The East End

by Jason Allen

  The flap of a bird’s wings snapped Leo out of his trance. He kept pulling Henry deeper into the darkness provided by the pine boughs until he’d entered a moonless, cave-like space between the tallest pines at the property line. There, he blindly gathered a pile of dry needles from the ground, felt along the length of Henry’s wrapped body and dropped them overtop, covering him as best he could in the dark. He would come back sometime tomorrow to check on him, hopefully to move him, but sunrise wouldn’t wait much longer. For now, this would have to do.

  He stumbled back over the same thick roots and trudged with arms out to keep from walking head-on into a tree, all the while his lips muttering along with his thoughts.

  No one can know. I’m so sorry, Henry. But no one can ever know.

  ELEVEN

  Angelique had just watched Mr. Sheffield drag the rolled-up body away from the pool a few lumbering steps at a time. She’d trailed him from the shadows with Corey at her side, until finally he set the body down on the edge of the lawn, turned and began backtracking toward the pine trees where they’d paused to hide.

  A few seconds later, she peered out just far enough to see him slogging past, limping the way Jack Nicholson had while wielding an ax in the snowy maze at the end of The Shining. After her friend’s father passed the tennis courts and entered the toolshed, Angelique took a step away from the tree trunk, baffled by the sounds of metal clanging and a series of thuds against the shed’s wooden floor and walls. When he emerged with a shovel over his shoulder, she gasped much louder than she should have, folded her ankle, and Corey held her close as they ducked back behind the trunk.

  She crouched stone-still until Mr. Sheffield passed by with the shovel. A man she’d known for most of her life, this man she’d respected and at another time would have said she loved: Was he really about to bury that poor guy from the pool? Would he try to kill her and Corey if he discovered them here? Would Corey be able to fight him off? She should have been sick with fear even acknowledging these questions as very real possibilities, but for some reason she felt strangely calm, almost numb. Despite her new hatred for him and the base insanity of the whole situation, the notion of fleeing before seeing how this horror show would end made no sense at all. Fascination had replaced the fear, and if she did feel anything at all, it was a sense that she’d detached from all the emotions that had triggered the panic attack on the porch. To a certain extent she and Corey no longer existed on the Sheffield property, but instead now hovered one dimension removed from his actions, experiencing this less as participants and more like moviegoers in theater seats. She and Corey hid behind the fourth wall, as the audience, while Mr. Sheffield forged ahead, the real-life performer. The star of the most warped reality show of all time.

  When Mr. Sheffield stepped to the side and slammed the shovel down, Angelique leaned out a bit more, realizing he’d given up on digging. She watched as he leaned over the wrapped body, and with a grunt began dragging it into the woods between two giant pines, the darkness swallowing him.

  She waited a minute, and then she and Corey left the shelter of the trees. He touched her arm, and the moment she faced him he asked the same question he’d been asking ever since this craziness started, though this time simply by raising his eyebrows.

  She nodded, and whispered, “Okay, let’s go.”

  The fact that she was still barefoot hadn’t occurred to her as they ran across all that soft grass of the lawn, but once they hopped down from the bulkhead and forged ahead into the reeds it made their escape more complicated. Corey held her arm over his shoulder and acted as a crutch while they traversed sharp twigs and other barbed things in the lake mud. In the shadows from the neighboring trees, they hiked side by side through a tangle of dried branches and vines along the bank, creeping farther away from the Sheffield estate as they passed an upturned, decrepit old rowboat with sun-split oars, and then the brown husk of a Christmas tree.

  After a few more steps in the rough terrain it became too awkward to rest her weight on him, so she held Corey’s hand as they pushed on toward the fence line of the Sheffields’ next-door neighbor, whispering about the plan to make a run for Corey’s truck as soon as they made it through the brambles and weeds along the uppermost edge of the bank.

  The moment she noticed the pair of swans in the tall grass, she held Corey back and raised a finger to her lips. The sight of the two sleeping birds had startled her, but then felt like the strangest of gifts, such an unexpected peaceful sight after so much fear and stress. She gripped Corey’s hand tighter and kept her finger at her lips, wondering if the female was nesting, and if the baby swans, the cygnets, might be due to hatch. They stood still while she stared at the birds with their long necks bent forward, recalling a much simpler time when she’d skimmed an illustrated book about swans that had been on the living room table in the Sheffields’ house, back when she and Tiff had just entered their teens and used to sit by the lake and talk about boys, daydreaming together about who they would marry.

  Swans mate for life, a fact that had always made these birds that much more beautiful in her mind. And the female did appear to be nesting. The male’s neck bent to his breast like a question mark, just as hers did, and yet he also held his body angled slightly toward her, as if to shield her from danger. These two majestic birds, this couple, they would mate for life...

  She took a step, wondering how many humans could say the same. Then she whispered to Corey, urging him to be careful not to disturb the reeds or the dead branches bordering the nest.

  “Try not to wake them,” she said, and he nodded, seeming to understand that everything depended on their stillness.

