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BEN WAS IDLING in the cruiser down the street from Emma’s boyfriend’s house, watching Lance and two of his friends pulling tricks on the half-pipe in the driveway. When he left Rachel and Emma at the condo, Ben tore off this way, not thinking, just raging to punch the kid in the face. Thank God for suburban stoplights and late rush-hour traffic. By the time he’d turned the corner onto the street, some fifteen minutes later, his head had cooled a bit. Think about us, Rachel’s voice said. Maybe that will help you understand.
The sun was going down, and the kids took turns rolling back and forth on their skateboards, the evening light casting their shadows across the wall of the house. There were no cars parked in the garage—home alone again—and they were blasting punk rock from a boom box. One of the kids, not Lance, dragged on a cigarette, blowing rings into the air as if he was sending up smoke signals. Hey, look at me. See how cool I am? The kid on the pipe wiped out, trying to flip the board around in the air. Lance helped the kid up and then dropped off the lip of the pipe and demonstrated the right technique. He leaned down and flew above the opposite lip, grabbing the edge of the board and spinning in midair, before hitting the landing. It was a nice move, Ben had to admit.
He heard Rachel’s voice again. You and I were stupid kids once.
Their first time wasn’t planned, it just happened, on the floor of her bedroom while Rachel’s parents were entertaining friends in the backyard pool. The two of them taken over with the feeling after hours of swimming together. Neither was prepared for it—no condom, no birth control, nothing. Yeah, stupid kids!
He remembered her sixteen-year-old body lying beneath him, her wet hair spread across the floor. Her skin was dotted with goose pimples, and when he kissed her breast she tasted of chlorine. What a relief, the passion he had for her that afternoon. He was submerged by the feeling with Rachel, and until that day he hadn’t understood what it was to willingly give your body away, to be or not to be consensual. She had led him up to her room. She had closed the door behind them. She had put her hands on his hips. He had been frightened, but he’d wanted it, too. And damn if it didn’t feel right, just like she had been made for him.
But the idea of this punk’s hands on his daughter’s skin! Lance was gliding back and forth on the half-pipe, spinning 360s as if he and the skateboard were one. It was as if the boy snuck into their lives and stole Emma away.
And then Lance wiped out, got only half the rotation and landed head and shoulder first on the driveway.
“Oh, shit,” Ben heard one of the kids say. The friends rushed to Lance, who was lying still on the driveway, not moving at all.
“Ah, Jesus,” Ben said to himself, unbuckling his seatbelt, about to call in an ambulance.
The kid with the cigarette bent down and put his hand on Lance’s chest, and Lance bolted upright, throwing his hands out at his friends, who jumped and then collapsed on the cement, cracking up at the joke, rolling on the ground like giggling children. Children, home alone.
Ben got out of the cruiser and walked the fifty yards to the driveway.
“Oh, man,” Lance said when he saw Ben. He brushed off his shirt.
“Dude, it’s the fuzz,” one of the boys said. The kid with the cigarette flicked it into the bushes.
“Man,” Lance said, “I know you don’t like me, but I think Emma is like totally amazing.”
“You guys go home,” Ben said to the other kids.
Ben took a step toward Lance and the kid backed up, his skateboard held to his chest.
“And you…you get inside and lock everything up.” It was getting dark, the streetlights flickering alive. “Are you stupid or something? Don’t you know there’s a serial killer running around?”
THE LIMBS AND MUSCLES OF FEAR
He had once watched a bobcat kill a jackrabbit. The sun had dropped out of the sky, the canyon slicked with shadow. It happened directly in front of him, as though the animal world didn’t see him at all. He was coming down the deer trail to the cabin when the rabbit zigzagged the open ground, its rear legs frantically kicking out behind it. The bobcat chased, swiping once with a broad paw to send the jackrabbit tumbling. The animal righted itself and then it sat there, frozen in the open country, its ears pinned backward, its stomach heaving. The bobcat didn’t hurry. It slunk across the ground, its body like a shadow inking the earth, and hooked the rabbit into its claws. The rabbit didn’t scream or kick, it simply fell limp into the cat’s talons, as though it had accepted its death. Then the cat sunk its teeth into the neck and the rabbit’s legs went electric with kicking, and then they stopped.
The cat carried the carcass into the cabin and he’d followed, heel to toe, heel to toe, making himself silent. The cat hissed at him—it could smell fear, he knew. But he wasn’t scared. He wasn’t the rabbit. He sat there in the doorway, watching the cat rip the wormlike intestines from the animal until it was too dark to see and there was only the crack and shred of a small body being torn apart.
Last night, when he was crouched in the orange grove, he could smell the fear on the policeman’s skin. They were ten feet from each other, both of them on their haunches in the irrigation trenches. The policeman held the gun, but his skin breathed fear—the sparked burn of it. He sat there in the darkness beneath the orange-tree branches and he felt a tenderness toward the policeman. I can end your fear, he thought. I can release it from you into the air. But he had to run; the policeman would catch him, throw him in jail, and jail was like a basement, and the basement was where he’d been the fearful one.
He’d raced into the city after escaping the policeman, backed his Toyota up against a wooden fence on the edge of an open lot in the old city where truck drivers and RV cruisers slept overnight in their rigs. He half-slept, hemmed in by eighteen-wheelers and Winnebagos, until midmorning when the last of the RVs pulled back onto the highway. He drove exactly twenty-five miles an hour down side streets to the Lucky’s shopping center, where the people walked in and out of the store like ants swarming a nest. Inside the store, he bought a screwdriver and then next door, at a Hallmark store, bought red cellophane and clear tape. Two security guards walked the sidewalk outside and he lingered inside for a few minutes, smelling the cinnamon-scented candles, touching the porcelain figurines with the sad eyes, talking with the pretty woman behind the counter about the crazy man who was climbing through people’s windows at night.
“Terrifying,” he said, agreeing with the woman.
“I moved here,” she said, “because it was safe. Because I didn’t have to lock my doors at night.”
“I know,” he said.