Wicked Cruel (3 page)

He opens a cupboard and pulls out a bag of cheese puffs.

“You’re feeding him those?” I ask.

“No way. These are for me. Have some.” He bends to a lower cabinet and opens a bag of Pedigree dog food and pours it into Barney’s dish. “You never know what’s in that crap,” he says, pointing to the cheese puffs. “We don’t let him eat anything that isn’t pure.”

He takes a handful of puffs and shoves them into his mouth, then steps over to the refrigerator and opens a giant bottle of Mountain Dew, chugging down several gulps.

Barney finishes eating and burps. Gary grabs his floppy ears and gently lifts them up. “Who’s a good boy?” he says like he’s talking to a baby. “Who’s a good little doggy?”

Our house smells like garlic when I walk in. Uncle David’s in the kitchen with every pan sizzling.

“Pour yourself something,” he says. “Something that goes with shrimp.”

For him, that obviously means white wine. For me, I guess it’s Sprite. I pour half a glass and top it off with orange juice.

“Smells wicked good in here,” I say.

He dips a finger in the sauce on the stove and licks it. Then he dumps in a load of chopped parsley.

David’s cooking beats my parents’ by a factor of about a thousand to one, so he’s always welcome here as far as I’m concerned.

“I remembered another good urban legend for you,” he says. “This teenager is babysitting for the neighbors. She puts the kids to sleep, then goes looking around the house for a TV. She finds one in the den, but there’s this full-size clown statue in the corner of the room with a creepy grin on its face, and it makes her very uncomfortable. The only other TV is
in the parents’ bedroom, so she calls their cell phone and asks if they’d mind if she watches TV in there because the clown statue is freaking her out. The dad says, ‘Grab the kids and get out of the house! We don’t have a clown statue.’ The parents rush home, and when they get there the babysitter’s been murdered.”

“Wow,” I say. “That really happened?”

“Absolutely. I think it was my friend’s barber’s cousin in Chicago.”

We dig into the shrimp and rotini. “So,” he says, “you’ve gotta spend a week in Boston at my place next summer. I’ll show you around. Go to a couple of Sox games.”

“Great,” I say. David grew up here, like my mother, but he went to college in Boston and stayed there. Mom commuted to Cheshire Notch State and never left town. That’s where she met my dad.

“How’s basketball practice been going?” he asks.

“It’s gone,” I say. “This was the only one.”

“One practice?”

“Yeah. It’s just games every Saturday. They let you have one practice session to get organized, but they say there’s not enough gym time for more than that. So today was it.”

He laughs. “You’ll be ready for the NBA in no time.”

“We play the biggest team in the league right off the bat this weekend. The tallest guy on our team is, like, five-two.”

“What are you?”

“Five even. Gary’s a quarter inch shorter.”

After dinner I say I’ll do the dishes, but he tells me to just dump everything in the sink and he’ll take care of it in the morning when I’m at school. “Let it all soak,” he says.

“Sounds like a plan.” I remember that I should bring in the
mail. I never get anything, but the weekly newspaper comes on Thursdays, and I usually spend about eight seconds reading everything in it that interests me.

Spike the cat is waiting on the porch to be let in when I open the door. She’s very quiet and spends most of her day wandering the neighborhood. She rubs against my leg and disappears into the living room.

There’s a bill from the power company, two offers for credit cards, and some supermarket circulars. The front-page headline of the
Observer
says “Mayor-Elect Promises Fiscal Responsibility.”

David’s in the living room with a fresh glass of wine, strumming his acoustic guitar. I take the mail into the kitchen and start flipping through the newspaper. The “Police Blotter” has a short item about one of our neighbors down the block who got arrested for a fight outside a bar. There’s a write-up about the high school football team losing in the first round of the state playoffs. And the school menu for next week is highlighted by pizza on Tuesday and chicken fingers on Friday.

I look at the obituaries, which I never do, but I’m suddenly thinking about death.

Nobody I know. Two men in their eighties plus some professor at the college who retired thirty years ago. They had long lives. Wonder if they ever got beat up when they were kids?

