The Run

by Tyler Wolfe

  My anxiety boiled over every time a Jon boat drifted by, or a group of jet skiers sped through cutting the rippling silver-white water. If they only knew what laid in the water below.

  I downed another cup of coffee and then tried busying myself with chores. I checked the laundry first and was genuinely stunned to find that even the ragged t-shirt had come out clean. I turned it over in my wounded hands, looking for any trace of the blood, sweat and grime, and then shook my head. Too bad I can’t just pour some of that stain remover into my ear.

  The shorts were the same. I folded them up with the rest of the laundry and tossed the shirt into the ragbag. I would be polishing my truck with the evidence before the week was out.

  I moved carefully around the house, picking up and wearing my headphones instead of playing the stereo. Zoe was a light sleeper. Normally I didn’t even try to do chores like this unless things were backed up or it was one of our days off together. But today, even though my body ached and my joints cracked uncomfortably whenever I reached for something, I couldn’t keep still.

  I did some research on local gyms. I hated the idea of exercising around other people, especially the big muscle-head types who loved those places and strutted around as if it was theirs. I also hated the extra expense. I just wanted to run. I didn’t want to be driven off the streets of my own neighborhood, but I had promised Zoe, and I kept my promises. She was one of the best things that had ever happened to me. I knew she had her pick of guys when we met, but she chose me. Even though things had been a bit rocky lately, she was still everything to me and I didn’t want to screw that up.

  Finally, I settled on a place that seemed as far away from one of those macho “bodybuilding gyms” as possible: an unpretentious all-ages gym with low monthly fees, roughly between my work and home. Now at least I could burn off my day’s frustrations in a safe environment, and I could start to work on toning up other areas of my body too.

  Around noon, I checked the news again. Local news and social media still didn’t mention anything about a missing teenager. Could he have been from out of town? Lucky me if he had been. Though that left me checking news from the surrounding areas as well.

  Still, nothing. It didn’t make sense. I set up some alerts on my phone to help keep me up on the news and tried to force myself to stop obsessively checking. Finally, I cleared my browser history and walked away from the computer entirely.

  I drifted around the house aimlessly until Zoe got up. I heard her roll out of bed and got the coffee maker going, doing my best to pretend that things were business as usual. But as soon as she finished showering and dressing and came shuffling out, she stopped in the doorway and stared at me. “...Jesus babe. Are you sure you don’t want to see a doctor?”

  “I’ll be okay,” I reassured—and looked down at myself. “Wow.” The bruises on my legs had fully developed overnight, giving me a lovely purple-and-red camo pattern. “That’s pretty graphic looking. Think I’ll have to wait to visit the gym.”

  “You had better wait!” Zoe shot me a glare. “No pushing it until you’re not limping around looking like you entered an MMA competition. Okay?”

  I forced a smile. “Okay.”

  Unfortunately for me, even after the pain started fading, my legs looked graphic enough that I had to wear long pants every time I went outside. One arm wasn’t much better, and neither was my eye. That left me knocking around inside of my house for days, without relief, without a run.

  Even when I closed my eyes, I didn’t get relief. I knew what stress nightmares were; maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me to get a few. But after the third day of dreaming over and over again that I had left the body under that bush, that it had been found floating in the lake, that I had completely flaked and that horrible bundle was still lying in the back of my truck...I was sick of it.

  By the time that Tuesday rolled around, I was eager to go to work for the first time that I could remember. I was short on sleep and walking around in a daze as I gathered my things. I caught myself stopping at the breakfast nook windows for a couple quick glances but forced myself to get moving so I wouldn’t be late.

  I listened feverishly to the news as I fought traffic on my way in to work. Still no news of a disappearance, or a disturbance in that neighborhood, or a body, or anything. It was as if that young man had vanished from the face of the Earth with no one close enough to him to notice. Even my memory of him had started to shift and fade—and with it, my guilt gnawed less and less.

