Jackboot

by Will Van Allen

  “Watcha readin’, faggot?” Boucher asked.

  Mitch returned to his book, fervently hoping that if ignored they would burst into flame, turn to stone, be devoured by a roving band of kobolds or simply disappear to an alternate plane.

  “I’m talkin’ to you, dweeb!”

  “He’s talkin’ to you, dickweed!”

  Nope. No random ethereal plane teleportation was happening here.

  “Consider Phlebas,” he said, his voice high, not atypical these days.

  “‘Consider Pee-bus?’” Boucher mimicked his squeaky voice. “Sounds like a book about buttfuckin’.”

  “It’s science fiction.”

  “Ohhh! Science fiction! Why the fuck you here, dork?”

  They weren’t going to leave him alone. “I helped Mr. Powell in the computer lab. We installed new modems. Fourteen-point-four baud, Trellis Code Modulation—”

  “Jesus! I didn’t ask for a play-by-play. Spaz.” High fives on that one.

  He turned back into his book.

  “Powell go home? You waitin’ for the activity bus?”

  “Hey! He asked you a question, buttmunch! Powell leave or what?”

  “Yeah. He left.”

  “Alright. Don’t be dissin’ me,” Boucher warned.

  Muttering to themselves the three swaggered down the hall in their 501s and North Central red and black letterman’s jackets.

  His first introduction to the Terrible Trio as they were known by the Computer Club, the two evil minions had dunked him headfirst into a cafeteria garbage can while Boucher rifled his wallet. He had gone hungry and worn pizza, taco salad and sour milk the rest of the day, barely holding back tears on the long bus ride home, nasty kids making nasty remarks and nasty smells before suffering his father’s disgust when he walked through the door. He had survived, as he had his humiliating expulsion from Elk Creek High a few months back when they blamed a stash of M-80s and several blown-up toilets on the reticent nerd in the black Smith’s T-shirt. Surviving meant life went on. Such as it was.

  His Casio calculator watch read 8:32 p.m. Thirteen minutes to go but sometimes Brenda came early. She would park and walk across to the alley and grab a smoke before dealing with the last rowdy busload, although tonight it looked to be a quiet ride. He wouldn’t complain. His book was really getting juicy.

  He sucked down the last of his Dew, deliberated over peeing before the long ride or holding it until he got home (or at least until the bus dropped him at the highway mile marker where he would walk the final four miles to the house). His bladder just wasn’t going to make it. Stuffing his book in his backpack and the backpack over his shoulders he braved the bathroom.

  It was empty, thank God. He did his business, washed his hands and hopelessly checked the mirror. Floppy brown hair as lame as ever and there was a new outbreak of acne constellation across his chin. He wasn’t growing into himself like his brothers had, dashing his dad’s own hope with his scrawny defection, more brain than brawn, on the farm that counted next to nothing.

  He puffed out his cheeks, splashed water on his face and headed back, hoping Brenda was now puffing away at her cancer stick and he could get on the bus. He wondered if the snow was sticking. That would make the ride twice as long not to mention the trudge to the house. The snow got deep out there. It was going to be a long night.

  Something hooked his backpack and he backpedaled, struggling to keep his feet as he was pulled through a doorway, his startled scream cut off by something crammed into his mouth. He froze when the door was pushed shut from behind by the well-built Ronnie Mangiano, his pockmarked face acidic and wicked. A sinking feeling filled him and he pulled at whatever was in his mouth, horrified to find a nasty pair of men’s underwear before arms wrapped around his backpack and small frame, locking his own useless against his sides. Someone reached from behind and pushed the gag back in place.

  His eyes went wide, darted for escape. He had never been in this room before but knew it to be Mr. Canter’s. Canter taught health and coached the wrestling team. There were pictures of skeletons and muscles and digestive tracts and sports posters on the walls: Adidas, Converse, and of course Nike. The words “Just Do It” beneath a tired but determined runner all alone on the highway of her life on the closed door. Something about that poster made him panic, he let loose a muffled scream that cut off abruptly as he was punched in the ribs, all his air wheezing out through the sour gag.

  “Shut the fuck up, queer!” breathed Scott Boucher into his ear. “No one around to hear you.”

