that felt too big. Picturing some other guy touching Celeste’s tattoos in ways Jacob never would again. His hand stroking the roses twined around her calf. Lips caressing the blackbirds fluttering above the swell of her breasts. The Celtic knot on her upper arm expanding, contracting, expanding, shiny in her sweat, contracting again as she clings to his shoulders.
A lanky young man with limp black hair, who’s wearing eye makeup and tight jeans that proudly display his androgyny, leans on the info desk and the employee puts her hand gently on his forearm. She beams with an unguarded warmth that no one has directed at Jacob since he was their age. In return, Lanky affects a bored expression, acting like everything else in the room is more interesting than she is.
Jacob catches the cops’ eyes. Nods his head to the info desk.
Shoulders knits his brow with confusion.
Jacob nods emphatically, mimes “jacket” in his best attempt at charades, then indicates the inside pocket. Mustache eyes the studded jacket folded over Lanky’s arm, and starts toward him. Shoulders hesitates another beat, clearly thinking this doesn’t add up, but knowing better than to abandon his partner.
Jacob would love to stick around and see that asshole’s expression as these giants hook his arms in theirs, but schaden-freude is a luxury he can’t afford just now. He dashes back to the Purple Room, bounds down the stairs to the Mezzanine, runs across to the Gold Room-
He finds the kid standing at the endcaps, right out in the open.
Jacob grabs the kid by his elbow, steers him through the Blue Room as fast as they can hustle without looking
“Wait, I don’t-”
“Tomorrow you and your girl move to another city. Don’t tell your friends, don’t leave a forwarding address, and don’t come back.”
“Can’t we just-”
Jacob yanks the kid’s arm, hard. “You got all that?”
The kid nods, and as they proceed into the Green Room, he glances past Jacob and his eyes widen with alarm. Jacob doesn’t have to look, but he does, looks as he keeps moving toward the front entrance, sees the cops descend the steps from the Purple Room to the Mezzanine.
They spot him at the same instant. Both men start as if to run, but think better of it, fast-walking past postcards and books about Oregon. Huge legs clearing the short distance quickly.
Jacob shoves the kid toward the front doors, putting himself between the kid and the cops who are fast approaching. He flings himself at the info desk and the two managers chatting behind it. He doesn’t have to fake the urgency in his voice: “My son’s missing! He’s only six!”
One of the managers darts for the doors-just as the kid disappears into the night air. The other manager picks up the phone and her voice crackles over the PA system: “White Rabbit. We have a White Rabbit.”
Employees spring into action. Cashiers rush over from behind the counter to stand guard by the door, where the first manager has stopped a middle-aged woman and her son on their way out. “I’m sorry, ma’am, no one can leave just now. This should only take a few minutes.”
The cops stop short. Shoulders goes for his wallet, starts to say something, but Mustache grasps him with a firm hand. Shakes his head. Wrong place, wrong time to flash a badge.
Shoulders paces a small circle, seething, utilizing every ounce of self-control to keep from punching something, someone, anything.
Mustache turns to Jacob, that sadistic gleam back in his eyes.
Jacob is too busy describing his nonexistent son-and the balding, fussy old man he’d last seen talking to the boy near the Rare Book Room-to say anything to Mustache that would get him killed.
When the manager dashes off to share the description, Jacob leans toward Mustache. “Purple Room. On the far right after you get up the stairs. Up on the top shelf, you’ll find what you’re looking for. And maybe a sleeping homeless guy too.”
Mustache unfolds his arms, easing off his scowl a bit. “Think that’s it? You just walk away scot-free?”
“The kid’s gone-you’ll never catch him,” Jacob says, surprised to find he hopes it’s true. “And I’m not worth risking your badges. Just a bag man.”
Mustache scans Jacob’s face like he’s committing the details to memory. “Don’t be too sure,” he says. Then nods at his partner and they stalk away, Shoulders brushing past Jacob hard enough to knock him off balance. Jacob rights himself against the info desk, watches them take the steps to the Purple Room two at a time.
Jacob looks out the front doors and tells the manager standing guard, “Oh, there they are!” He points at the crowd of tourists milling outside-could be any of a half-dozen kids with their mothers. “Thank you so much,” he says, then calls, “Honey, over here!” as he blows past the manager and out the doors.
Thinking as he goes out:
PART III.
BURNSIDE FOREVER BY JUSTIN HOCKING
1) Fuck Hawaii.
2) First time I see her: she’s lying on a dirty-ass mattress, up in the parking lot above Burnside Skatepark, right in the place everyone goes to piss or shoot up or toss their empties or die. It’s the middle of the day, 2 p.m. And she’s on this mattress, sleeping with this sketchy-looking young black guy, which honestly you don’t see too often down here under the bridge, and her pink g-string’s hanging way out of her Dickies, which strikes me as weird too, because most homeless girls don’t wear g-strings. Or not pink ones, at least. She’s sleeping but I can tell she’s pretty. And young. And then me and this sketchy black guy, we’re staring at each other, his stare all full of emptiness and craziness and malice-all shit I stare back with in fucking spades. We’re staring at each other hard, and I think to myself,
3) Things went okay over on the islands, for the first few months at least. I did what I do: drink, surf, skate, fight. It was the first and the last things that got me in trouble. And I guess the surfing too. They called me the Lumberjack over there, and at first I think they got a kick out of me, this big haole lumberjack motherfucker out in the lineup, fighting for waves with all the locals. What you hear about Hawaii is true: they’ll punch you in the face for stealing waves; they’ll do it right out in the water. But not me, not at first. They could see that I’d just been through some shit and I was over there to get away from it, just like half the other fucking Haoles on the island, but the kind of shit I’d been through was different and deeper and they could read it in my eyes and my beard and the way I’d take waves no one else would take, drop in high and late and still make it and generally just not give a fuck. Spiritual fuckers, the Hawaiians, from years of living between oceans and volcanoes. But still fuckers, nonetheless, from years of Haole lumberjack interlopers like me pissing them off, stealing their land and their waves, and the grudging respect they showed me at first wore off once I dropped in on the wrong people. Blood in the water: there was a lot of it.
4) This girl on the mattress, I don’t know what it was about her. She was too pretty and dressed too well to be homeless. She had dark black hair and pale skin and turquoise eyes.
5) Awhile back I worked at a summer camp, as a cook, and the kids liked me, more than they liked some of
