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  “Years,” she said. “Every few months I gave you a haircut and trimmed your nails.”

  He didn’t want her to see him shirtless or in his silly pajama bottoms, so he draped a humid sheet entirely around himself and dragged his duffel bag past her to the bathroom. He went through his daily rituals. For almost a half hour he arranged the towels and toiletries into a symmetrical pattern around the sink, combed down his bushy hair, and repacked his duffel so that the shirts didn’t touch the socks.

  When he returned, the young woman had made the bed, and was now running her fingertip along the windowsills in a facetious search for dust. With fading reception, the television played a sitcom full of emphatic laughter, and Kevin dodged around the rabbit ears to pass her. In a phony British accent, she said, “Ah good, now that you’re clean and presentable, I’m going to give you the rules.” She raised her chin as she spoke. “I will not tolerate untidiness or mischief. Breakfast will be served at seven o’clock, no excuse for being tardy; I deplore laziness of any kind. And one more thing, you look very nice, a perfect gentleman—but do please use the cologne a bit more sparingly.”

  “Who the hell are you supposed to be?”

  Lapsing back into her hoarse, tomboyish voice, she said, “Shit. I thought it was obvious. I guess I need a flying umbrella.” She sat down on the edge of the bed. “Hey—do they have room service in this hole?”

  “Just a vending machine.”

  “You’ve got to hit your father up for a nicer place,” she said. “What does he do anyway? Sell encyclopedias?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  She walked to the glass door and looked melodramatically at the darkness. “I daresay he’s not a very good provider.” Whatever character she was imitating, Kevin had never seen the movie; but he worried that if he admitted this, he would reveal something deprived about his childhood. In her normal voice she said, “You should find out what he does exactly. Maybe he sells coke to washed-up movie stars. And you know, Santa is very generous to kids who can rat out their parents.”

  “I’m not exactly a kid.”

  “Right, of course not. You’re a grown man with footballs on his pajamas.”

  “I didn’t buy those.”

  “No, no. I know. The tooth fairy brought them.”

  “You know what—don’t even try to mess with me. You may think you’re some kind of street girl, but I’m a green belt and I’ll kick your ass.”

  “A green belt. Oh my goodness. Karate and pajamas. How thrilling.”

  “Just forget it.”

  “You should come over here and feel how my heart is pounding.”

  “You’re crazy, aren’t you? You’re deranged. Are you on something right now?”

  “Maybe I’m just in the early stages of your bubonic plague. Poor me. Tomorrow I’ll drop dead under a bridge somewhere. You’ll be a murderer and never even know it.” She dove onto the bed, rocking them both on cheap springs. “Actually I’m delirious from hunger. Do you think we can break up this little quarantine and go for a market run?”

  So they crossed the street to the gas station, and each moment Kevin had a more difficult time deciding if she was a child or an adult. She bought beer and cigarettes from a man at the counter who rolled his eyes at her ID; then she shoplifted a dozen candy bars.

  Back at the motel, they sat on the balcony with their legs draped through the railing, eating packets of powdered doughnuts. Sitting in a pleasant breeze, tinged with the flowery smell of her hair, he clutched the balusters and knocked against her shoulder. She laughed and said, “It’s really touching that you’re already so in love with me. I’m flattered. But before you get your hopes up, you should know I’m completely out of your league.”

  “Why? You don’t think I could scrape together twenty bucks?”

  “Oh my God. You are so dead. That is just so wrong.”

  She hit him in the shoulder with a lopsided fist, and Kevin jumped up, snickering, to flee from her across the room. As she chased him in narrow circles over the bed and around the carpet, she told him that she was going to strangle him and string him up by his green belt. He was an evil little man. The game quickly expanded into the hallway, and for the next hour they staged an elaborate barefoot chase around the motel, playing hide-and-seek in the alcoves of ice makers and vending machines, running up and down the stairwell with echoing squeals of laughter.

  Up and down three floors and in a wide circle around windowless corridors, she chased him back into the room again, where he dashed onto the balcony. Quickly she locked the door. She stuck her tongue out at him and he pressed his crotch against the glass. “Oh, that’s very attractive. You just cool off out there.”

