Destinations
Evan Jay Williams
The heat clung to his skin, and the still island air weighed down on him in his bed like a salty fluid. His parents had left the whitewashed French doors of their hotel room slightly ajar, but the fresh nighttime breeze refused to mix with the sweaty and cloistered indoor air. His mother and father, reposed in the adjoining bed, inhaled and exhaled, inhaled and exhaled, with irritating synchronicity. Late as it was, Nate had not slept, and knew, as he had known during similar nights imprisoned in his freshman dorm room, that by this hour he never would. He entertained a childishly inviting thought of the dusting of beach not ten feet from their second-story balcony. Unsticking himself from the surface of the plasticky comforter, Nate substituted his pajama bottoms for the previous day’s khakis, which were still lumped upon the tile floor, and snuck from the room without scuffing his weather-beaten sandals.
It was neither the largest nor most beautiful beach on the island, but it felt to him the most personal, as if it were somehow his own. The shore swooped around the bay like a crescent moon, and the sand sifting through his toes was as fine and white as confectioner’s sugar sprinkled atop a pastry. He blemished the perfection by kicking a clump of sand into the air, but, like his late thoughts, the powder had nowhere in the end to go but down. Acting upon his little urge, Nate seated himself in the sand and began constructing a little castle, just as he would have, so many years ago, back on the public beach in the States his parents would drag him to, hampers of their toys and towels in tow. These were different waters here, on the shore of another world, yet the waves advancing in from the line of the horizon still doubled back and folded in on themselves like the ones he now faintly recalled, both changing and unchanging.
While the impulse to sculpt his miniature kingdom may have been the whim of a more child-like self, his restless thoughts weighed down upon a young adult instead. Though summer’s stay on the island was eternal, his own vacation was fading, slipping into yet another semester and the close of another year. As far removed from the tiny island as his education was, time nevertheless shortened the distance between the two destinations. He felt misplaced, foreign, and not only because he was a tourist, a half-welcome house guest in an unfamiliar home. Yet, whenever he tried, he couldn’t conjure a magical “elsewhere” he’d rather be. He wore this all-too comfortable numbness as if it were a favorite hoodie, and when he had the time to stop and consider it, as he too often did, his life seemed little more than a succession of places and events, a neatly ordered slideshow of memories.
As a psychology major, self-awareness was the least of his worries, and Nate knew how he had grown into this cautious disinterest: too many evenings just as this one, shut in with only his parents’ familiar eccentricities for companionship; too many safe, scheduled excursions to destinations that promised adventure and intrigue, while the memories of those travels became as vague, generic, as those colorful postcards he had no occasion to mail. Or perhaps the problem was too few of those awkward, unattainable commodities known as “friends,” whom his classmates gathered to themselves like they were collectible items; or merely too few excuses, he thought, to build the eighteen-year olds’ equivalent of a sandcastle.
Was that really why he hadn’t slept? Only a complete idiot would lose sleep over thoughts like that, when it was his academic responsibilities that should, by all rights, be plaguing him instead. His advisor would be inquiring about his future in college come fall, which concentration he elected to pursue, sociology or criminology, that was, but Nate had made no decision either way. The world was populated with people he had no desire to understand, and they had returned him the favor a hundred times over. Even as a young boy, he hadn’t played with others so much as he’d watched them at their games, always from just outside the circle of friends, ever observant, if a tad bored. Life was a spectator sport, after all. He was still that same boy, even here, for no matter how far he traveled, or on which distant beach he stood, he would always be lonely, even when he was not alone. The waves, gushing and sighing, brought him back to the beach, but they held no answers, only moonlight. At least, he thought, he could lay claim to something of himself now, even if only a lumpy sandcastle, and then only until the high tide crept in with the dawn.
He lifted himself from the sand, half-heartedly brushing off the patches of sand that had adhered, nearly invisibly, to the knees of his beige khakis. Scuffling over the beach, Nate passed the stairs back to the hotel room he and his parents shared and moved up the guest walk to the coral portico of their hotel, shell gray under the moon. The lobby lights were on, bright and inviting, but the semi-circular swath of asphalt was as deserted as his beach. Nate headed down the sloping drive, skirting the curving hedge of some island shrub that fringed the pavement. He was just navigating the small herd of sporty mopeds the hotel left out to pasture every evening when the sound first came to him.
He had been peripherally aware of a clanking sort of timbre for several of his lanky strides, but now the noise was just that much louder, more out of place, and so his hearing sought it out like a blip on a radar screen. He might not have noticed had the perpetrator ceased moving when Nate was just a yard further off, or had Nate, oblivious to all but his feet and his thoughts, walked past, unseeing even in the steady limelight of the moon. But the thief was just careless enough so that when Nate rounded one of the last retired mopeds his silhouette, crouched, couldn’t have been clearer at high noon.
Stepping out from the angle of the moped’s low shadow, Nate saw the hotel’s uninvited guest in the plain. He wasn’t appreciably older than Nate, yet, if standing, would have as much as half-a-foot on Nate’s five-ten. Over his well-built frame he wore khakis, like Nate’s, but studded with pockets, as well as a long-sleeve T-shirt and a plain but sturdy backpack. All this mass, balanced with a feline equilibrium on tan toe socks, nevertheless looked humorous crouched behind such a slight moped. The face that investigated Nate’s own, however, was not laughing. It was handsome, but boyishly freckled, capped by clear, blue-sky eyes that showed no guilt, surprise, or fear, but a fiercely concentrated alertness. The culprit shifted ever so slightly and cautiously on his haunches. Nate noticed his spanner-width hands. One grasped a flashlight. The other drifted towards his rear pocket. Even with Nate’s limited experience, he could identify the butt of a handgun. Gray gunmetal.
