I was a bastard, there’s no debate. My dad met my mama on a bus he was riding downstate to turn himself in for some resale of stolen property. When the state coughed him out six months early, she surprised him at the gate, handed him a just-weaned baby, and climbed into a Buick nobody’s seen since. As for my grandfather, he exchanged gunfire with his wife’s relations more than once. And my Uncle Burquet got locked in a mine with a girl named Claude McKinna: that’s where all the twins came from.
It was said no man and woman in my family ever got together right. I never made no promises on it, but when I was young I figured I could do better. If I just held out, maybe there’d come a girl for me. I didn’t know what she’d look like. I imagined she’d sort of drop down, like Wonder Woman without the wrestling tights, and something would send us the same way. I wasn’t never good at waiting. But I would wait for that.
I was nineteen and a half, approximately, when I met Mike Mark. That was his name, Mike Mark, like two tires going over a seam. He’s dead now, as everyone knows, died last November in Orange. My name is Farquhar. No one can say it.
Mike Mark robbed banks. When I met him, he was robbing a bank, the Wachovia where I was making the afternoon deposit for the one real job I’d ever had. I was first in the line when it happened.
He had a gun, didn’t swing it around much. Wore a mask—who doesn’t? Any consternation I felt, it was minor; this fellow had a handle on his business. One thing, he got everyone sat down in the easy chairs, even the old guard, with his six-gun he was too shaky to aim. The chairs were low and square and mossy green, and people sat back and crossed their legs and sighed, like they’d just got home after a hell of a day, now they got to see a bank robbed, front row. The only ones standing were him and those two cashiers and me. Simple instructions, no heart-attack hollering Everyone get the fuck on the floor. Mike Mark told you what to do like you would want to do that anyway.
I stood in line where I’d been, while the two cashiers cleaned out the drawers.
He noticed me. “Any reason you’re standing up, boss?”
“I got twenty minutes only to make this deposit,” I said, “or I catch three kinds of hell. So if it’s all the same to you, I’ll keep my place in line.”
Not that it grieved me if Mount Rogers Sandwich Masters lost its lunchtime take. It might do to get robbed in this set of circumstances, of money that none of it was mine.
For a moment he looked at me and the whole bank looked at me. I flared the yellow zipper deposit sack out from my leg innocently, only so he’d see what I was talking about. Bright yellow. I guess I was open to whatever happened.
He saw and came to relieve me of it. All this is true, it’s on the CCTV. “How much you got in here?”
Someone asks you a question, most times it don’t matter what your answer is. They listen how you answer. They watch you answering. My dad used to say that. I never held with my dad much. But he was a man who answered the hell out of things.
Loudly I declared, like it was money I had made myself, “Five hundred thirteen dollars.”
“You certain of that?”
“That’s the number the sumbitch counting it said.”
He nodded and slipped the zippered sack inside his jacket. A vest in there, black, armored—he could drop whatever he wanted and still have both hands free.
“Thank you, brother. You ain’t got to stand in line no more. Head on out if you want.”
“Me myself, I’ll stay for the police report. I won’t do you wrong,” I said. “I’m still on the clock.”
“I got you,” said Mike Mark. I saw his eyes make sure of his crowd in their chairs, cut back to the cashiers finishing their bagging. “Tell them officers I looked a lot like George Strait, will you?”
“Will do,” I said, and he took his money and split. I heard a set of tires slicing out of the lot, didn’t move to look. The people seemed to know it was finished now, but didn’t want to give up their seats. The elderly guard let out a snore and woke himself up.
I got back in the Mount Rogers Sandwich Masters delivery Jeep and it drove itself, finding the little roads as the green mountain got bigger and bigger.
“I clocked you out some time ago,” Harvey Kitts reassured me. “I had to, been making sandwiches in your place two hours now.” A bit of provolone clung to the weedy moustache he grew. “You’re gonna pay every dollar back,” he threatened.
“You can’t do me like that. He robbered the bank. The police took a police report.”
“I’ll see that report,” said Harvey Kitts. He was a big man, unpleasantly curious. He was a well-known failure in these parts. But the sandwich shop was working, and it was like he couldn’t stop searching for what would stop him this time. “Till I do, you owe the shop five hundred twenty-six dollars. I’ll take it out of your next five paychecks.”
“Five hundred thirteen dollars. You counted it yourself.”
“And thirteen more for the sack.”
“Fuck you, Mr. Harvey,” I declared. “You ain’t taking nothing out of nothing.”
