All-Day Breakfast Read online

I stopped at 7-Eleven and had the red-headed clerk fax my message to that number I’d been keeping in my wallet. As he rang up two dollars on the register I noticed the rotating rack of wieners behind his shoulder, its plastic case emblazoned with Why Not Make it a Bacon Dog?

  Josie and Ray were surprised to see me, waiting between Deb and the jungle gym at 2:30. We led them over to her Corolla, away from other kids, and I squatted on the dead leaves. Ray stared at me with round gray eyes—his mother’s. What the hell now, Dad?

  “We don’t know what’s happened exactly,” I said, smoothing his hair across the top of his head, “but there’s been an accident up at the house. Grandma and I think it’d be better if you stayed with her in MacArthur for a little while. You’ve got your rooms there already.”

  Josie let her backpack slide to the ground.

  “You’re getting a job in MacArthur?” she asked.

  “No, baby,” said Deb, squeezing a shoulder. “Your dad is going to stay here to sort things out.”

  “What things?” asked Ray. His face turned red while his arms bunched up like chicken wings. He looked ready to throw a tv out a window.

  I said, “Grandma and I just think it’d be better if—”

  “No, no, no!” Josie said.

  She dove for my arm and gripped my elbow like it was a rope dangled over a burning ship. Same thing she’d done on the morning I’d had to tell them that their mom had passed during the night: Josie had grabbed for my arm then pulled Ray against us. I’d thought at the time, through my own fog, that it meant I can’t bear to lose my mom and I have to hold onto something, anything. But Lydia had been out of their day-to-day lives for a couple of weeks by then, and I realized, squatting in the elementary school parking lot, that her clutching meant You are our whole lives, and that it had meant the same thing six months before. I pulled Ray’s face against my neck, felt his wet cheek there, and I leaned across to press my forehead against Josie’s.

  “I haven’t been acting like myself,” I whispered. “I’ve been too angry.”

  “Sorry,” said Ray.

  “That’s okay, Dad,” Josie said.

  “I haven’t been angry with you two. Even when you threw out the bacon, all right? You guys go to Grandma’s and I’ll come get you when I feel better.”

  “How long before you come?” asked Josie.

  Deb’s chin had crumpled and she was blinking hard. Rock-solid Deb.

  “A month,” I told them.

  It was possible I’d wake up the next morning with all of the rage dissipated from behind my eyes, so that I could see my way to MacArthur—the kids and I would only be apart one day in that case—and equally possible that my car would explode or I’d feel compelled to throw myself into a blast furnace, in which case we’d never see each other again. A month seemed like a decent compromise. Telling yourself anything is possible might feel terrific when you’re eighteen and hitchhiking across the country, but when you’re an underemployed widower and father of two it is a fucking terrible feeling.

  Deb nodded and shrugged her shoulders, wiping her nose.

  “Just one month,” she muttered.

  She picked up Ray and put him in the car. Luckily he’d left a stuffed rabbit on the back seat that she could jam into his arms. Deb got behind the wheel. I carried Josie around to the other side, and her dangling legs were so long that the toes of her sneakers whacked my shins. I buckled her in. She was breathing through her teeth, trying to hold herself together for the umpteenth time.

  “Will you meet us at the house?” she asked. “To get our stuff?”

  “No, baby,” I said. “Grandma has new stuff for you. Surprises.”

  I kissed her forehead and shut the door before she could say anything else, then I dragged myself around the car and twisted into Ray’s side to give him a hug. He squeezed back hard, then abruptly let go.

  “See you before long, Bugface,” I said, and kissed his forehead too.

  His fist hit me in the ear.

  I slid back and shut the door. Once he’d done the same thing when I’d forgotten to order curly fries and after thirty seconds that had blown over too.

  “Grandma doesn’t like that kind of behavior,” I said through the window.

  He thrashed against the seat and Josie put a freckled hand on his leg. Deb backed out of the parking spot and I barely got my toes out of the way, though even if she’d crushed them flat I probably could’ve reinflated them with a bicycle pump. A school bus pulled out behind the car as they drove away so then I couldn’t even see the backs of their heads, just this bus stops at r.r. xings.

