Pins: A Novel (22 page)

Before Buddha Martinez’s match came to a thunderous halt, the cameras had already swarmed around Coach Cleshun, the school principal, people craving their moment. A cluster of kids stood behind them, waiving or glaring into cameras.

Joseph was halfway into the locker room with Dink when a hand grabbed him by the scruff of his neck.

“Come on,” his father barked, dragging him off down the school hallway, but not to the front door, where the parking lot was.

“Where we goin’?”

“Adios, ameoba.” Dink thrust a hand out. They barely grazed fingers.

“Donnie!”

But his father said nothing, only shoved Joseph out and through a side door he’d never used before.

Mike and Sophia smashed their faces against the back window of the Bronco, giggles under glass.

“Get in.” His father shoved him past the back seat. Gramma and Aunt Lilla sat the back with his mother.

“Sorry you lost,” Lilla offered. Dino pulled out of the back driveway, avoiding the street in front of the school. For a moment, before they turned away, Joseph looked back, saw two police cars parked at the front entrance of the school.

“What is going on?” he screamed.

“It’s awright,” his dad said.

The front entrance to the school was ablaze in swirling silent sirens, shifting camera high beams.

“Stop the car, Da! Stop the car!” Road zoomed by beneath him as he opened the door, but he was ready to tumble. He had to see what was happening to Dink, but his mother lunged forward from behind, grabbed his hand, slammed the door shut.

“Jesus!” His father shouted, grabbing his son’s arm while steering with his left. Sophia shrieked. Joseph lunged closer to his father to get away from the door. He expecting a smack on the back of his head from his mother. It didn’t happen. Grandmama began to babble the rosary in Italian.

“Do you wanna kill yourself?” his father barked.

His mother tried quieting Sophia by showing her how to make handprints in the frosted windows. It wasn’t working.

His mother finally exhaled, then said, “Well, thank God we got out of that.”

Nobody spoke for three blocks until Mike called up, “Hey, I got a Colts banner. Look.” He wagged it up to the front seat. The felt edge tickled his ear until his mother swatted it away.

Grandmama Nicci and Aunt Lilla stayed the night, for support, for spells, to cook, to get in the way. As the boys knew with a small shred of joy, at least what used to be joy, this visit meant they got to sleep downstairs.

 
Joseph brought the team videotape Dink had given him weeks before. He would use the blank half to tape the news. He’d missed that night’s footage, wasn’t sure if he was relieved to have missed it.

Joseph set down the rules: “Volume down. I got the remote.” Mike agreed under the threat of a headlock.

After all the trips to the bathroom above them dwindled down to silence, Joseph lay on the living room sofa to tape his friends getting arrested. As he expected, it was the top story.

“Local police arrested three teammates of the alleged murder victim. Police would not reveal why they detained the team members, but sources say that the boys, aged eighteen, seventeen and fifteen, were at the scene of the Lambros boy’s death.”

A shot of Bennie, Hunter outside their homes, and Dink being led down the front steps of the school, which looked frightful under the harsh glare of the lights.

He tried to recall their warmth on him, compared to the cold video image, ended up crying in silence. With Mike once again sleeping nearby, it didn’t hurt so bad.

Inside the Peter Pan sleeping bag, a large green fuzzy alligator, his little brother turned over as he lay in its jaws.

Remembering Uncle Boring’s bottle his father got for Christmas, Joseph snuck into the kitchen, took a sip, then a gulp, then a chug.

DOG-PILING
  

NOOGIES
 

SNUGGIES

PARAMILITARY

The next night, their own private rituals were exposed, spelled out in terrific graphics. Their jokes were twisted into the terms of “a cult-like ritual” by one reporter.
 
She was the one who got her hands on a catalog with Hunter’s Grim Reaper “NEXT!” T-shirt, among others.

 
Joseph couldn’t help but smirk at seeing noogies defined on the local news by a reporter, that same chubby Latino guy. He’d flipped to the other channels, watching three or four versions at once, flipped more channels, recording bits and pieces until his father yelled for him to stop.

“The atmosphere was tense, and as the forfeit in honor of Anthony Lambros came up, a hush fell over the crowd.”

A shot of the ref with the other kid, standing, dopey. A sick feeling slid through Joseph’s stomach. He felt a weird sense of disappointment when they cut away from the match to some guy sitting behind a desk in an office: “We had to wait until evidence was substantiated to make our arrests.”

Other repeated shots showed Bennie, Hunter, Dink led out, handcuffed, Dink with his varsity jacket over his head, Bennie and Hunter with their sweatshirt hoods up.

Cleshun talked nervously about how he’d taught his players “to respect other people’s rights and treat them with kindness and understanding.”

