Zero Ave 1998

Chapter Two- Operation from the Bottom

Sunlight pours through the leaves and shards of warmth shine down on the forest floor like glistening daggers. At the bottom of a ditch a mound of leaves, mud and twigs begins to stir.

The swampy mass rises and Kevin rolls over onto his back. He takes a deep breath of fresh air and lets the sunshine warm his damp skin. He’s been laying here face down in the dirt for over 8 hours.

He slowly climbs to his feet and cautiously looks around. He’s still in the heavily patrolled area between the Canada and United States border. He squints his eyes and looks through the trees but can’t see any sign of people. He looks in the other direction and can now see that he was just 20 to 30 feet from the Canadian side of Zero Ave. In the chaos of the previous night he lost his bearings and was unaware of his location. This is the ultimate insult to injury; all he had to do was run a few more feet and he would’ve been home free.

Kevin quickly dusts himself off, picks up the backpack and walks out of the woods onto the road. The fact that he’s carrying over 20 pounds of marijuana doesn’t scare him- in Canada the worst possible scenario would be a few months or even a year of community service if he were to get caught. He doesn’t even want to imagine what his fate in the US would be. He’s heard the nightmare stories of juvenile detention centers and boot camps. Fuck that shit.

As he walks along the vast stretch of road back to civilization the weight of his current status begins to sink in. He didn’t make it across and as Bobby so astutely put it; the mission fucked up and now it’s on him.

Kevin arrives at a gas station just off of Zero Ave. The sun has now fully risen and he’s removed his black sweater. The white t-shirt he was wearing underneath is stained and wet with mud and water from the ditch.

He opens the door and wind chimes gently clang together as he enters. He grabs a bottle of orange juice from the freezer then puts it on the counter in front of the cashier and pulls a crumpled ten dollar bill out of his pocket.

“Can I get some quarters in my change please?”

The cashier is suspicious of this young man caked in mud and doesn’t quite know what to make of him. She hands Kevin his change and watches when he turns to leave.

“Thanks,” he says as he opens the door. The chimes clang together again.

Kevin walks across the parking lot to a payphone on the corner near the entrance. He takes a giant swig of orange juice and pauses to work through his thoughts before he begins to make some potentially malignant calls.

Richie sits alone at the back of his woodworking class. It’s the end of the school year and most of the projects have been completed so there’s not much left to do. This doesn’t matter to Richie though- he’s been sanding the same piece of wood for over 3 months. His only interest is seeing if he can get the wood so smooth that he can see his own reflection in it.

A navy blue Ben Davis work shirt hangs over Richie’s scrawny frame like a starched cardboard box on a hanger. While Kevin has somewhat matured during the past couple of years, Richie has yet to hit the same growth spurt. His features have aged a little but he still wears the same baby face and shaggy hair from adolescence that he now hides under a backwards LA Dodgers baseball cap.

The waist on his black Ben Davis pants begins buzzing. He pulls out his beeper and sees a number he doesn’t recognize, however, he does recognize Kevin’s code: 2572.