Seven Deadly Pleasures (23 page)

I decided to let him get his own Goddamned nails and pick mine up in the process. What did I owe him? A Chesterfield and a piece of gum? I didn't care. I wasn't going to do this. I had enough guilt dumped on me at home. Weren't friends supposed to be your relief from that stuff?

I spun around to face Kyle and somehow stammer my thoughts out to words, but he was not even looking my way. He was looking at something off to the right. Something absolutely mesmerizing.

I followed the line of his gaze and saw the car coming down the ramp.

It was coming fast, yet everything seemed to be caught in slow motion. The air suddenly tasted rusty and harsh. Kyle grabbed my arm. My stomach was a lead ball, my ears hot as branding irons.

We scrambled behind a red dumpster and there was the gritty sound of a car bumper banging from roadway to dirt. Kyle dropped to his knees for the low view and I stayed up high.

Sharp sun lanced off the chrome and plastered a hot glare to the windshield. It was a dull orange Honda Civic, already swerving, plumes of dirt spitting up behind in huge turkey-tails.

My mouth was working the word "no" silently.

There was a series of sharp "pop" sounds. The car did a rapid back-and-forth, left to right to left to right, then shot straight toward us. Like a yanked sheet the glare on the windshield vanished, and I was eye-to-eye with the driver.

She had straight blonde hair. I thought she was wearing one of those plastic, red, three-quarter-moon hair bands that formed her bangs into their own separate little statement, but I couldn't be sure at the moment. Her face had a long, sharp sort of beauty that was almost regal, and of that I was quite sure. Then the moment was gone. She overcompensated for control and yanked the wheel the other way. Now I saw the back of the car and the huge oak tree rising up ahead of it to the left of a long jobsite trailer.

There was a hard clap. The butt end of the car actually jumped, and small fragments of bark and glass burst to both sides. The car bounced twice and settled. The raised dirt split into threads and blew off into the woods like ghosts.

The car horn sounded.

Its steady wail fingered its way into the afternoon sky and spiraled up to an accusing, hot summer sun.

2.

We both spoke at once, and then took a moment to absorb what was voiced by the other.

"Run," I said. This was Kyle's problem. It was a bad dream that could not possibly have happened to me. Mom's specialty was trashing news flashes like this. She taught me to be concerned on the outside, and to turn up my nose just beneath the surface. We were above people who got caught up in dumb legal stuff. The proper response was to purse our lips gently and trade knowing glances when the trailer trash acted up. Dinnertime war council was all about our superiority and our ability to interpret the world around us. Surely, this would all go away if I ran fast enough and promised not to tell.

"We killed her," Kyle had said.

One of those nails was mine. The fact that dumping them was not my idea in the first place did not matter anymore. We were in this together.

I still thought we could run. I did not have time to consider what the slightly older boy I was on the verge of growing into would call "social responsibility," and what the boy I was on the verge of leaving behind would call "owning up." The car horn was a danger. Though we were five miles from Westville Central, there was bound to be someone passing by on the overpass with the windows down. And perpendicular to the dirt road, through the front leg of Scutters on the other side of a shallow, wooded valley of sorts stood my own house. Was it a quarter-mile from here? A half? Was Lucy out on her lead, up on her back legs, front paws scratching at the air in response to the sirenlike sound coming from this side of the trees?

I opened my mouth to argue what I thought was the obvious, and was denied the opportunity. Kyle was walking away. He was not running, but walking with casual purpose in the last direction I would have expected.

He was walking toward the Honda. His hands were in his pockets just to the fingertips and his shoulders hunched in just a bit toward his neck. He gave a cool glance to the side and I saw his future. In one hand he had a crowbar and in the back of his waistband was a Colt .45 with the safety flipped off. The Honda's horn was now the alarm in a jewelry store downtown after hours with a shattered storefront window and three smashed display cases inside. Kyle casually glanced down both sides of the avenue to see if the cavalry was onto him yet, and approached the getaway car. And he didn't approach it on the run, even though one of Westville's finest was just rounding the corner of Ludlow and Main. He walked toward it with casual purpose.

