Stay Away

by Ike Hamill

  At the bottom of the list, Eric wrote, “Advice.”

  He turned back around.

  “You got advice from the Trader?” Frank Libby asked.

  Eric nodded.

  “And what did you get in return?”

  Eric could only shrug. “I don’t… I don’t really know. He followed me to Ohio in my dreams, and then… I came back. I don’t think I ever gave him anything in return.”

  “You interacted with him when your aunt and uncle tried to shake him down for information?” Frank Libby asked.

  Eric was shrinking from the interrogation. Nicky wanted to tell Officer Libby to ease up. They were all on the same side. But it wasn’t just the eyes of Officer Libby that Eric was shrinking from. They were all looking at Eric in the same way, Nicky included. There was some nugget of information in his story. Maybe it was between the lines, but it was in there.

  “Yes. I… Nicky and I held him until my uncle arrived. He wouldn’t tell us anything because we didn’t have anything to trade.”

  “Because you had both already traded with him, right? Nicky had pizza for Dr Pepper and you had advice for…”

  Eric shrugged again.

  “Why did you come back to town?”

  “I… I wanted to make things right with my uncle. I thought that my aunt had… I don’t know.”

  Officer Libby was leaning forward in his chair by this point. It was amazing how intimidating he could be, even when he was sitting down. Nicky was getting ready to confess and she hadn’t even done anything. Then, Frank Libby leaned back, easing up on the pressure.

  “It’s okay, Eric. We just need to know everything. All the cards on the table, remember?”

  Eric nodded.

  “You had been living on the road, right? I remember you—pretty scruffy and scrawny. After your mom died, you were afraid to come back, right? Were you afraid of the Trader?”

  “No,” Eric said, shaking his head as he looked down. He put his fingers to his temples, like it was painful to try to recall. “I was afraid of what my uncle would say. I thought that my aunt died at the same time as my mom. That’s what… I don’t know why I thought that.”

  Officer Libby seemed lost in thought for a moment. When he stood up, everyone shrank back a little. Even Eddie and Brett forgot to pretend that they were above all this. But Officer Libby wasn’t paying attention to any of them. He moved to the board and asked Eric a quiet question while he took the chalk from his hand.

  Eric said, “1972,” and Frank Libby wrote that next to “Advice.”

  He went around the room, conferring with people. Nicky understood what the question would be and she came up with the right answer, as far as she recalled.

  “April, or May of seventy-three.”

  When all the dates were up next to the trades, Frank Libby rewrote them all in his angry scrawl. This time, they were in chronological order.

  When he was finished, he stepped back.

  “I wasn’t the first in my generation,” he said as he paced in front of the chalkboard. “There was another kid that I knew. An older kid named Jerry, who lived next door to me. He had traded for pinups, and he wasn’t quite sure what he had traded. He told me that it bothered him a little whenever he looked at his pinups. He just didn’t quite know what he owed, and that bothered him.”

  Eric took a seat in the front row. They were all watching Frank Libby remember. It was clear that Eric’s confusion had sparked this memory.

  “That’s why I was so adamant when I traded with the man. I knew what I wanted and I made him be specific on precisely what he required in return. From watching Jerry, I knew for sure that being in debt was a heavy load to carry. When he told me how many teeth he needed, I almost called off the deal. I had given a few of my teeth to the Tooth Fairy already. I had a couple of teeth from my puppy, but he said that those wouldn’t do. The only thing I could do was wait for my sister’s teeth to come out and talk her into giving them to me.”

  “How many did he want?” Lily asked.

  Frank Libby took the question without glancing at her or changing his stride.

  “Eight. Incisors and canines.”

  He tapped his teeth with a fingernail.

  “Didn’t matter who they were from, but he wanted four of each. A couple of years ago, I studied the file on a guy named Walter Marx, from California. He was convicted by the bite mark injuries he left on his victim. I remembered the teeth then. I remember thinking that someone could maybe use the teeth that I had scrounged up. They might be able to use them to create some kind of fake jaw and then plant evidence with that.”

  “Why would he…” Lily started to ask.

  Frank waved away the question.

  “He wouldn’t. I’m not suggesting that the Trader made a fake jaw. The teeth that I gave him were all different sizes. I ended up stealing one from a skeleton at the doctor’s office. I think that one could have been plaster, but the Trader accepted it.”

  Frank Libby paced back and forth.

  “What are we missing? He already knew what teeth were. Why did he need to have eight of them? Why did he need the pizza?”

  “The open trade,” Eric said.

  Frank Libby stared at him, blinking.

  Eric tried to explain. “He had an open trade with your neighbor, right? He had an open trade with my mother, and he has one with me. What if he has to have an open trade. What if it… I don’t know…”

  “Validates him?” Lily asked.

  “Yeah,” Eric said, eyes lighting up. “Like, maybe it gives him a way to hold on. He’s not a real, live person, right? I mean, how could he be? He has been around forever. So maybe what keeps him around is the fact that someone owes him something. He has to have an open…”

  “Transaction,” Frank Libby said. He and Eric nodded at each other.

  “Does this help us?” Lily asked. “What does it mean to us?”

