The world is full of people like us. Floating out here like these half-sunk islands covered in shit. We’re drifting through your city, your town, cutting across your backyard, walking up your fire escape, sliding a slim jim between your car window and door, slipping into your leather bucket seats that smell like money—your money. We’re wiring your ignition, busting your satellite radio, rifling through your shit, tossing out manuals and hand sanitizer, tissues, registration, and pens, until we find that emergency envelope full of freshly printed twenties. We coast along your streets, caught up in the current of something swirling inside us, riding swells of blacktop anger with the wind at our backs. We don’t really want your car, your daughter, your jewelry, your things. Just like with you, that shit helps us forget why it can hurt to be alive, but only for a little while.
We snuck away, DeShawn and me, leaving Tiny to be lectured by Cunningham about “crossing the treacherous waters,” “a new day dawning,” and “making the journey called Second Chance.” Somewhere behind us on that dark path, we could hear Tiny say he wanted to be different, but he just didn’t know how. He just didn’t know how, he repeated again and again, the sound of his voice echoing in the wind.
Later that night, we could hear Tiny crying himself to sleep, rocking back and forth. It was like we were all at sea, rolling through the waves of regret crashing around inside him.
“Feckin’ A,” Freddie said. “Feckin’ knock it off, you pansy.” Freddie had calmed down since earlier. At dinner that night he was so cool it was spooky, like Stubby and Da Cunha had worked him up something good.
“Shut up,” DeShawn said. “I’m sick of you and your freak-ass shit.”
“Yo, homes,” Freddie said. “I didn’t mean nuthin’ by it. You and me, we’re cool, a’ight?”
“No,” DeShawn answered. “We ain’t never been cool.”
We had all been pretending to be asleep, just waiting for Tiny to knock it off, which he did, eventually. Then the house slowly quieted down as the other guys stopped tossing and turning and dozed off for real. But after all of Tiny’s tears, that silence kept me awake.
I stared out the window and watched the moon rise higher like a giant eyeball staring out over the hill where the leper cemetery was. In the silence, I could tell someone else was awake and knew I was up too. And he—or it—was just waiting for that moment when I would fall asleep. I lay as still as possible and listened to the waves against our island rock. It was like we were part of some cycle of nature, meant to crash up against things forever.
Eventually, I fell asleep.
In the morning, I could hear Cunningham racing down the stairs. Tiny screaming. Voices coming in from outside. DeShawn and me flew out of bed at the same time, put on our jeans and boots, and ran downstairs. Ryan, Kevin, and Bobby came stumbling out of bed behind us.
Opening the door, I heard it. Like so many little creatures, Pukwudgies maybe, sobbing or laughing—I couldn’t tell which—in the wind. I looked around for them, but I didn’t see anything. DeShawn pointed to the chicken coop.
Cunningham, Da Cunha, and Stubby just stood and stared. Tiny was on his knees, inside the coop. No one was saying a word.
The chickens, which were usually running all over the place by the morning, crowing and cock-a-doodle-dooing, were trying to stand on their little chicken legs, but as soon as they got halfway up, they fell over. Someone or something had come in the middle of the night and broken all their legs, just snapped them like twigs. The chickens kept trying to stand, flopping over, and crying out. Lying there, dying, but wanting to live.
At least twenty pairs of beady little eyes looked up at us for help, looked at us for nothing cause there was nothing we could do but put them out of their misery.
Tiny was running his fingers through the dirt, tears streaming down his face. Even Bobby looked like someone had just punched him in the gut.
Freddie was the last person to come out of the house. He strolled up to the chicken yard and didn’t even try not to laugh.
Tiny picked up one of the littlest birds. I couldn’t tell if it was the same chicken Bobby had hypnotized. They had all grown some in the past couple of weeks and most of them had looked the same to me anyway. But Tiny held that chicken close to him and rocked it like it was a baby he was going to do everything in his power to try and save.
Sometimes I wish I could have cried like Tiny did. After Chad and me hit that car, I didn’t even realize there were tears streaming down my cheeks. There were sirens and lights. Cops and paramedics sawing through car doors with their Jaws of Life.
The last thing I remember was Chad sitting there, patting the dashboard of the Mustang and saying, “Guess we’re gonna have to take this one out and shoot it.”
The next day we all watched the fog swallow Second Chance whole. Freddie was onboard, being shipped out to “Plymouth Rock”—Plymouth County Correctional Facility, as it reads on the books, where all the child murderers go.
Tiny was different after that. I guess DeShawn and me changed too. We helped Tiny dig a grave and bury all the chickens. Cunningham showed us some books in the school library where we read up on Indian funerary mounds. We gathered up some rocks and soil and covered the birds’ grave the Wampanoag way.
Tiny, DeShawn, and me never talked about the chickens or how we became friends, if that’s what we really were. We didn’t talk about much. But we did our chores or whatever, and never said anything, which was like saying a lot because it wasn’t like being with someone you can talk to but don’t. It was pretty much all right.
PART IV
Homeland Security
AFTER THIRTY
by Don Winslow
1945
Charlie Decker is a hard case.
Ask anybody—his shipmates, his captain, his family back in Davenport if they’ll talk to you about him. They’ll all tell you the same thing.
Charlie’s no good.
He’s trouble and always has been. Drunkenness, absent-without-official-leave, brawling, gambling, insubordination—three stretches in the navy and Charlie’s been in and out of the brig and up and down the ranks. The navy probably would have thrown him out if there wasn’t a war on and they didn’t need a man who knew how to make an engine run. Give Charlie Decker thirty minutes and a wrench and he can fix anything, but you also know that he can wreck anything too, and just as easily.
People tried to tell Millie this, but she wouldn’t listen. Her roommates saw it clear as day. One good look in Charlie’s eyes, that cocky smirk of his, and you knew. They told her but it went through one ear and out the other. Now she opens her eyes, looks at the clock on her bed table, and slaps him on the butt. “Charlie, get up.”
“What?” he mumbles, happy in his sweet, warm sleep. They sat up and drank when she came home from her night shift at Consolidated, and then they did it and then drank some more, so he don’t want to get up.
She shakes his shoulders. “It’s thirty days.”
Millie knows the navy—up to thirty days it’s AWOL, after thirty it’s desertion. He’s been shacked up with her for almost a month now. Almost a month in the little bungalow that was already crowded with four other girls, and he said he was going back before the thirty days were up.