First the Thunder Page 16

  “Have fun,” Harvey told him. The bubble of fear was still there in his chest, and his body still felt unresponsive and heavy, as if he were being chased in a dream, but there was something else also making itself known in him now, a warming current of satisfaction, electric and invigorating.

  He and Will watched as Stevie crossed behind the front desk and made his way to the door in the rear of the room. There Stevie paused, put a hand on the doorknob, gave it a slow turn. The latch clicked. He swung the door open, turned back to his brothers, gave them a thumbs-up, and swaggered into Kenny’s office.

  “Piece of cake,” Will said.

  With their cans of paint he and Harvey scrawled neon-orange epithets in three-foot letters on the corridor walls, their backs to one another. Will wrote DEATH TO TEACHERS! and SCHOOL SUCKS! Harvey wrote FULTON SUCKS DICK! Both men chuckled to themselves as they wielded the cans in looping flourishes. Will painted in an evenhanded script, Harvey in thick, angry letters.

  Harvey had finished his first composition and was contemplating his second, trying to envision FULTON IS A PERVERT! emblazoned across the tile floor, when he heard Stevie’s hoarse whisper. “Hey Harv! Harvey! You might want to come have a look at this!”

  Harvey half turned to see Stevie leaning out the door to Kenny’s office.

  Will asked, “What wrong?”

  And Stevie said, “You’re not gonna believe this.”

  Will was closest to Kenny’s office and soon disappeared inside. By the time Harvey crossed the threshold, Will was already coming toward him, hands outstretched to stop Harvey’s progress as he shouted back at Stevie, “Get that shit off there!”

  But Stevie, seated behind Kenny’s desk, unsure of what to do, looked from the glowing computer monitor to Harvey, and Harvey knew in an instant he could not let Will keep him out, and he shoved his brother aside, pushed past him, and all but lunged forward to stand beside Stevie.

  “I was just going through the drawers,” Stevie told him, his words spilling out in a nervous torrent, “when I came across one that was locked, that one on the bottom there. I figured if it was locked there must be something good in there, so I jimmied it open. At first all I saw was that bag of caramels there on the desk, but after I pulled the bag out I noticed this flash drive stuck clear in the back of the drawer, and I was just curious, you know? I swear I had no idea what was on it till I booted it up.”

  Harvey stood beside the chair and leaned close to Kenny’s desk. The can of spray paint dropped from his hand, and with both hands Harvey gripped the metal edge of the desk. He’d needed only one glance at the screen, and all the air had rushed out of his lungs. The bubble in his chest exploded, filling his stomach and chest and throat and brain with nausea. He kept staring at the screen, eyes moving from one thumbnail photo to the next. He was aware of Stevie’s voice but discerned no words, heard it only as a buzz growing louder and louder, and the tug of Will’s hand on his arm just a meaningless pressure, Will’s voice like that of a distant barking dog.

  Tiled across the twenty-seven-inch monitor were the photos Stevie had found on the flash drive, pictures he opened one by one, working in stunned amazement until horror set in, three rows of six photos each, all featuring Jennalee, Harvey’s wife, Kenny’s sister, photographed from every angle, gorgeous but appalling. Sometimes Kenny was in the photo with her. Sometimes other men were. Sometimes two or three men with her at the same time.

  It was Will’s hand gripping Harvey’s shoulder that started the fulmination, the slow explosion in Harvey’s brain. He jerked away as if shocked, shoved the desk with such force that it was jarred several inches across the thick carpet. The monitor wobbled on its pedestal but didn’t fall, so Harvey seized it in both hands and ripped it into the air, only to have the cable jerk it out of his hands again. It came down with a loud crack atop the desk, the screen and plastic housing shattering. The screen crackled and went black.

  Then Harvey seized the desk itself and drove it hard across the floor, pushed it crashing into a wall. Will grabbed him by the arm but again Harvey jerked away, lunged for the door, arms swinging blindly at everything in his way.

