The Ones That Got Away

by Stephen Graham Jones

  I made myself walk up the stairs.

  Her door was open.

  I stepped in with the lower portion of my shirt pulled out to hold the broken cameras.

  There were two policemen in the living room.

  “I told you she threw something,” the first cop said, looking at my shirt.

  “Paraphernalia . . . ” the other one said, approaching.

  Lorinda was behind them, on the other side of the couch. She’d been crying. She looked hard at me, trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t get it, not until the police men leaned over the camera parts I had.

  The flyers, my flyers, the homeless men.

  They thought it was me. Because I kept them. Because I fit the profile.

  The second policeman—the one leaning over for the parts—saw it in my eyes the moment I realized it myself: that I was going to run. He took one step back, cocking his arm over his stick, and I flung the camera parts over the room, and the only reason they didn’t catch me right off was that I wasn’t scrambling for the hall, like they expected, but the bedroom.

  I grabbed the flyers off the nightstand, turned hard, and bounced off the wall back into the living room, knocking one of them over, then crashed out onto the balcony, letting all the flyers go, back to the city.

  After about thirty seconds I turned around.

  “You done?” the first policeman asked.

  The other was shaking his head, his hand at his waist.

  “Jeremy Barker?” he said.

  I swallowed.

  “We should take both of you in,” the first officer said, flashing his eyes over at Lorinda. I saw on his pad where it said Linda, her real name.

  “For what?” she said, her voice as small as it could get.

  “The Blue Inn?” the second policeman said. “Nine days ago?”

  I sagged against the rail.

  “Wasn’t me,” I said, the usual line.

  They looked at my scalp, Lorinda too, and I tried to push into their minds the Blue Inn desk jockey, describing me with hair, with all this hair, but it wasn’t working, I could see it in the crook of their elbows, their arms cocked above their pads, their nightsticks, but then down on the street someone screamed, straightening all our backs.

  The two policemen looked at each other, deciding, then the first held his hand out to me, index finger up. “Stay,” he said, and backed out.

  The second one turned to follow, his partner’s footsteps already retreating hard, then asked didn’t he know me from somewhere?

  “Nineteen seventy-eight,” I said, and he looked at me a moment longer, then left.

  We were arsonists, thieves, impersonators, drop-outs. Vegetarians. We fell into bed, the weight of the day pressing on our eyes, and when I woke again it was deep night and Lorinda was shuddering beside me and I held her as close as I could and our mouths found each other and hers was slick with tears and salty and I took them away, into me, and smoothed her hair back, told her everything was going to be all right. But she was shaking her head no.

  “What?” I said.

  Instead of answering, she closed her eyes against my chest—I could feel the lashes, even—and I drifted in and out, and when I came to once, the flyers on the nightstand were fluttering again, and I suddenly couldn’t breathe anymore.

  They were back was the thing.

  Someone had just left them.

  I stood, groping for the bedpost, the wall, then out into the living room.

  The balcony door was open, the curtains wisping through it.

  I parted them, stepped out, and there on the brick was a slab of raw meat. It was almost a relief, to be in one world instead of another. But still. I backed away, to the brick of the building. There was skin on the backside of the slab of meat, I could see it, but more, too: delicate footprints in red, the barest hints of toes. Lorinda’s. And then, with the tip of my tongue, I felt my mouth, my lips. They were crusted, but I corrected myself: congealed.

  This is where she got her protein.

  It was still feeding her.

  It’s happening again, she had said.

  The bloody napkin in the kitchen trash.

  It hadn’t been tears in her mouth.

  I felt back through the balcony door into the darkness of the living room, and the phone was ringing, had been. Once, twice, four times. I looked to the bedroom door, expecting Lorinda to fill it at any moment, standing-still asleep, her mouth red, like all she needed was a kiss to wake up, but the thing about fairy tales is that for every princess there’s a troll, leathery and slight, moving from building top to building top on fingertips and toes.

  No, I shook my head no, please, for her not to rise, then raised the phone to my ear.

  There was a long pause—nothing, nothing—then a voice, a man’s voice, a father: “Jeremy?”

  My lower lip trembled, the room blurred, and I nodded, said it into the phone even, yes, yes, then set the receiver down on the counter and followed the wall around to the molding of the front door, and the line of the jamb down to the handle, and the handle into the hall, and, stumbling out into the street at four in the morning I understood for a moment what it’s like to be lost, to be in the third grade and be lost, gone, disappearing, the only part of you still left a picture on a pole at an intersection as you hunch past with a crowd of students, your backpack slung over your shoulder like the rest, a girl standing on a balcony eight stories above you, waiting to be saved.

  The Ones Who Got Away

  Later we would learn that the guy kept a machete close to his front door. That he kept it there specifically for people like us. For the chance of people like us. That he’d been waiting.

  I was fifteen.

  It was supposed to be a simple thing we were doing.

  In a way, I guess it was. Just not the way Mark had told us it would be.

  If you’re wondering, this is the story of why I’m not a criminal. And also why I pick my pizza up instead of having it delivered. It starts with us getting tighter and tighter with Mark, letting him spot us a bag here, a case there, a ride in-between, until we owe him enough that it’s easier to just do this thing for him than try to scrounge up the cash.

