This Is What I Want (27 page)

RALEIGH

Raleigh kept checking the rearview mirror and the human cargo in the back. Funny kid, this Omar Smothers. Raleigh hadn’t even realized he was there, in the car now far in the distance, until he heard the rustle and tumble of thrown weight as the kid got himself upright. When he’d offered them a ride, the Smothers kid—Raleigh knew him on sight; this kid was a big star, or soon would be one—had told his friend to take shotgun, that he wanted to go back to sleep. And sure enough, he’d dropped off into slumber inside of fifteen miles.

Raleigh looked again and marveled anew at the size of him. Not many men towered over Raleigh, but this kid qualified, and one look at those hands suggested he wasn’t near done with the growth. Raleigh might have had trouble even taking him for a kid if not for the baby face—
life’ll beat that out of you soon enough,
he thought—and the wispy mustache that he was trying too hard to grow.

He shifted his gaze now to the girl, and he smiled at her, and she looked at her lap. She’d been stealing glances at him since he picked them up. He could feel the surreptitious stares. She had questions, and she was just trying to decide how to get them out. He got that a lot.

“You sure you don’t want to call your folks?” he said.

“No, it’s fine. I’ll call later.”

“You can use my phone if you want.”

“No, thank you. It’s OK.”

She glanced at him again and then looked away. Nervous. Raleigh wasn’t so far removed from his own adolescence that he didn’t know what this was about. They were getting away and didn’t want anybody to know, for whatever reason. He rolled his left shoulder against his cheek to scratch an itch. None of his business. If Billings is where they wanted to go, he figured that’s where he’d take them.

Now he looked at her again, and this time she struggled to meet his gaze. “What’s it like to be famous?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Yes, you would,” she said.

“Well, I’m not movie-star famous.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

Smart girl. A little more on the ball upstairs than he’d been inclined to give her credit for initially.

“It’s a drag,” he said. “Or, in your nomenclature, it’s totes lame.”

He gave her another smile, and she parted ways with a courtesy laugh.

“What’s nomenclature?” she said.

In Forsyth, a hundred miles to go, Raleigh left the highway and tooled into the main drag to the Town Pump. He had to piss, and the girl—Clarissa, he kept reminding himself—said she wanted something to drink.

“You want anything?” he said to Omar, still prone in the backseat.

“Beef jerky.”

“You got any money?”

“No.”

“No worries,” Raleigh said. “I’ll get it.” He slammed the door shut. Little fucker. Giant fucker. Whatever. It was hard to see what that girl saw in this kid.

Inside the store, he grabbed some jerky for Omar and a cup of Colombian for himself. At the register, he pulled a copy of the
Billings Herald-Gleaner
from the stack and set that on the counter, too. When Clarissa queued in behind him with a fountain drink, he waved her up and paid for everything.

“Thank you, Mr. Ridgeley.”

“It’s Raleigh. And you’re welcome.”

By Custer, fifty miles to go, they were fast friends. Clarissa had extracted from him a promise to do a video chat with her English class, and Raleigh had painted anecdotes for her that amplified and exaggerated his travels. From time to time, he’d watch the boy in the back, who’d cracked open his bag of jerky, taken a couple of small bites—and let that god-awful stench of animal flesh into the car—and then gone back to snoozing.

“Are you a cheerleader?” he asked her.

“No, I hate those bitches.” She caught herself. “Sorry.”

“It’s OK. When I was in school, being a cheerleader was just about the most important thing in the world to a girl.”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“Guess.”

She passed a discerning eye over him. Raleigh sat up straight and tried to suck in his gut.

“I don’t know. Forty, maybe?”

Raleigh laughed.

“What?” she said.

He waved his right hand in a tight circle. “Nothing,” he said.
Forty? Sweet Jesus. She must think anything north of that is dead
. “I like your answer. We’ll go with that.”

They drove on a few miles. Raleigh just smiled.
Forty. Unbelievable
.

“You know,” she said, “it doesn’t matter. You’re cool.”

“Thank you,” he said. He looked at her, and she smiled. “So are you.”

In the final few miles, Raleigh did what he’d been thinking of for a while, and he made his insurrection. They were talking about something—he’d lost the thread—and he slipped his hand across the console and set it on her thigh, just below the line of her shorts. She didn’t look, didn’t acknowledge his touch, but he felt the tightness in the muscle and the rigidity of the skin. He pulled back and she looked at him, and he tried to strike a look that offered conciliation. He put both hands on the wheel, and Omar thumped in the backseat as he adjusted his position.

