Twenty-one

“You going to eat that turkey sandwich?” Drew said.

“It’s all yours.” We were sitting in the bleachers near the playing field. I had no appetite. Ever since I’d run out of the diner that morning, my stomach had been churning.

“Joanie was over to the house last night.” He ate the sandwich fast and crammed a cupcake into his mouth. “She gave me back my class ring. Threw it at me, threw it right at me.” Suddenly he stood up and shouted at a couple of guys out on the field, who were tossing a ball back and forth. “Get your arm into it, Matheson, you dumb ass!”

He was quiet for a moment, then burst out, “You know what Joanie said? ‘I’m fed up with sharing you with a dozen other girls. I can’t believe anything you say!’ Hell! I never lied to her. My hand to God. My mom and Dawn were downstairs in the shop, but Deirdre heard everything … my adorable sister. She said I bloody got what I bloody deserved. What am I supposed to do now, Pete?”

“You mean about Joanie?”

“What else, man! Are you listening or not?”

“I’m listening, I’m listening.” But I was thinking about the agents.

“I tried to give Joanie back the ring this morning. She wouldn’t take it, she wouldn’t talk to me …”

“God, Drew, I don’t know what to tell you. What I know about girls—”

“You’ve got a girl friend now. Are you having problems with her? I know you’re not, because you don’t have crazy girls calling you up and screwing things up for you.”

“Why don’t you disconnect your phone?”

“I really appreciate that advice, Greenwood. Try again.”

“That’s what you have to do. Try again. You never know till you try. Don’t give up so easily, Gregoretti.” The old clichés poured out like water from a faucet.

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Way to go.” I sank back against the bleacher. What had I said this morning? Had I said anything I shouldn’t have? What I remembered most distinctly were their names and their faces. Jay Beckman. Hollywood hatchet face. Frank Miner. Friendly eyed as a dog.

Later that afternoon, not far from school, I saw a blue car with two men in it. I turned into the nearest store, walked through and out the back door. I took a different route home. But then, near the Interstate loop, I saw a man standing at a window on about the fourth floor in the Flannagan Building, staring straight down at me. One of them. Later I asked myself, Why would they put an agent in a building that they couldn’t possibly have known I was going to pass? The answer was—they wouldn’t. But at that moment, fear was stronger than logic. I ducked out of sight, my stomach churning again.

The worst moment came when I stopped in a market to buy milk. As I reached into the cooler, a man brushed briskly past me. Frank Miner! I must have groaned. He turned and looked at me for a moment. He was younger than the agent, shorter, fatter. Didn’t look like him at all.

By the time I got home, I’d worn myself out seeing agents on every corner. I turned on the TV, then turned it off, then turned it on again. I couldn’t think, couldn’t make up my mind about anything. Should I tell Gene? I needed support. But why worry him? Well, he should know. Still, wasn’t it my problem? I went round and round, but when Gene walked in, I stopped thinking and blurted it out.

“They’ve found me, Gene, they were waiting for me this morning when I left the house.”

He went into the kitchen and filled the teapot.

“Agents, Gene. Two agents. They called me by my real name. They were parked across the street, a blue car, but then they left it and just walked with me.” Why wasn’t he jumping up and down? How about a little reaction? Some fear and panic, to keep me company if nothing else. “Did you hear me? Did you hear what I said?”

He poured boiling water into the teapot. “Of course, I heard you.” His voice was as even as usual. “What exactly did they ask you, Pete?”

“They just said they wanted to talk to me. The short one, Frank Miner, he was chatty, pretty nice, but the tall one—the way he looked at me—real cold blue eyes, and tough. He asked me when I’d heard from Laura and Hal. And the way he said their names—”

Gene carried his tea into the dining room. “So they’ve found us.” He sat down, took a sip of his tea, then got up and pulled down all the window shades, even though it was still light outside. That was the first sign I had that he was disturbed. He peered around the drawn shade. “Did you say a blue car?”

My heart jumped. “Are they out there?”

“No … no … just the usual traffic.” He looked at me. “This morning?” he said, as if he were only now beginning to understand. He sat down close to me and whispered, as if Miner and Beckman were crouched under the plank table, taking down every word. “I used to worry about it all the time, that they’d connect me to Laura, come for you … I knew it was an advantage that I had a different last name than Laura, but still I worried. Do you think they knew all along and were just waiting … but for what? Why now? Jesus. What are they going to do, come around and grill us all? Me, Martha—”

“Martha doesn’t know anything, she doesn’t know about me.”

“That’s right, she’s not involved. And for that matter, what could they find out from me? I know nothing about Laura and Hal’s politics except what I read in the paper, the same as anybody else.”

He got up and started walking around. “I still remember reading about that explosion in the lab and thinking it was just one of those awful things, a tragedy, a freak accident … that’s what the newspapers said at first. And then later that day or the next day the news came out, a bomb had been planted and two people—”

I pushed away from the table, scraping the chair legs across the floor. “Why bring this up now? What good is that? We have to think, not chew over the past like a couple of cows.”

“So it just happened this morning?” he said again. And then, going back to the past, driving me mad with his meanderings, he said in that same melancholy, perplexed voice, “When you first came to me, every time a stranger walked into the office, I thought, Uh huh! Here we go. I knew just what I was going to say to them. ‘Look, I don’t know anything about my sister’s politics. That’s not my thing in life.’ I had an entire speech. I used to practice—gestures, everything. But no one bothered us. And a year passed and another year, and I thought, Okay, that’s it. Right. They’re not coming.” He frowned. “Pete, are you sure they were who they said they were?”

“Who else would they be? Who else would know my real name? Pax, they said. Pax Connors.”

“Did you have a good look at their identification?”

“No,” I said reluctantly. Frank Miner had flashed his card in front of my eyes—now you see it, now you don’t—and I hadn’t had the presence of mind to ask to look at his ID again. “He opened his wallet or card case, whatever it was, showed it to me, and put it away before I could check it out.”

“Just like TV,” Gene said. “Just like TV.” For some reason, the way he said it struck both our funny bones. We started laughing, laughing so hard we couldn’t stop. Every time our eyes met, we started all over again.

“Now I mean it this time,” Gene said sternly. “I am stopping. This is no laughing matter.” We pounded our fists on the table and laughed as hysterically as two little kids.