Ophelia's Victory
One of the boys’ names was Jesse James, no relation, and the other’s was Robert Ford, also no relation. They were just two twenty-first-century boys, fourteen and fifteen, who happened to be named Jesse James and Robert Ford respectively—but by then, both of them had seen stranger things in this life.
They’d been asked today to pick up Jesse James’s cousin from Dave & Buster’s. Her name was Ophelia (James) and it was her thirteenth birthday—the first, by her own measure, to really mark her growth into adulthood. All her birthdays previously had been celebrated at the Chuck E. Cheese around the corner on Friebolt and Marks Street, where Jesse James’s older brother worked and could offer them a discount. He did a lot of different jobs at Chuck E. Cheese, from collecting prize tickets to cleaning the bathrooms, and when they all went for Ophelia’s birthday, he’d usually dress up as Chuck E. Cheese and bring out the cake and then, after leading everyone in the happy birthday song, take off the big mouse mask and surprise them all by being himself.
But this year, Ophelia had announced, she was thirteen. “You all know what that means,” she’d said meaningfully, examining Jesse James and his mother across the card table in the kitchen, poking a spork in each of their directions. What it meant was, she was a teen-ager, a.k.a. no longer a child or at least not a Chuck E. Cheese-level child.
“I don’t see why we’ve gotta go at all,” said Robert Ford, hanging in the threshold of his doorway by the fingertips of both hands and frowning a little. He was a tall, mousy-haired boy who hated bright lights and loud noises.
“We don’t need to stay,” said Jesse James. “She just needs a ride.”
“Her parents aren’t there?”
Jesse James knitted his eyebrows together and looked at Robert Ford like he should’ve known better than to ask. Ophelia lived at his house most of the time because her father was out of the picture, and her mother was often what Jesse James’s mother liked to call “in and out of trouble.” They hadn’t seen her in a little bit so he assumed she was in trouble currently.
“What about your mom? I mean, who threw the party?”
“She was there, duh,” said Jesse James, a little annoyed and entertained at once. “But she had to drive some of the other kids home. Fee called me and said she hasn’t come back yet and all the other kids have left and she doesn’t feel like waiting around longer. And the people at Dave & Buster’s won’t let her leave by herself because she’s only twelve. So could you just—?”
“All right! All right,” said Robert Ford. He mashed his feet into a couple of shoes by the door without bending down to tie the laces, snatched his dad’s key ring off its hook and ambled out onto the icy stoop. He slipped a bit, but kept his hand on the doorknob so he only fell partway.
“Ha!” said Jesse James.
“Shut up!” Smiling, Robert Ford pulled himself back up and yanked the door shut in the process. “That’s just how I close doors in the wintertime.”
“Yes,” said Jesse James, skating haltingly across the driveway in his old sneakers. “As a matter of fact, this is how I walk in the wintertime—”
“You’ve got to become one with your environment.”
“Valuable life lessons—”
They got into the warm pickup truck and Jesse James hugged his knees to his chest and rubbed his hands together and smelled the good fabric truck-smell while Robert Ford started the engine and turned the heat on. Once they got out of the Fords’ neighborhood, the roads weren’t bad, only shiny and crunchy with salt.
Jesse James and Robert Ford, true to their names, knew they were meant to be bad boys. They couldn’t remember anymore whether they’d become best friends intentionally, or if it had simply happened because everyone else kept assuming they must be. But either way, at some point, they’d developed a murky plot together: Once they were both old enough to drive legally and had gotten their high school diplomas, they were going to run off west and fulfill their family-given destinies. They’d smoke cigarettes and wear leather that smelled like cigarettes. They’d hold up trains and banks together, but—they had agreed on this point early—they’d only rob rich people. Rich bad people, if they could manage it. They’d be outlaws, just sort of the Robin Hood type.
They knew they’d be the perfect outlaws because they were comfortable trying anything together, which meant compared to more insecure outlaws they’d have a bit of an edge. At school they’d both joined the chess club for a little while—a very outlaw thing to do in their school’s social stratosphere—to get good at strategic thinking. At lunch, back in elementary school, they’d taken turns concocting horrifying meals for each other out of cafeteria food (strawberry-milk salad; ketchup-pudding; watery chicken tenders) to build up their tolerances in case either one of them was ever forced to eat something disgusting in a strenuous train-robbing situation. Once, they’d taken some of Mrs. Ford’s makeup out of her bathroom and powdered up each other’s faces and put on lipstick: practice, for if they ever needed a spur-of-the-moment disguise.
