The Fates Will Find Their Way (6 page)

8

D
anny Hatchet was a weird kid, always had been. He wore a sweatshirt all through summer, even on the hottest days. He kept it on at pool parties, like those fat kids who thought they were fooling everyone by keeping on their T-shirts at the ocean. But Danny wasn’t fat, not even a little.

He was the kid always taking pills at lunch, the kid who pulled out brown medicine bottles and a small carton of chocolate milk from his lunch box instead of a sandwich and chips. He’d line up the bottles and open them one by one, and invariably we’d drop our heads into our hands and say, “Not this again. Gimme a fucking break. Enough with the pills already.” But Danny took the pills daily, without ever taking any real notice of our remarks. First he’d drink the chocolate milk, then he’d pop in a pill, one at a time, over and over. He couldn’t even get the order right—pill first, then the milk. That’s the kind of kid he was. We asked him about that, about the order, and he said, like he was happy we had asked and even happier to be able to articulate a clear answer, “I don’t like the taste of the pills. If I drink the milk first, then the pill never touches my tongue.” He smiled when he said it, like he was proud to have completed a sentence. We shook our heads and waited for him to finish. We asked him about the chocolate milk, too, but he just grinned and took a sip. Every day with the chocolate milk. It was too much.

He picked his face during class, sometimes until it bled, and the teacher would excuse him even when he hadn’t asked to be excused. He was always saying things like, “What’d I do? I don’t get it.” And, really, he didn’t get it, you could just tell. There wasn’t the willfulness in him to be a smartass. Teachers were always shaking their heads, saying things like, “Oh Danny. Enough already.” Or, when he was apologizing for something he didn’t understand, they might say, depending on their mood, something as snide as, “Yeah, you
are
sorry, Mr. Hatchet. You certainly are
sorry
.” (Teachers were always calling us by our last names when they were mad or disappointed. Like it made it easier for them to tear us apart, break us down, if they pretended we were other adults.)

Our mothers were constantly making sure that Danny was included on weekends or summer vacations. “He doesn’t have the same advantages that we have,” they might say, trying to hide a slight gleam in their eyes. “He hasn’t been as lucky.” Words like
lucky
and
advantages
we knew, even at our young age, were upscale euphemisms for
not poor
,
not the son of a drunk
and, later,
not the son of a suicidal mother
.

Poor
, by the way, is a relative term. The Hatchet house was as big as any of ours. They drove decent enough cars. (Remember the Nissan 300ZX his father brought home brand new during one of his many midlife crises? We were always groaning about who was going to have to sit in the trunk, but Danny—even though we usually made him take the shit seat—was always really excited when his dad was coming to get us, because he was coming in a sports car. But the sports car was a Nissan! They couldn’t even get that right.)

At any rate, the point is, they went on vacations. They came to our clubs. What made them
poor
were the inconsistencies, the strange, inexplicable differences from how we lived, how we did things. The Hatchet house, for example, was not what our mothers would have called
well kept
. The paint was chipping; the bushes were overgrown; the lawn wasn’t mown as often as it should have been. Mrs. Hatchet (who, at any given moment, seemed approximately five minutes away from crawling under a bed and crying her eyes out) installed lacey curtains when everyone else was putting in blinds. There were dust motes wherever there was sunshine strong enough to illuminate them. Their kitchen trash can never quite closed because the trash was always just a little too full. There were rooms with boxes that never got used (the rooms or the boxes). There were doors that we never saw opened—imagine that! The floors in the house were carpeted, and not just in the basement. Everything about Danny was slightly dirty, somewhat messy, and definitely a little bit smelly. He wore a patina of grime. A patina of gloom.

But in the end, Danny was Danny. He was weird, yeah, but he was one of us. And he must have known it. Because if there were longings in Danny to be at any school other than ours, we never saw it. Other than being a generally downtrodden-type kid, he never seemed especially to notice that he lived differently than we did. Like with his dad’s Nissan. He genuinely believed that car was cool. And it never even occurred to him that we didn’t feel the same way.