Perhaps he too, like the thief, had become too absorbed in the night to notice, but when the valet dislodged one of the misplaced bleached pebbles from the rose bed, Nate whirled around in stupid shock. The valet’s dark face was dulled in the moonlight, but it was indeed the same man who had hauled the luggage from his taxi, and whom he had observed tending the flock of mopeds for guests to rent.
“Can I help you find something, sir?”
Nate forced his mouth out of its fish-like gape in order to form words.
“Uh, no, found it. Thanks, anyway.” He swung open his phone and the artificial glare formed a square of light in mid-air, as if he had opened a miniature door to another dimension. The valet, after what seemed to Nate an infinite pause, shrugged and made for the lobby, kicking more pebbles absently as he went.
As the man ambled away, Nate reflected right then, of all times, on what the valet, or the delinquent huddling behind him for that matter, must have seen in their brief glimpses of him. Surely not much. The curve in his upper back gave him a hunched appearance that his long, splayed feet compensated for by propelling him quickly along whenever he was seen in profile. The plain brown hair never asserted itself enough to obscure his calm and contemplative eyes. His face seemed to imitate, in finer detail, his posture as a whole, for his nose, more prominent than most, hung far out over his chin, which was weaker than average. It was who he was, nothing more and nothing less, of course, but he wondered, not often, yet every once in a while, why it couldn’t be more.
He had no choice now, of course, but to turn around. The young criminal with the gun, waiting more diligently than he had when Nate first interrupted him, smoothly restored himself to full height after the valet’s retreat. There was another pause, as the two appraised, in their respective manners, the situation, Nate with adrenaline uselessly charging him like electricity through an abandoned socket, his opponent expertly judging him as a cat would a high ledge. Calmly but quickly, the boy brought the gun around to bear, if only loosely, on Nate. With a practiced ease, he gestured down from Nate’s hand to the hedge. Accordingly, Nate lightly lobbed his phone into the thicket, where it landed amongst scraping leaves, the screen once again dim. Still, the gun wavered. Nate was nervous, yes, and while his whole body pounded with his heart’s labor like his old roommates’ subwoofer, he was not, in point of fact, petrified. Some interpretive tic assured him that the firearm was merely a showy tool for defense, that this most unusual of adversaries intended for him no specific grief.
And yet, Nate’s nerves burned with indecision and apprehension. If he was not to be shot, neither could he simply trot back to the hotel lobby, which remained safely lit not a pebble’s throw away. He could yell, he supposed, cause a ruckus by toppling a moped or two, but what then? Would this island bandit attack him? He doubted it. The boy would have little choice but to flee, and from a perfect eyewitness at that. It was a small island, and the notion of a fugitive, of any age, scurrying about on a Caribbean paradise was ludicrous. The boy seemed to share these observations in his patently silent manner, and watched Nate, almost patiently, anticipating him moving, erupting into loud protests, doing something. But Nate, for reasons even he couldn’t fathom, remained standing, swaying slightly with the nervous current. He would wonder about many things, afterwards, but most of all why he had made no commotion, even aided and
abetted, as it were. Perhaps he had simply been intimidated and dumbstruck, having faced down an unpredictable criminal with a weapon. Perhaps.
And so, when the teenager’s gun beckoned to the moped seat, Nate dutifully perched on its rear like a little boy being taken for a ride. Deciding the best resting place for his hands was his thighs, he clenched and unclenched unease from his khakis, watching as his captor warily eyed him while replacing the firearm to his pocket, the flashlight to his backpack. Under the steering mechanism he spotted a rectangular compartment where a trio of black, green, and red wire had been frayed and twisted like twine. With a final silent acknowledgment, almost a warning, his right hand gravitating at waist level with the firearm, his kidnapper of sorts swung onto what remained of the seat, lifted the kickstand with a clean sweep of his leg, and commenced maneuvering the moped ever so silently down the needle-shaped drive. Feeling both utterly ridiculous and bizarrely exhilarated, Nate set his own limbs to work, quietly assisting the vehicle in its trajectory towards the main road. He was in one of those dreams, he realized, in time to quell the nervous chuckle that nearly spurted from his throat, one of those dreams in which you may do something both terribly naughty and yet tremendously exciting. This giddy sense of deception faded as abruptly as its onset, however. He had just been a witness, and now almost an accessory to, a crime. He was in the presence of a criminal, a real criminal, and nobody, least of all himself, would know why he had gone or where he was headed. His phone, his only life line, was buried in the horticulture of the hotel’s cul-de-sac, and his parents were not even aware he had left them. And yet.
And yet he wasn’t feeling real fear was he? Was this the nervous self-preservation one felt for their endangered life? As the pedaling duo reached the intersection, the boy in command stopped, lifted his legs to the footrests and pressed, after a hesitation, the ignition. The expertly hotwired machine shuddered to life, and while Nate didn’t dare look directly behind them, he could swivel his head enough to see they were too far removed from the hotel for anyone to recognize suspicious noises. As if the new freedom had excited him, the moped bandit commandeered the stolen property out onto the longer route with all the spunky energy of a windup toy being released. They motored in the opposite direction from the nearest village, and vaulted further up into the hills. For such a miniscule engine bearing the weight of two young men, the moped powered on admirably, responding to each precipitous s-curve as if a native who could anticipate every nook and cranny in the terrain. With each swerve and swoosh, Nate, who was forced to envelop the driver in something between a hug and a death-grip, was absolutely certain they would lose their center of gravity and smush themselves, like fried plantains, into a pulpy mess against the stone barriers. But he didn’t, he couldn’t, he discovered, fear the driver himself.
