“Huh?”

  “What’s with your legs?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s with my legs, Crosby. That dipshit convinced my sister that it wasn’t enough to murder our mother. There was still someone else keeping them from their everlasting love. And could he talk to me like a man? Could he fight me face to face? Nope. My sister texted me last week, said she needed help. I came home right away, stepped inside the door, and there’s her boyfriend slashing at me with a knife. If she hadn’t intervened, I’d have bled to death. She called an ambulance and the two of them took off in my car. God knows where they went. I just got discharged from the hospital so now I’m heading back to gather what clues I can. If I track them down … Well, if I find them … I don’t know quite what I’ll do.”

  “Call me drunk, bucko, but you don’t look so good. You sure they told you you’re free to go?”

  “I’ll be fine. All’s I need is a little nap.”

  I start tapping my head against the window, gently at first, then a bit harder, until I gotta roll it down so I’m not tempted to try to break it with my forehead. “You don’t understand,” I tell him, “just how important Mom was to me. She did everything she could so that Sis and I were never without meals, never without a bed, never without a ride to and from school or sports or dances. We were fortunate to have her. I know plenty of kids who’d give anything to be so lucky.”

  “I’m sure sorry for your loss, Spunk.”

  “Poor Spunk.”

  When he turns off the highway to drive me into Sibley, I ask him to drop me off in the parking lot behind the school, between the tennis courts and the football field.

  He does. Like I’d hoped, it’s deserted. I’m about a mile from home. He parks his truck and trailer at a slight jackknife and shakes my hand with his scruffy mitt.

  “You take care of yourself. Get some rest,” he tells me.

  Off he goes, driving slowly, eyeing me skeptically in his rearview mirror, like we share the same premonition of me taking one last walk through this ratty town before I save it from its own misery. Like he can hear me counting shotgun shells in my head. Two in the tube, one in the chamber. Pocket the rest.

  ***

  I take a step and my right leg gives out like I’ve been sitting on it for days and I list to the right, barreling into the chain-link fence that surrounds the tennis courts. My face smooshes against the metal, my leg hanging limp, my fingers barely holding me up. Grass has grown through cracks in the courts. My fingers begin to cramp. I try to pull myself up but can’t, so I rap my knuckles on my head, grab a clump of my hair, and yank my head side to the side. Then I’m walking again. Strands of hair are sweat-shellacked to my hands and for a while I struggle to slide the hairs free and flick them into the breeze.

  I make my way out of the lot toward the long gravel road that leads to Bongo’s street. Bongo is probably getting bronzed at the beach with his guitar and Sonya, waiting for rain or the heat index to clear the sand so they can fondle each other. But Bongo Light, Bongo’s little brother who, unlike his older brother, doesn’t tan so well, will probably in the inflatable pool on the patio behind Mrs. Bongo’s, blazing up beneath that rollout canopy she bought to keep him from sunburning. Bongo is good people. He had my back last spring when those bungholes jumped us after Battle of the Bands and one of them tried to snap the neck of my guitar by leaning it up on the curb and stomping on it with his boot. Bongo tackled him just in time.

  That was just before prom. For months Monica kept saying she wanted to lose it with me and didn’t wanna lose it with me and wanted to lose it with me right away and wanted to wait until prom to lose it with me and wanted to go to prom with me wearing a hot-pink corsage and strapless turquoise dress and glitter-lotion on her collarbone and wanted to go to prom with Samuel Dunch wearing a turquoise corsage and strapless honey-brown dress and glitter-lotion on her collarbone. She went with him, and I stayed home and cranked my amp up and Miss Bonnie came into the room and stroked my head while I whimpered because it seemed Monica had been leading me on. Then two nights later she came by, glitter still on her, tears cutting through her prom rouge and cleansing again and again the same thin cheek-to-chin streaks, and talked about how she still burned from the condom and how she didn’t feel about him the way she felt about me and I teared up because it seemed now she hadn’t been leading me on but was just like me, confused and childish at times, which is fine.

  “It won’t happen,” I told her.

  “How do you know?”

  “Does it hurt? Is it still sore?”

  “It feels different.”

  “We don’t have to.”

  Aching and trembling around me so that I didn’t last three seconds. I tried to play it off. She could tell I came. I passed Dunch in the hallway, and he smirked at me the way he must’ve at her after he pulled out and thought to himself, That’s all I needed from you. A sad thing, that smirk is the closest he’ll ever get to being a man.

  From up on Miss Bonnie’s roof I could shoot up a whole four blocks, one in each direction, before anyone got a clear line of sight to snipe me, and I wouldn’t be a sitting duck with the eave there and those chunky cops parked half a mile away, pretending they didn’t hear the call go out. No turning back now unless Monica says she’s coming with me. If she says yes, I’ll save the bullets for the road.

  If Dorian shows up, he’ll die with the rest of them. He couldn’t even bother to say my name. I disgust him just like I did back when he came to Miss Bonnie’s and somehow just knew what had happened to me. Maybe I gave it away somehow. Maybe there was some tell. No, his brother must’ve told him. Murphy. Murphy. Always slamming Miss Bonnie’s toilet seats.

