He turns, the light behind his green eyes burning into me.
“Wait a second, you know Babel?”
“It’s one of my top five,” I say, and it feels like I’m revealing some deep, dark secret.
“Me too. I saw it when it came out, although I was way too young. I snuck into the theater. I thought about it a lot.”
We smile at each other like we can’t really control what our faces are doing. We drink and play the movie game some more, until we hear the creak of the huge sliding door of the silo. It’s Jerry, and he’s carrying an old-fashioned lantern.
“OK, you two. I’m not harboring fugitives. I just watched the news. Do you know they’re calling you Bonnie and Clyde? You’ve got five minutes to get out of here, or I’m calling the sheriff.”
We scramble to get our stuff, and on the way out Levon stumbles, the whiskey falling out of his bag.
Jerry grabs the bottle, walks over to Levon, and holds it out to him.
“You and me, we never met. This never happened, you got it?”
“Got it,” Levon says, taking the whiskey. We get back in the car and pull away. There are a million stars, which are brighter than the weak headlights of our Toyota.
“Bonnie and Clyde,” I say.
“I guess we should rob some banks now,” Levon adds.
“Yeah, but they died in the end.”
He doesn’t answer. I can’t really tell, but it looks like he’s nodding off. I’m not in much better shape, but still, I offer to drive.
“It’s fine, Candy. I’m fine. I’m just going to go over here…for a while.” He turns onto a road that’s more like a path, towering corn on either side. He drives and drives until we can’t drive anymore, then we get out. I grab Mortimer and Randolph and shove them into my bag. I’m not superstitious, but they haven’t let us down so far. We stumble farther and farther into the stalks of corn until our exhaustion kicks in and we collapse.
Chapter 17
I wake up in Levon’s arms, an army of corn stalks standing proud around us.
I have no idea how this happened, and even though we could get caught at any moment, I feel safer than I’ve ever felt.
I don’t move for what seems like an hour. I breathe with him as his chest rises and falls. We are in the middle of a cornfield at the crack of dawn. A curious bird on one of the stalks is staring at us like we don’t belong here.
When he wakes, Levon is confused and kind of scoots away from me. I don’t register the slight, just propel into business mode.
“We’ve gotta go on foot. We can’t go back for the car.”
Levon still has a Smartwater in his bag. He hands it to me first, and after I swill it, I hand it back to him. He dumps it over his face.
We walk through the cornfields for what feels like hours, until we come to a clearing. There’s a bus stop that is obviously not a bus stop anymore and an abandoned cruiser bicycle.
Levon takes me behind a tree and pulls his shaver out of his bag, along with a clip for hair.
“You want me to shave my head?”
He nods.
“Well, I’ve attacked a meth head, been stuffed in a trunk, played suicide with a train, and slept in a cornfield, so I’m thinking shaving my head is a no-brainer.”
I turn my back to him as he clicks on the razor. The hair falls in clumps at my feet, and my head feels like it’s floating. I touch it, then turn around to look at Levon, who’s smiling wide.
“You have a nicely shaped head,” he says.
“I would have preferred something like You look great, but…”
“No! You do!”
“Whatever. What about you?”
He pulls the cowboy hat I picked out at Walmart out of his bag and puts it on.
“It does make you look different,” I say.
“In a good way?”
“Let’s just say different.”
He smiles and walks over to the bike, checking the tires.
“The rear one’s pretty flat, but it might get us somewhere.”
I sit on the front handlebar as Levon pedals. It takes us a while to get going. We are laughing like this is any other day, like we are not fugitives breaking the law.
We ride the shoulder of a paved road, and it looks like there’s a town ahead. The bike’s tire becomes completely flat so we ditch it and walk the rest of the way. We come to an old-school diner. Levon tells me to wait outside, then goes inside. A few minutes later, he comes out with two cinnamon rolls, handing one to me. As we walk toward a used-car lot, I eat mine, not remembering when food ever tasted this good. I moan a little, and Levon smiles. “Awesome, huh?”
“Sugar, cinnamon, and buttery bread… Can’t go wrong.”
“Stay here,” he says when we get to the lot.
It’s pretty much a miracle that twenty minutes later, Levon drives off the lot in a rusty pickup truck.
“Get in,” he says.
I do, and the inside is just as battered as the outside—ripped seats, sun-faded dash, a gaping hole where the stereo used to be.
“How much was this?”
“Twelve hundred, with temporary plates and insurance. Which means I’ve basically got nothing left.”
I look at the gas gauge.
“Well, at least the tank is full.”
He looks at me incredulously, my secret cowboy.
Minutes later, we are back on the highway. The truck makes a high-pitched whine when it goes over sixty, but after a while I get used to it.
I lean toward Levon so he can hear me over the noise.
“We should just go to the club when we get to Miami and ask about Whisper, start there.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“What was your original plan?” I ask.
“There’s a Black Angels show on Friday,” he says. “At that theater.”
“What day is it today?”
“Tuesday.”
