by L. A. Fields
Yanking on Noah’s canary scarf whenever he spotted him trudging through snow on his own, Ray would say, “It snows like this in Michigan, but it doesn’t feel as cold, no lake effect.” And when Noah would frown at him, thinking, Cold is cold, could a few miles really matter that much? Ray would nod at him and smile and say, “Trust me, you can really tell the difference.”
But most of Noah’s speculation concerning Michigan revolved around what he would tell his mother if he got in. He couldn’t tell her the real reason, that the thought of staying at home in Chicago without the first real friend he’d had in years was nearly unbearable. He and Ray had started riding to school together after New Year’s—driving if the weather was particularly unpleasant, taking the bus the rest of the time. The sight of someone waiting for him on the corner, flicking a cigarette into the street so it wouldn’t be in the way of all he wanted to say . . . Noah couldn’t let that get away from him. Not getting into U of M, that was one thing, that was just life as Noah had become accustomed to it, that was out of his control. But if he did get in—and his grades were way better than Ray’s, he knew—then Noah would be the one to say yes or no. Choosing to wake up in Chicago every day and walk out to meet nothing and no one . . . he’d hate himself forever. Having Ray around was like having an old constant ache suddenly removed. Noah hadn’t realized how much pain he’d been in until it was gone, and he couldn’t let himself get used to it again.
He’d tell her it started as a lark, then he’d explain the etymological origins of the term lark, from skylark, and how it most likely entered the lexicon as a term for playing about because of sailors who saw the birds darting about in their ships’ rigging. Then he’d tell her: home was wonderful, but the college experience was important. Chicago was wonderful, but Michigan had a great placement rate for graduate school. She was wonderful, but Ray was too, and she was a sure thing, but Ray was now or never. She’d have to understand.
So in March the snow started to patch away and disappear. In March his mother began speculating about when the tulips would emerge. In March the letter came letting Noah in on his acceptance to the school in Michigan, and so in March, Noah told his mother that he’d be leaving in September.
Faye was propped up in her bed playing on an abandoned video game console of Sam’s, focused on some game that looked like an Impressionist painting, and revolved around the premise of getting keys into locks, bricks into blocks; a game sold as a puzzle that could keep its players sharp. Noah brushed the bottoms of his feet off on his pant legs before he crawled in with her, settling onto newly laundered white bedding, stiff like thoroughly whipped heavy cream, and just starting to smell like her.
“You know Ray’s transferring schools,” he began. She did of course, because Ray had told her about it at least five times already. “Well, he got me to apply with him, and of course I got in, and I was thinking I might go.”
Faye’s player on the screen started long-jumping for no reason, arcing slowly, artfully, uselessly as it ran along. She was definitely listening.
“They have a great placement rate for law school, and it’s only four hours away by car. I’ll take the bus if Dad can’t drive me there for orientation, obviously. Ray drives around on his permit, but you know I don’t, but I’ll have my license by Thanksgiving, and for Christmas, you know, so I can drive us home for all of that. I think it would be an adventure,” he concluded. That was how Ray always billed it: an adventure, the first of many.
Faye smiled in the watery glow of the TV, paused her game, and shifted her shoulders towards Noah so that only half of her face was lit by the blue-green glow.
“I want you to be happy, and I want you to go for what makes you happy. Don’t worry about me,” she assured him. “I’m not going anywhere.”
10
THE END OF THE SCHOOL year for Ray brought the end of the reign of Tracy. On her last day Mother handed Tracy an envelope with a cash bonus and a gift card someone else had given Mr. and Mrs. Klein at a fundraiser, and Ray shook her hand over-firmly, and she hefted her backpack out their door for the very last time.
“Your grades haven’t been what we’ve come to expect anyway,” Mother said as the door clicked closed. “She hardly deserved the amount we gave her, but I guess I could think of this last year as a form of charity. She was clearly out of her depth once you got into college work. She went to some rural school; I should have expected it.”