  He silently siphoned air back into his lungs.

  “Better,” Boucher commended but not loosening his grip any. “Now, we’re just gonna have a little fun, Mitchy-Bitchy, ’kay? Desmitt, get the lights.” He nodded to Mangiano. “Get his backpack.”

  Mangiano tugged and pushed and dislodged the pack Boucher quickly closing the gap. His breath hot on his ear smelled of chocolate. Snickers, maybe.

  “If we’re gonna do it, let’s do it.” Desmitt appeared beside him, looking to the door.

  “Chill. Everyone’s gone for the weekend, dude. No one here but us ghosts,” Boucher chortled.

  They were going to humiliate him, rough him up a little, nothing he hadn’t experienced before but the underwear was pushing it. A putrid smell flooded his olfactory.

  Butcher wheeled him over to the teacher’s wide metal desk and bent him over it, papers and stapler flying to the floor. Great, a goddamn wedgie. He took a deep breath, winced in preparation.

  His pants and underwear were yanked down to his ankles. He rasped throaty umbrage. This was way beyond the pestering pale now.

  “Shut. The fuck. Up.” Desmitt hit him several times in the gut, each one sharper than the last, his delight growing more vividly evident with each jab.

  “Easy,” Boucher said. “You break it you buy it.”

  Mangiano cut a jump rope in half and he and Desmitt tied each of his ankles to a leg of the desk.

  He squirmed and squealed but he was weak and they knew it. Boucher leaned his full weight down on him. “You know you want it, faggot.” Boucher’s sweet breath wafted across him.

  “Yeah, he wants it.” Desmitt’s hungry eyes agreed.

  Mangiano chortled.

  His eyes darted for an escape that didn’t exist.

  “Hold his arms.”

  Desmitt fell into the teacher’s chair, pulled him taut across the desk by his wrists as Mangiano tied them together with another piece of rope. The edge of the desk bit into the soft flesh of his stomach and his exposed penis brushed against the cold metal. There was shuffling behind him. Two hands grabbed his butt cheeks and pulled them apart. He squeezed his eyes shut against mortified tears. Something pressed against him, seeking, probing.

  He cried.

  There was a horrible, alien, reverse pressure that thrust inside him.

  He screamed.

  They took their turn. They took their time.

  Unbearable agony ripped through him, hairy legs smacked his thighs, coiled pubic hair brushed against his own testicles with every searing thrust. He groaned into the sour gag now soaked with his own saliva.

  “Wanna go again?”

  “Fuckin A’…”

  In enthusiasm Desmitt released his wrists too soon and where he found the strength, the courage he would never know, but a split second before Boucher could snatch them back up he ripped the slimy gag from his mouth and let loose a hoarse rasp that evolved into a primal scream. He screamed and screamed until his head was slammed hard against the desk.

  Stars whirled about the chalkboard, and though he couldn’t see it he heard the door handle jerk up and down behind him. Then the voice: “Hey! Open this door!”

  Boucher shushed the other two to silence and cupped his mouth. He gave him a menacing look.

  Quiet. You could hear a pin drop.

  The door exploded inward, or so he imagined. It THWACKED hard the wall. Light from the hall poured inside the room.
/>   “What the fuck?”

  “Get ’im!” Boucher tore around the desk.

  Sounds of a scuffle. Swearing, grappling, the squeak of shoes on the floor, the smack of fists against flesh and grunts of pain. It seemed interminable then went coldly quiet after a series of blows punctuated by capitulating groans.

  Boucher swung back into view, grabbed the scissors, raised the edge to his throat and said “I’ll fuckin’ kill him, McConnell!”

  McConnell…yes! He knew him! Of him. Dating that nice, pretty girl that was in his physics class. She smiled at him once. Oh please God please please—

  “Please…” he pleaded.

  Boucher banged his head off the desk for silence. Out of his peripheral vision he glimpsed someone tall in the dark crimson warm-ups of the basketball team, blood leaking from above his eye as he spat out rich red on the floor.

  “I’ll kill him. I swear it. And we’ll say you did it. Three against one,” Boucher promised.

  McConnell snorted, spat more blood. “Go ahead. Kill him. Then none of ya will leave this room alive.”