I expected Kyle to look through the window of the Honda and give himself a "one-two-three," but he didn't. He simply yanked open the door and leaned in. Through the short rear window I saw his elbow piston backward. The horn stopped as if it was cut by a blade. He backed out, slammed shut the door, bent, and puked into the dirt.

I suddenly wanted my father, and a cramp of loneliness and hopelessness opened me up inside. Mom couldn't help me here. Mom pushed morals and preached lessons and soothed stomach aches and provided verbal simulations that
proved
mean people were insecure on the inside, but this was out of her realm. It wasn't even in her universe.

When I'd had man stuff to talk about I used to approach Dad and beg for "Boy's Club." As busy as he was, he always seemed to make time for these moments, most probably because it both excluded Mother and also helped him see himself for a moment as "Dear old Dad" with the pipe and the confident smile you saw in Fifties movies or the sugar tins and cookie jars with Norman Rockwell prints on them.

Once, back in fifth grade, I asked his advice after breakfast when Mom went to check the laundry downstairs. It was Saturday.

"Dad," I'd whispered.

"Yeah, Skipper." He turned down the corner of the paper and peered over it. My eyes were wide and earnest.

"I have to ask you a
question
!"

"Right." He put the paper down, folded it in thirds, and looked at his watch.

"Let's go."

We slipped out through the sliding glass doors and went to our spot on the log bench by the tire swing. I proceeded to tell him that yesterday when I went back to the school to get a social studies workbook I'd left in my cubby, I caught Spencer Murphy stealing Mrs. Levitz's science test from the top drawer of her desk. It had me frozen in the doorway. I looked over my shoulder for a janitor and saw nothing but empty hallway.

"Hey, dork!" Spencer said. He was a tall, thin boy with disheveled reddish hair. He had what seemed a permanent cowlick on the back left side of his head, early acne, an upturned nose flooded with dark freckles, and ears as small as quarters. He was wearing a light blue shirt with the Copenhagen tobacco logo written across the chest in cursive. There were stains of sweat under his arms. His face had paled, and the pimples on his cheeks shone out like stars. He took a menacing step toward me, the test between his thumb and index finger.

"Tell anyone, Raybeck, and I'll say you were in on it. I'll tell Principal LaShire you dared me to do it, I swear."

Mom would have hit the roof. She would have called Spencer's parents, demanded a meeting with LaShire, rounded up all the other kids involved, and lectured them all about "ethics." If she didn't get satisfaction, she would have gone to the board, and after that, the county paper. I would have been labeled the world's worst snitch and banished to the special ed. lunch table for life.

Dad just got out his calculator.

"What's your average in science so far, son?"

"Around a 95."

"More a 93 or a 97? Be precise, Jimmy."

I closed my eyes. The in-class report on the nervous system didn't go so well last week. I hadn't gotten a grade sheet for it yet, and I had been riding a 94 up until then.

"Maybe a 90."

"How many questions are on this test Spencer
borrowed
?"

"Fifty, I think."

He punched a bunch of numbers into his calculator.

"You're going to get eleven of those answers wrong. Make it every third or fourth, then clump a few together in a row. That'll leave you a 78. Considering it's a big one at the end of the marking period, I would imagine it might be worth fifteen or twenty percent. You'll wind up with a 'B' for the semester that you'll have to live with. If Spencer gets caught you never knew anything about it."

He tousled my hair.

"You're my tiger."

It was pure survival in its most practical form, and I needed that kind of logic in the here and now. I needed my Dad to hit his calculator, snip the goodie-two-shoes stuff to its bare bones, and map me a way out of this.

Kyle wiped off his mouth with the back of his forearm and came up to me. He stopped a few feet before me, put his hands on his hips, and looked around. By default, his logic was the only logic that was going to be heard around here, and he voiced it in a tone almost as cool as my father had done out by the tire swing three-odd years before.

"Listen, Jimmy, and please listen good. We have to get rid of her. We have to make her vanish like fucking Houdini. See, yesterday Barry Koumer called you a pussy while we were checking out his dad's compound bow, and to defend you I told him we were coming up here today to raise all kinds of hell. If someone finds this wreck, Koumer the Rumor is going to point it straight back at you. So there ain't gonna be any running, Jimmy. Stop standing there with your mouth open and start picking up nails."

