The November Criminals (4 page)

I’d make a hundred to start, I told myself. And paper them up on weekends, after school, during deliveries. Fucking seamless, right? I was humming with self-satisfaction when I heard the drumming sound of someone sucking mucus back down from their nose into their throat. This could only be Ms. Arango, Dr. Karlstadt’s subordinate, whose job it was to maintain the file systems on Kennedy students. Her mucus sound is famous. She’s a world-class nose breather. And so ugly. I don’t want to sound harsh, but it’s objectively true. Her skin is sallow, the color of old newsprint. A rodentine, pushed-forward mouth. A mole crested with three stiff hairs. And this
avid misery
in her eyes, a misery that wants only more and more unhappiness. She gets downright excited by annoyances and problems. And I’m in a position to know. I’ve had to be processed by Kennedy’s disciplinary apparatus nine times, and she is the operator of that process. I have nine disciplinary actions appended to my permanent record. Form 102B4, goldenrod in color. You have to get a parent’s signature. But my father, his hair unbound, had instructed me to forge his on the first one, when I was in ninth grade. And that had been standard procedure since. The cause? I told a Holocaust joke to Alex Faustner, who started weeping. Right in biology. Where’s the self-respect? So I began my
little tradition
of collecting and repeating jokes of that kind.
(What’s the difference between a Jew and a loaf of bread?)
Because she cried. I would have lost interest otherwise. (
A loaf of bread doesn’t scream when you put it in the oven.)

“May I
help
you, Mr. Schacht,” Ms. Arango asked, and her mucus rumbled.

“Uh, no, like I think I like have everything under
control
here.” I pointed at the copier, which was vronking away and emitting its green hell light. She answered with a snot-fluting sigh. It was widely believed that Mr. Vanderleun was boning Ms. Arango, and students in their dealings with her made subtle references to this fact. I saw them walking or eating together sometimes, and she seemed to find his missing finger fascinating. It
did
make a nauseating show when he combed back his dark, greased hair, which clumped into blades, when he combed it or adjusted it with three fingers and a thumb, the active remnant of his little finger signaling like a stubby antenna. Their affair might have been real. Who knows? Some people find über-weird shit attractive. Her small, neat figure—she has no extra flesh—quivered with some invisible satisfaction.

“Make sure that you don’t
overuse
the machine, Mr. Schacht.” Behind her, I saw the gray sergeant-like ranks of her file cabinets, which contain the records of all Kennedy students. She stood there, a sentinel, ladies and gentlemen, watching with covetous attention as the copier worked. Like I was taking something from her just by using it. She wore this weary half-smile of acceptance.

So I had to take stronger measures. In the face of this, I
had
to. And stealing Kevin’s file from the records office was not a
crime
or anything. It was just sitting there. I came up with the whole plan as Ms. Arango and I faced each other down. There wasn’t even any premeditation! If it had been anyone there but Ms. Arango, I doubt I would have done it. If she hadn’t put on that martyr’s smile, I would have made my stupid copies under the glaring BE UNSELFISH sign and left. But she just
had
to come and stare at me and make that face. And rage gives me ideas. It makes me ingenious and daring. So I started lying, pitching my voice just right, and I knew as soon as her face shifted, the hairs protruding from her mole tick-tocking as the muscles beneath it twitched, that this was going to work. “Uh, Mr. Vanderleun? Like asked me to ask you to come up to his classroom? Four oh three?”

Thought, like a migraine, forced her eyelids lower.

“Did he say why?”

“Toner?” I asked.

What toner is, I still don’t know. But its possession and hoarding are contentious subjects among our teachers and administrators. I stared at her, stone-faced. Her eyes glowed with unhappiness, and her hands sought and found each other before she spoke.