  Will turned to Stevie now, who had pushed his chair backward, up against the large dark window. “You get that flash drive!” Will told him. “Get everything. Everything we brought with us. And then you get the hell out of here!”

  Stevie nodded in response but Will didn’t see it, already in pursuit of his brother.

  A shattering of glass—a trash can hurled into the trophy case. Trophies heaved one by one against the cement-block wall.

  This time Will did not merely take hold of his brother’s arm or lay a hand upon his shoulder. This time Will ran at Harvey and tackled him around the waist, drove him away from the broken glass and ringing metal, and slammed them both against a wall, Harvey’s knee in Will’s stomach as they crashed to the floor.

  “Listen to me!” Will shouted, gasping for air, his face two inches from his brother’s. “We have to get out of here. You understand? First we get out. Then we kill the sonofabitch!”

  Now Harvey faced him, eyes flooded with furious tears. “Those were new ones,” he said.

  “What?” Will asked, confused, unsure of what he had heard.

  Harvey shoved him aside, pushed himself up and started jogging down the hallway, a strange lumbering gait that looked apelike to Will, elbows hooked, fists closed, Harvey’s heels thudding hard against the floor as he ran toward a door marked EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY.

  Will rolled over onto his hands and knees. “No! Come this way!”

  But Harvey continued on, and when he was close to the exit he kicked the lever bar across the middle of it and the door popped open and the alarm shrieked.

  Will scrambled to his feet. Still short of breath, he chased after his brother, followed him out the open door and caught up to Harvey standing outside in the grass, turning in an awkward circle, pivoting around his left foot while breathing loudly through his mouth, head thrown back, eyes on the heavens.

  Will seized Harvey’s arm just above the elbow and yanked him out of his pivot, tried to drag him stumbling toward the Bigley house. “Let me go,” Harvey pleaded. “Let me go.”

  But Will could not let go, could not surrender his brother to whatever emotion was rendering him impotent. “Run, damn it!” he shouted while the alarm shrieked and echoed down the empty hallways. “Goddamn it, Harvey . . . Run!”

  42

  Stevie, with no monitor to guide him, had no choice but to yank the flash drive out of its port. For a few moments he wondered what to do with the computer; should he grab the tower too? But then he wouldn’t be able to carry the duffel bag and ladder.

  Things were breaking down the hall, glass shattering, Will’s voice calling out to Harvey. Stevie pocketed the pink flash drive and took a last look around Kenny’s office—what else? What else?

  He patted his pockets. Glass cutter and suction cup secure. The duffel bag. He zipped it shut, grabbed it and went to the door.

  Silence down the hall. Stevie listened, waited. Will’s voice again . . . and then the alarm screaming. Stevie turned toward the windows, glanced out, saw only darkness, no strobing lights. Then told himself, You have three, four minutes at most.

  He turned and sprinted out the door, down the short hallway, leaped down into the lobby before encountering the glass and broken trophies scattered everywhere. His feet slid through the glass but he did not fall. He looked down at the floor, all those smiling faces peering up at him.

  He knew many of the faces in those photos, kids he had seen around town, and in the older photos kids he had gone to school with, kids who had bullied him, made fun of him, ignored him. And there was a picture of Harvey’s football team the year they had won the conference championship, a youthful, thin-faced Harvey grinning in the front row, a football in his hands.

  For some reason Stevie wanted that photo, needed to take it. He leaned down, picked it out of the broken frame, shook off the
dusting of glass, rolled the photo, opened the duffel bag, slipped the photo inside.

  Then quickly to the cafeteria. He slipped one arm through the duffel bag’s handles, then grabbed hold of the rope and pulled himself up. In a series of ten vertical lunges he scaled the rope, dragged himself up onto the roof. Stood in the warm tar-scented darkness and looked toward the front of the building. No headlights yet, the street still dark.

  He untied the rope and quickly retrieved and coiled it, threw the loop around his neck and scurried down the ladder. As his feet hit the ground he yanked the ladder toward him, let it fall with a loud clank onto the grass. Grabbed the top section by the bottom rung, lifted it free of the hooks, doubled it over the bottom section. Then grabbed the rails in his left hand, took the duffel bag in his right, and ran. He knew then that he would make it. They would all get away free and clear.

