Dirtbags (7 page)

Calvin’s arm involuntarily came round her and carved tiny circles into her shoulder blade with his forefinger.

She continued: “He tore me down. I caught him with a cocktail waitress, and he turned everyone, including my son, against me. He convinced everyone we knew that I was a drug addict and stole my little boy. So sure, he tore me down good and proper, but the best way for me to fight him is to bring myself and other people up.” She nuzzled her chin into his ribs. “I won’t be like him. No matter what. He’s the worst kind of person there is.”

“So you weren’t never a junkie?” Calvin asked.

She was quiet a moment, then said: “We would get off work at the restaurant and have a bottle of wine or so. Maybe some cocktails. He’d bum prescription pills off the waiters or go hunt up some snow when he was looking to blow the doors off. But all of that was more his thing than mine. I just wanted him to be happy.”

Calvin said nothing.

“Short version,” she said, “is that I can be like him and tear folks down, or I can go about things a whole other way. I have to make a difference somehow.”

She sat up and gathered her shirt and shimmied into it. Calvin pulled his jeans up from around his ankles and fastened his belt. He had no idea where the knife had gone. Once dressed, she leaned closer to him.

“It’s getting colder,” she said.

“Autumn is different in Texas, I guess. This really ain’t cold at all.”

She stood and gave him her hand. He took it and let her lead him back towards their cars. Somewhere behind him was the knife, and he wondered which would be better: going back for it after she had left, or buying another on the way back to the motel. He did the math in his head and was interrupted as she stopped fast, just shy of his car. Stopped in the middle of the road and said nothing for a long moment.

“Is everything okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know what happened back there,” she said.

“Me neither,” he said. “Everything is different now.”

She turned to him and looked at him as if he may be contagious. “Do you know he calls me?”

“What?” Calvin asked. “Who?”

“My ex-husband.” Her jaw set firm. Those sad eyes bored into his. “He gets drunk on some nights and calls me on the phone. He calls me horrible names, all sorts of stuff, and you know what else? He tells me he’s going to have me killed.”

“He sounds like a dick,” Calvin said. He moved her closer, to hold her, but she pushed him away.

“I won’t be with another man like him,” she said. “Did you hear me when I told you that I absolutely hate liars?”

He nodded. “I understand.”

“You can’t lie to me.”

“I won’t,” he said. He put his hands on her shoulders and brought her to him. They held each other there for a long while.

“Then will you tell me something?” she asked from within his embrace. “And promise not to lie?”

“Anything,” said Calvin. “Anything at all.”

“Why does your car have Virginia plates?” she asked. “And why are those plates from a dealership three miles from my husband’s restaurant?”

6

The dream mostly happened the same. On a sunny spring day, Phillip Krandall walks into Lake Castor High School, armed to the teeth. He steps into the office, just to the right of the front doors. Mrs. Medlin, the secretary, smiles at him. He shoots her in the face.

The game is afoot. A few people get brave. Hector Vazquez, no stranger to gunfire, waits to see the principal. At the sound of gunfire, he rushes Phillip. Phillip wheels around on him and squeezes off a shot that clips him in the thigh then, for good measure, he puts one in each of his shoulders. Most other people duck. Duck and scream for help.

Their cries are music, a sweet symphony. Phillip reckons turnabout is fair play and marches across the office, shooting them where they cower. One at a time, they stop screaming. Their pleas are each replaced by a single gunshot.

He steps into the hallway. Classmates, teachers . . . they run wild, this way and that. More screaming. Tears stream down their cheeks. In the dream, Phillip is suddenly equipped with a Mossberg 500, a pump action shotgun he found on the Internet and fantasized endlessly about. Mike Tallow, the varsity lineman, rushed the quarterback thirteen times for nine sacks in the big game against Danville that season, and he reckons Phillip no greater a foe. The Mossberg vaporizes his chassis, and he is neutralized.

Teachers are turned to Swiss. The shrieks from the cheerleading squad are silenced in a barrage of bullets. Phillip cannot miss. Every time he pulls the weapon, he hits his target. He murders
en masse
. The school hallways are awash with blood.

