Side by Side (6 page)

10

The warehouse was filled with the sounds of men at work. Stanley “Peanut” Smoot finished talking on the phone with his youngest son, Click, and slipped the disposable cell phone into his pocket. He focused his attention on the men who were loading boxes into a step van. Picking one of the cartons at random, he flicked open his knife, cut the paper tape, and opened the flaps. He pulled out a T-shirt, inspected the artwork, and admired the NASCAR authenticity tags complete with the holograms. Some people tried to sell counterfeit shirts and caps from China, but that was dumb. The company that screen-printed shirts and caps under official licenses ran off a few thousand extra pieces and claimed those were defective. The plant sent the actual rejects along with the good ones to a company that shredded and recycled the rejected piece goods to recycle. Peanut owned the shredding company, and the rejected NASCAR merchandise was recycled onto racks in stores all over the country to be sold to race fans. Initially the owners of the silkscreen printing company had not wanted to cooperate, but they’d come around. Most people did if you used the right persuasion.

The distinctive modified-hourglass shape of Stanley’s head had been passed down through the generations—in the way of long, narrow feet or crooked teeth. The fact was that the Sear County Smoots all had high foreheads and lantern jaws. It was not unusual in some communities—and not just the mountains—that one family might have a physical trait they shared down the line.

Peanut’s small ears lay flat like they’d been thumbtacked to his skull, which further accentuated the shape of his head. His hair, which he kept short and oiled, was the color of a molding strawberry and so thin you could see skin through it like bare ground beneath poorly scattered pine straw. His skin looked freshly sunburned, and flaked if he didn’t keep it moisturized.

Peanut dropped the shirt back into the box and went back into his office to get the valise that contained the week’s cash take from his various enterprises. He threw it onto the passenger’s-side floorboard of his shiny black, Hemi-powered Dodge Ram pickup and drove out of the warehouse. He drove downtown and pulled into the building owned by his partner. Every Saturday he parked in the same “client” spot and took the elevator up to drop off the week’s cash. As he waited for the cab to arrive, he shifted the heavy, short-barreled revolver from the side pocket of his limited-edition NASCAR jacket to the small of his back where it would be out of sight. The Smith & Wesson .44 special, five-shot revolver was Peanut’s favorite handgun. If anybody tried to rob him, they’d be very sorry.

Most people called Stanley Smoot “Peanut.” His father, a car salesman by title, had told him that going by a nickname made people feel like they’d known you a long time, and more likely to trust you right off the bat. Peanut had listened to his old man because anybody that put “Pooter” Smoot on his business cards, and sold used automobiles to coloreds and other credit-risky types and collected several times the blue-book retail, had a good handle on human nature. “Pay Pooter Pennies and Drive a Quality Car” was still talked about in regional business circles as being the model for the “buy here, pay here” scam, which was hardly more than legal loan-sharking. And those who didn’t pay Pooter always wished they had. Peanut had cut his business teeth on visiting deadbeats in the middle of the night and convincing them to get current on payments to Pooter’s.

Smoots had always known who and what they were, and they were taught that getting what their family needed was what life was about. Take care of your own, and they’ll take care of you. The Smoots had instilled that philosophy in their offspring for the past two hundred years. That mind-set and physical toughness meant that no man pushed you aside or broke apart what you were—always loyal to your blood. Getting what you needed didn’t have anything to do with good looks, but doing whatever was called for. And whatever it took was exactly what a Smoot did.

In the lobby Mr. Laughlin’s personal secretary, Rudy Spence, who was filling the receptionist’s chair, was looking down at a magazine at some pouty young man in a lime green shirt open to his belly button and a suit that looked like he had slept in it. What the boy in the ad was irked about wasn’t apparent, but Peanut thought maybe he’d gotten hold of some bad meth.

Rudy said, “Mr. Laughlin is waiting for you in his office.”

Rudy had a fancy college education and acted like he was a member of the royal family. He was a reed-thin boy-man who wore expensive clothes and slipper-looking shoes with soles hardly thicker than dog skin.

Peanut strode down the wide hall whose walls were paneled in rosewood and decorated with ornately carved frames holding oil paintings of farmland, mountains, rivers, shiny-coated horses, and one of hunting dogs.

