John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

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.”

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.”