  “Good question,” Frank Libby said.

  JESSIE

  ONCE MORE, THE ROOM broke up into several conversations. Jessie watched his sister get up and move to where Brett and Eddie were standing. It bothered him to see her so close to Brett. They had gone through several breakups before, each one worst than the last. Now that he was old enough to do something about it, he wasn’t going to let Brett push his sister around anymore.

  He had to remind himself that, this time, Lily had approached Brett. Jessie decided to hang back for a minute and see what happened.

  Next to him, Holdty and Fish were talking low.

  “Should we tell him about the bet?” Fish asked.

  “No. Who cares about that. It was a complete transaction. I think he cares more about the trades that didn’t finish, like Eric’s. Besides, all we gave him that time was a dollar,” Holdty said.

  Jessie looked at his cousin. Eric was sitting there, looking at the list as Officer Libby paced. Nicky had moved up to the desk next to Eric and was saying something to him. Jessie pushed away from the wall. Fish and Holdty looked to him.

  “We getting out of here?” Holdty asked.

  Jessie knit his eyebrows together, confused by his friend’s stupidity.

  “You heard what that cop said. We’re in this. Don’t try to leave. He’ll burn you.”

  Jessie left Holdty and Fish in silence and went to the desk behind his cousin.

  “…with each piece of information, he gets a little closer, you know?” Nicky was asking.

  Eric shook his head. “To what end? What’s the point?”

  “Right! That is what we should be figuring out. What’s his end goal, you know? It can’t just be survival. You don’t keep casting around, searching for new things if you’re only trying to survive.”

  “Is that true?” Eric asked. He cut his eyes over and seemed to notice that Jessie had moved close.

  “Hey,” Jessie said.

  “Hey.”

  “If this goes down like I think, I want my shot,” Jessie said.

  “How so?”
Eric asked.

  Jessie tilted his chin at Officer Libby. “He wants to pull the trigger, I get it, and I don’t mind if the final shot is his, but I want mine too. I want that old man to look me in the eyes and know that Wendell’s brother remembers.”

  Eric chewed his lip as he looked Jessie in the eyes.

  “Yeah. Okay,” Eric said. “But don’t think of him as an old man, okay? I remember his hands, and they were strong. Don’t look him in the eyes for too long and don’t let him get his hands on you, okay?”

  Jessie clenched his jaw.

  “I’m serious, Jessie. You’ll get your shot, but don’t underestimate him. There’s one thing about old guys—they have lived through some shit. Think about your grandpa.”

  Jessie didn’t like the sound of that. Even his father had been afraid of Grandpa. He used to say, “That old man has seen too much shit to be clearly focused on what is right in front of him.” What that had meant to Jessie, whenever the old man came over for dinner, was that you had to stay out of Grandpa’s way or you would get stepped on. His father had been wrong though. It wasn’t just a disregard for what was in front of him. Grandpa was nasty to anything smaller than himself.

  “So, Frank, what’s the plan?” Lily asked.

  Officer Libby opened his eyes wide, like he had just woken up and was trying to see clearly.

  He ticked off the points as he made them.

  “One, we flush him out with the prospect of a trade. You’re going to go to him and ask for poison—tell him you need something untraceable, so he thinks it’s for murder. Ask him his terms. Demand the terms of a trade or you won’t do it. When you find out what he wants, you bring it back to this group. From there, we’ll send Jessie with the item, but he’s going to ask for information about Wendell. Once we have that, we don’t let him get away.”

  Nicky was shaking her head.

  “I don’t know. Have you seen how he disappears when he gets what he wants? It’s like a magic trick,” she said.

  “That’s why we’re going to descend on him from every direction. We get him into a car and we drive him out to Jack Cornish’s barn. That’s where we finish it.”

  “Why not do it right there?” Eddie asked.

  “For one, we’ll need time to check out the information about Wendell. If he tries to trick us, I want to know about it before it’s too late. Number two, I know we can get rid of evidence at that barn,” Officer Libby said.

  “Okay,” Lily said. “So all I need to do is go to him and ask for poison.”

  “No,” Officer Libby said. “First, we have to make sure we’re all going to remember this.”

  ERIC

  “I’LL BE RIGHT HERE,” Eric said, glancing in the rearview mirror.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Nicky said.

  “You remember everything?” Lily asked.

  Eric looked down at his notepad. They had written out everything that Lily was going to do and the signal she would give if there was any trouble.

  “Yes,” Eric said. “It’s all here if I start to forget.”

  “We won’t forget,” Nicky said. “You have ten minutes before they come, okay? Worst comes to worst, ten minutes.”

  “Okay,” Lily said, taking a deep breath. “Okay.”

  “Get angry,” Eric said, turning around. “It will keep your head clear.”

  He wasn’t sure if it was true or not, but it sounded right. He could remember being very angry when he had held the Trader in his hands. It was infuriating that the fat little man had held so much power. Eric wanted nothing more than to hear him ripped away from that tree again.

  He saw her eyes harden. She nodded as she pulled open the rear door of the Gran Torino. Closing the door hard, Lily stalked down the hill towards the tree.

