by Carolee Dean
I park around back, wondering if Eight Ball is inside the house, holding Levida and Wade and Dorie hostage.
Getting out of the truck, I shut the door as quietly as I can, praying that whoever is inside didn’t see me coming up the road, knowing I could never be that lucky. Baby Face greets me, wagging her tail, whining in agitation.
“Shhh!” I tell her, scratching her neck to calm her so she won’t make any noise. Then I go into the workshop, looking for something I might use as a weapon. I sort through the various tools and find a long-handled screwdriver. It won’t do much against guns and switchblades, but it’s all I’ve got.
Walking silently out of the workshop, I enter the house through the back door, thinking maybe I can surprise whoever is inside.
There are voices coming from the living room. Women’s voices. I inch my way through the kitchen, past the refrigerator and the butcher block. I open a drawer. Take out a knife and hold it out in front of me, along with the screwdriver. Then the living room comes into view and I see …
Jess.
I quickly set down the weapons on the bar.
She looks up. Sees me. Jumps up from the couch. Runs into my arms. Wraps herself around me. Holds me so tight I feel all the scattered pieces of myself coming back together. Feel myself becoming solid again. Her hair is silk and she smells like fresh rain.
“How did you get here?” I ask.
“My emergency credit card. I flew to Houston and rented a car. Dylan, I’ve been so worried about you.”
Levida, who is standing now, crosses her arms against her chest and glares at me. “Wanted by the law for armed robbery. I guess the apple don’t fall far from the tree.”
“How did you find me?” I ask Jess.
“When you told me you were in Texas, I knew you’d come looking for your father. Livingston is where they keep the men on death row, so I figured if I hung out there, I would eventually find you.”
“You were the one who followed me the other day.”
“Yes, but then I lost you.”
If Jess could find me, so could anybody else who might be looking.
“If there’s one thing I won’t abide, it’s a liar,” says Levida.
“What happened that night, Dylan? What really happened?”
I look at Wade, sitting on the couch holding hands with Dorie, and my friend looks down at the carpet, as if the pattern of the old braided rug is taking all his concentration.
“You been runnin’ from the law this whole time,” Levida says. “Bringin’ more shame and humiliation to this family.”
“I didn’t rob that liquor store,” I say, feeling like I’m at the bottom of a swimming pool, unable to breathe. I glare at Wade, who looks up at me, then looks away just as quickly.
“Why should I believe you when your entire life is a lie?” Levida fumes. “Pretending to need glasses because you don’t know how to read.”
“Don’t talk to him that way,” Jess says. “You don’t know anything about him. He’s not a bad person. And of course he can read. He’s a poet.” Jess looks up at me and smiles.
She must have read the poems in my leather journal, printed there by my reading teacher. She must have seen her name above that sappy love poem. Now my humiliation is utter, complete, and final.
“Go ahead and tell your girlfriend the truth,” says Levida. “If it’s possible for anything honest to come out of your lyin’, filthy mouth. It’s all just lies upon lies upon lies, ain’t it?”
I look from Jess to Levida to Wade and Dorie, who are all staring at me expectantly.
Levida reaches down to grab her black leather Bible off the coffee table. She opens it and thrusts it at me. “Go on and read it. Prove me wrong. And don’t give me that lame excuse about needin’ glasses.”
“I can’t read it.” I admit to her, to them all. “I mean, I could, if I had long enough. I could make out the words, but I probably wouldn’t understand them.”
“But … your poems,” says Jess, a look on her face of total betrayal. And I feel myself slipping away again.
“I think it’s about time for you to be movin’ on, boy,” my grandmother says, snapping shut the Bible.
“I didn’t rob that liquor store,” I tell Jess.
She takes a step away from me, still looking confused and hurt. “You were the one person I thought was genuine. I don’t know what to believe. I don’t even know who you are.”
“Tell them, Wade,” I plead to my friend.
“He’s tellin’ the truth,” Wade says. “He didn’t have nothin’ to do with that robbery.”
“I doubt Dylan even knows what the truth is,” says Levida. “You got thirty minutes to get your gear and clear out. I don’t want to see your face on this farm or in this town ever again. Do you understand me?”
“I understand.” I’ll get my car and I’ll leave. That will be better for everyone.
“No, wait, please,” Wade says, looking at Dorie and then Levida. “It was me. It was all my doing. I robbed the liquor store. Dylan didn’t know what I was planning. He was just driving the car.” Wade goes on to tell all the details of how he was trying to become a member of the BSB. How they wouldn’t take him unless I joined up too. How they cornered us in the park and pulled a knife on him. How I punched Two Tone and saved him. But he leaves out the part about Two Tone dying.
When he is finished, both Jess and Levida are looking at him in total disgust. Dorie seems confused, like she can’t decide what to think.
“You’re one helluva friend, aren’t you?” says Levida.
“I’ve found the Lord and changed my ways. I’m saved now.” Wade smiles pathetically.
“And the good Lord forgives you, baby,” Dorie says, clutching his hand ever tighter. “I forgive you too.”
