The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley

by Hannah Tinti

  “All right,” said Hawley.

  But it wasn’t right at all. It was never going to be all right.

  Loo put her hand on her father’s arm.

  “Could we have a minute?”

  The officer nodded, then kicked the wedge so it was set firmly under the door. “This locks from the outside. Just knock if it slides shut.”

  As soon as Officer Temple was down the hall, Hawley got up and snatched the wedge from the floor and put it in his pocket. The door closed slowly. The lock clicked. Hawley took the cap off of the pen. He was sweating, dark patches underneath both arms and a strip in the center of his T-shirt.

  “After all I’ve taught you,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re supposed to think things through before you do them. You’re supposed to be smart.” He spread his fingers across the paper on the table and filled in their address, his phone, her name. “Maybe this is my fault. Maybe I’ve sheltered you too much,” he said. “The world is a rotten place and you’ve got to find a way to be rotten if you’re going to live in it. But you also have to be smart.”

  “I didn’t steal that car,” she said.

  Hawley kept writing. “I told you not to open your goddamn mouth.”

  And so she didn’t. She said nothing as her father filled out the rest of the form and then showed the police his license. She said nothing as they went through her bag—dumping her wallet and loose change, tissues and tampons onto the chipped plastic table. And she said nothing when Officer Temple came back into the room and said that he’d finally gotten through to Mabel Ridge, and that the old lady wasn’t going to press any charges, that she only wanted the car back, and that they were free to go, once they paid a fine for Loo’s joyride and promised to get her enrolled in driver’s ed.

  Hawley jumped up and shook the officer’s hand. He thanked him for his help. He apologized for the trouble. He made Loo apologize, too, and she hated him, and she hated the policeman, who stood there with his dull smile as the words came out of her mouth.

  She looked for Marshall as they left. The boy was nowhere in sight, but in the lobby she saw his mother. Mary Titus glanced up from her chair as they passed. The first expression that crossed her face was surprise, and in that moment Loo saw a flicker of the woman she had once been, before her first husband had died and her second husband had left her. Before she’d been evicted or institutionalized. Before she had even been Mary Titus. When she had just been a girl like Loo, doing the wrong thing at the wrong time, ashamed and sorry but also glowing from the thrill. And then the woman’s eyes narrowed, and Loo was nothing but another nail struck into the coffin of her life.

  “Hey!” she called.

  The Sawtooth apron was still wrapped around her waist. She must have come straight from the restaurant, which meant that Principal Gunderson knew about Loo getting arrested, and so did Agnes, and all of the chefs and probably the busboys, too. Loo’s cheeks flushed. She tried to walk around Mary Titus, but Hawley stopped.

  “I want an apology,” the widow said. “And a check for two hundred dollars.”

  “The charges got dropped,” Hawley said. “They’re both free to go.”

  “The apology is for involving my son in a felony. And the money is for my sanctuary.” Mary Titus smelled the same way Loo did at the end of a shift—like a greasy order of fish and chips. She reached into her purse and pulled out one of her pamphlets. She handed it to Hawley. He looked it over and gave it back to her.

  “People don’t care about the future,” said Hawley. “And fishermen need to earn a living today. You should leave this thing alone. You’re only making enemies.”

  “Somebody has to save the world instead of just destroying it.” Mary Titus squeezed up her tiny face. “One day, when all of the fish are gone in the North Atlantic, and you’re eating expired tuna out of a can, you’re going to remember this conversation.”

  Loo tried to pretend that nothing was wrong, stretching her mouth into a tight grin for the people waiting in the lobby, a vagrant handcuffed to a chair in the corner, and the desk sergeant eyeing them from behind the bulletproof glass. It was only a matter of time before Hawley lost his temper.

  “Dad,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Then she turned and made for the exit. But before she got away Mary Titus grabbed hold of the back of Loo’s shirt. The widow was fast and sure as she lifted the cloth in her tiny fist, revealing the solar system drawn across Loo’s skin, her ribs lined with asteroids, the base of her spine circled by Mercury and Venus.

