by John McManus
“I wasn’t wondering.”
“I mean, my wife was sixteen when we first hooked up.”
“Mary was fourteen when she had Jesus,” Jeremy said, because the day a Georgia cop helped him would be the day he died.
“Does Acworth know about you all?”
“When it gets warm, those guys like to come play their games.”
“Doubt it helps, talking to them like that.”
“You’re right, Officer, I’ll try being nice.”
“I’ll give you some advice. A week or so, they’re gonna come shut that place down. You’d do well to have a new residence lined up.”
“Police put us there to start with.”
“The papers have found out. Sheriff got them to sit on their story until you guys are staying someplace safe.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“It is what it is. I’m trying to help.”
Walking back to the World of Coke, Jeremy thought about his petition. So far, when anyone back at camp had asked Stephen for legal advice, he’d snapped that he didn’t work for free. Jeremy had a hunch that if he visited him at his office, it might go differently, but not today. He was numb from cold. The encroaching stupor put him in mind of the ’93 blizzard, that historic storm when his mom had run out of orange juice—the only drink that let her swallow all her pills without gagging.
“Drink whiskey like a normal woman,” his dad had said, and she set the pill bottles back down.
“What will happen now?” Jeremy had asked.
“My blood pressure will rise.”
“Roads are impassable,” his dad had said, which meant Jeremy could only trek alone through deep snow to Food City, where with stiff hands he selected a gallon of Tropicana. Carrying it uphill, he lost sensation in his fingers. He felt in service to something bigger. Back home, past dusk, he found his mother sitting in the dark. He flipped a switch, preparing for a swell of praise, but the power was out.
“Juice.”
“That’s sweet. No pulp?”
Jeremy looked down. Lots of pulp, the carton read. How had he forgotten that pulp made her gag like the pills did? It was suddenly all he remembered, along with his bank-breaking tonsillectomy, or the time he’d trampled her camellias. How had he been so mindless? She never asked, but he always wondered. Now, brushing snow off his car with a bare hand, he wondered too if he could trace all his bad luck back to that storm, when he’d thought he’d learned something. Perhaps everything he’d learned since then stood on a footing of that first wrong thing. His memory ceded no name for it, whatever it was. As he ran away, his mother had called out for him, too late; a blizzard yielded hiding places, and until they melted and were again exposed, he crouched in those holes like a gopher and never cried.
4.
In sixth grade, down below the gnat line where he was from, Patrick had sat quietly on the school bus every day for months while an eighth-grader pinched the Mexican boy’s arms. She did it with glee, hard enough to leave welts. “This is for your own good,” she would say, and “Look at you,” until one day Patrick pushed her out the emergency door onto Moultrie Highway.
It wasn’t about the Mexican boy; Patrick didn’t care about that. It was that she reminded him of his uncle. To shove her helped take the sting out, and it got Patrick away from home. “Won’t be too many Mexicans in there, but there’s lots of blacks,” his uncle had said on the way to reform school. Sure enough Patrick made friends with several, like his bunkmate Rooney, who played strategy games with him and ordered chess books through loan. For two years they learned every chess gambit, waiting for one of their own, namely the EF4 tornado that sucked up the perimeter wall and sent them fleeing in a car that Rooney hot-wired.
They drove it to Rooney’s cousin’s garage, where Patrick learned to detail cars with chamois leather and cotton swabs. He moved into Rooney’s top bunk. Nights they rode around in Supras, Camaros, Firebirds, Chargers, Miatas, Talons, which took hours to clean—hours he already thought of as the best of his life. Better than reform school. There were about five billion people alive back then. As he cleaned, he imagined how it would be if not just he and Rooney but all five billion had Q-tips in hand, drying leather cream off their seats.
“It’s almost like you enjoy washing cars,” Rooney had said during one of their last games. “You look downright enraptured.”
“Pays the bills,” Patrick said, even as he decided to try to quit liking it. Rooney was his best friend, but he wasn’t Rooney’s; every month there were more and more folks to compete with.
