The November Criminals (2 page)

Senseless or not, the murders eventually breathed out the last of their public thrill. All the Samaritans lost interest. There was this hideous memorial set up in front of the Stubb’s. Mounds and mounds of cheap, stiff-looking blue and yellow flowers, irises and ragged daisies, still mingled with the baby’s breath florists cram into their bouquets. And you know what kind of people leave flowers at public memorials, anyway. The anonymous, lonely, and deranged, in search of some free-floating emotion, some imaginary connection to the dead. Kevin sort of faded from the scene. Yes, there was slight, lingering unease among my classmates. But it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with them, if you see what I mean: it was contemplative, self-directed. As we had been encouraged to be all our lives, from four years old onward, to look for our own metaphysical condition in others. This effacing process continued until Kevin was only memorable as a disruption in the peaceful flow of events.

Then came the third day of school. We had a scratchy announcement about Kevin, about the murders, on the PA. It sounded like the speaker—Dr. Karlstadt, our principal and my world history teacher—was addressing us from fucking Tartarus, harsh, muted, and vague. “Attention, Kennedy students. Attention, Kennedy students. As some of you may already know, the Kennedy community suffered a loss this summer. Kevin.” Pause. The mike cut off then, I assume so that Dr. Karlstadt could check her pronunciation. “Kevin
Broadus
, a rising senior. Our thoughts are with him and with his family.” Pause. I knew what was coming next. “Here are this morning’s announcements. The women’s restroom on the third floor is out of order.” And Dr. Karlstadt continued, in her even voice, detailing the day’s service failures and after-school practice schedules for various intramural organizations.

There was an assembly the day after this announcement, as though to reassure us that we never had to think about Kevin again. The choir opened with “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” We have an excellent choir, restrained violence in their voices. Their name is the Singing Tigers (the tiger is Kennedy’s mascot), which is a name that I thought was awful until I realized it was, in a bizarre way, amazing. Dr. Karlstadt gave a speech. The microphone kept keening with feedback, and then she’d bang on it with two fingertips, stroking her gull-colored special-occasion scarf with the other hand. “We gather here today to say good-bye to a valued member of the Kennedy community. He’ll be missed by his teachers for his diligence. He’ll be missed by the band, which is now short one excellent saxophone player.” On and on in that vein, for however much time she and the other administrators had blocked out. Then the choir, in gold-and-amethyst robes (Kennedy’s colors), sang “Mary Don’t You Weep” to close things out, swaying in time and clapping their hands, making a communal leaden thud, the beat of a huge hollow drum.
Sic transit
, right? Even the unremarkable deserve pomps and works. The thing I remember most clearly, though? Alex Faustner, maybe the number one cunt in my grade, sitting next to me and
complaining
about how “all this”—she meant singing “Mary Don’t You Weep”—violated her First Amendment rights. She says things like that. She announced this as we were filing out. I wanted to tell her to shut the fuck up. But she wandered away with her murmuring friends before I could speak. In addition to being a huge cunt, Alex is—I’m sure you’re
astonished
to hear this—one hundred percent, rest-of-society-agrees beautiful, long dark hair, slender, a low rich voice.

So there it was. Our duty was done. The tombstone inscribed. However you want to put it. And nothing else would ever have happened to me—I mean nothing out of the ordinary—if I hadn’t gotten high and gone to the Bench with a friend of mine that afternoon. Not a friend. An
associate
. Just someone I associated with because one associates with people. Out of habit, right? And not to
talk things over
. That’s what most people my age waste their time doing, talking away all their energy and intention. It’s hard not to, because everything is so undecided, you believe you can transform into anything, overcome anything. No one can look at all that potential and not sink into terror or at least be tempted into lethargy by the apparently luxurious quantity of time before you.
What a pretentious asshole
, you’re thinking. It doesn’t matter. I
know
I’m right.

