The cop reads the information on Jessup’s driver’s license and then narrows his eyes, crosses his arms, and leans on the windowsill. “Collins?”
“Yes, sir,” Jessup says.
“Thought you were a Michaels.”
Jessup feels something shift in his stomach.
For the most part, the cops have left them alone since David John and Ricky went to jail. Every few weeks a cruiser from the sheriff’s office will do a drive-by on their trailer, but nothing that could be construed as outright harassment. Jessup’s mom keeps her head down, does her work, keeps quiet. Jessup has learned by example. Sticks to the speed limit, doesn’t push his luck.
“No relation, then? David John Michaels? He’s not your father?”
A pair of cars go wide around them. Jessup listens to the wet thrum of their tires on the road, a mix of asphalt and packed snow, more snow coming down slow and steady now.
Hawkins doesn’t pay any attention to the cars going by. He’s looking directly at Jessup, but Jessup can’t read him.
“Stepfather,” Jessup says. He says it reluctantly, and he’s ashamed that he’s ashamed to say it. Ashamed that he feels the need to correct the cop. Should be willing to own David John as his father. Might as well have been his father. But he knows something hangs in the balance here. The cops may not have bothered them since his brother and stepfather were sentenced, but in the time leading up to the plea deal, they were a constant presence in Jessup’s life, and not a good thing. Tossed the whole trailer. Did it twice. Warrant and all that. Got word that they were trying to get a warrant to search the compound, too, but that one was denied. Which was a good thing. Uncle Earl talked big, said he would have liked to see the cops try and serve a warrant. “Time for another Waco,” he said. Second Amendment.
The cop nods. He slides the registration and insurance card back into the little plastic pouch and holds the pouch and Jessup’s license between his thumb and forefinger. He holds them out, but not far enough that he’s giving them back yet. “If I run Jessup Collins through the computer, am I going to find anything problematic? What are you”—he looks at the license again, squints, does the math—“seventeen? Still a juvenile?”
“No problems, sir,” Jessup says. “This is the first time I’ve been pulled over. Never gotten a ticket. And I’m sorry about the taillight. Happened tonight. I’ll fix it first thing in the morning.”
“You hit something?”
“No, sir.”
What gears would be set in motion if he told Hawkins what happened? Make a complaint against Corson? No, too messy. How’s that going to look, Jessup complaining about a black kid kicking out his taillight? Small town. Family history. It would blow up. No way.
“What happened, then?”
“Don’t know what happened. I had a football game and when I came out afterward . . . Somebody must have broke it.”
Hawkins nods. The cop is late twenties, something like that. Buzz cut. Short, but has muscle packed on him, Jessup can tell even though he’s wearing a Kevlar vest. Every cop Jessup sees nowadays is wearing a Kevlar vest. Makes a small man look bigger. Maybe that’s the point, Jessup thinks, looking at Hawkins. He’s puffed up, inflated. Spends his free time lifting weights, but already starting the slow slide toward middle age. He looks like . . . a cop. Reminds Jessup of a kid who likes hazing, scaring freshmen, pretending it’s all a joke but you know it isn’t. Except there’s something off in the way Hawkins is talking to Jessup. No bullying there. Like he’s trying to be friends. He reaches out fully now, handing the license and paperwork back. “Been a long time since Cortaca made the playoffs, huh? I played, but not here. Safety. You?”
“Linebacker.”
“Good stuff. I miss it. Nothing like laying somebody out. You guys win tonight?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I like hearing that.” Hawkins straightens up. “You got any tattoos, Jessup?”
Jessup is shoving the insurance and registration into the glove box, and he tries not to let on that he’s confused by the question. “Sir? Uh, no, sir. No tattoos.”
“No Celtic cross? No eighty-eights? No fourteen or Sieg Heil? None of that white power bullshit?”