  A life without Lydia, okay, I was starting to digest that. But not Josie and Ray.

  I turned down Clemons though it wasn’t exactly on my way. A giant black Escalade was parked in Harv’s driveway so I didn’t slow down, much less go in. If the house had looked empty I would’ve broken in and eaten his dad’s driver’s license or crapped in his oven and set it on low, but Harv was probably in there and kids shouldn’t pay for their parents’ fuck-ups. Sins of the father and that, Ezekiel 18:20.

  How’d I even remember that? Funny how the brain works.

  At a red light at the bottom of our hill, I pulled up behind a little Acura. He wasn’t signaling, so I stayed behind him in the left lane instead of sliding into the right. When the light turned green he didn’t even inch forward until every last oncoming car had gone by us, and then he finally rolled ahead and turned left. Hadn’t had the decency to turn his signal on.

  Well, I signaled and went after him, and thirty seconds later I stopped behind him at another light. It’d started raining. I reached for my shovel in the back seat, climbed out, walked four steps and smashed in his tail lights. Drizzle on my face while I did it. I glanced up at the side mirror and saw the driver staring back at me, and just from his cheek and eye I could tell he was Chinese. And I admit that that freaked me out a little because I’d never seen a Chinese guy before, not in Hoover. I got back into my car, shut the door and waited for the signal to change. The modern world trains us to act like nothing’s happened. The Acura guy never even opened his door. The light turned green, he rolled ahead, I crunched over the shards of his lights and after a couple of minutes I pulled up in front of our house again.

  Only the foundation was left, the front steps, what might have been our blue couch, and a tangle of charred timbers like a campfire Boy Scouts had peed on. Two firemen in shirt sleeves and overalls were unrolling yellow danger keep out tape around the perimeter of the property. The facing wall of the houses on either side of us were toasted black. I peered up and down the block and didn’t see a single Alice’s Flowers van, so until I heard back from Jones or drove clear across the state to Lancaster County, maybe that meant I was out of clues. But why not drive straight to Velouria and ask what was in that soft-soled shoes only tank?

  “Hey, aren’t you the guy—are you Giller?” asked a bearded fireman.

  “I lived here, yeah.”

  “Your landlord was just here to poke around. Not a happy camper!”

  The other fireman laughed and they went back to what they were doing. A tall balding man sauntered up the sidewalk, leading a black miniature poodle on a leash. Even before my bacon problem I’d wanted to smash poodles into the pavement, and this little rat’s mucousy eyes kept glaring up at me.

  “Aren’t you Mr. Giller from the high school?” asked the bald guy.

  “I’ve done some subbing.”

  Didn’t want to own up to too much—maybe he had a subpoena because my shirt had traumatized some kid in the cafeteria.

  “I heard you had a fire up here, thought I’d better lend my condolences. I’m Doug Avery. Our daughter Megan went on that field trip to Velouria, you remember?”

  If Avery was looking for trouble, I’d duck when he threw his first punch, even with the extra reach he had on me, t
hough the poodle might be a problem. Unpredictable.

  “Sure. Megan,” I said. “Whiz at the periodic table.”

  “Yes, sir. Now, we had a fire at our place last night too. Gutted it. Haven’t quite accepted it in my mind yet. We’re staying at my brother’s place now, just over the way.”

  “Really, you too? Megan all right?”

  “Well, that’s the thing. That’s the thing, we haven’t seen her since Monday. She came in late on Monday, then Tuesday not at all. That’s two days ago. Cereal bowl sitting there untouched.”

  He blinked hard. His eyes looked rheumy as the dog’s.

  “That, uh—that doesn’t sound like Megan,” I said.

  Too homely to have run off with a motorcycle gang.

  “No, it doesn’t. Colleen’s still all smiles about it, says Megan’s at a sleepover and she’ll phone any minute, but…” Avery watched his dog sniff around the puddles left by the firehoses. “And we heard most of that Chemistry 11 class was acting strange even before. Some business in the cafeteria, with the boys threatening people!”

