One Shot Away Read online

  Detective Barnes writes the date on the top of his pad. He raises his eyes. “Do you help your father on carpentry jobs?”

  The question thumps Jimmy like a blow on the head.

  “If this is about my husband, why don’t you ask him the questions?” His mother’s lips flatten on her teeth.

  “It’s about your husband and your son. They were pulled over with a load of lumber in his truck. Your husband didn’t tell you about it?”

  “He mentioned it,” she says.

  “Your husband told the officer that they were on their way to a job site. Jimmy, do you remember that?”

  Jimmy swallows.

  “Where was that job?” asks Detective Barnes.

  Jimmy considers the lies his father told to the policeman. He doesn’t want to repeat them.

  “Your father was transporting lumber for a job, right?” he asks again.

  “Right,” agrees Jimmy.

  “What did your dad do with the lumber?”

  “I don’t know. He dropped me home.”

  Detective Barnes writes something in his pad. “Where did he pick up the lumber?”

  “I’m blanking out. I’ve been starving myself to make weight.”

  Detective Barnes smiles. “You do remember being pulled over by the marked unit?”

  “Marked unit?” repeats Jimmy.

  “The police car, the officer?” he asks. “Your dad failed to display a warning flag on the lumber. Do you remember that?”

  “I was sleeping through most of it.” His palms are soaked. Jimmy wipes them on his jeans.

  “Dead to the world, huh? Not according to the officer,” says Detective Santos. “He said you looked nervous. He said he didn’t write your father a ticket because he knew you wrestled for the high school and you looked like a good kid.”

  “He is a good kid,” says Trish.

  “We’re trying to learn what happened that night,” says Detective Barnes.

  “It’s obvious Jimmy doesn’t know, or he doesn’t remember,” she says.

  “Nothing is obvious.” Detective Barnes leans back and crosses his leg. He places his large hand at the top of his sock and massages his ankle. “I used to work highway patrol,” he says. “If I pulled someone over in a stolen vehicle, ninety-nine percent of the time they couldn’t keep their story straight because they were lying. They’d try to hand over their driver’s license and I’d watch it in their hand, shaking like a leaf.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” asks Trish.

  “I’ve heard a lot of stories.” He uncrosses his legs and folds his arms.

  “Is my son going to be arrested?” she asks. “Don’t you have to read him his rights?”

  “Whoa, hold on.” Detective Barnes raises his palms. “That’s TV, this is a simple interview. We’re trying to connect the dots. No one is getting arrested, at least not tonight.”

  At least not tonight! The tiny hairs on Jimmy’s arms stand up and he shivers.

  “At the same time, you should know, this is a grand-larceny investigation. A felony. If your son were arrested, he could do time in prison,” says Santos. “He could forget wrestling and whatever came after.” He looks at Jimmy. “So why don’t we start from the beginning?”

  “I’d like to talk to a lawyer,” says Trish.

  “Ending this interview now wouldn’t be the best thing for your son,” says Santos.

  “I’m asking you both nice.” She fixes her eyes on Detective Barnes.

  “Could we look around?” asks Detective Santos.

  Jimmy wants to take a shower, pull his bed covers over his head. He wants them gone from the house.

  “Why?” His mother’s face is unyielding.

  Leave, please leave.

  “Well, if you let us take a look around,” he says, “we’d be that much further with the investigation.”

  “No.” Trish shakes her head. “It’s late, and everyone’s tired.”

  The detectives stand. “What does your husband keep in the shed in the backyard?”

  “What does anyone keep in a shed? Stuff.”

  Detective Santos is looking in an ashtray on top of the stereo cabinet. Jimmy follows his gaze to a joint with his mother’s rose lipstick on one end. The detective pokes the joint with his pen. “Who’s smoking marijuana?”

  His mother holds her hands in front of her face like someone praying. “Oh, come on, that must have been there for six months. We had a party and someone—”

  “It’s not yours?” Detective Santos asks.

  “No,” she laughs. “I’ve got kids here.”

  “You could get charged for this.”