This made him mad as hell; nobody but nobody called him his first name. “You said it right.” Little spit fireworks dwindled over the cheese slices. “You ain’t got nothing to take because you ain’t nothing. Get out of here.”
“I will,” I said, but I didn’t go anywhere, chewing my long-earned belligerent minute. I saw my green apron hung up by his office. All I was leaving behind was my dad’s old copy of Guns & Ammo.
That’s when the same two detectives came in, wanting another word. Harvey Kitts changed then, from wanting me out of his store to saying the detectives needed his permission to ask me questions, even if I was off the clock and quit. I took off my Welcome Sandwich Masters My Name Is pin and pinned it into the You Found Virginia’s Tallest Sandwiches banner hanging over the counter, and enjoyed watching the detectives tell my boss it wasn’t none of his if they questioned me or not. Two minutes later I was in the back of their Ford, answering the same questions. Something about me they hadn’t liked. Something about me seemed cockeyed.
The black detective explained, “Everyone say the man don’t look a goddamn thing like George Strait.”
“I don’t know, something about the jaw,” I said.
“Do you, uh, get along with your Mr. Kitts?” the white detective asked. The black one chewed spearmint gum and twitched his nose now and then, like he was picking up a smell that he couldn’t place.
“I just quit that sumbitch, so draw your own conclusions.”
“Son, I can’t say I admire your attitude,” the black detective said.
“Brother, you ain’t the first,” I replied.
* * *
I had the feeling it was maybe the most important day of my life: I got bank-robbered, I said fuck Harvey Kitts, I decided I’d rather be a cockeyed eyewitness than a sandwich jerk the rest of my days.
I started working pit crew for my cousin Ray Jones. His real name was Ray Farquhar-Jones, but he dropped the Farquhar two years back. He claimed it was because my dad’s dad was a rapist and an asshole and did his mother wrong, but more likely it required more painting Farquhar-Jones on a race car than just Jones. I couldn’t deny any what he said about my grandpa Jenkins Farquhar, but if Jenkins Farquhar hadn’t made his way with Betsy Brown, I told him, wouldn’t be no Ray Jones racing sportsman cars, here or nowhere. “Sometimes them dirty apples is the only apples you got,” I said, “so get up out of my face.”
Ray Jones pulled his own V-8s cheap from a yard over the mountain, and did fabrication on his backyard slab, so he raced twenty weekends a year on not much. Had an old trailer he won in a bet, and his Dodge Ram Hemi with the X-cab to pull. I worked his pits and tires to make a little cash, two seasons I guess. I didn’t know much about race cars, didn’t love the noise and the smoke of it, floating like a brown skid mark beneath the lights. Mostly I handled the gas can and fetched Ray the wrench and, since I didn’t drink, I could drive home through the night, a half-case of Keystone cans in the back seat with Ray, and he saved the price of the motel and the Shoney’s breakfast it took for him to sleep it off. That price saved was the money he paid me, more or less, and his wife Curtsy was happier, comparatively, ’cause I got him home safe.
“You’re a godsend, Far,” she would say, putting her hand somewhere up on the back of my hand where it left a little charge, like she’d passed me some kind of chiggers she had.
Wasn’t long before Ray’s drinking got out ahead of him a little bit, like we’d get to the track, set up and practice, but by the time heats came around, he’d have a mountain of Keystone cans telling on him. The track stewards found out, and Ray got DQed a couple times. Word got around: Ray had to slow down drinking or think of something. What he thought of was him taking over the pits and me driving the car. I was the real driver in the family, he said, the second coming of Ricky Rudd.
I was fine being suddenly a race car driver. I drove well, always could. Ray had one of the better cars out there, but he never won a heat that I knew about, approached prize money mostly when other guys crashed each other or ran their engines out. Me, I went top three in heats pretty steady, ran second in the feature at Shenandoah my second time out.
Didn’t bother me the car still said Ray on the side and Ray still paid me like his pit man. What else was I going to do? I’d tried to plumb but didn’t make journeyman, and the armed forces didn’t want none of me on account of one school guidance counselor I never met. I was twenty-one now. If you asked me who I was, I was a goddamn race car driver. If you asked me any question at all, my tongue it was ready. I set about making myself a name, as someone who’d battle you in the corners.