And very recently, they’d started practicing crime. Last weekend they’d driven Robert Ford’s dad’s truck to the nearest mall and stolen two silk shirts by going into the fitting rooms and putting them on under the T-shirts they’d already been wearing. Jesse James had been sweating the whole time, the fancy navy collar closing onto the bare skin of his throat in a way that felt both gentle and threatening at once. He could’ve sworn the sales lady was watching them as they left, her gaze buttoning itself hotly into the back of his neck.
But as soon as he’d made it into the car with Robert Ford and they could hug and scream with victory and high-five, he’d realized the whole thing had been easy, and instantly he could breathe again.
In the car on the way to Dave & Buster’s, Robert Ford watched the road and Jesse James spent the whole drive fiddling with the radio dial, trying to find a station even though the place was right around the corner and there were only two good stations in town.
“I think,” said Robert Ford grandly—the way he always spoke when he started a sentence with I think—“I’m going to get really good at magic tricks.”
“You already can do that,” Jesse James said, still playing with the radio, his feet up on the glove compartment.
“I know, and I’m okay now. But I’m going to get really good. So we can use it in our outlaw-ery.”
“Do they call it outlaw-ery? Do they?”
“Who is they?” said Robert Ford disdainfully.
“Okay,” said Jesse James, and shook his head. “What kind of magic tricks?”
“Next-level kind. Like you know right now I can do card-tricks,” he said seriously, his eyes still scanning the strip-mall streets ahead of them. “And the coin-disappearing. And the ball-under-the-cup thing.”
“Right.”
“It’s about confidence,” Robert Ford explained, as though he hadn’t talked Jesse James through these concepts a million times before, walking around town and before the morning bell rang at school. “Like anything. If you can master the suggestion that you know what you’re doing, you can do magic. If you can create the illusion, then you can guide how people really think—”
“Robert,” Jesse James whined, “please—”
“Okay, okay. So, now that I’m good at that—I think it’s safe to say I’m good at that—I want to learn how to do the sorts of things they do in circuses. I think talking to animals would be the easiest place to start—”
“Like lions?”
“Well, yeah—in an ideal world. But I don’t think there are any around here so I’ll have to start—”
“You can use our cat for practice if you want. Tina.”
“That’s what I was going to say! And eventually I’ll work my way up to the really cool stuff. Like breathing fire and hula-hooping with fire.”
“How will that help during a train robbery?”
Robert Ford glanced at him sidelong. “It’s like you’ve never seen a movie in your life,” he said, but he didn’t elaborate. “Also,” he added, “regurgitating things. Like swords, and keys.”
“Oh.” Jesse James leaned back and looked out the window. They were pulling off the road and into the parking lot. “Well, I can do that.”
Robert Ford looked at him as he stopped the truck. “You can?”
“Sure, listen to you talk long enough and I’ll regurgitate anything.”
Jesse James grinned, and Robert Ford shoved him and the two of them got out of the truck. They wobbled across the parking lot, between the streaks of black ice and salty slush. The sky was one big slab of winter cloud.
Inside, it was dark and the colored lights from the arcade machines were ricocheting off the walls like oversugared neon rainbows. Robert Ford hunched his shoulders in a permanent wince and stayed close to Jesse James as they wove around the rows of stripy, chaotic carpet and elbowed politely past unhappy dads, kids clutching Slushees and thwacking at machines, and moms clasping ribboned fistfuls of tickets to their chests.
They found what seemed like the front desk and asked after Ophelia.
“Hmmm,” said the guy standing there, a man with very little face but big thick-lensed glasses to make up for it, who wore a maroon T-shirt and a Dave & Buster’s baseball cap. “There’s no little girl up here. But maybe try the gift shop.”
At the gift shop, a young woman in another maroon shirt tilted her head from side to side and back again. “Yeah, I think I might’ve seen her earlier,” she said. “Maybe try the bar.”
The jangling music was beginning to grate on Jesse James already, the chimes of nearby machines colliding in off-key scrapes of sound and the bass kicking in his ribcage. This was why he hadn’t wanted to come to the party to begin with. Robert Ford didn’t look much better, his eyes darting around, pale cheeks lighting up with a skeletal glow under the rhythmic sweeps of different-colored lights. Jesse James found himself speed-walking over the carpet. He didn’t understand why Ophelia hadn’t just waited for them by the front door.
