Infinity + One

  Finn was only a hundred yards from the Blazer, but he didn’t argue. When they pulled up, Bonnie climbed out of the Blazer, her face wreathed in a relieved smile.

  The old boy in the funny hat knew what he was doing, and within minutes, with Clyde pushing, Bonnie steering, and the pick-up pulling, the Blazer was freed from the snowbank. Bonnie left the Blazer running, letting it warm as she and Clyde walked to thank the owner of the pick-up for his help.

  “You folks lucked out,” he said, unhooking the chains and stowing them in the back of his truck. “You’re in the middle of Cuyahoga National Park. I usually wouldn’t have been out this way, but my sister and her husband own a farm just west of here, outside of Richfield. Her husband got sick last year and died, right out of the blue. I go check on her now and then.”

  “I thought we were on I-71 last night, but from what I can tell we’re now on I-80,” Clyde said.

  “Well no wonder nobody found you if you told ‘em you were on 71! I-80 intersects 71 a ways back. You must have headed down the turnpike in that blizzard and not even realized it.”

  “It was pretty bad.” Finn extended his hand to the man, thanking him. Bonnie extended her hand as well, but the old man was in a talkative mood and kept his window down as he climbed into his truck.

  “It was terrible! There were a lot of stranded motorists out last night. Kept the snow plows and the highway patrol busy, that’s for sure. I have one of those police scanners, and it was lit up all night with people needin’ help. There was even a report of an ex-con who they think mighta run-off with that little singer comin’ through here. You heard about that? When the call went out to the highway patrol you shoulda heard the buzz on that scanner!”

  Bonnie stiffened beside him, and Finn felt the bottom drop out of his stomach. Run off? What the hell was going on? His assistance call would most likely have been transmitted to the local highway patrol. That made sense. But the rest of it didn’t.

  “Cute little gal, that singer. Little blonde gal. I like some of her songs. Shelby’s her name. We got a Shelby, Ohio, too. Did you know that? I’ve got a cousin in Shelby.” The old boy started singing something about a big blue moon and big green mountains and a great big broken heart, apparently one of Bonnie’s songs that he was fond of.

  “Well, my feet are cold, and my hands are too, so thanks again!” Ever the performer, Bonnie reached through the window and patted the old man’s shoulder. Finn just stood there, the ache in his feet suddenly the least of his worries.

  “Just get back on 80 here, heading east. You’re going to intersect I-271 right away. Head south on 271, and it will take you right back down to I-71. You’ll be in Columbus in two hours.” And with that, and a little wave, the clueless old man rolled up his window and rumbled down the road.

  Clyde and Bonnie watched him go, their hands pressed into their pockets, their eyes trained on the Dodge 4X4 stenciled across his tailgate. They watched until he was out of sight. Then Bonnie turned on him.

  “You’re an ex-con?” she asked flatly.

  “Yeah. I am,” he said swinging around, arms folded against the cold. “And apparently, I ran off with a cute, helpless, little country singer, and everybody’s looking for me!” Finn kicked the tire of the Blazer with his soggy boot, wincing as his frozen toes connected with the hard surface.

  “Son of a bitch!” He yanked the driver’s side door open and climbed in, slamming the door behind him. He glared at Bonnie through the broad windshield, challenging her, knowing he wouldn’t leave her, knowing she knew it too.

  She walked slowly to the passenger side and climbed in. The Blazer was warmed up now, blasting heat in their faces and urging them to resume their journey. But they sat, unmoving, and not surprisingly, Bonnie was the first to speak.

  “You said you would tell me about that tattoo. That swastika. You never did. You didn’t tell me because you would have had to tell me you’d been in prison.”

  It wasn’t a question. She’d put two and two together pretty quickly. Who says she wasn’t good at math?

  When Finn didn’t reply to her opening statement, Bonnie tried again.

  “The old guy said they were looking for an ex-con. Not an escaped convict. So I’m assuming you did your time. Did you violate your parole? By leaving the state, I mean.”

  “No. I didn’t. And I don’t owe you an explanation, Bonnie.” And he didn’t. He didn’t owe her anything. At this point he figured she owed him. Big time.

