by Hannah Tinti
Loo pulled the door shut on the coupe and sat there for a moment, breathing in the leather seats. The steering wheel was glossy and smooth, a piece of polished mahogany. The rearview mirror was the same amber color, and so was the compass on top of the dashboard, the needle dangling and still. Loo clutched the wheel until her knuckles hurt. Her mother’s Firebird was a piece of junk, but this car smelled like money. Would she go to jail for longer if the coupe was worth sixty grand? Seventy? Her foot slipped off the clutch. The engine stalled and died. Loo hit the brakes.
It had been only a few hours since she was stretched on a glacial rock, the universe being drawn on her skin. She could still feel the planets beneath her clothes. The comets on her back that had lifted her out of her own body and toward some new and different way of being in the world. And here was another. Half a mile up the road were two flashes of red. The Firebird’s hazards, beating off and on. Like a pulse. Like a set of eyes blinking.
And so she did what she had been taught. She reached under the dashboard. She struck the wires. Later there would be time to worry, time to be afraid. Now there was only her foot on the pedal. The motor kicking. The wheel in her hands. The compass spinning from one direction to another. And her body, covered with stars.
Bullet Number Five
MABEL RIDGE WAS SUPPOSED TO be on the ten o’clock train. But the ten o’clock train had come and gone, and also the eleven-fifteen, so Hawley and Lily ate lunch across the street and came back for the twelve-thirty. Lily got out of the car and stood rocking back and forth on her toes in the parking lot as people hurried past, dragging their suitcases. Hawley leaned on the steering wheel and watched her wait. Every once in a while he would check the clock on the dashboard. 12:40. 12:45. 12:51. The minutes passed and it started to rain but Lily stayed outside, her hair getting darker and darker. When the platform finally emptied and the train pulled out of the station, she climbed back into the truck and slammed the door.
“We can wait for the next one,” said Hawley. “I’ll get us some more coffee.”
“No,” said Lily. “Let’s go back to the woods.”
Hawley felt relieved as they pulled out of the parking lot. It meant something, to meet Lily’s mother, but he could tell from the start that the woman wouldn’t be easy. Whenever Lily talked to her mother on the phone she’d get anxious, and when a letter arrived from Mabel Ridge, it would sit unopened for days. Hawley signaled and shifted onto the highway, then took exit nineteen and headed toward the forest. The rain came down harder. Even with the wipers going full tilt, he had to slow down to see the road.
Lily pulled out her tobacco and rolled a cigarette, licking the paper and then pinching and twisting the ends. She snapped the wheel of her Zippo, then put her boots up on the dash and opened the window a crack. She tapped ashes into the small sliver of air as rain splattered both sides of the glass. The ember at the end of her cigarette burned and faded with each sucking pause. Hawley had never liked the smell of smoke before but now the smoke was Lily and every time she lit up he inhaled.
“You’re killing yourself with those things,” he said.
“Yes,” Lily said, “but it’s slow.”
They’d spent the morning shooting rifles off at a range Hawley had set up deep in the forest. Lily had been quiet, drinking hot coffee from a thermos as he shot off his .387, handling a gun only when he put one in her hands. He’d hoped a round or two would help her blow off some steam, but Lily shot wide and soon gave up trying. She could load and reload now as fast as he could, but her aim hadn’t improved any, no matter how many hours he’d spent trying to teach her. She’d get caught up in the details instead of feeling her way through, and Hawley wasn’t sure how to fix this.
For the past week she had been cleaning their apartment, preparing for her mother’s arrival. Every surface had been scoured, the windows washed, flowers planted in the window boxes, curtains bought and hung. Hawley got up one night at three in the morning and found Lily kneeling in the bathtub, scrubbing the tile with a toothbrush.
“What do you think she’s going to see?” he’d asked.
“Everything,” Lily answered.
—
THEY DROVE DOWN a side street, then into a small lot that marked the entrance to the trailhead. The place was empty and littered with gravel and potholes. Hawley parked under a cluster of pine trees. The sound of the rain eased as they pulled under the canopy. He turned off the engine. The dashboard went dark.
