She blinks away tears. It doesn’t work. Shane sniffs, too. Blows his nose. Turns away as if embarrassed.
More vodka for her. And Shane takes another stab at the bottle, this time keeping it down.
A few quiet moments linger between them. Stretching like taffy. Collapsing like a stepped-on Coke can.
“They murdered him,” Shane says, suddenly. A bomb dropped on the conversation. A bunker-buster, even—drops from orbit, punches a whole in the surface of the conversation, blows it to hell from beneath.
They: the Neo-Nazi gun-club monsters that Chris Coyne’s father hired to “scare straight” his son. Atlanta went to bat for Chris. Tried to teach those bullies a lesson so that they stayed away from Chris and anybody like him. Took her shotgun and thought herself righteous and indomitable. The spirit of justice given form. Captain America wouldn’t save Chris, but by golly, she could.
And now, Chris is dead.
Bad thoughts threaten to punch clean through Atlanta’s head like a cannonball through tissue paper.
More vodka. Everything feels slow, sluggish, hot. The drunk is coming on, now.
“Cops called it a suicide,” she says, her mouth a grim line dragging. Those slurred words taste bitter like the beer. Sharp, but not sharp like the vodka. Sharp like a rusted nail poking up through a flip-flop.
“You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t know.” But she does know.
“You said it yourself. Orly Erickson’s got a cop buddy in his pocket.” And he did. Or does. The dark-eyed man from the gun club. Chris’ bullies weren’t just other kids. They were the children of powerful men. Men like Orly Erickson—great white hunter, head of the gun club, and the CEO of something called TNC biologics.
“What about the suicide note?” she asks.
“It was a message.”
“But not from Chris.”
“No. Not from Chris.”
She wants to cry but suddenly finds that the tears aren’t there. Her eyes hurt. Her brain wobbles inside her head. On one side of her the sun is melting into the horizon like a glob of orange sherbet oozing on a hot sidewalk. On the other, the ghost of the moon is already showing its face. Full, round, pregnant with all the nightmares sleep will bring. Atlanta reminds herself to go to Guy, her dealer. Buy more Adderall. With what money, she doesn’t know, but he’ll comp her. He always comps her. Guy’s good like that.
“They killed him, Atlanta. They killed our friend.”
There it is. The twist of the knife.
She gives the knife a twist of her own.
“I killed him,” Atlanta says.
“What?” Shane asks. Like for a second he’s not sure if she’s serious.
“I did it. I stirred up the shit and didn’t know what I was doing. You poke the bear and the bear wakes up.” She bites down on the inside of her cheek to stop herself from crying further. The taste of blood brightens her tongue. “If somebody killed him, it’s because of what I did.”
“We all did it. It was all three of us.”
“No!” she says, angry. Not at him, but anger is anger and he shrinks back just the same. “I was the one with the shotgun. I was the one who marched into the barn, who set up Jonesy and Virgil—“ She doesn’t even mention that Jonesy ended up in the hospital with a broken nose and broken ribs, another vengeful spirit who will surely come looking for a pound of flesh. “It was me all the way. The hand on the stick, the finger on the trigger.”
“Atlanta, we have to find out who killed Chris. Make them pay. Bring them to justice.”
She laughs, but it isn’t a happy sound. “Justice. What are you? The Sheriff? The lawman who wants to bring order to town? Wrangle up the outlaws and make things right? We tried that already, Shane. And let me tell you: we were not up to the task.”
“But Chris would want us to—“
“Chris is dead!” she yells. “Chris doesn’t want anything now.”
“Atlanta—“
But it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t want to hear him. She grabs her bag, throws him the vodka. Then she pushes past Shane and walks away, threading herself between the stones of the dead, walking the wobbly walk of the drunken and alive.
* * *
That night she goes to clean her shotgun. WD-40 and a coat hanger with a paper towel wad at the end. Crumbs of powder tumble out the end of the barrel and she finds an empty .410 shell in the breach, green casing uncrimped and open-mouthed from when the gun last belched forth a spray of pellets.
Halfway through she has to put the gun away. Can’t do it.
Can’t do any of this. Can’t solve Chris’ murder. Can’t bring him back. Can’t help Shane. She’s not equipped for any of this. That lesson she learned with great pain.
Her mother’s been hovering over her like a cloud of gnats since Chris died and tonight’s no different, asking Atlanta if she wants anything at all, and Atlanta thinks, I could really use a hug, but for some reason she doesn’t say that and instead she just shakes her head. Then closes the door and feigns sleep. This night. The next. And so many others after.
* * *
Mid-June.
It’s the last day of school for the year. Atlanta passed. B-pluses across the board, except in Mrs. Lewis’ English class, where she squeaked by with an untidy (but still passing) C-minus.
Atlanta goes by the English department, a dark little quad of classrooms. No lockers up here and the day is almost done and so it’s mostly empty. A few kids laughing, passing around yearbooks, dumb shit like that.
