Taming the Star Runner

  It was a big warehouse kind of room, the set was just a desk in front of a wall, a lot smaller than he'd thought it would be. There were cables lying around all over the floor. He tripped on two.

  "Let's get you miked," Steve was saying. He'd introduced them to the newscaster, a young black woman who looked like a model, and the camera crew.

  He sat behind the desk while they clipped a mike onto his collar, hiding the black wire under his jacket.

  "Nervous?" asked Steve. He probably didn't leave his office for everybody they had on the noon news. He was taking the time because he was friends with Ken.

  "Naw. If I goof up you can just shoot it again."

  "What?"

  "That's what we did in mass communications class. In sixth grade we taped a news show." Travis was growing uneasy, because this seemed to be a big joke to everyone.

  "This is live," Steve said.

  Travis felt his tongue starting to swell. It was a very weird sensation. It swelled until it felt as big as a dinner plate.

  This was live.

  "You were okay," Ken said. "You look good on camera."

  Travis stared out the window. He hadn't been okay. He'd been god-awful. He must have looked like a moron. He'd been so nervous he'd actually gotten tears in his eyes--Ken said you couldn't tell, but Travis knew he'd still looked like a moron. A good-looking moron, maybe.

  "You just have to learn to speak in sentences, you know, answer questions with more than yeah and naw. Get glib."

  Get glib.

  "On TV, you don't have time for a lot of pauses. Every second seems like a minute, a minute seems like an hour. You've got to remember your medium."

  "So who made you a director?" Travis muttered. Who the hell cared? His medium was writing, not talking.

  He wanted to do this, interviews and stuff. For the first time he realized how bad he wanted to do this.

  I can learn it, he thought. Next time'll be different. In his mind he started writing answers to the questions she'd asked him. Writing answers in sentences. Getting glib.

  He'd hoped maybe one of the teachers would ask him where he'd been that morning; he would be casual as hell while replying, "Oh, I was on the news," or maybe, "Doing a television show." He was getting a little antsy to let them know they were dealing with a real writer here.

  But nobody asked him anything. Everyone had left him alone and now they thought he wanted it that way. They had made him into a loner and then acted like it was his idea. Travis had never before realized how much your status depended on other people. He'd thought you got to choose your group. Well, you didn't. But he tried to pull off the loner role with as much dignity as possible: When the guys in the smoke hole talked about going to the river to do some longneckin' (he had picked up on some of the local jargon: longneckin' meant drinking beer) he didn't beg to go too. Bunch of hicks in a four-wheel drive, sitting in the sand chugging Coors--how cool could that be?

  He walked off to spend his lunch hour in the library. If they got the impression he was some kind of psycho who'd come to school with a gun someday, well, that was their impression.

  He wanted out of this school so bad. Even if it meant not seeing Casey every day. He had to get out of here before he broke down and begged to go longneckin' with hicks.

  When he answered the phone that afternoon he wasn't too surprised that it was Joe. He'd been thinking about the guys so strong, he'd even had a feeling that it was Joe when the phone rang. Sometimes he was kind of psychic about phone calls and stuff like that.

  "Travis?"

  "Yeah. Joe?"

  "Yeah. Can you come and get me?"

  "I can't hear you, man. This is a lousy connection.

  "I'm at the Quik Trip over on Highway Fifty-one. Can you come and get me? I can't walk, man, I jumped outta the car and messed up my leg..."

  Travis could hardly understand him, his voice had no air behind it, he was surprised now he'd recognized it--what the hell was going on?

  "How'd you get here?"

  "I hitched, man, and I had to jump outta the last car, the guy was getting weird with me, I guess I better get used to that..."

  It sounded like Joe was sobbing. Or maybe just too tired to even talk. Something was really wrong.

  "What's up?"

  "It's bad, Travis. Really bad. Can you come and get me?"

  "I don't have any wheels, man. My uncle won't be home for hours."

  "Oh, don't tell your uncle. Don't tell anybody, man."

  "Hold on."

  Travis ran to the kitchen window. Casey's Jeep was parked by the barn.

  "Listen, I think I can get there." He paused. "How bad?"

