Try as I might, I couldn’t be family to Fat Bobby. He had been alone at his father’s funeral—my parents, Sarah and I having driven him to the cemetery, but at his insistence not accompanying him to the coffin—and he’d been alone ever since. I tried to understand his sadness, depression, or whatever it was, for a wicked and evil man, but I couldn’t. He’d been freed from his prison, the monster had been slain, and yet he moped around as if still bound by what was gone, and that irritated me.
This irritation on my end worried me. I remembered what I’d felt like initially befriending this kid, and how it had made me feel good being there for him. Whether showing him the wonders of comics or listening to him on a hilltop talk about wanting to get away from it all; being there for another human being had stirred something in me that I now had trouble retrieving.
I think I understood on some level what was happening. It wasn’t just Fat Bobby and his despair over a dead father who didn’t deserve a single tear shed for him. So much had changed about the people, and the world, around me. It was as if I were seeing the world through a prism and the image of things was broken up. I was seeing behind it all, catching a glimpse of the true nature of things.
Since the night on Lookout Mountain and the death of Bobby’s father and the disappearance of the Collector, Tara and I hadn’t spent a single moment alone. We didn’t touch or hold hands, and a second kiss like the first at the fair seemed impossible and distant, like an astronomical body.
This is the night. These are the times.
The Collector’s words lived on in my mind, haunting me even though the man himself was gone. The fedora and the coat and the shadows they cast were thrown far and wide and seemed to eclipse the rest of my life. In the aftermath of death, something I’d never truly seen until the broken neck and crooked face of Mr. Templeton at the bottom of the hill, nothing seemed the same. They couldn’t be the same.
Fat Bobby was tainted by his father’s death, in a way, as strongly as he’d been tainted by the man in life. The rest of us were tainted also, by the desire for money that was blood bought and never ours, and our momentary claim over it was paid in death. Maybe that’s why Tara and I couldn’t touch each other. Stained by the pain and suffering our actions had inadvertently caused, such a warmth and comfort as human contact maybe wasn’t ours to have.
We didn’t deserve it.
Not merely an eight-hour stretch when the earth had turned and the sun had left our hemisphere, this was the night: pain and death and the memory of it playing endlessly in a loop in your mind. The darkness that pervaded the mind, heart, and spirit, born of the grim things in life that were always there. Catch a glimpse of the devil and maybe he never went away but camped out in the corners of consciousness, ready to hold up the pictures of sins and remind us all of how far we’d fallen.
These are the times.
I couldn’t read the things I’d so enjoyed reading since as far back as I could remember. I’d open a book, lying on my bed or sitting on the porch, and five minutes later I’d close it again. The words wouldn’t come together, they didn’t make sense. The story they built page after page fell absently through my mind like sand through a sieve.
I walked the house aimlessly, and Bobby did the same. We passed each other like lost drivers on a directionless highway, feeding off the invisible hurt and silent suffering of each other.
I think he disgusted me a little.
And I disgusted myself.
My sister and I didn’t so much avoid each other, as we did wordlessly agree with tentative nods and furtive glances that maybe a little distance was necessary. Although we were brother and sister and annoyed each other, I think we both knew that the kind of barrier that was between me and Bobby couldn’t be allowed to divide family.
But we could give each other a respectful buffer. A measure of time to permit the healing that only time could effect.
There seemed no cure to it, no end. Just day after day of the muck and mire, the heavy shadow over us and nightmares that overflowed from sleep to wakefulness. My parents felt it as well. After Dad reluctantly went back to work it was just Mom in the house, and she’d try to talk to me at times, ask how I was doing, if I was sleeping well, if there was anything I wanted to talk about. She said that Bobby and I should go out and play; she offered me money to go walk the shops in town; and yet none of it seemed right or proper.
To return to life as if nothing had happened would be a lie, one more atop the mountain of lies we’d already told. I couldn’t do it.
Then came the Fourth of July. The flyers posted about town and inserted in the morning paper promised fireworks and hotdogs and drinks in Town Square. Dad wanted us to go, thought it would be good for the family, and we went, along with most of the rest of the town. Under the evening sky with the expectation for the coming light blooming like flowers above, a work was done. For a time it seemed like things might return to a semblance of the way they were, and I felt a thing in my young heart like hope.
My parents picked out a spot for our family, Fat Bobby and Bandit included, atop a small rise not quite a hill but a mild roll like a small wave passing through the earth. Mom unfolded a blanket and set out the basket of food and the cooler with frosted drinks like cold ambrosia on that hot summer evening. People were everywhere along the green expanse of Town Square, like ants milling about, and the courthouse provided a backdrop that brought to mind again that Wild West image of hanging criminals and dust-trailed wagons and saloons.
Set apart from the gathering families and lovers holding hands was a roped-off area with several devices like miniature space shuttle launch pads pointing up at the sky. Here people with bright yellow shirts with “VOLUNTEER” stenciled in black pulled fireworks like little rockets from boxes and wrappers and organized them on folding tables and on the grass. It seemed like an arsenal being laid out and I grimly wondered about the mayhem that could ensue if all those little rockets exploded accidentally here on the ground, instead of high up in the sky.
I leaned over to my sister and told her about this, and how maybe if one landed on her head it would improve her face. She pushed me as I tried to take a bite of a sandwich, and my food landed on the ground. I picked it up, saw the dirt and grass stuck to the bread, and wiped it on her arm.
“You retard!” she said and wiped her stained arm on my shirt. I saw Fat Bobby sitting across from me flash the slightest hint of a grin, and that small miracle made me smile too.
“Leave your sister alone,” Mom said.
