the only good thing I see. But they just feed an old man the damn oatmeal. Coffee and oatmeal. It’s a plain breakfast.
Not even toast? I asked.
I could have it if I wanted, but I keep asking for pancakes. Bugger looked at me fiercely. I am holding out for pancakes!
I have to ask you something.
Ask away then. I’ll give you the answer for a pancake.
Okay.
And whiskey. He leaned forward secretively. Bring me a drop, but don’t let those others know about it. Keep the bottle in your shirt.
All right.
Bugger sat back, ready, his face expectant.
Remember when you took my bike?
His face turned blank. I spoke slowly, pausing after each sentence for him to nod.
You were sitting outside Mighty Al’s. You saw my bike. You got on my bike and started riding. I came out and asked where you were going. You said you wanted to check and see if something was a dream.
Bugger’s face lighted up.
Remember now?
No.
I reset the scene five or six times before Bugger’s mind finally turned back and began to riffle through the recent past. He held very still and concentrated now, so hard I could almost hear the gears grind. As his thoughts collected, his expression changed, but so gradually that it was only after I’d looked away impatiently and then looked back that I noticed he was petrified. He stared at something between us on the bedcover. I thought he was having a hallucination, not of the pancakes, which would have filled him with joy, but some sort of reptile or insect. But then his look changed to pity and he gasped, Poor girl!
What girl?
Poor girl.
He began to sob in dry wrenches. He kept crying about her. He mumbled about construction and I knew. She was in the construction site, the earth mounded over her. I couldn’t help the picture from forming. Us jumping our bikes, flying back and forth, and her below. I stood up, jolted. I knew, down to the core of me, that he had seen Mayla Wolfskin. He had seen her dead body. If we hadn’t killed Lark, he’d have gone to jail for life anyway. I spun around thinking I should go to the police, then stopped. I could not let the police know I was even thinking this way. I had to get off their radar entirely, with Cappy, disappear. I couldn’t tell anyone. Even I didn’t want to know what I knew. The best thing for me to do was forget. And then for the rest of my life to try and not think how different things would have gone if, in the first place, I’d just followed Bugger’s dream.
I needed to find Cappy. Not to tell him. I never would tell him. I’d never tell anyone. There was in me as I rode toward the Lafournaises a disconnect so profound I could think of nothing but obliteration. I would somehow find the means to get drunk. The world would take on that amber tone. Things would soften to brown as if in old photographs. I would be safe.
Zack and Angus were hanging out in the grocery store parking lot. Their bikes were there, and Cappy’s too, but they were sitting in Zack’s older cousin’s car. They got out when they saw me, and told me that Cappy had gone into the post office to see if there was a letter.
He should’ve come out by now, said Zack.
I went to get Cappy and finally found him out back of the building, sitting on a busted chair where the post office employees took smoke breaks in the summer. His hair was flung down over his face. He was smoking and didn’t look at me when I stood next to him. Just held out a piece of paper.
You will cease and desist from any contact with our daughter. My wife found the package of letters Zelia was hiding. You should have to consider that in this case we may persecute you to the full axtent of the law.
Also currently Zelia is being punished and also in short order we will be changing residence. You have stolen our daughter’s innocence and wracked our life.
Cappy’s arms and legs were splayed out, limp and despairing. His face was the color of ashes and there was a cloud of smoke around his head. I sat down beside him on a cardboard box. There was nothing to say about anything at all. I put my head in my hands.