After a while she comes out—Lee, the woman from the beach. In cargo shorts and a green tank top, she doesn’t look like she’s dressed for a bar. Her hair’s in a messy bun and her camera strap is slung diagonally across her chest like a line of ammo, camera bumping at her hip. She’s walking fast, but not like she’s scared. The man in the hat comes out after her.
“You are never gonna get an opportunity like this again, you know that?”
“Oh, Rusty, I bet you say that to all the girls.” She doesn’t turn around as she talks, taking her keys out of her pocket and walking up to the dusty jeep.
“These things we got around here? You can’t call them girls.” He sidles up behind her and drapes one arm on the window frame, pushes his hat back with his fist. “Not even women. They’re just bitches.” He puts a finger out to touch her bare shoulder and she fits her key in the door, opens it, swings inside and slams it before he can even get his hand back out of the air.
“Well, I’d hate to think what that makes me,” she says, turning the key in the ignition and popping the jeep in reverse. She flashes him a smile that has a little too much teeth then backs up even with the awning I’m crouched under, brakes, and looks at me. “Ansel, right? —Not after the photographer.”
“Yeah.” I stand up and realize it’s pretty cold and the man in the hat is turning to walk back towards the jeep.
She’s looking at me with something like laughter in her eyes, but there’s an edge to her voice. “If I were you, I’d get in.”
“Yeah. Okay.” I hustle around to the passenger side and jump in just as the man in the hat makes it to the jeep and Lee floors it. In the rear view mirror the man in the hat stands there, his hands hanging limply at his sides, then spits and heads back towards the bar.
“It’s none of my business,” she says, glancing at me, one wrist draped over the top of the steering wheel, “But I wouldn’t be out alone in this part of town so late if I were you.” I watch the dust blow up around the jeep and take my time responding since something in her tone rankles me.
“Except you were out alone in this part of town.”
“Right. But I’m not you.”
“Well, I was looking for someone.” She shifts in her seat, pulling her camera around onto her lap, and glances at me again.
“How old are you?”
“Almost sixteen.” I’m trying to sound cool but then I realize what a baby I sound like to be rounding up my age.
“Well, I hope to God whoever you were looking for wasn’t back there.”
“No. I just got lost. Sort of. I was looking for a house.”
“What’s the address?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, what’s it look like?”
“I don’t know.”
Lee lets out a quick “ha!” and leans over to tune the radio wavering between frequencies. She rolls the knob until she finds an oldies station and then pulls the rubber band out of her messy bun, shaking out her dark hair. “You don’t know what it looks like? The CIA must be recruiting you already.”
I think about the list of skills I’d bring to espionage—cereal making, butt wiping, hair brushing—and I can’t help laughing too. “Yeah. Actually, that’s what I was doing back there at the bar. Spying, you know. ”
“So that whole curled-up-in-the-fetal-position-like-an-abused-puppy thing was just part of your cover?”
“Right.”
“Good cover.”
“Thanks.”
She’s nice-looking in a skinny, unkempt kind of way. Except for a long, horsey nose, her features are generic as a china-doll’s, so balanced and symmetrical they might be pretty if she made an effort, but since she doesn’t wear make-up she just looks washed out and plain. Now, with her brown hair down, her plainness is messy enough to seem a little wild, the lines of her cheekbones angling into her small, bow-shaped mouth. The tiniest spark of jealousy simmers in my gut. I look in the rearview mirror and try to imagine my pointy chin, wide forehead, and light-lashed eyes as capable of that kind of fierceness, but I can’t see it. I slouch in the seat and fold my arms.
“It’s a nice night. I could drive up and down some of these sleepy little streets and you could give a shout if you see the house. The, uh, mystery house.” She grins at me.
“Yeah, okay.” We don’t talk, but the radio is tuned to the kind of music I imagine my parents used to listen to, bobby socks and hair pomade music. I shut my eyes and try to imagine what it felt like to have a reason to touch a boy, to put your hand on the hard curve of his shoulder and feel his arm nestle in against your back, his breath up close. His breath in your hair.
“Shouldn’t take long to drive a town that’s, what, eight blocks long and five wide?” She glances at me, and I shrug.
“I’ve never counted.” I try to imagine what a city is like, what New York City is like, and how long it would take to walk from one end to the other. I bet she knows.
“So, do we have anything to go on?” she asks.
“A bike. Probably the only one in town, if he parks it out front.”
Lee nods and smiles sideways at me, a knowing glint in her dark eyes. Although it’s been years since Cumberland had more than a dusting of late-January snow, all the houses look like they’ve emerged from a hard winter, the sea air bleaching them tired and wind-scoured. Each street we drive down, a dog barks somewhere inside.
“There.” Everett’s bike leans against the front porch of a yellow house with a tidy lawn. The windows are dark, but I worry if he looks outside he’ll see me craning forward in the seat of the jeep. When Lee slows down, I slouch low, waving her on, and she laughs and guns the engine.
“You get the house number, Ace?”
“316.”
“Right. Willow Street. Commit it to memory. Agents don’t leave a paper trail.”
Ten
Tuesday, July 9, 1974
29 days
Perfect for us the myth of Castor and Pollux, but which of us is the immortal? Which of us the boxer Pollux, which the horse-tamer Castor? Only once before, my hand under a peach-fuzzed muzzle, the fly-twitching flank, skin laid thinly over muscle. Mother holding me up to bottomless eyes, the smell of hot-animal hay, flat-fingered careful, wedge of an apple. What she said: He likes you. So me the mortal, saddled with flesh. She the everlasting fighter halving her life with me, but up against what enemy? Perhaps the pestilence Pandora let loose: Guilt, gone eyeless, grey lump of flesh. Lead-winged, it goes nowhere, sees nowhere to go. Or Accusation, scaled faceless finger pointing. Or is it, somehow, secretly sleeping, the serpent-curled, toothless, moon-eyed Envy. Hardly. Silly Izzy. Easier to envy a fish flap-flapping on a dock.
I haven’t used much of Izzy’s birthday money over the years, so even after I buy the canvas, acrylics, brushes, and lima-bean-shaped painter palette from Millard’s hardware store, most of the dollar bills from Grand and crisp twenties the Carson brothers have given us every year are still tucked inside her savings envelope.
I’m crossing onto Main Street when Everett rides up, his hair uncombed, his red t-shirt wrinkled and faded. He doesn’t say anything, just takes the paper bag from my hand and rides slowly along beside me. The two of us walking next to each other for all the world to see—the air feels thin in my lungs.
“Where’d you come from?” I ask, shifting the canvas to my other side so it’s not between