Billings now slipped into view, the east-end industrial area dappled in the sun.

“Where do you want me to drop you?” he said. “Or do you need something to eat or—”

“Just the mall,” she said. He listened closely for clipped words, for iciness, but it was hard to tell. The move had been unwelcome, in any case. Regret was thoroughly his, and his stomach roiled.

He left the interstate at King Avenue and drove into the West End. A few turns and it would be done. He’d planned to ask if he could help them out somehow in getting back to their car, but he wasn’t going to do that. Get them out and get gone.

In the backseat, Omar now rose to a seated position. Raleigh watched him through the mirror as he blinked away sleep.

“Hey, sleepyhead,” he said.

“Hey.”

They crested Twenty-Fourth Street, and the mall loomed into view.

“Where?” Raleigh said.

“Anywhere.” Clarissa didn’t look at him.

He pulled into the Dillard’s lot, the first one available, and he came to a stop. “This good?”

“Yeah,” she said.

While the kids clambered out, Raleigh pressed the button with shaky fingers to release the trunk lid so Clarissa could retrieve her stuff.
Come on, come on, come on
. He drummed fingers on the steering wheel. Next, finally, came the slam of the trunk, hard, and Raleigh engaged the window button and said, “No need for that.”

Omar’s shadow crossed his face, and Raleigh looked up to see the man-child looming over him.

“Forget something?”

The punch came like a stroke of lightning. The force of it broke the bridge of Raleigh’s nose, and before he could get his finger back on the window switch, Omar’s massive hands had hold of his shirt and were pulling him through to the ground below. The force of the fall knocked the air from his lungs.

The next shot, to Raleigh’s right eye, broke the orbital bone, and he heard the girl screaming, “Omar, no!”

Dazed, and with one good eye to see it, Raleigh watched the boy’s bloody fist rear back again, giving him just enough time to ponder the possibility that if somebody got this kid off him in time, before too many more shots, this all might make a good story one day.

DOREEN

The sadness began for Doreen Smothers when she saw Gabe Bowman walking up the sidewalk in front of the Farm and Feed. She gave Elbert Fleener his fifty and his sack of rabbit feed, and she moved along the big front windows, shadowing the boy, until she reached the door and opened it.

“Gabe?”

The Bowman boy turned to her, and his face betrayed a forgotten detail.

“You’re not at Fort Peck?” she said. “Where’s Omar?”

Gabe slumped, and then he told, and then Doreen made intimate acquaintance with silent terror.

Doreen closed the store and drove to Sam Kelvig’s house, and her heart quivered when she didn’t see his pickup out front. He’d called that morning to ask her to please mind the store just one more day, and of course she had said yes. In deference to his pain, she had stifled her own request, that Sam might try to find a way to reach Omar on that older-man-to-younger-man level she couldn’t scale no matter how much she tried. It could wait, she’d figured.

And now . . .

Patricia met her at the door, red-eyed and apologetic. No, she said, she didn’t know where Sam had gone. “We’ve had some sadness here,” Patricia told her, and Doreen had pursed her lips, at once not wanting to intrude but also figuring, lady, there’s trouble enough for everyone.

“Thank you just the same,” Doreen had said to Patricia’s “Is there anything I can do?” Doreen knew the direction the kids had gone and the destination, and she knew she wouldn’t close the gap by standing on the Kelvigs’ porch and explaining the inexplicable.

Badlands and beet fields and a ribbon of river mark the path to Glendive, where Interstate 94 comes shooting through on its barren east-west run. Doreen was a few miles into it, anxiety and adrenaline rising as she pushed the car to eighty-five and then ninety, frantically doing the math of how long it would take her to cover two hundred-some miles.

In the passenger seat, her cell phone lit up, an unrecognized number with a 406 area code, and she reached for it.

“Yes?”

“Doreen Smothers?”

Here came the sinking. “Yes.”

“Sergeant Wexler, Billings Police Department.”

She guided the car to the shoulder, the entirety of her given to trembles, as if on a blood-sugar crash.

“Yes?” she said again.