This
associate
was called Digger Zeleny. Not on her birth certificate, but that’s the nickname she and everyone else uses. (Real name: Phoebe.) We’d known each other since the beginning of our time at Kennedy. She was a frequent, reasonable customer of mine, and an acknowledger of my in-class sarcasm, as I was of hers. Her nickname is weird, I know, but she’s even gotten our teachers to use it. I asked her about it, right after we met, and she refused to tell me. This was four years ago. But a week later, when I sold her weed for the first time, and we ended up smoking some of it together, she came clean. When she was a kid, she had a sandbox in her backyard, where she spent most of her time digging. Not making castles or fake pies and hamburgers or anything, just digging and filling the hole, and then digging some more, and mumbling to herself the whole time,
Dig-dig-diggety-dig
. She continued this practice when she started kindergarten, and some genius in her class started calling her Digger. To make fun of her. So she bashed him in the face with her plastic shovel, and then with her bucket, and afterward refused to answer anyone who
didn’t
address her as Digger. She took
proprietorship
of the insult. She’s that hardheaded. Her parents had to take her, she told me, to a psychologist to get her to revert to Phoebe. But she defeated him too, and Digger she stayed. “I never liked Phoebe anyway, that much,” she muttered through a mouthful of smoke. “I
suspect
I was named after that guy’s sister in
Catcher in the Rye
. I started suspecting when I had to read it, I mean. So fuck
that.”

We cut out right after the assembly—there’s a little-known exit in the corridor that curves between our main chancel-like building, which is always filled with this horrible brown light, and the auditorium—and headed over to the Bench, which is a cedar bench set in a small deer park on the expansive property of a private school down the street from Kennedy, Brent Academy, named after our city’s first and least corrupt mayor, Robert Brent. We discussed a lot of initial trivia, and then I just let her talk, so I could avoid the real subject. She was telling me something about her mother, who’s a doctor, an in-depth fumbler in other people’s machinery, not some dermatologist or something. Her mother hates me. Understandable. Even though she doesn’t know the full extent of my relations with her daughter. We were stoned, a bit thick-lipped but still
compos mentis
. I sat there and watched her tweaking her hair and shoving the glasses back up onto the bump, that little Mediterranean bump, on the bridge of her nose. A path of scalp stood out, a demarcator, in Digger’s dark hair, a dumb dead white line. Shadows curtained the grass at our feet, which was still lush, and crept up over our ankles—a heavy cloud was passing. And then we were in the September light again. I was so high my head ached, a beating numbness above the roof of my mouth. Weed is the consummate drug for adolescents, because it induces that weak-shit sense of potential I was just talking about. This cloud swooped over us and cut off the light, and the sudden shift jarred me: here’s the light, here’s the darkness. Nobody wants to go into the darkness, to cross that line, right there, over by the clump of pines, that rooftop, whatever. The
physical specifics
don’t matter. Nobody wants it, it’s not at
all
what is wanted, but you can’t help
looking
at it, at the dividing line, and wanting to cross it
anyway
. The whole time Digger was telling me this story about her mother fishing a forceps out of someone that another surgeon had left in.

“And you can’t tell anybody. It would be proof of malpractice anyway. And it was this old black lady. So it makes the hospital super-vulnerable, legally.”

“What like just passed over us?” I mumbled.

“Dude, a cloud? What are you talking about? You are
fucked
up.” She chortled, and then I was off into the trees, to get out of the light and into the shadow, which cooled my hot forehead. My limbs hurt now, a dull body-wide ache. From the thicket I heard her call out my name twice, and then give up. It took a few minutes to recover my composure. I was still hideously stoned, though, in that phase of weak hilarity.

“Dude, Kevin Broadus. I mean, what do you even
do
with that,” I told Digger, still leaning against a tree.

“Are you all right?” she trilled.

“Do you think they’ll find the guy?”

“What guy?”

“The guy who killed him. I don’t know. Whoever. The guy.”

“Dude, were you even friends with him?”