There was this one time, midway through fifth grade.

Lorne kept bugging me about entering the school talent show with him. He had an idea that he’d win everybody over with a stand-up comedy routine, and he needed what he called a “straight man” on stage with him to set up the jokes. (Apparently, the Bainers were always watching clips of comedy teams like the Smothers Brothers or Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin—ancient stuff that you see advertised on TV infomercials.)

So Lorne had at least a marginal sense of humor. He figured we’d work up a ten-minute routine and he’d get all the laughs. Why he chose me I’ll never know, but I have to admit I had a sliver of interest. My life wasn’t going anywhere at the time.

So I spent maybe five minutes on the steps of the school with him, letting him make his pitch. “It’s all in the timing,” he says. “The straight man says something that sounds kind of logical but is really stupid if you think about it. But you don’t give the audience
time
to think. Just a tiny pause for the idea to sink in, then I come in for the kill.”

“And I look like an idiot.”

“It’s a routine,” he says. “We both get the laughs. And you could use a few, you know? So you can stop being the class loser.”

“Me?” I laugh. “You think I’m the class loser? You ever look in the mirror?”

“I’m trying to help you out here.”

“You gotta be kidding me.” Like I needed help from Bainer. The only thing he could help me do was lower my status to zero.

“So,” he says, “we get onstage and you go, ‘One day in kindergarten, I was making faces at the girls. The teacher tells me, “If you keep making that ugly face, it’ll freeze like that forever.” ’ Slight pause, then I go, ‘Well, you can’t say nobody warned you.’ ”

I admit that I laughed. A little.

“I heard your father is working as a plumber’s assistant,” he says.

“No, he isn’t.”

He rolls his eyes and sighs. “This is part of the routine.”

“Oh.”

“So … I heard your father is working as a plumber’s assistant.”

“Uh … yeah. That’s right.”

“The plumber’s cell phone rang, but he was knee-deep in a problem and asked your dad to answer it. He goes, ‘Hello.’ The voice on the phone says, ‘I need your help right away; I gotta leak in the sink.’ So your father goes, ‘Whattya need our help for? Just go ahead and do it.’ ”

So I’m laughing my butt off over that one just as Callas and Scapes get out of detention and come walking down the steps. You can imagine their reactions.

I didn’t get punched out or anything, but I suffered by association. Just being seen with him would have been enough. This was worse—I’m sitting there laughing as if me and Bainer are buddies.

The next day before gym, Bainer comes up to me and asks if I’ve made up my mind about the talent show.

“Talk to me later,” I say and start walking, getting away from him as fast as I can.

I bump right into Scapes. “So, how’s your new best friend?” he says. “You guys planning a sleepover for geeks or something?”

I give Scapes a shove—big risk—and tell him to get lost. “Bainer’s just pestering me like he does everybody,” I say. I make a fist and hold it up. “Don’t worry, he’ll pay for it later.”

So after gym we’re walking out. Bainer hangs back and says really loud, “Hey, Jordan. You wanna come over after school and practice with me?”

Everybody starts looking at me and laughing. I stop walking. The other kids all leave the gym, and I walk over to Lorne, who’s standing on the side of the basketball court. We’re alone in here; the gym teacher, Mr. Brendel, is already gone.

“Shut your mouth, Bainer,” I say. “I’m not doing that stupid comedy routine with you. Nobody can stand you, get it?”

To reinforce that, I give him a push, not any harder than the one I gave Scapes. His feet go out from under him, and he crashes into some metal folding chairs that are stacked against the wall.

He twists as he tries to catch himself and hits his head, but it’s no big deal. There’s a tiny scrape on his forehead and a drop of blood. I stand there waiting for him to start crying and threaten to kill me and run to the principal’s office. But he just sits on the floor, looking stunned.

I can feel myself shaking, but I’m pretty sure he’s okay. I stare at him. He stares back. So I just turn and get back to class. He shows up there in about five minutes, too. It looks like he washed the blood off in the bathroom.

