The Library at Mount Char

by Scott Hawkins

  There were some jokes about that, but they didn’t last. When Steve nearly drowned a well-dressed eighth-grader with a smart mouth in an unflushed toilet bowl, he was suspended for two weeks. The kid’s parents, red-faced and screaming, wanted him arrested. No one said anything about his clothes after that. Not to his face, anyway.

  He started shoplifting almost immediately—books, cassettes, candy, whatever—but it wasn’t until a year or so after his parents’ death that he committed his first burglary. In his freshman year in high school, on the Friday night of the football team’s homecoming, Steve put on his Salvation Army sneakers and jogged through the back woods to an expensive neighborhood eight miles away. That night there was a faint glow in the east, near the neighborhood where he lived when he was young.

  He selected a dark house at random, came out of the woods, and hopped the privacy fence around the pool. He carried a hammer and screwdriver, but ended up not needing them. The back door was unlocked. When Steve stepped over the threshold the dry husk of his old life fell away and was abandoned. He moved through the empty house with the savage glee of a marauding Hun. He’d brought a black pillowcase along with him to carry the loot. It fluttered from his hand as he moved, the flag of his new nation.

  Steve, childlike, stole what his eye was drawn to. A box of Milky Ways. Some Atari cartridges. Cassette tapes. Then, in the master bedroom, he happened on the object that set the course of his life. It was a lacquered wood jewelry box. Steve remembered gasping when he opened it. What lay inside glittered like a dragon’s hoard: silver chain, diamond earrings, golden rings. As he stole these things his hands trembled the way a newly frocked priest’s might, pouring the chalice of his first communion.

  Later, alone in his room in the single wide, Steve spread the gold out on his rickety bed and wept, smiling as he did so. In that moment he did not miss his parents at all.

  Some months later, he was the veteran of a dozen burglaries, and no longer quite so poor. Mostly through luck he had found an actual fence. Quiet Lou, fat and diabetic, lurked in the very darkest corner of a downtown pawn shop, his face lit from below by closed-circuit television monitors. Lou smoked vile cigars, and his shop had a permanent blanket of smoke floating at eye level. Many pawn-shop owners were legitimate, or mostly so. Lou was not one of these. He and Steve never became friends, but they understood each other.

  Not everything Steve stole went to Lou, though. Sometimes he kept things he particularly liked—not smart, but it never completely blew up in his face, either. One such was a leather jacket. It was quilted and heavy, very thick, and smelled of pipe tobacco. Steve kept it for himself.

  A week later he met Jack. He was peeing in the boys’ bathroom at school, later than usual for class that morning. One other kid was in there sneaking a smoke. Steve knew Jack slightly from a common gym class, but Jack was a junior, and rich. The gulf between them might as well have been the Grand Canyon…except for the fact that Jack, the clean-cut scion of two devout Mormons, also had a feral streak.

  “Nice jacket,” Jack said, over the sound of urine on porcelain.

  Steve didn’t look around. “Thanks.”

  “Where’d you get it, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  Steve shook off and zipped up. “The store.”

  “Oh yeah? Which one?”

  “I forget.” Steve could feel his pulse pounding in his neck, in his temples.

  “It wouldn’t be the ‘Maurley house’ store would it? ’Cause I know a guy over at Kennedy whose dad had a jacket just like that. Same stain on the elbow and everything. Somebody robbed his house a couple weeks back. They got the jacket.”

  Steve turned to Jack, looked at him.

  Jack’s grin faded. “Relax, man. I ain’t gonna say nothing. The kid’s an asshole anyway.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Tell you what—why don’t you meet me after class? We can go hit the mall or something. You can tell me all about how you got that jacket. Maybe we’ll burn one.”

  A cautious smile flickered on Steve’s face. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  As it turned out, they burned not one but two joints on the way to the mall, and wandered through the stores high as kings. They didn’t come home with Jack’s trunk bulging with loot that time, but they did the next day and a lot of days after that.

