“The papers have found out. Sheriff got them to sit on their story until you guys are staying someplace safe.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“It is what it is. I’m trying to help.”
Walking back to the World of Coke, Jeremy thought about his petition. So far, when anyone back at camp had asked Stephen for legal advice, he’d snapped that he didn’t work for free. Jeremy had a hunch that if he visited him at his office, it might go differently, but not today. He was numb from cold. The encroaching stupor put him in mind of the ’93 blizzard, that historic storm when his mom had run out of orange juice — the only drink that let her swallow all her pills without gagging.
“Drink whiskey like a normal woman,” his dad had said, and she set the pill bottles back down.
“What will happen now?” Jeremy had asked.
“My blood pressure will rise.”
“Roads are impassable,” his dad had said, which meant Jeremy could only trek alone through deep snow to Food City, where with stiff hands he selected a gallon of Tropicana. Carrying it uphill, he lost sensation in his fingers. He felt in service to something bigger. Back home, past dusk, he found his mother sitting in the dark. He flipped a switch, preparing for a swell of praise, but the power was out.
“Juice.”
“That’s sweet. No pulp?”
Jeremy looked down. Lots of pulp, the carton read. How had he forgotten that pulp made her gag like the pills did? It was suddenly all he remembered, along with his bank-breaking tonsillectomy, or the time he’d trampled her camellias. How had he been so mindless? She never asked, but he always wondered. Now, brushing snow off his car with a bare hand, he wondered too if he could trace all his bad luck back to that storm, when he’d thought he’d learned something. Perhaps everything he’d learned since then stood on a footing of that first wrong thing. His memory ceded no name for it, whatever it was. As he ran away, his mother had called out for him, too late; a blizzard yielded hiding places, and until they melted and were again exposed, he crouched in those holes like a gopher and never cried.
4.
In sixth grade, down below the gnat line where he was from, Patrick had sat quietly on the school bus every day for months while an eighth-grader pinched the Mexican boy’s arms. She did it with glee, hard enough to leave welts. “This is for your own good,” she would say, and “Look at you,” until one day Patrick pushed her out the emergency door onto Moultrie Highway.
It wasn’t about the Mexican boy; Patrick didn’t care about that. It was that she reminded him of his uncle. To shove her helped take the sting out, and it got Patrick away from home. “Won’t be too many Mexicans in there, but there’s lots of blacks,” his uncle had said on the way to reform school. Sure enough Patrick made friends with several, like his bunkmate Rooney, who played strategy games with him and ordered chess books through loan. For two years they learned every chess gambit, waiting for one of their own, namely the EF4 tornado that sucked up the perimeter wall and sent them fleeing in a car that Rooney hot-wired.
They drove it to Rooney’s cousin’s garage, where Patrick learned to detail cars with chamois leather and cotton swabs. He moved into Rooney’s top bunk. Nights they rode around in Supras, Camaros, Firebirds, Chargers, Miatas, Talons, which took hours to clean — hours he already thought of as the best of his life. Better than reform school. There were about five billion people alive back then. As he cleaned, he imagined how it would be if not just he and Rooney but all five billion had Q-tips in hand, drying leather cream off their seats.
“It’s almost like you enjoy washing cars,” Rooney had said during one of their last games. “You look downright enraptured.”
“Pays the bills,” Patrick said, even as he decided to try to quit liking it. Rooney was his best friend, but he wasn’t Rooney’s; every month there were more and more folks to compete with.
“It’s weird, and you don’t have bills. You’re fifteen.”
“Saving for a rainy day.”
“Wish you were saving for your own bedroom.”
Some nights Rooney, Oliver, Zane, and Edgar couldn’t squeeze him in to either front or back seats. “This is our special friend,” they took to telling girls on nights when he did come. The girls, sizing him up, would giggle. Back at reform school, the only difference between him and Rooney had been their feelings about the place. Patrick had liked it, would have stayed. Only in solidarity had he gone along with Rooney’s tornado gambit.
He made a deal with Rooney’s cousin to move in above the garage. When he turned sixteen, he started driving the cars to Florida. One morning near Daytona he was pulled over for a faulty tail lamp. From detention he wrote Rooney five times and never heard back; still, Patrick imagined him rolling up on release day in a shiny car, with no one in back. “Ain’t she sweet?” Rooney would say, and Patrick would nod blithely, but it was his own cousin who fetched him, in a Buick Century as filthy as the detention center.
He was eighteen by then. As his uncle’s son guessed, he’d never been with a girl. There were places down the highway, his cousin told him — what kind did he want?
“Kind of place?”
“Kind of girl.”
“What kinds are there?”
“You know, blond? Fat?”
“Black,” he said, and his cousin giggled like everyone had when Rooney called him a special friend.
At Headlights, slapping at gnats while bleach-blonds made love to their poles, Patrick imagined scouring the Century and then driving off to open a garage of his own, far from Tifton. “Pick.” Something looked familiar about one who held the pole funny. Patrick pointed. She took him in back. They hadn’t been talking for a minute before she started to yell.
What should he have done, Patrick complained to the police later; asked for ID? Blonds all looked alike. If he’d realized she was the bus girl, he might have only pinched her arm. A girl like her had a reason to shout on sight of him, but a stranger’s shout proclaimed that the problem with him was general to all girls, and growing in size, so that last year any girl would have laughed but this year any girl would scream. And what about next year? What then? He found himself on top of her, covering her mouth. He screamed back. Choking her, he couldn’t muffle her noise enough for the house music to drown it out. Even when the door opened, he didn’t let go.
In adult prison he got shunted into the white gang, and it wasn’t until he made parole that he learned that the offender camps were segregated too. When he arrived at an abandoned motor court off I-85, a black man he recognized from prison met him with a shotgun.
“I’ll give you to the count of three.”
“Look, I hung with those guys because I had to.”
“Two and a half,” the man said, chasing Patrick off to Acworth, where Gus gave him a tent because he looked like a nice guy.
On a pawn-shop Huffy he biked around applying at every auto detailing shop. Had he been convicted of a felony? Explain below. No one wanted him. Then Travis showed him the Jobs for Felons list and he became a clerk at a Flying J. The car wash there was a drive-through with abrasive brushes that no one cleaned. Sometimes a girl would smile at him; he never knew why. He saved up to buy an ’87 Fiero that never shone, no matter how he tried. Travis or Gus would invite him to play checkers, which left him feeling empty. One day, a week after the snow, two cops interrupted a game to say they would be shutting down the camp.
“You’ve got three days,” they told Patrick, Allen, Gus, and Bruce, all sitting around the fire pit.
“You can’t,” Bruce said. “Why?”
“News gets out, you could be in danger.”
“Where are we supposed to go?”
“I’ll recommend a real estate agent.”