by John McManus
“Not you; you’re different,” he said, another lie. He had read about Stephen at work. It was a good story. He could act it out.
Stephen was nodding. “There are tiers,” he said. “There’s us, and there’s everyone else.”
“I feel the same,” Jeremy said, standing to go.
“I’ll find out by tomorrow about your restraining order.”
Jeremy thanked him and left. He navigated the access road with care, breathing as deliberately as he could. Not until he’d merged onto the highway did he floor it, stereo on fifty, screaming along to a Björk song’s dissonant chords. She could distort his world into icy echoes that sealed him inside a blue crevasse, but not today. He aimed his hood ornament at the skyline and soon he was in Little Five Points, parking at the Fishers’, where Melissa answered in a leather jacket, holding a Siamese cat.
Her auburn hair was so stylishly coiffed that Jeremy gasped. “You’re ringing my bell,” she said, as the cat scrambled to escape.
“I’ve loved you all this time. You’re all I’ve got. Don’t shout.” How often had he rehearsed the lines that fell out of him like lead pellets? Speaking them, he got the sensation that he knew the wrong meaning of love, that that was the wrong thing he’d learned back in the blizzard.
“Your camp’s in the news,” Melissa replied.
She might as well have slapped his face. He wanted to slap her back. His mind wasn’t in his head; it was in his arm, slapping her. Just in time, he grabbed that arm with his other hand, and nodded toward a diploma on the mantel.
“Congratulations,” he said.
“Yeah, I’d have graduated no matter what.”
No matter how many times you hurt me, Jeremy thought, but he said, “I’ve come to apologize,” telling his third lie of the day, the one most likely to draw Melissa out of her father’s house.
He gestured up the block, where too many people were gardening for her to claim any threat. “Two minutes,” she said, slipping on her shoes.
The first half-minute he squandered on silence while waiting to escape any possible earshot or sight line. When they got to the main shopping street, he said, “I’m moving.”
“Me too, for a master’s in social work.”
To help abuse victims like yourself, he thought, hating Melissa again for being so smug. For not asking where he was moving. For pretending she’d never loved him. Spending the summer in Seville, after the trouble she’d caused by applying there. Finding a Spanish boyfriend, learning a language from him and God knew what else. He swallowed the anger, took her by the shoulders and said, “I’ll never stop loving you.”
They had stopped beside a newsstand. “Here’s what I was talking about,” Melissa said, so flippantly that she could have punctuated herself by blowing a bubble.
A headline read, “Homeless Sex Offenders Pitch Camp in Wild,” above a picture of Allen’s tent.
“Dad’s still kind of obsessed. He followed you there, then he went to the cops and they’re closing it.”
“I see,” Jeremy said. He walked on. After seven years, he was still a puppet on her dad’s string, and so was she and that was that.
The only way to force her into an emotion was to have a panic attack.
It wasn’t a decision so much as it was simply destined to happen. Kneeling on the sidewalk amid dog-walking couples, he held steady against the air. “Breathe,” Melissa said, jostling him. He shivered at that touch, the first in seven years, but took in no air. She shook harder. “Inhale!” she cried, full of concern.
His plan was working. All he had to do now was stop loving her.
It ought to be easy, with this new face to match to his old memories. He’d always fancied underdogs. His mom and dad; the Braves until they bought their way to first; Melissa, stammering through her testimony that day at Alateen when they had met. Crying about her dad the goner and all he’d squandered. She wasn’t an underdog anymore. He took the face begging him to breathe and put it to the time at Burger King when he’d had only three dollars, the evening after they’d buried his own father. What if we share a Whopper and a Coke, he’d asked, but she’d wanted her own Whopper and her own Coke. “You’re the dumbass who forgot the money,” she had said.
As he imagined her chewing that hamburger, the light ebbed. Selfishness was innate, it didn’t come from being young.
He awoke beside a juniper bush with Melissa squeezing his hand, crying. He stood up. “Go home,” he said. “You’re too old for me now.”