I huffed out a long breath. Grinding my shoulder against the comforting wrinkles of the bark.

“No, it’s fine, it’s just like it doesn’t matter. Your story like kind of fucked me up, I guess.”

She squinted at me, saying, “You are all
over
the place, dude.” And then returned to her narration. Dr. Zeleny—I’d met her a few awkward times, as I snuck down from Digger’s room—was as tiny as Digger. Tinier, maybe. The first time we met, she was wearing a short-sleeved periwinkle Oxford, which revealed her muscle-clotted forearms. The thought of her sawing open someone’s chest cavity, the blinding operation lights glancing off her fine-modeled avian head, terrified me as much as it made inevitable sense. The single occasion we’d
spoken
she’d thrust out an arm for a shake, her corded wrist manacled in a matte-silver Gestapo captain’s watch. Digger looks nothing like her, except that they’re both short. I gave up trying to explain to her about Kevin. I had nothing to explain, really, just a gaggle of stoned, moronic, unrefusable thoughts. So I listened to her talk about the hospital problems some more. My jaw clenched, along with my fists. I wanted to hit someone. For my own stupidity, I guess. But there was no one to hit, so I shook Digger’s hand and walked to my car.

I went to sleep when I got home, for an hour or two. In the car, I’d listened to the gargling radio, but I couldn’t stand it after one song, so I rolled down the window and listened to the wind inhabiting my neighborhood. The house was dark when I walked in—not dark but dim, as it is when my father is in his studio. He shuts off every light. And pulls the shades. This always mystified me, but it’s easier just to open them than to inquire or argue. But that night I stumbled through the dim house shivering, and slept with my heavy shoes still on. Have you ever noticed how heavy shoes are if you fall asleep in them? Like they contained reminders of gravity, of your bound state, right? An hour or two of sleep, and then my father woke me up. He had turned on the light in my room, which I had relocated to the basement in seventh grade. It’s comforting and windowless there. Secure. He had turned on the lights and bent over me, and his hilarious ponytail had slipped over his shoulder and was painting the air under his chin. “My Greek urn,” he mumbled, “exploded.” “I don’t know what to say,” I answered. The whole intrusion had the stagy, rushing tone of a dream. “It
exploded
. What’s the fucking
point
of all this?” My father cannot react to inconveniences without finality, without mentally removing himself from the landscape of life. This makes it easier (I think?) for him to suffer no reaction at all to
major
problems or catastrophes. So call it an adaptation, maybe. I knew where he was going with his speech, anyway:
Sometimes I think, Addison, I just fantasize sometimes about throwing myself under a bus
. His usual rhetorical capstone.

He also
always
uses my full name, in consequence of which I have never developed a nickname, in consequence of which everyone
else
, from Dr. Karlstadt on down, calls me Addison. He finished his speech about suicide, and I gave him a look of … what? Sympathy? Consolation? He accepted it and patted my shoulder, the clay still staining his nails and the faint webs of wrinkles on the skin between his fingers. My father’s hands, I should note, are huge, the paws of some clumsy, lugubrious animal. I was drenched in sweat. I felt as though I’d been swimming for hours against a nameless and powerful tide. Just from one afternoon of school. We overestimate our fortitude. After my father left me, I tried to do my calculus. No luck. I tried to translate some of the
Aeneid
. No luck. I lay back down, dressed and iron-quiet, and struggled into sleep an hour before sunrise. He was already burning pots when I woke up and checked the backyard, where the kiln is. I could see eyes and leaves of fire lashing out from its ash-colored bricks. Almost feel the sucking heat, in fact.

I made some coffee—which tasted, as usual, like earth—and I drove to Kennedy, early as fuck, and smoked some cigarettes at the Flagpole. This is the flagpole in front of our school. The flag is at permanent half-mast: the crank has rusted and no one can or will replace it. There’s a big vacant concrete court between you and school when you sit there. Smokers have used it as a meeting place for as long as I’ve been at Kennedy. I got through half a pack, watching the light, looking for shadows, which don’t exist at that hour in the fall. All the asphalt looked blue. This, I came to believe later, was the day when it began. When the whole process started that left me freed of my part-time occupation. And maybe even in possession of knowledge I lacked. But you’ll have to judge that for yourself.

