IT ALL HAPPENED SO FAST, LIKE A FALL, MICHAEL STUMBLED into the woods; a gigantic blue heron flapped above the tree line, a winged dinosaur, and Michael followed it with his eyes, his pounding, frantic heart. The woods were damp, ten degrees colder than the plowed and leveled world surrounding. Like a church, a Spanish church, a haunted church, an MTV church. The flaming tips of the budding wild apple trees were the candles; the twisted hemlocks were the fourteen stations; the wind was the heavenly choir. He wandered in and in and in, kicking off vines and brambles that grabbed at his legs like the hands of lost souls who lived beneath the soft, leaf-slick rot and renewal of the forest floor.
He let himself get lost. I want to get lost. He wanted to see what happened. Sam used to talk about a guy in an old song called Long Tall Shorty, who wondered where the lights went when the lights went out. Soon, Michael had no idea where the road was. A turn here, a rise there, a detour around a grassy stream. The heron passed again, enormous, pterodactyl, indifferent to Michael below.
An hour or two later: smoke. Just the scent of it, wild, errant, yet a sign of civilization. By now, Michael’s shoes were wet. His knee ached from a quick but wrenching slide down a wet, mossy ledge. He was thirsty. Not scared, not really. Concerned. He had to take a dump. Alone, nevertheless he did not want to drop his pants. Does the Pope shit in the woods? Sam’s joke: Michael remembered Nadia laughing at it, her little Persian hand covering her mouth.
Eventually—darkness was coming in now, bits of the sunset visible through breaks in the trees, stretched out across the west like a twisted bloody sheet—Michael found the source of that smoky smell. The hideaway, the hut, the lean-to, the shack. He waited in the bushes, afraid to approach it. (By now he was becoming afraid.) In a blink of an eye it was night. The shack had rectangles of satin nailed over the windows, except for one that was still glass and where the reflection of the rising moon swam like a creature beneath the ice. A faint glow of what Michael correctly guessed was a kerosene lamp came from the inside. A bright stainless-steel stovepipe ran up the side of the house, and white smoke poured out of its spout like milk from a pitcher.
Softly, boldly, Michael crept close to the house and looked through the window. Inside, a thin, sneaky-looking guy in his forties stood in the middle of the room, holding his body at an odd angle and flapping his arms, while a couple of teenagers, a boy and a girl, watched, laughing. There were candy-bar wrappers on the plank floor; there were clothes, blankets, sleeping bags, and comic books everywhere. The teenaged boy dissolved into a fit of laughter, rolling closer to the girl, who then moved away from him. Michael wanted to be in that house with a sudden and devastating paroxysm of longing—it was as if desire were an exotic poison that accelerated his pulse, closed his throat.
He was looking into the secret hiding place and home sweet home of Walter Fraleigh, who two years before had disappeared from Leyden—people assumed he had gone out west to find his wife, Cindy, who was believed to have run off with Fraleigh’s partner in the swimming-pool business, Jimmy Rugerio.
Michael had been with Fraleigh three or four or maybe it was five nights when Fraleigh, swigging on a bottle of Smirnoff vodka and cracking the swollen knuckles of his otherwise delicate hands, convened his little band of outsiders, after a day of supervising them while they dug an enormous pit in the spring-softened earth, which Fraleigh hoped to use as a repository for his growing cache of stolen goods.
“I feel so close to you guys tonight, I want to tell you something.” The kerosene lamp put a golden glow on his impish face. Even after two years in the woods, there was something dandyish about him. The law of survival of the fittest, which some men go to the woods to re-enact, would be no friend to a Walter Fraleigh. He had the lithe, jittery build of a third-rate jockey on the take, a jailhouse snitch. He looked around the cabin. He smiled. His teeth glinted between his mustache and goatee like a hacksaw in the grass.
And this was the story he told to Michael, and to Carmen and Johnnie, who had been living with him for nearly a year, and with whom he had had uncountable adventures, but of whom, he had quickly confided to Michael, he was getting tired.
