The Fourth Stall

by Chris Rylander

  I quickly got back on my bike and drove toward my house as the car bounced up onto the sidewalk after me. I couldn’t believe it; the driver was actually trying to hit me. I felt the headlights engulf me as the car got closer. He was driving up on the sidewalk and even on people’s yards. I envisioned myself being crushed underneath an old sports car on somebody’s front lawn while the family inside grouped around the window and watched. They would all be drinking huge cups of hot cocoa.

  I shook off the image and veered my bike across somebody’s front yard and around to the back of the house where there wasn’t room for the car to follow. I tried to stay low as I rode through that alley and then through another yard. Zigzagging madly through alleys and yards, I made my way toward my house. The car drove by a few times, but each time I was able to duck behind a fence or trash can. It also helped that there were no streetlights in the alleys.

  Eventually I drove up the sidewalk to my house. I typed in the code for our garage and it opened, spilling light onto the driveway. As I walked my bike inside, I heard a car screech to a halt right in front of my house. The red sports car sat there under the streetlamp with its headlights still on. I could feel the driver staring at me. I looked right to where I thought his head would be and stared back. It was pretty safe inside my garage but a chill went up my spine anyways. The car sat there for at least two minutes. Then my dad came into the garage and the red car drove away.

  “Hey, who was that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I think it was some pizza guy looking for a house,” I said.

  He nodded. “Close the garage door. You’re letting bugs in.” He went back inside.

  I wanted to tell my dad. I really did. I mean, I always try to keep my business and family separate but someone had just tried to kill me. There’s nothing I wanted to do more right then than to tell my parents.

  But I still couldn’t say anything. The Cubs game is too important and getting my parents involved would only risk us not being able to go. For one, they’d call the cops and once the cops got involved I’d run the risk of having to come clean about my Funds. No adult was going to let a kid keep six grand in his closet. Also, if my parents thought that someone was out to kill me, then they’d go into super overprotective mode. Which means they’d definitely nix our plan to go to Chicago with Vince’s brother.

  I wanted my parents’ help, but this was something I would have to deal with myself. It was the only way. Besides, this wasn’t my parents’ problem. It was mine. They had enough to worry about.

  Chapter 14

  On the car ride down to the lake cabin, I went through our Books and tried to figure out if I had any people who owed me a favor that I could use to help take down Staples. Vince sat beside me and read some ancient, dusty book about President Lincoln’s Cabinet or something incredibly boring like that. He gets these books for like fifty cents each at the Salvation Army store. I can never understand how he reads that stuff without falling asleep.

  I hadn’t slept well the night before so it was hard to stay awake on the drive there. I’d kept thinking I heard a car drive slowly past the front of my house. It was probably a different car each time, but I still couldn’t get the image out of my head of the sinister red sports car creeping past again and again, its tinted windows revealing nothing but the reflections of tall evergreens.

  “So you really think the plan to take out Justin will work?” I asked Vince as we later cast our lines out into the water. It was Saturday morning after we’d arrived, and we were sitting side-by-side on the end of the dock.

  “I don’t know. It has to; he’ll have no choice. I just don’t know if taking out Justin will get rid of Staples, you know? The U.S. put Castro into office in Cuba to get rid of the old dictator, but then they ended up having even bigger problems with Castro. You just can’t be sure.”

  “Huh?” I said.

  Vince laughed. “What I mean is we might solve one problem but that just may create another. Like, what if taking out Justin only motivates Staples more than ever to take us out?”

  “Maybe we should just call the cops,” I suggested.

  “We could, but what would we say? ‘Hey, this is some kid and I want to report this guy for running a gambling ring inside my school. And he also attacks us with his car and leaves rodents in our lockers. Oh yeah. I also don’t know his real name or what he looks like. I don’t even know his age. But please, officer, get right on that!’”

  “Good point,” I said.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes.

  “Want to know what my grandma might say at a time like this?” Vince asked.

  I grinned. “Of course.”

  “She’d say, ‘Sometimes I wish I was a manatee.’”

  I laughed. She probably would say that, too. Seriously, Vince’s grandma is such a riot, despite also being really cranky.

  After lunch that day we played catch. Vince brought up our financials right away. I think he thought I was blowing our chances of getting to the Cubs game by paying everybody so much to help us. I wanted to agree with him, but I hadn’t really had much of a choice.

  “Let’s be honest, Mac. From the beginning you’ve been more worried about outdoing Staples than simply protecting Fred. This isn’t a contest about whose business is better or anything like that. Sometimes I think you forget why we started this business and our Funds in the first place,” he said.

  “I’ve only done what I’ve had to,” I said. “It’s called confronting a problem.”

  Vince gave me one of his looks and then threw me a fastball. Thankfully, I caught it in the webbing of my glove and not on the palm. He’d put some real heat on that one. I was a little annoyed about his implied accusation that I was more concerned about beating Staples than going to the game.

  I threw a lazy curveball. He caught it without saying anything and threw me a circle change that I almost dropped. Silence isn’t like Vince when he’s around me. I could tell he was upset, and it was really irritating me. I know this will sound totally cheesy, but I kind of missed him even though we were together all the time. He was right here with me, but he might as well have been hanging out at the Great Wall of China.