  “What did you do?” she asked, undeterred.

  “I killed a famous country singer.”

  Bonnie didn’t laugh. He didn’t blame her. It wasn’t very funny.

  “How long were you there? In prison, I mean.”

  Finn gripped the wheel and tried to rein in the helplessness that filled his chest and made the palms of his hands sweat. He didn’t want to talk about this.

  But Bonnie did.

  “Come on, Clyde. Tell me. You’ve heard my sad tale. Let’s hear yours.”

  “Five years. I’ve been out for a year and a half,” he said, relenting, the response short and sharp, a verbal whip that left Bonnie temporarily stunned. But she was silent for all of five seconds.

  “And you’re twenty-four?”

  “Turned twenty-four in August. Eight, eight, remember? Heil Hitler.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Bonnie hissed, offended, just like he’d intended. He was angry. He wanted her to be angry too.

  “You didn’t notice? I have a swastika on my left pec, and a double eight on the right. H is the eighth letter in the alphabet—Heil Hitler, HH, 88. The Aryan Brotherhood has all kinds of cute little symbols like that. It just so happens to correspond with my birthday. Nice, huh? Convenient too.”

  “What did you do?” She went back to her previous question. Maybe the Hitler stuff was too much.

  “My brother robbed a convenience store. To this day, I don’t know what he was thinking. I was in the car. I didn’t know he had a gun, and I didn’t know he was going to rob the store. Unfortunately for Fisher, the owner had a gun too. And he knew how to use it. Fisher got blasted. He ran out of the store, but not before he pulled the trigger too. I don’t know how he managed to get a shot off, because he had a huge hole in his stomach. But I heard the shots, and I saw him fall. I grabbed him, got him into the car. Took him to the hospital. He died on the way. And I went to prison.” Finn kept his voice clipped, his answers short, making it seem like it was no big deal, just water under the bridge.

  “Your brother?” Bonnie sounded as stunned as he had been when she told him about her sister.

  “My twin brother,” he answered, not looking at her. But after a few seconds of silence he had to look. She was staring straight forward, but tears streamed down her face, and her hand covered her mouth like she was trying to hold something in. He turned off the key, climbed back out of the Blazer, and shut the door behind him. He had to. He had to get away from her. Just for a minute. He knew he should have told her about Fish when she told him about Minnie. But he’d been too stunned. The similarities had felt wrong, strange, and even false somehow, and telling her then would have felt like he was trying to one-up her story after she’d bared all.

  Fish had always done that. From the time they could talk, Finn would share something, and Fish would immediately have to top him. Finn would finish his dinner, and Fish would ask for seconds he was too full to eat. Finn would get a solid double in baseball, and Fish would kill himself trying to hit a home run. He kept track of all their stats, their grades, their girlfriends. Finn would tell him something, and Fisher would always come back with, “Oh, yeah? Well . . .” And Finn had hated it. He’d hated how competitive Fish was. How animated, how bossy. He’d hated how Fish could always wear him down. He hated how he always gave in to whatever Fish wanted. But most of all, he hated how much he loved him, and he hated how much he missed him.

  Finn heard Bonnie behind him. The snow crunched beneath her boots, and her breathing
was ragged. He noticed suddenly how ragged his own was.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I told you I had a brother named Fisher.”

  “But a twin? Finn, I . . .” her voice trailed off. She seemed as lost for words as he had been. Then she slid her arms around his waist and pressed her face into his back. She never failed to surprise him. He thought she would grower colder with the revelation—that she would feel betrayed that he hadn’t shared all there was to share. Instead, she held onto him. For a long time, she just held on. And they stood there in the road, surrounded by white and nothing else.

  “He died?” Her voice was a stunned whisper, more a statement than a question, though her voice rose a little on the end like she couldn’t believe it.

  “Yeah. He did.” Finn hadn’t wept for Fish in a very long time, but his mouth trembled as he verified that truth. Fish had died. And that had been far worse than what had come next.

  “Why did they send you to prison?” Bonnie asked, the question muffled, her face pressed into his jacket, but he heard her.