“Well, I guess
somebody
has to make sure that the ship doesn’t sink!” I swear to God! That’s how she talks, in grandiose and banal metaphors. And with these clicky, self-righteous heel taps she trotted out of the office, in her dress that matched the gray of the file cabinets, and I was alone. The file drawers were, of course, unlocked. Not because our administrators trusted us, but because they were negligent. I lifted Kevin’s light folder from the BO-BY drawer, which released the tannic scent of decomposing paper. I was too thrilled to open it. So I tucked it under my left arm and my sheaf of posters under my right and ran off, doing an idiot’s wobble, knees half locked. Down the echoing brown hall, through the knots of kids sneaking kisses or sly gropes, waiting for class to begin.

When Digger and I met up that afternoon, at the Flagpole, I told her I had something to show her. “The posters?” Her voice was still laden with mistrust. I wanted to keep her in suspense. I promised her I’d say, once we’d smoked. We were driving around in long ovals from her house to Kennedy to my house and back. On our second loop, we saw a man with a sky-blue megaphone haranguing the passersby from the small meadow in the middle of the traffic circle, named for a second-rate general, behind the blind back of the school. We pulled over to listen to him. “Some people want
nothing
to rule over them,” he shouted over and over, through his megaphone, into the air. “It’s eternity either way you look at it, my friends.”

“Are you going to tell me
now?”
Digger sighed, mouthing out a torus of smoke. “Waiting doesn’t make any sense.” A silence, from me, from the man with the megaphone. Even a miraculous break in the flow of cars.

Then everything lurched back into motion: Digger fumbled the radio on and the shouter spread his arms and yelled straight up into the sky. I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing with tremulous effort. He was just putting himself to work at it. Not caring whether he convinced anyone. It was time for me to speak, all signs indicated. I reached into my backpack and removed Kevin’s file.

“What’s that?” Digger asked. The folder had CONFIDENTIAL stamped on it, in red, and PROPERTY OF KENNEDY ADMINISTRATIVE RECORDS. In that army lettering my father uses to indicate
his
private materials. So there was some appropriate awe in Digger’s question.

“It’s his
file
, man,” I whispered to her. I don’t know why I whispered this. Because I was high, I guess. She faked a little unease, to hide her eagerness. Why do people do that at all? Fake unease, I mean? We let it lie there for a long moment. Opening it would be
proof
that we were really going to investigate. A Rubicon. We’d both stopped breathing.

Do I even need to tell you it was a colossal disappointment? Every expected thing is, because it can’t withstand the inflating power of the human mind. We went by year. Just for order’s sake. First semester, ninth grade. Nineteen-ninety-fucking-six, one of the most style-free years on record. Pre-Algebra: B+. Asian History: B. Band: A. Visual Arts: C. Earth Science he had dead-bang aced, an unmodified A. Kevin had actually
been
in my Earth Science class (by mistake, I assumed, given the aptitude his later science grades suggested; Earth Science is a bullshit class), which I had almost failed—sixty-six average. Mr. Ramses, our teacher, was a charitable man. We skimmed the rest of Kevin’s numbers. We could already tell they were going to be boringly normal. The upshot of the whole thing—for me, at least—was that Kevin at the time of his death had been carrying a 3.4 GPA and had a total of zero incident reports of any kind appended to his record.

“Jeez.” Digger coughed. “They really thought this kid was in a
gang?
That’s so
racist
. He’s so
boring.”
I had to suppress my surging delight, so I said nothing. My GPA was higher than Kevin’s, despite his generally better performance in the sciences. Not to speak ill of the dead or anything. But having a lower GPA than a dead guy would have stung. It would have been a terrible and ignominious failure.

IV
.

I
DON’T WANT TO BORE YOU
with trivial stuff—
Addison Schacht woke up and brushed his teeth. He had a morning hard-on and it was raining
, that kind of nonsense. Or the repetitive stuff: how many times do I need to tell you that I went to calculus? So the next thing that looms up in my memory is the Friday of the college-preparedness assembly. That day turned out to be one of those decisive ones that don’t announce themselves. Which I guess all human life is composed of.