  “Yeah,” I said blandly, “I’d heard about that.”

  “Little Scott Barnes, he’s an athletic kid, went down on his back during the soccer game last night—compound fracture of the leg, everybody could see it plain as day, but he hopped up and kept playing, said it didn’t bother him. Rest of the kids were just about sick! They had to strap him down on one of those stretchers just to keep him from hopping out of the ambulance! Feisty bugger.”

  “I hadn’t heard that one.”

  “Now, my wife sent me over here, Mr. Giller, to suss you out. She figured, hey, all these troubles with the eleventh-grade field trip, fire at our house, your house, the Sutherlands’ and the Mooneys’, then Scott Barnes’s mother in that accident…Colleen and I’ve almost started believing that something really terrible happened with that accident in Velouria, and now we’re being badgered out of town before we can put our heads together, hash it all out. Does that seem logical to you?”

  “Well.” I encouraged my brain to participate, this seemed important. “If it really has been organized by somebody, I couldn’t say why they’d do that. Obviously something happened to everybody in Velouria.”

  “Not there, Jocko, that’s the man’s vehicle!” Avery tugged the leash. “Now when we rolled into my brother’s place this noon hour, it happened a friend of his was over. This friend’s name is Svendsen, cheerful as all heck, made me think of a cocker spaniel—you know the guy?”

  “I’ve only been in town a couple of months, I—”

  “Well, this Svendsen’s ex-military, Air Force officer, I believe, saw action in the Persian Gulf and just retired very recently. And after we got to talking about Megan, he told us that plant in Velouria is owned by this Penzler Industries outfit, are you familiar with them?”

  “I know the name, sure.”

  “You do! Well, Svendsen said this Penzler has expanded like crazy in recent years, and their venture capital came out of military contracts. You aware of that?”

  The firemen had been ambling through the wreckage, hunting on the ground for something, but now they looked up at me and Avery.

  “I wasn’t aware,” I said softly.

  “Well.” Taking the hint, Avery tugged the dog in closer and nearly whispered. “Can you recall exactly what they were making over in Velouria? Because my girls only said garbage bags.”

  It was unbelievable to me that Avery could even hold this conversation, any conversation, while his daughter and her sequinned cardigan were two days missing and presumed God-knows-what, but I was keeping my cool pretty well myself considering that I’d just watched Josie and Ray getting spirited away. I tugged absently at my reattached finger and recalled that I had a hole through my shoulder that would probably show daylight if I stood, heroically, against the setting sun.

  “In Velouria,” I whispered, “they told us they were manufacturing garbage bags, and flexible pipes for the plumbing in motorhomes. They walked us through the whole procedure. Bit of this chemical, bit of that one, abracadabra—plastic.”

  “But if they put in a bit more of that one and a bit less of this, it’s another kind of plastic entirely,” Avery said quietly. “Were you aware of that?”

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s just science.”

  The bearded fireman ducked under the yellow tape, wiping his palms on his overalls.

  “Hey, Giller?” he said. “I’m probably not the one supposed to tell you—”

  Then why tell me? My ears flushed hot, and I glanced around for a two-by-four that I could use to knock him across the teeth.

  “—but you have been slightly lucky here,” he went on. “I mean, it could have been way worse. The arson guys from the police came across a device that had been set to go off in the middle of the night—you believe that? That’s what our chief’s paperwork said. But they figured it must’ve gone haywire and ignited this morning instead. The diagnostic told them that. Because you have young kids and that, right? Would have been way worse in the middle of the night.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for telling me.”

  All the time Avery was making a big show of rubbing his dog’s belly while it lay on its back, but he threw me this meaningful look—incendiary devices in the middle of the damn night? Badgered out of town?

  “This Svendsen had had about six beer,” he whispered, “so he was real talkative. He said the plastic Penzler made was for the soldiers.”

  The clean-shaven fireman seemed to be talking into a cb radio up in their cab.