They went to the bar, their shoulders hunching up even more around all the over-twenty-one-year-olds drinking their beers and cocktails. They knew there were kids at school who’d started venturing into the realms of alcohol, but the farthest Jesse James and Robert Ford had gotten was a mostly empty scotch bottle from the liquor cabinet in Robert Ford’s dad’s basement: barely a sip left for each of them. Really disgusting stuff, but they knew they’d have to get used to it if they were going to be hardened criminals one day. True blue all-American heroes. At least they could help each other through it.
The zinging sound effects and exclamations of the games were a little more muffled over here, and a few of the adults glanced at them as though trying to discern how they fit in: old enough that they could have pretended to be mature, but instead here they were with their untied shoelaces, their nervous expressions and shirts with the collars stretched out. The bartender ignored them until they waved their hands in his face and told him they weren’t trying to buy any drinks, they were just looking for a little girl from a birthday party.
He nodded understandingly and then shook his head. “Not here,” he said. “You try the front desk?”
“Are you sure?” Robert Ford persisted. “She didn’t ask you to use the phone? She called us from here earlier.”
The bartender only looked at them blankly, like he couldn’t tell what they wanted from him.
Jesse James and Robert Ford stalked back together into the disarray of games and machines, scanning every corner for Ophelia and calling her name. Jesse James tried to ignore how his heart had started beating a little faster. They walked past the machines that push golden coins slowly toward you like a promising tide that never comes all the way in, past the resounding roll-click of Skee-Ball and the breathy levitation of the air hockey tables. Cue sticks thwacked against pool balls somewhere far off, like the distant out-of-sight gunfire that sounded in the woods near Jesse James’s house during hunting season.
“Ophelia!”
“Ophelia!”
“Fee!”
“You know something—” Robert Ford suddenly snagged Jesse James’s coat sleeve. “Maybe your mom already came back and got her. I bet that’s it.”
Jesse James sucked in a breath. This did make him feel a little better. “I can’t just leave if I don’t know, though,” he said plaintively, and suddenly it struck him the unfairness of the situation: He wasn’t Ophelia’s father, wasn’t even her older brother, not technically. There was no reason he should be responsible for her—technically, he should be able to leave right now with Robert Ford and not even feel bad about it. But because he knew there’d been a moment recently when Ophelia had needed help and because he didn’t know if she still needed it, he felt he had to be the one looking after her, just in case nobody else was, which, maybe, they simply weren’t. He looked desperately away from his friend and to the glass cage full of bright stuffed animals with the claw waiting to grab them, and said, “Nobody ever tells me anything!” He felt like he might be about to cry.
“Let’s go back to the main desk,” Robert Ford urged. “We can borrow the phone and call your house. If nobody picks up we’ll figure out a new plan—but I think that seems like the next step.”
Jesse James loved how Robert Ford was always thinking of the next step. “All right,” he agreed.
Maybe he should have just gone to the party. Then there wouldn’t’ve been any danger of Ophelia getting separated from anyone—he would have been there, and they could’ve gone straight home. It wouldn’t have been fun, he thought, a guilty, prickly heat settling into his forehead, but it was only for a couple hours and it would’ve been the nice thing to do, the supportive thing. And after all there was nothing about Ophelia that didn’t deserve to be supported.
They went back to the front desk and found not only the guy from before there, the guy with the big glasses, but also the girl from the gift shop that they’d met earlier. She’d come over and was leaning with one elbow on the glass counter and talking to the front desk guy. They both turned when Jesse James and Robert Ford came over and blinked at them, almost in unison.
“Oh, hi,” said the girl. Her name tag said RACHEL. “You guys want some prizes?”
“No,” said the guy with the thick glasses. “Remember? They were looking for their little sister.”
“My cousin,” said Jesse James.
“That’s right. Did you find her?”
“No.” He thought for a second about saying, Did you?, but he didn’t want to start an argument. “Could we use your phone?” he asked. “I want to call home and see if my mom got her.”
“Yeah, ’course.”
They both stepped aside so that the boys could join the guy with the thick glasses behind the counter. Jesse James picked up the phone while just behind them the girl Rachel said, softly, “Um—shit, shit?” kind of like a question, and then the guy with the thick glasses’ hand gripped Jesse James’s arm very tightly and Robert Ford’s hand flew into his like a little bird.
Jesse James turned around with the phone still against his ear to see who’d come up to the counter. A bearded man in a big coat was now standing next to Rachel with one hand stuffed in his coat pocket.
Jesse James looked at Robert Ford next to him, in his one last, lingering moment of puzzlement. He hadn’t seen the weapon, but the knowledge and understanding of it descended upon him now in an inevitable chilling shift. All of the color had left Robert Ford’s face in a quick sweep. He was looking at Jesse James rigidly, unmoving and unblinking, as though in this one moment of glassy eye contact he could tell Jesse James everything he had ever wanted or needed to.
