The Best Part: Short Story by John Mantooth Page B

paid his seventy-five dollars. But the big money came from jumping off the bridge out at Moss Rock. The high school kids would pool their money, and he sometimes made up to three hundred dollars a jump, which was at least half as much money as Danny had ever made in a week working landscaping.
    Inside the trailer, he hears his mother’s alarm going off. Five-thirty. She has an hour and a half before her shift at the Waffle House begins. He needs to get rid of Truck soon to avoid a lot of yelling.
    “I’m in if Chet is out,” he says.
    “Negative. We need his van.”
    “Forget it. Either me or Chet. You said it was surefire. Chet is not surefire.”
    “How we gonna haul everything off without a van?”
    “Pay him to use it. If this haul is as good as you think, we ought to be able to cover that.”
    “You think?” Truck says, his face twisting up in that perplexed look Danny had seen so much back in Algebra class.
    “Of course. You said they were rich, right? Tell him we’ll give him fifty bucks and a full tank on return.”
    “Shit,” Truck says. “You think it’ll work?”
    This is Truck. Something starts as surefire, and five minutes later, he’s asking Danny if it’ll work.
    “We won’t know until we watch the place for a few days.”
    “Okay,” Truck says. “Now you’re talking.” He laughs and claps a heavy hand on Danny’s back.
    Danny wants to pull away. The weight of his old friend’s hand there makes him feel trapped somehow, like he’s being bound and gagged and shoved into a closet or the trunk of a small car. The world will go on all around him, but he will be stuck in the darkness, alone.
    Like everybody he knows, he wants to get out of this town and start his life all over again. That was the thing he thought about more than anything else when he had been landscaping, mowing or pulling weeds or blowing leaves across somebody’s lawn. He would imagine himself in a new place away from Mom’s ratty old trailer, away from Truck and Chet and the ex-girlfriends that broke his heart, not because he’d loved them, but because he’d loved them young and now he sees them fat and lethargic, toting around toddlers with dirty faces and shit-heavy diapers, left alone by husbands who in one way or another had learned to abandon everything—including the boys they once were—as a matter of principal. But lately, he thinks of moving away less, and instead sees his life as an airplane that never flew too high but always managed to stay a notch or two above the clouds. Until recently. Now it has begun to lose altitude at an alarming rate and seems to be heading directly through the clouds into a full tilt nose dive. Danny can’t shake the idea that once the clouds do finally clear, it will be too late, and the ground will rush up and eat that airplane alive.
    A week later, after forcing open a downstairs window, Danny and Truck sit in lawn chairs in the den of the newly finished house, running the air conditioner full blast, drinking cans of ice cold Schlitz. Another case waits, unopened in the refrigerator, which they have turned to the highest setting in order to ensure that the beer is as cold as possible.
    “Never had beer this cold,” Truck says as he drains the last of his can and tosses it with the other empties beside the window.
    They’ve been inside this house, watching the one across the street for three days now, and while Danny still doesn’t believe in surefire, he is beginning to think they can pull this off. The couple across the street do not vary their schedule. The wife leaves first, always before seven. The husband strolls out an hour later. Truck calls him “the fat fuck,” but he’s not actually fat, just big, muscular even. He is a fuck though; Danny can’t help but notice the way he walks, the way he brushes the slightest speck of lint off his suit, the way he pauses just for a moment after opening the door to his Beamer, as if to say, look at me, world, look at