Pandora's Gun (5 page)
Authors: James van Pelt
When he was ten, Dante saved Peter’s life. In late April, the days had grown unseasonably warm, and they decided they wanted to jump off the dam into Eaton Reservoir, which was an activity they’d done several times the summer before. Of course, jumping off the dam was illegal (there were signs posted warning trespassers to keep out). Swimming also was forbidden. The reservoir was the town’s drinking water supply. That made jumping off the dam even more attractive. In Peter’s neighborhood, among the kids, jumping off the dam was practically a badge of achievement. You couldn’t hold your head high, walking down the street, unless you’d made the jump.
Peter and Dante were charter members of the jump-off-the-dam club. They’d jumped the first time together. Peter remembered the air rushing against his face as they fell the thirty feet from the top of the dam, and the shockingly hard slap against the bottoms of his feet when they hit, but they’d surfaced laughing, high fiving each other even before they made it to shore, laughing even more because they couldn’t both swim and slap each other’s hands.
Christy Sanders jumped the next day, along with three of her girl friends. Of course, she trumped them by doing a front flip the thirty feet into the lake.
The heat drove them to try the April jump. Winter seemed to have broken, finally. They rode to the reservoir, towels wrapped around their handlebars. Peter remembered swinging his legs over the rail at the dam’s overlook. Dante joined him, both of them letting themselves lean out over the water, holding onto the rail behind them. At the time, nothing seemed finer. The spring sun warmed his shoulders and sent tiny diamond reflections back at them from the water below.
Air whistled by his ears just as he remembered it, and the adventure was glorious until he hit the water. Cold! Like hands of death cold. Paralyzing his lungs. His face burned against the cold. Somehow he surfaced, unable to breathe. Then, finally, a gasp, but it was all freezing water. He choked and went under. Looked up at the surface from a yard below, already losing consciousness. I’m dying. He remembered clearly knowing this was the end.
Then Dante grabbed him. His arm wrapped around his chest and Peter was brought to the surface, brought to the shore, where he lay half in and half out, coughing broken glass from his lungs. Dante lay beside him, gasping from the effort.
They didn’t talk about it ever. They rode their bikes home in silence, freezing despite the sun. Peter went to the bathroom, stood in the shower as hot as he could stand it, until the water heater was empty.
He never jumped off the dam again.
Peter saved Dante’s life in the spring too, but it was last spring. They walked home from the high school together each day. Devin Avenue was the only busy street they crossed, a four-lane, divided road that grew busy at rush hour, but most of the time was empty, a monument to the city planner’s belief that retail would move toward the high school. A half mile farther up the road lead to downtown and the business district, but here there was just a stoplight and the crosswalk.
Dante talked excitedly about a girl he sat behind in math class. “She looks at least eighteen,” Dante said. “I hear she’s dating a senior who got his last girlfriend pregnant. I’ll bet they’re doing it.”
Peter had been trying to ignore him. This talk about girls and sex stuff had integrated into Dante’s conversation a lot lately. Peter tried not to encourage him. He longed for the days when they talked about the movies they’d seen, and the computer games, and books. Although, he was sorry to admit to himself, there was something fascinating about girls and Dante’s single-minded obsession.
So, while they waited at the crosswalk on Devin Avenue for the light to change, Peter wasn’t watching the light. He was looking away from Dante, to their right. Coming toward them was a white van. Peter remembered thinking at first that a windshield with a crack that obvious in it must be hard to see through, but then he realized something was wrong about the van. It was going way too fast, and it was driving on the wrong side of the street, coming toward them.
The light changed.
Dante, who was saying, “Sometimes she wears these low-cut blouses . . .” as he looked left, and stepped off the sidewalk.
Peter reached, caught Dante’s shoulder, and pulled him back.
The van avalanched by, inches from their faces.
A paper caught in the turbulence shot six feet into the air, then drifted like an autumn leaf to rest at their feet.
“Shit, Peter,” Dante said. “Shit.”
It was the first time Peter had heard Dante swear.