  That cold matter-of-fact tone scared the room. Was this his savior or another nightmare?

  “Mangiano?” Boucher called out.

  “I’ done, man!” gasped a nasally challenged voice from somewhere in the dark. “Fawkin’ dick broke ma’ nose!”

  Boucher hesitated but he could feel the boy’s fear. “This ain’t over. Not by a long shot.” A punch goodbye in the abdomen, Boucher held up the scissors and glared at McConnell as he helped Mangiano up, the wrestler’s nose a rubicund geyser. They dragged Desmitt to his feet who had one hand to his groin and the other over an eye and all three shambled out, slamming the door behind them. It creaked slowly on its hinges. Just Do It!

  McConnell wordlessly untied his wrists and ankles and he slid down the desk into something sticky on the floor, a pool of his own blood and other’s semen and he began to wail. McConnell tentatively reached out, pity replacing his previous cold. “It’s okay. You’re okay, man. We just gotta get you to a hospital.”

  He stopped mid-sob. He drew on his pants, wincing. “No. No hospital.” His dad would never forgive him. He already hated him. And school, the other kids, it would be the end of him forever.

  “There’s a lot of blood—”

  “No! No fucking hospital!”

  Reluctantly, McConnell agreed, offered to take him to his house, get cleaned up and he nodded, eager to get out of there.

  The halls were empty, Brenda and the activity bus long gone as he waddled painfully next to the bigger man who was bleeding himself but didn’t seem to care. Outside the cold air hit him hard, the drifting flakes melting upon his hot face as they crossed the snow-choked parking lot. He sidled into McConnell’s old pickup and had to adjust his weight from one cheek to the other to alleviate the stinging ache in the middle as they plowed through the snow in silence. What to say? But he needed to say something. He cleared his throat, wiped at tears that wouldn’t stop leaking, started to say “thank you” but his psyche was already in full retreat and instead he croaked, “Nice truck,” and, “Old but nice.”

  “It was my dad’s.” Silence. “He died a few months back.”

  “Oh.”

  “Motorcycle accident. Drunk driver hit him.”

  He didn’t seem to be the only one struggling with what to say.

  “Sorry,” he said. And they returned to the silence.

  McConnell’s was warm and cozy but there was a palpable gravitas, an emptiness. He showered, delicately cleaning away the blood and semen and shit caked in the crack of his ass. He felt cautiously around his rectum expecting a three-inch gash but though tender and sore it seemed to be intact. The bleeding stopped, he sobbed, nauseatingly entranced at the rust-red trail disappearing down the drain. As he stood in a towel staring at his bloodied jeans and shirt there was a knock on the door and he graciously accepted a gray sweatshirt and sweats that belonged to McConnell’s ten-year-old brother. They fit loose but smelled fresh and clean.

  Bagging up his defiled garments McConnell took them out back and threw them in the trash, then they stood in the kitchen because it felt better to stand than to sit and they drank coffee.

  “I’m not gay,” he said.

  “I never thought you were.” McConnell’s words were thick from a swollen lip. His face would be bruised, the cut above his eye requiring three stitches but he never complained. In the aftermath he would serve as proxy and meet the Terrible Trio that Sunday at Corbin Park where it was agreed to let dogs lie as long as everyone kept their mouths shut and they never bothered him again.

  For his part, he survived, and life went on, but he retreated, gradually but steadily, and though high school was manageable he lasted only sixteen days at WSU before returning home, defeated, an ashamed wreck of nerves and dread before a once again disappointed and angry father.

  “You know where Mrs. Graham’s room is?” McConnell had asked as they bounced and slid over the snowy, ice-caked gravel, inexorably closer and closer to his home.

  He knew.

  “Right across, locker three-eighty-three, that’s my locker. Meet me Monday morning, I’ll wait for you. If I’m late my girlfriend, Angela, will be there.”

  “You won’t tell her?”

  “I’ll tell her what happened. We were jumped outside of school by some Shadle guys. Gave as good as we got.”

  That night on his parent’s porch, his behind a clamoring, stinging dirge, his throat sore, wrists raw, he built on that school rivalry story to explain why he was no longer wearing the same clothes as he had left in that morning, indeed no longer in possession of those soiled clothes at all.

