LITMIR.BIZ

      JUSTIN

      THE FIRST TIME he heard about the family, he had an impression of a story from his English class or something he’d seen on TV, about desperate, wandering people, and he was surprised that such characters might actually exist.

      They’ve been living in a motel near the overpass, his father said. The brown one. Right after the exit ramp. They spent Christmas there. I told them they can move in on the first.

      Justin was reading on the couch, and in the kitchen, his mother asked, Why not sooner? The carriage house is empty.

      I’ve no inclination to rent to desperate people, his father replied. If they can’t wait three days, they’re not the right tenants.

      That evening, Justin and his friends rollerbladed along the lakeshore’s wide concrete path, racing, picking up speed, and then slowing to catch their breath. As they started back, Justin hesitated.

      A white teenage boy stood on the shore with the black fishermen, watching where their lines disappeared against the water. His shoulder muscles ridged a threadbare T-shirt, his arms veined like a man’s. His ratty clothes weren’t jock or prep or even redneck. Justin’s friends glanced over too — the girls a little longer.

      On New Year’s Eve, Justin went to a party, squeezing into the packed car of Adam McCaskill, who’d just gotten his license. Though Justin didn’t drink, most of his friends did, and not long after arriving at Douglas Breaux’s house, they were wasted and hollering about the millennium. When a girl told Justin that her older brother was on a retreat in the woods, purifying himself for the Second Coming, he asked why she hadn’t gone with him. She said she believed in Christ already and would be taken to heaven. Not tonight, she specified. The millennium is off by like a few months. The Rapture will probably happen in March.

      He realized then that she’d never kiss him, and it was already too late to pair up with another girl, so he called his father for a ride home.

      The next morning a small U-Haul truck and battered gray Ford sedan pulled into his driveway and past the garage, behind the hedges to the parking area next to the carriage house. Justin ate his cereal at the window as a lanky man unloaded the U-Haul, his face so full of harrowed lines that his forehead, cheeks, and mouth resembled a series of descending brackets.

      A girl got out of the sedan. She looked young enough to go to his school, but like a TV star: dark bangs and shoulder-length hair, a black trench coat belted at the waist. The tall boy from the lakeside loped past her, his shoulders curved as if he might pounce.

      Don’t eat standing up, Justin’s father said. He’d come downstairs in his golf clothes, his shirt tight across the chest, his big bones and residual muscle making his body seem lumpy.

      Justin sat back down at the table, angled toward the window.

      They won’t be here long, his father said. People like that, they’re running away from something.

      Why did you rent to them?

      It’s hard to find a renter in the middle of the school year, and they didn’t tell me they had a boy. But now I’m seeing the situation clearly, and I have no doubt they’ll be gone before we know it. Just keep your distance. There’s no point making friends.

      His father normally rented to graduate students from McNeese State, but the girl who’d lived there had dropped out and moved home, leaving a rhyming handwritten note on the door. He’d ranted about the kind of person who absconds and apologizes with poetry.

      He went into the garage. As the door mechanically rose and the Lincoln started up, Justin returned to the window, cradling his cereal bowl.

      The carriage house was tiny, just a bathroom, an alcove kitchen, and a single room partially divided by shelves. His father was right. The family would soon be gone.

      As the boy came out and walked down the driveway, Justin went to the living room and stood just inside the drapes. The boy stopped at the street. He was now visible in profile, and far bigger than he’d appeared leaning on the railing at the lake.

      Justin didn’t think he’d ever seen someone so still — the way he pictured the first woodsmen in America. His friends twitched with energy, rolling their ankles to stand on the edges of their feet or popping their knees in and out. This boy stood like an animal listening in a forest. He set off down the street.

      Justin went to his room and read a chapter in a World War II memoir his father had given him for Christmas, his head propped on a pillow so he could look outside each time the screen door clapped.

      The lanky man and the girl left with both vehicles and came back in a sedan. The man was so tall he had to stoop to go in the carriage house. The girl wasn’t wearing her jacket, only a black tank top and jeans. Justin put his book down and crouched at the windowsill.

      She had tattoos on her shoulders and on the inside of her wrist. There was

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