He knew his captor now, knew his identity at least. Back in the driveway, the shock and excitement must have short-circuited his long-term memory, but now he remembered. When they first flew in to the island the paper had been ablaze, or as ablaze as a daily named “The Gleaner” could have been, with the tale of the teenage fugitive from the States. It had, at the time, been little more than diverting in-flight reading, as the stewardess, sweat dewing on her brow, had divvied out the local edition to the dozen or so passengers with all the import due the Sunday Times. Nate had read the article as he assumed everyone read the features in newspapers - except during playoff season – by skimming rather inefficiently, with maximum speed and minimum retention. But the boy he read about was here, now, no longer a curiosity, and anything but a distraction. Nate was filling in the gaps in the reportage he had glossed over or skipped entirely, and each flash of scenery, every curve in the drive, was one more image, another narrative detail the two boys shared; the one could not be mentioned without the other. Nate was seeing as if through his companion’s eyes, and as they escaped, with the darkness hanging down from the sky like a blank cinema screen, a jerky, poorly spliced film played in his imagination:
The property was camped on the border of civilization and wilderness, and looked its part. Whoever lived here clearly knew what they were doing, what with their well-outfitted four-wheelers, hunting sheds, animal-proof refuse bins and garden fences; no one would live out here unprepared. But those who lived out here could also afford to escape - from their hedge-fund managers, from their estate lawyers and corporate auditors - and inside the varnished log mansion would be a wall-covering flat screen, a granite-topped kitchen island, bamboo hampers in the bathrooms. That was why he was here – because what they had that, for the moment, he did not. This was as close as they would ever come to meeting, this young man on the run and these well-off property owners who had foolishly believed they had earned their privacy and their privilege.
He could pick a lock the way others flipped up a faucet handle or twisted off a jar lid, and he was inside within seconds. Five minutes later, he would be gone. He could find his way around as easily as if he had a complete set of blueprints in hand. The house was an improvement upon the ones at which he’d “dropped by” since making his way down from the Northwest. It wasn’t just a house, it was a true home, a family home, by the looks of it. It was certainly more of a home than any of the endless succession of
foster homes he’d known, more so than his own. He imagined those homes of his past lives lined up on the same bland, narrow street, all sided in vanilla vinyl, like a row of sugar cones. He savored the salty irony of being able to break into them all at will, as easily as he had broken out of each and every one of them in turn.
He found what he needed, he always did. Two credit cards under two different names, a large bottle of potent antiseptic, a package of high-energy bars. This wasn’t thievery, for property was an illusion, and a locked door meant no more to him than a fence or a tree line. Like all those who knew how to live off the land, he simply took what was necessary and gave back what he was able to offer. This was the way things used to be, the way things should still be, and these homeowners should be grateful for offering him what he was owed. No one would be the worse off, and anyway, he was moving on,
on to where no one could stop him. No one would hold him back ever again. He’d die first.
His five minutes were up. He turned to leave when just then, on the glowing hardwood floor, he met the family pet, a cat, two shades lighter than the polished floorboards it sat its fat haunches upon. He allowed himself an additional minute with the feline, who remained in place in order to maximize his scratching options, front legs straight like table legs, hind limbs as rounded and crouched as the sides of an armchair. As he received little static shocks from patting cat hair, he thought of the bedraggled animals he’d found struggling on the back roads, in the back woods, he’d crossed, more like miserable rats than the domesticated playthings they had once been. This house cat might as well have been a different species altogether from those discarded animals. He recalled all the dull owners’ tags he’d seen hanging around the animals’ collars, as useless as rusty jewelry. The nearest town would have a stray shelter - if they were decent people, that was. He fished $100 of crumpled bills from his backpack and flopped them onto the granite-topped kitchen island, next to a stick-it note on which he scribbled “For the Homeless Cats.” The loose money did not even ruffle, as he swished the door shut behind him. The cat remained stationary for another moment or so, then, realizing his new masseuse would not be returning, padded back to its napping place.
The “Cat Burglar,” that was the moniker the paper gave him, and, like many a second-rate idea, the nom-de-plume soon graduated to a stroke of genius. It had stuck, corny and obvious as it was, and soon superseded the poor boy’s own name, as if he were a superhero with a normal alter ego. He’d wondered, of course, why the paper should be so eager to announce a story that could be a deterrent to tourism, but after three days anchored to beaches like driftwood, terminally bored, he’d understood. And now here he was, with this “Cat Burglar,” who had now added an underpowered moped and a captive vacationer to his extensive criminal record.
They had wended their way, by then, into the highest rises of the island. Nate couldn’t judge how far they had driven, or for how long; the primitive roads swooped endlessly about the hilly topography, and his heart rate could have interpreted a mere ten minutes as a full decade. The pathetic little vehicle roared courageously, as if it fancied itself a sports convertible, on any descents, but then whimpered and sputtered on the reverse, a tired boy after a too-long day. They were high above the touristed domains of the island at this altitude, the resorts that sprouted along the wispy beaches, the old town with her homes of whitewashed balustrades and pastel stucco jauntily aligned like so many wedding cakes in a bakery. Even the local villages, where children fearlessly blazed across traffic’s path and mothers lazily peddled the catch of the sea and the pick of the fruit trees, no longer peppered the roadway. As they rounded one curve and swept into another, the island vista would dawn for him, the arid bramble that futilely sought nourishment in sterile sand, the mute sea rippling in like a fine silk scarf, and then the next hill would rear up to shield the view once again. They were the sole riders, and only every other minute or so did they scrape past a dwelling hugging, as island homes tended to, its mother road. The straining engine seemed to shift, with misplaced bravado, into louder protestations for each home they passed, or so he imagined, like a tone-deaf brass
band warming up. But the petit-four buildings did not awake with their passing, and Nate couldn’t decide whether he had let his breath in, or out, after each silent abode.
