“Erika made her own bed. Here more than once. Yeah—I’m here because I feel like shit. I wish I’d done more for her while she was alive. But I didn’t and—guess what?—neither did you.”
“I know and—”
“And now you want to be queen of the geeks. Well, I recommend not making out with the whole bunch like your sister would’ve.”
Tiffany walked off. Her shovel thudded at E.’s feet and struck shame into her heart. E. knew that Tiffany didn’t deserve antagonism, yet still she wanted to bare her teeth and throw dirt and whoop to drive the girl out. That’s what E. felt, not what she wanted, and she too was surprised when her mouth opened and the melodrama she’d long criticized paraded out. She sounded like her parents: needlessly defensive, petty, immature. Worse, she was doing it in front of John. Listening to her feelings also had urged her to care about him, to touch his shoulder, and to say something to redeem herself. She didn’t. The boy cringed with his arms crossed over his stomach as if the disturbance had physically wounded him.
“OK,” she said. “I’m being stupid.”
“Whatever.” Tiffany headed for her purse. She pitched Doug’s yard gloves up and over her billowing hair. He watched the girl’s shadow float across the grass.
“Forgive me, everyone,” E. said.
“Don’t apologize to me.” Greg waved her away with a scissor-like motion, making it clear he wouldn’t get caught in the middle. Their bickering made him regret coming out here. Greg heard enough of it at home between his mom and stepdad. John had assured him his time wouldn’t be wasted, confident that his investigation would uncover the killer. Now look at the drama—surprise, surprise. So, the kid had a shred of undisclosed info the police didn’t have. What’d he think would turn up that months of police work hadn’t? Anyway, Greg was no cop. Far from it.
Dougy’s gaze floundered back to E. He didn’t appear upset so much as defeated, submitting himself so that she might land the killing stroke for his faithlessness. E.’s eyes watered suddenly, as though knocked in the nose. The intensity of her shame was upsetting, yet that distaste was powerless against its breaking wave. She shielded her face at the thought of hurting her friend over something so childish as jealousy, that she’d never been any wiser than other people, only more alone, with less opportunity to exhibit her psychological shortcomings.
“Dougy, I’m sorry.” She spoke through her hands. There was more she wanted to say, not in front of the group. A second thud sounded at her feet. E. dabbed her tears with her shirt collar to find John collapsed into the hole.
The kids hoisted the boy out and laid him on his back. “Don’t be dead, dude,” Greg said. John looked unconscious. E. shook him. His eyelids popped open. He softly begged for water as if a child in need of help to break a fever. E. brought the bottle to his lips. Doug wasn’t resentful. He was glad the dying kid had someone at his side. John kept his gaze at kneecap level, and Doug would’ve sworn that, when the guy clenched his eyelids, he was going to sob from embarrassment. Muddied, at the mercy of others, their hometown hero had never looked more beaten and he must’ve felt that. John looked up at the faces of the kids close around him, Tiffany included. His head bobbed back, as if still faint. He smiled a weak version of his classic grin. Their memories filled in the rest.
“Friends,” he said cheerily, drunk with exhaustion.
The group shifted noncommittally, but they nodded, without glancing up at one another.
“My friends,” he said again.
Despite how little each kid actually knew him, John spoke with such sincerity that only Alex didn’t feel it instantly, owing to the distraction of calculating how much time it would take to carry John to Palos Community Hospital versus calling an ambulance crew to the location if his condition worsened: Yes, another dead kid. Same spot, no coincidence. While conducting an illegal private investigation … As if listening in on the imagined 9-1-1 call, John wore a humored smile, appreciative of the concern, then grateful for them all. He hadn’t ever been knocked down before, they realized. Publicly beat on, but never beaten. Of all the people in Palos Hills, they were at his side. John H. Walker was just a kid after all. He needed help sometimes, same as them.
