You Can't Catch Me

by Catherine McKenzie

  “How do we sit?” he said.

  I held my arm, feeling frozen by pain.

  “How do we sit?”

  Todd was yelling so close to my ear that my eardrum started to rattle. I planted my feet on the ground, but I couldn’t seem to let go of my arm.

  Todd started to move me like clay, forcing my back against the chair, squaring my shoulders, then prying my hand off my arm.

  “That hurts!”

  Todd froze, and I froze right along with him. Then his hand reared back and cracked against my face.

  “Stop it, Todd!” Kiki said, astonishing everyone since she’d never spoken out of turn her whole life.

  And then we both got punished.

  There wasn’t a beating, but there was the Back Forest.

  Kiki and I were banished there for a week. For willfulness, for troublemaking, for talking back to Todd. The list of our crimes was long, and we were lucky, my mother hissed at me, that she’d managed to intercede on our behalf and keep our banishment to a week.

  “What were you thinking?” she asked us, over and over. “I just don’t know what you were thinking.”

  “Oh, stop it, Therese,” Tanya said. “Can’t you see the girls are terrified as it is?”

  My mother looked at me, then Kiki. We were sitting together on Kiki’s bed, huddled together, too scared to cry. We’d never been to the Back Forest, but we’d heard enough horror stories about it. The bogeyman lived there. The devil. Children who were sent out there came back changed, or never came back at all. Who knew what was true?

  We were about to find out.

  “Get up,” my mother said. She had a hardness about her that Tanya lacked. People were always saying how much we looked alike, as if reminding themselves that we were related. I never saw the sameness, only the differences. Her hair was thick and wavy, and her eyes were set closer together than mine. Her arms were strong and muscular from all the manual labor she did around the compound. I was thin and weak, and I missed my mother even though she was standing right in front of me.

  “I said, get up.”

  “You sound like Todd.”

  My mother didn’t know how to take this. Usually, that was a compliment, but she knew I didn’t mean it that way.

  “What has gotten into you?”

  I didn’t answer her. Instead, I showed her my arm. She pulled back.

  “Come on, girls,” Tanya said. “We’d better go and get this over with.”

  I wanted to bite back at the “We,” but Kiki stopped me. She stood up and pulled me along with her.

  She looked at me and I was amazed. She didn’t look scared. She looked resolute.

  “We’ll be okay,” she said. “It’s only a week.”

  Chapter 15

  Philadelphia Feeling

  We’re sitting in a Starbucks near the Delaware River Waterfront. This is where JJ said she’d meet us at two p.m. It’s two forty-five. The Starbucks is full of the usual midafternoon crowd: people pretending to write the next great novel, students “studying” with their friends, stay-at-home moms wrangling their kids with promises of a cake pop so they can get their triple shot of whatever.

  “She’s not going to come,” Jessie says after I look at my watch for the tenth time. She’s had a cappuccino with two extra shots of espresso and is tapping her foot in time to the music that’s playing on the stereo system—someone new I don’t recognize. I ordered some calming tea, but it doesn’t seem to be working.

  “Let’s give it ten more minutes.”

  “Don’t you have her number?”

  “No, only Facebook.”

  “That wasn’t the best idea.”

  “I know, okay?”

  She raises her hands in surrender and returns to reading her book. I take out my phone and check Facebook again. JJ’s read my message asking if we’re still meeting but hasn’t responded. I hate this fucking feature. There’s nothing worse than knowing for certain that someone’s ignoring you.

  I write her again. Still here. I’d appreciate it if you could let me know if you’re going to show up.

  I watch the little icon appear next to my message, letting me know that once again she’s read it. But once again, she doesn’t respond.

  “Okay, you’re right. I don’t think she’s coming,” I say, putting my phone away.

  Jessie puts her book down on the table. She’s halfway through it already. “So, what now?”

  “I have no idea.”

  We finish our drinks, then head outside and down to the waterfront. There’s a tall-ships festival going on, and the air smells like the beach, that tang of ocean mixed in with decaying fish, though it’s only a river.

  The crowd is substantial. A nice Friday afternoon in June—everyone’s playing hooky. There are vendors selling popcorn and cotton candy; it contributes to the carnival atmosphere, a feeling that’s confirmed when I see a three-card monte man standing on a patch of grass next to the river. He’s in his midtwenties and is wearing a Phillies cap backward. He has a fairly large crowd around him. We stop and watch for a minute. I quickly spot the guy who’s in on the scam, a kid in his late teens who wins three quick hands in a row, giving confidence to those duffers watching that they, too, can make a quick buck.

  “Want to see something?” I say to Jessie. “I can beat this game.”

  “Nah, it’s a trick.”

  “I know.”

  She smiles. “How do you beat a trick?”

  “Watch.”

  The guy who’s been winning loses and hands back the money he’d just won. He walks away in mock dejection.

  “Step right up! Step right up if you think you can find the lady and beat a master at his game!”

  I walk to the portable card table he’s working on and smile nervously at the guy. “How does this work?”

  He shows me his teeth. One of his front teeth is turned half sideways, but his eyes twinkle and there’s a certain charm about him.

