For example: a quiet street in a suburb of Denver. The houses are small and older, mostly made of brick, and the lawns are big. There’s an elementary school a block away, and kids play outside without being watched too closely by adults. There are no children out today, because most of them are in school, and the others are inside, probably in front of the TV, because it’s too cold to be out. Many of the houses have Christmas decorations, lights and wreaths mostly, and one house has a plastic nativity scene in the front yard. It’s not life-size, but it’s pretty close, and the baby Jesus has been stolen and replaced with an empty milk carton wrapped in a blanket, although no one has noticed it yet. It’s a nice place to live, not too far from the glitter of the big city but far enough. A good neighborhood to raise a family.
There is a man walking down the street—he is a man, legally, twenty on his last birthday, although he has the acne-ridden face and scrawny arms of a boy. He is pale and small and his hair needs to be washed. He’ll beef up in the next few years, he’ll hit the gym and start lifting weights and eating plenty of protein, and he’ll wash his car with no shirt on so everyone can admire all his hard work.
That is, it’s what he’d do if he lives that long.
This boy is Jimmy Galen; he doesn’t have a car and has to walk everywhere, point his feet in a direction and go. He doesn’t like to walk on any of the main streets, tries to stick to the side roads and shortcuts, through neighborhoods and parks, over fences and along sewage drains. He doesn’t like anyone to see he doesn’t have a car, doesn’t like to think of the pitying looks he gets as people drive by, seeing his shoulders hunched up against the wind, his eyes squinted against the sun. So he takes the back routes, in the hopes he’ll never see anyone he knows.
“Why does it matter what anyone thinks?” his mother asks when he complains about his lack of wheels. “So what if you have to walk?”
“You don’t understand,” he says. “You don’t have to walk anywhere.”
And she doesn’t, because she already has a car. He loves his mother, doesn’t want to fight with her, but how’s he supposed to get anywhere without a car in this city—how’s he supposed to get a girlfriend?
“You’re still young,” his mother says. “Walking will do you good.”
“You have a car.”
“I have to get to work.”
“So do I,” he says. “You could buy me a car, you know.”
She snorts and waves her hand, goes back to watching the local news. That’s all she’s been watching the last few days, ever since that Simms girl turned up dead. It wasn’t all that long ago that she wouldn’t even talk about Seever, wouldn’t let anyone mention his name, because it could’ve been Jimmy buried in his crawl space, he could’ve been one of those poor kids on that long list of names.
I only met him once, he’d say when she’d start in about those dead kids, usually after some wine, but she didn’t want to hear it. We lived down the street from him for six months before we moved. I mowed his lawn twice.
My Jimmy’s a lucky boy, his mother had told the nice lady reporter from the newspaper all those years before, when Seever’s trial was ongoing and everyone was talking about him, and his mother had been so pleased when her name had actually been printed, she’d clipped out the article and saved it. Seever didn’t take a shine to him. He let my boy live.
“You know we can’t afford another car,” his mother says now. “If your father was alive—well, that doesn’t matter. We don’t have the money.”
Jimmy shrugs into a coat, not wanting to see his mother have another breakdown about his father, who fell asleep behind the wheel on the interstate and never even saw that tree coming. It’s been three years since then, and she still brings up her dead husband every time Jimmy asks for money, as if they’d be straight-up millionaires if her husband were still alive. He figures he’ll save up for a car, although it’ll be years before he has enough for something good. Tough titty, said the kitty, as his dad used to say.
“I’m outta here,” he says, but his mother isn’t listening, she’s so caught up in the news about that girl. He thinks about ripping the plug out of the wall, reminding his mother that he might be next, that whoever went after Simms might need another victim, that’s what the cops had said when they’d called that morning, that Jimmy and his mother should be careful, that they were contacting anyone who’d ever been connected to Seever, just in case. He thinks about telling his mom that she’d better drive him to work so he’d stay safe. But if he said that her imagination would start running wild, and then she’d be all over him, she’d want to take him to work every day, and then pick him up, and she’d sneak into his bedroom at night to check on him to make sure he was okay. So he doesn’t say anything, just shrugs into his coat and zips it up as far as it’ll go before heading outside, out into the cold. It’s the middle of the day, and the Second-Story Killer, or whatever they’re calling him, seems to be after only women, so he’s safe.