The Drowning Game

by LS Hawker

  MR. DOOLEY WHISTLED tunelessly between his teeth as he walked leisurely across the office floor. As quietly as I could, I stacked the file folders back in the box, closed it up and replaced the tape.

  I remembered how creaky the stairs were, but I placed my feet on the outer edges of them where they were less likely to make noise. They weren’t sound-­free, but it was better. It didn’t hurt that Mr. Dooley kept his radio going all the time. Down I went, little by little, until I got to the ground floor. Now I had to get out the front door without him seeing me. I got on my back and reverse-­army-­crawled toward the door, my bag on my stomach.

  When I got there, I took my time getting to my feet. I crouched behind the three-­foot-­high counter until his phone rang.

  “Dooley,” he said.

  I put the bag strap over my head, filled my lungs with air, exhaled and slowly depressed the thumb button on the door handle in increments, pulling the door toward me in slow motion—­

  Which rang the bell over the door, something I’d somehow forgotten about in just four minutes.

  I heard Mr. Dooley get to his feet.

  “Come on in,” he called.

  I slipped out the door and walked toward the yellow pickup truck.

  PETTY LOOKED UP and down the street once after exiting Dooley’s office and then got in the truck.

  She had a soft briefcase-­type bag with her, and it was bulging.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “A bag,” Petty said.

  I glanced over my shoulder to back out of the space, then looked forward as the door to Dooley’s office opened once again and Dooley himself appeared with his phone pressed to his ear. He twisted his head left then right, his mouth moving the whole time. I turned to ask Petty where she wanted to go just as she ducked her head, as if searching for something she’d dropped below the seat.

  “Um, Petty?” I said.

  Without really moving her lips, Petty said, “Go.”

  “Go?” I echoed stupidly. What did she think I was doing? But then I saw Dooley walking toward us, a grimace on his face, and suddenly I knew.

  “What were you doing in Dooley’s office?” I reached for the bag.

  She covered her face with her hand and said, “Go, Dekker, please.”

  “Not until you tell me—­”

  Suddenly, Petty removed a handgun from inside her zippered hoodie and shoved the muzzle into my hip.

  “Go,” she said.

  Waves of panic spread from the place on my leg where the pistol touched, and my muscles locked up. And all I could think was, I knew it. What I supposedly knew, though, I couldn’t have said. I stared at Petty, outraged.

  “I didn’t want to have to do this,” she said through gritted teeth. “Go now, before Mr. Dooley sees me, or I’ll shoot you. Believe me. I’ll do it.”

  I believed her. With more calm than I felt, I smoothly backed out of the space then put the truck in gear and drove the twenty-­five-­mile-­an-­hour speed limit toward the cemetery.

  Spots pulsed at the edges of my vision. The center of my universe was that quarter-­inch round spot on my hip. When I thought I could trust my voice, I said, “I’m going to drive you out to Highway 16 and I’m going to let you out. I won’t tell anyone anything. I don’t know what kind of trouble you’re in, but I’d rather not get involved.”

  This had to be some kind of weird militia shit, some mission she was carrying out on behalf of her insane dead father.

  In my rearview mirror I saw Dooley standing on the sidewalk, talking into his phone and gesturing. I refocused through the windshield on a red Dodge Ram driving toward us. It looked like Randy King’s. Beside me, Petty folded in half, her face to the seat.

  “What the hell, Petty?”

  “Keep going,” she said.

  I trained my eyes on the road, grinding my teeth.

  “Is that red pickup gone?” she asked.

  My eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. “Yes.”

  Petty sat up. “Drive me to Salina.”

  “You want to rephrase that as a question?”

  It was clear from her expression she had no idea what I was talking about.

  “How about a please, at least?”

  Still, she said nothing.

  “Fuck you,” I said. “I’m not doing shit for you after you . . .”

  I’d never, in my twenty-­two years, ever said “fuck you” to a girl. Not even in jest. My hands shook with rage and fear, my face was hot and my eyes watery.