II
.

C
ONTRARY TO WHAT
you might have assumed, Digger Zeleny is not my girlfriend. This is her own idea. Hers
and
mine. She doesn’t
want
a boyfriend. And I don’t want a girlfriend, preferring instead a life of free-ranging (albeit imaginary) concubinage. A lot of people think we’re dating. I’ve been asked that several times, by my father and others. We’re not. We’re, as I said,
associates
. Not even friends. People who share a set of parameters in their approach to life. She is
not
my girlfriend. I would fight you for saying so.
She
would fight you for saying so. It’s important you understand that, during everything that follows.

She’d seen me at the Flagpole and taken my arm, telling me I looked weird. She never sounds faux concerned, only observational. I mumbled something about needing more coffee, which she refused to accept—“Bullshit!” she fluted—and started marching me to the Tip-Top Diner. This is where Kennedy students go to avoid school. We have an eternal and inviolable agreement with the owner, whose name is not known. We behave ourselves, and he pretends we’re legitimate adults. The Tip-Top Diner, as its name implies, has terrible, addictive food. It’s just a tiled shack, the grout pond-black, the row of fuchsiacushioned stools defeated by legions of asses. There’s a pay phone, which has served at least two generations of dealers as an office: “Call 6883!” runs our refrain. It spells MUTE, NOTE, and nothing else meaningful. This is covered by the arrangement, too, as long as no commerce happens on the premises. The place was filled with that sad morning emptiness, the hooked column of stools and the short row of booths vacant except for a catarrhal man walled off from his pancakes by a newspaper and a sleeping junkie with an immobile tear lodged in the corner of one eye.

Digger had chosen, her transparent blue eyes hardened with shut-mouth delight, the booth between these two champs. I couldn’t decide where to start talking when we sat down. “You’re going to make me
ask,”
she muttered. So I did something moronic. I told her the truth.

“I’m kind of a mess, I guess. I sort of couldn’t sleep.”

“So,” she asked, “what do you want me to do about it, man?” A cough from the pancake eater: earth being shifted, a grave being scraped.

“I don’t know. I can’t even really say,” I said.

“That’s bullshit, man. You were standing there with that look on your face.”

“I didn’t have a
look
. That’s not correct.”

“It is correct. Unfortunately.” She grinned and poked my shoulder.

“How
is that correct?” I pursued. “I mean, I
get
it if you have trouble
understand
ing me, but it’s totally unfair to say I had a
look.”
I was grinning now, too, through the haze of my tiredness.

“You are such a
jack
ass.” Digger’s laugh chimed through the absurd thunder of the newspaper reader’s cough. “You were making your little-boy face. You get it all the time. And you think nobody notices. But they do. So don’t jester around.” I sucked at my scorching coffee and started talking. She’s hard to deny, ladies and gentlemen.

I said what, you ask? That some more serious region of life had intruded yesterday? That Kevin Broadus something something memento mori something something? I can’t remember exactly, because I was in a rush to get it out. But it was along the lines of:
It’s not fair that Kevin’s dead, and I don’t even know why I think it’s unfair, and I couldn’t sleep last night because of it, and and and
. Has this ever happened to you? You realize that something has disturbed you only when you say it out loud? I hadn’t even known I’d been
thinking
about Kevin until that retarded assembly. Digger took it in with her unfracturable slight smile. “And it’s just like,” I panted, “he took some other
element
with him. From
me
. I mean, why do I give a fuck? Maybe because nobody really cares but they all just
fake
it. I mean, with Alex bitching about the
First Amendment.”

