Picking the Bones

by Brian Hodge

  It was a quickie job, hand-lettered in black magic marker, with strips of electrical tape crossed over the face of the deadbolt lock. It had to be Enrique's doing. There's no reason I've ever had for mentioning him before, but Enrique handles maintenance for the complex, along with a couple part-timers. According to neighbors who've lived here long enough to remember the prior guys who held the position, Enrique puts them all to shame. I imagine they're right. He really does seem like a dependable guy, conscientious. And I've noticed this fall that he wields a mean leaf-blower.

  So, with my key in hand, I stood there at the clubhouse door and weighed the alternatives:

  (A) Obey. Turn around and go straight back to my condo. Shower, bed. Miss the night's workout and wake up with limbs feeling as though the muscles have turned to custard. One night's broken habit becomes two, then three, and by the end of the week I can't imagine lifting another weight in my life. In a few more months I'm miles down the road to developing the world's saggiest ass.

  (B) Bend the rules a bit to thwart the terrible consequences of (A).

  You know me well enough to realize there was no debate. At least I was careful about peeling the tape off the lock so it would fit back into place. I figured I'd open the door long enough to give it a sniff. If it didn't stink, there probably wasn't much of a problem and Enrique was just being Enrique, cautious to a fault.

  I didn't smell a thing. So I slipped in, smoothed the tape back over the keyhole, and locked up behind myself.

  What you have to understand now is that the basement is divided up a lot more than the upper floor. At the bottom of the stairs, the weight room is to your left. I tried the air again, but it smelled the same as always…this chilly scent of iron plates and a residue of old sweat. Enclosed the way it usually is, with the ceiling-level windows shut, you'd think if there really was sewage on the loose, you'd be smelling it by now.

  I put my towel and water bottle on the main weight bench and decided to make one last check before starting my workout. Like I said, when you come to the bottom of the stairs, the weight room is to your left, but if you go right, you're in this narrow corridor with a few storage closets, plus the bathrooms and a pair of showers. Which weren't spotless, but there were definitely no signs of muck backing up from below.

  So by now I was starting to wonder if the stuff on the door wasn't someone's idea of a prank, and a lazy one at that.

  At the very end of the hallway, that's where Maintenance works out of. Unless someone's in there, even during the day, the door's always locked, because they keep a lot of tools in there…although it's not really very secure. I guess so they can take what's essentially a workshop and make it seem more like an office, it's the only door downstairs with glass set into the top half. If you wanted to steal the tools, all you'd have to do would be smash the window, reach down past the blinds, and let yourself in. Seems awfully trusting to me, but they aren't my tools.

  I was about to turn around and get on with my workout when I noticed a light at the edges of the drawn blinds, about what you'd see if someone had left on a desk lamp. It didn't necessarily mean anyone was there…except then I heard a thin scrape of metal from behind the door, and then this gruff voice, but murmuring, so I couldn't make out all the words. But I heard this much:

  "…worse trouble…"

  Of course I took it personally—that there really was something to this infection risk after all and I was busted. So I called out Enrique's name.

  I'd never known him to be here so late. He doesn't live on-site, either, but then again, maybe he wouldn't want to. He'd probably never get more than an hour's peace during his off-hours, like a doctor at a party: Hey, as long as we're talking, would you mind taking a look at this rash?

  Nobody said anything, so I tried again. Even if the sign really was legit and now I was where I wasn't supposed to be, I doubted that Enrique would be angry. I suppose he has to get angry sometime, but I've never seen it, even when there's a good reason. Back in the summer, I saw one of his part-timers run over a garden hose with a mower, with predictable results. Enrique didn't get angry—he just scowled a moment, then laughed it off and gathered up the pieces like dead snakes. I remember thinking at the time that he'd probably make a good father, with that kind of patience.

  I told you that because I need you to know upfront that he's not some kind of hothead. This is something I had to remind myself of at first.

