Then and there in my sister’s room, I just felt like a kid. A kid deep over his head in things he couldn’t handle.
I realized I was trembling, tried to consciously will myself still.
“What happened?” Sarah asked, moving closer.
I told her everything. About deciding to speak with Mr. Perrelli by myself; he and Brock escorting me back to their car; the tract house in the nondescript neighborhood; the owners who were probably dead and the smell from the garage; and the shooting that left Dillon’s pals and dad dead.
“We’ve got to tell Dad!” Sarah said. “He’ll call the police!”
“And what do we tell them? How we wanted to steal ten million dollars? How we knew about a dead body and kept it a secret? How I just watched two kids and an officer murdered?” I shook my head. “We’d be stuck at the police station for who knows how long, all the while Mr. Perrelli would be out there tracking my friends down and—”
I didn’t finish that thought, but our imaginations did just fine.
“Then what do we do?” she asked, her tone taking on an edge of panic.
“We get to everyone before Perrelli does.”
“How?”
“We’ll take Mom’s car. You drive.”
“And then what? If we get to everyone before they do?”
“We bring everyone back here,” I said. I took a deep breath. Let it out slowly as if it might be the last breath I ever took and I wanted to relish it. “Then we tell Dad everything.”
“And what if Mr. Perrelli follows us back home? What’re we going to do? Have a big shoot-out?”
I said nothing after that, and Sarah looked at me as if I’d gone mad. I couldn’t argue so much with that, but wondered if it was just me or the entire world.
2.
We decided on Jim’s first since it was the closest. Not wanting him to get hurt, but not wanting to go completely unprotected, I decided to take Bandit with us and for once Sarah didn’t complain about him. She even knelt briefly in the hallway and scratched him behind the ears. Downstairs, we headed for the door and Sarah snatched the extra pair of keys hanging from the pegboard on the wall nearby.
“I’m borrowing the car, Mom!” she called out behind us.
Mom and Dad were still at the dining table, finishing lunch, and one or both of them said something back, but we were already out the door. I threw it shut against any protestations, and we raced down the porch and across the walkway to the driveway. I loaded Bandit into the backseat of the car, then climbed in myself, Sarah getting in behind the wheel and starting the car. Pulling out with a squeal of tires and kicking up gravel, we backed out of the driveway and onto the road.
“Where’s Bobby?” I asked, just now realizing I hadn’t seen him at home.
Sarah looked at me as she turned the steering wheel.
“I think he went for a walk or something,” she said.
“You think?”
My voice rose in near hysteria at the end there.
“I don’t know!” Sarah said, almost yelling. “I think he just said he was going out! Maybe he went to Jim’s.”
Moments later we were on the highway, heading for the Connolly yard and racing against time—a force that waited for no one.
* * *
I saw the rooms that Jim and his dad called home for the first time that day. Sarah pulled up to the gate of the Connolly car yard, and I got out to open it for her. We parked in front of the garage where the working bay doors were rolled up. The lights inside were on so that it looked like a trio of huge eyes looking out on the grounds.
Walking inside I saw one of the side doors open that Fat Bobby had pointed out to me before, and my sister and I walked over to it. Our footfalls echoed like ghost footsteps on the concrete floor of the garage. We peeked through the door hesitantly like maybe we were looking in on a secret chamber. Sounds of crashes and explosions and gunfire came from inside, and the flashes cast by the television screen on the walls lent an eerie cast to things.
Inside it was startling to see, like some sort of optical illusion. It was far more spacious than I would have thought possible judging from the exterior of the garage. There was a small dining nook, complete with stove, cluttered island counter, refrigerator, and cupboards. A booth and table lined one wall, and adjacent to this was the living area, where a sofa and reclining chair sat in front of a television set atop a small wheeled stand. A VCR and a pile of movies were stacked atop the television like an electronic totem pole for some pagan techno-religion, and at the far end past all of this was a door open to another room. In this room were double bunks, a dresser, and a small desk.