Still, too many hands helped him to his feet and dusted him off, and too many questions were asked about his condition for him to be average, what he might’ve liked to feel. John claimed to be simply in need of bed rest. He wasn’t keeping down much food these days, he admitted. Josué immediately gave him a hard lemon candy for his blood sugar, a bag of which he kept in his pocket after an aunt had begged God to banish them from the house, otherwise, she’d claimed, diabetes would make her face pucker permanently. John turned the tiny lemon in his fingers as if familiar, a memento returned, and popped it into his mouth with a warm “This means a lot,” and a handshake that lingered on well past awkward. Josué’s grin said he didn’t much mind. The ghost of the legend yet wore his sheen of specialness. While in his presence, they did, too.
For John’s sake, the kids hiked up out of the moraine for the first time as a group instead of trickling street-side singly. Down the walking trails, they smelled the spicy weeds and wild blossoms. They spotted the birds in the branches and the low sun in the sky, and returned to the sidewalk pace of small suburban life on a mild spring day. Each kid talked about what he or she would do with the rest of it. Generally, that was dinner and watch something or videogames. Only Josué would be eating with his family. Greg would be in bed before his mom came home and would stop at McDonalds on the way. E. hated TV—no offense, she said. Only Alex mentioned homework, studying for an honors algebra test. All of which recalled their many differences. The group fell quiet again as they struggled to imagine hanging out under normal circumstances. Part of them wanted to believe they could be friends, yet they knew it could never happen in any place but the woods.
The kids said bye where the trail along the elevated train tracks splintered and let out behind a derelict baseball diamond, the community recreation center’s parking lot, and, further up, the yellow-bricked building itself. They decided to come and go this way from now on to avoid being seen by traffic near the trailhead.
Good call, John added, because of the regular police patrol.
Just then, a squad car turned onto 115th a few blocks up. It sidled along the woods in their direction. The kids squatted, though too far off to be spotted. “Oh, shit! I’m too young to go to jail,” someone joked. “I’m too horny to shower with sex offenders!” mocked another. “Shut up, you jackasses,” was the last word. They hooted with laughter, and the fear of being caught dissipated, even the consequences—parental guilt? a minor criminal record? military school?—seemed inconsequential. The rules and laws of the adult world were make-believe they could shed like a dream, but only from this distance, playing as they were on the edge of belief and disbelief. Hearts thumping, they caught a waft of hot asphalt and the citrusy scent of cut lawns out there, on the other side. They’d been wrong earlier. Time didn’t move slowly in Palos Hills, but mechanically. For how many hours had they escaped today? The woods had granted that illusion, unadulterated time, the privilege of childhood, without delineation of weekdays or weekends or chores or homework or tests or big games, babysitting and “work around the house,” marks of greater responsibility a little further down the timeline—and then? They still had summers to idle away, at least. That refuge would very soon be eclipsed by high school and the looming uncertainty of their futures. Because who knew how long it went on. Because Erika. All at once, they became serious. The police weren’t looking for them, but a child killer.
The squad car U-turned in the rec center parking lot. They watched it double back, up 115th and out of sight. They were alone again as a group.
Before they disbanded, Tiffany unzipped Doug’s backpack and stuffed in the yard gloves. She’d picked them up from where they’d landed. She thanked him again.
“You’ll be back? Tomorrow?” he asked.
�
�Not even you could stop me, genius,” she said haughtily, chin pointed up the street. She let a playful smile slip.
E. started to apologize to her for earlier. “Hey, I lost it a little, and I—”
“I know—I know.” Tiffany snatched E. in a hug. She followed Greg out across the parking lot before the freak could say more.
E. insisted on seeing John home safely. Doug didn’t moan from heartache. He did that locked in his bedroom, later. Instead, he donated his bike for the week so she could speed him home on the handlebars, somewhat selflessly, conscious of appearing selfless but still feeling bad for the guy. John accepted his help, touched Doug’s shoulder in thanks without saying anything, the pain he wrestled with showing in his hunch and tepid gait. What was the allure of a guy like that? John’s renowned handsomeness had faded. Doug could still catch it, but only in glimpses, the way he sometimes spotted the smartass young man his grandfather must’ve been when he told a joke after a few beers. To want a relationship with John despite his eminent death, was sympathy enough? Maybe what the guy represented turned her on. E. liked big ideas. Or maybe he allowed her the opportunity to care about something bigger than herself. Doug wanted companionship and something big, too, one day.
