Page 1 of Locke

Chapter 1

August thought that he could watch football year-round. It would get in the way of his life, he knew, but it would be a good way to spend any extra time. He saw his older brothers coming toward him and moved over so that they could squeeze in beside him. There wasn’t really enough room for all three of them, but they’d make it work. The way the game was going, he didn’t expect them to be sitting much, either.

“Who’s out?” August was handed a chili dog while he answered Locke’s question. “That’s not yours. Unless you’ve changed your mind about hot stuff.” Trading chili dogs with his brother, he bit into the messy dog that was his and moaned.

“The cheerleaders are doing a bang-up job. Locke and I could hear them all the way to the concession stand. That’s the way to cheer on the town.” Dusty handed him a wad of napkins and told his brothers that Carol was still out sick. She was their neighbor’s daughter.

August agreed as he finished off his second dog that the cheerleaders seemed to be keeping people pumped up. There was soda, too, but he only drank water. He was actually waiting for them to make fun of him when Locke started yelling and standing up. It looked like a touchdown for the home team.

“What do you think the score would be if’n you were out there, Locke? Do you think…oh wait, you never got to play your senior year, did you? Something about cheating.” Stanley Cooper crossed his arms over his chest after taunting Locke. August looked at his brother and waited. There would be bloodshed if Locke reacted, and it would be all over Stanley Cooper. “Did you cheat or not? That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“You know as well as everyone around us that there was no one cheating. And I’d appreciate it, Cooper, if you didn’t bring it up every time you saw me. It was nearly ten years ago. Move on with the rest of us.” Cooper asked Locke if he was telling him what to do. “I wouldn’t do that. Not me. But I think that people are sick to death of you bringing it up every time there is a game and you see me.”

“Yeah, sit down and shut your trap, Cooper. We’re trying to have a good time here, and you’re messing it up.” There were other members of the crowd telling Stanley to shut his mouth, but it either didn’t get through to him, or he was still the stubborn ass he’d been all his life. “He’s right. You do this every single time. Get over yourself. The game was over the moment that you went out on the field. Clumsy toss, my ass.”

When Stanley took a swing at Locke, all he did was duck down enough so that his fist went wide. And because of him being a couple of steps up and behind them in the bleacher, it knocked him off his feet, and he started to tumble. If not for the quick thinking of Locke, the man would have gone over the back of the fence, and since it was a parking lot back there, he would have more than likely been hurt badly. Or dead if he’d gone head first.

“Get your hands off me, you cheating bastard.” Locke did let the man go, but he also held on long enough for him to have gotten his balance. Stan’s wife, Darlington, grabbed her husband by his high school jacket that he still wore to every game and told him to sit down. She did this through clenched teeth, and it must have impressed Stan enough that he sat down and shut his trap.

After that, the game got boring as the home team scored an impressive fifty-four unanswered points in the second quarter. They called the game at the beginning of the fourth quarter when the score was a very lopsided seventy-two to zero. This was the last team they played to make it to the playoffs.

As they were leaving, Darlington asked if she could speak to Locke. He agreed so long as his brothers could be there, too. She sort of laughed, telling him he’d be a fool to trust anyone named Cooper.

“You’ve probably heard that old man Coop is dying. He wanted to know if you’d come by and see him soon. I don’t think he has much longer to go, Locke. The doc only gave him six months, but I think he’s not even going to be that long.” He said that he would. He liked Mr. Cooper. “And he does enjoy having a game of chess with you, too. I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”

After making arrangements to meet up at the house at one, the three of them headed home. They were all slow to go, having no desire to go home and listen to their father bellowing about this or that. He was another mean bastard, and no one, especially them, wanted to be around him anymore. He wondered, too, if anyone had wanted to be around him at any point in his life.

Dad was just where they had left him. Sitting in front of the television with the volume up about as loud as it would go with a beer can in each hand. No one said anything to him, but when they went into the kitchen, Zander and Demitrius joined them. He asked where Knox was.

“He left about an hour after you three left for the game. He and Dad got into it again, and he said he was gone. I have no idea what that means, but he left here with a duffle.” Locke sat on the counter; he had a look of concern on his face. While he and Dusty talked about the game, August was surprised when Locke didn’t join in with the story of Stan.

