After they left, Patrick’s fingers still moved the checkers pieces, but in his mind his palms were joined in prayer. He asked for a signal, some glimpse of outcome. There was open country outside of Tifton where his uncle lived. Acres of emptiness, where no one could hear you. That wasn’t the signal, though; that was his memory again.
He lay awake all night. The next day, two hours into his shift, Rooney walked up, wearing a UPS shirt that matched a truck at the pumps.
“Pack of Camel Lights,” he said, eyes unfocused.
Rooney, it’s Patrick, he thought of saying. You found me. I’m free.
Tobacco purchases required an ID check. If Patrick performed it, he could learn his old friend’s address, go there later, even now. Rooney would ask where he stayed lately. Lake Allatoona? Got a boat dock? Boat? Bet you clean that boat with Q-tips — bet you enjoy it, and then the laughter, branding him a simpleton.
Bring it on, Patrick thought, it would be better than this.
Except he couldn’t speak.
Reaching for Rooney’s cigarettes, he considered how that girl on the bus must have felt, sitting beside him in the back room of that gentlemen’s club without being known. What he’d done was try to stop her from screaming. It had felt like protecting himself, and now he saw she’d been protecting herself too.
He ran Rooney’s card. Rooney signed. “Have a nice day,” Patrick said, and went in back to fetch a bottle of Boone’s.
He drank it down and opened another. “Anyone back there?” called a lady up front.
“Why, you horny?” he shouted back, quelling any need to return to the register.
Unplugging the security cameras, Patrick smiled at his joke. He was a sex offender who had never had sex: funny when you stopped to think. He stowed a case of Boone’s in his pathetic old car. He ripped eye holes into one of his socks, pulled it over his head, drove around front, walked in, and announced that he had a gun.
Two of the customers sank to their knees. Patrick aimed a finger through his coat at the man still standing and said, “Key’s in the drawer. Cash goes in a bag.”
It was the easiest thing he’d ever done. “Wallets,” he said, and they obeyed again. Folks did what you told them to. He drove home to Lake Allatoona, where he parked on the gravel below the bluff. The bag held eleven hundred dollars, more money than he’d possessed at once since working for Rooney’s cousin. Back then he’d had a friend to spend it on. Find a new friend, he thought, except maybe that was when things had begun going wrong, when he’d bought Rooney a polo shirt and a CD.
Fuck it, he thought, wiping a splatter of mud from the car grille. He filled his backpack with bottles and hiked up to the fire pit.
“Who’s that?” said a stiff corncob of a man, bucktoothed like Gus, sitting upright on a boulder. Patrick had never seen him.
“Your mom,” he said, and fell into position beside Allen and Gus, who were roasting slabs of beef.
“Look who’s shit-face drunk,” Allen said.
“This is my cousin Garth,” Gus said; “runs a quarry up in Rome.”
“Four of your friends have done signed on,” Garth told Patrick, “and I’ve got room for one more. No schools, no churches.”
“His niggers quit all at once,” Allen said, “like it was some kind of convention.”
Patrick’s pulse quickened. “You know what?” he said, feeling in his pockets, but he trailed off, wondering how the others knew he had quit too.
“See, it’s like I was saying. Patrick don’t fancy that word.”
“We’ve all got our pet peeves,” Garth said.
“I don’t want some bitch on my work crew lawing me for how I talk.”
“They aren’t my friends,” Patrick said.
“Do what?” Garth said.
“You said four of my friends have signed on. That’s wrong.”
“Look, bub. Day after tomorrow, cops will ask your intended residence. If you ain’t got one, they’ll take you into custody.”
It must be only a coincidence, Patrick thought. While he’d been robbing the store, they’d been drinking here by this fire.
“How do you know what words I like?”
“You paid a visit to the Sweetwater Creek Motor Court,” Allen said, as Stephen ambled over and sat down.
“I go where I please,” said Patrick, certain Allen could only have learned about that from the cops.
The cops must have gone to shut the other camp down too, and then laughed with the white campers about it.
“Well, why’d they leave?” Patrick asked.
“He means your niggers,” Allen said. Garth grinned; Gus bit his lip. They would rather be allied with the cops than with the other camp.
Earlier Patrick had thought Rooney’s visit to the Flying J was his sign, but Rooney had been only a prelude. Patrick walked to Stephen’s tent. The.45-caliber revolver from Stephen’s briefcase fit snugly in his coat pocket. As he returned to the fire, he heard Allen saying, “This one’s a bookworm. Too smart for your quarry.”
“Maybe Garth’s old employees were too smart for his quarry,” Patrick said.
“Maybe you’re shit-face drunk,” Allen said.
“Maybe I don’t want somebody solving your problems.”
“You mean you don’t want somebody solving yours?” Allen replied, reaching for the sizzling steak with a bare hand.
Allen had always given Patrick the creeps. His drawl, his leer, his dirty old Cavalier. The way his grimy fingers clutched meat while he gnawed at it like a squirrel. “Try this,” he said, offering the steak as if there was no conflict, and Patrick thought, Be with the guys who will have you. Go where you’re wanted. He played the idea out a few moves ahead. A quarry would be a filthy place to work. He didn’t like these guys. The only good work he’d done was on cars, cleaning them inch by inch with his friends.
“No, solving yours,” he said, and shot Garth in the temple.
Garth gasped, fell forward. Almost immediately Patrick could smell the flames singeing him. You couldn’t make people want you. Aside from that, though, you could do as you pleased. His uncle had taught him that much. What he pleased to do now was give the others a mess to clean up. Earlier he’d intended to go into the woods first. But watching Allen and Gus drag Garth away, he pictured them dragging him too. Explaining to the cops why he was covered in their fingerprints. Three black cops hearing Allen stumble through a tale of their bloody teamwork: that was too tempting an endgame to pass up. He picked up Allen’s steak from where he’d dropped it, had a bite, licked his lips clean, aimed, fired, lost his balance, shut his eyes, and never hit the ground.
5.
For three days, while the other campers disregarded the warning he delivered from the cop downtown, Jeremy left voicemails for Georgia Interstate Compact saying he’d planned to wait and move in the new year but now the timeline was out of his hands. “The police are worried about my safety,” he said, “so I’m hoping you guys are worried too.” He expected no answer, nor was he surprised that no one at camp believed him. It had to do with the shape of his face, the strange sheen of his eyes: people just didn’t trust him. Teachers, cops, the fathers of girls. Once he’d overheard an English tourist at work tell her friend he looked wanton. In Alaska, he thought, his ushanka and balaclava would help hide that.
On the third day he came home from the World of Coke to find the guys discussing where to go. Cumberland Island and live off shrimping. The Oconee Forest and hunt for deer. You did right by us, he waited for someone to tell him. Sorry for not trusting you.
“Still going to Alaska, wild boy?”
“Waiting to hear back.”
“Let’s all go,” Bruce said. “Gus can drive us in his bus.”
“I got laid by a pretty fine Alaska girl,” said Allen.