“Right now,” said Lily, “I’m glad you don’t have any parents.”
“Me, too,” said Hawley. But he was lying. There’d been plenty of times over the past six months when he’d wished he had someone to show Lily off to.
It was too wet to shoot, so they sat together in the car, listening to the storm. Every once in a while the branches of a tree would bend and hit the windshield. Hawley reached over and took Lily’s hand. He was always taking her hand. He felt better about things, just by holding her fingers.
“Your mother can’t be that terrible,” he said.
“She isn’t. But when I’m around her, I don’t feel like Me anymore. I feel like Old Me.”
“One of these days I’d like to meet Old You.”
“Trust me. You don’t.”
Lily’s Old Me was a lot like her father’s Drunk Gus. She hadn’t told Hawley too many details but it was enough. Alcohol poisoning. DWIs. Bridges burned with friends. She couldn’t make it through college. She got fired from work. Growing up, she’d thought she was better than everyone else in her hometown, but when it came down to it, Lily said, they didn’t want to be around her, either. At least not when she was Old Me.
Mabel Ridge had done her best to help. She’d brought Lily to the hospital and had her stomach pumped. She’d paid for her daughter to dry out at a fancy rehab clinic. When that didn’t work she tried to have her committed to a mental hospital. And when that didn’t work she had her daughter arrested. Eventually she dropped the charges, and Lily started going to AA. But things were never the same between them.
It was hard, at first, being with someone who was sober. Especially when Hawley had used whiskey to keep himself warm for so many years. But once he’d let it go, he found that drinking was a habit more than a need, a habit he was willing to break for Lily. She was better company than any bottle. And he wanted so much not to disappoint her.
“I might have to go to a meeting tonight,” Lily said.
“I’ll go with you,” said Hawley. “If you want.”
Instead of answering him Lily sneezed. And sneezed again. And again. She’d warned Hawley about these attacks when they first got together. Like hiccups, she said, but with her nose. Sometimes she’d sneeze twenty or thirty times in a row before it stopped. The whole thing embarrassed her, but Hawley didn’t mind. When she was finished her face was blotchy and her eyes were wet. It was the closest he’d ever seen her come to crying.
Hawley turned the key in the ignition and the dashboard lit. Heat radiated from the vents. The air blasted their faces. Lily pulled a tissue from her pocket and blew her nose.
“When’s the next train?” she asked.
“Three o’clock.”
Lily unzipped her coat, shrugged it off her shoulders and climbed onto his lap. She smelled smoky and tart and cold. Her skin was damp and her hair fell in clumps around her ears. Hawley unbuttoned his jacket and wrapped it around them both, pulling her against him. He could feel her thin arms thread up the length of his back. Hawley hoped that Mabel Ridge would never come. They could spend all afternoon in the car like this, tangled up in each other and listening to the rain.
“Sometimes I feel like I could kill her.”
“You’d probably miss the shot.”
Lily rested her face against his neck. He could feel her eyelashes against his chin. “Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done.”
“Marrying you,” said Hawley.
“Very funny.”
—
IT
HAD BEEN like stumbling into someone else’s life.
After Lily had dragged Hawley into the snowplow, after they’d crossed state lines, after she’d lied to the clinic in South Carolina about accidentally dropping her father’s favorite shotgun at his funeral, waving Gus’s prayer card and crossing herself and shouting Our Fathers and Hail Marys at the small-town doctor until he agreed not to report it to the police, and after Hawley had gotten patched up, they had stopped at another diner, one that sold cake instead of pie, and had split another milkshake and fallen in love. It was that easy. They talked until the diner closed. They paid their bill and tipped the waitress. Then they got a room at the motel across the street.
She’d taken his hand in the parking lot. He would remember that moment more than the sex they had that night. How he’d stared down at Lily’s fingers latched together with his, hardly believing the change in his luck.