But it was a forceless command, and I looked at her, saw the hint of a smile on her face also. I thought that maybe she wasn’t so mad that things were getting back to a semblance of normalcy, even if that normalcy meant us driving each other, and her, insane.
At eight o’clock the fireworks began and the explosions of them in the black night sky was like watching the universe becoming. Stars and planets colliding in bursts of color and fire and light. Flashing and then dimming in the dark to be replaced anew by further cascades of brilliant light. Reds and blues and yellows opening like hands and fingers of sparks darting out in every direction. Blooms of light and us below in the illumination of it all.
I looked about for Jim and Tara among the throngs in the dark. Trying to find a familiar face in a sea of strangers staring up at the lightshow in the sky was nearly impossible. Not wanting to miss the fireworks myself, I gave up, likewise turning my gaze skyward.
Cheers, clapping, and oohs and ahhs made a discordant yet cheerful chorus for the better part of an hour, until, finally, the lightshow slowed, then ended.
With the spectacle over, people started to trickle away. Slowly at first, so that it was like a small stream breaking away from the larger body. I turned and asked my parents if I could look around a bit, and they said for a couple minutes.
Despite the smile that had temporarily returned to his face under the lights of the fireworks, Fat Bobby didn’t accompany me. Healing is a slow thing, I guess, and we all do it in our own time.
With only Bandit at my side, I walked amidst the stirring yet still sizable crowd. It wasn’t unlike moving through the woods, stepping around and ducking, dodging people instead of trees.
I came to the steps of the courthouse, and a large sycamore to the side of them stretched high and the branches of it reached wide and far. I thought again of the town as a throwback in time and imagined the outlaws on their steeds and the sheriff’s posse in pursuit on desert landscapes, dirt clouds kicked up high by plodding hooves.
Climbing the courthouse steps I looked back over the crowd from my better vantage point. None of those I saw were those I was looking for and I started down the stairs again, slightly disappointed. This night of flowered lights and blooming universes was something that should have been shared with Jim and Tara, and that neither of them could be found, even after the show, was disheartening. I aimed myself in the general direction of my family and started back.
“That was quite a display,” a voice called from behind me. I stopped and turned in the direction of the speaker.
Two figures left the shadows under the sycamore and stepped into the light cast by the bulbs of the courthouse. In gray suits and ties, with shoes polished to such a shine that I thought if I bent over and peered at the leather surfaces I’d see myself staring back, the pair looked like distinguished businessmen.
Bandit growled beside me, and I pulled him close by the collar.
The speaker was the shorter of the two, an older man somewhere in his fifties, with silver-gray hair streaked back tight against his skull. Lines like borders and rivers on roadmaps spread across his face. Despite these signs of age, his black eyes were alert and aware and intelligent.
His companion was large and blockish, and a buzz cut like a marine made his head even more sharp-edged and angular. I remember thinking that block of a head could be used maybe as a carpentering tool to measure right angles if the need ever arose. The blockish man’s nose was crooked, pointing off to the right like it didn’t care for the smells of the world and turned away in disgust.
I knew without having to ask that these men weren’t locals, and the events of the past month had given me a good radar upgrade when it came to reading trouble. Wondering if I gave off some sort of pheromone that attracted trouble, I made a silent promise to start showering better.
“Yeah,” I said, stepping backwards and continuing back towards the crowd and my family somewhere among them. “It was cool.”
I turned and kept walking, and they fell in to either side of me, the older man on my left, Mr. Blockhead to my right. I felt like the innards of a sandwich, and the big guy especially looked hungry.
Bandit beside me looked to either side, that low growl still rumbling in his throat, and I shushed him sternly. I was thinking of the punches he’d taken from Bobby’s dad, and for some reason I thought these two men would do more than punch my dog, and that made me sick inside.
“I bet people from all over come to this small town,” the man with the silver hair and black eyes said. He leaned a bit towards me like we were buddies palavering. “Just to see the country, take in all this open space. Breathe the air.”
He stretched out his arms as if to embrace it all. Closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
“Sure,” I said. We reached the outskirts of the remaining crowd still milling about. Though the fireworks were over, people idly talked and shook hands with friends, and little bouts of laughter danced about the park. “I guess so.”
“I bet people even come here for business,” the older man said. His voice was slightly accented, and that along with his suit and fine hair made me think of maître d’s at fine Italian restaurants. “In fact, now that I mention it, I think this is just the sort of place I’d come to if I had business matters to attend to or associates to meet.”
I felt one hand touch me at the small of the back in a familiar way like we were friends, and I looked up at him and he looked down at me and smiled. His teeth were straight and white and reminded me of tombstones.
“An out of the way place like this might be just the sort of place big city folk might come for business affairs that require a bit of—how should I say this—discretion,” he said and tapped his chin with a finger like he was thinking carefully. “Wouldn’t you say so, Brock? That this is just the sort of place for a quiet, professional retreat?”
I turned to look at Mr. Blockhead (Brock) but he didn’t look at me. He was looking straight ahead, and as he walked people parted for him like the waters of the Red Sea for Moses.
“Yes, Mr. Perrelli,” he said with a voice like a buzz saw. “A fine place for business affairs.”
I could see my family now, through the moving bodies of the crowd. I thought about running, and the two men seemed to sense my intention and moved in closer, squeezing me more tightly between them. Bandit had to dart out from between the closing vise of the men and, trotting a few steps before us, he turned and showed his teeth.
“Now this isn’t the place for a scene,” the older man, Mr. Perrelli, said. “Not on a nice evening like this, the Fourth of July, celebrating the independence of our great nation. Is it, Joey?”
He knew my name and my heart skipped a beat when he said it. My name out of his mouth was like a poison and I wondered if I was infected. He knew me, and I was sure that wasn’t something I wanted.