  TWELVE

  At the neighbor’s wooden driveway gate, Corey bent down with his fingers interlaced, cupped Angelique’s foot and gave her a boost up. She gripped the top and swung one leg over, and as soon as she dropped on the other side, he backed up a few paces, ran and launched himself upward. The same ankle that had turned when he’d jumped from the roof filled with fire, but he shrugged off the pain and grabbed Angelique by the hand, holding on tightly as they sped two blocks up Gin Lane, each looking over their shoulders along the way. “That’s my truck,” he said, slowing when his rear bumper came into view. He noticed her limping a little when she approached his passenger-side door, and once they both hopped inside the cab and he’d turned the key, he watched her bend her leg to inspect the sole of her right foot.

  “Oh man,” she said. “Can you help me with this?”

  He flicked on the dome light. The short hike along the lake’s edge had ravaged her feet, and now, in better lighting, he could see the extent of the damage, the most prominent detail being the thick splinter in her heel.

  He nodded, taking her foot in his hands. “But we shouldn’t be here too long, in case a cop comes pulling up.”

  Angelique sniffed and squeezed his arm, still looking at her heel. “You think they might?”

  “Maybe,” he said, peering up at the windshield. “One of the neighbors might have heard you screaming.” The pickup’s engine puttered while he worked the buried end of the splinter forward with his thumb and eased it out through a bead of blood.

  “Thanks,” she said, leaning back, and he gripped the gearshift knob, about to put it into first. But then he turned his head as she placed her hand on top of his. “Really, thank you,” she said, and quickly kissed his cheek. He stared, knowing the kiss had nothing to do with the splinter, though his mind was blank as to what he should say.

  After a pause, she cradled her foot and said, “We should probably start driving, huh?” He agreed and shifted into first, but before they pulled away from the bushes she added, “If you want to tell me why you were here tonight at some point, that’s cool, but I’m not going to ask. Not tonight, anyway.”

  “It’s—” he began, but she cut him off.

  “I’m just glad you were.”

 
His Adam’s apple rose and fell and sweat filled the pores on his forehead. Her lack of inquiry was a mercy. She spotted his pack of cigarettes on the seat and took one out, and he flicked his lighter while the truck cruised in first gear along the shoulder of the road, cupping the flame in his hand even though the windows were closed and no wind could disturb it. She inhaled until the fire kissed the tobacco with a mild sizzling sound, then let the smoke out slowly through her nose, while Corey lit one for himself.

  “I don’t usually smoke,” he said over the sound of the engine. “Just once in a while.”

  “Same for me, usually only when I’m with Tiff and she’s been drinking a lot. I don’t drink, so I figure I should feel okay about the occasional bad habit.”

  After the curve along the lakefront houses’ hedges, they approached downtown Southampton, greeted by a glowing red stoplight beside the pyramid of cannonballs and the antique cannon at the intersection. Corey wanted to say something that didn’t have to do with the thin man’s body or the chase or how he’d hit his mom’s boss so hard they’d spied on him to make sure he didn’t die of a brain hemorrhage, but nothing else came to him.

  He’d been thinking about Angelique for so long, wondering if he’d only imagined her flirting with him last summer, hoping all those smiles when they’d spoken in the house or by the pool had been her way of sending signals that he should ask her out. Although he’d reached a point where he’d been much more relaxed around her by Labor Day, after looking through windows and lingering on the roof so he could be close to her tonight, he now felt he was sitting on a giant eggshell, one stupid line away from fucking everything up. He’d imagined plenty of scenarios with her, but never one remotely like this—thrust together after a sudden whirlwind of violence, fleeing the scene of more than one crime. He couldn’t slip up now, and yet the silence continued eating the oxygen in the truck cab. Feeling the pressure to say something, anything, he ended up rambling, “So then, uh—why don’t you? You know, why don’t you drink?”

  “Long story,” she said, exhaling a drag out her window.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Maybe I shouldn’t have asked that.”

  “No, it’s okay. It’s not that I wouldn’t want to talk about it, it’s just literally a long story.” She faced him and he flashed another quick glance away from the road, thankful to be in the low light of the truck cab. Otherwise she’d have seen his face had turned beet red.

  “All I can think about now is seeing Tiff’s dad when he leaned down and kissed that dead man,” she said. “I mean, how fucked up was that?”

  Corey downshifted for the upcoming curve, figuring the best way to avoid saying something stupid would be to not say anything at all.

  “Did you see Tiff’s dad with that guy when they were in the pool, before he died?”

  Fuck, he thought, how do I answer without giving myself away? He inhaled smoke to delay, hyperconscious that he still had to walk a tightrope.

  “He didn’t kill him,” he said. “Not sure if you knew that already.”

  “He didn’t? What happened, then?”

  “That other guy hit his head, I think. Then maybe he drowned, or else hitting his head might have done it. Or maybe he OD’d first. I don’t know for sure about that part, but I think they were both pretty wasted.”

