I'D GOTTEN INTO THE HABIT OF TAKING UP AS little space in this world as I could, which was to say I'd been hiding behind a book or my falling-down hair for basically the last three years. I wished I could go back and change things. If I'd been a better friend to Patrick, I'd have known what he'd been up to recently. Maybe I'd have been with him that Saturday night. Maybe he wouldn't have been attacked.
Maybe, maybe, maybe, and if wishes were horses, I'd gallop straight to Sheriff Doyle and hand over Patrick's attacker. Poof, I'd be Patrick's friend again, and poof, Patrick would wake up.
Last night as I lay in bed, I thought about Patrick lying alone in the hospital, his body broken and maybe his brain, too. I tossed and turned all night, in and out of sleep, and woke up before first light. I slipped out onto the porch, my quilt wrapped around me, and watched the sun rise from behind the mountains. It was beautiful. That's why Daddy picked this lot, way back when.
"So your mama could be surrounded by beauty," he told me every so often. I'd hug him on those occasions, because talking about my dead mama always made him feel blue. "You sure do call her to mind, sweet pea. My beautiful girl."
A silver mist cloaked the peaks and valleys. Golden sunshine glowed along the horizon, shifting into rosy pinks and a striking, fiery orange as the light pierced the clouds.
I closed my eyes, and still the colors reached me.
I opened my eyes again and turned to the job at hand: to find out who hurt Patrick. I reviewed what little I knew. Patrick was working the night shift at the Come 'n' Go on the night he was attacked, and he was scheduled to open the store the following morning. That's why it was lucky that man from Atlanta came along when he did, although I supposed-if I was trying to think like a detective, though the word detective made me feel foolish-that another way of looking at it was, Huh, what a coincidence he came along when he did.
Except Sheriff Doyle said Patrick's attack occurred between two and four a.m., and the man, whose name was Dave Tuttle, said he left Atlanta at five thirty a.m. I read that in the Toomsboro Times. Every day there'd been at least one article about how the investigation was proceeding, and every article said pretty much the same thing. It wasn't.
But in one article, Mr. Tuttle was quoted as saying that he made the drive from Atlanta to Highlands once a week, and that he always left at dawn. He had a daughter in Atlanta who didn't go with him that Sunday, and she confirmed that yes, he left when he said he did. She could be lying, but I assumed Sheriff Doyle checked out her story, and Mr. Tuttle's as well.
Who else might have been at the gas station late Saturday night or early Sunday morning? I needed to be open-minded. I needed to consider all possibilities. I wasn't convinced by the theory I suspected Sheriff Doyle of pushing, the one about a gang of outsiders attacking Patrick, but I'd be doing Patrick a disservice if I didn't give it a fair shake.
Black Creek had one of the highest illiteracy rates in the state, but if you traveled thirty miles in any direction, you'd hit a college. Not necessarily a good college, but a college. And what did college guys like to do? Besides getting laid and picking at their belly buttons, I mean?
They liked to party, and the Come 'n' Go on Route 34 was nearly halfway between Western State and Toomsboro Community College. When there wasn't a kegger at one of the schools, the college boys would drive to the other, and they often stopped at the Come 'n' Go for snacks. Beef jerky, Monster Energy Drinks, chewing tobacco. Beer.
Patrick wasn't supposed to sell alcohol, because he wasn't twenty-one, but Mr. Lawson, the store's owner, wasn't overly concerned with that law. He was concerned with making a profit, and he told Patrick to go on and sell to anyone with a valid-looking ID.
Unlike Mr. Lawson, Patrick was a rule player, but he had a sweet job and a steady paycheck, so he didn't argue with his boss. He took the "valid" part seriously, however. If a customer's ID looked authentic, then cool. If it seemed sketchy-like if the name listed on the license was "Mario Mario" and the guy sliding it across the counter looked all of eighteen, then Patrick didn't accept it, even though it would have been the easier thing to do.
"Mario Mario?" I said skeptically when my brother relayed this particular story one Saturday night, sitting out on our porch.
"From Mario and Luigi," Christian said. He recited a list of what I assumed were video games: "Super Smash Bros. Mario Kart. Brawl."
"The little dudes with the mushrooms?" I'd seen them on someone's handheld game at one point or another.
"Super Mario Mushroom, baby!"
I wasn't his "baby." I also wasn't drunk, since I'd had zero beers to his, oh, five or six or seven. "That's the stupidest name for a fake ID I've ever heard," I said. "And why Mario Mario? Doesn't the mushroom dude have a real last name?"
"I think that is his real last name, and yeah, it's dumb as shit," Christian said. "If you're going to make a fake, you might as well try to make it look authentic." He grinned. "But holy goddamn, it made me laugh."
Remembering made him laugh again. Out of stinginess, I didn't join in. My feelings toward Christian were too complicated. Also, I'd promised to help at the church nursery the next day, which meant for an early morning, and which meant I should have just gone to bed.
But didn't. I guess it was nice sitting on the front porch and listening to Christian laugh.
"I'm assuming Patrick turned Mario Mario down?" I said.
Christian filled me in. Apparently, Mario Mario came in with three other guys, all of them dudded out in college-boy button-downs over T-shirts with logos for skateboards and ski wear. They browsed the aisles and plunked their selections on the counter, including two cases of Budweiser. Patrick glanced at Mario's ID to be polite, but, he told Christian later, he'd known from the moment the guys came in that none of them was legal.