  Watching McConnell drive away in his dead dad’s beat-up old pickup, the ruby taillights fading into snowy obscurity, his tear-blurred gaze took in the virgin white world around him.

  The snow. It was sticking.

  CHAPTER 18

  JULY

  Elk, Washington

  He was still whistling, Geronimo riding shotgun, nose in the wind, a good day for it, the warm country air rich with summer as they wound along the narrow roads up and down hills through wide-open grassland and swathes of fir and spruce. Confrontation did wonders for the right man.

  When they turned onto the lane that ran by the Bullock farm he slowed. The two-story farmhouse looked a little older, a little sadder, a little more run down. Sun-bleached, scarred and peeling, it needed a coat of paint. Maybe two. As they came up the drive he peered down at a small, orderly garden. Off to the right Mitch’s old lab rose from the dirt to offer a pathetic bark that died on the breeze. A figure in T-shirt and shorts with pasty-white sticks for legs poking out stood on the porch shielding his eyes.

  McConnell couldn’t open the passenger door fast enough for Geronimo to leap to the ground and make acquaintances. “Brought my dog,” he said.

  “So I see.” The figure stepped down into the yard. “Ollie’s still friendly enough, if he feels up to it.”

  The dogs did the usual sniffing and wagging and then took off down the path that led past the old barn into the woods beyond. It was a fine day, not to be wasted. God knew how many more they had left.

  “They alright?”

  “They’re fine. Ollie knows his woods.”

  Mitch was thin save a protruding paunch and an aging roundness to his face. His pallor was too white and long hair more gray than brown. His movements were furtive and he glanced back at the porch more than once.

  “I heard you were fat. And bearded,” Mitch said, pushing up his glasses with his middle finger.

  “Was.” He rubbed at a belly and beard that were no longer there. “Glasses, huh? We that old?”

  Bullock shrugged.

  John extended his hand. “Good to see you, Mitch.”

  The hacker’s grasp was weak, his limp hair hung in his eyes. Again he peered out at the road, at McConnell, behind him at the porch then back at the road again.

  “You expecting someo
ne?” McConnell asked.

  “No. Why?” He blew out his cheeks, turned for the house, said over his shoulder, “Too hot out here. Let’s get something to drink.” Probably as good an invitation as McConnell was likely to get.

  The house was mostly the same. A few differences. A constant hum vibrated into his boots from the old wood floor. Mitch’s dad’s old chair sat stern and silent near the fireplace watching a grand battle of Dungeons and Dragons miniatures, the old pewter kind on a map that covered the old dining room table. Bookcases lined every wall, filled with fiction, cookbooks, travel, physics, astronomy, languages, programming theory, programming languages, politics, histories and biographies.

  The kitchen now boasted track lighting above a modern island topped with a butcher block full of Henckels and a deep double-sink. Above hung a medley of herbs, a who’s who of copper pots and pans and their entourage of ladles and spatulas.

  “Oh, the re-mod.” Mitch dismissed it with a wave. “An old D&D buddy did the work. I’m taking a culinary arts course, I’ll be an American Culinary Federation certified chef soon,” he said, proudly pouring tea from a large glass pitcher he retrieved from the oversized stainless side-by-side refrigerator. Mountain Dew lined one shelf and the rest overflowed with a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables and meat, how the fridge was kept so well stocked a curiosity but not an overly wrought one. Mitch had always been resourceful. It’s why McConnell was out here.

  “Don’t you need to take a test somewhere for that?”

  The future ACF chef shrugged.

  “Nothing like cooking the books, eh?”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?” He was miffed. “I’m not cheating. I’m doing the course, just using my own venue and inputting the appropriate score for their convenience later. Lemon? Sweetener?”

  “Lemon’s fine.”

  Mitch grabbed a Mountain Dew and disappeared down the dark rectangle leading into the basement. McConnell sighed and followed after him. Again. It was likely to be a long day.

  The hacker was already sitting before three large monitors and rattling away on a keyboard.

  “Keeps out the bugs,” he said, catching McConnell taking in the room. “There’s no Wi-Fi to bleed out but the chicken wire prevents any grab of the CAT5 or fiber.”