  “I didn’t want it to be you,” Petty said. “When I called the grocery I didn’t know it would be you.”

  “Well, that makes two of us.”

  “If you’ll take me to Salina, I’ll give you every cent I have. I’ve got twenty-­six dollars. I need to pawn some things and then get on a bus out of town.”

  “What?” I wiped at my eyes, but I didn’t care that I looked like I was crying. “Everybody was right. You and your old man are fucking bat-­shit insane. I mean, here it is, in living color. Holy shit. I can’t believe this.”

  “Please, Dekker. I am begging you.”

  “Women and drama. They go together like—­like—­I’m doing just like I said. I’m dumping you off at 16 and good fucking riddance to you, you psycho.”

  She withdrew the gun from my leg and pointed it at my head.

  “Drive me to Nick’s Pawnshop in Salina. I’ll sell my stuff, I’ll pay you for your time and gas, and then you can go. Do it, or I will shoot you. I’m fucking bat-­shit insane, and I will shoot you.”

  I hated the ragged, desperate sound of my own breathing, but I hated her more. It felt like the flesh of my face had been drained of blood, tight against my cheekbones. If I hadn’t been clutching the steering wheel so tight, my hands would have been shaking hard enough to knock me to the ground. I should drive her straight to the cop shop over in Niobe, but she’d know where I was going, and I believed she wouldn’t hesitate to blow my head off. I cursed myself for trying to help her in the bank yesterday, helpless in the presence of a pretty girl. So I kept driving, unable to do anything else.

  My phone buzzed, startling me, making me jump, and I was afraid the movement would make Petty’s gun go off. I started to reach for it, but Petty said, “Don’t answer that.”

  “It’s my boss,” I said.

  She pushed the barrel into my temple again. “Don’t.”

  “Okay. Shit.”

  After a bit, Petty’s gun was no longer aimed at my head, but it was close enough to take care of business if necessary. I drove five minutes longer as waves of nausea rolled through me. When I couldn’t hold it any longer, I pulled to the side of the road.

  “What are you doing?” Petty said, raising the gun again.

  “Permission to vomit, please,” I said, then threw open the door and threw up.

  Chapter 12

  “LET'S GO,” PETTY said.

  “Hurff,” I said. The wind blew and the occasional car or semi rushing by intensified it.

  “Come on,” Petty said, nudging me in the back with her gun.

  I was in no position to have a conversation at this point. I held up a hand as I spat and rubbed my mouth with my sleeve. I closed the door, staring out the windshield.

  “I think you should get out of my truck,” I said.

  “You’d better—­”

  “You’re not going to shoot me,” I said. I hoped saying it would make it true. “Get out of my truck. I don’t care where you go, but you’re not going there in my truck.”

  “Go now!”

  “Get out of my fucking—­” As I turned, I saw a red truck pulling up behind us. Curiosity quelled my anger temporarily. Hadn’t it been going the opposite direction down Main Street only moments ago?

  “Hey,” I said. “Here comes Randy King�
��s—­”

  Petty dove to the floor of the cab, curled into a smaller ball than I would have thought possible, and pulled her bag on top of herself.

  “Petty, why—­” I looked up in time to see Randy pull up beside me, the passenger window level with mine. In the seat was Keith Dooley. He rolled his window down and grinned expectantly at me. I was ready to signal with my eyes that Petty was on the floor of the Toyota, because surely she wouldn’t shoot me in front of two witnesses. But something stopped me.

  “Hey,” Randy said around Dooley. I’d always known who Randy King the Militia Man was but had never actually met him.

  “Hi, Dekker,” Dooley said. “How are you today?”

  “Fine,” I said out the window, my tongue thick and abraded from puking. I wondered if the lawyer could smell the fresh vomit on the road directly below his face, and the thought horrified me.

  “Was that Petty Moshen I saw in your truck earlier?” Dooley asked.

  “Yeah,” I said without hesitation. “She needed a ride.”