She knocks on the door to Mrs. Lewis’ classroom. The teacher looks up from a white carton of gummy Lo Mein, caught in a moment of embarrassment as she’s got a squid’s tangle of noodles dangling from her lips. She knits her dark brows and quickly slurps them up.
“Sorry,” Mrs. Lewis says, dabbing her lips with a napkin. “Kind of a tradition. Last day of the school year means a carton of Chinese from Happy Peking.”
“They have good egg rolls,” Atlanta says.
“They do, at that. What can I do for you, Miss Burns?”
“Just thought I’d tell you to have a good summer.”
The teacher smirks. “And here I thought you didn’t like me much. From what I hear, I was the only teacher to buck the B+ trend.”
“Yeah. You were.”
They stand there like that, in an awkward staring match, for ten seconds that seem to stretch into a geological epoch. Finally, Mrs. Lewis says, “I’m sorry to hear about your friend.”
“Mm. Yeah. Thanks.” A sour feeling sucks at her guts. “Did you have him as a student?”
“I did not. He was in AP English. Mr. Shustack teaches that.” Again the teacher dabs at her mouth with the napkin. “I’m surprised.”
“At what.”
“That you didn’t write anything for the yearbook. For your friend.”
“Not much to say.”
“Some wrote poems.”
Atlanta shrugs. “I’m not the poetic type.”
“Your analysis of ‘Of an Athlete Dying Young’ was surprisingly incisive. Sloppy in execution, perhaps, but some powerful insight in there.”
“Dying young’s kind of a theme these days.”
Mrs. Lewis doesn’t say anything. Her pained, sad smile says it all.
“Housman was gay,” Atlanta says matter-of-factly.
“He was. You should read all of ‘A Shropshire Lad.’”
“Maybe.” She pauses. “I probably won’t.”
Mrs. Lewis laughs. “Well. At least you’re honest.” Then, in a fit of her own honesty, she says, “My son died. When he was five. Leukemia.”
“I’m real sorry to hear that. I didn’t know.”
“Don’t be. It was before you were born. But it’s why I teach that poem. Among others. Life is equal parts strange and beautiful and horrible and we’re tossed into it without a map or an instruction guide. Poems and stories have a way of helping us make sense of things.”
Atlanta’s not so s
ure about that. She’s not sure anything makes any more sense just because you read or wrote some poem. Even still, she offers a wan smile and a wave. “Maybe. I’ll see you next year, Mrs. Lewis.”
“Have a good summer, Atlanta.”
But Atlanta knows the days of good summers may very well be over.
* * *
She hasn’t spoken to Shane since the night of the funeral. Shane tried to reach out a few times. Texts and emails and chasing her down in the halls. But she always got away and eventually he stopped trying. She told herself it was best: he deserved better friends. Friends that wouldn’t get him hurt.
* * *
People look at her now. Like, they actually look at her. Atlanta makes her way past lockers and the library and the administration office and out the front door toward the soccer field and, all the while, people meet her gaze. Some even wave or say goodbye. Eddie Peters tells her to have a good summer. Damita Martinez asks her to sign her yearbook. Kyle Clemons gives her a running high-five without saying anything.
Takes her a little while to figure it out, but figure it out, she does. Eddie is one of the La Cozy Nostra. Damita’s… well, Atlanta wants to say Mexican because that’s how all the white people around here see immigrants, but she’s probably Guatemalan. Or Venezuelan like Shane. Kyle is a gawky zit-sprung spaz in a Doctor Who t-shirt and checkered Converse All-Stars. A nice spaz, but definitely… spazzy.
These are her people, now. The downtrodden and disaffected. The beaten and bullied, the used and abused. The jocks don’t talk to her. The pretty girls won’t say “boo.” The party kids and Student Council jerks and the rich pricks still won’t give her a passing glance. But those beneath—the subterranean social dwellers, the mutants, the weirdos, the exiles—meet her eyes and, holy shit, actually talk to her.
But it isn’t long before she’s reminded how small this tribe of freaks really is.
She catches a whiff of weed, a skunky perfume plume that’s gone when the wind turns.
Words rise from the other side of the bleachers:
“Dude,” one of the voices, a boy’s voice, says. “God hates fags.”
Another voice: “…all should fuckin’ off themselves.”
Her bowels cinch like a too-tight belt. Sweat streaks the lines of her palms.
Keep walking, she thinks. Go home.
But even as she’s picturing herself walking back home down the back roads and through the cornfields, her boots are already taking her the other way. Toward the bleachers. Toward the voices.
Two shapes stand there. Underneath the stands. Passing a joint back and forth in a gray-green haze illuminated by vertical lines of afternoon sun. She knows the one: thick little nub that he is, catcher for the baseball team. Charlie Russo. The other—lankier, ropier—plays on the team too though she doesn’t know his name or position and doesn’t much care. Both are friends with Mitchell Erickson. Mitchell: son to Orly. And one of Chris Coyne’s original tormentors. T
The two boys continue talking—
“I’d kill myself if I were gay,” the lanky one says. “Especially that gay. Might as well be a fuckin’ girl, man.”
