Chinese Handcuffs (12 page)

She said, “No, I'm okay. All this news isn't blowing
me
away. I've known it for years. I'd like to get to know Stacy.”

Boy, I haven't been that agitated for a
long
time, maybe
since you died. All the ideas I had about this get-together turning into an informational clearinghouse were intensified by about seven thousand. I couldn't tell Stacy what I'd learned from Jen; but Stace is a reader of ambience, and she knew the mood before we'd all sat down. She also seemed to have some of that same kind of immediate connection with Jen that I'd had, so by the time the pie was on the table we were about three days into some serious talk, except for Ryan, of course, who was deeply into his pie art.

I felt this incredible need to
purge,
and the natural place to start was with my complicity in your death. It was the only thing powerful enough to get the conversation where I wanted it, and I thought it might establish trust. Once again, little big brother, I used you. I told them how I knew something was wrong but I let it go. And that once I got over the shock, a part of me was almost
glad
you did it. I've never said that before to anyone. I've thought it, and I've written it to you; but I've never actually heard those words. They threw me, but it was still true. I wouldn't have wanted your life for anything in the world, and if I'd had it, I'm not a bit sure I wouldn't have taken the same road.

Then I looked at Stacy and reached into my backpack. I pulled out the picture of me in the restaurant when I was a year old and handed it to her. I said, “The beat goes on.”

Stacy just smiled and sort of nodded. “That Preston?”

“Actually,” I said, “it's me.”

“No difference, really. The only reason I haven't told everyone is my parents,” she said. “I'm surprised anyone bought that story for fifteen seconds. I'm embarrassed to have to tell it.”

Jen looked confused.

Stacy touched her knee and told it all. “Dillon's brother was Ryan's dad.” She pushed her pie around the plate absently with her fork for a second, and Ryan took that as an indication that she wanted him to put a full handprint into it, which he did. The temperature of the ice cream surprised him a bit, but his shocked look turned quickly to glee as he stuck his hand into his mouth. Little bugger didn't have an idea what was being said would probably change his life forever. He just wanted more of that pie. And Stace went right on. “The crazy part is I did it on purpose. I lied and left my diaphragm home. Preston was so far gone and so far away from
me
that I was sure I was losing him forever. I don't even know what I was in love with, probably just memories, because there sure wasn't anything left coming from him.” She nodded toward Ryan. “Sometimes I think I had him to give myself a little Preston.” She closed her eyes. “That's sick.” That's what she said, Pres. I know it won't exactly make you the happiest corpse in the
world, but we're telling all here.

I sat in the booth and looked at Ryan, who leaned against Stacy, reaching for more of her pie, still untouched by all of this, and I said, “For a little shit, Preston made a lot of noise on the way out, huh?”

Stacy's eyes remained closed. “You know, Dillon, you said part of it might be your fault, knowing how crazy he looked that day and all.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you get only half the blame because he killed himself the day after I told him I was pregnant.” Tears started down her face, and Ryan tried to put his finger to one of them, leaving a perfect strawberry-rhubarb and ice cream fingerprint. “You might have provided the murder weapon, but I supplied the motive.” She opened her eyes again and looked at Ryan. “I love this little snotmaker,” she said, “but it might have been a mistake. I don't know what he needs half the time, and sometimes when I look at him and start thinking about Preston, I want to strangle him. But another part of me says I'd do it all again.”

So you see, Pres, you left things in a mess. I wish to hell I could make you come back and own your part of it all; but you made the great escape, and there's no turning that back. It's four o'clock in the morning now, and you're probably glad you're dead, so you really don't have to read
this. My ghost of a nephew is home licking the rest of Stacy's pie off his fingers, dreaming of new ways to foul his Jockey shorts; Jennifer, who I just love so much after tonight, I can barely stand it, is in her bed thanking God her house was dark when she got home and more than likely her asshole of a stepdad was asleep. Stacy and I both think we killed you, and I'm sitting here wondering what appropriate
responses
to all this would be, and I can't ask the one person in the world—Coach—who might be able to help me with that because before the night was over, I'd promised everyone I wouldn't tell
anything
I heard tonight.

