The East End

by Jason Allen

  The moment they kissed, Corey immediately covered his mouth with his hand. Holy fucking shit! Instantly, simultaneously, this qualified as both the most amazing moment of any of the break-ins, and by far, the biggest, most unexpected secret he’d ever stumbled upon. Shaking his head and wearing a huge smile, he crept back, just as Mr. Sheffield said, “We’re together now,” and the young man followed with something about being the only two people on earth. Determined not to let out a laugh, he must have lost focus, because as he crouched to drop down to the next level, he slipped. One sneaker skidded like a quick scuff of sandpaper, and to keep from tumbling off the roof, he clutched the shingles so tightly that he scraped each one of his fingertips raw just above the nails.

  With his right leg dangling and his head cocked to listen for any signs that they’d heard him, Corey didn’t move for at least a minute, hanging stone-still, breathing as inaudibly as possible, concentrating on shrinking his breath. He stayed like this until it seemed he no longer needed to breathe, until it seemed he’d become part of the roof.

  Another minute or two passed and he still hung there motionless, though the men’s voices had grown faint and eventually faded completely. Using extra caution, he dropped from the roofline and made his way over to Tiffany’s bedroom, where Angelique had been hiding. The open closet door told him she’d already left, so he sidestepped back over to the master bedroom window, looked in and saw Mr. Sheffield laid out on the bed with his eyes closed and both hands balled into fists, talking to himself. Five or ten seconds passed, and then suddenly, as though he’d been shocked with jumper cables, Mr. Sheffield leapt to his feet and began peeling off his suit, his tie, his shirt and socks, every stitch except for his blue-and-white-striped boxer shorts whipped from his sweaty body in a frenzy. And just as quickly as he’d undressed, he went heel-stomping out the door and into the hall.

  Corey leaned against the edge of the second-story wall and angled his head to the side, looking past the balcony toward the pool, expecting to see Mr. Sheffield barreling across the lawn to join the young man for a swim any second. And yet minutes passed and he saw nothing but the thin guest with the bandaged arms sitting with his legs in the pool water, all his clothes except for his underwear piled beside him, along with something in a small plastic bag that he kept bringing up to his nose. The empty acres seemed to embrace the quiet, so when Corey heard the man’s loud snorting and hacking echoing up each time he pressed the bag to his face, he knew the situation exactly. No wonder they were so jittery out on the balcony, he thought. But damn, this guy must be a serious junkie to jam that much coke up his nose in such a short time. And unbelievably, the man kept at it, snorting as if in a solo competition for the most fiendish dope fiend of all time, snorting without pausing to take a breath, reminding Corey of Tony Montana fatalistically shoving his face into a mountain of white powder toward the end of Scarface.

  He couldn’t believe how strange the night had become.

  Then, finally, the man stopped and released a terrible sound. As if Corey’s thought about the violent demise of the most iconic cokehead in film history had been a prophecy, the thin man must have suffered some sort of a rupture, because he started shrieking with his head pitched forward, and then dropped the bag in the pool, where it floated for a second and then sank. With both hands pressed to his face, he let out another sound of pure agony. Then a few fainter shrieks while he kept one hand clamped over his nose and held out the other, as if inspecting his fingers in the moonlight. Even from that distance, Corey could tell that blood now covered the lower half of the man’s face, as well as both his hands and a good portion of the bandages on his forearms. Corey ground his teeth and gripped the roof tighter, staring, anticipating the outcome of the awful sequence that had already begun unfolding in slow-motion.

  Mr. Sheffield’s friend placed both hands on one of the stone slabs bordering the pool and tried to stand. He stumbled sideways, and then his head jerked back suddenly, violently, as if he’d been struck by lightning or shot between the eyes. His knees buckled, and rather than falling into the water, his entire body pitched sharply to his right. Corey felt the grit from the roof shingles gouging his fingertips. The fall seemed to take a full minute while he held his breath and didn’t blink at all, but finally the worst moment arrived—the side of the man’s head smacked the stone edge, hard, with a sound like a coconut being cracked open. His limbs went limp. He twitched once, and then flopped headfirst into the water.

