Words We Don't Say

by K. J. Reilly

  Mr. Stanley announced that he had a surprise for us.

  Now, there were rampant rumors going around school as to exactly what Mr. Stanley’s surprise was—after all, this wasn’t the first time that he had taught Driver’s Ed. If you listened to the seniors they’d tell you that he’d been here at CC High since the Ford Motor Company rolled out the first assembly line vehicle in 1913 but Alex B. Renner said, “They didn’t have Driver’s Ed back then and Calf City High didn’t open until 1952.” Plus, Stanley told us on the first day of class that he started teaching at CC in 1971, so I mean, come on, do the math. Eddie Casonov said Mr. Stanley’s surprise was that he took you to the King Kone stand up on Route 127 and bought everyone in the car an ice cream. The kind of soft-serve ice-cream cone that is dipped in a hot chocolate glaze that turns solid but it makes the ice cream inside so soft that it drips down onto your hands when you try to eat it. I knew that ’cause when we stopped at King Kone with Jace when Jesus, Mary wasn’t with us, Jackson would tell him he had two choices—a dish or a cone. But the cone came with a trip through the car wash. Jace would get a real serious look on his face and he always said, “They don’t let kids go through the car wash, Jackson,” and get this, he added, “For out a car.” And I would say, “Jace, you mean without a car,” and he would say, “That’s what I said, Joel!” Jace was either way braver and way tougher than me, or else he thought the cone was worth it because he always picked the cone and the car wash, not the dish. Made a bigger mess than you’d think was possible, too. From his hair to his sneakers needed to be hosed down as he was covered in chocolate and Jace always looked a little scared anyway—not really scared, but just a little—his eyes dartin’ to me, then back to the car wash as we drove by it.

  Other seniors just smiled and said, “Ice-cream cone? No fuckin’ way, man. But you’ll see.” And I’d heard some weird rumors, too. Some kids said that Mr. Stanley took you out onto Route 287 on a long, straight strip of highway between exits 65 and 66 and then he took his foot away from the special brake pedal they install for the Driver’s Ed teacher and he made the kid driving step on the gas till the pedal hit the floor and the speedometer flirted with a hundred miles per hour as the little compact car started rattling to the bone ’cause the tin can piece of shit Ford Fiesta wasn’t stable at that speed. The seniors said he did it to teach us a lesson about drag racing and speeding. I didn’t know what was true and what was just shit kids made up to scare each other, but me? Personally? I didn’t care much for an ice-cream cone ’cause I’d have way rather seen Mr. Stanley yell, “Floor it, bitch!” as Alex B. Renner gripped the wheel and flew down the highway in the passing lane while me and Benj and Eli hung on tight in the back seat wondering if we were gonna die as Mr. Stanley was wringing his hands and his eye was twitching some message…dah-di-dit dah-dah-dah dah-dit-dah…as the world went by the car windows way faster than we would ever see it do again in our lifetimes with old Mr. Stanley’s lid dancing dits and dahs in rhythmic patterns galloping like a horse to water…dah-di-dit di-dah-dit di-dit dah-dit dah-di-dah…as the grassy hills of Rockland County flew by the economy car’s windows at warp speed with Benj playing What if, saying, “Joel, what if you modified the Driver’s Ed car and turned it into a time machine powered by plutonium stolen from Libyan terrorists just like in the movie Back to the Future and you drove so fast that we broke through the time/space barrier and then we went back in time and fixed things?”

  And I’d ask, “Fixed what, Benj?”

  And he’d say, “Fucking everything.”

  And I would say, “Hell yes, let’s do it!”

  Then I would blast right through any fucking barriers there were and we would fix all of it. Benj’s dead parents, Jace and the gun, Rooster, Andy’s cancer, PTSD, Spindini, the Colonel, Jesse, Hendricks Street Will Smith…

  But that’s not what happened.

  There was no crazy “Mr. Stanley’s lost it” moment. No Alex B. Renner behind the wheel of the Ford Fiesta as Mr. Stanley yelled, “Floor it, bitch!” and no Joel Higgins behind the wheel breaking through the time/space barrier.

