RAY AND MICHELLE drove up Holicong Road while he tried to get his bearings against the low hump of Buckingham Mountain starting to go green again. There were a few crocuses showing livid purple in the lawns they passed. The clouds moved fast in a wind that Ray could feel pulling at the car. The sky would show, blue- white between the clouds, then disappear again. He made two more turns, glancing down at a piece of paper Michelle had printed out for him.
She had been tense, watching the sheets print out, her shoulders drawn in, her eyes flicking over his. She shook her head. “If I said I didn’t want you to do this, would it matter?”
“Nothing will happen.” He smiled at her, or tried to, showed his teeth, but thought, how do I know that? “Anyway,” he said. “Anyway, I have to go.”
“Okay.” She looked down. “Okay, but I’m driving you.”
“No, it’s okay.”
“Fuck that. You’re pretending you’re handling shit. I get that. But I’m not sitting here and you go off and I never see you again.”
He saw she was close to crying and thought about it for a minute and finally nodded. “Sure. Nothing is going to happen, but it’s cool you come with me.” He kissed the top of her head, and she held his arms.
NOW THEY WENT slowly by neat houses, looking at numbers painted on mailboxes. They came to a brick house with a lot of windows, nicer than he thought it would be, the lawn trimmed. Flower beds, hard rectangles of turned soil expecting something that was coming.
He didn’t know exactly what he had expected. Dust and cracked windows, he guessed. Things rusting on a lawn. While they sat at the curb, the garage door lifted and there he was. Moving purposefully out across the driveway with a rake. Attacking a small pile of winter- dead leaves and pushing it into a black plastic bag.
He was still erect, and he matched the squared- away house. His hair was white etched with a few solid black lines, and his shoulders were broad. He looked like what he was, a state trooper. A cop. Retired, older, but still a cop.
Michelle opened her mouth, but Ray opened the door and pushed himself out, straightening slowly and then reaching back for the cane. She watched his face, showed him the cell phone. He winked.
He covered most of the distance to where Stan Hicks stood over the shrinking pile of leaves before the older man turned and faced him holding the rake loosely at his side. The eyes were pale gray and clear, focused. Ray wondered how old he was, comparing him mentally to the shriveled old man his father had been when they had finally let him out.
“I wondered if you’d ever come here.”
Ray nodded, thought about putting his hand out. He felt Stan Hicks look him over, taking in the cane, the thin frame. When Hicks looked back at the car, Ray followed his eyes to see Michelle sitting in the open door, watching tensely, working the cell phone in her hands like a rosary.
“That’s a pretty girl.”
“Yessir.”
“She looks a little like my girl.”
Ray nodded; there was no denying it. Ray allowed himself to see it, and he did have to look at Michelle again. He smiled at her.
“Why did you come here, son?”
“I don’t know.”
“You bring a gun? Going to make me pay for something?” He didn’t seem particularly worried about that possibility, and of the two of them seemed more able to defend himself.
“No, I thought maybe you already paid what ever you had to pay for.”
“And what would that be?” He looked Ray in the eye. “You think I ruined your life?”
“No.”
“You did that on your own.”
“No, my life wasn’t ruined.” Ray stuck his hands in his pockets. “Took me a long time to see that. I’d have said it was, you asked me not long ago. But it wasn’t.” They both looked down at the wet pile of jagged leaf fragments at their feet.
“Why didn’t you say what I did to you?”
“I wanted the same thing you wanted.”
“I kept expecting they’d come. I was ready for it. When you told somebody what I did.” He held the rake in his hands as if he were going to snap it. The way he’d snapped Ray’s arms.
Ray could almost feel it again. Stan Hicks pushing him down on the cold asphalt, the rage spilling out of the older man in a torrent of screamed curses and spit. The metal bar falling once, twice on each arm.
Ray cocked his head. “What was that? That bar you used on me?”
“The tire iron from my patrol car. I was ready to account for it. I think I wanted to. I broke your arms. I lied, I made that dope addict Perry March say you stole his car. I was ready to tell it. I was proud of what I did. But no one ever came.”
“No.”
“You killed my girl.”
“I loved her. A drunk driver killed her.”
“You don’t say that.” His eyes were full of tears and his mouth worked. “You don’t get to say that.”
“No, Stan. I think that’s why I went to prison. So I could say it. I think that’s why I let everything come. The beating and the lies you told.”
Stan Hicks sat on the ground and put his head in his hands. Ray got down slowly on one knee, the cold water from the grass soaking through his pants. He turned, to see Michelle standing now, watching intently, her eyes wet.
Stan Hicks spoke, his eyes hidden. “She’d have hated it. What I did.”
“Yes. But she’d have wanted me to help you.”
“I don’t deserve it.”
“No.” Ray reached over and put his hand on the older man’s arm. “That’s why I had to do it. Come here and say it was okay. That it worked out okay. It’s the same thing she did for me. Loved me. Wanted good things for me that I didn’t deserve. She would have hated what you did. But she would have kept on loving you.”
