Augie looked down at the sheet on which he had been jotting his numbers. “Maybe,” he said.
“How much?”
“One brick when we were in the crawl space. Jesus, it was just sitting there. It’s high-grade stuff, boys. Zoom. And I’m willing to share.”
Ben turned to me. “We should never have trusted him.”
“He’ll be okay,” I said.
“As soon as the coke he stole runs out, he’s going to buy more and kill us all.”
“You know,” said Augie, “I’m right in the room with you.”
“I don’t know if we should divide this or burn it,” said Ben.
“Hey, Ben,” said Augie. “Fuck you.”
“You already have,” said Ben, shaking his head. “Every time you snort up with the stolen coke, my asshole hurts.”
There was a long silence as Ben and Augie stared at each other, something ugly sparking in the air between them.
“When the hell did we become old farts?” said Augie finally.
“The day we stole a million dollars from a motorcycle gang,” said Ben. “From here on in, being old farts is the only thing going to keep us alive.”
It took us a couple of hours to do the whole split-up thing, Ben and I working while Augie did the calculation. And at the end, with Augie’s money in a leather gym bag, Ben’s in a locked wooden chest, and mine in a green metal toolbox, one of the few things of my father’s that my mother had taken when we moved, only a final twenty lay alone in the middle of the floor. And we each had, by Augie’s count, $424,390.
The new Springsteen was out, and Augie was playing it on his stereo, and just as we finished the split Springsteen called out the “Two, three, four” for “Bobby Jean.” Tired as we were from the job, and hyped as we were from what we had pulled off, and scared as we were by the real threat to our lives that still lurked outside, we couldn’t help ourselves. First I got up and started hopping around, and then Augie, and then finally Ben struggled to his feet. And together, the three of us, without even thinking about it, started dancing. “Bobby Jean” is a great song about old friends who drift apart, and the chord changes in the tune itself are so classic they radiate a sad nostalgia even as they’re rocking out. There is a point where Bruce calls out, “You hung with me when all the others turned away, turned up their noses,” and the three of us looked at each other and started laughing.
When the song was over we jumped around some more and looked at all our money. It was a great moment, really, between old friends who had fallen into an opportunity and run with it right off a cliff. The last great moment we ever had together. And it felt, yeah, it felt the way it felt before it all happened, and we were the best of friends, and all we wanted was to get trashed together in the woods and keep the future at bay. And even though Bruce was now singing “I’m Goin’ Down,” we didn’t care. We were back, together again, at least for a moment.
When we fell down to the floor, still laughing, Augie pulled out a joint. Ben and I begged off and watched as Augie lit up, dragged deep, held the smoke inside until it almost smothered him.
“Where are you going to hide your share, J.J.?” said Augie after he exhaled. “In your own crawl space?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t decided yet.”
“What about you, Ben? Going to bury it in a time capsule, only to be opened when you’re ninety?”
“I’ll put it someplace safe.”
“Where?”
No answer.
Augie took another drag, stared for a moment at the roach in his hand. “What’s the matter, boys,” he said with that constipated voice that comes from talking without letting the smoke out of your lungs, “don’t trust your old friend Augie?”
Neither Ben nor I said anything, which was an answer right there.
“It’s better if none of us knows where the others put the money,” said Ben. “If one of us gets picked up, the other two are going to have to run for it. This way, we’ll be able to run with our nest eggs intact.”
“I thought we swore to be loyal forever.”
“This just makes it easier to keep our promises.”
“So that’s the way it’s going to be?”
“That’s the way it’s going to be, son,” said Ben.
“And you, J.J.?”
“It’s safer,” I said.
“I get it,” said Augie. “I understand perfectly.”
“Don’t be a douche bag,” I said. “It’s safer for all of us.”
“Yeah, yeah. If I were you guys, I wouldn’t trust me either,” said Augie. “All right, no hard feelings, it’s all cool. You guys want to do a line to seal the deal?”
