Chinese Handcuffs

by Chris Crutcher

  “Now, you son of a bitch,” Preston says, “we’ll teach you to mess with our dog.”

  Dillon says, “Yeah, you son of a bitch.”

  Charlie squirms and fights in the sack like two badgers soaked in hot tar, his voice shrill and powerful, filled with terror and rage. Preston flips the switch to the dim overhead light and slowly begins swinging the sack in a circle above his head, then faster and faster as Charlie’s wails bounce off the thin plyboard walls. In a flash he slings the sack at the old wood stove in the corner, scoring a direct hit on the door handle, and the room is filled with the sickening thud. Dillon is frozen to his spot, filled with horror and tremendous excitement, and Preston leaps for the sack just as Charlie’s head appears in the opening. He stuffs the cat back inside; but Charlie gets a piece of his hand with his front claw, and Preston swears.

  “Okay, you son of a bitch,” he says between gritted teeth, nostrils flaring, “if that’s the way you want it . . .” He steps back and again flings Charlie hard against the stove.

  Dillon says, “Yeah, you son of a bitch. We’ll teach you now.”

  Charlie’s pitch changes. He knows, at some level where all living things know, that he’s going to die, and he’s scratching and clawing and screeching to the end. Preston hoists the sack, beats it endlessly against the floor, then loses his grip for an instant. Charlie struggles free. He crawls across the floor toward the door—toward Dillon—and Preston screams, “Get him! Get him! Kill that son of a bitch!”

  And Dillon knows it’s all way, way too far. He looks into Preston’s eyes and sees no one there—and Dillon himself is on the edge. The cat is a mangled, bloody mess, his timbre nearly human. Dillon is frozen, can barely breathe past the huge knot in the back of his throat.

  “Get him!” Preston screams again, and now Dillon actually looks to Charlie for help, knowing he can’t leave him alive like this and he can’t kill him, hoping he’ll take pity on them and just roll over. Preston clutches the sack, but Charlie has regained a bit of mobility and struggles more quickly toward the corner. Preston tosses Dillon a tire iron from the workbench as he moves to cut the cat off. “I’ll scare him back,” he whispers, “and you let him have it.” He slaps the sack on the floor, and Charlie turns back toward Dillon, low, like a cornered serpent, and in a blinding instant Dillon brings the tire iron down on his head. Charlie squirms, then flops, his one hind leg jerking involuntarily. Dillon is in it now, all the way. He brings the tire iron down again, then again, until Charlie is still. Electric adrenaline burns through Dillon, and he proceeds to beat Charlie’s still body until Preston seizes his wrist in mid-swing. “That’s it,” he says. “We got him.” He breathes deeply. “That’ll teach him to mess with our dog.”

  “Yeah,” Dillon says. “That’ll teach him.” But in that moment he knows something is terribly wrong, and Preston knows it, too. Neither speaks, but they stand gazing down at Charlie for an eternity in the dim light of the suddenly forsaken garage, wanting to go back—to step back over that treacherous, mysterious sliver of time that brought them here—and make it different.

  The boys bury Charlie in the dirt next to the alley, up against the garage, bury him deep, so deep no one will ever find him. Dillon has their grandfather’s old World War II folding blade army shovel, and he just can’t stop digging. He wants to dig so deep that if anyone finds Charlie, it will be someone Chinese; but Preston finally stops him, and they throw Charlie’s mutilated body into the hole and cover him up. They can’t throw the dirt over him fast enough, and when Charlie’s covered, Dillon places a crate filled with rusty car engine parts over the loose dirt, not so much to hide the evidence as to make sure Charlie stays put.

  Inside, Annie Hemingway offers them dessert, and they accept it in order to appear as if things were normal, and they sit on the couch, eating and watching a rerun of “Star Trek.” Caulder Hemingway says to judge from all the commotion out there, some hot little feline number must be roaming the neighborhood; that she’d best stay out of Charlie’s yard if she doesn’t want catdom’s ugliest babies. Caulder has always said Charlie was probably the last living thing to crawl out of the La Brea tar pits.