“No, sir,” I said, giving up on running, seeing we were still moving towards my family anyway. Realizing that neither he nor the behemoth on the other side of me would do anything rash with so many witnesses about. At least I hoped not.
“Good boy,” Mr. Perrelli said and he clapped me on the back and gave my shoulder a little squeeze. “I’m in town for awhile on business, Joey. And I think you know what that business entails.”
With that his arm left my shoulders and the two men fell behind me and it was just me and Bandit now, walking towards my family. I didn’t look back until I was there, standing close to my dad, and him looking down and smiling at me.
I tried to smile back.
When I finally turned and looked behind me the two men were gone. In their suits, so out of place on a summer evening, they should have been easy to pick out of the crowd. I scanned the throng but didn’t see them.
I’d see them soon enough, though. That I knew.
They had business to attend to and that business was me.
Even the incident with Mr. Perrelli and his man Brock couldn’t fully dispel the magic of the Fourth of July fireworks display. Those lights in the sky and the people gathered below watching them reminded me of the way things had been. The simple joy that could be had with others. Life in its fundamentals.
The day following, I called Jim and I learned that he and Tara had indeed been there, he with his dad and she with her parents. We simply hadn’t come across each other in the multitudes present.
But we’d all seen it, and in our minds maybe we’d been together. Transmitting the wonder of it, the majesty of the lights and the power of the spectacle, to each other.
After talking to Jim, I called Tara, and hearing her on the other end was like hearing an old song on the radio. A favorite you hadn’t heard for awhile and your heart kind of fluttered at hearing it again.
We agreed to meet at the sandwich place in town where we’d eaten last time. Having recently passed her driver’s exam, Sarah borrowed Mom’s car and drove us all into town, Bandit in the backseat with Fat Bobby.
After the incident on Lookout Mountain, Sarah and Barry hadn’t seen much of each other. Through overheard secondhand snippets of conversation between my parents and sister, I got the gist of the situation. Barry’s parents didn’t want him around my sister anymore and Barry, though going on eighteen, didn’t offer up any sort of resistance. It seemed his parents were paying his tuition after his senior year of high school for some expensive East Coast university, and he really wanted out of the dead end of Arizona.
So he did what his parents wanted him to, which included politely, but succinctly, dropping my sister like a bad habit.
This ended up with Sarah locking herself in her room for three days straight, the wracking of her sobs shaking the wall between our rooms. The sound of it was like the moans from torture chambers in hell. She came out only to eat and use the bathroom, and though several remarks came to mind on the spare moments during those days when I passed her, red-faced and bleary-eyed, her hair in tangles, I for some reason checked myself and kept my mouth shut.
All of this, along with what she’d gone through with the rest of us atop the hill, led to a strange outcome the likes of which I’d never imagined: I didn’t mind my sister’s company, almost preferred it.
Sarah pulled over at the curb in front of the restaurant’s patio.
The look Jim gave me when we approached the patio table he and Tara had already claimed, said he wasn’t too thrilled with this turn of events.
I gave him a not so subtle middle finger scratching my chin and he smiled. Tara rose to give Fat Bobby a hug, and I think I heard her whisper an “I’m sorry.” I didn’t need to ask what she was sorry about. Though she hadn’t shot Mr. Templeton, it was the chaos of the gunfire that had sent he and the Collector tumbling down. No doubt, she would feel at least indirectly responsible for Bobby’s dad’s passing. Bobby, to his credit, didn’t show any animosity, and he hugged her back.
Then we all sat down, no one else made an issue of Sarah’s inclusion, and we ordered and ate.
Tara was to my right and her presence sent periodic tingles through me like an electric charge. There was a feeling like sparks jumping between us, and I remembered my old thoughts in the first days following the events on the mountain. How I thought things would never be the same and how we deserved it.
But there she was, and here I was, and I still felt things, and even if I didn’t deserve it I wanted it. I wanted her, and not merely in the pop a boner way either. I wanted what she represented: happiness and friendship and good things.
The five of us talked about stuff as we ate, Bandit under the table waiting for the stray crumb or scrap. The things we talked of were incidental and unimportant, and that’s why we spoke of them. We talked about movies and music and books. We recounted the fireworks and how they lit up the sky. Jim told dirty jokes and we laughed and food sprayed out of our mouths and soda out of our noses.
What had happened on Lookout Mountain was still there, hanging over us like a cloud, but it didn’t seem to me as oppressive. Like maybe it was breaking apart and in time the light would shine through.
In the back of my mind lurked also Mr. Perrelli and Brock, and I wondered if I should mention them to my friends. I knew the answer to that, yet the laughter and smiles around the table made me push those darker thoughts away.
Then as if to slap me in the face and show me the error of my ways, some more people came onto the patio, taking a table nearby, and I saw them and they saw me, and that storm cloud seemed to settle overhead again. Dillon Glover gave me a little wave as he sat, that familiar smirk spread upon his face. Stu and Max settled into chairs on either side of him, their gazes aimed our way as well.
Jim was telling another joke and everyone else was laughing around me but it was like hearing noise through a thick wall. I saw only the three older kids looking at us across the patio.
“What’s wrong?” Tara said from beside me, poking me on the shoulder. She followed my gaze and then said: “Oh shit.”
Jim heard this, and Fat Bobby too, and they turned and looked at the table behind them. Dillon smiled at us like he was privy to a joke the punch line of which he wasn’t sharing. Only it wasn’t a funny, ha-ha joke, but a mean one. Sarah realized no one else was laughing anymore, and her laughter trailed off as well as she turned to see what we were looking at, then turned back to me.
“Who are they?” she asked.
I told her.
“Those are the guys from the fair? He’s the one that pulled the knife on you?”
