Toll Booth. Michael Aronovitz

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СКАЧАТЬ shit!” Kyle said from behind.

      There was a shhhuuuuckkk sound to my right followed by a flock of shadows spinning madly across the road. A shower of nails pelted down to kick up a scatter of dust.

      The lane was covered.

      I thought of picking up the nails one by one, but I stopped myself right there. I wasn’t the one who dumped the whole box. It wasn’t my idea to leave someone stranded out here with a flat.

      I decided to let him get his own Goddamned nails and pick mine up in the process. What did I owe him? A Chesterfield and a piece of gum? I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to do this. I had enough guilt dumped on me at home.

      I turned to tell him all this, but Kyle wasn’t looking my way. He was staring at something off to the side. Something absolutely mesmerizing.

      I followed the line of his gaze and saw the car coming down the ramp.

      It was coming fast, and the air suddenly tasted rusty and harsh. Kyle grabbed my arm. My stomach was a lead ball, my ears hot as branding irons.

      We scrambled behind a red dumpster and there was the gritty sound of a car bumper banging from roadway to dirt. Kyle dropped to his knees for the low view and I stayed up high.

      Sharp sun lanced off the chrome and plastered a hot glare to the windshield. It was a dull orange Honda Civic, already swerving, plumes of dirt spitting up high behind it.

      My mouth was working the word “no” silently.

      There was a series of sharp “pop” sounds. The car did a rapid back-and-forth, left to right to left to right, then shot straight toward us. Like a yanked sheet the glare on the windshield vanished, and I was eye-to-eye with the driver.

      She had straight blonde hair. I thought she was wearing one of those plastic, red, three-quarter-moon hair bands that formed her bangs into their own separate little statement, but I couldn’t be sure at the moment. Her face had a sharp sort of beauty that was almost regal, and of that I was quite sure. Then the moment was gone. She overcompensated for control and yanked the wheel the other way. Now I saw the back of the car and the huge oak tree rising up ahead of it to the left of a jobsite trailer.

      There was a hard clap. The butt end of the car actually jumped, and small fragments of bark and glass burst to both sides. The car bounced twice and settled, and the raised dirt blew off into the woods.

      The car horn sounded.

      Its steady wail fingered its way into the afternoon sky and spiraled up to an accusing, hot summer sun.

      2.

      We both spoke at once, and then took a moment to absorb what was voiced by the other.

      “Run,” I said. This was Kyle’s problem.

      “We killed her,” Kyle said.

      We.

      One of those nails was mine. We were in this together.

      But I still thought we could run. I didn’t have time to consider what the slightly older boy I was on the verge of growing into would call “social responsibility,” and what the boy I was on the verge of leaving behind would call “owning up.” The car horn was a danger. Though we were five miles from Westville Central, there was bound to be someone passing by on the overpass with the windows down. And perpendicular to the dirt road, through the front leg of Scutters on the other side of a shallow, wooded valley of sorts stood my own house. Was it a quarter-mile from here? A half? Was Lucy out on her lead, up on her hind legs, front paws scratching at the air in response to the sound coming from this side of the trees?

      I opened my mouth to argue what I thought was the obvious, and was denied the opportunity. Kyle was walking away. He was not running, but walking with casual purpose in the last direction I would have expected.

      He was walking toward the Honda. His hands were in his pockets and his shoulders hunched in just a bit. He gave a cool glance to the side and I saw his future. In one hand he had a crowbar and in the back of his waistband was a Colt .45 with the safety flipped off. The Honda’s horn was the alarm in a jewelry store downtown after hours with a shattered storefront window and three smashed display cases inside. Kyle casually glanced down both sides of the avenue to see if the cavalry was onto him yet, and approached the getaway car. And he didn’t approach it on the run. He walked toward it with casual purpose.

      I expected Kyle to look through the window of the Honda and give himself a “one-two-three,” but he didn’t. He simply yanked open the door and leaned in. Through the short rear window I saw his elbow piston backward, and the horn stopped as if it was cut by a blade. He backed out, slammed shut the door, bent, and puked into the dirt.

      I suddenly wanted my father. Mom couldn’t help me here. Mom pushed morals and preached lessons and soothed stomach aches and provided verbal simulations that proved mean people were insecure on the inside, but this was out of her realm. It wasn’t even in her universe.

      Before their divorce, when I’d had man stuff to talk about I used to approach Dad and beg for “Boy’s Club.” As busy as he was, he always seemed to make time for these moments, most probably because it both excluded Mother and also helped him see himself for a moment as “Dear old Dad” with the pipe and the confident smile you saw in Fifties movies or the sugar tins and cookie jars with Norman Rockwell prints on them.

      Once, back in fifth grade, I asked his advice after breakfast when Mom went to check the laundry downstairs. It was Saturday.

      “Dad,” I’d whispered.

      “Yeah, Skipper.” He turned down the corner of the paper and peered over it. My eyes were wide and earnest.

      “I have to ask you a question!”

      “Right.” He put the paper down, folded it in thirds, and looked at his watch.

      “Let’s go.”

      We slipped out through the sliding glass doors and went to our spot on the log bench by the tire swing. I proceeded to tell him that yesterday when I went back to the school to get a social studies workbook I’d left in my cubby, I caught Spencer Murphy stealing Mrs. Levitz’s science test from the top drawer of her desk. It had me frozen in the doorway. I looked over my shoulder for a janitor and saw nothing but empty hallway.

      “Hey, dork!” Spencer said. He was a tall, thin boy with disheveled reddish hair. He had what seemed a permanent cowlick on the back left side of his head, early acne, an upturned nose flooded with dark freckles, and ears as small as quarters. He was wearing a light blue shirt with the Copenhagen tobacco logo written across the chest in cursive. There were sweat-stains under his arms. His face had paled, and the pimples on his cheeks shone out like stars. He took a menacing step toward me, the test between his thumb and index finger.

      “Tell anyone, Raybeck, and I’ll say you were in on it. I’ll tell Principal LaShire you dared me to do it, I swear.”

      Mom would have hit the roof. She would have called Spencer’s parents, demanded a meeting with LaShire, rounded up all the other kids involved, and lectured them all about “ethics.” I would have been labeled the world’s worst snitch and banished to the special ed. lunch table for life.

      Dad just got out his calculator.

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