  I turn left onto Spruce Avenue. Mrs. Hankerson is jogging toward me in black tights, a grey sports bra, and a canary yellow headband. I stop. Forty feet out, she sees me. As she approaches, she keeps glancing at me warily like I’m wearing a ski mask.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. Excuse me,” I say not because I have anything to ask her for but so she’ll veer wide and ignore me, which she does. I keep walking, pass Julie Ann’s place. I’ve never shared one solitary word with her, then one time she spotted me in Target, walked right up to me, snorted, and spat a loogie that hit me in the chest only because it didn’t have the trajectory to hit my face like she aimed to. Standing in the window with a baby on her hip is Julie Ann’s stepmom, maybe thirty. She cocks her head forward and scowls at me. I keep going. Bongo’s isn’t far.

  Monica must’ve called me a killer a hundred times that night. After she saw the body on the kitchen floor, I offered her a hit to calm her down. It only made her more paranoid and somber. She sat on the stoop. I sat beside her. She wore jean shorts and a long-sleeve V-neck shirt. She said an awful lot. Said she wouldn’t visit me in jail, wanted no connection with me whatsoever anymore. Then she stared at her phone forever. It was agonizing. Some moments last so long they can’t ever really pass.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Call your dad, tell him what I did.” I meant it. I’d given up. For the first time in forever, I couldn’t see a way out.

  She didn’t lift her head. For a long while we were silent. There was no sound but my swallows and her mucusy inhales, noises that crept up on me as she scooted closer and closer even though she insisted I don’t put my arm around her.

  “But why, Heath?”

  I hushed her.

  “Why?”

  “I killed her.”

  “But why?”

  “I killed her.”

  “Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?”

  She put her phone atop her knee and slid her thumbs into the waistband of her jeans and stared at the steps.

  “What are you doing?” I asked when she suddenly stood.

  She didn’t reply. She walked into the house, and I followed her into the kitchen and she knelt next to Miss Bonnie. Eyes closed, she put her hands on Miss Bonnie’s face and neck, traced her fingers through the blood, which was still leaking quite a lot. She stained her jeans and the gut of her shirt with blood, then called Travis. “Daddy,” she said, “I did something terrible.”

  I went outside, I couldn’t listen to it. She came out and said her dad was on the way. She asked which drawer the money was in. It was the closest thing to salvation I’ve ever felt, how sure I was that she’d run off with me, if not that night, soon.

  “Don’t touch me!” she said. “Don’t!” She retrieved the cash. “And don’t do anything stupid with this, either. It’s for the funeral.”

  There never was a funeral. I still don’t know what happened to that money.

  Bongo Light is on the other side of the picket fence that separates his mom’s back yard from the dirt alley. Like I figured, he’s lounging in the inflatable pool. He’s got headphones on, a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, curly brown locks furling out from beneath it.

  “Light,” I say. He doesn’t flinch. I toss pebbles at him one by one. After I plop a few in the water, he finally looks out from under the brim of his hat, his small and slightly divergent brown eyes doped up good.

  I wave at him. “Light. Light.”

  He takes off his headphones, climbs out of the pool in his Hawaiian trunks, saunters to the fence, presses his face between two pickets, and looks me over, frowning.

  “Heath?”

  “What’s up?”

  “My brother’s not home.”

  “That’s okay. I came to talk to you.”

  “He’s pissed at you. Everyone’s been saying you capped yourself.”

  “You got a blunt, Light?”

  “My mom found my stash. She said she flushed it but I think she sold it to her friend Caroline. They let you leave the hospital like that?”

  “I didn’t go to the hospital.”

  “What happened to you, then?”

  “Just sick. Can I use your phone?”

  “Let me call my brother first.”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t tell anyone we talked. Not Bongo. Nobody.”

  He grimaces. Just how he is. He takes as an insult anything that makes him think.

  “You’ll understand later, Light. We didn’t talk. I don’t wanna ruin your summer.”

  “Who you calling?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Whatever you don’t know you won’t have to lie about later.”

  “Lie about what?”

  “Just trust me, dumbass.”

  He mutters something as he gets his phone from the patio. He holds it out between the pickets. When I grab it, he doesn’t let go right away. “You’re creeping me out with all this. I was on a good buzz.”

  “Thought you said you were out of bud.”

  “I am now.”

  I jerk the phone out of his hand.

  “Got any gum, Light?”

  “In the house, maybe.”

  He slips through the back screen door and into the house. I call Monica’s cell twice. She doesn’t answer, so I call the Spencers’ house. Jeremy picks up, of course.

  I talk like a muttering old man. “Monica there?”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Luther.”

  “Luther who?”

  “Luther Jones. She won a contest and I’m calling to notify her of her reward.”

  He pauses. “Heath?”

  “Huh?”

  “That you?”

  “This is Luther. Is Monica avail—”

  “You know I’ve got people accusing me of murder because of your crazy ass? My cousin—”

  “No idea what you’re talking about, young man. Is Monica there?”

  “I’m gonna end you.”

  “Good.”

  “I’m serious. If I don’t my dad will.”

  “I’m serious too. I’m calling from the hospital. Come and get me.”

