Seven Deadly Pleasures (21 page)

Maybe, but they weren't showing.

And I'd initially thought I was lucky. Even though I was pretty sure Melinda Thomas had seen the pictures I was drawing and actually heard bits of the conversation as she passed us in the hallway, Ferguson had confronted me after my second-to-last class on the day before summer vacation. There was no detention, no phone call home, and no lunch period for the rumors to fly through the student population like a bad disease. Still, the story had obviously gained legs over the last month and a half, painting me as the world's worst heavy breathing sex addict.

I rubbed out my dirty cartoons.

"So, how much kootchie are you getting?" I said.

"Enough. Just ask Billy Healy."

I had heard the stories. Supposedly, Kyle had copped a feel of Jeanette Wallman's crotch at the Thatcher Park Shopping Center, in an unlocked pickup parked behind the Briarbrook Deli. The legend was that she was wearing tight white jeans and his dirty hand left actual prints. Suddenly I wished for a magic scale that would weigh my "staring problem" against his little episode in the pickup and somehow come up with a comparison between us on the perv-o-meter.

"Got any gum, Jimmy?"

He was staring. It sort of hurt to look back at it. For the millionth time that day, I looked down, and to my dismay, started drawing in the dirt again.

"You know I don't," I said. My mom didn't let me have gum. She didn't let me have Twizzlers or corn chips either. She was a health food mom and stocked the house with granola, wheat germ, and soy products. Of course that didn't mean I couldn't sneak to the Acme or the Drake Emporium on 7th, and cram an entire Plenti-Pack of Doublemint in my mouth every now and then. The problem was that Mom did regular room checks, I wasn't good at hiding leftovers, and today, as always, I was flat broke in the munchie department.

"That's OK," he said. "I do."

He fished a square of Bazooka out of his pocket and chucked it to me. It fell a bit short and I reached to pinch it from the dirt. It felt like Christmas when you could scarf up a freebie. I ripped it open and licked the sugar powder off the comic no one ever read anyway. I jammed the pink square deep between the back molars and had chewed it three good times before I realized that Kyle was still wearing that hard, blank expression.

"That's all right," he said. "I didn't want my half anyway."

I froze. Kyle Skinner was the rudest, hardest, most obnoxious boy that went to Paxon Hill Junior High School, but he sure had his cast-iron rules of etiquette. Figuring out these laws and boundaries was a constant source of pain for me, but it also fascinated me in some deep, secret place. Somehow, these were the real laws of growing up your mom never told you about. I just wish I didn't feel so stupid every time there was an infraction.

He turned away and gazed out at the woods that flanked the dirt road.

"Come up here and have a smoke with me, Jimmy."

My hesitation was embarrassing.

"My mom will smell it on me."

"Huh?"

"My mom will smell it!"

My voice carried louder than it had before, but I knew it wasn't going to do me any good. I used that excuse yesterday when he tried to convince me to light up in my room and blow it out the window. He did seem to forget about the whole thing when he found my school supply drawer and started a rubber band fight, but you just didn't re-gift excuses to Kyle Skinner. He was too quick for that.

In truth, I had no excuse to deflect the fact that I was absolutely petrified of tobacco. In truth, I had nightmarish visions of taking
that puff
and feeling that dirty ghost eat away at my guts. Its gray wisps would scrape at my throat and push through my nose. I would rapidly fizzle away from the inside out and become a spotty skeleton-child, destined to be buried in the back yard under the dandelions.

And all this was stupider than the "mommy" excuse. Kyle smoked all the time and was healthy as a greyhound.

"That's bullshit and you know it," he said. "Butt breath goes away in fifteen minutes."

"How do you know?"

With a jerk of surety, Kyle bent up his knee and slapped the sole of his foot flat to the bulldozer's control panel. He hiked up the bottom edge of his jeans and dug for the smoke pack hidden in his sock.

"Bobby Justice told me."

I was silenced. Just the fact that Kyle had conversed with Bobby Justice was an instant credibility. It made me feel young, and unworldly, and again one step behind the parade.