  I heard that metallic scrape again, and what sounded like the shuffle of footsteps, only clumsy, and finally I got an answer from the other side of the door:

  "Hey! Can you get me out of here?"

  Not Enrique. Definitely not Enrique. In fact, it wasn't a voice I recognized at all.

  It didn't make sense to me, so I said something silly, like, "Why—is the door stuck?" But even if it was, I was thinking, What's this guy's problem, anyway? He's the one in there surrounded by all the tools.

  He only shouted at me: "Hurry, would you? Jesus!"

  I tried the door, but it was locked. So I went to one knee and put my eye to the glass, to look through a little gap in the blinds. And I was right, it was just a little desk lamp burning in there, so it was dim enough, and the peephole small enough, that it took awhile for me to make out what I was looking at across the room.

  The guy inside couldn't go anyplace because he was sitting on the floor with his hands overhead, chained to a vise. Remember Daddy's workshop when we were kids, and the vise he had bolted to his workbench? This one is twice that size. You could use it for a boat anchor.

  You'd probably react about the same way I did…totally clueless and no idea what to do about it. Should I get a loose free weight and break the glass? Go straight home and call the police? But then, too, a part of me was thinking, Well, if he's chained up in there, it's possible there's actually a good reason for it. He looked young, but I couldn't tell for sure. So I asked who he was.

  "Does that fucking matter right now?" he yelled. He said he could see my outline against the blinds, staring in at him, so I had to know his situation.

  Except I didn't, really. I didn't know his situation at all, only what I was seeing at that moment. I asked who left him like that. I didn't even realize that Enrique was there by now, behind me, at the opposite end of the hall. Not until he spoke up to say that he'd done it.

  "I've got pepper spray with me," I told him. Showed him, too, although I couldn't believe how calm my voice was.

  "OK," he said. "You can leave right now if you want, and do whatever you think you should do. But before you decide, I'd really rather talk to you a few minutes. You can hold the spray on me the whole time, and I promise not to come any closer than you want me to."

  That was when the guy in the workshop started shouting for me to use the spray on him right now.

  But there was something about Enrique's eyes, and the look on his face. It wasn't like I'd caught him in the middle of plotting something terrible or some kinky game he was playing. He looked ashamed. And sick. Not physically ill, but like something had made him sick to his heart, and that if I was intent on turning him in, he wouldn't do anything to stop me.

  He pointed toward the weight room, so we'd have more privacy…but I didn't like the idea, still didn't totally trust him, I suppose. I mean, if we got in there, we could stand on opposite sides of the room, but he could throw free weights at me from farther away than the pepper spray shoots.

  So we decided on the stairs, me at the top landing, him at the bottom. That was good. If he rushed me, I could blind him, then kick him back down.

  First, I had to know who he had in the workshop. Enrique said his name was Kevin Stapleton. From one of the other buildings, on the opposite side of the complex from mine, so there was no reason he'd be familiar to me.

  Next, how old? 16 or 17, Enrique thought.

  And finally, why? For as long as I live, I'll never forget the look on his face when he answered. Because even then I could tell he wasn't totally convinced, but th
e fear that he might be right was eating him alive.

  "I think he's one of those kids that's about to blow," Enrique said, "and wipe out as many people at his school as he can."

  It just hung in the air like that, because I didn't know what to say next. There was a time, not even all that long ago, when if you'd said that about a boy of 16 or 17, everyone would react as if you were crazy one. Well, not anymore. We know damn well they go off and do that sometimes, a few of them, and they always come from towns and suburbs just like this one.

  Tell me I'm wrong.

  Now maybe you know how I felt sitting at the top of the stairs looking down at Enrique.

  "Corri," he said then…which caught me by surprise, him calling me by name. I wasn't sure he even knew my name. It's one of those situations where you see someone 3 or 4 times a week, and you wave or say hi because it's a familiar face, but there was no reason he had to put a name with mine. I can't have introduced myself more than once, when I first moved in. He must have 100 names around here to know and all we have to remember is Enrique. It just impressed me, that he must've made a point of remembering who people are.

