“I’d like to have these possessions of mine returned to me.”
The hand on my shoulder clenched and unclenched not gently but not painfully either. Like maybe I was getting a firm massage. I spared the large knuckles and thick fingers there a nervous glance. Looked back at Mr. Perrelli.
I said nothing, unsure of what the best course of action would be here. Honesty? Lie to buy us time? Apparently reading my hesitancy as if I were leaning towards option two, Mr. Perrelli spoke again.
“There’s nothing to be gained from lying, young man,” he said, and patted my leg chummily. “I believe you met an associate of mine out there in the woods. He kept me apprised of all that transpired.”
“The Collector …” Jim muttered from across the table, his ability to speak when I couldn’t a reminder again of his strength.
“Bingo,” Mr. Perrelli said, winking at my friend and giving a finger and thumb gunshot his way. It was all too easy to superimpose a real gun upon that familiar gesture, and it didn’t seem at all friendly. Rather like a warning, a hint of things to come, instead of a jovial, casual motion.
That more than anything, the implied threat towards my friend, spurred me to honesty instead of option number two. It was lies that had got us to where we were in the first place. More lies could only bring about more consequences.
“We burned the money,” I said more calmly than I felt. Inside, my stomach was churning and quaking like geologic plates. “The Collector took the body.”
Mr. Perrelli smiled. Closed his eyes like he was enjoying the feel of the sun on his face, the heat of it and the warmth.
“You burned the money?” he asked. It wasn’t like he wanted the question answered, but merely like he was repeating it to himself for clarity. “A bunch of teenagers burnt ten million dollars?”
That number echoed in my head. Stated so casually, so unceremoniously, that figure giving a concreteness to what we had seen. It brought a reality to what we had so briefly dreamt of doing with the money in the sacks.
Ten million dollars.
Ashes in the wind. Lost and gone.
“That’s what you want me to believe?” Mr. Perrelli asked and he again circled the table with his gaze. His black eyes were like pools of darkness. “You burnt the money?”
Having nothing else to do, I nodded.
I thought about pissing my pants again, but having to inconspicuously throw out ruined jockey shorts without my mom noticing was getting old.
“Well,” Mr. Perrelli said and pushed with his hands on the table to stand. “This really is quite an unfortunate situation.”
Once on his feet, he pulled on the lapels of his suit jacket, straightening it. He brushed off unseen dust particles and lint from his pants. Then he offered me a smile and it seemed to me like a shark grinning before he chomped you in half at the torso.
“I guess we’ll have to come to some sort of arrangement then,” he said.
I had no idea what that meant, didn’t like the sound of it, and didn’t want to ask for clarification. And I didn’t have a chance to, anyways, because then he was walking away and the hand left my shoulder. Turning in my seat so that I was peering over the backrest, I watched the two men in suits walk a distance, climb into a long black car, and then the car pull away from the curb and roll away down the street. It rounded a corner and was soon out of sight.
Turning to face front again, I started to get up and stopped when I saw Dillon Glover there, standing over our table, his friends to either side of him. His fists were on the tabletop, and like Mr. Perrelli he looked around at each of us.
“You little fucks are in all kinds of trouble,” he said, and he smiled and the pure joy on his face was of a perversion I’ll never forget. He too had an idea of what kind of people Mr. Perrelli and Brock were and he found it amusing, a game, and he was glad to have been a part of it.
Then they too were gone, and it was just me and my friends, and we looked at each other across the table, all of us waiting for someone else to say something first.
“Well,” I said, “it looks like there’s more people that want to kill us.”
“Yeah,” Jim said, picking up his sandwich, taking a bite, washing it down with a long swallow of soda. “I was starting to feel normal again.”
“You’re not normal,” I said. “You’re colored.”
He grinned, gave me the finger, called me a “honkey.”
“So what do we do?” Fat Bobby asked. Surprisingly, he seemed to have recovered from his bout of sickness rather quickly.
“Same as always,” Tara said. She used the last of her French fries to mop up the last dabs of ketchup on her plate, stuffed them in her mouth, chewed.
“What’s that?” Sarah asked. “Coming up with stupid nicknames? Collecting decoder rings and playing Dungeons and Dragons?”
“At least we don’t play with ourselves,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” my sister said. “I bet your shorts are stiff as crackers with all the crank-yanking you do.”
I wanted to punch her but blushed instead and avoided looking at Tara.
“We deal with it,” Tara said, ignoring our exchange.
None of us said anything in response to that, and to me it seemed maybe there was no need to say anything else. Because maybe there wasn’t much else that could be said or done. What happened, would, and that was that.
Deal with it seemed to me like the summation of all things.
4.
One evening Tara called and asked if I could go out. She’d just gotten her driver’s learner permit and was borrowing her dad’s car. It was my birthday, and this fact must have slipped out earlier in the week, because she wanted to give me a present. I asked my dad, and he gave me a wry smile like he knew a secret and he wasn’t going to tell me what it was. He nodded and told me to have a good time. I relayed his answer over the phone to Tara and she said she’d be over soon. It took fifteen or twenty minutes to drive from town to the outskirts where we lived, and those minutes ticked away so slowly the anxiety of it made me pleasantly sick.