The dream varied. Sometimes, the entire student body is brought to him by African slaves. Their hard bodies gussied up by war paint and each of them with a different opinion on how his classmates should spend the afterlife.  In other versions, he confronts each wing of the school as if it were a different level of a video game, culminating in a final showdown with a villain, him with no princess to save. Other times, he searches each and every hallway and finds no one, the school having been dismissed for a holiday he knew nothing about.

But mostly, in his sleep, he slaughtered his classmates, one by one.

Should he ever forget what he felt leading up to that day, he needed only consult his journals. Notebook after notebook of hand-written entries: shitty poetry, half-crazed rants, and ever-growing hit lists. Him sometimes scribbling in the margins for lack of room or discipline. Doodles of blood spatter and explosions. A collection of composition notebooks that he’d left spread across his bed that day so that there would be no mystery, no question why he did what he did.

In his dreams, he is a god. He is in complete control. In his dreams, everyone who had ever pushed him around or gave him a hard time or laughed at him and made fun of his clothes, each of them atoned in bloodshed, and he absolved them of their guilt. But every morning he woke up, the day that wasn’t supposed to happen long behind him, he cursed himself for his lack of resolve and fortitude.

For on that day, he was a junior. It was April. Spring. Skirts and short shorts and all this energy with nowhere to put it. Phillip had long resigned such was his fate. He’d settled on it well before then, perhaps sometime over the holidays. He arrived to school with the gym bag, intentionally twenty minutes late so as to catch everyone in their classrooms unaware.

He took note of the sky: wispy clouds, gentle warm breeze. He inhaled a deep breath, sweet with flower blossoms, young love and other springtime shit. The lawn was freshly manicured, and soon it would be overrun with reporters and cameramen, parents and survivors, all of them tear-streaked and looking to the heavens, asking “Why? Why?” With a smile, he opened the door to the school.

First, Holly Jordan. The halls were empty as he made the length of the school and came to the door of Mrs. Churchill’s Calculus class. He closed his eyes and visualized it one last time, then put his hand to the doorknob.

Down the hallway, a ruckus. Phillip turned his head to see Calvin Cantrell, another student of equal social standing. Mike Tallow and Stammy Peanucker, two varsity players, had knocked his textbooks from his hand and then, for good measure, kicked them the length of the hallway. This sent them into hysterics and Calvin minded not, simply went about collecting his schoolbooks. Phillip watched, hand still on the doorknob to the calculus classroom, and considered the tableau before him: Two redneck athletes, two smaller students, one of them on the fringe and armed.

His grip tightened on the strap of the gym bag. The gun was loaded; he’d seen to it before leaving the house and once again while parked outside the school. With nary a thought, he set the bag to the floor and knelt before it, slowly fingering the zipper, then drawing it open.

With hand in the bag, for the first time, he considered Calvin. Calvin, bent over just like him but with the span of a hallway between them. Him, looking up and back at Phillip. Phillip Krandall never thought he spoke the same language as the teachers, the students . . . hell,
anyone
, but there, in that moment, he and Calvin Cantrell understood each other just fine. What passed between them was an unspoken litany of all the wrongs before them and after them and just how Phillip intended to go about righting them, and Phillip couldn’t move for fear that someone, after all this time, might actually
understand
him.

And in that moment, he knew Calvin saw it, too. For Calvin, leaning over his fallen books and homework, simply shook his head as if to say: “No, Phillip. Not yet.”

Phillip nearly fainted. His heart raced, and he feared he might vomit. He fell backward on his haunches, bracing himself with an arm and elbow. He couldn’t take his eyes off Calvin. He scurried to his feet and, nearly forgetting the gym bag, which inconceivably weighed much more than it had only a moment previous, made to quit the hallway. Quit the hallway, the school, the property . . . the whole damned planet if he could. For he rushed down the corridors and burst through the front doors of the building.

No hordes of media there to report on the massacre. No throngs of police and SWAT teams, all aiming to bring him down. No scores of huddled masses, weeping and hoping their child was not among the slain. No one save Phillip, running scared to his car. He raced home in a blur, hoping to be the first to his room so he could clear out the notebooks and journals and drawings and the video he left for his parents and the news stations. He rushed home in shame.

