But no, that wasn’t it, she was going for the shotgun in the trunk of the car. Jesus Christ. He watched her pull it free and cock it once as he went speeding by. It made him grin and he thought she was smiling too, a second before she blew out his back window.
That was the beginning.
S
tealing different cars and following her around
as best he could without being spotted, he watched her for two weeks. She was keen as hell and seemed to know he was out there keeping an eye on her. Always checking her rearview and making crazy U-turns, suspecting a tail and hoping to shake him out of the shadows.
There wasn’t much to his mustache but he let it grow and eventually dyed it. It made him look like Fu Manchu planning to take down all of Western culture. He wore a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses he picked up at Bookatee’s Emporium.
The minute he stepped into the shithole store filled with Southern kitsch items—these people had a thing about stuffed animals, a shellacked bullfrog, the hell was up with this part of the country?—he was filled with a new sense of pride for having shot the crew for choosing this place to knock over.
There were maybe fifty Jeb Stuart statues and Dixie flags hanging from the rafters. Guns, Bowie knives, plenty of Civil War pistols and cutlasses in the cases. The antique jewelry was right back on display. Some of it looked fairly impressive. He paid three bucks for the sunglasses, put them on, and thought for maybe the hundredth time, What am I doing?
Tuesday was her
day off. She went out to a matinee with a chunky friend of hers, poofy frizzy hair out to here, bad skin, the two of them heading down to the Piper Cub Movie Theater. It doubled as a place where country bands played on weekends, folks hopping out of their seats, yee-hawing and dancing in the aisles.
No chick flicks for Lila, she liked the bang-’em-ups. This one was about terrorists who take a cutiepie ten-year-old girl hostage and she turns out to be some secret government assassin trained since birth. Pretty soon she’s flying a jet at Mach 2.0 and handling a high-powered rifle with laser sighting, icing evil dictators. Chase had seen the trailer on his rented room’s television and thought it looked like it might be a decent way to kill a couple of hours.
He was staying at a boardinghouse two counties west, almost forty miles away, stealing cars over there just in case Lila’s father was still scouting around for his Mustang. The lady who ran the house was crocked on lightning half the time and never quit listening to Conway Twitty. There was a framed picture of the guy hanging on the wall over Chase’s bed where you usually found Jesus or Elvis. Chase felt a little uncomfortable with Conway looking down over him like that, especially considering the weirdo hair on that fucker.
A pretty big crowd at the theater for a Tuesday morning, lots of toughs with torn-off sleeves who carried snap knives on their belts. A group of teenage girls clamoring for attention, blouses tied at the midriff, showing off their belly-button rings. He wondered if they went in for Conway too.
Everybody knew Lila and they cooled their action when she walked by. Her friend was loud and talked a lot on her cell phone while they paid for their tickets.
Playing with the mustache, the damn thing driving him crazy, Chase hung in close enough to hear the friend’s name—Molly Mae—and tried to think of a way to get her out of there. She was an attention hound, practically shouting into her phone at somebody named Hoyt, telling him to fix the busted axle on Lottie Belle’s—seriously, you can’t mean it, Lottie Belle?—truck or she wasn’t going to make briarberry pie this Saturday. Chase tried to figure out how to use this information to his advantage but came up empty.
He needn’t have bothered. Turned out she was going to help him. At the candy counter she picked up a Mega-Box of popcorn, three candy bars, and a Jumbo Coke, the thing going forty ounces. She’d have to break for the bathroom by the end of the second reel.
The little-girl
assassin was poking out the eyes of a big bearded guy in a turban when Molly Mae made a beeline up the aisle and disappeared through the door into the lobby.
Chase’s pulse twisted in his neck, and with death on the screen and maybe a jail term coming up due to this next move, his mind wandered back to a scene of happiness when he was a kid. His mother and father dancing in the living room on New Year’s, their laughter forever alive inside him. Their deaths forever seared into him. A thief never followed his heart, he always planned every move out and had at least three escape routes in place. You scored or you ran. Chase fought the instincts ingrained in him by his grandfather. He understood with a sudden clarity that he was terrified of his own mounting loneliness, for fear he would become even more like Jonah.
Chase slid next to Lila, easing into Molly Mae’s seat, and put his feet up on the chair in front of him. She’d left some of her candy behind and in the darkness he plucked a few pieces out of the box.
The little killer chick was crying about her lack of a normal childhood and the government black ops and scientists who’d created her were making speeches about fighting for the American Way. A few moments later she was chopping the main villain in the throat as a nuclear bomb ticked down. Chase kept trying to think of something slick to say and thought maybe he had it now. He opened his mouth.