  I didn’t know if I was recovering mentally from the ordeal, or getting worse, and I had no one to give me a frame of reference. Even though I had gone through hell over it at first, my guilt seemed to be lessening as I got some distance and clarity on the whole messy situation.

  It’s a heck of a hard reality, I realized, as I fought to get over into the right lane for my off-ramp. But at the end of the day, I knew I killed that kid in self-defense. He wasn’t going to stop. I wished I knew whether he was desperate, crazy, drunk or just a reckless little punk. Whatever it was, he dragged me into a fight and died accidentally while I was defending myself.

  I ignored the brief twist in my stomach as I thought this. It might not be one hundred percent, but one thing absolutely was true: the death had been totally accidental, and no one would have believed that for a second. Not when it involved a white adult strangling a possibly underage black teen. Around these parts, people are too damned quick to call everything a hate crime. Not that they don’t happen, but that’s absolutely not what happened to that poor kid.

  A black SUV, the size of a tank, cut me off and I hit the brakes and horn, surprising myself with a flare of sudden anger. Get it under control, Carter. Some of these idiots have guns.

  The haze didn’t lift when I made it in to work. My bruises had faded a lot, but I still got some stares as I walked in. Bob came to my desk almost right away, but didn’t bend over it or me as I sat there. Instead, he stood back awkwardly. “How you feeling?”

  I blinked at him. This jerk didn’t care at all about anyone’s welfare; he had always been pretty transparent about it. But here he was. “I’m alright, recovering. Thanks.”

  “Take it easy at work these next few days,” he advised, and coughed into his fist, his eyes shifting around nervously. “So did some guy beat you up?”

  I looked at him, startled. “Uh, no. Like I said, I got knocked into a planter by a stupid dog the size of a truck.”

  “Oh!” He let out a nervous laugh. “Shit, sorry. You looked so beat up that I...kinda assumed you made up the dog thing.”

  I peered at him, suddenly keenly interested in how he knew the difference between an unintended accident and a deliberate attack by another human. Had he been the petty terror of a schoolyard himself? He seemed the type.

  I wonder how you’d feel if I bashed your face into a planter, Bob.

  I froze. The thought was so alien, so alarming, that it stunned me into silence and stillness. He blinked down at me. “You sure you’re okay to come back?”

  “I don’t want things piling up too much, other people’s work will start to be affected. Besides, I’m going crazy being cooped up at home. I’ll be fine.” Cold droplets of sweat ran down my back; I shivered slightly, suddenly hoping he would go away.

  “Oh good. We wouldn’t want you going…crazy.” He twitched a small, awkward smile, which vanished as quickly as it came. Then he turned and walked somewhat hurriedly back to his desk.

  I spent the day working on the simplest catch-up tasks that I had, knowing my mind just wasn’t at full capacity. From the concerned looks I kept getting, everyone else knew it too. They probably thought I was distracted by my injuries, but the pain had lessened so much that I barely noticed it. Now, I was distracted by my fear.

  The fear had eclipsed the guilt after the second day, and now it burned steadily inside of me, like a black sun. That list of what ifs haunted me, even as the specifics of the boy’s face became blurry and indistinct. I was n
o longer being haunted by the past. I was being haunted by my possible future—one in which I would lose everything because the body had been found, or someone had seen us.

  Zoe even noticed something seemed wrong with me, beyond the distraction from my injuries and the frustration from being cooped up. She brought it up Wednesday at one of the two dinners a week that we could have with each other. “I don’t get it,” she said quietly. “I know that you took a bad hit from that dog, but ever since then, you’ve seemed kind of...rattled. Like you’re both here and not here. Kind of in a daze. And you keep staring out at the lake!”

  I looked away from it quickly, feigning confusion. “Huh? I do?”

  She sighed, eyes full of frustration. “Yeah, you do. Like you’re expecting the goddamn Lock Ness monster to poke its head up or something.”

  “Just been dealing with some bad dreams since that damn dog jumped me.” I rubbed my temple as a sharp pain drove into it. The conversation was edging far too close to the truth.

