Nebraska

“Do I still get the money?”

Ron nodded. He was grinning around a cigar. He pushed an envelope across the table.

Rex just looked at it. “Then I guess I am happy.”

“You should be.”

Rex stuffed the envelope inside his coat pocket. Everybody was quiet until I spoke up and said, “I just can't stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he's going to get it. It's too damned awful.”

Rex looked at me strangely. Ron knocked the ash off his cigar. “Well,” he said, “you better not think about it.”

His Dog

This was when he first saw her. This was the job where he picked up four hundred dollars. He lifted the collar on his coat and stared into the window reflection of a liquor store across the street and of a fat man in a white shirt turning out the lights in the beer coolers.

The man in the street looked down. The window was the front of a pet shop. In a wicker basket puppies nuzzled and climbed one another in sleep. One of them was loose, prowling. The man tapped the glass with his finger and her ears perked. She had blue eyes. He put on a gruesome rubber mask. The puppy backed away, then yapped and jumped at the glass.

Shh! he said, smiling.

He saw the liquor-store owner begin to pull the iron grate across the high windows.

He crossed the street.

$403.45.

In September, in a park, he saw a boy with the same husky straining at a leash. She was much bigger now, almost grown. The boy dawdled and the pup leaned.

Hey, the man whispered.

The pup turned her head.

Remember?

***

He picked bone and gristle and choice bits off the plates in the kitchen of the café. The cook was giving him a weird look. He walked up a dark alley with a plastic bag warm and sticky under his arm. He bumped a garbage can and caught its lid. He peered over a hedge and grinned. He ripped the bag and threw it into the yard and watched the young dog snatch up the meat and jerk it back and drop it to the grass. She carried the bone away and sat there in shadow. He saw her eyes sparkle. She kept staring as he left.

He sat against the chain-link fence. His fingers twisted her fur. Occasionally she licked his chin through the mesh.

It's a crazy way of making a living, he said. Most of the time I just get by. Plus, you're alone all the time.

An autumn wind scattered alley leaves. He lifted the collar of his coat.

He said, I dreamt about you last night.

He said, This is my favorite time of year.

I've been thinking about retiring, he said. How would that be?

He tapped the dollar bills together and wrapped them with rubber bands. He spoke through the rubber mask: And now your change.

The clerk stared at him, his arms at his sides.

Just get out one of those paper sacks and scoop in all the coins.

The clerk raised his hands and suddenly lurched for the gun. There was an explosion. The clerk flew back against a tin rack of cigarettes. He looked down at his bleeding chest. He slowly slid to the floor. He sat.

Goddamn it, the man said. He left the change. Smoke stayed under the light.