“So, you were just going to show up at his dressing room?”
“Actually, I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. By now, he knows I have you. So the more time that goes by, the more desperate he’ll be.”
“He doesn’t care, Levon. Trust me.”
“But you said, since it’s in the press…”
“We have to find Whisper and reopen the case. Do you know who the detective is, the one who put your dad away?”
“Yes. And he’s still at the Miami PD.”
“Perfect. We’ll call him after we find Whisper.”
He looks at me like I’m some kid playing a made-up game.
“This is real, Levon. We can do this. We need to do this.”
He doesn’t say anything, just shakes his head again, except now with that half smile teasing his lips.
As we start to see signs for Savannah, the air gets thicker and the songs on the radio get twangier. We pull into a Red Roof Inn. The door is red, but the roof is brown.
In the parking lot, Levon tells me to stay in the car. I explain about Billy’s email and tell him I’m going to call Rena. He thinks about it.
“Don’t worry. I’ll hang up before they can trace it again.”
“OK.”
As he walks toward the lobby, I film him again on my handheld, even though I’m not supposed to. His butt is high in his jeans, and his arms sway ever so slightly. After he goes inside, I turn the camera toward me and smile.
I dial Rena, and she answers on the fourth ring.
“It’s me. Are you OK?”
“Yes. Candy, where are you?”
“I’m in North Carolina,” I lie. “Like I said, I’m safe. It will all be over soon. But Billy told me you had to be taken home by the police.”
“Just confused. I’m fine. Wade called, looking for you.”
; “Tell him he’s a little late to the party.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Rena, hang in there, OK? I’ll try to come home after all this is over. Before I have to go back to school.”
“Tomorrow?”
“No, maybe Sunday. I have to go. I love you.”
“I love you,” she says back, and I have to stare at the phone to make sure I heard it correctly. I hang up as tears gather and pool in my eyes, threatening to overflow. No one except my mother has ever said those words to me. I’m not one to feel sorry for myself, but I notice Mortimer and Randolph—who I replaced on the pickup’s dash—looking at me with such innocence that I have to wonder where mine has gone.
By the time Levon comes back, I’m convulsing in sobs.
“Hey,” he says tenderly, and I try to pull myself together.
“What is it?”
“My grandmother told me she loved me.”
“Well, isn’t that a good thing?”
“I guess so,” I say, and we both laugh a little.
He opens my door and helps me out, holds my hand all the way to our room, which is clean and smells like Pine-Sol. The TV is a flat screen, and the beds have pillow-top mattresses. I plop onto mine and say, “Moving up in the world.”
Levon jumps onto his own bed and says, “Better than a cornfield.”
“I thought you said you were out of money.”
“I am, but I still have the card. I’m surprised it still works.”
“This place is like Shangri-la.”
“Where the hell is Shangri-la anyway?”
“I don’t know.”
We both start laughing again, then he turns on the TV. We watch the news for a while, but nothing comes up about Bonnie and Clyde. The report probably already aired at the top of the hour.
“Candy, I forgot to tell you… Nice job with the fire alarm,” he says.
“Nice job on the train tracks.”
He walks over to my bed, sits down next to me, and cups his hand on my cheek for a second. His smile drops from his face, and I’m pulled into his magnetic gaze, his bottle-green eyes staring at me with what I could only describe as truth.
Then he kisses me, long and slow, and there is only this moment.
Chapter 18
This morning we have a pseudo-waitress for breakfast. She is very wholesome looking, but there is a message written up her arm, the words consonant heavy—I’m guessing in some northern European language. She assumes I’m Levon’s girlfriend, and I try to play down the smile that is forcing its way onto my face. After the kiss, and I will call it the kiss for its epic, mind-expanding qualities, he turned the light out and we went to sleep. But we were both awake in the dark for a while. It took all the strength I had not to get up and into his bed.
“So, what was the worst thing you did?” I ask him as I try to squish the rock-hard butter onto my frail toast. “I mean, besides sneak into the movies.”
“Taking you.”
“Besides that.”
He sips his coffee, pondering the question.
“Well, when I was in high school, I used to read to this blind woman. She was pretty funny. She’d ask me to read weird things like obituaries and statistics for random sports like rowing. Once I even read her names out of the phone book.”
“Ha.”
“She liked the names that started with P for some reason. I think she just wanted to hear someone talk. Anyway, she paid me twenty-five dollars a session, and one day, she gave me two twenties instead of a twenty and a five—and I didn’t tell her.”
I look at him, waiting for him to smile or laugh, but his face is even.
“You’re not serious.”
The thing is, he is serious. I almost spit out my toast.
“That’s pretty bad,” I say, trying to keep a straight face, but it’s not working.
“Shut up.”
“No, it’s sweet,” I say. But because of my usual sarcasm, he’s not convinced.
Levon takes a bite of his scrambled eggs, dabbing at the corner of his mouth with his napkin.
“I went back three years later,” he says softly.
“What?”
“I paid her back three years later. I was still thinking about it.”