  “We’ll be lucky if he even comes out,” Eric said. “I went there with my aunt and…”

  Lily was only halfway to the tree, but they already saw a shifting shadow. The old man leaned his head out, saw Lily approaching, and then circled the tree to stand in front of it. While he waited for her arrival, he straightened his vest and coat and then brushed them off. From a distance, he looked respectable. Eric knew that up close the formal veneer would appear shabby.

  “You think your uncle was stronger than you?” Nicky asked.

  Eric thought back. Certainly, when Eric was growing up his Uncle Reynold had been able to do anything. There was nothing that he couldn’t lift or carry. Then, as Eric grew into his own frame, he felt proud to find that his own strength matched his uncle’s.

  “As strong,” Eric said.

  “I was thinking back to that day. You were trying and trying to pull the Trader from the tree but he wouldn’t budge. Then, when your uncle showed up, he pulled him off pretty easily.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Eric said. “We’ll have a ton of people when the time comes.”

  “I’m just wondering if maybe he wanted your uncle to pull him free, or if maybe you didn’t have the will to do it.”

  Eric cut a glance over at her.

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  Pride and anger started to bubble up. He looked at the list on the notebook to ground himself. If Lily’s hands went up to her shoulder or higher, they would go to her rescue. If he reached out, or if she even got within reaching distance, they would go.

  “I’m not saying you did anything wrong,” Nicky said. “I felt it, too. Regardless of what we were trying to do, he was an adult and we were just kids. It’s tough to challenge that kind of authority, you know? Once your aunt left and he started to scream, I wanted to get out of there and the most you could do was hold him until your uncle came.”

  “That’s not going to be a problem,” Eric said.

  In the distance, Lily was standing about ten feet from the tree, a couple of paces into the road. There were no cars coming, but if one came from the south, it was going to have to swerve around her.

  “What do you think he’s saying?” Nicky asked.

  The Trader had his hands behind his back and then lifted one to his face as he tilted his head. He made a little bow as Lily explained something and then he put up a finger.

  “He’s like a cartoon,” Eric said. “I hope he’s buying it.”

  “I almost hope he’s not,” Nicky said.

  Eric glanced at her.

  “I mean, if he balks, then Lily is going to be there trying to convince him and time will run out. Those guys will come over and shit is going to get violent. I’m ready to see that guy pay for his shit,” Nicky said.

  “Good point,” Eric said.

  Lily took a step back from the man. He tipped his hat to her and disappeared behind the tree. Following the script, Lily backed away until she was at a safe distance. Then she turned and jogged back up the hill.

  Her mouth was a flat line as she nodded to Eric. When she got in, he started the car and put it in reverse. In the back seat, Lily was writing in her notebook. They didn’t speak until they were across the bridge.

  “Well?” Nicky asked, turning.

  “I think so,” Lily said. “I think so.”

  # # #

  Across the bridge, the other vehicles pulled in behind Eric and they drove as a convoy until they reached the Town Commons. They stood at the hood of the Gran Torino and everyone gathered around Lily.

  “He said, ‘Good to meet you, finally.’ That’s how he opened the conversation. Then I asked him if he would trade. He said, ‘Most definitely,’ before he even knew what I wanted. I told him I needed a poison, it had to be fast-acting, and untraceable by the police. He seemed excited by that. His eyes lit up when he said that was something that he could provide.”

  Lily paused but Frank Libby pressed her to continue.

  “What did he want?”

  “He thought about it. It’s just a guess, but I really think he was considering what he could get away with. I told him that it was important and I could get whatever he needed in trade, assuming
that he came through with the goods. He looked me over carefully. I may have pressed a little too hard because for a moment I thought he was going to back out of the arrangement. But there was something that he really appeared to want.”

  She took a breath. Frank Libby opened his mouth to prompt her again but she put up a finger to silence him.

  “A fish and a finger,” she said.

  “The fuck?” Eddie asked. “Like, your finger?”

  “I asked,” she said. “The fish has to be alive. The size and species doesn’t matter.”

  “Easy enough,” Eric said. He was thinking about the feed store, not more than a mile away. They sold fish there. They could get a little goldfish in a bag for next to nothing.

  “He said that the finger, obviously, doesn’t have to be alive. He smiled when he said this. I don’t know what he wants it for, but I think he really wants it. I asked if it had to be mine. He said, ‘From anyone human.’ I know this is stupid or whatever, but he said human like he held the whole species in contempt. Anyway, thinking about the teeth, I asked if it mattered how old it was.”

  Eric frowned and shuddered, hunching up his shoulders.

  “He said, ‘It must still have un-rotted flesh and a sturdy set of bones. Please, nothing that has been embalmed.’ He struggled to come up with that word and he glanced at the cemetery when he said it. I got the distinct impression that he had tried to get one from a fresh grave but he didn’t like the chemicals.”

  The group was silent. Eventually, all eyes had turned to Officer Libby, who seemed lost in thought.

  “Why are you all looking at me?” Frank Libby asked. “You think I can get a finger? Where the hell would I get a finger?”

  “Can’t you go to the morgue or whatever?” Jessie asked. “Can’t a cop get access to someone killed in an accident or something?”