Jim and his dad were on the sofa in front of the television. Seeing us, Mr. Connolly reached for the remote and muted the blaring speakers, but not before Bruce Willis yelled a “Yippie kai-yay motherfucker!” so loud it shook the walls.
“Hey, how you guys doing?” Mr. Connolly said.
We gave them little waves, Jim waved back from beside his dad, and I saw the large splint on his hand. The metal and gauze made his finger large and fat, making me think of those big foam rubber fingers at baseball games. I felt a quick surge of sickness rise up in me as I remembered Brock holding him, extending Jim’s hand, and snapping the finger back so casually like a twig he’d picked up from the ground. I was glad to see Jim and his dad okay, Mr. Perrelli and Brock nowhere about, but that left Tara and Bobby out there still unaccounted for, and that added to the sick feeling in my gut.
“Fine,” Sarah said. “We were hoping Jim could come out for awhile.”
I looked at Jim across the room, he looked back at me, and it was clear that he read something in our expressions and knew something was up. Apparently Mr. Connolly was on the same wavelength, or close to it, because his eyes swept from me to my sister, and then back again before he spoke.
“It seems you kids keep getting in trouble when you’re all together,” he said. A half grin on his face made this seem like a joke that wasn’t particularly funny the second and third time around. “Stabbings, broken fingers. I don’t know how many more lives poor Jim’s got hanging around you kids.”
Mr. Connolly’s tone, though half joking was also half serious, and it was that serious part that made me look away from him. I couldn’t meet his eyes knowing what had just happened to me that morning in the tract house in town, and what I was probably dragging Jim into. But I could think of no other way to protect my friends unless we were all together, with the exception of telling the whole truth, right now, and I wasn’t ready to do that with an adult who wasn’t much more than a stranger to me. A nice man, I had no doubt Jim’s dad was, but a stranger still.
I’d save the truth for my dad once I had all my friends with me. He’d know what to do. He always did.
“We’re just going to pick up Tara, sir,” my sister said. “Then we’re all going back to our place. Just to hang out.”
“Uh huh,” Mr. Connolly murmured, and by his tone I thought the scales were leaning towards the joking side of things. “But if my son comes back blinded, decapitated, burnt to a crisp, or otherwise crippled, dismembered, or dead, just know I’ll be sorely pissed.”
Sarah and I both nodded. Jim smiled and pushed up from the sofa, attentive of where he put his bandaged finger and the weight and pressure he put on it. He walked over to us and said goodbye to his dad. Sarah did too, but I kept walking and for some reason I felt something like daggers on my back and I knew that if I turned to look I’d see Mr. Connolly looking at me, and me alone. His eyes would shine like lanterns and he’d see through me and know what was going on inside.
The dark and hidden things all of us hide.
* * *
On the highway into town, I stared out the window and the desert to either side was like a sheet of ancient and brown parchment rolled out. Jim asked what was happening, leaning forward from the backseat so that his head was poking out like a jack-in-the-box between my sister driving and me.
I told hi
m about meeting Perrelli at the park. Told him about being driven to the nondescript neighborhood and led into the house. The smell inside and the bloodstains. The others inside waiting: our old friends the Glovers along with Glover Junior’s pals. The shooting that followed and how I made a run for it.
“He still doesn’t believe we burned the money?” Jim asked.
I shook my head.
“What if we didn’t?” Jim said, and Sarah and I both snapped our heads towards him. Sarah had to turn hers back to the road when the car started drifting, but my gaze remained fixed on my friend.
“What’re you talking about?” I asked.
Jim eased back from between the front seats, settling into his like he was trying to get as much distance between us as possible. He even looked down and away, and he’d never looked away from me before, always looked me square in the eyes. I knew I wasn’t going to like what I was about to hear.
He didn’t answer immediately, but looked out the window at the desert landscape whizzing by. Like there was something out there he wanted to see but couldn’t find it.