  But Dillon is thinking now, maybe he wasn’t all that ugly, and he doesn’t want to hear any jokes about Charlie, and neither does Preston. So Dillon pretends to fall asleep toward the end of “Star Trek,” then jumps up and runs to bed.

  Sometime later, way after midnight, with his heart hammering its way through his breastbone and his head movies running amok, Dillon throws back the covers and sneaks across the upstairs hall to Preston’s room. Preston’s door stands open, and light from a nearly full moon washes in through his six-pane windows, casting shadowy crosses across the foot of his bed and onto the floor. Dillon slips in carefully and makes his way to the edge of his bed, where he sits.

  “Can’t sleep either, huh?” Preston says into the darkness.

  “Nope.”

  Preston says, “Yeah.”

  Dillon is quiet a moment, then: “Preston, you think there’s something wrong with us?”

  Preston takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly, but doesn’t answer.

  “Preston?”

  “I don’t know, Dillon. Maybe there is.” His voice is choked and Dillon knows he’s crying.

  As the tears well up from deep inside, Dillon sees the spillway gate up at the earth dam rising—water from the reservoir rushing under with unstoppable force. There is no sound, only wave after wave of tears in silent convulsions. “We have to tell,” he says when he can finally talk, but Preston’s head shakes rapidly—more a vibration, really.

  “No,” he says. “We can’t ever tell anyone. Ever.”

  In the dim bluish moonglow of the dead of night the boys make a solemn pact never, ever to tell.

  P.S. It’s later and I’ve been thinking about Charlie. I don’t know much about Christianity, barely enough to blaspheme. But on the basis of what I do know, I think I accept Charlie the Cat as a major Saint; he’s the one who taught me not to judge. Since the day he died, I can’t look at the horror in anyone without looking at the horror in myself.

  I know we promised not to tell about Charlie, Pres, but I did. I told Stacy—years later, when the gentle cushion of time and space allowed me to venture a closer look and after you were dead—and she said it was a leak, a wrinkle where the coordinates of our individual time and circumstance come together at an odd angle and a crack appears in the structure we’ve built to keep ourselves decent, and our own personal evil seeps out. Leave it to Stacy to put it in language that would send William Buckley scrambling for his thesaurus, huh? It’s one of the hard ways, she says, that we learn human beings are connected by the ghastly as well as the glorious, and we need always to walk around inside ourselves looking for those leaks. And plugging them up. In the end, maybe that’s where you failed.

  You know, Preston, if you hadn’t gone off into that shadowy, savage drug world and come back all beaten up and broken in your heart, if you hadn’t finally wanted out, I might have been a little easier to handle by Caldwell and anyone else who thought he ought to be handling me; but I have this whole new sense of urgency now, and I can get downright nasty when someone tries to slow me down, especially when it’s some unconscious nosewipe with an idea where my life should be headed and how long it ought to take me to get there.

  But maybe not; maybe there is no handling me. Your memory isn’t the only thing that fuses me to my passions. Stacy does—even though she’s still yours—in some ways. Jen in others. I don’t think you know who she is.

  To tell the truth, I’m not doing any better with the American concept of boys and girls coming of age than I ever was. Certainly that has some to do with my being willing to crawl across ten miles of crushed glass in my Bermuda shorts to hear Stacy belch into a tin can over the telephone when it was you she liked, but even apart from that, it’s difficult for me to fathom why they tell you you can have only one member of the opposite sex in your life
at one time. In fact, I don’t even know who “they” is, so it’s hard for me to know even if that’s reliable information, but it seems to be accepted information. I’ve tried to accept it. But for me there’s Stacy and Jen. Stacy’s big in my past—if mostly in my past dreams—and Jen seems big in my present, which would be great except that my past runs right into my present and in some ways—most ways—right on into my future. Add to that confusion the fact that I can’t tell the difference between being horny and being in love and you might begin to envision the width and depth of my dilemma.

