The Missing Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

exactly when. On the day that changed everything. Only it wasn’t that simple, was it? Because if he’d never met her . . . if the Wolves varsity baseball team hadn’t made the finals in the NDHSA West tournament . . . if she hadn’t shaken her blue-and-silver pom-poms in the frosty spring air as he came up to bat for what would turn out to be the game-winning triple.
    If he hadn’t got that hit—surely then. T.L. knew what he could do and what he couldn’t. The triple was a fluke. He could draw an eastern cottontail so realistic it looked like it might leap off the page; he could unload and stack three dozen eight-pound baler bags of ice into the freezer in ten minutes; he could rattle off the name of every elder who’d served on the tribal business council since 1997, the year his mother died and Myron took him in. But what he could not do, on an ordinary day, was capture the attention of a blond-haired, blue-eyed pom-pom girl from Lawton High and so impress her that she got her friends to give him her phone number. The triple hadmade the difference: there were several hundred people in the Lawton High stadium, more than had turned out for any other game of the season, stamping their feet in the stands and shouting. Nearly forty of those people packed the visitors’ area, Myron and his buddies and a few of the guys’ moms, and they all started chanting “T.L.” Then someone on the other side picked it up, and his name echoed back and forth across the field, and everything in the world had seemed possible, including a girl like Elizabeth walking across the parking lot toward him after the game.
    Right there. That would have been the moment to freeze in time.
    T.L. leaned up on his elbows. The curtains didn’t close all the way, and light from the parking lot leaked through, casting a narrow stripe of yellow across his bed. That stripe had been there for thirteen of his nineteen years. He had once driven his Matchbox cars along it, long after Myron told him to go to sleep.
    He heard Myron’s keys landing in the dish on the hall table, his boots heavy on the linoleum, a glass of water being poured at the sink, seconds later the empty glass being set down on the counter. The walls in the house were thin, the doors hollow. Myron had bought the place for nothing, after the first boom was only a memory, when he got back from serving in the Gulf: a shitty house set back on a badly poured parking lot with a two-pump service station and convenience store fronting the highway. Myron struggled for years, but now it was boom times again and the location, right past the turn-in for the reservation, was genius: shift workers passing by four times a day, on the way to the rigs, on the way back to town. They might not always gas up, but they stopped for cigarettes, tall boys and jerky and sleeves of cashews, cupcakes and skin magazines and Red Bulls.
    Myron’s boots, on the way to his room. Steady. Slow. Worn-down . . .T.L. could hear it in the tread. Pausing outside T.L.’s door, only for a moment.
    Forty-five minutes at Griffon’s, for Myron that was one beer. He might not even have finished it. T.L. lay back down and closed his eyes. He’d sleep now. This new vigilance, as unfamiliar as a Sunday suit, wasn’t costing him any rest that he’d be getting anyway, not with the shadows and specters and fears that jammed his mind. Myron had come home drunk only a handful of times, and he was a calm drunk, usually getting a ride home. Besides, if his uncle decided to start leaving his money on the bar, what could T.L. have done about it?
    He had no idea, but he still had to be vigilant. Someone had to stay on guard. To keep hidden things hidden and danger at bay. T.L. was a man now, and he meant to do a man’s job.

five
    COLLEEN WOKE TO the remains of some fitful dream splintering and vanishing, leaving behind only a scattered sense of