Bret Anthony Johnston

A star-smeared night, the usual briny and humid haze of the brush country in August, and Dixon was hauling twenty cases of stolen toys up from the Rio Grande Valley. They were in the bed of his truck under a blue tarp. He took care to drive the speed limit and flash his blinker. If the border patrol at the Sarita checkpoint asked, he’d claim a delivery mix-up. If the guards were white, he’d blame it on Mexicans.

The toys had been slated for Dairy Queen kids’ meals, a promotion for a book series called 

 in which the characters were half alien and half winged horse, but that morning the office phone rang and a collectibles dealer had offered three grand for the lot. Dixon was forty-two and he’d managed the franchise outside Harlingen for four years. He knew he’d be fired, maybe arrested too, but he also knew better than to give himself time to reconsider. He loaded the cases into his truck between customers. When the afternoon crew arrived, he went to the filling station to top off the tank. He checked his tire pressure and brake lights. Then he drove to the house and had supper with his wife, hamburger meat fried with peppers and onions. Afterward, they ate Blizzards he’d brought home for dessert and he told her not to wait up. 

Dixon pressed his swollen knuckles to the cold paper cup and felt a soothing. Trish saw it, looked away. She said, “You’re doing all this for someone named Cornbread?”

“I’m doing it for the money. Three grand gets us closer to the twenty-eight days.”

“Three grand from a man named after bread you cook in a skillet,” she said.

“Where does a teenager get that kind of cash?”

Trish licked her red plastic spoon. She said, “Did you put the pistol back in the truck?”

“I’m doing it for Kay,” he said. Their daughter was fifteen. She’d been asleep in her bed since Dixon had carried her there the night before.

“A man got arrested this morning,” Trish said. “He was driving a hearse and had dope in the cadaver, an old woman stuffed full of pot.”

“He didn’t think the creek would rise.”

“I never understand what you mean by that.”

“My father used to say it,” Dixon said. He wanted to get going. The deal was to meet Cornbread at a Kingsville taxidermy shop by ten. He said, “It means we’ll be alright.”

“If your knuckles aren’t broken, they’re getting close. I can put some ice in the cooler for your drive.”

“Part of me wishes you hadn’t gone so easy on those boys.”

“I doubt that’s the word they’d use.”

“You know my meaning, Dixie,” she said.

“The man with the hearse probably figured the cadaver would confuse the dogs,” Trish said. She was rinsing the plastic spoon. Their drawers were full of Dairy Queen flatware.

“What time do they start admitting patients at Bayview?”

“The story was on the news,” she said. “It happened at Sarita. That’s all I’m saying. It happened where you’re fixin’ to go.”

His headlamps washed out on the pavement. The air pushing through the vents smelled of creosote and trapped heat. Dixon wished the truck’s radio still worked. He hadn’t missed it for years, but tonight he wanted distraction. The drive was too flat, too dim and quiet. Occasionally, a sharp and radiating pain singed his knuckles; he should’ve accepted that cooler with ice. He alternated hands on the wheel. Outside Raymondville, plastic grocery bags were snagged on barbed wire fences. They looked like jellyfish.

How long since he’d come up this way? They used to go to Corpus for Kay’s school clothes because Valley stores weren’t up to snuff. There had been trips to see the replica Columbus ships dry-docked by the museum and the air shows at the army depot. Mostly, they’d drive up to go bird hunting near the King Ranch. For Kay’s twelfth birthday, they’d given her a .20 gauge. Dixon taught her to press her cheek to the shotgun as she’s patterning the dove, to keep her eyes on a shot bird as it falls, to track them where they like to eat—wheat fields and sunflower crops and gravel roads. He didn’t know what other fathers did with their daughters; the greatest luck of his life was having the only girl he’d know how to raise.

An hour into the drive, his cell lit up on the passenger seat. Felipe, his assistant manager, had an irate customer.

“She’s got three kids here,” Felipe said. “They want the new toys.”

“That promotion doesn’t start until tomorrow. We aren’t allowed to pop the cases earlier,” Dixon said.

“I know, but the kids are losing their shit and we’re trying to close. I thought I’d just slip her a couple, but I can’t find them.”

“Give her free Blizzards,” Dixon said.

“We already shut down the machine. Before her, we hadn’t had a customer for an hour. Did we move the cases?”

“What about tomorrow? I’m scheduled to open and if the toys aren’t here, I can’t—”

“They didn’t grow goddamn legs,” Dixon interrupted. “Hell, Felipe, they didn’t just walk out the goddamn door.”

Before Shawn Milford, Kay’s interest in boys had not extended beyond hunting experience—how old they’d been when they got their first guns, what kind of shells they loaded, how many birds they’d brought down in a day. She was in competition with them, not love. At fourteen, she still played cards and went bowling with her parents, made honor roll, washed dishes without being asked. So when the cop called Dixon last year, he figured it for a prank. Kay detained for panhandling? The word itself seemed vaudevillian: panhandling. And yet it was no joke. Others were on the hook as well, a crew of friends whose names neither Dixon nor Trish recognized. But the cops knew Milford. He was nineteen, a burnout. No question that he concocted the scam where the kids spread out through the mall, claimed to have been separated from their church group, and begged for bus fair money. Security footage showed they’d been running the con for weeks. Kay spent the day at the police station but got off with a warning. She cried and shook and apologized when Dixon picked her up, but he knew he’d been given a gift: she’d be too scared to court more trouble in the future.