“It’s weird, and you don’t have bills. You’re fifteen.”
“Saving for a rainy day.”
“Wish you were saving for your own bedroom.”
Some nights Rooney, Oliver, Zane, and Edgar couldn’t squeeze him in to either front or back seats. “This is our special friend,” they took to telling girls on nights when he did come. The girls, sizing him up, would giggle. Back at reform school, the only difference between him and Rooney had been their feelings about the place. Patrick had liked it, would have stayed. Only in solidarity had he gone along with Rooney’s tornado gambit.
He made a deal with Rooney’s cousin to move in above the garage. When he turned sixteen, he started driving the cars to Florida. One morning near Daytona he was pulled over for a faulty tail lamp. From detention he wrote Rooney five times and never heard back; still, Patrick imagined him rolling up on release day in a shiny car, with no one in back. “Ain’t she sweet?” Rooney would say, and Patrick would nod blithely, but it was his own cousin who fetched him, in a Buick Century as filthy as the detention center.
He was eighteen by then. As his uncle’s son guessed, he’d never been with a girl. There were places down the highway, his cousin told him—what kind did he want?
“Kind of place?”
“Kind of girl.”
“What kinds are there?”
“You know, blond? Fat?”
“Black,” he said, and his cousin giggled like everyone had when Rooney called him a special friend.
At Headlights, slapping at gnats while bleach-blonds made love to their poles, Patrick imagined scouring the Century and then driving off to open a garage of his own, far from Tifton. “Pick.” Something looked familiar about one who held the pole funny. Patrick pointed. She took him in back. They hadn’t been talking for a minute before she started to yell.
What should he have done, Patrick complained to the police later; asked for ID? Blonds all looked alike. If he’d realized she was the bus girl, he might have only pinched her arm. A girl like her had a reason to shout on sight of him, but a stranger’s shout proclaimed that the problem with him was general to all girls, and growing in size, so that last year any girl would have laughed but this year any girl would scream. And what about next year? What then? He found himself on top of her, covering her mouth. He screamed back. Choking her, he couldn’t muffle her noise enough for the house music to drown it out. Even when the door opened, he didn’t let go.
In adult prison he got shunted into the white gang, and it wasn’t until he made parole that he learned that the offender camps were segregated too. When he arrived at an abandoned motor court off I-85, a black man he recognized from prison met him with a shotgun.
“I’ll give you to the count of three.”
“Look, I hung with those guys because I had to.”
“Two and a half,” the man said, chasing Patrick off to Acworth, where Gus gave him a tent because he looked like a nice guy.
On a pawn-shop Huffy he biked around applying at every auto detailing shop. Had he been convicted of a felony? Explain below. No one wanted him. Then Travis showed him the Jobs for Felons list and he became a clerk at a Flying J. The car wash there was a drive-through with abrasive brushes that no one cleaned. Sometimes a girl would smile at him; he never knew why. He saved up to buy an ’87 Fiero that never shone, no matter how he tried. Travis or Gus would invite him to play checkers, which left him feeli
ng empty. One day, a week after the snow, two cops interrupted a game to say they would be shutting down the camp.
“You’ve got three days,” they told Patrick, Allen, Gus, and Bruce, all sitting around the fire pit.
“You can’t,” Bruce said. “Why?”
“News gets out, you could be in danger.”
“Where are we supposed to go?”
“I’ll recommend a real estate agent.”
After they left, Patrick’s fingers still moved the checkers pieces, but in his mind his palms were joined in prayer. He asked for a signal, some glimpse of outcome. There was open country outside of Tifton where his uncle lived. Acres of emptiness, where no one could hear you. That wasn’t the signal, though; that was his memory again.
He lay awake all night. The next day, two hours into his shift, Rooney walked up, wearing a UPS shirt that matched a truck at the pumps.
“Pack of Camel Lights,” he said, eyes unfocused.
Rooney, it’s Patrick, he thought of saying. You found me. I’m free.