“And…”
“She told me I was crazy, but she thanked me. And then she gave me the money back. She said it was the gesture that mattered, that I should keep the money. I still have it. I’m not going to spend it.”
He is completely serious, and my heart flutters. Then his face blanches as he sees something behind me on the TV. I turn around. They are running a sketch of Levon, a crude pencil drawing that makes him look mean. Did they get that from the librarian? The hospital? In the drawing, the eyes are dead, which is so not him. Even when he’s melancholy or lost in thought, his eyes have a shimmer to them.
The picture of me is different, with hair past my shoulders. Did they get that from Rena? I touch my head to confirm my hair is gone. My scalp feels bristly in a good way. I looked in the mirror this morning, but only for an instant, afraid of what I might see. More than my look. I’ve been kissed before, but never like by Levon.
There’s a kid with a sailor hat, eating with his apathetic parents and watching the TV while he nibbles on one of the stale muffins. There is a picture of the Toyota, which they obviously found, and another sketch of Jamal, who they mention was “admitted to the hospital with critical head injuries.” The sketch could be any black man; it doesn’t look like Jamal at all. Then again, he didn’t look like himself with his head split open. Leaving him in that parking lot would have been a Wade Rex move, and even though I appreciate that Levon wanted to protect me, I feel like we did the right thing.
“Finish up,” Levon says. “We have to make it to North Miami tonight. You can sleep in the back. You were tossing and turning last night.”
“You were too.”
We stare at each other, both of us turning red. For an instant, I feel like he’s going to kiss me again.
“C’mon,” he says.
As we walk by the family, the kid with the sailor hat points at us and says, “You were on TV!” His parents look up, then at the TV, which is playing a weather segment.
“Johnny, don’t be silly,” the mother says.
“I saw him!” the boy says, putting on a grim face.
The waitress, who has overheard everything, walks over. “Wait a second… Was that you?”
“There must be a misunderstanding. I’m not an actor,” Levon says.
He’s learning.
“No! It was on the news!” the boy says.
“Shh,” the mother says.
“It wasn’t me. I’m Jack. Jack Hacken.”
I grab his arm and say, “Let’s go, Jack. We’re late.”
The waitress’s eyes narrow, but we don’t stop.
We go back to the hotel room and get our stuff together in seconds.
“Jack Hacken?” I ask, throwing my bag over my shoulder.
“It wasn’t my best moment.”
“Well, let’s get out of here.”
As we leave, I turn at the threshold of the door and say, “Bye, nice hotel room.”
“Rooms don’t have ears,” Levon says.
“Think of all the secrets they’d have if they did,” I say.
As we head down the stairs toward the car, a skinny man smoking in his doorway gives me a greasy smile, and I flip him the bird.
Back on the highway, I start to feel that adrenaline again. Like it all could end at any minute. Especially if that waitress calls the cops like the librarian did. I decide to make the most of the situation. See if I can dig deeper into Levon.
“What’s your father like?”
“He’s cool. He always had my back.”
/> “Did you ever try to contact your mother?”
“It didn’t matter, Candy. He was all I needed. I know they say kids need both parents, but do they, really? Look how you turned out.”
I roll the window down to get more air. I hope he’s not looking at me, because my face is probably caving into itself.
“I had my mother…for seven years at least.”
“Yeah.”
“So, you never answered my question. After your grandmother’s set up, what do you want to do?”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Buy an art-house movie theater, with a café maybe. Run it. Show whatever films I want.”
“That sounds like a great plan.” I roll down the window even more. The landscape looks polished, brighter. The trees are green; the sun is high. I’ve been kissed by an outlaw. I can almost feel his full lips, covered with a dull sheen of sweet whiskey. When we finished, we both took intakes of breath, neither of us wanting to let them out. We were suspended in time.
I stick my hand out the window, curling it like a wave through the air.
“You know, when I’m eighteen, I’ll get a ton of cash. I could invest in your theater, if you let me screen my own movie.”
“What movie?”
“A gritty kidnapping story.”
He glances at me, and I swear his eyes smolder for a second.
“Kidding!”
“You better be.”
He checks the rearview. A black car approaches us from behind. It looks like it could be an unmarked police car.
“Don’t worry. We aren’t linked to the truck,” I tell him.
“Unless the waitress…”
“I don’t think…”
He steps on the gas a little.
“No speeding,” I say.
“Got it,” he says, slowing down.
He looks over at me with his almost smile.
“What?”
“That haircut makes you look powerful.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
The black car passes us, and the coast is clear for now.
“It’s a good thing. So, what made you get into movies?” Levon asks.
“They’ve always been my escape. One good thing about my grandmother is she has no idea about parental controls, or even the difference between ratings. I watched Nightmare on Elm Street when I was eight and Primal Fear when I was twelve. I’ve seen every movie by Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee, Woody Allen, and my favorite director, John Hughes. Eventually I started making my own. It’s the only time I feel truly myself.”
Stealing Candy Page 9