  “Babe, you got pretty badly hurt,” she mused softly. “Are you sure he didn’t attack you? You keep saying it was an accident, but…”

  “It was an accident,” I snapped—and saw the shock on her face, quickly forcing myself to calm. “Sorry. It’s just so stupid that this happened.”

  “What are the dreams about, anyway?” Her soft curiosity didn’t mean any harm, but I shuddered inside as I was forced to think fast.

  “Boat crash. A really bad one. Out there on the lake. There’s burning gas and oil on the water. I always wake up just before it explodes and…”

  She blinked, looking a little less upset, and a little more fascinated. “Damn. That’s a weird one. You know there hasn’t been anything bad on that lake in forty years, right?”

  “I know. That’s what makes it weird.” Another lie to add to the stack. Sorry, sweetheart, but believe me, I’m protecting you from the truth.

  The strangest thing of all was that it was six days into this mess, and still no one had reported a young black man missing. It wasn’t on the public police blotter, it wasn’t in the news...it wasn’t even in social media. The biggest thing happening locally was a wave of evictions in the neighborhood as a slumlord raised rents. It included a line of houses over near the T-intersection at the end of Fernery.

  The morning of the seventh day, the fear started subsiding. I felt its burden had lightened some the moment I woke up. As horrifying as it was to contemplate, a whole living, breathing human being had disappeared off our streets...and nobody seemed to have noticed. That meant my terrible luck that night was being balanced by some amazing luck now.

  I started to relax. I started to even feel a little hopeful, thinking that maybe things could go back to normalcy. I could go back to fixing things up around the house, and fixing things up with Zoe, just like I had before.

  But I still kept watching the lake.

  CHAPTER 7

  Curiosity

  After an entire week of no bad news, I started to feel better. Ten days in, I stopped worrying about the lake—I stopped worrying about everything to do with all of it. A huge rainstorm came that morning, flooding the curb-sides and ditches and clouding the lake with washes of brown silt. I drove through the storm with surprising ease in my truck, feeling my heart lifting. Amazingly, beyond all expectations, it felt like I had a darn good chance of everything being okay again.

  I was back to my old self at work, plowing through the rest of my backlog in a matter of days. I sat through the drama of another arbitrary firing as placidly as a Zen master. It was trivial now that I had fought for my life and won. I still noticed Bob watching me occasionally, but it no longer really bothered me.

  I also started running again. I was visiting the gym diligently after work and pushing myself a lot harder on their treadmills. I also used the rowing machines and had started some mild weight training. I wanted to be stronger, as well as faster.

  It satisfied my need for exercise and advancement; I started pushing my personal best within five days of joining. It also gave me more confidence as my body healed and started growing stronger. But it didn’t satisfy my need to run in solitude and feel a real road beneath my feet.

  I started running around our neighborhood again. I didn’t go down Fernery any longer; instead, I ran along the lake shore in the early mornings, just before dawn. It took me out of my soft bed next to Zoe way too early, but I had gotten sick of my own excuses. Maybe it was a kind of penance...but I always felt better after I returned, showered, and curled back up in bed with her for a while.

  “Let’s go out to dinner tonight,” I said at lunch that Sunday. I had been thinking about it for a while. The urge to patch things up with Zoe nagged at me even more now that I had run a terrible risk of losing her.

  She set down her sandwich and looked at me in shock. “That means dipping into our down payment money.”

  I smiled. How many arguments had Zoe and I had, where I focused only on saving for our future home, but she reminded me that having a little fun now and then was good thing? Too many.

  If it would make her happier, this was one concession that I was happy to make. There would be no point saving for a house if she left me because she felt tied to a neglectful stingy miser. And we really needed to spend more time together.

  She blinked several times, opening and closing her mouth, and then smiled. “Steak?”

  I smiled back and nodded.

  “Steak it is.”

  Oddly, Lakeland’s downtown had a fantastic steakhouse. It rested right on the banks of one of Lakeland’s most attractive bodies of water, Lake Mirror. The steakhouse had an old wild west feel to it—big, and done in heavy timbers and rustic furniture, and was aptly named Big’s Cattle Ranch.