“The good Lord may forgive you, and the preacher’s daughter may forgive you, but don’t expect the same from me, boy,” Levida tells him. “All y’all can just hightail it off my property!” she yells at the lot of us. Then she storms out the back door.
I follow her outside to the workshop, where she grabs a shovel hanging on the wall. She spins around to face me so fast she almost hits me with it. “You don’t back down, do you?” she yells.
“I’m the one who shot Jack,” I say, and the words stick in my throat like a pill that won’t go down. “My father says it was a Colombian, but he’s lying. I remember I was there. I remember getting the gun.”
Levida looks me up and down, and then rests the shovel against the wall. “You didn’t shoot him.”
“There was a lot of confusion. It was dark, and I was scared out of my mind. I didn’t know he was a cop.”
She shakes her head. “The authorities never would have prosecuted you. There was no need for D.J. to lie to protect you if you were the shooter.”
“My father was trying to save me.”
“From what?”
“I don’t know. From being emotionally scarred.”
“Oh, like you haven’t been emotionally scarred by havin’ a daddy locked up in prison.”
I have to think about this. She’s right, of course. I was a little kid. They wouldn’t have put me in jail, but I can’t shake the feeling that my father was trying to protect someone. “I don’t know. I guess he had his reasons.”
“I’m sure he had his reasons. I just don’t believe you’ve figured them out yet.”
I should feel relieved, I guess, but I don’t. Just more confused.
“A .22 might stop a man,” says Levida, “but it won’t kill him, unless the bullet hits him in a vital organ. The heart. The head. You think in all that confusion you had the presence of mind to shoot to kill?”
“It could have been a fluke.”
“Yeah, a fluke,” says Levida, nodding. “That’s exactly what it was.”
“Why can’t you tell me what you know?”
“Because I don’t know anything.” She picks up the shovel and heads toward the door. “I’ll give you four days. I
f you don’t figure it out by then, it won’t matter. After that you can go back to where you came from and settle your troubles with the law.”
“What about Wade?”
“You test the edges of my patience, boy,” she says. “Why would you even want to keep a friend like that around?”
“He saved my life in juvie.”
She shakes her head. “Juvie. Should have known. Some people just draw trouble. Fine. Keep him around. But thinkin’ you owe people is dangerous business. Like your daddy discovered.”
I go back to the house and see Jess getting into the black Jeep. I run out to stop her, but she’s already pulling out of the driveway. I run up alongside her, pounding on the window, begging her to stop.
She brakes and rolls down the window, but won’t look at me. “What?” she says, and I can see that this time, I’ve really lost her.
There’s nothing for me to say, so I just pull the crumpled poem written on the greasy paper place mat from my back pocket and try to hand it to her.
She makes no move to take it, so I reach inside the window and set it on her lap. “It wasn’t all a lie,” I tell her.
She bites her lower lip to keep from crying, then steps on the gas, and as she speeds away her last words to me echo in my ears. I don’t even know who you are.
That makes two of us.
* * *
That night as I sit in the front room of the trailer, listening to Wade and Dorie giggling and laughing in the back bedroom, all I can think about is Jess. Jess loved me. She came all the way from California to find me, even after she knew I was wanted by the law. I could have told her the truth, but I lied about who I was. I search my pockets for the poem she wrote for me, but it is gone—just like she is gone. There will never be another girl like Jess, and the weight of this truth settles on me like a foot on the back of a drowning boy.
THE GIRL WHO LOVED ME
There was a girl who loved me,
her eyes aquamarine.
I used to dream I’d swim in them,
that sea of blue and green.
She didn’t care about my past,
or the trouble I had seen.
But in the end she walked away,
one lonely, desperate summer day.
There was nothing more for her to say,
once she knew I had betrayed
her with my pitiful disguise.
There were just too many lies.
Too much deceit had come between
me and the girl who loved me,
when
I was
seventeen.
35
MY BIRTHDAY. I CAN’T GO TO SEE MY FATHER UNTIL FIVE o’clock, when death row visitation time begins. The rest of Saturday is reserved for the general prison population. I should be doing something, but I’m not sure what. I open my father’s book and read chapter five. It’s only three pages long, and it takes me the better part of two hours to muddle through it, but in the end I feel proud, as if by this one small gesture I have disproved everything my grandmother said about me yesterday.
It helps that most of it is information I already know, his version of what went down in the trailer the night Jack Golden got shot. The version where my presence is not mentioned.
I set down my father’s book and pick up Poetry Through the Ages , wondering if what my reading tutor told me might actually work, if I really could learn to read by deciphering the poems I’ve already memorized.
“Fourteen, thirty-eight, twenty-two,” I say, absentmindedly, turning to page twenty-two, “The Stolen Child.”
“Why do you always say it like that?” Wade asks, coming out of the shower, towel drying his hair.
“Like what?” I reply, snapping the book shut. I didn’t get much sleep last night, because he and Dorie didn’t stop laughing and carrying on until she left at midnight.
“Why do you always say them page numbers out of sequence?”
