Bad Men

Why was he in Florida?

He was working there.

What did he work at?

He sold things.

What things?

Misery. Pain. Fear.

He sold cars.

Is he buried, like the people in the graveyard?

Yes, he’s buried.

Can we visit him?

Someday.

Someday. Just as someday she would be forced to tell him the truth, but not now. There would be time enough for anger and hurt and blame in the years to come. For now, he was her Danny and she would protect him from the past and from the mistakes that his mother had made. She reached out to him and ruffled his hair, but he seemed to take her gesture for one of acquiescence and bounced back to his perch on the couch.

“No, Danny, no more. You go to bed.”

“Mom.”

“No! You go to bed now, Danny Elliot. Don’t make me get up from this seat.”

Danny gave her his most poisonous look, then stomped away. She could hear him all the way up the stairs, and then his bedroom door slammed and his bed protested as he threw the full weight of his tantrum upon it.

She let out a deep breath and removed her glasses. Her hands were trembling. Perhaps it was surprising that Danny was as well adjusted as he was, given the lifestyle that he had been forced to lead. For the first two and a half years they had stayed on the road, never remaining long in any place, crisscrossing the country in an effort to stay ahead of any pursuers. Those years had been hellish. They seemed to coalesce into a constant blur of small towns and unfamiliar cities, like a movie screened slightly out of focus. The early months were the hardest. She would wake to every floorboard squeak, every rustle of trash on the street, every tapping of branches upon the window. Even the sound of the AC clicking on in cheap motel rooms would cause her to wake in a panic.

But the worst times came when car headlights swept across the room in the dead of night and she heard the sound of male voices. Sometimes they would laugh and she would relax a little. It was the quiet ones she feared because she knew that when they came for her, they would do so silently, giving her no time to react, no time to flee.

Finally she and Danny had arrived here, settling in the last place that they would look, for she had spoken so often about the West Coast, about a place with year-round sunshine and beaches for Danny. She had meant it too. It had long been her dream that they would settle at last out there, but it was not to be. She feared the ones who were looking for her (for they were surely looking, even after all this time) so much that the entire West Coast was not big enough to hide her. Instead, she had retreated to cold and to winter darkness, and to a community that would act as an early-warning system for her if they came.

She looked to the refrigerator, where she still had a bottle of unopened wine in case one of her new friends called and offered to curl up in front of the TV for an evening of comedies and talk shows. She so wanted to open it now, to take a single glass, but she needed to keep her head clear. On the kitchen table before her were spread the household accounts, abandoned since the previous night in the hope that a little sleep might make them less forbidding. She wasn’t earning enough from her job at the Casco Bay Market to cover her expenses, and Sam Tucker had already asked her to stay home for the rest of the week, promising to make up the hours within the month. That meant that she would either have to look for another job, possibly in Portland-and that was assuming that she could find a job and someone to baby-sit Danny after school or in the evenings-or she could dip back into the “special fund.” That would necessitate a trip to the mainland, and the mainland always made her nervous. Even the larger banks were a risk: she had already dispersed the funds into accounts in five different banks over three counties-no more than $7,000 in each account-but she was always worried about the IRS or some strange bank inspector of whom nobody had ever heard spotting the connections. Then she would be in real trouble.

And there was the fact that she didn’t like using the money. It was tainted. Wherever possible, she tried to get by on what she earned. Increasingly, that was becoming harder and harder to do. True, there was the knapsack itself, hidden among boxes and spare suitcases in the attic, but she had vowed not to touch that. There was always the chance of succumbing to temptation, of taking out too much and giving Danny and herself some treats, thereby drawing attention to herself. This was a small community, and even though Mainers didn’t go interfering in each other’s business, that didn’t mean that they weren’t curious about that business to begin with. It was the downside of living in such a comparatively isolated community, but a sacrifice worth making.