THE EAST
END
Jason
Allen
After sunset, Corey Halpern sat
parked at a dead end in Southampton with his headlights off and the dome light
on, killing time before the break-in. As far as he knew, about a quarter mile
up the beach the owners of the summerhouse he’d been casing for the past two
weeks were busy playing host, buzzed from cocktails and jabbering beside the
pool on their oceanfront deck, oblivious that a townie kid was about to invite
himself into their mansion while they and their guests partied into the night.
Smoke trailed up from the joint
pinched between Corey’s thumb and forefinger as he leaned forward and picked up
a wrinkled sheet of paper from the truck floor. He smoothed out his final high
school essay, squinting through the smoke-filled haze to read his opening lines:
In the Hamptons, we’re invaded
every summer. The mansions belong to the invaders, and aren’t actual homes—not
as far as the locals are concerned. For one thing, they’re empty most of the
year.
The dome light flicked off and he
exhaled in semidarkness, thinking about what he’d written. If he didn’t leave
this place soon, he might never get out. Now that he’d graduated he could make
his escape by taking a stab at college in the fall, but that would mean leaving
his mother and brother behind, which for many reasons felt impossible, too
abstract, the world outside this cluster of towns on the East End so
unimaginably far away….
If only he could write as he saw
things, maybe this place wouldn’t be so bad, though each time he’d put pen to
paper and tried to describe these solo hours at the ocean, or anything else,
the words remained trapped behind locked doors deep inside his head. Sitting on
his heels, he reached up and pressed the faint bruise below his right eye,
recalling the fight last weekend with that kid from North Sea and how each of
them had been so quick to throw punches…
_________________________________________________________________________
A few miles later, with Iggy Pop
and The Stooges blaring from his door panel, it made perfect sense to take the
night to a whole new level and rob his mother’s bosses before they came out
from the city; before Gina came home crying after one of the longer, more
grueling workdays; before he joined her for the summer as the Sheffields’
servant boy. Iggy reinforced the necessity of the much higher risk mission—the
need to do it now—as he belted out one of his early-seventies punk anthems, the
lyrics to “Search and Destroy” entering Corey’s brain and seeping much deeper
inside his chest as a truth he’d never been able to articulate for himself. His
fingers tapped steadily on the wheel when he turned off Main.
He drove slowly for another block
or two, his pulse beating in his neck as he turned left at the pyramid of
cannonballs and the antique cannon on the edge of town. A couple blocks later,
he downshifted around the bend, rolled to a stop and parked beside a wooded
section of Gin Lane. From there he didn’t hesitate at all. He hustled along the
grass bordering the roadside, past hedgerows and closed gates and dark driveways,
until the Sheffields’ driveway came into view. A life-size pair of stone lions
sat atop wide stone bases and bookended the entrance, two males with full manes
and the house number chiseled onto their chests. Corey knew the lions held a
double meaning. His mom’s boss put these statues out here partly because they
looked imposing, the type of decorations kings used to choose, but also because
they stood as symbols of August birthdays, the same astrological sign as Mr.
Sheffield’s first name—Leo.
He stood still for a moment,
looking between the bars of the tall iron gates crowned with spikes. Beginning
tomorrow morning, and then all throughout Memorial Day weekend— just as he had
the past few summers—he’d spend long days working there. Gina would be so
pissed if she could see him now. She’d at least threaten to disown him if she
ever found out he’d broken in, but that would be a hollow threat anyway, and
he’d already convinced himself that she’d never know. The Sheffields should
have paid her more to begin with, even if she didn’t have a deadbeat husband
like Ray pissing her meager savings away on his court fees and gambling debts.
But the memory that sealed Corey’s decision tonight had been replaying in his
mind for almost a year—the dinner party last summer, when Sheila Sheffield
yelled at his mom right in front of him and about ten guests, berating her for
accidentally dropping a crystal chalice that she said cost more than Gina’s
yearly salary. While Leo and the grown Sheffield kids looked on dumbly and
didn’t bother to make a peep, Corey had followed Gina into the kitchen and
stood a few feet away from her, unable to think of what to say to console her
while she cried. Ever since then, he’d wanted to get back at them all.
