A little more than an hour—and ten miles—after his onset, Dillon silently stripped off his sweat-soaked gear inside the enclosed porch and slipped through the house to the bathtub, not one of his dilemmas resolved, but at least physically more at peace. His father had long since stopped worrying about him when he disappeared on his late-night training excursions, and nothing stirred in the quiet house. For several hours he wrote in his journal before reaching this expended state in which he felt he could merely drop onto the bed and become unconscious. But still, he could not sleep, feeling he had set in motion forces he not only couldn’t control but possibly couldn’t contend with. He remembered the number of times he’d seen the cheap mahogany plaque on the desk in his dad’s study: THE UNEXAMINED LIFE IS NOT WORTH LIVING.
So when it’s examined, he thought, what then? He knew how to examine, but he didn’t know how to evaluate. He would ask his dad, soon, what the plaque meant to him, a man whose family had all but deserted him, who must feel the pain of loss so tremendously that he could only close it off. A burst of guilt filled Dillon, triggered somehow by the flash of Ryan Ryder across the screen behind his eyes. Ryan Ryder, the next generation. You couldn’t very well consider the next without considering the last. Dillon was suddenly aware he had left his father to figure it all out for himself. He was such a quiet man, seemingly so strong that Dillon never once thought to ask after his pain. What must it be like to watch everything you’d worked for for the past twenty-two years crumble before your eyes? Since Dillon could remember, his father had been a jack-of-many-trades, primarily a mail and freight man, contracting with the post office to haul into tiny mountain towns on the edges of the Idaho Primitive Area out of Three Forks, which stood only a few miles from the Washington-Idaho border. But Dillon could also remember his father at different times cleaning furnaces and building cabinets and taking in accounting work for small businesses, and he was aware that he’d never known if the Hemingways were rich people or poor people. He didn’t know how his father went about taking care of the family. There was always enough, and no more than that was said. He remembered his father teaching a class out at Three Forks Community College, though he had no idea what subject material was involved. Dillon suddenly felt tremendously neglectful that he had never queried his father at least enough to let his dad know he was important to him. He would do that, he thought, soon. A boy’s examined life needed to include his father.
As he contemplated his irresponsibility over the past two years, and as his muscles began to relax out of pure physical and emotional exhaustion, his mind began to drift and settled on the one time when his irresponsibility nearly resulted in real trouble, on the night the Warlocks came after him.
Dillon is driving from Chief Joseph toward home by one of several alternative routes he’s established in the past few days. It’s three days after the last of the nocturnal acts of vandalism on Chief Joe, and he’s acutely aware that the bikers haven’t forgotten his feeble attempt at voodoo or, more important, his injection of a foreign substance into their meticulously kept engines. He is also aware that these guys have been linked, though not conclusively, to at least two killings and several disappearances over the past five years. They are dangerous men, not to be fooled with.
He has also, with the passage of a little time—very little time, in fact—lost contact with some of the rage and zeal required to allow him to perform the act in the first place, and he is, quite frankly, scared to death that they’ll catch him off guard somewhere and make quick work of him. After his second day of secret worry he told his dad, expecting to have his butt chewed to shreds, but Caulder was so broken by his own losses and so filled with the same rage coursing through Dillon’s veins that he merely listened intently to the story, nodded, and cautioned Dillon to be very careful. Late that night Dillon came partway down the stairs after hearing unusual noises, only to find his father examining and loading a shotgun and a 30.06 rifle.
But the Warlocks didn’t come.
So now Dillon looks into his rearview mirror almost as often as he looks out the windshield, expecting at any moment to see it filled with Harleys, storming in to surround him.
It’s early evening, still light, with moderately heavy traffic still flowing on Ash Street, his main route home for tonight. It happens roughly the way he expected it to, first one bike in the mirror, mounted by a behemoth of a man behind mirrored sunglasses, his long dark hair whipping in the wind. The giant removes something from his belt and speaks into it, and within minutes he is joined by others.
Dillon’s heart blasts off, and he’s instantly scanning for an escape route; but the traffic clogs all possibilities, and he possesses none of the driving skills of a Hollywood stunt actor or the cockpit arrogance it would take even to consider that he could perform the lightning maneuvers required to lose a motorcyclist in a four-year-old Dodge van. It’s time to pay.
Several bikers merge from the side street ahead to cut him off, and in his rearview mirror he watches two bikes, one on each side, pull beside him, waving him over to the curb.
Through the driver’s window one biker shouts, “Pull over, shithead. We want to talk.”
He looks straight ahead, thinking what they want to talk about is where to dump the body. The biker lifts his leg high and stomps the frame of the van just below the door. He glances over involuntarily. The biker points to a side alley and yells, “Pull over!”
Dillon nods, signals, and turns across traffic into the alleyway. With no conscious idea of his intention and in sheer panic, he hits the gas as the rear tires touch the dirt, and gravel cascades back out onto the street. He shoots into the intersection at the next block at full speed, eyes closed, half expecting to be creamed by oncoming traffic; but miraculously he flies across the street into the next alley untouched, thinking he may have a chance if he can drive crazy enough long enough to be seen and reported to the police, or, better, if he happens on to a cop.