***
Then one night at a little half-mile right down the road, I had a bad wreck. The right rear wheel came off. It didn’t wobble, didn’t warn, but all of a sudden it sheared the studs and went zooming off and the goddamn car was a rocking horse with a broken rail and you could balance the weight maybe if you kept going right. Thing is, in racing, go left is all you can do. It was Ray’s best car, the yellow number 88 I’d run at Shenandoah. It had just the right slip, you could throw it to a slide with just a tap and a yank as you entered the turn. It was like riding a good horse, a horse that knew what you wanted and wasn’t too old to give you some, a horse that wanted a little bit itself.
So the weight tipped and then all the tires slid and I went round once and smacked the wall, hopped and came down sideways, all this goddamn sheet metal scraping down the straightaway like a hundred grinders at once. The engine was still full out because I’d stomped on both pedals, I stomped the whole floor; I didn’t let off till the car quit sliding. A pack of three cars went by me just like three kids, that’s what I remember, three humming sweaty boys racing for a pitcher of root beer, just racing back to the line. The yellow lights came on around the track, and Ray’s car made a sound like it was thinking about rolling over, but it stayed up on its side.
I watched the brake lights, the three cars heading into the turn. The outside wall was above me, the infield grass below, the pavement eighteen inches beneath my cage and the sky damp and shit-brown over my left shoulder. In my head my heart and blood were pounding. But I wasn’t scared. Up and down the stands, everyone was watching me. Just before something ends, that’s when you see you love it, that it is beautiful. Hanging over the track, the floodlights throwing three, four shadows off of everything, spreading out every which way like you could be all those places at once.
Maybe that’s why I never heard the tires screech. They say I put my head back and braced, and that saved me, because the 21 car was coming hard when it hit and blew apart Ray’s yellow 88, axles whipsawing free and the metal peeling like a candy wrapper as I tumbled down the front straightaway. I closed my eyes till it was over, though tumbling sideways and thrill-ride flying, you lose your sense of over. It might never be over. Or it might be over already.
***
The track techs were brothers, bumpers of fat lining their brows, like padding on a catcher’s mitt. One had a moustache and the other didn’t.
“You all right, bud?” said the brother with the moustache.
I had come to rest upside down. “Great,” I said. “How come there are two of you? What happened to his moustache?”
The two brothers looked at each other and the one without the moustache began to laugh first. In that moment I could see: he had always been the one without the moustache. This was how their parents told them apart. I could see their life stories.
I twitched my arms and legs, tried to count pieces. I didn’t think I’d broken anything but everything buzzed, like lightning had hit me.
The lights around the outside of the track shone red now. There was a picture in the paper of me in the cage and the wreckage trail behind it. I later learned that the photographer wasn’t but four years old.
“What’s the name of that fellow that hit me?”
“Oh, twenty-one,” said the one with the moustache. “Yeah, good on the gas. Not so much on the steering wheel.”
***
Of course we rode the same ambulance. They strapped us on backboards in case of anything. I wouldn’t have thought there were two backboards in the whole county. The paramedic seemed happy enough to ride up front.
“Showing your virules are stable,” he said.
“Vitals?” said the other driver, but the paramedic had already closed the door.
I knew I’d just about got killed.
“Sorry about that, boss,” the other driver said. He had banged his head, had it all trussed up in ice packs, like an organ kept cold for a transplant. “That your car we blew up back there?”
“My cousin’s.”
“What you doing stopped where you was?”
“Wheel come off. What were you doing still hauling ass?”
“I burnt my brakes out five laps back. Just hoping I could finish. But I ain’t gonna drive anymore, starting tonight. That was bad judgment, I can’t deny, and I don’t have the eyesight you young fellows do. Tell the truth, I was only racing to learn to drive better.”
“Learn to drive better,” I said, picking this through like someone had asked me to eat a plate of rocks.
“In real life,” he clarified.
“In real life? What you do, long haul?”
In half a minute he’d got me off wanting to kill him. Now I was inquiring after his day job. I was always thinking about getting some day job myself. But most of my life hadn’t seen it.
“I know you,” he said. But upcountry where I’m from, people say that. Someone says it every day.
“I’d say you do, personally. Seeing as you just drove a car up my ass.”
“I met you in a bank one time.”
“In a bank?”
“Five hundred thirteen dollars.”
I started laughing. I remembered him then, and for the first time since the tangle on the straightaway I felt the bruise in my body, the black bloom of it. I was going to hurt tomorrow.
“Son, you like to drive?” he said. “You any good at it?”
I turned my head under the straps, which it hurt to do, and studied him, masked in ice like he’d been masked in a Lone Ranger mask the first time. He didn’t look nothing like George Strait.
I said, “Better than you.”