As the pair rolled down 115th, his heart went limp. E. didn’t look back.
Doug tailed the rest glumly to the end of the trail where the trees thinned to full daylight behind the rec center. Ecstatic shrieks sounded from the playground, where children cried for the day to never end.
Doug had let E. go. He was kept standing by the residual rush of success with Tiffany Dennys. What would come of it? The question drowned out all thoughts of lesser excitement, which happened to be any other thought he was capable of at that moment. If Doug kept doing well, maybe the very popular non-nerd could be his first real date. His first kiss. She could be patronizing him, acting sweet and nice because she hadn’t much to lose. But maybe not. Wisps of much larger fantasies whirled in his head composed of pristine snapshots of her arms, her laugh, her boldness. Doug withheld from entertaining them. He feared jinxing his luck and the slap of disappointment. The result was that his head felt full of fizz. Anxious and desperate to be distracted, he walked beside Josué in a half-gestured conversation about videogames each played, the boys followed closely by Alex, silent and ever watchful.
Their favorite videogame of all time was the same. Doug didn’t know why this came as a surprise. He was captivated as J. described the epic end game scene Doug had yet to reach, the battle in Jakar’tep against the Great Snake in the statuary of the Old Gods, stone giants that rose on all sides as if bearing The Void upon their shoulders, where one’s story-companion at last succumbs to not just any curse, but possession by Balagal, and when a player must choose his or her fate: to forever banish the demon’s soul with magic or to rid the vile serpent with steel.
Josué slashed the air between them—cried out in delivery of the final blow. Doug flinched, and Josué could tell he’d scared the kid. He smacked the pendejo on the back to say it was OK, to lighten up, but also toughen up a little, too, eh? And the boys laughed to rid themselves of the discomfort.
Doug was fairly sure J. would never really hurt him. He was friendly and not ignorant as expected. His precision of expression and clarity of thought were arguably better than Doug’s, which surprised Doug as much as when J. had chopped the air between them. Why? Because he’d underestimated the guy and believed him dangerous, though he didn’t start the fistfights he got suspensions for at school, and because of how he looked, not stout in the middle and lean in the limbs with an easy smile, but foreign, dark-complexioned, Mexican. Doug wasn’t racist—was he? He’d flinched and laughed and kept laughing to expel the anxiety of difference. He couldn’t. He’d never helped J.—wouldn’t risk to pronounce the kid’s name—for fear of what? Doug probably deserved to be hit. He talked about his current favorite game instead, building a world block by block, etc., which J. had heard of and was excited to try. At every pause in the conversation, Doug tried and failed to put himself in Josué’s shoes: another landscape, language, family, food, traditions—problems—memories—dreams? What he’d assumed was the world wasn’t all or even most of it. Doug felt white for the first time, and a panicked burst of perspiration and shame over that fact, beside the other boy’s daily reminders of what he was and wasn’t.
So when Alex tapped his shoulder before they broke from the tree line and said, “Please, would you allow me to date your find?” hand open to take the bullet shell, Doug stared dumbly for a moment, as if the question were in another language.