“All the money in the register,” the man in the big coat said. “Now. I don’t wanna hurt anyone.”
The world beyond these few square feet had become a blur. So many people around, and none of them looking, none of them hearing. Not the couple taking shots over at the basketball hoops, not the dad calling out somebody’s name, Amelia? Amelia?, not the little girl who could be heard howling for someone to get her a Band-Aid, not the woman pushing the covered stroller toward the laser tag area with the hidden baby sending up screams from inside. Kids raced around a maze of lit-up corridors that now felt impossibly distant, chasing after one another and calling each other’s names, shrieking when they won their games, shrieking when they lost. For a moment all Jesse James could hear were the cries of children.
And then Rachel. “You got it,” she said. “Freddie, give it to him.”
Freddie, his head down so far his thick glasses were slipping to the tip of his nose, was opening the register, his right hand trembling with the keys.
Jesse James felt so frozen that the plastic phone pressed to his ear had switched to feeling just like another part of his head, or his hand. He’d even stopped hearing the dial tone which had been going this whole time. But now it hit him: This was a robbery, they—they, Jesse James and Robert Ford, and company—were being held up, and Rachel and Freddie probably wanted to call 9-1-1 but instead here was Jesse James, stuck, holding the phone.
The same moment he realized it, the man in the big coat seemed to realize it. He looked down at Jesse James, the fourteen-year-old boy pressed back against the wall with his mouth hanging open and the phone stuck just above his shoulder, and he furrowed his eyebrows and lifted his hand out of his coat for just a second to indicate to Jesse James the end of the gun, in case he hadn’t seen it before. “Be smart, kid,” he said.
Jesse James didn’t even nod. All he had to do was reach over and press in those three numbers—but his head was all jumbled now, and the 9 and the 1s kept muddling together with his mom’s phone number, which part of him still wanted to dial instead. All the same he still could just punch in 9-1-1, he could—except that he couldn’t, never could, when there was a gun anywhere near Robert Ford or himself. Bank money was a fun prize, a rush to the head, not a real thing, yet. The coat man could take all he wanted if he’d just leave.
Freddie took out the last stack of bills and handed it across the counter to the man in the big coat. The man in the big coat took the money with his other hand and stuffed it in the pocket without the gun. He nodded at them stiffly and turned away from the counter, and then a loud clueless voice rang through the air.
“Jesse! You dumbass. I’ve been looking all over for you.”
All of them—Jesse James, Robert Ford, Rachel and Freddie and the man in the big coat—turned their heads to the side. Standing several paces away was almost-thirteen-year-old Ophelia in full laser-tag gear, her chest blinking laser-light red and her feet planted, laser gun hanging at her side. A wide grin was spread across her face, and her lips and teeth—they could see even from here—had gone birthday-cake purple.
“And I know what you’re going to say,” she declared, striding across the stripy carpet toward them. “I shouldn’t say dumbass because it’s cussing. But I’m thirteen now, which means I’m almost a full-grown young woman and I can cuss as much as I want.”
She walked all the way up to them and stopped right next to the man in the big coat. She wasn’t even thirteen yet, not for a few days; she was twelve.
Jesse James realized only now that Robert Ford’s hand was still in his. He clutched it and squeezed as tight as he could. Maybe this would be like in the department store, he tried to tell himself over his heart’s drumming—in just a short moment now, he’d be able to breathe again.
Ophelia and the man in the big coat looked at each other squarely for a moment.
Then the man in the big coat turned and swept away from her. He made for the front door at an almost jogging pace.
“Hey!” Ophelia called after him, which made Jesse James’s arm jerk up involuntarily.
The man glanced back just once from the doorway, very quickly, and Ophelia lifted her laser tag gun and shot a laser at him. “Pew!” she cried. The harmless red dot wiggled across the chest of his coat, and then disappeared when she dropped the gun back down to her side, giggling.
Then he was out the door and back into the daylight, gone, running for his car.
Freddie snatched the phone out of Jesse James’s hand and dialed 9-1-1. “Jesus.”
“Are you kids okay?” asked Rachel, but she wasn’t looking at them, she was only looking forward, into space. Her voice came out in one shaky exhale.
Robert Ford tugged Jesse James back out gently from behind the counter and pulled him into a hug. They kept hugging until Ophelia started tapping them both on their shoulders simultaneously—tapping, and then hitting when they didn’t respond.
“What?” she demanded. “What?”
