Before grave yards were cemeteries, before used was pre-owned Lisa used the clipboard to block the sun from her eyes and Jake pulled lose a cigarette lighter from the passenger side door of a ’78 cadillac.

She and Jake walked up and down the aisles between hundreds of rust buckets and wrecked compacts. Lisa’s father owned the only salvage yard in Pickens county. The heat was dizzying and their eyes stung with sweat.

Most cars were crushed flat like tin cans. The first to go were the car seats, often spared from the crash, and worth the most in the salvage market. Jake collected spare change and forgotten possessions from where the seats used to be. Once he found an engagement ring stuck on a finger underneath the back bench seats. The flesh wasn’t pink any more but the fingernail was red as hell, its paint still flawless from corner to corner.

Every piece of medal was hot enough to singe their skin, but Jake never complained when Lisa pointed to a long metal telescopic antenna and say, “That one’s not bent.” And Jake would tackle the antenna like an enemy. With his bare fingers he unscrewed the hexagonal base wincing from the burning pain. He pulled out the long metal antenna with ten feet of copper wire like a spinal cord still attached.

Jake carried the cigarette lighter and retracted antenna in his pocket. Lisa checked the list on the clipboard and scanned over the two acres of metal which reflected white light into her eyes. She crossed the last item from the list and they headed back through the field.

From the only window murmured a single window unit air conditioner. A puddle of dirty water pooled below the heavy laboring machine.

From the lock box Lisa’s father counted out ten dollars and told them to divide it evenly. “Yall be careful, now.” He said, in a trance from the heat. “Looks like rain. I want you home in time for dinner.”

They followed the shallow creek upstream towards Jake’s house where his father had left for the night shift at the paper mill. Jake’s father was an angry man. He hadn’t seen his mother since she left for the store about a year ago.

Lisa and Jake walked through the creek weaving in and out of the poplars which gave just enough shade. Lisa held her shoes in her hands and walked up the middle of the creek, stopping to pick up mudbugs and feel the ice cold rush of water around her ankles.

Jake’s house was set a quarter mile back from the two lane highway that divided the county. They crossed the highway where something else tried some few hot days ago; its paleolithic carcass reeked of rotting skin and cooked intestines. To the left and the right, as far as they could see, the blurred ripples of heat evaporated upwards over the dark two-laner.

Jake went inside to the refrigerator to fetch two cold Cokes and Lisa sat on the steps looking into the dark clouds that crept over the trees, and the shadows climb through the yard.

Houston blamed Jake’s father for the loss of his job at the paper mill. He was a ghost to most in the county and haunted the highway stealing pine straw and d-class mail.

It was the accident that cost him his job. Not that he couldn’t work, with only two out of five fingers on his right hand, it was the two hours needed to clean out the strip saw blades and mop up Houston’s blood that crossed the floor manager. It just so happened Jake’s dad was the feeder that day at the mill, and Houston needed something to make sense of is bad luck.

A hard rain broke the heat, and the fat drops of water made a sound like bullet casings hitting the tin roofed porch where Jake and Lisa sat listening for thunder.

Through translucent curtains of rain that danced over the narrow highway Houston emerged, shirtless, and carrying what appeared to be a small severed horse’s leg.

Jake wouldn’t let Lisa out of his sight. It wasn’t a horse’s leg but a long shotgun that hung casually down his side.

“I’m scared.” Lisa said.

And the wind spoke coldly to his shoulders, and he shivered when Houston was undeniably headed for the porch where they sat, and he realized he was holding Lisa’s hand.

“Boy, where’s your daddy?” Houston shouted, spitting and swallowing the hard rain that fell on his face. His upper lip gleamed like the chrome bumper from a ‘58 cadillac from countless layers of caked on metallic silver paint. A flash of lightning lit up the tree line, followed by a rib-shaking crack of thunder.

Jake tried to speak but the tin roof chatter was much louder and he wasn’t sure if he said anything at all.

“Tell me, Jake,” Officer Ryan said as he casually shifted his bottom half to give his hemorrhoid a scratch, “do you remember what he smelled like?”

The dull fluorescent bulbs hummed and flickered overhead.

Jake looked up from his bare toes, “When can I get my shoes back?”

“Don’t worry about your shoes,” Officer Ryan said, “we will get you a nice new pair just as soon as we finish with this.”

Houston smelled like grass, sweat, and spray paint. The hard rain was relentless on the loud tin roof of the porch. His right hand was smooth and white with scar tissue. His thumb and pointer finger were still there, but everything else was sheared off and, from the look of it, not cleanly.

Houston used his right hand to point to the porch where Jake and Lisa sat.

“So you don’t mind if I sit here and wait for your daddy to come home?” Houston said, as the rain continued to bounce off his head and force his eyes to squint. The rain soaked and beaded around his raven hair as his ten gauge shotgun hung towards his feet.

Houston sat close to Jake and Lisa. He put the shotgun in his lap and rested his arms over the thick black barrel. “You sure do have a pretty house here, boy,” Houston said, still sitting with Jake and Lisa.

Lisa squeezed Jake’s hand. Jake took his gaze off the end of the driveway to look into her eyes. Her brown hair was wet and frizzled, and he was almost certain she was crying, and he knew they couldn’t just wait for his father to come home.