  And no ice cream either.

  Nothing like that.

  Not even close.

  Mr. Stanley’s surprise was waiting for us right up on the winding backcountry roads of the hill section of town, not on Route 287 or any other highway.

  When we were driving that day, Mr. Stanley told Alex B. Renner to pull to the side of the road, right at the same spot where the path to the Richardsons’ farm was. Right near the path where me and Eli cut in to collect eggs and asparagus and where I’d seen Rooster pushing his cart that first day. Then Stanley had him turn the engine off and he told us all to get out of the car. Mr. Stanley had us walk a few yards in from the side of the road as his eye was going haywire…di-dah dah-dit dah-di-dit…and then he told the four of us standing in the tall grass that this exact spot was where Abby Louise died.

  Kutchner leaned in to me and whispered, “Who the hell is Abby Louise?”

  And Mr. Stanley told us.

  “Twenty-seven years ago, Abby Louise came around that curve in the road.” Mr. Stanley was pointing up to a spot right before the Richardsons’ farm where the road bent at ninety degrees. “And she swerved into this tree.” We were standing in front of a big oak that’d been there a hundred years or more.

  “Dead on impact. Skull smashed in.”

  Eli let out a whimper.

  “Drunk driving accident. Blood alcohol level of point two-oh.” Stanley’s eye twitching away…dah-di-dit di-dah-dit di-dit di-di-di-dah-dit. “I just wanted you to know that.”

  Then while we all stood there looking at the tree and imagined hitting it at high speed and taking in the sum total of what Mr. Stanley had said, he added, “Abby Louise was my daughter. She was four days short of her seventeenth birthday.”

  Eli was whimpering and looking at her feet and Mr. Stanley’s eye was going di-di-dit dah-dah-dah di-di-dit twitching out a message nobody could understand and Eli converted that whimper to a full-blown cry and Alex B. Renner was just looking at the ground and kicking at the dirt and grass and I was thinking that I had been a total ass for not being nice to Mr. Stanley and I could add that to the everything-that-is-wrong-with-Joel column of one of Eli’s lists and then I was thinking about telling him I was sorry and then I was thinking about putting my arm around Eli, but Benj did it first. He draped his arm around her and she tucked right into his chest and started to sob. Then Mr. Stanley said, “Come on now, all of you get back in the car. I’ll drive.” Mr. Stanley got in the front seat driver’s side and Alex B. Renner hopped into the back seat and me and Eli were in line to climb into the back after him, which left Benj in position to ride shotgun, when Eli saw something out of the corner of her eye and she suddenly turned and was now standing just a foot in front of me with her face drawn and wet and pale from all that crying. Her eyes were just about drilling a hole through the front of my head and even though it was completely inappropriate under the circumstances I was thinking about kissing her right there in front of everyone, when she grabbed hold of my shoulders and very serious like as if she had seen a ghost said, “Joel, I see the bear.”

  And my heart went cold.

  Ice-cold.

  ’Cause I knew that Rooster was standing right behind me.

  I had to make a move immediately, or something bad was going to happen.

  That much was written all over Eli’s face.

  And then it happened.

  And Joel Higgins wasn’t fast enough or strong enough for the likes of the man we called Rooster.

  I heard a loud explosion and a piercing scream and a thud and a door slam and a male voice moan in anguish and then a commotion and then I heard feet sliding, then a dragging noise and then another scream that might have come from Benj or Eli—I wasn’t sure which—then a whimper and that sickening scream again and someone said, “Oh shit!” and I turned around and saw Rooster standing ten yards back directly behind me.r />
  And he was holding a gun.

  I turned slightly to my left in what felt like slow motion and I saw Benj Kutchner on the ground in a puddle of blood.

  There was so much blood.

  And I was trying real hard to connect the dots and nothing at all made sense and then I saw Eli fall to her knees and then she was leaning over Benj and covered in blood herself and then I saw Mr. Stanley planted in the roadbed like a statue unmoving but twitching di-dit dah-dah-dah di-di-dit and Alex B. Renner was nowhere to be seen but was presumably down on the floor of the back seat of the Ford Fiesta fearing for his life, and I finally unglued my feet from their stationary position and did something to propel myself to action ’cause once again both my feet and brain were rooted in something that kept them from moving for more seconds than I would have liked but then finally, finally, I lunged at Rooster.

