We Know

Chapter 13

The cold interrogation room, the car ride with Slim and the big guy, the coerced drop-off at LAX- they left me unable to catch my breath. At the Alaska Airlines counter, my hands shook so badly I could hardly count out seven of the traveler's checks from the envelope. I didn't know that oneway cost more than round-trip, and it took the agent to say, "Then just buy a round-trip and don't come back."

She looked mystified by my expression. I could only imagine what / looked like.

A moment later she frowned down at my driver's license. "I can't issue you this ticket. You're not eighteen for two more days."

I showed her the number written on the envelope and waited, melting in sweat, as she called and explained the situation.

"Oh, okay, sir. Right away, sir." The reverence in her voice and her lack of eye contact seemed to seal my fate as a nonentity. She hung up, printed my ticket, and handed it to me without further comment.

I spent half the flight in the cramped bathroom, sitting on the toilet and rocking myself while impatient passengers banged on the flimsy door. My running made me look guilty, but it also kept Callie clear, and that was a trade I was willing to live with. But how would I know when it would be safe to see her again?

We set down in Anchorage, the wind on the tarmac cutting me at the neck, the shins. I didn't even have a jacket. I followed a matronly woman who'd been on my flight to the terminal and boarded the same bus. I suppose I was clinging to anything familiar. She got off an hour in, and I watched her vanish into the white morning haze, my breath steaming the window. I rode on, watching the permafrost roll by, as blank and lifeless as I felt. I woke up half dead at the end of the line in Ketchikan.

It was light till ten-thirty at night. I got a job in a cannery, cutting the heads off salmon. No one asked questions. All those felons in Alaska, everyone on the run from something. Deadbeat dads and bail skippers. My own private Siberia.

I worked the line next to a massive bearded guy named Liffman who wore an eye patch and a maniacal grin. He brandished his knife with skill and zest that left me wondering.

After a few weeks, at bedtime, I called Callie just to hear her voice. I had to assume that the house was bugged, since they'd known about my conversations with her, but I needed to know she was safe. After she said "Hello" a third time, I hung up. I couldn't sleep, so I pulled the phone onto my little rented bed and curled around it, as if it held some imprint of my mom's voice.

I watched the news obsessively for some news about an attempt on Caruthers's life, but as the months dragged out, I tuned in less and less. Winter got so cold it froze the ears and tails off cats. I jerked awake at 2:18 every night, my arms clutching at Frank as he bled out. After six months Callie's home line was disconnected, so I risked a call to her at work.

Leaning against the pay phone at the back of the poolhall, sticky with sweat and trapped air, I pressed the familiar buttons. I'd gulped down a few beers to shore up my courage, and my buzz turned the whole thing into a dream-the sound of her, my shaky words, so much resentment and pain that neither of us could stop talking to breathe. She demanded to see me. When I told her it wasn't safe, she yelled at me until I eased the phone back onto its cradle.

I spent a sleepless week worried that they'd monitored the call and were coming to throw me in jail, but there wasn't anything I could do about it.

A few nights later, I came across Liffman outside the bar, shooting a pistol at a moose-crossing sign. His night-vision goggles were askew, and he staggered under the weight of the booze, but he cracked that sign again and again. The cops had wisely parked at a good distance and sat smoking on the curb, waiting for him to pass out. But Liffman, I'd learned, never passed out.

As he fumbled with a reload, I approached. Callie had never let Frank take me shooting, but I'd been around his guns enough to be calm in their presence. "Liffman."

"Yuh, Nicky?"

"What do you say we get you some sleep so tonight doesn't cut into your drinking tomorrow."

It took a few moments for him to decipher the words through the booze. Then a smile cracked his wind-chapped face, and he slid the gun into his pocket and trudged home. The cops waved as we passed.

The next day at work, while whacking the head off a sockeye, he gave me that missing-tooth grin. "You ready for when they come for you?"

I kept working.

He lopped off a few more heads, flicked them to the bin, the pink spray specking his corded forearms. "/ am. I'm ready for those motherfuckers. DEA, IRS. Shit, when the black suits come sniffin', I'll be a trace in the wind. Or a round in their chest."

When the whistle blew, I followed him out to his truck. He never turned around, but he unlocked the passenger side first, left the door standing open. I got in.

I said, "I don't want to be at the mercy of anyone ever again."

We drove out to the nowhere tundra and sat on his hood, draining a six-pack and squinting into the white. He pulled a pistol from his parka pocket and aimed it at my face. His head was crooked, his black curls hanging down like a curtain fringe. He was smiling, and it wasn't a pretty smile.

I said, "Liffman."

"Wanna learn how to shoot?"