I remembered the kiss under the moon at the fair.
The feel of her hand in mine at the top of the Ferris wheel.
But then the other things had happened: Sheriff Glover in the woods; the events on Lookout Mountain; the strain in our friendship and the dread that things could never be put right again; the arrival of Mr. Perrelli and the business he was about.
I thought of my sister in the bathroom not so long ago, getting herself all prettied up for Barry, and wondering if someday Tara would be doing that for me. Now here I was in the restroom in front of the mirror, looking from this angle and that like the slightly different view would reveal some hideous deformation that I’d somehow missed my entire life. Making sure each strand of hair was just so seemed a task of monumental importance. When I heard the sound of a car approaching, headlights skewing shadows through the windows of the house, I wasn’t ready, thought maybe I’d never be ready.
The knock on the door announced Tara, and I bounded down the stairs. Dad was there, looking over the back of the sofa at me, again with that wry smile like he had a secret.
“I’ll be back in a couple hours?” I said, my hopes turning into a question, my hand on the knob at the ready.
“Sure thing,” Dad said and I turned to go but stopped again when he called my name. “And son?” he began, the door still unopened, Tara still on the other side waiting. I turned back to him.
“Yes, sir?”
“I was wrong,” he said, and I wondered more about why he was bothering me at such a time more so than whatever he was wrong about.
“Sir?” I asked out of necessity because he was addressing me, not because I gave a shit.
“About her,” he said with a little nod towards the door. My heart lurched. Something in my stomach did a few somersaults. “She’s not too old for you. I think she’s just about right.”
He was saying more with those words than I could understand. Maybe it wa
s what me and my friends had been through, and he saw something in her and the others that he approved of. Maybe it was just something between a father and a son, and the secrets of growing up, the secrets of girls, that he was imparting to me or trying to. Both, maybe, and something more or less, and it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that girl on the other side of the door. She had a car waiting and we’d drive through the evening and go places in the last hours of this, my birthday, and I had one more gift coming and I wanted whatever it was more than anything.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said.
He nodded again, I opened the door, and there she was. The night was curtained behind her like a stage backdrop just to outline her for me. She waved over my shoulder to my dad, and then she had me by the arm and I was hers and the world was mine.
* * *
The truck wound through the dark roads and we descended into the sparse lights of town. A faint glow like a halo encircled the desert town, and I didn’t know if it was the sodium vapor street lamps and business neon and lights from houses, or something else, something in me, and something in her, and the expectation of things lighting up the world. I watched her hands maneuver the wheel and handle the gearshift. I knew she saw me watching her, but her eyes were on the road. Yet there was a slight tick at the corner of her mouth as if she were struggling against a smile.
“Where we going?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” she said and I saw that tick again at the corner of her mouth.
Through town we rolled and then it was dwindling behind us as we continued north. Eventually the lights of it blinked away as the bumps and rises of the road blocked them out. Tara took a turn and steered onto a dirt road. There was a sign but it was dark and we passed it before I could read it. She let her foot off the gas as the unpaved path jostled the truck and soon she slowed the pickup even more and stopped.
Tara cut the engine and got out.
I followed, coming around the truck to see her duck quickly back in to pull something out from behind the driver’s seat. A large bundle wrapped in birthday cake print gift wrap appeared in the cradle of her arms, the paper crinkling as Tara handed it over to me.
“Your present. But don’t open it yet.”
I nodded and tucked it under my arm. It was malleable and soft, squishing under my arm a bit like a pillow.
“Come on,” she said and hooked my arm with hers to pull me along towards the trees.
“Do you think it’s safe?” I said, thinking of Mr. Perrelli and his man Brock. “Maybe we shouldn’t be out by ourselves.”
Mentally, I cursed myself for making the suggestion.
“I watched to make sure we weren’t followed.”
So had I, in between bouts of staring at her and her hands and the dark desert rolling past outside the truck. Indeed, there hadn’t been a car on the road other than us since we had left Payne behind. But it wasn’t like we were experts at spotting tails either.
I nodded.
“Besides,” she said, “with the headlights off no one would know where we’d pulled off the road anyways.”
This made sense and I nodded again.
We strolled into the trees but it wasn’t like entering the forest from near my home or the Connolly yard. These were proper trails and along the trails were cleared spaces and wooden picnic tables. In one clearing was the squat brick structure of a public restroom, looking like a small military bunker in the night. Green signs made a darker hue in the night dotted the trails, telling passersby how far to where. We continued walking, Tara leading the way, and the area around the trees became more spacious so that off in the distance I could see a rippling and moving surface—almost black—and the light of the moon and stars glinting off of it like a million diamonds.
We walked to the shore of the lake and there Tara stopped, and I stopped with her. On the lakeshore was a large rock shaped like a state I couldn’t name and in front of it a length of driftwood, washed up like the last plank of a lost and sunken ship. Tara sat on the rock and patted the space beside her, and I lowered myself next to her.
There wasn’t much space and our shoulders brushed when we moved.
