Running the Risk (2 page)

“It's a big high school.”

“Yeah, but troublemakers stand out. And you didn't. B average, the records say. Not bad.”

“More like B minus these days. I've been slipping.”

“Could be the late-night job.”

“What are the odds of a scene like last night happening again? At Burger Heaven, I mean.”

“Not that great. Once a place gets hit, we keep a closer eye on it, and the bad guys know that.”

“Any leads?”

“A couple. Could you identify either of the men if you saw them?”

“I doubt it.”

“A lot of people are pretty shaken up after an event like that.”

“Traumatized?”

“Yeah, traumatized. But you seem to be rather cocky about it all.”

I figured that Solway detected that something was different about me. Being questioned like this had almost brought the adrenaline buzz back. And I liked that. I was a different person from the one who had gone to work last night. And even the principal of my school—my huge high school—now knew who I was.

“We're done,” Solway said.

“That's it?”

“Well, keep in mind you were lucky. You could have been killed.”

“I know that,” I said.

“Then why are you smiling?”

I didn't answer him. I hadn't realized it, but I had been smiling all through the interview. And I didn't know why.

I have always been pretty ordinary. No one expected too much of me. I was an only child, and my parents were pretty overprotective. When I rode a bike, I wore a helmet. When I skateboarded—not for long—I had the helmet, plus the pads for knees and elbows. My parents pretty much drove me anywhere I needed to go.

School was easy and I didn't have to try that hard. I'd had a couple of girlfriends but they were more like friends than girlfriends.
At sixteen I was a virgin, and it was not a big deal to me. Sure, I was horny sometimes, but actually having sex with a girl seemed so... well, complicated, that I wondered if it was worth it. And there were stds to worry about and possible pregnancy and even AIDS.

Are you starting to get the picture?

The job at Burger Heaven was an out-there thing for me. My father tried to convince me not to take it and said he'd up my allowance. My mother said I should concentrate on school and my “social life.”

“What social life?” I had countered.

And then I was in line at Burger Heaven one day and saw the sign for help wanted. The kids who worked there seemed to be kind of a team. They acted as if they liked each other, and I could see they helped each other out. I mean, I know what people think about working at burger joints. Not too glamorous, for sure. Crummy pay. Not a heck of a lot of excitement. Stupid uniforms. Free greasy food that would give you pimples.

But I asked for a form, filled it out and got a job. Hey, they were desperate. They would
have hired anyone with arms and legs. And like I said, I could have worked an easier shift. But I wanted the night thing. I was just tired of taking the easy route, the safe route, with everything. I wanted the night shift.

And got it. My parents were not happy.

It was exciting in a way. Staying up late. Weirdos coming in stoned or drunk. Hookers showed up sometimes. And creepy people who looked like they were dangerous. Sometimes the customers were rude. Sometimes they were funny. Sometimes downright friendly. Aside from the students who came in, most of these customers were unlike anyone I knew. These were the people my parents had been protecting me from all my life.

The day after the robbery, my boss, Ernesto, called to say I shouldn't come back to work for a week. “You're on what we call stress leave,” he said over the phone. “It's a company policy.”

“Like if you work for the airline and survive a plane crash?” I asked.

“Something like that. It's a mental-health thing.”

“But I don't feel stressed. I could come back to work tonight.”

“No. Don't worry. You'll get paid anyway.”

But I wasn't worrying about the pay. I wanted to be back at work.

“We're going to stay closed for a couple of days anyway and then reopen. Cam quit and so did Lacey. If you feel like doing the same, I'd understand.”

“No. It's okay, really. I'll be back in a week.”

“Suit yourself. And, hey, thanks for being cool through the whole thing. Seems like you kept your head.”

“Yeah.”

I hung up and relived the whole experience one more time. And then suddenly I felt the walls closing in around me. I started to feel really antsy. I had to get out of there.

My cell phone rang as I was leaving the house.

“Sean? It's me, Jeanette.” She had never called me before.