***
He lived eight miles down from my cousin Ray’s where I’d taken the bedroom over Ray’s garage, where his mother-in-law used to live. Curtsy’s mom’s things were still up there, and a few of Curtsy’s too. Curtsy used to ask if it bothered me, her old scrapbooks all quilted up like May Day aprons on the shelf over the sink. “It don’t bother me, Curtsy,” I’d say, and she’d look at me with her flashlight eyes, searching me out for a liar. I wasn’t a liar. I didn’t mind her scrapbooks jutting out up there.
They were from when she was younger, bits of newspaper or programs from plays and dances at her high school over the mountain, snapshots of pretty girls from ten years back, everything from ten years back, when she was a pretty girl too. A sizable gap between then and now that wasn’t explained, but I guess it didn’t need any explaining. Nor any of my asking about it either, when she stood behind my chair, hands on my shoulders ’cause we was family now, asking me how I felt.
Truth, I wasn’t too good. My concussion stuck around. It used to be hell getting up early, now I could barely stagger around in the afternoon. My skull felt like someone had prized it open and laid a couple shovel blades over my brain, keeping everything out. Just one hit. My dad played football and he fought bareknuckle down in Roanoke back in the day, and he wrapped a few trucks around telephone poles in his life, and I don’t think he’d ever had a concussion in his life. Barely even a knot on the head. Or so he would tell you. So he told me. I don’t know how much to credit the things he told me. I think these days about the things he didn’t tell, what they might have been.
Ray, he was kind, me living out of his kitchen, his wife rubbing my shoulders. He didn’t blame me for wrecking his yellow 88 car but once, and that was the beer talking, mostly. He spent his time out on his slab, doing repair and tune-ups, building up a new 88. Maybe he’d start driving again, he said, but that was the beer talking too.
Curtsy Jones’s scrap- and yearbooks that showed how pretty she was: they weren’t bothering me. She was bothering me. Her mother’s Farberware with the flaking coat was bothering me. But nothing bothered me more than those ten years missing, years she’d lived without saving a thing. I was that age now, inside those ten years, and I had nothing but a headache. When it went, Mike Mark came to fetch me, and it wasn’t but a gym bag full of clothing I took. I was basically like a child, ready to go.
***
So I became, for a time, a bank robber’s driver. Accomplice. Apprentice. Whatever you’d call it. It ain’t like we made me out a badge.
He put me up across the road, another mother-in-law apartment. Everybody in Virginia had them. I learned to cook eggs and cook a chicken in the electric frypan. “You can take two eggs a day and a chicken every week, starting Monday,” said the lady, with whom I had not exchanged names. “It’s in the rent already. It’s the board.” I looked out the window then, saw the chickens down there, cracked my knuckles. Same Farberware.
Mike Mark’s companion was named Cassie. At first I thought her his wife. Then girlfriend. She was neither. But I’d never seen devotion like that between a male and a female before. Inseparable. One time in school I had to write on Romeo and Juliet, which I hadn’t read, just watched the movie, most of the parts on YouTube in the library, half asleep the morning the paper was due. Then I looked up ‘love’ in the Random House dictionary. ‘Love’ was a long entry. I wrote my paper about thirteen different things love meant, and here and there I tossed in a line from the play. My teacher loved it. Best paper you ever wrote, she said. Gave me a B+.
I went to the library every time after that, trying to catch the same magic. Never did. But watching Mike Mark and Cassie wasn’t a dictionary definition of what love was. It was like watching someone invent it in a lab. Even when something bubbled over and blew up, it got cleaned up, they took notes. She walked him back through it. I gave them some distance. Something that rare, I wasn’t getting in the way.
This old fellow, Harrison, lived in the basement with his saws. He built custom cabinets in a county where no one needed custom cabinets, the cabinets they had worked just fine. The main floor was Mike Mark and Cassie’s, but there was only one kitchen, so Harrison came through all the time. He had his Mason-jar whiskey and his big pick-up. It was his house after all and he was a mountain we had to find ways around. We indulged him his trespassing. He indulged us our beers and hiding all the money in his linen closet, in a fireproof safe that Mike Mark had bolted right down through the joists—it weighed a good five hundred pounds. Harrison always told stories on Mike that ran half like a boast and half like a curse. “I saw this boy steal a mailbag from a mailman once,” he said. “December too, all them Christmas envelopes.”
“Aw, no I didn’t,” Mike Mark would say. “You got that story wrong. All them envelopes got delivered, every one.”