Ray got awkwardly to his feet, Michelle running across the lawn to help him. Together they helped Stan Hicks get up, and they went with him inside. The house was bright and empty, and there were pictures of Marletta and her mother. Michelle stood in the entryway and looked at them, and then at Stan Hicks and Ray standing in the kitchen. Ray got a glass from a cabinet and ran the water, filled it, and handed it to the older man.
Ray leaned back against the counter. “My mother always did that.”
“Mine, too.” Stan Hicks wiped at his eyes with his sleeve.
“It always helped.”
They both looked at Michelle. For the first time, the older man smiled. “Just like my girl.”
HE WAS IN the store late on a Wednesday night, unpacking boxes and thinking about locking the door, when one of the detectives from the hospital came in. The tall one, good cop, the one named Nelson. The detective looked around and rocked on his heels. Ray waved from where he was kneeling in the space between the register and a display table, motioning him further in.
“Nice place, Raymond.”
“Ray. Everyone calls me Ray, Detective.” He stuck out his hand.
“Right. Ray.”
Ray pointed down the stacks. “Take a look around. Help yourself to anything catches your eye.”
Nelson scratched his ear, smiled.
Ray said, “If that’s not a problem. Graft or something.”
Nelson pulled out his note pad and gestured at a table and two chairs up against the far wall. “You got a second?”
Ray hesitated half a beat, then pointed to the chair nearest the door. “Sure. You want some coffee?”
Nelson said yes, and Ray went back to the storeroom, returning with two cups. Nelson had wedged his tall frame into the seat, and his notebook was open on the table. But Ray’s eye was drawn by the paper- wrapped bottle that sat next to it. Green glass and a red cap that Nelson unscrewed. He poured a small dollop of the brown liquid into his coffee and held it out to Ray, who wagged his head for a second indecisively before saying sure, what the hell. Nelson sipped at his coffee, and they sat for a minute.
“You’re seeing someone.”
“You been keeping tabs.”
Nelson laughed, holding up his hands to make peace. “No, really. Just saw you in the coffee shop with a woman.”
“Michelle. She’s usually here, but she’s taking a writing class at Bucks.”
Nelson nodded. “Nice. She seems like a nice lady, Ray.” He looked sheepish. “Not doing so hot in that area myself.”
Ray sipped at the coffee, made a face. “Forgot how bitter it is.”
“Only at first.” They sat in silence, Nelson tapping his pen on his cup.
“I gotta ask.”
“Why am I here?”
“Well, yeah. Is it about the kid in the house in Falls Township?”
Nelson shook his head. “No, but thanks for that. They got the kid out.”
“Good. I saw the news.”
“They took two bodies out of the yard. Young girls who disappeared. At least we can tell the families something.”
“That’s good, I guess. And you got the kid out?”
“Yeah, into family services. I didn’t think you’d want your name in it.”
“No.”
“But that’s not why I came.”
Ray raised his eyebrows. “Okay.”
“I’ve been asking around. About what happened the year you went upstate.” Ray stopped smiling, and waited. “I talked to Perry March’s mother.”
“His mother?”
“He’s dead.” Ray shook his head. Nelson tapped the notebook. “Overdose, two years ago. She told me some interesting things.”
“Yeah?”
“She said Perry would get high and talk about Stan Hicks and you and the car. She said her son was afraid of Stan and that Perry told her he lied about you taking the car because he was jammed up on a possession thing.” Ray put his coffee cup down and looked at his hands. “I looked at the records from the accident. And I looked at the medical records from the County Youth Authority the night you got your arms broken.”
Ray rubbed his arms then, an old reflex. Feeling the thickened bones that ached when it was cold.
Nelson said, “I talked to Stan Hicks.”
Ray looked up now. “How did that go?”
“He told me you’d been there. He told me everything.”
“I guess he’s ready to tell it.”
“He laid it all out. How he pressured Perry March with the possession beef and got him to say you stole his car. The guy who hit you and Marletta? The guy who was killed? He was a drunk. Blood alcohol well over the line. Your blood screen was clean. Stan pressured the DA, made her life hell until she made you a priority. Then he took you out of County in the middle of the night and broke your arms with something, I can’t figure out what. You went to prison with busted arms at seventeen. Stayed for two years for something you didn’t do.”
Ray was quiet. “The jack from his car. He said. It was dark. He told the Youth Authority I ran away from him in the dark and fell off a loading dock. I said, sure, what ever. I didn’t care.”
“So, what do you want to do?”
“Do?”
“About Stan Hicks. What do you want to do?”
Ray shook his head, surprised. “Nothing.” He picked up the coffee again. “I really forgot. It does kind of grow on you.”
“You might be able to press charges, I don’t know. Maybe sue, collect some money.”
“No, I’m not doing that.” Ray looked into the cup.