She motioned at Dillon with a slight nod, and I nodded too.
She looked to Dillon again, seemed to measure him. I knew what she was seeing. His face, his sneer, the eyes that screamed Hey, I like pulling knives on people. He had that face of casual, suppressed violence, the kind of face you passed in a crowd and felt a chill down your spine like you’d just come too close to something soiled. Something not right and maybe filaments of it had reached out to touch you.
“Maybe we should call the police,” Fat Bobby said, and I turned to look at him, saw his face pale like maybe he was going to get sick.
I shook my head.
“They’re not going to do anything in public,” Jim said, apparently sharing my assessment of the situation. “They’re just fucking with us.”
“And doing a good job,” Tara said.
Dillon gave us another wave.
Tara flipped him off.
Instead of exploding in anger and running over to stab us all to death with the knife he no doubt had secreted in his jacket somewhere, as I half expected him to, Dillon just leaned back in his seat and his smile broadened. Pudgy Stu and acne-scarred Max did the same, and I knew something wasn’t right. These weren’t guys who had patience or tolerance to spare. These were guys who flew by the seat of their pants, reacted, gave in to impulses rather than thinking things through.
“I think we should go,” I said, knowing that they wouldn’t do anything in broad daylight with other strollers and diners about. But that wasn’t the fear: that they’d do something. The fear was that maybe they didn’t have to, and I wasn’t sure what made me think that until I scooted my chair back and stood.
A hand on my shoulder like a clamp pushed me back down.
The sound of a chair scraped along the patio concrete behind me, drawing up to our table, and Mr. Perrelli in his black-gray suit and with his hair like spun silver scooted in between me and Tara. He folded his hands on the table and looked at everyone—Jim, Bobby, Tara, and my sister—and then turned sideways slightly so that he was looking at me. He seemed like an executive at a board meeting, us all around the conference table, and I remembered his words from the night before, that he was here on business. We were about to learn what that business was.
“What a fine day for a bite to eat,” he said, sitting head and shoulders above the rest of us. That hand was still on my shoulder, and I knew if I turned I’d see the man-mountain Brock. The head like a granite slab looking down on me. “A fine day for a friendly chat.”
My friends and my sister looked at him and at the figure behind me, unseen by yours truly but the hand on me firm, and the confusion on their faces was clear.
Bandit growled from beneath the table. I felt him rise under there, brushing against my legs.
I wondered why the other patrons on the patio or those in the restaurant didn’t come out to ask us how we were doing. Didn’t they know something was wrong? Wasn’t it obvious? There was a young couple at the far end of the patio, in their twenties maybe, and they spared us not a single glance. People walked past on the sidewalk, and not one stopped to ask why this old man and his square-headed companion were bothering five kids eating lunch.
In suits and for all appearances professional and affable, they nonetheless nearly reeked of danger and malice. It was like it lived beneath their skin, oozed from their pores, and could be smelled on the air that came along and carried it from them.
These two men weren’t like Dillon and his two buddies. They weren’t thugs or punks. These two weren’t even like Mr. Templeton, Bobby’s late father, bored and complacent with the suppressed violence within him. They weren’t like the Collector either, who collected what was owed, yeah, but also sometimes collected for himself and was gratified by it.
These two men were of a different breed.
I knew their potential for violence, but it wouldn’t be violence out of vengeance or vendetta. They would hurt people—they would hurt us—because it was what they did. It was their business, their livelihood, and when Mr. Perrelli pulled the trigger and blew your face off, or brought the garrote over your throat and choked the life out of you, there would be no personal malice in it at all.
He was just doing a job.
“I hear you kids came across something pretty interesting some weeks back,” Mr. Perrelli said, again favoring everyone around the table with a glance. The CEO and his board members all around. “These fellas,” and he pointed at Dillon and company with a thumb, “were kind enough to fill us in on the details. When we told them what we were looking for, they were only too eager to help us find you.”
I looked again at Dillon Glover. His smile was still there and again he waved, just a twiddling of his fingers like a patron flagging a waiter.
“I’ve spoken to lots of people,” Mr. Perrelli said, “and I’ve read the newspaper stories about what happened out in the woods a couple weeks back. But I think maybe there were some parts left out.”
He looked at me and his eyes twinkled with a light that spoke of profound intelligence. He favored me with a chummy grin again like we were old friends, and then he passed that grin around the table to my friends and sister.
“It’s those parts that were left out that interest me,” he said. “There was a car mentioned in the papers. An old car. A Buick. But the paper treated it like just a small detail. Some place you kids liked to hang out.”
All of us exchanged glances at this, and I remembered a fire on the hilltop, and millions burning to ash and carried away on the wind like dust.
“I think there was something in the car,” Mr. Perrelli said. “Maybe a couple somethings depending on where you looked. And those somethings belonged to me.”
He said this again not with malice or accusation or anger, but as simple fact.
“I’d like to have these possessions of mine returned to me.”
The hand on my shoulder clenched and unclenched not gently but not painfully either. Like maybe I was getting a firm massage. I spared the large knuckles and thick fingers there a nervous glance. Looked back at Mr. Perrelli.
I said nothing, unsure of what the best course of action would be here. Honesty? Lie to buy us time? Apparently reading my hesitancy as if I were leaning towards option two, Mr. Perrelli spoke again.
“There’s nothing to be gained from lying, young man,” he said, and patted my leg chummily. “I believe you met an associate of mine out there in the woods. He kept me apprised of all that transpired.”
“The Collector …” Jim muttered from across the table, his ability to speak when I couldn’t a reminder again of his strength.
“Bingo,” Mr. Perrelli said, winking at my friend and giving a finger and thumb gunshot his way. It was all too easy to superimpose a real gun upon that familiar gesture, and it didn’t seem at all friendly. Rather like a warning, a hint of things to come, instead of a jovial, casual motion.