  Sometimes I feel I’m inside Jen’s head. God, I wish you knew her, Pres. From the day I first saw her at Chief Joe, the first day of our junior year, I was drawn to her like a masochist to hot tongs. Up lit my eyes, and over to her I went. It wasn’t lust or lechery or any of the baser passions that usually get me sauntering toward some girl’s locker between classes, digging into my bullshit bag of emotional magnets for the one that will pull her tight. What drew me to Jen was that magical sense of connection that goes beyond time and experience together, that sense that we already shared important knowledge—even if that knowledge was dark. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it’s powerful stuff. Screwballs like Stacy, no offense, would tell you Jen and I probably knew each other in another life, but unless Stace wants to offer me a close encounter of the physical kind, she’ll be hard pressed to get me believing anyone who had spent one life here would re-up for a second.

  Anyway, those two ladies are in my life right now, and though they’re as different from each other as either is from me—and neither wants into my pants—they give me what I need, and I wouldn’t be with one to the exclusion of the other, though Stacy’s been gone a lot and that hasn’t been tested. I don’t believe in ownership, and luckily for me, neither do they.

  You can’t talk about Jen without talking about hoops, just as you can’t talk about Stacy—at least I can’t—without talking about you. Jen is probably the best athlete at her sport, male or female, at Chief Joe, and that’s coming from me, easily the best male athlete, as you no doubt heard me say from time to time. It might be hard to get consensus from the athletic department, because I still don’t play any sports here, though every coach in every sport except golf and tennis has tried to recruit me. I don’t want to brag, but you should see me now, Pres. I think I could make varsity for any one of them. I just haven’t found anyone I wanted to play for. Like I said, I’m still hard to control.

  Actually part of what I just wrote is a lie: I do like to brag. That’s not new to you.

  CHAPTER 2

  Generally speaking, driving into Jennifer Lawless’s territory was like water skiing in shark-infested waters behind a slow boat. Sooner or later you’d lose your ass. Practice was no different from a game to Jennifer, and today was no exception. The first team worked a zone defense, and she owned every inch of hardwood invisibly marked off to be hers. Three times Sandra Madison, the sinewy whippet of a second-string point guard, had tried to drive on her, and three times Jennifer’s lightning-quick hands whipped in like a snake’s tongue and batted the ball away, once into the bleachers and twice into her own teammates’ hands. On Sandy’s fourth try, Jennifer feigned fatigue (Sandy should have known better), let Sandy smell the path to the hoop, then moved in a flash to an intersecting point and took the charge, hands in the air, crashing butt first to the floor.

  “That’s our ball,” Jennifer said, smiling, then waved a friendly index finger side to side in front of Sandy’s nose. “Don’t come in here.”

  Sandy picked up the ball and checked her body parts. “Don’t worry.”

  The whistle blew, signaling the onset of conditioning drills, and as the girls lined up, Coach Sherman motioned to Jennifer, who approached like a racehorse following a tough workout, shoulder-length blond hair clinging to her neck like a wet mane, her long, sinewy legs glistening with sweat. Standing face-to-face, the two looked like images through a twenty-year mirror, identical long, strong bodies nearing six feet in height, identical hair color, even the same intense eyes.

  “Hey, Jen,” her coach said with a laugh, “save a little of that for Wenatchee, okay? I want you in one piece.”

  “I’m okay,” Jennifer said. “Sandy didn’t hurt me. I mean, look at her. . . .”

  “It hurts me,” Coach said. “When your body hits the floor like that, it rattles my skeleton. Indulge an old lady, okay? I have to be ready for Wenatchee, too.”

  Jennifer smiled and slapped the coach on the butt as she headed for the baseline where the rest of the players lined up for sprints. “Okay, Coach,” she hollered back over her shoulder. “I’ll take it easy. From here to Saturday it’s strictly powder puff.”

  Kathy Sherman turned and walked back toward the bench while Rich Shively, her assistant, ran the girls through their postpractice sprints. Scott Wakefield from the Three Forks Free Press waited patiently to get a few comments about the upcoming Wenatchee game.

  “What’sa matter, Scotty? Boys’ teams all have the night off?”

  Wakefield laughed, well aware of Coach Sherman’s running contention that girls’ athletics took a backseat to boys’ down at his paper. The Free Press had printed her thoughts on that very subject several times. He had even defended his paper in a local TV debate with her earlier in the year, saying it covered what the people wanted to know. “So does the Enquirer,” Kathy had shot back.

