We Know

We drove out to the nowhere tundra and sat on his hood, draining a six-pack and squinting into the white. He pulled a pistol from his parka pocket and aimed it at my face. His head was crooked, his black curls hanging down like a curtain fringe. He was smiling, and it wasn't a pretty smile.

I said, "Liffman."

"Wanna learn how to shoot?"

"Yeah."

He walked off twenty paces and crunched the bottles into the snow. We shot. He drank the next six-pack himself. We shot some more. When I turned to reload, I heard a flicking sound, and he had a knife out, low and mean at his side. He faked a swing at my head, the blade whistling by so close I could feel the air move.

"Knife fight?"

I said, "That, too."

Every six months I sent Callie a card at work telling her I was alive and okay, delivered through a remailing service in Utah so it would bear a different postmark. Another lesson from the school of Liffman. The service would alert me if the letter bounced back as undeliverable, so I'd know if she quit or moved. I was terrified she'd get sick and wouldn't be able to contact me, or that she'd die scared and alone. Those sporadic cards served as my lifeline to her.

I moved to Washington and snagged a job driving a delivery truck for a bakery. And then, two years later, to Oregon, where I worked mornings on a road crew and earned a night-school B.A.

I felt like a hermit crab trying out new shells, looking for a fit. I didn't realize it consciously at first, but I was inching my way toward Los Angeles.

Nine years after that first flight, I finally came home. When the plane touched down at LAX, I was so ashen that the kindly schoolteacher next to me offered his airsickness bag. The first weeks were awful. Some nights I lay awake, wrapped around a pillow, eyes on the door, until sunlight fell through the dusty motel drapes. Other times I prayed they would come just to get it over with. But, slowly, perspective returned. They had to know that if I hadn't talked all this time, I had nothing to say. Surely they had moved on.

I waited a month to track down Callie. She was living in a big white house in Pasadena. Frank's hefty life-insurance policy had bought her a nice piece of property. Coming up the walk, I almost puked in the tulips. When Callie opened the door, she stood perfectly erect, her face motionless except for the tears streaming down her cheeks. We hugged and sat and talked, and I told her some of where I'd been. I lied, too-those lies of omission that had become part of who I was, blank spaces at the center of me. I said I'd fled because of guilt alone, and given what I'd done, that was plausible enough.

She gave me Frank's steamer trunk, which she'd filled with some of my personal things and held on to all these years. But after six months, we hardly saw each other. I still didn't want to risk telling her the whole truth, so there were buried land mines everywhere. And Callie had a whole other life that I didn't fit into, no matter how hard she tried to let me. I drove by her house a few times, sat in my car, and watched the impassive face of the large white house. And I heard an echo of the big guy's voice, just after he flipped me the envelope filled with traveler's checks. You don't talk about this to anyone. Ever. Or we '11 know. And we 7/ know who you talked to also. We won't be nearly as accommodating next go-round. To you or her I could no longer bring myself to stroll up that nice suburban walk and ring the doorbell. On my third or fourth trip, as night fell and the lights began clicking on upstairs, a neighbor slowed in passing to cast a suspicious glance at my crappy little Honda. The drawn reflection I saw in my rearview was alarming even to me. I had become that troubling watcher in the night. That dark, idling car at the curb, beyond the curtains. The thought of someone outside my mother's house, scaring her, finally drove me off for good.

I tried to resume my old life. But I quickly learned it wasn't there waiting for me. My friends, too, had moved or moved on. Seeing them brought home just how much I'd lost. How bad the damage was, burned into my character like a convict's brand. One day I'd been a seventeen-year-old with a Nintendo and a decent life forecast. The next I was a grown-up on the run. Secretive, itinerant, alone with my guilt and those dwindling traveler's checks. And then just my guilt.

I drove to Bob's Big Boy one night. I didn't get past the parking lot. The huge picture windows were lit up like a Norman Rockwell. All those kids eating and drinking, talking about movies and lying about getting laid. I was brought up short there outside, like a bum contemplating a lavish window display. I didn't think about everything I didn't have, but everything those kids did. Envy flared, of course, but when it burned away, I said a silent prayer for them, that their lives would stay blissfully uncomplicated, that for many more years they would be able to take everything for granted.

Hurwitz, Gregg