Nelson looked at him and rocked a little in his chair. “Okay, so…”
“You never knew her?”
“Marletta? No.”
Ray looked at his pale hand. “She was, I don’t know the words. There was a light inside her. Ever know anyone like that? She glowed.” He smiled and closed his eyes. “She was one of those people. You just liked her. And she was the only one who cared about me.”
“You feel guilty?”
“I was driving. I can’t remember now, but I know what I was like then. Looking at her and not the road? I can’t remember, and I don’t want to anymore. Anyway, I can imagine what it was like for him. If she was my family? And then to lose her like that? I was Stan Hicks I would have done the same.” His eyes clouded over. “Worse.”
“You got hit by a drunk driver, Ray. You can’t think she’d have wanted you to go to jail.”
“No, she’d have hated that.”
“How did you make it? With broken arms?”
“Harlan Maximuck.” Nelson shook his head, not getting it. Ray said, “Harlan had a younger brother died in prison in Maine.” He conjured Harlan then, tall and lopsided, walking with a hitched step, a staccato lope from where a statie had tagged him with shotgun pellets in the thighs when he and an even crazier friend had robbed a pawnshop and killed two people. Broad across the chest and wild brown hair that he’d stab at with oddly delicate hands, trying to keep it out of his eyes.
“So he, what? Adopted you?”
Ray pursed his lips. “Guys like you? Like anyone I guess hasn’t been sent up. You see Harlan as a scumbag. As, I don’t know. Evil, I guess.”
“And you think, what? He was misunderstood?”
“No. No.” Ray looked at the books on the shelves and tried to stretch for the words. “He kept me alive. He didn’t have to. He didn’t take anything off me. Except what he took off everybody.” Ray smiled at a memory. “He’d be talking to you and, like, going through your pockets. Looking for cigarettes, what ever. I even saw him start to do it to a CO once.” Nelson picked up the bottle again and offered it to Ray, who waved him off. “But he was crazy. I mean he was crazy. I saw him, well… One time this guy flicked cigarette ash in his oatmeal? Harlan shanked him with a fucking pork chop bone.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. So it’s not like I don’t know who he is. Would he rat me out if that was in his best interest? Yes. Would he fuck me over in a deal? Yes, if by some tragic fucking wheel of fortune miscalculation he ever gets out again.” Ray leaned in. “But he also did this.
He’s also this.” Made a circle in the air to include himself, the body saved. “Guys like Harlan? And Manny? Me, too? We’re more and we’re less than you think. Worse and better. And the thing is, all you people are, too.”
“So what does a cop do about that?”
Ray smiled wide. “Lock us up. What the hell else can you do? But maybe know, too. You lock up the good and the bad and sometimes both in the same person.”
Nelson squinted, not entirely convinced. “Maybe.”
“You think a person is defined by the worst thing he ever did? The most desperate, the most terrible day in his life?” He got a glimpse of himself in the farm house in Ottsville, the smoke hanging in the air, the milk and blood pooled on the floor and his head on fire.
“That’s how the law sees it.”
“What about Stan Hicks? He probably locked up a lot of guys who broke the law, bad guys who hurt people. You’re willing to send him away, too?”
“It’s the law, Ray. Without the law, what do we have?”
Ray lifted his shoulders. “I don’t know. Just a lot of fucked- up people trying to get through a day.”
ADRIENNE GRAY STAGGEREd home at two o’clock on a Saturday morning, and Ray was sitting on her steps in a bright cone of light. She started when she saw him and stepped back, holding her keys out. Her eyes were wide but red and bleary.
“Adrienne.”
“Is that you, Ray?”
“Yes, it’s me.” She put a hand on her heart.
“Jesus Christ. You scared the crap out of me.”
“Sorry.” He thumped the cold stair next to him. “Come sit and talk to me.”
She lifted her shoulders, patted her arms. “It’s cold out, hon. Can’t we talk tomorrow? I’ll come by the store.”
“No. Come here.” She made a gesture of giving up with her spread arms and slowly navigated the step and parked herself on the step below him, holding her arms in her thin coat. Ray took off his parka and put it over her shoulders, and she smiled at him and pulled the sleeves together.
They had started talking, Ray finding her coming out of Kelly’s or Chambers and walking her home. Trying to pull her into the store instead of letting her go back up the hill to the bars. Bringing her books she didn’t read.
“Adrienne.”
“What can I do for you, hon? You lonely?”
“No. Adrienne, you need help.”
She stood up slowly and turned to look down at him. “And you’re going to help me?”
“I’ll do what I can.” He lifted a shoulder, not sure how this should go.
In the cold light he saw her face close up, a subtle shift in her muscles, the way a closed hand becomes a fist. “Who the fuck are you?”
“Nobody. But you need a friend.”
“I got all the fucking friends I need. The bars are full of them.” She shucked the coat and threw it down at his feet.
“I don’t think those are your friends, Adrienne.”
