Ravens
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Synopsis
When Shaw McBride and Romeo Zderko drive into the small town of
Disguised as a state lottery representative, Shaw enters the Boatwright's home and holds the family hostage, while Romeo patrols the town, staking out the homes of the family's loved ones, should the Boatwrights refuse to comply with their demands. But Shaw isn't your average criminal out to make a quick buck. Instead, he has a grand messianic vision and he'll stop at nothing to see it through -- and soon, the Boatwrights find themselves living a Flannery O'Connor American nightmare from which they can't properly awaken.
At once frightening, comic, and suspenseful, RAVENS is a wholly original and utterly compelling novel from one of our most talented writers.
Release date: July 15, 2009
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Print pages: 336
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Ravens
George Dawes Green
front of the car. The impact was disturbingly gentle. No thud — just a soft unzipping, beneath the chassis. Still, it tore at Romeo’s heart. He braked and pulled over.
Shaw awoke. “What’s wrong?”
“Hit something,” said Romeo, and he got out and started walking back up I-77, hunting for the carcass. Shaw followed him.
A tractor-trailer bore down on them with a shudder and the long plunging chord of its passing. Then the night got quiet. They
could hear their own footsteps. Cicadas, and a sliver of far-off honkytonk music. “God,” said Shaw. “This is it. We’re really
in the South.”
But they found no trace of the animal.
They walked quite a ways. They waited for headlights so they could scan up and down the highway. They backtracked and searched
along the shoulder. Nothing — not so much as a bloodstain. Finally Romeo just stood there, watching the fireflies rise and
fall.
“Hey,” said Shaw, “I bet your friend got lucky.”
“Uh-uh. I hit it.”
“Well maybe it was like a sacrifice.” Playfulness in Shaw’s tone. “Maybe it just wanted us to have a propitious journey.”
When they got back to the Tercel Shaw said he was wide awake and could he drive? That was fine with Romeo. He got in on the
passenger side, and they descended into the North Carolina piedmont. His ears popped; the air grew humid. He tilted his seat
all the way back and looked up at the moon as it shredded in the pines. Somewhere after Elkin, NC, he let his eyes slip shut
for just a second — and then the highway started to curve beneath him, and he felt himself spiraling slowly downward, into
a bottomless slumber.
Tara kept away from the house on Wednesday nights.
Wednesday nights were jackpot nights. Mom would start drinking early. Pour herself a g&t in a lowball glass; then fan out
all her lottery tickets on the coffee table and gaze lovingly at them, and touch them one by one and wonder which was going
to be the one. The TV would be on but Mom would disregard it. All her thoughts on the good life to come. Yachts, spas in Arizona, blazing
white villages in Greece, the unquenchable envy of her friends. She’d finish her first drink and fix herself another. Her
boy Jase — Tara’s little brother — would put his head in her lap while he played with his Micro. She’d tousle his hair. She’d
swirl the ice in her drink. At some point the colors of the dying day, and the TV colors, and all the colors of her life,
would begin to seem extra-vivid, even gorgeous, and she’d tell herself she was the blessedest woman in the world, and pick
up her cell phone and text her daughter:
I know we win tonite!!
Or:
I need u!! Tara baby!! My good luck charm!! Where are u? Come home!!
They were siren calls though, Tara knew. She had to be deaf to them. Study late at the library, catch a movie, hang out with
Clio at the mall — just keep clear of the house till the jackpot was done and Dad would come home to take the brunt of Mom’s
drunken post-drawing tirade. By midnight Mom would have worn herself out with rage and grief, and she’d have passed out, and
the coast would be clear.
But on this particular Wednesday, Tara had made a blunder. She’d left her botany textbook, with all the handouts, in her bedroom.
She’d done this in the morning but she didn’t realize it till 7:00 p.m., after her organic chemistry class, when she checked
her locker and saw that the book wasn’t there.
She had a quiz tomorrow. She hadn’t even looked at that stuff.
She thought of calling Dad. Maybe he could sneak the book out to her. But no, it was too late. He’d be on his way to church
by now, his Lions of Judah meeting. Maybe Jase? No, Jase would tip Mom off; Jase was in Mom’s pocket.
