Ravens (3 page)

“Or the thirteenth.”

“Young lady! I’ve been a customer of this bank since before you were
born
. I used to think I was a
valued
customer. I used to
imagine
…”

But Tara was thinking of the flowing blue skies of the jackpot. The jackpot which overruled and eclipsed everything, including
Mrs. Potro, and which held the silver keys to the future. And in less than an hour she’d be telling Nell about it! Should
I just lay it on the table, or should I tease her first? Make it a guessing game? So every time Nell guesses wrong I can say,
“No, bigger. Think bigger,” and then should I —

“Are you
ignoring
me?” said Mrs. Potro.

“What.”

“You’re? Ignoring?
Me
?”

“Well yeah. I was sort of in my own thoughts there.”

The neck-cobra pulsed. “Let me speak to Mr. Allen this instant.”

“Why? You gonna get me fired?”

“I want to speak to Mr. Allen!”

“Mr. Allen’s gone home. You can come see him tomorrow. But you can’t get me fired, ’cause I don’t work here anymore. This
is my last day. Actually, this is my last minute in this dump. So. What is it you were whining about again?”

Right before her eyes the woman was turning into an openmouthed gargoyle. A pleasure to witness.

“So what was it again?” Tara asked her. “Twenty-five?” She reached into her own purse and counted out a twenty and five ones,
and set these down before the wounded duchess. “Here. Little farewell gift,” she said. Then added two quarters and a nickel.
“With interest.”

She turned away, went back to her monitor, her accounts. After a while she heard Mrs. Potro sniff significantly and totter
away.

But only after scooping up the money. This is the crowning touch, thought Tara. This makes this day
perfect
.

She finished her paperwork and said goodnight to the tellers like it was any other day, and took off. On the way back to Brunswick
she played Santogold as loud as she could. “Break it break it you can’t stop me in this race!” The sky over the marshes had
no end, the whole world was in her grasp, and it seemed as though she was lifting off above herself; tooling along in her
Geo and at the same time lifting into the sky, and so filled with excitement and freedom that she had to open her mouth and
scream
.

Then her phone beeped. Message from Clio.

Headquarters. Code Blu.

Code Blu meant a full-on panic attack — usually brought on by some bass guitarist messing with Clio’s head.

Tara wrote back:

Cant.

A moment later she got:

Code INSANELY frikkin Blu!

Tara gave up then. What else could she do? She went to Headquarters, which was the name they’d given to Skeet and Bobbie’s
condo. It was out on Altama Avenue, in the gloomy whitetrash hive called Spanish Gardens (nothing Spanish about it except
a crude Moorish archway on the sign, and no gardens either). Bobbie let her in. Everyone was smoking weed and watching Sarah
Silverman on TV. Tara went looking for Clio. She found her in the kitchen heating a frozen pizza. The guy Jonah from Kings
of Unsnap was with her. He was trying to look languorous and slouchy and world-weary, but his big quivering Adam’s apple spoiled
the effect. He wasn’t uncute though, and his band was not unbearable, and yesterday Tara had even been considering him a little.
But now the jackpot had swept him off the planet. Now, when he drawled “Heyyy, Taraaa,” she found she had
no
interest. She scarcely nodded. She looked to Clio, who gestured toward the sliding back door.

Jonah said, “Where you going? You doing lesbo stuff? Hey, I’m a dyke too.” They ignored him. They went out to the yard (weeds,
beer kegs in the weeds, a rusted weedwhacker) and slid the door shut.

Tara said, “Sup?”

Clio said, “Sup with
you
? Sup with all this
I’m too busy, I’m too busy
shit? ’Cause what you’re doing is like, I’m not your bitch anymore?”

“Well no, I really have been busy —”

“Rat, don’t lie to me. Just tell me. You guys win the lottery?” Meteor crashing. Try to keep your wits. Try to look bewildered.
“What?”

“Do
not
lie to me. You’re a terrible liar.”

“I just don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“Laurie Massey told me you guys won the Max-a-Million jackpot.”

“The what?”

Enough variations on
what.
Fight back or you’re finished. “Is she, like, joking? Is she nuts?”

Said Clio, “Apparently your brother told some kid y’all had won it.”

