The night Jerry killed Riley, Mimi Yow threw the biggest house party of the semester. Out of the blue her parents decided to spend the weekend at their other house in San Tropez, and all morning Mimi had rallied the cheerleaders and the football team, the hoodied toughs, the fledgling stoners with the pot connects. By lunch word had spread to the theater kids and the semi-attractive overachievers; even Topher Pinkus, who was best remembered for wetting himself during a fire drill several years back, was talking about how tonight was his night. There were whispers that a fraternity from the nearby college would be supplying not one, but three kegs, and the long-running hostility between Chad Hanrahan and Welsh Dixon was expected to culminate in a jealous brawl.

At precisely nine twenty-two that evening, Riley strapped on his cleats and tightened the chinstrap of the CHS football helmet that would be a deciding factor in his fate. He was going to do the pool jump. As a child he’d demonstrated an unusual and slightly alarming capacity for hurtling long distances, clearing deckchairs, parking spaces, and rows of cousins laid side by side as easily as if he had springs embedded in his ankles. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” his grandfather once asked him, dandling the young Riley upon his knee. “A kangaroo,” Riley answered, and promptly flung himself out of the chair and onto the nearby kitchen counter. He dislodged one of his front teeth in a keening miscalculation, but his mother could never understand why he’d gone out for football.

At the moment Riley pounced from the roof of Mimi Yow’s guesthouse into the far end of her swimming pool, Jerry was backing out of his driveway on Lawngood Circle. Steve Miller was still on the radio, and Jerry still hated Steve Miller. Steve Miller reminded him of all the advice his brother had ever given him on the opposite sex — be more open! be more confident! you're the gangster of love! — and how the handful of times he’d actually acted on this advice his personality had become infinitesimally closer to that of Steve Miller; a preening, entitled jerkoff; and how, during that brief period in his thirties when he’d taken his brother’s advice to heart, he’d met and eventually won Cherise. Cherise, who’d followed him into the suburbs; who’d bore him his only son, Sandy; who would never get to know the “real” Jerry; who was now sending what was evidently the “fake” Jerry out for the special chanterelles they didn’t stock on Saturdays. Steve Miller was responsible for this, Jerry thought. Steve Miller was responsible for the deception that was his entire life.

Less than two miles away, Riley lifted himself out of Mimi Yow’s pool and began to run. He wasn’t sure why — he just started running. Maybe it was the roar of the crowd, or maybe it was the feel of the brown liquor mixing with his blood. The wind felt good on his face, and he didn’t even notice when his cleats became untied. Behind him, Welsh Dixon clipped Chad Hanrahan in the ear (“Now pony up, fucker!”), and Topher Pinkus, who was about to wet himself again, albeit for entirely different reasons, cried, “I can’t believe he actually did it!”

It’s not true what they say about how time slows down those few flashing seconds before something terrible happens. It’s happening, and then it’s over, and then you have to figure out how to manage the rest of your life. That was what Jerry realized between when Riley barreled wailing over the roof of his car and when he buried him, bloody and rigid, in the woods behind Freebo’s Gas.

What had the kid been thinking, leaping out into the road like that? He had obviously been drunk; his cleats were untied — cleats! — and the chinstrap of his football helmet dangled oafishly, like a rope of drool. In the red of his brake lights Jerry could see the crumpled figure, the bone protruding from below the knee. Stupid! he thought. Drunk moron! He frowned into his windshield, into the broad spiderwebbing fissure. The more reality dawned on him, the more it struck him as unfair. He’d only looked away for a second; he’d been changing the song on the radio. This couldn’t be his fault. Steve Miller, that was whose fault it was.

“Call the hospital,” Riley said as Jerry knelt over him. “Call my mom.”

His face was narrow, with an almost feminine angularity betraying the recent divestment of baby fat. The unpruned hedges of throat hair, the dark congestions of acne remarkably free from cuts and scratches: that helmet had done its job. Jerry tried not to look at the knee; already he was feeling sick. Human scaffolding, he told himself — that was all it was. Structural matter, no different than a tooth.

“I’m I’m I’m I’m I’m.”

The way he saw it, his options were dwindling by the minute. They played out in an instant, magnetizing towards their outcomes in breathless sequence. Scenario A: he calls the hospital. He stands around as the EMS workers grimly bear the kid away, perhaps calling Cherise to tell her that the chanterelles were going to have to wait. He answers whatever questions the cops need to ask him (“And then he just jumped out. I thought he was a goddamn deer.”) as pliant, as obliging as silly putty. He’d take the breathalyzer, he’d walk the yellow line. And that night he might even sleep in his own bed. But there would be court dates. There would be a suit from Riley’s parents. Oh yes. People had been sued over far less in this town. Ralph Dotter had been taken for everything he had after his lawnmower sent a small rock zipping through a neighbor’s window. Last Jerry heard, he was pulling shakes at the Fleetwood Dairy Frost to make ends meet. In fact, at this very moment he was probably mopping up some teenager’s marshmallow-dyed upchuck. Ralph Dotter, in his little paper hat. A family man.