  A sheet of darkness slid past Corey’s shoulders. He tried to swallow, turning for a moment to face the wide swath of clouds creeping overhead, and then looked back down, blinking until he could focus again on the pool. The man’s mouth and nose lay fully submerged, and the whole area, from the lake to the house and beyond...quiet. Eerily quiet. Corey pressed his palms to the roof peak and pushed himself up to crouch, then inched backward a few feet but stopped there, positioned sideways on his thigh. He had no idea what to do. Knowing the man down there might die, but incapable of climbing down, he briefly considered jumping from three stories up. He’d heard about what happens to a person when they’re in shock. This frozen feeling, this must be it. Wishing he could move, he could only watch.

  Even the insects and other nocturnal creatures seemed to cease all movement, as if they too had begun holding their collective breath, waiting to see if either Corey or Mr. Sheffield might reach the man in time to save him—that is, if the man had any time left at all. He’d lost a good amount of blood from the hemorrhage alone, even before he cracked his skull, and had been losing more each second. He’d been underwater for a minute, maybe two, maybe even three by now, knocked unconscious at the very least, though possibly even killed the moment he’d fallen in.

  The clouds passed. The pool water must have been heating up the entire time, because now it whispered a faint layer of steam all around the man’s outstretched, bandaged limbs. He lay still. Floating. Much too still, and for much too long by the time Mr. Sheffield finally entered the frame, crossing the lawn dressed only in boxer shorts, carrying a bottle in one hand and a silver tray propped above the other that flashed like a mirror in the moonlight.

  About ten yards from the pool he called the man’s name, “Henry...” then called out again, “Henry, I brought treats!” but the floating man remained silent and still. It took a few more steps for Mr. Sheffield to see him floating facedown. Corey watched his mother’s boss stop short and drop the bottle and the tray, which crashed like a gong on the lawn. He ran full stride the rest of the way to the water and came plunging down the stairs, dived forward and swam frantically to the midpoint of the giant pool.

  Arms flailing, he wrestled with Henry’s limp body, spitting water as he struggled to keep both their heads above the surface of the deep end. As soon as he could stand, Mr. Sheffield hauled his friend across the shallow end and up the pool stairs, dropped his torso just above the water line at the top step and began pressing on his chest. After five or six compressions, he leaned down to breathe into his mouth, then repeated the series again, shouting, “Breathe!” over and over, like a mantra, before he finally resorted to sledging down on Henry’s chest with the side of his fist.

  Corey couldn’t get any air himself. He sank down and lay on his stomach with his nose pressed to the roofline. His raw fingertips hurt as he clawed at the grit of the shingles, but he couldn’t let go. Instead, he pressed even harder, tearing his own skin as though someone had hypnotized him and ordered him to do so. No more than twenty minutes ago he’d seen his mother’s boss kissing the man on the balcony, who now wasn’t answering or moving or showing any indication that he was still alive. He’d never seen a dead body before, but once Mr. Sheffield finally gave up on beating him back to life, not only was Corey sure Henry was dead, he realized that he alone had watched him die.

  A subtle movement entered the low end of his vision and he crept back as Angelique stepped out onto the balcony. He pressed himself f
latter to the roof and kept his eyes fixed on the men in the pool, imagining that Angelique had momentarily been turned to stone, unable to comprehend the scene on the pool stairs. Then he nearly choked, as Mr. Sheffield raised his head mid-sob and looked right at the balcony. Right at her. In that moment of recognition, she must have understood. She’d just become a witness—a witness staring down at him with a dead man in his arms.