  Jack was an easygoing, wry guy. His own amorality flowed from a different place than Steve’s. Steve, by nature an introvert, had long since figured out the basics of his own psychology. Jack he never quite understood. Jack’s parents were solid, churchgoing types. To all appearances they were happy, and Steve got a pretty close look. Jack’s brother was a church youth-group type.

  Jack could be raw, angry. His temper snapped at unpredictable times. Steve once saw him beat the shit out of a guy behind a movie theater for spilling popcorn—not on Jack himself, or even a person, just on the floor. He and Steve got into it more than a couple of times as well, blacking eyes, bloodying noses. Usually Jack started it, and he always came over to Steve’s place afterward, shame-faced, and apologized. It got to where Steve would roll the joint in anticipation of his arrival and wave off the actual apology.

  Within six months or so, Jack’s family semi-adopted him. He spent three nights a week at their house, sleeping on the floor in Jack’s room or in the bedroom down the hall. Jack’s parents never said anything, but Steve got the feeling that they knew his situation, perhaps pitied him. Steve resented that at first, but Martin and Celia were so old-fashioned nice that he just couldn’t dislike them. They bought him presents on his birthday, for fuck’s sake.

  Steve had done dozens of burglaries by then, enough that it got written up in the paper. Jack was with him on seven of them. By the last two, Steve thought that Celia and Martin were beginning to suspect that something was up, but they never really probed. Steve figured they were afraid of what they might find out.

  Perhaps they were wiser than they knew. On the most recent burglary Jack had suggested that they use gasoline from the garage to burn the place down. “We should torch the place, man! Cover our tracks!”

  Steve, the acknowledged leader on the burglaries, vetoed this. That night he slept at Mary’s trailer for the first time in several days. He lay awake in the moonlight until almost dawn, flopping around in the bed, wondering if his friend might be crazy. Two weeks later Jack shat on an old lady’s bed and wiped his ass with her aging, yellowed wedding photo.

  Jack funneled some of the pawn profits into a sideline business, buying small quantities of pot from a guy Steve knew, cutting it with oregano, selling it to other high school kids. It was a solid if unremarkable stream of spending money. Then one of their clients, a freshman girl, got caught with a baggie in her purse. In tears, she promptly confessed who she bought it from. The police showed up at Jack’s house and searched his room. Jack left with them, in handcuffs.

  The legal trouble ended up being not that big of a deal—juvenile court, record expunged, blah-blah—but from the standpoint of Jack’s family it might as well have been Armageddon.

  Naturally enough, Celia and Martin blamed Steve. Probably, he thought now, there was some justification for this. At the time, though, it seemed like the grossest injustice. They forbade Jack from hanging out with Steve. He was barred from the house, exiled back to Mary’s trailer.

  The two of them still hung out, of course, but now they had to be circumspect. No more trips to the mall, at least not in Jack’s car. Steve started thinking about ways to get his own car, started scanning the classifieds with a pen in his hand. But the numbers were oppressive. He could probably figure out a way to steal one—it wasn’t his specialty, but he was becoming very good with locks. Registering it would be another matter, however. Something decent would probably cost around $2,000, five times as much money as he had on hand. Steve went to Quiet Lou. They talked numbers. Lou mentioned pharmacies.

  A month later he and Jack climbed up the back of an independent pharmacy with a d
iamond-tipped circular saw normally used for cutting through concrete. Quiet Lou had sold them the saw at a good price, and promised to buy it back when they no longer needed it. It was noisy, but it got the job done. Three quick strokes cut a black triangle out of the roof. If that had tripped the alarm, there was no sign.

  Steve had tied footholds into eighty feet of strong nylon rope. One at a time they climbed down between the shelves, silent as wraiths. In residential burglaries Steve made a habit of turning on the lights—flashlights bobbing through darkened houses would look odd to the neighbors—but here he didn’t have that option. He never found out for sure, but he thought it was their flashlights that had betrayed them. A neighbor? A passing car? Who knew.