There’s always tomorrow
, he told himself over and over.
I can come back tomorrow.
But he never did. He faked a fever for two days. He lay in bed and contemplated his options. He considered gearing up and heading back into the school but couldn’t. Couldn’t look in the mirror. Couldn’t face his classmates. Couldn’t face Calvin Cantrell.

And two days later, some kid shot up Virginia Tech, and all of Phillip’s thunder scattered to the winds. His moment, it appeared, had passed.

Moments like those didn’t come every day. Each time he passed a populated sidewalk cafe, each time he entered a crowded movie theater, each time he sat in a busy restaurant, something in him itched to high heaven, and he wondered just when he would stab at scratching it. For those moments came so few in life, and he saw yet another passing. As Calvin Cantrell stood before him in that cheap motel room south of Dallas, he felt him dousing that flame yet again, and Phillip’s resentment mounted.

Calvin’s response could not be more infuriating, him with downcast eyes, looking hangdog and saying over and over: “You don’t get it. You don’t understand.”

However, Phillip understood perfectly. He glared back at his cohort and felt his body uncontrollably shaking from what he could only assume was pure rage.

“I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” he growled. “This is a plot convoluted enough for a shitty novelist or a B-movie. Scratch that. No novelist worth his salt would touch this plot.”

“Just hear me out,” Calvin pleaded.

“I’ve heard enough.” Phillip had opened a bottle of corn liquor earlier and pulled from it. He wiped his mouth and shook his head. “You dragged me clear across the country to do a murder, and now you’re calling it off. Because you are thinking with your
dick
.”

“That’s not fair,” Calvin said. “We can still do a murder, if that’s what’s got you all bothered. We just go out and pick somebody. It ain’t hard, what with all the Mexicans wandering around down here.”

“We ain’t paid to just
pick someone
,” Phillip said. “We’re paid to kill Tom London’s ex-wife. Specifically.”

“This is only a minor setback.” Calvin took a seat in the motel’s ratty easy chair. He crossed his legs. “The only thing that changes is the target.”

Phillip took another slug from the bottle of corn. His anger mounted. “This changes everything. I should have had my head examined for following you out here. I knew you lacked the . . . the
commitment
. Your handicap is debilitating.”

“My what? What handicap?”

“You lack a certain wherewithal to do this kind of thing,” Phillip said.

“Oh? And what is that?”

“The compulsion. The craze. How can you insist that you can manage to be any type of serial killer at all if you ain’t batshit crazy?”

Calvin shook his head. “I done read
Catcher in the Rye
a half-dozen times, if that counts.”

“There’s a bit more to it than that.”

“Besides, I have a perfectly reasonable alternative to our original plan,” Calvin said. When Phillip didn’t respond, he continued, “We kill Tom London.”

“Beg pardon?”

“It’s perfect.” Calvin leaned back in the chair and cradled his hands behind his head. “We drive back to Lake Castor, tell London the job is done, collect the money, then whack him.”

Phillip began to take another drink, then thought better of it. Looking into the neck of the bottle, he said: “I stand corrected. You’re crazier than I thought.”

“No, it’s perfect. You see, Corrina ain’t exactly as advertised. She’s ain’t at all the junkie London made her out to be. He’s just a creepy, philandering bastard, and he framed her. Now he wants her dead.”

“I don’t care if she’s Sister Holy Shit down at the St. Chastity’s, we were paid to knock her off for a guy, and that’s what we’re going to do.” Phillip slammed the bottle on the nightstand and paced a groove into the carpet. “We’re almost out of money, Calvin. We’ve pissed straight through the cash London gave us, and we’re going to need some more. What are you doing taking up with her anyhow? You got a wife back home. What about her?”

“Rhonda?” A smile crept across Calvin’s face. “Last thing on my mind right now is ole Rhonda, and let me assure you, I bet dollars to do-nuts that I’m the last thing on hers. That woman will land on her feet, don’t you worry.”

“You’re a piece of work,” Phillip muttered.

“We’re not killing Corrina London,” Calvin said. “You know, I ain’t never met anyone with a vision so clear and defined as her. She takes care of them addicts. I could only be lucky to matter as much as she does around here. And we’re supposed to take it away because some greasy restaurant owner holds a grudge? No thank you.”