Bobby Justice was seventeen. He took shop classes half the day, majored in raising hell, and even got arrested once for selling grams of Hawaiian pot under the bleachers on the football field. He drove a jacked-up black Mustang. He wore shit-kicker boots, and a chain hanging out the back pocket in that half-moon that said in its dumb, blind sort of grin, "Fuck off, Chief." Rumor had it that he once pulled a sawed-off shotgun out of his trunk at a Hell's Angels biker party, somewhere between the tube-funnel beer-chugging contest and the motor throw, because some dude was wearing a Lynyrd Skynyrd T shirt that he wanted.

And it was mind-boggling to picture Kyle extracting this information from Bobby Justice in casual conversation. The only reason this bully ignored kids like us was that we were still too young to beat up.

Kyle drew out the pack, ripped away the cellophane, and let it float off on the wind. With a mild sort of alarm I noticed that the brand in his fist was the filterless Chesterfields. Last time I'd looked it was Marlboros.

He scratched at the foil cover and shook one up.

"Come here, sit down, and have a smoke with me, Jimmy." He held it like a pointer for emphasis. "I'm not asking you to steal the change from your mom's purse like I did. I'm not asking you to go down to the Rexalls and tell the old fart that the butts are for your old man, neither. I've already done all that myself. The only thing I want is for your first puff to be with me. Ain't you my new best friend no more? Don't ya want to hang out with the big boys?"

I climbed out of the trench and edged toward the dozer, my face burning, my mind racing. In the past two years friendships had suddenly twisted around by definition, and it was like I hadn't been paying attention in math or something. Up until third grade the fastest readers and the ones who brought in the most clever projects were the coolest. In fourth and fifth the best on the playground sort of shared the rule of the roost with the fast talkers, and the only ones picked on were those accused of being quiet, bookwormy, unpopular gay birds. It seemed I had tons of friends and we told each other everything.

But things shifted in seventh and eighth. Suddenly friendships seemed built on what you could bring to the table, not who you were or the thoughts you could share. A boy who had regular access to his father's
Penthouse
and
Gallery
magazines was far more revered than the "nice" kid in the school choir. Anyone with a steady supply of Pop Rocks, cherry bombs, pump BB guns, and exploding gag cigarette loads stood head and shoulders above those with straight A's and no allowance like me. Cool kids were building monster album collections with the complete works of Zeppelin, Sabbath, Kiss, and The Who, while my only eight-track was a commercial, pop anthology you ordered from TV called
Autumn '73.
Every day it seemed like I was losing ground. I tried talking to Ma sometimes, but her response was always to supply me with thick doses of values after methodically rejecting my requests one by one.

I walked to the dozer.

Kyle scrambled from the big bucket seat and sat on the dozer's thick tread strip between the two side wheels. He slapped the area next to him and I took my place at his side. Our weight bowed the track pad down a bit and it brought our shoulders together. I cupped my hands between my knees. His arm was across my shoulders.

"Now listen," he said. "Don't suck it down like you're gulping a Pepsi. And don't use your teeth. Take a small puff, hold it in your mouth for a second and then breathe it in slow. And when you blow it out don't try to do smoke rings. That shit is for girls."

I nodded. With all the steps and instructions I was more worried about doing it wrong than the effects of doing it in the first place. I guess that was a good thing.

"Go on then, Bozo. Take it," he said. He was holding the pack out over my lap with my cigarette jutting up about a half inch from the others. It was a sentinel on guard duty with Kyle's arm holding me in place. No escape.

I reached for the cigarette. My fingers were shaking a bit.

"Breathe," he said. "Breathe, baby. Stay with me." In a far-off way I noticed that his arm had disengaged itself. I put the cigarette between my lips. Took it back out. Wiped off a little drool. Reinserted. "OK, OK," he said. "Here we go."

He struck a match, cupped it, and brought across the two-fisted treasure. I leaned in going cross-eyed in my trance before the dancing flame. Close up it looked beautiful and deadly. I sucked in carefully and got braced for the hot, nasty swallow.

It was awesome.

Sharp, it hit the back of my throat and rolled into me like a chocolate cloud. It was potent and rich. Forbidden. I blew it out and watched the gray smoke make art on the air, a mushroom cloud spreading to the gauzy, three-fingered hand of a beckoning witch, to thinning curlycues, drifts, trails. My head spun a bit in a friendly sort of a way, and I knew I could handle this. I was older now. Better. I spit my gum out and took another deep drag.