When I let Jen off, she was warmer to me, actually brushed the side of my face with hers, and told me she was sorry she had to be so cold. It came to me that the reason I've never felt much for her physically before is she hasn't offered
any
kind of target for that.

So at least I'm not crazy there.

The place I may be
really
crazy is that from the instant I knew her stepdad was messing with her, I felt this tremendous desire for her. I can't ever tell anyone alive that, and I don't have a clue what to do with it. Responses are one thing; impulses are another. I'm gonna have to watch myself like a hawk.

Hell, I'm going to bed.

Dillon

Dillon fell onto his bed, exhausted. Earlier in the evening he had spent several hours with Jennifer and Stacy and Stacy's son, Ryan, clearing the decks, and had come home so conflicted and confused that he couldn't concentrate on TV or hold a conversation with his dad or read without vivid images of Jennifer and her stepdad or of Preston blowing his head off. Finally he pulled on his winter running gear—long johns under sweatpants, two sweatshirts (one crew-necked and one hooded) over a long-sleeved running shirt, and gloves—and hit the dark, snowy streets in an attempt to run some of it off. Approximately an inch of newly fallen snow covered the streets, and the dark skies still spit flurries as he ran, so his relatively new Nike Airs gripped the road well, giving him a feeling of power as he ran. Available light glowed
dimly off the new snow, and he had no trouble seeing his trail in the night, even on the four-mile loop through Three Forks Regional Park, where a high ridge blocked the lights of the city. He found his pace quickly, permitting his mind to run to the gentle rhythm of his waffle treads pushing into the snowy cushion.

A little more than an hour—and ten miles—after his onset, Dillon silently stripped off his sweat-soaked gear inside the enclosed porch and slipped through the house to the bathtub, not one of his dilemmas resolved, but at least physically more at peace. His father had long since stopped worrying about him when he disappeared on his late-night training excursions, and nothing stirred in the quiet house. For several hours he wrote in his journal before reaching this expended state in which he felt he could merely drop onto the bed and become unconscious. But still, he could not sleep, feeling he had set in motion forces he not only couldn't
control
but possibly couldn't contend with. He remembered the number of times he'd seen the cheap mahogany plaque on the desk in his dad's study:
THE UNEXAMINED LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING
.

So when it's examined,
he thought,
what then?
He knew how to examine, but he didn't know how to evaluate. He would ask his dad, soon, what the plaque
meant to him, a man whose family had all but deserted him, who must feel the pain of loss so tremendously that he could only close it off. A burst of guilt filled Dillon, triggered somehow by the flash of Ryan Ryder across the screen behind his eyes. Ryan Ryder, the next generation. You couldn't very well consider the next without considering the last. Dillon was suddenly aware he had left his father to figure it all out for himself. He was such a quiet man, seemingly
so strong
that Dillon never once thought to ask after
his
pain. What must it be like to watch everything you'd worked for for the past twenty-two years crumble before your eyes? Since Dillon could remember, his father had been a jack-of-many-trades, primarily a mail and freight man, contracting with the post office to haul into tiny mountain towns on the edges of the Idaho Primitive Area out of Three Forks, which stood only a few miles from the Washington-Idaho border. But Dillon could also remember his father at different times cleaning furnaces and building cabinets and taking in accounting work for small businesses, and he was aware that he'd never known if the Hemingways were rich people or poor people. He didn't know how his father went about taking care of the family. There was always enough, and no more than that was said. He remembered his father teaching a class out
at Three Forks Community College, though he had no idea what subject material was involved. Dillon suddenly felt tremendously neglectful that he had never queried his father at least enough to let his dad know he was important to him. He would do that, he thought, soon. A boy's examined life needed to include his father.

As he contemplated his irresponsibility over the past two years, and as his muscles began to relax out of pure physical and emotional exhaustion, his mind began to drift and settled on the one time when his irresponsibility nearly resulted in
real
trouble, on the night the Warlocks came after him.

 

Dillon is driving from Chief Joseph toward home by one of several alternative routes he's established in the past few days. It's three days after the last of the nocturnal acts of vandalism on Chief Joe, and he's acutely aware that the bikers haven't forgotten his feeble attempt at voodoo or, more important, his injection of a foreign substance into their meticulously kept engines. He is also aware that these guys have been linked, though not conclusively, to at least two killings and several disappearances over the past five years. They are dangerous men, not to be fooled with.

