Nick and June were here.
Unless something happened to this building, there’d always be evidence that we were here, together. It felt important.
We slipped back into my room and Nick checked the time on his phone.
“I have to go,” he said. “Aunt Linda said they serve dinner at five.”
“Yeah, it’s the early bird special every day.”
I got in the bed and under the covers. I was exhausted from our field trip.
“So I guess I’ll go,” he said.
But instead of walking out the door, he sat on the bed next to me and reached for my hand.
“Yeah,” I said. “You should go.” But I squeezed his hand tighter, pulling him closer. “Try to get some sleep tonight.”
His eyes were on the restraints again.
“I’ll be fine. I promise.”
He scooted closer to me, the covers bunching between us, his knee touching my hip, right above the feather, but he still wasn’t looking at me. I wanted to distract him from the restraints.
“There was a girl and a boy,” I said.
He lifted his eyes and looked at me.
“The girl was sick,” I said.
He pulled me even closer to him. “And the boy was bad,” he added.
“Not as bad as he thought, though.”
He ran his fingers across my forearm and it took me a minute to realize he was drawing a bird, his fingers tracing along the feathers.
“The girl didn’t know what to do next,” I whispered.
“The boy never knew what to do.”
“She was scared.”
He rested his forehead against mine. “So was he. Maybe they could figure it out together,” he said.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Was there a dragon?” he asked. There was a hopeful sound in his voice.
“There was a dragon.”
It was the first summer I’d spent at Hank’s since my dad had gone to prison, and the sound of wood splintering was my new favorite sound. The hammer became an extension of me. There was a moment when I brought the hammer down on the furniture and found the weak spot in the wood and I knew it would only take a couple more hits before it would break. I was in the workshop behind the cabin. I’d busted up four chairs already. They were ones I’d built, so I figured they were mine to break.
“What are you doing?” John asked.
He came in from the back door and dropped a pile of wood at his feet. He walked toward me, but I thrust my arm out so he’d see that he needed to stop where he was. There was a hole at my feet, and if he got too close, he’d fall in. We’d both be stuck in this pit. Uncle Hank walked in right after him and took in the scene around him, me pointing the hammer at John, the splintered heaps of broken furniture all around me. He came right for me, like he couldn’t see the hole I was standing in, or if he could, he didn’t care. He jerked the hammer away from me and tossed it to the side.
“Get out of here,” he said to John. He didn’t take his eyes off me.
Once we were alone, he kicked at the broken chairs at our feet. “Is there a reason you’re undoing all of your hard work?”
“They weren’t good chairs anyway,” I said. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Sure you do.” He bent down and started picking up the wood. “Help me,” he said.
I didn’t move. He stood.
“Help me,” he repeated.
He thrust his gathered pieces of wood into my hands. “We’ll get this cleaned up and then you’ll go out back and help John cut the rest of the wood.”
“What’s the point?” I asked.
“The point is I need the wood cut. You can’t make furniture without cutting the wood first.”
“Then what?” I asked.
He knew I wasn’t just asking him what to do after the wood was cut.
“You don’t have to have it all figured out right now,” he said.
My nose burned. I was going to cry and I didn’t even know why. I had so much anger in me. There was so much that was out of my control.
It was my hardest summer at the cabin, but by the end of it, I was feeling better. The Ozarks held a special kind of quiet, the kind of quiet I wanted to take with me back to Creed.
“There’s no place like this at home,” I told Uncle Hank.
We’d been outside, stretching canvas all day. We always spent our last day of the summer doing this, so he’d have plenty to paint on during the year.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Someplace where I can just be and not worry about everything.”
I’d made a lot of progress over the summer and I wanted to hold on to it.
“I know of a place,” he said. “It’s kind of a secret.”
“In Creed?”
“Do you know where the Franklin farm is?”
I nodded. The Franklins had been one of the founding families of the town, but they’d left a long time ago. They’d never sold their property. The farm was a hundred acres of grown-up grass and not much else.
“There’s a barn at the back of the property, near the woods. You can’t see it from the road. It was a place I used to go to when I needed things to get quiet. I made it my own, brought some of my stuff there. I didn’t really have a place that was just mine at home. The barn became that place. You could go there. It’s probably ready to fall down, though, so you’ll have to be careful. You’ll need to replace a lot of the boards in the loft if you want to use it. But that won’t be a problem for you now.”
It wouldn’t be.
“And it’d keep your hands busy.”
I needed that. “You won’t mind?”
“I wouldn’t be telling you about it if I did.”
He seemed tense, though, like he might’ve regretted it.
“It started out as just a place,” he said. “Then it became something more.”
* * *
The sun poured into the space through the loft window of the barn. I was lying on the cot, face to face with one of Hank’s paintings. It was of the high school and the railroad tracks behind it.