“What the hell do you know about it? What the hell do you want from me anyway?”
He jammed up, not ready for her to be so amped up, ready to fight. “Don’t you want to get right? Get clean?”
“So I can be what, like you? Your life’s a picnic and I’m invited?”
“No, man. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know is right.” She stalked up the steps, her small, hard shins banging his bad leg. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. You don’t know me.”
“Adrienne.”
She took a couple of steps back down toward him, and he retreated, almost losing the rail.
“I lost my father. One day he’s a lawyer and he’s got money and respect and he takes care of me and the next day he’s dead, and his name gets dragged through the mud, and now he’s a shit-bag who stole money, and how do I even know what’s true? Everyone knows but me. Everyone knows he’s a shitbag. And me? I’m the shitbag’s daughter. You going to make that go away? Are you?”
“No.”
“And how do you even know my name? Where did you come from?”
“I’m nobody. I just thought…”
“Yeah, you just thought.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Go home, Ray.”
“Adrienne. Goddammit.” “Go home.”
TWO O’CLOCK IN the morning and Ray’s cell rang at the apartment on Mary Street. He looked at the number and didn’t recognize it.
He whispered, “Hello?” Michelle sat up, widening her eyes to clear the sleep, her hair rucked to one side from sleeping on it. He kissed her and winked while he listened. Then his face changed and he started nodding.
HE HADN’T BEEN inside Manny’s in almost a year. It was a narrow apartment fronting 611, quiet now at three in the morning. He looked right and left moving through the dark parking lot, the careful habits of his old life slow to desert him.
Sherry met him at the door, small and pale under unwashed black hair, speed- rapping about how she couldn’t get him up and he was just so lazy and she thought about an ambulance but who was paying for that? He put her in a chair in front of the tele vi -sion, noticing the scattered potato chip wrappers, the empty beer cans on the table, the smell. The same smell he’d got off the bag Manny’d left at Theresa’s. Sherry chewed her nail and watched an infomercial with couples in Hawaii wearing flower print shirts and looking painted into the scenery, tapped her feet on the table, blinking.
He made his way back to the bedroom where Manny was stretched out, blue and still. The orange sodium lamps on the street half lit the room, a salvage diver’s light illuminating a tiny wedge of a wreck in black water. He was facing up, naked to the waist, and Ray sat down next to him and touched an arm like cold putty. He got out his cell, called an ambulance, and waited. Heard Sherry muttering to herself about getting a dog, about money she was owed by her sister in Kutztown.
Manny’s mom had died when they were in Juvie. Abducted from some bar in Bristol, left in plastic bags by the side of the road. When he heard the CO say it, Manny slugged him in the face and ran for the fence. Three guards brought him down, got him in a choke hold and threw him into Isolation, and Ray went that night, one of the female guards taking him back to the door to try to calm Manny down. Ray banged on the door, called out, and looked through the tiny, smudged window, seeing nothing. Finally he slid open the chute and stuck his arm through and grabbed Manny around his skinny bicep and just held on, feeling the muscle vibrate and hearing his friend’s ragged breath.
On the nightstand he found Manny’s sunglasses and put them over his eyes, smoothed the hair away from his face. Fit his hand around Manny’s bicep and squeezed.
HE STAYED UP all night, first emptying dope and guns out of the apartment and Manny’s car before the cops came through, then finding Sherry’s sister and getting her to come down to pick her up at the hospital where they took Manny. When he left Abington Memorial it was nearly dawn, so he drove up to the Eagle and got a cup of coffee and some toast. When he paid, he went outside and the sky was just starting to go blue at the edges.
He’d have to get Sherry into rehab, have to watch her and take care of her, and it would probably all be for nothing, but that’s how it would go and there wasn’t anything to be done about it. He was starting to see an outline of the life in front of him. It was different than the one behind, harder to dope out, but he had to think it would be better. He had to believe in it, the way Theresa believed that prayers to St. Jude had brought him home safe from prison. Even if what he did never worked, if he was no good at it.
It would be where the money went, where his days got used up. Taking care of all the fucked- up people around him. Maybe because he’d been given this other chance he never earned. Because somebody loved him and he never understood why. Because the alternative was endless black night and dope dreams and there wasn’t anything else he could do.
AT DAWN HE took a bag into the garage at Theresa’s house. He went through Bart’s scarred wood worktable, pulling tools out of the drawers and laying them quietly on the floor. A hammer, a punch gone black with age. A speckled boning knife, still carry -ing a faint, vinegary tang.
He dumped a dozen guns out on the floor, then knelt slowly, the cold from the cement grabbing at the bones in his knees. He looked at the guns a long time, picking up each one and putting it down. He held up the Colt, ejected the clip, worked the slide to spit a dull brass shell onto the floor. He worked methodically, re moving the barrel, the slide. Working the firing pin out with the punch, his fingers feeling thick and slow in the weak blue light from the window.