“Not falling for that,” she said, in pursuit not toward her house but Patrick’s car, which he’d already pointed toward I-75, which stretched north to Canada, where he could bear west across the boreal forest for five thousand miles.
If he reached that forest, he thought, walking faster, his luck had turned.
“I know how you try to make people hate you.”
“It’s been two minutes.”
“Where will you go when they close it?”
“Told you. Alaska.”
“You only said moving. Ask where I’m moving.”
“I’m not attracted to women your age.”
“Do you even have a job lined up?”
“No, ask your dad to lend me some money,” he said—a funny joke, given that Mr. Fisher really had spent tens of thousands of dollars to try and send Jeremy away forever. The best things were free, he thought, smiling in farewell. Her lip was quivering when he turned away, so he never knew if she acknowledged the irony before turning toward home.
6.
The name on Allen’s birth certificate was Al Jack Downey, Jr., after his dad, who’d been named for two minor-league all-stars. At school Allen liked bragging on Jack’s 100-mph shine ball and Al’s 600-foot home runs. He said he’d met Michael Jackson and his mom was Robert E. Lee’s great-grandniece. It got to where other kids called bullshit even on the truth. “If those dudes and your grandpa was so good, why didn’t they reach the majors?” By then Allen’s grandpa was dead along with his other grandparents. His mom was in New Mexico; his dad was locked up. No one around could confirm or deny anything, and Allen resolved to go look for Jack and Al himself someday.
The year he learned to drive, he found Al, the shortstop, in a pine shack in the Okefenokee Wilderness. Huge, blind, and one-footed, Al believed it was 1989. “Living in the future, old man,” said Allen, to which Al croaked, “You’re living in the past.”
“Why didn’t you reach the majors?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Were you blackballed?”
“Are you the police?”
“I’m Davy Downey’s grandson.”
“I couldn’t hit for shit, but I was better than him.”
“Baseball was only his hobby,” Allen said, compelled to lie even to bedraggled strangers. “He gave it up once he won the welterweight championship.”
Six hours north, on a high heath bald near Rabun Gap, Allen knocked on the door of a square pine shack like Al’s, as if they’d helicoptered Al’s up while he was en route. Jack was supposed to be eighty, but the kid who answered was no more than twenty, rail-thin, bottle in hand, joint in his mouth.
“Who are you?” he said, and Allen said he’d come to shake hands with the pitcher he was named for.
“That’s me,” the skinny kid said, and Allen thought, You’re living in the past. Then the kid said, “Joke, he’s dead.”
“Since when?”
“Other day.”
“Is that gin?”
“Have a taste.”
The boy invited Allen into a room whose four windows faced down four slopes. Woods, woods, woods, town, and in the town window sat a girl whose green eyes Allen stared into until she was offering to give him head.
Her name was Eulalia, the boy’s cousin and Jack’s grandchild. Let them call bullshit on this, Allen thought, leaning against the pine wall. “I’m his grandkid too, in a way,” he said, stoned by then. They tripped together, hit after hit, day after day, until
Jack’s acid was almost gone. He said he bought it by the sheet in Nashville once a month and sold hits for five bucks. “I could sell a sheet a week,” Allen said, knowing he couldn’t. Jack phoned in an order quintuple the usual size. In a grand finale they ate five hits apiece and hit the road. Allen drove. Whole cyclones of rain poured down, and mastodons roamed the highway, but what wrecked them and killed Jack was a broken axle.
“I’m a world-class driver,” he stood there telling Eulalia in the cold rain; “NASCAR’s recruiting me.”
For a little while, she quit blaming him. Holding hands on the shore of Lake Ocoee, they vowed never to part, but then she was asking if he would ever have an abortion. It was apropos of nothing. “I’m a dude,” he said, as rain flowed down the bank, or was she crying? She seemed to be sliding away with the water.
“Our mom wanted to get rid of us.”
“You were twins?” he asked, astonished.
“No, we were four years apart.”
As the sirens approached, Allen saw into her question and understood what she meant: because of his mind, combined with his driving, his search for some failed namesake, his mom should have gotten rid of him.