  He put his lips onto the glass, at first kissing it tenderly; then he exhaled so that his cheeks inflated and his mouth spread wide.

  “Wonderful,” she said. “You know, I’m going to throw you off that balcony. Then I’ll come in here and forge a suicide note.”

  With his breath he made a circle of fog on the glass, then drew a sad face into it.

  “ ‘Dear world,’ ” she said. “ ‘I’m just too big a loser to go on any longer. I’ve been killed by unrequited love, and I leave my green belt to my criminal father.’ ”

  When she unlocked the door, Kevin climbed over onto the outside of the balcony railing, glancing down at a three-story drop through palm fronds and into an empty section of the parking lot. She gasped and hovered in the doorway, as he crabbed sideways onto the neighboring balcony. He rolled over the railing and tried to open the sliding glass door. It was locked, so he continued to the next balcony, eventually climbing across the entire length of the third floor until he found an open passage through an occupied room. He tiptoed into the darkness, across the blue night light of the television, past a snoring old man and the lit outline of a closed bathroom door, to emerge in the bright hallway, where the girl ambushed him by leaping forward and grabbing his ear. She twisted it and dragged him ahead, whispering, “That was way out of line. Oh my God, you’re psychotic.”

  Back in the room, with belts and sheets and the drawstring from a robe, she tied him to the bedpost while he tried not to laugh. “You’re going to stay here until I can get an exorcist, Damian.”

  Throughout the ten o’clock news, she sulked on the bed, watching a report on a Korean airliner downed by the Soviets, until the game once again evolved and Kevin played the wounded prisoner of a brutal dominatrix.

  “If you ask me politely,” she said, “you may have another doughnut.”

  “Please, mistress, may I have a fucking doughnut?”

  “Is that what you think is polite?”

  She leaned down and smudged powdered sugar all over his face.

  Just then, Jerry returned, nonchalantly dropping his bag and keys onto the cabinet. He cleaned his glasses with his shirttail, then pointed the frames at Kevin and said, “I’m not paying extra for that.”

  “He just got a little bit excited, sir. He’s feeling a lot better.”

  “What the hell is that powder all over his face?”

  “It’s from a doughnut,” said Kevin.

  “You fucking kids are going to give me a heart attack. All right, all right—party’s over. Let’s untie the boy and you can get back to business.” Kevin groaned and rose, easily extricating himself, and the girl dropped into the armchair hugging a throw pillow to her chest.

  Massaging his temples, Jerry said, “So we’re all fine, right? Nobody was injured; no hemorrhaging. Right? Fantastic. Thank what’s-his-name for me—um—Mr. Ruba-somebody.”

  “Elia? Yeah, sure. I’ll thank him.” She gave him an awkward smile of tucked-in lips, which made a popping sound as she opened her mouth again. Kevin noticed a somber tension come suddenly over the room.

  Without looking at the girl, Jerry fished a roll of cash from his pocket and wiggled off a thick rubber band. “So what are we talking about?”

  “Listen, I’m not comfortable discussing business in
front of your son.”

  “What does he care? He’s seen money before.”

  “Could we handle the financial situation someplace else? Please?”

  He gave a hiccup of air. “The financial situation. Everybody in this town talks like a pissed-off bookie.”

  “If we could go someplace more private.”

  “Well, maybe we should cram into the closet? That’s private.”

  She grunted and rose, grabbing his elbow to lead him from the room. At first he seemed amused by her frustration, allowing her to escort him out to the hallway as if he were blindfolded and awaiting a surprise.

  As soon as they were gone, Kevin unzipped his father’s bag to find hundreds of credit cards held together in stacks with fat rubber bands. They were obvious fakes, with only names and account numbers embossed onto gray or white plastic.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Jerry, just outside. “What do I look like—some kind of tourist?”

  Kevin hunkered down and spied on them through the partly opened door, but the girl’s voice was drowned by a stammering change in the air conditioner’s cycle.