He separated the parts into two piles, then centered each part in front of him in turn and covered it with a decaying terrycloth rag. He raised the hammer and smacked each piece a few times, denting the barrel, snapping the magazine spring with his fingers. He had to get up periodically and work his knees, flex at the hips to keep from getting locked up. As the sun came up he began to sweat, and his hands got slick and black with old gun oil and grit.
He finally walked into the house and went into Theresa’s linen closet and got a bunch of pillowcases for his bed, moving quietly in the dark house.
She called from the kitchen. “What are you going to do with those guns?”
He jumped and banged the cane against the doorjamb. “Jesus Christ, don’t you sleep?”
“Not anymore.” She came to the hallway and handed him a mug of coffee.
He shook his head. “I’m getting rid of them. I smashed them up, so no one can find them and get hurt.”
“Come in when you’re done, sit down like a person and have some coffee.” She reached into the closet, straightened the mess he’d made. “Sneaking around the house in the middle of the night. You’re lucky Idon’t have a gun.”
“Old habits.” He smiled, and she rolled her eyes.
THREE WEEKS AFTER Manny’s funeral, Ray stood at the store’s counter, sorting through invoices. Michelle sat cross- legged on the floor in a storm of packing material and bright paper, her new laptop open. She had them selling books online. It more than doubled their income but meant shipping and tracking and dealing with people over the phone, which Ray left to her. He loved her openness to the new world but felt he couldn’t be much help and just admired the work from a distance. He told her they had gotten far out of his commercial comfort zone, which was sticking a gun in someone’s face and demanding money.
The shop was doing good, she said, and he trusted her to be right. He felt himself being drawn forward into life, and some days that was good and some days he’d pull back against it. He’d smell dope on Stevie and instead of giving him crap about it, he’d want to get high. Or a customer would get in his shit and he’d have to leave the store, drive around and listen to music and let the tide in his blood shift until he was drawn home again to find Michelle waiting for him, and when he tried to apologize or explain she’d shake her head and hold him and he’d believe in it again.
Theresa crouched in the back pawing the new romances before they went out onto the shelves, pulling each one to her face to squint at the covers, thumbing them open and mouthing a few words.
Michelle smiled. “Finding everything, Theresa?”
“I’m an old lady, hearts and flowers don’t do it for me. I like the ones where they get laid.”
Ray said, “ We should get you some little stars to put on the ones where they get their cookies. We won’t be able to keep them on the shelves. The little old ladies who come down from the shrine after mass’ll clean us out.” He looked outside, saw Andy launching herself up the stairs, one hand around her belly. She pushed through the door hard, the noise scaring Michelle, who ran to the front.
The girl was sobbing. “Has Lynch been here? Is he here?” Michelle put her arm around the girl, but she slid away to stand in the corner, her head swiveling. “Get him out here.”
“He’s not here, Andy.” Ray held up his hands. “What’s going on?” The girl was hugely pregnant now, her belly projecting over the small hand she kept on the waistband of the oversized jeans Michelle had helped her pick out. They had been trying to figure out her living situation, which seemed to be on- and off- again at home and occasionally in the basements of friends. They had even tried to get her into a cheap rental, but Lynch just waved them off and shrugged, and the girl volunteered nothing, though the bruises that occasionally appeared on her face made Michelle drop her eyes and shake her head.
They were standing there, Ray at the counter, Michelle hovering in the empty space between the door and the register, her arms outstretched as if Andy were a cat she was trying to coax off the windowsill, when Lynch ran up the street and into the store, Stevie a few steps behind him, the two of them out of breath.
The door banged on the wall, and Theresa got up and slapped the stack of books with an open hand. “Jesus Christ, can’t anyone open and close a door?”
Stevie bent over, wheezing, and hit his knees with his fist. Lynch put his arms around Andy, his back to the room, and she stood still and white. Ray could see the boy’s hands were shaking.
“What’s going on?” Ray looked from one to the other. Michelle touched Stevie’s arm and he jumped, his eyes moving wild in his head.
Theresa said, “Is it the baby? We need to call an ambulance?”
Stevie shook his head, pointed at his friend. “Man.”
Lynch turned, and they saw he was crying and there was a fine spray of blood across his eyes. Michelle sucked in a breath and stood up straight. They were all still for a moment. There were muted traffic sounds and a distant siren, and Andy, quiet now, turned to look at the street.
Lynch made a motion with his upper body, flexing his arms as if the sleeves of his thin jacket were too small. He smeared at his face with his hand, looked into his palm, but the blood had dried to rust. “I told that fucker. I told him he fucked with Andy again…”
Stevie spoke to the floor. “You told him. But man, Lynch.”
“No, I told him, he touched her again.”
Michelle pulled her arms around her as if she were cold. “You have to tell us what happened. Andy, what happened?”
The young girl moved closer to the window, breathed on it. She traced something no one else could see onto the window in the fine mist from her breath, watched it evaporate. Ray thought it might have been a heart.