Nate knew exactly where the rest of his stress had manifested itself, however. His weary knees and ankles, wrenched outward by his awkward perch, were stretching his ligaments like the rubber band of a slingshot. His back had absorbed, or so it felt, every jerking and jarring motion in lieu of a good pair of shocks. His hands and arms, barely clasped together around the driver’s backpack and lower waist, felt nothing but the mild warmth of a fellow human being. The most wrenching distraction of all was the gun, which was jutting and grating under his lowermost rib, in sharp contrast to the airbag-like backpack cushioning his chest.
He could only assume the purpose of this shared excursion was to remove him from any immediate assistance, to dump him in some remote bush so he would be delayed in contacting any authorities about his, about their, little mishap. So he assumed. But could he really predict the actions of this young man, who had mutely asserted his dominance, forced him, as a sort of hostage, to fly away from safety? Why was he now careening across the island on a hijacked moped, clutching a wanted fugitive about the waist as if they were clumsy dance partners?
Whenever the vehicle decelerated or changed course, the thief gave no verbal notice, and his head, which pivoted only now and then to assess an oncoming intersection or quiet dwelling, was most often level, sensing the road ahead as acutely as the beam of their moped’s headlight. They were animal senses, Nate thought, skills the thief would have honed in order to survive, as he had, off the grid and on the run, almost as an animal himself. It was the sort of original intelligence that sought out exactly what it required and nothing more, trim, lean information, no fat attached. Nate had also educated himself towards an end, but it was not an end, after all, of his own choosing, those steps which lay before him like footprints in a beach, inviting him to place his soles into theirs. His parents’ footprints. But his feet were too big, his stride too long to match perfectly what had been laid before him.
All thoughts of beaches and metaphors were rapidly swept away as the Burglar veered up a road Nate thought he wouldn’t have noticed even were he on foot, the moped’s tires scrunching into the clay-like dirt. A solitary home rested in the intersection, and the dramatic accelerando of the engine cued a lamp to light from somewhere within. As they cheated gravity, rambling around the rise of the hill, Nate’s brain began calculating an escape. Or, more accurately, he was considering what he would say, let alone do, when this young man eventually stopped, for they could not ignore each other much longer. The road, such as it was, showed no inclination of arriving at either a destination or distinguishing feature, and the last specific landmark Nate now recalled was the lone home at which they had awakened a resident, now long past. The road then leveled out for the first significant stretch, and Nate felt the moped slow down before he consciously registered the deceleration. Now he was truly alarmed.
Alarmed for himself, and alarmed for any others they might encounter, and yes, even for his captor and chauffeur as well. But a different alarm registered just then – there was the piercing siren of a police vehicle, something far more substantial than a moped, echoing against the hill they hugged. Even with the reverberations, Nate could detect the source of the sound was close and now joined by similar pitches, each riding over the other in a high, invisible wave. The Burglar started, but quickly took advantage of the sudden situation, flooring the moped into a precipitous wheelie and dropping his rear passenger to the road like a sack of ballast. Zooming off down the other side of the hill, the Burglar’s moped downshifted several times, and then the loud drone of the engine sank sharply away. Thoroughly stunned, and not least by his impact, Nate crept to full height at the path’s apex. He held to the open end of the road for a moment, contemplating its forbidding slope, then turned and retreated the way he had ascended, retracing the route until he returned to the little house, and from there, his hotel. It would be a lengthy trek, but the moon was still with him, illuminating the way.
The news on the Windex-streaked TV was reiterating the tale as Nate sat in the airport’s “Passenger Lounge” – really only several rows of seats bolted into one corner of the room that also served as the “Baggage Claim Area,” “Customer Service Desk,” and “Transportation Depot.” The weather was simple and bright, and the slightly wilted pink pavilion that was the international airport caught a pleasant island cross-breeze. The prop plane on which he and his parents would finally ascend from the island lazed contentedly on the cracked tarmac, not twenty meters from where he was sitting. The “island time” attitude that had kept them in this faded pink terminal for a further two hours after their scheduled departure had also delayed the investigation of the incident with the Burglar. Nate was of little interest to either the local police or the sophisticated swarms of men in intimidating suits that had dropped down from the States like large, black locusts. He’d told them all his story, repeated the story, written it out and signed on the line, and then told it again. Well, most of the story, anyway.
Nate saw the footage playing again on the news channel, but he already had the scene running through his mind on a relentless feedback loop:
On a small village beach in the very early morning, a tall, young man attempts to speed his exhausted vehicle through the yielding sand, his waist hanging dangerously over the handlebars as if in this position he could prod the moped on. A sharply prowed security boat charges in from the shore, as several men in uniform leap from their flashing cars and give chase, kicking up sand from their heels in great arcs, like the spray of the waves upon the rocks. They must be joined by an intrepid news team, for the footage jerks kinetically across the beach, treacherous at high speed, although the image remains as clear as any still photograph in a news weekly. The defeated moped finally topples, catapulting its driver upon the damp sand like a horse collapsing from exhaustion. Guns are drawn as the law enforcement officers close in, and the Burglar sinks back onto his knees in expectation, almost resignation, one arm looping smoothly around to his waist … Nate didn’t know how many people would have the watched the recording by now, but of them all, only he would have recognized the briefest of expressions captured on thefugitive’s face. It was that instant twinge of confusion yielding swiftly to comprehension that he’d seen there, on the magnified face of the no-longer-a-boy, not-quite-a-man. After all, the gun he’d expected to find at the ready in his rear pocket now lay somewhere in the bramble off the side of the dirt road where he’d earlier discarded his passenger. For his part, Nate hadn’t even bothered to toss the firearm in question. Instead he’d simply dropped it from his warm grip and let it skid safely to rest, no longer of any danger to anyone.