No. What I have to do, Tara thought, is just go back there and be really docile and don’t let Mom draw me into a fight, whatever she says don’t fight back —and first chance I get I’ll slip away to my room before
the drawing, before she blows up.
Tara went to the parking lot and got in her battered Geo, and left the campus of the Coastal Georgia Community College. Fourth
Street to Robin Road to Redwood Road: streets she despised. She hated their dull names and their blank lawns and their rows
of squat brick ranch houses. Hers was the squattest and brickest of all, on a street called Oriole Road. When she got there,
she slowed the car to a crawl, and looked in through the living room window. Mom, the TV. The painting of Don Quixote tilting
at windmills. The wooden shelf of Dad’s # 3 Chevy models, and Mom’s Hummels. Jase’s feet stuck out at the end of the couch.
Everything that Tara despised about her home was glowing and warm-looking like an advertisement for low mortgage rates or
pest control, and such a depressing show she had to call Clio and tell her about it.
“I’m spying on my own house.”
Said Clio, “That’s kind of perverted.”
“It’s a really ugly house.”
“I know.”
“I can see my brother’s little marinated pigs’ feet.”
“OK.”
“But I have to see how drunk Mom is.”
“How drunk is she?”
“That’s the problem, I can’t tell. I can’t see her hands. I have to see how she’s holding her glass. If she’s swirling her
glass with her pinky out, then I’m already in deep shit.”
“Are you going in there?”
“I have to.”
“But isn’t this your Mom’s freak-out night?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So what are you doing there? Come over to Headquarters. You know who’s coming? That Kings of Unsnap guy. Jonah. The one who wants to do you.”
“You told me that, Clio.”
“So come let him do you.”
“I got a botany quiz in the morning.”
“Oh God. You’re such a boring geek.”
“Why don’t you do him?”
“OK,” said Clio. “You talked me into it.”
“You’re such a whoring slut.”
“I know. Hey I gotta go. If your Mom does something interesting, like touching your little brother’s weewee or something,
let me know.”
“I’ll send you the pics,” said Tara. “You can post them.” She hung up, and sighed, and pulled into the carport.
As soon as she stepped into the living room, Mom was at her: “Where were you?” Tara consulted the lowball glass and saw that the swirling was quick and syncopated, with the pinky fully extended, which
presaged a grim night.
“I was in class.”
“You should call me when you’re gonna be this late.”
Not late, Tara thought, but drop it.
Mom kept pressing. “Which class was it?”
“Um. Organic chemistry.”
“Why you taking that?”
Leave it alone. The only goal is freedom. “I don’t know, I guess it’s some kind of a requirement.”
“But if you’re only gonna be a goddamn whatever — why do they make you take organic chemistry?”
Tara shrugged.
Said Mom, “They want all our money and what they teach you is worthless.”
Hard to let that pass. Inasmuch as Mom contributed not a cent to her tuition — inasmuch as every penny came from Tara’s job
at the bank plus help from her grandmother Nell plus a small scholarship, and all she got from her parents was room and board
for which she paid $450 a month so that wasn’t a gift either — it was a struggle not to snap back at her. But what good would
that do? Remember, all you want is to get to your room. Remember, this woman is the same birdnecked alien you were just watching
through the living room window a moment ago. Pretend there’s no family connection, that you’re invisible and you can slip
away unnoticed at any time —
“Wait. Sit for a minute. The drawing’s coming up.”
“Got a quiz tomorrow, Mom. So I should probably —”
“You know what it’s worth this time?”
Tara shook her head.
“You’re kidding me,” said Mom. “You really don’t know?”
“I really don’t.”
“Three hundred and eighteen million dollars.”
“Wow.”
The sum touched Tara’s life in no meaningful way, but she thought if she showed sufficient awe maybe Mom would release her.
“Though if you take the lump sum,” said Mom, “then after you pay your taxes, you’d only have a hundred some million.”
“Oh.”
“Like a hundred twenty-odd. Hardly worth bothering, right? You mind freshening this for me? So I won’t disturb the Little
Prince here?”
Mom swirled her glass.
On the TV was Nip/Tuck, which wasn’t appropriate for ten-year-old Jase but then he wasn’t watching it anyway. He was playing Revenant on his Micro. Oblivious as ever — and Tara was happy to ignore him back. She carried Mom’s glass to the kitchen, filled it
with ice and Bombay and tonic, cut a thin half-wheel of lime and placed it festively. Be solicitous, servile. Try to soften
her. Don’t resist in any way.