  Hoping he hadn’t already given away too much, Corey gripped the steering wheel tighter, noting distractedly that the ash from his cigarette was beginning to curl. He braced for her next question, sifting through a handful of flimsy reasons why he might have been at the estate in the middle of the night. The best excuse he could come up with was that he’d left something there when he’d been working with his mother, his wallet maybe—and since he needed it and couldn’t wait until morning, he’d thought he’d sneak in when nobody was home and pick it up. Innocent enough, right? No harm done, nothing creepy there. Would she believe that? What bullshit. Of course she wouldn’t.

  A set of headlights from a car in the other lane began expanding and brightening, and Corey squinted as Angelique said, “So, do you know who that guy was?”

  “Not really.”

  He made a show of shielding his eyes with his hand until the car in the other lane passed, hoping to appear distracted long enough by the bright headlights for a lull in the conversation, which worked—she didn’t ask another follow-up question, and for the next few minutes they sat in silence while Corey drove outside of Southampton along a farm road that would take them through North Sea, Noyack and Sag Harbor, all the way to East Hampton if they decided to go that far. He let out a breath, his knuckles finally relaxed enough to take his left hand off the steering wheel and to flick his cigarette butt out the window. She did the same before settling in on her side with the posture and sharply focused gaze of someone who’d just awoken from night terrors—her knees bent at her chest, one arm hugging them tightly, the other shoulder braced against the door, one of her fingernails between her teeth.

  Corey drove them down long stretches of country roads, resisting the temptation to sound smart by telling her that most of the farms out there were owned by CEOs like Leo Sheffield, or by famous actors, or by other multimillionaires who didn’t have a drop of ancestral blood connecting them to this rich soil or the rugged family-farm way of life. They passed rows of lettuce and cabbage, railings with grape vines, fenced-off fields where horses roamed during the daylight. He thought more about the land, how it would have been converted by then to businesses or perfect green lawns for perfectly ugly condos or McMansions if the wealthy landowners who’d purchased so much of it years ago hadn’t wanted the area to feel like an escape from the city. They’d encapsulated their sliver of the country life, preserved their own quaint idea of the countryside by renewing the black-and-white images of eastern Long Island from back when the locals and a small population of visitors lived in simpler times, the period when life revolved around the harvest. The landowners out here had invested in the narratives they’d read about in coffee table books and seen in films and television shows based in the bucolic setting of the old Hamptons. For a fraction of their extravagant wealth, they could own their own wide vistas with rows of vegetables that would be sold at roadside stands, or horse corrals and hay fields, or rolling acres of wine grapes growing fatter on the vines, plumping in the sun.

  But Corey also knew the main reason many of these farms, at least those with a summer home on the property, had been resurrected or kept alive. They made for an interesting conversation piece at cocktail parties in Manhattan or other Hamptons summer homes. Hosts like the Sheffields could say things like, “Oh, meet the so-and-sos, they have five acres in Sagaponack, and the lettuce in our salads came straight from their farm!” His thoughts drifted further and he fell into imagining what farmers in the Midwest or down South, or especially the peasants who worked the land in third world countries would think of these “farms” of the Hamptons.

  Angelique rolled up her window, which cut the sound of rushing air and disentangled him from the sweeping thoughts about these towns out on the East End, where some of the richest people in the world owned these views on either side of the road, where they arrived from the city after driving past the exit for the less desirable area where he’d grown up in a tiny house raised by a single mom. This girl next to him...what did she know about how he and his family lived? Could he blame someone who came from tons of money for not understanding his life? For the first time in all the hours of daydreaming about seeing her again, he felt a quiver of doubt, and began squirming in his seat at the thought that he may have built her up too much to see her as a real person, flaws and all, and that maybe his pot-laced daydreams over the past year had turned her into a fantasy.

  “That look in his eyes,” Angelique said absently. “I’ll never forget that look when he was on top of me.”

  Corey kept his focus on the road and leaned into the curve, his blood pressure rising now as he env
isioned Mr. Sheffield slamming her to the ground. He started to answer, “Maybe we should still call—” but she cut in.

  “That look,” she said, “that was so—just so fucking crazy... But the guy in the pool, I don’t even know what to think of that. You’re sure he didn’t kill him?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Then why didn’t he call someone? And why drag him into the woods? And before that, why did he fucking kiss him?”

  “I think he loved him,” Corey said, flashing back to the two men on the balcony. “But I don’t know why he dragged him all the way out there, either. I think he was drunk, maybe coked-up, too. He could’ve just panicked, I guess.”

  “Love?” Angelique sounded appalled.

  He shrugged with both hands still on the wheel. “It’s not like he’s happily married or anything. You probably know better than I do that Leo and Sheila don’t exactly like each other that much. But maybe he always just wanted to be with a guy.” Angelique turned her head toward him, expressionless when he glanced over. The engine noise and sound of the tires against the road filled the space before he added, “It surprised me, too, though.”

  “Why haven’t we called the police yet?”

  “And tell them what? I don’t mean we shouldn’t—just saying.”

  She fidgeted and pulled her knees back up to her chest. “I have no idea what to do now. Or what to say to Tiff. No fucking clue.”

  “Want me to drive you to the city? I will if you want.”

  “I can’t go back there.”

  “The Sheffield house or the city?”

  “Both, I guess. But definitely not the city.”