Russo laugh-coughs, a hacking blast as he exhales. “You got it all—“ More coughing. “You got it all wrong. They’re not tryin’ to kill themselves, they just think the gun barrel is a dude’s dick!”
Then he mimics a slobbery blowjob where his brains come blasting out the back of his head. He passes the joint back.
“Dude, awesome, right,” Russo says. They high-five: slap. “Hey, you comin’ to the fights later this—“
Atlanta comes up underneath the bleachers. Doesn’t bother trying to hide her presence. The two guys do however try to hide the joint—but when they see who it is, Lanky brings it back out from behind his back.
“Yo, baby, you want a hit?” Lanky says, sticking the weed down by his crotch level and tweaking his two fingers so the joint waggles back and forth. Ash falls. He laughs. Hurr hurr hurr.
Normally Atlanta would be into some banter, maybe saying something about “my what a tiny dong you have,” but she’s mad and her patience is like a camping hatchet dangling by a single horsehair.
Instead she just kicks him in the nuts. Hard.
Embers from the joint swirl. The air goes out of him. Lanky tumbles sideways. Russo’s fast with his fists but it doesn’t matter, because Atlanta was ready. She has a new knife—a small lockback with a rubberized orange handle and a fat little three-inch blade. A jerk of the wrist and the blade pops, clicks, glints in the sun.
A few swishes of the blade through the air and Russo knows not to test her. By now they should all know not to test her.
A voice inside her screams and yells and throws objects around the romper room that is her mind, telling her to go home, leave it alone—stop throwing rocks at beehives. But she stands her ground.
Lanky mumbles. Feels around the grass for the joint.
Russo blinks his bloodshot eyes. “You bitch.”
“That’s me.”
“Should learn to mind your own business.”
“Yeah. Probably. But I’m going to need you to shut the fuck up when it comes to my friend.” She feels tears threaten the corners of her eyes once more—not now, don’t cry in front of these assholes quit it. “Chris was cool. The coolest. And it’s things like this that make people feel bad just for being who they are, just for living in the world they way they got to. Anybody should off themselves it should be you dumb shits.”
Russo takes a step toward her, but again she swipes the knife. It cuts the air with a hiss.
“Don’t,” she says. “I’ll pop you like a water balloon.”
“You don’t got the balls,” he says.
“Don’t much need ‘em.”
From the ground, Lanky moans. “She’ll do it. Dude. Dude.” He tilts his head toward her. “We’re sorry. Okay?”
But Russo doesn’t agree.
“You’ll get yours,” he tells her.
“I figure you’re right about that.”
And then she backs away. Heart pounding. Throat tight. Eyes hot and raw.
She turns and runs home.
* * *
Home. A dilapidated old farmhouse with a boozy lean to it. Shows in all the doorways—each tilted off-kilter like something out of a carnival funhouse. Floor aren’t level, either. Atlanta one time put a cat’s eye marble on the floor and it rolled away, down the hall and into an old iron floor grate. She never got that marble back.
The house sits between fallow cornfields, fields now peppered with sprigs of green. Next door—not right next door but a couple-few acres down the road—is the cat lady’s house. Atlanta’s not sure of her name. But she’s old and frail, like a bundle of sticks draped in a moth-eaten bedsheet. All her cats look that way, too. She remembers Chris saying something about how she probably turns into a cat on the full-moon. Wailing and slinking about. Gulping down moles and voles and mice.
Atlanta walks down the long driveway toward their house, boots crunching on loose limestone gravel, dust kicking up since it hasn’t rained in a couple weeks.
In the distance, in the woods far beyond the house, plump cloud-bulges rise into the sky. Steam from the PP&L power plant behind the woods. Winter time comes and the leaves fall you can see the cooling towers. Now it’s all green and you have to squint to see the shapes.
Sometimes the clouds coming up out of there look like things. Hands or fists. Faces. Vegetables. Animals. Right now they just look like lumpy piles of stuffing cut out of a pillow.
As she gets closer, she sees someone sitting on the steps outside the ratty screened-in porch.
A girl. Familiar but not too familiar. White-blonde hair. Nice white sweater. Jeans, but not trashy jeans that hang low and show off the whale-tail of a thong. Pink lipstick. Good shoes. Rich girl, by the looks of her.
She’s sporting an infinite stare. Looking off at a fixed point in-between worlds. Almost like there’s nobody home in those
eyes.
Atlanta lifts her chin in a bro-nod. “’Sup.”
Blondie twitches, jarred from her reverie. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh. You lost?”
“Are you Atlanta?” The girl stands.
“Maybe. Yeah. Why?”
“I’m Jenny. Jenny Whitsett.” The girl thrusts out her hand. It’s like a mannequin’s hand it looks so nice. Atlanta figures on not being rude so she takes it. Blondie—er, Jenny—has a mannequin’s handshake, too. Stiff, limp, lifeless. “I’d like to talk to you about something.”
Bait Dog: An Atlanta Burns Novel Page 11