100%
The cop asks the question, but Jessup is thinking about walking with Deanne last Sunday. They were up in the university’s bird sanctuary, holding hands. Still warm. Leaves on the trees. The path didn’t have any discernible reason for twisting this way or that. They stopped deep in the woods and Deanne sat on a downed tree that formed a natural bench. Jessup was standing between her legs, kissing her, his hand under her shirt, when he felt something watching them. He opened his eyes and saw a big buck barely fifteen feet from him, the kind of rack you mount and display as a trophy. He wished he had his rifle. He whispered to Deanne, and the two of them just stared at the deer until, after thirty, forty seconds, the buck turned and walked away. He thinks of the way the buck sized them up, trying to figure out if they were a threat or not. He can’t decide how he feels about this cop, so he closes the glove box and sits up straight. He keeps his torso forward, puts his hands back on the wheel, turns his head to look at Hawkins, keeps his voice flat.
“No, sir. No tattoos.” Thinks of David John’s tattoos. On his back, “Blessed Church of the White America” circling a flaming cross—the exact same as what Ricky got, a big deal when he was old enough to get one to match David John’s, Jessup for years thinking he’d get one, too, when David John said he was old enough, though with both him and Ricky, David John expressed some doubts—an iron eagle complete with swastika high up on his stepfather’s right shoulder, double SS lightning bolts on his left pec with “fgrn”—For God, Race, and Nation—inked below, over his heart. Wonders if David John got any new tattoos in prison. Ricky wrote that he’d had a spiderweb tattooed around his elbow by one of the guys in his crew. “Not yet.”
“You don’t remember me, do you?”
There’s a flicker, something approaching a memory, but Jessup can’t place it.
“That’s a good thing, then. Not the worst thing to blend in. Piece of advice for you, Jessup. Skip the tattoos. Makes it too easy to flush you out. You get yourself a big old one hundred percent on your shoulder and then try to join the army? Put a swastika on your forearm and then try to become a cop? They look for that stuff. Pride is important, but it’s not always a bad thing to work in the background, keep your head down until you’re needed.” Hawkins has one hand resting on the windowsill, has the thumb of his other hand tucked into his belt, above his gun. “Tell you what. I’ll write you up a warning. No ticket, no fine. You get that taillight fixed first thing in the morning. And tell David John that Paul Hawkins says welcome home and that I expect I’ll see him at church on Sunday.”
MINUS FIVE
He has to sit for a few minutes and wait for Hawkins to write up the warning. Hawkins hands over the piece of paper, tells Jessup to drive safe, and then saunters back to his cruiser. He pulls out and is past Jessup before Jessup starts driving. Jessup holds the warning in his hand. It’s not a ticket, but he’s not really sure if he can just throw it away, so he places it in the slot above the stereo.
By the time he gets to Victoria Wallace’s place, the party is well under way. The house is out past the university, out in the country a few miles, but not the kind of country that Jessup lives in. Victoria’s house is set on at least twenty acres. It’s the property that you buy when you can afford not to have neighbors. The house is at least two hundred yards from the road. As he turns off and heads up the driveway, he takes in the view: the university, the town of Cortaca, the lake. The property is on a rise. There’s an open field that starts flat but then turns steep off the city side of the driveway, dropping headlong into a thick corset of forest. The house and the driveway sit high enough up that it’s a clear view for a dozen miles.
The house itself is all glass and m
etal, but it’s built to resemble a farmhouse. Resemble, but Jessup thinks it’s only a passing resemblance. It looks like what a man who’d never worked on a farm would build. Beautiful in its way, easy to imagine it on the cover of one of those home magazines one rack over from the outdoor magazines at the bookstore. It’s the kind of house his mother cleans, but he can’t imagine ever living in a place like this. With all those windows, the gas bills in the winter must run more than what Jessup’s mom pays for the mortgage and taxes combined on their place.
Victoria is a junior. Her mom is a professor at Cortaca University—of what, Jessup doesn’t know—and her dad does something that lets him work from home. Whatever it is, they’re rich. Victoria drives the smaller, high-end, Volvo SUV. Brand-new. This after she totaled her first car, a Honda that had also been new. Jessup is friends with her boyfriend, Aaron Burns, and he’s been in the Volvo a couple of times with them. Leather seats and wood trim, chrome on the outside. He looked it up: close to sixty grand the way she was rolling in it.