  The layout was unfamiliar, and it took time to locate the bottles that Lou was interested in. They split up and scanned the shelves in parallel. Steve’s heart thumped in his chest. Jack whistled. One at a time the prizes fell to their search—valium, Xanax, Vicodin, morphine sulfate, cough syrup, brand-name and generic, many doses, many bottles. Steve was still using the black pillowcase. Soon it bulged.

  After about fifteen minutes, Steve judged they had enough. Lou was a skinflint, but he never tried to cheat them. Steve’s cut would be well over two thousand. With that, he could have his car. He had not told Jack this, but that meant something else to him as well. With his own wheels, he would not be so reliant on Jack for transportation. They could begin to go their separate ways.

  Steve went up first, pulling himself up the rope with his shoulders. Jack, still in darkness, tied the pillowcase to the end of the rope. Steve hauled up the loot.

  He was getting it untangled when he saw the flashing blue lights in the distance. They weren’t using sirens. For a long minute he hoped that it was just coincidence, but as they bore down he knew in his heart that it wasn’t.

  “Cops,” he hissed to Jack.

  “What? How far?”

  “Not far. Hurry.”

  “Ah, shit.”

  A minute later Jack was halfway up the rope. “Dude,” Steve said, “they’re about two blocks away.”

  Jack looked up at him, his face pale in the moonlight. He seemed resigned, and not especially worried. Steve was scared enough for both of them.

  “Go,” Jack said. “I’ll catch up.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  Steve thought about it for a second, then took off. He left the bag on the roof. In later years he would lie awake in the dark and wonder why he had done that. The possibility of leaving Jack holding the bag—literally, ha-ha—either had occurred to him in that moment, or it had not. He simply could not remember.

  Then the blue lights were bearing down on him, too close for anything but flight. He climbed over the side of the roof, dangled, dropped, bypassing the storm drain he and Jack had climbed up. He darted into the shadows behind the strip mall a second and a half before the lights turned into the parking lot. He hid behind a Dumpster as the first car did a tentative probe. Steve could hear the radio through the squad car’s open window. “Suspect in custody.” It did a U-turn and circled back to the pharmacy.

  This time there would be no juvenile court, no pre-trial intervention. That ship had sailed. Jack was charged as an adult with burglary. He might have lessened his sentence if he ratted Steve out, but he didn’t. Martin and Celia got him a good lawyer, though. They pleaded it down to three years, out in eighteen months on good behavior. It wasn’t such a long time as these things go, but even from the first visit, Steve could tell it wasn’t going well. The prison was medium-security, but Jack was young, relatively good-looking, and white. Quiet Lou had explained that he would be a prize, explained what that would mean. After only three days, Jack looked back at him with haunted eyes.

  He lasted three months, then hanged himself with his underwear. Steve didn’t go to the funeral, but he attended the graveside service. He watched from a hundred yards away, behind a tree. Celia saw him anyway. After she buried her oldest son she bore down on Steve, eyes bright, like a hawk descending on a field mouse. She didn’t say anything. The woman who had bought him his one and only fifteenth-birthday present slapped him hard across one cheek and then the other and delivered her verdict.

  “You…you little…you asshole.”

  She was crying. Steve didn’t stop her, didn’t try to say anything. There was nothing to say.

  As the days and weeks and seasons wore on he found himself repeating this nothing, not wanting to. Gradually he came to understand that this particular nothing was all that he could really say now. He chanted it to himself in cell blocks and dingy apartments, recited it like a litany, ripped himself to rags against the sharp and ugly poetry of it. It echoed down the grimy hallways and squandered moments of his life, the answer to every question, the lyric of all songs.

  Chapter 9

  A Bone That Cannot Be Cracked

  I

  An hour or so after Steve and the lions took shelter in the room with the cave paintings, Mrs. McGillicutty’s cell phone rang. Steve was sitting next to the female lion, checking her bandages. He stood with a grunt, limped across the room, and answered it on the fifth ring. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Steve. It’s Carolyn.”

