Saints of Augustine

by P. E. Ryan

  He had no idea where he was going; he just knew he wanted to be gone.

  13.

  (You don’t look so good yourself.)

  Charlie heard footsteps approaching, fast. He’d driven to the park at the back of the neighborhood so that he could get a better look at the car’s damage under the trio of pole lamps, and his first thought was that they were coming back to pound the car some more. When he lifted his head, it wasn’t Derrick or Wade, but Sam Findley slowing down to a stop several feet away.

  Charlie’s eyes were damp, and he felt immediately embarrassed—and angry—about having been spotted this way. Especially by Sam. “What are you staring at?” he asked, clearing his throat.

  Sam ran his eyes over the battered VW. “What happened?” he asked hesitantly.

  Charlie dropped his face back into his hands, which only made his sore eye throb. Looking up again, he said, “You don’t want to know.”

  Then he realized that Sam didn’t look any better than he felt. He looked spooked, even confused about where he was. His hands were shaking.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Charlie asked.

  Sam seemed to snap out of a trance. “I just have to get out of here,” he said quickly. “I have to go somewhere. I can’t go home. I don’t think I can ever go home again. Shit!” He started to pivot on the asphalt. He looked like he was going to jump out of his shoes.

  “Take it easy!” Charlie said, getting up. “It’s not that bad, whatever it is.”

  “Screw you! It is too! You don’t know what’s going on!”

  “Hey—screw you back, pal. I don’t know what’s going on because you ditched me as a friend, remember?”

  “I can’t…I don’t want to be here!” Sam said. “I just want to get as far away from my house as possible!”

  He turned and started walking away. Then he picked up into a run.

  “Wait!” Charlie called. “Hey, Sam, wait!”

  Sam stopped and turned around. “What?”

  “You can’t just…run off into the night.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well…it’s crazy, for one thing! I mean, what’s your plan? You going to run all the way to Canada or something?”

  Sam seemed confused. “Maybe,” he said fiercely.

  Charlie glanced at the Volkswagen. “Get in,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Just get in, would you? We’ll drive somewhere. I don’t really want to be here right now either.”

  The idea seemed to freeze Sam where he stood.

  Charlie dug his keys out of his pocket and rattled them at him.

  They were crossing the Bridge of Lions when Sam tilted his head forward and started banging the heel of his hand against his brow.

  “Man,” Charlie told him, “you’ve got to chill out.”

  “This is so bad,” Sam said. “This is so bad.”

  “What’s going on, anyway?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Why?” Charlie asked sarcastically. “Afraid it’s going to damage our friendship?”

  Sam ignored him and started banging his brow again. “This is so bad.”

  “Will you give it a rest? I don’t want you knocking yourself unconscious in my car. Just take a deep breath and calm down.”

  Sam lowered his hand. He stared at the dashboard and sucked in a lungful of air, then exhaled slowly. He glanced out the side window at the bay. “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just driving.”

  “What happened to your hood, anyway?”

  “That’s what I don’t want to talk about.”

  The bridge put them onto Anastasia Island. Charlie stuck to A1A and headed south. It was hard to believe he was sitting here with Sam. The most they’d said to each other in over a year was that awkward exchange in the electronics store a couple of days ago. That left a lot of uncovered ground. But here they sat, neither one of them saying a word.

  He rolled his window all the way down and rested his elbow on the door. He switched on—and then immediately switched off—the radio. He glanced at Sam out of the corner of his eye.

  After a full mile of silence, he said, “You’ve got to tell me what’s going on. You looked like you were going to blow a gasket back there.”

  “Yeah, well, you don’t look so good yourself,” Sam said. “Did the same thing happen to your eye that happened to your hood?”

  “No. The eye was an accident.”

  “The hood was on purpose?”

  “It wasn’t me. Someone else did it.”

  They fell quiet again. Then Sam said, “Your eye looked a lot worse a couple of days ago.”

  “Why were you such a dick in the electronics store?” Charlie asked.

  “I wasn’t! I just didn’t know what to say.”

  “I was right in the middle of a sentence and you walked away. That’s pretty dickish, if you ask me.”

  They sailed past a police cruiser sitting at the entrance to Butler Park. Charlie checked his speed. It was fine. Then he remembered both his tail lights had been smashed out.

  “Sorry,” Sam said evenly. “It was just weird, that’s all.”

  “Don’t,” Charlie said, staring into his side mirror.

  “Don’t what? Apologize? Then don’t tell me I was a dick.”

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” Charlie muttered, ignoring him.

  The cruiser, already shrunk down to a tiny pair of headlights in the mirror, turned onto A1A. A second later, the reds and blues were flashing, and they heard the siren.

  “Damn it!” Charlie said.

  Sam turned in his seat and looked behind them. “You know you’ve only got one headlight.”

  “And no taillights. Please do not let this be happening.”

  “He’s got you. Just pull over.”

  “I can’t,” Charlie said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t!” He didn’t want to explain to Sam about the Baggie of pot in the glove compartment. He didn’t want to explain it to anyone. He glanced over at Sam’s lap. “Hook your seatbelt.”