As bank robbers go, we had our routine. Mike Mark handled the inside. I drove. Cassie rode up front. She would hold the headrest, turned around, talking to him. I wanted to tell her not to ride that way, that if we hit anything she’d wreck her neck. But I didn’t dare speak up to Cassie much. She had bright orange hair and she scared me a little.
We hit a bank about every week that fall. Upstairs at Harrison’s, we’d have meetings. Mike Mark told us how it would go, and we’d pace it off on the maps. Then he’d ask if we had any questions, which Cassie never had any questions.
“How many banks you robbed so far, anyway?”
Mike Mark ducked his head to look out through the back window at Harrison standing looking at the mountains, a small white mountain himself. “I don’t worry about it.” He said crisply, “How many banks you robbed?”
“None,” I said. “And I’m worried about it already.”
“That’s the difference,” Mike Mark said.
You see bank robbers in a movie: car rolls up, three or four guys leap out, running like they’re fighting a fire, in fast, out fast, hit and run. Not Mike Mark. Before he walked into a bank we’d sit sometimes outside for half an hour. Like, meditating. I thought it was wrong, crazy; I thought that’s how you got caught. “No,” Mike Mark said, “you don’t want to rush it. You want a chance to watch people move. Makes you relax.” He glanced me over. “You ever rob a place before? Store, church, anything?”
“Me rob a church?” I said. “I’m the kind of people churches rob.”
He touched his lips. Mike Mark, he used to be a smoker. It still ran through his body, how he’d bend a few fingers together, pull on something no one else could see.
“You are at that,” he said. “You understand, we’re a kind of a church, the three of us. We run on faith. And prayer.”
“You’re the preacher,” I said.
“I ain’t but the office manager,” said Mike Mark. “Cassie, she’s the priest.”
That made me the bus driver, I guessed. We waited around the corner from the bank. This was once a farm town, now a yard sale town. Big mint-green water tower with the graffiti painted over, the name of the town swabbed out too. A pair of little boys played in the yard, whacking each other with a hollow yellow plastic bat. Neither seemed too unhappy about it. Nor did they hesitate taking their turns.
“See do they have any two-dollar bills,” said Cassie. “Christmas is coming.”
“Right!” said Mike Mark. He pocketed his pistol in his light fall coat with the vest underneath, and he went. In the long minutes after, Cassie searched the radio for a song she liked. Then she sat still and did a crossword in her lap, in fine-tip ink, never looking for nothing. We were both keyed up and pretending not to be. Myself, I had to keep from staring out at everything. I could see an old, old man, sitting on the stoop beyond the two boys, perfectly still.
A church. A bunch of prayers and rites and sins and devils one had to learn. We listened to the end of ‘Tell Me Something Good’. The two boys tired at last and went in the house. Somebody hollered. Mike Mark came back.
I said, unable to rein in my nerves any longer, “You took a while.”
“Them goddamn kids,” Cassie said.
“That’s right,” said Mike Mark. “Go.”
I moved the car out from the curb, and we all buckled in. It was so calm and slow. Honestly, it didn’t figure to me like he’d even entered the bank. “This wasn’t the place to park,” he said. “Not in front of them two little boys playing. They were gonna remember this. This car. Me. They remember everything. And Cassie. You’re too pretty for this town,” he added.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Not your fault,” Mike Mark said pleasantly, though it was. I’d picked the space out. He’d hired me on so easy, like there was nothing I had to know.
“Want me stop some other place and we line it up again?”
“No need.” Mike Mark reached inside the vest, grabbed a handful of something, tossed it out the window into the wind. When it hit the street it exploded in a pop of velvety red. I almost screamed.
“Dye pack?”
“It was buzzing at me,” Mike Mark explained.
***
Different towns, different banks, different instructions. Stay in place or drive around. He’d jump in outside the bank, or we’d pick him up down the street, once on a ladies’ bicycle, once at the Sonic. One time I got lost, other side of the tracks as a Norfolk Southern passed by, but he found me there. We watched each other across the flatbeds until the last car cleared.
The road away, different every time. I knew the Piedmont from driving sandwiches, pizzas. Some rides we took fast. Sometimes we loitered along in plain sight. Once he got out all at once on a curve. “Go on,” he commanded.
“What?”
“I hear them,” he said, descending the ditch, getting invisible. A mile down, Cassie and me hit the roadblock. They asked us had we seen anything. We said sorry, we had not. Stopped for a cheeseburger, picked up change off the floor. Cassie told me to keep going. Mike Mark got home late with a nice old lady. In between time, he’d robbed a dollar store too.
“I’ll go in with you,” I volunteered. “Some time.”