  What you need to know about Mark is that he’s twenty-five, twenty-six, and smart enough not to be in jail yet but stupid enough to be selling out the front door of his apartment.

  Like we were geniuses ourselves, yeah.

  As these things go, what started out as a custody dispute took a complicated turn, and whoever Mark was in the hole with came to him for a serious favor, the kind he couldn’t really say no to. The less he knew, the better.

  What he did know, or at least what he told us, was that somebody needed to have the fear of God placed in them.

  This was what he’d been told.

  In his smoky living room, I’d looked to Tim and he was already pulling his eyes away, focusing on, I don’t know. Something besides me.

  “The fear of God,” though.

  I was stupid enough to ask just what, specifically, that might be. Mark narrowed his eyes in thought, as if considering the many answers. By ten, when I knew it was time to be home already, what the three of us finally hit on as the real and true proper fear of God was to think you’re going to die, to be sure this is the end, and then live.

  We thought we were helping Mark with his dilemma.

  Sitting across from us, he crushed out cigarette after cigarette, squinched his face up as if trying to stay awake. Every few minutes he’d lean his head back and rub the bridge of his nose.

  The trick of this operation was that there couldn’t be any bruises or cuts, nothing that would show in court.

  Of all the things we’d thought of, the knives and guns and nails and fire and acid and, for some reason, a whole series of things involving the tongue and pieces of wire, the only thing that left a mark on just the mind, not the body, was tape. Duct tape. A dollar and change at the convenience store.

  This is how you
plan a kidnapping.

  Mark’s suggestion that it should be us instead of him in the van came down to his knowledge of the law: we were minors. Even if we got caught, it’d get kicked when we turned eighteen.

  To prove this, he told us his own story: at sixteen, he’d killed his step-dad with a hammer because of a bad scene involving a sister, and then just had to spend two years in lock-up.

  Our objection—mine—was that this was all different, wasn’t it? It’s not like we were going to kill anybody.

  So, yeah, I was the first one of us that said it: we.

  If Tim heard it, he didn’t look over.

  The second part of Mark’s argument was What could we really be charged with anyway? Rolling some suit into a van for a joyride?

  The third, more reluctant part had to do with a tally he had in his head of bags we’d taken on credit, cases we’d helped top off, rides we’d bummed.

  Not counting tonight, of course, he added. Because we were his friends.

  The rest of it, the next eighteen hours, was nothing big. Looking back, I know my heart should have been hammering the whole time, that I shouldn’t have been able to talk to my parents in the kitchen, shouldn’t have been able to hold food down, shouldn’t have been able to stop fidgeting long enough to concentrate on any shows.

  The truth of it is that there were long stretches in there where I didn’t even think about what we were doing that night.

  It was just going to be a thing, a favor, nothing. Then we’d have a clean tab with Mark, and Mark would have a clean tab with whoever he owed, and maybe it even went farther up than that.

  Nicholas, of course—it was his parent’s front door we were already aimed at—he was probably doing all the little kid things he was supposed to be doing for those eighteen hours: cartoons, cereal, remote control cars. Baseball in the yard with the old man, who, then anyway, was still just a dad. Just catching bad throws, trying to coach them better.

  At five after six, Tim called me.

  Mark had just called him, from a payphone.

  We had a pizza to deliver.

  On the pockmarked coffee table in Mark’s apartment was all we were going to need: two rolls of duct tape, two pairs of gloves, and an old pizza bag from a place that had shut its doors back when Tim and me’d been in junior high.

  The gloves were because tape was great for prints, Mark told us.

  What that said to us was that he wasn’t setting us up. That he really would be doing this himself, if he didn’t want to help us out.

  Like I said, we were fifteen.

  Tim still is.

  The van Mark had for us was primer black, no chrome, so obviously stolen that my first impulse was to cruise the bowling alley, nod to Sherry and the rest of the girls, then just keep driving.

  If the van were on a car lot in some comedy sketch, where there’s car lots that cater to bad guys, the salesmen would look back to the van a few times for the jittery, ski-masked kidnappers, and keep shaking his head, telling them they didn’t want that one, no. That one was only for serious kidnappers. Cargo space like that? Current tags? Thin hotel mattresses inside, to muffle sound?

  No, no, the one they wanted, it was this hot little number he’d just gotten in yesterday.

  Then, when the kidnappers fell in with him, to see this hot little number, one would stay behind, his ski-mask eyes still locked on the van.

  The reason he’s wearing a ski mask, of course, is that he’s me.

  What I was thinking was that this could work, that we could really do this.

  Instead of giving us a map or note, Mark followed us out to the curb, his head ducked into his shoulders the way it did anytime he was outside, like he knew God was watching, or he had a bad history with birds. He told Tim the address, then told Tim to say it back.

  2243 Hickory.

  It was up on the hill, a rich place.

  “Sure about this?” Mark asked as we were climbing into the van.

  I smiled a criminal smile, the kind where just one side of your mouth goes up, and didn’t answer him.