One of T-Man’s friends was leaning against Peter’s locker. Peter spotted him as soon as he entered the hallway. For a second he considered going the other direction, but what could the guy do with all these witnesses? A math teacher stood in his doorway right across from Peter’s locker, greeting kids.
The boy looked terrible: circles under his eyes, hair uncombed. Dried mud on his shoes and the cuffs of his pants. He hadn’t changed or even cleaned up since yesterday. When he saw Peter, he straightened and took a step back, as if he thought Peter would hit him. The boy’s face clenched in conflict. Peter had never so clearly seen someone making a decision in his life, and it looked like one of the choices was to run. He stepped forward, lifted his chin, and waited for Peter to approach.
“Are you a wizard?” he said. His chin quivered.
“What?”
“Or a beast master? I’ve seen movies, you know. Are you a god?”
Peter decided to let the boy talk his way to sense. “What do you think?”
“At the field, there was that thing.” The boy licked his lip, then glanced around as if afraid of being caught from behind. “I couldn’t sleep. When I tried, I kept seeing it. We weren’t going to do anything to you guys. The ball field’s a good place to hang out.”
“I know.”
The longer he talked, the more miserable the boy seemed, teetering on the edge of tears. “I don’t know about T-Man and the other guys, but I’m never going back there. I want you to know that. I don’t have any problem with you, so you shouldn’t have a problem with me. If T-Man does something, and he might, it wasn’t me. I’m not hanging out with him anymore.”
“What do you mean that T-Man might do something?”
The boy leaned in. “He’s crazy, man. He thinks you tricked us, like with a special effect. An illusion. But it wasn’t fake. I could smell it. I heard it breathing. It looked right at me.” He closed his eyes as if he could stop from seeing it. “I told him he shouldn’t mess with you. I want you to remember that. I warned him, and now I’m warning you. So, don’t turn that thing loose on me.”
Peter nodded, more confused than anything.
“I’ll think about it. Umm . . . thanks for the heads up. About T-Man, I mean.”
The boy’s face sagged with relief. He shook Peter’s hand. “He has a pistol he showed us, stolen from a house he broke into this summer. He brings it to school sometimes. Keep it in mind.”
Peter watched as the boy headed toward the gymnasium. He wondered if the gun had a setting that could convert delinquents to productive citizens. That would be an interesting function! But it sounded more like what Dante discovered was a scare-the-hell-out-of-you app.
Peter kept his eyes open for T-Man the rest of the day. He felt like he was in a prison movie. At any moment, T-Man could come up behind him with a shiv, probably a spoon he sharpened in the metal shop, and shove it into his kidney. T-Man wasn’t in 3rd period Geography, though, which wasn’t unusual. Peter figured he saw him in class less than half the time. He wished he did know T-Man’s parole officer. That was a lucky guess on his part. Peter would call him with the pot information on the spot. Better to get T-Man out of the picture before he did anything. The high school would be better without him, and so would the middle school.
Christy met him in the hallway on his way to 4th period. She wore her Pom uniform today, which generally Peter thought didn’t do any of the girls any good. The school had backed off of the short, short skirt look this year and gone for sort of a retro ’50s thing that dropped the hem lines below the knees, and no matter how hard the girls worked at them, they seemed tailored for people without human figures. Christy, however, somehow pulled the outfit together. Bright red skirt. White, long-sleeved, sweater top with a matching red letter “L” sown in the middle, topped with a red collar. It might be because she wore clothes confidently, which fit her personality, and that when she smiled, most people weren’t focused on her clothes.
“Do you have an illuminating moment from
Of Mice and Men
for class? I tried when Lennie talked to Crooks in the barn and Crooks said that all ranch hands had the same dream, but that sounds lame to me, and I have no idea how I’m supposed to turn that into an entire paper. I can’t stretch my two-hundred word thought into a thousand-word essay.”
