More than that, my brain was kind of swirling. I knew it was not a good idea to be hanging around with these guys. But for the reasons I’ve already explained, I was kind of—I don’t know—curious about what was going to happen next. It was interesting. It was exciting. It was just the sort of thing a preacher’s kid wouldn’t do.
So after another moment of recuperating and catching my breath, I straightened up and followed the three of them over the sandy driveway to the barn.
Jeff was unlocking a padlock that held the barn’s big door closed. Then Ed P. took hold of the door and sort of walked it open. Inside, it was dark and shadowy.
“Get her going,” said Jeff to Ed P.
Ed P. squatted down just inside the door. I could see him yanking at something—the way you yank on the cord of a lawn mower or a motorboat. After a couple of yanks, I heard a gas engine rumble to life. I guessed what it was: a portable generator. Sure enough, a moment later some lights flickered on inside the barn.
Jeff turned to me and grinned and made a grand gesture, sweeping his hand toward the barn as if to say: Enter a world of enchantment.
Which I did.
The first things I noticed inside the barn—the first things anyone would have noticed—were two cars. Very, very nice cars. Luxury cars, like something some of the richer people in town might have driven. One was a great big black Audi, brand-new. The other was smaller, a cool, sleek silver Mercedes, also new. The barn was lit by these hooded lamps held up on tall silver poles, and the bulbs were directed at the cars so that the cars were sort of spotlighted as if they were on display.
“Whoa!” I said. I moved around the two cars, staring at them. I don’t mind saying I was impressed. My dad drives a Volkswagen Passat. It’s about five years old and kind of rattles when it gets up past fifty miles an hour. My mom drives a clunky minivan that I think dates back to cowboy-and-Indian days. I have a learner’s permit and I get to drive the Passat sometimes, but mostly I still get around on a bike. Staring at the Audi and the Mercedes in the barn, I was mesmerized. I forgot all my aches and pains as I imagined what it would be like to sit behind the wheel of one of these babies, to drive one of them through town with everybody standing back to admire me.
The rest of the barn was mostly clutter and dust. A hard-packed earth floor. Tangled extension cords. There was also a small sitting area in one shadowy corner. There were a bunch of old office chairs there—swivel chairs with torn upholstery—plus an old sofa that looked like someone had rescued it from a garbage dump. There was a small cooler too, a big white Styrofoam box with a blue Styrofoam lid on it.
Jeff plunked down on one of the chairs. He sprawled in it like a drunken king on his throne. He swiveled back and forth. Finally, he leaned back and pried the top off the cooler so that it slipped over and stood slanted, leaning against the cooler’s side. He reached into the box and pulled out a can of beer. He tossed it to me—so quick, I caught it kind of automatically. I held on to it for a second and then tossed it away again to Harry Mac.
Jeff laughed at me. “You’re not gonna tell me you don’t drink, are you?”
“No,” I said. “I’m gonna let you guess.”
Everyone stopped moving. Harry Mac and Ed P. looked at Jeff to see if he was going to get angry at me for being a wise guy. But after a second, Jeff laughed.
“S’what I’m talking about,” he said to Harry Mac, pointing at me. “He’s a tough little punk. I like that.”
Now that they knew what they were supposed to think, Harry Mac and Ed P. nodded in appreciation of my tough little punkitude. Jeff tossed Ed P. a can of beer and took one for himself. The barn popped and hissed as they tore open their tabs.
“So,” said Jeff, kicking back in his chair. “What do you think, punk?” He was indicating the cars now. “They’re nice, aren’t they?”
I looked the two cars over some more. I nodded. “They’re nice, all right,” I said.
“Which one you like best?” Jeff asked me.
I moved around in front of them, examined their fenders.
“I guess if I had to choose one, I’d take the Audi,” I said. “It has this feeling about it like . . .” I couldn’t think of the right word.
“Money,” Jeff said, nodding at it. “It feels like money. It’s a money car.”