So, scenario B: he does nothing and continues on his merry way. Leave the moron to bleed. Why should Jerry suffer for this brain trust’s failure to look both ways? Look at his car — he oughtta be suing him! And Jerry or no Jerry, someone was bound to notice a moaning, disfigured football player flopped in the gutter. He would get his precious medical attention. And Cherise would get her chanterelles.

But that was just it. Somebody was bound to notice. There were the houses, observant and yellow-lit, and there was Jerry, and there was Jerry’s license plate. Hell, even the kid could read it if he pulled that clunky helmet out of the way.

That goddamn helmet. If only he’d been dressed like a normal person, if only the force of the windshield hadn’t been blunted on impact, if only the helmet had come loose as Riley went sailing into the night sky, higher and farther than he’d ever sailed before. As Jerry lifted Riley into the trunk of his used LaSabre, he blamed that helmet most of all.

~  

A car verges out of the parking lot and onto the unlit turnpike. Everywhere there are lurking speed traps, Amish wagons tricked out with electronic turn signals, roadside ads for a local meatpacking enterprise, Meatland, which also does weddings and business events. This is Jerry’s car, tooling towards the highway, and Jerry is inside of it. The window has been fixed, but the four ragged cleat marks are still visible along the hood, the scratches he tells Cherise are antler marks from the deer he pulverized. If that deer had been real, its body would have sunken back into the earth by now; its bones would be picked clean.

It had all flown apart like chalk.

The planning, the subterfuge, and the missed days of work. The million tiny dishonesties that clotted into something like an independent lifeform. The evasions, the forced genialities, the pretending to sleep, the pretending to listen, the pretending to give a fuck when Sandy told him his Frankenstein paper got second place in the First Quarter Roundup. The way every decision became deeply contingent, all of them nested in dependencies and unforeseen consequences, Troika dolls of possibility.

He floored it the moment he hit freeway. East Pennsylvania, sound barriers and weak hills. His cell phone chirped in the cupholder — Cherise, who would realize that he was gone by now, that he wasn’t merely out strolling the lobby or taking a dip in the lap pool. She’d see that the car was gone, and for a time she would wonder if he’d only run out to the liquor store, or maybe he’d forgotten something at the restaurant, a credit card or a glove. She’d return to their cramped country room, with its double bed and rustic B&B furnishings, and as the local channels phased into their nighttime infomercials (reading lamps! carving knives!) she would begin to wonder.

He hit the silent button. He remembered the night they met.

“This music’s really good!” he said. Jersey courtship, 1990.

“It makes me want to dance!” said the leaning, narrow-faced woman who was Cherise. The bar, a place called Spur of the Moment, was a leathery crater dense with cigarette smoke, specializing in squalid restroom conditions and homegrown cocktails with names like “The Lester.”

“It makes me want to fuck!” said Jerry.

Three months and they heard wedding bells.

All his life Jerry swore he wouldn’t end up in the suburbs, but Jerry swore a lot of things. He swore he’d never work for someone younger or dumber than he was. He swore he’d never drive anything weaker than a V6. He swore he’d never cover up if he started balding; he would be one of those badass bald guys who buff their scalp with sandpaper and you can see the arteries throbbing as they heft their metal lunch pails. He swore he’d never have children.

Each evening, if there was enough light by the time he returned from work, he would change into sneakers and walk to the beach. He didn’t particularly like the beach. He would scowl at the teams of golf-visored grandmothers and the small jumping children unspooling their kites. What was the point of a kite? They just hang there like huge painted mosquitoes and shrink into hazy blots until you can’t see them at all, or they swoop collapsing towards your feet, buckling the frame and ensuring the futility of all future operation. Then the parents rush out to one of Main Street’s ubiquitous trinket huts, where they replace it with something larger, uglier, and more expensive. The polystyrene circle of life.

But it was better than hanging around the house. The truth was that this was Cherise’s world, not his: the boat shows, the brunches, and the claustrophobic swelter-thons known as neighborhood cookouts. But it was part of what he’d signed on for after he made head bookkeeper, after Sandy was born, after the crouching, joint-cracking commuter class came to encompass his best possible future. But every time she came home with another wrought iron garden bunny or sat on the porch rereading Help! I’m Famous!, the runaway bestseller ghostwritten for one square-jawed star or another, he could feel what little remained of his dignity shriveling up and evaporating.

“What’s that look for?” she’d say. “Shoot me, it’s a funny book.”

“It’s nothing. What do you mean? This is the way my face looks.”

And it was. At least since the accident — in his head he referred to it as the accident — his face had been frozen in a worried rictus, the kind of expression worn by stewardesses and perturbed waiters. Then came the page-long feature, sweeping and monolithic with three separate reporters, which said a local athlete had disappeared. When he saw the yearbook photo, it was all Jerry could do to resist tearing out the page and balling it quickly into his mouth.

Sandy was the one who noticed when the walks got longer. “Are you having a midlife crisis or something?” he said, and Cherise covered what could’ve been a sigh. “Don’t tell me you’re gonna buy a Camaro and start doing aromatherapy.”

“Eat your mushrooms,” Jerry told him. That evening he deposited himself in the rough sand — so different from real sand, island sand — and watched a group of teenagers cavorting in the surf, black and orange bathing suits no more substantial than witty Censored bars. He remembered what he’d been like at that age. Most of the time he’d been too sullen and pointedly morose to bother making friends, swaddling his timidity in a gauze of romantic asceticism. Forever he would walk alone, the lonely road of the irreproachable, a road he wandered with no apparent destination in mind. Even here, as one of the girls wet her midriff and tittered, he could feel the old tang of resentment rising in the back of his throat.