The illuminating moment Peter had right then was that he now completely understood a concept Mrs. Pickerel had tried to teach a couple of weeks ago when they were reading poetry: “cognitive dissonance,” which she’d explained as being the time when two realities you believed in clashed. On one hand, Christy Sanders wanted to know about their English assignment, a perfectly valid reality that Peter normally would participate in without question. On the other hand, he now possessed a strange weapon with capabilities he’d never heard of that he increasingly was beginning to believe was not a secret government project, but an alien one instead, and that it didn’t matter one fig what was the illuminating moment for him in his reading of
Of Mice and Men.
Christy added, “I could go with Candy deciding that he should have shot his own dog. I might be able to get four-hundred words out of that. After all, I’d have to spend a page or so talking about symbolism and foreshadowing.”
Still not thinking about Steinbeck, Peter was happy that he didn’t feel like apologizing to Christy as he had earlier, and the blush reflex hadn’t kicked in. Then he realized she was waiting for an answer.
He said, “Did you read the Robert Burns poem Mrs. Pickerel assigned? I’ll bet I could get a thousand words by claiming that illuminated the novel for me. Throw a poetry quote at English teachers, and they go all weak in the knees. I can probably get her to swoon if I say, ‘Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie’ with a Scottish accent.”
Christy laughed. “Was that truly an ‘illuminating moment’ for you?”
Peter was impressed he’d come up with this much, but he couldn’t sustain it, even at the cost of not making her laugh again.
“I don’t know. I just plowed through the reading, most of it during lunch before class. I probably didn’t give the book a fair chance. I know how to write a thousand word essay that sounds sincere, though. I think it’s my super power.”
“You’ll have to show me how to do that when I start my paper,” she said. “At least you didn’t SparkNote your way through the book. It’s only a hundred pages long. One of the senior Poms told the sophomore squad to read SparkNotes so they could both stay eligible and make the extra-long practices they’d scheduled for us.”
Lots of people Peter knew read the SparkNotes instead of reading the book, which was why Mrs. Pickerel always made up test questions that only folks who’d read the book would get. She was ingenious that way. Peter had heard that she’d given a one-question quiz on
The Natural
to her A.P. Lit class last year, which was, “What happens at Roy’s last at bat?” About half the class described—some of them with genuine poetry—how Roy’s home run shattered a field light, and that he ran the bases in a cascade of golden sparks from above. Of course, that was how the
movie
ended, not the book, where Roy Hobbs struck out. “Say it ain’t so, Roy,” said a character in the book.
This was one of the reasons he liked Mrs. Pickerel. For the last quiz, she’d given a true/false test that had a pattern to the answers: two “true,” two “false,” all the way through the twenty questions. But she had the same class later in the day. She mixed the questions up for that test. About a third of the kids failed because they wrote down the pattern from earlier in the day. Peter enjoyed the idea of how smug the cheaters must have felt as they handed in their tests.
Christy said, “Did you hear they caught an intruder on campus earlier today?”
Peter’s eyes widened.
“He was in the counseling office, going through the student records. The secretary saw him and called Assistant Principal Bovine.” Bovine was the assistant linebacker coach for the football team, and was larger than any two of his players combined. “Bovine grabbed the guy and called the cops, but he got away.”
“Why would anyone want student records?”
“Probably he’s a pedophile. Those files have our pictures and home addresses and everything.”
“Why not just go through our computers?”
Christy sniffed disdainfully. “My uncle’s the IT security guy for the district. He told me that they have military-grade protections for the district’s servers. The barriers he’s set up against unauthorized use are way hard to get through. Breaking into the student record room where they keep hard copies was much easier. So, do you want to come over tonight and show me how to write a thousand word paper out of two-hundred words of thought? We’re having lasagna for dinner. My mom can set out an extra plate.”
“That’s the draft that’s due tomorrow, right?”
“I suppose yours is done.”
“Last week. Okay, I’ll help,” said Peter. “Tonight’s the night,” but he was thinking about being tracked down. He hadn’t, technically, stolen the duffle bag, but he hadn’t left it alone, and he hadn’t tried to return it either, and he had a suspicion that whoever owned it wasn’t likely to give him an award for holding on to it. He was starting to wish that he’d never picked it up. Why couldn’t he have just found some more useless junk instead?