  Anyway.

  What he said: "Corri…I've got a little sister that goes to the same school."

  Which explained his apprehension, if not the rest of the situation. I mean, God knows our family has its own baggage there, too, right—high school cruelty. And all these years later, we're still living with the repercussions.

  I asked, "How do you know this about him?"

  Turns out it was because of the ants.

  This past summer, a few of the buildings developed a problem with little teeny red ants. A bunch came in from somewhere and decided to colonize. It's not a ground floor thing, either. I'm on the 3rd floor and still see them come out of the woodwork along my kitchen counter. Because it's a problem that affects whole buildings, and not just individual units, it's Maintenance's responsibility. So the guys have been making the rounds once a month with this contraption, sort of like a hot-glue gun only bigger, and they use it to leave dabs of poison around. The ants eat it and carry it back to the colony, and everybody gets sick…genocidal I'm sure, from the ants' perspective, but come on…N.I.M.S.B.

  Not In My Sugar Bowl.

  If you're not going to be around on poison-bait day, they want you to make arrangements so they can get in anyway…leave a key, with them or a neighbor. That's what tripped Kevin up. His parents split years ago, and it's just been him and his mom. And she'd been gone all week—a business trip or a convention, something like that.

  You're probably thinking the same thing I did at first: If she's gone but her son is still around, why does she need to leave a key with Maintenance? To answer that, all you have to do is think back to how reliable you and I must've been the first year or 2 after we started driving.

  So it was late afternoon when Enrique made it into the Stapleton place, and had to use the key to let himself in. The fact that so many people have no problem with him coming into their places when they're not home shows you the kind of trust everyone has in him. Which must be why he seemed embarrassed when he told me about looking over the papers that were lying out in plain view on the kitchen snackbar…like unless he's totally blind, he's committing a violation of privacy.

  But he showed them to me then, and I can see why they caught his eye.

  You know how something looks when it's been handwritten, but appears to have been done by someone at different times and in 2 completely different moods? Almost like it's been done by 2 different people? That's what these were like. Parts of them were really precise, painfully precise…straight diagram lines, lettering so neat it could've been done by an architect. You could picture someone hunched over the paper trying to be soooo careful.

  But the other parts? It was the kind of thing that's frightening to look at, even before you know what it is, because of the state of mind it reflects…a place of such uncontrollable rage: swirls of black and red ink, slashes back and forth so hard they'd nearly worn through to the other side of the paper. Words, too, so jagged they were barely legible: DAY OF JUDGMENT, he had that one a couple of times. LET GOD SORT EM OUT, that one once, except then he'd crossed out GOD and replaced it with THE DEVIL. In one place, BITTER NECTAR, which didn't seem nearly as obvious. Lots of FUCKs, of course, with a different object every time…sometimes a first name, once a big angry EVERYBODY.

  But I mentioned diagrams, right?

  Enrique thought it was his school, and I had to agree. Hallways, classrooms…nothing was labeled as such, although some seemed to be marked with abbreviations, others with numbers, like a sequence of events. Some were marked with symbols, too. A few resembled bombs; others were bullets, from 1 to 5 in a row, like a rating system. They couldn't have looked any more perfect and lined up if they were printed in a magazine. That was the most disturbing aspect about this whole thing: the layout done so painstakingly, then the rest layered on top of it, like an explosion.

  So Enrique had me now. It didn't take much persuading for me to see the same potential bloodbath that he did.

  And you're wondering how Kevin ended up in the workshop like that, right?

  Even though Enrique still had a few more places to do, after he left the Stapleton place, he came straight back to the clubhouse. You don't just discover something like this and then go on about your work. Except when he got back there, that's when he found Kevin in the weight room, pumping iron like there's no day-after-tomorrow.