Fuck
these people, he thought.
He would rob them, and smash some
windows on his way out so they wouldn’t suspect anyone who worked there. All he
had to do was make sure not to leave any evidence behind, definitely no
fingerprints, and he’d take the extra precaution of scaling the gates rather
than punching in the code.
He wriggled his fingers into his
gloves. Crickets chirped away in the shadows, his only witnesses as he looked
over each shoulder and back through the bars. He let out a long breath. Then he
gripped the wrought iron and started to climb.
Moonlight splintered between the
old oak branches and cut across his body like blades. It took only a few
seconds to grapple up the bars, though a bit longer to ease over the spear-like
tips while he tried to shut out a nightmare image of one of them skewering his
crotch. Relieved when his legs reached the other side unharmed, he shimmied
down the bars like a monkey and dropped, suddenly hidden from the outside world
by the thick hedge wall. Poised on one knee, he turned to his left and scanned
the distant mansion’s dark windows, the eaves and gables. The perfectly
manicured lawn stretched for acres in all directions, a few giant oaks with
thick limbs and gnarled trunks the only natural features between the faraway
pines along the property line and a constellation of sculptures. A scattered
squad of bronze chess pieces stood as tall as real-life soldiers, with two much
larger pieces towering behind them—a three-ton slab of quartz sitting atop a
steel column and a bright yellow Keith Haring dog in mid stomp on its hind
legs, each the size of an upended school bus or the wing of a 747, all the
sculptures throwing sharp shadows across the lawn when Corey rose to his feet,
leapt forward and ran toward the Sheffields’ sprawling vacation home.
His sneakers crunched along the
pebble driveway, his steps way too loud against the quiet until he made it
across the deeper bed of beach stones in the wide parking area and passed
through an ivy-covered archway, still at top speed while he followed the curved
path of slate down a gentle slope, and then pulled up at the corner of the
porch. Breathing heavily, he grappled up the post and high-stepped onto the
railing, wiping sweat from his forehead when he turned to face Agawam Lake. The
moon’s light came ladling down onto the water like milk and trailed into the
darkness of the far shore, while in the reeds beside the nearest willow tree a
pair of swans sat still as porcelain, sleeping with their bills tucked at their
breasts.
No one will know, he thought. The crickets
kept making a soft racket in the shadows. The swans seemed like another good
omen. But then a light went on inside one of the mansions directly across the
water, and Corey pulled his body up from the railing, thinking he should get
inside before someone saw him. He quickly scaled the corner porch beam and
trellis while trying to avoid the roses’ thorns, even as they snagged his
sleeves and pant legs. Then, like a practiced rock climber, in one fluid motion
he hoisted himself from the second-story roof up to the third-floor gable. He
crouched there, looking, listening. The house across the water with the light
on was too far away to know for sure, but he didn’t see any obvious signs of
anyone watching from the picture windows. Probably just some insomniac
millionaire sipping whiskey and checking the numbers of a stock exchange on the
other side of the world.
Confident that he should press on,
Corey half stood from his crouch and took the putty knife from his back pocket
to pry open the third-story bathroom window, the one he’d left unlatched the
previous day when he’d come there with his mother. The old window sash fought
him with a friction of wood on wood, but after straining for a few seconds he
managed to shove the bottom section flush with the top, and was struck
immediately by the smells of Gina’s recent cleaning— ammonia, lemon and
jasmine, the chemical blend of a freshly scoured hospital room. Balanced at the
angle of the roof, he stared down at the neighboring properties once more.
Still no sounds, no lights, no signs that anyone had called the cops, so he
turned and stretched his arms through the window and shimmied down until he
felt the toilet lid with both gloved hands and his sneakers left the shingles,
all his weight sliding against the sill as he wriggled in.
