. He waved them. “Until I hand over sixteen hundred dollars, I ain’t bought shit.”

      Clyde flushed with worry. He hoped he hadn’t actually hurt the clutch. “It’s, uh, not as fast as it sounds.”

      The daughter made a noise and Jay said, “Good. Good! That’s what I wanna hear.”

      “I don’t want no sissy car,” she said. She flicked a hand and made a big show of folding her arms across her chest. “I want a car with some cajones.”

      “Why ain’t she as fast as she sounds?” Jay said. “What’s wrong with her?”

      “No, nothing,” Clyde said. “It’s a two-fifty two-barrel. Aftermarket glass pack makes it sound like it’s got more horses than it does.”

      “Ah,” Jay said. “I gotcha. All right. She’s naturally slow, like my sister. Anything else? This thing gonna be Tina’s sixteenth birthday present, Clyde. I find out it’s a lemon, I’m coming to your house to git my money back.” Jesus. Clyde stepped back. Jay grabbed his arm, laughing, but the hold was firm enough. “Just kidding. I got no idea where you live.” He snickered, looked at his daughter, and leaned in. “Course, wouldn’t be too hard to find out.” He slapped Clyde’s arm. Even though Clyde felt like the threat was only about half real, he wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find Jay Smalls outside his bedroom window in the moonlight. Now he knew why the other bidder had bowed out.

      Jay smacked his daughter on the arm and said, “Say thank you, Tina.”

      “Thank you, Tina,” Tina said, all teeth, and Jay dragged her away.

      Back in Independence, Clyde waited in line with the other drivers until Leon slipped three ten-dollar bills and two fives off the stack in his hand, which made it seem like more than the measly $40 it was. Clyde waved the bills and said, “Thanks for nothing.”

      Independence, a loud, cluttered sprawl, gave way in time to Boonville, but at twenty-thousand souls even its population was beyond Clyde’s comfort zone. When he was a boy he’d made the trip to this town with his dad to buy feed nearly once a month. Even though Boonville in those days had been half the size it was now his dad always griped. “These city folks just as soon run you off the road as look at you,” Clyde remembered him saying, though it was possible he’d made it up, he’d been only five or six at the time. Memories of the first half of his life were as unreliable as daydreams. Since the economic collapse, Clyde had heard there’d been carjackings in Boonville, robberies where they intentionally rear-end you to bring you out of your vehicle. Clyde’s thinking was, If I get out, it’ll be with the Colt in hand.

      At the Sinclair station, half the day’s pay went right down the fucking tank. Thank you, Obama. Across the road was the Walmart Clyde had to visit next. He hated shopping there but it was the cheapest option. Since high school a few extra pounds had maybe settled in around the middle. Clyde knew this, he wasn’t blind. He knew he couldn’t drive a hard punch into his gut the way Jay Smalls had done. But he also knew that he hadn’t let himself go completely, like most of the Walmart shoppers he saw now. None of them had even paused at the point of no return.

      Here it was, a Tuesday afternoon, and the lot was nearly full. Where did these bastards come upon the lucky combination of money and leisure in 2011? In the three years since Mr. Longarm closed, Clyde had almost become a stranger to work. His savings were gone, he’d cashed out of his retirement. To get unemployment he’d had to humiliate himself to some bitch at the government office, only to have it stop when he got the driving job. Apparently $40 was enough to make him ineligible for any government aid, thank you very much. Forget insurance—health, life, truck—he had none of it. All this had beaten Clyde down in ways he didn’t even know. As a boy he’d been an early riser. He remembered winters spent hunting, bundled up to immobility by his dad and uncle and trying to step in their deep bootprints before the sun was even up. He hadn’t hunted in ages, hardly shot his guns at all anymore. These days he slept late, and that wasn’t all. He watched too much TV, avoided his few friends, drank himself to sleep. Work was a hell of an important thing to a man.

      Crossing the pavement of Walmart Country, he shook his head at Boonville’s fortunate sons and daughters; the suffering of the people of Strasburg, not forty miles east, was evident: houses lost, yards overgrown, vehicles left on roadsides. Half the town’s residents, no more fight left in them, had thrown in the towel, walked away. Strasburg was the town the American Dream forgot.

      The doors parted and Clyde jerked a basket. He needed Spam, baked beans, eggs, milk, hot dogs, white bread, mayonnaise, margarine, whisky, cigarettes. He checked prices, kept track of the total in his head. Then he looked for Esther Hines in checkout.

      This was a girl who turned her hair a new color almost every other week. This was a girl who sang Christian songs with a closed-eye passion while scanning your purchases; she thought of Jesus Christ as savior and boyfriend both. This was a girl who smoked up a storm, partied in the woods, drank herself unconscious, and claimed the next morning with a straight face that her body was a temple into which she took nothing unholy. Clyde had happened upon her checkout once, months back, and had been seeking her out since. When she saw him, Esther moved her next register please sign behind his items. “What’d you drive today?” she said, scanning the Spam. Her fingernails, chewed to the quick, held tiny chips of black polish.

      “You woulda liked it,” he said. “Firebird.”

      “You’re shitting me.” She bit her thin pink lip and cast her eyes to the ceiling. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, scanning the beans. The apology, Clyde knew well enough by now, was for Jesus.

      “Sits too low for me though.”

      “I know how you like to be up all high to look down on the rest of us.” Esther winked and scanned the whiskey. “Now what do we have here? Baked beans, Spam, and whiskey? Looks like you’re about to have yourself one heck of a party.” She leaned in. “You are nothing but a heathen. I knew it first time I saw ya.” Her voice, now that Clyde heard it up close, trembled. If a baby bird could talk, it’d sound like this.

      Clyde pointed at the cigarettes behind Esther and said, “You mind adding a carton.”

      “GPCs,” Esther said, going with her key to the cabinet. “I don’t know how your uncle can smoke these.”

      Clyde said, “When I asked if he wanted something better he said, ‘Much as I smoke I can’t afford to smoke good cigarettes.’ ” Clyde watched the blue tips of Esther’s white-blonde hair brush her slim shoulders, thinking, again, about trying to see Esther outside of Walmart. So far thinking was as far as he’d got, the right moment never seemed to come and Clyde felt most of the time like he was living under a heavy winter quilt, he had no energy, none at all. She totaled the bill and Clyde groaned. How did this math make sense to anybody? Prices kept going up when the salary went down, it was a conflict of interest he couldn’t see