by Ed Gorman
“You ever think about him?”
“Sure. He was my best friend.”
“He felt the same way about you.”
David was getting uncomfortable again. Staring out the window.
His house was approaching. I sped up.
“Hey, Mr. Rhodes, we’re goin’ right past my house.”
“Yeah, I guess we are.”
“Mr. Rhodes, I’m getting’ kind of nervous, I mean, I wish you’d just let me out right here.”
I stared at him a long moment and said, “David, you’re going to tell me what happened to Jeff or I’m going to hurt you. Hurt you very badly. Do you understand?”
He got pale. He was just a kid.
I said, “I want to know what’s in that envelope you’re giving that blond kid every Wednesday, and I want to know who the blond kid is. Though I think I’ve got a pretty good idea.”
I made it pleasant as possible. I took him to a Pizza Hut in a nearby mall. We had a double-cheese and two large Cokes and eventually he told me all about it.
He didn’t show up Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, the blond kid, but Wednesday, just as I reached my hiding place back of the clearing, I saw him climb the bridge and stand on top in that swaggering way of his.
I watched him for a few moments and then I walked into the clearing and through the buffalo grass to the bridge.
I wasn’t nearly as good at it as the kid, of course. He was younger; the monkey in him hadn’t yet fled.
He watched me. He watched me very carefully and very curiously.
He wasn’t afraid. If he had been, he’d have walked down the other side and run into the woods.
No. He just stood there smoking his cigarette watching me as I finally reached the top chord and started across to him.
For the first time, he showed some anxiety as to who I might be. “Nice up here, ain’t it?” he said.
But I didn’t hear him. I heard only the approaching train.
“Don’t usually see guys your age up here,” he said, smirking a little about my thirty-eight years.
The train, right on time according to what I’d been able to observe over the past week, rumbled toward us. You could feel its power shuddering through the iron box of bridge.
The blond kid looked behind him. At the other end of the bridge. The free end. He looked as if he wanted to turn and run now.
The big bass horn of the train set the forest animals to scurrying. And then the engine came hurtling around the bend into the straight-away across the bridge.
The kid finally figured out what I was going to do but he was too late.
I grabbed him by the hair, jerked him to me and then held him ‘til the train was twenty yards from crossing the bridge. We were up too high for anybody in the train to see us. He smelled of sweat and heat and dirt and cigarette smoke.
His mouth swore at me but I couldn’t hear in all the noise. He fought but he was no match for me, not at all.
I shoved him downward just at the right moment.
I suppose I should have looked away but I didn’t. I watched every moment of it.
How he hit the tracks on his back, legs flung across one track, head and arms across the opposite track.
He screamed but he was in pantomime. He tried to scramble to his feet but it was too late.
The train lifted him and punted him into one of the sides of the bridge. When his body collided with the iron, he splattered. That’s the only way to describe it. Splattered.
Then the train was gone, receding, receding, and there was just birdsong and sunlight and the fat muddy movement of the creek far below, and the ragged bloody remains of what had once been a human boy. The animals would come soon, and feast on it.
Just as I was getting in bed that night, my wife came in and said, “My God, Charlie, on the news.”
She was ashen.
“What about the news?” I said, sliding between the covers.
“A boy. Fourteen years old. Playing on that railroad bridge. He— was killed just the way Jeff was.”
She started sobbing so I held her. She was a good true woman and good true mother and good true wife. Nothing bad should have happened to her. Not ever.
I suppose that was why I never quit looking into our son’s “accidental” death. Going through his things one day up in the attic, I’d come across a note he’d written to David Malory, saying that even though David was mad at Jeff because Jeff kissed his girl friend…Jeff didn’t think it was fair that David would hire Lon McKenzie to beat him up.
David had finally told me all about it that afternoon at the Pizza Hut. The blond kid was one Lon McKenzie from the steel-town section of the city, a bully who not only took pride in his work but charged for it. If you wanted somebody taken care of, you hired Lon to do it and if the price was right, your enemy would receive a beating that he would remember for a long, long time.
A hit man for the junior high set.
Lon had probably followed Jeff to the bridge, where Jeff—despite our constant complaints—frequently played. Jeff loved to sit up on the top span and look out at the woods.
Afterward, McKenzie had bragged to David that he’d killed Jeff on purpose. He’d never seen anybody die before and he was curious. Then he’d started blackmailing David. $25 a week—or McKenzie would go to the police and implicate David in Jeff’s death. David had been scared and guilty enough to go along, saving every bit of his allowance to pay McKenzie.
Now it was all done. I suppose I should have hated David but I couldn’t quite. Foolish as he’d been, he hadn’t wanted to see Jeff die.
My wife turned off the light and got in next to me and clung to me in the darkness the way she would cling to a life preserver.
“I just keep thinking of that boy’s poor parents,” she said, starting to cry again. “It must be terrible for them.”
“Yeah,” I said there in the darkness, seeing again the train lift Lon McKenzie’s body and boot it against the bridge, “yeah, it must be awful for them.”