  “For one lousy joint? Oh, I get it—if I let you look around, I don’t get arrested.” Neither detective budges. Trish searches their faces. “Then go ahead and take a look,” she says.

  “We’ll start with the shed,” says Detective Barnes, moving toward the back of the house.

  “I told you that’s my husband’s. I can’t give you permission for the shed.”

  “What does he keep in there?”

  “It’s not my stuff. I don’t bother with it. He told me it’s off limits.”

  “Off limits? A shed in your yard is off limits?” Detective Barnes smirks. “We can start with the house if you want, but we will get to the shed eventually. If not today, then someday soon. We could get a warrant.”

  “I don’t think so.” She’s not blinking. She’s almost daring them.

  The detectives walk through the rooms and poke their heads in the alcove. They open the closet door.

  “Make this easy and get it over with,” says Detective Barnes. “All that’s left is the shed.”

  “Enough,” says Trish. “We’re done.”

  “Not quite,” says Detective Santos. “Flush the joint.”

  Trish opens her mouth an inch and takes a few short breaths. She grabs the joint from the ashtray and strides into the bathroom. The toilet flushes.

  Roxanne’s Volvo idles across the street. Jimmy is flooded with relief. She waited for him. He jogs to the car. Roxanne turns the radio off. “Are you all right?”

  Should he tell her about stealing the lumber to pay an overdue mortgage, about his mother spending money on pot? That he didn’t know his father was a bona fide thief? “I’m okay.” He takes her hand. “Thanks for not leaving.”

  “Jimmy, I know it can’t be anything terrible, right?” She brings his hand to her lips and kisses it. Her confidence in him is overwhelming. He wipes his eyes on the shoulder of her coat and buries his face in her honey brown hair. All he wants to do is hold her.

  “No, it’s not that bad,” he says.

  “What did they want?” She’s wide-eyed and serious. “I mean, if you want to tell me.”

  Jimmy considers laying it out to her, describing the night moment by moment, the wet earth, the guard, the police lights. He wants to trust her, but should she know? What would she think of him? “It’s my father. He’s always getting into trouble at work.”

  She bites her bottom lip, waiting for more.

  “I don’t even know what it’s really about.” He tries to smile.

  “Is that the truth?”

  “Yeah.”

  She lets go a breath. “Close your eyes.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes, right now.”

  He hears some rustling, then something is placed on his lap. “Open,” she says.

  It’s his jacket. Above his name in thread script it says “Captain.”

  “It’s perfect, really, thank you.” He didn’t buy her a gift.

  “Can I wear it?” she asks.

  “Of course.” She climbs over the bucket seat and almost falls on top of him. He feels her warm body. Her weight. The firmness of her breasts on his chest.

  “Move the seat back,” she says.

  He finds the control and floats the seat back, until she’s lying on top of him with their noses touching. Their mouths come together. It is the
longest kiss. When they come up, the windows are fogged and the streetlight is blinking on and off.

  Diggy

  DIGGY COULD HAVE PRACTICED, BUT HIS LIP IS STILL SWOLLEN. So after warmups he settles on the corner of the wrestling mat, his Spanish book on his lap, thankful that he’s not sweating to Greco’s whistle. Diggy fell behind in Spanish III. Señora Rodriguez is relentless on verb tenses. She doesn’t allow anyone to move to a new tense until they master the last one. He’s stuck on the imperfect. He could never memorize or concentrate on anything for very long. Names, dates, and events become tangled in his head like wrestlers in a giant heap. Words and letters leap around the page like frogs. In grammar school, he was tutored in math and English. Diggy once overheard his mother use the term “learning disability” while she was talking to his tutor. Afterward he confronted her. She became flustered and said he was just a slow learner; “You’ll outgrow it, don’t worry.”

  He reads lines in his text: Yo estaba hablando. I was speaking. Estabamos comiendo. We were eating. Estabas leyendo un libro. He closes his textbook. He nods to Jane, who’s lounging in the bleachers across the gym. She nods back. Jane’s been watching him for almost the entire practice. She’s the team’s groupie, sort of an obsessed one-girl wrestling fan club, officially called “manager” by Coach Greco. At matches, she keeps the time clock, the score, and mops blood off the wrestling mat with a rag soaked in Clorox. There were two other girl managers last year. The guys called them the Lemming Sisters because they’d basically run off a cliff if you told them to. Both graduated.