  “My name’s Hal.”

  “Hi, Hal. I’m Jess.”

  “Well, Jess, you ever play before?”

  I shake my head.

  “It’s two dollars a hand. You guess right where the queen is, I give you four dollars.”

  “And if I guess wrong?”

  “I keep the money.”

  “Sounds simple enough.”

  He starts to shuffle his cards. “Sure it is. You got a good memory?”

  “I like to think so.”

  “Quick on your feet?”

  “Do I need to catch anything?”

  He laughs. “No, I just meant you have a better chance if you can think fast.”

  “Oh, right. Sure. What do you think?” I say to Jessie.

  “I say go for it.”

  “Okay, then.”

  I take two singles out of my wallet and put them down on the table. He goes through his routine, showing me the red queen, then dealing the three bent cards onto the table one by one. Then he moves them around as he patters about following the lady. First slowly, then more quickly. I watch his hands, and not the cards, and so I see him palm the queen while he shuffles the other two cards, then pull it out again as he moves in for the flop.

  “Follow the card now, don’t lose sight. Follow the card, or hope you guess right.”

  His hands stop moving.

  “All set?” he asks. “You know where that pretty lady’s at?”

  I hesitate, acting uncertain, then point to the far right.

  “You sure?” he asks, smirking.

  I’ve picked the right card, but this is another tactic. If someone guesses right, then they try to undermine their confidence and convince them to switch their initial choice.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  He turns it over. The red queen looks back at me, minx-like.

  “We have a winner!”

  A few people clap and press closer. Jessie bounces on her heels.

  “Beginner’s luck,” I say.

  I reach for the
money.

  “Again?” Hal says. “Double or nothing?”

  I look at Jessie. She nods enthusiastically. I make a show of considering what I’m agreeing to.

  “So, I bet four dollars and if I win, I get eight?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh, come on,” one of the lookie-loos says. “It’s only eight dollars.”

  “True! Okay, let’s go.”

  We go through it all again; then I point to the card in the middle. He doesn’t ask me if I’m sure this time. He frowns and flips over the queen.

  “Oh! You won!” the woman standing behind me says.

  “Go again,” Jessie says.

  “What do you think?” I ask Hal. “Eight dollars for a chance at sixteen?”

  He considers. He isn’t sure, yet, that I’m onto his game. And it’s not as if my bet is big at this point. Besides, the people watching will think they can win now, and that will help him draw more people in. I can sense the crowd getting bigger behind me. I’ve become the assistant, good for business.

  He calculates his odds and agrees. “All right.”

  He shuffles his cards. The longer I look at him, the older he seems. He’s got deep lines in his forehead, and his skin is tinged in that way that happens to longtime smokers. He gives me a look as he exposes his queen, then shuffles the cards quickly. I take even longer to decide which card is right, and in the end, I pick the one in the middle. He’s giving me a hard stare now. These guys like taking people. They do not like to be taken.

  He turns the card over, the queen appears, and the crowd claps. He shuffles some bills together and hands them to me. He knows he’s been beaten, but he’s still in charge.

  “Show’s over,” he says to me in a way so we understand each other. “Who’s next?”

  We spend the next couple of hours wandering around the waterfront. Jessie is strangely keyed up after my modest takedown of the three-card monte man.

  “That was pretty great,” she says. The sun is glinting off the water, and the crowd has multiplied as the day’s gotten nicer.

  “Thanks.”

  Jessie’s gesturing with her hands as she talks. “No, I mean it. Beating someone at their own game like that . . .”

  “He was onto me pretty quickly.”

  “But you didn’t care about getting caught. I bet you could’ve had him going for much longer if you mixed up your winning and losing.”

  “Yeah, that’s how it’s done.”

  “How come you didn’t do that?”

  “I wanted to show you I could beat the guy. I didn’t care about tricking him for real.”

  “How long do you think you could have kept him going, though?”

  “Liam’s taken some of them for a couple hundred. But he gives the money to homeless guys.”

  Her hands fall. “Oh, Liam.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I didn’t ask about him; I asked about you. How much do you think you could make?”

  “Maybe the same. Why do you want to know?”

  Her eyes are bright and glistening. It’s a look I’ve seen before, the glint of power when you realize you can get something over on someone.

  “Just curious.”

  I think about that for a moment, and then I say, “We could do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Con someone.”

  “What? Why?”

  “For the fun of it.”

  “Umm . . .”

  I smile. “Oh, come on. You’re telling me you’ve never thought about it?”

  “You have?”

  “Sure. I read up on them a while back, for an article I was writing. Confidence tricks.”

  “You did?”

  “You think it’s weird?”

  Jessie gives me a look. “I’m not sure what I think, to be honest.”

  “Fair enough. But didn’t what happened to us make you wonder? How easy it would be to get away with it?”

  “Okay, maybe I have.”

  “Of course you have,” I say. “We’re different now. Different than all of them.”

  I motion to the crowd around us. So many families having a nice Friday together. I’d never had a day like this, full of candy and sunlight. I guess Jessie hadn’t, either, based on what she’d said about her upbringing. The LOT was dark in general, and then there was the Back Forest, where the old-growth trees were so thick it felt like no light could get through.