“You should have listened to me, I told you,” Ray said rotely as he went upstairs to gather his keys, wallet, and phone.
“You don’t have to keep harping on it now, she’s gone,” Mother replied with the same tired familiarity. With Ray’s departure to Michigan a sure thing, the fight had gone right out of their rivalry.
Ray went straight to Noah’s house with a cheap bottle of wine he picked because the name Smoking Loon made him snort. He smuggled it in his now unused backpack out of the corner-cabinet vintages his parents kept for unimportant guests. He presented it to Noah upon entry to his room.
“It’s not even one in the afternoon,” Noah said.
“I’m finally without supervision, I can’t help myself. Let’s go drink this in the park like bums.”
“We can’t drink it out of that, unless we want to get arrested like bums too.”
In the kitchen pouring wine into a large plastic squeezy bottle is where Faye found them. Ray saw her first, felt a presence come to stand just outside the doorway, and when he turned to look, she was smiling tolerantly at them.
Ray did an exaggerated slide to put his body between Faye and her view of the wine bottle. “We aren’t drinking underage! I mean, uh, hello Mrs. Noah’s Mom.”
“I should stop you, but it’s just so nice seeing you have fun,” she said, speaking to them both, but looking only at her son.
“It won’t all fit,” Noah told her, stopping his pouring and capping the squeeze bottle.
“Want a hit off this?” Ray asked, taking the excess to Faye. She upended the bottle and finished it in three gulps.
“I’ll hide this from your father,” she said to Noah as he zipped their portion into Ray’s backpack and handed it over. Ray slung it on and started moving towards the back door. Noah came with him taking a set of keys from a set of hooks shaped like keys (in case you got confused about what should go there). “Stay out of trouble, you two.”
“I will,” Noah promised her, backtracking to give his mother a kiss on the cheek.
“No promises,” Ray told her as he held the door for her son and then closed it behind them.
Noah took in a big sigh of thick late afternoon summer air before he started talking. He looked his most out of place in the charm and wonder of a Chicago summer—that severe face was winter all over, Ray decided, and only a big coat with big 1980s-style pads could hide his lack of shoulders. It didn’t bother Ray though; Noah was still good company.
“So Tracy’s gone and you’re free at last.”
“Yes. This is going to be such a nice summer. Ever notice you like a place best right before you leave it?”
“I haven’t left a lot of places before now.”
“It’s the opposite with people though, I get sick of people.”
“No, leaving people is the worst, there’s no guarantee you’ll ever see them again. You can always come back to a place.”
“Unless a storm destroys it, or a fire.”
Noah frowned. “The weather would still be the same.”
“Nuclear winter.”
Noah coughed, and almost managed to laugh. “Okay then, I guess I will miss Chicago after it’s bombed.”
“I sure won’t miss Tracy. I hope she gets hit by a bus on her way home.”
“Isn’t that a little extreme?”
“Doesn’t feel that way to me. Didn’t you hate your nanny or whatever you had?”
“My au pair.”
“Oh right, because she was French, right?”
“German. Most languages just us
e the French term.”
“Oh my God, no one cares.”
Noah sighed. He cared.
“I don’t know, the stuff with Nadine got weird at the end. I was getting too old, and something was up with her and my older brother, I sort of caught on to that later, something sexual.”
“You didn’t have a molester nanny did you? Because then I’ll wish for her to get hit by a bus instead. I’ll do that for you.”
“Not me, not as far as I remember it, but Mike and Sam are both better looking than me though, so . . . there’s that to consider.”
Ray laughed, extricated their hooch, and handed the squeeze bottle to Noah. “That was funny.”
“Yeah, hilarious; always the witness and never the victim. So what do you have planned for this sentimental summer?”
“Oh, I’ve got ideas,” Ray said as they began cutting through grass, heading towards the middle, the leafiest part of the park.