Stevie said, “Andy’s old man was wailing on her again. He kicked her in the stomach.”
“Jesus.” Ray covered his face with his hands and spat out the words. “Jesus.”
He heard a rustling, and when he opened his eyes Lynch had produced a pistol from his oversized thrift store parka. It was comically large, a long barrel like something from a western.
Michelle said, “Bradley.” It was the boy’s first name, and Ray had never heard her say it out loud before. Lynch turned to her and his eyes were dull. “Honey, put that away.”
Ray came from around the counter. Theresa was standing, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide. He moved deliberately, slowly, imagining each terrible way this could play out. He put himself in front of Michelle and backed up, moving her into the aisles and toward the rear of the store. Then he stepped forward, one arm extended.
Michelle’s eyes filled with tears and she grabbed at a bookshelf, her knuckles showing up white against her dark skin. She said, “Andrea, honey, come stand by me,” but her voice was strange, rounded and hoarse.
“Lynch, man, you are among friends.” He turned to Michelle, who reached past him and grabbed Stevie by the sleeve and pulled him and Theresa toward the back door. “Think, kid, you don’t want a gun around Andy or the baby.”
Lynch turned and looked at Andy, who sighed as if she were bored by an argument she had heard before and stared out at the street.
She said, “Lynch, we have to go.”
“We need money.” He lifted the pistol and pointed it at Ray, who put up his hands. Behind him he heard Michelle stifle a scream, clapping her hand over her mouth. He turned and smiled at her, or thought he did, watching through the rear window at Theresa stumbling across the parking lot toward the borough hall and the sign that said police.
“I know, man, you can have what ever you need, we just have to talk about what’s going to happen, and you need for Christ’s sake to put away the gun.”
The pistol went off then, always a different sound than Ray expected, not that resonant bang they dub into the movies but a concussive pop that slapped at his head and made his ears ring. The bullet cracked a display case behind him that showered glass onto the floor. Michelle jumped forward into the room, scuffling with Stevie, who was panting and trying to pull her back out to the parking lot.
Andy sighed again, and Lynch said, “I shot her old man. I told him and told him, but he was such a dumb- ass. You can’t keep beating on people. You can’t.”
Ray dropped his head. “Lynch.”
“Don’t fuck with us. Just give us some money and we’ll get out of here.”
“You don’t have to do this. Tell me what happened.”
“I just fucking told you.”
“No, I mean everything, everything, the whole story. He was hitting her, right?” Ray had only glimpses of their lives, Stevie and Lynch and Andrea. Drug abuse and alcoholism, suicide and abandonment and rage that chased the kids into the street to live in alleys and abandoned cars, camp in the woods, or cling to each other in wet sleeping bags in half- built houses and vanish into the forest like deer when the Mexican and Guatemalan construction crews came to work in the morning.
“I don’t have time to tell you no story. Me and Andy are going to Idaho. We’re going to do comics. Andy can draw. Man, she draws everything, and no one knows it but me.”
Ray’s head snapped up as Nelson appeared on the porch, and he turned behind him to see another cop, this one in a uniform, muscle past Michelle in the rear of the store and stand rigid. He saw Nel-son, Glock in hand, take up a position just outside the front door. He heard the cop behind him draw his gun, the creak of the leather holster. Through the window he could see people on the street. A couple stopped in front of the building, pulling apart a soft pretzel from the place across the street, the man feeding the woman the soft white flesh with the tips of his fingers while she laughed.
“Lynch, man, listen to me.”
“Drop your weapon, son.” The cop in uniform edged forward, his arms locked, the pistol a few feet from Ray’s head.
Ray circled, his arms wide. “Wait a minute, will you fucking please?” He watched the door swing slowly behind Lynch, Nelson holding his blocky automatic, his face transfixed, hard. Ray shook his head, held his hand out, palm up, at first the boy, then the cops each in turn.
“It’s all okay, right? This is just okay, all right?” He swallowed, his brain firing and his sinuses full of a strange ozone smell as his heart hammered and sweat began to form in a line on his back. “There’s a story here. You have to know the story. It’s not, you know. This is not,” he said, but Lynch raised the pistol and Michelle screamed and Ray didn’t know what to do and he was launching himself at the boy, his arms wide, crossing the floor without being conscious of moving his legs as if he were pulled on a wire.
There were shots, pop, pop, pop, loud, and glass breaking, and later Ray could never be sure of the order of things as he gathered Bradley Lynch in his arms and they went over together, everything happening at once, blood pouring onto the floor, following the cracks in the hardwood, eddying in hollow scuff marks. Michelle screaming, and Stevie yelling his friend’s name, and Andy giving one long banshee shriek that sounded like she had been saving it her whole life. Ray’s cheek was against the floor, and he saw the blood as a dark tide that came to carry him away to drown. When he lifted his head, his face was dripping, and he looked down at Lynch, his coat open and his T-shirt wound around his thin chest, and saw the boy’s white flank torn open, shattered like glass.