  I tackled him, wrestled him to the ground, and got hold of the gun and tossed it to the side of the road. Not because I was fierce and strong, but because he wasn’t trying to stop me.

  Kneeling on top of Rooster with my knees pressing into his chest right there in the road where Mr. Stanley’s daughter plowed into a tree and cracked open her skull I looked back over my shoulder and saw Benj still lying on the ground and Eli was still next to him now with both hands pressing hard on his shoulder as she yelled, “Somebody call an ambulance!” And I was trying to put two and two together but was getting nowhere even close to four until I finally figured out the what but not the why.

  Rooster had shot Benj Kutchner.

  I yelled to Eli, “How bad is he hurt?”

  And she yelled back, “I don’t know! He’s bleeding a lot!”

  In that moment Mrs. T’s voice resonated in my head—“We can feed ’em but we can’t fix ’em”—and I screamed, “What the fuck did you go and do that for?” to the big old bear of a man who never spoke.

  Then, with one hand around his throat and the gun lying off to the side of the roadway where I had tossed it, I reached into my pants pocket for my cell phone and called 911. I told the operator to send an ambulance to Mill Lane up near the Richardsons’ farm. Said that there was a man with a gun who shot a kid. Then I did a double take and looked at that gun, stunned for a moment.

  It had never occurred to me that Rooster could have had more than one gun.

  Then I heard Spindini’s voice telling me that he had a whole collection of guns and then my voice telling the detectives and Jackson and my mom that I found the gun on the side of the road up on King Street near the Boys & Girls Club now knowing that if I had told the truth I could have stopped this and that this, just like the near tragedy with Jace, was on me.

  Then, as I knelt there with my knees still pinned against this man’s Purple-Hearted chest, I heard my pop’s refrain playing in my head. “It is what it is.” A horrible summation of the fact that shit happens like Mr. Stanley’s dead daughter and Benj Kutchner getting shot and his parents getting killed and Jace bringing a gun to school and the vets committing suicide and Andy getting cancer and Rooster suffering from what he was suffering from and my own long string of stupid decisions and that all of it could be so goddamned unfixable just like a blown-out tire or a seized-up transmission and there was nothing anyone could do about any of it no matter how hard we might try. But then, as these last few months were flashing before my eyes with me seething in anger and looking to lay blame and with Eli whimpering over Benj as he lay bleeding in the street and Mr. Stanley still planted in the roadway lightning-struck with terror and Alex B. Renner hiding on the floor of the back seat of the Ford Fiesta, Rooster spoke for the first time since I had met him.

  He yelled, “Get back in the fucking Humvee, Joel. That’s an order!”

  Tears started falling from my eyes and my heart broke in that moment just like a bullet had pierced glass and shattered it into 10.7 million pieces.

  And then he yelled again, “We need air support. Get back in the Humvee! Call in air support!”

  The sirens were getting closer and closer and I bent down and hugged Rooster. Even though everything was wrong and everything was messed up and it made no sense to hug him. I did it anyway.

  He was trying to protect me.

  It was PTSD and friendly fire.

  Then I released myself from the hug and I looked right at him and said, “Hold up one finger if you want me to try to get you help.”

  Rooster made eye contact with me and I saw it there again in his eyes, that fear, raw and bleeding and too big for any man to conquer alone. But then something clicked in those eyes of his and he slowly lifted his right hand and held up one finger and I hugged him again.

  I hugged that big bear of a man even though he did the wrong thing because it seemed like the right thing and because he recognized that he needed help. I hugged him ’cause he fought for this country and came home and nothing made sense anymore and he found out that he had lost himself over there and because when he got home he had parts missing even though they were all there.

  I was still five foot eight and Eli was still five foot ten and Abby Louise Stanley was still dead and Andy was still dead and Jace still brought a gun to school and Rooster still had a Purple Heart that screwed up his head and now Benj Kutchner was shot and bleeding and there was nothing that any one of us could do to change any bit of that.

