B009XDDVN8 EBOK (19 page)

I had told the world of Pitchford I was going to Boston College, but that was just a cover story. If everyone knew where I was going, what good would the name switch have been? Madeline was headed for the University of Maryland and for a moment I imagined going there, too, pressing my case and winning her back, seizing again the future I had glimpsed when our limbs were entwined. But she actually did go to the prom with Richie Diffendale—what secret hoard did he have buried and what did that say about her? With my little stash of cash, I figured I could do better. So when a thick letter from Madison, Wisconsin, arrived at our house addressed to Jonathon Willing, my future was set. That I hadn’t told Ben or Augie the truth gnawed at me some, but not enough to blurt it out.
Incognito
meant exactly that.

“What about you, Ben?”

“Training camp starts in two weeks.”

“Good luck with that,” I said.

Ben winced. Because of his knee, which cut his senior season in half, the top Division I schools had stopped calling, but he had still pulled a scholarship from Lehigh. The pro dreams were gone, thank God, but he would still have to play college ball, at least until his knee gave out for good.

“What about you, Augie?” I said.

“I’ve got some things working,” said Augie.

“You were talking about Penn State Ogontz.”

“Next year, maybe. For now I need to stay around my dad for a bit.”

“Yeah, I understand,” I said.

“I couldn’t do school right away, anyhow,” said Augie. “I was so sick of high school I almost puked every time I stepped through the doors.”

“That’s because you were drunk,” said Ben.

“How else could I stand it? But you suckers enjoy taking your tests and writing your papers.”

“I’m a football player,” said Ben. “We pay someone else to write our papers.”

Augie patted the side of the U-Haul. “You ever coming back?”

My hand instinctively rose to my neck and I rubbed the scar. It wasn’t red and raw anymore, but it was still raised and obvious as hell. I rubbed it constantly, a reminder of what awaited me if I failed in my precautions.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“So this is it.”

“Yeah,” I said, kicking at the cement. “Good-bye, Pitchford. If you ever see me back on Henrietta Road, you have my permission to hit me on the head with a baseball bat.”

“Even if you’re gone for good, J.J., we can still get together,” said Ben. “Why the hell not? It’s not like we won’t be able to afford it. Maybe New York, maybe Mexico.”

“Mexico,” I said, nodding.

“Or Las Vegas,” said Augie. “If we can’t get in trouble there, boys, we’re not trying. And the whores are legal, too.”

“Some of us don’t need to buy it,” said Ben.

“Talk to me after your knee explodes and the cheerleaders stop jumping your bones,” said Augie.

Ben thought about it for a moment. “Vegas, then.”

I glanced at my watch. “It’s a long drive and I want to make some distance before dark.” I opened the truck door, hopped up into the cab. “We’ll get together for a celebration when we can.”

“Next week, boys?” said Augie.

“Not quite,” I said. “It’s still too soon to start spending, don’t you think?”

“We need to keep in touch,” said Ben.

“Sure,” I said.

“No,” said Ben, lowering his chin in seriousness as he lowered his voice. He leaned toward the open truck door. “I don’t mean, like, saying we’ll have lunch and then letting it pass. I mean keep closely in touch.”

“I don’t know, man,” I said. “It might be hard.”

“I’m not talking long heart-to-hearts. Just check in, until we’re certain everything is over. Just to know that there have been no more break-ins and that we’re all doing okay.”

“Like saying, ‘Still here,’ right?” said Augie.

“Exactly,” said Ben. “And so we can pass on anything we see or hear that worries us.”

“I get it.”

“The thing is,” said Ben, his gaze scanning back and forth across Henrietta Road, “we’re connected by what we did. It’s like a cord between us. We’ll always be connected.”

I looked down at my two friends and was startled to realize that I was sad. We had gone our separate ways in the last year, but still I sensed even then that I would never have better friends than these two.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll keep in touch.”

“Since Augie’s sticking around, J.J., why don’t you and I call him? Once a week, just to say hello. You’ll be our intermediary, okay, Augie?”

“You guys sure you want to trust a dopehead like me as the middleman?” said Augie.

“Sure we do,” said Ben.

“Absolutely,” I said, and Augie beamed at the responsibility in a way that made me feel like a creep.

“Okay,” said Augie. “Once a week. You can get me at home, at least until my old man kicks it. Then I think I’ll scope out Vegas.”

“Just don’t start having too much fun without us.” I shut the door, leaned out the open window. “I’ve got to go. It’s a long drive.”

“We did it, didn’t we?” said Ben softly.

“Yes we did,” I said.

“Jesus,” said Augie. “I don’t know if it’s the best thing I’ll ever pull in my life, but if it is, that’s okay with me.”

I looked at them both for a moment and my eyes grew teary as I found myself overwhelmed by sorrow, not just because I was leaving them, the best friends of my life, but also because I was leaving my childhood, leaving Pitchford. Figure that out if you want—I still can’t. But I opened the door and jumped down and gave them each a hug, Ben huge and solid like a great brown bear, and Augie thin, nervous, wriggling in my arms like a fish on a hook.

And then I hopped back into the U-Haul and drove off, away from Henrietta Road for what I knew would be the very last time, waving once as I made the turn like a goddamn movie hero on his horse. And quick as that, I was gone. But not heading straight for the highway, not yet, at least.

I took a left, and then another, and then I weaved along until I pulled into a small, barely used road that ran along the far edge of a grove of woods. I parked by the side of the road, opened the back of the truck, took out a shovel I had slipped into the corner, and headed into the trees.

