The Journey Prize Stories 24 (5 page)

“Hey,” Paul yelled.

Matthew stopped short in the doorway and turned around. He stood there waiting.

“Get us some drinks for the ride back if you want.”

Matthew nodded and went inside. Paul looked over at the closing door for a few seconds, and turned back to the pump and watched the numbers cranking over, the digits distorted by faulty electronics in the display. He got near enough to the amount he wanted and guessed where to stop, then walked the nozzle back to the pump. He saw what looked like twenty-six dollars and eighty-eight cents worth of gas and let out a little laugh, thinking about Matthew’s face when the attendant told him what he owed. Paul went over to the back of the car to shut the gas-tank flap. As he did so he saw three men about his age walking into the lot toward the store. Two of them were wearing ball caps and cargo shorts and the other had short, ragged hair and torn jeans and no shirt on. They all had the rough look of a long night, but they were talking and laughing, so Paul called over to them.

“Hey guys,” he said. “How’s it going?”

The shirtless man turned as they came by and they slowed up but didn’t stop. None of them said anything. They just looked at Paul.

“You guys from around here?” Paul said.

“Yeah,” the shirtless one said. “Why’s that?”

“I passed by the turnoff I was lookin’ for and ended up here. I wonder if there might be another route to where I gotta go without havin’ to backtrack.”

“Where you goin’?”

Paul studied the three men for a moment. The two men with caps were taller and they seemed uninterested. One took
off his cap to wipe his brow and he had a bad haircut with a bald patch at the centre of his head. The shirtless man was shorter and well-built and he had a cross tattooed across his shoulder, the work poorly done.

“We gotta get to Pineridge. You know the place?” Paul said.

The man smiled. “Yeah, I know it.”

“Good.”

“What you gotta go there for? Who you got in there?” the man said.

Paul looked into the man’s eyes and then he turned and stared out past the gas-station lot at the firs that rose up the valley hillside. He cleared his throat and turned back. The man was still waiting for an answer, still grinning. Paul didn’t like the man at all. “So, how do we get there from here?”

“Nobody wants to go out there,” the man went on. “People go in there for a reason. They don’t come back out. You know that old guy that shot that cop in the head in the bar a couple years back. In front of all those people. He’s in there. So’s the fucker who did all them kids. All kinds of wackos in there. For real.”

“I’m not fuckin’ goin’ to that part. That’s the maximum-security part. He’s in the other side. Where you get treated and you get out.”

“Who is?” the shirtless man said.

Paul kept staring at the three men, but he didn’t have anything to say to them. Now they wouldn’t move along. They just stood there smiling and mumbling things to each other, and then Paul heard the creak of the shop door and he saw Matthew coming out with a plastic bag in his hand. Matthew was looking down. He spat on the ground and when he looked
up he saw Paul. He hesitated and then went on. Paul turned back to the men and went around the car to the driver-side door and opened it. The shirtless man watched him go, said something to his friends over his tattooed shoulder and kept staring Paul down. Paul still wouldn’t say anything more.

“Who you goin’ to see in there?” the shirtless man said. “Ain’t nobody from around here, that’s for sure. That loony bin is for fuckin’ psychos and diddlers, and if you got family in there you ain’t from here neither and should keep your crazy asses outta here. They fuckin’ set up shop there and bring all these sickos from everywhere and fuck up our town. Creepy bastards. That place should be burnt to the fuckin’ ground with whoever you goin’ to get in it.”

Paul shut the door and the shirtless man drew himself up big and held his hands out in waiting. But Paul wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at Matthew, who had dropped the bag on the ground and had come up behind the three men.

“Hey,” Matthew said.

The shirtless man turned. He was still grinning and didn’t see it coming. Matthew dug his feet in and threw a short left hook from the hip and caught the man right on the mouth and the man sat down hard on the sand-strewn asphalt and stared up in utter confusion, blood coming out of his nose in a thin steady line. Matthew had his right cocked, but the shirtless man didn’t try to get up and his two friends just stood there. One swore, but he didn’t move. Matthew looked at each of the two men and back at the downed man. Then he looked over at his brother. Paul had come around the car and stood beside the pump shaking his head.