  “Of course it is.” He rummaged around in the supply pile for another piece of beef jerky. It was homemade, and very good. “Who else would it be, really?” He noticed that he was slurring a little. Probably the pain pills. Or maybe the blood loss.

  “How are you?”

  “Oh, I’m great,” he said, putting a little edge in his voice. “Thanks to you, I mean. I found the bandages and whatnot. Very helpful. I think the bleeding has stopped.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is. And suspiciously convenient.”

  Long pause.

  “There’s a little clay pot with a cork in it,” Carolyn said. “Did you see that?”

  “Matter of fact, I did. Right next to the syringes? I wondered about what it was.”

  “That’s the one. I got it from my sister. What’s in there will help you with blood loss.” She paused. “If, um, you know…if that’s a problem.”

  “As it happens, yes. I believe that it is. However could you have guessed? I’m pretty light-headed, and I don’t think it’s just the pain pills. So, what…do I chew up the little round things in the pot, or…?”

  “Umm…no.”

  “What, then?”

  “Well, you, ah, that is…it’s a suppository.”

  “I see. So I should stick it up my ass, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Interesting.”

  “What?”

  “I was just thinking the same thing about you,” Steve roared. “Cram it up your ass, you crazy, horrible bitch!” He reached for the Off button, then something occurred to him. “Quick question, though, before I hang up on you.” He waited for a long time. “You still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does the stuff work on lions?”

  “Lions?”

  “Yes. Lions. My backup. Thanks for them as well, by the way. Those guys were awesome. They got here just in the proverbial nick of fucking time. But the female is banged up pretty bad. She’s lost a lot of blood. I put a couple of those pressure bandages on her, but I think she’s still bleeding.”

  “They’re not dead?”

  “Nope,” Steve said, proud of himself for the first time in decades, “I let them in.”

  “But…I told you…”

  “Yes. You mentioned that they were ‘disposable.’ I’m pretty sure that was your word. But seeing as how they’d just saved my life, I didn’t feel like leaving them out there to fucking die was the dao way.”

  “The what?”

  “The dao way. It’s Chinese. I meant it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

  “Oh. Your pronunciation…”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. But to answer your question, yes. It should work on lions as well.�
��

  Steve was quiet for a long time.

  “Are you still there?”

  “What? Yes. Sorry. I was trying imagine sticking something up a lion’s ass. I don’t think I’m quite there yet.”

  “Oh. Well…it’s up to you. Like I said, at this point they’re disposable. But they won’t hurt you. They’ve given their word.”

  “I see. Gave their word, did they? To you?”

  “Not me. My brother.”

  “The big scary guy?”

  “No. My other brother. Michael. He talked with the lions. He told them to look after you.”

  “Talked with the lions, did he?”

  “Yes. We made a deal. They will protect you as if you were their own cub.”

  “Maybe they were just being polite.”

  “No,” she said seriously. “Dresden may be in exile, but he is still king. In his language the word for ‘promise’ is the same as the word for ‘a bone that cannot be cracked.’ He will do as he says.”

  Steve considered this. When he spoke, some of the joking was gone from his voice. “If you say so. That seems to be what they’re doing. And honestly, I’d almost figured out that they weren’t going to hurt me.” He paused. “It just takes a while to wrap your head around the idea. When I got up this morning I was under the impression that lions were scary.” He patted Dresden’s mane, offered him the rest of the beef jerky.

  The big lion sniffed, then took it gingerly from his hands, exposing canines thicker than Steve’s thumb.

  “These two seem OK, though. We’ve struck a mighty blow against prejudice this day.” A thought occurred to him. “Say, do you know the female’s name?”

  She didn’t answer at first. Then, he heard a deep, bass rumble that sounded exactly like a lion. Steve held the receiver away from his head, eyebrows raised. The male lion looked up at the sound, interested. “Is there another lion with you?”