Mr. Laughlin’s door was cracked open and Peanut saw the attorney sitting behind his desk shuffling papers. Peanut tapped on the door and Mr. Laughlin smiled and came around the desk to shake hands with him. Laughlin wore what appeared to be expensive golfing attire—a powder-blue shirt and yellow linen slacks with a crease you could peel an apple with. His white hair was combed straight back on the sides. He had bushy brows, which contrasted with the tidy mustache. The first time Peanut had met him, twenty years before, he’d told the lawyer that he looked just like the little rich guy on the Monopoly board game.

Mr. Laughlin didn’t even glance at the valise in Peanut’s hand. The attorney always acted like the money was the last thing he cared about, and maybe it was.

“Sit down,” Mr. Laughlin said. “I wanted to go over the latest figures with you before Sarnov and Randall get here.” He went around the desk and turned a computer printout around so Peanut could see the figures. Peanut was always amazed at how Mr. Laughlin changed their illegal profits into legitimate money with the swipe of his pen. That was a trick not every lawyer could perform. Mr. Laughlin was a legal magician.

11

Winter Massey headed for I-85, and during the twenty-five-minute drive to Charlotte, he had time to reflect on Alexa Keen and their once-in-a-lifetime relationship, which had seemed until that morning like something that had happened in another lifetime altogether.

At one point, around his third year in high school, Winter had desired Alexa Keen in the way only a young male with turbo-driven hormones can, but that had been the smallest part of his attraction to her. It was a fluke that he had gotten to know Alexa at all, much less that he had offered up to her his deepest secrets. Now he found himself wondering if he had ever been as emotionally honest about himself with anyone before or since.

It all began with a twenty-nine-cent spiral notebook. Late for class, Winter had been hurrying down the empty hallway when he spotted the manila cardboard backing covered with dusty footprints near the row of lockers outside his biology classroom. He stooped and scooped it up and carried it in with him. The cover was red, and there was no name on the outside. He slipped it into his pack intending to drop it into the lost-and-found box when he passed the office. But he forgot.

That night he went into the backpack and found the notebook. Out of curiosity he opened it. The handwriting was perfect and clean and easy to read. So he read a few lines and discovered that it was a journal. Since he didn’t know whose it was, he didn’t feel the least guilty about reading it. And an hour later, he was closing it, stunned by what he had read, and hungry for more.

The journal covered a few months of a young girl’s life, and it was written in third person.

She was alone in a skin she didn’t fit into, but couldn’t get out of. She never asked the others circling around her about their lives, but she picked up bits here and there by listening to them. How could she learn about the others if she couldn’t gather the nerve to speak to them, without the fear of letting them see her clearly? She studied the ones around her over the weeks, and she wondered what sorts of thoughts were contained in their heads, what kind of world each saw through their eyes. She resorted to clues like the way hair was kept, the styles and amount of wear of clothes, the way fingernails were kept, and from that she imagined their lives. Most of them looked like they came from places that had always been soft, and made warm by those who had borne them.

When one of them looked at her, she closed herself up in a coil, and usually their eyes kept moving because there was nothing here to waste time on. She was always angry with herself for being different, an alien walking among them, a creature of the shadows. She knew that not one of them could ever imagine what her life was like, how empty it was, how deeply she wanted just a little of what those around her experienced. . . .

How many of them had slept with one eye open, worried if someone would come to the bed uninvited, bringing with him the scent of whiskey and an appetite she couldn’t understand and was defenseless against? She was a child who wanted only to be loved and cherished and have value, and even a loathsome creature’s prodding her and dampening her skin with his sweat was somehow preferable to being ignored—being branded as a being without worth. . . .

Winter’s heart felt squeezed by the anguish, which wasn’t merely insecurity, the adolescent angst he and his pals suffered. Each paragraph was a spotlight illuminating another chasm of alienation, some emptiness greater than a teenager is supposed to feel. Who was this girl? How would he find her without knowing her name? The journal had no signature, just a star applied with a permanent marker. He had never met anyone in school who talked the way this girl wrote. Such a lonely soul, such a hunger reflected in those lines. He had to find her. Nothing else mattered.

The next day, Winter had taken the notebook out of his backpack when he arrived at school, and he carried it in his hand all morning, like a fisherman trolling for the author. He knew the diary was too precious for anyone to let go of; surely no one would want someone else to have access to their innermost feelings. He met the eyes of everyone he caught looking at him, but nothing. He studied the crowds like a predator.

He went home carrying the journal. In the silence of his room he read it again, and it filled him with emotion, with a longing to know this girl, maybe to put his hands on her cheeks and share her pain.
I feel this! I know your pain of aloneness. The riotous world is revolving around your utter stillness.
He understood it, felt something of it himself. He too was an emotional outcast, a stranger in a strange land, a peg that had no proper hole. He had suffered to a lesser degree. He had never been physically abused, was never without someone who loved and protected him.