  "The twins are dead." Joe's voice sounded flat. Flat and old.

  "Orson killed them. And I helped him."

  Travis felt so spacey. For a second he thought he was going to drop the phone. He didn't ask if this was some kind of sick joke.

  "Stay there. I'll get a ride."

  "Okay," Joe said, and hung up.

  "I need to borrow your Jeep."

  Casey looked up from her record books. "I don't think--what's wrong?"

  "Just for a couple of minutes--to go to the Quik Trip."

  "Hey, this is some nicotine fit."

  Travis wanted to smack her across the room, but she said quickly, "What is it?"

  "I need to pick up a guy at the Quik Trip, he hitched this far, it's real important--you drive if you want, but let's go, okay?"

  She got to her feet, looking at her watch. "I've got a lesson ... what the hell, they've been late for me--"

  She drove even fast enough to suit him, raced down to the highway like she did across the fields, chasing the Star Runner. Travis gripped his seat, too scared to think. He could think later, when Joe told him what had happened--the twins dead?

  He could remember the last time he'd seen them, the night before his big fight with Stan, they were working on the Trans Am, he was sitting on the washing machine in their garage watching them, drinking Pepsi because their mom was home. He remembered how pale they looked under garage light, skinny, Mike under the hood and Billy laughing at whatever Travis was saying. He'd been lying extravagantly about something, he couldn't remember what, they wouldn't allow smoking in the garage, they thought they were such hotshot mechanics...

  Joe was sitting on the curb in front of the Quik Trip. He almost fell as he got up, and limped to the Jeep. To Travis he seemed like someone stumbling in his sleep, exhausted by a nightmare he couldn't awake from. Travis was stunned. Joe was thinner, dirtier, and older. And he knew these changes were recent--for the first time he could believe stories he'd heard about people turning gray overnight.

  He jumped out of the Jeep to help him. Joe yelped when he grabbed his arm.

  "Sorry, man," he muttered, heaving himself into the front seat. "I think I tore some muscles or somethin'."

  He gazed at Casey.

  "She's cool," Travis said, hopping in back, and Casey proved it by not asking any questions, just speeding back to the barn.

  In Travis's room Joe stretched out on the bed, not even taking his shoes off, staring straight up at the ceiling. Travis couldn't figure out what to do. In a little while Joe started shaking, and tears ran down his face, but he didn't even seem to notice, like this had happened so much he was used to it.

  Travis went to the kitchen and poured out a couple of good shots of bourbon and dropped a handful of ice cubes in it. He'd worry about Ken later.

  Joe pulled himself up into a half-sitting position, leaning back against the headboard. He gulped the bourbon like it was water--Travis realized he should have brought water to begin with, but Joe did quit shaking so much.

  "Got anything to eat?"

  Travis doubted it--he came up with a couple of cold weenies in stale buns, but Joe ate them without complaint, slowly, not bothering to wipe the streaking tears off his face.

  "So what happened?" Travis asked finally. He dreaded knowing.

  "The twins are
dead."

  "Yeah. So how?"

  "Orson killed them. Took a twenty-two, oh, God--"

  Joe finished off his bourbon.

  "He tried to make me shoot Mike, but I wouldn't. You think that might help, at my trial, that I didn't pull the trigger? I thought he was ready to kill me, too, and he still couldn't make me--"

  "Start from the start," Travis said.

  Joe munched along on his hot dog, obviously rewinding his story in his mind, trying to decide where "start" was.

  "We've been working for Orson," he said--he meant himself and the twins, he wasn't used to the fact that they were past tense yet. "I wrote you that, or told you, right?"

  Travis nodded.

  "It wasn't dope," Joe said. He didn't seem to know what to say next. "We were doing houses..."

  Doing houses? thought Travis. Painting or something? He couldn't imagine Orson organizing house painting, or why it would cause him to kill someone. But he just let Joe work on his second bourbon, because he was remembering vividly how it felt to be scared like that.