Tobacco purchases required an ID check. If Patrick performed it, he could learn his old friend’s address, go there later, even now. Rooney would ask where he stayed lately. Lake Allatoona? Got a boat dock? Boat? Bet you clean that boat with Q-tips—bet you enjoy it, and then the laughter, branding him a simpleton.
Bring it on, Patrick thought, it would be better than this.
Except he couldn’t speak.
Reaching for Rooney’s cigarettes, he considered how that girl on the bus must have felt, sitting beside him in the back room of that gentlemen’s club without being known. What he’d done was try to stop her from screaming. It had felt like protecting himself, and now he saw she’d been protecting herself too.
He ran Rooney’s card. Rooney signed. “Have a nice day,” Patrick said, and went in back to fetch a bottle of Boone’s.
He drank it down and opened another. “Anyone back there?” called a lady up front.
“Why, you horny?” he shouted back, quelling any need to return to the register.
Unplugging the security cameras, Patrick smiled at his joke. He was a sex offender who had never had sex: funny when you stopped to think. He stowed a case of Boone’s in his pathetic old car. He ripped eye holes into one of his socks, pulled it over his head, drove around front, walked in, and announced that he had a gun.
Two of the customers sank to their knees. Patrick aimed a finger through his coat at the man still standing and said, “Key’s in the drawer. Cash goes in a bag.”
It was the easiest thing he’d ever done. “Wallets,” he said, and they obeyed again. Folks did what you told them to. He drove home to Lake Allatoona, where he parked on the gravel below the bluff. The bag held eleven hundred dollars, more money than he’d possessed at once since working for Rooney’s cousin. Back then he’d had a friend to spend it on. Find a new friend, he thought, except maybe that was when things had begun going wrong, when he’d bought Rooney a polo shirt and a CD.
Fuck it, he thought, wiping a splatter of mud from the car grille. He filled his backpack with bottles and hiked up to the fire pit.
“Who’s that?” said a stiff corncob of a man, bucktoothed like Gus, sitting upright on a boulder. Patrick had never seen him.
“Your mom,” he said, and fell into position beside Allen and Gus, who were roasting slabs of beef.
“Look who’s shit-face drunk,” Allen said.
“This is my cousin Garth,” Gus said; “runs a quarry up in Rome.”
“Four of your friends have done signed on,” Garth told Patrick, “and I’ve got room for one more. No schools, no churches.”
“His niggers quit all at once,” Allen said, “like it was some kind of convention.”
Patrick’s pulse quickened. “You know what?” he said, feeling in his pockets, but he trailed off, wondering how the others knew he had quit too.
“See, it’s like I was saying. Patrick don’t fancy that word.”
“We’ve all got our pet peeves,” Garth said.
“I don’t want some bitch on my work crew lawing me for how I talk.”
“They aren’t my friends,” Patrick said.
“Do what?” Garth said.
“You said four of my friends have signed on. That’s wrong.”
“Look, bub. Day after tomorrow, cops will ask your intended residence. If you ain’t got one, they’ll take you into custody.”
It must be only a coincidence, Patrick thought. While he’d been robbing the store, they’d been drinking here by this fire.
“How do you know what words I like?”
“You paid a visit to the Sweetwater Creek Motor Court,” Allen said, as Stephen ambled over and sat down.
“I go where I please,” said Patrick, certain Allen could only have learned about that from the cops.
The cops must have gone to shut the other camp down too, and then laughed with the white campers about it.
“Well, why’d they leave?” Patrick asked.
“He means your niggers,” Allen said. Garth grinned; Gus bit his lip. They would rather be allied with the cops than with the other camp.
Earlier Patrick had thought Rooney’s visit to the Flying J was his sign, but Rooney had been only a prelude. Patrick walked to Stephen’s tent. The .45-caliber revolver from Stephen’s briefcase fit snugly in his coat pocket. As he returned to the fire, he heard Allen saying, “This one’s a bookworm. Too smart for your quarry.”
“Maybe Garth’s old employees were too smart for his quarry,” Patrick said.
“Maybe you’re shit-face drunk,” Allen said.
