Shine Your Light on Me (3 page)

He moved silently into the men’s locker room and planted a bomb in one of the empty lockers. He’d been made fun of here, in this room, more times than he could recall. He didn’t like to think about it, yet couldn’t stop himself. The jocks had the looks and the confidence he had never possessed, and there wasn’t much he could do about it except kill them. He didn’t think the majority of them were much of a loss. There might have been one or two who could, or would have, went on to play college football or basketball. They were big fish in a small pond, weren’t they? Better to put them out of their misery now. He’d seen too many of their kind all over town, thirty years after school, pushing their children to live just as they had, regardless of what their children wanted to do with their lives, with their time. He knew one kid, Dewey Langford, who wanted to write poetry, and Bobby didn’t care much for poetry, but what he’d heard Dewey reading in the halls, his lean back hunched and pressed to the cool wall, his voice alive as he read to passing students, had sounded good, it had a depth to it that not many parents would have appreciated because they felt slightly stupid in Dewey’s presence.

And no one had felt more threatened by him than his father, Mark Langford, a man who was still in the graduating class pictures of 1994. And Dewey’s father had burned all of Dewey’s books, flushed all his poetry down the toilet, part of Dewey’s soul with it, no exaggeration, and the kid refused to play sports like his old man wanted, and instead of throwing a football, he took a week to craft his final piece of poetry and he left the letter on his bedside table and his brains all over the wall.

Bobby had heard snippets of it and he couldn’t remember them now, but it was real beautiful. There was a waste, he thought. But far as he could tell, Mark Langford did not blame himself for his son’s suicide, he seemed to simply write it off as something wrong with the boy; thought there had always been something wrong with a boy who put more weight in words than he did the cheers of a crowd.

 Fuck ‘em, parents like that, Bobby thought.

He left the locker room and kept close to the wall. He heard a maintenance man waxing the floor somewhere in the building, the man singing a tuneless rendition of Tommy Petty’s
Last Dance With Mary Jane
.

He took the first branch to his right. The hall had four rooms, one he wasn’t certain of, then the Home Ec room on the right, the art room across from it, the shop at the end. He went straight down the hall, heard the singer drawing closer, and slipped into the classroom. It smelled of freshly cut and routed pine, glue, sweat, stale laughter. The people who loved this place weren’t so bad. They weren’t like the guys that raced the loud cars, drove the big trucks, had big egos to protect the scared little boys living inside them. The kids who enjoyed this room just liked to work with their hands, building something that gave someone else pleasure.

Bobby had tried it himself and found that he didn’t have any talent for woodworking, although he wished he would have because it seemed like a great way to pass the time. His teacher had scarred hands, an easy smile, but his words had been hollow (hadn’t they?) when he’d told Bobby that he could still do it for the process and the love of it. There were few who were a Michael Jordan of anything. But Bobby had a bad night at home the day before, and when the teacher told him that he’d broke down crying, fourteen at the time, three embarrassing years ago, and Mr. Mackey had tried to console him, to find the true meaning of his heartbreak, but Bobby couldn’t tell him that he’d heard his whole life that everybody was great at something, and he’d been searching real hard, and couldn’t find a goddamn thing he was even competent at. He’d been suicidal for a while after that, but he didn’t even like the sight of his own blood, so how was he supposed to end his life?

He held one of the small bombs in his hand. He still loved this room and the feeling it gave other students, much the same way the art room did, and both of them had offered him such hope, a chance for meaning in his life, a direction he could point his endless energy.

All for naught.

All a waste of time in the end.

He set the timer and placed the bomb under Mr. Mackey’s desk. It would be a fitting end for the man. He was just like Bobby, not exceptional at what he did, mediocre if anything, and the world wouldn’t miss him. Bobby would though. He’d think about Mr. Mackey as he moved on with his life, think about the lessons he taught, and the patience he’d had, the easy-going smile, the crinkles at the corners of his eyes, the slap on the shoulder when a student created something that truly impressed him.