  “Looks like my son’s been doodling on your daughter. Maybe you’ll care about that, Sam Hawley.”

  Hawley stared at the spray of stars on her skin. The comet that disappeared in a trail beneath her belt buckle. And the ripple that Loo had been waiting for shuddered along the length of his face. Loo yanked her shirt back down. She shoved the widow away from her. Mary Titus stumbled and fell against the vending machine.

  And that’s when Marshall came out of the bathroom.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  They all looked at one another. Then Hawley picked the boy up and threw him against the wall. Marshall came down hard on the edge of the water fountain and collapsed to the floor in a heap. Mary Titus screamed, and the policemen came scurrying out from behind their desks and everyone was separated again and eventually more sets of forms were produced that they all had to fill out. It was another forty minutes before they were finally released, and by then Hawley had cooled down and stepped back inside his shell, apologized for losing his temper, paid a fine for disturbing the peace and even paid Mary Titus the two hundred dollars. He took Loo’s arm as they left, brought her to the truck, opened the passenger door and pushed her inside the same way Officer Temple had done only a few hours before.

  “Can I talk now?” Loo asked.

  Hawley did not answer her until he had walked around and climbed into the driver’s side. He closed the door and gripped the wheel. “I can’t believe that piece of shit had his hands on you.”

  “He’s not a piece of shit.”

  “He told the police you stole the car. He would have walked for this and you would have gone to jail.”

  Loo did not care. She worried only that her father had scared Marshall away and that now he would never shout her name again or draw another universe across her back.

  “I didn’t—” she began. But Hawley cut her off.

  “You’re still a minor, but grand larceny means you’d go away for at least two years. And you weren’t even careful. I mean, for God’s sake, of all the people in the world, you had to rip off Mabel Ridge?”

  “I didn’t steal the car!” Loo shouted. “Besides, it’s not even hers. It’s Mom’s.”

  The lights of the police station filtered through the windshield of the truck, casting Hawley’s face in a bluish glow. For the first time, he looked at her.

  “Are you sure?”

  “The registration’s in her name.”

  The muscles in her father’s shoulders tightened. He turned his head and began scanning the building, the other cars, the fence. “Is it here?”

  “No,” said Loo. “We left it on 127.”

  Hawley gunned the engine. He stepped on the clutch and shifted. He said, “Show me where.”

  Loo directed him along the back routes. Her father flicked on the high beams, the truck springing forward along the twisted road. Oncoming traffic honked, but Hawley kept the brights full force as he slid to the edge of the driver’s seat.

  “We should have passed the car by now,” she said.

  “What kind was it?”

  “A Firebird.”

  “Firebird.” For a moment Hawley’s gaze drifted. He shook his head.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. I just never thought your mother would own a Pontiac.”

  When they hit Beverly Farms, Hawley pulled off to the side of the road. In the glow of the hazard light
s she could see him working his lip. A moth fluttered through the open window and began throwing itself against the dashboard, the roof, the glimmer of the clock radio.

  “It’s gone,” said Loo.

  Hawley watched the moth, then threw out his fist and smashed it against the windshield. He wiped the wings off on his jeans. Then he signaled and spun the truck around. He shifted gears and leaned on the gas.

  “It’s not gone,” he said.

  It was after midnight and they were the only car on the road. All of the traffic lights had switched from red to a constant, blinking yellow. Hawley turned down a side street. They passed a self-locking storage unit, a garage with several tow trucks parked in front, a tire shop and a back lot full of vehicles, surrounded by a chain-link fence and topped with swirls of barbed wire. Hawley drove onto the shoulder, into the dark shadows and away from the streetlight that flooded the road. He turned off the truck. The engine ticked and then quieted.

  “Where are we?” Loo asked.

  “The impound lot.”