That more than anything, the implied threat towards my friend, spurred me to honesty instead of option number two. It was lies that had got us to where we were in the first place. More lies could only bring about more consequences.
“We burned the money,” I said more calmly than I felt. Inside, my stomach was churning and quaking like geologic plates. “The Collector took the body.”
Mr. Perrelli smiled. Closed his eyes like he was enjoying the feel of the sun on his face, the heat of it and the warmth.
“You burned the money?” he asked. It wasn’t like he wanted the question answered, but merely like he was repeating it to himself for clarity. “A bunch of teenagers burnt ten million dollars?”
That number echoed in my head. Stated so casually, so unceremoniously, that figure giving a concreteness to what we had seen. It brought a reality to what we had so briefly dreamt of doing with the money in the sacks.
Ten million dollars.
Ashes in the wind. Lost and gone.
“That’s what you want me to believe?” Mr. Perrelli asked and he again circled the table with his gaze. His black eyes were like pools of darkness. “You burnt the money?”
Having nothing else to do, I nodded.
I thought about pissing my pants again, but having to inconspicuously throw out ruined jockey shorts without my mom noticing was getting old.
“Well,” Mr. Perrelli said and pushed with his hands on the table to stand. “This really is quite an unfortunate situation.”
Once on his feet, he pulled on the lapels of his suit jacket, straightening it. He brushed off unseen dust particles and lint from his pants. Then he offered me a smile and it seemed to me like a shark grinning before he chomped you in half at the torso.
“I guess we’ll have to come to some sort of arrangement then,” he said.
I had no idea what that meant, didn’t like the sound of it, and didn’t want to ask for clarification. And I didn’t have a chance to, anyways, because then he was walking away and the hand left my shoulder. Turning in my seat so that I was peering over the backrest, I watched the two men in suits walk a distance, climb into a long black car, and then the car pull away from the curb and roll away down the street. It rounded a corner and was soon out of sight.
Turning to face front again, I started to get up and stopped when I saw Dillon Glover there, standing over our table, his friends to either side of him. His fists were on the tabletop, and like Mr. Perrelli he looked around at each of us.
“You little fucks are in all kinds of trouble,” he said, and he smiled and the pure joy on his face was of a perversion I’ll never forget. He too had an idea of what kind of people Mr. Perrelli and Brock were and he found it amusing, a game, and he was glad to have been a part of it.
Then they too were gone, and it was just me and my friends, and we looked at each other across the table, all of us waiting for someone else to say something first.
“Well,” I said, “it looks like there’s more people that want to kill us.”
“Yeah,” Jim said, picking up his sandwich, taking a bite, washing it down with a long swallow of soda. “I was starting to feel normal again.”
“You’re not normal,” I said. “You’re colored.”
He grinned, gave me the finger, called me a “honkey.”
“So what do we do?” Fat Bobby asked. Surprisingly, he seemed to have recovered from his bout of sickness rather quickly.
“Same as always,” Tara said. She used the last of her French fries to mop up the last dabs of ketchup on her plate, stuffed them in her mouth, chewed.
“What’s that?” Sarah asked. “Coming up with stupid nicknames? Collecting decoder rings and playing Dungeons and Dragons?”
“At least we don’t play with ourselves,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” my sister said. “I bet your shorts are stiff as crackers with all the crank-yanking you do.”
I wanted to punch her but blushed instead and avoided looking at Tara.
“We deal with it,” Tara said, ignoring our exchange.
None of us said anything in response to that, and to me it seemed maybe there was no need to say anything else. Because maybe there wasn’t much else that could be said or done. What happened, would, and that was that.
Deal with it seemed to me like the summation of all things.
One evening Tara called and asked if I could go out. She’d just gotten her driver’s learner permit and was borrowing her dad’s car. It was my birthday, and this fact must have slipped out earlier in the week, because she wanted to give me a present. I asked my dad, and he gave me a wry smile like he knew a secret and he wasn’t going to tell me what it was. He nodded and told me to have a good time. I relayed his answer over the phone to Tara and she said she’d be over soon. It took fifteen or twenty minutes to drive from town to the outskirts where we lived, and those minutes ticked away so slowly the anxiety of it made me pleasantly sick.
I remembered the kiss under the moon at the fair.
The feel of her hand in mine at the top of the Ferris wheel.
But then the other things had happened: Sheriff Glover in the woods; the events on Lookout Mountain; the strain in our friendship and the dread that things could never be put right again; the arrival of Mr. Perrelli and the business he was about.
I thought of my sister in the bathroom not so long ago, getting herself all prettied up for Barry, and wondering if someday Tara would be doing that for me. Now here I was in the restroom in front of the mirror, looking from this angle and that like the slightly different view would reveal some hideous deformation that I’d somehow missed my entire life. Making sure each strand of hair was just so seemed a task of monumental importance. When I heard the sound of a car approaching, headlights skewing shadows through the windows of the house, I wasn’t ready, thought maybe I’d never be ready.
The knock on the door announced Tara, and I bounded down the stairs. Dad was there, looking over the back of the sofa at me, again with that wry smile like he had a secret.
“I’ll be back in a couple hours?” I said, my hopes turning into a question, my hand on the knob at the ready.
“Sure thing,” Dad said and I turned to go but stopped again when he called my name. “And son?” he began, the door still unopened, Tara still on the other side waiting. I turned back to him.
“Yes, sir?”
“I was wrong,” he said, and I wondered more about why he was bothering me at such a time more so than whatever he was wrong about.
“Sir?” I asked out of necessity because he was addressing me, not because I gave a shit.