He has also, with the passage of a little time—very
little time, in fact—lost contact with some of the rage and zeal required to allow him to perform the act in the first place, and he is, quite frankly, scared to death that they'll catch him off guard somewhere and make quick work of him. After his second day of secret worry he told his dad, expecting to have his butt chewed to shreds, but Caulder was so broken by his own losses and so filled with the same rage coursing through Dillon's veins that he merely listened intently to the story, nodded, and cautioned Dillon to be very careful. Late that night Dillon came partway down the stairs after hearing unusual noises, only to find his father examining and loading a shotgun and a 30.06 rifle.

But the Warlocks didn't come.

So now Dillon looks into his rearview mirror almost as often as he looks out the windshield, expecting at any moment to see it filled with Harleys, storming in to surround him.

It's early evening, still light, with moderately heavy traffic still flowing on Ash Street, his main route home for tonight. It happens roughly the way he expected it to, first one bike in the mirror, mounted by a behemoth of a man behind mirrored sunglasses, his long dark hair whipping in the wind. The giant removes something from his belt and speaks into it, and within minutes
he is joined by others.

Dillon's heart blasts off, and he's instantly scanning for an escape route; but the traffic clogs all possibilities, and he possesses none of the driving skills of a Hollywood stunt actor or the cockpit arrogance it would take even to consider that he could perform the lightning maneuvers required to lose a motorcyclist in a four-year-old Dodge van. It's time to pay.

Several bikers merge from the side street ahead to cut him off, and in his rearview mirror he watches two bikes, one on each side, pull beside him, waving him over to the curb.

Through the driver's window one biker shouts, “Pull over, shithead. We want to talk.”

He looks straight ahead, thinking what they want to talk about is where to dump the body. The biker lifts his leg high and stomps the frame of the van just below the door. He glances over involuntarily. The biker points to a side alley and yells, “Pull over!”

Dillon nods, signals, and turns across traffic into the alleyway. With no conscious idea of his intention and in sheer panic, he hits the gas as the rear tires touch the dirt, and gravel cascades back out onto the street. He shoots into the intersection at the next block at full speed, eyes closed, half expecting to be creamed by
oncoming traffic; but miraculously he flies across the street into the next alley untouched, thinking he may have a chance if he can drive crazy enough long enough to be seen and reported to the police, or, better, if he happens on to a cop.

That thought is barely warm when two Harleys pull across the alley entrance on the next block and sit straddled, arms crossed. Dillon slams the van into reverse for a flying backward exit, but the story in the rearview mirror is the same; and he knows the motorized portion of this chase is winding down quickly.

In a flash he's out of the van and over the garbage Dumpster on the driver's side, streaking toward the street between two old buildings, thinking this is how he should have done it in the first place. He has a much better chance on foot. He veers right at the sidewalk, headed back the way he came, hoping to throw them off long enough to give himself running room, knowing if he can get three blocks, four at most, he'll be at the river, which is lined with trees and underbrush. They'll have a rough time finding him there. If worse comes to worst, he can hit the water. The river is cold and rough in places; but he'd rather take his chances with a few rapids and hard rocks than let these leviathan mothers get to him.

The Warlocks figure him out quickly and double
back, staying with him on the street with their bikes as he sprints down the sidewalk. Dillon tries to picture the river, the hiding places there, and where he can get in if he has to. A fifteen-foot chain-link fence topped with circular barbed wire runs between the path and the river, and he can't think where it ends, but if he can get to that path, the fence has to stop somewhere.

At the river he takes another right and sprints south on the path. The brush isn't as thick as he pictured it, but the path is narrow and rough, and none of the bikers comes down, three of them choosing rather to ride parallel to him on Park Drive. Dillon knows there are more; but all he can do now is hope to get to the water before they figure out where he's going.

