Thirteen Days to Midnight

by Patrick Carman

  “Who was first?” asked Milo.

  “What do you mean, first?”

  “I mean, who’d you give it to first? Her, right? You wrote it on her cast, remember?”

  I nodded, sipping from a cup of Starbucks I’d brought along.

  “Could be she was first and now… dang, I don’t know.”

  I picked up where Milo left off.

  “No, wait, I think that could be something. What are we really doing, when you get right down to it?”

  Milo didn’t answer, so I went on.

  “If we’ve saved a life, we’ve prevented a death. But in the grand scheme of things, you can’t keep preventing death, for like, ever, right? It’s like throwing off the natural order of things. Death still has to have its moment. I tried to get into this with Father Tim, but he wasn’t much help.”

  Milo jumped on my train of thought. “So… are you asking yourself something like, if death was gonna come to town but didn’t, where the hell did it go instead?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am. And there’s something else. When I have the power, it feels darker and deadlier all the time, and when I give it to someone else, say the guy at the bank, it tries to claw its way back in. But—”

  “Wait a minute. Back up. Say that again? The diamond feels dark? Deadly?”

  “Yeah… I never mentioned it before, but I think I know why. It’s been small shifts toward a deadlier feeling over time, adding up. It’s like I’ve been lulled into it, I guess.”

  “So you never talked about that. The power of indestructibility feels deadly. Pretty ironic.”

  “Except now, when I give it to Oh. Then it doesn’t want to come back.”

  Milo stared out the rain-streaked windshield, moving his chin to the beat of “Over the Hills and Far Away.”

  “So… it likes being there, I guess. Maybe because you gave it to her first, and this power, whatever it is, just keeps going back. Every time Death doesn’t find its eternal resting place, it’s going to go somewhere else. What if Oh is that place?”

  “Dude, that’s sick. I don’t get it. She’s not dead.”

  “Maybe she wants to be.”

  I was stunned to silence.

  “No, seriously. Maybe Mr. Fielding never gave it to anyone until he gave it to you. Think about it. He passes the power to you, then he dies. He’s gone and you have it. One life ends, another continues on. But what we’re doing isn’t like that. You’ve passed that thing all over the place like a flu bug. Who knows what kind of rift in the death-life continuum you’ve created?”

  Milo was going all comic book on me, but he might have been onto something.

  “And so the question would be what? How much death can Oh carry around before it drives her insane? Very nice.”

  Milo shrugged and stared out the window.

  “Hear me out. Think of it as an animal, like this black lion you keep imagining. It lives in you, you’re like its cave, right? And you send it out to protect someone. The death comes calling and the black lion picks it up and carries it back to you, but now he’s home. He doesn’t want a rotting ugly death hanging around his cave stinking up the place—he wants to get rid of it. So where does he put it? The same place he always puts it.”

  “Inside Oh?” I whispered. “Man, that is so crazy, Milo. It makes sense for, like, half a second, and then I totally lose it again.”

  “Could be the black lion is as confused as we are. You send him over to Oh, and he expects you to be gone when he turns back, like Mr. Fielding was gone. But no, you’re still standing there! Now he’s like—which one is home?—it’s you, man, you’re his home. And Oh? That’s important to him, too. That’s where he goes to unload his burdens.”

  “Dude, that was heavy, but pretty cool.”

  “I know. It’s also probably a load of horseshit.”

  “True.”

  Milo switched off the iPod with a flick of his thumb and stared at me despite the fact that we were doing fifty around a wide two-lane turn. Time to unload a secret.

  “Eighteen is a magic number,” I said. “It’s when you get to vote or join the army. Or get an inheritance.”

  “Tell me more,” said Milo, eyes back on the road as a semitruck blasted by and sprayed his windshield with standing road water. Everything outside turned murky as the wipers tried to catch up.

  “Father Tim hasn’t been going to Seattle to beg for money. He’s been working out a plan for what the school is going to do when I graduate.”