“I knew Cindy was fucking my partner and supposedly best friend, Jimmy Rugerio. The only question was what was I going to do about it.” He sucked in some vodka through his whiskers with a sharp, sibilant slurp. “Michael. Move the lamp more to the center, okay? Carmen’s face is in shadows and it weirds me fucking out.”
Michael picked the lamp up by its wire handle. The tall glass chimney radiated heat onto his knuckles. Outside, the tree frogs were peeping off and on like little transistors. He placed the lamp in the dead center of their circle. Its light spread over Carmen’s serene, beautiful face. He could barely look at her, she was so beautiful.
“I used to think about it all the time. I mean, I stayed up nights. Cindy always came home, sometimes half- crocked, and she’d just plop into our bed and be out like a light. She was what you’d have to call a real fucking whore. She lost all respect for her own body and so did I.” He went silent for a moment and then repeated himself, but slowly, with a kind of obvious drama that made Michael suspicious. “And so did I.”
“Your wife was screwing this guy?” asked Johnnie. He was a pale, puffy guy of about nineteen. He had a tattoo of an eagle on his meaty forearm and little stud earrings that said EAT ME. His dark hair was buzz-cut, shorter than a Marine’s; it grew in whorls, and when Michael stared it started to look exactly like a fingerprint.
“That’s right, Johnnie,” said Fraleigh, shaking his head. He winked at Michael. He had decided that he and Michael were intellectual equals, wise men in a world of fools. Somewhere along the way, Fraleigh had developed a habit for reading and learning, and it seemed to have turned him against his own nature, like one of those yappy little apartment house dogs who can’t go out to take a leak without a sweater and booties on. When Michael had first told him that his father was a writer, Fraleigh’s eyes widened, his jaw literally dropped. “The life of the mind,” he’d said, sighing, wringing his hands, cracking his knuckles.
“Getting rid of my lying, thieving partner wasn’t the hard part,” Fraleigh was saying. “I had enough shit on him to put him in jail for twenty years. He was kiting checks, robbing the business, robbing me. I had it all figured out and I had him dead to rights. I mean, BOOM!—I just dropped that motherfucker.” Fraleigh tapped the side of his head, indicating that his weapon had been the intellect.
“So Jimmy Rugerio—he’s out of there. He knows if I don’t slit his throat for fucking Cindy then I am sure as hell going to have him arrested for taking fourteen thousand dollars out of our swimming-pool business. Next, I gotta deal with Cindy.”
Carmen stretched nervously. Her white knit sweater rode up, exposing a band of brown flesh. She checked through the corner of her eye to see if Michael was watching.
“So one day, I don’t know, Jimmy’s been gone about a week. I know for a fact he’s gone out to San Diego, where his sister lives and her husband’s brother is in the swimming-pool business, which of course is a million times better out there anyhow. Jimmy always makes out. But the point is Cindy. Cindy has no fucking idea where Jimmy is—did he go out for a Slurpy or fall off the edge of the world? Not that she seems particularly upset or anything. Cindy has this way. She’s like her mother. But never mind, I’m getting off track.
“I’m waiting for her to crack, just say something. Like ‘Where’s Jimmy these days?’ Or even go out looking for him. Every day she goes to work, driving the school bus, coming home for lunch and a nap, going out again until dinner. She don’t give away a thing. She even has me fooled, if you want to know. Not really. I waited a week and two days. One night I rolled next to her in our bed. We had a waterbed, so she could always hear me coming.”
Fraleigh smiled, as if this were an awfully pleasant memory. Michael’s heart beat in his stomach. The big chunks of wood were popping in the rusted potbelly stove.
Every night it had ended something like this, sitting on the floor with the stove pumping out heat like organ music and Fraleigh talking until they one at a time fell asleep. It was bedtime stories. He talked about the houses they had robbed and the ones they were going to hit next. Or all kinds of high-flying poetic musings about life in these woods and how they, his band of outsiders, were the last real Americans. The next night he told them the story of the book he had just read, Stranger in a Strange Land, told it like a child, with exhausting, undifferentiated detail and a hundred self-interruptions, like “Oh yeah, I forgot the part when….” They slept curled like dogs, and when they awakened—Michael shy, nervous, Johnnie and Carmen politely distant from each other, as if some huge fight had been resolved with an uneasy truce—Fraleigh was right there, making coffee on the potbelly stove top, humming happily, his yellow hair dark from a dunk in the stream and combed straight back so that his pink scalp showed through.