Mike Mark said, “Mr. Farquhar, that ain’t your job.”
Only once did they have us for sure—it was a brand-new Ford with dual searchlights and heavy suspension. I had a Subaru that bounced up the mountain nicely in the twilight; sunset was coming earlier and earlier. Behind us the white Ford tracked up the dirt road steady as a bug. “God damn,” moaned Cassie, and we headed toward the summit, me crouched down steering, Cassie and Mike Mark braced against the jostling. All of a sudden Mike Mark said, “Run up left off the road and stop once you clear the last post of that fence.”
“So what? They can catch us on foot?”
“You ain’t got no other choices,” said Mike Mark. “I thought you said you knew this road.”
“I do,” I said, but this fast, sweating myself, nothing looked familiar. “How am I gonna know where the fence stops?”
“Concentrate, boss,” said Mike Mark. “Slow down. Use your eyes. Let him get close, don’t worry.” But the Ford was already close, red and blue lights splitting the air.
I wanted to vomit. I saw the fence cut away just below the ridge and there was something, maybe a two-track, just past the last fencepost. No time to ask questions. I jerked the wheel left and we cleared the fencepost then the car dug in like a groundhog and stopped. Not good at all, but it left the cop Ford nowhere to go but straight ahead. We held still and dark as a rootball as it plowed by. Nowhere to go but through that last line of barbed wire across the peak.
It wasn’t a road we’d found. It was a manure pit. A sheep stood across the fence, studying me.
The cop, he hung in air for a moment, then disappeared, down the back side of the mountain where there was no road.
Mike Mark added, surprising me always, “I happen to know there’s a nice pond down there.”
Cassie said, “Just stocked.”
***
Sometimes I woke knowing it was a dream we were living, that we rode some charm up and down the black roads. What was going to stop us? If you’d asked Mike Mark, he’d have said nothing. He’d say, “We got the exact team you want: me on the people end, Cassie handling the luck and the nerves, and Del Far in the 88 car. A dream team. Better than they got.”
If you’d asked me, I would have said the same. Like a movie, where the luck of true believers never runs out.
But underneath those two gravediggers’ shovels, I wondered what would catch us. A pack of SWATs running Mike Mark down at the car. Or a curve I’d take too fast, too late. Or a tire strip laid in a shadow across the road, cops chuckling behind a tree. I’d spent my life around Virginia country police. Seen them pleasant, seen them vicious.
They’d all be vicious from here on.
One day I showed up when Cassie and Mike Mark were out, and Harrison asked me—I don’t think I’d ever seen him leave the house—“What’s gon’ happen to you, boy, when you get done robbing banks?”
This old feedbag of a man, demanding answers of me. “I suppose we quit when we got enough.”
He guffawed. A guffaw is a laugh that is loud and is boisterous, a dictionary will tell you that. But in Virginia, when a man guffaws right in your face, he is counting you, seeing how you add up. This no-count old bastard with his liver spots and his gut spill.
“How much is that? What’s the number,” he said. Then when I said nothing, he said, “You quit and then what? Huh?”
“Get a job,” I said. “I won’t need to rob no banks then. I’ll do whatever I want.”
“That’s what you say,” said Harrison. “That is what you’ll wonder them long mornings in jail. Like your daddy. What it was, that other thing you supposed to be doing. Because if you were gonna do it, you’d be doing it already.”
I didn’t ask how he knew my daddy. Everyone knows everyone’s daddy.
“Maybe I’ll go back and be a race car driver.”
“Maybe I’ll go back and be quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers,” remarked Harrison. “That’s a job with a salary at least. Driving cars ain’t even a hobby. It’s a habit.”
“Maybe I’ll stay here and learn my trade from you,” I sneered. Right then Cassie and Mike Mark walked in with a case of beer and a bag of sandwiches, Mount Rogers Sandwich Masters.
“Even you ain’t that stupid,” Harrison said. “Though I did get a job this week. Set of kitchen cabinets for a brand new mansion up top of the hill.”
“Why, congratulations, Harrison,” Cassie said. With a stray kindness now and then, she kept him buttered up.
“Giving your boy some guidance counsel,” Harrison said to Mike Mark, by way of parting.
“He’s found his future,” Mike Mark said.
***
I didn’t have the combination. But Mike Mark didn’t mind opening it, showing me the piles of money.
“How much money is it?”
And Mike Mark would say, “Almost enough.”
***
Two months since the concussion. Sometimes I was fine. But not that I’d realize at that moment. The sort of fine I’d remember the next day, when I wasn’t so fine anymore.