  “A ride? From where? To where?”

  “From her house to . . . town, I guess.”

  Dooley glanced over his shoulder at Randy, whose mustache twitched.

  “And what happened when you got to town?”

  This was strangely reminiscent of TV court cross-­examinations, and my guts started rolling again. “She got out of the truck.”

  I watched Dooley rise almost imperceptibly in his seat, trying to see into the Toyota. Maybe Stockholm syndrome had already set in, because I was careful not to shift my gaze, not to look at my passenger hiding on the floor, and my eyes watered with the effort.

  “Where is she now?” Randy asked me.

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Where’d you leave her off?”

  “On Main Street.”

  “On Main Street,” Randy said, almost mockingly. “Where on Main Street?”

  “Son,” Dooley said. “You need to know something about Petty Moshen. She’s not well. She’s not right in the head. Sad but true. I advise you to not take any more delivery calls from her. She’s unstable. You might have heard about the incident a few years back at the dump. She can be dangerous.”

  Of course I remembered the incident at the dump. Everybody did. Justin Pencey and a few of his brain-­dead pals went out to the dump to torment her but got more than they bargained for. Justin had told everyone that she’d attacked them for no reason, but no one who knew Justin actually believed this. Still, it hadn’t stopped everyone from embellishing the story to paint Petty as a monster freak.

  So “dangerous” seemed a bit of an overdramatic interpretation. “Defending herself” was more like it. This further put me on alert.

  “She’s actually retarded or autistic. Something like that,” Randy put in.

  Dooley looked back at Randy, annoyed. “In any event,” he said, “if you know where she is, you need to tell us so we can help her.”

  Randy put his hand on Dooley’s arm. “We’re wasting our time,” he said. “Don’t worry. We’ll find her. She can’t get far.”

  His weird confidence seemed to confirm my intuition. I knew Petty was strange, but it wasn’t like she hadn’t been provoked that day at the dump. It wasn’t like that behavior came out of nowhere. And I got a major bully vibe off Randy. Plus Dooley was a lawyer. So fuck them.

  My phone buzzed again. Candace would be throwing a rod back at the grocery, wondering where I was, what was taking so long.

  “Aren’t you going to answer that?” Dooley said.

  “Nope,” I said.

  We stared at each other until the phone quit buzzing.

  “Well,” I said, taking a Camel from the console, lighting it up and blowing a lungful of smoke into the Ram. “I don’t know what to tell you. I’m just out making a delivery. So I’m going to go on ahead now. Good luck to you.” I rolled up my window and, without letting my eyes drift downward, accelerated out from the roadblock of the Dodge Ram and back onto the two-­lane highway.

  Neither of us spoke for several minutes, and Petty didn’t rise from the floor.

  “So what kind of trouble are you in?” I said. “Come up here. The coast is clear, or whatever.”

  Petty climbed up in the seat and looked out through the back window. She turned, sat and buckled up.

  “That was, like, beyond weird,” I said.

  Petty was silent.

  “Do you want to hear what they said?”

  “No.”

  Why didn’t she want to know? I’d never met someone so untalkative. So literal and awkward. So uninquisitive. I, on the other hand, was burning with curiosity. But I held off for a while. Finally, I said, “Why is . . . Randy King so interested in where you are?”

  Petty winced.

  “I mean, he really, really wants to know where you are. I mean, really.”

  “I know.”

  I finished my cigarette and flicked it out the window. I drove silently for several minutes, thinking about all the possible reasons two men with as little in common as Dooley and Randy King would be hunting an awkward, isolated, grieving girl, and couldn’t come up with anything. If she’d killed someone or robbed a bank, they would have flat-­out said so. And actually, the cops would be the ones out searching. My sense of injustice was ruffled, so I turned my head toward Petty and said, “You can put the gun away. I’ll take you to Salina. But then I want you out of my truck. I don’t know what kind of shit you’re mixed up in, but I don’t need it. My life is starting to turn around, and I don’t need any drama to fuck it up. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Petty said.