  Jane’s tall and scrappy, with slim hips, C-cup tits, and abs hard as a wrestler’s. She’s got dull brown hair that falls past her shoulders. Diggy considers calling her over, but there’s this thing about Jane: she’s got a birthmark around her right eye, covering half her forehead. It looks as if it could be peeled off like dried Elmer’s glue. Even in grammar school, when Diggy lived on the same block as her, she was Jane the Stain.

  Jane hops off the bleachers and crosses the wrestling mat in shredded jeans and a tight wrestling T-shirt. “Studying?” She has one of those gargantuan smiles with lots of teeth and gums.

  “More like procrastinating.”

  Guys say Jane’s doable, not dateable. According to one story, she snuck into an away wrestling camp and blew half the team. His brother was there but said don’t believe everything you hear.

  She leans against the padded wall, then slowly slides to the floor next to him. Her tan thighs show through holes in her jeans. “How’s your mouth?”

  He pulls down his lip and shows her the gash.

  She winces.

  “Crow wants my weight class,” he says. “Trevor no es mi amigo.” They watch the practice. Trevor is matched up with a kid named Turkburger, who’s about as coordinated as a penguin. Trevor executes a ball and chain move and has Turkburger on his back.

  “Crow’s weird,” says Jane. “Walks around like he’s tripping on something. You ever notice that?”

  “I guess it’s an Indian thing,” says Diggy. “You know he sleeps in a teepee?”

  “He does?”

  Diggy laughs. “Yeah, and he shoots buffalo from the school bus.” They watch Trevor tie Turkburger in a human knot.

  “Trevor got jacked over the summer,” she says.

  “Oh, really? I didn’t notice.” He looks at her cross-eyed.

  “You better stop being such a wiseass know-it-all.” She squeezes his thigh a few inches above his knee and it tingles all the way up his leg.

  Across the mat, Trevor gets in a takedown on Turkburger. It’s clean, completely awesome. Trevor never apologized, never said the collision was an accident. Diggy wonders if Trevor will have the balls to challenge him to a wrestle-off.

  “So how’s living in the Hills?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “Gateway Hills, what’s that like?”

  “It sucks, it’s great, who cares. It’s a place to live.”

  “It’s got to be better than our old neighborhood.”

  “Better? Maybe quieter, more spacious, but not better.”

  “You have a pool and a hot tub, right?”

  Diggy shrugs. “You know what, no one ever goes in them. All we do is pay all these people to take care of the chemicals, vacuum the pool, cover the pool. Right now there’s a sycamore branch sticking out of the pool. Went right through the pool cover. My old man saw it, and do you think he cares? You know what he cares about?”

  She shrugs a shoulder.

  “Coach Randy has this idea that I can be half as good as my brother.”

  “I’ve seen your father at practices. He looks intense.”

  “Coach Randy thinks he’s my ‘real’ coach. He’s not doing it because he’s trying to win father of the year. He wants his last name on the Wall again.” They look up at the names. Last season, Jimmy O’Shea’s name was added as a District and Region winner. Diggy was relieved when Jimmy lost at the State tournament. He didn’t need Randy ragging on him about that.

  “I wish we could go back to when we were kids just, like, for a week. You ever think about that, when we used to live on the same block?”

  “I think about it.” Diggy used to ride minibikes with her brothers. They reduced their front lawn to bare earth from circling the house. He considers sneaking out of the gym with her. He watches the wrestlers, waiting for the right moment.

