I

Ray worked at a car wash. He washed the same cars every day. His hands were always wet. He stood behind a bucket of soapy water and wiped down hoods and roofs and bumpers with a rag that was never quite clean enough. The cars came in yellow and white and occasionally someone brought in a car that had been white once and was now the color of the sky after a dust storm.

Mike was the nurse at the local clinic. He was everyone's favorite. He remembered people's names. He brought soup when people were sick. He held the hands of old women when the doctors delivered bad news. Mike died. He jumped from his apartment. Nobody knows why.

Ray went to the funeral. No one cried. Frank stood by the coffin. His face was a stone. Maria sat in the front row and held a handkerchief but she didn't take it to her eyes. She just held it.

Ray went back to the car wash the next day. He washed the same cars. His hands were wet.

II

Jax got out of the county jail. He was twenty-eight and had been inside for four years. He came to the car wash on a Tuesday morning and found Ray wiping down a silver sedan that belonged to a woman who came every Thursday and never tipped.

"I need your help," Jax said. He smelled like a cheap motel and cheaper cigarettes.

Ray didn't look up from the car. "No."

Jax left. He walked down the strip mall parking lot and got into a truck that was parked two spaces down from Ray's bicycle. The truck was someone else's. He didn't care.

Next day Jax was back. He was standing by the entrance to the car wash, leaning against the chain-link fence, watching Ray work. Ray kept working. He washed three cars that morning. Two of them belonged to people he knew. One belonged to a stranger.

"You gotta help me," Jax said.

"I said no yesterday. I'm saying no today."

"Today's different."

Ray washed the last car. He wrung out the rag in the bucket. The water was grey. He put the rag on the rack and went inside to the tiny office where he kept a folding chair and a radio that only picked up one station. He sat in the chair and waited for Jax to go away. Jax didn't go away. He stood outside the office window, looking in, his face flat and expressionless in the Florida sunlight.

At noon Ray went out to a gas station for coffee. Jax was there, waiting by the cooler. He bought a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of water and handed them to Ray. Ray didn't take them. Jax put them on the counter.

That afternoon Jax called him. Ray's phone was a landline — an orange plastic thing that hung on the wall of his mother's house. It rang at six in the evening, right when Maria was making rice and beans and Frank was watching the news.

"Get in the car," Jax said.

"What car?"

"The blue Corolla. The one on Elm."

Ray got in the car. It was a client's car. He had washed it two days ago. The seats still smelled like someone's perfume — something floral and expensive, the kind of perfume that doesn't belong in a blue Corolla driven by a man named Ray who works at a car wash.

He drove. Jax gave him directions. They went out past the strip malls, past the mobile home parks, past the place where the highway split and one road went to Orlando and the other went nowhere in particular.

They stopped at an empty lot surrounded by scrub and dead fence posts. Jax told Ray to get out of the car. Ray got out. Jax gave him a package wrapped in brown paper. It was heavier than it looked.

"Drive to the next road. Turn left. Wait by the big oak tree. A man will come. You give him the package. He gives you an envelope. You drive back."

Ray didn't want to do it. He said so. Jax looked at him the way dogs look at people — not with malice, exactly, but with an understanding of leverage that was almost unsettling.

"Six years, Ray," Jax said. "You were inside for six. I was inside for four. You got out early. I didn't. Do you know what that feels like?"

Ray thought about it. He did know. He sat in the blue Corolla and drove to the next road and turned left and waited by the big oak tree. A man came. He was wearing a grey coat. He looked at Ray the way you look at something you've seen before and don't like. Ray handed him the package. The man handed him the envelope. It was thick. Ray put it in his pocket and drove home.

It started raining on the way back. Florida rain — sudden and heavy and over in twenty minutes. Ray drove through it with the wipers on and the radio off. When he got back to the blue Corolla, parked at the edge of the scrub lot, Jax was gone.

Ray waited. He waited in the car for an hour. He waited standing up next to the car for another hour. Then he got in and drove home.

He waited at the car wash the next day. He waited at his mother's house that evening. Jax did not come back.

III

Weeks passed. Ray kept washing cars. He washed the same cars. His hands were always wet. Jax did not return.

Then the man in the grey coat found him. He appeared at the car wash on a Wednesday afternoon, standing at the edge of the lot with his arms crossed and a face that said he had been standing there for a while, watching.

"Where's the money?" he asked.

Ray didn't know what money he was talking about. But he knew enough to say the right thing. "I gave the package to the man. He gave me the envelope. I didn't open it."