They spent a week together in that motel. Reading the paper in the morning, ordering takeout for meals, sharing stories, playing cards and making love until they were tired enough to sleep. Lily changed the bandages and kept the wound in his leg clean, and once the sun set Hawley hobbled out to the pool and watched her swimming through the blue lights in her underwear. Her legs were long and powerful, her back flexing with muscle, her face a blur as she snatched a breath between each stroke.
When she was through swimming, Lily pulled herself from the water in one fluid motion, then walked dripping toward him across the cement. He held out a towel and wrapped her in it and felt the chill of her body through the fabric.
“What’re you doing here with me?” he asked.
She pressed her cold lips against his skin.
She said, “Warming up.”
At the end of the week they drove north until they hit Maryland, got a license and went to city hall. Hawley in a new shirt and Lily in her dress from the funeral, with daisies picked from the side of the road threaded through the veil of her little black hat.
Now here they were, newlyweds, their hands in each other’s pants. The rain battering the roof of the truck. The trees swaying in the wind. Their bodies pressed close enough to be a single person. She had a way of kissing that took the air out of Hawley and then pushed it back, down to his lungs, as if she’d taken over his breathing. With each inhalation, he felt stronger. Smarter. All the things he’d ever wished to be and knew he wasn’t.
The knock on the window startled them both. Lily scrambled back into her seat and buttoned up her shirt. Hawley pulled his jacket across his lap. The glass was steamed and they couldn’t see out. Hawley used his fingers to clear the condensation. Outside in the rain there was a teenage boy, maybe fifteen. Hawley rolled down the window a crack and the boy leaned in, curling his fingers around the edge, dribbling water inside the car.
“Have you guys seen a dog?”
“What kind?” Hawley asked.
“A mutt,” said the boy. “But she looks like a Lab.”
“We haven’t seen her,” said Lily.
“My dad’s going to kill me,” said the boy. “I took her for a walk and she slipped out of her collar.”
In a locked metal box bolted in the rear of Hawley’s truck, there were two long-range rifles with scopes, a SIG Sauer pistol, a set of derringers he’d been saving as a surprise for Lily, his father’s M14, ammunition for all of the guns and a set of targets. Hawley checked the kid’s eyes, but he didn’t seem like he was on anything. The rain came down steadily and the boy kept his fingers on the window.
“Do you need some help?” Lily asked.
“Sure,” said the kid, and his face brightened.
Hawley didn’t want to leave the car. But Lily had already pulled her jacket on and tied up her boots. Before he knew it, the door was open and she was outside. Hawley reached under the seat, where he kept his Colt. He put the gun into his pocket and then stepped out of the truck into the rain.
“What’s your name?” he asked the kid.
“Charlie.”
“And what’s the dog’s name?”
“Her name is Charley, too. But with a y,” said the boy.
“Is the dog named after you or are you named after the dog?” Hawley asked.
“She had that name when we got her.”
“Funny.”
“Yeah,” Charlie said. He was a skinny kid. He had on torn-up jeans, purple sneakers, a leather coat that was too big for him and a sweatshirt underneath, the hood pulled up against the rain, the fabric shiny and wet. The dog leash was wrapped tightly around his palm several times, the empty leather collar dangling from his wrist like an oversize bracelet.
Lily opened the door to the truck again and pulled out an umbrella from under the passenger seat. The umbrella was from a bank where Hawley kept one of his safe-deposit boxes. Lily pressed the button on the handle and the umbrella sprang to life, extending twice its length, then spreading its mechanical arms. The web of nylon stretched into place with a pop, and Lily stood under the bright-yellow dome, circled with the logo of the bank—a beehive made of dollar bills. YOUR MONEY IS SAFE WITH US HONEY.
“Which way did the dog go?” Lily asked.
“That way,” said Charlie, and he pointed into the trees.
“You should follow the trail,” Hawley said. “We’ll flank the sides.”
The kid hesitated.
“You want to find this mutt or not?”
“Yes,” said Charlie. Then he started calling for the dog and hurried into the trees.
