Toll Booth. Michael Aronovitz

to the dirt road, through the front leg of Scutters on the other side of a shallow, wooded valley of sorts stood my own house. Was it a quarter-mile from here? A half? Was Lucy out on her lead, up on her hind legs, front paws scratching at the air in response to the sound coming from this side of the trees?

      I opened my mouth to argue what I thought was the obvious, and was denied the opportunity. Kyle was walking away. He was not running, but walking with casual purpose in the last direction I would have expected.

      He was walking toward the Honda. His hands were in his pockets and his shoulders hunched in just a bit. He gave a cool glance to the side and I saw his future. In one hand he had a crowbar and in the back of his waistband was a Colt .45 with the safety flipped off. The Honda’s horn was the alarm in a jewelry store downtown after hours with a shattered storefront window and three smashed display cases inside. Kyle casually glanced down both sides of the avenue to see if the cavalry was onto him yet, and approached the getaway car. And he didn’t approach it on the run. He walked toward it with casual purpose.

      I expected Kyle to look through the window of the Honda and give himself a “one-two-three,” but he didn’t. He simply yanked open the door and leaned in. Through the short rear window I saw his elbow piston backward, and the horn stopped as if it was cut by a blade. He backed out, slammed shut the door, bent, and puked into the dirt.

      I suddenly wanted my father. Mom couldn’t help me here. Mom pushed morals and preached lessons and soothed stomach aches and provided verbal simulations that proved mean people were insecure on the inside, but this was out of her realm. It wasn’t even in her universe.

      Before their divorce, when I’d had man stuff to talk about I used to approach Dad and beg for “Boy’s Club.” As busy as he was, he always seemed to make time for these moments, most probably because it both excluded Mother and also helped him see himself for a moment as “Dear old Dad” with the pipe and the confident smile you saw in Fifties movies or the sugar tins and cookie jars with Norman Rockwell prints on them.

      Once, back in fifth grade, I asked his advice after breakfast when Mom went to check the laundry downstairs. It was Saturday.

      “Dad,” I’d whispered.

      “Yeah, Skipper.” He turned down the corner of the paper and peered over it. My eyes were wide and earnest.

      “I have to ask you a question!”

      “Right.” He put the paper down, folded it in thirds, and looked at his watch.

      “Let’s go.”

      We slipped out through the sliding glass doors and went to our spot on the log bench by the tire swing. I proceeded to tell him that yesterday when I went back to the school to get a social studies workbook I’d left in my cubby, I caught Spencer Murphy stealing Mrs. Levitz’s science test from the top drawer of her desk. It had me frozen in the doorway. I looked over my shoulder for a janitor and saw nothing but empty hallway.

      “Hey, dork!” Spencer said. He was a tall, thin boy with disheveled reddish hair. He had what seemed a permanent cowlick on the back left side of his head, early acne, an upturned nose flooded with dark freckles, and ears as small as quarters. He was wearing a light blue shirt with the Copenhagen tobacco logo written across the chest in cursive. There were sweat-stains under his arms. His face had paled, and the pimples on his cheeks shone out like stars. He took a menacing step toward me, the test between his thumb and index finger.

      “Tell anyone, Raybeck, and I’ll say you were in on it. I’ll tell Principal LaShire you dared me to do it, I swear.”

      Mom would have hit the roof. She would have called Spencer’s parents, demanded a meeting with LaShire, rounded up all the other kids involved, and lectured them all about “ethics.” I would have been labeled the world’s worst snitch and banished to the special ed. lunch table for life.

      Dad just got out his calculator.

      “What’s your average in science so far, son?”

      “Around a 95.”

      “More a 93 or a 97? Be precise, Jimmy.”

      I closed my eyes. The in-class report on the nervous system didn’t go so well last week. I hadn’t gotten a grade sheet for it yet, and I had been riding a 94 up until then.

      “Maybe a 90.”

      “How many questions are on this test Spencer borrowed?”

      “Fifty, I think.”

      He punched a bunch of numbers into his calculator.

      “You’re going to get eleven of those answers wrong. Make it every third or fourth, then clump a few together in a row. That’ll leave you a 78. Considering it’s a big one at the end of the marking period, I would imagine it might be worth fifteen or twenty percent. You’ll wind up with a ‘B’ for the semester that you’ll have to live with. If Spencer gets caught you never knew anything about it.”

      He tousled my hair.

      “You’re my tiger.”

      It was pure survival in its most practical form, and I needed that kind of logic in the here and now. I needed my Dad to hit his calculator and map me a way out of this.

      Kyle wiped off his mouth with the back of his forearm and came over to me.

      “Now listen, Jimmy, and please listen good. We have to get rid of her. We have to make her vanish like fucking Houdini. See, yesterday Barry Koumer called you a pussy while we were checking out his dad’s compound bow, and to defend you I told him we were coming up here today to raise all kinds of hell. If someone finds this wreck, Koumer the Rumor is going to point it straight back at you. So there ain’t gonna be any running, Jimmy. Stop standing there with your mouth open and start picking up nails.”

      I could hear myself breathing.

      Nothing left but me, Kyle, and the street logic.

      And we were under the gun to hide a dead body by sundown.