Gun Lake (22 page)

It wasn’t that he really liked Elton John. What he liked were the memories that Elton John evoked.

He could remember sitting next to his father in that old Ford truck listening to these same songs play on the eight-track as they drove to town. They hadn’t talked much during these half-hour drives, but there was still a sentimental quality to these memories. Sean didn’t need to ask why. He didn’t miss them or long to reenact them, but he liked having them. The cut-up leather seats shedding foam, the plastic cup holder in the center console always holding a used McDonald’s cup that would be filled up at home with cheap store-brand coffee, his father’s nasty red cap, the smell of tobacco.

He could hear these songs without having to play the cassette. And Sean could still picture his father too. They were memories of a seven-year-old living in a small town somewhere in the heart of Texas. Memories of a long-lost kid thinking of long-lost times. Why did the time in that truck still mean so much to him now, sweating under a blue July sky, the weather sticky hot, the road open and quiet and free?

Even if everything turns out bad, memories can still be good.

He decided to go ahead and buy the tape. When Sean arrived at the register, he put the cassette down with everything else and gave the redheaded teenager a smile that made her blush.

Life is too short. Too short to not enjoy simple, routine, mundane things like this. Like simply buying an album you love
.

“Like Elton John, huh?” she said, scanning the tape as if she had never seen it before.

“One of my favorites,” he said, his voice unable to keep from sounding overeager, excited.

“Madman Across the Water?”

“One of his most undervalued albums—did you know that?”

She looked up and acted as though he were speaking a different language.

“Come on,” he continued. “‘Tiny Dancer.’ ‘Levon.’ Ever heard of those songs?”

She shook her head and told him his total was $66.77 with the gas. He pulled out a wad of bills from his jeans pocket and handed her a couple of fifties.

“So what do you like?” he asked.

“Eminem.”

He nodded. He’d heard his share of Eminem. “Yeah, he’s pretty talented for a white guy.”

She handed him the bag, obviously a little uncomfortable carrying on a conversation with a stranger.

“Enjoy this day,” he told her. “You never know when it’ll be your last.”

“Huh?” the girl said, again giving him that foreign-language look.

“Have a great one.”

He smiled at the big guy standing at the entrance as he walked past, through the glass doors, into the sunlight and the faint smell of hamburgers from the adjoining McDonald’s. He just stood there for a moment and looked up to the blue sky and breathed in.

I’ve missed this so much
.

Sean walked to the beast and climbed in the driver’s seat and started it up. He opened the cassette he had bought. He’d been dying to listen to this for years. Not days or weeks or even months, but
years
. It took him a minute to open it and get rid of the stupid protective tape that covered it. He could remember flipping through his father’s LPs. Sure, they didn’t sound as clear and crisp as CDs—he wished this old heap had a CD player—but something was lost when they stopped making vinyl. First of all, you didn’t have those great record jacket sleeves that felt like uncovering some great, hidden map to another country. You could read about your favorite musicians and see great pictures of them and hold the jacket as you listened to the needle lock into the groove of the record on the turntable. He missed that feeling, the sound of the static and the occasional click or crackle over a scratch in that groove. That was part of his childhood.

Man. What a long time ago
.

The cassette turned. The piano began to play, and Elton John started singing one of his classics. Sean Norton sat there listening to “Tiny Dancer” in the idling Chevy, singing along to the song and then the next, unable to keep the smile on his lips, incapable of suppressing the tears in the corners of his eyes.

“And he shall be Levon,” Elton John, a much younger Elton John, belted out the lyrics.

Sean felt goose bumps as he drove.

Freedom—what an amazing, awesome thing
.

The door opened, and Sean walked into the small motel room with its two double beds. The place smelled like Mexican food and sweat. Ossie looked at him and noticed the excited smile on his face. They had all spent the night here last night, with Kurt and Sean sharing a bed, Wes getting one to himself,
and Craig and Ossie sleeping on the floor. Ossie hadn’t slept much, worrying about his job and his apartment and what the people in his church were going to think when he showed up missing. It hadn’t helped that Wes snored like a boar.