  Diggy

  IN THE SUMMER, CUSTOMERS LINE THE PARKING LOT FOR MR. Freeze’s ice cream and Italian ices. Tonight the outdoor ice cream window is shuttered and locked. Diggy follows Jane’s firm little butt through the side door under a plywood cutout of a giant French fry with a long nose and a stupid grin. The restaurant has no customers, which is fine with him. He should take her home now, before he spends any more time and effort, but he has to admit, he wants a girlfriend. He’s tired of beating off to his brother’s porn stash and more tired of beating off to his father’s vintage Penthouse mags in the basement. He even crashed his laptop looking for porn.

  Everyone in school thinks he’s the master of poon, the Molly Pitcher babe magnet. He’s got the face. He’s got the attitude. No one would believe he only did it one time with a chubby girl on a pile of coats in an upstairs bedroom at his cousin’s engagement party. By the time he lifted her dress and pulled down her panties, he was already half over. He rolled off her and wiped himself on a mink coat. A few weeks later, at his cousin’s wedding, the girl approached him on the church’s walk and said, “Scope out your aunt Dotty.” His aunt was wearing the mink.

  Diggy chooses a corner table. A waitress with vampire eyes and poufy hair falling to the side like a ruined soufflé appears from behind the counter. Her turquoise uniform is splattered with mustard. “We’re closing soon.” She slides menus on the table and fills their water glasses. “You know what you want?”

  “A turkey burger, no roll, and a diet Sprite,” he says.

  “So just the patty?” she asks, squinting.

  “Right.”

  The waitress writes on a small pad. “It comes with fries, you want fries?”

  “No.”

  “Onion rings?”

  He shakes his head. He hasn’t had an onion ring in this century.

  “I’ll have his French fries and a vanilla soda,” says Jane.

  The waitress collects the menus. “Be right back.”

  “This is cool,” says Jane. “I like it when it’s quiet.”

  “You eat here a lot?”

  “Sometimes with my sister. They have specials.”

  “I never come here,” he says. “I can’t eat anything greasy, so what’s the point?” In the stark light, her birthmark reminds him of a violet-colored balloon floating across her face.

  “I think you’re a good wrestler.” She places her elbows on the table and folds her fists under her chin.

  “My brother was a lot better than me.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “He hurt his back. He h
ad to quit.”

  “I know that—the whole town knows that.”

  “He left Iowa State and transferred to Springfield College in Massachusetts. He’s a computer science major. He never opened a book and now he’s always in the library studying. It’s got Randy crazy. He had plans for Nick to go to the Nationals, and then the Olympics.” Diggy closes his eyes and sees his father in the dark family room drinking scotch, playing Nick’s wrestling tapes over and over. They have stacks of them, marked and categorized. Every match ends the same way: Nick’s arm raised in victory.

  “I remember Nick’s one-hundredth win,” says Jane. “There had to be two thousand people in the gym.”

  The match was moved to Rutgers University. The high school provided bus transportation. “Sometimes I think my brother’s better off now. At Iowa State, he was majoring in basket weaving and bowling.”

  “None of my brothers were into sports. Frank plays guitar. He’s in a hillbilly rock band. They call themselves Whiskey Tango. You ever hear of them?”

  Diggy shakes his head.

  “Whiskey Tango is what the police call the white trash people in this town.” She puts her hand to her mouth as if holding a radio head. “I’ve got a Whiskey Tango pushing a shopping cart on Main Street.” They laugh. “I know, it’s so lame, right?”

  “And your other two brothers?” he asks.

  “Willy’s into cars. He fixes them and sells them. My oldest brother, Hank, well, you heard about that, right?”

  “He got in trouble?” Diggy guesses.

  “He’s in prison for drugs. It was in the paper.”

  “For how long?”

  “You ever hear of the Federal guidelines? They suck. He has four years left.” She looks at the table. “At home, it’s me and my little sister, Gloria. She’s in the ninth grade.”

  Gloria’s a mini-version of Jane, slim, tall, long neck, pissed-off facial expression, proof that without the birthmark, Jane would have been as pretty as any of the popular girls, even Jimmy’s girlfriend.

  The food comes. Diggy pokes the small gray burger with his fork. It reminds him of something he’s seen on the Discovery Channel. He douses the meat with ketchup. The smell of her French fries drifts across the table. “Have one,” she says.