“Got to go,” said Ben.
“Me, too,” I said. “It’s late.”
“What about this last twenty?” said Augie, pointing to the orphan bill in the middle of the floor.
“Keep it,” said Ben as he and I both stood.
“No,” said Augie, “fair is fair. I wouldn’t want you boys to think I was cheating you.” He took the bill, ripped it into three, and gave us each a piece, leaving the last third for himself. “Fifty years from now, we’ll tape it all together and buy each other a beer.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“Then I guess this is it.” Augie stared down at the joint smoldering in his fingers. “Keep in touch.”
We should have shared Augie’s joint just then, or done a line in solidarity, we should have sworn our fealty one to the others one more time, we should have done something other than what we did, which was just to leave Augie alone with his pile of easy money and his burning joint and what was left of his stolen stash of coke. Was the future inevitable from that point on?
I think maybe it was, because after that night the three of us, we kept drifting further apart. Augie found a whole new group to get trashed with, along with a whole new bouquet of ever-more-powerful drugs. And Ben, strangely, started playing the full jock role, banging down beers with the rest of the football team, acting like a jerk in the hallways. And I had a new landscape to explore, someplace foreign and lush and absolutely intoxicating, the landscape of Madeline Worshack.
I loved Madeline Worshack. I loved her eyes, her lips, the way her limbs draped around me when we had sex in my bed while my mom was at work. She was everything I ever wanted. I began to make plans for our future. I looked teary-eyed at old couples I passed on the street. I felt sorry for the rest of the world. I was besotted, which should have been warning enough.
And then I felt the knife at my throat.
“Where is it, motherfucker?”
I was in my bedroom, in my bed, in the imperfect pitch of the night, pinned down by some foul-smelling monster while another, skinnier bastard pricked my neck with a knife. This was the stuff of my recurring nightmares, and so it took a moment to understand that this was no paranoid bad dream; this was real as steel.
“Whah?” I said. “Huh?”
“Where is it, dirtbag?”
“Who are you?” I said, though by then I had a pretty good idea.
With the streetlights bleeding in the single window facing the street, I could make out some details. The fat guy’s hair was gray and wiry as it poured out of a bandanna wrapped around his face.
He had arms like pistons, a gut like a medicine ball, bad skin, bad breath, a scar on his forehead, the smell of a dog. The skinny guy with the knife had a similar bandanna. He looked even older, and yelled at me with the high-pitched screech of an angry crow.
“Tell me where the fuck it is,” he said, “or you’ll be carrying your head around in a suitcase.”
I would learn later that it wasn’t just those two that had broken into my house. There was another in my mother’s bedroom to keep her quiet. And there were two more going methodically through the house, room by room, top to bottom, pulling up carpets, stabbing cushions, dragging bureaus and cabinets away from our walls, digging up the crawl space, tossing the place as if our Pitchford s
plit-level was rife with hidden corridors and recessed wall safes.
“What are you looking for?” I said, even though I knew. “What do you want?” I said, even as I was certain they wanted nothing so much as my death.
“Our money, motherfucker,” said Knife-Man.
“What money?”
“Did you think you could just waltz away with it?” he said. “Did you think we’d just let it go?”
“I don’t have anything.”
“Too bad, Frenchy,” he said as he started sawing.
There was blood and there was terror. I tried to scoot back to escape the knife, but the fat guy grabbed my hair, and Knife-Man gave me another saw, and my blood spurted. Jesus Christ, my blood spurted. And I could feel my life spurting away with it. I slapped my hand over the cut to stop the bleeding and through the slickness of the blood I felt how wide was the wound. Damn wide. I was going to die, I was sure of it. Molten lead poured into my stomach. I wanted Augie and Ben, I wanted my mommy, I wanted my daddy, I wanted to cry.