I nodded too. He was right. That’s what it was. It was the sort of big limo-like car people drove when they had a lot of money.
“Get in,” said Jeff.
I looked at him, uncertain, excited. Did he mean it?
He lifted his chin at the car. “Go ahead. Get in the car. See what it feels like.”
I shrugged. Why not? I thought. I went over to the Audi and tugged on the handle. The door didn’t open.
I glanced over at Jeff.
“It’s locked,” I said.
“Is it?” said Jeff—though I was pretty sure he already knew it was. He gestured at Harry Mac with his beer can. “Sam says the car is locked, Harry.”
“Oh yeah?” Harry Mac answered dully. Harry said everything dully. He had the kind of voice where, the minute you heard it, you knew he had the same insight and intelligence and sensitivity as a clump of dirt. “That’s too bad.”
“Well, don’t just stand there, man,” Jeff Winger said to him. “Teach our new friend Sam how you get into a car when it’s locked.”
Harry Mac slowly understood and slowly smiled. He walked over to the Audi—no, he swaggered over to the Audi—swaggered like he felt like a big man because Jeff had given him this important task. He was wearing a black hoodie. He reached inside its pocket and pulled out a tool: something sort of like a Leatherman, one of those tools with multiple blades and extensions. He held it up to me.
“Know what we call this?” he said.
I shook my head.
“We call it Buster,” said Harry Mac. “Know why?”
I shook my head again.
“Because it busts into things. Watch.”
I watched. Harry Mac unfolded a long thin blade from the Buster. He worked it smoothly through the edge of the Audi’s window. A moment later, the door clicked open.
“Cool, huh?” said Jeff from his chair.
I nodded. Because I had to admit: it was pretty cool. It was just the kind of thing I wanted to see. The kind of not-too-good thing a preacher’s kid never does see.
“Now watch this,” said Harry Mac.
I leaned in at the door and watched as Harry Mac lay down on the front seat and reached under the steering wheel. Using another of Buster’s extensions, he worked behind the dashboard panel for a moment. Then suddenly, with a thrilling roar, the Audi’s engine started.
Harry Mac sat up and held up the Buster for me to examine. “Easy-peasy, right?” he said.
Jeff laughed with delight. “You should see the look on your face, punk.” Then he gestured with the beer can at Harry. “Shut it off,” he said.
Harry Mac used the Buster to turn the engine off. He got out and shut the car door. It let out a tone as it locked.
“Now you do it,” said Jeff.
Startled, I turned to him. “Me?” I said.
“Sure. Show him how to pop the door, Harry.”
It didn’t take long. In just a few minutes, Harry taught me how to use the Buster’s blade to unlock the Audi. I got in the car and sat behind the wheel. Oh, man, it was nice! A nice feeling. Soft, soft leather seats. This great, fresh, sweet smell like it was brand-new, straight from the factory. And with the built-in GPS monitor and the elaborate radio and temperature controls, the dashboard looked like something you’d see in the cockpit of a jet.
I ran my fingers over the smooth surface of the steering wheel. It was easy to imagine sailing down the highway in this beauty. Not likely to happen in real life. When I got my driver’s license, I’d be lucky if I would occasionally get to borrow the Passat like my older brother sometimes did. Pretty doubtful I would ever get to drive something like this.
“Now show him how to s
tart it,” said Jeff.
Harry Mac showed me how to use the Buster again. When I made the Audi roar to life on my own, I laughed out loud. It was an incredibly exciting feeling to have that big machine smoothly humming around me. It made me feel powerful, like now I could get into any car I wanted anytime.
Jeff got out of his chair. He carried his beer over to the open door of the car. He looked in at me with his weaselly eyes. He pointed his chin at the Buster I was still holding in one hand.
“There’s a lot more that thing can do, punk. Wanna see?”
I looked up at him. The car hummed around me. Everything felt exciting, dangerous, different from anything I’d done before.