Smashing car windows, once he’d done it about three times, had completely lost its thrill. The last time, he was so without fear that he rooted through the car a bit and took what he could find: a phone charger, a bottle of hand sanitizer, and a key chain shaped like the Eiffel Tower. He was a tiny bit amused when he washed his hands of the crime using the hand sanitizer (before chucking it all in a trash can), but he had outgrown this pursuit, his skills had surpassed his task, and he was bored again.
Stealing was the next logical extension: not just breaking, but taking, gaining personally from what he was able to get away with doing to others. He had already started in small ways, stealing money from his mother’s purse, stealing candy from his brother’s bedside supply, but that was just to loosen up; he wouldn’t really be testing himself until he started to steal from people who had no reason to trust him.
“What do you think about pick-pocketing?” Ray asked.
“I actually saw an article about how it’s a dying art, nobody really carries around cash anymore, and credit cards get you caught too quickly, there are cameras in every store and ATM, there’s a tech trail. You could steal phones, but people usually have them glued to their palms, they notice too quickly. If that’s your plan for the summer, it’s not great.” Noah finished his downer’s speech with a gulp of wine and a sour face.
“I was just trying to introduce my idea rhetorically. I think I might try stealing, but I already know what a pain it is. I wanted you to brainstorm with me, not just deliver a lecture, professor.”
The wine was warm and already tasted like plastic that had been through a dishwasher. Ray made a face too.
“If you say so. But if you can’t steal money and you can’t sell what you steal, what’s the point?”
“The thrill of the hunt, the joy of the sport! Why does anyone ever play a game of baseball if there’s no trophy? They like it.”
“I hate sports.”
“I know you do.”
1
RAY’S SUMMER STARTED LATE, HE felt, because he wasted the first couple of weeks doing nothing. Literally nothing; full days spent with no one thing to say when asked, “So what did you do today?” He called or visited Noah, and Noah was always doing something, and that was what he told his family at the end of each day: “Nothing much, just relaxing, talked to a friend of mine who’s recording bird sightings for an article.” Then he would repeat some-to-all of Noah’s prattle about classification, documentation, categorization, and people would still be impressed even though Ray had done nothing. Noah’s life was so structured that it erected a kind of scaffolding around Ray’s mere existence. That was a considerable power.
Eventually his parents came to know Noah by name. Ray would say, “a friend of mine,” and they would ask, “Is that Noah?” It got to the point where his mother insisted to meet this boy, insisted so hard Ray wondered if she thought he was made up. He thought it was funny that after all of the lies he told, the actual truth sounded false to her. He’d have to lie to be believed forever, he decided.
Ray also got serious about his work after a fortnight of loafing, but it wasn’t work he could crow about.
He started stealing for real, not just borrowing-without-asking sort of stealing from friends and family, but robbing items from stores. He was too young to steal anything he could use—he was eyeballed when he wandered near male accessories like wallets, cufflinks, watches, etc., but if he was browsing through the women’s section of a store and wasn’t approached by a sales chick beaming that for your mom or your girlfriend? face, he had a neat little trick for taking anything off a rack’s peg. His secret? Long, opaque sleeves. It would be an easier grift in winter with sleeves and a coat on, but then stores know to be suspicious of a bulky coat, so maybe he was as favored by fate as ever.
All he had to do was pick up the front item of a display row: a bracelet, some hair pins, jangly useless key chains, earring bobbles . . . and let the second item on the row slip between his skin and his sleeve. He would pull off the first thing, let the second one sink to his elbow, then put the first one back like it just wasn’t the right look. There aren’t security tags on cheap costume danglers, so by the end of June he had a creepy hoard of lady’s jewelry in an unused recipe box on his windowsill. He didn’t fondle his treasure much, but he did like to sit at his telescope and stroke the box. He was quite fond of what its contents meant about his potential.