This thing. The accident. He had to keep it under control.

And that’s what he was doing, now. Mile markers, station bleed, featureless PA plates. He merged into the fast lane. This is Jerry handling it. This is Jerry taking control.

 

“It makes me want to dance!”

“It makes me want to fuck!”

Okay. It was sloppy and inappropriate and perhaps even a tiny bit sinister. But it still made Cherise smile when she thought about it, which was more often than she expected. The words would come to her as she was tearing out recipes or dropping off overdue library books or reaching for the Advil she’d dropped under the bed, and in her amusement she would catch her hair in one of the springs.

It was true that they’d rushed into things, but what difference did that make as long as they were satisfied? The surrealism was not lost on her; two perfect strangers, and all of a sudden they were sharing a home. Jerry, tall and stoop-shouldered and looking like the ragged king of the benders the first time she laid eyes on him — and then one day they were apportioning finances, pounding Ikea furniture together. She was in the living room watching the UPS truck go by, and Jerry was lifting Sandy by the hem of his blue onesie and pretending to stuff him into the mailbox and then mail him. She could hear him through the glass: “Where do you put the stamp on this thing?” He smiled, the broad, rumpled expression that lately had been replaced by a look of morose cluelessness.

Was it work? Was it her? Was it something else? Ever since the accident with the deer, something had changed in him, rattled loose along with the front bumper. His usual evening walks swelled in length, worrisome nocturnal wanderings closer to planned disappearances than bouts of exercise, and what to make of the time she’d seen him bent over the newspaper in obvious distress, as if he’d just seen his own name on the obits page?

Perhaps it was more truthful to say that she’d finally gotten to know him.

“Anyone for dessert?” She lifted one of her Tupperware containers from the fridge, retrieving an old yogurt cup from inside. “Heaven,” she said as the sludge touched her lips, her eyes closing as if no greater delicacy had ever been conceived by man.

“Why don’t you just open a new one?” Jerry said. Was he even aware of the thorn in his voice?

“Oh, do you want one? Here, you can finish this.”

“That’s not what I said.”

“No, finish it! I’m insisting.”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“Well, take something else, then.”

“Look, we’ve got about two hundred of those things sitting in there. They cost about seventy-five cents apiece. I know this because I picked up ten of them the other night. Now, is it absolutely necessary to save every decaying edible we bring into this house, while whole buckets of perfectly fresh food are going to waste? I mean, please. Treat yourself. It’s not like you don’t do enough of that already, you and your — ” He fished for a suitable example. “Lawn bunnies.”

She’d rifled through the recycling that night, determined to uncover the root of Jerry’s sudden mercurialness. There was the article covering the Colonial Days Parade Sandy had marched in, and the feature about the football player who evidently used to force her son to consume the crud and bug-parts lodged in the blacktop grout, the boy who had disappeared.

That was a troubling thing. Since it went public, the school had issued a series of mass-email bulletins entreating parents to keep tabs on their children’s whereabouts, advising them to limit their play-radii and to install GPS trackers on their cellphones. There were rumors: a kidnapper, a basement dungeon. Where was that swimming coach, Mr. Prindle, who had taken such an interest during the boy’s preadolescent years? Where were Barbara and Emanuel Yow, whose home, the place Riley McIlvenny had last been sighted, was the site of the party now being called “A Bacchanalian Spree”?

“I know we’re all supposed to be sad and stuff,” Sandy said after the first e-mails went out. “But that guy was an asshole. I’m sorry. But wherever he is, somebody did the world a favor.”

She dropped her fork, made some vague scolding comment about attitude. But Jerry, Jerry only looked down into the reflection of his plate. If what she saw in his face wasn’t exactly empathy, it was obvious that the story had really him torn up. Maybe it had something to do with his diet, or the time of the month. Cherise had always believed that men had their cycles, too, their own gulches of mood and frantic biology.

But when she ran into Carol McIlvenny in the produce aisle, she was swept by a chilly unease that engulfed her other concerns, an inky storm cloud slowly spreading to envelop the sky. The woman’s makeup was dense, shiny, and hastily applied, the face of a ceramic figurine or an eerie replacement cast of one’s most neutral expression. She said, “Thank you,” and, “I appreciate that,” and, “I’ll be sure to pass that along,” her appearance unchanging, her voice as free-floating and rehearsed as an answering machine message. Then she put her leeks in a plastic bag and walked away.

What if something were to happen to Sandy? What if someone were to follow him past the abandoned gas station between the school and the place where he parked his car; what if they were defective in all the critical places and weren’t interested in money? Would her face become waxy and impassive, would the world continue unabated, with no cry or fanfare except for a page-long feature that shared space with the horoscopes?

“Jerry,” she said, pulling the blanket up to her shoulders. He breathed thickly through his nose. “Jerry,” she said, “Are you awake?”