  “Armed robbery. Seven year maximum sentence for a first time offender.”

  “But you didn’t shoot anybody or take anything, right? You didn’t even have a gun.”

  “I took the gun out of Fish’s hand. I threw it in the backseat on the floor. My prints were on it. I was there with him. I helped him get away,” Finn said humorlessly. He’d helped him get away. And Fish had gone far, far, away. “It wasn’t hard to assume I was in on it. We were both high. And Fish shot the owner of the store. The guy almost died.”

  Finn could almost feel Bonnie’s dismay, her wonder, gauging his remorse, the truthfulness of his tale, but she stayed silent.

  “They offered me a deal. It was three days after my eighteenth birthday, and I had no priors. Five years and no attempted murder charge if I would plead guilty to possession and armed robbery. I would have been out in less time, but I didn’t adjust very well.”

  “So you got a tattoo of a swastika . . .” Bonnie moved to stand in front of him. She was biting on her lip, worrying it between her teeth like it held the answer to her dilemma. “I still don’t understand that. Was that something Fisher was involved in too?”

  “No!” Finn shook his head vigorously, not wanting Bonnie to lay that on his brother’s head. “I got that tattoo a month after I arrived at Norfolk. I’d tried to impress some people by showing them what I could do with numbers, with cards. It didn’t go over very well. I got beat up, they marked up my back, and I was sure if I didn’t find a gang, I was going to die just like my brother, and die soon. So I joined up with the only gang who would have me.”

  Bonnie’s eyes were wide like she was putting it all together.

  “Funny,” Finn said, though it really wasn’t funny at all. “What feels necessary on the Inside makes you a freak on the Outside.”

  “The inside?” Bonnie asked.

  “Inmates call prison the inside.”

  “And the outside is . . .”

  “Life. Freedom. Everything beyond the walls. I thought the tattoo was necessary. I thought it was survival. In the end, though, the tattoo didn’t save me. I was saved by numbers. I was attacked, yeah, but I’d made my point, and eventually I had people coming to me, powerful people, and I didn’t need the tattoo after all.”

  There was a long silence between them, Bonnie staring wordlessly at him, Finn staring back, wondering if she could really understand. Finn touched his chest and her eyes followed his fingers.

  “The tattoo is a reminder that choices made out of desperation are almost always bad choices.” Finn paused, hoping Bonnie was thinking about her choice to climb the bridge. She’d been desperate too, and it had been a bad choice. “I don’t take off my shirt at the beach or in the weight room or when I go for a run or play ball with my friends. And I would never have shown you. It’s there, over my heart, making me look like something I’m not. Pretty hard to get past, I know. But it’s over my heart—not in my heart. And hopefully that makes a difference.”

  Bonnie nodded and reached over and placed her left hand over his right one, peeling it off his chest so she could hold it. Finn was so surprised that he let her. It hung between them, and she wrapped both of her smaller hands around it, cradling it.

  “I’m sorry about Fisher,” she said sincerely.

  Finn snorted in disbelief and pulled his hand away. She grabbed it back and swung on him fiercely, bringing their conjoined hands to her chest, his arm resting between her breasts, her right hand clinging to his forearm.

  “I’m sorry that happened to you, Finn.” She repeated the words with a vehemence that had him snapping back at her.

  “Don’t do that, Bonnie! Don’t be one of those girls who thinks I’m something to save! You can’t save me. I can’t save you. I sure as hell didn’t save Fish, and you couldn’t save Minnie, could you?”

  Bonnie’s brow was furrowed, resistance written all over her face.

  “Could you?” He was being a son-of-a-bitch. But it was the truth, a truth he didn’t think Bonnie had come to terms with.

  “No.” Her lips trembled, and she shook her head. “No. I couldn’t. I didn’t.”

  Finn swore, an ugly word for all the ugly feelings in his chest, and he tried to pull his hand free. Instead he just pulled her with it.

  “But you did save me, Finn.” Her face was tipped up to his, his arm pinned between their chests.