The college-preparedness assembly happened ten days after my theft from the records office. The assembly itself turned out to be dull, as I’m sure you are all shocked to hear. But I need to explain something about my line of work, in order for the events
before
the assembly to make any sense to you. Weed sales are not a seasonal business. I mean, if people want drugs, they are going to want them year-round. So there’s always this steady base of demand. However, there are certain times when it spikes. Minor spikes around weekends, larger ones before school vacations, and then a long crescendo during summer, which peaks around the third week of July. Then there’s a slow descent back to normal, and then we’re back in the school year. September, though, is a statistical outlier. It often shows a real drop-off in sales, for me. A lot of kids decide to “get serious” about school (hilarious!), so they take up the
ascetic practices
that they associate with high achievement. Another instance of the Protestantism infecting our society. But this year, September had been profitable. No one cared about excellence any longer in my class, or maybe the standards of excellence had come to seem trivial to us, faced as we were with the prospect of imminent release.

On account of this I had to get up early, in the colorless dawn, to go and buy more weed. I figured the transaction would take between ninety minutes and two hours. Noel, my supplier, is a weird early riser. Which is convenient. But he considers me a friend (I think). Which always makes our business dealings drag. I should explain about Noel. His father, Eliot Bradley, owns a controlling interest in Envivia, formerly Bradley Pharmaceuticals, formerly Bradley Brothers, formerly Kingman Bradley and Sons, some kind of dry-goods emporium extant in the 1820s, according to my city history textbook, which lists the Bradley family as among the most notable and permanent (white) residents of D.C. Noel has a brother named Paul Preston Bradley, and Noel’s own middle name—this is amazing—is Eleuthere. Eleuthere! I got him to tell me this once, when we were making an exchange. And despite his slender, euphonious set of names, he’s
huge:
one of those fat guys whose fatness is joyless. With green rings of exertion under his eyes just from breathing and walking around. When he sits his thighs spread to the width of my waist.

He lives on Otis Street, at Tenth Street and Otis. His house is tall and narrow, ash-colored, with decrepit stone pineapple finials jutting from the facade and almost no furniture inside, just a spine-broken leather couch in the living room and a king-size mattress on the concrete floor of his basement. Such houses aren’t unusual in his neighborhood. Loose congregations of black guys my age build up outside the convenience stores and identical Chinese restaurants; a few buildings stand blinded with plywood slabs. Smiling and indifferent old people hunch on stoops and porches. But the same heavy blue sky covers it that covers my neighborhood, and the same absurd problems of conscience afflict its residents, I imagine, exacerbated by the grime and poverty maybe, though fundamentally identical, which should prove that squalor isn’t ennobling, at least as far as basic inner makeup is concerned. Noel has
chosen
to live there, and contrary to what you think, he doesn’t do so on his family money. He’d been bounced from private school to private school, this by his own admission, in D.C., in New England, one in Texas, one in Hawaii. After he was booted out of Chandler, a last-chance kind of prep school in the forests encircling Blue Knock, Vermont, his father disowned him. Old-fashioned as it sounds. I kind of admired Noel for having been disinherited, though I can’t say why. His parents divorced right after he returned from the woods. As though they’d been awaiting his homecoming.

How did he get into the wholesale drug business? I have no idea. He never told me who
his
suppliers are. But he took to the work. His fat-guy’s friendliness helps, even though it’s
overdone
. I was at a party at his house once, right when we first met, which was right after he moved down there, and this old crackhead/junkie/general bum came around, this guy Stokey. This was three years ago. It was a June Saturday. Still balmy, the scent of whole and crushed grass filling my nose and mouth, along with the harsh stinking-sweet smoke from the blunt we were handing around. Noel’s backyard has, for some reason, five or six rusted lawn mowers scattered around it. Stokey tripped over one hidden by a thatch of tall grass and weeds, and we in the circle laughed our various stoned laughs, animal sounds:
grunt-grunt, haw-haw
, cackles, barks, and hoots. Stokey lumbered toward us, tugging at the pointed lower corners of the filthy blue corduroy vest he wore, and called out, “You
best
let me hit that.”

So we did, and he stood next to me, and he
stank
of dead sweat and liquor, of decay. I was the only white guy there, besides Noel, and that’s why Stokey asked me what he asked me. “You know what D.C.
stand
for? The letters?”