I thought to myself: Hey, what’s the harm? It’s not like I’m stealing anything. The cars are already here.
“Sure,” I said out loud. “Show me.”
6
My Life as a Thug
I went back to the barn the next day. And the day after that. And the day after. I stopped running. I stopped training for track. I biked up the hill to the barn and hung out with Jeff and Harry Mac and Ed P. instead.
They taught me how to break into different kinds of cars and how to start them all without a key. They taught me how to disable a steering-wheel lock so I could drive the cars once I started them. They even let me drive the Audi a couple of times—just around the driveway and a few hundred yards along the empty dirt road. Still, it was cool. It was a lot of fun.
They showed me other stuff too. How to pick different dead bolts and padlocks and knob locks. They even showed me a way to disable a computerized keypad if it was the right kind. All of this using that little Buster device with the various tools inside it.
How did it feel to be doing stuff like this? It was exciting. It made me feel like I wasn’t such an innocent and goody-goody preacher’s kid anymore. When I went to school during the day and Jeff said hi to me in the hall or Harry Mac nodded at me or Ed P. slapped hands with me as he went by, I thought I saw the other kids look at me differently. I felt I was into something they couldn’t get into, that I knew something now they didn’t know. Something secret. Something dangerous. Something forbidden.
And I told myself: Hey, it’s just fooling around. It’s not like I’m really breaking into anybody’s car. It’s not like I’m really stealing anything. I’m not really doing anything wrong at all.
But yeah, I knew that wasn’t true. I knew the cars in that barn didn’t belong to Jeff. I knew the stuff that Jeff and his friends were doing was wrong—not to mention illegal. I knew I shouldn’t be hanging out with a thug like him. And I knew that every day I did hang out with him made it harder for me to tell him I was going to stop.
But I knew I had to stop. Jeff kept telling me that I was almost ready to go on a “job.” And I had a pretty good idea what a job was. And I knew once I went out with Jeff and his crew, once I really did steal something, it was going to be even harder for me to make things right.
Now during this time, I didn’t talk to my parents very much. In fact, I kind of avoided them. Which was easier than you might think. See, my family lived in the East Valley Church rectory, which was sort of diagonally behind the church, on Maple Street. It was a big, rambling house with a lot of different doors—so many doors that I could always come in and get to my room without anyone seeing me. Plus my parents—and my older brother—were always kind of busy—usually too busy to notice whether I was around or not.
My brother, John, for instance, was usually busy working out which college he was going to go to. I knew this because whenever I knocked on his door, he would shout out, “Leave me alone. I’m working out which college I’m going to go to.” This was a hard choice because practically every college in America wanted him. John was always hardworking, always had his face in books or was practicing his soccer skills or whatever. But now I barely ever saw the guy anymore.
My mom was busy with—well, like, a million different mom-type things. If being a preacher’s kid was tough, I guess being a preacher’s wife was no picnic either. She called herself the church’s unpaid music director, plus she ran a bunch of committees and charities and was always going off somewhere in dirty jeans and a sweatshirt to rebuild a house or paint a children’s center or serve meals to the homeless or something. Plus she served meals to the homed too—meaning us—and kept the house nice and did the laundry and stuff like that. So yeah, she was busy.
And my dad, of course, was busy with all the stuff he did, like meeting with church people and visiting sick people and burying dead people and marrying people in love and writing sermons and studying to write sermons and giving sermons and other stuff like that.
And listen, my dad and mom and brother were all nice people—they really were. Just busy, that’s all. Which, as I’ve said, made it easy for me to come home at the end of the day and go to my room and do my homework and whatnot without talking to anyone at all.
Finally one evening, the last evening before all the trouble started, I was hanging out in the barn with Jeff and the guys. Jeff was sitting in his swivel-chair throne, kind of kicked back with a beer in his hand. Ed P. was lying across the front seat of one of the cars, with his legs hanging out the door. He was doing something with the dashboard radio, I’m not sure what. Anyway, it wasn’t the same car as before. It was a big blue BMW. The Audi was gone, I don’t know where.