“It’s Mike’s birthday,” said Cassie. She was on the sofa, doing a crossword. I guessed she and Mike Mark had already discussed the job before I came over.
“Why you like them crosswords so much?” I asked Cassie, small talk-like.
“I don’t like them at all,” she said, with vehemence. “They’re what I do.”
Took me a while to see that Cassie wasn’t a priest. She was a witch. To see that she was the lifer.
The car was a little Pontiac with a strong V-6. It drove fine, but a little kid had placed stickers all around the doors and roof and dash, funny stickers that clung on like a fat wet scab. “It ain’t like you got to read them all,” Mike Mark said. “Drive it today. We’ll never see it again.”
Today we were going east. It was a little town called Orange. “You driven that town before, you said,” Mike Mark checked me.
“Yep. Used to pick up tires.”
“You know the ways.”
“I do.”
“All right,” said Mike Mark. “Well, I might take a shower.”
I wasn’t one for asking personal questions. My teachers back in school used to note on my reports: Delbert should feel more confident asking questions when he needs help. But I asked one now.
“How you get together with Cassie?”
Mike Mark came close and gazed, like he’d spotted something on my face. “What do you mean, together? We’re roommates,” he said. “Ain’t that clear to you?”
“I mean—” But I didn’t know what I meant. “What’s it mean, handling the luck?”
“Cassie is gifted.” Then, as if he didn’t believe I believed him, he said, “Cassie’s not for me. That girl’s young enough to be my daughter.” He fished a key out of his pocket, checked the writing on the grimy tape. “I am confident we’ll be out on the road by nine-thirty,” he announced.
I went inside, waited on the sofa while Cassie took her shower. Whenever she was done, I’d be ready. I’d had my lean breakfast and gone jogging around Harrison’s yard in my sweatpants, shadowboxing. Though this headache I had, boxing was probably not the best idea.
Harrison knocked twice on the front door once he was already inside. “What are you still doing here? I thought you all were going out somewhere today.” He sat down beside me and the floorboards wheezed like they’d been caught in a lie.
“Might soon,” I mumbled. “Not yet.”
“Sorry about that talk,” said Harrison, picking something off his shirt. “Mikey likes you. He’s my boy, I got to look after his best interests.”
“What do you mean, your boy?”
“What, can’t you see no family resemblance?” Harrison cackled again.
“I’ll be damned.” This weird man who collected rent on these rooms, who thumped around downstairs with his saws and molding and mountain curses.
“It don’t mean anything,” said Harrison. “It’s a fact you ain’t ever gonna outrun, like your birthday, but it don’t mean nothing to nobody unless you throw a party for it.”
“Speaking of which, today’s Mike Mark’s birthday,” I said stupidly, since I had nothing else to say. Like if Harrison was Mike Mark’s father, he wouldn’t know this.
Harrison seemed pleasantly amused. “Well,” he said, “there you go. Y’all doing a job today?”
“I don’t know.”
He chuckled. “How far away is the job you don’t know if you’re doing?”
“Over in Orange.”
“Good answer,” he said. “That’s a fair piece. Drive safe.”
* * *
Mike Mark and I stood up on the back porch together. It was a gray day, the sort of not-quite-dark, not-quite-wet day when something is pushing up the mountain ridge, bringing a storm, colors are dark and oily and the tops of the trees move ever so slowly like a large creature just beginning to wake up, when the leaves close up reveal their ancient spines.
“How come nobody told me you were Harrison’s boy?” I said.
“Why the fuck would I tell you that?” said Mike Mark. “Who told you that?”
There was something red-faced in Mike Mark today. He had some aftershave on, rich and faraway. Maybe he was allergic to it.
“He did,” I said. “Your dad did.”
Mike Mark stared down at Cassie in her thin shoes where she was picking her way over to the smudge-painted Pontiac, through the piedmont mud that never really seemed to dry. He seemed, for once, stuck. Like he’d forgotten why he was keeping this secret, could only remember that he was.
For a moment I was ready to call the job off myself.
Then Mike Mark’s face tightened and he inhaled. He nodded, as if to say: You were born ready, right? Like we were in a band, done tuning. Like the singer has to sing that song, every night. You can’t be Bruce unless you remember ‘Born to Run’.
He’d already let it pass. “We are what we are,” he said.
***
The bank was a sky-gray stone such as crypts are made out of. We parked seven cars beyond. In front of me, one car length, a right turn around a shattered curb, and I’d be on a road behind warehouses. We could catch a low farm road between two wedges of corn.
