He shook his head no; his breath came shallow. He said, “Your eyes are all weird. What are you going to do?” He sounded scared.
Jay’s fear coursed through me like a drug: it made me feel sort of invincible, the way I figured Jay usually felt. Maybe I had somehow stolen that power from him when we’d fucked, like all his greatness had been absorbed into me. “We aren’t going to be able to get anywhere without money,” I said. At this hour, the whole world was deserted; no one would see what I was about to do.
The plan must have started percolating in my head as soon as we’d walked down the dinky main drag of town, and now it began to solidify, to knit together out of the air, to fill me with self-importance, but the reality of the idea was somehow fake, too, like I was no longer the real me, but a me inside of a play, a better me, and the plot had already been written: now all I had to do was fulfill it. I kept one hand in my pocket, closed over the gun, as the other reached out to open the door of the bail bond store.
A man stood behind a counter in a white shirt and string tie. He was reading a book, but when we entered, he flipped it words-down to mark his place. On the cover, a couple of cowboys rode horses into a blood-red sunset.
“Howdy, boys,” he said. “What can I do you for?”
“A Mexican,” Jay said under his breath.
I pushed the hatred out through my pores, coating my whole body with a glimmering armor of loathing. Under this protection I could do what needed doing.
“Give us your money,” I said. Beside me, Jay buzzed like a hundred thirty pounds of pure nervy energy; I willed him to look fierce. “Hand it over to this guy here”—I bent my head towards Jay—“and we’ll get out of your hair. Or don’t, and there’ll be consequences.”
The man’s hands were palms-down on the counter. “Now boys,” he said. “Your pops just get thrown in jail, maybe? You need to make bail for him?”
“Don’t move those hands unless it’s to get the money.”
“Boys, now, listen: we don’t keep the funds on the premises. I’m sorry to inform you. We just wire a promise on over to the courthouse.”
“Give it over,” I said. “I know you got money in here.”
“I’m telling you,” the man said. “You should have thought this through.”
“I have a gun!” I said. “I have a fucking gun!” The rage I’d felt earlier in the phone booth surged up again, swelling every one of my veins. It roiled beneath my skin. “Now,” I said, and, “goddamnit,” and “if you don’t, I will…”
The man’s lips rose into sort of a goofy smile. “It’s the truth.”
I brought the gun up above the level of the counter, and the man’s features slackened. He reached for me, but before he could get to me, I pulled the trigger. The release felt so good that I pulled it again.
As blood webbed out across his white shirt, his eyes rolled downwards to take in the wound, or maybe to look for his western, to see if he could just go back to reading like we’d never come into his shop, and before he buckled, before he fell, I pressed the gun into Jay’s hand. “You shoot him, too,” I said. “This isn’t only my fault.”
Jay shook his head.
“Goddammit you do it now!”
He shivered and leaned over the counter—the man had dropped into an awkward pile on the floor—to put a bullet straight through the body’s throat. I snatched the gun back.
“Where’s the money in this fucking place,” I said as I searched behind the counter. Pieces of paper spilled from a drawer; paperbacks were stuck everywhere. But there was no money. I kicked the water cooler and threw a calculator against the wall; there wasn’t even a cash register. As I stepped over the body, I thought about snatching its bolo tie or wallet, but everything was covered in blood. The sewer smell churned my stomach. “Let’s go,” I said, and then Jay and I swung through into the too-early air, pumping ourselves up and out and into the next life, the one where we did better, where everything came easy and we were happy.
Chapter 19
“I don’t want to go so far back,” Jay told me.
We were in the swamp, hiding out. “I heard sirens,” I said. “If I can still hear them, they can still find us.”
Jay feared whatever might be secreted in the swamp, but we were the ones using it for cover, now; it was the only place where we’d be safe. “We’ve become real outlaws,” I said. “Not like before, with Toshi. This time, we really did something.”
Jay was scared to follow me, but he was afraid to be on his own even more, and so he trailed me like a dog.
“People live in here,” I said. “They do it, so we can do it too. At least for a while. They’ll be looking for us at my mom’s, I think. Maybe even have road blocks. We’ll have to wait a while before we go to her. But the swamp—the swamp is for people like us.”
“Could be no one saw us go into that place,” Jay said.
“We’re suspect.” Jay seemed to be getting stupider and stupider with age. “You’re the one who said that being on the move keeps you from getting caught.”
When the day started to fade towards dusk, we found a good sleeping tree, this thing that had a huge trunk made up of a hundred smaller trunks. We crawled up there and rested among the branches. “Figure out some plants for us to eat,” I said. Earlier, we’d swallowed some raw eggs that we’d found in a nest, but we needed more in order to keep going.
“You want to sleep in a tree again?”
“This time,” I said, “I won’t leave the gun behind like an idiot. Hurry up; I’m hungry.”
“I don’t know any of the plants around here,” Jay said. “Maybe I could hunt us some food.” He stared at the gun in my lap.
“No way.” I wasn’t so naïve as to hand him the gun at this point, when he was starting to realize that our roles were changing; I wrapped both hands around it, ready to fight him if he tried to take it. But I shouldn’t have worried: of course he did what I wanted; he couldn’t turn against me. I was the new Jay, now. I was in charge.
When the dark came, I couldn’t get to sleep because of an empty gnawing deep inside my middle. The ground rustled, and not too far off, something splashed in shallow water. The dark was never quite full, as if half the swampy things phosphoresced.
But Jay could sleep anywhere. After he’d been snoring for a while, I brought out Stella’s panties and fitted them to my hand; I rubbed the slippery material across my face to feel something nice for a change. “Are you okay?” I asked, and the puppet said she was. She told me that she was proud I was taking over, because Jay had never been the leader, not the real leader, of our group. I breathed her in; her sweet smell grew fainter every day. “There’s something in you, Bennet,” Stella told me, “that’s better than him. Remember what he did to you?”
“No,” I said, “no.”
“When you were kids? Nine years old?”
“No.”
“Well, I do,” the Stella puppet said. “You’re ready to remember, now. Jay isn’t all that powerful, not anymore.”
Overhead, a cloud broke into jagged pieces around the sliver of moon. I couldn’t stop this moment.
“He locked you into the closet,” Stella said, “in our parents’ room.”
“I never went in there before recently. Before the day that I got you.”
“And he told you that if you gave yourself away, our father would slice off your toes, one by one, and feed them to you.”
“I don’t remember this at all.” Their bedroom, the rumpled and stained sheets, the weapons mounted on the walls, flashed through my mind. “It must not have happened.”