Trevor and Barry Get Lucky (2)

Trevor Mott caught his toast.

He hadn't meant to. He had buttered it at the counter and turned for the kettle and taken it off the plate with his elbow, which was how breakfast generally went, and his hand had dropped after it out of a habit that had not once in eleven years achieved anything. This time the toast was in it. Butter side up. Still warm.

He looked at it for some time.

Barry looked at it too. Barry was nine, or near enough, a brown dog of no particular kind with one ear that had given up, and he had spent most of his life on that exact square of lino because in this kitchen toast came down four mornings out of five. It was the nearest thing Barry had to a pension. He lifted his head off his paws, looked at the toast in Trevor's hand, and then looked at Trevor.

"Don't," Trevor said. "I don't know either."

He ate it standing at the sink. The window over the sink faced east, which out here meant it faced a great deal of nothing: a field of cut stubble running flat to the edge of the world, and above that a sky that started at the ground and went up from there without stopping. In Swindon the sky had the decency to end at the rooftops. Here it went on all day, over everything, like a supervisor. He had never got used to it, and he had stopped expecting to.

Then he sniffed the milk.

The milk in this house went off a day before its date, every time, as if it had heard something about him. He had tried buying it later in the week. He had tried taking the one from the back. He had once, in a low period, driven out to the petrol station on the highway in case the problem was the shop, and that pint had turned on the drive home. So he sniffed the new milk, and it was fine. He sniffed it again with the fridge door open and the cold rolling out round his ankles. It went on being fine. In the end there was nothing for it but to put it in his tea.

He drank the tea at the kitchen table with his coat already on. Barry came over and sat against his knee and leaned, which was what Barry did instead of conversation.

Trevor had come out to the Plains eleven years ago for a woman who taught geography. She had since gone to Phoenix. He had stayed, which the town took as loyalty and he took as inertia, and neither side had ever brought it up.

Barry had come later, with a Buick. Trevor had towed the Buick off the county road one February morning, and when he unhooked it at the yard there was a dog asleep across the back seat. The owner, when she came for the car, looked at the dog and said she had never seen it before in her life. Nobody had. Trevor put a notice up on the board at the co-op. Nobody rang. That was nine years ago, and the notice was still there, faded to the colour of weak tea, and in the photograph Barry looked exactly as he looked now, which was resigned.

"Right," Trevor said, and finished his tea, and they went out to the truck.

The town had one tow truck and it was his. MOTT'S TOWING, it said on both doors, and under that, in smaller letters, a number that every person in the county had rung at least once on the worst morning of their year. A pickup in the ditch out on the section road. A hatchback locked with its keys inside outside the post office, engine running, wipers going. A grain truck that had lost an argument with a soft shoulder. A wedding car, once, with the tin cans still tied on. Trevor was what happened after something went wrong, and by a process he understood perfectly well and could do nothing about, he had become, in the town's eyes, more or less the same thing as the something. People did not wave him over. Mostly they waved him off once he'd done the job, and then they rang the paper about his rates.

He put the phone on the dashboard, face up, with the ringer turned all the way up, the way he did every morning. The first call usually came before he'd finished his tea. He had finished his tea. He looked at the phone. It lay there.

Barry got in on the passenger side, where the window seal leaked. Barry had been dripped on by that seal through six winters and a good many summer storms, and Trevor had twice bought the part to fix it and twice been sent the wrong part. Barry settled on the damp patch in the seat with the sigh of a dog who had made his peace with it a long time ago.

There were three sets of traffic lights in town, and Trevor's loop took in all of them: down Main past the café and the hardware store, left at the co-op, out along the elevator road to the edge of town and back the other way. All three were green. He turned round in the elevator lot and came back, and all three were green again.

He sat at the last one, which was green, with nobody behind him, and did not go.

"That's never happened," he told Barry. "Eleven years."

Barry looked out of the window. A pickup came the other way, and the driver lifted one finger off the wheel at him as it passed. They all did that out here. Trevor had been told it was friendliness. After eleven years he still suspected it was a comment.

He pulled into the co-op car park, past the yellow bollard at the corner, with which he had a long and complicated history, and got out and walked round the truck.

He did the tyres first, all six, pressing each one with his thumb. He lifted the bonnet and checked the oil, which was where it should be, and the belts, which were tight, and the battery terminals, which were clean in a way he could not account for. He looked underneath for drips. He looked at the winch cable, a yard at a time. He counted the chains in the side locker, which was a habit: two. There were always two. He opened the glovebox, which had been held shut with tape since the hornets, and shut it again. Everything was fine. It was the particular kind of fine that a man with his experience had learned not to trust, the kind of fine that generally came along just before.

Inga from the co-op came out with a sack of layer pellets on her shoulder and stopped to watch him lying on his back on the tarmac with his head under the truck.

"Somebody break down, Trevor?"

"Not yet," Trevor said, from underneath.

She waited, in case there was more, and then she put the sack in her car and drove off, and he heard her indicator ticking all the way to the corner, which it never did, because it had been broken since the spring. He lay there under the truck and listened to it tick.

He came out and stood up and brushed the gravel off his back and shut the bonnet. Barry watched him through the windscreen with his good ear up.

"Don't look at me like that," Trevor said. "You've seen what happens."

They went on along Elm Street, slowly, because Trevor was looking at everything.

A man was painting his porch on Elm. Trevor knew the house; he had once towed a boat trailer out of its side yard, and the man had argued about the bill for a fortnight. The ladder stood against the porch roof with a full tin of white balanced on its top step, and the man himself was round the back of his van with the doors open, looking for something and finding everything else. While he looked, a cat came out from under the porch, went up the ladder as if it were late for an appointment, and knocked the tin off the top step with its tail.

Trevor braked. Twelve feet. A full tin of white. He had already seen the lawn.

The tin came down flat on its base in the grass, with the lid still on, and stood there. One drip had got out from under the rim on the way down. It landed on the porch rail, on a bare grey patch about the size of a coin. It was the one spot on the whole length of the rail that the man had missed.

The man came round the van with a brush in his hand. He looked at the tin on the lawn. He looked up at the ladder, where the cat was now sitting on the top step washing a paw. He scratched his neck with the end of the brush. Then he picked the tin up, carried it back to the porch, and went on painting. He never once looked at the rail.

Trevor sat with his foot on the brake.

"That's four," he said.

Barry thumped his tail once against the door. It wasn't clear what Barry was counting, but he had been listening.

The phone did not ring.

At half eleven it still had not rung, and Trevor did the loop again, slower, the way you go back through a house to check you've turned the gas off. Green, green, green. A man changing a tyre outside the feed store had already finished and was putting the jack away. A grain truck went past with its load tarped down tight and did not drop so much as a kernel. Out by the elevator a woman was reversing a horse trailer into a gap that was clearly too small for it, and Trevor slowed right down to watch, the way you watch the weather, and she put it in first time.

"Five," Trevor said, though he wasn't sure it counted. She was clearly good at it.

He parked outside the café.

A big man in a seed cap was coming out as Trevor went in. He held the door, and he nodded, and he said, "There you go, buddy."

Trevor knew him. Last month this man had stood in the car park behind the bank and called Trevor a vulture, along with several other things that Trevor had not heard since school, and had filmed him on his phone the whole time Trevor was winching his pickup out of the disabled space. He had put the film on the internet. Trevor had watched it, and had thought he came across quite well, for a vulture.

Today the man held the door for him, and nodded, and went off down the pavement toward the petrol station, with no idea at all who he had held it for.

Trevor stood in the doorway a second too long, with the bell still going over his head.

"Someone's having a laugh," he said.

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