W
hat we knew—what none of us was supposed to know but what each of us knew because our mothers couldn’t help themselves and so made us promise, one at a time, each believing she was the only mother spilling the beans and that it would never get around—was that Danny’s grandmother footed the bill. She footed the bill for almost everything. She footed the bill for the Hatchets’ house, their membership to the clubs, their annual Christmas trips up north, Mrs. Hatchet’s prescriptions, Mr. Hatchet’s spending sprees, and definitely Danny’s education.

We had vague images of an old lady sitting by herself in a decaying mansion in New England, writing checks with Danny’s name on them. As children, we were jealous of that old lady. We wanted her to be our grandmother. We wanted checks of our own. We wanted better vacations. The things we could have done with that money! What we believed was that Danny didn’t know how to spend it, that Danny’s family didn’t know how to spend it. (Again, the Nissan.) We believed that the grandmother, in forgetting to pass along the gene for ambition and success to her son, Danny’s father, had also forgotten to pass along the gene for taste, for imagination, for knowing how to spend what you have.

Of course, we got older. Mrs. Hatchet died our freshman year of high school. Danny’s father was in and out of rehab, and Danny himself seemed only a few years away from the same fate. The grandmother died. The checks stopped coming. Mr. Hatchet inherited, but not as much as he had hoped. He cut Danny off. It was for his own good, he said. Time to teach him responsibility, he said. But we were in our twenties by then, just out of college, too old to be taught anything we hadn’t already learned. That’s when Danny started calling, asking us for money. “Don’t do it,” our mothers said. “Mr. Hatchet said he’s only using the money to buy drugs.”

“He should know,” we said under our breaths.

“What’s that?” they asked.

“Oh, nothing, nothing.”

At first it was an us-against-them thing, and we couldn’t help but give him money. Twenty here, a hundred there. Maybe each of us thought we were the only one he was asking. But eventually we married, had babies, acquired bills. The twenty here and hundred there got annoying. But that wasn’t till later.

I
t was Danny who, a week after Thanksgiving, hit a dog the year we got our driver’s licenses. (This was almost exactly one year after Mrs. Hatchet committed suicide, though nobody really talked about it like that.) And so leave it to him to be the downer, the precautionary tale we told each other on long, slow drives home from the movie theater or trips to the mall. “Slow down already,” we might say, nearing the hairpin curve on Sycamore. “You’re going to Hatchet something if you don’t slow down.” We were sophomores, newly sixteen, a year shy of missing Nora Lindell terribly. We were creeps, jerks, idiots. We were boys; we couldn’t help ourselves.

Trey Stephens was in the passenger seat the night Danny hit the dog. They were going to a party or coming from one. Who can remember? What we remember is that Danny Hatchet hit a dog. It was late, dark. Trey said to keep driving. “Book it, man,” would have been the way he said it. “Flee the scene.” But already Danny was leaning towards vulnerability as his signature trait in life, towards skittishness and sensitivity. He’d only recently learned of Sarah Jeffreys’ rape, though it had happened years earlier. Probably he was already feeling guilty about insisting he put his fingers where another man had violently and disrespectfully put himself.

And then, that night, there was a glint, a thud, a howl. In the headlights, to the right of the car, knocked into the grass, there was a dog, panicked, hyperventilating, not unlike Danny.

Maybe, if we’d been there, we too would have preferred to flee the scene, happy to be told what to do, to have someone else make the decision. Who knows? And maybe Danny also wanted to drive away, leave the dog, but even in the dull yellow light of the Nissan’s headlights, he could see the dog wasn’t dead. He could see the thing flopping around, trying to get up. Trying, but falling, whimpering. It was pathetic. The whole thing was just too pathetic. And this, more than anything, is why Danny got out of the car.

He’d seen it in a movie, probably, that you should cover an injured animal’s head so it can’t bite you while you’re trying to save it. Because how else would Danny have known to take off his shirt and toss it on the dog’s head?

“It was crazy,” Trey told us the next night, while we sat or stood or crouched around Trey’s basement pool table. “You should have seen it. I didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.” Trey told the story, of course, but Danny was there, his back to us. He stood at the sliding glass door, waiting, like any minute he might make a break for it, leave us, leave this neighborhood behind. But he stayed through the entire story, interrupting only occasionally to disagree or shake his head and say something quietly, not even defensively, like, “No, that’s not how it happened.”

