B009XDDVN8 EBOK (17 page)

“Where is it, motherfucker?”

I was in my bedroom, in my bed, in the imperfect pitch of the night, pinned down by some foul-smelling monster while another, skinnier bastard pricked my neck with a knife. This was the stuff of my recurring nightmares, and so it took a moment to understand that this was no paranoid bad dream; this was real as steel.

“Whah?” I said. “Huh?”

“Where is it, dirtbag?”

“Who are you?” I said, though by then I had a pretty good idea.

With the streetlights bleeding in the single window facing the street, I could make out some details. The fat guy’s hair was gray and wiry as it poured out of a bandanna wrapped around his face.

He had arms like pistons, a gut like a medicine ball, bad skin, bad breath, a scar on his forehead, the smell of a dog. The skinny guy with the knife had a similar bandanna. He looked even older, and yelled at me with the high-pitched screech of an angry crow.

“Tell me where the fuck it is,” he said, “or you’ll be carrying your head around in a suitcase.”

I would learn later that it wasn’t just those two that had broken into my house. There was another in my mother’s bedroom to keep her quiet. And there were two more going methodically through the house, room by room, top to bottom, pulling up carpets, stabbing cushions, dragging bureaus and cabinets away from our walls, digging up the crawl space, tossing the place as if our Pitchford split-level was rife with hidden corridors and recessed wall safes.

“What are you looking for?” I said, even though I knew. “What do you want?” I said, even as I was certain they wanted nothing so much as my death.

“Our money, motherfucker,” said Knife-Man.

“What money?”

“Did you think you could just waltz away with it?” he said. “Did you think we’d just let it go?”

“I don’t have anything.”

“Too bad, Frenchy,” he said as he started sawing.

There was blood and there was terror. I tried to scoot back to escape the knife, but the fat guy grabbed my hair, and Knife-Man gave me another saw, and my blood spurted. Jesus Christ, my blood spurted. And I could feel my life spurting away with it. I slapped my hand over the cut to stop the bleeding and through the slickness of the blood I felt how wide was the wound. Damn wide. I was going to die, I was sure of it. Molten lead poured into my stomach. I wanted Augie and Ben, I wanted my mommy, I wanted my daddy, I wanted to cry.

But at the same time I was holding back the blood and the tears, part of me had floated away into a cloud of angry reason.
The skinny little demon had called me Frenchy. No one called me Frenchy anymore, no one except for Tony Grubbins. That son of a bitch. He had thrown a football at my face. He had killed my dog. He had beat on me and ripped me off and stolen my change at lunch. And now, guessing I might somehow be responsible for his tragedy, he had sent these two maniacs to slit my throat. My anger gave me a shot of calm. It didn’t matter that he was right, Tony wasn’t getting the money from me, no way, no how. It wasn’t in the house, I wasn’t that stupid, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell these cretins where it was.

“I don’t have your money,” I said with more bitterness than I intended, all the while just trying to gain some time.

“But you know where it is,” said Knife-Man.

“The cops took it.”

“But you got your share.”

“Why would I get a share? Who the hell am I? Whatever Tony told you is a lie.”

Knife-Man’s eyes narrowed at the name.

“He just wants you to kill me for him,” I said.

“Why would anyone want to kill a dickwad like you?”

“Because he hates me. He killed my dog.”

“Your dog?”

“He poisoned him,” I said. “My little dog.”

And then it hit me with the force of truth. My dog was dead, and I was going to die, and my mother was going to die, and so was Ben and so was Augie, and all of it was my fault, my fault, all of it. If I hadn’t poked Tony Grubbins like a bear in his cage, if I hadn’t broken into his house just for the hell of it, if I hadn’t stolen a boatload of hot cash from his demonic brother, if I had been a decent and kind kid instead of a ruthless pot-smoking thief, none of this would have happened. And Rex would be happily bouncing around. And Augie, Ben, and I would still be best of friends. And my mother and I would be facing a tuna casserole instead of death. The tears that I had been fighting suddenly
rushed out of me, just as the blood had rushed out of my throat a few moments before, and my calming anger dissolved, and my emotions took me over the edge.