  “You’re not going to—”

  Sam’s question was answered when Charlie pressed the gas pedal to the floor. Sam hooked his seatbelt.

  The cruiser was still far behind them, but gaining.

  Charlie knew the VW wasn’t fast enough to outrun anything. “Hold on,” he said. There were other cars on the highway, but none of them close. He hit the brakes, killed the lights, and made a sharp left. Sam grabbed the vinyl strap near his head and braced his other hand against the dash. The tires squealed over the pavement.

  “You’re going to kill somebody!” Sam said. “You’re going to kill us!”

  “Just hold on,” Charlie groaned. He knew the street. It was residential, but there were only a few houses on it, tucked out of sight. Here and there, a wood-chip–lined path was cut into the palm scrub, just wide enough for the Volkswagen. They were right next to the beach Kate liked to come to.

  With the lights still off, Charlie turned onto one of the darkened side paths and steered the car into the tiny clearing where he and Kate had parked just last week. It put them almost entirely out of sight from the residential street.

  “What the hell—” Sam began.

  Charlie shushed him. They heard the siren approach, then saw flickers of red and blue light flashing through the leaves. The cruiser drove straight past them, following the street that Charlie knew led back out onto A1A, and the siren receded into the distance.

  “Can I speak now?” Sam asked in an exasperated voice.

  Charlie nodded.

  “Are you nuts? You’d have gone straight to jail if they’d caught us!”

  “I know.”

  “Well, they don’t put you in jail for having a busted taillight! Why didn’t you just pull over?”

  Charlie’s mind was racing. “We’re going to have to sit here for a while. I don’t know how we’re g
oing to get home. They’ll be watching for us.”

  Sam looked out at the wall of palmetto leaves near his window. “I don’t get it,” he said. “I was having, like, the worst night of my life, and now you’ve screwed it up even more!”

  “We’ll just have to wait till it’s daylight,” Charlie said, thinking aloud.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That cop probably didn’t get my license number. He didn’t pull out right away. So we’ll just wait until daylight, then drive home, and tomorrow I’ll replace the bulbs. They might even have taillight shells at the junkyard.”

  “You’re crazy,” Sam said. “Do you know that? Crazy.”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “Everything’s not fine! That was a really stupid thing you just did.”

  “All right, shut up!” Charlie snapped. His hands were still gripping the steering wheel. He looked over at Sam. “All we have to do is wait it out.”

  “I’m not spending the night in the middle of the woods in your crappy car!”

  “We don’t have to,” Charlie said, remembering. He opened the glove compartment and reached inside. “I just thought of something.”

  14.

  (Pretend we’re the only two people on the planet.)

  They locked up the car and followed the footpath down to the beach. Sam still couldn’t believe how quickly his day had fallen apart. He felt shell-shocked, numb, as if his brain couldn’t hold on to everything that had happened over the past twelve hours.

  It was low tide. The water was so far out that the beach seemed to stretch on for miles to the horizon, rippled and glistening like the damp surface of some foreign planet. There were houses tucked into the palmettos, most of them dark. The full moon rendered the sand a deep neon blue.

  How could he ever face Justin again? How could he ever face his mom? He didn’t want to think about it. “Are you going to tell me what that was all about, back there?” he asked, trying to put his mind on something else.

  “Can we just…be quiet for a minute?” Charlie asked. “At least till we get to the house?”

  “What house?”

  “Where I work. This is Crescent Beach. The house isn’t too much farther.”

  Sam didn’t know what Charlie’s job was, but as they walked side by side along the sand, he realized Charlie was right: It was nice not talking about anything, pretending—for a few moments, anyway—that nothing was wrong, that they were just hanging out, the two of them. Like they used to.

  We could be on another planet, he thought, listening to the distant surf. We could be the only two people on it. We’ve just landed, and no one else is going to come. Childish thoughts, but he kept them to himself and was able to enjoy them as they made their way across the beach. He turned around and walked backward for a few yards, looking at the footprints they’d made in the bluish sand.

  “You’re going to fall on your ass,” Charlie said. And then, “Here’s the house.”

  Sam looked to where he was pointing. The house was small and completely dark. They mounted a short boardwalk that led right up to the back porch.

  “This is where you work?”

  Charlie nodded. “It belongs to a family that must be loaded, because they don’t even live here yet but they’re having it fixed up.”

  “You’re house-sitting?”

  “I’m painting the inside. And redoing the windows.” Charlie dug his key ring out of his pocket and unlocked the sliding glass door. They stepped inside.

  There was no furniture. There were no curtains on the windows. The living room was completely empty except for a ladder, a canvas tarp spread across one corner of the floor, some paint cans, and a toolbox. “All this stuff is yours?” Sam asked. He had no idea Charlie could do this kind of work. It made him feel ridiculous to think that all he did for a job was serve yogurt.

  Charlie walked over to the tarp and kicked at it. “Yeah. Well, the Danforths paid for all the supplies. I just do the work.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In Pensacola. They don’t seem to be in any hurry to move here, either. Like I said, they must be loaded.” He smoothed the tarp out with his shoe and looked around, wiping his hands on his hips. “We can hang out here till morning.”