What did happen, though, was Danny eventually got the dog in the backseat of his dad’s car. Trey hadn’t moved from the passenger seat, except to roll down the window and yell at him. “You’re fucking crazy,” he said, half laughing, half shivering in the cold. “This is fucking crazy. Ah, man, there’s blood.”

The dog was whimpering. Trey gave us a great impression. “Mmmm,” he said, pulling up his hands in front of his chest and letting his fingers fall limp. “Mmm. Errrrr. Mmmmmm. Bambi eyes,” he said, opening his eyes wide and innocent. “Fucking Bambi eyes this dog had.” We laughed because it was funny—Trey moaning like a sick animal. But a glance at Danny’s back and we couldn’t help, one at a time, a singular private thought, to wince at Trey’s delivery. We couldn’t help but be thankful we weren’t there, even as we said, repeatedly, things like, “Man, oh, I wish I’d been there.”

The dog’s back legs were mangled, sloppy, limp. There was blood all over the backseat, though neither Danny nor Trey could stop the bleeding. “Blood all over,” Danny told us from his station at the sliding glass doors. The night a black wall in front of him. “That’s true. Blood everywhere.”

Trey asked about a tag once Danny was back in the front seat. Maybe he thought they could dump the dog with the owners and keep going, forget the accident ever happened.

“Collar. No tag,” said Danny. “I checked.” He wiped his face.

“Oh shit,” said Trey. “You’re crying? Oh shit. Too much, man. Crying?” (And this is where Danny had said from his spot at the sliding glass doors, again softly, “No, that’s wrong. No crying,” though he didn’t say it angrily; it was just a necessary argument to make.) Trey was laughing in the passenger seat; it would have been impossible not to laugh. Laugh or cry, your choice, but if you imagine the moment—really close your eyes and think about two boys sitting in a car by the side of the road late at night, all alone, a dying dog in their backseat—you understand that something—something guttural and uncontrollable—had to be released from the body in order just to make it through.

“Fuck you,” said Danny finally. “Fuck you, fuck you.”

Sitting in the front seats, the boys turned and looked at the dog. It was cold that night and Danny should have been cold without his shirt but if he was, he wasn’t aware of it. He was skinny and muscle-y in that undeniably poor way. The muscles of hard times, of a body ready to fend for itself, of a body whose mother wasn’t around to feed it properly. He touched the dog’s ribs. It whimpered.

Trey broke the silence. “What’s the plan, man? This is bad, you know. Bad. So what’s the plan?”

Danny started the car. “We take him to the vet.” Simple, straightforward, the right thing to do.

And that
was
the plan, and it’s what Danny meant to do. It’s where Danny pointed the car when they finally started moving again. But the dog died before they’d driven a mile, and so where they ended up—some indeterminate number of hours later, past curfew if either of those two had had a curfew, which they didn’t, but many hours past
our
curfew—where they ended up was in the woods, probably not too far from where the man in the Catalina might eventually take Nora Lindell. Two counties over, who knows how many miles away from us and our houses, into the forest, near the water, close to the clearing. They drove the Nissan into the woods and the dog, dead finally, was chucked by both boys onto the ground. “A missing dog is better than a dead one,” Trey had said, and left it at that.

Danny would have covered the dog with leaves. Trey didn’t have to say it for us to know for certain this happened. Danny didn’t like things in pain; he wouldn’t have liked the idea of a dead dog exposed, and so he would have covered the dog with leaves. In part out of respect for the dog, in part out of disgust for what he’d done, in part out of some twisted memory of his mother. Trey would have gotten back in the car, ready for the night to be over, the novelty of the hit having worn off for him. Maybe he would have used Danny’s shirt to wipe up the blood while he waited. But the blood would have been dry by then or at least clumpy, gelatinous. If anything, he would have made the mess bigger, spread the stain farther.

T
he dog, we found out later, belonged to the Wilsons, whose kids were still in middle school. We didn’t feel accountable to them, and so when the “missing” signs went up, we kept our mouths shut, managing somehow to keep this secret from our mothers. It felt like the first of any real conspiracies.