Ahead the path widens, and he sees the end of the fence. The bikes roar just to his right on the street, but he's sure he can get into the water before they get to him. Suddenly the wide spot in the path is filled with Warlocks. Most are on foot, and they're coming toward him. He skids to a stop and reverses direction, only to encounter an equal number moving through the brush to the path. They're all smiling—had him all the way. Up through the bushes the street is filled with bikes, and behind him is the fence. Trapped. He whirls and bolts for the fence, scaling frantically toward the barbed
wire, which he finds to be thick and rigid. There's no way through it without shredding himself. He hangs from the top of the fence until his arms give out, then drops to the ground in a heap.

A voice above him, deep and mean, says, “We just want to talk to you, shithead.”

 

The night before the chase, in the bowels of the Dragon tavern, the Warlocks held an informal meeting. It began with a conversation between Wolf and an angular, sinewy biker named Fat Jack. Jack, nearly forty, with long, stringy hair hanging in oily strands from an almost perfect bald beanie in his crown, reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a Baggie of coke, and strung out a few lines onto the table. “We done with the petty bullshit on the high school?” he asked, laying one end of his straw near his nose and approaching the coke line with the other.

“Yeah,” Wolf said. “Enough's enough. No sense wasting any more time.”

“What about Hemingway's brother?”

Wolf shrugged. “Boy's got to pay. We can't let no punks get away with butcherin' our hogs.”

“Messed up mine pretty good,” Fat Jack said. “I wanna piece of that kid.”

Wolf smiled and nodded. “You'll get it. We'll all get it. No hurry, we can take our time. He's gotta be sweatin' rabbit pellets about now, wonderin' when we're comin'.”

Jack lined up the coke, and both men snorted quickly, their straws resembling rival vacuum cleaners in a TV commercial. They looked up simultaneously to see Marva, leaning knuckles first onto the table. Marva was a bit unusual in that she was the only female Warlock, and her admittance into the gang had caused hard feelings among some members. Several had actually dropped out to form a club of their own. How tough could a gang be if a
woman
could be full-fledged? But Marva was strong as a bull and tough as boiled owl and sported nearly as many tattoos as Wolf. None of that would have been enough to allow her member status had she not, on a cold late night three years ago, pulled Wolf out from under his flaming bike and actually reached inside a gash to stop the blood flow from a major artery in his leg. When the attending physician let Wolf know he certainly would have lost his leg—not to mention his life—were it not for Marva's quick thinking, Wolf told her he owed her one.

Within that second Marva said, “Okay. I want to ride with your chickenshit motorcycle gang.” It wasn't
what Wolf had expected; but he stayed with his word, and among the Warlocks, Wolf's word was law.

Marva reached for the straw and snorted a quick line of her own.

“Just talkin' about makin' some short work of the Hemingway kid,” Wolf said.

Marva smiled, slowly looking from one to another of the two bikers. She shook her head. “You pusses don't know a class act when you see one. If it was up to me, I'd be askin' the little shithead if he wants to join up. Throw in bike lessons for free.”

Fat Jack snorted. He was used to Marva's jerking everyone around. The only thing faster than her nose for the snow was her mouth. “Yeah,” he said. “It's a real class act, messin' up five hogs. Kid was stupid. Nothin' more than terminal stupid.”

“You say so, Jack,” Marva said. She laughed again. “How many heroes you think it will take to teach this rough, tough high school boy a lesson?”

The question obviously didn't merit an answer. Both bikers only glared at her as Jack set up another set of tracks on the table. “What's the matter with you, bitch?” Wolf asked. “That punk messed up some good Harleys, then come in here pourin' his goddamn brother all over everything. You think we let shit like that go?”

“Like I said, you guys don't know a class act when you see it. We're
Warlocks,
right? Boy witches? What's that sweet little genius do but come in here and
haunt
our asses. You see the rest of these pusses after he left? Even you, Jack, brushin' shit off and movin' away from all the hauntin' like the bogeyman himself was in that Baggie.”

Wolf thought a second and smiled. “Yeah, that was cool. He shouldn't have messed with the bikes, though.”

“Maybe,” Marva said, “but in his mind we killed his brother. And to tell the truth, he's not that far off. You remember what you did when Song Man said your old man was a queer, Wolf? Like to tore his head right off his skinny shoulders.”