“Maybe I don’t want somebody solving your problems.”
“You mean you don’t want somebody solving yours?” Allen replied, reaching for the sizzling steak with a bare hand.
Allen had always given Patrick the creeps. His drawl, his leer, his dirty old Cavalier. The way his grimy fingers clutched meat while he gnawed at it like a squirrel. “Try this,” he said, offering the steak as if there was no conflict, and Patrick thought, Be with the guys who will have you. Go where you’re wanted. He played the idea out a few moves ahead. A quarry would be a filthy place to work. He didn’t like these guys. The only good work he’d done was on cars, cleaning them inch by inch with his friends.
“No, solving yours,” he said, and shot Garth in the temple.
Garth gasped, fell forward. Almost immediately Patrick could smell the flames singeing him. You couldn’t make people want you. Aside from that, though, you could do as you pleased. His uncle had taught him that much. What he pleased to do now was give the others a mess to clean up. Earlier he’d intended to go into the woods first. But watching Allen and Gus drag Garth away, he pictured them dragging him too. Explaining to the cops why he was covered in their fingerprints. Three black cops hearing Allen stumble through a tale of their bloody teamwork: that was too tempting an endgame to pass up. He picked up Allen’s steak from where he’d dropped it, had a bite, licked his lips clean, aimed, fired, lost his balance, shut his eyes, and never hit the ground.
5.
For three days, while the other campers disregarded the warning he delivered from the cop downtown, Jeremy left voicemails for Georgia Interstate Compact saying he’d planned to wait and move in the new year but now the timeline was out of his hands. “The police are worried about my safety,” he said, “so I’m hoping you guys are worried too.” He expected no answer, nor was he surprised that no one at camp believed him. It had to do with the shape of his face, the strange sheen of his eyes: people just didn’t trust him. Teachers, cops, the fathers of girls. Once he’d overheard an English tourist at work tell her friend he looked wanton. In Alaska, he thought, his ushanka and balaclava would help hide that.
On the third day he came home from the World of Coke to find the guys discussing where to go. Cumberland Island and live off shrimping. The Oconee Forest and hunt for deer. You did right by us, he waited for someone to tell him. Sorry for not trusting you.
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“Still going to Alaska, wild boy?”
“Waiting to hear back.”
“Let’s all go,” Bruce said. “Gus can drive us in his bus.”
“I got laid by a pretty fine Alaska girl,” said Allen.
“Just don’t tell Stephen. He’ll light our bus up with a Molotov cocktail.”
For another whole day Jeremy stared at his phone, until it occurred to him that neither response—approved, denied—would answer the question he had been hanging on.
Forty-five minutes later he was on the eastern perimeter, parking at a nearly abandoned strip mall where he found Brick, Butter, and Younce nestled between a gospel church and a military recruiting center.
“Hello?” he called, standing before an unmanned desk in a low room lined with faux-wood paneling. The place looked like a den of shysters.
“Jeremy?” asked Stephen when he emerged, sounding unsure of his name.
“I’m wondering what happens if I violate a restraining order.”
“Depends on who took the order out.”
“Father of the fifteen-year-old I slept with,” Jeremy said. He knew how Stephen felt about the men at camp, and he wasn’t going to downplay his crime.
“If you write her a letter, I could deliver it.”
Stephen was staring hungrily at Jeremy, who’d seen that look before—from across the circle, from across the fire. He could smell alcohol. For only one reason did anyone help anyone, and it had as little to do with Jeremy himself as the AA groups’ hatred did.
“Just tell me how long I’d go to jail.”
“You’re on parole, right?”
He nodded, suddenly ashamed of bringing such an obvious question in. “I only asked because I was passing by on the way to a meeting.”
“You pass five feet from my tent every day,” said Stephen. He probably thought Jeremy was lying, which for once Jeremy was doing.
“That reminds me, the cops came to confirm what I told everybody Monday.”
“Yeah, and you attacked a kid in Savannah wearing Mickey Mouse ears.”
“Okay, well,” Jeremy said.
“Who will you be this afternoon?”