  “I think I may have you,” I finally said, getting tired of doing all the talking.

  Vince raised his eyebrows. “We’ll see.”

  “What was the original name of Wrigley Field?”

  “Weegham Park. Easy,” Vince said as he caught my floating slider that broke all of half an inch.

  I shrugged. It was going to be impossible to stump this kid. That’s probably why I hadn’t been able to do it in the two years we’d been doing trivia. Not like it mattered at that point. Honestly, I was too busy obsessing over why Vince had been acting so distant lately to come up with a better question. There had to be more to this than simply my spending too much money. I mean, for him to answer a Cubs question right and not do any gloating afterward is like a girl in my class leaving a shopping mall empty-handed.

  We threw the ball back and forth in silence for a while. The air felt heavy, like we were in a giant sauna. I knew we were both thinking the same thing: What went wrong? It seemed like this Staples thing had taken over every part of our lives. We couldn’t even fully enjoy a simple trip to the lake anymore.

  Plus, we had like only seven or eight days before we needed to buy tickets to the Cubs game, assuming they kept winning, and the tickets weren’t going to buy themselves. I felt myself wishing that I’d just told Fred good luck and sent him on his way. Maybe Vince was right. Why did I always have to get involved? But what am I supposed to do? Ignore everyone who comes to me with an inconvenient problem? Where am I supposed to draw the line?

  “How much money do we have right now anyways?” I asked Vince after a long silence that had been broken only by the muffled thumps of a baseball hitting leather.

  “Why?” Vince asked. It was the fastest he’d responded to a question all weekend.

  I held the ball for
a bit and just looked at him. He looked worried, but then he smiled a smile so phony I could have seen it was fake if I was blindfolded.

  “I’m just checking, that’s all,” I said.

  “Oh. Well, I think we have just over six thousand or so,” he said. Then he shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “No, wait. No, I guess it’s more like just under six thousand. I think it’s like roughly fifty-nine sixty-two all combined. That’s every dollar to our name. Or as my grandma would say, ‘There ain’t no place like Chattahoochee for making a lady feel like a carpetbagger.’” He laughed after saying this, but again it didn’t sound quite like the Vince laugh I’d been used to hearing for the past seven years.

  “Come on, Vince. That grandma quote isn’t even close to making sense,” I said while throwing him the ball. Normally, I would have laughed anyways, but I didn’t feel much like laughing.

  Vince caught the ball and shrugged without even cracking a smile and threw the ball back. Another nasty circle change that dropped off the table and this time I missed it. The ball bounced off the edge of my glove and hit my foot. It rolled under some trees a few feet away.

  “Sorry, Mac,” he said as I turned to get it.

  “No problem,” I said. “It was a good pitch.”

  Vince is going to be an awesome pitcher next summer when we finally get to play full-fledged fast-pitch baseball. Vince had been studying some Nolan Ryan book on pitching that he’d found at the Salvation Army, and ever since, whenever we play catch, we just throw different pitches at each other. I’m not nearly as good as Vince. Which is funny because in movies the guy who’s good with math and reads a lot usually isn’t all that good at sports. But Vince is good at everything. Except confrontations.

  I leaned under a tree to get the ball and something caught my eye. It was an older red sports car. With faded black racing stripes. It was down the street and parked just off to the side of the road. I grabbed the baseball and stood up.

  “What’s wrong?” Vince asked, jogging over.

  I motioned for him to follow me. We crept up to the next cabin over and peeked around the corner. It was definitely a red sports car, and it looked like the same one that had tried to run me down the night before. We could see it parked about a hundred yards down the gravel road in front of a small and dirty trailer that some mean lady lived in year-round. One time I drove a Jet Ski we’d rented too close to her dock and she came running out of her house screaming at me to get off her property, and then she threw a beer bottle at me.

  “Is that the same car?” Vince whispered as we crouched behind the edge of the cabin.

  “I think so. I can’t believe he followed us here,” I said.

  “What should we do, Mac?” he asked.

  “Doesn’t your grandma have some advice for a situation like this?” I asked.

  He rolled his eyes but actually grinned, which was nice to see.

  “Let’s get a closer look,” I suggested.

  Vince pondered this. I could tell he didn’t want to, but he finally nodded.

  “You go first,” he whispered.

  I quickly ran from the edge of the cabin to a small tree across the gravel driveway. Vince followed. We moved closer to the car, hiding behind various objects: trash cans, trees, boats on trailers, central air-conditioning units. Finally I stopped behind a pine tree right next to the dirty trailer, about forty feet away from the car. I really thought it was the same one from the other night, but it was hard to tell because I had last seen it under the creepy, hazy orange glow of streetlights.

  “You don’t think that this place is Staples’s headquarters, do you?” Vince asked.

  “I don’t think so; it’s too far away from our school. Plus, I know the lady who lives here, and I think she lives alone.”

  We waited and watched. The car was empty.

  “Well? Let’s go!” Vince said, and started to run toward the car. But just then the trailer’s front door slammed open with a bang that sounded like a gunshot.

