ONE
The air was cold at the top of the water tower. Kody could see the whole town and off into the Pine Barrens. All day he’d gotten ready, planned, prepared, scouted, held back seeing her. Ran reconnaissance. Now it was almost time.
He had no coat. Goose bumps rose on his skin. He shivered in jeans and a T-shirt. It was March, the magic hour.
He raised the binoculars and found Tella Carticelli’s little brick house. The last one on a dead-end street. Right across from the church. The school bus came and she stepped off and walked up the lawn. She was in her Catholic-school uniform, same as when he first met her. Ribbons in her hair. It was understood, they’d use the dress to start a campfire in the hills beyond the reservoir.
His name was Kody Rawlee Green. He called her Teal Cartwheels. They were the same age but went to different schools. It was the afternoon after his escape from the youth detention center and she was hours away from being stuck on an airplane.
She walked to the rhododendrons lining the front of the house, knelt down, and tilted back a concrete head of St. Anthony. But no spare house key was underneath it. She let St. Anthony fall and sat down on the front steps, waiting for her parents to come home.
He thought of himself as the pilot of a strange spaceship, lumbering back from utter blackness, controls set solely on the redemptive glory of Tella’s light.
The wind whipped and he shuddered and stomped his feet on the catwalk to warm up. From that distance he couldn’t see her face. He was growing impatient to be near her, hold her, kiss her, talk. There was a lot to say.
Usually he carried a locket with her picture, but it’d been taken from him by the sheriff and he never got it back. It was fine, he’d get another, take her picture again.
The locket she wore had a portrait of him snapped at Fried Paradise, dropping the breaded chicken into a vat of grease. He’d begged for a better photo, but she’d just smooched it and said he looked most handsome.
Teal didn’t have an after-school job. He used to be her after-school activity, in secret. All the while, her mom thought Tella was destined to become a nun.
My girlfriend the nun, he thought, laughing.
Things were in motion. He hugged himself hard. Teeth chattering. He’d wait for her parents to come home and he’d climb down the water tower when everything was perfect and he’d meet them for the first time. He’d reason with them. He’d drive over to Teal’s house and take her away. He didn’t have a driver’s license but he’d stolen a car.
Kody wished he had the orange scarf she’d knitted for him in home economics. He usually hated scarves but now wouldn’t mind one. Forget looking tough. And he wished they’d hurry the hell up.
He was giving her parents one last chance, though he didn’t feel they deserved it. Being diplomatic. He figured life should be like that. Free will and all. No destiny. You get to decide what you will be punished for. Don’t forget, everybody is punished for something.
In the distance, Kody saw a million black starlings swarm together in the sky to form a skull.
Spring was coming, they’d gotten that right.
Kody wasn’t sure if the birds were real. He had hallucinations all up and down a sliding scale. He had a constant headache too. He patted his pockets again but of course he didn’t have his pills. That was just too bad.
He reached in his jeans and took out the wrinkled letter from her father and read it for the hundredth time.
I have a gun now.
Kody loved that part.
He saw Arturo Carticelli’s beat-to-shit red pickup truck wobble down the block. Sand in the bed, broken shovels, rusted wheelbarrow. A lousy mason and father.
Arturo parked in the driveway and appeared from the cab, ghostly with cement dust. Curly hair, messy mustache. Kody wondered how he ever fit inside the cab of the truck. Tella hadn’t gotten her looks from that rhinoceros.
Teal sat up straight on the steps but did not stand. Arturo walked over and crouched in front of her. He spoke a few words. She didn’t respond. He touched her shoulder and kissed her on the mouth. She pulled away.
Arturo stood and went into the house. Tella remained seated. Now Kody thought she might be crying. He waved to get her attention but she couldn’t see him up there. He was too far. He didn’t want that to happen again. He wanted her to see him, wherever he was, for as long as they both lived. He wanted to make everything good for her.
Down below in the car, Kody had camping gear, the U.S. Army Survival Manual: FM 21-76, countless atlases of America. He had five changes of clothes. Canned goods. MREs. Some cash, unscratched lottery tickets, a stolen credit card, and, most important, a gun.
Mimi Carticelli’s silver Valiant rounded the corner and headed toward the dead end. Kody felt his pulse quicken. Teal’s beautiful mother. Smoke began to rise out of the chimney.
The last frozen night was on the way. The light was blue-gray steel and ice. The orange sun vanished over the soft curve of the earth. He worried he’d never glimpse another.
Everywhere he looked he saw pine trees, power lines, traffic lights, houses that all looked the same.
The water tower perch he stood on had a typo:
home of the screming eagles.
According to the water tower, the town was nameless. It existed merely for typos and high school football. It was a careless void in which they lived. But Kody and Teal were leaving.
Mimi stepped out onto the driveway. Long dark hair. A white dress with blue flowers or birds, he couldn’t tell. Shrug sweater around her shoulders. As a young adult she’d drifted on a raft made of tires, crossed the Atlantic from Havana. Now she was the assistant bank manager at the place over by the bowling alley.
Teal looked up at her mother. Mimi breezed by wordlessly into the house. They hadn’t spoken since Teal’s procedure.
Satisfied they were all home, Kody climbed down the ladder. One hundred and eighty feet. At the base of the tower, he was obscured by shadow and felt tiny again.
He knew he was being dramatic. Her parents had only heard horrible things about him from people who didn’t know how he really was. Teal had come to his defense, he was sure she had. It didn’t matter. Kody was coming to the house not only uninvited but forbidden.
This was his big debut. He tucked in his shirt and tried to smooth his cowlick, but his mouth was so dry he couldn’t get any spit.
Kody Rawlee Green got in the boosted car and started it after two attempts. The ignition was weird. Bats swooped out of the trees in pursuit of insects fleeing through the vivid dusk.
It was spaghetti night at the Carticelli house.
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