by Hannah Tinti
They’d both seen him—Hawley and the girl. If the man had only stolen some money, he might get in his van and leave. If he’d killed the Navajos, he’d probably come after them. The man with the freckles went back to his van and reached behind the driver’s seat. He took out a box of ammo, opened the cylinder on his revolver and reloaded. Then he wiped his hands on the red bowling shirt and started up the stairs.
Hawley knew how to read the weather, to compensate for drag while taking his shot. If leaves changed direction, the wind was close to seven miles per hour. If branches began to bend, it was closer to nine. But there were no trees here to tell how fast the storm was blowing, not even a plastic bag caught in a fence. Only the sand that was circling the asphalt below, crossing the desert and pelting the windows with dust.
The man with the freckles climbed onto the landing, then turned and made his way along the row of doors. He took out a set of master keys and fit one into the lock of Amy’s room. He slipped inside. As soon as he did, Hawley stepped out onto the landing. He leveled the rifle but the wind swept up and started pushing against him.
Start with your feet, his mother told him. Your heels are already on the ground. Build from there when you lose your way. Hawley eased his weight back. He shook the tension from his calves and loosened his knees. He turned at the waist. He pressed one elbow to his hip and the other high against his ribs. And then he laid his cheek gently to the stock of the barrel and dragged it down behind the rear sight.
Hawley took in a full breath. He let half of it out.
The man with the freckles stepped from Amy’s room, not even careful, the red shirt like a target. Hawley could have shot him in the head but he went for the shoulder. The man cried out and staggered and then lurched for the stairs, but before he made it down he turned and fired off all the rounds he’d been holding. Hawley stepped back too slowly and felt a burn through his right side, and suddenly his arm couldn’t support the rifle anymore. It was falling and it fell and he watched it fall and then he was scrambling for the Beretta. He staggered over to the edge of the balustrade with the handgun. There was blood; it was streaming out over the walkway and his head was spinning. He looked from the pool of red to the man struggling into the van below, the bowling shirt catching air and fluttering sideways, clocking the speed of the wind. Thirty miles per hour, Hawley decided. Then he raised the gun and took the shot.
When Hawley tried to stand, his lungs weren’t working—it was like there was a sponge at the back of his throat. He crawled across the landing on his knees. The concrete was cold and unforgiving. He called Amy’s name and pushed open the door. When she came out of the bathroom she was fully dressed, like when he first met her, her hair pulled back tight in a bun once more and the baby in the sling and zipped up in her jacket. The only thing different was her face, pale and white and thin.
“We got to leave,” he managed. But he couldn’t get up from the floor.
Amy grabbed towels from the bathroom and wet them and pressed them to his side. Then she pulled out some diapers from her purse and opened them and put them underneath, taping the plastic tabs to his skin. Hawley told her to get the bag with the guns and to fetch the rifle he’d dropped and then he told her to open the toilet and get the jar of licorice out of the tank and put it in the bag, too. She did all he asked and when she came back and kneeled beside him her face held that same strange look from earlier when he’d told her that her name was pretty.
He barely remembered coming down the stairs. Amy maneuvered him into the back of her car and then she put the bag in the trunk and then she opened the other door and took the baby out of the sling and strapped him into the plastic seat next to Hawley. The van was still running, the man with the freckles half in, half out of the driver’s seat. Clots of hair and shattered bone littered the pavement, and the windshield was sprayed with blood.
Amy got into the front of the hatchback and slammed the door. She gripped the steering wheel and kept her eyes on the rearview mirror. “Do you think the manager’s dead?”
“We should check,” said Hawley.
They drove around the front of the building. Amy got out, and this time the motel doors were unlocked. Hawley and the baby stayed in the car, the kid watching the spot his mother had disappeared into, kicking his tiny feet and drooling. Hawley pressed the diapers against his ribs and drifted in and out. When Amy came back she froze for a moment, holding on to the handle of the car, looking like she was going to be sick, and Hawley knew he’d been right and the other men were dead and he wished he’d listened to his guts when he checked in and saw those freckles. He could have been miles away by now or even drinking beers with Jove and not dying in the backseat of some girl’s car.