It went Popeye quick. Mike Mark entered the bank, then barely a minute later, he emerged onto the sidewalk, between that stone and a shiny line of parked cars. I’d been watching the mirror for him. That was my discipline, watching the mirror.
Mike Mark looked up the street like he was waiting on a bus, then craned his neck and waved. A wild, quivering wave, off one side of his body, like he was flagging down invisible taxis all down the street.
“He want us?” I asked Cassie. “What’s that mean?”
She covered her puzzle and turned around. “No. He’s telling us to get going.”
I began to roll the window down, and she hissed, “Do not. Do not roll the window down. Do not let anyone see you looking. Do not.”
“Give me the shotgun. I’m going in.”
“No,” Cassie said. “He wants us gone.”
“Why would he want that?”
“Mike Mark wants what he wants,” Cassie said. She added, “You don’t even know him.”
In the mirror I saw Mike Mark heading back into the bank. We crept out of the gravel.
“How’s he gonna find us?”
Cassie looked back at her puzzle. “All this, all this has been discussed.”
The rites, the sins. The secrets. I didn’t remember anything like this being discussed. But I knew the roads, the land. I had the wheel, not Cassie. On the old two-lanes, I cut back, our reversal of course covered by the sunless gray of the clouds. Came into town the other way.
Out front they had the ambulance, were loading someone in. A gurney, a sheet. A pair of black boots, streaked with alluvial mud.
“What is this? What is this?” Cassie said, just now realizing what I’d done, where I’d brought us. She swiped at me in her fury.
“Maybe it isn’t him,” I said.
In the mirror I saw them shut the door on the ambulance. But they never even turned on the lights.
I took Cassie home.
***
A neighbor stood outside Harrison’s house with a small fire extinguisher lain in his arms like a prize piglet. All four corners of the house were on fire.
“What the hell, you tried to burn up our house?” said Cassie. She went straight past him, went inside.
“He did,” said the neighbor, stirring his hand around in a circle like he was trying to bring the name up out of the mud. “Harrison.”
“You want to try to put it out with that thing?” I asked him.
“Already tried,” said the neighbor. “It’s empty now. I tried with your garden hose but it’s cut.”
Harrison.
“I summoned the County for you.”
“Thank you,” I managed, though a visit from the County was the last thing I wanted right now.
“You might want to fetch out your girlfriend, I guess,” the neighbor said.
“She ain’t my girlfriend,” I said. I ran into the burning house.
Everything was as we’d left it, except the smell of gasoline, flames scaling up the corners and poison curling out of the walls. And the safe closet. Cassie had unlocked the door, but there was nothing there anymore. Harrison had sawed the floor out from below, straight through the joists, a big square gap where the safe had been. We looked down into the basement. The safe had fallen, I guess, landed right on the cabinets he was making for the new mansion up on the hill. Smashed them to bits. But it wasn’t there now.
The next day it came on the news, a man died of a heart attack right in a bank. He had an account. A gun in his pocket. But it’s Virginia. A gun don’t mean nothing till you pull it out.
“What are we gonna do,” said Cassie. But it didn’t sound like a question.
I stood on the other side of the road watching the pumper truck cool down the smoldering timbers of the house where Mike Mark brought us all together. The flares of white water in the dark, the hiss.
The two of us now. I hated her. That winter we went mostway across the country together, made a baby, someone to curse us down the ages. It took months for them to catch us. But to me it felt like years.
That afternoon we searched for Harrison or his truck. We kept to the mountain ridge. Somehow it seemed like the safest place. Somehow we imagined he’d be on it or along it. The sun burnt the clouds off, filled the valleys in green.
Cassie looked out, the sun behind her, momentarily blocking out her face, edging her ruff into gold. We looked down that long road under the nose of the mountain. That straightaway where the trucks coming off the hill let their Jake brakes hammer, and the bikers flashed by like hornets growling in the sun. In a few minutes the sun would duck behind the mountain, begin soaking the road in darkness.
I knew what was waiting for me down there. Cassie rode in the back seat now. Minutes later I stopped the car.
“Give me the shotgun,” I said.
Cassie handed it over. I checked the action. She glanced up through the dusty windshield, recognized the banner.
“The usual,” she said. Then maybe she realized who she was with. We didn’t know each other from anyone. “Turkey and provolone,” she added, small kindness.
But you are who you are. I went inside to see Harvey Kitts one more time. And Cassie bent back to her puzzle, weaving answers together with her fine slashing pen.