I started to cry, but not quietly, not with the dignity of a partisan facing his death. Instead I wept, I sobbed, I wailed like a kid on Santa Claus’s lap. And when I noticed my attackers cringe and step away from my blubbering, I cried even harder, keening as I pulled my legs to my chest, making myself seem smaller, younger, as unthreatening as a colicky babe.

Later, when the cops came and looked over what was left of our house, and questioned me and my mother as we waited for the ambulance, my pride stopped me from mentioning the crying jag that saved my life. I didn’t tell them how terrified Knife-Man looked as I continued to sob, how he backed away, how I heard him say to the fat mountain of a man who smelled like a dog that there was no way this kid had the balls to even steal a pair of socks. Instead I simply described my attackers to the cops and detailed the bare facts of our confrontation. And as I repeated the demands for the money, the officers looked at each other knowingly.

“I can’t stay here anymore,” said my mother to one of the police officers, a cigarette lit to calm her nerves, a steadying drink in her hand. “This neighborhood is going to hell.”

“We’re doing what we can, ma’am.”

“First a drug ring being run out of the house across the street, and then those motorcycle freaks cruising the neighborhood, and now this. Where have you been? Thank God I’m only renting. We’re getting out of here. I hear Florida is nice.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said the cop, before turning to me. “Any idea why they might have thought you had the money?”

“We live across the street from the drug house. I suppose that’s reason enough for them,” I said, as I pressed a bloodied towel against my wound. “And I wasn’t on the best of terms with the Grubbins kid. Is the missing money really more than a rumor?”

“They sure searched pretty hard for a rumor, didn’t they?” said the cop. “They take anything of value from you?”

“We don’t have anything of value,” I said.

“The TV’s still here, I suppose,” said my mother. “Thank heaven for that. They could have killed us. I don’t know why they didn’t kill us.”

“You were lucky, that’s why,” said the cop, looking around at the destruction. “You don’t have that money somewhere, do you, son?”

“Me?”

“Just asking.”

“If I had it,” I said, “would we still be living here?”

The cop laughed, my mother inhaled, an ambulance siren cracked the silent night.

They put twenty-seven stitches in my neck in the emergency room. The knife hadn’t gone deep enough to sever anything brutally serious; the spurting blood came from minor blood vessels only. The doctors told me how Knife-Man had missed severing the carotid artery by millimeters, that I didn’t know how lucky I was. And lucky was just how I felt, lucky lucky lucky. I always feel lucky when a madman is sawing at my throat. My mother made them get a plastic surgeon before she let anyone stick a sewing needle in her son, but they must have dragged the surgeon out of a bar, what with the jagged scar he left.

Back from the hospital, the ruins of our life piled around us, my mother insisted on leaving Pitchford right then and there, getting in the car and driving south on Route 1 all the way to the end. But I convinced her we should wait until I finished my senior year. I told her senior year was supposed to be the highlight of my life. I wanted to party like a maniac with my friends, go to prom with Madeline Worshack, get into a good college. In a comic turnabout, I convinced my mother that staying in Pitchford was crucial to my making something of my life.

“You owe me this,” I said to her, which was a bitter thing to say. But that’s just how I felt—she did owe me. And after much
argument, she agreed. I didn’t tell her that running away like a thief in the night could only raise suspicions. I didn’t tell her that if we stayed a little longer despite the danger, I could begin to make the preparations I needed to live a life safely hidden from our pursuers.

And make no mistake, preparations were needed.

My attacker had been brutally on point. I had thought we could just waltz away with it, that they would just let it go. I had thought after things had cooled that the three of us would be safe. But the very presence of those thugs in my house was enough to convince me that safety would never be possible.

When we huddled the next day at our cherry tree, me with the thick tape across my neck like some newly formed creation of Dr. Frankenstein, Ben and Augie told me it had been the best thing that could have happened.