Matthew raised his eyebrows. “What?” he said.

“Get in the car,” Paul said.

Matthew stayed calm as he picked up the plastic bag and side-stepped the three men, the one he’d punched still sitting on the ground with his hand over his nose, blood between his fingers and hate in his eyes. Matthew went over to the car and Paul opened the passenger door and waved him in. As Matthew sat down the door shut behind him. Then he heard the sound of gravel shifting as the man he had hit scrambled up to holler something at them. Matthew turned to Paul, but Paul was already making his way over to the men with his long deliberate strides. Matthew got out of the car but he wasn’t quick enough. Paul had already hit the shirtless man three times before Matthew got to him. The man had only been on his feet long enough to say a few words. Now he was lying on the ground again with his hands pawing at the air. If the other men had thought about doing something they gave it up when Matthew came back. He grabbed Paul around the chest with both arms and pulled him away. Once he had been dragged clear he shucked loose and started for the car without looking back and without even looking at Matthew. His face was flushed and his teeth tight together and his knuckles were slathered with blood from the man’s ruined nose and mouth. The brothers walked to the car together and Matthew had his right arm over Paul’s shoulder. His heavy hand lay flat against Paul’s chest and Matthew held him close, patting his palm hard against a fast-beating heart.

The car crested the north ridge of the valley by the late afternoon and started down the other side. For a few minutes Paul and Matthew were high above the town, staring out together
at the shoreline with its maze of docks and piers and boats coming into their slips and others drifting out into the bay. The water shone green in the sunlight. There were no waves because there was no wind, but the surface shimmered and shifted just so slightly. Far off in the bay were tiny islands of shield rock and some were topped with dwarf white pines and bowed willow trees. The horizon line lay out in the distant waters and if there was land beyond you couldn’t tell it by sight.

“That’s a nice place, isn’t it,” Matthew said.

“It would be.”

They could have driven straight through the town, but Paul took them around it, coasting down on a zigzag route through the streets until the car came out onto a long, level road that took them past parks and marshes and a massive retrofitted power station before leading right to the bayside of the town. Here they merged into sparse traffic on a four-lane shoreline roadway and drove a little more than a mile east around the outskirts of the north end before leaving the winding coastal road. A large promontory rose up toward the water’s edge, blanketed by pines and larger deciduous trees with their foliage burnt and dried above the tree line. Further up the tree cover thinned and there were great, smooth boulders jutting out of the hill-face as renegade knobs and joints of the earth’s very bones. On the plateau sat an enormous modern building made of grey stone and newly forged metal and heavy slabs of glass set together to form a near-seamless westerly roof.

“That’s one hell of a fuckin’ building,” Matthew said. “You really need to make it stick out like that, in case anyone would ever forget it was there in the first place. Jesus.”

Paul nodded, but he didn’t say anything. He had taken to wringing the steering wheel with his hands as he drove and when he saw the sign he was looking for he turned left and took the car up the hillside road. They climbed up to the place under the ever-shifting shadows of the wooded pass and at the top the road flattened out. Paul slowed the car as they came to the front gates. There an old man with a guard’s cap and uniform sat in a glassed-in booth and when they pulled up he pushed a button and asked them what they were there for.

“We’re going to the northwest wing. To pick somebody up.”

“Okay,” the man said and relaxed somewhat.

Paul gave their surname and the man said it was all right. He opened the gates and waved them through. Paul nodded and drove on.

“Doesn’t take much to get in or out of here,” Matthew said.

“That’s ’cause people don’t care about this part of the place. It’s that one there they’re worried about.”

Paul cocked his thumb toward the passenger side of the car and Matthew looked out of his window. A fork in the road ran toward another set of gates, solid metal doors sealed fast between barricades that stood twenty feet tall with razor wire fixed between spikes at the top. The building that they had seen from the road sat far away behind the barrier. The car followed the gentle curve of the road until they were driving away from the structure. Now they saw another one ahead. It was older and made of limestone and red brick, with dozens of its windows shut except for a few on the lower level beside the main entryway. There were no gates and no guards. They pulled right up to the front steps and Paul put the car in park, but he left it running.