“About her,” he said with a little nod towards the door. My heart lurched. Something in my stomach did a few somersaults. “She’s not too old for you. I think she’s just about right.”
He was saying more with those words than I could understand. Maybe it was what me and my friends had been through, and he saw something in her and the others that he approved of. Maybe it was just something between a father and a son, and the secrets of growing up, the secrets of girls, that he was imparting to me or trying to. Both, maybe, and something more or less, and it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that girl on the other side of the door. She had a car waiting and we’d drive through the evening and go places in the last hours of this, my birthday, and I had one more gift coming and I wanted whatever it was more than anything.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said.
He nodded again, I opened the door, and there she was. The night was curtained behind her like a stage backdrop just to outline her for me. She waved over my shoulder to my dad, and then she had me by the arm and I was hers and the world was mine.
* * *
The truck wound through the dark roads and we descended into the sparse lights of town. A faint glow like a halo encircled the desert town, and I didn’t know if it was the sodium vapor street lamps and business neon and lights from houses, or something else, something in me, and something in her, and the expectation of things lighting up the world. I watched her hands maneuver the wheel and handle the gearshift. I knew she saw me watching her, but her eyes were on the road. Yet there was a slight tick at the corner of her mouth as if she were struggling against a smile.
“Where we going?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” she said and I saw that tick again at the corner of her mouth.
Through town we rolled and then it was dwindling behind us as we continued north. Eventually the lights of it blinked away as the bumps and rises of the road blocked them out. Tara took a turn and steered onto a dirt road. There was a sign but it was dark and we passed it before I could read it. She let her foot off the gas as the unpaved path jostled the truck and soon she slowed the pickup even more and stopped.
Tara cut the engine and got out.
I followed, coming around the truck to see her duck quickly back in to pull something out from behind the driver’s seat. A large bundle wrapped in birthday cake print gift wrap appeared in the cradle of her arms, the paper crinkling as Tara handed it over to me.
“Your present. But don’t open it yet.”
I nodded and tucked it under my arm. It was malleable and soft, squishing under my arm a bit like a pillow.
“Come on,” she said and hooked my arm with hers to pull me along towards the trees.
“Do you think it’s safe?” I said, thinking of Mr. Perrelli and his man Brock. “Maybe we shouldn’t be out by ourselves.”
Mentally, I cursed myself for making the suggestion.
“I watched to make sure we weren’t followed.”
So had I, in between bouts of staring at her and her hands and the dark desert rolling past outside the truck. Indeed, there hadn’t been a car on the road other than us since we had left Payne behind. But it wasn’t like we were experts at spotting tails either.
I nodded.
“Besides,” she said, “with the headlights off no one would know where we’d pulled off the road anyways.”
This made sense and I nodded again.
We strolled into the trees but it wasn’t like entering the forest from near my home or the Connolly yard. These were proper trails and along the trails were cleared spaces and wooden picnic tables. In one clearing was the squat brick structure of a public restroom, looking like a small military bunker in the night. Green signs made a darker hue in the night dotted the trails, telling passersby how far to where. We continued walking, Tara leading the way, and the area around the trees became more spacious so that off in the distance I could see a rippling and moving surface—almost black—and the light of the moon and stars glinting off of it like a million diamonds.
We walked to the shore of the lake and there Tara stopped, and I stopped with her. On the lakeshore was a large rock shaped like a state I couldn’t name and in front of it a length of driftwood, washed up like the last plank of a lost and sunken ship. Tara sat on the rock and patted the space beside her, and I lowered myself next to her.
There wasn’t much space and our shoulders brushed when we moved.
She folded her hands in her lap and turned to me. Now she was smiling and it reached her eyes, along with the reflected sparkle of the heavens, and it seemed like there was a whole universe in her eyes.
“You can open your present now,” she said, and I blinked, confused, then remembered the package under my arm and pulled it free.
I tore at the wrapping like I imagined tearing at her clothes someday, the way ruggedly handsome actors did it in the movies. When the paper was tossed away and I saw what I held in my hands, I felt both extremely unmanly, as far from Mel Gibson or Tom Cruise as a guy could get, and very, very happy at the same time. To be completely honest, the happiness outweighed the embarrassment.
The stuffed plush Batman, previously gutted in the Haunted House, stared back up at me, stitched inexpertly but charmingly across his midsection so that it looked like train tracks crossed the width of him. Batman as the Frankenstein monster maybe.
I knew the grin on my face was wide and foolish, and I didn’t care.
I held Batman tightly in my lap, my fists squishing him.
“I went back that night to get him,” Tara said and I looked at her and she looked away, off across the dark waters of the lake. “It seemed wrong to leave him there. You know, after all he’s done for Gotham.”
“Wow,” I said. “You just might be the biggest nerd I’ve ever met.”
She laughed and nudged me with her shoulder.
“Don’t make fun. He may have saved our lives.”
I thought of that night in the Haunted House, and Dillon pulling the knife away from me to go to work on the stuffed Batman. Tara acting quicker than any of us, turning and kicking the guy a good one on the shin.
I don’t think it was the Caped Crusader who saved me that night.
I stared at Tara by the lake with the trees rustling and whispering in the evening breeze, and she finally looked back at me. I think she may have seen a hint of my thoughts. She nudged me with her shoulder again and then leaned over and I leaned over to meet her.
Our lips met and time seemed to stop. Again there was that feeling that the world was moving just for us: this night was ours, and this lake, and the wind in our hair. And this girl, this most beautiful of creatures, was mine, here and now and mine alone.