  “I guess you’re right,” Jessie says. “But what does that have to do with conning someone?”

  “It’s the challenge, I think. Seeing if you can get a stranger to trust you . . .”

  I turn and look at the river. The water’s dotted with sailboats, paddleboards, and kayaks. I wonder what it would be like to be on one of them. The wind in my hair, the rough chop beneath my feet, the horizon a destination.

  I’m not entirely sure why I’m pushing this, but I don’t seem to be able to help myself. It’s an impulse that’s gotten me into trouble before.

  “What do you say?” I ask Jessie. “You want to do it?”

  “I’d like to try,” Jessie says in a small voice.

  I smile. “Cool.”

  “Should we do three-card monte?”

  “What about something a bit harder?”

  “Such as?”

  “It’s funny,” I say. “They all have these fancy names. Like the Widow or the Driver.”

  She looks at the boats. “I don’t know those, but there is this one I read about once, I think it’s called the Bar Bill Scam? It’s this thing where you make nice with a guy and then pretend you can’t pay at the end of the evening.”

  “That sounds like college. Or dating.”

  She smiles. “True.”

  “Are you serious?” I ask. “You want to do this?”

  “Ah, hell, why not? It’ll help defray our costs since this trip was a waste and all. And it might give us some insight into Jessica Two, right?”

  “It could. So, we hit on a guy and get him to buy us dinner?”

  “Basically.”

  I look down at what I’m wearing. Broken-in chinos and a stretched-out long-sleeve T-shirt I think I stole from Liam years ago. Jessie’s a bit neater, in a pair of slacks and a short-sleeve shirt with flowers on it, but neither of us is dressed for fine dining. “I don’t think we look the part, though that might be an advantage.”

  “How so?”

  “I think you need to be unexpected. That way, they don’t see you coming.”

  I look at Jessie. She’s nodding in agreement. We probably shouldn’t be doing this, but I have to admit I don’t see the harm in it, so long as we pick someone who can afford to pay at the end of the evening. Is it really any different from the nice meals I’ve had on a guy I had no intention of sleeping with or ever seeing again?

  Moral relativism. That’s Liam’s voice in my head. But for once, I want to banish it.

  “Okay,” Jessie says. “Let’s do it.”

  Chapter 16

  Bar Bill Scam

  The Back Forest wasn’t just a place; it was an idea. Sort of like the cave that Luke goes into on Dagobah in The Empire Strikes Back—somewhere where your worst fears could be realized. We were provided with a tent, a shovel, some matches, and a water jug. That was it. Any food we ate, anything else we needed, we were on our own. I remember how quiet it was in that thick wood. How Kiki tried to hide her tears from me. I remember notching a tree when I thought a day had passed and then giving up on the other days because night and day were barely distinguishable.

  “Will they come for us?” Kiki asked me every “morning” as we rose from the beds we had fashioned out of leaves and dirt when our internal clocks woke us.

  “They will,” I assured her, though I barely believed it myself.

  Solitary confinement, it was supposed to be. Only the forest was alive. We were cut off from the others, and in the end, even from ourselves. For Kiki, it was a descent into an even stric
ter obedience. She would barely blink without permission.

  But for me, it was the solidification of an idea. I would find a way out. And when I did, no one would ever find me.

  Here’s how the Bar Bill Scam goes down.

  We find a restaurant that has a happy hour from five to seven. It’s a low-key place where a man might stop in for a drink before he heads home for the night. There’s a large square bar in the middle of the room surrounded by high-top tables. English pub food, and a mix of regulars and one-timers with a sleepy-looking bartender wiping down the bar. Perfect.

  We take up seats away from one another around the bar. Jessie pulls out her book; I look at my phone. We both order a glass of white wine. These are the signals that we want to be disturbed. Because nothing says Talk to me like “I’m busy reading,” if you’re a man on the make.

  Sure enough, within five minutes, a man in a suit with his necktie loosened sidles up to Jessie. He’s holding a full tumbler and strode past fifty a few years ago. I don’t see a ring from where I’m sitting, but he looks married. Jessie puts down her book reluctantly and begins to make small talk. She gives him clipped answers to begin with, then opens up slowly until he makes her laugh. He signals for a waiter, and she orders a glass of champagne and asks to see the menu. The champagne is a test we devised in our hastily made plan. If he balks at the price, then we’ll abandon and move on to another mark.

  I get up to go to the bathroom. As I suspected, the man is wearing a wedding band, tight on his fat finger, which is what also makes it okay: he’s a married jerk buying a woman an expensive drink in a bar, and the fact that he’s married means there’s no way he’s going to complain to anyone when he gets taken.

  I catch Jessie’s eye as I pass them and give her a short nod. He’s too engrossed in Jessie to notice me. I go into the bathroom and waste a few minutes washing my hands and drying them carefully. When I return, I stumble on the floor and grab on to Jessie for support.

  “Oh, hey,” I say as she straightens me up, “it’s you.”

  “Wow,” Jessie says. “Long time.”

  “Such a long time.”

  “So great to see you.”