But then came truancy notices and calls from Ivan at the pawnshop: Kay was hocking her mother’s tennis bracelet, Dixon’s circular saw, the .20 gauge she’d gotten for her birthday. Then came so many nights of her sneaking out her window that Dixon drilled it shut; he countersunk six screws from outside so she couldn’t work on them from her bed. Dixon talked to her by himself, so did Trish, and they talked to her together. She saw a counselor at school and started reading books to old folks at the retirement home. Then she got suspended for fighting Alma Santos in the cafeteria. Kay said Alma had been the instigator, but only Dixon believed her. Trish accused him of cutting Kay too much slack, of seeing good where there was only shit. A month ago, Kay came home in a police cruiser with pupils the size of quarters. The cops had been called on a noise complaint and when they arrived at the apartment Milford shared with his brother, they found a bowl party.

“A what?” Dixon had asked the officer. Kay was still in the cruiser, her cheek pressed to the window.

“Kids dump a bunch of their parents’ pills in a bowl, then spend the night munching on them like popcorn. No one ever knows what they’re taking.”

“County,” the cop said. “His brother, too.”

“Up to the judge. With all those pills, they might be in for a stretch.”

Then he crossed the yard and gathered his daughter from the squad car. She was dead weight in his arms, like her bones had turned to gruel.

Next time his phone buzzed, the night was full dark and the call lit the cab. Trish said, “Why are you the one on the road?”

“If Mr. Cornbread wants his toys so bad, why didn’t he make the drive down?”

“This doesn’t add up,” Trish said. “We didn’t think it out.”

In truth, Dixon had suggested delivering the toys tonight because Cornbread said he wouldn’t have access to a truck until next week. Waiting that long seemed careless, cowardly.

“I guess she hasn’t emerged yet,” he said.

“I checked on her. She kicked the covers off.”

“She’ll sweat some of it out. That’s all to the good.”

“She still smells like that glue,” she said.

“Like those resistoleros,” she said. There’d been articles in the paper about homeless kids addicted to huffing Resistol across the border. The cobbler’s glue was cheap and legal in Mexico. It suppressed hunger. Dealers sold it in baby food jars.

“She’ll hate us more if they have to cut her hair to get it out,” Trish said.

“Bayview will have better shampoo,” he said. “She doesn’t hate us.”

“They start admitting at eight. I didn’t answer you earlier.”

“We’ll be the first in line,” he said.

“I made some tuna in case she wakes up wanting real food. I thought you might want some when you got home, too.”

“Nothing would taste better,” he said.

“Felipe called,” Trish said. “I let the machine get it.”

“We talked. He needed help closing out the register.”

“Coming up,” he said. “I can see the lights.”

“I told you about the woman stuffed with pot, right?”

“Cornflake should’ve come here. You shouldn’t be driving all that way. Your poor hands.”

“I didn’t want him to know where we live,” he said.

“Maybe he was thinking along the same lines.”

“That’s what you keep saying,” she said.

The Sarita checkpoint was bleached in artificial light. Dixon had to lower his visor as he idled behind a tractor-trailer being searched by two guards. One was white, the other was Mexican. Flashlights, clipboards, handcuffs and side arms. The Mexican guard led a German Shepherd around the truck on a leash. He opened the trailer and waved his light inside: wooden crates of grapefruit. Dixon rolled down his window and the night swamped in, heavy as wet wool. He fidgeted with the vents. He could feel his pulse racing under his jaw. His knuckles were throbbing too and he concentrated on the pain as a way of calming himself. After a sedan pulled behind him, he realized he’d been considering reversing out and hooking a U-turn back to Harlingen.

The rig heaved into gear and rumbled out of the checkpoint. Dixon pulled up. The white guard stepped in front of the truck, waving him forward then motioning for him to kill the engine. Dixon considered asking if he could keep it running, explaining that the starter was on its last legs, but he turned the key instead. The guard flipped a switch in his booth and a strip of spikes hinged up from asphalt. The other guard set to circling the truck with the dog.

“Carrying any firearms or illegal drugs?”

“I’ve got a .38 under my seat,” Dixon said, hoping such honesty would pay off later. He added, “Permit’s at home.”

The guard scratched a note on his clipboard just as the tailgate dropped down and rocked the whole truck. It was like jumping a curb. The guard with the dog whistled and his partner went to see what he’d found.

When the guard returned, he said, “What’s with the boxes?”

“Toys for kid meals. I manage the Harlingen DQ. We got the Corpus shipment.”

“I’m meeting another manager there. He’s hauling them the rest of the way.”

The guard surveyed the truck’s cab: paper trash on the floorboards, sun-split dashboard, cellphone on the passenger seat. He glanced to the rear. In the mirror, the other guard shrugged. Dixon put both hands on the wheel, a mistake.

“What happened to your knuckles?” the guard asked.

“Punched the wall when I saw we got the wrong shipment.”

“Not my finest hour,” Dixon said. His shirt was soggy against the seat. If he floored the gas, he’d make it no farther than fifty feet past the spikes. Then, a memory: Kay used to love the sound of balloons popping. When she had chicken pox, Dixon had blown up a bag’s worth of balloons and burst them with his pocketknife to make her laugh.

The guard had been talking. “Sir,” he repeated, “I need to see your license.”

Dixon fished out his billfold. The guard checked the ID picture against his face. He wrote something else down, then passed it back.

“Can I get hold of the Corpus manager?” the guard asked.

“He’s on the road. I don’t know his cell, but his name’s Milford. If he ever passes through, your time wouldn’t be wasted searching his car.”

“If he’s got something to hide, we’ll find it,” he said.

“I heard about the hearse,” Dixon said. “It’s bad in the Valley too—heroin, glue, pill parties.”

“Unloaded, it’s just a paperweight.”

“And if I make a call, I won’t have trouble finding it registered in your name?”

Bret Anthony Johnston

Bret Anthony Johnston

Fiction

Winter 2017 - Cell

Dixon