The back of Earl’s van had no plumber’s tools at the moment but had mattresses lining its walls and door affixed in place by screws into a plywood frame. The entire structure, frame, mattresses and the inner space it contained could be removed from the back of the van like a large cage. He put the cage there when he thought he might be taking a trip to the old, abandoned house in the woods. Earl would remove it and replace it with tools and supplies before going to a job. The fabric that covered the bedding had prints of children playing sports, baseball, and soccer, illustrations in the primary colors of red and blue. In the middle of the small padded chamber there lay some early readers, a gameboy, a bag of Halloween candy and a Thomas the Tank engine blue and red plastic lantern. The space was only accessible from the rear windowless locking doors.
“She said she’s the babysitter, but I know she’s lying, ’cause I watched her coming home late at night.” Stevie said, relishing the memory of the lighted vignette of the woman’s first floor bedroom window. Hovering in the blackness a rectangle of glowing amber, light filtered through a mica lampshade, framed Charlene’s shape.as he sat in the woods and watched her undress.
“And you’re sure no one else is in the house?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think so,” the man mimicked his young companion in a mocking voice, “No Stevie, you just don’t think. This ain’t like snatching a kid off the street in the projects. This is a rich neighborhood. They might have an alarm, a dog, a gun.”
“You promised,” Stevie’s insistence withered mid-speech when he noticed the look the big man gave him. He sat motionless and tried to let the darkness conceal him. Earl’s face contracted slightly to the center, fusing for a second into a near snarl. Earl could be explosive, especially when he hadn’t gotten any in a while; especially if there was no one else around to notice. It had taken all of Stevie’s nerve to coax Earl out here. Stevie worked at it for weeks. He gave out his intention in small packets of reluctance and hesitation; he avoided Earl, he stayed at his grandmother’s for days at a time, until he thought Earl got the message that Stevie would not help him bring any more kids back to his place until Earl helped Stevie get something he wanted for himself.
In the beginning the pot and beer, a place to stay when his stepfather was in a beating mood were enough for Stevie. But as time went on, the high of excitement congealed into a thought that throbbed like his first really bad hangover. Whatever Earl was doing, -, whatever they had done, he was undeniably a part of it now. He knew he couldn’t go back in time and have a do-over. Stevie felt controlled by it, unable to return to any other kind of society until this one was resolved, like being stuck to a conveyor belt, with no way of escaping what came next. He and Earl formed a society of two with certain rules of behavior, mores, and he felt the rules of their cult as certainly and strongly as the cell in the back of the van confined their captured prey.