Without turning to look at him, Deputy Sheriff Lila Bodeen pressed a snub .32 into his ribs and said, “Now that there is one hell of a disguise, stranger.”
Okay, now he needed something else to say instead. Nothing was coming, the bomb beeping at ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety-seven—
“But what do you think of the mustache?” he asked.
“Is it real or is that a rat’s ass glued to your lip?”
Christ, that was a much better line than anything he could come up with. She was going to trounce him at this. “Only one way to discover the truth. You’ll have to gather the empirical datum on your own.”
She frowned, the bright light from the screen igniting the furrows in her brow. “You one of them college-educated outlaws?”
Someone shushed them and they leaned their heads closer together.
“No,” he whispered. “The fat scientist guy just told the little vicious chick that.”
Lila nodded and dug the .32 in deeper, and Chase ground his back teeth together. She said, “Do I take it you’ve been struck with a case of conscience and are planning on turning yourself in?”
“I just wanted to watch the movie.”
“I admit I was liking it myself. Now the call of justice will interrupt me on my day off.”
“I regret that,” Chase said. He let out a chuckle, feeling cool but not cold. A nervous tremor worked through him for a lot of reasons besides the fact that an extra foot-pound of pressure from her index finger would blast his spleen over the teenage couple sitting behind him.
“Be a shame if you had to waste your $3.25 matinee money,” he said. “How about if you turn me in afterward?”
“You think I won’t?” Lila asked.
“Let’s find out.”
It was then that Molly Mae returned from the ladies’ room and said, “Who’s this roughneck that’s been eatin’ my peanut clusters!”
After gathering up
her remaining candy, Molly Mae picked up on the undercurrents, maybe spotted the gleam of the gun in Chase’s ribs, and with a huff that blew more poof into her poofy hair, she moved an aisle down.
The assassin girl defused the bomb, discovered the whereabouts of her real parents, tried to act like a normal girl but eventually garotted a terrorist in front of her mother’s coffee klatch, and finally decided to go live with the scientists again. Chase and Lila finished watching the film and sat in their seats, nodding as her friends and neighbors walked by, his bruised ribs really starting to kill him, until the theater completely emptied.
She said, “Guess it’s time to escort you over to the jail.”
“Nice day out. Maybe we can walk it.”
“You’re taking this lightly.”
“No, I’m not. It’ll give me a chance to breathe in my last bit of fresh air for a while.”
“I suppose we can do that. Especially since Molly Mae drove and you done run her off with your peanut cluster heist.”
Lila tried hard to keep from smiling but couldn’t entirely manage it. She grinned, her chin dimpling, her eyes on him but not looking into his. A rush of warmth brimmed inside him and he thought, Maybe this is how you beat the cold spot, this is how you stay out of that place.
He said, “It was about as worthy a score as knocking over Bookatee’s Emporium was.”
“Don’t you tell her that though.”
So they walked through town toward the police station, and he found himself rambling about how the last three years had gone, saying nothing of Jonah, nothing of his mother’s murder or his old man’s suicide. People waved to Lila and she waved back with her free hand, the snub jutting into his side every once in a while, mostly hidden by her purse. Chase smiled and waved too.
“Judge Kelton didn’t show much mercy on your friends.”
“I told you, they weren’t my friends.”
“Your former crew?”
“Hardly. When thieves working together aren’t all that tight we call it a string. Those idiots weren’t even that.”
“You probably shouldn’t have gotten involved with them then, a stand-up professional villain like yourself.”
“I know it. I needed some quick money.”
“It’s only an assumption on my part,” Lila said, the “my” coming out mostly as “ma,” “but I’m guessing that’s what every thief says just about every time he’s doing any thieving.”
It wasn’t true, but he liked listening to her.
When they got to the police station she marched him up the front steps to the door. A couple of deputies moved in and out. Chase really hoped he hadn’t misread the whole situation, because if he had, he was going to have to cut and run now, and probably take a bullet in the spine.
He turned and faced her, pressing her back against the brick building. Now the snub was in his belly. He almost went in for a kiss, but veered off at the last second. She’d flattened her lips, still trying to read him and figure out what she was dealing with. It was good to know he wasn’t the only one who was confused.
“This is a helluva dangerous way to woo a girl,” Lila said.
“Yeah, but is it effective?”
“I’ve had worse dates,” she told him.
“Yeah?”
“You don’t want to hear about them and I don’t want to relive ’em.”