  We could hang out here forever, Sam thought.

  He was already forgetting that officially they weren’t friends. How long would it take for anyone to find them? If the Danforths were all the way over in Pensacola, and the car was stashed away, no one would know where they were, which was fine with Sam. And it might be fine with Charlie, too, because something was up; even before the police came after them, Charlie had been upset.

  “Hey, watch this.” Charlie bent down and opened the toolbox. He pulled out a hammer and walked over to a large picture window made up of dozens of panes of glass. “See this pane? See the crack down the middle of it?”

  Sam moved closer and squinted. “Yeah.”

  “Here’s the best part of my job,” Charlie said. Then he lifted the hammer and smashed it against the windowpane, shattering it. The shards of glass flew out into the yard.

  “What did you do that for?”

  “It’s my job,” Charlie said, smiling. “I’m replacing all the cracked windows and reglazing them. Here, you try it.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Take the hammer. Here’s another pane with a crack in it.”

  “It’s hardly cracked at all.”

  “I have to replace every cracked pane. It’s my job. Go ahead.”

  Sam took the hammer from his hand, but he didn’t do anything with it. Charlie took hold of his wrist and raised his hand until the hammer was poised in front of the cracked pane. “You don’t really want me to do this,” Sam said.

  “Of course I do. I’ve already bought the new glass.”

  Sam looked at him. Charlie nodded. Sam swung the hammer, but not hard enough; it bounced off the window as if the glass were rubber.

  “Come on. Smash it.”

  He swung again. This time, the glass shattered. It was a good feeling, somehow, hearing the crash and seeing the immediate result of open, jagged space within the wooden frame.

  “You’re a natural,” Charlie said absently. He stepped back, then dropped down and sat cross-legged next to the tarp.

  “You’re just going to leave it broken?”

  “I’ll fix it tomorrow.” He was no longer looking at the picture window. He was staring at the bare floor in front of him. “This is a little weird, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “The two of us, in the same room. I haven’t talked to you in, what, a year? More than a year?”

  “That doesn’t have to make it weird, does it?”

  “Dude, you basically told me to go to hell.”

  “I did not!” Sam felt nervous, all of a sudden. He dropped the hammer back into the toolbox and walked to the other side of the empty room.

  “You might as well have,” Charlie said.

  Sam sat down on the floor. “Let’s focus on the now. Are you going to tell me what’s going on, or not? You’ve turned me into a fugitive from the law. We’re on the lam here. I think I have a right to know why.”

  Charlie almost laughed. “We’re not on the lam. That cop couldn’t have read my license plate. He never even got close to us. I just don’t want to put the car back on the road while it’s still dark.”

  “Come on,” Sam said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “It’s all so rotten.” Charlie took a deep breath. “You know Kate Bryant?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’ve been dating since before summer started.”

  “She’s the girl you were talking about a year ago.” Sam felt a twinge of jealousy similar to what he’d felt when Justin had told him about Tommy.

  “She dumped me tonight.”

  “Really? Just like that?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, what did she say? She must have give
n you a reason.”

  Charlie dragged a hand through his hair. “Yeah, she gave me a reason.”

  Silence. Sam leaned his head forward. “It’s a big secret?”

  “It should be.”

  “Come on. Pretend we’re the only two people on the planet,” he said. “Nobody but us.”

  “You’ll freak out.”

  “No, I won’t.”

  “All right, let me ask you something. Have you ever gotten high?”

  The question caught Sam off guard. “You mean pot?”

  “Such a model citizen,” Charlie said. “Yes, I mean pot.”

  “No.”

  “Well, Kate’s just as pure, if not more, as you are. And she doesn’t want me doing it. But she found out that I do.”

  “You do? Since when?”

  “Since about a year ago. Not a lot. Just sometimes. The point is, she doesn’t want to go out with me anymore because of it.”

  “How’d she find out?”

  “She just knew. I was dumb enough to call her when I was stoned, a couple of times. Plus, I kind of…stood her up. Like, a few days ago I was supposed to take her out for a nice dinner. She was all dressed up, waiting for me.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Yeah, that was a major screw-up.”

  “But you only do it sometimes?”

  “I’m not keeping a written record, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Well, why don’t you just stop doing it?”

  “I could. I mean, I can. I’m going to. It’s messed up my game, and I’ve been feeling like crap lately. But there’s some serious stuff going on at home, and it helps sometimes, being able to…unwind.”

  “You know, I was really sorry about…” Sam didn’t know how to finish the sentence in a way that would do any good; finally he just blurted it out. “Your mom. I heard she was sick, but I didn’t know it was so serious. I was really sorry to hear what happened.”

  “Yeah.” Charlie bent his head down. “It was pretty bad.”

  “I liked your mom.”

  “So did I.” Charlie shook his head as if trying to dislodge a thought. “I haven’t talked about it that much with anybody. No one really wants to hear about it, you know, when somebody dies who wasn’t close to them. Unless they’re a professional. Like that Ms. Rafferty, the guidance counselor? She called me in for an appointment, and we talked about it for twenty minutes. That was just…weird. She’d never even met my mom.”