Nate registered that the news spot had moved on to developments in the case – the Burglar would be relocated to the States, to face full criminal charges, and so forth. The story had moved on now, in other words, beyond his small role in whatever future telling. He heard his flight number called over the crackling loudspeaker, as the anchor spoke at length about increased security and the effect a criminal threat was expected to have on island tourism. Shrugging, Nate hauled his luggage under one arm, regretting he hadn’t thought to bring a book for the lengthy flight, perhaps even something on criminology that his advisor had recommended. Stepping off the island, he boarded the plane home.
It was neither the largest nor most beautiful beach on the island, but it felt to him the most personal, as if it were somehow his own. The shore swooped around the bay like a crescent moon, and the sand sifting through his toes was as fine and white as confectioner’s sugar sprinkled atop a pastry. He blemished the perfection by kicking a clump of sand into the air, but, like his late thoughts, the powder had nowhere in the end to go but down. Acting upon his little urge, Nate seated himself in the sand and began constructing a little castle, just as he would have, so many years ago, back on the public beach in the States his parents would drag him to, hampers of their toys and towels in tow. These were different waters here, on the shore of another world, yet the waves advancing in from the line of the horizon still doubled back and folded in on themselves like the ones he now faintly recalled, both changing and unchanging.
While the impulse to sculpt his miniature kingdom may have been the whim of a more child-like self, his restless thoughts weighed down upon a young adult instead. Though summer’s stay on the island was eternal, his own vacation was fading, slipping into yet another semester and the close of another year. As far removed from the tiny island as his education was, time nevertheless shortened the distance between the two destinations. He felt misplaced, foreign, and not only because he was a tourist, a half-welcome house guest in an unfamiliar home. Yet, whenever he tried, he couldn’t conjure a magical “elsewhere” he’d rather be. He wore this all-too comfortable numbness as if it were a favorite hoodie, and when he had the time to stop and consider it, as he too often did, his life seemed little more than a succession of places and events, a neatly ordered slideshow of memories.
As a psychology major, self-awareness was the least of his worries, and Nate knew how he had grown into this cautious disinterest: too many evenings just as this one, shut in with only his parents’ familiar eccentricities for companionship; too many safe, scheduled excursions to destinations that promised adventure and intrigue, while the memories of those travels became as vague, generic, as those colorful postcards he had no occasion to mail. Or perhaps the problem was too few of those awkward, unattainable commodities known as “friends,” whom his classmates gathered to themselves like they were collectible items; or merely too few excuses, he thought, to build the eighteen-year olds’ equivalent of a sandcastle.
Was that really why he hadn’t slept? Only a complete idiot would lose sleep over thoughts like that, when it was his academic responsibilities that should, by all rights, be plaguing him instead. His advisor would be inquiring about his future in college come fall, which concentration he elected to pursue, sociology or criminology, that was, but Nate had made no decision either way. The world was populated with people he had no desire to understand, and they had returned him the favor a hundred times over. Even as a young boy, he hadn’t played with others so much as he’d watched them at their games, always from just outside the circle of friends, ever observant, if a tad bored. Life was a spectator sport, after all. He was still that same boy, even here, for no matter how far he traveled, or on which distant beach he stood, he would always be lonely, even when he was not alone. The waves, gushing and sighing, brought him back to the beach, but they held no answers, only moonlight. At least, he thought, he could lay claim to something of himself now, even if only a lumpy sandcastle, and then only until the high tide crept in with the dawn.
He lifted himself from the sand, half-heartedly brushing off the patches of sand that had adhered, nearly invisibly, to the knees of his beige khakis. Scuffling over the beach, Nate passed the stairs back to the hotel room he and his parents shared and moved up the guest walk to the coral portico of their hotel, shell gray under the moon. The lobby lights were on, bright and inviting, but the semi-circular swath of asphalt was as deserted as his beach. Nate headed down the sloping drive, skirting the curving hedge of some island shrub that fringed the pavement. He was just navigating the small herd of sporty mopeds the hotel left out to pasture every evening when the sound first came to him.
He had been peripherally aware of a clanking sort of timbre for several of his lanky strides, but now the noise was just that much louder, more out of place, and so his hearing sought it out like a blip on a radar screen. He might not have noticed had the perpetrator ceased moving when Nate was just a yard further off, or had Nate, oblivious to all but his feet and his thoughts, walked past, unseeing even in the steady limelight of the moon. But the thief was just careless enough so that when Nate rounded one of the last retired mopeds his silhouette, crouched, couldn’t have been clearer at high noon.
Stepping out from the angle of the moped’s low shadow, Nate saw the hotel’s uninvited guest in the plain. He wasn’t appreciably older than Nate, yet, if standing, would have as much as half-a-foot on Nate’s five-ten. Over his well-built frame he wore khakis, like Nate’s, but studded with pockets, as well as a long-sleeve T-shirt and a plain but sturdy backpack. All this mass, balanced with a feline equilibrium on tan toe socks, nevertheless looked humorous crouched behind such a slight moped. The face that investigated Nate’s own, however, was not laughing. It was handsome, but boyishly freckled, capped by clear, blue-sky eyes that showed no guilt, surprise, or fear, but a fiercely concentrated alertness. The culprit shifted ever so slightly and cautiously on his haunches. Nate noticed his spanner-width hands. One grasped a flashlight. The other drifted towards his rear pocket. Even with Nate’s limited experience, he could identify the butt of a handgun. Gray gunmetal.
Perhaps he too, like the thief, had become too absorbed in the night to notice, but when the valet dislodged one of the misplaced bleached pebbles from the rose bed, Nate whirled around in stupid shock. The valet’s dark face was dulled in the moonlight, but it was indeed the same man who had hauled the luggage from his taxi, and whom he had observed tending the flock of mopeds for guests to rent.
“Can I help you find something, sir?”
Nate forced his mouth out of its fish-like gape in order to form words.