Victoria’s parents are in the city for the weekend—they have a two-bedroom condo there and go down most weekends, so this isn’t the first time Victoria has thrown a party—and there are at least seventy kids inside the house already. Jessup figures another fifty before the night is over. Cortaca’s football team only carries forty guys, and most of them will come out, bringing girlfriends and buddies, and Victoria’s friends and people who just heard about it. Jessup will know everybody here.
NEAR DARKNESS
There’s a long line of cars and trucks off the high side of the driveway, and Jessup does a K-turn before parking his truck so that he’s set up to head out when Deanne is ready to leave the party. He pulls the warning from the slot, looks at it again for a second, then returns it to the glove box and gets out of the truck. Before closing the door, he reaches behind the seat and touches the game ball. Wishes Deanne had seen her father hugging him like that. I’m proud of you, son.
It’s dark as shit where he is. The lights from the house don’t even come close to cutting through the darkness. He’s on the high side of the driveway and he takes a few seconds to look across and out, the way the grass runs down like a ski slope, steep into the woods, the view over the city, the water. The house is oriented to take advantage of the views, so most of the windows are turned away from the driveway, but the house is still a beacon on the hill.
He pulls out his phone to use it as a flashlight. The snow is rutted on the driveway and deep enough in the grass where he’s parked that his feet would have gotten wet if he wasn’t wearing his Timberlands. The boots are in rough shape, but he got them at the university yard sale at the beginning of last year for six bucks. Maybe now that David John is back, Jessup thinks. Save up his paycheck from the movie theater for a couple of weeks and buy a pair brand-new. What would that run him? One twenty? One fifty? A splurge. He walks to the back of the truck and looks at the shattered taillight. Forty bucks right there. Asshole. Before heading into the house, he shrugs off his jacket and tosses it on the passenger seat where his gloves are. Doesn’t bother locking the door. Could leave the keys in the ignition and nobody would steal the thing.
He’s cold by the time he gets to the house, the walk from his truck up the driveway a hundred yards, near darkness the whole way except for the light from his phone. Wishes he’d worn his coat. Inside, he stomps his boots clean in the entrance hall, a thicket of coats and bags on the floor. Bumps knuckles as he walks through, Mike Crean wrapping him up in a hug designed to pop your ribs. A lot of “atta boys” for the fumble recovery and touchdown. The front hall leads into a single, giant, open room. The kitchen is separated from the living space by a counter made of dark stone, and the appliances look they come from the future. Jessup bets the dishwasher costs more than his mom earns in two months. The dining area is simple, just a sideboard and a table that isn’t overbearing. Instead of a massive landscape for candelabras and two dozen guests, it’s a table that has chairs for eight, a sleek piece of glass and steel, the glass looking like it’s floating. Victoria has the table loaded up with bowls of pretzels, chips and salsa, cookies, a vegetable tray on a silver platter. Napkins fanned out like something from a magazine. Parroting the parties she’s seen her parents throw. The sitting area has a sectional and a couple of chairs, one of them leather and beat-up-enough-looking that Jessup wouldn’t have bothered stopping to pick up if it was free on the side of the road, but it’s evidently a piece of vintage furniture, cost five grand. The large, open room is easily twice as big as the double-wide trailer Jessup lives in, except that the ceiling jumps two stories high, and there’s floor-to-ceiling glass so that you can see the whole of Cortaca laid out below. Victoria lives in a castle.
There’s a keg out on the deck—somebody’s older brother came through— but he’s not a drinker. Ricky made him promise. Jessup might not remember much of his mother’s drinking, but Ricky does. Doesn’t bother Jessup to abstain. He’s taken sips of beer here and there. Tastes like dog piss. Wyatt tells him you grow to like it, but Jessup figures, what’s the point of learning to like something nasty? He steps out, takes a cup, but then brings it around the counter to the kitchen sink and fills it up with water. He likes having something in his hand.
He’s standing a few steps out of the kitchen area, looking around to see if Deanne is there yet, when he sees the gang of boys and an equal number of girls come through the door. The boys, five of them, are all wearing Kilton Valley jackets. Kevin Corson in the front.
