The Lock Artist (20 page)

One down. Seven million to go.

There are prison programs where you leave the grounds for a few hours every day to help out on some kind of project or other. Clearing out debris from a demolition, say, or maybe even helping to build something if you have the skills. It’s a chance to get out of the prison, ride a bus down a real street, see real women walking along on the sidewalk, then to actually do
something constructive when you get there. Most inmates would gladly stick a knife in someone else’s back to get that kind of assignment.

It’s not like in the old days, like when they made the prisoners themselves build Sing Sing from the ground up. With regular whippings for anyone who didn’t pull their weight. No, they just don’t do that kind of thing anymore. No more backbreaking labor. No more rock piles and sledgehammers. No more whippings. They sure as hell don’t stick you in the middle of a field by yourself and tell you to start digging a swimming pool. That kind of cruel and unusual punishment would get a modern warden fired by the end of the first day.

But I wasn’t in a prison. I was here in the Marshes’ backyard and would be here everyday except Sundays. For the rest of the summer. I didn’t think I had much choice in the matter. I sure as hell didn’t want to find out if that juvie camp was an idle threat. So I put the shovel back in the ground, pushed down with my foot, lifted the dirt, and threw it into the wheelbarrow.

I kept going. I filled the wheelbarrow, rolled it over to the edge of the woods, and dumped it. I rolled it back and picked up the shovel again. While filling up the second load, I started to hit rocks. Some of them were big enough I had to shut everything down and spend the next few minutes working around it, until I finally got enough leverage to pry the damned thing free. My hands were starting to hurt already. My back, too. I was pretty sure I hadn’t even been digging for half an hour yet.

The sun was punishing me. I put down the shovel, took the plastic water jug over to the house, and turned on the faucet. The cold water felt good on my hands. I knelt down and splashed my face with it. Then I filled the jug and took a long drink. When I turned off the faucet, I could hear Mr. Marsh from inside the house. He was yelling at someone. I didn’t hear anybody respond, so I figured he must be yelling into the phone. I couldn’t make out the words. Only the anger.

Probably wouldn’t be a great idea to have him come out right now, I thought, see me sitting here by the house. I took the jug back with me and started digging again. I could see that I was barely making a dent in the ground. This would have to be something not to think about. At all. Just turn off your brain, I told myself, and keep digging.

Another half hour passed. Another few loads of dirt, moved from inside the stakes to the growing pile at the edge of the woods. The sweat was starting to sting my eyes. I didn’t see Mr. Marsh come out of the house. All of a sudden, he was just standing there behind me.

“You’re going to destroy your back,” he said to me. “You won’t last two days like that.”

I stopped and looked at him. He was holding a drink, some kind of summer cocktail with fruit and lots of ice.

“Use your legs,” he said. “Keep your back straight and use your goddamned legs. Then you
might
last three days.”

I pushed the shovel into the ground, bending with my knees. I hit another big rock.

“You can’t do this by yourself. You know that.”

I wiped off my face, then started working around the rock. This felt like the biggest one yet.

“You’re being a fool,” Mr. Marsh said. He took a long sip from his glass and squinted as he looked up at the sky. “This sun will kill you. Are you listening to me?”

I stopped and looked up at him.

“You give up the others, I’m telling you . . . I’ll let you sit out here under an umbrella.”

I went back to work on the rock.

“Fine, keep digging,” he said. “Let me know when you’re ready to reconsider.”

He walked back into the house, shaking his head. I spent the next twenty minutes hauling out a rock the size of a basketball. Things got a little hazy after that. I remember two birds high above me. I could hear one of the birds screaming at the other. When I looked up, I saw that the screaming bird was chasing a much bigger bird, drawing jagged shapes against the blue sky. The bigger bird could have flown away, or it could have turned on the smaller bird and knocked it out of the game entirely. It didn’t seem to want to do either, maybe as a point of pride. The smaller bird kept after it, screaming those same notes over and over again.

You cannot do that, a voice coming from somewhere inside my overheated head. Never mind the flying. You can’t even make a sound like that. The most elemental thing that any bird or lowly animal can do . . . it is beyond your abilities.

I started to hit roots, as thick as my arm. I hit them with the sharp edge of the shovel but could not cut them. I stopped and went to refill the water jug. I put my head under the faucet and shocked myself with the electric coldness of the water. I didn’t get up for a while. I sat there until I looked up and saw Mr. Marsh looking at me through the back window. His arms
were folded and he had a look on his face that didn’t need any interpretation. I got up and went back to work.

Another hour passed. I didn’t slow down, but there was a strange yellowish tint to everything I was seeing, and the birds above me seemed to turn into vultures. Watching me. Waiting. I kept digging in that one little corner of the rectangle, getting down as deep as I could in that one spot so it would actually look like I was getting somewhere. I knew on some gut level that if I spread out my efforts too much, I’d just end up scraping the top two inches off of everything. And that would make me lose my mind.

The dizziness came next. Every time I bent my head down, I felt like I was going to pass out. I could feel the sun burning right through my shirt. I kept drinking, going back to work, drinking, going back. I didn’t hear her as she came up behind me. I didn’t notice her at all until I turned to reach for the water jug and saw her black sneakers. I looked up, at faded blue jeans with holes in the knees, at a blinding white shirt that gathered around her shoulders and made her look like she belonged on a pirate ship. At her face. Amelia’s face, for the first time in real life. Not a drawing, not a photograph.

Her eyes were dark brown, her hair was light brown. Kind of a mess, like mine, but maybe only half as curly. More like an unruly mop she’d have to push away from her eyes just to get a good look at you. A permanent set to her mouth like she’d just won an argument with you.

