Lonesome Point (26 page)

What Leo saw most clearly was the blood. He also remembered the clatter and thump when the boy rolled over the hood, the thud against the windshield. He kind of recalled the boy falling off—that part seemed to take a long time.

Then he sat there in shock. Then, after a time, he stumbled out and knelt over the boy lying faceup in the middle of the street, blood leaking from his ears and nose. The boy still, not making a sound.

One open eye staring at Leo.

A light came on in the veranda of a house across the way. Leo nudged the boy’s shoulder. “Hey, hey, wake up, hey,” his voice catching in his throat.

He stood up, trembling, took himself over to the car, and sat behind the wheel. The engine was still running. There was a woman looking out from the veranda. Leo gripped the wheel, saw he had smeared it with blood; he looked at his hands, wiped them on his pants.

Headlights approached from up the street. It was Freddy, in the Rev’s Jag. “I found Fonso. He’s coming now.”

More headlights rolled up. A police Land Rover, Fonso behind the wheel. Fonso parked on the grassy verge and he and Patrick got out.

Leo told them what happened. Fonso looked down at him, real cool, looked over at the woman on the veranda.

“Shit, I didn’t mean to do it,” Leo said.

“Easy there,” Fonso said, checking out the scene. He smiled at Leo, calming him. “The police is here.” He turned to Freddy.
“Keep on driving. Take the car to your house and stay home.” Then to Leo he said, “Go straight to Lonesome Point and wait there. I got this. G’wan now.”

Half an hour later, Leo was smoking a cigarette, sitting on the hood of his father’s car parked near the mangroves at the edge of Lonesome Point. A faint wind was blowing. Heavy clouds obscured the stars and the moon.

Fonso and Patrick stood in front of him, waiting for an answer.

Leo puffed the cigarette, tossed it away. “Well, what if we get caught?”

Fonso said, “Get caught doing what? Didn’t the police show up? Cart the body away?”

Leo fired up another smoke, inhaled deep. “Who is he? What’s his name?”

“Just some thief.”

“No, I need to know, I need to know. Who is this boy? I want to
know
.”

Fonso said, “I can’t pronounce his last name, but his wallet says Ramon.”

“He’s just a thief,” Patrick said.

Leo lowered his head.

Fonso said, “We’re trying to help you here, Leo.”

Leo nodded, staring at the ground.

His cigarette burned down in his fingers.

Patrick said, “What’re we gonna do, Leo?”

Leo tapped the long ash. He puffed the cigarette, flicked it away, and stood up. “Let’s bury his ass,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

They lifted the body out of the back of Fonso’s Land Rover
and carried it to a spot by clumps of bushes. They laid it down, oddly gentle about it, then Patrick brought the shovels, and they all started digging. The only sound you could hear was the shovels biting the earth, the wet clop of sand that piled up in a mound.

When it was deep enough—it didn’t take that long—they lifted the body, Leo grabbing the feet, and dropped it in the hole. The boy’s ankles were so skinny. Later on in his dreams, he’d feel them.

Moonlight peeked out of the clouds onto the clay ground.

They started covering the hole. Sand piled up on the chest, the legs. Sweat pouring off Leo, his shirt sticking to his back. Sand piling up. Even in the poor light, he could see the white of Ramon’s open eye. He shoveled up a heavy load and pitched it over the face so that he wouldn’t have to see it anymore.

L
EO’S PACE HAD SLOWED to an ungainly walk. He kept his eyes on the road up ahead where the strawberry field ended. He was thirsty, so he stopped to pluck two berries and sucked on one. Spat the flesh out and popped the other in his mouth, continued walking. Eyes on the road. Heat shimmering over the bright green field.

His eyes were not focusing; the road seemed to be shifting, now up, now down. Maybe he was losing too much blood. Shit, his arm was on fire, the pain was killing him. The pain was killing him? He smiled at that. He spat out the strawberry but had no taste for another. He kept walking, unsteady.

When he looked back, Patrick was far away. Standing where Leo had left him. He was yelling something but was too far away to be heard. He was probably half deaf from the shot going off so close to his ear. The next time Leo saw him, he wanted it to be in a courtroom, then behind Plexiglas in a prison somewhere.

Leo stuck the pistol in his waistband, on the opposite side of the other gun. It was stupidly uncomfortable. Movies that made this look easy had misled him.

He came to the end of the field and saw that the road curved west to an intersection with what appeared to be a main drag about a mile ahead. On one corner was a gas station, a Shell, with a convenience store.

Cars were pulling in and out. When he saw one with sirens, he started running toward it, legs heavy. The car was black and gold, highway patrol colors, the car parked. Leo thought he was dreaming this. A trooper got out of the cruiser and crossed the road. Leo tried to pick up his feet. Running too slowly, through a wall of heat.

Two figures at the side of the road. An impossible distance. The trooper talking to a woman in a straw hat sitting in a chair under an umbrella. A roadside vendor.

It felt like one of those dreams in which he couldn’t run fast enough. The road was a hundred miles. His feet flopped hard on the asphalt when he stopped, out of breath. He leaned over, hands on his thighs. His pants were soaked heavy with blood, his left arm bathed in it. His heart was racing, he needed to think straight. The guns.

He tugged them out and pitched them in the grass. He was going to keep on running, keep moving, before he collapsed.

He started off again. Then he felt himself lifting out of his body and he was one of those blackbirds that rose from the trees near the strawberry field and he could see Patrick standing below him, far down there in the field, and see the trooper, hat tipped low over his eyes, rapping a watermelon, and see himself running the road that narrowed and curved through farmland now, the smell of pesticide in the air. Was that Tessa over there, her belly big and beautiful, standing on the side in the grass? He thought he must be losing consciousness, his mind hovering just below the clouds, feeling that elation he used to feel when he was a boy, yearning, filled with hope; running this road that
he’d been traveling for years, that had led all the way to this one afternoon, this moment, under a fading sun—all the way from Lonesome Point.

Leo just kept running.