46

There was nothing to clear a man’s head like a drive in the country.

About five o’clock, just as everybody else was settling into the Miss America Parade and all that silliness on the Boardwalk, Wayne headed out of town in his red 1968 Mustang, a car he dearly loved. He’d thought for a few minutes about taking a rental car, the Mustang being such a standout, but then, nobody in Atlantic City ever noticed anything anyway, and the people where he was headed, well, there weren’t many of them in the first place, and in the second place, they never talked.

Besides, he didn’t want to waste the money. Now that he was out of a job—well, it might not be long before Michelangelo Amato took him on, probably wouldn’t be, but you could never tell. All that talk Mr. F had done about bad times—who knew how far that might go? Maybe even the mob had more than it could handle, had fallen on lean days. Though he didn’t think so.

Anyway, Dean said Michelangelo wasn’t mob. Michelangelo was connected, he kept saying, like he thought he was hot stuff, talking the lingo.

And anyway, even if everybody had to suck it in, including connected dudes, whatever that meant, Wayne knew he had plenty of resources when it came to hard times. In fact, with this little trip, he was hoping to kill two birds with one stone.

First, he had the business in the trunk to take care of. Second, he was scouting for where he might set up a home site, push came to shove. Wayne was good at living off the land. Hadn’t that been exactly what he was doing when Mr. F found him?

Wayne looked out the window at a church sign. Drive in and drop off all your suffering with us. We’ll wash it clean. Well, that was a sign, all right. A sign he needed to stop thinking about Mr. F. That was over. Dead. Done and gone.

Back to his plan, that was what he’d been doing when Mr. You Know Who found him. Living in that tree house. Living off the fat of the land and what he could lift from the FrankFair, Grand Union, and Radio Shack. Depending on his innate skills and his innate worth. He had learned even more skills since then. And he had a lot more cash. Yeah, Wayne figured, looking to be careful he didn’t miss the turnoff in Egg Harbor City from White Horse Pike onto the Egg Harbor-Green Bank Road, he’d be just fine, thank you very much, Mr. You Know Who.

He knew his way around. Especially this area. One of the things Wayne loved about it was how, 30 minutes from Atlantic City, headed inland like you were going to Philly, you could hang a right and be in wilderness in no time flat.

The Pine Barrens were one of the last true wildernesses in this country. The size of Grand Canyon National Park, 650,000 acres, with a population density of fifteen people per square mile. In one area of the Barrens, over 100,000 acres, there were only 21 people. Wayne had not only visited, he’d read up.

He could tell you that the eastern part of the Barrens—where he was driving his Mustang now, along a dirt road that was two tracks in the sand with brush growing up between them—was covered with dwarf forests as far as a man could see. Over to the west and north stood oaks and pines and tall white cedars. It was tannins and other organic waste from the cedars that gave the dark color to the water that flowed so freely here. In summer, the water, while uncontaminated as pure rainwater or melted glacial ice, was so cedar-dark with those tannins you couldn’t see the bottom of the riverbeds.

Wayne was driving toward one of them, Bass River, right now.

The car was bouncing against scrub-oak boughs and blueberry bushes. Running over rattlesnakes. There were lots of rattlers in the Pines. Probably lots more snakes than people, but they all made out.

In the old days, it used to be that Pineys, that’s what the folks who lived here called themselves, lived completely off the land—the way Wayne liked to do. They didn’t have FrankFairs, Grand Unions, and Radio Shacks, but they had the sphagnum moss to sell to florists, wild blueberries, cranberries, cordwood, and they made charcoal. They sold holly, mistletoe, pine, and greenbrier for Christmas decorations. They gathered wildflowers in the spring, made birdhouses out of cedar slabs, sent box turtles to Philadelphia to keep the snails out of the cellars.

Some of those things remain. Pine Barrens cranberries, commercially grown, furnish a third of the country’s supply. Charcoal’s gone. Wild game has declined. Many Pineys now have jobs outside.

But they come back and stay home, given the choice. They love their wild land. And they love to be left alone. Like Wayne.

In fact, Wayne thought, maybe he wouldn’t even call on Michelangelo Amato with his Grand Plan.

Maybe he’d just tuck in here and become a Piney with the rest of them. Build him a shack. Or reclaim one that was falling down. There were plenty. Nobody would care.

He’d met some Pineys. They were good people. Quiet. Shy. Though once he’d sat with some old men and shared their food, and boy, could they tell some tales.

There were those who said Pineys were all touched in the head because of inbreeding, but those people didn’t know what they were talking about. Pineys just liked to mind their own business.

There was a lot to be said for that.

Now if Dougie had learned to do that, instead of telling tales on him to Mr. F all the time, he wouldn’t be in the pickle he was in now.

Wayne kept bumping along until he reached Bass River, then pulled the Mustang right up to the edge of it. Dark as ink, the water was. You couldn’t see a thing through it.

He turned off the ignition, opened the door, stepped outside. Wayne lifted his arms to the sky. Christ, the air smelled so sweet. It was great to be away from that stinking city. You wouldn’t think that a town that was right up on the Atlantic Ocean could smell bad, but AC did. It smelled of rot, sweat from the gamblers, the stink of unwashed kids.

Dougie was going to start to smell, too. He’d smell up the Mustang if Wayne didn’t get him out of there.

Wayne whirled in a circle, took a look around. Miles and miles of deep forest. Nobody in sight but just us critters. He opened the trunk, and, holding his breath, dragged Dougie’s blanket-wrapped body out. Then it didn’t take but a minute to roll him over and over. Kerplop. Dougie dropped beneath the surface of the dark water.

Just like Kurt Roberts, somewhere around here. Up a few miles, maybe. Wayne had taken a different road that time.

He felt bad about contaminating the water, but, hell. There was lots of water. It wouldn’t take long before it ran clean again.

Wayne dug in his shirt pocket, lit a cigarette, and took a deep drag. He’d stopped smoking a long time ago, but every once in a while, times like this, a job well done, an unfiltered smoke was just the ticket.

It had been simpler this time. With Kurt, well, he’d wanted to show Mr. F the job well done. So there’d been the video camera he’d had to set up. It was hard to find the right height to get everything he wanted in the picture. He’d wasted a lot of time fooling with the tripod. And, somehow, the camera, all that high tech stuff, well, it just didn’t feel right, here in the Barrens.

But this time, this time Wayne had done good. He’d done perfect.