by K. J. Reilly
That was a joke we had ’cause it was the title of a book she loved. I’m not much of a reader but my mom was what I’d call a militant reader and she was always trying to convince us book atheists to come over to the other side—basically meaning me, because Jacey loved books and she had given up on Jackson a long time ago.
I grabbed a plate of food from the fridge, assembling it from all sorts of covered bowls full of leftovers, and without even looking up from Oprah’s tips on “How to Have Your Best Summer Ever,” my mom said, “I called the school today and spoke to your guidance counselor. Then I signed you up to retake the SATs.”
I said, “I told you I’m not taking them again.”
And she said, “We’ll see.”
Then I made a giant glass of chocolate milk and she said, “I hope you’re not planning on taking that food upstairs, Joel.”
“Please, Mom, just this once. I’ve got homework to get going on.”
Of course, she wasn’t really buying into the “just this once” or the homework claim either but she smiled and said, “How about we strike a deal? You take the SATs again this spring and you can eat in your room.”
“Just this once? Or for the rest of my life?”
“Not planning on moving out when you graduate from high school are you, Joel?” she teased.
I smiled. “The cooking’s too good here, Mom, you know that.”
“Well?” she asked.
“What if I say, I’ll think about it.”
She sat back in her chair and looked me over.
“You’ll think about taking the SATs?”
I tucked a whole box of cookies under my arm. “That would be a maybe.”
“What kind of maybe are we talking about?”
I smiled again. “A soft maybe.”
“Then maybe I’ll let you eat upstairs.”
I went in for the close. “I’ll tuck Jace in.”
She grinned. “Joel, I suspect you’re playing me.”
I said, “You might be right about that,” and kissed the top of her head. She just laughed and waved her hand as if dismissing me and I headed up to my room with enough food for a small city as I was thinking about Rooster and all the other homeless people in the US of A that Mrs. T had been telling us about as my mom went back to reading recipes for Georgia sun tea and a stress-free summer. She was just looking for peace and quiet, and I was headed upstairs to google .38 Smith & Wesson revolvers with inlaid wood grips and dead cops and violent crimes in Rockland County.
I stuck my head into Jace’s room as promised.
He’s named Jackson like my pop, but we called him Jace on account of the fact that having two Jacksons was just too confusing. Jace looked like my pop, too. Big and stocky with dark hair and eyes. I looked more like my mom, slight and fair. I didn’t mind the blue eyes and fair skin and blond hair, but the slight part was real goddamned annoying. Jace was sound asleep, wearing pajamas with trucks on them and feet. My pop kept saying to my mom, “Jesus, Mary”—I don’t think I have ever heard my pop say, “Mary” without putting a “Jesus” in front of it—“the kid’s too big for damned feet-y pajamas.” And he had a point. A few of Jace’s toes were sprouting through the plastic bottoms of his pj’s like dandelions popping out of the cracks in a sidewalk. But from the look of his room, which was still full of little kids’ things like stuffed animals, my mom wasn’t ready to give in to “Jace is too big” for anything just yet. Probably figured he’d be too big for everything soon enough.
I pulled his covers up and took a toy truck from his hand, then turned out his light. I wondered if he would ever be hungry in his life or if he would be six feet tall someday like Pop. Then I wondered what he would do if he was older and had a gun and a cop’s badge stashed away in the back of the garage under the bricks pop had dug up. Right then I was wishing real bad that I had an older brother or a pop who said more than, “Pull the goddamned pitcher.” Or, “Jesus, Mary.” Or, “What were you doing going and hitting Benj Kutchner? You know that boy ain’t right in the head.”
I’m not saying Jackson’s not a good dad ’cause he is. I know that. I’m just saying my pop’s not much of a conversationalist. That is unless that conversation happens to be about gas millage on half-ton pickups or locking differentials or who’s offering the best bumper-to-bumper warranty on full-size trucks—or the subway series or left-handed pitchers—and then you’d be in luck.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO ANDY 9:12 p.m.
I called you again and left a message.
I know it’s stupid.
But I wish you could call back.
I really need to talk to you right now. I mean really.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO ANDY 9:49 p.m.
I have a gun hidden in my garage. Stuck in between the bricks in the wayback. A homeless guy from the soup kitchen gave it to me.
I work at the soup kitchen. On Wednesdays. With Eli.
that night.
No missing cop.
No dead cop.
No recent gun-related crimes. No armed robbery. No murders.
No nothing.
I kept my search close to home figuring that if Rooster committed an armed robbery or a homicide, he probably did it nearby, being that he didn’t have a car and was always pushing that shopping cart with the busted wheel.
And I went back a couple of years, but still came up empty.
By and large the police blotter was populated with shit so ridiculous that you’d think the secretary at the police station would say, “I’m not typing this and I’m not submitting it to the paper either. Tell me about a real crime or something that means something instead of this crap!”