Harry Mac was lying stretched out on the sofa, reading Sports Illustrated.
And I was sitting in one of the swivel chairs, examining one of these Buster things, pulling the different blades and tools out, looking them over, pushing them back in.
All of a sudden Jeff said, “You can keep that one if you want.”
Startled, I looked up at him. “What?”
“Sure. The Buster. Keep it. It’s yours.”
“Oh no, I don’t wanna . . .”
“Keep it. I’m telling you,” said Jeff. “It’s a present. You can’t insult me by turning it down.”
I opened my mouth again, but nothing came out. I didn’t want to insult him, after all.
“Anyway,” Jeff said. “You’re gonna need it. For a job. Soon.”
I felt my mouth go dry. I felt my throat get tight. I licked my lips, trying to think of something to say. But I couldn’t think of anything.
Slowly—almost as if my hand were working on its own—I slipped the Buster into my pocket.
That night, after dinner, I went upstairs to my room. I was feeling bad—really bad. Scared about what was going to happen. I wanted to get out of this. It had gone too far. I wanted to tell Jeff that I wasn’t going to come to the barn anymore. But I knew in my heart that I wasn’t going to tell him. I was afraid to tell him. I was afraid he would beat me up. I was afraid he wouldn’t like me anymore. I was afraid I wouldn’t feel cool anymore when I went to school and would go back to just being a PK.
I sat at my computer and I noticed Joe Feller was online. Joe’s a big, shambling, friendly guy, kind of like a Saint Bernard dog in human form. We’ve known each other since we were little. His parents used to go to our church, and Joe and I used to hang together after Sunday school. About a year ago, Joe’s dad got a job in Albany and they moved away. But Joe and I still chat online all the time. We’ve sort of developed this code, which is partly the usual chat abbreviations like LOL and IMHO and so on, but is also partly stuff we made up ourselves over time and just got used to using. So if I wrote our chat down word for word, it would pretty much look like alphabet soup to anyone who didn’t know us. So I’ll save you the trouble of translating and translate it for you myself.
It went like this:
ME: Are you there?
JOE: Always at the keyboard.
ME: Got a problem.
JOE: You fascinate me strangely.
ME: Did something dumb.
JOE: Tell all.
ME: Been hanging out with Jeff Winger.
JOE: ?????
ME: I know. And Ed P. and Harry Mac.
&n
bsp; JOE: That IS dumb.
ME: I know.
JOE: That is dragnet.
ME: I know, I know.
(Dragnet is an old, old police television show that Joe likes because he thinks it’s so old-fashioned and funny. The theme song goes, “Dum-de-dum-dum.” So “dragnet” is Joe’s way of saying something is really, really, really dumb.)
JOE: What do you do? With Jeff?
ME: Nothing. They show me stuff.
JOE: ?
ME: How to break into cars. Pick locks.
JOE: Cool!
ME: !!!
JOE: But dragnet.
ME: Right.
JOE: You should stop.
ME: Thank you, Yoda. Your wisdom astounds me.
JOE: But if you stop, they will kill you.
ME: Bingo.
JOE: Also, you will no longer be cool.
I knew Joe would understand. Like I said, we’ve known each other a long time.
ME: What do you think?
JOE: It’s bad.
ME: I know.
JOE: Really bad.
ME: I know.
JOE: Dragnet.
ME: I KNOW!
JOE: You don’t have to shout.
There was a long pause here. I stared at the monitor. As I’ve said, there was nothing much there but a bunch of letters: YHAP Rly? SA WDID . . . and so on. But I saw the whole conversation in my mind just as if it were all spelled out. It was not a pleasant sight.
The pause went on a long while—and then I saw something that made my heart grow heavy in my chest. In fact, it made my heart sink like a rock, bang, straight down to the bottom of my feet.