“I think you scared him,” said Lily.
Hawley ducked under the umbrella. Inside the dome the rain sounded like static. “What are we doing out here?”
“We’re helping,” said Lily. “What if that was our dog?”
“Do you want a dog?”
“No,” said Lily. “But I’d want someone to help if our dog was missing.”
Hawley took the umbrella from her and lifted it so he could stand without crouching. All around them the rain poured down, and her green eyes looked greener than ever.
“Give me the gun,” Lily said.
He hadn’t pulled a job since they’d been married. They were living off some money he had stashed away. It was enough to keep Hawley out of the game for at least a year. Even so, he kept a weapon close. For the first time he had something to lose, and it was funny how that changed things, how it made Hawley imagine himself living past the next day, into the next week, the next year. He’d started wearing his seatbelt. He brushed his teeth. Sometimes he fell so deeply inside his new life that the edges of himself felt like they were coming loose. Then Lily would catch him in one of his old habits—checking and rechecking the locks, or doubling back on streets when he thought they were being followed—and the years he’d spent alone would rise up solidly around him, resonating in the dark like blood pushed out of a pinprick.
He took the Colt from his inside pocket and handed it over. Lily checked the barrel and then put the gun in her coat.
“Let’s go find that dog.”
They went in different directions, each taking a branching path from the one where the boy had disappeared. Hawley was glad Lily had the umbrella. It let him keep an eye on the yellow dome bobbing through the branches. Then the woods got thick and he lost sight of her.
The air smelled of moss and mushrooms, things that spring to life from the muck. All around him the branches shook and spattered and spilled. The rain was still coming down hard and Hawley was soaked up past his knees. He could hear Lily’s voice calling, Charley, Charley. Prickers stung his hand. Water ran down the neck of his coat.
If the dog was smart, Hawley decided, she’d be looking for shelter, not off wandering in the woods. There wasn’t any solid cover here—not for miles. Except for the truck. That’s where Hawley would go, if he were a dog.
For a moment he scanned the bushes ahead for movement. Then he turned around and started walking back toward the parking lot. He hoped he was right—that the dog was huddled underneath the engine. H
awley pictured a chocolate Lab, overweight and panting in the mud. With some coaxing the dog would crawl out and lick his hand, and he’d carry it down the path and show Lily that he was the kind of man who could find things.
When he got back to the parking lot, he saw the kid, Charlie, crouched beside the truck instead. At first he thought the boy had had the same idea, and was checking beneath the undercarriage for the dog. But then he saw that one of the backseat windows was smashed and the driver’s side door was propped open. Charlie didn’t look up. All around them, water was pelting down, hitting the trees and covering the sound of Hawley’s footsteps as he left the woods and stood behind him.
“You should have gotten inside and closed the door before you pulled the wires,” he said. “Now you’ll never get it to start.”
The boy looked so frightened that Hawley almost didn’t hit him. But then he did. A few heavy punches to the gut and a couple more to the face for good measure. He could feel the boy’s jaw bust out under his knuckles. He saw a tooth flung onto the mud. The kid was sobbing. He tried to crawl away and Hawley dragged him back and then kicked him twice in the ribs.
It was one thing to jack a car, and another to lure them out with a sob story about a missing dog. It was the dog that got him, and it was the dog that he thought about as he beat the boy—Charley the dog wandering around out there alone in the rain, scared and lost and feeling ready to curl up and die, and with no one even looking for her, because she didn’t exist.
Hawley was swinging his leg back for another kick when he heard the shot. The bullet grazed his lower leg, dug out a chunk of flesh and then kept on going, right into the front tire. Hawley stumbled and fell, and when he hit the ground he saw the air streaming out of the wheel, the black rubber slowly collapsing around the hole and then slumping onto itself, the truck tilting over onto its axle and into the mud.
Lily stepped out of the woods, the Colt held just as Hawley had taught her, arms braced and fingers locked, pushing and pulling to steady her hand. She stood ten feet away but didn’t lower the weapon.