“No, I suppose not. Well, here we are at the halls of justice.”
“Yeah,” she said, showing just a flash of teeth.
“Time for your just reward.”
The gun in his guts didn’t hurt that much, but the smile—like a knife in the heart.
A
few days later, while they lay in bed in a rough-and-tumble
spot called the Skeeter Motel—these people just didn’t think their names through down here—Lila asked him about his parents, how he’d wound up such a young outlaw. He was starting to like it when she called him that.
Chase had already told her a lot about Jonah, but this was different. He did what he’d trained himself to do, separating himself from his emotions and keeping memories of his childhood as blunt as possible, letting the words drop from him like stones.
He lit a cigarette and took a couple of deep drags. His voice took on the hollow ring he expected, and he smoked and listened to the person speaking as if it was somebody familiar whom he hadn’t heard from in a long time. The man spoke fast.
“Nine years ago my mother was murdered, shot through the head in our kitchen. She was eight months pregnant.”
“Sweet Jesus—did you…?”
“No, I didn’t see it. I was at school. So was my father. He was a college professor who taught world literature. After her funeral, we’d visit her grave every day. He was wrecked. It was a bad winter, but we’d go out there and stand in the snow, sometimes for hours. Even back then I knew it was at least a little crazy.”
“He was grief-struck,” Lila said.
“There are only so many prayers you can say. He was out of his head and stayed there. He’d recite poetry and scenes from Greek plays. He was soft.”
“He was doing the best he could.”
“Sometimes that’s enough and sometimes it’s not,” Chase said. “He’d get drunk on whiskey. So would I. It was all we had to keep us warm out there in the cemetery. He used to sink to his knees and hold on to me while he wept. Sometimes he’d pass out from exhaustion or just because he was bombed. I’d stand there with ice in my hair, loaded on scotch, and try to keep him from freezing to death.”
Not exactly the best postcoital topic of conversation, but he knew Lila was the one, and he was glad she’d asked. He had his arm around her and raised his hand to brush the hair from her face.
She reached for his cigarette and took a few puffs, handed it back to him. “And you’re angry with your father for that?”
“I guess I sound like it, don’t I?”
“Because he acted weak in front of you. Because you were so young, and he put all of that responsibility on your shoulders. So you hated him.”
“Not about that so much as what came next,” Chase admitted. “After the cops hit a brick wall with their investigation, my father asked a newscaster if he could go on television and appeal to the killer. The newscaster said he thought that instead of my dad doing the pleading, I should do it instead. Maybe I’d warm the murderer’s heart. Like he’d suddenly crack and give himself up.”
A tiny groan drifted from the back of Lila’s throat. “And I said that thing to you about your being struck with a case of conscience and turning yourself in.” She gently pressed her lips to his neck. “I’m sorry for that.”
“When you said it, it was funny.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
“But what they wanted me to do, it was stupid, just a ratings ploy. But I was a kid and had no say. They put cameras and lights on me and instructed me on what to do. When my eyes didn’t look wet enough they made me repeat my performance. When they still weren’t wet enough, they used glycerin on my cheeks. There was a makeup woman and somebody kept coming over and brushing my hair. It was like a movie set. Me doing twelve takes begging the man who killed my mother to give it up. Looking left, then right, then straight on while they decided which was my best side.”
“I like ’em both.”
“Yeah?”
“Yep. Now that the mustache is gone, anyways.”
“They put mascara on me to thicken my eyelashes.”
“It was callous and cruel,” Lila said, “that’s for sure, but still, it’s understandable. If they had no hard evidence or suspects after the first few days, the police would’ve been willing to try damn near anything. They wanted to get the killer.”
“That’s the logical, adult way of thinking about it. But my head is still wrapped up in what I saw and felt back then. That afternoon, my old man, he looked like he’d swallowed rat poison. Later, my father and I watched the news together. He sat around waiting, like the killer might phone him up and apologize. My dad was already mostly out of his head but now he went even further. I knew he was going to kill himself, and there was nothing I could do about it.”
“You were just a little boy.”
Chase shrugged, ground the cigarette out against the side of the nightstand.
Lila sat up, propped by the pillows and took his face in her hands. It felt like the most natural kind of touch in the world, and he knew he’d never felt it before. “You were already proving yourself tough and strong, bearing up under that kind of pain.”
“Maybe that’s why Jonah came back for me. Just because I made it through. Even my father buckled and went out the easy way.”
She stiffened and frowned. “I’m not sure that’s such a generous comment to make about your own daddy.”
