lead anyone to you. The back door church lock is pie. All you got to do is stick a credit card in between the door and lock, and that moves it, then you lift up and it’ll open. They got this fancy, expensive church, and it has locks a blind, two-fingered retard could open.”
“Describe where the DVDs were,” I said. “In a little detail.”
Ernie looked at me curiously, then slowly he began to explain.
“There’s a stage up front. There’s a big purple curtain and another stage behind that. It’s elevated. I guess it’s for the choir. You go back there behind the curtain, there’s a little run of stairs and they go up to a landing. It has a rail on it and it looks down on the second stage, the one in the back. If you go along the landing, you find another stairway on the other side, and that one zigzags and makes the platform above. It goes around in a circle inside the dome, and there are three little rooms off the landing. Going up there I felt like that guy in that play, the
“I still find it hard to believe,” Jimmy said, slowly shaking his head. “Caroline didn’t seem anything like that.”
“Oh,” Tabitha said, looking right at Jimmy, “she was like that, all right. That’s the kind of girl she was. She farted real hard, only thing that would blow out was shadow.”
22
I took Ernie’s backpack and poured his books and school papers out of it and he put the DVDs in it. Not just the ones they had of Jimmy, but the other ones too. I pulled the hard drive from their computer and packed it away, made Ernie and Tabitha drive us back to the hill above the Siegel house.
By the time we got to the hill and they let us out, the stars had been blanketed by cloud cover and a soft wind full of the smell of wet dirt was blowing.
We made our way up the hill. The wind picked up, and now there was dampness with it. Not full-blown rain, but a soft lick of moisture. We found our pup tent and pulled some things from the motorcycles inside and let down the mosquito netting again, though now we didn’t need it. The mosquitoes and flies had fled before the oncoming rain. We unrolled our sleeping bags inside the tent.
From the vantage point we had made for ourselves on the hill, we could see lights in the town, and in the wet mist that was soon to be a full blowing rain, the lights seemed greasy, as if wiped over with Vaseline; they seemed farther away than they really were, as if they had taken the place of the stars and had become a galaxy of their own.
We took off our gloves, our socks and shoes.
Jimmy said, “I think we screwed up, bro. I don’t like letting them go.”
“What were we going to do with them? Keep them as pets?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it.”
“We got them by the balls now.”
“Just because we got some DVDs, the hard drive, doesn’t mean they don’t have others of me and Caroline. And besides, the Tabitha kid. She doesn’t have balls.”
“We in the intellectual trade call that speaking metaphorically.”
“Is that what you call it? I call it bullshit. Cops come, find us with all this stuff, how’s that gonna look?”
I had to admit, I hadn’t thought about that.
“Jesus,” Jimmy said. “I can’t believe Caroline was like that. I thought we had something special.”
“So did Trixie.”
“Don’t go there.”
“Caroline may have been a bigger shit than you, Jimmy, but you don’t come out of this shiny as a newly minted dime either.”
“Still, don’t drop it on me.”
“You brought us to this place the minute you started lying and fucking around.”
I stretched out on my sleeping bag and watched the rain, which was now coming down hard with a sound like someone standing above us flinging down ball bearings.
Jimmy shifted so that he was on his stomach with his hands holding up his chin, looking out the front of the tent.
“I hate this rain,” he said. “It always depresses me.”
“After all the dry I saw and lived with, all the dust I had to eat, anytime it rains I’m a happy man. I love the rain. I love to watch it, smell it, feel it.”
“You believe what those two said, Cason? About Caroline? About what they did, how they came by the DVDs?”
“They probably prettied themselves up a little, but yeah, I think they’re shooting straight for the most part.”
“You don’t think they killed Caroline, do you?”
“They’re dopes, but they aren’t killers.”
Jimmy repositioned himself, turned his head toward me.
“You’ve found out a lot of stuff about me, Cason. I hate you had to.”
“It’s how it is.”
“I want you to know I didn’t do anything on purpose to hurt you.”
“I know that. You think I don’t know that? Come on, let’s get some sleep.”
I reached around the netting and pulled the zipper to the tent until it closed, and then I crawled inside the sleeping bag. For a little while I thought about Gabby, and then I thought of Iraq and all the sand and all the heat and all the emptiness I felt; the emptiness was for me a feeling like tumbling from an airplane without a chute. Finally I just closed my eyes and thought about a nice comfortable place in the woods and me all dry and at ease, listening to the rain, feeling the cool wind blow.
23
It was still dark when we broke camp. We had slept for a while, but during the night the comfort I had felt went away and the rain pounded against the tent so loud I couldn’t sleep. And then, just as quickly, the rain was gone and the night was clear again and the lights were no longer greasy.
We got up and shook the tent off and rolled it up, Jimmy saying he would spread it out to dry when he got home. I took the shells out of the gun Jimmy had taken from the kids, and wiped them with a handkerchief and wiped the gun down and held it with the handkerchief, keeping my fingers off of it. I walked down to the kudzu, looked around and, when I felt no one was looking, tossed the gun and the shells into the greenery and went back up the hill to join Jimmy.
We packed up, me with the DVDs in the pack on my back, the rest of the stuff, including the hard drive, wrapped up in my sleeping bag, strapped across the back of the bike. We mounted up and pulled on helmets and kicked the bikes to life and rode down the slick hill without the tires sliding out from under us, went through the gravel spot behind the house and on out to the road that wound down to the highway below.
The rain had busted up the heat. Riding into town the air was cool and pleasant. When we got to Main we forked. Jimmy went left and I went right. I rode over to my place and parked the bike in front of the door. I unlocked the door and took the pack inside and dropped it on my couch. I got the sleeping bag with the hard drive in it and the rest of my goods, and shoved the bike inside the apartment and left it, muddy tires and all, just to the left of the door. I didn’t know what else to do with it. I left it outside, it might be stolen. I got a towel and wiped the bike down, but didn’t bother with the tires or the muddy mess it made on the floor.
I opened up the pack and prowled through the DVDs. They had numbers on them. The numbers didn’t mean anything to me. I put the DVDs in the player, one after another, watching just enough to see if I recognized any faces. I did. Nearly all of them surprised me. One of them was the high school principal. One of them was the