“I have your boy here. He wants to talk to you, and then I’m going to need to talk to you a bit more, OK?”

“What’s happened?”

“We’re still figuring it all out, ma’am. Somebody’s hurt bad, and your son is involved, and we’re still trying to sort it out. Here he is, OK?”

“OK.” Doreen looked south to the sunbaked sloping prairie, and she wondered how you brace yourself for the vagaries of violence when your son—your child who would never willingly hurt anyone—is involved.

“Mom?” came Omar’s voice, the first time Doreen had heard his little-boy lilt in years.

She straightened her legs and pushed her back into the bucket seat, and she said, “What did you do?”

The spill came in sniffles and chokes and hysterics, and Doreen became convinced in frantic increments that the dreams she’d harbored on his behalf were fracturing, one by one.

SAM

Sam stood next to his son atop Telegraph Hill, and by rote he made his customary post-Jamboree scan of the town, a little bit of theatrical closure he allowed himself every year. It had never looked like this before. And then, at once, he thought that assessment too simple. Does anything ever look the same?

“Swarthbeck blowing up his own building was the most normal thing that happened,” he said. The incredulity stretched his voice into thinness that came across as exasperation. Sam knew better. He was on the damn verge of melting down, all the time now.

“Never a dull moment, right?” Samuel said, nudging him. Sam didn’t acknowledge that, and didn’t say anything else. Samuel cleared his throat and settled back on his heels.

“I’m going to be back, Dad,” he said. “I’m going to be back soon. And we’re going to do better from now on. All of us. OK?”

Sam swallowed what was moving up in his gullet, and he blinked. Reset. Focus. Stand and deliver.

“And your mother?”

“You talk to her. I’m not ferrying messages between the two of you, OK? I’m not going to do it. But I think that’s her intent, yeah.”

“Intent.” Sam rolled the word around on his tongue before expelling it. He took off his cap and swept it across his brow. The hottest part of the day was upon them, and it choked out the breathable air.

“Dad, it’s going to be OK.”

“Is it?” Sam took a hard look at his son, but the resolve wasn’t there. He glanced away with a brief shake of his head, letting Samuel know he didn’t need, or want, an answer that he knew was yet to play out.

He clasped his hands behind his back and he spread his stance, and he found a spot on the horizon that would help him hold these things in abeyance. He worked the inside of his lip with his teeth, gnawing off small bits of skin from the inside. His eyes blinked, a faltering sentry against his welling grief.

His son moved closer, almost imperceptibly, and then, in an instant, fully there, and Samuel slipped a hand across the older man’s shoulders, and Sam leaned into the warmth of his child and waited and hoped for the despair to pass, as all things surely must.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Where to start? The beginning, I suppose.

This is my fifth novel with the folks at Lake Union Publishing, and I never fail to be amazed at their intelligence, their love of the books they take on, and their endless dedication to getting those books into the hands of readers who will also love them. Thanks to my former editor, Terry Goodman, who staved off retirement long enough for one more acquisition from me; my new editor, Jodi Warshaw, and her unerring eye and good cheer; and the entire team that shows such incredible dedication to their authors. My developmental editor, Charlotte Herscher, is simply the best, and this marks three novels with her. I hope there are many more to come.

Mollie Glick, my agent, and the folks at Foundry Literary + Media do great work. I’m fortunate, indeed, to have landed with them.

Jim Thomsen, as ever, is a steadfast friend and a reliable arbiter of quality. His well-considered notes when this book was in manuscript form made it leagues better. Thank you, bud.

Other friends supply encouragement and engage me in conversations that help shape my work in ways profound and subtle. My thanks to Elisa Lorello, Gwen Florio, LynDee Walker, Cass Sullivan, Ed Kemmick, Lynn Lunsford, Craig Huisenga, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Rolfsness, Jill Rupert, Jill Munson, and others I’m sure I’m forgetting. These creative alliances buoy me in ways I couldn’t begin to quantify.

Finally, I offer thanks to my family. I was fortunate enough to be born into a clan that values intellectual curiosity above all else, and that has served me well at every turn in my life. I had the great fortune of marrying into a family that has lived in the places where this story resides, and if not for those folks taking me in and making me one of their own, I might never have found the thread. There, my gratitude lands most heavily on Angie Buckley, my ex-wife. The marriage is over, but the love and the regard will carry me through the remainder of my days.