  Not a goddamned-fucking thing.

  But right there on that street waiting for that ambulance to pull up and praying real hard that Benj would survive this, I decided that I was sure as hell going to try anyway.

  To fix everything going forward.

  As best as I could.

  to Burning Man.

  My version of it anyway.

  Benj had been hit in the shoulder, which the doctors said can be deadly within minutes, but luckily the bullet missed his major arteries and he was going to fully recover. But because of the trauma, everyone was worried about all of us and I was worried about all of us, so a few days after Benj got out of the hospital I texted him to meet me out in front of his aunt’s house and I texted Eli to meet me in front of her house and I said that we had to meet up to do something important and they both texted Okay, and then I told Jackson that I had to take his truck somewhere for a few hours and he said, “Joel, you don’t have your license.” And I said, “That’s only a technicality.” And he said, “Promise you won’t do anything stupid or drink and drive or—”

  And I said, “Look at this.” And I handed him my phone and showed him a text that Eli sent me a few days back:

  Every single day 28 people in America die in a drunk-driving accident.

  That’s 28 Abby Louise Stanleys EVERY SINGLE DAY.

  That’s 196 Abby Louise Stanleys EVERY SINGLE WEEK.

  That’s 10,220 Abby Louise Stanleys EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

  And 10,220 heartbroken Mr. Stanleys EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

  And 10,220 heartbroken Mrs. Stanleys EVERY SINGLE YEAR.

  Here’s the thing.

  I don’t have enough room for that many Stanleys.

  Don’t ever drink and drive.

  Jackson said, “Eli sent you this?”

  “Yep.”

  “Who is Abby Louise Stanley?”

  “My Driver’s Ed teacher’s daughter.”

  Jackson said, “Here are the keys. Do what you have to do.”

  I picked up Benj and his shoulder was bandaged and his arm was in a sling and he said, “Don’t look at me like that, Joel. The doctors say I’m going to be back to normal in a few months.”

  I just nodded my head and then texted Eli again and told her to come out when she saw my dad’s truck pull up in front of her house.

  I had brought along a can of gasoline, wire cutters, and a lighter. And a sledgehammer and a fire extinguisher.

  I was going to make this right.

  Or as right as it could be with Benj with a bullet wound in the shoulder and Rooster in the VA hospital.

  the truck by the tree where Abby Louise died and
Benj got shot.

  The exact spot that marked the entrance to the path to the Richardsons’ farm and Rooster’s shanty.

  When I pulled in, Eli said, “Joel, this is where Benj was shot. I don’t think…”

  But I ignored her and climbed out of the truck and they followed after me. I grabbed the gas can, the sledgehammer, the wire cutters, and the fire extinguisher from the back, asked both of them to carry something and said, “Come with me.”

  Eli said, “Joel, you’re scaring me.”

  But I didn’t respond.

  As we headed down the path Eli asked, “Why are we going to the farm where we came to collect the eggs and pick asparagus?”

  I still didn’t respond.

  “What are you going to do with gasoline?” she asked.

  As we headed farther into the woods I said, “Don’t worry. Nothing bad.” And I took Benj and Eli to Rooster’s shanty.

  Benj stopped, put the stuff he was carrying down and looked around, and then said, “What is this place?”

  But I didn’t answer. I just put the gas can and the fire extinguisher down and picked up the sledgehammer.

  “Stand back.”

  “Joel, don’t!” Eli looked scared. Real scared.

  I started swinging.

  “What is this place?” Benj asked again.

  “This is Iraq,” I said.

  I swung again. Hit the walls, the shopping carts, all the shit inside.

  “This is Afghanistan.”

  I swung again and again with each declaration.

  “This is mental illness.”

  The doorway collapsed.

  “This is homelessness.

  “Hunger.

  “Veteran suicide…”

  The sidewall fell.

  “This is dead parents.

  “Cancer.

  “And dead friends…”

  The back wall hit the ground….

  “This is post-traumatic stress disorder.