“I don’t even know your last name,” he called to Eulalia as they dragged him away, hoping his tears would make it to the river.
Every day of five years, Allen would look up to where Brushy Mountain loomed over the prison of that name. On it stood a stone cottage where a ravishing gypsy observed the prison yard through a silver spyglass. “She likes guys like you,” said Allen’s cellmate, who’d been with her on furlough.
“I’ve dropped in on the stone lady, too,” Allen replied. No matter what you claimed in prison, it was real. He said he’d had twenty-eight girls from twenty-five states. His fellows were so pleased in that brag that he decided to render it true.
“Where’s she from?” he asked one day in the yard, gesturing to the mountain. His cellmate gestured the same.
“But what state was she born in?”
“Is that the first thing you ask all your girls?”
“Sure,” Allen said, heart racing. How you got to be the best, you said something and then you did it. Every day the sun reflected off the stone lady’s window and he waved. In March 1993, when they set him free, he walked the main road to a gravel drive up the mountain. When he reached the summit clearing, the sun was sinking over the plateau. Ready to knock, he stopped in his tracks: the cottage wasn’t a house, only some sheets of propped-up plywood painted to look like stones.
He kicked them onto a pile of gaffing lights soaking in mud. It was almost dark. Counting blow jobs, he’d been with girls from only two states. He was done with that number, and rode an old bicycle downhill into Wartburg to take his first girl.
“You should feel glad to have a man like me,” he told Cheryl, who’d lived her whole life in Tennessee.
She drove him to Harriman, where every woman he talked to came from there. He hitched down 27 past Chattanooga and across the line, where he met Infinity. If Infinity had lived in Tennessee, he might have returned to a prison whose inmates knew him for a fool, but the inmates at Hays State didn’t know a thing. That was where he met Travis. “I’ve been with girls from thirty-six states,” he told Travis, who replied, “My goal’s to get with every pretty girl in one state.”
Upon parole they shared an apartment. He got a job selling cars. In 2006 a school opened across the road, and then the law passed in 2007. They made their way to an outdoor outfitters to shoplift some tents. Allen’s, a Marmot, may have saved his life. If he’d bought one instead of stealing it, he wouldn’t have been able to afford flame-retardant cloth—not that he’d been looking for that feature; he only chose the warmest one. He knew winters would be no joke. The night of the fire, the temperature dropped to eleven while they argued about what to do with the bodies of Garth and Patrick. Travis said it would need to be twenty below to keep them from putrefying. Gus countered that if eviction was coming tomorrow anyway, so what?
For once Allen didn’t take Travis’s side. Who cared? He’d stopped seeing the point of Georgia. As long as he lived in camp, his number would remain two. Georgia and Tennessee. Down at the car lot lately the guys were calling bullshit. He imagined the campers did too, at least in their heads. Looked up team rosters from the years he gave. “Screw it, they can smell or not smell,” he told Bruce, and went in his tent to think back on the stone lady. If she’d been up there where she was supposed to be, he might never have touched anyone else. Was she on Eulalia’s mountain, laughing at him out four windows through a silver spyglass? Fuck that bitch, he was thinking as he came. Then he unstaked his tent. Waiting for everyone else to fall asleep, he passed out too. He awoke to flames, closer than the campfire.
Two of the tents were burning.
Without a moment’s thought, Allen rolled down the bluff, tent and all, past strange voices. He landed inches from the lakeshore. He untangled himself and saw pickup trucks and a police cruiser parked near his car. They were empty; no one saw him drive away for good. Blasting the heat, hugging curves like a stock-car driver, he thought of a new story, I saved six men from a fire, but as it turned out, besides Jeremy—who’d vanished—he was the only one who hadn’t survived to hear the news.
“The men at those camps got a preview of hellfire,” said a state representative on the TV above Allen’s barstool at Waffle House.
There had been injuries, and some loud guys to the left were chuckling about it. “I had a cousin burn to death in Iraq,” the waitress told them. “Not what I’d call funny.”
“You feel sorry for them?” one of the guys asked.