But tonight’s tale would not put them to sleep. Each of them knew from the story’s beginnings that it was going to end in killing. (The life in the forest made the idea of killing easier to take: in the few days that Michael had been there, they had already killed two ducks, a raccoon, and a rabbit. Johnnie had gutted them, shoved sticks through them, turned them slowly over the fire. They were delicious. “I love springtime!” Fraleigh had said, wiping the grease from his beard.)
“So I rolled over to her. We had this signal. I put my hand on her hip and shook her back and forth. But her skin was cold and she moved away from me. Not sleepyish, but like she’s totally pissed off. Like I did something wrong. It made me…” He paused, let them wonder. “It made me crazy.
“I kicked her out of bed and she landed, bang, flat on her back, and when she tries to get up I push her down again, but this time her head cracks against the floor and she’s wild. Cindy had real spirit, I’ll give her that. She was not someone you could just push around. She’s cussing me out, calling me a little faggot. Real sweet stuff. She could really be a little darling. ‘Thank you so much,’ I said to her. ‘That does wonders for my self-esteem.’ And bang, I push her down again. But this time she doesn’t go down so easily, so I just sweep her legs out from under her. So now she falls like a ton of bricks.”
Michael took a quick inward breath. He felt Carmen looking at him. What was he supposed to show here? Interest? Fear? Revulsion?
“Now she’s not acting so angry. Her expression is kind of blank, and it’s like her eyes are suddenly filled with milk. Oh Jesus, kids, I shouldn’t even be telling you this. But you have to know. What we’re doing out there…. going into houses, taking what we need…living the life…we just all have to be real straight with each other. In truth we find our strength.” He gestured with his hands, like a priest patting the heads of adoring little children.
“She made a sound.” Fraleigh expelled his breath, tried it again, shrugged: he wasn’t doing it justice, that last sound Cindy made. “I knew right away she was in trouble. Her brother is an epileptic; I guess she was wired up crazy, too, without anyone knowing about it. But a couple cracks on the head and she’s dead? Come on. That don’t figure.” He rubbed the back of his neck.
“I just left her there, right in the bedroom, in the dark. I went into the living room and watched TV. Isn’t that just like me?” He laughed and talked through his laughter. “I mean, they were selling food dryers, hits of the sixties, Dial a Psychic, and there’s me kicking back in my La-Z-Boy, with Cindy dead in the next room.
“Next morning, I wrapped her in a shower curtain and shoved her into the trunk of my Celica. Cindy in the Celica.” He rocked his head back and forth, as if it were a song. “It was hard getting her in. The Japs design those Toyotas for killing a very different-sized woman. But I managed. Gently. Then I called these people who I was supposed to be cleaning their pool—that was how bad business was, because I promised myself I’d never clean a fucking pool, but now I was and glad for the work.”
“Wait a minute,” said Johnnie. “You killed your wife?” His voice was stunned, but that wasn’t so unusual.
“Shut up, Johnnie,” said Carmen.
“I was just asking,” said Johnnie, looking down at his hands, which were laced in his lap, the fingers rising up and down like the undulations of sea plants.
“Isn’t he a fucking trip?” Fraleigh asked, jerking his thumb at Johnnie but grinning at Michael.
“Tell us what happened to Cindy,” said Carmen. Her voice was deep, shredded, as if she were always on the mend from laryngitis.
“Worried?” Fraleigh asked her.
“Should I be?”
“I drove her out to Pennsylvania, filled her up with stones, and dumped her in a river.”
“Yeah, right,” said Johnnie.
“I was going to take her apart with my chainsaw. I laid her out in the woods. Took off all her clothes. It was cold out. Her pussy hair puffed up and turned like silver from the frost, and there I was with my Stihl saw smoking in my hands and the chain going around and around. But forget it, I couldn’t do it. I got my limits. So I just put her in in one piece. Why? Do you think that was a mistake?”