“Uh, no, found it. Thanks, anyway.” He swung open his phone and the artificial glare formed a square of light in mid-air, as if he had opened a miniature door to another dimension. The valet, after what seemed to Nate an infinite pause, shrugged and made for the lobby, kicking more pebbles absently as he went.
As the man ambled away, Nate reflected right then, of all times, on what the valet, or the delinquent huddling behind him for that matter, must have seen in their brief glimpses of him. Surely not much. The curve in his upper back gave him a hunched appearance that his long, splayed feet compensated for by propelling him quickly along whenever he was seen in profile. The plain brown hair never asserted itself enough to obscure his calm and contemplative eyes. His face seemed to imitate, in finer detail, his posture as a whole, for his nose, more prominent than most, hung far out over his chin, which was weaker than average. It was who he was, nothing more and nothing less, of course, but he wondered, not often, yet every once in a while, why it couldn’t be more.
He had no choice now, of course, but to turn around. The young criminal with the gun, waiting more diligently than he had when Nate first interrupted him, smoothly restored himself to full height after the valet’s retreat. There was another pause, as the two appraised, in their respective manners, the situation, Nate with adrenaline uselessly charging him like electricity through an abandoned socket, his opponent expertly judging him as a cat would a high ledge. Calmly but quickly, the boy brought the gun around to bear, if only loosely, on Nate. With a practiced ease, he gestured down from Nate’s hand to the hedge. Accordingly, Nate lightly lobbed his phone into the thicket, where it landed amongst scraping leaves, the screen once again dim. Still, the gun wavered. Nate was nervous, yes, and while his whole body pounded with his heart’s labor like his old roommates’ subwoofer, he was not, in point of fact, petrified. Some interpretive tic assured him that the firearm was merely a showy tool for defense, that this most unusual of adversaries intended for him no specific grief.
And yet, Nate’s nerves burned with indecision and apprehension. If he was not to be shot, neither could he simply trot back to the hotel lobby, which remained safely lit not a pebble’s throw away. He could yell, he supposed, cause a ruckus by toppling a moped or two, but what then? Would this island bandit attack him? He doubted it. The boy would have little choice but to flee, and from a perfect eyewitness at that. It was a small island, and the notion of a fugitive, of any age, scurrying about on a Caribbean paradise was ludicrous. The boy seemed to share these observations in his patently silent manner, and watched Nate, almost patiently, anticipating him moving, erupting into loud protests, doing something. But Nate, for reasons even he couldn’t fathom, remained standing, swaying slightly with the nervous current. He would wonder about many things, afterwards, but most of all why he had made no commotion, even aided and
abetted, as it were. Perhaps he had simply been intimidated and dumbstruck, having faced down an unpredictable criminal with a weapon. Perhaps.
And so, when the teenager’s gun beckoned to the moped seat, Nate dutifully perched on its rear like a little boy being taken for a ride. Deciding the best resting place for his hands was his thighs, he clenched and unclenched unease from his khakis, watching as his captor warily eyed him while replacing the firearm to his pocket, the flashlight to his backpack. Under the steering mechanism he spotted a rectangular compartment where a trio of black, green, and red wire had been frayed and twisted like twine. With a final silent acknowledgment, almost a warning, his right hand gravitating at waist level with the firearm, his kidnapper of sorts swung onto what remained of the seat, lifted the kickstand with a clean sweep of his leg, and commenced maneuvering the moped ever so silently down the needle-shaped drive. Feeling both utterly ridiculous and bizarrely exhilarated, Nate set his own limbs to work, quietly assisting the vehicle in its trajectory towards the main road. He was in one of those dreams, he realized, in time to quell the nervous chuckle that nearly spurted from his throat, one of those dreams in which you may do something both terribly naughty and yet tremendously exciting. This giddy sense of deception faded as abruptly as its onset, however. He had just been a witness, and now almost an accessory to, a crime. He was in the presence of a criminal, a real criminal, and nobody, least of all himself, would know why he had gone or where he was headed. His phone, his only life line, was buried in the horticulture of the hotel’s cul-de-sac, and his parents were not even aware he had left them. And yet.
And yet he wasn’t feeling real fear was he? Was this the nervous self-preservation one felt for their endangered life? As the pedaling duo reached the intersection, the boy in command stopped, lifted his legs to the footrests and pressed, after a hesitation, the ignition. The expertly hotwired machine shuddered to life, and while Nate didn’t dare look directly behind them, he could swivel his head enough to see they were too far removed from the hotel for anyone to recognize suspicious noises. As if the new freedom had excited him, the moped bandit commandeered the stolen property out onto the longer route with all the spunky energy of a windup toy being released. They motored in the opposite direction from the nearest village, and vaulted further up into the hills. For such a miniscule engine bearing the weight of two young men, the moped powered on admirably, responding to each precipitous s-curve as if a native who could anticipate every nook and cranny in the terrain. With each swerve and swoosh, Nate, who was forced to envelop the driver in something between a hug and a death-grip, was absolutely certain they would lose their center of gravity and smush themselves, like fried plantains, into a pulpy mess against the stone barriers. But he didn’t, he couldn’t, he discovered, fear the driver himself.
