John McManus - Fox Tooth Heart

“Where’s she from?” he asked one day in the yard, gesturing to the mountain. His cellmate gestured the same.

“But what state was she born in?”

“Is that the first thing you ask all your girls?”

“Sure,” Allen said, heart racing. How you got to be the best, you said something and then you did it. Every day the sun reflected off the stone lady’s window and he waved. In March 1993, when they set him free, he walked the main road to a gravel drive up the mountain. When he reached the summit clearing, the sun was sinking over the plateau. Ready to knock, he stopped in his tracks: the cottage wasn’t a house, only some sheets of propped-up plywood painted to look like stones.

He kicked them onto a pile of gaffing lights soaking in mud. It was almost dark. Counting blow jobs, he’d been with girls from only two states. He was done with that number, and rode an old bicycle downhill into Wartburg to take his first girl.

“You should feel glad to have a man like me,” he told Cheryl, who’d lived her whole life in Tennessee.

She drove him to Harriman, where every woman he talked to came from there. He hitched down 27 past Chattanooga and across the line, where he met Infinity. If Infinity had lived in Tennessee, he might have returned to a prison whose inmates knew him for a fool, but the inmates at Hays State didn’t know a thing. That was where he met Travis. “I’ve been with girls from thirty-six states,” he told Travis, who replied, “My goal’s to get with every pretty girl in one state.”

Upon parole they shared an apartment. He got a job selling cars. In 2006 a school opened across the road, and then the law passed in 2007. They made their way to an outdoor outfitters to shoplift some tents. Allen’s, a Marmot, may have saved his life. If he’d bought one instead of stealing it, he wouldn’t have been able to afford flame-retardant cloth — not that he’d been looking for that feature; he only chose the warmest one. He knew winters would be no joke. The night of the fire, the temperature dropped to eleven while they argued about what to do with the bodies of Garth and Patrick. Travis said it would need to be twenty below to keep them from putrefying. Gus countered that if eviction was coming tomorrow anyway, so what?

For once Allen didn’t take Travis’s side. Who cared? He’d stopped seeing the point of Georgia. As long as he lived in camp, his number would remain two. Georgia and Tennessee. Down at the car lot lately the guys were calling bullshit. He imagined the campers did too, at least in their heads. Looked up team rosters from the years he gave. “Screw it, they can smell or not smell,” he told Bruce, and went in his tent to think back on the stone lady. If she’d been up there where she was supposed to be, he might never have touched anyone else. Was she on Eulalia’s mountain, laughing at him out four windows through a silver spyglass? Fuck that bitch, he was thinking as he came. Then he unstaked his tent. Waiting for everyone else to fall asleep, he passed out too. He awoke to flames, closer than the campfire.

Two of the tents were burning.

Without a moment’s thought, Allen rolled down the bluff, tent and all, past strange voices. He landed inches from the lakeshore. He untangled himself and saw pickup trucks and a police cruiser parked near his car. They were empty; no one saw him drive away for good. Blasting the heat, hugging curves like a stock-car driver, he thought of a new story, I saved six men from a fire , but as it turned out, besides Jeremy — who’d vanished — he was the only one who hadn’t survived to hear the news.

“The men at those camps got a preview of hellfire,” said a state representative on the TV above Allen’s barstool at Waffle House.

There had been injuries, and some loud guys to the left were chuckling about it. “I had a cousin burn to death in Iraq,” the waitress told them. “Not what I’d call funny.”

“You feel sorry for them?” one of the guys asked.

“One used to come in for omelets. This lawyer. He was sweet to me.”

“Probably hoped you had a daughter.”

She shrugged as if maybe the man was right, which of course he was. Stop being so naïve, Allen wanted to tell her. Only fools trust sweet. You’ll get yourself hurt.

He chewed his toast, and the news moved on to the continuing saga of Michael Vick, en route to US District Court for sentencing.

“These Falcons, their time is up,” said one of the men.

“Their time was up years ago,” the waitress said. She drifted over and refilled Allen’s coffee. “You look wistful, mister. Penny for your thoughts.”

“Just eager to get back on the road.”

“Where you headed, all by yourself?”

“All over the place,” he said, wondering if they were flirting like normal people. He wasn’t sure; still, even in the wake of the fire, the chance felt good. “I’ve only ever been to two of the fifty states. Figure it’s time to see the country.”

7.

Alone in his office after Jeremy left, Stephen pulled up records of Jeremy’s 2001 statutory rape case on LexisNexis for the second time. He read more closely than before. Mid-trial the kid had fired his expensive lawyer and pled nolo contendere. Stephen didn’t get it. Why didn’t Jeremy want people to like him? If a protective order was still in place from back then, it was permanent. To break it would commit a new crime, which Jeremy surely knew, which meant he was lying to Stephen, scoping out details for Act Two in the strange performance piece playing out in the addiction recovery rooms of Greater Atlanta.

Cancel the show by phoning ahead to the Fisher household, thought Stephen — but he was no rat. He only wanted to teach the boy a lesson.

He screen-captured eighteen-year-old Jeremy’s mug shot and saved it with his other pictures, then drove downtown to defend a woman accused of stealing a purse. She didn’t show. The court ruled against her, in favor of a department store that had spent more money prosecuting her than the purse had cost. Who cared? Not Stephen. Nothing was at stake; she was just another broke woman. He went to Vickery’s for martinis, one two three four. In the parking lot afterward, the flags of America and Georgia rippled in the wind. On a truck bumper a third flag announced Power of Pride , although pride was a sin. Cover it with one that said Sin of Pride , he thought, driving away.

On the radio some woman was interviewing a theologian. “Do you consider Muhammad to have been a pacifist like Jesus?”

“I do not consider Jesus to have been a pacifist,” the theologian answered. “Jesus drove out the money changers with a cord whip and said, What I offer is the sword .”

Before getting on the highway Stephen bought a six-pack of Heineken. He drank one on I-75 and then another on Glade Road before he arrived home. Home . He needed a new word for the place. Then again, Jeremy had said the evictions were real.

He ought to be happy about it, but as he climbed the hill, he didn’t want to believe it.

Ignoring the eternal campfire, where the guys sat talking to a stranger, Stephen fetched a towel from the line. He undressed under the oak and righted the upended jug with the holes in it. After tying the dangling rope to the bottleneck he pulled it until the jug hung above him. He looped it around a branch. Water was spilling out, muddying the dirt. He opened another beer. It was about fifty out, maybe the last day before spring when a shower would feel bearable. Humming a tune, he scrubbed himself. A bird chirped. As it flew away, Stephen turned to see Bruce running off with his clothes and his towel.

Dripping dry, he devised a hateful lie to tell the D.A. about Bruce. About everyone. Then he stalked naked to his tent and found the clothes baskets gone too.