SECOND MOST POPULAR
The girl behind him went “sssttt” and tapped him on the shoulder. Before turning around, Sully Driscoll first checked out Sister Mary Philomena. She was a bitch and had forty-one eyes. Presently not one of them seemed to be watching him, so he twisted his body half-backwards.
“Note,” the girl whispered.
If he had shown such speed in sports, the coach would have over-looked Sully’s habits of smoking cigarettes and sneaking beers. For in less time than it took Sister Mary Philomena to crack you across the mouth with her big, mannish hand, Sully had turned around, taken the note, and turned frontward again.
After reading it, he wondered if it had been worth risking the nun’s wrath. For worse than hurting you physically, she could cower and embarrass you, as if you were a girl or something. And that should not happen to an eleventh-grade boy, particularly one who was generally considered to be the second most popular and third most tough boy in the entire class. The note just didn’t justify such danger. It said only, “I want to see you,” and it was signed, “Louise.”
Louise Malloy, of course. She was the second most popular girl in the class and, for Sully, the first best looking. Opinion was divided on the subject—some of his buddies preferred Linda Carmody who had extraordinary breasts but, Sully felt, a face merely “cute.” Where Louise Malloy’s face was more classic and nearly beautiful.
Louise and Sully had been going steadily for two months, and it was assumed by those who cared—generally homely or fat girls who did not have boyfriends of their own and who followed the love lives of others with the same passion they read movie magazines—it was assumed that the two would soon be going steady.
Which Sully absolutely wanted to do but Louise did not. Not yet. Not, she said, until she felt she could “trust” Sully and that meant only one thing. That Sully keep absolutely secret the privileges Louise granted him with her body. As she told Sully, she’d heard how the other boys discussed
their girls and she did not want to be reduced to that. As if the boys were in some sort of competition with each other to “get the most” and “go the farthest.” If Sully told no one what they did and, as she always pointed out, they did not do that much, then someday, and probably it would be soon, then someday soon she would consent to go steady with him and their affair would be in the eyes of everyone who mattered, especially Tim Moore, whom Sully considered his chief rival for her heart and her proclivity to French kissing; then everyone would know, the world itself would know, how serious they were.
Complying with her single demand was not easy. And Sully wasn’t always faithful to it—not exactly. He had devised ways of letting what they did be known without using specific words. For instance. When another boy was relating how the night before he’d had his girl so hot a football team couldn’t have handled her, Sully would start laughing very loudly and maybe even slapping his knee like some old sour-dough in a cowboy movie and say, “I know what you mean” or “I sure know what that’s like.” And that way they’d all be jealous.
For only Jim Murrin, who had access to the wiles of Linda Carmody, only Jim Murrin was doing things to anybody as socially prominent as Louise Malloy. The rest of the boys were spending their time with plain or even homely girls and getting things off them was not, when you really thought about it, much of a big deal at all.
The second most popular boy and the exclusive boyfriend of the first best looking girl was nobody to mess with. Especially when they were one and the same person and that person happened to be Mr. Sully Driscoll himself, Esquire and bad ass.
“Sully.”
He looked up from the note he held in his hands and stared directly at Sister Mary Philomena. Christ, he must have dozed off or something. He had one of those scary, inexplicable feelings of having just been dropped off here on this planet and not knowing a word of the native tongue. After a long time, in which his heart against his chest felt like a hardball being tossed into a glove with increasing ferocity, he finally said, “Yes, Sister?”
“Who was Victor Hugo?”
“A writer.”
“And he wrote what?”
“Books.”
The class laughed and giggled, delighted.
Sully felt blood as warm as fever flood his neck and face. He did not like to appear stupid nor did he wish to have Sister Mary Philomena, who after all could do much worse than hurt you physically, he didn’t want her thinking he was being a smartass.
“He wrote The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” Sully said quickly.
Thankfully, she seemed impressed and asked somebody else another question.
He waited several minutes at Louise’s locker before, with her friend Dottie who because she was plain ugly sometimes treated Louise with sickening obeisance, Louise, looking peculiar and maybe even perturbed, arrived. “Bye for now,” she said to Dottie, who left immediately, pushing her glasses up her nose with an ink-stained finger.
“What’s up?” Sully asked, and all of a sudden he was afraid. All of a sudden he could sense something in her manner and in the abrupt way she’d dismissed Dottie. All of a sudden he was scared.
She looked at him and he could see that her lips were white. White. And her eyes were a fierce and angry blue. “I hear I’m a lot of fun.”
“What?”
“Janice Farraday told me that Don said I was a lot of fun.”
“You know how Don talks. He lies through his teeth.”
She grabbed his wrist suddenly and there were tears in her eyes and she stood so close to him and whispered so ferociously that she sprayed spittle all over him. “You broke your word to me and I’ll never trust you again!”