He knew his captor now, knew his identity at least. Back in the driveway, the shock and excitement must have short-circuited his long-term memory, but now he remembered. When they first flew in to the island the paper had been ablaze, or as ablaze as a daily named “The Gleaner” could have been, with the tale of the teenage fugitive from the States. It had, at the time, been little more than diverting in-flight reading, as the stewardess, sweat dewing on her brow, had divvied out the local edition to the dozen or so passengers with all the import due the Sunday Times. Nate had read the article as he assumed everyone read the features in newspapers - except during playoff season – by skimming rather inefficiently, with maximum speed and minimum retention. But the boy he read about was here, now, no longer a curiosity, and anything but a distraction. Nate was filling in the gaps in the reportage he had glossed over or skipped entirely, and each flash of scenery, every curve in the drive, was one more image, another narrative detail the two boys shared; the one could not be mentioned without the other. Nate was seeing as if through his companion’s eyes, and as they escaped, with the darkness hanging down from the sky like a blank cinema screen, a jerky, poorly spliced film played in his imagination:
The property was camped on the border of civilization and wilderness, and looked its part. Whoever lived here clearly knew what they were doing, what with their well-outfitted four-wheelers, hunting sheds, animal-proof refuse bins and garden fences; no one would live out here unprepared. But those who lived out here could also afford to escape - from their hedge-fund managers, from their estate lawyers and corporate auditors - and inside the varnished log mansion would be a wall-covering flat screen, a granite-topped kitchen island, bamboo hampers in the bathrooms. That was why he was here – because what they had that, for the moment, he did not. This was as close as they would ever come to meeting, this young man on the run and these well-off property owners who had foolishly believed they had earned their privacy and their privilege.
He could pick a lock the way others flipped up a faucet handle or twisted off a jar lid, and he was inside within seconds. Five minutes later, he would be gone. He could find his way around as easily as if he had a complete set of blueprints in hand. The house was an improvement upon the ones at which he’d “dropped by” since making his way down from the Northwest. It wasn’t just a house, it was a true home, a family home, by the looks of it. It was certainly more of a home than any of the endless succession of
foster homes he’d known, more so than his own. He imagined those homes of his past lives lined up on the same bland, narrow street, all sided in vanilla vinyl, like a row of sugar cones. He savored the salty irony of being able to break into them all at will, as easily as he had broken out of each and every one of them in turn.
He found what he needed, he always did. Two credit cards under two different names, a large bottle of potent antiseptic, a package of high-energy bars. This wasn’t thievery, for property was an illusion, and a locked door meant no more to him than a fence or a tree line. Like all those who knew how to live off the land, he simply took what was necessary and gave back what he was able to offer. This was the way things used to be, the way things should still be, and these homeowners should be grateful for offering him what he was owed. No one would be the worse off, and anyway, he was moving on,
on to where no one could stop him. No one would hold him back ever again. He’d die first.
His five minutes were up. He turned to leave when just then, on the glowing hardwood floor, he met the family pet, a cat, two shades lighter than the polished floorboards it sat its fat haunches upon. He allowed himself an additional minute with the feline, who remained in place in order to maximize his scratching options, front legs straight like table legs, hind limbs as rounded and crouched as the sides of an armchair. As he received little static shocks from patting cat hair, he thought of the bedraggled animals he’d found struggling on the back roads, in the back woods, he’d crossed, more like miserable rats than the domesticated playthings they had once been. This house cat might as well have been a different species altogether from those discarded animals. He recalled all the dull owners’ tags he’d seen hanging around the animals’ collars, as useless as rusty jewelry. The nearest town would have a stray shelter - if they were decent people, that was. He fished $100 of crumpled bills from his backpack and flopped them onto the granite-topped kitchen island, next to a stick-it note on which he scribbled “For the Homeless Cats.” The loose money did not even ruffle, as he swished the door shut behind him. The cat remained stationary for another moment or so, then, realizing his new masseuse would not be returning, padded back to its napping place.
The “Cat Burglar,” that was the moniker the paper gave him, and, like many a second-rate idea, the nom-de-plume soon graduated to a stroke of genius. It had stuck, corny and obvious as it was, and soon superseded the poor boy’s own name, as if he were a superhero with a normal alter ego. He’d wondered, of course, why the paper should be so eager to announce a story that could be a deterrent to tourism, but after three days anchored to beaches like driftwood, terminally bored, he’d understood. And now here he was, with this “Cat Burglar,” who had now added an underpowered moped and a captive vacationer to his extensive criminal record.
They had wended their way, by then, into the highest rises of the island. Nate couldn’t judge how far they had driven, or for how long; the primitive roads swooped endlessly about the hilly topography, and his heart rate could have interpreted a mere ten minutes as a full decade. The pathetic little vehicle roared courageously, as if it fancied itself a sports convertible, on any descents, but then whimpered and sputtered on the reverse, a tired boy after a too-long day. They were high above the touristed domains of the island at this altitude, the resorts that sprouted along the wispy beaches, the old town with her homes of whitewashed balustrades and pastel stucco jauntily aligned like so many wedding cakes in a bakery. Even the local villages, where children fearlessly blazed across traffic’s path and mothers lazily peddled the catch of the sea and the pick of the fruit trees, no longer peppered the roadway. As they rounded one curve and swept into another, the island vista would dawn for him, the arid bramble that futilely sought nourishment in sterile sand, the mute sea rippling in like a fine silk scarf, and then the next hill would rear up to shield the view once again. They were the sole riders, and only every other minute or so did they scrape past a dwelling hugging, as island homes tended to, its mother road. The straining engine seemed to shift, with misplaced bravado, into louder protestations for each home they passed, or so he imagined, like a tone-deaf brass
band warming up. But the petit-four buildings did not awake with their passing, and Nate couldn’t decide whether he had let his breath in, or out, after each silent abode.
Nate knew exactly where the rest of his stress had manifested itself, however. His weary knees and ankles, wrenched outward by his awkward perch, were stretching his ligaments like the rubber band of a slingshot. His back had absorbed, or so it felt, every jerking and jarring motion in lieu of a good pair of shocks. His hands and arms, barely clasped together around the driver’s backpack and lower waist, felt nothing but the mild warmth of a fellow human being. The most wrenching distraction of all was the gun, which was jutting and grating under his lowermost rib, in sharp contrast to the airbag-like backpack cushioning his chest.