“Lorne,” Mrs. Munson says when we’re halfway through arithmetic, “what happened to your forehead?”

I freeze.

“I got hit by a BB last night when me and my father were shooting at robins,” he replies.

“Well, it’s starting to bleed again,” the teacher says. She writes him a pass to see the nurse. Next day there’s a purplish, dime-size spot around the cut, and it lasts a few weeks before fading away.

But that was the last I thought of it.

Until now.

I lean across to my desk from bed in the morning as soon as I wake up, and an IM from Gary appears on my computer screen:

There’s an attachment and I click on it. It’s an obituary, dated Thursday.

It says he died Tuesday, and I just stare at the screen for a few seconds and think backward. He was already dead when I saw him on that video.

I print the obit and get dressed quickly and text Gary to meet me by the bagel place. The smell of coffee and toast is coming up the stairs.

“You’re not eating?” David asks as I hustle through the kitchen.

“I’ll grab something out. I’m late on a project, so I gotta get in early.”

“You have lunch money?”

“Yeah.”

I’m out the door in a few seconds. Then I open the door again, run up the stairs and brush my teeth, and rush back to the street.

“You read this?” I call to Gary when he finally appears. I shake the printout at him.

“Of course I read it.” But he grabs the corner of the paper and starts reading it again.

“It doesn’t say how he died,” I say.

“Oh no? That’s a pretty good clue right there about the brain injury foundation. That’s no coincidence.”

I read the whole thing again.

“Yeah,” I say slowly. “That brain injury thing would do it.”

Gary gives a halfhearted laugh, but he’s looking squirmy. “Wonder which was the fatal blow.”

“You mean, from somebody out in Pennsylvania?”

He shrugs. “Could be. I mean, he was probably getting beat up out there, too. He was always asking for it.”

“Was he?”

Gary hesitates, scratching at his lower lip and staring at the obit. “I didn’t hit him much.”

“Me either.”

“Scapes did more than his share.”

“That’s true.”

“But like I said, it all added up.”

“Yeah, I guess it did.” I just hope nothing I did was a factor. “You said he died a
year
ago.”

“Guess I was wrong. But he sure is dead now.”

It’s warmed up by the time we get out of school, so we take the long way home and circle toward Main Street. Neither of us mentioned Bainer’s death to anyone at school, but it’s all I thought about. I don’t even know what homework we have or whether we’ve got a test coming up. I’ll find out from somebody over the weekend.

“Still can’t believe this,” I say. My stomach is growling like crazy; no breakfast and just a couple of chicken nuggets at lunch. I couldn’t eat anything. “The freakiest thing isn’t that he’s dead—I mean, that totally sucks for him—but that I saw him the day after he died.”

Gary shrugs. “I guess his energy was still around. Something like that. They say ‘rest in peace,’ but how can you do that if you still have scores to settle?”

“What would he have to settle with me?”

Gary kicks at an acorn on the sidewalk and shoves his hands into the big pocket of his sweatshirt. Then he lets out his breath. “Maybe you just happened to be available. You were
online, late at night … maybe he wanted to send you a message.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know. So he wouldn’t be forgotten around here. Maybe so people would think twice about the consequences before smacking somebody else around.”

We pass the library, the YMCA, and the newspaper office, then duck into the bagel place and stare at the drink cooler.

“You want a bagel?” I ask.

“Sure.”

I order two cinnamon-raisins and Gary says he wants to hit the skateboard park. I avoid that place because a bunch of dirtbags hang out there looking for trouble. You’ll find Scapes there most afternoons.

“Come on,” he says. “For five minutes.”

“I told my mother I wouldn’t go there.”

“She’s in Europe.”

“So? I still told her.”

He doesn’t even have his skateboard with him, but he goes anyway, so I walk the rest of the way alone, waiting again to cross Main Street. Cheshire Notch is the county seat. We have plenty of bars, which are filled with college kids most nights, and of course a bunch of hair places and funky stores and college buildings. Walmart and McDonald’s and those other chains are out on the highway, removed from the downtown.