 

The good news was that he was in New Jersey. He turned on his high beams, delighting for a moment in the sheer absurdity of that sentiment. New Jersey meant he was almost in New York, which meant he was almost in Connecticut, which meant he would again be within shouting distance of the place that, on his best days, could only be thought of as the breeding ground for the worst news imaginable. He would be with the boy soon.

A pair of sirens flashed ahead of him, some boozing high schoolers pulled over in the breakdown lane. They had them kneeling on the pavement with their hands folded and cuffed, and as one of the officers spoke into his walkie-talkie Jerry quickly reduced his speed. The humiliation of it. Always they were looking to humiliate you.

In a way, the boy was already with him. Aside from the cleat marks, there was the gouge in the bumper and the fissured headlight; there was the shoelace he’d discovered wrapped mysteriously around one of the windshield wipers, which he’d knotted into a flimsy hoop and secreted at the bottom of the console. There were the hard, dark little splotches in the trunk, the dime-sized stains he’d been unable to get out. The ones that, after he’d exploded at Cherise (“You and your — lawn bunnies”), he’d wanted to thrust her and Sandy’s faces into and scream, “Don’t you see what I’ve done for you? Don’t you see? Look at it!”

Obviously, that was out of the question. He lived underground now. That was what he had repeated to himself as he weeded the garden, as he picked up his shirts from the dry cleaners, as he rode the train to work in the morning. I’m living underground, I’m living underground. A mantra, like in meditation. He repeated it in the shower. He repeated it in his sleep. And once, when Cherise asked him if he was ever going to take the car in or did he need to get it towed, he nearly repeated it out loud.

The Real Jerry was living underground, weighing the variables, making the hard decisions. The Fake Jerry handled the dirty work. The Fake Jerry was the getaway driver.

“I’m sorry. But wherever he is, somebody did the world a favor.”

The Real Jerry sat on the beach, making a timeline in his head. Riley’s parents — Riley, the boy’s name was Riley — would struggle to keep the investigation open for months, maybe years. Priorities would inevitably shift, but for now, with the press attention and the whole town up in arms, it was likely that he would have to continue on this way until the next local flare-up knocked Riley off the front page. It was with perverse delight that he contemplated new, beguiling machinations of chaos, ghastly biological outbreaks and flaming eighteen-wheelers sent blundering into town hall. He’d don a hockey mask and perch himself in the cell tower bordering I-95, picking off drivers with the pellet rifle he’d bought to keep geese out of the backyard. “Bastids,” he’d roar — for some reason he had a wiseguy accent in this particular fantasy — “Doity bastids.”

But that night, as he lay blinking at the ceiling, it didn’t seem so funny. He thought of the somber headlines (Locker Room Rapport “Not the Same” Without McIlvenny), and the look on Riley’s face as he stood over him. He thought of the way he’d once hidden a report card from his mother, how all that week he’d felt like he was carrying a huge and terrible secret. Then, late one night, he’d relented, creeping outside to plant the card in the mailbox, feeling as if he’d just bought the nails for his own coffin. The lines of a poem came to him, the poem he had failed to interpret to his teacher’s satisfaction: “I am the captain of my fate, / I am the master of my soul.” For a whole minute he’d stood at the end of the driveway, frozen like a stray cat on the interstate — too late to go back, too risky to proceed.

With a start he realized that Cherise was lying awake next to him. For a time he’d actually forgotten that another heaving, sweating organism occupied the room, another knotted back cresting inches away. “Jerry, are you awake?” she whispered. He lay there silent, breathing through his nose. Asleep, asleep.

“I saw Carol McIlvenny in the produce aisle today,” she said, rolling onto her other side. “She had all these little discolored spots on her face, like she’d been picking at her eyebrows and then filling in the spaces to hide it, but you could tell, you couldn’t not tell. And she was just — standing there, bagging her vegetables. Doing her shopping. It’s amazing, the lengths people go, Jerry. Jerry?”

After a while, he didn’t have to pretend to sleep anymore.

 

Riley Pacer McIlvenny is one of the shining stars of Cadport High School. In the classroom and on the playing field, he commands not only the hearts of his peers, but their admiration. That’s why we, the Cadport class of 2011, have signed this 8x10 poster — to express our concern, our compassion, and our confidence that you will find your son. Our friend. Our Riley.

 

“Oh. My. God. His eyes? He had the most — like, the most — gorgeous eyes. You would look into them and you would know, you would just — know. I mean, I’ve been with a lot of the guys on the football team...and the track team, the rock-climbing club, the Young Shriners Society... But Riley just had a way of making you feel, making you feel, like — I don’t know. I don’t know.”

 

“Yeah, after he did the pool thing he just kind of bounced. Like, running. He was wearing football gear, that I remember. I mean, a helmet and stuff. I guess I was pretty drunk. That doesn’t, like, incriminate me or anything, right?”

 

“Yo, me and Ri-Dogg had us some times. Chilling at D-Bru’s condo, claaaassic... Mothafucka always flossin’ with the biddies, the Jäger, the Coors Light like, “Code Blue, bitch!” And that one girl, the one who got passed around the rock-climbing club? Ho-o! But I guess that doesn’t help you very much.”

“That’s quite all right. Thank you, Mr. Slosberg.”