“I’ve found us a new home, guys,” Sean said, plopping a magazine on the bed.

Kurt and Craig were out getting some breakfast. Wes lay propped up in bed watching Oprah on the television.

Ossie picked up the magazine. For a second he didn’t see what Sean was talking about, but then he spotted the advertisement for the rustic cabin rentals.

“You talking about these?”

Sean nodded. “I was driving around after getting some stuff—listening to a tape I bought—and I stopped and flipped through this magazine for a few minutes. So then I went and called the number. I asked if there were any vacancies, and they said there were. They have a big group coming in a couple of weeks, renting out all of the cabins and such. Some church group. So I told them we were some youth pastors checking out places—wanted to possibly come back here with our youth groups. So … Pastor Oz—or should I say, Pastor Lee—you’ve got some work to do.”

Wes had noticed the beer and gotten up to open the case. He seemed uninterested in the conversation. Ossie looked hard at Sean and shook his head in mild disgust.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I need you to take care of the rental. They need some basic info—driver’s license, address, stuff like that. I’d oblige, you know, but—”

“Youth pastors?” Ossie asked.

“Sure. Five guys scoping the place out, getting together to pray about it. Sorta like a retreat, you know?”

“You think people will believe
he’s
a youth pastor?” Ossie asked, pointing to Wes.

Sean grabbed himself a beer and leaned over the air conditioner.

“Maybe he’s one of those reformed people—bad guys who
turned their lives around.” He grinned. “Maybe an ex-con, you know.”

“Sounds good to me,” Wes said, taking a sip of the beer.

“The thing is, you’re a holy man, right?” Sean asked him.

“A holy man? You make it sound like I can heal sick people and cast out demons and stuff like that.”

“No, but you know what I mean. You’re a religious man.”

“Being religious doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Ossie said.

Sean rolled his eyes, drained half the can of Bud, and nodded. “Holy, religious, Christian, whatever. You know the lingo, right?”

“It’s more than lingo to me.”

“See, that’s good,” Sean said. “That’s why I thought youth pastors, you know? Kurt and his quiet, sensitive aura. Craig and his ‘Craigness.’ We got it down. We just need someone to make us sound religious. Or, well, whatever you want to call it.”

“How long are we going to be here?” Ossie asked.

“I don’t know,” Sean said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Maybe for a while. I kinda like this place.”

“And what do I do?” Ossie said.

“Keep doing what you’re doing.”

Ossie and Sean stared at each other, and neither said a word.

THE PHONE SEEMED to pulse like a heartbeat, wanting her to grasp it, waiting for her to crawl into it and ask for help. And there was only one person she could ask for help. The same person she needed rescuing from.

Norah knew herself well enough to know she was easily deluded and had been for the last few years. Abused women always came up with excuses, rationale, reasons. She’d seen enough
Oprah and other talk shows to know about women like her. But those other women usually had others they could count on—parents, friends, family. Norah was alone. She had put all her eggs in one basket, and everyone knew what happened to people who did that.

It was evening. The light was still on, and her half-read Stephen Conroy novel had been put aside, and now she was looking around this tiny apartment, the only one she had been able to afford, wondering what she was doing. Wondering whether she had felt more afraid back in Bangor than she did now.

Norah stood and went into the bathroom to get ready for bed. It used to take her half an hour to get ready for bed and another two hours to get ready for the day. Her mother had taught her well. Harlan wanted
—demanded
was the more accurate word—that she look her best, and that always meant makeup and styled hair and the perfect outfit and accessories, and such beauty didn’t come quickly or easily or cheaply.

Now, in the harsh white glow of the fluorescent bulb, she knew that even fifteen minutes would be too long for her new evening ritual. She didn’t have much makeup to remove, and her hair was already far too dry and dull to bother with. So she just brushed her teeth and studied the stranger in the mirror. A weak, scared, odd-looking face looked back at her.