Amy fumbled with her seatbelt. Then she put the car in reverse and backed out of the parking lot. “There’s a doctor on the reservation,” she said, “about ten miles down.”
The seat cushion beneath Hawley was wet with blood. There was blood on the seatbelts, blood on the floor. “He’ll report it.”
“Not if you pay him,” Amy said.
And that’s when Hawley knew she’d gone into the jar.
He tried to say something about this but it came out slurred. He focused on the little boy strapped in the carrier next to him and did his best to stay awake. The elephant pajamas had blood on them and the baby was staring at the back of Amy’s head and his arms were grabbing for his mother like she was the only thing that mattered in the world.
The sun seemed to be coming up—the sky a multitude of pinks and oranges—and Hawley wondered again what time it was. The bullet was turning now, spinning into a dark place and taking him with it. He touched the diapers taped along the side of his stomach. They smelled of talcum powder and were heavy and warm and felt alive in his hands, just like the baby’s diaper had when he’d carried it into the bathroom and put it in the trash.
“We’re nearly there,” Amy said. Then she said, “I’ll go back and get your car for you.”
Hawley hoped she would. He hoped that when he woke up and stumbled out of the doctor’s house into the blazing desert heat she’d be there with the baby and the money and it wouldn’t just be his car dusted on the side of the road with the keys in the ignition and a pile of bloody towels. That he wouldn’t have to check the trunk to see if she’d left the guns, and that there’d be at least a grand left for him in the licorice jar. She owed him that, at least, he thought. She owed him something.
They went over a bump in the road. Hawley looked out the rear window. It was roadkill, something with fur and feathers mixed together. A rabbit and an eagle, he thought. A coyote and a vulture. In the seat beside him the baby moaned and whimpered and then the baby began to cry.
“He’s hungry again,” said Amy, but they couldn’t stop so she started singing. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Rock-a-bye Baby.” Hawley closed his eyes and listened. Her voice wasn’t pretty but she was trying.
“You’re a good mother,” Hawley said, or at least he thought he did, and then the bullet pulled him the rest of the way into the dark.
Dogtown
WHEN LOO WAS SIX YEARS old she got lost at a county fair. She was distracted by a sword-swallower, disoriented by the swirl of noise and colored lights, turned around by the crowds, and suddenly found herself separated from Hawley. He’d won a giant teddy bear for her earlier that day, and Loo clutched it tightly, the synthetic fur prickling her skin as she looked for him. Without her father the world turned dangerous, each step she made weighted with magnitude and meaning. Loo did not cry or ask anyone for help. She turned away from the sword-swallower, who was busy clutching and gulping his steel, and focused on the carny games and the smell of cotton candy and caramel apples and popcorn and used them to retrace her steps. By the time she found Hawley he was so frantic he’d started scuffling with the security guards. They were escorting him off the grounds when he saw her standing by the carousel, right where she’d let go of his hand.
Sh
e still loved going to carnivals. The biggest one near Olympus happened each October, when the leaves turned color and the air got its first chill—a giant county-wide agricultural fair. Underneath tents and inside barns the 4-H clubs judged livestock and ran pig races. There was a draft-horse show and a pie-eating contest and who could grow the largest pumpkin and a midway with games and rides.
The fair fell near her birthday, and her father let her choose whatever rides she wanted. When she was thirteen, Loo asked for the bumper cars. When she was fourteen, they went up in the Ferris wheel. At fifteen, she wandered with Hawley in and out of the House of Mirrors, and they waved at each other and bumped into walls. The year Loo turned sixteen she was ready for something new. She walked up and down the midway with her father and chose the scariest contraption she could find: the Galaxy Round Up. Hawley took one look at the metal wheel covered in flashing lights that spun faster and faster, lifting on its giant arm at an angle into the sky, the floor dropping out beneath the screaming riders’ feet, and told her that this time she was on her own.