“Are you shitting us?” said Johnnie.
“Now that was the middle of nowhere. A forest preserve. There were picnic tables, but even the squirrels were asleep. Lucky for me, the river was still moving. There was a corny little bridge, one of those fairy-tale jobbies, you know, ‘Let’s tiptoe through the tulips, la-la-la, everything is beautiful.’ I dragged Cindy to the middle of the bridge and gave her a sailor’s burial. Her father was in the Navy, in World War II. And what a sonofabitch piece of shit he is! Boils on his back and so much hair on his big fat paws it looks like he’s wearing gloves. You know the type?”
“You actually killed her?” said Johnnie.
“What if I did? You’re a thief.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it? ‘Thou shalt not steal.’”
“It’s different. And you know it.”
Fraleigh took a long swallow of vodka, closed his eyes as it warmed him, dried the corners of his mouth with his knuckle.
“The Bible says, ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ It doesn’t say, ‘Thou shalt really really not kill because killing is worse than stealing.’ It’s all on the same level—same thing. Same fucking thing, Johnnie boy. And you know it.”
Fear entered Michael’s skull, just the way he entered that flimsily locked river house the night before, and now fear pushed Michael’s mind around as if his brain were a thing on wheels. He could not complete a thought. Knowing Fraleigh’s crime made them all a part of it, unless they now were to turn him in, which was out of the question.
“If this is bullshit, Walter…” said Carmen. She stretched her legs before her with deliberate languor, then poked a finger under the elastic cuff of the black leggings she wore beneath her girlish skirt.
It was what she was wearing two days later when she stood with Michael on a rocky rise in the woods, overlooking an old, well-cared-for farmhouse. There was a smell of rain in the air. A couple, a man and woman in their forties, were loading up their Lexus with a few things they wanted to bring back to the city. They were vibrant, fit; they had, like some childless couples, managed to avoid growing old.
“Who are they?” Michael asked.
“The Caldwells. They own these woods. They got about two or three hundred acres, but they just stay in the little grassy mowed part.” Carmen carried a thick white bath towel, stolen from the Martin house a couple days ago. It was rolled tightly and she tucked it under her arm.
“What are we doing?”
“Waiting for them to leave. What’s today?”
“I think Monday.”
“Yeah. They should be gone. Is it a holiday?”
“I don’t think so.”
“When they leave for the city we can go into their house. I want to take a real shower, and we can watch TV. What shows do you like?”
“I don’t know. Whatever.”
He looked at his watch. It was nearly noon. The news would be on and maybe they’d be on it. The last house they robbed, it went sort of crazy. Michael put himself in charge, telling Fraleigh what was worth real money. No one wanted silverware anymore, silver wasn’t worth shit, and it weighed a ton. Textiles, take the hooked rugs, the faded- aqua needlepoint samplers; take the paintings. Fraleigh didn’t mind a kid telling him what to steal, that didn’t bother him at all; but it made Johnnie jealous, and when Johnnie got jealous Johnnie got rough. There was considerable breakage. Glass figurines—ballerinas, puppies—then a painted glass lampshade, a huge smoky mirror that hung over the white marble mantelpiece. Scuff marks on the woodwork. Fraleigh just let him. He understood. It was either this or something worse. They’re only things, was how Fraleigh saw it. Funny philosophy for a thief.
Down below, the Caldwells were kissing. It was a very big deal of a kiss, as if they knew they were being watched, or had always hoped to be. Everybody wanted to be a star, even a childless banker weekending in the boonies with his childless photographer wife. Sam used to say that publicity has taken the place of grace. Now His eye wasn’t on the sparrow, but a camcorder lens was.
Fuck you, Sam, get out of my head.
Carmen pointed at the Caldwells as Mr. pressed Mrs. down onto the hood of their black car. She threw her arms back, offered herself up.
The rain was starting to come in big, fat, lazy drops. It stirred the trees around them, made Michael look up.