“Can you park here?” Matthew said.

Paul just sat there for a moment and then he took a deep breath before opening his door.

“Hey,” Matthew said.

Paul turned. “You stay here in the car. If somebody tells you to move then move it.”

“I’m coming in there with you. We’re gonna get him together.”

“It’s not like that in there. It won’t make it any better. I been in before so I’ll go get him. The sooner we get him outta there and on the road the easier it’ll be.”

“What the fuck are you talkin’ about?” Matthew said. “I want to go in there and get him with you.”

“Why the hell would you want to do that?”

“What?”

“Listen to me. Stay here. I’ve seen him in there before. You haven’t. He’ll remember it that way. Just you being here with him in the car, not in there. It won’t make it any better for you to go in.”

“What the fuck you mean, ‘any better?’ ”

“It won’t make it any better for him.”

Paul got out of the car and stood there with the door open. He stared up at the building and then looked west toward the seemingly endless waters. He swore then and shut the door and leaned down so he could see in through the open window on the driver’s side. Matthew kept looking at him, but he didn’t say anything else. Paul nodded. He slapped the edge of the window with his palm and then stood up and walked around the car and started to walk up the stone entryway steps.

“Tell him I’m waiting out in the car,” Matthew called out.

“Okay,” Paul said, but he didn’t look back.

When he came back down the steps a few minutes later Matthew was sitting in the backseat. Paul was carrying a small suitcase with their father right behind him at his shoulder. He had gone nearly all gray, though his hair still grew thick and his dark eyes were the same as Paul’s, as were his small ears and slender nose and the shape of his chin as well as the narrow shoulders, the wiry arms and legs. If he weren’t so much shorter than Paul the future would have seemed utterly foretold. Matthew got out of the car and looked at Paul as he went by to put the suitcase in the trunk.

“Hey Dad.”

“Hello son.”

Matthew smiled crookedly and went over to put his arms around him, the man’s chin pushing against his shoulder. His father seemed not to know what to do at first, but soon enough those aged, familiar arms rose and held fast and then he was patting his son’s back with his worn-out hands.

They drove with the sun sinking into the jack-pine forest to the west. Paul was still behind the wheel. Matthew sat in the back seat and he could see his father’s eyes in the passenger-side mirror and he had never seen their reflection in that mirror before. The three of them had never been in a car at once without their father as the driver. The old man stared out of his window at the fading day and must have seen something there because he sat very still for a long time. When they asked him about the hospital or about his health at all he only gave them a few words back and after he replied he would look away again and seemed to be thinking too long about what he’d said.
He appeared eerily calm until he turned to answer another question from Paul and saw the swollen knuckles on his son’s right hand.

“What the hell is that?” he said.

Paul shifted in his seat, lifting his hand off the wheel like he might hide it somewhere. There were lies circling about in his head and he glanced up at the rear-view mirror at Matthew for just a second.

“It’s nothing.”

“Who did you hit? Why did you hit them?”

As he said it he reached out and took Paul’s hand in his and examined it close, his own scarred and misshapen fingers going over the damage with great care. Faint red stained into the ridged skin over the knuckle joints. Paul didn’t say anything.

“The man needed to be hit,” Matthew said from the backseat.

“Matthew,” their father said sharply and Matthew went quiet. He didn’t even have to turn around. He looked over at his eldest son and his eyes were wide and full of concern and other things that Paul had never seen there before and couldn’t identify. He let go of Paul’s hand and shifted back into his seat properly, but he kept his eyes on his son.

“I couldn’t help it, Dad,” Paul said. “I didn’t even think about it.”

“Did they hit you first?”

“No.”

“What did they do to you?”

Paul ran the injured hand through his hair, then scratched at the back of his neck. After a few seconds he lay on the wheel again.