"I can ring up the food, but not the beer," Patrick told him. "Sorry, bro."
Mario hadn't liked it. Patrick held firm. So Mario and his friends started ragging on Patrick: calling him a fag, telling him to not to be so gay, checking his plastic name tag and shortening his name to Trish. Normal old normal, and nothing Patrick hadn't endured before.
"Then they laid into Gwennie," Christian said.
"Gwennie?" I said. "What was she doing there? Was she alone?" Gwennie was fifteen years old and too innocent for her own good.
"Uh, no, she was with Patrick."
"Yeah, but…" I shook my head. "What about Beef? Was he there?" I guess part of me still clung to the belief that big brothers took care of their little sisters.
"Hush up and I'll tell it," Christian said. "Beef wasn't there, just Gwennie. When Mario and his buddies couldn't get a rise out of Patrick, they went off on her."
"How?" I said.
"Just, you know. Making rude comments and stuff."
"Like what?"
He rubbed his neck.
"What did they say?"
"Fag hag," he said, shifting his gaze. "But don't worry, 'cause right about then is when me and Tommy came along."
He got his groove back. "Patrick had Gwennie behind the counter with him. The college boys were up in their faces, and we got there in time to see Patrick pull himself tall and let them have it." Christian slapped his knee. "He told them to exit the premises or he'd call the police."
"And they did? They left?"
"Well, Tommy and me gave them a helping hand."
"Good," I said vehemently. "I'm glad you were there."
Christian looked at me with a funny expression, which I pretended not to see. Maybe I didn't send love his way all that often, but that didn't mean I couldn't.
As I sat on our porch now and watched the sun rise, I thought about those underage party boys. Maybe they held a grudge against Patrick. Did they return with thoughts of revenge? If so, how could I find out?
I could go to the Come 'n' Go, I supposed. But, no. If any of them had attacked Patrick, they'd never come back.
So, okay. My suspects so far were out-of-town college boys or some random sadist who just happened to be driving along Route 34, and who just happened to brutally assault a guy he didn't know from Adam.
I'd keep those options in mind, but my money was on someone from Black Creek, possibly aided by one or two of his buddies. My money was on the redneck posse, and the only member I exempted was Christian. He wasn't perfect, but I knew with absolute certainty that my brother didn't go after Patrick with a baseball bat. He would never.
It was possible he knew who did, though.
The first order of business was to find out what happened in the hours prior to Patrick's attack. Patrick went out that night with my brother and some others, including Beef and Tommy, and I needed to know what happened when he was with them, before he was beaten up, strung to the gas pump, and left to die.
Christian wouldn't tell me. I'd bugged him and bugged him, and he flat-out denied that anything had happened. Yet with every denial, he'd get the same stubborn look I'd seen him wearing all week. One time he said, "Just lay off. It's nothing you need to worry about."
If it was nothing for me to worry about, what was the "it"? If he didn't want me worrying, why not come clean?
There was no point asking Tommy. He'd lie, and a lie was no better than Christian's closed-lipped agitation.
So that left Beef. Beef and I weren't as close as we used to be, but maybe I could get a straight answer out of him anyhow. He was almost a second brother to me, after all. We had a lot of history between us.
Once, when I was a fifth grader, a bigger boy at school told me to move. When I didn't jump to it, he elbowed me in the face and barked, "Move!"
Beef found me huddled on the side of the playground with Gwennie, holding a scratchy brown paper towel to my bloody nose.
"Who did it?" he said, his face darkening, and before recess was over, that bigger boy knew never to bother me again.
Another time Beef came over to see Christian and found me crying at the kitchen table.
"Uh… what's wrong?" he asked with all the finesse of a farmer in a fancy ladies clothing store. He'd gotten a new buzz cut, and I remember thinking he looked like a baby chick, all scalp and fuzz.
I swallowed and waved my hand to indicate my book, lying facedown on the table. It was To Kill a Mockingbird. I'd just finished the chapter where Scout finally meets Boo Radley, who she always thought was scary, but who turned out not to be. Turned out, he was just scared to death of the world. Even so, he put his life on the line and saved Scout from a truly bad and scary man. Afterward, Scout's daddy said to Boo, "Thank you for my children." It killed me every time.
"Just a sad part," I told Beef. "I'm okay."
"Haven't you already read that book?" he said.
"Only a couple hundred times."
"Do you cry every time?"
I sniffle-laughed, seeing how he might not understand that sometimes it was good to cry.
He squinted, unsure what to do. He wanted to go shoot things with my brother, but because he was Beef, he didn't feel right about leaving me behind when I was all weepy. "Well… wanna rub my head?"
I laughed again. I loved rubbing his freshly mowed head. He knelt on one knee before me, and I moved my palm over his bitsy chick fuzz. Sure enough, it stemmed my tears.
I'd grown up with Beef. I could trust what he told me, and-a big bonus-I could be in the same room as him without wanting to shrivel up and die. But mainly, I needed to get up off my butt and do something. Anything.
I'd made a promise-to Patrick, to Mama Sweetie, and to God-and I was going to keep it.