  Vince dove back behind the tree as if it actually was a gunshot. We ducked as low as we could. The tree was behind the front door a little bit, but it was only fifteen feet away.

  A fat, balding guy came thundering out of the trailer. He wore an old, faded black shirt. His jeans were stained and holey. He looked to be about forty or so. He walked down the steps and across the lawn. Then we heard a woman screaming and he stopped.

  “Don’t come back, you drunken, lazy slob!”

  “Yeah, don’t worry about that!” he said, and headed for the car.

  She came to the doorway of the trailer. “You’re pathetic! Pathetic! Your son pays your bills, you useless piece of garbage! How embarrassing is that? No wonder your wife disappeared on you!” She slammed the door.

  Vince and I both flinched.

  The man just waved and kept walking toward the red sports car across the street. He got into the car and peeled away, spraying gravel and dust all over the lady’s lawn. Once he was out of sight, we ran back to my cabin’s backyard. After we caught our breath, we looked at each other.

  “Guess it wasn’t the same car,” I said with a shrug.

  “Nope,” Vince said. “Unless, unless that old fat dude is Staples. I mean, the legends of Staples have been around forever, so maybe he really is that old now?”

  I didn’t think he was being serious. But it was possible. Maybe. Wouldn’t Fred have said something, though? I realized that he’d never told me just how old Staples was.

  Vince saw me thinking it over and then he rolled his eyes.

  “Hey, Mac, I was kidding. You don’t really think that was him, do you?” he said.

  “I don’t know. I mean, it does seem a little suspicious, right?”

  “I guess, Mac, but this isn’t a Charles Dickens novel,” Vince said.

  “What?”

  “I mean, this is real life. Sometimes weird things happen. Events don’t always have to connect perfectly or make sense. Like, the dude who was the fisherman at the beginning of the story doesn’t always need to come back and also show up as the cobbler in the middle and then eventually be revealed to be the main character’s long-lost uncle’s cousin’s former best friend’s roommate who just so happens to be currently married to the main character’s brother’s friend’s mailman. You know?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “What other explanation is there? I think we both know that guy couldn’t have been Staples. He was, like, forty. There’s no way,” Vince said.

  “Yeah, that makes sense, but I’m almost sure that was the same car. What if . . . what if that was Staples’s dad?” I said.

  Vince looked at me for a moment, like he was thinking hard about what I said. “Mac, that really could be it. So that would mean Staples is doing all of this to help pay some of his dad’s bills like that lady said.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “That would change everything, don’t you think?”

  “Um, not really. Vince, I don’t really care why he needs the money—that doesn’t make it okay to cheat and swindle to get it.”

  “Well, maybe that kind of a situation would make a kid do crazy stuff he normally wouldn’t do, right? I mean, how would you know what it’s like for him?” Vince said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Vince just shrugged and gave me a look of his that said I should know what he meant.

  “What’s your problem lately, Vince? Look, I used to live in a trailer, too, remember? I know what it’s like to not have a lot of money.”

  “Yeah, but do you still? Do you know what it’s like for your family to never have a lot of money?”

  “Whatever, Vince.”

  “Yeah, whatever is right,” Vince said.

  And that was that.

  We got back from the lake cabin on Sunday evening around six. After dropping Vince off, we drove home. Vince and I hadn’t talked a whole lot since that argument, and when we did, it was businesslike, as if we were doing it on
ly because we had to. Really, I just didn’t get what was up with him lately. It was like he was blaming me that his family still doesn’t have a lot of money. As if I had anything to do with that. It’s not like my family is rich or anything. Sure we have a house now and go on more vacations than we used to, but we aren’t, like, driving around in luxury Italian sedans and telling the time with diamond-encrusted Rolex watches. I do feel a little bad that his family doesn’t have as much, but Vince himself has plenty. Our business buys him basically whatever he wants.

  As we drove up to our house, I heard my mom gasp. Then she swore, which she almost never does. My dad swore, too, but that isn’t too unusual.

  I looked up to see what all the commotion was.

  It was our house. There were eggs all over it. I knew right away who had done it. I didn’t even need to read the message they had crudely left in huge, red, spray-painted letters on the garage: “BacK oFF MaC or Your DeaD.”

  Poor spelling aside, it was pretty menacing. Mostly because I couldn’t back off. If I gave up and just rolled over, then it would be easy for him to wipe us all out. So it wasn’t really a threat. It was just meant to say: “You’re dead, Mac.” Which wasn’t any better.

  Chapter 15

  The next morning as I left for school, I saw my dad on a ladder trying to scrub off congealing eggs. My mom pulled the car out of the garage and waited for me. I’d had her drive me to school ever since the night the red car tried to kill me. I couldn’t risk riding my bike or walking to school anymore.

  “Christian, are you sure that you have no idea who might have done this?” my dad asked, looking down at me. “You have no clue who this Mac character is?”

  I felt like melting into the cracks on our sidewalk. My dad had so much work ahead of him and it was all my fault. But I still couldn’t tell them, no matter how bad I felt. I had made a vow to keep my family and business separate and I meant to keep it.