B009XDDVN8 EBOK (26 page)

“My nest egg,” I said.

“If I’d have known what was in that thing, I wouldn’t have come back with it.”

“Sure you would have, Harry. Because you might drink too much, and you surely talk too much, and you might have taken one punch too many to the head, but in spite of everything, you’re a man of honor.”

“You don’t know me good enough,” said Harry.

“Take this,” I said, tossing him a stack of bills. “For expenses.”

As he caught the stack his tongue slipped out and licked his lips. “I’m not no good with receipts.”

“I’m not expecting change.”

“Good, ’cause you ain’t getting none.”

I took out the hunting knife, put it in my pocket along with another stack of bills, and then closed the box. When I was back on the dock, with the rusted green thing in my hand, Caitlin looked down at the chest. “What’s with the tools?”

“I lent them to Harry so he could get his engines ready for the trip.”

“Where is he taking us?”

“To his sister in Kitty Hawk. She’ll preach at you a bit, but she’ll take care of you, too. She has a house not far from the beach.”

“What are we going to do in Kitty Hawk?”

“Frolic. Just don’t tell anyone where you are. You can call your parents from the boat to say you’re okay and that maybe
they should take a quick trip somewhere just to be safe, but that’s it. And keep your phone off so they can’t trace you.”

“What about clothes? What about food?”

“Here,” I said, pulling the bundle of hundred-dollar bills out of my pocket and trying to hand it to her on the sly. “That’s more than you’ll need.”

She took the money and held it out and stared at it for a bit, heedless of what anyone else saw. She riffed the bills, smelled them even. And then she gave me the strangest look, as if I were someone she had never seen before. As if I were suddenly someone worth seeing. It’s funny what cash can buy.

“You can’t use your credit cards,” I said. “They’ll trace those, so use the cash for everything.”

“They have outlet stores in Nags Head.”

“Buy some clothes for the kids.”

“How long will it take?”

“I’ll get it over with one way or the other as quickly as I can.”

She stared at me for a moment longer. I reached out to give her a kiss, but she pulled away, as if I were indeed a stranger. I supposed then that the pretending had all ended. Ignoring my offer to help her onto the boat, she turned to Harry, who reached out a hand to pull her aboard. She looked at his weathered face, at his proffered hand black with grease, back at his face, which was now awkwardly smiling, and then put her hand in his and climbed into the boat.

“That was quite a slap Mom gave you in front of that house,” said Shelby quietly, after Caitlin was safely aboard.

“She’s right to be upset. I’m an idiot.”

“What did you do, really? Why are you sending us away?”

“When I was your age, I did something, something a little brilliant and a lot stupid, and I’ve been dealing with the fallout ever since. Let that be a lesson, young lady: choices matter.”

“Oh, so that’s the way it works. You screw up and then start lecturing me.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s the way it works. But I’m going to handle it once and for all.”

“While we go for a cruise,” she said, gesturing toward Harry’s boat.

“Exactly. Be sure to try the rock-climbing wall.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’re going someplace safe. With a beach. But I’m not going with you. And neither is your phone.”

“What?”

“Give it to me.”

“No. It’s my phone. It’s personal.”

“They can trace these things now, Shelby. Every second your phone is on, it’s sending a signal telling anyone who cares enough exactly where you are. Normally it doesn’t matter, but right now it does.”

“It’s not fair.”

“It’s not about fairness.”

“I’ll turn it off, okay? And promise not to use it. Promise.”

“Sweetie? Give me the damn phone.”

She looked at me and saw something in my bruised eyes that caused her to take out her phone, turn it off, and hand it over.

“What will I do?” she said.

“Talk, read, think.”

“This is so not fair.”

“Take care of your mother, please.”

She rolled her eyes. “Are you going to be okay?”

“I hope so.”

“Okay, see you,” she said with a quick wave.

Her back was turned to me and I expected her just to tromp off to the boat, but she did something strange instead. She backed into me and turned slowly so that, before I knew it, I was hugging her. She didn’t hug back, that wasn’t her way, but she did bow her head into my chest, as if she were giving me permission to kiss her on the crown. Which I did.

And then she was gone, reaching out and letting Harry pull her up onto the boat to join her mother.

“Are we going fishing?” said Eric.

“Do you want to go fishing?”

“Please God, no.”

“Then good news: no fishing. Harry’s just taking you on a little trip.”

“Where?”

“Kitty Hawk.”

“The Wright brothers?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool. Maybe I’ll build my own plane.”

“And fly where?”

“Back to school. Didn’t I tell you about the Science Olympiad?”

“I’m sending you off with your mom and sister on a beach vacation. What kid doesn’t want a beach vacation in the middle of school?”

“Me.” He looked down at the wooden dock. “Why don’t I come with you?”

“You can’t. It’s too dangerous.”

“I’ll be your Robin.”

“My what?”

“You know. The Boy Wonder.”

It took a moment for the implication of that comment to sink in, and when it did, something cracked in me and the emotions flooded. Is it too pathetic for such a throwaway moment to be one of the greatest of my life?