“They better not start having sex,” said Carmen.
“But I like to watch,” said Michael, in a deliberately drooly, creepy voice, but when he heard it he wondered all of a sudden if maybe this was his real voice, at last.
“I want them to go back to New York so I can go into their house and take my shower.” She was always at one with her feelings. She wanted this, she wanted that; there was never any maybe about her.
The phone rang within the Caldwell house. The sound carried up, light, tinkling, cheerful birdsong. Mr. Caldwell abandoned the project of romancing his wife and ran back to the house to answer the phone. She remained there on the car, lifted her feet off the ground, raised her legs. She was doing exercises while she waited for another take of their love scene. Too rich to worry about the rain. He came out a minute later, full of gestures. She slid off the car while he locked the back door to the house and put the key in an empty planter, and a few moments later they were gone.
Michael and Carmen waited for the Caldwells to be safely gone, assumed they would not double back for some forgotten item.
“Let’s go,” Carmen said. She was in charge. She reached out for him, and Michael took her hand. He had a momentary impulse to pull her close. What would that feel like? he wondered. His lust was monstrous. Would his erection be sheer blue steel, a special-effects hard-on, fabulous and humiliating?
“Kiss me, you fool,” she said, clasping her hands, batting her lashes. Carmen waited for a moment to see if Michael’s face contorted in a confession of desire, and then stepped back, laughed. In the past couple days, there had been more and more jokes between them, all of them having to do with what it would be like to sleep in the same bed, to kiss, to have sex.
At first these jokes shocked Michael, but the tension they released was a relief, and soon he could not stop himself from making them. Last night he sneezed, and when Carmen said “God bless you” he grabbed his crotch and said “Bless this.” Part of the rules of this ritual was that they would both have to laugh, no matter how bad the joke was.
Yet even the jokes could not stave off the intimacy growing between them. Carmen told Michael she was starting to hurt between her legs and then further amazed him by telling him the source of her discomfort was a recurring yeast infection and then, seeing the confusion on his face, explained what that meant in calm, semimedical terms. She breathed directly into his face and asked him if her breath smelled okay.
For the first time ever, Michael felt a countervailing weight to his desire—a sense of his own desirability. Routinely, almost compulsively, visions of his ungainliness and flat-out ugliness were the inevitable Pong off the Ping of yearning. He had a dim memory, fished from the murk of psychotherapy, that once Olivia subtly moved away from him when he prolonged a certain kiss on a certain night (bedtime, thunder), a memory of her fingers pressing firmly against his chest and her face receding from that part of the darkness tinged by streetlights and into that part of the room where the existence of anything at all was a matter of faith. For most of childhood and all of adolescence he had felt as if he were repulsive, and so he could not take jokes; the rough-and-tumble of life with other kids made him ache with unhappiness. He had developed habits of the heart that were fruitless, destructive: he perfected poetic fixations that would implode from lack of air, passions that went unnoticed by others, unacted upon by himself, and he was used to gnawing through these secret connections to rid himself of them, like a fox chewing off its own leg to spring free of a trap.
On the way down to the house, staggering through the brambles that became thicker and greener day by day, both Michael and Carmen had a sense that Fraleigh was somewhere close behind them. Neither mentioned anything, but from time to time they stopped and looked back. Trees, mist, the smell of the wet earth, the sound of raindrops hitting against the leaves.
The Caldwell house was only a couple of hundred feet off the dirt road that wound through their property. It was like those old white houses with black shutters that Olivia picked on when she went hunting for antiques.
Next to the house was a small garage where they had left their Saab. There were new garden tools; cross-country skis rested across the beams. Thick spider webs trembled in the corners of the shed’s greenish windows. The car was old, with nearly one hundred thousand miles on it. The Caldwells kept the key under the mat around the clutch and the brake.
Michael and Carmen went inside the house, through the kitchen door in the back. They took off their shoes; Carmen’s red socks were torn at the toe.