  2243 Hickory. A lawyer’s house, probably.

  We were supposed to take whoever answered the door. Nothing about it that wasn’t going to be easy.

  To make it more real, we stopped for a pizza to put in the pizza bag. It took all the money we had on us, but this was serious business. Another way to look at it was we were paying twelve dollars for all the weed and beer and gas Mark had burned on our undeserving selves.

  In which case it was a bargain.

  The smell of pizza filled the van.

  On the inside of his forearm, Tim had written the address. Instead of “Hickory,” though, he’d just put “H.” All he’d have to do would be lick it a couple of times and it’d be gone.

  Like 2243H meant anything anyway.

  Then, I mean.

  Now I drive past that house at least once a month.

  We finally decided it should be Tim who went to the door. Because he already had a windbreaker on, like pizza guys maybe wore once upon a time. And because he had an assistant manager haircut. And because I said that I would do all the taping and sit on the guy in the back while we drove around.

  How I was going to get the tape started with my gloved fingers, who knew?

  How I was going to stop crying down my throat was just as much a mystery.

  In the van, Tim walking up the curved sidewalk to the front door, I was making deals with anybody who would listen.

  They weren’t listening, though.

  Or, they didn’t hear that I was including Tim in the deals as well.

  Or that I meant to, anyway.

  As for the actual house we went to, it was 2234 Hickory, not 2243 like it should have been. Just a couple of numbers flipped. Tim would probably say that they were all the same house anyway, right? Up there on the hill? If he could still say.

  As to what happened with whatever custody case we were supposed to be helping with, I never knew, and don’t have any idea how to find out. But I do know that the name associated with the property records for 2243 Hickory wasn’t a lawyer like we thought, but a family court judge.

  We were supposed to have grabbed his wife, his daughter, his beagle.

  I’ve seen them through their front window on Thanksgiving eight times now.

  They’re happy, happy enough, and I’m happy for them.

  All this happiness.

  When I finally made it back to Mark’s the week after, somebody else answered the door. He had all different furniture behind him, like the girl at the portrait studio had rolled down a different background.

  What I did was nod, wave an apology, then spin on my heel—very cool, very criminal—walk away.

  What I would be wearing when I did that was a suit, for Tim. Or, for his family, really, who had no idea I’d been there that night.

  Anything I could have said to them, it wouldn’t have helped.

  This is the part of the story where I tell about meeting Tim in the third grade, I know. And all our forts and adventures and girlfriends, and how we were family for each other when our families weren’t.

  But that’s not part of this.

  I owe him that much.

  We should have cruised the bowling alley on the way up the hill that night, though. One last time. We should have coasted past the glass doors in slow-motion, our teeth set, our hands out the open window, palms to the outsides of the van doors as if holding them shut.

  The girls we never married would still be talking about us. We’d be the standard they measure their husbands against now. The ones who got away.

  But now I’m just not wanting to tell the rest.

  It happens anyway, I guess.

  Nicholas answers the door in his sock feet, and Tim holds the pizza up in perfect imitation of a thousand deliveries, says some made-up amount of dollars.

  Then, when Nicholas leans over to see the pizza sign on the van, Tim does it, just as Mark played it out for us f
ifty times: spins the pizza into the house like a frisbee, so everybody’ll be looking at it, instead of him and who he’s dragging through the front door.

  On top of the pizza, stuck there with a toothpick, is the envelope Mark said we had to leave.

  Putting it inside the box was our idea.

  It was licked shut, but we knew what it said: if you want whoever we’ve got back, then do this, that, or whatever.

  As the pizza floated through the door, I saw me in the back of the van with Nicholas, playing games until midnight. Making friends. Tim driving and driving.

  We were doing him a favor, really, Nicholas. Giving him a story for school.

  But then the pizza hit, slid to its stop down the tiled hall of that house.

  Mark was twelve miles away, maybe more.

  I was only just then realizing that.

  The way some things happen is like dominoes falling. Which I know I should be able to say something better, but that’s really all it was. Nothing fancy.

  Domino one: the pizza lands.

  Domino two: Nicholas, who’d turned to track the pizza, turns back to Tim, like to see if this is a joke, only stops with his head halfway around, like he’s seeing somebody else now.

  Domino three: Tim leans forward, to hug Nicholas close to him, start running back to the van.

  Domino four: what I used to think was the contoured leg of a kitchen table, but now know to be one of those fancy wooden pepper grinders (my wife brought one home from the crafts superstore; I threw up, left the room), it comes fast and level around the frame of the door, connects with Tim’s face, his head popping back from it.

  Domino five, the last domino: Tim, maybe—hopefully—unconscious, being dragged into the house by Nicholas’s father, who looks long at the van before closing the door.

  The reason I can tell myself that Tim was unconscious is the simple fact that Nicholas’s father didn’t come out for me too. Which is a question he would had to have asked, a question Tim wouldn’t have been able to lie about, even if he tried: whether he was alone.

  So what I do now is convince myself he was knocked out. That he didn’t have to feel what happened to him over the next forty-five minutes, like Nicholas did. Or saw, anyway. Maybe was even forced to see.