“Jim?” I said, with more than a hint of anger in my voice. “What the hell are you talking about?”
After a moment he looked at me again. There wasn’t shame or embarrassment in his expression, but neither was there defensive anger aimed back at me. Instead, he wore a sort of dead expression, a resignation, and somehow that was worse.
“Bobby took some of the money before we burned it,” Jim said, looking at me with that flaccid face.
“What?” Sarah exclaimed, shooting a look at Jim through the windshield rearview mirror.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” I repeated.
“Before moving the money to Lookout Mountain,” Jim began flatly, like he was lecturing about the thrills of watching grass grow to an audience of rocks, “Bobby wanted to put some of the money somewhere else, in case things went wrong.”
“In case things went wrong …” I said, shaking my head, thinking that was the understatement of the year.
“Which they did,” Jim said, a tinge of emotion returning to his voice, and then it dawned on me why and I actually lowered my head into my hands.
“It wasn’t just Bobby,” I said. “You wanted the money too.”
It wasn’t a question.
Now he did meet my gaze, and a spark of that old Jim—the Jim who was raised like me and didn’t take shit from anyone—returned. His brow was furrowed and his mouth did something like a sneer or growl, as if he might bite.
“We all wanted the money,” he said. “That was the plan when we found it, and we didn’t see why it should change just because some weirdo threatened you.”
“He didn’t just threaten me, Jim!” Stretching, I leaned towards the backseat like I was on the verge of climbing back there and fighting him, which maybe I was. “He threatened all of us! And it wasn’t just threats! The Collector would’ve killed us all! Maybe keep parts of us for souvenirs and shit!”
“But he didn’t kill us!” Jim shouted back, leaning forward again so that we were nearly face to face. Spittle leapt between us like little liquid gymnasts. “We killed him and we still burnt the money! What kind of sense does that make? We were in the clear! The money was ours! And we burned it!”
“The money wasn’t ours!” I threw the words back at him, our faces close enough to kiss if I suddenly chose to go gay and wanted some hot black action. “It was never ours!”
Bandit, on the seat beside Jim, looked back and forth between us, confused.
I knew I was talking to myself as much as I was to Jim. I think he realized that too because we both almost instantly calmed, moving away from each other and settling back into our respective seats.
“How much did you guys hide?” I asked.
“Two million,” Jim said without hesitation.
Even then that number rolled around my head. It wasn’t ten million, but it was sure still a hell of a lot more than I’d probably ever see at one time if I lived to be a hundred. Divided five ways and that was four hundred thousand each. That was still a lot of comics and books and all sorts of things.
Everything in me told me these thoughts were wrong.
I tried to push them away, but they wouldn’t go.
Then something else dawned on me, and why it wasn’t the first thing on my mind after hearing Jim’s confession about the money, I didn’t know. Dad would have been deeply ashamed, and that was the clincher that helped me refocus my thoughts.
“Bobby’s the only other one that knows about the two million?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Jim said.
“Any idea where he is?”
“No,” Jim said, and his mental wheels and cogs began to move the same as mine. He again leaned forward so that he was between Sarah and me. “He’s not at your house?”
I shook my head.
“So he’s out there somewhere,” Jim said, and the vagueness of that, like Bobby was lost in a formless and directionless world, seemed somehow right and true, but that wasn’t entirely accurate either. Because out there, separated from us, Fat Bobby wasn’t truly alone. There were others out there, looking, searching, hunting. And if they found him before we did I think then he truly would be lost.
We all would.
3.
Though she’d given me her address a while ago, I realized with a mild surprise that this was the first time I’d been to Tara’s house. That I’d kissed her and touched her, and she’d kissed and touched me, and yet I’d never seen where she’d lived seemed strange. I wondered if that meant something: two people in some ways so close, and yet keeping a certain distance.