His reaction was understandable, Alex thought; they hadn’t known each other long enough to have developed faith in the other’s abilities. Or he too suspected foul play. Alex had estimated the probability of at least one member of the group being involved in the murder of the twelve-year-old Erika Summerson as moderately high. All knew the victim and were potentially motivated by social-sexual jealousy and/or betrayal. Contrary to Tiffany Dennys’s earlier defense of her presence on the team exonerating her from being a suspect, Alex had watched enough Real Crime documentaries in the last forty-eight hours in preparation for this investigation to know that murderers often return to the scene of a crime to tamper with evidence, posture as an innocent, and/or generally mislead an investigation. Doug, for instance, could be the murderer, which would easily explain his leading Tiffany Dennys to dig exactly where the bullet casing was found as well as his eagerness to pick it up—to give false cause to the presence of his fingerprints and/or to pocket and “accidentally” lose it later. Any unwillingness on his part to hand the object over might incriminate him further. Alex therefore clarified:
“Despite the reported cause of death, we need to conclusively rule out the bullet as evidence. I’ll inventory it and do what research I can so that we might put this heartless child slasher behind bars. Unless you have any reason not to give it to me?”
“Oh, date it,” he said and gave over the shell. “Sure—I mean … of course.” Doug was still wary as to whether Alex could be trusted to keep their work secret. What would stop her from running the evidence straight to the police? Well, if the group got in trouble now, they would surely all go down together, her included.
Alex parted with the boys at Depot Street, where they waved and took the pedestrian tunnel beneath the elevated tracks to the lower part of town. Their voices elongated, bounced excitedly off the concrete walls as they passed through to the arc of light on the other side, talking about girls, specifically Tiffany Dennys, who, though pleasing enough to behold, was, in Alex’s opinion, too much of a drama queen to waste time courting. Alex let both suspects return to their regular lives, this time without trailing Doug, as on that first night that John had led him and E. down into the woods. As long as Dennys was alive, it seemed, he wasn’t going anywhere. Alex climbed the commuter stairs and walked on the tracks across 111th Street. It was the shortest line home and, anyway, Alex avoided those who attracted or created drama. Achieving mastery of advanced mathematics was a challenging enough pursuit, and the attention necessary to do one thing brilliantly required the keeping of a well-ordered life. Distancing oneself from conflict had led Alex to being labeled as a tattletale, which had stunted the acquisition of acquaintances beyond fellow mathletes, who were united by purpose more than affinity. Skipping grades had further complicated junior high. For one, Alex did not share the interests of older boys and girls. Elder mathletes saw placement in state competitions as opportunities to flirt and make out with each other during the long bus trips, rather than opportunities to exhibit one’s intellectual fitness. Alex was curious about sex only as an intellectual problem. Who to like and how to express that sentiment seemed so much less complicated than what kids seemed to make of it due to sex’s exaggerated role. Perhaps they too hid a good deal of their true feelings and acted out simply to conform. Alex had given that up, conforming, after coming to Palos Hills Junior High and meeting Mrs. Shepard, the s
chool gym teacher and volleyball coach, easily the most captivating person in the building. Within days of witnessing the well-muscled spark of positive energy that was Mrs. Shepard, Alex got a similar bowl haircut and began dressing in smart, boyish clothes. Alex would’ve tried out for the volleyball team if athletic. Ever since, the primary goal of dressing had become identity expression—studious, fastidious, affable—not the attraction of mates. This attitude, that life should be lived with clear purpose to accomplish some meaningful goal, was the deepest divide between Alex and other students. In that regard, math was much less a challenge than navigating the social world of junior high. Alex very much desired to be accepted and respected, but sought that validation in terms of intellectual aptitude. Like the great Marie Curie, Alex hoped to make a discovery worthy of praise and, one day, perhaps even love. At one time, John Walker held that throne for so many people. What fair-weather fans didn’t see was his unyielding brilliance. He refused to play the part others expected: the sickly boy in a hospital robe and wheelchair, who was to accept their pity and flowers and roll into the sunset without a squeak. His strength had been robbed, yet the passion of the great sportsman remained. Alex saw it—altered in form, but indestructible—when he sporadically reappeared at school, then noticed a pattern to his visitations that corresponded to watching those within Erika’s intimate circle. He was at work again, plotting his last earthly exploit, maybe only to reclaim his place in people’s hearts. Whatever the motive, Alex wanted in, in a big way.
Into that Good Night Page 9