That thought is barely warm when two Harleys pull across the alley entrance on the next block and sit straddled, arms crossed. Dillon slams the van into reverse for a flying backward exit, but the story in the rearview mirror is the same; and he knows the motorized portion of this chase is winding down quickly.
In a flash he’s out of the van and over the garbage Dumpster on the driver’s side, streaking toward the street between two old buildings, thinking this is how he should have done it in the first place. He has a much better chance on foot. He veers right at the sidewalk, headed back the way he came, hoping to throw them off long enough to give himself running room, knowing if he can get three blocks, four at most, he’ll be at the river, which is lined with trees and underbrush. They’ll have a rough time finding him there. If worse comes to worst, he can hit the water. The river is cold and rough in places; but he’d rather take his chances with a few rapids and hard rocks than let these leviathan mothers get to him.
The Warlocks figure him out quickly and double back, staying with him on the street with their bikes as he sprints down the sidewalk. Dillon tries to picture the river, the hiding places there, and where he can get in if he has to. A fifteen-foot chain-link fence topped with circular barbed wire runs between the path and the river, and he can’t think where it ends, but if he can get to that path, the fence has to stop somewhere.
At the river he takes another right and sprints south on the path. The brush isn’t as thick as he pictured it, but the path is narrow and rough, and none of the bikers comes down, three of them choosing rather to ride parallel to him on Park Drive. Dillon knows there are more; but all he can do now is hope to get to the water before they figure out where he’s going.
Ahead the path widens, and he sees the end of the fence. The bikes roar just to his right on the street, but he’s sure he can get into the water before they get to him. Suddenly the wide spot in the path is filled with Warlocks. Most are on foot, and they’re coming toward him. He skids to a stop and reverses direction, only to encounter an equal num
ber moving through the brush to the path. They’re all smiling—had him all the way. Up through the bushes the street is filled with bikes, and behind him is the fence. Trapped. He whirls and bolts for the fence, scaling frantically toward the barbed wire, which he finds to be thick and rigid. There’s no way through it without shredding himself. He hangs from the top of the fence until his arms give out, then drops to the ground in a heap.
A voice above him, deep and mean, says, “We just want to talk to you, shithead.”
The night before the chase, in the bowels of the Dragon tavern, the Warlocks held an informal meeting. It began with a conversation between Wolf and an angular, sinewy biker named Fat Jack. Jack, nearly forty, with long, stringy hair hanging in oily strands from an almost perfect bald beanie in his crown, reached into his breast pocket, pulled out a Baggie of coke, and strung out a few lines onto the table. “We done with the petty bullshit on the high school?” he asked, laying one end of his straw near his nose and approaching the coke line with the other.
“Yeah,” Wolf said. “Enough’s enough. No sense wasting any more time.”
“What about Hemingway’s brother?”
Wolf shrugged. “Boy’s got to pay. We can’t let no punks get away with butcherin’ our hogs.”
“Messed up mine pretty good,” Fat Jack said. “I wanna piece of that kid.”
Wolf smiled and nodded. “You’ll get it. We’ll all get it. No hurry, we can take our time. He’s gotta be sweatin’ rabbit pellets about now, wonderin’ when we’re comin’.”
Jack lined up the coke, and both men snorted quickly, their straws resembling rival vacuum cleaners in a TV commercial. They looked up simultaneously to see Marva, leaning knuckles first onto the table. Marva was a bit unusual in that she was the only female Warlock, and her admittance into the gang had caused hard feelings among some members. Several had actually dropped out to form a club of their own. How tough could a gang be if a woman could be full-fledged? But Marva was strong as a bull and tough as boiled owl and sported nearly as many tattoos as Wolf. None of that would have been enough to allow her member status had she not, on a cold late night three years ago, pulled Wolf out from under his flaming bike and actually reached inside a gash to stop the blood flow from a major artery in his leg. When the attending physician let Wolf know he certainly would have lost his leg—not to mention his life—were it not for Marva’s quick thinking, Wolf told her he owed her one.
Within that second Marva said, “Okay. I want to ride with your chickenshit motorcycle gang.” It wasn’t what Wolf had expected; but he stayed with his word, and among the Warlocks, Wolf’s word was law.
Marva reached for the straw and snorted a quick line of her own.
“Just talkin’ about makin’ some short work of the Hemingway kid,” Wolf said.
Marva smiled, slowly looking from one to another of the two bikers. She shook her head. “You pusses don’t know a class act when you see one. If it was up to me, I’d be askin’ the little shithead if he wants to join up. Throw in bike lessons for free.”
Fat Jack snorted. He was used to Marva’s jerking everyone around. The only thing faster than her nose for the snow was her mouth. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s a real class act, messin’ up five hogs. Kid was stupid. Nothin’ more than terminal stupid.”
“You say so, Jack,” Marva said. She laughed again. “How many heroes you think it will take to teach this rough, tough high school boy a lesson?”
The question obviously didn’t merit an answer. Both bikers only glared at her as Jack set up another set of tracks on the table. “What’s the matter with you, bitch?” Wolf asked. “That punk messed up some good Harleys, then come in here pourin’ his goddamn brother all over everything. You think we let shit like that go?”