 

According to Sandy, high school was a little microcosm of the universe, a four-year psychological experiment in the vein of Zimbardo or Milgram, uniquely capable of presenting humankind at its best and, more often, its worst. He didn’t come up with that himself; it was something he’d read on the Internet. He wasn’t even sure if Zimbardo was a person or the thing you used to clean hockey rinks. But it sounded good, and he repeated it at every given opportunity, each time honing his diction and perfecting that little skyward glance that suggested the words were coming from some cosmic mainline to which only Sandy was attuned. Even the two police officers, who all morning had been conducting interviews, looked impressed.

Every day, students had their innocence stripped from them, their morals perverted, their goodwill pushed to the chafing edge. The strong preyed on the weak. The weak preyed on the weaker. The weaker went home and set fire to their neighbor’s pets, then gathered to watch Japanese cartoons in the dark. Who could be surprised, in this sunken world, when the wheels flew off, when something went horribly wrong? Put enough independent, Polo-shirted variables in the same room, and eventually they will wipe each other out. This was the shark tank, the jungle, Sandy thought, and the various school programs that had sprung up in the wake of Riley’s disappearance — turgidly grueling “stranger danger” assemblies, clods of security cameras angled in every direction — seemed to confirm it.

“So, what you’re telling us is that you weren’t at the party, and your dealings with Mr. McIlvenny are primarily limited to tussles of the schoolyard variety.”

“That’s one level of it, yes.”

He was used to dealing with the police by now. The other afternoon they’d even shown up at his house, which was close enough to the last known Riley-sightings to show up on their grid. They’d questioned his father, asking him his whereabouts on the night of the disappearance, and Sandy had listened from the top of the stairs.

He’d always looked up to his father. He thought it was pretty cool, how Jerry would mock the weeping, banshee-like children who swarmed the beach, and the way he’d stood up to Mom that time she flipped on him for not wanting to eat some nasty yogurt or something. Although it had been years since they discussed anything besides the rote — they were beyond that, conversing in the secret Man Language of nods and pregnant nose-scratches — he’d always thought of the two of them as being on the same side. That was just the kind of relationship they had.

So when Jerry had gone pale, stuttering and swallowing and touching his face — some people just froze up around cops — Sandy had swooped quickly to his aid. “Guys, guys,” Sandy said. “My dad didn’t do anything wrong. He hit a deer, that’s all. You can even see the antler marks if you don’t believe him.”

They left after that, and Jerry spent the rest of the day out in the garage, sorting his various tools and gardening implements. Although he hadn’t said anything, Sandy knew his father was grateful; he could see it in the lift of Jerry’s brow, in the biting of his lip, in the way he glanced secretly at Sandy as he tested a trowel beneath the azalea bush. They were a team, father and son. They looked out for each other. What could be more important in this world gone mad?

 

“I want to buy this shovel.”

“Well, all right. I’m gonna need to see some ID for that, sir.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Personal identification. Passport or drivers license, birth certificate. We also accept a wide variety of medical documents.”

“I just want the shovel. You don’t understand. I need to buy this shovel. I need this shovel right now.”

“Hoo, I’m just playing with you. That’s $19.99, sir. Although I’ve gotta say, you look like you just stepped off the Scaredy Express. Watcha planning to do with that shovel, rob a bank or sumptin?”

Now that the boy was near — swooningly near — Jerry could see how it would all come together. He’d take his receipt, bring the shovel back to his car, and soon enough his life would return to its regular tempo. Back to craft beer and mass-market paperbacks. Back to parent-teacher conferences and late-night runs for the special chanterelles. The land of topsiders and distressed bedroom sets opened before him, beckoning, waiting for him to rejoin its gilded ranks. He would come up to Cherise as she bent over her lawn ornaments, and for the first time in ages he would take her into his arms, and even as Sandy read Nietzsche on the deck he would have her right there.

But first he was going to have to dig. He turned onto the Post Road and tried to remember how to get to the gas station. The streets were bright with banks and reflective paint.

After Leonard Freebo put a shotgun in his mouth, the gas station — the town’s first — was turned into a local heritage site, ceasing operation and functioning as a kind of free-floating museum piece. The old-fashioned pumps, the sign in the window that read WHISKEY; aside from the occasional spit-shine, none of it had been touched since the fifties. If you drove your car over the rubber hose, a bell still tinkled somewhere far away, or maybe it was all in your head.

For decades intrepid high schoolers had gotten stoned in the restroom, mashed tongues in the garage, dared each other to run into the woods without a flashlight. There were legends about those woods. A goat-headed demon who stalked the waiting pines. A dog-headed beast who lurked in the ivy. A wasp-headed ghoul — and so on and so forth.

He’d had to dig after Sandy’s gaffe with the police. The smell made him retch, burnt baby garbage mushrooming from some unholy vent. It was the skin that smelled. The skin had corrupted and stretched itself taut, like the skin of a drum, and except for the wanness of the lips it had deepened to a burnt raceless color. He’d been grateful the football helmet still covered the top part of the head.

He’d had to dig, and for a time he’d been safe. Someone had taken the credit card he’d found in Riley’s wallet and left lying conspicuously at a diner in Fleetwood; someone had traced it and all of a sudden, Riley was alive again. He was on the lam, living it up on his father’s dime. Jerry wondered what narrative of consumption had been appended to his disappearance — flashy cellphones? vats of Cristal? He found himself remembering scenes from Help! I’m Famous!, contented with the knowledge that to be human was to take what was not rightfully yours.

