Train Wreck Girl by Sean Carswell Page A

this—because you didn’t get benefits or workman’s comp and it was tougher to make good money—but I worked faster than most welders and I appreciated being able to make full-time money without having to work full-time.
    Plus, Duane paid me under the table. In cash. There was no record of me working there, so I felt like I’d be harder to find, should the Flagstaff police come looking. Which I guess didn’t matter because the wheelchair dude had already found me. He was sitting outside the shop in his van when Bart came by to see me. I knew this because Duane had told me. He told me that he knew the wheelchair dude was after me for something. Duane said that, if I didn’t do something about the wheelchair dude, I was going to have to find another job. He told me that the wheelchair dude made him nervous. I knew the feeling.
    Bart came inside the metal shop. I showed Bart the things we were making. Some kind of cellular phone sub station antennas. Bart asked, “Are you still doing sculptures?”
    I pointed to some over by my work station. “Nothing special,” I said. “Just something to keep me busy while I’m waiting for supplies and shit.”
    This wasn’t exactly true. I worked on those sculptures every day. They were the most important thing in the world to me. I don’t know why I always downplayed that, always acted like they didn’t matter.
    Bart walked over to the biggest of my sculptures. It was about sixteen inches high and thirty inches wide and six inches deep. I’d made it out of galvanized wire cloth and some strips of sheet metal and straps that carpenters use to brace trusses against hurricane winds. There was a bull, kinda, and a sort of horse looking thing and some fucked up looking people reaching for the sky. A total rip-off of Picasso’s Guernica, only I hadn’t seen Guernica for a few years and just went by memory, so maybe people wouldn’t even know what I was ripping off. I think there was enough of my style in it to make it distinctive, too. I was actually pretty proud of that one. Bart said, “You could probably sell this for a decent amount of money.”
    â€œNah,” I said. “It’s crap. Let’s go.”
    Bart tried to take the sculpture with him, but I told him to put it down. And, anyway, we didn’t have a lot of time. We had to make it out to north Merritt Island and back in time for Bart to drive his four o’clock bus route.
    Bart drove deep into the swamps and orange groves of Merritt Island, to that weird, rural redneck moat that surrounds Kennedy Space Center. We turned onto a dirt road lined by retention ditches and citrus trees. Wind blew through the groves, kicking up that smell of orange blossoms. An ibis fed on insects in a freshly mown section of grass. I hung my hand out the window of the car and let it float up and down. It was all white noise and peace. I felt like I was a world away from civilization out there.
    At the end of the dirt road was an ancient little chapel and a little graveyard. Bart parked the car. We got out and started walking.
    Of course, all that was left of Joe was a sorry little slab of a tombstone. Not even a tombstone, really. A grave marker. The kind that you could run the lawn mower right over. Which I guess would be cool with Joe, because if there was one thing Brother Joe hated, it was running a weed eater. I’d hate to think that sister Janie would’ve bought a big ass tombstone and doomed a new generation of guys like Joe to run a weed eater.
    That was the first thing I thought about when I saw Joe’s grave marker, too: oh, good, no one’s gonna have to weed eat around this shit.
    The second thing I thought was: oh, shit, he’s really dead.
    The next thing I did was laugh. Not long and hysterical. Not even loud. Just that little quick laugh that I always let out when I saw Joe after not having seen him for a bit.
    Because, in