She hockeyed a butter capsule between her hands, the foil glinting. “So their fake care is worse than your
heroic
emergence from indifference? Come on, man. That’s even more bullshit. And you’re making the face again now.”

I took another scalding gulp and blurted out, “No, man, I don’t mean that. I mean, how can you feel fucking
guilty
about not
knowing
someone you didn’t even
know?
I don’t even know why but I want to know. It’s been three
months.”
Another grinding cough. The junkie’s pearly tear careened down his dusty face.

“What do you want to
know?”
Digger answered. To my utter lack of surprise, I found that I could say nothing. Her meal came, though, just then, always an event for her, and that balked further discussion.

At ten o’clock in the morning food horrifies me. Not Digger. She’d ordered the Tip-Top Deluxe, which is an obese hamburger capped by an amnio-slippery fried egg. She’s one of those compact, petite people who eats as though she were pregnant and three to four times her corporeal size. And gains no weight. Something invisible makes demands of her energy, I guess, keeping her metabolism jacked up to some inhuman speed. I like to think that this is why, in every season, she carries a slight odor of wood smoke, of burning. The burger, bleeding yolk and shining grease, obscured the lower half of her face.

“How can you
eat
that?” I asked in awe.

“Because it’s fucking
delicious,”
she grunted, her mouth full.

A truck rumbled up the street, the same truck—I swear—twice. It was a Rex Rentals truck, a well-known local moving company, which uses a servile, staring maroon dog as its mascot. This happens to me a lot. I mean, I look up from whatever I’m doing and some trivial action in the theater around me is being repeated. Fucked-up, right? “What you want to know,” she said, having demolished the burger, “well, you could ask
around
. Not about the
shooting
, you morbid jackass. But Kevin. You’re just
pretending
to be unsympathetic, anyway.” And she drained with a gusty slurp the last of her grape soda.

“Wouldn’t people think it’s weird?” I asked. “I think they would, right? Some random guy asking questions.”

Probing the glass with her straw, she answered me. “No one could think you’re any weirder than they already do.” This was, I am sure, correct. I mean, I must have done an okay job of faking normalcy, or else my business would have suffered, because there’s only so much sketchiness—I’m talking about emotional unpredictability here—that people will tolerate in a guy who’s selling them a bag of weed. People consider me odd, though. I can see that look in their eyes, that puzzled look. Digger and I walked after she’d finished eating. She had just cut her hair, and the wind kicked it in oblong strands across her forehead, her dark hair, which she cropped herself, out of stubbornness. I couldn’t tell you about her clothes on many other days, but I remember that morning she was wearing all black, which she always started wearing around this time of year with eagerness, and she had a heavy silver chain around her throat. This her mother had given her. She told me once it was from Chile, in a tone that demanded my nod of wise amazement.

She even had the tenacity and kindness to finish our argument. About my little-boy face, I mean. She waited until the old couple dog-following us up the street in the busy wind was out of earshot, though, to explain my misunderstanding further.

“I wasn’t trying to
insult
you,” she opened with. I stumped along, wrong-footing it to match her motions.

“No, I
know
. I admit it. I
was
doing it. Making that face.” I knew exactly which face she meant, too: I’d caught myself making it once, while mooning around the house, caught a glimpse of my pout and half-lidded eyes in our age-dim hallway mirror.

“See? See how easy it is? So why deny it? You just make more work for yourself. Because I’m right like ninety percent of the time.”

“You’re
wrong
like ninety percent of the time,” I sang, and in the black sea of a velvet-backed empty shopwindow we watched the old couple pause and drown.

“You just can’t
stand
that I’m right,” she said, and sped ahead. I caught up to her at a parking meter whose glass forehead had been smashed in. At this point going to school would have been idiotic. We shared a look of sudden complicity, which shocked me, as it always did. I mean that she was so willing to let me fuck her.