He’d held onto the wallet. When Cherise went out he would retrieve it from the inside of the bedpost and rifle through its contents, laying them out on the floor like tarot cards. There was no driver’s license, only a flimsy learner’s permit, and aside from this the only identifying document was a library card issued in 1997. The signature on the back was a hesitant, child’s cursive: I, Riley Pacer McIlvenny... and on the other side of the learner’s permit someone had written DRUNK DRIVING PERMIT in cramped capitals. He carried a guitar pick and a receipt from Blockbuster. He carried fifty-two dollars and a picture of a teenaged girl wearing only a football jersey.

He turned the picture over in his hands. In a way they were tarot cards, he thought, or maybe a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing. From the part you could ascertain the foggy outlines of a whole, rising in the dark, ocean shapes. At night he swore he could smell the ruined earth-smell straining from the hollow, and he hid the wallet in an empty paint can before Cherise could catch the scent.

It followed him to work, the smell, rising unexpectedly from subway vents, coffee machines, his boss’s breath. He opened the book of company receipts and choked back strings of revulsion. On the train from Grand Central a tallish bald man sat down beside Jerry as he was sniffing the inside of his jacket. His bare forearm was cuffed by a pattern of lunging wolves and chainsaws, and a movie-perfect scar branched from his throat to the base of his ear. “You, too?” said the man, who nodded sadly. At the nearest stop Jerry exited the car and ran to the back of the train before the doors could close.

And now he was running again. Cherise had been in the shower when the news report came on, the one that said a suspect had been apprehended in the whole McIlvenny clusterfuck. Rather than take the heat of entanglement, he’d gone on record describing the person who left the card at the diner, a thin, stoop-shouldered man in a “Spur of the Moment” t-shirt he’d seen getting into a bruised LaSabre.

He dreaded this. He dreaded the swaying branches, and the sound that the shovel would make when it broke the crust of the dirt. He dreaded the whistling rot and sinew and the way that Riley’s fingernails had grown long, like a woman’s. As the woods drew towards him he tightened his shoulders, which he had never thought of as stooped, and steeled himself against the wheel, not even noticing when, as he passed the sign for Freebo’s Gas, a gentle tinkling could be heard.

 

“We should do something,” said Jerry.

“He speaks,” said Cherise.

“Let’s get out of town this weekend, the two of us. Let’s go back to Jersey. The Spur.”

“Jersey,” said Cherise. “Think of the romance.”

“All right, then. Somewhere else. Boston, then. Or Providence.”

She opened the lid of her Tupperware, a little absolving sigh. Providence?

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess you’re really trying, aren’t you?”

And he was trying. The Delaware Water Gap was trying. Cherise could appreciate that, even if, as marital gestures went, this was a fairly desperate one. His heart was in the right place.

“Betcha never knew the Delaware Water Gap was in Pennsylvania,” he said on the drive, goofy and placating the way a report on domestic terrorism might be tagged with the weekly forecast. Low wind and sunny skies! Nothing in his expression acknowledged the sudden, inexplicable outbursts of late, or the now-routine disappearances, or the time she’d found him lifting his shirts out of the dresser drawer and smelling them one by one.

“How about that.”

“It sounds like a pretty good gap to me! As gaps go!”

The room at the B&B was chilly, so they left for an early dinner. In the car she paged through the photos she’d taken that afternoon (rocks, water, a duck, and various permutations of the three), realizing on her second cycle that in none of the pictures did the two of them appear together. There she was, trussed up in her red raincoat, her broad smile largely the result of the wind beating back her cheeks. There was Jerry, as much a blur as the rock he was pitching into the river. The juxtaposition did not inspire optimism. But wait, look at the duckies!

What was he staring at now? Something had caught his attention in a shop window near the restaurant. He’d been silent, and Cherise was nearly a block away when she realized he was no longer walking next to her.

“What’s the hold up?”

She saw it reflected in a car window. It was only a “Missing” poster, the granular Xeroxed image of a teenaged girl, the same apprehensive look worn by the black and Puerto Rican children in the supermarket flyers. She was reminded briefly of that football player, the one who went to Sandy’s school. She had her theories about that. It was obvious that he’d ran with a bad crowd, that he’d had little regard for his family or his schoolwork. Of course, he was long gone by now. He was snorting cocaine off a highway toilet, he was slipping bills into strippers’ waistbands, he was passed out on a beach in Miami. Come on, people. He didn’t want to be found.

She could disappear, too. Slough off this life like snakeskin. When Jerry went into the restroom she could take the car, leave him shaking his dick out, as oblivious as ever. She could go anywhere she wanted. Her new life opened up before her, a freeway Oz of hot tar and greasy spoons. That would be her, passed out on the beach. That would be her, dancing on top of the bar. That would be her, uninhibited and unbeautiful and wholly unattached. She could be the person she’d always wanted to be. The person she’d really been all along.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

She looked suddenly up from her menu, telepathically accused. Was that possible? If you lived with one person long enough, did your brains start to connect?

“Nothing,” she answered.

“You mean you’re not going to order anything?”