But when she returned, Mom was holding up a thin windowed envelope, a bill from some credit card company, and demanding: “Know
how I got this? Came right to the office. Angela gave it to me. I didn’t even know this bill existed. It’s for seven hundred dollars. Your father never mentioned it.”
What would be the least resistant reply possible? Tara tried, “That’s awful, Mom.”
“Awful? It’s the most humiliating thing that can ever happen to anyone. Anyone. Ever. Of course your father isn’t worried. Your father thinks we’ll be fine.”
“Well, won’t we?”
Oh, that was dumb. That was way too cheerful. Mom pounced. “You don’t get it at all, do you? They’re gonna foreclose. They’re gonna take our house. They’re gonna take it out from under our feet and take the damn Liberty with it. You’re gonna have to leave school. I’m
sorry, cupcake. You’re gonna have to start producing some income.”
“Mom, I’m a little tired. Would you mind if I —”
“Do you think I’m not tired? I am so damn tired of being this poor and your father in total denial and you kids thinking this is some kind of bad dream we’re gonna
wake up from! We’re gonna lose everything, do you not get it? This boat is sinking. Nobody’s gonna bail us out. The boat is going down! I mean, baby, sugar-cake, you’re gonna have to start swimming. You’re gonna —”
But then came a fanfare on the TV, and instantly Mom left off. She gave Jase a little swat and he hustled out of her way,
and she leaned forward to check her flotilla of tickets.
“And now,” said a somber announcer, “here’s tonight’s drawing for the Max-a-Million jackpot. Tonight’s jackpot is worth… three
hundred and eighteen milly-on dollars.”
No one onscreen. Just the voice of that undertaker. And a hopper in the shape of a funeral urn, full of lightly waltzing plastic
balls. One of them flew up suddenly on a puff of air and rolled down a serpentine ramp and posed itself before the camera.
“The first number is… tuh-wenty-seven.”
Mom murmured, “Uh-huh. Got that here.” Trying for indifference. But her eyes were full of eagerness.
Tara quietly cheated a few steps toward the hall.
“The next number is forty-two.”
“Well I do have that,” said Mom.
And Tara made her move. Melted silkily away while Mom was too dazzled by the numbers to notice.
In her room, Tara shut the door and sat at the laptop on her desk. Clio had just posted:
u still "studying" bitch? do u think jonah wrights sperm has beneficial properties of healing? wil it help u lose pounds from
hips waist and thighs? he wasn't at headquarters tho just creepy seth from jax. I h8 the wick. die if I dont getout of the
wick.
Tara wrote back:
Havent started yet. Caught by Mom. She's watching the drawing. In 20 seconds she'l lose and go skitzo.
And right on time: Mom’s hell-on-the-loose shriek from the living room. Worse even than usual. Then: “TARA! TA-RA!”
Tara typed brb and opened the door. “Yes?”
“TARA!”
Particularly anguished tonight. Tara returned to the living room to find her on her knees before the TV, with Jase cowering
in the corner. Mom had utterly lost it. Her mouth was open and she was holding up one of her tickets and tears were pouring
down her cheeks, and this wasn’t just another drunken display of self-pity: there was true fear. “GRACE OF GOD!” she cried.
As though she were beholding His face at that very moment. She clutched the ticket in her fist and rocked back and forth.
“GRACE OF GOD! GRACE OF GOD! GRACE OF GOD!”
Shaw was roasting to death. So feeble the a.c. in this ’91 Tercel that he had to leave the windows open or die. Though the air
that came in was as hot as jet exhaust, so he was dying anyway. For a while he crowded up to a big rig in the next lane, for
the shade. But the truck turned off at a weigh station and left him in the oven again, and he hadn’t slept for more than twenty-four
hours and he’d been behind the wheel all night with only the one nap at that rest stop near Charlotte, and he was jacked to
the gills on Red Bull, coffee, and Dextrostat. And the Georgia landscape was nothing but slash pine and ribbon-of-highway,
forever. Also Romeo’s sleeping was getting on his nerves. Romeo had been sleeping ferociously since the mountains: sweating,
shivering, sometimes grinding his teeth, which annoyed the hell out of Shaw. It was high time to wake him up.
