You find yourself standing in a Nebraska wheat field. You’re seventeen years old. You learned to drive five years ago. You were in school once, for two months when you were eight, but you read well and you can multiply three-digit numbers in your head faster than a calculator, and you’ve seen the country with the old man. You’ve learned people aren’t that smart. You’ve learned how to pull lottery ticket scams and asphalt paving scams and get free meals with a slight upturn of your brown eyes. You’ve learned that if you hold ten dollars in front of a stranger, he’ll pay twenty to get his hands on it if you play him right. You’ve learned that every good lie is threaded with truth and every accepted truth leaks with lies.
You’re seventeen years old in that wheat field. The night breeze smells of woodsmoke and feels like dry fingers as it lifts your bangs off your forehead. You remember everything about that night because it is the night you met Gwen. You are two years away from prison and you feel like someone has finally given you permission to live.
This is what few people know about Stuckley, West Virginia — every now and then, someone finds a diamond. They were in a plane that went down in a storm in ’51, already blown well off course, flying a crate of Israeli stones down the eastern seaboard toward Miami. Plane went down in a coal mine, torched Shaft #3, took some swing-shift miners with it. The government showed up along with members of an international gem consortium, got the bodies out of there and went to work looking for the diamonds. Found most of them, or so they claimed, but for decades afterward there were rumors, given occasional credence by the sudden sight of a miner still grimed brown by the shafts, tooling around town in a Cadillac.
You’d been here peddling hurricane insurance in trailer parks when word got around that someone had found one as big as a casino chip. Miner by the name of George Brunda suddenly buying drinks, talking to his travel agent. You and Gwen shot pool with him one night, and you could see it in the bulges under his eyes, the way his laughter exploded — too high, too fast, gone chalky with fear.
He didn’t have much time, old George, and he knew it, but he had a mother in a rest home, and he was making the arrangements to get her transferred. George was a fleshy guy, triple-chinned, and dreams he’d probably forgotten he’d ever had were rediscovered and weighted in his face, jangling and pulling the flesh.
“Probably hasn’t been laid in twenty years,” Gwen said when George went to the bathroom. “It’s sad. Poor sad George. Never knew love.”
Her pool stick pressed against your chest as she kissed you and you could taste the tequila, the salt, and the lime on her tongue.
“Never knew love,” she whispered in your ear, an ache in the whisper.
“What about the fairground?” your father says as you leave the office of True-Line Efficiency Experts Corp. “Maybe you hid it there. You always had a fondness for that place.”
You feel a small hitch. In your leg, let’s say. Just a tiny clutching sensation in the back of your right calf, but you walk through it, and it goes away.
You say to your father as you reach the car. “You really drive her home this morning?”
“Who?”
“Mandy?”
“Who’s…?” Your father opens his door, looks at you over it. “Oh, the whore?”
“Yeah.”
“Did I drive her home?”
“Yeah.”
Your father pats the top of the door, his denim jacket flapping around his wrist, his eyes the blue of bullet casing. You feel, as you always have, reflected in them, even when you aren’t, couldn’t be, wouldn’t be.
“Did I drive her home?” A smile bounces in the rubber of your father’s face.
“Did you drive her home?” you say.
That smile’s all over the place now, the eyebrows too. “Define home.”
You say, “I wouldn’t know, would I?”
“You’re still pissed at me because I killed Fat Fuck.”
“George.”
“What?”
“His name was George.”
“He would have ratted.”
“To who? It wasn’t like he could file a claim. Wasn’t a fucking lottery ticket.”
Your father shrugs, looks off down the street.
“I just want to know if you drove her home.”
“I drove her home,” your father says.
“Yeah?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Where’d she live?”
“Home,” he says and gets behind the wheel, starts the ignition.
You never figured George Brunda for smart, and it was only after a full day in his house, going through everything down to the point of removing the drywall and putting it back, touching up the paint, resealing it, that Gwen said:
“Where’s the mother stay again?”
That took uniforms, Gwen as a nurse, you as an orderly, Gentleman Pete out in the car while your father kept watch on George’s mine adit and monitored police activity over a scanner.
The old lady said, “You’re new here and quite pretty,” as Gwen shot her up with phenobarbital and Valium and you went to work on the room.
This was the glitch — you’d watched George drive to work; watched him enter the mine. No one saw him come back out again, because no one was looking on the other side of the hill, the exit of a completely different shaft. So while your father watched the front, George took off out the back, drove over to check on his investment, walked in the room just as you pulled the rock from the back of the mother’s radio, George looking politely surprised, as if he’d stepped into the wrong room.
He smiled at you and Gwen, held up a hand in apology, and backed out of the room.
Gwen looked at the door, looked at you.
You looked at Gwen, looked at the window, looked at the rock filling the center of your palm, the entire center of your palm.
Looked at the door.
Gwen said, “Maybe we—”
And George came through the door again, nothing polite in his face, a gun in his hand. And not any regular gun, a motherfucking six-shooter, like they carried in westerns, long, thin barrel, a family heirloom maybe, passed down from a great-great-great-grandfather, not even a trigger guard, just the trigger, and crazy fat fucking George the lonely unloved pulling back on it and squeezing off two rounds, the first of which went out the window, the second of which hit metal somewhere in the room and then bounced off that and then the old lady went, “Ooof,” even though she was doped up and passed out, and it sounded to you like she’d eaten something that didn’t agree with her. You could picture her sitting in a restaurant, halfway through coffee, placing a hand to her belly, saying it: “Ooof.” And George would come around to her chair, say, “Is everything okay, Mama?”
But he wasn’t doing that now, because the old lady went ass-over-teakettle out of the bed and hit the floor and George dropped the gun and stared at her and said, “You shot my mother.”
And you said, “You shot your mother,” your entire body jetting sweat through the pores all at once.
“No, you did. No, you did.”
You said, “Who was holding the fucking gun?”
But George didn’t hear you. George jogged three steps and dropped to his knees. The old lady was on her side, and you could see the blood, not much of it, staining the back of her white johnny.
George cradled her face, looked into it, and said, “Mother. Oh, Mother, oh, Mother, oh, Mother.”
And you and Gwen ran right the fuck out of that room.
In the car, Gwen said, “You saw it, right? He shot his own mother in the ass.”