On the previous Thursday, Toby had climbed into the attic searching for a shoebox where his mother sometimes kept spare change. A loose plank shifted beneath his knee, exposing a narrow space between the joists. He moved aside a dusty stack of Christmas decorations and found an iron-bound wooden box wrapped in a fraying towel. There was no key in the lock, but the hinge screws were loose, and he managed to open it with the careful impatience of a boy who had watched enough mechanics at work to know that force usually broke the wrong thing.
The box smelled of wood dust and old leather. Inside lay a brass compass with a hairline crack in its glass, a pocket watch frozen at twenty minutes past six, a heavy ring whose golden surface had been worn smooth by years of contact, and a silver lighter blackened almost beyond recognition. Beneath those things were a photograph folded twice and an envelope containing papers written in handwriting Toby did not recognize. The photograph showed several men standing beside motorcycles in the desert, but the faces were darkened by age and sunlight.
Toby had rubbed the lighter with the edge of his shirt. Under the grime he found the outline of a winged skull with its lower jaw missing, a broken chain running through the empty eye sockets, and letters carved near the bottom. He tried to read the initials, then gave up when the tarnish made the strokes run together. What mattered to him was the weight of the silver and the possibility that someone might be willing to pay for it.
He had gone downtown the next day carrying the four objects in a canvas pouch. At the first pawn shop, a man with a cigarette hanging from his lip asked whether Toby had stolen them. At the second, the owner offered a few dollars for the watch without looking at its movement or asking whether it had ever worked. At the third, a woman kindly told him he needed an adult to sell anything, then asked if someone at home was in trouble.
He shook his head, thanked her, and hurried outside before she could ask another question. He knew the difference between helping and telling, or at least he believed he did. Grown-ups had already seen the bills, heard his mother's coughing, and said they were sorry. So far, sorrow had not paid anything, and Toby wanted to come home with more than another sympathetic face.
That was how he came to think of the Rusty Anchor. Older boys at the public pool sometimes talked about the men who gathered there, describing motorcycles worth thousands and pockets full of cash. Toby had seen those bikes once from the window of a school bus, their chrome flashing beneath the afternoon sun. He imagined that anyone who could afford a machine that fine might give him a fair price for his father's old possessions.
It was a child's reasoning, formed from scraps of information and a frightening amount of responsibility. He did not understand the history of the motorcycle club whose members occupied the building. He knew only that everyone in Bakersfield treated the Rusty Anchor like a place to avoid. That warning should have sent him in the opposite direction, but every time he considered going home, he pictured his mother's breathing machine falling silent because someone had come to remove the electricity meter.