He could sense their eyes and their whirring little minds, all his classmates who clogged the hall watching him, for it was his turn to act. The boys would be wondering if he’d lose face and get punked off by a girl. The girls would be wondering if he’d crumble, too, for most of them did not think he was quite good enough for her.
And in a second he figured out what to do, it was his only hope; he’d light a votive candle for that sonofabitch Robert Mitchum, the patron saint of studs and tough guys.
He leaned quickly forward and kissed her on the forehead and said in his deepest voice, so that everybody could hear, “I’ll call you as soon as you grow up.”
Just like in the Robert Mitchum movie.
Which would have been so fine and so cool and worth so many retellings, except that before he could walk away and out of the school and over to the little hamburger joint where they smoked and played pinball, before he could really enjoy his moment of glory, he glanced at her eyes and he goddamned near burst into tears, because it was right there gazing up at him with the innocence and vulnerability of a child, right there he saw how much he’d hurt and betrayed her, and then he didn’t give a damn at all what anybody thought, not the bragging boys or the jealous girls or even the busybody nuns.
He moved toward her now. There were tears in his eyes but he didn’t care. He was going to say it in front of everybody, no matter, how much he loved her and how much he was sorry because he hadn’t kept his promise, he had broken his word and it had been the only word she’d asked him to give. And with all this pushing up in him and about to erupt, just exactly then, he saw the blur on the right side of his head but he wasn’t sure of what it was, he didn’t at the moment give a damn what it was.
And then it landed and it was as strong and hurting as any he’d ever had from a boy. He could hear them gasp. He still hadn’t quite realized what it was. And then Louise was walking away and he could only stand there.
He had been slapped, slapped so hard he could not quite believe it even yet.
“Hey, Driscoll,” somebody said, “you got a date for the dance tonight?”
Their laughter did not make him feel any better.
He would be more honest, more truthful with her than he’d ever been with anyone. Than he’d ever been in confession. He’d tell her his insecurities, all of them, and then she would see and understand, then she’d take him in her arms and she’d cry—no, they’d both cry—and then things would be as they’d been before.
At least that was his plan as he walked up the front steps to her house that night.
She was on the porch, on the same swing where they’d spent half the nights of the summer. Since it was October and mildly chilly, she wore a sweater over her school blouse. And she wore jeans. She looked so good in jeans. So sexy. His lust annoyed him. This was no time.
He sat beside her and started to say something and she said, “Be quiet.” Not harshly, just purposefully.
They swung, then, and he got to like the way the squeaking sounded in the clear night and the way the leaves smoldered in the gutter and the way the smoke from them haunted the air like a melancholy song.
Every few minutes he would move a bit closer to her. If he tried to move too much too quickly, he was afraid she would bolt. He had to treat her like some shy animal, like a little kitten or a doe, something precious and skittish like that.
Even with a few feet between them he could feel how rigid her body was. Oh, he’d screwed it up and screwed it up so badly.
Finally, when his right leg was only an inch from touching her left leg, and when her body felt a little less stiff, finally, and with a great deal of fear, he said, “You know how much I love you, don’t you?”
She said nothing.
“You do know, don’t you?”
“I know,” she said.
“Then you should also know how sorry I am.”
“I know you’re sorry. And I know why you came here and I know what you’re going to say and I believe you. It’s just that—well, it doesn’t make any difference any more.”
Hearing her say that, and the way she said it, he got dizzy, as if someone had smacked him on the side of the face again. He couldn’t recall anybody’s words ever having such impact on him before.
Now he was afraid to say anything
, scared that she had said what she’d wanted to and would go into the house. But they went back to swinging. Sometimes cars went by and sometimes they honked, but neither Sully nor Louise looked to the street. They just continued swinging, one full inch between their bodies, the squeaking loud and the night air rich with the smoke from the leaves.
This time she spoke first. “Why did you have to tell them?”
“I’m going to tell you the truth. Will it help if I tell you the truth?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m not very tough.”
“You act tough.”
She looked at him then. “I didn’t think you were tough. I don’t know why. Maybe because you tried to act so tough.”
“And I’m not very popular.”
“As far as I know, you are.”
“Not when you really ask people about me.”
“Why aren’t you popular?”
“Because I’m not tough and I’m not good-looking.”
“You’re cute.”
“Not very cute. Not really cute. Not like Murrin or Delaney.” He sighed. “Or not like Tim Moore.”
“Tim Moore.”
“He’s popular.”
“Not with me,” she said.
“Well, anyway.”
“You still told everybody, Sully. You still broke your word.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Why I told.”
“It doesn’t make any difference. Not to me. Not now.”
“I told because people would think I was popular if they believed we did things.”
“Oh, Sully, that’s crazy.”
“No, it’s not. You know Fred Quinn in twelfth grade? He came up to me one day and said, ‘You go with Louise Malloy?’ And I said yes and he said, ‘She’s really fine, you lucky bastard.’ And ever since he always makes a point of saying hello to me. He never spoke to me before he found out I went with you.”
“Fred Quinn. I could care.”