MINUS FOUR
He’s decided to avoid trouble and just leave the party—text Deanne and meet her somewhere else—when he feels a hand slap down on his shoulder. Wyatt.
“Kind of ballsy, huh?” Wyatt moves his hand from Jessup’s shoulder and clamps it on the back of Jessup’s neck. This is his way of being friendly. He looks across the room with Jessup at the crowd of boys and girls from Kilton Valley. The boys move slow, looking around, casing it out, but the girls come in bubbly and chatting, colliding with five or six girls from Cortaca High in a pileup of hugging and kissing. “Aaron said that Victoria goes to camp with one of the girlfriends and they all know each other or something, so she invited them to the party. Don’t think they would have been dumb enough to come if they’d won, but nobody’s going to bother stirring up trouble with the losers.”
“To the victor go the spoils,” Jessup says.
Wyatt gives a rough squeeze. “Now, don’t go doing that sort of shit, Jessup. I hate it when you go all gnostic on me. What do you mean, ‘To the victor go the spoils’? I know what it means, but what’s it supposed to mean?”
Jessup slides out from Wyatt’s arm. “You know, just because you learn a new word doesn’t mean you need to use it all the time. And if you are going to use it, at least use it right. I took AP Global same as you. You can’t just slide in ‘gnostic’ when you mean mystic or mysterious. Beside which, you ever think that you not understanding something might not be because I said something cryptic? Maybe you don’t understand it because you’re dumb.”
It’s an old joke, which is why it’s still funny, and Wyatt ruffles Jessup’s hair. Which he knows Jessup hates. Which is why he does it. Which is why that’s funny, too. Wyatt doesn’t get it as bad from the teachers as Jessup does in school, but that’s because Wyatt flies below the radar. His mom’s a bookkeeper and his dad works steady as a mechanic. He lives in Cortaca proper, on city sewer and water, and even though he loves to hunt and can bag a deer from four hundred yards no problem—he’s the best shot of anybody Jessup knows—he doesn’t wear camo to school. Gets B grades across the board. Not interested in anything better than that. That’s good enough to play football at UConn, and he’s already looked into dental school: only needs a B+ average in college for that. Does just well enough that the teachers ignore him, Blessed Church of the White America or not, though it’s not a thing you can tell just by looking. Jessup thinks of that and then thinks of
the cop, Hawkins, telling him not to get tattoos. If it weren’t for what Ricky did, Jessup could fly below the radar, too, but what’s done is done, and the teachers get angry at Jessup all the time, as if it’s some sort of insult to them that he’s earning A grades, like they can’t understand why he isn’t as dumb as he’s supposed to be.
“Eh,” Wyatt says, “fuck ’em. We won, they lost. What are they going to do? Lose again?”
MINUS THREE
Before he can think better of it, Jessup tells Wyatt what happened in the parking lot between him and Corson. He sticks pretty close to the truth. Makes himself sound a little better, Corson a little worse.
Says, “I would have kicked his ass, but there was a cop was sitting right there.”
“Come on,” Wyatt says. “Need more beer.”
Jessup follows Wyatt onto the deck. The snow has slowed down enough that it might as well have stopped. There’s a cluster of boys from the team leaning against the railing and looking out at the lights of Cortaca dripping across the landscape below. Cortaca Lake is a dark spill of ink. Derek Lemper is holding two beers and laughing. He’s topless for some reason, despite the cold, his gut spilling out.
Wyatt reaches for the tap to fill his cup. “Sweet Jesus, Jessup, can you think of anything worse than Derek topless?”
Jessup takes a sip of his water. It’s refreshing out on the deck. “Worse than Derek topless? Derek without pants is no picnic either.”
They both laugh. Jessup puts his cup on the railing and then places both his hands flat while Wyatt messes with the tap, trying to get more beer than foam.
The sky is dark with clouds, but the city and the university are a galaxy of stars, dorms lit up and stadium lights tunneling out of the darkness by the soccer fields, the hotels near the downtown core with gap-toothed grins, open and closed curtains, people getting ready for a late night out, others already in bed for the evening, streetlights and houses lit up, the sparkling blue of a snowplow clearing off Route 13.
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