She folded her hands in her lap and turned to me. Now she was smiling and it reached her eyes, along with the reflected sparkle of the heavens, and it seemed like there was a whole universe in her eyes.
“You can open your present now,” she said, and I blinked, confused, then remembered the package under my arm and pulled it free.
I tore at the wrapping like I imagined tearing at her clothes someday, the way ruggedly handsome actors did it in the movies. When the paper was tossed away and I saw what I held in my hands, I felt both extremely unmanly, as far from Mel Gibson or Tom Cruise as a guy could get, and very, very happy at the same time. To be completely honest, the happiness outweighed the embarrassment.
The stuffed plush Batman, previously gutted in the Haunted House, stared back up at me, stitched inexpertly but charmingly across his midsection so that it looked like train tracks crossed the width of him. Batman as the Frankenstein monster maybe.
I knew the grin on my face was wide and foolish, and I didn’t care.
I held Batman tightly in my lap, my fists squishing him.
“I went back that night to get him,” Tara said and I looked at her and she looked away, off across the dark waters of the lake. “It seemed wrong to leave him there. You know, after all he’s done for Gotham.”
“Wow,” I said. “You just might be the biggest nerd I’ve ever met.”
She laughed and nudged me with her shoulder.
“Don’t make fun. He may have saved our lives.”
I thought of that night in the Haunted House, and Dillon pulling the knife away from me to go to work on the stuffed Batman. Tara acting quicker than any of us, turning and kicking the guy a good one on the shin.
I don’t think it was the Caped Crusader who saved me that night.
I stared at Tara by the lake with the trees rustling and whispering in the evening breeze, and she finally looked back at me. I think she may have seen a hint of my thoughts. She nudged me with her shoulder again and then leaned over and I leaned over to meet her.
Our lips met and time seemed to stop. Again there was that feeling that the world was moving just for us: this night was ours, and this lake, and the wind in our hair. And this girl, this most beautiful of creatures, was mine, here and now and mine alone.
I had the notion to use my hands this time and wanted to do it oh so badly. To touch her, let my fingers roam her. To feel the curve of her back with the skin of my fingertips. Maybe to put one on her leg and let it spider-crawl there, seeking, feeling. If I was real daring, to encircle her with my arms and pull her close so that our bodies were touching too, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, a dozen little places, a dozen little meetings of us and the tingle of it like electric pulses.
But she pulled away before I could command my hands to act.
Just that kiss and the contact was broken.
Again she stared out over the lake and embarrassed, disappointed maybe too, I did the same, trying to find whatever it was she was looking for. Knowing she wasn’t really looking for anything in particular, or perhaps one very important thing. The most important thing ever: understanding.
“What do you think will happen to us?” she asked in little more than a whisper, a sigh.
I didn’t know if she meant me and her; or Jim and Bobby too and the whole Outsiders’ Club; maybe Mr. Perrelli and Brock, and the things that had come before; Dillon, Max and Stu at the Haunted House; Sheriff Glover at the access road near the Buick; the Collector and Mr. Templeton on the mountain. Perhaps she meant all of it and that feeling I’d had for awhile after it all, that feeling that things were closing in on us, that we’d been too lucky for a bunch of kids who’d wanted what wasn’t rightly theirs. That maybe all there was for us was pain after pain, trial after trial, and a special place in hell for kids who plotted to steal money that didn
’t belong to them and killed people who wanted it back.
I shook my head, not knowing what to say.
“What if it doesn’t end with this Perrelli guy?” she said. “What if we do … something … again, and someone else comes after him?”
Silence was all I had to give.
The trees continued their murmurs, better conversationalists than I.
“When I had to do that counseling,” Tara continued and I knew without having to ask she was talking about what the court had ordered after her having shot the Collector up on Lookout Mountain, “the doctor kept asking me about my feelings and what I thought about shooting that guy. Shooting the Collector.”
She stood and stepped over the driftwood so that the toes of her shoes were almost touching the water. I stood up and walked over to stand beside her.
“All I wanted was to be out of there,” she said. “His office was so drab and dull. Just all these leather doctor’s books. And on the walls were just a bunch of degrees in fancy frames. It was a dead place, and it reminded me of being up there on the mountain and pulling the trigger and watching that man fall all the way down.”
I was looking for something again out on the lake. Looking anywhere to find it, anywhere but in Tara’s eyes.
“He wanted to know if I had nightmares,” she said. “But I just wanted to go home. So I kept it all in. I didn’t tell him about my feelings, and I said nothing about nightmares.”
She grabbed me and turned me towards her, turned me away from that something I sought over the black waters, and towards her and the pain in her eyes. The pain in her eyes maybe reflecting what was in me, and me not wanting to see it.
“But I do have feelings. And I have nightmares.”
I had nightmares too, remembered the one about us high in the Ferris wheel, the ride falling apart around us, and us crashing down among the ruins of its mechanisms. I didn’t share this though and said nothing.
I was becoming real good at saying nothing.
I thought maybe I could major in it in college. Probably get full tuition paid by the United Mutes of America Foundation.
If You Go Down to the Woods Page 20