“District of Columbia?” I responded. His mouth was a ruin, teeth post-shaped and omelette yellow, and his breath vinegary and choking. He shook his head, as though to get rid of a gnat.

“Then I don’t know.”

“Drama ci-taaay,” Noel warbled out. That was wrong, too. Stokey—his eyes cleared for an instant, smiling a weird, gentle smile—croaked out, “Don’t. Care.”

“Man, dis nigga
always
come up here wissome
non
sense.” Noel cackled, and my terror at his use of THE N-WORD dizzied me, dried out my mouth. But everyone was already guffawing, and Stokey handed the blunt to the next guy and crowed a jagged laugh, and the conversation wandered elsewhere. A natural, right? Noel certainly dresses the part. In winter and fall, jeans that sit well below his ass, and billowy T-shirts, white or primary colored, blazoned with names that mean nothing to me, the hems hanging almost to his knees. He’s too heavy, really, to need a coat. In the spring and summer he switches from jeans to low-sitting khaki shorts. These sit so far down that you can see only three inches of his cellulite-dimpled pale calves above his shoes, filigreed with greenish veins. A thin strap of beard frames his round chin. He keeps his hair short, a caplike scrub. All this sounds like it would look idiotic, but on Noel you half believe it. Still, meeting with him can be trying, because—as I said—he considers me a friend. He’s always telling me stories, as he breaks off my package, about his recent imaginary sexual conquests.

It was seven a.m. when I arrived. David Cash, who remains the most muscular human being I have ever met, was already waiting on the sofa, wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt, pollen yellow, which hid his sculptural build, but veins and tendons cabled his forearms. He was the one who had introduced me to Noel. A kid from Kennedy. He graduated at the end of my freshman year, from the G&T Program, and entered the world of business. He now presides over all Noel’s transactions. I watched him kick a guy’s ass once: that same crackhead/junkie/general bum Stokey, who had been hassling us for a beer as we drank on Noel’s stoop one night last summer. David struck him without any anger, exerting zero effort, a painter’s squint in his eye as he placed his blows. “What up,” David observed as I walked in. His voice, not at all as deep as you’d expect from his chest, which is the size of a concert hall, is nonetheless steel-steady. “Come on,” chirped Noel, “less
do
dis.” I made for the basement door. He gestured me on down, into the usual mineral stink of damp concrete.

Do you know how
weird
it is to be in the bedroom of someone who has nothing else in there other than a bed? No books, no art, not even porn magazines, not even dirty laundry or food cartons or whatever, not even
filth
. Noel’s room is like a monk’s cell, bare and clean. It’s huge, too. One of the biggest single rooms I’ve ever seen. It runs the whole length and breadth of his house, front to back. Which makes the emptiness even weirder. There’re even some subrooms in the back, doored off. And a big drain in the floor. It was once a workshop, I think. Noel’s installed soundproofing, these white baffles, all along the walls and ceiling, which, combined with the concrete floor, make for heavy, cottony, dead acoustics. The air always feels stifling. The only human object there, other than the bed, is a small blackboard hung on a rusty steel hook protruding between two of the baffling sheets. When I asked him, around the time we first met, what the soundproofing and the blackboard were for, he shouted, “Dawgfightin, niggaaaa!” I laughed, but stopped when I saw he was serious. David later confirmed that Noel was telling the truth, although I had never been invited to any of the matches. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or insulted by this.

Noel sleeps with no sheets or comforter. How depressing is that? He has a safe hidden in the box spring the mattress sits on, which in turn rests directly on the floor, right in the cold the concrete sends up in waves. He has to lift the mattress to make any transaction. And I have to help. He won’t
ask
, either; he just loses his breath and gets red, then dead-pale, and then I join in. It’s in my interest, after all. Which is how it went that morning. “Man, I be
out of shaaaaape
, niggaaaa!” His usual crowed response. As though there could be some misunderstanding about the level of his fitness that required public correction.