They broke apart. Jesse James saw now that there were a couple of tiny red nicks in Robert Ford’s hand: the half-moons of Jesse James’s fingernails. Now, the realization arrived in them both, it was their moment to decide—should they tell her, Ophelia? They were only a hair older than her, but at that point in time the difference felt monumental. If they told her they’d be exposing her to the evils of the world, the evils she didn’t know she’d just moments ago made eye contact with. Shouldn’t they keep this knowledge withheld just a little longer, so Ophelia could stay all right?
A moment passed.
No, thought Jesse James—if the world of adulthood was an evil secret, it wasn’t one he was going to be responsible for keeping. This all wasn’t his mess to protect. Not him and Robert Ford. He didn’t care to—Rachel, Freddie, and the rest of them, they could all have it.
He looked across at Robert Ford, and he could tell instantly his friend had been thinking the same thing. “Fee,” Robert Ford said, and gave a hesitant, shuddering laugh. “The craziest thing just happened.”
“What?” She was practically bouncing on her heels.
Robert Ford explained it all: the man coming in, his hand in the big coat, the two boys stuck behind the counter, the robber gesturing toward the cash register. He spoke haltingly through the story like he kept expecting Jesse James to interrupt him, so they could tell the story together, the way they often would. But Jesse James just nodded along.
“No way,” Ophelia erupted. Her eyes had gone huge, her voice low and breathy. “That guy? The guy I—”
“Yeah!” Robert Ford smiled.
“No way!”
“Yes. Way.” He looked at Jesse James then with a sad bright look in his eyes, and nudged his shoulder softly. “I bet this never would’ve happened at Chuck E. Cheese,” he said.
Jesse James’s lips twisted, but he couldn’t smile. It was hard to not still be seeing the man in the coat with the beard standing there, hand nudged deep in his pocket, eyes glossy and looking right at him. Hard not to feel the phone imprinting a square into his ear, to hear the blurry dial tone. Probably he would think about it a lot more later. Maybe it would fall into line with the rest of the unjustifiable images that shuffled always in Jesse James’s head and through his dreams: the hitchhiker he once saw rappelling up a billboard, the girl in the pink ballgown he’d exchanged a few words with last May at a Mystery Spot tourist trap, the thing in the schoolyard dead in the grass, the brother who transformed into Chuck E. Cheese to make screaming happy kids even happier. Ophelia’s mother who circled in and out of their lives like a frail, excitable ghost. The things that made no sense, made so little sense they haunted him. The only thing that fit better as time went by was the understanding that things didn’t really fit almost ever.
“Where the fuck is your mom?” said Ophelia. “Let’s not tell her.”
“Hey!” Jesse James roused himself, speaking up finally.
“What?” said Ophelia. Her eyes were glittering.
“You know what. You can’t say fuck.”
“Fuck you!” said Ophelia. “If you tell your mom I’ll tell her you two got—” But she stopped short of the words held up, as though that, on the other hand, she wasn’t sure if she could say.
They all looked at each other. Jesse James let out a breath and felt his shoulders drop.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They went back outside, the three of them, Ophelia still clumsy and blinking like a target in her laser-tag gear. Nobody from Dave & Buster’s came after her. She twirled the laser gun around on her finger, then stopped and focused on the icy ground beneath her feet while they walked across the asphalt parking lot to Robert Ford’s dad’s truck. The sky was still a sharp silver, slashed here and there with robin-egg blue. They all felt a little uncertain, Jesse James could tell—unsure if it was okay to feel okay just now, unsure what at all to be sure of.
Halfway there, Robert Ford slipped on the ice and landed on his tailbone. “Oww,” he cried, waiting for Jesse James to offer him a hand and lift him up. Ophelia laughed again, her same old high-pitched giggle traveling up into the gray sky while Jesse James pulled his best friend to his feet, and in this motion Jesse James remembered. What he was sure of. It was incredibly simple, a feeling he couldn’t even put words to. Like the invisible pockets of air Robert Ford’s coins disappeared into whenever he did magic: invisible, maybe a trick, but there.
“That hurt,” said Robert Ford. “I feel it all the way up my spine.”
“I didn’t know you had a spine,” said Jesse James, and they kept walking, grabbing at one another’s sleeves for rocky balance on their way back to the car.
Laura Dzubay
Laura Dzubay recently earned her MFA from Indiana University, where she won the AWP Intro Prize and served as fiction editor for Indiana Review. Her stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Electric Literature, Blue Earth Review, Hobart, and Mid-American Review. In addition to writing, she loves good food, hiking, and haunted places.