  He smiled. Grinned. Felt smart and competent and agile.

  Then he remembered the photos on the flash drive. The look on Harvey’s face. And felt all the lightness and grace go out of him. Whoosh and it was gone. Because this was the end of something. He did not know what. Only knew that now, with the school’s alarm fading behind him, the ladder clanking against his leg as he ran, sweat tickling down his spine and the rope scraping his neck and the patrol car with its strobing lights only a minute or two away, something crucial to his happiness had ended. He knew that after this night, after all those damn photos in his pocket, nothing would ever be the same, and that the cascade of damage to his family and his world had only just begun.

  43

  It took Will and Harvey a minute and a half to cut across the practice field to the yard behind Bigley’s house. Stevie’s pickup was parked farther down the unlighted street, in front of other houses not much better maintained than Bigley’s. They slowed to a walk on their way to the truck, Will taking the lead, Harvey behind, neither man speaking, both still trying to catch and silence their breath.

  At the rear of the truck, Will turned, sat down lightly on the rusted bumper. Harvey bent forward over the tailgate.

  Not long afterward, Will said, “Listen,” and they held their breaths. In the distance a soft clanking noise, as rhythmic as footsteps.

  “Go ahead and get in the truck,” Will said. “I’ll be right back.” And he disappeared into the darkness at the side of the nearest house.

  Will met Stevie coming across the practice field, the extension ladder clanking with each step. Will snatched the duffel bag from Stevie’s other hand and turned back toward the street, matching Stevie’s gait.

  “Did you get the rope?” Will whispered.

  “It’s around my freaking neck,” Stevie said.

  “You get the flash drive?”

  “I got everything.”

  “Harvey didn’t have his gloves on when he came down the rope. I can’t remember if he ever put them on.”

  “It’s too late now to worry about it.”

  “What about the paint cans?” Will said.

  “You didn’t grab them?”

  “You said you got everything!”

  “Everything there was to get,” Stevie said. “I figured you guys were bright enough to take your own paint cans.”

  With every clank of the ladder, Will winced. Behind them the alarm still whined inside the school. Will calculated that the police had probably pulled up in front of the school by now. But only one deputy would be on duty this late on a Sunday night, either Ronnie Walters, all two hundred pounds of him and as lugubrious as a black bear in January, or his polar opposite, skinny Chris Landers, the one folks called Barney Fife because he was always patting his pockets, checking for his keys, a nervous talker always adjusting or fiddling with his belt. In either case the deputy at this hour would have been watching TV at the fire station, maybe playing euchre with a couple of volunteers who preferred to spend their nights away from home. Too far from the school to actually hear the alarm, they wouldn’t be alerted to the break-in until called by the county dispatcher.

  He’s probably climbing out of his car right now, Will thought. He and Stevie approached the pickup as quietly as they could, then gingerly slid the extension ladder over the tailgate and into the bed.

  “We’ll be fine,” Will said aloud, and Stevie chose not to answer. He went to the driver’s side of the truck, climbed in and eased shut the door. Harvey, seated close beside him, leaning forward with hands clasped between his knees, neither spoke nor looked Stevie’s way, and remained just as motionless when Will opened the passenger door and squeezed in beside him.

  Four long minutes later Stevie slowed to make the turn toward Will’s bar. “Just pull over and let us out,” Will said. “You better keep going. Get your stuff back home.”

  Stevie pulled close to the curb, kept his foot on the brake. Will slid out first and held the door wide for Harvey, who walked straight to the bar’s door.

  Will leaned into the truck. “You sure you got everything?”

  “Everything but the paint cans,” Stevie said.

  Will nodded. “I’ll call you tomorrow.” Then he closed the door as softly as he could, and turned away.

  He was surprised to find Harvey hunkered down against the bar’s front door, sitting exactly as he had in the truck but with his butt braced against the wood. He was doubled over his clasped hands, and was making a groaning sound with each exhalation, a soft “Hunh” that Will thought might be from crying or hyperventilating.