  “Good.”

  Another fifteen minutes went by before I spoke again. “You burglarized Dooley’s office, didn’t you? That’s what it is, right?”

  But if that’s what it was, why was Randy King involved?

  “No.”

  “What’s all that shit in your bag? You didn’t go into his office with it.”

  Petty sighed. “Things that belonged to my dad.”

  Weirdness on top of weirdness. “Why did Dooley have them?”

  “Long story,” Petty said.

  “WHERE IS THIS pawnshop?” Dekker asked as we drove into Salina an hour later.

  I gave him the address. I kept an eagle eye out, because I didn’t know whether he was going to drive me straight to the police station. But he pulled into the parking lot of a corrugated tin-­shed-­type building with the sign NICK'S PAWNSHOP on the front. I was disappointed. I’d hoped for a pawnshop like those I’d seen on TV. A storefront in an old New York City brick building with the crisscrossed bars over the windows. This building stood alone and seemed fairly new. It also looked so flimsy it would crumple if you leaned on it too hard.

  “Can you help me get some stuff out of my suitcase back there?” I asked. “I need to pawn it.”

  “So you said.”

  “Will you help me?”

  “Why not,” Dekker said. It was not said kindly, more like he didn’t really mean it. But then he smiled. It was going to take me a while to decipher what different tones of voice and facial expressions meant in the real world. I wished I had a chart or something.

  We got out of the truck. I felt stiff and slow after all the stress of the afternoon. I unzipped the suitcase and surveyed my dad’s and my guns. It was the story of my life in firearms.

  “Holy shit,” Dekker said, stepping backward with his hands in the air. “So your dad really was survivalist guy, huh? A John Bircher?”

  “Dad always said it was a dangerous world,” I said. I carefully considered what I wanted to sell and what I would need to keep and use. “Which do you think will bring the most money?”

  Dekker kept his hands up and said, “I don’t know shit about guns.”

  Finally, I chose the 9mm
Sig Sauer P226, the Stoeger Double Defense shotgun, the Bushmaster AR-­15, and the AK-­47. I’d packed each with its registration papers. I left the Winchester rifle, the Mossberg 590 Mariner, and the Weatherby SA-­459 TR.

  “What about the one you got in your holster?” Dekker said. “You gonna sell that one?”

  “No,” I said. “That was the last thing my dad ever gave me.”

  “Just a sentimental fool, wasn’t he?”

  Dekker picked up the AK and the AR and held them like they might explode spontaneously. He went to the door and held it open for me, but I shook my head. He shrugged and went in. I followed, back to the wall, found the exits, located the security cameras, evaluated the threat level. The building had the smell of old dust. I pictured in my mind the kind of guy who would be behind the counter—­a short, round Italian guy with a cigar in the corner of his mouth wearing a Hawaiian shirt. I was of course disappointed again. The guy behind the counter was tall and thin and very white, like most ­people in Kansas, and he was wearing a blue button-­down shirt.

  Dekker laid the guns carefully on top of the glass. I set the dump diamond ring next to them and pulled out the black jewelry box with my engagement ring. I was happy to be rid of the thing—­it felt dirty and evil. If I didn’t need the money so badly, I’d use it for target practice.

  I set the ring box on top of the Bushmaster.

  Dekker raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything.

  I reached inside my pocket and felt my mom’s silver necklace chain. No way would I pawn this, even if it were worth anything.

  The clerk surveyed the collection of stuff, looked up at Dekker and then at me. “Shotgun wedding?”

  “That’s a rifle, not a shotgun,” I said. “There’s a difference. See, a rifle has a—­”

  Dekker burst out laughing. I turned to him, confused, and then saw the clerk was laughing too. He gathered up the gun papers and the rings.

  “Take a look around. I’ll be right back.” He disappeared through a doorway.

  “Did Randy King give you those rings?”

  “One of them,” I said. “The other I found at the dump.”

  “So . . . you’re a runaway bride, is that it?”