But at the same time I was holding back the blood and the tears, part of me had floated away into a cloud of angry reason. The skinny little demon had called me Frenchy. No one called me Frenchy anymore, no one except for Tony Grubbins. That son of a bitch. He had thrown a football at my face. He had killed my dog. He had beat on me and ripped me off and stolen my change at lunch. And now, guessing I might somehow be responsible for his tragedy, he had sent these two maniacs to slit my throat. My anger gave me a shot of calm. It didn’t matter that he was right, Tony wasn’t getting the money from me, no way, no how. It wasn’t in the house, I wasn’t that stupid, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell these cretins where it was.
“I don’t have your money,” I said with more bitterness than I intended, all the while just trying to gain some time.
“But you know where it is,” said Knife-Man.
“The cops took it.”
“But you got your share.”
“Why would I get a share? Who the hell am I? Whatever Tony told you is a lie.”
Knife-Man’s eyes narrowed at the name.
“He just wants you to kill me for him,” I said.
“Why would anyone want to kill a dickwad like you?”
“Because he hates me. He killed my dog.”
“Your dog?”
“He poisoned him,” I said. “My little dog.”
And then it hit me with the force of truth. My dog was dead, and I was going to die, and my mother was going to die, and so was Ben and so was Augie, and all of it was my fault, my fault, all of it. If I hadn’t poked Tony Grubbins like a bear in his cage, if I hadn’t broken into his house just for the hell of it, if I hadn’t stolen a boatload of hot cash from his demonic brother, if I had been a decent and kind kid instead of a ruthless pot-smoking thief, none of this would have happened. And Rex would be happily bouncing around. And Augie, Ben, and I would still be best of friends. And my mother and I would be facing a tuna casserole instead of death. The tears that I had been fighting suddenly rushed out of me, just as the blood had rushed out of my throat a few moments before, and my calming anger dissolved, and my emotions took me over the edge.
I started to cry, but not quietly, not with the dignity of a partisan facing his death. Instead I wept, I sobbed, I wailed like a kid on Santa Claus’s lap. And when I noticed my attackers cringe and step away from my blubbering, I cried even harder, keening as I pulled my legs to my chest, making myself seem smaller, younger, as unthreatening as a colicky babe.
Later, when the cops came and looked over what was left of our house, and questioned me and my mother as we waited for the ambulance, my pride stopped me from mentioning the crying jag that saved my life. I didn’t tell them how terrified Knife-Man looked as I continued to sob, how he backed away, how I heard him say to the fat mountain of a man who smelled like a dog that there was no way this kid had the balls to even steal a pair of socks. Instead I simply described my attackers to the cops and detailed the bare facts of our confrontation. And as I repeated the demands for the money, the officers looked at each other knowingly.
“I can’t stay here anymore,” said my mother to one of the police officers, a cigarette lit to calm her nerves, a steadying drink in her hand. “This neighborhood is going to hell.”
“We’re doing what we can, ma’am.”
“First a drug ring being run out of the house across the street, and then those motorcycle freaks cruising the neighborhood, and now this. Where have you been? Thank God I’m only renting. We’re getting out of here. I hear Florida is nice.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said the cop, before turning to me. “Any idea why they might have thought you had the money?”
“We live across the street from the drug house. I suppose that’s reason enough for them,” I said, as I pressed a bloodied towel against my wound. “And I wasn’t on the best of terms with the Grubbins kid. Is the missing money really more than a rumor?”
“They sure searched pretty hard for a rumor, didn’t they?” said the cop. “They take anything of value from you?”
“We don’t have anything of value,” I said.
“The TV’s still here, I suppose,” said my mother. “Thank heaven for that. They could have killed us. I don’t know why they didn’t kill us.”
“You were lucky, that’s why,” said the cop, looking around at the destruction. “You don’t have that money somewhere, do you, son?”
“Me?”
“Just asking.”
“If I had it,” I said, “would we still be living here?”
The cop laughed, my mother inhaled, an ambulance siren cracked the silent night.