Digger is
not
my girlfriend. She doesn’t
want
to be. We’re just
making use
of each other, as she puts it.
You
wouldn’t think she was hot, and she is not. But she
is
remarkable-looking. A blade-thin nose and pale, fragile-seeming skin, which looks even paler next to her jet hair. She has this constant
stare
, and her eyes are transparent blue. I’m not saying this out of any sense of possession. I’m just being objective here. I could go on and on about her and about fucking her. And you’re expecting me to:
I wouldn’t know better at my age
. Just to frustrate your expectations, though, I’m going to tell you all the incidental details of that late morning, without any of the salacious stuff. (1) In our eagerness, we knocked over the rubber plant that stands guard in her townhouse’s front hallway, which spilled a spray of clean-looking soil on the paws of a white porcelain dog-lion (her parents have a matched set). (2) I tripped three times on the stairs, once on each flight. (3) The handles to the windows in Digger’s bedroom are made of bronze, heavy real bronze, and they spin and cantilever the windows open. (4) She did not remove her necklace. (5) We could hear traffic filtering up from the street. (6) We both spoke to each other the whole time. As usual. (7) The answering machine took three calls: one from her mother, responding to her own voice, one from a garbled and soft-voiced man looking for her mother, and one that was a smear of hissy dead air. (8) Judging from the traffic sounds, someone rammed someone else’s car, and human cries mingled with the other noise. Afterward the flames of sunlight, through the opened windows, licked at the white ceiling.

“Why are you even
interested
in this guy.” Digger coughed. We were passing her bulbous, vermilion-streaked glass pipe (which always weirded me out with its suggestion of some indistinct human organ) back and forth in the orange light. To that I had no response. I couldn’t tell her,
Because of that cloud we saw, man
. Which would have been true, in a sense. But I didn’t speak. Relief stabbed through me. I should have told her. She would have figured out, probably, the falseness of my position, which I did not realize until … well, more or less until I started trying to answer
your
question, ladies and gentlemen. And she would have talked me down, and all the confused nonsense that followed from our conversation might have been avoided. She’s good at talking me down.

“It’s just like a project, right?” I asked. Digger was now sitting, still naked, against the wall, her after-weed cigarette dangling out the window, her arm stretched. From her bed, I could see the tender plate of muscle shift beneath her right breast.

“A project? Since when do you do
projects?”

“Alex
Faustner
does all kinds of projects.”

“That’s a retarded statement.”

“What is it then,” I replied as I sat down and rooted through her bag for a smoke, “if not a project?” She pulled in her hand and barked it against the window frame.

“It’s
just
peculiarity. And that’s all right with me. You don’t have to justify it to me.”

“Justify
it, justify it to you,” I sang (my singing voice is horrible), snapping my fingers in time, and then got up and looked down into the street for the accident or signs of the accident, but perpetrator and victim were gone; just the usual stream of honking cars remained, trying to make their way around a construction crew. Who, I could tell even from four stories up, were fat, were joke exchangers, and would work with infinite slowness and carelessness. They had orange helmets and orange vests and moved like an uncertain basketball team around the sandy pit they’d dug in the street.

“How long have those construction guys
been
there?” I asked Digger.

“Forever,” she replied, and let go of her smoke. It tumbled and bounced against the stone front of her house, spitting amber-red sparks.

I didn’t take any of the numerous pages—they start coming in around this time, late afternoon/early evening—summoning me to work. Sometimes I made people wait. Selling drugs is the single market of exchange in which the customer is always wrong. And making people wait stops them from thinking you’re a lackey, which is necessary. Otherwise the customers wouldn’t value your product. On the other hand, take it too far and you get a reputation as unreliable. Your business dries up. You’re not, after all, selling smack to hardened, hollow-eyed fiends. You’re selling weed to rich kids, at once arrogant and frightened. Some of them this makes deferential, some it has no effect on, and some it prompts to show off their own dreamed-up toughness. So keeping people on the hook makes sense, for me, as a business and social proposition. You have to feel it out as you go. You have to set it up to imply that
you’re
doing
them
a favor.