  "Robbing houses. Orson would scout neighborhoods and me and the twins would break into the houses he picked, you know how good they are with tools and stuff, it wasn't too hard, a lot of times I just stood lookout because they could get in small windows, we just took easy stuff, you know, Orson fenced it, he said people's insurance covered it, nobody was really getting hurt, and he paid us, you know, like for each job. If we got a lot of stuff it was more. He knew how to get rid of the stuff, so we just took whatever he gave us."

  Joe closed his eyes and sighed. Travis was sick with cold apprehension. Joe was in big, big trouble. And even in the middle of his terror for his friend came the selfish, unbidden thought: Thank God it's not me!

  "I quit," Joe said. "You think they'll believe me when I tell 'em I quit?"

  His sad olive-brown eyes fixed on Travis, desperate for hope, but Travis couldn't even nod.

  "We did this one house, we thought it was empty, but just as we were packing up the silver this old lady came in and started screeching--Billy shoved her and she fell, we ran out of there, she wasn't hurt because it was in the papers, but I got to thinkin' about Grandma, what if somebody shoved her, old ladies break bones real easy, you know. And I didn't want to do this anymore and I quit. The twins said they quit too." He sighed. "But they didn't. They did one more job and didn't tell Orson."

  Travis's mind raced around and around. Ken could help him, he knew the law, he could ... And at the same time he told himself over and over, it couldn't have happened to him. Oh, no. Suppose he had stayed at home, had been hanging out with them, he'd never have done anything so dumb. Robbing houses and ... He'd never have been so dumb.

  He stared at Joe and thought of all the reasons why it wouldn't have happened to him.

  "Orson came by and got me. He said he'd heard the twins pulled a job without cutting him in. I think they found a different fence, I don't know, I quit and I thought they did too. Orson said he was going to kick ass. That's all I thought he was going to do, honest, he said he was going to do a little ass kickin' and teach them a lesson. He'd been drinkin' and smoking grass and coke too. I was scared to get out of the van--he wasn't mad at me and I was trying to keep it like that. The twins were hanging out in the parking lot by the park and Orson got out and got them and they just climbed in; we've been doing more grass since you left, Travis, it's easier to get than booze. They were pretty stoned. And all the way up the mountain, he was driving up the mountain road, toward the reservoir, we kept drinking and smoking and it was like a foggy bad dream, like you can't wake up from, Orson ranting on and on about how they double-crossed him, how he was going to fix them. It was scaring me, man, but it was like it wasn't happening either. It just wasn't real. You ever have something happen, and it just didn't seem real?"

  Travis nodded. He knew Orson's van. He could picture everything, the black night out the windows, the heavy smell of the grass, the glare of the dashboard lights on Orson's mad face. Crazy mad, drunk and stoned.

  He pictured the silent twins, passing a bottle back and forth. It wouldn't seem real to them either.

  "Anyway, Orson drove down one of those side roads, a dirt one, it was too bouncy to drink. Then he stopped and got out and rolled the side door open and made them get out. And me too. They ended up sitting on a log, Orson was still yelling and I was too scared to sit down with them. And he was waving a gun around. I thought it was just to scare them. I thought that right up to when he shot Billy in the head and he went over backward. Mike just sat there, staring at the ground. Orson said to me, 'You do this one,' but I wouldn't. I didn't say anything but I wouldn't. Then he was yelling, 'Look at me, damn you,' at Mike, but he kept staring at the ground, shaking his head. Orson shot him too. I thought I was next, but he drove me back to town, saying I knew better than to tell anyone.

  "I got a bus to St. Louis and then hitched the rest of the way--the last guy got a little weird with me and I jumped out of the car...

  "You know what I keep thinking about? Leaving them up there on the mountain, it was a real cold night and they didn't have jackets..."

  Joe started shaking so his ice cubes rattled.

  Travis finally said, "You sure they were dead?"

  Joe nodded.

  "When did this happen?"

  "I think it was two nights ago, I ain't sure anymore."

  Travis found himself shaking. But it wouldn't happen to me, he kept thinking. I'd have jumped out of the van, grabbed the gun, knocked Orson out ... He kept running it over in his mind, changing the story, fixing it.

  Fixing everything.