  Corey heard her bump into one of the French doors on her way inside and her bare feet slapping against the bedroom floorboards as she raced deeper into the house. Mr. Sheffield stepped back a few feet into the shallow end but didn’t look away from the balcony, not even when his arms went slack and Henry slipped from his hands, the body sliding into the middle of the pool and drifting. He stood waist-deep in the film of steam, his chest and arms pale in the moonlight, staring at the vacant balcony for what felt to Corey like a very long time; until a sudden lunge, and then, with mechanical movements, he returned to the top of the wide staircase and rose up out of the water with his boxers clinging to his thick legs. He took a few awkward steps onto the lawn, grunting, whimpering, stumbling a bit while he got some momentum, and then went loping off like a wounded animal toward the house.

  Corey skittered down the shingles and dropped to the second story, sweat trickling down his back. Mr. Sheffield must have assumed exactly what Corey had, that Angelique had viewed him as a killer. Not only that, he was obviously fucked up in more than one way, drunk, high on coke, traumatized—and now charging around the corner of the house like a man possessed. What was he about to do? Would he hurt his daughter’s friend? Corey edged over to the gutter, planning to jump from the second story and run inside. He couldn’t remain hidden much longer, but also couldn’t pull the trigger yet to blow his cover. Hoping she might get away without his help, his pulse pounded along the side of his neck. Loud noises emanated from the house and the windowpanes rattled. Then a heavy slam sent vibrations into his thigh and knee. He leaned out a foot or two from the gutter at the sound of strained hinges, saw the screen door swing wide and Angelique running out barefoot and leaping from the porch steps. He watched her sprint across the lawn with the breeze off the lake blowing her hair out behind her in a dark funnel, and a few seconds later the screen door flung back open with immense force and smacked the wall. Mr. Sheffield hauled his heavy body off the porch, chasing her across the lawn while he shouted, “Stop running so I can explain! I just want to talk to you!” and then even louder, “Stop, goddamn it!” calling out with such desperation that Corey knew this rich guy had completely snapped.

  Angelique obviously knew this as well, as she screamed back, “Get the fuck away from me!”

  Corey steeled himself for the fall, counted down from three and then leapt from the roof. He landed beside the bushes lining the porch with a shunt of pain in each ankle and tumbled next to a squat statue of a cherub, which he grabbed and cradled, thinking a heavy chunk of stone might come in handy. Staggering to his feet, wincing, he started to run, his pulse thrumming in his ears while his legs pumped hard toward Mr. Sheffield, who was roughly twenty yards ahead of him, charging forward with his arm outstretched toward Angelique. The gap between them had shrunk, already slim enough now for Mr. Sheffield’s finger to graze her shoulder blade and for her to slap at him. She zigzagged and dodged his hand and kept shouting for him to get away from her, then took a sharp turn at the lake’s edge and kept running along the last strip of grass before the bulkhead.

  Insect noises swelled up from the bushes and reeds while Corey trailed them with the stone cherub in his arms, aware that neither had seen him yet, and also that within the next few seconds the three of them would converge in a violent collision. Angelique appeared to be tiring, falling back once again to within a mere inch of Mr. Sheffield’s reach. Then his hand snagged her shirt and he yanked her toward him. She flailed, no longer running, her arms swinging wildly to slap at his face. Corey closed in on them, though too late to keep his mom’s boss from tackling her. She landed on the lawn with a thud that sent a small bird in the nearest willow tree flying from its nest, and Mr. Sheffield pinned her to the grass with her arms out to the sides. She screamed with his hand clapped over her mouth, squirming, punching and slapping his jaw and neck, while he struggled to hold her down, shouting, “What are you doing here? No one’s supposed to be out yet! Stop fucking hitting me, and just let me—”

  Corey cut him off by lowering his shoulder and plowing into his back hard enough to flatten him, and then, as soon as Mr. Sheffield began struggling to his knees, Corey whacked his skull with the cherub. The blow instantly sent him falling forward in a heap, like a lion shot with a tranquilizer dart, and all two-hundred-plus pounds of him flopped lengthwise on top of Angelique, who let out a sound that was a cross between a gasp and a scream.

  Corey tossed the bloody cherub into the bushes and leaned with all his strength to push Mr. Sheffield to the side, then grabbed Angelique by the wrists and pulled her the rest of the way free. They stayed on their knees with a foot of space between them, breathing like asthmatics, until suddenly she fell against him and clutched him in a hug.