Clio was a big girl, striking, with tattoos up and down her arms and a silver serpent that looped through her cheek. Her stare
was demanding. Tara loved her, and hated to lie to her. But she’d made a solemn pact with her family: we won’t tell
anyone
. If Jase had broken this vow, that was Jase’s business, but Tara wasn’t going to let her family down. She met Clio’s gaze
and said, “My little brother is
delusional
. As well you know.”

“Well,
somebody
won the thing.”

“Yeah? Not us.”

“But here you’ve gone into hiding and all —”

“Hiding? For shit’s sake, dude, I’m just
busy
. I just got out of the bank. You think I’d go work at that bank if I’d just won like all the money in the world?”

Clio took a long thoughtful pull on her cigarette. She said, “It’s just, if you
had
won, I’d be so happy for you I’d be peeing my pants. But if you’re like, hiding this from me? And if it’s like I’m
losing
you or something — then I don’t know what I’d do. I’d kill myself. I mean it. I would.”

“Oh shut up. You’re not gonna lose me. Who’s my bitch?”

She put her hand on Clio’s neck.

Said Clio, “Let go of me
now
, degenerate.”

Tara said, “You’d love it.”

Said Clio, “Hey, guess who got his snake milked last night?”

“Oh God. Not that FLETCY guy? Oh god. That’s too gross.”

“You have no frikkin
idea
.”

I just have to keep this safe for another day or two. Then we’ll let the truth out and I’ll take her to New York first and
then Paris, and it’ll be the sweetest trip of a lifetime and she’ll forgive me, she has to; she loves me. And anyway winning
the jackpot means you get
everything
; love, riches, dreams, forgiveness, sky, ocean, shoes, power over the Mrs. Potros, everything, nothing denied: this is how
I intend to proceed.

Shaw
surfed. The motel room had a back door which he left wide open, and the outside came pouring in — the heat, pollen, salt
air, and some heartbreaking vineflower that was blooming just outside the door. All this was mixing with the cinderblock-mold
smell of the motel itself; also there were the shouts and sudden splays of music from unsavory folk trawling past on Rt. 17.
It was paradise. He took deep guzzles from his Wendy’s ice tea, and searched the web.

Cheryl at that convenience store had said that he, whoever
he
was, had a copier store. Shaw went to Yellowbook and found there were only two independent copier businesses in Brunswick,
Georgia: Murray Copiers and Boatwright Office Supply and Copiers.

He clicked on Murray’s, which was painfully slow to load, and when it did there was a notice from ’06:

Dear Customer. Due to rising costs and
foreign competition…

Belly-up. Gone.

He went back and clicked the link for Boatwright Office Supply and Copiers, and got a pic of Mitch Boatwright, CEO. Studio
halo. But with slightly bulging eyes that made him too bulldoggish, too eager looking. And that shadow in your ear, Mitch
— is that
earhair
? In your business photo? Are you a simpleton?

More important: are you my quarry?

mitch boatwright brunswick ga brought him oceans of useless stuff. For example he discovered, in the 1870 City Directory for
Scranton, Pennsylvania, that Henry Boatwright had been an ironworker, and that Greta Schuleit, laundress, hailed from Brunswick,
Germany. He wondered if they had ever met. Were they lovers? Did she come to his room above the ironworks?

I better focus here.

Look at this: “Joseph Boatwright deceased 1892 survived by his wife Kathleen, two sons, Abner and Edgar, also by his daughter
Louise who is married to Dr. Mitchell Vermillion of Brunswick, Georgia.”

Vermillion: now there’s a name. Should I change my name to Shaw Vermillion?

He kept floating. Boatwright after Boatwright, but most of them were in the ground: in the graveyards of Brunswick, Georgia,
Brunswick, Maine, and New Brunswick, New Jersey. And the few that were living were uselessly faraway. He placed half a dexie
on his tongue and let it dissolve. It tasted like a Sweet Tart but drier, more businesslike. He drank from his Wendy’s giant
cup of tea.

Behind him, Romeo, sound asleep again, started grinding his teeth.

That bitch Cheryl had said, “They go to Renewal.” What would Renewal be? Some kind of church? Or gym, or club or something?
He typed in renewal brunswick ga and found he was right the first time: the first two hundred entries were for the Faith Renewal
Church on Altama Avenue. He typed faith renewal mitch boatwright brunswick — and was granted a vision:

A girl, on stage. Tara, age 12. Daughter of Mitch and Patsy Boatwright. She was wearing donkey ears. It was Christmas 1999,
at the Faith Renewal Church of Brunswick, Georgia. The girl was kind of skinny but what intense eyes!