  “What happens when you graduate?”

  “They have to take care of me until then. No more foster homes, that was part of the deal. Once I’m gone though, they get ten.”

  “Ten—ten—ten… you mean ten?”

  “Yeah, I mean ten million.”

  “Holy freakin’ Schlotzsky, Jacob! Why didn’t you tell me? Ten million? The whole place isn’t worth a fraction of that.”

  “Thank you for not swearing. It means a lot. You want some of my money, don’t you?”

  “Sounds to me like it’s the school’s money, Richie Rich.”

  I laughed for the first time on our trip and sipped my coffee. “First off, the will actually said I couldn’t tell anyone about any of the money. Not the part for the school or what was left for me, so I’m taking a huge risk telling you. That’s the rule I was referring to. Who knows, maybe Mr. Fielding left people behind who could screw this up, I don’t know. But you have to keep a lid on it. No one can know about it.”

  “How much do you get?” asked Milo.

  “Enough,” I said.

  “Come on! Don’t hold out on me, man! How much?”

  “There are a lot of zeros, that’s all I’m saying. He left me everything else. There was no one, not even a distant relative or a friend. Just me and the school.”

  “I can’t believe my best friend is super rich. Incredible.”

  “When I turn eighteen, we’ll throw a party and I’ll buy you a new front bumper. For now just forget I ever told you, because nothing’s going to change for a while.”

  We were coming to a place on the trip where I was going to ask Milo to pull over, but now that the time had come, I wasn’t sure if I could do it. I sipped my coffee and Milo tried to get the inheritance amount out of me. I wasn’t going to tell him, maybe not ever, but it was an insane number. Lately I’d actually had some thoughts about what I could use the money for, at least some of it, but we were coming to the spot where I needed to have Milo stop.

  “Pull over,” I said.

  “Gotta pee?” he said, looking at my empty Starbucks cup. “That’s why I don’t drink those things on a road trip.”

  I didn’t answer as the car swung around another wide, soft turn through an old-growth forest. He pulled to the shoulder and started messing with his iPod again.

  “Come on,” I said, opening my door.

  “I think you’re taking this whole date thing a little far. I’m not that interested in helping you take a leak.”

  I leaned back into the car, felt the rain on my neck.

  “I don’t have to pee, Milo. Just come with me.”

  Milo shrugged and turned off the car, then we walked together in the rain. We’d come up short by about thirty yards.

  “This is where it happened,” I said, pointing to a stand of trees up in the distance.

  Milo didn’t say anything but I knew he got it. He understood we’d arrived at the place where Mr. Fielding was killed. We reached the group of trees, both of us dripping wet and shivering. They were something else. The trunks were spotted green with moss, shooting overhead into canopies of branches against an iron gray sky.

  “We used to drive around a lot. It was just this thing we did. Long drives that always ended with a big breakfast. Sometimes it was an all-day thing on a Saturday because we kept picking places that were far away.”

  “I know. You’ve told me like a thousand times,” said Milo, but he knew it meant a lot to me. “It sounds cool.”

  “If w
e were on a back road somewhere or he was feeling especially tired because it was a long way to where we were going he would… well, you know…”

  Now that I’d come to a secret truth, I couldn’t bring myself to say it.

  “What? Pull off the road and take a nap?” asked Milo. “What did he do?”

  I took a long breath of fresh air so full of life it made me light-headed. I thought seriously about running all the way home. Could I make it? If I ran all day, could I outrun the pain like I’d always done? I’d done a lot of running in my day. Sometimes it had been the right thing to do, like when I saw a gun or a needle, but this time was different. The pain had caught me on the side of the road, and I couldn’t get away.

  “Once in a while he let me drive the car,” I said quietly.

  “Dude, this is old news. You’ve told me all this stuff before.”

  My best friend looked at me then, and I could tell he’d finally figured it out. I was sure he’d hate me.

  “Don’t say what I think you’re going to say,” said Milo.

  I wasn’t thinking anymore, I was just talking.