“I’ll wait for you by the exit,” he said, and then he took the box of popcorn she was holding and walked toward the gate.
The line was short and Loo was ushered in with the next batch of customers. She hurried along the wheel, past the drawings of Saturn, Venus, Mercury and Neptune, and chose a spot to stand on her own, pressing her shoulders against the padded back wall, gripping the bars on either side of her cage, and lining up her heels so they were firmly on the metal edge. A teenage carny walked the length of the ride and got it ready to go. He was wearing a T-shirt with some kind of writing.
“What’s it say?” Loo asked.
“Song lyrics.” He flashed a smile as he locked the safety bar in place. He was not handsome but he had nice dimples. “You look scared.”
“I’m not.”
“Don’t worry.” The carny winked. “It makes you feel weightless, like a walk on the moon.” Then he smiled again and scurried off the ride and flipped the switch.
The motor started and the planets began to spin, orbiting around the sun painted at the center of the wheel. Riders began to shout and scream. Loo’s palms were slick against the metal poles. The ride began to lift, and instead of becoming weightless her body grew heavier and heavier and heavier, until it was crushed into the padded wall behind her. She tried to move, but her head was stuck tight, as if her skull had been sewn through with lead. Then the floor dropped out beneath her feet, and there was nothing between her and the world.
Loo screamed and found that the more she screamed, the less afraid she was of dying. The air whipped through her open mouth and the galaxy tilted upside down and it was like some massive creature had rolled over on top of her life until it was flattened. Loo’s mind swirled and her boots turned in the open air above the crowd playing Milk-Bottle Toss and Plinko and her father staring up at her, clutching the box of popcorn.
“What’d I tell you,” said the carny afterward as he unlocked her cage. “Like flying, right?”
Loo tried to nod but instead she stumbled, her legs gone weak.
He caught her elbow. “Careful.”
She tried to read his T-shirt again. It seemed important that she know what it said. But the writing was in a loopy, cursive scrawl that disappeared up his sleeve. And then her father was there and his arms were around her and he was whisking her through the gate and away from the ride and over to a trash can, where she promptly threw up.
“Happy birthday.” Hawley handed her a napkin. “Still want your popcorn?”
Loo shook her head, embarrassed. She wiped her mouth.
Hawley tossed the box. “That asshole was flirting with you.”
“He was not.” She glanced back at the Galaxy Round Up. The carny was flashing his dimples again and locking a blond woman into one of the cages.
“He was,” said Hawley, and then his hand slid behind his back, and Loo knew that he was checking his gun. Reminding them both that it was there. As if any part of him would not remember. As if Loo could ever forget.
—
ON MONDAY SHE was back in school, still flush from the fair. She didn’t care that she’d thrown up or that the carny had so quickly forgotten her. All that mattered was that she’d drawn his attention. It felt like she’d discovered some secret ability within herself that had appeared only because someone else had pointed out where it was hidden.
They had lived in Olympus for more than four years now. It had become their home. Each spring Hawley planted a garden in the backyard, and by summer they had beans and tomatoes and corn to set on the grill. They went to the beach and stretched out on towels in the sun and listened to the surf and dug clams on the weekends. They raked fall leaves into giant piles and burned them, and they bought a real Christmas tree each year and set it up in their living room, and used snowshoes to tromp through the woods. They had a garage that Hawley turned into a workshop, full of wires and shovels and tools, and they had shelves lining their walls that Loo filled with books that did not have to be returned to the library. She had spent her life looking at empty closets, and now all the closets in their house were full.
The only thing that hadn’t changed was Loo’s reputation. She had been in ninth grade when she smashed Mary Titus’s head in the bathtub, and now three years later, in her last year of high school, she still could not outrun her rock-in-a-sock. The widow hadn’t pressed charges but she made sure the whole town knew about Samuel Hawley and his crazy daughter. The good news was that the widows stopped coming around. The bad news was that people started avoiding them again, except for Pauly Fisk and Joe Strand, who remained Hawley’s drinking buddies, and Principal Gunderson, who continued to slip Loo passes to get her out of detention. Jeremy and Pauly junior did their best to steer away with their bent noses, encouraging others to do the same, and the only person who would talk to her at school was Marshall Hicks.