If you think that I’m kidding, one entry was that a local shopper called 911 to report a man wearing short shorts near the Pizza Station in town. Next up was a lost purse in the ShopRite parking lot. Then there was this shocker: the Girl Scouts were holding a cookie drive and the troop leader who had dropped the girls off backed into the Hostess cupcake delivery van. That was followed by a report that a raccoon in Mrs. Fillmore’s yard on Pine Street that was suspected of being rabid on account of the fact that it was exhibiting unusual behavior of a “particularly aggressive nature” was shot dead in the orchestrated effort of police officers from two towns. And this weekend’s capper? A plastic sandwich bag containing a suspicious white powder was found near the entrance to the town swimming pool. The Rockland County hazmat team was brought in to retrieve it and the bag with the white powder was sent to the New York State crime lab, where the suspicious substance was identified as powdered sugar from a donut—I’m guessing of the Dunkin’ variety.
Then I read that there were still no suspects—or any new evidence—in the ongoing theft of shopping carts from local stores and I was thinking, What is going on here and who’s in charge? I mean, there are lots of hungry people in this town and maybe that should be a crime and there’s a poor guy living in the woods behind the Richardsons’ farm and I have a gun stashed in a stack of old bricks in my garage that was given to me by a man not in control of all his faculties, so maybe the police should adjust their priorities? Then I started thinking that maybe I should become a detective ’cause I had a pretty good handle on where a few of those missing shopping carts were and since every single one of them was full of stuff nobody should be saving in the first place I was wondering why that wasn’t something the town could do a bit more about.
But since there was absolutely no mention of stolen guns, or gun violence, or dead police officers or anything else at all remotely important, and since I had no idea why Rooster had given me the gun in the first place, I decided my original guess was right and he probably just figured it was payback for the food and shit. Then I decided to take things under advisement and wait to see what turned up next before settling on what to do about the gun and the rest of the contents of that plastic bag that I had stashed in the back of my garage.
If you’re keeping count that was mistake number three in my geometric
progression.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO PRINCIPAL REDMAN 12:54 a.m.
If classic Mustangs are too expensive we could go with Jeep Wranglers.
They’re cool.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO PRINCIPAL REDMAN 12:56 a.m.
There are more than two million homeless people in America.
Two million. Eli, you know Eli? The girl who fixes everything and makes all the lists? She told me that’s more people than live in the entire city of Philadelphia or Houston, or twice as many as who live in Dallas, Texas. We should do something about that.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO PRINCIPAL REDMAN 1:27 a.m.
I have a gun hidden in my garage. A .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. With an inlaid wood grip and a six-inch barrel. In a plastic bag, wrapped in a rag. Behind the bricks.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO PRINCIPAL REDMAN 1:28 a.m.
A homeless guy from the soup kitchen gave it to me.
when Rooster showed up at the soup kitchen I waited until Eli brought him his tray of food and then I went over and sat down across from him at the table.
I said, “Hey, how are you doing?” but he kept looking down at his food or over my shoulder at the door like he didn’t even hear me. I knew he was probably nervous about his shopping cart, so I said, “Don’t worry, I’ll go out there to watch your stuff in a minute. I just want to ask you something first.”
Rooster was still wearing his heavy winter coat and gloves and hat as he sat there hunched over shoveling big forkfuls of beef stew into his mouth. I leaned in close to him and whispered real low, “What were you doing with a gun? And why’d you give it to me?”
I got nothing back. Rooster just kept eating.
“Do you want me to keep it for you?” I asked as he tackled a big mound of mashed potatoes with gravy.
I couldn’t tell if he didn’t hear me or didn’t understand or just couldn’t talk or didn’t want to answer, but I kept pushing.
“Are you going to want it back?”
Nothing. He just spread butter on a roll and then moved on to the fruit portion of the meal.
“I mean, I think the gun’s cool and everything but I was thinking that maybe I should turn it over to someone. What do you think?”
Still nothing, so I pressed even harder.
“I mean, I don’t want to get you in trouble, but if I tell the cops that you…”
The mention of cops got his attention real fast and now he was looking up from his food right at me.
Straight in the eyes.
And what I saw on his face scared me.
And not because I was afraid of him or because I thought he was going to hurt someone, but because I saw how scared he was.
It was there plain as day in the expression on his face. All around his eyes and mouth was fear. Raw and bleeding like an open wound and about as sad a thing as I’ve ever seen in my whole life. I mean, right there in front of me I saw a kind of hurt that can’t be fixed. Everything on his face said I can’t handle any more trouble. I got enough.
So I doubled back, and leaning in close again so no one else could hear, I said, “I’ll keep the gun. No police. No trouble. No nothing. I promise. It’s all good.”
Rooster’s scared look dissolved a bit and then he went back to eating his food. Never said a word, though, but I heard him loud and clear.
I sat there for a bit trying to make sense of what just happened, but once again I came up desert dry and full-on empty, which was something that was happening to me a lot lately.
Then I just stood up and headed outside to stand guard over Rooster’s shopping cart while he finished his meal.
TEXT FROM JOEL TO PRINCIPAL REDMAN 12:09 a.m.
That gun I told you about? I decided to keep it.
I hated the cafeteria, too.
The way I figured it, the only difference between the two was that the cafeteria was bigger and served food. At lunch everyone was all clustered together in defined groups, divvied up like there was a median strip separating them. It was like they were all traveling at high speed in lanes going in such opposite directions, and any contact at all between groups, let alone a head-on collision, just might be deadly.