I was walking through our woods, just hitting them from the other end. It wasn’t long before I found our clearing, surrounded by oaks, with the ruined stone walls and the cherry tree that had miraculously grown within the old building’s perimeter. The tree was sickly even when I first came upon it; now its bark was split, the wood peeking through was a drawn gray and infested with ants, its limbs were as leafless and dead as the arms of a corpse. All around the tree, on the stone remaining from the structure, was the ragged graffiti we had scrawled over the last eight years.
AI RULES. TG SUCKS COCK. BP
—89.
GOD MADE WEED/IN GOD WE TRUST. JJ
♥
MW. FUCK THE WORLD.
I found a rock at the base of the tree with its own rough lettering:
REX—RIP.
I shoved the rock aside and started digging.

The dirt was softer than you might have expected. It wasn’t long before I found the blanket I had buried there eight years before. The blanket was filthy and tattered but still intact. Inside was a bundle of bones and pale white hair. I pulled the bundle out and kept digging. A few minutes later I heard the lovely scrape of metal on metal.

With the bones of my dog back in the grave, and the stone marker back in its place, I gripped the handle of my father’s green toolbox, encrusted now with dirt and rust, and headed back to the truck. J.J. Moretti was as dead as his dog; it was time for Jonathon Willing to begin his life anew, free of the past, free of the fears, with nothing but glorious opportunity ahead of him, and rich as a goddamned king.

As I took a deep, satisfying drag from the cigarette in the basement of my George Washington at Patriots Landing, I remembered the emotions that had coursed through me then, relief and hope and possibility pure, like a clean bright light had washed out all the imperfections of my life. That my future had turned out not quite so rich didn’t diminish the power of that moment. And I was feeling some of those very same emotions now as the remainder of my stolen cash rested in the hidden compartment of my father’s green metal toolbox and I faced another escape that would save both my life and my family’s financial future. But I was also mourning the inevitable losses that had stacked up over the years: a failed marriage, an estrangement from my best friends, Augie’s murder, and now, worst of all, the necessary abandonment of my family. And so considering all I had gained and all it had cost me, the question had to be asked:

Was it worth it?

Was it ever.

And it wasn’t about the money, or only about the money. That moment when Ben and Augie and I had seized our opportunity was the bravest of my life, the boldest, and, in its way, the truest expression of the dark anarchy at the root of my soul. Everything before was as if it never existed, everything after paled in comparison. As my life deteriorated here, as my marriage crumbled and my kids turned hostile and my business disappeared and my equity cratered, the only thing that stayed solid and reliable was that moment.

And it hadn’t just changed my life, it had guided it, too. I had learned to trust it and in that trust it had given me everything. It told me to change my name and go to Wisconsin because Wisconsin was safely away from anything Pitchford, and it was in Wisconsin that I met Caitlin. It led me here, to Patriots Landing, because here I could be anonymous and safe and it was here that I raised my children and found a profession that kept me in the lucre until it didn’t anymore. And now it was telling me to change directions again and to seize the life for which everyone secretly yearned. To be free and tanned, living on a boat, living where the rest of the world could visit only on rare vacations. And there would be opportunities for me there, too, I had no doubt: new women, piles of money, adventures that would thrill me to the bone.

The opportunity I had seized twenty-five years ago was leading me now to paradise.

I took a deep drag, felt the smoke expand in my lungs, like the hot, fragrant air of the tropics. Caitlin and I had vacationed in Jamaica before Eric was born. The jungle there was too fertile to control, towers of mahogany and rosewood marching across dense mountainsides, greenery spilling down the cliffs in luxuriant waves of orchid and fern, vines reaching across the rugged roadways and past stands selling breadfruit and plantains, pineapple sliced before your eyes with heavy machetes. The verdant riot fell through the valleys, collapsed alongside breathtaking
waterfalls, twisted beside still lagoons before again tumbling down in a great uprising of life toward the brilliant turquoise of the Caribbean Sea.

You know what they could have used down there? Good curbing. Like the curbs we had at Patriots Landing, meaty and thick, impervious to the wild imperfections of the lawns they restrained or the random weight of a badly parked truck.

With the back of my hand I wiped a tear from my eye.

God, I would miss those curbs.

I
COULDN
’
T DO
it.

“Well, of course you couldn’t,” said Harry. “I knew it from the start.”

“That makes one of us.”

“But that’s always the way, isn’t it? The last thing any of us ever sees clearly is his own reflection in the mirror.”

“So what do you see when you see me?”

Harry was leaning over the rear of the
Left Hook
, holding my boat fast to his with a grappling hook, speaking a little too loudly, which was his way. He appraised me for a moment, as if I were a piece of beef in a butcher’s counter. “A bleeder, with slow hands and sloppy footwork. A tin can full of tomatoes, sure. But not a runner.”

Which meant only that Harry was a hell of a lot more perceptive than I had been, because I saw me as a sprinter, pure and simple.

At the time of my planned demise, we had met up in the secluded cove on the James, sheltered by overgrown gorse and thick rafts of pine, the spot I had chosen to take the first steps of my escape. I would slice my arm, spill gouts of blood over the wood and cushions of my boat, put a dent in the boom with a coconut covered with my blood and bits of my hair, capsize my daysailer, and push it out into the main current of the river. The
boat would flow downstream, an accident scene waiting to be discovered, while I rode upstream aboard Harry’s old wooden fisher.