John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

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.

“Just don’t tell Stephen. He’ll light our bus up with a Molotov cocktail.”

For another whole day Jeremy stared at his phone, until it occurred to him that neither response — approved, denied — would answer the question he had been hanging on.

Forty-five minutes later he was on the eastern perimeter, parking at a nearly abandoned strip mall where he found Brick, Butter, and Younce nestled between a gospel church and a military recruiting center.

“Hello?” he called, standing before an unmanned desk in a low room lined with faux-wood paneling. The place looked like a den of shysters.

“Jeremy?” asked Stephen when he emerged, sounding unsure of his name.

“I’m wondering what happens if I violate a restraining order.”

“Depends on who took the order out.”

“Father of the fifteen-year-old I slept with,” Jeremy said. He knew how Stephen felt about the men at camp, and he wasn’t going to downplay his crime.

“If you write her a letter, I could deliver it.”

Stephen was staring hungrily at Jeremy, who’d seen that look before — from across the circle, from across the fire. He could smell alcohol. For only one reason did anyone help anyone, and it had as little to do with Jeremy himself as the AA groups’ hatred did.

“Just tell me how long I’d go to jail.”

“You’re on parole, right?”

He nodded, suddenly ashamed of bringing such an obvious question in. “I only asked because I was passing by on the way to a meeting.”

“You pass five feet from my tent every day,” said Stephen. He probably thought Jeremy was lying, which for once Jeremy was doing.

“That reminds me, the cops came to confirm what I told everybody Monday.”

“Yeah, and you attacked a kid in Savannah wearing Mickey Mouse ears.”

“Okay, well,” Jeremy said.

“Who will you be this afternoon?”

“Not you; you’re different,” he said, another lie. He had read about Stephen at work. It was a good story. He could act it out.

Stephen was nodding. “There are tiers,” he said. “There’s us, and there’s everyone else.”

“I feel the same,” Jeremy said, standing to go.

“I’ll find out by tomorrow about your restraining order.”

Jeremy thanked him and left. He navigated the access road with care, breathing as deliberately as he could. Not until he’d merged onto the highway did he floor it, stereo on fifty, screaming along to a Björk song’s dissonant chords. She could distort his world into icy echoes that sealed him inside a blue crevasse, but not today. He aimed his hood ornament at the skyline and soon he was in Little Five Points, parking at the Fishers’, where Melissa answered in a leather jacket, holding a Siamese cat.

Her auburn hair was so stylishly coiffed that Jeremy gasped. “You’re ringing my bell,” she said, as the cat scrambled to escape.

“I’ve loved you all this time. You’re all I’ve got. Don’t shout.” How often had he rehearsed the lines that fell out of him like lead pellets? Speaking them, he got the sensation that he knew the wrong meaning of love, that that was the wrong thing he’d learned back in the blizzard.

“Your camp’s in the news,” Melissa replied.

She might as well have slapped his face. He wanted to slap her back. His mind wasn’t in his head; it was in his arm, slapping her. Just in time, he grabbed that arm with his other hand, and nodded toward a diploma on the mantel.

“Congratulations,” he said.

“Yeah, I’d have graduated no matter what.”

No matter how many times you hurt me , Jeremy thought, but he said, “I’ve come to apologize,” telling his third lie of the day, the one most likely to draw Melissa out of her father’s house.

He gestured up the block, where too many people were gardening for her to claim any threat. “Two minutes,” she said, slipping on her shoes.