Now he thumb-riffled the stack of money I’d brought. He never counted, in front of me, at least. He’s indulgent about protocol, as though the worries of a businessman are beneath him: “Shit
sound
right.” Does it? To the manner born, I guess. I knew David would feed it through their money counter later. He never let anything pass with such flippancy. Which undercut the expansiveness of Noel’s gesture. That’s how it goes with the two of them, though. He handed me my purchase, crammed into a cheap brown canvas tote. Noel puts his weed in a tote 90 percent of the time. They’re his signature, or whatever. Although a pretty lame one, in my opinion. I have no idea where he acquires them. From his mother’s charity work, maybe. This one said SIDNEY MEMORIAL HOSPITAL JUVENILE CANCER DRIVE on the side. There was a drawing of a bug-eyed lamb. I waited behind him as he struggled up the stairs. I figured I had less than five minutes to make my excuses before he launched into one of his fantasies. So I tipped David a nod and told Noel that I had to go. He grinned and poked two fingers into my chest. “Nuh-uh, you gotsta give me a ride uptown. I gotsta go see my
moms
and shit.” He does this, at odd moments. Reminds you, I mean, that he’s kind of one level up from you. But, like I said, why
not
exercise power if you have it? I almost objected:
I’ll be late for school
. How would
that
have sounded, putting off a weed wholesaler with that excuse? I’d take the blame anyway, if we got searched or anything. Which he knew, of course. He’s one of these amateur-of-the-law guys. He’s the one who told me that having three small bags of weed gets you a much worse prison sentence than one large one, because it proves intent to distribute. As we got into my car, he cautioned me, “A smart muhfuh like you ain’t need to be
told
what happens if the beast search this shit. So drive real reasonable. Ya heard?”

That fat shithead! You had to admire him. He was wearing this subtle torturer’s grin as he warned me. And I knew, I
knew
he was fucking with me, but it worked all the same. (So much for the ameliorative power of the rational mind!) And so we started off, keeping a schoolteacher’s pace. Weak sunlight hit everything at the wrong angle. There wasn’t much traffic. Noel caught me wiping nervous sweat from my neck: “Shit, dude. Ain’t nothing.” The brick of weed I had stuffed under my seat. The whole trip, as I kept darting glances around for I don’t know what, some manifestation of malign authority, he was unfolding a sexual tale, involved and impossible to believe. “Damn,” I interjected at the appropriate times, and even whistled once. I remember nothing of this story except that he kept repeating, “And dat ass! Like a muhfuh shelf! Shit!” After Noel’s narrated climax (he spoke with the embarrassing fluency produced by long inner rehearsals) we drove west to Foxhall Road (you can imagine what kind of people live there, just from the name) and then on into Palisades, where his mother lives.

The morning traffic had just started, and I was able to miss the worst of it. Every asshole in the world comes to D.C. in the morning, to work at some government job. It’s the only industry we have, and everyone involved in it is miserable. So the traffic is just terrible, physically and spiritually. Noel and I were driving away from the nexus of it. We were okay.
You
know the kind of morning I’m talking about. The air was weightless, like my limbs and head. The pink light exaggerated the innocence of house-fronts and lawns. When I’d parked, he sneezed—as if on purpose, flinging an oystery gob of mucus out to cling to his upper lip. He wiped it off with his hand, then reconsidered. “Shit. You godda muhfuh Kleenex?” I pointed at the glove box, which he opened. And into his hummocky lap slid Kevin’s school file. Yes, I’d been keeping it in my car. So what! So nothing had come of it yet, so what. It was evidence of an exploit. And exploits are valuable in themselves. Noel has this stupid pennant, anyway. On his wall. From Chandler. It’s up over his couch, on the dirty wall, a white-and-red pennant. By far the cleanest thing in his house. No pictures, no posters, nothing but barren, grime-feathered paint—and then that retarded pennant. It’s blindingly visible. As though it meant something. As though he played on any of the Chandler teams. Hockey! Cross-country! Lacrosse! Dressage! As though he even gave a shit! Chandler kicked him out for selling porn he stole from the general store in Blue Knock to his classmates. I’ve never asked him why he keeps the pennant pinned up there. But that’s how everyone is. You can’t refute it. Everyone holding on to the cheap tokens of their past.