  I end the call. Before I can try the house again, Monica’s number pops up on the screen.

  “Heath?! I thought you were … What’d you do to yourself?”

  “Nothing. It’s all a misunderstanding. I’ll explain everything later.”

  “I had to, Heath.”

  “I know.”

  “I had to tell them about Jeremy, except he’s here at the house and people are out looking for you. I think they figured it out.”

  “Don’t worry. Everything’s gonna be fine.”

  She breathes into the phone. “I’ve been crying nonstop.”

  “You have?”

  “Of course, Jesus, I thought you’d—”

  “I never wanted you to be sad,” I tell her.

  “Fuckin A, how’d you think I’d feel?”

  “I didn’t know you still loved me.”

  “I never stopped. I’m still pissed at you. So pissed. But that doesn’t mean I—”

  “You still love me?”

  “No shit,” she says.

  “Monica, I’m so sorry. I couldn’t have messed things up worse. Is your mom there?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “I’ve got a little money. We’ll put Miss Bonnie’s plates on your mom’s car. We’ll be in South Dakota before they have any clue we’re gone.”

  She doesn’t answer. I checked to see if she’s ended the call.

  “Monica.”

  “No.”

  “I’ll find us a car, then.”

  “I’m not skipping town with you, Heath.”

  “Goddamn transmission.”

  “This isn’t about the transmission. You never think things through! You don’t even have a plan for living. It’s just a plan to not be here anymore.”

  “The hotel—”

  “That’ll cover, what, one night?”

  “You said you love me.”

  “I do.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Heath …”

  “I don’t. And another thing, what happens when they start asking questions about what happened to her? What if the wrong people start wondering about who was where and when, and what people had to say after the … crime took place?”

  As she speaks, her voice grows nasally, cracks. “I don’t know what they’ll do to me, jail or who knows. If I go down with you, at least I’ll have a clear conscience, which is something you could use. Sometimes I think you obsess about me and leaving town and all that just because it keeps your mind off of what you did.”

  “Don’t say that. You don’t know how I feel. Just come meet me at Miss Bonnie’s.”

  “No.”

  “Please, please, Monica.”

  “No.”

  The screen door smacks against the door frame. Light comes toward me holding a glass of water and a lit fatty.

  I plead with her. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes or so. Please just … I need to see you. If I can see you, maybe I can hang on a while longer. And I’ll tell you what all happened to me, too. Be there.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “That’s all I needed to hear. I love you, baby.”

  “Love you too.”

  I hand the phone back to Light, drink the entire glass in two gulps.

  “Sorry, bro,” he says. “I rolled you one to make up for lying about not having none.”

  I belch, hand him the empty glass, take the blunt, and draw a deep hit. “It’s all good. And no matter what happens after this, it wasn’t your fault, Light. There was nothing you could do to change it. Got it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Just remember what I said.”

  “You’re creeping me out. Don’t do nothing stupid. I’ll send Bongo over to check on you later.”

  I look him hard in the eyes, one then the other, which isn’t easy the way his eyes are. “Don’t send anyone over. No one. Keep them far away from that house, okay? And one more thing. You. Didn’t. See me.”

  I leave in the direction of Miss Bonnie’s.

  “You’re a good kid, Light!” I yell. “Always been kind to me! Kinder than I deserve! Don’t forget sunscreen!”

  I roast the blunt down to my fingertips and flick the stub onto the gravel. It whirls twice before it stops, its smoke-plume one tall ray piercing the wet, still air.

  She’s coming. She has to. She’ll be waiting for me, parked in front of the house, tapping her thumbs on Delia’s leather steering wheel. There’s a secluded rest area south of Brainerd where I can pull over to hold her and wipe her tears on the shoulder of my shirt and kiss her lips, thin and supple and plum pink. On the highway, she can say everything she must, and I can say everything I must.

  If she doesn’t come, she’ll tell everyone where I am. They’ll show. I’ll be ready for them.

  As soon as I step onto my street, that stray mutt Herbert is on my heels. A menace, he’s had his fangs on me before, once on the calf, once on the hip, so I keep my eyes on the alley and move as quick as can be while he’s back there huffing and grumbling.

  Monica isn’t there yet. On the block are four vehicles. Mr. Schlitz’s Ford is always locked. The keys are probably just inside the door or in his bedroom. I could smash his bedroom window with a shovel, a rock. Corey Dinkelmann’s parents leave their car keys on a hook just inside the front door but they installed double bolt locks on the front and back doors after Corey denied pawning his mom’s jewelry enough to convince them they were victims of vandals. The other two are maybes. Anyway, she’ll take her mom’s car because she’s not walking and she’s not asking anybody for a ride. She’ll be here.

  That night, before the murder, I walked to the Spencers’ place. Delia answered the door, this time to confront me about the “procedure” I’d “forced on” her daughter. She’d convinced herself I did it on purpose, to punish her for scoffing at my proposal to Monica.

  I couldn’t get much in, words-wise.

  “The abortion—”

  “Procedure,” she corrected me.

  “Abortion.”

  “Procedure.”

  “It wasn’t my idea. I wanted her to keep it.”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21