It no longer felt particularly strange to Michael to be sneaking around someone else’s house. Short on friends and shorter still on that outgoing quality that allowed one to make friends, Michael had always been curious about how other people lived, and now he was finding out. The things people kept in their pantry—the red-and-gold can of Portuguese olives, the tin of sugar cookies with ice skaters on the lid, the chutney, the bitters, the honey mustard, cookbooks, manila folders crammed with recipes clipped from The New York Times, even a breast pump—were now a matter of experience rather than conjecture. He had helped to rob only three houses, but his mind was already full of new knowledge of refrigerators, Jenn-Air ranges, hooked rugs, magazine racks holding medical journals, family albums embossed with elaborate coats of arms, sconces and portraits on the walls, human smells, perfume, rot, dead flowers, squirrel shit, the contents of bedside tables (bifocals, lubricants, sleep mask).
Walking with Carmen through the Caldwells’ kitchen, thinking of the bedroom upstairs, and for some reason not only noticing but staring at a solitary pale-green coffee cup on the wooden counter, Michael was suddenly beset by the impulse to call home and reassure his parents that he was still okay. He hadn’t contacted them in a while, and it seemed somehow smart to remind them (in case he ever wanted to move back) that he was only missing, not dead. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life hearing how they didn’t know if he was dead or alive.
“What are you thinking about?” Carmen asked. “You look scared.”
“I’m not scared at all. I was just—” He stopped for a moment, hoping to think of something to say.
“Did you hear him last night?”
“Fraleigh? No.”
“He was saying things in his sleep. I wanted to get close so I could hear, but maybe he’d wake up and grab me.”
They wandered through the dining room, with its long cherry table and lyre-backed chairs, its salmon-colored walls, brilliant white woodwork, and worn carpeting. Next, they came to the library, where the television set was. Carmen knew exactly where they kept the remote control.
They sat on the sofa and Carmen raced through the stations, past a soap opera, “The Price Is Right,” a household- hints show. She stopped at a talk show with a panel of very thin men sitting with their heavy wives and talking about the love they have for each other and the trouble they have in the world because people cannot accept a thin person loving a fat one. First to speak was an immense woman with short curly red hair and the face of someone who used to laugh a lot but no longer does. “Look, I’ve got health problems, financial, employment, you name it….”
“Can you imagine even kissing her?” said Michael, without really giving the matter much thought. He just wanted Carmen to listen to him and not the set.
“When you love someone you just love them.”
“I guess.”
“It doesn’t matter what. Maybe they have a great job and lots of money or maybe they don’t. Maybe they’re Catholic and you’re not. Maybe they live out in the woods and rob houses at night.”
Michael laughed. A feeling of warmth spread through him, as if something hot had spilled inside him.
“I’m serious. When you fall in love with someone, all that stuff is just little stuff. You hold on with both hands, until they saw off your arms. And then you hope someone comes along who’ll fall in love with a girl who’s got no arms.”
The show broke for a commercial. An ocean liner cut its way through glassy, sun-struck waters while a woman sang about the pleasures of being on a cruise, and how your friends will envy your freedom and all the fancy foods you’ll be eating.
“Is that how you were when you were in love?” Michael asked.
He could actually feel himself moving toward her, inwardly. It was as if every stray feeling, every romantic and erotic impulse, every dream, every thought of being with a woman—all his disparate moments of desire, beginning with the smell of his mother’s skin and going forward in time to include the first girl he had held hands with, the first girl he had ever kissed, the strangers in skin magazines whose wide-openness he had studied beneath the tent of his blankets—all of those moments and images of love were suddenly airborne and in formation.
Carmen shrugged. “Almost.”
“Who did you love like that?”
“My first boyfriend.”
“Your first boyfriend?” He forced a laugh. “How many have you had?”
“Two. But Thomas was just to get back at my mother because she made me break up with Julius.” As she spoke, she took Michael’s hand and pretended to count his fingers.
Michael’s heart was a maniac in a locked room. He looked at their hands together, the difference in their colors. He had a moment of absolute certainty that their lives were joined and would remain so. His heart, his imagination, were taking possession of her. He could see them in a restaurant together, wearing beautiful clothes and eating by candlelight.