He was wearing that expression of bland surprise she’d come to know so well, the look that said, “Help me, I’m clueless.” It was a boy’s face, not an adult’s, and in recent years she’d seen disturbing watermarks of it in their son’s expression.

“Why don’t you order for me?”

She shouldered her pocketbook and disappeared into the restroom. When she came out her eyes were red, and she hurried over to the hostess’s booth.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I was wondering if you could take a picture of the two of us?”

 

At the stoplight Jerry reached over and patted the helmet on the passenger seat, as if to convince himself of its continued presence. It was like a child at the doctor’s office or a not-quite-domesticated animal — at any moment it might try to make a break for it. Under the stoplight his accumulated fingerprints were exposed, whole foggy waves of them, and he knew that he’d been right to come all this way.

“Nice night,” the helmet said. “Where we going?”

“We’re going home,” Jerry said. “I’m going to take you into my basement and annihilate you with a ball-peen hammer.”

“Well, then at least turn the radio on. Last rites and all that. I wanna kick out the jams.”

Jerry reached for the dial. A Steve Miller song came out of the speakers.

“Hey, this one’s a peach!” the helmet said, and began to sing along. It sounded a little like Tom Waits, but early Waits, before all that Brechtian carnie stuff. “Now that’s what I call a blast from the past. Last time I heard that song I was in the back of Suzy Ryzinsky’s VW Rabbit and I was just about to put my hand up her shirt.”

“I don’t want to know about this.”

“Fine pair of twins on that girl, if you catch my drift. Haunted me for years. I’d be sitting in my office, getting ready to cut out for the day, when BAM. Off to the men’s room, if you catch my drift.”

“What is it you do?”

“I’m in civil engineering.”

Jerry made the turn into his street. That was odd — why was it lined with cars? He lowered the volume of the radio and turned on his high beams, and a nude teen in a pair of hiking boots skirted through them.

“Explain something for me, Jerry,” the helmet said. “You’re gonna smash me up into little fiber-reinforced mildew-resistant multi-ventilated smithereens, maybe toss me in the garbage disposal or an incinerator, and then you’re going to — what? — drive back to your hotel? give your wife a big, wet smack on the cheek? What happens next, Jerry? That’s all I want to know. What happens next?”

“You’re a piece of shit.”

“No, I have a retail value of $275.95, and I was manufactured by the same team that designed the Audi A3, the safest midsized family car for the year 2010.”

“You don’t deserve the air you breathe.”

“What’s the plan, Jerry? You haven’t thought things through. There’s nothing more dangerous than a man who hasn’t thought things through. What happens in the next ten minutes, Jerry? What about the next twenty? The next day? The next year? What happens in the next year, Jerry?”

 

Party at Sandy’s house! The kegs were delivered at seven, the first comers arriving shortly thereafter. By eight the basement had been turned into a marijuana sweat lodge, and at 9:30 the football team rolled up in a parade of black minivans.

Sandy was amazed how simple it was, like a game of telephone. That morning he’d told Wedge and Topher to strap on their party pants, because tonight they were all going to peak early. The word spread like wildfire, and by lunchtime he sensed that already his star had begun to rise. People looked at him differently, spoke to him differently: “All right, Sand Man! Get drunk!” “Chyea! Code Blue, bitch!” “I swear I’ll cry rape if you come any closer.” All right, so they couldn’t all be winners. But with a graceful economy of motion that nearly broke his heart, Monica Stirrup had run the tips of her fingers along his chest’s circumference.

He no longer cared that Welsh Dixon had once locked him in the janitor’s closet, or that Mimi Yow had spiked a volleyball at his face the time she caught him staring in Gym, causing Sandy to require a black unibrow of stitches above the bridge of his nose. He even felt a surge of companionship with Riley McIlvenny, a briefly fond feeling he interpreted as grief. Most people had started to suspect the worst. Elaborate death scenarios were traded across the lunch tables, each one more feverishly Grand Guignol than the last. He’d died in a drunken mishap, zombie-wandering onto the interstate and stumbling over the guardrail. Shadier elements came into the mix, a drug dealer from New Jersey who’d chained him to a pipe and forced him to eat himself. Or perhaps it was the scourge of Freebo’s woods who’d tasted Riley’s final moments.

“To Riley!” Sandy bellowed, and as he hoisted his leaking Dixie cup the football players encircling him did the same.

“To Riley!”

“To titties!”

“I like beer!”

Except for the Manischewitz Uncle Larry once brought to Passover, Sandy had never tasted alcohol before. It eddied through him now, warmth like a hot coal wrapped in a sock, his head swelling with blurry notions. Had he and Topher just been singing the Stanley Steemer jingle? Had Monica Stirrup been looking at him from the top of the staircase? Who was that man, that shifting nebulous outline, who now came faltering across the yard?

“Oh, shit. Dad?”

What was there for Sandy to do? All of a sudden he was kicking cigarette butts into the lawn, grabbing bottles out of people’s hands; for a crazed moment the attitude of “if he didn’t see it, it didn’t happen” seemed almost reasonable. He staggered backwards into the house, a slow-motion horror movie of paternal disappointment.

“Sandy! Get these people outta here!”