  “No, Bonnie. I interrupted you. If you wanna die, you’re gonna die. You know it, and I know it. I just hope you change your mind, because you’re better than that. Fish and Minnie are gone. Maybe we failed them. Hell, I don’t know. But we don’t help them by jumping off bridges.”

  “I am?” she asked, still clinging to his hand.

  “What?”

  “I’m better than that?”

  “Yes!” Finn sputtered. “You are!”

  She smiled at him then, just a wry twist of her lips and a softening through her eyes. But her tone was wry as she said, “You’re gonna have to make up your mind whether or not you hate me, Clyde.”

  “I don’t hate you, Bonnie.” How could he hate her with her lips inches from his and her chocolate eyes so full of compassion? “I just don’t know what the hell to do with you. And now, I’ve got the police looking for me, thinking I’ve kidnapped you.”

  “You don’t hate me, but you don’t like me very much.” Bonnie ignored the part about the police looking for him. She was still holding his hand and Finn felt ridiculous and irritated and more than a little turned on with his hand clasped between her breasts. He tugged again but she held fast.

  “I do like you, Bonnie.” Damn it all. He did, too. “But you’ve got to call your gran, your friend Bear, and everyone else who needs to know where the hell you are, and clear this up. Do you understand? Remember what I said about games? This isn’t one. This is my life, my freedom, and I don’t want to go back to prison.”

  Bonnie sighed but didn’t respond. She just held tight to his hand for a minute longer and then released it. Together they walked back to the Blazer, climbed in, and without further fanfare, headed down the road.

  Finn was tired, and he felt filthy, the result of sleeping in the car all night, wearing the same clothes for two days solid, and brushing his teeth with snow and his middle finger—his way of saying eff-you Mother Nature. They needed to find a hotel and recoup. And Bonnie was going to make those calls if he had to hold her down and dial for her.

  THE MAN WHO has been seen with singer Bonnie Rae Shelby has now been identified as Infinity James Clyde, a twenty-four-year-old ex-con from the Boston area. Clyde served five years for armed robbery and was released from Norfolk Penitentiary in Massachusetts in 2012. A vehicle registered to Clyde, an orange, 1972 Chevy Blazer, seen leaving the scenes of both recent sightings of the young superstar contributed to his identification. Bonnie Rae Shelby’s family is convinced that Miss Shelby had never met Infinity James Clyde before and had no r
elationship with him prior to her disappearance, leading police to believe that Miss Shelby either met or was bodily detained by Clyde in Boston, the last time her family or friends saw her. Infinity James Clyde resides in South Boston and left the area the night Bonnie Rae Shelby performed at the TD Garden.

  Infinity James Clyde is a white male, approximately six-two, two-hundred-ten pounds, and twenty-four years old. He has dark blond hair and blue eyes and is currently wanted for questioning by the police. If you have any information for police, you can call the number at the bottom of the screen.

  WITHIN MINUTES THEY were on 271 which, just like the old man said, eventually spit them out back on 71, heading toward Columbus, but they’d burned through most of their gas keeping warm the night before, and before too long Finn pulled off the freeway in a town called Ashland to refuel. Bonnie hadn’t said a word since they’d hit the road again. She was full of contradictions. Most of the time she couldn’t shut up, and then there were moments like this, stretches of time when she just turned it off and went somewhere else. They had both sat in contemplative silence, looking anywhere but at each other. She’d stared sightlessly straight ahead, and he had stared at the road while his gut had churned, and his mind had raced, the peace from that morning destroyed.

  He pulled into the gas station feeling like he wore a target on his chest, worried that any moment someone would step forward and point, yelling for the police who would swarm in and haul him off. But the world seemed oblivious to him, the way it usually was, and cars and trucks caked in dirty ice and snow rolled in and out of the gas station, refueling and recharging without taking note of the old, orange Blazer or its occupants. The knot in his gut eased slightly.

  Bonnie slid a pair of sunglasses on and stepped out of the passenger side, not looking right or left, and headed inside. He washed his salt and sleet covered windows before he noticed that Bonnie had put $70 down on the pump. He supposed that was her way of telling him they were going to be together for a few more miles. He just shook his head and commenced refueling.