“My dad taught me. Obviously. When is yours going to?”
I said, “Maybe I’ll have to be self-taught.”
“Better not.” Jay flicked the truck into a smooth forward roll. “You might ruin the gears that way. I could show you, though. It’s not too hard. At least, it wasn’t for me.”
Toshi said, “Your dad taught you even though you don’t have a learner’s permit?”
Headlights were coming at us, and I worried about those double-yellow lines, the only barrier between us and the other car.
Jay said, “What if he and Ma need a trip to the hospital? Family comes first, and I got to pull my weight. Or what if there’s a war?”
When the headlights zipped past us without incident, my body still jolted as if there had been a collision. Toshi’s widened eyes, highlighted by the ski mask, looked ghostly, floating there without a face.
“What if the government tries to take over, and it’s the apocalypse, and I have to escape? You never know what might happen. Driving a car is just one of those skills you need. Don’t matter your age.”
“Your age doesn’t matter,” Toshi said, quietly.
We reached Tony’s Mattress Madness at about one in the morning. A single orange light glowed in the parking lot, but when we pulled around to the back, where the dumpsters lived, all was black. We looked at each other in our ski masks, our eyes disconnected, no more than strange, gelatinous slits floating in the dark.
The bright-white mattresses glowed faintly, and I wondered if they were the source of the eggy smell that hung in the air.
“Are there security cameras?” Toshi asked.
“If there are, now they have your voice.”
Toshi clapped his hands over his mouth, and Jay laughed at him.
We blew past all of the No Trespassing and Beware signs and walked straight over to the mattresses, which were piled up like a messy stack of pancakes.
“Grab the hugest ones,” Jay said. The ski mask made his body look bigger, or maybe just his head look smaller.
“And the cleanest. For the girls. That’s what the girls will want.”
As we heaved the soft and surprisingly heavy things into the back of the truck, I kept expecting a police siren to sound or a floodlight to illuminate this illegal thing that we were doing, but we loaded three queens without incident. After Jay had slammed the tailgate, he grabbed something out of the cab that rattled in his hand. I didn’t realize what it was until after he’d spray-painted the first penis over the Beware sign.
“You do one,” Jay said and handed me the can.
“I don’t really want to,” I said. “How do you even get the shape right?”
“Nut up,” Jay said.
It wasn’t like he’d tried to convince me or threatened me or ridiculed me, it was just that I’d always done what he’d said. I was compelled to do it. I took the can; it felt lighter than I’d expected. I shook it and then sprayed.
“That’s great, Bennet.” Jay slapped me on my back. “See? A black dick. That’s what Tony the mattress man has.”
I grinned and handed back the can.
As Toshi and I tied down the mattresses, Jay sprayed some more, and when I looked back, I saw that he’d drawn two more penises and connected them into a swastika.
“Holy shit,” he said, “check out that work of art.”
The wind threw up dust and shoved the sulfur smell of the dumpsters against my nose, and I looked away from the graffiti as my stomach walloped the inside of my spine.
As we rode home, Toshi kept saying, “Wow.” He sat in the middle of the bench seat, between me and Jay. The bitch seat. “Wow, wow, wow. We did it.”
He didn’t sound so much happy as shocked.
“Probably we’re going to get caught,” he said. “They could always pick us up later.” He pulled off his ski mask, then Jay and I did the same. My hair, buzzed with electricity, prickled skywards from my scalp.
When we reached the edge of the woods, Jay finagled the truck through a narrow path almost the whole way to New Veronia. We unloaded and propped the mattresses against some trees. The plan was for me and Toshi to stand watch over our loot while Jay returned the truck. His father, he said, would never know.
“See?” Jay stuck his head out of the driver’s window right before he pulled away. The bumper sticker of an American flag glowed red in the brake lights. “A real man does stuff with a truck.”
Something about the half-sneer on his face, the cocky tilt of his elbow out the window, made me remembered the pallets and how Jay had gotten nine of them, somehow, overnight, when it had taken the three of us all day to get six. How did I not see before that it would have been impossible for Jay to carry those nine pallets for mile after mile through the woods in the dark? We’d found him the next day curled up in New Veronia, but he hadn’t acted tired. He must’ve used his father’s truck to get the pallets, and then let us think that he’d done all that work by hand, let us think he was superhuman, almost.
When Jay returned after parking the truck, he acted completely normal—but he had no reason not to. He hadn’t really lied, because he’d never said how he’d gotten the pallets, and we’d never asked. Jay heaved up one end of a mattress and I held the other and we carried it off, Toshi following behind and not really contributing much of anything.
“Jay,” I said, “did you ever think of using the truck as a place to get with girls?”
“Couldn’t do that,” he said. “My dad would strangle me. It’s not about keeping his upholstery clean or whatever. He said if Ma ever smelled pootang in there, she’d think he was messing around on her, and she’d kill him.”
“Huh,” I said. Jay’s parents were one of the few married couples I knew anything about, but still I felt pretty sure that they were strange. I wanted to ask him about that morning, about the pictures on the coffee table, but even though it seemed like a simple question, of course it wasn’t, not with Jay.
He said, “I saw this show about this bear that broke into a guy’s truck. He hit the gear shift with his paw, and the truck started rolling backwards down this hill…”
Chapter 6
We spent the last day of summer vacation hanging out in New Veronia. When Jay was dribbling his soccer ball, Toshi was playing his horn (in New Veronia, he could free himself of the fake cast and practice, his trills and toots scattering the birds and disturbing the wood’s stillness), and I was reading the play we were putting on in theater that upcoming semester, a shout echoed off the trees.
“Boys?” the voice said. It was my dad’s. “Boys, you back here?”
The three of us froze and then glanced at each other. The afternoon had almost become evening, and the squirrel we’d named Dave was busily running up and down the trunk of his favorite tree.
“Dad?” I said, when he finally lurched into the clearing.
“Well,” he said, “this is the strangest looking patio I have ever seen.”
His eyes were bloodshot and his voice had that twangy, blurred quality that meant he’d downed too many. Toshi and Jay and I were standing in different parts of the New Veronia clearing, but as my dad moved closer to us, we grouped together between him and the house. Toshi kept his arm behind his back, hiding the fact that he wasn’t wearing the cast. My dad stopped about six feet from us and stared up at the structure.
“What a piece of crap,” he said. “I never seen anything that looked so junky.”
“It’s just a fort,” I said. I thought I could smell his sweet-rotten alcohol breath, but it might have been all the decomposing stuff in the woods.
“Looks like a junky bunker in a third world country.” He swayed on his feet.