John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

The first half-minute he squandered on silence while waiting to escape any possible earshot or sight line. When they got to the main shopping street, he said, “I’m moving.”

“Me too, for a master’s in social work.”

To help abuse victims like yourself, he thought, hating Melissa again for being so smug. For not asking where he was moving. For pretending she’d never loved him. Spending the summer in Seville, after the trouble she’d caused by applying there. Finding a Spanish boyfriend, learning a language from him and God knew what else. He swallowed the anger, took her by the shoulders and said, “I’ll never stop loving you.”

They had stopped beside a newsstand. “Here’s what I was talking about,” Melissa said, so flippantly that she could have punctuated herself by blowing a bubble.

A headline read, “Homeless Sex Offenders Pitch Camp in Wild,” above a picture of Allen’s tent.

“Dad’s still kind of obsessed. He followed you there, then he went to the cops and they’re closing it.”

“I see,” Jeremy said. He walked on. After seven years, he was still a puppet on her dad’s string, and so was she and that was that.

The only way to force her into an emotion was to have a panic attack.

It wasn’t a decision so much as it was simply destined to happen. Kneeling on the sidewalk amid dog-walking couples, he held steady against the air. “Breathe,” Melissa said, jostling him. He shivered at that touch, the first in seven years, but took in no air. She shook harder. “Inhale!” she cried, full of concern.

His plan was working. All he had to do now was stop loving her.

It ought to be easy, with this new face to match to his old memories. He’d always fancied underdogs. His mom and dad; the Braves until they bought their way to first; Melissa, stammering through her testimony that day at Alateen when they had met. Crying about her dad the goner and all he’d squandered. She wasn’t an underdog anymore. He took the face begging him to breathe and put it to the time at Burger King when he’d had only three dollars, the evening after they’d buried his own father. What if we share a Whopper and a Coke, he’d asked, but she’d wanted her own Whopper and her own Coke. “You’re the dumbass who forgot the money,” she had said.

As he imagined her chewing that hamburger, the light ebbed. Selfishness was innate, it didn’t come from being young.

He awoke beside a juniper bush with Melissa squeezing his hand, crying. He stood up. “Go home,” he said. “You’re too old for me now.”

“Not falling for that,” she said, in pursuit not toward her house but Patrick’s car, which he’d already pointed toward I-75, which stretched north to Canada, where he could bear west across the boreal forest for five thousand miles.

If he reached that forest, he thought, walking faster, his luck had turned.

“I know how you try to make people hate you.”

“It’s been two minutes.”

“Where will you go when they close it?”

“Told you. Alaska.”

“You only said moving . Ask where I’m moving.”

“I’m not attracted to women your age.”

“Do you even have a job lined up?”

“No, ask your dad to lend me some money,” he said — a funny joke, given that Mr. Fisher really had spent tens of thousands of dollars to try and send Jeremy away forever. The best things were free, he thought, smiling in farewell. Her lip was quivering when he turned away, so he never knew if she acknowledged the irony before turning toward home.

6.

The name on Allen’s birth certificate was Al Jack Downey, Jr., after his dad, who’d been named for two minor-league all-stars. At school Allen liked bragging on Jack’s 100-mph shine ball and Al’s 600-foot home runs. He said he’d met Michael Jackson and his mom was Robert E. Lee’s great-grandniece. It got to where other kids called bullshit even on the truth. “If those dudes and your grandpa was so good, why didn’t they reach the majors?” By then Allen’s grandpa was dead along with his other grandparents. His mom was in New Mexico; his dad was locked up. No one around could confirm or deny anything, and Allen resolved to go look for Jack and Al himself someday.

The year he learned to drive, he found Al, the shortstop, in a pine shack in the Okefenokee Wilderness. Huge, blind, and one-footed, Al believed it was 1989. “Living in the future, old man,” said Allen, to which Al croaked, “You’re living in the past.”

“Why didn’t you reach the majors?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Were you blackballed?”

“Are you the police?”

“I’m Davy Downey’s grandson.”

“I couldn’t hit for shit, but I was better than him.”

“Baseball was only his hobby,” Allen said, compelled to lie even to bedraggled strangers. “He gave it up once he won the welterweight championship.”

Six hours north, on a high heath bald near Rabun Gap, Allen knocked on the door of a square pine shack like Al’s, as if they’d helicoptered Al’s up while he was en route. Jack was supposed to be eighty, but the kid who answered was no more than twenty, rail-thin, bottle in hand, joint in his mouth.

“Who are you?” he said, and Allen said he’d come to shake hands with the pitcher he was named for.

“That’s me,” the skinny kid said, and Allen thought, You’re living in the past. Then the kid said, “Joke, he’s dead.”

“Since when?”

“Other day.”

“Is that gin?”

“Have a taste.”

The boy invited Allen into a room whose four windows faced down four slopes. Woods, woods, woods, town, and in the town window sat a girl whose green eyes Allen stared into until she was offering to give him head.

Her name was Eulalia, the boy’s cousin and Jack’s grandchild. Let them call bullshit on this, Allen thought, leaning against the pine wall. “I’m his grandkid too, in a way,” he said, stoned by then. They tripped together, hit after hit, day after day, until Jack’s acid was almost gone. He said he bought it by the sheet in Nashville once a month and sold hits for five bucks. “I could sell a sheet a week,” Allen said, knowing he couldn’t. Jack phoned in an order quintuple the usual size. In a grand finale they ate five hits apiece and hit the road. Allen drove. Whole cyclones of rain poured down, and mastodons roamed the highway, but what wrecked them and killed Jack was a broken axle.

“I’m a world-class driver,” he stood there telling Eulalia in the cold rain; “NASCAR’s recruiting me.”

For a little while, she quit blaming him. Holding hands on the shore of Lake Ocoee, they vowed never to part, but then she was asking if he would ever have an abortion. It was apropos of nothing. “I’m a dude,” he said, as rain flowed down the bank, or was she crying? She seemed to be sliding away with the water.

“Our mom wanted to get rid of us.”

“You were twins?” he asked, astonished.

“No, we were four years apart.”

As the sirens approached, Allen saw into her question and understood what she meant: because of his mind, combined with his driving, his search for some failed namesake, his mom should have gotten rid of him.

“I don’t even know your last name,” he called to Eulalia as they dragged him away, hoping his tears would make it to the river.

Every day of five years, Allen would look up to where Brushy Mountain loomed over the prison of that name. On it stood a stone cottage where a ravishing gypsy observed the prison yard through a silver spyglass. “She likes guys like you,” said Allen’s cellmate, who’d been with her on furlough.

“I’ve dropped in on the stone lady, too,” Allen replied. No matter what you claimed in prison, it was real. He said he’d had twenty-eight girls from twenty-five states. His fellows were so pleased in that brag that he decided to render it true.