Nothing left but me, Kyle, and the street logic. There would be no "tsk-tsk" over the rims of our herbal tea mugs and no quick fixes totaled up on the calculator. We were two young boys who had been left no choice at the crossroads, scarred, hardened, and under the gun to hide a dead body by sundown.

3.

The nails were everywhere. A small colony of them had remained in the strip between the dumpster, the dozer, a few stacks of three-foot-by-twelve piping, and various pieces of construction equipment. Still, the Honda had scattered many of them into trickier nooks and crannies. I found two under the rack of a gas generator and seven in the shadow of a huge compressor that said "Emglo" on it. There were storage boxes and gravel troughs gated off near the green construction trailer, and I found six nails playing chameleon with the bottom of the chain link fence. The were three nails hiding under a long roll of razor twine that had caught on a wooden surveyor's marker with an orange strip-flag on it, and I cut my middle finger on the withdraw when I finally managed to coax out the third bent fastener.

I'd filled all four pockets and I widened my sweep. On the far side of the trailer, toward the oak tree now directly to my left, I found a good many clever ones that had bounced into the dead grass that split the dirt road from the woods. I found five more in a patch of wild ivy below a trio of birches and then I backed on all fours into the dirt road. I took my time with the bloody horror only a few feet away. I sifted my hands back and forth for leftovers beneath the dusty surface. Sweaty hair dangled in front of my forehead.

From behind I heard Kyle open the car door for a second time. There was that wheezing sound that happened when a knee got pressed down to an old seat, then muffled shifting and knocking about.

"Jesus Christ," he said. "Get the fuck
off
me!"

I got to my feet and turned.

The passenger side of the car was smashed in, and I really had no window to look into. Not like I wanted to study the damage or anything, my eyes just sort of fell there at first. It looked like a smunched-in picture frame with turned edges. I moved around the back of the vehicle to get a view of Kyle's side of it. Ass in the air, he was buried in the driver's opening all the way to the waist. The car was rocking a bit, and it was clear that he was struggling with something on the floor.

He backed out and his face was a twist of aggravation. A smear of the woman's blood zigzagged across the chest of his T-shirt and a wipe of it stained his left cheek in a shape like the Nike logo that came out three years before. He shrugged his shoulders like the dope I must have looked like, paused, then looked to the side and threw up his hands.

"Well, don't just stand there," he said. "Try shifting your ass and helping me out over here."

I came forward a bit. My wrists were throbbing from the doggie-walk and my eyes were burning. I got close enough to touch the back left corner of the Honda's fender with my knee and stopped.

This was it.

Whatever Kyle expected of me it was sure to involve the dead woman, and I wasn't ready and it wasn't fair. While I had been picking up nails, Kyle had already hurdled a stage or two ahead of me, graduating with fast honors from looking to pushing at the dead thing and yelling. I hadn't managed my first solid glance yet.

I took a peek through the back window and made out the form of her head. It leaned to the right with that crown of blonde hair swirled around. It looked hot and disturbed. It looked like disbelief, rage, and disgrace.

I brought down my eyes to the back seat area and suddenly I knew her, or at least it felt like I did.

At an odd angle between the right side of the car, the void, and the back of the passenger seat, there was a picnic basket made of weaved bamboo. It had been filled with a bunch of stuff now vomited across the vinyl from the impact. There was a ground blanket with braided frays at the edges still half rolled up in the bottom of the basket, its other side unfurled. It had maroon stitchings of wolves and bears on it. There were a few paperbacks scattered across the blanket and the seat. One was missing its cover, and the others were face down and open like birds. In the far left corner was an upside-down bunch of dried roses tied with a rubber band. It had shed most of its dead petals in its trip across the seat and had left a trail that settled over the books and the blanket. Deeper in on the floor it seemed as if there was a pair of yellow flips-flops, a squeegee, a record album by Jackson Browne, and something with red streamers. Could have been a kite.