The man hit him. Not hard enough to knock him down. Hard enough to make a point. Ray fell against the chain-link fence and the fence rattled and the cars nearby rattled too, their metal skins vibrating with the force of the blow.

"Jax is gone," Ray said. "I don't know where he is."

The man looked at him for a long time. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a wad of cash. He counted out some bills and handed them to Ray. "Delivery fee," he said. "Jax isn't coming back. You're free of him."

Ray took the money. He put it in his pocket next to the envelope he hadn't opened. The envelope was still in his desk drawer at home. He hadn't opened it either.

Two days later, someone found Jax. Someone else found him. Not Ray. Not the man in the grey coat. Someone else — a man who was walking his dog along the abandoned stretch of highway between the mobile home parks and the scrub lots. The dog was barking at something under a bush. The man went to look.

Jax was dead. Someone had beaten him. The face was unrecognizable — swollen and bruised, the features rearranged into something that looked like a face but wasn't.

Ray stood on a bridge over the highway. The weather was fine. The sun was shining on him. He looked down at the traffic — cars and trucks and semis, all moving in both directions, all going somewhere that was not here.

Frank was at the diner across from the clinic. He was eating a hamburger when a woman at the next table said something to the waitress. "Shot somebody," the woman said. "Six shots. Surveillance caught the guy's back as he was walking away."

Frank froze. The hamburger was half in his mouth. He set it down on the plate. He looked at the waitress. "Who was shot?"

"Some guy. Name of Delgado. Or something. They found him under a bush off Highway 17."

Frank put the hamburger back on the plate. He paid for it. He walked out to his truck and sat in the driver's seat for a long time. The back of the man in the surveillance photograph — he had seen that back before. It was his younger son's back. The way he stood. The way his shoulders slumped when he was tired. The way he wore a jacket that was too thin for the weather.

Frank drove to the diner's parking lot. He found a man who knew Jax's father. He gave him twenty thousand dollars in cash. "Tell him to stop," Frank said.

Jax's father looked at the money. Then he looked at Frank. "Where were you when your son went to jail?" he asked.

Frank didn't have an answer.

Frank went to the car wash. He stood outside the chain-link fence and watched Ray wash cars. Ray came out for lunch. Ray went back inside. Ray came back. Ray wiped down a yellow sedan. Ray wiped down a white sedan. Ray wrung out his rag in the bucket. The water was grey.

Frank stood there for a week. Every day. Morning, noon, and evening. He watched Ray come and go. He watched him wash the same cars. He watched his hands, always wet.

One day he saw Jax's truck. It was parked at the edge of the lot. Ray was inside it. Jax was in the passenger seat. They were talking. Ray was holding something — a package, wrapped in brown paper.

Frank drove home. He got in his truck. He started the engine. Rain came down — heavy, sudden, the kind of rain that comes without warning in the Sunshine State and then stops just as suddenly.

He drove. He found Jax's truck parked near an abandoned stretch of road. He got out of his truck. He got back in. He drove forward.

The impact was solid. Jax's truck moved. It kept moving. Frank followed. He dragged it off the road, into the scrub, behind a wall of dead fence posts and overgrown bush.

He got out. The rain was still falling. He looked at Jax through the broken window. Jax was not moving.

Frank got back in his truck and drove home. He didn't turn on the radio. He didn't listen to the news. He just drove.

IV

The next morning, Frank told his neighbor at the grocery store: "I have one son."

The neighbor was a woman named Louise who had known the Castillos for twenty years. She looked at Frank and saw something she had never seen before — not sadness, not guilt, not relief. Something that was none of those things and all of them.

She didn't ask questions. Louise didn't ask questions. She just nodded and went back to her shopping.

Ray pushed a bicycle down the road that ran behind his mother's house. Maria walked beside him. The sun was bright. The trees lined the road — palm trees and oak trees and things Ray couldn't name, trees that grew in the wet soil and threw their shadows across the road in long, thin lines.

Light came through the leaves. It landed on Maria's face. It landed on Ray's hands. It landed on the ground between them, where the road was made of cracked asphalt and small green weeds pushing through the cracks.

Nothing changed. Nothing would change.

Ray kept washing cars. Maria kept cleaning houses. Frank kept driving. The sun came up every day.

Ray pushed the bicycle. His mother walked beside him. The trees stood on both sides of the road. The light came through the leaves.

That was it.

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: