Save the Enemy (25 page)

I stand up, help a grimacing Dad to his feet. Dad puts his hands on his tailbone and says, “It really hurts. But I don’t think doctors can fix a broken tailbone.”

“I don’t know either,” I say. We take tiny steps, Dad seeming old and feeble.

“Is that my jacket?” he asks me.

“Yeah,” I say.

“It looks nice,” Dad says.

When we get around the house, I expect that we will reunite, get in the Lincoln, if it still drives, and go home. And after that? I don’t know. I’ll get my cell phone turned back on, I guess. Go back to lacrosse practice. Take some shooting lessons. Do some research about slow-acting poisons. Make sure Ben eats kale, and Dad doesn’t blackmail anyone.

Turning the corner, I see another car pulling up to the cabin. It’s a big black SUV. It stops next to our smashed up Lincoln. Both P.F.s get out, followed by Mrs. Severy.

Pete steps forward first. “Mom, what are you doing here?” he says.

“Putting an end to this nonsense,” says Mrs. Severy. It is getting to be dusk, but she still wears a pair of expensive-looking, surprisingly fashionable sunglasses over her eyes. She peers over them at the scene before her: my brother holding a book in one hand and Roscoe’s leash in the other; Roscoe, whose tail is slowly wagging; the still-slowly-burning cabin; Pete, chest out, confrontational. She seems only just to be noticing me and my wrecked father hobbling toward the others when I pull the gun out of my pocket again, old hat. Aim it toward Mrs. Severy. She wants this over? Me, too. I cock, then pull, the trigger.

Nothing. The gun is empty. No
Dayenu
.

P.F.—the first one, from the first night—pulls out his gun.
He aims it at me. I guess after all these tackles and tumbles, I am the one he hates the most. I wrack my brain, trying to think of the self-defense move one would employ in this situation. I can only think of one.

“Roscoe!” I shout, hoping that my big husky knows that he should bite P.F. on the arm, make him drop the gun. He’s a husky, he’s a wolf, he has to have this killer instinct somewhere in him even if we spend so much time reassuring nervous children that no, he’d never hurt a fly. “Roscoe, help me! Ben, let him go. Please, Roscoe!”

Ben drops the leash. Roscoe comes running toward me.
Roscoe, bite him, bite P.F.
, I think. Roscoe doesn’t bite him. He just runs toward me and Dad, wagging that fluffy, banner-like tail of his. Mrs. Severy cries out, “Don’t shoot Adolfo!”

Roscoe stops, standing in the middle of our pack. His tail is still wagging, but slowly, and he is looking between us, and Mrs. Severy, and the P.F.s, and Ben and Pete. I’m trying again to think of exactly how we can all live through this. There’s no jiu-Dadsu move that comes to mind. No physical one. There’s always the mental-jitsu, of trying to get someone to help you. I’m trying to send brain signals to the P.F. who isn’t directly aiming to kill us, and trying to make some eye contact.

“Where is the J-File?” Mrs. Severy says louder than I’ve heard her say anything before. “If you tell me, I may let you leave.”

I consider saying that it is with Molly, then think that this information is unlikely to help us stay alive; and I don’t need to get Molly killed because of the idiot, evil Trasks, too.

“We don’t have it,” I say, completely depleted. “It’s gone. It’s gone! Gone! Even if you shoot me and my dog and everyone I love, it’s still gone!”

“You are your father’s daughter,” Mrs. Severy says. “I don’t mean that as a compliment.” She sighs. “I suppose we are at an impasse.” She nods to P.F. again. He pulls out his gun once more. I think of running to him, to tackle him again. But my body is done, after everything. And I won’t be able to surprise him. I could try to reach the car, use it to run him over. But there’s no time to get there. He’s walking toward me and Dad and Roscoe.

This may be it, I think. I’ve played my last hand. My brain signals, my eye contact, are ineffective.