“I need to talk to you guys. Out back.” They nodded. It was the only place that they felt safe from their dad hearing them. Also, none of the neighbors could either. August didn’t think there was a nosier group of people than the ones that lived around them. When they’d been younger and had been plotting and planning, something they had done a great deal, Locke had built them a makeshift house that was complete with electricity. It powered up not just the light that swung in the middle of the ceiling but also the small compact fridge that was forever filled with bottles of water. “Someone needs to get in touch with Knox. He needs to be here, too.”

While they waiting on their brother, they talked about Stan and his problem with their oldest brother. Stanley had accused Locke of copying his work from a test, and it took them a week to figure out that every answer on Locke’s test was correct and Stan had barely spelled his name correctly, putting in a d instead of a l and that should have been the end of it.

But their dad wanted Locke to be tossed out of school as well. No doubt to hold that over his head and make him work twice as hard around the house. The house, even for as old as it was, was neat and clean, with the exception of the area right around their dad and his bedroom. No one ever went in there.

Their dad had told the school board that Locke had always been a cheater and that they should have kicked him out of school a long time ago. Because of their dad, Locke had missed the final game that year, causing the team to lose and the championship was lost to them. Locke had never spoken a word to their father to this day.

When Knox showed up, Locke looked at the cut that was on his forehead and asked him if he was all right. He wasn’t. Anyone could see that. But getting into a fight, most of the time with fists or knives, was a nearly daily thing with their father. Today hadn’t been any different, August thought sadly.

“You guys remember about six months ago, maybe a little less, when the Powerball lottery winnings were up well over fifty-six billion?” They all laughed and told their oldest brother, who could forget that. “There was only one winner to it. They got all six numbers correct. It was us. We won.” No one moved when his brother said that.

As they sat there, all August could think about was what a person would do if they won that much money. Getting out of this town was all he wanted to do, and he was sure that the rest of them wanted to do it as well. He asked Locke if he was having fun with them.

“No. You know me and money. I don’t kid around. We won all six numbers on the sheet that I always play. Our birth dates. The power ball number was another twenty-three, which accounted for Demitrus and Knox having the same birthdate.” Still, none of them moved. “It took me this long to get the money distributed to us in a way that no one knows about us being the winners. I thought that this way, we could go on with our lives quietly until we found out what we wanted to do with ourselves.”

He looked around the little room and then back at Knox. August didn’t know what to think when Locke looked at each of them one at a time. It was tempting to believe him but also very frightening. More so, it being scary.

“There will be no more hitting on us. We don’t have to go without anymore when the bastard in there gets it in his head to rob us while he’s out. A nice car that starts every time you turn the engine over. There are—”

“Wait. You’re not kidding, are you?” Locke shook his head and smiled at him. “What do you mean it took a while for you to get the money? Don’t you get one of those giant checks with—I believe you need to start over. Right with the fact that we won.”

“We did. All of it. And since it’s so much, we’ll never have to work another day in our lives if we don’t want to. I don’t know that I will be able to just sit around. I’d be afraid of becoming our dad. But whatever we need, we can get it. However, and this is important, we don’t tell anyone that not only did we win the money but how much. That sort of money will make people dangerous to be around. Not even the bastard will know.” Zander asked if they could move away. “Yes. But I have a plan for that. We just leave. No packing. No forwarding address, nothing that can be traced back to where we are. Just go out of the house like we normally do to go to work, one at a time tomorrow, and never look back. If you take something, dad will have it in his head that we robbed him, and he’ll send the police after us. To be honest, I can’t think of a single thing to take with me when we leave. It’s all worthless if it means us having to deal with people. Especially the old bastard.”

It took them nearly an hour to get around to being happy about it. Then another telling them they’d won and to get it through their thick heads, that the money was just waiting for them to collect it. Locke also told them of the plan he had and what he’d done to get it moving.

“There is a nice used van just outside of town that I’ve been making payments on since forever, it seems. The attorney told me not to get anything new if we didn’t want people to put two and two together. Buying a new car at this stage would send off warning signs that something is different for us. Besides, I have a feeling that the old bastard would be taking it to wreck it just to be a fucking dick.” They all agreed with him. “Good. We’re just going to get into the van and drive away. Nothing to hold us back. But once we leave, we can’t ever return because someone, anyone again, will figure it out. Am I being paranoid? Yes, yes, I am. But unless we want to be broke within a year, this is the plan that we have to stick with. Unless you have another plan. I’m all ears.”

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