"Now you're ready for the surprise," Kyle said. He was studying me, smoking one himself now. His eyes were thin, but his expression was otherwise neutral. I leaned back.

"Show me."

He hopped down, went to his knees, and reached behind the dozer's front roller. I couldn't see his arm from my angle, and I had the sudden premonition that he was going to fake like something grabbed his hand. He would open his eyes in wide surprise and jam his shoulder into the front of the dozer, giving the illusion he was being yanked really hard from something lurking in the shadows under the load bucket. Of course, this did not happen. If it had, however, I would have been ready and it made me smile. I really was changing for the better.

He came back with a cardboard box about half the size of a car battery. It was old and stained with what was either coffee or puddle splashes, and the front had a sticker that said "16D."

"What is it?" I said. He carefully set it down on the tread a few feet to my left.

"This here is a fine example of why most grown-ups have shit for brains, that's what it is," he said. He gave the box a half turn so we both could view its front label. He took a deep drag of the smoke he'd been lipping, then pointed to the box with the lit end for emphasis.

"Notice, James, the '16.' This stands for three and a half. The 'D' stands for 'penny.' Put them together and the '16D' means three and a half inches of nail. But please explain to this dumb-ass kid what 'D' has anything to do with 'penny,' and what 'penny' has to do with hand nails which are so obviously made of steel and not copper."

I let go a nervous titter which hung in the air for a moment. I took a deep drag off my Chesterfield to fill the space when Kyle didn't respond, and marveled at all the social uses these cigarettes had. During the exhale I reasoned that I wasn't really supposed to understand Kyle's joke yet, but was more there to prep him for the punch line. Another breakthrough. I was really on a roll.

"Where did you get—"

"I clipped them from my Pop's tool box," he said. "Look." He flipped open the top, dug up a nail, and held it outward. It was bent and a bit jagged.

"Why's it all screwy?" I said.

He frowned. I had not kept up with his storytelling rhythm and he didn't want to backtrack. He tossed the nail back into the box and shut the cover.

"When my Pop's done framing a house he walks the job and yanks out all the bent nails."

"Why?"

"He brings them all back to the toolhouse and pulls a major bitch and moan. Gets paid back for each and every one of them."

"Then he'll miss that box!" I had jumped to my feet and chucked away the smoke. "Geez, Kyle, why did you go and do that? He's probably going to kill you and then come for me!"

His eyes went wide.

"I ain't that stupid, James. I found the empty box in the garage two months ago and stashed it in the closet behind my old board games and Lego garbage. I've been filling it up one nail at a time. Cripes, don't be such a fucking dipshit!"

I forced a wounded grin.

"You're the one with a dipshit pal and that makes you a total bonehead."

"Yeah," he said. "I must be freakin' bonkers." He was smiling but I found it hard to mirror it. Just because Kyle knew how to handle his old man didn't mean I'd cracked the code.

Mr. Skinner was Westville's definition of a good ole boy. He drove a mud-splattered, light brown Chevy pickup and always had the back bed filled with ladders, lumber, metal scraps, upside-down wheelbarrows, and garbage barrels filled with square-mouthed shovels, street brooms, steel-tined rakes, and nail-ripping pry bars. He had a chainsaw, a gas-powered chop saw, and a circular saw with a continuous-rim diamond blade on it. He had pickle barrels filled with drills, Sawzalls, nails, and a million miscellaneous hinges, Y-fittings, PVC junctures, and wall anchors. He had an American flag on the hood-side opposite the antenna and a bumper sticker that talked about ripping his pistol from his cold, dead fingers. On the driver's door was his company logo, "One-Truck-Johnny."

I knew the ass-end of that vehicle because Mr. Skinner had grudgingly driven a couple of us home from practice once when our moms were too busy to come by the field this past spring. Kyle, Lars Maynard, and Tommy Birch made me sit out back in the "junkyard." Before we set off, Mr. Skinner had told me to be careful not to "mess up his office back there." He touched his leather belt as if he wasn't afraid to use it, opened a quart of Miller by snapping the cap off in a notch he had cut into the wheel well, and pointed the mouth of the bottle at me meaningfully. Then everyone in the truck-cab had laughed. And if you think the veiled threats and the booze were disquieting, you should have seen old "Pop" on the baseball field.