The skinny girls like Angela Marshfield and Brandy Kennedy drinking Diet Coke wearing skinny jeans and skinny tops and too much makeup who would never dream of actually eating lunch were heading one way and the ass-saggers with their hats on backward and their pants slipping so low that the crotch was down near their ankles were going another. Then there were the stick-toting, cleat-wearing ass-letes, the skaters, the stoners, and a whole bunch of subcategories and unidentifiables that were not as easy to label, and off to the side on the fringes were the AP Physics wonks headed up by Alex B. Renner in an exclusive group that featured future computer hackers, coders, tech wizards, hedge fund managers, and start-up incubators who were always making some robotic shit out of straws and Bic pens, and for reasons beyond me those projects always seemed to involve lemons. I watched one day as one of them kept running back to get more lemons and more straws from one of the lunch ladies like they were onto something really big. It was the nice lunch lady with the big glasses and the grandma hair named Miss Beverly who was inclined to sneak you an extra cookie or one of those big soft pretzels if you played her just right. She kept smiling at them and giving them lemons like she had a tree growing in the back. They kept typing shit into their cell phone calculators or checking their compasses or maybe they were just sending encrypted text messages back and forth to each other, but whatever they were doing they were having a hell of a good time doing it.
But all that self-selected segregation in the cafeteria didn’t flow through to Driver’s Ed. I mean, it was like they purposely picked one kid from each of those lanes going in opposite directions and assigned them to the same Driver’s Ed car. Like it was some cosmic high school joke.
The consensus was that the Monday, 12:15 p.m. car had the worst collection of misfitted students you could imagine ’cause they put a brand-new kid from Japan named Oshi who didn’t speak any English in with Tory Bunson, who was the biggest weed head in the school and should never have been allowed to drive ’cause he had a habit of closing his eyes and napping at inappropriate times and when he walked the halls he was so chill he forgot where he was going half the time. And the two of them were in with Emily Harriman and Brady Stark, who had broken up over the summer and it did not end well. Emily started calling Brady a cheating, body-slamming, misogynistic steak-head meat-stick, and that was only on the days when she felt like being nice. So there was either a stoned weed weasel behind the wheel and a fight going on in the back seat, or a foreign student who couldn’t read the road signs and didn’t know how to convert miles per hour to kilometers driving and a fight going on in the back seat, or Emily would be driving and crying the whole time and Brady would be in the back with the exchange student and the guy whose future life plans included building a meth lab in his mother’s kitchen, or Brady would be driving and pounding the steering wheel ’cause Emily was correct in her assessment that he was basically a steak-head with aggressive tendencies and anger problems and the poor Japanese kid would be stuck in the back with the weed weasel and a sobbing girl.
Here’s who I—the future gas station attendant—was sitting next to in the back seat of the white four-door Ford Fiesta starting at 2:15 p.m. on Wednesdays and Fridays and every other Thursday when it wasn’t my turn to drive. There was Eli, future bright shining star of something or other; Benj Kutchner, possible parent killer; and Alex B. Renner, future CEO of a global enterprise that would cure malaria or some such shit. He had it all planned out. He was going to be doing an internship at a biotech company in the city this summer, which I only knew ’cause I overheard him tell the guidance counselor, Ms. Emmitt, who I was there to see about my “disappointing performance” on the SATs, that he planned on curing cancer or reinventing the wheel or building a rocket and he was going to get started right away. The way he apparently figured it, there was no point in w
aiting until he actually knew how to do anything.
Then of course there was Mr. Stanley, the Driver’s Ed teacher, with his clipboard and sweaty hands and that left eye that was a bit smaller than his right and twitched real fast when he got nervous. Looked like he was sending secret messages in Morse code to a spy behind enemy lines. He’d be forcefully saying, “Joel, son, you’ve got to put the car in D for drive not R for reverse and go easy on the gas pedal and try not to lurch out into the roadway with such a heavy foot. Now, try again, and go slowly this time. Ease into it.” But I was mesmerized by the di-di-dit dah-dah-dah di-di-dit of his left eyelid and didn’t hear a thing he said until I was back to driving badly and he was yelling again.
“I said, slowly! Pull over, son. Now!”
Then I’d lurch the damn Ford Fiesta to the side of the high school parking lot—we hadn’t gotten to the actual road yet what with my lead foot and tendency to go in reverse—and Eli would be sitting in the back seat probably wishing she was somewhere else making lists of all the things in the world that needed her attention and Alex B. Renner was memorizing SAT vocab words when he should have been reading the pamphlet Mr. Stanley had handed out on how to drive a motor vehicle ’cause Alex B. Renner couldn’t drive for shit, and Benj Kutchner would be bopping to some song he had playing on his phone oblivious to what was going on ’cause he was wearing earbuds that were not allowed but that Mr. Stanley couldn’t see because they were running inside his shirt and hidden in his hair and I’d just look at Mr. Stanley and he’d start doing it again. Di-di-dit dah-dah-dah di-di-dit.