  Of course I didn't see it happen, but it's not hard to picture the scene: They look at each other, and Enrique's surprised in a way he ordinarily never would be, so Kevin cues right into that. He sees the poison-bait gun and knows where Enrique's just come from. And Enrique knows he knows. All this going on between them without either one saying a word.

  Enrique didn't remember what he said, finally, just that he pulled the papers out of his back pocket and Kevin went ballistic. Whoever started it, the fight couldn't have lasted long. Enrique may not be very tall, but he's sturdy and wiry at the same time, like that guy you dated awhile in college, the one on the wrestling team.

  Whether or not it was right or wrong, while Kevin was basically out of it, that's when Enrique chained him to the vise.

  I know what you're probably thinking now, because they're the same reactions and questions that came to me there on the stairs:

  (1) Why didn't you just call the police?

  (2) That was nearly 4 hours ago. What have you been doing all this time?

  (3) How does Kevin explain what you found?

  (4) What are you planning on doing with him?

  (5) Don't you realize that the longer you let this this go on, the worse it's going to be for you?

  And Enrique seemed contrite enough. He realized he'd panicked, and things got out of hand before either of them could stop it. Yet despite everything, even if what Enrique was doing was wrong, maybe it would've been a worse wrong to just let it go.

  So I'll answer those questions more or less the way Enrique put it to me, and hope you'll understand why I started seeing things…not his way, that's not it, more that I wanted to mediate this situation to the best possible conclusion for everyone concerned. I was frightened for both of them, but in Enrique's case, I knew he was a good man; where Kevin was concerned, I didn't know a thing about him.

  Anyway, your answers:

  (1) and (4) Enrique didn't call the police because technically he was the criminal at this point. He may have been motivated by good intentions, but it was still kidnapping. It wasn't that he'd ruled out the police, just that he hoped he might have something more concrete to give them when they showed up, so what he'd done might seem more reasonable.

  (2) After he put Kevin in the workshop, Enrique was still shook up, and it took him awhile to come up with a plausible reason to keep other people out of the building, in case someone came over. (Obviously, for me, it still wasn't good enough.) After that, he went back to the Stapleton place and
starting looking for anything he could find to build a case against Kevin. Except, under the circumstances, Enrique felt that he wasn't being methodical and all he was doing was going in circles. That's where he was when he eventually looked out the window and saw the lights in the clubhouse basement, after I'd turned them on in the weight room.

  (3) Kevin's explanation for what he'd left out on the counter was that they were rough layouts for levels in a video game he was designing.

  (5) Enrique understood he was in deep and digging himself in deeper. That's why he was so desperate to find something at Kevin's place. And why I was inclined to let him have a little more time to do it.

  OK, it was more than that. Not just let Enrique have more time…but help him.

  "I don't know anything about computers, Corri. I never had any reason to," he told me. "But Kevin's got one over there in his room, and what if it's all on there? These kids that snap, you always hear about these journals they keep and nobody finds them 'til it's too late."

  Here's what I told him: "I'll do this, but only under one condition. I'm not going to invade this boy's home and possibly his most personal thoughts until I meet him." Which Enrique understood. "And if I don't find anything that points in the direction you think is there, you're going to have to call this off and face the consequences. This can't continue."

  So he gave me the key to the workshop.

  I'm still not sure what I was expecting. After these kids explode, you see their pictures in the papers, or on the news, and there's always a disconnect with how young they look and the adult hatefulness of what they've done. Kevin was working at a disadvantage, though. He looked nothing like a yearbook photo. He'd gotten sweaty hours earlier, and never cleaned up. He had a bruise on his jaw and dried blood on his lip. Worst of all, he'd had 4 hours to sit there fuming with his wrists chained to a vise.

  I swear to you, he wasn't very big but he didn't look young. Or frightened. He looked like he was ready to kill someone. I tried to put this evaluation behind me and remember why he might've looked this way. Now, there did seem to be a peculiar little vibe when I first walked in, something I couldn't quite put my finger on…but it was only later why I realized it was more than just the situation and not my imagination.