I had the notion to use my hands this time and wanted to do it oh so badly. To touch her, let my fingers roam her. To feel the curve of her back with the skin of my fingertips. Maybe to put one on her leg and let it spider-crawl there, seeking, feeling. If I was real daring, to encircle her with my arms and pull her close so that our bodies were touching too, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, a dozen little places, a dozen little meetings of us and the tingle of it like electric pulses.
But she pulled away before I could command my hands to act.
Just that kiss and the contact was broken.
Again she stared out over the lake and embarrassed, disappointed maybe too, I did the same, trying to find whatever it was she was looking for. Knowing she wasn’t really looking for anything in particular, or perhaps one very important thing. The most important thing ever: understanding.
“What do you think will happen to us?” she asked in little more than a whisper, a sigh.
I didn’t know if she meant me and her; or Jim and Bobby too and the whole Outsiders’ Club; maybe Mr. Perrelli and Brock, and the things that had come before; Dillon, Max and Stu at the Haunted House; Sheriff Glover at the access road near the Buick; the Collector and Mr. Templeton on the mountain. Perhaps she meant all of it and that feeling I’d had for awhile after it all, that feeling that things were closing in on us, that we’d been too lucky for a bunch of kids who’d wanted what wasn’t rightly theirs. That maybe all there was for us was pain after pain, trial after trial, and a special place in hell for kids who plotted to steal money that didn’t belong to them and killed people who wanted it back.
I shook my head, not knowing what to say.
“What if it doesn’t end with this Perrelli guy?” she said. “What if we do … something … again, and someone else comes after him?”
Silence was all I had to give.
The trees continued their murmurs, better conversationalists than I.
“When I had to do that counseling,” Tara continued and I knew without having to ask she was talking about what the court had ordered after her having shot the Collector up on Lookout Mountain, “the doctor kept asking me about my feelings and what I thought about shooting that guy. Shooting the Collector.”
She stood and stepped over the driftwood so that the toes of her shoes were almost touching the water. I stood up and walked over to stand beside her.
“All I wanted was to be out of there,” she said. “His office was so drab and dull. Just all these leather doctor’s books. And on the walls were just a bunch of degrees in fancy frames. It was a dead place, and it reminded me of being up there on the mountain and pulling the trigger and watching that man fall all the way down.”
I was looking for something again out on the lake. Looking anywhere to find it, anywhere but in Tara’s eyes.
“He wanted to know if I had nightmares,” she said. “But I just wanted to go home. So I kept it all in. I didn’t tell him about my feelings, and I said nothing about nightmares.”
She grabbed me and turned me towards her, turned me away from that something I sought over the black waters, and towards her and the pain in her eyes. The pain in her eyes maybe reflecting what was in me, and me not wanting to see it.
“But I do have feelings. And I have nightmares.”
I had nightmares too, remembered the one about us high in the Ferris wheel, the ride falling apart around us, and us crashing down among the ruins of its mechanisms. I didn’t share this though and said nothing.
I was becoming real good at saying nothing.
I thought maybe I could major in it in college. Probably get full tuition paid by the United Mutes of America Foundation.
“I think about you all the time, Joey,” she said, and those words filled me with a sense of contentment so profound I felt airy and light. I wondered if I should strap myself to something lest I float away like a balloon in the wind. “And I have nightmares about one of us not making it.”
That deflated me right quick.
Dread replaced my momentary elation, pushing its way like a bully cutting in line.
“This Mr. Perrelli doesn’t seem like a nice guy,” she said. “And I get the feeling his blockheaded friend likes to hurt things. Ten million dollars is a lot of money to lose. When he finally believes that we don’t have it, he’s going to be pissed.”
I agreed with all of this and so continued my record-breaking silence.
“I got the distinct impression,” Tara continued, “that when Mr. Perrelli gets pissed, people get hurt. I think those people are going to be us.”
She sought my hand again and squeezed it. My fingers intertwined with hers, each touch like dynamite going off inside me.
“Jim or Bobby. Your sister maybe. You or me. I don’t think this thing will pass without us suffering for it.”
Finally, I found words and said them, knowing they were inadequate even before I spoke them, but saying them anyway.
“We seem to have done alright so far.”
“Is that so?” Tara said. “We beat up some punks; threw rocks at a fat sheriff; and killed a man.” In my mind I corrected her, saying: No, you killed a man; you’re the one that shot him. Horrified at my own selfishness, I wisely kept my mouth shut. “And for what? A bunch of money we ended up burning anyway?”
She looked away from me again. Dropped my hand.
“I wonder if it isn’t all our fault,” she said in a near whisper. “I wonder if maybe we wouldn’t have been better off never meeting.”
“Don’t say that,” I said, wondering how the conversation had turned in this manner, my heart sinking. She had called me. She had picked me up and driven us out here. She had walked me out to the lake and given me my present and then kissed me. This time I grabbed her hands and held them tightly. “Don’t ever say that,” I repeated and then I was moving forward and kissing her. At first she tried to pull away but I pulled her back, and then she was yielding, accepting it.
This time I did use my hands, desperately, almost without even thinking about it. First they were on her hips, moving up and down the denim of her jeans, finding the seam there between her blouse and waistband, touching that small strip of skin. Then they were under her blouse and touching the flat of her stomach, smooth and taut like leather. I felt her gasp into my mouth, tasted her breath in puffs. I pulled her close like I’d wanted to minutes ago, making those dozen small contacts: legs brushing legs, stomach to stomach, chest to chest and the swell of her breasts mashed against me, and her heartbeat behind them. Our faces were close, and when the kiss was done, but my hands still moving, roaming like they had minds of their own along the hidden skin beneath her shirt, we leaned against each other so that our foreheads rested one against the other.
“Don’t ever say that again,” I repeated once more, whispering it fiercely to her, breathing it on her, wanting the words to go into her and take root there. “This will be over soon.” I realized that like a hero in a movie I was making my first promise to a girl, and I wondered if I’d be able to keep it. “It’ll be over and we’ll still be here.”