P.F. lifts his hand. Aims. I hold Dad’s hand with my left hand and touch Roscoe’s head with my right, thinking, toward Dad and Roscoe and Ben and even Pete, I think,
I love you. I love you. I love you. And Ben, honey, I’m sorry I didn’t protect you enough
. I don’t know how much kale it would have taken to have kept him safe from
this
.

I hear a gunshot. But a moment later, the world still exists. I still exist.

Look up to see if Dad is still standing. He is. Roscoe isn’t hit, either.

“Ben!” I call out. He calls back to me, “I’m right here.”

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“My arm still hurts from before,” he says.

“Are you hurt in any
new
way?” I yell.

“No,” he says. “Not in any new way.”

“Pete?” I say. “I’m here,” he yells back.

Who is missing? Who’s been shot?

Short P.F. is standing next to Mrs. Severy, holding the gun to her head. Fat lobbyist P.F. is on the ground. His forehead is bleeding.

“Get out of here,” still-alive P.F. says to me.

The keys are already in the ignition of the black SUV. Pete gets behind the wheel. I sit next to him. Dad and Ben and Roscoe sit in the backseat.

The last thing I see, as we drive away, is P.F. walking Mrs. Severy toward the cabin.

No one talks as
we head back onto the crowded highway into Old Town. Pete says nothing about his mother being marched into a fire. About the possibility that he will be an orphan after this, or the possibility that he won’t be. I steal glances at Dad in the rearview mirror. He looks awful, as you might expect after having been kidnapped, tied to a chair, and left in a burning cabin. I can’t imagine he ate very well in the last week, and he has a more gaunt look to him, though you can still see his belly extending under a T-shirt with a picture of a heroic superhero on it. That shirt seems richly ironic right now. And, belonging to a “hirsute people” as he is wont to put it—it’s his fancy way of saying
that he has a lot of
hair
and I don’t know why he can’t just say it like that—this week without shaving has left his face covered in thick and uneven bristle. He’s got dark rings under his eyes. Darker than usual.

He also just looks worn out. Done. I think about him asking me to leave him in the cabin and try to stop thinking about it. That was the most terrifying moment of my life. And especially of late, I’m not wanting for terrifying moments. But it’s really scary seeing Dad sitting quietly like this, too.

Ben, who is looking a little more oily than usual, could also use a shave—evidently he is a hirsute Trask as well. He doesn’t ask what happened in the cabin, nor if we’ll get to see the jail where Norman Mailer stayed when he tried to levitate the Pentagon. He just keeps petting and hugging Roscoe, who looks healthier than ever. (Roscoe’s thick black and white coat is glossy. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he appears to have had a pedicure. Certainly, if nothing else, his nails, and his whole being, look better-groomed than any other Trask. His eyes are bright and calm, and closing, slowly, as he settles in for a nap.)

Did it work, when Mailer tried to levitate the Pentagon? Does it work when anyone tries to make anything levitate, or are we all just stuck in a confusing but unmagical world after all? I used to think—to believe—that we had either reason, or magic, in this world, but not both. And probably just reason. Picking wood shards out of my hands and brushing off my knees, I’m worried we don’t have either. In which case, what do we have?

We have a brother with a shot arm, is what we have, and to tend to this we stop at a drop-in medical clinic on the way home. When we pull up, Dad starts to get out of the car.

“Medical reporting laws might cause some problems
here,” Ben says. “If we go in with an adult, I’m concerned that the police will be notified. It might be safer if only the kids go inside, and we don’t use our real names.”

Dad looks stunned and hurt, settling back into the car. Pete and I take Ben inside, give the receptionist a fake name. Smith. Hank Smith. Because
that’s
not suspicious. The doctor asks what happened to young Hank’s arm. Nearly crying, again, I explain that one of his careless cousins, Bob Smith (??!!), was shooting BB guns in the backyard. The doctor says that the wound does not look like a BB gun wound—it’s not “arrayed” in the way, she explains, a BB gun wound would be—but I just shrug, and, counting on Ben’s enhanced facial expression-reading skills, give my brother a stern look that tells him now is not the time to be concerned about the
truth
or
facts
.