  Chapter 13

  It crossed Travis's mind to try to hide all this from Ken, but he soon realized that wouldn't work. For one thing, Joe sacked out into a sleep that resembled a coma, and Travis would have to take Christopher's bed; but mostly Travis wanted somebody else to lay this on--he wanted help.

  What was going to happen to Joe? He tried to keep that question at the top of his mind, but if he let down his guard for a second, he found himself dwelling on how close he had come to being in the same mess.

  If he had hit Stan just a little bit harder...

  Ken took it a lot more calmly than Travis had expected. They stayed up till two o'clock talking about it--at least they ended up talking. At first Travis tried to persuade him to get Joe on a plane out of the country. When Ken refused even to discuss that option Travis got a little wild, but by midnight he was worn out and facing facts. Ken was going to call the authorities first thing in the morning; he was going to do all that was legally possible; he was going to help find a good lawyer. Joe was going back.

  It was settled and Travis had known all along this was how it was going to be settled and he didn't think Joe was going to be too surprised.

  He wasn't. Travis finally had to go shake him awake the next morning; he ate his toast and drank his coffee and listened to the plans with dull indifference. Travis remembered when he'd worked for the vet: a couple of times people brought in dogs that had been hit by a car--they had the same look.

  And Joe was tired. He was too tired to think of showering, but Travis made him, and ran his clothes through the washer and dryer. It might be his last private shower for a while.

  For some reason that thought made Travis cry. He leaned on the washer and cried. The machine was noisy, nobody could hear him.

  Joe was ready at last. He seemed to be walking in his sleep. Travis couldn't help remembering the bouncing bravado he'd managed himself, when the cops came for him, but then Stan hadn't been a friend, or really dead. He let Joe sit up front, even though he hated being scrunched up in the back.

  "What's that?" Joe sat up and looked around, like someone trying to wake up.

  "Thunder," Travis said.

  "We're under a severe thunderstorm watch," Ken said. It seemed like a last-ditch effort for a normal conversation; they were reduced to talking about the weather.

  "Does that mean like
tornadoes and stuff?"

  "Naw." Travis reassured him with the line he'd heard: "Not this time of year."

  "I don't know," Ken said absentmindedly. "A few years ago we had one on Christmas."

  Now he tells me, Travis thought. Actually, he hadn't really noticed the dark gray sky, it seemed such a natural extension of how everything was going--he would have been shocked and depressed by blazing sunshine this morning. The distant zigzag flashes through the blacker clouds to the west were like his thoughts, racing across his mind, the growing thunder like the march of doom.

  Nobody tried to talk again. It was over quickly. They were in some building. It didn't seem like a police station, but there were policemen waiting to take Joe, men in suits to talk to Ken--Travis tried to take notes in his mind but everything blurred. Everything but the quick hug he gave Joe.

  He was shaking.

  "So what's going to happen?" he asked, finally breaking silence on the way home. The lightning was closer now, crackling like skeleton fingers across the sky, the thunder booming and rolling (giants bowling, he remembered from when he was little, he'd thought thunder was giants bowling--had he thought that up or had he seen it in a cartoon a long time ago?). But it wasn't raining yet. The hairs on his arms, on the back of his neck, stood and wiggled.

  "Do I look like God?" Ken said. "How should I know?"

  Not much, Travis thought, not with those bags under your eyes.

  "I mean legally."

  "Sorry. Legally. Well, it depends on whether or not they catch this other guy. How much of his story is corroborated by the evidence. And a big factor is whether he's tried as a juvenile or an adult. How old is he?"

  "Sixteen," Travis said, then remembered, with a sinking feeling, that Joe's mom had held him back a year, before grade school. Joe was the only person he knew who'd flunked kindergarten. "Seventeen."

  "It could go either way."

  Travis stared out at the trees dancing in the wind.

  "It wouldn't have happened if I'd been there," he burst out. "I never liked that scuzz-ball Orson. I'd never have let them get suckered into working for him--if I'd stayed home this wouldn't have happened."

  "Maybe something else would've happened," Ken said. Maybe it would have been you and your stepdad murdering each other. Fate and will--it's baffled better minds than mine." In a minute he added, "Fate's what happens to you, and will is what you make happen to you."