  Stained glass lamps hung from the ceiling, casting a yellowish glow on the booths and the assortment of rustic art on the walls. Zoe and I adored the place. There were more cuts of meat to choose from than I had known existed, and the place was just busy enough to feel lively without being overwhelmingly noisy.

  “So what made you decide to splurge?” Zoe asked with real interest halfway through her house salad.

  “Well,” I said, ignoring the little voice inside my head that said It’s all a distraction, hunny. “I just thought about some of the old arguments we kept having, and how you kept saying that saving for a house is important, but we still need to live. We can’t just live on a strict budget all the time, and I don’t want you to be unhappy. Besides, I miss our date nights…it’s been a little while”.

  That made her smile again. I was on a roll.

  Dinner turned into dinner and drinks, then dinner, drinks and dancing. It was awkward as hell trying to line dance in sneakers, but I didn’t care once I had enough beer in me. It would be a little while before I was sober enough to drive, so we opted for a nice stroll around the lake. About half way around I stopped and looked at Zoe. “I love you” I said as I gazed into her beautiful brown eyes. “I don’t ever want to be without you.”

  She smiled as she gazed back, then laid a kiss on me that instantly reminded me exactly why I loved her so much. She was my soul mate, and I hers.

  After our moment, we began walking back. I joked how I might have a future in line dancing—just needed to trade in my running shoes for some cowboy boots. We laughed all the way home.

  Upon returning, Zoe lead me into the house and straight to our bedroom. We tumbled into bed, another thing that hadn’t happened in a while. She still gave me that look though, the one of slight disappointment as I rolled over to retrieve a condom from the nightstand. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I thought as I rolled back toward her and reached for her. We’ll make a baby when we’re ready.

  I woke up feeling slack and lazy from our night. I laid there as I listened to the hard rattle of heavy rain against the roof. Thank God I had the morning off because nothing short of a fire was dragging me out of bed. At least it will be slightly cooler once the rain stops. Well, hopefully.

/>   September was still beastly hot most of the time, but the rain no longer had that nasty lukewarmness, and it brought a cooler breeze with it.

  Already restless, I decided to go out and stretch my legs. The rain had settled down to a light sprinkle and I could hear the wind whistling weakly through the trees. I stepped out on my porch and the cool, moist breeze soothed my skin. Not too hot yet. Guess I was lucky again.

  I set out—but instead of circling back to the launch and the footpath by the lake, I found myself jogging my old route instead.

  I almost stopped myself, momentarily blaming it on old habit, but I had to admit...I was curious. Were there any leftover indications of what had happened down at the end of Fernery that night? I wanted to make sure that the rain had washed away any leftover drag marks, and that the mud had swallowed any possible evidence that might have been mistakenly left.

  Plus, the recent the rash of evictions had my curiosity piqued. One of those battered fixer-uppers might go up for sale. I wouldn’t ever want to live down in that area, but if I could buy one of the houses cheap, fix it and flip it, we would have all the money we needed to get a better place elsewhere.

  I reached the end of my street and took a right onto Fernery. The street looked as it always had, empty of cars and people: away at working-class jobs that started too early. I jogged down to the end of the street, impressed by how much my time on the treadmill had improved my speed and stride. As I drew near the T-intersection, I slowed down, my eyes alert for any changes.

  There were eviction notices taped firmly to the doors of five or six houses—including one ugly bungalow across from the ditch. Residents had just left them there, perhaps too depressed to deal with them. Perhaps too stubborn to acknowledge them, or too lazy. I knew from a neighbor’s experience that evictions often took months and months in this town and sometimes were overturned if the tenant could come up with the money. To local landlords, cash in hand and a filled vacancy were almost always favorable to the expense and hassle of kicking someone out, unless of course the plan was to raise rent. Good luck, guys, I thought, once disgusted with their landlords and now hopeful that one of them would sell.