It was after five and his mother wasn’t yet home. When there was a knock on the door, he figured Lydia had arms loaded with groceries, so he opened the back door to a stranger. He knew her—sort of. The skinny girl in a baggy sweater and loose-fitting jeans who stood there on the other side of the screen door, scowling, with her fists clenched, was in his school, had been in classes with him. Her eyes were on fire, and they burned into him.
Angela, or Amelia or something,
he thought. She was biracial, and, at first look, she wasn’t a beautiful girl, because she worked as hard to camouflage her physical attractiveness as other girls her age labored to enhance theirs. This girl wore outdated clothes to hide her shape. She kept her hair as short as possible and she avoided makeup like it was poison. If that weren’t enough to discourage approaches, she was aggressively unpleasant, sullen, and acid tongued.

“You read it?” she demanded.

“What?” Winter had said.

“What the hell you think?” she replied, her bottom lip quivering. He suddenly realized that she was not as furious as frightened. “Mine is what. Give it back.”

“No,” he was surprised to hear himself say.

“It’s mine,” she insisted, tears starting to stream down her dusky cheeks. “Please, it’s personal. You have no right.”

He stepped back and opened the door wide. “Come in,” he said. “Please?”

She opened the screen door and entered, her eyes casting about the kitchen as though she expected that she was entering a trap.

He went into his room and got the journal. He held it out, and she snatched it out of his hands and clutched it to her chest. “You . . . you . . . you stole . . .”

“No,” Winter protested. “I didn’t. I found it in the hall. There was no name on it.”

“You . . . you read it.”

“Yes, I read it.”

“I can’t believe you’d read a diary! Don’t you know that’s a sin against privacy?”

“I couldn’t help it. It’s unbelievable.”

“You crazy?” She looked up into his eyes. “Isn’t any of it true. I made it all up. It’s fiction.”

“If it’s fiction, it’s better than anything I’ve ever read.”

“You tell anybody?” she asked. “Let anybody else read it?”

“Of course not.”

“Good. You better not. I got brothers. They’ll kick your ass.”

“No you don’t,” Winter said. “And you don’t have any friends either.”

“How do you know?” she shot back.

“Look, cross my heart, I won’t ever tell a soul one word that is in your journal.”

“You’d better not,” she threatened, and turned on her heel to leave.

“Angela?”

“Alexa. It’s Alexa Keen.”

“I’d like . . . I mean . . . I want to be your friend.”

“I don’t need anybody feeling sorry for me, Massey. And I don’t need any sneaky-ass diary-reading friends.”

“A diary is true,” he said. “It can’t be fictional if it’s true. Even if it’s based on—”

“Screw you,” she snarled, stomping out. She slammed the screen door.

“I
do,” he called. “I need a friend like you, Alexa Keen.”

She stopped in her tracks and turned to look at him, her eyes narrowed. “What? Why?”

“Because you’re special. Because you can write what you feel. I feel some of what you feel, but I could never write it like you do. When you write, I can feel it, see it, and taste it. I want to learn to express myself the way you do.”

“You don’t know me.”

“My father was an alcoholic. One day a couple of years ago he ran off. He never told us where he went or why. But he was gone a long time before he left. He made me feel empty and worthless and helpless. He didn’t hit me, but what he did was worse than any beating.”

Her eyes reflected deep suspicion. “What’s in it for you?”

“I don’t have anybody I can talk to, tell my thoughts and feelings to. I need someone I can trust. I know you feel the same way. If I could trust you, you could trust me. I give you my word of honor.”

She smirked and shook her head slowly. “Sex. You think because I’ve done some things, that I’ll—”

“Never,” he blurted. “Alexa, that’s not why at all.”

“Never, ever try it! You do, we’re all done. You do that and I’ll hate you.”

“I swear that I will never betray you.”

“Cross your heart? Swear to God?”

“I swear it.”

He had honored his word. But it hadn’t been easy. She grew more attractive as they grew closer, able to tell each other their deepest thoughts, their insecurities and secrets. Some things he couldn’t tell her, like how sorry he was that he couldn’t explore the deeply sexual feelings he had for her, that he often suspected she had for him. Naturally he had always wondered how things might have been if he hadn’t stuck to his pledge—a pledge that was the very foundation of their friendship.

Winter had mixed feelings about working with Alexa. He also had no choice.