  “That could mean anything,” I muttered. “Body armor or—”

  “Right, of course! Well, my sister-in-law was trying to escort the guy out but when he started hunting around for his shoes he told me something else. Put his arm around me and said that plastic was meant to go inside the soldiers. Inside. Then ran out to his car in his stocking feet and drove away! My sister-in-law shut the door and my jaw hit the floor with this whole thing. I mean, our house had just burned down!”

  His eyes bugged out. The dog sat down on the sidewalk and stared at me too.

  “Soldiers,” I finally said. “Like they’re sending to the Congo?”

  “I guess! Puts Penzler on a tight effin’ schedule, hey? What do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “All right. All right,” he said. “I’ll ask Svendsen about it again if I see him. I’d better roll back along to my brother’s, tell my wife I sussed you out.”

  I watched him saunter away up the block between the hedges and the line of elms, like we’d only been talking about the Steelers’ post-season chances, and wasn’t Coach Tomlin a snappy dresser? Beside me the clean-shaven fireman leaned his elbow out the fire engine’s window.

  “Guy seems pretty excited,” he called.

  “His daughter’s missing and his house burned down last night.”

  “Oh, yeah, down on Mitchell! Thought he looked familiar. Hey, you still staying down at the Brennan?”

  “That’s right,” I said, though I hadn’t ever checked in.

  He nodded, patted the outside of the door agreeably. His head jerked up.

  “Oh, man, holy shit!”

  I looked too—a car must’ve been pulling into one of the driveways, and now Doug Avery lay sprawled on his face beneath its bumper, motionless as a pork sausage. At that distance it looked like he’d put on a red skullcap. The car was some sporty model, yellow—I couldn’t see the whole car, a tree was in the way—and I was going to punch my fist through the driver’s chest whether old Doug was dead or not. I started running and the fireman jumped down from the engine and ran beside me.

  The yellow car was backing out onto the street.

  “Hey!” the fireman yelled, waving his dinner-plate hand. “Hold up!”

  Its tires s
quealed and it roared fifty feet then squealed again around the hedges at the corner. Only then did we get to Avery. The leash was still around his wrist and Jocko licked his ear, tail wagging. Doug’s left leg was twisted backwards under him, and something like raw egg dripped out of the back of his head. A half-gallon of blood showed where his head had hit the right-angle of the curb.

  Before he’d even stopped running, the fireman was calling into his walkie-talkie, and I didn’t stop at all—I had enough bacon dogs in me that I figured I could chase that yellow car clear across Colorado, straight down the interstate, so long as I could keep one eye on him. But I slingshotted around the hedge and of course it was long gone. Just a woman in pink, raking leaves beside the sidewalk.

  “You see that car?” I yelled. “Get the license?”

  She scratched her chin on her knobbly work glove.

  The fireman stood six feet back from the body, the leash in his hand and Jocko straining like hell to try to sniff Doug. The bearded fireman was sprinting up the sidewalk from my house, some kind of plastic tool kit in one hand, pulling a latex glove onto the other with his teeth.

  “Don’t bust a gut. No vitals,” the clean-shaven one called. “Hang around to give a statement to the cops,” he said to me. “They’re looking out for the car. We’ll see.”

  I studied how the blades of grass bent beneath Doug’s elbow.

  “Hey, I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

  Ah, yes, I thought. This makes sense. It’s all been building up to this exact thing. If only Doug had been washed in pink goop with us, he could’ve sat up and asked for breakfast.

  As the firemen bent over the body I wandered back toward my burned-down house. A baby-blue convertible was parked between the fire truck and the neighbor’s brown pickup. Grace sat on the hood, gnawing pepperoni and swinging her flip-flops, while Amber probed the ashes of my front porch with her sneaker.

  “Hey, hey!” She waved her one arm. She wore a squirrel whisperer T-shirt.

  “Why’re you guys hanging around here?” I asked. “Might not be the safest—”

  “We can see that!” said Amber. “Figure you didn’t want your house to—”