  “We were going to the Oregon coast for breakfast at this place called the Pig ’N Pancake,” I said. “It’s a long drive.”

  I saw the flash of understanding pass over Milo’s face. His mouth hung open, and all the muscles around his eyes went slack under wet skin. Everyone at Holy Cross knew the story. We’d been driving to the coast on a rainy day, swerved off the road, slammed into a giant old-growth tree. But that hadn’t been the whole truth.

  I’d been thinking a lot about Father Tim’s words earlier in the week, when we were in his office and I almost choked on my toast.

  Sometimes a person will share mistakes more openly with a friend than with a priest. You understand what I mean?

  But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get myself to say the words. I’d held them in too long and turned mute on the subject. It was Milo, pal that he was, who said what I couldn’t say, the thing I’d expected to keep secret forever.

  “You were driving when the accident happened, weren’t you?”

  I didn’t answer him, didn’t have to. That’s what made it cool, and maybe what Father Tim had meant. Milo was the friend who said things I couldn’t say for myself.

  I stood in silence, gazing out at the trees, and felt an awful tightening in my lungs, remembering the sound of approaching police cars as I stumbled around in a daze after the accident. Mr. Fielding and I were both blown through the windshield and thrown at least twenty feet from the car. At that point, it was impossible to say who was driving, so I lied. When they asked, I said it was him, not me, behind the wheel; I couldn’t quite believe that it had been me. Until this very moment, I hadn’t been able to truly even accept it.

  My chest started heaving, but I couldn’t cry. No way I was doing that. I never cried in front of anyone. But the rain was falling and my face was already wet. I stared up into a thundering sky and my throat narrowed.

  So, Milo knew that I’d killed Mr. Fielding. It was an accident, sure, but it didn’t matter to me. It would never matter. I was a killer, always would be. That’s how I felt about it.

  Milo put an arm around me. He didn’t say a word, and I couldn’t be totally sure if tears were sliding down my cheeks or not. All I knew was that I hurt like I hadn’t hurt before, and I was glad my best friend was with me.

  An hour later we arrived in Lincoln City, a tourist town on the Pacific with a ceaseless wind and car-sized black rocks scattered on the beaches. Everything felt old and seaworthy: chipped paint storefronts, monstrous docks with timber pylons, countless fishing boats, and gray-bearded sailors in search of chowder and a beer. Southern Cal it was not.

  “So this is the hangout? The pipe place you’ve been telling me about since day one?” Milo asked, staring at the sign over the door. Sir Walter Raleigh’s.

  “That it is,” I answered, sliding a key from my hip pocket. I thought of all the things I’d planned to do with Oh but didn’t get to do as the door opened and an old, familiar smell floated out of the pipe shop. Milo hadn’t been inside Sir Walter Raleigh’s, but I’d told him about it a few times, how me and Mr. Fielding would come here together.

  “Let me guess,” said Milo, blasting past me into the small space. “He gave you this place, too.”

  “Technically, it belongs to Father Tim until I’m of age, but yeah, it’s pretty much mine.”

  “Who pays the rent?”

  “Nobody. The whole building is mine.”

  “Good God, man, you’re a tycoon.”

  I slid in behind one of the two counters, not ready to get what I’d come for just yet. The counters ran waist-high along both sides of the store, glass tops covering rows of pipes and lighters. At the far end sat a bar made from a boat rail. There were three stools and Milo sat on one of them.

  “I do love that smell,” said Milo, breathing in a giant whiff of pipe tobacco.

  “You know, this place was only open on Saturdays,” I said, setting my cell phone on the bar and fishing two pipes and a lighter out from under the counter. “Eleven Saturdays, that’s how many I spent here. He’d open the shop, then give me a twenty and send me down to the beach for crab rings. By the time I got back to Sir Walter’s, there were always two or three old men sitting on the stools, smoking their pipes and talking about how developers were ruining Lincoln City.”