“Did Ernesto call you?” she asked.

“Yep. You on stress leave too?” I said.

“Yes. And I can use it. I'm not sure I want to go back after that. Do you?”

“Yeah, I do. Isn't that funny?”

“A little. But then, you acted different from the rest of us.”

“I did what I had to do,” I said.

I couldn't exactly figure out why she was calling me or even how she got my cell phone number. But I pictured her in my mind. Long dark hair, usually under one of those stupid net caps at work, and kind of sexy.

“Want to go get a coffee?” I asked. “I'm just leaving my house and heading out.”

“Sure,” she said. “Meet you at Tim Hortons on Queen Street. In thirty minutes.”

“See you there,” I said as I closed the phone. I was surprised that I had been so forward.

On the way to Tim Hortons, I did something strange. I closed my eyes and kept them closed as I walked.

I used to do this when I was a kid—in an open field, with no one around, with nothing to bump into. And I'd count the seconds. When I got to thirty, something would make me open my eyes. I knew I wasn't going to bump into anything. I knew I wasn't going to fall off a cliff. At worst I'd trip and fall down on the grass. But I couldn't get past
thirty. Thirty seconds with my eyes closed seemed like a long time. Some primitive part of my brain always forced my eyes open.

The sidewalk was straight. I knew the suburban neighborhood I was walking through. There were a few people around, but I figured they'd get out of my way. And I counted to thirty. The impulse to open my eyes was strong, but I fought it. I squeezed my eyelids shut tighter. I heard some people walking past me, and they were laughing. Even that didn't make me open my eyes.

But the tree did. The tree had decided it wasn't going to get out of my way. It was staying put. I'd made it to forty-two seconds. A record.

If anyone had been watching, they must have thought I was beyond stupid.Needless to say, I kept my eyes open the rest of the way downtown.

Jeanette was already in the coffee shop. She waved as I walked in.

“What happened to your nose?” she asked.

“Disagreement with another life form,” I said, touching the tip of my nose and discovering it had been scratched. “Hey, thanks for coming,” I said. I wanted to change the subject.

“I'm surprised you asked.”

“Me too.”

“We've been working together for months. How come you ask me out for coffee today?”

“I don't know. Why did you say yes?”

“I don't know. I guess I realized you were more interesting than I thought.”

“Can I take that as a compliment?”

“Sure.” Jeanette smiled at me, and then she took something out of her pocket. She set a perfectly rolled, rather fat joint down on the table between us. “We're on stress leave, right?” she said.

I didn't know what to say.

“C'mon,” she said, taking a gulp of her coffee and retrieving the joint.

I followed her outside, and we walked behind the coffee shop. We didn't go far. She sat down on the curb in the back and, in full view of the cars lined up for the
drive-through, lit the joint with a lighter. Jeanette inhaled deeply and then passed it to me. At first I thought it was a joke. I mean, here we were, toking up, with people looking right at us. But I decided what the hell.

I sucked in the smoke and, of course, coughed. I'd only smoked a couple of times before and never particularly liked it that much, but I couldn't turn down a beautiful girl passing me some weed. I handed the joint back to her and found myself smiling at the scowling woman in the Toyota who was looking straight at me.

The second time I didn't cough. I was more cautious. This stuff was clearly stronger than anything I'd experienced. Jeanette had taken on a kind of dreamy look, and I found myself drifting up into the sky.

When I brought my gaze back down to earth, I realized that the rear door of the coffee shop had opened, and someone who might've been the manager of the place was headed our way. Time to leave the premises.

We both got up and started walking away.

“Why did we just do that?” I asked.

“Do what?”

“Sit there in public and smoke a joint.”

“It was a kind of test,” she said.

“Of me?” “Of both of us.”

“You don't normally do that sort of thing?” I asked.

“No. But it seemed all right since you were with me.”

“Do you get high a lot?”

“Not usually. Today seemed different.”