“Like I said, you guys don’t know a class act when you see it. We’re Warlocks, right? Boy witches? What’s that sweet little genius do but come in here and haunt our asses. You see the rest of these pusses after he left? Even you, Jack, brushin’ shit off and movin’ away from all the hauntin’ like the bogeyman himself was in that Baggie.”
Wolf thought a second and smiled. “Yeah, that was cool. He shouldn’t have messed with the bikes, though.”
“Maybe,” Marva said, “but in his mind we killed his brother. And to tell the truth, he’s not that far off. You remember what you did when Song Man said your old man was a queer, Wolf? Like to tore his head right off his skinny shoulders.”
“Let it ride, Marva,” Wolf said.
“You know,” she said, “I don’t mind that you guys are assholes. That’s why I ride with you. What I don’t like is that you’re stupid assholes.”
No other Warlock would even consider speaking to Wolf in that manner, and Marva did it with astonishing regularity.
“You got a million-dollar drug business going, plus a hundred other illegal activities cookin’, and you’re willing to risk it all to get even with a punk high school kid.” She shook her head in disgust. “What do you think the newspapers are gonna do with it when this kid turns up beaten bloody or dead? Cops’ll be on us like grease on Fat Jack’s hair.”
Wolf hadn’t taken his eyes from her. “Forget it. The kid is meat.”
“And the Warlocks are pusses,” Marva said. That was pushing it, even for Marva, and she stood to walk to another table.
Somewhere in the night, through the cocaine-leaden, beer-soaked, angel-dusted haze, Marva’s words worked their way to a soft spot in Wolf’s brain and started a nest there. He began to let it be known through the evening that the Warlocks were off the Hemingway kid’s case. It was challenged often enough, and Wolf made enough counterthreats, that the idea lodged in, and he would not let it go even in the semisober hours of early morning. Somehow, through Marva’s words, a fraction of Dillon Hemingway’s actions became heroic, and it was a big enough fraction to save his skin. But a line had to be drawn. Hemingway needed to know it was a line he would not be allowed to cross again.
Dillon lies on the ground, waiting for the worst. He can almost feel the first steel-toed boot boring deep into his gut, but instead is helped to his feet. His first instinct is to swing and try again to run; but he’s gasping for air and flat beat, and something tells him to take his medicine and maybe he’ll come out alive. He opens his eyes to see Wolf staring back, smiling. “Good run. Had you all the way, though.”
Dillon raises his eyebrows, still trying to catch his wind. “I s’pose so,” he says. “Thought I could make it to the river.”
“You were gonna jump in the river?”
Dillon nods. “It was my only chance.”
“Didn’t you hear Eddie tell you we just wanted to talk?”
“Yeah,” Dillon says. “I heard him.”
“So why the hell didn’t you stop?”
“I didn’t believe him.”
Wolf nods, still smiling. Finally he says, “Look, kid, I’m sorry your brother snuffed himself, okay? This is a shitload more energy than we wanted to spend to tell you everything’s even. Long as you’re done playing Lone Ranger.” Wolf sticks a finger hard into Dillon’s chest. “But don’t mess with us again. You’ll lose more than just wind.”
Dillon puts his hands up in the air. “No more Lone Ranger,” he says, so relieved he thinks his legs will give away. “I’m done.”
Wolf nods again, looking Dillon straight in the eye. “You better be,” he says. “You better be.”
When the last biker disappears into the brush, headed for the street, Dillon sinks to his knees at the fence and throws up his lunch.
Jennifer experienced the same order of insomnia as did Dillon after the conversation in the car, though she responded differently. Because her interior world had been so deeply invaded all her life, her consistent tendency took her outside for comfort, focusing on challenges, past and present. Introspection left her feeling empty and powerless, her sense of guilt for her sexual complicity with T.B. being so great. As many times as she told herself how much she hated
it, and him, and as much as the weight of responsibility for her mother’s and Dawn’s very lives held her down, she could never get past her awareness of the soiled, obscene harpoon that lay wedged in her soul. Introspection lead to one question: What’s wrong with me? How dirty and awful must I be to have always been someone’s target? So she looked outside; she played games—basketball games.
She visualized the tough ones, saw her opponents at their best and herself at hers. She ran defensive sequences over and over until she could actually see herself moving to the right spot at exactly the right time. And she imagined games in the future, previews of the toughest coming attractions. She would visualize all possible situations. When the game rolled around, Jen owned her opponents. That was where she went on nights like tonight, when her life troubled her, the same place she went on the nights when T.B. came into her room.
But tonight she lay more than merely troubled; she was unable to get away. Tonight was the first time she had said anything about the continuing horror of her existence since she was eleven, when she had sounded the alarm only to have it silenced. And even though she trusted Dillon Hemingway more than anyone—with the possible exception of Coach—since she had trusted her grandfather, still, any leak in that stainless steel box around her heart sent waves of panic through her. Only in containment was there any real control. If her real feelings ever started spilling out, well, she might just discover the pit of her pain and rage to be bottomless.