Boredom naturally set in though; stealing isn’t the end, it’s the means to something greater, the same way money isn’t the thing to want, it’s the way to acquire what you want. He began to give away the jewelry as gifts, first to girls in his periphery. Flirting with them became easier than ever, he could capture their whole attention with the right little gift and presentation (“I saw the color and thought of your eyes/hair/hands,” whatever). It granted him so much good will and devotion that he started gifting things to his mother, even searching for bits and bobs she might actually like, which is a terrible thing for a criminal to do, act with a consistent motivation. But this phase of his development was short-lived, because Mother was a bitch about every gift.
“What is this for? What did you do that you’re trying to distract me from?”
“Where are you getting the money for this stuff? I mean it’s cheap, but it’s not free, I hope you’re not spending your allowance on this type of stuff.”
“Raymond, do I look like I can’t pick out my own jewelry? Your father can’t even guess at my preferred settings, and he’s been trying for years, just stop. It’s nice that you’re thinking of your old mother, but please . . . just stop.”
So after a series of rebuffs like those, Ray started giving his gifts to Noah’s mother, and she actually appreciated it.
“Oh, how sweet of you!” Faye cooed at the first one, a necklace Ray laced into his fingers like a cat’s cradle web, with a heavy, quarter-sized clock locket hanging in the middle; a dense little egg in a nest. “Oooohhh, look at that! I love little charms like this.”
The locket’s cover had a pair of lovebirds on a branch etched into the filigree—Ray snagged it because it reminded him of Noah, and he thought the boy might like to see such an ornament nestled in his mother’s bosom. Ray bestowed the chain over Faye’s head like some royal raiment of mink and trinkets. She gave him a true mother’s smile for doing that, the kind Noah must have seen all the time growing up. Ray had never been the target of one before, and it made his thieving habit feel not just fun and challenging, but right: the correct choice to have made.
By the summer solstice, Ray finally couldn’t keep his work from Noah for another moment. Once Noah asked his mother about that locket, it was time to pay back all of Noah’s stuffy lectures with his own passion and purpose.
“Did you steal a necklace from your mom and give it to mine?” That’s how Noah brought it up. He wasn’t angry about it; he asked it contemplatively, like he’d been trying to deduce the origin of that locket as a puzzle since he first spotted it.
“No,” Ray told him, his face blank, his sp
eech uninflected and honest. “I stole it from a fake boutique in the hipster part of town.” Ray kicked off his shoes as he said this, pulling his legs onto Noah’s bed and crossing them shin-over-shin in a meditation pose.
“Really?” Noah asked, leaning back in his desk chair, striking his psychiatrist’s pose, and picking up a pen just to set it stately against the corner of his mouth. “Go on,” he said.
And Ray did. He lied to Noah like he lied to everyone, about his habits with girls, about his grades, about his evenings alone, and Noah knew better than to believe him (unlike every other idiot Ray knew), and yet still Noah liked him, or at least found him fascinating. So about his work, Ray decided to tell the truth, finally.
And when the reality of Ray also kept Noah fascinated, that’s when Ray really started to like him.
2
NOAH’S SUMMER WORK HAD MOSTLY been as serious as Ray and his audiences believed.
Number one: he never left his education and exploration on the subject birds; he always had one book open, one trip planned, one paper started, or more cataloging to do.
Number two: law isn’t a subject one can just wing; with his decision made to follow Ray to the University of Michigan, Noah pulled up the last decade of course schedules, downloaded their syllabi, and started compiling a list of cornerstone textbooks to read before he even arrived on campus.
Number three: college isn’t just an expensive book club; Noah looked up every professor he’d have access to, searched their accomplishments and standings, and picked those he wanted to ingratiate himself with in the hopes of having them as future references. That would mean taking any class they happened to teach, lurking near them for any opportunities to aid their work, and never correcting some pet opinion they uselessly advocated, no matter how wrong Noah might know them to be. He was willing to make that nearly insufferable sacrifice of his own principles, that’s how much Noah demanded success in his pursuit of a law degree.