Leather Maiden

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.