The room around him exploded into more screaming and shout ed orders, and he saw movement and lights out of the corners of his eyes. He looked over at Andy. She was hunched in the corner, her mouth working soundlessly, her arms around her belly and her jeans stained with dark water and flecked with foam.
He put his hands over the wound in Lynch’s side and pressed, put his blood- painted face inches from the boy’s and tried to hold his gaze, and he was screaming something but he never knew what it was, holding the boy’s eyes with his and willing him to stay in the room, stay connected, pushing hard on Lynch’s frail chest, as if he could hold his life in by force, hold him together, keep him alive.
August
It was a long drive into the hills, out past Valley Forge and through quiet towns where no one stirred on the street, and when they finally got out of the van everyone stretched and squinted, pulling at themselves in the heat like athletes before a long run. They started across a long stretch of grass, and small insects opened white wings and vaulted ahead of them.
It took a while to get them all in, Ray and Michelle taking turns holding the baby while Andy and Stevie signed the visitation forms and passing each other the mealy, lopsided bread that Andy had made herself the day before and an unwieldy bowl of peppery chicken salad. Theresa’s offering, though she herself was down with a cold and propped up in bed with a stack of romances, some DVDs of a cop show she liked, and a carton of cigarettes, which she claimed were necessary to keep her throat clear.
They put everything out on a long table in the visiting room, shyly watching the other families. They were black and white and other colors and nationalities that Ray couldn’t guess, clustered in knots, heads together, voices quiet except for the occasional murmuring cry from a baby or screech from two kids roughhous-ing in front of the vending machines.
Lynch was buzzed into the visiting room in his blue DOC jumpsuit, his arms out for his son, and they clustered around him and touched his shoulders, which were getting broad. Andy fingered his thin growth of beard while Lynch held his head up, his teeth showing and his bright eyes flicking back and forth between Andy and the baby, who observed everything with a wry and satisfied look. He reached for his father’s bright lapel and worked it in the minute and impossible fingers Ray could never stop looking at.
Michelle, hovering, organized plates of food and went into the diaper bag for a bottle. Ray caught Stevie checking out her ass and gave him yard eyes that had mellowed sufficiently to make the boy lift one shoulder and smile. The room was hot and close with bodies, but through the long windows they could see bright grass divided by rolling coils of wire and beyond that the Pennsylvania hills. They sat to eat, Lynch holding the baby across his lap and watching his son work his mouth and blink his eyes.
Ray knelt near him and kept his voice low. “How you making it?”
Lynch never took his eyes off the baby but nodded. “I read a lot, write letters. Stay in my house, out of the shit on the tiers. It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not, it’s fucked every minute, but it’s twenty- four months. Not even. We can do twenty- four months.” He balled some of the loose material of the jumpsuit and put his lips inches from the boy’s pale ear. “Listen to me. Never think any of this shit is okay. Never think it’s what you got coming.”
Lynch shrugged, and Ray put a hand on his arm. “No, man. Twenty- four months and out, no fucking around in here, no ganging up, none of that slopbucket meth. Seven hundred and thirty days and you’re home with your boy and Andy and this is all behind you.”
“Yeah, it’s less time than middle school, huh?” Ray nodded, lifted one brown hand and touched Lynch at his temple, and was almost overcome. He cleared his throat and rubbed at his reddened eyes, trying to think of the light sentence as lucky for nearly killing Andy’s father, who had lived through the bullet in his back but who would never leave a wheelchair.
WHILE STEVIE AND Lynch walked around the visiting room and talked about TV shows and movies, DVDs that Stevie was putting aside for his friend to watch when he was out, Michelle sat by Ray and massaged his tense shoulders, swiveling her head to watch for the guards.
She put her head down into the back of his neck and whispered into his hair. “Fuck, I hate this.”
“You and me both.” They watched Stevie lift his T-shirt, show Lynch a new tattoo: barbed wire encircling his arm. Lynch rolled his eyes and slapped his friend lightly on the forehead.
Michelle said, “I keep expecting a couple of guards to cut me out of the herd and take me back to my cell.” She shivered, and Ray covered her hand with his and then lifted it to his lips. “How’s he doing, Ray?”
“He’ll be okay. If he was fucking up, we’d know it.” He looked to the gate, saw the COs checking clipboards and counting heads. He watched through the smeared glass as the shadows of clouds moved over the low hills and the towers and gauzy rolls of wire, painting them with a dark wash like ink dissolved in water.
Michelle slid onto the bench beside him and pressed against his hip, and they watched Andy feed the baby, the mother making small sympathetic movements of her lips as she held the minute spoon to the boy’s puckered mouth. While they watched, Michelle took Ray’s hand and pressed it against her, low on her stomach inside her jeans, and he felt the heat in her belly and the palms of her hands.
She said, “Do you want that, Ray? Do you want that for us?”
