The Spot: Stories

In the evening the men sit in front of the fire, talking softly, conspiratorially, their words quiet, epigrammatic. When they’re planning the heist — as they call it — Byron and August (nicknamed after the month he joined) speak in dainty voices, as if the scheme were an egg to be held with the utmost care. They sketch diagrams on paper — of the mall, the parking lot, the positioning of the truck, the various routes in and out, escape plans and alternates — and then burn the papers ritualistically, poking them into the flames with a stick.

Under the table an electric tingle spreads on her palms when she thinks about the guns and listens as the dogs stop barking, and there is only the rustling of trees, throwing mottled green shadows across the rooms upstairs. The oaks in front of the house have grown close to the screens, touching them, and with the breeze comes a smell from the Hudson that reminds her of summers at Lake George, when her father would come up from the city to visit for the weekends, relaxed, shedding his suit coat, his neck visible, loose-fleshed. Drinkable water, potable, her brother Hank liked to say, trying to get her to sip. You can see all the way to the bottom because it’s the purest lake water in the world. Now Hank’s in a grave, at Arlington, not far from the eternal flame over J.F.K. (I’m gonna blow it out, he had said, going up to pay his respects when they visited on a family trip.) Each summer, her father took them to the end of the lake to visit Fort Ticonderoga and told them how it had been conquered by a distant relative, Ethan Allen, and his Green Mountain Boys (the land of the dead, Hank had called it — hadn’t he?) — and then to a wooded area near the fort where the French had massacred the British, and then the British, a year later, massacred the French. The ghostly aftermath in the wind, the silent vestiges there amid the thin, second-growth forest of quaking aspen and ragged maple. The inaccurately reassembled buttresses. The placards that rang false against the weighty, blood-slicked solidity of history.