“I have to tell you something,” he said.
“What?” She furrowed her brow, withdrew her hand, as if expecting him to say something critical of her.
With a casualness that surprised him, he took her hand again. It was a gesture more unmistakable than a kiss. It said: You are mine.
“My father is going out on my mother.”
“Yeah? Well, my father—”
“No, wait. Okay?”
“Sorry.”
“My father met this woman. He even brought her to our house. She was okay. Actually, I sort of liked her. Then they broke up or something. Maybe they just had a fight. Anyhow, she sent him this really pissed-off letter, and really intense, too. Can I tell you what she said?”
“Go ahead.”
“It’s sort of disgusting.”
“I think I can stand it, Michael.”
He breathed in the air into which she had just said his name.
“She said he used her box like a toilet.”
“‘Her box’?”
Michael shrugged. “Her cunt.”
“Where do you get ‘box’?”
“A friend of mine used to call it that.”
“You know the Eskimos? They got a hundred different names for snow.”
“Really?”
“Men are like that, for the place down there.” She pointed to her lap and smiled.
She sat back on the sofa and moved her head to the side, so she could see the TV screen better. One of the skinny men was remembering what it was like when his wife was trying to lose weight, what a trial their life had been. And a woman in the audience was shouting back at him, “But you should have encouraged her, for God’s sake! This is her life you are talking about.”
“I don’t know what to do,” said Michael. “I don’t want to be a part of his secrets, but I don’t want to tell her, either. She’ll hate me. Everyone will.”
Carmen switched the TV set off with the remote control and turned her full attention on Michael. He could feel her filling him. He had often wondered what it must feel like to be fucked, and this might be it: another human being was inside of him.
“Maybe she already knows. Maybe she knows and doesn’t want to do anything about it. Women know what a man feels.”
They were silent. The rain beat against the roof. Michael felt he had been suddenly led to a moment he wasn’t prepared for. But now he stood before it, like a man before a vast, locked bronze door, compelled by fate to knock.
“Why do you stay here?” he asked her, his voice small.
“I don’t have anywhere else to go.”
“But where are you from?”
“What difference does it make? The Bronx, Tremont Avenue. Then my mother and her boyfriend and me moved up to Newburgh. He started to mess around with me, and when I told her she told social services I was crazy and they tried to put me in a hospital.”
“Are you with Johnnie?”
“Please.”
He shrugged.
“Fraleigh?”
“What do you think I am? Because I’m not white or something?”
“I feel that you’re the nicest person I ever knew,” he said.
“Then you ought to get out a little more,” answered Carmen.
“If I could get Fraleigh to listen to me…”
“He don’t listen to anyone. You should know that.”
“About robbing the houses. What to take.”
“He took your advice last time. That was weird. He sort of looks up to you. Johnnie to him is an idiot and I’m just a girl. But he respects you.”
“He’s been breaking into places for a year.”
“Longer. I’ve been with him almost a year and he was doing it way before then.”
“But what does he have to show for it?”
“He just does it. He says a real thief doesn’t do it for the profit. A real thief isn’t afraid to have everything and he isn’t afraid to have nothing.”
“We could make a lot of money. We’re in the places anyhow. You can’t just go in and use the bathroom and eat their food and take a bunch of junk. You have to know what’s what, and you have to know where to sell it. Even if you’re stealing the best things and you don’t know where to sell it—what’s it worth then? You know?”
“Who’s he going to sell it to? The Easter Bunny?”
“I know people. In New York. We could make money. A lot of money.”
Michael’s insides throbbed with the audacity of what he proposed. Complex plans of deeply criminal cunning seemed suddenly his second nature. He took a deep breath, let his eyes lock fiercely onto Carmen’s, until she demurely averted her gaze.
“I better take my shower and then we have to go.”
He took her arm in his hand.
“We’d have all this money. And we could go wherever we wanted.”
“Who? Me and you?” Her voice rose, as if she was a little offended by the presumption.
“Yes.”
She was silent for what seemed like a long time.
Finally, she said, “Let me think about it.”