He had given everyone creative freedom. Bobby was offering him the same. An early start, he figured, to find his place in the big workshop in the sky, all of Mr. Mackey’s unaccomplished dreams would finally be within his reach and he’d have an eternity to master his discipline.

He backed away from the desk. The coffee mug on the top said #1 DAD!

Bobby shook his head.

There was no such thing.

He left the woodshop and planted a bomb in the art room, then another in the Home Ec room. He avoided the man polishing the floors. He planted a bomb in the bathrooms on both sides of the school and dropped them into garbage containers he passed.

There were only two places left, and both of them frightened him for different reasons.

The girl’s locker room was off the back of the cafeteria on the south side of the building. He stood outside the door for several minutes, so deep in thought a noise behind him startled him. He expected to turn and see his father sitting at one of the tables in the cafeteria, nearest the locker room, that knowing smile on his face, his large hands brandishing the paddle. There would be no moral light in his father’s eyes, only a cold certainty and a determination to correct his son of behavior he did not approve of.

But his father wasn’t there, and he saw that a poster plastered to the wall had come free and banged a table across the cafeteria. He took a deep breath. He only had two bombs left and then he had to get out of there before his luck ran out.

He pushed the door open. It was red, steel, heavy. His limbs shook. He hitched his backpack higher and exhaled as he crossed the threshold into a private place. It smelled so much different than the boy’s locker room. The scents of various perfumes, feminine deodorants, hair sprays, nail polish, bubble gum, baby powder, and other things he could not decipher, nearly overpowered him.

The floor was cement like the boy’s room; the lockers were the same color red as the door. The shower stalls were partitioned. He grinned nervously and looked at the coach’s small office in the corner of the room closer to the door he’d passed through. There were rumors that she was a lesbian, and Bobby’s father said it was pretty disgusting if it was true, and Bobby, like many boys, wondered if she touched herself when she watched the girls strip after P.E., watched their bodies glow beneath the water, heard their laughter like some kind of siren call, and what kind of restraint she must have had to resist the temptation to bed one of those young lambs, because Ms. Mercedes was a fine looking woman and one most of the girls respected and tried to emulate. It wouldn’t have been the first time a teacher was caught in a relationship with a student, not at this school, or any other.

Bobby imagined all the naked flesh that had moved through here, his girl Cindy among them, her pale, thin body, her stringy hair, her too far apart eyes, looking with envy and appreciation of the finer specimens among her peers. He felt sorry for her in a way. Cindy was just as much an outcast as he was. Her parents worked themselves to the bone just to pay the bills and didn’t have money left over to buy her nice clothes; her aunt cut her hair for free and you could tell; her shoes were ratty; she had a hand-me-down purse of such a violent yellow that it assaulted the eyes; her hair was dirty blonde and greasy and thinning; her nose seemed to always be running; her eyes always looked moist.

Yet she was a pretty good person, despite all that, he thought. Stupid in some ways, maybe just in the way she hoped and dreamed that she would do something worthwhile with her life. Bobby had tried to talk about it with her once, asking her how she was supposed to build castles when all her parents and life had supplied her with for material was dry sand. But she was stubborn, and that might help her. And far as he’d seen she wasn’t afraid of working, which was more than he could say for himself.

He walked around the girl’s locker room and wondered what Cindy was up to at that very moment. Probably reading, soaking up some kind of knowledge she figured she could use to improve her circumstances. Bobby shrugged and pulled a bomb from his pack. He taped it under a bench in the center of the room. He wasn’t sure if anybody had first hour P.E. but it didn’t hurt to put one there just in case.

The enormity of what he was doing hadn’t really had time to sink in. How many kids would die? How many teachers? There were only three hundred students, junior high through to seniors like himself. There were thirty teachers, a few groundsmen, about a half dozen women that worked in the kitchen, preparing lunch. He estimated that the bombs would kill at least half, and injure the other half.

Roughly three hundred and forty people.

A lot of funerals. A lot of flowers.