“Then I must be a bad influence on you,” I said.

“Hey, lighten up,” she said.

And then she kissed me hard on the mouth.

We sat on a bench in the park and made out for a while. Jeanette was very stoned and very sexy. I began to consider what I'd been missing. It occurred to me that the girl was trouble but I didn't care. Maybe trouble was what I needed to make my life a little more interesting.

And then suddenly she pulled back from me and checked her watch. “Damn. Gotta go,” she said. “Big Sunday dinner with my folks. And I'm starving.” She kissed me one more time on the lips and then left.

I sat there for a few minutes, suddenly not feeling all that good. I touched the scratch on my nose and remembered the tree. Then I found myself looking up into the branches of the trees around me, and I watched the patterns of the sunlight coming through the leaves.

Trees reminded me of my grandfather, my father's father, who had died when I was twelve. The trees had killed him.

Well, maybe it wasn't the trees' fault, but at the moment it seemed that way. I missed him, even now.

He had insisted I not call him Granddad or Grandpop or anything like that. His name was Henry and he liked to be called Hank. “Like Hank Williams or Hank Snow or Hank Aaron,” he'd say, although none of those names meant much to me.

My father was always busy and never did a lot of father-son things with me. He worked for an insurance company for a long time, and he'd work weekends if he had to. Right up to the time he was fired and had to look for a new career. Hank wasn't like that. Hank would show up on a Saturday with the
top down on his Mustang convertible. He'd drive me anywhere I wanted to go. During my skateboarding phase, he would even take me to the skateboard park and join me. The kids all laughed at him when he fell, but he didn't care.

Can you picture some kid's grandfather on a half-pipe? That was Hank. “Sean, you only get to live once,” he'd say. “And you can't just sit on your ass and watch the world go by.”

He made a living by building homemade ultralight aircraft. He'd make one at a time and then sell it. I don't think he made a ton of money but he liked what he did. I was never allowed to fly with him in his noisy, two-person, totally-open-cockpit planes. Not even once. He and my father argued about that a hundred times. And my mother told Hank that if he didn't stop asking about it, he wouldn't be allowed to hang out with me at all.

And so I think Hank must have really liked me as a grandson because he stopped asking. Instead of flying, we hiked. And sometimes we swam in a deep abandoned
quarry where every sound echoed off the cliff walls. And it was there, with the safety of deep water beneath us, that he tried to teach me to rock climb—barefooted in a bathing suit, using nothing but fingers and feet to climb a sheer rock wall.

I never got very high. I fell a few times and it felt like I was going to die. Hank would climb way up to a ledge and then do a cannonball into the water. He'd surface with a big grin on his face. My parents never found out about the quarry or the rock climbing. They just thought we were swimming in the public pool. It was a secret I kept even after Hank was gone. And it was a secret Hank took to his grave.

The first ultralight crash didn't kill him. The engine conked out, and he said he was pretty sure he could glide in to safety but the wind suddenly switched. “And the ground came up and grabbed me,” he said, always enjoying the reports of his own near- death disasters.

The second crash involved a neighbor's shed. “The man just can't die,” he'd said,
having walked away from that one with no more damage than an angry neighbor and a lot of work repairing the ultralight.

It was the third crash that did him in. Turned out the immortal Hank could die after all, although it must have come as quite a shock to his system. People who watched him crash said that if he had just been able to keep his machine up for another fifty feet, he would have been past the trees. But it was the trees that got him. Big tall ones—white pine and maple and spruce. They had his number.

I sat there alone on the bench, the taste of Jeanette still in my mouth, and I wondered where the spirit of my grandfather was just then. And I realized how much I still missed him.

On my way home, I had to cross a four-lane highway. There was a lot of Sunday-afternoon traffic and there was no place for a pedestrian to cross. In fact, I stood by the side of the road waiting for a break, thinking maybe someone would see me and cars would let me cross.
But it wasn't like that. Everyone was on their way somewhere. And in a damn hurry.