And then his father was dragging him to his feet, clapping him on his shoulder. Why were his hands so raw with blisters? Why was his face smeared with dirt? What was he doing with a football helmet that appeared to have been rescued from the ruins of Pompeii?

“Dad,” Sandy said. Was he going to cry? “Dad, I’ll take care of it. I swear, I’m a good kid and I’m going to fix this. Just don’t tell Mom, Dad, please don’t tell Mom.”

But Jerry wasn’t listening, and (to Sandy’s secret relief) neither were the teetering masses, which continued to throb against each other with clueless abandon. No, Jerry was somewhere else, it was clear to Sandy, somewhere on a whole new plane of anger, frustration, and regret. Sandy had let him down this time, and no matter how many lawns he mowed, cars he washed, and boots he kissed, things would never be the same between them.

Now the room was spinning, with Jerry the stable constant at its center. He reached for the basement door, that filthy non sequitur of a helmet knocking bluntly against the wood. And although Sandy had fared poorly in both Pre-Algebra and Ancient Myth, never let it be said that he lacked the ability to put two and two together. As the shrinking quadrant of his brain that was not yet inebriated thought back to the episode with the two police officers, Sandy felt a hot pang of shame, a feeling he no longer needed to interpret in order to recognize.

All the times he and Jerry had spent together. Getting nailed in the throat during their first and final trip to the batting cage; sitting in the car in companionable silence, turning up a song they both recognized; even the feeling of the dust on his hands as he hefted the other side of an air conditioner. You had to hold on to memories like that.

Right then and there he decided that popularity was a sham, that romance was for the weak, and that these gross, uninhibited people were not his friends. That scar Mimi Yow had left on his forehead? That would be there for the rest of his life. That morning he’d spent locked in the service closet? He’d been claustrophobic ever since. And Riley McIlvenny? What had Riley McIlvenny ever done that was anything but vulgar, stupid, or cruel?

“Dad,” he said. He stood blinking at the helmet. “Dad, I’ll help you. Please. I’ll help you, Dad.”

Finally, he would be part of something he could believe in. They would hide from the law; they’d hide from Mom. A father-son duo. They would burn their clothes and cover their tracks. They would reveal this world for the noxious pit it was. And maybe, when the way was clear, maybe one day they would strike again.

“He's an asshole, Dad. You did the right thing. Just tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

Jerry turned the helmet over in his hands. He took a deep breath, as if all of a sudden the sea was near, and for almost a full minute he closed his eyes.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay, come with me. In the basement.”

With his son leading the way, Jerry made sure the door was closed tightly behind him.

~  

The night Jerry killed Riley, Ralph Dotter pushed back his paper hat and swept his mop across the Frosty Freeze vomit that had hardened to the floor of the men’s restroom. Monica Stirrup looked at the president of the Young Shriners Society with a face that said, “Let me ease your sorrows,” and Carol McIlvenny, turning the lights out as her husband crawled into bed, paused over the spot on the kitchen counter where the impression of her son’s front tooth could still be distinguished.

In his bedroom Sandy visited the Naked and Antisocial webchat homepage for the third time that day, while Cherise lay awake perusing that week’s bargains on lawn ornaments, wondering if she should’ve told her husband to pick up hand cream while he was out. Several time zones away, Jerry’s brother Larry attached his headphones and hopped onto his treadmill, a smile forming on his lips as Steve Miller told him once more about the gangster of love.

In the woods behind Freebo’s Gas, Jerry angled himself over the fresh mound of dirt, leaning hard against his shovel. From time to time there would be movement, and the dirt would pour inward like the dirt in an anthill, but at least the yelling had stopped. At first the noises had coalesced into clear individual words; then, as the weight of the soil grew less and less bearable, they’d deteriorated into ragged vowels, the language of dogs and records played backwards. He spread some leaves around to make it look more convincing, and then he was done. It was over. He could go home.

Instead he went to the beach. He ran his hands through the water and sat on the worthless sand. Why did cold parts of the world have beaches? You wouldn’t travel to Florida and expect to find ice shelves. It didn’t make any sense.

His family would be asleep by now, unless Cherise had stayed awake to worry and watch talk shows. “His family.” He turned over the phrase in his head. Was it something you possessed, family, like a set of keys or a favorite shirt? And if you possessed it, could you ever lose it? He thought of Cherise, a younger, less familiar Cherise, tucking their son into bed when he was seven. He imagined a man in a black ski mask rising out of the darkness, taping their mouths and stuffing them into an enormous burlap sack. Or she would be bathing Sandy in his infancy, and when Jerry opened the door they would have vanished down the open drain, their cries mingling with the slurping water. Oh no! I’ve lost my family!

By the far jetty a group of teens hurried back and forth in wide drunken circles, the tallest of them unspooling an elaborate kite out over the water. Although it was far away, the moon still lit up its little interior ribs. Jerry could relate to the kite. It rose further and further away, reducing to an indeterminate speck, but always you could hold onto it, if only by a string. A wind came, causing the kite to dive-bomb and shudder and otherwise spazz out, and its captain yelled something before falling, winded, onto his ass. He lay there, laughing, while his friends rushed out into the water. But through the whole plastered ballet Jerry was straining, sending out telepathic signals: Pull it back, pull it back.