Walking back to the door, he paused, unsure why he was hesitating. But then it came to him that Cindy didn’t listen to him like she should, and he feared that her too hopeful ass might come into school tomorrow anyway, and really she was the only person he’d met who had really given him a fair shake. He passed kids every day who never asked how he was doing, if he was all right, mostly because they didn’t like him, but some just because of who his father was and they suspected he might be some kind of rat. But he wasn’t and he could never prove that to anybody if they didn’t offer him the chance to mess up.

The cafeteria was quiet but far off he could hear the drone of the floor polisher. It sounded like it was on the other side of the school, but in all that stillness, among all that concrete and glass, it was hard to tell how far away exactly the man was working. His melancholy bothered him, and he felt as if he were somehow jinxing himself.

A couple minutes later he was standing outside the office. His dad’s secretary and the teacher’s lounge and his father’s private room were on the other side of the glass crisscrossed with steel wire. It reminded him of a warden’s chambers. He went inside, through the swinging half door that led into the rear quarters, the teachers’ breakroom, the counselor’s office, his dad’s room. The sign on the closed door read Principal Russell.

Bobby frowned.

He started sweating.

He’d saved this room last because it made him feel so many things he didn’t like to question, let alone explore. Inside the room he sat in his dad’s chair. It was expensive, leather, high-backed. The desk was organized, nothing out of place, the pictures of their family and the awards his father had earned were straight on the wall.

A big sham. This was only the man he pretended to be. Nobody really knew what he was like at home once he took off his suit and let his real skin breathe.

• • •

Aria pulled back into LeDoux’s bar at ten after eight. The snow was giving way to rain but the white wet powder was everywhere, and it slushed beneath her shoes as she pulled Jessica from the back seat and held her hand and approached the door full of trepidation.

At first she thought it was because of what she caught Pine doing to her granddaughter, but it was more than that. She could hear the people inside the bar talking, some crying, some passed her, coming outside, just to dump their beers out on the snow and carry the empty bottles back inside.

She draped her arm over the child’s shoulder and opened the door for her and found Aiden and his father and Mitch at the center of a body of stars. All of them seemed to glow from their encounter with the miracle. She knew all of them well enough, and had never seen a one appear even remotely close to how they did now. The pastor was the most animated. She couldn’t blame him; devoting your life to a belief that never offered you anything but a promise, was not an easy road to stumble down. And when he’d gotten cancer, there were many not of the faith who had snickered and believed that he had it coming. It was cruel, not that she was unused to cruelty or harshness, but it said more about the people who found joy in his misery than it did about Pastor Clement or whatever God he chose to worship.

But he had brothers and sisters now, blue collar men and women with scars as deep as they were wide, with hopes they had put on hold because it was difficult to pursue those desires when what little energy they had was spent just getting by. They looked at him and even more so at Aiden as if they were part of a greater plan, one they were being offered a glimpse of, a part of, and their gratefulness was palpable.

Mitch had his back to her and was questioning Aiden but the boy stared at him blankly, and at first Aria thought he had been struck dumb by the incident, or that his mind had been wiped clean, the soul plucked out of him, possibly its essence the source of the light as it had fled his body. But then Aiden shook his head to the question. Aria hadn’t heard it. Others were asking questions as well; there was a murderous tide of voices.

Jessica’s hand was small in Aria’s. She made her way through the crowd, thinking that she wanted to see the young girl speak again as badly as Mitch did. Two months prior, when Rebecca had fallen asleep at the wheel and hit the tree and died, the young girl had been with her. Jessica had sat in the back seat for twelve hours with her mother’s corpse, the scent of her blood, all the unanswered questions, before someone had found them.

She had not spoken since, and one of her eyes was always too large, as if extremely focused on the world she was stuck in, while the other was squinted, as if to peer into the distance of eternity, hoping to catch a glimpse of her mother’s face.

The doctors had been no help: some said she might speak again, others said she might not. There was no definitive answer. None of them as of yet knew what was wrong with her eyes. Mitch had refused to let them open his baby’s skull if it came to that. And here, in this room, was his greatest hope.