Tara. He loved the Deep-South cheesiness of the name.

She’d be twenty-one or twenty-two now.

tara boatwright facebook

But Facebook’s Tara Boatwright was an old crone from Perth, Australia.

Maybe, because this was a small town in Georgia,
his
Tara hadn’t gotten around to Facebook yet?

tara brunswick ga myspace

And that was it.

She was now twenty-one. Her handle was johnny’s girl — the page was backdropped with a sprawling Johnny Depp. He went right
away to her pics. Those eyes again. Oh my god. Curious, large, innocent. Though not
too
innocent. In one beach pic she was turning to look back at the camera and you saw that not only did she have a devastating
ass; she also knew what you were looking at. Another shot had her wearing smudged mascara and a black choker and black bangs.
Severity in her jawline. She was representing danger. God. Will you fight me, Tara? He grinned. I imagine you will.

Shot of a rock concert with some goth girlfriend: Drive Fast & Shut Your Eyes. in Savannah. With Clio! Favorite band evvvuh!

Another shot, also with Clio and some other girls: CRUNK POSSE!

Shot of her little brother Jase.

Various boys. James, a dull boy, and Wynn, equally dull. No, maybe Wynn was one degree cooler, shaggier. James was posing
woodenly in front of a church bus.

Various shots of other relatives and friends.

Two somewhat strained poses with her father, Mitch. Only one with her mom.

But more than a dozen pics of her with her grandmother Nell.

The two of them laughing, waltzing arm in arm: Me and Nell in New Orleans. Then they were in Tunica, Miss, before a row of
one-arm bandits. Looked like Tara was only fourteen or so — had Nell sneaked her into a gambling joint?

Everything I need, thought Shaw, is right here. All that the girl cares about, all she prizes. Into the basilica of Tara comes
the beast. The pillager, the barbarian.

He looked down and saw that his hand was shaking. He pressed his palm into the corner of his desk, to steady it. But it kept
shaking.

Why? Because I’m terrified? Probably. Yes. But so what? I can’t live the way I’ve been living, not another hour. Not as a
gonking field mouse for Dayton Techworld. Not another
second
.

BOOKS: The Bell Jar. The Wind in the Willows. The Monkey’s Paw, by W. W. Jacobs.

Being scared.

GOAL IN LIFE: Get out of the Wick.

The Wick? What could the Wick be? And why be so intent on escaping it?

Could “the Wick” represent time going up in smoke? The grindingness, the ephemerality, of day-to-day life?

Oh. Wait. Of course. Bruns
-wick
.

The tea was sweet and dilute; it slapped against his gullet and was about the best thing he’d ever tasted. The feeling in
his limbs was cool, stony. He brushed his fingers against his thigh and his own touch was distant to him. I believe if she
crosses me I’ll be
happy
to let her feel some of what I’m capable of.

In her JOURNAL, in an entry from a week ago, she’d written:

Worrying last night and once I start worrying I can’t stop and cant sleep. is everything in the world about money? But Nell
never had money &she’s so happy. I want to marry edward scissorhands. I want to BE edward scissorhands.

She also wrote, and this came as a shock to him:

Do not mess with the people I love because I will CUT you and no one will ever fix you again, I’m serious.

He consulted 411.com. There was a Nell Boatwright on Egmont Street, and a Mitchell Boatwright at 38 Oriole Road.

On Birdseye, there were aerial views of Brunswick that seemed to have been made on a day as sepulchral as this one. Scattering
of cars on Rt. 341, and on Gloucester Street, but most of the streets were completely empty, lifeless, not a soul in sight.

38 oriole road.

Birdseye took him in a great arc over Brunswick, the chemical plant, the railroad tracks, the hospital, and then softly downward.
Descending as though on spidersilk into a neighborhood of middling prosperity. Till he was dangling just above the Boatwrights’
home. A brick ranch house, no more or less soulless than the houses to either side. The oval blob in back might be a kiddie
pool. One spindly tree out front. Looked like a hedge on one side; on the other a wooden fence.