He could only assume the purpose of this shared excursion was to remove him from any immediate assistance, to dump him in some remote bush so he would be delayed in contacting any authorities about his, about their, little mishap. So he assumed. But could he really predict the actions of this young man, who had mutely asserted his dominance, forced him, as a sort of hostage, to fly away from safety? Why was he now careening across the island on a hijacked moped, clutching a wanted fugitive about the waist as if they were clumsy dance partners?
Whenever the vehicle decelerated or changed course, the thief gave no verbal notice, and his head, which pivoted only now and then to assess an oncoming intersection or quiet dwelling, was most often level, sensing the road ahead as acutely as the beam of their moped’s headlight. They were animal senses, Nate thought, skills the thief would have honed in order to survive, as he had, off the grid and on the run, almost as an animal himself. It was the sort of original intelligence that sought out exactly what it required and nothing more, trim, lean information, no fat attached. Nate had also educated himself towards an end, but it was not an end, after all, of his own choosing, those steps which lay before him like footprints in a beach, inviting him to place his soles into theirs. His parents’ footprints. But his feet were too big, his stride too long to match perfectly what had been laid before him.
All thoughts of beaches and metaphors were rapidly swept away as the Burglar veered up a road Nate thought he wouldn’t have noticed even were he on foot, the moped’s tires scrunching into the clay-like dirt. A solitary home rested in the intersection, and the dramatic accelerando of the engine cued a lamp to light from somewhere within. As they cheated gravity, rambling around the rise of the hill, Nate’s brain began calculating an escape. Or, more accurately, he was considering what he would say, let alone do, when this young man eventually stopped, for they could not ignore each other much longer. The road, such as it was, showed no inclination of arriving at either a destination or distinguishing feature, and the last specific landmark Nate now recalled was the lone home at which they had awakened a resident, now long past. The road then leveled out for the first significant stretch, and Nate felt the moped slow down before he consciously registered the deceleration. Now he was truly alarmed.
Alarmed for himself, and alarmed for any others they might encounter, and yes, even for his captor and chauffeur as well. But a different alarm registered just then – there was the piercing siren of a police vehicle, something far more substantial than a moped, echoing against the hill they hugged. Even with the reverberations, Nate could detect the source of the sound was close and now joined by similar pitches, each riding over the other in a high, invisible wave. The Burglar started, but quickly took advantage of the sudden situation, flooring the moped into a precipitous wheelie and dropping his rear passenger to the road like a sack of ballast. Zooming off down the other side of the hill, the Burglar’s moped downshifted several times, and then the loud drone of the engine sank sharply away. Thoroughly stunned, and not least by his impact, Nate crept to full height at the path’s apex. He held to the open end of the road for a moment, contemplating its forbidding slope, then turned and retreated the way he had ascended, retracing the route until he returned to the little house, and from there, his hotel. It would be a lengthy trek, but the moon was still with him, illuminating the way.
The news on the Windex-streaked TV was reiterating the tale as Nate sat in the airport’s “Passenger Lounge” – really only several rows of seats bolted into one corner of the room that also served as the “Baggage Claim Area,” “Customer Service Desk,” and “Transportation Depot.” The weather was simple and bright, and the slightly wilted pink pavilion that was the international airport caught a pleasant island cross-breeze. The prop plane on which he and his parents would finally ascend from the island lazed contentedly on the cracked tarmac, not twenty meters from where he was sitting. The “island time” attitude that had kept them in this faded pink terminal for a further two hours after their scheduled departure had also delayed the investigation of the incident with the Burglar. Nate was of little interest to either the local police or the sophisticated swarms of men in intimidating suits that had dropped down from the States like large, black locusts. He’d told them all his story, repeated the story, written it out and signed on the line, and then told it again. Well, most of the story, anyway.
Nate saw the footage playing again on the news channel, but he already had the scene running through his mind on a relentless feedback loop:
On a small village beach in the very early morning, a tall, young man attempts to speed his exhausted vehicle through the yielding sand, his waist hanging dangerously over the handlebars as if in this position he could prod the moped on. A sharply prowed security boat charges in from the shore, as several men in uniform leap from their flashing cars and give chase, kicking up sand from their heels in great arcs, like the spray of the waves upon the rocks. They must be joined by an intrepid news team, for the footage jerks kinetically across the beach, treacherous at high speed, although the image remains as clear as any still photograph in a news weekly. The defeated moped finally topples, catapulting its driver upon the damp sand like a horse collapsing from exhaustion. Guns are drawn as the law enforcement officers close in, and the Burglar sinks back onto his knees in expectation, almost resignation, one arm looping smoothly around to his waist … Nate didn’t know how many people would have the watched the recording by now, but of them all, only he would have recognized the briefest of expressions captured on thefugitive’s face. It was that instant twinge of confusion yielding swiftly to comprehension that he’d seen there, on the magnified face of the no-longer-a-boy, not-quite-a-man. After all, the gun he’d expected to find at the ready in his rear pocket now lay somewhere in the bramble off the side of the dirt road where he’d earlier discarded his passenger. For his part, Nate hadn’t even bothered to toss the firearm in question. Instead he’d simply dropped it from his warm grip and let it skid safely to rest, no longer of any danger to anyone.
Nate registered that the news spot had moved on to developments in the case – the Burglar would be relocated to the States, to face full criminal charges, and so forth. The story had moved on now, in other words, beyond his small role in whatever future telling. He heard his flight number called over the crackling loudspeaker, as the anchor spoke at length about increased security and the effect a criminal threat was expected to have on island tourism. Shrugging, Nate hauled his luggage under one arm, regretting he hadn’t thought to bring a book for the lengthy flight, perhaps even something on criminology that his advisor had recommended. Stepping off the island, he boarded the plane home.