  Hawley got out of the truck and started rummaging through the back. He took a long thin metal rod, a screwdriver and a set of wire cutters from his tool chest. Then he unlocked the side compartment and grabbed his long-range rifle, a suppressor and a scope. He closed and locked the compartment and then he walked into the woods. Loo sat for a minute in the passenger seat, watching the place where he had disappeared.

  “Shit,” she said. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” She spread her fingers across the dashboard and gripped it tightly, as if she had the power to rip the whole thing off. Then she got out of the truck.

  Her father was only a few yards in, thirty feet from the outer edge of the fence. He had his rifle on his shoulder. He’d added the suppressor. He lowered the gun and handed it to Loo.

  “Is it there?”

  She set her eye against the scope. Through the crosshairs she could see maybe thirty cars behind the fence. Most were in some state of disrepair, windshields smashed in or back ends crumpled. An old Chevy was missing its hood entirely, the engine exposed. But at the far edge of the lot was a shiny black BMW, a truck with new rims, a small sports car with a custom cover pulled tight across its small body, and behind that—her mother’s Firebird.

  “In the corner.”

  Hawley took the rifle back and peered through the scope. “What do you know,” he said. And then he just stayed there, watching the car, his mouth twitching.

  “Okay,” said Loo. “You’ve seen it.”

  Slowly, her father began to sweep the barrel of the gun toward the left, like he was tracking something.

  “What are you looking for?” Loo said.

  “Cameras.”

  “Cameras?”

  “There,” said Hawley, and he shot out the first one. A small black security box by the front gate. It was hanging in place and then it was shattered to pieces, nothing but wires and a bit of loose plastic. Hawley shifted, lined up the rifle close to his shoulder and pulled the trigger again. The gun shook in his arms and another camera, set on the roof of the garage, went down. Then another, mounted near the back door. Each shot left behind a muffled huff of displaced air from the suppressor that Loo could feel in her chest, like an underwater explosion.

  “What you doing?”

  “It’s a Guard Rail system,” said Hawley. “They come in sets of four.” The rifle shuddered again and Loo saw a spark as the final camera, mounted on the fence, went down right over the tiny sports car. The black box bounced off the hood and crashed onto the asphalt.

  Hawley lowered the rifle. He flicked the safety, then loosened the canvas strap and slung the gun over his shoulder. He picked up the shell casings from the ground and slipped them into his pocket, then grabbed the wire cutters and moved quickly toward the fence. Loo followed, pushing past bushes and stumbling through vines. By the time she reached the fence he had already started clipping through.

  “Let’s go,” she said. “Let’s go before somebody comes.”

  “Do you think I’d cut this fence if anyone was here?” said Hawley. Then he was rolling back the chain link as if it were the entrance to a teepee. When he was on the other side, he held the wire for her, and Loo got to her hands and knees and crawled through.

  They crossed the parking lot, exposed under the floodlights. Loo kept her eyes on the darkened windows of the auto-body shop, waiting for a lamp to flick on, an alarm to go off, but everything remained quiet.

  Hawley walked straight over to the Firebird, then circled the frame, examining the dings and scratches, slipping his finger into a dent by the left wheel well. When he got around to the driver’s side, he stood for a moment, his hand on the roof. Then he put down the rifle, and took out the long metal rod he’d brought from the car, and the wedge he’d lifted from the police station out of his pocket. He jammed the wedge into the edge of the door, slid the rod into the space he’d made, and in less than a minute he had the car open. With the screwdriver he loosened the access cover under the steering wheel. He put the car in neutral, took out his pliers and started stripping a set of wires. He bound two red ones together. And then he used a black wire to hit where the copper was exposed. There was a spark, and then another, and then the engine came to life and started rumbling.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to find the keys?”

  “There’s an alarm on the building. Besides,” Hawley said, looking back over his shoulder, “this is half the fun.”

