“I’m sorry! Is that what you want?… You let me fall away!”
Jake sat up in bed. There was a momentary quiet; he could hear the gurgle of the fountain. He felt a little dizzy, which was probably due to the fact that he’d drunk three beers at the barbecue, grabbed from the eskie by his cousin Xavier, who had been nicer and cooler than the bratty kid Jake remembered. Somewhere in the middle of the third beer, sitting at the foot of an enormous Norfolk pine, overlooking the Swan River and the Perth city skyline across the river, Jake had confided to Xavier that he hated Australia.
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he worried that Xavier would be offended. Xavier had lived in Western Australia his whole life. All of the Price family had.
“It’s not the place, exactly,” Jake said. “It’s my parents. They fight all the time. And I miss home.”
Xavier bobbed his head. “Man,” he said. “You should just head back to the States, then. You should just bolt.”
He should just bolt. Jake had seventy Australian dollars, three hundred American dollars, and a Visa card that his father had given him in case of emergencies, but if he used the Visa card, it would take Jordan and Ava only about five minutes to figure out where he was. They would find him and come get him. He was still a minor.
Or at least those had been Jake’s thoughts earlier, at Heathcote Park. Now, having just heard his parents fighting again, he climbed out of bed and got dressed. He wasn’t going to stay here. He packed a duffel bag with clothes, his running shoes, the Hemingway novel, his camera, and one picture of Penny. He stuffed all of his money and his credit card into his jeans pocket. He jammed his earphones into his ears and walked out the door of the shed and through the garden, quietly, quietly, until he was out the side gate and on the street. It was 11:00 p.m.
He had nowhere to go. Most of Fremantle was closed up by this time of night, except the pubs, which he was too young to enter. He walked toward South Beach because that was the direction his feet seemed to want to take him. A crescent moon hung out over the Indian Ocean. Jake was chilly; he hunted through his duffel bag for his navy blue Nantucket Whalers sweatshirt.
His parents had been fighting about Ernie. If Ernie were alive, he would be four and a half years old now, a little kid who could ride a tricycle and ask Jake for piggyback rides.
Jake stuck to sidewalks and then moved over to the bike path that meandered through the park leading to the beach. He wondered if he should be worried about getting mugged. He wished he had another beer. He looked at his iPod, and despite the fact that he knew it would make him feel even worse than he already felt, he played the track of Penny singing “Lean on Me.” Lean on me, when you’re not strong: her voice sounded real, close, nearly three-dimensional. It was like a silken rope that he could climb up, maybe, until he reached her. Lean on me. When you’re not strong. He was not strong. He wanted to lean on her. More than anything, he wanted to hold her, tell her he was sorry, he would take the blame, it was his fault for what he’d done with Winnie, the kissing, the touching, the way his body had betrayed him. What he wanted to make clear was that he hadn’t stopped loving Penny, not at all, not for a second. He had run from the Pottses’ basement. He hadn’t followed his lustful seventeen-year-old desires; he had understood, even while he was captive to them, that they were wrong. He should have told Penny about it himself and not let Demeter, or possibly even Winnie, tell her in the dunes.
He should never have given her the keys to the car. He should have yanked the emergency brake. He had been worried about his transmission, for crying out loud. He’d never in a million years thought Penny would keep going, faster and faster.
He had thought she would hit the brake. Of course she would hit the brake.
At South Beach there was a group of people gathered around a bonfire. Jake stared at them from a distance. Another beach, another bonfire, the other side of the world. He didn’t recognize anyone there, of course; they were all strangers. Ferals. They were kids his age or a little older with dreadlocks and tattoos, they were drinking, and Jake smelled weed. This was most certainly not the place for him. But he was freezing now despite his sweatshirt, and the idea of being next to the fire was too tempting to resist. He would go check it out.
“Hey, man.”
One of the ferals stood. He was bare-chested, wore brown swim trunks, and had a bush of bronze-colored hair. He was so tan that the overall effect was of a continuous column of color-hair, skin, trunks. He stuck out his hand. “I’m Hawk,” he said. “Welcome.”
“Hey,” Jake said. This was a cult or something for sure. Regular people weren’t this friendly.
“What’s your name?” Hawk asked.
“Um, Jake,” he said.
“You American?” This was asked by a girl sitting a few people away from where Hawk had been sitting. She had long tangled hair and wore a white bikini top and a white eyelet skirt. How were these people not freezing their asses off?
“Yeah,” Jake said.
“Come sit,” Hawk said. “Join us. Warm yourself by the fire. You want a beer?”
Now would be a good time to excuse myself, Jake thought. Someone else, across the fire, asked, “You want a toke?” And everyone else laughed.
There was some tribal drumming music in the background, which gave the whole scene the feeling that someone was going to be sacrificed here tonight. Probably him, the newbie whose sweatshirt announced him as a punky American high school student.
“No, man, I gotta go,” Jake said.
“Go where, man?” Hawk asked.
“Sit,” the white-bikini girl said. “Have a beer. I’ll get it.” She ran through the sand to a big blue eskie. She pulled out an ice-cold Emu and handed it to him.
“Thanks,” Jake said. He had been craving a beer. He would stay for just this one. “Who do I pay?”
“ ‘Pay’?” Hawk said. “We all chipped in, man, you want to throw some in the pot, go right ahead.”
Jake pulled ten Australian dollars out of his jeans pocket and handed it to Hawk.
“Thank you!” Hawk said, holding the money out for everyone to see. “Have a seat, my friend. Have a seat.”
One hour, three beers, and two hits of marijuana later, Jake had handed over his remaining sixty Australian dollars, as well as two hundred of his three hundred American dollars, to Hawk, securing himself a place in Hawk’s van first thing in the morning. They were traveling across the Nullarbor Plain toward Adelaide, where some people would get out and some different people would get in, and then they were continuing east to Sydney. From Sydney Jake would use the credit card to book a flight back to the States, or he would jump on a container ship and cross the Pacific that way. His parents could chase after him, let them do that, or maybe they would realize how serious he was about returning home and they would do the wise thing and let him live with Zoe and Hobby for his senior year. Or he could live with the Castles. Once he reached Nantucket, it would be harder for his parents to make him return to Australia. Possession was nine tenths of ownership, after all, or something like that.
Two hours later Jake had had six or seven beers and another toke of marijuana, which had been a lot stronger than the first two hits. In one of his remaining cogent moments he wondered if it actually was just marijuana, or if it was something else. He remembered stumbling toward the ocean to take a piss, and when he returned to the circle, the fire was dwindling, and so was the group of people around it. The girl in the white bikini top was still there; he asked her what her name was, and she said… but he didn’t hear what she said, he was too busy noticing that her feet had a sort of black rind on the bottom of them, as thick as the sole on a pair of shoes. The next thing he knew he was falling, he tried to grab for the silken rope of Penny’s voice, but he missed it, and his head hit the sand with a thud that sounded like it hurt, but he barely felt it.