  “I don’t care if that’s what you think your time is worth,” said Jerry, “that’s not the service you provided here. At least I hope it isn’t.”

  She moved a few steps closer and her voice was audible in fragments: “… because I have to make a living, okay? We’re not talking about anything else but my time, sir.”

  “You can’t deliver a pizza and charge for filet mignon. You see what I’m saying?”

  “No, sir. My time is my time. I don’t see how there’s any—”

  “This is bad business, that’s what this is. Flat-out unprofessional. And as far as I’m concerned, you don’t deserve a dime now.”

  “Elia said this was all arranged. If you have a problem, you have to deal with him—”

  “Oh, okay. I get it. Blackmail. Great.”

  “I don’t make the rules, Mr. Swift. You’re putting me in a terrible position.”

  “You know what? Fine. Here. Go nuts.”

  Kevin eased the door open and saw the hallway strewn with leaves of cash. She stood with bare feet wide apart, her stiletto sandals wedged into a black velvet purse. His father waited, hands on his hips. “Whatever you think you’re worth, kid. Jackpot.”

  From the disgusted look of her drooping eyelids, Kevin thought she would turn and walk away, crunching over the money; but instead she whispered something, stooped down, and snatched each bill as if she could hurt it. With the velvet purse dangling at her legs like a sling, she said, “This is just about the lamest jackpot I’ve ever seen.” Finally she stuffed the harvest into her purse, gave him the finger, and crossed the hall in fitful strides.

  THREE

  Kevin told himself that the girl was like so many other vanishing faces: motel clerks, local kids riding old shopping carts, or hitchhikers with cardboard signs. They were features of a passing landscape, staying in his mind no longer than wind devils or drizzly afternoons. But something in her nature, beyond all the crisp details that stayed with him that night—her smile with the one indented tooth, like a sticking piano key, or the suntan-lotion smell that hovered in the pillowcase—something underlying the games and jokes had seemed filled with significance, like the whispered intensity of a secret pact. She had left so bitterly. He wasn’t angry with his father: Jerry would always fight over money. But for the first time he wished he could apologize and explain his life. Kevin wasn’t dragged along by some unfeeling monster; he wasn’t a hostage—and he wasn’t a child.

  One bright morning when he was twelve years old, his father had arrived out of an approaching dust cloud along the dirt road. His mother had passed away that June, and by the end of the summer Kevin foresaw nothing but a lifetime of habitual mourning. Suddenly, fueled with milk shakes and French fries, Kevin and Jerry began to spend whole afternoons in batting cages, on ragged public golf courses, or riding go-carts around crooked stacks of tires, until Kevin believed that a new and easy life could be formed out of sunny days and spare change. Kevin’s aunts spoke about his father with tense mouths, claiming there was more to redemption than a few skipped rocks. He had come off a three-year sentence for a puzzling list of activities (merchant fraud, check kiting, interstate trafficking of stolen goods), and they warned that everything he did had an ulterior motive. Years ago he had brainwashed Kevin’s mother and she had only recovered in the nick of time. Enduring their criticism with a tilted smile, Jerry repaired the fences, rewired the chicken coop, built a backstop, fixed the crumbling chimney, telling Kevin stories up on the hot tar paper. “Back when I worked construction, couple of associates and I, we’d give a free inspection to some poor old bag, go up on the roof, knock down the chimney, then charge her an arm and a leg to fix it. Don’t worry, Kev—they were rich and mean as badgers. Every last one of them. And I kept them from losing it on bingo and slot machines.”

  The three aunts and his grandparents would constantly discuss strategies for getting rid of Jerry, always returning to what Kevin’s mother “would have wanted.” Everyone orbited so tightly around her memory that Kevin believed she hadn’t gone away, but had condensed into a black hole with strengthened gravity. Jerry would brusquely reply that she was dead and gone, and—more to the point—she wouldn’t have known what she wanted; and they would cry and slam doors and discuss him between rooms for the rest of the night. Jerry remembered a vastly different woman, and Kevin knew his version far better than the revised, saintly one who had drawn a pilgrimage of doting relatives. “In her prime, Kevin—before the cancer and this whole conversion—in the old days when she didn’t care where I got a car or a necklace, she was the kind of woman who caused traffic accidents whenever she dropped her purse.”