  SIX

  His first thought was to run away—don’t say a word, just run away. Instead, after she’d held him tightly for about thirty seconds, Corey gently removed her arms from his shoulders and knee-walked over to check Mr. Sheffield.

  The wound had drenched the hair on the back of his head in blood, some of the blood had already painted the grass blades beside him, some of it now slick on Corey’s hand. Angelique began wheezing, possibly hyperventilating as she scooted over to the railroad tie atop the bulkhead that separated the lawn from the drop down to the lake. She and Corey stared at each other until her eyes lowered, and she crept back a bit more, as if in reaction to the blood on his hand. His chest pounded. Sweat coated his forehead and rolled along his stomach and spine. He wiped his hand on the grass and then held both palms out, rising from his knees, hoping she would see that he only meant to help.

  Still breathing hard, he heard his voice crack as he asked, “Are you okay?”

  She looked up at him with wide eyes, but sounded drowsy as she answered, “I know you...” A breeze swept the willow branches beside them with a gentle rustling sound while she stood up and stepped toward him, slowly, as though she’d just awoken from a deep sleep. “Corey? Why were you—Why are you here?”

  He didn’t know how to answer, but before he even had a chance she brought her hands to her face and muffled sounds escaped through the spaces between her fingers. He reached out and gently placed a hand on her arm, and the moment he touched her she flung her arms around his shoulder blades again, her hug cinching him in place, snug as a straitjacket. His thoughts immediately split down two tracks: On the one hand, the long-running fantasy of holding her was now no longer a dream. On the other hand, Mr. Sheffield could be dying at their feet—from a wound he’d inflicted.

  He held her until the sounds of her wheezing and sniffling began tapering off, and then looked over her shoulder, swallowing hard when he saw that a light had come on in one of the picture windows in the mansion across the lake, the same window he’d seen illuminated when he’d broken in here. That glow now appeared to him as a giant eye staring from across the water. He felt exposed out there in the moonlight, and the hug-induced spell abruptly broke.

  “If you’re okay now,” he said, with his mouth still beside her neck, “we should probably leave. Before he wakes up.”

  Releasing her hold, she raised her head from his shoulder just as the breeze strengthened to a gust, the lake water rippling and the willow branches sweeping the ground when she tilted her head slightly to the side. “Wait,” she said, “why were you—” She looked away and swiped at her eyes, sighing before she went on, “I guess it doesn’t matter why you were here. I don’t even want to imagine what might have happened if you weren’t. I really don’t want to think about that.”

  Cor
ey mopped the sweat from his forehead with his shirtsleeve while a feathery sensation rose beneath his ribs like the flapping of a wing. He needed a cover story, and couldn’t believe that during all the time sitting on the roof he hadn’t prepared one.

  “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “Honestly? I have no idea. That was so beyond fucked up.” She pointed at Mr. Sheffield. “And what about him? What do we do about him now?”

  They both looked down in silence for a long beat.

  Corey knelt next to him and pressed two fingertips to the side of his neck until he found a pulse, and then cocked his ear to his nose.

  “He’s just knocked out,” he said. “And the spot where I hit him looks bad but it isn’t bleeding much anymore, so I think he’ll be all right. We should really go, though, before he wakes up.”

  Angelique nodded while looking past him. The distant voice over his shoulder that held her attention also prompted him to turn his head. Tiffany had called out from inside the house, and although the sound had been muted from that far away, Corey imagined her approaching the porch, his worry confirmed when the lights popped on in one of the lakefront rooms on the first floor. He cringed while counting down—three, two, one—and then right on cue, the screen door screeched open and Tiffany shouted with hands cupped at her mouth. “Angel? You out here?”

  Angelique pulled Corey over to the bushes at the corner of the lawn and they crouched there, a few feet from the retaining wall and the gently lapping water.

  He squinted through the leaves and whispered, “What should we do?”