“It’s not, but it’s hard to feel charitable to someone who quits the game and leaves you on your own at ten years old.”
“I’m guessing if he could’ve found another way, he would’ve. Not everyone is made of the sternest stuff.”
“No.”
“So what happened to him?”
There was the question. He saw his father again, holding a bottle of whiskey to his chest as if it might somehow save him. The snow mounting on the tombstones, the man as cold outside of her grave as she was in it.
“He had a sailboat. We used to go out on the Great South Bay during the summers. One morning, about a month after the murder, we were expecting another blizzard. I got ready to go to the cemetery as always, but instead he drove down to the marina. He started to dig his boat out of the ice with an ax. The bay itself wasn’t frozen, just the edges of the channel where the boats were docked. People drove by and called to him but he ignored everyone. He didn’t say a word to me. I said nothing either. When he got too tired, he looked at me like he might begin crying again, so I took over chopping the ice. Eventually the boat got loose. He left me on the dock. Climbed on board and took it out of the bay and toward the ocean channels. I lost sight of him fast. The storm hit maybe an hour later. I hitchhiked back to the house.”
Lila’s lips drew together, bloodless.
Chase said, “You’re not liking him so much anymore, are you.”
“I just wish he’d found another way. One where you weren’t dragged in so deep.”
“The wreckage washed up on Fire Island that night. His body was never found. Probably threw himself overboard as soon as he was far enough from shore that the tide wouldn’t take him back in. Has a romantic kind of quality to it, I think. Going out like Shelley and Hart Crane.”
“I don’t know who they are.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“He didn’t say anything at all to you before he sailed off?” she asked, her fingers tangled in his chest hair.
Chase thought, I shouldn’t be talking about this. I should’ve kept it under control. We ought to be laughing, rolling over each other, getting ready for another bout. I’m doing her a disservice.
“No,” Chase told her.
“Didn’t have the heart to kill himself right in front of you, so he just slipped away.” She looked into his eyes, figuring him out a little more now. “He thought he was doing a kindness to you, but that was the worst part, wasn’t it.”
“I don’t know.”
“You know it really wasn’t his fault. There’s no shame in having a nervous breakdown ’cause of such misery. He loved your mama so much, some people can’t go on brokenhearted like that.”
Saying nothing because there was nothing to say, Chase drew Lila to him and kissed her. The solidity of her body on his connected him not only to the world but somehow also to himself. What had been kept frozen in the cold spot for so long was beginning to warm and loosen. He had always thought of his father as fragile, perhaps even cowardly, but now he saw the man in a different way. A new perspective, thanks to Lila.
“So how’d you wind up with Jonah?” she asked.
“My old man wasn’t considered legally dead yet so the house and bank accounts were all tied up in court. I had no relatives I knew of and was sent to live with a foster family. A rich, sweet, older couple, the kind of folks whose favorite game is reading random quotes from the Bible and seeing who can guess the chapter and verse. They had a couple kids of their own and had taken in another six or seven to care for. All different colors and nationalities. Half with prosthetics of some kind. One girl with her face badly disfigured with burns. All of us in a huge home on the North Shore of Long Island.”
“And you were eyeing the silverware.”
Even now, she got him grinning. “I wasn’t with the family long. After only about a month Jonah showed up at the front door one day and said, ‘I’m your father’s father. You never heard of me, have you?’ I hadn’t and told him so. He said, ‘We’re blood, that’s important, and you’ve got a choice. You can stay with these people and live life on the map, or you can come along with me.’”
“Life on the map?”
“I didn’t even know what it meant, but he said it in such a way that I understood and believed him. He said, ‘It won’t be pretty, some of it, but it’s a part of who you are.’ So I went with him.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah. My foster parents raised hell while I was packing, but they were scared of Jonah. He sat in a chair in the living room and stared at them until I was done. The girl with the burned face wanted to come too, if you can believe it.”
“She liked you, and the two best sides of your face.”
“No, she liked Jonah. His strength and his calm. So I just walked off the map and out of the system. I didn’t want school and a college education. My mother died in her quaint kitchen. My father was a professor. I wanted to be anyone but them.”
“An outlaw from the start.”
“I guess so.”
With a slight shrug against the sheets, Lila curled beside him, and the dried sweat on her flesh
scritched
against his own. “What would your daddy think of the way your life’s been going these last few years?”
Chase thought about it, looking up, scanning the ceiling as if searching for the man. He lit another cigarette and smoked it all down to the filter. Lila was still staring at him, expecting an answer. He tried to give her one.
“I don’t really care. He made his choice and I made mine.”