  By then Kevin mostly remembered the illness, and the way she had become preachy and demanding from her stale-smelling room, hating the food they brought her and expecting sudden and sincere tributes, as if proximity to death had earned her a kingdom of frightened servants. He was never comfortable beside her. He was ashamed by how he had refused to hold her as her body withered, and how he had resented her over those final months. She terrified Kevin with a long list of burdensome wishes—be honorable, decent, and happy, things she never would have told him during her healthy and volatile years. He hated the pitying looks his aunts gave him when he left the room, the way they mussed his hair and tackled him with unsolicited hugs; and he hated how the sickness had usurped all of his mother’s original qualities. A few months after her death, no one spoke of anything but her Strength, Courage, and Faith, until Kevin felt that she had been worn down by pious generalities. He grew suspicious of the words, and craved instead his father and all the tangible grime and stink of a cursed life.

  On the first anniversary of her death, Jerry had a disagreement with the aunts over the pruning of a tree, which somehow escalated, snowballing across the house through lit and dark rooms, gathering force. A little past midnight, his father came to his bedroom to say good-bye, and Kevin replied, “You better goddamn believe I’m coming with you.” His childhood ended with the scraping ignition of a Dodge Dart. They filled the backseat with clothes, bedrolls, potato chips and soda, then pulled out along the dirt road, howling out the open windows. Jerry flicked his cigarette at the row of passing oak trees, leaned back in the seat, and said, “Keep smiling like that, kid—you’re going to see the world.”

  It was never an easy life. Jerry moved between connections, from chop shops along the windy edges of the desert to cheap motels on the interstates. He tried to keep his work away from Kevin, leaving him in karate classes and game rooms, dropping him off for double features or with odd baby-sitters covered with blue-ink tattoos. Kevin quickly understood that no town was safe for more than a week or two. Jerry said that he was a barometer for tension, his fraying nerves manifesting in a passion for order: Kevin couldn’t sleep in a new bed that wasn’t arranged symmetrically; he would tie his shoes a hundred times
until the laces lay in exact proportion to each other. Soon Kevin would eat only breakfast for each meal, and this eccentricity, which had initially amused his father, trapped them within a vast archipelago of twenty-four-hour family diners.

  If there was anything he wished the girl could have seen, it was how much Jerry appreciated Kevin and his love of precision. He knew it meant that sometimes Kevin lost track of the larger picture, entire new cities with dingy horizons of phone wires and cypress trees. But he also understood his son’s desire for mastery. Like an alien studying a new planet one tiny increment at a time, Kevin became obsessed with clocks, radar, fuzz busters, radio frequencies, police scanners, and revolvers. Jerry was careful not to get him “hooked on something new,” because sleep and food were irrelevant to Kevin in the face of some new microscopic discovery. Mostly his father praised him, saying that someday he would be a scientist or inventor—or, at the very least, the greatest handyman the world had ever known.

  Like any good partners, they each became indispensable to the other. Jerry relied on his son’s patterns and organization, and often said that without him, he would get lost forever in the fast-food wrappers he threw into the backseat. But he could also tell whenever Kevin’s meticulous nature was becoming too confined, when his son was trapped between pinions of a disassembled watch, with the irritable intensity of a boy who dreamed of controlling time itself; and those days, Jerry would spirit him away to the clutter of some nighttime carnival, or drive to a lake past dark, banks full of crickets and bonfire rocks, and they would swim or run or kneel on a beach in the tide, until the weight of so much anxiety was shaken loose and scattered, and the only thing between heartbreak and freedom was a thin tissue of air, torn open with fingernails, teeth, or a fist through the wind.

  FOUR

  Late afternoon in a restaurant near the marina, Kevin ate his ritual breakfast of pancakes and orange slices, while Jerry recovered from a tough hangover with a Bloody Mary and a withered celery stalk.