No matter how many times Harlan or anyone else said it, No-rah had always found it hard to believe she was remotely attractive, much less pretty. Emotional scars still lingered—from growing up too soon, from her body going through puberty before her mind could catch up, from giving that body away to a guy she supposedly loved in high school, from feeling like a lost child in a big, ugly world. And now, without the wardrobe to cushion her, the makeup and the salons and the sports club to assist her, and the life with Harlan to numb her, the pain felt fresh and raw. It felt juvenile, as though she were back in high school, betrayed by the upperclassman she believed she loved.

She didn’t want to linger by the mirror too long.

Norah could list her weaknesses, could recite her failures.
Self-assurance had never been and probably would never be her strong suit, though a lot of people in her life would be surprised to hear that. She knew that she put up a good front and could even seem stuck-up or superior. But it was the inside that really mattered. And the truth was, though her life might have resembled a fancy gated mansion on the outside, inside she had always been an ugly orphan girl, living on handouts.

As she slipped underneath recently purchased sheets and rested her head against a pillow that would take a good year to soften up, Norah wondered again how long this inner storm would rage on. When would the sunlight come back to her soul? Would she even recognize it when it did? It had been too long since she had basked underneath its warm glow.

What she needed to do was to make a life for herself that wasn’t dependent on anyone else. She needed to find out who it was who lived there inside her. Find the real Norah behind all the walls. Learn to trust herself, so she wouldn’t be tempted to fall into another phony, lying life.

“Please, God, help me,” she said, just as she had secretly said many times before, speaking unheard words to a deaf God who maybe, just maybe, would hear her one day.

The first thing he noticed was her hair—long, dark, burnished to a sheen. Even tied back, it gave off a glow. Daylight flooded the restaurant and gave the hair and the waitress an electric, lit-up quality.

She was the first thing he noticed upon walking into the establishment. He couldn’t stop looking at her as a hostess seated him in the one room that looked open. This was the down period between breakfast and lunch, and the restaurant was almost empty. That was why Kurt had chosen it. Only two tables were occupied, and normally Kurt would have studied the people at them, making sure that no one paid him any special notice. This morning, however, he couldn’t keep his eyes off the tall brunette who walked past him and stunned him with her dark beauty.

Dark
and
beauty
were the words that kept rolling around in his mind. The waitress stopped at another table, and he took her
in. Eyebrows thin and long. Eyes rich and dark, maybe brown and maybe green. Lips full, skin smooth and tawnytan. A tall, rounded figure that Kurt admired without thinking how obvious he looked doing so.

Her eyes darted quickly toward him, aware that he was gawking, and then shifted away. Kurt scratched the growth of beard on his face and allowed himself to enjoy the sight of her again.

Half a month ago—seventeen days, to be exact—this stunning woman would have been just a fantasy. Such fantasies filled the minds of the men at Stagworth, but that was all they ever got. Kurt couldn’t believe she was real, that she actually worked here, that she would soon be coming up to him and handing him a menu and saying something like—

“Would you like some coffee?”

And, like any free man might say, he told her that yes, he would like some coffee.

And anything else you might care to give me
.

“We, uh, are still serving breakfast for another fifteen or twenty minutes. Is that okay?”

And again it was. Anything would be fine as long as he had a chance to sit here nodding, studying, stealing peeks at her like a pervert or a young kid. He forced himself to peruse the one-page laminated menu but looked up again as the woman walked away.

His biggest weakness had always been the presence of a beautiful woman. His mind had always turned to mush, and he would do absolutely anything to talk and spend time with her. He couldn’t believe how quickly these feelings and sensations came back to him now. Every cell in his body, every thought in his mind seemed concentrated on the waitress. Who was she and was she married and how long had she worked here and where did she grow up and had she heard about the Stagworth Five and what was her opinion and—

Whoa, buddy
.

If he were on a horse, he’d be reining the animal in hard. He wasn’t here for a fling. This wasn’t spring—or make that summer—break. The key word in his mind needed to continue to be
break
, but in a different context. He and the others had just managed to break out of a maximum-security prison, and he couldn’t exactly turn around seventeen days later and start making googly eyes at the pretty waitress who had no idea he was a con. An escaped con, no less.