What is this what is this what is this? I was thinking. I was surprised how much it freaked me out. I had some tricks I’d come up with over the years to keep from losing it, and I used them all. I waited a half hour after the cop cars left and lay there banging my chin on my gloves. Who else did I know who’d be in a sand pit in the snow outside somebody else’s house?
The sleet changed to rain. It was so cold my head was rattling. One of the medics supposedly training me in the Reserves used to call me TBI, for Traumatic Brain Injury. The first time he called me that I told him I hadn’t had any brain injuries, and he said, “Well, maybe it happened when you were a baby.”
Finally I stood up and came down the hill and circled my house on the outside. The backyard was like a lake. The light was on in my mother’s bedroom and I went up to the window. On the dresser under the lamp there was a pamphlet that said, Your Service Member Is Home! The TV was going in the living room but maybe she was in the cellar. I waited until she came up the stairs and then pushed through the back door.
“They’re looking for you, boy,” she said when she saw me. Not, You must be fucking freezing. Not, how about a warm shower.
“What’d they want?” I asked.
“They said they had a number of things they wanted to talk to you about,” she said. “They wanted to look in your room and I said, You got a warrant? I told them you’d be back tonight.”
“What’d you say that for?” I asked.
“What was I supposed to tell them?” she said. “That you were out looking for a job?”
I went up to my room to think. There were some issues about prescriptions at the local pharmacy. Some bad checks back in Wichita Falls. There was a girl I’d scared by not letting her past me when we ran into each other in the woods. She’d torn her sleeve when she finally got away. It could’ve been a lot of things.
“I gotta go,” I said when I came back downstairs. “I’m gonna do some camping for a while.”
“Camping,” she said. “In this.” She put her hand out to the window.
“Don’t tell them where I went,” I said. “Far as you know, I never came home.”
“I should be so lucky,” she said.
I changed into dry clothes and put on like twelve layers and got together a rain fly and a cooking stove and a tent and a big pack full of cans of food and other shit and got out of there. “You taking your dog?” she called, but I never heard what she said after that.
It took me an hour to get to the end of the logging road because I was covering my tracks with a pine branch as I went, and then another hour to find the duffel bag in the snow, and from there I followed a creek uphill way into the forest. I found a spot I already knew they had good cover and visibility and got everything set up and then started going through what I had and just what it was I thought I was going to do.
There was a trail fifty yards below that did a hairpin, and snowmobilers used it and cross-country skiers. Farther down was a waterfall and swimming hole and I remembered a notice on the library’s Christian Outings bulletin board about a faith hike for teens called the Polar Bear Mixer.
I figured, Well, if I’m going to jail I might as well get something to eat first, so I made some stew. And while I was eating I started thinking that once the cops had me one thing would lead to another and I knew what went on in jail, I’d heard stories. So I emptied the duffel in the tent and got all geared up. I had stuff I didn’t even know I had. A bipod mount for the rifle and a winter camo wrap for the stock and barrel and scope. Even winter camo field bandages. When I was finished I felt like this way I was at least ready for whatever.
But nobody came down the trail. It got dark. I got some sleep. Nobody came the next day, either. I had little meatballs for breakfast and sat around and waited and finally went out looking for rabbits but the snow was too deep so I had to come back.
I’d stepped in the creek and even with three layers of socks my feet were freezing. In the credits part of Boys Town right at the beginning there was a kid in an alley warming his hands over a fire in a bucket. I’d forgotten that.
The guy that gets electrocuted is the one who gives Spencer Tracy the idea for the orphans’ home in the first place. When they’re getting ready to take the guy to the chair the governor tells him he owes a debt to the state, and the guy goes nuts on them. He asks where the state was when he was a little kid crying himself to sleep in a flophouse with drunks and hoboes. He says if he had one friend when he was twelve he wouldn’t be standing here like this. Then he throws everybody but Tracy out of his cell.
I spent the afternoon keeping the stove going and sitting on a tarp and squeezing my head with my hands. The difference between where I was and my mother’s house was that where I was I didn’t have to listen to TV.
I had everything I needed in front of me and I still couldn’t let well enough alone. That night it sleeted again and the next morning my stove was covered with ice. I washed my face and changed my socks and got my Desert Eagle and hiked back down to the road and through the woods to the culvert that led the back way into town. It was sunny and I was sweating like a pig by the time I climbed out of the culvert at the turnaround at the end of Janice’s street, but I didn’t want to hang around for too long so I stood there for a few minutes with my field jacket open, flapping it to dry myself off, and then went up to her house and rang the bell. The Eagle hung in the big inside pocket like a tire iron and I thought, I don’t know what you brought that for. A guy swung the door open like he’d been waiting for me. He had to be the ex-husband. He looked me up and down and said, “What can I help you with?” But I let it go and just said, “Is Janice here?” And he gave me another look and I remembered how sweaty I was and that I was wearing four shirts under my field jacket. Collars were sticking up all over the place.
He said, “Yeah, she’s in the back. What can we help you with?”
I stood there bouncing my leg for a second and reached under my coat like my Eagle might’ve fallen out. Then Janice came up behind him and I saw her get a good look at me. And I just said, “Nothing. I’ll come back,” and I left.
“Hey,” the guy called from behind me, and I heard Janice laugh. Halfway down the block I cut through somebody’s yard into the culvert. My heart was going so fast I was sure I was having a heart attack. She was probably still laughing. He was laughing with her. It was a comedy. I crouched at the bottom of the culvert and stepped around like a midget taking a walk. Even my outside shirts were soaked. I can never believe how fast I sweat through my clothes at times like that.
I worked my way up the culvert to Janice’s backyard and then ran up to their window but it was too high to see in so I just reached up as far as I could and squeezed off four rounds. From that angle, I probably just hit the ceiling. The Eagle’s so loud that at first your ears can’t believe it. Somebody yelled something but I couldn’t tell what. After the last round I was booking back through the yard for the culvert. I could hear somebody whooping from the next house over. They probably thought it was fireworks. And while I was hauling down the culvert to my path through the woods I got to hear sirens from every cop car in upstate New York.