“I'm sorry, I'm sorry.” He drew in a few deep breaths. “I'm not crying.”
“Nothing worse than a crying fascist. You and your wife and your baby girl and your manager clip-on tie and your five-dollar haircut, and you lording over Carl back there and you thinking you're better than me. Well, fuck you very much, Barry.” The handle of the gun tingled in his grip, but his hand no longer trembled.
The cook set the two cups before him, fished out two straws, and placed the lot in a bag. When he had finished, Carl stared at the counter, mumbling a penance. “You don't want to shoot that gun, friend. Don't ever start down that road. That road leads you straight to hell.” He stared, unblinking and steadfast as an owl, hoping to break down the boy's will.
“Thank you, Carl. This is your lucky day. I am sorry to have to do this, so be sure that I mean no harm to you. Your day will come, brother, when you are truly free. I am on your side. Tell them the Angels spared you. Do you have a rope around here, maybe a roll of duct tape?”
Fixing his gun on Barry, he watched him tie and gag Carl, and then Wiley bound them together to chairs in the storage room amid the gallon drums of ketchup, the cardboard cartons of toilet paper, the solvents and cleaners. At seven in the morning, the day manager found the cook and the counterman taped back to back, alive and livid. The milkshake machine had frozen, and the night deposit bag was missing, but by the time the police arrived, the Angels had flown. They were veering southwest, slouching toward Memphis.
10
As he left for the clinic in the morning, Paul finally remembered his note on the table and told his wife that it was the Green girl who had invited Erica to spend the night. Margaret called the Greens and discovered that Erica had not been there, no sleepover plans, and when the daughter Joyce came to the phone, it was clear that she had played no part in the subterfuge. Are you sure? Margaret had wanted to ask, could you check again? Instead, she left the note on the kitchen table and slowly took the stairs to her daughter's room to see if Paul had made some mistake, perhaps he was wrong, and their daughter had come home late and merely slept in; she imagined the rumpled quilt, the slumbering body, Sleeping Beauty curled in the bed, but no. She feared even before opening the door what the room would reveal. Quiet as a burglar, Margaret searched through the dresser drawers, investigated the closet, and took inventory of all that was missing.
Erica had left, and Margaret knew she had run off with that boy.
As she tried to picture Wiley's face, she realized how little they really knew about him. Early on, Paul had disapproved, as he always had with whomever Erica dated, and because that displeasure manifested itself every time the boy came around or at the mere mention of his name, they did not see or talk with him as much as they could have, should have. As tangential to the main frame of their lives as the postman or the newspaper boy, Wiley was a rumor. A glimpse, a wave, and then gone again. And after the time Paul had found the spent joints and smelled the boy's presence in their bed, after the accusations and demands, Erica never mentioned him again. But crediting her mother's instincts, Margaret knew her daughter secretly continued to see her lover, knew that she was with him that very moment.
Finding no hard proof in the bedroom, she closed the door and tried to remember the boy's last name—Bannock, Babcock, Riddick, Rinnick. There was only one listing in the telephone book, so she dialed S. Rinnick and let it ring seven times before hanging up and jotting down the street address. She drove across town to one of the older neighborhoods, modest brick houses built for the mill hands, with old cars parked along the curbs, tiny yards choked with toys and dead grass. The wind chased her up the walk and blew across the porch. The night before, that same wind had rattled the windows so fiercely that she woke in the middle of her dreams and could not fall asleep again till her husband joined her, slipping in quietly so as to not disturb her, tossing in his private restlessness. Margaret banged on the door, and when nobody answered after she counted to fifty, she knocked louder and waited. A shower of beech leaves eddied in the corner of the porch. Across the street, a young woman in round glasses peered from the front bay windows and then withdrew as suddenly behind the curtains.