But not yet. Less than an hour to Florida. He could deal with the heat. It had been another cold miserable Ohio spring and
now Florida by his calculations was fifty-six minutes away. If he endured the heat and the boredom, and stayed at eighty-one
miles an hour, they could be in Florida in fifty-five minutes and… forty seconds — more or less, and stop for breakfast in
Florida.
Then he noticed the pull. There was a slight shimmy in the wheel, coaxing him to the left. He thought he knew what it was.
The left front tire had a slow leak, which Romeo was supposed to have checked before the trip, but he must have forgotten.
Shaw took the next exit. There were four gas stations, but all he wanted was air, so it didn’t matter: he chose one at random.
He drove up to the air hose at the side of the lot.
After he cut the engine, it still seemed that the world was hurtling along.
He got out and picked up the air hose, and found that the pressure gauge was busted. He knew Romeo wouldn’t have one. He went
into the store. It called itself ‘Chummy’s Gourmet Shoppe’, but it was just standard convenience-store junk. Chips and salsa,
banks of candy, a great wall of electrified soda. The air was sweetly cool though. And the counter girl had nice upstanding
breasts under her T-shirt.
“Hi,” she said, and it had a Southern flip at the end. His first Southern girl. He’d met girls from the South before but this
was the first girl he’d met in the South. Her nametag said Cheryl. He ran his tongue over his teeth to clean them, and wished he had something clever to
say back. But he couldn’t think of anything.
“You got like a tire gauge?” he asked. “I have to check my tires.”
She placed a much-worn gauge on the counter. “Don’t drive off with it.”
“I won’t.”
She gave him a warm smile.
He went out to the Tercel and squatted beside the left front tire and tried not to touch the hubcap. He read the pressure
at 28 psi, which seemed not too low considering. He gave it a few jolts of air, then went and read the rear tires, which were
right at 30 so they were fine.
Romeo’s door swung open, and his voice came out: “Sup?”
“Car’s sort of pulling.”
“Where we at?”
“Georgia.”
“They weren’t shitting about the heat, were they?”
If it wasn’t the tires, Shaw thought, it was probably the alignment. Or even the bearing. It had better not be the bearing.
He’d agreed to split costs on this trip, but he wasn’t paying half on a new fucking bearing when it was Romeo’s car. Maybe
they could ignore it. Just nurse it as far as Key West and then sell it (the plan was to hire out on fishing boats and work
their way to Trinidad and never return to their zombie jobs at Dayton Techworld).
He went up to check the right front. He thought about the clerk again. At least this would give him an opening with her. He
could go back in and say, “The tires were OK. I guess my car was just pulling me — it wanted me to come in here.” Should he
leave it like that? Subtle, mysterious? Or should he explain how there were lines of power running under the Earth, called
ley lines, and vortices where they crossed, and how these vortices could act as huge magnets? Well. That might strike her
as too weird.
Maybe he should just say, “My car likes blondes.”
God. Yes. He was a thousand miles from Piqua, Ohio, and nobody was here to judge him except Romeo, and his judgment didn’t count.
Why not say whatever comes to mind?
As he was going back into the store, a truck pulled up: one of those TV satellite trucks. WSAV from Savannah. It wasn’t coming
for gas. It pulled off quietly to the side, and Shaw watched for a moment as the driver got out, and then this smartly dressed
dude who was probably the reporter, then some other guy. They conferred amongst themselves. Shaw felt stupid just standing
there watching, so he went in.
Cheryl wasn’t at the counter anymore. Some Asian guy now. On his cell phone, talking animatedly in Chinese or Korean or whatever.
Shaw handed over the tire gauge and the guy took it without a glance and went back to chirping into the phone.
Then Shaw noticed Cheryl standing by the front window, looking out at the TV truck. She had her back to him. He approached
her, thinking he could still say the thing about blondes. But she was also on the phone, and she seemed excited about something.
Saying, “He’s like friends with my brother? They’re both in third grade? And he’s bragging how it’s his family that won.”
A little pause. Then she said, “Yeah, but Ashley, nobody even knew this was the store! It hasn’t been announced yet! And they
buy tickets here all the time.”
