Envious Moon(36)

“Seventeen.”

He pulled on one side of his long hair. “I took you for older. All right,” he said. “You got to drive, though.”

We finished the beers we had and then we drove into Litchfield in Victor’s Chevy. We must have looked like quite the pair, the long-haired heavyset old man, and the thin Portuguese boy. In the car, Terrence smelled funky, like cigarettes and beer, but like the woods too, perhaps like the mushrooms he harvested for money. I was glad he was getting me the beer, but I think I was even happier to get some separation between us. We could split up when we got back. We could split up and I wouldn’t have to answer any more of his questions about Hannah, and have to see through his eyes what he thought about her.





Terrence asked me to eat with him that night. He had a small cookstove and I didn’t know how to say no and so we sat together and got drunk on beer and ate some cheap steak he fried up with onions in a cast-iron skillet. He made some potatoes out of a box too and it was lousy food but it tasted sort of good after all the fast food I had been eating.

Afterwards we sat in the lawn chairs and it was a clear and beautiful night though the wind that came through the trees held some of the winter to come. I put on my coat but it still made me shiver. All that beer had completely gone to my head too and this might have contributed to the cold I was feeling. Terrence and I talked about fishing for a while, and then he told more about his life. How he chased the good weather, moving south when winter started to come.

“Anywhere there are woods, there are mushrooms,” he said.

He spent his summers in the Northeast and in the winter he generally went down to the Carolinas. He camped the whole time and he worked when he wanted and it sounded like a decent life to me.

When we had exhausted that conversation we sat for a time in silence and smoked and kept our thoughts to ourselves. I was thinking of Hannah, of where she was, and whether or not tomorrow might be the day I would see her. On my morning drives past the school I kept expecting to just see her in front of one of those buildings, helping her mother unload a station wagon with all her things. Of course, I wouldn’t be able to approach her just yet. I would need to give it some time, to pick my spot. I had no idea how she would react. And that was what was going through my mind when Terrence said, “How long they been looking for you?”

“Who?”

“The cops.”

“What are you talking about?”

Terrence leaned forward in his chair and he brought his cigarette up to his lips and in the dark I sensed his eyes on my face, though I kept looking straight ahead, toward my campsite, to where the brook ran through the trees. “I been around a long time, boy,” Terrence said. “I can tell when a man’s running from something. You don’t even have as much as a tent. Sleeping on the ground in the woods.”

“Nah,” I said. “I just don’t have a tent.”

“How long?” Terrence said. “Listen, I got no love for cops.”

I leaned back and sipped from the can of beer. I didn’t feel like lying. “Four days,” I said.

“’Cause of what you did to the girl?”

“I didn’t do anything to the girl.”

“They know you’re here?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“What they want you for?”

“An accident.”

“An accident?” Terrence said. “Cops never want people for accidents.”

“A man died.”

“How?”

“I don’t want to talk about this,” I said.

“Just tell me how and I’ll let you alone.”

“My buddy and I were robbing a house on Cross Island. Not even robbing it really, though it doesn’t matter. We thought it was empty. It wasn’t.”

Terrence nodded. “Sounds like a bitch.”

“It was,” I said.

“Tell me one more thing,” he said.

“What?”

“What’s the girl got to do with it?”

I sighed. “It was her father.”

“What you going to do to her?”

I looked over at him. “I’m not going to do a thing to her. I love her.”

“There’s a lot to this then,” said Terrence.

I lighted a cigarette. “Tell me about it,” I said.

We didn’t say much more that night. We sat in the dark for a time and finished our cigarettes. Above us the tall pines shook with the autumnal breeze.





The next morning I woke to the drizzle of rain and I had a hangover. I stood up and opened the door to the car and for a few minutes I sat in the driver’s seat with the door open and watched the soft rain fall. Terrence’s trailer was there but his truck was gone. He must be in the woods.

I drove over the rolling hills to Litchfield and at the drive-through picked up a coffee and a sandwich. The day was cloudy and gray and the rain now was just a misting on the windshield. I came back down 75 and as I went I wished Victor’s radio worked. It would be nice to listen to the radio. I passed the white sign that said WELCOME TO LINCOLN and then I was coming on the school when I saw all the cars. My heart flipped in my chest. This was the day.

I slowed down coming past the school, and everywhere, on both sides of the road, expensive cars were being unloaded by well-dressed men and women with their daughters. Bags and bags, clothes on hangers. I drove as slow as I dared and I scanned the people as I went but to tell you the truth, their faces were all blank to me. I was looking for Hannah and for Hannah only. Where was she? It seemed as if everyone had arrived at once, and I did not see her among them. I was almost past the school, and about to turn around and make another pass, when I saw the cars. Three of them, all state police cars. Most ominously, one of them had the colors of Rhode Island. We were more than two hours from Rhode Island. They were parked in a row in a small parking lot next to a large white house with pillars on the front. One of the Connecticut cars and the Rhode Island car were both facing toward the main road. The other car, in between them, faced back toward the athletic fields. Through the glass I saw the shadows of the men who sat in them. I kept on driving and when I looked in my rearview, they had not pulled out. Either they had not seen me, or they did not know yet what they were looking for. Because one thing was crystal clear: They were here for me. I didn’t know what they knew. Did they just think I might decide to come here? Or did they know from Victor that this was my plan?