“I don’t know.”
He watched a man in a blue jumpsuit serving tuna salad to his family from a foil pan, his brow thick with scar tissue. A heavy woman with blond hair like a suspended wave watched him, her eyes wary, and when the plastic spoon snapped in his hands she winced and grabbed involuntarily at the frail, pink- eyed girl in her lap.
Michelle waited, and he finally said, “I just don’t.” He made a movement with his free hand that took in the room. “Trust that things will be okay. That they’ll be good.”
“They won’t, always.” She smiled. Lifted one hand and touched the baby’s white hair. “But we’ll do the best we can, and we’ll have a good life.”
“Do I deserve that?”
She pressed against him, and Ray could feel pain in his arm from where he’d had his tattoo burned, the laser turning the heavy black letters into an oblique scar so that he’d shaken his head, laughed at himself for wasting the money. He’d marked himself; he’d always be marked.
He said, “Who am I now?” but there was a change in the room, a collective sighing and pauses in conversation, and it was time to go, and Michelle hadn’t heard what he’d said.
They packed up, Andy clinging for a long moment to Lynch, their eyes closed, swaying in the heat as if at one of the high school dances they’d all missed, though it was Stevie who teared up and had to go stand in front of a vending machine and pretend to pick out orange soda, working quarters in his red fist.
Ray walked Lynch back to the door and handed him two car tons of cigarettes. Hugged him hard, feeling the knot of scar tissue at his side through the jumpsuit, then stood while the boy went through the gate to stand patiently with his arms out to be wanded by a short woman with wide hips who laughed at some-thing the boy said.
While Ray was watching, an older man came down the hall from the tiers in the brown jumpsuit of a lifer, his shoulders riding in a lopsided wave and one long hand pushing at a mass of graying hair. When the man got to Lynch the younger man turned, smiled, and said something lost to Ray behind the glass. He patted the older man’s mountainous shoulder and pointed through at Ray, shaking his head, mouthed a word that might have been “bad- ass.” When the door nearest him was buzzed open, Ray could hear the distant shouting and banging of the tiers.
Ray lifted a hand and waved at Harlan and Lynch as they turned to go back. Harlan went into Lynch’s pockets while they walked, pulled a cigarette out, and stuck it behind his ear. He turned and nodded at Ray, made a scooting motion to send him on his way.
Ray knew he couldn’t fix everything, couldn’t stop every bad thing just by his love for Michelle or these broken kids. He’d failed with Adrienne Gray, and he’d let Manny slide away into the dark. The rest of the money had all gone to legal bills for Lynch and medical bills for Andy and rehab for Sherry, and he saw they’d always struggle to stay ahead. But there were good, clear days, too, and sometimes he came home tired and slept without dreams.
Ray knew Lynch would come out with tattoos and scars, but Michelle had said it would be a map only of where he had been, not where he was headed. Ray hoped it was true, though he sometimes saw her staring into the middle distance and knew she saw her mother’s untended grave in the flat Ohio earth, a boy she had loved in high school walking down a tree- lined street with his children.
Ray turned to the rest of his pickup family, clutching bags and blankets as they clustered by the door, and looked out into the daylight with the hooded and set- upon eyes of refugees. In the parking lot he had to keep himself from running, and Michelle laced her fingers through his and kissed his cheek.
In Phoenixville they stopped at a Dairy Queen, and he bought sodas for the kids and soft serve for the baby. The clouds had piled up overhead into a hard ceiling threaded with black and softening the light to a muted blue. He stood at the eroded curb and watched them all, Stevie draped over the seats and flipping through the CDs, Andy furiously texting one of her girlfriends from work, Michelle cradling the baby and smiling at him with her crooked smile.
They looked okay, and he let himself believe they would be. They looked hungry and tired. They looked like any family by the side of the road, and he had the thought that if they locked him up again this would be the image he’d remember. At night on his bunk, when the lights would go out, this moment, these few quiet seconds, would be the thing he’d hold on to to keep himself sane.
There was a low, drumming rumble behind him, and he turned as a motorcycle appeared on the street and drifted to a stop at the light. The noise grew louder, bouncing and echoing off the buildings around him, and then there were a dozen more bikes strung out along the road. Ray stood silent, watching them come. Men in leather jackets, some wearing chromed helmets, most with noth-ing on their heads but bandannas or long hair in matted plaits.
At the back of the line, a young guy with black hair and a goatee turned and looked at Ray, his face shadowed and unreadable. Ray felt naked, exposed, blinking away the sweat from his eyes. His heart worked faster, but he stood up straight, put his chin out. Thought to himself, take what comes. The bike coasted; the man leaned forward, reached a hand behind him. Touched a small form there. A boy, pressed against his back, wearing goggles and an oversized helmet the blue of a robin’s egg. White- blond hair framing a heart- shaped face. The boy held a hand up and gave Ray a quick, shy wave. Then the light changed, and they were gone.