“Do we have to?”
“Just a drink,” he said. “I’ll have you back in—” He rolled his wrist over. That was stupid. There was a clock the size of a goddamned brick glowing green in the dashboard right in front of his face. “Fifteen minutes. You got somewhere you need to be?”
No, coach. Whatever you say. I’m a piece of shit.
I shook my head and looked at my hands, pressing the legs of my shorts down against my thighs.
“Great! Buckle up, son. I’m buying!”
While we drove through Glenbrook, the cop went on and on and I hardly listened to him at all. He talked about my school—the football team, naturally—and asked if I did any sports. When I told him I ran cross-country, I could tell by the way he inhaled slowly that he was waiting for me to say something else, a different sport—something where boys hurt each other—because guys like Avery Scott don’t consider running to be a “sport.”
I didn’t look out the window when we drove down Main Street past Steckel Park, the lightpost where Conner and I tagged our initials, Java and Jazz.
I knew he was trying to observe what I paid attention to, so I kept my face forward, watching the swirls in the wood paneling on the dashboard. I wondered if it was wood or plastic.
I just thought about the swirls. Strings. Stella’s Russian nesting dolls. And I reasoned that there were all these strings, layers, stacking and stacking in every unimaginable direction; that they were all going through me—the center of the universe—and somehow I kept jumping from thread to thread.
I was a needle on a scratched black record.
The glasses, the broken lens, just skipping from channel to fucked-up channel.
And, what Conner wrote on a wall in that other Glenbrook:
THIS WAS THE HARDEST TO GET OUT OF.
And this is where I am, sitting in a Cadillac with a cop who wants to ask me things about a man I killed.
This is home.
THIS WAS THE HARDEST TO GET OUT OF.
“Are you okay, John?”
“Huh?”
“I asked if the DQ was okay with you.”
“Oh. DQ. Yeah. But nobody calls me John.”
Scott cranked the steering wheel and pulled inside the curbs to the Dairy Queen’s drive-thru. A phone began ringing. I instinctively reached for my pocket, felt the glasses there.
It was the cop’s phone.
He flipped it out from his belt and looked at it.
That was the first time I’d noticed he was wearing a gun.
Why didn’t I notice that before?
He looked at his phone screen.
Fake smile. “Don’t do this when you drive.”
He sounded like Dr. Nobody telling me to use condoms.
He pressed the END button. “Fuck ’em.”
Yeah, you’re cool, Detective Scott.
“So, what do they call you, then?”
“Jack. My name is Jack.”
* * *
We’d already been gone past Scott’s promised fifteen minutes. And I never looked at his face one time. I kept the straw in my mouth and sucked. I couldn’t even taste the milk shake I ordered. It may just as well have been a cup of my own sweat.
I still hadn’t cooled off.
Scott didn’t buy anything to drink for himself. He just kept driving around. I thought he was trying to get me to relax, or he was going to try to spring something on me and shock me into saying whatever it was he was looking for.
I hated cops.
They always knew the answers to everything they were going to ask, anyway.
So out of the corner of my eye, I could see him visibly flinch like he’d been splashed with cold water when I said, “Okay, this is a nice car and everything, but I didn’t think I was going to be driven around Glenbrook all fucking day.”
And I just kept looking at the swirls.
Scott cleared his throat. He probably had to stop himself from calling me a piece of shit.
“Would you feel more comfortable if there was a female detective present, or maybe a doctor?”
I started to crumple the wax cup in my grip, had to stop myself.
Fuck you, Avery Scott.
“Comfortable? Why does how I feel matter?”
“Okay,” he said. “Okay, Jack. So, do you want to start?”
“I don’t know what the fuck you want from me.”
“Tell me about that guy. Freddie Horvath. When was the first time you saw him?”
I felt myself sinking, getting smaller, needing air.
“You mean did I ever see him on the news? I never watch the news.”
The car turned.
I looked up as we passed beneath the archway sign reading DOS VIENTOS ESTATES. The new development where Freddie used to live. I started to panic.
The detective said, “No. That wasn’t what I meant.”
“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I thought you said I wasn’t in trouble.”
I felt myself going whiter than the wax inside my empty cup.
“I promise you’re not in any trouble, Jack.”
“How can you promise shit like that?”
Scott didn’t say anything.
And then we were there.
Freddie’s house.
I’d never seen the outside of Freddie Horvath’s house in the daylight, but this was it. Avery Scott pulled his Cadillac right between the brick pillars at the end of the driveway and I looked up at the window where I’d climbed out onto the tile roof before I jumped.
And now it felt like only fifteen minutes had passed since I did that, barefoot, wearing those loose drawstring pants, bleeding, dizzy from the shit Freddie drugged me with.
It was like a dream.
Before the car even stopped rolling, I was out the door, on my hands and knees, puking my guts out, warm, sour vanilla shake, steaming all over the driveway.
I wished I’d thrown up inside that asshole’s Caddy.
I spit between my hands. “Take me home.”
The cop hurried around the front of his car. I could tell he was looking to see if I’d gotten any puke on his shiny wheels.
“Take me the fuck home right now.”
I closed my eyes and put my hands in my hair. It was so wet; it felt like I’d just stepped out from the shower. I thought about taking the glasses out of my pocket, flipping that third lens down, so Jack could just disappear, skip over to another thread somewhere, try to find a new and improved John Wynn Whitmore IV.
I want to go home.
Avery Scott sucked in his gut and leaned against the fender of his Cadillac. He wore slip-on shoes that had tassels, and no socks. I kept my head down and spit again. I waited for him to say something. When I looked at him, he was holding a brown can of Copenhagen tobacco, pinching some of it down inside his lower lip.
Football coach.
He spit.
And I knew exactly what he was thinking; what he was waiting for me to say.
“I should have told you I get car sick when it’s really hot.”
“Is that it?”
I looked at him.
“Yes.”
He put his tobacco in his pocket and checked the display on his cell phone.
I wished I could force myself to stand up. The sun was already burning on my neck and it hurt my knees to be down there on the concrete of Freddie’s driveway. The smell of my puke was nauseating. But I wanted to stay small, keep myself away from anything out there, so I leaned over my hands and watched the foamy white vomit find its way downhill.
Scott spit again.
“You going to be okay?”
I shook my head.
“I got bottled water in the back.”
I thought about the last time I’d been given a bottle of water in this driveway.
“Come on.” Then I felt Scott’s hand cup under my sweating armpit and he pulled me up to my feet. “You don’t look good.”
“I told you.”
I wiped my hand across my mouth, my face. Little bits of sand gritted into my skin. I could see a yellow paper that had been posted, taped, on the front door of Freddie’s house. Some kind of notice. A warning. And Scott watched my eyes when I looked at the door.
“You ever been here before?”
“No.”
The cop spit again.
“Strange,” he said.