“I think we passed some sort of test,” said Ben.

“We?” I said.

“They came after us, yes they did, and the saps came up empty,” said Augie.

“Us?” I said.

“The lead Tony gave them turned out empty,” said Ben. “We’re a step closer than we were before.”

“Any closer than that and my head would have been lying on the floor.”

“You took one for the team, bub,” said Augie. “Don’t think we’re not grateful.”

“Grateful it was you and not us,” said Ben, laughing.

But I wasn’t quite so merry. It was a sweet little fairy tale they were spinning, that we had been looked at and passed over, and it made them feel better, I’m sure, but they hadn’t had a knife at their necks.

So I did it on my own, my preparations to start a new life, a life not just miles away from Pitchford, but miles away from who I had been in Pitchford. Even while J.J. Moretti was going through his senior year of high school, taking tests, drinking beer, licking
Madeline Worshack’s nipples like each was the tip of a Carvel soft-serve vanilla cone, Jonathon Willing was applying to a host of universities well out of state. A letter from my mother that I forged and a copy of my birth certificate sent to each admissions office was enough to get J.J. Moretti’s high-school transcript and recommendations accepted for Jonathon Willing’s application. I didn’t tell anyone in Pitchford about the name switch, not even Augie and Ben, didn’t tell anyone that once J.J. Moretti finally left Pitchford he would disappear completely. The motorcycle madmen had taught me how careful I needed to be.

The only person I was tempted to tell was Madeline, sweet Madeline Worshack, the love of my life. But I decided I couldn’t tell her the truth while we were still in Pitchford. Instead I lived like a spy, keeping my secrets, scheming to end up at the same college as Madeline so we could continue to date and then commit our futures one to the other. In an idyllic campus setting, under the leaves of some ancient oak, I would ask her to marry me. And when she said yes, and she would say yes, I would tell her about the money, and about how lovely our lives would be together with the head start the stolen cash would give us. We would be rich, forever, together. Yes, I was that much in love. She applied to Penn State and so did I, though of course I couldn’t go there and stay unrecognized. But she also applied to Boston College and so did I. She applied to UVA and to Maryland, to Indiana and Wisconsin, and so did I. How sweet the future would fall upon us, like the dapple of sunlight on the first crisp day of spring.

“We need to talk.”

“Why?” I said, as I nuzzled her neck with my teeth. We were parked at the naval air base in Willow Grove a few weeks after my throat was cut. Her skin tasted of licorice, her breast swelled against my palm, I was drunk on her aroma, on the pressing pulse of my own blood. Who the hell wanted to talk?

Which just showed how much I knew.

“I don’t understand,” I said a few moments later, after my future with Madeline imploded like a dead sun in my chest. “I love you.”

“I know you do,” she said.

“Then why?”

“Because there’s something always coming between us. I don’t know what it is, but half the time I’m with you, it’s like I’m alone. And the other half you’re trying to molest me.”

“Like now.”

“Stop. J.J., I’m tired of doing all the work in this relationship.”

“And yet I’m always the one unhooking your bra.”

“I’m serious.”

“It’s Richie Diffendale, isn’t it? He’s been sniffing around you like a raccoon in heat.”

“It has nothing to do with him.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s you,” she said. “It’s like there’s something else in your life that’s more important than me. I don’t like the competition.”

Getting dumped by Madeline hurt worse than the football in my face, than the knife in my throat. But in a way it was a relief, too, because I had my secret and now, with Madeline gone, I didn’t ever have to share it with anyone. And I never did, not with any of the girls who left me for the same reasons Madeline left me, not with any friends I ever made other than Augie and Ben, and not with my wife. When it was time to choose, I always chose the secret.

And now, more than twenty years after losing Madeline Worshack, as I headed toward a new and radiant life of unlimited promise, I realized I was making the same damn choice. For I was about to lose all that I loved most in the world, my children and my wife, but the secret, oh, the secret, would forever stay close to my heart.

Old habits die hard.