That was the last thing either of us said there in the night by the black water, the trees whispering their devious secrets, their own promises maybe, of shadowy things and hidden things. And suddenly, despite the kisses and the touches, the girl in my arms and the taste of her on my lips, I didn’t want to be out there anymore.
Tara felt this, I think, as well and we walked back to the truck and she drove me home, where I had many feelings in the long night in my bed, and many nightmares. Oh, God, were there nightmares, and morning seemed so far away.
Dad was off to work and Mom went into town for shopping when Sarah came into my room and tried to rouse me from bed. I was awake but not wanting to be, trying to make up for the sleep lost the night before. My breath had that morning stench like sour things and I hoped it hadn’t smelled that way yesterday when I’d kissed Tara.
I purposely blew it into my sister’s face.
“You stupid troll!” she said, backing away and holding her nose. “You smell like ass! Go brush your teeth or something!”
“Don’t … bother me then,” I croaked. I added a fart too, just for good measure, hoping it would scare her away. But Sarah held her ground. “What do you want?”
“If you weren’t so stupid and gross I would have told you by now.”
She went to my bedroom window and looked out. Then she turned back to me.
“Hurry and get up. I have something to show you.”
“A … new face?” I said through a yawn. “No need for me to see it. I’m sure it’s an improvement.”
Sarah moved quickly to the bed, grabbed my leg and the covers, and pulled hard. I slid along the mattress and then there was no mattress and I fell in a tangle of sheets to the floor. Bandit leapt down from the bed at the disturbance. My head hit the wall.
“You tampon!” I said, rubbing my head. “What’s your problem?”
“Remember those journalism skills you asked me about?” she said, and she smiled in triumph. “I went on Dad’s computer and found out some stuff about your friend Mr. Perrelli.”
The triumph quickly left her face and was replaced by something else. Worry, maybe, or fear.
“I think you should come take a look.”
I was already struggling to my feet at the mention of Mr. Perrelli. We moved quickly out the door and down the hall towards Dad’s office. Bandit brought up the rear, his nails clacking madly as he rushed to follow the excitement.
In Dad’s office I moved around his large oak desk and took the swivel chair, rolling it close so I could reach the keyboard, mouse, and lean in close to the monitor. Sarah at first stood close behind me, looming, and so I puffed another burst of dragon breath in her face and she backed up a few steps, looking like she was deciding whether to retch or punch me in the face. In the end she did neither, but just stood back as I read what she had pulled up on the computer screen.
As my eyes roamed down the screen, taking in the words and pictures there, stark validity was brought to the fears that Tara had voiced last night. I added my own blooming fears to those, and it seemed I’d stepped into another world.
“This is insane,” I said.
Using the mouse to move the onscreen pages up and down, I re-read some of what I already had. I looked back over my shoulder at Sarah. She stood there, leaning against the wall in her pajamas, chewing on a fingernail.
“He’s a mob boss,” she said, speaking the words around the finger in her mouth. “Ties in Philadelphia and Chicago.”
She glanced from me to the screen.
“He’s the real thing,” she said.
I turned slowly back to the computer screen.
On the screen was one silver-haired, black-eyed Vincent Perrelli, a black-and-white photograph of him standing in front of a brownstone building. Around him were several uniformed police officers, one of them standing behind him, only partially seen. Mr. Perrelli’s arms behind his back let the viewer of the photograph know what was happening, as if all the cops weren’t enough of a hint. He was being arrested, though from the smile on his face and his casual, leisurely posture, he could have been surrounded by a personal escort, readying for a night on the town.
“Indicted on five counts of murder,” I said, reading aloud the words on the screen before me. “Three counts of racketeering and two of extortion. He did seven years of a fifteen year sentence. Paroled after an appeal brought into question the chain-of-custody of certain forensic evidence, and one of the witnesses changed his story.”
“I get the feeling this witness didn’t just wake up one morning, realizing he’d given bad testimony,” my sister said, and I agreed with her.
“And now Perrelli’s after us.”
“What do we do?” Sarah asked.
That was the ten-million-dollar question, which I had no answer for, because the ten million dollars that had briefly been in my possession had gone up in smoke.
I wondered if we were next for the flames.
* * *
Fat Bobby was out on the porch and I called him upstairs. The heavy thumps of his footfalls on the steps and then coming down the hall announced his approach. Poking his head into the room like he wasn’t sure if he should be there, he looked at us in front of the computer, and I waved him over.
We showed him the stories about Vincent Perrelli. I even narrated some of it for him, like maybe he was dyslexic or retarded and wouldn’t understand the gravity of what he was reading.
But he did grasp it, and there was that pasty pale hue to his face again like he might get sick. He rolled his eyes, leaned against a wall, and held his head in a way like he was thinking about it and coming to a determination. In the end he fortunately didn’t spew all over my dad’s computer, but there was this large lump that went down his throat like he’d swallowed what had been about to come up. This made me a little sick in turn.
“What do we do?” Fat Bobby asked. “That was obviously his money in the car, and we burned it all. What’s he going to do when he doesn’t get his money?”
I had no answer for him as I’d had no answer for my sister and myself. For a time in that room there was only silence, and I felt uncomfortably like someone had me in their crosshairs with their finger on the trigger. So strong was this feeling that I stepped away from the window, which brought me closer again to the computer monitor. Not wanting to, my gaze found the black-and-white of Vincent Perrelli again, smiling like a kindly grandfather or a man on a stroll.
I wondered if this was how our end would be: just another story in the morning paper. The totality of us summed up in a few paragraphs and maybe a poor photo and a caption.