“One used to come in for omelets. This lawyer. He was sweet to me.”
“Probably hoped you had a daughter.”
She shrugged as if maybe the man was right, which of course he was. Stop being so naïve, Allen wanted to tell her. Only fools trust sweet. You’ll get yourself hurt.
He chewed his toast, and the news moved on to the continuing saga of Michael Vick, en route to US District Court for sentencing.
“These Falcons, their time is up,” said one of the men.
“Their time was up years ago,” the waitress said. She drifted over and refilled Allen’s coffee. “You look wistful, mister. Penny for your thoughts.”
“Just eager to get back on the road.”
“Where you headed, all by yourself?”
“All over the place,” he said, wondering if they were flirting like normal people. He wasn’t sure; still, even in the wake of the fire, the chance felt good. “I’ve only ever been to two of the fifty states. Figure it’s time to see the country.”
7.
Alone in his office after Jeremy left, Stephen pulled up records of Jeremy’s 2001 statutory rape case on LexisNexis for the second time. He read more closely than before. Mid-trial the kid had fired his expensive lawyer and pled nolo contendere. Stephen didn’t get it. Why didn’t Jeremy want people to like him? If a protective order was still in place from back then, it was permanent. To break it would commit a new crime, which Jeremy surely knew, which meant he was lying to Stephen, scoping out details for Act Two in the strange performance piece playing out in the addiction recovery rooms of Greater Atlanta.
Cancel the show by phoning ahead to the Fisher household, thought Stephen—but he was no rat. He only wanted to teach the boy a lesson.
He screen-captured eighteen-year-old Jeremy’s mug shot and saved it with his other pictures, then drove downtown to defend a woman accused of stealing a purse. She didn’t show. The court ruled against her, in favor of a department store that had spent more money prosecuting her than the purse had cost. Who cared? Not Stephen. Nothing was at stake; she was just another broke woman. He went to Vickery’s for martinis, one two three four. In the parking lot afterward, the flags of America and Georgia rippled in the wind. On a truck bumper a third flag announced Power of Pride, although pride was a sin. Cover it with one that said Sin of Pride, he thought,
driving away.
On the radio some woman was interviewing a theologian. “Do you consider Muhammad to have been a pacifist like Jesus?”
“I do not consider Jesus to have been a pacifist,” the theologian answered. “Jesus drove out the money changers with a cord whip and said, What I offer is the sword.”
Before getting on the highway Stephen bought a six-pack of Heineken. He drank one on I-75 and then another on Glade Road before he arrived home. Home. He needed a new word for the place. Then again, Jeremy had said the evictions were real.
He ought to be happy about it, but as he climbed the hill, he didn’t want to believe it.
Ignoring the eternal campfire, where the guys sat talking to a stranger, Stephen fetched a towel from the line. He undressed under the oak and righted the upended jug with the holes in it. After tying the dangling rope to the bottleneck he pulled it until the jug hung above him. He looped it around a branch. Water was spilling out, muddying the dirt. He opened another beer. It was about fifty out, maybe the last day before spring when a shower would feel bearable. Humming a tune, he scrubbed himself. A bird chirped. As it flew away, Stephen turned to see Bruce running off with his clothes and his towel.
Dripping dry, he devised a hateful lie to tell the D.A. about Bruce. About everyone. Then he stalked naked to his tent and found the clothes baskets gone too.
Behind him he heard giggling, and backed out to find Allen, Travis, Gus, Bruce, and the bucktoothed stranger all gathered there. He cupped his hands over his cock, and they laughed harder.
“It don’t bother us,” Bruce said. “Be naked. Don’t you like to?”
“Or we’re too old to be naked in front of,” Gus said, causing more eruptions.
Letting his hands fall, Stephen stood there as casually as he could. He wanted his demeanor to convey that he still had friends in high places, and that those high-placed friends would come fuck everybody up.
“Dude, your clothes is under the sycamore,” Bruce said. “We were just having fun.”
Bending to pick up a tree branch, Stephen focused in on Bruce’s pouty eyes.