I didn’t know what time it was, but it was late in the day, by the looks of it. I’d spent most nights here since June had been admitted to the hospital. I’d paint until I couldn’t see anymore and then crash on the cot in the loft. I’d been up late the night before. I’d tried to rest like June had wanted, but I couldn’t stop thinking about her sleeping in a bed that came with straps to tie her down. And then once I’d fallen asleep, I’d had a nightmare.
I’d known I was dreaming, because we were in the barn and June was dancing. June never danced. She moved to music I couldn’t hear. She was free in a way I’d never seen her in real life, her movements unmeasured. I didn’t want to look away from her, but John was there, too. I hadn’t dreamed about him in a long time. There was a TV in the loft, and an Xbox. John sat in front of it and held out a controller. There wasn’t electricity in the barn, but it didn’t matter in this dream.
“Wanna play?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, taking the controller from him.
There was something different about him, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. He wore the desert camo I’d seen in one of the pictures he’d sent me from Afghanistan. The camo was worn now, though, and ripped in places. He looked like he’d been left outside for too long, his face tan from spending so much time in the desert.
We played for a while, June dancing around us. Then it hit me, why he looked different.
He was dead.
That was what was wrong with his eyes. I saw the wound then, a hole in his side, and the stains on his camo where the blood had dried.
I’d woken up with a start and now John was in my head and I couldn’t get him out of it. For a secon
d I’d forgotten he wasn’t somewhere where he could take calls and I’d picked up my phone to call him. I really needed to talk to him. I needed to know that he was okay and for him to tell me what to do next. I couldn’t call June either and Hank didn’t have a phone, so there was nobody to talk to, nobody to tell me that it was just a dream, nothing to do but stare at Hank’s painting.
I dialed John’s number anyway. When his voice mail picked up, my stomach hit my feet.
“It’s John. Don’t leave a voice mail, because nobody checks those.”
The beep sounded.
“Hey, man, it’s Nick. I know you won’t get this. I just wanted to talk to you. I hope you’re okay. I haven’t heard from you in a while. I hope you’ve been getting the drawings I’ve sent you. I’m bringing June with me to Hank’s this summer. We can take her out there, to our spot. She’ll love it. She’s looking forward to coming. She’s not been doing so good lately. Anyway, I hope I hear from you soon.”
I hung up. My phone rang a second later and I answered it so fast, like there was a chance that it was John calling me back.
“Hello?”
“The car I was telling you about will be in the area tonight,” Benny said.
He was the last person I wanted to talk to. I hadn’t heard from him in days. Part of me had wondered if he’d forgotten that he’d offered me double to steal a car. Part of me hoped that he had.
“Come to the garage and I’ll give you the details.” He hung up without waiting for me to say anything.
I didn’t want to go to the garage. I couldn’t shake my dream. I wanted to see June again, but it’d be stupid to push my luck and I couldn’t risk Aunt Linda’s job any more than I already had. So I did the one thing I didn’t want to do and went to the garage.
* * *
I’d been there for an hour. Benny had told me to wait outside. I wished I hadn’t told him I’d do it. I wanted to be free already. Especially after seeing the look on June’s face when she’d said she was proud of me. That was the thing, though. Once you agreed to a job, you had to go through with it or pay one of the other guys to do it. It was the way Benny kept us from agreeing to shit we couldn’t really do just because he dangled some extra money in front of us. Nobody reneged on Benny. Only a couple of guys ever had, and they’d showed back up at the garage busted up so bad that they had a hard time walking.
I checked my phone. Correction: I’d been there an hour and fifteen minutes. Benny’s favorite game was telling guys to come to the garage and then acting like he didn’t know why we were there. We were his puppets. I kept my hands in my pockets so I didn’t start punching things: my car, the brick wall behind me, Tommy, who wouldn’t stop looking at me.
“What?” I asked him.
“I can’t believe you’re quitting.”
“Believe it,” I said. “I’m getting out of here.”
“It’s gonna suck without you here.”
“It sucks now,” I said, trying to take the anger out of my voice.
“Yeah, but when you’re gone it’ll be worse.”
“You could quit, too.”
“And do what?” he asked.
The side door to the garage opened and Benny stuck his head out. “Get in here,” he said to me.
Following him inside, I thought about this being my last time in the garage. Some of my best memories were here. I knew that was screwed up.
We stepped into his office.
“Close the door,” Benny said.
He sat at his desk and opened an envelope.
“It’s a ’97 Crown Vic,” he said. “Black.” He slid a picture of the car across the desk. “It’ll be in El Dorado tonight at the downtown theater. It should be there by eight o’clock.”
I picked up the photo. “Should Tommy go with me?” I asked.
“No, he’s got shit to do here. Somebody’ll bring you back to your car later.”
I waited to see if there were more instructions, but he just stared at me.