“I’d like that,” I said. “And you would be a wonder. But you know how when you go up to bat in baseball, you can’t bring anyone with you? This is like that, something I have to do myself. For you, not with you.”

“Is it as bad as Little League?”

“Worse.”

“Wear a helmet.”

“What I need you to do is take care of Mom and make sure you all stay safe. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Now give me a hug.”

“Okay,” he said, and he did, a hug so quick and furtive, it was as if he wanted no one to notice, not even us. And then my boy wonder hopped onto the boat.

They were my crew, my family, along with one of my last true friends, and the emotions that had flooded in when I said good-bye to Eric continued rising as the boat finally pulled away from the dock. Eric waved and Shelby waved and Harry waved and Caitlin turned to stare at the end of the harbor. And then they were heading out toward the mouth of the river, away, getting smaller and smaller, and my tears flowed. In the last few days I had become a faucet and it was embarrassing. I was tougher when I was ten. But there I was, tearing up as my family disappeared into the horizon, and I remembered what Harry had said the difference was between winners and losers in the prize ring.

“When you’re in a fight, Johnny—a real fight, I mean, where you’re both pounding the hell out of each other without an ounce of mercy—you’re going to see death in that ring. He’s standing there, true as life and ugly as a washerwoman. And if you step away from him, you step into the cross that puts you down. That’s just the common sense I was talking about, because there’s no safer place than on the canvas with the ref counting six, seven, eight. But the pug who steps up and gives death an embrace, that’s the boy what climbs the rope to standing and ends up on top. If you’re in a fight like you say, Johnny, make sure you’re the one giving death that hug, make sure you’re the one most willing to die.”

When the boat was gone, while still staring at the horizon, I took the phone out of my pocket and turned the thing on. M
ENU
: O
UTGOING
C
ALLS
: a Chicago number. I pressed S
END
.

“Frenchy,” said Clevenger. “I’ve been waiting for your call.”

“I told you not to call me that.”

“It hurts your feelings?”

“No, it makes me think of Augie. And then all I want to do is slit your throat.”

“Oh, aren’t we suddenly feisty. Okay, boy, what’s on your mind?”

“A lot, but I’m not telling it to you. I’m telling it to the guy pulling your strings. Put him on.”

“No one pulls my strings, pal. The only one you’re talking to is me, and you better talk fast because I have an army of collection agents on your trail.”

I suddenly felt naked. I looked around at the docks and the boats and the houses along the waterfront. “Is that what you call your goons, collection agents?”

“That’s what we are. You have a debt you need to pay, we’re here to collect.”

“Whatever happened all those years ago, you weren’t involved. The guy who hired you was. He’s the one I want to talk to.”

“He doesn’t want to talk to you.”

“Does he know you killed Augie?”

“Don’t bother me with details.”

“That detail is going to cost you your neck.”

“Now you’re a comedian.”

“You hear yet from your boy Holmes?”

“I will.”

“You better lawyer up before you do. I left a note for the cops linking him to Augie’s murder. They’re going to be asking all kinds of questions, and the answer to each of them is you.”

“You know, friend, you’re turning into a thorn. We’re going to have that sit-down sooner than you think.”

“What are you in this for, Clevenger? The money?”

“What else? The same as you.”

“You willing to die for it?”

“I’m willing to kill for it. Isn’t that enough?”

“Not nearly. Put me in touch with the guy who hired you.”

“No chance.”

“Then I’m going to find the son of a bitch on my own.”

“Keep in touch.”

—Augie Iannucci

T
HE THOROUGHFARES OF
the American landscape have been sanded flat by commerce. Wherever you go, there are the same bold trademarks fighting for your attention, signs for fast-food joints, casual dining joints, rib joints, steak joints, Walmarts and Kmarts, chain hotels and chain motels. You can hit a strip and not know if you are in San Jose or Santa Fe, in Virginia or Maryland or Delaware. And then you approach a strip as anonymous as all the rest and yet in the curve of the boulevard, in the rhythm of the signs, in the juxtaposition of that McDonald’s with that Target with that Sunoco, you feel a vibration in your chest. Because that McDonald’s is where you used to hang when you cut lunch in high school. And that Target used to be the Sears where your mom bought that cheap red bicycle you rode back and forth on your street all afternoon. And that Sunoco is where you filled up your mom’s Chevy that time you were so wasted you drove off with the hose still jammed into your car and tragicomedy ensued. This isn’t just any strip, this is your strip, and suddenly you know you are home.

It should have been no surprise that I was heading back to the old neighborhood. What criminal doesn’t have the urge to return to the scene of the crime? But what did surprise me were the emotions that welled as I drove along my old strip. There was fear, of course, and despair at ever fixing this thing,
and a lingering nausea that hadn’t left me from that moment in the gun shop when I knew I had finally been found. But there was also excitement, a quickening of the pulse. If you asked me what I considered my home, I would tell you Patriots Landing, or maybe the leafy Main Line suburb of my early, prosperous youth, but the emotions I was feeling now would put a lie to all of that. Whatever the word
home
meant, for me, even against my will, it meant Pitchford.