  Loo turned toward the garage. A home security sticker was on the corner of one of the windows. Inside there was a tiny red light, blinking steadily. By the time she turned back to Hawley he was examining the gate that enclosed the property. He pumped his rifle and aimed at the center of the lock. The zip of the suppressor pierced the night air, followed by the thump of the lock coming loose. He pulled what was left off the fence. Then he bent down and picked up the bullet casing from the dirt.

  He was already looking beyond the chain-link fence, beyond where the trees covered the road, and beyond the road to the rotary and then the bridge. For a moment it all seemed connected—Hawley’s shadow stretching from the gate to the highway, past the borders of Olympus and to another place in time, when Loo was seven or eight, and Hawley was waking her up in the middle of the night. He’d wrapped her in the bearskin rug and carried her out of their motel room and into a brand-new station wagon, with wood paneling on the sides. She remembered the station wagon because it looked just like the family car on one of her favorite television shows. It’s ours now, her father had said. And she’d felt so excited, and wanted people to see them driving in it, her teachers from the school she’d just left, and the kids who’d teased her on the playground, which made it even more upsetting when they stopped at a salvage yard a few days later and Hawley swapped the car for a pickup truck. The only thing that raised her spirits was watching the station wagon being put into the crusher, the windows bursting into the air like glitter, the metal compressing down into folds until it was the size of a suitcase.

  Hawley opened the gates of the impound lot. Then he went back to the Firebird and slid his hand along the roof. “We need to steal the rest.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If only the Firebird is missing, the police will suspect you. But if more cars are gone, they’ll think someone came to rob the place. A professional,” Hawley added.

  Loo watched him shoulder the rifle and understood, in a flickering moment, that her father was exactly that—a professional. All the guns in their house. All the scars on his body. All the ways that he was careful. It was because of this.

  He slipped the metal casing he’d been holding into his pocket with the others. Loo could hear them clinking against one another. His eyes scanned the lot. Then he walked toward the covered sports car. He pulled the canvas loose from the bumper and the wheels, then tugged the whole sheet free. Underneath was a sky-blue coupe. The body was all curves, the hubcaps gleaming. Hawley used the wedge to prop the door and the metal rod to tu
rn the lock. Then he took his screwdriver and pliers and held them out to Loo.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  As Loo worked, Hawley gave her directions. More pressure. Turn there. Only strip the ends. He opened the glove compartment, pulled out an envelope and threw it onto the passenger seat. “Registration,” he said. “It’s the easiest thing to alter. You can do it on a computer, or even a Xerox machine. Just get them matched and lined with whatever license you’re carrying. Cops only check the names and numbers. And you should always carry extra plates. After that it’s the ID numbers, on the engine and to the left of the steering wheel, but you only need to worry about those if you’re holding on to a car for a day or two. And you should never hold one for long. Pick and drop. That’s how you work it.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Loo asked.

  “So that next time you’ll know how to do it right.”

  Loo twisted the copper filaments together. She held the black wire and the red wires in her hands. She glanced over at Hawley.

  “Go on,” he said.

  Loo struck the wires together. There was a small spark that jolted her fingers.

  “Again,” said Hawley.

  Loo hit the wires hard, like she was striking a match. The engine sparked and turned and the dashboard lit and the radio turned on. It was set to an oldies station, the volume up loud. Some fifties crooner singing about love. Loo snapped the tuner off.

  “Now what?”

  Hawley tossed his guns and tools in the trunk of the Firebird. He climbed inside and moved the driver’s seat until it was pressed against the rear bench. The engine was humming. Hawley touched the steering wheel, touched the gears, touched the radio dial. Then he seemed to remember himself. He glanced over at Loo and cranked the window open.

  He said, “Follow me.”

  The headlights rose from the tip of the Pontiac like a creature waking from a deep sleep. Then the wheels reversed out of the parking spot and Hawley shifted and drove toward the gates. The Firebird slipped out from the floodlight and onto the dark road. The tires squealed as the car took the turn.