  I leaned back and opened a sliding glass door where the cookie jars of tobacco were kept. Each glass container had a label, and I chose the smoothest blend Mr. Fielding carried. A rookie blend, as he liked to call it. I filled the pipes, handed one to Milo, and we lit them. Gray smoke filled the room, and a fan whirled to life over our heads, sucking the smoke into the chilled air outside.

  “Fancy,” said Milo.

  “The smoke sets it off, keeps things from getting too stuffy in here. It’s like when you go by a Burger King and they’re pumping the smell of French fries into the air. Mr. Fielding loved the fact that ten minutes after the fan went on, someone showed up at the front door with a pipe in his hand, looking for a conversation.”

  “So some old dudes are about to show up, that what you’re telling me?”

  I hadn’t thought of that and leaned over, turning off the fan with the manual switch.

  We smoked our pipes, tested some of the spendier Zippos.

  “Why are we here?” asked Milo.

  “Hopefully for some answers, but I don’t know for sure.”

  I reached back into the cooler and pulled out one of the glass jars. It was marked Captain Black.

  “He said something once, I guess it must have been the fifth or sixth time he brought me here. I didn’t think much of it at the time.”

  “And…” said Milo, sucking on his pipe and trying without success to blow a smoke ring.

  “If something happens to me and you don’t know what to do, come back here, okay?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Mr. Fielding’s words, not mine. He was talking about the future, about what might happen if he ever died. And he kept looking at this jar of Captain Black, like he’d put something there for me to find. You know, when you get that feeling someone is hiding something? You’re just so sure of it—”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” said Milo, looking at me as if I’d been a good example of exactly what I was talking about.

  “It was always in the back of my mind, figured it was money or a parting note about how much he’d enjoyed my company or something.”

  “But now you’re not so sure?”

  “Yeah, now I’m not so sure. I think it has something to do with this ability I have. I think it was a secret he didn’t want anyone else to know about.”

  I reached in where the glass jar had been and felt around with my hand. There was a ledge there, at the back, that dropped down a few inches.

  “Anything?” asked Milo, sitting up in his chair and leaning over the bar with the pipe between his
teeth. He looked a fair amount like Popeye.

  I had my fingers around something kind of small, which made me wonder if I’d gotten it right. I’d expected a decent-size box. I don’t know why, Mr. Coffin never said, and I didn’t ask.

  “I’ve seen that before,” said Milo, surprised as I was at the small thing I’d uncovered.

  “No way.”

  “Yeah, huh… my dad had it.”

  “You know he tracked down a lot of stuff for Mr. Fielding?”

  “Course I know. My dad finds stuff for a lot of people, collectors and stuff. I do remember he was into that box though. It didn’t have a key.”

  The box was the size, shape, and weight of a three-hundred-page hardback book, with a keyhole on one of the long edges. The thing was old, had to be a serious antique.

  “Should we bust it open?” asked Milo. “Maybe there’s a million nickels inside.”

  I rolled my eyes and dug my hand in my pocket, pulling out the small silver key from the lighter.

  “You’re kidding me,” said Milo. His pipe had gone out and he set it in an ashtray, waving me over the bar. I set the box down carefully, looked at my watch.

  “How about if I open it while you drive back toward home,” I said, feeling more isolated than I liked on the farthest shore of Oregon. “If we need to see Oh, we’re going to want her close by.”

  If what we were about to see could help me trust Oh again, if it could fix whatever had gone wrong, I wanted to be as close to her as I could.

  Milo smirked and set the pipe down in the ashtray. “Let me ask you something.”

  “What?”

  “How long have you and I known each other?”

  I thought back to our first encounter the summer before at Coffin Books. “I don’t know, seven months, eight?”

  “Yeah, about that. And how long did you know Mr. Fielding?”

  “Like a year. What’s your point?”

  “Know anyone else that long?”

  I thought a second, then another, then really tried to look back. “No, he was the longest. Unless you include my mom when I was really little and a couple foster kids I haven’t seen in a while.”