Jake drifted back into the sun where the heat made his pants stick to his legs. He was in the car field with Lisa; she was comparing the parts list with the scraps that surrounded them, in the hopes that something essential was nearby.

Lisa’s thin legs and arms were tan and shiny with sweat. “This isn’t right,” she said, holding her shiny right arm up to block the sun’s glare. “We are in the Chevy section. Daddy said Ford.”

Jake rolled his sleeves up to his small shoulders, exposing his white upper arms above the tan line. An old minivan sitting on concrete blocks with its bench seat unremoved was in the shade of old magnolia tree. Jake exhaled a long sigh like a flat tire as he laid out on the hot cloth cushion. The rolling side door had long since been removed and through its opening came a welcome breeze. “We will find it in a minute,” he said, with his eyes closed, loud enough for Lisa to hear. “It has to be twenty degrees cooler in here.”

Lisa put her head through the door opening. She was tired of being the responsible one, and it really did feel twenty degrees cooler in there. “Move over,” she said, and let out a sigh as she relaxed on the hot cloth bench seat across from Jake. She guessed herself to sleep wondering how Jake would react if she kissed him, and wondered how something so old could be so wrong.

Her head fell carelessly onto his shoulder.

“Tell me, Jake.” Officer Ryan said, casually shifting his weight in the chair. “It isn’t nice to keep secrets, you know?”

Jake fingered the bit sized candy he was given, still in its wrapper. He twirled it around in his fingers and memorized the smooth though wrinkled texture of the wax paper.

Houston used his left hand to wipe water from of his shotgun. He broke the barrel open to inspect ammunition. With the thumb and pointer finger on his right hand he plucked out the ten gauge shell, brought it to his lips, and blew away any moisture from the casing. The rain hitting the tin roof made it impossible to hear anything except the endless hammering overhead like they were trapped inside some maniac’s antique typewriter.

The darkness came in layers, and the rain seemed to hang from the clouds in curtains of dull beads. There were no street lights, there were no neighbor’s porch lights, only the thick clouds having crept over the horizon which now covered the sky in every direction and blocked any light coming from the moon.

The storm brought a cold breeze which carried a chill to the children’s skin.

“I can see why your mother left.” Said Houston to the rain.

He stared out through the broken windshield of the minivan and tried to count all the leaves within his view. Whatever emergency in the world there may be, Jake couldn’t think of a greater sin than to move, or make a sound, to disturb Lisa’s sleep.

The soft, almost silent sound of her breathing, like gentle ocean waves, made him forget the numb tingling sensation in hislegs. The sun had set and the minivan was consumed with shadow.

She didn’t want him to know. Her back was stiff and her neck felt wrapped in needles but she was never more comfortable. She kept her eyes closed and listened to the beating of his heart. She didn’t want him to know she had never really fallen asleep. It was going to be her secret.

Officer Ryan began to lose his patience and cared less and less about Jake’s feelings. The silence seemed to form a canyon in which his last question echoed. “Do you remember what you told your father when he got home?” Officer Ryan asked.

Jake forgot the sound of his voice. Staring at the floor, avoiding the officer’s stare like a polar magnet, he was still trying to understand how he got to be where he was. Even his thoughts, distant, unfamiliar, and lacking in confidence, somehow placed the blame firmly in Houston’s hands.

Houston’s hands fumbled the shotgun in the rain and Jake felt Lisa’s hand slip from his wet rubbery grip. She charged right into Houston’s soft stomach and jarred loose his weak grip on the slippery ten gauge shotgun, it fell in a thick clump of grass a few feet from Jake’s feet.

Jake watched the rain, like a meat tenderizer, assault the wood and metal frame of the shotgun. Jake watched as Houston slapped Lisa, how his heavy left hand moved through her face with ease, and he watched as Lisa fall back into the grass.

She stood up, mud on her knees and elbows and blood running fast around her mouth. She shouted for Jake to do something, anything other than watch as Houston tried with his poor hand to collect the shotgun from the grass and keep Lisa away with his left. He fumbled the wet handle in his right hand but it was too heavy for his two fingers, and he dropped the shotgun within a few inches from Jake’s feet.

They walked through the wood behind his house, around trees with thick brown bark and branches Jake couldn’t reach no matter how hard he tried. Colorful birds chirped and squeaked all around them. Every step crunched small twigs and shattered dry leaves.

Lisa picked up a stone as flat and round as a piece of clay. It was black with traces of white streaking through the middle. “Look,” she said, holding her hand out for Jake to see. It was a real beauty for sure. “I bet I could skip it all the way cross the lake!” She said. And although Jake knew this was impossible, at that moment with no one else around, he completely believed her.

“We all make mistakes.” Officer Ryan said coldly. “That bruise on your shoulder, it isn’t from a shotgun is it?”

It wasn’t worth the Officer’s time. Jake couldn’t hear a word he was saying. Only in his mind he was intensifying his hatred for that big man with the mangled hand.

“Come on, Jake. Lying isn’t going to bring Lisa back.” Officer Ryan said, as he tried to put his big hand on Jake’s shoulder. Then Jake was in the room with the Officer, back in the flickering fluorescent light, and he jumped from his chair onto the cold linoleum tiles, so that he could look Officer Ryan in his eyes. “No.” Jake said. “He pushed me down. He shot that gun. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t do it.”

Officer Ryan stood up, too. “Alright, Jake.” He said with a smile. “Now how about that new pair of shoes?”