  Will stood beside him, his own back to the wall, and laid a hand on Harvey’s shoulder. He could feel the rigidity of Harvey’s clavicle, the way his shoulder quivered. Will had never before felt so helpless, so foolish. The air was thick and warm and stank of dirty pavement.

  A few minutes later Harvey unclasped his hands, placed both hands against the wall at his back and pushed himself upright. Yet he remained slumped over, his head moving slowly back and forth.

  Will said, “We better get inside.”

  Will took the key from his pocket and unlocked the door, then followed his brother inside. For some reason the scent of the place, the stale air and lingering food scents, made his throat tighten, made his stomach turn. Even the soft security light in the kitchen seemed too bright.

  He closed the door and locked it, then slid his hand over the light switch, but paused. “Lights or no lights?” he asked.

  “No,” Harvey said. He walked straight to the bar then and sat heavily on a stool. Will could not remember another time when Harvey had sat at his bar; he always stood at the open end; never sat.

  Will went behind the bar, reached into the cooler and brought out two bottles of beer. He wiped them with a clean bar rag and twisted off the caps and set one in front of Harvey. Will tilted up his bottle and drank, surprised at how thirsty he was and how good the beer felt on his throat. Harvey held his bottle in both hands but did not drink from it.

  Will told him, “I don’t know what to say, brother. I’m sorry we ever went over to that damn school. I’m sorry I talked you into it.”

  Harvey was silent for a while. Then he said, “I should have taken that flash drive.”

  “I’m pretty sure Stevie grabbed it.”

  “You think he did?”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “I hope so.”

  Will leaned back against the cash register, the hard metal edge against his spine. He sipped his beer. He thought he could hear a police siren across town but wasn’t certain; it might be nothing more than the residue of the school’s alarm still ringing in his brain. He thought of other things he might say to his brother but discarded them all. What good would they do? Clumsy phrases. Useless. There was no magic in words.

  It was Harvey who broke the silence. “The two of us were over at the Marriott one night,” he said. He picked at the label on his beer bottle as he talked, tore off tiny pieces and left them on the bar. He spoke haltingly, in no hurry to hear this or to be heard.

  “You and Kenny?” Will asked.

&
nbsp; “Me and Jennalee. This was just after we’d gotten engaged. Maybe a month or so after. Anyway we were dancing, drinking, just having some fun. And this guy I barely knew, some band geek friend of Kenny’s from high school. He comes over and starts making an ass of himself. He’s so shit-faced he can barely stand up. But he keeps trying to drag Jennalee out on the dance floor. She sees I’m getting kind of hot about it so she excuses herself and goes off to the lady’s room. But the guy still won’t leave. Suddenly I’m his best buddy in the whole damn world, and he’s telling me what a lucky man I am. How she’s got the hottest body he’s ever laid eyes on. All that kind of crap. I’m just about ready to deck the guy when he up and asks me if Kenny’s still got those nude photos of her he had in college.”

  “Jeezus,” Will said.

  “I didn’t even slug the guy. I just went cold.”

  “So . . . what happened then?”

  “Soon as Jennalee came back, I dragged her outside. We sat in the car and . . .” He tore the last of his label free. Scratched a fingernail over the rough smear of glue.

  “At first she denied it,” he said. “Claimed she didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. So I threatened to haul that geek in the bar outside there with us and beat the truth out of him. Funny but she didn’t seem to mind that idea. So then I said, ‘On second thought I think there’s somebody else who needs it even more.’ So I started the engine and peeled out of the parking lot. I must’ve laid rubber for fifty yards down the road, I was so pissed.”

  “The somebody else being Kenny.”

  Another fifteen seconds passed before Harvey continued. “She made it sound like it was all so innocent, you know? Like something brothers and sisters do all the time. Just fooling around, she called it. She’d let him take pictures and maybe touch her once in a while. But she swore up and down it never went any further than that. Swore it all stopped when she went off to college herself.”