Mary Titus had a big mouth, but her son didn’t. He’d never told anyone about Loo breaking his finger. If he had, the air would have gone out of what had happened between them, and the memory would have faded over the years. Instead, his silence had turned the finger into a secret. A secret that he reminded her of whenever he nodded at her as they passed in the hall, or loaned her a pencil when hers broke during a history test, or chose her for a partner in biology, after the long, uncomfortable moment when the teacher said to pair up and Loo sat alone, biting her lip and trying not to notice everyone moving away from her.
“I think it’s going to be worms,” Marshall said, as he placed the wax tray and metal pins in front of her. “They always start the semester with worms.”
“Sea worms or earthworms?”
“Earth.” Marshall pulled out a leather pouch from his backpack, stuffed with colored pens. “I’ll do the worksheet if you do the cutting.”
Two girls at the table across from them raised their eyebrows. And then one of them pretended to pour maple syrup on the other’s chest. Loo picked up the scalpel. “Deal.”
They got worms. Big ones. Loo cut the skin and pinned the edges back against the tray. Marshall identified the clitellum and gizzard but had trouble with the reproductive system.
“Those look like ovaries to me,” said Loo.
“They have male parts and female parts.” Marshall poked the worm with a pin. “Receptacles and vesicles. They’re hermaphrodites. Like Hermaphroditus. He was the son of Aphrodite and Hermes. A nymph fell in love with him and so they merged. Became two people inside one person.”
“That sounds kind of amazing,” said Loo. “Like being alone but not being lonely.”
“They still need another worm to reproduce.”
“How do you know all this stuff?”
“My stepfather’s a marine biologist. He read me science textbooks at bedtime.”
Loo thought of Hawley tucking her underneath a motel bedspread. The two of them sharing a bag of chips from the vending machine and laughing at Godzilla and Frankenstein o
n TV. Marshall took a pen from his leather pouch. He flipped over Loo’s worksheet and sketched a beautiful woman with flowing hair, standing naked in an open clamshell, surrounded by winged cupids. Then he gave this woman a beard. Underneath he wrote, Herm-Aphrodite, and slid the drawing across the table with his crooked finger.
At the end of class, Loo did not turn in her worksheet. She folded the paper up and took it home instead.
Marshall and Loo spent the next few weeks dissecting frogs together, and then a cricket, and then a fetal pig, and then a starfish. For an hour each day they took turns with the knife and labeled organs on their lab sheets and talked. Loo had no problem with the frog or even the pig, which felt the same as gutting a flounder, but for some reason the giant preserved starfish made her nearly faint as soon as she snipped through its thick skin with a pair of scissors and began scraping out its pyloric cecum. Marshall Hicks took over just as the last bit of color drained from Loo’s face. The girls who sat across from them noticed, and one of them puckered her lips while the other pretended to make herself vomit with her own finger. Loo stared back, her mouth tasting like old metal filings. She counted forward from zero to twenty, then backward from twenty to zero, and it was just enough to keep her from taking the scalpel and stabbing the pretend-vomit girl in the eye.
—
AFTER A LONG, hard winter, the teenagers of Olympus witnessed their first sign of spring: an outdoor kegger. Marshall and his cousin got their hands on a half-barrel of Heineken and rolled it about a mile into the woods to the whale’s jaw—a giant natural rock formation in the center of Dogtown that looked like a humpback breaking the surface, far from any roads or houses so no one would hear and with plenty of places to hide if the cops showed up. Word spread at school that everyone was invited to drain the keg in the forest. Even so, when Marshall handed her a flyer for the party, complete with a hand-drawn map, the whale’s jaw circled in the middle, Loo checked his face to make sure he wasn’t making fun of her. When he smiled she said that she would come.