And he does something that nearly makes me fall over in surprise. “I know hospitals are legally mandated to report to law enforcement in cases of gunshot sounds. And in child endangerment cases,” he says, “I can see why you’d be confused about the nature of my injury. But I assure you that high-caliber BB guns array identically to youth-marketed .22 caliber rifles. I would be quite pleased to put you in touch with my friends at the National Rifle Association to give you more information if you’d like.”

“That’s okay, Hank,” she says.

The doctor cleans and wraps Ben’s arm. Gives us a bottle of antibiotics and instructions to use Neosporin and fresh bandages twice a day for two weeks, then asks one more time if there are “problems at home” that we “need to tell an adult about.”

I can see the doctor, in her clean white jacket, looking all of us over. I’m filthy. Covered in mud, smelling like a house fire,
which I can only hope covers up the smell of a person who hasn’t showered or changed clothes in quite a while. I haven’t slept a full night in over a week. Haven’t eaten a real meal in days, I don’t think; I can’t even remember. My brother is shot in the arm and we’ve got an unbelievable story about how this came to be, that I guess we’re going to get away with?

Then Pete … well, he looks great, somehow, his hair still curled attractively over his forehead, his skin with a healthy sheen to it. His clothes are rumpled, but appealingly so. I do not detect any stench on his person. Is he as pulled-together as he looks? If so, how can this be? Did he not just go through what we went through? I’m gazing at him, trying to know this boy, and I don’t. I know that I’m drawn to him, almost chemically so. And I know, or I think I know, that he helped us after trying to hurt us. But I don’t know
him
.

“We’re fine,” I say to the doctor.

You have to love the American medical system and its respect for privacy. Pete pays the receptionist with $200 in cash from his wallet and we walk out the door.

“How did you do that?” I ask my brother when the door is shut behind us.

“I used bits and pieces of facts that I know to be true and wove them together in untrue ways,” Ben says.

“You lie now?” I ask.

“Not
right
now,” he says. “I’m going to run back to the car so I can see Roscoe again.”

Pete holds my hand for a moment in the parking lot as my brother runs off, and we’re walking more slowly back to the car.

“I know this is crazy,” he says. “I, I wish I could take you to prom.”

“Shenandoah doesn’t have a prom,” I reply.

“I said it was crazy,” he says.

We get back in
the car and make our way through quiet, quaint Old Town. It’s Sunday and spring in the early evening. Tourists are walking up and down our peaceful, shop-lined streets.

“It’s strange but good being back,” Dad says as we’re driving down King Street.

“We ate there,” Ben says, pointing at Lee’s as we drive by.

“She’s from Guam,” I explain to Dad, which I assume he’ll understand means that she’s not still hoping slavery starts up again. Or actively working toward making that happen. I’m trying to please him again, I realize. I stop talking.

“Did you like it?” Dad asks.

“Yeah, it’s good,” I say. “Lee said she’d give me a job if I need one. She gave me a tarot reading.”

“Your mother believed that horseshit,” Dad says.

“Yeah,” I say. “It was really helpful, actually.” I stare down at my lap, then turn around to look at him, and Benny, and Roscoe. Ben is reading. Dad is watching out the window, with one hand on Roscoe, and tears running down his face.

“Why didn’t you leave her, Dad?” I ask.

“Over the tarot?” he asks. He laughs, wipes his eyes on his shoulder. I laugh. No one asks why Dad would have left Mom. I suppose Pete probably knows the context already. Ben is just lost in his book. And Roscoe doesn’t speak English that well.

The sky is turning a kind of burnt orange; the cherry trees are in full pink bloom. Both sides of King Street are silly with those trees, covered in the delightful, glorious, deliciously scented blossoms. They will last only a couple of days, I understand, before falling to the ground and becoming so
much pink trash. But for now, just briefly, they are beautiful and perfect.

I look at Pete. I want to say something to him. More like I want to want to say something to him. I’m out of words. I’m filled with a longing for him to stay with me, but I don’t think it’s going to happen.