Although he hadn’t been sure
whether he’d ever go through with it, he’d plotted this burglary for weeks, the
original iteration coming to him during Labor Day weekend last year. The first
step had been to ask Gina if he could clean the Sheffield house with her for a
few extra bucks before the summer season began. She’d raised an eyebrow but
agreed, approving at least of her teenager’s out-of-character desire to work,
and throughout the past week, whenever she’d left him to dust and vacuum the
third floor, he’d had his chance to run recon and plan the point of entry. He
knew she wouldn’t bother to check the latch on a closed window three stories
off the ground, not after she’d scrubbed and ironed and Pledged all day. And
more important, by then he knew those upper-floor windows had no seal-break
sensors. He knew this because a few days earlier he’d left this very same
window open before Gina armed the alarm, and afterward nothing happened—no
blaring sounds before they pulled away, no call or drive-by from a security
officer. So tonight, again, the security company wouldn’t see any flashing red
lights on their computer screens. Not yet anyway, not until he smashed a window
downstairs and staged a sloppy burglary scene on his way out.
Despite knowing that nobody would
be out till Friday, his footsteps were all toe as he crept from the dark
bathroom and into the hazy bluish hall, and yet, even with all this effort to
tread lightly, the old floorboards still strained and creaked each time his sneakers
pressed down. Trailing away from him, a black-and-white series of Ansel Adams
photos hung in perfect rows, one on either side of the hall, hundreds of birch
trees encased in glass coverings that Corey had just recently Windexed and
wiped. Every table surface and light fixture and the entire length of the floor
gleamed, immaculate, too clean to imagine the Sheffields had ever even set foot
in here, let alone lived here for part of the year. He’d always felt the house
had a certain coldness to it, and thought so again now, even though it had to
be damn near eighty degrees inside with all the windows closed.
After slowly stepping down one set
of stairs, Corey skulked along the second-floor hall, past the doorway to Mr.
and Mrs. Sheffields’ master bedroom and then past Andy’s and Clay’s rooms,
deciding to browse Tiffany’s bedroom first, his favorite room in the house. The
Sheffields’ only daughter had a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf full of hardcover
novels, stage plays and poetry collections, a Super 8 projector, stacked film
reels and three antique cameras. He’d spent as much time as possible in this
room during his previous workdays, mainly staring at the paintings mounted on
three of the walls, and now lingered once more looking at each textured image,
surprised all over again that a rich girl had painted these shades of pain,
these somber expressions on the faces of dirty figures in shabby clothes,
compositions of suffering he’d have expected from a city artist teetering
between a rat-hole apartment and a cardboard box in an alley. They all had
something, that’s for sure, but one portrait had always spoken to him much more
than any of the others. He stood before it and freed it from its hook.
At the window he noticed the light
had gone off at the mansion across the lake and figured the insomniac must have
drunk enough for sleep. Although he knew he shouldn’t, he flicked on Tiffany’s
bedside table light to get a better look at the girl in the painting, her brown
eyes, full lips, caramel skin, her black hair flowing down to divots between
her collarbone and chest. He knew Tiffany had painted it, but also that it wasn’t
a self-portrait. She looked nothing like the girl she’d painted. Anorexically
skinny, Tiffany had dyed-blond hair and usually wore too much makeup. In one
photo with her parents and two older brothers, while the rest of the family had
dressed in country club attire, she had on a tank top and frayed jean shorts,
dark sunglasses, the only one of them with any tattoos, the only one barefoot
on the grass.
Corey searched her shelves until he
found the photo of Tiffany’s best friend, the girl from the painting,
Angelique. He’d seen her at the estate plenty during the previous summers, and
last Labor Day weekend they’d talked many times, their conversations lasting
longer and seeming to have more depth until finally he summoned the courage to
ask her out. Her long pause had made him wish he could disappear, and then
those four awful words, I have a boyfriend, had knocked the wind out of him
just before he nodded with his eyes to the ground and walked away. Reliving the
disappointment, he killed the lamplight and lay on the bed with her photo on
his chest, and then, stupidly, closed his eyes…
Excerpted from The East
End by Jason Allen, Copyright © 2019 by Jason Allen. Published by Park Row
Books.
Songlight by Moira Buffini