"Yeah."

He walked off twenty paces and crunched the bottles into the snow. We shot. He drank the next six-pack himself. We shot some more. When I turned to reload, I heard a flicking sound, and he had a knife out, low and mean at his side. He faked a swing at my head, the blade whistling by so close I could feel the air move.

"Knife fight?"

I said, "That, too."

Every six months I sent Callie a card at work telling her I was alive and okay, delivered through a remailing service in Utah so it would bear a different postmark. Another lesson from the school of Liffman. The service would alert me if the letter bounced back as undeliverable, so I'd know if she quit or moved. I was terrified she'd get sick and wouldn't be able to contact me, or that she'd die scared and alone. Those sporadic cards served as my lifeline to her.

I moved to Washington and snagged a job driving a delivery truck for a bakery. And then, two years later, to Oregon, where I worked mornings on a road crew and earned a night-school B.A.

I felt like a hermit crab trying out new shells, looking for a fit. I didn't realize it consciously at first, but I was inching my way toward Los Angeles.

Nine years after that first flight, I finally came home. When the plane touched down at LAX, I was so ashen that the kindly schoolteacher next to me offered his airsickness bag. The first weeks were awful. Some nights I lay awake, wrapped around a pillow, eyes on the door, until sunlight fell through the dusty motel drapes. Other times I prayed they would come just to get it over with. But, slowly, perspective returned. They had to know that if I hadn't talked all this time, I had nothing to say. Surely they had moved on.

I waited a month to track down Callie. She was living in a big white house in Pasadena. Frank's hefty life-insurance policy had bought her a nice piece of property. Coming up the walk, I almost puked in the tulips. When Callie opened the door, she stood perfectly erect, her face motionless except for the tears streaming down her cheeks. We hugged and sat and talked, and I told her some of where I'd been. I lied, too-those lies of omission that had become part of who I was, blank spaces at the center of me. I said I'd fled because of guilt alone, and given what I'd done, that was plausible enough.

She gave me Frank's steamer trunk, which she'd filled with some of my personal things and held on to all these years. But after six months, we hardly saw each other. I still didn't want to risk telling her the whole truth, so there were buried land mines everywhere. And Callie had a whole other life that I didn't fit into, no matter how hard she tried to let me. I drove by her house a few times, sat in my car, and watched the impassive face of the large white house. And I heard an echo of the big guy's voice, just after he flipped me the envelope filled with traveler's checks. You don't talk about this to anyone. Ever. Or we '11 know. And we 7/ know who you talked to also. We won't be nearly as accommodating next go-round. To you or her I could no longer bring myself to stroll up that nice suburban walk and ring the doorbell. On my third or fourth trip, as night fell and the lights began clicking on upstairs, a neighbor slowed in passing to cast a suspicious glance at my crappy little Honda. The drawn reflection I saw in my rearview was alarming even to me. I had become that troubling watcher in the night. That dark, idling car at the curb, beyond the curtains. The thought of someone outside my mother's house, scaring her, finally drove me off for good.

I tried to resume my old life. But I quickly learned it wasn't there waiting for me. My friends, too, had moved or moved on. Seeing them brought home just how much I'd lost. How bad the damage was, burned into my character like a convict's brand. One day I'd been a seventeen-year-old with a Nintendo and a decent life forecast. The next I was a grown-up on the run. Secretive, itinerant, alone with my guilt and those dwindling traveler's checks. And then just my guilt.

I drove to Bob's Big Boy one night. I didn't get past the parking lot. The huge picture windows were lit up like a Norman Rockwell. All those kids eating and drinking, talking about movies and lying about getting laid. I was brought up short there outside, like a bum contemplating a lavish window display. I didn't think about everything I didn't have, but everything those kids did. Envy flared, of course, but when it burned away, I said a silent prayer for them, that their lives would stay blissfully uncomplicated, that for many more years they would be able to take everything for granted.

Hurwitz, Gregg

We Know (aka Trust no One) (2008)

I had to start over. And I gave it my best shot. Make new friends. Build a different life. Cut my bitterness with gratitude for what I still had. I tried to live up to Callie's hopes for me by not spending my life looking over my shoulder. Now and then, when I'd see a dark sedan or hear a voice of a certain timbre, I'd feel a flicker of the old fear, a snake's tongue moving along my spine. At any moment they could pounce on me and throw me in a cell, charge me with a murder I didn't commit.

But they didn't. I got a job helping people who were homeless. I managed to become a part of society, so if I did get hauled off, I could feel like my life had been worth something.

I had finally found calm, or at least my version of it.

And then I awoke one night to see the end of a black rope coiled on my balcony.