I wondered not for the first time if the old Buick, the money and the body inside it, had tainted us in some way. Soiled us and left us stained at the deepest of levels, at the root and core, so deep maybe that you couldn’t see it. Perhaps so far down it could only be felt. Yet its effect on things was nonetheless real and acted as a force and attracted certain things and kept certain things away.
Gravities and polarities, I thought, those words coming to me from somewhere, with the beginning of a meaning I’d never attached to them before.
When we pulled into the driveway, I stepped out and strode up the walkway to the front door. Pressing the doorbell, I waited in dread. As at the Connolly yard under Mr. Connolly’s scrutinizing gaze, I felt that when the door opened my deceit would be laid bare.
I realized that I should be there on that doorstep asking Tara to a movie, or asking her out to eat somewhere.
But that’s not why I was there.
I was there to gather her up and take her somewhere where bad things would happen. The understanding that maybe this was all I could ever give her, all that I would ever have to give, brought a heavy sadness upon me.
Yet it was necessary, I told myself, clinging to that fragile and clumsy belief. The alternative—all of us apart, separate, easy pickings for those in the black Cadillac searching for us—was no alternative at all.
Her dad opened the door. Tall and lean, his sharp face again reminded me of a bird of prey looking down. His smile, no doubt intended as a pleasantry, made him look hungry. I wanted nothing more than to be away from him as soon as possible.
“Hello, Joey,” he said.
“Hi, sir. I was hoping I could see Tara.”
He looked over my shoulder at the car in his driveway. He waved. I looked back, saw my sister and friend waving in return. Bandit looked out the window like a forlorn stowaway.
“Kids have a day planned?” he said. In his uniform, the gun at his belt, he seemed not merely a park ranger, but a Gestapo ready for an interrogation.
“Nothing special,” I said. “Just board games maybe. My mom’s going to bake something. Just thought, you know, school’s getting closer and we’re not going to have much time once it starts.”
He nodded as if this all made sense. I hoped he didn’t ask why I hadn’t called beforehand. That seemed an obvious questio
n to me, and I had no ready reply if it should become one for him too.
He didn’t have a chance to ask it.
Tara came down the stairs then and to the front door. Her dad moved aside a bit to let her in the doorway. We looked at each other and something like what had passed between me and Jim back at his place seemed to pass between her and I.
“Mind if I go out for a bit, Daddy?” she asked, looking up at her dad like Sarah had done with ours back at the fair, like Mom had done that same night to get him to let me go with my friends. The batting of eyelashes, a little tilt of the head like a puppy; kryptonite to any man, be him father or love-struck boy.
“Sure,” he said. “I don’t see why not.”
Tara and I hurried back across the lawn together to the car. I wished again that someday I could make that walk to her front door and it would be for that movie or lunch. It seemed to me the denial of this was in some ways as much a crime as clubbing a man to death and sticking him in the trunk of a Buick.
* * *
On the highway heading back home, each of us scanned the shoulders of the road looking for Bobby. I’d filled Tara in on my morning with Mr. Perrelli and Brock, and the mention of the shootings made her go a shade of white so pale that the blue of her veins stood out beneath her skin like cords. I didn’t have to hold any psychology degrees to know that my story had pulled her back to Lookout Mountain, when she’d shot the Collector. After that, no one said anything for awhile.
Until I noticed Sarah’s eyes moving again and again to the rearview mirror, her face frantic. I turned around to look out through the rear window, craning my neck side to side to see past the heads of my friends and my dog.
A black Cadillac, long and sleek, sped towards us like a torpedo zeroing in on its target. Soon, bumper to bumper with us, it hung there, straying only the merest of inches. So close, the roar of its engine behind us was like a beast. The windows were tinted, shadowed, so that there seemed no driver. Just a black ghost car rumbling down the highway.
Jim and Tara both turned to see what I was looking at, what had Sarah so frenzied. Immediately, Jim turned back, pushed forward again so he was between the front seats, a hand gripping either one, me having to move back into mine so he didn’t collide with me.
If You Go Down to the Woods Page 24