“I don’t know, Wade. That’s the way my mother always says them. Is there some law about saying page numbers in order?”
“No. It just sounds weird. Like a combination to somebody’s gym locker or something.”
I jump off the couch, and the book falls to the floor. “Wade, you’re a genius.”
“I am?”
“‘The key is in Yeats.’ My mother always used to tell me that.” I crawl under the couch and pull out the metal box with trembling hands.
“Fourteen,” I say out loud as I turn the dial to the right. “Thirty-eight,” I say, turning the dial to the left. “Twenty-two.” I turn the dial to the right, holding my breath as I hear the tumblers clicking into place, and the latch slipping open.
“Who woulda figured,” says Wade, who has come to stand beside me. Suddenly I can’t move. I can’t help feeling that whatever is in this box will change everything forever.
“Go on,” Wade says.
I ease open the top of the box and see a tiny revolver sitting inside. A snub-nose .22. The gun that killed Jack Golden.
I slam the lid shut, as if this will make the contents disappear. “He lied to me,” I say, shaking all the way down to my bones. “He told me the Colombian got away with the gun, but it’s been here all this time. What if …”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I can’t finish the thought out loud. What if the person my father has been trying to protect all these years is himself?
My head starts to spin, like I’m being sucked backward in time. I remember finding the gun in the peanut sack. I remember seeing Jack Golden dead on the floor. I remember seeing my father standing over Jack’s body, holding the gun in his hand. He put the gun in his back pocket and then picked me up and ran with me out of the trailer. “Everything’s going to be all right,” he told me. “Don’t you worry. Everything is going to be all right.” The next thing I knew, he was banging on the door of our neighbor’s house. A woman answered in a nightgown. A man was standing behind her. My father left me there and ran away into the darkness, and I could see the bulge of the gun in his back pocket.
“Dylan, are you okay?” Wade’s voice brings me back to reality.
“I can’t breathe,” I say. “I can’t …” I run out to the truck, start the engine, and drive as fast as I can, leaving behind Wade and the trailer full of memories. I don’t know where I’m going, or what I will do when I get there, but I have to put some distance between me and that place.
When I get out to the highway, I go south toward Brenham. I drive for over an hour before my head begins to clear and I start thinking straight again. I see a sign for Victoria, and that’s when I realize I’m on my way to La Puerta. To my mother. I pull over to the side of the road and try to figure out what I’m going to do.
It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. If my father killed Jack Golden, it doesn’t matter. It had to be an accident.
I bang my head on the steering wheel. My mother knew that combination. She must know other things as well. I need to talk to her, but if I drive all the way down to La Puerta, I’ll never make it back to Livingston in time to visit my father. I can’t see him tomorrow because it’s Sunday, and they’re scheduled to kill him on Tuesday.
I stop at a gas station in Hope, fill up, and then call my uncle’s house from a pay phone.
“I need to talk to my mother,” I say when Mitch picks up the phone.
“Hello to you, too.”
“I don’t have time to jack around with you, Mitch. Put my mother on the phone.”
“She’s asleep.”
“Wake her up.”
“You’re not in a position to be orderin’ me around, boy.”
“I’m going to talk to her one way or another, so put her on the phone, or else I’m going to drive down there and talk to her face-to-face, and by the time I get there I’m gonna be pretty damn agitated, so maybe I’ll just mention how you’ve been weaseling her out of her money all these years.”
“Fine!” Uncle Mitch leaves, and a voice comes over the phone
telling me to deposit more money. I search my pocket for quarters and just about decide Mitch has left me standing there, when I hear my mother’s voice.
“Dylan?”
“Mom, I found the gun.”
“What?” Her voice is a hairline crack in a sheet of glass about to shatter.
“Fourteen, thirty-eight, twenty-two. The combination to the lock. You knew it all this time. How did you know?”
There is a long silence, and I can’t be sure, but I think my mother is crying. “They won’t kill your father. It won’t come to that.”
“How can you be sure?”
“He promised me.”
“Who promised you?”
“Your father.”
“When?”
More silence.
“Mom?”
“D.J. had a box hidden in the barn. He told me about it right before—”
“Before you left,” I say, so she doesn’t have to.
“He told me the combination and said that if anything happened to him, I should find the box. There were certificates of deposit, stocks, bonds, numbers for foreign bank accounts. Enough money to take care of us, he said. I told him I didn’t want any of his drug money. Then I called your uncle Mitch to come get us. I took you away from that awful place and I left him.”
At least that part of my father’s story was true. I take a deep breath before I ask my next question. “Mom, what do you think really happened that night?”
It is a long time before she answers, and the voice comes on the line again. “Your time is about to expire,” it says. I search my pockets but I’m out of change. “Mom, I gotta go,” I tell her.
“He didn’t kill that cop,” she says.
“How can you be sure?”
“Your time is about to expire.”
“Just a minute,” I tell my mother, spotting a quarter lying on the ground. “Mom …”
“He said he wanted me to forget about him and go on with my life. If only I could have forgotten.” She’s crying again, and I realize that she may have left my father, but she has never stopped loving him.