Another pause. Then she said, “No, he owns that copier place. They’re like, I know them, they go to Renewal. Oh shit. Well,
you’ll hear about it tomorrow!” She laughed.
She became aware of Shaw. “Hold on,” she told her friend. She asked Shaw, “Help you?”
“I brought your gauge back.”
“What?”
“I mean, it wasn’t the tires. It was the, just, it was, you know, pulling.”
“Pulling?”
“Like my car was pulling me here.”
“Oh.”
She had no idea what he was talking about, and didn’t care. She was checking out another TV truck pulling into the lot. She
told the phone, “Oh my god, there’s another one! From Jax! Ashley, I gotta go.” Calling out, “Mr. Hu! Here’s another TV station!”
The Asian guy said, “Call Courtney, tell her come in! And find Wes!”
When she turned away from the window, she was surprised to find Shaw still standing there. “You all set?” she said.
He asked her, “How come those trucks are out there?”
“Um. ’Cause we sold the ticket outta this store.”
“What ticket?”
“For the jackpot.”
“Out of this store?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How much?”
She gestured to a sign, by the lottery display. THIS WEEK’S MAX-A-MILLION JACKPOT IS WORTH… Under which someone had written,
in magic marker: “$318,000,000.00.”
The reach of it, the vastness, caught him in the gut.
“That’s. Millions?”
She nodded. Already dialing another friend.
He tried to steady his breath. “And you know the winners?”
She shook her head. “No. Nobody does. They have to come forward. Could be weeks.” Her call went through and she left him,
telling the phone, “Hey, Rosemary. Guess what?”
Why had she lied to him? Telling him nobody knew who won, when he’d just heard her gossiping about the winners. She’d probably
seen him checking the tires on the Tercel, which looked like an old beat-up filing cabinet on wheels — and had zero respect
for him, and thought he wasn’t worth sharing this secret with.
And did he give a shit? The girl was a clerk in a palace of crap in the middle of nowhere, she was empty-headed and kind of
unpretty, and did he give a damn what she thought about his car?
But he did, he realized. He was all worked up. A shaft of anger had opened inside him.
He walked down the aisle that led to the ATM. Planning to withdraw some cash, but then he couldn’t bear to. He couldn’t face
his paltry balance. He stopped beside the Party Time ice chest, which looked like a pirate’s chest, with loose pieces of ice
glittering and smoldering, and he considered that while he had all of nine hundred fifty dollars to spend on this whole vacation,
someone else had just won three hundred eighteen million. Out of the blue! Thrown away on a family of South Georgia nothings! And would they even have a clue how to use it? No. In
fact it was bound to destroy whatever meager happiness they had. Leave them feeling unloved, untrusting, miserable. Prey to
any scavenger who got a whiff of their feast. He heard Cheryl laugh into her phone, and the sound came to him like fingernails
scraping down a blackboard, and he walked out into the sunlight just as the TV crews were coming in, and he thought, goddamn
this shitshack to hell.
Romeo was awake by now but still sleep-paralyzed. It seemed like a good idea to get out of this frypan and go take a leak. But
that would have required unfolding his legs, raising up the seat, brushing the crumbs off his shirt. So he stayed where he
was. He lay there and looked out idly at the TV trucks and wondered what all the commotion was about. He was still turning
this over when Shaw opened the door.
“What’s with the TV trucks?”
“It’s ’cause you’re such a star, Romeo. They’re stalking you.” Shaw snapped off the music and started the engine. To deal
with the scorching steering wheel, he grabbed a T-shirt from the backseat and made it into an oven pad. He drove out of the
lot.
He was in one of his moods. The kind of mood he got into only when some girl had snubbed him.
Said Romeo, “I gotta take a leak.”
“Should have thought of that sooner.” Shaw pulled out into the four-lane — but away from the interstate. A sign said DOWNTOWN BRUNSWICK.
Said Romeo, “I was asleep. Could we go back there for a second?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Place is full of shit.”
“She was that fuckable?”
“Who, the clerk? Who cares about the clerk?”
So he had been dissed. The clerk must have flirted with him on account of his charming skewed smile — but then he’d come on a little
too odd, or too needy, and she’d shut him down. Happened all the time. And these rejections always got him going. But this
time his pique seemed to be mixed w. . .
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