They put twenty-seven stitches in my neck in the emergency room. The knife hadn’t gone deep enough to sever anything brutally serious; the spurting blood came from minor blood vessels only. The doctors told me how Knife-Man had missed severing the carotid artery by millimeters, that I didn’t know how lucky I was. And lucky was just how I felt, lucky lucky lucky. I always feel lucky when a madman is sawing at my throat. My mother made them get a plastic surgeon before she let anyone stick a sewing needle in her son, but they must have dragged the surgeon out of a bar, what with the jagged scar he left.
Back from the hospital, the ruins of our life piled around us, my mother insisted on leaving Pitchford right then and there, getting in the car and driving south on Route 1 all the way to the end. But I convinced her we should wait until I finished my senior year. I told her senior year was supposed to be the highlight of my life. I wanted to party like a maniac with my friends, go to prom with Madeline Worshack, get into a good college. In a comic turnabout, I convinced my mother that staying in Pitchford was crucial to my making something of my life.
“You owe me this,” I said to her, which was a bitter thing to say. But that’s just how I felt—she did owe me. And after much argument, she agreed. I didn’t tell her that running away like a thief in the night could only raise suspicions. I didn’t tell her that if we stayed a little longer despite the danger, I could begin to make the preparations I needed to live a life safely hidden from our pursuers.
And make no mistake, preparations were needed.
My attacker had been brutally on point. I had thought we could just waltz away with it, that they would just let it go. I had thought after things had cooled that the three of us would be safe. But the very presence of those thugs in my house was enough to convince me that safety would never be possible.
When we huddled the next day at our cherry tree, me with the thick tape across my neck like some newly formed creation of Dr. Frankenstein, Ben and Augie told me it had been the best thing that could have happened.
“I think we passed some sort of test,” said Ben.
“We?” I said.
“They came after us, yes they did, and the saps came up empty,” said Augie.
“Us?” I said.
“The lead Tony gave them turned out empty,” said Ben. “We’re a step closer than
we were before.”
“Any closer than that and my head would have been lying on the floor.”
“You took one for the team, bub,” said Augie. “Don’t think we’re not grateful.”
“Grateful it was you and not us,” said Ben, laughing.
But I wasn’t quite so merry. It was a sweet little fairy tale they were spinning, that we had been looked at and passed over, and it made them feel better, I’m sure, but they hadn’t had a knife at their necks.
So I did it on my own, my preparations to start a new life, a life not just miles away from Pitchford, but miles away from who I had been in Pitchford. Even while J.J. Moretti was going through his senior year of high school, taking tests, drinking beer, licking Madeline Worshack’s nipples like each was the tip of a Carvel soft-serve vanilla cone, Jonathon Willing was applying to a host of universities well out of state. A letter from my mother that I forged and a copy of my birth certificate sent to each admissions office was enough to get J.J. Moretti’s high-school transcript and recommendations accepted for Jonathon Willing’s application. I didn’t tell anyone in Pitchford about the name switch, not even Augie and Ben, didn’t tell anyone that once J.J. Moretti finally left Pitchford he would disappear completely. The motorcycle madmen had taught me how careful I needed to be.
The only person I was tempted to tell was Madeline, sweet Madeline Worshack, the love of my life. But I decided I couldn’t tell her the truth while we were still in Pitchford. Instead I lived like a spy, keeping my secrets, scheming to end up at the same college as Madeline so we could continue to date and then commit our futures one to the other. In an idyllic campus setting, under the leaves of some ancient oak, I would ask her to marry me. And when she said yes, and she would say yes, I would tell her about the money, and about how lovely our lives would be together with the head start the stolen cash would give us. We would be rich, forever, together. Yes, I was that much in love. She applied to Penn State and so did I, though of course I couldn’t go there and stay unrecognized. But she also applied to Boston College and so did I. She applied to UVA and to Maryland, to Indiana and Wisconsin, and so did I. How sweet the future would fall upon us, like the dapple of sunlight on the first crisp day of spring.
B009XDDVN8 EBOK Page 12