  “You guys are what’s hot,” Wakefield said now. “If this game with Wenatchee lives up to half the hype, you won’t have to worry about female obscurity in athletics for a long time. I’d suggest you don’t lose this one, dearie. You’re tomorrow’s lead on the prep school page.”

  “Then I think I’ll tape what we say,” Coach said teasingly. “And if you quote one wrong word, you’ll hear about it on all three TV newscasts tomorrow night. Dearie.”

  “Jeez,” Wakefield said in mock defense, “I should get a tape recorder myself.”

  “All the big boys have ’em,” Kathy said. “Considering your note-taking history—with me at least—it might be money well spent.”

  “So,” Wakefield started, pulling his trusty notebook from his shirt pocket, “I’d like to come at this from the Lawless-Halfmoon angle.”

  “You and every two-bit yellow journalist in the state,” Kathy said. “This is a team sport, Scotty. You know I don’t use the star system.”

  “I ought to know that, for as many times as you’ve told me, Coach. But you have to admit there haven’t been two athletes of this caliber going head-to-head for quite a while. And for all the complaining you do about chicks not getting any ink, you don’t help much when you protect them the way you do.”

  “So what do you want to know?”

  “I want to know how you think Jennifer Lawless is going to stack up against Renee Halfmoon.”

  “Well,” the coach said thoughtfully, “I can’t tell you about Renee Halfmoon, but I can tell you about Jennifer Lawless. She’s the most talented athlete I’ve ever coached if you talk about a balance between raw ability and ‘want-to.’ I’ve never met a kid this tough.” She stopped short of saying that sometimes she worried that Jennifer didn’t feel pain or maybe that pain made her go, for fear of what Scotty might do with it in print.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you saw her just now. She’ll take a charge from anyone. Any size. I’ll bet she draws more charging fouls than any two players in the league simply because she’s willing to take a full shot,” Kathy said, thinking how sometimes she worried that she couldn’t coach Jennifer to protect herself better—put her hands up at least.

  Out on the court the girls ran quarter-, half-, and full-court sprints alternately, and Jennifer Lawless led them all by a furlong, her face impassive, showing no sign of the burning pain in her legs and lungs.

  “Word has it she’s not bad on the academic front, too. Is that right?” Wakefield asked.

  Boy, this guy is one incisive interrogater, Kathy th
ought. Saying Jen is “not bad” on the academic front is like saying Jerry Falwell trifles in fundamental Christianity. “Close to a four-point,” Coach said patiently. “She’s a National Merit Scholar finalist and probably the only athlete in school who’s won a letter in every sport every year, two years at her old school in the Midwest and now two years here. I wish we’d had her all four years.” At this point the coach’s demeanor became exaggeratedly expansive as she stretched her arms out over the gymnasium floor, teasing Wakefield. “As far as her total high school record goes, Jennifer Lawless’s sweat smells like a blend of the finest French perfumes.” She dropped her hands and looked back at Wakefield. At the end of the bench Dillon Hemingway, applying reinforcing tape to a second stringer’s ankle, raised his eyebrows in surprise and let out a loud guffaw.

  “Can I quote that?” Wakefield asked.

  “About her record,” Coach Sherman said, “not about her sweat.”

  Wakefield smiled and shook his head, looking back to his notepad. “So, is she coachable?”

  “Is a five-pound gerbil fat? The only problem I ever have is getting her to back off her intensity, and it’s seldom you’ll hear me complain about that.”

  Wakefield scribbled furiously for a few moments, then looked up to watch the action on the court. While fatigue, bordering on desperation, reigned prominently on the faces of the other players continuing the fierce conditioning drills, Jennifer clearly pulled away from them, seeming to gather energy rather than fade.

  Visibly impressed, Wakefield turned back to the coach. “So, how do you plan to play Renee Halfmoon?”

  “I don’t plan to play Renee Halfmoon,” Kathy answered patiently. “I plan to play Wenatchee.”