I’m making her sound pretty ordinary here. A normal seventeen-year-old, maybe a little un-put-together yet, going through one of those phases, never smiling, never brushing her hair. If you think you have the general picture, then I don’t think I’m doing her justice. Because there was something above and beyond about her, something I could see right away, even as she was standing there at the edge of the hole shading her eyes from the sun.

Of course, I know that seeing her drawings first was a big part of it. I mean, how could it not be? It was just a gut instinct at this point, this feeling that there was definitely something different about her. That maybe she’d seen some of the same things I’d seen.

Crazy, I know. Impossible to know so much about someone from just a few drawings, before you even meet them in person. Now here she was, about to say her first words to me.

“You are so full of shit. Do you know that?”

I kept standing there, looking at her. I can’t imagine what a sight I must have been. Hair even messier than hers, dirt and sweat all over my face. Like some medieval street urchin.

“I already heard about you,” she said. “I mean before you broke into our house. You’re the guy from Milford High School who doesn’t talk, right?”

I didn’t answer. I mean, not with a nod or a shake of the head. I looked at the way the sun made her skin glow.

“Because . . . why? What’s the deal with that? Because something happened to you when you were a little kid?”

I couldn’t move.

“I can see right through you. Your silent act there. Because believe me . . . you want to talk about things happening to you when you’re a kid? We could exchange a few stories someday.”

A sound from somewhere, a glass door sliding shut with a bang.

“Or no, maybe not. You’d have to drop the act then, right?”

Her father rushing across the grass now, slipping on the loose straw and nearly falling on his face.

“Nice job on the break-in, too,” she said. “That was real smooth.”

“Amelia!” Her father grabbing her by the arm. “Get away from him!”

“I’m just seeing what he looks like,” she said. “The big bad criminal.”

“Get in the house. Right now.”

“All right, all right! Relax!” She shook her arm free and went back toward the house. She turned and looked back at me for one second. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but I did know one thing. What Mr. Marsh had said about her, about how traumatized she was by just the thought of me breaking into her house? About how terrified she was?

Somehow, I wasn’t getting that from her.

“I warned you,” he said to me. “Did I not warn you?”

Well, yes, I thought. You did warn me.

“If I ever see you . . .”

Then he ran off the rails. What was he going to say? If I ever see you talking to her? Just standing there like you’re made of stone while she insults you?

“Look, this isn’t going to work,” he said. “Can we just cut through the bullshit right now? You don’t want to come here every day and do this, do you?”

I looked past him. Amelia was standing next to the sliding door. She was watching me. I picked up the shovel and pushed it into the dirt.

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “If that’s the way you want it. Looks like you’re making some progress on the shallow end here, eh? Just wait until you get to the deep end.”

He turned to walk away from me. Then he stopped.

“You’ve got one more hour out here,” he said. “I expect sixty minutes. Not fifty-nine. That’s all I’m gonna say.”

I carried the shovelful to the wheelbarrow and threw it in.

“Last chance,” he said. “I mean seriously, I know I keep saying it, but this is seriously your last chance. You come in right now, you write down the names, and we’re good. You hear me? That’s all it takes.”

What I did next . . . I don’t know where it came from. It’s not something I’d normally do, not in a million years. Maybe only after digging a hole for three straight hours on a hot summer day, while some middle-aged rich jackass wearing tight shorts gives me one last chance for the seventh time. I made an
F
sign with my left hand, a
K
with my right, brought them together, and then made like I was throwing the whole thing right at his face. Sure, there might be simpler ways to say it. Hell, you can do it with one finger on one hand. But if five years of sign language taught me anything, it was how to do things like this with a little more style.

Then I turned my back on him and rolled the wheelbarrow over to the woods.

“What was that?” he yelled after me. “What the hell was that supposed to be, you stupid little freak?”

He was gone when I came back. I didn’t see Amelia anywhere, either. I kept looking at the house for the next hour, but she didn’t appear.

I finished up at four o’clock. Then I left. I tried to keep her face in my mind as I drove home. I went right to my drawing paper and tried to capture it. I had such a talent for drawing from memory, after all. That was my “mutant gift,” as Mr. Martie called it, being able to re-create every detail, just starting with the basic shape and letting it all come back to me.

Today I couldn’t do it. For the first time ever, I couldn’t draw somebody’s face. I kept trying and failing and wadding up the paper and trying again. You’re too tired, I told myself. You can barely keep your eyes open. So I gave up and went to bed.

Waking up the next morning . . . biggest mistake of my life. My back was so tight, I literally had to roll myself out of bed. My legs were sore. My arms were sore. But nothing, and I mean nothing, has ever hurt as much as my hands hurt that morning.

I couldn’t open them, for one thing. I couldn’t completely close them, either. Then I took a shower and just about went through the ceiling when the hot water hit my blisters. When I was dressed, I rummaged around in
the back room of the liquor store and found an old pair of work gloves. Better late than never, I figured. Uncle Lito took one look at me and just about fainted.

“What the hell did they do to you?” he said. “Your face is as red as a lobster. I’m going to call that stupid probation officer right now. Hell, I’m calling the judge.”

I grabbed him by the shoulders, which surprised the living hell out of him. I grabbed him and my shook my head. I didn’t want him to call anybody or do anything else that would stop me from going back to the Marshes’ house that day. I had to see her again, no matter what.

I ate something just so I’d have a little energy, got in the car, and drove over to the Marshes’ house, trying to loosen up my hands as I drove. It was a few minutes after noon when I got there. Mr. Marsh was waiting for me in the driveway.