“I meant what I said the other day,” I said.
He gave me a confused look.
“On the phone. When I said this was the last one. I meant it.”
He studied my face for a long time. I didn’t know what he saw there. The only sounds came from outside the office, tools clanging, pumps breathing. He kept staring.
Finally he grunted. “A lot of guys have sat just where you’re sitting and said the same thing. They always come back, though.” He leaned forward. “You need me more than you think you do.”
“I don’t. I don’t need you.”
“We’ll see about that,” he said.
I didn’t care if he believed me. I wouldn’t disappoint June. I’d wanted to come clean in the hospital and tell her that I had one more job to do, but I knew it would have upset her. I was the last thing she needed to worry about.
“Get going,” he said. “I’ll expect you back here by ten.” His look said he knew this wasn’t going to be my last job.
* * *
It had been dark for a while and I’d been driving around El Dorado, wasting time. I’d had to get out of Creed earlier. I’d kept driving by the hospital, like I was making sure it was still there.
Parking on a side street across from the theater, I spotted the car. Under any other circumstances, I’d never pick this car to steal, not where it was. The theater was in the middle of downtown and there were too many other businesses around, too many windows looking out on the street. I thought about waiting for whoever owned it to come back and following them to wherever they went next. Maybe it’d be a more secluded spot. But Benny wanted me and the car back in a couple of hours.
Reaching under my seat, I grabbed my tools. This was the last time. As stupid as it was, part of me was sad to let go of something that my dad had taught me how to do. We didn’t share a lot.
What was even more screwed up was that part of me still missed the days when we had done it together, me being his lookout during those years when I was too young to steal a car by myself. I’d been his lookout more times than I could count, my back pressed against the car while he worked the lock. The first time I’d helped him, he had the door open and me in the car in no time. The feeling was amazing, my dad’s laugh loud when he saw I was excited. It was a “That’s my boy” moment. I knew that stealing was wrong, that what we were doing was wrong, but I was his boy.
It was time to let it go, though. I could do it. I could make a break from this life. I opened my car door and stepped into the street. I could be who June wanted me to be.
The street was lined with cars, but nobody was around. Probably everyone was inside the theater. I didn’t know who the car belonged to, or when they’d be back for it, and my heartbeat picked up. I didn’t know what was inside it, or why Benny wanted it, but I knew I needed to stop thinking about the things I didn’t know.
I walked up to the car and slid the lock pick between the window and the door. “One fluid motion,” my dad would say. The lock made the click noise that let me know I was in. What if I was never as good at something else as I was at this? I opened the car door and dropped down into the seat. I had it cranked in no time.
There was movement in my periphery. It was one of those moments that I’d rewind in my mind over and over again, trying to find the exact moment when it had all gone to shit, trying to figure out what I’d missed.
The car door was still open and I noticed the smell of a man’s aftershave. The hairs stood on the back of my neck and I gripped the tool still in my hand.
“Stop what you’re doing and step out of the car,” he said. His voice was older, gruff.
Time stopped moving. I opened my mouth to try and get a good breath, because the air stopped moving, too. I got out of the car. I couldn’t see him. He was behind me.
“Put your hands in the air. S
lowly.”
I almost couldn’t hear him over my heartbeat hammering in my ears. I was hot in an instant, sweat dripping off my forehead. What would John do? I thought. A flashlight shone on the back of my head now. John would run. He’d never been arrested. He was almost shot once, but he’d never been arrested. I could run, too. I could knock back into him, throw him off balance, and run like hell. I was fast.
“Drop your tools,” he said.
The metal made a quiet clanking sound against the street.
Run.
“Turn around. Keep your hands up,” he said.
I was going to run.
I turned. I couldn’t see his face because of the flashlight now shining in my eyes, but I saw his uniform, his utility belt, his badge, the gun pointing at my face. It wasn’t the first time one had been pointed at me, but never this close before. There was no way I could run without getting shot.
The air left my body in one slow exhale until there was no more breath in me.
He reached for me, pulling cuffs from his side. They were on me in a second, cold and pinching, and he turned me to face the car, pushing my face to the hood. It was still warm. I didn’t resist and he didn’t have to tell me what to do next. This was a dance I knew.
It was over. There was a feeling, a sick kind of relief. I could stop dreading it now, because this was always going to happen. This wasn’t gonna go like the last two times I was arrested. The judge had warned me the last time that I wouldn’t see the inside of a juvenile courtroom again. I was going to real jail. Maybe they’d put me near my dad. I wondered if he’d be surprised to see me, or worse, if I’d get a “That’s my boy” smile.
This shouldn’t hurt, because this was where I’d always been headed. Why did it hurt?
“That your car back there?” he asked.
He hefted me up and turned me to face the way I’d come. He must’ve been watching me.
“Or did you steal that one, too?”
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