The reporter outside the school: “Prosecutors neither confirmed nor denied the rumor of a confession by another team member…”

A shot of Joey walking away in defeat, his face blurred out, electronically erased. He looked like an alien with a human body in a singlet, above his neck a cluster of square-shaped blurs. What remained of his face looked obscene. Just blocking him off like that made him look guilty. Anybody from school would know him.

“Oh, shit.” He dropped the remote.

“Joseph, watch your mouth.”

“…whose name is being withheld, since he is a minor. . .”

“Oh, triple shit.” He paced around the living room.

“I’m warning you!”

“…who may have been in the car that rammed the Lambros car the night of his death. . .”

“Whaddaya– Dad, whad’ they? Aw, shit.”

“Joseph Nicci, you shut your mouth!!”

“…but the court would not reveal more on the minor. In Little Falls, this is John Soto.”

“More on the minor? The hell with you, dickweed.”

“Joseph!” His mother’s face flushed, steamed red, brought him to pleading.

“Ma. They got me. I’m a dead man.”

“Siddown.”

He walked away from the television, pacing around the dining room, looking for something to grab. There were only plates, glasses, baskets, useless things he couldn’t hurl to absorb his rage. Everything seemed stupid, every bit of his home a reminder of how dumb life was, how things were just going to sit there while he was fading, not even there.

“Joey, calm down.”

“Siddown.”

“They got me.”

“Joseph, calm down.”

“Why don’t you eat something.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Just. Sit. Down.”

He sat. One knee refused to stop tapping.

“Now. They are not gonna know that was you, and even if they did, they are under arrest now. They can’t hurt you. Awright?”

“Yeah, but what about everybody else? What about at school? What about Bennie’s parents, or Hunter’s?”

“They are not going to hurt you. I will not let them.”

He didn’t feel convinced, and his father didn’t look convincing. His father wore out any argument with a look, a glare that said, trust me.

He wanted to believe him. He always wanted to believe.

He didn’t hear Mike hovering outside his bedroom door. He felt him. Joseph darted to it, opened it, waited. But Mike didn’t flinch, merely gazing at his brother with a curious upward glance as he walked in.

“Did you see him?”

“Who?”

“You know.” Mike waited, then, like saying boo: “Anthony.”

“No, I didn’t. Leave me alone.” He started to shut the door, but Mike had scooted in. The interrogation wasn’t over.

“Was he all bloody?”

“No.” Joseph knew he was supposed to shut up about everything. But with Mike, it felt easy, as if they were discussing something gruesome but outside themselves.

He closed the door, put on some music, low so nobody else could hear, swore Mike to complete, utter silence. “And if you don’t–”

“Okay,” Mike said, as if he were preparing for a science project. They sat on opposite ends of the bed, cross-legged. They squared off, eye to eye.

“Bennie did it. Hunter threw a bottle that almost made him wreck. Dink was fighting with Hunter, and I was…Bennie like, was like strangling him, I think, in the car.”

“Did you see him dead?”

“No. You know he had asthma.”

“No.”

“You know what that is?”

“Yeah. When you don’t breathe good.”

“Close enough. So Anthony got scared and went off the road. He might have even had an attack. Maybe even Bennie was. . .no, I mean, no, it…But I seen that, he did that at the match in Paterson. He like passed out. Remember? I told you when that happened.”

“No. You don’t talk to me at all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Okay. So why’d you do it?”

“Me?”

“No, yeah, alla youse.”

“Don’t say that. They don’t talk like that here.”

“All of you’all. Why, bro?”

“‘Cause we … the other guys were yelling things at him.”

“Why?”

“Well, Bennie I think is like a psycho, basically.”

“So why are you friends with him?”

“Because I am a total jerk.”
 
Because Dink is, he started to say.

He didn’t want to choke up in front of Mike, so he forced a cough until it pushed the tears back. “Bennie’s got a car. He would drive us around, buy us beers. He has a fake ID, looks twenny-one.”

Mike understood. “How much can you drink?” he asked, as if conducting a survey.

A pang in his stomach echoed the memory of their binge. “Not as much as I think I can.”

“But…” Mike was bursting with questions. “But what happened?”

“I know, it was …Look, I was really sick. I passed out. I wasn’t even…I really don’t think he knew what he was doing but he was like beating up Anthony in his car and he like lost his breath and died.”

“Huh.” Mike looked at him, curious. “Are you gonna go to jail?”

“I dunno.”

“Dad says you won’t.”

“When did he say that?”

“I got ears. My room’s next to theirs.”

“Can you hear everything?”

“Except when they whisper, or when they’re bumping around.”

“Do they do that a lot?”

“Sometimes.”

“You know what they’re doing, doncha?”

“Oh, gross. Stop it.”

Mike paced aimlessly around his brother’s room, eyeing things, almost window-shopping for what he would claim if his big brother wound up in the slammer.

Joseph really didn’t care. It could go, all of it.
 
Where he was going they don’t take luggage.